Why Read Moby-Dick?

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  In the summer of 1851, as he struggled to finish his whaling novel, Melville dared to imagine himself and Hawthorne together in a writers’ paradise. They would find “some little shady corner by ourselves,” and with a basket of champagne they would “cross our celestial legs in the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and strike our glasses and our heads together, till both musically ring in concert.” They would then reminisce about their past lives and compose “humorous, comic songs” with titles such as “ ‘Oh, when I lived in that queer little hole called the world,’ or, ‘Oh, when I toiled and sweated below,’ or, ‘Oh, when I knocked and was knocked in the fight.’ ” As the agnostic writing outside his own uncertain beliefs, Melville is describing the fantasy he desperately needed but could never quite convince himself existed. It is a paradise born of several longings: of the twelve-year-old boy for his dead father; of the author for fame; and of the almost-middle-aged man for a friend. It is the longing that is in all of us, and it is there, in every page of Moby-Dick.

  13

  A Mighty, Messy Book

  Hawthorne had a lot to do with the making of Moby-Dick, but the novel truly began in February 1849 when Melville purchased a large-type edition of Shakespeare’s plays. The eyes that would become so inflamed during the composition of Moby-Dick were already beginning to bother him. “[C]hancing to fall in with this glorious edition,” he wrote to a friend of the large-type volumes, “I now exult over it, page after page.”

  Melville’s example demonstrates the wisdom of waiting to read the classics. Coming to a great book on your own after having accumulated essential life experience can make all the difference. For Melville, the timing could not have been better, and in the flyleaf of the last volume of his seven-volume set of Shakespeare’s plays are notes written during the composition of Moby-Dick about Ahab, Pip, and other characters.

  Instead of being intimidated by Shakespeare, Melville dared to wonder whether he might be able to surpass him. Given the constraints that existed in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare had to be careful about what he revealed. As a result, Melville wrote, “[i]n Shakespeare’s tomb lies infinitely more than Shakespeare ever wrote.” Fully realizing his own age applied its own set of limitations on a writer, he still wondered whether being an American in the mid-nineteenth century might allow him to push the artistic bar set by Shakespeare to new heights. “[E]ven Shakespeare was not a frank man to the uttermost,” he wrote to Duyckinck. “And, indeed, who in this intolerant Universe is, or can be? But the Declaration of Independence makes a difference.”

  Shakespeare was a critical influence on Moby-Dick, but there is also the Bible, which Melville, in essence, reimagined through the prism of his youthful experiences in the Pacific, providing his prose with an energy and surprise born of a convergence of the Old Testament and pagan exoticism even as he grappled with the issues of his own day. There is the Jonah of Father Mapple’s sermon at the Seamen’s Bethel in New Bedford, who, like a runaway slave in post–Fugitive Slave Act America, attempts to escape God’s omniscient gaze but is stymied at every turn. “In this world . . . ,” Father Map-ple sermonizes, “sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.”

  Embedded in the narrative of Moby-Dick is a metaphysical blueprint of the United States. Melville fills the book with telling similes and metaphors that allow a story set almost entirely at sea to evoke the look and feel of America in 1850. When rowing after a whale, Ahab’s crew of five powerful oarsmen produce such force that they “started the boat along the water like a horizontal burst boiler out of a Mississippi steamer.” After a whale has been cut up, the Pequod’s crew use block and tackle to “drag out [the] teeth, as Michigan oxen drag stumps of old oaks out of wild wood-lands.” When a sperm whale’s severed head accidentally drops back down into the sea, it hits “with a thunder-boom . . . like Niagara’s Table-Rock into the whirlpool.” The “thick curled bush of white mist” rising from a massive herd of sperm whales looks “like the thousand cheerful chimneys of some dense metropolis, descried of a balmy autumnal morning, by some horseman on a height.” We are on the deck of the Pequod with Captain Ahab, but we are also visiting the scenes, commonplace and noteworthy, of inland America.

  Despite Moby-Dick’s often dark and ominous themes, Melville obviously had great fun writing this book. Listen to him here as, tongue in cheek, he proclaims the novel’s audacious scope. “Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.” Moby-Dick is a true epic, embodying almost every powerful American archetype as it interweaves creation myths, revenge narratives, folktales, and the conflicting impulses to create and to destroy, all played out across the globe’s vast oceanic stage.

