CASE HISTORY DATA

From the first exciting moment that one looks at Moby-Dick as logic, it is startlingly clear that the book, as a living entity, and Melville-Ishmael, as driving intellects, have rich and textured ways of thinking that are consistent with and advance the main psychological trust and message of the book. After dramatically telling us who the logician is—“Call me Ishmael”—Melville begins the journey with an extended syllogism, called a sorites. First, he summarizes the argument in a rather straightforward and beguiling fashion:

Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation.

(Melville 1972, 93)

But then, Melville-Ishmael becomes explicit and reveals the bitter underlying meaning in this sorites:

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

(93)

In case any reader has lost sight of the argument (that getting away, egressing, is Ishmael's substitute for knocking people's heads in, for committing mayhem or murder), Melville-Ishmael tells us bluntly: “This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship” (93).

The argument can be restated this way: When my humors (hypos) are such that I feel like committing murder, I (Melville) instead commit a partial or symbolic suicide by burying myself for an extended time in a ship at sea.

No one can miss the point: Moby-Dick is about suicide, specifically suicide as an alternative to murder (but not precluding murder-suicide). The first chapter is about it; the last chapter is about it. Self-destruction is the psychological topic that frames the entire work. All the glorious text in between is interstitial to the “book-ends” of self-sought death.

And still further: Moby-Dick is about the covert, subintentioned, beneath-the-surface ways (“as if that infatuated man sought to run more than half way to meet his doom”), in which a person can demean, truncate, limit, narrow, or diminish himself. It is about the moieties of life, “living on with half a heart and half a lung,” short of death itself. It is about the unconscious elements, “the gliding great demon of the seas of life,” in self-induced destruction. The exploration of this world of the subsurface stream of the mind makes this book an endlessly unfathomable excitement.

In order to understand man's logics, specifically the logics of his (accidentally suicidal) death, we must know something—as much as we can possibly learn—about his character, his personality, his life.

In Moby-Dick, we must wait until almost the end (Chapter 132 of 135 chapters) to learn the bare-bone details of Ahab's life. From Ahab's anamnestic report, we learn that he is fifty-eight years old; he has been at sea since he was a boy-harpooner of eighteen (forty years of continuous whaling); at some age past fifty he married a young girl and sailed for Cape Horn on the next day; and he has a young child. Those are the bare facts.

But this book is about suicide and our main interest is in Ahab's death. What can we learn about that?

First, some facts: For Ahab's death, we have the following account (from Chapter 135) of his last actions:

The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the groove;—ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone.

(684)

On first reading, it might seem as though Ahab's death were pure accident, an unintentioned death; but let us see where our second thoughts lead us. Could it be called a suicide? Or, more likely, a subintentioned death?

If any case is to be made for subintention, then, at the least, two further background issues need to be involved; the concept of unconscious motivation and the concept of ambivalence. Ahab's chronicler would not have, in principle, resisted the concept of subintention, on the grounds of its involving unconscious motivation. For, as Melville tells us about Ahab (Chapter 41):

all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go. The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick?

(286)

That which is most sharply and most accurately characteristic of the subintentioned person—namely, the ubiquitous ambivalence, the pervasive psychological coexistence of logical incompatibles—is seen vividly in the following internal dialogue of life and death, of flesh and fixture, within Ahab (Chapter 51):

Walking the deck with quick, side-lunging strides, Ahab commanded the t'gallant sails and royals to be set, and every stun-sail spread. The best man in the ship must take the helm. Then, with every masthead manned, the piled-up craft rolled down before the wind. The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air beneath the feet; while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic influences were struggling in her—one to mount direct to heaven, the other to drive yawingly to some horizonal goal. And had you watched Ahab's face that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffin-tap. On life and death this old man walked.

(335)

And within Ahab, toward Moby Dick, there were deep ambiguities.

In any psychological autopsy, it is important to examine the method or the instrument of death and, especially, the victim's understandings and subjective estimations of its lethal works. Ahab was garroted by a free-swinging whale line. In Chapter 60 we are warned that “the least tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take somebody's arm, leg, or entire body off” (385). We are forewarned “of this man or that man being taken out of the boat by the line, and lost” (387); and we are warned again, “All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life” (387).

