Text: Grace Farrell Lee, “Pym and Moby-Dick: Essential Connections,” Studies in Poe's Pym (1975), pp. 73-86 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 73:]

Often rudderless and compassless, Arthur Gordon Pym pushed forward into that vast ocean of dream, surged upon some great secret which never fully revealed itself to him, but left instead its cryptic hieroglyphs as shrouded in mystery as the apocalyptic chasm which swallowed him up. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is Poe's dream quest into the unknown, of gray visions and vast oceans, of inarticulate meditations wedded forever to water.

For Poe, and for Melville, water is, as Eliade terms it, the cosmic substance in which life, reality, is somewhere concentrated.(2) Their heroes dive down into oceanic depths and into those “ever vernal endless landscapes of the soul.”(3) Pym, through a series of dream states, and Ishmael, through a montage of meditative plunges, embark on parallel voyages of discovery directed through water toward some “deep axis of reality.”(4)

Many similarities between Pym and Moby-Dick have been delineated, most notably and expertly by Patrick F. Quinn.(5) What I would like to suggest here is that the essential connection between the novels Ties in the form which their journeys take, that of the familiar descensus ad inferos. The mythic pattern of descent and return, and its analogue, death and rebirth, are variations of the myth of the eternal return. As such they are symbolic movements backwards in time to the primordial origins of the universe, a knowledge of which implies knowledge of the very essence of humankind and reality.(6) The mythic pattern is embedded in Poe's novel as a substructure which gives continuous form to a work often perceived to be without continuity.(7) I believe that Melville must have recognized the pattern and seen in it possibilities of great significance; he weaves it intricately into his own narrative, forming a complex interlacing of descent-return, death-rebirth motifs, constantly, as Quinn put it, bringing up “to the level of direct statement the kind of thing that Poe leaves latent and inferential.”(8) [page 74:]

The basic framework of Pym's journey, one of enchantment by the dead, movement to the underworld, and ultimate ritualistic disenchantment, finds echoes throughout the text in images of sleeping and awakening, dying and being reborn. Through dream, beginning in the Ariel episode, where images of dream and death coalesce, and intensifying in the stupefaction and prolonged sleep of the hold sequence on the Grampus, where he dreams within his dream, Pym undergoes a series of symbolic deaths and rebirths.(9) The two major death-rebirth motifs, on the Grampus and on Tsalal, are analogous to the initiation rites of descent and return which Eliade describes: “A large number of myths feature 1) a hero being swallowed by a sea monster and emerging victorious after breaking through the monster's belly; 2) initiatory passage through a vagina dentata, or the dangerous descent into a cave or crevice assimilated to the mouth or the uterus of Mother Earth.”(10) The hold of the Grampus is the mythic equivalent of the belly of the sea monster and only by a sort of difficult birth process through the labyrinths created by piles of lumber does Pym finally emerge reborn. The rebirth process, similarly imaged as regressus ad uterum, is experienced again in the Tsalalian cave. Pym's rebirth from the hold constitutes not an awakening, is but rather a movement which passes right through dream into a realm of being once more removed from consciousness. The descent and rebirth sequence in the Tsalalian cave takes Pym still deeper t into the recesses of an obscure universe to confront “what there might be therein.”

The Grampus episode provides other suggestions of the pattern of descent by the dead to the underworld. Pym's hideaway box is coffin-like, regally outfitted for a soul on its journey of death. Augustus describes Pym as buried, and Pym calls his rescue a redemption “from the jaws of y the tomb.” His escape from the labyrinthan hold is a significant trial in his descensus ad inferos; as Eliade relates, “the labyrinth rituals upon which initiation ceremonies are based ... teach the neophyte, during his sojourn on earth, how to enter the domains of death without getting lost.”(11) The ship itself is a familiar image of the vehicle of the soul on its journey to the underworld. Melville's Pequod, with its coffin-1ife-buoy, and Poe's Grampus, with its coffin-box, become, in fact, hearses.

Like Pym, Ishmael begins his journey as a death experience. He is impelled by a kind of sickness unto death: “ ... whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet ... then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish, Cato throws himself upon his sword, I quietly take to ship” (p. 12). Death, Ishmael tells us, is “only a launching into the region of the strange Untried . the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery,” and thus is the sea a lure for those “who have left in them some interior compunction against suicide ...” (p. 402).

