Why Read Moby Dick?

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ven though I hadn’t read a word of it, I grew up hating Moby-Dick. My father was an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh with a specialty in American maritime literature, and that big, battle-scarred book came to represent everything I resented about his job: all the hours he spent in his attic study, relentlessly reading and writing, more often than not with Moby-Dick spread out before him.

Sometimes he even dared talk about the novel, inevitably in an excited, reverential tone that only exasperated me all the more. It wasn’t until my senior year in high school, when my English teacher made it clear that I had no choice in the matter, that I finally read Moby-Dick . I soon found myself in the worst position an adolescent male can ever know: having to admit that maybe, just maybe, his father had been right all along.

The voice of Ishmael, the novel’s narrator, caught me completely by surprise. I had expected to be bored to death, but Ishmael sounded like the best friend I had not yet managed to find. Thirty-seven years later, after reading Moby-Dick cover to cover at least a dozen times, I still count Ishmael as a beloved soulmate and spiritual adviser. Not only is he funny, wise, and bighearted, he is the consummate survivor, for it is he and he alone who lives to tell about Ahab’s encounter with the White Whale. For me, Moby-Dick is more than the greatest American novel ever written; it is a metaphysical survival manual—the best guidebook there is for a literate man or woman facing an impenetrable unknown: the future of civilization in this storm-tossed 21st century.

Much of this has to do, I think, with the extraordinary historical moment at which Herman Melville wrote his masterpiece. In the fall of 1850, when he moved his family from New York City to the Berkshires in western Massachusetts, the United States was in the midst of pushing its way west. Railroads had begun to knit the interior of the nation into an iron tracery of ceaseless, smoke-belching movement. Steamboats ventured up once inaccessible rivers. With the winning of the Mexican War, in 1848, America’s future as a bi-coastal nation was sealed. When word reached the East Coast later that year that gold had been discovered in California, thousands upon thousands of prospectors quickly made that future an accomplished fact.

But there was a problem with this juggernaut: a lie festered at the ideological core of the then 30 states of America. Despite the fact that her founders had promised liberty and freedom for all, the southern half of the country was economically dependent on the slavery of Africans. And with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required that any escaped slaves be handed over to the authorities, slavery was no longer just a southern problem. Antagonisms that had lain dormant for decades could no longer be contained, and an eruption of terrible violence appeared inevitable.

Melville’s intense imaginative engagement with these forces of turmoil and change meant that the novel he wrote and re-wrote over the course of a year beginning in September 1850 would be about much more than a whaling voyage to the Pacific. Indeed, contained in the pages ofMoby-Dick is nothing less than the genetic code of America: all the promises, problems, conflicts, and ideals that had contributed to the outbreak of a revolution in 1775 and were about to precipitate a civil war in 1861, and that have continued to drive this country’s ever contentious march across 160 years, up through the current “war on terror.” This means that whenever a new crisis grips this country, Moby-Dick becomes newly important. It is why subsequent generations of readers have seen Ahab as Hitler during World War II or, closer to our own day, as a profit-mad, deep-drilling oil company in 2010, or as one of several power-crazed Middle Eastern dictators in 2011.

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he 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—a third of the total that his first novel, Typee, had sold. It wasn’t until after World War I that what had begun as a few belated plaudits became 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 first encountered the book were stunned and deeply influenced by how Melville conveyed the specifics of a past world even as he communicated an unmatched sense of what it is like, in any age, to be alive. What Moby-Dick had needed, it turned out, was space—the distance required for its themes and images to resonate, unfettered by the passions that had inspired them. Once free of its own time, the novel was on its way to becoming the seemingly timeless source of meaning that it is today.

Among the expatriates in Paris in the 1920s, Moby-Dick was 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, Ernest Hemingway, upon entering his 50s, wrote his publisher that he considered Melville one of the handful of writers he was still trying to beat.

By 1951, when the centennial of the novel’s publication was celebrated, Melville’s masterpiece had succeeded in becoming more than a literary sensation; it had become an indispensable part of the popular culture. Even so, in our day, Moby-Dick is the most reluctantly read of the American classics. Not only is the book long; many of its 135 chapters appear to have nothing to do with the tale of Captain Ahab’s pursuit of the White Whale. But the novel, like all great works of art, grows on you. Instead of being a page-turner, Moby-Dick is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.

In fact, 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.

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elville’s years on a whaleship in the 1840s gave him a firsthand appreciation for the backbreaking reality of physical labor. Politicians of his day might have spoken patriotically about the nation’s founding principles, but it was repetitious, soul-crushing work—a form of bodily punishment to which most white Americans refused to submit—that was responsible for the country’s prosperity. Once a whale was killed, it took an entire day to process it, only to be repeated when another whale was sighted. “Oh! my friends, but this is man-killing!,” Ishmael laments. “Yet this is life.”

