16 January 2006
Moby Dick
So, you know the story. A fellow, despite all the ominous warnings and foreshadowing, joins up with whaler, sails the seas, discourses on whales, men, and fate, and then everyone else dies. While you are reading, keep an eye out for the trinity. It is everywhere, three masts on the Pequod, three mates, three harpooners, and three days to hunt the whale, three legs for Ahab.
“The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust his heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch.”
-- Letter from Herman Melville to Nathanial Hawthorne, June 1851.
“A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.”
-- Letter from Herman Melville to Nathanial Hawthorne, November 1851.
The peg-legged Ahab is ultimately impotent in the face of natural fury, despite his maniacal approach. For instance, on the first day of the hunt, after Ahab repositions the boat and the harpooner in anticipation of the rising whale: “But as if perceiving this stratagem, Moby Dick, with that malicious intelligence ascribed to him, as it were, in an instant, shooting his pleated head lengthwise beneath the boat (italics added).”
We are all marked by a head-to-toe birthmark – our mortality, and the curse of self-awareness in an indifferent world. In fact, Ahab usually celebrates the lack of a will, his state of being fated and determined to hunt his nemesis.
“Like a truly myth-making poet’s, Melville’s imagination was obsessed by the spectacle of a natural and human scene in which the instinctive need for order and meaning seems mainly to be confronted by meaninglessness and disorder; in which the human will seems sometimes to be sustained but oftener to be thwarted by the forces of physical nature, and even by agencies that lie behind it; in which goodness and evil, beneficence and destructiveness, light and darkness, seem bafflingly intermixed. In none of the great formulations that were available to him, neither Calvinist Christianity nor in romantic optimism, could Melville discover a myth that for him was adequate to the lighting up of these obscurities. Moby Dick is his endeavor to construct his own myth.”
-- From _Herman Melville_, Newton Arvin, New York: William Sloane Associates, 1950, and my Bantam Classic paperback edition.
The challenge for me and many modern readers is to be moved by Melville while willing to accept his central premise from the start. I am on Ahab’s side, doomed and thwarted, at least to the point where you make an ass of yourself attacking the universe. This reading renders Starbuck the believing hero, carrying on as if he can return home safe. Starbuck is Patel from _Life of Pi_. When you are in a lifeboat with a tiger, you can either make a deal with it (Pi), or attack (Ahab). Again and again we learn Pi has the nicer story, but it bears repeating. What kind of person, given the choice, would choose the void, even if true?
Perth the carpenter and blacksmith became my favorite character. He destroyed his life, his family, and his future with the bottle. Yet he toils on hammering, creating and fitting legs for crazy whaling captains, writing, reading, living like us all, as we can and must.
If you haven’t yet finished, toil on through the cetology, blubber gore, and ‘savages’ to reach the last third of this book. Ishmael did.
I am surprised we haven’t had the President Bush as Ahab adoption, chasing after evildoers while ignoring all other sage advice. How would the rest of the crew stack up: Colin Powell as Starbuck, with Cheney and Rumsfeld as Flask and Stubb? Who is the sole survivor Ishmael, Condaleeza Rice?
“The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike Him, is because they rather distrust his heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch.”
-- Letter from Herman Melville to Nathanial Hawthorne, June 1851.
“A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.”
-- Letter from Herman Melville to Nathanial Hawthorne, November 1851.
The peg-legged Ahab is ultimately impotent in the face of natural fury, despite his maniacal approach. For instance, on the first day of the hunt, after Ahab repositions the boat and the harpooner in anticipation of the rising whale: “But as if perceiving this stratagem, Moby Dick, with that malicious intelligence ascribed to him, as it were, in an instant, shooting his pleated head lengthwise beneath the boat (italics added).”
We are all marked by a head-to-toe birthmark – our mortality, and the curse of self-awareness in an indifferent world. In fact, Ahab usually celebrates the lack of a will, his state of being fated and determined to hunt his nemesis.
“Like a truly myth-making poet’s, Melville’s imagination was obsessed by the spectacle of a natural and human scene in which the instinctive need for order and meaning seems mainly to be confronted by meaninglessness and disorder; in which the human will seems sometimes to be sustained but oftener to be thwarted by the forces of physical nature, and even by agencies that lie behind it; in which goodness and evil, beneficence and destructiveness, light and darkness, seem bafflingly intermixed. In none of the great formulations that were available to him, neither Calvinist Christianity nor in romantic optimism, could Melville discover a myth that for him was adequate to the lighting up of these obscurities. Moby Dick is his endeavor to construct his own myth.”
-- From _Herman Melville_, Newton Arvin, New York: William Sloane Associates, 1950, and my Bantam Classic paperback edition.
The challenge for me and many modern readers is to be moved by Melville while willing to accept his central premise from the start. I am on Ahab’s side, doomed and thwarted, at least to the point where you make an ass of yourself attacking the universe. This reading renders Starbuck the believing hero, carrying on as if he can return home safe. Starbuck is Patel from _Life of Pi_. When you are in a lifeboat with a tiger, you can either make a deal with it (Pi), or attack (Ahab). Again and again we learn Pi has the nicer story, but it bears repeating. What kind of person, given the choice, would choose the void, even if true?
Perth the carpenter and blacksmith became my favorite character. He destroyed his life, his family, and his future with the bottle. Yet he toils on hammering, creating and fitting legs for crazy whaling captains, writing, reading, living like us all, as we can and must.
If you haven’t yet finished, toil on through the cetology, blubber gore, and ‘savages’ to reach the last third of this book. Ishmael did.
I am surprised we haven’t had the President Bush as Ahab adoption, chasing after evildoers while ignoring all other sage advice. How would the rest of the crew stack up: Colin Powell as Starbuck, with Cheney and Rumsfeld as Flask and Stubb? Who is the sole survivor Ishmael, Condaleeza Rice?
