Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europaclinging to his graceful horns; his lovely leering eyes sideways intentupon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straightfor the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme!did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.What! These whalefishers are hurrying to their death and the greatblasphemer to his retribution, and Melville chooses this moment to lingerover the behavior of some birds and to insert an elaborated Renaissancevignette?This beautifully wrought metaphor, though not at all classical infeeling, represents a device we frequently find in Homer. The simile whicharises from the presented action begins to lead an independent life of itsown; it flowers into details and developments which occasionally disturband even reverse its relation to its original correlevant. This evocation ofJupiter not only arrests our excitement; it almost cuts us off from direct vision.This would seem to be a flaw, but its justification lies in its relation totime.There are three times transpiring on this page. There are—as in allnarration—the time of the action and the time of the narrative; Ishmael athis desk recalls and re-experiences those events from the past. But the timewhich is passing in the mind of Ishmael the narrator is invaded by anothertime which can best be called the timeless. If Melville were writing anadventure story for boys, “Joe Foster, the Young Whaler,” it would indeedbe lamentable to deflate our excitement at this moment. But in the realmof moral issues and total experience, such human tensions are not out ofplace. Older readers know that life is crisis. (Goethe said that the Iliad teachesus “that it is our task here on earth to enact Hell daily.”) The house burnsdown, and no Joe Foster rushes through the flames to rescue the child fromthe cradle; the survivors of the wreck turn black and expire upon their raftbefore Joe Foster appears upon the horizon; the consequences of the liveswe have fashioned advance toward us with age and death on their heels.Homer and Melville remove us to a plane of time wherein catastrophe orrescue are mere incidents in a vast pattern.But these birds and this fragment of mythology have another character.They proceed from another form of excitement. They have about themthe hushed, glassy precision of hallucination. For those who come upon themin their place in the vast book, they are like the intrusions of a dream andlike the irrelevances in a moment of danger. They are that moment when198