The Word and the Thing: Moby Dick and the Limits of Language
Gayle Smith, ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 31.4 (1985): 260-271.
"Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it ... retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own," Ishmael advises as he examines the whale's insulating blanket of skin [in Moby-Dick].1 This, of course, is Ishmael's great challenge, to confront the complexity of the whale and all reality on his own terms, neither adopting uncritically any single, insufficient explanation nor lapsing into a desperate nihilism. At the heart of Ishmael's ability to maintain an epistemological "temperature of [his] own" is his deviation from ordinary language patterns in order to express perceptions otherwise inexpressible and perhaps even unable to be considered. Ishmael's language choices reflect Melville's awareness that the received language is not adequate to his perceptions of reality, that the normal strictures of language must be transcended if it is to begin to be fully expressive. The most significant, deviant, and unexplored of Ishmael's patterns involve negation, particularly the doubling up of negatives to create phrases such as "not seldom," "not unattended," and "not disincline" (pp. 260, 385, 77). Ahab too engages in a kind of semantic doubling that calls attention to itself, but his patterns reflect both a different consciousness and a different understanding of the role of language,
The linguistic patterns Melville has his protagonists use reflect his awareness of the contemporary controversies about the relationship between language and meaning, signifier and signified. Philip F. Gura argues cogently for the impact of the linguistic theories of nineteenth-century thinkers such as Alexander Bryan Johnson and Horace Bushnell on the writers of the American Renaissance.2 Johnson and Bushnell were alike in rejecting the Transcendental notion of simple correspondence between words and things, but while Johnson despaired of the ambiguity of language and advocated a persistent return to the senses and contemplation lest one stray too far from meaning in mere words, Bushnell celebrated the ambiguity of language as a means of communicating complex, even spiritual, ideas. Specifically, Bushnell recommended a rhetoric of multiple perspectives, contradiction, and paradox, a position that leads Gura to observe that, although there is no direct evidence that Melville read Bushnell's works, he became "the novelist of Bushnell's imaginative universe" as he explored "the 'rupture' between language and meaning" that Bushnell had exposed ("Language ["Language and Meaning: An American Tradition,"]," pp. 19, 17). Gura documents some of the larger ways in which Moby-Dick demonstrates the need for pluralistic interpretations, for using different "grammars" to read the provoking "text" of the whale, referring specifically to the chapters "The Whiteness of the Whale" and "The Doubloon." I would like to show how, even more pointedly, Ishmael and Ahab act out in dramatic form the debate about the nature of language. Ishmael's strategies dynamically reflect Bushnell's theory, as he creates patterns that force readers into a realm of thought virtually beyond the reach of ordinary language. He uses language not merely to refer to things and ideas but to point beyond this sort of signification. In contrast, Ahab's linguistic choices reflect a rigid, correspondential notion of language, a faith that meaning and reality somehow inhere in language itself. Among Americans, Sampson Reed probably articulated this position most clearly: "There is a language, not of words but of things," he declared in his 1826 "Growth of the Mind." The inherently meaningful nature of language, especially of names for things, is clear as Reed continues his thought:
Every thing which surrounds us, is full of the utterance of one word, completely expressive of its nature. This word is its name; for God, even now could we but see it, is creating all things, and giving a name to every work of his love, in its perfect adaptation to that for which it is designed.3
In Moby-Dick Melville displays the limitations of Ahab's view of language and reality; as he believes that each word has a given, unalterable meaning independent of the interpreter, so he maintains that phenomena, such as the whale, stand for some specific meaning to which he imagines himself privy. Ishmael, on the other hand, knows that no one word or combination of words can fully convey the reality either of things or of thoughts, but that, creatively used, language can engage the consciousness of the listener or reader as well as that of the speaker in a search for deeper understanding.
