|
Herman Melville
|
|
Herman Melville
American author
born Aug. 1, 1819, New York City
died Sept. 28, 1891, New York City
Main
American novelist, short-story writer, and poet, best known for his
novels of the sea, including his masterpiece, Moby Dick (1851).
Heritage and youth
Melville’s heritage and youthful experiences were perhaps crucial in
forming the conflicts underlying his artistic vision. He was the third
child of Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melvill, in a family that was to
grow to four boys and four girls. His forebears had been among the
Scottish and Dutch settlers of New York and had taken leading roles in
the American Revolution and in the fiercely competitive commercial and
political life of the new country. One grandfather, Maj. Thomas Melvill,
was a member of the Boston Tea Party in 1773 and was subsequently a New
York importer. The other, Gen. Peter Gansevoort, was a friend of James
Fenimore Cooper and famous for leading the defense of Ft. Stanwix, in
upstate New York, against the British.
In 1826 Allan Melvill wrote of his son as being “backward in speech
and somewhat slow in comprehension . . . of a docile and amiable
disposition.” In that same year, scarlet fever left the boy with
permanently weakened eyesight, but he attended Male High School. When
the family import business collapsed in 1830, the family returned to
Albany, where Herman enrolled briefly in Albany Academy. Allan Melvill
died in 1832, leaving his family in desperate straits. The eldest son,
Gansevoort, assumed responsibility for the family and took over his
father’s felt and fur business. Herman joined him after two years as a
bank clerk and some months working on the farm of his uncle, Thomas
Melvill, in Pittsfield, Mass. About this time, Herman’s branch of the
family altered the spelling of its name. Though finances were
precarious, Herman attended Albany Classical School in 1835 and became
an active member of a local debating society. A teaching job in
Pittsfield made him unhappy, however, and after three months he returned
to Albany.
Wanderings and voyages
Young Melville had already begun writing, but the remainder of his youth
became a quest for security. A comparable pursuit in the spiritual realm
was to characterize much of his writing. The crisis that started Herman
on his wanderings came in 1837, when Gansevoort went bankrupt and the
family moved to nearby Lansingburgh (later Troy). In what was to be a
final attempt at orthodox employment, Herman studied surveying at
Lansingburgh Academy to equip himself for a post with the Erie Canal
project. When the job did not materialize, Gansevoort arranged for
Herman to ship out as cabin boy on the “St. Lawrence,” a merchant ship
sailing in June 1839 from New York City for Liverpool. The summer voyage
did not dedicate Melville to the sea, and on his return his family was
dependent still on the charity of relatives. After a grinding search for
work, he taught briefly in a school that closed without paying him. His
uncle Thomas, who had left Pittsfield for Illinois, apparently had no
help to offer when the young man followed him west. In January 1841
Melville sailed on the whaler “Acushnet,” from New Bedford, Mass., on a
voyage to the South Seas.
In June 1842 the “Acushnet” anchored in the Marquesas Islands in
present-day French Polynesia. Melville’s adventures here, somewhat
romanticized, became the subject of his first novel, Typee (1846). In
July Melville and a companion jumped ship and, according to Typee, spent
about four months as guest-captives of the reputedly cannibalistic Typee
people. Actually, in August he was registered in the crew of the
Australian whaler “Lucy Ann.” Whatever its precise correspondence with
fact, however, Typee was faithful to the imaginative impact of the
experience on Melville. Despite intimations of danger, Melville
represented the exotic valley of the Typees as an idyllic sanctuary from
a hustling, aggressive civilization.
Although Melville was down for a 120th share of the whaler’s
proceeds, the voyage had been unproductive. He joined a mutiny that
landed the mutineers in a Tahitian jail, from which he escaped without
difficulty. On these events and their sequel, Melville based his second
book, Omoo (1847). Lighthearted in tone, with the mutiny shown as
something of a farce, it describes Melville’s travels through the
islands, accompanied by Long Ghost, formerly the ship’s doctor, now
turned drifter. The carefree roving confirmed Melville’s bitterness
against colonial and, especially, missionary debasement of the native
Tahitian peoples.
These travels, in fact, occupied less than a month. In November he
signed as a harpooner on his last whaler, the “Charles & Henry,” out of
Nantucket, Mass. Six months later he disembarked at Lahaina, in the
Hawaiian Islands. Somehow he supported himself for more than three
months; then in August 1843 he signed as an ordinary seaman on the
frigate “United States,” which in October 1844 discharged him in Boston.
The years of acclaim
Melville rejoined a family whose prospects had much improved.
Gansevoort, who after James K. Polk’s victory in the 1844 presidential
elections had been appointed secretary to the U.S. legation in London,
was gaining political renown. Encouraged by his family’s enthusiastic
reception of his tales of the South Seas, Melville wrote them down. The
years of acclaim were about to begin for Melville.
Typee provoked immediate enthusiasm and outrage, and then a year
later Omoo had an identical response. Gansevoort, dead of a brain
disease, never saw his brother’s career consolidated, but the
bereavement left Melville head of the family and the more committed to
writing to support it. Another responsibility came with his marriage in
August 1847 to Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of the chief justice of
Massachusetts. He tried unsuccessfully for a job in the U.S. Treasury
Department, the first of many abortive efforts to secure a government
post.
In 1847 Melville began a third book, Mardi (1849), and became a
regular contributor of reviews and other pieces to a literary journal.
To his new literary acquaintances in New York City he appeared the
character of his own books—extravert, vigorous, “with his cigar and his
Spanish eyes,” as one writer described him. Melville resented this
somewhat patronizing stereotype, and in her reminiscences his wife
recalled him in a different aspect, writing in a bitterly cold, fireless
room in winter. He enjoined his publisher not to call him “the author of
Typee and Omoo,” for his third book was to be different. When it
appeared, public and critics alike found its wild, allegorical fantasy
and medley of styles incomprehensible. It began as another Polynesian
adventure but quickly set its hero in pursuit of the mysterious Yillah,
“all beauty and innocence,” a symbolic quest that ends in anguish and
disaster. Concealing his disappointment at the book’s reception,
Melville quickly wrote Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850) in the
manner expected of him. In October 1849 Melville sailed to England to
resolve his London publisher’s doubts about White-Jacket. He also
visited the Continent, kept a journal, and arrived back in America in
February 1850. The critics acclaimed White-Jacket, and its powerful
criticism of abuses in the U.S. Navy won it strong political support.
But both novels, however much they seemed to revive the Melville of
Typee, had passages of profoundly questioning melancholy. It was not the
same Melville who wrote them. He had been reading Shakespeare with “eyes
which are as tender as young sparrows,” particularly noting sombre
passages in Measure for Measure and King Lear. This reading struck
deeply sympathetic responses in Melville, counterbalancing the
Transcendental doctrines of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose general optimism
about human goodness he had heard in lectures. A fresh imaginative
influence was supplied by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, a novel
deeply exploring good and evil in the human being, which Melville read
in the spring of 1850. That summer, Melville bought a farm, which he
christened “Arrowhead,” near Hawthorne’s home at Pittsfield, and the two
men became neighbours physically as well as in sympathies.
Melville had promised his publishers for the autumn of 1850 the novel
first entitled The Whale, finally Moby Dick. His delay in submitting it
was caused less by his early-morning chores as a farmer than by his
explorations into the unsuspected vistas opened for him by Hawthorne.
Their relationship reanimated Melville’s creative energies. On his side,
it was dependent, almost mystically intense—“an infinite fraternity of
feeling,” he called it. To the cooler, withdrawn Hawthorne, such depth
of feeling so persistently and openly declared was uncongenial. The two
men gradually drew apart. They met for the last time, almost as
strangers, in 1856, when Melville visited Liverpool, where Hawthorne was
American consul.
Moby Dick was published in London in October 1851 and a month later
in America. It brought its author neither acclaim nor reward. Basically
its story is simple. Captain Ahab pursues the white whale, Moby Dick,
which finally kills him. At that level, it is an intense, superbly
authentic narrative of whaling. In the perverted grandeur of Captain
Ahab and in the beauties and terrors of the voyage of the “Pequod,”
however, Melville dramatized his deeper concerns: the equivocal defeats
and triumphs of the human spirit and its fusion of creative and
murderous urges. In his private afflictions, Melville had found
universal metaphors.