Ahab knew all this; nor was he a careless, accident-prone man. The apothecary knows his deadly drugs; the sportsman knows the danger of his weapons; the whaler captain—that very whaler captain who, instead of remaining on his quarterdeck, jumped to “the active perils of the chase” in a whaleboat manned by his “smuggled on board” crew—ought to know his whale lines.

Having described the precise circumstances of Ahab's death, and having mentioned some background issues deemed to be relevant, I would now pose some questions concerning his demise: Was Ahab's death more than a simple accident? Was there more intention than unintention? Was Ahab's orientation in relation to death entirely that of postponing death? Are there discernible subsurface psychological currents that can be fathomed and charted, and is there related information that can be dredged and brought to the surface? Specifically, can Ahab's death be described as victim-precipitated homicide; that is, is this an instance in which the victim stands up to subjectively calculated overwhelming odds, inviting destruction by the other?

Ahab led a fairly well-documented existence, especially insofar as the dark side of his life was concerned. Moby-Dick abounds with references to various funereal topics: coffins, burials, soul, life after death, suicide, cemeteries, death, and rebirth.

But, as in a psychological autopsy, we are primarily interested in interview data from everyone who had known the deceased, especially in what our informants can tell us about Ahab's personality, insofar as his orientations toward death are known. It should be recognized that, in some important ways, Captain Ahab's psychological autopsy will be a truncated and atypical one, especially with respect to the range of informants. There is no information from spouse, parents, progeny, siblings, collaterals, or neighbors; there are only mates, some of the more articulate shipboard subordinates, captains of ships met at sea, and, with terrifying biblical certitude, Elijah.

As we know, all the possible informants, listed below, with the exception of Ishmael, perished with Captain Ahab and are technically not available for interview. Only Ishmael's observations are direct; all else is secondhand through Ishmael, colored by Ishmael, and perhaps with no more veridicality than Plato's reports of Socrates. We shall have to trust Ishmael to be an accurate and perceptive reporter.

Our primary informant, Ishmael, reflected about Captain Ahab in twenty-five separate chapters (specifically 16, 22, 27, 28, 30, 33, 34, 36, 41, 44, 46, 50, 51, 52, 73, 100, 106, 115, 116, 123, 126, 128, 130, 132, and 133). Starbuck, the chief mate of the Pequod, is next: there are nine separate encounters with, or reports about, his captain (in Chapters 36, 38, 51, 118, 119, 123, 132, 134, and 135). Next is Stubb, the second mate, with seven separate anecdotes (to be found in Chapters 26, 28, 31, 73, 121, 134, and 135). All the others are represented by one or two bits of information apiece: Elijah (in Chapters 19 and 21); Gabriel of the Jeroboam (Chapter 71); Bunger, the ship's surgeon of the Samuel Enderby (100); the blacksmith (Chapter 113); the captain of the Bachelor (Chapter 115); Flask, the third mate (Chapter 121); the Manxman (Chapter 125); and the carpenter (127).

How can I summarize all the data? Perhaps my best course would be to concentrate on the general features that one would look for in a psychological autopsy. Thus, the information distilled from interviews with Ishmael, Starbuck, Stubb, and all the others might, in a dialogue of questions and answers, take the following form:

1. Hidden psychosis? Not at the beginning of the voyage, but certainly at the end (and indeed from Chapter 36 on: “‘the chick that's in him pecks the shell. ‘Twill soon be out.’” [258]), the madness in Ahab was blatant, open, known. His monomania was the official creed of his ship. Along with his other symptoms, his psychiatric syndrome was crowned with a paranoid fixation. But what matters in Ahab is not so much the bizarrely shaped psychological iceberg which many saw above the surface, but rather the hugeness of the gyroscopically immovable subsurface mass of the other—destruction and self-destruction. We know the poems about fire and ice. Ahab is a torrid, burning, fiery iceberg.

