In Nomine Diaboli

Next to the seizures and shapings of creative thought—the thing itself— no comparable experience is more thrilling than being witched, illumined, and transfigured by the magic of another’s art. This is a trance from which one returns refreshed and quickened, and bubbling with unenvious praise of the exciting cause, much as Melville bubbled after his first reading of Hawthorne’s Mosses. In describing his experience Melville chose a phrase so apt—“the shock of recognition”—that in the thirties Edmund Wilson took it as the irresistibly perfect title for his anthology of literary appreciations. Acknowledging a shock of recognition and paying homage to the delivering genius is singularly exhilarating, even today—or especially today—when every waxing enthusiasm must confront an outgoing tide of culture.

In our time, the capacities for wonder and reverence, for generous judgments and trustful affirmations, have largely given way, though not without cause surely, to their antitheses, the humors of a waning ethos: disillusionment, cynicism, disgust, and gnawing envy. These states have bred in us the inclination to dissect the subtlest orders of man’s wit with ever sharper instruments of depreciation, to pour all values, the best confounded by the worst, into one mocking-pot, to sneer “realistically,” and, as we say today, to “assassinate” character. These same humors have disposed writers to spend immortal talent in snickering exhibitions of vulgarity and spiritual emptiness, or in making delicate picture puzzles out of the butt ends of life.

In the face of these current trends and tempers, I, coming out of years of brimming gratefulness for the gift of Moby-Dick, would like to praise Herman Melville worthily, not to bury him in a winding sheet of scientific terminology. But the odds are not favorable to my ambition. A commitment of thirty years to analytic modes of thought and concepts lethal to emotion has built such habits in me that were I to be waked in the night by a cry of “Help!” I fear I would respond in the lingo of psychology. I am suffering from one of the commonest ailments of our age—trained disability.

The habit of a psychologist is to break down the structure of each personality he studies into elements, and so in a few strokes to bring to earth whatever merit that structure, as a structure, may possess. Furthermore, for reasons I need not mention here, the technical terms for the majority of these elements have derogatory connotations. Consequently, it is difficult to open one’s professional mouth without disparaging a fellow being. Were an analyst to be confronted by that much heralded but still missing specimen of the human race—the normal man—he would be struck dumb, for once, through lack of appropriate ideas.

If I am able to surmount to some extent any impediments of this origin, you may attribute my good fortune to a providential circumstance. In the procession of my experiences Moby-Dick anteceded psychology; that is, I was swept by Melville’s gale and shaken by his appalling sea dragon before I had acquired the all-leveling academic oil that is poured on brewed-up waters, and before I possessed the weapons and tools of science—the conceptual lance, harpoons, cutting irons, and whatnots—which might have reduced the “grand hooded phantom” to mere blubber. Lacking these defenses I was whelmed. Instead of my changing this book, this book changed me.

To me, Moby-Dick was Beethoven’s Eroica in words: first of all, a masterly orchestration of harmonic and melodic language, of resonating images and thoughts in varied meters. Equally compelling were the spacious sea setting of the story; the cast of characters and their prodigious common target; the sorrow, the fury, and the terror, together with all those frequent touches, those subtle interminglings of unexampled humor, quizzical, and, in the American way, extravagant; and finally the fated closure, the crown and tragic consummation of the immense yet firmly welded whole. But still more extraordinary and portentous were the penetration and scope, the sheer audacity of the author’s imagination. Here was a man who did not fly away with his surprising fantasies to some unbelievable dreamland, pale or florid, shunning the stubborn objects and gritty facts, the prosaic routines and practicalities of everyday existence. Here was a man, who, on the contrary, chose these very things as vessels for his procreative powers—the whale as a naturalist, a Hunter or a Cuvier, would perceive him, the business of killing whales, the whale ship running as an oil factory, stowing down—in fact, every mechanism and technique, each tool and gadget, that was integral to the money-minded industry of whaling. Here was a man who could describe the appearance, the concrete matter-of-factness, and the utility of each one of these natural objects, implements, and tools with the fidelity of a scientist, and while doing this, explore it as a conceivable repository of some aspect of the human drama; then, by an imaginative tour de force, deliver a vital essence, some humorous or profound idea, coalescing with its embodiment. But still more. Differing from the symbolists of our time, here was a man who offered us essences and meanings which did not level or depreciate the objects of his contemplation. On the contrary, this loving man exalted all creatures—the mariners, renegades, and castaways on board the Pequod—by ascribing to them “high qualities, though dark” and weaving round them “tragic graces.” Here, in short, was a man with the mythmaking powers of a Blake, a hive of significant associations, who was capable of reuniting what science had put asunder—pure perception and relevant emotion—and doing it in an exultant way that was acceptable to skepticism.

