Why Read Moby-Dick? (6 page)

Nothing, of course. As Starbuck discovers, simply being a good guy with a positive worldview is not enough to stop a force of nature like Ahab, who feeds on the fears and hatreds in us all. “My soul is more than matched,” Starbuck laments, “she's overmanned; and by a madman!” Just like Starbuck, America's leaders in the 1850s looked at one another with vacant, deer-in-the-headlights stares as the United States, a great and noble country crippled by a lie, slowly but inevitably sailed toward its cataclysmic encounter with the source of its discontents.

W
e Americans love our wilderness: that empty space full of beckoning dreams, the unknown land into which we can disappear, only to return years later, wiser, careworn, and rich. Most of us think of the West as this hinterland of opportunity, but Melville knew that the original wilderness was the “everlasting terra incognita” of the sea. Even today, long after every terrestrial inch of the planet has been surveyed and mapped, only a small portion of the sea's total volume has been explored by man. Back in 1850, Melville commented that “Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one.”

Today the American West is a place of cities, suburbs, ghost towns, and national parks. It is civilized. Not so the sea. “[H]owever baby man may brag of his science and skill,” Ishmael ominously intones, “and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which aboriginally belongs to it.” This is not the sea of the “Nantucket” chapter. This is the godless sea of the
Essex
disaster. “No mercy, no power but its own controls it . . . ,” Ishmael continues; “the masterless ocean overruns the globe . . . the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.”

Given the dangers of the ocean, the wisest thing for a man or woman to do is to steer for the same Polynesian islands that the
Essex
men so feared and to remain there at all costs. “For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”

Ishmael's “insular Tahiti” is the South Seas equivalent of a 1960s-style fallout shelter; both are hideouts from “the horrors of the half known life,” radioactive or wet. The United States in the 1850s must have felt much as it did during the cold war. In both eras, citizens lived with the conviction that a catastrophe was imminent. America dodged the nuclear bullet in the 1960s, but the twenty-first century feels more and more like an era in which a cataclysm, whether financial, environmental, or terrorist devised, is just around the corner. In the end, we are still at the mercy of the sea.

T
o love and work and be happy in this life is to refrain from focusing on what awaits us and everyone we care about: decay and death, at least in this world. The curse of being human is to realize that it all ends and can do so at any moment. To acknowledge and internalize this truth in an unmediated way is to go, like Ahab, insane.

Some people don't think about death very much, if at all. Since there's nothing they can do about it, why worry about it? Not Melville. Judging from his letters to Hawthorne and his writings throughout his life, he thought about it all the time. The belief that death was the end, that we are utterly and truly annihilated when we die, was not something he could easily accept. He desperately needed to know there is a heaven.

In the beginning of the book, Ishmael is confident that eternity will be waiting for him no matter what happens down here on Earth. He may be crushed by a whale, but not even God can stave his immortal soul. Even before the
Pequod
sets sail, however, he has begun to wonder whether this is entirely true. It becomes an obsessive theme of
Moby-Dick:
Is there a heaven?

At one point Ishmael jokingly tells us how he proposes to settle the question once and for all with the help of a whale: “With a frigate's anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces [bundles] of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!”

Later in the book, in his description of the ship's carpenter, who is called upon to manufacture Ahab's new whalebone leg, Melville provides a haunting portrayal of a world bereft of heaven. The carpenter is an existential nullity without a spark of intelligence or human warmth; he merely exists. He personifies a world without God. His “impersonal stolidity . . . seemed one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world,” Ishmael tells us, “involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying heartlessness . . . ; living without premeditated reference to this world or the next . . . ; his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers.”

Ahab is infuriated by his dependence on the carpenter. “Here I am,” he agonizingly soliloquizes, “proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on!” He may strive to transcend all that is mundane and bestial, but in the end Ahab is a one-legged old man who requires the help of others.

So it was for Melville, an author with unquenchable ambition, but who depended on mere mortals to publish and read his books. “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay,” he lamented to Hawthorne. “Yet, altogether, write the
other
way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.... What's the use of elaborating what, in its very essence, is so short-lived as a modern book?” But, of course, more than 150 years after its publication, we are still reading
Moby-Dick.
Posthumously, Melville achieved the promised land; he is a god in our literary pantheon.

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
.

H
awthorne 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.