Timeless Classics: Moby-Dick

I just completed reading another timeless classic, Moby-Dick, arguably the most cited candidate for the GAN─the Great American Novel. I first heard of it when I was in junior high school due to its fame, though I had never read it until two months ago. Published in 1851, Moby-Dick is an epic novel, centered on the sailor Ishmael’s narration of Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal quest on ship Pequod, for vengeance against Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg on the ship's previous voyage. 

The novel was authored by Herman Melville, a teacher-turned-sailor and sailor-turned novelist and poet. Born in New York in 1819, Melville completed Typee, his first book, in the summer of 1845. The book was published in London in February, 1846 and became an overnight bestseller in England. In the next four years, Melville wrote a few more books that gave him renown as a writer and adventurer. However, Moby-Dick, now considered his masterpiece, was published to mixed reviews in 1851. It was a commercial failure, and was out of print at the time of his passing in 1891. Its reputation as a Great American Novel was established only in the 20th century, after the 1919 centennial of his birth, amidst a renewed interest in his writings known as the "Melville revival", during which his work experienced a significant critical reassessment.

As I explored it further, I was intrigued to learn that while Melville created Moby-Dick largely based on his experiences as a sailor, he did draw inspiration from an earlier American explorer and author, J. N. Reynolds, who published an account of the whale in Mocha Dick, Or The White Whale of the Pacific: A Leaf from a Manuscript Journal, printed in The Knickerbocker in 1839. Mocha Dick was the nickname given to a rogue albino male sperm whale that lived in the southeastern Pacific Ocean in the early 19th century, usually encountered in the waters near Mocha Island, off the central coast of Chile. 

Moreover, I learned that Melville was among the five authors deemed the representative figures of American Renaissance in literature─a period in American literature that ran from about 1830 to around the Civil War. In American studies, the American Renaissance was once considered synonymous with American Romanticism, and was closely associated with Transcendentalism. Besides Melville, the four representative authors of the American Renaissance were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. 

There are many characters in the novel, but I will just cover the main ones in this blog post. The first one is Ishmael, a junior crew member of the Pequod, the whaling ship that sets sail from Nantucket, an island in the state of Massachusetts known for its whaling business. Though Ishmael doesn’t play a major role in the events of the novel, he is the narrator and much of the narrative consists of his eloquent, verbose, and extravagant discourse on whales and whaling. Ishmael is believed to be a reflection of Melville himself in the novel. Posing in the photo is Ishmael, played by Richard Basehart in the 1956 film based on Moby-Dick.

The protagonist of the novel is Ahab,

the monomaniacal captain of the Pequod. Having lost his leg to Moby Dick, Ahab is single-minded in his pursuit of the whale, using a mixture of charisma and terror to persuade his crew to join him. As a captain, he is dictatorial but not unfair. At moments he shows a compassionate side, caring for the insane Pip and musing on his wife and child back in Nantucket. In the 1956 film, the role of Captain Ahab was played by Gregory Peck, one of the top Hollywood legends. 

I was impressed by Melville's creative pairing of mates and harpooners in the novel, which mirrors relationships of oppression in the nineteenth century. They are Starbuck, the First Mate from New England, pairing his harpooner Queequeg, from a South Sea island; the Second Mate Stubb, from the American West, pairing Tashtego, a Native American Indian; the Third Mate Flask, from the South, pairing Daggoo from Africa. While these pairings do reflect larger social structures, they also involve relationships that are much more complicated and much more interdependent than simple master-slave or boss-worker exchanges. The Pequod depends on cooperation for success in catching whales and sometimes for mere survival at sea, and men, in the end, are assessed according to their skill rather than race.

Last but not least character is Pip, a young Black boy who fills the role of a cabin boy or jester on the Pequod. Pip has a minimal role in the beginning of the narrative but becomes important when he goes insane after being left to drift alone in the sea for some time. Like the fools in Shakespeare’s plays, he is half idiot and half prophet, often perceiving things that others don’t. As it turns out, Pip and Ahab are a bizarre pair, opposites in almost every respect, but Pip proves to be the only one who can connect with Ahab on a human level. 

The rich biblical implications that Melville employed in naming the characters have been critically acclaimed aspects of the novel, and were the part I enjoyed most, though I'm not a Christian. The novel begins with its iconic opening sentence, "Call me Ishmael", which is among world literature's most famous. Per the Book of Genesis, the birth of Ishmael was planned by the Patriarch Abraham's first wife, Sarah, who was 75 years old and had yet to bear a child. She had the idea to offer her Egyptian handmaiden Hagar to her husband so that they could have a child by her. Abraham slept with Hagar and she bore a child, Ishmael, who would live to the age of 137 and would become the ancestor of the Arabs. This image is a depiction of Hagar and her son Ishmael, fleeing into the desert and running out of water.

