AN APPROACH TO M!LVILLE
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betraying whatever
is
creative within them and &ubmitting them–
selves to everything that
is
mechanical, corrupting, repressive, and
death-wishing. In doing so they kill themselves and all whose fate
is
in
their hands. They are the Tragic Suicides. But they are only a
part of a larger personality.
The Divine Inert.
The Divine Inert, as Melville says in
Mob
y
Dick,
are "God's true
princes of the Empire ... a choice hidden handful" who are as superior
to the Tragic Suicides as the Tragic Suicides are to "the dead level
of the mass." They are figures whose withdrawal from the world has
been uncompromising and complete and who have gained the spir–
itual illumination which comes from dying out of life without dying
into death. Pip, the Negro cabin boy, has been "mystically illumined"
by the terrifying ordeal of being lost overboard: he sees "God's foot
upon the treadle of the loom." He is saved from the sea, but he does
not emerge from the depths' of his own unconscious. To Ahab, Pip
now seems "holy." And Ahab banishes Pip from the deck, saying
that there is something in him "which I feel too curing to my malady";
he fears that somehow, without meaning to, Pip will dissuade him
from the inexorable hunt after the whale.
Bartleby
is
another of the Divine Inert. An industrious scrivener
who works
in
a W
~11
Street law office, he gradually becomes a schizo–
phrenic, cutting himself off from the commercial world about him,
saying little whenever he is addressed except "I should prefer not to,"
and inspiring his philistine employer with a sense of religious awe.
Bartleby regresses into the shadows of his childhood as relentlessly as
Ahab drives himself into outward action against the whale. He dies
curled up like a child, a prisoner in the Tombs. "Benito Cereno" is
also a story about a man cut off from the world and living in the
twilight of consciousness. In this story Melville dramatizes the psychic
plight of the Divine Inert by showing us a Spanish sea captain who
has been subjected to the will of a mutinous band of slaves aboard
a ship off the coast of South America. He is terrorized into a spiritual
illumination, a fact which eludes the honest but obtuse Yankee cap–
tain, Amasa Delano. The Yankee captain saves Don Benito bodily
but fails to grasp the implications of his spiritual plight.
The Handsome Sailor
The aspects of personality we have noticed so far are not mutually
exclusive; there is much of Pip in Ahab, for example. The Handsome
