The Enigma of Moby Dick

Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby Dick has been enjoying something of a renaissance in the last few years. The great white Leviathan is called forth once more in online memes, jokes and think-pieces. There was a disappointing 2014 movie and an interesting 2017 film short. Bob Dylan even mentioned the book as inspiration for his own writing in his acceptance speech for the 2017 Nobel prize for literature. Perhaps the book’s renewed appeal registers a fresh search for meaning, as the zombified corpse of post-war liberalism staggers on directionless. In many ways, this 150- year old novel is a novel for our times.

In any case, the recent surge of interest prompted me to finally read this classic novel which had been on my ‘must read’ list for longer than I can remember. It turns out that I’d been foolish to delay; it’s a fascinating read. It mixes together, in fairly equal measure, empiricism and romanticism; a catalogue of facts stirred into the most compelling fiction. It is a magical concoction that conveys a drama both dream-like and incontrovertibly real.  Melville rigorously investigates the evidence on record about whales and sets that record before the reader. He explores geology, mythology, law, literature, history, natural history, biology, archaeology, geography, politics, international relations, anthropology, theology, psychology and much more; empirical knowledge collected within many disciplines as they relate to whales in all and every sense. But he also makes clear that in doing so, he fails – just like Captain Ahab – to capture the essence of Moby Dick. Melville is no Gradgrind.

In his celebration of human diversity alongside an awareness of the painful futility of seeking meaning in human existence, Melville sits among the great Romantic poets and writers of his century. The nineteenth century was an age of innovation, scientific discovery and technological invention. As Melville wrote, facts were challenging faith; religious dogmas were being overturned and undermined by scientific discoveries in every sphere. He published Moby Dick only eight years before Darwin published his Origin of Species (1859). There was something in the air; the questions of fact and meaning battled one another. The novel is an attempt to reconcile the deeper, more spiritual meaning of the world with the newer discoveries about it.

But the novel’s tragic ending points to the uncomfortable paradox that while humanity can’t possibly survive in a world without meaning,  the unending search for absolute truths is also ultimately futile, even fatal. Or rather, the search itself can come to blind a man to his own purpose. As Starbuck pleads with Captain Ahab, “See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou that madly seekest him!” Ahab’s vengeful madness consumes his mind, body and soul. The reader wonders whether Melville wants Ahab to go home to his devoted, patient wife and find peace or to conquer his fishy nemesis and find glory? Either path will destroy him but only the latter will fulfil his destiny.

It is this transcendental destiny that really occupies Melville and all those who pursue Moby Dick: locating that sublime conjunction between the factual and the meaningful. Ultimately, the search will bring the whole ship down: all the faith and tradition of generations; all the people, black and white, young and old. For his contemporary, Marx, the relentlessness of modern capitalist progress led inexorably to solids melting into air; for Melville, the relentlessness of human curiosity – and the false certainties it leads to – plunges us onward at great risk to our own sanity and safety. Melville spoke most directly to Emersonian Transcendentalism but posits diverse, vivid, open-ended democracy as the antidote to certainty and the tyrannical absolutism of Ahab’s truth.

Moby Dick is famously a novel of adventure and single-minded pursuit. But there is so much more that makes it a truly American novel – perhaps THE great American novel. The restless angst of a young America, pushing its frontier-line forward and its mastery over nature upward, seeps out of the pages at every turn.  There is the tragic story of young Pip, an African American cabin boy driven mad when forced to reckon with the truth of his fragile existence.  (Pip is the namesake of Dicken’s more famous hero, who fulfilled his vital potential rather than having it ripped from him, as American slaves did). There is the ‘melting pot’ cast of seamen; diverse characters from all races and civilisations mixing together, learning from one another and depending on each other.

Rather than following a destructive path to absolute truth, Melville’s story recommends greater recognition of human mutuality and interdependence. One of the most moving passages in the book is a reflection by our narrator, Ishmael, on the precariousness of his situation when tied on a “monkey-rope” to his friend the harpooner Queequeg. As Queequeg stood atop a dead whale’s head, balancing in the sea as the men rotated the whale to strip it’s fat in coils, Ishmael stood on deck, harnessed to Queequeg in a deadlock of security and peril.

“I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint-stock company of two; that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death . . .  I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connection with a plurality of other mortals. . . . But handle Queequeg’s monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the management of one end of it.”

It is not a comfortable relationship, necessarily, but suggests the import of mutual trust and open communication. In a democracy, meaning can only be reached in conversation with fellow citizens. Essential truth is impossible because truth – in a democracy at least – is negotiated and contingent. If the crew had turned their collective will to more democratic ends, they might have combined constructively to put an end to Ahab’s absolutism and his madness.