Speaking of Moby-Dick, Nina Baym maintains, "Truth is doubted, but not language," pointing out that Ishmael never questions his activity of verbalizing his experiences.4 Maintaining as she does that an "Emersonian," correspondential theory of language infuses the entire book, she does not pay particular attention to the way Ishmael must constantly struggle to adapt the rigid language available to him to what he must say. Language as it is normally used, language as a transparent medium, is doubted here. James Nechas claims that "Melville discovered that language was quite capable of expressing all that man can with assurance know," but, according to his reading of Moby-Dick, the most man can know is that the universe is unknowable: "Melville found that his language, man's language, was completely able to express the failure of his imagination."5 A closer look at Ishmael's linguistic choices, however, shows that his search for truth and his intensely creative use of language constitute instead a great victory of the imagination. Finally, this victory is Melville's, as he demonstrates his ability to transcend the limits of ordinary language.
As Newton Arvin observes, "One feels ... that the limits of even the English vocabulary have suddenly begun to seem too strict, too penurious, and that the difficult things Melville has to say can be adequately said only by reaching beyond those limits." Arvin cites, for example, Melville's tendency to create nouns and modifiers out of participles and to pluralize abstract nouns.6 These are important aspects of Ishmael's language and consciousness; Ishmael seems determined to infuse his language with the dynamism he feels, to mingle in his language the static and the active, the abstract and the concrete, theoretical opposites that seem mysteriously joined in the reality he alone among the crew perceives. Every time Melville has Ishmael derive a new word form such as "ponderings," "palpableness," "uninvitedly," or "sentinelled" (pp. 20, 424, 109, 112), he is arguing the insufficiencies not merely of our ordinary vocabulary but of the forms of ordinary language classification. As the lines between parts of speech begin to blur, so do the distinctions between what is real and what is fanciful, what is known, what is expressible, and what is not. Ishmael's language, in stark contrast to Ahab's, reflects the need to go beyond the common forms and structures of language to contemplate and express the complex reality he has experienced.
One index to Ishmael's sense that there is no exact correspondence between language and reality is his heavy use of the very word "nameless." Seventeen times he refers to things, people, or abstractions as "nameless"; once he uses "namelessly."7 Most frequently he is referring to the whale, whaling, or to Ahab.8 He opens Chapter 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale," tentatively, referring to "another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form" (p. 163). Fully aware of the difficulties, however, he says, "explain myself I must" and launches into one of the more speculative and metaphysical chapters of the book (p. 163)--and the only chapter in which he must use the word "nameless" three times. "Nameless" is but one of many negative words that begin to take on positive meaning, to be more than privative. Ahab asks what "nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing" drives him on, but instead of following out all the possibilities as Ishmael might, he quickly decides that he has no separate power, that God "does that thinking" and "Fate is the handspike" (pp. 444, 445). Using a related form with very different implications, Ahab tells the dying whale, "All thy unnamableimminglings float beneath me here" (p. 409).
Nameless though Ishmael finds many aspects of reality to be, none seems really unnamable. In an effort to communicate qualities that have no proper names but nonetheless exist for him, he sometimes resorts to two-part noun phrases such as "a certain wild vagueness of painfulness" and "a weariness and faintness of pondering" (pp. 77, 174). Each of these constructions creates a noun phrase, normally an agreed upon "something," of ambiguous, difficult to verbalize or even isolate, yet very real impressions. If Ishmael cannot quite define his perceptions, he will at least suggest them. Elsewhere he gives us alternatives. In the passage cited above, the whale's whiteness is "another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror" (p. 163). Speaking of the feeling he had about Ahab before seeing him, he says, "But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or uneasiness--to call it so--" which he felt, it was allayed when he considered the three mates (p. 109). Similarly, he shows scrupulous attention to Ahab; he describes how Ahab reacts to Stubb's whale, how "some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed working in him" (p. 248). No single word is adequate, so he gives us the words that he uses to approximate his feelings and perceptions. Ishmael uses language not only to communicate specific ideas, but to formulate those ideas and communicate his own thinking process; Ahab makes speeches.