  There is a wonderful slapdash quality to the book. Melville inserts chapters of biology, history, art criticism, you name it, sometimes at seeming random. Ishmael is the narrator, but at times Melville invests him with an authorial omniscience. It’s a violation of the supposed laws of fiction writing; but who cares? In this book, especially the chapter titled “Ce-tology,” which contains some of the funniest parody writing you’ll ever find, Melville is out to lay bare his own creative process as well as the absurdity of our attempts to classify and quantify our lives into manageable, understandable entities. “[T]hough of real knowledge there be little,” Ishmael confides, “yet of books there are a plenty.” Ishmael creates a ridiculously complex classification system for whales but is finally left trying to account for some species that don’t fit in his system, dismissing these unclassifiable whales as “full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing.” Like Melville’s book, Ishmael’s “cetological System” can never be fully completed. “For small erections may be finished by their first architects,” he declares; “grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!”

  Even the beginning of the book is a magnificent mess. Contrary to what many people assume, Moby-Dick starts not with Ishmael but with “Etymology,” a listing of obscure quotations and translations supposedly collected by “a late consumptive usher to a grammar school.” As if that’s not enough, Melville follows “Etymology” with “Extracts,” a seemingly endless compilation of whale-related passages that takes up a full thirteen pages in the Penguin edition of the novel. From the beginning, Melville is challenging the reader with both his scholarship and his wit. By the time you reach chapter 1, you know you are in for a most quirky and demanding ride.

  There is an inevitable tendency to grow impatient with the novel, to want to rush and even skip over what may seem like yet another extraneous section and find out what, if anything, is going to happen next to Ahab and the Pequod. Indeed, as the plot is left to languish and entire groups of characters vanish without a trace, you might begin to think that the book is nothing more than a sloppy, self-indulgent jumble. But Melville is conveying the quirky artlessness of life through his ramshackle art. “[C]areful disorderliness,” Ishmael assures us, “is the true method.”

  For me, Moby-Dick is like the Oldsmobile my grandparents owned in the 1970s, a big boat of a sedan with loosey-goosey power steering that required constant back-and-forth with the wheel to keep the car pointed down the highway. Melville’s novel is that wandering, ov
ersized automobile, each non sequitur of a chapter requiring its own course correction as the narrative follows the erratic whims of Melville’s imagination toward the Pacific. The sheer momentum of the novel is a wonder to behold, barreling us along, in spite of all the divergences, toward the White Whale.

  14

  Unflinching Reality

  Within weeks of meeting Melville in August 1850, Hawthorne had procured copies of the young novelist’s two latest books, Redburn and White-Jacket. Both were based on Melville’s own experiences at sea: Redburn recounts his first voyage as a common seaman from New York City to Liverpool and back; White-Jacket tells of his stint aboard the naval frigate that took him from Hawaii to Boston. Hawthorne read the novels, his wife, Sophia, recounted to Evert Duyckinck, “on the new hay in the barn—which is a delightful place for the perusal of worthy books.” In a letter of his own to Duyckinck, Hawthorne spoke of his “progressive appreciation” of Melville’s work. “No writer ever put the reality before his reader more unflinchingly,” he wrote.

  Melville’s great strength (a strength that sometimes got lost in his Ahab-like preoccupation with what he once called “ontological heroics”) was an almost journalistic ability to record the reality of being alive at a particular moment. In Moby-Dick we feel in a profoundly emotional and visceral way what it was like to be a whaleman in the nineteenth century. In the chapter titled “The Affidavit,” Melville makes it clear that what he is describing could really have happened. The reality of whaling is, he insists, more incredible than anything a novelist could invent. “So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world,” he writes, “that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.”

  Ishmael points to several historical instances, including the story of the Essex, that illustrate “the great power and malice at times of the sperm whale.” Clearly, a whale is no ship’s carpenter. Far from passive and dull, a bull whale not only is huge but also thinks with the crafty intelligence of a man.

  Ishmael describes the wondrous way a craft as tiny as a whaleboat negotiates the massive swells of the ocean: “[T]he sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;—all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen . . . all this was thrilling.” And then there is the even more wondrous way a whale dives underneath the sea: “[T]he monster perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air, and then sank out of sight like a tower swallowed up.”