2. Disguised depression? Ahab was openly morbid and downcast. His was not exactly psychotic depression, nor can we call it reactive depression for it transcended the bounds of the definition. Perhaps at best it might be called a “character depression,” in that it infused his brain like the let-go blood from a series of small strokes in the hemisphere.

3. Talk of death? The morbid talk of death and killing runs through reports about Ahab like an idée fixe.

4. Previous suicide attempts? None is reported.

5. Disposition of belongings? Ahab, after forty solitary years at sea, had little in the way of possessions or personal belongings. His wife, he said, was already a widow; his interest in the possible profits from the voyage was nil; his withdrawal from meaningful material possessions (and his loss of joy with them) is perhaps best indicated by his flinging his “still lighted pipe into the sea” and dashing his quadrant to the deck—both of which are rash acts for a sailor-captain.

In Ahab's conscious mind, he wanted to kill—but have we not said that self-destruction can be other-destruction in the 180th degree? Figuratively speaking, the barb of the harpoon was pointed toward him; his brain thought a thrust, but his arm executed a retroflex. Was his death “accidental”? If he had survived his psychodynamically freighted voyage and had returned unharmed to Nantucket's pier, that would have been true accident. Men can die for nothing; most men do. But some few big-jointed men can give their lives for an internalized something: Ahab would not have missed this opportunity for the world.

What further evidence can be cited bearing on the issue of subintentioned cessation? With his three harpooners before him, with their harpoons turned up like goblets, Ahab commands them in this maritime immolation scene:

“Drink, ye harpooneers! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat's bow—Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!”

(265)

Kill or be killed; punish or be punished; murder or suicide. The two are intertwined.

In Ahab's case, we have no suicide note or other holograph of death, but, mirabile dictu, we do have Ahab's last thoughts (Chapter 135):

I turn my body from the sun … Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; 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, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!

What is to be particularly noted in this passage is the prescience of Ahab. “I spit my last breath at thee,” he says. How does he know that it is to be his last breath? Where are the sources of his premonitions? What are the contents of his subintentions? Does this not remind us of Radney, the chief mate of the Town-Ho (Chapter 54), who behaved as if he “sought to run more than half-way to met his doom”? Is this not exactly what the tantalizer says to his “all-destroying but unconquering” executioner in cases of victim-precipitated homicide? And is that not rather close to our everyday use of the word “suicide”?

It is suggested that Captain Ahab's demise was goal-seeking behavior that made obsessed life or subintentioned death relatively unimportant to him, compared with the great press for the discharge of his monomania of hate. He dared, and made, that murderous death-white whale kill him. He could not rest until he was so taken. (Did Satan provoke God into banishing him?) Ahab invited cessation by the risks that he ran; he was a death-chancer. He permitted suicide. Consider Ahab's psychological position: What could he have done, to what purpose would any further voyages have been, if he had killed the symbol of his search?

Our present death certificate is inadequate to reflect the psychological facts. A certification of Ahab's death as “accidental” would be blatantly superficial (and inaccurate); and a certification as “suicidal” would be difficult to substantiate and would not reflect “suicide” as we currently use the word. What we are left with is our musings that the most accurate designation, “subintentioned,” is not currently available on the death certificate. Perhaps this is just as well, because Ahab's death was too special and too complicated to bury with a single word.

SELF-DESTRUCTIVE PATTERNS OF LOGIC

Let us turn now to some illustrations of logical gambits within Moby-Dick. We begin with the more simple examples.

DENOTATIVE DEDUCTIVE LOGIC

Not unexpectedly, Moby-Dick has some interesting examples of straightforward Aristotelian syllogisms. Here, from Chapter 17 (“The Ramadan”), is an AAA (or Barbara) syllogism. When Ishmael wishes to enter his room at the inn, he discovers Queequeg performing Ramadan.

The room was locked even though sufficient time has elapsed for Queequeg to have completed his ritual:

Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances and rituals must be over, I went up to his room and knocked at the door; but no answer. I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside. “Queequeg,” said I softly through the key-hole:—all silent. “I say, Queequeg! why don't you speak? It's I—Ishmael.” But all remained still as before. I began to grow alarmed. I had allowed him such abundant time; I thought he might have had an apoplectic fit.

