The Meanings of the White Whale

THE MEANINGS OF THE WHITE WHALE* R. E. WATTERS TO produce a mighty book," wrote Herman Melville, "you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it." (452) 1 Everybody will now grant that Moby Dick is a mighty book on a mighty theme-even though there is little agreement about the definition of that theme. At the core of the problem is the interpretation of the white whale himself. Every reader capable of seeing more in the book than an exciting adventure story or a treatise on an extinct maritime industry soon becomes an enthusiastic fisherman, endeavouring "to hook the nose of this leviathan" ( 131). Not all such enthusiasts are sufficiently impressed by Ishmael's warning that the undertaking is a ponderous task: "To grope down into the bottom of the sea after them [the whales]; to have one's hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing. What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of this leviathan! The awful tauntings in Job might well appal me. 'Will he (the leviathan) make a covenant with thee? Behold the hope of him is vain!' But I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans . . . I am in earnest; and I will try." (131) And much later Ishmael cries out that "in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not exc)uding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme!" (452) If Melville himself, through Ishmael, could declare that his "whole book is a draught-nay, but the draught of a draught" ( 142), it at least behooves all commentators to avoid easy and superficial interpretations . Nevertheless, the very disagreement of the critics may indicate something of value. Perhaps we might take a hint from Ahab and dive to "a little lower layer" for the universal principle which may *In its original fonn this paper was read as a lecture at the University of Kansas Lawrenc,e, Kansas, io April, 1949 1 Numbers followiog quotations indicate pages in the "Modern Lbrary" edition of Moby Dick. Any quotations hom other books will be indicated by standard footnotes. ISS UNJVER.SITV OP ToR.ONTO Qu~oRTERLY, vol. XX, no. 2, Jan., 195t 156 THE UN!VERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY be putting "forth the mouldings of its featuresu ( 162) through the different white whales. Might it not have been Melville's own intention to invest his great symbolic leviatb.an with a plurality of meanings? Simultaneously with his posing the problem, Melville created a formidab]e body of conflicting interpretations. The whalers on board the Pequod and the other whaling ships differed about the meaning of the white whale. At least, they differed when they were not hypnotized by Ahab>s "evil magic,)) as Ishmael calls it> into accepting Ahab's interpretation that the whale was "in some dim, unsuspected way ... the gliding great demon of the seas of life'' ( 186). Many readers are .simi1arly hypnotized into accepting one or more of Ahab's views, since Ahab had more than one. In Pierre, the novel written immediately after M oby Dick, Melville writes: uSay what some poets will, Nature is not so much her own evcr-swect interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads hjs own peculiar Jesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood!'2 In Moby Dick Melville may have followed Nature in supply~ ing, in the white whale, a "cunning alphabet'' for each of us to read his own lesson. One doesn't have to read Pierre to obtain this clue to the riddle of Melville's greatest book. M oby Dick can stand without help. There is...