MOBY-DICK
By Herman Melville
Illustrated by Rockwell Kent
864 pp.
Modern Library Edition
$13.65 Amazon.com

Reviewed by Roy Potter

Dear Reader,

What follows is not really a review, but a tribute to what I believe is one of the best novels in world literature. I hope in this space to turn your attention again, or for the first time, to Moby-Dick.

What novel in American literature aims so high? Melville has created in Captain Ahab a rational madman with the courage, strength, and determination to challenge fate. The plot is deceptively unassuming: a whaling ship, the Pequod, leaves Nantucket to hunt whales. The captain, Ahab, is really after a white whale called Moby-Dick, who in a previous encounter cost Ahab a leg. The narrator, Ishmael, is a sailor on the ship. After hints and warnings that all is not right aboard the Pequod, the truth begins to emerge as Ahab mulls his obsession:

“All visible objects, man, are but pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will
strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks
me, he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.
Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”

Mad? Absolutely. And he knows it: “…all my means are sane, my motives and my object mad.”

What American novel of today or yesterday attains Moby- Dick’s heights of inspired passion in such great poetic prose? Take as an example the short chapter on the mysterious character Bulkington, who had just landed from a four-year voyage and was immediately ready to ship out again. “The ground,” said Ishmael, “seemed scorching to his feet.”

Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ’gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe.

…Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing—straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

Is there another novel that examines so successfully the rational and irrational through the relationship between two fascinating characters? Only one man aboard the Pequod sees the danger Ahab represents for the ship and crew. Starbuck, the chief mate, has the courage to question the captain’s obsessive drive to find and kill Moby-Dick. Starbuck was heard to say:

“I will have no man in my boat…who is not afraid of a whale.” By this he seems to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is far more dangerous than a coward.

What irony that the utterly fearless man in his boat is Ahab. And what a pity that Starbuck knows he is no match for Ahab’s mad strength:

Oh! I plainly see my miserable office, --to obey, rebelling; and worse yet, to hate with touch of pity! For in his eyes I read some lurid woe would
shrivel me up, had I it.

The only way Starbuck could have stopped Ahab would have been to shoot him when he had the chance one night. Musket in hand, he stood outside Ahab’s cabin, convinced that only by killing Ahab could the ship and crew escape death, but in the end he was unwilling to act. In Starbuck’s last talk with Ahab, we see that the captain is now unswerving in his course:

Ahab is forever 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. Look thou, underling! That thou obeyest mine.

Here is a book written in 1851 that has a wider diversity of characters than any book I know. There are whites, blacks, and all shades between: an Indian and others from Nantucket, Chinaman, Sicilian, Dutchman, sailors and harpooners from Iceland, the Azores, Tahiti, Malta, England, Spain, and the Isle of Man. To find such diversity aboard sailing ships at the time Melville wrote was not unusual, and as sailors and whalermen, they got along quite well, their lives and fortunes depending entirely on constant cooperation.

These were men not easily awed by the world. In Moby-Dick this cosmopolitan attitude is seen when the harpooneer Queequeg dives into the ocean and saves a man who has been swept overboard:

Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies.
He only asked for water—fresh water—something to wipe the brine off; that done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to be saying to himself—“It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians.”

If you would know Ahab, and whalers, you must know whales. And herein lies a problem many readers face: the number of pages devoted to the natural history of the whale, the history of hunting him, and the complex work aboard ship that reduced him to valuable oil. I don’t think Melville thought of these pages as digressions, but a way to show how the lives of everyone aboard the Pequod were ruled by the whale. The first time I read Moby-Dick I became impatient with what seemed like irrelevant detail about whales. On later readings at a more leisurely pace (which only makes sense with an 864-page book), I found these passages interesting and was conscious they gave the book greater coherence and meaning.

For me, Moby-Dick has been a lifelong voyage of grand reading and discovery. Perhaps two or three times a year I pick it up and read a chapter or two, check a quotation, show someone a passage I think is interesting. And just leaf through it to see again some of Rockwell Kent’s famous illustrations. There are over 250 of them in the Modern Library Edition. Kent must have been Melville’s alter ego because his drawings capture the soul of the book: its humor, terror, and humanity.

And so it goes, my long pursuit of Ahab. While he follows his self-created destiny, I try to understand him using the map Melville has provided. Is it possible? Ishmael muses on the difficulty:

But Ahab, my Captain, still moves before me in all his Nantucket grimness and shagginess…I have only to do with a poor old whale-hunter like him; and, therefore, all outward majestical trappings are denied me. Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!

Is Moby-Dick the perfect book? Of course not. But Melville has aimed higher and dug deeper than most writers before and after him. He once said: “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 that have tried it.”

Moby-Dick is a mighty book. 

 

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