Passages: Herman Melville

From Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick, an account of some of the labors that followed after a whale was killed and brought alongside the whaling ship:

When in the Southern Fishery, a captured Sperm Whale, after long and weary toil, is brought alongside late at night, it is not, as a general thing at least, customary to proceed at once to the business of cutting him in. For that business is an exceedingly laborious one; is not very soon completed; and requires all hands to set about it. Therefore, the common usage is to take in all sail; lash the helm a’lee; and then send every one below to his hammock till daylight, with the reservation that, until that time, anchor-watches shall be kept; that is, two and two for an hour, each couple, the crew in rotation shall mount the deck to see that all goes well. But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather round the moored carcase, that were he left so for six hours, say, on a stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by morning. In most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so largely abound, their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades, a procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to tickle them into still greater activity. But it was not thus in the present case with the Pequod’s sharks; though, to be sure, any man unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it. nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was concluded; and when, accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman came on deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks; for immediately suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering three lanterns, so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid sea, these two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an incessant murdering of the sharks, by striking the keen steel deep into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not always hit their mark; and this brought about new revelations of the incredible ferocity of the foe. They viciously snapped, not only at each other’s disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound. Nor was this all. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin, one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg’s hand off, when he tried to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw. Queequeg no care what god made him shark, said the savage, agonizingly lifting his hand up and down; wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin.

I read somewhere that William F. Buckley Jr. finally worked his way through Moby-Dick after decades of dithering. When he finished, he told friends: “To think I might have died without reading it!” I know exactly what he meant. This is one of the most unjustly maligned books in American literature. If you are reluctant to try it because of a bad experience in high school English class, all I can say is: Get over it.

By an interesting coincidence, while I was poking through the book again, blogger and historian Eric Alterman ran this excerpt from E.L Doctorow’s new book Creationists, a collection of essays, many of them about American writers and performers:

I can claim a personal relationship to Melville and his works, having read MOBY-DICK three and a half times. The half time came at the age of ten when I found a copy in my grandfather’s library — it was one of a set of great sea novels all bound in green cloth—and it was fair sailing until the cetology stove me in. I first read the book in its entirety, (and TYPEE, OMOO, BILLLY BUDD and the ENCHANTADAS, and BENITO CERENO and BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER, for that matter) as an undergraduate at Kenyon College. Then, as a young editor at the New American Library a mass paperback publisher, I persuaded a Kenyon professor, Denham Sutcliffe to write an Afterword to the Signet Classic edition of MOBY-DICK, and so read the book again by way of editorial preparation. And now on the 150th anniversary of its publication (and after too many years) I have read it for the third time. The surprise to me, at my age now, is how familiar the voice of that book is, and not merely the voice, but the technical effrontery, and not merely the technical effrontery, but the character and rhythm of the sentences…and so with some surprise, I’ve realized, how much of my own work, at its own level, hears Melville, responds to his perverse romanticism, endorses his double dipping into the accounts of realism and allegory, as well as the large risk he takes speaking so frankly of the crisis of human consciousness, that great embarrassment to us all that makes a tiresome prophet of anyone who would speak of it . . . Literary history finds a few great novelists who achieved their greatness from an impatience with the conventions of narrative. Virginia Woolf composed Mrs. Dalloway from the determination to write a novel without a plot or indeed a subject. And then Joyce, of course: Like Picasso who was an expert draftsman before he blew his art out of the water, James Joyce proved himself in the art of narrative writing before he committed his assaults upon it.

The author of the sterling narratives TYPEE and OMOO precedes Joyce with his own blatant subversion of the narrative compact he calls MOBY-DICK. Yet I suspect that, in this case, the subversion may have been if not inadvertent, then only worked out tactically given the problem of its conception. I would guess that what Melville does in MOBY-DICK is not from a grand preconceived aesthetic (Joyce: I will pun my way into the brain’s dreamwork; I will respect the protocols of grammar and syntax but otherwise blast the English language all to hell.) but from the necessity of dealing with the problem inherent in constructing an entire 19th century novel around a single life and death encounter with a whale. The encounter clearly having to come as the climax of his book, Melville’s writing problem was how to pass the time until then — until he got the Pequod to the Southern Whale fisheries and brought the white whale from the depths, Ahab crying “There she blows — there she blows! A hump like a snow hill! It is Moby-Dick!” She blows, I note, not until page 537 of a 566 page book – in my old paperback Rhinehart edition.