Death and rebirth themes are repeatedly, and often playfully, woven into the fabric of Moby-Dick, [page 75:] from Samuel Comstock's curt “‘If you make the least bit of noise, I will send you to hell,’” which is recorded in the “Extracts” (p. 10), to Ishmael's first clumsy and comic descent through the streets of New Bedford, into an ash-filled Hell of smoky light:

It seemed the great Black Parliament sitting in Tophet (p. 18).

The descent theme is almost immediately suggested again in allusions to Lazarus and Dives. In a later chapter Ishmael identifies himself with the Lazarus of John (11:1-44), who made the Journey to death and back, but here he alludes to Luke (16:19-31), in which Lazarus, the beggar, is taken to heaven, while Dives, the rich man, descends to Hell. “Old Dives,” comments Ishmael, “in his red silken wrapper (he had a redder one afterward).” And Ishmael bemusedly suggests that this Lazarus, who never made the descent which Dives made, might also consider taking the plunge to Hell, if only for the warmth it could provide him: “Would he not far rather ... go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to keep out this frost?” (p. 19). Many such small suggestions of the descent motif are dispersed throughout the text. They accrue significance through accumulative repetitions. The multiplicity of suggestions creates a rich harmony of plungings and splashings through which Ishmael moves in a “blending cadence of waves with thoughts” and against which Ahab “deliriously howls” his own daemonic melody of descent.

In “The Sermon” the pattern of descent and resurrection implicit in the Biblical material of Jonah is highlighted with Father Mapple's song of Jonah on “the bottom of the waters ... deepening down to doom”:

I saw the open maw of hell,

With endless pains and sorrows there;

Which none but they that feel can tell-

Oh, I was plunging to despair.(p. 44)

Mapple's Jonah is 1ike Ishmael who begins his journey amid a plunge to despair, but his resemblance is even greater to Pym. The name of Pym's ship, the Grampus, is that of a class of whale which Melville discusses in “Cetology”; Pym, incarcerated in the hold of the Grampus, is quite literally like Jonah imprisoned in the belly of the whale, “the belly of hell,” Father Mapple calls it. For Pym this belly of Hell is a very womb-like tomb from which he experiences a rebirth. Melville's Jonah, too, is reborn, resurrected from the belly of the sea monster, at the hands of his “Deliverer God.”

Ishmael's 1ittle blasphemy at the midwifery nature of God's delivery of Jonah is made clear in “The Sermon's” parodic analogue, “Cistern and Buckets.” There Tashtego, echoing Jonah, is [page 76:] “buried-alive ... sinking utterly down to the bottom of the sea” in the sperm whale's head. He a is “delivered” by Queequeg who, with a thrust of his arm “far inwards and upwards,” echoes Father Mapple's rhapsody on delight: “A far, far upward and inward delight.” The pattern of death and rebirth is made comically clear: “And thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg, the deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully accomplished . Midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing, riding and rowing” (p. 290).

Queequeg dives to Tashtego's rescue into the “coffined, hearsed, and tombed” spermaceti case (p. 290). and Ishmael, likening himself to John's Lazarus, he who died and lived to tell of it, decides to “dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost” (p. 197). In Pym the survivors of the Grampus dive time and time again into the waterfilled hold of the ship, creating a suggestive mixture of Christian and pagan descent themes. The immersions suggest links to Christian themes of death and rebirth, descent and return. “Immersion is the equivalent, at the human level, of death,” writes Eliade, “ ... immersion in the water of Baptism is equivalent to being buried with Christ. ... Man dies symbolically with immersion, and is reborn, purified, renewed; just as Christ rose from the tomb.”(12) Baptismal immersions are linguistically associated with the descent into Hell, “the starting-point is the word ‘abyss’ — the underwaters and so the underworld to which Christ descended.”(13)

