MAN AGAINST NATUREi MOBY DICK AND "THE BEAR'

by
CHARLES W, HUGHES, B.A., M.A.

A DISSERTATION
IN
ENGLISH

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty

of Texas Tech University in
Partial Fulfillment of
the Requirements for
the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Approved

Accepted

August, 1971
 73
V'?!

Jj. ^J

^op

Copyright by
CHARLES W. HUGHES
1971
 ACKNO\;LEDGMENTS

I am grateful to all the members of my advisory com-

mittee for the encouragement and helpful criticisms they
provided me in the preparation of this dissertation. I
particularly appreciate the help of the chairman of my
committee. Dr. Everett Gillis, who read the manuscript
closely and made many valuable suggestions for its improve-
ment. I am also indebted to Dr. J. T. McCullen who nro-
posed needed changes and who gave unselfishly of his time.

ii
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii
I. INTRODUCTION 1
II. AldERICAN ATTITUDES TOWARD NATURE 29
III. MELVILLE'S DEEPENING CONCEPT OF NATURE 54
IV. NATURE THEME IN MOBY DICK 64
V. I>1ELVILLE AND FAULKNER 86
VI. NATURE THEI4E IN "THE BEAR" 102
VII. MOBY DICK AND "THE BEAR" 126
BIBLIOGRAPHY 147

iii
 CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The two greatest hunting stories in American Litera-

ture, Herman Melville's Moby Dick and William Faulkner's
"The Dear," written not quite a hundred years apart, reveal
two different stages in man's struggle against nature in
the New VJorld. Although v/hen Melville wrote and published
his great whaling epic at the middle of the nineteenth
century much of the mystery and terror of the North American
continent had been neutralized by the restless probings of a
rapidly increasing population, still there remained many
challenging and awesome stretches of unexplored and untamed
land v/estward. And the sea, Melville's chosen element, was
undiminished in its pristine terror, grandeur, and power.
The mystery of the watery tv/o-thirds of the globe still
possessed its primeval profundity and supplied Melville a
material counterpart for his own prolific and probing imagi-
nation. Though on land, man may have won a few skirmishes
against portions of the wilderness and against a few species
here and there, nature still ruled supreme on earth, a Gul-
liver assailed by a seemingly ineffectual but ominously
growing band of Lilliputians,

In the relatively short span of about ninety years.

however, the balance of power shifted. By 1942, when Faulk-
ner published the final version of "The Bear" in his collec-
tion of interrelated but independent stories entitled Go
Down, Moses, the New England whaling industry, which Melville
had seen as the incarnation of man's eternal struggle with
nature, had long since vanished, and on the North American
continent the subjugation of nature was virtually complete.
The passenger pigeon was extinct; the American bison were
nearly soi and many otlier species were threatened: the eco-
logical balance of the continent which had obtained since
primeval times had been irremedicibly shattered, and the
ancient inhabitants of the land, including the American
Indians, had been destroyed or put to rout by the white
man's greed, technology, and exploding population. Nature's
doom in the United States is nowhere better depicted than in
Faulkner's story of the destruction of Old Ben, the giant,
man-maimed bear of Mississippi and of the wilderness which
he inhabited.

The thesis of this study is that Melville's great White

Whale and Faulkner's grizzled old reel-footed bear are sym-
bols and that, whatever else they may symbolize, they both,
as various critics have pointed out, are symbols for nature.
Once this proposition is accepted, man's changed attitude
towards nature as reflected in these two works becomes clean
Moby Dick is immortal; but Old Ben, the giant bear of the
Yoknapatawpha wilderness, is mortal. What had seemed incon-
ceivable to many at the middle of the nineteenth century be-
came an inescapable fact by the middle of the twentiethi
With his increased numbers and technological power, man does
indeed have the capacity to destroy nature. My purpose in
pursuing this thesis will be not so much to offer new read-
ings of these two American hunting stories as to employ what
are considered central and fundamental interpretations in
order to exaonine the contrasting attitudes toward nature
which are revealed in the two stories and to relate those
attitudes to the periods in which the authors lived. But
before the larger purpose can be explored, the foregoing
thesis statement must be expanded upon for two reasons;
first, the term "nature" is much too vague and general and
requires some definition if a comparison of the two stories
is to be meaningful; second, while there are many similari-
ties between Faulkner's bear and Melville's whaleboth are
old, battle-scarred, man-hunted giants of their species
supposedly possessed of supernatural powersand while they
both in part symbolize wild nature, they are, nevertheless,
symbols for different complexes of values.
It is presumptuous to claim that man can in fact de-
stroy nature per se. It may be true, as someone has said,
that if man could reach out and touch the stars he would
have torn them down eons ago. But the stars, like much else
in nature, are beyond his grasp. But the stars are part of
cosmic nature, the Aristotelian or Spinozan Metaphysic that
nature is everything man perceives through his sensesthe
All. Nor can man in reality destroy terrestrial nature.
Man can spread out over the surface of the earth; he can
displace and destroy those creatures which compete with him
insofar as they are visible and accessible; he can rupture
the delicate ecological web of life from which he himself
has sprung, and whose importance he understands not in the
least; yet terrestrial nature is nonetheless far too tena-
cious, adaptable, and pervasive ever to be destroyed by man-
witness his long war against insects, not one species of
which has been eliminated. That realm of nature which is
essentially vulnerable to civilization is wild nature, the
primordial balance which existed prior to the incursions of
civilized man.

Wild nature is one of sixty different meanings of the

word "Nature" presented by Professor A. O. Lovejoy in his
essay "'Nature' as Aesthetic Norm." Meaning A.5 he defines
as follows: "'Nature' as antithetic to man and his works;
the part of empirical reality which has not been transformed
(or corrupted) by human art; hence, the out-of-doors,
'Natural' sights and sounds." But since native inhabitants

1 _
A. O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of ideas (New
York; George Braziller Inc., 1955) , p. 71.
lived in the New World for untold generations before the
coming of the white man, we must in order to discuss the im-
pact of Western Civilization on the New World, expand Love-
joy's definition to include the American Indian. We know
that the concept "man and nature" is comparatively recent;
whereas that of "man iji nature" was, for several million
2
years, the prevailing condition on earth. Raymond Cowles,

in fact, makes the point that, at least in Africa, primitive

man is an essential element for a natural environment. "In
some South African preserves," he says, "removal of the
natives from among other animals has probeibly also meant the
loss of one of the most influential ecological elements and
may explain . . (adverse] ecological changes." Against

this background Lovejoy's definition of wild nature may be

modified as follows; "'Nature' as antithetic to civilized
man--particularly v;estern, scientific, Christian manand
his works; the part of empirical reality v/hich has not been
transformed (or corrupted) by civilized man's art; hence,
the out-of-doors, 'Natural' sights and sounds,"

P. V. Tobias, Olduvai Gorge, Vol. 2, ed. by Dr. L. S. B,

Leakey (Ceimbridge; At the University Press, 1967), p. 242.
Dr. Leakey's anthropological findings in Olduvai Gorge in
East Africa have shattered earlier conceptions of the antiq-
uity of man.

Raymond B. Cowles, Zulu Journal; Field Notes of A

Naturalist in South Africa (iTerkcley; University of^^aTi-
fornia Press, 195^), pp. 244-45.
 The comprehensive scientific genius Von Humboldt re-
marked over a century ago that "It is only within the ani-
mated circles of organic structure that we feel ourselves
peculiarly at home. Thus whenever the earth unfolds her
fruits and flowers, and gives food to countless tribes of
animals, there the image of nature impresses itself most
vividly upon our senses." it is, ironically, this Adamic
vision of nature which is most vulnerable to man's assaults.
Celestial nature is immune, and, basically, largely alien to
roan--as the narrator of Stephen Crane's story "The Open
Boat" realizes v;hen he looks to heaven for salvation from
the menacing sea and is answered only by the cold, remote,
indifferent blinking of the stars.

Still our definitions of nature can be only provisional.

For nature in Mobv Dick is not the same as it is in "The
Bear." Faulkner's concern is with the land, specifically
the vanishing wilderness areas; Melville's concern is with
the sea. Although the events in "The Bear" take place in
the 1870's and 80's, Faulkner writes from the perspective of
the 1930's, forty or fifty years after the closing of the
American frontier. He is able to view clearly the passing
of an era and is concerned with what we as a nation have

^Alexander Von Humboldt, Cosmos; A Sketch of a Physi-

cal Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 ""(London: Ge'orge"""
!3eTl and Sons, l^TTl) , p, 65.
lost; namely the tribal and totemistic mystique of the wild-
erness. On the other hand, Melville's attitude toward wild
nature is representative of mid-nineteenth century America,
of a period when the land still abounded in untouched re-
sources and the sea itself rolled on as it had since the
creation.
Nonetheless, crucial to both author's concepts of nature
are three theories of history, elements of which are to be
found in the writings of both men: The first of these is the
cyclic theory of history; the second is the idea of progress;
and the third is the concept of the Fall, The Bible, a per-
vasive and powerful influence in both stories, provides, in
Ecclesiastes' "fine hammered steel of woe" the definitive
statement of the cyclic theory of history; "One generation
passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth
abideth for ever. . . . The thing that hath been, it is that
which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall
be done; and there is no nev/ thing under the sun. Is there
any thing whereof it may be said. See, this is nev;? It hath
been already of old tir.e, v/hich v;as before us" (1;4, 9-10).
Melville was obviously not unaware that there were new
things under the sun, the New England v/haling industry for
example, whose history he traces in Moby Dick; but such
things were only apparently new. After describing the pov/er
and malice of the sperm v/hale in Moby Dick, Melville notes
 8
that "these marvels (like all marvels) are mere repetitions
of the ages; so that for the millionth time we say amen with
5
SolomonVerily there is nothing new under the sun." Man
has always hunted nature's creatures, and the New England
whaling industry was simply an ancient practice carried out
in a new fashion. It is thus merely superficial fashion,
not the underlying reality, that changes. As Babbalanja,
Melville's philosophical mouthpiece in Mardi, explains;
"Nothing changes, though much be new-fashioned: new fash-
ions but revivals of things previous. In the books of the
past we learn naught but of the present; in those of the
6
present, the past."
The cyclic theory of history, whose existence spans a
period at least from the ancients (Herodotus and Lucretius)
to the twentieth century (Spengler and Toynbee), has drawn
its cogency, not only from the myriad cultures which have
risen, flourished for a time, then returned to oblivion, but
from the cycles of nature as well. The more man learns of
the physical universe, the more the cyclic theory comes into

^Herman Melville, Moby Dicjc o, The VHiale, ed. V7ith

introduction by Alfred KazinTiioston: xlougnton Mifflin
Company, Riverside Edition, 19 56), p. 174. Hereafter page
numbers from this edition will be cited in the text.

^Herman Melville, Mardi and a Voyaae Thither (New York:

Capricorn Books, 1964), p. SltH
play. Not only are the seasons subject to cyclical laws^
but so, it seems, are such things as earthquakes, moonquakes,
solar radiation, and all living organisms. There are, un-
questionaJaly, in the universe, "wheels within wheels" and
man is subject to their influences. Yet it is much easier
to understand why Oswald Spengler in the disillusioning
milieu of pre-World War I Germany would deny progress and
subscribe to the cyclic theory of history than it is to
understand why, in the heady, optimistic expansionist years
of our country's history, Melville did.

Although the universal wave of exhiliration which began

with the discovery of the New World did not crest until three
2md a half centuries later, there was no doubt, once Columbus'
three frail ships began gingerly touching the islands of the
Carribean, that there was indeed something new under the sun,
new, not only for the inhabitants of Europe, but for the
inhcibitants of the Americas as well. With the opening of
the Western Hemisphere, not only geographical, but commercial,
cultural, and scientific horizons began to expand, slowly at
first, then ever more rapidly; and this expansion was termed
progress, and it was held to be, indeed, new. The productive
ferment in Europe, aptly named the Renaissance, if not pre-
cipitated by the opening of the New World, was certainly
stimulated by it. Yet though momentarily upstaged by the
wonders of the New V7orld, and by the concept of progress,
 10
the cyclic theory of history was by no means finished. With
the restoration of Charles II to the English throne in 1660
this classical concept of man and history was given new
life. The Neoclassical era of eighteenth-century England,
no doubt partly a reaction against the fervor of the Renais-
sance, returned to the cyclic theory of history, to an em-
phasis upon reason, order, and rules. And it was not until
the full-blo\7n emergence of the Romantic movement at the end
of the century that the idea of progress burst brightly into
flcune again.

The Romantic poets were followed by philosophers and

social theorists, such as Hegel, Marx, and Engels, who pro-
vided theoretical bases for the idea of progress in their
dialectical theories of history. Although Goethe had an-
ticipated the theory of evolution as early as 18 32 in Part 2
of Faust, it was not until 1859 that a cogent theoretical
premise was provided for biological evolution by Charles
Darwin in Origin of Soecies, This germinal work had great
impact, not only upon biological sciences, but upon all
sciences, as well as upon religion, arts, and social theo-
ries. How could the concept of progress be more powerfully
reinforced than by evidence that biological evolution toward
ever more sophisticated and complex organisms is nature's
plan? Yet in the very sciences which enabled the promulga-
tion of the evolutionary theory lay the seeds of another
 11
theory which was to provide an uncreasingly somber backdrop
to Darwin's theory. Thirty-five years earlier, another
scientific discovery had been published, almost unnoticed,
by the French scientist, Nicolas Carnot, In his work with
the physics of heat, Carnot had discovered the laws of
thermodynamics, the second of which is the principle of
entropy. Sir Arthur Eddington defines entrooy as "The
practical measure of the random element which can increase
in the universe but can never decrease," The inescapable
implication of this principle is that the universe is run-
ning down, "Unless," Eddington tells us, "we can circum-
vent the second law of thermodynamicswhich is as much to
say unless we can find cause to run time backwardsthe
ultimate decay draws surely nearer and the world will at
the last come to a state of uniform changelessness,"^ What
then is to be said for progress in light of this somber
news?
The third theory of history, one independent of either
the cyclic or the progressive theories, has also had a
great impact on the literature and philosophy of Western
man. This third theory is the concept of the Fall, the

"^Sir Arthur Eddington, The_ nature of the Physical

World (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Tae University of Michigan
Press, Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1958), p, 74,

^Ibid., p. 169.
 12
archetypal version of which is found in Genesis, though its
counterparts can be found in the literature of all ages.
How else shall we explain the Neoclassical urge to return
to the Golden Age of the ancient world except as evidence
of a belief in the Fall? The Romantics sought to turn the
calendar back even furtherfar beyond the Augustan a g e -
to prehistory: to a period when man still possessed his
primal innocence. So the fugitive, Rousseau, sought to
escape from his own complexity; he dreamed of the simple
life, the life of natural man; he dreamed of unity in a
forest of light and shade. Paradoxically, through the pro-
cess of biological ascent, man had fallen from nature's
grace; he had developed a duality of nature which he had
projected into his universea duality variously character-
ized as mind and matter, spirit and flesh, reason and in-
stinct, good and evil; a duality which, ultimately, led
him to dream eternally of returning to a condition of primal
unity, to the Golden Age, to Paradise before the Fall, to
nature's womb. It is this distress of duality that leads
men to theology; and the promise of unity is the foundation
of all religions.
Each of the three theories of history has its analogies
in nature; The cyclic theory is corroborated by the cyclic
processes of the universe, from the rotations of galaxies to
man's own life cycle; the progressive theory is supported by
 13

the clear evidence of evolution, both organic and celestial;

and the concept of the Fall has its physical counterpart in
the second law of thermodynamics. But these concepts of
historical process, it should be noted, are not mutually ex-
clusive. The Bible contains all three; The Fall in the
story of Adam and Eve in the Garden; the cyclic theory in
Ecclesiastes; and the idea of progress in the New Testament
Gospels. Moreover, elements of all three ideas can be found
in Moby Dick and "The Bear"although in Melville the cyclic
theory predominates, whereas in Faulkner, in spite of the
faith express in his Stockholm Address, the dominant and per-
vasive concept is that of the Fall. In both writers, how-
ever, deterministic leanings are present, and a mood of pre-
destined fatality pervades both Moby Dick and "The Bear."
From antiquity man has projected his own psyche into
nature and has consequently seen there largely what he him-
self has implanted. Yet while both Melville and Faulkner
inevitably follow this process of projection, their por-
trayals of wild nature seem free of much of the bias of
other v;riters. The accusation of the eminent humanist
critic, Irving Babbit, that the Rousseauist "sees in nature
9
what he himself has put there" seems equally true of the

Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism (5th ed.;

Boston and New York; Houghton !iiflin Company, 1928) ,
p. 302.
 14
classicist, for whom, as Babbit also remarks "nature and
10
reason are synonymous." Both the romanticist and the

classicist thus project themselves into nature, the dif-

ference in their practice lying in the fact of the former
placing the emphasis upon emotion, color, unconscious im-
pulse, and the latter emphasizing order and reason. The
typical nineteenth-century Romantic tended to sentimentalize
nature, to see in her a benevolent concern for man, an edi-
fying, uplifting force which led Wordsworth in "Tintern
Abbey" to feel
. . well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being (11. 107-111).
This same confidence in nature's beneficence is found in such
American Romantics as V7illiam Cullen Bryant, who saw in the
flight of a v/aterfowl evidence that nature would guide man's
steps aright;
He who, from zone to zone.
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain
flight.
In the long v;ay that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright ("Thanatopsis,"
Stanza VIII).
The classical-humanist tradition, on the other hand, tends
to ignore the wild in nature. It was, at least in part,
selective vision which enabled Alexander Pope in "Essay on

10Ibid., p. 38.
 15
Man" to assert that "whatever is, is right." Pope was more
enmeshed in literary and philosophic convention than was
Melville; moreover, he had never had the opportunity offered
the robust Melville to observe and reflect upon the nature
of the white shark. Melville faced nature more honestly
than either the Neoclassicists or the Romanticists, and he
saw not only her mystery and v/onder, but her terror as well.
But he overestimated wild nature's power against man, a
mistake which Faulkner, almost a century later, did n o t
and perhaps could notmake, since even by the 1930's the
outcome of man's struggle against nature in America was
evident to all who had eyes to see.
Men of all ages have recognized the value of nature in
her larger dimensions. For not only does she provide us
with all our needs, she is the very source of our being.
But he has not always nobly cultivated her resources. "We
nestle in nature," says Emerson, "and draw our living as
parasites from her roots and grains," Man thus deliber-
ately regiments her, totally subjugating and domesticating
her for his selfish ends. And in developing and cultivating
useful species, and in destroying those he considers useless
or harmful, he simplifies the ecosystem; and, as Paul Erlich

^^Ralph V7aldo Emerson, "Nature," Essays (New York;

Thomas Y, Crowell Company, Apollo Edition, 1961) , p, 382.
 16
tells us, "the simpler an ecosystem is, the more unstable it
12
is." But always mitigating against this latter fact is
the persistent argument of economic self-interest, which con-
quers in the end.
Yet does nature as antithetical to man, nature in her
wild state, have any spiritual or emotional value for eco-
nomically-minded man? Though some would dismiss the idea
as unscientific or mystical, many men of considerable in-
tellect--including Melville and Faulknerhave believed that
it does. How else shall v;e explain the magnetic pull of the
ocean upon the New Yorkers, described by Melville in the
first chapter of Moby Dick, inlanders who spend their week-
days "put up in lath and plaster--tied to counters, nailed
to benches, clinched to desks" (p. 23). "Cities," exclaims

Emerson, "give not the human senses room enough. We go out

daily and nightly to feed the eyes upon the horizon." 13
But nature means more than mere space, more than simple re-
lief from the daily confines of home and office. Paul
Erlich quotes three biologists, H. H. litis, P. Andrews, and
O. L. Louchs, who suggest that man has been "genetically
programmed" by nature to his natural environment through

^^Paul R. Erlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Bal-

lantine Books, 1968), pTT9.
13
Emerson, Essays, p. 382.
 17
"one hundred millions of years of evolution." "For thou-
sands of years," they point out, "we have tried in our
houses to imitate not only the climate, but the setting of
our evolutionary past; warm, humid air, green plants, and
even animal companions."14 Of course, such a theory, though
certainly plausible, is impossible to prove. But the
strength of man's sense of identity with nature, whatever
the reason,is one at once powerful and mystical. Even such
a distinguished scientist as Sir Arthur Eddington is moved
to a VJordsworthian acceptance of mystical communion v^ith
nature. "If I were to try to put into words," Eddington
says, "the essential truth revealed in the mystic experience,
it would be that our minds are not apart from the world; and
the feelings that we have of gladness and melancholy and our
yet deeper feelings are not of ourselves alone, but are
glimpses of reality transcending the narrow limits of our
particular consciousnessthat the harmony and beauty of
the face of Nature is at root one with the gladness that
transfigures the face of man."^^
Underlying such fundamental theories of the value of
nature to man seems to be a Cartesian-like concept of innate

^^Erlich, Population Bomb, p. 64. Quoted from un-

published manuscript, 19 67,

^^Eddington, Physical World, p. 321.

 18
predispositions, innate values, innate correspondences with
external nature. Such a concept seems all the more reason-
able in light of the advances made by the brilliant lin-
guist, Noam Chomsky^and his colleagues at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, who have refuted the Lockean and
Behavorist theories of language learning and who suggest
that children learn languages quickly and efficiently simply
because they are born with a universal grammar in their
brains. How else could a child, by the time he goes to
kindergarten, they suggest, have mastered so complex a
skill as speech unless there is a potential language faculty
already present in the brain? If such is the caseand it
now certainly seems plausibleis it not conceivable that
the brain is biologically structured for other internal-
external correspondences as well? Irving Babbit, in his
criticism of the Romantics, describes the principle very
well, though he does so under the more familiar terms of
metaphor and symbol;
The first part of the romantic metaphor,
the image or impression that has been
received from the outer world, is often
admirably fresh and vivid. But the
second part of the metaphor when the
analogy involved is that between some
fact of outer perception and the inner
life of man is often vague and misty;
for the inner life in which the roman-
ticist takes interest is not the life
he possesses in common with other men
but what is most unique in his own emo-
tionshis mood in short. That is why
 19
the metaphor and still more the symbol
in so far as they are romantic are al-
ways in danger of becoming unintelli-
gible. 16

One might defend the Romantics by suggesting that moods and

emotions are universal experiences of mankind, and that-
using T. S, Eliot's phraseif the poet selects the proper
objective correlative, he can accurately communicate his
moods and emotions. But still Babbit has put the case for
internal-external correspondences very well. Perhaps the
best statement of the principle, however, is from Melville's
Ahcib, when he exclaims, "O Nature, and O soul of man I how
far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies I not
the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its
cunning duplicate in mind" (p, 248).
There have been those, however, who have hoped to find
meaning, not through intuitive or mystical communion with
nature, but through an objective, empirical study of nature
herselfthrough science. In the Preface to the first edi-
tion of Philosonhiae Naturalis Princioia Mathematica, (1687)
Sir Isaac Newton, first announces that he has determined
the mathematical principles behind the forces of gravity of
"celestial phenomena," then goes on to say, "I wish we
could derive the rest of the phenomena of nature by the same

16
Babbitt, Rousseau, p. 297.
 20
kind of reasoning from mechanical principles, for I am in-
duced by many reasons to suspect that they may all depend
upon certain forces by v;hich the particles of bodies, by
some cause hitherto unknown, are either mutually impelled
towards one another, and cohere in regular figures, or are
repelled and recede from one another,"

Although Nev/ton was himself a modest and religious

man, his faith in the mechanical principles became the basis
for scientific determinism; the belief that all phenomena
operate according to mechanical laws, and that, with suf-
ficient knowledge of those mechanical laws, all could be
explained thereby--including man and his particular role
as an object in nature. Yet even if the basic premise of
scientific determinism could be completely demonstrated its
adherents could be held guilty of naivete in so grossly un-
derestimating the profusion and complexity actually inherent
in natural phenomena. At the middle of the nineteenth cen-
tury, Alexander Von Humboldt, who was himself a scientific
optimist, repudiating the determinist doctrines, remarked,
"As men contemplate the riches of nature, and see the mass
of observations incessantly increasing before them, they
become impressed with the intimate conviction that the sur-
face and the interior of the earth, the depths of the ocean,
and the regions of air v;ill still, when thousands and thou-
sands of years have passed away, open to the scientific
 21
17
observer untrodden paths of discovery."

