Moby-Dick Week #17: “followed by the joy-childlessness of all hell’s despair”

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This Wednesday we will be discussing Chapters CII – CVII, comprising ‘A Bower in the Arsacides’ (inside a mossy skeleton), ‘Measurement of the Whale’s Skeleton’ (ribs and other bits), ‘The Fossil Whale’ (dinosaurs vs. thesaurus), ‘Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?’ (on the threat of extinction), ‘Ahab’s Leg’ (shame and the sadness of the gods), and ‘The Carpenter’ (the human Swiss-army knife, and the best character-intro ever).

We’re getting into the final hundred pages now, though by no means the final stretch quite yet. Ishmael begins this week by recounting a period of repose in Tranque, with the King of Tranquo, who kept a whale skeleton as a sort of temple for lectures. Ishmael is aware that we may well ask “How is it, that you, a mere oarsman in the fishery, pretend to know aught about the subterranean parts of the whale?”, but he has literally been inside one, as indeed have others who, in the less cannibal parts of the world, also visited bones like those of Sir Clifford (subject of a recent restoration effort). The skeleton alone does not give us a true sense of the whale’s fins, vastness, and overall majesty, however, and so it takes someone like Ishmael to interpret the living “text” of the whale for us.

“I here saw but a few disordered joints; and in place of the weighty and majestic, but boneless flukes, an utter blank!”

On that note, we discover, 500 pages into the novel, that Ishmael himself had the whale’s measurements tattooed on his own body so he wouldn’t forget them, and here too there is this curious blend of book and subject, body and text, written and read, that feels like the final pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude more than anything written in the nineteenth century. Ishmael is self-conscious about the extraordinary task of “manhandl[ing] this leviathan”: he needs big words to describe them, a volcano for an inkstand, and a bigger brain. As he puts it:

in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

To think about the whale requires you to think about deep space and deep time, and the discovery of what we would come to call dinosaurs, these vast skeletons in the ancient layers of the earth, again sets Melville at this fascinating moment in history, when a Biblical way of thinking about the world was getting married to a more scientific, perhaps even vaster view. Deep-time thinking perhaps absolves us of the cruelty we have done to whales, who in the long term will outlast us, though Ishmael’s assumption that the whale can always escape to the poles, or that it has the ocean to hide in, feels eerily outdated.

Finally we return to Ahab, whose leg has failed him: another point in the pattern of woe that stems from the gods themselves, who “are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers”. The ship re-awakens after the work of the whale to get the captain fixed, and the grand old carpenter, a sort of human swiss-army knife, is brought, almost literally, to life for the purpose. Onward.

Phrases of the Week:

“how vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try”

“I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence”

Moby-Dick Week #16: “this man’s blood—bring the thermometer!—it’s at the boiling point!”

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This week we will be discussing Chapters XCVI – CI, comprising ‘The Try-Works’ (a great lamp), ‘The Lamp’ (pure oil), ‘Stowing Down and Clearing Up’ (hard labour), ‘The Doubloon’ (interpretations of the coin), ‘Leg and Arm: The Pequod, of Nantucket, Meets the Samuel Enderby of London’ (Ahab meets some Brits), ‘The Decanter’ (British appetites). Some really funny chapters this week, even if there’s still absolutely no plot happening, ha.

The Pequod is transformed into a giant lamp in the opening chapter this week, with its “brick-kiln” burning away on board and the men standing around like “chiselled muteness[es]” in “some illuminated shrine of canonized kings.” The “Greek fire” they carry, however, only really serves to illuminate the utter darkness around them. Like some latter-day Milton, Melville describes “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.” Amazing.

Ishmael provides a brief note on the clean-up after all the “slaughte[r] in the valleys of the deep,” before we see the deck scrubbed of all the white that remains from the burning of the whale. This chapter ends with a very odd paragraph indeed regarding the metempsychosis of Pythagoras, with whom Ishmael apparently once sailed. (An allusion to Pythagoras’s vegetarianism? To cult leaders in general?)

