J's Reviews > Moby-Dick or, The Whale

Moby Dick is no doubt the Great American Novel. Nothing else from this continent can stand with Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dumas, Dickens, Tolstoy and the like. William Faulkner may be the greatest of American authors, but nothing in his vast catalog quite measures up to Herman Melville’s opus. The southern modernist apparently agrees, as it is cited in various publications that Faulkner named Moby Dick as a book he wished he’d have written.

It is both modernist and romantic, nearly as digressive as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: nearly equaling the adventure in a completely different type of classic, The Three Musketeers. It is an encyclopedic epic—some other examples being the aforementioned Tristram Shandy, Ulysses, Foucault’s Pendulum, Infinite Jest, and Gould’s Book of Fish. It is a miracle of a book—an epiphany nearly every page—almost flawless.

Ernest Hemingway wrote to his publishers in the late 1940s and cited Melville as one of the writers he was “still trying to beat.” This he never accomplished. We honor Hemingway’s blue-gill sized yarn, The Old Man and the Sea, but how puny that is when compared to the one true Whale Tale.

A list of sayings from venerable literature mentioning the whale startsthings off, like a myth. The whale is the “Salt-Sea Mastodon.”

Much of the book is an ode to the sea. And of course the sea represents so much, mainly the unknown. When the soul is on dry land it is worm-like; but on the open ocean it lifts its sails and spears its prow through both treacherous waters in dark tempests and shimmering diamonds of blue on peaceful, sunny days.

Even early on one can tell Moby Dick is one of the rarest books, seeming to contain the whole world in its finite pages.

It is not long before we find our author rather gloomy: “…this earthly air, whether ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the numberless mortals who have died exhaling it…” But not without hope: “…man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature…” Nearly all misanthropes were molded first by the unrequited love of their fellow humans. All noble things are touched with some melancholy.

Our narrator, Ishmael, is progressive, philosophical, and inquisitive. Upon meeting Queequeg, a “clean, comely-looking cannibal”, we get these tolerant lines: “A man can be honest in any sort of skin,” (Queequeg being covered in tattoos) and, “Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian,” sentences that champion the idea of judging everyone on individual merit, rather than by preconceptions of groups. Melville’s forward-thinking ideas about “savages” align him with Rousseau.

Finally aboard the Pequod and ready to set sail we find that the harpooner is to the lancer as the squire was to the knight. There is even a bit of The Canterbury Tales in Moby Dick.

Once out of the frigid temperatures of the Atlantic near Nantucket and into agreeable weather, Ishmael displays more of his skilled prosody, “…when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts to welcome such glad-hearted visitants…”

But the sun does not warm Ahab, who infrequently takes over for Ishmael, either in soliloquy or in thought, and he is a different kind of narrator, character, and man. Monomaniacal is used many times to describe his obsession with the murder of Moby Dick.

Captain Ahab is a monster, a hero, a villain; but perhaps above all, he is a poet, an insightful psychologist. He’s of one mind with Dostoevsky when he says, “This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! Damned in the midst of Paradise!” There is no way of knowing, but Dostoevsky probably never read Moby Dick, as Melville was not known internationally in his day. In his 1886 novel, Crime and Punishment (Moby Dick was published in 1851), Fyodor writes, “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness.”

Melville’s pessimism sometimes seems to come straight from Arthur Schopenhauer; however, we only have proof that he read the German philosopher later in life. Like Rousseau, we can either speculate that Melville was familiar with him before writing Moby Dick, or that he came to similar conclusions independently. Like in many of these situations, it was probably a bit of both. We know less about his influences, outside of The Bible and Shakespeare, than we do about whom he’s influenced. James Joyce never mentions reading Melville, but it seems possible that the Irishman came upon the idea for writing a chapter in Ulysses in the form of a play from Moby Dick.

An interesting aside: a night of drinking on the ship sees the sailors and harpooners sing a song, a Napoleonic ballad called, “Spanish Ladies.” This song is also sung in the 1970s movie, Jaws, by the ship captain in that film who leads the attempt to find and kill the man-eating great white shark.

Ishmael has been on ships before, and though he is able to see the wonder in the world, he can also reduce the grandness of global travel to cynical lyricism: “Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could forever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.”

There is an entire section that reads as if Melville had already read a copy of Darwin’s, On the Origin of Species. But that book was published almost a decade later. We are given a surprisingly accurate explanation of the taxonomy of cetaceans, not without its errors but still prescient. It is a satisfying portion where we see that even something as hideous as whaling has taught us much about the world. The baleen of the Right Whales, Humpbacks, etc, is described as looking rather like Venetian blinds. The amount of oil each whale species can produce is logged as well.

After a literal, and rather complex, description of the whale lines and their danger, we get this beautiful and poignant metaphor: “All men live enveloped in whale lines. All are born with halters around their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turns of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whaleboat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.”