Scientific determinism must of necessity be foiled, not

only by the infinite variety and complexity of nature her-
self, but by man's innately limited ability ever to know
totally the vast complexity of the empirical universe. As
early as 1710 Bishop George Berkeley, in A Treatise Concern-
ing the Principles of Human Knowledge published in that year,
erected a formidable barrier against scientific determinism
with his concept of esse est percipi; with his denial of
the existence of an empirical universe and his claim that
nothing can exist outside the mind, apart from man's per-
ception. Although the average person in this respect is
probably a naive realist and would agree with Dr. Johnson's
evaluation of Berkeley's theory when he kicked the stone
saying "I refute it thus," still Berkeley's idealistic
philosophy appears immune from absolute refutation. An-
other blow to scientific determinism came in 1739-40 with
David Hume's publication of Treatise of Human Nature, the
title of which v;as later changed to An Enquiry Concerning
Human Understanding, In this work Hume attacked the funda-
mental principle of all scientific inquiry, the principle
of causality. There is absolutely no way, Hume determined,
that one can prove, simply because event B follows event A,

17
Humboldt, Cosmos, Vol, I., p, 21,
 22
that event A is the cause of event B. In the introduction
to his Sketches of Moral Philosophy (1839) the Reverend
Sydney Smith, summed up the scientific determinists' plight
quite aptly; "Bishop Berkeley destroyed this world in one
volume octavo; and nothing remained, after his time, but
mind; which experienced a similar fate from the hand of
Mr. Hume in 1739."

Nonetheless, ignoring the strictures of Berkeley and

Hume, science went blithely on its way in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Of paramount impact, as already
noted, was Darwin's Origin of Species, which reinforced the
deterministic learnings of Newton's follov;ers by providing
a theoretical basis for biological determinism. Also im-
portant were Hegel, Marx, and Engles,who supplied theories
of social and historical determinism and thereby helped to
fill in the over-all picture and making it seem plausible
to some that, provided sufficient data were available,
everything in the universe, including man, his past and
future, could be known. All that stood between man and
ultimate knowledge was the task of collecting and evaluating
the necessary data.
Not even all scientists, however, have shared this
glowing faith. As early as the seventeenth century the
brilliant French scientist-philosopher, Blaise Pascal, had
questioned man's ability, through reason and science, to
 23
know or understand himself or the world he inhabits, asking;
"what is man in Nature? A cypher compared with the Infinite,
aui All compared with Nothing, a mean between zero and all.
Infinitely unable to grasp the extremes, the end of things
and their principle are for him hopelessly hidden in an im-
18
penetrable secret," From this point of view, man exists
in a very restricted space-time frame, and he cannot possi-
bly comprehend what lies outside that frcime. Obviously,
moreover, no part can know or understand the v;hole. Again,
in the nineteenth century, the British historian and phi-
losopher, Thomas Carlyle, in a passage which brings to mind
19
Ahab's "pasteboard masks" speech, presented another bar-
rier between man and the accomplishment of ultimate know-
ledge: "All visible things are emblems; v/hat thou seest is
not there on its own account; strictly tciken, is not there
at all: Matter exists only spiritually, and to represent
some Idea, and body it forth,"20 This view is, of course,
something quite akin to Berkeley's idealism; but it is, at

^^Blaise Pascal, Pascal's Pensees, notes and intro. by

H. F. Stewart, D. D. (Nev; York: I'antheon Books, 1950),
p. 21,

Tyrus Hillv/ay, Herm.an Melville (New York: T\7ayne,

1963), pp. 84-85. Hillway suggests that Carlyle's scien-
tific realism influenced Melville's attitude toward nature.

^^Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Pesartus (Chicago; Weeks

Publishing Co., 1897), p. 79.
 24
the same time, close to the modern scientific concept of the
empirical world. It is a truism today that a direct know-
ledge of external objects is impossible, for, as Alfred
North Whitehead has said, "It is not the substance which is
in space, but the attributes. What we find in space are
the red of the rose and the smell of the jasmine and the
noise of the cannon,"^^ In this view man is forever banned,
at least through scientific inquiry, from entering into the
substance of things, from determining the essence of the
physical world, VThitehead, indeed, maintains that we have
no right even to assume the existence of substance. There
are only attributes. That Melville anticipated this prin-
ciple can be seen in the following reflection of Ishmael;

And v/hen we consider that other theory

of the natural philosophers, that all
other earthly huesevery stately or
lovely emblazoningthe sweet tinges
of sunset skies and v/oods; yea, and the
gilded velvets of butterflies, and the
butterfly cheeks of young girls; all
these are but subtile deceits, not
actually inherent in substances, but
only laid on from without; so that all
deified Nature absolutely paints like
the harlot, v7hose allurements cover
nothing but the charnel-house within
(p. 163).
The horror attributed to the whiteness of the whale derives,
at least in part, from Ishmael's (and Melville's) awareness

Alfred North VThitehead, The Concept of Nature (C2un-

bridge University Press, 1964), p. 21.
 25
that, behind nature's facade of attributes there lies a
blank nothingness.
The final blow to the hope of ultimate knowledge
through science came witli Einstein's theory of relativity
early in the twentieth century, and with the somewhat later
discovery of the principle of indeterminancy. The theory
of relativity states that not only is there no aether, no
U3solute frame of reference within the universe, and not only
is all motion relative; but the very act of observing phe-
nomena destorts the phenomena observed. The principle of
indeterminancy, according to Eddington, is based on the
fact "that we cannot know accurately both the velocity and
position of a particle at the present instant." 22 The more

accurately the velocity of a particle is determined, the

less accurately can the position be determined, and vice
versa. Accepting this truth means that the hopes of the
scientific determinists must be forever thwarted because,
among otlier difficulties, a knov/ledge of the positions and
velocities of not only all particles, but of any particle,
is forever beyond man's ken. The principle of indetermi-
nancy presumably presents the final insuperable barrier
between man and the knowledge of whether all events in the
universe are predetermined. No recent scientific discoveries

^^Eddington, Physical v/orld, p, 307

 26

have encouraged the renewal of the earlier faith in science

as a way to ultimate knowledge. Even Einstein, after his
early and brilliant achievements, including the general
theory of relativity and the photon theory of light, devoted
the rest of his life to his unified field theoryto a
fruitless attempt to prove that the gravitational and elec-
tro magnetic fields, have a common source. He sought a
coherence in the physical world which no scientific demon-
stration on mathematical principle can readily prove. The
further man extends the boundaries of his knowledge, the
more baffling becomes the phenomena he confronts.

Thus, in the perspective of Western thought, man is

cogenitally afflicted with intellectual insecurity and
surrounded by impenetrable mystery. All those phenomena
over which he has no controlthe structure of matter, man's
own mortality, the eternal cycles, the drift of the stars
these are the stuff of cosmic and terrestrial nature which,
like the great v;hite Whale itself, are supremely indifferent
to man's spiteful hostilities or his heart-rending suppli-
cations. Nature destroys man and his instrumentalities and
continues beautifully and serenely on its inscrutable course
from its unknown origin toward its unimaginable goal.
But there is one realm of nature which, though no less
impenetrable and mysterious, is at least vulnerable to man.
And if he can evoke no response from nature in its ultimate
 27
sense, he can at least work his will on wild nature; and
nowhere in his history has he been more dramatically suc-
cessful in this respect than in the settlement of the New
World. Man's victory over nature did not result from any
specific plan, however, but from forces simply let loose
haphazardly on the New World's virgin soil. The onslaught
against the American wilderness was mostly thoughtless;
men felled the trees, slaughtered the game, depleted the
soil; that is, they did precisely the things men have al-
ways done. But now tliere was a difference; Mankind v/as
greatly increasing in number; men were strongly motivated
by dreams of commercial gain. Moreover, they were riding
a technological explosion which was inexorable, "It is no
accident," Newton Arvin remarks, "that Ahab, as a whale-
hunter, represents one of the great exploitative, wasteful,
predatory industries of the nineteenth century; from this
point of view the t'Thale embodies nothing so much as the
normally innocent and indifferent forces of wild naturethe
forests, the soil, the animal life of land and seathat

nineteenth-century man was bent on raping for his ov/n ego-

istic ends," 23 It may have been no accident that Ahab
represented a predatory industry, but on the other hand it

^^Newton Arvin, Herman Melville: A Critical Auto-

bioqraphv (New York; 'rae"V,""kin'g Press7 Compress Books
l!:c[ition,'l957) , p. 180.
 28
is hard to believe that Melville was consciously critical
of the whaling industryin light at least of Ishmael's
lengthy and detailed defense of whaling in Moby Dick, What
seems more likely is that Melvillein spite of his acuity
of observation, his subtle analytic powersshared the
dominant,raid-nineteenthcentury T^erican attitude that
nature was inexhaustible. It was, after all, Moby Dick,
not Ahab, who survived the epic conflict.

Almost a century was to pass before Faulkner enabled

man, in the person of Boon Hogganbeck, to exact his
revenge, Ahab had lost only a battle. But when the mind-
less Boon hurdled through the surging hounds and bounded
on to Old Ben's shaggy back, when he buried his knife deep
into the great bear's heart and brought the giant of the
Yoknapatawpha v;ilderness crashing to the ground, man had won,
not just a battle, but the war. The destruction of the
Pequod in man's immemorial struggle against nature was only
an episode; the destruction of Old Ben was the finale.
 CHAPTER II

AMERICAN ATTITUDES TOWARD NATURE

Near the end of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's

study of the perversion of the American Dream, Nick Carroway,
the narrator of the novel, looks out upon the man-blighted
beauty of East Egg just outside New York City and contem-
plates what, in winning this great continent, man has lost.
He imagines that "for a transitory enchanted moment man
must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, i
face to face for the last time in history with some- i
thing commensurate to his capacity for wonder." The new j
thing which man confronted in the Western Hemisphere was, as
2
Norman Foerster says, "simply nature." And with that first
confrontation battle lines were drawn which would endure for I
Ill

several centuries. On one side was western civilized man

who, in addition to his basic human drives, burgeoning num-
bers, and expanding technology, was abetted in his purpose

^F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York;

Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), p, 182,
2
Norman Foerster, Nature in American Literature (New
York; The McMillan Company, 1^3) , p. 1,
29
 iillllii
mm

30
by certain religious and philosophical ideas. First among
these were the Judeo-Christian ethic and its various mani-
festations, including the early Puritan movement. Also of
considerable importance was the utilitarianism which grew
out of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and which
was important both in the establishment of American democ-
racy and in the development of the great technological and
industrial power of the country. Finally, there was one
ingredient which, though pitifully lacking in practical
consequences, added significantly to the intellectual and
emotional climate which prevailed during the great push
westward of the nineteenth century; that ingredient was the

nineteenth-century Romantic attitude toward nature, and the

relatedyet significantly differentconcepts of nature
which were articulated by American Transcendentalists such
as Emerson and Thoreau.
Mem's opponent in the New World was nature, and though,
as Walter Prescott Webb has noted, all the fighting was done
3
by man, still, nature was not without her weapons; With
the passage of time the early dreams of great wealth and
earthly paradise gave way to a more somber realization of
nature's terrors. Over a century was to elapse before the
magnitude of the New World was appreciated, and, as the

Walter Prescott V?ebb, The Great Frontier (Austin;

University of Texas Press, 1951), p. 33.
 31
forbidding expanse of the Western Hemisphere slowly revealed
itself, "it turned out to be," Howard Mumford Jones remarks,
"a land of the incredible, the immeasurable, the unpredict-
4
able, and the horrifying."

Certainly there was, among the early Puritan settlers

of New England, little romantic sentiment towards nature.
Nature was a constant threat to their survival; the wilder-
ness was the dark dwelling place of Satan and his dark-
skinned henchmen, the Indians. And the dangers were not
purely theological imaginings as can readily be seen from a
few exerpts from S2unuel Sewall's Diary. The aftermath of
an Indian attack was grim; "Wednesday, June 7., [1676] Mr.
Bendal, Mrs, carried one after another, and laid by one an-
other in the same grave. Eight young children." The
Indians were ruthless; "Saturday, July 1, 1676, Mr Hezekiah
Willet slain by Naragansets, a little more than Gun-shot off
from his house, his head taken off, body stript." And the
savagery of nature's children was often matched by the
savagery of God's children. "[Monday, July 6 1685] An

4
Hov/ard Mumford Jones, Ideas in Anerica (Cambridge,
Mass.; Harvard University Press, T5"4 4) , p. 61.
^Samuel Sewall, The Diary of Samuel Sewall, ed. and
cibridged by Harvey Wisn (i\ev7 VorTc; Capricorn Books, 1967),
p. 24.

Ibid., p. 25,
 32
Indian was branded in Court and had a piece of his Ear cut
off for Burglary,"^ The superiority of the Puritan ethic,
however, is revealed in their propensity to mingle edifi-
cation with execution, "June 22 [1676]. Two Indians, Capt.
Q
Tom and another, executed after Lecture."
The Puritan attitude toward nature in the New World
was based upon the Calvinistic conception of the universe
as the battleground between the forces of light and dark,
of good and evil. And there was no question, as far as the
Puritans were concerned, that their society represented the
force of good while the wilderness and its dark inhabitants
represented the diabolical side of the struggle, Nathaniel
Hawthorne understood fully the early Puritan world view and
used his knowledge to produce vivid chiaroscuros in a num-
ber of his stories. The Walpurgisnacht of "Young Goodman
Brown" is made a sinister chiaroscuro partly through Haw-
thorne's use of the dark mysterious wilderness as the site
of the demonic revelry which young Goodman Brown, to his
horror, discovers. The contrast of to\-7n and wilderness in
The Scarlet Letter is marked and significant. The tov/n is
the locus of reason and moral order whereas the wilderness
is a dark place of moral chaos and brooding evil. It is

Ibid., p. 36.

^ibid., p. 24.
 33
significant that Chillingworth, when he returns from exile
in the wilderness, has brought back many of nature's secrets
with him, secrets learned from the dark-skinned Sagamores.
Dimmesdale, in contrast, represents that group of men who
sought to make moral inroads into the wilderness, to bring
a measure of light to an otherwise dark continent. He is
described by Hawthorne as one "bringing all the learning of
9
the age into our wild forestland." Both Chillingworth and
Dimmesdale are knowledgable, but the sources of their know- n
ledge are the two antitheses of Calvinistic theology.
The Puritans, Perry Miller observes, came to America
to set an example for the European Puritan movement; and
i
through initially they were largely successful, there was i
no one to take notice of, or to appreciate, their success. j
The result was disillusionment and dissolution. "Having
failed to rivet the eyes of the world upon their city on the
hill," Miller notes, "they were left alone with America,"
Although the deistic philosophy of the Age of Reason
had a great impact upon the establishment of democracy in
America, our founding fathers, theologically speaking, were
a distinct minority. The Bible remained the dominant

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York;

Signet Classic, 1959), p. 72,

^^Perry Miller, Errand Into the Wilderness (New York;

Harper Torchbooks, 1956), p, 15.
 34
religious guide throughout the period when the continent was
being settled, and in that influential book man found justi-
fication in his struggle against nature; God said to man;
"Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and
subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and

over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that |
*
moveth upon the earth" (Genesis 1;28). ^Vhile the pioneer .
was not particularly concerned with replenishment (the wild-
erness was after all apparently inexhaustible) he was cer- 5
tainly prepared to subdue. The sound of the axe was the
music of the age, and the pioneer was the hero. Walt VThit-
man captured the spirit of the "resistless restless race";
I
We primeval forests felling, '
We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing !
deep the mines within, j
We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin '
soil upheaving, .
Pioneers I O pioneers 1
Though Herman Melville was imbued with the Calvinistic
theology of his mother's Dutch Reformed Church, and strongly
influenced by pessimistic scientific realism, he neverthe-
less shared the heady optimism of nineteenth-century America,
the optimism pervading \7hitman's Leaves of Grass. Van Wyck
Brooks expresses the belief that Melville "fully accepted
the notion of progress, the belief that history had just

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, and Selected Prose

(Now York; Holt, Rinehart anH" Winston, Inc., 1949), p. 194,
 35
Degun. And indeed, in light of many passages in his
writings, particularly in his earlier works, it seems evi-
dent that Brooks is right. In Redburn Melville rhapsodizes
upon America and sees her as a potential paradise;
We are the heirs of all time, and with
all nations we divide our inheritance.
On this Western Hemisphere all tribes
and people are forming into one feder-
ated whole; and there is a future which ^
shall see the estranged children of .i
Adam restored as to the old hearthstone
in Eden. i
The other world beyond this, which w
was longed for by the devout before f
Columbus' time, v;as found in the New;
and the deep-sea lead, that first struck
these soundings, brought up the soil of
Earth's Paradise, Not a Paradise then,
or now; but to be made so at God's good
pleasure, and in the fulness and mellow- |
ness of time,13 i
I

And in White Jacket Melville contradicts Ecclesiastes, main-

taining that there is truly something new under the sun;
that new thing being the United States and its democratic
form of government;
Escaped from the house of bondage,
Israel of old did not follow after the
way of the Egyptians. To her v;as given
an express dispensation; to her were
given new things under the sun. And we
Americans are the peculiar, chosen peo-
ple--the Israel of our time; we bear

Van VJyck Brooks, The Times of Melville and Whitman

(New York; E. P. Dutton and Co. Inc. , ID'^V) , p. 157,

Herman Melville, Redburn; His First Voyage (New

York; Richard R, Smith, 1930) , p.""Tr7. ^"""^
 36
the ark of the liberties of the world.

Not only does Melville, like Whitman, celebrate American

democracy, but also like Whitman, he is not concerned with
that hobgoblin of little minds, consistency. In his works
a comprehensive spectrum of opinion can be found, sometimes
at variance with itself, so tliat Melville might exclaim with
Whitman,
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself
(I cim large, I contain multitudes.)
Melville's cunbivalent attitude toward VJestern Civiliza-
tion's encroachment upon nature is characteristic of his
time. In his classic study. Democracy in America, Alexis
de Tocqueville described the booming impatience of the
American spirit during the assault upon the v/estern wilder-
ness;
The Americans contemplate this extra-
ordinary and hasty progress with exhulta-
tion; but they would be wiser to consider
it with sorrow and alarm. The Americans
of the United States must inevitably be-
come one of the greatest nations in the
world; their offset will cover almost the
whole of !Jorth Ar-erica; the continent
which they inhabit is their dominion, and
it cannot escape them. VThat urges them
to take possession of it so soon? Riches,
power, and renovm cannot fail to be theirs

^^Herman Melville, \7hite Jacket (New York; Holt, Rine-

hart and Winston, 1967), p, 150,

^^Leaves of Grass, p, 76,

 37
at some future time, but they rush upon
their fortune as if but a moment re-
mained for them to make it their own,^^

The irony of the westward movement, of the settling of

America, was that all the while man was destroying nature's
wilderness he was extrolling her virtues and, indeed,
claiming, in Perry Miller's phrase, that America was "na-
ture's nation," "The more rapidly, the more voraciously, j
the primordial forest was felled," Miller notes, "the more ^
desperately poets and paintersand also preachersstrove g
to identify the unique personality of this republic with
the virtues of pristine and untarnished, of Romantic, Na-
ture," 17 That which distinguished America from the Old
World was her wilderness areasNature, Yet the belief
that man could return to Paradise by returning to nature in
the New World was illusory and in many respects painfully
disillusioning. The image of the American Adam, which
R, W, B, Lewis describes "as a figure of heroic innocence
emd vast potentialities, poised at the start of a new his-
tory, "^^ is an image found in both Moby Dick and "The Bear,"

^^Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy iii America, Vol, I

(New York; The Co-operative Publication s'ociety, 1900) ,
p. 409,

^^Perry Miller, Nature's Nation (Cambridge; Belknap

Press, 1967), p. 199.

