The Radical Politics at the Heart of Herman Melville's "Moby Dick"

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is superficially a story about the perils and adventures of whaling. On this plane of the book, animal lovers would probably find the scenes of hunting and slaughtering whales to be gruesome and unpalatable, while others who are more carnivorous will vicariously experience the excitement of the chase. But there are other layers of meaning that arguably are more important and without which the book would never have become a classic. One is the political content; sometimes explicitly and other times below the surface, Moby Dick is a treatise on Melville’s radical democratic and subversive politics. There are also insights on the nature of power and leadership. As will be argued below, Moby Dick highlights how these things cannot be exercised with force alone. Intangibles like courage, knowledge, and character matter just as much if not more. Finally, like all great books, Moby Dick illuminates some of the universal and general aspects of the human condition: the ways we try to escape from pain, loss, and frustration.

Herman Melville was an American North Easterner, abolitionist, and devout Unitarian writing in the early/mid-19^th century, when the new American Republic was experiencing dramatic political convulsions over slavery which would culminate in the civil war. The language of Moby Dick in many ways reflects its time; it is common to refer to those of non-European stock as “savage” or “barbaric” or even “pagan”. But this crude terminology is overshadowed by the radical equality that lies at the heart of the book, which, for an early and mid-19^th century audience, was probably subversive. Although on land, slavery and other injustices reigned supreme, on the Pequod (the name of the whaling ship) we see something very different: whites, blacks, aboriginals, and disabled working together, mostly cooperatively, towards their common goal of capturing whales. On the ship, their ostensibly irreducible differences are subsumed under the shared experience of living in close quarters for multi-year voyages on the sea.

The diversity and equality on the Pequod is clearly an expression of Melville's ideal society. In Moby Dick, the philosophical basis of this kind of politics is ultimately religious or, more specifically, Protestant. In one scene, the main narrator soliloquizes the following

By this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes….thou shall see [dignity] in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God Himself! The great God absolute. The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!

This sentiment suffuses the book throughout and explains some specific aspects of the story, like the valorization of Queequeg and Pip, even though the former is aboriginal and the latter is of African-origin. Queequeg is clearly the hero of the story, demonstrating virtues such as perspicacity, intuition, strength, magnanimity, and courage. Pip, meanwhile, is the most intelligent crewman. Here, Melville was not so subtly telling his slave-owning readers that persons of African descent were not stupid as the commonly-held stereotypes assumed. They were often brighter and more talented than whites. This gave them a humanity that was hard to square the institution of slavery. The tendency to valorize non-whites is, throughout the text, not coincidently accompanied by the denigration of what Melville calls the “conceits” and “hypocrisies” of Christendom (as the West was then called). Here, Melville was attacking the presumed superiority of his readers, many of whom were probably slave owning whites who believed they were true Christians.

Back to Queequeg, who, as well as being the hero, is the most interesting character of the book. When Ishmael initially encounters him in Nantucket (the island in Massachusetts from which whalers departed), his initial reaction is fear and disgust. Queequeg is full of tattoos and is known by locals to be a cannibal. Ishmael is forced to sleep in the same bed as Queequeg one night because the only room available at the inn was a shared accommodation with a single bed, and the alternative was sleeping outside in the freezing cold of Nantucket’s winter. Here we begin to see some of the most remarkable and, from Ishmael’s perspective, transformational scenes. As Ishmael waits in the room, full of terror and trepidation because of who he must share a bed with, Queequeg comes in and silently engages in some of his “pagan” rituals, such as taking Yogo, a statue of his deity, out of a bag and performing rituals with it. Queequeg and Ishmael share a few words, and after his initial alarm the latter begins to feel at ease, saying the “man’s a human being just as I am…better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian”. He falls asleep and rests peacefully, and wakes up with Queequeg hugging him in an affectionate but completely non-sexual manner. From here, they develop an unbreakable bond that ties them together throughout the whaling voyage.

