The Weird Wisdom of Moby Dick

The Boring Parts Tell The Human Story

It took me the better part of six months, but I finally finished Moby Dick. What a weird and frustrating book!  As in crazy weird and crazy frustrating.  So much so that my husband demanded I move to another room while reading it, as my sighs and outbursts of profanity became pretty annoying.  But in hindsight, all that weirdness and frustration is essential to Moby Dick’s purpose.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the book’s structure.  Before you crack the spine, you know Moby Dick is about a monomaniacal ship captain’s quest to track down and kill his terrifying nemesis, the White Whale.  You know this, just as you know when you walk into a Bond movie you’re about to watch 007 confront and defeat a supervillain possessing some kind of flamboyant deformity, saving the world while seducing lots of hot models along the way.

So you begin Moby Dick fully committed, because you’ve already consented to the ride.  You commit to The Narrator, Ishmael, and the “damp, drizzly November” in his soul that compels him to sign on for a stint on a whaling ship, of all things.  You warm to the Quirky Sidekick, Queequeg, and the foil he provides with his tattoos and harpoon mojo and general awesomeness.  You sit up when Elijah makes vaguely sinister comments about Captain Ahab and the Pequod, portending the ship’s doom (Aha! you think. Foreshadowing!  Now we’re getting somewhere.).

When, at Chapter 28 and after the Pequod has set sail, Ahab finally appears, scarred and peg-legged and acting off his bean, you anticipate his plunge into madness.  And when, at Chapter 36, Ahab finally imposes his horrible mission upon the crew – “Death to Moby Dick!” – you brace yourself for the mother of all battles with a whale.  You’re ready for Something Big to happen.

And then it doesn’t.

For page after page, chapter after chapter, not only does Something Big not happen, but Nothing Much seems to happen at all.  It has to be the most ballsy bait-and-switch in all of literature.  The White Whale is nowhere to be seen.  In fact, Ahab himself disappears – to do what? Bang his head against his cabin wall? Scratch raunchy graffiti into his whalebone leg? Melville leaves no clues. 

What’s more, Ishmael disappears, too, replaced by – who? It’s entirely unclear. Sometimes Melville gives us an omniscient narrator who floats from crewman to crewman, recounting intimate interactions and conversations to which only a God-like persona could be privy. Other times he gives us a wry-and-dry narrator who describes, in excruciating detail, every facet of 19^th-Century whaling, from the making of hemp ropes to the culling of ambergris to the skinning of a sperm whale’s penis.

For the love of spermaceti, you think, why all these endless discourses on cetology?  Can we just get to the freakin’ whale? If Moby Dick were Octopussy, it would cut straight from 007’s near-demise from the yo-yo buzzsaw to a lengthy documentary about the mining of the titanium used in the sawblades.  The incongruity between such a promising set-up and the subsequent Jordan Schlansky-esque meandering led me to wonder: Was Melville on the autistic spectrum?  Or was he simply a master troll, taking sadistic pleasure in subverting his readers’ expectations?

Yet on I persevered, through the mini-treatises on whale migration patterns and the rendering of blubber.  There must be a point to this, I told myself.  All these beautifully realized but seemingly tangential scenes must surely mean something.  There must be a reason why Melville forsook the plot for a deep-dive into minutiae.

And then, about two-thirds of the way in, the reason hit me:  This is life. Melville structured the book to mimic human existence.  To wit:

(1)    For better or for worse, you get on the boat.  In other words, you arrive at a crossroads and choose a path, sometimes through thoughtful deliberation and soul-searching.  But just as often, and as I’ll discuss below, through aimlessness or impulsiveness, the sense you should be heading somewhere.

(2)   Your voyage, for long stretches, lacks drama.  But you have the power to invest those seemingly mundane and unimportant aspects of the journey with profound meaning.

(3)  All voyages end in the same destination.  And no one makes it out alive.

