Why Read Moby-Dick

other breakthrough associated with his invention of Ahab was something he clearly got from Hawthorne: a way to put artistic distance between himself and the very thing he most identified with, thus providing a way to write about the darkest and most frightening aspects of human experience. That was why he could write to Hawthorne, “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.”
    Ultimately, however, Melville had difficulty maintaining Hawthorne’s cool remove from the darkness. As Sophia Hawthorne observed, Melville engaged with life; he also engaged with his characters. In December 1850, as he rebuilt his novel on the blasted, ripped-apart foundations of the first draft, he wrote to Duyckinck about the difficulties of transferring what he had in his head onto the page: “And taking a book off the brain, is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel—you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety—& even then, the painting may not be worth the trouble.” As suggested by this letter, the process of creating Ahab, of channeling what Melville later called “my evil art,” was an all-involving and psychically corrosive experience. If bits of his brain matter were not literally being left upon the manuscript pages of Moby-Dick, something nonetheless was happening to him during those winter and spring months in his study.
    The eyes that so troubled Sophia Hawthorne began to bother Melville to the point that he could barely see the words he was writing on the page. In Pierre, the novel he wrote after Moby-Dick, he provides a fictionalized account of the torment he suffered in his second-story room: “His incessant application told upon his eyes. They became so affected, that some days he wrote with the lids nearly closed, fearful of opening them wide to the light.... Sometimes he blindly wrote with his eyes turned away from the paper.” His eyes so scalded that he could not even see what he was writing, Melville pushed on toward Ahab’s encounter with the White Whale.

10
    The View from the Masthead
    I shmael of the Bible was Abraham’s bastard son, who along with his servant mother, Hagar, was banished from his father’s household and forced to wander the desert. Ishmael of Moby-Dick has suffered some grievous unnamed loss and now wanders the waters of the world.
    He is not alone in this. As he mentions in chapter 35, “The Mast-Head,” a whaleship in the mid-nineteenth century served as “an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber.” As opposed to Ahab’s urgent, soul-singed probing into the meaning of life, Ishmael and his compatriots are more interested in losing themselves in the cosmos. As naive seekers of philosophical truth, their favorite perch is at the masthead on a quiet sunny day in the Pacific.
    â€œThere you stand,” Ishmael says, “a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor.”
    But there is a danger in all this seductive oneness. Simply feeling good about life doesn’t mean life is good. “But while this sleep, this dream is on ye,” Ishmael continues, “move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!”
    With the appearance of Ahab on the quarterdeck, everything changes. Ishmael becomes one not with the cosmos but with his captain’s monomaniacal quest. Ishmael may have his intellectual pretensions, but they evaporate in the face of Ahab’s overwhelming charisma. “[M]y oath had been welded with [the rest of the crew’s],” Ishmael admits. “A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me;