Moby-Dick

Review

Sometimes a classic is a classic for a reason. I remember picking up Moby-Dick sometime in elementary or maybe middle school and bouncing off of it instantly. Hardly surprising. I doubt I thought about the book at all between then and a few months ago, reading that Cormac McCarthy drew some inspiration for Blood Meridian from Melville’s work, and apparently this was McCarthy’s favorite novel. Not difficult to see why, or to see the parallels.

But perhaps the most surprising question I have after closing the book: Is Moby-Dick queer? I think there’s a pretty reasonable read that way. We start off with Ishmael sharing a bed with Queequeg, and Ishmael seems rather taken with his new friend, and quite happy to think himself almost as a wife to him (I believe Queequeg actually refers to him as such, though with some cultural meanings otherwise maybe). The sperm of it all certainly reads as homoerotic! I didn’t get particularly queer vibes from the book while reading, but I’ll admit that some has been a bit recontextualized as I read more about Melville and the man to whom this book is dedicated, Nathaniel Hawthorne. I’ve read a few articles now, including one I quite from Maria Popova, adapted from her book Figuring (which I purchased just after reading this article), which is pretty convincing to me (article: “Herman Melville’s Passionate, Beautiful, Heartbreaking Love Letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne”). Sent or not, I’ve written love letters, and spoken them into the loved’s ear, and I know them when I see them.

I did not expect to fall for the writing in the way that I did. So melodious is it at times that it’s hard to stay silent. I read much of the book aloud to my cat, the language being so pleasing to pronounce. The contents themselves remind me of Les Miserables, with the chapter-long digressions. Where Les Mis spends a hundred pages discussing Waterloo or argot, Melville discusses at exceptional length every minute detail of the whale’s anatomy, the kinds of whales, the churning of sperm, and more, and more, and more. I admit that some of Hugo’s digressions tuckered me out, but that did not happen here. Perhaps because Les Mis is some 1200 pages, almost double M-D.

Because I began the book with Blood Meridian in mind, it became difficult not to look for similarities and differences. Very often I thought of the Judge, and the environs while one being land and the other sea, are characterized similarly. There is a great deal of religious language, and both Ahab and the Judge clearly think of themselves as gods (perhaps Ahab moreso than the Judge, it’s been a few years since I read B-M). Several times, Ahab declares himself as having adopted the power of the gods, or having been a god, being ageless, etc. In one of the most gripping scenes, Ahab shouts out to a storm:

‘Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e’en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power: but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me.’

The next page:

‘All your oaths to hunt the white whale are as binding as mine . . . And that ye may know to what tune this heart beats: look ye here; thus I blow out the last fear!’ And with one blast of his breath he extinguished the flame.

It is difficult for me not to picture Ahab here as Poseidon with his trident. I had to remind myself over and over again that Ahab wielded a harpoon. There is so much to swim in and ponder.

But there is also a lot, a ton, to laugh at or along with. The opening chapters with Ishmael and Queequeg are a delight to read. It is hard, though, to beat the chapter that’s all about squeezing sperm. Beginning on page 562, chapter ‘A Squeeze of the Hand’ does nothing but make me cackle and gasp. I have not seen so much sperm written on the page since I was scribbling out erotic stories in high school. Let us enjoy them together:

It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times sperm was such a favourite cosmetic. Such a clearer! Such a sweetener! Such a softener! Such a delicious mollifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began as it were to serpentine and spiralize. . . .

. . . I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma, literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it, I almost began to credit the old Paracelsian supersittion that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me, and I found myself unwittingly ssqueezing my co-labourers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally, as much as to say, Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humour or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

How could one read this without bursting? It’s tremendous. I’m so pleased to have read this and really find it such a treat. For such a long book, it reads very fast and is “fun” by my definition the whole way through.