This last point is the metaphorical climax of the novel, the Pequod’s clash with Moby Dick, the great face-off with merciless, annihilating Nature that Melville precedes with hundreds of pages of the slowest burn ever.  But it’s also the point I find least interesting because it’s the most obvious.  So for purposes of this post, I’m going to turn my attention to points one and two.

Climb Aboard, Matey

When you take on Moby Dick, you become a crewman on the Pequod.  Via your imagination, you get on the boat with Ishmael and the rest, expecting a certain journey and getting quite another.

But what does that mean, exactly, to “get on the boat”? Most of the Pequod’s crew got on for a practical reason we can all relate to: It’s a job, and it pays. When you’re a flat-broke, 19^th-Century illiterate, of course you hop on the first ship that offers free housing, meals, and a chance at making some coin if you bag enough sperm whales – crazy captain aside.

Ishmael, on the other hand, isn’t on the boat for practical reasons.  For him, it’s a matter of self-preservation:

. . . whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship.

In choosing the boat, he’s choosing life and rejecting nihilism.  Yet this “choice” reads less as a carefully considered decision than a spooked reaction; his impulse for self-destruction creates a counter-impulse to flee and “get to sea as soon as I can.”  In fact, you almost get the sense he chooses the boat because, well, it’s there, and what’s the alternative?

I think Melville portrays a common experience.  By middle-age, we’ve been through it so much, it’s old hat.  It doesn’t usually manifest itself, as it does for Ishmael, with morbidity or depression.  But it involves the same urgency to move, to do something, to embark on a path that gives us the semblance of forward momentum as opposed to treading water – or worse yet, drowning.  And so we convince ourselves we’re “choosing” to get on the boat, when we’re really stumbling aboard by accident or impulse.  We get on the boat out of existential inertia, that itch that compels us to, once moving, stay moving.

Here’s an example. Beginning in early childhood, we’re shepherded through a highly supervised and sequential system of education, “progressing” from one grade to the next, “passing” one exam after another, often until our early twenties.  By that point, we’ve been conditioned to accept our life’s mission as crossing state-sanctioned pedagogical thresholds. Our youthful sense of agency aside, both the goals and the goalposts are set for us by The System.  

And when we finally do receive that diploma, after a lifetime spent as a seedling in the hothouse of School?  Only then are we expected to Find Our Purpose, Figure It Out, Follow Our Passion/Bliss.  Only then are we confronted with the drifting and ambivalence and wheel-spinning that inevitably occurs when there is no next level or next test. 

What do you do when you’ve been trained to expect, even crave, a sense of forward momentum that’s now missing? You seek it out.  You get on the boat.  You apply to and attend grad school, perhaps in a discipline that ill-suits you but offers the safety of a well-trod path to a career and the illusion of “advancement” (I took this route.  I was very dumb.).  You become a professional student.

Another illustrative example is marriage.  In midlife, I’ve witnessed several divorces.  Talking to the couples involved, I’m struck by how early some knew, in the twists and kinks of their guts, that they were incompatible; often the doubts began before they tied the knot.  Hindsight is 20-20, and it could be that we project a clarity upon our younger selves that only exists from the vantage point of experience.  It could be we were oblivious to all those “warning signs” and “red flags” pre-marriage because we were intoxicated with love.

But it could also be that we invested years into building a relationship with someone, such that marriage seemed the only conceivable next step (don’t couples often talk of taking things “to the next level”?). That hard-wired desire for a constant, forward-moving journey – towards marriage, family, a shared life – got us on the boat and kept us there, despite those visceral misgivings.

In this, Moby Dick is a trenchant cautionary tale.  Given the unhinged maniac Ahab becomes, and the total carnage that ensues, a plausible moral is: Choose your own adventure –  get on the boat! – but for God’s sake, do it wisely.  

