God in Melville and London

Coming from Facebook? Please leave your comment on this page instead of back on Facebook. You’ll make me happy in the clavicle.

Warning: This essay contains spoilers of the books Moby Dick and The Sea Wolf. If you haven’t read them and wish to, read no further!

While I was in college I studied history, and didn’t have a chance to read many books that didn’t concern angry Greeks raiding small poleis in rickety old triremes, so after I graduated I resolved to read all the books I missed. I decided to start with a sea theme, since I have always been fascinated with the sea, and so I read Moby Dick by Herminie Melville, The Sea Wolf by Jack London, and The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway. At the request of my friend David, I’m writing up this little analysis of these books (though I will leave out Hemmingway, for there just isn’t anything to write about). In short, they were all good, and my preference gœs: London, Melville, Hemmingway.

Moby Dick is big, in many ways. It is physically a thick book, quite suitable to use as a weapon, and Melville’s prose is just as thick. This isn’t due to the words he uses alone, but also due to his bizarre method of crafting a story. I’ll give a rough estimate that only twenty percent of the book is actually dedicated to furthering the plot. The rest talks about the anatomy of whales, much of which is purposefully inaccurate and highly romantic. Using the main character Ishmæl, Melville romanticizes whaling as a profession and whalers as people, describing them as morally superb and even hygienically cleaner than most others. He describes whaling as a noble profession and a holy one, and uses whaling as a pretext to go off on tangents concerning religion, culture and tradition.

The reason I did not lose interest in this book is because Melville’s divergences from the story were rather interesting, and some were even insightful. He takes great care to describe the inner workings of every character’s mind instead of allowing these things to become clear to the reader during the course of the story. He is very methodical and organized. He describes the ship, what each part of the ship is used for, anecdotal accounts of how those parts of the ship were made, the process of killing a whale, hanging up a whale, stripping the fat from a while, what whale oil is used for, the history of whale oil, its consistency and its smell, the etymology behind the name of the sperm whale — so on and so forth. This could get quite tedious and boring to a reader who has no interest in this sort of stuff, but I found it fascinating, so I did not lose interest.

However, I don’t know if this information was best placed within a narrative. It would have made for an interesting essay, article or non-fiction book, but it distracted from the story so much that when Melville switches back to his narration, it is a little jarring. What is even more jarring is that Melville apparently can’t decide if this is a book told in the third person, told in the first person, is a pœm or a play. Halfway through the book he suddenly starts writing as if it were a play, complete with stage direction. I really did not like this at all. If it is a prose narrative, write it in the third or first person and stick with it.

After I left the woods of Melville and picked up London’s The Sea Wolf, I was instantly charmed and delighted, for though I enjoyed Moby Dick and appreciated what Melville tried to do, a good story should be written like a good story, and London did this superbly. I enjoyed The Sea Wolf immensely. London paints his characters with broad, vivid strokes and we get to know each of them well. They are all of them interesting characters, and all of them quite different. London, as opposed to Melville, describes the sea as frightful and even horrible. This may be due to the great differences between Ishmæl and Van Weyden, the two book’s respective main characters. Ishmæl is a lonely man who gœs through melancholy moods and even contemplates suicide, so he throws himself onto a whaling vessel to escape life on the land. Thus the sea is wondrous and new to him, and every thing he sees is almost like a fantasy. Van Weyden, however, is a gentlemen of privileged birth who has never done a single day’s labor his entire life, and so when he finds himself stranded on a ship at sea, he describes the sea as horrible and murderous, life at sea as demeaning to a man’s dignity, where men go to become beasts. That is how the book starts, at any rate. By the end, the sea has transformed Van Weyden into a completely different person, a better person, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

The most interesting part of The Sea Wolf, to me, is the interaction between Wolf Larsen, the amoral giant of a man who captains the ship, and Van Weyden. Both men claim to be atheists, but differ in key ways. Wolf Larsen, in my opinion, is the true atheist, the more honest, and lives his life according to his convictions. Van Weyden is a learned man and believes there is no God, and that men are made good by education, gentlemanly breeding, and by testing each other with intellectual debate. He believes in morals and knows the difference between right and wrong, but he dœsn’t make God the definer of right and wrong. Instead, man’s dignity and civility are what Van Weyden continually appeals to.

I say that Wolf Larsen is more honest because, if you follow the trail of atheistic thought all the way, you end up with a philosophy that is embodied by Wolf Larsen. We humans are just the product of evolution, and are filled with our own “piggishness”. We are all just a little bit of yeast in the world, and so why value the human yeast more so than the animal yeast? Therefore there is nothing special within human life, and it shouldn’t be valued. This mindset gives Wolf Larsen the impetus to treat everyone around him as he sees fit. Once on board his vessel, you become his slave, because he is bigger than you. As the Athenians said, the strong will do what they can and the weak will do what they must — Larsen was a giant of a man who could crush any man aboard his vessel with one hand, and therefore his will prevailed.

