Melville’s Moby Dick is a book I have not read. It was one that used to be on the curriculum
of my undergraduate college, but it was replaced by Melville’s Bartelby the Scrivener – a much more modest book.
Moby Dick is about the furious pursuit of a White Whale who has turned
the Whaling world on its head by attacking one of the whaling ships. It is one of those Big Books – meaning not
just that it is a great book, but that it is really long. I have never taken the time to plow through
it. This more modest book by Nathaniel
Philbrick tells the story that Melville used as the basis for his tale of
Captain Ahab’s revenge- but the captain of the Essex, George Pollard, sought
not revenge, but survival, both in the immediate aftermath of his boat being
sunk by the whale – in a harrowing journey with his crew across the open sea –
and then after his next commission also sunk, this time on a reef, when he was
able to return home much more quickly, but could only get work as a night
watchman.
This is a tale that is told on many levels. I will enumerate some of them. This book is about to be released as a film
and I am curious about which themes will emerge in the movie. I think the first theme is a morality
play. The Essex was an old boat at the
time of the final voyage in 1820. It was
also part of a fleet of boats sailing out of Nantucket that had decimated the
sperm whale population in the Atlantic.
Though, as the author points out, the number of whales taken in any
given year was not nearly as high as at the height of the factory ship whaling
era in the 1960s, these whales that produced oil for lubrication and lighting
in the US and Europe before petroleum was used were harvested at a rate that
led the whalers to sail further and further from home. In 1820, the prime hunting grounds were about
3,000 miles off the west coast of South America in an area the authors refers
to as the heart of the ocean because it is as far from land as you can get anywhere
in the world.
To get to this spot, the Essex made a stop at the Galapagos
Islands – the islands made famous by Darwin’s stopping there to observe species
not seen elsewhere – and by the tortoises named after the islands. The crew rounded up tortoises to throw onto
the ship where they would live on deck – unfed – slowly dying of dehydration
and starvation until the crew decided to kill and eat them. As if this weren’t cruel enough, before
reboarding the ship, one of the crew, as a stunt, set fire to some of the
vegetation – the fire spread and wiped out all of the flora on the island and the
turtles that didn’t die on shipboard starved to death on land.
So a modern audience was, I think, at least partly cheering
when a large whale – one who was not in the group being pursued by the Essex’s
whaleboats – found the Essex manned by a skeleton crew – took a look at it and
rammed it – not once but twice – the second time apparently with the
premeditated intent of harming it. The
hunted became the hunter and the old, worm eaten keel was stoved in and the
ship sank – so that when the crew returned in three whale boats from hunting, they were suddenly in
survival mode, gathering up the tortoises to keep in the three whaleboats (open
rowboats to which they lashed make shift masts) as they rowed and sailed almost
ninety days and 2,500 miles to be rescued only after they had been subjected to
the starvation and dehydration they had inflicted on the tortoises. Further, they had been reduced to eating
their shipmates who died of natural causes or drew lots to be killed so that
some could survive and, in one of the two boats that made it, the men were
rescued huddled in the bottom of their boat, out of their minds, clinging to
the bones of their shipmates sucking the last marrow out of the bones.
Brutal. And, at least
to me, this tale is a transparent attempt to clarify what the consequences will
be to us of not respecting Mother Nature, even though that is never stated
directly. Instead,the tone of the book
is dry and dispassionate – clinical. We are not preached at. Instead we are told in excruciating detail
what we know scientifically about the process of dehydration and the process of
starvation; edifying in a macabre sort of way.
And it is left to us to realize that this is a cautionary tale about us
– overfishing, thinking that we can do what we want and there will be no
consequences - but there will be, including the possibility that we will become
as primitive as these men did.
