Student ID No.

1171361

‘Leviathanic Allusions’: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and the

American Epic.

In a celebratory appraisal of fellow writer friend and resident of Massachusetts, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Melville eloquently wrote that the world is “as young today, as when it was created, and this Vermont
morning dew is as wet to my feet, as Eden's dew to Adam's.” (Melville, 1976, p.411) This, I believe,
pertains to the intention of Melville to construct a national Epic for America. In forging what can be
termed an ‘American Epic’, Melville’s novel demonstrates suitably vast generic and stylistic plurality.
The centralising human conflict of the endeavour to understand the world and our place within it is
arguably Moby Dick’s thematic core. Amid that most arid and yet implacable of existential questions
we can argue that the book identifies with both ‘American’, and ‘Epic’ as classifications. In his
seminal inquiry into the mythology of the American West Richard Slotkin illuminates the relation
between American cultural mythology and Melville’s metaphorical narrative mode; “In creating his
epic, Melville reenvisioned the traditional myths of his culture, bringing their implicit structures of
symbol and value to consciousness by extending and expanding the symbolic elements and by
providing new contexts for and therefore new perspectives on the central themes of the hunter’s
adventure.” (Slotkin, 2000, p.550) Melville takes a prominent aspect of American life, whaling, and
gives it metaphorical flight, so it symbolically functions to represent “any man’s life in general”
(Auden, 1977, p.9). Within this symbolic structure whaling as an analogous representative of
epistemological inquiry participates in and communicates with a framework of popular American
mythology. Melville expands the symbolic structure of Frontier mythology to incorporate his
metaphorical narrative detailing an epistemological quest to penetrate the core of ‘reality’, in which
the white whale symbolises the primary forces of nature, “is not Leviathan the immortal symbol of the
inscrutability of the created world, a mystery not to be resolved until the end of days?” (Fiedler, 1960,
p.548)

I would argue that the novels central theme, one of man’s struggle to understand the world and attain
some final ‘truth’, is not an entirely universal one and it is restrictive to think of it as so. By framing
the metaphorical narrative within the frontier mythical archetype, the thematic core addresses the
white, urbanised, industrialised American man of Melville’s contemporary social setting. Melville
provides new contexts of understanding for the hunter mythology, he expands the ‘wilderness’ of the
frontier and the prairie into the sea as a symbolic wilderness. In this sense we can consider Moby-
Dick to be a generically transformative epic in as much as he transforms the symbolic structures of
Frontier mythology for 19th century America, appropriating national myths as a base to produce a
work that could participate in Eurocentric ‘Old World’ tradition of epic poetry. Richard Martin asserts
that ‘Epic’ is a “contingent and culture-bound category.” That the ‘Epic’ “applied to similar categories
across cultures, plays a necessary role that transcends genre” (Martin, 2006, p.9) Melville adapts the
symbolic features of Frontier mythology, the isolated hunter in the vast wilderness, into a broader
symbolic structures achieving the cosmic scale of Epic material, the hunter is now the whaler, the
wilderness is now the sea. His re-appropriation of the ‘quest’ aspect of Frontier mythology is most
critical, the quest is no longer to cast a nation out of the wilderness but an ‘epistemological’ quest to
understand man’s position in the world, to penetrate the surface of material reality and reach some
final attainment of ‘truth’. In this way Melville has updated and expanded Epic content and the
symbolic structure of American mythology to communicate themes of profound importance to
Western civilization in the mid-19th century. The internal logic of the novels thematic metaphor rests
upon this symbolic relation of both the white whale and the sea representing the vast chaotic forces of
nature. The primary symbolic relation of pursuit of the white whale with pursuit of knowledge of the
infinite is delineated in the novels opening chapter, the alignment of sea and ‘truth’ that generates
much of the metaphorical narrative is cast. “Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the
Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning? […]
But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable
phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.” (Melville, 2008, p.3) The narrative documents the
progression of Ishmael’s sequential thought, this progression from the optimistic indignation, “Surely
all this is not without meaning?” to the resignation of unattainability, “ungraspable”, “Key to it all”,
arguably enacts the entire course of the epistemological quest that the metaphorical narrative is
concerned with in microcosm, this “reaffirms the inscrutability of existence.” (Gilmore, 1977, p.6)
The whale, functioning as a symbol of nature’s mystery and all life, is eminently unknowable.
