Have You Ever Read Moby Dick?

I finally read Moby Dick, the 1851 novel by Herman Melville. It is famous for being famous. It is one of the best examples of the kind of novel that nobody could ever publish today. It gets interesting about page 700. It is filled with hortatory language in which Melville is quite literally and vigorously preaching to the readers, “O ye foolish mortals,” over and over. Melville injects drama into scenes with none, but in the exciting climax of the book—somewhere after page 700—Melville uses the passive voice: “The harpoon was darted.” The characters are memorable but do not seem real, especially when they are reciting long soliloquies, using words such as uninterpenetratingly. Instead of developing characters, Melville usually just describes them; he calls Captain Ahab “monomaniacal” about four dozen times. Whole chapters of textbook-like information are inserted right into the midst of the plot. There is no consistent point of view; he throws in things that Ishmael could not possibly have seen, such as what goes on at the captain’s table. The book is full of errors (such as assuming that gold tarnishes), which the editor of the volume I read had to correct. For example, did the ship have a steering wheel, or a tiller? Melville is inconsistent.

Of course, it has some very bold and striking features, starting with the first line, which everyone knows: “Call me Ishmael.” And Melville pushes the limit of what a novel can be, in ways still considered daring. Some of the chapters are in the form of a dramatic script, Enter Ahab and all that. I wish editors would let writers get away with that today. And much of the language is astonishingly beautiful and creative. Just one example from near the beginning: An ice palace made of frozen sighs. Try writing something better than that.

And it has some unforgettable scenes, such as Ahab catching the ball-lightning on his harpoon, or the sharks around the whale-boats in their final attack, and Moby Dick bristling with harpoons of previous unsuccessful attacks, and the dead “Parsee” who was being dragged around by Moby Dick bobs up from the deep. And then, Queequeg’s coffin, transformed into a life-buoy, springs up from the very center of the vortex in which Moby Dick drew down the ship. And then, in the final irony, Ishmael (the lone survivor) is rescued by the very ship that Ahab refused to help. These fine scenes get lost in Melville’s clutter.

But perhaps the most striking thing, especially at the time it was published, is Melville’s direct assault on cherished religious assumptions, which is why I am writing about it in this blog. The whole novel is imbued with an awareness of a spiritual significance of the world, especially when he considers the “watery part of the world” that most writers and readers knew little about. Everything—not just Ahab vs. Moby Dick—is a symbol of good vs. evil, and strength vs. strength. It is certainly not atheistic or materialistic. But Melville does focus squarely on upsetting nineteenth-century American Christianity. For example, we violently kill whales to get oil for lamps to “illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.”

The first and most striking example of this is how Ishmael meets Queequeg, the barbarian from some imaginary Pacific island. When Melville calls him a cannibal, this is apparently just a general epithet. Queequeg is introduced in the most frightening way. Ishmael discovers that he must share a bed with him! And yet he develops an intimate friendship with this “savage.” Queequeg spears steaks with his harpoon, and goes into a trance worshipping his little idol. And yet, what does Melville, through the character of Ishmael, say about him? “Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian,” and, “I’ll try a pagan friend…since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.” Ishmael has to deal with his own prejudices, then ends up comparing Queequeg to George Washington. Then he has to decide how to respond to Queequeg’s demand that he bow before the idol, something that conventional Christians would say would send his soul to hell. But he rationalizes that to do the will of God is worship, and God’s will is the golden rule, and so out of love for Queequeg he bows before the idol. Alas, very soon, Ishmael seems to care nothing for Queequeg, hardly talks with him, seems to show no emotion when Queequeg almost dies of a fever, and then when he actually does die at the end (spoiler). In fact, all three harpooneers are heroically strong, and all three are of racial origins that Melville’s white American readers might despise: Queequeg; Tashtego the Native American; and Daggoo the African. Even though Melville described Daggoo as a “negro-savage,” he said, a “…white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce of a fortress.” There is also the little black boy Pip, who was a tragic figure, and the insane Ahab kept imagining Pip with him, and talked to him after he was dead. Melville notes that, in Alabama, a whale’s oil would sell for thirty times the price that Pip would bring.

In fact, Melville’s spirituality is a challenge to American Christianity of his day (and ours). Melville saw God in everyone, not just white Christians. “Thou shalt see it [the presence of God] shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike…His omnipresence, our divine equality!” Even the idea of the dignity of the common man was relatively new in literature. Melville considered humans overall to be “noble and sparkling”. He says, “Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterian and pagan alike—for we are all somehow cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.” Therefore, he could only conclude, “…hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling…” an idea which cannot be taken seriously if you believe that God is love. True savages, says Melville, are found in the shadows of churches. He contrasts Ishmael’s religion with Stubb’s nihilism; Stubb said, “…think not, is my eleventh commandment, and sleep when you can, is my twelfth…”

Part of Ahab’s tragedy is that he considered his pursuit of Moby Dick to be the ultimate religious reality, starting with a sort of eucharist with the pewter urn, and rum in the goblet ends of the harpoons. The harpooneers and the whole crew are a sworn holy army against the devil, which is the white whale.

But I think a whole tradition has arisen in which scholars have tried to read as much symbolism as possible into this book, even more than Melville himself put in. In the library copy I read, someone wrote marginalia in chapter LXVIII. These notes said that the skin of the whale was God: “Where is He? What is He?” Then the reader noted that the skin was the Word of God.  The heiroglyphical marks inside the blubber was “rejection of Christ’s God, focusing on pagan.” Melville noted that blubber allowed the whale to be comfortable in all seas and at all times, but the marginalia-scribbler added, “all expansive like God, awe—God is good even to whales who cannot understand. The whale had great abilities like God/Jesus.” The warm whale was in the world but not of it, as a Christian should be. And so on. This thick jungle of notes was written only for this one chapter. Some pious reader out-Melvilled Melville, but couldn’t keep it up for the whole CXXXV chapters.

Well, there it is. I distilled the religious significance out of the 724 pages, and it will be archived here for any time you want to refer back to it.