In Our Time - Moby Dick

Episode Date: December 7, 2017

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Herman Melville's (1819-1891) epic novel, published in London in 1851, the story of Captain Ahab's pursuit of a great white sperm whale that had bitten off his leg. He risks his own life and that of his crew on the Pequod, single-mindedly seeking his revenge, his story narrated by Ishmael who was taking part in a whaling expedition for the first time. This is one of the c1000 ideas which listeners sent in this autumn for our fourth Listener Week, following Kafka's The Trial in 2014, Captain Cook in 2015 and Garibaldi and the Risorgimento in 2016.With Bridget Bennett Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of LeedsKatie McGettigan Lecturer in American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of LondonAndGraham Thompson Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of NottinghamProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, Moby Dick by Herman Melville tells the story of Captain Ahab, whose leg was bitten off by a great white whale, and Ahab wants to hunt it down and kill it in revenge.

It was published in 1851, but it was over 50 years before Moby Dick became known or thought of as a great American novel as it is today. Then in the Cold War readers saw Ahab as a dictator, leading his crew on the Peacord to disaster in pursuit of a mission they didn't sign up for. We're discussing Moby Dick now this autumn, as this autumn we ask you to suggest today's topic.

This one came from, James Rogers, Michael Redmayne, Caroline Hack, Mike Stanley, Arizona Baker, Drew Kirkland, Charlie Pullen, Mike Medcalf, John Rowlands, Minkoo Yonk and Martin Padgett. Our thanks go to them, and to all of you for sending in almost a thousand ideas. We will plunder those in the years to come.

With me to discuss Moby Dick are Bridgett Bennett, Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds, Katie McGettigan, Lecturer in American Literature at Royal Holloway University of London, and Graham Thompson, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham. Bridget Bennett, what was Herman Melville's background? Melville was born in 1890,

he died in 1891, and his story is a story of decline from quite a patrician background, into one in which his family had a set of financial crises. So by 1830, his father, Alan, has to liquidate his business. And by the kind of financial crisis of 1837, Melville finds himself working for his brother in his brother's fur and cap store. So his education is damaged by this experience.

He's pulled out of school. He finds that he doesn't have the education to which he would expect to have. His family moves from New York City to upstate New York, and we see this kind of narrative of decline. One thing that he gains after his father's death is a letter E, which his family adds to the end of his name so that it moved from Melville, double L, to Melville with the year at the end.

So this is how we recognise him as Melville. Why do they do that? It seems like they wanted to distance themselves potentially from the father and this financial failure. So it's not entirely clear, but his mother chose to do this. Was his financial failure one of those things that happened in finances or was he sort of drunk, disreputable or something like that? It's a period of great financial crises in the United States,

particularly around 1837. So it just seems to be part of that period in the US life in which that's happening. So at this point then, Melville, his father's dead, he has a peripatetic life, he's trying to find employment. And within his family history, there's a history of men going to see. He has an uncle who's gone to see. He's got a cousin who's gone to see.

So his brother, Gansfort, puts him on a vessel as a cabin boy, and he sails over to Liverpool. And he has an experience in Liverpool of seeing what port is like, seeing what it's like to work on a merchant vessel, comes back to the United States. And then in the period of the early 1840s, he sails once more on a whaling vessel, the Akushnet. He jumps ship at the Marquitas Islands. He has a set of adventures, including a period of mutiny, comes back eventually. to the United States and settles down to write a series of novels

over a short period in which, broadly speaking, they derive from this experience. So he writes Tai Pi 1846, Omu, 1847, Mardi, 1849, White Jacket, 1850.

A lot. No, no reason to be successful adventure novels, one and two of them are very successful. But he had only one major welly experience is what you're talking about. He did. Over this period of time, yes. And how big was one

What do I mean when I say major? Well, so he embarked on a vessel. He learned all about whaling, what it was. He worked as a harpooner, so he's literally at the sharp end of what you do on a whaling vessel. And he knows his ships. He knows what it means to be a whaler. He knows what it means to travel. Where did that ship go?

It went all over the place, over the South Sea Island. He ended up in Tahiti at one point and in Hawaii. So it was a great, grand period of travel. and he, everything he learned about, did he, after that, did he start to write about his attraction to the idea of whaling, to whales themselves? Did that start then? It did, but he also, that attraction was also boosted

by a great deal of research on whaling, which he did. So his experience, on the one hand, his actual experience feeds into the novel, but on the other hand, it's boosted by the fact that he does a huge amount of reading. And that's what we get in the novel, isn't it? that combination of the practical experience and that real knowledge coming from reading, the text of what whales are. Yes, enormous, enormous.

Right, Graham, Graham Thompson, to carry on from that, what had he been reading before he started Moby Dick? Apart from reading all about Wales, and by the time, if you don't know all about Wales, you haven't read the book, really, have you? Absolutely. I think we know that just before he started writing Moby Dick and during the writing of Moby Dick,

he was really reading, for the first time, intently Shakespeare. This was a huge influence on Moby Dick. So he calls Shakespeare the divine William at one point. He even says in a letter to a friend that if the Messiah ever comes again, it will be in Shakespeare's person. So he's smitten by Shakespeare, and you can see that all the way through the novel, really. So those speeches that Ahab gives, even the more meditative moments that Ahab has, particularly a chapter like the Gilder,

which is a really moving chapter about the cycles of life and how one grows up as a child and turns into a man and then his return to childhood again, this cycle of life. It's almost like a Shakespearean soliloquy. You know, he even goes so far to put stage directions in some of the chapters, some of those central chapters, the quarter-deck chapter, you know, it's enter Ahab. We are on the stage here.