‘The Dubloon’ is great fun. Recalling the earlier chapters on Queequeg’s tattoos and the painting back in the Spouter’s Inn, we run here through the crew’s various interpretations of the coin (of South American design, being a kind of grail and an el dorado and a “navel,” umbillically binding, all in one?) that Ahab has promised to the man who sights the white whale. “The firm tower, that is Ahab; the volcano, that is Ahab; the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab.” Others are more circumspect in their readings, and none so much as Pip, whose mind is completely broken after last week. Recalling (or, rather, anticipating) Mervyn Peake’s ‘Reveries’ chapter in Titus Groan, Pip’s inner speech reads a little like the mad twins and a lot like Sepulchrave after his mind is broken:

‘And I, you, and he; and we, ye, and they, are all bats; and I’m a crow, especially when I stand a’top of this pine tree here. Caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! caw! Ain’t I a crow? And where’s the scare-crow? There he stands; two bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more poked into the sleeves of an old jacket.’

I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look.

To finish off we have another gam, this time with the Samuel Enderby of London. The English Captain is presented as an intriguing double to Ahab: a Captain who seems to quite like his crew (he keeps stopping his story to introduce more of them, much to Ahab’s chagrin), he also lost a limb to Moby Dick and frankly has no desire to ever run into him again. Perhaps it’s just a British thing. In ‘The Decanter,’ after all, we learn that the Brits like their home comforts, even while away: faced with a long list, it takes Ishmael “three days to the studious digesting of all this beer, beef, and bread,” though without an actual crumb for himself!

Phrases of the Week:

“And I’m thinking Moby Dick doesn’t bite so much as he swallows.”

“a jolly ship; of good fare and plenty; fine flip and strong”

Moby-Dick Week #15: “the admirable brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries”

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For next Wednesday we will be reading Chapters LXXXIX – XCIII, comprising ‘Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish’ (laws of salvage), ‘Heads or Tails’ (laws of possession), ‘The Pequod Meets the Rose-Bud’ (mistranslation), ‘Ambergris’ (perfume), ‘The Castaway’ (poor Pip), ‘A Squeeze of the Hand’ (squeeze, squeeze…), ‘The Cassock’ (the whale’s member).

Ishmael casts his cetologist’s eye towards the law this week, with an account of the rules around salvage. His theory of fast-fish and loose-fish applies to everything under the sun, from women (claimed by men), slaves (claimed, most obviously here, by Americans), America itself (claimed by Columbus), and even—and most pleasingly indeed—the reader, who if they aren’t held fast will find another boat to cling to.

A short chapter on the division of whales between kings and queens before we meet the Rose-Bud, a French ship which has fastened itself to a decaying whale. Stubb, who is growing ever more conniving, convinces the French captain (in a scene of amusing mistranslations) that there is nothing of value to be had here, so that he can get his own hands on the ambergris lurking within, the perfumed substance inside the plagued oyster.

But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?

Though we were introduced to the Pequod’s crew early on they have been largely absent thus far. When they appear it’s usually a bad sign that something terrible is about to happen to them. So it goes with Pip, who is introduced in (somewhat) loving terms—“this little black was brilliant, for even blackness has its brilliancy”—before a swipe with a whale’s tail hurls him into the water. Stubb has to let loose a fast-fish to recover Pip, who he reprimands for “leap[ing]” from the boat, and warns him that they will not rescue him again, for coldly mercenary reasons: “We can’t afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama.” Another whale, another leap, and Stubb leaves Pip this time to die. Pip is rescued a second time by a happy chance, but whether because of the betrayal of the crew or the sheer immensity of the ocean, his mind is destroyed by the experience that, in Melville’s full-flow, anticipates the best of Lovecraft:

carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs.

If ambergris is the perfume in the plague and Pip is like “some crown-jewel stolen from the King of Hell,” then Pip’s chapter is similarly surrounded: a dramatic moment of heights as deep as its depths before he is immediately, seemingly, forgotten. ‘A Squeeze of the Hand,’ just after, is hilariously sensual and homoerotic, as Ishmael loses himself in all “that inexpressible sperm,” while ‘The Cassock’ makes light of the whale’s own member, fashioned by a worshipful butcher into the “canonicals of his calling.” Poor Pip, indeed.

Phrases of the Week:

“nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other”

“And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?”

Moby-Dick Week #14: “there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men”

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For next Wednesday we will be reading Chapters LXXXV – LXXXVIII, comprising ‘The Fountain’ (a whale’s breath), ‘The Tail’ (kittens of the sea), ‘The Grand Armada’ (whale-herds in Asia), ‘Schools and Schoolmasters’ (like they do on the discovery channel).

