Wrapping Your Arms Around a Whale,
Or (At Least) Four Ways of Looking at a Dick

The discerning reader will notice that what follows here is less a fully formed essay and more a series of shards, or attempts at understanding. In other words, what I’ve done here lies far from wrapping my arms around the beast of Melville’s novel. And yet, it is included here. In thinking about ideas of (in)completion and (im)perfection, especially in regard to this project, it seemed to me important to present all the shards – not just the prettier specimens. 

When a text, a work, a novel, is as massive and intimidating, as storied and mythologized, as is Moby-Dick, perhaps the only way to get your arms (or head, as the case may be) around the creature, the work, the tome is to break it up, break it down, greet the fragmented tale with suitably postmodern fragmented perception. If there are, with apologies to Wallace Stevens, thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, there have to be more than a few ways of looking at a dick.

Canonical texts come and go, the tides of various literary fashions and culture wars wash in and out. Thackeray and Trollope, to name just two white men, seem have given way to Hurston and Morrison, to name just two women of color, the wave bearing this great white whale seems to have staying power. When an educated reader approaches such a “great” work of literature, such a clear and stalwart presence in the canonical pantheon, one that has resisted the batterings of recent decades, s/he does so with the perhaps-crippling knowledge of the whale’s place in the literary global consciousness of generations. While graduate students are charged with “making a contribution” and attempting to “say something new,” the reader with an iota of awareness of literary history knows the near impossibility of this charge when it comes to such a written-, thought-, and talked-about work as Moby-Dick. Yet, as Samuel Beckett has his characters say in The Unnamable: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Moby-Dick is one of those novels that has become a cultural touchstone, an institution. Writers, readers, people at cocktail parties refer to “the great white whale”; they invoke Ahab, make mention of Queequeg. Essayists, journalists, book reviewers, comedians say, “Call me Ishmael.” But who among these have actually read the book? I wonder.

It is so massive, so discursive, so digressive, so littered with historical and literary allusions and references, embroideries and wordplay, that this reader, for one, felt that undertaking its reading was a quest akin to Ahab’s search for Moby-Dick, an all-consuming journey that at times felt endless, no horizon in sight. It would not be surprising if Melville himself experienced similar feelings during the writing of the book. Here, at the end of this one reader’s quest, her copy of the book littered with Post-its of every color and shape, the pages underlined and marked with stars, exclamation points, and asterisks, are just four of the shards of perception left in the whale’s wake.

1. Disability.

Among the many iconic features of this iconic book, one that stands out, as it were, is the disability of Captain Ahab. He is the novel’s central figure, and it is his quest for Moby-Dick, his obsession with the whale, that forms its central action. The characteristic that marks him in the reader’s mind, first and foremost, is the fact of his missing leg. He is deformed, crippled, handicapped, legless[1], a gimp, unstable, in need of assistance, different than the others on the Pequod. He is alien, other, a grotesque, monstrous, a monster, and, with his leg made of ivory, an intoxicating, boundary-blurring, category-defying mix of human and animal, what Donna Haraway would call a “cyborg.” And top it all off, Ahab was neither born with his disability nor did he suffer an accident at the hands of some whimsical fate. He brought it on himself in his quest for Moby-Dick. In the time-honored tradition of writers using a disability as metaphor and signal, rather than an integral part of a character’s being, Ahab’s not only acts as a metaphor for his inner turmoil but it is also a loud-and-clear signal of his moral failing.

His disability sets him apart from his crew. He would be apart from them in any case, by virtue of his status and authority as captain, but his missing leg makes him doubly different – one might even say, exponentially different, since the difference occasioned by a physical disability is of a whole other order than a mere difference of rank. Melville makes the point that “Islanders seem to make the best whalemen,” giving them the whimsical name of “Isolatoes” and describing them as each “living on a separate continent of his own” (107). Yet Ahab is the Isolatoe par excellence among this company. He may be fore or aft, on deck or below decks, but he is almost always alone, isolated, separate. As Rosemarie Garland Thomson notes in Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature: “Ahab is, perhaps above all else, different from other men. … The outer mark of his difference is his ivory leg …. Ahab’s body is violently and definitively separated from the rest of the community on the Pequod.”

2. Maleness.

The novel’s world is strikingly male in two senses. One is the absence of women; the other is the presence of men and their harpoons, of their desire for each other, what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “male homosocial desire.”

The Pequod’s men are for the most part orphans, unmarried, disconnected and unmoored from society. Whether Melville sees them as poor wanderers, adrift and bereft without the supposedly civilizing company of women, or as autonomous seekers after agency, truth, and their destiny, unencumbered by the imprisoning company of women, is not clear to this reader. Perhaps one of the richnesses of the novel lies in this ambiguity. Tara Penry, in her article, “Sentimental and Romantic Masculinities in Moby-Dick and Pierre,” posits the absence of women as an implicit “critique of Romantic masculinity” (235), saying that “there is ample evidence that women suffer in consequence of a man’s narcissistic quest at least as much as men suffer from feminized propriety” (236).

Of the many scenes in the novel of male-on-male desire, yearning, love – some more explicit, some more subtle; some more symbolic, some more “real” – none comes close to the scene at the Spouter Inn between Ishmael and Queequeg. It is astonishing in its audacity, its clear delineation of what is happening, what you might call its “out-ness.”