And that follows on for two or three chapters. And then we get a kind of Shakespearean chorus in Midnight Folkall, all the crew kind of joining in conversation and in song as well. So the tragedies, Leah Macbeth, they're very important to Melville's conception of Ahab. But there are other influences as well, and they tend to be English, and they tend to be from 16th, 17th century. So Milton is another one. So some of Ahab's more crazed speeches are clearly based on Milton's depiction of Satan in Paradise Lost.

but he's also attracted to more esoteric early modern texts like Robert Burton's anatomy of melancholy, this strange book which is a collection of verses, poetry, anecdotes about melancholy. So its formal structure is very influential. So it's this mixture of genres, which is exactly what you get in Moby Dick as well. And what influence would you say that King James Version, as it's called in America, had on him? I think more generally that book is the most important book in 19th century American literature probably. And clearly Moby Dick's a religious novel. I mean the religious allusions starts with Kormi Ishmael

and they go all the way through to the epilogue where we get that quote from Job about, you know, I'm the only one to escape and I can tell you this story and the story of Jonah, obviously. But I guess the more important influence of the King James Bible is on the language of Moby Dick. So it gives, although it's a great American novel, I think what's distinctive is the way that it's actually drawing on a very English literary tradition. And that kind of archaic nature of the poetry of the King James Bible gives Moby Dick a kind of reach and a resonance

that perhaps it wouldn't have if it was entirely written in a kind of colloquial or American vernacular. Is he drawing more on a new or the Old Testament? On the Old Testament, I think. And just going back to this point about the language, I think what he really does is to bring these different influences together. So there's a kind of, there's a homogenising quality, really, or the ability to bring these different styles together

in a way which is uniform and which works. It's not a kind of disjointed novel stylistically in many ways. The language continues. Briskly, I'm sorry, but some of our listeners might not know the outline of the story. Could you just tell us? It could be summoned up very quickly if you want. Well, I think we have to remember Ishmael. So this is a story of a young man who goes to see on a whaling vessel.

He ends up on a ship, captain by Captain Ahab, who's on a revenge mission to catch a white whale, and that's the story of the novel, and we end up with the white whale crushing, destroying the ship, and killing everybody apart from Ishmael. Yes, well, we might amplify it a little as we go on. but that gives us the bare bones of it. Kate, Kate McGettigan, how familiar would the whaling industry have been to 19th century readers? Well, I think the important thing to remember

was quite how vast the whaling industry was in the period that Melville is writing, Maybe Dick. It's the fifth largest industry in the United States, in the 1840s and the 1850s. The United States has by far the largest whaling fleet. 70% of the world's whaling ships were, going out were based in United States ports, largely in New England, ports of Nantucket and New Bedford, which is where Moby Dick takes place, Ishmael Sails from Nantucket,

70,000 people's livelihoods were connected to the whaling industry in some way. So it would have been an industry about which people had general knowledge. It would have been part of people's life because the products of the whaling industry were parts of people's lives. So whale oil oil is used as a source for light. So the sort of crude oil that comes from the whale, the less refined oil from whales like right whales was used by poorer people because it still had a bit of a smell when you burnt it.

But sperm whale oil, from the head of the sperm whale, that burnt very brightly, very pure light, and it burnt without a scent. So it made the best quality candles. So the whaling industry then spurn, the sort of candle making industry, around Nantucket 2. Whale oil was also particularly important because it was a lubricant for industrial machinery. So as the northeast of the United States is industrializing in this period,

development of things like textile mills in rural Massachusetts, whale oil is incredibly important for that too. So it's really connected to all parts of the United States economy in a way that we might not think about now. And also it goes on. Can you give us a few more examples of the way that what comes from a whale goes into the commercial community? Oh, so lots of different ways. So oil was obviously the main product. The really crude stuff was used to tan leather. So it's in that industry.

The more refined stuff, as I said, is a machine lubricant is used for lighting and candles. Parts the whale are also used in the manufacture of perfume. Ambergrace, which comes from the bodies of dead whales, as Melville talks about in Moby Dick is an important thing in the manufacture of clone and perfume. Whalebone corsetry, Melville has a lot of fun with imagery about well-bone corsetry in his novel too. And also just, I mean, small things like Scrimshaw.

