When we finish chapter 81 "The Pequod Meets the Virgin" of Moby Dick, the Pequod has killed 3 whales. However, this chapter is different.
The 1st whale is killed in chapter 61 "Stubb Kills a Whale". Ishmael's standing at the foremast-head, watching; the whale suddenly appears.
"And lo! close under our lee, not forty fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like the capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue, glistening in the sun's rays like a mirror. But lazily undulating in the trough of the sea, and ever and anon tranquilly spouting his vapoury jet, the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a warm afternoon. But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last."
That last sentence is a sad one, because the pipe seems to represent, or can be understood as, an enjoyment of life (the happy-go-lucky Stubb always has a pipe in his mouth; Ishmael and Queequeg reach a kind of closeness sharing a blanket and a smoke; Ahab throws away his pipe because he no longer has the serenity to enjoy it...), and the idea is made even stronger because it's not a real pipe, but a "pipe of a warm afternoon".
"After the full interval of his sounding had elapsed, the whale rose again, and being now in advance of the smoker's boat, and much nearer to it than to any of the others, Stubb counted upon the honour of the capture. It was obvious, now, that the whale had at length become aware of his pursuers. All silence of cautiousness was therefore no longer of use. Paddles were dropped, and oars came loudly into play. And still puffing at his pipe, Stubb cheered on his crew to the assault.
Yes, a mighty change had come over the fish. All alive to his jeopardy, he was going "head out"; that part obliquely projecting from the mad yeast which he brewed."
Here Ishmael focuses on the crew members (Stubb, Queequeg, Tashtego), on the process of capturing the whale (method, actions, tools). Being attacked, the whale starts bleeding.
"The red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a hill. His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake."
Stubb churns his lance into the whale.
"... When reaching far over the bow, Stubb slowly churned his long sharp lance into the fish, and kept it there, carefully churning and churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold watch that the whale might have swallowed, and which he was fearful of breaking ere he could hook it out. But that gold watch he sought was the innermost life of the fish. And now it is struck; for, starting from his trance into that unspeakable thing called his "flurry," the monster horribly wallowed in his blood, overwrapped himself in impenetrable, mad, boiling spray, so that the imperilled craft, instantly dropping astern, had much ado blindly to struggle out from that phrensied twilight into the clear air of the day.
And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into view; surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and contracting his spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations. At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea. His heart had burst!"
It's a striking image ("red tide", "gush after gush of clotted red gore", etc.), and Ishmael does write "tormented body" and "agonized respirations", but in this chapter he's rather neutral and objective- he's just describing everything he sees and helping us visualise how a whale is captured. The focus of the chapter is not on the whale, but on the whalemen. Ishmael goes on to devote the 2 next chapters to the tools used in the capture.
The 2nd whale-killing scene is found in chapter 73 "Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk". It is brief.
"An interval passed and the boats were in plain sight, in the act of being dragged right towards the ship by the towing whale. So close did the monster come to the hull, that at first it seemed as if he meant it malice; but suddenly going down in a maelstrom, within three rods of the planks, he wholly disappeared from view, as if diving under the keel. "Cut, cut!" was the cry from the ship to the boats, which, for one instant, seemed on the point of being brought with a deadly dash against the vessel's side. But having plenty of line yet in the tubs, and the whale not sounding very rapidly, they paid out abundance of rope, and at the same time pulled with all their might so as to get ahead of the ship. For a few minutes the struggle was intensely critical; for while they still slacked out the tightened line in one direction, and still plied their oars in another, the contending strain threatened to take them under. But it was only a few feet advance they sought to gain. And they stuck to it till they did gain it; when instantly, a swift tremor was felt running like lightning along the keel, as the strained line, scraping beneath the ship, suddenly rose to view under her bows, snapping and quivering; and so flinging off its drippings, that the drops fell like bits of broken glass on the water, while the whale beyond also rose to sight, and once more the boats were free to fly. But the fagged whale abated his speed, and blindly altering his course, went round the stern of the ship towing the two boats after him, so that they performed a complete circuit.
