4 Not-Isaac and You

“Call me Ishmael.”  Our narrator has been but leanly introduced as the wild Not-Isaac.  Reading with an expectation of meaning, however, one might find more in this character’s slender account of himself.  For instance, he is not a character at all.  Rather, he signifies the absence of one.  His name bears no promise; homeless, wandering, one of the million sea-bound masses of Chapter One—that is, he is you.  Melville’s famous opening line asserts the character of all humanity.  This is why the line is so famous.

Melville spends a great deal of the book’s beginning explaining this identity.  The art of Moby-Dick slowly unfolds a conception of the human being at once singularly dense and deceptively simple.  Its power lies in continuous, profound revelation, tempered always with humane humor and compassion.  The opening chapters define the identity of Melville’s universal character.

First, Ishmael is no hero:

            “…nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook.  I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them.  For my part, I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever.  It is quite as much as I can do to take care of myself…” 

Ishmael scorns to be honored.  In his humility, in his humanity, he admits self-preservation takes all his time.  He strives to stay alive.  So Melville includes us all in Ishmael’s fortunes by the simplest, strongest empathy.

Second, Ishmael seeks shelter:

            “Yes, these eyes are windows, and this body of mine is the house.  What a pity they didn’t stop up the chinks and the crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and there.”

Human waywardness and suffering (Melville’s clearest influences, it seems to me, are Dante and Shakespeare) pervade this novel.  If the body is a house, the ship is too, and a poorly founded one.  Ahab himself, five hundred pages from now, will confess to Starbuck, “I am all aleak myself.  Aye! leaks in leaks! not only full of leaky casks, but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship…”  The novel fixates on this leakiness, wadding pages to plug the hole.  And it takes at least this many to appreciate the damp condition of things.  Our human body is a leaky house.

If we do not yet see the intense gravity of this assertion, we can at least relate to it.  The not-Isaac, one of the crowd, desires the sea, for the sea signals a search for home.  Ishmael’s search responds to three things: the cold, the darkness, his poverty.  All center in his body.  Melville writes intimately, sketching his portrait of humanity in a single face—a solitary, individual human person to whom the whole race familiarly responds.  (Incidentally, here the novel becomes distinctly American, and American fiction becomes distinctly applicable.)  We are cold, being alone.  We are dark, making mistakes.  We are poor, having at the last only ourselves.

The human body seems insufficient.  Ishmael at last houses himself with a man named Coffin.  His search leads to the grave.  Yet, woven in the bleakness of his beginning, Melville’s robust humor glints like strands of golden thread.  He closes with a mild pun:

            “But no more blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is plenty of that yet to come.”

It is Melville’s deepest secret, one he keeps to himself for a time, making us smile through pages of gloom, until we find at last glimmers of the deepest joy.

3 Means to the End

I want to turn for a moment—in Melville’s own fashion—to the question of meaning.  I base my reading of Moby-Dick almost entirely on a line in Chapter 1: “Surely all this is not without meaning.”  I apply this sentiment liberally.  So does Melville:

Chapter 7: “All these things are not without their meanings.”

Chapter 8: “What could be more full of meaning?”

Chapter 99: “And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher…”

Melville’s novel has great worth.  Therefore, I read it as though it were full of meaning.  To illustrate how, I have no better means than to share a passage from one of the best-written books in the English language: The Wind in the Willows.  The following occurs as Mole and Rat, the central characters, lose themselves in the Wild Wood.

“There seemed to be no end to this wood, and no beginning, and no difference in it, and, worst of all, no way out.

(Just so, Melville’s round world, if meaningless, seems “an empty cipher.”)  Continuing:

                ‘We can’t sit here very long,’ said the Rat.  ‘We shall have to make another push for it, and do something or other.  The cold is too awful for anything, and the snow will soon be too deep for us to wade through.’  He peered about him and considered.  ‘Look here,’ he went on, ‘this is what occurs to me.  There’s a sort of dell down here in front of us, where the ground seems all hilly and humpy and hummocky.  We’ll make our way down into that, and try and find some sort of shelter, a cave or hole with a dry floor to it, out of the snow and the wind, and there we’ll have a good rest before we try again, for we’re both of us pretty dead beat.  Besides, the snow may leave off, or something may turn up.’

                So once more they got on their feet, and struggled down into the dell, where they hunted about for a cave or some corner that was dry and a protection from the keen wind and the whirling snow.  They were investigating one of the hummocky bits the Rat had spoken of, when suddenly the Mole tripped up and fell forward on his face with a squeal.

                ‘O my leg!’ he cried.  ‘O my poor shin!’ and he sat up on the snow and nursed his leg in both his front paws.

