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    Moby Dick
    Moby Dick
    Moby Dick
    Ebook1,013 pages16 hours

    Moby Dick

    By Herman Melville

    3.5/5

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    With an Introduction and Notes by David Herd, Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury and co-editor of ‘Poetry Review’.

    Moby Dick is the story of Captain Ahab’s quest to avenge the whale that ‘reaped’ his leg. The quest is an obsession and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic.

    But it is also a hymn to democracy. Bent as the crew is on Ahab’s appalling crusade, it is equally the image of a co-operative community at work: all hands dependent on all hands, each individual responsible for the security of each.

    Among the crew is Ishmael, the novel’s narrator, ordinary sailor, and extraordinary reader. Digressive, allusive, vulgar, transcendent, the story Ishmael tells is above all an education:

    in the practice of whaling, in the art of writing. Expanding to equal his ‘mighty theme’ – not only the whale but all things sublime – Melville breathes in the world’s great literature. Moby Dick is the greatest novel ever written by an American.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWordsworth Editions
    Release dateOct 1, 2011
    ISBN9781848703926
    Author

    Herman Melville

    Herman Melville (1819-1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet who received wide acclaim for his earliest novels, such as Typee and Redburn, but fell into relative obscurity by the end of his life. Today, Melville is hailed as one of the definitive masters of world literature for novels including Moby Dick and Billy Budd, as well as for enduringly popular short stories such as Bartleby, the Scrivener and The Bell-Tower.

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    Reviews for Moby Dick

    3.5/5

    263 ratings200 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A perfect novel. Pure genius.
    • 5/5
      This is it, folks--the Great American Novel. It doesn't get any better--or more experimental--than this.
    • 5/5
      A review of Moby-Dick? Right. It's been around for 150 odd years. It'll be around for at least another 150 odd. For good reason. If Shakespeare wrote Genesis and the Book of Judges, this might be a nice approximation of how Melville writes. And that's how I would describe Moby-Dick.Other notes, pay attention to Ahab's speech patterns and his spiritual journey throughout Moby-Dick; you'd swear he was a maimed Hamlet.
    • 5/5
      In my view, America's greatest novel. Timeless, poetic and emblematic of a once great industry dominated by Americans.
    • 1/5
      I don't suggest reading this unless you enjoy torture or just want to say "yah, that's right - I read Moby Dick!" I just do not like this book at all.
    • 4/5
      Read this out of a sense of duty, while recovering from surgery for a deviated septum, which required laying on my back for a week. I thought it was pretty good.
    • 5/5
      The most beautiful modern edition of an undisputed masterpiece. Stranger, funnier, and more varied than I imagined, this edition literally stopped people on the street. A homeless man in San Francisco stopped and admired the book, smiling as he told me he "needed that".
    • 5/5
      On my should read list list but avoided successfully for 45 years. Between the Philbrick recommendation and the lauds to Hootkins' narration, I finally succumbed and spent nearly a month of commutes taking the big story in, and the next month thinking about the story. SO glad I listened rather than skimmed as a reader. It has everything;. Agree with Floyd 3345 re fiction and nonfiction shelving
    • 4/5
      Considered an encyclopedic novel. Never heard of this before but it fits. In this story based on the author's whaling voyage in 1841, Moby Dick, or the white whale, inspired by Mocha Dick and the sinking of the whaleship Essex. The detail is very realistic and in this book you not only learn about whale hunting, you learn about whales and porpoise and ships. Chapters are dedicated to lengthy descriptions. On the ship, the reader is introduced to a cultural mixture of class and social status as well as good and evil and the existence of God. Melville used narrative prose but also songs, poetry, catalogs and other techniques from plays. The story is told through Ishmael. Plot:Ishmael meets up with Queequeg and shares a bed because the inn is overcrowded. Queegueg is a harpooner and they sign unto the Pequod. Characters:Ishmael: Queequeg:Starbuck: first mateStubb: second mateTashtego: Indian from Gay Head (harpooner)Flask: third mate,Daggoo: harpooneer from Africa. Captain Ahab: Fadallah: a harpooneer, Parse. Pip: black cabin boyThe boats: Jeroboam, Samule Enderby, the Rachel, The Delight and Pequod. These ships all have encountered Moby Dick. Ahab is obsessed with revenge against Moby Dick because of the loss of his leg which the whale bit off. There are several gams or meetings of whale boats. Ending with a tireless pursuit of the whale without regard to the dangers it exposes the sailors of Pequod. Starbuck begs Ahab to quit. Structure:narrator shapes the story by using sermons, stage plays, soliloquies and emblematic readings. The narrator is the aged Ishmael. There is also narrative architecture. There are 9 meetings with other boats.
    • 3/5
      Societally we all know the basic story. I learned a great deal about whaling, and the times.
    • 5/5
      Read this in tandem w/ friends, a full spectrum of opinion was thus established. My friend Roger Baylor left an indelible smudge on his own critical reputation for his hapless remarks. I tended to the ecstatic edge of said continuum. I did find the novel's disparate elements an obstacle at times, but, then again, I had to temper my velocity anyway as it was a group read: there's been sufficient snark from my mates for a decade now about plowing through a selection in a weekend. There was such a foam of detail and philosophy. The terrors of thunder and the groan of salty timber abounded. The stale breath of morning would often freeze upon the very page. The majesty of Melville's prose was arresting, it held, bound -- it felt as if one's focus was being nailed to the mast like Ahab's gold. Moby Dick is such a robust tapestry, epic and yet filigreed with minor miracles and misdeeds.

