Moby Dick: Capturing the Geist of the American Renaissance through Melville’s Transparent Eye

Moby Dick: Capturing the Geist of the American Renaissance through Melville’s Transparent Eye

John Kuczmarski

 “It may no be precisely accurate to refer to our mid-nineteenth century as a re-birth; but that was how the writers themselves viewed it.  Not as a re-birth of values that had existed previously in America, but as America’s way of producing a renaissance, by coming to its first maturity and affirming its rightful heritage in the whole expanse of art and culture”

-- Francis Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman

September 25, 2005

Colorado College

Professor Dan Tynan

English 394: American Renaissance

Moby Dick: Capturing the Geist of the American Renaissance through Melville’s Transparent Eye

In his “hugely influential book”, Francis Matthiessen asserts, “works such as Moby Dick came to be seen as declarations of American cultural independence from the aesthetic canons of England and Europe” (Selby 51).  In other words, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, and other mainstream American authors that wrote around the 1840s, produced quintessential “declarations” that not only differentiated from the traditional European and English frameworks, but also generated an entirely genuine American literary construct in itself.  Although these writers and their craft, like Melville’s Moby Dick or Emerson’s Nature, mark only the nascence of the “flowering of native American literary culture”, this burgeoning style was the very first clean break from the English and European literary methods (Selby 51).  Because the era was the genesis of an entirely original and undiluted American style, Matthiessen and literary scholars refer to that period as the “American Renaissance” (Matthiessen vii).  

The factors that caused the break from traditional literary transitions launched extremely revolutionary ideas.  Some of these radical messages included the economic self-sufficiency and omnipresent divinity inherent in the revolutionary transcendentalism of Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau, and Hawthorne’s dark-sided criticism of the Puritan mind.  Pinpointing the precise cause of this movement is complex, but it is clear that a creatively energetic and flourishing period of entirely new ideological and literary frontier emerged.  The backbone of this shift revolved around the authors of that time and, more specifically,  Melville’s Moby Dick.  Moby Dick was such a seminal piece of American literature because of its simultaneous depiction of antebellum America, the emphasis of antebellum America in defining the American Renaissance, and most importantly, Melville’s ability to intertwine the myriad contemporary transcendental ideas with rich Biblical, geographical, historical, and psychological themes into the text.

While Benjamin Franklin was no doubt the key figure representing Enlightenment in American -- by founding the American Philosophical Society and his myriad inventions, from the lightning rod to ventilation systems -- Melville, Emerson, and the other transcendentalists, no doubt, define the literary American Renaissance (Hoffman 36).  Scholars claim that Melville’s work operates on so many different layers that the same text of Moby Dick can be read literally, psychologically, morally, or mythically (Bixby107).  David Leverenz even believes that Moby Dick can be read purely in terms of gender issues: “Moby Dick is obviously a man’s book, about a man obsessed with avenging his shattered manhood” (Leverenz 126).  From whatever perspective the text is read, it no doubt leaves an impact. Additionally, Moby Dick is a novel that plugs into nearly whichever generation that reads it, and it is precisely this ability, to connect with myriad generations, that makes it an archetypal text.

Because Moby Dick portrays “an image of America that is particularly conducive to that specific generation of readers,” Donald Pease and Wai-chee Dimock declare that Moby Dick is an “archetypal American text” (Selby 147).  Given that Pease can only really be understood by following the logic of Matthiessen, because so much Pease’s criticism revolves around Matthiessenian analysis, one thing is clear from Pease: Moby Dick has become an archetypal text because it elucidates “the tensions and struggles within antebellum America” (Selby 147).  However, just because the book uses brilliant imagery -- drawing Biblical, geographical, psychological, and historical references – to paint the picture of America before the Civil War, does not make it the so-called great make American novel; what makes Moby Dick the great American novel is the fact that antebellum American – the very era of which Melville wrote – is the period that has “come to be seen as epitomizing American identity and culture generally” (Selby 147). 

