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Trocchi at 100: Morning Session

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After last night’s screening of Young Adam (David Mackenzie, 2003) at the Glasgow Film Theatre, the Alexander Trocchi at 100 Symposium regrouped this morning for its opening panel.

Kicking off the proceedings was Calum Barnes with his paper ‘“Seizing the Grids of Expression”: On Trocchi’s Failed Aesthetics of Revolt’, followed by Jim Pennington with ‘Alexander Trocchi – Making an Icon of Himself’.

Provoking some excellent discussion, these two papers then set the stage for the closing paper of panel 1, James Riley’s ‘Destroy All Traces: Young Adam and the Writing of Erasure’.


Calum Barnes is a writer and bookseller based in Edinburgh. His writing has appeared in Tribune, The Quietus and 3:AM Magazine.

Jim Pennington is a printer, publisher and independent scholar/artist, specialising in the works of William Burroughs, counter-culture, biblio-arcana and the image interventions carried out by Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell. In 1970, aged 23, he founded the small press, Aloes Books, with poet/artists Allen Fisher and Dick Miller, publishing New British poetry and American fiction.

James Riley is Muriel Braddock College Associate Professor in English Literature at Girton College, University of Cambridge. He is author of The Bad Trip (2019) and Well Beings (2024) and is the editor of several volumes on 1960s fiction and the work of Trocchi and is currently preparing a study of William Burroughs and the tape recorder.

Stay tuned for more!

Moby-Dick Readthrough (2024-2025)

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Welcome to the contents page of our 2024-2025 Moby-Dick readthrough! Below you’ll find the links to each of our weekly reports. We hope you enjoy the novel along with us.

Moby-Dick Week #1: “the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open” [Etymology and Extracts, and I-III]

In which we discuss the cover, the title, the Etymology, the Extracts, ‘Loomings,’ ‘The Carpet-Bag,’ and ‘The Spouter-Inn.’

Moby-Dick Week #2: “a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity” [IV – XI]

Hello sailors. For next week we will read Chapters IV – XI, comprising ‘The Counterpane’ (Queequeg cuddles Ishmael), ‘Breakfast’ (Queequeg eats), ‘The Street’ (a trip around New Bedford), ‘The Chapel’ (a wannabe boat), ‘The Pulpit’ (where we meet Father Mapple), ‘The Sermon’ (the life and times of Jonah), ‘A Bosom Friend’ (just friends?), and ‘Nightgown’ (or something more?).

Moby-Dick Week #3: “and side by side the world-wandering whale ships lay silent and safely moored” [XII – XVI]

Hello Nantucketers. This week we will read Chapters XII – XVI, comprising ‘Biographical’ (Queequeg’s princely history), ‘Wheelbarrow’ (Queequeg earns a crew’s respect), ‘Nantucket’ (a mere “elbow of sand”), ‘Chowder’ (a world of cod), and ‘The Ship’ (in which we meet the Pequod and her captains!).

Moby-Dick Week #4: “At last the anchor was up, the sails were set, and off we glided” [XVII – XXV]

Hello oysters. This week we’ll be reading chapters XVII – XXV, comprising ‘The Ramadan’ (Queequeg quiet as a doorknob), ‘His Mark’ (Queequeg the Hedgehog), ‘The Prophet’ (tales of Ahab), ‘All Astir’ (the Pequod is prepared), ‘Going Abroad’ (the hunt for a good seat), ‘Merry Christmas’ (setting sail!), ‘The Lee Shore’ (Bulkington redux), ‘The Advocate’ (an apology for whaling), and ‘Postscript’ (oily kings).

Moby-Dick Week #5: “soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harborless immensities” [XXVI – XXXII]

Hello cetologists. This week we’ll be reading chapters XXVI – XXXII, comprising ‘Knights and Squires’ (meeting the crew), ‘Knights and Squires’ (meeting more crew), ‘Ahab’ (a man and his leg), ‘Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb’ (dreams of sleep), ‘The Pipe’ (hot water), ‘Queen Mab’ (nursing a bruise), and ‘Cetology’ (a concept of an idea).

Moby-Dick Week #6: “the chick that’s in him pecks the shell” [XXXIII – XL]

Chapters XXXIII – XL this week, which comprise ‘The Specksynder’ (a guide to leadership), ‘The Cabin-Table’ (social czarship), ‘The Mast-Head’ (the high-minded), and five dramatic scenes: ‘The Quarter-Deck’ (introducing Moby Dick), ‘Sunset’ (madness maddened), ‘Dusk’ (Starbuck bucked), ‘First Night-Watch’ (Stubb’s laughter), and ‘Midnight, Forecastle’ (all the world’s a ball).