A writer lacking Melville’s genius might conceive of a shorter novel, its entry point being possibly closer in time to the deadly encounter. And with maybe a flashback or two thrown in. A novelist of today, certainly, would eschew exposition as far as possible, let the reader work out for herself what is going on, which is a contemporary way of maintaining narrative tension. Melville’s entry point, I remind myself, is not at sea aboard the Pequod, not even in Nantucket: he locates Ishmael in Manhattan, and staying in scene every step of the way, takes him to New Bedford, has him meet Queequeg at the Spouter Inn, listen to a sermon, contrives to get them both to Nantucket, meet the owners of the Pequod, endure the ancient hoary device of a mysterious prophecy…. and it isn’t until Chapter 20 which begins “A day or two passed” that he elides time. Until that point, some ninety-four pages into the book, the writing has all been, a succession of unbroken real time incidents. Another ten pages elapse before the Pequod in Chapter 22 “thrusts her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves.”

I wouldn’t wonder if Melville at this point, the Pequod finally underway, stopped to read what he had written to see what his book was bidding him to do.

This is sheer guesswork of course. I don’t know what Melville himself may have said about the writing of MOBY-DICK beyond characterizing it as a “wicked book.” Besides, whatever any author says of his novel is of course another form of the fiction he practices and is never, never, to be taken on faith.

Perhaps Melville had everything comfortably worked out before he began, though I doubt it. Perhaps he had a draft completed of something quite conventional before his writer’s sense of crisis set in. The point to remember is the same that Faulkner made to literary critics: they see a finished work and do not dream of the chaos of trial and error and torment from which it has somehow emerged.

No matter what your plan for a novel — and we know Herman was inspired by the account of an actual whaling disaster (the destruction of the ship Essex in 1819) and we know how this was a subject, whaling, he could speak of with authority of personal experience abetted by research, and we know he understood as well as the most commercial practitioner of the craft, that a writer begins with an advantage who can report on a kind of life or profession out of the ken of the ordinary reader — nevertheless I say that no matter what your plan or inspiration, or trembling recognition for an idea that you know belongs to you, the strange endowment you set loose by the act of writing is never entirely under your control. It cannot be a matter solely of willed expression. Somewhere, from the depths of your being you find a voice: it is the first and most mysterious moment of the creative act. There is no book without it. If it takes off, it appears to you to be self-governed. To some degree you will write to find out what you are writing. And you feel no sense of possession for what comes onto the pages — what you experience is a sense of discovery.

My own discovery of Moby-Dick came through the back door of Hollywood. John Huston’s film version turned up on television seemingly every other month when I was a sprout, and it took a long time to shake Gregory Peck’s bizarre performance as Captain Ahab — Peck was the only guy who could overact woodenly — out of my mind. I remember being surprised when I first looked at the novel — from what I remembered of the movie, it didn’t seem there could be enough going on to fill several hundred pages.

That’s because Huston and all the other filmmakers who’ve gone sailing after Melville’s whale chuck out the book’s soul. That means the philosophical ruminations, sure, but it also means the odd music of the passages describing whaling lore and gear, and the herculean labor of taking the body of a creature that was often as long as the whaleship itself and reducing it to barrels of oil and meat. I think it’s safe to assume that most modern readers find the idea of whaling repugnant, but even the most dedicated Greenpeace member could leave this book impressed by the sheer physical courage demanded by whaling.

Mystic Seaport in Connecticut just held its annual Moby-Dick Marathon in honor of Melville’s birthday, so you’ll have to wait another year to participate in that. If you’re impatient, another marathon reading takes place every January at the New Bedford Whaling Museum to mark the anniversary of the day Melville himself set out on the whaling ship Acushnet. And the BBC has a fine Web site devoted to the story of the whaleship Essex, which may have inspired Melville to write Moby-Dick.

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Hope is the thing with bookshelves