Moby-Dick (1851)

by Herman Melville

The story of Ahab and the White Whale is so thoroughly diffused into the American psyche that for some time I believed that there was no longer any reason to read it beyond what vague historical intrigue it may hold. We had wrung the juice out of the fruit and used it to enrich our cultural punch and were now free to discard the remaining rind and pith.

I suspect that this is a commonly held view these days; it certainly is among the technocratic yuppie class to which I belong for whom truth comes only from boolean expressions. Picture my shock, then, when following a recommendation of Moby-Dick from an eccentric uncle as a way to learn how to live a more fulfilled life in $CURRENT_YEAR, I found myself actually following through and purchasing the book.

Moby-Dick then sat on my shelf and taunted me each time I reached for a new book, saying “you won’t,” and indeed, for a few years, it was correct. It wasn’t until the summer of 2020 that, with more time at home and more interest in learning how to live a fulfilled life than ever, I finally had had enough of its mockery and set out on my vicarious journey aboard the Pequod.

On that voyage I learned that it is as preposterous to be prejudiced against the learnings of this book for its old age as it is to consider breathing outdated simply because we’ve been doing it for so long. The external reality for man may change with the ages, but his internal reality does not. Moby-Dick is a captivating and soul-wrenching illustration of the wickedness of man and nature and the chains of fate that bind them together.

Now, the superficial differences in form between this book and one published more recently should not be ignored. I was taught that good creative writing involves linear sentences: sentences with a single objective whose paths through space can be traced with a straight line. Congruent with most 19th-century English and American literature, Melville’s sentences are anything but linear. Next to the taut, short sentences devoid of punctuation that are currently fashionable, Melville’s diction appears more poetic than prosaic. Consider the following paragraph regarding the Pacific Ocean (ch. 111, The Pacific) to be representative (the enjambment and stanza grouping is my own):

There is, one knows not what sweet mystery
about this sea, whose gently awful stirring seem to speak
of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations
of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John.

And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures,
wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters’ Fields
of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall,
and ebb and flow unceasingly;

for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows,
drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries;
all that we call lives and souls,
lie dreaming, dreaming, still;
tossing like slumberers in their beds;
the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.

The dense sentences and myriad references to historical, biblical, and mythological figures, features, and events necessitate a slower and more methodical approach be taken by the barely-literate modern reader. I was at first appalled at the creeping progress I made through long hours of toil, but soon enough found it in myself to swallow my pride, discard my existing conception of a reasonable pages-per-hour rate, and accept my woeful undereducation in the classics by keeping my magic screen nearby to enter mysterious proper nouns into that encyclopedic search box.

Thematically, it would be foolish of me to attempt to extract a few overtones and put them forth as the distillation of the insight present within Moby-Dick. Instead, I will highlight the single theme of recurrence, which rears its head repeatedly throughout the novel, through a selection of short passages.

On the uniqueness of man:

“Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.” (ch. 107, The Carpenter)

Being a duplicate, a man’s existence is treading this path of men as but the latest incarnation of Sisyphus:

“For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from the world’s vast bulk its small but valuable spermaceti; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when—There she blows!—the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life’s old routine again.” (ch. 98, Stowing Down and Clearing Up)

Though this path is long blazed and well trodden, it no less belongs in full to the man currently walking it. When asked if repeated failure in the face of his enemy had shaken his resolve, Captain Ahab responds:

“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 Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders.” (ch. 134, The Chase—Second Day)

In forging on down this damned path, the Pequod, succumbing to the inexorable force of the whale, suffers the same fate of the antediluvian world, and in so sets the stage back as it was in anticipation of the next turn of the wheel:

“Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” (ch. 135, The Chase—Third Day)

In defiance of this flood, as Noah and his brood survived to propagate when the waters receded, so did Ishmael and his story of the Pequod and her ill-fated quest. Through this metaphor one may evaluate the effectiveness of Moby-Dick in shining insight into the modern man’s life, and admit that a cogent argument has been made that today’s man is but yesterday’s man in superficially different surroundings, trodding the same path in different shoes.

Don’t take my word for it, though, or the word of a few cherry-picked passages. Perhaps the theme of recurrence only stood out to me as Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being was bouncing around in my head, having read that novel recently. Perhaps only in the face of Kundera’s refutation of recurrence did an affirmation of it jump out at me from Melville’s disjointed and innumerable metaphors.

This is but one take from a book offering countless. Page in and page out Moby-Dick presents fertile ground from which insight may be sown. For the reader that wants to learn about whales, sailors, himself, his ancestors, the ocean, or his gods, this book is a worthwhile read — so long as he rejects the idea that our world is materially different from those past.

Plus, think of the gratifying pat on the back you’ll be able to give yourself after finishing.