So the whalers, while they're on their voyages, would make artisanal things from the parts of the whale. They would engrave on tooth. They would make things like snuff boxes and sell those back when they were on shore. So it really kind of permeates a lot of different. different levels. How typical would Ahab ship, the Pequod, how typical would that have been of ships of the time? Well, Ishmael makes the point that it's a smaller ship than perhaps as usual,

and I guess it's slightly unusual in that it's an older ship that has been refitted with newer things. So it is, in some ways Ishmael does make the point that it's an unusual ship, but also the Akushnet, the ship that Melville went out on his first voyage, was also slightly smaller than a normal whaling ship. In terms of the crew, yeah, so the crew of the Pequod, that's Ahab's ship, is very transnational. There are people from all over the world, there are Englishmen, Manxmen, Portuguese, South Sea Islanders, and that was, I mean, Melville emphasises and sort of plays up the transnational aspects of wailing crews. Most of whaling crews would probably not have had that many nationalities when they left port in America.

Those in charge were white Americans, though. usually there are a few instances of black whaling ship officers that we know about, but most of them would have been white Americans. But because whaling voyages are so long, some of your crew jump ship, as Melville himself did, people get sick, there are accidents. So they would end up picking up lots of other people along the way from ports in South America, from the South Sea Islands. It has a sort of strange quality about it.

When they're loading up the ship with the goods they're taking with them, you wonder how a small ship can take, all that and all those people and leave space for the whales? Yeah. When they cut the whales up. It would have been really, really confined. You're spending years and years and very close confines with the crew. I suppose Melville does make the point that some things you don't have to bring on a whaling voyage.

So you don't have to bring oil, for example, because hopefully if the whaling voyage is successful, you would get that. And you would stop in at ports, obviously, and pick up supplies. But yeah, it would have been a very strange experience to have your whole. world packed into a very small space. Bridget Bennett, the first chapter with the wonderful sentence called me Ishmael and Ishmael is the only man left standing or rather almost

standing at the very end. Can you tell us about Ishmael? So Ishmael is the person who we think of as narrating what Graham's talked about, the adventure side of the story. On the one hand, so he's the protagonist of this story of a young man going out to hunt Wales. But he's also the organiser and the kind of mind.

through which a lot of what happens in the novel works. And that's a strange and slightly conflicted position. So on the one hand, he tells us things, we know that he's there, we see how he operates with people. And then on the other hand, the novel is narrated in such a way that things that he couldn't possibly have seen

are told to us. So there's a question about Ishmael, the character, the protagonist, the person that we can see, who says, call me Ishmael. We don't know if his name actually is Ishmael, right, he says, call me Ishmael. And then this kind of mind that is fascinated by whales

that's full of wonder, marvel, that wants to collect information about whales, wants to present those to us, who isn't driven as Ahab is by this kind of madness of wanting to pursue Moby Dick. But imagined that whales are, as we know them, to be fantastical creatures, mysteries, marvels, that we might say things about.

And in the process of the book gives us a mini-encyclopedia, on Wales. Indeed. And using the encyclopedia as a kind of model for how to do it as well. So one of the great things about Ishmael's narrator is he's profoundly digressive. And then he goes to bed with Quequequeh. How does that come about? He decides that he's going to stay at an inn for the night.

He arrives, it's dark and there's nowhere to stay. And the innkeeper says, well, there's somewhere you can stay, but, you know, someone else is staying there and he finally agrees to do this. It's some room, not someone else. It's a room. It's a room. It's a room. Yeah. And he knows he'll have to share a bed with someone, but he doesn't know who it is. And then the figure that he ends up sharing a bed with is this Polynesian man,

Quiqueuag, who he believes to be a cannibal. It's great comedy about this. And they develop a very loving relationship, a kind of bromance. And indeed, when they wake up together, their relationship is described as being like a marriage. It's like having a honeymoon together. It's very strangely innocent the way he says that. There's no knowing innuendo. It just, it's very...

We were, they sling their arms around each other, and Ishmael thinks, well, he's good after all. Whatever he looks like, he's tattooed, heavily tattooed, he shot up his teeth on a harpoon. He's been out that evening selling heads that he has, bodies he has eaten. And he's got a few heads left, and he's trying to get rid of them and make a bit of money before he sail. So he's a real cannibal person.

He is, but in one way, we see that what we see with Ishmael in this novel, he keeps asking, well, which of us isn't one way or another a cannibal? Who might not be a savage? What is the relationship between the cannibal and the savage and the civilised? That's one of the great questions of the novel, right? What's the relationship between these? And who chooses these categories? And also we find in Quakewe're great characteristics of massive loyalty and bravery and rescuing people and so on.

So he is, I think he runs away with the novel in my mind, in my mind. For many people, yes. Well, I mean, I think, yeah, what the character of Queuegg does is introduce us into, I think what Bridget was suggesting here, the importance of male friendship on board ship. I mean, this is, you are sleeping cheap by jowl with men in the forecastle. The ship relies upon close male-maleh relationship. So Melville introduces this to us to this very, very early on in the novel. But also the key factor is, of course, that it's a cross-racial friendship, which is a tradition in American literature. We see it in Cooper's leather-stocking novels.

We see it in Huckleberry Finn with Hook and Jim. There's a scene where they're walking up street together, wheeling about it, and the alarm isn't that they're pushing a wheelbarrow, but a white man and the cannibal are walking up street together amiably as they're going to get under the ship. Yes, but of course this was Port Life. This is what you would find in Port Life, that kind of cross-racial sort of relationships.

