Why Read Moby-Dick?

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  As I have said before, Moby-Dick is a book that was written for the future. In this portrait of a person who resists the fiery, disorienting passions of the moment, who has the soul of a high-flying Catskill eagle, Melville, in his preternatural way, has hit upon a description of the political figure America desperately needed in 1851 but who would not appear on the national stage until almost a decade later, when Abraham Lincoln became president of the United States.

  21

  So Remorseless a Havoc

  In chapter 105, Melville tackles a prescient question given today’s extinction-prone Earth: “whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must . . . , like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.” In the paragraphs that follow, Ishmael compares the whale to the buffalo in the American West and acknowledges that given what has happened to those “humped herds,” it might seem inevitable that “the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.”

  But after examining the question from a variety of angles, he decides that this is not the case. First off, whales have a much larger habitat than the buffalo—larger, in fact, than all the earth’s landmasses combined. Second, sperm whales have the ability to retreat to “their Polar citadels” in the icy north and south, where they can “bid defiance to all pursuit from man.” As a consequence, the whale is, Ishmael insists, “immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality.”

  For those of us who grew up in the aftermath of the industrialized slaughter of whales in the 1950s and 1960s, when it looked as if several species of cetaceans would indeed go the way of the buffalo, Ishmael might seem woefully naive, especially since the world’s ice sheet has so dramatically diminished in recent years. On the other hand, the sperm whale population is now on the rebound even as evidence continues to mount that our addiction to what replaced whale oil—petroleum—has contributed to global warming and sea-level rise. In the years to come, the combination of climate change and population growth could have a devastating effect on the planet and, needless to say, on humanity. Maybe Ishmael’s reference to “the last man” is more than a figure of speech. Instead of whales, maybe the endangered megafauna is us.

  “In Noah’s flood [the whale] despised Noah’s Ark,” Ishmael reminds us, “and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.” There it is, Ishmael’s vision of the future: a drowned world devoid of land dwellers, a paradise for whales.

  22

  Queequeg

  In Typee, the bestseller Melville wrote about his time with the native peoples of the Marquesas, the narrator is at first enraptured with his hosts, in particular the beautiful Fayaway. But then something strange happens. His leg begins to bother him to the point that he can no longer walk. He soon realizes that he must leave this island paradise; otherwise he is going to rot to death like an old banana. “Try to go back to the savages,” the novelist D. H. Lawrence wrote in an essay about Melville, “and you feel as if your very soul was decomposing inside you.” So what happens when the roles are reversed; what happens when the native flees his island paradise for a whaleship?

  Queequeg was born on a Pacific island but decided that he had to leave. Like Melville, he fled his former home for the strangeness of the other. After his years as a whaleman, he is no longer strictly a native, but he is far from being your ordinary Westerner. He is, Ishmael tells us, “a creature in the transition state—neither caterpillar nor butterfly.” And then, after several sweltering days cleaning out the Pequod’s hold, this tattooed exotic from the South Seas gets sick and, like the narrator in Typee, begins to die.

  As his body wastes away, his eyes become increasingly prominent. “[L]ike circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of Eternity. An awe that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the side of this waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as any beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster died.”

  When Queequeg was on Nantucket, he saw, Ishmael relates, “certain little canoes of dark wood . . . ; and upon inquiry, he . . . learned that all whalemen who died in Nantucket, were laid in those same dark canoes.” Since his own people laid out their dead in canoes, he decided that he, too, should be buried in a “coffin-canoe,” and the carpenter subsequently builds him one of these formfitting vessels with some old planks taken from a grove of trees on a South Seas island named, cunningly enough, Lackaday.

  Like the Essex crew members, who fitted out their own coffin-canoes with what provisions they salvaged from the wreck, Queequeg prepares his craft for a voyage to eternity, requesting that his harpoon, some biscuits, a flask of water, a bag containing “woody earth scraped up in the hold,” and a piece of folded sailcloth for a pillow be placed in the coffin. Once all is in readiness and Queequeg has climbed into the coffin to make sure it is “a good fit,” he suddenly begins to feel better. “[I]t was Queequeg’s conceit,” Ishmael says, “that if a man made up his mind to live, mere sickness could not kill him.” Within a few days, Queequeg is fully recovered and decides to use his coffin-canoe as a sea chest. Later in the novel, after the Pequod’s life buoy is lost during an unsuccessful attempt to save a sailor who has fallen from the rigging, Queequeg offers his sea chest as a replacement. And so his former coffin-canoe is caulked and sealed and turned into a life buoy, the irony of which is not lost on Ahab. “A life-buoy of a coffin!” he soliloquizes. “Does it go further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but an immortality-preserver! I’ll think of that.”

