When It Comes to Climate Change We Are All Captain Ahab
Climate change is no less than humanity’s cannibalism of the planet. Our current, last-gasp fossil fuel feeding frenzy leads directly to Ahabian downfall. The ship of civilization may ultimately go down with the captain, by the final silent slip-knot of the whale line tied to the object of his pursuit. If we have a chance for rescue upon a flotsam coffin, the realization of humanity’s self-devouring assault on nature is the tragic abyss that we all must recognize. If we, as Ishmael, are to survive to tell the tale, we will all have to take a deep dive to confront the fearsome depth of what it means to destroy our very selves as we destroy nature, all for the ephemeral sense of power it may briefly afford.
In the last scene of Melville’s Moby Dick, a lone vessel named The Rachel searches for her children lost in the devouring sea. She finds only an orphan, Ishmael, floating upon the coffin of his cannibal comrade, wrecked by the fury of the White Whale upon The Pequod. This final metaphoric passage encapsulates the themes of the entire epic novel. The name Ishmael refers to the biblical wild man, son of the Egyptian slave Hagar, begotten by Abraham at the behest of his barren wife Sarah, yet cast out along with his mother by Sarah’s jealousy (Gen. 16.12 qtd in Melville p 18). The name Rachel refers to the disconsolate mother of the Hebrews (Jer. 31.15 and Matt. 2.18 qtd in Melville p 396 and 399). Rachel mourned for the sufferings of her children made to wander the earth in sorrow and affliction. Ishmael is the infidel son of the line of Abraham, a wild man who must bear the eternal opposition of his brethren among whom he dwells. “And he will be a wild man; and his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him: and he shall dwell in the presence of his brethren” (Gen. 17.12). Mankind’s assault upon Nature and the wild brother in God are themes woven throughout the text of Moby-Dick. This is what makes this American novel an epic.
The sons of The Rachel are lost in the sea. There is no rescue for them; instead, she takes in the orphaned Ishmael, saved from devouring sharks by floating upon a coffin made for his indigenous, animist friend Queequeg, which serendipitously arose from the wreckage of The Pequod after Moby Dick’s furious destruction.
Melville’s novel describes an epic sea-journey to confront the Leviathan on both inner and outer planes. For Ahab, and for the narrator, Ishmael, the White Whale is both reality and symbol. The whale hunt entails a descent into mythic motifs that shed light on cultural issues with resonance from the mid-eighteenth century to today. It is an epic Nekyia, or underworld journey.
As a ‘descent-and-return’ cycle, a Nekyia generally follows the arc of the hero’s journey: from the Call to Adventure, to subsumption within the Belly of the Beast, to the Return. It illustrates an individual’s process of transformation by release of one state of mind or being into another. For this cycle to be complete, a fulsome return of the hero to the community, bearing the boons of wisdom gained through the ordeal, is necessary. The hero takes this journey as an emblem of the soul life of the entire community or culture. This epic process, when preserved in oral or written literature, may act as both a mytho-historical record and an artistic reenactment of cultural renewal.
But return is not guaranteed. As the genre moves in time towards modernity, new cultural challenges are presented. Many of these have no resolution. Contemporary authors of Nekyia tales often place less emphasis on the triumphant return of the transformed hero to focus instead on the tragic moment of the hero’s confrontation with the abyss. A famous example of this is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This 1899 novella leaves the reader on an unresolved note, as the protagonist cannot bring himself to reveal the truth of the horror witnessed in the colonized Congo to Mr. Kurtz’s ‘Intended.’ Though the narrator, Marlowe, detests a lie for the “taint of death” in it, and though he claims that Kurtz “wanted only justice,” he could not tell Mr. Kurtz’s fiancée the truth of Kurtz’s dying words. “It would have been too dark — too dark altogether” (Norton, 1714). The reader, thus, is left holding the unspoken secret like a question unanswered. In this way, resolution is left up to the audience, a question to ask oneself in the breach, just as the Thames turns tide in the setting sun upon the British Empire in the final scene of the novella. This is the tragic moment.