^^R. W. B, Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago; The

University of Chicago.Press, 1955), p. T.
 38
Thus in Moby Dick, Ishmael speaks of the "White Steed of the
Prairies" as "A most imperial and archangelic apparition of
that unfalien, western world, which to the eyes of the old
trappers and hunters revived the glories of those primeval
times when Adam walked majestic as a god." America was
superior to the Old World because of her wilderness; because
here man had elbow room, the room to be really free. Yet,
ironically, as more and more men rushed to enjoy the ad-
/)
i

vantages of America, those advantages necessarily dwindled, J

Philip Freneau expressed the conceit that nature had con-
cealed the New World for centuries to protect it from man's
depredation; yet when Freneau came to consider the vast
I
natural wealth of the continent, he could conceive of no ,
I

possible purpose for such great resources if they were not j

for man; "But if this new world was not to become at some
time or another the receptacle of numerous civilized na-
tions, from one extremity to the other, for what visible
purpose could Nature have formed these vast lakes in the
bosom of her infant empire?"20 Once again we have the

^^Herm.an Melville, Moby Dick, ed. Alfred Kazin, (Boston;

Houghton Mifflin Company, 1^56), p. 159. Hereafter page
numbers will be cited the text of the chapter.
20
Philip Freneau, The Prose of Philip Freneau, ed.
Philip M. Marsh (Hew Brunsv/ick, New Jersey; The Scarecrow
Press, 1955) , p. 228.
 39
Biblical conception of a paradise made for man who inevitably
brings corruption to that paradise.
The dilemma which resulted from the clash of the Judeo-
Christian concept of man's dominant position on earth with
the romantic idea of a natural paradise can be found in both
Melville and Faulkner. In Moby Dick Melville can celebrate
man's dominion; "I know a man that, in his lifetime, has .
j
taken three hundred and fifty whales. I account that man
i
more honorable than that great captain of antiquity who <g
boasted of taking as many walled towns" (p, 102), Yet
earlier, in Typee, he laments the very same arrogance, ag-
gressiveness, and ruthlessness of Judeo-Christian civili-
zation; "The Anglo-Saxon hive have extirpated Paganism from
the greater part of the North American continent; but with
it they have likewise extirpated the greater portion of the
Red race. Civilization is gradually sweeping from the earth
the lingering vestiges of Paganism, and at the same time the
shrinking forms of its unhappy worshippers," 21 Melville's
hostility tov/ard Christian missionaires in the South Pacific
was no secret to the readers of his early books. He be-
lieved that the missionaries, in bringing their Judeo-
Christian ethics and their ideas of "progress" to the natives
of those beautiful Pacific isles, were destroying the

Herman Melville, Tvnee, pp. 266-67,

 40
delicate natural fabric of native culture and supplanting
innocence and beauty with sin, disease, and greed.
But the missionaries were only symptomatic of a larger
evil. The white settlers of the New World brought the
vices of the Old World with them as Faulkner makes clear in
"The Bear." In part four, when Ike McCaslin is discussing
his repudiation of his inheritance with Cass Edmonds, his B
i
cousin and guardian, he explains his understanding of God's *
purpose; J
He made man. He made the earth first
and peopled it with dumb creatures, and
then He created man to be His overseer
on the earth and to hold suzerainty
over the earth and the animals on it in
His name, not to hold for himself and |
his descendents inviolable title for-
ever, generation after generation, to ;
the oblongs and squares of the earth, i
but to hold the earth mutual and intact *
in the communal anonymity of brother-
hood, and all the fee he asked was pity
and humility and sufferance and endurance
and the sweat of his face for bread,^^

But western civilized man had perverted God's purpose with

his greed and had, the moment he set foot upon American soil,
destroyed his second chance at Paradise. In Ike's opinion,
God in His goodness had seen fit to offer man another
chance. "He used," said Ike, "a simple egg to discover to

2^V/illiam Faulkner, Go Dovm, Moses (New York; Modern

Library), p. 257, Hereafter page numbers from the edition
will be cited in the text of the chapter.
 41
them a new world where a nation of people could be founded
in humility and pity and sufferance and pride of one to an-
other" (p. 258) . But the plan was doomed from the outset,
for the very ships which brought the white man to America
were driven by "the old world's tainted wind" (p. 259). And
the Indians--like the islanders Melville describes in Typee
and Omoowere immediately corrupted by the first contact
with the white man, Ike's grandfather, Lucius Quintius
Carrothers McCaslin, had bought the land from the Old Chica-
saw Chief, Ikkemotubbe; but, as Ike sadly remarked, "the
instant Ikkemotubbe discovered, realised, that he could sell
it for money, on that instant it ceased ever to have been
his forever" (257), Thus, man's desire to own Paradise,
to exploit it for his o^^n selfish ends, keeps it forever out
of his reach. It should be noted, however, that Ike places
no blame upon the Judeo-Christian concept of man's dominion
over nature; he places the blame upon man's mistaken in-
terpretation of the divine fiat. In seizing upon nature for
his own personal gain, man fails to understand, or simply
disregards, God's plan that he should be its conscientious
caretaker. Man has no right to destroy her creatures, to
divide the land into "oblongs and squares" to be passed in
fee simple to his descendents forever, Man's attitude to-
ward nature, Ike believes, should be fundamentally re-
ligious.
 42
The disillusionment Ike feels over the destruction of
the wilderness and the disillusionment Melville felt over
the destruction of the native cultures of America and the
South Pacific, spring in part at least from the nineteenth-
century Romantic concept of nature. The basic tenet of
this Romcintic faith was the Rousseauistic belief that evil
does not reside in man, but in his institutions; that if
man can break free of those institutions and return to na-
/i
t
ture he can find felicity; that he can be, as those idyllic j

Typees Melville describes, free of "foreclosures , . , notes

. , bills , , . debts . duns , . . assault and bat-
tery attourneys . . . poor relations . , , destitute widows
. , , children starving . . . beggars , . , debtors pris- ,
ii23 !

ons. . , , The dominant evil to both writers, and the }

one which# to some extent, plagued them both, was money,
the universal lubricant which oils the gears of man's in-
stitutional machinery.
The great disparity between the romantic ideal of na-
ture as man's salvation and the reality of the destruction
man wrought upon her led to what Perry Miller has called
"The Romantic Dilemma," American painters such as Thomas
Cole and others of the Hudson River School, glorified na-
ture in their works; The naturalists John James Audubon,

23
Typee, p, 173,
 43
C. S. Rafinesque, and Thomas Say, lovingly classified the
flora and fauna of the new land. And all, both painters and
naturalists, were obsessed by the romantic dreams of idyllic
communion with nature. But they were, inevitably, disillu-
sioned when they witnessed what their fellow men did to na-
ture in America.
Perhaps no other fictional character embodies the
Romantic dilemma as thoroughly as does James Fenimore
Cooper's archetypal American character. Natty Bumppo. Natty,
the hero of the Leatherstocking Tales, blazes the way through
the wilderness; he is schooled in nature's ways, and is
brother to the Red man whose lore and skills he has mastered.
He is, ironically, however, both an instrument and an agent
in the destruction of the wilderness. For not only does he
lead other white men into nature's inmost preserves; he is,
like Ike McCaslin, himself a killer. Both Natty and Ike
are troubled with scruples about the depradation of nature,
but they are never troubled enough to take any positive,
meaningful action. VThereas Ike acquiesces in the destruc-
tion of the bear in Mississippi, Natty (Leatherstocking)
watches the destruction of wild pigeons in New York, emitting
only a few pieties as he too joins in the killthough he,
with great moral delicacy, kills only enough for his own
requirements. The pigeon kill described in The Pioneers was
similar to one witnessed by Cooper himself as a boy, and it
 44
pictures vividly America's thoughtless assault against na-
ture wherever she was vulnerable. When the pigeons approach
the town all the villagers turn out with firearms of every
conceivable description. Natty is silent as he watches the
slaughter, but when some villagers bring out a small sv/ivel
cannon and begin firing into the great flock of birds, he
Cm restrain himself no longer;

"This comes of settling a country!"

he said; "here have I kno^>m the oigeons
to fly for forty long years, and, till
you made your clearings, there was no-
body to skear or to hurt them. . . .
Now it gives me some thoughts when I
hear the frighty things x^hizzing through
the air, for I know it's only a motion
to bring out all the brats in the village.
Well! the Lord won't see the waste of
his creatures for nothing, and right will
be done to the pigeons, as well as others,
by and by."24

Not only are Natty and Ike very much alike in their attitudes
toward the wilderness, but Ike's words echo those of Natty.
In Faulkner's story "Delta Autumn," Ike, like Natty Bumppo
in The Pioneers, is an old man. He has in his seventy-odd
years watched the continuation of the same destruction which
Natty had witnessed a century before. And he too wonders
what will be the consequences of man's thoughtlessness and
believes with Natty that "the Lord won't see the waste of

James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers (New York; Dodd,

Mead and Company, 195 8), p. 25r,
 45
his creatures for nothing." But Ike concludes that God's
instrument of revenge will be man himself. Close to the
end of "Delta Autumn" Ike thinks; "No wonder the ruined
woods I used to know dont cry for retribution! . . . The
people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge"
(p. 364),
It is tempting to find fault with Natty and Ike and
their creators for their passiveness in the face of man's
1
destructiveness; but a moment's reflection makes it clear
that my other stance taken by the two characters would, in
the light of the history of America, ring false. For no
fact of American history is more incontrovertible than that
I

our material culture was built at the direct expense of na-

ture. Lynn Altenbernd has noted the kinship between Natty I
and Ike cind comments upon the ironical role played by such
men in history; "the man of the woods," Altenbernd notes,
"opens the way for the destruction of the forest he loves," 25
And speaking of the conduct of the red, white, and black men
in Go Down, Moses, Altenbernd makes a comment which applies
equally well to the dichotomy betv/een the romantic concep-
tion of nature and the material, industrial reality v/hich
grew out of that dream; "an ironic necessity in human

Lynn Altenbernd, "A Suspended Moment; The Irony of

History in William Faulkner's 'The Bear,'" xModern Language
Notes, Vol, 75, 1960, p. 577.
 46
affairs," he says, "requires that the fullest realization of
the dream shall destroy the source of the dream." 26 so, in
retrospect, it now seems apparent that the nineteenth-century
exuberance over America's future found in I'Thitman, Melville,
and a host of other lesser writers of the period, was
destined to diminish and finally work itself out as the
wilderness areas diminished and disappeared forever from the
!
face of the continent.
Although the concept of progress played an important <
a

role in America during the nineteenth century, the cyclic

theory of history exerted considerable influence as well.
Melville was not the only artist to consider the possibility
I
that man's success against nature was more apparent than ^
I

real, that the progress which so excited imaginations was j

merely one swing of a pendulum which would be followed
ineluctably by a swing in the opposite direction. This same
truth is reflected in a series of paintings by the v/ell-known
American Artist, Thomas Cole, entitled "The Course of Empire,"
in which is depicted the various stages of man's eternal
struggle against nature. The stages, as he painted them in
1836, were five; "The Savage State"; "The Arcadian or
Pastoral"; "The Consummation of Empire"; "Destruction"; and
"Desolation," Civilization, which slowly develops from the

^^Ibid.
 47
Savage and Arcadian stages inevitably falls victim to de-
struction through war, natural calamity, or both. The one
thing in Cole's paintings which does not change is a mountain
peak which stands in the background, symbolic of nature's
eternal endurance through every revolution of what Melville
calls, "young life's old routine,"
The Judeo-Christian ethic; the utilitarianism which
i
I

grew out of the Age of Reason; man's innate propensity for

avarice and greed; his expanding population and technology j
all these things played important parts in the defeat of
nature in the New World; but perhaps no general factor con-
tributed more to that defeat than did the mindlessness of
I
the settlers of America, Although Cooper does not specifi- ,
I

cally say so, the pigeons whose slaughter he describes in j

The Pioneers are, judging from their description, passenger
pigeons. These birds, which became extinct in 1914, once
numbered in the billions. John James Audubon recorded his
observance of one flight of passenger pigeons witnessed in
the early nineteenth century while he was on a visit to
Kentucky, VThile riding in the country one day he saw a
flight of the birds go by and decided to dismount and count
the number of flocks passing by in one hour. But he became
totally discouraged before he had half completed the task.
He recounts his experience in his Ornithological Biography;
I rose, discouraged, after having recorded
163 flocks in twenty-one minutes. The
 48
farther I proceeded the more I met. The
air was literally filled with Pigeons
that obscured the light of noonday like
an eclipse. Dung fell, here and there,
like melting snowflakes. The buzzing of
wings had a curiously lulling effect on
my senses.27

The immensity of the flight of birds was unbelievable; it

can only be sensed from Audubon's description of the flight's
duration;
That night at Louisville, fifty-five
miles from where I had been watching, I
found the Pigeons still passing, undi-
minished. They did so for three days in
succession. Men and boys crowded along
the banks of the Ohio to shoot incessantly
at the pilgrims that flev; lower as they
passed the river. Multitudes were de-
stroyed. For a week or more the popula-
tion fed on no flesh other than Piaeons,
and talked of nothing but Pigeons,^^

No species, except perhaps the American bison, suffered |

more extensively from America's mindless destruction of na-
ture's creatures than did the passenger pigeon. Yet the de-
struction of the birds described by Cooper and Audubon is
relatively minor compared to that inflicted later by the
professional hunters who, using explosives, nets, and other
devices of mass destruction, killed the birds in such num-
bers that countless freight cars were required to ship the

John James Audubon, Audubon, By Himself, selected

arranged and edited by Alice Ford (Garden City, New York;
The Natural History Press, 1969), p. 70,

2^Ibid,, p, 71,
 49
29
the birds back to the eastern markets. The irony of such

behavior cuts deeply when one considers that America be-

lieved herself uniquely associated with the glory of her
natural environment, holding herself superior to her Old-
World forebears primarily because she was heir to the vast
bounty of unspoiled nature, "Nature's own nation," M, B,
Kline points out, "was indubitably, buildiug a civilization
i

30 '
that was destroying her Nature,"

Perhaps the most notable voices speaking out against j

man's senseless assault on the wilderness in the first half

of tlie nineteenth century were those of the Transcendental-
ists: They did not, however, hold nature to be more noble
or in any way superior to man. They generally adhered to
the traditional Judeo-Christian belief concerning man's j
position in the Universe, Man, Bronson Alcott said, "is
the rightful sovereign of the earth, fitted to subdue all
things to himself, and to know of no superior, save God,"-^^

A, V7, Schorqer, The Passenger Pigeon; Its Natural

History and Extinction (Madison: Trie University of Wis-
consin, 153*5) , see cnapter VIII ":iethods of Capture,"

^^Marcia B, Kline, Beyond the Land Itself; Views of

Nature in Canada and th United States (Cambridge, Mass,:
Howard University Press, 19 70) , pT 59.'

^^Bronson Alcott, "The Doctrine and Discioline of Human

Culture," in Selected Writings of The American Transcendental-
ists, ed, witii mtroauction by George Ilochfield (New York:
*rhe New American Literary, A Signet Classic, 1966) , p. 131,
 50
But man must be educated in order to fulfill properly his
role in the natural order. Often, because of his ignorance,
man misapplied his considerable powers, and the results were
disastrous, not only for external nature, but often for men
themselves. The Transcendentalists were among the first to
recognize the dangers inherent in an American society so
deeply concerned with material gain, "I have . . . learned,"
1
I
Thoreau said, "that trade curses everything it handles; and
though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse j
32
of trade attaches to the business," Thoreau recognized
a truth which the majority of his countrymen well over a
century later still have not; Material goals in themselves
I

are empty; blind technological progress can take man nowhere ,

I

worth going, "Our inventions," he said, "are wont to be j

pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious
things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end,"^^
Whereas Thoreau went to Walden Pond "to front only the
essential facts of life,"^^ Emerson, his friend and mentor,
remained for the most part amid the complexities of human

^^Henry David Thoreau, Walden or in the Woods; and, On

Civil Disobedience (New York; The New American Library, A
Signet Classic, 1960), p, 52,

33ibid,, p. 40,

^^Ibid., p. 66,
 51
society, although the natural world, which was but a step
away from Concord, was important to him. He too communed
with nature and saw her value and beauty and was forced to
recognize, in contrast, "the poorness of our invention, the
ugliness of towns and palaces,"^^ Yet for Emerson man's
poor showing alongside nature's did not result from any in-
herent inferiority. Society had lost its true bearings,
"Man," Emerson said, "is fallen; nature is erect, and serves '
as a differential thermometer, detecting the presence or j

absence of the divine sentiment in man. By fault of our

dullness and selfishness, we are looking up to nature, but
when we are convalescent, nature will look up to us,"^^
I
Yet nature in herself is incomplete. The great chain of i
I
I

being requires a whole and healthy mankind to occupy the key |

position in the earthly order, "The beauty of nature,"
Emerson said, "must always seem unreal and mocking, until
the landscape has human figures, that are as good as it-
self,""^"^
Many of the conflicting attitudes discoverable in the
works of Melville are also to be found in the writings of

^^Ralph v;aldo Emerson, "Nature," from Essays (New York;

Thomas Y, Crowell Company, 1926; Appollo Edition, 1961),
p. 383.

^^Ibid,, p. 387.

^"^Ibid.
 52
the Transcendentalists. It is clear that the Transcendental-
ists believed in The Fall as did Melville. They believed,
as he, that America, with her great natural resources and
democratic principles, offered man a new opportunity for re-
demption. They thus believed firmly in the doctrine of pro-
gress. America was the new Eden and the American pioneers
were the descendents of a fallen race given the opportunity
to work their way back to the original state of bliss. The
essence of that progress to which both Melville and the
Transcendentalists gave allegiance was not material, but
spiritual. They all believed in the perfectibility of the
human spirit.
One further American attitude toward nature is worthy
of mention here; that attitude is one which derives from j
the belief that man can from nature obtain valuable moral
precepts. Although either Melville nor Emerson went so far
as to entertain such a view, many of their fellow thinkers
in the nineteenth century did, including Henry Hedge, the
founder of the Transcendental club. Perry Miller, discussing
the search for moral meanings in nature in his essay "The
Insecurity of Nature," 38 shows how such a search was destined
to fail just as the scientific determinists' search for a
rational order in nature had failed. While it is possible
perhaps to extract certain isolated moral or rational pre-

"^Nature's Nation,
 53
cepts from the natural world, there is, nonetheless, no uni-
versal moral or rational order underlying the whole. Man's
plight, as William E. Sedgwick remarks, is existential;
Man's life is enacted against a mys-
terious, inscrutable backdrop. He makes
his foreground the world of human values.
. . . He makes a little world of love
grounded in the organic unity of man, that
brotherhood of man which besoeaks the
fatherhood of God. This little world of
color and human warmth hangs perilously
among "the heartless necessities of the
predestination of things," or what [Mel-
ville] called in Moby Dick "the heartless
voids and immensities of the universe,"
Man must make his own moral order. When he looks to nature,
if he is honest as Melville was, he cannot ignore the cruel
economies of biological survival, the universal cannibalism
of all life on earth.
But at one time early in his career, Melville did look
to nature. His youthful experiences with the stern, venge-
ful, predestinating God of the Dutch Reform Church en-
couraged him to look elsewhere for security and contentment,
and the islands of the South Pacific seemed to offer refuge
to a young v;anderer fleeing the complexities of a troubled
civilization.

^^William E, Sedg^-zick, Herman !!elville; The Tragedy

of Mind (Cambridge, Mass,; Harvard^University Press, 194'4) ,
p. W 7 "
 CHAPTER III

MELVILLE'S DEEPENING CONCEPT OF NATURE

Melville was hardly more than a month from his twenty-

third birthday when the whaling ship on which he was sail-
ing. The Acushuet, first touched the Marquesas islands of i
the South Pacific in the late spring of 1842. If ever man ,

was to find refuge from the cares and conflicts of civili- \

zation, if there was a place on earth where man lived
happily and in harmony with naturethese Edenic islands
r

were the place. The beauty of the islands and the islanders j
I
and the innocent simplicity of their existence had a great ]
impact upon the young flelville, who had been reared in the )
sharply contrasting seasons of the temperate zone and nur-
tured upon the dark, Calvinistic concept of original sin.
Unlike Ahab, he had not lost his low enjoying power, but he
could never entirely give himself up to it. Pagan idealism
might be strongly alluring to him; but as V, L, Parrington
points out, "though he might imrierse himself in Plato, Mel-
ville was no Gree);; he was Hebraic rather, out of Ecclesi-
astes, and Solomon and Jesus,"

^V, L, Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought,

II (!Jev; York; Harcourt, Brace and WorTH", 1927), p, 264,
54
 55
The South Pacific of the mid-nineteenth century provided
an arena in which could be seen operating the forces of vari-
ous world theories. Native life, where it had not been dis-
rupted by the white man, followed the age-old cyclic patterns
of the universe. Generation followed generation in balance
and harmony with one another and with nature, neither needing
nor comprehending the idea of progress. The happy state of
the islanders must have brought, to the mind of someone with
Melville's background and propensities, a vision of Paradise
before the Fall, But the forbidden fruit which signaled the
end of the earthly paradise in the Pacific was Western Civi-
lization's concept of progress. And the serpent which
tempted and cajolled the natives to accept the fruit was, at
least as far as Melville was concerned, the Christian mis-
sionaries, who came to "save" the poor pagans. And ironic
it is that the fall which disrupted the cyclic rhythms of
life in the islands was ushered in under the name of Progress.
Many years later Melville scored the following passage in his
copy of Schopenhauer's Studies in Pessimism;

Accordingly, the sole thing that recon-

ciles me to the Old Testament is the
story of the Fall, In my eyes, it is
the only metanhysical truth in that book,
even though it appears in the form of an
allegory.

^cited in Melville's Uce of the Bible by Nathalia V7right

(Durham, North Carolina: Uuke University Press, 1949), p. 16
Melville's copy of Studies in Pessimism is in the Harvard
College Library,
 56
Melville would not have agreed perhaps that the Fall is "the
only metaphysical truth" in the Old Testament, but there can
be little doubt that the concept of the Fall was one which
occurred to him wherever he witnessed the encroachments of
Western Civilization upon the wilderness areas of the world.

But to Melville nature meant more than the primal in-

nocence which was fading away across the globe before the
onslaught of Western Civilization. Nature is,in the broadest
sense, the way things are. And the way things are, for any
man, depends upon his particular vantage point, upon his in-
dividual quality of mind and his past experiences. In ad-
dition to the Bible, and the Calvinism which constituted so
important a part of his early education, Melville was also
influenced by nineteenth-century Romanticism, by the demo- I
cratic optimism characteristic of America of that period,
by the Transcendentalists, andincreasingly as life wore
onby the less cheerful voices of Pascal and Carlyle, It
was, more than anything else, however, Melville's experi-
enceshis voyage eiboard a whaler, his tour as a seaman
aboard a U. S, Warship, his many v/itnessings of man's and
nature's mindless crueltieswhich turned him away from
optimistic philosophies. His experiences with the untutored
and happy Typees were to prove only a pleasing and momentary
counterpoint to life's grimmer side;
I will frankly declare, that after
passing a few weeks in this valley of
 57
the Marquesas, I formed a higher esti-
mate of human nature than I ever before
entertained. But alasl since then I
have been one of the crew of a man-of-
war, and tlie pent-up wickedness of five
hundred men has nearly overturned all
my previous theories.^
While recent studies reveal that much of Typee is fac-
tual, Melville's account of his stay with these benevolent
cannibals can hardly be taken as completely objective re-
portage. He was clearly much under the influence of
Rousseau when he described the felicity of the islanders
living close to nature, and the misery of the white man
struggling to survive while ground between the gears of
civilization's institutions. But though Romanticism may
have supplied the tone, the cogency of Melville's descrip-
tion results in large part because, first, in spite of his
romantic bias he did describe fairly accurately what he saw,
cuid second, Rousseau was not altogether mistaken in his
views of VJestern Civilization, Who will dispute Melville
when he says.
The fiend-like skill v;e display in
the invention of all manner of death-
dealing engines, the vindictiveness with
which v;e carry on our wars, and misery
and desolation that follow in their
train, are enough of themselves to dis-
tinguish the v;hite civilized man as the
most ferocious animal on the face of

3
Herman Melville, Tvnce, from The Portable Melville
ed. Jay Leyda (r.'ev; YorkT\/Tking Press, 1952), p, 276,
 58
4
the earth.

