In the novel the Heart of Darkness, Marlow, like Kurtz before him, and like countless Europeans before them too, ventured out from safe London to journey up that river into the heart of the continent.

That big river that “resembled an immense snake uncoiled” had a powerful attraction for Marlow. He admitted that, “it fascinated me as a snake would a bird.”  It was the fascination of the abomination.

Most of such adventurers were dreaming of the glories of exploration.  Some were lusting for exploitation. Many succumbed to the lures of treasure, and power, and unspeakable gratifications. Some sought the salvation of souls. Kurtz was one of them.

Many of those who came to the river where their journey began were, according to Conrad, “the joy pioneers of progress” who could drink their “jolly lager-beer.”  They had no idea what they were getting in for, but they would find out.

In the outer room of the company office where these journeys began sat two old women knitting. They reminded me of Dickens’ old women knitting beside the guillotine as heads rolled in a Tale of Two Cities. A cat sat on the lap of one of them.  When she looked at Marlow her glance over her glasses was described by him as follows, “The swift and indifferent placidity of that look troubled me.” It was a simple but ominously elegant description.  Marlow often thought of them when he was far away.:

“Often far away there, I thought of these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm pall, one introducing, introducing continuously to the unknown, the other scrutinizing the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes.   Ave!  Old knitter of black wool.  Morituri te salutant. Not many of those she looked at ever saw her again—not half by a long way.”

Marlow also described the company accountant who kept up his appearance “in the great demoralization of the land.”  Marlow respected that, for it kept the accountant sane (sort of anyway) in a crazy land where everything else was in a riotous muddle.   The accountant refused to be distracted by the pain around him.  As he said, “The groans of this sick person… distract my attention. And without that it is extremely difficult to guard against clerical errors in this climate.” Clerical errors were more important than lives. One could even expand that to include moral errors!

It was there at the company office that he learned about Kurtz “a first class-agent”.  So he was described to Marlowe, He was remarkable for he sent in more ivory than all the others put together. Of course, at what cost was he able to gather all that ivory? It really didn’t matter.

Marlowe was disturbed by the insanity of the company business in the yard.  He saw many men there. He described it this way, as part of  a strange religious quest:

“I asked myself sometimes what it all meant. They wandered here and there with their absurd long staves in their hands, like a lot of faithless pilgrims bewitched inside a rotten fence.  The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse.  By Jove!  I’ve never seen anything so unreal in all my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.”

Conrad knew that the entire European invasion was “fantastic” and also, was driven by “imbecile rapacity.”   That is part of the dark center of this dark continent. And it is part of the dark centre of people.  It is not innocent people who are led to imbecile rapacity. It is in their nature.

Conrad was also disturbed by the false consciousness of the European enterprise in Africa. It is astonishing to think that many of them believed they were there to help the downtrodden.  They really believed they were bringing civilization to savages.  They believed the illusions. That created a surreal world. Conrad said “It was as unreal as everything else—as the philanthropic pretense of the whole thing.”

This may please some of you. This should be my last post on Moby Dick.

Remember the “rainbowed air”? On the third day of the chase (I call it the quest), as in the Bible, there is resurrection. There is one more brief respite from the bleak world of Captain Ahab. That occurs on the very last page of the book in what is called the epilogue. In fact, as I learned from Lara Rae, this one-page chapter was an afterthought. Melville originally published the book without it, but people asked what happened to Ishmael? He was the narrator, but it seemed like everyone perished at sea after Moby Dick attacked the boats and the ship. How could he then tell the story?

So, in one final page Melville,  through his narrator, explains that Ishmael was about to drown with all the others when the coffin Queequeg had made for him when he thought he was dying, “burst upward” from the bottom of the sea and rose with great force beside him. The coffin became a life-buoy and floated by his side, and Ishmael was saved. Resurrected by a coffin. He floated on the coffin while “the unharming sharks, they glide by as if with padlocks on their mouths, the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks.” With the death of Ahab, the war of man against nature was over.  Nature won.

After floating on the sea for a day, Ishmael was rescued by the Rachel who was still looking for her lost children in a quest in which Ahab had refused to help.  So, the Rachel “found another orphan.” Ishmael. Here was a genuine connection. Here was a genuine spiritual quest.

As a result, one of the crew of 30 men was not destroyed by Ahab’s monomaniac religious quest. And you can call him Ishmael.

And so ends this religious quest.

In Moby Dick we saw where hatred led. It led to the apparent death of all the men on the ship and the whaling boats. Total catastrophe. All of this is incredibly bleak.

However, I want to take a slight meander away from all this madness of the quest to something benign. Melville offers some amazing hints about this possibility. The quest need not be malignant. There is a better way.

Ishmael asked us readers to consider an alternative. This is what he said,

“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal wars since the world began.”

That was one side of the story. Those wars are of course waged by sparring creatures such as sharks and men.  They seem interminable. Yet there is an alternative and Melville suggests we consider that. As his narrator Ishmael says,

“Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find strange analogy to something in yourself?  For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return.”

