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Vol. 42 No. 11 · 4 June 2020
The Last Whale
by Colin Burrow
Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick
by Richard J. King.
Chicago, 430 pp., £23, November 2019, 978 0 226 51496 3
Complete Poems
by Herman Melville, edited by Hershel Parker.
Library of America, 990 pp., £37.99, August 2019, 978 1 59853 618 8
Are you a Moby-Dickhead? If so, are you enough of a Moby-Dickhead to
have visited the Phallological Museum in Iceland to inspect a sperm
whale’s penis? This is one of the many intrepid expeditions undertaken
by Richard King in the course of researching Ahab’s Rolling Sea. His
book, like Moby-Dick itself, tells you everything you ever wanted to
know about whales but were too ashamed to ask. The fact that the sperm
whale’s penis, or ‘grandissimus’, is four and a half feet long is just
one of its juicier details. All but the truly dedicated cetologist will
learn the following from King’s book: that right whales can be
identified by the shape of the callosities around their blowholes, which
are infested with cyamids, or whale lice; that a whale’s spout or blow
contains snot as well as seawater; that ‘belugas have an extraordinary
range of sound out of their blowholes – think whoopee cushions and
bagpipes’; that a giant squid’s eye can be 11 inches in diameter; that
ambergris (which sells for $15,800 a pound) is found in the rectum of
only about 1 per cent of sperm whales and is an accretion that builds up
around indigestible material such as squid heads.
Herman Melville culled his knowledge of whales from his voyage aboard
the whaler Acushnet in 1841-42 and from authoritative texts ranging from
William Scoresby’s Account of the Arctic Regions (1820), through
encyclopedia entries, to Frederick Bennett’s Narrative of a Whaling
Voyage round the Globe (1840). King tests this information against
up-to-the-minute data from modern marine science. It turns out that,
with due allowance for the state of knowledge in the 1850s, Melville got
a surprising amount right about whales: their size, their bone
structure, their mass, even their emotional lives. Melville knew that
the destruction of the Pequod by the white whale was physically
possible, King argues, because in 1820 the Nantucket ship Essex was
rammed by a sperm whale and sank. King even cautiously allows, after
what one hopes was a carbon-neutral visit to the cetologist Marta Guerra
Bobo in New Zealand, that a sperm whale could bear grudges against an
Ahab, or can at least in theory recognise individual humans. Anyone who
isn’t completely turned off by sea creatures will enjoy surfing the
waves of information that roll genially from this book.
Ahab’s Rolling Sea also has a big thesis. King argues that Moby-Dick
offers a ‘proto-Darwinian decentring of the human and the elevation of
the whale’. Moby-Dick, King claims, is an ecological fiction that not
only displays sympathy for whales but sets acquisitive human
perspectives against the wide and impersonal horizon of the sea.
Melville’s novel can offer ecological counsel for today since it
encourages us to think about the violence mankind is doing to the
natural world. The statistics support this argument: the global
population of North Atlantic right whales, for instance, has dropped
from an estimated twenty thousand before industrial-scale hunting in the
19th century to 458 today.
It would be hard to fault either the motives or the facts underlying
King’s ecological zeal. But it’s also hard to believe that Moby-Dick
belongs near the top of any global list of ecological fictions. Melville
does ask ‘whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase ... whether
he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale,
like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and them himself evaporate in
the final puff’. But he then contentedly concludes that whales aren’t
actually being exterminated as a result of being hunted: they’re just
changing their routes to avoid whalers, or are ingeniously hiding
beneath the ice caps. ‘Hunted from the savannas and glades of the middle
seas, the whale-bone whales can at last resort to their polar citadels,
and diving under the ultimate glassy barriers and walls there, come up
among icy fields and floes; and in a charmed circle of everlasting
December, bid defiance to all pursuit from man.’ King says that
‘Ishmael’s belief that whales can survive the pressure of American
hunting in the 1850s reflected the mainstream knowledge of his day.’
Fair enough, but that does nothing to boost his ecowarrior credentials.