The repetitive diving in Pym also echoes that of the “earth divers” of mythology, who, in the beginnings of time, when the earth was entirely covered by water, attempted to grasp soil in their hands.(14) This ritualistic action on the Grampus is symbolic of the entire tale as a movement through water to discover primal reality. Pym's voyage is an attempt to dissolve the created order and to approach a more fundamental reality, the source of all realities. As Eliade notes, “Immersion is equivalent ... at the cosmic level, of the cataclysm (the Flood) which periodically dissolves the world into the primeval ocean.”(15) The mythic impulse is to return to this primeval source of all creation, to re-establish the “‘absolute beginning,’ that is the Creation of the World,” in the hope of being reborn, recreated with the knowledge of the essence of all.(16) The crew of the Pequod travels back into the ocean of antiquity, “the great shroud of the sea”; Pym moves backward in time to the very beginnings of creation, where, on the island of Tsalal, the Tight brought forth in creation confronts in everlasting opposition the black.

Blackness and whiteness function on Tsalal as the most fundamental of opposites. They are, as Poe later explains in Eureka, the basic forces of attraction and repulsion of which the universe consists. In Eureka Poe expresses belief that all matter arises from an original Unity and attempts to return to that Unity. This reverse motion leads the universe to contract into its center and thus to destroy itself. In Pym the conflict between the forces of blackness and whiteness, the primal elements of reality which were separated in the creation of the world, sets off an [page 77:] apocalyptic fire on the Jane Guy which annihilates ship, island, and inhabitants. This apocalyptic event is a fictive precursor of Poe's explanation of the workings of the universe in Eureka. There he writes:

I repeat then — Let us endeavor to comprehend that the final globe of globes will instantaneously disappear, and that God will remain all in all.(17)

The “great secret” which Arthur Gordon Pym glimpsed through the gray vapors of an ashen sea is at once annihilistic and redemptive.(18) The world pulls in upon itself, annihilating all that is, sinking at once into a chasm of Nothingness; but it is a chasm which throws itself open as if to embrace. It is the chasm of Unity and the embrace of God.

Whether diving into the “whitest and daintiestof fragrant spermaceti” or taking meditative plunges into the “deepest reveries” of the soul, the ultimate destination of the divings, plungings, sinkings, and drownings which fill the pages of Moby-Dick is also the “source of sources,” that primal and deep “axis of reality.” For Ishmael the act of descent, of ritualistic death, is ultimately the act of gnosis: “Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest shall never weary? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are Tike those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it” (p. 406). Pip glimpses that ultimate secret in his lonely abandonment in Pacific waters:

Pip's dive takes him back not merely to the paternal source of self, but to the primeval ocean of Creation. That ocean and the Leviathan that swims it are the subjects both of Ahab's seafaring voyage and of Ishmael's soul-searching one.

The epigraph of the novel from Paradise Lost, “There Leviathan, / Hugest of living creatures, in the deep ...” occurs in Book VII, lines 412-416, when Raphael tells Adam of the creation of the world. As the epigraph suggests, Moby-Dick, like Pym, is a mythic exploration of the creation text. The white whale is the primal creature, pre-adamite, ubiquitous, a “fusion of whale- [page 78:] Leviathan-dragon-chaos-Satan-serpent,” and the nexus of myriad allusions to creation myths.(19) H. Bruce Franklin, in his excellent study of Melville's mythology, presents evidence which links Moby Dick and Ahab to the seasonal creation struggle of Typhon and Osiris:

Franklin's study shows that “Ahab plays the role of Osiris, not only as sun-god but also as fertility god, infernal god, and the savior of man, the dragon slayer, hunter of the gliding great demon of the seas of 1ife.”(21) Not only do the connections with this myth lend additional suggestions that the voyage of the Pequod, like that of the Grampus and the Jane Guy, is backward in time to the origins of creation, but they also Tink Ahab with the descensus ad inferos. Unlike Osiris, Ahab does not enact a rebirth from his final descent. He “plays the role of avatar to the hell at the end of the hunt. After rejecting the brotherly bonds of the Rachel after rejecting the lessons of mortality presented by the Delight — turning his taffrail to ‘the resurrection and the life,’ and after rejecting the Right Reason for which Starbuck pleads, Ahab meets the demon he seeks.”(22)