Moby-Dick Week #7: “methinks this white-lead chapter about whiteness is but a white flag” [XLI – XLIV]

Speaking of madmen at the helm, this week we’ll be following Ahab into Chapters XLI – XLIV, comprising ‘Moby Dick’ (the white whale), ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’ (the whale’s white), ‘Hark!’ (three soaked biscuits and a stowaway?), and ‘The Chart’ (Ahab’s navigations).

Moby-Dick Week #8: “‘Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often happen?’” [XLV – L]

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!).

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

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.

Moby-Dick Week #10: “keep cool, keep cool—cucumbers is the word” [LV – LXIII]

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).

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

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.

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

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).

Moby-Dick Week #13: “I say, pull like god-dam” [LXXIX – LXXXIV]

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).

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

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).

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

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).

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

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.

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

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).

Moby-Dick Week #18: “Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?” [CVIII – CXIV]

Next Wednesday we will be discussing Chapters CVIII – CXIV, comprising ‘Ahab and the Carpenter’ (phantom limbs and fixes), ‘Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin’ (last-ditch reason and a leak), ‘Queequeg in his Coffin’ (preparing for the end), ‘The Pacific’ (arrival in Japanese waters), ‘The Blacksmith’ (another depressive; another incredible character introduction), ‘The Forge’ (fixing wrinkles), and ‘The Gilder’ (calm before the storm).

Moby-Dick Week #19: “he stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames” [CXV – CXXIV]

Next Wednesday we will be discussing Chapters CXV – CXXIV, comprising ‘The Pequod Meets the Bachelor’ (homeward bound boat), ‘The Dying Whale’ (the worshipful dead), ‘The Whale Watch’ (the Parsee’s prophecy), ‘The Quadrant’ (Ahab and the sun), ‘The Candles’ (Ahab and the lightning), ‘The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch’ (brain-trucks), ‘Midnight—The Forecastle Bulwarks’ (sensible Stubb), ‘Midnight Aloft—Thunder and Lightning’ (Um, um, um!), ‘The Musket’ (Starbuck’s chance…), and ‘The Needle’ (a broken compass).

Moby-Dick Week #20: “the rest were buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb” [CXXV – CXXXII]

We have reached the penultimate week, and the last set of pages before the final chase! Next Wednesday we will discuss Chapters CXXV – CXXXII, comprising ‘The Log and Line’ (Ahab’s little friend), ‘The Life-Buoy’ (a life-saving coffin), ‘The Deck’ (carpentry vs. cobbling), ‘The Pequod Meets the Rachel’ (ghosts at sea), ‘The Cabin’ (Pip’s big friend), ‘The Hat’ (pole stars and portents), ‘The Pequod Meets the Delight’ (one last gam), and ‘The Symphony’ (Oh, my Captain! my Captain!).

Moby-Dick Week #21: “the jaw! the jaw! Is this the end of all my bursting prayers?” [CXXXIII – Epilogue]

Next Wednesday we will discuss Chapters CXXXIII – Epilogue, comprising ‘The Chase—First Day’ (the grand god, great hearts), ‘The Chase—Second Day’ (defiance and teeth), ‘The Chase—Third Day’ (the end?), and ‘Epilogue’ (a final word).

Moby-Dick Week #21: “the jaw! the jaw! Is this the end of all my bursting prayers?”

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Next Wednesday we will discuss Chapters CXXXIII – Epilogue, comprising ‘The Chase—First Day’ (the grand god, great hearts), ‘The Chase—Second Day’ (defiance and teeth), ‘The Chase—Third Day’ (the end?), and ‘Epilogue’ (a final word).

And so at last we come to the end.

The white whale, when we finally see him, is genuinely majestic, beginning with that wonderful description of him that delays the subject for almost as many lines as Milton might:

Not the white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful horns; his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid; with smooth bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete; not Jove, not that great majesty Supreme! did surpass the gloried White Whale as he so divinely swam.

Melville’s descriptions of Moby Dick are by turns beautiful and placid, cinematic and terrifying (with that “glittering mouth yawn[ing] beneath the boat like an open-doored marble tomb”), monstrous and violent. The way he “ladles” men out of the sea and smashes the boats into pieces makes the fight seem wholly imbalanced, the whale never under any real threat, even from Ahab. Yet we were struck too by how passive Moby Dick is: the revenge story is Ahab’s alone, and the whale wants nothing of it.