In The Tragic Abyss, Louise Cowan describes the difference between the tragic sense and the comic cycle. “The effect of comedy is developmental, lifting spirits and enlightening intellects, so that the audience can see better how to compromise and endure in a damaged world. Tragedy in contrast is cataclysmic, granting its recipients an exalted wisdom then and there, at that very moment” (10). She goes on to postulate that the intent of tragedy is communal catharsis. This is achieved through its effect as a “liturgy, a public ceremony…its results, which, we are hazarding, effect a cleansing of the soul and regeneration of the polis” (15). Cowan is claiming that the catharsis which may be available in the moment of apprehension of the tragic abyss is emotional and psychological regeneration. This is the turning point of the hero’s return from the underworld. In the case of a tragic treatment of the Nekyia, the imperative of the journey of return is thrust upon the receiving reader or audience. Modern and postmodern Nekyia portrayals often leave recipients with this lone heroic task.
It is my perception that this same unresolved treatment of the underworld journey is present in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. While Melville’s protagonist, Ishmael, like Conrad’s Marlowe, is rescued to tell the tale, the fact of the horrors he witnessed still hangs in the air. The social, psychological, and religious issues Melville has dredged from the deep relentlessly resound today in the climate crisis.
Many scholars have appreciated Melville’s novel as a quintessential American epic. After its initial controversial reception, it came into greater renown in the twentieth century. The concerns that it brings forward are still being plumbed for meaningful cultural reflection. In Melville’s Moby-Dick: An American Nekyia, for example, Edward Edinger inquires into the archetypal underworld symbolism of the novel, while in Regeneration through Violence: the Mythology of the American Frontier, Richard Slotkin examines the resonance this epic has with deep-seated American attitudes towards nature and indigenous people.
Melville’s complex, interwoven mythological and symbolic references throughout his novel are varied and polyvalent. Themes of atheism and faith, animism and Christianity, the fury of civilization upon a hostile wilderness, interlock throughout the tale. Slotkin opens with an acknowledgement that in this journey “the whaling voyage opens up for us not only the outward but the inward ocean as well” (540). The primary point of tension is between Captain Ahab and the White Whale. Edinger clarifies the psychological dynamics inherent to the whaling industry. “An encounter with whales is dangerous, threatening drowning or dissolution of the conscious personality (psychosis), for the whaleman, the hero, whales are a vitally necessary source of energy to light the lamps of civilization. They must be hunted out, killed and dismembered, so that their raw natural energies can be transformed and applied to the uses of civilization — the purposes of the conscious discriminating personality” (77). Melville’s constant theme of cannibalism echoes against this basic economic fact, for if, as Edinger goes on to say, “to hunt the white whale in the same way as all other whales are hunted is a sacrilege, a blasphemy…an assault on the very concept of the sacred,” (78) then the polarization between Ahab and Moby Dick may be seen as an interpretation of the opposition between Western Civilization and God seen through the exploitation of industry upon nature. Specifically, the dismemberment of the whale for the extraction of spermaceti for the specialty oil used for light and fuel is a precursor for the fossil fuel industry that now threatens ‘the very concept of the sacred’ in its relentless, Ahabian assault upon the life force of the planet. It is a Faustian wager, which Slotkin brings home to each one of us in a modern tragic apprehension of personal culpability.
The love we have for the things of the world, the delight we take in them, goes hand in hand with our destruction and conversion of them, perhaps because the act of destruction itself somehow makes us believe in our manhood and our godhood, our Ahab’s power to dominate life and to perpetuate and extend ourselves and our power. The mythopoeic mode of reconciling historical paradoxes enables us to glory in this role, on the one hand, and to take the curse off our axe- and gun-work, on the other, by allowing ourselves to identify with what is wounded or destroyed. (563)
Melville takes the reader on an underworld journey to face this inward ocean and ultimately to be shipwrecked upon it. Ishmael survives clinging to an empty coffin. “Nothing has changed of the eternal, divine processes of the world;” reminds Slotkin, “but all that man has been here has collapsed, vanished in an apocalyptic holocaust, leaving only one mind to remember and carry the tale to us” (550). The journey into the depth is taken by one for all, one who can only offer a mindful reminder for the rest of us, each of whom are now enjoined to follow.
