The Ongoing Relevance of Moby Dick

Thursday marks the 200th birthday of Herman Melville – the author of the greatest unread novel in the English language. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen eyes glaze over when I ask people if they have conquered Moby-Dick. It is the Mount Everest of literature: huge and apparently insurmountable, its snowy peak as elusive as the tail of the great white whale himself.

Having grown up loving whales as a boy – in the era of the Save the Whale campaigns of the 1970s – I was underwhelmed when I watched John Huston’s grandiose 1956 film, Moby Dick. Perhaps it was because I saw it on a tiny black-and-white TV, but the whole story seemed impenetrable to me. And there weren’t enough whales. I would have been even less keen had I known that the whale footage Huston did include had been specially shot off Madeira, where they were still being hunted. For the Hemingwayesque director, there was none of that final-credit nonsense: “No animals were harmed in the making of this film.” Because they very much were.

Forty years later, I saw my first whales in the wild, off Provincetown, a former whaling port on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. It was there, in New England, that I finally finished the book. What had seemed to be a heroic tale of the high seas proved to be something much darker and more sublime. I realised its secret. Not only is it very funny and very subversive, but it maps out the modern world as if Melville had lived his life in the future and was only waiting for us to catch up. I fell in love with Melville as much as I had fallen in love with the whales. My own five-year-long voyage searching for these magnificent creatures produced my own book, Leviathan or, The Whale and a subsequent film, The Hunt for Moby-Dick. But even now, having read it a dozen times, I’m still not sure I can tell you what Moby-Dick is all about. Yes, it’s the tale of Captain Ahab, who sails his ship, the Pequod, in search of a white whale that had bitten off his leg. But it’s also a wildly digressive attempt to comprehend the animals themselves. And despite the author’s rather unhelpful conclusion, after 650 pages, about the whale, “I know him not, and never will”, here are some very good reasons why you need to read his crazily wonderful book.

It is precisely Moby-Dick’s forbidding reputation that has inspired artists, writers, performers and film-makers from Frank Stella to Jackson Pollock, Led Zeppelin to Laurie Anderson, Orson Welles, Sylvia Plath, Stanley Kubrick and Lynne Ramsay, as well as the makers of Tom and Jerry, and even The Simpsons. The musician Moby claims direct descent from Melville (although he admitted to me that he wasn’t so sure it was true at all). There are many who hold it as one of their favourite books: Barack Obama, Joyce Carol Oates, Patti Smith, Nile Rodgers and Bob Dylan (who cribbed it for his Nobel speech), among them.

It’s a tribute to Melville’s imagination that his book remains so strongly in ours. He may have done for the whale what Peter Benchley’s Jaws did for the shark – recreating the animal as an icon of otherness. He invests cetaceans with their own intrinsic beauty and in doing so, he pre-empted our conception of animals we know to be highly sentient and entirely matriarchal, expressing their own culture through their sonar clicks.

Equally, Melville’s reflections on our own species still reverberate. Days after 9/11, the Palestinian-American writer Edward Said compared George W Bush’s pursuit of Osama bin Laden to Ahab’s obsessive hunt for the white whale. The current tenant of the White House draws comparisons to Ahab’s crazed mission, too: Trump’s desire for a wall – an “unnecessary and expensive …vengeful folly”, according to Neil Steinberg in the Chicago Sun Times – is as irrational a pursuit as Ahab’s.

You might apply similar metaphors to the head of our own shaky ship of state. When the prime minister’s cabinet was announced last week, I couldn’t help but think of Melville’s line: “Such a crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge.”

But it is Moby-Dick’s premonitory brilliance that continues to make it relevant. Melville predicts mass extinction and climate breakdown, and foresees a drowned planet from which the whale would “spout his frothed defiance to the skies”. And in its worldwide pursuit of a finite resource, the whaling industry is an augury of our globalised state. It’s no coincidence that the Pequod’s first mate, Starbuck, gave his name to a chain of coffee shops.

Moby-Dick may be the first work of western fiction to feature a same-sex marriage: Ishmael, the loner narrator (famous for the most ambiguous opening line in literature) gets hitched – in bed – to the omni-tattooed Pacific islander, Queequeg: “He pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married.” Other scenes are deeply homoerotic: sailors massage each others’ hands in a tub of sperm oil and there is an entire chapter devoted to foreskins (albeit of the whalish variety).

