One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me the condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.
-pg 471 (Bantam Classic)
By the time the reader runs across these lines, Melville in fact has accomplished what this passage describes; he's written a book that, while ostensibly about whales and one whale in particular, is used as a vehicle to explore everything. What is more surprising than his ambition is the execution, and how even in the descriptions of the most technical aspects of whaling he manages to be both edifying and entertaining. Or, at least, this was surprising to me, having long held the perhaps common misconception that this book is 'about' Ahab's quest for the white whale Moby-Dick.
What I found almost as enjoyable as the questing narrative, or the action of the hunting of the whales, was the descriptions of all the processes of the whaling world; the whales' biology; and, even, Melville's detours into the suburbs of the narrative, such as when he considers the dread that whiteness produces in men (there might be some connection here between Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Moby-Dick). But more than the sheer enjoyment of reading Ishmael talk about the importance of whaling, its history, the methods for hunting, killing, and processing the beasts mid-ocean, I was struck by how convincing it all is; I found myself believing, quite willingly, that the sum total of human knowledge of Cetacea was contained in this book; that nothing more had been discovered since; that here, when reading, in my hands was the key to that world. It was like a different order of the willing suspension of disbelief, that although Wikipedia might be a click away to discover, truly, what ambergris is, or the entire historical process for dismantling a whale, I preferred to be led by Ishmael's encyclopedic knowledge, however dated it might be.
Part of it, of course, is Melville's prose, and although almost any passage plucked from the text would serve to illustrate this point, as, even, the quotation above does, there are some moments of surpassing eloquence, that manage to both describe and inspire, such as this one, in which Ishmael describes their arrival to the South Pacific:
There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters' Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.
--pg 498
And although the prose here is stellar, the rhythm rising and falling as naturally as waves, the thematic depth that he achieves in such a short passage is particularly noteworthy and representative of the book in general. The Pacific, which serves well as a synecdoche for the ocean as a whole, is a vast graveyard for the entire world, over which the living observer travels, conscious of the "the tidebeating heart of the earth," which might stand for history or simply life, or both, in fact. In this way the passage also has an ourobourian quality to it, that if one considers the ocean, one is considering the land; if one is considering the dead then one must needs be thinking of those who have yet to pass; and so the passage serves to illustrate the thematic link between whale and man; they are complementary, and each worthy of a grand book to describe them to those who would listen.
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