The fact that Ishmael still has more of the whale to catalogue really goes some way to demonstrating its enormity. Whether or not the whale’s spiracle spouts water or vapour is the definitional problem of the day, not least because you cannot get close enough to the spout to see it: “you might almost stand in it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely.” Lung-ed like us, a sort of “camel” of the sea, Ishamel concludes (without very much proof, he is painfully aware), that the whale’s vapor must be interpreted as the steam of the its own deep thoughts, “glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon” them. This theme extends into ‘The Tail,’ which moves from the dense fibres of the thing itself to reflections on different genuflections, such as those of the elephants of antiquity who were said to “hail the morning with their trunks uplifted in the profoundest silence.” The more Ishmael considers it, however, the more he “deplores” his “inability to express it.” But maybe the unsayability is the point.

‘The Grand Armada’ sees the Pequod arrive in Asia through a great gate formed of a “vast rampart of islands”: a wonderful image. We get some glimpses here of other ships sailing into the “all-grasp[ed]” eastern world, but a whaling ship stops at no harbours. Essentially empty of any goods except those it is going for, the Pequod, excepting the lake of drinking water carried on board (the logistics of which are hard to fathom), constitutes a wide open mouth. There is some slippage in the chapter title, however, and it seems more readily to apply to the vast herds of whales that explore these waters. Ishmael compares these herds, rather amusingly in ‘Schools and Schoolmasters,’ to roving bands of “pugnacious” Lotharios with all the ocean for their beds. The comparison of these whales to the “lion-maned buffaloes of the West” forebodes a familiar natural holocaust, however, and the emphasis on the “women and children of this routed host” twist the knife a little harder.

As always, Ishmael’s pleasure in the hunt sits very uncomfortably with his tender descriptions of these young whales who, exactly like human infants, “while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence.” The emphasis on blood and milk and the umbilical cord here, the grim implication underlying Ishmael’s cross-section of an unborn whale curled in its mother’s womb, “all ready for the final spring”… could there be any adequate excuse for this, even 630 pages of excuse for this, or will the justification always end up betraying itself?

Phrases of the Week:

“a dense webbed bed of welded sinews”

“tumbling round the world at such a reckless, rollicking rate”

Moby-Dick Week #13: “I say, pull like god-dam”

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For next Wednesday we will be reading Chapters LXXIX – LXXXIV, comprising ‘The Praire [sic?]’ (whale phrenology), ‘The Nut’ (a handful of brain), ‘The Pequod Meets the Virgin’ (Derick and a very old whale), ‘The Honor and Glory of Whaling’ (knights and dragons), ‘Jonah Historically Regarded’ (extra exegesis), ‘Pitchpoling’ (Stubb kills another).

We are starting to see the shape of the novel’s meander. Ahab has been absent for some time, the Fedallah has gone missing, and the plot feels somewhat becalmed. And yet, as Ishmael reminded us many chapters ago, sitting up there with the ocean around you there is still so much to think about, and if the novel’s purpose is to capture a whale, in prose if not in realer terms, Ishmael is always moving forward on that front at least.

“I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can.”

Ishmael’s effort to apply human phrenology to the whale falls somewhat short when the latter lacks basic beginner features like a nose, but then the whale does have qualities all of its own as well: “Few are the foreheads,” notes Ishmael, “which like Shakespeare’s or Melancthon’s rise so high.” The chapter title ‘Praire’ here, which is spelled ‘Prairie’ in some of our copies, seems to allude either to the vast planes of such foreheads, or in French to the ‘warty venus‘ clam, with some sealed away life within. Recalling Douglas Adams’s wonderful line about the intelligence of other species:

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

Melville notes that though the whale may never have “written a book, spoken a speech,” his “great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it.” Unlike Ishmael!

These pages extend last week’s ruminations on the non-Euclidian, wholly inaccessible intelligence of the whale, like some old wild god that lingers. The “mere handful of this monster’s brain” that is to be found inside the enormous skull leads Ishmael to theorise that the creature’s cognitive capacities must extend beyond it, down (he supposes) into the enormous spine.