Meantime, they hauled more and more upon their lines, till close flanking him on both sides, Stubb answered Flask with lance for lance; and thus round and round the Pequod the battle went, while the multitudes of sharks that had before swum round the Sperm Whale's body, rushed to the fresh blood that was spilled, thirstily drinking at every new gash, as the eager Israelites did at the new bursting fountains that poured from the smitten rock.
At last his spout grew thick, and with a frightful roll and vomit, he turned upon his back a corpse."
Again, Ishmael's just describing. The death of the right whale, in itself, isn't important- it's what it means that is. The chapter's to show Ahab's madness and Fedallah's mysteriousness, at least from the point of view of Stubb and Flask.
It's different when we get to chapter 81. Here, what we have is "a huge, humped old bull", whose "spout was short, slow, and laborious; coming forth with a choking sort of gush, and spending itself in torn shreds". The whale has 1 fin.
Ishmael describes the competition between the 2 ships, and then:
"It was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight. The whale was now going head out, and sending his spout before him in a continual tormented jet; while his one poor fin beat his side in an agony of fright. Now to this hand, now to that, he yawed in his faltering flight, and still at every billow that he broke, he spasmodically sank in the sea, or sideways rolled towards the sky his one beating fin. So have I seen a bird with clipped wing making affrighted broken circles in the air, vainly striving to escape the piratical hawks. But the bird has a voice, and with plaintive cries will make known her fear; but the fear of this vast dumb brute of the sea, was chained up and enchanted in him; he had no voice, save that choking respiration through his spiracle, and this made the sight of him unspeakably pitiable; while still, in his amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and omnipotent tail, there was enough to appal the stoutest man who so pitied."
If the whale-killing scene is just a job, a process in chapter 61, and a meaningful, symbolic act in chapter 73, the one in chapter 81 is more. The narrator now concentrates on the whale, on the pain of the whale.
"As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony!"
Those passages are sadder than anything about whaling that we've seen in Moby Dick. The narrator now no longer sounds like a whaleman or a member of a whaling ship, he sounds like a spectator shocked by the awful scene he witnesses. Does Ishmael now doubt the job he has chosen, and start to question the point of killing whales?
He doesn't stop there. He goes further.
"As the boats now more closely surrounded him, the whole upper part of his form, with much of it that is ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed. His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the knot-holes of the noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale's eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see. But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all. Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely discoloured bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the flank."
Aren't human beings selfish? As though that isn't enough, Ishmael describes Flask pricking the whale again, for the mere fun of it.
"At the instant of the dart an ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more than sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift fury blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying crews all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask's boat and marring the bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin, then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most piteous, that last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to the ground—so the last long dying spout of the whale."
Chapter 81 is the saddest chapter in the book so far. If before Ishmael watches from afar, now he comes close to the whale, and seems to feel what the whale feels. He anthropomorphises the whales.
"Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great buoyancy, with its side or belly considerably elevated above the surface. If the only whales that thus sank were old, meagre, and broken-hearted creatures, their pads of lard diminished and all their bones heavy and rheumatic; then you might with some reason assert that this sinking is caused by an uncommon specific gravity in the fish so sinking, consequent upon this absence of buoyant matter in him. But it is not so. For young whales, in the highest health, and swelling with noble aspirations, prematurely cut off in the warm flush and May of life, with all their panting lard about them; even these brawny, buoyant heroes do sometimes sink."
The chapter is so sombre, and Ishmael appears so critical of whaling, that right after this chapter comes "The Honour and Glory of Whaling". But does whaling sound honourable and glorious any more, after such a scene?
Reading Moby Dick isn't enough. I have to know more about whales, especially sperm whales.
How do they function, having such small eyes and ears?