Ishmael meets the dragon of the seas of life, too, but in a different way. His exploration of the whale, layer by layer, is equivalent to his gnostic, meditative descent deeper and deeper into the maternal grave and the primeval ocean. The phantom of life, the key to it all, is the object of Ishmael's voyaging through Pacific waters into the “endless landscapes of the soul.” In “Loomings” we are offered the image of Narcissus “who, because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life, and this is the key to it all” (p. 14). Ishmael, however, knows that the voyage is fraught with peril, that the tiger heart pants beneath “the tranquil beauty ... of the ocean's skin, ... that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang” (p. 405). Narcissus is drowned by his plunge into the water of the fountain; Pip loses his mind in the terror of his descent; Ahab, caught by a harpoon line, shoots out of his boat, smites the sea, and disappears forever into the depths, dragged down to Hell (pp. 468-9); and Pym, in his headlong “rush into the embraces of the cataract” is swallowed up by a giant shrouded figure. Only Ishmael, for whom the voyage of descent is maintained as a meditative act, survives.

The narrative corner into which Poe worked himself as a result of Pym's disappearance into the perfect whiteness of the chasm is well known. But Melville learned from Poe's dilemma and created a narrator who could survive the descent ordeal. Ishmael survives first, because he comprehends [page 79:] the nature of his journey as a meditative, yet dangerous, dive at death, and second, because he distances himself from the dive to death which Ahab takes. In “The Mast-Head” Ishmael reveals his understanding of the perils of the descent:

Pym, like the absent-minded youth of “The Mast-Head,” is lulled into “unconscious reverie” and “at last loses his identity” in an oceanic abyss. Indeed, at the end, Pym succumbs to Poe's dangerous Romanticism and is consumed by the chasm of Unity which annihilates the ego. But while Pym's voyage into the ocean of self is imaged in terms of stupefactions, Ishmael's descent is a meditation, with the “I,” although in reverie, still conscious and in control. Pym's voyage is internalized, but, unlike Ishmael's, his reveries are unconscious, suffused with sleep and dream. His inward journey is inarticulate. It is manifested only in action, action in which he is swallowed up, in which he has minimal control, and in which he is propelled downward into the primitive recesses of the human psyche and hurled finally into Descartian vortices.

Ishmael, too, for a time, loses himself in the action of the novel, but in a significantly self-conscious way. First, immediately after describing the perils of lost identity in “The Mast-Head,” Ishmael, as if to exemplify his warnings, disappears from the text for the duration of five chapters (from “The Quarter Deck. Ahab and All” to “Forecastle. — Midnight”). In these chapters Ahab and his crew perform diabolic rituals which ensure the direction of his voyage into Hell. At the conclusion of the rites Ishmael again appears in the text with a reassertion of his identity: “I, Ishmael, was one of that crew” (p. 155). He explains that “A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine.” Ishmael makes clear that he disappeared into the text when he aligned his own identity with that of Ahab and gave himself up to the action at hand. By reasserting his identity, Ishmael breaks the powerful hold which Ahab has upon him and effectively removes himself from Ahab's course of action, which is an actual, rather than a meditative, descensus ad inferos.

Ishmael never again loses himself in Ahab's perilous quest. At key junctures in Ahab's descent, during “Symphony,” for example, when Starbuck and Fedallah angle for their captain's soul, Ishmael absents himself from the action. Having learned first hand of the danger of Descartian vortices, he distances himself from an action which can lead only to a Hell from which there is no rebirth. Melville learned well from Poe's narrative dilemma; he bifurcated his voyager into a meditator who could survive the action and tell the story and an actor who could not. And thus it [page 80:] is Ahab, the actor, rather than Ishmael, the meditator, who is the central figure in those events of Moby-Dick which parallel the plot mechanisms of Pym by which the descensus ad inferos is accomplished.

