A leviathan of a book, Melville’s Moby Dick is a towering achievement. This extraordinary book reinvents the novel as did Goethe’s Werther. Yet whilst Goethe’s brilliant analysis of a psychotic breakdown was an immediate success (so much so that some foolish readers followed the example of its unfortunate protagonist), Moby Dick only ‘took off’ years after the author’s death in 1891.
Moby Dick is much more than an adventure story, though it can certainly be enjoyed as such if you are prepared to put the effort in. Therein lies the problem.
The book demands substantial work on the part of the reader, and there is much to baffle anyone expecting a straight-forward tale of derring-do on the high seas. The plot moves forward slowly. It takes some time before Ishmael, a young crew member and the story’s narrator, finally gets to sea. The first two pages are the etymology of the whale, supplied by a “late consumptive usher to a Grammar School”. There then follows a series of quotations relating to whales, supplied by a “Sub-Sub-Librarian”.
I cannot say I have ever read them all, but I imagine many a potential reader is already put off plunging into this opus before he or she even gets to read the famous first sentence “Call me Ishmael”. I persevered because it was during the Covid-19 lockdown so I had the time and I’d been told by a very clever former pupil to give it a go.
Virtuosity
On opening the first page, the reader is immediately struck by the brilliance of the language, which is effortlessly sophisticated, though without a trace of pretension. Melville writes as Picasso paints and Bach composes: it is genius on that level. He creates his own language through the influence of Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and his own take on the contemporary local vernacular. Reading, and indeed rereading the book, I am constantly dazzled by sentences and paragraphs, both on account of the insight Melville displays and the sheer virtuosity of the prose.
Melville is given to musing on the human condition and much else. As a result, it wasn’t until page 117 in my Penguin edition, that the whaling ship, the Pequod finally “thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves”. It was only on page 237 that the boats were finally lowered to hunt a whale. The reader must be patient but is rewarded by some of the greatest writing in English. For this is the one novel that Nobel Prize winning author William Faulkner wishes that he had written, and he was no mean stylist.
This is style with substance. It’s a prose poem, a miraculous oeuvre, Shakespearian both in its language and breadth.
Analogy
Moby Dick is the story of Ahab, the brilliant but flawed Nantucket whaling captain whose leg was bitten off by the white whale Moby Dick, who then decides to avenge himself and kill his assailant. Ishmael joins his ship, the Pequod (named after an extinct Indian tribe) and its crew of “mongrel renegades, castaways and cannibals” from all over the world.
Gradually, you realise the book is all about America. Whaling was about making money, but it was also dangerous and brutal. That was America, a country that a decade after the novel was written, would be at war with itself.
Melville knew well that people were frequently irrational. This is implicit in the character of Ahab, a crazed narcissist, for whom vengeance has become more important than commerce (does that ring any bells?).
In a chapter entitled The Quarter Deck, with the strength of character and oratorial powers of a true demagogue, he persuades the crew to swear an oath to join him in his quest to inflict retribution on Moby Dick.
Ahab inserts his whalebone leg into a slot in a board and proceeds to stir up the crew, offering a reward of a doubloon, a Spanish ounce of gold, to the crew member who “raises” the whale. Only the first mate, Starbuck, argues against this folly:
“I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance,” he declares. Yet Starbuck cannot counter Ahab’s explanation, which is extremely hard to follow but convincing in its sheer force: “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.”
That is, of course, an absurd hypothetical, but Starbuck’s “incompetence of mere virtue or right-mindedness” is no match for Ahab, who bullies him into submission.
“Morally enfeebled”
Ahab also succeeds because his crew is “morally enfeebled”. His officers, the mates Stubb and Flask, are hopelessly inadequate. “The invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness” of Stubb, and the “mediocrity” of Flask mean that Ahab will prevail.
Ishmael understands all this better afterwards. Even during the events, he sensed that the quest was mad, but Ahab beguiled him.
“Morally enfeebled” could describe so many people, nations, and political parties. Does it sum up MAGA America, Russia, or Reform? The term is brilliant and apt. With his decision to consider Putin’s Russia a nation worthy of respect (“Putin and I have gone through so much together”), Donald Trump has very clearly morally enfeebled the Republican Party and much of America.
As for “the incompetence of mere virtue or right-mindedness”, that can be seen amongst all too many of those who oppose Trump. Or indeed amongst the Remain campaigners in 2016. And as for “the invulnerable jollity of indifference and recklessness”, that is Farage or Johnson, the arch-Brexiters. Make no mistake – these people are fellow travellers.
Looking back, Ishmael comes up with this chilling explanation for the compliance of the men of the Pequod:
“Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some internal fatality, to help him in his monomaniac revenge. How was it that they so aboundingly responded to the old man’s ire?”
Reopening Moby Dick this year, it struck me more than ever that Melville was describing America then, in those dark years before the Civil War, and, most terrifyingly, now.
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