  Queequeg, the instigator of this unsettling transformation, remains an enigma to the end. The tattoos on his body were etched by one of his island’s holy men “who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out . . . a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read.”

  For Ahab, who spends his days and nights ruminating on the meaning of the universe, Queequeg’s mere presence is a torment, providing hints but no answers in his eternal quest for certainty. One morning, Ishmael recounts, Ahab turns from the harpooneer with a frustrated cry: “Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!”

  23

  Pulling Dictatorship Out of a Hat

  Just about anyone, it turns out, can be a demagogue or a dictator if he or she masters a few simple tricks, what Ishmael calls “some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base.” As a result, most leaders “become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass.” Dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein are not geniuses; they are power-hungry, paranoid, and expert manipulators of men. If you want to understand how these and other megalomaniacs pull it off, read the last third of Moby-Dick and watch as Ahab tightens his stranglehold on the Pequod’s crew through a series of magic tricks worthy of Las Vegas.

  It begins with the sacrilegious forging of the harpoon meant to kill Moby Dick (“‘Ego non baptizo te in nomine pa-tris, sed in nomine diaboli!’ deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood”). Then Ahab tramples his quadrant (“Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy”) and waves around his demonically glowing harpoon during a terrifying storm only to blow out the lurid fire with his own hot breath. Finally, there is the equally dramatic magnetizing of a new compass needle to replace the one blasted by lightning. The cumulative effect of these over-the-top acts of prestidigitation is a purposeful numbing of the crew’s (and, it must be admitted, the reader’s) emotions as all of us become servile automatons to
Ahab’s unalterable purpose: “Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to finest dust, and powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of Ahab’s iron soul. Like machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever conscious that the old man’s despot eye was on them.”

  There are occasional brief reprieves when the Pequod meets yet another whaleship with news of Moby Dick (each ship representing its own alternative to the Ahab way), but as the final showdown approaches, we have become so scorched and crushed and otherwise slapped around by Ahab in his magnificent emergence as an evil superhero that it becomes increasingly difficult to care.

  But that is precisely the point.

  24

  Essex Redux

  We all struggle with the demands of work. We need the money to support ourselves and our families, but when does a job, especially the pat on the back for a job well done, begin to distract us from the much more difficult work of being a good parent and spouse? If you want to understand how a job can destroy a person, read not only Moby-Dick but the real-life story that underlies much of the latter portion of the novel.

  In April 1851, just about the time Melville was entering the final stages of writing Moby-Dick, he received a copy of Owen Chase’s narrative of the Essex disaster, the same book he had read a decade before as a whaleman in the Pacific. The Chase narrative had come via a Nantucket friend of his father-in-law’s, and this may have been the first time he’d read the account (which had become quite rare) since his introduction to the story in the forecastle of the Acushnet. Just as he was writing notes to himself in the back pages of his volumes of Shakespeare’s plays, Melville wrote down relevant memories of his connection to the Essex in the Chase volume.

  In addition to recounting how he came to read the book for the first time, he writes about seeing none other than Owen Chase himself during a gam with the ship Charles Carroll. (Historians have since established that Melville was mistaken in this claim, but for our purposes the important point is that Melville thought he saw Chase.) “He was a large, powerful well-made man; rather tall . . . with a handsome face for a Yankee, & expressive of great uprightness & calm unostentatious courage. His whole appearance impressed me pleasurably. He was the most prepossessing-looking whale-hunter I think I ever saw.” But like the captain of the Essex, George Pollard, whose bad luck continued when his next command struck an uncharted reef off Hawaii and sank, “the miserable pertina-ciousness of misfortune . . . did likewise hunt poor Owen, tho’ somewhat more dilatory in overtaking him, the second time.” Melville heard that soon after the gam with the Acushnet, Chase received “letters from home, informing him of the certain infidelity of his wife, the mother of several children.... We also heard that this receipt of this news had told most heavily upon Chase, & that he was a prey to the deepest gloom.”

  What moves Melville now, ten years after first reading Chase’s narrative, is the personal plight of the participants. Not mere symbols, Chase and Pollard are men who have been bludgeoned by fate. There is a pathos, even a tenderness, that enters Moby-Dick in its final chapters, and it was Melville’s memory of the real men behind the Essex, Nantucketers who never completely escaped the shadow of that disaster, that brought a much-needed injection of humanity to his attempts to bring his dangerously digressive, sometimes bombastic novel to a close.