Another quality of the white man, one which made him

particularly destructive in his encounters with wild nature,
was his complete disbelief in, and disregard of, taboos.
Western Civilization, as has been noted, is built upon the
Hebraic concept of man's dominance over nature. If man is
meant to hold dominion over the earth, how can any of her
creatures be sacred? What are taboos but animistic non-
sense? Melville was struck by the Typee's curious practice j
of placing certain creatures, places, or objects, seemingly
at random, under taboo. But the practice of taboo is, per-
haps, founded on a deep, non-rational wisdom which Western
I
man might do well to recognize. Primitive man seems to i
I

acknowledge a close kinship with, and a dependence upon, j

nature, a trait which sharply distinguishes him from civi-
lized man. In some native tribes this tendency goes so far
as to acknowledge kinships between clans and certain animals.
This practice, called "totemism," is described by the famed
anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowoki;
Totemism appears thus as a blessing be-
stowed by religion on primitive man's ef-
forts in dealing with his useful surround-
ings, upon his "struggle for existence," At
the same time it develops his reverence for
those animals and plants on which he depends,
to which he feels in a way grateful, and yet
the destruction of which is a necessity to

Typee, p. 172.
 59
him. And all this springs from the belief
of man's affinity with those forces of na-
ture upon which he mainly depends.^
On the island of Nukahiva, where the Typees lived, such
was the beneficence of the natives toward nature that "the
birds and lizards of the valley [showed) their confidence
in the kindness of man" by approaching Melville freely and

without fear. But the white men in the South Pacific, just
as the white men on the North American continent, quickly
disabused any creature, wild or tame, timorous enough to
come within range. Thus Melville describes a sea captain
who gleefully shot tabooed chickens in the bay of Tier. The
same captain had earlier, while rounding Caoe Horn, sat on ;
I
the taffrail of the ship and shot "albatrosses, cape pigeons, ,
I

jays, petrels, and diverse other marine fowl." This not-so- j

2mcient mariner blasted nature's ministers out of the air
with impunity, though, as Melville notes, "The sailors were
7
struck aghast at his impiety," The sailors, it should be
noted, were shocked, not because they were civilized, but
because they were savages. Note Melville's description of

5
Bronislaw Malinov/ski, "Magic Science and Religion,"
from Magic Science and Religion and Other Essays (Garden
City, New Yor/Tl The Masterv;ork 'program, 1948) , p. 47.
^Typee, p, 287.
7
^Typee, p, 301,
 60
the whale hunter in Moby Dick;

Long exile from Christendom and

civilization inevitably restores a man
to that condition in which God placed
him, i.e. what is called savagery.
Your true whale-hunter is as much a
savage as an Iroquois (p, 219),
Melville did not replace his youthful romantic optimism
with the more somber views of man and nature which he very
likely read in the works of Pascal and Carslyle, Nor did
he abandon his exuberant American optimism when confronted
by the repressive cruelty of the U. S. Navy aboard the war-
ship the United States. What he did do was face up to the
fearful and negative aspects of man and his lot, incorpo-
rating them equally into his own particular world view; he
was apparently unable, or unwilling to resolve life's con-
tradictions in his early works, so his views consequently,
are not consistent. On one page he may celebrate civiliza-
tion's conquest of nature in the New World, and on another
leiment the destruction of the creatures and primitive peo-
ples which inevitably accompanies the spread of civiliza-
tion. In one mood he will espouse his faith in progress,
in another swear with Solomon that there is nothing new
under the sun, Melville--who like Whitman contained multi-
tudeswas much too honest to resolve, superficially life's
paradoxes; he rather incorporated them into his works. It
is in large part the v/arring of extreme opposites in Moby
Dick which accounts for the great power of that book.
 61
The deepening of Melville's view of nature first becomes
evident in Mardi, which was published just three years after
Typee, In addition to the impact of Pascal and Carlyle,
whom by now he had apparently read, Melville was clearly in-
fluenced by the scientific theories of his age, "Between
Omoo and Mardi," Tyrus Hillway has noted, "a tremendous un-
folding occurred in Melville's mind. Among other develop-
ments, he apparently had begun to be familiar with the ideas
o

of the nineteenth century scientists," one of the scien-

tists whose theories clearly influenced Melville was Malthus,
Hillway notes evidence in Mardi v/hich reflect Melville's
awareness of the struggle for existence which goes on in ;
I
I
nature. The modern concern over a rapidly increasing pop- ,
ulation v;hich must rely on a limited food supply was antici- }
pated by :ielville in Mardi; but by the time he wrote Moby
Dick his concern had shifted from the cruelty inherent in
the struggle for survival to the horror inherent in the na-
ture of the food supply. Through Carlyle, through the scien-
tific speculations of his day, and through his own experience,
Melville was forced to confront nature more honestly than had
perhaps any novelist before. Nature was, unquestionably,
great and mysterious, and beautiful. But she also had, Mel-
ville discovered, a terrible new dimension:

^Tyrus Hillway, "Melville and the Spirit of Science,"

South Atlantic Quarterly, XLVIII (January, 1949), p. 81,
 62
Consider the subtleness of the sea;
how its most dreaded creatures glide
under water, unapparent for the most
part, and treacherously hidden beneath
the loveliest tints of azure. Consider
also the devilish brilliance and beauty
of its most remorseless tribes, as the
dainty embellished shane of many species
of sharks. Consider, once more, the
universal cannibalism of the sea; all
whose creatures prey upon each other,
carrying on eternal war since the world
began (Moby Dick, p, 222),
Melville's decision to go to sea, not only in his life
but in his fiction, undoubtedly played a crucial part in
his conception of man and nature. For one thing, the heart-
less immensity of the sea tends to dwarf man, to reveal to
him his puniness and insignificance compared to nature, T^d i
the mystery of the sea parallels and reflects the even deeper
I

mystery of the universe; {

Though America be discovered, the
Cathays of the deep are unknown. And
whoso crosses the Pacific might have
read lessons to Buffon, The sea-serpent
is not a faible; and in the sea, that
snake is but a garden worm. There are
more wonders than the wonders rejected,
and more sights unrevealed than you or
I ever dreamt of.9

Thus the sea provided Melville the perfect metaphor for the
universe, since the sea, like the universe, was not only
beautiful and inunense but the repository as well of in-
scrutable mysteries and nameless terrors.

^Herman Melville, Mardi and a Voyage Thither (New York;

Capicorn Books, 1964), p, 33, "
 63
As already noted, this more somber conception of nature
did not emerge fullblown in Melville's first literary en-
deavors, but grew steadily side by side with Rousseauistic
romanticism and democratic optimism. The conflicting views
of nature which pass as minor inconsistencies in his earlier
works were to become the poles of opposition between which
the powerful currents of Melville's nev/ly tapped creative
energy would surge in Moby Dick' V a
 CHAPTER IV

NATURE THEME IN MOBY DICK

Shortly after Melville returned from his four or five

years wandering at sea and joined his fcimily at Lansing-
burgh, Massachusetts, he began to write a narrative of his
adventures in the Marquesas, The time was October, 1844,
Melville was twenty-five, the age, as he was later to tell
his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, at which his intellectual
development had truly begun. The next several years were
to prove one of the most productive periods ever in the
life of an American writer. In seven years Melville pub-
lished seven books, beginning v/ith Typee in 1846 and ending
with Pierre in 1852, As far as public recognition was con-
cerned, Moby Dick, published sixth in the series, was, hardly
distinguishable from the others.

Herman Melville, The Letters of Herman Melville, ed,

M, R, Davis, W, H. Oilman (ricv/ naven, Connecticut: Yale
University Press, 1960), p. 130. [June, 1851,] "Until I
was tv7enty-five," Melville told Hawthorne, "I had no de-^
velopment at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life.
Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then
and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I
feel that I am no\7 cone to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and
that shortly the flower must fall to the mould,"
64
 65
Melville's first five books had firmly established him
in the minds of the reading public as a successful writer of
sea travels and adventures; and even though he momentarily
wondered off into some rather confusing German metaphysics
in Mardi, he had gotten back on the track in Redburn and
White Jacket, Superficially Moby Dick was directly in the
vein of his earlier works. The author was continuing to
mine the rich ore of his seagoing experiences; he was con-
tinuing to v:restle with those interests v;hich had absorbed
him in his earlier works. The influence of Pascal and
Carlyle is still much in evidence. The metaphysical in-
terests which absorbed Melville in Mardi are given further
I

treatment in Moby Dick, though they are more under control, i

being subordinated to the action. The prose is rich in 5
texture and reveals the author's continuing interest in
Rousseauistic romanticism, American Transcendentalism, Cal-
vinistic theology, and science. Indeed, his intellectual
appetite seemed boundless; the vast range of his omnivorous
readings is nov/here better revealed than in the pages of the
novel.
In spite of the surface similarities between Moby Dick
and Melville's earlier works, however, there are some funda-
mental differences which sharply distinguish the whaling
story from its predecessors. Perhaps the principal differ-
ence which makes the novel stand head and shoulders above
 66
the works preceeding it is the new level of maturity the
author achieves; Melville attains a peak of artistic dis-
tance, humor, and imaginative power in Moby Dick which he
was never again able to master. Also of considerable im-
portance were Melville's new friendship with Hawthorne, his
reading of Shakespeare, and his discovery of an appropriate
form to harness the powerful forces of opposition which he
found warring within himself.
The scope of Moby Dick is epic; the theme is grand.
"To produce a mighty book," Ishmael exclaims, "you must
choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can
ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have
tried it" (p. 350), On the literal level Moby Dick is a
hunting story, a story of man's very real struggle against
wild nature. On the symbolic level, and in the demented
mind of Captain Ahab, the events in the novel represent
man's struggle against cosmic nature and against the God
who resides in that nature, or who has created it and re-
mains beyond it. But Melville sav/ both wild and cosmic na-
ture as superior to, and perpetually victorious over, man.
All nature was, moreover, inextricably bound up in the
figure of a stern Hebraic, Father-God, This cruel and
haughty God-figure invited the challenge of proud men like
Ahab, and just as surely crushed such mortals for their
temerity.
 67
To trace the theme of wild nature in Moby Dick, one
must read the novel on the most literal level. Wild nature
in the story is the sea and the creatures of the sea which
man pits himself againstprimarily the whale. It could
be argued, however, that the dominant and most compelling
image in Moby Dick is not, as virtually all critics have
maintained, the White I^rtiale, but the sea. The sea in the
novel is suggestive of a wide spectrum of meaningsa refuge
for lost men; man's mind, both conscious and unconscious;
his dreamy spirit; a mystical world soul; a graveyard for
the dead; deatJi itself; the matrix of life on earth; the
ungraspable phantom of life. Beyond and above all these,
however, the sea is its own terrible reality.

In the opening paragraph of the novel, Ishmael humor-

ously presents the sea as a refuge from the trials and
troubles of earthly existence;
Whenever I find myself growing grim
about the mouth; whenever it is a damp,
drizzly November in my soul; whenever I
find myself involuntarily nausing before
coffin warehouses, and bringing up the
rear of every funeral I meet; and espe-
cially whenever my hypos get such an
upper hand of mo, that it requires a
strong moral principle to prevent me
from deliberately stenning into the
street, and methodically knocking peo-
ple's hats offthen, I account it high
time to go to sea as soon as I can.
This is my substitute for pistol and
ball (p, 23),
The sea is not only a literal refuge for troubled mankind;
 68
it is a fitting symbol for man's consciousness, and, in a
Freudian sense, man's unconscious. In the chapter entitled
"The Mast Head," Ishmael reflects upon the hypnotic spell
the undulating sea has upon dreamy and speculative youth;
lulled into such an opium-like listless-
ness of vacant, unconscious reverie is
this absent-minded youth by the blending
cadence of the waves with thoughts, that
at last he loses his identity; takes the
mystic ocean at his feet for the visible
image of that deep, blue, bottomless
soul, pervading mankind and nature; . , .
In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs
away to whence it ccime; becomes diffused
through time and space; like Cranmer's
sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at
last a part of every shore the round
globe over (p. 136),
There can also be seen in this passage the definite stamp of
Walt Whitman and the American Transcendentalists, The sea,
*,
as Melville describes it, is a fitting symbol for Emerson's
"oversoul" or \ihitman's "float." All souls emerge from the
universal soul in the form of specific identities and ulti-
mately lose their identities by returning to the world soul,
Melville unquestionably had the capacity, at least
imaginatively, to experience mystical union with the uni-
verse. But, unlike Whitman, he could not make that realm
his homeground. For that reason he could never, as VThitman
did, deny the existence of evil, Melville wrote to Haw-
thorne;
In reading some of Goethe's sayings, so
worshipped by his votaries, I came across
 69
this, "Live in the all." That is to say,
your separate identity is but a wretched
one,good; but get out of yourself,
spread and expand yourself. , , , iVhat
nonsense 1 Here is a fellow with a raging
toothache, "My dear boy," Goethe says to
him, "you are sorely afflicted with that
tooth; but you must live in the all, and
then you will be happy I"
Then in a postscript Melville adds, "what plays the mischief
with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal
application of a temporary feeling or opinion,"^ Melville's
mystic moods, often triggered by observing or contemplating
the sea, form only one strand in the complex fabric of his
writing.

The sea to Melville was perhaps above all a terrible

reality. Melville's belief that man was unequal to v/ild,
terrestrial nature undoubtedly springs from his intimate as-
sociation with the sea; for, at the middle of the nineteenth
century, man was still humiliated and whelmed by the sea.
He used her and crossed her only at her sufferance. The sea
was to the nineteenth-century seafarer truly unknowable and
unconquerable. So, Ishmael remarks,
we know the sea to be an everlasting
terra incognita, so that Colombus sailed
over numberless unknown worlds to dis-
cover his one superficial v;estern one;
though, by vast odds, the most terrific
of all mortal disasters have immemorially
and indiscririmately befallen tens and
hundreds of thousands of those who have

2
Letters, p. 131
 70
gone upon the waters; though but a mo-
ment's consideration will teach, that
however baby man may brag of his science
and skill, and however much, in flatter-
ing future, the science and skill may
augment; yet for ever and for ever, to
the crack of doom, the sea will insult
and murder him, and pulverize the state-
liest frigate he can make; nevertheless,
by tlie continual repetition of these
very impressions, man has lost that
sense of the full awfulness of the sea
which aboriginally belongs to it (p, 221),

The sea is a source of death for man; it is a graveyard

where "millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams,
somnambulisms, reveries" toss and roll "like slumberers in
their beds" (p, 368). Paradoxically the sea also embodies
and represents life in its richness and profound mystery,
tliough not so paradoxically when one considers that life
and death are both inextricably part of the same mystery.
What is it Melville and Ishmael saw in the Ocean? "It is
the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is
the key to it all" (p. 24).
If the sea is the ungraspcible phantom of life, what
then is Moby Dick? Both the sea and the ^Thite ^-Thale are
comprehensive symbols, and their meanings overlap. Both are
things of mystery and magnitude. To say the sea represents
life and the whale represents nature is not entirely satis-
factory, since it is difficult to distinguish neatly between
life and nature; yet the comparisons do seem to have some
validity, Ishmael remarks that "the VThite VThale v;as to [the
 71
crew) . . . in some dim, unsuspected way, . . . the gliding
great demon of the seas of life . , ." (p, 156). So the sea
provides the setting and the whale the object of central
focus within the setting; the sea is the universe, and the
whale is nature within tlie universe.
Numerous critics have concluded that the White Whale in
Moby Dick symbolizes nature, and it is perhaps fitting to
cite a few of those here. Richard Chase comments on the
significance of Moby Dick;
As a symbol the whale is endlessly
suggestive of meanings. It is as sig-
nificant and manifold as Nature herself,
and, of course, that is the point. Like
nature the whale is paradoxically benign
and malevolent, nourishing and destruc-
tive. It is massive, brutal, monolithic,
but at the same time protean, erotically
beautiful, infinitely varible. It ap-
pears to be unpredictable and mindless;
yet it is controlled by certain laws,^

Tyrus Hillway says that the whale "represents the elemental

forces of nature," Daniel Hoffman expresses the belief
that, "For Ishmael, Moby Dick is^ Nature, concentrated in a
5
single unfeatured visage."

^Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition

(Garden City, Nev; York: Doubleday Anchor Books', 1957) ,
p. 110,

Tyrus Hillv;ay, ":ielville and the Spirit of Science,"

South Atlantic Quarterly, XLVIII (January, 1949), p, 81,

"^Daniel Hoffman, F o m and Fable in TVmerican Fiction

(New York: Oxford University Press, T765), p, 25in
 72
The White \^ale, according to various critics, and judg-
ing from the evidence in the novel, represents both cosmic
and terrestrial nature. It also represents metaphysical na-
ture, and physical nature as studied in the various sciences.
Ishmael, expressing imaginatively the cosmic significance of
the whale, remarks, "I could mount that v^hale and leap the
topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all
their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal
sightl" (p. 220). The metaphysical significance of the whale
emerges primarily in the dark breedings of Ahab's demented
mind, though it should be noted that there is considerable
cogency in tlie case Ahab makes against the White Whale. When
the first mate, Starbuck, finds his traditional Christian
values as well as his life threatened by Ahab's monomaniac
hunt for the whale, he accuses the mad captain of blasphemy
for attacking a mindless brute, Ahab responds in a fit of
passion;
All visible objects, man, are but as
pasteboard masks. But in each event-
in the living act, the undoubted deed--
there, some unknov/n but still reasoning
thing puts forth the mouldings of its
features from behind the unreasoning
mask. If man v/ill strike, strike
through the marik! IIov: can the prisoner
reach outside except by thrusting
through the wall? (p. 139)
This is a metaphysical concept, possibly, as Tyrus Hillway
has noted, taken from Carlyle's clothes philosophy. But the
concept that v;hat occupies space are attributes rather than
 73
substances, as discussed earlier in this study, is the modern
scientific view as well.

Ahab's madness is proven, not by his recognition of the

indifference and cruelty of nature, or by his awareness that
all objects in nature are merely pasteboard maskshis mad-
ness is proven by his assumption that the force behind the
masks is evil, and by the wild belief that he can assail
that diffuse force by concentrating on a single object in
nature, \7hat he does not understand is that the whale is as
much a victim of nature's laws as is Ahab. Man cannot re-
taliate against cosmic nature by attacking wild nature,
though surely Ahab is not the only man who has tried. Still,
if one accepts Ahab's premises, he must acknowledge that the
obsessed captain is truly heroic in a Promethean sense.
But Ahab, apart from his unmistakably noble and heroic
qualities, has much in common with a large group of men v^ho
helped shape T^erican history--the industrialists and en-
trepeneurs who carved their fortunes out of nature's hide
in the New World, Newton Arvin, as has been previously
noted, remarked that Ahab v;as part of a "great, exploitative,
wasteful, predatory" industry, F, O. Matthiessen, in Ameri-
can Renaissance, makes a similar observation:

Nev7ton Arvin, Herman Melville: A Critical Biography

(New York; Viking Press, 1957) , p. 1817,
 74
And the captain's career is pro-
phetic of many others in the history
of later nineteentli-century America,
Man's confidence in his own unaided
resources has seldom been carried far-
ther than during that era in this
country. The strong-willed individuals
who seized the land and gutted the
forests and built the railroads were
no longer troubled with Ahab's obses-
sive sense of evil, since theology had
receded even farther into their back-
grounds, 7

It is on the most basic level, the economic level, that the

White Whale functions as a symbol for wild nature; for, in
a literal sense, Moby Dick, as do all whales in the novel,
represents money. But perhaps Ahab should be rated a cut
ed^ove the industrialists of his period; for his purpose,
demented though it may have been, was surely more noble
than those of many industrialists of the nineteenth century
Flask, who saw the doubloon which Ahab nailed to the mast
only in terms of how many cigars it would buy, is closer in
spirit to the nineteenth-century industrialists than is
Ahab,

But taken either in the economic or the metaphysical

sense, Ahab certainly embodies the defiant and ruthless
spirit of Western man's assault against nature. But his
chosen element, the sea, which he feared, hated, and loved.

7
F, O, Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York;
Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 459,
 75
happened to be, at the middle of the nineteenth century,
virtually impervious to man's attacks. So too, the whale,
which swam before AhcUD "as the monomaniac incarnation of all
those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in
them" (p. 154) , was invulnerable. The following passage de-
scribing tlie beauty and power of the White v^ale would serve
admirably as a description of all wild nature, which many
nineteenth-century Americans assumed was too resilient ever
to be crushed under man's boots;
No v/onder there had been some among the
hunters who namelessly transported and
allured by [the White VThale's] serenity,
had ventured to assail it; but had fa-
tally found that quietude but the ves-
ture of tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing
calm, oh, whale 1 thou glidest on, to
all who for the first time eye thee,
no matter how many in that ssune way
thou may'st have bejuggled and destroyed
before (p, 412),

The beauty of the wilderness lured settlers into it

many of whom payed the price by forfeiting their lives, just
as the whaling men paid a high toll for their assault on
nature on the high seas. At mid-nineteenth century, nature
ruled supreme on earth; man was a minor infestation, one
which nature took little note of, one she could easily slough
off, Man on earth was like Flask when he stood on the shoul-
ders of the giant Negro harpooner, Daggoo, while riding in
a whaleboat;
Though truly vivacious, tumultuous, os-
tentatious little Flask would now and
 76
then stamp with impatience; but not one
added heave did he thereby give to the
negro's lordly chest. So have I seen
Passion and Vanity stamping the living
magnanimous earth, but the earth did
not alter her tides and her seasons for
that (p. 182).
Throughout his life Melville seemed preoccupied with
objects of great bulk, not only giant specimens of the noble
savage (Daggoo, Tashetego, and Queequeg), but with phenomena
such as icebergs, whales, and pyramids. In the Autumn of
1856, Melville, for the sake of his emotional health, was
eUale to take a trip to the Holy Land, where he finally was
able to see the pyrcimids which had loomed as frequent images
in his writings over the previous ten years. In his de-
scription of the pyrcimids, which he recorded in his journal
of the trip, Melville reveals his fascination with magnitude;

As with the ocean, you learn as much of

its vastness by the first five minutes
glance as you would in a month, so v/ith
the pyramid. Its simplicity confounds
you. Finding it vain to take in its
vastness man has taken to sounding it &
v/eighing its density, so with the pyra-
mid, he measures the base, & comnutes
the size of individual stones. It re-
fuses to be studied or adaquately com-
prehended. It still looms in my imagi-
nation, dim & indefinite,^

Melville v/as concerned, not only with objects of magni-

tude but with themes of magnitude--the sea, the cosmos, God;

Herman Melville, Journal Uo the Straits, ed. by Raymond

Weaver (New York: Colophon, 1975") , p. '53,
 77
and in writing Moby Dick he extended his imaginative power,
attempting "to include tlie whole circle of sciences, and all
the generations of whales, and men, and mastadons, past,
present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of
empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not ex-
cluding its suburbs" (p. 350), It is against such magnitude
that Melville views man, and it is easy to see why in his
writings nature looms over man. Man is only one small part
of life on earth, as Babbalanja explains in Mardi;
We are the least populous part of crea-
tion. To say nothing of other tribes,
a census of the herring v;ould find us
far in the minority. And v;hat life is
to us,--sour or sweet,so it is to
them. Like us, they die, fighting
death to the last; like us they spawn
and depart. We inhabit but a crust,
rough surfaces, odds and ends of the
isles; the abounding lagoon being its
two thirds, its grand feature from
afar; and forever infathomable (p, 504),

Not only is m.an locked into the same eternal life patterns
as other creatures in nature ("the herring"), but the land
surface he occupies ("Mardi") is only a fraction of the
total surface of the earth; the sea ("The abounding lagoon")
covers tv/o-thirds of the globe. Here again Melville ex-
presses a belief, common throughout his v/ritings, that the
sea is "forever infathomable" to man. And, since the sea
was to Melville, wild nature, it is clear why he could never
foresee man's victory against nature on earth. Today, in
contrast, while there undoubtedly remain many areas of
 78
mystery concerning the sea and her creatures, few could be
found who would maintain that such information is "forever
infathomable."
Melville was not, however, ignorant of what men were
doing to the wilderness areas and creatures in his own
country. Even by the middle of the nineteenth century it
was clear that man could wreak havoc upon his fellow crea-
tures, and Melville knew this. He acknowledged that man had
decimated the buffalo herds "which, nor forty years ago,
overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois and
Missouri" (p. 353). But what he didn't believe was that
man, in his overall struggle against nature, could ever pre-
vail. He might win a battle or two, but he was destined to
lose the war. Ishmael cites as an example the elephant
which has "been hunted for thousands of years" in the East,
where it still survives "in great numbers," and concludes
from this evidence that "much more may the great whale out-
last all hunting, since he has a pasture to expatiate in,
which is precisely tv/ice as large as all Asia, both T^ericas,
Europe and Africa, IJew Holland, and all the Isles of the sea
combined" (p. 354). If all else fails, Ishmael is consoled
v/ith the belief that the whales will still "have two firm
fortresses, which, in all human probability, will for ever
remain impregnable" (p, 354), He is referring to the two
polar regions, one of v/hich, the Antarctic, would become by
 79
the middle of the present century, the chief center of the
whaling industry.