      I do look forward to a reread.
    • 5/5
      No one ever seems to discuss this, but there are parts of this exquisitely written tome that are hilarious!
    • 5/5
      very good, very long
    • 1/5
      Worst book ever
    • 4/5
      Quite difficult to read - but enjoyable
    • 4/5
      A good story shouldn't take that long to tell.
    • 5/5
      One of my favorites! The opening paragraph pretty much sums up why I read it.
    • 4/5
      I listened to the unabridged text as an audiobook over a couple of months of long drives to and from work, and what struck me most was the structure of this huge book: the story of Ahab is essentially a short story which Melville has fragmented and embedded in thousands of tons of blubber! That is bold. I think it's also interesting that when this long text finally ends we're actually not quite half way through Melville's source--the sinking of the Nantucket ship Essex in 1820. Within this context, Melville's colossal text is actually a truncated and abbreviated version of his primary source! Again, wild to think of it. Because I love to hear stories even more than to read them, because the rhythms have a physical presence when read aloud, I highly recommend the text as an audiobook. That Melville would devote an entire chapter to "The Blow Hole" is outrageous in many ways, but also an interesting listen. A friend told me her professor advised her class to "not wait for the whale" as they were reading the novel. That's hard advice to take. The book is definitely a unique experience.
    • 1/5
      i tried. god did i try.
    • 3/5
      Meeslepend, maar de onderbrekingen storen toch. Die vertonen trouwens sterke gelijkenis met methode van Herodotus: kritische bevraging van verhalen. Het geheel is niet helemaal geloofwaardig, en vooral het slot is nogal abrupt.Stilistisch vallen de abrupte veranderingen in register en perspectief op, waarschijnlijk toch wel een nieuwigheid. De stijl zelf doet zeer bombastisch, rabelaissiaans aan. Tekening Ahab: mengeling van sympathie en veroordeling
    • 5/5
      (Original Review, 1981-02-10)This is a book that knows how excessive it is being.It took me three times through it to realize that it's the greatest novel in the English language. Of course it has everything wrong with it: the digressions, the ludicrous attempt to out-Shakespeare Shakespeare, the prose through which a high wind blows perpetually, the fact that it's written almost entirely in superlatives . . . Never mind, it's overtopped by wave upon wave of genius, exuberant, explicative, mad in its quest to be about everything at once and to ring every bell in the English language. Yes it can be tough going sometimes, but here's an all-important hint: read this book aloud.Needless to say, it would never get across an editor's desk intact today. And today we're poorer for that. Something else: no one ever seems to mention how madly funny it is. It's vital to tune in to the humour, I think, if you are to enjoy reading it.“The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” is a good book, but doesn't quite rank with Poe's best work, and the "Scarlet Letter" has always seemed to me so narrowly provincial in its concerns that I've never been tempted to read it. But "Moby-Dick" is something else. Strange, digressive, sprawling, experimental, playful... it's a book that takes chances - and sometimes falls flat on its face: for example, not all the digressions work and, as someone already mentioned, the attempts at Shakespearean language are often laughable. But in the end, I think it has to be recognised as a monumental effort.First encountered it at 19 as required reading and found the tale enjoyable but the digressions on whaling baffling and tedious. Some year’s later I am two-thirds of the way through re-reading it. It now seems as though the tale is the most minor and uninteresting part of it. The supposed digressions are the bulk of the work.It is beyond marvellous. The language rings with echoes of the Bible and Shakespeare but the high style is mingled with prose of such simple directness that it barely feels like a 19th century novel at all. For me, what rises endlessly from the pages is a sense of joy and wonder - the sheer joy of being alive and experiencing each moment as something new, and the profound wonder of man in the face of a natural world he may come close to conquering but will never fully understand.I still find myself struggling to get my head around what it all means and quite why it is so great. But great - immense, staggering, colossal - it surely is. A mighty work."Moby-Dick" will be the equivalent of the Hogwarts Sorting Hat at the gates of Heaven. If you liked it, you'll go straight through the gates. If you didn't, well....As a side note, whilst “Moby Dick” remains his towering achievement, works such as "Bartleby the Scrivener", "Billy Budd & Pierre", or "The Ambiguities" are all remarkable in their own ways, whilst utterly different. Alongside "Bartleby", though, for me, Melville's other astonishing achievement is "Confidence Man" - a breathtakingly modern, or perhaps better, "post-modern" book, almost entirely without precursor. Imagine a literary "F is for Fake", & you begin to get a tiny hint of what Melville is up to. Of all writers, he seems to me to be the one who, standing at the very cusp of that moment when literary form is about to find itself cast in stone, is able to invent, it seems as if with every work, a wholly new literary form in & for each of his works. In every sense of the word, his writing & his works are excessive, just as Faulkner's Willbe, & those of Gaddis, &, to an extent, Pynchon. This "excessiveness" is, for sure, a predominantly American phenomenon.
    • 3/5
      Beautiful when focused on the actual story. The whaling chapters took me right out.
    • 3/5
      This is an odd book. It has some passages that I found really very uncomfortable, the chase of the sick whale, for example, turned my stomach. Having said that, it serves to illustrate the mindset and the times they lived in. Did I enjoy it? Not sure. But I did always want to know how it ended (badly). Starts and ends as a first person tale, not sure it always fits into that category though.
    • 5/5
      Despite Ishmael's astonished and disquieting first encounter with Queequeg, readers may feel a gentle entry,an easing into his life as a whaler. Then comes an awakening call from Jonah and Father Mapple:"You cannot hide the soul!"Melville alternates unflinching minutely detailed descriptions of whale hunting, hideous cold-bloodedkillings, and god-awful butchery with his own kind hearted compassion, love, and respect for animals.One imagines him pondering, as he did the nursing whale babies who were spared death, all the three-legged Easter lambs that never get a chance at life. He skewers foie gras, leading this reader to wonder if President Obama read the volume before his visit to Paris restaurants.Though daunting reading at times for animal lovers, the unrelenting pursuit of the divine, sublime, mysticLeviathan monster sphinx overrides the parts to skim over.Midway through the lengthy book when interest may be waning, Melville changes directions, introducing GAMS, and the plot takes off again. Insights into various characters' humor, mysteries, and personal life philosophies abound as we are all "lashed athwartship." The rhythms of the ship, the winds, weather, and waves interweave in this fateful journey toward the "...spouting fish with a horizontal tail."And, woe be to anyone who interrupts the reading of the Three Chapter Chase!Rockwell Kent's many illustrations not only illuminate the long text, but move it smoothly along. As well,we see the world from the whale's eye...and, we want that Great White Whale to make it, to live,sounding deep and free and far from Ahab's treacherous commands to "...spout black blood.""Speaking words of wisdom, let (them) be..."For readers who inquire about the relevance of this old Classic, Ishmael offers up the headline he sees:"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGANISTAN"The climax of Moby-Dick is perfect. For me, the ending was not. Why did the bird need to be nailed to the mast of the dying ship?Why are we left with this horrifying image? What does it mean?Other mysteries > The significance of the three mountains (rooster, tower, and flame) on the Spanish doubloon?Why the out-of-place, contrived conversational "Town-Ho"episode is included? It would not be missed.> What Fedallah gets out of joining Ahab? With his gift of prophecy,he must have known before departure that he would be doomedwith the rest, so what was he seeking? Unlike Hecate and the three witches who did not join MACBETH in his castle, Fedallah strangely casts his lot with The Captain.(The book I read was unabridged - this Great Illustrated Classics is the only Rockwell Kent title I could find.)
    • 5/5
      Very slow read if you want to get a grasp on all the descriptive images by Melville. Nice short chapters keeps reader from getting bogged down in too long of a reading session. These short chapters are akin to where a commercial would be if the book were a TV show, LOL, but make the reading more easy.
    • 1/5
      This is the real thing, not the easy reading shortened versions available in any imaginable media. It drags for almost 700 pages with little to almost nothing happening at all, just long and boring descriptions of whales and life at sea. So, before venturing into it, remember there thousands of far better and more important works to read and enjoy.
    • 3/5
      While I am no stranger at all to the digressions and slow pace of 19th century literature, much of which I love, I am unwilling at the moment to read any more of this after reaching the 40% mark. The basic theme of Captain Ahab's monomanic revenge against the sperm whale that cost him his leg is fair enough, and some of the characters are vividly described, but there is just too much information dumping on the history of the whaling industry, different types of whales, and other digressions, and very many (mercifully) short chapters which seem opaque and purposeless. A pity as the novel started well, and the first few chapters, in particular Ishmael's first meeting with Queequeg, were humorous. I may return to this some day, but there are just too many other books to read and enjoy.
    • 5/5
      This is the best book I've ever read. An amazing adventure. I couldn't believe what I was reading at times! The way the main character delivers his humor is just exquisite. I had to look up a lot of words, a lot of Biblical references, and a lot of American history to understand parts of the book, and that was a great educational experience.
    • 4/5
      good book.
    • 5/5
      Incredible.

