A Moby Dick Manifesto (Or, The Writing on the Whale) · 6:09pm Sunday
In his 1981 essay Why Read the Classics?, Italo Calvino offers fourteen different definitions of the word ‘classic’. The first one, the one that opens the essay, reads:
1. A classic is one of those books about which you always hear “I’m re-reading…” and never “I’m reading…”
The following thirteen definitions are used to build the case of, well, why you should read the classics—but Italo Calvino has already told you all he intends to say. He opens with his main thesis; the rest is an excuse to elaborate.
A classic, Italo Calvino says, is a book that matters. It’s a book that might help you define yourself, or it might help you define the universe. It’s a book that marks a clear distinction—there was a before, then the classic happened, and now there is an after. It’s a book that people love.
This is a blog about literary classics, and about books that matter. It’s a blog about Moby Dick.
It’s a blog about hell.
1. Moby Dick is a Book
Whenever there’s an argument about the Great American Novel, Moby Dick shows up; you can guess who’s read it because they’ll be foaming at the mouth. In a good way.
As a piece of popular culture, Moby Dick—which is, by the way, the Great American Novel—doesn’t require an introduction. But, you know, fame is a double-edged sword. Moby Dick has hit that sweet spot of ubiquitousness where so many people know of it that many people don’t bother to learn about it.
So, let’s do this properly:
Moby Dick is a book written by Herman Melville, published in 1851. It took him eighteen months to write, and it was an absolute commercial failure upon release. Reviewers who read the book seemed to like it. Reviewers who didn’t, didn’t.
I do not envy any of them, for what is worth.
Moby Dick is a hefty book, and it escapes definition. Being simplistic, it’s a naval action adventure about a man’s quest to kill a whale. Being pedantic, it’s a philosophical comedy and dramatic tragedy, a manual on cetology, and a romantic ode to honor the whaler.
Conventional wisdom will tell you that the truth lies somewhere in the middle, and conventional wisdom is fucking wrong. You want to define Moby Dick? You need to be pedantic. Anything else is a lie.
You need space to summarize Moby Dick. You cannot talk about it. You need to shout. You need to scream, to sing, to carve words on the side of a mountain. You need to grab someone’s head, kiss them, look them in the eyes, say: I am burning alive! This book is marking my veins in fire! It is consuming my every thought!
As a consequence, there are entire generations of literary critics being pedantic about Moby Dick. They mean well, sure, but still. Thousands of people trying to be loquacious in a desperate bid to be precise.
That’s a heavy weight to carry. Few books survive a bad childhood experience; being forced to read about Moby Dick in highschool is bound to poison you against it. And, because of everything I just explained, trying to talk people out of this mindset just makes it worse, because you get all scholastic, you get pompous, you get boring.
Ursula K. LeGuin once said that the artist deals with what cannot be said in words, and the novelist says in words what cannot be said in words. The only way to describe Moby Dick is to write Moby Dick a second time. The only antidote against hating Moby Dick is to read it.
How delightful, then, that the easiest thing about Moby Dick is to start reading it.
Herman Melville knew that the things he wanted to write would not sell, and made a conscious decision to let Moby Dick be a complete commercial failure—but, man, you need to be a really good writer to do that. This is immediately apparent: the intro to Moby Dick is masterful.
“Call me Ishmael,” the book starts, and that’s already legendary—but then it keeps going. Ishmael is our narrator and protagonist. He’s phlegmatic and witty, he’s depressed, he’s sarcastic, and he’s deeply homosexual. He’s got nerdy tattoos and makes obscure pop culture references. In the modern world, he’d have a tumblr blog, and buy clothes at Hot Topic.
He’s well-versed in esoteric and classical literature, fields utterly useless to earn a living. He does not have a penny on his name, and manages to be both overqualified and underappreciated for any job he finds. He longs for manual labor, not because he likes it, but because it will allow him to disconnect, to stop thinking and stressing and wanting to either kill everyone or die.
He is, in other words, deeply relatable for anyone who’s ever lived under capitalism. Ishmael is the best narrator I’ve read in my life, and when I finished the book, I was actively genuinely sad I had to say goodbye to him.
This is all thrown at you in the very first page of Moby Dick, mind. Ishmael, he explains, goes to the sea whenever he gets too depressed or too feisty. In his own words: whenever he lingers too much in front of coffin shops, whenever he wants to punch random people? Then he knows it’s time to go to the ocean and smell some fish, baby.
But not as a passenger. You need money for that, and vacations on a ship just means you get ennui and seasickness. Nor does he go as a Captain, or Commodore, because responsibility might as well be cyanide for all the good he does to his metabolism. No, he goes as a sailor. Complete bottom of the barrel.
(Sidenote, because I find it too delightful not to add: before working as a sailor, Ishmael worked as a schoolmaster. He already struggled with the responsibility of having ‘the taller boys’ look up to him, sure—but going to sea means he went from authority to utter peasant in the span of a week. To cope with the whiplash, he quotes Seneca and the stoics to himself. What a nerd. What a delightful little individual.)
Ishmael is so fun you want to read the book just because of him. He owns the page with his 1850’s swagger, his self-deprecating humor, and off-the-handle Biblical references. He exiles himself to sea because it is cheaper than therapy. What’s not to love?
So, Moby Dick is fun. It’s entertaining, it’s engrossing, it’s invigorating. The main character and narrator would carry the book by himself if he had to, and he doesn’t even need to do that. It’s easy to start reading it, to get sucked in immediately.
But, and here’s the surprise twist of the blog I guess—it is not easy to keep going. Moby Dick is incredible, but you need to fight for it.
Let’s talk about what Moby Dick is about.
2. Moby Dick is a Book About Hell
Books can be judged on two qualities: concept, and execution. What the story is about, and how the story is told. Moby Dick is supremely written, yes, but right now I want to focus on the concept. Here’s my thesis:
You cannot learn what Moby Dick is about without being fascinated—nay, obsessed, with it.
Moby Dick, the book, is not about Moby Dick, the whale. It’s first and foremost a book about whaling, the art of hunting whales.