Although Melville speaks literally of the invincibility

of the whale, his references to elephants and other creatures
suggest that he also uses the whale to represent all nature.
His assertion that "the whale [is] immortal in his species,
however perishable in his individuality" (p, 355), would
seem to fit his concept of nature as a whole, Melville sees
the struggle between man and nature as eternal, just as the
Calvinistic struggle betv/een good and evil is eternal; but
there the parallel ends because he does not identify man
with good and nature with evil. Good and evil cut through
both man and nature. Nature is to Melville both beautiful
and terrible, mysterious and sacred. Like the species of
the whale, nature is immortal, while man in his individual-
ity, like Ahab, is perishable. The earth in Moby Dick is
inexhaustable, unconquerable, and in the eternal struggle
between man and nature the end is foreordained. Nature in
the shape of a White VThale responds to man's challenge;
"Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his
whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do,
the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship's
starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled" (p, 430). Man
may challenge nature, but oblivion follov/s fast upon, Ahab
hurls his harpoon and finds his mark, but the stricken.
 80
though immortal, whale flies forward and yanks the presump-
tuous human to his doom. Nature, not man, is the inevitable
victor in the eternal struggle; nature in the shape of a
whale, which

swam the seas before the continents

broke water; he once swam over the site
of the Tuileries, and v;indsor Castle,
and the Kremlin. In Noah's flood he
despised Noah's Ark; and if ever the
world is to be again flooded, like the
Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then
the eternal whale will still survive,
and rearing upon the topmost crest of
the equatorial flood, spout his frothed
defiance to the skies (p, 355),
Melville's tendency to viev/ wild nature as one with
cosmic nature led him to see individual species as part of
the total, unending fabric produced on the loom of nature.
In the chapter of Moby Dick entitled "A Bower in the
Arsacides," Melville presents a vivid and beautiful image
of the weaver god of nature, and effectively compares na-
ture's frantic activity with the din and frenzy of a nine-
teenth-century textile mill;
Through the lacings of the leaves, the
great sun seemed a flying shuttle v/eav-
ing the un'./oaried verdure. Oh, busy
weaver I unseen v/eaver!pause 1--one
v/ordlwhither flows the fabric? what
palace may it deck? \/hercfore all
these ceaseless toilings? Speak,
weaver 1stay thy hand!but one single
word with theel Naythe shuttle
flies tlie figures float from the loom;
the freshet-rushing carpet for ever
slides away (p, 346),
 81
Nature works ceaselessly, eternally, and the only certainty
is that the eternal cycles will be reenacted without end.
In the bower where the great whale's bleached skeleton lay,
Ishmael notes that "Life folded Death; Death trellised Life;
the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-
headed glories" (p. 346).
If Melville had been a landsman, he would likely have
developed a different concept of wild nature. For one thing,
man might not have been so small relative to nature, for man
finds things in cities and settlements built to his scale. I

Of course the vast prairies and great mountain chains of

America do dwarf man, but they lack that terrible magnitude ^1^
which belongs peculiarly to the sea and which proved, in the
case of the little black cabin boy, Pip, that its sheer vast
emptiness could drive man mad. And the universal canni-
balism of earth is somehow less noticeable on landperhaps
because of the great number of browsing animals, and because
much of the predation is performed stealthily and secretly
in the hidden recesses of tlie forests.
Another reason Melville did not perceive the vulner-
ability of wild nature was that he, as did many of his con-
temporaries, considered nature to be inexhaustible. His
attitude was undoubtedly shaped by the vast areas of wilder-
ness which still stretched across the American continent at
the middle of the nineteenth century; an attitude further
 82
reinforced by his experiences upon the "heartless immensities"
of the sea. But above even these considerations was the fact
that Melville tended to look upon nature as a monolithic
whole, and he identified it closely with God; seeing in wild
nature the nature of God Himself. Thus when Queequeeg ex-
claims, "de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingine"
(p. 241), one can detect a sense of awe on the part of the
author at the terrible, cannibalistic efficiency of God's
creation. And after describing the destructive pov/er of the
whale's flukes, Ishmael exclaims, "what are the comprehen-
sible terrors of man compared with the inter-linked terrors
and wonders of Godl" (p. 100). Because Melville links wild
nature with cosmic nature and God, he logically sees man as
the eternal victim in his struggle against nature. One
suspects that he does really agree with Solomon, that there
is nothing new under the sun, and with Thomas Cole who saw
civilization and wild nature alternating on an eternal wheel
of fortune.
On the other hand, it is possible that Melville actu-
ally wanted and v/illed nature's victory over man. For in
spite of the Rousseauistic hopefulness expressed in his
earlier works, there exists, throughout his writings, a
strain of cynicism about the nature and potentialities of
man. The sea captain shooting tabooed chickens, the mis-
sionaries and sailors corrupting the natural serenity and
 83
beauty of island life in the South Pacific, the destruction
of the American bison, man's cruelty to man as seen in the
frequent floggings aboard a U. S. Warship, man's own canni-
balismthese and other of man's sins might easily have led
Melville to side with Isaac McCaslin and Natty Bumppo, to
believe and even hope that God would not stand by and see
the waste of his creatures for nothing. And naturethe
sea, the VThite Whaleis so much more beautiful and majestic
than man. In his beautifully written introduction to Moby
Dick, Alfred Kazin notes that

Melville often portrays the struggle

from the side of nature itself. He
sees the vv^hale's viev/ of things far
more than he does Ahab's; and Moby-
Dick's milk-white head, the tail
feathers of the sea birds streaming
from his back like pennons, are de-
scribed with a rapture that is like
the adoration of a god (p, xi),
A further reason Melville may have occasionally chosen
nature over man is that tlie laws of nature are direct and
straightfor-zard, in contrast to the complex morass of man's
moral laws. The cruel efficiency of wild nature has for
example, been presented by some authors in a romantic light.
Jack London in the follov/ing passage from Call of the Wild,
describes the mercilessness of nature as it was relearned
by the great dog of that story as the latter reverts to a
stage of savagery;
Mercy did not exist in the primordeal
life. It was misunderstood for fear.
 84
and such misunderstandings made for
death. Kill or be killed, eat or be
eaten, was the law; and this mandate,
down out of the depths of time, he
obeyed.^

Whitman, too, recognized the strength and attractiveness of

non-human nature;
I think I could turn and live with ani-
mals, they're so placid and self-
contain' d,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their
condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and
weep for their sins.
They do not make me sick discussing
their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is de-
mented with the mania of ovming things.
Not one kneels to another, nor to his
kind that lived thousands of years ago.
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the
whole earth. ("Song of Myself," sec. 32.)
But IThitman, like Melville, stopped short of total commit-
ment to non-human nature because, even though he could ad-
mire the beauty and strength of the stallion, his human in-
telligence, his imaginative faculty, enabled him to out-
distance all four-footed animals and to soar above all
winged creatures on earth. But the price man must pay for
his imaginative intelligence is the price he paid in the
Garden when he first fell from nature's graceeternal
duality. And concept of the Fall is fundamental to any

^Jack London, The Call of the Wild (New York: Grosset

and Dunlap, 1903) , p. '15 3,
 85
discussion of man and nature; for the distance of man's fall
is precisely the same as his distance from nature.
Why should Melville or Cooper or Faulkner at least oc-
casionally side with nature? Perhaps the reason is that
nature's cruelty is mindless and therefore innocent, whereas
mam's cruelty is conscious, a factor which makes man guilty
of the crime of volition, a crime nature is not capable of.
And Cooper and Faulkner, though separated by more than a
century, perceived man's destructive potential in his un-
ceasing war against wild nature,
Melville, on the other hand, did not foresee the defeat
of wild nature on earth. The reasons are partly theological:
he saw v</ild nature as one aspect of an invincible God, And
his fascination with objects of magnitudeoceans and whales--
rendered man small and puny in comparison. He was, therefore,
disinclined to recognize the explosive power inherent in man's
growing numbers and rampant technology. It may also be that
witnessing man's cruelty and mindlessness encouraged him to
take wild nature's side in the struggle, Melville's predic-
tion that v/ild natureas embodied in the whalewould never
be defeated could be, in the final analysis, more wish than
prophesy.
 CHAPTER V

MELVILLE AND FAULKNER

Two of the perennial questions put to Faulkner in the

inevitable interviews to which he was subjected concerned,
first, his favorite books and, second, the works which had
had the most significance for, and impact upon, his life
and art. To such, he would generally reply that a writer
is influenced by every tiling he has ever read; and then pro-
ceed to mention four or five books which were his favorites.
Almost always Moby Dick was among the few he mentioned. He
told one interviewer that he read the novel every four or
five years, in 1940, two years before "The Bear" was
published in its final form, he mentioned to Dan Brennan
that he was reading Moby Dick to his young daughter, Jill,
Thirteen years earlier the book editor of the Chicago Tri-
bune had as/:ed Faulkner v/hich book he would most liked to
have written, Faulkner ansv/ered in part: "I think that

Lion in the Garden: Interviews with VJilliam Faulkner

1926-1962, ecT, James B. Meriv/cTcner and^Ilichael Millgate
(New York: Random House, 1968), p, 110,

^Ibid., p. 48,
86
 87
the book which I put down with the unqualified thought 'I
wish I had written that' is Moby Dick,"-^ When Harvey Breit,
while interviewing the author in 1955, suggested that "The
Bear" seemed to be a modern Moby Dick, Faulkner character-
istically shifted the conversation to another topic,^ But
despite the fact that he declined to reveal (presuming he
had an opinion on the matter) how much direct influence
Moby Dick had exerted on his o\^n story, it is likely that
Melville's great whaling epic did to some degree influence
the shaping of Faulkner's great hunting story.

And there were, to be sure, common influences which

shaped the works of both men. The most obvious of such
forces was the stream of American culture which provided the
theme of the wilderness vs, civilization, nature vs, mana
theme used in varying degrees by writers such as Cooper,
Hawthorne, T\'/ain, London, and Hemingway, Leatherstocking,
Ahab, and Ike are of different eras, different stages of
American development, but they all took part in the same
struggle; the force which (v/illingly or not) they and their
contemporaries struggled against was the same forcewild
naturethough it grew progressively weaker from Cooper's

William Faulkner, Essays Sneeches and Public Letters,

ed, James B, Meriwether '(I^ew YorKl Random House, 1965) ,
p. 197,

^Lion in the Garden, p, 82,

 88
Leatherstocking tales to Faulkner's Go Down, Moses,
Although both Melville and Faulkner wrote about the
same historical reality, they spoke from different historical,
geographical, and temperamental perspectives, Melville was
a New England yankee who wrote primarily of the sea. The
geographical scope of his works is expansive, encompassing
the whole globe. The geographical scope of Faulkner, on the
other hand, is intensive, focusing primarily upon his own
"little postage stamp of native soil"; but both writers are
penetrating in their explorations of the human heart, Mel-
ville wrote from the historical perspective of the mid-
nineteenth century, when the forces of civilization and the
wilderness were more equally balanced; Faulkner wrote from
the perspective of early and mid-tv;entieth century America,
at a time when the frontier had been closed for decades,
at a time when the outcome of man's struggle against nature
in the New V7orld had long since been decided.
Another important, germinal influence v/hich is common
to both authors is the Bible, particularly the Old Testament,
The Biblical influence in Faulkner and Melville is most ap-
parent in the names of tlieir characters, Ahab, described

5
William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, ed,
with Intro, and iii:jiiograpiiy by E, J. HoTfman and Olga
Vickery (Michigan State University Press, 1960), p. 82,
 89
by Captain Peleg as "a grand, ungodly, god-like man" (p. 80),
derives his ambiguous power, in part, from the presumably
wicked nature of his Biblical namesake. Although he is de-
scribed by Peleg as a good man, his name ominously suggests
that he might be otherwise, Isaac is interestingly the
Biblical half-brother of Ishmael, (Abraham is the father
of both; Sara is Isaac's mother; Hagar is the mother of
Ishmael,) And Isaac of the Old Testament is gentle and re-
flective as is Isaac of Faulkner's hunting story. But the
Biblical influence in xMelville and Faulkner goes beyond the
names of characters. The themes, the imagery, and the
Icuiguage of both writers bear the deep and unmistakable im-
print of the King James version of the Old Testament,
The New Testament, though its influence is not so per-
vasive, also had a definite impact on the works of both
authors. Christian imagery is used by Faulkner, just to
mention a fev/ examples, in Light in August (Joe Christmas),
The Sound and the Fury (Benjamin) and in "The Bear" (Ike
McCaslin), The parallels between Ike and Jesus are made
quite specific. After Ike repudiates his inheritance, he
takes up carpentering "because if the Nazerene had found
carpentering good for the life and ends He had assumed and
elected to serve, it would be all right too for Isaac
McCaslin" (p. 309). R. W. B. Lewis, among others, has re-
marked that "the novels and stories preceding Go Down, Moses
 90
reveal an atmosphere like that of the Old Testament," where-
as "The Bear may be regarded as Faulkner's first sustained
venture towards the more hopeful and liberated world after
the Incarnation," Although he is not truly successful in
the act, Ike's repudiation of his inheritance is a Christian
gesture reminiscent of Christ's command to the rich man to
sell all he owned and give the money to the poor, Ike gives
up his wealth, but he never really takes up the cross to
follow Christ, His gesture of repudiation is entirely nega-
tive,

ProbU3ly the most striking Christian imagery in Mel-

ville appears in Billy Budd, Billy Budd is a naturally in-
nocent, Christ-like figure who is put to death by a system
which is unable to comprehend or cope with his innocence.
Although there is no character in Moby Dick comparable to
Billy Budd, Starbuck does represent a sane and practical
manifestation of the Christian ethic. He combines prag-
matic American materialisma trait carried to the extreme
by the Quaker, Captain Bildadwith Christian benevolence
and good common sense. But perhaps Starbuck's principal
Christian virtue is his faith. He is surrounded by the

^R, W, B. Lewis, "The Hero in the New World: William

Faulkner's The Bear" in Bear :!an and God: Seven Anproaches
to William rTul/iner' s The i^aar, ed, r, L, Utley, L. 2,
EToom, A, FT'^^inney (New York: Random House, 1964) , p, 306.
 91
demonism of mad Ahab and his crew; he, too, sees the canni-
balism of nature; but he sees her beauty too, and he holds
steadfastly to his faith. Gazing deep into the "golden
sea," he exclaims;

"Loveliness unfathomable, as ever

lover saw in his young bride's eye!
tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks,
and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let
faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory;
I look deep down and do believe" (p, 353),
Another influence apparent in the writings of both Mel-
ville and Faulkner, one which derives, by way of the Refor-
mation, from tlie Bible, is Calvinistic theology. Three of
the principal tenets of Calvinismthe concept of original
sin, the concept of the universe as a battlefield between
the forces of good and evil, and the belief in predestina-
tionall appear to greater or lesser degrees in the works
of the two men.
The concept of original sin is particularly strong in
the works of Faulkner, In "The Bear," the original sin of
Pidan is brought to the New V7orld, on "tainted winds" from
Europe, by the earliest white settlers. The Western concept
of ownership destroys the primordial innocence of America's
wilderness. The ultimate perversion of that concept is re-
vealed when Ike's grandfather, L, Q, C, McCaslin, commits
incest v/ith his ov/n half-Negro daughter, Tomasina, because
he is unable to see her as human, because he can see her only
as property. Old McCaslin's sin pervades everything Ike
 92
experiences. It is that sin, based ultimately on the lust
for ownership, which leads Ike to repudiate the land, to re-
fuse to father a child, and it is Ike's sordid inheritance
which makes the wilderness in the story appear innocent and
desirable by contrast.
In Melville the doctrine of original sin is more dif-
fuse; yet it permeates his work. It could be argued, for
example, that Ahab himself shares equally in the sin of Adam
and Eve, for Ahab aspires to, indeed claims to possess, the
knowledge of good and evil. And to his horror, he discovers
that evil in the universe vastly outweighs good, and he
blames God for this imbalance. He actually goes beyond the
sin of hdaiA and Eve, for he takes it upon himself to redress
the evils which afflict mankind. But he pays the ultimate
price for challenging God's ways. Shortly before his fatal
encounter with the VThite \7hale he confesses to Starbuck;
"I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were
Adcim, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise"
(p. 409). Ahab has partaken of the forbidden fruit, and,
like Adam, for his sin he must surely die.
In Melville's brooding and labyrinthine novel, Pierre,
the protagonist, Pierre Glendinning, parallels Ike McCaslin
in many respects. He, too, inherits the sin, of an ancestor,
namely his father, who in earlier years had had an affair
with a young French girl. But Pierre, while idealistically
 93
trying to help the young Isabel, the offspring of his
father's affair, becomes incestuously involved with her, his
own half-sister, Melville also treats the theme of civili-
zation vs, nature in Pierre, taking the characteristically
nineteenth-century Romantic position that nature is the
source of virtue whereas civilization is a corrupter of
virtue.
Another Calvinistic influence which appears in the
works of Melville and Faulkner is the concept that the earth
amd the universe are battlefields in the struggle between
the forces of good and evil. In Moby Dick this concept is
paraunount and gives the novel its much discussed epic quali-
ties. The struggle between good and evil in "The Bear" is
less clearly delineated, but it does exist. The elements
of the struggle are primarily civilization and the wilder-
ness; the Old V/orld and the New, The two forces are symbol-
ized by the totemistic animals which represent the values of
the American wilderness (the buck and Old Ben), and the Old
VJorld (the serpent) . In the section of G Down, Moses en-
titled "The Old People," Sam Fathers, the half-Indian half-
Negro priest of the wilderness, takes Ike as a boy into the
woods, where they are ritualistically permitted to see a
mysterious, giant buck, Sam greets the buck as follows;
"Oleh, Chief. , , . Grandfather" (p, 184). Toward the end
of "The Bear," Ike, now eighteen years old, returns to the
 94
wilderness where Sam Fathers is buried along with Old Ben
and the fierce dog Lion, both of whom had been mortally
wounded while locked in combat two years before. On his way
to the burial plot, Ike encounters a rattler;
the old one, the ancient and accursed
about the earth, fatal and solitary and
he could smell it now: the thin sick
smell of rotting cucumbers and some-
thing else which had no name, evocative
of all knowledge and an old weariness
and of pariah-hood and of death (p, 329),
Evil has been unloosed in the Garden of Eden, and Ike ac-
knowledges his kinship with the source. He addresses the
serpent; "'Chief,' he said; 'Grandfather'" (p, 330).
Predestination is tlie third Calvinistic doctrine which
permeates the works of Melville and Faulkner, Perhaps Mel-
ville's view is more orthodox, since Faulkner seems to re-
strict God to mere foreknowledge of events. In Part IV of
"The Bear" Ike, speculating upon God's purposes, says to
his cousin, Cass, "maybe He had foreseen already the de-
scendants Grandfather would have, maybe He saw already in
Grandfather the seed progenitive of three generations" (p,
259), This is a much weaker concept of God than that held
by either Ishmael or Ahab, Ike's Deity foresees events and
takes steps to cimeloriate man's condition, but man's innate
depravity always foils God's purpose, Ike speculates that
God "'used a simple egg (the round earth] to discover to
them a new world where a nation of people could be founded
 95
in humility and pity and sufferance and pride of one to an-
other'" (p, 258), But God was disappointed when man's con-
cept of ownership led him to divide the New World up, as he
had the Old, into oblongs and squares, to place even other
human beings in bondage and label them also property,
Faulkner's version of predestination is very close to Mil-
ton's who tried to reconcile God's foreknowledge v/ith man's
free will.
The determinism in Moby Dick is implacable in contrast
with that in "The Bear," "'This whole act's immutably de-
creed,'" Ahcib tells Starbuck just before the third and
final day of the chase, "''Twas rehearsed by thee and me a
billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the
Fates' lieutenant; I act under orders'" (p, 422). God, in
Moby Dick, is powerful, and more immanent in nature than
transcendant; God, in "The Bear," on the other hand, is
seemingly weak and ineffectual, and His transcendence is
more pronounced tlian his immanence. There are a number of
possible reasons why the two authors construe the nature of
God differently, one being that they do not agree on the
nature of man. Although Ahab is certainly, in most respects,
a more powerful and compelling figure than Ike, he is weaker
in one important v-/ay; He lacks free will; or he chooses to
deny free willan act which is tantamount to not having it.
Ike, in contrast, though he does nothing to compare with
 96
Ahab's hunt for the great whale, does make a decision. He
freely decides to repudiate his inheritance; he refuses to
profit from the sins of his forebears. In a sense, in both
stories, the strengths of God and man are inversely pro-
portional, A universe completely predestinated by God
leaves man no leev^ay to assert himself; God is all-powerful;
man is merely an instrument of His purpose. But a universe
in which beings other than God possess free will necessarily
limits God's capacity to determine the outcome of things,
A further reason why God appears weaker in Faulkner's
works is tliat both authors, to some extent, associated God
with wild nature. Since v/ild nature at the middle of the
nineteenth century was still at least man's equal around
the globe, it is not difficult to see how Melville could
identify nature's power v/ith a powerful God, By choosing
to write about "the omnipotent sea" (p, 184), Melville re-
inforced his concept of an omnipotent God, Since nature
rules supreme in Moby Dick, it is only natural that nature's
God should also rule supreme. Since, on the other hand, man
has become the dominant force in his struggle against wild
nature in "The Bear," it is understandable v^/hy God stands
quietly behind the v/ings, weakly witnessing tlie implacable
destruction of his ov/n creation.
But Melville and Faulkner have traits in common which
go beyond a traditional cultural and religious heritage.
 97
Both, in a sense, were failed poets who achieved a very high
order of poetry in their prose. Both were experimental,
eclectic writers who dared to fit the form of their works
to their purposes. It has been a custom in the past to de-
preciate Melville's gifts as an artist; and it might appear
tempting to assign Faulkner the role of superior artist in
a comparison of the two writers, since he, in his works,
was able to maintain a consistently higher order of crafts-
manship than was Melville. But such a judgment is short-
sighted, as Howard P. Vincent points out;

For if anything is obvious, it is the

fact that a work of arta sonnet, a
novel, a play, a song, a painting
can be great only in fulfillment of
the fundamental requirements . . , of
a work of art. The syllogism cover-
ing the situation is valid and is
built on sound premises; A great
novel is inso facto a work of art;
Moby Dick'"is a great novel; therefore,
Moby Dick must be a v/ork of art. Quod
crat ac::;onstrnndum,"^

Faulkner, moreover, wrote at a time when fictional techniques

were far advanced. And it is certainly true that for his
time he was innovative and courageous, but then so was Mel-
ville, The dramatic devices, the "stream of consciousness"
techniques used in Moby Dick, are often highly effective.

Howard P, Vincent, The Trying Out o Moby Dick (Car-

bondale and Edwardsville;'~Toutiiern TTTinois University
Press, 1949), p. 5,
 98
Again, both writers had failures as well as successes in
their experimentation with narrative techniques; yet both
are completely deserving of the high praise which has been
heaped upon them as artists.