Here is a useful article:
"... In 1839, in the first scientific treatise on the sperm whale, Thomas Beale, a surgeon aboard a whaler, wrote that it was “one of the most noiseless of marine animals.” While they do not sing elaborate songs, like humpbacks or belugas, in fact they are not silent. Whalers in the 1800s spoke of hearing loud knocking, almost like hammering on a ship’s hull, whenever sperm whales were present. They called the animals “the carpenter fish.” Only in 1957 did two scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution confirm the sailors’ observations. Aboard a research vessel, the Atlantis, they approached five sperm whales, shut off the ship’s motors and listened with an underwater receiver. At first, they assumed the “muffled, smashing noise” they heard came from somewhere on the ship. Then they determined the sounds were coming from the whales.
Biologists now believe that the sperm whale’s massive head functions like a powerful telegraph machine, emitting pulses of sound in distinct patterns. At the front of the head are the spermaceti organ, a cavity that contains the bulk of the whale’s spermaceti, and a mass of oil-saturated fatty tissue called the junk. Two long nasal passages branch away from the bony nares of the skull, twining around the spermaceti organ and the junk. The left nasal passage runs directly to the blowhole at the top of the whale’s head. But the other twists and turns, flattens and broadens, forming a number of air-filled sacs capable of reflecting sound. Near the front of the head sit a pair of clappers called “monkey lips.”
Sound generation is a complex process. To make its clicking sounds, a whale forces air through the right nasal passage to the monkey lips, which clap shut. The resulting click! bounces off one air-filled sac and travels back through the spermaceti organ to another sac nestled against the skull. From there, the click is sent forward, through the junk, and amplified out into the watery world. Sperm whales may be able to manipulate the shape of both the spermaceti organ and the junk, possibly allowing them to aim their clicks. The substance that made them so valuable to whalers is now understood to play an important role in communication..."
"... “Acoustics is a great way to see what’s going on where you can’t see,” Benoit-Bird says. To understand sperm whale sound, she had to first establish how the whales use their clicks to find squid. Unlike fish, squid don’t have swim bladders, those hard, air-filled structures that echolocating hunters such as spinner dolphins and harbor porpoises typically key in on. “Everyone thought squid were lousy sonar targets,” she says. But she thought it unlikely that the whales would spend so much time and energy—diving hundreds or thousands of feet, clicking all the way down—only to grope blindly in the dark.
In a test, Benoit-Bird, Gilly and colleagues tethered a live jumbo squid a few feet under their boat to see if the echo sounders could detect it. They found that squid make fabulous acoustic targets. “They have plenty of hard structures for sonar to pick up,” she says. Toothy suckers cover their arms; the beak is hard and sharp; and the pen, a feather-shaped structure, supports the head. Benoit-Bird was thrilled. “You could say,” she says, “that I’m learning to see like a sperm whale.”..."
Back to whales.
Let's look at some photos of sperm whales:
Before reading Moby Dick, whenever hearing the accusation that it's not a novel, I thought of War and Peace, which was 3 books put together- a novel, a historical chronicle and a philosophical book about war, history and determinism. However, whilst War and Peace is largely a narrative, sometimes interrupted by philosophical essays (which I think fit rather well into the chapter), Moby Dick isn't like that. Roughly speaking, except for some digressions, the 1st 31 chapters are mostly story or character. From chapter 32 "Cetology", now and then there are some chapters about the Pequod like Ahab and his wish for revenge and some crew members' reactions, or about the capture of some whales, but for a large part Moby Dick is hardly a novel any more- it's more like an encyclopedia about whales and whaling, mixed with philosophy.
Before, my interest in whales was zero. I wouldn't go get a book about whales- they're big, they're in the sea, they're mammals, that's what I knew and that was enough. It's probably the same for most people. What keeps me interested is Melville's language, and Ishmael's infectious enthusiasm*. It's easy to understand why many readers think the book boring and give up on it, because if they don't get that tingling along the spine from Melville's language and style, and don't feel an affinity with Ishmael the narrator, the book may be hard to get through once it ceases to be a conventional novel.
On my part, I initially was fine with the whale/ whaling chapters, thinking they're necessary. Then I started to enjoy them, because they not only provide information of which I didn't know about whales and the sea and the whaling industry but also make me start to wonder, to think about things that never interested me before.
