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Moby-Dick thus invites at least two different kinds of allegorical readings: one that regards the novel as a general critique of power and the dangers of corruption, and another that focuses more particularly on the social ills of exclusionexclusion in the polity of the United StatesUnited States of America. At the same time, however, the text also discourages allegorical readings entirely. Admittedly, an allegorical reading of Ahab’s story is strongly suggested in some of the novel’s early chapters, in which Ishmael visits “a Whaleman’s Chapel” in New Bedford. In these chapters, Ishmael suggests that “the world’s a ship” and “the pulpit its brow” (47; ch. 8), with the preacher acting as “pilot-prophet” (53; ch. 9). Accordingly, if Ahab the pilot goes astray, then this involves grave allegorical dangers for the world. And yet, at other times the narrator explicitly urges readers to refrain from seeing Moby Dick as “a hideous and intolerable allegoryallegory” (172; ch. 45), emphasizing the realismrealism of his tale instead (e.g. ch. 55, “Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales”). Indeed, the narrator’s attention to even the smallest details of whaling appears superfluous if we read his tale allegorically. It would therefore be better to say that Moby-Dick uneasily combines features both of a realistrealism novel and of traditional allegory, without being fully at home in either genregenre.84 The extent of the book’s generic unbelonging is, in fact, reflected in the plethora of labels that critics have used to describe Moby-Dick, from “fable of the Real” (EagletonEagleton, Terry, Trouble with Strangers 216) to “monster anti-novel” (HillisMiller, J. Hillis Miller, On Literature 73) and “modern epic” (Franco MorettiMoretti, Franco, Modern Epic).

Moby-Dick’s uneasy combination of allegorical imagery and novelistic realismrealism is in many ways epitomized in Ahab, who constitutes a borderline figure between a ‘realistic,’ embodied individual with psychological depthdepth, and a ‘flat,’ allegorical character. In his study of nineteenth-century realism, Fredric JamesonJameson, Fredric notes in passing that “allegoryallegory and the bodybody […] repel one another and fail to mix” (Antinomies of Realism 37), and it is indeed difficult to reconcile the allegorical readings proposed above with the idea that Ahab suffers from post-traumatictrauma and shell shock stress disorder. In other words, as soon as we focus on the realistic depiction of Ahab as a traumatized individual with a wounded body, we remain in the domain of literal meaning – which poses a problem for traditional forms of allegorical reading because, as Jeremy TamblingTambling, Jeremy notes, allegory privileges the ‘spirit’ over the ‘letter’ of the word: “A spiritual reading says that the literal meaning is not as important as the allegorical message” (16). Accordingly, close attention to the ‘literal,’ realistic details of a character’s embodied mind distracts from the text’s allegorical message, which can only be revealed if the literal character disappears, or at least recedes from view. Perhaps this explains why, according to Angus FletcherFletcher, Angus, an allegorical character’s way of acting typically is “severely limited in variety” (38), for by reducing the character’s ‘realistic’ complexitycomplexity texts can foreground that character’s allegorical function.

Intriguingly, for FletcherFletcher, Angus, this limited behavioral complexitycomplexity of allegorical characters is open to two entirely different interpretations, one religious and the other secularsecular. To tease out these two different interpretations, FletcherFletcher, Angus imagines how an allegorical character would appear to us if we were to meet that character in real life:

[W]e would say of him that he was obsessed with only one idea, or that he had an absolutely one-track mind, or that his life was patterned according to absolutely rigid habitshabits and the habitual from which he never allowed himself to vary. It would seem that he was driven by some hidden, private force; or, viewing him from another angle, it would appear that he did not controlcontrol his own destiny, but appeared to be controlled by some foreignforeigners force, something outside the sphere of his own ego. (40–41)

In the context of a real-life situation, the allegorical character would “appear to be controlled by some foreignforeigners force,” and FletcherFletcher, Angus notes that in religious views of the world such external forces are referred to as the demonicdemonic (39). By contrast, from a secularsecular perspective, the character’s “one-track mind” and “rigid habitshabits and the habitual” appear as nothing other than psychological obsessionobsession. As FletcherFletcher, Angus suggests, Moby-Dick’s portrayal of Ahab oscillates precisely between these two poles (61), and even Ahab himself wavers between a religious and a secular interpretation of his own condition: “I’m demoniac, I am madnessmadness maddened!” (143; ch. 37).

