I look, You Look: Relationship Exchange in "Moby-Dick"

Jamie Ferrell

Professor Kent Puckett

UC Berkeley English N166

7 July 2016

I look, you look: Relationship Exchange in Moby-Dick

In Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick, the status of value is a widely disparate concept in terms of how it is conferred onto objects and how it may fluctuate in various scenes within the narrative. Karl Marx’s concepts of exchange value and use value play an essential role in determining the economic and ethical values within Moby-Dick, a phenomenon that may be further investigated down to the level of language. When language is considered as a universal equivalent similar to money, it eventually results in a highly indeterminate status for whatever commodity is being evaluated. In the case of the doubloon and the white whale in Moby-Dick, it is this irresolute status that embodies a fundamental challenge in the novel, and may begin to explain Ahab’s fervent chase after the whale.

Janet Sorensen’s essay “I Talk to Everybody in My Own Way” examines this concept more specifically. She writes that the advent of a universal language and grammar “parallels the rising form of commodity exchange… the English language, in turn, functions like money, as a universal equivalent, constructing and abstracting difference in its circulation.” (Sorensen 75). When considering value in Moby-Dick from a verbal or linguistic perspective as well as a monetary one, the concept becomes increasingly complicated as values are seemingly assigned at random through language, and inanimate objects encompass a new sphere that is more complex than the use and exchange value championed by Marx. It is perhaps simplest to consider this concept firstly with regards to the doubloon, the Spanish coin that Ahab calls attention to near the beginning of the novel.

The doubloon is an otherwise unremarkable coin, identical to millions of other doubloons in circulation throughout the world at any given moment. However, its use value and exchange value are modified by Captain Ahab’s decision to set it apart from all other doubloons near the beginning of the novel, when he addresses the Pequod’s crew: “Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw… look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!” (Melville 176). It is in this moment that the doubloon adopts a new value outside of its candid monetary one—it becomes a facet of Moby Dick, signifying the bond that Captain Ahab promises to maintain between himself and his crewmembers. This is the first time in the book where the doubloon is placed on a sort of linguistic pedestal, built up into a signifier of the White Whale and subsequently revered by the crew throughout the novel due to this new layer of value.

However, it is when the doubloon adopts multiple values through crewmembers’ differing interpretations of it that any attempt at deriving specific value from the doubloon becomes overwhelmingly indeterminate. Sorensen explains that it is the layering and exchanging of values, in this case verbally, which creates this inconclusive status:

The commodity, marked by a series of slippages and displacements, is ultimately discernible only relationally, particularly in the moment of exchange… A distinctly atemporal entity, the value and identity of the commodity are instantaneous, apparent briefly in an exchange relationship of self and other via a numerical grammar. (Sorensen 85)

In other words, Ahab’s decision to equate the doubloon’s value to that of capturing the White Whale complicates it as something that is not wholly monetary, and is exchangeable based on this “numerical grammar” rather than a stable numerical value. When multiple other characters discuss the doubloon from their own separate perspectives, it derives an increasing amount of values through verbal exchange relationships. Ishmael is the first to discuss what the doubloon’s significance is to him, first acknowledging that it is “set apart and sanctified… as the white whale’s talisman.” He goes on to describe the doubloon’s beginnings, its composition of “purest, virgin gold,” and its origin at “a country planted in the middle of the world” (Melville 470-1). In typical narrating Ishmael fashion, he focuses on the specific origins and technicalities inherent to the coin, deriving value from its history more than anything.