And I have tried, I have truly, truly tried to keep a professional tone through this section, but cannot goddamn do that. Moby Dick does not survive in the realm of the half-assed. You need to go all-in.
Whaling is the worst fucking job humanity has ever created.
It’s not “risky”, it’s not “dangerous”, it’s destructive. If life is a slow, inexorable path towards death, whaling is the art of living very fucking quickly.
Whaling trips take years; the Pequod—the ship that acts as the setting of most of Moby Dick—is going on a three-year-long trip, but four or five-year-long trips aren’t unheard of. So whaling ships are big; they need to carry enough water and food to keep a whole crew well-fed for dozens of months.
But you don’t use the big fucking cruiser to hunt the whales.
The big ship is used to travel, to keep the food around, and to look for whales. That’s it. The moment they see the whale, what they do is lower four to five small rowboats, and that’s what they use to chase the whale.
Let me repeat this. You chase the whale on a fucking rowboat. A vessel that can be capsized by a moderately sized wave. A sperm whale is so big that an adult human can swim through its aortas. And you just approach it, at top speed, and when close—close enough you can touch the leviathan’s flesh—the harpooner, at the helm of the rowboat, throws his harpoon.
This causes the whale to run away, because it just got stabbed by an iron designed not to kill, but to cause as much pain as possible. The goal is to get the whale to panic so it runs away, hyperventilates, and tires itself out. Then, once the whale is so exhausted it can barely move, you approach it, stab it, and truly kill it.
And you do all this by having the whale drag the rowboat behind it for miles and miles of open sea.
The harpoon is tied to a rope—the so-called whale-line, remember this detail—and the rope is tied to the rowboat. It is essentially waterskiing; the harpoon’s job is to secure the rowboat to the whale, to become the weight that the animal will drag with it for the rest of its now-shortened life.
Now, a sperm whale can swim at up to 20 knots; that’s 23 mph, or 37 km/h for us landwalkers. You’re riding a rowboat with no other means of locomotion than the strength of the people inside it, and the whale is pulling from you at such a speed that the boat flies through the air. The sea is rowdy, because there is a fucking sperm whale having a seizure in front of you, so you may fall off at any moment. And it you fall off, you’re probably dead, because there is a fucking sperm whale having a seizure right in front of you.
But this is not enough—the whale-line coils itself around the boat itself, and it twists around near the legs, arms and necks of the rowers. Check the drawing again. You yourself are tied to the fucking whale-line.
This is, hilariously, a failsafe measure. The whale-line needs to be secured on both ends to make sure it never breaks, right? But it also means a whale is pulling from a rope coiled around your body, racing against your skin, burning you like sandpaper.
And whales pull hard. If whoever set the rope in the first place made a single mistake in the coiling, guess what: the whale-line whips out. If you’re lucky, you lose an extremity. If you’re unlucky, you lose everything attached to that extremity.
I’m not even done. I can never be done. The whale may retaliate—the spout of a sperm whale, its means of breathing, is hot enough to boil you alive, by the way—or drag you for so long that the boat is lost forever. There is a second harpoon tied to the same whale-line; it can whip out and eviscerate you before throwing you to the waves. You may fall off and drown. You may be eaten alive. You may kill yourself cutting the blubber.
It never ends. It is death after death after death, every step of the way. It is psychotic. It is nightmarish. And this is a rowboat—you need to row. There’s an official manning the helm, directing the boat—but to keep balance, to avoid capsizing, to fight against the whale, you need to row. You need to follow orders, never look at the whale, never stop pulling, never stop working.
Rowing means you move backwards, that you can only look to the trail you leave behind. It is the maximum expression of physical effort, pulling at your arms, legs, neck, back. You cannot look around, cannot stop to breathe, you cannot stop to be afraid, because anything that makes your rowing weaker will kill you and everyone around you.
A rower in a whaling rowboat is not a human, it is merely the muscles of the official at the helm. He says row, you row; he says row harder, you row harder. There are no other orders. There is only exhaustion or death. You are denied any degree of body autonomy: do not think, do not feel, simply act.
There is a sperm whale in front of you, and you are trying to kill it. You do not have the means, or the strength, or the size, or the numbers to do it. Your only tools are fear, and pain, and the knowledge that you are expendable.
Moby Dick is a book about hell.
Ishmael is a rower; he describes the experience with cold, clinical objectivity. He explains the technical details, the ins and outs of the whale-line, the way officials talk to the rowers. He mentions, coldly, almost humorously, that you are denied the very horror that courses through your veins as you row.
Ishmael is a deeply sentimental man. He uses lyrical language because literalism cannot possibly describe the depth of humanity he wants to portray. And yet, he is absent when rowing. He disappears from the scene, nothing but an objective narrator until it’s all over. You only learn he was in the boat after the scene is done.
There is only one depiction of his reaction, and again, it’s told as a joke. He goes on his first whaling trip, and survives—upon which he asks the officials at the Pequod if “all that” was business as usual. They say yes. So Ishmael goes below deck, and drafts his own will.
The Pequod is on a three-year-long whaling trip. There is no escape. Sperm whales and the hunting thereof aren’t just a possibility, either—they’re an enthusiastically sought-after event. At all points, be day or night, you’re on the lookout for the whales. They do not simply signal your death—they define your life.
Moby Dick is often mocked for being half an adventure book, half a manual on cetology; roughly a sixth of the story are chapters where Ishmael describes the anatomy of whales, their cultural impact, their habit and habitats.
I argue: what else could it be? What, other than true obsession, describes the relationship between a whale and a whaler? The least you can do is to know your own monsters, is to try to understand your downfall. Ishmael finds a chance to inspect an intact whale skeleton, and tattoos the measurements on his arm, so that he never loses them. Ahab loses his leg, and fashions a facsimile out of whale bone.
This gives none of them pause. Why would it? Whales are already a core part of their beings, they’re defined in contrast and comparison to them. They live and die by the whale; what does it mean, to make it a permanent part of your body, except that you’re being true to yourself? What else could you possibly do?
