Herman Melville

> Oh, the rare old Whale, mid storm and gale, In his ocean home will be, A giant in might, where might is right, And King of the boundless sea . This anthem closes a vast preamble in which Melville, like "a mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm of a poor devil of a Sub-Sub," compiles an extensive catalogue of citations on the Whale, spanning from the Bible to world literature. Self-taught and an insatiable reader, Melville seeks to forestall the accusation of being a mere chronicler of seafaring life. We must not fall into this trap. *Moby Dick* is the greatest sea novel ever written; and it is so because Melville truly lived the experiences he recounts. > I, Ishmael, was one of that crew. (...) With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge . What misleads the reader is the pervasive, intense religious atmosphere; yet it could not be otherwise. For Melville, as for most of his contemporaries, the Bible permeates every facet of life: hence the metaphors, the reflections, and indeed the anxieties that define the novel. The narrative may be divided into four parts. In the first, the narrator and protagonist is Ishmael: still a youth, he resolves to ship aboard a whaler out of a vague yearning for adventure and knowledge. In the mid-nineteenth century, Nantucket stood as one of the premier American ports for fleets engaged in the sperm whale fishery; with a narrative style suspended between Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe, Melville crafts a portrait of it that is simultaneously realistic and hauntingly evocative. One is captivated by the figure of Queequeg, a cannibal with whom Ishmael forges a profound friendship. The pivotal moment is the sermon devoted to the biblical episode of the prophet Jonah, swallowed by the whale by the will of God and saved by God alone. It is no myth; it is the truth, thundered to the faithful (sailors and the widows of men lost at sea), that they may know that salvation proceeds solely from faith, from the literal, devout reading of Scripture. He who flouts the words of the Lord is doomed to self-annihilation and damnation. > The world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow . At last, the vessel sets sail on a long voyage. > We found ourselves almost defenseless upon the hostile ocean. (...) Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dread creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. (...) Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began . (...) As this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return. > The second part introduces the novel's dramatis personae: the mates and the harpooneers, delineated in chapters bearing evocative titles: Knights and Squires > . It is an effective depiction, for what revolves around Captain Ahab, the monomaniac "protagonist," is essentially a feudal system. He looked like a man cut away from the stake. (...) His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus > . Yet it is not his physical semblance that marks Ahab’s defining trait; it is his soul, shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its gloom > . A scene of mesmerizing power concludes this gallery of characters and constitutes a watershed for the entire narrative. Ahab reveals to the crew that the voyage's true quarry is the white whale: Moby Dick. Amid a crescendo of collective frenzy, only the first mate, the pious Starbuck, dissents, knowing as he does that it was Moby Dick who reaped Ahab’s leg. Vengeance on a dumb brute, that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous > . The pious Starbuck is right, the more so because what Ahab seeks is not mere vengeance; the captain repudiates his own destiny, even in defiance of God's will. They think me mad; I am demoniac, I am madness maddened!(...) The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. > The third part chronicles the circumnavigation of the globe's oceans and the pursuit, slaughter, and flensing of the whales. It constitutes a monumental treatise on marine zoology, authored by a scientist enchanted by, if not enamored of, these great cetaceans. Only intermittently does the plot resurface, now narrated in the third person, so that it may cease to be the mere impressions of a boy and become the chronicle of a detached observer. Certain scenes remain indelibly etched in the imagination: the sharks ravenous for blood while the whale is flensed; the valiant Queequeg plunging underwater amidst the sharks to rescue a fallen shipmate who, like the prophet Jonah, has tumbled into the dark cavity of the whale’s cavernous head; and like a divine obstetrician, he, the cannibal, delivers his friend into new life, pulling him forth from the cranial vault. And what can be said of the enthralling Chapter 87, entitled The Grand Armada > , in which the whaleboats pursue a vast pod of cetaceans, complete with nursing dams and their calves? Equally arresting are the gams with other vessels, they too years into their voyages, aboard which one frequently encounters fanaticism and collective lunacy. After all, there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men. (...) For, lurid-like, as the slaughtered monster slues you deeper and deeper into the panics of the herd, our whole panoply of reason falls from us; we live only in a delirious gasp > . At last, one arrives at the final section, an authentic tour de force. The White Whale is finally sighted: the desperate chase commences. A gentle joyousness—a mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. (...) From each soft side, (...) from each bright side, the whale shed charm upon the sea > . With that very elegance, yet within a terrifying vortex, Moby Dick hurls himself upon the whaleboats, and upon Ahab in particular. Oh, Ahab, cried (the pious) Starbuck, it is not too late (...) to desist. See! Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him > . What hast thou done, Ahab? How couldst thou contend with the great Leviathan? How couldst thou set thyself against the will of God, rather than surrendering to Him as did the prophet? Without ever losing sight of Melville’s principal design (to illuminate the whaling industry, so little understood and appreciated), *Moby Dick* lends itself to diverse interpretative lenses, and herein lies its modernity. One fruitful avenue of inquiry is to examine the novel through the prism of how humanity has depicted animals across literature and art. A fine study by Gianni Valente ( *Dall’arca di Noè a Moby Dick* > , Edizioni Blu 2004) provides compelling avenues of reflection for assessing the work. Ever since the Bible, our relationship with the animal kingdom has been fraught with ambivalence: symbols of vice and virtue > . We are all familiar with the sinister attributes of the biblical serpent, yet in numerous other passages of the Old Testament, animals bear a redemptive image: as the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God > (Psalm 42:1). Animals serve as the expression of a wondrous, vital force; thus are they chronicled by Marco Polo, celebrated in *Orlando Furioso*, and delineated in the travelogues and cartography that accompanied the Age of Discovery. Animals are likewise the object of scientific, artistic, and moral inquiry (witness Leonardo da Vinci). Indeed, all these facets (emblems of vice and virtue, wondrous vitality, empirical science, and morality) converge within *Moby Dick*. The White Whale is an extraordinary monster, the supreme beast of Creation, an emblem of enduring fortitude and eternal solitude, a cruel and terrifying presence propelled by demonic fury. Simultaneously, the great sperm whale is anatomized, dissected with fastidious precision, the subject of dispassionate scrutiny. Viewed through the perspective of our relationship with the animal realm, *Moby Dick* is an unfinished project; it demonstrates the difficulty of establishing a harmonious footing toward our fellow creatures and toward nature as a whole. We project onto the animal our own rational constructs alongside our deepest phobias; we fail to apprehend it as an other > , endowed with an autonomous essence. It is an arduous text, and in many stretches, outright tedious. Its architecture is intricate, marked by an incessant shifting of narrative voice (Ishmael, the third-person narrator, the scientist > , Melville the declamatory orator, Ahab as Melville’s tormented conscience), and by an incessant layering of disparate registers—clinical, evocative, allegorical, and picaresque. The dense fabric of quotations, whose provenances are often vexingly difficult to trace, hardly eases comprehension. The prose is, naturally, laden with the nautical lexicon of the whaling fishery; yet this is not what renders the reading so demanding. Rather, it is the syntax—frequently tortuous and punctuated in a manner that arrests the cadence of thought. It must also be said that one has to let oneself go": surrender the impulse to decipher every nuance, abandon oneself to the evocative resonance of the phrasing, and pursue the musicality of its stride. Finally, the scientific and anatomical digressions regarding the whale are so frequent and protracted as to render the reading genuinely cumbersome; a word of advice: just as one did in one's youth with *War and Peace* and *Anna Karenina*, skip the pages outright, without the slightest pang of guilt. Why read it? It is magnificent; do not labor to absorb every word—heed your own instinct.