In other words, it is the formation  “American Renaissance”, and the specific gravitation to the pre-Civil War era, that embosses Moby Dick upon American literature. If this same logic was extrapolated and applied so that the Gilded Age or the Post-Reconstruction Era was said to embody American culture and identity, then Twain’s Huckleberry Finn or Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, respectively, could easily have been the “great American novel”.  However, this was not the case. Melville’s masterpiece is the centerpiece of the antebellum era, and antebellum America is the centerpiece of the American revolutionary identity and Renaissance.  Because of this inference, interpreting Moby Dick, or more specifically, the protagonist of the novel, remains one of the best ways to investigate the American Renaissance.

One of the key discrepancies in the format of the novel is that the unequivocal nature between the narration and the character of Ishmael.  From the first sentence, Melville degrades his primary character by dubbing him Ishmael – “the very name being significant of a propensity to wander” (Parker and Hayford 595).  In giving him this name, Melville connotes the Biblical, outcast Ishmael, who “will be a wild donkey of a man; his hand will be against everyone and everyone's hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers: (Genesis 16:12).  Right off the bat, Melville crafts the character Ishmael into a penniless, low status wanderer -- a stark contrast from the magisterial presence and long-winded narrative of the narrator Ishmael. 

And it is this contrast that gives Ishmael the status of the “Twenty-Ninth bather” from Whitman’s Song of Myself , which is a model of Emerson’s transparent eyeball image.  Whitman asserts that to truly experience the world one must be fully in it, yet distinct enough from it.  This is fully exemplified with Melville’s creation of Ishmael because the character Ishmael he can be “bathe by the shore…dancing and laughing”, while the narrator Ishmael can remain hidden, “handsome and richly deft” (Whitman 2238). The narrative-character duality between Ishmael simultaneously gives him the immersion of experience and the awareness of outside observation.  Clearly, Melville did not splatter the messages of contemporary writers into a messy pastiche, but cleverly intertwined them into a delicate framework throughout the story of the Great While Whale.

But one other essential detail must be addressed regarding the protagonist is this: it was not Melville who dubs the narrator Ishmael, but the character himself who asks the reader to “call [him] Ishmael (Melville 1).  By having the narrator christen himself as Ishmael, the very first sentence is symbolic of America independently identifying its own style; it is not a British or European label, but an American identity made by America, for America.  Through this simple phraseology Melville brilliantly makes the storytelling much more tangible by using the low-status, “donkey of a man” character coupled with the elaborate story-telling capacity of the narrative Ishmael.  The penniless, Ishmael character can objectively wander throughout Nantucket and observe the dealings of the Pequod, while the narrative Ishmael, with his majestic descriptions, can infuse the details of the story that the character Ishmael experiences.  The two are almost completely distinct personas, but they both embody the self-identifying richness of American heritage.   

But Ishmael is more than a simple character narrative; he is what Emerson would refer to as a “transparent eyeball” where one feels like a “part or particle of God” and where “all currents of the Universal Being circulate through [him]” (Emerson 10).  There are strong Emersonian themes running throughout Melville’s work.  In regards to writing style, Nina Baym remarks, “It is surprising how much Melville resembled Emerson” (Baym 2).  Additionally, in a letter to Evert Duyckink, Melville alludes to Emerson’s elevated intelligibility and remarking on Emerson’s depth of thought, Melville remarks, “I love all men who dive” (Melville; Duyckink 1).  To further understand Melville’s link between Ishmael and the transparent eyeball state, one must dive into an understanding of Emerson.  

As one Colorado College professor scrutinized, “Emerson is not a philosopher”; he approaches the topics in Nature is in a literary manner, not a typical philosophical train of logic.  While Emerson’s methods may not be philosophical, the concepts in Nature certainly are.  Melville’s usage of circle, transparent, and nature imagery is strongly reminiscent of Emerson’s concepts in nature.  Especially significant, however, is Emerson’s discussion of the communicative distinction between God and man is of primary importance to understanding Ishmael.

The relationship with fellow man is different than the relationship with God.  There are tasks, routines, agendas, appointments, and scripts involved with relationships with fellow man; those create the enchaining protocol of conduct that simultaneously provide direction, but also completely limit man.  The very human-to-human interaction, even if it is devoted to the liberation or removal of the enchaining protocol of conduct, cannot escape its medium because.  Just as a telephone call cannot occur without some form of telephone wiring, station, or signal, the human-to-human interaction cannot function without the enchaining protocol of conduct.  Communication with God, however, is the abandonment of script; it is the abandonment of certainty, and the fixation and obsession with compassion.  However, because the essence of universal communication revolves around compassion, the established connection is very strong.  When the Universal being is felt and “all egotism vanishes,” confining protocols cease to exist (Emerson 10).

