THE SPECTATOR BOOKS
As well as being a mythic tale, Moby-Dick is a superb guide to oceanography
Having spirited us briskly through Manhattan, New Bedford and Nantucket, and having flushed Ahab from his lair on to the deck of the Pequod, Herman Melville divagates into a disquisition on whale taxonomies. In Ahab’s Rolling Sea,
Richard J. King asks: ‘What happens to the story if Melville had an editor who convinced him to just cut cetology?’...Melville’s experience as a whaler equipped him with a deep knowledge of cetology and marine biology, making Moby-Dick a true novel of the sea
To ‘Moby Dickheads', Ahab’s Rolling Sea is a treasure trove. King situates Melville as a person of his time, writing amid a quickening pace of discoveries about the natural world but, pre-On the Origin of Species, inclined to couch them as further disclosures of God’s design. Still, Moby-Dick prefigures Darwin ‘by de-centering the human’. Less convincing is King’s gloss on the book as a ‘proto-environmentalist’ text, with Ahab as a stand-in for ‘Big Oil’.
Richard J. King asks: ‘What happens to the story if Melville had an editor who convinced him to just cut cetology?’...Melville’s experience as a whaler equipped him with a deep knowledge of cetology and marine biology, making Moby-Dick a true novel of the sea
To ‘Moby Dickheads', Ahab’s Rolling Sea is a treasure trove. King situates Melville as a person of his time, writing amid a quickening pace of discoveries about the natural world but, pre-On the Origin of Species, inclined to couch them as further disclosures of God’s design. Still, Moby-Dick prefigures Darwin ‘by de-centering the human’. Less convincing is King’s gloss on the book as a ‘proto-environmentalist’ text, with Ahab as a stand-in for ‘Big Oil’.
Annexing Moby-Dick to contemporary pieties serves to make it relatable, but defangs and domesticates a confounding work fully in touch with its dark side, as strange as the oil-engorged Leviathan that inspired it, and, to use Yeats’s words, ‘as cold and passionate as the dawn’.
