Herman Melville - Moby Dick
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| Frontispiece: Beale, Thomas. The Natural History of the Sperm Whale: which is added, a sketch of a South-Sea Whaling Voyage (London: John Van Voorst, 1839) |
The White Whale swam before him as the
monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men
feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half
a lung.
- Moby Dick, Chapter 41, ‘Moby Dick’
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READING Herman
Melville's Moby Dick has been a
rather strange experience. Though it was only written some scant 160 odd years
ago, the story has permeated culture enough to become the definitive allegory
regarding the follies of (as the novel frequently refers to it) monomania.
Despite this, I haven't seen or heard any of the number of dramatizations of
the novel, and my only contact with it aside from this is a vague memory from a
number of years back when I decided it looked too long to fit into my reading
schedule during my first undergrad year. Before picking it up, I really only
had the most basic idea of the story - Ahab hunts the White Whale, Moby Dick,
and it does not go too well for him. Thus, with little in the way of
expectations I found the novel quite the odd chestnut.
Athenaeum called Moby Dick "an ill-compounded mixture of
romance and matter-of-fact" and went on to say that "the idea of a connected
and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and
again in the course of composition"[1] on
account of the various asides and essays which comprise a large number of the
chapters in the work. Indeed, the reader often must contend with passages containing
a volatile admixture of whale-themed speculative science and metaphysics.
However, this does not become dull despite the volume's length on account of
the intensity of Melville's prose. This intensity is delivered in modes ranging
from almost biblical intensity to visceral, almost palpable humour and
sometimes a combination of the two.
On the thick skin of the whale:
Herein we see the rare virtue of a strong
individual vitality, 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.
– Moby Dick, Chapter 68, ‘The Blanket’
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What really struck me about the
unconventional structure of the novel was how modern it was. With reference to other popular 19th
Century novels, the way Melville writes doesn't seem so much to fall into the
common literary tradition, so much as stand upon it, waving its harpoon
insanely in the storm. More simply put, Moby
Dick seems like an early precursor to the Modernist narratives.
Chapters 55 through 57 really got me
thinking on this tangent, the former being titled "Of the Monstrous Pictures of
Whales". At the start of this chapter, the narrator claims to want to "paint to
you as well as one can without canvas, something like the true form of the
whale as he actually appears to the eye of the whaleman when his own absolute
body the whale is moored alongside the whale-ship so that he can be fairly
stepped upon there." He then goes on to discuss the discrepancies in the way
that whalers actually saw whales to the way that they were depicted in art.
Naturally he covers the gamut of everything from pub-signs, to religious art,
to high art.
This aim, to depict things as they
were actually seen as opposed to how they were traditionally shown, corresponds
to the general aims of the early Impressionist painters. Of course the Salon de Refuses, which brought fame to
Manet and later was to propel the whole milieu of them to prominence wasn't
until 1863 - some twelve years later. It would initially appear as though the
narrator wishes to change the perceptions of how whales are viewed in order to increase
the biological accuracy of whale-art, but it is clear that his interest is in
nothing but professing his own stilted viewpoint.
Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the
good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to
back me.
- Moby Dick, Chapter 32, ‘Cetology’
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In this
way, it is similar to the way that Impressionist painters sought to capture not
the idealised form of a subject, but the object as it appeared to the human eye
- they painted the light that illuminated the object as Melville writes the
words that breathe life into the whale.
Though it could be seen as a
stretch, in this light, one could easily read the interesting asides and essays
in Moby Dick as something akin to the
Bildungsroman that occurs in so many
earlier novels. Similarly, doesn’t the Ishmael that we find constantly
struggling to maintain voice in the narrative correspond to the way that in
viewing an Impressionist painting, we become aware that we are viewing a
painting of someone’s view rather than a canvas-window to another place?
If I may be
permitted to indulge my insubstantial research with something by way of a
summary: Manet can be said to be the one who paved the way for the much needed
epistemological changes in art that created masters of such painters as Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso, then Melville's
Moby Dick can be said to be the same
with regard to Joyce, Kafka and Faulkner. Though I frame that concluding
sentence with not a little unction, waiving all argument, I take the good old
fashioned ground that Melville is the pioneer of modernist literature.
[1] Athenaeum (London: October 25, 1851) cited in: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale (Penguin Books,
2009 [originally published 1851]).
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