Reading Moby Dick

A very American book?

I’ll be doing two zoom calls to discuss Moby Dick — July 14th (Tuesday) at 7 p.m. and July 15th (a Wednesday) at noon, (both NY time) — I hope many of you read it, and then join one of the calls¹. Below is my review, of sorts. Needless to say, with spoilers, so if somehow you don’t already know how it ends, maybe wait until you finish the book.

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“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on a flea, though many there be who have tried it.”

“He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”

“What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish too?”

“Being horizontal in its position, the Leviathan’s tail acts in a different manner from the tails of all other sea creatures. It never wriggles. In man, or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority.”

“For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! Not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it.”

“I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense.”

Despite being obsessive about packing light, I always carry at least one book, to fill the many empty moments of travel, which becomes a security blanket of sorts; a competing world I can step into when the physical world grows wearisome. Tired of the linoleum and fluorescence of terminal three, sick of the pervasive sticky pungence of Auntie Anne’s, feeling untethered, I open up Thackeray and flee into the high vanities of English nobility.

That’s how I started reading Moby-Dick, a book I’d tried and failed to complete three times before, each time put off by what I then saw as unnecessarily opaque prose, as if the author had something to prove. A showy “look ma, no hands!” style.

I picked up Moby Dick again, plucked from the library shelves, for mostly physical reasons, because it had exactly the balance and heft I needed for my daily maintenance walks while home, the ballast my ship needed. Into my backpack you mighty weighty tome, to reform my calves, hamstrings, and Achilles.

That it was packaged with two early Melville novels, one a travelogue focused on Liverpool (Redburn) was also a selling point, but as I found out, post walk, sitting in a McDonald’s, early Melville is something entirely different, and not in a good way, and disappointed, I tried Moby Dick again, and this time, I was enchanted, engrossed, and most importantly taken in.

I’d found my other world, the one to temper the blandness around me — A 19th century whaling ship captained by a cinematic megalomaniac, narrated by an autodidact, who at times comes off as a waggish imp drunk on grog, having the time of his life, sitting in his single-room Bronx apartment, laughing at the lines he’d just put on paper (“Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.”), and at other times a man going through a severe psychic break.

Ishmael is clearly Melville, the third-person omniscient Melville, and Moby-Dick (the book) his diary from his two-ish years immersed in the whaling and maritime world, fictionalized, made more romantic, more compelling, more dramatic, through poetic license. I’ve long believed great fiction has at its core non-fiction (Dickens, Thackeray, Austen, Bolaño, Faulkner), that keeps it tethered to what we know, but with enough slack to allow it to shine, and be seen in a different light, or to readers in a distant time and place, seen at all.

Moby-Dick is great fiction, and it shines, and it worked for me because I now have a notion of what it was like to be a ship-hand on a 19th century whaling vessel, which is an extraordinary thing to have been, to leave your family for three years to live with forty strangers, most with questionable and/or complicated pasts, sleeping right next to all of them on thin corn-husk-filled mattresses in a dirty, windowless pitching cabin, to spend your waking hours climbing a tangle of ropes fifty yards high, to stand in the weather, balanced on a single gyrating beam, searching the oceans for a whale’s spout, to then at the cry of “thar she blows,” rappel down into fragile row boats, and make our way straight into the gyrating mass of three-ton mammals, try and spear one from ten yards, or less, away, and if successful, and if you and your boat are not obliterated in the process, pull the carcass alongside the mother ship, to spend the next four days chopping it up before the swarm of feasting sharks do, boiling the tonnage of flesh down into casks of oil. An unctuous, dangerous, isolated task with little to no monetary reward.

That Melville worked on a whaling ship is only unusual because of who he was, an educated elite. There are many exaggerations in Moby-Dick, many fabrications for excitement and drama, but the setting is not one of them. Whaling was a dominant industry prior to the 20th century, especially in the US, where it was the fifth largest employer, and its output, machine lubricant, candles, and baleen one of the largest sources of hard foreign currency for the young country.

Whale oil, specifically the head oil from the sperm whale, was famously at some point more valuable in weight than gold, and America, the land of opportunity (flush with inexpensive labor, vast unharvested oceans, capital striving for rewards, clean of antiquated regulations) quickly excelled at whaling, eclipsing the Dutch and English.

I paired Moby Dick with Leviathan, The History of Whaling in America, by Eric Jay Dolin, an excellent companion, because it highlights how unremarkable the seemingly remarkable setting is.