Increasingly a recluse to the point that some friends feared for his
sanity, Melville embarked almost at once on Pierre (1852). It was an
intensely personal work, revealing the sombre mythology of his private
life framed in terms of a story of an artist alienated from his society.
In it can be found the humiliated responses to poverty that his youth
supplied him plentifully and the hypocrisy he found beneath his father’s
claims to purity and faithfulness. His mother he had idolized; yet he
found the spirituality of her love betrayed by sexual love. The novel, a
slightly veiled allegory of Melville’s own dark imaginings, was rooted
in these relations. When published, it was another critical and
financial disaster. Only 33 years old, Melville saw his career in ruins.
Near breakdown, and having to face in 1853 the disaster of a fire at his
New York publishers that destroyed most of his books, Melville
persevered with writing.
Israel Potter, plotted before his introduction to Hawthorne and his
work, was published in 1855, but its modest success, clarity of style,
and apparent simplicity of subject did not indicate a decision by
Melville to write down to public taste. His contributions to Putnam’s
Monthly Magazine—“Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853), “The Encantadas”
(1854), and “Benito Cereno” (1855)—reflected the despair and the
contempt for human hypocrisy and materialism that possessed him
increasingly.
In 1856 Melville set out on a tour of Europe and the Levant to renew
his spirits. The most powerful passages of the journal he kept are in
harmony with The Confidence-Man (1857), a despairing satire on an
America corrupted by the shabby dreams of commerce. This was the last of
his novels to be published in his lifetime. Three American lecture tours
were followed by his final sea journey, in 1860, when he joined his
brother Thomas, captain of the clipper “Meteor,” for a voyage around
Cape Horn. He abandoned the trip in San Francisco.
The years of withdrawal
Melville abandoned the novel for poetry, but the prospects for
publication were not favourable. With two sons and daughters to support,
Melville sought government patronage. A consular post he sought in 1861
went elsewhere. On the outbreak of the Civil War, he volunteered for the
Navy, but was again rejected. He had apparently returned full cycle to
the insecurity of his youth, but an inheritance from his father-in-law
brought some relief and “Arrowhead,” increasingly a burden, was sold. By
the end of 1863, the family was living in New York City. The war was
much on his mind and furnished the subject of his first volume of verse,
Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), published privately. Four
months after it appeared, an appointment as a customs inspector on the
New York docks finally brought him a secure income.
Despite poor health, Melville began a pattern of writing evenings,
weekends, and on vacations. In 1867 his son Malcolm shot himself,
accidentally the jury decided, though it appeared that he had quarrelled
with his father the night before his death. His second son, Stanwix, who
had gone to sea in 1869, died in a San Francisco hospital in 1886 after
a long illness. Throughout these griefs, and for the whole of his 19
years in the customs house, Melville’s creative pace was understandably
slowed.
His second collection of verse, John Marr, and Other Sailors; With
Some Sea-Pieces, appeared in 1888, again privately published. By then he
had been in retirement for three years, assisted by legacies from
friends and relatives. His new leisure he devoted, he wrote in 1889, to
“certain matters as yet incomplete.” Among them was Timoleon (1891), a
final verse collection. More significant was the return to prose that
culminated in his last work, the novel Billy Budd, which remained
unpublished until 1924. Provoked by a false charge, the sailor Billy
Budd accidentally kills the satanic master-at-arms. In a time of
threatened mutiny he is hanged, going willingly to his fate. Evil has
not wholly triumphed, and Billy’s memory lives on as an emblem of good.
Here there is, if not a statement of being reconciled fully to life, at
least the peace of resignation. The manuscript ends with the date April
19, 1891. Five months later Melville died. His life was neither happy
nor, by material standards, successful. By the end of the 1840s he was
among the most celebrated of American writers, yet his death evoked but
a single obituary notice.
In the internal tensions that put him in conflict with his age lay a
strangely 20th-century awareness of the deceptiveness of realities and
of the instability of personal identity. Yet his writings never lost
sight of reality. His symbols grew from such visible facts, made
intensely present, as the dying whales, the mess of blubber, and the
wood of the ship, in Moby Dick. For Melville, as for Shakespeare, man
was ape and essence, inextricably compounded; and the world, like the
“Pequod,” was subject to “two antagonistic influences . . . one to mount
direct to heaven, the other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal.”
It was Melville’s triumph that he endured, recording his vision to the
end. After the years of neglect, modern criticism has secured his
reputation with that of the great American writers.
D.E.S. Maxwell
|
|
|
|
BENITO CERENO
|
Type of work: Novella
Author: Herman Melville (1819-1891)
Type of plot: Adventure romance
Time of plot: 1799
Locale: The harbor of St. Maria, off the coast of Chile, and Lima, Peru
First published: 1856
|
|
Superficially, this is a story of slavery and mutiny on the high
seas, but beneath the adventure-charged plot lies Melville's examination
of that subject which so fascinated him: the confrontation of extreme
forces of good and evil in the universe. The irony of the tale is that
goodhearted, naive Delano is only victorious in rescuing the victimized
Benito because he is too innocent to comprehend the horror and depravity
into which he wanders.
|
|
Principal Characters
Ainasa Delano (a-ma'sa del'э-no), an American sea captain. Off the coast
of Chile he sees a ship in distress and sets out with food and water for
her company. He finds a Spanish merchantman carrying slaves. Ship and
crew are in deplorable condition, and their captain suffers from what
appear to be severe mental disorders. A series of strange and sinister
events lead Captain Delano to the knowledge that the Spanish captain is
a prisoner of the slaves. He is able to rescue the captive and take him
ashore.
Don Benito Cereno (don bane'to thara'no), the captain of a Spanish slave
ship. His human cargo mutinies and makes him a prisoner, and he is
forced to witness horrible atrocities on and murders of the Spanish
crew. After his rescue by Captain Delano, he gives testimony concerning
the mutiny and dies broken in mind and spirit.
Babo (ba'bo), a mutinous slave. He poses as the devoted servant of
Captain Cereno and attempts to deceive Captain Delano concerning his
master's true condition. Failing in this attempt, he is captured and
hanged on Captain Cereno's testimony.
Don Alexandro Aranda (don a-la-ksan'dro aran'da), owner of the cargo of
the Spanish slave ship. He is murdered and mutilated by the mutinous
slaves.
Raneds (ra'nadz), the slave ship's mate, murdered by the mutinous
slaves.
|
|
The Story
Captain Amasa Delano was commander of an American sealer called
Bachelor's Delight, which was anchored in the harbor of St. Maria, on an
island off the coast of southern Chile. While there, he saw a ship
apparently in distress, and thinking it carried a party of monks, he
sent out in a whaleboat to board the vessel and supply it with food and
water. When he came aboard, he found that the ship, the San Dominick,
was a Spanish merchant ship carrying slaves. The crew was parched and
moaning; the ship itself was filthy; the sails were rotten. Most
deplorable of all, the captain, the young Don Benito Cereno, seemed
barely able to stand or to talk coherently. Aloof and indifferent, the
Captain seemed ill both physically (he coughed constantly) and mentally.
The Captain was attended by Babo, his devoted slave.
Delano sent the whaleboat back to his ship to get additional water,
food, and extra sails for the San Dominick, while he remained aboard the
desolate ship. He tried to talk to Cereno, but the Captain's fainting
fits kept interrupting the conversation. The Spaniard seemed reserved
and sour, in spite of Delano's attempts to assure the man that he was
now out of danger. Delano finally assumed that Cereno was suffering from
a severe mental disorder. The Captain did, with great difficulty and
after frequent private talks with Babo, manage to explain that the San
Dominick had been at sea for 190 days. They had, Cereno explained,
started out as a well-manned and smart vessel sailing from Buenos Aires
to Lima but had encountered several gales around Cape Horn, lost many
officers and men, and then had run into dreadful calms and the ravages
of plagues and scurvy. Most of the Spanish officers and all the
passengers, including the slave owner, Don Alexandro Aranda, had died of
fever. Delano, who knew that the weather in recent months had not been
as extreme as Cereno described it, simply concluded that the Spanish
officers had been incompetent and had not taken the proper precautions
against disease. Cereno continually repeated that only the devotion of
his slave, Babo, had kept him alive.
Numerous other circumstances on the San Dominick began to make the
innocent Delano more suspicious. Although everything was in disorder and
Cereno was obviously ill, he was dressed perfectly in a clean uniform.
