Why Read Moby-Dick? (3 page)

Ishmael describes this approach to life as a “free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy.” In the chapters to come, Ahab will drag him (and all of us) into the howling depths of the human psyche. In the beginning, however, before Ahab takes hold, we are in the presence of a soul so buoyant, so mischievous, so wise, and so much fun that even after the worst happens at the end of the novel, we can take consolation in knowing that at least Ishmael has found a way to survive. Like Melville, who is one of our country's greatest literary survivors, Ishmael is still left to tell the tale, and we had better listen to every word.

W
hen Melville wrote
Moby-Dick,
New Bedford, not

Nantucket, was the most important whaling port in America. But Ishmael is not interested in the biggest whaling port; he wants to go to the first, to the “great original,” the sandy island almost thirty miles out to sea where it all began.

Melville drew upon his own personal experiences in his novels, but he was also a great pillager of other writers' prose. During the composition of
Moby-Dick
he acquired a virtual library of whaling-related books, and passages from these works inevitably made their way into his novel. The writing process for Melville was as much about responding to and incorporating the works of others as it was about relying on his own experiences. And since Melville seems never to have visited Nantucket before writing
Moby-Dick,
he was free to create an imagined rather than an actual island, an animated, often antic state of mind that exemplified America's grasping push for more. And since Nantucket in 1850 was already past its prime, there is a nostalgic quality to his five-paragraph evocation of the island in chapter 14. Instead of writing history, Melville is forging an American mythology.

Nantucket, Ishmael proclaims, is “a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background.” He then proceeds to spin off joke after joke about how sandy and sterile the island is. There are so few trees on Nantucket that islanders carry around scraps of wood “like bits of the true cross in Rome.” They plant toadstools to provide themselves with some shade. In order to wade through all the sand, they wear the gritty equivalent of snowshoes. The sea is so omnipresent “that to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering.”

After devoting the two subsequent paragraphs to a distillation of the island's history, taking us from the oral traditions of the first Native inhabitants through to the islanders' current pursuit of “[t]hat Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon,” he establishes Nantucket as a nodal point of global, God-ordained ambition. “And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders; parcelling out among them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires.”

The Nantucketer does not just sail across the ocean; he lives upon it in his quest for the sperm whale. “
There
is his home;
there
lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China.” These are not people of the real world; these are the argonauts of their day, superheroes impervious to the worst that God has heaped upon humanity. Then there is the chapter's beautiful, carefully modulated final sentence: “With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales.” And so it ends, this little sidebar of miraculous prose, one of many that Melville scatters like speed bumps throughout the book as he purposely slows the pace of his mighty novel to a magisterial crawl.

T
he Nantucket of chapter 14 is a euphoric whirlwind. The “real” Nantucket, at least the town in which Ishmael and Queequeg soon find themselves, is anything but boisterous and fun. It is a shadow land made of Melville's worst nightmares, the breeding ground of the ominous cloud out of which Ahab will eventually stump forth on his whalebone leg.

Before we get into all that, however, we must linger over one of the more tangible gifts Melville provides in
Moby-Dick:
his recipe for clam chowder. Ishmael and Queequeg have just found their way to the Try Pots Inn, named for the huge iron cauldrons in which the whale's blubber was boiled into oil. There they enjoy bowl after bowl of Mrs. Hussey's chowder. “Oh, sweet friends!” Ishmael crows with delight. “[H]earken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt.” Remember this, all ye modern-day chowder makers, forgo the cloying chunks of needless potato and go with the biscuit bits!

Even before they enter the Try Pots, Ishmael has begun to wonder what he's gotten himself into. The inn's sign, made from a sawed-off topmast, reminds him of a gallows. Then there's the name of the man who recommended this establishment, I. A. Coffin. He cannot help but suspect that these are “oblique hints touching Tophet.” While leading them to their room, Mrs. Hussey tells the story of “young Stiggs,” the whaleman who, after returning from a four-year voyage with only three barrels of oil, stabbed himself to death with his own harpoon. “[E]ver since then,” Mrs. Hussey explains, “I allow no boarders to take sich dangerous weepons in their rooms a-night.”

The next day, Ishmael leaves Queequeg in their room praying to his tiny wooden idol, Yojo. When he returns that evening, he finds the door locked. Queequeg does not answer his increasingly anxious knocks, and Ishmael, aided and abetted by Mrs. Hussey, begins to fear the worst. Queequeg has killed himself. “It's unfort'nate Stiggs done over again . . . ,” Mrs. Hussey wails. “God pity his poor mother!” In desperation, Ishmael shoulders open the door, only to find Queequeg still squatting trancelike before his wooden idol.

A similar drama was enacted every day in the Melville household during the composition of
Moby-Dick
. Locked in his room, Melville routinely ignored attempts by his family members to offer him some lunch. In the years to come, his very Mrs. Hussey–like mother feared that her son's commitment to writing was not good for his sanity, a concern Ishmael echoes soon after discovering Queequeg: “I began to grow vexed with him; it seemed so downright senseless and insane to be sitting there all day and half the night on his hams in a cold room, holding a piece of wood on his head.” These are sentiments to which the parent (or spouse) of any writer can relate.