    Book preview

    Moby Dick - Herman Melville

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    Contents

    General Introduction

    Introduction

    Notes to the Introduction

    Bibliography

    A Note on the Text

    Etymology

    Extracts

    Moby Dick

    Etymology

    Extracts

    1. Loomings

    2. The Carpet-Bag

    3. The Spouter-Inn

    4. The Counterpane

    5. Breakfast

    6. The Street

    7. The Chapel

    8. The Pulpit

    9. The Sermon

    10. A Bosom Friend

    11. Nightgown

    12. Biographical

    13. Wheelbarrow

    14. Nantucket

    15. Chowder

    16. The Ship

    17. The Ramadan

    18. His Mark

    19. The Prophet

    20. All Astir

    21. Going Aboard

    22. Merry Christmas

    23. The Lee Shore

    24. The Advocate

    25. Postscript

    26. Knights and Squires

    27. Knights and Squires

    28. Ahab

    29. Enter Ahab; To Him, Stubb

    30. The Pipe

    31. Queen Mab

    32. Cetology

    33. The Specksynder

    34. The Cabin-Table

    35. The Mast-Head

    36. The Quarter-Deck

    37. Sunset

    38. Dusk

    39. First Night-Watch

    40. Midnight, Forecastle

    41. Moby Dick

    42. The Whiteness of the Whale

    43. Hark!

    44. The Chart

    45. The Affidavit

    46. Surmises

    47. The Mat-Maker

    48. The First Lowering

    49. The Hyena

    50. Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah

    51. The Spirit-Spout

    52. The Albatross

    53. The Gam

    54. The Town-Ho’s Story

    55. Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales

    56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes

    57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars

    58. Brit

    59. Squid

    60. The Line

    61. Stubb Kills a Whale

    62. The Dart

    63. The Crotch

    64. Stubb’s Supper

    65. The Whale as a Dish

    66. The Shark Massacre

    67. Cutting In

    68. The Blanket

    69. The Funeral

    70. The Sphynx

    71. The Jeroboam’s Story

    72. The Monkey-Rope

    73. Stubb and Flask Kill a Right Whale; and Then Have a Talk Over Him

    74. The Sperm Whale’s Head – Contrasted View

    75. The Right Whale’s Head – Contrasted View

    76. The Battering-Ram

    77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun

    78. Cistern and Buckets

    79. The Prairie

    80. The Nut

    81. The Pequod Meets the Virgin

    82. The Honour and Glory of Whaling

    83. Jonah Historically Regarded

    84. Pitchpoling

    85. The Fountain

    86. The Tail

    87. The Grand Armada

    88. Schools and Schoolmasters

    89. Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish

    90. Heads or Tails

    91. The Pequod Meets the Rose-Bud

    92. Ambergris

    93. The Castaway

    94. A Squeeze of the Hand

    95. The Cassock

    96. The Try-Works

    97. The Lamp

    98. Stowing Down and Clearing Up

    99. The Doubloon

    100. Leg and Arm

    101. The Decanter

    102. A Bower in the Arsacides

    103. Measurement of the Whale’s Skeleton

    104. The Fossil Whale

    105. Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? – Will He Perish?

    106. Ahab’s Leg

    107. The Carpenter

    108. Ahab and the Carpenter

    109. Ahab and Starbuck in the Cabin

    110. Queequeg in his Coffin

    111. The Pacific

    112. The Blacksmith

    113. The Forge

    114. The Gilder

    115. The Pequod Meets the Bachelor

    116. The Dying Whale

    117. The Whale Watch

    118. The Quadrant

    119. The Candles

    120. The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch

    121. Midnight – The Forecastle Bulwarks

    122. Midnight Aloft – Thunder and Lightning

    123. The Musket

    124. The Needle

    125. The Log and Line

    126. The Lifebuoy

    127. The Deck

    128. The Pequod Meets the Rachel

    129. The Cabin

    130. The Hat

    131. The Pequod Meets the Delight

    132. The Symphony

    133. The Chase – First Day

    134. The Chase – Second Day

    135. The Chase – Third Day

    Epilogue

    Explanatory Notes

    General Introduction

    Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and specialists to write wide ranging, jargon-free introductions and to provide notes that would assist the understanding of our readers rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction.

    General Adviser

    Keith Carabine

    Rutherford College

    University of Kent at Canterbury

    Introduction

    How the whale got its lungs

    Shortly before the Pequod leaves the Indian Ocean for the Pacific, through the Straits of Sunda that separate Java from Sumatra, as Captain Ahab nears the end of his terrible quest, and when the crew is about as far from America as it is possible to get, Herman Melville, author, breaks brilliantly into his narrative, carrying his reader back to a farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where, since earlier that day, in the shadow of Greylock mountain, he has been writing a chapter about the whale’s spout.

    My hypothesis is this: that the spout is nothing but mist. And besides other reasons, to this conclusion I am impelled, by considerations touching the great inherent dignity of the sperm whale; I account him no common, shallow being, inasmuch as it is an indisputed fact that he is never found on soundings, or near shores; all other whales sometimes are. He is both ponderous and profound. And I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my head. The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep thought, after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon; this seems an additional argument for the above supposition. [pp. 309–10]

    It is usually the case that when, like some literary Alfred Hitchcock, an author shuffles fleetingly into his own book, something notable is going on. So it is worth considering for a moment why Herman Melville, full up with tea in his ‘thin shingled attic’, all vestige of his narrator Ishmael temporarily shed, should choose this point in his story to show himself.

    The chapter in question, ‘The Fountain’, is an important moment in the book. After many detailed descriptions of many aspects of the whaling industry, after sketches of the whale from all angles, and after numerous semi-philosophical digressions on the meaning of the beast and its significance to man, Melville is at that point in his story when he can finally show what most makes a whale a whale. It is, after all, the fact that it breathes through a spout and into lungs that distingushes a whale either, as Melville would have it, from its fellow fish, or, as modern taxonomy insists, from fish altogether. Either way, it’s the spout and lungs that count.

    Everyone knows that by the peculiar cunning of their gills, the finny tribes in general breathe the air which at all times is combined with the element in which they swim; hence a herring or a cod might live a century, and never once raise its head above the surface. But owing to his marked internal structure which gives him regular lungs, like a human being’s, the whale can only live by inhaling the disengaged air in the open atmosphere. Wherefore the necessity for his periodic visits to the upper world. But he cannot in any degree breathe through his mouth, for, in his ordinary attitude, the sperm whale’s mouth is buried at least eight feet beneath the surface; and what is still more, his windpipe has no connexion with his mouth. No, he breathes through his spiracle alone; and this is on the top of his head. [p. 306]

    Melville spells this all out very carefully, as he does the difference between a whale’s lungs and a human’s.

    In man, breathing is incessantly going on – one breath only serving for two or three pulsations; so that whatever other business he has to attend to, waking or sleeping, breathe he must, or die he will. But the sperm whale only breathes about one-seventh or Sunday of his time. (pp. 307–8)

    In other words, it is at the point when he is showing the whale most like itself – like a fish, but different; like a man, but different – and when he is in the midst of describing it in its most essential activity (breathing), that Melville chooses also to show himself, to liken the whale to the writer at work. The moment has the force of a revelation: Melville revealing himself not only to the reader, but also to himself by the act of holding up a mirror. It is almost as if by entering the lungs of the whale Melville has gone to the heart of his writing. As if in contemplating the process of the whale’s breathing – air down through the spout, into the lungs, back out as mist – that he has come to understand something about the act of writing itself, that he has caught himself as a writer being most like himself.