Six black men were sitting in the rigging holding hatchets, although
Cereno said they were only cleaning them. Two were beating up a Spanish
boy, but Cereno explained that this deed was simply a form of sport. The
slaves were not in chains; Cereno claimed they were so docile that they
did not require chains. This notion pleased the humane Delano, although
it also surprised him.
Every two hours, as they awaited the expected wind and the arrival of
Delano's whaleboat, a large black in chains was brought before Cereno,
who would ask him if he, the Captain, could be forgiven. The man would
answer, "No," and be led away. At one point, Delano began to fear that
Cereno and Babo were plotting against him, for they moved away from him
and whispered together. Cereno then asked Delano about his ship,
requesting the number of men and the strength of arms aboard the
Bachelor's Delight. Delano thought they might be pirates.
Nevertheless, Delano joined Cereno and Babo in Cereno's cabin for
dinner. Throughout the meal, Delano alternately gained and lost
confidence in Cereno's story. He tried, while discussing a means of
getting Cereno new sails, to get Babo to leave the room, but the man and
master were apparently inseparable. After dinner Babo, while shaving his
master, cut his cheek slightly despite the warning that had been given.
Babo left the room for a second and returned with his own cheek cut in a
curious imitation of his master's. Delano thought this episode curious
and sinister, but he finally decided that the man was so devoted to
Cereno that he had punished himself for inadvertently cutting his
master.
At last, Delano's whaleboat returned with more supplies. Delano, about
to leave the San Dominick, promised to return with new sails the next
day. When he invited Cereno to his own boat, he was surprised at the
Captain's curt refusal and his failure to escort the visitor to the
rail. Delano was offended at the Spaniard's apparent lack of gratitude.
As the whaleboat was about to leave, Cereno appeared suddenly at the
rail. He expressed his gratitude profusely and then, hastily, jumped
into the whaleboat. At first Delano thought that Cereno was about to
kill him; then he saw Babo at the rail brandishing a knife. In a flash,
he realized that Babo and the other slaves had been holding Cereno a
captive. Delano took Cereno back to the Bachelor's Delight. Later they
pursued the fleeing slaves. The slaves, having no guns, were easily
captured by the American ship and brought back to shore.
Cereno later explained that the slaves, having mutinied shortly after
the ship set out, had committed horrible atrocities and killed most of
the Spaniards. They had murdered the mate, Raneds, for a trifling
offense and had committed atrocities on the dead body of Don Alexandra
Aranda, whose skeleton they placed on the masthead.
On his arrival in Lima, Don Benito Cereno submitted a long testimony,
recounting all the cruelties the slaves had committed. Babo was tried
and hanged. Cereno felt enormously grateful to Delano, recalling the
strange innocence that had somehow kept the slaves from harming him,
when they had the chance, aboard the San Dominick.
Don Benito Cereno planned to enter a monastery; however, broken in body
and spirit, he died three months after he completed his testimony.
|
|
Critical Evaluation
Originally serialized in Putnam's Monthly in 1855, Benito Cereno first
appeared, slightly revised, in book form as the first story in Herman
Melville's Piazza Tales in 1856. It was not reprinted until 1924, when
interest was being revived in Melville's writings. Since then it has
often been praised as not only one of Melville's best fictional works
but also one of the finest short novels in American literature. In 1964,
Robert Lowell adapted Benito Cereno into verse-drama as the third act of
his play The Old Glory.
Benito Cereno is Melville's version of a true story he had read in Amasa
Delano's Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern
Hemispheres (1817). Melville freely adapted Delano's account to his own
fictional purposes. The court depositions, which make up a considerable
part of the latter half of Benito Cereno, have been shown to be close to
those in Delano's account, though Melville omitted some of the court
material. In contrast, the creation of atmosphere, the building of
suspense, the development of the three main charactersDelano, Cereno,
and Babo—and the extended use of symbolism are among Melville's chief
contributions to the original story. Also, the thematically important
conversation between Delano and Cereno at the end of Benito Cereno was
added by Melville.
The remarkable third paragraph of Benito Cereno illustrates Melville's
careful combining of atmospheric detail, color symbolism, and both
dramatic and thematic foreshadowing.
The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and
calm; everything grey. The sea, though undulated into long roods of
swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead
that has cooled and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed a grey
surtout. Flights of troubled grey vapours among which they were mixed,
skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows
before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.
The description, with its repeated use of grey and seemed, is important
in setting the scene for a story the action of which will be, as seen
through Delano's eyes, ambiguous and deceptive until the light of truth
suddenly blazes upon the American captain's mind. Until that time, he
will be seeing both action and character through a mist. The grey is
symbolically significant also because Delano's clouded vision will cause
him to misjudge both the whites and blacks aboard the San Dominick. In
the light of the final revelations of the story, the grey has a moral
symbolism too, perhaps for Melville and surely for the modern reader,
since Cereno and Delano are not morally pure white or good, nor is Babo
all black or bad. The Spaniard is a slaver and the American appears to
condone the trade though he is not a part of it; the slave is certainly
justified in seeking an escape from captivity for himself and his fellow
blacks, though one cannot justify some of the atrocities consciously
committed by Babo and his followers. The closing sentence of this
mist-shrouded paragraph—"Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows
to come"—not only looks forward to the mystery that so long remains
veiled but also anticipates the final words of the two captains, words
that partly suggest the great difference in their characters. Delano
says, "You are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?" Cereno
replies, "The negro."
In reading Benito Cereno, one is caught up in the same mystery that
Captain Delano cannot penetrate, and one longs for a final release of
the suspense, a solution to the strange puzzle. Melville's hold upon the
reader until the flash of illumination in the climax is maintained by
his use of Delano's consciousness as the lens through which scene,
character, and action are viewed. The revelation is so long delayed
because of Delano's being the kind of man he is: "a person of a
singularly undistrustful good nature, not liable, except on
extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in
personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in
man." His heart is benevolent, but his mind is slow to perceive through
the dragging hours from his boarding the San Dominick until he is
finally shocked into recognition of the truth when Babo prepares to stab
Don Benito with the dagger he had concealed in his hair. At one moment
Delano is repelled by Don Benito's manner and suspicious of his
intentions; at the next he is inclined to acquit Cereno of seeming
rudeness because of his frail health and condemn himself for his
suspicions with the excuse that "the poor invalid scarcely knew what he
was about."
Just as Melville may have intended to portray Delano as representing a
type of American—good-hearted, friendly, and helpful but rather
slow-witted and naive— so he may have delineated Don Benito as
emblematic of eighteenth century Spanish aristocracy—proud, enfeebled,
and, finally, troubled in conscience over such moral crimes as slave
trading. To Delano, he first appears as "a gentlemanly,
reserved-looking, and rather young man . . . dressed with singular
richness, but bearing plain traces of recent sleepless cares and
disquietudes." Later, Don Benito's manner "conveyed a sort of sour and
gloomy disdain [which] the American in charity ascribed to the harassing
effects of sickness." Further observation leads Delano to conclude that
Don Benito's "singular alternations of courtesy and ill-breeding" are
the result of either "innocent lunacy, or wicked imposture." He is
finally undeceived and apologizes for having suspected villainy in Don
Benito toward the end of the danger-filled encounter with the slaves.
Delano is lighthearted and eager to dismiss the affair when the danger
is over and his suspicions have been erased. Don Benito's mind, however,
is of a different cast. He broods on the results in human experience of
the confusing of appearance and reality: "You were with me all day," he
says to Delano, "stood with me, sat with me, looked at me, ate with me,
drank with me, and yet, your last act was to clutch for a monster, not
only an innocent man, but the most pitiable of all men. To such degree
may malign machinations and deceptions impose. So far may ever the best
man err, in judging the conduct of one with the recesses of whose
condition he is not acquainted."
The horrors resulting from the slave mutiny and the tensions and terror
that follow Delano's kind offer to aid a ship in apparent distress,
leave an already ill man a dejected and broken one. The shadow of "the
negro" has been cast forever upon him. He retires to the monastery on
the symbolically named Mount Agonia and, three months later, is released
from his sufferings.
Babo, the third major character in Benito Cereno, is unforgettable, one
of the first important black characters in American fiction (Mrs.
