Moby-Dick and the Myth of Narcissus: Seeing Into and Seeing Through

Dennis Patrick Slattery, Ph.D.

An unapparent connection is stronger (or: better) than one which is obvious. - Heraclitus, Fragment 54.

Off the coast of southern California where I live and teach, as part of a course called “Psyche and Nature,” I take my students whale watching on one Sunday morning during the course. We launch out to the Channel Islands in the Spring in hopes of glimpsing the blue whales on their migration from Baja, California to Alaska, along a corridor some marine biologists estimate to be as old as 75,000,000 years. It is an ancient avenue and we feel its antique presence when we enter it. Some years, if the krill is thick and milky in the water, these largest of whale species will pause for longer than their normal stay and feed close to the islands. The whale watch skipper, Captain Jerry of the ship, the “Rachel G,” knows where these city block-long mammals weighing up to 100 tons, will feed.

To see one surface, glowing like a blue-green luminous light from the dark depths of the Pacific, is mystical in its majestic motion. Those fortunate enough to witness such a spectacle feel as if they are witness to a wonderful theophany and we always give thanks for the presence of the blues, when they do surface, which is not every trip. The footprints they leave by the slow but thick motion of their flukes will remain visible on the surface of a calm sea for up to 20 minutes.

What interests me here, however, is how students will comment on how they see and apprehend something of themselves in these mighty moving souls of nature. On some deep level, they feel that they are given back to themselves through the whale’s immense presence. I too sense this strange familiarity with the luminous, 20 miles from the mainland and with a mile of water below us. Some strange familiarity and intimacy attends these gams, of sorts, between us inhabitants of the Rachel G and the monstrous silent beauties from the depth. I wonder sometimes if it is depth itself that these blue whales allow to breach somewhere deep in our own souls. Do they strike an analogous cord in us, putting us in touch with that part of the anima mundi that exists within our own depths? Perhaps; what I do witness is the instant sense of community formed on board among the students and what were a moment ago perfect strangers who had nothing to say to one another. The presence of a surfacing whale changes the tenor and even the psychic barometric pressure on board and makes us all see something of one another in each other’s response, the delight and the wonder that always attends such a blow. My sense is that at these moments, some crucial energies of the Narcissus myth enter the boat and move within all of us. But I have thought recently that it is not just the whale, or the whale’s presence alone, that people respond to, where something mysterious befriends them at this moment. I think it is as much about the water that contains the whale as the animal itself. The myth of Narcissus is about the carrier of his image as well as the image itself. Without water there can be no self-reflection. These moments are what often happens to us as we read Melville’s at-times unfathomable epic; we see through it and not just to it and glean ourselves deep in the myth.

Midway through the first chapter of the epic, Ishmael muses over the quality and place of the world’s water in “Loomings.” He thinks mythically for a moment about it and asks “why the Greeks give it a separate deity and make him the own brother of Jove?” (14). This reverie leads him to the larger question of meaning, as the water given divine status is connected to the significance of things in the world; water expresses its own imaginal way of seeing through into the world’s larger body. As he continues to muse on divinity and water, Ishmael seems naturally drawn to the most recognized figure in mythology who is engaged by water, Narcissus, “who,” Ishmael muses, “because he could not grasp the tormenting mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans” (14).

Some impediment stops Ishmael cold right at this moment; is it a Narcissistic instance that he steps into and begins to see by means of—a Narcissistic seeing, a place of entrapment and illumination simultaneously? It is both mythic and metaphysical in its effects on the isolated exile at the very genesis of his quest. He arrives at a recognition in this initial journey towards understanding, one which he will carry with him and asks that we do the same, throughout his voyage he has completed in fact and now gathers into himself in memory: “It is the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all” (14).

Moby-Dick would not be the first work of fiction that imbeds in its narrative a method for reading it, a guide for apprehending it, or a grid for grasping it most fully. The Narcissus myth from Ovid’s Metamorphosis is one. The other two include the Old Testament story of Jonah who attempts to escape God’s instructions, who is then pursued and swallowed by the whale, and Dante’s pilgrim/writer of the Commedia whom Ishmael follows and echoes in a similar conversion over 500 years later. But the Narcissus myth is the one aperture I want to focus on to see through to the difference between the splintered world Ahab views the world through and is mirrored back to him in a univocal vision of the white whale, and the fuller and integrated world of Ishmael, for their respective differences help us to visualize some fundamental distinctions between the genres of tragedy and comedy.

With Ishmael, who proclaims: “I celebrate a tale,” we join him in this important year commemorating the 150^th. anniversary of the novel’s birth by returning to Ovid’s intricate narrative of Narcissus. We might look closely at the place of Echo in the drama of self-reflection and ask: “is there a before-Echo Narcissus, a with-Echo Narcissus and an after-Echo Narcissus? What is it that we attempt to grasp which seems so out of reach until it is echoed, repeated, revisioned, revisited, sometimes over a lifetime, before it eventually becomes part of our understanding?

