El gesto del dolor que se levanta: Montaje de imágenes

At last the white whale is sighted, and the final act of the tragedy begins. For three days Moby Dick is chased. Harpoon in hand, Ahab meets him for three successive encounters.

The symbolism of the three-day hunt and the triple encounter is significant. It is an archetypal motif referring to the fulfillment of a development process in time. It signifies the completion, for good or ill, of a fateful destiny. In fairy tales, we frequently encounter the theme of the crucial act which must be repeated three times. The Greek mythical symbol for destiny, the three Fates, has a threefold nature: Clotho who spins the thread of life, Lachesis who measures it and Atropos who cuts it. In Teutonic myth, there are three Norns: Urd, Verdandi and Shuld. Urd, the aged one, refers to the past, Verdandi to the present and Shuld to the future.

There seems to be a deep-seated archetypal tendency to organize temporal or developmental events in terms of a threefold pattern. Starbuck expresses this instinct as he contemplates the beginning of the third day of the chase:

And this the critical third day?For when three days flow together in one continuous intense pursuit; be sure the first is the morning, the second the noon, and the third the evening and the end of that thingbe that end what it may. (p. 617, chap. 135)

Another facet of this same symbolic fact is the relation between the number three and the theme of the night sea journey. This latter image is a symbol of death and rebirth, that is, of psychological transformation. Typically, in the legends of the hero swallowed by a monster, the hero spends three days in its belly, like Jonah, for instance, who was in the belly of the whale for three days and three nights. Three days elapsed between Jesus' death and his resurrection. The crucifixion itself was a triple one, since Jesus was crucified between two thieves. These mythological parallels indicate that Ahab's encounter with the white whale reflects the typical pattern of death and rebirth. Another significant image comes up twice in these final pagesthe image of spiral motion. On the first day of the chase, after the whale wrecked the boat:

Moby Dick swam swiftly round and round the wrecked crew. . . . so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale's aspect, and so planetarily swift the ever- contract-

ing circles he made, that he seemed horizontally swooping upon them. (p. 599, chap. 133)

The same image appears more powerfully in the very final scene as the Pequod is sinking beneath the waves:

So, floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the half-spent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex. When I reached it, it had subsided to a creamy pool. Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble at the axis of that slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. (p. 625, epilogue)

The white whale and its effects are thus twice associated with the image of spiral motion.

The spiral is a very ancient symbol. One finds it, for instance, on Mycenaean artifacts, circa 1500 B.C. The Kundalini serpent of Tantric Yoga is coiled in a spiral of three and one-half turns around a creative central point. Yahweh appeared to Job out of the spiral whirlwind. A spiral is basically a circular movement toward or away from a central point or axis. Hence it is an apt symbol for the process of

individuation, which is a kind of circumambulation of the Self in ever smaller circles. Where this unconscious dynamism that seeks the center is activated without the ego's being consciously related to it, dangerous or destructive aspects of spiral form appear. The image of the whirlpool in which Ishmael revolves belongs to this latter category. It symbolizes, as it were, the involuntary individuation process that seeks the central Self in disregard of the conscious ego. If the latter is too weak and immature to relate to this central dynamism, it will be sucked down and destroyed.

Melville provides us with another interesting association to the whirlpool. He says that Ishmael went round and round the whirlpool "like another Ixion." Ixion is a figure in Greek myth who offended Zeus by attempting to seduce Hera. In punishment for this act of hubris, Zeus had Ixion bound to a fiery wheel which revolved eternally. The wheel is a mandala, a symbol of the Self. Ixion, by presuming to seduce a goddess, was acting out of an inflated attitude. He was identified with the Self and hence behaved as though he were a deity. In such a state, the Self becomes a fiery torture wheel to the ego. The individual is bound to it by identification. This false and unconscious relation of the ego to the divine, suprapersonal energies of the psyche causes them to become a fiery torment.

A parallel image is found in the Indian myth of the wheel of rebirth. This wheel is rotated by the three animals the pig, the cock and the snake, symbols of instinctive desirousness. According to the myth, as long as a man is bound to this torture wheel he must endure repeated reincarnations. He is released only by enlightenment (consciousness) which separates him from identification with his desires.

Ahab was an Ixion. His hubris, deriving from an identification with the Self, bound him to its fiery wheel. We have had occasion to note the intolerable burden he complained of carrying. The white whale and the whirlpool it creates are one. Moby Dick is the fiery wheel of

torment to which Ahab was bound by his inflated identification with deity. Ahab expresses this bondage in his final words just before the rope catches him around the neck and carries him into the sea, tied to the whale by his own harpoon line.

Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, Ho! from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear! (pp. 622623, chap. 135)

Ahab's dying words are, "Thus, I give up the spear!" And thus, he also gives up the ghost. From his first encounter with the whale, Ahab had been carrying a spear of vengeance against him. And now, in the finale, he gives up that spear. The spell is broken, vengeance has died, and the drama is done.

