Why Read Moby-Dick? (10 page)

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.

I
n 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 hiatus 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.

B
efore we continue, I need to make something perfectly clear. The White Whale is not a symbol. He is as real as you or I. He has a crooked jaw, a humped back, and a wiggle-waggle when he's really moving fast. He is a thing of blubber, blood, muscle, and bone—a creation of the natural world that transcends any fiction. So forget about trying to figure out what the White Whale signifies. As Melville has already shown in chapter 99, “The Doubloon,” in which just about every member of the
Pequod
's crew provides his own interpretation of what is stamped on the gold coin nailed to the mast, in the end a doubloon is just a doubloon. So don't fall into the Ahab trap of seeing Moby Dick as a stand-in for some paltry human complaint. In the end he is just a huge, battle-scarred albino sperm whale, and that is more than enough.

This is the fundamental reason we continue to read this or any other literary classic. It's not the dazzling technique of the author; it's his or her ability to deliver reality on the page.

Which leads us to yet another blessing provided by Melville's reengagement with the
Essex
narrative in the spring of 1851. In Chase's unforgettable firsthand account, he told of what it was like to be aboard a ship that had become the target of a giant whale's wrath. With Chase's words fresh in his memory, Melville launched into a series of scenes that conveyed an unmatched sense of immediacy even as they nimbly gathered together the many strands of the novel's narrative.

In chapter 133, “The Chase—First Day,” Melville divides our introduction to Moby Dick into three parts. We first see him from a distance, moving leisurely across the surface of the sea as the
Pequod
's whaleboats, led by Ahab, approach. “As they neared him, the ocean grew still more smooth; seemed drawing a carpet over its waves; seemed a noon-meadow, so serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came so nigh his seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump was distinctly visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish foam.... A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale.... [N]ot Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the glorified White Whale as he so divinely swam.” This is Moby Dick as aesthetic object: a slithering snowhill projecting circles of glorious calm.

Then the whale starts to dive, and we realize that there is more to this big white creature than at first met the eye. “But soon the fore part of him slowly rose from the water; for an instant his whole marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia's Natural Bridge, and warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand god revealed himself, sounded, and went out of sight.” And we wait. For an hour. The tension builds, and then in a scene that inverts even as it anticipates the black vortex that will soon consume the
Pequod,
Ahab stares into the endless watery blue and sees Moby Dick. Note the cinematic nature of how we are there with Ahab as he looks down into the aquamarine void: “[S]uddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom.”

Ahab somehow escapes the White Whale's first attempt to capture the boat in his jaws, but not the second. Moby Dick rolls onto his back like an attacking shark and seizes the boat in his mouth “so that the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw curled high up into the open air.... The bluish pearl-white of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of Ahab's head.... In this attitude the White Whale now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse. With unastonished eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms; but the tiger-yellow crew were tumbling over each other's heads to gain the uttermost stern.”

Fedallah may be sitting there like a diabolical Yoda, but not Ahab. “[T]hen it was that monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which placed him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated; frenzied with all this, he seized the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to wrench it from its gripe.” In our age, we all love whales and wish them nothing but the best, but you've got to hand it to this castrated, one-legged, fifty-eight-year-old lapsed Quaker; he doesn't mess around. Like Melville with
his
Whale, he has the audacity to take Moby Dick by the jaw. “As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped from him; the frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws, like an enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in twain, and locked themselves fast again in the sea, midway between the two floating wrecks.”

Now that Ahab is in the water, Moby Dick sticks his head up into the air and starts revolving like a lighthouse beacon so that he can see what's around him. (As Melville points out in a footnote, this is a common behavior among sperm whales. No matter how fantastic it may seem, everything in these last three chapters
could
have happened.) What Moby Dick sees, it turns out, is Ahab, who quickly finds himself at the center of a wild maelstrom of whale-induced foam. Luckily, the
Pequod
isn't too far away. “Sail on the whale!—Drive him off!” Ahab shouts.

The ship succeeds in pushing back Moby Dick, and Ahab is hauled into Stubb's whaleboat, where he lies “all crushed in the bottom . . . like one trodden under foot of herds of elephants.” Instead of a man, Ahab is a piece of topography, a fractured continent echoing hurt and pain. “Far inland, nameless wails came from him,” Ishmael tells us, “as desolate sounds from out ravines.”

On Day Two of the encounter, Moby Dick bashes Stubb's and Flask's whaleboats to bits before diving below the surface. In the swirling wake of the White Whale's leave-taking, the second and third mates and their crews cling desperately to whatever is close at hand as “the odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced round and round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch.” Thanks to Melville's letter to Hawthorne, we know how personal this scene is to him. “My dear Sir, a presentiment is on me,” Melville wrote. “I shall at last be worn out and perish, like an old nutmeg-grater, grated to pieces by the constant attrition of the . . . nutmeg.” In the destruction of two whaleboats, Melville is also portraying the disintegration of his talent.

Day Three dawns clear and fresh, and the narrative takes a breather. “What a lovely day again!” Ahab marvels. “[W]ere it a new-made world, and made for a summer-house to the angels, and this morning the first of its throwing open to them, a fairer day could not dawn upon that world.” He then lapses into a soliloquy that echoes Melville's complaint to Hawthorne that he has rarely known the quiet circumstances required to produce proper creative writing. “Thinking is, or ought to be,” Ahab says, “a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that.” Here Melville touches on that dynamic tension between active and passive engagement. If the author simply sits back like God and casts judgment, the verdict is inevitably less than persuasive. What makes for good writing is when the author somehow achieves perspective within the tumult of the moment, and this is exactly what Melville accomplishes in
Moby-Dick
.

But back to Ahab, who happens to have good reason to be agitated. Amid the chaotic furor of the previous day's action, Fedallah mysteriously disappeared. What makes this particularly ominous is that the harpooneer had prophesied that he must die and then reappear before Ahab could be killed. Instead of dwelling on this
Macbeth
-like riddle, Ahab soon finds himself rowing through a sea of ravenous sharks that, like the nutmeg grater, chew the blades of his oars into fragments.

It all comes together like Fate's well-oiled machine: Fedallah's lifeless body appears among the snarl of harpoon lines crisscrossing the White Whale's humped back; as Fedallah also predicted, Moby Dick then transforms the
Pequod
into a vast, American-built hearse when the whale bashes into her bow with his mammoth head. As the ship sinks into the sea, Ahab hurls his harpoon only to have the line wrap around his neck and whisk him to his death in the wake of the creature he despised above all else. Lastly, there is the Wampanoag harpooneer Tashtego at the masthead, valiantly fulfilling Ahab's order to nail his bloodred flag to the top of the spar even as a savage sky hawk attempts to steal away the flag. The sky hawk's wing becomes caught between the masthead and Tashtego's hammer (one wonders whether Melville came up with this astonishing conclusion as he hammered away at his house that spring) and is pulled down with the
Pequod,
“which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.”