The transparent eyeball image is vital to explaining the distinction between spiritual communication and human-to-human communication.  This state of universal knowing and awareness can only be acquired, Emerson states, when all “mean egotism vanishes” and during this time of incredible humanitarian unity, ironically, Emerson feels that “the name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental” (Emerson 10).  Not only does the presence of fellow man – friend or stranger, master or servant, whatever the relationship – appear accidental, but it is a “trifle and a disturbance” (Emerson 10).  And it is a trifling disturbance that confronts Ishmael in the first three inns he visits.

Upon settling on the Spouter-Inn, Ishmael has tapped into the universal being.  His first attempt at finding a place to rest, the “Crossed Harpoons”, is “too expensive and jolly” (Melville 8).  And even though the “dreary streets” are checkered with “blocks of blackness”, Ishmael’s next stop, the “Sword-fish”, is too illuminated, with “such fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the packaged snow and ice” (Melville 8).  Next, “The Trap”, where the Negro church represents the sacrificial “Ben Hinnom” Valley, or the Valley of Slaughter, from the Biblical location of Tophet near Jerusalem, is too dark and hell-like (Melville 8).  What is Ishmael looking for?  More directly, what is Melville showing us?  His character doesn’t want a place too bright or too luxurious, like the “Crossed-Harpoons or Sword-Fish, because such a place is not fluid, but fixed – the opposite of the Emersonian state of Universal Being, which is “not fixed but fluid” (Emerson 48).  Nor does Ishmael want a vile, dark place like “The Trap”, where “disagreeable appearances, swine, spiders, snakes…and the sordor and filths of nature” lie because that is an impediment to the Universal being, as well (Emerson 48).  Melville deliberately shows Ishmael’s elimination process to show his unity with the Universal being.  Additionally, it is the “zephyr” from the Greek west wind god, Euroclydon that causes Ishmael to settle on the Spouter Inn.  Being drawn to the inn but a gust of wind is strongly reminiscent of the “pure spirit, fluid, volatile, and obedient” quality of Universal oneness (Emerson 48).  

Once Ishmael commits to the “universally connected” Spouter-Inn, his tale has already begun.  In fact, all throughout his journey on shore, Ishmael is on board some kind of ship on another.  He is already “aboard a boat” more or less when he sees the “straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft” (Melville 10).  Additionally, when he hears Father Mapple’s sermon, the preacher had ascended the “perpendicular side ladder” to the pulpit as if “mounting a ship form a boat at sea” (Melville 37).  Clearly, when Ishmael has decided on the Spouter-Inn, his sea-faring journey has already begun.

More importantly, however are the Biblical connotations for arriving at the Spouter-Inn by the Euroclydon wind because this is exactly what happened to Paul, formerly Saul, in his sail for Rome.  Along the shore of Crete, Paul’s ship was “caught by the storm and could not head into the wind; so [he] gave way to it and were driven along” (Acts 27:15).  This maneuver of being carried by what the Bible describes as the “wind of hurricane force”, the Euroclydon wind, is in itself extremely in tune with the Emerson’s idea of Universal Being (Acts 27:14). After all, giving into the course of the celestial Euroclydon storm would be becoming one with the “uncontained and immortal beauty” running through the “currents of the Universal Being” (Emerson 10).   

Just as Saul, reborn as Paul, goes on to tell the story of “the Kingdom of god…about Jesus from the Law of Moses and from the Prophets” when he arrives to preach in Rome (Acts 28:23), so does Ishmael, possibly reformed himself, go on to tell his story of the universe of the Pequod, the sinister Ahab, the prophet Gabriel, who forbade Ahab’s doom for seeking out the whale, and Ishmael’s near-death escape from the “closing vortex…ever contracting toward the button-like black bubble” that sank the Pequod (Melville 566).  The ties between the Euroclydon wind driving Ishmael to the Spouter-Inn automatically encapsulate the story as having biblical significance because Ishmael, in that specific context, symbolizes Paul, telling his tales after so many years of blindness to, and then illumination toward, God.  Additionally, however, the process of eliminating the fixed (and not fluid), expensive inns along with the inn of “blackness and darkness” reveals Ishmael’s tendency to gravitate toward loci where the Universal Being force can resonate, which shows his appreciation of nature.  

