Moby Dick
by Herman Melville (New York: Bantam Books, 1981).
In a letter to Sophia Hawthorne, Nathanial Hawthorne’s wife, dated 8 January 1852, Melville wrote of Moby Dick:
“At any rate, your allusion for example to the ‘Spirit Spout’ first showed to me that there was a subtle significance in that thing – but I did not, in that case, mean it. I had some vague idea while writing it, that the whole book was susceptible of an allegoric construction, & also that parts of it were – but the speciality of many of the particular subordinate allegories, were first revealed to me, after reading Mr. Hawthorne’s letter, which, without citing any particular examples, yet intimated the part-&-parcel allegoricalness of the whole.” (537)
There is so much in this book, I don’t think anyone could’ve set out to mean even half of it and pulled it off. It seems such an intuitive venture, containing so many essayistic passages and forays into soliloquies for the stage, woven in organically with the “main action,” and I have trouble deciding what I think the whole thing is “about.”
It begins with the “human connexion” as Lawrence called it (583), between Ishmael and Queequeg, so perhaps it is about some deep friendship? “But no. Queequeg is forgotten like yesterday’s newspaper. Human things are only momentary excitements or amusements to the American Ishmael.” (583)
Then, perhaps it is about the darkness of an obsessive heart? Ahab’s need to overcome the whale? That was the point drilled in when I read it for school (I even think we read it back to back with Heart of Darkness or Lord of the Flies), but while I was reading it this time, Ahab’s inner turmoil felt a mere side-point. Something to drive the novel toward its end, but not something that occupied much of its meaning.
Even the White Whale himself is just an apparition in the back of the mind for most of the book. Melville spends the bulk of the novel detailing the sperm whale’s anatomy and behavior and recounting operations and quirks of the whale fishery.
Moby Dick seems a fabric of zoology, mythology and folktale. Science and superstition and an adventure plot, told to us by a meticulous narrator. The mythological aspects most clearly emerge in passages concerning the White Whale.
“Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, there was another though, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught.” (178)
Furthermore, how much can we even say Ishmael is a character to himself? His voice is that of an overhead observer as opposed to a protagonist. Yet, if Ishmael is not the protagonist, then who is? Ahab? The whale itself?
Perhaps, in Moby Dick, we have a novel without protagonist or antagonist, though there is no shortage of conflict.
“Doom! Doom! Doom! Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America. Doom!” (587)
I know this post is disjointed, but so are my thoughts on this book.
