Sad to say, Philbrick got just about everything wrong.
Is the White Whale Evil?
Let’s start here. Funny how this single sentence struck me.
According to Ahab, Moby Dick is not just a sperm whale; he is the tool of an unseen and decidedly evil power.
Evil? Moby Dick is the tool of an unseen and decidedly evil power? He is? Did Philbrick read the same Moby-Dick that I did? Because in the Moby-Dick I’ve read (six times, no less), the whole point seems to be that the White Whale is not evil (that is, an entity opposed to the affairs of men), but rather, and tellingly, an entity absolutely indifferent to them.
Indeed, following up on this comment, Philbrick goes on to quote one of the most famous passages from the whole novel. Here, it is Ahab talking to Starbuck.
All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event -- in the living act, the undoubted deed -- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.
Admittedly, Ahab is interpreting what the White Whale represents to him, and he sees malice in that entity, but even here, that malice is modified with other adjectives. Unknown. Unreasoning. Inscrutable. And it is not the malice, but chiefly it is “that inscrutable thing” that Ahab hates; hates, I contend, because he cannot understand or interpret it. The White Whale -- “It” -- tasks Ahab, it heaps him, it stands athwart Ahab’s intentions, against his “living acts” and “undoubted deeds,” but at the same time Ahab cannot understand why or what It wants. Sometimes, he even wonders if there be “naught beyond.” But whether or not the White Whale has the agency that Ahab would prefer to ascribe to it -- it is Ahab that has declared war upon Moby Dick, not Moby Dick that has declared war upon Ahab.
Symbols and Reality
Philbrick’s book is generally organized as a chronological tour through Moby-Dick, pausing on some chapters and not others to tease out some esoteric or literary-minded point, essentially to highlight all the symbols and deeper meanings that Melville scholars may or may not have agreed upon over the years. As he nears the end, however, just before we enter The Chase, Philbrick offers this warning.
Before we continue, I need to make something perfectly clear. The White Whale is not a symbol. He is as real as you or I. He has a crooked jaw, a humped back, and a wiggle-waggle when he’s really moving fast. He is a thing of blubber, blood, muscle, and bone -- a creation of the natural world that transcends any fiction. So forget about trying to figure out what the White Whale signifies. As Melville has already shown in chapter 99, “The Doubloon,” in which just about every member of the Pequod’s crew provides his own interpretation of what is stamped on the gold coin nailed to the mast, in the end a doubloon is just a doubloon. So don’t fall into the Ahab trap of seeing Moby Dick as a stand-in for some paltry human complaint. In the end he is just a huge, battle-scarred albino sperm whale, and that is more than enough.
This is the fundamental reason we continue to read this or any other literary classic. It’s not the dazzling technique of the author; it’s his or her ability to deliver reality on the page.
Okay. Two things.
Philbrick is right. Moby Dick is a whale, as real as you or me. He has a crooked jaw, a humped back, and a wiggle-waggle when he’s really moving fast. He is a thing of blubber, blood, muscle, and bone.
And Philbrick is wrong. The White Whale IS a symbol. In fact, it is baffling to me that Philbrick could possibly say that it is not. The fundamental reason we continue to read Moby-Dick is not because it is a good adventure story, realistically told. We read it because it is BOTH an adventure story, realistically told, AND it is a symbolic quest for an understanding of man’s place in the cosmos.
Maybe the point Philbrick is making is that The Chase, the three chapters that detail Ahab’s final confrontation with the White Whale, can be read as a first-class adventure story. It is. I’ve made this point myself. This is from a previous blog post I wrote on the novel.
Moby Dick does not reveal his secrets in these three chapters -- chapters that sometimes read more like an adventure story than the allegory they truly are. But he does prove himself to be something more than a dumb animal as Starbuck has so often classified him. He is intelligent, spiteful, powerful, and victorious against those who would choose to challenge him. Knowing that this is allegory, therefore, what is Melville trying to tell us about that inscrutable thing?
It is the blending of the adventure story with the symbols that makes Moby-Dick worth reading. The whole book, from start to finish, is a master class in this technique -- using the characters and plot to advance not just a story, but an exploration of symbolic and existential meaning. There, in fact, may be no finer example of this in all of literature. THAT is why I keep reading Moby-Dick.
But allow me to take this one step further. Philbrick is also wrong in the sense that the White Whale and the inscrutable thing that it represents -- whatever it is -- is, in fact, reality, no less real than creatures made of blubber, blood, muscle, and bone. It is, essentially, the ultimate reality that all of us -- be us Ahabs or be us Starbucks -- may never fully understand. But it is REAL, and the fact that Moby-Dick is also a story about that reality is, ultimately, what makes it a book worth reading, again and again.
Sharks
To be fair, Philbrick’s dissertation does have value -- even if he misses the essential point. He knows far more about Melville’s other works than I do. And with that expertise, he is able to illuminate some ideas that I’ve not previously seen in the text, and which I would like to spend more time exploring.
Here he recalls the scene when the sharks are feasting on the whale carcass affixed to the side of the Pequod’s hull.
Thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness. The few sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the sharp slapping of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the sleepers’ hearts. Peering over the side you could just see them … wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of the whale of the bigness of a human head. … The mark they thus leave on the whale, may best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking for a screw.
And Philbrick’s interpretation is both expansive and worth remembering. Amidst this maelstrom, second mate Stubb wants a piece of the whale to cook for himself as a whale steak, and he orders the Pequod’s black cook, Fleece, to deal with the sharks.
While delivered in a stilted dialect, the sermon that follows contains wisdom that comes straight from the author himself. “Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don’t blame ye so much for; dat is natur, and can’t be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not’ing more dan de shark well goberned.”
This is Melville’s ultimate view of humanity, the view he will bring to brilliant fruition forty years later in the novella Billy Budd. The job of government, of civilization, is to keep the shark at bay. All of us are, to a certain degree, capable of wrongdoing. Without some form of government, evil will prevail.
Here lies the source of the Founding Fathers’ ultimately unforgivable omission. They refused to contain the great, ravening shark of slavery, and more than two generations later their grandchildren and great-grandchildren were about to suffer the consequences.
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