Melville, Mapping and Globalization by Tally Robert T.;

Author:Tally, Robert T.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2009-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Fourth Antinomy: “Who’s to Doom?”

The fourth antinomy, as it is dealt with in Moby-Dick, follows directly from these others and may be treated briefly. The matter of God’s existence is not the fundamental question; rather how God is imagined defines the problem. Melville’s “quarrel with God,” and his tortured metaphysics have been the subject of a library’s-worth of material,50 but the key issue in the antinomy of national narrative is how such a godhead is figured. Starbuck’s God is the principle of punishment, the disciplinary figure that Dimock conflates with the Author. This God is figuratively allied with the State insofar as one must enter into a (tacit) contractual relationship with Him, as with the social contract, and if one demurs from the terms of that agreement, he will be punished accordingly. Ahab’s “blasphemy,” as Starbuck understands it, will lead to his damnation, both in the present world and in the hereafter. Ahab’s blasphemy is an affront to both the heavens and the social order, since it violates the tacit agreement with God the Father and the signed contract with the owners of the ship, “the business we follow,” as Starbuck puts it. A direct connection is established by Starbuck, with his strong Protestant ethic, between religious sin and the disruption of the political economy.

The “voice” that announces Starbuck’s moral position, prior even to Starbuck’s appearance in the novel, may be found in Father Mapple’s sermon.51 Jonah, in attempting to flee to the ends of the earth from God’s “hard command,” brings upon himself the punishment of the infernal belly of the “great fish.” For Mapple, God must be understood as a punitive force (“O Father—chiefly known to me by Thy rod”), a cosmic policeman who must regulate the mortals under his jurisdiction. Ahab, of course, does not flee from God; more blasphemous, he vies with him. “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. […] Who’s o’er me?” Significantly, Mapple ends his retelling of the Biblical Jonah narrative before Jonah’s own quarrel with God (see Jonah iv: 1–11), in which he questions God’s decision to punish or refrain from punishing. Ahab is more like the affronted Jonah than the Jonah who Mapple declares is “grateful for punishment.”52

Ahab’s “Who’s over me?” challenge appears to be an irreligious and even anti-democratic, because autocratic, dictum. But this is not exactly the case. If anything, Ahab’s stance is hyper-democratic. In this “Quarter-Deck” speech, Ahab places himself on equal footing with the sun itself, as he will do later in another conversation with Starbuck (in “The Symphony”) in which he speaks of both his and the sun’s lack of agency. The equality of Ahab and the sun, as with the multiple connections between Ahab and fire throughout the narrative, points to that “pantheism”—the same pantheism Ishmael on the mast-head had warned against, fearing “Descartian vortices”—which animates much of Moby-Dick. This pantheism presents a naturalistic God (Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura), a creator inseparable from creation, and therefore unfit or unable to judge and condemn.

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