On an overcast day in late December, I stopped by a bookstore with the intention of buying a hot coffee and a book. The coffee was, as always, the simple purchase – black, no sugar, no cream. The book proved to be a little more difficult. I keep a running list of novels and short story collections I intend to read. As we speak, Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children,” and Philip Roth’s “The Counterlife” are all competing to be the next book I open. In all honesty, those three books held the top spot last December, but I have bad habit of disrupting this schedule with works that either satisfy a sudden interest of mine, or were recently recommended by a friend, loved one, or NPR.
I took my time perusing the shelves that day because, to my wife’s displeasure, I find peace and comfort in bookstores. If there was a Heaven, and if I was lucky enough to be admitted, I imagine it’d look something like the inside of a bookstore on a rainy, cold day – the light from the reading lamps warm and inviting, a fresh cup of coffee sending up steam, and the shelves upon shelves of books that could fascinate, touch and inspire me for the remainder of eternity.
On this particular day, I instinctively headed toward the “M” section because, as far as author’s last names go, those beginning with the letter “M” seems to be particularly rich. I glanced at Mailer’s “The Naked and the Dead,” Malamud’s “The Fixer,” Miller’s “Sexus,” all with equal, though not supreme, interest (those works all have places, though farther down, on my eternal reading list.). I think I knew going in what it was I planned to get. For years, I’d talked about reading the Great American novel, and for years, intimidated by what I’d heard, I’d always stalled. It might be said that book held the honor of holding the very last spot on my reading list. The work in question was Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.”
My wife, Danica, persuaded me to go ahead and buy it. I’d avoided it long enough, stared at it long enough, obsessed over it long enough, she said. Time to seek out my own personal white whale, which was, in fact, a book about a man’s quest for the great white whale. I bought the book that day in December, brought it home and promptly put it on my book shelf, where it stayed, greedily eyeing me for months. Occasionally I’d pick up the book, thumb through the pages, look at the illustrations, feel the exhilaration of spending a few weeks at sea, but always the novel went back on the shelf.
By that June, with the warm summer weather boosting my spirits, I finally decided to set sail. The voyage turned out to be beyond anything I’d ever expected. I had a certain prejudice towards the book. I expected it to be great, but in a traditional sort of way. “Moby Dick” is anything but traditional. I hesitate to speculate on alternate realities, but I can confidently say that had Melville lived in the 21st Century, no publishing house would have touched the manuscript he submitted.
The novel opens with those famous three words, “Call me Ishmael,” and the reader assumes he or she is going to read a straightforward narrative about a young sailor who goes out in search of sperm whales. The beginning of the novel sets up this belief, with Melville taking meticulous care to describe both the whaling culture in Nantucket and the deep, homoerotic relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg. The two men, in those early passages, share a bed, interlock their legs together and are described as being “married.”
The work then, oddly, turns its back on Ishmael. The main character becomes the second mate, Stubb, who slays several of the leviathans, eats a steak from the whale and provides a steady dose of comic relief to the proceedings. Stubb commands one of the three whaling boats that go off to hunt the whale. Ishmael, we are clearly told, belongs to the crew of the first mate’s boat, Starbuck. Yet the reader is treated to the conversations and personal thoughts of Stubb that our narrator could not possibly have heard. The work, at that point, has changed point of view, from first person to third person. But what exactly is the nature of this third person point of view? Is it an omniscient narrator, is it the imaginings of Ishmael, is it God himself listening to the prayers of his children, or is it perhaps Melville. The authorial intrusion isn’t so far fetched, given the long, encyclopedic descriptions of whaling life the narrator provides.
This element of the work is key to its greatness, and the strangeness only increases as the narrative, if it can be called that, proceeds. Eventually, Stubb is replaced by Captain Ahab as the central character, and Ishmael is all but forgotten. The novel Moby Dick becomes Ahab’s story, and his monomaniacal pursuit of the whale. The omens of bad tidings, the foreshadowing of the tragedy to come, overflow through these sections, leaving the reader no doubt that The Pequod is fated for disaster. Particularly when the crew meets the ship the Rachel, a femininely named ship desperately searching for and mourning her lost sons. Ahab ignores her pleas, and continues on his mad journey, ultimately destroying himself and the crew.
After The Pequod sank, I suddenly remembered Queequeg, the spouse of our sometime narrator. No significant mention was made of his death. I thought this was odd until I realized that no Ishmael himself had disappeared from the remainder of the book, only to resurface, like Queequeg’s coffin, in the novel’s brief coda. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that what I at first assumed to be mere sloppiness was in fact one of the book’s greatest strengths, and what marked it as a truly fascinating triumph in Romantic literature. There are several times when reading the novel that one can almost see Melville scribbling away frantically, trying to transcribe the fever dream that is plaguing him before it disappears forever. The novel is not the work of a writer’s mind, but rather of his soul. “Moby Dick” is a book to be felt, not necessarily read. Its plot doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, but the emotion it conjures for the astute reader is beyond compare in world literature. It’s the work of a hungry soul, searching madly like Ahab, for the great white presence of God.
Early in the novel, Melville takes a slight detour from the plot to present us with a unique story of Jonah and the Whale, as told by a mariner preacher to congregation of seamen and widows. It’s a long, elaborate story the minister tells about one sailor, Jonah, foolishly trying to run away from God. But the sermon isn’t simply filler. It’s the crux of the novel. For, the rest of Moby Dick is the inversion of that tale. It’s one man, blinded by rage, scouring the earth in search of God, if such a being does exist.
“To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me,” Ahab says. “Sometimes I think there's naught beyond.”
In the end, it is only nature that exists. Not a sentient God capable of vengeance or salvation. The whale is that nature. He isn’t interested in man’s worship or man’s scorn of him. It is only man who invests nature with the power of the almighty.
"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!"
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