Indeed, the whole book is a love letter (sadly unreciprocated) from a besotted Melville to his hero, Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he wrote: “You have sunk your northern roots down into my southern soul.”

Faced with such unbridled flagrancy, the US establishment has never been keen to accept the idea that Melville may just possibly have been gay. And it must have rankled to have the brilliance of his book pointed out to them by a bunch of British queer writers. When a modest Everyman edition appeared in London 20 years after Melville’s death in 1891, DH Lawrence declared it a work of futurism before futurism had been invented; EM Forster and WH Auden extolled its queer nature. Virginia Woolf read it three times, comparing it to Wuthering Heights in its strangeness, and noted in her 1926 diary that no biographer would believe her work was inspired by the vision of “a fin rising on a wide blank sea”.

The alluring figure of Queequeg is one of the first persons of colour in western fiction, and the Pequod carries a multicultural crew of Native Americans, African Americans and Asians (evocatively reflected in the paintings of the contemporary black American artist Ellen Gallagher). It is a metaphor for a new republic already falling apart, with the pursuit of the white whale as a bitter analogy for the slave-owning states. It is why, in 1952, the Trinidadian writer CLR James called Moby-Dick “the greatest portrayal of despair in literature”, seeing an indictment of imperialism in Ahab’s desire for revenge on the whale. (In fact, Melville hints it wasn’t only his leg that was bitten off. As Cerys Matthews asked me: “Shouldn’t it be called Moby-no-Dick?”)

Melville was born in Manhattan on 1 August 1819, in sight of the sea. As a failed teacher, he signed up for a whaling voyage in New Bedford – then the richest city in the US, wealthy on the oil of whales. He deserted the ship a year later, but on his return to the US became a glamorous figure, acclaimed for his sensual books about the “exotic” inhabitants of the Marquesas islands. But by 1849, his output had become increasingly obscure, and that October, he arrived in London, seeking inspiration. Installed in lodgings overlooking the Thames at Charing Cross, he spent his time visiting publishers and getting drunk. Stumbling home, he saw whales swimming down Oxford Street. It was if they were haunting him.

A month later, after a diversion to Paris, he returned to New York with a new book he had been given: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Its tale of perverted nature and overweening ambition fed into Moby-Dick. The first version of the book was published in Britain in 1851, entitled The Whale. It came out in the US later that year as Moby-Dick – and failed, miserably. When Melville died 40 years later, he and his book were long forgotten.

If the last 1,400 words haven’t convinced you (“Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!” as Melville complained), you don’t have to read the book at all. The artist Angela Cockayne and I have curated the Moby-Dick Big Read for the University of Plymouth, featuring Tilda Swinton, David Attenborough, Fiona Shaw, Stephen Fry, John Waters, Benedict Cumberbatch and 130 others who will read it to you, chapter by chapter, for free. The site has had 10m hits to date.

A word of caution, though. Once you do read it, it’s hard to let it go. I’m still haunted by Melville: this winter, staying alone in an 18th-century house that he visited on the island of Nantucket off Cape Cod, I started to think that he was coming up the stairs. This side of the Atlantic, his anniversary ghost has conjured up some aptly eccentric events. The Isle of Man, which lays claim to a crewman on the Pequod, has issued a set of commemorative Moby-Dick stamps, while a Yorkshire stately home is asking for the return of bones pilfered from the only whale mentioned in Moby-Dick that really did exist – a skeleton assembled at Burton Constable Hall in 1825, on whose jaws, Melville joked, the lord of the manor liked to swing. And if you happen to be in Paris on Thursday, you can join us reading the book aloud in the bookshop Shakespeare & Co, close to where Melville stayed in 1849. We are hoping for a bigger crowd than his book launch, when the party consisted of just him and Hawthorne. Melville was defiant. “I have written a blasphemous book,” he declared, “and I feel as spotless as the lamb.” The wickedness lives on. Happy birthday, Herman.

Subversive, queer and terrifyingly relevant: six reasons why Moby-Dick is the novel for our times. By  Philip Hoare. The Guardian , July 30, 2019.