In that light, Moby Dick is a quintessential American novel, an ethnography of a dominant but shunned-by-the-literate lifestyle, the quest for wealth through entrepreneurial toil. A mid 19th century oil-rush preceding the gold rush that siphoned away its men with dreams, before the oil-from-the-soil rush killed it entirely.

Putting yourself through immense physical and psychological hardship, all in the hope that your lay will be the fortune that makes you whole. You’re gambling on you, and while it might be long odds (that 1/170th of a lot is still a lot), you at least have a stake. America as a nation of “temporarily embarrassed capitalist” might be over-simplified, but it captures an essential component of our thick culture, especially when compared to the rest of the world.

“I have little sympathy for the Americans … but their energy in bringing the trade (whaling) to the pitch it has arrived at, deserves the highest encomium.” wrote an English whaler in 1846². That energy is still there, and is foundational to who we are, especially when it’s about making money. The US is a nation of capitalism, of citizens striving for material wealth, and comfort, unfettered by their past, class, or race, held together by a shared faith, and all that is good, bad, and hypocritical about us is held within that.

To the degree Moby Dick is the great American novel, it’s because it’s about that, about forty or so men, from disparate backgrounds, united in that desire, and willing to undergo all sorts of hardships to obtain it, and in the process, realizing, some slowly, some never, that hard-work alone won’t overcome forces greater than you — including nature, an immoral economic system still rife with class/race, and metaphysical issues beyond you.

Moby Dick is long, dense, philosophical, and punctuated with eccentric soliloquies, many moving and beautiful, and some that sound like they come from that guy sitting in corner of a McDonald’s, wearing remains of a once fine outfit, who smells bad, has a bag of used books, scribbling slanted notes in a waterlogged notebook, and who you regret talking to when fifteen minutes later he won’t stop. Which means it’s ripe for “what does it all mean” interpretations, and picking through the thousands of them, they generally fall into four camps, with further sub-camps: The theological, the economic, political, and then the psychological.

Here is my list of them, although it’s hardly complete, because every review I read I find a new take. Moby Dick is one of those rare books where the interpretations don't diminish it, and each one you read makes you want to go back and find what you missed, which is a sign of inexhaustible richness. It is the book that keeps on giving, in a literary criticism way.

• Calvinist God — Moby Dick as the omnipotent divinity that destroys without reason, Ahab as the man who won’t submit.

• Gnostic demiurge — Moby Dick as the false creator god, powerful and malevolent but not the true divinity. Ahab, fighting against that, and failing³.

• The Godless universe — Moby Dick as pure indifferent nature, man as another animal forced to compete, and while able to defeat most of it, fails when his hubris, and emotions, overtakes him.

• Human hubris — Ahab represents mankind that cannot accept limitation, either imposed by nature, or by the Gods.

• American imperialism, the bad side — the Pequod as America, its multiracial crew exploited in service of one man’s obsessive capitalist extraction from nature.

• American exceptionalism, the mostly good side — the Pequod as America itself, the crew striving for wealth, and in the process doing great things, until done in by a corrupt leader.

• Capitalism itself — The hunting of whales as industrial capitalism, the crew as exploited labor, Ahab as the monomaniacal CEO who pursues Moby Dick for a personal vendetta, which he can do because he’s flush with unwarranted profits.

• Democracy and tyranny — the Pequod as failed democracy, Ahab as the demagogue who sways lesser men into instruments against the common good.

• The unconscious — the whale as the shadow self, the hunt as the ego’s doomed attempt to destroy what it cannot integrate. Or something like that — I didn't read much of these interpretations, since Freud and all his sidekicks have never been my thing.

I’m mostly in the economic camp, as is clear from what I wrote before, but the theological is certainly there, as it is in the US. We are an economic nation steeped in faith, and the two, especially in the 19th century, are inseparable.

Yet what struck me was the crew, who while not well fleshed out (more on that below), are recognizable, still today. Go into any dive bar, any military base, into any McDonald’s when the work crews come in from their break, sweaty in their orange shirts, and you see men who want to make something of themselves through hard labor, to be in their own way, a hero. Who want to be part of a meaningful (even if misplaced) quest. To be able to conquer something, with other like-minded souls, and return to accolades, with dignity granted.

The Pequod is a fraternal order — that and the appeal of the unknown, of adventure, of a danger that can test them, draws the men (and a few women) to it, which is made even clearer in Leviathan, where excerpts from diaries of young men reveal they went less for the money, more to be part of a precarious journey.