Finally, it is not only technique and artistry that

distinguish the writings of Melville and Faulkner. Both men
were equally daring in their treatment of subject matter,
Melville's attack on Christianity as practiced by VJestern
missionaries required considerable courage. So did his
treatment of the theme of incest in Pierre, for the reading
public of Melville's time generally adhered to a stern Vic-
torian moral code, Pierre is the one novel of Melville's
whose themes might be called Faulknerian, for Faulkner too
probed the darker side of man's psyche. His novels, which
deal witli such tabooed themes as incest and miscegination,
also reveal considerable courage. Ultimately, both v/riters
followed their own creative bent and said what they wanted
to say v/ithout regard for public censure.
It is perhaps suitable to close a discussion of Melville
and Faulkner with some comment about their basic attitudes
tov/ard man, toward his nature and condition. Much of their
attitudes concerning man's predicament derives, I believe,
from their conception of time. Melville and Faulkner be-
lieved, in varying degrees, in the concept of progress; they
also believed in the concept of the Fall, The interaction
 99
of these two concepts in their works is often ironical and
paradoxical as I have attempted to show elsewhere in this
study. Both writers believed in predestination, though
Faulkner's version seems a bit more hopeful than Melville's.
The determinism in Melville is absolute; it leaves no room
for man's spirit. "All Mardi's history" Babbalanja ex-
claims in Mardi," beginning middle, and finiswas written
out in capitals in the first page penned. The whole story
is told in a title-page,"^ Ahab expresses Melville's iron-
bound determinism in a different way;

But if the great sun move not of himself;

but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor
one single star can revolve, but by some
invisible pov/er; how then can this one
small heart beat; this one small brain
think thoughts; unless God does that
beating, does that thinking, does that
living, and not I, By heaven, man, we
are turned round and round in this v/orld,
like yonder v/indless, and Fate is the
handspike (p. 410),
One must not take for granted, however, that the author
agreed with Babbalanja or Ahab since arguments for free will
can also be found in his writings, (The chapter entitled
"The Mat Maker" presents what is surely one of the most
lucid explanations of the interaction of necessity, free will,
and chance,) But tlie determinism Melville inherited from

Herman Melville, flardi and a Voyage Thither (New York;

Capricorn Books, 1964). ""
 100
his mother's Dutch Reformed Church is a powerful element in
his writings.
What makes Melville's version of determinism less hope-
ful is the fact that he generally adheres to a cyclic in-
terpretation of history, Man is not moving toward some
larger purpose; he is merely repeating the eternal cycles
on the treadmill of time. If man could follow a straight
course, if time were linear, then there would be some hope
that he might arrive at some destination, "V7ere this v/orld
an endless plain," Ishmael reflects, "and by sailing east-
ward we could forever reach nev/ distances , , . then there
were promise in the voyage" (p. 194) , But the shape of the
eartli is itself symbolic of man's predicament: his farthest
journey succeeds only in bringing him back to where he
started.
Faulkner's version of the world process is more hopeful,
and not only because he allows man some free-will, but be-
cause he has a linear conception of time. He does not deny
the clear cyclic character of much in nature, but the cycles
in Faulkner are like v/heels taking man somev/here: This is
not to say that Faulkner approves of the direction in which
man is heading, for he often does not. For example, while
serving as a guest lecturer at the University of Virginia
in 1957 and 195 8, Faulkner v/as asked a question about change.
He replied;
 101
Change if it is not controlled by
wise people destroys sometimes more
than it brings, , , . If the reason
for the change is base in motivethat
is, to clear the wilderness just to
make cotton land, to raise cotton on
an agrarian economy of peonage, slavery,
is base because it's not as good as the
wilderness which it replaces. But if in
the end that makes more education for
more people, and more food for more peo-
ple, more of tlie good things of life
, , , then , . , it v/as v/orth destroying
the wilderness. But if all the destruc-
tion of the wilderness does is to give
more people more automobiles just to
ride around in, then the v/ilderness was
better.^

What is significant in Faulkner's concept of history is

his belief that v/ise men have tlie capacity to influence
change for the better. This hopeful note in Faulkner is
often overshadov/ed by the self-serving and short-sighted
characters in his novelsthe Snopes for examplebut faith
in man's potential is nonetheless a genuine ingredient in
Faulkner's fiction. It is not, as is Melville's nineteenth-
century 7\merican optimism, something merely grafted on.

Q
Faulkner in the Univernitv; Class Conferences at the
U, of Viramra' TTSV-D?,, ed. PretTrick L. Gwynn ana .Joseph L.
Blotner Tc^iar^cttcGViTle, Virginia: The University of
Virginia Press, 1949),
 CHAPTER VI

NATURE THEME IN "THE BEAR"

Faulkner, like Melville, had a remarkably productive

seven-year period during v;hich he produced seven novels.
Although none of his works of that period possess the power
and magnitude of Moby Dick, the sustained artistry of the
seriesbeginning with Sartoris and The Sound and The Fury
in 1929 and ending with Absalom, Absalom in 1936is per-
haps unequaled by any other American novelist. Whereas
Melville's burst of creative power played out while he was
in his early thirties, Faulkner's did not begin until he
was that age; and Faulkner was in his mid-forties v/hen his
novel treating the theme of civilization vs, nature. Go Down,
Moses, was published in 1942.
Ninety-one years, much history, and many changes in the
face of the /American continent separate the publication of
Moby Dick and Go Down, Moses. But the central, unifying
themes of Jlelville's novel and the portions of Go Down, Moses
dealing with Isaac McCaslin and the wilderness are the same.
On one side is man, man the hunter, man the clearer of the
wilderness, man the farmer, man the builder, man the en-
tepreneur, the ov/ncr, the possessor. On the other side is
102

AA
 103
naturetlie sea and the wilderness together with their crea-
tures, the great Wliite Whale and the giant bear, majestic,
mysterious, cruel, silent and brooding.
The first phase of man's encounter with wild nature is
always the hunt, and perhaps no other activity better ex-
presses man's driving nature tlian does this primordial
ritual. In explaining the significance of the hunt in "The
Bear," Faulkner remarked to a questioner;
The hunt was simply a symbol of pursuit.
Most of anyone's life is a pursuit of
something. That is, tlie only alternative
to life is immobility, v/hich is death.
This was a symbolization of the pursuit
which is a normal part of anyone's life,
while he stays alive, told in terms which
were familiar to me and dramatic to me,l
But pursuit, that restless striving which Goethe said is the
proper activity for man, can be good or bad depending upon
the goals man sets for himself. The goals the white man set
for himself in the New World were not, unfortunately, based
on humility and sufferance and pride; more often they were
based on rapacity, on the lust for the kill and the lust for
ownership, God cannot be blimed for man's rapacity, Ike
McCaslin believes. The fault lies v/ith man himself. As an
old man in "Delta Autumn" Ike reflects upon man's lust for

iFaulkner in the Univerr>ity; C^lass Conferences ajb the

Univc r5"! cy~o f "vI'rgini a"T9 5 7-38 , ed. Fre^rrcK L. Gv/ynn ana
jdscpa L.' srotncr (cTiarlottesville, Virginia: The University
of Virginia Press, 1959), p. 271,
 104
the kill and God's designs;
"God created man and He created the world
for him to live in and I reckon He created
the kind of world He would have wanted to
live in if He had been a man--the ground
to walk on, tlie big woods, the trees and
the water, and the game to live in it.
And maybe he didn't put the desire to hunt
and kill game in man but I reckon He knew
it was going to be there, that man was
going to teach himself, since he wasn't
quite God himself yet" (p. 348) ,
As elsewhere in Faulkner, God does not predestine; he merely
foresees the consequence of man's actions.
In Moby Dick the symbols of nature are the sea and the
White VThale which swims the sea; in Go Down, Moses nature
is represented by the wilderness and the creatures which in-
habit the wilderness, principally Old Ben, the giant bear.
Old Ben functions primarily as a symbol for the wilderness
itself. In ansv/er to a question about symbols in his hunt-
ing story, Faulkner replied: "Well, one symbol was the
bear represented the vanishing wilderness."^ In "The Bear"
the identification of Old Ben with the wilderness is made
reasonably explicit when the giant bear is described as
"not even a mortal beaf5t but an anachronism indomitable and
invincible out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and
apotlieosia of the old v/ild life which the little puny humans
swarmed and hacked at in a fury of abhorrence and fear like

^Ibid., p. 200,
 105
pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant" (p. 193).
This passage describes the way men swarmed about and hacked
at the wilderness, "that doomed wilderness whose edges were
being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and
axes who feared it because it was wilderness" (p. 193) .

Nature in the Nev/ World was viewed differently by dif-

ferent people. To Ike, America's wilderness furnished man
his second opportunity for Paradise. In order to possess
Paradise, however, man had to repudiate the concept of
possession, and such an act for men like L. Q. C. McCaslin
and millions of his ilk v/as simply unthinkable. The para-
dise most of the settlers of America sought was not one in
which man lives v/ith nature in humility and sufferance and
pride, but one in which the streets are paved with gold--
real gold. To tlie overwhelming majority of America's
pioneers nature meant simply land, land that could grow
crops v/hich could be translated into that most prized of all
commoditiesmoney. Ike, on the other hand, realized that
true possession has nothing to do v/ith titles and deeds.
Although he repudiated his material inheritance, he never
relinquished the land. The narrator of "Delta Autumn" notes
that "it v;as Ike's land although he had never owned a foot
of it. He had never wanted to, not even after he saw plain
its ultimate doom, watching it retreat year by year before
the onslaught of axe and saw and log lines and then dynamite

JJ
 106
and tractor plows" (p. 354). It should be noted that al-
though Faulkner was unquestionably sympathetic to Ike, he
did not completely share Ike's conception of the nature of
the wilderness. Faulkner explained to his Japanese audience
at the Nagano Seminar of 1955;

"The wilderness to me was the past, which

could be the old evils, the old forces,
which were by their own standards right
and correct. . , , the boar v/as a symbol
of the old forces, not evil forces, but
the old forces which in man's youth were
not evil, but that they were in man's
blood, his inheritance, his [instinctive]
impulses came from that old or ruthless
malevolence, which was nature,"-^

To Ike, the wilderness was a place where man encountered the

beauty, the mystery of God's creation. It was a school
where man could be initiated into the esoteric secrets of
nature, "If Sam Fathers had been his mentor," the narrator
says of Ike in "The Bear," "and the backyard rabbits and
squirrels his kindergarten, then the wilderness the old bear
ran v;as his college and the old male bear itself, so long
unwifed and childless as to have become its own ungendered
progenitor, was his alma mater" (p, 210) , Although Ike ul-
timately takes a wife, there is never much chance for the
marriage since in part V of "The Bear," Ike, at the age of

^Lion in the Garden: Intcrviev/s with William Faulkner

1926-l7oT7 ecr,*Trrme3 fi. Meriwetiier and MTcliael Millgate
T^ew 7oF;r: Random House, 1968), p, 115,

AA
 11

107
eighteen, takes the woods to be "his mistress and his wife"
(p. 326).

In addition to being represented by the wilderness,

nature in Goi Down, Moses, is represented by several animals
and at least one man; Old Ben; the giant buck (the spirit
deer) which Ike sees when he is eleven years old; Sam
Fathers, Ike's part-Indian, part-Negro, pai:t-white mentor;
amd all the lesser creatures of the wilderness. The clan
of hunters--Ike, Walter Ewell, General Compson, Major DeSpain,
Boon Hogganbeckembody, in varying amounts, the wisdom and
code of the wilderness, but by and large they are too tainted
with civilization to be considered representative of nature's
wilderness.
It is interesting that the early descriptions of Old
Ben often contain such v/ords as "indomitable," "invincible,"
and "immortal," words used often in the description of the
White IVhale in Moby Dick, Such words describe Ike's
earliest conception of the old bear. It is not until he
takes his first trip to the big bottom country at the age
of ten that he realizes, after seeing a fresh print of "the
enormous warped two-toed foot" (p, 200) , that the bear is
mortal. Then "for the first time he realised that the bear
which had run in his listening and loomed in his dreams
since before he could remember , , , was a mortal animal"
(pp, 200-01), Old Ben is a symbol of the wilderness, a

AA
 108
symbol of nature; and just as nature in the New World was
first conceived of as inexhaustible, so the old bear is
first conceived by Ike as immortal. Not until it was too
late, not until the bears of Mississippi and the wilderness
areas of the New World were doomed, did man realize the
tragic error of his judgment. Faulkner addressed the issue
directly at Nagano when he was asked if the bear is symbolic
of nature. He replied; "Yes, symbolic of nature in an age
when nature in a way is being destroyed. That is, the
forests are going, being replaced by the machine, and that
bear represented the old tradition of nature," Ike lived
at a crucial period in our nation's history; he grew up to
realize what our nation is growing up to realize; man in
his onslaught against the wilderness in the New World is
destroying irrevocably that ancient and delicate web of life
which is wild nature.

But Old Ben's function goes beyond representing the

mortal v/ilderness; he also serves as a mythical totem anim.al
for Sam Fatherr., VThen Old Ben is killed, Sam mysteriously
lapses into unconsciousness and shortly thereafter dies,
perhaps with the help of Boon Hogganbeck, The connection
between the death of Old Ben and the death of Sam Fathers
is clear; both their lives are inextricably bound up with

"^Ibid,, p. 140,
 109
the wilderness, and with the destruction of the wilderness
they both become obsolete. The irony is that, by training
the giant mongrel mastiff. Lion, for the hunt and by teach-
ing the other hunters the skills of the hunt, Sam prepares
the way for his own destruction, John Lyndenberg sees the
hunt for Old Ben in terms of a tribal ritual, "They (the
hunters, the tribe) are under a compulsion to carry out
their annual ritual at the time of 'the year's death,' to
strive to conquer the Nature God whose very presence chal-
lenges them and raises doubts as to their power,"^ The same
motives often seem to lie behind man's onslaught against
nature in America.

Contrary to most primitive tradition, Sam Fathers had

more than one totem animal. In "Delta Autumn," Ike, re-
flecting back to his initiation into the wilderness years
before, thinks "there v/as something running in Sam Fathers
veins which ran in the veins of the buck too" (p, 350), And,
in "The Old People," when Sam had taken Ike to see the ghost
buck, Ike had heard his old mentor address the buck as
"Grandfather" (p, 184) , acknowledging kinship with the
mysterious spirit of the wilderness.

5
John Lyndenberg, "Nature Myth :.n Faulkner's The Bear"
in Bea\- l\an and '^',cd: Seven Approaches to V7illiam Faulkner's
"The i<co.i'r' eTT 77 k, Utley, L, '7, ;jTo'om, A, t^ Is^inney (Tlew
yorx.:""^rfaridon House, 1964), p. 284,
 110
Even though Ike is initiated into the ways of the wild-
erness, even tliough he repudiates his tainted inheritance,
he is still unable to absolve himself of his Western heri-
tage. Like Lancelot, he is permitted to see a vision of
the ideal, but because of his inherent unworthiness as a
white representative of V7estern Civilization he is excluded
from the holy inner sanctum. Because of the curse upon the
clan into which he was born, he is forced to acknowledge
kinship with a totem animal of a completely different na-
turea serpent, V^Then Faulkner was asked about the sym-
bolism of the snake in "The Bear," he replied; "Oh, the
snake is the old grandfather, the old fallen angel, the
unregenerate immortal," The first association the reader
is likely to make with the snake in "The Bear" is Satan's
appearance as a serpent to Eve in the Garden, But it is
interesting that both Ike and Faulkner call the old rattler
grandfather, particularly in light of the corrupt nature of
Ike's fleshly grandfather, Carrothers McCaslin, Certainly

the rattler stands for what Lynn Altenbernd calls "the evil
7
principle incarnate," but the evil he represents is different
from that represented by the sharks in Moby Dick, There is

Faulkner in The University, p, 2,

"^Lynn /vltenbernd, "A Suspended Moment: The Irony of

History in Willia^^i Faulkner's 'The Bear,'" Modern Language
i:otGn,"vol, 75,, 1900, p, 581,
 Ill
something human about the old rattler; one might even specu-
late that he represents the evil brought into America's
wilderness by Western Civilization, by man's rapacious de-
sire to attack, to desecrate, to own Paradise. The evil
represented by the sharks in Moby Dick is, in contrast,
machine-like, inhumanalthough, as Melville notes, there
is some inhuman cruelty and cannibalism in all men.
The wilderness. Old Ben, the ghost buck, and to some
extent the serpent, represent nature in Go Down, Moses.
Civilization is represented by men; L, Q, C, McCaslin and
his descendants. Boon Hogganbeck, General Compson, Major
DeSpain, all the members of the yearly hunting party, and,
literally, all the white and black inhabitants of
Yoknapatav/pha county, with the possible exception of Sam
Fathers, whose role is ambivalent. Civilization is also
represented by man's institutions; plantations, lumbering
operations, railroads, farms, gins, and that most wicked of
all institutions, slavery. In some respects tv/o dogs, the
fyce and Lion, might also be considered representative of
Western man and his civilization.
The serpent, as already noted, is the incarnation of
evil, and though he may more cogently represent the evil of
civilization, which might be considered in terms of the
concept of original sin (either Adam's or Carrothers
McCaslin's), he is also representative of the predatory.
 112
cruel, cannibalistic evil of the wilderness. Faulkner, as
well as Melville, recognized that evil is intrinsic to na-
ture as well as to civilization; The following exchange
occurred between Faulkner and a questioner at the Nagano
Seminar;

Q: Does tliat nature (as symbolized by

Old Ben] include both evil and good?
Faulkner; Yes, sure. Its own morality.
It did things that were evil, by a more
intelligent code, but by its own code
they were not evil and it was strong
and brave to live up to its own code of
morality,^

Faulkner here seems to be talking about the law of the sur-

vival of the fittest, that code of nature which writers like
Jack London and Robinson Jeffers celebrated, that law which
is cruel to individuals but beneficent to species and to the
overall balance of nature.
The evil of civilization which the serpent symbolizes
is not so defensible. Perhaps the paramount evil of civili-
zation in Go Down, Moses is its mindless destruction of wild
nature, although certainly there are evils within Western
Civilizationmost notably slaverywhich rank with, and in
human terms, outv/eigh the destruction of nature. But under-
lying these and other evils is a common motive, one recog-
nized and repudiated by Ikethat is the desire for ovmership.

Lion in the Garden, p. 140,

 113
the desire to possess Paradise, Years before, Thoreau had
recognized in the settlers of this land the same base motive.
He scored a farmer named Flint who had the audacity to give
his name to a pond on his property, "Some skin-flint,"
Thoreau remarked, "who loved better the reflecting surface
of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his ov/n
brazen face; \>/ho regarded even the wild ducks which settled
9
in it as trespassers," Both Thoreau and Ike well under-
stood the presumption of ephemeral man's claim to own the
timeless eartii. And both lamented the destruction of the
wilderness. In the following passage Thoreau explains v/hat
has happened to Walden Pond in the years intervening between
his stay there and his writing of Walden,
But since I left those shores the wood-
choppers have still further laid them
waste, and nov/ for many a year there
will be no more rambling through the
aisles of the wood, with occasional
vistas through v/hich you see the water.
My Muse may be excused if she is silent
henceforth. How can you expect the
birds to sing v/hen their groves are cut
do.;n?10
This passage is written in much the same tone as those por-
tions of Go Down, Moses v/hich deal witli the destruction of

^Henry David Thoreau, v;alden or in tlve Woods? and. On

Civil Disobedience (:3ew YoriTl TITe NGW American Library,
A Signe"trcla::sic,"^1960) , p, 134.

10Ibid,, p. 132.
 114
America's Southern wilderness.

For the most part, the men in G Down, Moses who embody
the predatory, destructive aspects of Western Civilization
remain anonymous. But their perpetual presence is made
known by the frequent and ominous references to the axe and
the plo\>/, the saw and the log lines; the ring of civiliza-
tion is implacably closing upon the doomed wilderness in the
story. It is not particularly important that the perpetra-
tors of the destruction remain largely anonymous; such has
been the case throughout the settling of America,
There is, however, one man who serves as a central focus
of the evils of Western Civilization in the storyIke's
grandfather, old Carrothers McCaslin, It was he who founded
the McCaslin family in Yoknapatawpha county early in the
nineteenth century. He, it v/as, v/ho was determined to own
a large portion of Paradise, to clear the wilderness in
order to grow crops which could be exchanged for money. He
bought the original McCaslin place from the old Indian chief,
Ikkemotubbe, a transaction v/hich Ike believed neither man
had the right to make. He compounded his sins by purchasing
slaves to clear the v/ilderness and work the land. And,
finally, he corrmitted the crov/ning sin of miscegenation and
incest with his own half-Negro daughter, Tomasina,
One of the dramatically successful incidents in the dif-
ficult and often criticised part IV of "The Bear" is Ike's
 115
step by step fitting together of the evidence of his grand-
father's sin, Ike, at the age of sixteen, examining the old
ledgers tsJcen from the shelves of the commissary, reads the
following entry in the hand of his own father, Theophilus
(Uncle Buck);

Eunice Bought by Father in rinw Orleans

1807 ^6^0 dolars, :iarricr"tQ"^ucvdu3
1809 Drownd in Crick Crir;tma3 Day TST2
Tpr'2m
Then he reads another entry, this one in the hand of his
father's twin brother, Amodeus (Uncle Buddy);
June 21th 1833 Drov/nd herself (p, 267)'
TUid then another entry in his father's hand;
23 Jun 1833 \^o in hell ever heard of
a niqer drov/ndino^im self (p, 26 7)
Ike cannot understand why his Uncle Buddy believed Eunice
drovmed herself, v/hy it could not have been an accident.
Then ne notices that Eunice's daughter, Tomasina (Tomy),
died in childbirth in June of 1833, and that her son Terrel
(Turl) was listed in his grandfather's will. Now Ike fits
all the pieces together. For old McCaslin to include Turl
in his will, Ike reasons, "v/as chnaoer than saying riy Son to

nigger" (p. 269),

Ike agonizes over his discovery. He tries to find some
mitigating motive for his grandfather's behavior;
But there must have boc^ love he thought.
gorne'^F^cTrl: of lovo. :.vo.n what he v/ould
have caTTo^ love: not Vui^r an after-
noon ' s or a nTaTTt's""T;r;itt:oon fp. 270) .
 116
Ike reconstructs in his mind the circumstances that might
have led his grandfather to commit incest with Tomy, but he
cannot rid himself of tlie agony of his knowledge. "His own
daughter His own daughter. No No not even him (p. 270) .
Ike cannot escape the truth.
Ike considers his grandfather's loneliness; he considers
the possible temptation of being womanless and having the
young girl working about the house. But he doesn't specifi-
cally consider what was perhaps the principal reason for the
old man's sin; L, Q, C, JlcCaslin was a man who saw every-
thing according to its dollar value. He looked upon Tomasina,
not as his daughter, but as his property. His lust for pos-
session v/ent beyond the desire to ovm and exploit the wild-
erness; he sought to own people, and he did own people, and
the sin he commits with his daughter is merely an extension
of the sin which the ships bringing white men to America
brought v/ith them on tainted winds from Europe, That sin is
man's desire to divide the earth into oblongs and squares,
to own Paradise, to own anything, no matter hov/ sacredeven
other human beings, even one's own child.
Just as Faulkner does not look upon nature as all good,
neither does he look upon civilization as all bad. Western
Civilization has brought rapid and ever-increasing change
to the New World, and Faulkner, throughout his works, seems
to reveal true admiration for those characters who have the
 117
strength and courage to cope with adversity and change.
Lena Grove, in Light in August, is one such character. She
sets out walking across country, with great strength and
infinite patience, to track down the fugitive father of her
unborn child, Dilsey, the sprightly old Negro servant in
The Sound and The Furv, is a paragon of moral strength who
holds together the unravelling strands of the effete Compson
clcui. In "The Bear" the creature who is perhaps most cap-
able of coping with his environment is Ike's small dog, the
fyce. Since the fyce helps in the struggle against Old Ben
he is therefore on the side of civilization in its v/ar
against the wilderness. But there can be no doubt that
Faulkner admires the "desperate and despairing courage" of
the little dog who attacked the giant bear with "that sort
of courage which had long since stopped being bravery and
had become foolhardiness" (p, 211) . VThile at the University
of Virginia Faulkner was questioned about the breed and
character of the fyce. The follov/ing exchange took place:

