Moby-Dick (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (3 page)

Moby-Dick
(1851) was Melville’s sixth novel in a series of nine plus a collection of shorter tales, a sequence that began with
Typee
in 1846 and ended with
The Confidence-Man
in 1857; there was later poetry, and the novella
Billy Budd
was found in manuscript after his death in 1891. During these years he showed, for such a period, a productivity unsurpassed in concentration and quality among our best writers, and by common agreement
Moby-Dick
is the masterpiece. It is often seen as the greatest work of American fiction to date.

It is surely one of our most remarkable. Melville was thirty-four when it appeared, and he had written it in a year and a half, an astonishingly short time given its scope, complexity, and imaginative force. He had worked at great pressure, obsessed with his subject and unforgiving about his schedule.

He sent a copy to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, remarking, “I have written a wicked book, and I feel spotless as a lamb,” and in answering a letter from Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia, he wrote:

Melville’s surprise at the book’s implications doubtless showed more modesty than truth, but it would have been natural enough that in the work of composition he had not been fully conscious of all he had done.

Melville was a writer whose work often began with his own experience, changed and elaborated in the course of composition. At his birth in 1819 the family was economically middle-class though of distinguished heritage, but family fortunes collapsed after his father died when Herman was twelve. He left school for various jobs and when nineteen sailed to Liverpool on a merchant ship, later using that experience in
Redburn
(1849), his fourth novel. When he was twenty-one he sailed on the whaler
Acushnet
, and finding life there intolerable after eighteen months, he and a friend jumped ship at the Marquesas Islands in the Pacific. They spent almost a month in the Taipi valley living with a native tribe that occasionally practiced cannibalism, a matter much elaborated in his first novel,
Typee
; the book sold well in part because of the exotic contrast between accounts of attractive native girls and the gory possibilities lurking in the background. He went from the Marquesas Islands to Tahiti and other islands, finally returning to Boston in late 1844, almost four years after he had left the country.

His seafaring and travel adventures underlie five of his nine novels—six if one includes the first part of
Mardi
(1849)—but none is literally autobiographical.
Typee, Omoo
(1847),
Redburn
, and
White-Jacket
(1850), unlike
Moby-Dick
, depend in some measure on particular episodes in Melville’s life, while
Moby-Dick
draws more generally on his experience of the open ocean and his knowledge of life in a whaling ship.

Melville read widely, and one book was particularly important to him in developing the story: Owen Chase’s
Narrative of the Wreck of the Whaleship Essex
(1821). Chase was first mate on the
Essex
when, in the Pacific, it was rammed and sunk by a large sperm whale. A number of the crew survived after long suffering, and Melville read Chase’s account with great interest, especially the description of the whale’s apparent malignity.

Moby-Dick
’s plot is simple enough. The whaling Captain Ahab had lost a leg in an encounter with the white whale Moby Dick and is bent on revenge. When recovered he goes to sea again and pretends for a time to search for oil, but his wound has made him mad with hatred, and he lives only to kill the animal that maimed him. Almost all the crew follow his plan because of his charismatic leadership. They find the whale, Ahab is killed while attacking it, and the ship, the
Pequod
, sinks after Moby Dick rams it. The only survivor is the novel’s narrator, Ishmael. His voice opens the work as he describes himself and how he became a member of the crew. In the Epilogue he floats in the water and is picked up by a ship.

The story line is slowed down and given variety by four other kinds of material: the “gams” or visits with other ships on the open ocean; extended similes that take us off the
Pequod
to scenes on land; allusions and references through which the narrator connects shipboard life to general culture; and cetology, information about whaling and whales so that we can understand the industry.

A long novel whose action is confined to a small ship might easily make a reader restless, and after the
Pequod
leaves the dock Melville heads off such narrative claustrophobia in a number of ways, the most obvious being the “gams,” the visits with other ships on the high seas. Each encounter provides a nautical world different from the
Pequod
’s, and several, like “The Town-Ho’s Story” (chap. LIV) go on at some length, keeping our attention elsewhere.

Second, Melville takes us off the ship by extended similes of the kind so frequent in
The Iliad
, in which action is similarly constricted to the patch of beach before Troy’s wall. In “Squid” (chap. LIX) “the seamen rushed to the yard-arms, as in swarming-time the bees rush to the boughs” (p. 327). We are on dry land again for a moment with an image familiar in country life, and in “The Grand Armada” (chap. LXXXVII) we are secure in a lovely urban view: The spouts of massed whales “showed like the thousand cheerful chimneys of some dense metropolis, descried of a balmy autumnal morning, by some horseman on a height” (p. 445). And after this moment of peace Melville at once continues with an evocation of danger and death analogous to what is happening in the scene.

All these similes take us off the
Pequod
’s deck and momentarily ventilate the closed-in scene of action on the ship.

