From Adam to Ahab
Genealogy in the Making of a Madman

There are many forces driving Ahab. While they have been energetically analysed for nearly a century, we still have not nearly mined them for all they are worth, nor even far exceeded Ishmael, who tells us this "would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go"("Moby Dick," p. 222) 'Adam,' with all its mythic-historical and theological connotations, is an influence that pervades the text and serves as the symbolic center for subsidiary forces at work in Moby-Dick. Melville develops this central image in several strongly related but seemingly disjointed passages. One reason for the separation of these passages may be the corresponding separation of his modes of being. The constellation of concepts signified by Adam takes root at every level of Ahab's existence ‹ physical, subconscious-emotional, and conscious-willful. The emerging perspective on the sources of Ahab's inexorable drive suggests that his "cruel, remorseless emperor" is not so mysterious and etherial as it might at first seem. 'Adam' provides a sort of skeleton-image of that which drives Ahab "against all natural lovings and longings, ... to do what [he] durst not so much as dare"(The Symphony, p. 605).
'Adam' has a two-fold meaning in Moby-Dick. Drawing on the Calvinist theological traditions of the Pequod's Nantucket point of departure, it invokes the concept of fallen man and his entrapment in the fleshy and physical world. In this sense, 'Adam' is closely connected with Ahab's own sense of place in the world ‹ "'Oh, oh, oh! how this splinter gores me now! Accursed fate! that the unconquerable captain in the soul should have such a craven mate!'"(The Chase, Second Day; p. 623). Ahab feels the full weight of the chains that bind him to the earth. Though he does not express that sense in Calvinist terms, he nonetheless recalls Calvinist doctrin with his experience. When he says, "Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I'm down in the whole world's books"(A. and the Carpenter; p. 527) ; when Ahab says this, he is not rebelling against Christianity, but in fact expressing its Calvinist formulation with rare intensity.
This leads to the second branch in the two-fold meaning of 'Adam.' When Ahab complains of being "down in the whole world's books," he is in effect cursing the fate that binds him to Adam, the "first man"(p. 270) and progenitor of "earth's primal generations," to which Fedallah, Ahab's shadow, is directly linked (more of that later). This branch of 'Adam' draws its significance from the anthropological importance of the concept of a "first man," and from the cultural practices that are presumed to have been his .
'Adam' is a constellation of theological and anthropological ideologies, both of which are crucial in determining the course of Ahab's mad quest. The theological and anthropological intersect at the problem of human subjection to the world. In Calvinist theology (as informed by Paul's letter to the Romans), Adam is responsible for our inability to escape sin and for our mortality. He bound us to the earth and the only way to escape is in the Last Judgement. Anthropology must concern itself with comparing the variety of solutions humans have had for a very limited and stark set of problems: we have always neeed and will always need food and warmth; to continue being, we must continue to obtain these. In the study of civilizations, anthropologists cannot avoid seeing the pain these problems inflict. Ahab only makes them more visible to us because his resistance to them occasions a profound elaboration of the condition they create.
As I have said, Ahab's quest is directed from three cruxial points by this two-fold Adam. At the physical level, Ahab refers to the phantom-sensation of his lost leg as "old Adam"(A. and the Carpenter; p. 526), lamenting the fact that the fashioning of a new leg cannot erase the shadow of that old one. In his subconscious lurks the entombed ruins of past generations down to Adam. Here, "far beneath the fantastic towers of man's upper [modern] earth, his root of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded state;" and from this "grim sire only will the old State-secret come"(Moby Dick; pp. 220-1). Here, perhaps, is the throne-room of that "cruel, remorseless emperor"(The Symphony; p. 605) commanding Ahab. Finally, Adam plays his part in Ahab's more conscious formulation of the quest: "[Ahab] piled upon the whale's white hump all the general hate and rage felt by his whole race from Adam down"(Moby Dick; p. 219). In all these ways, Ahab finds his course determined by the patterns of ages past.
Ahab comprehends that determinacy and, more importantly, understands it to have its origin in the history of human subjection to the world. There is certainly that in Ahab which resists the crazy purpose to which he and the traditions of suffering that date to pre-historic times have fixed him. He is in the paradoxical position of wanting on the one hand to be the champion of the sufferers of history and present against the oppressor, and on the other hand realizing that those sufferers of history are a key component of that oppressor. Melville makes this resistance clear soon after we first meet Ahab, in "The Chart":

[Ahab's] purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. [p. 237]

And as the final crisis nears, Ahab himself proclaims resistance, or at least laments his state:

What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? [p. 605]

