By Intellicurean, July 25, 2025
“Call me Ishmael.”
This iconic first line anchors one of the most enduring openings in American literature. Yet before it is spoken, before Ishmael’s voice emerges on the page, we encounter something more unusual: a kind of literary invocation. The opening pages of Moby-Dick—those dense, eclectic “Extracts” quoting scripture, classical literature, scientific treatises, and forgotten travelogues—do not serve as a traditional preface. Instead, they operate like a ritual threshold. They ask us to enter the novel not as a narrative, but as a vast textual cosmos.
Melville’s fictional “sub-sub-librarian” gathers fragments from Job to Shakespeare to obscure whaling reports, assembling a chorus of voices that have, across centuries, spoken of the whale. This pre-narrative collage is more than ornamentation. It proposes a foundational idea: that the whale lives not only in the ocean, but in language. Not only in myth, but in memory. Not only in flesh, but in thought.
Before the Pequod ever sets sail, Melville has already charted his central course—into the ocean of human imagination, where the whale swims through texts, dreams, and questions that refuse easy resolution.
Proof of Two Lives
“There’s something I find strangely moving about the ‘Extracts’ section,” remarks literary critic Wyatt Mason on The World in Time, a podcast hosted by Lewis Lapham. “It’s proof of two kinds of life. The life of the creature itself, and the life of the mind—the attention we pay over time to this creature.”
Mason’s comment offers a keel for the voyage ahead. In Moby-Dick, the whale is not simply an animal or antagonist. It becomes a metaphysical magnet, a mirror for human understanding, a challenge to the limits of knowing. The “Extracts” and “Etymologies,” often dismissed as digressions, are in fact sacred rites—texts that beg to be read with reverence.
In teaching the novel to incarcerated students through the Bard Prison Initiative, Mason and fellow writer Donovan Hohn describe how these obscure, labyrinthine sections are received not as trivia but as scripture. The students descend into the archive as divers into a shipwreck—recovering fragments of forgotten wisdom, learning to breathe in the pressure of incomprehensibility. “The whale,” Mason repeats, “resides or lives in texts.” And what a library it is.
The Whale as Philosophy
“All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.”
Harold Bloom, the late sage of literary criticism, would have nodded at Mason’s insight. For Bloom, Moby-Dick was not merely a novel, but “a giant Shakespearean prose poem.” Melville, he believed, was a tragedian of the American soul. Captain Ahab, mad with self-reliance, became for Bloom a Promethean figure—bound not by divine punishment, but by his own obsessive will.
In Bloom’s classroom at Yale in 2011, there were no lecture notes. He taught Moby-Dick like a jazz solo—improvised, living, drawn from a lifetime of memory and myth. “It’s very unfair,” he said, reflecting on the whale hunts—great mammals hunted with harpoons and lances. Yet the Pequod’s most moral man, Starbuck, is also its most proficient killer. A Quaker devoted to peace, he is also the ship’s deadliest lance. This contradiction—gentleness and violence braided together—is the essence of Melville’s philosophy.
The whale, in Bloom’s reading, is sublime not because it symbolizes any one thing—God, evil, justice, nature—but because it cannot be pinned down. It is an open question. An unending inquiry. A canvas for paradox. “Heaven help them all,” Bloom said of the Pequod’s doomed crew. “And us.”
Melville the Environmentalist
“There she blows! There she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!”
Where Bloom heard Melville’s music in metaphor and myth, Richard J. King hears it in science. In Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick (2019), King charts a different map—overlaying Melville’s imagined ocean onto real tides, real whales, real voyages. He sails replica whalers, interviews marine biologists, pores over Melville’s notebooks.
His inquiry begins with a straightforward question: could a sperm whale really destroy a ship? Historical records suggest yes. But King doesn’t stop at anatomy. His portrait of Melville reveals a proto-environmentalist, someone who revered the sea not just as symbol but as system. Melville’s whale, King argues, is a creature of wonder and terror, not just prey but presence.
In an age of ecological crisis, King reframes Moby-Dick as a book not just of metaphor but of environmental ethics. Ishmael’s meandering digressions become meditations on the ocean as moral agent—an entity capable of sustaining and destroying. The sea is no backdrop; it is a character, a god, an intelligence. Melville’s ocean, King suggests, humbles the hubris of Ahab and calls readers to ecological humility.
