Born in New York City in 1819, Herman Melville worked extensively on various ships as a crewman and did administrative work in seaports while publishing novels, short stories, and poetry, mostly about the sea. In Moby-Dick he took on the tale of one of the most fearsome beasts on Earth, the Great White Whale. Melville creates some of the most impressive pages in the English canon with a mixture of prose and academic intuition. This weird sea dream follows the story of several porters, harpooners, and cabin boys, with special attention on a sailor named Ishmael and his captain Ahab. Moby-Dick is a classic example of body horror caught on the page as Melville seeks to create a record of the industry of whaling, which was the process by which sailors would contractually set sail over many months to procure the lucrative commodities sourced from the body of the whale. The novel explores working attitudes in the face of economic destitution with gracious nods to popular Western culture, mostly through the perspective of Ishmael. Aboard the creaking Pequod, he finds Captain Ahab ravenous and half mad with his own quest to slaughter a great white whale called Moby-Dick, who tore off his leg in mortal sea combat. Through challenging syntax and elaborate tangents, Moby-Dick begs us to consider the gravity of the wager between Man and the elements, deeming this a work reflective of the hero’s journey. Melville works within multiple literacies, creating epic depth in biological, philosophical, and maritime realities.
As a young reader, I want to express some appreciation for the macabre in these times of ultra-modernity and the sterile convenience of store-bought amenities, all with an obscured history from harvest to point-of-sale. To witness the great Leviathan die for profit is to see our decimated social nature masquerade as progress, but prove to have an undeniable relationship to regression as these invaluable creatures are hunted. The anticipation surrounding the capture of Moby-Dick is like a ghost that lurches the sailors out of their maritime depression and into absurdist time, much like the waves that edge them into many turbulent scenes.
Like Shakespeare, Melville prefers to see the bodies of his characters subject to the gravity of adventure and consequently lets reality collapse upon them. The novel so famously provides an account of the epic tragedy. Similar to the way that Mother Nature minds the wilderness, we witness many whales and their pursuers die famously amid the indifference of the sea. Melville systematically breaks down the energy exchange between Man and Beast as a capitalist mode of gratification, and in doing this, Melville situates the reader amid a horror-esque backdrop. With shrewd self-awareness and critical devotion, Melville captures the heart of an extractive business that became a way of life for him and his characters.
Melville is leisurely with his signature omniscient authorship style that develops each character without predictability. Because of this, the lines are blurred between historical fiction and fantastic non-fiction. The misshapen plot is dreamlike and almost frantic with poetic interjections to fashion a watery world of hellish proportions. Each paragraph is arrested with troubling detail seemingly in light of the modern pressure to analyze, record, and master all inquiry. Perhaps if any creature of such magnitude as Moby-Dick were to pick up a pen, it would fathom Melville’s true passion for articulating the slaughter. A quote from Chapter 70 captures the gore prevalent throughout the book:
The Pequod‘s whale being decapitated and the body stripped, the head was hoisted against the ship’s side—about half way out of the sea, so that it might yet in great part be buoyed up by its native element. And there with the strained craft steeply leaning over to it, by reason of the enormous downward drag from the lower mast-head, and every yard-arm on that side projecting like a crane over the waves; there, that blood-dripping head hung to the Pequod‘s waist like the giant Holofernes’s from the girdle of Judith.
Melville is intelligent in his portrayal of men from all walks of life who gather in the name of the Great White Whale, and creates a portal through which the reader can see into the age-old sensibility of the classic sea odyssey. The Pequod has famously sailed across pages for over 150 years, and since the book’s publication in 1851, Herman Melville reminds us to swim out of our stupor and believe in fables after all!
Get the book! BMCC’s library has several editions of Moby-Dick, including three print editions and a few digital editions. You can also read or download the work from Project Gutenberg.
About the author Rain Marie Robertson is a Literacy Studies Major at BMCC. Hailing from Atlanta, GA, she is often seen around her neighborhood in Harlem and enjoying matcha lattes in Meatpacking (at her other job).
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