Sunday Pages: "Moby-Dick"

A novel by Herman Melville

Dear Reader,

I came late to Melville.

When I was little, and my sense of the culture was being formed, I assigned Moby-Dick to the same category as Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: swashbuckling YA adventure tales involving the ocean that boys my age used to get really into but no longer did. These were old-fashioned stories from an old-fashioned time, the novelistic equivalent of The Little Rascals or The Three Stooges. I didn’t care about “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum” and all that, and no one else I knew did, either. Whaling had not been a thing for over a century; the last thing I wanted to do was read a 200,000-word book about a whale hunt. This was obsolete literature. That Moby-Dick was never part of my curriculum in middle school, high school, or college was further evidence of its obsolescence.

The contours of the story I knew well, seemingly by osmosis. There’s the captain of a ship, named for an obscure Biblical king—Ahab—who’d lost half his leg at the hands, or rather the jaws, of a monstrous white whale: the titular Leviathan. Captain Ahab assembles a motley, ragtag crew, and off they sail to the other side of the globe in what begins as a standard whaling voyage, but winds up being a mission to hunt down the tormenter of his dreams, the object of his monomania—that is, the snickeringly named Moby-Dick—and avenge the loss of the captain’s foot, ankle, and shin. The mission is unsuccessful. The great whale takes down Ahab, literally and figuratively; the ship is smashed to pieces; the end. The story is narrated, as all of these tales of the sea tend to be, by the lone survivor of the wreck. (This, too, is Biblical. Yahweh was especially fond of sparing the life of only one man. It’s a device He returns to again and again, like how Taylor Swift is always singing about her shitty relationships with shitty guys.)

Oscar Wilde said that nowadays we sit through Shakespeare to recognize the quotations. So it is with canonical novels. As with another interminable classic, Anna Karenina, the best known passage from Moby-Dick is the very first sentence: “Call me Ishmael.” This is significant, I suppose, because before Melville came along, novels did not begin with a command to the reader. The three words establish a sort of intimacy, a sense that the narrator is finally going to spill the tea about something personal and profound. (Also, we don’t know if his name is actually Ishmael, or if he’s comparing himself to another Biblical figure: the one who is spurned by his father, at the behest of his father’s second wife, and who is cast out with his mother at the age of 14 with nothing but some bread and water.) The other famous line is the comparison of the whale emerging from the water to two snow hills. None of that seems worth the bother.

These days, Moby-Dick is primarily known for two things: Moby, the musician, who was said to be, but who is apparently not, a direct descendent of Herman Melville; and Starbuck, the ship’s chief mate, for whom the ubiquitous purveyor of burnt coffee is named.

For all of these reasons, I did not read Moby-Dick until I was in my early 30s—which is how old Melville was when he wrote it—and I was shocked at how good it was. Its lofty literary reputation is well deserved. If anything, Melville’s magnum opus is underrated. This is, if you pardon the pun, a whale of a book, an ambitious work that, like the ocean on which most of its action takes place, contains multitudes. It’s all in there, all things great and small. The crew is multi-racial, multi-ethnic, of different ages. Ishmael is refreshingly non-racist or prejudiced; his closest friend among the crew is Queequeg, a Polynesian harpooner with face tattoos. There is the homoeroticism you’d expect to find in a novel with “Dick” in the title; the first time he meets Queequeg they sleep together—“You had almost thought I had been his wife,” Ishmael tells us—and are later said to be married. And there are no judgments. Contrast this diversity and inclusivity with The Great Gatsby, a book primarily concerned with rich white people. Melville seems, dare I say, woke.

In the “Extracts” section at the beginning of the book, Melville drops every literary reference to whales that he can dig up—and there are a lot! It’s like he’s warming us up, filling the hull of our mind with relevant information, preparing us for the extravagantly long journey we’re about to embark on. In its expansiveness, its allusiveness, its effortless shifting of literary styles, and its (again: pardon the pun) deep dive into a very specific subject—cetology, in this case—Moby-Dick reminds me of James Joyce’s Ulysses. But unlike Ulysses, Moby-Dick is not impossible to read. Yes, it is very long. But the length, and the tedium of the tangential chapters about whalelore, are intentional, mirroring the monotony of a long whaling voyage.