Stowe's Uncle Tom had preceded him by only four years). He is one of the
most striking of the "masked" characters who appear in Melville's work
from beginning to end, hiding their true selves behind the semblance
they present to the world. Captain Delano is completely deceived in his
first sight of Babo with Don Benito: "By his side stood a black of small
stature, in whose rude face, as occasionally, like a shepherd's dog, he
mutely turned it up into the Spaniard's, sorrow and affection were
equally blended." His atten-tiveness makes him seem "less a servant than
a devoted companion" to Don Benito. Though he speaks little, his few
brief speeches suggest the intelligence that enables him to lead the
revolt on the San Dominick. He is capable of irony, as is clear when
Benito explains that it is to Babo he owes his preservation and that
Babo pacified "his more ignorant brethren, when at intervals tempted to
murmurings." "Ah, master," he sighs, ". . .whatBabo has done was but
duty." The remark is as masked as Babo's bowed face, and the American is
so completely taken in that, "As master and man stood before him, the
black upholding the white, Captain Delano could not but bethink him of
the beauty of that relationship which could present such a spectacle of
fidelity on the one hand and confidence on the other."
With its many ironies—an aristocratic Spanish slaver captured by his
slaves, a murderous black posing as a faithful servant, a naive American
protected from violent death through his own innocence and uncovering
villainy by accident—Benito Cereno may be read as a magnificently
contrived parable of limited, rational, well-ordered man struggling
against evil in the social and natural universe and achieving at least a
partial victory.
|
|
|
|
BILLY BUDD, FORETOPMAN
|
Type of work: Novel
Author: Herman Melville (1819-1891)
Type of plot: Symbolic tragedy
Time of plot: 1797
Locale: Aboard a British man-of-war
First published: 1924
|
|
In this last of Melville's works, published posthumously, the
author dramatized the clash between natural goodness and innocence as
personified by Billy Budd, and unprovoked evil as embodied in Claggart.
Captain Vere, as his name suggests, is the upholder of truth and right
in the story. When Billy inadvertently kills his antagonizer in a fight,
Vere is caught between his love for Billy and his duty to uphold the law
and maintain order; he opts for justice over mercy, and decides that he
must hang the boy.
|
|
Principal Characters
Billy Budd, a youthful member of the crew of the merchantman
Rights-of-Man, who is impressed into service aboard H.M.S. Indomitable
during the last decade of the eighteenth century. Billy is twenty-one,
"welkin-eyed," and possessed of great masculine beauty; he has no idea
who his father and mother were, having been left a foundling in a basket
on the doorstep of a "good man" in Bristol, England. Billy was a
cheerful, stabilizing influence on the rough crew of the merchantman;
when he is taken aboard the Indomitable, he is popular with all the
officers and crew except John Claggart, the mas-ter-at-arms, who is
envious of Billy's almost perfect physique and personality. Claggart
falsely accuses Billy of fomenting a mutiny aboard the ship. When he
repeats the charges in the Captain's quarters while Billy is present,
the young man (who stutters under stress and sometimes suffers a total
speech block) can say nothing in his own defense and hits Claggart on
the forehead with his fist. Claggart falls and dies. In the subsequent
trial at which the Captain is the sole witness, there can be no leniency
because of the recent Great Mutiny in the fleet. Billy is sentenced to
hang. At the execution his last words are, "God bless Captain Vere!"
Honest, refreshing, ingenuous, uncomplaining—these adjectives may be
applied to Billy Budd, who represents an innocent youth trapped by the
brutality of fleet regulations or, perhaps, who represents truth and
beauty trapped by the wickedness of the world.
Captain the Honourable Edward Fairfax Vere, of the Indomitable. He is
known in the fleet as "Starry" Vere to distinguish him from a kinsman
and officer of like rank in the navy. The nickname is a misnomer,
however, for Captain Vere, a bachelor of about forty, is a quiet,
brooding intellectual who reads a great deal. He is also a fine
commander, but he lacks the flamboyance of the more famous Nelson. He
suffers greatly at having to testify before the three-man court against
Billy Budd, whom he recognizes as an efficient, attractive, impulsive
seaman. He, too, seems trapped by regulations (tightened during the
Great Mutiny) which state that striking an officer is a capital offense.
When Claggart comes to Captain Vere with his foggy, unsubstantiated
charges that Billy is mutinous, the Captain summons Billy to his
quarters only to prove that Claggart is a false witness.
John Claggart, the master-at-arms of the ship. Since guns have replaced
the many small arms used in naval fighting, his duties are mainly to
oversee the crew and its work. When Claggart observes Billy Budd, he
quickly becomes envious of the personal beauty of the young man. In this
respect he is like Iago in "Othello"; Iago hates Cassio partly because
he is an open, honest, handsome man. So with the Claggart-Budd
relationship. The only basis for the charges Claggart makes against
Billy is that an afterguardsman, a troublemaker, tries to be friendly
and confidential with the foretopman. Because he joined the navy for no
apparent reason and because he never makes any reference to his previous
life ashore, Claggart is a man of mystery about whom many rumors are
circulated on the ship.
The Dansker, an old veteran who serves as mainmast-man in his watch. He
likes Billy from the start and is the one who nicknames him "Baby." When
Billy comes to him for counsel and to ask why his petty mistakes are
getting him into trouble, the Dansker astutely remarks that "Jimmy Legs"
(meaning the master-at-arms) is down on him.
The Afterguardsman, a troublemaking sailor. He approaches Billy and
tries to tempt him to join an incipient mutiny. Billy angrily rebuffs
him but does not report the incident to any officer.
Lieutenant Ratcliffe, the officer who goes aboard the Rights-of-Man and
selects Billy to be impressed into his majesty's service.
|
|
The Story
In 1797, the British merchant shipRights-of-Man, named after the famous
reply of Thomas Paine to Edmund Burke's criticism of the French
Revolution, was close to home after a long voyage. As it neared England,
the merchant vessel was stopped by a man-of-war, H.M.S. Indomitable, and
an officer from the warship went aboard the Rights-of-Man to impress
sailors for military service. This practice was necessary at the time to
provide men to work the large number of ships that Britain had at sea
for protection against the French.
The captain of the Rights-of-Man was relieved to have only one sailor
taken from his ship, but he was unhappy because the man was his best
sailor, Billy Budd. Billy was what his captain called a peacemaker;
because of his strength and good looks, he was a natural leader among
the other sailors, and he used his influence to keep them contented and
hard at work. Billy Budd seemed utterly without guile, a man who tried
to promote the welfare of the merchant ship because he liked peace and
was willing to work hard to please his superiors. When informed that he
was not to return to England but was to head for duty with the fleet in
the Mediterranean Sea, he did not appear disturbed; he liked the sea,
and he had no family ties. He was an orphan who had been left as a tiny
baby in a basket on the doorstep of a family in Bristol.
As the boat from the warship took him away from the merchant ship, Billy
called farewell to the Rights-of-Man by name, a deed that greatly
embarrassed the naval officer who had impressed him. The remark was
unwittingly satirical of the treatment to which Billy was being
subjected by the navy.
Once aboard the Indomitable, Billy quickly made himself at home with the
ship and the men with whom he served in the foretop. Because of his good
personality and his willingness to work, he soon made a place for
himself with his messmates and also won the regard of the officers under
whom he served.
At first, the master-at-arms, a petty officer named Claggart, seemed
particularly friendly to Billy, a fortunate circumstance, Billy thought,
for the master-at-arms was the equivalent of the chief of police aboard
the warship. The young sailor was rather surprised, therefore, when he
received reprimands for slight breaches of conduct which were normally
overlooked. The reprimands came from the ship's corporals who were
Claggart's underlings. Since the reprimands indicated that something was
wrong, Billy grew perturbed; he had a deadly fear of being the recipient
of a flogging in public. He thought he could never stand such treatment.
Anxious to discover what was wrong, Billy consulted an old sailor, who
told him that Claggart was filled with animosity for the young man. The
reason for the animosity was not known, and because the old man could
give him no reason, Billy refused to believe that the master-at-arms was
his enemy. Claggart had taken a deep dislike to Billy Budd on sight,
however, and for no reason except a personal antipathy that the young
man's appearance had generated. Sly as he was, Claggart kept, or tried
to keep, his feelings to himself. He operated through underlings against
Billy.
Not long after he had been warned by the old sailor, Billy spilled a
bowl of soup in the path of Claggart as he was inspecting the mess. Even
then, Claggart smiled and pretended to treat the incident as a joke, for
Billy had done the deed accidentally. A few nights later, however,
someone awakened Billy and told him to go to a secluded spot in the
ship. Billy went and met a sailor who tried to tempt him into joining a
mutiny. The incident bothered Billy, who could not understand why anyone
had approached him as a possible conspirator. Such activity was not a
part of his personality, and he was disgusted to find it in other men.
