Nobody needs my close reading of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Instead of that, some other things:
1. I avoided it for a long time. It’s of an era with The Scarlet Letter, which I loathed as a high schooler. I assumed that the entire era was characterized by tedious rambling (see: the fourteen thousand word forward to The Scarlet Letter describing life as a customs official in Salem).
2. And Melville’s reputation as a whale pervert did not help the case. Everyone who knows anything about Moby Dick knows that it contains dozens of chapters of asides on whales (taxonomy, anatomy, behaviors), whalers (idiosyncrasies, nationalities, habits), and whaling (ships, equipment, techniques).
3. But this was the wrong impression entirely. Those chapters are not tedious customs-house rambling. Melville soaks (dunks?) these unsolicited lectures in both metaphor and in explicit references to the Bible and the classics. On blubber:
Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperance of thine own.
4. You’ll also see there how the narrator, Ishmael, is just very excitable. He’s prone to lapse into delirious grandiloquence on the barest excuse. And there are plenty of excuses. It proves a fascinating way for Melville to weave assorted Whale Facts™ into something with the depth and breadth of an epic.
5. I think there’s also something to the way that the time spent reading these majestic interludes stands in for the months (or years) spent on a proper whaling cruise.
6. Because Ishmael is an excitable, voicy little nerd, it gives Melville an excuse to speak directly to the audience whenever and basically however he pleases. On the wrinkles and scars on a sperm whale’s forehead:
If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can.
Read the symbolism of the whale if you can, dear reader.
7. Look, it’s just not possible to overstate how into this shit Melville is. He basically tells you:
One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. 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.
8. Oh, and some more stuff in the book that has some meta-textual weight, if that’s your kind of thing:
Book! you lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You’ll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.
That line is spoken by second mate Stubb, a sarcastic, everyman, damn-the-philosophy sort of guy. This is part of a chapter where Ahab and his three mates (in a very Shakespearean stage-play scene narrated by Stubb as he watches from the wings) each, in turn, regard the doubloon Ahab famously nailed to the Pequod’s mainmast and interpret the symbols minted on to it. A whole chapter about textual interpretation! What a nerd!
9. This book was, maybe, written for exactly me. I have a reading background in the age of sail (it seems pretty helpful to go into this book knowing what mizzenmasts, top-gallants, and shrouds are) and the Bible, and though I haven’t read a lot of classics per se I have a conversational knowledge of them. Melville gets pretty hipster about that stuff, though.
10. The joke I want to make is that Melville was so racist he looped back around to woke. Ishmael notices that he’s getting looks on the streets of New Bedford, hanging around with a dark-skinned guy:
… for some time we did not notice the jeering glances of the passengers, a lubber-like assembly, who marvelled that two fellow beings should be so companionable; as though a white man were anything more dignified than a whitewashed negro.
But really I think “so-racist-it’s-woke” doesn’t capture the dynamic right; I think Melville is more of a 19th century version of an “equal opportunity hater” guy. Like a lot of authors of his era, he was really into the dark-skin-as-a-symbol thing; in real life it constantly stood for the White Light of Civilization vs. the Black Darkness of Barbarism. So it is in Moby Dick. But in particular Ishmael (and so, possibly, Melville) was really into comparing Christianity and Paganism. Race and racial symbolism, rather than the focus, are an accessory to the idea of Christian Civilization vs. Pagan Barbarism. And into this all, famously, “Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian,” Ishmael comments early on, as he warms up to his new friend Queequeg.
My guess, taking a first gloss as a newbie to Melville, is that in his sailing experiences he met a number of Black, Asian, Native American, and Polynesian sailors and noticed he liked at least a few of them better as people than he did some of his fellow white Christians. He retained belief in the technological and imperial achievements of the western world as well as Christianity as the True Faith, but all of that was dogged by doubts about some of the underlying intellectual systems, which he couldn’t square with his experiences as a man of the sea.
11. The queer subtext is not really subtext, it’s honestly just text.
If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan’s breast, this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left us cronies. He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him; and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have seemed far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted; but in this simple savage those old rules would not apply.
I really wish I had the historical and literary power level to read passages like that with more confidence. People out there say that, no, people were just like that sometimes; not everything is all about homosexuality. And yes, that is the basic read of the above passage: Queequeg explains that this particular “marriage” is a sort of ritualized companionship. But, I mean.
How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.
Come on!
12. I regret to inform myself that I owe The Scarlet Letter a reread. It’s hard to tell if I enjoyed Moby Dick more for the fact that Melville’s prose is more enjoyable than Hawthorne’s or for the fact that I’ve now had twenty years more experience, maturity, and patience (even appreciation) for difficult prose. But I think I’ll find something fluffy and easy to plow through first.