“Moby Dick, as a medium of information, cannot be found fault with.”

— Anonymous Reviewer, 1851.

BORN IN NEW YORK on August 1, 1819, Herman Melville achieved limited notoriety during his lifetime. After the financial success of his first two novels, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), subsequent writings were met with mixed, sometimes scathing reviews. The 1851 whaling epic, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale was no exception. While praised by a select few critics as an instant classic, Moby-Dick was seen by many as tedious, verbose, even profane. It was not until the 1910s and ’20s — three decades after Melville’s death in 1891 — that a “Melville Revival” swept the literary world, leading to reappraisals of his work and a flurry of new interest.

Since this rediscovery, Melville’s seafaring masterpiece has provided a source of inspiration for numerous philosophers and literary theorists, among them Carl Schmitt, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. In recent years, a group of media theorists, cultural historians, and literary scholars in Germany have been particularly drawn to Melville’s white whale, focusing on Moby-Dick’s ongoing relevance for information theory, law, rhetoric, animal studies, and other topics. Led by Bernhard Siegert, Markus Krajewski, and Harun Maye, the group holds yearly conferences devoted to Moby-Dick and publishes an ongoing chapter-by-chapter commentary in the German literary journal, Die Neue Rundschau.

This year’s meeting took place on July 12–13 in Bad Homburg. For Melville’s 200th birthday, I sat down with Siegert, Krajewski, and Maye to discuss the project.

BRYAN NORTON: Professor Siegert, Professor Krajewski, Dr. Maye — I’m thrilled to have you join me for this interview. I would first like to hear about the origins of the group and its format, which is very unique. Each of the participants provides commentary, about half an hour talk, on a chapter of their choosing from Moby-Dick. No titles. No introductions. Each chapter is simply treated as its own unit. How did this all get started?

HARUN MAYE: Well for the group itself you might say there are two origin myths.

MARKUS KRAJEWSKI: Yes, Harun and I thought, well, we have some friends who are very good readers, so let’s form a reading group, just for pleasure. The plan was to go away together for a weekend. Stefan Heidenreich had a cottage at the Kyffhäuser, which would have been ideal. However, this retreat never happened, but we held on to this idea. The only thing missing was a suitable text. Moby-Dick came to our mind very early. Which other text had so much to offer in terms of modernity, classical subjects, and those perpetual questions at the same time?

BERNHARD SIEGERT: And then the second point of origin was a conversation I had in my office with Markus. We were just sitting there talking about conferences we would love to go to and why we hated the ones we got invited to. We started speculating about the best way of doing a conference. We would have friends around and for two days just talk about a novel that everybody finds exciting and enjoys reading. We started to think about what kind of novel that would be. We agreed almost from the start there was only one novel this could be — Moby-Dick.

BRYAN NORTON: And why Moby-Dick? Why not another encyclopedic novel, like Gravity’s Rainbow?

MARKUS KRAJEWSKI: Well, Pynchon was out of the question since it was already at the time the topic of Friedrich Kittler’s Oberseminar. We thought something like the Bible would have been a bit too big. So it was a very brief discussion over what obvious choices remained.

BERNHARD SIEGERT: There was a good opportunity to begin this in 2006. Joseph Vogl was organizing a huge conference on Political Zoology that year in Weimar. We suggested putting on a preconference as a sort of warm-up. He was very fond of this idea. The first meeting happened the day before Joseph’s conference.

BRYAN NORTON: How did this become an annual event?

BERNHARD SIEGERT: We skipped the next year in 2007. But at the end of the first workshop so many people said this was so great that we just had to do it again. The second meeting was organized in 2008 by Friedrich Balke in Cologne.

MARKUS KRAJEWSKI: We thought, there are only about 115 chapters left, so let’s do the whole thing!

BRYAN NORTON: And was the format already decided at this point? The commentary for each individual chapter?

BERNHARD SIEGERT: Yes, we agreed from the beginning what the ideals were. No obligation to do all these things you normally do at a conference. No titles.

MARKUS KRAJEWSKI: No introductions.

HARUN MAYE: And no publications!

BRYAN NORTON: So, the idea was just to have each participant select a chapter and see what they make of it. How did the publications come about?