A few days later, the master-at-arms approached the captain of the ship
and reported that he and his men had discovered that a mutiny was being
fomented by Billy Budd. Captain Vere, a very fair officer, reminded
Claggart of the seriousness of the charge and warned the master-at-arms
that bearing false witness in such a case called for the death penalty.
Because Claggart persisted in his accusations, Captain Vere ended the
interview on deck, a place he thought too public, and ordered the
master-at-arms and Billy Budd to his cabin. There Captain Vere commanded
Claggart to repeat his accusations. When he did, Billy became
emotionally so upset that he was tongue-tied. In utter frustration at
being unable to reply to the infamous charges, Billy hit the
master-at-arms. The petty officer was killed when he fell heavily to the
floor.
Captain Vere was filled with consternation, for he, like everyone except
the master-at-arms, liked Billy Budd. After the surgeon had pronounced
the petty officer dead, the captain immediately convened a court-martial
to try Billy for assaulting and murdering a superior officer. Because
England was at war, and because two mutinies had already occurred in the
British navy that year, action had to be taken immediately. The captain
could not afford to overlook the offense.
The court-martial, acting under regulations, found Billy Budd guilty and
sentenced him to be hanged from a yard-arm the following morning. Even
under the circumstances of Claggart's death, there was no alternative.
The only person who could have testified that the charge of mutiny was
false was the man who had been killed.
All the ship's company were dismayed when informed of the sentence. But
Billy bore no animosity for the captain or for the officers who had
sentenced him to die. When he was placed beneath the yardarm the
following morning, he called out a blessing on Captain Vere, who, he
realized, had no other choice in the matter but to hang him. It was
quite strange, too, that Billy Budd's calm seemed even to control his
corpse. Unlike most hanged men, he never twitched when hauled aloft by
the neck. The surgeon's mate, when queried by his messmates, had no
answer for this unique behavior.
Some months later, Captain Vere was wounded in action. In the last hours
before his death, he was heard to murmur Billy Budd's name over and over
again. Nor did the common sailors forget the hanged man. For many years,
the yardarm from which he had been hanged was kept track of by sailors,
who regarded it almost as reverently as Christians might revere the
cross.
|
|
Critical Evaluation
According to Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, the editors of Billy
Budd, Sailor, Herman Melville began the novel in 1886, developed and
revised it through several stages, and then left it unpublished when he
died in 1891. The Hayford-Sealts text, published in 1962, differs
considerably from earlier ones published in 1924 and 1948. Among the
noteworthy differences is the change of name for the ship on which the
action occurs, from Indomitable to Bellipotent. The symbolism of the
latter name relates it to the emphasis that Melville places in the novel
on war, man's involvement in it, and the effects of war on the
individual.
That Melville did not wish his readers to mistake the nature or the
general intent of his novel is clear in his early warning that Billy "is
not presented as a conventional hero" and "that the story in which he is
the main figure is no romance." The story itself is extremely simple. A
young sailor on a British merchant ship is impressed for service on a
British warship. He offers no resistance but accepts his new assignment
with good will and attempts to be an ideal sailor. The ship's
master-at-arms takes an immediate and unwarranted dislike to the sailor,
plots to cause him trouble, and then accuses him to the captain of
having plotted mutiny. The captain summons the sailor, asks him to
defend himself, and sees him strike and accidentally kill his accuser.
The captain imprisons him, convenes a court-martial, condemns him to
death, and has him hanged. This plot is the vehicle for Melville's
extended use of moral symbolism throughout the novel.
Billy Budd, Claggart, and Captain Vere are all clearly symbolic
characters, and Melville brings out the symbolism through information
supplied about their backgrounds, language used to describe them, and
authorial comment of moral, theological, and philosophical import.
Melville employs a double symbolism for Billy: He is both a
Christ-figure and a representation of innocent or Adamic man. Before
Billy is removed from the merchant ship, the Captain explains to the
lieutenant from the warship that Billy has been most useful in quieting
the "rat-pit of quarrels" that formerly infested his forecastle. "Not
that he preached to them or said or did anything in particular; but a
virtue went out of him, sugaring the sour ones." The captain's words
echo Luke 6:19: "And the whole multitude sought to touch him: for there
went virtue out of him, and healed them all." When the lieutenant is
adamant about Billy's impressment, the captain's last words to him are:
"You are going to take away my peacemaker." Again, there is no mistaking
the reference to the Prince of Peace. In describing Billy as he appears
to the men and officers on the warship, Melville mentions "something in
the mobile expression, and every chance attitude and movement, something
suggestive of a mother eminently favored by Love and the Graces." An
officer asks, "Who was your father?" and Billy answers, "God knows,
sir." Though Billy explains that he was told he was a foundling, the
hint has already been given of a divine paternity. Melville drops the
Christ symbolism of Billy until the confrontation with Claggart when
Billy, unable to reply to Captain Vere's request that he defend himself,
shows in his face "an expression which was as a crucifixion to behold."
At the hanging, Billy's last words are, "God bless Captain Vere!" and
the reader recalls Christ's words on the Cross, "Father, forgive them;
for they know not what they do." The symbolism continues with the
hanging itself. Captain Vere gives a silent signal and "At the same
moment it chanced that the vapory fleece hanging low in the East was
shot through with a soft glory as of the fleece of the Lamb of God seen
in mystical vision, and simultaneously therewith, watched by the wedged
mass of upturned faces, Billy ascended; and, ascending, took the full
rose of the dawn." In the final chapter, Melville adds that
The spar from which the foretopman was suspended was for some few
years kept trace of by the bluejackets. . . . To them a chip from it was
as a piece of the Cross. . . . They recalled a fresh young image of the
Handsome Sailor, that face never deformed by a sneer or subtler vile
freak of the heart within. This impression of him was doubtless deepened
by the fact that he was gone, and in a measure mysteriously gone.
Even in the verses which close the novel, with Billy's words, "They'll
give me a nibble—bit o" biscuit ere 1 go./ Sure a messmate will reach me
the last parting cup." one cannot miss the Last Supper reference.
Yet, though Billy is Christlike, he belongs to the race of man, and
Melville repeatedly employs him as an archetype. His complete innocence
is first suggested in Melville's comment that "Billy in many respects
was little more than a sort of upright barbarian, much such perhaps as
Adam presumably might have been ere the urbane Serpent wriggled himself
into his company." Later, Captain Vere thinks of the handsome sailor as
one "who in the nude might have posed for a statue of young Adam before
the Fall." But innocence will not protect Billy. As Adam's human
imperfection led to his fall, so an imperfection in Billy leads to his
destruction. In times of stress, Billy stutters or is even speechless
and, says Melville, "In this particular Billy was a striking instance
that the arch interferer, the envious marplot of Eden, still has more or
less to do with every human consignment to this planet of Earth."
The innocence that is his "blinder" causes Billy (or "Baby," as he is
called) to fail to see and be on guard against the evil in Claggart, and
his "vocal defect" deprives him of speech when he faces his false
accuser. He strikes out as instinctively as a cornered animal, and his
enemy dies. Billy did not intend to commit murder but, as Captain Vere
tells his officers, "The prisoner's deed—with that alone we have to do."
Billy does not live in an animal's instinctive world of nature. His life
is bound by social law and particularly by naval law in a time of war.
As Captain Vere explains, innocent Billy will be acquitted by God at
"the last Assizes," but "We proceed under the law of the Mutiny Act."
That act demands death for Billy's deed, and he dies in order that
discipline may be maintained in the great navy which must protect
Britain against her enemies.
As Billy symbolizes innocent man, Claggart represents the spirit of
evil, the foe of innocence. There is a mystery in Claggart's enmity
toward harmless Billy. For, says Melville, "what can more partake of the
mysterious than an antipathy spontaneous and profound such as is evoked
in certain exceptional mortals by the mere aspect of some other mortal,
however harmless he may be, if not called forth by this very
harmlessness itself?" Claggart's evil nature was not acquired, "not
engendered by vicious training or corrupting books or licentious living,
but born with him and innate." He can recognize the good but is
"powerless to be it." His energies are self-destructive; his nature is
doomed to "act out to the end the part allotted to it." Although he
destroys an innocent man, he must himself be destroyed as well.