Ahab knows his determined position all too well, and, with the interview between him and the carpenter in "Ahab and the Carpenter," we may begin to see the voyage not as a dismissably monomaniacal, but as a meaningful and (figuratively, if not literally) constructive response to that painful knowledge.
Though an event in Moby-Dick that receives little critical attention, Ahab's experience of the common phenomenon of the phantom limb is significant, particularly in the present discussion of Ahab's relationship with history:

"Look ye, carpenter, I dare say thou callest thyself a right good workmanlike workman, eh? Well, then, will it speak thoroughly well for thy work, if, when I come to mount this leg thou makest, I shall nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical place with it; that is, carpenter, my old lost leg; the flesh and blood one, I mean. Canst thou not drive that old Adam away?" [A. and the Carpenter; p. 526]

With this word 'Adam,' Ahab forces an interpretation that goes below the literal layer. This passage evokes the image of the quest trying to stand on its own leg, created from the very ivory it hunts, but haunted by the shadow, Adam-leg of Ahab's imagining. The most important physical circumstance in the book ‹ the apparent absence of Ahab's old leg and the presence of some generations of newly-made legs ‹ becomes complicated by the mysterious persistance of what we suspected was totally annihilated. Ahab's leg(s) are both the physical cause of the voyage and Ahab's means for prosecuting it. Since the cause and means of the voyage are implicated by this reference to Adam, so too is the voyage itself.
This thread may be followed much farther if we are willing to follow its hidden windings through seldom-read passages. This requires interpreting the concluding reference to Adam (above) at the figurative level, just as Ahab himself interprets even the most routine objects in his world at the figurative level (witness "The Doubloon"). Ahab's lost leg may be taken for the symbol of past generations, the physical manifestation of his genealogy. He would like to construct present reality totally independent of what has gone before it; he would like to walk on legs whose design he himself has ordered, unencumbered by the shadow of the old and not endebted to it. He would drive away all trace of Adam.
In "Leg and Arm ‹ the Pequod Meets the Samuel Enderby," Melville establishes the image of the whale as preserver of corpses and parts of corpses ‹ a kind of coffin . Anticipating Ahab's metaphorical struggle with the extention of history's influence into the present in "Ahab and the Carpenter," Melville earlier establishes the persistence even of that which is consumed and seems to be long gone:

"Well, then," interrupted Bunger, "give him your left arm for bait to get the right. Do you know, gentlemen" ‹ very gravely and mathematically bowing to each Captain in succession ‹ "Do you know, gentlemen, that the digestive organs of the whale are so inscrutably constructed by Divine Providence, that it is quite impossible for him to completely digest even a man's arm? And he knows it too. So that what you take for the White Whale's malice is only his awkwardness. For he never means to swallow a single limb; he only thinks to terrify by feints. But sometimes he is like the old juggling fellow, formerly a patient of mine in Ceylon, that making believe swallow jack-knives, once upon a time let one drop into him in good earnest, and there it stayed for a twelvemonth or more; when I gave him an emetic, and he heaved it up in small tacks, d'ye see. No possible way for him to digest that jack-knife, and fully incorporate it into his general bodily system. Yes, Captain Boomer, if you are quick enough about it, and have a mind to pawn one arm for the sake of the privilege of giving decent burial to the other, why in that case the arm is yours; only let the whale have another chance at you shortly, that's all." [p. 494-5]

Thus, as we consider the scene with the carpenter, we must keep in mind that Ahab's leg is quite possibly still posing problems for Moby Dick, who cannot "fully incorporate it into his general bodily system." Beneath a layer of humor in this passage lies a displaced moment in the continuing establishment of 'Adam's' dominance over Ahab. Bunger's remarks are the key to our understanding of Ahab's relationship with his leg (artificial and lost and phantom), and through the leg we can gain a glimpse at Melville's conception of 'Adam' itself.
Just as Bunger suggests a continued hunt as the way to obtain a funeral for the devoured arm of Captain Boomer, Ahab sees Moby-Dick's destruction as a way to eliminate the persisting presence of his old leg, his "cruel, remorseless" Adam. In the figure of Moby-Dick, the inscrutable mysteries of the world have not annihilated but rather stolen and hidden from Ahab the presence of his genealogical determinant. In this sense, it is not the loss of the leg that bothers Ahab, but rather its phantom persistance on his own person, and the corresponding thought of its existence 'out there' in the physical world, in Moby-Dick's digestive organs. Ahab seeks not only some mad revenge, but also wants a proper closure to the violence that severed his limb. Insofar as he accepts the loss, he strives to make that loss complete. He strives to sever himself completely from all trace of the old leg.
In this unobtainable desire for closure or "proper burial" Ahab has company. In "The Chapel," Ishmael describes the position of friends and family of lost whalemen:

A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. [p. 60]

...I feel sure that here before me were assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh.
Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say ‹ here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave. As well might those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here. [p. 62]

