Melville's Lear and Poor Tom

Chapter 89: The Log and the Line

I've been been wondering for some time now whether to categorize Ahab as evil. As I mentioned below, I had developed a sort of sympathy for him, at least until a recent chapter when Starbuck was almost forced to kill him in his sleep for making insane decisions that could get the whole crew killed. Before this, it seemed like hunting the elusive white whale was no worse than hunting and killing all the other whales for oil that they encountered. And despite his obsession with finding Moby Dick, he had acquiesced to Starbuck's remonstrances on a few occasions. But then Ahab's monomania fully takes over: in the face of his crew's fears, he drives them straight into a typhoon and the Pequod gets struck by lightning (a serious pet fear of mine). Things are certainly getting dicey. Actually, now that I think about it, sounds like George Bush and Ahab have quite a bit in common.

I pause here to note that my cat Peanut is standing on my lap right now, intently staring at the screen. She is dying to know what is coming next. An incentive to figure out how to work this computer's camera.

I'm still thinking about the Melville/Shakespeare connection. Ahab, having dragged his crew into a miserable storm, seems to take on qualities of Lear. Really the similarities between the stories abound: Lear recklessly and selfishly divides his kingdom, which results in total chaos and loss of life. Ahab allows his selfish obsessions to lead his whole crew into dangerous territory (I am sure loss of life is just around the bend), and when the compass is electrocuted, he creates his own compass as Lear has created his own map of England: "'Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not lord of the level loadstone! The sun is East, and that compass swears it!'...In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all his fatal pride" (358).

But it gets even better. Pip, the idiot boy who I thought was playing the role of the Shakespearean fool, suddenly morphs into Poor Tom, or Lear's banished son Edgar. If you remember, Edgar disguised as a beggar is the one character who finally gets through to Lear. In that famous stormy scene on the heath (having BBC flashbacks as I type this!) Lear's better nature surfaces as he tries to shelter Poor Tom. I believe he offers his own shelter to Tom, suddenly remembering that as king his job is to nurture and protect his people. Surely this principle duty would also apply to a whaling captain, although Ahab has gotten further and further away from it the longer they are at sea. But he demonsrates a glimmer of humanity when interacting with Pip, as if Pip calls him to reason (as fools often due in Shakes). Here he offers Pip the shelter of his cabin:

"...Oh, ye frozen heavens! look down here. You did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye creative libertines. Here, boy; Ahab's cabin shall be Pip's home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou touchest my inmost center, boy; thou art tied to me by cords woven of my heartstrings. Come, let's down.

What's this? here's velvet shark-skin," intently gazing at Ahab's hand, feeling it. "Ah now, had poor Pip but felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had ne'er been lost! This seems to me, sir, as a manrope; something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let old Perth now come and rivet these two hands together; the black one with the white, for I will not let this go.

"Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse horrors than are here. Come, then, to my cabin. Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come! I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor's!

"There go two daft ones now," muttered the old Manxman. "One daft with strength, and the other daft with weakness..." (362).