Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

I've been meaning to read this book for years. Three of my favorite authors (Nicholas Meyer of the even-numbered Star Trek movies, Mike Carey of The Unwritten, and science fiction juggernaut Ray Bradbury) have repeatedly expressed deep admiration for Herman Melville's 1851 novel, making extensive allusions to it in their own works. Heck, Bradbury loved it so much that he wrote the screenplay for the 1956 movie starring Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab! To endure as a "classic" for a hundred and fifty years and amass a fan-club that includes writers like those three, Melville must've done something right, right?

Boy, did he ever.

Moby-Dick is (if you'll pardon the obvious pun) a whale of a tale. And I mean that literally: it's a huge book, almost a thousand pages long. And it's not only whale-like in size, but in depth as well, sounding  the human soul and the human condition in ways that most other novels can only weakly imitate, covering themes as diverse as friendship, work, man's relationship with the natural world, madness, revenge, fate and destiny, human frailty, mortality, and about a hundred other themes besides.

I'll warn you before I go much farther, though: this book isn't for everyone. Obviously, if you have a problem with graphic depictions of animal harm, then this isn't the book for you; there are passages where the main characters are literally drenched in the blood of their prey, and Melville gets explicit when describing how they take the whales apart, winnowing these leviathans down into oil and meat and ivory. Likewise if you need female characters to catch your interest: there are only two minor female characters in the whole novel, and none appear after the Pequod sets sail. This is realistic for the setting, since women, as a rule, did not travel on whaling ships, but it's worth mentioning that the entire cast is basically one big sausage-fest.

That said, I think that this book will give you a lot of food for thought, if you give it a chance. I was struck early-on by how funny the narrator, Ishmael, can be when he turns his keen wit on his fellow men; he wryly remarks, upon being forced to share a bed with a Polynesian cannibal (who later becomes his best friend): "Better a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian." As a former schoolmaster, Ishmael is well versed in classical literature, European and American history, geography, the natural sciences, and even scriptural analysis. His web of allusions and references is so dense that any worthwhile edition will include endnotes for clarity's sake.

Moby-Dick is also surprisingly exciting, which I really didn't expect in a book that was written before the Civil War. There were several times where I needed to stop reading and consciously relax the muscles in my legs and arms, because I had tensed up with fear and anticipation. There were harrowing, horrifying scenes where I gasped aloud as men were killed, or maimed, or drowned, or dragged off into the deep blue sea. Melville does a great job of conveying how incredibly, insanely dangerous the whaling profession was. In an age without radios or flare-guns or life vests, these men piled into rowboats, six at a time, to chase down, harass, stab, and enrage animals who could weigh more than sixty tons! And if that's not enough, after fastening themselves to the whale with a giant meat-hook and being dragged behind it for miles, praying that their boat didn't swamp and the leviathan didn't decide to go for a deep dive. And all this they did with the whale-line, the rope which attached whale and harpoon to boat and crew, twisted around their necks and oars! Ishmael observes that "when the line is darting out, to be seated then in the boat, is like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you."

Speaking of whaling equipment, the edition I read has some really gorgeous Early American Modernist illustrations by Rockwell Kent, which helped to clarify and explain a lot of the obscure terminology and nautical tools to which Melville alludes. For someone like me who has never been to sea, I found Kent's illustrations really helped convey the sheer sense of size, the breathtaking power of whales and the sea in which they live. If you get a chance, I recommend an illustrated edition if you can find one.

Strange to say, I can't honestly believe that Melville/Ishmael is entirely at peace with his profession, with the business of hunting and killing whales. Not after reading Chapter 87: The Grand Armada. I don't know how you could write such a tender, touching encounter between whalemen and their prey and not be affected by it somehow. I think this passage helps to underscore the key differences between Ishmael and his captain, Ahab:

''And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre [of the herd] freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea, serenely revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.''