Navigating the Doldrums

The beginning and ending of Moby Dick are compelling.  But the many chapters of minutiae bookended between the two? They can be a slog.  They often read as tortuous stalling, roadblocks preventing you from getting to the bloody meat of the book: the ultimate confrontation with mortality.

But they should not be read as meaningless.  Quite the contrary.

All those chapters of minutiae parallel human existence.  Our lives, after all, are also book-ended between dramatic beginnings and endings, between “getting on the boat” and the final destination.  Decades pass from that first shitty job and the ending of a storied career.  Likewise from the birth of the first child and that of the first grandchild.  We process life as a series of milestones marking our passage: from youth to seasoned age, innocence to experience, novice/apprentice to master.

But what of all that time sandwiched between beginnings and endings – or, to be frank, between cradle and grave? What happens during those “middles”?

Through observation, participation and study, you prepare for what’s to come.  Melville’s digressions into the historic use of whale oil, the methods for cutting and stripping blubber, the secret to a successful harpooning? They are the narrator’s acquired expertise.  His knowledge of All Things Whale is his arsenal, the skill-set he’ll rely upon for the inevitable meeting with Moby Dick.  And because he so generously shares it with us readers, by extension we share in his mastery.  Chapter by chapter, we build a sense of vicarious competency, such that by the novel’s end, when Moby Dick is at last sighted and pursued, we think: Bring it on.

Yet in another of Melville’s sadistic twists, all that expertise seemingly counts for naught. Ishmael/the Narrator/Melville extensively preps us on the anatomy and history of the White Whale, as well as exactly how to kill it.  And . . . for what?  What possible use is expertise in harpoon lines when Moby Dick handily smashes the Pequod to smithereens, creating a vortex that swallows Ahab and crew? When the existence of both the ship and human life itself is erased, “and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago”?

Again, the twist mimics the human story.  You can read every parenting book on the market, you can baby-sit your friends’ infants, but nothing quite prepares you for those bleary nights trying to coax your own squalling one-month-old to sleep. You can sit in on trials, you can take pointers from senior attorneys, but nothing quite prepares you for the adrenaline maelstrom of calling your first courtroom witness for questioning.  And certainly, you can contemplate death, and even witness the death of loved ones. But in the end, nothing quite prepares you for the great mystery that is The End.

Sick twist aside, however, expertise is not useless.  Melville adeptly demonstrates how to invest the narrow and particular with universal meaning. Case in point is Chapter 89, on the “Fast-Fish” and the “Loose-Fish” – terms to delineate the legal ownership of hunted whales.  While a Fast-Fish is deemed the property of the ship to which it is attached or fastened, Loose-Fish are “fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.”

Melville/the Narrator/Ishmael could have left the reader with this dry bit of property rights doctrine and moved on.  Instead, he re-imagines Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish as metaphor, imbuing the terms with significance far surpassing their legal definitions:

What to the rapacious landlord is the widow’s last mite but a Fast-Fish? What is yonder undetected villain’s marble mansion with a doorplate for a waif; what is that but a Fast-Fish? . . .

What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?

A key to meaning, Melville suggests, is the Big-5 personality trait of openness: The ability to connect ostensibly unrelated ideas and mine them for deep, even transcendent knowledge.  Making such connections requires not only keen observation, but curiosity about lives and experiences other than your own.  It requires you step outside your own skull: a step Captain Ahab is unwilling and unable to take.

The Folly and Tragedy of Solipsism

As I was completing Moby Dick, I re-watched Charlie Kaufman’s film Synecdoche, New York.  And I was struck by the similarities between Captain Ahab and Synecdoche’s protagonist, the playwright and director Caden Cotard.

For the uninitiated, the movie follows Caden’s quest for his own White Whale: genius, the artistic expression of truth far surpassing the size of his own puny life. Toward that end, he launches an obsessive theater project, in which he attempts to dramatize the entirety of his existence – or at least, his existence as he sees it. He casts actors to represent himself, his loved ones, his lovers.  He creates a gigantic set resembling an ever-growing apartment building, warehousing ever-multiplying compartments of players, all enacting his reality at his direction.  Somehow, through this unwieldy, messy portrayal of his own being, Caden thinks he can express the universal meaning of all beings. He thinks his narrow part can represent the whole.

