The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [260]
But even this mystically joyous moment, when Ishmael imagines all the human race at one -'let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness' - has been bought at the price of little Pip, the black cabin boy, losing his wits in terror during the chase of the whale which provided the sperm. The double-entendre of `sperm' in itself carries homoerotic echoes. And we are soon back into that other harsh, bleak, pitiless man-centred world, preoccupied with death and destruction, chequered with foreboding, which dominates most of the narrative.
Much of the structure of the latter part of the story is built round the successive meetings with other whaling ships, each from a different nation, again conveying the sense that we are here meeting all the human race. Each is hailed by the increasingly mad Ahab in hope that it might have news of the whereabouts of Moby Dick. And each encounter in turn adds to the build-up towards the final climax. The American Jereboam had lost its first mate to Moby Dick, and its crew have been terrorised by a religious fanatic who warns of a similar death for Ahab. The English captain of the Samuel Enderby has lost an arm to Moby Dick, and shortly afterwards Queequeg falls seemingly mortally sick and orders his coffin to be made, before he miraculously recovers.
At last they emerge into `the great South Sea'. It is not unlike that moment in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, when `we were the first that ever burst into that silent sea' (indeed there are profound symbolic echoes between the two stories, each centred on the image of killing a creature which stands for the majesty and perfection of nature). Ahab orders the blacksmith to forge a special harpoon, like the dark version of a `magic weapon'. Dipping it in the blood of the three harpooners, he dedicates it to the devil and to the destruction of the `White Fiend' in a fearful inversion of Christian symbolism:
"`Ego non baptizo to in nominepatris, sed in nomine diaboli" deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood.'
The next afternoon four more whales are killed, one by Ahab. As, `floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky', Ahab's whale and the sun `died together', `such a sweetness and such plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy air' it almost seems as though the wind has carried `vesper hymns' from some far-off Spanish convent, lost in a dark, green valley. Again, there is the identification of whales and the world of nature with Christian symbolism: everything Ahab and his crew are now so explicitly set to defy. That night the sinister Fedallah prophesies to Ahab that, before he dies, `two hearses must verily be seen by thee on the sea; the first not made by mortal hands'; the other made from wood grown in America.
There is a terrifying midnight thunderstorm, when the Pequod is struck by such fearsome lightning that each of its `three tall masts' are seen `burning like three gigantic wax tapers before an altar'. They encounter the Rachel, `weeping for her children' as in the Bible, as its captain distractedly searches for the whaleboat lost to Moby Dick in which his 12-year old son had been among the crew. Ahab refuses the captain's plea to help in the search, and as the Pequod ploughs on, it meets the Delight, carrying the `few splintered planks' of its smashed whaleboat. `Hast seen the