Herman Melville and Ishmael both decry allegory, rage against the idea of portraying Moby Dick as a symbol, and I agree. The whale does not signify death, it does not signify God, it does not signify nature. The whale is a whale, and by God above, that is more than enough.
The whale is your life and your death and the endless suffering in between. It is your personal hell, and the means to your survival. Ask yourself—what kind of social conditions must there be for people to willingly sign up for this? What level of despair, of necessity, compels you to shatter your body and mind to such a degree?
Do you know why sperm whales were hunted? Not for their meat—even though they could be eaten—or by their bones—even though they could be carved. It was for their oil, for the blubber and the grease that envelops their body; after a sperm whale is hunted, it is then peeled like an orange, then the carcass is thrown away.
Oil. Lamp oil, so that people more privileged, people who do not need to risk total dehumanization for the sake of survival, are slightly more comfortable. So they can read in the dark without dealing with unpleasant smoke. So they can make fucking perfume.
Hunting whales is, inherently, deeply, repugnant. It is vile work. It is an instrument of suffering that destroyed one of the most magnificent, regal animals of this planet, decimating its population, and it ruined the lives of people—both the whalers, and the people around them. Whaling is the purest symbol of capitalism as a destructive force: kill yourself, for the sake of money.
But the whalers were not an instrument of the massacre. They were the victims. Herman Melville, through the mouth of Ishmael, makes his intentions clear at the start of the book: Moby Dick exists to honor the whaler, to bring dignity to a profession utterly ignored and mocked by society at large. Torture, met with disdain. Only the scum of the earth would fall into this lifestyle; they have nothing to lose anyway.
The book is a triumph in this regard. You cannot read through pages and pages of suffering, parse through the fear and the horror and the injuries, learn to become obsessed with the whale as a means of self-defense—and not understand that whalers were, in a way, heroes.
But do not be mistaken: there is no honor in the killing of whales. It is a repulsive endeavor, like any job that demands you sacrifice yourself in the name of profit. There’s never any honor in the fucking job. The honor is always in the people.
3. Moby Dick is a Book about People
The concept of Moby Dick is mesmerizing. It is wonderful, it is passionate, it demands that you pump your fists against your chest as you read along. But the writing, oh, the writing. The characters, fucking God.
Let’s talk about Captain Ahab.
Captain Ahab is described in superlative terms, because anything else does not do him justice. A godless, god-like man, you’re told, way before he appears on the scene—and as soon as he does, you’re sucked in, absorbed by the raw charisma of his hatred.
It is almost unfair that, in a book which already has Ishmael, Ahab exists alongside him. When he appears, Moby Dick metamorphosizes into a story about Captain Ahab and his metaphysical quest for revenge. Ishmael, who is my best friend and we are married and he loves me, disappears from the book as a character, being relegated exclusively to the role of narrator.
And nobody has ever complained about this. Because Ahab is that good.
There is but one God on Earth, and one captain on the Pequod, and that is Ahab. The old man’s story is well-known: he’s a whaler, one of the best. In a profession where men die young, he’s fifty-seven, captain of his own ship.
And Moby Dick, a white whale known for its malice and intelligence, took his leg, and his sanity with it. His life ruined, his very anatomy violated in the most violent of ways, Ahab becomes consumed by hatred and thirst for revenge. He lives, exclusively, to kill Moby Dick.
That’s all well and good, but I feel Ahab has been overly simplified by pop culture. He’s not simply a rageful man, even though he is full and fueled by rage. He has depth in his purity.
Captain Ahab didn’t just lose his leg in the maelstrom of hunting Moby Dick—rather, the whale actively chewed his leg off; that is, Ahab felt himself be eaten alive, felt his muscles and bone crack and sever, and his leg be pulled, torn, and swallowed.
Moby Dick did not just maim Ahab, it didn’t just make him lose a leg: it utterly humiliated him. Whales are life and death for a whaler, but mankind’s tools are psychological. You need to scare the whale, you need it to tire itself. I said it already: you work with pain and fear, not with strength.
There is no way, no universe, in which a man can fight a whale, and win. The whale can only lose against itself.
Moby Dick reminded Ahab of that.
I ask again: what can you possibly do, other than become obsessed? How can you live down such a brutal, explicit takedown of your entire way of life? You put everything at risk for the sake of something as worthless as perfume and candles, and this is your just reward: fuck you. You do not matter, and you never mattered. You are nothing to society, and you are nothing to the whale.
Moby Dick is an aberration because it does not flee from the pain. When a whaling ship approaches it, when the rowboats log their harpoons into its flesh, Moby Dick fights back. It doesn’t even need to put that much effort, it just fucking swims at you. What are you going to do? It’s a sperm whale.
Ahab got maimed, and his life as a whaler got ruined. The physical pain was insufferable, but the emotional pain cannot be overstated—the Pequod had to be refashioned to accommodate his disability, and he now struggles to board other ships. Hell, he can barely maintain balance on a rowboat, he can’t climb a rope ladder—and Moby Dick is a fucking animal. Did it even know what was going on, or was it all just instinct?
That last question is one of the core themes of the book, immediately brought up as soon as Ahab sets foot on deck. He seeks revenge on Moby Dick, not just for what it did, but for what it meant. The first mate—Starbuck is his name—immediately brings up the obvious: you cannot take revenge on an animal. It’s a dumb brute. You cannot humanize it. That is blasphemy, Sir.
And—and here’s one of the two most beautiful moments in Moby Dick—Ahab tells him to shut the fuck up.
While Moby Dick—the book, not the whale—isn’t strictly a religious book, it is religion-adjacent. The characters attend a church sermon at the start of the book (on the story of Jonah and the whale, no less), and half the cast are Quakers—which, incidentally, informs how they talk. Thous and thees galore.
This to say, the figure of a God is never examined, but rather, taken for granted. And while Quakerism isn’t exactly the same as Calvinism, there are similarities between the two—and there’s one old debate between the two, on the issue of determinism.
Or, in more literary terms: does fate exist? And if it does, Ahab asks, was his fate to lose his leg, to be struck down with such cruel disregard for his humanity?
