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PARTISAN REVIEW
and goads them into violence and negation. As Freud pointed out,
the repetitive rhythms of human activity are either creative post–
ponements of death or they are short-cuts to self-destruction. For
Ahab and Pierre, they are the latter. The Hero who cannot "with–
draw" when the economy of his personality demands that he should,
must finally withdraw by committing suicide.
In the figure of the Handsome Sailor we see personality in the
act of emerging from the dark night of the soul-the giant Negro
with the emblem of Light on his forehead. The particular facts of
his future are unknown. But his eventual apotheosis
is
assured, for
he has been able to ally himself with the spiritual transit.
Ahab and the Whale.
But of course the picture is only half complete.
So
far we ha ···
man and we have man transfigured into Prometheus or, to put it
another way, we have man a fragment and man complete. There
must be an Adversary, a God and Fathet-a Zeus in opposition to
whom Prometheus undergoes his ordeal. Melville almost always re–
gards God as the enemy of man. Moby Dick is God incarnate in the
Mechanical Brute, the huge mindless hulk which "god-bullies" the
Pequod. He is the challenge which God hurls at man, hoping that in
the fight with the whale, man will "unman" himself-that is, undergo
transfiguration, not into the image of Prometheus, but into the image
of the Beast-Machine. This is precisely what happens to Ahab and
it is what constitutes his falseness. Like the true Promethean guardian
of humanity, Ahab can shout defiantly at his "fiery father" that "in
the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here."
Yet caught in the final violence of the whale hunt, Ahab is transfig–
ured into the "impersonal," into the mechanical monster with blood
on his brain. He knows well enough what is happening and
~hat
is
at stake. The idea of the false Prometheus obsesses him. In the ma–
chinelike operations of the ship's carpenter and blacksmith he sees
himself, caught in the iron hand of his own death-wishing will power,
which makes such ready and fatal use of the mechanical techniques
of tyranny in general and the whale hunt in particular. He has an
almost hallucinatory awareness of an apotheosis looming up behind
the blacksmith. The blacksmith is making a new whalebone leg for
Ahab, and Ahab, addressing him ironically as "Prometheus," says,
I'll order a complete man after a desirable pattern. Imprimis,
fifty feet high in his socks; then, chest modeled after the Thames