Not at first, but later, I perceived the crucial difference between Melville’s dramatic animations of nature and those of primitive religion makers; both were spontaneous and uncalculated projections, but Melville’s were in harmony, for the most part, with scientific knowledge, because they had been recognized as projections, checked, and modified. Here, then, was a man who might redeem us from the virtue of an incredible subjective belief, on the one side, and from the virtue of a deadly objective rationality, on the other.

For these and other reasons the reading of Moby-Dick—coming before psychology—left a stupendous imprint, too vivid to be dimmed by the long series of relentless analytical operations to which I subsequently subjected it. Today, after twenty-five years of such experiments, The Whale is still the whale, more magnificent, if anything, than before.

Before coming to grips with the “mystery” of Moby-Dick I should mention another providential circumstance to which all psychologists are, or should be, forever grateful—and literary critics too, since without it no complete understanding of books like Moby-Dick would be possible today. Ahead of us were two greatly gifted pioneers, Freud and Jung, who, with others, explored the manifold vagaries of unconscious mental processes and left for our inheritance their finely written works. The discoveries of these adventurers advantaged me in a special way: they gave, I thought, support to one of Santayana’s early convictions, that in the human being imagination is more fundamental than perception. Anyhow, adopting this position, some of us psychologists have been devoting ourselves to the study of dreams, fantasies, creative productions, and projections—all of which are primarily and essentially emotional and dramatic, such stuff as myths are made of. Thus, by chance or otherwise, this branch of the tree of psychology is growing in the direction of Herman Melville.

To be explicit: psychologists have been recognizing in the dream figures and fantasy figures of today’s children and adolescents more and more family likenesses of the heroes and heroines of primitive myths, legends, and fables—figures, in other words, who are engaged in comparable heroic strivings and conflicts and are experiencing comparable heroic triumphs and fatalities. Our ancestors, yielding to an inherent propensity of the mind, projected the more relevant of these figures into objects of their environment, into sun, moon, and stars, into the unknown deeps of the sea and of the earth, and into the boundless void of heaven; and they worshiped the most potent of these projected images, whether animal or human, as superbeings, gods, or goddesses. On any clear night one can see scores of the more luminous of such divinities parading up and down the firmament. For example, in fall and winter, one looks with admiration on that resplendent hero Perseus and above him the chained beauty Andromeda, whom he saved from a devouring monster, ferocious as Moby-Dick. Now, what psychologists have been learning by degrees is that Perseus is in the unconscious mind of every man and Andromeda in every woman—not, let me hasten to say, as an inherited fixed image, but as a potential set of dispositions which may be constellated in the personality by the occurrence of a certain kind of situation. Herman Melville arrived at this conclusion in his own way a hundred years ago, sooner and, I believe, with more genuine comprehension than any other writer.

An explanation of all this in scientific terms would require all the space permitted me and more. Suffice it to say here that the psychologists who are studying the elementary mythmakings of the mind are dealing with the germy sources of poetry and drama, the fecundities out of which great literature is fashioned. Furthermore, in attempting to formulate and classify these multifarious productions of the imagination, the psychologist uses modes of analysis and synthesis very similar to those that Aristotle used in setting forth the dynamics of Greek tragedy. In these and other trends I find much encouragement for the view that a rapprochement of psychology and literary criticism is in progress, and that it will prove fruitful to both callings. As an ideal meeting ground I would propose Melville’s world of “wondrous depths.”

To this Columbus of the mind, the great archetypal figures of myth, drama, and epic were not pieces of intellectual Dresden china, heirlooms of a classical education, ornamental bric-a-brac to be put here and there for the pleasure of genteel readers. Many of the more significant of these constellations were inwardly experienced by Melville, one after the other, as each was given vent to blossom and assert itself. Thus we are offered a spectacle of spiritual development through passionate identifications. Only by proceeding in this way could Melville have learned on his pulses what it was to be Narcissus, Orestes, Oedipus, Ishmael, Apollo, Lucifer. “Like a frigate,” he said, “I am full with a thousand souls.”

This brings me to the problem of interpreting Moby-Dick. Some writers have said that there is nothing to interpret: it is a plain sea story marred here and there by irrelevant ruminations. But I shall not cite the abundant proof for the now generally accepted proposition that in Moby-Dick Melville “meant” something—something, I should add, which he considered “terrifically true” but which, in the world’s judgment, was so harmful “that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter or even hint of.” What seems decisive here is the passage in Melville’s celebrated letter to Hawthorne: “A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book.” From this we can conclude that there are meanings to be understood in Moby-Dick, and also—may we say for our own encouragement?—that Melville’s ghost will feel secure forever if modern critics can find them and, since Hawthorne remained silent, set them forth in print. Here it might be well to remind ourselves of a crucial statement which follows the just quoted passage from Melville’s letter: “I have written a wicked book.” The implication is clear: all interpretations which fail to show that Moby-Dick is, in some sense, wicked have missed the author’s avowed intention.