(178)

Through the key-hole, Ishmael espied the shaft of Queequeg's harpoon:

I looked through the key-hole; … I was surprised to behold resting against the wall the wooden shaft of Queequeg's harpoon.

(178-79)

Ishmael knew that Queequeg never left his room without his harpoon:

That's strange, thought I; but at any rate, since the harpoon stands yonder, and he seldom or never goes abroad without it.

(179)

The syllogistic conclusion:

therefore he must be inside here, and no possible mistake.

But this straightforward syllogism is not totally straightforward. Curiously, it has a conditional quality about it. “He seldom or never goes abroad without it.” The word “seldom” introduces a continuum in the “always-never” dichotomy, but Melville treats the situation as though it were a dichotomy when he adds, “and no possible mistake.”

Another, more dramatic example comes from the final paragraph of Chapter 44 (“The Chart”) and is quoted in its entirely:

Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.

(302-303)

The syllogism in this chilling paragraph may be paraphrased as follows:

• In each human being, there are these two aspects of the self: the characterizing mind and the eternal living principle or soul.

• In times of great emotional intensity, these two elements—which should, in their normal functioning, be united—can become separated by a psychological chasm and thus become dissociated from each other.

• In extreme cases of such dissociation (such as Captain Ahab's), by sheer power of will, one of the two elements, specifically the unsouled mind, can assume a grim (but empty) existence of its own.

• Therefore, the manifestations of the tormented spirit that others see is but a hollow vessel; a man without a soul; an empty being. Such a man is a blankness, a nullity doomed by his self-created, self-destroying psychological vulture.

This extraordinary extract of Melville's is pregnant with passages and original concepts. In this one paragraph, Melville anticipates Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939), who coined the term schizophrenia, implying a split personality, a schism between thought and feeling, a cleavage or fissure between the basic mental functions of intellect and emotion. Further, it presages Carl Gustav Jung's (1875-1961) notions of the persona, the shadow, as well as the existential ideas of the hollow man, the empty person, the meaningless life, the estranged individual, the affectless human (Chapter 36):

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.

(262)

It also anticipates the basic psychoanalytic concept of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) of the unconscious and, necessarily, of the various layers of personality functioning: “‘Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer’” (262); “how all this came to be … how to their unconscious understandings … all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go” (286). In all, this passage, like a frigate filled with a thousand ideas, is a rather fully packed syllogism.

These syllogisms give us some idea of Melville's deductive logical styles. Moby-Dick is filled with logical arguments. The book itself can be seen as one immense sorites.

The major premise of Moby-Dick might go something like this: There is a natural order in the universe, an order between man and man, and between man and nature. (By implication, there are strict limitations to any individual's autonomy and power.) The first minor premise would be: To depart from or to challenge this natural order always results in a corrective redress or balance by nature, usually retaliatory punishment of the offending individual. The second minor premise is that Ahab's monomaniacal, revengeful drive could have remained his own crazy business, but his overwhelming hubris openly taunted the Fates and thus became a matter between him and the natural order. Conclusion: Therefore, Ahab had to be punished; he had to be destroyed, even if it meant the death of almost everyone around him. Ishmael's admonition (Chapter 96), “Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man!” (535) can also be read as: Beware! Do not overtempt the Fates. You may go only so far—even (or especially) in your monomania.

CONNOTATIVE OR CONDITIONAL DEDUCTIVE LOGIC

Among the 216,104 words in Moby-Dick there are 17,560 different word forms. From among these, I have looked at the “logical” words (adverbs like “therefore” and “hence” and words like “both” and “half”) that reflect Melville's concern with simultaneous opposites, oxymorons, moieties, and ambivalences. The twelve “logical” words used most frequently in Moby-Dick (taken from The Concordance) are: then (629 times), half (137), both (124), because (92), therefore (67), since (65), hence (32), thinking (28), concluded (19), thereby (18), whereas (18), and whenever (15). The other words, with lesser frequencies, are: argument, conclude, concluding, conclusion, deduction, denote, denoted, denotes, follows, inasmuch, premised, and whereupon (Cohen and Cahalan 1978).