He justified being cruel by saying that it pleased him, and, as merely one piece of yeast, he exists to please and protect himself alone. Therefore if it humors him to force a gentleman to become a cabin boy, and if he is strong enough to force it to happen, how can it be wrong? Right and wrong are moral inventions by man, not hard-​wired truths created by God, and as a good atheist he need not follow such a conjuring of human piggishness to appease just another piece of yeast.

And so Wolf Larsen beats those who oppose him, kills those who audibly defy him, and maliciously play with those he despises. He was his own god. He worshiped his own strength and his own mind, for he was indeed a very smart man, self-​educated, and as a self-​worshiper he found competition in Van Weyden, a true gentleman who had the blessing of good breeding and an education. Therefore Van Weyden was kept alive on the ship solely so that Wolf Larsen could exalt himself. Not only was Larsen an infinitely more superb specimen of a human, as far as his body went, but he purported to be Van Weyden’s superior in philosophy and intelligence. Larsen saw himself as better because Van Weyden’s silly adherence to certain morals kept him from getting the things he wanted — Larsen saw them as a hindrance, and any belief in man’s ultimate goodness and dignity as foolishness.

And here I will have to agree with Wolf Larsen, and this is something I do not think London anticipated very well. You see, the point of the story, I believe, was to demonstrate that a man’s good character, when tested by fire, will shine forth as a beacon of human goodness. Wolf Larsen was just a bad egg, and acted like a bad egg. Van Weyden was a good egg, though he had never had an opportunity for his inherent goodness to be proven. It took a rough sea voyage where he had to learn all about sailing in order for his inherent goodness to shine forth. And yet the only reason Van Weyden was a good egg was because he had been cultured in an environment that adhered to intrinsically Christian principals — love your neighbor as yourself, thou shalt not kill, do not covet, so on and so forth. Even though Van Weyden had decided to become an atheist later in life, these moral concepts stuck with him as a part of his being, and he could not disobey them. Wolf Larsen, however, was not cultured around such morals, and was instead grown in an environment that was ruthless, where the strong survive and the weak perish — as Darwinist as one can get. Larsen points out on many occasions that Van Weyden has no good reason to cling to morality and man’s supposed dignity, and though London tries through Van Weyden to excuse morality as being something that betters a man while not necessarily being derived from faith, he fails because he never describes what standard human “betterness” is compared to.

Let us not forget Maud Brewster. A woman is found at sea and brought aboard the ship. She is beautiful and Van Weyden instantly falls for her, but Wolf Larsen desires her for himself. He, of course, eventually tries to take what he wants from her, being the good atheist that he is, but he is thwarted (conveniently) by sharp and stabbing pains in his head. This gives Van Weyden a chance to snatch Maud Brewster and escape to sea in a small boat.

After days of torment at sea, they arrive at a deserted island, and begin to build lives for themselves, one of the interesting things about the book is Van Weyden’s description of what was going on within him. Though both he and Maud Brewster were born in privilege and highly educated, it is through manual labor that Van Weyden feels like he is becoming a man — at the age of 35. He loves her, and it is this love for her that gives him the resolve to save both her and himself, to defeat Larsen and the elements and arrive safely home.

The book is about “good” pride and “bad” pride — but it is all about pride. Larsen is so proud in and of himself that he thinks that he is invincible, and takes what he pleases. This is bad pride, according to London. Good pride is a sort of pride that prides oneself, but not at the expense of others, and prides this strange thing we all must have called “dignity”. What is this dignity? Pride. So good pride is being proud of pride. Van Weyden is repulsed by brutality and keeps himself from being a killer (though he is often tempted) because it is not a gentlemanly thing to do. He has a conscience, and if he were to violate this conscience he would hurt his own dignity. His own pride. There are few men on board the boat that Van Weyden talks of with any kindness. Johnson and Leach are the only two, and he only speaks well of them because they stood up to Wolf Larsen. But they only stood up to Wolf Larsen because they were too proud to stand Larsen’s arrogance — again, pride. Johnson was too proud to be insulted, so he stands up to Larsen and gets a beating. Leach was too proud to be treated like a possession, and so he also stands up to Larsen and is brutally beaten. Both men, in the end, are killed by Larsen because they stood up to him, but Van Weyden praises them, not because they stood up for “right” by refusing to sin, but because they had self-​pride that kept them from keeping silent.

Moby Dick, however, is about how bad choices lead to a bad end. The book is religious and superstitious. Omens abound, and the sailors on board the Pequod see the folly of captain Ahab’s decisions, and yet follow him out of fear, and because they took a demonic oath to follow him. Revenge leads to death: that may not be what Moby Dick is about, for there is so much within Moby Dick that has nothing to do with the story, but as far as the narrative gœs, that is all there is. Revenge leads to death.

