Moby Dick, monster of the forbidden seas

UNESCO Courier, August-Sept, 1991 by A. Robert Lee

IN 1839 eighteen-year-old Herman Melville, the son of a prominent but impoverished American family, sailed as a deckhand from New York to Liverpool and back aboard the packet ship St. Lawrence. This was his first taste of the sea. Less than two years later, after a short and unsuccessful spell as a teacher, he returned. Signing on this time as a lowly whalerman, despite his genteel origins, he embarked upon the Acushnet, which took him from Fairhaven, Massachusetts, round Cape Horn, to the Pacific. There, after deserting the Acushnet and becoming involved in a mutiny on another whaling ship, he became variously a harpooner and beachcomber on islands from the Galapagos-where just a few years earlier Charles Darwin had preceded him on board the Beagle--to Tahiti. In 1844 he returned to Boston from Honolulu as an enlisted seaman aboard the man-of-war United States.

It was then that his writing career truly began, informed by his first-hand experience of the sea, its calms and tempests, its exhilarations and tribulations. For Melville, the sea was both massively actual, alive with observable creation, yet at the same time a kind of cosmic key or cipher. Within its ebbs and flows, its moving surfaces and mysterious depths, its plenitude of life-forms from plankton to leviathans, was to be found the very riddle of existence. "You must have plenty of sea-room to tell the truth in", he proclaimed.

He could hardly have better indicated the ocean dimensions of the epic tale then taking shape in his imagination, one which would take its hero, Captain Ahab and his ship-of-all-nations, the Pequod, backwards and forwards across the great Atlantic and Pacific fishing lanes in pursuit of that most sumptuous of aquatic creatures, the white whale, Moby Dick, which would give its name to his novel.

A LONGSTANDING TRADITION

Yet in speaking of "sea-room" Melville was also aligning himself with a very longstanding tradition in Western culture. The Book of jonah, to take one starting-point, explicitly alluded to in Chapter 9 of Moby Dick, relates a parable of would-be flight and guilt in which the sea is portrayed as the tempestuous domicile of a "great fish" that swallows and later spews forth the recalcitrant prophet. Then there is Homer who, with the Iliad and the Odyssey, composed epics that became founding stories in the Graeco-Roman legacy. In the latter, especially, which recounts Odysseus's journey homeward to his faithful wife Penelope after the Trojan war, we have one of the classic expressions of the sea as both actual and figurative domain.

Other landmarks in Western literature, the anonymous Beowulf and the Nordic sea sagas, delineate the sea as a place of northern dark and cold. Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff, a fifteenth-century German satiric masterpiece, bequeaths us the image of a Ship of Fools afloat on a sea of illusion and false hopes. The European Renaissance, an age of boundless discovery, yields images of the sea as at once a site for battles and piracy, for the unknown, and for possible routes to Utopla, reflected in Shakespeare's The Tempest or Camoes's Os Lusiadas (The Lusiads), the national epic of Portugal. Camoes, not incidentally, was favourite reading for Melville. Other poetry of the sea ranges from Coleridge's ghostly The Ancient Mariner to Rimbaud's intensely imagined Le bateau ivre, with the lyrics of a Fernando Pessoa, a Hart Crane or a Rafael Alberti there to enrich the list.

But it has perhaps been in the modern novel that the sea has found its most striking literary expression. Who has not relished the voyaging and the shipwrecks of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Swift's Gulliver's Travels or Stevenson's Treasure Island? Do not Antarctic fantasias like Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym or jules Verne's underwater empire of Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea weave a spell which extends well beyond childhood? Nor has the sea lost any of its fascination for our century, though it does have a growing rival in the immensities of outer space. In joseph Conrad, Polish-born and also an ex-mariner, one can turn to a tale of the Malaysian Straits like Lord Jim or of ocean journeying from the Thames to the River Congo in Heart of darkness. English fiction also supplies Virginia Woolf's The Waves, a "modernist" classic in which the sea acts as a metaphor of human consciousness, and, as recently as the 1980s, William Golding's Rites of passage, the fictionalized log of a late-eighteenth-century crossing to Australia. In these too, the sea goes beyond mere theme: its rhythms and cadences get drawn into the very story-telling itself.

Herman Melville thus joins distinguished company, and not only on account of Moby Dick. The sea marks much of his other fiction. Still, it is Melville's "whale-book", as he liked to call it, which remains central. Perhaps this is because Moby Dick so dazzlingly combines high adventure with philosophy, authentic sea lore with a taste for metaphysics. "I have written a wicked book", Melville told his fellow writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, "and feel as spotless as the lamb". How, then, does Melville's epic picture the sea?