Despite the quality of the book as a whole, the first description of a successful whale hunt is every bit as gruesome and hard to read as one might imagine. The force that propelled the evolution of certain land mammals into fully aquatic animals, whales, did not account for the coming of man, the building of ships, the mastheads of said ships, and the deadly call of the watch, “There she blows!” The fate of so many creatures sealed by the otherwise ingenious adaptation of the blowhole. For no matter how deep the whale sounds he must inevitably surface to expel his air, thus perpetually signaling to the death-ship his location. This brings the lowering of the whaleboats, the line of the harpoon, and the sting of the lance.

The killing of the whale is sad and atrocious—blood spouting from the blowhole—necessarily torturous. What humans are able to do, though sometimes amazing, is often horrendous.

The description of “cutting in” the whale is almost as rough as the hunt and the killing. The blubber is rolled off with a line pulled by the windlass—a hook and a couple spades begin the cut into the dead whale. Sharks must constantly be fended off. This whaling business was truly a rough trade. That was one of Melville’s aims: to show the harshness and the barbarity. But there is always admiration in Ishmael’s descriptions. This is why the measurements and the listing of the different whales are important parts of the book. They show the respect for whaling and the whale that the narrator possesses. Whaling led to much discovery for humankind: commercially, geographically, and scientifically.

Ishmael often admires the battering ram capabilities, and other qualities, of the sperm whale. This love he has for the whale, and the compassion he shows for life in general, mitigates some of the horror of the book. The whalemen who hunt sperm whales are at the top of the heap. They think of hunting any other species as an inferior endeavor.

Melville seems to be writing for posterity. There is no way a contemporary human can comprehend the whaling profession of the mid 19th century. At least we have this work to tell us a little about it—the immensity, the danger, the thrill; and despite the wrongness and cruelty in killing such a smart, curious, and gentle creature, a giant dog in the sea, we can tell it took some kind of man to be a whaleman. The kind of danger involved ended with the invention of exploding harpoons. Humans are hard to beat when it comes to destruction. “There is no folly of the beasts of earth that is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”

Another harrowing whale hunt shows more of Melville’s sardonic, misanthropic disdain. We are not spared any detail, but I will spare the reader here and only say that the maiming and killing of one poor whale was almost too much to bear.

For what is all this murdering? From the novel, regarding this particular whale: “But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm (fin), and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gray bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.”

Above all books on which to linger, there is Moby Dick—to study cetology, the evolution of whales, to discover arcane words and obscure references. And like all the great books, not all the learning is academic.

Most chapters begin with the goings on of the ship; but after these practicalities are described, we get interesting observations both sorrowful and inspiring. Not only is the chief narrator, Ishmael, full of high-minded thought, but the brief sojourns into the minds of Ahab and Starbuck (the first mate) give us recondite but beautiful language.

The future of whales is pondered. Can they survive the onslaught? Melville thinks a bit too much of man and the leviathan. He could not foresee the aforementioned exploding harpoons, the endless entanglements caused by discarded fishing lines and nets, collisions with cruise ships—ships of a size that a sailor from the 19th century could never imagine.

The book is tangential, meant to meander. There is no guilt of prolix. So timeless is the work that it is frozen in the infinite.

The narrator knows he must accept the world of whaling for what it is—a nasty business, but one where beauty and awe are found. The birth of a sperm whale is described, and this gives us some needed humaneness.

Ishmael respects the whale, but he must hunt him, help kill him. He must ruminate on things for which there are no answers. He must describe the feelings for which there are no words. The whale is the world and the world is the whale.

Sometimes a beautiful morning begins a chapter, but we know this is not for long. Blood and death are the order of the day. Ahab says, “Were I the wind, I’d blow no more on such a wicked, miserable world.”

No matter if the reader comes to enjoy Ishmael’s musings, laugh at Stubb’s humor in the face of danger, admire Queequeg’s sincerity and courage, or take interest in Ahab’s poetic fatalism, the whale is the hero. Any respectable reader must root for Moby Dick to break the planks of every boat. One must hope for the giant flukes to smash the oars, lances, and harpoons to bits. Unlike Jonah, all aboard the Pequod can take the whale’s belly for their cemetery.

But Melville knows exactly how to end his tour de force. His is like all the great misanthropic minds—all those who realize humanity’s overreaching ways are not only harmful to the earth’s other inhabitants, but also harmful to humanity. He wishes, as I wish, that there were a great creature, on land or sea, too massive and powerful for humans to defeat. It might do a lot to temper our arrogance. If only there were beasts we still had to fear, adventures left to take.

In a last bit of irony, it is the coffin fitted for Queequeg, the one that had been repurposed as a lifeboat that resurfaces at the end of it all to save Ishmael. The sharks won’t bother him at this point; even nature knows that someone must tell this story.