The Sheila Variations

Happy birthday to Herman Melville!

Here's a page with his biography. Moby-Dick is one of my favorite books ever written, and I love to hear the story of its composition. The book is dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who pushed Melville to grow, move to another level. (Moby Dick, though, would not make its real mark until years after Melville's death.)

"Call me Ishmael," says the narrator in the beginning of Moby-Dick. We don't know is it his real name and exactly when his story is taking place. He signs abroad the whaler Pequod with his friend Queequeg, a harpooner from the South Sea Islands. Then the mood of the story changes. The reader is confronted by a plurality of linguistic discourses, philosophical speculations, and Shakespearean rhetoric and dramatic staging. Mysterious Captain Ahab, a combination of Macbeth, Job, and Milton's Satan, appears after several days at sea. Melville named the character after the Israelite king who worshiped the pagan sun god Baal. Ahab reveals to the crew that the purpose of the voyage is to hunt and kill the snow-white sperm whale, known as Moby-Dick, that had cost Ahab his leg on a previous voyage. The captain has his own faith and sees the cosmos in contention between two rival deities. "Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance." Ahab has nailed a goldpiece to the mast and offers it as a reward to the first man who sights the creature. Starbuck, the first mate, tries to dissuade Ahab from the quest. The novel culminates when Moby-Dick charges the boat which sinks. Ahab is drowned, tied by the harpoon line his archenemy. In his end Ahab takes his crew with him. The only survivor is the narrator, who is rescued by a passing ship.

Moby-Dick was misunderstood by those who read and reviewed it and it sold only some 3,000 copies during Melville's lifetime. The book can be read as a thrilling sea story, an examination of the conflict between man and nature - the battle between Ahab and the whale is open to many interpretations. It is a pioneer novel but the prairie is now sea, or an allegory on the Gold Rush, but now the gold is a whale. Jorge Luis Borges has seen in the universe of Moby-Dick "a cosmos (a chaos) not only perceptibly malignant as the Gnostics had intuited, but also irrational, like the cosmos in the hexameters of Lucretius." (from The Total Library, 1999) Clare Spark has connected in Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival(2001) different interpretations with changing political atmosphere - depending on the point of view Ahab has been seen as a Promethean hero or a forefather of the twentieth-century totalitarian dictators. The director John Huston questions in his film version (1956) which one, Ahab or the whale, is the real Monster.

I read Moby Dick in high school and despised it. I thought it was one of the most boring pointless things I had ever read. It was on our summer reading list, and I clearly remember FORCING myself to read the damn thing, during the dog days of August ... nearly crying from the psychological boredom. Whatever, man ... Moby Dick, Captain Ahab, endless discourses on blubber ... I was 16. I DIDN'T GET IT.

Cut to many many years later. 2001, to be exact. I read it in the spring of 2001. Around that time I decided to systematically go back and re-read all of the books I had been forced to read in high school (which, obviously, made me despise them at the time). I read The Scarlet Letter and Tess of the D'Urbervilles and many others. Moby Dick is such a massive book, and I had hated it so much when I first read it that I hesitated to put myself through it again.

And honestly - the feckin' book blew the top of my head off.

I have rarely had such an exciting reading experience as that one. I didn't want it to end. I underlined passages feverishly. I put exclamations points in the margins next to particularly amazing sentences. Honestly. It blew me away.

Re-reading Scarlet Letter, et al, was also really fun - and yes, I renewed my appreciation for those old books, and realized: "Ohhh, okay, yup. THAT'S why the dern thing is a classic" ... but none of them flattened me as much as Moby Dick.

Holy mackerel. ahem.

The book, in high school, seemed so far from relevant ... to my life ... and also: there was nothing even remotely recognizable. At least in Scarlet Letter you deal with social issues and sexual issues - stuff I could latch onto as an adolescent ... but Moby Dick? I'm supposed to give a hoo-hah about the spout-hole and what it means and why it's important?

Also, except for the blowsy woman who serves Ishmael chowder in the 2nd or 3rd chapter, there are NO women in this book. NONE. Now: I wasn't a big girlie girlie book reader - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was one of my favorite books growing up ... but there are at least SOME girls in that book. Women are not completely banished to the sidelines. Not at all. But Moby Dick? This is a universe not just of men - but a conscious rejection of the female. There is the memory of Captain Ahab's new bride at home, her head "denting the pillow", I believe is the phrase - but other than that - NO GIRLS. If you look at the book in another light (as Camille Paglia does so brilliantly and so bizarrely in her chapter on it in Sexual Personae) - the whale could be seen as the "spirit" of female energy in the world. It is obvious that the great white whale is a male - but Paglia theorizes that something else might be going on there. Whaling boats were 100% male, they lived out on the ocean for 3 or 4 years at a time. There were no women. None.

Melville himself was a vicious misogynist. He tried to kill his wife. I believe she would flee from the house in the night, screaming, etc. It is well-known that he had many homosexual experiences during his time at sea. Many whalers did.