Words with negating affixes abound in Moby-Dick,hinting all the time at the power and the reality of the negative, which is, of course, dramatically manifested in the whiteness of the whale.9 The presence and the terrific weight of Melville's negatives remind one of Shakespeare's examination in King Lear of the enormous meaning of "nothing" and of Donne's passionate analysis of nothing as absence or substance in "A Nocturnall upon St. Lucies Day." Many of the negative words in Moby-Dick are unusual if not deviant derivations, and the great majority of them are Ishmael's creations. I find at least seventy-two such formations, but after reading and rereading Moby-Dick, one's sense of what is and what is not deviant becomes somewhat undependable: "unceasingly," "incorruption," and "familyless" (pp. 170, 343, 402) seem rather less odd now than they might have earlier. Certainly they are not in the same category with "uneventfulness," "unnearable," and "uncatastrophied" (pp. 137, 201 and 304, 401). Some call attention to themselves because the root word in any of its derivations does not usually accept a negative affix, as with "unoutgrown," "unlimbed," "unloitering," "unnearable," and "unsupplied" (pp. 71, 160, 173, 201 and 304, 318). Others are peculiar because the negative affix is not generally found with that particular derived form of the root word, as with "undeliverable," "unsay," and "uninvitedly" (pp. 16, 26, 109). As these examples demonstrate, it is not necessarily the negative affix that makes the words unusual: "invitedly" would be just as aberrant as "uninvitedly" and "uninvited" is fully acceptable. But the negative words do constitute a special group among the larger set of words created by piling up unlikely affixes. When we entertain other ways of expressing these ideas, we appreciate more fully Melville's stylistic choices and the mentality he reveals in Ishmael. When Ishmael calls the spirit-spout and the Fin-Back's spout "unnearable," he asserts something about the spout itself, something that makes it all the more mysterious, a quality totally absent in a more conventional statement such as, "They were unable to come near the spouts" (pp. 201 and 304). Similarly, the Fin-Back is a "species of uncapturable whales" (p. 304). Ishmael's adjectives translate an inability in the agent into a positive, even magical quality in the object. Other negated words are significant for the way in which they simultaneously assert the negative and imply the positive, as when Ishmael speaks of the sailor's belief that no matter how often speared, the white whale's "unsullied jet" would again be seen in "unensanguined billows" (pp. 158-159). He suggests the doom that awaits the crew when he speaks of the blacksmith's "as yet uncatastrophied fifth act of the grief of this life's drama" (p. 401).
Negated verbs and nouns are the most curious of the negated forms. Ishmael is so disturbed by his landlord's stories about Queequeg that he begs him to "unsay that story about selling his head," as though it could be undone (p. 26). Ahab puts his typical reflexive twist on the same verb when he tells Starbuck that "what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself" (p. 144). Ishmael expresses a special appreciation of paradox when he asserts the substantive quality of negative concepts by creating negated nominals. Were Ishmael to say that the ship's carpenter was "unintelligent," he would not create the same impression he does when he says that "this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a sort of unintelligence" (p. 388). To be "unintelligent" is simply to be lacking mental power; "unintelligence" seems a radical quality in its own right, a sense amplified of course by Ishmael's indefinite modifiers and the other unusual abstract nominalization, "uncompromisedness." Ahab's "breezelessness" and Ishmael's "unbecomingness," "landlessness," "uneventfulness," "unfulfillments" and "passionlessness" can be seen as back-formations, nouns formed from adjectives (pp. 264, 33, 97, 137, 300, 411). But the most striking thing about these negative forms is that they do not have clear positive counterparts; these negatives have an existence all their own while "incorruption," for example, though it is somewhat odd, does not (p. 343). Since comprehending a negative construction seems to require first conceptualizing the positive and then going back and mentally negating that concept, these words present special problems. When we encounter "uneventfulness," since there is no word "eventfulness" in most lexicons, we must imagine that there is, establish what it would mean, and then negate it. This kind of negative in a sense presupposes the existence of its opposite; the negative in fact contains its contrary as it undoes its meaning. The fact that Ishmael calls the "uneventfulness" of the whaler's days "sublime" stretches our appreciation of the negative further still (p. 137). Equally provoking is his exclamation about the leviathan, "Oh! thatunfulfillments should follow the prophets" (p. 300). While "fulfillments" is deviant because of the plural affix which mass nouns do not accept, the negated form is doubly strange, suggesting that these abstract nonentities may have concrete, countable existences.10 Taken together, these constructions reflect a consciousness that blurs some of the distinctions between singular and plural, concrete and abstract, and positive and negative. Melville's vocabulary suggests that these distinctions may be imposed by the structure of language rather than by the structure of reality.