By far, the most frequent means of widening the stage is the novel’s great allusiveness; the book is a magpie’s nest of information, and these references take us to many other people, ideas, and places in the world. It is hard to think of another work of fiction that so frequently makes overt use of history, geography, travel writing, literature, philosophy, religion, and the science of the day. And it is less remarkable that Melville acquired such wide knowledge than that his imagination could so readily call it up to enrich the narrative by similarities, precedents, analogies, contrasts, contradictions, and illustrations by anecdote.

Melville left school in his teens, but he was immensely intelligent, with curiosity to match, and he continued his education by having the run of libraries and through conversations with his friends. There can be an advantage in the self-education of a very intelligent person—originality is less likely to be rounded off and even dulled by the cultural consensus found in the schools. A number of our writers have had to educate themselves in large part—among others Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. The poet W. H. Auden remarked that a number of classic American authors wrote as though no one had done so before them, and while the comment has the panache of exaggeration, it points to a quirky freshness that has something to do with modest institutional training, a circumstance now rare when extended education is so common.

The largest body of material outside the plot, though intimately related to it, is the information about whales and whaling. In providing this, Melville of course relied on his own experience, but he also consulted the works of others who had written about the industry, and a good deal of this secondary reading found its way into the novel, usually without attribution. This was not plagiarism, of course; sources were bent to his own purposes, transformed into things the narrator now and then reports that he learned from others but more often presents as coming from his own long-standing knowledge. He is also occasionally given to satire about solemn erudition: The long riff in chapter XXXII, “Cetology,” about “Folio,” “Octavo,” and “Duodecimo” whales is a send-up of scientific classification systems as well as an explanation of real differences.

The book is organized as a recurring wave-like pattern of calm and tension. From the start a rhythm is established in which information about the scene or about the whaling alternates with something about the looming purpose of Ahab’s quest. The “Etymology” and “Extracts” preceding the narrative are both amusing and serious: On the one hand they are extravagant and arbitrary, and on the other they show humanity’s awe at the colossal scale of the whale’s presence.

The third Extract quotes the Bible about Jonah, who will be the central figure in “The Sermon” by Father Mapple (chap. IX). Jonah is also mentioned in the thirtieth Extract, which reports in a matter-of-fact way that a harpooner caught a whale “that was white all over” (p. 15). Melville begins to complicate that creature at the end of “Loomings” (chap. I), where Ishmael, in the “wonder-world” of his experience and in his “wild conceits,” sees a procession of whales “two and two,” evoking thoughts of both fertility and the destruction of the Flood. At the chapter’s end there is the vision of the “grand hooded phantom” in language that combines magnificence and foreboding.

The information about whaling and whales is interesting in itself, but also vital to the fiction because it anchors in reality things that would otherwise look even more strange than they do. If one thinks of the bare-bones plot, there are things hard to believe. Despite Ahab’s force of character, it seems unlikely that he could retain the crew’s loyalty, deranged as he is. Except for him and his mysterious boat crew, everyone on board has signed on for the money to be made, about which Ahab cares nothing. But as with Ahab, Melville’s quarry is much larger than life: Every allusion to Moby Dick heightens the whale’s status to that of a nature-god, who does not so much swim in water as in myth. Seen this way, the novel concerns a crazy man who tries to kill a legend.

Melville lends credence to these improbabilities by embedding them in a world of detail. The central part of the novel is in large measure given over to the technical aspects of whaling—the equipment, the anatomy of the whales, the procedures of the hunt. Chapters LV to LVII show how whales have been portrayed, and from there to chapter CV we are told most of what we need to know. During this section we are only intermittently brought back to the movement of the plot for which the book’s first third sets the scene, and which, in the final chapters, drives toward the disaster. And just as the unlikely is given reality by what is on this ship the mundane, so in turn the frequently heightened language in which the ordinary is portrayed casts a glow that often makes common life seem astonishing. The novel’s action takes place in a realm that is not quite ours but that is not entirely alien.

One of the major sources of the book’s vitality is this vividness about the ordinary. Melville brings everything to life—not only the human characters and the creatures of the sea, but also the sea itself and the
Pequod
upon it. Such passages operate on us like animism, giving life and energy to inanimate things such that the whole world is charged with intention though we do not know to what end.

The
Pequod
has barely weighed anchor in Nantucket when the analogies turn it first into a warrior and then into the largest of land animals: “We found ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened in the moonlight; and like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows” (p. 137). A little later “with a fair wind the ship was rushing through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity” (p. 158).

In thinking that color may not be inherent in visible objects, the narrator humanizes the macrocosm only to make it ill: “The palsied universe lies before us a leper” (p. 238), and in a bravura passage as the ship approaches the Cape of Good Hope,