Wherefore Ishmael?: Melville and the Back of God

I recall reading, somewhere, that Moby-Dick is a sort of proving ground for young American theorists. This same source, which I cannot now find nor recall, remarked that new critics like to "try their weapons on its hide." And far be it from me to break with tradition.

I have thus far finished only one critical essay for this website, on Hamlet, and from a professedly religious and even theological perspective. It is perhaps fitting that my second essay should be on Melville's masterwork (that story second only to Hamlet itself in enigma, and therefore its second also in the sheer amount of critical attention- at least, after the end of Melville's obscurity in the early twentieth century) and begin from a like vantage point. Hamlet is, after all, in Moby-Dick's bones, along with Lear and Macbeth- where better, then, to go?


Moby-Dick is among the most allusive novels in history: Melville weaves a dense fabric of symbols, each of which is grounded in a dozen sources, and each of which spins out a hundred meanings. The whales themselves are explained in light of all the contemporary zoological and natural-historical accounts available to Melville, as well as by any number of mythic and biblical references (we will allow Melville his error- intentional or not- in supposing that "Leviathan" in Scripture stands for "whale"); the defining character of The Whale, his unearthly coloration, is linked to all the different meanings and uses of "whiteness" one can imagine, and many more besides; the awfulness of electrical storms and fires is traced back to its ancient history in Prometheus and Zoroaster. And above all, Jonah; and above all, Ahab. The unwilling prophet and the wicked king: these are the chief things in the book, in these two images stand Ahab and Starbuck, Fedallah and Stubb, Man and Whale- perhaps, Man and God.

It is curious, then- is it not?- that the good prophet, the rebuker of Ahab in Bible and novel alike, the prophet Elijah, is reduced to a passing curiosity. He offers warning to the pagan Queequeg and the no-less-pagan Ishmael, he prophesies the unhappiness of Ahab and his ship, and then is gone. We meet Elijah only as other, only as outsider, only in passing. We do not know where he is going, nor from where he comes. We do not know what God he serves, we never see the tokens of his faith. Elijah! No less than Isaiah or the Baptist, the type and image of the prophet, and yet we meet him only as an eccentric on the street, speaking only for a moment and then departing. He is a tangent to the story, touching at the one point and only at the one point. Ishmael seems to forget him (Well! He forgets Queequeg, too, and rather quickly, for all his promises of union and marital closeness.); Ahab, to ignore him. What Elijah thinks of the wreck of the Pequod, we can only guess: whether he finds it worth his notice; whether he nods in self-satisfaction; whether he mourns the inexorable, fated doom, we cannot know.

Strange, too, I think, that of a book so filled to bursting with allegory and symbol, we do not always think to ask of the importance of names. For certain, Melville is not Bunyan. He does not name Ahab Captain Vengeance or Mr. Blasphemer, and the whale he does not name Evilfish or Work-of-God. But at the same time, he raises up a constellation of three names, and in them there seems much meaning, if we are willing to look for it: Ishmael, Ahab, Elijah. Ahab, of course, is the sinful king who will not heed the prophet. Elijah is the prophet. But what of Ishmael? There is some special force in that name, which we know for several reasons: the very first words of the book (or rather, the book proper), so familiar to us all, "Call me Ishmael," demand we notice it; and, after all, it would have been so easy for Melville to do without a name for the narrator at all, had he chosen, since it is no more than once or twice that anyone besides Ishmael himself is heard to utter it.

The tempting explanation of the name, as the most readily suggested by the nature of the Pequod and her crew, is that Ishmael is the orphan, or the marginalized. We could very easily construe him as the man on the edge of the desert, living apart from mankind, with every hand, as the Bible tells us, raised against him. But this is not the whole story- true, Ishmael is made to be fatherless, but he has a mother. True, he is a hunter in the wilderness, but he has a wife. And every hand may be turned against him, but that is only because he is (or will be) a great nation. No, Ishmael is not the orphaned and the desperate, or not in any unmixed sense.

But what is Ishmael? For Reformed Christians like Melville (and, incidentally, myself), Ishmael is a challenge and a riddle, a strange mystery. He is the son of Abraham, but he is not the child of the covenant. He is blessed by God and protected by him- he is even promised, like Abraham and Jacob and Moses, to be made a nation- but not in the promised land, and not by solemn oath. Paul makes of him an allegory(!) of the law and Sinai, which are blessed things, but contrasts him with gospelly Isaac, the child of promise. Ishmael is reprobate- or so, at any rate, we would reflexively think- where Isaac is elect, but what kind of reprobation is this! There is nothing else like it- Esau bears, perhaps, the closest analogy, as a passed-over elder brother who grows great, but Esau's prosperity and his nationhood are not attended by the intercession of an angel, nor by promises of God. If I may be vulgar and imprecise for a moment, Esau seems to succeed by virtue of his strength and vital force (the great hunter! the shaggy man! his father's favorite!), but Ishmael through the workings of Providence. Melville's Ishmael, too, seems preserved by the workings of God (or fate), saved alone from the wreck of the Pequod and then only by a strange and unlooked for conspiracy of details.