The hunt comes in stages. Ahab’s boats are broken, his spirit crushed, but he rallies. Then his ivory leg is snapped and the whale, with Fedallah, goes missing. And then finally on the third day he rises again, the dead devil bound to his body with hemp, a white vision of the first hearse in the prophecy of Ahab’s death. When The Pequod is broken upon the wrinkled forehead of the whale, Ahab recognises its black hull as the second. All the signs then have clicked into place, and the end feels simultaneously climactic and anti-climactic. Ahab gets his great last speech (“for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee”) but dies in silence; the crew we’ve come to feel such affection for is barely mentioned, and die unnamed; the whale disappears again into the deep without saying a word.

as in his immeasurable bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmon-like to Heaven

Across our crew we read the whale as a symbol of the ultimate capitalist pursuit of resources, of the colonialist pilfering of the natural world, of the ultimate uncapitalist pursuit of a monstrous god not for money but for honour and pride and vengeance. The book seems to be a vision of a truly American quest (“all the individualities of the crew […] were welded into oneness”), a vision of death, a vision of Christ, a vision of God, a metafictional leviathan, but then a whale is also a whale is a whale: all these things and none.

The final lines are wonderful, with the hammer and Tashtego and the bird like “a living part of heaven” dragged down to hell with the rest. Melville’s final vision of the sea settling back over the boat, as if mankind had never happened, as if the sea had never noticed us, feels eerily, awfully, relevant. Against the infinite we are finite.

But of course the final lines are not the final lines. At the last opportunity Ishmael speaks again, silent himself for so long (and yet never silent: a poet throughout), who watched it all from the margins. Rescued by the coffin intended for his dead friend, alone in what he once called the “step-mother world,” Ishmael is again an orphan, a loose fish, free.

We’ll miss him.

Phrases of the Week:

“ever contracting towards the button-like black bubble”

“Will I have eyes at the bottom of the sea?”

Moby-Dick Week #20: “the rest were buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb”

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We have reached the penultimate week, and the last set of pages before the final chase! Next Wednesday we will discuss Chapters CXXV – CXXXII, comprising ‘The Log and Line’ (Ahab’s little friend), ‘The Life-Buoy’ (a life-saving coffin), ‘The Deck’ (carpentry vs. cobbling), ‘The Pequod Meets the Rachel’ (ghosts at sea), ‘The Cabin’ (Pip’s big friend), ‘The Hat’ (pole stars and portents), ‘The Pequod Meets the Delight’ (one last gam), and ‘The Symphony’ (Oh, my Captain! my Captain!).

Our pages this week are full of doom and foreboding as we near the final section. Things are going wrong on the ship—the quadrant, the compass needle, and now the log-line has snapped—Ahab loses his hat, and even the things that go right, such as Ahab’s new-found fondness for Pip, seem wrongheaded. Pip’s mind has gone elsewhere, and Ahab sees in this severance a kind of “holiness,” a sign that Pip’s little life lingers wherever Ahab’s lost leg does: in hell, perhaps, or in heaven, or in the abyss we all reside in on either side of life, that brief (by comparison) period of time in which “man should be a thing for immortal souls to sieve through!” Probably not a healthy basis for a friendship.

Putting Queequeg’s unnecessary coffin to use as a life-buoy seems similarly paradoxical and portentous: as the carpenter puts it, “if the hull go down, there’ll be thirty lively fellows all fighting for one coffin, a sight not seen very often beneath the sun!” On deck Ahab listens to the carpenter’s music–like Faulkner’s Addie listening to her own coffin’s construction in As I Lay Dying–which puts him in an understandably foul mood, and sets him up badly for his meeting with The Rachel. The crew have seen the white whale recently (though luckily for Ahab they haven’t killed him), but they lost some of their own, including the captain’s children, and beg for help: even after the Captain appeals to the fact that Ahab is also father to a son, Ahab refuses.

“Oh, my captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all!”

Watching for the whale from his makeshift basket, Ahab seems to have left whatever shred of humanity he ever had on the Nantucket soil. Yet in the final chapter this week, ‘The Symphony,’ and the final chapter before the chase, we see him shed a tear. In a truly Shakespearean monologue, he decries his forty years of suffering in his war against the deep, and wonders if things might not have been different for him. The book, as is always the case, is so much more interesting than the cliches and caricatures that have spilled into the culture. But with one last look at Starbuck (“let me look into a human eye”) Ahab turns back to God, or the gods, or heaven, or hell, or the abyss, against which he stands defiant, driven by something he knows not wholly of. “Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?” The monologue shakes Starbuck to the core and Ahab stands, at the precipice of the final pages, alone.

Phrases of the Week:

“Art thou a silk-worm? Does thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself?”

“as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise”

Moby-Dick Week #19: “he stood erect before the lofty tri-pointed trinity of flames”

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Next Wednesday we will be discussing Chapters CXV – CXXIV, comprising ‘The Pequod Meets the Bachelor’ (homeward bound boat), ‘The Dying Whale’ (the worshipful dead), ‘The Whale Watch’ (the Parsee’s prophecy), ‘The Quadrant’ (Ahab and the sun), ‘The Candles’ (Ahab and the lightning), ‘The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch’ (brain-trucks), ‘Midnight—The Forecastle Bulwarks’ (sensible Stubb), ‘Midnight Aloft—Thunder and Lightning’ (Um, um, um!), ‘The Musket’ (Starbuck’s chance…), and ‘The Needle’ (a broken compass).

