The Leviathan Rages
It’s been a few months, but I haven’t exactly been sitting on my hands. After moving to Spain, bopping around the country, and finally settling in Madrid, I’ve also drilled through two major works of fiction: Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun series and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Since Wolfe’s sprawling science fantasy series is closer to my wheelhouse, I’ll need time to gather my thoughts. But Melville’s American classic certainly deserves comment.
Years ago, I read Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. At the time of its publication, critics accused Tolstoy’s work of being too long with too many characters: clunky. In response, Tolstoy supposedly said, “I am very proud of its architecture--its vaults are joined so that one cannot even notice where the keystone is” (everyone cites this line but I can’t find its original source). This sentiment, apocryphal or not, strikes me as apt for Moby-Dick. My copy runs 576 pages and while there is a central narrator, key figures, and an epic arc, there is much here that threatens (successfully) to drag the reader in different directions; Moby-Dick is ornate.
The most banal read of Melville’s opus is that it’s about a crazed captain, Ahab, and his self-destructive quest for vengeance against the white whale. No real spoilers here, but I’d like to point out that Ahab doesn’t appear on deck of the Pequod until page 133: our narrator says (in one of my favorite lines), “Reality outran apprehension; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck” (p. 136). That’s just shy of a quarter of the way through the book. Moby Dick himself isn’t definitively sighted until thirty pages from the end of the book: “There she blows!--there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!” says Ahab himself (p. 546). Only about 5 percent of the novel portrays the corporeal battle between captain, crew, and beast.
Initially, I’m reminded of the Chinese classic: Romance of the Three Kingdoms. A common practice in that work is for the author to spend several pages describing how badass someone is--their fighting prowess and battles and victories--and then have them bested by a main character in two sentences. It’s a “You thought that guy was tough? Look who just knocked him on his ass” form of storytelling. One argument might be that Melville’s opus is this: 550 pages of buildup for 30 pages of a monumental battle. And I think using Melville’s own words, this might be true. Ishmael, describing his weariness with leviathans, says, “One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one . . . To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it” (p. 462). Big whales need big books.
But I’d argue that Moby-Dick is not strictly a monster-slaying epic, a tale of one crazed captain against a demonic leviathan. Perhaps much like the actual practice of whaling, it’s long stretches of nothing--Ishmael’s idle musings--punctuated with moments of intense, bloody violence.
If I had to break down the novel, I’d say that the first 120 pages or so are about Nantucket and the goings-on in and around a New England fishing port. The vast middle section--maybe pages 120 to 540--is what I referred to in my head as “whale facts.” Thank you for signing up for Whale Facts! Did you know that four hundred years ago, right whale tongue was a delicacy in France (p. 308)? Did you know British royals were anointed with whale oil during their installation as head of state: “Think of that, ye loyal Britons! We whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff” (p. 124)? You have unsubscribed from Whale Facts.
The crew of the Pequod sail around the world, hunting and killing leviathans, while Ishmael provides insights on the nature of whales and the practice of their hunting along with the byzantine politics of a sailing vessel like the Pequod. There are side stories, flowing descriptions, sailing practices, violent struggles among the crew, threats of murder and mutiny, but large swaths of Moby-Dick read like 19th century wikipedia articles.
I feel particularly attuned to this kind prose. Exposition dumps are one thing I (attempt to) avoid in my own fantasy and sci-fi works. I also feel like there’s a trend in modern fiction to worldbuild through Wikipedia. The internet, social media, videos, new media, etc., make many people feel like they understand a place without ever having visited. Or, perhaps more accurately, the author is able to trick the reader into believing they understand a place. While a certain degree of artistic license is necessary for any story outside of an autobiography (and those, too), it can be taken too far.
I’m reminded of American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins. In this story, a Mexican woman flees from cartel violence. Cummins, who has generally self-identified as a white American, seems to have a tenuous connection to Latin American identity through a grandparent, and whose immigrant experience comes from her Irish husband who lived as an undocumented migrant in the US. Here is an author with limited access to a place (Mexico), an experience (cartel violence), and a journey (refugee migration) who writes a financially successful novel. And, rightfully, received a great deal of backlash for appropriating that place/experience/journey completely foreign to her being. If a writer is making money off the actual, on-going pain and suffering of others, they either need to have a damn good reason, or that money better be going to people that need it. Additionally, Cummins’ work exacerbates the harmful discourse surrounding a problem that needs direct, systemic solutions, not cash-grab sensationalism in the guise of “raising awareness.”
Melville’s work is not this. Melville spent years at sea, both in the US navy and on merchant vessels, where he participated in the hunting of whales. Ishmael is, I suspect, not far removed from Melville’s own inner monologue. But Melville was not aboard the Essex, a whaling vessel sunk in 1820, which served as the inspiration for the Pequod in Moby-Dick. Melville followed that classic writer’s aphorism of “writing what you know,” but also pulled from external experiences to produce a classic. It’s one of the most admirable qualities of this work.