From phrenology we have a dash of plot when the Pequod meets the virginal (which is to say oil-less) Dutch ship The Virgin, manned by Derick who is ever so green. When Derick chases a particularly old and rather moss-ridden whale–its large body sick in a large way, its cones of vision turned to protrubing husks over old blind eyes, its body already riven with the stone lances thrown by some ancient natives–the Pequod joins the chase to prove its own mettle, and Derick as a bit of a dolt. Ishmael calls Starburck “humane” during this rather pointless hunt, but the tongue is in the cheek: the creature is wholly pitiable.

The plot over, we return to the work of the sub-sub when Ishmael turns to his case that whalers are but the last in the line of heroic, lettered knights, including “Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there’s a member-roll for you!” Yet even here the heroism is embittered, somewhat, by Ishmael’s wistful remembrance of that golden age, “when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and not to fill men’s lampfeeders.” In the final chapter this week, ‘Pitchpoling,’ the way Stubb taps a new whale’s body to make “from that live punch-bowl” a drink of blood leaves a bitter taste indeed.

Phrases of the Week:

“many are the Dericks, my friend”

“causing the waters behind him to upbubble”

Moby-Dick Week #12: “so out of all proportion is it to the magnitude of the head”

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For next Wednesday we will be reading Chapters LXXIII to LXXVIII, comprising ‘The Monkey-Rope’ (on being tied to Queequeg), ‘Stubb and Flask Kill a Right-Whale, and then Have a Talk Over Him’ (two heads), ‘The Sperm Whale’s Head–Contrasted View’ (whale cognition), ‘The Right Whale’s Head–Contrasted View’ (inside the mouth), ‘The Battering-Ram’ (boneless toughness), ‘The Great Heidelburgh Tun’ (house of the spermaceti), ‘Cistern and Buckets’ (falling in).

Ishmael is always most fun in the least exciting chapters. The hunt is over, the killing is done, and this week we get chapter after chapter on “practical cetology,” and yet this goes hand in hand with some curiously metafictional moments. When it comes to butchery, writes Ishmael, “everything has to be done everywhere. It is much the same with him who endeavors the description of the scene.” Our narrator is bound to the linearity of narrative, and so he must let the whale “continue hanging there” while he describes something else, while the whale’s ear is so miniscule “you can hardly insert a quill in it,” despite Ishmael’s best efforts. The human mind is flat: even the infinite happens one bit at a time.

This week’s chapters follow two main threads. On the one hand we have Ishmael wedded to Queequeg by a rope—Stubb’s clever idea, since putting both men in danger incentivises extra care on the part of the one above—as the savage mines the body of the whale for its resources. The whale is so enormous it is more like a place than a creature: its mouth a cave of teeth like the stumps of oaks, its body an enormous Heidelburgh’s Tun of spermaceti to be tapped. On the other hand we have the other head: after capturing a right whale (another wrong whale, since it’s hardly a white whale) to satisfy an old sailor’s tale that no ship with two heads can be sunk, the Pequod ends up looking like a mule bestridden with two saddlebags. When the two threads meet and Tashtego plunges into the whale’s body like a bucket of oil, Queequeg the Capable rescues him by the hair of head (recalling our introduction to him as the seller of shrunken heads).

Between one head and another (as between Kant and Locke, as Ishmael puts it), there is much philosophising, and perhaps the most thrilling part of these pages is the curious encounter Ishmael describes between himself and the animal, an other intelligence, hiding somewhere once inside the thick mass of the whale’s head. Not unlike Derrida, who after his famous encounter with a cat wrote that the history of philosophy is sound and profound but written by people who have never encountered an animal, Melville also describes the different schools of philosophy as somewhat bereft of the “clear Truth” which is ”a thing for salamander giants only to encounter.” Ishmael’s inability to define a whale’s ‘front’ because of the inhuman arrangement of its eyes betrays his own anthropocentrism, and yet he is generous in his account of what a whale must see:

How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man’s, that he can at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he can, then is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid.

There is something wholly Lovecraftian in the non-Euclidian intelligence of this other creature, this “mighty monster” with the crown of crabs.

“I know not that it has been defined before.”

