Moby Dick or The White Whale by Herman Melville
Book Review
It's a whale of a book, but if you cut it into 135 chapter-sized pieces, using the saws and hooks of critical thinking, you can boil all that literary sperm down to a consumable product that will profit you well when you return to the Nantucket of your heart. It was published in 1851, and I think it can be revealed by now without guilt - Ahab doesn't get the whale, the whale gets Ahab. Ahab gets Ahab. Getting the whale gets Ahab. And the whale gets everyone, except Ishmael.
What follows are notes and observations of a neophyte sailor on the Hermanuetical seas, from high in the mizzen mast of his mind. Whatever that is.
1. The idea of whales as vicious creatures to be defeated in battle never stopped seeming absurd to me. But maybe if you stab them with harpoons you can really piss those suckers off. They probably weren't out to get you before you went to war against them.
2. OK, so they probably aren't out to get us, until we turn out to get them. But the Sperm Whale is still the largest freaking toothed carnivore on Planet Earth. I don't know why the internets consistently use the qualifier of "oceanic" or largely consider only "land-based carnivores." This animal eats animals - three percent of its body weight each day. That's a lot of squid and shark munching down in the deep depths. It is the largest toothed carnivore on earth. This is flesh eating on a very large scale. That's a fun fact.
I say toothed carnivore, because yes, larger whales it krill, and krill is a small shrimp. But they do it by filter feeding. Sperm whales do it by tooth chomping.
3. The etymology of "Ahab"? Yes it is from the Hebrew "ahav" - love. Perhaps, the better to paint a contrast with a man consumed with a lust for revenge?
4. Did any whale ever actually stove in the side of a full size whaling ship and cause it to sink? Apparently this did happen on at least several occasions, in the South Pacific, including the famous case of the 1820 sinking of the Essex ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essex_(... ) that formed the basis for his dramatic final scene. Says Wikipedia "The tragedy attracted international attention, and inspired Herman Melville to write his famous 1851 novel Moby-Dick." And that wasn't the only time it happened.
"The Essex was not the only ship known to have been attacked by a whale:
In 1807, a whale attacked and sank Union.[29]
In 1835, Pusie Hall was attacked.[30]
In 1836, whales attacked Lydia and Two Generals.[30]
In 1850, a whale sank Pocahontas.[30]
On August 20, 1851, a whale sank Ann Alexander.
In 1852, a whale sank Crusader.[31]
In 1855, a whale sank Waterloo.[31]
On January 27, 1972, a pod of killer whales sank the 43-foot (13 m) schooner Lucette.
On July 7, 1999, a humpback whale sank the 73-foot (22 m), 111-year old Herreshoff-designed Merlin in Whale Bay, Baranof Island, Alaska.[32]"
5. Is Star Trek's and Patrick Stewart's character of Captain "Picard" related to Melville's "Pequod," the ship on which the story takes place? I think it must be. You decide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pequod_...
6. Some say that the Pequod is named after the disease ravaged and destroyed Pequot people of Massachusetts. Their doom has been taken as a prefiguring of the Pequod's fate.
7. First Mate Starbuck? Could that character's name be the source of Starbucks coffee? Probably. The Seattle Times reports in an interview with a co-founder:
"My recollection is this: We were thinking of all kinds of names and came desperately close to calling it Cargo House, which would have been a terrible, terrible mistake. Terry Heckler [with whom Bowker owned an advertising agency] mentioned in an offhand way that he thought words that begin with “st” were powerful words. I thought about that and I said, yeah, that’s right, so I did a list of “st” words.
Somebody somehow came up with an old mining map of the Cascades and Mount Rainier, and there was an old mining town called Starbo. As soon as I saw Starbo, I, of course, jumped to Melville’s first mate [named Starbuck] in Moby-Dick. But Moby-Dick didn’t have anything to do with Starbucks directly; it was only coincidental that the sound seemed to make sense. A lot of times you’ll see references to the coffee-loving first mate of the Pequod. And then somebody said to me, well no, it wasn’t that he loved coffee in the book, it was that he loved coffee in the movie. I don’t think even Scarecrow Video has a copy of that movie. Moby-Dick has nothing to do with coffee as far as I know."
The co-founder of Starbucks wasn't entirely right. In fact coffee appear six times in Moby Dick, and at least once in the same sentence as First Mate Starbuck.
“What has he in his hand there?” cried Starbuck, pointing to something wavingly held by the German. “Impossible!—a lamp-feeder!”
“Not that,” said Stubb, “no, no, it’s a coffee-pot, Mr. Starbuck; he’s coming off to make us our coffee, is the Yarman; don’t you see that big tin can there alongside of him?—that’s his boiling water. Oh! he’s all right, is the Yarman.”
8. Should YOU read Moby Dick? Idonknow. Many parts are a bit tedious and difficult to relate too. But if you read those parts as a bedtime soporific, it's effective enough. Other parts are astonishingly lyrically beautiful. A great deal is just plain old 19th century strange, whether for what the author seems to imagine a reader might find interesting, or because he dables in phrenology, and color based essentialism. He seems to believe that the essence of things, in an ontological sense, can be found by simply turning around in one's mind every aspect of it. This effort to practice a kind of science without actual evidence, science based on words and perceptions and feelings, seems just a little silly. But oh well, that's the 19th century for ya. You can taste New England America here - its attitudes, its blindness, its manners.
9. Is there a sex scene in Moby Dick? Absolutely. Read Chapter 132 - The Symphony.
10. I am glad that I read it. For me Moby Dick was always on my list of books I really should get to someday. I'm very glad to count it as my own now.