We reach the antepenultimate week: the chase is on the horizon, and with the ship we hit one portentous warning after another. This week’s pages begin with another gam with a “too damned jolly” ship, which by way of contrast marks the Pequod out as doomed and gloomy. And who can blame them? The Parsee’s prophecy spells out the requirements for Ahab’s death (two coffins and some hemp), and we know one coffin at least has been provided. Things simply can’t go well once death is prophesied, and the Pequod’s crew stands at the fork: windward is doom and darkness, homeward is safety and blue skies. Of course there is only really one option.

We had a calm last week, so right on time a storm arrives and this one is terrific. The waves have the run up of the whole world, and the lightning—like “elbowed lances of fire”—strikes each of the Pequod’s masts to light them like three candles on some boat bound down to the underworld. Ahab himself is the lightning rod, a tree for bolts, ready to “feel this pulse, and let mine beat against it; blood against fire!” Wholly pagan, yet wholly religious, Ahab’s way of worship and his perverse proof of God is to stand in defiance against Him; indeed, to call himself God’s better, since unlike the Creator who “callest thyself unbegun” Ahab has a beginning, and something more therefore than “thou omnipotent.” Milton couldn’t have put it better when he brought Satan to rebellious life.

Thou canst blind; but I can then grope. Thou canst consume; but I can then be ashes.

Ahab is front and centre as we near the end, and he has turned wholly whale-ish. Like lovers beneath the same moon, he and his whale share the same sun, that keyhole glimpse of hell, and each seem driven towards the inevitable climactic encounter that must surely end the book. There are moments of humanity too, like Ahab’s little vial of Nantucket sand which seems to tug at him, though perhaps the most human moment of all is Starbuck’s temptation, to murder Ahab while he sleeps and set the crew free of his madness. There is an ocean and a continent between him and the law, he tells himself, but still he cannot pull that trigger. And who could blame him either? The book needs him not to, and there is no stronger pull than that.

Phrases of the Week:

“live in the game, and die it!”

‘Um, um, um. We don’t want thunder; we want rum’

Moby-Dick Week #18: “Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?”

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Next Wednesday we will be discussing Chapters CVIII – CXIV, comprising ‘Ahab and the Carpenter’ (phantom limbs and fixes), ‘Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin’ (last-ditch reason and a leak), ‘Queequeg in his Coffin’ (preparing for the end), ‘The Pacific’ (arrival in Japanese waters), ‘The Blacksmith’ (another depressive; another incredible character introduction), ‘The Forge’ (fixing wrinkles), and ‘The Gilder’ (calm before the storm).

The end creaks ever closer, and Ahab is firmly centre-stage at this point. His conversation with the Carpenter is amusing, and most interesting when Ahab implies that the phantom pains in his missing leg are proof that the leg must still exist, and must therefore be in hell already, waiting for him. You can almost understand why Ahab is less invested in his next conversation, with Starbuck, who says there is a leak in the oil-hold which begs attention, when he’s clearly got other places to be.

The title of ‘Queequeg in his Coffin’ is foreboding indeed, and when in the hold of the leaky ship Queequeg catches a fever that brings him “nigh to his endless end,” the outcome seems inevitable (especially if we recall Ishmael’s hint much earlier on that Queequeg has died by the point of the telling). This seems to unsettle Ishmael for all sorts of reasons. He can describe anything but not “Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a last revelation, which only an author from the dead could adequately tell.” Like Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying, Queequeg oversees the carving of his own coffin. Unlike Addie, Queequeg doesn’t die despite the good fit, and turns instead to carving patterns in the wood.

Death seems to be our theme this week. ‘The Pacific,’ finally arrived at, is said to be the home of “mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams […] all that we call lives and souls,” while ‘The Blacksmith’ sees the introduction of another wonderfully richly miserable character, whose life would have been better had he died earlier and left his family with a “legendary sire to dream of in their after years,” instead of hanging on “till the hideous rot of life should make him easier to harvest.” (!).

Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely?

Channelling Hamlet (through a sort of bottled storm of wild watery prose), Melville writes:

Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them—‘Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them.

The blacksmith can’t fix the wrinkle in Ahab’s brain, but so it goes. The “threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm.” The Japanese waters are calm for the moment, too calm. Whatever could be next?

Phrases of the Week:

“as a tender-hearted old lady uses her roly-poly old coach-horses”

“has postponedly encountered that thing in sorrow’s technicals called ruin”

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”