So what do we make of him in Moby-Dick? What is the meaning of this name, "Ishmael"? Might it be that he is a man who does not know God, but only of God? Consider the biblical Ishmael: a very young man when he is forced out from the covenant family, the tents of Abraham, where God speaks (and sometimes even visits, sometimes even eats), driven into the desert, and in that place saved from death. The central fact of his life is this divine rescue, with its attendant blessings, and yet Ishmael himself is not told of them, or not directly. Hagar, his mother, receives the angelic word, and, while she surely tells the boy, he never hears the promise and the explanation himself. He hears of God secondhand, in contrast to the patriarchs. He knows who God is, but he does not know him (in German, one might say Er wisst Gott, aber kennt ihn nicht). One might expect him to look for signs of God in the world, to strive to find him in the ways of history and happenstance. But God, after all, cannot be understood this way, or not, at any rate, by sinners such as we. The whole thought of Christendom- and especially of the Protestant world- demands that God be the revealer of himself. Sola Scriptura, solus Christus, solus Spiritus Sanctus. Even Job floundered until the LORD spoke to him.

But this effort to see God without God, to know him apart from his presence- apart, ultimately, from Christ as the true Word of God- is precisely what Ishmael is engaged in, and it is precisely this effort that leads Ahab to his final renunciation of good and God together: Ego non baptizo te in nomine Patris, sed in nomine Diaboli!* (Charles Olson, in his bizarre but potent Call Me Ishmael, despite his eager pagan proselytizing, correctly notes that Ahab names only the Father in his baptismal formula because he cannot speak of Christ, or, indeed, the comforting Spirit. Ahab can only name God as a fearsome monad, alone and alien, as the enemy of mankind. Only Starbuck does, or can, use the name of Jesus in the whole of the novel.)
*"I do not baptize you in the name of the Father, but in the name of the devil!"

Almost the whole meaning of Moby-Dick may be summed up in two passages, one from Ahab and the other from Ishmael. Having sworn the crew to his vengeance, Ahab is confronted by Starbuck, who insists that "To be enraged with a dumb thing.... seems blasphemous." He is right, but he does not yet know why. Ahab's revenge is not properly against the whale, but against what he perceives the whale to be:

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event- in the living act, the     undoubted deed- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.... I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.

Ahab has seen, quite truly as it seems to me, the hand of God in all things, mediately immediate. Moby-Dick is the very finger of God, and it is God who has, in some sense or other, crippled Ahab. (The psychologists insist that we must read the whale's attack as a castration. Well, they may be right- but still, I will bow to them and smile and say, "Nevertheless....") What Ahab hates is not chiefly the existence of evil, but that evil is evidently as much a part of providence as good. This may be an unusual use of the term "providence"- it is mostly used in reference to God's dispensing of good gifts to the world- but it is, I contend, still appropriate. It is not sovereignty to which Ahab objects, for a sovereign God could permit nothing but good, and is an attribute rather than a deed- but providence is God's activity in the world.

As time goes on, the whale develops as a symbol from God's activity to a kind of god himself. He is a divine incarnation- though the question remains, of whom? Ishmael reminds the reader that Vishnu took the form of a whale, and the mad sailor, Gabriel, aboard the Jeroboam insists that it is the God of the Shakers (that strange thing, male and female together, and with a female Christ, the Englishwoman Ann Lee, as well as the male, Jesus). Ishmael later, however, deliberately parallels the whale with the biblical God, even as he doubts that such a God can be known. And this is the second chief passage:

If I know not even the tail of this whale [for he develops at length the idea of the tail as the power or work of God in the world- the tail is the whale's providence], how understand his head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none [since the whale has no nose to center the face, and his eyes are on the sides of his head, such that he has, as Ishmael points out "two backs"]? Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face.

Ishmael evokes the theophany of Exodus 33 (In the King James, "I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back parts; but my face shall not be seen") and doubts whether it can be. The whale has no face, only a tail. God, he says, has no hidden glory, no incomprehensible goodness- only incomprehensible power. Only the working of the world, in which good and evil seem to come indifferently.

The Pequod sets out on Christmas day, whether because Ahab is intent on his mission of self-exaltation to divinity (an "ungodly, god-like man"), or because its crew, like the wise men- or, better, like the shepherds- are in search of the God Most High, or because of both. The Pequod is on a voyage to understand deity and to kill it. Ahab sees in his crippling the fingerprints of God, and is intent to spit in the divine face if he cannot bloody it. But even beyond this, Ahab has an urge, a compulsion, an obsession to know the God whom he hates. He addresses himself to God in the fire: "Defyingly I worship thee." He is fascinated by providence even as he wishes to jam its inexorable wheels. And this, ultimately, is what gives the book its overall character.

Blake, the archetypical "mad prophet" of English literature, claimed that he wanted to write a "Bible of Hell," an account of the world from the diabolical perspective, and this he did in the form of his mythopoeic pseudo-epics. Melville, I believe, set out to write a "Bible of the Reprobate," the Bible as written by Ahab and Ishmael rather than Elijah and Isaac, and did so in Moby-Dick. Unlike Blake, I do not believe Melville sets himself in direct opposition to the "heavenly" (for Blake, this meant only the restrictive and the rationalistic; for Melville, it probably means something more along the lines of the ordinary good, the contented and dutiful). Instead, I think, he meant to write for those who, like the biblical Ishmael, stand near to the presence of God, who want desperately and perhaps angrily to see into it, but are unable- for what reason, only providence can tell. It is for those who have seen the tail but doubt the existence of the face. If Melville felt himself one of these, I cannot tell, but for certain, his Ahab and his Ishmael belong to that party.