To Emerson, the universe is composed of nature and soul. Nature, basically everything except your soul, is all other men, body, nature, and art. “Nature in the common sense refers to essences unchanged by man “like space, the air, rivers, and life (Emerson 8).  Art, on the other hand, is “applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture” (Emerson 8).  So the Pequod would be an example of art – the “contrasting things – oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp” -- within the unchanged essence of the ocean (Melville 547).  Because of the “man-made art within nature context,” Ishmael experiences oneness by simply being aboard the Pequod.

But on board the Pequod, whether it be near the horn of Africa or in the vastness of the Indian Ocean, some form of Universal being constantly surrounds Ishmael: “the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman’s look” (Melville 531).  As the hunt for Moby Dick reaches its apex, Ishmael witnesses how the Pequod itself “held them all…all the individualities of the crew, the man’s valor, that man’s fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness” (Melville 547).  Furthermore, as Ishmael observes a pod of nursing mothers, he sees the beauty of nature in the ocean that is “to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent” (Melville 386).  Out of all the depictions of nature’s beauty and “unearthly reminiscence” witnessed by Ishmael, it is no coincidence that one of the most wondrous occurs with the usage of Emersonian transparency.  Clearly, the link between Emerson’s universal being and transparency and Ishmael’s narration is secure, and even though the vessel may be set on an outrageous hunt and controlled by a mad captain, it, nevertheless, operates as binding universe in itself where, as Emerson put it, “all the parts incessantly work into each other’s hands for the profit of man” (Emerson 12).  

One of the interesting things about Ahab, which Ishmael gets to observe, is his almost intrinsic connection with the whale. Nearly every ship-captain Ahab encounters he interrogates about the Whale and everyone tells him to turn back, but Ahab’s obdurate resilience is indefatigable.  When he meets the Jeroboam he is encountered by the mad Gabriel who prophetically was “ascending to the main-royal mast-head, was tossing one arm in frantic gestures, and hurling forth prophecies of speedy doom” about pursuing the whale (Melville 315).  When Ahab meets Captain Boomer from the Samuel Enderby, Bunger is astonished at the devil-like heat that radiates from Ahab: “this man’s blood – bring the thermometer! — It’s at the boiling point!” (Melville 439).  And even when Captain Boomer suggests that the whale is “best let alone”, Ahab remarks that Moby Dick is “a magnet” perpetually luring him into the chase (Melville 439).  

Another interesting quality of Ahab is his demonic personality.  M.O. Percival references Kierkegaard: “the demonic person, he says, becomes more and more shut up and incommunicative” (Percival 59).  Connecting with the “many silences in Ahab’s life”, one could infer that the captain becomes more and more demonic throughout the journey.  However, despite what Kierkegaard says, it is not simple isolation that creates a devilish character.  Instead, it is the a combination of Ahab’s oddities -- the “solemn meals, eaten in awful silence,” how “Ahab’s soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom,” and the hot-blooded demeanor that constantly affects Ahab – that make him a very mercurial character (Melville 151).  Mercurial offers a much more accurate description of Ahab because from Captain Boomer’s remarks about his boiling blood and from witnessing his dream episodes, where he “would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire,” one realizes that Ahab is a character who suffers with his compulsive pursuit of the great White Whale and should by pitied, not demonized (Melville 201).  

Alternatively, maybe Ahab is sexually deprived or, through some seriously awkward logic, maybe relates the great White Whale to sex.  After all bursting from a “fiery bed” and constantly getting “boiling blood’ when discussing Moby Dick certainly has its sexual connotations, as well.  But if Melville is symbolically linking Ahab to Satan, then, in a purely Biblical context, he is insinuating that he is Lucifer – a former archangel who had stood side-by-side with God before becoming corrupt and falling from Heaven to Hell.  Given the symbolic link to Lucifer being a degraded, character who lost his place, Ahab could use a little compassion, considering his state.  Besides, compassion goes a long way, even if it is “sympathy for the devil” (Jagger and Richards).  Regardless of the cause of Ahab’s idiosyncrasies, considering the captain’s obstinate and deranged drive to hunt the whale, it is amazing that Ishmael managed to escape the deadly demise of the Pequod at all.  