But I think what's different about the relationship between Kwekeg and Ishmael and some of these other examples that we see in American literature is the closeness of that relationship. So they are wedded and there's that wonderful monkey rope chapter where they're literally tied together and they're lowered down to bring this whale to the side of the ship. And Ishmael describes this as being wedded to Quigwegg and they're tied together with this Siamese ligature. Now they set up just whaling, catching whales, trying to earn a lot of money as much money as they can

by bringing them on, butching them and butchering them and and so on. But Ahab, the man with the whale leg and the obsessed man, and the man straight out of the Old Testament, plus as it were, persuades them to give all that and pursue the great white whale. How does he persuade them to do that? Well, he uses simple tactics like bribery, so he nails the doubloon to the mask. And when they start to show their support, he gives them a round of grog. I mean, these are useful tactics. But the key thing, the key way that he persuades him is through the power of his voice and his oratory.

So that quarterdeck chapter is the pivotal moment in the novel where he gets them on side. So the only potential opposition is Starbook, who has a very bland sort of counter-narrative, which is this is an economic mission. That's fairly boring. So what Ahab's able to do, he's able to reach into the minds and the hearts of these sailors. And he persuades them to make his quest, their quest, this idea of striking through the pasteboard mask, of reaching outside the prison. just my fight and battle. This is your fight and battle. This is where he becomes

epic on a different scale, doesn't it? He does. And this is where Melville starts to use that kind of Shakespearean literary tradition, that really powerful speech. And it's about what a leader is. How should a leader operate? What's the difference between a leader and a follower? And I guess one of the major questions the novel asks is what should a legitimate leader because after all he's captured of the ship so he has authority but what does he do with that authority? Kate, do you want to come in? Yeah, I suppose

I would just add to that that idea of legitimate authority but also how far authority can actually reach is a really important thing in Moby Dick so yes, Ahab nails the doubloon to the mast and he says this is the reward for citing Moby Dick

this is whoever cites Moby Dick will get this de Blune so he tries to essentially control the meaning of that that coin in the same way that he tries to control the meaning of Moby Dick, tries to control the whole ship. And to an extent he can do that, but we also have a really interesting later chapter in Moby Dick called the Dubloon, where we see all the different members of the crew looking at this coin,

and they all transform its meaning into something different. They all take it to mean something else, and none of them really associate it with Moby Dick. So it's this idea that Ahab's control can only extend so far, that perhaps he doesn't quite have the reach that he thinks he does. You're being a little bit complicated. Am I? Yes.

So can you just unravel that a little bit? What do you mean extend so far? They don't really know. There's a de bloon now. The first person who sees the white whale gets the de bloon. That isn't very complicated. Well, it's this idea that the de bloon, that Ahab has tried to make the de Blune mean something particular,

to have a single meaning. Yeah, you spot the whale, you get the de Blune. Yeah, and that's exactly the same thing that he tries to do with Moby Dick. He says that Moby Dick is evil. And that Moby Dick is evil, that's all that Moby Dick is, and nothing else can substitute for Moby Dick. And he believes that he has impressed this on his crew, that they have all joined him in his mission.

But the fact that they take that coin then that Ahab has said has meant one thing and transform its meaning in their own minds might lead us as readers to question the extent to which the crew are part of this or the extent to which freedom can exist alongside Ahab's kind of all-encompassing whale. Is it, why is it, can you tell us how important it is that the whale is white? Yes, I can.

So I think the whiteness of the whale is important for two reasons that are kind of interconnected. And the whiteness of the whale is particularly important to Ishmael. So Ishmael has a whole chapter on the whiteness of the whale, and he says, you know, what the whale meant to Ahab has been said, but what it meant to me has not. And he says that it's the whiteness of the whale that was above all things appalling. That it's the whiteness that's the most important thing.

And he goes to this whole catalogue of white things and this idea that whiteness has both signified value, signified power, signified things being terrible. But the fact is that all Ishmael sort of ends up doing is just listing whiteness. So the more he tries to analyse what it is about whiteness that makes it so powerful, that he realizes that he's just listing things.

And he comes up then to the conclusion that perhaps whiteness is powerful because it's a dumb blankness full of meaning. The idea that whiteness becomes a surface on which you can project ideologies. And I think that's particularly important for racial politics in the United States in this period too. Bridget Bennett, Starbucks was passed over very lightly by your colleague on the left. I think there's a bit more to say about him, do you? I think there is a bit more to say about him. But I also think that what Graham said was right in trying to counter Ahab, simply producing that economic argument isn't enough, and that's what the crew finds.

Starbuck is a Quaker from Nantucket. He's described as a very kind of thin, slightly austere man. One of the great things about Starbuck is he understands that whaling is dangerous. He's a man with very considerable courage, but he also doesn't want to expose himself or the crew to unreasonable risk, which is quite the opposite of Ahab. He's also a man who's married and he has a much-loved wife who he's left behind

and a much-loved son who he's left behind. So he in the novel represents something about a man who understands that there is more to life than being on a whaling vessel. In conversations with Ahab, he reminds Ahab that he too has a wife. And Ahab has clearly forgotten this in his great quest for the whale and there's a very touching moment

towards the end of the novel where it seems like Starbuck has persuaded Ahab not to continue his mad pursuit of the whale. And an entire chapter seems to be devoted to that, and suddenly Ahab shifts. So Starbuck has this power as a persuader, but he's not as persuasive as the mad Shakespearean Ahab, who has that power over language and therefore can control the vessel and make men act against their own best interests, because that's what Ahab does repeatedly. Graham, can I go back to Quicquakely, I'd rather rush through him? they're very close.