A few critics have scouted all attempts to fish Melville’s own meaning out of The Whale, on the ground that an interpretation of a work of art so vast and so complex is bound to be composed in large measure of projections from the mind of the interpreter. It must be granted that preposterous projections often do occur in the course of such an effort. But these are not inevitable. Self-knowledge and discipline may reduce projections to a minimum. Anyhow, in the case of Moby-Dick, the facts do not sustain the proposition that a critic can see nothing in this book but his own reflected image. The interpretations which have been published over the last thirty years exhibit an unmistakable trend toward consensus in respect to the drama as a whole as well as to many of its subordinate parts. Moreover, so far as I can judge, the critics who, with hints from their predecessors, applied their intuitions most recently to the exegesis of The Whale can be said to have arrived, if taken together, at Melville’s essential meaning. Since one or another of these authors has deftly said what I clumsily thought, my prejudices are strongly in favor of their conclusions, and I am wholehearted in applauding them—Newton Arvin’s most especially—despite their having left me with nothing fresh to say. Since this is how things stand, my version of the main theme of Moby-Dick can be presented in a briefer form, and limited to two hypotheses.

The first of them is this: Captain Ahab is an embodiment of that fallen angel or demi-god who in Christendom was variously named Lucifer, Devil, Adversary, Satan. The Church Fathers would have called Captain Ahab “Antichrist” because he was not Satan himself, but a human creature possessed of all Satan’s pride and energy, “summing up within himself,” as Irenaeus said, “the apostasy of the devil.”

That it was Melville’s intention to beget Ahab in Satan’s image can hardly be doubted. He told Hawthorne that his book had been broiled in hellfire and secretly baptized not in the name of God but in the name of the Devil. He named his tragic hero after the Old Testament ruler who “did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger than all the Kings of Israel that were before him.” King Ahab’s accuser, the prophet Elijah, is also resurrected to play his original role, though very briefly, in Melville’s testament. We are told that Captain Ahab is an “ungodly, godlike” man who is spiritually outside Christendom. He is a well of blasphemy and defiance, of scorn and mockery for the gods—“cricket-players and pugilists” in his eyes. Rumor has it that he once spat in the holy goblet on the altar of the Catholic Church at Santa. “I never saw him kneel,” says Stubb. He is associated in the text with scores of references to the Devil. He is an “anaconda of an old man.” His self-assertive sadism is the linked antithesis of the masochistic submission preached by Father Mappie.

Captain Ahab-Lucifer is also related to a sun god, like Christ, but in reverse. Instead of being light leaping out of darkness, he is “darkness leaping out of light.” The Pequod sails on Christmas Day. This new year’s sun will be the god of Wrath rather than the god of Love. Ahab does not emerge from his subterranean abode until his ship is “rolling through the bright Quito spring” (Eastertide, symbolically, when the all-fertilizing sun god is resurrected). The frenzied ceremony in which Ahab’s followers are sworn to the pursuit of the White Whale—“Commend the murderous chalices!”—is suggestive of the Black Mass; the lurid operations at the tryworks is a scene out of Hell.

There is some evidence that Melville was rereading Paradise Lost in the summer of 1850, shortly after, let us guess, he got the idea of transforming the captain of his whale ship into the first of all cardinal sinners who fell by pride. Anyhow, Melville’s Satan is the spitting image of Milton’s hero, but portrayed with deeper and subtler psychological insight, and placed where he belongs, in the heart of an enraged man.

Melville may have been persuaded by Goethe’s Mephistopheles, or even by some of Hawthorne’s bloodless abstracts of humanity, to add Fedallah to his cast of characters. Evidently he wanted to make certain that no reader would fail to recognize that Ahab had been possessed by, or had sold his soul to, the Devil. Personally, I think Fedallah’s role is superfluous, and I regret that Melville made room for him and his unbelievable boat crew on the ship Pequod. Still, he is not wholly without interest. He represents the cool, heartless, cunning, calculating, intellectual Devil of the medieval mythmakers, in contrast to the stricken, passionate, indignant, and often eloquent rebel angel of Paradise Lost, whose role is played by Ahab.

The Arabic name “Fedallah” suggests “dev(il) Allah,” that is, the Mohammedans’ god as he appeared in the mind’s eye of a Crusader. But we are told that Fedallah is a Parsee—a Persian fire worshiper, or Zoroastrian, who lives in India. Thus, Ahab, named after the Semitic apostate who was converted to the orgiastic cult of Baal, or Bel, originally a Babylonian fertility god, has formed a compact with a Zoroastrian whose name reminds us of still another Oriental religion. In addition, Captain Ahab’s whaleboat is manned by a crew of unregenerated infidels, as defined by orthodox Christianity; and each of his three harpooners, Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo, is a member of a race which believed in other gods than the one god of the Hebraic-Christian Bible.

