“Daemonic preludium”, an extract from The Daemon Knows

Hailed as ‘the indispensable critic’ by The New York Review of Books, Harold Bloom has for decades been sharing with readers and students his genius and passion for understanding literature and explaining why it matters. In The Daemon Knows, he turns his attention to the writers of his own national literature in a book that is one of his most incisive and profoundly personal to date. The following is an extract placing Walt Whitman and Herman Melville ‘in conversation’ with one another.

Our two most ambitious and sublime authors remain Walt Whitman and Herman Melville. Whitman creates from the powerful press of himself; Melville taps his pen deeply into the volcanic force of William Shakespeare.

American Shakespeare for the last two centuries has been a prevalent obsession, a more nervous and agile relationship than the bard’s cultural dominance in Britain. Emerson remarked that the text of modern life was composed by the creator of Hamlet. Moby-Dick, Shakespearean and biblical, relies upon Ahab’s fusion of aspects of Macbeth and of Lear. Consciousness, an ordeal in Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and William Faulkner, shares the quality of that adventure in self that is the Shakespearean soliloquy.

Charles Olson, poet and seer, pioneered the study of Shakespeare’s influence upon Moby-Dick. Others have expanded his recognition, and there is more to be apprehended; Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and above all Hamlet reverberate throughout Ahab’s odyssey. Is Moby-Dick a revenge tragedy? Only as Hamlet is: not at all. Prince Hamlet rejects Shakespeare’s play and writes his own. Does Ahab accept Herman Melville’s epic? The great captain composes his fate, and we cannot know his enigmatic creator’s intentions any more than we comprehend Shakespeare’s.

I first read Moby-Dick in the early summer of 1940, before I turned ten. My sympathies were wholly with Captain Ahab, to some degree because the Book of Job—and William Blake’s designs for it—were engraved deep within me. More than seventy years later, I teach the book annually and my judgment has not swerved. Ahab is as much the hero as Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, or Macbeth. You can call them all hero-villains, but then so is Hamlet. I weary of scholars neighing against Ahab, who is magnificent in his heroism. Would they have him hunt for more blubber? His chase has Job’s Leviathan in view, a quarry representing Yahweh’s sanctified tyranny of nature over man.

Moby-Dick is an ecological nightmare; so are we. Melville’s cause is not “save the whales” but “strike the sun if it insults you and strike through the white pasteboard mask of all visible things at God, who has degraded you.” Ahab has passed through Parsee Manichaeism and arrived at an American gnosis, ruggedly antinomian. Yes, Ahab is a dictator who drowns his entire crew with him, except for Ishmael. What would you have? Yahweh’s Leviathan cannot lose; should Ahab yield to Starbuck, who informs him that he only seeks vengeance on a dumb brute? The Promethean captain ought to abhor himself and repent in dust and ashes? Write your own tale then, but it will not be Melville’s.

Moral judgment, irrelevant to Moby-Dick and to Shakespeare, would have provoked Dr. Samuel Johnson not to countenance Ahab nor to finish reading more than a page or two. From the best of opening sentences on, the White Whale remorselessly voyages to a heroic conclusion. Except for Starbuck and Pip, the Pequod’s company votes for its marvelous catastrophe. Ahab is possessed, but so are they (Ishmael included). As leader, their captain finds his archetype in Andrew Jackson, who represented for Melville and others the American hero proper, an apotheosis of the politics of one who characterizes the American Dream. From lowly origins he ascended to the heights of power and brought into sharper focus what is still American nationalism.

Denying Ahab greatness is an aesthetic blunder: He is akin to Achilles, Odysseus, and King David in one register, and to Don Quixote, Hamlet, and the High Romantic Prometheus of Goethe and Shelley in another. Call the first mode a transcendent heroism and the second the persistence of vision. Both ways are antithetical to nature and protest against our mortality. The epic hero will never submit or yield.

Such uncanny persistence is dangerous to all of us. We do not wish to rise crazily with Don Quixote, to plot and counterplot with Hamlet in poisoned Elsinore, to serve under doomsayer Ahab in the Pequod. But how can the reader’s sublime be better experienced than with Cervantes, Shakespeare, or Melville? Only the self-named “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,” is comparable to Captain Ahab in the United States. Ahab and Whitman are our Great Originals, our contribution to that double handful or so among whom Falstaff and Sancho Panza, Hamlet and Don Quixote, Mr. Pickwick and Becky Sharp take their place.

Featured image credit: Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California by Albert Bierstadt. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.