If we view the loose structure of the novel as that of an epistemological quest, a product of Melville’s
disclosed wisdom of the impossibility of a full comprehension of the ‘truth’ to the mystery of nature
and human existence is the consideration of ontological identity and subsequent presentation of man
(Symbolically Ishmael, as the ‘everyman’) as an “ontological orphan” (Tanner, 2000, p.69). Crucially,
the novel ends on the word “Orphan” (Melville, 2008, p.509). At various points in the novel, this
condition of contemporary man as an ‘ontological orphan’ is delineated as a contingency of the
absence of man’s access to the ‘truth’ of his reality. We can argue that the internal logic of the
metaphorical narrative posits that the implacable condition of the pursuit of existential ‘truth’
generates the ontological identity of man as forever seeking without ever finally knowing. The
epistemological conditions the ontological state of perpetual orphanhood, as Michael Gilmore states;
“Ishmael himself says that all men are figurative orphans who seek in vain for the secret of their
paternity and who voyage eternally in pursuit of “the final harbour, whence we unmoor no more.” ”
(Gilmore, 1977, p.7) Tony Tanner specifically relates this condition of orphanhood to Nietzsche’s
diagnosis of modern man as fundamentally rootless, in this sense man will forever be searching for
understanding primarily because of the historical loss of the function of myth as the basis for a
culture. For Tanner, this conception of orphanhood comes to resemble the “constituent plight of
modern man” (Tanner, 2000, p.69) for Nietzsche. Nietzsche designates this as the condition of his
contemporaneous man,
Now, mythless man stands there, surrounded by every past there has ever been, eternally
hungry, scraping and digging in a search for roots, even if he has to dig for them in the most
distant antiquities. The enormous historical need of dissatisfied modern culture, the
accumulation of countless other cultures, the consuming desire for knowledge – what does
this all point to, if not to the loss of myth, the loss of a mythical home, a mythical, maternal
womb?
(Nietzsche, 1999, p.109)
Tanner’s insistence on the correspondence between Melville’s narrative of metaphysical orphanhood
and Nietzsche’s concept of cultural orphanhood devised roughly 20 years later is most illuminating,
but there is an aspect of it which is arguably misleading. I assert that the metaphysical orphanhood in
the text specifically pertains to the socio-historical conditions under which the text was produced. The
theoretical paradigm of cultural materialism when used to analyse literary texts asserts that “culture
does not (cannot) transcend the material forces and relations of production. Culture is not simply a
reflection of the economic and political system, but nor can it be independent of it.” (Dollimore and
Sinfield, 2003, p.viii) We can argue that the concept of orphanhood in Melville’s novel is only
universal in an abstract and removed sense, so man is not universally an ontological orphan but more
specifically, American man is an ontological orphan. This leads to a consideration of the anxiety of
American Identity in the 1850s, a point at which America can still be identified as a ‘new’ nation.
The declaration of Independence in 1776 from the Colonial master necessitated symbolic acts of
cultural fratricide from which Americans could define themselves and the character of this new nation
could be distilled. The function of mythology within a culture can be conceived of as that of a
schematic structure that works to tangibly define ‘national character’, to provide a symbolic
framework through which ideas and values are transmitted. To establish a structure of meaning from
this framework that all subsequent works participate in. Nietzsche defines ‘myth’ as “the contracted
image of the world” as an “abbreviation of appearances” (Nietzsche, 1999, p.108) Myth functions
within a culture to form a basis of communally held ideas and images that serves both to structure the
historical experience of a nation and to provide a structure for understanding and interpreting ongoing
experience. Thus a vast array of multifarious historical experiences are given shape and order in the
form of a mythological framework of symbols that constitute this “contracted image of the world”.
The chapter of Moby Dick entitled ‘The Gilder’ contains an implicit refutation of Tanner’s claim that
Ishmael’s orphanhood represents Nietzsche’s expression of the condition of man abstracted and
deracinated from the “mythical home”. Through analogy, Melville continuously aligns the experience
of the whaler with the experience of those first explorers of the Frontier;

and the distant ship revealing only the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not
through high rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: as when the western
emigrants’ horses only show their erected ears, while their hidden bodies widely wade
through the amazing verdure.