Ahab's sense of incommunicability and remorselessness of sorrow and desire for isolation has a similar source in the unceasing presence of what is lost and the Promethean reopening of old wounds. Like the "bleak tablets," Ahab's phantom limb is a constant reminder of what is lost; it will not allow him to forget. And if he cannot deny or overcome the loss through some sort of rebellion against gods, neither can he obey gods or God in hope of resurrection, for like the "placelessly perished" sailors above, his leg is as ubiquitous or as placeless as is Moby Dick who carries it.
Within this space that allows nowhere to go, Ahab nonetheless has the impulse to take the resurrection upon himself, to craft a new leg according to his own specifications, free from any debt to god or man. By self-generation, by severing all ties to genealogy and gods (anthropological and theological Adam), he wants to escape the earth that Adam bound him to. His failure to get beyond the effects of the world through the construction of another new leg only prompts him to consider still more ambitious dreams and projects. After inspecting the blacksmith's work on the hardware for his new leg, Ahab fantasizes:
"Hold; while Prometheus [the ship's carpenter] is about it, I'll order a complete man after a desireable pattern. Imprimis, fifty feet high in his socks; then, chest modelled after the Thames Tunnel; then, legs with roots to 'em, to stay in one place; then, arms three feet through the wrist; no heart at all, brass forehead, and about a quarter of an acre of fine brains; and let me see ‹ shall I order eyes to see outwards? No, but put a sky-light on top of his head to illuminate inwards. There, take the order, and away." [A. and the Carpenter; p. 525]

There are two levels here at which Ahab imagines an ideal form for humanity, which has suffered in its present form. By elevating a good ship's carpenter and craftsman to the title of Prometheus, and himself to a hight from which he can give orders to that demi-god, Ahab forms the example of man as god. He would have us be powerful enough to revise the physical situation of our being in the world. At the more obvious level, he would exercise this power, remaking humanity to be inherently more isolated from the world. Heartless and frowning like Ahab himself, with a brass forehead or "an iron brow"(p. 531), and endowed with superior intellect ‹ "acres of brains" ‹ but no outward-looking capacity (neither eyes to see nor heart to feel with), Ahab's man would have less connection with the world, less to respond to outside his own self, and thus would contemplate his being solipsistically, by the light of the "sky-light on top of his head" that illuminates only inwards. Ahab says he would "dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra. So"(p. 527). In striving to free himself from 'Adam,' Ahab also perpetuates his condition of "grief" that is "insular and incommunicable."
[transition]
In his chapter on "The Matching of the Forces," Matthiessen identifies the Hotel de Cluny rightly as the locus of Ahab's deep-seated, "primitive human drives far beyond the scope of the cultivated mind"(AR p. 438). However, his argument could not afford it the attention I wish to give it. With this Hotel-mountain of massively-layered cultural tradition, Melville signifies the palpable source of Ahab's (natural drive, urge--find the exact terms Mvll uses). This is his genealogy:
...yet Ahab's larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted. But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound. Winding far down from within the very heart of this spiked Hotel de Cluny where we here stand ‹ however grand and wonderful, now quit it; ‹ and take your way, ye nobler, sadder souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes; where far beneath the fantastic towers of man's upper earth, his root of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded state; and antique buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes! So with a broken throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder souls! question that proud, sad king! A family likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young exiled royalties; and from your grim sire only will the old State-secret come. [p. 220-1]

There is no question that Ahab may be counted among these "prouder, sadder souls" who seek the "State-secret" in the remains of the past. This "proud, sad king" is Ahab's father. Ahab's burdened brow, pride and sadness are first "a family likeness" and then revealed to be inherited directly. Yet this is a realm of contending authorities, where Ahab (and now us as well) is a "young, exiled royalty" pitted against his "grim sire" who holds "the old State-secret." Despite this Secret, however, "the great gods mock that captive king": beneath this "grim sire," for all his fundamentality, there lies an even deeper truth.
The attributes of this king bear a remarkable resemblance to those of the fire-god Ahab defyingly worships in "The Candles":

"Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till...so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar: I now know thee...and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. ...I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whenceso'er I came; whereso'er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. ...Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.
...Oh, oh! Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though thou be, thou leapest out of darkness; but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! The javelins cease; open eyes; see, or not? There burn the flames! Oh, thou magnanimous! now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel! what hast thou done with her? There lies my puzzle; but thine is greater. Thou knowest not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten; certainly knowest not thy beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with haughty agony, I read my sire. ...defyingly I worship thee!" [pp. 563-4]