I take this to mean that Ishmael gives himself a little space, in the very heart of his being, where he doesn't let the world get to him, and can appreciate the beautiful things in life, in the sea, in his quotidian workaday life, and even in the whales he hunts. Ahab, on the other hand, can only see whales as embodiments of evil, living incarnations of "some unknown but still reasoning thing [that] puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask." Both men project their own inner natures onto their prey: one sees gentle creatures with complex lives and life cycles, the other sees only mindless brutes that exist only to torment and destroy mortal men.

...which leads me neatly to Captain Ahab himself. I saved him for the end because, asides from Moby Dick himself, Ahab is probably the most enigmatic character in the book. His name is practically synonymous with madness and doomed quests, but his arguments are weirdly compelling anyway. He's able to command the loyalty of his crew through a combination of personal magnetism, revenge fantasy, pseudo-religious symbolism, and appealing to the base human desire for violence and victory. Scholars have spilled oceans of ink on the subject of Ahab alone, so there's no chance that I'll really do him justice in these few-hundred words. Personally, I wonder if his mad quest for the White Whale really is the revenge-fantasy that most readers make it out to be. I wonder if, deep in his heart of hearts, Ahab knows this is a battle he can't hope to win. I wonder if his doomed quest for the beast that maimed him is really a form of suicide-by-whale.

Over the last century and a half, critics have claimed that the White Whale himself represents many things: God-with-a-capital-G, or Evil-with-a-capital-E, or the unstoppable and uncompromising power of Nature, or death/mortality, or the unfairness of life, or the ocean itself; the list goes on and on. Each critic seems to see something different in the White Whale's wrinkled brow and snow-white skin. Melville/Ishmael declines to define the White Whale too closely, preferring to let us use our own imaginations to discover what we see in him. Like an enormous movie-screen, we can project anything we want onto Moby-Dick's snowy flesh, but all of our assertions and projections only bounce off his chalky skin, leaving his insides, his true nature, untouched and unknowable.

[Movie Review] Moby Dick (1956)

Moby Dick (1956)
Director: John Huston
Starring: Gregory Peck, Richard Basehart, Leo Genn, Orson Welles
Screenplay: Ray Bradbury

For years I've been getting suggestions from authors whom I greatly respect and admire that Herman Melville's epic masterpiece Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, is a tale which is worthy of that nebulous and ill-defined distinction of being a "Great American Novel". I had never really given the book much thought, and never seriously considered reading it, until I realized that the recommendations were really starting to pile up: once I realized that this book had been recommended by no less than Nicholas Meyer, Mike Carey, even the astonishingly-talented Ray Bradbury, I decided I really had to see what all the fuss was about.

But I'm a man of limited means, so I thought I would rent the movie from my local library before committing to the novel. After all, that thing is HUGE! You might even say it's a whale of a tale.

"Haunting" is the best word that I can think of to describe this film. I think I finally understand why people keep reading the book, despite its forbidding size: the tale of Ahab and his mad, all-consuming quest for revenge has a way of gripping the mind. I keep finding myself thinking about this story and its characters, even several weeks after watching this film for the first time.

(Oh yeah, I guess there are spoilers ahead. Even though I'm pretty sure the statute of limitations on spoilers expired a long time ago.)

I'm sure you're all familiar with the basic outline of the story, even if you've never read it or seen the movie: Captain Ahab is maimed in an ill-fated encounter with an unusually large and intelligent white sperm-whale named Moby Dick, and spends the rest of his life (as well as his ship and the lives of his crew) in a Quixotic, suicidal quest to take his revenge against the monster who took his leg and scarred his face. Sure, there's all that stuff about Ishmael and Queequeg and Starbuck and all the rest, but make no mistake: Ahab is the real star here, even if it's the White Whale who gets the title.

Peck gives a commanding, sonorous performance as the crazed-but-brilliant Captain Ahab, master of the whaling ship Pequod. He's a bit more handsome than I expected Ahab to look, but Peck's Ahab is scarred more deeply inside than out. Ahab is not just a gibbering madman, though: he is an accomplished leader of men, an experienced sea-captain, and possessed of a brilliant analytical mind.