Which of the encyclopedia chapters are your favourite? Mine are:
- Chapter 42 "The Whiteness of the Whale", because Ishmael discusses the colour white and the "meaning" people in different cultures attach to it- the idea of purity, innocence, royal pre-eminence, divine spotlessness, power, honour, sublimity, sacredness... and then challenges it by suggesting that white can cause or heighten dread and terror.
- Chapter 68 "The Blanket", because after reading about the blubber, and the thin transparent stuff that Ishmael calls the skin of the skin, I want to see and touch a real whale.
- Chapter 74 "The Sperm Whale's Head- Contrasted View" and chapter 76 "The Battering-Ram".
Look at this passage from chapter 74:
"Far back on the side of the head, and low down, near the angle of either whale's jaw, if you narrowly search, you will at last see a lashless eye, which you would fancy to be a young colt's eye; so out of all proportion is it to the magnitude of the head.
Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the whale's eyes, it is plain that he can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no more than he can one exactly astern. In a word, the position of the whale's eyes corresponds to that of a man's ears; and you may fancy, for yourself, how it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects through your ears. You would find that you could only command some thirty degrees of vision in advance of the straight side-line of sight; and about thirty more behind it. If your bitterest foe were walking straight towards you, with dagger uplifted in broad day, you would not be able to see him, any more than if he were stealing upon you from behind. In a word, you would have two backs, so to speak; but, at the same time, also, two fronts (side fronts): for what is it that makes the front of a man—what, indeed, but his eyes?
Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to produce one picture and not two to the brain; the peculiar position of the whale's eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid head, which towers between them like a great mountain separating two lakes in valleys; this, of course, must wholly separate the impressions which each independent organ imparts. The whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him. Man may, in effect, be said to look out on the world from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his window. But with the whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view. This peculiarity of the whale's eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes.
A curious and most puzzling question might be started concerning this visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a hint. So long as a man's eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing whatever objects are before him. Nevertheless, any one's experience will teach him, that though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of things at one glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively, and completely, to examine any two things—however large or however small—at one and the same instant of time; never mind if they lie side by side and touch each other. But if you now come to separate these two objects, and surround each by a circle of profound darkness; then, in order to see one of them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to bear on it, the other will be utterly excluded from your contemporary consciousness. How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man's, that he can at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he can, then is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid. Nor, strictly investigated, is there any incongruity in this comparison."
(my emphasis)
And this passage from chapter 76:
"You observe that in the ordinary swimming position of the Sperm Whale, the front of his head presents an almost wholly vertical plane to the water; you observe that the lower part of that front slopes considerably backwards, so as to furnish more of a retreat for the long socket which receives the boom-like lower jaw; you observe that the mouth is entirely under the head, much in the same way, indeed, as though your own mouth were entirely under your chin. Moreover you observe that the whale has no external nose; and that what nose he has—his spout hole—is on the top of his head; you observe that his eyes and ears are at the sides of his head, nearly one third of his entire length from the front. Wherefore, you must now have perceived that the front of the Sperm Whale's head is a dead, blind wall, without a single organ or tender prominence of any sort whatsoever. Furthermore, you are now to consider that only in the extreme, lower, backward sloping part of the front of the head, is there the slightest vestige of bone; and not till you get near twenty feet from the forehead do you come to the full cranial development. So that this whole enormous boneless mass is as one wad. Finally, though, as will soon be revealed, its contents partly comprise the most delicate oil; yet, you are now to be apprised of the nature of the substance which so impregnably invests all that apparent effeminacy. In some previous place I have described to you how the blubber wraps the body of the whale, as the rind wraps an orange. Just so with the head; but with this difference: about the head this envelope, though not so thick, is of a boneless toughness, inestimable by any man who has not handled it. The severest pointed harpoon, the sharpest lance darted by the strongest human arm, impotently rebounds from it. It is as though the forehead of the Sperm Whale were paved with horses' hoofs. I do not think that any sensation lurks in it."