Can you develop Quicueg a bit more than I did in the novel? I think one of the key things about Quigwegg is that he points America in a different direction. So this is not an Atlantic country anymore. This is a Pacific country. And that's, again, one of the things that Quicueg brings to the novel. He's also a mysterious character as well. He's covered in tattoos.

And just going back to this point about the De Blune and the Whale in a way, He's another, if you like, a symbol which needs to be read or interpreted. So that section that Katie was talking about with the de balloon, I think what we see there is the way that this is a novel full of symbols which don't have a single meaning, and that Melville is asking us to think about the multiple meanings that are attached to individual objects. And what multiple meanings does it see in quick way?

Well, I think it's partly friendship and reliability and loyalty, but also a kind of mystery and unknowingness. So there's a great chapter, the Triworks, where they're boiling down the blubber. And Ishmael is steering the ship at this point, and he's watching the harpooners who are in charge of this process. And it's like a scene out of Dante, but at this moment you start to understand that even though Ishmael spends all this time with these men on board ship, he's very close to them, he knows them well, they talk to one another, they are something ultimately different. And that's partly to do with their racial background. He sees them as racial others in a way at that point. And of course, then you know, you carry on and get on with the voyage,

but it's a moment that... And I just wanted to pick up on that point about reading. One of the things about Quicwegg is that he's a non-reader. He's not literate. And in this great text about textuality, Quigweig understands Wales, he knows Wales. But he can't even talk, to some degree, he can't even talk about the symbolism on his own body.

So there are areas that are mysterious to him. Letters are mysterious. Nonetheless, he's perhaps one of the most knowledgeable figures on the vessel because he knows whales. Kate, there's something, and nowadays, a lot of people listening to this programme will think whaling itself is a terrible thing to do, and they're great creatures of the deep, and they deserve their own life, and they don't deserve to be hunted down. In fact, the laws against them being hunted down, constantly broken by the Japanese, but apart from that, way they go. We keep the laws.

And Melbourne doesn't hold back in describing it. How do you think it reads today? I think you're absolutely right in saying that he doesn't hold back. I think the thing that Melville exposes time and time again is how

visceral the labour of whaling is. He describes one of the harpooners stabbing into a whale and churning and churning and and that physical kind of slowness of the process of actually killing a whale, blood and guts spew into the water. Sorry to anyone who's having a late breakfast.

But there's so much blood. And he talks about the Leviathan taking over the whole ship that it literally ends up kind of smeared all over the decks. And I don't think he hides away from the fact that this labour can be in some senses dehumanising. The triworks, the chapter that Graham mentioned earlier, which, as he said, is helen. She talks about the red hell of the fires and the fact that they reveal the ghastliness

of the other men on board and the fact that in some ways what they're doing is hellish, is ghastly, it's dehumanising them. But on the other hand, the labour of whaling is also presented as something romantic, something positive. So the actual work of whaling comes off quite well. So there's a chapter called a squeeze of the hand

where Ishmael and his fellowship mates are squeezing out sort of knots in the blubber of the whale to kind of get it as smooth as possible. and their hands end up meeting and squeezing each other. And it becomes this great experience of male friendship, almost eroticised, all these hands together squeezing. So as well as showing that the work hip wailing is dirty, it's disgusting.

It's also something that inspires kind of camaraderie and nobility in the people who do it. But it was taken in its stride at the time, wasn't it? It's one of the many, many ways in which we've changed so much. It's like bullfight. We can go on and on about other exams. but let's stick to whaling. It is unacceptable now, whether it was just part of the scenery,

a fifth biggest American industry then. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. But Melville does at other points meditate on whether this can continue. So he has a chapter about whether the whale will ultimately perish, like the buffalo has in the United States. And in some ways, I think that one way that Moby Dick speaks to our present moment is as an environmental novel, as a novel about overproduction and consumption of fuel.

that I think does speak to our particular moment in sort of our use of petroleum or use of oil today. There are many digressions in the book, Richard Bennett. All of a sudden, we're up in the history of Wales, all of a sudden, and it's one of the things that makes it multitude in us and tests the idea of a novel, and as we know, it didn't sail easily at the very beginning. One digression is the connection between the whale and the biblical libion

and in the many, many quotations, which precede chapter one of the book, He pulls in, quotations, which keep mentioned the Leviathan, the Leviathan. What is it about that connection which satisfies him so much? Well, the Leviathan, the biblical, right at the beginning of the book then, before the opening chapter, when we hear, my name is, or call me Ishmael, I should say. We have a set of extracts and an etymology. The set of extracts start with Genesis. So we first of all get God creating great whales.

