186 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865and death of many, including a hero who appears to exist somehow both above and
below ordinary humanity.
The contradictions inherent in the portrait of Ahab spring from the dualism of
Melville’s own vision. Together, the narrator and the hero of Moby-Dick, Ishmael
and Ahab, flesh out that dualism. So does the structural opposition of land and sea,
which rehearses in characteristically Melvillean terms a familiar American conflict
between clearing and wilderness. The land is the sphere of “safety, comfort,
hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities”; the
sea, in turn, is the sphere of adventure, action, struggle. The one maps out security,
and mediocrity; the other carries intimations of heroism but also the pride, the
potential madness involved in striking out from the known. The one inscribes
reliance on the community, the other a respect for the self. A densely woven network
of reference establishes the difference between these two territories; it also suggests
the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of either choosing between them or finding
an appropriate border area. “Consider them both, the sea and the land,” the narrator
advises, “and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?” The
analogy is ambivalent, however. At one moment, the reader may be urged not to
leave the land for “all the horrors of the half known life” (“God keep thee! Push not
off from that isle, thou canst never return!”). At the next, he or she may be told
precisely the opposite; that, “as in landlessness resides the highest truth, shoreless,
indefinite as God,” nobody should “worm-like, then, oh!... craven crawl to land!”
The opposition between land and sea is made all the rawer by Melville’s portrait of
the ship, the Pecquod, on which Ahab, Ishmael, and their companions voyage. The
crew, “a deportation from all the isles of the sea, all the ends of the earth,” are, we
are told, a “joint-stock company” and “Isolatoes.” They are together and alone, knit
into one shared purpose yet utterly divided in terms of motive and desire. Caught
each of them between the land and the sea, the social contract and isolation, they
remind us that this is a ship of life, certainly, burdened by a common human
problem. But it is also, and more particularly, the ship of America: embarked on an
enterprise that is a curious mixture of the mercantile and the moral, imperial
conquest and (ir)religious crusade – and precariously balanced between the
notions of community and freedom.
All the tensions and irresolutions of Moby-Dick circulate, as they do in The Scarlet
Letter, around what gives the book its title: in this case, the mysterious white whale
to which all attention and all the action is eventually drawn. The reason for the
mystery of the whale is simple. It “is” reality. That is, it becomes both the axis and the
circumference of experience, and our understanding of it, in the novel. It is nature,
and physics, a state of being and of knowing. Each character measures his
understanding of the real in the process of trying to understand and explain the
whale; it becomes the mirror of his beliefs, like the doubloon that Ahab nails to the
mast as a reward for the first man who sights the white whale, to be valued differently
by the different crew members. It is both alphabet and message, both the seeming
surface of things and what may, or may not, lie beneath them. So, like the scarlet
letter “A” in Hawthorne’s story, its determining characteristic is its indeterminacy.GGray_c02.indd 186ray_c 02 .indd 186 8 8/1/2011 7:54:42 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 42 AM