We have both the good and bad in us. The land and the sea. Ahab and Starbuck. We have choices. Starbuck offered it to Ahab. Ahab turned it down. This insular Tahiti is not just a far-off dream. It is real. Melville through his narrator Ishmael draws it to our attention at various times in this book to give us relief from the mad quest of Ahab. It is a place of peace in an otherwise often mad world of turmoil and strife.

Earlier in the novel, in pursuit of another whale, in fact a herd of whales, the ship

“glided between 2 whales into the inner most heart of the shoal, as if from some mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake. Here the storms in the roaring glens between the outermost whales, were heard but not felt. In this central expanse the sea presented that smooth satin-like surface called a sleek…we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion.”

There was also the time the ship the Pequod found calm sailing in the heart of the Japanese cruising ground where,

“At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe,; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.”

Sometimes the turbulence and dangerous upheavals the sea is prone to, are quiet and peaceful and we forget about the monsters gliding by underneath.

Such times, occur even on land, and are dreamy and idyllic:

“The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill-sides, as over these there steals the hush, the hum; you almost swear that play-weaned children there are sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad May-time, when the flowers of the woods are plucked. And all this mixes with your most mystic mood; so that the fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole.”

Clearly, in Melville’s mind these times of peace are rare and brief. And it was acknowledged that such soothing scenes affected Ahab, though “of temporary effect” and “if these secret golden keys did seem to open in him his own secret golden treasures, yet did his breath upon them prove tarnishing.” Ahab could ruin even such golden days. Such blessed calms don’t last. “A storm for every calm.”

We get moments of peace even in our most mad quests. But they are not long-lasting. And in the end, Moby Dick midst “enticing calm” the hunters “allured by all this serenity, had ventured to assail it; but had fatally found that quietude but the vesture of tornadoes.” The serenity could be hideously deceiving. And woe to the person who forgets that. There is a tiger heart beneath.

In the end we learn what hatred brings us. The whale approached Ahab’s boat.  One of the crew, Parsee, who had harpooned the whale the day before had held on so tight that the whale dragged him all night until he was stuck to the whale, lashed there by the harpoons rope wound round and round him. That is where hate brings you. Or at least the half of his body that remained was stuck to the whale after two days.

Now Ahab’s irrational hatred of the whale—hatred of his god—becomes alive.  Ahab “darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer curse into the hated whale.”

Finally, the whale reacts to its relentless foe, becoming a “down coming monster” as a result of the thirst for revenge levied against it.  That’s what revenge creates—a monster.  Ishmael describes Moby Dick wheeling round to Ahab’s boat:

“in that evolution, catching site of the nearing black hull of the ship, seemingly seeing in it the source of all his persecutions; bethinking it—it may be—a larger and nobler foe; of a sudden, he bore down upon its advancing prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam.”

Ishmael came close to admitting what Ahab always claimed, that the whale has “intelligent malignity,” but he just says it “may be” that it is “bethinking.”  What is certain, though, is that Ahab is a rational creature made irrational by hate, lust for revenge, and mad about his holy cause. Ahab says, “I grow blind.” Ahab asks, “Is this the end of all my bursting prayers? All my life-long fidelities?”  The answer is clear-yes! That is the end of mad quests.

The whale rams into the ship, with all the men on it, and the men gazed at the whale with “enchanted eyes,” as it moved

“his head side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship’s starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled.”

Through his own hateful seeking vengeance, Ahab transformed the whale into exactly what Ahab was. That is the child of hate. Hate begat hate. Ahab realizes his ship is now just a “God-bullied hull.” Ahab realizes, “Oh now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief.” He is a tragic hero of sorts. Yet even with that knowledge, Ahab does not relent.

Instead of relenting, Ahab thinks,

“Towards thee I roll, thou all destroying but unconquering whale; from hell’s heart I stab at thee, 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, thou tied to thee, thou damned whale.”

Of course, it is not the whale that is damned. Even as Ahab hates to the last, we note the reverential use of “Thee” and “thou” the phrases appropriate to conversation between human and god.

With that the Pequod and the whaling boats  and all the men in them all sunk into the sea even as the “faithful harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts.” They all go down with their ship. There followed an astounding image, of Tashtego, Stubb’s personal faithful harpooneer, a  Native American from Gay Head, the westernmost point of Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, sinking with a whaling boat, but still with his “red arm and a hammer” hovered” above the surface of the water in the act of nailing Ahab’s flag faster and faster to the subsiding spar.  Then a sky-hawk tauntingly came down “from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag and incommoding Tashtego there” but it got between the hammer and the wood, and still,

“simultaneously feeling that ethereal thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-grasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed; and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”

 

Despite all the hatred of Ahab for nature—i.e. the white whale—nature won in the end. The obsessed man lost. The mad quest was over.

My wife Christiane used to wear a pin (until it was lost or stolen) that said, “Religion is no longer religion if it leads to hate.”  Maybe this is what Moby Dick is all about.

