Words&Dirt

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick seems to instill in prospective readers the same trepidation felt by the whalers who pursue its eponymous sea monster. During the two weeks I spent reading it, multiple people inquired as to why I would put myself through such an agonizing ordeal. Early on, I could provide no better answer than that Moby-Dick is part of the American canon, and therefore something I should read at one point or another. But once I sunk my teeth into it, I started giving a much different response: Because it’s fucking magnificent!

I’ll happily concede that Moby-Dick a deeply flawed novel. It’s way too long. The prose is painfully dense and histrionic. Most of the characters are underdeveloped. Melville routinely puts the narrative on hold to indulge in recondite tangents about whale anatomy or sailing techniques. It’s just a tough book. But it’s also a singular work of genius brimming with passages easily on par with the English language’s greatest literary offerings. And the most surprising discovery of all: Even though the world has changed dramatically since 1851, Moby-Dick is unnervingly relevant. This American classic still has plenty to teach 21st-century humans about our tragic flaws, intellectual limitations, and capacity for progress.

Moby-Dick’s most familiar theme is the conflict between humankind and nature, symbolized by Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal obsession with the White Whale that bit off his leg. Ahab’s drive to conquer the elusive sperm whale is tragic in every sense of the word, but also exciting. Melville sees whaling as a noble but also morally ambiguous activity: “There is death in this business of whaling––a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of man into Eternity” (41). The whalers grope for glory and fortune, risking their lives and sacrificing years away from home.

From a modern perspective, it’s impossible to avoid mixed feelings about contrast between the impressive grit displayed by the whalers and the indubitably barbarous nature of whaling. Contemporary scientific knowledge about the intelligence and social lives of whales adds a layer of tragedy to Melville’s descriptions of the hunt, which detail the whales essentially being tortured to death before being harvested with equal brutality.

At the heart of this process is spermaceti, an extremely valuable substance found in the heads of sperm whales. In Melville’s time, spermaceti was used for making candles, among other things. Today, there are competing theories about spermaceti’s biological function; it either plays a key role in echolocation or is responsible for buoyancy control. This adds yet another layer of tragic irony: Whalers were harvesting the sperm whale’s ability to navigate its environment in order to provide humans with a light in the dark. This extractivist mindset is still at the heart of human life, as we delve ever deeper into Earth in search of fossilized organic matter to heat our homes and fuel our cars.

Even in the ebullient 19th century, when it seemed science would solve every problem and overcome all nature’s limitations, Melville wasn’t so sure: “However baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may augment; yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him” (226). In a century when rising oceans pose a significant threat to human civilization, these words may come to ring true in ways Melville couldn’t have imagined.

Even if complete domination of nature is off the table, we still have the issue of progress to consider. Again surpassing the thinking of his time, Melville puts forth a complex theory of progress that feels quite at home more than 150 years on:

There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause:––through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. (390-1)

All generations do well to remember that progress is neither guaranteed nor permanent once achieved. We must carefully guard against nature’s attrition, which forever threatens human order. Our most cunning adversary is, of course, our own selves. If we become like Ahab––certain that the only way to rectify loss is to vanquish a perceived foe––we will never be able to make peace with our inevitable doom. The only way to overcome nature is to stop fighting it, and thereby shuffle off the illusion of being separate from it. This doesn’t mean giving up the project of progress, or living in defeat; it means striving for what we can achieve within reason, and letting the rest go at the end of the day. It means stopping the march toward the next victory long enough to be grateful for the legs that carry us.

Melville’s message is even timelier when it comes to the American concept of “whiteness,” which has once again reared its repulsive head in recent years (not that it ever went away).

Not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous––why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as an essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour, and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows––a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues––every stately or lovely emblazoning––the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without…Pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino Whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt? (163-4)

This breathtakingly beautiful passage reveals an essential and shameful element of American consciousness. Since our country’s inception, White America has always lived under the tyranny of our illusion of whiteness––a tyranny whose violent results we externalized through the brutal oppression of generations of nonwhite Americans. This self-induced sickness falsely presents itself as a “symbol of spiritual things,” when in reality it “stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation,” making it all but impossible to escape an identity founded on an illusory superiority over fellow humans. Only a fraction of us have managed to recognize ourselves as blinded by a “monumental white shroud” composed of “subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without.” Collapsing under our own cowardice, we still have not “solved the incantation of this whiteness.” And each day, nonwhite bodies suffer for someone else’s sins.

Moby-Dick is a novel of its time, and also timeless; it straddles the boundary between divisive ignorance and unified understanding. Ishmael, our protagonist, occasionally sees through the racism and bigotry that are commonplace in his world, at one point arguing for “the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole worshipping world; we all belong to that…in that we all join hands” (81, emphasis his).

This attitude is mirrored by Ishmael’s growing ability to see humanity on a continuum with nature, as symbolized by the awe-inspiring ocean:

Lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space…There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. (134-5)

If there is hope to be found in Moby-Dick, it is here. Just as the threat of annihilation can drive us toward unspeakable wrongs, it can also break down identity, revealing “the inscrutable tides” from which we all come and must all return. Extend this thinking to the whales gliding so gracefully before your prow, and you have transcended your own bloody prison. Learn to see their suffering as your own, and you have entered a better world.

Such revelations are only fleeting for the characters in Moby-Dick, and Ahab ultimately drags his crew across the thresholds of madness and mortality. Even after recognizing his own foolishness, Ahab cannot escape his overbearing hatred, born of extreme physical and mental anguish. His crew shows it is indeed heroic to stretch our limits before a new horizon, but Ahab himself is the barbed harpoon darting against the winds of nature and decency: “There is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men” (310).

A cautionary tale of the highest order, Moby-Dick implores us to recognize and take responsibility for the totality of human nature––good, evil, and everything in between.

Rating: 9/10