When Starbuck tells Ahab not to get revenge on the whale, Ahab replies this:
“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. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.”
To translate: Starbuck, that whale is every whale. That whale is an instrument of God, or it is God itself. That whale was the universe, life and death and nature, breaking me in half, insulting me, destroying everything that made me whole.
If my destiny was to lose my leg, the white whale wrote my fate. And I am going to fucking kill it.
Moby Dick is many things, but it is not a subtle book. Truth this stark does not survive subtlety. Ahab says he will kill the whale, because he wants revenge on life itself, on the wanton cruelty of the cold universe that did not care enough for him to kill him. And yet, again, Moby Dick is not an allegory. It is simply a whale.
And that is enough.
Ahab as a character is mad, but he’s not crazy. His every thought is dedicated to the whale; the book uses the term “monomaniac” often, and it is the only accurate term there is—because nothing else but the whale matters. It’s obsession to the final degree, it’s a complete redefinition of his character so it’s focused entirely on Moby Dick. He stops smoking, because it’s too pleasurable, and it distracts him from his hatred!
But he does not let his own madness dominate him, and rather, he uses it as a tool. He uses his rage to bring passion from his men—to hype them up, to get them rowdy and bloodthirsty and ready to do anything for him. He promises favor and fortune to those who aid them, and shows enough dexterity and reason as a captain that they cannot do but obey.
One God on earth, and one captain on the Pequod. Godless, but godlike. He looks for the white whale, lets his thoughts be consumed by it, but kills other whales all the while, to keep his men entertained. He studies the currents and the seasonal migrations of sperm whales so that he can guess where Moby Dick will be, come the summer.
Hell, he lets in four strangers as castaways so that he can man his own rowboat, because the owners of the Pequod won’t let him go out and hunt whales directly anymore. He’s lacking a leg! He can barely keep balance as-is, and he wants to chase the worst whale that ever lived?
Ahab does not fucking care. Ahab disobeys orders and brings an extra rowboat, and extra crew, just so he can be down at sea with his men. Just so he can truly lead them, and truly kill the white whale come the moment. He is so going to die. He so does not give a shit.
Captain Ahab is painfully, excruciatingly aware of his own fate. He is told directly by Starbuck, and indirectly, by the universe itself.
And yet, does he give up? No! He does not cower, he does not run, he does not surrender! Through storms and lightning, through fire and wind, he looks at the sky and raises a fist, and says, kill me yourself, you fucking coward! Strike me down, if you’re so willing!
This is no exaggeration. He really just straight up does that, yelling at thunderclouds as the crew panics around him. The closer he gets to Moby Dick, the harder it is to keep going.
Winds and storms oppose the Pequod, pushing it away from their destination, unsubtly leading them back to Nantucket, where it came from. Lightning falls, and destroys all the compasses on deck, forcing them to discern north and south from the sun and stars. Their log and line—instruments to measure their speed, and the distance the ship has traveled—rot and fall on the sea. Their life buoy gets lost. Fish disappear all around them. A fucking eagle swoops down from the sky and steals Ahab’s hat as he’s looking for the whale, daring him to chase it and go back.
Ahab refuses to. Ahab remains steadfast, iron-willed in his pursuit of the white whale. Nothing can make him stop. Nothing can deter him.
Then, the Pequod meets the Rachel.
The Rachel is another whaling ship, one that—confirming Ahab’s suspicions—has seen Moby Dick recently. The white whale is near, so near that Ahab can almost taste it… And then, the captain of the Rachel boards the Pequod, and asks for their help.
More specifically, he asks for the Pequod’s time. Two days ago, the Rachel captain explains, they found a group of whales, and three rowboats lowered down to sea to chase them. The whales were all successfully harpooned—but then, they swam in diametrically opposite directions, dragging the boats behind them.
Remember: we’re talking almost 40 km/h if the whale is swimming as hard as it can, and it will, because there’s a fucking harpoon in its back. The Rachel chased two of the whales, but the third one swam backwards, and its corresponding boat was completely lost.
It’s been two days, then, and this boat is nowhere to be seen. The whale swam into the horizon, and ever since, the Rachel has been looking for it, navigating in a frenzy, calling for that spare boat. The captain asks Ahab if he can help the Rachel for two more days, just two more days. Let’s look for this third boat, it has to be somewhere, it can’t have vanished like this.
Ahab is about to say no, and then the captain of the Rachel, a Nantuckeer like Ahab, and an old friend of his to boot, explains his desperation, he explains why they need to find this rogue boat:
His own twelve-year-old is in it.
Whaling captains sometimes brought their children along on some trips. The whaling job became a generational curse, a blight to carry deep into your bloodline, because there’s a depraved sort of pride in such systemic misery. This was the case of the Rachel, and the boy is just—a boy. Thrown into the deep hell that is hunting for whales, and then lost, to die by thirst of starvation, alone in the open sea.
So the captain pleads. Please, Ahab, he says. Please, help me take my son back.
And Ahab sees this as what it is—just another trial, just another obstacle on his way. Wasting two days, this close to the white whale, means Moby Dick will get away. Just another way in which God tests him. He’s willing to sacrifice his own life, so be it.
But is he able to sacrifice another man’s son?
Moby Dick needs to be explained in high words; as a book, it is too complete, too universal, to be compressed in simple vernacular. Herman Melville, however, understood what all good writers know: that in spite of this complexity, humans are simple creatures.
An innocent child, dying—that’s it. That’s all it takes to really test a man’s resolve. Everything else is window dressing, because deep inside, on a fundamental level, we cannot abide for our young getting hurt. If there is such a thing as a soul, that is the soul’s only purpose: to make it so children don’t suffer.
So Ahab sees this, and says, no. No, I will not help you.
And so Ahab, a man with a son on his own, a man who understands the weight of his own choices, seals his own fate. He does not give himself the respite of madness, he makes a conscious choice to let the child die. He does not refuge in sociopathy, the way a soldier kills a child by convincing himself the child is not human. He looks the father in the eye, and says: I will let your boy die.