Speaking roughly, it might be said that Captain Ahab, incarnation of the Adversary and master of the ship Pequod (named after the aggressive Indian tribe that was exterminated by the Puritans of New England), has summoned the various religions of the East to combat the one dominant religion of the West. Or, in other terms, that he and his followers, Starbuck excepted, represent the horde of primitive drives, values, beliefs, and practices which the Hebraic-Christian religionists rejected and excluded, and by threats, punishments, and inquisitions forced into the unconscious mind of Western man.

Stated in psychological concepts, Ahab is captain of the culturally repressed dispositions of human nature, that part of personality which psychoanalysts have termed the “Id.” If this is true, his opponent, the White Whale, can be none other than the internal institution which is responsible for these repressions, namely the Freudian Superego. This, then, is my second hypothesis; Moby-Dick is a veritable spouting, breaching, sounding whale, a whale who, because of his whiteness, his mighty bulk and beauty, and because of one instinctive act that happened to dismember his assailant, has received the projection of Captain Ahab’s Presbyterian conscience, and so may be said to embody the Old Testament Calvinistic conception of an affrighting Deity and his strict commandments, the derivative Puritan ethic of nineteenth-century America and the society that defended this ethic. Also, and most specifically, he symbolizes the zealous parents whose righteous sermonizings and corrections drove the prohibitions in so hard that a serious young man could hardly reach outside the barrier, except possibly far away among some tolerant, gracious Polynesian peoples. The emphasis should be placed on that unconscious (and hence inscrutable) wall of inhibition which imprisoned the Puritan’s thrusting passions. “How can the prisoner reach outside,” cries Ahab, “except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me ... I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it.” As a symbol of a sounding, breaching, white-dark, unconquerable New England conscience what could be better than a sounding, breaching, white-dark, unconquerable sperm whale?

Who is the psychoanalyst who could resist the immediate inference that the imago of the mother as well as the imago of the father is contained in the Whale? In the present case there happens to be a host of biographical facts and written passages which support this proposition. Luckily, I need not review them, because Mr. Arvin and others have come to the same conclusion. I shall confine myself to one reference. It exhibits Melville’s keen and sympathetic insight into the cultural determinants of his mother’s prohibiting dispositions. In Pierre, it is the “high-up, and towering and all-forbidding ... edifice of his mother’s immense pride ... her pride of birth ... her pride of purity,” that is the “wall shoved near,” the wall that stands between the hero and the realization of his heart’s resolve. But instead of expending the fury of frustration upon his mother, he directs it at Fate, or, more specifically, at his mother’s God and the society that shaped her. For he sees “that not his mother has made his mother; but the Infinite Haughtiness had first fashioned her; and then the haughty world had further molded her; nor had a haughty Ritual omitted to finish her.”

Given this penetrating apprehension, we are in a position to say that Melville’s target in Moby-Dick was the upper-middle-class culture of his time. It was this culture which was defended with righteous indignation by what he was apt to call “the world” or “the public,” and Melville had very little respect for “the world” or “the public.” The “public,” or men operating as a social system, was something quite distinct from “the people.” In White-Jacket he wrote: “The public and the people! ... let us hate the one, and cleave to the other.” “The public is a monster,” says Lemsford. Still earlier Melville had said: “I fight against the armed and crested lies of Mardi (the world).” “Mardi is a monster whose eyes are fixed in its head, like a whale.” Many other writers have used similar imagery. Sir Thomas Browne referred to the multitude as “that numerous piece of monstrosity.” Keats spoke of “the dragon world.” But closest of all was Hobbes: “By art is created that great Leviathan, called a commonwealth or state.” It is in the laws of this Leviathan, Hobbes made clear, that the sources of right and wrong reside. To summarize: the giant mass of Melville’s whale is the same as Melville’s man-of-war world, the Neversink, in White-Jacket, which in turn is an epitome of Melville’s Mardi. The Whale’s white forehead and hump should be reserved for the world’s heavenly King.

That God is incarnate in the Whale has been perceived by Geoffrey Stone, and, as far as I know, by every other Catholic critic of Melville’s work, as well as by several Protestant critics. In fact, Richard Chase has marshaled so fair a portion of the large bulk of evidence on this point that any more from me would be superfluous. Of course, what Ahab projects into the Whale is not the image of a loving Father, but the God of the Old Dispensation, the God who brought Jeremiah into darkness, hedged him about, and made his path crooked; the God adopted by the fire-and-brimstone Puritans, who said: “With fury poured out I will rule over you.” “The sword without and the terror within, shall destroy both the young man and the virgin.” “I will also send the teeth of beasts upon them.” “I will heap mischiefs upon them.” “To me belongeth vengeance and recompense.”

