What's Eating Ahab? The Logic of Ingestion and the Performance of Meaning in Moby-Dick - Critical Essay

Style, Spring, 2000 by Mark Edelman Boren

In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville describes Captain Ahab as "a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain and ponderous heart [...,] one in a whole nation's census--a mighty pageant creature" (71). More than a century after the figure's conception, William Faulkner points to this one-legged hero as the most original character in American letters. Yet, for some reason, Ishmael, and not Ahab, has remained the darling of Melville critics. I believe that the privileging of Ishmael's perspective and interpretations over the sophisticated but oblique performances of Ahab is a serious critical blunder--a move that carries with it an unwarranted assumption that Ishmael's concerns correspond with the interests of the text.

The problem begins when there is an unquestioned epistemological alignment with Ishmael. His assumptions--that Ahab is mad and his quest is unreasonable--are too often quietly, trustingly adopted by readers, who may sense ironic distance between Ishmael and Melville, but who nevertheless accept Ishmael's descriptions of the captain and his motivations. [1] Such a tack in reading is critically valid and has stood a test of time, but it issues from a limited perspective. Placing confidence in Ishmael as witness to Ahab's monomania leads to a skewed reading of the text. [2] When we stop looking through the eyes of a lowly sailor who must have everything explained to him, and who must pathologically interpret his world to feel adequate to it, the rest of the text changes dramatically: the objects of Ishmael's study--the whales, the various whaling implements and trophies, the ship, the sailors around him--all mean differently. Likewise, Ishmael's own experiences change (that is, to the reader they change). Such is the case with Ishmael's assessment of Ahab. Granted, what we know of the captain comes by way of Ishmael, but Ishmael naively judges the man, and although Ishmael cannot understand Ahab on Ahab's own terms, we, as careful readers, can comprehend his existence as a life distinct from the narrator's.

Once we stop reading with Ishmael, it becomes clear that Ahab serves as the center of a highly developed epistemology that competes with and eludes the narrator's comprehension. [3] The trophies that appear throughout the text confound Ishmael. These invested objects of significance, which recognizably carry their meaning with them, are manifest examples of this other-than-interpretive system of knowing--exhibits of this system, if you will. And Melville uses the act of possessing trophies, particularly the act of eating trophies, to show graphically how this system works. If we stop looking through Ishmael's eyes, we can see Melville has developed a complex system of ingestion to show how a specific type of knowledge communicates. Ishmael cannot see that Ahab belongs to an epistemological system constructed on how meaning materially invests language and how language performs that meaning. [4] I argue that to understand Moby-Dick thoroughly, we must recontextualize Ahab and his entire textual existence and v iew him as operating within his own textual logic, one separate from Ishmael's, for as that Leyden jar of material rhetoric, himself, claims, "Ahab is Ahab"--Ahab is not Ishmael.

Philological and epistemological from the outset, Melville's nautical journey explores different ways that language signifies, that it generates knowledge. The tome aptly begins with a consideration of linguistic origins, with various etymologies for "whale." From this exploration, Melville proceeds to a collection of literary extracts concerning whales and whaling adventures ranging from the ancients to his contemporaries. All this occurs before the tale begins and establishes the context for this story before the narrator asks the reader to call him Ishmael. Melville's interest in the knowledge swirling about the subjects of his text does not, however, remain confined to the front matter only. Ishmael himself becomes a great agent of interpretation, and through his struggles to understand what transpires in the world about him, he gives the reader a virtual encyclopedia of what is knowable through interpretation of that world. As active interpreter, Ishmael shines in such chapters as "The Whiteness of the Whale," in which he explores numerous connotations for the color of the whale, ranging from its "freakishness" as an albino, "more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion," to its uncanny "supernaturalism," which it owes to its having "the pallor of the dead" (166). In other chapters, such as "The Sphynx," "The Fountain," and "The Nut," Ishmael unfurls the impressive standards of scientific observation and historical interpretation for the various phenomena he witnesses. In Melville's epistemological drama, Ishmael clearly becomes the act of interpretation incarnate, and he plays his role to the fullest.

First to admit that he can only understand a thing in relation to other things, the narrator explains, "Nothing exists in itself" (55). [5] Evident in almost every chapter of the book, his astonishing ability to metaphorize and interpret upon the slightest provocation goes into overdrive when he is faced with what is to him the sheer incomprehensibility of Moby-Dick. The whale spouts too much meaning and always escapes his interpretive nets. Unable to deal with the animal's brute existence as a whole, Ishmael focuses on a part of the animal, its whiteness, as the cause of his own consternation: "It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. [...] Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty" (163). [6] And although Ishmael's tone throughout this chapter conveys understanding, his extended deliberation on possible reasons for the unsettling effects of whiteness, as such, reveals he cannot account for "the supernaturalism of this hue" (168). [7] He notes, for inst ance, that "from that pallor of the dead we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to throw the snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog" (166). But he also considers, "The Albino is as well made as any other men. [...] yet this mere aspect of all pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion" (166). To the New England sailor regarding the Antarctic seas, he claims the color generates a "fear that one would lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes" (168).