But it wasn’t just nautical history that served as the source material. Religious and mythological allusions abound in Moby-Dick. It was hard at times to not compare Melville’s novel with that other seminal nautical tale: The Odyssey. While vengeance is a theme in both works--Ahab/Moby Dick and Poseidon/Odysseus--I don’t believe that there’s as much crossover here as my mind desires. Moby-Dick is decidedly a Christian novel, or perhaps a critique of Christianity. As such, the story of Jonah and the whale plays a major role, regularly referenced by Ishmael and other characters. But due to my own ignorance, I feel unqualified to make any pronouncements regarding Moby-Dick’s theological themes.
Tacking away from the utterly innocuous topic of religion, I believe it’s important to discuss another uncontroversial subject: Melville’s treatment of race. To no one’s surprise, a book written by a relatively well-to-do white man in the mid-1800s has some--hmm, let’s say--“problematic takes” on race. To Melville’s credit, one of his most beloved characters is Queequeg, a chieftain’s son from a fictitious Polynesian island. Ishmael’s relationship with Queequeg is, at minimum, exceedingly sensual and, in my read, explicitly sexual. He may be written as a stereotypical savage, but I’d say he’s treated with more humanity than, say, the living exhibits from the many human zoos common in Melville’s era.
With regards to religion, Queequeg’s fictitious (and painfully stereotypical) cultural practices are often juxtaposed against the more ardently religious inhabitants of Nantucket or the crew of the Pequod. Ishmael displays a sense of religious tolerance when he says, “Queequeg thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to be content; and there let him rest. All of our arguing with him would not avail; let him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all--Presbyterians and Pagans alike--for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending” (p. 95). His refusal to elevate Christianity above other religions feels refreshing. But it’s not as simple as that when one considers that Moby-Dick was written in an era dominated by James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and the ongoing state-sponsored genocide of America’s indigenous population.
I intentionally mention these two books in the same breath. The connection between them was brought to my attention by Roxanne Dunbar-Otiz in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United State. Dubar-Ortiz’s work is a concise takedown of the myths in America’s founding and how these utter falsehoods have shaped our shared “history.” One of the most insidious myths was that the European-led settlement of the Americas was a peaceful, inevitable process with only a few hiccups (read: massacres) along the way. Cooper’s work was key in shaping that myth, which Melville wholeheartedly endorsed; Dunbar-Ortiz notes that Melville referred to Cooper as “our national novelist” (p. 103).
Without going into too much detail, the protagonist of The Last of the Mohicans is Natty Bumpo, aka Hawk-eye, the son of white settlers raised by “Delaware Indians,” perhaps based on the Lenape peoples. The book ends with Hawk-eye defeating the Hurons (likely related to the Wyandot peoples), and the orphan son of white and native cultures is symbolically gifted the whole continent (Dunbar-Ortiz, p. 104).
This is the height of myth. America, all countries in the western hemisphere, were founded upon genocide. There is no other way to describe the devastating loss of 90% of the total population of the Americas, from 100 million to 10 million, during the colonization projects beginning at the end of the 15th century (p. 40). It is hard to square the Declaration of Independence stating that all people are created equal while at the same time killing and displacing native populations and participating in chattel slavery. But Cooper’s novel provides a solution--a workaround--to this paradox between the rhetoric of freedom and the realities of oppression.
The myth says that the native populations are not being systemically hunted and killed; rather, they are slowly dissolving, fading away, their cultures blending into the rightful heir of the continents: European settlers. These “terminal narratives,” as Dunbar-Ortiz calls them, are personified in Hawk-eye (p. 39). Dunbar-Ortiz cites historian Wai-chee Dimock: “Far from being antagonistic, ‘empire’ and ‘liberty’ are instrumentally conjoined. If the former stands to safeguard the latter, the latter, in turn, serves to justify the former. Indeed, the conjunction of the two, of freedom and dominion, gives America its sovereign place in history--its Manifest Destiny” (p. 105). Conquest for liberty. Liberty through conquest.
By recognizing the nobility and/or utility of Indigenous Americans, but (insincerely) lamenting the tragically inevitable decline of the native populations, Cooper and those that accepted his myth found a convenient story to tell themselves as the US army marched across the continent to displace, pillage, and slaughter whole tribes, not to mention disrupting hunting patterns, controlling waterways, and other forms of environmental colonialism, freeing up land for settlers. The Indians served their purpose and are now, conveniently, fading away through no fault of any European settler colonial government. This is hardly a myth, but a self-serving, malicious lie used to justify genocide.
I find a related racial tinge in Moby-Dick. If you didn’t know, when a whaling vessel spots a whale, they lower rowboats into the water, get close to the leviathan, and then someone throws a harpoon into the beast. This causes panic in the whale, often leading them to bleed out and die. If you had to guess at the racial make-up of the harpooners, gold star for you if your answer is “not white”:
Queequeg: the halfway civilized savage from the fictitious island of Rokovoko;
Tashtego: a Native American hunter from the Gay Head tribe, likely the Wampanoag;
Daggoo: a towering Black harpooner from West Africa;
Fedallah: an Indian “Parsee,” or more commonly known as a Zorastian.
