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Moby-Dick or, The Whale

Herman Melville

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Feb 13, 2008 Werner rated it liked it

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"Call me Ishmael." This is one of the most famous first lines of a novel in world literature, but its very real significance isn't analyzed much. It's instructive that, unlike Chaim Potok's Asher Lev, the narrator here doesn't say the obvious, "My name is Ishmael." Why not? Why the more circuitous phrasing? The most obvious explanation that suggests itself is that Ishmael isn't his name; it's just what he wants to be called --and if it's a self-designation that he picks, he picks it for a reason "Call me Ishmael." This is one of the most famous first lines of a novel in world literature, but its very real significance isn't analyzed much. It's instructive that, unlike Chaim Potok's Asher Lev, the narrator here doesn't say the obvious, "My name is Ishmael." Why not? Why the more circuitous phrasing? The most obvious explanation that suggests itself is that Ishmael isn't his name; it's just what he wants to be called --and if it's a self-designation that he picks, he picks it for a reason, a reason bound up with associations that today's typically Bible-illiterate American readers don't recognize, but that typical American readers in 1851 would have. In the book of Genesis, Ishmael is Abraham's oldest son, his son by his slave Hagar, who is subsequently displaced as his heir by the birth of Isaac, Abraham's son by his wife Sarah. In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul, in passages like Galatians 4:21-31 and Romans 9:6-9, uses these two sons to develop a symbolic typology contrasting those who claim God's favor on the basis of natural descent and human law vs. those who simply receive it as a miraculous gift. But in the history of Christian Bible interpretation, those texts were taken by Calvinist expositors as literal "proof-texts" for the idea that God arbitrarily predestines some humans to be forgiven of sin and given eternal life in paradise, while the majority are just as arbitrarily predestined to be fiendishly tortured forever in hell. Calvinism bulked large, for centuries, in America's religious consciousness, shaping the way many Americans understood God and Christianity; and Melville, his religious upbringing run by his Dutch Reformed mother, was one of them. So his narrator's self-designation, deliberately associating himself with the NOT-chosen one, the one arbitrarily predestined for the eternal short end of the stick, has significance, and lets us know at the outset that we're in for a novel that has serious theological concerns. (More on that below.)

This is a novel that tries to be several things. At one level, it's a story of sea-going adventure (of a life-threatening sort); and parts of it succeed pretty well in being that. It's also a socially-conscious novel; it brings out the often-exploitative treatment of sailors by the 19th-century whaling industry, and through the character of Queequeg, the "cannibal" harpooner on the Pequod (though he may not be the cannibal that the white characters' cultural stereotypes make him out to be) the author challenges the racist assumptions of his day. (The narrator's conclusion that "the man's a human being just as I am" cut against the cultural grain then even more than it would now.) And it's a penetrating study of the psychopathology of vengeful obsession, personified by the (also symbolically named) Captain Ahab. Less successfully, it sets out to educate the reader about whales and whaling, a field where Melville had vast personal experience (and couldn't bear to relegate any of it to the discard pile :-( ) That aspect is less successful, not because it doesn't convey information --it conveys a TON of information!-- and not mainly because some of it's wrong (in the then-raging dispute over whether whales are fish or mammals, Melville comes down on the fish side), but because it's mostly not well-integrated into the narrative; it's steam-shoveled in via a number of eye-glazing info-dumps.

Finally (and in Melville's eyes, most importantly), it's a heavily symbol-laden novel, which tries to make ambitious philosophical statements about existential questions. The whiteness of the whale is of course the central symbolism, the decoding of which is something of a cottage industry in Melville criticism. As is often the case, much of this scholarly posturing ignores the fact that Melville didn't leave the meaning of the symbolism ambiguous --he devoted a chapter to explaining it, and states explicitly that it represents existential negation or nothingness at the heart of the universe (see especially the last paragraph of that chapter). It's a statement of philosophical nihilism as grim and comprehensive as anything to be found in the work of 20th-century writers like Hemingway and Lovecraft. Ahab's self-justification by appealing to the idea that God made him this way and predestined everything he does is another key philosophical passage. It parallels Master Prynne's God-makes-me-do-it defense in The Scarlet Letter; but where Hawthorne clearly views this as self-serving sophistry from a "fiend," Melville seems to think that it's true --he just doesn't like the idea that it's true. His resentment towards Calvinism's far from winsome God, and towards the disliked theology pounded into his head as truth at his mother's knee, colors the many references to religion in the book, such as Ishmael's gleeful twisting of Scripture to stand it on its head and make a supposed case for joining in idol worship, and Father Mapple's disparagement of the idea of an afterlife. (If all that the vast majority of humans can look forward to is a Calvinist hell, no matter what they think or do, the absence of an afterlife begins to seem positively cheery. :-( )

One point that should probably be addressed, in a review for modern readers, is the not-uncommon contemporary reaction that goes something like: "EEEK! This is a novel about whale-killers! Case closed; no thought necessary, it's politically incorrect, and therefore evil, EVIL!" Now, I'm a staunch environmentalist and proud of it; I'm completely opposed to whaling and support efforts to ban it and stamp it out. Our modern ability to recognize the validity of that position, though, is based on ecological knowledge people in the 19th century simply didn't possess. For Melville and his contemporaries, whales were simply animals that existed to be used as a legitimate exercise of humanity's "dominion;" oil lamp technology required their oil, and they were a vast, inexhaustible resource that would always be there to provide it. Nobody imagined that we could actually hunt a species to extinction, nor imagined what effect it would have on the ocean as an ecosystem if we did. We can say that their attitudes were ignorant. But it's not fair to brand them as morally evil, or to judge the literary merits of the book on the basis of modern knowledge that would have been totally alien and unbelievable to the writer and original readers. Dislike for whale-killing can be a legitimate reader-response criticism here, certainly; but it shouldn't be the sum total of our engagement with the novel.

IMO, this novel is overrated by modern critics, who like it primarily only because they find much of its theological/philosophical content as congenial (at least, if they only analyze it superficially) as I find it uncongenial. But there's enough positive content here, as indicated above, that I felt it earned its three stars. Melville is, among other things, a master of characterization, and he can sketch scenes, both on land and on water, with considerable vividness. To date, besides Billy Budd, Sailor, this is the only one of his novels I've read (I've read a couple of his shorter pieces as well). But I definitely do intend to read the others, sometime! ...more

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