We have said (in this section) that “therefore” does not always indicate a totally automatic or innocuous operation. By examining Melville's use of “therefore” and “hence,” we can better understand his style of thinking—the ways in which the author of Moby-Dick is traditionally Aristotelian and the ways in which he is idiosyncratically, uniquely Melvillean in his thinking.

Not unexpectedly, most of Melville's usage of “therefore” is straightforwardly syllogistic, as in the following example (Chapter 44):

Now, the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the Season-on-the-Line. No possible endeavor then could enable her commander to make the great passage southwards, double Cape Horn, and then running down sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time to cruise there. Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season.

(301)

There are many instances in Moby-Dick of this kind of not very exciting syllogism and sorites, all of them grist for any schoolman's mill.

But Melville was capable of a much more subtle kind of “thereforing.” And it is in these non-Aristotelian variations of syllogistic reasoning, specifically in his conditional, almost Persian ways of thinking, that Melville creates a new language and a new logic and adds to the tone of Moby-Dick that sense of special inevitability and doom.

All this can be seen in Melville's conditional uses of “therefore” (and “hence”). Father Mapple provides a telling example of conditional thinking (Chapter 9):

“Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press upon me. I have read ye by what murky light may be mine the lesson that Jonah teaches to all sinners; and therefore to ye, and still more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye.”

(141)

In this case the “therefore” has more intensity (as if one had turned up the volume on a rheostat) for Father Mapple than it has for others. “Still more to me.” All men are sinners but some men are greater sinners than others. And what Jonah teaches to all sinners, he teaches much more to those who are the greatest sinners: “God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press upon me.”

And reasoning can even depend on even more subjective states. Consider this passage from Chapter 42 (“The Whiteness of the Whale”):

Can we, then, by the citation of some of those instances wherein this thing of whiteness—though for the time either wholly or in great part stripped of all direct associations calculated to impart to it aught fearful, but, nevertheless, is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however modified;—can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us to the hidden cause we seek?

Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without imagination no man can follow another into these halls. And though, doubtless, some at least of the imaginative impressions about to be presented may have been shared by most men, yet few perhaps were entirely conscious of them at the time, and therefore may not be able to recall them now.

(292)

What is to be noted here is that what follows “therefore” relates to the state of consciousness of the individual at that time, an interesting example of conditional thinking specifically depending upon, of all things, the logician's state of mind.

In addition, there are philosophical elements that condition the logical flow. In Chapter 72 (“The Monkey-Rope”) the narrator muses as follows:

So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while earnestly watching his motions, 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. Therefore, I saw that here was a sort of interregnum in Providence; for its even-handed equity never could have sanctioned so gross an injustice. And yet still further pondering—while I jerked him now and then from between the whale and the ship, which would threaten to jam him—still further pondering, I say, 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. If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die.

(426)

All this is prologue to the main act: the psychological nuances in Melville's paragraphs on death and suicide and Melville's daring and original notion of partial suicide (like burying oneself in a whaling ship at sea) are a kind of subintentioned or unconscious way of cutting oneself off from life, short of overt death. Consider this passage in Chapter 112:

Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them—“Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them. Come hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death. Come hither! put up thy grave-stone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!”

Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sunrise, and by fall of eve, the blacksmith's soul responded, Aye, I come! And so Perth went a-whaling.

(596-97)

Continuing to focus on this issue of subintentioned death—wherein the individual plays a latent or covert, an indirect or unconscious role in hastening his own demise—let us examine the final chapters of Moby-Dick, especially as they touch on Ahab's death.

There is a certain persuasive logic to the manner of Ahab's death, which might be called a victim-precipitated homicide; he dared, and made, that murderous death-white whale kill him. He could not rest until he was so taken. He invited death by the risks that he ran. His death by Moby Dick on that voyage came at the right time, for in his unconscious wish it was perfect—the only death, the “appropriate” death.