    Melville’s image of the whale breathing is revealing. Think about it carefully and one begins to understand why Moby Dick is the great, strange book that it is. In particular one begins to understand the book’s obvious peculiarities: why it begins with definitions; why it is prefaced by extracts from earlier writers; why it is so frequently allusive; why it reads, at times, more like a whaling manual than a novel. And in understanding all of this, what one comes to learn is something profound about writing itself. Few writers ever understood the act of writing better, showed more insight into its basic properties, than Melville did when he was writing Moby Dick. The result is a truly inspirational novel, one way into which is through the whale’s spout.

    i

    When Melville started to write in the winter of 1844–5, aged twenty-five and only five years before he began Moby Dick, it was largely as an expedience. He was born, in New York City in 1819, into what is best described as the American aristocracy. [1] Both sides of his family could trace their descent to European nobility: on his father’s, the Melvills, to Scottish knights and lords; on his mother’s, the Gansevoorts, to Norwegian kings. Both his grandfathers had been revolutionary heroes. Thomas Melvill had participated in the Boston Tea Party and Peter Gansevoort (the ‘Hero of Stanwix’) had famously obstructed the British at Fort Stanwix in 1777. But Melville’s father, Alan Melvill, was a disastrous business man, squandering his inheritance and many paternal hand-outs, so that instead of the privileged upbringing Melville and his seven siblings were expected to receive, the family was frequently on the move, each time to smaller accommodation. The moves were sometimes hasty, as landlords lost patience with unpaid rent – Melville once accompanied his father on a midnight flit, leaving Manhattan for the grandparental house in Albany – and amid all this uncertainty Melville received only limited schooling; his school career ending at the Albany Academy, which he left at the age of twelve. His was, as he described it, an ‘irregular education’.

    There are benefits to be had from a limited schooling. What is Moby Dick if not the work of an autodidact? What does it offer the active reader if not an irregular education? In the short-term, however, Melville’s lack of formal qualifactions made life difficult. The American labour market he entered in the 1830s was contracting, and unable to secure more than a clerical position, Melville eventually decided, at the age of nineteen, that like many of his cousins he would go to sea, sailing to Liverpool on the merchant ship St Lawrence on 5 June 1839. On his return, in October that year, he tried teaching, at the Greenbush and Schodack Academy, soon discovered that teaching didn’t pay and, after some unsuccessful schemes and business adventures of his own, signed up to sail again, this time leaving New Bedford, at Christmas 1840, on the whaling ship Acushnet. This time he was away for the best part of four years, during which he served on various ships (the whalers Lucy Ann and Charles and Henry and the US Navy frigate the United States) and spent several months living among South Pacific islanders: on Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas, Tahiti, Eimeo and on the Hawaiian Island of Lahaina. When he returned, to Boston in October 1844, it was with a succession of extraordinary tales to tell – about life at sea and more especially about his time with the peoples of the South Pacific – and also with a new way of making a living to be found. Prompted by his family, who were thrilled by his tales, Melville decided to transform himself from sailor into novelist. [2]

    He wrote quickly – nine novels plus short stories in eleven years – and initially with considerable commercial success. Typee, or A Narrative of a Four Months’ Residence among the Natives of a Valley of the Marquesas Islands was published in the spring of 1846, in London and New York, and Omoo, his second novel, a year later. Both were lushly described, sensationally elaborated accounts of Melville’s adventures, notably his sexual adventures, among South Sea Islanders. Neither is without literary value, each articulating a highly open-minded appreciation of the ways of life Melville found there. But the fact that they sold well was due primarily to his adroit combining of Romance conventions with taboo encounters. Mardi, his third novel, was a very different kind of book.

    What made the difference between Omoo and Mardi, it doesn’t over-state it to say so, was Melville’s reading of Rabelais. Later, in February 1849, Melville would write of the profound jolt he received on his first thorough reading of Shakespeare.

    Dolt and ass that I am I have lived more than 29 years, and until a few days ago, never made close acquaintance with the divine William. Ah, he’s full of sermons-on-the-mount, and gentle, aye, almost as Jesus. I take such men to be inspired. I fancy that this moment Shakespeare in heaven ranks with Gabriel, Raphael and Michael. And if another Messiah ever comes ’twill be in Shakespeare’s person.

    Much has been made by critics, rightly so, of Melville’s ecstatic response to Shakespeare, of the effect his discovery had on the writing of Moby Dick, and on the conception and language of Ahab in particular. [3] Ahab is thus understood as a modern-day Shakespearean tragic hero, his ‘nervous lofty language’ finally contrasted with the lunatic wisdom of Pip’s fool. But Melville’s reading of Rabelais at the end of January 1848 – when he borrowed the second book of Gargantua and Pantagruel from his friend, the New York editor Evert Duyckinck – was hardly less important.

    What Rabelais gave Melville was a way of handling his reading. His education having ended in a formal sense at the age of twelve, it was resumed, as Melville several times observed, at sea. In White Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War (the novel he wrote before Moby Dick), Melville devotes a chapter to ‘A Man-of-War Library’ and makes it clear throughout the book that his time at sea was largely spent reading and discussing books. Likewise Ishmael’s insistence that ‘a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard’, not only makes the anti-institutional claim that he received his instruction from the University of Life – from the realities of sea-faring and the company of old tars – but also the biographical observation that it was as a sailor Melville became a serious reader (p. 93).

    The poet, and great Melvillean, Charles Olson said of Melville that ‘He read to write.’ [4] This is true, certainly, of Moby Dick. Reading voraciously, Melville needed the constant nourishment of other people’s words to produce his own. Or to change the metaphor, as Ishmael puts it in Chapter 32 ‘Cetology’, Melville ‘swam through libraries’ to write Moby Dick (p. 111). And it was reading Rabelais that enabled Melville to become this kind of writer, Gargantua and Pantagruel providing him with a model of a structure within which to make the kind of loosely associated philosophical and observational digressions which would eventually so characterise Moby Dick. Rabelais’s gift to later writers is to have given this structure metaphorical form, his first great character, Gargantua, being, from the moment of his birth, comically insatiable. Gargantua thus embodies the expansive procedure that enabled Rabelais to contain and present his vast learning, and in the process to document his historical moment (the shift in sixteenth-century France from the Gothic to the Renaissance). Rabelais’s great insatiable baby, who grows up to be an adventuring man, is thus the prototype for what Henry James called ‘the loose baggy monsters’ of American literature: Whitman’s ‘Self’, the Pound of The Cantos, Charles Olson’s own Maximus, and before them all Ishmael, simple sailor and sub-sub-librarian.

    Mardi didn’t sell so well. It is an important book, containing many splendid and sometimes brilliant digressions. But in the excitement of writing a Rabelaisian novel, of which he proved surprisingly capable in his late twenties, Melville abandoned almost all sense of plot, save the loosest gesture, at the beginning of the book, of a thwarted romance between the narrator and the beautiful and elusive Yillah. In so doing he disappointed his audience, which had been primed by Typee and Omoo to expect a sensational yarn. The two books that followed, Redburn and White-Jacket, were written more quickly than ever (both were out within a year of Mardi’s publication in March 1849), Melville resorting to much more straightforward accounts of his maritime experiences (the voyage to Liverpool and his time on the United States respectively) in an attempt to satisfy the Anglo-American public’s enduring curiosity for life at sea.