Since the society’s vision of deity, and the society’s morality, and the parents and ministers who implant these conceptions, are represented in a fully socialized personality by an establishment that is called the Superego—conscience as Freud defined it—and since Ahab has been proclaimed the “Captain of the Id,” the simplest psychological formula for Melville’s dramatic epic is this: an insurgent Id in mortal conflict with an oppressive cultural Superego. Starbuck, the first mate, stands for the rational realistic Ego, which is overpowered by the fanatical compulsiveness of the Id and dispossessed of its normal regulating functions.

If this is approximately correct, it appears that while writing his greatest work Melville abandoned his detached position in the Ego from time to time, hailed “the realm of shades,” as his hero Taji had, and, through the mediumship of Ahab, “burst his hot heart’s shell” upon the sacrosanct Almighty and the sacrosanct sentiments of Christendom. Since in the world’s judgment, in 1851, nothing could be more reproachable than this, it would be unjust, if not treacherous, of us to reason Moby-Dick into some comforting morality play for which no boldness was required. This would be depriving Melville of the ground he gained for self-respect by having dared to abide by his own subjective truth and write a “wicked book,” the kind of book that Pierre’s publishers, Steel, Flint, and Asbestos, would have called “a blasphemous rhapsody filched from the vile Atheists, Lucian and Voltaire.”

Some may wonder how it was that Melville, a fundamentally good, affectionate, noble, idealistic, and reverential man, should have felt impelled to write a wicked book. Why did he aggress so furiously against Western orthodoxy, as furiously as Byron and Shelley, or any Satanic writer who preceded him, as furiously as Nietzsche or the most radical of his successors in our day?

In Civilizatioti and Its Discontents Freud, out of the ripeness of his full experience, wrote that when one finds deep-seated aggression—and by this he meant aggression of the sort that Melville voiced—one can safely attribute it to the frustration of Eros. In my opinion this generalization does not hold for all men of all cultures of all times, but the probability of its being valid is extremely high in the case of an earnest, moralistic nineteenth-century American, a Presbyterian to boot, whose anger is born of suffering—especially if this man spent an impressionable year of his life in Polynesia and returned to marry the very proper little daughter of the chief justice of Massachusetts, and if, in addition, he is a profoundly creative man in whose androgynic personality masculine and feminine components are integrally blended.

If it were concerned with Moby-Dick, the book, rather than with its author, I would call this my third hypothesis: Ahab-Melville’s aggression was directed against the object that once harmed Eros with apparent malice and was still thwarting it with presentiments of further retaliations. The correctness of this inference is indicated by the nature of the injury—a symbolic emasculation—that excited Ahab’s ire. Initially, this threatening object was, in all likelihood, the father; later, possibly, the mother. But, as Melville plainly saw, both his parents had been fashioned by the Hebraic-Christian, American Calvinistic tradition, the tradition which conceived of a deity in whose eyes Eros was depravity. It was the first Biblical mythmakers who dismissed from heaven and from earth the Great Goddess of the Oriental and primitive religions, and so rejected the feminine principle as a spiritual force. Ahab, protagonist of those rejected religions, in addressing heaven’s fire and lightning, what he calls “the personified impersonal,” cries: “but thou art my fiery father; my sweet mother I know not. Oh, cruel! What hast thou done with her?” He calls this god a foundling, a “hermit immemorial,” who does not know his own origin. Again, it was the Hebraic authors, sustained later by the Church Fathers, who propagated the legend that a woman was the cause of Adam’s exile from Paradise, and that the original sin was concupiscence. Melville says that Ahab, spokesman of all exiled princes, “piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down.” Remember also that it was the lure of Jezebel that drew King Ahab of Israel outside the orthodoxy of his religion and persuaded him to worship the Phoenician Astarte, goddess of love and fruitful increase. “Jezebel” was the worst tongue-lash a Puritan could give a woman. She was sex, and sex was Sin, spelled with a capital. It was the church periodicals of Melville’s day that denounced Typee, called the author a sensualist, and influenced the publishers to delete suggestive passages from the second edition. It was this long heritage of aversion and animosity, so accentuated in this country, which banned sex relations as a topic of discourse and condemned divorce as an unpardonable offense. All this has been changed, for better and for worse, by the moral revolutionaries of our own time who, feeling as Melville felt but finding the currents of sentiment less strongly opposite, spoke out, and with their wit, indignation, and logic, reinforced by the findings of psychoanalysis, disgraced the stern-faced idols of their forebears. One result is this: today an incompatible marriage is not a prisonhouse, as it was for Melville, “with wall shoved near.”