                ‘Poor old Mole!’ said the Rat kindly.  ‘You don’t seem to be having much luck to-day, do you?  Let’s have a look at the leg.  Yes,’ he went on, going down on his knees to look, ‘you’ve cut your shin, sure enough.  Wait till I get at my handkerchief, and I’ll tie it up for you.’

                ‘I must have tripped over a hidden branch or a stump,’ said the Mole miserably.  ‘O, my!  O, my!’

                ‘It’s a very clean cut,’ said the Rat, examining it again attentively.  ‘That was never done by a branch or a stump.  Looks as if it was made by a sharp edge of something in metal.  Funny!’  He pondered awhile, and examined the humps and slopes that surrounded them.

                ‘Well, never mind what done it,’ said the Mole, forgetting his grammar in his pain.  ‘It hurts just the same, whatever done it.’

                But the Rat, after carefully tying up the leg with his handkerchief, had left him and was busy scraping in the snow.  He scratched and shovelled and explored, all four legs working busily, while the Mole waited impatiently, remarking at intervals, ‘O, come on, Rat!’

                Suddenly the Rat cried ‘Hooray!’ and then ‘Hooray-oo-ray-oo-ray-oo-ray!’ and fell to executing a feeble jig in the snow.

                ‘What have you found, Ratty?’ asked the Mole, still nursing his leg.

                ‘Come and see!’ said the delighted Rat, as he jigged on.

                The Mole hobbled up to the spot and had a good look.

                ‘Well,’ he said at last, slowly, ‘I see it right enough.  Seen the same sort of thing before, lots of times.  Familiar object, I call it.  A door-scraper!  Well, what of it?  Why dance jigs around a door-scraper?’

                ‘But don’t you see what it means, you—you dull-witted animal?’ cried the Rat impatiently.

                ‘Of course I see what it means,’ replied the Mole.  ‘It simply means that some very careless and forgetful person has left his door-scraper lying about in the middle of the Wild Wood, just where it’s sure to trip everybody up.  Very thoughtless of him, I call it.  When I get home I shall go and complain about it to—to somebody or other, see if I don’t!’

                ‘O, dear!  O, dear!’ cried the Rat, in despair at his obtuseness.  ‘Here, stop arguing and come and scrape!’  And he set to work again and made the snow fly in all directions around him.”

As the scene continues, heroic Ratty reveals a door-mat and, digging further, at last uncovers the door itself.  They are saved.

Moby-Dick is full of door-scrapers.  So often we only trip over them, but Melville has written them as meaningful items, each of which signifies the door.  This is the way to read the text.  This is the way Melville reads the round world itself.

“Call me Ishmael,” he begins.  A door-scraper.  Our narrator does not give his name.  Rather, he says, we might as well call him Ishmael.  Who is Ishmael?  As far as Ishmael is concerned, he is not Isaac—not the promised son of Abraham, through whom all God’s promises extend to His people, particularly that of Land.  Thus, the wilderness fathers Ishmael.  He (like Rat and Mole) loses himself in the Wild Wood.  And in this place, the round world quite often appears an empty cipher.  Ishmael surveys a place of confusion and injury.  Seeing the same, we too share his “everlasting itch for things remote,” searchingly uncomfortable with being lost.  Now we are really reading!  So as the novel continues, when we find a door-scraper at our feet, let’s conduct ourselves like wise old Ratty, else the Moles among us may forever remain in the cold.

2 The Epic Librarian

Before Melville begins, he must first begin.  The great epic poets—Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton—invoke the muses before they start to sing, begging inspiration from those goddesses of song.  Melville is no different.  (In fact, is Moby-Dick our best candidate for an American epic?)  Every great author must begin in this way, introducing his art before his art starts.  Thus, “Extracts” appears at the beginning of Melville’s text.

“Extracts” does not invoke the muses; still it might be read as an invocation.  In this introduction, Melville draws from a vast literary sea as many quotes and verses touching on whales as he can find: roughly ten pages worth.  He does not introduce himself as a poet, but rather as a

“mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a [Sub-Sub-Librarian].” 

Melville, therefore, casts himself not as a singer, as the epic poets do, but rather as a librarian, a reader of shelves and shelves of others’ books.  In other words, he is a reader of humanity.

(Read these quotes.  They give depth to the text, heightening the drama of Ahab’s bout with the whale and his boat’s with the sea.  Note: he begins with the Bible; he ends with a common sailor’s song.)

So what do these “extracts” mean?  Why does Melville include them in his text at all?  How do they serve as an introduction and a replacement for an invocation?  Melville tells us in a small paragraph introducing the “Extracts.”