It’s possible to filter out the krill from the turbid mass of Moby-Dick
and get a nutritious meal of ecological concern, but quite a lot of
other stuff gets lost along the way – including, perhaps, the main thing
that makes this magnificently self-indulgent cetological feast so
delicious. Whaling could produce a great novel because it’s an activity
in which a lot of what are now distinct arts and sciences messily
converge. Hunting meets marine biology meets global economics meets
geography meets healthcare meets carpentry meets ethnography – and one
could add politics, since the ship is a micropolitical climate ruled by
one man but manned by a hodgepodge of peoples. Melville’s mingling of
ecology into those other concerns was both peculiarly mid-19th-century
and peculiarly him. He is fascinated by whales and the way they live,
but he also can’t stop talking about human ingenuity: the skill required
to balance at the front of a harpoon boat on a surging sea while hurling
your weapon at the right spot to kill a whale, the power required to
peel the blubber in strips from the body of a whale without making your
ship capsize, the care required to run a furnace on a wooden ship
without turning the whole structure into a flaming hell. The perspective
of Moby-Dick is profoundly anthropocentric, and its scientific
inwardness with whales is absolutely a byproduct of their destruction,
as is apparent from the virtuoso chapter in which Melville invites us
literally to get inside a sperm whale’s head:
Let us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand, cant
over the sperm whale’s head, that it may lie bottom up; then, ascending
by a ladder to the summit, have a peep down the mouth; and were it not
that the body is now completely separated from it, with a lantern we
might descend into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his stomach. But
let us hold on here by this tooth, and look about us where we are. What
a really beautiful and chaste-looking mouth! from floor to ceiling,
lined, or rather papered with a glistening white membrane, glossy as
bridal satins.
The whale’s body is beautifully open to the human potholer because men
have cut its head off.
In the wistful ruthlessness of his anatomical fictions Melville has much
in common with one of his main sources, William Scoresby. Scoresby was
both a harpoonist and a naturalist. His Account of the Arctic Regions
combines tales of derring-do – stories about harpoonists having their
legs sliced off by the rope of their own harpoon, of seamen pulled from
the icy waves – with exact descriptions of local fauna. Philip Pullman
knew what he was doing when he borrowed Scoresby’s surname for the
entrepreneurial balloonist Lee Scoresby in His Dark Materials, since
both Scoresbys manage to be at once sentimental and dispassionate polar
adventurers. The original Scoresby describes how whalers can lure a
nursing mother to her death by killing her calf:
She loses all regard for her own safety, in anxiety for the preservation
of her young; – dashes through the midst of her enemies; – despises the
danger that threatens her; – and even voluntarily remains with her
offspring, after various attacks on herself from the harpoons of the
fishers ... There is something extremely painful in the destruction of a
whale, when thus evincing a degree of affectionate regard for its
offspring, that would do honour to the superior intelligence of human
beings.
From one angle this is ecologically aware and indeed cetocentric. From
another it’s the voice of an ultra-efficient killer. Melville is far
subtler than Scoresby, but displays a similar mixture of perspectives.
His curiosity about nature co-exists with and derives from a ruthless
desire to work out how best to exploit it.
So quite a lot of fishful thinking is required to support King’s claim
that Moby-Dick is an ecological fable. And when he moves from whales to
humans his perspective seems askew. He claims that ‘Ahab on his ivory
leg serves as a symbol for modern consumerism, and the trampling of
nature that can never curb its sharkish, sea-hawkish appetite. More
specifically, Ahab easily stands in for Big Oil, the ceaseless quest for
fossil fuels.’ Certainly whale oil was the Big Oil of its day: Scoresby
records that it sold for £50 or £60 a ton in 1813 and expresses concern
that peak whale might have passed because of the growing use of coal gas
for lighting. Identifying Big Oil with a self-destructive headcase like
Ahab has instant appeal today, as global mean temperatures continue to
rise towards the point at which many kinds of animal, including human
ones, will surely die. But reading Ahab as an allegory of
self-destructive consumerism risks abstracting from Ahab everything that
makes him Ahab. The reason the crew of the Pequod get restive with the
captain is not because Ahab risks cracking the ship’s timbers by filling
it up with more tons of whale oil than it can support. They – including
the super-diligent Starbuck, who much more than Ahab is the Pequod’s
conscientious capitalist – are uneasy because Ahab doesn’t care enough
about killing whales in general. He only cares about getting revenge on
the one particular whale who has cost him his leg.