Last week we discussed Melville’s luck to live before the modernisation of whaling. This week he seems to stand even more profoundly between two worlds. It is the lurch into modernity that brings him face to face with the monsters of the deep, and yet he has not yet lurched so far that their majesty is completely lost. More modern, and he might know too much; more ancient, and he might know too little. Between those states the whales are still kings and gods, which makes their butchery of sublime creatures all the more striking, all the more terrible. As Ishmael concludes this section, had Tashtego died inside the “very whitest and daintiest of fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale,” it would have been a “very precious perishing.” There is, in this, a bit of Icarus, Narcissus, and the Siren all in one: to reach the very thing you reached for, to be swallowed by the very thing you are obsessed with, is that not what we really want?

Lastly, we enjoyed Stubb’s horrified description of Aunt Charity’s ginger drink, which recalls those great lines from ‘Bartleby,’ on which we can’t help but end:

He lives, then, on ginger-nuts, thought I; never eats a dinner, properly speaking; he must be a vegetarian then; but no; he never eats even vegetables, he eats nothing but ginger-nuts. My mind then ran on in reveries concerning the probable effects upon the human constitution of living entirely on ginger-nuts. Ginger-nuts are so called because they contain ginger as one of their peculiar constituents, and the final flavoring one. Now what was ginger? A hot, spicy thing. Was Bartleby hot and spicy? Not at all. Ginger, then, had no effect upon Bartleby. Probably he preferred it should have none.

Phrases of the Week:

“these tufts impart a rather brigandish expression”

“Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, being all accomplished dentists, are set to drawing teeth”

Moby-Dick Week #11: “Whereupon, this accomplished swordsman, […] once more makes a scientific dash at the mass”

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For next Wednesday we are reading Chapters LXIV to LXXII, comprising ‘Stubb’s Supper’ (whale meat), ‘The Whale as a Dish’ (et tu, brute?), ‘The Shark Massacre’ (devilish sharks), ‘Cutting In’ (peeling the whale), ‘The Blanket’ (thick skin), ‘The Funeral’ (cannibal guilt), ‘The Sphynx’ (O beheaded head!), and ‘The Jeroboam’s Story’ (the angel Gabriel). Lots and lots to talk about. See you soon.

We are setting sail again.

Ishmael welcomes us back with a lovely, excessive description of “we eighteen men with our thirty-sex arms, and our hundred and eighty thumbs and fingers,” all slowly toiling at the busy work of butchering the body of a whale. Ahab is grumpy that this isn’t the whale he wanted, of course, but it is whale enough: lashed to the ship the ship doubles in size, and the weight of the Pequod + the men aboard + the rhythm they make when they rock the thing works the whale like a fruit inside a spiralizer, the skin peeling off like the rind.

Some among us read a deeply vegetarian sentiment in chapters like ‘The Whale As a Dish,’ which sees in a man’s act of “feed[ing] upon the creature that feeds his lamp” something quite grotesque, an insult to injury. Ishmael has been setting his Christian self against the cannibal throughout, yet as he puts it here: “Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal?” Is all the butchery then just some more of nature red in tooth and claw? Or should humans try to rise above the “horrible vultureism of earth!”?

Others argue that with this chapter Ishmael is once again defending the so-called butchery of the whalers to his land-bound readers, who have no right to denigrate their ugly art when they do plenty of butchering themselves. Indeed, perhaps it would be more of an insult to injury not to make sure of all the materials the whale provides. Considering what Joe Roman calls the division between old and modern whaling around 1860 (9 years after Moby-Dick‘s publication), which was marked by the invention of harpoons with fragmentation bombs on their tips, Melville’s man-powered industry seems almost civilised by comparison. Ishmael couldn’t have known this of course, though perhaps he might catch glimpses of extinction in the eyes of Ahab, the same way he sees a distinctly “et tu Brute” expression in the eye of the poor beheaded whale. At least one intelligence is hurting here…

Unlike the devilish, ‘ingin’ sharks who feast on the whale’s corpse with no decorum whatsoever, the human feast is measured and precise. Stubb casts aspersions on the cook Fleece for not knowing how to cook whale meat properly (show it to a coal, he says: a sort of sashimi), which leads Fleece to wish that fortunes might be reversed and the whale will eat Stubb instead. Ishmael, meanwhile, takes his own sort of “scientific dash at the mass.” The whale’s skin poses a particular problem for the anatomist. It is rather like defining Pluto: the thin film around the blubber is too thin to be skin, but the blubber is too think. The whale’s neck presents a similar problem, since where on earth do you behead it? Using flakes of the dried outer layer of the whale as a bookmark in his books about whale’s layers, Ishmael puzzles over the right words.

there, that blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod’s waist like the giant Holofernes’s from the girdle of Judith

Ahab puzzles too, but he always has the right thing to say. With his spade plunged into the head of the ‘sphynx,’ he eyes the eye of the monster whose head

though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. […] O head! thou has seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not on syllable is thine!