But soon after that, we have mentions of the Leviathan, the biblical Leviathan, which is both, the sea monster, it's the fish that swallowed Jonah, it's also something that's kind of fantastical, and potentially it's also an enemy. But it also is a gentle creature that's created by God. So we have right from the inception of the novel this sense of what Moby Dick might be. Is he the enemy? Is he simply part of God's creation? Is he monstrous? And immediately then we're obliged to think through those things. Obviously, Leviathan is, is also the title of Hobbes' 1651 great work on political philosophy, in which the Leviathan is also the figure for the state.

So it encourages us to start thinking about the political allegories that might be at work in Moby Dick. And the scene that Graham talks about where the men give up their freedom to the dictator figure of Ahab is absolutely at the heart of that. The digressions are long and testing, Graham. What have you read, excuse me, what have you read the book

just as a, strip those out and read it as an adventure story, sorry, such as those he'd been writing before this. What would you make of that? Yeah, I think it works as an adventure story and one of the reasons that the novel lives on is that, you know, publishers have taken out all the wailing bits and just turn the book into an adventure story. It works in two archetypes, I guess.

So it's a voyage and return narrative, which is Ishmael's story, a bit like the Odyssey, perhaps. It's also the revenge, story, so slaying the beast, Perseus, Theseus, even Beowulf. So it works as an adventure story. But I guess the one thing that happens then is that's what makes

the novel like or the adventure stories. It's not what makes it different or unique or great. Do you think that when he was writing it, Melville thought, I will extend the reach and range of the novel? Or do you just think he thought, I want to put this in? Well, I think it fits in with his working method, which is often to come up with a basic story and then to go back to it and expand it

and elaborate on certain things. He did that with Tai Pi, certainly, which started off as a very, his first book, started off as a very short story, which he then supplements with his reading. And this is what happens in Moby Dick as well. So I think he's obviously fascinated by the reading that he's doing about wailing and about whales.

And I think he wants to bring all that material in as well. And that's what makes it the novel that it is, without that material, it would just be an adventure story like any other. But Kate, Kate McGilligan, the novel, as it is, was not received in the way it is now thought of, is it, at the time? No. Not received at the time the way it is now thought of. No, it wasn't a great book from the outset.

And part of this is slightly a problem of its publication. So Moby Dick was actually published first in England called The Whale or Moby Dick, so the title was the other way round. That was in order to say that Melville could secure copybook. write in both Britain and America. But what happens is a couple of not very good reviews from England, one particular in a magazine called the Atheneum that describes the book as kind of disfigured by mad English and absurd.

They actually cross over the Atlantic. Disfigured by mad English meaning the language? Yeah, yeah, they just said it's crazy. And that goes across the Atlantic before the books comes out in New York. So in some ways that colours the American reception. some reviews that Melville was kind of counting on by magazines that were edited by friends are lukewarm.

Mostly people are just disappointed that it's not a kind of rip-roaring adventure story like his first book was. They don't really know what to do with a novel like maybe Dick. So it sort of doesn't really come off in the way that Melville wants it to. So what does this affect on? Graham, you want to come in?

Well, I just, it's curious, because when you go back and look at the reviews, actually the reviews, some of the reviews are fantastic. Pretty good. And people loved the book as well. And it's an oddity of the way that literary history works, that those important reviews, you're right, do affect our understanding of the reception,

whereas actually the reception was in large parts, certainly in Britain, probably better in Britain than the US. You know, better. And people enjoyed the bits about wailing. They saw the importance of bringing those genres together. Some of the other English reviews that just don't cross over are really positive and say that this is Melville's best book yet. Bridget, can you tell us

in what way this book became thought of as a book which inspired such awe and why what to some people had appeared to be self-indulgent digressions became part of a development of novel that was welcome? I think the novel becomes well, far better regarded and then really increases and enhances its reputation

in the 1920s. One of the things that happens then is there's a reassessment of Melville because it's the centenary of his birth. Secondly, modernism is happening and within the context of very different kinds of narratives in which putting things together, assembling them in different ways,

is much more a kind of mode of what the novel looks like. Moby Dick stops looking quite so mad in that way. But another thing that happens is his last posthumous piece, Billy Budd is published comes out in 1924, I think, is picked up by Benjamin Britain who writes a great opera with a libretto by E.M. Foster

and this also is a narrative that is about sailing. Did D.H. Lawrence have anything to do with enhancing his reputation? Yes. D.H. Lawrence, again, of obviously a great modernist, decides, understands that Moby Dick is indeed a great novel, identifies it as such.

And in one of his essays, in the early work that he does on American writing, which is very influential, he praises it. So that makes a great difference. In what terms does he praise it? What bit of it does he praise? A lot, you don't know. I mean, I think Bridget's right.

He praises it as a proteomodontist text. Lawrence sees a lot of himself and the sort of struggles of conflicted selfhood, the struggles of identity that are in his works. He finds those in Moby Dick. And I think there's also an issue about men and male sexuality here as well. But, you know, clearly, and certainly it's reception in Britain

at the end of the 19th century, because people were still reading it, it was picked up by a certain kind of groups. And one of those groups was, you know, homosexual men who read those C narratives as one of the places where you could find out about how male-male relationships worked. And it's no coincidence that Britain picks up Billy Budd, I think, which deals with similar kinds of questions about authority and leadership and morality.