This is also a story about the miserable lives the whalers
led shipboard. While there were great
riches to be had – in the 1820s when the rest of the world was in a deep
depression, Nantucketeers were quite wealthy, providing a universally needed
supply - it was really tough work to get this supply. The killing of whales and then the rendering
of their bodies for oil was physically demanding – it stank in a slimy
penetrating way that got under the skin and ruined the men’s clothes. The food was marginal and the dangers of the
sea were constant. They used the skin of
the whales to burn an open fire on the ship deck to boil the oil out of the
blubber and store it in barrels. Even
without the toil, the men were away from their families for years at a time –
to return to find children they had never known now two years old and stay with
them for a few months before leaving again.
This is also a story about leadership. I can't find a picture of Captain George Pollard. His style – a conciliatory one – one in which he takes other’s opinions into account – turns out to be
problematic. He takes the his first mate’s
advice, Owen Chase (pictured above) about heading to South America instead of using the trade winds to go to
Tahiti. A mistake, as it turned out,
that cost the lives of most of the crew.
The first mate’s leadership style (he ended up captain of the second whaling boat) is one the author preferred. This
man was a “fishy” leader – a complement in the whaling industry – and one
intended to articulate that he was demanding and autocratic. And this style of leadership was a better one
when the boats needed to be conserving resources. The first mate did not stick with his fishy
character, but was more flexible; he became more compassionate when the
provisions had nearly run out and the men needed not discipline but a sense of
hope and support.
The captain’s professional afterlife turned out to be a mess
after his second shipwreck. The first
mate went on to become a successful whaling captain; though, from the end of the voyage to the
end of his life he was hoarding food and he ended up being driven mad by
intense headaches. The captain’s life –
as unsuccessful as it may have been materially and professionally – was
apparently a happy one. One reason he
survived was the he was short and rotund, so he had more body fat going into
the ordeal, which helped him survive it. As an old
man, he was a jovial, portly man who looked after the town in his job as night
watchman. Is this another morality
tale? If so, it is a bit harder to
figure out who the good guy and who the bad guy is – who should we emulate?
This is also a story about classism and racism. The men who died first were African
American. All the men who survived came
from Nantucket and were white. The
author acknowledges that there are multiple factors that led to this outcome,
but he emphasizes the biological – the ways in which the diets of the lower
class and black sailors were poorer and thus they had less body fat going into
the ordeal. He also acknowledges that
this was a difficult part of the story for the Quaker community of Nantucket to
grapple with. Their abolitionist stance
was, at heart, an anti- discriminatory one, yet the pecking order of the
whaling ships rigidly supported a class system.
Again, is this a cautionary tale?
Certainly we are anti-discriminatory and we sustain a classist society
that is in conflict with that position.
But I think that, at its center, this is a story of the
sea. Or, I should say, another story of
the sea. I have reviewed many of them in
the short time I have been blogging. It
bears a resemblance to The Life of Pi – both involve shipwrecks and cannibalism
– and to the book A Pearl in the Storm about the first woman to row across the Atlantic – and there
is a certain heroism in both. I also
reviewed a book written by an African American about a weird science fiction
type remnant of the whaling ships written about by Edgar Allen Poe in the story Pym. I am surprised by how many others
there are. One could, in the style of
the author of this book, note that more than half of the world’s population
lives within 100 miles or so of an ocean – that we have spread by sailing the
seas – and that our inland cities – like the one I live in – are mostly
situated on waterways. And we could
leave it at that – water was the dominant mode of transportation. It is still a very important one – think of
container ships – and much of our food comes from the sea. And we have to live on the sea in order to
transport our stuff and to reap its bounty.
But, as a psychoanalyst, I think the pull of the ocean - the
thing that pulls us into its heart - is much more primal than that. I have to admit to a deep and powerful fear
of water. Not because I’m incompetent on
the water – I lived near the ocean as a child and learned to sail, canoe and
row. I swam competitively for years –
and it was there that I first noticed the fear.
In practices we would swim to the point of exhaustion and then swim some
more. I would find myself swimming in
water that I could easily stop and stand in but I feared that I could not make
it to the end of the pool – that I would drown before I got there. More recently, I was swimming across a lake
at some friends’ cottage when we were visiting them on vacation and I realized
that if I had a heart attack I would drown before I could swim to either
side. Ironically I was not as fearful as
when I had been in the pool where I could stand up, this was more of an
intellectual realization than a gut fear, but it was very real and hard to
shake.