In Pierre Melville confessed his own faith when he said that Eros is god of all, and Love “the loftiest religion on this earth.” To the romantic Pierre the image of Isabel was “a silent and tyrannical call, challenging him in his deepest moral being, and summoning Truth, Love, Pity, Conscience to the stand.” Here he seems to have had in mind the redeeming and inspiriting Eros of courtly love, a heresy which the medieval church had done its utmost to stamp out. This, he felt convinced, was his “path to God,” although in the way of it he saw with horror the implacable conscience and worldly valuations of his revered mother.

If this line of reasoning is as close as I think it is to the known facts, then Melville, in the person of Ahab, assailed Calvinism in the Whale because it blocked the advance of a conscience beneficent to evolutionary love. And so, weighed in the scales of its creator, Moby-Dick is not a wicked book but a good book, and after finishing it Melville had full reason to feel, as he confessed, “spotless as the lamb.”

But then, seen from another point, Moby-Dick might be judged a wicked book, not because its hero condemns an entrenched tradition, but because he is completely committed to destruction. Although Captain Ahab manifests the basic stubborn virtues of the arch-protestant and the rugged individualist carried to their limits, this god-defier is no Prometheus, since all thought of benefiting humanity is foreign to him. His purpose is not to make the Pacific safe for whaling, nor, when blasting at the moral order, does he have in mind a more heartening vision for the future. The religion of Eros which might once have been the secret determinant of Ahab’s undertaking is never mentioned. At one critical point in Pierre the hero-author, favored by a flash of light, exclaims, “I will gospelize the world anew”; but he never does. Out of light comes darkness: the temper of Pierre’s book is no different from the temper of Moby-Dick. The truth is that Ahab is motivated by his private need to avenge a private insult. His governing philosophy is that of nihilism, the doctrine that the existing system must be shattered. Nihilism springs up when the imagination fails to provide the redeeming solution of an unbearable dilemma, when “the creative response,” as Toynbee would say, is not forthcoming, and a man reacts out of a hot heart—“to the dogs with the head”—and swings to an instinct, “the same that prompts even a worm to turn under the heel.” This is what White-Jacket did when arraigned at the mast, and what Pierre did when fortune deserted him, and what Billy Budd did when confronted by his accuser. “Nature has not implanted any power in man,” said Melville,

that was not meant to be exercised at times, though too often our powers have been abused. The privilege, inborn, and inalienable, that every man has, of dying himself and inflicting death upon another, was not given to us without a purpose. These are the last resources of an insulted and unendurable existence.

If we grant that Ahab is a wicked man, what does this prove? It proves that Moby-Dick is a good book, a parable in epic form, because Melville makes a great spectacle of Ahab’s wickedness and shows through the course of the narrative how such wickedness will drive a man on iron rails to an appointed nemesis. Melville adhered to the classic formula for tragedies. He could feel “spotless as the lamb,” because he had seen to it that the huge threat to the social system immanent in Ahab’s two cardinal defects—egotistic self-inflation and unleashed wrath —was, at the end, fatefully exterminated, “and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” The reader has had his catharsis, equilibrium has been restored, sanity is vindicated.

This is true, but is it the whole truth? In point of fact, while writing Moby-Dick did Melville maintain aesthetic distance, keeping his own feelings in abeyance? Do we not hear Ahab saying things that the later Pierre will say and that Melville says less vehemently in his own person? Does not the author show marked partiality for the “mighty pageant creature” of his invention, put in his mouth the finest, boldest language? Also, have not many interpreters been so influenced by the abused Ahab that they saw nothing in his opponent but the source of all malicious agencies, the very Devil? As Lewis Mumford has said so eloquently, Ahab is at heart a noble being whose tragic wrong is that of battling against evil with “power instead of love,” and so becoming “the image of the thing he hates.” With this impression imbedded in our minds, how can we come out with any moral except this: evil wins. We admit that Ahab’s wickedness has been canceled. But what survives? It is the much more formidable, compacted wickedness of the group that survives, the world that is “saturated and soaking with lies,” and its man-of-war God, who is hardly more admirable than a primitive totem beast, some oral-aggressive, child-devouring Cronos of the sea. Is this an idea that a man of good will can rest with?