Even today, with life less unstable, men⁴ still need this, and will go to great lengths to manufacture it. I was thinking of the documentary The Dark Wizard, about the life of the solo climber Dean Potter, who kept pushing and pushing, and succeeding, then moving on to the next absurdly risky goal, until he found one that killed him. There is a surfeit of young men who seek out the precarious, not for the money, but for spiritual fulfillment.

I was thinking about the returning service men I’ve met, many of them now in a deep funk, who still perk up when they talk about the camaraderie they had in the military, the friendships made under duress (and boredom), and how that is what they miss the most about civilian life — and how lost they feel without it⁵.

Whaling offered an antidote to that, a community yoked to something larger than themselves, and I came away from both books believing that was the greater motivation, not the pay. I would bet that if the stigma of hunting whales was removed, you would still find plenty of men who would sign up for the Pequod now, simply for the thrill, the greater the sense of danger, the greater the reward from conquering it.

It’s especially appealing to men who feel slighted, who feel they’ve yet to achieve anything in life worth celebrating. Who feel disrespected, and consequently, suicidal.

That's how Melville starts Moby Dick, with Ishmael confessing that whaling and suicide draw from the same death wish — one just more alive, scenic, meaningful, and communal than the other:

This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feeling towards the ocean with me.

Yet none of the other interpretations are outright wrong. The strength of Moby Dick comes from its richness. It is one hundred and thirty-five diverse, insightful, and moving essays held together by an irresistible plot, which is also its greatest weakness as well — the characters get subsumed, at the expense of depth. They are primarily devices to make a point, and few come alive, and are distinguished, beyond caricatures. Ahab the obsessive, Queequeg the noble savage, Pip the innocent, Stubb and Flask the devoted but simple upper management yes-men, Fedalla the foreign mystic.

Starbuck is given the most space to flourish, given over to doubt, but even then it’s through actions, not thought. Maybe that’s the point, that we are all actors with little free will, being moved around by forces beyond us. Or maybe Melville believes that is how the majority of us go through life, acting without thought. As he writes, “But then again, what has the whale to say? Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living. Oh! happy that the world is such an excellent listener!”

It is after all Ishmael's (which is to say Melville's) story, and for all its strengths as an ethnography, it can't escape the writer's perspective: we rarely grant others the depth we assume in ourselves. It’s about Ishmael, not the others, which makes me wonder if Melville spent his two years on the whaling ship feeling the isolated intellectual, unable to fully comprehend those around him, unable to fit in, and spent his long nights standing watch, thinking about what the color white really means, or what it would be like to have eyes on the opposite side of your head, unable to look ahead. The quixotic bookish nerd, trying to understand, anything and everything, but never fitting in. Alienation versus belonging, the role most writers inhabit.

Of all the interpretations, the one I found least satisfying is the one currently fashionable — which is the political. Ahab as the dictator, which while true, wasn’t where the energy of the book was. I was reading Moby Dick at the same time as Plato’s Gorgias, his dialogue on rhetoric and I’d imagined this review might turn into a comparison of the two. Yet, there is little exploration of why Ahab had the control he had, why the crew followed him, other than that they did, because that is how the system, corrupted though it may be, worked. Again, Starbuck comes the closest to contemplating mutiny, but what’s going through his mind is absent. Which is all the more surprising since Melville himself was a crew member on a mutinous ship⁶.

The most emotionally powerful, and empathetic, chapters are not about the people, but about nature and especially the whales, which even though it is a book about a floating abattoir, didn’t surprise me. Hunters, ranchers, fishermen, often have deep respect for their prey, built from proximity. There is a reason early religion was so steeped in and intertwined with the ecological, including the animals that provided the people with their food. It is an adversary that you respect, because you know it so well.

The image of the row boats of hunting men with lances, trapped inside the foaming circle of herding bulls, spotting the mothers and newborns under the calm waters, with Queequeg reaching out to playfully scratch one’s head, will be the last to leave me⁷. While Melville might not have directly intended this to be a plea to end the slaughter of whales, that is what it reads as now, although there are parts where he directly questions the ethics behind the whole industry, writing at the end of a long chase of an elderly maimed bull, “For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.”

Men get what they want, animals are the Loose-Fish, men the Fast-Fish. Until he aims too high, gets too full of himself, and believes he can do no wrong. Hubris sure, but never forget we are still animals, still made of the same stuff, by the same creator, as the leviathans we harvest to light our lamps and give our corsets shape.