As Billy at one extreme is Christlike and childishly innocent and
Claggart at the other is Satanic, Captain Vere represents the kind of
officer needed to preserve such an institution as the navy he serves. He
is a man of balance, "mindful of the welfare of his men, but never
tolerating an infraction of discipline; thoroughly versed in the science
of his profession, and intrepid to the verge of temerity, though never
injudiciously so." His reading tastes incline toward "books treating of
actual men and events . . . history, biography, and unconventional
writers like Montaigne, who, free from cant and convention, honestly and
in the spirit of common sense philosophize upon realities." More
intellectual than his fellow officers, he seems somewhat "pedantic" to
them, and Melville hints that, in reporting Vere's long speech to his
junior officers of the drumhead court, he has simplified the phrasing of
the argument. Yet elsewhere Captain Vere's speech is simple, brief, and
direct.
Although Captain Vere is a thoughtful, reserved man, he is not without
feeling. Quickly recognizing Billy's inability to speak when he has been
ordered to defend himself, he soothingly says, "There is no hurry, my
boy. Take your time, take your time." He is even capable of momentary
vehemence as when he surprises the surgeon with the outburst, "Struck
dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!"But he quickly regains
control. Melville does not report what Captain Vere says to Billy when
he informs him privately of the death sentence, though he suggests that
Vere may have shown compassion by catching Billy "to his heart, even as
Abraham may have caught young Isaac on the brink of resolutely offering
him up." Vere is seemingly overcome after Billy's last words, "God bless
Captain Vere!" and the echo from the crew, since "either through stoic
self-control or a sort of momentary paralysis induced by emotional
shock," he stands "rigidly erect as a musket." The final view of a man
whose heart balanced his mind is given in the report of Captain Vere's
dying words, "Billy Budd, Billy Budd," spoken not in "the accents of
remorse." Though capable of fatherly feeling toward an unfortunate young
man, he had caused to be carried out a sentence he believed was needed
if the strength of order was to be maintained in the turmoil of war.
Although Billy Budd has occasionally been read as a veiled attack on the
unjust treatment of a hapless man by an impersonal, authoritarian state,
a close reading of the novel makes it seem more likely that Melville's
intent was to show, especially through Captain Vere, that the protection
of a state during a time of war must inevitably involve on occasion the
sacrifice of an individual. Melville does include scattered satiric
comments on the imperfections of both men and organizations, but his
overwhelmingly favorable portrait of Captain Vere as a high-principled
and dedicated representative of the state leaves the reader with the
final impression that Melville had at last become sadly resigned to the
fact that imperfect man living in an imperfect world has no guarantee
against suffering an unjust fate. That Billy uncomplainingly accepts his
end, even asking God's blessing upon the man who is sending him to
death, suggests that Melville too had become reconciled to the eternal
coexistence of good and evil in the world.
|
|
|
|
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
1819-1891
Moby-Dick is often cited as the Great American Novel, the high
watermark of the nineteenth-century imagination. A huge,
monstrous, and yet exquisitely refined creation, it continues to
confound, enthrall (and often defeat) generations of readers
around the world. Narrated by Ishmael, a Massachusetts
schoolteacher who has forsaken his old life for the romance of
the high seas, the novel chronicles the fong sea voyage of the
Pequod, a whaling ship led by the demonic Captain Ahab. Ahab is
in search of the white whale that has robbed him of one of his
legs. All other considerations (including the safety of his
crew) become secondary to his monomaniacal quest. However, no
summary can do justice to the breadth and complexity of
Melville's novel. One can almost feel the book fighting with
itself—balancing the urge to propel the narrative forward with
the urge to linger, explore, and philosophize. Moby-Dick is a
turbulent ocean of ideas, one of the great meditations on the
shape and status of America— on democracy, leadership, power,
industrialism, labor, expansion, and nature. The Pequod and its
diverse crew become a microcosm of American society. This
revolutionary novel borrowed from a myriad of literary styles
and traditions, switching with astonishing ease between
different bodies of knowledge. No one in American literature had
written with such intensity and such ambition before. In
Moby-Dick, one can find abstruse metaphysics, notes on the
technicalities of dissecting a whale's foreskin, and searing
passages of brine-soaked drama. Moby-Dick is an elegy, a
political critique, an encyclopedia, and a ripping yarn. Just
reading the novel constitutes an experience every bit as
wondrous and exhausting as the journey it recounts.
|
|
|
|
MOBY DICK: Or, The Whale
|
Type of work: Novel
Author: Herman Melville (1819-1891)
Type of plot: Symbolic allegory
Time of plot: Early nineteenth century
Locale: High seas
First published: 1851
|
|
Herman Melville brought many disparate elements together in Moby
Dick: Or, The Whale, a realistic picture of the whaling industry, an
adventure-romance of the sea, an epic quest, a Faustian bargain, and
metaphysical speculation. Although it is unlikely that any one
interpretation of Ahab's obsessive pursuit of the white whale will ever
be generally accepted, the depth, sweep, and power of the author's
vision guarantees the novel's stature as one of the world's proven
masterpieces.
|
|
Principal Characters
Ishmael, a philosophical young schoolmaster and sometime sailor who
seeks the sea when he becomes restless, gloomy, and soured on the world.
With a newfound friend Queequeg, a harpooner from the South Seas, he
signs aboard the whaler Pequod as a seaman. Queequeg is the only person
on the ship to whom he is emotionally and spiritually close, and this
closeness is, after the initial establishment of their friendship,
implied rather than described. Otherwise Ishmael does a seaman's work,
observes and listens to his shipmates, and keeps his own counsel. Having
been reared a Presbyterian (as was Melville), he reflects in much of his
thinking the Calvinism out of which Presbyterianism grew; but his
thought is also influenced by his knowledge of literature and
philosophy. He is a student of cetology. Regarding Ahab's pursuit of
Moby Dick, the legendary white whale, and the parts played by himself
and others involved, Ishmael dwells on such subjects as free will,
predestination, necessity, and damnation. After the destruction of the
Pequod by Moby Dick, Ishmael, the lone survivor, clings to Queequeg's
floating coffin for almost a day and a night before being rescued by the
crew of another whaling vessel, the Rachel.
Queequeg, Starbuck's veteran harpooner, a tattooed cannibal from
Kokovoko, an uncharted South Seas island. Formerly a zealous student of
Christianity, he has become disillusioned after living among so-called
Christians and, having reverted to paganism, he worships a little black
idol, Yojo, that he keeps with him. Although he appears at ease among
his Christian shipmates, he keeps himself at the same time apart from
them, his only close friend being Ishmael. In pursuit of whales he is
skilled and fearless. When he nearly dies of a fever he has the ship's
carpenter build him a canoe-shaped coffin which he tries out for size
and comfort; then, recovering, he saves it for future use. Ironically it
is this coffin on which Ishmael floats after the sinking of the Pequod
and the drowning of Queequeg.
Captain Ahab, the proud, defiant, megalomaniacal captain of the
"Pequod." He is a grim, bitter, brooding, vengeful madman who has only
one goal in life: the killing of the white whale that had deprived him
of a leg in an earlier encounter. His most prominent physical
peculiarity is a livid scar that begins under the hair of his head and,
according to one crewman, extends the entire length of his body. The
scar symbolizes the spiritual flaw in the man himself. His missing leg
has been replaced by one of whalebone for which a small hole has been
bored in the deck. When he stands erect looking out to sea, his face
shows the indomitable willfulness of his spirit, and to Ishmael he seems
a crucifixion of a "regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe." Ahab
is in complete, strict command of his ship, though he permits Starbuck
occasionally to disagree with him. Ahab dies caught, like Fedallah the
Parsee in a fouled harpoon line that loops about his neck and pulls him
from a whaleboat.
Starbuck, the first mate, tall, thin, weathered, staid, steadfast,
conscientious, and superstitious, a symbol of "mere unaided virtue or
right-mindedness." He dares to criticize Ahab's desire for vengeance,
but he is as ineffectual as a seaman trying to halt a storm. Ahab once
takes his advice about repairing some leaking oil casks; but when
Starbuck, during a typhoon off Japan, suggests turning home, Ahab scorns
him. Starbuck even thinks of killing or imprisoning Ahab while the
captain is asleep, but he cannot. Having failed to dissuade Ahab from
the pursuing of Moby Dick, Starbuck submits on the third day to Ahab's
will, though feeling that in obeying Ahab he is disobeying God. When he
makes one final effort to stop the doomed Ahab, the captain shouts to
his boatmen, "Lower away!"