(my emphasis)
How can that not be fascinating? Chapter 68 makes me want to see and touch a whale. Chapters 74 and 76 make me wonder what it's like to be a whale, at least, how to see the world through the eyes of a whale. How do they function, having eyes so tiny and placed at the sides, nearly 1/3 of their entire length from the front?
Who cares whether or not these chapters contribute anything to the story (except the 1 detail Ishmael wants us to keep in mind- the fact that whales cannot see anything right in front of them), they're sufficiently enjoyable, and captivating, in themselves.
PS:
Nicole at Bibliographing wrote:
"... Another affinity that’s probably necessary to embrace Ishmael and be a “good reader” of Melville is a love of learning. Ishmael wants to know as much as he can know; his appeals to authority are meant to bolster faith in his own narration but just as much serve to show how much research he wants to do and how much he wants to know. He does all in his power to explore the whale inside and out, the process of whaling in all its steps, and everything else he comes into contact with. Readers of Moby-Dick must do the same, learning about the sperm whale from head to tail, blanket to case, and those who simply enjoy such quantities of new and strangely interesting information will feel some of their narrator’s enthusiasm rubbing off before long."
*: And humour! How could I forget humour? Moby Dick is hilarious! Ishmael examines the whale from the physiognomical and phrenological point of view.
1/ Woman in the Dunes (1964) by Hiroshi Teshigahara, Japan
2/ Ran (1985) by Akira Kurosawa, Japan
3/ Ringu (1998) by Hideo Nakata, Japan
4/ Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (2003) by Kim Ki-duk, South Korea
5/ Mother (2009) by Bong Joon-ho, South Korea
6/ Raise the Red Lanterns (1991) by Zhang Yimou, China
7/ To Live (1994) by Zhang Yimou, China
8/ Happy Together (1997) by Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong
9/ Chungking Express (1994) by Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong
10/ 2046 (2004) by Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong
Being so ignorant, I have a hard time trying to write about Moby Dick. There are so many good essays, articles and blog posts out there, I don't have anything intelligent to say. So I've been poking around, making notes, raising questions, making silly remarks...
Look at chapter 68, "The Blanket". After writing about the definition and classification of whales, the whiteness of whales, the Gam (the social meeting of 2 whaling ships), the whales' attacks, the books about whales, the pictures of whales, the inaccurate representation of whales, the food of whales (squids), the whaling line, the whaling scene, the dart in the capture of whales, the crotch that keeps the harpoon for attacking whales, the way whale meat should be cooked, the whale as a dish, and so on and so forth, Ishmael now writes about the whale's skin.
"In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not seldom displays the back, and more especially his flanks, effaced in great part of the regular linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude scratches, altogether of an irregular, random aspect..."
(my emphasis)
This reminds me of chapter 3- the 1st thing Ishmael describes about Queequeg is his skin:
"It was of a dark, purplish, yellow colour, here and there stuck over with large blackish looking squares. Yes, it's just as I thought, he's a terrible bedfellow; he's been in a fight, got dreadfully cut, and here he is, just from the surgeon. But at that moment he chanced to turn his face so towards the light, that I plainly saw they could not be sticking-plasters at all, those black squares on his cheeks. They were stains of some sort or other. [...] He now took off his hat—a new beaver hat—when I came nigh singing out with fresh surprise. There was no hair on his head—none to speak of at least—nothing but a small scalp-knot twisted up on his forehead. His bald purplish head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull.
[...]
Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last showed his chest and arms. As I live, these covered parts of him were checkered with the same squares as his face; his back, too, was all over the same dark squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years' War, and just escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his very legs were marked, as if a parcel of dark green frogs were running up the trunks of young palms..."
(my emphasis)
The passage describing the whale's skin ends with this remark:
"It also seems to me that such scratches in the whale are probably made by hostile contact with other whales; for I have most remarked them in the large, full-grown bulls of the species."
Now look at this line from the passage about Ishmael's 1st impression of Queequeg:
"I remembered a story of a white man—a whaleman too—who, falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them. I concluded that this harpooneer, in the course of his distant voyages, must have met with a similar adventure."