While Freud maintained that there were no universal symbols
in dreams – we need to follow the associations of each individual to find out
what this particular thing means to this particular person – there are some
that are nearly universal. So he thought that a house so frequently symbolized
the self that it makes sense to consider that as a very likely meaning in any
given dream. Similarly, I think that
water is often used by the dream machinery to symbolize the unconscious. If we think about the threads of this tale
from that perspective, we can begin to see how the various themes might be
related. We don’t all go to sea – nor,
fortunately, do we become shipwrecked.
We don’t all engage in cannibalism, nor do we become so dehydrated that
there is a very real likelihood of death despite being surrounded by
water. But we all do traverse a life
that in some way seems very ordered and productive – we live in the conscious
parts of our mind that, like the whaling ship, has compartments and crew that
take care of various tasks. We also sail
this ship across a surface – a part of one’s self that has depth, but a depth
that we can barely see into. And we
profit from some of the spoils that emerge from it – though fear becoming lost
in it, drowning in our own fantasies about how the world is constructed.
Moby Dick, that book that I have not read, becomes a tale,
both of revenge against an external agent, but against that part of ourselves
that would destroy us. It is the tale of
a fishy man who fights against nature, as if that were possible – either on the
actual sea or in the theater of the mind – where our baser selves – our
primitive, needy and demanding selves threaten to sink us at any time – not
least because we are convinced that the conscious self is at war with us and will
plunder what we have – will reap it and in the process tear something valuable
from us. We need to keep our boats
afloat – we need to stay above the waters else we will perish – so we struggle
against the sea – in the outer world, maintaining a class system, even though
the lower classes, whether animal or human may revolt against us, and, in the
inner world against nightmare visions of ourselves – distorted, awful visions from which we wake, sweating, in the night – relieved that it was just a dream,
but fearful that the dream portrays something true about us.
So it is ironic, I think, that this dry book will become a
movie. I’m remembering a book that I
read recently but did not post about, Beautiful Ruins, and a central plot component was that a
character was recruited to pitch a movie to the Hollywood producers about the
Donner party – the settlers that got caught in a mountain pass in winter and
had to resort to cannibalism to survive.
The pitching of this movie, despite the earnestness of the man pitching
it, was guaranteed to fail. It was about
cannibalism and no one would go to see a movie about that! This is a book with layer after layer of
grime and filth and fetid stuff, and then, at its center, cannibals: eat or be
eaten: seemingly the law of nature.
My last post, on August: Osage County, looked at the way
that something that played well in the theater did not translate to the
screen. The Harry Potter Books made
perhaps the best paper to screen transition – it was almost like a
transliteration. This book, because of
the clinical remove, allows us to look closely at things that are difficult to
see – and smell and touch. We don’t
recoil from them because we have created them.
The author gives us words, but our images are only as gruesome as we can
tolerate. On the screen, we may be forced
to look away (in a dream, we wake up).
Or we may become numbed to what is portrayed before us (we remember
chaotic dreams only vaguely on awakening).
It is also the case that the themes pulled out here are pulled out – we are
not hit over the head with them. Will
they come through on the screen? Will
the director read this text in the same ways that we do?
The book resolves, more or less, by looking at the
reception these men received when they went home. The author’s research has led him to conclude
that the townspeople were generally accepting of the returners. The returners, for their part, seemed to
maintain a healthy reverence for the intensity of what they had
experienced. The captain seemed to, more
or less, be able to come to grips with being the person who had survived a
harrowing journey. The first mate was
not as competent at doing that. When we
come in contact with others, if they have an understanding of just how
primitive life can be – especially when our unconscious rears up and attacks
us, and we learn how lost we can become in the wake of such an attack, others
who have lived at sea are not too quick to judge. It is hard to be a seafarer – or a warrior –
or even to survive in the comfort of a middle class lifestyle that is supported
by labor (physical and psychological) that, if we allow ourselves to be aware
of it in its raw form, can sicken us.
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