    But Melville wasn’t, couldn’t be satisfied with this kind of book. As he wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne in June 1851, when deep into the fabric of Moby Dick, and with a strong presentiment that despite his best wishes this wasn’t a book that would satisfy the market: ‘What I most feel moved to write, that is banned, – it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.’ [5] The pressure to make money notwithstanding – he married in 1847, and had a son in 1849 – Melville could no longer write the way the market required. His resistance, which increased the more he read, and which he put in the form of a religious imperative – ‘Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot’ – had much to do with his irregular education. Coming to literature relatively late in life, Melville did so not with the reluctance of an unwilling recipient of some institutionally imposed reading-list, but with the wide-eyed eagerness of the autodidact, hungry for the resources of the world’s great books. Scholars searching for Melville’s secrets have given great attention to his reading, tracking his borrowings from friends and from New York libraries. [6] But Melville never made any mystery of his sources, passing them on (not showing them off) in the ‘Extracts’ with which Moby Dick begins: the Bible, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Browne, Milton, Pope, Goldsmith, Jefferson – the list is not endless, but it does go on. And the point is that the more he read, the more Melville wanted to emulate what he read, until he could not, simply could not, write ‘the other way’. Or to go back for a moment to Rabelais, the more Melville read the more he wanted to find a way of writing that would enable him to meld together all that he found valuable in other works. And this, more or less, as his diaries and letters describe it, was the state of mind, the state of readiness, in which he sat down to write Moby Dick: full to the brim with the world’s literature, in a state of something like intellectual frenzy.

    There were a number of good reasons for Melville to write a book about a whale. One was that it was the only the aspect of his life at sea he hadn’t yet turned into words. A second was that the public’s appetite for such a book was large. Newspapers regularly carried stories of whaling dis­asters, and books written from first-hand experience of whaling had recently found a market. Owen Chase’s Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale Ship Essex (1821) (itself an important source for Moby Dick, Chase telling the true and subsequently legendary story of a seemingly calculated attack by a sperm whale on a whale-ship), Richard Henry Dana Jr’s, Two Years Before the Mast (1840) and J.Ross Browne’s Etchings of a Whaling Cruise (1846) had all recently achieved the kind of sales for which Melville hoped. A third reason, more in the substrata of Melville’s thinking perhaps, but there none the less as the novel brings out, was the importance of sperm whaling to the American economy. Charles Olson writes about this best, showing that until the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvannia in 1859, sperm oil was very largely how the life of the nation was fuelled. Olson makes the point statistically, showing that, for instance, in 1844 the vast sum of a hundred and twenty million dollars was tied up in whaling, a figure that was high compared with other burgeoning American industries. [7] The consequence of this industrial and economic centrality, as Melville makes brilliantly clear in Chapter 24 ‘The Advocate’, was that in writing about the whale and its products, the ambitious writer could justly encompass very disparate aspects of American, and for that matter European, society. Which points, in turn, to the overriding reason Melville had for making whaling his subject: the great theme it supplied his writing. As Ishmael puts it when considering ‘The Fossil Whale’:

    One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor’s quill. Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. [p. 376]

    The virtue of his subject, as this passage shows, was that Melville could hardly contain himself, his writing expanding into ‘placard capitals’, his sweep and scope becoming epic, sublime. Nothing it seems, not even the suburbs of the universe, could exceed his writing now he had embraced his great theme, which, as he indicates, is not only the whale, but everything man has ever encountered that he can neither fully comprehend nor bring totally into view. What Melville is writing about, in other words, is that which exceeds language – no matter how deep your inkstand, how big your quill – the consequence of which is that he finds himself at liberty to expatiate, to extend, almost until it has no limits, his ‘outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep’. What Melville came to understand, then, was that Moby Dick was his Gargantua; that what the insatiable child had done for Rabelais, the whale might do for him: provide the form and theme that would hold together the speculations and digressions that were for him the very fabric of writing; a form and theme, moreover, for which the American public already seemed to have an appetite.

    Not that Melville saw this all at once. As with Mardi – in which part way through a conventional, if stylised, adventure shifts abruptly into an intellectual excursion – the writing of Moby Dick appears to have been a broken-backed affair. It is speculated that Melville began the book in February 1850. Certainly by 1 May of that year he was well on with it, writing to his fellow whaleman Richard Henry Dana to say, among other things, that the book was half done. [8] This initial rate of progress was confirmed by Evert Duyckinck, who in a letter in early August that year told his brother in passing that Melville’s book was nearly completed. Moby Dick wasn’t finally finished until the end of the summer of the following year. [9]

    There were practical reasons for the delay. In September 1850 Melville bought a farm in Pittsfield, Massachusetts – the farm on which we find him when he is contemplating the whale’s lungs – and the move itself and then the work involved in running the farm were undoubtedly very time-consuming. But not so time-consuming as to explain the gap of year between Evert Duyckinck’s estimation and the book’s actual completion, especially not given Melville’s fluency. Scholars and critics have filled the gap, the consensus being that, as Olson first argued in Call Me Ishmael, there were in fact two Moby Dicks: the one Melville was writing until August 1850, and the one he wrote after that time, the one we know. And what made the difference, so it is persuasively suggested, is a review Melville wrote for Duyckinck’s Literary World entitled ‘Hawthorne and his Mosses’. Ostensibly the review was of Hawthorne’s book of tales Mosses from an Old Manse, published some four years earlier but which Melville, who had recently met Hawthorne, had only just read. But Hawthorne’s book stirred something very deep in Melville, so that his review of it became an occasion for his reflections on Shakespeare (whom he had read, it will be recalled, only a year or so earlier), and, through those reflections, for a statement both of his ambitions for American writing and of his democratic aesthetic as he now understood it. In Hawthorne, Melville felt he had for the first time read an American author who might with justice be compared to Shakespeare, and the salutary effect of this would seem to have been to cause him to re-imagine the book he was then writing. Exactly how is a matter of confident scholarly speculation. The most significant change, it is generally agreed, is that Ahab only became the looming tragic presence that he is after August 1850, the darkness of Hawthorne’s imagination perhaps enabling Melville to siphon Shakespeare into his prose in a way that previously he hadn’t found possible. [10] Perhaps, also, the change of direction in August 1850 explains the marked differences of tone between the first twenty or so chapters, with their comic, even Dickensian, social observations, and the epic sweep and ambition of the rest of the book. But whatever did or did not happen to the composition as a result of the thinking he did through ‘Hawthorne and his Mosses’, what is clear is that Melville wrote Moby Dick in a state of considerable excitement, that he was consumed throughout by the act of composition. The result was a novel more eager to share the pleasure of writing with its readers, to pass on the satisfaction that comes from the process of composition, than anything to be found in the English tradition except Tristram Shandy.