In Pym the appearance of the Dutch brig, quite literally a ship of death, serves as & catalyst for the voyage downward to the grave. In Moby-Dick a parallel ship of death is sighted, “bleached like a skeleton” with “spectral appearances,” and called the Albatross. Poe's brig “had no other sails set than her foremast and mainsail, with a flying jib,” while the Albatross had “only her lower sails” set. Only three seamen are at first seen onboard the brig and three look-outs first appear on the Albatross. The silent Dutch brig “passed under our stern at a distance of about twenty feet”; the Albatross “glided close under our stern ... yet, those forlorn-looking fishermen ... said not one word.” The central figure on the Dutch brig was “leaning over the starboard bow ... leaning on the bulwark,” while the “strange captain” of the Albatross was “leaning over the pallid bulwarks.” The red flannel cap of the dead Hollander fell “from his head into the water,” much as the trumpet of the Albatross's captain “fell from his hand into the sea.” The survivors of the Grampus shout to the dead for help, and Ahab loudly hails the silent Albatross (P: 782-3; M-D: 203).

The black brig enchants those aboard the hull of the Grampus as its appearance focuses upon it all the dispersed energy of the survivors. It becomes a powerful mesmeric force as the sailor at the bowsprit beacons encouragingly, casting over the survivors of the Grampus a state of stupefaction. Finally the gull makes a symbolic offering of human flesh: the bird, “flying directly above our deck, hovered there awhile with a portion of clotted and liver-l1ike substance in its beak. The horrid morsel dropped at length with a sullen splash immediately at the feet of Parker” (p. 782). The narrative focus zeroes in on the splashed morsel. Attention rivets to it. The implications of the offering escape none of the survivors, for it is accepted in the cannibalistic rite which follows. Their acceptance seals their fate and ensures the direction of their voyage, for as folklore relates, anyone who eats food offered by the dead cannot return to the world of the living.

In a related way, Melville's Albatross also serves to breach the doom into which the Pequod finally sinks. The seamen mark as “ominous” the reaction of the captain of the Albatross who is rendered silent by the loss of his trumpet at the “first mere mention of the White Whale's name.” Ahab shouts, “Ahoy there! This is the Pequod, bound round the world! Tell them to address all future letters to the Pacific ocean! and this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them to address them to —,” and like a harbinger of what is to pass, his final words fall silent, while “shoals of small harmless fish ... dart away with what seem shuddering fins. ... ‘Swim away from me, do ye?’ murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water” (p. 203). He stands there, a dark Narcissus [page 81:] gazing at his image in the water. Narcissus, in pursuit of the “image of the ungraspable phantom of life,” plunged in and was drowned; Ahab, “in tormented chase of that demon phantom” (p. 204), will likewise plunge in and “sink to hell” (p. 469), and even “the smallest chip of the Pequod,” now “bound round the world,” will be carried out of sight “all round and round in one vortex” (p. 469). The next time Ahab gazes into the water he will meet the eyes of Fedallah, who wins the Faustian battle with Starbuck for Ahab's soul: “Ahab crossed the deck to gaze over on the other side; but started at two reflected, fixed eyes in the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly leaning over the same rail” (p. 445). As Narcissus gazed into the fountain of his own self which mirrored up his soul from watery depths, Ahab gazes into the Pacific, the “landscape of the soul,” to glimpse demonic eyes reflected up towards him.(23)

Ahab had shouted to the Albatross for letters, but the only letter which finds its way to him is one which he passes to the ship Jeroboam addressed to the dead Harry Macey, who, as Ahab will, made that final, flying descent, “no more to rise for ever.” Killed by a white shadow which rose up from the sea, “the luckless mate, so full of furious life, was smitten bodily into the air, and making a long arc in his descent, fell into the sea at the distance of about fifty yards. Not a chip of the boat was harmed, not a hair of any oarsman's head, but the mate for ever sank” (p. 268) .(24) As Ahab passes the letter to the dead man's captain, the mad Gabriel, archangel of the Jeroboam, cries in prophesy and in truth, “‘Nay, keep it thyself, ... thou art soon going that way. . The letter suddenly ranged along with Gabriel's eager hand. He clutched it in an instant, seized the boat-knife, and impaling the letter on it, sent it thus loaded back into the ship. It fell at Ahab's feet. Then Gabriel shrieked out ... “ (p. 269). Ahab, who had called to the silent, death-like Albatross for letters, receives his reply in an involuted way, as the survivors of the Grampus, who had called out to the ship of death, had received theirs. The dead man's letter falls at the feet of Ahab just as, in Pym, the morsel of the dead man's flesh dropped at the feet of Parker. The auguries are clear: Parker is dead and his flesh eaten within four days; Ahab's final descent, an analogue of Macey's, is postponed, but when it comes, the specter of the Jeroboam's archangel appears in the guise of a taunting sky-hawk which, “with archangelic shrieks” (p. 469), sinks down to Hell with the Pequod.