T
ime passes, fashions come and go, and the past becomes its own hermetically sealed world. It's easy to laugh at those people under figurative glass, or, even worse, to revere them as exempt from the complexities of our own age. Baloney. Life is life, and the world Melville describes in
Moby-Dick
is as cutting-edge, confused, and
out-there
as anything we can dream up in our own time. Take, for example, the square-rigged, bluff-bowed whaleship.

Simple and cheap to build, it lasted for decades and could sail around the world without using a jot of carbon-based fuel. It was home to a crew of between twenty and thirty-five sailors who regularly pursued the largest game the world has ever known. If the whalemen were lucky enough to kill one of these creatures, the deck of the ship became a slippery slaughterhouse as the gigantic corpse was hacked into pieces for processing. With the firing up of the chimneylike tryworks, the ship was transformed into a refinery, and the greasy, foul-smelling whale blubber became oil. The sale of this yellowish fluid, stored in wooden casks and used to light the streets of major cities and lubricate the machines of the emerging Industrial Age, made the predominantly Quaker whaling merchants of Nantucket some of the richest men in America and the world.

The
Pequod,
the ship that Ishmael chooses for himself and Queequeg, is one of these remarkable, incredibly complex machines, but she is also something more. Just as Nantucket is largely a rhetorical construct, so is the
Pequod
not of this world. She is the mythic incarnation of America: a country blessed by God and by free enterprise that nonetheless embraces the barbarity it supposedly supplanted. The
Pequod
(named for the once-defeated Indian tribe that now owns a highly profitable casino in Connecticut—how Melville would have loved that turn of events!) is an old ship, and she wears her history visibly: “Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flag-stone in Canterbury Cathedral where Beckett bled. But to all these her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining to the wild business that for more than half a century she had followed.... She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to.... A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.”

On the
Pequod
's weather- and oil-stained deck, her two owners, the Quaker merchants Peleg and Bildad, sheltered in a wigwam made of whalebone, sign on crew members for as little money as possible. Like the United States, a nation devoted to freedom for all that also sanctioned slavery, these two Quaker whalemen—in particular, the pious Bildad—have found a way to accommodate two seemingly irreconcilable principles. “[T]hough a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he . . . spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore.” A “Quaker with a vengeance,” he also has no qualms about exploiting the whalemen under his employ. Bildad, Ishmael opines, “had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This world pays dividends.”

The compartmentalization of spiritual and worldly concerns is a temptation in every era. In Melville's day, it was most apparent with the issue of slavery, and Bildad, the Bible-reading Quaker whaleman, illustrates the truth of Frederick Douglass's observation that the most brutal slaveholders were always the most devout. “For a pious man,” Ishmael says, “especially for a Quaker, [Bildad] was certainly rather hardhearted, to say the least. He never used to swear, though, at his men, they said; but somehow he got an inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated hard work out of them.”

Melville's years on a whaleship gave him a firsthand appreciation for the backbreaking reality of physical labor. Politicians might speak patriotically about the principles of liberty and freedom, but it was repetitious, soul-crushing work—a form of bodily punishment to which most white Americans refused to submit—that was responsible for the country's prosperity. Once a whale was killed, it took an entire day to process it, a task only to be repeated when another whale was sighted. “Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing!” Ishmael laments. “Yet this is life. For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world's vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when—
There she blows!—
the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's old routine again.”

The crew of a typical whaleship was made up of men from all over the world. In addition to white sailors from America and Europe, there were Native Americans, African Americans, Azoreans, Cape Verdeans, and South Sea Islanders. The harpooneers aboard the
Pequod
include Queequeg, from the Polynesian island of Kokovoko (“It is not down in any map,” Ishmael tells us; “true places never are”); Daggoo, the “imperial negro” from Africa; Tashtego, a Wampanoag from Martha's Vineyard; and Fedallah, the mysterious fire worshipper dressed in a Chinese-style jacket. What distinguishes the thirty crew members of the
Pequod,
Ishmael notes, is that almost all of them, including the officers, many of whom hail from Nantucket, are islanders, what he calls “
Isolatoes
. . . each
Isolato
living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel . . .”

This demographic diversity was not typical of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, when to be an American was to be white and, if not already rich, on the way to wealth as the nation proudly took its place as a global power. A century and a half later, we have a very different perspective on the role of other peoples and cultures in America's rise. As Ishmael notes, the white American “liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying the muscles.” Because of his exposure to these various peoples aboard a whaleship, Melville was one of the few authors of his time to have firsthand experience with where the future lay for America in a demographic sense, and his portrayal of working people is never stereotypical or condescending.

Melville was well aware of the great gift he had been given when he shipped out on a whaler. His contemporaries didn't recognize it, but he knew that his experiences in the Pacific had better served his artistic purposes than any education he might have received at a traditional university. Whatever future reputation he might enjoy would depend on his exposure to whaling: “[I]f hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone,” Ishmael tells us, “if, at my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”