Contemplations of the Whale
Humanities
LTEL 190: Moby Dick and its Avatars
Writing like another speaker is something akin to method acting. You hope that you can learn something about the source by going through the motions of the result. From the bottom up, Ishmael’s voice can be characterized by long tangents, lists of facts dumped in a pile like a magpie’s treasure trove, inappropriate but philosophically poignant comparisons of whales to human beings, questions directed the reader, and of course the odd-bit of bawdy humor in the midst of a profound message so Ishmael can pretend to be an everyman. It’s a style with a lot of self-consciousness, like Ishmael feels the need to present piles of information to be taken seriously as an intellectual, but also keep up a conversational dialogue to be relevant to the salt-of-the-earth (perhaps more aptly salt-of-the-sea) reader.
I did not write this piece as Ishmael. I am tainted by the different values of my time, and I think the piece is better if I am honest with what it is. I am writing as a modern person with substantially more access to research on cetaceans and different concerns than a 1850s writer, but like Ishmael I am succumbing to the temptation to put poetry and metaphor to nature to better understand something about myself as a human participant in nature. This project would horrify those professors and teaching assistants in the marine biology department that spent so much time training me to write non-human centric explanations of the natural world. Anything I have sourced with a citation can be followed back to the original paper for verification. However, I want to be completely transparent; anything without a citation is a scientifically unsubstantiated digression in the style of Ishmael. That being said, this project made me reflect on the nature of data.
I have been warned to not turn contort data into meta-physical truth because it’s just data. It can be interpreted as many ways as a religious text to suit our means. Thus, it’s best to stay in the literal domain of what the data says and venture into interpretation with caution and hedging. Even in the cited journal articles that appear as concrete facts in magazines, newspapers, and this paper start to look hazier when you squint at the small sample size. For example, can you really find the average size of sperm whale hearts from just seven samples, some of which have spent years in formaldehyde? Then, you look deeper and notice all the claims are led by “it’s possible” and “we hypothesize.” In my experience, ecologists are especially skittish about claiming to “know” anything. The ecology that informs environmentalism is hedged by a giant “probably,” but we still use it because it’s the best guess we have. I bring this up to point out that the truth can be flimsy, even in the realm of science. There’s room for interpretation from science’s greatest authorities, so I feel I have a right to do some uncharted musing and speculation like Ishmael as long as I’m upfront about my sources and where I editorialize. If we find poetry in nature, maybe that’s sometimes because nature made the same pattern millions of years before. Maybe sometimes our culture is nature’s spill over into us instead of human spill over into nature. I will concede, that in my personal belief, I don’t think a whale would remember a specific whaler or find him inscrutable. However, Ahab brought a spiteful whale into existence by making his crew believe in it, and, one step back, Melville made us believe in a fictional Ahab that we engaged with. Now the story is in our heads, and our view of the world is at least a little changed. When it comes to even fictional stories, we are fast fish the moment we care enough to engage.
I focus on a few aspects of the Whale Melville or Ishmael did not have the benefit of knowing. I hope this expansion—or fan-fiction—illuminates the nature of stories as I have described, and why I think reading Moby Dick is worthwhile. I already know that I wrote in the style of Ishmael imperfectly, but I hope to have cultivated that confusing potpourri of what we think of as fact mixed with mythology, humor, and tragedy which Ishmael evokes to vex the reader in search of one answer. In some ways, I diverged. For example, I made a stylistic decision to capitalize all the Whales to complicate the Whale’s identity as a sentient being. At the very least, I know this project, like Ishmael’s, is written with sufficient self-awareness about its incompleteness. To quote Ishmael, “God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught—nay, but the draught of a draught.” (Melville 125)
