Recently, I picked up Moby Dick, to read it again. I hadn’t read it in a decade or so, and I found it more profound and provocative than I remembered. Anyway, one bit in particular has stayed with me after this reading. It is one of the more famous passages. The first mate, Starbuck, mocks Ahab’s obsession with the white whale, saying it is “Madness. To be enraged with a dumb thing seems blasphemous.” Snarling Captain Ahab, fired by Starbuck’ critique, spews out a whirlwind. I quote at length:
Hark ye yet again, –the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event –in the living act, the undoubted deed –there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines.
A sea of pathos and blasphemy, this is purest Melville. I could wish to break this into smaller bits and talk about each of them at length. But for now, let me draw attention to that line:
in each event –in the living act, the undoubted deed –there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask!
That “unknown but still reasoning thing” is obviously Ahab’s (Melville’s?) name for god, the god of his New England upbringing. And the maddened captain doesn’t know for sure if this god in fact lives there “behind the unreasoning mask” of human experiences. He doesn’t know if the reasoning is “out there” “behind” the “mask” or “in here” within himself. As he says, “Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond.”
So he pursues Moby Dick – he must know! In a line doubled with meaning, Ahab shouts, “That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate.” Meaning, Moby Dick is “that inscrutable thing” which he hates, and at the same time meaning he hates Moby Dick because the whale represents (!) what is unrepresentable, incomphrehensible, inscrutable. Ahab determines to “strike through the mask.” He will not be imprisoned, enslaved. He will open up the meaning of it all. For that is, after all, what Ahab is after: the meaning, the logos, of it all. He wants to totalize, to comprehend, to grasp. (In this, I follow the reading of Hubert Dreyfus.)
Dreyfus says there is nothing “beyond the wall.” There is no “unknown but still reasoning thing” existing behind the “mask.” There is only the “mask.” Ahab’s quest to know is foolish, dangerous, obscene, perverse, even if it is profoundly moving.
I disagree. Yes, Ahab is mad to pursue Moby Dick. He has confused the white whale with Another. And yet I think it is quite right to attempt totalization, even though we can never totalize entirely rightly. It is right to try to “strike through the mask,” though that in itself will get us only so far. There is something “beyond,” but I don’t think it is “unknown” in the sense Ahab means.
This passage conjours in me echoes of C.S. Lewis’ book, Till We Have Faces. In it, Orual, the ugly and embittered queen of Glome, finds herself consumed with spite toward the gods. She means to face them, to name them for the tyrants they are, so her life morphs into a prolonged protest, an ever-rising lament and complaint. The book is her account of this complaint. In the end, however, after long and deep suffering, she finally faces the fearsome truth: “How can the gods meet us face to face till we have faces?”
Ahab and Orual alike burn with spite for the “inscrutable.” They despise and refuse the meaningless and absurd. They mean to meet the Adversary and fight for all they’re worth. But Orual gets what Ahab (it seems) never does. She sees the problem is not “out there” in the “unknown but still reasoning thing” behind the “mask.” The problem lies not in the Un-known but in the knower, not in the one behind the mask, but in the one who wishes to strike through the mask. She learns she is faceless, and the “malice” is not in truth “out there” but from “in here.” It really is “seeming malice.”
What is needed, then, is not a breakthrough to the truth, but a breakdown, a humbling, a surrender. Then – and only then – can the truth be comprehended. Only when the truth is allowed (note the passive construction) to read us, can we read it. Only when we let ourselves be apprehended, can we begin the joyous work of comprehending the truth.