A, He [the fyce] isin our Mis-

sissippi jargon, he is any small dog,
usuallyhe was a fox or rat terrier at
one time that has gotten mixed up with
hound, v/ith bird-dog, everything else,
but any email dog in my country is
called a fyce,
Q, Can v/e look upon him as re-
presenting the primitive, such as the
bear and the forest?
A, No, he's thein a way, the
anthithesis of the bear. The bear
 118
represented the obsolete primitive. The
fyce represents the creature who has
coped with environment and is still on
top of it, you might say , , ,^^

All the creatures in Faulkner's writings who have the ability

to cope with their environments, it should be noted, are not
worthy of admirationthe Snopes for example. At least they
do not elicit, as human beings, the reader's admiration even
though they might on occasion draw grudging regard for their
clever and cool chicanery.
One other animal which fights on the side of civiliza-
tion in the story is the great blue mastiff. Lion, Although
this creature's determination and courage at least equal
that of the fyce, he does not elicit from the reader any
sense of affection as does the fyce. The reason is that
Lion is one dimensionalhe is murder incarnate, "Lion in-
ferred not only courage and all else that went to make up
the will and desire to pursue and kill, but endurance, the
will and desire to endure beyond all imaginable limits of
flesh in order to overtake and slay" (p, 237) , Because of
his pov/er and his machine-like efficiency in the hunt. Lion
has been labeled a symbol of the mechanized civilization
which is destroying the wilderness areas of the New

Faulkner in The Univernitv, p. 37,

 119
12
World. He seems in some respects like the cruel sharks in
Mo^y Dicl<, although he fights on the opposite side in man's
war against nature.
Above and beyond the adversaries in the struggle be-
tween man and nature in Go Down,Moses are the moral values
represented by civilization on the one hand and the wilder-
ness on the other. Even though Faulkner sees good and evil
in both civilization and nature, the fact is that virtue in
the novel resides heavily on the side of nature. Part of
the reason for this, Faulkner admits, is simply the human
propensity for looking back with pleasure upon the "good
old days," It is natural for a man who spent his youth in
the wilderness, then grew up to see the wilderness destroyed,
to look back upon the days of his childhood with nostalgia,
as though looking back upon lost Eden, But civilization's
inordinate burden of sin in G Dov/n, Moses is not entirely
undeserved. The technology which destroys the wilderness
is often mindless and misdirected, and it brings in its
train a series of genuine evils. In answer to a question
on this issue, Faulkner remarked:

^^Sec Lynn Altenbernd, "A Suspended :'.oment: The Irony

of History in VJilliam Faulkner's 'The Bear,'" Modern Language
Notes, Vol, 75, November 1960, 572-582, And W. R. :ioses,
^'Vrnerc History Crosses :iyth: Another Reading of 'The Bear, I It
Accent, Vol, 12:1, Winter 1953, 21-33,
 120
Well, of course the destruction of
the wilderness is not a phenomenon of
the South, you know. That is a change
that's going on everyvvhere, and I think
that man progresses mechanically and
technically much faster than he does
spiritually, that there may be something
he could substitute for the ruined wild-
erness, but he hasn't found that. He
spends more time ruining tlie v/ilderness
than he does finding something to re-
place it, just like he spends more time
producing more people than something
good to do with the people or to make
better people out of them. That , , ,
to me is a sad and tragic thing for the
old days, the old times, to go, provid-
ing you have the sort of background
which a country boy like me had v/hen
that was a part of my life, , , , I
don't v;ant it to change, but then that's
true of everyone as he grov/s old. He
thinks that the old times v/ere the best
times, and he don't want it to change,-^^

Civilization and its accompanying technology cut the

ties which bind man to nature. They set him adrift in a
world whose principal aim is personal aggrandizement. The
first object in the quest for property is the earth itself,
the earth v.'hich Ike believes no man has the moral right to
own. The second phase in civilized man's lust for ownership
is even more sacrilegious: after man has satisfied his lust
for possession by dividing the earth into oblongs and squares,
he then turns to the only other property of value v/ithin his
reachhis fellow man, Faulkner once told a history professor

13
FauDcner i n t h e Univr>rsitv, p . 6 8 ,
 121
that labor unions are our last frontier. The professor ex-
plained to Faulkner's brother, John, what he had understood
the autlior to mean; "Man, in his westward movement across
this land, was motivated mainly by a desire to get rich
quick, and when virgin country and virgin resources gave
out at the Pacific shores, he turned to our one remaining,
untapped resourceman himself."^^ Of course man didn't
wait until the frontier was closed to exploit his fellows;
slaveryof all kindsis far older than history. But cer-
tainly the concept of property which is an integral part of
Western Civilization, is one that has ushered many evils
into man's existence.

Held up to Western Civilization as an alternative and

counterpoise are the wilderness and the wilderness code.
The wilderness, like the sea, is first of all its own reality,
not terrible like the sea, but nonetheless brooding and
mysteriousthe v/oods and canebrakes and river bottoms
often fraught with challenge and danger. Moreover, the wild-
erness is peopled v/ith creatures more closely kin to man than
are the creatures of the sea. They are generally warm-
blooded and soft and v/alk upon the earth as man does, some-
times even upon two legs as the anthropomorphic bear. In

^^John Faulkner, Mv Brother Bill (New York; Trident

Press, 1963) , p, 223.
 122
spite of the sea's mysterious allure, man feels more at home
in the wilderness; his most recent ties are there and the
smell of v7ood-smoke, the sight of the campfire, the ritual
of the hunt, all exert a strong, atavistic influence over
him. But nature in the wilderness, like nature in the sea,
is essentially amoral. It is the code of the wilderness,
handed down to Ike by Sam Fathers, who in turn received it
from his Indian ancestors, which serves as a counterbalance
against the immorality of civilization.

The wilderness code is essentially a religious attitude

toward life. It is based upon an awareness of man's kinship
withand dependence uponnature. Although carnivores are
never on the side of morality in Western Civilization, such
is not the case in the wilderness. Killing is part of the
code, it is part of the ritual, but it is always killing
with respect for the life that is taken. In "Delta Autumn"
Ike articulates the code which he had adopted as a boy of
twelve when he was initiated into the ways of the wilderness
by Sam Fathers, After he had killed his first buck Sam
marked his face with blood and the boy thought, though he
could not phrase it: "I slew you; my bearing must not shame
your quitting life. Mv conduct forever onv/ard must become
your death" (p, 351), This is something far deeper than the
practical conservation of Ike's hunting companion, Henry
Wyatt, who explains; "We dont kill does because if we did
 123
kill does in a few years there wouldn't even be any bucks
left to kill" (p. 347). Such an attitude derives basically,
from the same utilitarianism which was instrumental in the
destruction of the wilderness.

Ike's attitude toward the wilderness, in contrast, is

primitive. The wisdom of the wilderness code is prerational
and profound. It is based upon the timeless laws of nature
the struggle for existence, the survival of the fittest, the
perfection of all speciesboth prey and predatorthrough
the universal ritual of the hunt. Robinson Jeffers expresses
the principle effectively in his poem "The Bloody Sire";
What but the wolf's tooth whittled
so fine
The fleet limbs of the antelope?
What but fear v/inged the birds, and
hunger
Jeweled with such eyes the great
goshawks head?
Violence has been the sire of all
the v/orld's values (11, 6-10) ,1^
Nature's laws, v/hile kind and beneficient to species, are
rigorous and often cruel to individuals. Civilization's
laws, on the other hand, v/hile often couched in terms of
compassion and great moral purpose, are often cruel to in-
dividuals and species alikev/itness the countless wars
fought under the banners of high, moral purposes. Even

15 rs. Be Angrv at the Sun and Other

From Robinson Jeffe ouse, 19'ii) ,
Poems {Uew York: Random Hou
 124
civilization's best-motivated endeavors often go awry be-
cause of man's ignorance of nature's deeper laws. A case in
point is the fiimine which has occurred in some underdeveloped
countries where Western medical technology has drastically
reduced the death rates, while doing nothing to check the
birthrates, thus permitting populations quickly to outstrip
food supplies.

It should be recognized, hov/ever, that the wilderness

theme in G Down, Moses is not a study in objectivity; it is
rather a study in nostalgia, Faulkner does not offer the
wilderness code as an antidote for the evils of civilization.
It cannot, for excimple, counteract the evil of slavery, as
William Van O'Conner has pointed out in a perceptive essay
on the wilderness theme in the story. He remarks;
The treatment of the spirit of the wild-
erness has no real relevancy beyond ac-
knowledging a forriGr and continuing
wrong. It relates to a world not merely
prior to slavery but prior to civiliza-
tion. It is a kind of neurotic dream--
an escape from, rather than an attempt
to solve, the present injustice,16

But Faulkner should not be blamed because the wilderness

theme in his novel does not solve the injustice of slavery.
It was not intended to, I^at it does is provide the contrast

William Van O'Conner, "The Wilderness Them.e in

Faulkner's 'The Bear,'" Accent, Vol, 13, VJinter 195 3,
p. 20,
 125
which makes the evils of Western Civilization stand out in
relief. And Faulkner's study of the wilderness does provide
some insight into v/hat we, as a nation, in our victory over
nature, have lost.
What one historian has said about the frontier in
America applies equally to her wilderness areas.
The people are going to miss the
frontier more than v/ords can express.
For four centuries they heard its call,
listened to its promises, and bet
their lives and fortunes on its out-
come. It calls no more, and regardless
of hov/ they bend their ears for its
faint whisper they cannot hear the sug-
gestion of a promise,-^'

^"^VJalter Prescott Webb, The Great Frontier (Austin;

The University of Texas Press,T951) , p, 373,
 CHAPTER VII

MOBY DICK AND "THE BEAR"

Between the middle of the nineteenth and the middle of

the twentieth centuries, an event occurred v/hich was un-
precedented in world history; that event was the fall of
nature. Although nature's fall is now virtually v/orld-wide,
its most dramatic defeat occurred in America with the clos-
ing of the frontier shortly before the turn of the century.
Prior to that time the cyclic patterns of nature had domi-
nated life on earth for untold ages. Almost totally un-
perceived during those ages, however, were two linear-
progressive processes v/hich v/ere destined to disrupt and
radically modify the cyclic rhythms of life on earth. The
first of these progressive processes is biological evolution
which culminates v/ith man; the second, a much more recent
and volatile process, is technology.
Although there v/ere a fev; prophetic individuals who
foresaw, at the middle of the last century, nature's ultimate
doom, people, for the most part, even at that late date,
took nature's inexhaustibility for granted, A century later,
though there v/ere still many v/ho had given the issue abso-
lutely no thought, those who did came away v/ith a completely

126
 127
different attitude toward nature's vulnerability.
In regard to the issue of man against nature, both Mel-
ville and Faulkner are fairly representative of their times.
Faulkner was born only six years after Melville's death,
but almost a century separates their v/orks treating the
theme of nan against nature in the New WorldMoby Dick and
Go Down, Moses, Both Moby Dick and those portions of Go
Down, Moses dealing with the wilderness theme"The Old
People," "The Bear," and "Delta Autumn"reveal attitudes
toward nature which are fairly representative of the periods
in which they v/ere written. In Melville's v/haling story,
time is cyclic, !Ian and nature carry on eternal v/ar, and
man is the eternal victim in that struggle. In Go Down,
Moses, particularly in "The Bear," time is linear. The
"progress" of civilization spells the doom of nature's
wilderness. In a sense Faulkner's story "The Bear" is a
modern Moby pjjgk, reflecting man's recently changed attitude
toward nature's invincibility.
It seems quite plausible that Faulkner's hunting story
may have been strongly influenced by Melville's great whaling
epic. He confessed to the book editor of the Chicago Tribune
that he would rather have written Moby Dick than any other
book. He then proceeded to praise Melville's novel;
The Greek-like simplicity of it: a man
of forceful character driven by his som-
ber nature and his bleak heritage, bent
on his own destruction and dragging his
 128
immediate world down with him with a
despotic and utter disregard of them as
individuals; the fine point to which
the various natures caught (and passive
as though with a foreknowledge of un-
alterable doom) in the fatality of his
blind course are swept--a sort of
Golgotha of the heart become immutable
as bronze in the sonority of its plung-
ing ruin; all against the grave and
tragic rhythm of the earth in its most
timeless phase: the sea. And the
symbol of their doom: a White VJhale.
There's a death for a man, nov/; , , .
There's magic in the very word. A
White \-/hale, VThite is a grand v/ord,
like a crash of massed trumpets; and
leviathan himself has a kind of placid
blundering majesty in his name. And
then put them together!11 A death for
Achilles, and the divine maidens of
Patmos to mourn him, to harp v/hite-
handed sorrov/ on their golden hair,-^

This rhapsody upon Moby Dick reveals that Faulkner, like

Melville, appreciated the grand theme. He proved as much
when he wrote his ovm novel dealing with the theme of man
against nature, for the creature he chose to symbolize na-
ture was to the wilderness of Yoknapatav/pha county what
Moby Dick v/as to the seathe greatest and most venerable
member of the hugest species of them all.
Although it is not possible to determine how much direct
influence Moby Dick had on "The Bear," it is possible to ex-
amine the two stories together; and when this is done some

^William Faulkner, Esnays Sneeches and Public Letters,

ed, James B, .Meriwether (Hew il'ork:"' random House, VK^) ,
pp, 197-98.
 129
striking parallels, as well as some fundamental differences,
appear. To begin with some rather basic observations, both
stories are, primarily, hunting tales. Both Moby Dick and
Old Ben are giants of their species, old, deformed, battle-
scarred, legendary, and powerful, fitting symbols for man's
ancient adversarynature. Moby Dick, called by Captain
Boomer of the Samuel Enderby an "old great-grandfather," has
a deformed "scrolled" jaw and carries in his flesh various
lances and harpoonspainful reminders of man's aggressive
and destructive nature. The superstitious whalemen believe
Moby Dick is ubiquitous; he has supposedly been sighted at
different latitudes at a single moment in time. He is also
believed to possess a supernatural malignant intelligence;
and his spirit spout is said to lead men to their destruc-
tion. Occasionally the White l^ale has been known to defend
other members of his species by attacking the whalemen who
prey upon them, by biting the lines to the "fast fish" and
by smashing the whale boats of the crews, as Captain Boomer
so vividly relates (pp. 560-61),
Faulkner's bear is also old, as his name suggests; he
is "solitary, indomitable, and alone; widowered childless
and absolved of mortalityold Priam reft of his old wife
and outlived all his sons" (p. 194), Old Ben's deformity is
a trap-maimed foot, and he too carries many evidences of
man's aggressiveness. After he is killed, all the old
 130
projectiles are extracted from his flesh and counted and
"there were fifty-two of them, buckshot rifle and ball"
(p, 247). The old bear is also credited with a supernatural
intelligence, though it is not considered malignant. He
supposedly comes to the Big Bottom country of Yoknapatawpha
county each winter for the ritual hunt. He comes to warn
the other smaller bears to clear out of the area, and he
comes to look over and size up the men who have come for the
hunt, particularly the new ones. Unlike Moby Dick, hov/ever.
Old Ben, though he leaves "a corridor of wreckage and de-
struction" (p. 193) through property and possessions, never
attacks a man.

In considering the bear and v/hale as symbols of nature,

it is important, as Irving Howe has cautioned, not to neg-
lect "the literal surface of the story." One must not for-
get, Hov/e warns, "that the bear, like the VThite \'7hale, is
2
a 'real' animal, not a specter of allegory." Both crea-
tures in the stories are perceived through the conscious-
ness that gives the animals their mystical dimensions. The
follov/ing passage illustrates the source of Moby Dick's
supernatural powers;
, , . knowing that after repeated, in-
trepid assaults, the vrnite VTliale had
escaped alive; it cannot be much matter
of surprise that sone whalemen should

^Irving Howe, Willir.n Faulkner: A Critical Study (New

York; Random House, Vintage boo-is, 19^*2) , p, 2D 5,
 131
go still further in their superstitions;
declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous,
but immortal (for immortality is but
ubiquity in time); that though groves of
spears should be planted in his flanks,
he would still swim awav unharmed; or if
indeed he should ever be made to spout
thick blood, such a sight would be but
a ghastly deception; for again in un-
ensanguined billows hundreds of leagues
away, his unsullied jet would once more
be seen (p, 153),
It is thus not only what the whale and the bear are that is
important (both are literal representatives of wild nature);
it is equally important how they are perceived by menpar-
ticularly by Ahab and Ike,
Had Melville lived a century later he could not have
created TVhab, for man, at the middle of the twentieth cen-
tury, could not conceive of nature as invincible. And there
could be no epic heroism to Ahab's struggle unless nature
in the shape of the White Whale is considered invincible.
Ahab does not perceive the whale's omnipotence, hov/ever;
he is blinded by his madness. He sees the v/hale solely as
the embodiment or representative of the cruel lav/s of
nature which operate against man and all earth's creatures,
Ahab's God is a heartless, alien God, and Ahab attempts
to strike back at that God by striking at the whale. In
setting himself against nature Ahab completely isolates
himself. He repudiates nature and chooses to rely upon his
own sovereign will. He even regrets having to depend upon
his crew. In an act which symbolizes his ultimate repudiation
 132
of nature, Ahab destroys his quadrant; he prefers to rely on
his own ability for dead reckoning rather than on an instru-
ment which depends upon nature's sun.

Ike, in pursuing his quarry. Old Ben, performs a strik-

ingly similar act; He also rids himself of man-made in-
strumentsas he sets forth into the woods he leaves behind
his compass, watch, and gun. But Ike's motives are far dif-
ferent, even the reverse, of Ahab's, Ike does not see na-
ture's la\/s as inimical to man; he sees them as beneficent
though inadequate; inadequate because the wilderness is un-
able to stand up against man's onslaught and because the
wilderness code cannot effectively counteract the evils of
Western Civilization, Ultimately nature is inadequate be-
cause nature is doomed. Whereas Ike's God appears weaker
than T^ab's God, He is at the same time more human, Ike's
God is anthropomorDhic; Ahab's is a cruel and alien spirit.
Ike does not rid himself of his instruments as a gesture
of self-reliance; he does so to purify himself, to rid him-
self of the tainted trappings of civilization in order to
prepare himself for the essentially religious experience of
seeing Old Ben. There is considerable irony in the fact
that Ahab, who focused upon the negative, capricious, de-
structive aspects of nature, v/ho hated nature, was destroyed
by nature; v/hereas Ike, on the other hand, who loved nature,
who felt a deep reverence for the wilderness, lived to see
 133
the wilderness virtually destroyed and, in fact, was himself
one of the tacit instruments of its destruction.
Both Moby Dick and "The Bear" reveal strong Biblical
influences. Both are permeated with a predestined fatality,
though fate in "The Bear" is not as implacable as in Moby
Diclc. For his part, Ahab accepts his fated course v/illingly,
defiantly; "The path to my fixed purpose is laid v/ith iron
rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded
gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under tor-
rents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle,
naught's an angle to the iron way!" {pp, 142-43). Both
Starbuck and Ishmael sense the danger in Ahab's challenge
to nature, but they are incapable of deterring the mad captain
from his purpose. It does appear, as Ahab maintains, that
the hunt for the VThite VThale is "immutably decreed," But
what TUiab refuses to recognize, in spite of the many warn-
ings he receives from nature, is that from the outstart his
quest is doomed to failure, destined to end in his own de-
struction. To Melville, as to most of his contemporaries,
the idea that man could subdue and destroy nature was un-
thinkable.
On the other hand, as Captain Peleg correctly observes,
Ahab is not devoid of "humanities," Ahab's ov/n injury has
shocked him into recognizing tlie plight of all men in their
unequal battle v/itli nature. Just as Moby Dick maims and
 134
finally destroys Ahab, so does nature maim and destroy all
her creatures. But Ahab does not waste his time sympathizing
with individual man; he is out to avenge the race of man. He
recognizes the kinship of Pip's suffering with his ov/n; he
feels true compassion for the little Negro who has been
driven mad by man's cruelty and nature's indifference, but
he realizes the futility of pitying his predicament. The
only course he can countenance is vengeance; he must strike
back, thrust through the mask, at the immutable laws of na-
ture which decree that man must suffer and die.
But whereas Ahab defies nature with the will of an Old
Testament Jehovah, Ike McCaslin, the saintly protagonist of
"The Bear," looks upon nature with a deep mystical reverence;
and whereas Ahab determinedly seizes upon his predestined
role, Ike passively accepts his. But the same "fatality"
echoes through both stories. In reflecting upon his com-
panions aboard the Pequod, Ishmael remarks; "Such a crev/,
so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some
infernal fatality to help him [Ahab] to his monomaniac
revenge" (p, 156), In "The Bear," after the capture and
harnessing of the v/ild and cruel pov/ers of the great dog.
Lion, the creature v/hich v/ould prove to be the instrument
of Old Ben's destruction, Ike senses the predestined end
of the v/ilderness;
So he should have hated and feared Lion,
Yet he did not. It seemed to him that
 135
there was a fatality in it. It seemed
to him that something, he didn't know
what, was beginning; had already begun.
It was like the last act on a set stage.
It was the beginning of the end of some-
thing, he didn't know what except that
he would not grieve. He would be humble
and proud that he had been found worthy
to be a part of it too or even just to
see it too (p, 226),
Ike is ambivalent in his feelings toward the destruction
of the wilderness. One cause of his passivity, his failure
to act to save the wilderness, is his propensity (and Faulk-
ner's) to view past, present, and future as a single whole,
Gavin Stevens, in Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust; says;
"The past is never dead. It's not even past." V-Thile in a
very important sense such an assertion may be true, it is
cui idea which, if totally accepted, can cripple one's
ability to effectively act in the present. Ike, for example,
can acquiesce in the destruction of something valuable, the
wilderness, because, in his view, if it exists how it can
never really cease to exist. In "Delta Autumn," as Ike ac-
companies his nephev/ Roth Edmonds and his young companions
to the shrunken wilderness of the 1940's for the now empty
ritual of the yearly hunt, he realizes why he had never at-
tempted to save the v/ilderness, to stop "progress."