Orson Welles gives an unexpected cameo as Father Mapple, who delivers a sermon (on the subject of Jonah and the Whale, of course) which closes out the first act. Watching Welles transition smoothly from glowering intensity to thundering rage to pious tenderness is a fascinating study in emotional nuance from a master actor; do not skip this scene, however you might feel about listening to sermons.

As I watched, I was struck by the diversity of the Pequod's crew: in an era where segregation of the races was still enforced by law in many parts of the world, the crew of the Pequod includes Irishmen, Africans, New Englanders, Native Americans, African-Americans, and even a Polynesian Islander. The tasks assigned to various crewmen do not seem to hinge on race (though it's worth noting that the captain and all three of his mates are white), and race is not a barrier to promotion. After demonstrating his considerable skill with a harpoon, Queequeg is immediately recruited to the Pequod with a whopping sixtieth part of the voyage's profits (compared to Ishmael's measly three-hundredth).

Bradbury's screenplay is axiom-dense. It seems like every other line is some sort of pithy maxim that could easily spark hours of book-club conversations and classroom debates:

• "Better a sober cannibal [for a bedfellow] than a drunken Christian." ~Ishmael
• "Captain Ahab did not name himself. .Sign the paper now, and wrong him not because he happens to have a wicked name." ~Bildad
• "Captains can't break the law. They is the law, as far as I'm concerned." ~Flask

Moby-Dick is actually a very philosophical film, despite the blue-collar setting. Lots of thought-provoking dialogue on the nature of Man, the sea and man's place upon it, what rights (if any) one man may hold over another), the extent of obedience and duty to one's captain, and whether it is moral to seek revenge against an unthinking animal. As First Mate Starbuck warns his captain, "To be enraged with a dumb brute that acted out of blind instinct... is blasphemous." There's a lot of deep thought here, and (at least initially) the viewer might even feel some sympathy with Ahab's desire for what he sees as justice, when he explains why he acts as he does:

Look ye, Starbuck... all visible objects are but as pasteboard masks. Some inscrutable yet reasoning thing puts forth the molding of their features. The white whale tasks me. He heaps me. Yet he is but a mask. It is the thing behind the mask I chiefly hate. The malignant thing that has plagued and frightened Man since time began. The thing that mauls and mutilates our race... not killing us outright, but letting us live on... with half a heart and half a lung.

But over the course of the film, we come to have less and less sympathy with Ahab, as it becomes clear just how many people he's willing to take down with him. Besides risking his own life and (remaining) limbs, he risks his ship, the Pequod, which he does not own; the financial well-being of all the New Bedford families who depend on this voyage's success for their sustenance; the lives of his crewmen, and the wages they bring home to their own families; and even (some might argue) his very soul.

In the course of his quest, Ahab encounters other captains who have had their own run-ins with Moby-Dick. Captain Boomer, who lost his hand to the whale (an even greater blow to a seaman than the loss of a leg!), makes jokes about his hook ("Better than flesh and blood! Like her so much, I've a mind to have me other arm cut off,") and professes that he is simply grateful to be alive after such a harrowing encounter. Ahab, of course, refuses to hear the wisdom of these words, and plunges on. The second captain, Gardiner, has suffered an even more terrible loss than either Ahab or Boomer, though not to his own body: his twelve-year-old son was killed by the whale, and the body was lost overboard. Gardiner begs Ahab to stay and help him search for his son's body, but Ahab, throwing Christian charity aside, and continues in his quest.

Sadly, unlike the acting, the script, and pretty much everything else about this movie, the whales of Moby Dick are merely "passable" at best. The first whale-chase was convincing enough that I, having never seen real whales up close, briefly wondered whether they might be real. But the illusion only remains convincing because all we see of the fleeing whales are their humps: as soon as I understood that that was all the prop-makers had built, and this was all of them we were going to see, it became a little harder to suspend my disbelief. When the White Whale himself breaches for the first time, it is instantly clear that he's a puppet, and not an especially convincing one. To be fair, this was 1956, and filmmakers were fairly limited by the technology of their day, but it was still something of an anticlimax that the main antagonist looked so fake.

