Cast off, set sail, cut loose
Michael Peterman unlocks the mystery and strength of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
One of the greatest novels ever written is Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Or, The Whale (1852). It makes almost every Best 100 Novels list and has been a staple of American literature courses around the world for the last 70 years. However, it is not a book taken up by many book clubs these days, partly because there are virtually no women in the story and partly because it is so long and multi-faceted. Some people today admit to knowing only a little about it, while others confess to having tossed it aside in frustration. In the 21st century a novel about hunting sperm whales for profit might seem a subject of interest only to cetological specialists.
If we cast our minds back to the early 19th century, we might recall that sperm whales - those huge and magnificent maritime creatures - were fair game for the many whaling ships that circled the globe in search of them. In 1850 it was a $70 million dollar business in the United States alone. Sperm whales were hunted relentlessly because, among other commodities like ambergris, their oil had a very high value in pre-industrial days. Other than candles and fireplaces, it was the means by which people lit their homes after dark; indeed, folks around the world were dependent on sperm oil to light their buildings in those days before electricity completely changed habits and fostered a new set of nighttime activities
Early this week I learned to my horror that a right whale had been found dead off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts. It was the 16th right whale to die this year, though most of the deaths occurred in our vast Gulf of St. Lawrence. Accidental collisions, entangling fishing lines, and illnesses were among the causes. One result is that we now know that the right whale is an endangered species, facing several threats to its survival, even as those whales seem to have moved from their traditional summer habitat in the Bay of Fundy. By the late 19th century sperm whales were similarly endangered.
When Herman Melville (18191891) penned Moby-Dick, the business of whaling, which was still in its heyday, was his preoccupation. He had gone to sea at age 19 and worked in whalers and other ships sailing out of New Bedford. After five years at sea he began to write adventure novels set in the South Seas - Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) - while he carefully prepared to undertake his whaling book. Having become known in the popular press as “the man who lived among cannibals,” he read as widely as he could about the history and science of whaling; he studied the wrecks that had occurred when whales turned on or rammed one of the tall ships that was hunting them. As well, he took careful measure of the drama and importance of whaling, both factually and metaphorically.
“A whale ship was my Harvard and my Yale,” he later wrote. In his vision he did not want to leave out religion, psychology, and the great mysteries of “the deep,” but he was bent on approaching them with his characteristic irreverence—that included a devilishly-inclined tongue in cheek.
The sperm whale, he wrote, was “ponderous and profound;” it was a creature with “great inherent dignity and sublimity, worthy of our closest attention.” Words like ‘profound,’ ‘dignity,’ and ‘sublimity’ must have seemed rather daunting to readers who were simply searching for a good yarn. They did not expect to see whales evoking types of human behaviour, a range of human emotions, and indeed the human condition itself. Readers who came to the book looking for a compelling narrative, found first a celebration of the whaling industry and many chapters about the science of cetology—the scientific classification of whales. Moreover, classifying whales was still a difficult challenge in the mid-1800s; as Melville well knew, precise information concerning the many species of ‘leviathans’ haunting the deep was thin.
On a deeper level Melville’s subjects were the great literary themes—epic quest, heroic action, tragic destiny (perhaps better, the nature of human destiny), and the meaning of life itself. But it takes time for a serious author to set up his story and begin to probe those depths. Melville’s narrator, evocatively named “Ishmael,” is a ready talker and philosophizer who takes his own sweet time in unfolding the great adventure he has to tell. As he puts it at the beginning of the chapter entitled Cetology, “Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harborless immensities.” Eventually we witness the vengeful actions and fate of Captain Ahab as he seeks to take his revenge upon the infamous white whale that--or who-wounded him in the past. By that time, with the narrative in full gear, most readers are fully engaged. But the story does take time to get up steam and some readers—both then and now-have found themselves disappointed with the book.
My own experience was entirely exciting and fruitful. I first read Moby-Dick in a second-year American literature class. I was struggling with the text and went into my weekly tutorial pretty much confused and at a loss. Our teacher, however, skillfully opened up the text for us step by cogent step. He engaged us first in Ishmael’s wide-ranging point of view (“meditation and water are wedded for ever,” Ishmael tells us), then Captain Ahab’s tragic obsession, then the first-mate Starbuck’s clear-minded religious thinking), and then Queequeg’s entirely different outlook (he is a South-Seas cannibal and harpooner who first becomes Ismael’s inadvertent bedmate and then his close friend).
So awakened, I found the book’s many strengths and mysteries tumbling out before me; I raced back to my dorm bent upon rereading the entire novel. That tutorial provided the kind of quiet and gentle encouragement in reading closely that I needed; thereafter, deep and troubling as some parts of the book are, I was Ishmael’s eager acquaintance in discovering the extraordinary joy and the epic adventure of the chase. Few moments in my life were as decisive and formative as that hour-long tutorial back in 1963.
Moby-Dick is many things— a whaling tale, an epic adventure, a study of whales, a probing of oceanic depths, and an investigation into the mysteries of life itself. Melville offers us a quest for meaning in a dark and often contradictory world where organized religions only serve to confound that pursuit.
Next time I’ll look more closely at Ishmael and his take on such subjects as destiny and meaning. At its best Moby-Dick is a book that “force(s us as readers) to cast off, set sail, cut loose, leave our harbor, [and] leave the slavish shore.” “We are launched upon the deep, sailing into mysteries, getting in over our heads, getting us out of our depths.” Welcome to shorelessness!
When a book accomplishes so much, it is a wonderful experience; when a book makes us think about so many issues and mysteries, it is worth celebrating.