It is extraordinarily difficult to write a tragedy; in fact, very few completely satisfactory tragedies have ever been written. The Scarlet Letter is not the least in that small number. We pity the minister as he struggles to confess; when he finally succeeds it is almost as if we too have been able to confess. When he dies of his confession, a willing sacrifice, we are able to live.
Unfortunately, Hawthorne doesn’t appear to have benefited as much as we may from his story. His frightful loneliness was not dissipated by his considerable fame as a writer, by his friendship with a president, by his travels abroad. He died in 1864; Ralph Waldo Emerson was present at the funeral and wrote in his journaclass="underline" “Yesterday, May 23, we buried Hawthorne in Sleepy Hollow, in a pomp of sunshine and verdure and gentle winds … I thought there was a tragic element in the event—in the painful solitude of the man, which, I suppose, could not longer be endured, and he died of it.”
The Scarlet Letter is a very short book, but even so it is not necessary to read all of it, at least the first time through. Hawthorne was anxious about its reception; at the last moment he therefore composed a long, rambling introductory chapter—“The CustomsHouse”—that most readers should simply skip, or at least skim. Scholars and high school English teachers will dispute this advice, because “The Customs-House” is full of puzzling details that require explanations. Whenever a scholar can explain a detail he leaps at the chance, because that allows him a little longer to delay facing up to a home truth. But if you, like me, prefer home truths, then turn to Chapter 1, “The Prison Door,” and begin to read.
HERMAN MELVILLE
1819–1891
Moby Dick
The best books begin well. Moby Dick begins like this:
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato threw himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
I deny the major premise: I don’t think most men cherish those feelings about the sea. Certainly I do not. And certainly it would never occur to me, no matter how far down in the dumps I was, to go on a three-year whaling voyage. But I do know about the dumps, when it is “damp, drizzly November in the soul,” and then I, like Melville, like his hero Ishmael, want to get away, to do something very strange and different from anything I have ever done before. Maybe even to search out and challenge Moby Dick, the great white whale.
The great White Whale, I should say, with capital letters, for surely this beast is more than a beast, more than a mere fish, as the whalers call him, and instead is a symbol of evil, or good, or the unconscious, or God—it doesn’t matter what, exactly, as long as we recognize that it is something immense and important to the life and mind of mankind.
For Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, out of New Bedford, Moby Dick is the symbol of all the evil in the world, the symbol of the terrible fact that there is evil in the world, that God has made the world imperfect, the why of which is indeed the central question of theology, not alone for Ahab. For Melville the White Whale is something different, which he cannot quite say, but which he allows his protagonist Ishmael to muse and speculate upon in the profound and moving chapter, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” Here Melville attempts to solve “the incantation of this whiteness,” and to learn “why it appeals with such power to the soul.”
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the Milky Way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like willful travelers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?
And wonder ye then that Melville wrote to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, after Moby Dick was finished: “I have written a wicked book, and I feel spotless as the lamb”? He had driven out all the damp, drizzly November thoughts from his soul, asked all the most daring, most blasphemous questions, and felt himself shrived and pure. Such is the role of art in a few great breasts; it serves some as the sea serves others.
Moby Dick contains a lot of metaphysics, but it is far from being nothing but metaphysics, and in fact it is also one of the best adventure yarns. Born in 1819, Herman Melville had served on a whaling ship and had spent four years (1841-44) knocking about the South Seas, the experiences of which time gave him the inspiration for half a dozen novels, of which Moby Dick was the best (but the others—Typee, Omoo, Mardi—were good, too). Moby Dick is full of lore; when you have finished it you will know what can be known about whaling, whale ships, and the South Seas, short of going there and spending years in a wooden ship searching for whales, which of course is no longer possible. The book is also full of psychological insights about men and sailors, and it contains unforgettable characters: Father Mapple, and his wonderful sermon—one of the great sermons in literature; Queequeg, the heathen harpooner; Starbuck, the faithful first mate who attempts to bring back his captain to a sense of his human responsibilities; the captain of the Rachel, the symbol of human kindness, who saves what little can be saved from the wreck of the Pequod; Ishmael; and Captain Ahab, than whom there is possibly no more tragic hero in fiction (his equals exist, but they are not many).