Moby-Dick is such an extraordinary and impossible success not because
it’s a fable about man’s environmental overreach but because it is
several distinct things at once, things that at a radical level don’t
add up. It displays the fascination of the hunter with the anatomy and
habits of the hunted and it does so with such intensity that the
fascination turns into something like love. It takes you inside the
process of learning things about other species and the process of making
money from killing them. Then, stuck right into the middle of that
intoxicating brew are huge shards of Hamlet and ‘The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner’ in the form of the madly vengeful Ahab. If you were at a
creative writing class and said you wanted to write a novel embodying
the obsessive imagination of the romantic hero in the captain of a whale
ship as a modern Hamlet plonked in the middle of a factory floating on
the sea, your instructors would no doubt be encouraging, because that’s
their role, but would gently tell you that it wasn’t quite time to give
up the day job. But that completely non-viable combination is what gives
this infinitely frustrating and ambling novel the propulsive energy of a
time bomb, lifting it out of the fishery into the realms of cultural
critique. The impersonal violence of energy-seeking capitalism, which
boils down distinct entities into a fungible oil, is hijacked by the
obsessive energy of a post-romantic individual. This particular man,
Ahab, wants this particular whale, Moby-Dick, and will seek it through
every possible sea, regardless of all physical or financial risk.
This means that the Satanic obsessive Ahab is not in league with the
shipowners and whale-oil burners, nor is he the friend of Victorian
ladies with their baleen stays. He’s the arch-enemy of all these. When
the whale oil starts to leak into the Pequod’s hold Starbuck says they
must ‘up Burtons and break out’ – raise the winches and unpack the hold
– because of the lost profit that will result. ‘What will the owners
say, sir?’ the deferential Starbuck asks. ‘Let the owners stand on
Nantucket beach and outyell the Typhoons,’ Ahab replies. ‘What cares
Ahab? Owners, owners? Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck, about
those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience.’ If Ahab had,
say, proudly worn the badge of WhaleCorpTM embroidered on his bosom and
personally sucked the spermacetti from the heads of all the sperm whales
in the multitudinous seas, barrelling it up to make his shipowners
massively wealthy and provide his crew with their pitiful share of the
spoils (in Chapter 16 Ishmael is tricked into signing up for a three
hundredth ‘lay’ or share of the profits by two of the owners of the
Pequod) there would be no Moby-Dick. It would just be Barrett’s
touristic whaling voyage or Scoresby’s Arctic, whaling as industry with
a sideline in marine biology. Moby-Dick doesn’t give the last laugh to
the ocean or to man or to the environment. It asks how we can marry the
obsessions of individuals together with the intrinsically
deindividuating industrial-scale processes that melt life down into
money. The conclusion – we can’t, or at least not without wrecking the
entire ship and killing the crew – is indeed not great news for
shareholders in whale boats or for whale-oil futures, but Moby-Dick is
probably more on their side than on that of Ahab. The wrecking of the
Pequod is the result of human obsession rather than unsustainable
fishing practices or ecological collapse. Certainly one can see in
Melville’s heirs – notably in the John Steinbeck of Cannery Row – a
premonitory recognition of the damage done by human beings to marine
ecology, but Melville’s gaze is always that squinting vision of the
mid-19th-century adventurer-cum-naturalist-cum-money-maker, for whom a
whale is a fascinating creature partly because of what you can get for
its blubber, and partly for the beauty you can see inside when you chop
off its head.
