All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.
I don’t think the world needs my amateur analysis of Moby Dick, so I’ll just use this space to record the fact that I don’t know why it took me so long to read this classic; Moby Dick turned out to be funnier, less dry, and more entertaining than I had imagined. Using a wide variety of tones (ironic, philosophical, swashbuckling), a variety of formats (straight storytelling, scientific interludes, theatrical dialogue with asides and stage directions), Herman Melville threw everything he knew about whales, whaling, and writing into this behemoth and the result (although a flop in its day) endures as a true classic of American Literature. Let this paragraph stand as my “review”; the remainder are the bits I've collected for myself.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
Everyone knows that opening line: “Call me Ishmael” feels almost Biblical in its gravity, so I was immediately amused by the paragraph that follows those weighty words; who knew that Ishmael (if that is his real name…) would go to sea every time a fit came over him that made him want to step out in traffic or knock off strangers’ hats? The scenes that follow, leading up to Ishmael meeting the curiously tattooed Queequog, were by turns engagingly lyrical (poor Lazarus stranded on the curbstone before the door of the rich man Dives, “who only drinks the tepid tears of orphans”) and weirdly slapstick (Peter Coffin grinningly planing down a bench for Ishmael to sleep on). The shifting tone had me constantly backfooted, and I liked that. When Ishmael and Queequog eventually share a bed (apparently not uncommon at the time) and Ishmael wakes up in Queequog’s warm embrace (surely more uncommon?), I was hooked (harpooned?). From their initial meeting, I was intrigued by Melville’s (or Ishmael’s, at any rate) apparently nonracist attitudes, and was floored by, “What’s all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself — the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.” And when the pair travel together to Nantucket to find a whaling ship to sign on with, I was further intrigued by, “For some time we did not notice the jeering glances of the passengers, a lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that two fellow beings should be so companionable; as though a white man were anything more dignified than a whitewashed negro.” But eventually, this book does display the prejudices of its time, as when Melville tries to explain why people are inherently afraid of white things (like Moby Dick) but argues in favour of the colour, “This pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe.” “Every dusky tribe” appears to be represented on the Pequod (with correspondingly cringe-worthy dialects), and when Ahab’s secret boat crew appears, Ishmael describes them thusly:
The companions of this figure were of that vivid, tiger-yellow complexion peculiar to some of the aboriginal natives of the Manillas; a race notorious for a certain diabolism of subtilty, and by some honest white mariners supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential agents on the water of the devil, their lord, whose counting-room they suppose to be elsewhere.
So, while I was impressed at first, I had to eventually mark Melville down as just another man of his time. Plus ça change.
The following is an example of Melville’s humour:
Why it is that all Merchant-seamen, and also all Pirates and Man-of-War’s men, and Slave-ship sailors, cherish such a scornful feeling towards Whale-ships; this is a question it would be hard to answer. Because, in the case of pirates, say, I should like to know whether that profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it. It sometimes ends in uncommon elevation, indeed; but only at the gallows. And besides, when a man is elevated in that odd fashion, he has no proper foundation for his superior altitude. Hence, I conclude, that in boasting himself to be high lifted above a whaleman, in that assertion the pirate has no solid basis to stand on.
And the following is an example of Melville’s lyricism:
The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body 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 the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; 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 mad.
I came into this knowing that Melville had worked on whaling ships, and I had read somewhere that he based his novel on both an actual white whale of ill repute (Mocha Dick, apparently) and the real life sinking of a whaling ship (the Essex ), so I expected Moby Dick to be a credible, and hopefully exciting, account of the 19th century whaling industry. And I think it’s common knowledge that Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal quest to hunt down the white whale that took his leg — even at the risk of his ship and crew — is used as the prime example of the man vs nature conflict when discussing literature; you pretty much know from pop culture how this plot plays out. What I hadn’t known is just how many literary references Melville would fit in here — from the Bible and the Ancient Greeks, poets and philosophers, Shakespeare and scientists; I can now picture Melville, by the light of a bright-burning spermaceti candle, combing through countless volumes, hunting down rare references to the leviathans of the deep until, thar she blows!, he had found some cetological allusion to make use of. In an early chapter, I was quite enchanted by a chaplain (a former whaler who now ascended his prow-shaped pulpit via retractable rope ladder) as he outlined the story of Jonah from the perspective of the sailors who unwittingly aided in the prophet’s flight from God; what a vivid and thrilling tale he made of that short Old Testament book. The frequent informational chapters (on a whale’s physiology or how to coil rope or harvest sperm) are apparently boring to some readers (or at any rate, are found to interrupt the flow of the narrative for them), but I found it all fascinating and necessary; I can totally understand why Melville wanted to stuff in everything he discovered from his research. If I could point to a misstep it would be making Ahab’s fate too similar to Macbeth’s; the reader of Shakespeare knows not to interpret literally the details surrounding one’s death, whether foreseen by three witches or a “Parsee” in a turban. But I still appreciated Melville invoking Shakespeare.
In the end, Moby Dick was so much more than I expected — and so much more readable than I expected — and I am pleased to have now made it a part of me.
I picked this off my shelf, at this particular moment, as a follow-up read to Fathoms: The World in the Whale (reviewed here) and they are excellent in concert. I didn't need Rebecca Giggs to convince me of the majesty of whales, and while I also didn't need to be persuaded as to the senseless brutality of the whaling industry (those wise and playful leviathans, hunted painfully for their oil?), as with Melville's casual racism, I do understand that that industry was an artifact of its time. Still, reading about the fate of the real life Mocha Dick - survivor of apparently over a hundred kill attempts, eventually taken with nineteen harpoons lodged in his body, finally killed, apparently, when he came to the aid of a distraught cow whose calf had just been slaughtered - that story made me sad. Happily, Moby Dick ultimately gets perfect revenge on the little man who wouldn't stop poking him with sharp sticks; take that, Ahab! So, thanks for the happy ending, Mr Melville.