The third and final day of chasing Moby Dick was a “lovely day in “a new-made world.” It was a ‘summer house to the angels.” The Pacific Ocean again was tranquil. The calm before the storm. This time a metaphysical storm. The crew of the Pequod followed the whale “in his infallible wake.” Like so many true believers, they followed their god to their doom. “A fairer day could not dawn upon that world.”

Once again, the 3 boats each filled with a small crew of harpooneers, set out into the “wondrous blue” in search of Moby Dick. The sharks “know” that they should only follow Ahab’s boat. They ignore the others. Even Ahab sees this and asks, “who can tell…whether these sharks swim to feast on the whale or on Ahab?”

Sure, the crew heard the whale before they saw him. It was a “subterraneous hum” after which all the men held their breaths when “a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air and then fell swamping back into the deep.”  Melville hints at a resurrection. As the whale went down water, white water 30ft. high was pushed up, “leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the whale.” As Ishmael described it, “Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven.”

Starbuck again tries to convince Ahab to relent. He says to him, as the whale goes down again, “See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly sleekest him!”

None of this persuaded Ahab to give up the quest.  For the true believer, nothing can convince him or her to give up a religious quest. That is one of the dangers of such a quest.

 The crew met up again with their mighty foe on this tranquil day. Not to be tranquil for long. After that we learn what mad hatred brings us.

The Chase for Moby Dick, “the grand god,” continued on Day 2. The crew of the Pequod were transformed by the chase. As Ishmael described it:

“The hand of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by the stirrings of the previous day the rack of the past night’s suspense; the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless, way in which their wild craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all these things, their hearts were bowled along. The wind that made great bellies of their sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race.”

They were one man, not thirty.

Like the American motto: e pluribus unum. Out of many one. But this crew, were one in this unholy chase. I have always said, the essence of religion is connection. The crew of thirty were connected in an unholy cause. But they were connected, even if the religion was black. As Ishmael said, they “were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to.” Now blasphemously, Ahab had become their God.  “How they still strove through that infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy them.”

Astonishingly, with the harpoons stuck to him, Moby Dick breached the surface:

“…not by the peaceful gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White Whale now reveal his vicinity; but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching. Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling up a mountain of dazzling foam, show his place to the distance of seven miles and more…this breaching is his act of defiance… as in his immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to Heaven.”

Or was it hell? Then Moby Dick turned upon the three “devoted boats” that had “planted irons in him.” They were devoted like true believers clinging to their god. But the god in fury turned on the 3 boats and “seemed intent on annihilating each separate plank of which those boats were made.” Finally the men in their mad pursuit had created the vengeful creature Ahab thought he was. The whale attacked Ahab’s boat from beneath the surface:

“Ahab’s yet unstricken boat seemed drawn up towards Heaven by invisible wires,–as arrow-like, shooting perpendicularly from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad forehead against its bottom, and sent it turning over and over, into the air, till it fell again.”

The white whale almost succeeded in shoving Ahab toward heaven.

Starbuck again tries to persuade Ahab to give up the quest:

“Great God! But for one single instant show thyself,” cried Starbuck; “never, never, wilt thou capture him, old man—In Jesus’ name no more of this, that’s worse than devil’s madness…thy evil shadow gone—all good angels mobbing thee with warnings:–what more wouldst thou have?  Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps the last human? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh, oh, impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!”

Starbuck knows this chase leads to hell, not heaven. Ahab probably knows it to, but still can’t stop. Ahab says, “Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed.. Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fate’s lieutenant; I act under orders.” Ahab thinks, as so many do that are on mad quests, that he is following God’s orders—the grand illusion of so many quests.

Some might think this long past due, but finally, we are drawing to the end of this mad quest. With 25 pages remaining in a 502-page book, Moby Dick, the great white whale is spotted.

Instead of giving up the mad quest, Ahab and his crew see the gliding whale with his white hump above the surface of the sea. Nothing did “surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.” Ahab has found God. The religious quest is over!

It was a calm day at sea. “Through the serene tranquilities of the tropical sea, among waves whose hand-clappings were suspended by exceeding rapture. Moby Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw…the grand god, revealed himself, sounded and went out of sight.” God revealed himself only for a moment and disappeared again.  That’s what gods do.

As the three boats waited, the whale did return to the surface in time: he peered into the depths of the sea until “he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned and then were plainly revealed two long spoked rows of white, glistening, teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom…the glittering mouth yawned beneath the boat like an open-doored, marble tomb.”

With its “malicious intelligence” that only Ahab could see, the whale ducked its head beneath the boat that carried Ahab in hot pursuit and shook it “as a mildly cruel cat her mouse…as the whale dallied with the doomed craft in his devilish way.” Ahab was in the jaws of the whale, like Jonah, but this drove Ahab even madder. “That monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated.” The whale bit Ahab’s boat in two.

Yet Ahab returned to the ship, and they continued the pursuit. Nothing could stop him. As Stubb said, “O whale! The mad fiend himself is after ye!” The men of the crew had “growing awe of Ahab.” The men were in awe of Ahab, they should have feared him.

The chase was not over, but continued into the second day, with the harpoons in the great white whale.