Melville was no doubt influenced by Alexis de Tocqueville’s disquisition on Democracy in America, published a decade before Moby Dick, which notes that while “in their country and their age, man is brought home to himself by an irresistible force; and losing all hope of stopping that force . . . turn all their thoughts to the direction of it.” Melville recognises the force that drives Ahab (to know the Whale) and Ishmael (to know Ahab) but also recognises its futility and ultimate destructiveness.  While Tocqueville’s Americans “do not deny that every man may follow his own interest, but endeavor to prove that it is the interest of every man to be virtuous,” Melville too acclaims the good, indeed the divine, nature of human equality, gracing God as  the “the centre and circumference of all democracy.” For him, human dignity “has no robed investiture.” Rather, “Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike.” He warns the reader of his commitment to this creed:

“If then to meanest mariners and renegades and castaways I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark, weave around them tragic graces; . . . then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just spirit of equality, which has spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind.”

His profound, romantic plea for democratic egalitarianism continues:

“Bear me out in it thou great democratic god who did not refuse to the swart convict Bunyon the pale poetic pearl; thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles, who didst hurl him upon a war horse, who didst thunder him higher than a throne; thou who in all they mighty earthly marchings ever collect your champions from the kingly commons – bear me out in it, oh god!”

The body of postcolonial criticism that caricatures nineteenth-century novels as performing racist, imperial adventures for home audiences and reflecting a crude belief in scientific objectivity does most of them a disservice but distorts Moby Dick grotesquely. Melville is all too aware of the limits of scientism and of the romance of adventure. Moreover, he does not simply reflect a new democratic culture, he helps to forge it. As CLR James has it, “In his great book the divisions and antagonisms and madnesses of an outworn civilization are mercilessly dissected and cast aside.  Nature, technology, the community of men, science and knowledge, literature and ideas are fused into a new humanism.”[i]

Melville embraces the particular American experience but his novel speaks to all of us moderns. He establishes fact and fiction as complementary tools in an ongoing search for knowledge, truth and meaning and he explains both the necessity and the limitations of that search. Moby Dick, he finds, is just as much about what we bring to him as what he brings to us. In his own enigmatic nature, he might bring to us a better understanding of our own purpose – or drive us mad. Melville’s imagination is expansive and his writing is ambitious and risky. He writes the world and acknowledges that our own location in it is “not down on any map. True places rarely are.” It is always out there for us to discover for ourselves.

[i] CLR James, Mariners Renegades and Castaways (Bewick Editions, 1978): 105.

HAMILTON: Enlisted as a General in the Culture Wars

Lin-Manuel Miranda is a creative genius; he is not a polemicist. Nevertheless, his hit Broadway musical about American founding father Alexander Hamilton, set to open in London’s West End in December and already staged in Chicago and touring nationally, is his opening shot in the culture wars raging in Trump’s America. He doesn’t throw away his shot.

Miranda’s Hamilton engages afresh with the meaning of the nation’s founding. The show launches a twenty-first-century campaign for the hearts and minds of Americans in a cultural parody of the military skirmishes and political battles that the revolutionary Hamilton fought in the eighteenth century. While the ‘young, scrappy, and hungry’ Alexander Hamilton worked alongside George Washington to usher forth a new nation, Miranda’s Hamilton fights to redefine meaning and purpose in a nation suffering a severe identity crisis today.

History itself has become a cultural battlefield; the show represents a liberal response to conservative claims on the nation’s origins story and foundational values. From the Tea Party movement to shock-jock Glenn Beck’s ‘Common Sense’ and associated arguments against centralised power and constitutional defences of free speech and gun ownership rights, conservatives have consistently presented themselves as the true heirs of the founding fathers.  America, they imagine, will be Great Again when the nation returns to the original intentions of the founders. Progressives, tending to have at least one eye on the future and forswearing commitment to traditional values – including nationalism – suggest that the best of the founders shared their own future-facing approach. But the liberal response to conservative assertions of originalist authority has generally been fairly thin.

Until now.

In fact, there is something in the musical for everyone, which helps to explain its extraordinary success. The power of Miranda’s vision is that it manages to play to both sides: it taps into many of the best, most enlightened traditions of the American past and underlines their continuing relevance. It feeds the current demand for heroic tales of the founding fathers and engages the intense contemporary interest in the history and heritage of revolutionary America. It works too as a classic Horatio Alger story, drawing on the deep cultural veins of the American Dream. Hamilton, a poor orphan boy, makes good through his hard work, determination and willingness to take risks for a cause he believes in. An immigrant outsider who fought his way into ‘the room where it happens,’ Caribbean-born Hamilton “gets the job done.” The show also directs nods to feminist aspirations and signals strong approval of revolutionary abolitionists like John Laurens. All of this, wrapped in a cast of minority (black and Hispanic) performers adds the identity politics that any worthy cultural warrior carries in his knapsack. The musical form: a sweet combination of rap, soul and pop appeals to a younger, hipper audience than Broadway usually caters to.