But the real surprise, for me, was the voice. Although Melville uses old-timey words a lot, and allusions to things no longer well known or relevant, there is a striking modernness to the prose. It’s conversational. He is an exquisitely good writer. Every sentence teems with life. Reading the book for the first time, I got the sense that Melville was not some passé DWEM (or DWAM, I suppose), but a cool hipster living in some studio in Williamsburg: that the chief mate was named for the coffeehouse chain and not the other way around. Immediately, I felt like I knew the guy, a feeling I never got from, say, Dickens.

Yesterday, when I started to research this piece, I assumed Melville’s prime was the late 19th century—that he was the same generation as Thomas Hardy, that Moby-Dick came out when Treasure Island did, in the late 1880s. I was wrong. Melville was born in 1819, 21 years before Hardy. Moby-Dick was published, somehow, in 1851—and is arguably the best American product to come out of the Millard Fillmore years. Melville writes gorgeous prose. There is wisdom and poetry and dynamite word choices in almost every paragraph. And he’s funny. Humor tends not to stand the test of time, but there are passages in Moby-Dick—Ishmael’s first night with Queequeg, for example—that are a riot.

Here is the first chapter, titled “Loomings”:

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. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

The “damp, drizzly November in my soul” line is wonderfully expressive. He is saying that when he feels a depressive funk coming on—or looming, if you will—he knows that he must go out on the ocean. There is levity in how he speaks, but beneath that levity is a darkness—just as the great whale lurks beneath the surface of the wine-dark sea.

Next he argues about the universality of the urge to commune with water:

There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.

Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues—north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?

Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. . . .

Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever. . . .

He helps us see Manhattan Island through the frame of its proximity to, and reliance on, the sea. And while there are certainly some souls who would prefer the great American desert to the ocean, we get his point. Then he gets more allusive and more philosophical:

Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

Having stretched out the literary accordion, he folds it back up, bringing the narrative back to himself:

Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it. Besides, passengers get sea-sick—grow quarrelsome—don’t sleep of nights—do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing;—no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. . . . No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there to the royal mast-head. True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one’s sense of honor, particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just previous to putting your hand into the tar-pot, you have been lording it as a country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The transition is a keen one, I assure you, from a schoolmaster to a sailor, and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin and bear it. But even this wears off in time.

In real life, Melville was a descendant of one of those old established families, the Gansevoorts, and he was proud of his pedigree.

What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about—however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way—either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content.

In this next paragraph, his wry sense of humor shines through:

Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid,—what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

And now, having set the mood, and given us some insight into Ishmael’s complex and fascinating personality (but without divulging too many specific details about his life), Melville launches the story proper:

Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the fore-castle deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way—he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

“Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States. “WHALING VOYAGE BY ONE ISHMAEL.” “BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN.”

Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces—though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.

Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.

Thus does Ishmael explain how Fate chose him for this assignment—or, rather, this role in the play—but using a more humorous tone than Homer or Virgil would employ, the levity obscuring the darkness looming below the surface. This is a complicated guy, a man alone in the world, without a family, without any money, but with a good education, “tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote,” only one of which remote things, we can safely assume, is the deepest ocean. The use of “inmates” in that last sentence suggests confinement against one’s will. Inmates exist in prisons and asylums. But Melville uses “inmates” here in a sweeping way, as if the entire world were a prison, as if we are all trapped here.

The chapter concludes:

By reason of these things, then, the whaling voyage was welcome; the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.

I don’t really want to take a whaling voyage, but if I’m going to, this Ishmael is the dude I want coming along on the journey. He’s the perfect guide. And so we read on, captivated.

Moby-Dick is not a novel you can breeze through. Parts of it are dull—intentionally, I believe. But as a work of fiction it is an undeniable masterpiece, decades ahead of its time. Its prose remains formidable, its themes eternal, its plot relevant. The tragic tale of an angry, fanatical old white guy unhesitatingly jeopardizing the lives of the men he commands to vent his spleen over some long-simmering and absurd grievance is, alas, all too timely.

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ICYMI

Our guest on The Five 8 was Frank Figliuzzi:

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Photo credit: Book cover from the Chartwell Classics edition (2021).