In Moby Dick, or The White Whale, Herman Melville sought to portray man’s liberation (or at least man’s potential for liberation) from his Wheel of Fate, a fate that has destined him to war and theories of war (cf. Joyce Adler: War in Melville’s Imagination). Melville was most concerned with mankind’s obsession with the madness of his own devising; Moby Dick was his greatest symbolic treatment of what he regarded as man’s mythic tale of search and destroy versus peace and brotherhood.

As George Lucas has so often informed us (mainly through the popularity of his movies but also in the many interviews conducted in journals and magazines, which incorporated his agreements with Joseph Campbell on the creation of modern treatments of ancient myths) the mythic tale which must inform and surround us has been given a variety of masks by different cultures, different times, different authors. His own tale of adventure and heroes, Star Wars (and here I mainly limit myself to the first episode—that being the first in the middle trilogy—A New Hope) must then agree somewhat with what Melville saw, with what Shakespeare saw, with what Homer saw. That is, if it does indeed participate in a modern revival of ancient truths.

Melville’s greatest work serves up his greatest symbol: the White Whale. As Adler and countless others have pointed out, he makes this whale the height of creation, so great as to be undefinable, and as such it embodies the entirety of life including polar opposition (dread and beauty, evil and good). He might be thought to be akin to what Kant and Kant’s followers viewed as an undefinable other, as something which we cannot know, as our knowledge is limited to what our senses evidence. Yet, as Ross states concerning Kant’s proposal for his theory of knowledge, if "only reason connects us to the transcendent and that sensation is only a subjective and confusing factor that distracts and distorts reason: sensibility, our passive relation to objects, is the mark of our imperfection" (cf.http://www.friesian.com/eliade.htm (c) 1996 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D.) and if Melville was aware of this distinction and thought, we might see in the whale some measure of immeasurablilty, some degree of unknowableness, of numinousness, of mysticism. He becomes whatever the viewer sees, through his subjective senses.

Melville does make much of this whale*s otherness, its indefinable nature: he makes of it indeed a kind of everything, with a mythic origin as in the Iroquois Turtle or the Tlingit Raven or the Yuchi Crawfish. Its whiteness is the absence of color but is also all of the colors. He cannot be known though he be dissected. He cannot be read: its hieroglyphs are not decoded (or decodable). The chapter titled Cetology creates more and more uncertainty as the narrator attempts a greater and greater delving of the nature of leviathan. We know not where or what he is. Melville makes this very clear. Indeed, Kant’s followers (Otto, Fries, Nelson) struggled with the sense that the numinous can be known, somehow, can be brought to bear, though not with a scientific sense of knowledge. It would need a different non-rational sort of knowing to bring this "beast" to bear. Kant himself, through his aesthetics, felt that Nature and its beings were unknowable except as through Beauty/Art, which is not a true knowing of evidencial nature. This was not a rational knowing but a "felt" ineffable knowing. We see more of this feeling later, both in Moby Dick and in Lucas’s A New Hope.

If Moby Dick is the symbol of the numinous (or of Life and all its many, indefinable qualities, as Adler proposes) what can be Lucas’s analog? Star Wars mythos makes much of a sort of life-force which pervades the universe. It remains unnamable (except in the bland assertion, The Force) and ultimately unknowable in a Kantian sense. And here we seem to find the whale, except for it is not a symbol, for it is not an object. It is what is behind the object. This is Lucas’s greatest flaw, artistically. He shows us nothing, tells us all in a comic book fashion. Yet there are many clues which abound throughout the Lucas films: the color of Vader is the whale’s opposite, black, yet his army is mostly white. The force is felt by both those on the Rebellion as well as those in the Empire’s thralldom. None seem to be able to speak of the force with any intelligibility, with any language. It remains aloof.

If the Whale is equivalent to the Force, then what of Ahab, Melville’s other great symbol, the embodiment of imperium in imperio? It should be obvious to all that Vader is Ahab, provoking like tendencies to evil, to rigidity, to irrationality, and madness. Ahab and Vader have a defective nature, Ahab losing his leg to the whale on a previous venture, and the Sith Lord a victim of some sort of melting pit disaster creating a wound so gruesome he needs a mask and breathing apparatus —a melding of metallic and human that Melville might well have appreciated. These defects relate to their imperfections, their incomplete natures. Ahab turns to the dark side (cf Adler: "Ahab knows ‘all loveliness is anguish’ to him, that ‘war is pain, and hate is woe,’ that he is ‘so far gone’ on the dark side of the earth that its other side is lost to him.") as does Vader, through a hatred of loss: Ahab his leg, Vader his wholeness (though at this point in the trilogy of trilogies we don’t know the specifics of his turning).

