A Page at a Time: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, or The Reading of a Daunting Classic
Progress: Days 83, Pages 410
From the very outset it’s clear that Melville views whales as the most interesting subject in all of nature, and that he views the men who hunt them as unmitigated, noble heroes. In these last few chapters, he makes this worship of whalers explicit. And if there is one enduring and consistent stylistic choice that we have observed in 400 pages of this book, it is Melville’s penchant for making chapter titles as straightforward as humanly possible, this time around the chapter in question is “The Honor and Glory of Whaling.” True to promise, he doesn’t shy away from hyperbole:
“Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole roll of our order. Our grand master is still to be named; for like royal kings of old times, we find the head-waters of our fraternity in nothing short of the great gods themselves…Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there’s a member-roll for you! What club but the whaleman’s can head off like that?” (pg. 397-398).
Back in March we talked about literary MacGuffins—now officially known as a Krauss—and how an author proclaiming the specialness of an element in their book is not the same as proving it. Having spent time with Ismael, Queequeg, Straub, Flask and Ahab, we must consider the ballad worthiness of Melville’s whalers. Thus far, there’s not much evidence speaking to their holiness, as there’s not much characterization at all in Moby-Dick beyond Ismael’s relationship with Queequeg in Nantucket and the first major introduction of Ismael’s shipmates chapter by chapter. The people on the Pequod don’t really talk to each other—except for shouting encouragements when whaling needs to be done—and they haven’t had much space to show virtue (or vice) either. In fact, their only act, one that by process of elimination Melville must consider valiant, is killing whales.
Melville’s simultaneous adoration of whalers and fanatical love of whales is profoundly strange to modern eyes. Why would someone so obsessed with an animal compare its hunters to gods? The reason strikes me as one that belongs to Melville’s century: he believes the greatest accomplishment that can be achieved is man conquering whale, which according to him is the most majestic, awe inspiring, colossal, unassailably grand facet of nature that there is. We can kind of forgive him for his stance on man verses nature to a certain extent: life expectancy at the time when Moby-Dick was published was about 40 years old, while the Sperm Whales life expectancy is around 70 years old. In the 1800s nature was still very much winning, making killing a whale amount to immortality and the conquering death itself.
Last week the Pequod crew killed their first whale, and this week they got their second but in a different manner. Outracing German whalers (inferior whalers we’re informed), they harpoon to death a “humped old bull, which by his comparatively slow progress, as well as the unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing him, seemed afflicted with the jaundice, or some other infirmity.” It’s hard watching Ishmael & Co. take out an geriatric whale, who lags behind the pod of younger whales (incredibly sad), and see it as glorious. With no connection to the characters in Moby-Dick or what motivates them—other than pure profits—there’s little reason to feel as a reader in this century that this hunt is a victory in the lineage of mythic and biblical triumphs. Melville has only proclaimed the specialness of whalers; he hasn’t shown it.
Now we live longer than whales, generally, and man is no longer fighting against nature, but nature is waging a losing battle against men…and women. Sorry, but there are absolutely no women in Moby-Dick, another feature of the peak man verses nature era in literature. In our times of Whale Wars and Blackfish, and the overall dwindling of nature, it’s hard not to read Moby-Dick as a kind of grotesque hunt of nature for profit and more convenient living. Because, ironically, for as much as Melville hasn’t convinced us that his whalers are heroes, he has certainly made a strong case that whales are quite incredible and worthy of our awe. Watching Ahab’s crew takes apart the first whale is quite gross, but after they hunt the second elderly whale with sporting glee it is hard not to fall on the side of the whale over this hardly-described crew. The cruelty makes you want to root for the villain, and as we near the elusive White Whale it is hard not to hope that Moby Dick, the supreme force of nature, wins out in the end.