None of the debate over what it all means would survive a lesser writer. What carries Moby Dick, what makes it a pleasure, is the prose itself. It shines so bright because it’s exceptionally well written, with six hundred plus pages of lyrical prose. It is prose that reads as poetry⁸, and so I supplemented my reading with an audiobook, and for three weeks that’s all I listened to on my walks, even though I’d read the sections before. Even the simple description of a boat plowing through the water, its deck try-pots ablaze, is turned majestic,

As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.

It’s also very playful, with far more humor than it is credited with. That playfulness, at times absurd (the bull whale with his harem, chapter 88), at times bawdy (the double entendres of sperm), can also be self-referential, such as when he suggests trying to figure out what the white whale means is only for us over-educated fools, “So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, 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.”

We, the critics, are thinking too much, “So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have ‘broken his digester.’”

We should sit back and enjoy the story, for the incantatory writing, the lessons in whaling, and a compelling adventure story. And for the jokes, because I laughed out loud every few pages, to the confusion of those in the McDonald’s, and anyone spotting me walking alone through the woods, headset in my ears.

Which is why I keep reading Moby Dick, picking it up, flipping to a random section, and being entertained, and finding things I missed, because there is so much there, even if what it means is uncertain.

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PS: There was recently an article asking, Who is America’s Homer, that received a lot of attention, with Zena Hitz nominating Melville, and Moby Dick, suggesting “The voyage of the Pequod is America’s greatest quest, the search for meaning.”

(It’s a great article, and I urge everyone to read it.)

As I argued in this piece, I do believe Moby Dick can be seen as representing the American Dream, as capturing the American desire for entrepreneurial excellence, channeled through capitalism, wrapped in old testament theology.

Yet to be more precise about it, in such a diverse, individualistic society, I doubt we can ever have a single author, or work, that defines us the way Homer defined the ancient world.

Homer’s works didn’t just “capture the Greek spirit, the Greek story, the Greek identity”, but became archetypes that citizens strove for, even if they didn’t realize it. It wasn’t just a product of the thick culture, but came to represent it, and then change it.

As I’ve written before, I believe societies provide their citizens an array of “roles to play”, like character select in a video game, and that’s what Homer came to represent to the ancient world, so much so that Alexander the Great carried a copy of the Iliad with him, as his “blueprint” for life.

Moby Dick does represent our thick culture — as well as any single work of art — but I doubt there are many citizens who take it as a guide to how to live a good life.

1. I will post links in a later newsletter, and will also email them to those who have expressed interest, which is about forty of you so far.

2. From Leviathan. Here is the full excerpt,

In a letter to the London Times in 1846, an Englishman who served nearly six years on board American whaleships pulled no punches in telling his fellow citizens exactly why the Americans were so much better at whaling than the British. “A few words will explain it,—the greater cost of fitting out whalers here, the drunkenness, incapacity, and want of energy of the masters and crews”—all of which were traits that he claimed the Americans didn’t share. “I have little sympathy for the Americans,” the writer continued, “for as a body, I do not believe you could well find a more dishonest people, but their energy in bringing the trade to the pitch it has arrived at, deserves the highest encomium.”

3. Jorge Luis Borges, in his usual erudite insight, has a mixture of these two. He reads in Moby Dick, “a cosmos (a chaos) not only perceptibly malignant as the Gnostics had intuited, but also irrational, like the cosmos in the hexameters of Lucretius.” (Selected Non-fictions by Jorge Luis Borges)

4. It is primarily men, though women are drawn to this too — a growing minority, but still a minority

5. The movie The Hurt Locker illustrated all of this well. The addiction to risk, and then the withdrawal when faced with the benign.

6. Chapter 54, The Town-Ho’s Story, is about a mutiny, and is one of the strongest, but it’s more plot than meditative.

In Leviathan, there is description of the mutiny on the Junior, on Christmas 1857, when Cyrus Plumer and three others killed the captain, and two officers, fled by small boats to the coast of Australia, where they wandered for three months, living with aboriginals, before being captured, brought back to the United States for a trial that became a national drama. Plumer was sentenced to death, then had his sentence reduced to life by President Buchanan, and then given a full pardon by President Grant fifteen years later. Other than a five page summary in this book there is little else written about it, not even a wiki page.

7. Chapter 87, the Grand Armada.

8. I noted to a friend, that sections of Moby Dick could be lifted and turned into lyrics for songs, with little to no modification.