A Careful Disorderliness

“There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.”

At the time this review was written, the first entry on Goodreads described Moby Dick as ‘curious’ and ‘unwieldy’ – not an unfair description, but I think one with which readers of Melville’s classic will need to wrestle, for there is also a sense in which the essence and greatness of Moby Dick relies on its cumbersomeness. In this regard, Moby Dick put me in mind of an entry Kafka made in his diary regarding Dickens and ‘David Copperfield’;

“Dickens’s opulence and great, careless prodigality, but in consequence passages of awful insipidity in which he wearily works over effects he has already achieved.” (October 8th, 1917)

Before enthusiastically hammering tent pegs in Kafka’s camp, I think it should be born in mind that Kafka has the ideals of his own literature in mind, and that from a contrary point of view his writing could be accused of being the over-assiduous, literary equivalent of the hospital tuck. Dickens’s literary superabundance is crucial to his treatment of the crass overstatement a classically materialist vision of the world would impose. What is ‘curious’ in Melville, however, and what I believe distinguishes him from Dickens in this regard, is what most negative reviews here have objected too in Moby Dick: the seeming superfluity of many of the expository chapters and their inappositeness to the action of the novel (whereas, incidentally, Kafka is accusing Dickens of spelling things out too clearly). I would contend that Melville’s superfluity, his “opulence” and “prodigality”, is crucial to understanding and enjoying Moby Dick, and that readers tempted to “judicious” scanning are ruining the experience of this classic. For how much of Moby Dick is actually concerned with the story of Ahab’s quest? Well, proportionately, not a lot. To start with, the first 25 chapters could easily be squished into one without losing any narrative cohesion. Nevertheless, you would be hard pressed to find a reader willing to discard Ishmael’s ribald shore sequences. The fact is (and without detracting from the importance of its theme in the book) Ahab’s quest is the stuff of novellas, or a rather one-dimensional page-turner. So, if Melville’s epic is to be granted its due, attention must turn to what at first glance might seem superfluous.

At the beginning of Chapter 104, Ishmael tells us;

“From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, you could not compress him.”

The first sentence is a rather tongue in cheek self-acknowledgement on Ishmael’s part, but the second gestures towards an important paradox which threads Moby Dick: Ishmael’s prolix, scientific, inductive expositions on the sperm whale attempt, in a sense, to “compress”, or render comprehensible, the leviathan, but consistently spin off into metaphysical tangents. Indeed, across several captures Ishmael’s expatiation leads us further and further into, literally, the guts of the beast, until we are left with nothing more than a skeleton;

“They (vertebrae) mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on a Gothic spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry...The smallest, where the spine tapers away into the tail, is only two inches in width, and looks something like a white billiard-ball. I was told that there were still smaller ones, but they had been lost by some little cannibal urchins, the priest’s children, who had stolen them to play marbles with.”

Thus the sperm whale’s skeleton at its most impressive resembles spires reaching to the sky, and at its other limit its components are too small to be registered as meaningful at all – so even materially, let alone otherwise, the whale foils human pretence of complete comprehension. Another good example would be the sequence of chapters 55, 56 and 57 dealing with pictorial representations of the sperm whale. These chapters deal progressively with aboriginal misrepresentations, through an increasing sense of accuracy into scientific exactness, before reasserting the unknowable and mystical in firsthand experience which science fails to account for and which only finds true representation in –you guessed it - aboriginal “misrepresentations” and fancy. It is in this manner that Moby Dick approaches something we might nowadays dub prose poetry, much of the novel’s meaning being evinced from the relationship between elements rather than by linear plot.

Crucial in forming the relationship between these elements is the voice of the narrator. “Call me Ishmael” is the oft-quoted (and rather histrionic) introduction to the narrator of Moby Dick, and as we might imply from the imperative’s seeming arbitrariness (why not “Call me Cain”?), Ishmael’s voice is as quicksilver and difficult to pin down as the identity he cloaks in this nomination. But it is Ishmael’s rhetoric in Moby Dick which constitutes Melville’s one great, multifaceted literary device. This could be taken for a convoluted manner of accusing Melville of sententiousness (and there are not a few moments in Moby Dick where that might hold), but I’m here referring to what grows to be a complex relationship between the novel’s theme and voice, and I believe ignoring this relationship would leave Moby Dick resembling an impoverished King Lear. As is pointed out in one of the essays included in the “Contexts” afterward of this sesquicentennial edition, there are a lot of parallels to be drawn between Ishmael and Ahab, and not the least of these is a Shakespearean sense of stung humanity. At the commencement of the novel Ishmael, like Ahab, suffers from the metaphysical “thump” of the world, however unlike Ahab, Ishmael’s “drizzly November” of his soul is quickly assuaged by Queequeg in the opening chapters; Ahab by contrast will pursue what he interprets to be the source of his spleen with monomaniacal, almost suicidal force of will, discrediting the phenomenal world by pronouncing himself overseer of the noumenal and symbolic.

“In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whencesoe’er I came; wheresoe’er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights.”

The distance between Ahab and Ishmael is no better represented than by their senses of humour: Ahab quite simply has none, whereas Ishmael openly values recourse to laughter. In fact, the character of Ishmael reminds me of Poe’s attitude to the vacuum of modernity epitomised by the maelstrom, which entrances even as it devours. And as with flotsam whisked by the whirlpool, so odd elements and cast off fragments inhabit Ishmael’s narrative voice; there is the aforementioned expository voice, the sermon giver, there are the chunks of authentic sailor speak, “The Town-Ho’s Story, there are theatre conventions and there is the poetic in which some segments seem composed with such an ear for metre that I’m certain they would stand up to scanning, and there is also the voice which recognises itself and its own distortions;

“Oh, Ahab! what shall be grand in thee, it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and featured in the unbodied air!”

– and in that list I’m sure I’ve probably omitted some. This multifarious voice represents in many ways The Pequod’s motley crew, and also Ishmael’s own relativist opinions concerning culture and religion, which expand to the point where his view of the world becomes all-inclusive; a world view and a world voice which can synthesise diverse elements and support paradox and contradiction. Ahab’s linear monomania for the white whale represents the opposite of this vision, and in a moment of semi-conscious nightmare, while lulled by the glow of the try-works fires, Ishmael senses “something fatally wrong” with the Pequod’s mission;

“Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern.”

There are any number of approaches to Moby Dick which a review of this length can never hope to include, but I believe the key to enjoying this grandiose book is adopting something like Ishmael’s openness toward the novelistic form and relinquish ideas about what a novel should and should not be, and perhaps apply Ishmael’s, and perhaps Melville’s, exhortation to himself; “God keep me from ever completing anything.”