him to charge a Leyden jar,” which could, in turn, “explode gunpowder, inflame spirits of wine, or produce the ordinary phenomena of a snap, a spark, and a shock.” Rutter, Human Electricity, 157.
117 Rutter, Human Electricity, 115 118 Rutter, Human Electricity, 123
These experiments in “human electricity” went beyond just revealing that a human body could internally produce a kind of charge that would register on a “galvanoscope” or spark a Leyden jar. Not surprisingly—given the burst of commercial products like “the invigorator” or electrical baths in the next decade—electricity was also directly linked to the “state of health.” Here Rutter explains that for healthy subjects the body was in a state of balanced equilibrium. But with nervous disorders or an “overworked brain” there is more “excitability.” And ultimately “a healthy and vigorous person” is unable to develop “electrical current as freely and forcibly as another with some accidental or constitutional defect.” Their “nerves are more sensitive,” which makes them “more perfect conductors.”119
Here we certainly might turn one last time to Captain Ahab, who—following Rutter’s logic— might not be an actual “Leyden jar” but who could certainly hold and then release his own charge, or this “shock of his electric power.” Ahab clearly meets Rutter’s criteria for a subject who is likely to produce a charge. He is not healthy. His pacing does not make him vigorous. And he definitely has an “overworked brain.” Rutter continues to offer accounts that seem to match Melville’s most famous character. “Some persons are more susceptible to external influences than others,” he explains. “For example, some are affected by sudden changes in the weather, or the direction, or force, of the wind” or “by an unusual quantity of electricity in the atmosphere” or by “the occurrence of a thunder-storm.” And some are even so “susceptible” that “they know by their sensations, whilst in bed, if the direction of the wind has changed during the night.” These people can also “foretell coming changes of the weather that are not expected,” and “they can indicate the approach of an electrical cloud.”120 Ahab’s comparison to a Leyden jar begins in a similar moment, just as “he looked not unlike the weather horizon when a storm is coming up.”121
119 Rutter, Human Electricity, 125-126, 156.Also see Rutter’s chapter “Are Health and Disease Affected by Electricity?” Rutter, Human Electricity, 156.
120 Rutter, Human Electricity, 167-168. 121 Melville, Moby-Dick, 161.
And finally, in his very next sentence Rutter adds: “antipathies with respect to certain animals, birds, insects, and reptiles, and which in some instances are mutual… are most likely allied to this class of phenomena.” He continues by explaining that these relationships are more easily
accounted for, by reference to their electrical relations, than on any other principal.”122
This is circumstantial evidence, of course. But Rutter’s conclusion is ultimately that “man cannot, even if he were to desire it, be an isolated being. He may shut himself up, or wander far away,” but he must “still communicate with the living world.”123 And this openness is, in its own way, the real lesson of humans as Leyden jars, even if they produce some of their own charge.
*****
When we use this emphasis on openness and permeability to reconsider “Ahab” a very different version of his character comes into focus. Ahab, we see, is shaped and driven by external forces. This is all but explicit in “The Chart,” when “it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead.” Perhaps Ahab actually does have a totalizing, universal will that, at the end of the day, writes everything. Or, as this passive construction suggests, the lines that Ahab makes and the lines that he receives each come from the same “place,” or have the same origins. Ishmael selects the second option when he surmises that “subtle agencies” “wrought on Ahab’s texture.” In fact, as with White-Jacket, Ahab finds that the weather affects his body and his “soul”: “all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned upon the soul”124
122 Rutter, Human Electricity, 168. 123 Rutter, Human Electricity, 168.
124 Melville, Moby-Dick, 198, 126. I will have far more to say about Melville’s “souls” in my next chapter, but I would like to note, here, that Melville at least considers a conception of “souls” as “material.”
Here Ahab—quite counterintuitively—is not the pinnacle of selfishness. Instead, he seems quite passive. Yes, “‘the firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab.’” But we can read this
declaration in two different ways: Everything is Ahab—or everything makes Ahab.125 He is what he encounters—what he gathers, or what clings to him. This second option seems more likely. Ahab is responding, after all, to a magnetizing doubloon that all the characters read differently, according their own backgrounds, interests, investments—or even, “matters of concern.”
Starbuck considers the bible, Stubb the zodiac, Flask sees dollars and cigars—and in Pip’s words, “‘I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.’” Meanwhile Ahab—perhaps
unexpectedly—shows remarkable self-awareness, offering an account that is the more visible version of Pip’s. Ahab explains, directly, that the gold is like a globe, which “to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious self.” Then he goes on to declare that there is “‘something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things.’” “‘Look here,’” Ahab continues “‘three peaks as proud as Lucifer.’” This is simply not the voice of a self-absorbed villain.126
As “The Chart” concludes, we find confirmation for this reading—and gain an even deeper sense of Ahab’s passivity. At this point, we learn, Ahab “was no longer an integral.” Instead he is “dissociated” from his “characterizing mind,” and the “formless” “vacated thing” that remains is inextricably linked to both a kind of “common vitality” and a “living principle.”127It seems appropriate, here, to compare Ahab to the Pequod’s carpenter: “a life-long wanderer” who had “gathered no moss” and who had, instead, “rubbed off whatever small outward clingings might have originally pertained to him.” The carpenter is a “literal” tabula rasa: a blank, a “sort of unintelligence,” even “uncompromisedness,” who worked by a “spontaneous literal process.”
