A wonderful book review of a new biography of Herman Melville.
I like this:
Readers will note that I have said nothing very much about Moby-Dick . But what can anyone say? Its quietly portentous first sentence is as famous as any in world literature (“Call me Ishmael”), and some of Ahab’s monologues, like the one beginning “Is Ahab Ahab?,” achieve an eloquence rivaling that of the Bible and Shakespeare. There are longueurs, but even in the midst of tedious cetological lore, one comes across such disturbing passages as that in which the Pequod’s sailors squeeze and squeeze and squeeze handfuls of white spermacetti. Then there are the marvelous portraits of the crew — the black cabin boy Pip, who goes mad and loses his sense of self, the well-meaning but weak Starbuck, the mysterious harpooners Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo. There are the haunting encounters with other ships, especially the Rachel “searching for her lost children.” And throughout there is philosophizing that at times rises to a kind of prose poetry:
“All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in a whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.”
In Melville’s lifetime few recognized or even suspected the writer’s exceptional genius — but Nathaniel Hawthorne came close, and the two men established a long-lasting friendship. After their first encounters, the writer of Polynesian adventures went back to his romantic tale about “Whale Fishery” and, in Delbanco’s words, “tore it up from within.” Melville deepened and amplified his novel, enlarged it in every sense, with the obvious hope of joining what he called, in an essay on Hawthorne, that fraternity where “genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.” With wonderful appropriateness, then, the author of The Scarlet Letter — which appeared in 1850 — became the dedicatee of the following year’s Moby-Dick .
I’ve always loved that story about the unlikely pairing of Melville and Hawthorne.
Moby Dick. What a book.
One of my favorite passages (always gives me chills) is:
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.
That is a very powerful passage.
Of all the touchstones in Moby-Dick, one that has always stuck most strongly in my memory is the following (which I quote at the risk of being thought a pervert) in which Ishmael is squeezing whale sperm.
“I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,- Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side; the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.”
On a similar fun note, I happened once to come across this page about assassinations of famous personages foretold in Moby-Dick.
Bryan – yeah, that chapter about the spermaceti is so haunting. He describes it so well … and it’s so awful – how he describes how their hands became literally as smooth as oil, because of the spermaceti. Amazing, though – how everything starts in the specific, and then moves back into the metaphoric. I never know where it’s going to take me … I’m learning about blubber, then he makes a comment about the nature of man. It’s just incredible. I love that book.
bryan – oh my God, that link is so insane!!! I love it!
More evidence that God likes to play word and number games ;)
Your comment about how Moby-Dick constantly moves from specific to metaphorical I think captures a lot of what makes the book so powerful. The characters themselves are obsessed with symbolism. Nature for them is never just nature; it is always a sign of something beyond nature, as in Ahab’s famous rant:
“All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event- in the living act, the undoubted deed- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike though 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 chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.”
What moves me so much about the sperm-squeezing passage is that it seems to me the point at which Ishmael is saved. The invisible spheres, Melville tells us, were formed in fright, even if the visible spheres seem to have been formed in love. Ahab sees this truth and wants revenge against it. Ishmael almost deliberately refuses to see it, or at least chooses to ignore it, opting for the illusion of love that the whale’s sperm provokes in him rather than for Ahab’s quest to strike through the mask. This, perhaps, for Melville was the only salvation that is available to us.
As I was reflecting on the sperm passage, I found myself thinking of a passage from Beckett’s Endgame and realizing that this passage had occurred to me precisely because Beckett’s message is the opposite of Melville’s. The character Hamm is speaking.
“I once knew a madman who thought the end of the world had come. He was a painterand engraver. I had a great fondness for him. I used to go and see him, in the asylum. I’d take him by the hand and drag him to the window. Look! There! All that rising corn! And there! Look! The sails of the herring fleet! All that loveliness!
(Pause.)
He’d snatch away his hand and go back into his corner. Appalled. All he had seen was ashes.
(Pause.)
He alone had been spared.”
The painter and engraver we should probably take to be William Blake, who saw in the created world a condition of fallenness from our true spiritual potential. And in Beckett’s cosmos, Blake alone was saved.
That kind of insight gets you damned in Melville’s cosmos.