Why Read Moby-Dick? (7 page)

There is an inevitable tendency to grow impatient with the novel, to want to rush and even skip over what may seem like yet another extraneous section and find out what, if anything, is going to happen next to Ahab and the
Pequod
. Indeed, as the plot is left to languish and entire groups of characters vanish without a trace, you might begin to think that the book is nothing more than a sloppy, self-indulgent jumble. But Melville is conveying the quirky artlessness of life through his ramshackle art. “[C]areful disorderliness,” Ishmael assures us, “is the true method.”

For me,
Moby-Dick
is like the Oldsmobile my grandparents owned in the 1970s, a big boat of a sedan with loosey-goosey power steering that required constant back-and-forth with the wheel to keep the car pointed down the highway. Melville's novel is that wandering, oversized automobile, each non sequitur of a chapter requiring its own course correction as the narrative follows the erratic whims of Melville's imagination toward the Pacific. The sheer momentum of the novel is a wonder to behold, barreling us along, in spite of all the divergences, toward the White Whale.

W
ithin weeks of meeting Melville in August 1850, Hawthorne had procured copies of the young novelist's two latest books,
Redburn
and
White-Jacket
. Both were based on Melville's own experiences at sea:
Redburn
recounts his first voyage as a common seaman from New York City to Liverpool and back;
White-Jacket
tells of his stint aboard the naval frigate that took him from Hawaii to Boston. Hawthorne read the novels, his wife, Sophia, recounted to Evert Duyckinck, “on the new hay in the barn—which is a delightful place for the perusal of worthy books.” In a letter of his own to Duyckinck, Hawthorne spoke of his “progressive appreciation” of Melville's work. “No writer ever put the reality before his reader more unflinchingly,” he wrote.

Melville's great strength (a strength that sometimes got lost in his Ahab-like preoccupation with what he once called “ontological heroics”) was an almost journalistic ability to record the reality of being alive at a particular moment. In
Moby-Dick
we feel in a profoundly emotional and visceral way what it was like to be a whaleman in the nineteenth century. In the chapter titled “The Affidavit,” Melville makes it clear that what he is describing could really have happened. The reality of whaling is, he insists, more incredible than anything a novelist could invent. “So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world,” he writes, “that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.”

Ishmael points to several historical instances, including the story of the
Essex,
that illustrate “the great power and malice at times of the sperm whale.” Clearly, a whale is no ship's carpenter. Far from passive and dull, a bull whale not only is huge but also thinks with the crafty intelligence of a man.

Ishmael describes the wondrous way a craft as tiny as a whaleboat negotiates the massive swells of the ocean: “[T]he sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;—all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen . . . all this was thrilling.” And then there is the even more wondrous way a whale dives underneath the sea: “[T]he monster perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air, and then sank out of sight like a tower swallowed up.”

No one has ever written a more beautiful and horrifying account of the death of a whale than the magnificent set piece contained in chapter 61, “Stubb Kills a Whale.” Perched on the onrushing bow of the whaleboat, the second mate merrily probes for “the life” of the whale with his lance until the giant creature begins to die. “His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men.” The whale goes into its final paroxysms, “spasmodically dilating and contracting his spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations. At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea. . . . Stubb scattered the dead ashes [of his pipe] over the water; and, for a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.”

In his detailed descriptions of the whale's anatomy, Melville is carefully, meticulously preparing us for the novel's climax. In the chapter titled “The Battering-Ram,” Ishmael anatomizes the “compacted collectedness” of the sperm whale's block-shaped head. It is, he tells us, “a dead, blind wall, . . . [an] enormous boneless mass . . . as though the forehead of the Sperm Whale were paved with horses' hoofs. I do not think that any sensation lurks in it.” In addition to this mysterious “wad” of insensitivity, we are introduced to the whale's tiny and “lashless eye, which you would fancy to be a young colt's eye; so out of all proportion is it to the magnitude of the head.” The spout hole is “countersunk into the summit of the whale's head” so that “even when tranquilly swimming through the mid-day sea in a calm, with his elevated hump sun-dried as a dromedary's in the desert; even then, the whale always carries a small basin of water on his head, as under a blazing sun you will sometimes see a cavity in a rock filled up with rain.” The whale's tail is “a dense webbed bed of welded sinews . . . knit over with a warp and woof of muscular fibres and filaments . . . so that in the tail the confluent measureless force of the whole whale seems concentrated to a point. Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it . . . where infantileness of ease undulates through a Titanism of power.”

