Dear Friends,

Moby Dick is not necessarily a book one approaches on a whim. Getting through it requires patience, focus, persistence, will power. The archaic grammar and language are unfamiliar – what is a “boggy, soggy, squitchy picture” anyway? The many digressions into whaling arcana and cetology are mostly tedious. There’s also the shock of navigating a 19th century white man’s account of the world: a lot of the worst isms are on full display, like meats strung up in a butcher’s window. Reading Melville, at times you avert your eyes and hold your breath.

I’m rereading Moby Dick (the third time in a decade) because of a feeling. Autumn is tumbling quickly toward Vermont’s months-long winter. Most mornings now when I step out with the dog, frost on the windshield reminds me that I need to change over the tires to snows. The musty odor of dead vegetation mixed with sub-freezing air inspires the memory of colder times. We’ve long stopped pretending that we don’t need to turn the heat on, and the wood pellet stove is cracking out of its summer sleep. Weekend couch naps are happening. I tuck snugly under a wool blanket to read. For me, Moby Dick registers as a cold weather book. The main action of the novel happens in the warm waters of the Pacific, but the opening chapters are set in New Bedford, Mass. and Nantucket Island in late December. From my chilly vantage point, I felt like fall was a good time to start reading it again. On a whim, I suppose.

The story of Ahab’s mad pursuit of the white whale is Melville’s metaphorical device – “the gliding great demon of the seas of life.” It’s also a historical document of a particularly grim business: the systematic slaughter for profit of hundreds of thousands of whales (totalling nearly 3 million by the end of the 20th century). On display in Moby Dick is a celebratory, relentless pursuit of these massive creatures, who often enough are imbued with human-like malintent – a “foe” to be vanquished. Moby Dick epitomizes this animal evil. The white whale had ripped Ahab’s leg off; no doubt pissed off (if I can indulge the personification further) because another one of those humans was trying to murder it. If Ahab’s obsession with destroying Moby Dick is a sign of his madness, isn’t humankind’s industrial project to squeeze every inch of life out of our home planet just as mad? Melville’s poetic rapture about the whaling industry and culture predates the question.

What else? The words cannibal, savage, and pagan hang off the pages like bad flags. In the world of white European colonizers, these are the most matter-of-fact words to describe non-white, non-Christian people. (E.g. “Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the undeniable dark side of mankind—devilish dark at that. No offence.”) The racial stereotypes deployed by Melville are disgusting and many. I feel the weight of how those insidious caricatures have perpetuated centuries of harm (genocide) towards BIPOC communities, which continues to this day. Curiously though, in the tale of the whaling voyage and crew, Melville establishes a bond of common humanity through the men’s shared experience on the ship. United in their gruesome quest, the crew, hailing from diverse places and cultures around the globe, appears less concerned about their racial differences than their drive to adventure, kill whales, and survive. There’s a genuine camaraderie that complicates a simple reading of the book’s racist tropes.

Most striking to me as I wrestled with the opening pages was the queer love between Moby Dick’s narrator, Ishmael, and Queequeg, the harpooner-prince, the dark-skinned, tattooed “cannibal” from an unnamed island in the South Pacific. Circumstances dictate that they share a bed together as strangers before shipping out on the Pequod. What begins as an awkward, fearful encounter (for Ishmael) becomes over the course of two nights a strange, intimate union between two men with nothing in common except their temporary quarters and a call to sea. The closeness of their bodies aided by the clearly anti-Puritanical self-possession of Queequeg opens Ishmael up to an unexpected “bosom” relationship. Melville’s analogy is marriage, specifically the marital bed.

“How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.”

Let me clarify my use of “queer” above. I mean the exultation of people discovering for themselves those relationships and intimacies with others that fulfill them, regardless of traditional categories of how and who to love. What astounds me is that in this book from the 1850s about a whale ship on a brutal mission of destruction, full of racist language and depictions, Melville has written such a tender account of these two men’s love for each other. Strange bedfellows indeed. And how could I have failed to notice this the last time I read it? 

When I read a book more than once, I note how I’ve changed in the interim. The book is static, of course, but my interpretation of it is different because I’ve hopefully had new experiences, new realizations, and new awakenings to other perspectives. In revisiting a book from my past, I may find an enlargement of myself. A book revisited shows me the contours of this enlargement, the extent to which other ideas and understandings about the world have expanded my thinking beyond its previous boundaries. Our relationship to the past is complicated and ever changing. So is my relationship to Moby Dick.

Keeping reading,

Jeremy