Central to Pym's journey to Hell is the acceptance of the food offered by the dead in the cannibalistic feasting upon the body of Parker, from which, with multiple allusions to the Last Supper of Christ, Poe creates a mock communion. As Bezanson has also noted, the cannibalistic rite is imbued with a confusion of Biblical overtones and the language with Biblical cadences. The religious is continually transmuted into the macabre as the Sacrificial rite is transported, like Pym himself, to a primitive, subliminal realm where the sacred can make linkage with the most degraded of human actions, and where the cannibalistic innuendoes of the Gospel account are [page 82:] parodied into high relief. The port, drunk in common and associated with words such as “species,” “immersion,” “consummation,” suggests communion wine. The casting of lots to determine who must be the victim echoes both the Biblical scene in which the garments of Christ are divided and the story of Jonah in which lots are cast to determine who will be thrown overboard to appease the wrath of God and, thus, to save the other lives aboard ship. Parker is portrayed as the most willing of sacrificial lambs, and the Last Supper is again conjured up as the dead man makes the same offering, rendered in bizarre literality, as did Christ: his body to be eaten and his blood to be drunk. After the sacrifice is performed, the survivors are saved by the Jane Guy, only to be po mo transported to the island of Tsalal, an imaginative Hell pronounced with a serpentine hiss and on brilliantly described by Sidney Kaplan.(25)

“The Quarter-Deck” provides Moby-Dick with a satanic echo of Pym's mock communion feast. While the survivors of the Grampus accept the offering of the dead, the crew of the Pequod acquiesce in the diabolism of their captain. Ahab leads them in a catechismic antiphon:

A demonic communion follows: “‘Drink and pass!’ he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to the nearest seaman. ‘The crew alone now drink. Round with it, round! ... ‘tis hot as Satan's hoof. So, so; it goes round excellently. It spiralizes in ye; forks out at the serpent-snapping eye’” (p. 145). Finally in a frenzied black mass the Pequod's high priest performs a marriage ceremony of sorts, one of contrasts to the “loving and affectionate” and ultimately redemptive union between Ishmael and Queequeg:

“Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous chalices! Bestow them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble league.” ... The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted; and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the spirits were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. (p. 146)

Starbuck pales, turns, and shivers in the chill of that collective, chthonic hiss, and Ahab descends to his cabin, to his “grave-dug berth” (p. 112). Later he tempers his harpoon with heathen blood, “‘Ego non baptize te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!’ deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood” (p. 404). And later still, in “The Candles,” the Pequod lights up and becomes a gargantuan altar of evil: “All the yardarms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tri-pointed Tightning-rod-end with three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently burning in that sulphurous air, Tike three gigantic wax tapers before an altar” (p. 415). Like the mysterious hieroglyphs engraved deep within the caves of Poe's Tsalal, the burning corpusants of the Pequod are interpreted by Ishmael as [page 83:] “God's burning finger ... laid on the ship. ... His ‘Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin’ has been woven into the shrouds and the cordage” (p. 415).(26) Like the mock communion on the Grampus, the demonic rites on the Pequod serve to ensure the direction of the voyage — downward, Hellbent.

The Tsalalian Hell into which Pym sails provides a completion for the novel's mythic structure of enchantment and movement to the underworld. The fragmentary ending of the tale, in which the two final survivors, Pym and Peters, disappear into the “milky depth of the ocean” when enveloped in the perfect whiteness of the chasm, suggests conclusions to pagan and Christian descent motifs. It was impossible to return from Hell without effecting some mode of disenchantment, one of which was immersion in water or milk to be transformed from non-human to human form or to redeem one from another realm of being. Also, the Gospel of Nicodemus, which relates the descent into Hell of Christ, concludes as two brethren ascend from the underworld, are baptized and clothed in white robes, “transfigured, exceedingly white, and were no more seen.”(27)

The final destination of Ahab and the Pequod is a quite literal Hell:

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.(p. 469)(28)

Ahab's voyage took him further and further into the recesses of the universe, plunged him into the primeval ocean, that “great shroud of the sea,” and finally pushed him fatally into “that blackness of darkness” from which there is no possibility of return.

