Moby-Dick, or The Whale

Moby-Dick or, The Whale (1851)

Herman Melville

            For the first time in my life I’m at a loss for words, unsure, for once, of what exactly my fumbling little pretensions could add to anything. Moby-Dick is arguably the greatest novel of all time and I hadn’t read it until just now, which makes me feel as though I’ve been wasting my time as a booklover. As if reading anything else has merely been dicking around. This book is usually assigned in high school but it wasn’t assigned to me for some reason. My class read something different. The Scarlet Letter, maybe. Probably the first and third period senior English classes got Moby-Dick and the second and fourth period classes got I don’t know, Pride and Prejudice or some other nonsense. Whatever it was I’m sure I hated it. What a rip-off. My teachers could have been inducting me into the mystery cults of knowledge and misanthropy and struggle and freedom and death and ART but instead they helped me waste my youth by boring me to tears with stories about the privileged and their insipid feelings. I almost feel like it’s too late for me now, like this book could have and should have come to me at a young age like a meteorite from the dark cosmos landing aflame in my lap but now I’m too old and too calloused to really appreciate or understand it. Took me a long time to get through it, too, and if anyone cares I’m sorry about that. Mr. Melville is not at fault here: I was harpooned from the first sentence. Rather I’m a very slow reader and at my ten page per day pace a 630 page book is practically Mt. Everest.

            Where to start? Moby-Dick is a book that puts other books into perspective. It puts Gravity’s Rainbow into perspective. It puts Blood Meridian into perspective. It puts Journey to the End of the Night into perspective. It puts Last Exit to Brooklyn into perspective. And so on. It’s sort of a wellspring of sorts. Other things unfold from it. It’s so epic in scale and scope that most other books seem puny in comparison. I feel at times that Melville was trying to say everything he knew about the universe, in one big burst, and he tried to illustrate it using whaling as a device. He certainly says everything he could know about whales. That is, what was known about whales in 1850, or more bluntly: lots of incorrect things about whales. For example: they aren’t fish, no matter what Herman wants you to believe.

            I was surprised at how little I actually knew about the story. I knew the basics: Ishmael ships out on the Pequod; the Captain is old Ahab, a moody cripple hell-bent on exacting vengeance upon the titular white whale, and they all die. But that isn’t even half the book. That’s barely a third of it. The rest of the book is about an ineffable something else. It’s about men, work, fear, risk, adventure, wanderlust, immensity, projection, humanity and the unknown. This book is big. It is about big things: the indifference of nature and the absence of God and our lame, weasly little attempts to anthropomorphize the inhuman and unknowable. No wonder Mastodon made a concept album about it. The story of the Pequod is merely a skeleton, a frame, upon which Melville hung a canvas or a mural painted with everything he thought he had time to say. In fact I will admit that I was a little daunted by the massiveness of this book. I had heard all the same stories everyone else has heard and they had me walking a little nervously into this situation but, fortunately, I discovered all those fears were unfounded. The book is very easily readable. Melville had the kindness and mercy to break the story up into very short chapters, and I found it very easy to devour a couple four or five page chapters while sitting down with my morning coffee and cereal. There is a middle section wherein Melville kind of drags his feet (or his pen) writing about cetology for a million pages but heck, who am I to question the masters? Perhaps in Melville’s case THE Master? Melville is immortal and his immortality is well-earned. 

            It’s sometimes very humbling to be in the presence of someone unparalleled in their craft. That’s the way I felt while reading this book. Melville is (or was, he’s dead now) an expert at weaving a Byzantine web of symbolism. Some of the imagery he chose is so shockingly fresh yet always intimately familiar. It’s as if he really wanted to dive down to the core of the human experience so he cast a universally wide net all in search of references. He pulls in images from the Bible and other mythology, philosophy, Shakespeare, history, anthropology, the sciences, and anything else he could get his hands on. Some of his language is so surreal and so almost futuristic in a way. When he writes of the sea and the dwellers within he sounds almost like H.P. Lovecraft at times. Or to say that Lovecraft sounds like him would be more accurate. A rootless crew of savages led by lunatic on a mad quest for a legendary leviathan? It almost sounds like something out of an old pulp magazine. A couple of weeks ago I was trying to think of words I could use to describe Moby-Dick, I keep a little notebook for all the books I read and I was jotting some notes down and stumbled upon what I think may be the worst word in the history of any language. I don’t know if I made it up or what but it describes the structure of Moby-Dick perfectly. You may want to be sitting down. Brace yourself, for this is some Harold Bloom level bullshit: “protometafictional”. Doesn’t that just sound like nails on a chalkboard? Like the most soulless, sexless, academic, ungrounded word in the lexicon? It almost feels sacrilegious to use such an unloved and ill-conceived a word as that in relation to Moby-Dick but that’s the way this book is structured sometimes. It bounces around in form and mood. The language moves between the elevated and the salty. The magnification zooms in and out. Did a teacher ever make you watch that Powers of Ten video? Moby-Dick at times feels a little like that.