It v/as because there v/as just exactly

enough of it. He seemed to see the two
of thenhimself and tlie v/ildernessas
coevals, his ov;n span as a hunter, a
woodsman, not contemporary with his
first breath but transmitted to him,
assumed by him gladly, humbly, v/ith
 136
joy and pride, from that old Major de
Spain and that Old Sam Fathers who had
taught him to hunt, the two spans run-
ning out together, not toward oblivion,
nothingness, but into a dimension free
of both time and space where once more
the untreed land , , , v/ould find ample
room for boththe names, the faces of
the old men he had known and loved and
for a little v/hile outlived, moving
again among the shades of tall unaxed
trees and sightless brakes v/here the
wild strong immortal game ran forever
before the tireless belling immortal
hounds, falling and rising phoenix-
like to the soundless guns (p, 354),
Ike accepts the mortality of the wilderness as he accepts
his own mortality; the one is as inevitable as the other.
His consolation is a static vision of the old wilderness,
the old people, the old times which he, somehow, feels are
immortal. Lynn Altenbernd has noted Ike's attempts to hold
"motion in stasis" and has observed that Ike refuses to kill
or to take part in the killing of Old Ben in order "to avoid
the climax that will bring all of his apprenticeship to the
wilderness to an end, and to have his life in the woods re-
main forever suspended just short of the moment of fulfill-
ment and annihilation,"
It is not only in old age that Ike denies the finality
of death. In Part Five of "The Bear," when he is eighteen

Lynn Altenbernd, "A Suspended Moment: The Irony of

History in V?illicu:i Faulkner's 'The Bear,'" Modern Language
Notes, LXXV (1960), p. 579.
 137
years old, Ike returns to the Big Bottom wilderness where
two years earlier Old Ben had been killed by Boon Hogganbeck
and Lion and where now, Sam Fathers, the half-Indian half-
Negro priest of the wilderness and the giant dog are buried.
As Ike leaves the burial site, a beautiful passage ensues
which is \^itmanesque in its denial of death and in its af-
firmation of the unity of time and space and identity;
. . . the knoll [v/here Sam and Lion are
buried] , , . was no abode of the dead
because there was no death, not Lion and
not Sam: not held fast in earth but
free in earth and not in earth but of
earth, myriad yet undiffused of every
myriad part, leaf and twig and particle,
air and sun and rain and dew and night,
acorn oak and leaf and acorn again,
dark and dav/n and dark and dawn again in
tlieir immutable progression and, being
myriad, one (pp. 328-29).

As moving as this passage is, and in spite of its mystical

germ of truth, poetry is a v/eak contender against the axe
and the plow, the sav/ and the log lines. Life may be myriad
and free in earth, but it cannot in its natural state exist
in concrete and chemically deadened soil or in neatly ordered
rows of money-making cotton.
Even as a ten-year-old boy Ike had sensed, though he did
not realize, that the wilderness was being destroyed. In
"Delta Autumn," when Ike is in his seventies, he has lived
to see in actuality v/hat he had only sensed as a lad of ten.
As Roth and his companions and the old man drive along the
road toward the remnant of the v/ilderness, Ike falls back
 138
upon the opiate of old agememory;

it seemed to him that the retrograde of

his remembering had gained an inverse
velocity from their ov/n slow progress,
that the land had retreated not in
minutes . , , but in years, decades,
back toward v/hat it had been v/hen he
first knew it: the road they now fol-
lowed once more the ancient pathway of
bear and deer, the diminishing fields
they now passed once more scooped punily
and terrifically by axe and saw and mule
dra\>m plow from the v/ilderness' flank
, . . in place of ruthless , . , machin-
ery (p, 341-42),
The two driving forces which lead to the destruction of
the wilderness are the lust for money and the lust for the
kill. Economic motives have led man to deswamp, denude, and
deriver the land. The land has been raped, thinks old Ike,
"so that v;hite men can ov/n olantations and commute every
night to Memphis and black men ov/n plantations and ride in
jim crov/ cars to Chicago to live in millionaires' mansions"
(p, 364) , The institution of slavery v/as economically mo-
tivated, and its consequence was the destruction of the
wilderness, V.^ien Ike is tv/enty-one and repudiates the land
that represented his tainted inheritance from his grandfather
L, Q, C, McCaslin, he comprehends the root of the evil;
". . . the human beings he [L, Q. C. McCaslin] held in bond-
age and in the pov/er of life and death had removed the forest
from it [the wilderness] and in their sv/eat scratched the
surface . . . in order to grow something . . . which could
be translated back into money" (p, 254),
 139

Ike was innocent of the lust for land and money, but he
was a killer (though he killed by a "code") all his life.
Ike's code of the wilderness, which he receives through the
tutelage of his mentor, Sam Fathers, is based upon the aware-
ness of man's kinship with his fellow creatures, and upon a
reverence for life, Sam Fathers understood the ways of the
deer because "there v;as something running in Sam Fathers'
veins v</hich ran in the veins of the buck too" (p, 350) . The
ritual marking of Ike's face with the hot blood of his first
slain buck contrasts sharply v/ith the demoniac blood baptism
of Aliab's harpoon. The reverence for life of Ike the boy is
articulated by Ike the old man as he remembers his first
kill: "I slew you; mv bearing must not shame your quitting
life. Mv conduct forever onv/ard must become your death"
(p, 351) , As noble as the code might be, it was not suf-
ficient to stop or even to retard the destruction of the
wilderness.
If slavery in "The Bear" is the archsymbol of man's
lust for money, the dog Lion is the archsymbol of the lust
for the kill. Lion's eyes are described as containing "a
cold and alnost impersonal malignance like some natural
force" (p, 218) , In spite of his vicious singleness of pur-
pose, there is something fascinating, awe-inspiring, even
in a sense admirable about tlie great, steel-blue mongrel
mastiff. There is some Lion, perhaps, in all men and Ike
 140
is no exception. He submits to his hunting instincts with
the same predestined fatality with which he accepts the de-
struction of the wilderness. In "Delta Autumn" Ike specu-
lates on God's purpose;

"He put them both here; man, and

the game he v/ould follow and kill, fore-
knov7ing it, I believe He said, 'I v/ill
give him his chance. I v/ill give him
warning and foreknowledge too, along
with the desire to follov/ and the power
to slay. The v/oods and fields he
ravages and the game he devastates will
be the consequence and signature of his
crim.e and guilt, and his punishment,'"
(p. 349)
There can be no doubt that Ike shares the guilt since he has
had the foreknowledge of the consequences of man's lust.
The bears of Mississippi v/ere hemmed in by man's economic
pursuits, but they didn't die from starvation or claustro-
phobiathey were killed. And Ike must include himself when
he thinks as an old man: "No wonder the ruined woods I used
to knov/ dont cry for retribution! . . , The people who have
destroyed it will accomplish its revenge" (p. 364), If Ike
is no Messiah, he is at least something of a prophet,
Melville saw as clearly as Faulkner the twin motives
that drive r.en to contend v/ith nature. The whaling industry
was established to render money from the flesh of God's
creatures; but the lust for the kill was the immediate in-
stinctive force which drove the crew when a whale was
sighted, Stubb goes for the vulnerable afflicted spot on
 141
the old whale as instinctively as Boon goes for Old Ben's
heart with his knife, Ishmael, however, accepts man's kill-
er instinct somewhat more philosophically than his Biblical
half-brother Ike. In the chapter entitled "Cetology,"
Ishmael, in defense of the killer whale, asserts that "we
are all killers, on land and on sea; Bonaparts and Sharks
included" (p, 12 3). And nowhere is man more vividly identi-
fied with the universal cannibalism theme than when Stubb
stands on deck chewing his rare whale steak while a few feet
below him "thousands on thousands of sharks" swarm round the
dead whale and mingle "their mumblings with his own masti-
cations" (p, 234),
Moby Dick and "The Bear" are related to one another and
to a number of other works of American literature because
they are part of the same continuum, the same historical
process--man's war against nature in the New World, During
the early phases of the struggle the balance of power re-
sided overv.'helmingly on the side of nature. The rigorous
demands of life in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
American wilderness and the high toll exacted from the early
settlers are recorded by Samuel Sewall and other early
American v/riters. As early as the third and fourth decades
of the nineteenth century, however, some Americans, notcibly
naturalists such as John James Audubon and Transcendentalists
such as Thoreau, realized that the balance of power was
 142
shifting, or had shifted, in favor of man, James Fenimore
Cooper recognized man's destructive potential and his
Leatherstocking tales contain ominous forebodings of na-
ture's ultimate doom. But at the middle of the nineteenth
century when .Moby Dick was published most Americans, includ-
ing Melville himself, still looked upon nature as inex-
haustible,

Melville was aware of the inroads man was making

against tlie wilderness on the North American continent; he
knew the plight of the buffalo, and even the grizzly bear;
"He [Ahab] lived in the v/orld, as the last of the Grisly
Bears lived in settled Missouri" (p, 131) , But he did not
foresee man's victory in his struggle against nature. The
reasons Melville failed to perceive the future course of
events in America are several; he associated wild nature
with an omnipotent God, therefore he could not envision
man's dominion over God's creation. Though man v/as making
considerable headv/ay against the North American wilderness
at the middle of the nineteenth century, wild nature was
still pov/erful on the continent, Melville's choice of the
sea as the subject of his speculations and v/ritings rein-
forced his belief in the invincibility of nature, for the
sea to Melville seemed not only beautiful and compelling,
but alien and forever unfathomable. Almost forty years
after the publication of Moby Dick the author's feelings
 143
toward the sea had changed little as the following stanzas
from his poem "Pebbles" reveal;

III
In hollows of the liquid hills
^There the long Blue Ridges run.
The flattery of no echo thrills.
For echo the seas have none;
Nor aught that gives man back man's strain
The hope of his heart, the dream in his brain,
IV
On ocean v;here the embattled fleets repair,
Man, suffering inflictor, sails on sufferance there

Implacable I, the old implacable Sea;

Implacable most v/hen most I smile serene
Pleased, not appeased, by myriad wrecks in me.
One other reason Melville did not foresee man's victory
over nature in the New World was that he failed to recognize
the technological revolution that v/as already well under
way v/hen Moby Die]: was being v/ritten. He did not see the
technology of nineteenth-century whaling ships as the pre-
cursor to the booming technology of tv/entieth-century Ameri-
ca, He rather sav/ the v/haling industry of his day as a
continuation of the ancient and honorable ritual of the
primitive hunters. He did, however, recognize the base mo-
tives v/hich lay behind the ventures of some in the whaling

Herman Melville, Collected Poens, ed. Hov/ard P. Vincent

(Chicago: Packard and Corapany, Henaricks House, 1946) ,
pp, 205-06,
 144
industry. He noted with irony the role of the Quaker Captain
Bildad;

Though refusing, from conscientious

scruples, to bear arms against land
invaders, yet himself had inimitably
invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and
though a sworn foe to human bloodshed,
yet had he in his straight-bodied coat,
spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan
gore. , , , probably he had long since
come to the sage and sensible conclu-
sion that a man's religion is one
thing, and this practical world quite
another. This world pays dividends
(p. 76) .

Melville also recognized the absolute mindlessness of some

Americans in their assaults on wild nature, VTitness the
following description of the Pequod's third mate. Flask;
So utterly lost v/as he to all sense of
reverence for the many marvels of [the
whale's] majestic bulk and mystic v/ays;
, , , that in his poor opinion, the
wondrous v/hale was but a species of
magnified mouse . . . requiring only a
little circumvention and some small ap-
plication of time and trouble in order
to kill and boil (p. 106),

Such a mindless attitude tov/ard the destruction of nature,

coupled v/ith the realization that the v/orld pays dividends,
spurred v/haling technology to the point v/here, by the sixth
decade of the tv/entieth century, helicopters were used to
search for whales v/hich, once sighted, were picked up by
ship's sonar and followed until a deck-mounted harpoon can-
non could fire an explosive-tipped harpoon deep into the
hapless creature's body. Technology has brought man a long
 145
way from the ago of the primitive hunter, from the ancestors
of Tashtego, "those proud warrior hunters, who, in quest of
the great New England moose, had scoured, bow in hand, the
aboriginal forests of the main" (p, 106).
Sam Fathers and Ike McCaslin represent the end of a tra-
dition which reaches back to Tashetego's ancestors and be-
yond. The tradition of the primitive hunter survived during
the New England whaling era in the persons of such sailors
as Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashetego; but the Ahabs, the Bil-
dada, and the Flasks alloyed the tradition v/ith the evils
of Western Civilization. VThat the Bildads did for the whal-
ing industry, the Carrothers McCaslins did for the South.
Sam Fathers' attempt to preserve the wilderness code and to
pass it on to Ike was doomed to failure because the rising
crescendo of technology v/as everyv/here smothering the voices
of the v/ilderness. So Ike, v/ith each passing year of his
life, was doomed to watch "the territory in which the game
still existed drav/ing yearly inv/ard as his life was drawing
inward" (p, 335) ,
Man has at long last gained dominion over the earth;
the great battles have been won. Only a fev/ skirmishes, a
few rear-guard actions, remain. But man's victory over wild
nature has resulted from no purposeful plan. It has been,
rather, a clumsy, uncoordinated, thoughtless, blundering
victoryeven a somewhat unintentional and shamefaced victory
 146

Like Isaac McCaslin, Western man has lived to see the wilder-
ness in which he grew up, the wilderness which he loved but
never understood, destroyed. And the destruction came swift-
ly. Slightly more than a century ago the bastions of wild
nature seemed as impregnsible as Moby Dick's great white hump.
But as the turn of the century approached, it became in-
creasingly clear that wild nature in North /America, like the
giant, reel-footed bear of the Yoknapatawpha wilderness, was
doomed. The year 1883 is significant, for that date closely
coincides with the closing of the frontier in America, and
that was the year the hounds, led by the machine-like dog.
Lion, caught up with Old Ben and permitted Boon Hogganbeck
to bring him down with a knife in the heart. That act
signalled the end of an age-old pattern of life and ushered
in, in its place, a technological era with an unimaginable
future.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books
Arvin, Newton. Herman Melville: A Critical Biogranhy, New
York; Viking Press, Compass" Books edition, 1957,
Audubon, John James, Audubon, By Himself. Selected, edited
and arranged by nlice ForcT. cTarcIe'n City, New York;
The Natural History Press, 1969,
Babbitt, Irving. Rousseau and Romanticism, Boston and New
York: Houghton MifflTiT Company, The Riverside
Press, Cambridge, Mass,, 5th ed., 1928,
Brooks, Van Wyck, The Times of Melville and T'Thitman, New
York; E, P, Dutton & Co,, Inc., l5T7",
Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus, Chicago; Weeks Pub-
lishing Co., 1S57.
Chase, Richard, The American Novel and Its Tradition, Gar-
den City, Ue\-r York; Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957,
Chomsky, Noam, Language and Mind, New York; Harcourt,
Brace and l/orld, l^TH",
Clough, Wilson O, The Necessary Earth; Nature and Solitude
in T^erican iTrFerauure. Austin; The University of
^ x a s Press, 190 4,
Cooper, James Fenimore, The Pioneers, New York; Dodd,
Mead and Company, 19^8,
Cov/les, Raymond B, Z u 1 u Journal; Field No ten of a_ Natural-
ist in South /.rrica. ijerkeley: UniversiTy'"of Call-"
fornra Press, 1959.
Crevecoeur, J, Hector St. John, Letters from aii Amorican
Farr.v-2r. Garden City, :Je'./ Yor):: DoIpITin Books,
Doubleday and Company, Inc., Ir.t ed., 1782,
147
 148
Bddington, Arthur. The Nature of The Physical World. Ann
Arbors Ann Arbor Paperbacks, The' University of
Michigan Press, 1958.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays. New York; Thomas Y. Crowell
Company, 1926. Appollo Edition, 1961.
Erlich, Paul R. The Population Bomb. New York; Ballantine
Books, 1965T"

Faulkner, John. Mv Brother Bill. New York; Trident Press,

1963. "^
Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses. New York; The Modern
Library, 1942:

* Essays, Speeches and Public Letters. Edited

toy James fl. Meriwether.Tew York; Random House,
1965.

Foerster, Norman. Nature in American Literature. New York;

The MacMillan Company, iy2J.
Freneau, Philip. The Prose of Philip Freneau. Edited by
Philip M. Marsh. Nev7"^runswick, New Jersey; The
Scarecrow Press, 1955.
Fussell, Edwin. Frontier; American Literature and the
American West. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1965.
^/Gwynn, F. L. and Blotner, J. L, eds, Faulkner in the Uni-
versity; Class Conferences at the University of
Virginia, 1957-58, Charlotessville Virginia; "The
University of VrFginia Press, 1959.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. New York;
Signet Classic, 1959.
Hillway, Tyrus. Herman Melville. Nev/ York; Twayne, 196 3.
Hoffman, Daniel. Foxrm and Fable in T^erican Fiction. New
York; Oxford University Press, 1965.
Hoffman, E. J. and Vickery, Olga eds, William Faulkner;
Three Decades of Criticism, Michigan State Univer-
sity Press, 19 OT.
Howe, Irving. William Faulkner; A Critical Study. New
York; Random House Vintage""Books, 1962.
 149
Humboldt, Alexander Von. Cosmos; A Sketch of a Physical
Description of the Universe," Vol. I.""Lon3onI
licorge bell & Sons', 11)01. '
Huth, Hans. Nature and th American; Three Centuries of
Changing Atti^ucTes, Berkeley; University ot CaTT-
tornia Press, ii)57,
Jones, Howard Mumford, O Strange New World; American
Culture The Formarive Years, New York; Viking
Press, l^TTT,""
Kline, Marcia B, Beyond the Land Itself; Viev/s of Nature
in Canada and The UnTto^nTtiiti^r^, Cambridge7 Mass.;
Ha'rvard UniversTFy Press,T[)7"0'.
Lewis, Richard W, B, The American Adam, Chicago; The
University of cKTcago Press,' 1555.
Leyda, Jay. The Melville Log. New York; Harcourt, Brace
and Company, 1951,
London, Jack. Th Call of the Wild. New York: Grosset
and Dunlap, 1903.
Lovejoy, A. O, Essays in the History of Ideas. New York;
George Braziller"Tnc,, 1955.
Malinowski, Bronislaw, Magic Science and Religion and
Other Essays, Garden City, New' ^ork: The Master-
works Program, 1948.
Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance. Nev/ York; Oxford
University Press, 1941.
Melville, Herman, Tynee, in The Portable Melville, Edited
by Jay Leyda, ticj York: ^king Press, 1952,
, .'!ardi and a Vovage Thither, New York; Capri-
corn BOOJ:S, 19647

, VThite Jacket, New York: Holt, Rinehart and

TTiii s ton'rT!!r6 7 T ^
, Redburn: His First Vovage, New York; Richard
!rr"Smith, 19 30,
, Moby p i c k . E d i t e d v/ith i n t r o d u c t i o n by A l f r e d
K a z i n , i i o s t o n ; Houghton M i f f l i n Company, 1956.
 150

__ Pierre or The Ambiguities. New Yorkt A Signet

Classic, 19647" "~"
The Letters of Herman Melville. Edited by
T T T R . Davis, w. H.Triiman. New iJaven, Connecticut i
Yale University Press, 1960.
Journal of a Visit to London and The Continent
"iTO-lH^u. EdrEe? by Eleanor MelviTTe' ReTcalT: Ca3n-
toridge, Mass.i Harvard University Press, 1948.
> Journal Uo The Straits. Edited by Raymond
v^eaver. New York; Colophon, 1935.
. Collected Poems. Edited by Howard P. Vincent.
cnicagoi Packard & Company, Hendricks House, 1946.
Meriwether, J. B. and Millgate, Michael, eds. Lion in the
Garden; Interviews with William Faulkner 192^^1962.
New Yorkt Ranaom House, 1968.
Miller, Perry. Natures Nation. Cambridge; Belknap Press,
1967.
, Errand into the Wilderness. New York; Harper
Torchbook, Harper and Row, 1964.
Mumford, Lewis. The Golden Day. New York; Boni and
Liveright,"T72n
Parrington, V. L. Main Currents in TVmerican Thought. Vol.
II. New York; Harcourt, Sirace and World, 19 27.
Pascal, Blaise. Pascal's Pensees. Notes and intro. by
H. F. Stewart, D. D. New York; Pantheon Books,
1950.
Rourke, Constemce. The Roots of Tumeric an Culture. Port
Washington, N T ^ . : Kennlkat Press Inc., 1965.
Schorger; A. W. The Passenger Pigeon; Its Natural History
and Extinction" MadisonT rHe University ot Wis-
consin, 1955.
Sealts, Merton, Jr. Melville's Reading; A Check-list of
books owned and borrov/ed, Madison;"" The University
of Wisconsin Press, 1966.
Sedgv^ick, William E. Herman Melville; The Tragedy of Mind.
Cambridge, MassTl Harvard University Press, T74 4.
 151
Sewall, Samuel. Th Diary of Samuel Sewall. Edited and
abridged by Harvey Wish. Mew Vorki Capricorn Books,
1967.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land. Cambridge, Mass.t Harvard

University Press, l^STJT"
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden or Life in the Woods, and On
^he D^ty of Civil Disobe(rience."^Nevr"York8 TK^^ew
American Elbrary, A signet Classic, 1960.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Vol. I.
New York and London; The Co-operative Publication
Society, 1900.
Turner, Fredrick Jackson. The Frontier in American History.
New York; Holt, 195157" - * .

Utley, F. L.> Bloom, L. Z.; and Kinney, A. F. Bear Man and

Godl Seven Approaches to William Faulkner's "rHb
bear." New York; Random House, 1964.
Vincent, Howard P. The Trying Out of Moby Dick. Carbon-
dale and Edv7ardsville: SoutHe'rn Illinois University
Press, 1949.
Webb, Walter Prescott. The Great Frontier. Austin; The
University of Texas Press, 1951.
Whitehead, Alfred North. The Concept of Nature. Cambridge
University Press, 1964.
Wright, Nathalia. .Melville's Use of the Bible. Durham,
North Carolina; Duke University Press, 1949.

Articles and Periodicals

Alcott, Bronson. "The Doctrine and Discipline of Human
Culture," in Selected VZritinas of The American Tran-
scendentalists^. Edited with introduction by George
Hochiield. New York; The New American Library, A
Signet Classic, 1966,
v^ Altenbernd, Lynn, "A Susoended Moment; The Irony of History
in William Faulkner's 'The Bear,'" Modern Language
Notes. Vol. 75 (November, 1960), 572-582.
 152

Brumm, Ursula. "Wilderness and Civilization; A Note on

William Faulkner," Partisan Reviev;, 22 (Summer, 1955),
340-350, Appears in I'JilirirT Faulkner; Three Decades
of Criticism, Edited by i', J, Hoffman and Olga
vickery, ^TTchigan State University Press, 1960,
Hillway, Tyrus, "Melville and the Soirit of Science," South
Atlantic Quarterly, XLVIII (January, 1949), 77-88,

"Melville as Critic of Science." Modern Lan-

guage r;otcs, LXV (June, 1950), 411-14,

. "Melville as Amateur Zoologist." Modern Lan-

quage ^^uartcrlv, XII (June, 1951), 159-6Tr^
LaBudde, Kenneth, "Cultural Primitivism in VJilliam Faulk-
ner's 'The Bear,'" American Quarterly, II (VJinter,
1950), 322-328, ^
Lewis, R, W, B. "The Hero in the New World; William
Faulkner's 'The Bear,'" Kenyon Review, 13 (Autumn,
1951), 611-660,
Lyndenberg, John, "IJature Myth in Faulkner's 'The Bear,'"
American Literature (March, 1952), 62-72,

Miller, Perry, "Melville and Transcendentalism," Virginia

Quarterly Reviev/, XXIX (Autumn, 1953) , 556-7^7""'^

t/^ Moses, \7, R, "v;here History Crosses Myth: Another Reading

of 'The Bear,'" Accent, Vol. 12:1 (Winter, 1953),
21-33,

O'Connor, William Van, "The V7ilderness Theme in Faulkner's

The Bear,'" Accent, 13 (Winter, 1953), 12-20,

Wliitcomb, Seldon. "Nature in Early American Literature,"

Sewanee Review, II (1893), 159-179.