A Moby-Dick manuscript
It is beautifully right
to find what I take to be rough notes for Moby-Dick in the Shakespeare
set itself. They are written in Melville's hand, in pencil, upon the
last fly-leaf of the last volume, the one containing Lear, Othello
and Hamlet. I transcribe them as they stand:
- Ego non baptizo te in
nomine Patris et
- Filii et Spiritus Sancti--sed
in nomine
- Diaboli.--madness is
undefinable--
- It & right reason extremes
of one,
- --not the (black art)
Goetic but Theurgic magic--
- seeks converse with the
Intelligence, Power, the
- Angel.
The Latin is a longer form
of what Melville told Hawthorne to be the secret motto of Moby-Dick.
In the novel Ahab howls it as an inverted benediction upon the harpoon
he has tempered in savage blood:
- Ego non baptizo te in
nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli.
- I do not baptize thee
in the name of the father, but in the name of the devil.
The change in the wording
from the notes to the novel is of extreme significance. It is not for
economy of phrase. The removal of Christ and the Holy Ghost--Filii et
Spiritus Sancti--is a mechanical act mirroring the imaginative. Of necessity,
from Ahab's world, both Christ and the Holy Ghost are absent. Ahab moves
and has his being in a world to which They and what They import are
inimical: remember, Ahab fought a deadly scrimmage with a Spaniard before
the altar at Santa, and spat into the silver calabash. The conflict
in Ahab's world is abrupt, more that between Satan and Jehovah, of the
old dispensation than the new. It is the outward symbol of the inner
truth that the name of Christ is uttered but once in the book and then
it is torn from Starbuck, the only possible man to use it, at a moment
of anguish, the night before the fatal third day of the chase.
For more information
about Call Me Ishmael and Olson's study of Melville, please see
Olson's
Melville Project.