Also from chapter 68:
"A word or two more concerning this matter of the skin or blubber of the whale. It has already been said, that it is stript from him in long pieces, called blanket-pieces. Like most sea-terms, this one is very happy and significant. For the whale is indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a real blanket or counterpane; or, still better, an Indian poncho slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity. It is by reason of this cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to keep himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides. What would become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters; but these, be it observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies are refrigerators; creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of an iceberg, as a traveller in winter would bask before an inn fire; whereas, like man, the whale has lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood, and he dies. How wonderful is it then—except after explanation—that this great monster, to whom corporeal warmth is as indispensable as it is to man; how wonderful that he should be found at home, immersed to his lips for life in those Arctic waters! where, when seamen fall overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards, perpendicularly frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found glued in amber. But more surprising is it to know, as has been proved by experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer than that of a Borneo negro in summer."
(my emphasis)
This makes me think of a passage in chapter 11, again about Ishmael and Queequeg:
"... Yes, we became very wakeful; so much so that our recumbent position began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves sitting up; the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the head-board with our four knees drawn up close together, and our two noses bending over them, as if our kneepans were warming-pans. We felt very nice and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors; indeed out of bed-clothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room. The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed, in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal."
(my emphasis)
Look at that again:
"For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal."
Look at this passage from chapter 65:
"... It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras."
You're looking at 1 of those people guilty of eating, and enjoying, pâté de foie gras.
PS: I've spotted a place in Oslo that serves whale meat. Never been there.
Moby Dick, chapter 45:
"In the sixth Christian century lived Procopius, a Christian magistrate of Constantinople, in the days when Justinian was Emperor and Belisarius general. As many know, he wrote the history of his own times, a work every way of uncommon value. By the best authorities, he has always been considered a most trustworthy and unexaggerating historian, except in some one or two particulars, not at all affecting the matter presently to be mentioned.
Now, in this history of his, Procopius mentions that, during the term of his prefecture at Constantinople, a great sea-monster was captured in the neighboring Propontis, or Sea of Marmora, after having destroyed vessels at intervals in those waters for a period of more than fifty years. A fact thus set down in substantial history cannot easily be gainsaid. Nor is there any reason it should be. Of what precise species this sea-monster was, is not mentioned. But as he destroyed ships, as well as for other reasons, he must have been a whale; and I am strongly inclined to think a sperm whale. And I will tell you why. For a long time I fancied that the sperm whale had been always unknown in the Mediterranean and the deep waters connecting with it. Even now I am certain that those seas are not, and perhaps never can be, in the present constitution of things, a place for his habitual gregarious resort. But further investigations have recently proved to me, that in modern times there have been isolated instances of the presence of the sperm whale in the Mediterranean. I am told, on good authority, that on the Barbary coast, a Commodore Davis of the British navy found the skeleton of a sperm whale. Now, as a vessel of war readily passes through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm whale could, by the same route, pass out of the Mediterranean into the Propontis.
In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar substance called brit is to be found, the aliment of the right whale. But I have every reason to believe that the food of the sperm whale—squid or cuttle-fish—lurks at the bottom of that sea, because large creatures, but by no means the largest of that sort, have been found at its surface. If, then, you properly put these statements together, and reason upon them a bit, you will clearly perceive that, according to all human reasoning, Procopius's sea-monster, that for half a century stove the ships of a Roman Emperor, must in all probability have been a sperm whale."
Chapter 59:
"There seems some ground to imagine that the great Kraken of Bishop Pontoppodan may ultimately resolve itself into Squid. The manner in which the Bishop describes it, as alternately rising and sinking, with some other particulars he narrates, in all this the two correspond. But much abatement is necessary with respect to the incredible bulk he assigns it."
Does the act of specifying these sea monsters make the mythological/ unknown creatures more ordinary, less mysterious and therefore less scary (because "[i]gnorance is the parent of fear"- chapter 3)? Or does it do the opposite- the frightening creature one'd like to dismiss as legendary and nonexistent is discomfortingly real?