The powerful figure in this passage is most closely tied to the king beneath the Hotel de Cluny by their common situations of power. This fire-god is "omnipotent," yet is but the "clear spirit" that shrouds over "some unsuffusing thing beyond." It has a "speechless, placeless power" and Ahab must "dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery," he says, to the "last gasp of my earthquake life." This is a power being challenged.
Its power also derives from some sort of royal title that implicitly plays against what Ahab feels to be his "queenly personality" and "royal rights." Ahab is striving to posit a traditional system of law to ground his assertion that "In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here." He is finding a footing for his needed humanist dignity before gods. It is interesting, then, that he did not choose the metaphor of king here. This can only be because the place is, or feels, occupied. To assume that role would be an impossible usurpation of the ultimate authority that both king and fire-god signify.
Ahab elaborates the power-relationship when he uses the discourse of genealogy. He uses the word himself ("now I do glory in my genealogy!"), and immediately goes on to call the fire-god "fiery father," and ask it "what hast thou done" with "my sweet mother"? The fire-god is "light" that "leapest out of darkness." Ahab says he is "darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee!"
The passage on the Hotel de Cluny and the passage on the fire-god treat of the same place of power and influence. Their sameness is along lines of discourses of political power and genealogy. In each, the power-dynamic is oppositional, and Ahab seeks to make it an even match, to become equal. In the Hotel de Cluny, Ahab has the position of a "young, exiled royalty," implying the attempt on his part of becoming king even while his father is still king. In "The Candles," Ahab quite obviously sets himself in opposition by his use of the word "defiance." Though that word implies a hierarchy of power in which he is lower, within the same passage Ahab strives to reduce the fire-god by indicating the limitations of his "placeless power": the "omnipotent" does not even know its own origin, nor its own beginning. And just as in the first citation, the "great gods mock the captive king," in the second one "there is some unsuffusing thing beyond...to whom all thy eternity is but time, all thy creativeness mechanical." In both instances there is a layer beyond the god-king that serves to mitigate its otherwise total power. Genealogically, the powerful figure is father in both passages, and in both the mother is strangely absent or unknown. The "State-secret" that the father-king in the Hotel de Cluny held becoms an "incommunicable riddle" or "unparticipated grief" in "The Candles." Ahab's interview with the fire-god is a conscious confrontation with the "grim sire" that is always working on him, if often subconsciously.
Fedallah is representative of the figure common to both of the above citations, and even embodies some of the same links between them to which I have pointed. If Matthiessen gives little attention to the passage on the Hotel de Cluny, he is thorough in tracing the role of Fedallah in historical terms as well as in terms of his associations within the text of Moby-Dick. From the beginning, Ishmael describes Fedallah as a sort of phantom, and he "remained a muffled mystery to the last"(A.'s Boat and Crew; p. 270).
His relationship with Ahab falls neatly along the lines of a genealogical influence like that of the Hotel de Cluny put in present-tense, interpersonal terms. "Whence he came in a mannerly world like this, by what sort of unaccountable tie he soon evinced himself to be linked with Ahab's peculiar fortunes; nay, so far as to have some sort of a half-hinted influence; Heaven knows, but it might have been even authority over him; all this none knew." He is placed in contrast with "these modern days," being of a culture whose
immemorial, unalterable countries ... still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth's primal generations, when the memory of the first man [Adam] was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as real phantoms, and asked the sun and the moon why they were created and to what end..." [A.'s Boat and Crew; p.270]

Coming from "earth's primal generations," Fedallah is closely associated with the patient king who waits beneath the Hotel de Cluny. He is but another angle from which 'Adam' comes to bear on Ahab's thought and action. And though this angle tends toward the vocabulary of mystery and ethereality, it likewise highlights the realist biographical elements in Moby-Dick that go to substantiate Ahab's genealogy. In "The Candles," Ahab lets slip the previously hidden origin of his striking, full-body scar:
[T]hou 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...

Ahab's biography is intimately bound with the Parsee and his ancient tradition. Through Fedallah, his fire-worship becomes a reaching back to Adam, the "first man" for whom the worship of "the sun and moon" was initiated. Similarly, the ignorance of "whence he came" here recalls the "unbegotten" and "unbegun" of Ahab's fire-god. Fedallah is Ahab's direct biographical link to the traditions of "primal generations."
There are many forces acting on Ahab. Because he is buried beneath the Hotel de Cluny, 'Adam' is not among the most obvious of these. Yet it is one of the most important, encompassing as it does so many structurally disparate elements in Moby-Dick. Without 'Adam' one would not think that Ahab's interview with the fire-god has anything to do with his interview with the carpenter. It is 'Adam' as a question of origins that leads Ahab from the physical pain and grounded suffering of a "dismasted" captain to the mental anguish and god-challenging questions of a monomaniac. In the attempt to get beyond 'Adam,' Ahab becomes mad, but also gives us new insight into the essence of our mythologies of origin.