There is another important aspect of this turning to both characters. Both see the world irrationally through emotion (hate, anger, vindictiveness, power, control). Lucas thought introduces a new element, or perhaps merely an inconsistency. Toward the end of the novel Ahab is seen turning from the instruments of his scientific day (the ship’s quadrant: "Foolish toy! babies’ plaything of haughty Admirals...Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all things that cast man’s eyes aloft to that heaven....") and sailing toward his goal by "feel" trusting the dark side (as Lucas would have it). But Vader is very much of the scientific world of his day. Indeed, he is himself an instrument, a kind of computer element. At the end of A New Hope Vader is seen in combat with his son, Luke Skywalker, in aerial dogfight, but whereas Luke trusts the "feel" of the Force (as instructed by his ghostly mentor, Obi Wan Kenobi) and thus is victorious, Vader accepts the computer’s validity, which disinherits him further from the Life-Force, allowing Luke time enough to scoot past and destroy the DeathStar (allowing for a crediting to his faithful sidekicks Han Solo and Chewbaka). The important difference here is that Melville treats "feel" as destructive whereas Lucas sees it as more in line with Fries and Otto, as something akin to an aesthetic knowing of the numinous. But this is a superficial treatment. Melville does not so much as say all feeling is destructive; he says, All turning from the brotherhood of mankind, from the feeling of the heart, is destructive. Therefore there are two sorts of feelings in Melville, those of humanity and those of the supermen, those tyrants who wish control over all. One should remember the scene where Starbuck feels he should destroy the destroyer, Ahab, with the musket, but being too much in league at that point he sets the musket back in its rack, dooming all aboard to their respective fates.

Melville then sets before us the Lucas canon, a kind of modern day equivalent to the Persian Zoroastrian: the force of Good and the force of Evil. The dark side versus that of the light.

The constant warring between the Light and the Dark is obvious in Lucas. The beginning of A New Hope sets forth the ancient renewal of battle:

A vast sea of stars serves as the backdrop for the main

title. War drums echo through the heavens as a rollup

slowly crawls into infinity.

It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking

from a hidden base, have won their first victory ....

(from the revised fourth ed)

It is less so in Melville. Joyce Sparer Adler’s treatments of Melville’s fiction is replete with the theme of war; her thesis is so well thought out I cannot conceive of a more appropriately based Melvillean synthesis. Indeed, the only aspect that I would wish to further exploration would be the basis of Kantian philosophy within the scope of Melville and Lucas’s treatments. I have begun with a mere trifle of the possible influence of Kant on Melville.

There are many more parallels between Moby Dick and Star Wars which can be fun to elucidate. The hero Luke Skywalker embodies some of the traits of the Great Whale, Ahab, Ishmael, Queequeg. His name implies that of a hero like unto the Greek gods, a walker among the constellations (Cetus, too, was a sky walker, as pointed out by Adler). He is in this movie a hero in the making, one making choices, seeking adventure, seeking knowledge. He has his mentors (Queequeg is a mentor of a kind to Ishmael) in Yoda and Obi Wan. He is drawn to both the dark side and the light: his father, though unbeknownst to him, is drawing him closer and closer to the side of tyranny, the side of Ahab. He is the character we most identify with, and as such, though no narrator/Ishmael, is the one we see escape from the depths (this time of space). Luke has a more obvious feminine side to him; we see him first as Lucas describes him, as a farm boy with heroic aspirations who looks much younger than his eighteen years. His shaggy hair and baggy tunic give him the air of a simple but lovable lad with a prize-winning smile.

As Adler makes clear it is the feminine side to man that redeems Ishmael/Queequeg, that lends him his tendency to life-giving brotherhood. Without such a nature, as Ahab, he is driven by power and greed and hate. It is interesting to note that with the dawn of The Phantom Menace there is a hint to a mother-less semi-divine birth for young Vader, Anakin Skywalker. Ahab, knew not his mother and left his wife after his marriage.

Queequeg is the central human figure in Melville’s novel, but we do not find his analog in Lucas. He has some Yoda in him, some Chewbaka, but he is not fulfilled in Lucas’s treatment of the myth. Luke himself is half Queequeg, half Vader.

I had hoped to see some comparison in Starbuck, and the other ancillary characters (Flask and Stubb, Tashtego, and indeed one could come up with such a comparison, yet this would be a false, invented one. There are characters in Lucas that might be Starbuck-like (and I think principally of Hans Solo) in that they exercise a choice to be made. Yet none in Lucas make the decisive turning aside toward the side of tyranny that Starbuck does.

Yet this would be a facile treatment of two influential works, to force a round peg inside a square hole. What is important to realize is that both Lucas and Melville sought to crystallize artistically (I hesitate to raise both to the same shelf: Lucas is no Melville as ________ might say) how they saw man’s current mythos. Both saw it as warlike. Both saw it as a choosing of the Light or the Dark. And both sought after what Kant saw as unknowable, and as later German philosopher’s saw as merely mystical, a Life Force, an Other.

Melville and Lucas saw this Other as capturable, Melville through his symbology in the Great Whale, and also, I feel, in the felt reactions of Ahab’s pulse on the sea, and Queequeg’s feeling for life (indeed in all the characters there is a moment of choosing based on the feel of life’s pulse), and Lucas in the feeling of the Force through the agents of the Rebels and the Empire.

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Notes

http://www.friesian.com/otto.htm