Ahhhh, nice to be able to get back to this.

I’ve been so busy lately, very stressed out about this project at work, plus I got sick last weekend. Ugh. But now, I’m on vacation, time to get back to my true passion: writing about writing about the sea.

Summary

True to his word, Ishmael reports to us the somewhat imprecise dimensions of the whale skeleton he saw in the garden of the Tranque. Since he already explained the dimensions of a whale’s head in depth earlier in the book, he skips that part and mostly focuses on the spine and ribs.

Ishmael notes that the skeleton is much smaller than the whale would be in life, and is but a pale imitation of the true reality of a live whale encountered at sea. The ribs are not even half as large as the true girth of a living sperm whale, and the mighty flukes are entirely missing!

Analysis

Well, he told us what he was going to do, and then he did it. One can hardly complain about that, even if these… measurements, leave something to be desired.

The ribs were ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck, was nearly six feet long; the second, third, and fourth were each successively longer, till you came to the climax of the fifth, or one of the middle ribs, which measured eight feet and some inches. From that part, the remaining ribs diminished, till the tenth and last only spanned five feet and some inches. In general thickness, they all bore a seemly correspondence to their length.

Oh you know, some inches here and there, roughly corresponding to the shape of ribs, etc etc. I suppose he didn’t have time to take out his measuring tape, since the priests were not happy about him taking any measures at all of their temple.

Still, it shows a bit of that characteristic voice through the prose that I do enjoy so much. Ishmael is a practical man, he’s just gonna give you some practical measurements, not down to the micron or what-have-you.

Taking a Measure of God

Continuing the theme from last chapter, Ishmael notes how this mighty and impressive skeleton still roundly fails to give any proper indication of what a real sperm what is actually like:

How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood. No. Only in the heart of quickest perils; only when within the eddyings of his angry flukes; only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested whale be truly and livingly found out.

How futile, then, is it to simply write the measurements down, and for us to read them! A reflection of a reflection of a fiction, of the desiccated remains of what we have already seen described in the flesh. Perhaps this gives us an inkling of the difficulty faced by Ishmael in conveying the true magnitude of the things he has experienced.

Perhaps, also, it extends to the difficulty he has in conveying his own emtional response to them, and his own struggles with it, which are sublimated within the text itself. The aggrandizing of whalers, and of Ahab in particular, trying to make sense of this senseless tragedy that befell him.

In extolling his profession and his old comrades in this way, turning them into demi-gods in his imagination, Ishmael breathes into them the life of that “democracy of nature” he talked about so many chapters ago. All the biblical and Shakespearean allusions serve to decorate these poor men in the glory they deserve, as humans who lived and breathed and died.

Aesthetics of Precision

Circling back around, I find the prose in this chapter very interesting. It’s not just that we’re getting the same old folksy Ishmael voice, but rather what we’re not getting, which is anything approaching an academic tone.

Melville, and by extension Ishmael, is not above shifting the voice of this book where he finds it appropriate. We got a whole chapter in legalese, which is one of his favorite tricks. We got a chapter that was written as a stage play! We’ve had chapters written as encyclopedia entries. But we get nothing of the sort here, just more of Ishmael’s lovable ramblings.

For one thing, we’re still coming off that chapter that introduced an entirely invented kingdom where this whale skeleton temple exists. Shifting the tone to be more academic would be a bit jarring, and perhaps feel somewhat dishonest. And for another, the real point here isn’t the measurements, but rather that measurements are not useful when considering whales at all.

The goal of this novel is to allow the reader to understand what it is that whalers go through, and this chapter’s purpose is to show how it is impossible to do so through dry measurements and lists of facts. The reality of a sperm whale is as it appears on the open ocean, a vast and terrifying creature that could kill you at a whim.

Reality Rears its Ugly Head

Once again, I will connect this back to the anticapitalist themes that I find present.

This time it seems rather obvious, something I’ve hit more than a few times: Ishmael wants to explain and fully realize the plight of these laborers who suffer and die anonymously on the sea, far from human civilization and the benificiaries of their labor. Every ounce of sperm brought back was paid for with blood of men laying at the bottom of the ocean, etc etc.

But also, I think this particular chapter and its themes represents the aim of focusing on material realities rather than theoretical ones. By measuing a whale skeleton, you can construct a picture in your head, but it will not be correct. You can measure out how many foot-pounds of pressure a whale’s jaw is able to produce, but that tells you nothing of the man whose leg it has severed.

Industrialization produced machines capable of wreaking havoc on the human body in ways unimaginable in past ages of human civlization. It also produced a great bounty of convenience and life, a flourishing of humanity that continues to this day, also unprecendented in human history.

These facts are in fundamental tension. People do not want to know how the sausage is made. The greater the distance between labor and customer, the more potential for dehumanization, and thus the greater suffering and oppression of laborers.

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God, I missed writing this stuff. Really helps me use my brain in ways that I don’t get to on a day to day basis. I love getting deep in the weeds on stuff like this, and I want to do more of it! Not only about Moby Dick, which certainly doesn’t need the attention, but about other things I enjoy on a day to day basis.

Until next time, shipmates!