(Melville, 2008, p.436)
Within the symbolic framework of Frontier mythology that this chapter participates with, this analogy
has the same function as an epic simile within the tradition of Homeric epics. The allusion to a
popular mythical frame of reference elevates and heightens the status of the whaling ship, further
aligning the symbolic relation of the sea and the unexplored wilderness of the Frontier, and of whaling
and the pioneers. Within the micro-structure of this chapter this allusion serves to establish the
symbolic alignment of whaling and the Frontier, which manifests as a conceptual bridge that allows
Melville to attribute further metaphorical dimensions to the whaling profession. The narrative is
generated through a metaphorical structure of symbols, Melville relates two aspects of American
experience, the historical experience of the Frontier and the contemporaneous experience of the
whaling industry, to the pursuit of unravelling the mystery of human existence. This is achieved in the
form of a stylised progression of Ishmael’s thoughts in which seemingly fragmentary and disparate
components are sequentially brought together. With the correspondence between pioneers and
whalers established, Ishmael’s thought pattern takes metaphorical flight which manifests as a poetic
and philosophical evocation of the cyclical nature of human existence; “Where lies the final harbour,
whence we unmoor no more? […] Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in
bearing them; the secret of our paternity lies in their grave and we must there to learn it.” (Melville,
2008, p.437) We can argue that the form of this chapter is one of philosophical exposition in which
heterogeneous and fragmentary experiences of reality are related within a symbolic structure. Imagery
of sea and frontier are already aligned through a literary device resembling the epic simile, Ishmael
then describes his state of a “most mystic mood; so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting,
interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole.” (Melville, 2008, p.437) This sentence can be conceived
of almost as a meta-textual commentary on the form of the chapter as the “seamless whole” is the
metaphorical interrelation of whaling and the pioneers. The two components of American experience
are aligned through imagery, and then “interpenetrate” to resemble a “whole” in which both are
metaphorically related to the epistemological quest. The logic of this metaphor being that both acts of
seeking, those of the pioneers and the whalers, are pursuing some “final harbour” (Melville, 2008,
p.437). The pioneers were interpreting a physical wilderness, the whalers interpreting a metaphysical
wilderness, both are confronted with “the impossibility of finding a conclusive solution to the riddle
of the universe.” (Gilmore, 1977, p.6) Pioneers and whalers “interpenetrate” through imagery to
constitute a “seamless whole” in which ontological orphanood is to be understood as directly
corresponding to the cultural history of America in as much as it is being presented as the historical
condition of the development of American culture.
When Nietzsche asks his reader to “think of a culture which has no secure and sacred place of origin”
(Nietzsche, 1999, p.109), we can examine America’s cultural identity in the mid-nineteenth century.
The ‘New World’ did not have a tradition Epic poetry as the basis of its cultural identity, Slotkin
asserts that “The mythology of a nation is the intelligible mask of that enigma called the “national
character”. Through myths the psychology and world view of our cultural ancestors are transmitted to
modern descendants” (Slotkin, 2000, p.3) Thus myth functions to provide a structure for interpreting
both historical and contemporaneous experience, if we accept Nietzsche’s view that a culture without
a “secure and sacred place of origin” necessarily produces “mythless man” or ontological orphans
then this materialises as a seemingly viable interpretation of the presence of metaphysical orphanhood
in Melville’s novel. But this view would negate the importance of mythological framework of the
Frontier to an analysis of Melville’s narrative form. Nietzsche argues that “The images of myth must
be the unnoticed but omnipresent, daemonic guardians under whose tutelage the young souls grow up
and by whose signs the grown man interprets his life and his struggles” (Nietzsche, 1999, p.108) This
accords with Slotkin’s view that the symbols of Americanism propagated by popular Frontier
mythology, the hunter and pioneer casting anew upon a vast wilderness, became “the structuring
metaphor for American experience” (slotkin, 2000, p.5). Melville places the symbolic components of
his narrative, the whaler and the sea, within this mythological imagery as a means to provide an
interpretative framework this is demonstrated by the use of analogy in the chapter entitled ‘The
Lamp’; “He [the whaleman] goes and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its freshness and
genuineness, even as the traveller on the prairies hunts up his own supper game.” (Melville, 2008,
p.381) This analogy builds upon the symbolic correspondence between the sea and the wildness of the
Frontier which is delineated in the previous chapter, ‘The Try-Works’, “The sun hides not the ocean,
which is the dark side of this earth, and which is two thirds of this earth” (Melville, 2008, p.380) The
sea as the ‘dark side of the earth’ in representing the natural world in its primal state has a twofold
symbolic function; it serves to relate the pursuit of whales through the darkness of the sea to the
pursuit of knowledge and ‘truth’ through the darkness of nature’s mystery, and it relates both the
literal pursuit of whales and the figurative pursuit of knowledge to the imagery of American
experience within the framework of Frontier mythology.