Having arrived in New Bedford on a freezing December evening, Ishmael realizes that he just missed the boat bound for Nantucket. When he spots "the Spouter-Inn—Peter Coffin", he associates his suffering with Lazarus of Bethany, a figure of the New Testament whose life is restored by Jesus four days after his death, as told in the Gospel of John. The resurrection is considered one of the miracles of Jesus. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, Lazarus is venerated as Righteous Lazarus, the Four-Days Dead.

The next biblical names appearing in the novel are Elijah and Ahab. Elijah was a prophet who lived in the northern kingdom of Israel during the reign of King Ahab (9th century BC), according to the Books of Kings in the Hebrew Bible. Elijah defended the worship of the Hebrew deity Yahweh over that of the Canaanite deity Baal. However, Ahab was a Baal worshipper and was criticized for causing moral decline in Israel. Ahab's reign was deeply unpopular among Yahwists and was considered to be worse than the previous kings of Israel.

In the novel Melville also referred to Jonah, the central character in the Book of Jonah, in which God commands him to go to the city of Nineveh, but Jonah instead goes to Jaffa. He sets sail for Tarshish and encounters a huge storm. The sailors, realizing that it is no ordinary storm, cast lots and discover that Jonah is to blame. Eventually, Jonah is thrown overboard as a sacrifice offered to God, and the storm calms. After being cast from the ship, Jonah is swallowed by a large fish (a whale), and within the belly of the fish he remains for three days and three nights. While in the great fish, Jonah prays to God in his affliction and commits to giving thanks and to fulfilling his vows. Finally, God commands the fish to vomit Jonah out.

Apart from the biblical implications, I was amazed by the breadth of knowledge fields Melville explored in the novel. The first one is cetology, the branch of marine mammal science that studies approximately eighty species of whales, dolphins, and porpoises in the scientific infraorder Cetacea. Observations about Cetacea have been recorded since at least classical times. Ancient Greek fishermen created an artificial notch on the dorsal fin of dolphins entangled in nets so that they could tell them apart years later. Approximately 2,300 years ago, Aristotle carefully took notes on cetaceans while traveling on boats with fishermen in the Aegean Sea. This knowledge is ancient, yet entirely new to me.

The others that interest me are physiognomy and phrenology. Physiognomy, also known as face reading, is the practice of assessing a person's character or personality from their outer appearance—especially the face. Phrenology involves the measurement of bumps on the skull to predict mental traits. It is based on the concept that the brain is the organ of the mind, and that certain brain areas have localized, specific functions or modules. It was said that the brain was composed of different regions, so those that were used more often were bigger, resulting in the different skull shapes. Both physiognomy and phrenology meet the contemporary definition of pseudoscience because of their unsupported claims, yet they are both new to me.

I was also fascinated by a number of startling points made in Chapter 99, titled "The Doubloon", about how people interpret the world—particularly Stubb's imaginative and dazzling interpretation of the zodiacal signs as representing the twelve stages of a man's life, as shown in this passage: 

"Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round chapter; and now I'll read it off, straight out of the book. Come, Almanack! To begin: there's Aries, or the Ram—lecherous dog, he begets us; then, Taurus, or the Bull—he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the Twins—that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue, when lo! comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and here, going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path—he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin! that's our first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra, or the Scales—happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the Scorpion, stings us in the rear; we are curing the wound, when whang come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing himself. As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside! here's the battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt, he comes rushing, and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Water-bearer, pours out his whole deluge and drowns us; and to wind up with Pisces, or the Fishes, we sleep."

The main theme of Moby-Dick is "the limits of knowledge." Though Ishmael tries in the novel to make use of nearly every discipline known to man—including art, taxonomy, physiognomy, and phrenology, he still fails to understand the essential nature of the whale. It suggests that human knowledge is always limited and insufficient. When it comes to Moby Dick himself, this limitation takes on allegorical significance. The ways of Moby Dick, like those of the Christian God, are unknowable to man, and thus trying to interpret them, as Ahab does, is inevitably futile and often fatal.

In the final chapter, Moby-Dick smashes the Pequod, which goes down without its captain. Ahab is determined to strike at Moby Dick with all of his power. After harpooning the whale, Ahab is caught around the neck by the flying line and dragged under the sea. Tashtego, meanwhile, still tries to nail the flag to the ship’s spar as it goes down. He catches a sky-hawk in mid-hammer, and the screaming bird, folded in the flag, goes down with everything else. The vortex from the sinking Pequod pulls the remaining harpoon boats and crew down with it. These are the closing sentences:

"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."

Queequeg’s coffin, the iconic symbol of life and death, appears in the Epilogue. Queequeg has it built when he is seriously ill, but when he recovers, it becomes a chest to hold his belongings and an emblem of his will to live. He perpetuates the knowledge tattooed on his body by carving it onto the coffin’s lid. The coffin further comes to symbolize life, in a morbid way, when it replaces the life buoy of the Pequod. When the ship sinks, the coffin becomes Ishmael’s buoy, saving not only his life but the life of the narrative that he will pass on.