Reading
Moby-Dick,
we are in the presence of a writer who spent several impressionable years on a whaleship, internalized everything he saw, and seven or so years later, after internalizing Shakespeare, Hawthorne, the Bible, and much more, found the voice and the method that enabled him to broadcast his youthful experiences into the future. And this, ultimately, is where the great, unmatched potency of
Moby-Dick,
the novel, resides. It comes from an author who not only was there but possessed the capacious and impressionable soul required to appreciate the wonder of what he was seeing. At one point, Ishmael draws our attention to the majestic head of the sperm whale: “[G]azing on it . . . ,” he insists, “you feel the Deity and the dread powers more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature.... If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birth-right, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove's high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.”

By the last third of the novel, we know all there is to know about the anatomy of the whale and the specifics of killing a whale; we have also come to appreciate the whale's awe-inspiring mystery and beauty. As a consequence, Melville is free to describe the final clash between Ahab and Moby Dick with the unapologetic specificity required to make an otherwise improbable and overwrought confrontation seem astonishingly real.

M
oby-Dick
is a novel, but it is also a book of poetry.

The beauty of Melville's sentences is such that it sometimes takes me five minutes or more to make my way through a single page as I reread the words aloud, feeling the rhythms, the shrewdly hidden rhymes, and the miraculous way he manages consonants and vowels. Take, for example, this passage from chapter 51, “The Spirit-Spout,” which picks up with the
Pequod
just south of St. Helena: “while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude: on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea.”

Good poetry is not all about lush and gorgeous words. It's about creating an emblematic and surprising scene that opens up new worlds. When the
Pequod
meets the whaleship
Albatross,
the men at the mastheads find themselves passing each other silently in the sky: “Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast, they swayed and swung over a fathomless sea; and though, when the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in the air came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped from the mast-heads of one ship to those of the other; yet, those forlorn-looking fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our own look-outs, while the quarter-deck hail was being heard from below.”

Good poetry also directs our attention to the most ordinary of human experiences. I know that I cannot go to bed on a cold winter night without thinking of Ishmael's lyrical aside in chapter 11, “Nightgown,” about the benefits of sleeping in an unheated room. Not only does he provide some very practical advice; he delivers a kind of poetics of physical sensation that culminates in a quietly stunning prose haiku. “[T]o enjoy bodily warmth,” Ishmael explains, “some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if... the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”

In chapter 60, “The Line,” Ishmael's poetry takes something as prosaic as a piece of rope and turns it into a continuously evolving metaphor of the human condition. He begins with the differences between the two kinds of lines (“Hemp is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian to behold”), then describes how the line crisscrosses the whaleboat in “complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it . . . in its perilous contortions,” which leads to a description of what happens when the whale is harpooned and the line darts out (“like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you”) and then to the final revelation: “All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.”

In chapter 85, “The Fountain,” Ishmael's description of a whale's spout causes him to launch into a riff about the figurative steam that sometimes emanates from his own skull, what he calls “a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my head . . . while plunged in deep thought, after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic.” In this instance, the image leads to a philosophical breakthrough in which Ishmael hits upon the attitude with which all of us should confront this conundrum called life: “[R]ainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray.... Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.” A generous agnostic, Ishmael is also a witty and profound poet for whom enlightenment comes from the improvisational magic of words.

D
arkness has fallen by the time the second mate Stubb's freshly killed whale is secured to the side of the
Pequod
. Even though it is already quite late, Stubb decides he wants a whale steak for supper. He rouses the ship's black cook, Fleece, from his hammock and orders him to prepare the bloody hunk of whale meat. As Stubb mercilessly harasses the old man about how to cook the steak, hordes of hungry sharks enjoy a meal of their own in the dark waters below: “[T]hou-sands on thousands of sharks, swarming round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness. The few sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the sharp slapping of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the sleepers' hearts. Peering over the side you could just see them . . . wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of the whale of the bigness of a human head.... The mark they thus leave on the whale, may best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking for a screw.”

It is a terrifying and fascinating scene in which Melville lays bare the brutal savagery that underlies even the most polite of slave-master relationships. Stubb claims the uproar in the waters below is bothering him and orders Fleece to address the sharks. While delivered in a stilted dialect, the sermon that follows contains wisdom that comes straight from the author himself. “Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don't blame ye so much for; dat is natur, and can't be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned.”