Why Read Moby-Dick

pleases me better,” Sophia wrote of their new literary friend, “than to sit & hear this growing man dash his tumultuous waves of thought up against Mr. Hawthorne’s great, genial, comprehending silences.”
    But Melville was not all ardent impetuosity in his conversations with Hawthorne; there was, as Sophia observed, a somewhat unsettling method to his madness. In a letter to her mother, Sophia revealed that the one thing she didn’t like about Melville was his “small eyes.” “Once in a while,” she explained, “his animation gives place to a singularly quiet expression, out of those eyes to which I have objected; an indrawn, dim look, but which at the same time makes you feel that he is at that instant taking deepest note of what is before him. It is a strange, lazy glance, but with a power in it quite unique. It does not seem to penetrate through you, but to take you into itself.” This is Melville caught in the act of creative infiltration—the sneaky, deceptively “lazy” way that he took what he needed from Hawthorne. Instead of a literary influence, Hawthorne was, for Melville, more of a source of emotional inspiration: the figure that moved him to take Shakespeare’s lead and dive into the darkness. Just as Ahab co-opted the Pequod, Melville used Hawthorne’s fiction only as it served his own literary purposes.
    But what about Hawthorne the man? Where did the power of darkness come from? Melville was at a loss. “Whether Hawthorne has simply availed himself of this mystical blackness as a means to the wondrous effects he makes . . . ,” Melville wrote in his review, “or whether there really lurks in him, perhaps unknown to himself, a touch of Puritanic gloom,—this, I cannot altogether tell.” “[T]here is something lacking—a good deal lacking,” Melville wrote in February 1851 to Duyckinck, “to the plump sphericity of the man. What is that?—He doesn’t patronise the butcher—he needs roast-beef, done rare.” What Hawthorne needed, more than anything else, was a cannibal friend like Queequeg.
    Late in life, long after Hawthorne’s death at fifty-nine, Melville told his son, Julian, that he believed his father “had all his life concealed some great secret, which would, were it known, explain all the mysteries of his career.” The essential inscrutability of Hawthorne is everywhere in Moby-Dick —in Ahab’s agonizing need to know what is really behind the world’s “pasteboard masks,” in the way the White Whale resonates with fearful and fantastic possibilities and yet ultimately reveals nothing.
    Prior to meeting Hawthorne, Melville had been churning out novels at such a furious rate (he’d penned his most recent two books in a matter of months) that his British publisher advised him to slow down. Under the steadying influence of Hawthorne, Melville paused in the middle of a quite ordinary, picaresque novel about whaling and completely rethought the story in terms of the power of darkness he recognized in Hawthorne’s short stories. Only then did he plunge once again into his whaling material, this time creating the masterpiece for which he will always be remembered.
    Through Ahab, Melville found a way to articulate what he called in his review of Hawthorne “the sane madness of vital truth,” those Tourette’s-like outbursts that no one wants to hear, especially since they happen to be true. If a life amounts only to a senseless death, what is a person to do? Ahab has decided that the best and noblest option available under the circumstances is to attack some substitute for this absurd and ultimately amoral life, such as a white whale, and hurl all his rage and fear and hate at this thing even if he knows, in his heart of hearts, that it will lead not only to his own death but to the deaths of those who follow him.
    One of the reasons Ahab is such a compelling character is that Melville saw much of himself in the captain’s tendency to regard the world symbolically. This is the tendency Melville had to battle throughout his literary career as his metaphysical preoccupations perpetually threatened to overwhelm his unsurpassed ability to find the specific, concrete detail that conveys everything. He also identified with Ahab’s outrageous ambition, for Melville was, he at least hoped, creating a “mighty book.”
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