The Cartesian Vortex in Moby-DickAuthor(s): David Charles LeonardSource: American Literature, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Mar., 1979), pp. 105-109Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2924925Accessed: 30/08/2010 02:35

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Notes I05

The Cartesian Vortex in Moby-Dick DAVID CHARLES LEONARD

University of Maryland

CONTEMPORARY CRITICS of Herman Melville have offered various interpretations of the Cartesian vortex in Moby-Dick without a

thorough study of Melville's scientific source, Rene Descartes.' From Herman Gansevoort, Herman Melville acquired in I846 Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia: or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, which he kept until I872, when it was passed to Captain Thomas Melville.2 In his article "Melville's Education in Science," Tyrus Hillway includes Chambers's huge two-volume encyclopedia in a list of source books from which Melville derived all his scientific information before I85I (the publication date of Moby-Dick).' Given the specific reference to the Descartian vortices in the Mast-Head scene, it seems certain that Melville read the "CARTESIANISM" and 'VORTEX" entries of Chambers's Cyclopaedia:

But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descar-

' Howard P. Vincent, The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick (Carbondale, Ill., and Edwards- vi'le, Ill., I949), p. I57, has come closest to a Cartesian framework for Melville's vortex by stating that "the Descartian vortices represent multiplicity." And indeed, the Cartesian cos- mos is made up of an infinite number of vortical systems. However, the primary meaning of the Cartesian vortex system is three-dimensional circular (vortical) motion. Declaring the vortex an avatar of reincarnation, James Baird, Ishmael: A Study of the Symbolic Mode in Primitivism (1956; rpt. New York, I960), pp. 266-273, regards the vortex as a "descent into the water, the emblematic essence of God." In the Cartesian cosmology, the central portion of each vortex is inhabited by a sun, not God. Baird, however, does note Melville's repeated use of the vortex in Mardi, White-jacket, Moby-Dick, Clarel, and Billy Budd. To Paul Brodtkorb, Jr., Ishmael's White World: A Phenomenological Reading of Moby Dick (New Haven, Conn., I965), p. 37, the vortex is a "way out of horizontal, circular motion." Descent into the Cartesian vortex is not vertical and linear, as Brodtkorb suggests; it is instead hori- zontal and circular. Thomas Woodson, "Ahab's Greatness: Prometheus as Narcissus," ELH, XXXIII (Sept., I966), 357, declares that the Descartian vortices support the "assumption of a cleavage between mind and matter." But nowhere in the Cartesian system of vortical motion does mind have a place in an essentially mechanistic and clockwork construct. Em- phasizing the importance of the vortex as a primal form, Robert Zoellner, The Salt-Sea Mastodon: A Reading of Moby-Dicl (Berkeley and Los Angeles, I973), p. 203, defines the vortex as "a void surrounded by a circle." But in the Cartesian vortex system, no void exists in the universe. All space is filled with matter in motion.

2 Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville's Reading: A Checklist of Books Owned and Borrowed (Madison, Wisc., I966), p. 48.

3Tyrus Hillway, "Melville's Education in Science," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, XVI (Fall, I974), 42I-422.

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tian vortices you hover. And perhaps at midday, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!4

Under Chambers's "VORTEX" entry, Melville would have found that the

VORTEX, in the Cartesian Philosophy, is a System or Collection of Parti- cles of Matter moving the same way, and round the same Axis.

Such Vortices are the Grand Machines whereby these Philosophers solve most of the Motions and other Phaenomena of the heavenly Bodies.- Accordingly, the Doctrine of these Vortices makes a great part of the Cartesian Philosophy. See CARTESIANISM.5

Under Chambers's "CARTESIAN Philosophy, or CARTESIANISM entry, Melville would have found

that God created Matter of an indefinite Extension . . ; that he im- press'd two Motions on this Matter; one, whereby each Part revolv'd round its Centre; another, whereby an Assemblage, or System of 'em, turn'd round a common Centre: Whence arose as many different Vortices, or Eddies, as there were different Masses of Matter, thus moving round common Centers.6

Descartes posits this basic concept of vortical systems in his Le Monde; ou, Traite' de la Lumie're. Or il suit de ceci deux choses qui me semblent fort conside'rables. La pre- miere est que la matiere de Ciel ne doit pas seulement faire tourner les planetes autour du Soleil, mais aussi autour de leur propre centre (excepte lorsqu'il y a quelque cause particuliere que les en exnpeche) et ensuite qu'elle doit composer de Petits Cieux autour d'elles, qui se meuvent en meme sens que le plus grand. Et la seconde est que, s'il se rencontre deux Plane"tes inegales en grosseur, mais disposees 'a prendre leurs cours dans le Ciel a une meme distance du Soleil, en sorte que l'une soit justement d'autant plus massive que l'autre sera plus grosse: la plus petite de ces deux, ayant un mouvement plus vite que la plus grosse, devra se joindre au petit Ciel que sera autour de cette plus grosse et tournoyer continuelle- ment avec lui.7

4 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick: or The Whale, ed. Luther S. Mansfield and Howard P. Vincent (New York, I952), p. I57. All quotations from the novel are from this edition and will be cited in the text.