Despite its technological shortcomings, Moby Dick is absolutely worth your time and attention. If you've ever wondered whether the book is any good, but been scared off by its tremendous size and "SERIOUS BUSINESS" reputation, then this film is the next best thing. Your knowledge of this tale will impress the hell out of your friends at parties, and Peck's crazed, throat-shredding screaming of Ahab's final lines - some of the best last words ever penned - is worth the price of admission alone.

"Ye damned whale! From hell's heart I stab at thee! For hate's sake... I spit my last breath at thee...thou damned whale!"

Book Review: "Longutude," by Dava Sobel, 1995

Living in Warren and working in Ann Arbor is draining, on my gas tank, my time, and my sanity. To ease the monotony of the hour-long commute, I've taken to borrowing audio books from the Ann Arbor Library, to keep my mind occupied. Thanks to this, I've finally gotten around to reading (well, hearing anyway) a book that I've been meaning to read for no less than fifteen years: Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, by Dava Sobel.

Longitude tells the story of John Harrison, a West Yorkshire carpenter who built what is universally regarded as one of the most important clocks in human history, the marine chronometer, without apprenticeship or training in the principles of clock-making. His machine was nothing short of a miracle; in an age where clocks could gain or lose as much as an hour a day on dry land, Harrison’s fourth sea-clock, “H4,” kept time to within five seconds during a six-week sea-voyage from England to Jamaica! (My mind has officially been boggled by this Harrison guy.)

Longitude a fascinating read. More than once I found myself gasping with surprise or laughing with amazement at the "true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time." I had no idea how difficult and dangerous seafaring used to be. Even in calm weather, and with favorable winds, every sea-journey taken beyond sight of land involved becoming lost at sea at some point. Sailors could find their way by the stars, but Polaris could only tell you how far north or south you were; it was impossible to judge your position relative to east or west. “In literally hundreds of instances, a vessel’s ignorance of her position led swiftly to her destruction” [Sobel].

For example: in October 1707, Admiral Sir Cloudesley-Shovell of the H.M.S. Association was returning to England with five warships under his command, after a victory against the French navy. The Admiral and his navigators believed themselves charting a safe course for northern England, but a sailor told them that he had been keeping his own private reckoning of their position, and feared that they would be smashed to flinders on the rocky cliffs of the Scilly islands.

The Admiral had him hanged instantly. It was insubordination verging on mutiny for a sailor, an uneducated seaman, to second-guess the judgment of his betters; it invited dissent and rebellion. But within 24 hours, just as the unfortunate sailor had predicted, the cliffs of Scilly loomed out of the fog, and four of Admiral Cloudesley’s five ships “pricked themselves on the rocks and went down like stones” [Sobel]. In the space of five minutes, the rocks became the unmarked graves of nearly 1,5000 English sailors.

In light of this disaster, Parliament offered a prize of £20,000 (millions of dollars in today’s money) to anyone who could come up with an accurate and reliable method for telling time at sea, so that sailors could compare their perception of midday with the local time in their home-port, and figure out how far they were from home. Harrison’s clocks were entered into the contest, but Nevil Maskelyne, Harrison’s arch-nemesis, did everything in his power to discredit Harrison and deny him the prize, insisting that his own Method of Lunar Distances was far superior. (Even if it did take four hours to compute, and didn’t work on cloudy nights, new moons, or when the sea was rough.)

All in all, it’s a really good book. It made the science (and the danger, and the back-stabbing) come alive for me. John Harrison could easily be seen as a stuffy old man in a powdered wig, but this book made him flesh-and-blood, a real human being with real emotions, foibles, and shortcomings. Check this book out! Especially if you’re a scientist with children, or an elementary-, middle-, or high-school teacher who needs a way to get kids interested in science. It might be a bit dry for the ones who aren’t already into that stuff, but the book begins with a story about a massive shipwreck that's sure to hook anyone’s attention. After all, who can resist the lure of human tragedy?