The mess that is Moby-Dick didn’t go down well with its early
audiences. Readers who had absorbed Melville’s semi-autobiographical
ripping yarns about adventures in the South Seas in Typee (1846) and
Omoo (1847) just didn’t get it. That’s probably because Moby-Dick’s
ambitions are so thoughtfully contradictory, though it may also be
because Melville tried so hard to cram all his reading not only of
encyclopedias and travel narratives but also of Shakespeare and
Coleridge into this overladen sea chest of a book. The commercial
failure of Moby-Dick was one reason Melville decided later in life to
become a poet. He wrote verses on the American Civil War, which chiefly
celebrated victories of the North. These combine incongruous traces of
Coleridgean language (‘The moon looked through the trees, and tipped/The
scabbards with her elfin beam’) with tub-thumping patriotism (‘Faith in
America never dies;/Heaven shall the end ordained fulfil,/We march with
Providence cheery still’). Melville then spent years writing what is
often said to be the longest poem published by an American. This is
Clarel (1876), an 18,000-line epic – almost twice as long as Paradise
Lost – about the journey of a young American called Clarel through the
Holy Land. Based on Melville’s own journey to Palestine in 1857, it
relates Clarel’s meetings with a range of sages, nationalities and
religions, and explores in some very long dialogues his religious doubts
and those of his fellow travellers.
Like Moby-Dick, Clarel was not a commercial success. Three years after
it came out Melville authorised his publisher to destroy the unsold
copies. But literary critics can seldom resist the temptation to take a
long, failed work by someone who was capable of great writing and find
greatness in it. This has led to an uptick in the reputation of Clarel
over the past few decades. To give Clarel its due, it is a work of huge
ambition, which tries to explore the nature of varying shades of
Christianity and other faiths in depth and detail. But it is also,
sadly, an outright, relentless, irredeemable stinker of a poem. Its
tetrameters feel like tourniquets to thought, making its veins stand out
and its circulation fail. There are poets who think in verse, and there
are poets for whom verse can generate stresses and forces that make them
express things they wouldn’t otherwise have been capable of thinking.
Melville thought he was one of these, but he was actually one of the
much larger cohort of poets who reckon that poetry will lead them into
sublime insights, and maybe fame too, but who tie themselves into knots
as they seek to circumvent what are to them – because they aren’t really
poets – the unnatural obstacles of rhyme and rhythm. One of Melville’s
favourite tricks in Clarel is to use a series of questions to reach out
into the ineffable unknowable sublimity of religious belief. It seldom
works:
What reveries be in yonder heaven
Whither, if yet faith rule it so,
The tried and ransomed natures flow?
If there peace after strife be given
Shall hearts remember yet and know?
Thy vista, Lord, of havens dear,
May that in such entrancement bind
That never starts a wandering tear
For wail and willow left behind?
That means, roughly: ‘Do dead people remember what it was like to be
alive, or is the sight of God so glorious that they don’t look back?’
What instantly marks it as god-awful verse is the way it pairs things
together with the conjunction ‘and’. Does it conjoin the unlikely in
order silently to advance a thought? No: ‘tried and ransomed’ deals with
the judgment of the dead briskly enough, but ‘remember yet and know’
really just is ‘remember’ stretched out so that it rhymes with ‘flow’.
And ‘wail and willow’? Puhleease.