            I don’t know why this came to me but Moby-Dick had me thinking of something that happened to me as a child that I hadn’t thought about in years. I was probably eight or nine, so it was 1993 or ‘94 or thereabouts. A new kid had come to school and we became friends. I remember I went over to his house for the first time and he introduced me to something that I was quite obsessed with for a long time afterward: Magic: The Gathering, a collectible card game. I was immediately entranced and loved to look at the cards for hours and hours, to look at the illustrations, to shuffle them and feel the glossy cardboard with my fingers. The cards I liked best were always cards like “SEA SERPENT. 5/5. Sea Serpent may only attack if your opponent controls islands” or “SALTWATER ZOMBIE. 2/2. Sacrifice a Swamp: your opponent must choose and discard a card from his hand” and then there would be some of what they called flavor text, usually a quote drawn from the Bible, ancient witchcraft or Shakespeare or Arthurian legend or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This was back in M:TG’s golden era before they got a unified art direction and when most of the cards were drawn from mythology or at least something more primal and human than whatever the dorky little storyline is now. It seemed so mystical and arcane to me. It’s really geeky and stupid but there were times when I was reading Moby-Dick that I almost approached that same wonderful childish feeling of cosmic wide-eyed terror. My friend and I eventually drifted apart and I think he eventually became a heavy drug user or a raver or something like that; I had heard rumors of homelessness and violence. Who could blame him? His old man was a cop, and we had the misfortune of being born in the most tedious time and place in the history of mankind. There is little opportunity out there for adventure and danger and LIFE… instead you get boredom and death and everyone around you will believe honestly that the accumulation of consumer goods is what ultimately leads to fulfillment. I promised myself that I would never quote Freddy Nietzsche but I think there’s one that really applies to Moby-Dick: “Man needs play and danger; civilization gives him work and safety.” Whalers were the cowboys of Melville’s day (or the cyborg space rangers of the future): men who spurn the calm comforts of the civilized world and instead choose to roam searchingly over the ragged unknown frontier. It may be idealistic and hopelessly romantic of me to say this but there isn’t very much of that around for anyone these days, there is instead spiritual malnutrition and revulsion and loss of an opportunity to draw your own maps, and I think maybe that’s something our civilization really missing. Obviously I don’t think whaling is a good idea but I promise you, when they call for passengers on the great wagon train to the stars I will be first in line.

            A few more disorganized observations:

           

1) Moby-Dick is possibly the most homoerotic book I have ever read. It makes Forbidden Colors look like Chesty College Co-eds Crave Cock #4. Or like a really heterosexual Hemingway novel. A bunch of seaman get on a boat and circumnavigate the globe chasing after sperm whales full of spermaceti and sperm oil and into which they plunge their harpoons and lances. The whales with the most sperm and sperm oil are the big males such as Moby-DICK. There’s even a chapter when they are squeezing the sperm (that is, refining it) and revel in plunging their arms to the elbow in vats of sperm and squeezing away. I was really surprised by the amount of homoeroticism. I think it’s actually pretty subversive.

           

2) This book is almost pre-Marxist in a way. Melville’s heart is definitely with the working-man, in this case whalers. He affirms in whaling a nobility and dignity that the city-dwelling elite won’t grant. Whalers are explorers. Whale bones played an important part in the coronation ceremonies of the Roman emperors. Whale oil is used to anoint the heads of European kings and without the whale they would seem less kingly. He doesn’t have much time for sedentary city fops, and in his words the whale ship was his “Yale College and his Harvard.” He outright rejects comfort and elitism: on a ship men live hard as equals.

3) I really enjoyed the tone of Melville’s writing. Very digressive and confidential, as if he’s letting you in on a little secret. He kind of does this thing, and it works most of the time, where he’ll be describing some action, say a boat chasing a whale and then the whale breeches and he’ll stop and drop from action into a bit of a lecture and I imagine he was thinking “Shit, I’ve got to tell them what happens when a whale breeches!” It’s sometimes sort of funny and other times sort of immersion breaking. The action pieces I found a little confusing and the dialogue hard to handle. I blame myself for that, though.

When I sat down to write this review (if that’s what you want to call it) I was pretty nervous about what I would say, what I could possibly add. Many critics, much more intelligent and better educated and more well-read than I, have already said a lot about Moby-Dick. However--and forgive me for taking some space to mention something that matters only to me--I was thinking about this blog and what it is and the way I usually write and I came to the conclusion that I don’t really have that much to add intellectually (I haven’t read much criticism and I don’t actually know that much) but instead what I have been focusing on is my emotional reactions, which I think works for a book that like Moby-Dick is so emotionally complex and deep. I adored this book without reservation and will have you know that it stirred up urges and desires in me that I think are elemental to humanity: wanderlust, for example, and yearning for freedom. I think Melville and I would agree: there is room for that in the world. There’s space for emotional response, there’s time for the gut, and everything is worth writing down. I think there is room enough for just about damn near everything, really, and it’s the rare book that tries to cram it all in.