I recently finished a big series of illustrations for Moby-Dick, and I’m currently running a Kickstarter campaign to self-publish an illustrated edition of the book (but also, you can read the book for free any time you like). I’m going to use this as an excuse to add to the pile of writing about one of the most written-about books in history: a book that is pored over and analyzed and cross-referenced as if it were scripture.
I am obsessed with this book: as a story and as an unfashionable, aggressive effort, and as an articulation of an interest I have in humanity’s confrontation with the limits of itself and its understanding. I am only lately and by the light of this book seeing that particular throughline connecting a lot of the stories I’ve been preoccupied with throughout my life. It’s a good book to get obsessed with, and to build an overambitious, impractical project on the back of.
Moby-Dick wasn’t well-received in the 1850s, was out of print by the end of Melville’s life, and seems to have been thought of at the time as a major turning point in his career: a once-successful writer at first known for his popular and commercially-viable adventure novels who turned instead to chase, monomaniacally, this weird, encyclopedic, metaphysical story about an apocalyptic whaling voyage.
It was decades after Melville’s death that the book began accruing its reputation as an Undisputed Classic, and that reputation is still kind of hard to believe: Moby-Dick is every bit as structurally unusual, disjointed, misleading, and disturbing now as it must have seemed in 1850. It isn’t a book to be nodded over and politely accepted as Great. It’s aggressive and grotesque and blasphemous.
I don’t mean blasphemous in a religious sense (though it is that, too), but more broadly: a central argument that I see Moby-Dick making is that reality and objective truth are categorically inaccessible to us. This truth is the rot at the heart of every fundamentalism and every monomania. That the world is truly known is the lie on which the entire modern world is built.
All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough.
The chapter CETOLOGY is about the point where Moby-Dick’s initial pretense at being a straightforward adventure story is irrevocably broken, and it’s the point where I’ve heard more than one person saying they’ve given up on reading it. It is a kind of grueling chapter, and maybe consciously so: the narrator (nominally, but increasingly nebulously, a man named Ishmael) outlines his own new categorical system for making sense of different species of whale, in opposition to that of mainstream science, which is only lately coming to terms with the idea (ridiculous on its face) that a whale is a mammal.
The narrator’s categories are based on standard book sizes: the folio, the octavo, and the duodecimo. A book is an artifact designed for maximum intelligibility. Every inch of a book is artificial; every letter is put in its place by a guiding intelligence; it is meant to be read by a human and understood fully in the terms of humanity. The whale is in no way like a book. The whale is violent but amoral. The meaning of the carven “hieroglyphics” that mark the entire body of the whale is not simply beyond you: it is absent.
A reading of this chapter as a satire of humanity’s flimsy attempts to make sense of the world around it has become key to my understanding of the book’s relationship to the unknown and the unknowable. It’s funnier and makes its point even better, I think, in the context of 21st century readers smugly assured that the whale is not a fish, and that the book’s understanding of mainstream cetology is hopelessly incorrect: that we now see the world as it really is, not like those ignorant 19th-century people. To think this is to make the same mistake Melville mocks in this chapter.
For all our labels and our categorization how much do we know? We may know a lot, and we certainly know more than did any writer in 1850. But what inappropriate license do we grant ourselves on the premise that we know everything?
I see in Moby-Dick an elaborate, operatic condemnation of this surety that is the driving force of Ahab’s suicidal journey. Though the book is dense with Christian language and imagery, it articulates a sort of atheism as a counterpoint to fundamentalism in all its forms. Ishmael, after all, is the only survivor: the one figure untethered to belief and reverence.
This atheism isn’t the one lately associated with the word, which flatly and uncritically substitutes a scientistic surety for a scriptural-literalist one. It’s an atheism of God and of any pernicious substitute for him: any implicit belief that the world is intelligible, or that it ought to be. The unknowable isn’t so because it’s categorically transcendent, but just because it is indifferent to us.
Where would the answers to our questions be, anyway? How could we ever access whatever transcendent space—religious/metaphysical or objective/scientific—where those answers could be pointed to?
This preposterous whale-chase, and this preposterous industry (outmoded not long after the publication of Moby-Dick and looked on with disgust in 2016) can be taken as a symbol for our entire modern, industrialized, capitalist world. We have driven ourselves with our surety to the edge of economic and ecological collapse every bit as bluntly foreshadowed as the Pequod disaster.
It is not just Ahab that dooms the ship, but his crew, too. The crew of the Pequod can see what’s coming, but their power is hemmed-in within a dense protocol that allows no resistance. And every one of them is there in desperation: in a struggle to make a living for themselves, to have something to send back home, or to keep themselves from suicide. They are working people, disenfranchised and marginalized people with no means of appeal. Starbuck, the first mate, makes an impassioned resistance, but abandons it for the sake of order and civility.
“He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys; most careful bravery that!”
Ahab dooms the ship, and the crew can see what’s coming. In Ahab’s quest to slay his own personal avatar of the unknowable and to substantiate his desperate extremism, he kills them all. No one objects.
