Michael Quinion explains in his beautiful online dictionary of idioms World Wide Words the origin of the expression ‘having a whale of a time’, meaning enjoying yourself enormously. The idiom originates, as it easy to surmise, in the idea that whales are big animals to which big things can be compared. Apparently, Quinion informs his readers, turn-of-the-century US student slang was prolific in its many references to whales. The article by Willard C. Gore, “Student Slang” for The Inlander, a Monthly Magazine of the Students of Michigan University (December 1895), defines ‘whale’ as 1. A person who is a prodigy either physically or intellectually (“He’s a whale at tennis”) and 2. Something exceptionally large, severe or jolly, hence the idiom having “a whale of a time” (in Quinion). By 1901, Quinion notes, the idiom was fully consolidated and “It has never gone away”.
This prologue is my introduction to the problem I have suffered as a reader these last few weeks: I haven’t had a whale of a time reading Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, the Whale (1851). This has been, if I recall correctly, my third attempt at reading this famed American classic and if this time I have persevered it is only because I had announced to two colleagues who specialize in Melville that I was finally reading the book. As happens, I am co-editing a book called Detoxing Masculinity for which one of my two colleagues (Rodrigo Andrés) has contributed a chapter on Moby-Dick and I just thought the time had come to fill in that woeful gap in my reading. Besides, my doctoral student Xiana Vázquez is working on the concept of humans as prey, and it seems to me that Melville’s novel is fundamental for her dissertation. Please, note that Moby-Dick is a sperm whale, a toothed predator unlike the even larger blue whale, a filter feeder that eats tiny krill. No humans have been eaten by a sperm whale (or there are no reports), and despite constant speculation that the whale that swallowed Jonah could have been a sperm whale, the scientific studies indicate the prophet would have been crushed in the event.
The problem with Moby-Dick is not its length (539 pages in its Project Gutenberg edition) but the problematic merger in the text of, essentially, two books: one, a seaman’s yarn dealing with how Captain Ahab obsesses about the white whale that took his leg away; the other, a non-fiction report (I would not call it essay) on whaling and whales, in particular sperm whales. Nam Peruge claims in a blog post that readers can skip the 100 non-narrative chapters of the novel and just focus on the remaining 35 that are narrative, which, indeed, can be done, Rayuela-style. The problem, as you can see, is that if you only read the 35 narrative chapters you cannot claim to have read Moby-Dick, this so-called novel which is more non-fiction than fiction. The other major problem is that whereas the narrative chapters are proficient enough as adventure, the long list of non-narrative chapters are quite dull as non-fiction. I would call myself a rather patient reader but despite my love of non-fiction and my being used to academic prose, which is usually a pretty dry affair (including mine), I had many difficulties to read for more than thirty minutes at a time Melville’s too detailed informative chapters. The day I read one hour of Moby-Dick I was on a train with nothing else to do (or read).
In fact, I have used with Moby-Dick an old trick from my student days, which consisted of combining the books I had to read for class but didn’t like with one book I loved. If I read a good chunk of the compulsory set text, then I would allow myself to read a bit from the one I preferred. Quite by accident, my choice of companion for Moby-Dick turned out to be a perfect match. John Vaillant’s The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival (2010)—which you should hurry to borrow from the Internet Archive before they close it down, as it might soon happen—is a thrilling non-fiction narrative volume about the hunting of a man-eating Siberian tiger, which tells, besides, the story of this species and of how the collapse of the Soviet Union led to its desperate situation. It is so close to Moby-Dick in so many ways that Vaillant even chooses an epigraph from Melville for one of the chapters. The two books differ, however, in one important point: even though The Tiger is the perfect mixture of the informative and the narrative Melville was aiming at it will never compete with Moby-Dick because non-fiction books still suffer from the absurd prejudice of being considered inferior to fiction.
This is due to the modern worship of authorial imagination. The irony is that although Melville invented Captain Ahab and had the idea of making his sperm whale an albino (see how popular the white humpback Migaloo is today), he took his inspiration from a very well-known historical episode, that of the sinking of the whaleship Essex in 1820 by a sperm whale. The first mate Owen Chase published the following year his Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, which inspired Melville to write his novel 30 years later. The Essex tragedy inspired as well American author Nathaniel Philbrick to write a truly admirable non-fiction volume, one of the best books I have ever read, in any genre: In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (2000), which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. In 2015 Ron Howard released the film adaptation, a fiction film (not a documentary) with Chris Hemsworth playing Chase (who was not that handsome…).