More generally, Moby-Dick as a novel oscillates between a realistrealism understanding of madnessmadness as a psychological problem, and a religious interpretation of madness as demonicdemonic – i.e. a phenomenon with transcendental significance. For instance, when Ahab discloses his desiredesire to take revengerevenge on Moby Dick, the first mate Starbuck wavers between psychological and religious discourses, retorting that such a plan is “[m]adness” as well as “blasphemous” (139; ch. 36).85 The notion that madness may in fact be linked to transcendencetranscendence is stated most explicitly, however, in Ishmael’s account of Pip’s tragic fate:

The sea had jeeringly kept his finite bodybody up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes […]; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him madmadness. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God. (321–322; ch. 93)

Pip may be madmadness, but he was also confronted with visions of the divine, and accordingly for Ishmael the boy’s “insanity is heaven’s sense”: the madnessmadness of the holy fool, which might hold the key to a kind of transcendental knowledgeknowledge that other mortals seek in vain.

Ahab, too, refers at one point to Pip’s “holiness” (391; ch. 125), which suggests that he shares with Starbuck and Ishmael a view of madnessmadness that Michel FoucaultFoucault, Michel regards as typical of a much earlier historical period:

In the Middle Ages and until the Renaissance, man’s dispute with madnessmadness was a dramatic debate in which he confronted the secret powers of the world; the experience of madness was clouded by images of the Fall and the Will of God, of the Beast and the Metamorphosis, and of all the marvelous secrets of Knowledge. (Madness and Civilization xii)

FoucaultFoucault, Michel argues that, in the Middle Ages, the link between transcendencetranscendence and madnessmadness constituted a theological given, and in Moby-Dick Ahab’s very name emphasizes this connection. “Ahab” is, as Ishmael points out early in the novel, the name of an idolatrous and ill-fated King of Israel denounced by the prophet Elijah, and we learn that it was given to Ahab by his “crazy, widowed mother” (78; ch. 16; see 1 Kings 18: 16–19). In other words, Ahab’s mother was madmadness when she chose his name – yet her choice also proves propheticprophecy, for Ahab, too, is denounced by a man who calls himself Elijah. Indeed, Elijah had warned Ishmael and his friend Queequeg not to embark on the Pequod, and though Ishmael believes that Elijah “must be a little damaged in the head,” he is also riveted with the latter’s “insane earnestness” (87; ch. 19), confessing later that Elijah’s “diabolical incoherences” continue to haunt him (108; ch. 28). Moreover, by the end of MelvilleMelville, Herman’s novel, we know that Elijah’s prophecies of doom have all come true, which in turn seems to confirm the earlier link between madness and “the marvelous secrets of Knowledge.” We are thus now in a position to understand what Georg LukácsLukács, Georg means when, in his Theory of the Novel, he interprets madness as an objectivation of “transcendental homelessnesstranscendental homelessness” (61). Extraordinary mental states appear as demonicdemonic or propheticprophecy in a world of faith, and it is only when the link to the transcendental home is severed that a purely secularsecular concept of madness can emerge.

Let us be clear about the implications of these conflicting interpretations of madnessmadness for the larger theme of homelessnesshomelessness in Moby-Dick. What EmersonEmerson, Ralph Waldo defines in positive terms as selfself-reliance – a kind of ‘splendid isolationisolation’ from the mass of average beings – in Ahab appears as both mental and social alienationalienation (i.e. his madness is linked to his being cut-off from other human beings).86 The captain’s madness thus constitutes a state of unbelonging – provided that we subscribe to a secularsecular interpretation of his condition. We have seen, however, that Moby-Dick also offers a competing interpretation of madness as the sign of transcendental connectedness (“insanity is heaven’s sense”), and perhaps this explains why Ahab is so afraid of spending more time with Pip. If recognition of the symbolicalsymbolical slave were indeed able to cure the master’s malady, then this process might also force Ahab to face the possibility that his obsessionobsession is ‘mere’ madness, and that his quest for the white whale lacks any transcendental significance. Put differently: were Ahab to relinquish his beliefbelief in the “demoniac” nature of his quest, then this would force him to confront two kinds of traumatrauma and shell shock at one and the same time: the historical traumatrauma and shell shock of physical mutilation and mental illnessillness (i.e. a recognition of his own madness, resulting from post-traumatictrauma and shell shock stress disorder), and the structural or existentialexistential & existential angst/trauma traumatrauma and shell shock of transcendental homelessnesstranscendental homelessness. Faced with this double threat of unbelonging, Ahab holds fast to the obsessiveobsession quest that has given meaning to his life – and turns away from Pip forever.