This speech is very Tolkien (again), very Biblical, and sits in interesting anticipation of the next chapter, ‘The Jeroboam’s Story,’ in which a man believing himself to be the angel Gabriel (not unlike Gibreel in The Satanic Verses) finds that the world rewards him for his faith. The Captain of the Jeroboam doubts the angel’s gift and would have him overboard, but because the crew believes in Gibreel, believing makes it true: the Captain cannot risk hurting the angel or the wrath of God might manifest. Intriguingly, and in an echo of the Town-Ho’s story (from which the angel first emerged), Moby Dick again embodies a kind of narrative logic here, arriving at just the right moment to prove the prophet true and damn those who doubted him. Would Ahab be wise to listen to his warnings, we wonder.

Phrases of the Week:

“Mingling their mumblings with his own mastications”

“Speak, thou vast and venerable head”

Moby-Dick Week #10: “keep cool, keep cool—cucumbers is the word”

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It’s our final meeting of 2024 next week and we’ll be discussing Chapters LV – LXIII. These comprise ‘Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales’ (what the painters get wrong), ‘Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes’ (more ekphrasis), ‘Of Whales in Paint; In Teeth; In Wood; In Sheet-Iron; In Stone; In Mountains; In Stars’ (yet more), ‘Brit’ (whale food), ‘Squid’ (white imposter), ‘The Line’ (sharp ropes), ‘Stubb Kills a Whale’ (murder on the high seas), ‘The Dart’ (bad odds), and ‘The Crotch’ (odds).

Ishmael is back in Cetologist mode this week with a detailed picture of the catalogue of pictures that have been painted by others of whales. “It is time to set the world right in this matter,” he tells us, “by proving such pictures of the whale all wrong.” From Hindoo sculpture to Frederick Cuvier’s Natural History of Whales to the “sign-painters’ whales seen in the streets hanging over the shops of oil-dealers” with their “Richard III whales” decked in “dromedary humps,” none is reliable, and the whale is living two lives: one in the world and one on the wall of Plato’s cave, deformed and “floundering in seas of blood and blue paint.”

And in a sea of bad sculpture as well. Whales have been wrong ‘In Teeth; In Wood; In Sheet-Iron; In Stone’ and so on, and all these artists have it wrong because they have only ever seen the whale in death. Who seeing “Jeremy Bentham’s skeleton” could guess his philosophy from the bones? Ironically it is only those who venture out to kill the whale who see it living; Ishmael is, therefore, an authority, and we have to trust his words instead. It is difficult to put oneself in the mind of someone who depends on words and books to envision the enormity and mystery of the whale, when we can google the footage: our reliable catalogues feel like a loss, somewhat, of that particular kind of wonder, but the novel does make us feel that loss at least.

Yea, foolish mortals. Noah’s flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.

In ‘Brit’ we see the whales as still and dead as rocks while they feast on tiny fish, and in ‘Squid’ we see what Ishmael thinks is a living squid but one which may well be dead (our resident expert tell us that squid are only white when they die, and Starbuck does indeed call it a “white ghost”). Ishmael calls the whale’s watery feast the “cannibalism of the sea,” as if all the creatures in the sea were one kind of creature, and so to eat is to eat oneself. (Yet if men and animals share their skeletons too, is any kind of eating a kind of cannibalism?). The description of the hunt in ‘Stubb Kills a Whale’ is certainly thoroughly gruesome, as the iconic spout of water turns to “gush after gush of clotted red gore” until finally the heart of the “poor whale” bursts.