Many readers who share their problems with Moby-Dick on Goodreads (see the very thorough discussion by ‘Matt’) mention Philbrick’s masterpiece as a volume which, unlike Melville’s, gave them a whale of a time. My colleague Nick Spengler, who wants to teach Moby-Dick in an elective, semestral course tells me that Melville’s novel needs to be approached as a singular construction rather than a standard novel. He told me that the illustrious Francisco Rico and Gonzalo Pontón once shared at UAB a similar elective subject on El Quijote, which is also a composite text, and not what we know now as a novel. My impression is that our students will have a hard time reading Melville, though I trust that if anyone can make Moby-Dick attractive, this is Nick. I would myself join his class… As I told him, I am planning to teach a non-fiction course in 2023-24, which will certainly include In the Heart of the Sea, so it might well be that students will read the two books simultaneously. That will be an interesting experiment!
The other major problem which Melville’s (alleged) masterpiece faces today is its insensitive approach to whales and whaling, as many other commentators have noticed. A passage from Chapter 41 encompasses everything that makes contemporary readers cringe before this novel’s appalling approach to animals; I refer to the lines describing Ahab’s dismemberment. The captain is attacking Moby-Dick with a “six inch blade” when the animal “reaped away Ahab’s leg”, in an action that can only be called self-defence but that Ahab reads as pure “malice”. Since losing his leg Ahab “had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale” as “the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them”. Melville writes that Ahab identifies the “intangible malignity which has been from the beginning” with the “abhorred white whale”, and sentences that “He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down”.
Melville is subtle enough for us to be able to read Ahab as a madman unfairly pursuing an animal that must feel terrified and that tries, accordingly, to flee his foe and, later, to save his own life for good [SPOILERS ALERT] by destroying Ahab’s whaling ship, the Pequod. Yet, in Chapter 105 Melville dismisses the account of how 18th and 19th century whaling almost exterminated these fellow mammals with the rather absurd observation that since other species hunted in bigger numbers still survive (such as elephants), “we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality”. Perhaps because of the negative reaction all this provokes in contemporary readers, Moby-Dick may be functioning today as a potent defender of animal rights. I am sure that many readers cheer when [SPOILER ALERT] the whale carries Ahab away (presumably to drown, not eat, him).
I wish, finally, to praise Ray Bradbury, for being one of Herman Melville’s best readers. John Huston commissioned Bradbury to write the screenplay for the film eventually released in 1956. Bradbury was then rather well-known but he was not familiar with Moby-Dick, and he found the double task of adapting the book and putting up with Huston’s ill-treatment barely bearable. He narrated his ordeal in Green Shadows, White Whale (1992), which is his lightly fictionalized memoir of the almost two years spent in Ireland writing the screenplay, while Huston drank, led a hectic social life, and enjoyed horse racing. Huston, by the way, stole a writing credit from Bradbury as he was by no means the screenplay’s co-author. It appears that Steven Spielberg wanted to show in Jaws (1975) his fisherman Quint (Robert Shaw) watching Huston’s Moby-Dick, to stress the character’s similarities with the obsessive Ahab, but actor Gregory Peck, who played the captain, did not allow it. Peck, imposed by Warner Bros. against Huston’s criteria though the actor was not aware of this, was always unhappy with a role that came to him aged only 38 (Ahab is 58). I saw the film (again) right after finishing the novel and I must say that for me Peck still is the perfect Ahab. There are many other adaptations, but this one has a quaint charm that makes it unique. Incidentally, Russell Crowe, currently 58, might be a great Ahab.
I don’t have room here to comment on whether Melville was aware of the obvious queer elements in the relationship between the narrator Ishmael and his Polynesian harpooner pal Queequeg, but I marvel that the original readers didn’t see anything… queer… in their friendship. I just wish that their part of the story was longer, and that the couple [SPOILER ALERT] could have survived happily ever after on a lush tropical desert island with Moby-Dick as their companion, all three having a whale of a time.
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