Melville adapts the symbolic structures of his primary source of indigenous myth, the hunter’s quest,
to generate the metaphysical and epistemological dimensions of his own metaphorical narrative.
Therefore these popular American mythical archetypes are re-arranged and expanded in order to
question man’s relation to nature. D.H. Lawrence elliptically conveys this dimension of the narrative
as “The sheer naked slidings of the elements. And the human soul experiencing it all.” (Lawrence,
1923) If we reduce the novel’s structure to essential metaphysical components, the internal logic of
the metaphorical narrative posits that the white whale is nature and that Ahab and Ishmael are man.
Man’s relation to nature changes dramatically from the historical experience of the Frontier to
Melville’s contemporary setting but man is still seeking answers in nature, the hunter’s quest has
become epistemological. By framing the epistemological quest within the Frontier mythical archetype
it can be inferred that Melville is specifically focalising white, urbanised, industrialised American
man. Man is no longer striving to cast a nation upon a wilderness, that nation has already been cast,
and critically, an industrial and technological revolution of mechanisation has occurred, casting the
relation of man to nature in new light. The framing of man’s epistemological quest within an
industrialised society within the mythical archetype of the Frontier illuminates the impact of
mechanisation and industrialisation upon man’s understanding of his place in relation to nature. One
of the more explicit references to industrialisation occurs in the ‘A Bower in the Arsacides’ chapter in
which Ishmael tries to comprehend the whale’s totality through empirical means, measuring the
skeleton of the whale as a means to understand its mystery, and admits failure. Ishmael endeavours to
“set him [the whale] before you in his ultimatum; that is to say, in his unconditional skeleton.”
(Melville, 2008, p.400) In metaphorical terms he pursues nature right to its most primal incarnation,
represented symbolically as Ishmael physically standing inside the deified whale skeleton temple and
reinforced through the florid use of naturalistic imagery. But a tension emerges when natural imagery
is sequenced alongside mechanical imagery, the contrasting imagery first established as “The wood
was green as mosses of the Icy Glen […] the industrious earth beneath was a weaver’s loom”
(Melville, 2008, p.401) After the contrasting sets of images are established the mechanical begins to
obstruct the natural; “and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through
it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken words that are inaudible amongst the flying
spindles.” (Melville, 2008, p.402) Within the internal logic of the metaphor, the noisy mechanical
obstruction results in understanding of the absolute reality of nature eluding man, “Ah, mortal! then,
be heedful; for so, in all this din of the great world’s loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard
afar.” (Melville, 2008, p.402) and the epistemological quest is obstructed. Within the metaphorical
narrative the hunter of the Frontier, the whaler, and the man who seeks to understand his origin and
purpose are symbolically aligned, this implicates a broader symbolic alignment in which all human
endeavours are aligned, the chasm between the act of seeking and the act of killing dissipates, “For we
are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonapartes and sharks included.” (Melville, 2008, p.125)
Ishmael’s acceptance of the failure to comprehend nature and the absolute in totality, “I promise
nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason
infallibly be faulty.” (Melville, 2008, p.117) indicates an acceptance of his own ontological
orphanhood. He dwells in mystery, accepts it and perseveres as the sole survivor of the Pequod, he
endures and survives the ultimate conflict with the incomprehensible void, whilst Ahab is defeated by
the conflict and perishes. Above all, Ishmael displays great courage in his acceptance, a courage he
administers as a sincere compliment to Hawthorne in a letter to him; “By visable truth, we mean the
apprehension of the absolute condition of present things as they strike the eye of the man who fears
them not, though they do their worst to him.” (Melville, 2008, p.510) The whale “serves a dual role as
an object of both physical and metaphysical capture” (Belknap, 2004, p.135) for both Ishmael and
Ahab and its dual presence conditions their status as ontological orphans, in which Ahab’s refusal of
anything resembling acceptance conditions the dimensions of his own tragedy and demise. He
observes the immaterial absolute condition of reality that lies beneath the material reality of
appearances, “All visible objects, man, are but pasteboard masks.” but believes the truth to be
obtained through a destruction of surface-level appearances, “But in each event – in the living act, the
undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the moulding of its features
from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! To me, the white
whale is that wall […] I see in him outrageous strength with an inscrutable malice sinewing in it. The
inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate” (Melville, 2008, p.145) Ahab, conditioned by the suffering of
ontological orphanhood, seeks to destroy the “inscrutable” nature of existence, the forces beyond him.