5 Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia: or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (London, I728), II, 330, S.V. VORTEX.

6 Ibid., I, I64, s.v. CARTESIANISM.

7 Rene' Descartes, Oeuvres Philosophiques, ed. Ferdinand Alquie (Paris, I963), I, 334.

Notes 107

Melville uses Descartes's paradigm to create a number of revolving vortical systems in Moby-Dick. The motion of each system is end- lessly circular, and being three-dimensional, endlessly vortical. As a result, everything in the material world is condemned to a hellish circular flight about its center as well as about the center of a central sun.

The first vortical system has Ahab and the sun endlessly circling about the earth: "For a long time, now, the circus-running sun has raced within his fiery ring, and needs no sustenance but what's in himself. So Ahab" (p. 378). Both the sun and Ahab appear to circle the earth on their own power, but in actuality there is an agent beyond the sun and beyond Ahab that moves them in endless circles: "By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike" (p. 536). Ahab and the sun circle endlessly not on their own volition, but as a result of the clockwork system of Cartesian vortical motion. The second vortical system is a subunit of the first. Ahab spins on his axis and as a result his crew revolve about him: "my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve" (p. i66). Ahab as the center of this vortical system spins about on his own axis and his spinning motion causes the other satellites (the crew of the Pequod) to revolve about him. Ahab's grim purpose of hunting the White Whale becomes the mad quest of all the crew of the Pequod. The third vortical system is described in the Grand Armada scene: "in more and more con- tracting orbits the whales in the more central circles began to swim in thickening clusters . . . the entire host of whales came tumbling upon their inner centre" (p. 388). The Grand Armada vortex, like the Descartian vortices of the Mast-Head scene, is a microcosm of the violent cosmic macrocosm. The fourth vortical system is described in the final climactic scene of Moby-Dick: "concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight" (p. 566). Only Ishmael is left in the center of the vortex sys- tem: "at the axis of the slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion I did revolve" (p. 567). Like Ixion, Ishmael's fate is to be bound to a fiery wheel in Hades, to be bound to a circular universe of endless motion. Unlike the transcendentalists, who view man as progressing toward God through nature, Melville in Moby-Dick finds man

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caught in a system of nature that is nonprogressive, nonspiritual. God is separate from nature and man in nature is separate from God. According to Gillispie in his The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay

in the History of Scientific Ideas, the seventeenth century produced the prophet of science, Francis Bacon, and the founder of science, Rene Descartes.8 Both men sought a new methodology which would refute the scholasticism of the Middle Ages. Bacon's methodology of experiment and induction complemented Descartes's methodology of reason and deduction. Descartian Rationalism and Baconian Em- piricism combined to form a mathematical physics that would re- order and reexplain the universe. Unlike Bacon, who succeeded only in separating religion from science, Descartes unwittingly severed God from the universe. According to Burtt in his Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, Descartes's vortex system created an entirely new external world that was no longer teleologi- cal, no longer spiritual: God had created the world of physical existence, for the purpose that in man, the highest natural end, the whole process might find its way back to God. Now God is relegated to the position of first cause of motion, the happenings of the universe then continuing in aeternum as incidents in the regular revolutions of a great mathematical machine.9

The world, then, is no longer a physical manifestation of a spiritual Being. The progress of the world no longer concludes with God. Each world spins about its axis and revolves about a sun in an end- less vortical path that fails to lead to any spiritual resolution in God.

For Descartes and Melville, the primary law of nature is circular motion ("tous les mouvements qui se font au Monde sont en quelque facon circulaires"10). To Descartes, this great circular motion is a sign of a great watchmaker God that keeps order and stability in a fluid universe. To Melville, the great circular and vortical motion of the universe is a horror, as horrible and as real as the White Whale and the white depths of the Milky Way. Thus, in Melville's Moby- Dick, stasis is as illusory as the colors of the universe. The transcen- dental peace and calm experienced by Ishmael in the Mast-Head

8 Charles Coulston Gillispic, The Edge of Objectivity: An Essay in the History of Scien- tific Ideas (Princeton, N.J., I960), p. 83.

9 Edwin Arthur Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science: A Historical and Cr-itical Essay (London, I932), p. I05.

10 Descartes, I, 332.

Notes 109

scene is a subtle deceit, for at the bottom of it all is a yawning, churn- ing vortex, ceaselessly whirling about in a chained orbit, a fiery hell, an ungodly colorless all color of universal motion. In universal mo- tion and universal whiteness or blankness lies reality. But this blank- ness in Moby-Dick is not an absence of matter; it is, rather, a nullity of meaningless circular motion for the wretched infidel who spins about himself, makes no headway, and gains no headland. To Mel- ville, the Cartesian vortical system replaces the optimism of tran- scendentalism with the pessimism of mechanism. As a result of his knowledge of Cartesianism, Melville views nature as an impersonal mechanism that runs without human or divine intervention. Thus, Melville's affinity with Cartesianism alienated him from the main- currents of nineteenth-century transcendental thought.