Moby-Dick in 2020
This week: conversations about Moby-Dick with Jonathan Lethem, Donald Pease, Wyn Kelley, Alexander Chee, and Cornel West. Listen today at 2 pm, or anytime at our website.
If 2020 isn’t the year of the apocalypse, it’s at least an apocalyptic year, a time of mass death and institutional collapse. Here in the U.S. alone, the coronavirus pandemic has killed around 180,000 people; crucial institutions like the postal system and elections are failing. This is, if nothing else, something like how the world ends.
And so we’re looking to a novel of microcosmic American apocalypse. The book is Moby-Dick, the microcosm is the ship, the Pequod, and the tyrannical manipulator of lonely people is Captain Ahab, who takes almost everyone down with him on his obsessive and cursed mission to hunt a white whale.
It’s a story of doom, cosmic horror, and tyranny. But it’s easy to forget all that while you read it, because throughout Moby-Dick, there’s still a real sense of hope and utopian potential, a joyous feeling for democracy and a love of humanity.
We started this week’s show with the novelist Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude. He sees in Moby-Dick a novel that contains it all, including a great revenge story, the story of Ahab vs. the white whale who maimed him. It’s a revenge story that also says so much about human history:
Is Ahab mad or is he just angry? It’s a great revenge story, and it makes you feel the sadness of all revenge stories: they are stories of love and mutual destruction. The whale knows Ahab too well, and the whale has shown Ahab too much in himself. It’s a great death pact. It’s a great death cult that Ahab represents. And I guess that’s a form of madness, but it’s unfortunately a very historically, powerful kind. The Ahabs of our history aren’t madmen being being tended to in asylums. They’re they’re running the ship. That’s the problem.
Donald Pease, professor of English at Dartmouth College, joined us to talk about a similar problem.
Pease is a foundational figure in American Studies, a scholar who sees the murky psychic interplay between American politics, social reality, and literary imagination. In Moby-Dick, he finds the basic American tensions between democracy and its opposite.
Melville built his novel out of these American tensions by placing Ahab’s totalitarianism alongside the crew’s democratic qualities. A peculiarly American character pervades the whole thing; Melville (or Ishmael) emphasizes this for us when he cites Andrew Jackson:
Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! . . . Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!
Donald Pease walks us through the Jacksonian side of Ahab, while reminding us of Trump’s affinity for Andrew Jackson:
When Melville decides he needs to write Moby-Dick, he’s lived through the presidency of Andrew Jackson, and he’s seen how that presidency appealed to, in the name of democracy, simultaneously the deepest aspirations and the basest drives . . . The reason Donald Trump invokes Jackson as his precursor is because he sees that that it was Jackson who appointed Roger Taney (who gave us the Fugitive Slave law) as his Supreme Court Justice. He sees that all of his appointments to the court were political, as are Trump’s, hence he does not believe in the independence of the judiciary. He also had nothing but disdain for Native Americans, African-Americans, and immigrants alike. So Melville sees in Jackson a prototype: King Andrew Jackson, a prototype for let’s call it the totalitarian temptation of a democracy.
Such thoughtful consideration of horror (of totalitarianism, of ecological nightmare) makes Moby-Dick especially necessary this year.
Wyn Kelley, a Melvillean who teaches at MIT, says on our show:
It seems to me the overwhelming thing about Moby-Dick is the way the characters live within eternal and ever-present danger. The whale is a terrifying presence and the characters are constantly being called out of their sleep and out of their meals and wherever they are to go race after this creature who could smash them to smithereens. The sense of personal danger and vulnerability is central to the book’s effect. And reading it now, I’m just as taken with the heroism of the characters, the way that Ishmael finds humor and solace and human companionship in the midst of things that we we can’t even begin to understand.
This companionable book, scary as it is, also tells us of great companionship, and love. The novelist Alexander Chee spoke to us about the love story between Ishamel and Queequeg, two isolatoes who find their way together onto Ahab’s ship.
Chee says:
I had put off reading the book for a very long time — just sort of afraid in a certain way of encountering the sorts of orientalist racism that one can find in this kind of material. And when I finally did read it, I remember thinking “Why didn’t anyone tell me that this novel was like this?” By which I mean, why didn’t anyone tell me that it was such a love story between these men.
To Cornel West, Melville is the greatest American novelist, in part because his work registers the love and the horror, the tragic dimensions and the threadbare hope of American life. “Melville himself has a profound sense of the tragic,” West says on this show; he describes how Melville “is the greatest American novelist and America is finally beginning to catch up with him,” as the nightmarish side of the American project becomes ever more evident. Donald Trump, West says, simply represents “the worst of what Melville is talking about.”
Watch: Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan
Jonathan Lethem this week discusses pop-culture’s allusions to Moby-Dick, and one of pop culture’s most over-the-top Melville-alluders is the obsessive, vengeful Khan (played by Ricardo Montalban) of the second Star Trek movie. Khan, once defeated by William Shatner’s Captain Kirk, has vowed, above all, vengeance against Kirk, and he finds in Moby-Dick language to express his monomania.
As an Ahab figure, Khan stands almost radically opposed to the space-mariner Captain Kirk, who rambles widely and (usually) without malice. But you can notice unsettling parallels between the two: Khan and Kirk share a feeling for glory, a thirst to venture into the universe heroically. Their strange harmonizing reveals something troubling about Star Trek’s whole story, and behind so much American imagination about exploration. That underside: obsession, selfishness, something opposed to the ideal community we sometimes find both on the Pequod and the Starship Enterprise.
Read: King Lear
We also learned on this week’s show about Melville’s debt to Shakespeare—to King Lear in particular. Here’s King Lear, who harmonizes so well with Ahab:
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, an germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!
Ahab’s raging against nature (especially against one white whale in particular) has its own poetic music to it:
Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: “Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave.”
Support us on Patreon and hear Elisa Gabbert on disaster literature
Please do consider supporting Open Source at patreon.com/radioopensource. This week over on Patreon, you can hear Elisa Gabbert in conversation with Adam Colman about essays that think hard about disaster. Gabbert’s new book of essays, The Unreality of Memory, considers catastrophe from so many angles, and in this conversation, she describes the rewards of essays that pursue such restless exploration.
This Week’s Ephemeral Library
What Have We Done to the Whale? U.S. policy that turns a desert into a graveyard. Infamous college quarantine food.
Take care mates, we’ll be back in port next week. Stay safe, warm and dry.
The OS Crew