NON-SUMMATIVE DEDUCTIVE LOGIC

Melville understood the importance of the non-Aristotelian coexistence of A and non-A. Was Socrates mortal or immortal? In a sense (by virtue, in part, of this very question), the answer is both. Was Ahab's goal survival or self-destruction? “On life and death this old man walked.” Clam and cod. Life and death illustrate the close relationship between the style of logic and the basic theme in Moby-Dick. A suicidal person such as Ahab is basically ambivalent, thinking with simultaneity of opposites. He wants to flee unbearable circumstances and, at the same time, he has active fantasies of magical intervention to be like a Catskill eagle (Chapter 96):

And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

(535-36)

In the Aristotelian sense, Moby-Dick is not a logical book and Ahab is not a logical character. We can reasonably conclude that Melville was not, himself, a logical person when he wrote it—for which we can be eternally grateful.

Part of Melville's marvelous illogicality stems from the fact that he was a self-taught depth psychologist. It may be as accurate to say that Melville was a pre-Freudian as it is to state that Freud was a post-Melvillean. Melville wrote about the unconscious in 1851, five years before Freud was born. When in Moby-Dick the author-narrator says, “What the White Whale was to them or to their unconscious understanding” (Chapter 41) or “through infancy's unconscious spell” or the phrase “the little lower layer,” he is telling us that he understands the dualities, the admixtures, the contradictions, the ambivalences, the ambiguities, and the layers of the human mind.

Ambivalence is the non-Aristotelian idea that contradictions can coexist psychologically, like the simultaneous feelings of love and hate toward the same person. (Nowadays, ambivalence is considered to be an essential psychoanalytic idea.) In Melville's work, one can get clues about his understandings of ambivalence by examining his use of the word “both.” Melville knows that it is humanly possible, even if it is logically strained, that “even Christians could be both miserable and wicked” (Chapter 12, p. 151); one can “boldly dip into the Potluck of both worlds” (Chapter 12, p. 151); and there is no rule of nature that one has to choose, as a rule of life, between clam or cod: “‘Both’, says I” (Chapter 15, p. 162). This seemingly innocuous statement projects more than gustatory greediness; it is a paradigm of life itself. In a single act, we can do something that has two different uses. Queequeg's tomahawk pipe can both brain his foes and soothe his soul (Chapter 21); the whaleboat hull is both balanced and directed by one central keel (Chapter 134); and Ahab plunges his harpoon into Moby Dick with both steel and curse (Chapter 135). The point is that Ahab and every one of us have within us warring forces: good and evil, light and dark, land and sea, order and disorder, love and hate, flesh and ivory limbs. Without these contradictory psychological richnesses, we would be as two-dimensional as pasteboard masks.

The first cousin of ambivalence is the oxymoron. It involves a union of opposites for epigrammatic effect. Among the best-known examples in English are from Romeo and Juliet: “Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health” and, of course, “parting is such sweet sorrow.” Here is Melville's oxymoronic gem, his short poem, “Art”:

In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate
A flame to melt—a wind to freeze;
Sad patience—joyous energies;
Humility—yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity—reverence. There must mate,
And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel—Art.

Two points about the logic in this poem. The first is that it is from the juxtaposition of opposites—after conflict, sacrifices, and struggle—that something tangible and worthwhile, art, is created. The second point reinforces the first. “Jacob” reminds us of the wrestling with the angel (Genesis 32:25-33) as a result of which he obtained both a blessing and a new name (Yiśrā’ēl) as well as an injury in “the hollow of his thigh.” Reflecting on the latter, we think of symbolic castration. So again: There are opposites of castrative injury, sacrifice, sweat, blood, tears, effort, pain, and loss on the one hand and, on the other, victory, creativity, and almost everything that has value in life—as art and love have value. These values not only have their opposites, but, as part of a larger opposite, they have their “price.” Ahab certainly wounded, perhaps even killed, “the stricken whale” (Chapter 135), the object of his hate, but at a price that a more rational man (one who is not crazy, not wildly vindictive, not obsessively hateful, not rigidly monomaniacal) would, long before, have prudently decided not to pay.