Around this bloody moment, in ‘The Line,’ ‘The Dart,’ and ‘The Crotch,’ we learn about the cat’s cradle of ropes that encircles the whale-hunters when they venture out in their little boats. Not unlike the M.A.D. logic of Frank Herbert’s lasguns–

if a lasgun beam hit a Holtzman field, it would result in sub-atomic fusion and a nuclear explosion. The center of this blast was determined by random chance; sometimes it would originate within the shield, sometimes within the laser weapon, sometimes both.

–throwing harpoons is “like holding an enemy’s sharp two-edged sword by the blade”: a risk if they hit and join themselves to the whale, and a risk if they miss and they leave a rope dangling to be caught in some teeth below. In his usual universalising way, Ishmael recognises that “All men live enveloped in whale-lines […] but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realise the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.”

We leave Stubb standing, “thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.” We’ll see what they do with it in 2025.

Phrases of the Week:

“His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood”

“the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm”

Moby-Dick Week #9: “For by a mysterious fatality, Heaven itself seemed to step in”

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In the spirit of ‘having a gam,’ this week we will read Chapters LI – LIV, comprising ‘The Spirit-Spout’ (a ghostly whale), ‘The Albatross’ (a spectral ship), ‘The Gam’ (when ships meet), and ‘The Town-Ho’s Story’ (nested mutinies). I think the last chapter might be the longest sustained piece of narrative in the novel so far: I really enjoyed it.

Lovely silvery sibilance starts ‘The Spirit-Spout,’ as Melville describes the silent, “silvery jet” of a whale spout sprouting against the serene waves with “their soft, suffusing seethings.” Moby Dick, who has seemed so very physical so far, takes on a spectral aspect here: a wet white mirage on the horizon which the Pequod can’t catch up to, and which drives the ship quite insane as it tries, “gor[ing] the dark waves in her madness.” We liked the description at the end of the chapter (and the always-fun footnote) about the “tell-tale,” an object that “swing[s] from a beam in the ceiling” like an indoor weather-vane, informing the sailor where the ship is tilted. It is quite telling, however, that Ahab is looking at the tell-tale with “closed eyes,” as if he’s trusting some other, inner gyroscope.

‘The Albatross’ is not a bird as you might expect if you know your Coleridge, but a boat, wizened by four years of travel. Ahab’s shouted question about the “White Whale” is enough to make the other Captain drop his trumpet (another great of way of building up the monster in the reader’s mind), and as a result no gams happen here: the Pequod is off, “bound round the world,” and “all future letters” should be addressed there. For the mailman this is easier task, perhaps, than if the world were “an endless plain,” but as Ishmael puts it, a globe is curtailed, an encircled infinity, which closes in on itself to make “barren mazes” in which demon whales can hide and whalers lose themselves.

“Noah Webster’s ark” (a lovely way to conceptualise a dictionary) may not contain the title of the next chapter, but a ‘Gam,’ Ishmael informs us, is a tête-à-tête between ships. These ship-to-ships are quite competitive, it seems, and informed by the same—for lack of a better phrase—‘gay panic’ that Ishmael exhibits here: the Yankees think themselves superior to the English because they kill more whales in a day than the English do in ten years; whalers think themselves superior to the ‘brace of dandies’ one finds on merchant ships; while merchants think their profession superior to the butchers’ work of whalers. This may be our first hint, here, as to why Ishmael feels whaling needs such an apology. Like butchers throughout history, the population at large benefits from the end-product but doesn’t want to think too hard about the process.

“they swore they were ready for that, or for any other mad thing”

Finally we come to “The Town-Ho’s Story,” a long nested narrative (mumbled in Tashtego’s sleep; recounted by Ishmael to companions at Lima; that recounting recounted here) about the mutinous conflict between first mate Radney and his superior inferior Steelkilt. A few things we really liked here. One is the claustrophobia that comes with politics on a ship at sea, hardly helped by the leaks the ship is springing: the thought of constantly having to pump out water to keep the ship afloat (as if the ship were wounded or bleeding internally) is deeply unnerving. Two is the arc of justice that Melville describes here. Steelkilt’s transgression against his superior is laid out in such a way that it seems fairly justified (‘touch me again and I’ll kill you’), and the tanglings of the plot from this point on—a mutiny against the captain who wants to do ‘justice’; the mutiny amongst the mutineers to avoid a fight to the death—build logically towards a dramatic, tragic ending. Just when Steelkilt is about to revenge himself upon Radney, however, fate, in the shape of Moby Dick, intervenes. As if the whale itself were God, or God’s hand, or at least a creature with an appreciation of narrative, he arrives just on time to save Steelkilt from the horror not of being murdered, but of murdering. Ishmael’s own hand is present here (as he reminds us when he nests his story), both in the structuring of the narrative, the Christlike association he makes when the Captain hangs Steelkilt like “three quarters of meat” between two “crucified thieves,” and in his final declaration, hand on holy book, that all of this is true. He’s just so convincing…

