Moby-Dick Recap: Chapters 55-65
Ishmael as art critic and animal right activist?
After last week’s slow single chapter send of “The Town-Ho’s Story,” we were off to the races this week, galloping through a total of eleven chapters with titles like “Stubb Kills A Whale,” “The Crotch,” or uh “Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars,” but before we start recapping, I must note that this week also saw the birthday of Herman Melville. This Leo was born August 1, 1819 and on his birthday, McSweeney’s published “If Starbucks had been named after other characters from Moby-Dick” by Amanda Lehr (thanks to my friend Ben for finding this). It’s very clever, especially the Ishmaels entry.
Last week, several of you shared that “The Town-Ho’s Story” was difficult to get through and I agree. At times, it felt like a story that could have been a paragraph or two dragged out to fifteen pages. But sometimes I find the shorter chapters aren’t any easier. For example, we saw Moby-Dick take on yet another form in this week’s opening chapters. We’ve seen it be a play, a story within a story, a reference book, and now we get “Ishmael as art critic” for three chapters. Especially in“Monstrous Pictures of Whales,” Ishmael was totally being that guy at dinner who talks endlessly about a work of art nobody but him has seen, so not only is he holding us hostage with his opinions, we also have no reference point for what he’s talking about. I mean, at least in 2022 we can Google what some of these pieces looked like, but readers back in 1851 just had to sit back and take his “I’ve actually seen a whale and these artists haven’t” rants as gospel. Let’s take a look at some of the pieces Ishmael low-key shit-talks, I will admit they’re pretty silly.
“Nor does Hogarth, in painting the same scene in his own “Perseus Descending,” make out one whit better. The huge corpulence of that Hogarthian monster undulates on the surface, scarcely drawing one inch of water. It has a sort of howdah on its back, and its distended tusked mouth into which the billows are rolling, might be taken for the Traitors’ Gate leading from the Thames by water into the Tower.”
Yeah, this looks nothing like a whale. It looks a lot more like a sea dragon.
“Look at that popular work “Goldsmith’s Animated Nature.” In the abridged London edition of 1807, there are plates of an alleged “whale” and a “narwhale.” I do not wish to seem inelegant, but this unsightly whale looks much like an amputated sow; and, as for the narwhale, one glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in this nineteenth century such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon any intelligent public of schoolboys.”
Gotta say, +1 for Ishmael here, I agree with this.
“In this book is an outline purporting to be a “Picture of a Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale from one killed on the coast of Mexico, August, 1793, and hoisted on deck.” I doubt not the captain had this veracious picture taken for the benefit of his marines. To mention but one thing about it, let me say that it has an eye which applied, according to the accompanying scale, to a full grown sperm whale, would make the eye of that whale a bow-window some five feet long. Ah, my gallant captain, why did ye not give us Jonah looking out of that eye!”
Lol, what is up with this one. It looks like when you half-ass a school assignment.
Anyway after three chapters of Ishmael as art critic, and bragging how he has seen a real live whale, but none of these art poseurs have, we get Chapters 58 and 60, devoted to “Brit” and “The Line” respectively, with a meaty cool squid encounter sandwiched in the middle (Chapter 59 “The Squid”). “Brit” and “The Line” both have a similar arc, they go into over-detail (but at this point, would we expect anything less from Ishmael?) about an aspect of whaling life (yellow clusters of crustaceans found on the surface of the water that whales feed on, whaling rope) that’s really a jumping off point to end with a metaphor about humanity. Aren’t the contrasts between the unknowable dark sea and safer land similar to the contrasts in the human soul? Aren’t we all trapped in a whale line, born with halters round our necks? I do love the line “it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.”
All three chapters also foreshadow the eventual encounter with a whale in Chapter 61, in which, well, “Stubb Kills a Whale.” I must say, I read this chapter with a bout of insomnia late at night and it was horrifying. We’re spared none of the gruesome details about how brutal it is to a kill such a large creature. The whale's heart bursts. There’s blood everywhere. I respect this choice of Melville’s though, he wants the reader to know what violent business whaling is, and what the impact really is of killing such a creature.
Before we move on, we get two more chapters explaining the logistics and equipment involved in what just happened (Chapter 62’s “The Dart” and Chapter 63 “The Crotch”), then a return to plot in Chapter 64. “Stubb’s Supper” opens with the crew dragging the whale carcass back to the Pequod. They have a dead whale, but it’s not Moby Dick, and that just makes broody Ahab even more depressed, so he goes to mope in his cabin, while Stubb is whooping it up, and being all like, “O hell yeah! Also, I love eating whale. Daggoo, overboard you go, and cut me a nice rare slice off for supper.”
From there, we have a darkly comic scene between Stubb and Fleece, the cook who has prepared his late night whale snack. Stubb’s chowing down on whale, which he can only see because he has lighted two lanterns of sperm oil (“But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he?”) and meanwhile, swarms of sharks are also gorging themselves on the whale that’s tied to the Pequod. They’re taking ravenous bites, scooping out “huge globular pieces of the whale of the bigness of a human head.” Stubb calls Fleece to insult his cooking and demand he tell the sharks to quiet down, as all their racket and lip-smacking is ruining his own pleasurable enjoyment of the whale. Fleece, to his credit, is having none of this, and I hope we get to see more of this sarcastic character. The whole scene is one of the most wtf and absurd in the novel, and it was welcome to see humor return to the story.
I also enjoyed “The Whale as a Dish.” I don’t have the historical context to know whether Ishmael’s points in the last two paragraphs were groundbreaking for his time, but I was surprised to see this novel give such compassionate consideration for how animals are sacrificed, both for food and for products/tools. Ishmael has more respect for a starving person forced into cannibalism than he does for the bourgeois folks who are okay with torturing geese to enjoy the culinary delight that is paté-de-foie-gras. I had never heard of paté-de-foie-gras, and I did not know the process involved to make it. I quick Google searched it, in addition to the whale artwork mentioned at the beginning of this recap. It is indeed quite horrific.
During the art critique chapters, all I could think about was how an ocean documentary would blow Ishmael's (/Herman Melville's) mind. "Oh no one can ever capture the likeness of a whale bc it looks different dead/on land/not in the wild!"