Reading Moby-Dick: Part Two
Two pages from "The Whiteness of the Whale" chapter in my old paperback with a particularly poetic passage notated. This also serves as an example of something Melville uses a lot during the course of the novel - footnotes. An interesting touch.
This rereading of Moby-Dick reiterated the distinctive and rewarding experience Melville's prose. The novel is quotable on several levels. To keep it entertaining, he uses action and suspense to punctuate the lengthy descriptive sections. These include several fantastic and gripping descriptions of killing whales.
“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. The slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men. And all the while, jet after jet of white smoke was agonizingly shot from the spiracle of the whale, and vehement puff after puff from the mouth of the excited headsman; as at every dart, hauling in upon his crooked lance (by the line attached to it), Stubb straightened it again and again, by a few rapid blows against the gunwale, then again and again sent it into the whale.”
“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 frightened air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea. His heart had burst!” (both quotes from Chapter 61)
On a deeper level, there are a few noteworthy “fortune cookie” one-liners, like the “damp, drizzly November of my soul” at the start of the story. The book is filled with these phrasings. Too many to mention. One of my favorite paragraphs reads...
“And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.” (Chapter 87)
There are many paragraphs of sheer poetry, bringing life even to the most mundane aspects of the adventure.
“At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
“These are the times, when in his whale-boat the rover softly feels a certain filial, confident, land-like feeling towards the sea; that he regards it as so much flowery earth; and the distant ship revealing only the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not through high rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie: as when the western emigrants' horses only show their erected ears, while their hidden bodies widely wade through the amazing verdure.
“The long-drawn virgin vales; the mild blue hill-sides; as over these there steals the hush, the hum; you almost swear that play-wearied children lie sleeping in these solitudes, in some glad May-time, when the flowers of the woods are plucked. And all this mixes with your most mystic mood; so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole.” (Chapter 114)
Then there is one great poetic chapter devoted the nebulous horror aesthetic of the white hue. Chapter 42 is entitled “The Whiteness of the Whale” and it is one of massive novel's most noteworthy chapters. It is also of interest to me because it provides clues as to why Cormac McCarthy may have given Judge Holden albino flesh in Blood Meridian. It should be remembered that reading that great novel motivated this rereading of Moby-Dick.
The chapter begins by mentioning that besides the terror of the great White Whale itself there is “a rather vague, nameless horror concerning him.” A horror so fundamental that Ishmael feels “almost despair at putting it into comprehensible form.” Such phrasing immediately reminds me of H.P. Lovecraft. It is a sudden, macabre twist to the novel. Melville even frames it as the “supernaturalism of this hue.”
This is a strange existential threat Ishmael perceives in himself alone. The entire chapter is a deconstruction of why he is so afraid of the idea of whiteness of the whale. It is important to remember that, like the reader, he has never seen Moby Dick at this point. All he has are stories surrounding Ahab's obsession. This is truly a sense of dread in his mind.
But his dread is steeped in historical tradition. Ishmael has a sustained discourse with himself about white elephants, Siam, American justice, Greek mythology and the vision of St. John bathed in white. Of the sacred nature of the hue. That is not what troubles Ishmael, obviously. It is something “more elusive.”
He speaks of "the White Steed of the Prairies" (another reference to the American prairies - see Part One) whose majesty is strangely “commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless terror.” And we run headlong into a statement about "Albino" men, that they “repel and shock the eye.” “It is that whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears. The Albino is as well made as other men— has no substantive deformity—and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so?”
More likely than not, this passage would have impressed Cormac McCarthy when he was writing Blood Meridian. It is an easy comparison (among others) between the two novels. Whether he was influenced by this when he made his supernaturally evil character an Albino is purely conjectural, as far as I know. (Admittedly, I have a lot to learn about McCarthy.) But he surely knew about Melville's wrestling match with white and the perceived evil of the Albino.
Ishmael continues to wonder why white has this unsettling quality to it. He delves deeper into self-examination and realizes that white is the hue of death itself. “It cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of the dead which most appalls the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there; as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of consternation in the other world, as of mortal trepidation here. And from that pallor of the dead, we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our phantoms; all ghosts rising in a milk-white fog—Yea, while these terrors seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified by the evangelist, rides on his pallid horse.”
But,
Ishmael still asks why is this so. The answer to his query still
eludes him but, he says, “Let us try.” With this phrase he
introduces a more direct route toward the evil of whiteness. Off we
go on another semi-stream of consciousness path taking us to the
White Tower of London, the granite mountains of New Hampshire, and
the native Indians of Lima, Peru. Then we come to it. The “...dumb
brute, the instinct of the knowledge of demonism in the world.” The evil lurking in white is instinctual.
On the way, Melville has the reader (!) call Ishmael out for spouting so much about all this whiteness. It is as if Melville needed to justify what he has written to this point as something more than simply “a white flag hung out from a craven soul.” To which Ishmael answers himself “No” and brings up the basic instinct for wicked things. “...the nameless things of which the mystic sign gives forth such hints; ...somewhere those things must exist.”
Melville poetically arrives at the heart of the matter. “Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning— the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like willful travelers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?”
It is the “absence of color” accompanied by “the thought of annihilation” that is most frightening. White is the annihilating anti-color, anti-natural, pale death itself. In that sense does Ishmael feel a genuine fear and dread of meeting Moby Dick. That the Whale touches something so deeply within Ishmael reveals even more about him to the reader. It allows the reader to see into Ismael's troubled soul and know the power of symbol in his Being. Again, being Albino is not just another detail here. It is a big deal and an influence, I think, on McCarthy's Judge Holden.
The novel contains the name “Ishmael” only twenty times. “Ahab” appears 500 times, by comparison. Two of those precious few Ishmaels occur in the chapter on whiteness. If nothing else, this brings added weight to this chapter. Which is appropriate because the unsettled feeling of annihilation that the Whale conjures within him is foreboding of how the novel ends; in utter annihilation of everything about the Pequod except the injured whale and Ishmael himself floating alone amongst the wreckage in the vast Pacific.
Moby-Dick remains a work that fascinates me anew with each reading and certainly one of the greatest books ever written. I don't know if I would place it in my Top 5 book list but it would certainly make the Top 10. Melville's prose is a bit antiquated but that matters little to me. It is what Melville is saying and how he constructs ideas and feelings like “the tornadoed Atlantic of my Being” that makes him seem fresh and challenging and completely relevant to our time. This is not some dry, dusty and disconnected classic. It speaks with strong emotions about heartfelt things, of questing and arrogance and obsession and the chaotic oblivion that arises in the mix of these.
Encyclopedic and poetic, detailed and laborious with surprising moments of adventure and even terror, Moby-Dick well withstands the test of time. Written in 1851, it is still appealing today as few other works are after 170-odd years. It is entertaining and challenging, filled with all sorts of weighty themes of which I was well aware. But it wasn't any of that that appealed to me this time around. It turned out to be a completely different experience as I directed my attention toward the mechanics of novel. The procession of ships, the poetry of the prose, and the mystery of our trusty narrator himself, telling the story in retrospect from some undetermined future after the enterprise enabled me see the novel with fresh eyes. And I dare say further freshness awaits me on future journeys upon the high seas and within the glorious “November” of Ishmael's enigmatic soul.
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