But Ishmael’s ability to so effectively account the story of Moby Dick goes back to how Ishmael first sought the ideal place to begin his journey -- seeking, not places of luxury, not of poverty, not of illumination nor darkness, but a place that resonates with the Universal Being.  By synchronizing himself with the Universal being Ishmael was able to decide upon a place that would harmonize him with methods to not only survive the adventure, but also to then effectively re-account the story. 

It is very fortunate, too, that the protagonist of the great American novel symbolizes universal being and the biblical journeys of Paul because this bodes a very auspicious future for America in the Reconstruction era.  Even though it was Melville, in his Hawthorne and his Mosses, who referred to Hawthorne as an “American Shakespeare”, Melville -- because of his literary mastery and ability to intertwine biblical, geographical, historical, religious, and psychological themes – is most certainly an “American Shakespeare” himself.  This mastery is certainly revealed in his masterpiece.

So Moby Dick represents the American Renaissance because the book reflects antebellum America and antebellum America is considered the centerpiece of American revolutionary identity; but it is not simply the connection with antebellum America that makes Moby Dick a centerpiece of American literature and the great American novel.  Instead, it is Moby Dick’s connection with antebellum American coupled with Melville’s ability to intertwine the contemporary transcendentalist ideas of Emerson’s universal being along with rich psychological, religious, historical, and geographic themes that make Moby Dick capable of taking the cake for capturing the cultural geist of the entire American Renaissance. 

Works Cited

Baym, Nina. “Melville’s Quarrel with Fiction.” Proceedings of the Modern Language 

Association of America. 34, 1979.  p. 909-923.

Described Melville’s similarity to Emerson

Bixby, William.  Rebel Genius: The Life of Herman Melville.  New York: David McKay 

Company, Inc.

Described the multiple ways MD can be read and Melville’s rebellious bio.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. New York: The Library of America, 1983.

Excerpts from Nature regarding the transparent eyeball image and the details of Universal Being.

Hoffman, Abraham & Soifer, Paul. United States History. New York: Wiley Publishing, 

1998.

Useful account of Ben Franklin and general antebellum to reconstruction US 

History.

Holy Bible: New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 

1984.  

Essential reference for deciphering Melvillian Biblical metaphors.

Jagger, Mick and Richards, Keith. “Sympathy for the Devil”. Beggar’s Banquet. Dec. London: London 

Records,1968.

The lyrics of “Sympathy for the Devil”.

Leverenz, David. Manhood and the American Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1989. 

p.270-281.

Discusses MD in terms of gender roles and manhood.

Matthiessen, Francis Otto. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of 

Emerson and Whitman.  London: Oxford UP, 1941. p. vii.
Quintessential resource for one of the primary analysts of what is none to be the 

American Renaissance.

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. New York: Random house, The Modern Library, 1926.

The primary text of MD.

Melville, Herman. “On Ralph Waldo Emerson and his Philosophy.” Letter to Evert 

Duyckink. March 3, 1849.  HYPERLINK "http://www.melville.org/hmquotes.htm" http://www.melville.org/hmquotes.htm.

Primary source reference of Melville’s thoughts on Emerson.

Percival, M.O. A Reading of Moby Dick. Chicago: Chicago U P, 1930.

Selby, Nick. Herman Melville: Moby Dick. New York: Columbia U P, 1998.

Wove together reflections or literary critics, including Matthiessen and Leverenz.

Whitman, Walt. "Song of Myself". The Norton Anthology of American Literature: 

1820-1865. Vol. B. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003. p. 2232.

The full text of "Song of Myself".

  It is important to note that, because of the distinction between compassion and pity, Ahab would deserve compassion, but Lucifer, most likely, would not.  Ahab truly suffers and deserves compassion, which is a sympathetic concern for one’s sufferings with the desire to alleviate and/or reduce such sufferings.  But, the corruptness of Lucifer more aptly deserves pity, which is a simply an emotion of sorrow upon encountering a person who suffers, making it compassion without the desire to help, or “indifferent compassion”.

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