            “Therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the higgledy-piggledy whale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel cetology.  Far from it.  As touching the ancient authors generally, as well as the poets here appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining, as affording a glancing bird’s eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own.”

Three observations about this passage:

 

First, in his efforts as a librarian, Melville scorns cetology—the scientific study of whales.  He is by no means a scientific observer or a mere expert on whales.  The full significance of this becomes apparent later in the text.  For now, Melville simply points out that his “extracts” are not derived from the whale itself, its presence in nature, scientific observation or dissection, but rather from literature.  Melville is a reader. 

So, secondly, take note of his objects of study, “the ancient authors” and “poets.”  Here Melville subtly indicates his implication among the ranks of the great literary giants of the past, while yet cheekily maintaining his humility as a “sub-sub.”  While he does not claim to write epic poetry, still he wants us to know he has read it, and concerns himself with equally weighty subject matter in his master-text.  

Thirdly, we can now identify this subject matter.  Melville calls his introduction “a glancing bird’s eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations, including our own.”  Melville does not concern himself with real whales so much as he does with the whale’s massive presence in the human imagination.  He does not invoke the muses, but rather the great imaginative power of humankind.  This, like the muses, inspires great works of art.  Melville finds in this great catalogue the crucial elements of being human.  He records in his novel that grave impression left by Leviathan on our mortal selves.  The whale, Moby Dick, finds its being in fiction; and we find in the whale a self-knowledge necessary to real life.

1 Living with Digression

It is not that Melville digresses, but rather that every thought of his honestly deserves to be written down.

For every person I meet who has read and enjoyed Herman Melville’s fixture Moby-Dick, I meet twenty who began the novel and gave up.  There is an enduringly consistent reason: Melville’s tendency to digress, his endless narrations.  Which chapter cracked your own sinking spirits?  “The Spouter-Inn,” “The Sermon,” “The Wheelbarrow?”  Or later, “The Advocate,” the redundant “Knights and Squires?”  Surely we must own, if we are honest, that “Cetology” did at one time wreck us all.  Even so, I insist that he does not digress, and I intend to prove it.  There can be no digression where there is such intricate intention.  Herman Melville is a near flawless narrator; Moby-Dick aptly, artfully, and astoundingly told.

(A universal truth: one does not read to know about books—one reads to know human life, and there is hardly any better way of knowing it.  This blog aims to teach the skill of interpreting literature--to really know--indicating the observations necessary to triangulate one’s position in a book, any book.  Melville’s novel is one of those that seem more full of human life, vitally portrayed.)  

The purpose of Melville’s verbosity appears quite early in the text.  In Chapter One, “Loomings,” in the place reserved for introduction, while discoursing on the general significance of the sea and its universal call to every living person, Melville writes, with utmost simplicity: “There is magic in it.”  He goes on to explain:

“Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it?  Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach?  Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea?  Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land?  Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy?  Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and make him the own brother of Jove?  Surely all this is not without meaning.”  (My own emphasis.)

This one last sentence expresses the whole design of Moby-Dick.  At least, as far as concerns digression.  Melville witnesses a world remarkably full of meaning.  He therefore cannot help but remark.  It might really be that simple.  He sees magic.  We will see it too, if we read.  Far from the crusty, rambling, delusional sailor readers might picture, Melville swells in his prose with amazing energy, he sinks with profound gravity.  He laughs.  He writes as though each reader stood by his side, an intimate friend, with whom he shares his ecstatic vision of this meaningful, magical human existence.  (Incidentally, if you passed over the quotation above, please attend to it now.  Melville begs you to.  This is why he goes on and on.  Read the prose, and see if he does not persuade.)

The bigness of his novel, then, does not result from his digression.  Do not believe the rumors about his having been paid by the page—it does not matter if they’re true.  The breadth of Melville’s writing simply reflects the profundity of his vision.  He stands as though upon a ship’s masthead (more on this later), with a wide view of the signifying world, and writes from this vantage.  His expansive chapters, at first glance, seem to cover a hundred varied topics (well, one hundred, thirty-five, precisely).  But this is not the case.  Rather, his one topic—the grandeur of the world and the insistent significance of human life in it, all centered in one Captain Ahab—spans miles and miles of artistic perspective.  Hence, pages and pages, yet intricately knit.   His novel contains so much because he cannot contain himself--more exactly, his words cannot contain his excitement at such abundant significance in our world.  "Surely all this is not without meaning!"

Here, therefore, I plan to discuss his observations each in turn, as I find them in the text.  I invite you to join me, looking with Melville at the wonder he saw fit to inscribe, in toto, in Moby-Dick.