Thus, dismemberment of Ahab’s leg is metaphorical dismemberment of the illusion of control. We as
humans, unlike our fellow inhabitants of Earth, are endowed to experience this planet with sentience,
this conditions us all as ontological orphans. Sentience presumes control, which is an illusion
constantly embattled in conflict with the vast chaos of nature and a universe which cannot bequeath to
us the origin and secret of our paternity as a species. Such a concept has been poetically evoked by
Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Cat’s Cradle; "Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and
wonder, 'Why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand."
(Vonnegut, 2010, p.182) Ahab seeks to obtain truth in the act of destruction, for him the physical
destruction of the whale produces the metaphysical destruction of illusory appearances. Much of this
characterisation of Ahab is not generated through the Shakespearean rhythms and cadences of his
speech but indirectly through the prosaic narration of Ishmael; “where Ahab, though everywhere else
foiled in his pursuit, firmly counted upon giving battle to Moby-Dick, in the sea he was most known
to frequent; and at a season when he might most reasonably be presumed to be haunting it.” (Meville,
2008, p.341) Here we see the conflict of the disparity between human endeavour and the vast mystery
of nature, the futility of human endeavour is through the constituents of cognation (thought, reason,
language) amounting to merely hopeful, vague, intangible approximates. In this guise our means to
interpret the world are seen as ultimately meaningless, in the face of great unknowable nature we have
only empty platitudes. “when he might most reasonably be presumed”, the futility of this statement is
conveyed through the leaden, ponderous syntax, “might most reasonably” amounts to nothing. This
enacts the technical mechanics that produce Melville’s metaphorical narrative structure,
demonstrating an insurmountable void between language, or our ability to cognate and interpret
objects of reality and ‘truth’. Ahab’s firm countenance presupposes a tangible link between thing and
expression of thing that fails to hold up.
Melville expands and re-appropriates the symbolic structures of American mythical archetypes to
generate his metaphorical narrative of an epistemological quest. In this regard we can consider it to be
a generically transformative epic, Melville expands the hunter’s quest to focalise his contemporary
setting and nation to provide a way to structure experience and provide an Epic for America. Within
the narrative whaling and the act of eternally seeking knowledge become “truly New World models of
heroic behaviour” (McWiliams, 1989, p.7) All mortal and earthly resources are exhumed and yet the
mystery of nature and ontological paternity abides, “Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet
yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud
of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” (Melville, 2008, p.508) Man is lost in
“unshored harborless immensities” (Melville, 2008, p.116) as the eternal processes of nature and
mystery remain and abide, “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the
earth abideth forever.” (Ecclesiastes 1:4) Man remains an ontological orphan “that in her retracing
search after her missing children, only found another orphan.” (Melville, 2008, p.509) The novels
central wisdom is imbued in its denouement “By ending Moby-Dick with the word “orphan,” Melville
reemphasizes the impossibility of finding a conclusive solution to the riddle of universe.” (Gilmore,
1977, p.6) We can say the epistemological quest has led to the ‘truth’ that nature’s mystery is eternal
and human life is transient. The quest resolves itself in epistemological indeterminacy, the
determinate cannot be wrought from the indeterminate.
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