Such distinctions are further compromised when Ishmael negates words that are already semantically negative as he does with "unceasingly," "undecreasing," "unwaning," and "unenervated" (pp. 170, 294, 326 and 359, 435). Elizabeth ClossTraugott notes that while we can negate semantically positive adjectives, creating words like "ungood" or "unhappy," when we negate semantically negative adjectives, we get deviant results like "unsad" and "unfalse."11 Whether Ishmael's terms are technically deviant or not, they require a deliberate effort by the reader to negate an already negative concept. The "unceasingly advancing keel" seems to be working against greater forces than a "steadily advancing keel" would be (p. 170). More difficult to trace out is Ishmael's statement about the whalemenwho are not "as a body unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors" (p. 156). Ishmael's multilayered constructions that require such consideration suggest how much is not directly understandable, not neatly this or that. They suggest that there are indeed layers upon layers of meanings, each of which qualifies the others and all of which we must consider.
Melville adds to the layers of negation and required processing when he in turn negates such words. When Ishmael says that the Canaller in "The Town-Ho's Story" is "not unshunned in cities," he makes us wonder if he really means that he is shunned (p. 215). More baffling is Father Mapple's assertion that the sailors "not unreluctantly lay hold of Jonah," a phrase whose three layers of negatives make it very difficult to ascertain just what the sailors' attitude was, particularly since the term "unreluctantly" is new to us (p. 49). The difficulty the reader has is indicative of the difficulty Ishmael accepts as inherent in understanding reality and finding the words to express that understanding.
The most conspicuous and significant feature of Ishmael's language is his persistent negation of words that are already negative. When he negates words that are semantically negative, he creates phrases such as "not seldom," "not without," and "not a little" (pp. 260, 262, 110). Negating words that already contain the negative morpheme produces less familiar constructions such as "not unworthy," "not unpleasing," and, of course, "not unreluctantly" (pp. 71, 96, 49). Taken individually, some of those in the first group particularly seem to be simple examples of litotes: when Ishmael says the Malay pirates "by no means renounce their claim" to tribute, or when he says that "no small excitement was created among the sharks" by the dead whale, his negatives combine to emphasize the positive (pp. 318, 257). Other superficially similar expressions cannot be classified so easily, however. When Ishmael observes that the ladder to Father Mapples's pulpit "seemed by no means in bad taste," it is not entirely clear that he found it to be in good taste either (p. 42); there are extenuating circumstances, he seems to be saying, that prevent it from being in bad taste. The apparently simple dichotomy between "good" and "bad" is called into question; there must be a gray area, a middle ground, whether or not there is a name for it. At least forty-three times Ishmael combines a negating word with a semantically negative word; Ahab does this just once, as he reflects on the meaning to him of the dying whale: "Nor has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round again, without a lesson to me" (p. 409). Some of these expressions allow Ishmael to approach certain mysteries, as when he says of apparently illogical practices concerning the dead, "All these things are not without their meanings" (p. 41). This structure allows Ishmael to assert their meaningfulness without having to specify exactly what their meanings may be. In a more complicated sentence about the "unearthly conceit" that MobyDick was ubiquitous, he qualifies his statement, saying, "Nor, credulous as such minds must have been, was this conceit altogether without some faint show of superstitious probability" (p. 158). The rather oxymoronic phrase "superstitious probability" further attests to his willingness to consider this idea about the whale.