However, in a fleeting moment of relationship exchange, that same value is then transferred over to the perspective of Ahab, who considers it quite differently while examining the coin’s designs: “The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab; all are Ahab…” (471). Captain Ahab derives value from the coin in the strength it gives him to continue his pursuit of Moby Dick, using the repetition of his name to emphasize the quantity of connections he may make between himself and the coin. But more importantly, the doubloon’s symbols, which carried such historical significance for Ishmael, are now considered significant for their strength and congruence to Ahab himself. It follows that there is some wavering congruency between the value of historical elements of the doubloon, as Ishmael considers them, and the value of its implications for Ahab’s power, which is where the doubloon’s overall value adapts a “shaky, indeterminate status” (Sorensen 85) through language that Sorensen’s essay seeks to unpack. Language, as the vessel through which multiple characters confer their own ideas about the doubloon’s value, therefore operates as a “universal equivalent” similar to money in a transaction.

As the characters continue to discuss their varying perspectives regarding the doubloon, the values become more and more fungible. In fact, the very language that Flask uses to describe his own perspective about the doubloon underscores this reflexive quality of the relationship exchange phenomenon. He says, “Shall I call that wise or foolish, now; if it be really wise it has a foolish look to it; yet, if it be really foolish, then has it a sort of wiseish look to it” (Melville 474). The antimetabole of this sentence makes the language into a somewhat more physical entity that may be materially reversed and exchanged, similar to money. This is reflected in Pip’s contribution to the layers of opinions regarding the doubloon—he uses a grammar lesson to accentuate a fundamental facet of English language: “I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look” (475). Here, language at its most banal form still confers value, lending even more layers to the doubloon to the point where the over-determination of the object essentially clouds over the object itself. This is the crux of both Marx and Sorensen’s argument: eventually, an object’s ability to be exchanged alienates the object from itself. The characters in Moby-Dick create such a wealth of values around the doubloon that its original value is irrelevant, and the doubloon instead takes on an unspecified meaning that is difficult to construe or equate to anything in particular. It is worth considering, however, that an object with a wealth of values like this, conferred upon it through language, stories, and opinions, likely adopts a value much greater than that which it had before.

Captain Ahab initially established that the doubloon would be rewarded to the individual who caught Moby Dick. This is an essential part of the doubloon’s meaning: in all its indeterminacy, with this inherent connection to Moby Dick, it acts as a metaphor for the whale itself. The multiple layers that the crewmembers attempt to place on the doubloon, and the accompanying power, are just as easily applied to the whale, because its status as a commodity makes it equally as susceptible to the “numerical grammar.” For example, tales of Moby Dick ranging from Ahab’s own experiences to the Town-Ho story contribute to the legend of the whale and cloud its original value or significance. The whale’s indeterminate form, therefore, is a result of similar multiple moments of relationship exchange that the doubloon is subject to. Just after announcing the doubloon’s new significance as a prize for capturing Moby Dick, Ahab is questioned by Starbuck and subsequently acknowledges this unpredictable and undetermined aspect of Moby Dick himself. He says,

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If a man will strike, strike through the mask! … To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. (Melville 179)

It is apparent that Ahab’s search for Moby Dick arises principally from his fear of the whale’s inability to be pinned down, and his fear of how truly powerful the whale’s many values might be; that is, Moby Dick’s value or identity is an “inscrutable thing” that is hidden behind the pasteboard mask. Similar to the doubloon, Moby Dick’s essential meaning or significance is derived from so many stories, legends, and whale tracking voyages that his uncertain value encompasses an impenetrable, ubiquitous, eternal space. It is this indeterminacy that is at the core of the relationship exchange argument, meaning that the nature of Moby Dick as an unidentifiable, complex force may be slightly more understandable from an analytical point of view.

The concept of relationship exchange is a quite specific way of understanding the fundamental exchange values and use values from Marx’s work, but it makes the construction of the story somehow more accessible. When considering language itself as a universal equivalent similar to money, it may be revealed that exchange value can be administered to a commodity in multiple layers that complicate its ability to be identified as solely one thing or another.

Works Cited

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale. New York City: Penguin, 2003. Print. 03 July

2016.

Sorensen, Janet. "I Talk to Everybody in Their Own Way." The New Economic Criticism:

Studies at the Interface of Literature and Economics. N.p.: Routledge, 2005. N. pag.

Print.