Leon Black / Herman Melville / Moby Dick
I.
A friend of mine, Anja, has decided to read Melville's epic novel Moby-Dick (1851) between now and the end of May (she plans to digest a chapter a day for the next 135 days).
It's not a book that I've read: I've tried, but have never managed to get through more than a few pages. For some reason, I find it irritating. And this, despite the fact that Lawrence describes it as "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world" [a].
Indeed, in his chapter on the book in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), Lawrence also insists that Moby-Dick is "the greatest book of the sea ever written" [146]; a work whose profound symbolism inspires him with a mixture of fear and wonder.
And, let me assure you, that's rare praise coming from Mr. Lawrence, who doesn't often gush about books or their authors. But Melville is, for him, the greatest poet of the sea:
"His vision is more real than Swinburne's because he doesn't personify the sea, and far sounder than Joseph Conrad's, because Melville doesn't sentimentalise the ocean and the sea's unfortunates." [122] [b]
Perhaps that's because, according to Lawrence, Melville has "the strange, uncanny magic of sea-creatures, and some of their repulsiveness" [122] - i.e., something not quite human.
But never mind Melville, let's focus on the huge white sperm whale, Moby Dick, and discuss what it is that Lawrence finds so fascinating (and yet so terrifying) about these magnificent mammals whose commercial hunting began in the 18th-century and only came to an end in the 1980s [c].
II.
Of course, Lawrence being Lawrence, he is more interested in Moby Dick as a symbol. Although, like Melville, Lawrence is not quite sure what the warm-blooded whale symbolises.
But that doesn't prevent him from declaring Moby Dick to essentially be a phallic symbol; "the deepest blood-being of the white race [...] our deepest blood-nature" [146].
And the fact that he is so cruelly and relentlessly hunted "by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness" [146] symbolises the fact that we are motivated by a kind of death drive:
"We want to hunt him down. To subject him to our will. And in this maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves [...] is our doom and our suicide." [146]
Lawrence continues:
"The last phallic being of the white man. Hunted into the death of upper consciousness and the ideal will. Our blood-self subjected to our own will. Our blood-consciousness sapped by a parasitic mental or ideal consciousness.
Hot-blooded sea-born Moby Dick. Hunted by monomaniacs of the idea." [146]
A tragic fate. But one that Lawrence accepts:
"Ah well, if my day is doomed, and I am doomed with my day, it is something greater than I which dooms me, so I accept my doom as a sign of the greatness which is more than I am." [146]
III.
Of course, there are some fates worse than the collective doom of a people; worse even than having your leg torn off at the knee, or being drowned at sea.
For example, one can be so heart-broken following a painful separation from a loved one, that one takes to one's bed, depressed, and lacking the energy to do anything. This form of spiritual impotence is what Leon Black famously describes as mopey dick [d].
Whether the cure for this psycho-physiological condition involves inserting a gerbil into one's anus remains, please note, highly controversial.
Notes
[a] D. H. Lawrence, 'Herman Melville's Moby Dick', in Studies in Classic American Literature (Final Version, 1923), ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 145.
Future page references to this text - and to the preceding chapter, 'Herman Melville's Typee and Omoo' - will be given directly in the post.
[b] Despite his admiration for Melville the artist, Lawrence can't help taking a pop at Melville the man; "a rather tiresome New Englander of the ethical-mystical-transcendentalist sort" [134]; someone often clownish and clumsy as a stylist who writes in sententious bad taste.
[c] Commercial hunting led to the near-extinction of large whales, including sperm whales. The International Whaling Commission only granted the species full protection in 1985 (although hunting by Japan in the northern Pacific Ocean continued until 1988). Recovery has been slow, but remaining sperm whale populations are now large enough that the species is no longer listed as endangered.
[d] See the season 6 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, entitled 'The Bat Mitzvah', dir. Larry Charles, written by Larry David, and first broadcast on 11 November 2007: click here. The character Leon Black is played by J. B. Smoove.