To exist with the knowledge of ambivalences, dualities, and oxymorons is a more complicated challenge than to live in the more simple world of the sixteen valid moods of the Aristotelian syllogism. And even more frightening, for unlike the ordered Aristotelian world, there are no magic talismanic formulas to guide and save us. Melville tells us as much in his summation of the human course of life itself, and his reflection that there is no single set of fixed stages of life (Chapter 114); see below.

Melville would seem to be open-minded, of two worlds, about the etiology of suicide. Some things are predictable and some things are not. Some suicides have their origin early in life and seem “die-cast,” whereas others are not at all of this type and seem much more tied to circumstances or even to impulses that appear to have no precursors and no previous analogous patterns in that life.

In one of Melville's journeys at sea (either on his way to London or as a passenger around Cape Horn to San Francisco), he annotated his copy of The Poetical Works of John Milton. (These 1836 volumes, with Melville's written notes, came to light only in 1984.) To Milton's line “the childhood shows the man, as morning shows the day” (Paradise Regained, Book IV), Melville wrote the following at the bottom of that page:

True, if all fair dawnings were followed by high noons and blazoned sunsets. But as many a merry moon precedes a dull and rainy day; so, often, unpromising mornings have glorious mid days and eves. The greatest, grandest things are unpredicted.

And it would follow that also unpredicted are the saddest, direst things, like some suicides.

This view of Melville's—of the unpredictability of some of life's events—is one that Melville could propound about life in general. In Moby-Dick, he states some of his “circular” ideas of the development of personality, a view sharply at odds with Shakespeare's view of the seven set “stages of life” (As You Like It) or, in our own time, Erik Erikson's “linear” notion of eight psychosocial stages of life. Here is Melville speaking about a general, “spiral,” repetitive view of human development (Chapter 114, “The Gilder”):

Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye—though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life,—in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed graduations, and at the last one pause:—through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must go there to learn it.

(602)

So we see that in some crises, suicide in an adult has its origin in the traumas of early childhood and it is to there that we must look if we wish to unravel the mystery of the tragic end. But, in others, the story is quite different, and, accordingly, so is the locus of origin.

I believe that the greatest oxymoronic passage in Moby-Dick is the stunning opening paragraph of “The Funeral” (Chapter 69):

“Haul in the chains! Let the carcase go astern!”

The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre; though changed in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal. Slowly it floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls, augment the murderous din. For hours and hours from the almost stationary ship that hideous sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.

(414)

What is to be noted especially in this superlative passage is the breathtaking shift in mood between the first eight lugubrious sentences and the last lilting sentence—from horror and rapaciousness to the most pacific calm. Indeed, the last sentence itself contains this same dramatic contrast in the shift in tone between the first three phrases and the last two. It is the connotative tension in this passage that rivets and chills us. The description is a paradigm, if not of the actualities, then of the omnipresent tensions (whatever their character) in our own lives. In Moby-Dick it is the logic of tension and the aberrant ways in which these tensions are reduced that, together, provide the central implicit drama beneath the surface of the written text.

PARALOGIC

As though all this were not enough, there is still one more kind of logic we must consider: paralogic. The topic of paralogical thinking in Moby-Dick has to be of some special interest to us—even though it may be somewhat painful to look at it too closely. Let us look briefly but open-mindedly at the issue.

“N.B.,” wrote Melville in March of 1877, at the bottom of a letter to his brother-in-law John C. Hoadley, “I ain't crazy.” He underlined the words for emphasis. But his disclaimer has not prevented a whole swirl of controversy about his mental state; independent of this, the family tried to get him to see an alienist, the esteemed Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Recently, some newly found correspondence from Elizabeth Melville and Melville's brother-in-law, Samuel Shaw, has revealed rather explicitly that Melville was viewed as having more than ordinary perturbation (Kring and Carey 1975; Yannella and Parker 1981). Although there is no evidence, in my opinion, that Melville suffered from what we today would call schizophrenia, it nonetheless provides an intellectually engaging exercise to turn to the topic of “language and thought in schizophrenia.” In doing this, I am not for a moment attempting to imply that oversimplified notion that insanity and genius are identical, or that they are similar or just a hair's breadth apart. It is more sensible to say that they are “different.” Both the insane person and the genius are, almost by definition, “different” from the sane and the ordinary; but they are different in radically diverse ways: principally the genius is effective and makes sense, whereas the insane person is not and does not.