Rest with? Certainly not. Melville’s clear intention was to bring not rest, but unrest to intrepid minds. All gentle people were warned away from his book “on risk of a lumbago or sciatica.” “A polar wind blows through it,” he announced. He had not written to soothe, but to kindle, to make men leap from their seats, as Whitman would say, and fight for their lives. Was it the poet’s function to buttress the battlements of complacency, to give comfort to the enemy? There is little doubt about the nature of the enemy in Melville’s day. It was the dominant ideology, that peculiar compound of puritanism and materialism, of rationalism and commercialism, of shallow, blatant optimism and technology, which proved so crushing to creative evolutions in religion, art, and life. In such circumstances every “true poet,” as Blake said, “is of the Devil’s party,” whether he knows it or not. Surveying the last hundred and fifty years, how many exceptions to this statement can we find? Melville, anyhow, knew that he belonged to the party, and while writing Moby-Dick so gloried in his membership that he baptized his work In Nomine Diaboli. It was precisely under these auspices that he created his solitary masterpiece, a construction of the same high order as the Constitution of the United States and the scientific treatises of Willard Gibbs, though huge and wild and unruly as the Grand Canyon. And it is for this marvel chiefly that he resides in our hearts now among the greatest in “that small but high-hushed world” of bestowing geniuses.

The drama is finished. What of its author?

Moby-Dick may be taken as a comment on the strategic crisis of Melville’s allegorical life. In portraying the consequences of Ahab’s last suicidal lunge, the hero’s umbilical fixation to the Whale and his death by strangling, the author signalized not only his permanent attachment to the imago of the mother, but the submission he had foreseen to the binding power of the parental conscience, the Superego of middle-class America. Measured against the standards of his day, then, Melville must be accounted a good man.

But does this entitle him to a place on the side of the angels? He abdicated to the conscience he condemned, and his ship Pequod, in sinking, carried down with it the conscience he aspired to, represented by the skyhawk, the bird of heaven. With his ideal drowned, life from then on was load, and time stood still. All he had denied to love he gave, throughout a martyrdom of forty years, to death.

But “hark ye yet again—the little lower layer.” Melville’s capitulation in the face of overwhelming odds was limited to the sphere of action. His embattled soul refused surrender and lived on, breathing back defiance, disputing “to the last gasp” of his “earthquake life” the sovereignty of that inscrutable authority in him. As he wrote in Pierre, unless the enthusiast “can find the talismanic secret, to reconcile this world with his own soul, then there is no peace for him, no slightest truce for him in this life.” Years later we find him holding the same ground. “Terrible is earth” was his conclusion, but despite all, “no retreat through me.” By this stand he bequeathed to us the unsolved problem of the talismanic secret.

Only at the very last, instinct spent, earthquake over, did he fall back to a position close to Christian resignation. In his Being, was not this man “a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe”?

Appendix

Personology (as well as the personologist) is shaped by numerous and various forces by Edwin S. Shneidman

Numerous forces help to create an individual personality, even—or especially—that of Henry A. Murray. In an essay on Dr. Mortoti Prince, the man with whom he worked at Harvard, Murray speaks of “genes and fortune,” a phrase which seems to include almost everything. But if we know anything about Murrays work, we are aware that it focuses on taxonomy and explication, so obviously there is much more than those two simple factors.

In discussing “fortune,” many forces that shape personality can be cited. There is the role of planful choice, those turns in life when one makes a conscious decision, as Murray did when he elected to attend medical school in New York, specifically in order to detach himself from his “playboy and athletic friends in the Harvard-Boston area. ” There are vast underground currents—the unconscious psychic processes—which are enormously important in the swaying and shaping of any life. And there are, to use Pasteurs felicitous phrase, “chance and the prepared mind”—terms which could be used to describe Murrays meeting with Moby-Dick aboard a ship or his reading Jung’s Psychological Types at just the propitious moment in his life or his being offered the post at the Harvard Psychological Clinic seemingly against all odds.

And naturally, there is chance alone, what Murray calls Fate, defined as “the epigenetical program plus other factors. ” There is, to use Otto Bank’s phrase, “willing the obligatory” or acceding to the inevitable or gracefully accepting the immutable. And, idiosyncratically for Murray, there is what he calls his “sanguine surplus, ”by which he means his penchant for adventurously embracing the largest ideas and conceptualizations. And there are many more.

Herman Melville—Murray’s lifelong obsession—said, “Like a frigate I am filled with a thousand souls.” In this present context, we can understand this to mean that I, a human personality, bear within me the cargo of a thousand influences. Some of these influences were laid down with the keel of my hull and some others were taken on board every league of every trip since I was first launched and first embarked.

As one reads the lives of interesting persons, one notes how often such individuals will have known and interacted with a substantial nujnber of other noteworthy persons of that same era. It is not at all surprising then that Murray would have followed this same pattern. His friends and acquaintances included scientists L. J. Henderson, J. B. S. Haldane; Nobel Laureate F. Gowland Hopkins; Jacques Loeb, Alexis Carrel, Talcott Parsons, Kurt Lewin, Hans Zinsser, and Clyde Kluckhohn; the sculptor Gaston Lachaise—who sculpted a bust for him; poets Edwin Arlington Robinson and Conrad Aiken; the actress Katharine Cornell; Felix Frankfurter; Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. As a young surgeon in New York City and as a psychoanalyst in Boston, Murray met and developed, as he says, “varied, intimate relations with hospital patients, ranging from a notorious gangster and dope addict to a champion world politician with infantile paralysis.”

