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There was a whale went forth
May 10, 2020 by imothyt


I blasted through 7 chapters since we last spoke about Ahab and his monomaniacal quest for the White Whale. This group could be called the “legs” of the book, or perhaps the “bones” of the book since chapters 100-107 concern the whale’s skeleton, Ahab’s leg, and the Captain of the Enderby’s arm (both made of ivory).

There’s little in these chapters in terms of deep thought and argument toward his central point but Melville spends some time wrapping himself in the romanticism of the time and lovingly describes a whale carcass dragged up from the sea to be used as a sort of natural church for some locals.

This is where I most enjoy Melville’s writing. His visual descriptions are often too heavily reliant on classic writings or art and the modern reader loses the visual impact I think the writer is going for. And the book ends up being either a wikipedia quest to even know what he’s alluding to or just a basic glossing over of what he’s writing about.

For example, if I say that “my two dogs flushed a flock of pigeons like Nelson bearing down on Villeneuve’s navy”, you will guess from the sentence that they just dispersed but the specificity of how Nelson ran columns of ships into the French fleet and cut them apart would be lost. At times I feel like I’m reading a 1850’s Dennis Miller cracking jokes about cultural references that are no longer relevant. This is how Moby Dick falls apart for modern readers: it becomes a morass of name-dropping and cultural references that we don’t get.

But Melville is a great writer and can often give us images that aren’t dependent on knowing some obscure book of the bible. When he describes things in nature, when he steps back from his reference texts, he’s enjoyable. And yet he still can’t help himself – even in these moments when he lets the reference library slip from his fingers he slips in an obscura:

Now, amid the green, life-restless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging- a gigantic idler! Yet, as the ever-woven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around him, the mighty idler seemed the sunning weaver; himself all woven over with the vines; every month assuming greener, fresher verdure; but himself a skeleton. Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.

The word “Arsacidean” is Melville at his worst. He’s referring to an ancient Roman-allied kingdom in Armenia (it’s bigger than that but, I digress). Why is this kingdom chosen? It would later become what we now know as the Parthian Empire, which spread as far as India. But why choose this specific less-used name for the kingdom? What images is it intended to conjure up? The entire chapter is set in a wood in this area and yet, all I can see are generic woods or maybe a Brazilian wooded area – neither of these exist in the geographical area of the Arsacid kingdom. And is there some deeper meaning to the choice of this kingdom? There are some hints; wikipedia claims (without reference) that Arsacid rulers called themselves the “kings of kings”, and that the Parthians attacked and defeated Herod in Judea. But altogether this is yet another of either one of Melville’s little jokes, the significance is lost, or Herman is simply name-dropping here.

The imagery is incredible, the argument in the text clear, and yet he almost can’t help himself but to set this scene in some obscure, ancient, forgotten subset of the Roman empire. Perhaps this is the literary equivalent of dick waving.

I would have loved to read Moby Dick lovingly written by a romantic writer who described in great detail the ship, the men, the whales, the ocean, whaling, and everything else, wrapped in a small story about some guy on a singular quest. He could have even been making some greater point the whole time about how everything is vanity.

I recently also read Whitman’s poem “There was a child went forth” and it starts like this:

There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part
of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass and white and red morning-glories, and white and red
clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,
And the Third-month lambs and the sow’s pink-faint litter, and
the mare’s foal and the cow’s calf,
And the noisy brood of the barnyard or by the mire of the pond-
side,

And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there, and
the beautiful curious liquid,
And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads, all became part
of him.

This is Whitman at his most elegant, describing mundane things with radiant beauty, a poet with a point to make about the way we collect memories, experiences, and they stay with us “they gave him afterward every day, they became part of him”.

And yet this poem begs us to stay child-like in our approach to life: for as he goes through the life of the child, and it collects older experiences (lust, inebriation, uncertainty, and nears death “the horizon’s edge”) yet Whitman ends the poem saying

These became part of that child who went forth every day, and
who now goes, and will always go forth every day.

Moby Dick has incredible passages which rise to the level of Whitman’s craft and yet it feels like Melville yearned to be one of the “cool kids” in early American writing. He tries too hard and while one one hand produced a book that is over-researched and too heavy with literary references, it is simultaneously one of the the worst-researched books ever. And yet he can shine in moments,

Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from that same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.

He wanted to be that man apart from the morass, he wanted “to produce a mighty book… (with) a mighty theme.” For “No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.”

Herman has a crack at poor John Donne, who while recognized as one of the greatest poets of his time, never produced a novel as great as Moby Dick.

Perhaps I’m a simple man. I wish that Melville sought the more child-like approach. Just tell us about whaling, man! What were the men like? What was the sea like?

I don’t care about Etruscan princes.

Qq