Paglia believes that Melville was writing out his anxiety and his anger towards women, in general. But not just 'women' as in 'a person who happens to be female' - but on a larger level: Woman as nature, woman as chaos, woman as the uncontrollable force running the universe.

Paglia feels that the entire book, with not one woman in it, is actually haunted by this spectre of female-ness.

Interesting. I'm not sure if she's right or not - but it is a very interesting theory - and I think there is definitely some truth to it (especially when you know some of the details of Melville's life.)

It's a big mess of a novel. We have 20 chapters which are basically marine biology. And yet ... the marine biology chapters always have a spiritual or metaphorical theme to them as well.

The point of view switches inexplicably. The first line of the book is "Call me Ishmael". This establishes that we have a first-person narrative. But that does not remain consistent. There are private moments of Captain Ahab and Starbuck described - moments when they are alone - moments Ishmael could never have witnessed. During the whale chapters - where we learn about blubber, and the spout, and their mating rituals, etc. - the voice changes from first-person to omniscent. With no warning. It doesn't seem to be Ishmael anymore. The "I" in the beginning of the book, Ishmael's "I", does not seem to be the same "I" who gives us marine biology lectures throughout the middle of the book. It is not the same voice at all.

But in the end, none of that matters.

It is an unconventional book, with its own narrative rules. Once you succumb, you will not have a better reading experience. The same could be said for Joyce's Ulysses. If you just trust the author, even though they seem to be off on their own personal jaunt, just writing to please themselves, they will take you places you could not even imagine.

The "interminable" chapters on whales, the chapters which I found so unbearable in high school, are what make the book (in my opinion) so stunning, so bizarre, and so - in the end - important. What is Melville's genius here is that - he starts out telling us, "Okay, so let's talk about the spout-hole ..." And he takes you through it, telling you how it works, what it is, how it evolved. But throughout this, somehow, he elevates each part of the whale into something almost allegorical. Blubber can actually teach us something about ourselves. We all can learn a lot about ourselves from studying the different parts of whales.

My favorite chapter, in these sections, is the one on the skin of the whale. It is called "The Blanket".

I read it, and it seems relatively informational, matter-of fact, and then by the end, Melville does a little jujitsu move in his prose - and I found myself in tears.

This happened to me time and time again when I re-read this great book. I would have a momentary thought, "Jesus, this chapter on the sperm in the sperm-whales is freakin' long, and i wish he would just get back to Queequeg, and the plot ... Dammit, this is so LONG..." And then suddenly, with a few simple phrases, Melville will draw back the veil, and show you the underbelly, give you the real GUTS of what he is saying.

Here's what I mean. This is an excerpt from the stunning chapter "The Blanket" - and look out for the jujitsu move at the end:

The Blanket

I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of the whale. I have had controversies about it with experienced whalemen afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. My original opinion remains unchanged; but it is only an opinion.

The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale? Already you know what his blubber is. The blubber is something of the consistence of firm, close-grained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and ranges from eight or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness.

Now, however preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any creature's skin as being of that sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point of fact these are no arguments against such a presumption; because you cannot raise any other dense enveloping layer from the whale's body but that same blubber; and the outermost enveloping layer of any animal, if reasonably dense, what can that be but the skin? True, from the unmarred dead body of the whale, you may scrape off with your hand an infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling the thinnest shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible and soft as satin; that is, previous to being dried, when it not only contracts and thickens but becomes rather hard and brittle. I have several such dried bits, which I use for marks in my whale-books. It is transparent, as I said before; and being laid upon the printed page, I have sometimes pleased myself with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At any rate, it is pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles, as you may say. But what I am driving at here is this. That same infinitely thin, isinglass substance, which, I admit, invests the entire body of the whale, is not so much to be regarded as the skin of the creature, as the skin of the skin, so to speak; for it were simply ridiculous to say, that the proper skin of the tremendous whale is thinner and more tender than the skin of a new-born child. But no more of this.

Assuming the blubber to be the skin of the whale; then, when this skin, as in the case of a very large Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one hundred barrels of oil; and, when it is considered that, in quantity, or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed state, is only three fourths, and not the entire substance of the coat; some idea may hence be had of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part of whose mere integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten barrels to the ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters of the stuff of the whale's skin...

A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of the whale. It has already been said, that it is stript from him in long pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, this one is very happy and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of this cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to keep himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. What would become of a Greenland Whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these, be it observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies are refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of an iceberg, as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn fire; whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood, and he dies.

How wonderful it is then - except after explanation - that this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as indispensable as it is to man; how wonderful that he should be found at home, immersed to his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when seamen fall overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued in amber. But more surprising is it to know, as has been proved by experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer than that of a Borneo negro in summer.

It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peters, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.

Stunning.

And so: happy birthday to Mr. Melville.

Posted by sheila