We could say, then, that the ‘epic’ character Ahab shies away from the aestheticaesthetic of the novel, for according to LukáLukács, Georgcs the genregenre of the novel is a formalform and content expression of transcendental homelessnesstranscendental homelessness (41). LukáLukács, Georgcs argues that the world of the epicepic (and, arguably, allegoryallegory) “is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars” (29). The novel, by contrast, “is the epicepic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem” (56). As both Michael McKeonMcKeon, Michael (Theory of the Novel 179) and John NeubauerNeubauer, John (533–534) have noted, for LukácsLukács, Georg this transcendental homelessnesshomelessness constitutes a fundamental lossloss, and Robert T. TallyTally Jr., Robert T. Jr. rightly notes that the feeling LukácsLukács, Georg evokes is akin to Martin HeideggerHeidegger, Martin’s notion of existentialexistential & existential angst/trauma angst (Spatiality 47). LukácsLukács, Georg’s evaluation thus differs markedly from Mikhail BakhtinBakhtin, Mikhail’s, who finds in the genre of the novel “a certain linguistic homelessness of literary consciousnessconsciousness” that he sees as profoundly liberating because he believes it to be incompatible with oppressiveoppression, ‘monologic’ types of discoursediscourse (“Discourse in the Novel” 367; see McKeonMcKeon, Michael, Theory of the Novel 318; NeubauerNeubauer, John 541).

Despite such differences in evaluation between LukácsLukács, Georg and BakhtinBakhtin, Mikhail, however, we should note that linguistic and transcendental homelessnesstranscendental homelessness in fact remain intimately related. The link between the two ideas is nicely expressed in Barry UnsworthUnsworth, Barry’s historical novel Morality Play, set in fourteenth-century EnglandEngland, in which a former monk wonders whether it is morally acceptable for actors to perform a play based on a real-life crime rather than stories taken from scripture:

God has not given us this story to use, He has not revealed to us the meaning of it. So it has no meaning, it is only a death. Players are like other men, they must use God’s meanings, they cannot make meanings of their own, that is heresy, it is the source of all our woes, it is the reason our first parents were cast out. [… I]f we make our own meanings, God will oblige us to answer our own questions, He will leave us in the void without the comfort of His Word. (74)

If meaning is not revealed (and thus transcendentally guaranteed), then according to UnsworthUnsworth, Barry’s narrator it necessarily becomes the problematic task of orphaned selves to create their own meaning in a comfortless void. In other words, if we lose the transcendental anchor of God’s Word, meaning itself becomes arbitraryarbitrariness and linguistically homeless.

Of course, it is possible to disagree with LukácsLukács, Georg’s and BakhtinBakhtin, Mikhail’s view of homelessnesshomelessness as an inherent characteristic of the novel as a genregenre, but the important point in our context is that Moby-Dick’s concern with both transcendental and linguistic homelessness is in fact apparent from the novel’s very first page. In Moby-Dick’s opening section (“Etymology”; 7), the narrator tries to unravel the meaning of the word whale by venturing beyond the boundariesboundaries and borders of English, his linguistic home:

חן	Hebrew.
khtoς,	Greek.
CETUS,	Latin.
WHÆL,	Anglo-Saxon.
HVAL,	Danish.
WAL,	Dutch.
HWAL,	Swedish.
HVALUR,	Icelandic.
WHALE,	English.
BALEINE,	French.
BALLENA,	Spanish.
PEKEE-NUEE-NUEE,	Fegee.
PEHEE-NUEE-NUEE,	Erromangoan.

In doing so, however, MelvilleMelville, Herman’s narrator merely highlights the arbitraryarbitrariness nature of linguistic signs (or, more precisely, the free-floating nature of the signifiersignifier, the meaning of which is not, in fact, transcendentally given). Moreover, in the novel’s second section (“Extracts”), the narrator provides us with quotations on whales “from any book whatsoever, sacredsacred or profane,” and his use of the phrase “gospel cetology” beautifully encapsulates Moby-Dick’s characteristic oscillation between empiricist realismrealism (“cetology”) and allegorical or transcendental significance (“gospel”; 8). In short, while initially these two sections are bound to have an alienating effect on the reader, in retrospect we find that they are intimately related to the novel’s key philosophical conflicts.