    You can hear Melville’s excitement, his desire to communicate it, in the letters and reviews he wrote while at work on his whale. Witness his letter to Dana, May 1850, in which he makes the first reference to what he calls his ‘whaling voyage’:

    It will be a strange sort of book, tho’, I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho’ you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a maple tree; – & to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. [11]

    The thing to notice here is the way everything gets tangled up: Melville’s description of the act of writing the novel taking on the metaphors which are the substance of the novel itself. This, remember, proved to be early in the process, but already Melville is consumed. Already he is thinking about his writing in terms of the whale. Or to put it more strongly, the whale has become his way of thinking about writing. And not just writing. Consider this, from ‘Hawthorne and his Mosses’, in which Melville tries to get at the revelatory quality in Shakespeare:

    But it is those deep far-away things in him; those occasional flashing-forths of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality: – these are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare. [12]

    These are also the things that make Melville, Melville. Where, after all, do ‘those short, quick probings’ come from if not the whale hunt; from the late stages, perhaps, before the final flurry, when the harpooneer has done his work, and the whale killer has stepped in to finish the business. As when Stubb, for instance, ‘firmly planting his knee in the clumsy cleat, darted dart after dart into the flying fish’ (pp. 238–9). There are other ways, of course, of talking about the truth in Shakespeare. What is clear is that for Melville the processes of the whale hunt have become inextricably intertwined with his epistemology. But what about what makes Hawthorne, Hawthorne? Melville tells us, in related terms:

    . . . unlike Shakespeare, who was forced to the contrary course by circumstances, Hawthorne (either from simple disinclination, or else from inaptitude) refrains from all the popularizing noise . . . content with the still, rich utterances of a great intellect in repose, and which sends few thoughts into circulation, except they be arterialized at his large warm lungs, and expanded in his honest heart. [13]

    Melville, we might conjecture, knew little about Hawthorne’s lungs (they had, after all, met only the once). He did, however, know a good deal about the whale’s lungs and, as we have seen already, in his consumed state, they were, for him, becoming inseparable from the act of writing.

    Nor does the prose Melville wrote while writing Moby Dick only show us the shape of his thinking at the time. What we learn also is that during this period Melville was as intimate with the rhythms and pulse of writing as perhaps any writer ever has been, his letters to Hawthorne in particular catching the state in which composition becomes possible. 1 June 1851:

    I go to New York, to bury myself in a third-story room, and work and slave on my Whale while it is driving through the press. That is the only way I can finish it now, – I am so pulled hither and thither by circumstances. The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose – that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. [14]

    This is how it was; Melville was still working on Moby Dick while it was going through the press. But the thing to notice is that ‘silent grass-growing mood’, which brilliantly describes the state of concentration necessary to hold together a book as diverse and extensive as Moby Dick. And if such a mood was seldom Melville’s it must sometimes have been his, as elsewhere in his letters to Hawthorne he shows. Reading Goethe, he tells Hawthorne, ‘I came across this, "Live in the all".’ Upon which remark Melville offers the following commentary:

    This ‘all’ feeling, though, there is some truth in. You must have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer’s day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the all feeling. But what plays the mischief with the truth is that man will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion. [15]

    Or, as he puts it later, after Hawthorne has written praising Moby Dick:

    Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips – lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling. [16]

    Pieces that, when in the grass-growing mood, Melville believes the great writer capable of holding together. As he says in ‘Hawthorne and his Mosses’, with reference to Shakespeare, but in defence of the most modern American writing, and in a statement that makes Melville’s occasional criticism comparable with Keats’s: ‘great geniuses are parts of the times; they themselves are the times; and possess a correspondent colouring’. [17]

    What this amounts to – this state of mind in which truth can be probed, and the lungs are full – is what Sophia Hawthorne, Nathaniel’s wife, in a letter to Evert Duyckinck, called Melville’s ‘enthusiasm’. Describing her delight at reading ‘Hawthorne and his Mosses’, she observed how

    I keep constantly reading over and over the inspired utterances, and marvel more and more that the word has at last been said which I have so long hoped to hear, and said so well. There is such a generous, noble enthusiasm as I have not found in any critic of my writer. [18]

    ‘Enthusiasm’ is key. It was a central term in American literary culture at this time, not least because it was one of Emerson’s favourite words. [19] Returning to it time and again, and to its cognates, notably inspiration, ‘enthusiasm’ was variously crucial to Emerson’s thinking. In the ‘Oversoul’, for instance, one of his clearest statements of what he meant by ‘Transcendentalism’ (‘that Unity . . . within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all other’), he judges that ‘a certain enthusiasm attends the individual’s consciousness of that divine presence’. [20] Emerson’s use of ‘enthusiasm’ here is etymologically proper, the word meaning, in its original Greek sense, to breathe in and be possessed by a god. But Emerson is also allocating to the enthusiastic state of mind a highly significant social function. Such sense of society as Emerson’s writing offers is located in the spiritual affinity that people have with one another as a result, as he sees it, of being party to the oversoul. It is in the ‘enthusiastic’ state that people gain access to that ‘divine presence’, to what Melville called the ‘ all feeling’. Enthusiasm is thus the medium by which people are joined.

    Or, at least, by which Americans were joined, because among the other uses to which Emerson put the term ‘enthusiasm’ was as a point of differentiation between American and British culture. In ‘English Traits’, Emerson observes of the English that ‘cold, repressive manners prevail. No enthusiasm is permitted except at the opera.’ [21] In so far as this is true, it would seem to be the truth of commonplace, enthusiasm, functioning here in its everyday, arm-waving sense. But in attributing enthusiasm to American culture, Emerson was actually making a much more radical distinction, as is apparent from his late essay ‘Inspiration’. Noting that ‘a religious poet once told [him] that he valued his poems not because they were his, but because they were not’, Emerson goes on to observe, ‘We might say of these memorable moments of life that we were in them, not they in us.’ [22] For Emerson ‘inspiration’ and the enthusiastic state were all but interchangeable, and what characterises the moment of inspiration, as he argues it here, is a sense of living quite purely in the moment, a sense of occupying a pure present. Which is why the idea is crucial to his thinking. To say, in other words, that the English are not enthusiastic is to argue in quasi-religious terms what he argues time and again elsewhere: that Old-World culture is overladen with history; that only in America is it possible to live in the here and now.

    So when Sophia Hawthorne noted in Melville’s review – which he published under the guise of a ‘Virginian spending July in Vermont’ – a generous, noble enthusiasm, she no doubt appreciated that she was attibuting to its writer a currently prized quality. What she could not have known was that enthusiasm went to the heart, we should perhaps say the lungs, of the writer’s work. Melville’s thinking on the subject, especially in Moby Dick, being a good deal more callibrated than Emerson’s. That thinking had begun in earnest in Mardi, in which the allegorical journey around the islands of ‘Mardi’ reaches its high-point at ‘Serenia’, ‘that land,’ as Babbalanja puts it, ‘of the enthusiasts, of which we hear’. And the thinking concludes in Pierre, the novel that followed Moby Dick, in which a clearly disconsolate Melville – disconsolate, perhaps, because Moby Dick was widely dismissed in review, leaving the author and his family to face damnation by dollars – traces Pierre’s journey from his youthful, naïve, enthusiastic state to a shattering encounter with the realities of life. Coming between Mardi and Pierre, it was in Moby Dick that Melville gave the enthusiastic world view its most elaborate and testing articulation.

    ii

    There are two great collisions in Moby Dick. One, of course, is between Ahab and the whale, the vengeful collision that is coming for the whole book, that gives the novel its basic narrative drive, and without which Moby Dick would have been another Mardi. The other great collision, and the one that actually consumes the body of the book, is the collision between Ahab and Ishmael. And in the terms being presented here what that collision looks like is the conflict between the enthusiast and the fanatic. It is a function of Ahab’s bombast, and of the fact that Ishmael is telling his story – Ahab, it should be noticed, could never tell Ishmael’s – that the monomaniacal captain often gets the critical headlines. This is not unnatural. Ahab is the hero of the book, in so far as the book has a hero, and in him Melville has given us an extraordinary, if sometimes flawed, picture of the character type of the strong leader. (Flawed not least because in some of Ahab’s moodier monologues Melville shows a weakness for the kind of ‘Shakespearizing’ he implicitly criticises in ‘Hawthorne and his Mosses’.) It is Ishmael, however, who survives to tell the tale, and it through him that Melville articulates his most dearly held values. I will dwell first, then, and longest, on Ishmael.