Stubb, the second mate, happy-go-lucky, indifferent to danger,
good-humored, easy; he is a constant pipe-smoker and a fatalist.
Flask (King-Post), the young third mate, short, stout, ruddy. He
relishes whaling and kills the monsters for the fun of it or as one
might get rid of giant rats. In his shipboard actions, Flask is
sometimes playful out of Ahab's sight but always abjectly respectful in
his presence.
Fedallah, Ahab's tall, diabolical, white-turbaned Par-see servant. He is
like the shadow of Ahab or the two are like opposite sides of a single
character and Ahab seems finally to become Fedallah, though retaining
his own appearance. The Parsee prophesies that Ahab will nave ne/trier
nearse nor coffin when he dies. Fedallah dies caught in a fouled harpoon
line which is wrapped around Moby Dick.
Moby Dick, a giant albino sperm whale that has become a legend among
whalers. He has often been attacked and he has crippled or destroyed
many men and boats. He is both a real whale and a symbol with many
possible meanings. He may represent the universal spirit of evil, God
the indestructible, or indifferent Nature; or perhaps he may encompass
an ambiguity of meaning adaptable to the individual reader. Whatever his
meaning, he is one of the most memorable nonhuman characters in all
fiction.
Pip, the bright, jolly, genial little Negro cabin boy who, after falling
from a boat during a whale chase, is abandoned in midocean by Stubb, who
supposes that a following boat will pick him up. When finally taken
aboard the Pequod, he has become demented from fright.
Tashtego, an American Indian, Stubb's harpooner. As the Pequod sinks, he
nails the flag still higher on the mast and drags a giant seabird,
caught between the hammer and the mast, to a watery grave.
Daggoo, a giant African, Flask's harpooner.
Father Mapple, a former whaler, now the minister at the Whaleman's
Chapel in New Bedford. He preaches a Calvinistic sermon on Job filled
with seafaring terms.
Captain Peleg and Captain Bildad, fighting, materialistic Quakers, who
are the principal owners of the Pequod.
Elijah, a madman who warns Ishmael and Queequeg against shipping with
Captain Ahab.
Dough-Boy, the pale, bread-faced, dull-witted steward who deathly afraid
of Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo does his best to satisfy their
enormous appetites.
Fleece, the ship's cook. At Stubb's request he preaches a sermon to the
voracious sharks and ends with a hope that their greed will kill them.
He is disgusted also by Stubb's craving for whale meat.
Bulkington, the powerfully built, deeply tanned, sober-minded helmsman
of the Pequod.
Perth, the ship's elderly blacksmith, who took up whaling after losing
his home and family. He makes for Ahab the harpoon intended to be Moby
Dick's death dart, which the captain baptizes in the devil's name.
Captain Gardiner, the skipper of Rachel for whose lost son Captain Ahab
refuses to search.
|
|
The Story
Ishmael was a schoolmaster who often felt that he must leave his quiet
existence and go to sea. Much of his life had been spent as a sailor,
and his voyages were a means for ridding himself of the restlessness
which frequently seized him. One day, he decided that he would sign on a
whaling ship, and packing his carpetbag, he left Manhattan and set out,
bound for Cape Horn and the Pacific.
On his arrival in New Bedford, he went to the Spouter Inn near the
waterfront to spend the night. There he found he could have a bed only
if he consented to share it with a harpooner. His strange bedfellow
frightened him when he entered the room, for Ishmael was certain that
the stranger was a savage cannibal. After a few moments, however, it
became evident that the native, whose name was Queequeg, was a friendly
person, for he presented Ishmael with an embalmed head and offered to
share his fortune of thirty dollars. The two men quickly became friends
and decided to sign on the same ship.
Eventually they signed on the Pequod, a whaler out of Nantucket, Ishmael
as a seaman, Queequeg as a harpooner. Although several people seemed
dubious about the success of a voyage on a vessel such as the Pequod,
which was reported to be under so strange a man as Captain Ahab, neither
Ishmael nor Queequeg had any intention of giving up their plans. They
were, however, curious to see Captain Ahab.
For several days after the vessel had sailed, there was no sign of the
captain, as he remained hidden in his cabin. The running of the ship was
left to Starbuck and Stubb, two of the mates, and though Ishmael became
friendly with them, he learned very little about Ahab. One day, as the
ship was sailing southward, the captain strode out on deck. Ishmael was
struck by his stern, relentless expression. In particular, he noticed
that the captain had lost a leg and that instead of a wooden leg, he now
wore one cut from the bone of the jaw of a whale. A livid white scar ran
down one side of his face and was lost beneath his collar, so that it
seemed as though he were scarred from head to foot.
For several days, the ship continued south looking for the whaling
schools. The sailors began to take turns on masthead watches to give the
sign when a whale was sighted. Ahab appeared on deck and summoned all
his men around him. He pulled out an ounce gold piece, nailed it to the
mast, and declared that the first man to sight the great white whale,
known to the sailors as Moby Dick, would have the gold. Everyone
expressed enthusiasm for the quest except Starbuck and Stubb, Starbuck
especially deploring the madness with which Ahab had directed all his
energies to this one end. He told the captain that he was like a man
possessed, for the white whale was a menace to those who would attempt
to kill him. Ahab had lost his leg in his last encounter with Moby Dick;
he might lose his life in the next meeting; but the captain would not
listen to the mate's warning. Liquor was brought out, and at the
captain's orders, the crew drank to the destruction of Moby Dick.
Ahab, from what he knew of the last reported sighting of the whale,
plotted a course for the ship that would bring it into the area where
Moby Dick was most likely to be. Near the Cape of Good Hope, the ship
came across a school of sperm whales, and the men busied themselves
harpooning, stripping, melting, and storing as many as they were able to
catch.
When they encountered another whaling vessel at sea, Captain Ahab asked
for news about the white whale. The captain of the ship warned him not
to attempt to chase Moby Dick, but it was clear by now that nothing
could deflect Ahab from the course he had chosen.
Another vessel stopped them, and the captain of the ship boarded the
Pequod to buy some oil for his vessel. Captain Ahab again demanded news
of the whale, but the captain knew nothing of the monster. As the
captain was returning to his ship, he and his men spotted a school of
six whales and started after them in their rowboats. While Starbuck and
Stubb rallied their men into the Pequod's boats, their rivals were
already far ahead of them. The two mates, however, urged their crew
until they outstripped their rivals in the race, and Queequeg harpooned
the largest whale.
Killing the whale was only the beginning of a long and arduous job.
After the carcass was dragged to the side of the boat and lashed to it
by ropes, the men descended the side and slashed off the blubber. Much
of the body was usually eaten by sharks, who swarm around it snapping at
the flesh of the whale and at each other. The head of the whale was
removed and suspended several feet in the air, above the deck of the
ship. After the blubber was cleaned, it was melted in tremendous
try-pots and then stored in vats below deck.
The men were kept busy, but their excitement increased as their ship
neared the Indian Ocean and the probable sporting grounds of the white
whale. Before long, they crossed the path of an English whaling vessel,
and Captain Ahab again demanded news of Moby Dick. In answer, the
captain of the English ship held out his arm, which from the elbow down
consisted of sperm whalebone. Ahab demanded that his boat be lowered at
once, and he quickly boarded the deck of the other ship. The captain
told him of his encounter and warned Captain Ahab that it was foolhardy
to try to pursue Moby Dick. When he told Ahab where he had seen the
white whale last, the captain of the Pequod waited for no civilities but
returned to his own ship to order the course changed to carry him to
Moby Dick's new feeding ground.
Starbuck tried to reason with the mad captain, to persuade him to give
up this insane pursuit, but Ahab seized a rifle and in his fury ordered
the mate out of his cabin.
Meanwhile, Queequeg had fallen ill with a fever. When it seemed almost
certain he would die, he requested that the carpenter make him a coffin
in the shape of a canoe, according to the custom of his tribe. The
coffin was then placed in the cabin with the sick man, but as yet there
was no real need for it. Not long afterward Queequeg recovered from his
illness and rejoined his shipmates. He used his coffin as a sea chest
and carved many strange designs upon it.