And mutiny. mutiny. But did this coincide the time when America was looking for the Great American novel? Is it seen from the great European novel, Graham? Yes. But that came slightly earlier. So in the 1860s and 70s, so you get an essay by John DeForest, who asks the question,

where is the Great American novel? Let's start looking for it. So that's the impetus. And gradually that that develops. And the thing that Moby Dick does as a Great American novel and the way that it's a template for the Great American novel is it's one of these mega novels. So it has an incredible kind of range of characters and themes. Ultimately, it's about the dysfunction of democracy. And you can see how that's important in the 20th century

writers who try to use that template. So Dos Passos in USA, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, even somebody like David Foster Wallace, writing those mega novels. Bridget, what do you think he was pushing against in terms of it took time? Although he got good, Graham's pointed out, they did get very good reviews. Nevertheless, it was, pushing against the idea of being a great novel for quite a while. What was the resistance? Partly, I suppose, a lack of legibility in those terms to some degree. If we think of the 19th century as the period of realism in the novel,

part of that is what the novel is, obviously it's realist, but it's also, we might even think of it as post-modernist in terms of the kind of pastiches and the collections of different texts and the kind of cut-and-paste method. So this all makes it quite, illegible in some kinds of ways. But that's precisely what the novel is about.

It's about the limits of meaning. It's about what can be done with the novel. It's about the extent of the novel. And if we think of the great bestseller American novels of the 19th century, they're very different. Uncle Tom's Cabin, Little Women. They're novels by women, actually, in those two instances. Quite different novels that are doing different things,

that aim at different things. And Melville was conscious of the dominance of some women writers in the market. whose works just seem much more kind of approachable, I guess, amenable, easy to read, perhaps. Katie McGittigan, what, again, sorry, what influences he had or can he be seen to have now on writing, on novel writing?

I think sort of it was picking up on what Graham was talking about, this idea of the vast American novel is still one that is thought of, the great American novel has to be a big novel, It has to be a novel that somehow encompasses a section of society, which Moby Dick does, despite the fact it takes place in a very small space on board a ship. It still has that sense of vastness. I also think another theme that the American novel, even today, is still coming back to, is the individual in the wilderness. So we can even see it in a novel that's quite different from Moby Dick, Marilynne Robinson's housekeeping, which begins, my name is Ruth, like Call Me Ishmael. And it's about these young women who are similarly in this isolated scene.

space and having these transcendent experiences in nature. So that idea of an individual's confrontation with the natural world is something I think that American literature is still today going back to. Briefly, Grant. Yes, no, I agree. The other thing that I think maybe Dick gives us is the great anti-hero, and that's what Ishmael is, I guess, and you can see that tradition following on in the 20th century as well, particularly the male anti-hero.

He's an ambivalent character in many ways. He's not a rebel. He's not a revolutionary. He's an anti-hero. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Graham, Graham Thompson, Bridget Bennett, Katie McGettigan. Next week, it's the life of Thomas Beckett, who was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral. Thanks for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I missed out a massively brilliant quotation. I've got here in another room. We missed out the humour, I think. Yeah, we did. Yeah, that happens quite a lot. Yeah, it is a very funny funny novel in lots of ways.

If you kind of got the ear for it, sometimes it's difficult you miss it because you're in a different kind of style and then you switch suddenly. I read you saying about humours it was when Quickwark turned up in the middle of the night and I was on the side of Ishmael thinking what the hell is going on

and being sort of more than a little worried. It's worrying and especially when he's smoking in bed with him he's going to set the bed clothes alike. And sharpening his harpoon. And sharpening his harpoon. But Ishmael's also a prick, isn't he? Let's face it. He's kind of stuck up.

I can't, how could I possibly show him? But the great thing about Ishmael is the way that he changes his mind so quickly, he's so open to that experience. For a provincial young man, I mean, that's the other great thing about the story. It's about a provincial man becoming a global citizen. And this is his first meeting with it, you know, in bed with Quico. But he adapts straight away. He's not, his priggishness soon disappears.

Yeah, exactly. That's the brilliant thing that Melville would be. does. He doesn't make him a prig all the way through the novel because he would be tedious and bored. He's also in Quicuette, he's got a friend and I think if you're a sort of lonely provincial going somewhere trying something out, we don't quite know why Esmere's trying something. He's got a friend

and he can rely on this person and all of a sudden he thinks I can rely on this person and this person wants to rely on me and then Quicueh becomes a complete friend. Shares everything shares his money, shares everything with it. And that buttons it down for Schmend, he's not lonely anymore. It does. The coffin, right? The coffin stays a fly.

I didn't, yes. We're going to explain to the coffin, Katie. You can do the coffin. Yeah, so Quake, partway through the voyage, falls ill and becomes briefly convinced that he's going to die. So he has a coffin that's made for him. And he actually lays out in this coffin and the lids put on it. And again, this is one of the moments where the humour comes through. But he doesn't die.