In the history of literature, Ahab stands tall as a mythological creature, as the greatest villain in the greatest story of revenge ever told. This is the reason why. Faced with his own humanity, Ahab decides to define himself in hatred.
Does the rest need to be written? Do we need to delay the inevitable? The chase goes on, Moby Dick is seen, and what must happen, happens. A man cannot win against a whale, not if the whale intends to fight.
So Moby Dick retaliates, and destroys every boat—and ultimately, the Pequod. The ocean abhors a vacuum; the Pequod sinking causes a bubble, which causes a current, which causes a vortex. Every rowboat and every piece of lumber is swallowed up by the sea, taking all lives except for that of Ishmael—who got thrown overboard by a spasm of the whale, and thus survives to tell the tale.
As the Pequod sinks, though, there’s a man on the main mast, nailing back the flag that got torn halfway through the final chase. It is a formality—they’re all about to die—but it is a meaningful formality. The Pequod will sink as itself; not a dreadful mass of nails and timber, but a proud, worthy ship, one with a name and a legacy.
But as the man nails the flag to the mask, a sky-hawk tries to prevent it; God, again, punishing this blasphemy, insulting Ahab once more. The man perseveres, however, and eventually catches the hawk with the nail, as well as the mast. And, to quote directly:
[...] and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.
Fuck. This is such a good book.
4. So, Should You Read Moby Dick?
In his 1981 essay Why Read the Classics?, Italo Calvino offers fourteen different definitions of the word ‘classic’. Through them, Calvino distinguishes between two similar, but not identical concepts.
To quote:
11. Your classic is that book that you cannot be indifferent towards, and which helps you define yourself in relation—or in contrast—to it.
12. A classic is a book that existed before other classics; but whoever reads the later ones first, then the former, quickly understands its place in the genealogy [of classical books].
(Emphasis mine.)
-A- classic, then, is a book that a significant enough number of people consider -their- classic. Throughout this blog, I’ve made my point as to why Moby Dick is my classic. Would it be yours, though?
See, I don’t think that’s an easy question to answer. It would be foolish to imply Moby Dick is easy to read; I’ve posted two quotes in the entire body of this blog, and one of them, I had to translate to make sure it read as English.
Moby Dick takes effort. The prose and dialogue, while great, are antiquated even by 1850s standards—I cannot stress hard enough how half the cast are Quakers—and there are maritime and biological terms you might need to look up. Hell, there are chapters that are impossible to understand if you miss the proper Biblical reference. Chapter 95, The Cassock, is an extremely funny chapter that you will not get if you don’t know who Queen Maacah was.
On a personal level, you’ve got to be deeply unemployed to really get into Moby Dick. A book about obsession, it worms its way into your brain, but you need to be constantly thinking about it to feel its full effect. I am a busy person, yes; by all means I barely have time to myself—but what little time I get, I get to spend it by my lonesome. I get to obsess, to daydream, to think my own private thoughts.
I do not think it is easy to work a full nine to five and take care of a house, meals, cleaning, and possibly children—and then get lost in a book about whaling that requires you to Google pictures of the precise way in which a rope is coiled to really get it. It is a great book, it is an incredible book, but, by God, it takes energy, it takes effort, and it takes time.
Perhaps that’s the greatest tragedy of growing older: everything takes time, everything takes energy, everything takes priority. Moby Dick is high art, but high art demands that you meet it half-way. It may take the helm, but you still need to row.
So, is it worth it? To me, it was. To you, it might. Or it might not. Only you can decide that, and I think it is irresponsible, or even cruel, on my end, to imply otherwise. It is a good fucking book, but at the same time, it is a big fucking commitment. I am not going to guilt trip you into dedicating a month of your life to losing yourself into this obsession.
And yet.
And yet.
Maybe it is because I’ve become older, maybe it’s because I’ve not become wiser, but it feels like my life has been taken over by convenience, often in exchange for quality. We’re in the age of the internet, of easy-to-digest literature, of mile-a-minute short videos ready to inject serotonin straight into our eyeballs at a moment’s notice.
I’m not saying anything new when I say that attention spans are getting shorter; I myself suffer greatly from it. Moby Dick, and books like it—what Italo Calvino would call a classic, and what your eight-year-old self would call a bore—become less attractive. They demand a resource that we might not have. They ask for a level of focus we’re not ready to give anymore.
But precisely for that, I think, it becomes even more gratifying to climb that mountain. It took effort on my end to read Moby Dick; there would be chapters I’d have to read twice, concepts I’d have to look out for, articles on Calvinism I had to skim. I did that by myself, and for myself, because I wanted to feel I was taking back what I felt had lost.
I fought to enjoy Moby Dick, and it felt good to finish it, to enjoy it, to truly let it hit me with its full force. It was gratifying, like I had regained some amount of humanity I hadn’t noticed I had lost. It was a personal victory.
So, no, Moby Dick is not easy to read, and it might very well not be the right book for you. If you’re going to be miserable because of it, I do not think you should read it. Do not go through hell for the sake of something that does not resonate with you.
But I do think, somewhere, there is a book like this—a book that requires effort, that you gotta fight for—that is for you. One that scratches your particular itch. One that changes you.
That’s why I wrote this blog, in the end. Part of me wanted to share this sense of elation, of passion, that only truly great stories can evoke. Call this a plea to give ‘boring’ books a chance. Grab that copy of Middlemarch that’s been rolling around your house lately, go to the library and check out Beloved, download an epub to try to see what’s up with all this Wuthering Heights deal.
Engage with the classics. Somewhere among them, one of -your- classics awaits. And, by God. They’re so fucking worth it.
There are endless things about Moby Dick I couldn’t fit into this blog out of sheer fear I’d never stop talking—Pip, Queequeg, Starbuck’s role as the conscious objector, Flask and Stubb, the fact that some chapters are randomly written as a stage play because Melville fucking loved Shakespeare. It’s such a good book. EDIT: Also! It was first published on October 18th -- my birthday! I was BORN to write this blog. Moby Dick really is my white whale.