The crew of a typical whaleship was made up of men from all over the world. This demographic diversity was not typical of the United States in that era, when to be an American citizen was to be white and, if not already rich (few, proportionally, were well-off), certainly on the way to wealth as the nation proudly took its place as a global power. A century and a half later, we have a very different perspective on the role of other peoples in America’s rise, and Melville was one of the few authors of his time to have personal experience with where the future lay for America in a demographic sense. What’s more, his portrayal of working people is never stereotypical or condescending.

Melville’s time aboard a whaler also left him with an appreciation for the liberating power of democracy, what Ishmael calls the “democratic dignity” that distinguished America at the time—with the notable exceptions of the settlers’ treatment of Native Americans and the institution of slavery. In the dangerous work environment of the whale fishery it didn’t matter what your race or background was; what mattered was whether you could do your job. At one point thePequod’ s third mate, Flask, climbs onto the back of his towering black harpooneer, Daggoo, to get a better view of a pod of whales. “The sight of little Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious,” Ishmael observes, “for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of, barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider.” In this single image, Melville has managed to illustrate what he calls elsewhere “the divine equality” of humanity even as he provides a scathing critique of slavery. Flask may out-rank Daggoo, but it is the African harpooneer who literally carries the third mate. Indeed, one might go a step further and contend that what Ishmael repeatedly refers to as the whale’s appalling demonic whiteness signals the author’s stand against his nation’s racist practices. Democracy in principle, Ishmael maintains, “radiates without end from God; Himself!”

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n every age, there will be a threat to the principle of “divine equality,” and his name is Ahab. In Melville’s view, it doesn’t take much to become a demagogue as long as you learn a few simple tricks. Dictators such as Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Qaddafi are not geniuses; they are paranoid despots and expert manipulators of men. If you want to understand how these and other megalomaniacs pull it off, read the last third ofMoby-Dick and watch as Ahab tightens his stranglehold on the Pequod’ s crew in his increasingly horrifying quest for the White Whale.

But Melville also provides a description of the ideal leader. In the midst of a disorienting crisis, what is needed more than anything else, he suggests, is a calm, steadying dose of clarity, the kind of omniscient, all-seeing perspective symbolized by an eagle on the wing: “And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces.” This is the anti-Ahab, who instead of anger and pain relies on equanimity and judgment, who does his best to remain above the fray and who even in the darkest of possible moments resists the “woe that is madness.”

In this portrait of a person who resists the fiery, disorienting passions of the moment, who has the soul of a high-flying Catskill eagle, Melville, in his preternatural way, has hit upon a description of the political figure America desperately needed in 1851 but who would not appear on the national stage until a decade later, when Abraham Lincoln became president of the United States.

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n one of his typical chapter-length asides (the book is truly proto-modernist, given its fractured structure, voluminous lists, idiosyncratic asides, and interior monologues), Melville tackles a prescient question, considering today’s extinction-prone Earth: “Whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must … like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.” In the paragraphs that follow, Ishmael compares the whale to the buffalo in the American West and acknowledges that, taking into account what has happened to those “humped herds,” it might seem inevitable that “the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.”

But after examining the question from a variety of angles, he decides that this is not the case. Given the difficulty of pursuing whales across an ocean larger than all the earth’s landmasses combined, along with the whales’ ability to retreat to “their Polar citadels” in the icy North and South, where they can “bid defiance to all pursuit from man,” the whale is, Ishmael insists, “immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality.”

For those who grew up in the aftermath of the industrialized slaughter of whales in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, when it looked like several species of cetaceans would indeed go the way of the buffalo, Ishmael might seem woefully naïve, especially in light of what has happened in recent years to the world’s ice sheet. On the other hand, the sperm-whale population is now on the rebound, even as evidence continues to mount that our addiction to what supplanted whale oil—petroleum—has contributed to global warming and sea-level rise. In the years to come, the combination of climate change and population growth could have a devastating effect on the planet and, needless to say, on humanity. Maybe Ishmael’s reference to “the last man” is more than a figure of speech. Instead of whales, maybe the endangered mega-fauna is us.

Melville ends this chapter with an image that has taken on a frightening immediacy due to the ravages of climate change and the aftermath of the tsunami that recently decimated Japan. “In Noah’s flood he [the whale] despised Noah’s Ark,” Ishmael reminds us, “and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmast crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.” There it is, Ishmael’s vision of the future: a drowned world devoid of land dwellers, a hell for people but a paradise for whales.

So how do we face a world in which yet another cataclysm, whether it be environmental, financial, or terrorist-devised, always seems to be just around the corner? I think it’s Ishmael who puts it best. Nearly halfway into the novel, after almost getting killed in pursuit of a whale, he says, “There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life 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.” Elsewhere Ishmael advises, “Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.” This redemptive mixture of skepticism and hope, this genial stoicism in the face of a short, ridiculous, and irrational life, is why I read Moby-Dick.