Hakugei

Don't call me Ishmael

☭ Slavlander☭ (formerly Rurik)’s latest podcast is a gold mine. I loved it all, but one nugget shone particularly brightly for me at 31:22 (emphasis mine):

Allegory is basically something that you cannot intuitively figure out. Like an allegory has to be explained to you. Someone has to sit you down and explain that the white whale in Moby-Dick is meant to represent this, this, and this, and this story is actually about this, this, and this, right?

And it’s an elitist approach to art because no one can figure it out on their own you have to have an education - an indoctrination - and from there you’re able.

That’s pretty much all we do nowadays in universities, right? Like all these people who major in any form of humanities where you read literature or you watch movies or whatever and basically, the teacher sits you down and explains all the hidden themes in the film, and this makes you very worldly - it makes you very sophisticated.

In other words, it makes you very intelligent - the fact that you can decode these hidden meanings - these allegories - that have been hidden within these films, right? So not only is it elitist, but it’s a form of obfuscation of truth.

Before I go on, I need to confess that like Zelig from Woody Allen’s 1983 film of the same name, I never read Moby-Dick.

Dr. Eudora Fletcher: You recall the first time you began behaving like the people you were around?

Leonard Zelig: In school, some very bright people asked me if I read Moby-Dick. I was ashamed to say I never read it.

Dr. Fletcher: And you pretended?

Zelig: Yes.

Unlike Zelig, I never had to pretend - because I was never asked. Melville was ‘out’ in my circle in the eighties.

I never even saw the anime The White Whale of Mu (1980), shown in Italy as Moby Dick 5.

I didn’t read the novelization either. The spaceship on the cover is the white whale - the 白鯨 hakugei. In Japanese, Moby-Dick is called 白鯨 Hakugei. A regular white whale is a 白い鯨 shiroi kujira ‘white whale’ - two words - but Melville’s whale got its own special word, a shorter combination of two roots that cannot stand alone: haku ‘white’ (as in 白人 hakujin ‘White person’) and gei ‘whale’.

I never saw the actual text of Moby-Dick until just now.

I do know someone who read it all, including what Wikipedia charitably calls “[c]hapters that are of a non-narrative, descriptive type […t]ogether, they constitute about one fifth of the total number of chapters”. Sounds like bloat to me. Let’s take a look at the first of those chapters, “Cetology”. The title is a warning. I’ll ignore it and take a plunge …

Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored harborless immensities. Ere that come to pass; ere the Pequod’s weedy hull rolls side by side with the barnacled hulls of the leviathan; at the outset it is but well to attend to a matter almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to follow.

It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera, that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed. Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down.

“No branch of Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled Cetology,” says Captain Scoresby, A.D. 1820.

And on and on it goes before actually getting to a biological point:

First: The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish.

I am normally not a fan of data dumps in fiction, but that takes the cake. It can’t even start with a dump. It’s bloat within bloat!

It’s brilliance. So say authorities:

William Faulkner said he wished he had written the book himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world" and "the greatest book of the sea ever written"

But Faulkner and Lawrence were writing after Melville’s death. The initial reception of the book was mixed. A sample of early attacks:

Henry Chorley: [A]n ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition. The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed.

The Boston Post: […N]ot worth the money asked for it, either as a literary work or as a mass of printed paper

On the other hand, a reviewer for Harper’s - perhaps George Ripley - though there might have been a code in the novel (emphasis mine):

Beneath the whole story, the subtle, imaginative reader may perhaps find a pregnant allegory, intended to illustrate the mystery of human life.

Don’t ask me what the allegory is. The code has been cracked in so many different ways:

A great herd of readers profess devotion to Herman Melville's classic Moby-Dick, but novelists especially seem to love saying they love it. On The Top Ten, a website that lists authors' favorite books, Moby-Dick is cited more often than not (and by writers as dissimilar as John Irving and Robert Coover, Bret Easton Ellis and Joyce Carol Oates). But perhaps they all love a different Moby-Dick. It's been called a whaling yarn, a theodicy, a Shakespeare-styled political tragedy, an anatomy, a queer confessional, an environmentalist epic; because this novel seems to hold all the world, all these readings are compatible and true.

“All these readings” … even an Afrofuturist reading. Don’t be Wacist and deny that Melville was really writing about Wakanda in code to fool the white supreeeemists that infested the nineteenth century. WHITE whale .. BLACK Panther … don’t you see it now? Don’t you feel smahhhhter having received my gui-dunce?

The inhumanities is a scam. It’s a bunch of priests claiming to be codebreakers. Seeing whatever they want to see.

My literature classes were exercises in guessing what the instructor saw. Read the code their way and get an A.

We never asked if there was a code in the first place. Or why we had to decode these books but not other books.

Nobody told us that the canon is a construct. That there was a serious threat to drop Moby-Dick from Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World. That in Melville’s time, “many reviewers […] could not see in him the author of great literature.”

What changed since then?