Condemned by Juno for distracting her as she pursued her husband Jove’s trysts with the wood nymphs, Echo’s power to originate speech is taken from her; instead, she must wait for the speech of others and then echo back to them their last words or word. She trails words in memory rather than blazes paths with them. She is speech’s double, a mirror speech. At first hearing, we may think that her words are simply exact duplicates of what has just been said. But if we listen more closely, we hear something happen in the repetition. What changes is that a bit of irony creeps into her re-speaking because in the repetition something new is spoken: her own desire. Hers is a desire of irony, perhaps even reflecting something ironic in desire itself. Echo is also the presence of resonance; some of our speaking is full of echoes, of nuances, of possibilities that the words resonate, creating desire, provoking attraction. When Moby-Dick begins with the declarative “Call me Ishmael,” are we not already within earshot of Echo’s presence as we respond: “Ishmael”? Patricia Berry writes that “For Echo, words are neither just words nor are they facts. But words are fertile, seductive, procreative” (“Echo and Beauty,” 425). We hear them, re-hear them, even re-hearse them over and over, seeing how their meaning can resonate over time.

At her first sight of Narcissus, Echo falls heatedly in love and stalks him: “furtively--/she followed in his footsteps. As she drew/still closer, closer, so her longing grew/more keen, more hot—as sulfur, quick to burn.” (Ovid 92). Alone one day, and Ovid says “by chance,” separated from his friends, Narcissus calls out” “Is anyone nearby?” to which Echo responds, “Nearby.” His words allow for the presence of irony, for they are at the same time both a question from him and an affirmation from her, a doubling that is really an extension of the question into an answer. He looks but sees no one; with no image to accompany her word, he asks: “Why do you flee from me?” and she repeats his words to express her own feelings. Now the response to this is very interesting: “That answer snares him; he persists, calls out:/”Let’s meet,” to which she responds in joy, “Let’s meet” (92). A kind of duplicity in duplication gathers here, resonates, moves forward.

When Echo soon reveals herself to embrace Narcissus, he runs from her, demanding, “don’t touch me.” He keeps her at a distance; the consequence is her fading and dissolving to eventually become only a voice in the air. I believe as well that Echo is distance. She promotes distance, allows for it, keeps things echoing and allows for a certain ironic space to exist between what is said and its response. Echo is witness to spaciousness, which is part of irony’s power. Irony keeps one from becoming too fixated on one’s self, keeps a gap open, allows one to remain free of the snares of self-fixation, promotes a path of psychological and emotional wiggle room and keeps one from getting into his own face too intimately, where fixation rules. Once Narcissus loses Echo, he moves rather quickly and naively to fixation, trapped first, echoing Echo’s own fate, by eros, by a burning desire of what cannot be attained. Without Echo, all desire turns inward to consume.

Narcissus moves quickly into a virginal and mythic space of an untrammeled natural terrain. Here the water he will gaze into is “silverlike,/gleaming, bright. Its borders had no slime./No shepherds, no she-goats, no other herds/of cattle heading for the hills disturbed/ that pool” (93). It is an untouchable place, like Narcissus, after he has wounded Echo with his rejection; the place mirrors his own disposition. To stay detached would be to preserve the ironic; but to insist that the image be touched, possessed, taken in, leads to a tragic impossibility under the weight of a futile desire. At this point the ironic stands in direct opposition to the tragic. Writers of tragedy have insisted that irony is one way of saving the tragic figure from self-annihilation. Irony keeps self-reflection from coagulating into self-fixation.

Narcissus’ thirst is quenched by the pool, but it is immediately replaced by another appetite that burns within him. Water is replaced by fire as the element of conversion. Fire is Ahab’s element as water is Ishmael’s. Narcissus is as still and as unyielding as a marble statue at this point--completely fixed and fixated.This fixity is the stance of Ahab who in the epic lives out this part of the myth—its fixed nature. Ovid tells us Narcissus stares not once but twice, so the image of himself is echoed through him, and he gazes unblinking “at the twin stars that are his eyes”(94), visual echoes of one another. The myth reveals to us that what is Echo orally is mirroring visually. Some boundary or division between the heavens and earth break down in this gaze.