Notes

• p75 - Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say – here, here lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave. As well might those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here.
  • TB: Stunningly beautiful depiction of ambiguous loss.
• p108 - [Queequeg] only asked for water – fresh water – something to wipe the brine off; that done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to be saying to himself – ‘It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians.’
• p124 - For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease.
• p171 - And, as for me, if, by any possibility, there by any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me; if I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might not be unreasonably ambitious of; if hereafter I shall do anything that, upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone; if, at my death, my executors, or more propertly my creditors, find any precious MSS in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honour and the glory to whaling: for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
• p173 - ‘I will have no man in my boat,’ said Starbuck, ‘who is not afraid of a whale.’
• p237 - ‘Vengeance on a dumb brute!’ cried Starbuck, ‘that simply smote these from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.’
• p287 - God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.
• p294 - I am not superstitious, but I consider the Commodore’s interview with that whale as providential. Was not Saul of Tarsus converted from unbelief by a similar fright? I tell you, the sperm whale will stand no nonsense.
• p309 - ‘. . . Let all your crews pull strong, come what will. (Spring, my men, spring!) There’s hogsheads of sperm ahead, Mr Stubb, and that’s what ye came for. (Pull, my boys!) Sperm, sperm’s the play! This at least is duty; duty and profit hand in hand.’
• p319 - There are certain queer times and occassions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes his 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.
• p333 - But in pursuit of those mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, sometime or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.
• p398 - ‘Yes; both pipes smoked out!’ andwithdrawing his own from his mouth, Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.
• p412 - ‘. . . Well, for the future, when you cook another whale-steak for my private table here, the capstan, I’ll tell you what to doso as not to spoil it by overdoing. Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live coal to it with the other; that done, dish it; d’ye hear?’
• p443 - When Stubb reappeared, he came with a dark flask in one hand, and a sort of tea-caddy in the other. The first contained strong spirits, and was handed to Queequeg; the second was Aunt Charity’s gift, and that was freely given to the waves.
• p482 - ‘. . . Oh! won’t ye pull for your duff, my lads – such a sog! Such a sogger! Don’t ye love sperm? There goes three thousand dollars, men! – a bank – a whole bank! The bank of England! . . .’
• p492 - There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.
• p508 - And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapour, engendered byhis incommunicable contemplations, and that vaour – as you will sometimes see it – glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts.
• p524 - But sperm whales are not every day encountered; while you may, then, you must kill all you can. And if you canlot kill them all at once, you must wing them, so that they can be afterwards killed at your leisure.
  • TB: Reminds me of Butcher’s Crossing. Somewhere else within MD there is a comparison of the killings of buffalo in the west as comparison to whaling.
• p 525 - I mention this circumstance because, as if the cows and calves had been purposely locked up in this innermost fold, and as if the wide extent of the herd had hitherto prevented them from learning the precise cause of its stopping; or, possibly, being so young, unsophisticated, and every way innocent and inexperienced; however it may have been, these smaller whales – now and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the lake – evinced a wondrous fearlessness and confidence, or else a still becharmed panic which it was impossible not to marvel at. Like household dogs they came snuffing around us, right up to our gunwales, and touching them, till it almost seemed that some spell had suddenly domesticated them. Queequeg patted their foreheads, Starbuck scratched their backs with his lance; but fearful of the consequences, for the time refrained from darting it.
  • TB: Rather horrible to understand that these little pups would have been brained if the boat were not surrounded by the mothers and the bulls outside them.
• p559 - ‘Stick to the boat, Pip, or by the Lord, I won’t pick you up if you jump; mind that. 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. Bear that in mind, and don’t jump any more.’
  • TB: Horrific.
• p562-563 TB: The whole chapter, ‘A Squeeze of the Hand,’ is worth reading. I laughed all the way through it. I’m not sure I’ve seen such protracted discussion of the joys of sperm outside of erotic literature.
  • It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times sperm was such a favourite cosmetic. Such a clearer! Such a sweetener! Such a softener! Such a delicious mollifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began as it were to serpentine and spiralize. . . .
  • . . . I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma, literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it, I almost began to credit the old Paracelsian supersittion that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.
  • Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me, and I found myself unwittingly ssqueezing my co-labourers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally, as much as to say, Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humour or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
  • Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever!
• p571 - So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others.
  • TB: I’m not going to transpose the very long ¶, but on this page, in chapter ‘The Try-Works’ there is an amazing passage describing the image of the Pequod storming through the night as the ovens belch fire as if it’s a dragon. Really great.
• p593 - ‘Do you know, gentlemen, that the digestive organs of the whale are so inscrutably constructed by Divine Providence, that it is quite impossible for him to completely diggest even a man’s arm? And he knows it too. So that what you take for the white whale’s malice is only his awkwardness. For he never means to swallow a single limb; he only thinks to terrify by feints. But sometimes he is like the old juggling fellow, formerly a patient of mine in Ceylon. . .’
• p594 - ‘He is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He’s all a magnet! How long since thou saw’st him last? Which way heading?’
  • TB: This is Ahab responding to the speaker of the preceeding quote. That Captain, Boomer, had an arm removed by Moby-Dick. He is a direct contrast to Ahab in every single way - gregarious, good-humoured, understanding.
• p610 - Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off at last into simple child’s play.
  • TB: re: the vertebrae of the whale.
• p628 TB: Chapter 108 is a departure from the novel form and almost into stageplay, actually relatively close to McCarthy’s ‘novel in dramatic form.’ (I say McCarthy’s, I’ve no idea if this format is known by a different name, surely it is). Interesting that Melville was such an inspiration for McCarthy that Blood Meridian is apparently mapped to this novel, so I suspect it can’t be chance that several of McCarthy’s shorter forms are like this.
• p636 - ‘Thou hast outraged, not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware of Starbuck; that wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of thyself, old man.’
• p647 - Out of this revelation, part by part, at last came out the four acts of the gladness, and the one long, and as yet uncatastrophied fifth act of the grief of his life’s drama.
  • TB: writing so good it’ll terrify you away from your pencil.
• p649 - ‘Are these [sparks from the blacksmith, Perth’s, work] thy Mother Carey’s chickens, Perth? They are always flying in they wake . . . but thou – thou liv’st among them without a scorch.’ ¶ ‘Because I am scorcted all over, Captain Ahab . . . I am past scorching; not easily canst thou scorch a scar.’ ¶ ‘Well, well; no more. Thy shrunk voice sounds too calmly, sanely woeful to me. In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of all misery in others that is not mad. Thou shoudst go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How canst thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens yet hate thee, that thou cast not go mad? – What wert thou making there?’
  • TB: later, ‘if thou couldst, blacksmith, glad enough would I lay my head upon thy anvil, and feel thy heaviest hammer between my eyes.’
• p655 - ‘Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride’s eye! – Tell me not of thy teeth-tiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look deep down and do believe.’
• p676 - ‘Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e’en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power: but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. ’
  • TB: Ahab’s long speech in the middle of the lightning storm, an amazing scene. On the following page, Ahab brandishes his harpoon at a crew near mutinous and terrifies them all.
• p677 - ‘All your oaths to hunt the white whale are as binding as mine . . . And that ye may know to what tune this heart beats: look ye here; thus I blow out the last fear!’ And with one blast of his breath he extinguished the flame.
  • TB: Very difficult not to picture Ahab as Poseidon with his trident.
• p698 - ‘. . . Oh! how immaterial are all materials! What things real are there but imponderable thoughts? Here now’s the very dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the help and hope of most endangered life. A lifebuoy of a coffin!’
• p703, Ahab talking to Pip, in a long exchange all of which is noteworthy - ‘. . . There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too curing to my malady. Like cures like; and for this hunt, my malady becomes my most desired health.’ . . . ‘Weep so, and I will murder thee! Have a care, for Ahab too is mad. Listen, and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still know that I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand! – Met! True art thou, lad, as the circumference to its center. So: God for ever bless thee; and if it come to that, God for ever save thee, let what will befall.’
  • TB: Yet again, his crew pulls him from his madness for Moby-Dick, now in the form of the stricken Pip, half mad from a prior trauma. Ahab takes a shine to Pip earlier, and now observes in himself that Pip pulls him away from madness, and he makes a conscious choice to protect his madness in pursuit of revenge upon a creature with no sense of revenge. Second, the ‘as the circumference to its center’ bit is amazing writing.
• p717, in another interaction now with Starbuck, in which Starbuck tries to pull him back towards Nantucket - But Ahab’s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.
• p740 - ‘Starbuck, of late I’ve felt strangely moved to thee; . . . But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the palm of this hand – a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed. ’Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fate’s lieutenant, I act under orders. Look thou, underling! That thou obeyest mind.’
• p750 - ‘Oh! Ahab,’ cried Starbuck, ‘not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist. See! Moby-Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!’