Murray is a dynamically oriented “man-watching naturalist.” The two giants of psychoanalysis, Freud and Jung, were enormous personal influences in his life. Murray met Freud, and although there was not an intense personal relationship between them, he never lost sight of the fact that much essential sense and wisdom necessary for a meaningful —not to say profound—understanding of man came from Freud’s writings.

For Murray, Jung was a different story. The impact was not only from writings but also from the man himself. Simply put, Jung was probably the most influential person in Murray’s life; although Murray never was, strictly speaking, a “Jungian.” In his two autobiographical essays, Murray tells us again and again of Jung’s charismatic effect on him. He never forgot the impact of hisfrst electrifying session with Jung, “from which explosive experience he emerged a reborn man. ” One important result of this critical experience was that Murray would never again in his life give picayune statistical details, no matter how precise or “accurate, “priority over meaningful relevance in the study of himself or others.

Another major influence on Murray was Herman Melville. Among his idiosyncrasies is a special quest for perfection, particularly as it touched a topic in which he was especially invested: his abiding passion for the life and works of Melville. It was difficult for him to feel that anything he wrote on Melville was finally fit for print. There was in him, figuratively speaking (he never wore any personal Jewelry), a keen disdain for lesser gems than flawless diamonds. In practice, this meant that in relation to Melville every word of every essay, every phrasing of every thought, every facet of every word had to reflect just the right light, to gleam in just the right way. It is a lofty standard that certainly does not make for rushing into print. Thus, during over half a century of intensive creative thought and after many pages of carefully crafted manuscript about Melville, Murray regrettably published only four relatively short pieces on the man who had almost obsessively colored his entire intellectual and psychological life. They are published together for the first time in this volume.

Early in the 1920s, Murray, then a young doctor, was on his annual trip to England and the Continent on one of the Cunard liners when, three days out to sea, the captain of the ship developed acute appendicitis necessitating an emergency-at-sea operation. The ship’s surgeon invited Murray, inasmuch as he was also a physician, to assist him by administering the chloroform and, in their conversation, mentioned his admiration of Herman Melville. Indeed, on this trip to the States the surgeon had taken special pains to go to New Bedford to see the Whaleman’s Chapel. By pleasant coincidence, Murray had had a copy of Moby-Dick “forced upon” him by a friend and had begun to read it on that voyage. Thus, during the decade of the Melville Bevival, an Englishman and a Boston Brahmin, almost literally over their captain’s anesthetized body, discussed America’s masterpiece. Appropriately, while at sea, Murray finished this great oceanic book.

The effect of Murray’s first reading of Moby-Dick was magical. In one elevating and insightful experience, Melville’s book revealed to Henry Murray the vast mysterious world of the unconscious—a topic that had previously never occupied his mind and subsequently never left it.

Thus began Murray’s central lifelong interest—soon thereafter made alive by his contact with Ereud and his intense relationship with Jung—in the workings and wonders of the unconscious elements of the human mind.

The title of Murray’s paper “In Nomine Diaboli” comes from Chapter 113, “The Forge,” of Moby-Dick, in which Captain Ahab deliriously howls, “Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli. ” (I do not baptize you in the name of the father, but in the name of the devil.) When it appeared in The New England Quarterly in 1951, it was a bomb-burst. Murray was an outsider to literary criticism, yet he brought to his work on Melville impeccable scholarship and, what no professional student of literature seemed then to possess, profound psychoanalytic insights. “In Nomine Diaboli” transformed Melville scholarship. It dared to grapple with the demonic powers in Melville’s book, providing deep understandings of the psychodynamics of Ahab’s monomania and, indirectly, of Melville’s core interests and conflicts. In this one brief essay, Murray became one of the few writers since the 1920s to testify to the epic proportions of Moby-Dick and to recount the awful price that it cost Melville to write it.

James Grier Miller, an eminent psychologist/psychiatrist and systems theorist, paying homage to Murray and citing him among the major influences in his life in the preface to his recent monumental book, Living Systems, characterizes Murray in these ways: “a sociotropic biochemist, a psychologist physician, a clinician, an imaginative humanist and scientist, and an exciting mind capable of stimulating others to concern themselves with central issues. ” Murray himself, in his own autobiographical essays, indicated a large number of the influences—the books, the people, the events and situations, the challenges—that touched and moved him and played variously weighted roles in shaping the components of his own complex personality.