Moby Dick: or the Whirlwind; a Short Review about Ishmael’s Quest for Meaning
A review
Moby Dick takes many forms: an epic, a classification of nature, an investigation, a poem, a play; it swings back and forth from comedy to tragedy with ease despite the weight in each swing. Talking about Moby Dick, I sometimes feel like Polonius:
“The best actors in the world, either for
tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical,
historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,
tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or
poem unlimited.” Hamlet, act 2, scene 2.
It is a poem unlimited: but for this review I must reduce it. I will discuss two major quests that drive the story on. The major rhythms of the novel are Ahab’s quest to conquer nature and Ishmael’s quest to understand the meaning of the world. Ahab wants to slay the whale; Ishmael can’t stop himself from dissecting it.
Everyone is aware of Ahab’s quest, having read the story or not. But the interesting fact is that Ahab doesn’t even appear for the first hundred pages. He doesn’t even announce his quest, ratifying the crew to his noble and dark urge, until nearly two hundred pages into the story. For roughly one third of Moby Dick, the quest to kill the whale is just a rumor learned outside of the text. When Ahab arrives, Ishmael is subsumed (or sublimated) into Ahab’s story; I will do the reverse, here, and wrestle Ishmael back from Ahab.
Before the quest to slay the whale, there is Ishmael. Melancholic, sentimental, suicidal, Ishmael is a drifter who signs on to a whaling ship as a means of “driving off the spleen.” This is a ridiculous reason to join America’s most horrifying and deadly industry, especially for a 1/275th part of the profit. So, the reader must wonder, why? At the time, the whaling industry was the absolute cutting edge of human technology: life on a whaling vessel was like a space voyage, a whale fisher spent months and years aboard a ship without ever seeing land, exploring waters that were only recently unknown and unmapped: taking Ishmael from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. He would come to see the world and the secrets of the world, the ocean, the watery void, the place where leviathan amours are revealed. It is the equivalent of going to space on a ticket that requires you to risk life and limb in the most awful conditions for rather short pay. Why? For the same reason that many people nowadays would do anything to go to space, go to Mars, to see the void and the stars no matter the discomfort. Ishmael does this because he is drawn by a quest to make life meaningful, to understand finally the essential meaning hidden just behind the curtain of the world. In the opening chapters on hellish, cold, and dark Nantucket, Ishmael contemplates suicide and yearns for something more from life, looking out onto the water. So he hops on the Ahab’s cannibal craft, the Pequod. Where previously he brought up the tail-end of funeral wakes, now he sits on the ship’s mast-head and contemplates the universe in the roiling wake of the Pequod. A change of perspective, perhaps, to drive off the spleen.
I see Ishmael’s quest as the driving force behind Moby Dick. Ishmael is faced with unimaginable confusion and meaninglessness in the world and he is trying desperately through many means to put order on it. While the chapters on whale biology and classification are often maligned, they are essential to the book: classification of nature is one way we have of imposing meaning on this world. The list is Ishmael’s favorite weapon. The list is a compulsion: to gain mastery over the world, to dive into its depths and take as hostage its most precious divine captives, leviathans and coral insects alike, making our death more glorious by fighting the gods. The list is a compulsion of the mind over matter, of psyche over flesh. If we can number the world, we have in some way killed it. See Ahab’s quest; see Ishmael’s quest.
It makes sense then that a book so obsessed with classifications and lists should employ a kaleidoscope of modes. Epic, novel, biology textbook, poem, drama. Sperm whale, right whale, fin-back, hump-back. Folio, octavio, duodecimo. The lists become increasingly nonsensical; the poet sits on the masthead and numbers all the fish in the seas while far below the leviathan sets its irongray gaze on the ship. The lists are desperate, the doom is fated. Ishmael tries to number the world, Melville numbers the storytelling modes, the reader numbers lists; and all the while, the book shakes with rage. Moby Dick is a whirlwind much like the biblical one out of which god speaks to Job and Ezekiel. It is a terrifying and incomprehensible response to Ishmael’s questioning. Despite the lists, the terror remains. Now Polonius’s words are resonating like a sacred relic on some starstruck anniversary. Scene individable or poem unlimited. All sound and fury, signifying nothing. What then can be said about my attempts to classify the book?
Silenced by the question posed above, I will leave you with a quote from a book that is infinitely quotable. One of my favorite quotes from Moby Dick, Ahab apostrophying a whale head attached to the Pequod:
“It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx’s in the desert. “Speak, thou vast and venerable head,” muttered Ahab, “which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw’st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed—while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!” (Moby Dick, The Sphynx).
On Moby Dick: res ipsa loquitur. It is large and strange. But go read it. Read it. The text lives and breathes. The thing speaks for itself.
Peace and Love,
William Diana.
Brilliant
Fantastic observations! I’m also more interested in Ishmael than Ahab… in so many ways the Minos/Theseus contrast is mirrored in the Ahab/Ishmael pairing.
The old authorities (Minos/Ahab) encounter the white creature from the deep, and are consumed with a desire to dominate it.
Theseus/Ishmael, on the other hand, enter the dark domain of the “half-known life” (the ocean or the labyrinth, as described in Chapter 58: Brit) which we can read as the liminal space between awareness and the unconscious, and confront the monster.
Both Ishmael and Theseus are images of the internal alchemy that takes place as a result of that voluntary confrontation. Your work on this topic is really insightful and thought provoking! Thank you for sharing it.