Not all examples of reasoning in terms of attributes of the predicate have wild or fervent content. In Chapter 82 (“The Honor and Glory of Whaling”), there is a rather benign and innocuous example, in which Melville is clearly spoofing. He knows that the syllogism “St. George killed a whale; Nantucket whalers kill whales; therefore Nantucket whalers are equal with St. George” does not quite “hold water.” But other times, Melville-Ahab uses an identical flawed logic in a totally serious way, filled with urgency and passion. What are we to make of the logic of this tirade by Ahab (Chapter 37): “Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run” (66). A locomotive runs on rails; my soul runs on rails; therefore—it has a wild, Whitmanesque ring—I am a locomotive.

And, again, in a great credo passage from Chapter 134 (“The Chase—Second Day”):

“Starbuck, of late I've felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour we both saw—thou know'st what, in one another's eyes. But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand—a lipless, unfeatured blank. 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 Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders. Look thou, underling! that thou obeyest mine.”

(672)

The underlying syllogism of this passage takes its very strength from the attributes of the predicate: The Fates have grand designs and immutable needs; I have grand designs and immutable needs; therefore, I am part of the Fates, the Fates' lieutenant.

It is evident that although some of A is B, and some of C is B, A is not C. Paralogical thinking—reasoning in terms of the attribute of the predicate—makes the mistake of believing that because A and C can be mentioned in the same breath (in relation to B), they are coequal. It is the wish to do so, even in the absence of the necessary logical supports, that creates this fantasized bridge. It is the logic of yearning and of passion, not the logic of common sense.

Again, in Chapter 133, “The Chase—First Day,” just prior to the preceding passage, Ahab, in response to a statement by Starbuck about an omen, declaims:

“Omen? omen?—the dictionary! If the gods think to speak outright to man, they will honorably speak outright; not shake their heads, and give an old wives' darkling hint.—Begone! Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing; Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck; and ye two are all mankind; and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor gods nor men his neighbors!”

(662)

Confused in his logic, Ahab desires to be straightforward in his speech in order to communicate his deeper emotional needs. He does not seem to care that what he says contains a truly megalomaniacal bit of tortured reasoning. Here is what he implies: The extended universe—all that one can imagine—is made up of two and only two units: (1) All mankind (represented by their monotonous duplicated opposites, Starbuck and Stubb), and (2) one Ahab—“nor gods nor men his neighbors!” Does Ahab really mean that he is somehow outside mankind—that man makes one in the whole nation's census—“a mighty pageant creature, formed for noble tragedies” (Chapter 16, p. 170).

Ahab is so wrought up that he does not care how far he goes; he seems to have the need to show just how desperately he feels by making overextended assertions to the world: “‘Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. … Who's over me? Truth hath no confines’” (Chapter 36, p. 262). And it does not matter if such a man has some defects (Chapter 16):

Nor will it at all detract from him, dramatically regarded, if either by birth or other circumstances, he have what seems a half wilful over-ruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature. For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.

(170)

Works Cited

Cohen, H., and Calahan, J. A Concordance to Melville's Moby-Dick. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms International, 1978.

Kring, W. D., and Carey, J. S. “Two discoveries concerning Herman Melville.” In Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 137–141. 1975.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Edited by Harold Beaver. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1972.

Shneidman, Edwin. “The Suicidal Psycho-Logics of Moby-Dick.” In Definition of Suicide, 155–93. New York: Wiley, 1985.

Yannella, P., and Parker, H. The Endless, Winding Way in Melville. Glassboro, New Jersey: The Melville Society, 1981.