Missing the Point of Moby Dick
Before I started reading Moby Dick, I thought I knew what this book was about. Captain Ahab swears vengeance on the sea monster that robbed him of his leg. The crew of the Pequod searches for the whale, finds him, and it turns out that overweaning lust for vengeance is a poor trait in a sea captain.
Not only is this the story I’d been told about Moby Dick, it’s the story that’s been adapted from Moby Dick. When the story’s retold into other genres, especially science fiction, the vengeance quest is the center—that’s how it works in Wrath of Khan and First Contact and Nova, for example, and Railsea is full of good-natured ribbing on mole-train captains and their vendettas against unfeeling giants of the deep.
I’m reading Moby Dick now and while Ahab’s an important part of the story, I’m struck by how small a part he is, and how little the book’s actually about revenge. For every one chapter about Ahab there are six or seven about the Pequod being a normal whaler, and for each such slice-of-life chapter, there’s another four or five about whales, their beauty, biology, history, mythology, the lies told about them, the way they move, the way they die. While Ahab’s psychodrama is cool, and Queequeg and Ishmael have an epic bromance, the book’s more about this vast world of whales and whalers and whaling. Ishmael’s experience of whaling seems less about man struggling with nature and more about man’s most direct and overpowering encounter with nature.
(For all Melville saw, the things he didn’t see are more interesting—I think we’re supposed to see Stubb as a charming jokester, which makes his off-the-cuff racism pretty overwhelming. It also never seems to cross his mind that all this hunting might actually endanger the whales as a species. I don’t know much about historical thoughts on extinction though. When did we first start to think that species might die out from human action?)
Anyway, I’d love to see a science fictional story with a whaling to revenge mix closer to the novel’s—where the captain’s quest for vengeance is even smaller and stranger set next to the immensity and majesty of his quarry, where the quarry’s closer to the center of the book. Making the whale a MacGuffin seems to miss the point.