The coffin Ishmael rides to rescue was designed for his pagan comrade, whose heathen icon guided him to The Pequod in the first place. Ishmael’s initial befriending of Queequeg pairs the two characters throughout the plot so that the significance of Queequeg’s coffin as Ishmael’s deliverance is emphatic. Contrasting themes of cannibalism and Christianity interweave so closely it is as if they intermarry throughout the text, foreshadowed by Queequeg’s sleeping arm “thrown over” Ishmael “in the most loving and affectionate manner…almost [as if] I had been his wife” (36). After a whale is killed and its precious head towed alongside the vessel, a feeding frenzy of opportunistic sharks is described. Swarming sharks must be beaten off the carcass by whaler’s harpoons, so that wounded, the sharks’ “wondrous voracity” redoubles. “They viciously snapped, not only at each other’s disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound” (242). This horrific image of cyclical self-devouring is brought home to humanity. When crewmember Stubbs sits down to a whale steak meal by the light of his whale-oil lamp, cabin boy Pip philosophizes on the parallel he makes. “You is sharks, sartin;” exclaims Pip to Stubbs, “but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not’ing more dan shark well goberned” (238). In these pages the narrator unapologetically decries, “Cannibal? Who is not a cannibal?” Ishmael points out that “Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? And that is adding insult to injury, is it?” — but the reader may not comfortably distance from this portrayal: “Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized and enlightened gourmand” (242). Melville draws close the picture of predation to the audience’s self-reflection: We are eating our own whale by the light of its death, and its death is our own.
Melville’s description of the whaling industry epitomizes the cannibalism of mankind upon nature. Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit of Moby-Dick sublimates this issue into a religious concern. Amidst a wild typhoon, Ahab stands in ritual fervor while lightning flashes about him, and delivers a speech to “thy speechless, placeless power.”
Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence call thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical… Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief… Leap! leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly I worship thee! (383)
It is at this moment that lightning strikes Ahab’s harpoon, and Starbuck decries his mission as against God. Ahab’s atheistic, animistic sermon is wedded and welded to his suicidal vengeance upon the body of God as the White Whale, Moby-Dick.
Ishmael’s final rescue-by-resurrection leaves a question hanging. Who are we, mankind, who strike out in such fury at the body of God? Are we, as children, lost? Are we the wild brother against whom all hands turn? Ahab’s harpoon is fashioned by pagan blood and tempered by invoked fire: it emblemizes his animistic fury at a distant God, at life’s incessant feeding upon life, at the inherent atheism that haunts faith. Tied to his nemesis, Ahab descends. Buoyed by an empty casket, the philosophic wild man returns.
To be shipwrecked upon the inward ocean is the state of the Nekyia. Ahab’s initial speech to rally his hearties on the deck of The Pequod to his cause hearkened them to a “little lower layer” of his monomaniac mindset. “All visible objects, man, but are pasteboard masks.” He is enraged with the “unknown but still reasoning thing” that lurks inscrutably behind “each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed.” Ahab is aware of the sacrilege inherent to his hunt. “That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principle, I will wreak that hate upon him” (140). In the end, just before the errant whale-line whiplashes him to his furious descent, Ahab exclaims, “Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief,” but still stabs out from “hell’s heart…for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! And since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!” (426).
Ahab’s swift, silent disappearance into the deep, forever fastened to his foe, beckons a modern audience to ponder our own brink. As the fury of climate change begins to lash the waves, to ram the vessel of civilization with its ‘wrinkled brow,’ humanity now stands poised before the foam with our own vengeful spear upraised. What of our topmost greatness do we glory in, as a civilization supremely proud of our ‘manhood and our godhood,’ having transformed ‘raw natural energies’ into power for our use and pleasure? Doing so requires cannibalization of ‘living acts and undoubted deeds’ of the ‘unknown, still reasoning’ thing that forever lies behind our pasteboard symbols of Divine Nature. Shall we stand like Ahab in the bow of our puny whaleboat, ready to harpoon the last extreme energy from the bowels of Earth, and so, still chasing and forever tied, be immolated into our topmost grief?
Or shall we rise, each of us afloat upon the coffins of the indigenous, both the cultures and peoples we’ve consumed and that within us that belongs to land? Are we to be orphans of civilization, awaiting hopeful rescue by an eternally grieving Mother? For maybe, in the darkness of the heart, as Conrad’s Marlowe ponders: “in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible” (Norton, 1749).
Peering into this tragic abyss, perhaps we might someday appreciate the ‘reasoning being’ behind the mask and come into some future common relationship with the soul of nature as both principle and agent.
Works Cited:
Cowan, Louise. “The Tragic Abyss.” The Tragic Abyss. Ed. Arbery, Glen. Dallas: The Dallas Institute, 2003. Print.
Edinger, Edward F. Melville’s Moby-Dick: An American Nekyia. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1995. Print.
Holy Bible. Containing the Old and New Testaments: Translated out of The Original Tongues. New York: American Bible Society, 1893. Print.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Eds. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. 2002. Print.
Norton Anthology of Western Literature. Martin Puchner, General Editor. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. Print.
Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Print.
