288
PARTISAN REVIEW
Sailor encompasses and reconciles both the Suicide and the Divine
Inert, a kind of synthesis which the dialectic of personality produces
out of thesis and antithesis. Yet the figure of the Handsome £ailor
remains so inadequately objectified in Melville's books that it cannot
fully serve as a synthesis; it
is
a direction, a motion, as well as an
objective reality. At the beginning of
Billy Budd
the Handsome
Sailor is pictured as a gigantic Negro wearing a Scotch Highland
bonnet with a tartan band- the symbol, as we shall see, of the Pro–
methean Light or the humanizing Intelligence. He is attended by a
retinue of fellow sailors, an "assortment of tribes and complexions."
Surrounding the superior figure, they move along the Liverpool docks
as the lesser lights of a constellation move with the central star. The
tribes and complexions, Melville seems to be saying, have chosen to
live with the Handsome Sailor rather than, as they do in
Moby Dick,
die with the master who hurls them at the White Whale.
In
Moby Dick,
the Handsome Sailor is Bulkington- the man
from the Southern mountains, with "noble shoulders and a chest like
a coffer-dam"-who stands at the helm of the Pequod on the Christ–
mas night when she "thrusts her vindictive bows" into the cold
Atlantic. But Bulkington disappears from the story, with only a brief
farewell from the author: "Take heart, 0 Bulkington. ... Up from
the spray of thy ocean-perishing-straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!"
He must in fact disappear from the story if the story
is
to go on.
Otherwise he would have done what Jack Chase, the Handsome
Sailor of
W kite ]acket,
was driven to do: countennand the orders
of the captain and save the ship. Together with Billy Budd these arc
Melville's Handsome Sailors. We do not see much of them (wrth
the exception of Billy Budd, but he is too complex a problem to
consider here). They are direction, force, potentiality rather than
completed fonns. They are the stuff and energy of an heroic American
personality in the act of setting forth toward fulfillment- the Titanic
body of America stirring out of the uncreated Night and passit;J.g
ponderously into motion and consciousness.
Prometheus.
"Prometheus" is the name we may give to the total personality
which encompasses the Suicide, the Divine Inert, and the Handsome
Sailor. The Suicide is a false Prometheus, false because of the blind
violence to which he is driven by his neurosis. The Divine Inert
is also a false Prometheus because his compact with death and the
unconscious is irrevocable. The Promethean man is he who has