So he doesn't die. But what he does is he transcribes the tattoos that are on his body onto the coffin. So it almost becomes an extension of himself. And it's on that coffin. that Ishmael, it becomes Ishmael's life boy at the end of the attack. So in some way, this friendship with Quickewark is the thing that sustains him, his ability to make connections across. So when everybody else is being blown out of the water,

dragged into the depths, harpooned or harpooning, Ishmael has got Quakeek's coffin to hold onto and presumably sails to safety. He's picked up by a ship called the Rachel, who are actually looking for the captain's lost son. So in some ways, Ishmael, it's part of Ishmael's every man quality, that he becomes a substitute for somebody else. He's another orphan that gets picked up in the place. And his name indicates that he is an orphan.

That's what his smell suggests. And Rachel is the biblical. She's the mother who cries over her children or lost children. So the fact that the ship's called Rachel kind of ties in with all biblical sort of narrative. I would like to have got to grips with that wonderful sermon. A father Mappel, yeah. Well, I mean, he's one sermon, isn't it?

He's quoting, you know, he quotes the King James Bible. Those quotes he uses are from the King James Bible, but it's that mixture of vernacular with the King James Bible. And I think when I said homogenising, it's a completely wrong word to use about Melville's bringing these styles together. But you see it in Father Mapple. He's got the salient vernacular. He was a whaler.

But he's, you know, he's a preacher as well, and he's quoting from the Bible. And he brings these two things together in that wonderful sermon about Jonah and the whale. And that's where you see women too. and I think that's important because this is a novel in which there are very few women characters but you see the wives and the sisters and the mothers in that chapel listening to this

looking up at the monuments to dead men and it's an extraordinary juxtaposition of these women sitting there listening to this and knowing that's the future and that story about mothers and women comes back in the way that he thinks about Wales as well there's that chapter about the beautiful one about the Armada

of Wales and about the Armada of Wales and about these mothers and their calves. Carves. Yeah, very touching and moving chapter, I think, as well. We didn't talk about the other harpooners either. No. Tash Tago and Daegu. So the three harpooners are the three great, non-white,

very significant heroic characters of the novel. And they're all depicted beautifully, with great sympathy, with great admiration. And that's a remarkable thing to see in a novel of that period. by an American writer, where whiteness is actually the thing of horror. Actually, white masculinity is something that he's very anxious about. Whiteness is an ideology, something that has no meaning in and of itself, but can be brought into, can be made to mean something,

can be made as a source of power. Even though there's nothing really intrinsic, intrinsically powerful about whiteness, it simply becomes a surface onto which you can project the ideas that you want to project, which is quite a radical thing to be saying about race in the mid-19th century in America. Well, just after the fugitive slave acts. Exactly, in the run-up to the Civil War. We didn't really talk about slavery, didn't. We didn't.

This is the problem with Moby Dick. Also, just one other thing, and it's an obvious one. If we think of the 19th century novel, and if we think of how we talk about the 19th century, it's all about land, it's all about expansion, it's all about moving across the frontier. This is a novel that is about the United States, but takes place on the sea. It takes place on the water.

Land is scarcely part of it. and that seems to be an absolute transformation of how we might understand what American novels are about in the 19th century. So American history happens offshore? Yeah, and it's transnational. And it's diverse, and it's all of those things that the novel reminds us of. I mean, I suppose that's the other thing we didn't think about is that, you know, maybe Dick isn't standing alone as a kind of sea narrative.

It was a very popular genre in the 19th century. In Melville, you know, read and understood how sea narratives work. So Dana's book, two years before the mast, is an important novel. And all these whaling ships had libraries as well. Yes. So reading was incredibly important whilst you were at sea. And you can see lists of the books that were on the ships that Melville sailed. And if you're reading, you're maybe using the oil of a whale to read by.

It's absolutely next to you at all times. But one other thing we perhaps would have been interesting to talk about is the way that, you know, you talked about the labour of whaling. Yeah. But the job of a whale is an odd one. It's a physical job. But you get those great moments where you're in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Yeah.

In the middle of nowhere, you know, and you go to the top of the mast and you can see the universe almost. It's that combination of the physical labour, but the meditative space. So whalers and shipment more generally were both labourers and thinkers at the same time, almost. Yeah, and he talks about that in that chapter on Starbucks, where he introduced is Starbuck and he basically says you know this is a man he's a flawed man men are flawed but in the abstract men are divine

and he has that moment of spiritual democracy where he talks about the abstraction the beauty the wonders of humans men it is exactly that it is exactly that type of moment and then we look at Starbuck who is flawed as all the characters are flawed but nonetheless represents

something that he wants to celebrate I think that's a I wish I'd said that about Starbucks, because that's really important, I think. I guess one of the questions which is never resolved is to what extent that sense of community that's created on board ship can survive. You know, is it a novel about the importance of brotherhood and community democracy? Or is it about the failure of community brotherhood and democracy to restrain a figure like Ahab? And it's that tension, which Melville, I think, sense of. never goes one way or the other.

It leaves us kind of thinking about the question because it reoccurs in so many other situations in politics in particular. I think I'm about to unleash the producer on you with it. Yes. Only to offer tea or coffee or grog or... Grog, I think. Hello, I'm Neil McGregor.

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