Rediscovery in Dark Times
“Strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?”
Aaron Sachs, in Up From the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times (2022), picks up the whale’s trail in the 20th century. In 1929, as the world plunged into the Great Depression, the writer and historian Lewis Mumford resurrected Melville from literary oblivion. His biography of the long-forgotten author recast Melville not as a failure, but as a visionary.
For Mumford, Melville was a kindred spirit—a man who, long before the term “modernity” took hold, had already seen its psychic cost. As Mumford watched the rise of industry, mass production, and spiritual exhaustion, he found in Melville a dark prophet. Ahab’s fury was not personal—it was civilizational.
Critics have praised Sachs’s biography as timely and thoughtful. Its thesis is clear: in times of disorientation, literature does more than reflect the world—it refracts it. It preserves vital truths, repurposing them when our present crises demand older insights.
In Sachs’s telling, Moby-Dick is not just a classic; it’s a living text. A lighthouse in the storm. A warning bell. A whale-shaped mirror reflecting our fears, failures, and persistent hope.
The Whale in the Classroom
“Ignorance is the parent of fear.”
The classroom, as Sachs and Mason both suggest, becomes a site of literary resurrection. In prison education programs, students discover themselves in the “Extracts”—not despite their difficulty, but because of it. The very act of grappling with Melville’s arcane references, strange structures, and encyclopedic digressions becomes an act of reclamation.
To teach Moby-Dick in a prison is to raise a sunken ship. Its sentences, like salvaged artifacts, reveal new meaning. Forgotten knowledge becomes fuel for rediscovery. Students, many of whom have been dismissed by society, see in Melville’s endless inquiry a validation of their own intelligence and complexity.
Harold Bloom taught Moby-Dick the same way. Every reading was new. No fixed script, only the swell of thought. He modeled Melville’s method: trust the reader, trust the text, trust the mystery.
The whale resists capture—literal and interpretive. It is not a symbol with a key, but a question without an answer. That resistance is what makes Moby-Dick enduring. It insists on being re-read. Re-thought. Re-discovered.
The Archive That Breathes
“It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
Taken together, the voices of Wyatt Mason, Harold Bloom, Richard J. King, and Aaron Sachs reveal Moby-Dick as something more than literature. It is a breathing archive—a repository of imagination, inquiry, and paradox.
Within its pages dwell theologies and taxonomies, drama and digression, sermons and sea shanties. It houses the ethical weight of ecology, the fury of Ahab, the wonder of Ishmael, and the ghosts of Melville’s century. It defies genre, resists reduction, and insists on complexity.
Melville did not write to close arguments but to open them. He did not believe in neat endings. His whale is the quintessential “true place”: uncapturable, immeasurable, endlessly sublime.
And yet we return. We keep hunting—not with harpoons, but with attention. With interpretation. With awe.
A Final Breach
What, then, do we do with Moby-Dick in the twenty-first century? How do we reconcile Ahab’s consuming fury with Ishmael’s contemplative awe? How do we carry Bloom’s Prometheus, King’s Leviathan, Sachs’s resurrected Melville, and Mason’s classroom in a single imagination?
We read. We reread. We become “sub-sub-librarians”—archivists of ambiguity, curators of complexity. We do not read Moby-Dick for closure. We read it to learn how to remain open—to contradiction, to paradox, to mystery.
But what if we, like Captain Ahab, set off to find Moby Dick and never found the whale?
What if all our intellectual harpoons missed their mark? What if the whale was never there to begin with—not as symbol, not as certainty, not as prize?
Would we call that failure?
Or might we discover, like Ishmael adrift on the coffin-raft, that survival is not about conquest, but endurance? That truth lives not in the kill, but in the quest?
Perhaps Melville’s greatest lesson is that the whale must never be caught. Its sublimity lies in its elusiveness—in its capacity to remain just beyond the reach of definition, control, and meaning. It breaches in metaphor. It disappears in digression. It waits—not to be captured, but to be considered.
We will never catch it. But we must keep following.
For in the following, we become something more than readers.
We become seekers.
THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN BY INTELLICUREAN UTILIZING AI
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