Carl Jung offers this insight about water that helps illuminate the myth: “Whoever looks into the water sees his own image, but behind it living creatures loom up; fishes, presumably, harmless dwellers of the deep, harmless, if only the lake were not haunted” (Archetypes, 126). His gazing at what he desires creates in Narcissus “the seeker and/the sought, the longed-for and the one who longs;/he is the arsonist—and is the scorched” (95), and to echo the epic, the dismembered and the dismemberer. Self-reflection dissolves into self-fixation when the distancing quality of Echo is denied. Losing her makes the difference between keeping a sense of irony about one’s own identity that allows one to see through to the larger patterns governing one’s existence and becoming caught on iron rails that Ahab feels he is grooved to follow to the heart of the white whale. His vision allows only a seeing into, where he is end-stopped by vengeance and desire.

My sense is that Ahab is the wounded Narcissist who has jettisoned Echo in the figure of Starbuck and moves to complete self-fixation through the blank white image of Moby-Dick. It is a tragic trajectory that leads him and the Pequod to the virginal waters which appear on none of his maps, in the sea of Japan, to the very spot of the original wounding, “hard by the very latitude and longitude where his tormenting wound had been inflicted” (437); in these same waters the white whale will breach to pull him to it by means of the hemp rope he becomes tangled in, a yarn of Fate of sorts that fixation ties him to.

Queequeg, by contrast, is Ishmael’s Echo. In his presence, something in the splintered heart of the angry isolato melts, opens up and moves towards a response to the world that is communal rather than isolated. This same impulse to community is created when we respond to him in his initial request: “Call me Ishmael.” In their room together early in the novel, he describes a transformative scene:

The evening shades and phantoms gathering round the casements, and peering in upon us silent, solitary twain; the storm booming without in solemn swells; I began to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it. (53) Embracing Echo places Ishmael in the realm of resonance; denying Echo’s presence, as Ahab does when Starbuck’s pleas to turn back fall on his deaf ears arrests the wounded captain in the field of fixation. No distance separates him from the white whale, an intimacy that at the end of the third day’s chase is literalized in the tangled rope of the harpoon that runs afoul and pulls Ahab from around the neck into the sea where he, all of his crew and “the smallest chip of the Pequod” are sucked into the vortex and “out of sight” (469). Dissolution is the psychic penalty for the absence of Echo’s distance.

By contrast, Ishmael sees through or by means of Queequeg: “you cannot hide the soul,” Ishmael realizes. “Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart, and in his large deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils” (52). Dissolved in the solutio of the soul’s alchemical bath, the process in which solids are turned into a liquid (Edinger 47), Ishmael melts into a marriage with Queequeg, which is to embrace the presence of Echo’s resonating presence. Ishmael has himself mirrored back to him in the tattooed body and gestures of Queequeg: “He pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me if need be” (53). The classic narrative of Narcissus and Echo is not only the story that Moby-Dick reflects through its own narrative image; it is also the mythical method for reading it, as Ishmael at one point uses the thin outer skin of the whale as spectacles for reading of the whales’ nature.

More time would allow one more layer of this myth to work, which I believe Melville is poetically conscious of: the widely known practice of reading in 12^th. century Europe wherein the reader exposes himself to the light of the page so he might recognize himself. As Ivan Illich informs us, in the light of the page, the reader recognizes the self. ‘Know Thyself’ was a widely-quoted epigram through to the 12^th. century” (21). The whiteness of the page, with its curious tattooed markings of the ink that offer us the words, embody another variant on the Narcissus myth. As we read, we grasp and interpret what is already a reflection of our own personal mythology. As Hugh of St. Victor and other writers on the act of reading in the 12^th. century make clear, the reader is to face the page so that by the light of wisdom he discovers himself in the mirror of the parchment” (22); in this reflective act, the reader will then know herself by sight. Such is the rippling effect of this powerful myth of self-reflection and self-fixation and the Echoic power to save one from drowning in the latter.

Echo’s power to resonate through time reveals itself once more in the most recent of Robert Bly’s volumes of poetry. In “How This Wealth Came to Be,” he keeps her forceful power resonating in our memories:

It’s hard to know how all this wealth came to be.
Ishmael was not created from a fight with a whale.
The ocean is not wild enough to have created Melville’s soul. (The Night, 87).

Berry, Patricia. “Echo and Beauty.” Spring. Irving, Texas: The University of Dallas, 1980. 49-59.

Bly, Robert. The Night Abraham Called to the Stars: Poems. New York: Harper Collins, 2001.

Edinger, Edward. Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy. Chicago: Open Court, 1996.

Heraclitus. Fragments. Trans. T.M. Robinson. Toronto: U Toronto P, 1996.

Illich, Ivan. In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1993.

Jung, C.G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Vol. 9,1. Trans. R.F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. New York: Norton, 1967.

Ovid. The Metamorphosis of Ovid. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, 1993.

Dennis Patrick Slattery, Ph.D.
Pacifica Graduate Institute
249 Lambert Rd.
Carpinteria, California 93013
Email:Dennis_Slattery@pacifica.edu
(805) 969-3626/ext. 129