All four harpooners--all four crewmen that throw spears--are people of color. There is a respect for these individuals and their prowess, but only a respect for their nearness to a perceived primitiveness, something that makes them better at hunting than, say, the “civilized” Nantucket sailor.
Again, my sense is that some would read this as positive: huzzah, a multi-racial crew. And in a very limited sense, this might be true. But there is very nearly a race-based knife fight between Daggoo and an unnamed Spanish sailor who says to the West African, “thy face is the undeniable dark side of mankind,” and then cheekily adds, “No offense” (p. 184). Only the possible sighting of a whale ends the fight. There is racial cooperation (not equality) only when there is an economic incentive; there is a very neoliberal lesson here.
The most maligned racialized character is the young Pip, a ship-keeper. Again, Melville damns with praise: “Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe [Pip is from Connecticut]; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with finer, freer relish than any other race. For blacks, the year’s calendar should show naught but three hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and New Year’s Days” (p. 419). Yep, Black people, just happy and out there celebrating life. And definitely celebrating Independence Day. I’m sure that’s exactly how Black folks felt a decade before the outbreak of the Civil War.
But when Pip, unpracticed at rowing in a whale boat, jumps out during a heated chase, the boat’s mate, Stubb, remonstrates him by saying, “a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama” (p. 421). Stubb states that he will not save Pip a second time if he jumps out. And, of course, Pip jumps out. And Stubb is true to his word, leaving Pip floating in the endless blue. This near-mystical brush with death drives the fourteen-year-old rather mad, a condition he retains to the end of the book.
In the novel, Captain Ahab pities Pip, and does his best to care for him. Indeed, Pip is the one person--perhaps aside from Starbuck--that stands a chance of convincing the mad captain to turn from his quest for vengeance. “Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would not have thee by him. 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” (p. 533). This passage comes mere pages before the white whale is spotted and the fate of the Pequod is decided once and for all. Again, here, there is a recognition of the humanity of a Black child, but it is a pitying appreciation.
The madness in Ahab is mirrored in Pip, and in treating the lost cabin boy kindly, the captain becomes cognizant of his own madness. But lost in his quest for revenge, kindness to him is a poison, so he pushes Pip away to better stoke his rage. Pip is a foil, and a necessary one from a literary point of view. The idea of ballast is the heart of the problem. As Tressie McMillan Cottom said in her essay, “Black is Over (Or, Special Black)”: “Blackness is necessarily static as a counterweight to whiteness” (p. 135). This is all any poorly written racialized character can ever aspire to be: a stand-in providing relief to the more human, white, civilized character. In literature, foils may be necessary, but race as a foil should not be.
This long tangent is not designed to condemn Melville, only point out the problems as I see them. Addressing the failings in historical works of art, not ignoring them, is the only way to preserve them, if indeed that’s what we decide is necessary. Historical works must be folded into the context of our time, weighed and measured, and either accepted with their flaws or discarded as the world sees fit. Again, it’s hardly a surprise to find racism in an American novel from the 19th century. But if I can be generous and step away from its “missteps,” I do think that, at its core, Moby-Dick is an outstanding example of Romanticism.
Romanticism as a movement is said to have run across the early half of the 19th century. Moby-Dick, published in 1851, arrives at the tail end, the flukes as it were. One of the era’s core components is the glorification of the individual, of individualism itself. My hunch is that this is part of capitalism’s project to atomize society, reducing communities to the individual or nuclear family units. Dunbar-Ortiz notes that the impact of emigration from Europe to the Americas required a process of “deliberate disaffiliation”; plenty of literary figures, Ishmael among them, are displaced orphans: Cooper’s Hawk-eye, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, the later figure of the Lone Ranger among them (p. 105).
Romanticism also developed as a response to urbanization and industrialization. And both of these trends play a big role in Moby-Dick. Again, the first quarter of the book explores Nantucket and the spicy bustle around a New England port town, while the second half is very much about the whaling industry, where there is both high praise and utter scorn. I’m reluctant to make this statement without a second readthrough, but I think Melville, with Moby-Dick, might be calling for an end to whaling.
But I’d argue the hallmark of romanticism, at least from my perspective, is the sublime, standing in awe of nature’s force and fury. It is watching a tornado destroy a town, a boat sailing into a hurricane. Earlier, I mentioned how a lot of Melville’s opus consists of “whale facts.” To me, Moby-Dick is the story of a narrator spilling almost 600 pages worth of ink, disgorging everything there was to know about whales, fighting them and killing them and dicing them up for profit. Even with all that knowledge, the narrator meets an unstoppable force of nature that utterly wrecks his shit. Moby Dick cannot be reasoned with, or about. He was death, nature’s grim reaper for the proud and arrogant.
Moby-Dick straddles a moment in history between the receding superstitions surrounding gods and monsters with modernity’s seductive narrative telling us nature can be known, named, categorized, and tamed. Here, the white whale is an avatar of nature--nature wronged--that, despite all our industry, will not be dominated. Here is nature fighting back, demonstrating the fragility of human ingenuity. Melville might be trying to tell us, in an age of rapid industrialization, that nature can and will scour us from the earth. And in a pandemic, with a world facing snowballing climate crises, it’s hard to disagree.