125 Melville, Moby-Dick, 431. 126 Melville, Moby-Dick, 431-434.
Like “a new-born babe; living without premeditated reference to this world or the next,” he is a pure responder. And nothing builds him up against this: intelligence included. To use Melville’s language, he “was a pure manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers.” 128
If Ahab were like the carpenter, he would be “an unfractioned integral”: made and completed by various, separable parts, without conflict between his material responsiveness and his
“characterizing mind.” We could perform an anatomy on him, or trace his compositional forces. But to do so, he must be “a stript abstract”—a leaf without its stem, a tree divested of its bark, or even something that’s been torn—disconnected from its roots, its network, or its context, always ready to be reproduced or recombined, like print.129 So if Ahab were actually like the carpenter, then he could be complete: whole, balanced, and unaffected by his surroundings. Nothing would stick to him because he would have no charge. But, of course, I have said “if” for a reason. The exception—as this chapter works to show—is the electrifying whale. Ahab cannot escape the white whale—any more than Ishmael can prevent “the great flood-gates of the wonder-world” that send “endless processions of the whale” floating, “two by two,” into his “inmost soul.” 130 But this attraction to “whales” is about more than Moby-Dick. After all, Melville repeatedly links whales—as the remainder of this chapter will show—to the “wonder-world,” or a realm of invisible but material agencies like electricity in the atmosphere or atoms in a vortex. And these “subtle agencies” will drive both Ahab and his crew.
128 Melville, Moby-Dick, 394, 356-357. This is actually compatible with ways of thinking about “character” at the time. In fact, one of the common notions cited, with regard to autographs in the period, is that “the characters of most men are assumed to ooze out at their finger tips.” As I will discuss in my third chapter, for Melville character is inextricable from its origin in writing—a fiction of personal legibility. Tamara Thornton, Handwriting in America; A Cultural History, (New Haven: Yale UP, 1996), 87.
129 "Stript, n.". OED Online. March 2014. Oxford University Press. 130 Melville, Moby-Dick, 7.
Atmospheric Electricity
If Ahab is really a kind of Leyden jar who influences his crew with magnetism then we have to ask: what is his “prime conductor?” And what, in turn, is Ahab’s charge, or the “fiery emotion of his own magnetic life”? Because a Leyden Jar is not only about the structure or the charge. It is about the play of elements that constantly surround it, which bring charge or enable discharge. It is, in short, about its atmosphere, meteorological and otherwise.
Ahab’s prime conductor—or the generator or origin of his change—seems to be something like lightning. Of course it manifests itself as magnetism in some moments, but as we read in “The Needle,” “the magnetic energy, as developed in the mariner’s needle,” “is essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven.” And magnetism is consistently framed as being weaker. After all, one paragraph later Ahab changes the magnetism of a compass needle, declaring himself “lord” of the “lodestone,” which suggests that he is stronger than a derivative magnet. Ahab also calls himself “Old Thunder!” which frames him as a direct result—if not a sort of echo —of lightning. Finally, in a discussion of lightning when Starbuck calls for the crew to put out the lightning rods, Ahab atypically declines, cries out “Avast,” and then offers an otherwise
puzzling, uncharacteristic suggestion: “let's have fair play here, though we be the weaker side.”131 This suggestion that Ahab’s power was somehow derived—at least in part—by lightning is also suggested by his physical description: with “no sign of common bodily illness about him,” Ahab still “looked like a man cut away from the stake” after being overrun by “fire. That fire had, somehow, “wasted” his limbs “without taking away one particle.” (“Fiery emotion,” indeed). And this appearance of being consumed and then preserved by fire was because of lightning “Threading its way from among his grey hairs, and continuing down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck,” we learn:
131 Melville, Moby-Dick, 516-517, 505
You saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded.132
Ahab’s scar, we are told, “resembled that perpendicular seam” sometimes made by “lightning,” just like it brands a tree. It seems to run “from crown to sole.” And the remainder of the passage is even more informative. We learn that according to the Manxman Ahab received the scar, or became branded—specifically as if by lightning—when he was forty. And the scar “came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an elemental strife at sea.” 133 This reading of “elemental strife” in Ahab suggests a kind of chemical recomposition—as does the initial image of lightning “wasting” him “without taking away one particle.” It also harkens back to this chapter’s original comparison between Ahab and White-Jacket, who was made of circulating atoms that were continuously exchanged and then conserved.134 Finally, of course, this reading of Ahab struck by lightning helps explain how a human could serve as a charged Leyden jar.