One of the things I don’t mention in the blog, though, is that the book has the awkward quality of having basically no female characters whatsoever, other than a random inn owner at the very start. Melville himself was aware of this, and he sent a letter to his best friend, a woman, explaining this book was “utterly devoid of feminine qualities.” It’s a homosexual sailor living it up at sea while Ahab broods in the background. It’s all dudes.
The best friend, delightfully, loved the shit out of Moby Dick, and asked Melville to write more of this. She was the first fujoshi!!!
I read this letter and exchange while I was reading the book, and it fucking kills me that I cannot find it again so I source it properly. It fucking kills me. Anyway. Happy Pride!!!!!
It sounds like the themes have only gotten more relevant over time, and that schools suck the joy out of it intentionally because those in power are scared of it.
Poor Ahab made the same mistake many people today are making. Not the whole 'letting hatred consume you utterly after being fucked over' thing, that's understandable. No, he failed to recognize the root cause of his suffering. Not the whale, not the universe or God, but the aristocrats who demanded that whale oil in the first place because they felt slightly inconvenienced by candles. Using a harpoon on one of those guys would have been way more effective, too.
Thank you.
This was an incredible read, as your blogposts always are; this little addition means the world.
Honestly, I skipped most of essay.
May be now I am too disappointed by all this? A lot of ink was spilled overy centuries, yet we still happiely make hell on Earth for themselves and anyone else?
Whaling turned industrial and nearly killed said whales biologically - and who knows how much was lost lingustically and culturally?
Humans and their slave meat animals are like 90% of all land biomass[url= https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass] now - and things hardly about to turn around for better on this ...
So, all I can see in history - same errors repeated on new, more destructive technological level. Humans are affected by magic of words, but not really? Not even when their own future is on stake ...
Can't decide if it's damning or not, but it feels relevant to say that I tried to read Moby Dick for a high school summer reading assignment, and despite loving the prose it was the only summer reading book I was ever assigned that I didn't finish, and I didn't remember this happening at all even though I'm pretty sure I got that far into it.
So with that in mind, I think you nailed why it's so hard to teach Moby Dick---and really, all the "classics," however you define the term---in anything close to a standardized educational environment: because it's written by a proper, soul-deep, made-in-God's-own-image Writer, and you can't teach something like that in objective terms just like you can't teach the highest levels of mathematics as conceptualized by God's Own Mathematician, or science as it really felt to someone driven to discover the secrets of existence by something too pure to be called "passion" and too hideous to be called "love."
It's about obsession, yes, but it's also about the lack of it: the world which dispassion and apathy creates, the debasing desire for unearned comfort and the ease with which we all (Ishmael and Ahab included) trade the blood of an unknowable "someone else" to obtain it. Because we're only human, after all. We're not bad people just because we don't like smoke getting in our eyes. We're not stupid or lazy or hopelessly self-obsessed just because we had to be made to engage with something we didn't understand, or because we figured out how to get out of doing it, or because there are a million billion social and economic and interpersonal pressures influencing every choice we make and blunting every glimmer of dissonance in the corners of our overtaxed cognitions.
Good post. Good book. Still skeptical about the importance of the cetology chapters, though, not gonna lie.
I've never heard of any of those in my life. I probably should.
Oh fine. I'll read it.
The New Bedford Whaling Museum has a yearly tradition of live readings of Moby Dick. https://www.whalingmuseum.org/program/moby-dick-marathon-2024/
2024 is also online. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-DESwsTirM&list=PL7VSI73mTDioXURG9j-9NQfK_Pv9pR7RH
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I couldn't find the exact exchange you describe, but there are two letters that are similar enough to be plausible candidates.
From The Letters of Herman Melville, in a letter to Sarah Huyler Morewood in 1851, Melville writes:
The book doesn't contain her reply, but Michael Shelden's Melville in Love gives the following incident:
The other letter that seems relevant is this one, to Sophia Hawthorne:
Me being me, my mind immediately went to a Magic card that makes the same claim of unicorns.
I do love that diagram of the whale-rowboat system. It's like a physics problem that actively hates everyone involved and you for reading it.
Can't wait for Aragón's rendition of Dante's Inferno, where Ishmael will play the role of Virgil.
Who surely did not deserve to get a metastasizing chain of coffee shops named after him.
I do love seeing people looking at an uncaring universe and deciding that they'll make it care or die trying.
Mind you, that doesn't mean I like Ahab himself.
Excellent work in giving some sense of what the books means to you. I'll be honest, I'm probably never going to read it myself, but experiencing it through your eyes gave me some slim sense of the best-case scenario if I ever do.
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It was the one to Sarah Hurley Morewood!! Oh my god I'm so glad I didn't imagine this. That's the one!
I cannot say for sure, not having access to the earlier versions of this blog that you kept revising due to dissatisfaction, but to judge from the final version, it was worth the effort. Not unlike how you describe the book itself, this blog was heavy, and one the reader had to meet halfway to get the most out of – but it was so worth it, and I think cutting a lot of the impassioned yet vestigial gushing on other characters and aspects of the book only strengthened that.
The big thing, that a lot of classics are hard due to having to meet them halfway, and everyone has a classic out there that will be the one that clicks for them, really made this piece, and put words to something about tackling such "renowned things that can feel like an obligation because of how renowned they are" pieces, especially given they're doorstop-length novels as opposed to simply a single film. As does the thing about continuing to look and take a chance on them until you find yours. It may be ages until I find mine, I confess – as great as this blog it, I confess I am not yet compelled to go check out a bunch of 19th century literature – but it's a valid takeaway.
And in the meantime, you did the great thing, you made your obsessions our own for the time you talked about it, and in a more refined manner that made it easier to digest and get on board with than the raw, unfiltered gushing before. Can't ask for more then that, can you?
I thought you said you read this book in its original English, not a Spanish translation? This doesn't make sense unless you were reading a translation, as your English is well good enough that you can understand it all right away.
I presume he didn't actually say this to his friend, nor were such words used in the book anywhere, given it was, y'know, the mid-1800s, and this is just your modern infernal of it. Likely a correct one, and I do not question that the whole thing may well have a lot of homosexual energy coming off it. But obviously not stated explicitly as such.