  It begins with chapter 128, when the Pequod meets the Rachel, whose captain has halted his pursuit of whales to search for the missing whaleboat containing his son. In this heartbreaking chapter, in which the captain unsuccessfully pleads with Ahab to assist him in his search, we see the terrifying coldness behind Ahab’s quest for Moby Dick. It is not until chapter 132, “The Symphony,” however, that all the sadness and despair of Melville’s notes in the Chase narrative, particularly when it comes to the fragility of domestic happiness, come to the fore in Ahab’s conversation with the conscience of the Pequod, Starbuck.

  The chapter begins on the quarterdeck on the morning of a beautiful “steel-blue day.” Ahab is alone, looking out across the serene Pacific. “That glad, happy air, that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him; the step-mother world, so long cruel—forbidding—now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her heart to save and to bless.” It is then that a tear leaks from Ahab’s eye and falls into the sea. At that moment Starbuck comes upon the captain and pauses on the quarterdeck. Suddenly noticing the first mate, Ahab launches into a lament about the purposelessness of his purpose-driven life.

  We learn that he is fifty-eight years old and of the forty years he’s been a whaleman, he has spent not even three ashore. “When I think of this life I have led,” he tells Starbuck, “the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain’s exclusiveness . . . oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!—when I think of all this . . . how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul!” He is married and has a son, but what good is that given his commitment to the hunt? “I widowed that poor girl when I married her.” Like all of us wedded to our careers, whether we be doctors, teachers, truckers, lawyers, bond traders, or writers, he has missed what is truly important: “[W]hat a forty years’ fool—fool—old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now?”

  Starbuck sees his chance. “Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home! Wife and child, too, are Starbuck’s. . . . How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to see old Nantucket again! I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days, even as this, in Nantucket.”

  But Ahab, all his strength and will drained out of him, is ultimately powerless to alter the momentum established after forty long years as a whaleman. “What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare?”

  Starbuck eventually gives up and walks away. When Ahab crosses the quarterdeck and looks once again into the sea, he discovers with a start that another pair of eyes are reflected in the ocean’s windless surface—those of the evil puppet master, Fedallah. Starbuck, we realize, never had a chance.

  This is where Melville is perhaps the most profound in his portrait of Ahab as the demagogue and dictator. In the end, even the fiercest of tyrants is done in, not by his own sad, used-up self, but by his enablers, the so-called professionals, who keep whispering in his ear.

  25

  The Inmost Leaf

  In his letters to Hawthorne, Melville provides snapshots of his psyche during and after the composition of his masterpiece. The same propulsive poetry that animates Moby-Dick runs through these missives, many of them wildly manic in their intimate revelations of what Melville was thinking about as his novel galloped, paused, then galloped again toward publication. I would go so far as to insist that reading Moby-Dick is not enough. You must read the letters to appreciate the personal and artistic forces that made the book possible.

  By early May, Melville was almost through with the novel he was then calling The Whale. Then he stopped writing. In early June he tells Hawthorne that for the last three weeks he had been “out of doors,—building and patching and tinkering away in all directions. Besides, I had my crops to get in,—corn and potatoes . . . and many other things to attend to, all accumulating upon this one particular season. I work myself; and at night my bodily sensations are akin to those I have so often felt before, when a hired man, doing my day’s work from sun to sun.”

  The hia
tus has apparently been good for his creative energies, if not his sanity. Melville begins to sound like someone gone giddy on truth serum as he discloses his most intimate concerns. He frets about his literary reputation: “To go down to posterity is bad enough, any way; but to go down as a ‘man who lived among the cannibals’ ! ” He worries that his book is a meandering “botch” even as he fears that it signals the end of a five-year period of exhilarating intellectual growth: “Until I was twenty-five, I had no development at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life. Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould.” In a week, he tells Hawthorne, he will go to New York City “to bury myself in a third-story room, and work and slave on my ‘Whale’ while it is driving through the press. That is the only way I can finish it now,—I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose,—that, I fear, can seldom be mine.” A few paragraphs later, he returns to the subject of his novel: “But I was talking about the ‘Whale.’ As the fishermen say, ‘he’s in his flurry’ when I left him some three weeks ago. I’m going to take him by his jaw, however, before long, and finish him up in some fashion or other.”

  Here we see Melville marshaling the courage for one last go-around with the White Whale. Like Ahab, he is about to go into battle, and like Ahab, who spills his soul to Starbuck in “The Symphony,” Melville tells Hawthorne everything. He fears, more than anything else, that this is the end of something; already he can sense that his artistic powers will never again reach this height, and it terrifies him. For three weeks, he has been plowing his land, pounding nails with a hammer, his mind turning over the final encounter with Moby Dick, and the result will be one of the most exciting and intricately choreographed action sequences ever written.