Ishmael, however, is saved, “floating on the margin of the ensuing scene” (p. 470). He has already glimpsed Hell in the image of the Pequod transformed into a fiery sea-riding Tophet. The chapter on “The Try-Works” describes it best as “an argument for the pit”:

The Pequod itself is the destination of its own descensus ad inferos; its final collapse into Hell is merely a physical confirmation of its previous arrival there.

Pym is redeemed from his Hell, but the momentum of his journey does not cease, and he is propelled even further into “the sea of darkness” until he finally rushes into the apocalyptic embrace. Ishmael, however, although “drawn towards the closing vortex,” is drawn “but slowly,” and the momentum of his journey subsides as he approaches “the button-like black bubble at the [page 84:] axis.” In a final, double allusion to the descent motif, Ishmael describes himself as another Ixion, one of the great sinners of Hades whose revolving wheel, to which he is bound forever, stops when Orpheus descends to the underworld seeking Eurydice. Ishmael is redeemed from “that vital centre” of the vortex of Hell by the novel's central emblem of death and life, the coffin1ife-buoy which had transformed the Pequod into a hearse and which was translated, by Queequeg's ( carving, into the very image of his living, loving self. It is a fit saving vessel for one who made the gnostic dive to death, for upon its 1id are carved copies of the tattooing from Queequeg's body:(29)

Such truths may remain forever mysteries, but the very act of diving towards them through “the great flood-gates of the wonder-world” (p. 16) makes our live hearts beat against them, as Queequeg's did, though we never solve their riddle. But to dive toward truth is to dive at death and to glimpse the fires of Hell; and as Ishmael tells us after he gazed into the blackness of darkness of the try-works and felt the “stark, bewildered feeling, as of death” (p. 354) come over him, there are those who “would rather talk of operas than hell” (p. 355).

Both Poe and Melville talked of Hell. Poe left in Pym traces of a grand endeavor, a voyage into the vast ocean and the sea of darkness where those who dream by day might “obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in awakening, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret.” Ishmael, that dreamer by day, took the same voyage as did Pym, but with a far greater awareness of the nature and implications of the journey. He understood that the dive at death does not guarantee a rebirth; but not to dive may mean not to live at all.

Sacred Heart University

[page 85:]

Notes

My thanks to Lawrence Lee, Lois Cuddy, and Walter Brooks, Catskill eagles.

1 Edgar Allan Poe, The Complete Poems and Stories, ed. Arthur Hobson Quinn and Edward H. O’Neill (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), p. 372. All subsequent page references from this source will be indicated in the text. Translation is from Eric W. Carlson, ed., Introduction to Poe: A Thematic Reader (Glenview, I1linois: Scott, Foresman, 1967), p. 583.

2 Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York: New American Library, 1974), p. 192.

3 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York: Norton, 1967), p. 406. All subsequent page references to Melville are from this source and will be indicated in the text.

4 The phrase is Melville's: ‘But it is those deep far-away things in him; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality: — these are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare.’ from ‘Hawthorne and His Mosses,’ reprinted in the Norton Moby-Dick, p. 541.

5 The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale, I11inois: 1957), pp. 205-214. Quinn cites the opening she lines; the embarkments from Nantucket; the hieroglyphs in the Tsalalian cave and the mysteries of the gold doubloon; the motives which drive both Pym and Ishmael to sea; the preliminary fore-shadowings of doom in the Ariel episode and the chapel scenes; the seagull which plops flesh at the feet of Parker and the sea hawk which swoops down upon Ahab; the narrative rather than heroic function of both Pym and Ishmael; the similarities between Peters and Queequeg; the saving rope which secures Pym to Peters as they descend the Tsalalian cliff and the monkey-rope which ties ness Ishmael to Queequeg; the final pages of Pym and the chapter on “The Whiteness of the Whale.” He concludes that “what is carried over is not a set of details but the living thing, the essence there and flavor of the whole story. It is assimilated, and this, surely, is the kind of influence which really counts.” See also Harold Beaver, ed., The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), pp. 278-81 for a discussion of Melville's familiarity with Pym. For Melville's reading of Poe see Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville's Reading (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), p. 86.