Our last view of Ahab is to see him being carried into the depths of the sea, tied to Moby Dick by his harpoon line. This image recalls the monkey rope which was the connecting cord between Ishmael and Queequeg; it reminds us of Ahab's remark to Pip, "Thou touchest my inmost centre, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heart strings"; and also it is reminiscent of what was seen at the calm center of the whale mandala:

As when the stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds of fathoms of rope; as, after deep sounding he floats up again, and shows the slackened curling line buoyantly rising and spiralling towards the air; so now, Starbuck saw long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame Leviathan, by which the young cub seemed still tethered to its dam. (p. 424, chap. 87)

Harpoon line and umbilical cord are equated. Thus, Ahab in his death has reconnected himself with the whale as Great Mother. Beneath his compulsive ha-

tred and fury, this has been the hidden intent all along. Now it is fulfilled. In Ahab's death, the white whale and its antagonist are reunited. A version of the coniunctio that reconciles the opposites has occurred.130 And out of this union comes the possibility of rebirth.

There is a survivor. Queequeg's coffin was ejected from the very center of the whirlpool's vortex. The coffin-life buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, floated by Ishmael's side, and saved him from otherwise certain death. This coffin had been made at the request of Queequeg when he was close to death with fever. It had been made to his exact measurements, and later Queequeg made it still more his own by pouring lavishly his time and energy into carving it.

Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this tattooing, had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth. (p. 524, chap. 110)

Queequeg's coffin thus became a symbolic duplicate of himselfat least that part of himself that carried the eternal primal signs and mysteries of being. The carved coffin is a representation of the saving wisdom of the primordial psyche. A coffin is one aspect of the Great Mother archetype. As a protective container, it is analogous to cradle and womb. Queequeg's coffin-lifebuoy carries the paradoxical meaning of both the container of death and the womb of rebirth.

The double significance of the coffin had occurred to Ahab. When Queequeg recovered and the coffin was not needed, it was caulked and made into a lifebuoy. Ahab mused over that strange object, a coffin-life buoy:

A life-buoy of a coffin! Does it go further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality preserver! I'll think of that. But no. So far gone am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one, seems but uncertain twilight to me. (p. 575, chap. 127)

The same whirlpool wheel of the Self which sucked the ill-fated Pequod down to death threw up out of its center the protective vessel of rebirth for Ishmael. In this final scene, Queequeg's redemptive function for Ishmael, which was noted earlier, is verified. Ishmael's words shortly after meeting Queequeg come back to us with added meaning: "I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it." (p. 57, chap. 10)

The epilogue on the final page is headed by a quotation from Job: "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee." This phrase comes at the very beginning of the story of Job, when he is informed of the catastrophes that have befallen him. Consciously or unconsciously, Melville is giving us a clear statement that the reading of Moby-Dick should be followed by the reading of Job. It is to that latter source we must go to find the reconciliation between God and man that Moby-Dick hints at but does not achieve.

In 1819, the year of Melville's birth, the whale-ship Essex sailed from Nantucket for the Pacific cruising grounds. A little over a year later, this ship was deliberately rammed twice by a sperm whale and sank within ten minutes. The crew set out in three whale boats for the coast of South America, two thousand miles away. After the most frightful privations which reduced the survivors to cannibalism, eight of the original twenty men were finally rescued. Owen Chase, the first mate of the Essex, wrote a narrative of his experiences, which was read by Melville and profoundly affected him. In chapter 45 of Moby-Dick, the tragedy of the Essex is described. Melville records in notes written in his copy of Chase's book how he first heard the story of the Essex. During Melville's whaling voyage, they met another Nantucket ship and spoke with her.

In the forecastle I made the acquaintance of a fine lad of sixteen or thereabouts, a son of Owen Chase. I questioned him concerning his father's adventure; . . . he went to his chest and handed me a copy of the narrative. . . . The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, and close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect on me.131

The "surprising effect" indicates that the Essex story touched a complex or unconscious issue in Melville. Moby-Dick can be taken as the working out of that complex. Every complex has an archetypal core. In this case, the core is the Job archetype, man's encounter with an apparently malevolent deity. In psychological terms, it is the ego's experience of being wounded by an encounter with the Self. Resentment and lust for vengeance are symptoms of the wound.

The ego, having separated itself from its unconscious matrix and from nature, is wounded to discover its alienated state. The wound exists prior to its discovery, in fact it occurs at the birth of the ego. The anguished realization of one's wounded condition is actually the first step toward recovery of the lost wholeness. Resentment of the injury can contain the seeds of a future religious attitude. Hatred of God at least grants His existence. It assumes a responsible transpersonal agency to whom one can bring his grievances, or even against whom

one may retaliate. The crucial feature is the ego's awareness of the "other," the basic requirement for dialogue.

Ahab's mad pursuit of the whale is a kind of primitive, negative dialogue with the Self. His persistence, like Job's, leads him eventually to the corrective experience which teaches the ego, decisively, the difference between it and the Self. From such a defeat, consciously lived, comes the redeeming encounter with the numinosum. Jung says, "The experience of the self is always a defeat for the ego."132 This is the message of Job, and this is the lesson of Moby-Dick.

Like Ishmael, Melville barely survived the writing of Moby-Dick. In fact, it is likely that the images of Ahab and the white whale, like Moses' brazen serpent, were instruments of his own ultimate healing. The excruciating conflict between the opposites which Melville endured was finally reconciled. Eventually, he experienced the coniunctio that was prefigured at the end of Moby-Dick. In Clarel, written many years later, he says,

Speak not evil of the evil: Evil and good they braided play Into one cord.133

And in a late poem he wrote:

Healed of my hurt, I laud the inhuman sea Yea, bless the Angels Four that there convene; For healed I am even by their pitiless breath Distilled in wholesome dew named rosemarine.134

132Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, par. 778. 133Clarel, p. 419.