  No one has ever written a more beautiful and horrifying account of the death of a whale than the magnificent set piece contained in chapter 61, “Stubb Kills a Whale.” Perched on the onrushing bow of the whaleboat, the second mate merrily probes for “the life” of the whale with his lance until the giant creature begins to die. “His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men.” The whale goes into its final paroxysms, “spasmodically dilating and contracting his spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations. At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea. . . . Stubb scattered the dead ashes [of his pipe] over the water; and, for a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.”

  In his detailed descriptions of the whale’s anatomy, Melville is carefully, meticulously preparing us for the novel’s climax. In the chapter titled “The Battering-Ram,” Ishmael anatomizes the “compacted collectedness” of the sperm whale’s block-shaped head. It is, he tells us, “a dead, blind wall, . . . [an] enormous boneless mass . . . as though the forehead of the Sperm Whale were paved with horses’ hoofs. I do not think that any sensation lurks in it.” In addition to this mysterious “wad” of insensitivity, we are introduced to the whale’s tiny and “lashless eye, which you would fancy to be a young colt’s eye; so out of all proportion is it to the magnitude of the head.” The spout hole is “countersunk into the summit of the whale’s head” so that “even when tranquilly swimming through the mid-day sea in a calm, with his elevated hump sun-dried as a dromedary’s in the desert; even then, the whale always carries a small basin of water on his head, as under a blazing sun you will sometimes see a cavity in a rock filled up with rain.” The whale’s tail is “a dense webbed bed of welded sinews . . . knit over with a warp and woof of muscular fibres and filaments . . . so that in the tail the confluent measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point. Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it . . . where infantileness of ease undulates through a Titanism of power.”

  Reading Moby-Dick, we are in the presence of a writer who spent several impressionable years on a whaleship, internalized everything he saw, and seven or so years later, after internalizing Shakespeare, Hawthorne, the Bible, and much more, found the voice and the method that enabled him to broadcast his youthful experiences into the future. And this, ultimately, is where the great, unmatched potency of Moby-Dick, the novel, resides. It comes from an author who not only was there but possessed the capacious and impressionable soul required to appreciate the wonder of what he was seeing. At one point, Ishmael draws our attention to the majestic head of the sperm whale: “[G]azing on it . . . ,” he insists, “you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature.... If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove’s high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.”

  By the last third of the novel, we know all there is to know about the anatomy of the whale and the specifics of killing a whale; we have also come to appreciate the whale’s awe-inspiring mystery and beauty. As a consequence, Melville is free to describe the final clash between Ahab and Moby Dick with the unapologetic specificity required to make an otherwise improbable and overwrought confrontation seem astonishingly real.

  15

  Poetry

  Moby-Dick is a novel, but it is also a book of poetry.

  The beauty of Melville’s sentences is such that it sometimes takes me five minutes or more to make my way through a single page as I reread the words aloud, feeling the rhythms, the shrewdly hidden rhymes, and the miraculous way he manages consonants and vowels. Take, for example, this passage from chapter 51, “The Spirit-Spout,” which picks up with the Pequod just south of St. Helena: “while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude: on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea.”

  Good poetry is not all about lush and gorgeous words. It’s about creating an emblematic and surprising scene that opens up new worlds. When the Pequod meets the whaleship Albatross, the men at the mastheads find themselves passing each other silently in the sky: “Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the air came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped from the mast-heads of one ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our own look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.”

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nbsp; Good poetry also directs our attention to the most ordinary of human experiences. I know that I cannot go to bed on a cold winter night without thinking of Ishmael’s lyrical aside in chapter 11, “Nightgown,” about the benefits of sleeping in an unheated room. Not only does he provide some very practical advice; he delivers a kind of poetics of physical sensation that culminates in a quietly stunning prose haiku. “[T]o enjoy bodily warmth,” Ishmael explains, “some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if... the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”

  In chapter 60, “The Line,” Ishmael’s poetry takes something as prosaic as a piece of rope and turns it into a continuously evolving metaphor of the human condition. He begins with the differences between the two kinds of lines (“Hemp is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian to behold”), then describes how the line crisscrosses the whaleboat in “complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it . . . in its perilous contortions,” which leads to a description of what happens when the whale is harpooned and the line darts out (“like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you”) and then to the final revelation: “All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.”