6 See Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).

7 I have already established the existence of a mythic substructure in Pym which unites the seemingly disjointed episodes of the novel in “The Quest of Arthur Gordon Pym,” The Southern Literary Journal, IV (Spring 1972), 22-33. It has been necessary at times for clarity to repeat brief portions of that argument.

8 Quinn, p. 212.

9 See Walter Bezanson's fine study of death and rebirth in Pym, “The Troubled Sleep of Arthur Gordon Pym,” Essays in Literary History, ed. Rudolph Kirk and C. F. Main (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965).

10 Myth and Reality, p. 81.

11 patterns, p. 381.

12 Patterns, pp. 194, 196.

13 A. MacCulloch, The Harrowing of Hell (Edinburgh: T. T. Clark, 1930), pp. 133-4.

14 C. Wimberly, Folklore in the English and Scottish Ballads (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), p. 108. Note also Eliade, Patterns, p. 191, regarding creation myths: “ ... Vishnu, in his third reincarnation (as a giant boar), goes down to the depths of the primeval waters, and draws the earth up from the abyss.” Melville links the white whale to Vishnu: “The Hindoo whale referred to, occurs in a separate department of the wall, depicting the incarnation of Vishnu in the form of Leviathan, learnedly known as the Matse Avatar” (p. 225).

15 Patterns, p. 194. Referring to the Flood, Melville concludes his novel with “then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago” (p. 469). [page 86:]

16 Myth and Reality, p. 37.

17 Eureka: A Prose Poem, ed. Richard p. Benton (Hartford, 1973), pp. 138-9.

18 See Barton L. St. Armand's penetrating analysis of Eureka as an act of faith in “‘Seemingly Intuitive Leaps’: Belief and Unbelief in Eureka,” American Transcendental Quarterly, 26 (Spring 1975), 4-15.

19 David H. Hirsch, Reality and Idea in the Early American Novel (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), p. 214. See also James Baird, Ishmael (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956).

20 The Wake of the Gods (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), p. 73.

21 The Wake of the Gods, p. 97.

22 The Wake of the Gods, p. 98.

23 Water-gazing becomes a variation of meditative plunges and dives at death, and the adumbrations in the novel's first chapter, “Loomings,” become more clear. There Ishmael says, “Look at the crowds of water-gazers there. ... But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. ... Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever. ... Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus ...” (12-14). See Charles Feidelson, Jr., Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 28-35 for a discussion of water-gazing and symbol making.

24 Compare Macey's death with Ahab's. The only significant difference is that while Macey's death harms not a hair of any oarsman's head nor a chip of his boat, Ahab's draws his whole crew and even the smallest chip of the Pequod down with him: “The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the groove; — ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight” (468-9).

25 “Introduction,” The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (New York: Hill & Wang, 1960).

26 The hieroglyphs in the Tsalalian cave read, “I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock.”

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin reads, “God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end ... you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting ... and your kingdom has been divided and given to the Medes and Persians.” (Daniel 5:26-29).

27 MacCulloch, p. 170.

28 The endings of the novels are similar in language as well as in intent. Melville's “Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf” echoes Poe's “white birds flew continuously now from beyond the veil, and their scream was the eternal Tekeli-1i!” Melville's “yawning gulf” is like Poe's “embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us.” Poe's fantastic “shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men” becomes Melville’ s more naturalistic “great shroud of the sea.” And Poe's milky white ocean is Melville s “sullen white surf” which he described earlier in “The Whiteness of the Whale” as a “sea of milky whiteness.’

29 William Rosenfeld puts it in “Uncertain Faith: Queequeg's Coffin and Melville's Use of the Bible,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, VII (Winter 1966), 317-27, “Queequeg carves onto the coffin lid the tattoo markings on his body, thus identifying the art of attaining truth with the coffin.”