We have seen already that the whale is a mystery, that he supports an indefinite range of meanings and that ultimately, in fact, he is unrepresentable. This quality is first suggested in the extracts that stand as Preface to the book, and then amplified by the discussion of the mysterious whale painting in the Spouter Inn. The cetology chapter clinches the claim, arguing as it does that nothing worthwhile and true can ever be complete. But if the whale is God then he is a polytheistic god, and his is a world of multiple meanings and truths. Look at the extraordinary distinction that Melville draws between the Sperm Whale and the Bible's God. By tradition the Hebraic God refuses to show his face. When Moses asks God to show His glory, the Lord replies:
"I shall make all my goodness pass before you, and I shall pro-nounce in your hearing the name, 'Lord.' I shall be gracious to whom I shall be gracious, and I shall have compassion on whom I shall have compassion." But he added, "My face you cannot see, for no mortal may see me and live." [Exodus 33:18-20]
Melville has this Hebraic tradition firmly in mind when he proposes the Sperm Whale as a new kind of god, and he intends to go one step beyond the Bible's account. The extraordinary and sacred power of Melville's Sperm Whale consists not in its hiding its face from man. Rather, the Sperm Whale has no face at all:
But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty god-like dignity inherent in the brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature. For you see no one point precisely; not one distinct feature is revealed; no nose, eyes, ears, or mouth; no face; he has none, proper; nothing but that one broad firma-ment of a forehead, pleated with riddles . . . "
To say that the Sperm Whale has no face at all is to go beyond any traditional kind of religious mysticism. It is not just that his face is too
awesome to look at or too complex to grasp. It is not a matter of his exceeding the bounds of our capacity to understand him. Rather, the god of Melville's universe, and therefore Melville's universe itself, lacks a hidden truth. Its face is not hidden behind some pasteboard mask. The mask—the skin, the riddled brow—is all there is. At the center of Melville's understanding of the whale is the idea that there is no meaning to the universe hidden behind its surface events, that the surface events themselves—contradictory and myste-rious and multiple as they may be—are nevertheless all the meaning there is. As he says in a later chapter, "Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep."" Ishmael's amazing strength is that he is able to live in these surface meanings and find a genuine range of joys and comforts there, without wishing they stood for something more. This is what he means by "lowering the conceit of one's attainable felicity":
I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country."
This ability to live at the surface, to take the events of daily life with the meanings they present rather than to seek their hidden purpose, to find happiness and joy in what there already is, finds its easiest expression in a pre-Christian age. Indeed, not just a pre-Christian age, but a pre-Buddhist, pre-Platonic, pre-Hinduist, and pre-Confucian one as well.
SINCE KARL JASPERS'S 1949 book The Origin and Goal of History, historians and sociologists have emphasized a cross-cultural turn in the first millennium BC that Jaspers called the Axial Revolution This revolution introduced the idea—through Plato's metaphysical philosophy, the Buddha's conception of Nirvana, and various religious notions of Eternal Life—that there is a good beyond what we can find in the everyday conception of human flourishing; that there is a transcendent good that is the nature of the Divine. As Charles Taylor explains it:
The Axial Revolution tended to place the Divine on the side of the ultimate good; while at the same time redefining this as something which goes beyond what is understood as ordinary human flourishing: Nirvana, Eternal Life.56
It is precisely this conception of "going beyond" that Melville's faceless whale encourages us to resist. Rather than searching for some reasoning thing behind the mask as Ahab insists on doing, Ishmael thinks we should nurture the moods of everyday existence—the moods of the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, and any others we can learn about or discover—for the meanings they already offer. As Nietzsche points out, such a life is at its best in the pre-Axial wonder of the Homeric Age:
Oh, those [Homeric] Greeks! They knew how to live. What is required for that is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance. Those Greeks were superficial out of profundity.57
The profundity of this kind of superficial life consists not only in its ability to find genuine meaning in the rituals of the family table or, like Helen for example, in the wonder of Aphrodite's erotic world. It consists in the ability to live in the contradictions that these meanings present. Shining Helen is perhaps the most extreme example of this, as we have seen already: first she is drawn by Aphrodite's light to run away with the charming and handsome houseguest Paris, and then later she is happy to return to the domestic life of ease exemplified by Hera and enabled by her first husband, Menelaus. Throughout