    Melville’s narrator, as commentators have often pointed out, is no naïve Emersonian, Ishmael warning against precisely that brand of naïve enthusiasm that invites one to live too fully in the moment. The warning is issued when Ishmael is up the mast-head, apparently looking for whales, but actually drifting off into a complacent, and therefore perilous, reverie:

    There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gentle rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists! [p.132]

    What Ishmael-Melville is arguing against here is the kind of loss of self that Emersonian epistemology, with its highly religious sense of enthusiasm, implies. Because what Ishmael stands for is not the disappearing self, but the expanded self: the kind of expanded self that Rabelais embodies in ‘Gargantua’. Which makes Ishmael sound like a curious creature, his enthusiasm a very mysterious process. But there is nothing curious or mysterious about Ishmael’s development. He feeds, like, Melville, on reading, his narrative expanding, growing in stature, with each new text it takes in. Which is one reason the book starts with ‘extracts’ from previous writings about the whale.

    The inclusion of the extracts was a stroke of genius, Melville showing in one bold textual gesture what variously he had learned in the composition of Moby Dick. Partly what the extracts show about Ishmael, or Melville, or Ishmael-Melville, is an aspect of enthusiasm that Emerson rarely acknowledges: the enthusiast as sub-sub-librarian, browsing, fondling, cataloguing his collection. Melville’s ‘sub-sub’ is the enthusiast as antiquarian, approaching his subject with the harmless zeal of the book-collector. And of course it is as zealous book collector, cetological antiquarian, that Ishmael makes one of his approaches to the whale, dividing the species up into Folio, Octavo, Duodecimo types, carrying the language of one obsession into the sphere of another.

    But if we begin the book with an image of the writer or narrator as antiquarian (accumulating books on his favourite subject), as we read we soon understand that the extracts enfold a much more noble, generous enthusiasm. Melville, after all, is not just a collector, but a reader, and not just a reader but someone who reads to write. In one way, then, what the extracts constitute is the skeleton of the book, the structure to which the blubber of Melville’s prose could cling. But that’s not really the metaphor – implying as it does a separation of bone and flesh – because what Melville had come to understand, during the steep learning curve that was the composition of Moby Dick, was that writing and reading are a continuous process. In the cetology chapters, for instance, as scholars have pointed out, Melville’s words owe a great deal to some of the sources he cites in the extracts, Scoresby in particular. [23] There is no deception here: Melville, after all, happily shares his sources with his reader. The image, then, is of the writer at his desk, his books open all around, working his sources into his own prose. To spell it out, Melville’s sentences are the product of his research, sometimes in only mildly altered form. He takes in reading and pushes it out as writing. He takes in words. He pushes other words out. It is a process he might have learned from that great literary enthusiast, the anatomist of melancholy, Robert Burton, who described his own great collage, and his relation to the writers he had used and learned from, in the following terms (the passages in square brackets being translations):

    The matter is theirs most part, and yet mine, apparet unde sumptum sit [it is plain whence it was taken] (which Seneca approves), aliud tamen quam unde sumptum sit apparet [yet it becomes something different in its new setting]; which nature doth with the aliment of our bodies incorporate, digest, assimilate, I do conquere quod hausi [assimilate what I have swallowed], dispose of what I take. [24]

    Or as Burton also puts it, continuing the metaphor, but reversing the process, and quoting Aelian, ‘Our poets steal from Homer; he spews . . . they lick it up.’ But if there is a basic kinship of method between Melville and Burton – Melville loved The Anatomy of Melancholy, lapped it up – there are significant differences also, Melville quoting much less than Burton does, transmuting much more into his own prose. Melville, accordingly, has to come up with different metaphors for writing, for that mysterious process which occurs when a writer turns the words of others into something different from, even better than, the original.

    In Moby Dick, Melville several times tells us quite directly about this process. For instance, in ‘The Affadavit’, where he is very direct:

    I care not to perform this part of my task methodically; but shall be content to produce the desired impression by separate citations of items, practically or reliably known to me as a whale man; and from those citations, I take it – the conclusion aimed at will naturally follow . . . [p.169]

    Or in his great chapter on ‘Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish’ – in which the world is divided according to that which is owned and that which one can borrow, according to the difference, one might say, between book collections and libraries – writing is shown to be the gathering up of loose fish:

    What are 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? [p.330]

    So here’s Melville as Hitchcock again, as ‘smuggling verbalist’, ostentatiously putting other people’s thoughts into his own words. Which is as much as to say, as he does in ‘Cetology’, ‘I have swam through libraries and sailed through oceans’, grazing, of course, like the baleen as he went.

    But more interesting than these quite direct references to his own method are those metaphors which make the process by which the book is composed indistinguishable from its content and events. The Pequod itself is one of the first such emblems, being cobbled together from items gathered on its various voyages, but having before the present voyage been given a good make-over – ‘to all these her old antiquities, were added new and marvellous features’ (p. 59). It is a modern vessel, in other words, put together from things ancient. Melville is getting deep, now, elemental even, because what he is really trying to get at when he is producing metaphors for writing, making his short, sharp probes at the matter itself, is how, through the agency of imagination, one thing can become another. With this in mind then, though it might not look like it initially, Melville gives us an analogy for writing when Ishmael first encounters Queequeg. Testy at first, the encounter becomes very amic­able, to underline which Queequeg divides his money, some thirty dollars in silver, into two piles, pushing one towards Ishmael and telling him it is his. This is a most generous gesture. Queequeg has given Ishmael a gift, and somehow that gift ought to be acknowledged. Ishmael, however, does not just give something in return, does not turn the gift into a straight exchange. Rather, the next day, he uses Queequeg’s money to pay the landlord of the Spouter for both his own board and Queequeg’s. It is a lovely sequence of events, Ishmael receiving a gift, passing it on, and in the process turning it into something else.

    This hints at much. It hints at the way, in his manner of composition, Melville circulates learning: receiving words from another writer and passing them on, although not before he has turned them into something else. Which makes the book a bit like a library. Which makes the book a bit like a whale-ship. The sequence hints also at Melville’s argument with Emerson. There are times in Emerson, in Nature for instance, when he seems simply to want to forget the past, when his great hope for American literature and culture is that it might be a whole new beginning. What Melville articulates in Moby Dick is not the hope for a new beginning – he knows the world is far too old for new beginnings – but an image, rather, of one thing becoming another, of the ways of the past being turned into something new. Rather, then, than obliterate the past, what Melville does in Moby Dick is make the past present. He makes Plato, the Bible, Rabelais, Burton, available to us as if for the first time, greeting and presenting them at the age of thirty-one, wide-eyed and democratic, with the enthusiasm of the autodidact. He thinks of himself, and would think of his reader, as contemporaries of the ancients. Which is why, at one staggering moment in the narrative, he can turn and shake hands with Noah’s son Shem. And why, at another, he can subscribe to metempsychosis:

    Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage – and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope! [p. 354]

    For the writer who reads the ancients and then re-presents them to his reader as if they were being encountered for the first time, the Greek doctrine of metempsychosis, in which a spirit migrates from one body to another, is not beyond the bounds of credibility. As Melville would see it, writing is metempsychosis, spirits migrating from one book to another.