In other words, he can’t step outside his own skull.  And Kaufman takes pains to emphasize that, yes, there are lives beyond Caden’s skull – lives with their own casts and plots, many of them tragedies.  Caden’s parents suffer horrific deaths and his estranged daughter dies without reconciling with him.  Towards the end of the film, there are hints – dead bodies, burnt-out-buildings – that something disastrous is happening in New York City.  Yet Caden remains locked in his tortuous navel-gazing, oblivious.

Likewise with Captain Ahab. He encounters Captain Gardiner of the Rachel, whose own son has just gone missing in a rowboat in pursuit of Moby Dick. Distraught, Gardiner begs Ahab to enlist the Pequod in the search party, but Ahab refuses, saying it would cause him to “lose time” in his own hunt for the whale.  The coldness of this refusal is amplified by a subsequent chapter, when Ahab confides in first mate Starbuck that he not only is married, but like Gardiner, the father of a son. Starbuck, also a husband and father, urges Ahab to abandon the chase so that they might avoid near-certain death and return to their loved ones.  But again, Ahab refuses.  Because of his solipsism, the only real story is the conflict playing in his own head.  The only real beings are himself and the whale.

In Synecdoche, Caden’s solipsism dissolves as he dies.  In an attempt to connect with his ex-wife, he acts as her cleaning woman, Ellen.  In taking on that role, he takes on Ellen’s own disappointment and pain.  Eventually he becomes so frail that he cedes the direction of his work to Millicent (played by the same actress as Ellen. It’s a confounding film.).  He ceases controlling and constructing others as characters, and begins inhabiting their lives instead, with all the compassion that entails.  And in the end, he seems to have an epiphany, as articulated by Millicent:

The specifics hardly matter. Everyone is everyone.

But no such epiphany occurs for Ahab.  To the bitter end, he’s occupying his own very narrow, very particular Hell.  His last words convey his all-consuming hatred for Moby Dick:

Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee!

And in the very next moment, the harpoon line attached to Moby Dick

caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone.

This is the folly of solipsism and narcissism: you imagine yourself the avenging hero of your own epic, but in the end, you’re nothing more than a projectile, a moving part in the vast expanse of the universe.   You think that even in death you command the spotlight, but the truth is you just might vanish before anyone even notices you’re gone.

So what’s the antidote?

Moby Dick’s wide-ranging and free-wheeling narration suggests it’s to venture outside your head and acquaint yourself with other perspectives.  Melville/Ishmael/the Narrator takes pains to describe the subjective views of various members of the Pequod. The aim is not to raise or denigrate any one person’s experience.  Rather, it’s to acknowledge that each such experience is but a thread in the larger human fabric. Or, as the lyrics to Little Person, the theme song to Synecdoche puts it:

I'm just a little person
One person in a sea
Of many little people
Who are not aware of me.

Without this multiplicity of perspectives, Moby Dick becomes solely Ahab’s story, and the tragedy of the Pequod lacks any profundity or resonance.

Perhaps more importantly, Moby Dick suggests the antidote to solipsism and narcissism is to admit the limits of one’s subjective experience and open oneself up to mysteries beyond what our senses and logic can comprehend.  With such openness to transcendence, a whale transforms from a dumb beast to one of God’s creatures, and even the vapor rising from his spout hints at a reality larger than any one of us:

And how nobly it raises our conceit of the mighty, misty monster, to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea; his vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by his incommunicable contemplations, and that vapor- as you will sometimes see it- glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his thoughts.

For d’ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air; they only irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a heavenly ray. And for this I thank God; for all have doubts; many deny; but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly; this combination makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both with equal eye.