Why Read Moby-Dick

sharks, swarming round the dead leviathan, smackingly feasted on its fatness. The few sleepers below in their bunks were often startled by the sharp slapping of their tails against the hull, within a few inches of the sleepers’ hearts. Peering over the side you could just see them . . . wallowing in the sullen, black waters, and turning over on their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of the whale of the bigness of a human head.... The mark they thus leave on the whale, may best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking for a screw.”
    It is a terrifying and fascinating scene in which Melville lays bare the brutal savagery that underlies even the most polite of slave-master relationships. Stubb claims the uproar in the waters below is bothering him and orders Fleece to address the sharks. While delivered in a stilted dialect, the sermon that follows contains wisdom that comes straight from the author himself. “Your woraciousness, fellow-critters, I don’t blame ye so much for; dat is natur, and can’t be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not’ing more dan de shark well goberned.”
    This is Melville’s ultimate view of humanity, the view he will bring to brilliant fruition forty years later in the novella Billy Budd . The job of government, of civilization, is to keep the shark at bay. All of us are, to a certain degree, capable of wrongdoing. Without some form of government, evil will prevail.
    Here lies the source of the Founding Fathers’ ultimately unforgivable omission. They refused to contain the great, ravening shark of slavery, and more than two generations later their grandchildren and great-grandchildren were about to suffer the consequences.

17
    The Enchanted Calm
    E ven amid the worst of all possible worlds, life goes on.
    Even amid the dehumanizing brutality of Southern slavery and the agony of a concentration camp, people find a refuge, if only temporarily, from the suffering and fear. In chapter 87, “The Grand Armada,” Melville takes us to that secret center within the storm. It’s that place where passion and love can bloom, even in the most horrible of circumstances; otherwise the human race (which has known plenty of rough patches) would have long since ceased to exist.
    Shortly after escaping Malaysian pirates, the Pequod comes upon a massive pod of whales. When the whales realize they are under attack, some of them flee in a “distraction of panic.” Others simply give up in a “strange perplexity of inert irresolution” and are easily killed. This mixture of panic and paralysis was typical of a group of whales that had become, in the words of the whalemen, “ gallied .” Rather than be surprised by the behavior, Ishmael reminds us that “there is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.” All of us, whales and men alike, have our absurdities, especially when our fears get the better of us.
    Ishmael’s whaleboat crew harpoons a whale that drags them ever deeper into the chaotic fury of the gallied herd. Eventually, “the direful disorders seemed waning,” and they enter “the innermost heart of the shoal . . . [where] the sea presented that smooth satin-like surface, called a sleek.... Yes, we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every commotion.”
    Within this lake-like still point, all the rules have changed. Instead of hunter and prey, it is as if the whalemen and the whales are now part of the same extended family. “[I]t almost seemed that some spell had suddenly domesticated them,” Ishmael recounts. “Queequeg patted their foreheads; Starbuck scratched their backs with his lance.” At the center of this benign and blissful scene, a mother whale suckles her baby. Melville, the new father, engrafts the physical delicacy of his infant son into his account of a newborn whale: “The delicate side-fins, and the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby’s ears newly arrived from foreign parts.” Elsewhere whales are gently copulating. “Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond,” Ishmael tactfully relates.
    Melville has created a portrait of