Ahab directly confirms that he was affected by fire, charge, or lightning. He cries: ‘“Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit.’” Then he acknowledges that he is part of this a circuit “‘Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.’” This is followed by a stage direction that signals “sudden, repeated flashes of lightning.” And Ahab calls lightning his “sire” before addressing it: “‘I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee.’”135
132 Melville, Moby-Dick, 123.
133 Melville, Moby-Dick, 123-124. Here with this reference to “elemental strife at sea” we should also
remember the account of Ahab’s monomania: “his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.” This also seems to be a form of “elemental strife.” Melville, Moby-Dick, 185.
134 Again, in White-Jacket we meet a protagonist relates to his shipmates by way of “capillary attraction.”
who absorbs rain into “his own proper person” “in accordance with the natural laws, and who undergoes a series of phase changes declaring that even his soul is “made up of atoms.” Melville, White-Jacket, 4, 392.
Here the question, of course, is: what is Ahab’s charge? What is the “fiery emotion of his own magnetic life”? And how does this abstract conceptual idea translate into human experience? The answer, here, is two-fold. First, this idea of “fiery emotion” is a technical reference to work by Benjamin Franklin, which makes this about the conservation or circulation of change, and second, it brings us to Melville’s enduring interest in the connection between humans and the atmosphere, which has palpable effects throughout his fiction.
In 1749 Benjamin Franklin became the first person to make what he called a “battery” for storing charge. He also developed the idea that electricity was a “fluid” that could be positive or negative. This electrical fluid, Franklin explained, was governed by a “conservation of charge.” That means charge was passed along—not created or destroyed. This conceptual work, in many ways, was dependent on the Leyden jar, which Franklin brought to America in 1747. By 1752 Franklin flew his kite—and drew electricity from the sky. Finally, his fourth major contribution to electricity was that Franklin referred to charge as “fire.” In blending his idea of the conservation of charge with the idea that charge is a kind of fire, Franklin developed “an account of electricity in the Leyden jar as a circulating fire” that perpetually “sought” a natural state of equilibrium.” 136
This idea of electricity as “circulating fire” certainly resonates with the “fiery emotion accumulated” within the Leyden jar of Ahab’s “own magnetic life.” And this comparison of electricity and fire is by no means a one-time reference for Melville. In fact, in midst of a lightning storm Ahab’s path is “made plain to him” quite “suddenly” thanks to “lances of fire.” And throughout Moby-Dick and Pierre we find references to Franklin’s electric fluid. We learn, for example, that lightning rods are built to “carry off” “perilous fluid.”And by Pierre Melville’s engagement with this theory of electricity is explicit. He offers that “Isabel seemed to swim in an electric fluid,” while the shield “of her brow seemed as a magnetic plate.”137
136 Steven Johnson, The Invention of Air: A Story Of Science, Faith, Revolution, And The Birth Of America
(Penguin, 2008), 21, 37, 23; Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders, 1, 11, 16.
These references to electric fire continue throughout Melville’s fiction, even in ways that reach beyond Ahab. Lightning spotted on the Pequod was described as a “darting flambeaux,” or flaming torch. And this “fire” also references other characters’ interiors. We read, for example, that with Starbuck’s “flashing eyes” and his “fiery cheeks” it was easy to believe that he had “received the blaze” of a musket that was curiously and chemically described as a “levelled tube.” And this reaction is explicitly linked to his “emotion,” which he had to “master.” Melville builds this connection between lightning and the fieriest emotions of life in Pierre, which I will discuss. And after Ahab exclaims that “the white flame but lights the way to the White Whale!” he goes on to describe him as “fire.” Finally we learn, at the conclusion of “The Needle,” that Ahab has “fiery eyes” to match his “fiery emotion.”138
Unfortunately this engagement with electric fluid is not as simple as it seems. Melville also offers a multitude of moments that engage with developments in electromagnetism after Henry and Faraday’s transformative development of induction. In addition to Ahab’s “magnetic ascendency,” for example, discussion of Ahab as a Leyden jar points to “his own magnetic life.” That passage begins with the fact that his question had somehow “magnetically thrown” his crew. And as I’ve described repeatedly throughout this chapter, magnetism is linked to Ahab
throughout Moby-Dick, from the moment he points his magnet at Starbuck’s brain to his position as “lord of the lodestone” or his description of the ever-alluring Moby Dick as “all magnet.” 139
This aspect of Melville’s account is not drawn from Benjamin Franklin. In fact, by the time electromagnetism was imagined the idea of electric “fire” was long gone. Of course Franklin did make the comparison between lightning, electricity, and fire that Melville draws from when he