Leviathan or The Whale

saponification, distillation–extended and rationalized the use of whales in lubricants, paint, varnish, ink, detergent, leather and food: hydrogenation made whale oil palatable, sanitizing its taste. Efficiency ruled, in place of the early whalers’ waste. Whale liver yielded vitamin A, and whale glands were used to make insulin for diabetics and corticotrophin to treat arthritis. Nineteenth-century trains had run on whale oil; now streamlined cars with sleek chrome fins used brake fluid made from the same stuff. Victorian New Englanders had relished doughnuts fried in whale oil; now children with crew-cuts and stripy T-shirts licked ice cream made from it. Their bright shiny faces were washed with whale soap, and having tied their shoelaces of whale skin, they marched off to school, past gardens nurtured on whale fertilizer, to draw with whale crayons while Mum sewed their clothes on a machine lubricated with whale oil, and fed the family cat on whale meat. In her office, big sister transcribed memos on typewriter ribbon charged with whale ink, pausing to apply her whale lipstick. Later that afternoon, she would play a game of tennis with a whale-strung racquet. Back home, Daddy lined up the family to take their photograph on film glazed with whale gelatine.
    Whales imprinted with the image of the age.
    It was not until 1973, when I was a teenager, that Britain began to ban whale products. Even then, it allowed exceptions such as sperm whale oil, used as engine lubricant, and spermaceti wax, for softening leather–of which it still imported a total of two thousand tons a month–along with other products ‘incorporated abroad into manufactured goods. Sperm whales had not been overexploited,’ said the Minister of State for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, ‘but baleen whales had.’ The Pet Food Manufacturers’ Association–which used ninety-five per cent of all imported whale meat to give its dog and cat foods ‘“chunky” appeal’, announced that it would accept its last consignment that November.
    Whales may no longer have lit the world, but time still ran on their oil. Watchmakers used the superior lubricant, prized in polar latitudes for its ability to allow chronometers to function in freezing temperatures (thereby allowing the hunting of more whales by Antarctic fleets). As the giant astronomical clock of Strasbourg Cathedral ceremonially tolled European hours, it did so lubricated by the products of William Nye’s Oil Works, New Bedford.
    And while whale-oiled clocks ticked, the mythic beast acquired a new meaning in the half-life of the nuclear era. In the late 1940s the American artist Gilbert Wilson became obsessed with Melville’s novel, as well as with modern science. In the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist
, he wrote
of Moby-Dick
that ‘no tragedy in world literature succeeds quite as powerfully or as clearly in pointing up the mortal errors of hate and domination’. Wilson even suggested to Shostakovich that they should create an opera of
Moby-Dick
as ‘a catalyst for helping to dissolve American and Soviet cold war dissension and to restore world peace’.
    In Wilson’s own dystopian imagination, the White Whale became an augury of atomic conflict, and Ahab’s ‘insane pursuit of Moby Dick into the Sea of Japan’ analogous to America’s ‘atrocious nuclear experiments and explosions in the same area’. Similarly, in his critical work,
The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick
, published in 1949, Howard P. Vincent considered that Moby Dick was ‘ubiquitous in time and place. Yesterday he sank the
Pequod;
within the past two years he has breached five times; from a New Mexico desert, over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and most recently, at Bikini atoll.’
    A cloud like a whale.
    A generation earlier, D.H. Lawrence, writing in Lobo, New Mexico, had seen in Melville’s book the ‘doom of our white day…And the
Pequod
is the ship of the white American soul.’ In 1952 the Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James was detained on Ellis Island. Exiled within sight of Manhattan’s towers, in a dull brick block next to Liberty Island, James composed his critique
of Moby-Dick
, comparing Ahab with modern dictators. In James’s essay, written in the running shadow of the nuclear race, Ahab’s
Pequod
became a weapon of mass destruction. ‘He has at his sole command a whaling-vessel which is one of the most highly developed technological structures of the day. He has catalogued in his brain all the