ahab as luddite (Quakerism)

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Kai wrote:

>   perhaps ahab's black magic is just counterbalancing the whale's archontic
>   whiteness. if so, the spiritual rebellion would not address the real christian
>   god (as manifest in the gospel of john) yet his demiurgic secretary who - this
>   is the breaking of the vessels - somehow fucked up the job...

What does "archontic" mean?

Whom does Ahab rebel against? On one level, understandably, he wants revenge on the
white whale who has taken his leg. Secondly, he rebels against the "reasoning force
behind the mask". And does Moby Dick's "ontological status" ever become clear? These
are the subjects of my ramblings below. Let it be quoted once again:

"Vengeance on a dumb brute!  cried Starbuck, that simply smote thee
from blindest instinct!  Madness!  To be enraged with a dumb thing,
Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.  Hark ye yet again, --the little
lower layer.  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.  If man will strike, strike
through the mask!  How can the prisoner reach outside except by
thrusting through the wall?  To me, the white whale is that wall,
shoved near to me.  Sometimes I think there's naught beyond.  But 'tis
enough.  He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength,
with an inscrutable malice sinewing it.  That inscrutable thing is
chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white
whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.  Talk not to me of
blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me."

This is the question on which the relationship between Ahab and Moby Dick, and thus
the whole novel, turns: Is Moby Dick an agent of the "unknown but still reasoning
thing", or his he just a dumb brute? In the first case Ahab's rebellion would be
against the "Angry God" of the Puritans, the one who holds you in his hand and at
his whim can throw you into hellfire (or has your leg bitten off by a white whale);
it would be blasphemous. The narrator, Ishmael, who, of course, can not possibly
know what he is talking about, explains Ahab's feelings:

"And then it was, that suddenly
sweeping his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had reaped
away ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field.  No
turbaned Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with
more seeming malice.  Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever
since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild
vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his
frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all
his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations.
The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all
those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till
they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.  That
intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose
dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds;
which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue
devil; -- Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but
deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he
pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and
torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice
in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle
demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly
personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.  He piled
upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate
felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had
been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it."

Note that "seeming malice". I think it is made quite clear here that Ahab's
perspective is by no means the same as Ishmael's or the implied author:
"Transferring its idea", "all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and
made practically assailable in Moby Dick." "He piled upon etc." Ahab obviously  is
"projecting a world". He is making sense of the world and the thing that he thinks
somebody consciously did to him, although in his weaker moments he fears there might
"be naught beyond" the wall. Ahab sees the possiblity that the universe might be
meaningless, inscrutable as the white whale's hieroglyphic brow, as the colour white
itself. But he cannot accept that possibility (neither does Melville, but he opts
for something else) and instead launches a satanic attack against the idea of God he
finds expressed in what he perceives as the maliciousness of Moby Dick. the idea of
a Puritan God, I believe. But Starbuck is right: "Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is
thou, thou, that madly seekest him!" Ahab's spiritual rebellion is directed against
an enemy he himself has created. In the course of his hunt he becomes the spitting
image of what he thinks is his adversary - dead white leg, wrinkled brows,
inscrutability and all. But the text may seem contradictory at times. It is
important to look at Melville's choice of words. Near the end, when Moby Dick is
rushing towards the Pequod, he is described like this: "Retribution, swift
vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man
could do, the solid white buttress smote the ship's starboard bow, till men and
timbers reeled." Here, Moby Dick indeed seems to become the epitome of an angry
God's eternal wrath, a supernatural force none, at least not mortal man (and it
turns out that Ahab is just this: not a demon, not a God, not Satan, but a mortal
man) can resist. Yet all this is in the white whale's "aspect", that is, how he is
being perceived. Projection. The mind making sense...

Nice to hear from you, by the way, Kai (no, no irony intended).

Alaaf,
Thomas

P.S. As for what jbor termed "Ahab's response to mortality": The idea that Ahab's
leg was reaped away by Moby Dick as a mower would reap away a blade of grass in the
field reminds me of that passage to be found somewhere in the Bible in which it is
bluntly stated that "all flesh is grass" - which I think is a brillant and quite
horrifying metaphor for mortality.