Why Read Moby-Dick? (2 page)

The irony is that when
Moby-Dick
was first published in the fall of 1851, virtually no one, except for the author to whom the novel was dedicated, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his wife, Sophia, seems to have taken much notice. By the time of Melville's death in 1891,
Moby-Dick
had sold a grand total of 3,715 copies. (As a point of comparison,
Typee
sold 16,320 copies.) It wasn't until after World War I that what had begun as a few belated plaudits by some Canadian and English readers had become a virtual tidal wave of praise. There were still some naysayers (Joseph Conrad ridiculed
Moby-Dick
for its romantic, overblown prose), but the vast majority of writers who encountered this improbable book in the first half of the twentieth century were stunned and deeply influenced by how Melville conveyed the specifics of a past world even as he luxuriated in the flagrant and erratic impulses of his own creative process. In its willful refusal to follow the usual conventions of nineteenth-century fiction,
Moby-Dick
possessed the experimental swagger that so many authors were attempting to capture in the years after World War I.

Among the expatriates in Paris in the 1920s,
Moby-Dick
became what one writer described as “a sort of cunning test by which the genuineness of another man's response to literature could be proved.” In 1927, William Faulkner, who would later hang a framed print of Rockwell Kent's
Captain Ahab
in his living room in Oxford, Mississippi, claimed that
Moby-Dick
was the one novel by another author that he wished he had written. In 1949, the ever-competitive Ernest Hemingway wrote to his publisher Charles Scribner that as he approached the end of his career, Melville was one of the handful of writers he was still trying to beat.

By 1951, when the centennial of the novel's publication was celebrated throughout the world, Melville's masterpiece had succeeded in becoming more than a literary sensation; it was part of the popular culture. Despite being the author of that most landlocked of American novels,
The Grapes of Wrath,
John Steinbeck had a house in the former whaling port of Sag Harbor on Long Island, and in the 1960s he was the honorary chairman of the Old Whalers Festival, which featured a floating, propeller-driven version of the White Whale known as “Mobile Dick.” The novel has inspired plays, films, operas, comic books, a television miniseries, and even a pop-up book. Those who have never read a word of it know the story of Ahab and the White Whale.

Moby-Dick
may be well known, but of the handful of novels considered American classics, such as
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
and
The Great Gatsby,
it is the most reluctantly read. It is too long and too maddeningly digressive to be properly appreciated by a sleep-deprived adolescent, particularly in this age of digital distractions. I know that as a high school senior in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1974, I had expected to be bored to death by the book. But then came that three-word first sentence—“Call me Ishmael”—and I was hooked.

But I had my own reasons for almost instantly falling in love with
Moby-Dick
. On the first page, Ishmael describes the city of New York on a Sunday afternoon, its cooped-up inhabitants lingering on the waterfront, looking out longingly toward the sea in search of the “ungraspable phantom of life.” For me, a city kid who had developed an unlikely infatuation with sailing, this scene spoke with a direct, almost overwhelming power. Many of my classmates, however, did not share my enthusiasm, and looking back, I can hardly blame them.

But the novel, like all great works of art, grows on you. Instead of being a page-turner, the book is a repository not only of American history and culture but also of the essentials of Western literature. It has a voice that is one of the most nuanced in all of literature: at once confiding, funny, and oracular—an outpouring of irrepressible eloquence that soars into the stratosphere even as it remains rooted to the ground. The book is so encyclopedic and detailed that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the middle of the nineteenth century.

In the more than 150 years since the novel's publication, we have become those space aliens, the inhabitants of a planet so altered by our profligate presence that we are living on a different Earth from the one Melville knew. And yet the more our world changes, the more relevant the novel seems to be. If
Moby-Dick
should, like so many works of literature, fall by the wayside, we will have lost the one book that deserves to be called our American bible. As individuals trying to find our way through the darkness, as citizens of a nation trying to live up to the ideals set forth in our constitution, we need, more than ever before,
Moby-Dick
.

I am not one of those purists who insist on reading the entire untruncated text at all costs.
Moby-Dick
is a long book, and time is short. Even a sentence, a mere phrase, will do. The important thing is to spend some time with the novel, to listen as you read, to feel the prose adapt to the various voices that flowed through Melville during the book's composition like intermittent ghosts with something urgent and essential to say.

What follows is my idiosyncratic answer to the question that serves as this little book's title. As a resident of Nantucket Island, the holy ground of
Moby-Dick,
and the author of a book about the real-life nautical disaster that inspired the conclusion of the novel, I have my own prejudices and point of view. Perhaps because my parents named me for the author who served as Melville's muse, Nathaniel Hawthorne, I am as intrigued by the events that made possible the book's composition as I am by the book itself. I am also interested in how the novel continued to haunt Melville in the months and years after its publication. Most of all, however, I am interested in getting you—yes,
you
—to read, whether it be for the first time or the twelfth time,
Moby-Dick
.

I
n January 1841, Herman Melville shipped out on the
Acush - net
from Fairhaven, Massachusetts, just across the river from the whaling port of New Bedford. His father, a well-liked but ineffectual merchant, had died when Herman was twelve, plunging the family into humiliating poverty. In the eight years since, everything Melville tried, from working as a clerk at a law firm to teaching school to making his fortune in what was then the American wilderness of Illinois and Missouri, had failed. With the economy sunk in depression and with no job prospects, Melville did what the narrator, Ishmael, decides to do at the beginning of
Moby-Dick;
he went to sea.