MARKUS KRAJEWSKI: After three or four years, we had this whole collection of commentaries. We saw that the commentaries weren’t all that bad. The pressure was growing to do something with them.

BERNHARD SIEGERT: We thought it would be awful for everyone to start publishing these commentaries here and there in a disorganized way. First, we discussed websites.

MARKUS KRAJEWSKI: But we decided that this would be too precious to just put online. And we didn’t want to maintain a website. We were trying to decide what to do with the commentaries when in 2011 I was in Frankfurt for the 125th anniversary celebration of the Fischer Verlag. With the name Fischer Verlag there is this metaphor of getting something from the ocean, which was great. I ran into a friend of mine, Alexander Roesler, who is an editor at the Neue Rundschau. I explained the project to Alexander, and he immediately said let’s do it!

BERNHARD SIEGERT: First we did a special issue in 2012 for the Neue Rundschau.

HARUN MAYE: And now we have three commentaries in each issue, four times a year.

BRYAN NORTON: The series is titled Moby-Dick: Ein historisch-spekulativer Kommentar. What exactly is this historical-speculative methodology?

MARKUS KRAJEWSKI: From the outset, we knew we did not want to go into philological criticism. We began wondering what a good term might be for our approach. I recall that we started with Dalí and his method of speculative paranoia.

BERNHARD SIEGERT: The idea was to look for secret relations in the texture of the text which only a paranoid could see. You are allowed to make connections that have nothing to do with each other upon first glance. This has also a certain kind of arbitrariness that Nietzsche uses when he is doing genealogy. You start at this arbitrary point in the present and jump backward in an unexpected way.

HARUN MAYE: The term speculative historical reading came out later as a result of this practice.

MARKUS KRAJEWSKI: Right. And the approach was also not to be loaded with existing scholarship. The idea was to have fresh meetings, readings from scratch, you could say.

BRYAN NORTON: Of course, many philosophers and theorists had already written on the novel. Carl Schmitt’s Land and Sea. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write on Ahab’s becoming whale in A Thousand Plateaus. Is there a way of understanding your commentary as participating in these conversations?

BERNHARD SIEGERT: I think so. Juridical questions were very present at the outset. Readings of Carl Schmitt’s Land und Meer. And it really is no surprise that the first chapters we read were those like “Chapter 89: Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish,” those dealing with sovereignty — the question of: “To whom belongs the whale?”

BRYAN NORTON: And does media theory fit in anywhere?

MARKUS KRAJEWSKI: You could also say that media theory is the disciplinary framing we all share.

HARUN MAYE: Yes, in Germany you have the field of media theory that reaches back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, which in the United States became a discussion later on with the reception of Friedrich Kittler. When we began this group in 2006 it wasn’t really a big thing to do “media theory” any more. There no longer was the need to directly frame a research topic this way. It was just common sense that this was what all of the group members were doing at the time.

MARKUS KRAJEWSKI: We all have backgrounds in this field, so it was quite obvious that we didn’t need to go into all of these questions of defining media. We were free to work with other figures of thinking here.

BERNHARD SIEGERT: And in addition to this, I think members of the group also experienced the prehistory of German media theory. We were active in academia before this thing was called “media theory.” All this became important for our reading of Moby-Dick. Lacanian psychoanalysis always comes up in our reading. Deleuze. Foucault. What in the United States is called French theory or poststructuralism. It is impossible to think of German media theory without this conceptual framework, so in this way I would say German media theory is somewhere in our Moby-Dick project. But it isn’t in this canonical way where you say now that we have read McLuhan we will apply it. Actually, we never really refer to McLuhan in the group.

MARKUS KRAJEWSKI: Well in the beginning Matthias Bickenbach did refer to him in the St. Elmo’s Fire chapter.

BERNHARD SIEGERT: And the try-works. He interpreted the fire in the furnaces as McLuhan’s TV.

MARKUS KRAJEWSKI: Yes. Very historically speculative, emphasis on the speculative.

HARUN MAYE: Friedrich Kittler is also completely present, indirectly, through Lacan, Derrida, and so forth. Although we aren’t doing Kittler Studies, per se, the group really sharpens one’s attention to aspects of media theory like instruments, paper, and the history of science that are so central to the novel. Certain objects take on their own sense of agency. And the ocean of course is the most central medium in the novel!

