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The Little Lower Layer: Anxiety and the Courage to be in Moby-Dick
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
Extract
In his foundational work on the problems of anxiety and self-affirmation, The Courage to Be, Paul Tillich refers to the twentieth century as an age of anxiety. He describes the century as an era in which humankind has become deeply and disturbingly aware of the threats of meaninglessness and spiritual nonbeing. This anxiety, Tillich asserts, has become a central theme for modern artists and writers, whose works have frequently depicted humankind and society as teetering on the brink of an ontological and spiritual abyss. As Tillich was aware, however, the concept of anxiety did not magically appear in literature in the year 1900. Although Tillich considers the anxiety of meaninglessness to be paramount in the present day, he gives extensive treatment to other anxieties (for example, the anxieties of guilt and death) that deeply concerned writers in earlier times. Tillich mentions T. S. Eliot, Camus, and Sartre, but he also hails Flaubert and Dostoyevsky as explorers of the “deserts and jungles of the human soul.” Another nineteenth-century novelist, who should not have passed without notice, escaped Tillich's attention: Herman Melville.
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- Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1988
References
1 Tillich, Paul, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952) 35.Google Scholar
2 Ibid., 143.
3 Ibid., 137.
4 Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick; or, The whale (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964).Google Scholar All page numbers appearing in parentheses refer to this edition.
5 M, Raymond. Weaver, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic (New York: Doran, 1921) 320.Google Scholar
6 Tillich, Courage to Be, 35.
7 Ibid., 36.
8 Ibid., 89. See also generally 86–112.
9 Ibid., 39. See also generally 32–39.
10 Ibid., 155–56.
11 Ibid., 163.
12 Ibid., 166.
13 Miller, Edwin Haviland, Melville (New York: Braziller, 1975) 193.Google Scholar
14 Tillich, Courage to Be, 125.
15 Ibid., 124–25.
16 Ibid., 157.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 36ff.
19 Ibid., 39.
20 Chase, Richard, “Melville and Moby-Dick,” in Herman Melville: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962) 57.Google Scholar
21 By having Ahab give full vent to the “hell within himself,” Melville may have been using his hero to assail romantic philosophers and writers like Schopenhauer and E. T. A. Hoffman, who espoused what Tillich calls demonic realism. The demonic realists suggested that the evil aspect of the human spirit is not wholly negative but rather forms a part of the creative power of being. They believed, according to Tillich, that the courage to affirm oneself must include the courage to affirm one's own demonic depth. The notion that one should affirm the satanic as a means to creativity, however, cuts radically against the Protestant mainstream. Melville, the child of a Calvinist home, must have been disturbed by demonic realism, and Ahab may have been his challenge to it. When Ahab is not trying to destroy his “larger, darker, deeper part” by killing Moby-Dick, he violently affirms this darkness through satanic rituals and wild ravings. But his affirmation is far from creative. When Ahab affirms his demonic depth, his affirms madness and destruction. He affirms into a bottomless vortex.
22 A fascinating comparison may be made between Ahab's demise and another spectacular literary suicide, that of Kirilov in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed. Kirilov kills himself specifically in order to exercise his free will. A few moments before putting a bullet in his brain, Kirilov makes the following statement of purpose: “If there's no God, then I'm God. … If God exists, then the whole world is His and I can do nothing. If He doesn't exist, then all will is mine and I must exercise my own will, my free will. … For three years I've searched for the attribute of my divinity and I've found it—my free will! This is all I have … to show my independence and the terrifying new freedom I have gained. Because this freedom is terrifying all right, I'm killing myself to demonstrate my independence and my new, terrifying freedom” (Dostoyevksy, Fyodor, The Possessed [trans. MacAndrew, Andrew; New York: New American Library, 1960] 635–38).Google Scholar Like Kirilov, Ahab also aspires to assert his will above all others, to supplant God (the difference being that Ahab believes in God, if only as an enemy to challenge, whereas the atheist Kirilov sees himself as filling the void left by the absence of God). Like Kirilov, Ahab seeks to perform the act most emblematic of the power of will. For both Ahab and Kirilov, the ultimate expression of will lies paradoxically in the extinguishing of the will.
23 Of course, Melville was not the first American writer to appreciate the anxiety of trying to reconcile the quest for worldly wealth with the pursuit of salvation. The desire to resolve the tension between secular and saintly aspirations was present from the earliest days of Puritan New England. In his deeply perceptive book, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978)Google Scholar, Professor Sacvan Bercovitch details the efforts of the Puritans to create a New Canaan in which the wheels of fortune and grace would revolve in harmony. Bercovitch observes that the Puritan culture adopted a liminal state, forever oscillating between the temptations of society and the demands of faith. In effect, the Puritans sought to prevent the individualistic excesses of both antinomianism and self-interest by establishing liminality as a social norm. Liminality is itself an anxiety-producing state, but it struck the Puritans as preferable to a self-indulgent extremism. Melville's own greatest attempt to bring the demands of the physical and spiritual world into synchronicity would come a year after the publication of Moby-Dick. In Pierre, or The ambiguities, Melville includes a brief discourse entitled “Chronometricals and Horologicals” in which he endeavors to demonstrate that the truths of the world and the truths of heaven “by their very contradictions are made to correspond.” Starbuck, however, is ultimately unable to make his peace with both God and Ahab. When the demands of the two diverge too greatly, they tear Starbuck apart.
24 Tillich, Courage to Be, 121.
25 Ibid., 172.
26 Ibid., 173.
27 See generally Ibid., 163–67.
28 Ibid., 172.
29 Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, 23.
30 Ibid.
31 Tillich, Courage to Be, 163–67.
32 Perhaps the ultimate example of this form of guilt was the guilt experienced by the reformers who first challenged the dominance of the Catholic Church. See Tillich, Courage to Be, 60–61.
33 Tillich, Courage to Be, 168–69.
34 Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, 191.
35 See in particular Tillich's discussion of Martin Luther in Courage to Be, 170–71.