Phrases of the Week:

“through a blinding foam that blent two whitenesses together”

“where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies”

Moby-Dick Week #8: “‘Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often happen?'”

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For next week we’re reading Chapters XLV – L, comprising ‘The Affidavit’ (celebrity whales), ‘Surmises’ (keeping Starbuck on board), ‘The Mat-Maker’ (Ishmael and Queequeg at the loom), ‘The First Lowering’ (we’re going on a whale hunt), ‘The Hyena’ (health and safety), and ‘Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah’ (stowaways!).

‘The Affidavit’ puts the seal on last week’s chapters, with a final defence of Ishmael’s claim that whales are indeed malicious and vengeful killers. Having spent so long trying to justify this point, Ishmael becomes somewhat self-conscious and the novel slips into metafiction. To start, Ishmael acknowledges that “what there may be of a narrative in this book” has been somewhat sidelined. Then he quotes the story of the Essex-ship tragedy, showing his working in a way that novelists aren’t supposed to do. And finally he insists that for the reader to interpret “Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory” would be a grave mistake. This is quite an odd note, given how much Ishmael himself has been allegorising him—the figure of whiteness, the face of the horrors of the sea, and so on—but as Tolkien would soon so famously put it:

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

Moby Dick, Ishmael insists, is real, but what he means, and what Moby-Dick means, we are perhaps free to decide.

We then shift into a number of chapters which set up and describe the book’s first hunt. ‘Surmises’ concerns Ahab’s control of the crew, which seems quite precarious: he has Starbuck by a magnet for now, and the others by the promise of whaling in the interrum. Again Ishmael slips into the metafictional when he says that “the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the obscure background,” and the crew occupied by “temporary interests and employments [which] intervene and hold them healthily suspended for the final dash.” This seems to precisely describe the role of the reader, who though they now know the premise and the mission, is going to be on hold for a while in waiting. (So not so free, maybe, after all).

A nice glimpse of Ishmael and Queequeg weaving together in ‘The Mat-Maker,’ before the first whale is sighted. The boats are lowered in ‘The First Lowering’ and what follows is wild and wonderfully described. Stubb roars sweet nothings (“The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin rapscallions […] Why in the name of gudgeons and gingercakes don’t ye pull?”) to get his men to row; Flask stands tall on Daggoo (on whom “[he] seemed a snow-flake”); and Starbuck drives Ishmael and the others through “the watery glens and hollows”–a fantastic visual–and over the “knife-like edge[s]” of the roiling sea. Underpinning these chapters is the mystery–hardly resolved here–of the stowaways, who turn out to be “tiger yellow creatures” from the Orient, under the command of a “hair-turbaned Fedallah” who Ahab stowed aboard in secret. Where our cannibals and savages have been Othered but still American in their way, here these men are truly Other, belonging to “those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries” far to the East (or perhaps the very very West). Melville has been playing with the line between civilised and cannibal throughout the novel so far, and advanced civilisations like Japan, which Marco Polo called, in the thirteenth century, the jewel at the edge of the world, trouble that distinction.

“‘There she blows! there! there! there!’”

The line between Ishmael’s life and death is also troubled by the disastrous results of the hunt, which sees him plunged into the water. Luckily Ishmael is rescued in the next chapter, and though he has come to the grim realisation that Starbuck’s famed sense of care and prudence should, by the standards of a non-whaler, be pretty akin to madness, he learns to laugh like ‘The Hyena’ in the face of death, as “an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints.” Not, however, before he finalises his will.

Phrases of the Week:

“with tornado brow, and eyes of red murder, and foam-glued lips”

“tossed helter-skelter into the white curdling cream of the squall”