Melville’s first audacious step is in Chapter 10, “A Bosom Friend,” when he likens Ishmael and Queequeg to “man and wife” as they lie in their bed at inn, nothing that “there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. … Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair” (57). Then, in the next chapter, “Nightgown,” Melville introduces out-and-out physicality, with “Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine” (57) These are no mere friends. “Man and wife” comes closer to the truth of their matter.

3. Tale-telling.

Moby-Dick, it has been noted, is the first post-modern novel. There are many reasons this can be said. Perhaps first and foremost, there is the sneaky surprise, revealed only at the book’s close, of the narrator’s identity, coupled with the novel’s very first line, the by-now-iconic “Call me Ishmael,” to which we may not have given much thought when we first read it, but to which we are forced to return, to reckon and wrestle with, after arriving at the final revelation of our tale-teller’s identity. And once we start this reckoning and wrestling, we are besieged by questions: Why are we to call the narrator this name, this biblical name, which means “outcast”? Is this his true name? Why does he have no surname? Is it because he has been cast out from the family of humankind, human society? Is this the reason he embarks on his journey on the Pequod in the first place, even though he has, from the very beginning, grave doubts (which he tamps down and ignores). Or is he, rather, an outcast from the family of the Pequod, that odd and traumatized all-male society? For the entire crew of the unlucky ship ends up in each other’s company, all except for Ishmael: As we find out at the book’s end, they are together either in the great hereafter (if you believe in that sort of thing) or at the floor of the ocean that has animated and dominated so much of the book.

Then there is the way Melville allows himself his innumerable digressions and embroideries, his enumerations and lists, his showings-off of perhaps-useless, perhaps-useful knowledge, information, anecdote, historical incident (often, this seems to be yarn-spinning for the sake of yarn-spinning, a bit of “see what I can do”). Just when he seems to veer off course, he triumphantly brings himself back to his main trajectory. His narrative is not at all a straightforward, linear one. It is circuitous, full of loop-de-loops and feints, muchness and excess, side trips and voyages that perhaps mirror that of the Pequod. Melville stops to discuss, of course, various aspects of the art and craft and industry of whaling in great technical detail; the custom of gamming (the social interaction of ships that cross paths on the sea; bristles; whiteness (so important in this book); sperm oil (the memorable spermaceti-squeezing chapter that perhaps has no rival in this book for weirdness and barely contained under the surface homosexual desire. The book is world-spanning. Just as the Pequod’s journey spanned the globe, Melville seems driven in his quest to jam-pack practically everything under the sun into his tale.

But perhaps foremost is the self-consciousness with which Melville constructs his narrative. He breaks the Brechtian fourth-wall repeatedly, referring to the reader as “you,” reminding the reader (and himself) of what, exactly, is going on here: a tale is being told, a book is being read, a story is being related. Melville makes explicit the parallels between Ahab’s obsessive pursuit of the white whale and his own quest to fill white, blank page after white blank page. Here, in stark terms, is his claim to veracity, to possessing the truth of the story: “For unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth” (268).

4. Nature and the Animal.

The place of nature in Moby-Dick is vexed. Melville projects much onto nature in the form of the sea. He, along with Ahab, sees it as giver and taker of life, fearsome and sublime. As William Cronon notes of in his essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”: “As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires.” Humans have constructed nature and the sea, as surely as Ahab has constructed his whale.

What is especially curious about Ahab’s relation to Moby-Dick is that he both sees him in human exceptionalist terms – that is to say, as irretrievably other, different – and he at the same time imbues the whale with human motives and emotions. Ahab is human, while the whale is animal, “something irreducibly nonhuman, something profoundly Other than yourself,” as Cronon says. Yet how then to account for Ahab’s view of Moby-Dick as a vengeful, spiteful being with motives and aspirations all his own?

Melville puts it to the reader, head-on: “I would have you investigate it now with the sole view of forming to yourself some unexaggerated, intelligent estimate of whatever battering-ram power may be lodged there. Here is a vital point; for you must either satisfactorily settle this matter with yourself, or for ever remain an infidel as to one of the most appalling, but not the less true events, perhaps anywhere to be found in all recorded history” (267).

Another interesting facet of the human/nonhuman duality of the whale is that he is given a name, that most human of characteristics. To be sure, Melville explains that other “famous whales” (171) were accorded this honor, but it nevertheless remains noteworthy in this novel that Ahab’s great foe, the object of his all-consuming quest, has a name. For while much is made of the blankness, the whiteness, of Moby-Dick, he has none of the anonymity of that other pale specter, the ghost, who may haunt a human’s attic, none of the blankness of the unnamed monster under the bed. As Melville says: “he was admitted into all the rights, privileges, and distinctions of a name ….”

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Works Cited.

Cronon, William, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, Ed. William Cronon. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995. 69-90. Print.

Haraway, Donna, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-181. Print.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1967. Print.

Penry, Tara, “Sentimental and Romantic Masculinities in Moby-Dick and Pierre,” Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture, Eds. Mary Chapman and Glenn Handler. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: U of California Press, 1999. 226-243. Print.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia U Press, 1985. Print.

Stevens, Wallace, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954. Print.

Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia U Press, 1997. Print.

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[1] The word “legless,” interestingly, came to mean extremely drunk in the early years of the 20th century in both Britain and the U.S., according to the Oxford English Dictionary, although it is now chiefly used in Britain.