Holy crap.... My scroll wheel...
Mad lad
Will you write other blogs like this on other books? Maybe something Italian since you mentioned Calvino?
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It was going to be named after the boat, but he decided it should be something people can spell before their morning coffee. (Because yes, the name really is a Moby Dick reference.)
Do you have a citation for that? (A cetacean circulation citation, I suppose.) The numbers I've seen say 20 cm diameter, and I'm pretty sure that's too small for an adult to fit through (certainly too small for me). A child probably could, though.
Do you mean Jonah, or is Jason and the whale a New Testament story I've never heard of?
Great blog! Almost convinced me to read it, but alas, I have a bunch of other books in my queue first. This did make me look at the value in reading difficult books in another way, though.
It’s really funny because I have also spent the last few months obsessed with a book about obsession and being utterly unable to communicate why besides just generally gesturing at the entire book and going “yes I know it’s dense and yes you need an annotated version of the book to fully appreciate it but it’s so good" and this blog really helped me put a lot of my own thoughts into words, especially about something being a classic vs your classic. I am definitely feeling defined by the before and after of reading it, and kinda seeing it everywhere in a way, and every reread just reveals more to me. It's been driving me nuts not being able to convey what I've been feeling so thanks for putting it all out there.
(For the record, my Moby Dick is Nabokov's Lolita, which admittedly is also hard to talk about since people have... preconceptions about what it's about. Horrid book, makes you want to take a shower with bleach, but an expertly written depiction of obsession from a villain as well.)
Also, fun fact, but my particular brand of mental illness is what the Victorian's used to call monomania (certain types of OCD present themselves as that single-minded obsession, including my own), so Captain Ahab just like me fr fr.
This wonderful essay made me want to read Moby Dick again (3rd time), but then you mentioned MIddlemarch and I immediately wanted to read that again first, and then I thought of all the other wonderful classics out there that I really should read again...
Life is too damned short.
This was a brilliant piece of writing and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you so much!
(#Rollin' Down to Old Maui)
I don't think Moby Dick is a book for me. Then again, I read it in either high school or right beforehand, for school, and back then I -hated- every piece of Classic Lit I was forced to read. And still, as a whole, do.
Like The Scarlet Letter is a book I hated in every way. Still hate. It makes some great points about ostracization and hypocrisy and the shittiness of people, but I hated every word of reading it so much thats the biggest thing I remember about the book.
Because in the end I am fascinated by worlds, by systems, by things that can't or at least currently don't exist. There's a wonder and magic in them to me, and well, a book where nothing vaguely supernatural or extraordinary happens is bleh.
Which admittedly means that I actually -did- like Moby Dick more than most of what I read for school, because The Big Fucking Whale was a monster. A monster that exists, bt stull - monsters are interesting.
Then I eventually discovered my own Moby Dick, which 1000% is Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! (and really RAW's work as a whole).
As you say - there is a before, and an after. And that book forever changed me over 20 years ago, and still changes me to this day, even when I take years-long gaps before going back - but it does feel a good time to revisited George and Hagbard and Marilyn Monroe and Leviathan and more. Soon.
moby dick annotated version
whaling for dummies
quaker to english tourist dictionary
holy bible annotated version
funny jokes from the 1850s explained
unfunny jokes from the 1850s explained
Am I missing anything?
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I read the book in English. In the passage you mention, I'm referring to the first Moby Dick quote I posted in the blog, the one where Ahab talks to Starbuck. It is in English, absolutely, but it's in old-timey English, and I felt it was hard to parse on first sight. If you check the blog again, you'll see that right after posting the quote, I go "To translate: Ahab says, this whale is every whale. This whale is---" That's what I was referencing there.
When I said "I had to translate it to make sure it read as English" I was being metaphorical! And kind of making a joke, really. I basically meant I had to reword the passage so it could be understandable without having spent 80 pages getting accustomed to Quaker manner of speech.
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Interestingly, I did google to re-check the whale-aorta-swim-through fact, and I did see enough results on google that confirmed my memory to add it to the blog---I was getting passionate while writing that section and didn't wanna stop out of fear of losing the juice. Re-checking it now, indeed there are sources that confirm this (there's a famous scale model of a heart in a science museum in Boston that you can climb inside of) and National Geographic used to say that indeed you could do that. But I guess now National Geographic says you cannot, and there are also a pretty high number of sources that say that, no, the heart is big but not AS big.
So either it was an urban legend, and I fell for it, or science moved on somewhere in between when I was a teen and I first learned this fact, and now. Either way I guess I'll have to eventually revisit the blog for accuracy.
(As per the Jonah/Jason thing, that's entirely a typo; I'll fix it now).
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Oh, I forgot to reply to this -- I don't know. Maybe? Like most people, I go through random bouts of reading a book a week, and getting really super into them---and then I stop and it's months till I pick up another one. After Moby Dick, my studies have accelerated enough that I'm in kind of a lull, reading-wise, and I don't read much. But in the future, maybe?
For what is worth, I read a bit of The Name of the Rose and fucking loved it, and both the Decameron and Orlando Furioso call to me like a siren. So maybe it will be Italian, even! But I am not planning it for now. It'll just have to happen.
Ooo I've been waiting for this blog since you teased it. Fantastic essay! Moby Dick has been on my TBR for years, and you've definitely convinced me to take it for a spin.
My own classic is Ulysses, maybe the zenith of impossibly dense doorstoppers. My first time reading it, I bounced off hard - on the second, armed with 200 pages of annotations and several lectures, it still took me a while to get into it. But when I did? My god, that thing fucking altered my relationship to stories permanently. And I still don't understand half of what Stepehn Daedelus is talking about.
I think books like these encourage you to talk in sweeping superlatives -- because, as you say, they demand a certain obsession, require the sacrifice of a small part of your soul to enage with fully, but ever since then I've been sort of struggling to find a book that lives up to the lofty standards set by The Best Book - so in that spirit, I'll add another definition to Calvino's list:
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When you find out that somehow, the whales have shrunk.
you, like it did to Ahab except that you still have both legs.
