Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Moby Dick 217transported into a transcendent state of awareness. Unlike the merelybeautiful, which, according to Burke, only “induce[s] in us a sense ofaffection and tenderness” (Burke 51), the sublime draws its emotivepower from painfully disconcerting images: the immense vistas ofthe Pacific, the unfathomable power of Niagara Falls, and the godlikestature of the inscrutable whale all evoke sublime feelings due to theirlarge scale (which suggests infinity), their power, and their obscurity.To fully appreciate the place of the sublime in Melville’s novel,however, the development of aesthetics after Burke must be taken intoaccount. More importantly, the intricacies of Melville’s narrative pointto a more nuanced view of the sublime and the metaphysical struggledepicted in Ahab and Ishmael’s descriptions of Moby Dick. Ratherthan simply conclude that Melville was critiquing the aesthetic dogmaof his age, we must, as Ishmael prescribes, “subtilize” our thinking.The German idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant, heavilyindebted to Burke’s analysis, discusses the sublime at length in hisCritique of Judgment (1790). Many have noted the central positionof the sublime in Kantian philosophy, as it constitutes a linkbetween what Kant called the phenomenal (the empirical world ofsense impressions) and the noumenal (the world of undifferentiatedthings-in-themselves). This picture of the cosmos is aptly describedby Ahab’s rousing speech in “The Quarter Deck” chapter when hetries to enlist Starbuck to aid him in his quest for vengeance:Hark ye yet again,—the little lower layer. All visible objects,man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in theliving act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown butstill reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its featuresfrom behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strikethrough the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside exceptby thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is thatwall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naughtbeyond. But ’tis enough. (140)Here Ahab speaks of Moby Dick in a manner that suggests Kant’sconception of the sublime: For Ahab, the White Whale is comparedto a “wall,” a limit that bars his inquiring mind from knowledge of themysteries that determine lived experience. It is during Ahab’s explanationof his grievances to Starbuck that we become acquainted with the