BERNHARD SIEGERT: The ship, too, the Pequod. We wanted to do a close reading of the ship itself as an object in its own right, as an artifact rather than just a metaphor.

MARKUS KRAJEWSKI: And the chart.

BERNHARD SIEGERT: Yes, we take these media that appear in the novel very seriously, trying to reconstruct their history in great detail. You need the work of an oceanographer like Matthew Fontaine Maury, for instance, to read “Chapter 44: The Chart,” in order to go into this history of mapmaking, chart-making, oceanography in the 19th century. In a way, this truly is a classical exercise in German media theory — combining Foucault with archival work and the history of science.

BRYAN NORTON: What is interesting about that chapter as well is the presence of paper. Ahab seems to disregard many of his nautical instruments in favor of the medium.

MARKUS KRAJEWSKI: Right. And this is because of the statistical knowledge he gains from the chart. Ahab always adds data about where he spots whales, which he overlaps with the territory of the ocean. He then knows where to follow the season-on-the-line, as it is called.

BRYAN NORTON: And you don’t just have the ship alone out to sea. It exists itself on a sort of information network.

MARKUS KRAJEWSKI: Of course! The Pequod encounters other ships and Ahab asks if they have seen the whale, where and when it was last spotted. The chart is updated constantly.

BERNHARD SIEGERT: In this way, it is more or less like Moby, the white whale himself. He exists as a sort of archive of encounters. He has harpoons and scars all across his body.

HARUN MAYE: Reading and writing are omnipresent too. Questions of readability and unreadability of Ahab, of the whale, the ship, and of whiteness in general. These are central for Melville.

BERNHARD SIEGERT: I think that is what made “Chapter 99: The Doubloon” such a highly sought-after chapter for commentary. This chapter is an entire exercise in interpretation, how to read simultaneously in a literal, allegorical, metaphorical sense and so on. The novel itself contains within itself an interpretation of interpretation.

HARUN MAYE: And since this hermeneutical work has already been done over and over again, we focused more on materiality, media history, and on material practices of reading and writing in the novel. It wasn’t just about meaning and interpretation for us.

BERNHARD SIEGERT: Yes. We had this broader perspective of cultural techniques, the history of sciences like zoology, sources on whales and whaling. We were able to discover Melville’s reflections on reading in the novel where we would never have expected them. In “Chapter 68: The Blanket,” for example, practically the entire skin of the whale appears as a conglomerate of media and sub-media that helps you to read.

BRYAN NORTON: Right. In your commentary, you mention how part of the sperm whale’s skin is being used as a bookmarker by Ishmael. This whole feedback loop is uncovered between whaling and techniques of reading implicated in the novel.

BERNHARD SIEGERT: Exactly.

BRYAN NORTON: The group has been meeting now for nearly 14 years straight. What remains to be done for the commentary?

HARUN MAYE: We have eight chapters remaining, I think, plus the prologue and epilogue.

MARKUS KRAJEWSKI: When we finish, there will be a print-on-demand version and a complete collection in a single volume.

HARUN MAYE: We are also thinking about publishing a translation in English.

MARKUS KRAJEWSKI: We are not officially in negotiations just yet, but some big publishing houses have already displayed interest.

BRYAN NORTON: And where will the remaining meetings take place?

MARKUS KRAJEWSKI: Burkhardt Wolf mentioned he may host the next meeting in Vienna.

HARUN MAYE: And for a final meeting we are talking about going to the Mystic Seaport — Nantucket itself.

MARKUS KRAJEWSKI: We want our last meeting as a group to be on the only whaling ship still afloat — the Charles W. Morgan.

BERNHARD SIEGERT: Which is also the sister ship of the Acushnet, on which Melville sailed. So if you are on board that ship, you would know how Melville himself would have sailed.

BRYAN NORTON: Well, I can’t think of a better way for the project to end. Professors Siegert, Krajewski, Dr. Maye, thank you very much for your time.

Melville and the Media: A Conversation with Bernhard Siegert, Markus Krajewski, and Harun Maye. By  Bryan Norton. Los Angeles Review of Books , August  1 , 2019.