The sailors had been puzzled by the appearance early in the voyage of
the Parsee, Fedallah. His relationship to the captain could not be
determined, but that he was highly regarded was evident. Fedallah had
prophesied that the captain would die only after he had seen two strange
hearses for carrying the dead upon the sea, one not constructed by
mortal hands and the other made of wood grown in America. He also said
that the captain himself would have neither hearse nor coffin for his
burial.
A terrible storm arose one night. Lightning struck the masts so that all
three flamed against the blackness of the night, and the men were
frightened by this omen. It seemed to them that the hand of God was
motioning them to turn from the course to which they had set themselves
and return to their homes. Only Captain Ahab was undaunted by the sight.
He planted himself at the foot of the mast and challenged the god of
evil which the fire symbolized for him. He vowed once again his
determination to find and kill the white whale.
A few days later, a cry rang through the ship. Moby Dick had been
spotted. The voice was Captain Ahab's, for none of the sailors, alert as
they had been, had been able to sight him before their captain. Then
boats were lowered and the chase began, with Captain Ahab's boat in the
lead. As he was about to dash his harpoon into the mountain of white,
the whale suddenly turned on the boat, dived under it, and split it into
pieces. The men were thrown into the sea, and for some time the churning
of the whale prevented rescue. At length, Ahab ordered the rescuers to
ride into the whale and frighten him away, so he and his men might be
picked up. The rest of that day was spent chasing the whale, but to no
avail.
The second day, the men started out again. They caught up with the whale
and buried three harpoons in his white flanks, but he so turned and
churned that the lines became twisted, and the boats were pulled every
which way, with no control over their direction. Two of them were
splintered, and the men had to be hauled out of the sea, but Ahab's boat
had not as yet been touched. Suddenly, Ahab's boat was lifted from the
water and thrown high into the air. The captain and the men were quickly
picked up, but Fedallah was nowhere to be found.
When the third day of the chase began, Moby Dick seemed tired, and the
Pequod's boats soon overtook him. bound to the whale's back by the coils
of rope from the harpoon poles, they saw the body of Fedallah. The first
part of his prophecy had been fulfilled. Moby Dick, enraged by his pain,
turned on the boats and splintered them. On the Pequod, Starbuck watched
and turned the ship toward the whale in the hope of saving the captain
and some of the crew. The infuriated monster swam directly into the
Pequod, shattering the ship's timbers. Ahab, seeing the ship founder,
cried out that the Pequod—made of wood grown in America—was the second
hearse of Fedallah's prophecy. The third prophecy, Ahab's death by hemp,
was fulfilled when rope from Ahab's harpoon coiled around his neck and
snatched him from his boat. All except Ishmael perished. He was rescued
by a passing ship after clinging for hours to Queequeg's canoe coffin,
which had bobbed to the surface as the Pequod sank.
|
|
Critical Evaluation
Although his early adventure novels—Typee (1846), Omoo (lW),Redburn
(1849), and White Jacket (1850)— brought Herman Melville a notable
amount of popularity and financial success during his lifetime, it was
not until nearly fifty years after his death—in the 1920s and 1930s—
that he received universal critical recognition as one of the greatest
nineteenth century American authors. Melville took part in the first
great period of American literature—the period that included Рое,
Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Thoreau. For complexity, originality,
psychological penetration, breadth, and symbolic richness, Melville
achieved his greatest artistic expression with the book he wrote when he
was thirty, Moby Dick: Or, The Whale. Between the time of his birth in
New York City and his return there to research and write his
masterpiece, Melville had circled the globe of experience—working as a
bank messenger, salesman, farmhand, schoolteacher (like his narrator,
Ishmael), engineer and surveyor, bowling alley attendant, cabin boy, and
whaleman in the Pacific on the Acushnet. His involvement in a mutinous
Pacific voyage, combined with J. N. Reynolds' accounts of a notorious
whale called "Mocha Dick" (in the Knickerbocker Magazine, 1839),
certainly influenced the creation of Moby Dick.
The intertangled themes of this mighty novel express the artistic genius
of a mind that, according to Hawthorne, "could neither believe nor be
comfortable in unbelief." Many of those themes are characteristic of
American Romanticism: the "isolated self and the pain of self-discovery,
the insufficiency of conventional practical knowledge in the face of the
"power of blackness," the demonic center of the world, the confrontation
of evil and innocence, the fundamental imperfection of man coupled with
his Faustian heroism, the search for the ultimate truth, and the
inadequacy of human perception. The conflict between faith and doubt was
one of the major issues of the century, and Moby Dick, as Eric Mottram
points out, is part of "a huge exploration of the historical and
psychological origins and development of self, society and the desire to
create and destroy gods and heroes." Moby Dick is, moreover, a work that
eludes classification, combining elements of the psychological and
picaresque novel; sea story and allegory; the epic of "literal and
metaphorical quest"; the satire of social and religious events; the
emotional intensity of the lyric genre, both in diction and metaphor;
Cervantian romance; Dantesque mysticism; Rabelaisian humor;
Shakespearean drama (both tragedy and comedy), complete with stage
directions; journalistic travel book; and scientific treatise on
cetol-ogy. Melville was inspired by Hawthorne's example to give his
story the unifying quality of a moral parable, although his own
particular genius refused to allow that parable an unequivocal, single
rendering. Both in style and theme, Melville was also influenced by
Spenser, Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Robert Burton, Sir Thomas
Browne, Thomas Carlyle, and vastly miscellaneous reading in the New York
Public Library (as witnessed by the two "Etymologies" and the marvelous
"Extracts" that precede the text itself, items from the writer's notes
and files that he could not bear to discard). It was because they did
not know how to respond to its complexities of form and style that the
book was "broiled in hell fire" by contemporary readers and critics.
Even today, the rich mixture of its verbal texture—an almost euphuistic
flamboyance balanced by dry, analytical expository prose—requires a
correspondingly receptive range on the part of the reader.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the plot of the novel is that
Moby Dick does not appear physically until after five hundred pages and
is not even mentioned by name until nearly two hundred pages into the
novel. Yet whether it be the knowledge of reality, an embodiment of the
primitive forces of nature, the deep subconscious energies of mankind,
fate or destiny inevitably victorious over illusory free will, or simply
the unknown in experience, it is the question of what Moby Dick stands
for that tantalizes the reader through the greater part of the novel. In
many ways, the great white whale may be compared to Spenser's "blatant
beast" (who, in The Faerie Queene, also represents the indeterminable
elusive quarry, and also escapes at the end to continue haunting the
world).
It is not surprising that Moby Dick is often considered to be "the
American epic." The novel is replete with the elements characteristic of
that genre: the piling up of classical, biblical, historical allusions
to provide innumerable parallels and tangents that have the effect of
universalizing the scope of action; the narrator's strong sense of the
fatefulness of the events he recounts, and his corresponding awareness
of his own singular importance as the narrator of momentous, otherwise
unrecorded, events; Queequeg as IshmaePs "heroic companion"; the "folk"
flavor provided by countless proverbial statements; the leisurely pace
of the narrative, with its frequent digressions and parentheses; the
epic confrontation of life and death on a suitably grand stage (the
sea), with its consequences for the human city (the Pequod)\ the
employment of microcosms to explicate the whole (for example, the
painting in the Spouter Inn, the Nan-tucket pulpit, the crow's nest);
epithetical characterization; a cyclic notion of time and events; an
epic race of heroes, the Nantucket whalers with their biblical and
exotic names; the mystical power of objects like Ahab's chair, the
doubloon, or the Pequod itself; the alienated, sulking hero (Ahab); the
use of lists to enhance the impression of an all-inclusive compass.
Finally, Moby Dick shares the usually didactic purpose of the epic; on
one level, its purpose is to teach the reader about whales; on another
level, it is to inspire the reader to become, himself, a heroic whaleman.
All this richness of purpose and presentation is somehow made enticing
by Melville's masterly invention of his narrator. Ishmael immediately
establishes a comfortable rapport with the reader in the unforgettable
opening lines of the novel. He is both an objective observer of and a
participant in the events recounted, both spectator and narrator. Yet he
is much more than the conventional wanderer/witness. As a schoolmaster
and sometime voyager, he combines book learning with firsthand
experience, making him an informed observer and a convincing, moving
reporter. Simply by surviving, he transcends the Byronic heroism of
Ahab, as the wholesome overcomes the sinister.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
