Why Read Moby-Dick

boat floating on the ocean or even on a large lake has felt the panic of realizing that below you is an emptiness so vast that you in your pitiful churnings are nothing. You are completely and absolutely alone. “The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity,” Ishmael says, “my God! who can tell it?” Pip lives the Essex nightmare in all its heartbreaking, wisdom-gathering poignancy, providing the Pequod with, Ishmael informs us, “a living and ever accompanying prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove her own.”
    Pip’s mind and soul, if not his body, travel down into the distant depths of a sea that Ishmael elsewhere describes as “the tide-beating heart of earth.” Down there at the bottom, “strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.” Pip is eventually saved, but he is left a husk, an idiot savant of eternity, to whom Ahab in his angry attempt to get at the source of our collective human misery is inevitably drawn.
    As the innocent victim who sees too much, Pip becomes the counter to Ahab’s other confidant, Fedallah. Whereas the Parsee, an amalgam of Iago and the Weird Sisters of Macbeth, whispers teasing prophecies in Ahab’s ear, Pip is part cipher, part sounding board. Like King Lear’s Fool, Pip proves that Ahab has, in the words of one of the Pequod ’s owners, “his humanities.”

19
    The Squeeze
    T here are two ways to get oil out of a sperm whale. You can peel off the blubber, chop it into bits, and boil it into oil. Then there is the creature’s blocklike head, which Ishmael jokingly refers to as the great Heidelburgh Tun: a huge reservoir of vodka-clear oil known as spermaceti. Once the spermaceti is exposed to the air, it begins to solidify, “sending forth beautifully crystalline shoots,” Ishmael informs us, “as when the first thin delicate ice is just forming in water.” Eventually, the spermaceti (so named because that’s what it now looks like, semen or sperm) becomes so thick and lumpy that it must be squeezed back into a liquid form before it can be heated in the tryworks.
    For Ishmael, the antidote to Pip’s terrible loneliness is sitting around a big tub of spermaceti with his shipmates as they all squeeze the gooey, sticky, mushy clumps and, inevitably, each other’s hands. You can just see the crinkle in those small penetrating eyes as Melville pushed this not-so-subtle double entendre into the kinds of places Walt Whitman would go just four years later with the publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855. “Oh! my dear fellow beings,” Ishmael effuses, “why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.” This is the homoerotic answer (which, given his troubled marriage, may have been where Melville’s heart really lay) to the heterosexual bliss of “The Grand Armada.”
    As it turns out, chapter 94, “A Squeeze of the Hand,” is just a warm-up for the next chapter, “The Cassock,” in which Melville constructs what may be the most elaborate, not to mention obscene, pun in all of literature. Ishmael begins by describing how the mincer, the sailor who cuts up the whale blubber into thin pieces known as bible leaves, secures a very special coat made from—get this—the foreskin of a sperm whale’s penis . . . that’s right, the foreskin of a whale. I won’t go into the details (for that you have to read the book), but suffice it to say that once the mincer is dressed in this black tubular outfit, he looks, Ishmael insists, just like a clergyman as he stands at a