    But perhaps the best image for all this, for the beautiful, mysterious, elemental process through which, by the agency of imagination, one thing becomes another, is, after all, the image of the whale’s spout; a phenomenon which, as Melville asserts at the beginning of ‘The Fountain’, nobody has yet fully understood.

    That for six thousand years – and no one knows how many millions of ages before – the great whales should have been spouting all over the sea, and sprinkling and mystifying the gardens of the deep, as with so many sprinkling or mystifying pots; and that for some centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain of the whale, watching those sprinklings and spoutings – that all this should be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock p.m. of this sixteenth day of December A.D. 1851), it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all, really water, or nothing but vapour – this is surely a noteworthy thing. [p. 306]

    Or as he puts it, a couple of pages later, in a passage we have heard already, but which bears repetition:

    While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my head. The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep thought, after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon; this seems an additional argument for the above supposition.

    And the outcome of all this, of all this reading and writing, whether vapour or water, is Ishmael’s sensibility – one of the most rare and beautiful creations in all literature.

    Not the least beautiful aspect of Ishmael’s sensibility is the spin he puts on the American idea of self-reinvention. Emerson believed deeply in self-reinvention, in the capacity of the invidual to cast off his or her former self, and become something better, more gratifying. But he tended to shroud the process in a kind of Romantic mystery, signalling that such reinvention chiefly occurred when one steps outside society and into nature. This is to root reinvention in the epiphanic moment, the all-feeling which, as Melville pointed out, is not a sustainable sensation. What Melville shows, on the other hand, through his Gargantuan narrator Ishmael, is that reinvention (self-expansion) is an effect of going to the library. Ishmael never stops changing throughout the novel, displaying not the integrity of a conventional character, but the capacity for growth of a curious mind. He is altered by each experience he has, his narrative changes shape with each new text it takes in. Reinvention, then, for Melville, is largely a function of reading. Enter the library, he urges, become somebody else. Ishmael is the outcome of this profoundly liberating credo. He stands for a freedom of choice worthy of the name.

    But Ishmael’s erudition notwithstanding, it is as a simple sailor that he goes to sea. He is an Ordinary Joe, and as such not least among his virtues is a uniquely democratic approach to the world. Fundamental to this democratic approach is the fact that Ishmael can live with uncertainties. That he does not think he can be certain about anything – about the meaning of the whale, say – means also that he cannot reasonably privilege his way of seeing over other people’s. He is, as a consequence, profoundly open to other outlooks, Queequeg’s, of course, being the prime example. Ishmael, in other words, is a supreme ironist – aware, always, that there is another point of view. And because he is an ironist he is also a humourist. He never fails to see the joke because he is always aware that to somebody else the situation might look faintly ridiculous. Living with uncertainty, then, is one of the pleasures of Ishmael’s life, and it is because it is through his eyes that we view the events of the novel that Moby Dick is so often outrageously comic. Ahab, one can be confident, could never squeeze sperm with a straight face. Ishmael, in other words, is capable of the lowest vulgarity, takes healthy pleasure in it, relishes the joke.

    But he can also be delicate, extraordinarily delicate. Always he is making connections between things, while simultaneously showing their difference from one another. Because of this, because of this capacity for distiction, it is through Ishmael that we come to appreciate what it really means to live in a state of mutual dependence, or as he puts it, in a joint-stock world. This mutuality is given emblematic form in Chapter 72, ‘The Monkey Rope’, in which Ishmael and Queequeg, tied to each end of a single piece of rope, the former on ship, the latter hanging overboard as he cuts into the whale’s flesh, are entirely dependent on each other for each other’s safety. One slips both slip; two existences held precariously in common. It is because of Ishmael’s sensibility, then, that we can see the Pequod for the subtle political allegory that it is; at once a ruthlessly divided organisation, and also a model community at work, all hands depending on all hands, each crucial to the success of the whole. The Pequod, in other words, as we see it through Ishmael’s eyes, is a hierarchical society that has the potential within itself to become an operational democracy.

    But it doesn’t. Ishmael isn’t the captain of this ship, and probably, given his willingness to listen to all-comers, it would be difficult for him ever to be so. And if one’s judgement is that a ship needs a captain, then the outlook, as far as the political allegory goes, is depressing. Because in your captain you might get the wrong kind of enthusiast. You might, as Melville warns us, end up with Ahab.

    Not that Ahab, for all his biblical reputation – the Old Testament Ahab ‘did more to provoke the Lord God of Israel to anger than all the kings of Israel that were before him’ – is all bad. [25] Like the epic obsessives on whom he is modelled – Prometheus, Tamburlane, Coriolanus, Lear – Ahab has values one might happily sign up to – values, certainly, that Melville endorsed, as, for instance, his contempt for money. Ahab, it is several times observed, accommodates the crew’s profit-motive only in so far as it coincides with his own objective (the killing of whales other than Moby Dick serving to ensure that come the ultimate encounter the crew will be equal to his vengeful purpose). Like Ishmael, then, Ahab has a low regard for commercial values. For Ishmael, as we have seen, what this entails is a whole other, more generous mode of exchange: giving and taking, sharing and communicating knowledge and belongings in the spirit of collaboration. And this is where the similarity ends. Ahab, as polar opposite of Ishmael’s sensibility, is horrified by exchange in all its forms. Witness Chapter 108, in which Ahab finds himself, mortifyingly dependent on the ship’s carpenter to make him a replacement ivory leg.

    Oh, Life! Here I am, proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this block-head for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal interdebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books. [p. 389]

    This, Melville wants us to see, is self-reliance gone mad. It’s as if Ahab is constitutionally incapable of exchange, constitutionally incapable of opening himself up to what the rest of the world has to offer.

    What Melville also wants us to see, however, is that this pathological reserve has its causes, that Ahab’s constitutional incapacity to enjoy relations with others is tragically understandable, if unforgiveable. Ahab, that is, cannot open himself up to the world because the world, in the shape of the whale, has wounded him so badly. So whereas Ishmael is entirely comfortable with the accidental, with the things that just happen along in life, Ahab, who knows what an accident can mean, has become incapable of living with the idea of contingency. Melville dwells patiently on this, documenting the process whereby Ahab comes to believe in the significance of an apparently meaningless, if cruel event:

    Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual aspirations. The white whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil; – Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks up the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practicably assailable in Moby Dick. [p. 153]

    Here, again, is the difference between Ahab and Ishmael, told this time in terms of the operations of language. Ishmael’s language, as we have seen, is characterised throughout by a state of constant expansion, his narrative growing with each new detail it takes in. By contrast, as it is presented here, Ahab’s language has become monomaniacally narrow, all the hurt he, or anyone, has ever experienced becoming ‘visibly personified’ in the whale itself. And crucially as it is visibly personified so also it becomes ‘practically assailable’. This is Melville at his most politically insightful because what he is describing here is the terrible logic of scapegoating, the transferring of resentment on to an individual or a group in order to make that resentment practically assailable. What Melville is relating, in other words, as he tells Ahab’s psychological history, is nothing less than the birth of a fanatic; Ahab’s fanaticism residing precisely in his willingness to concentrate meaning, to personify, in something else that which belongs in him. Above all, then, what Ahab can never do is accommodate thoughts and interpretations not his own. The whale, for him, must be evil, and he, in turn, is the very opposite of an ironist. He is also, as Melville is at pains to underline, the opposite of an enthusiast. So it is that following the loss of his leg Ahab is described as becoming one of

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