Throughout the novel, Ishmael constantly refers to the whale as leviathan. Are we meant to think that the act adds something extraordinary, magical and wondrous to the whale, which is already terrifying because of its monstrous size and strength, and our limited knowledge of the species? Or does it make the leviathan not only more "concrete" and specific but also more ordinary? Or does Ishmael/ Melville simply like to give the whale some religious/ symbolic meaning?
On the surface, the Town-Ho story has little to do with the book. However, chapter 54 has several functions:
- Like the previous chapter "The Gam", it lets us know more about whaling, specifically about life on whaling ships and conflicts between crew members.
- It tells 1 of the stories about Moby Dick.
- The story establishes the meaning of Moby Dick, to Ishmael and to us, depending on how you look at Steelkilt and Radney.
Let's see what happens: Steelkilt jokes about Radney in front of others=> Radney orders Steelkilt to sweep the floor, which isn't his job and which looks like a way of humiliating him=> proud, Steelkilt refuses to comply=> Radney raises a hammer=> Steelkilt threatens=> Radney swings the hammer at his face=> Steelkilt knocks down Radney=> [brawl, quarrel with captain, the lock-up, the hanging, etc.]=> when the captain, after hearing Steelkilt's threat (inaudible to everyone else), draws back, Radney steps forward and flogs Steelkilt=> Steelkilt prepares to kill Radney to revenge=> before he does it himself, Radney's killed by Moby Dick.
If we're on Steelkilt's side, because he simply refuses to do something that isn't his job, especially when he's already exhausted from working on the pumps, and hits Radney in self-defence (Radney's the one that has a hammer), and later suffers the injustice of being flogged, he has the right to be angry at the petty-minded, unreasonable and malicious Radney, and Moby Dick now looks like an avenger.
If we're not on Steelkilt's side, because his insults start the conflict and he's too proud to react in a milder or more compromising way to Radney's order, and later intends to push the matter farther by turning to murder, Moby Dick is the opposite of that- what do you call it? something that sides with the wrongdoer, making injustice a greater injustice, evil a greater evil.
If we're not on anyone side and see it as a meaningless cycle of violence and revenge, Moby Dick is the force of nature that intervenes and resolves the matter.
Or we can forget all of that- Moby Dick knows nothing and stands for nothing, it's but "a dumb brute", and devouring a seaman is what it does, as a whale. It's just a coincidence that Moby Dick appears at that moment, and it's Radney that is thrown overboard and gets killed. The incident means nothing, it's just the way the story is told that creates the illusion of meaning.
Note-taking again.
Ishmael sums up the meaning of Moby Dick to Ahab in this passage:
"All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it."
To Ahab, Moby Dick is a symbol.
In the book, it's also a symbol. Of what? God? Nature? Fate? Evil? Something forever mysterious, elusive and unknowable? etc. But before seeing Moby Dick as a symbol, I want to see it clearly, as a whale. This is what we know:
- a sperm whale
- "a peculiar snow-white wrinkled forehead", "a high, pyramidical white hump" and a crooked, sickle-shaped jaw
- "3 holes punctured in his starboard fluke"
- "The rest of his body was so streaked, and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had gained his distinctive appellation of the White Whale; a name, indeed, literally justified by his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon through a dark blue sea, leaving a milky-way wake of creamy foam, all spangled with golden gleamings."
- "unwonted magnitude"
- "his spout is a big one, like a whole shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our Nantucket wool after the great annual sheep-shearina"
- "he fan-tails like a split jib in a squall"
- said to be ubiquitous and immortal
- "that unexampled, intelligent malignity which, according to specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his assaults" invests the whale with natural terror
"All the seven deadly sins are self-destroying, morbid appetites, but in their early stages at least, lust and gluttony, avarice and sloth know some gratification, while anger and pride have power, even though that power eventually destroys itself. Envy is impotent, numbed with fear, never ceasing in its appetite, and it knows no gratification, but endless self-torment. It has the ugliness of a trapped rat, which gnaws its own foot in an effort to escape."
(Angus Wilson)