Almost as soon as the
Acushnet
set sail, Melville began to hear stories about the
Essex,
a Nantucket whaleship that had been sunk more than two decades before by an infuriated sperm whale about a thousand miles west of the Galápagos Islands. Seven months after departing from Fairhaven, the
Acushnet
was approaching the very latitude in the South Pacific on which the
Essex
had gone down when the lookout sighted another whaleship. It turned out to be the
Lima
from Nantucket. During what was known as a gam, a meeting of two or more whaleships at sea, the crews were given the opportunity to mingle and talk, and Melville was introduced to the son of Owen Chase, first mate of the
Essex
and the author of a narrative about the disaster.

Chase's son offered to lend Melville his copy of his father's book. That night Melville read the story of how an eighty-five-foot bull sperm whale crushed the bow of the
Essex
into splintered fragments and how after taking to three twenty-five-foot whaleboats, the twenty-man crew discussed what to do next. Given the direction of the wind, the obvious next move was to sail to the islands to the west, the closest being the Marquesas. But Chase and his shipmates had heard rumors of cannibals on those islands. Better to sail to a civilized port on the western coast of South America, even if it was against the wind and more than three thousand miles away.

Three months later, when just five survivors were plucked from two sun-scorched, barnacle-encrusted whaleboats, they were no longer the same men who'd refused to sail to an island of hypothetical savages. They had become what they most feared. As made plain by the human bones found in the hands of two of the survivors, they were cannibals. Melville later wrote, “The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, & close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect upon me.”

Almost a year later, Melville first glimpsed the islands that the crew of the
Essex
had chosen to spurn. On June 23, 1842, the
Acushnet
arrived at Nuku Hiva, part of the Marquesas group. Melville and the rest of the crew stared at the green spectacular peaks as swimming native women surrounded the ship. According to Melville's later, inevitably fictionalized account of his adventures, the whaleship's deck quickly became crowded with these beautiful young girls, who offered themselves to the sailors for bits of cloth. Not long after, Melville decided he would do exactly the opposite of what Owen Chase and the other crew members of the
Essex
had done. He would desert the ship that had been his home for the last nineteen months and live among the so-called cannibals.

Nine years later he published
Moby-Dick,
a novel that begins with the protagonist, Ishmael, finding himself, to his initial horror, sharing a bed with a tattooed cannibal named Queequeg. In a winningly comic distillation of the experience that had forever changed Melville's life in the Marquesas, Ishmael comes to the realization that artificial distinctions between civilization and savagery are beside the point. “What's all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself—the man's a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.” This startling insight was revolutionary in 1851 and is still wickedly fresh to us today, more than 150 years later, as globalization makes encounters with foreign cultures an almost daily occurrence.

But Melville was not able to laugh away the lessons of the
Essex
. Despite its comic beginning,
Moby-Dick
quickly moves into darker and more harrowing metaphysical territory, and it is the moral isolation of the
Essex
crew members, afloat upon the wide and immense sea in their tiny whaleboats, that underlies the fated voyage of the
Pequod
. In the chapter “The Lee Shore,” Ishmael speaks of one Bulkington, a sailor for whom the land has proved “scorching to his feet” and who heads out once again after just completing a previous whaling voyage. It is only amid the terrifying vastness of the sea that man can confront the ultimate truths of his existence: “[A]ll deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea. . . . [I]n landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God. . . . Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain?” For Melville, and for any thinking human being, this is more than a rhetorical question.

H
e tells us to call him Ishmael, but who is the narrator of

Moby-Dick
? For one thing, he has known depression, “a damp, drizzly November in my soul.” But he is also a person of genuine enthusiasms. Like Holden Caulfield in
The Catcher in the Rye,
he is wonderfully engaging, a vulnerable wiseass who invites us to join him on a quest to murder the blues by shipping out on a whaleship.

Ishmael is no tourist. As a common seaman, he gets paid for his adventures. “[
B
]
eing paid,
” he rhapsodizes, “what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!”

Getting paid is certainly a bonus, but Ishmael isn't doing this for the money. He's in pursuit of an almost Platonic ideal, what he calls “the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself.” “Such a portentous and mysterious monster,” he continues, “roused all my curiosity.” But he's also looking for the clarifying jolt that comes with doing something dangerous. “I love to sail forbidden seas,” he tells us, “and land on barbarous coasts.” The best way to satisfy this “everlasting itch for things remote,” he decides, is to head for Nantucket, the birthplace of American whaling. “[T]here was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island,” he says, “which amazingly pleased me.”

Not even a sobering visit to the Seamen's Bethel in New Bedford, where he studies the marble tablets memorializing those lost at sea, is enough to make him rethink his decision to ship out on a Nantucket vessel. “Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then?”

A reckless, rapturous sense of his soul's imperishability overtakes Ishmael. “Methinks my body is but the lees [the sediment left in wine] of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me.” Let God, fate, or what have you do as it sees fit. In the end, Ishmael will prevail. “And therefore three cheers for Nantucket,” he exults, “and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.”

Later in the book, after he is almost killed when his whaleboat is smacked by a whale before being swamped in a squall, Ishmael decides it might be a good idea, after all, to write his will. And it is here, in chapter 49, “The Hyena,” that he hits upon the approach to life that will act as the emotional and philosophical center of the novel. “There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life,” he tells us, “when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.”