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these turns and contradictions, indeed perhaps even because of them, Menelaus, and even Homer himself, sings her praise. Ishmael is also full of meaningful contradictions. His, however, take on a more explicitly religious tone. Ishmael is perfectly happy to transition, for example, from the joy of Father Mapple's powerful Presby-terian sermon to the wonders of Queequeg's weird idol-worshipping rites. Father Mapple is the former whaleman turned minister who reaches at the Whaleman's Chapel, down the road from the Spouter-an. When Ishmael visits his church one Sunday, before starting out on the Pequods voyage, Mapple's sermon focuses (naturally) on the biblical story of Jonah and the whale. Unlike Queequeg, who slips out of the church sometime before the benediction, Ishmael stays for the entire sermon and seems to think that there is something worth retrieving in Mapple's Presbyterian vision of the universe. At the end of the sermon, for example, he reports that Mapple "showed a deep joy in his eyes." (Presumably this joy is something that Queequeg, in his complete rejection of Christianity, couldn't appreciate or even detect.) If Ishmael's goal is to chase away the "damp, drizzly Novem-ber in his soul," then perhaps this kind of Christian joy is one of the moods for which to aim. But there is clearly something in Mapple's view that Ishmael wants to reject as well. For Mapple's real goal is not just earthly joy but the highest ecstasy of heavenly delight. "Delight," he says, "top-gallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven."" This rejection both of the joys of everyday communal existence and of all religions other than Christianity—this all-enveloping idea that the Christian God brooks no other and that Christian joy is the perfect heavenly delight—is undermined by Ishmael's very next act. For after he leaves Father Mapple's sermon, he returns to the Spouter Inn to join in Queequeg's idol rite. There is no doubt that this transition is at odds with Mapple's traditional conception of Christianity. But Ishmael, who was "born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church," gives a wonderful kind of Christian argument against this closed and total-izing interpretation of Christianity. It is by this argument that he con-vinces himself to stop at the surface and enter into Queequeg's rite. The argument goes something like this:
1. To worship is to do the will of God. 2. The will of God is to do unto others as I would have others do unto me. 3. I wish Queequeg would unite with me in my form of (Presbyterian) worship.
Therefore: I should unite with him in his form of (idol) worship.'
This argument, if taken seriously, seems to speak against the closed, inward, and totalizing isolation of Mapple's version of Christianity. It speaks, of course, against Queequeg's utter rejection of Chris-tianity as well. It suggests instead that Christianity in its essence requires openness to and community with others—even openness to other forms of (non-Christian) worship. Christianity itself, in other words, requires that one "cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's religious obligations,"62 even, perhaps, to the point of joining in them. The implicit criticism is that Christianity goes astray not in its basic religious impulse, but rather in its totalizing turn. When Christianity accounts itself the one true faith, when it claims a total, unique, and transcendent truth, then it leads to isolation and lack of community. For in its search for some tran-scendent Divine it forsakes the multiple, communal goods that are already to be found here on earth. Ishmael's polytheistic view finds in the communal rituals of daily life, contradictory and polysemic and plural as they are, the meanings that can drive away the drizzly November of the soul. This is perhaps clearest in the famous chapter titled "A Squeeze of the Hand." At this rather late point in the story the Pequod has managed to kill a sperm
whale. Sperm whales are so named for the milky-white, waxy sub-stance called spermaceti that is found in their heads; it was originally mistaken for sperm or semen. This was one of the very valuable sub-stances that could be harvested from the whale, since it was used to make wax candles as well as oils, sweeteners, softeners, ointments, and so on. In the chapter in question the spermaceti has been collected into a large bath, where it has formed brilliant white crystals that are hard but oily to the touch. Ishmael finds himself, along with several Dther shipmates, assigned to the task of "squeezing these lumps back into fluid."63 During this task he sometimes finds himself unwittingly squeezing his co-laborers' hands. His description of this kind of lov-ing, communal experience seems to be the essence of Melville's under-standing of the Christian mood of agape, or Christian love for others. En what might have seemed a dreary and monotonous task, Ishmael manages to find Christian joy:
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affec-tionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! My dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acer-bities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness."
In this joint, communal task Ishmael has the experience of "an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling," which seems clearly to be his characterization of agape love.
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