Rereading Moby-Dick: “so noble and so sparkling”

Not a comforting thought to an ignorant and slow reader like me, but Tom (Wuthering Expectations) was right when he said there’s no reading deeply without reading widely. Moby-Dick feels different—and even better—now that I have read (and immersed myself in) Shakespeare. The influence is obvious: the language, the madness and grandeur of Ahab (in whom we find the rage of Lear and Timon), the play-like chapters, the references, and so on. 

I forgot, for example, that there’s a Shakespeare quote in the “Extracts”: 

“Very like a whale.”—Hamlet. 

References abound, like the chapter titled “Queen Mab”, or: 

“… But I omit them as altogether obsolete; and can hardly help suspecting them for mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but signifying nothing.” (ch.32)

And plenty of others. 

Sometimes it’s less obvious: 

“Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.” (ch.26)

Does that not make you think of Hamlet?

“HAMLET […] What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals; and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” (Act 2 scene 2)

Both are about the contradiction in man, but Ishmael’s quote is the inverse of Hamlet’s. 

He goes on: 

“That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!” (ibid.) 

That makes me think of that moment in King Lear when Lear asks “Is man no more than this?” and realises the shared humanity between himself and a beggar, and wants to take off his lendings. But Melville—shall I say Ishmael?—isn’t just talking about shared humanity; he talks about the dignity of each individual and all humanity. He makes a stronger, more emphatic point about equality. 

____________________________________

I still don’t understand why there’s a hyphen in the title. 

Anyway, reading Moby-Dick, I get that bliss from every line as I get reading Shakespeare. One doesn’t experience that with every writer. Dickens is another one, Bleak House most of all. Nabokov. But especially Shakespeare and Melville. Much as I love Tolstoy, Chekhov, or Cervantes, there’s some barrier, some distance as I read them in translation and don’t have their exact words.