Ishmael and Queequeg eventually join the crew of the Pequod, which is commanded by the monomaniac and one-legged Ahab. He has a life-time of experience as a whaler and lost his leg while trying to hunt Moby Dick, the fierce and redoubtable albino sperm whale that becomes the object of Ahab’s obsession. Vengeance must be obtained for the infliction of this unfixable and debilitating injury, and Ahab offers a large sum of money to whoever of his men helps capture that hated whale. His power on the Pequod is almost absolute, and this tyranny is perhaps in tension with the radical equality that elsewhere suffuses the story. But Ahab’s leadership also reveals how power is effectively exercised. Although he possesses muskets and other instruments of violence that allow him to impose his will, these things form only a small part of his leadership. The possession of a forceful and confident personality that exudes authority matter more. Also important are his forty years of experience of being an audacious and fearless whaler, which has provided valuable knowledge of the sea and its perils. It is these intangible traits that explain the crew’s obeisance to Ahab’s authority. They feel, according to Melville, a “mystical and sympathetic” connection with Ahab that binds crew and commander together in a way that gives him the power to shape the destiny of all.

Ahab’s mission to find and destroy Moby Dick becomes the possession of everyone else’s even though it was not in the crew’s material interest to capture the dreaded whale. Strictly speaking, the crew’s interest is to capture “normal” sperm whales so that they can profit from the whale oil which, in the mid-19^th century, was the energy used to power lamps. But Ahab’s obsessive desire for revenge becomes theirs. There are exceptions; one of the crew members, Stubb, realizes the suicidal folly of Ahab’s mission and, at a certain point, contemplates killing him. From a utilitarian perspective, this action arguably would have been just because, by killing Ahab, the entire crew would have been saved. But it was not to be, and the hunt for Moby Dick ends in tragedy for all. The final scene is a dramatic and cosmic struggle between Moby Dick and Ahab. The latter ultimately obtains his objective of striking a fatal blow, but before Moby Dick dies, he delivers a devastating attack to the Pequod’s hull, which sinks in the middle of the Pacific and kills the entire crew, including, sadly, Queequeg. At this point, I was hoping that he would somehow save the day and prevent the disaster ultimately caused by Ahab’s madness. In the end he goes down with the ship, but he indirectly produces one final act of goodness: a coffin built for Queequeg (he almost died of illness during the voyage) becomes a life-boat that is used by Ishmael, the only survivor who lives to tell the story.

The whaling voyage can also be read as an expression of the condition of man who lives in a world full of injustice, pain, and sorrow, and how people find ways of dealing with these things. Most aim to be as comfortable as possible by accumulating material possessions and establishing the security and luxury of family and community. A special minority deal with life’s frustrations by embarking on risky and high-stakes adventures. Moby Dick clearly conveys contempt for the former and celebrates those who willingly pursue the latter. The whaling voyage itself is the embodiment of this attitude. Most of the crew are persons who have experienced some sort of personal pain rooted in a socially unjust system, unfortunate circumstances, or a combination of both. They reject the temptation to find comfort on land and decide to sail around the world in search of the profits that accrue from harvesting the highly valuable whale oil, but the hunt is not reducible to pecuniary considerations. It includes the excitement of encountering far-off civilizations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and entails an almost mystical union with nature that appreciates its beauty and transcendence even while recognizing the savagery that characterizes the natural world.

A 19^th century whaling voyage that lasted three or four years would be mostly alien to the contemporary mind—characterized as it is by a hyperconnectivity, constant distraction, and the endless pursuit of social comfort and material satisfaction. During such a voyage, one would be completely isolated from home and mostly focused on the hunt, exposed to the dangers of the sea and elements with no way of calling for help in the event of an emergency. Such an adventure required the cultivation of virtues like courage, collaboration, tenacity, creativity, and the myriad skills upon which success and even survival depended. This collaborative effort, moreover, would trump any racial, national, religious, or other group categories that elsewhere would define and orient social action, all while providing a sense of vulnerability, danger, excitement, and adventure that would dissipate life’s mostly petty frustrations.