The only plausible defence of Clarel is that the difficulty of making
sense of what it says a lot of the time creatively mimics the way its
hero can’t quite understand himself and his world. That defence,
however, is sophistry. Clarel is hard to understand not because it’s
profound but because Melville is making himself up as a poet in it. As
you read you can see him drowning in ambition and clasping hold of bits
of Tennysonian or Keatsian or Coleridgean or Wordsworthian flotsam to
keep his poor floundering head above water. It is a mark of Clarel’s
complete failure as a narrative poem that several people die in the
course of it, including (spoilers, but if any poem deserved to be
spoiled it’s this one) the hero’s great love, Ruth, but with most of
these deaths you aren’t quite sure who among its large cast of
characters has actually sat down to gaze at a tree and succumbed to the
whateverness of the vastness and kicked the bucket (or, to translate
that into Melvillese, ‘So undisturbed, supine, inert –/The filmed orbs
fixed upon the tree’), but you’re quite sure that you don’t care. The
journey through the Holy Land has none of the forward motion of a
traditional epic quest, let alone the obsessive energy of Ahab. That is
part, for its admirers, of the poem’s brilliance: it offers a mental
pilgrimage, which circles back on itself to mimic its age of religious
doubt. But actually the journey of Clarel through the Holy Land never
escapes from the tedious rut of cultural tourism: you go and see the
Holy Sepulchre and drink in its awesomeness, then you go on into the
desert, and – behold! – it is deserted (sublimely, scarily, profoundly),
and then you eventually in a great pointless circle end up back in
Jerusalem, largely unchanged by the experience. The moral is: stay at
home, folks.
The epic poem, as a genre, encountered profound problems when it began
to seem unnatural or politically contentious to found it on a narrative
of national or ideological expansion. In Wordsworth’s Prelude you can
often hear the strain of developing an alternative to such a story, and
in Wordsworth’s narrative of his youthful journey through France and
Switzerland in particular there is a risk that the poet’s experience
will simply become that of the tourist, sampling the delights of the
world and then just moving on. The overarching story of the growth of
Wordsworth’s mind and the motions of his memory do just about serve to
egotise the epic even in The Prelude’s most touristic moments. In
Moby-Dick, Melville produced a different version of the epic of the ego,
in which a commercial journey across the sea becomes not an act of
heroic nation-building or of capital accumulation but a covert suicide
mission. But Clarel doesn’t manage a similar transformation of the
genre. Oodles of Miltonic exoticism, ‘Plate of Byzantium, stones and
spars,/Urim and Thummin, gold and green;/Music like cymbals clashed in
wars/Of great Semiramis the queen’, aren’t enough to give it
intellectual colour.
Some of Melville’s shorter poems have tiny flashes of something that
might be good. ‘The Ravaged Villa’ offers faint soundings of Eliot in
‘The spider in the laurel spins,/The weed exiles the flower’, until you
juxtapose it with Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’ (‘What will the spider do/Suspend
its operations, will the weevil/Delay?’) and you realise how lame it is
by comparison. I can almost imagine Wallace Stevens enjoying ‘The
Aeolian Harp at the Surf Inn’: ‘Listen: Less a strain ideal/Than Ariel’s
rendering of the Real’, but then I imagine Stevens switching off as
Melville’s fleet-footed muse abandons him in the very next line with
‘What that Real is, let hint/A picture stamped in memory’s mint.’ And
the shorter poems do have moments of pure chucklability: ‘Sport ye thus
with your spoonies, ye fair,/For your mirth? nor even forbear/To juggle
with Nestors your thralls?’ Eh?
‘If a sensuous relish for the harmonious as to numbers and the thoughts
they embody and a magic facility in improvising that double harmony
makes a poet then Zardi is such,’ Melville writes in one of the
uncollected pieces gathered in Hershel Parker’s volume of his poems.
According to that definition Melville really should have stuck with
prose. The poems are, however, beautifully presented (as always) by the
Library of America, though the elegant thinness of the paper on which
they are printed will augment the illusion that one has made no real
advance, despite all the hours spent reading nigh-on a thousand pages.
The edition has a very full timeline of Melville’s life, and useful maps
of Clarel’s journey, but if one flicks to the back to consult the rather
bony notes, Parker’s decisions as to which phrases and names need a
gloss can seem arbitrary. We are told that Phocion is ‘an honourable
Athenaeum politician’, which is a little odd but is at least trying to
help, but there is no note on (inter alia) ‘oriflamme’, ‘bobolinks’,
‘xebecs’ (a word for the worst possible hand in Scrabble?), in
understanding which many readers may feel more at sea than they do with
the ship’s parts and whale bones of Moby-Dick.
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