"Consider the Subtleness of the Sea..."
Some quotations from Melville's Moby Dick, or The Whale
On November 14, 1851 Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was published in the U.S.A.
In honor of that, on November 14, 2023, I went searching through my bookshelves and found my tattered, Norton Critical edition. It fell open to chapter 37, the binding barely holding:
The cabin; by the stern windows; Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out…
…Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise! Good night—good night! (waving his hand, he moves from the window.)
’Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least; but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many ant-hills of powder, they all stand before me; and I their match. Oh, hard! That to fire others, the match itself must needs be wasting! What I’ve dared, I’ve willed; and what I’ve willed, I’ll do! They think me mad—Starbuck does; but I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend itself! 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. That’s more than ye, ye great gods, ever were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists….I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies, —Take some on of your own size; don’t pommel me! No, ye’ve knocked me down, and I am up again; but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab’s compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!
In addition to powerfully revealing the agonizing depths of Ahab’s desire for revenge, these chapters of the novel slowly introduce elements of dramatic writing (“Enter Ahab; then all” begins chapter 36, and this chapter begins with “The Cabin;…Ahab sitting alone…” and includes the stage direction, “waving his hand he moves from the window” ). The first-person narrator, Ishmael, seems to have vanished altogether by the time we see Ahab “sitting alone,” soliloquizing about his “madness maddened.” By chapter 40, Melville abandons the novel structure altogether for several chapters, fully adopting the form of a dramatic script.
Moby Dick was unlike any other work to precede it. At times, it feels like a deeply interior modern novel, like Virginia Wolff’s Mrs. Dalloway; at other times, it feels more like a Thomas Pynchonesque, post-modern text. Through it all, the scene quoted above seems to spring from soliloquies of Lear, Hamlet, and MacBeth all rolled into one, Melville even using Shakespearean meter and language—Ahab’s extreme madness an extension of Lear’s call for “Vengeance, plague, death, confusion!” Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy also comes to mind, especially:
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep—
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to.
Moby Dick stands as one of the truly great novels of all time. A kind of behemoth itself, it stands as a breathtaking example of artistic experimentation, play, invention. All at once it shifts from adventure story to a treatise on competing theistic belief structures, to love story (Ishmael and Queequeg?), to a deep, philosophical exploration of epistemology itself. A book to be read again and again, to be journeyed upon, like Ahab’s turbulent, ever-changing, never-subtle seas.
You can purchase a deluxe edition of the novel HERE (I’ll receive a small commission of the sale at no extra cost to you).
If you’ve been enjoying my writing, please consider doing any/all of the following:
Help me grow my audience by Sharing this post or my main site with a few people you think might enjoy it as well.
Upgrade your subscription to paid. For only $.14/day, you can help me continue to devote the many hours I do each week to writing, editing and promoting this page.
JourneyCasts is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
You can also help a lot by making a one-time contribution at any time by “buying me a coffee” (or two). And certainly a good amount of real coffee has gone into the making of JourneyCasts.
As always, I encourage you to leave a comment.
Be sure to check out my podcast, “Hemingway, Word for Word.”