Or people's skill at swimming-though-whale-aorta technique has declined.
Or the universe has just decided to
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I believe the model in Boston is of a blue whale's heart, not a sperm whale's. Assuming it's of accurate size, the chambers and ventricles are large enough for an adult to fit through (with quite a bit of crouching). My guess is that the aorta narrows significantly from there.
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Ah!
~Berenstein~Bears~Mandela Effect! 🙏Gonna take this opportunity in a blog about Melville's masterpiece to say once again how much I love Italo Calvino.
Great blog, Aragon. Makes me want to get out my well-worn copy of Moby Dick and re-read it for the nth time. Or maybe grab a copy from the classics section at the local bookstore and read it for the first time. Who knows? It's a classic, after all.
I always know I’m in for a ride when you drop a blog post, and this did not disappoint!
What you’re saying about time and attention resonates with me a lot. I’m finding it harder to slow down and take that time and attention towards things now that I’m officially in Middle Age™️ I find it hard to shake the notion that there’s not much time left to engage with things, because there’s so much to engage with! It’s basically archive-panic-as-lifestyle, and it frickin’ blows.
So thank you for the reminder about claiming one’s humanity in the face of all that. It’s appreciated.
I also love Moby Dick. What I tell people who get bored reading about whales is: Just remember, whales are dragons.
If someone wrote a fantasy book which was exactly like Moby Dick, except instead of hunting whales in the ocean, they were hunting dragons through the skies, it would be the greatest fantasy book ever written, with worldbuilding, characters, and themes that would make Tolkien look like a schoolchild. If someone wrote a science fiction book which was exactly like Moby Dick, except instead of hunting whales in the oceans, they were hunting great interplanetary monsters in space, it would be the greatest science fiction book ever written. How is it that the mere fact that a thing is not only possible, but true, makes it less interesting to some people?
And I love your observation that "The whale does not signify death, it does not signify God, it does not signify nature. The whale is a whale, and by God above, that is more than enough." Amen! Reality can be more powerful than symbols!
However. Aragon, dear Aragon whom I admire and love and could almost be gay for, I must take you to task for this talk of "capitalism".
Any time you feel like deriding "capitalism" for a problem, you should first ask yourself: Does any other system do as well? In my experience, the answer is always no–at least, for the things people other than me criticize "capitalism" for, like poverty, exploitation, alienation, and environmental destruction.
I've had many jobs, and the most-demoralizing were the ones that were socialistic. By that I mean that they were funded by taxpayers and managed by a government committee, to address a problem chosen by a panel of experts, administered in a way that guaranteed that no one involved would make more money if the project succeeded in its technical goals, or if anyone ever used the thing that it produced.
I could give many examples of how the socialist projects I've worked on failed, were deliberately killed, went berzerk, or made a wonderful thing that no one ever used, because they were neither motivated nor restrained by a desire for profit. But let's take Aragon's example: whaling.
So, there was no whaling industry in the Soviet Union? No sailors dying to provide rich elites with whale oil? On the contrary, the Soviet Union was a rapacious whale-murderer, precisely because they were not capitalist. One of the top hits in my Google search for Soviet whaling was this:
To summarize: From 1946 until the International Whaling Commission banned commercial whaling in 1986, the Soviet Union managed an insane 40-year industrialized slaughter of every whale they could catch. They ordered whaling captains to burn their records after their voyages, and reported completely phony statistics to the IWC. And the quotas increased each year, because that's what quotas do when people are judged by their ability to raise quotas rather than by their ability to make stuff people want. Nobody could stop this crazy runaway train, because that would call attention to the criminal negligence of the entire system.
Some whale products were brought back to land, and presumably sold to somebody. But most of the whales killed were just left to rot. From the article:
If Soviet whaling had been restrained by the desire for profit, they would have stopped killing whales when it became unprofitable. Instead, they kept killing even when there was no market for them, even when they were killing them faster than their floating factories could process them, because they were rewarded for killing, not for selling.
Fantastic essay. I'm not certain that I want to make the commitment to experience the entire thing for myself -- a bucket is a finite thing, and Melville is quite a weighty commitment for a bucket list -- but it was an absolute joy to experience that passion by proxy, and I learned a massive amount about both the novel and whaling.
As far as my own classics, I pleasure-read Don Quixote in high school, and it definitely makes the Calvino-definition list because even at the time I loved it and now I want to come back to it with the benefit of a fully developed adult brain. It's another one where the memetic version of it doesn't do the original justice.
Maybe that's another definition of a classic: one whose core idea was sufficiently awesome to have become memetic, but which then adds a whole extra layer of exquisite construction only its readers will ever get to fully appreciate. The best of both worlds.
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Ok, suppose I (quite reasonably, imho) accept your criticisms of what I might call 'example socialisms': certain government-funded environments you've worked jobs in, and some of the horrendous environmental waste committed by the former Soviet Union.
Does that mean no one gets to write about problems they are seeing or even personally encountering in an example capitalism they are examining or even personally living in? (Or, in at least a few cases, dying in?)
Do I just have to take a very coarse grained 'socialism bad, capitalism better' and stop right there?
Rather than leave you without any example of a political or economic system EVER having been replaced by something that might be at least somewhat better, I leave you with Le Guin's National Book Foundation Award acceptance speech, in which she makes reference to the divine right of kings as something that was once taken for granted as the best system, and which has since largely passed away.
https://www.ursulakleguin.com/nbf-medal
I do wish to warn that the acceptance speech is so SHORT, it really shortchanges Le Guin. I know you are a thoughtful person (a few might even call you an 'overthinking' person, I suppose) and I think if you read nonfiction written by Le Guin during the prime of her life, you are likely to find it offers you a lot.
I understand and sympathize that it can be IMMENSELY annoying to have someone complain and complain but not offer clearly effective and superior alternative options. I think complaining is still a legit thing to do, though, even if complaining by itself is limited in its usefulness.
P.S. "nonfiction written by Le Guin during the prime of her life" is mostly not politics, but more about literature. That's part of why I suggest it to you.