But let us compare Ahab and Wolf Larsen. Ahab, despite his stilted manner of speech, is more human. He is half mad, and chases after Moby Dick because he wants revenge, and he puts the life of every man on board at risk in order to fulfill this revenge. But there are moments when he thinks of his lonely young pregnant wife at home, and the wives of his men, and he shakes his head, cursing himself for taking them all on this foolish mission. But the madness in his mind is stronger than his humanness, and so the chase continues.

Wolf Larsen, however, is not a man, and indeed, is called Lucifer by both Van Weyden and Maud near the end of the book. For that is what the true atheist is. Lucifer. Larsen lived for himself, and every other bit of yeast he came across was there for his own amusement, enjoyment or to be an object of his rage. He only ever checked himself when doing so would better himself in the end. Where there were no consequences for his actions, he acted exactly as he wished, because he only loved himself.

I find it interesting that London, an atheist, writing a book populated with atheists, in the end has his own “good” atheists scorn the “bad” atheist and compare him to Lucifer — an embodiment of atheism. For in the end, atheists do not disavow all gods — no, they have a god, and this god is themselves. Their life revolves around their own life, and they do what they please in order to please themselves, instead of doing what God pleases in order to please God. It is still worship and it is still religion, but it is religion misdirected.

And in the end, it is utterly empty. At the end of The Sea Wolf, Wolf Larsen is stricken with pains in his head. Over time he loses mastery of his body. First his eye sight gœs, then feeling on the left side of his body, then feeling all over his body. Finally he loses his hearing too, so that all he is is a mind. Had Van Weyden and Maud Brewster not been there, I doubt Wolf Larsen would have been contended to have only himself around when he died. You see, we take no pleasure in pleasing ourselves. If you are alone, you cannot compliment yourself, love yourself or worship yourself without it being completely empty and meaningless, and we all know it. But when others are around, suddenly we have our pride, and in order to “save face” we project false walls of confidence and mastery to appear to be in control. Even though Van Weyden and Maud Brewster had the power to kill the crippled man that had tormented them for so very long, they didn’t — not because it wouldn’t further their own situation (it would have) and not because it wouldn’t have been delightful to enact revenge (it would have) but because to do so would have conflicted with a deeply engrained morality within them that came directly from their exposure to Christian morality. So they spared his life, and watched him waste away. Had Wolf Larsen not had Van Weyden and Maud Brewster around to save face in front of, he might have realized how empty and meaningless his life was by being his own god, for his god was soon going to die, and it is folly to worship a mortal god. But pride is immortal for now, and once he had a means by which to appeal to pride, he worshiped that god until his wick went out.

The end of Melville’s Moby Dick shows us the consequences of fear and pride. Pride led Ahab on his mad quest, and fear kept Starbuck from rebelling against Ahab and freeing the Pequod and her sailors. Fear and pride caused the savages to make their blood pact on Ahab’s harpoon, and chase after Moby Dick with trembling and delight. And because of this reckless pride, Moby Dick sank the Pequod, and all perished save the narrator Ishmæl. Man was not in control, in the final moments of the Pequod’s life. God came and saved whom he fancied to save, and Ishmæl survived while Queequeg, his dear and pagan friend, waved good-​bye with confused eyes, clinging to the topmast as the sea enveloped it. There are no such consequences for pride in London. Van Weyden saves himself by becoming a man and working hard, pushed onward by the woman he loves. In the end we here the trumpets blast: “Van Weyden the hero! Van Weyden saved the day! Van Weyden killed the male seals, built his shelter, loved his woman, made his fire, re-masted his ship! Van Weyden is the hero!” But in order to do that we have to overlook the miraculous. We have to overlook the miracle of Van Weyden chancing upon a deserted island after abandoning The Sea Wolf. We have to overlook Wolf Larsen’s ship drifting to the same deserted island after being pillaged by Death Larsen. We have to overlook the convenient miracle of the giant losing his sight, strength and hearing just at the right time so that Van Weyden was not crushed in his hands. And we have to overlook the miracle of the other boat happening to come across Van Weyden and Maud Brewster after they set sail from the island, stumbling upon them in that one spot of the whole sea. Indeed, God is found on every page of The Sea Wolf, and yet he is never recognized.

About Oxhorn I’m an author, songwriter and movie-​maker who lives in Seattle, WA. I earned my BA in history from the University of Washington and have been interested in arguments, reasoning, research, writing and history ever since. I’m best known for my animated comedy machinima movies and music which you can find at oxhorn​.com. Visit brandonMdennis​.com for more about me, and be sure to subscribe, follow me on Twitter and Facebook. Watch my weekly live show, Scotch & Smoke Rings, at 7:00 PM Pacific for more classiness.