Miranda’s creative vision unifies. Just as the election of Obama represented “a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views,” [from his The Audacity of Hope] so the Hamil phenomenon uses the cues from America’s political culture to hold a mirror up to the nation. Everyone sees something to like.

There is no doubt that Miranda’s Hamilton further cultivates the liberal ‘founder chic’ of popular books and TV shows about the men who fought the revolutionary war, wrote the US Constitution and turned the world upside down. And, like the HBO mini-series based on David McCullough’s best-selling, Pulitzer-winning biography of John Adams and others, the elevated founders are undoubtedly selected for their distance from or disdain for slavery. Slave owners Washington, Jefferson and Madison – first, third and fourth U.S. presidents – have not inspired Broadway musicals or TV dramas.

There is discernible political correctness in Miranda’s choice of Hamilton as his hero but he does still present the first Secretary of the Treasury as a national hero, albeit a tragic one. Resurrecting a ‘great man’ narrative of history, Hamilton inspires because he came from nowhere and he made a difference. The founding fathers changed the world in dramatic ways because they were principled and disciplined; Miranda understands and applauds this. His construction comes alive because it recognises the power of human action to change the course of history. Yet Hamilton’s single, almost Shakespearean tragic flaw – that he believes in himself a little too much – spells his ultimate downfall. It is the tragedy of liberal hopefulness. Burr, a pragmatic careerist and Hamilton’s constant companion and nemesis, is the architect of his doom. The national allegories play large.

Miranda’s optimism, energy and passion and his focus on aspirational immigrants lead him to embrace foundational values in a way that few liberals, and no liberal politician, has done in recent memory. Indeed, in an early performance of the opening song at Obama’s White House, the president’s embarrassed laughter signals his discomfort. While Obama squirms, Miranda reaches back into the past and pulls out Alexander Hamilton as a happening hip-hop character who has a million things to do – just you wait! Miranda makes the founding fathers cool again, and without irony.

By reclaiming the nation’s origins for progressives, Miranda shows great verve and a nose for important historical lessons. It’s a wonderful thing to look back upon the open-ended, dialogue-laden political debates of the 1790s as an alternative to the brittle culture wars of the first decades of the twenty-first century. The issues don’t map exactly but today’s liberals might embrace the Hamiltonian strong central government, support for foreign investment and protection of minorities (albeit political factions rather than identity groups). Tea Party libertarians, on the other hand, would welcome Jeffersonian strict constructionism, defence of individual liberties and states’ rights. To present these disputes as Cabinet Rap-battles, as Miranda does, is great fun but also highlights the importance of debate itself. Honest dialogue between those in strong political disagreement was embedded in the making of the nation. Rather than screaming ‘fake news’ at ideas you disagree with, or deriding people with opposing views as ‘a basket of deplorables,’ the nation was forged through debate, difference, dialogue and ultimately, compromise. It was not that Hamilton or Jefferson ‘won’ their debates but that they sat together, talked it out, and found a way to incorporate enough of what they each valued into national policy. The real majesty of being in the ‘room where it happened’ was that the compromise took place between those with sincerely held principles in bitter opposition to one another. They managed to reach a resolution that for Hamilton placed great financial power in the federal government and for Jefferson removed the centres of political power away from the corrupting financial and commercial influence of New York, to a new ‘virtuous’ republican city – Washington DC.

The greatest naïveté and perhaps the greatest irony of Miranda’s story is that it largely ignores the question of democracy; for sure, most founding fathers were ambivalent democrats at best.  Hamilton was certainly no populist. Jefferson, despite his slave owner status (or perhaps because of it) was the more radically democratic of the two. Hamilton, compared to Aaron Burr, was daring, strident and principled; but compared to Jefferson he was elitist and authoritarian. While Hamilton was uneasy about the passions of the mob, Jefferson asserted “I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.” This view was perhaps uncommon among the founding fathers but it foreshadowed the continued struggle that troubles American democracy today: how to reconcile the claims to justice of minorities with the demands and interests of a democratic majority. Miranda shows us that the best way to do this is to talk to one another – in rap, if necessary.

As many Americans forage in their history, searching for a lost identity, Miranda’s Hamilton is splendid in its focus on ideas rather than identity. Beyond the black lives/all lives position-staking of the culture wars, Miranda shows us that the particular and the universal can complement one another. Ironically, the black and Hispanic cast flag up the fact that it is indeed the ideas that count – and that those ideas are still relevant to all Americans today, whatever their identity. The cast’s plea to Vice-President-elect Mike Pence that the incoming Trump administration respects the inalienable rights of all Americans underlined that. A patriotic national identity never went out of style for many ordinary Americans – and in each generation immigrants to the U.S. have breathed new life into enlightened foundational values. At a time when faith in the wisdom and capacity of the American people is at a historic low, it’s time to put all of our prejudices aside and engage in a rap-battle of ideas.