On Not Reading Herman Melville; or, Wu Tsang’s The Whale
With Additional Notes Pertaining to the Notions of Understanding and Insight
A summer evening stirs sinister in Sydney. Clouds are pulling together on the horizon, their scattered grey melting into a unified black sky that signals torrential rain. The cheap convenience store umbrella I clutch in my hand seems outmatched by the gathering storm. Normally, facing such horrors of nature I would duck inside a pub for a pint, or turn on my heel and, gathering pace, head toward home. Tonight, however, I am going to an open air cinema which overlooks the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House. The Cinema, sponsored by some bank who revels in taking people’s homes from them, runs run or shine, the only weather protection offered being cheap plastic ponchos the staff indifferently hand out to the ill-fated movie goers. Unless of course you’re willing to pay for the covered seats in the bank-who-will-take-your-home-from-you’s very own premium lounge.
The weather is disheartening in the extreme but it’s ideal conditions for what I’m going to see: Wu Tsang’s The Whale. An adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale that is mostly silent except for the score and a narration provided by the ‘sub-sub-librarian’. The score, written by Caroline Shaw and Andrew Yee, is being performed live by the Sydney Chamber Orchestra. In the first thirty minutes of the film the storm breaks, and we’re as soaked as the sailors on the screen. To call Tsang an accomplished film maker seems like an understatement: they’re clearly hot shit. Yet The Whale falters as an adaptation of Moby-Dick; less retelling and more mere repetition; it stays on the surface, and fails to, in its recounting, understand Moby-Dick. Yet on what grounds could I justify this thesis. You see, I haven’t even read Moby Dick. What insights have I to offer?
A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece on not reading James Joyce. Actually, I wrote two. In the first one another great novel of horrifying length and immense cultural status that mine eyes had neglected was briefly mentioned: Melville’s Moby Dick. Except again, I’m not really sure how true this is. For I have encountered this text in many forms, and many of its pivotal scenes are etched upon my mind.
This time I’m not here to ask what it means to encounter a text. My latest encounter with Moby-Dick has perplexed me a great deal. One purpose given to the importance of reading canonical works and reading them cover to cover is that it will develop one’s understanding. This is unobjectionable: if one doesn’t have all the pieces in front of them, one cannot complete the puzzle. Yet, as we will see, things are rarely so simple. I assume that Wu Tsang and scriptwriter Sophia Al-Maria have read Moby-Dick cover to cover. But perhaps here, in the film’s failings, we can glimpse how hard fought for is understanding.
First, however, a little history and a little narrative. See I put off reading Moby-Dick for so long because in many ways I had already read it. When I was about 6 or 7, which I agree is a little too old for this, my father read to me from an abridged and illustrated edition of Moby-Dick. We had just moved to New York and I guess he thought it would be good for me intellectually or somethin’. Scenes from that reading are etched into my mind, in part because of the illustrations, and in part because I probably demanded certain scenes be re-read. The scene where Queequeg enters the room Ishmael is staying in and the description of Queequeg as some sort of deeply intimidating figure, a fear of the other I had yet to see narrated so; the scene where Tashego falls into the whale carcass, an event so visceral and horrifying to my little 6-and-a-half year old mind I don’t think I’d forget it illustrated or not; the all consuming whirlpool that emerges in the books final scenes, an image of total destruction hitherto unknown to me. A few years later, 9 or 10, too old to be reading an abridged anything, I read the book myself. For years I was convinced that I had read Moby Dick cover to cover. It was only much later, while helping my parents move, I came across the book, its white cover and red lettering emitting the warmth of familiarity, and realized to my horror that I had only ever read the abridged edition.
Around half a decade later, I was living in Washington D.C. My teenage years were ones in which my literary interests waned and my interests in music and science grew. The aesthetic connection between music and science is held together by the vast genre known as metal. They both focus on technicality, knowledge, arrangement. The care of the theoretician is all present here. Yet metal is also the breeding ground for harsh noises, unusual recording techniques, attempts to push music to its extreme. Here then is the irreverence of the experimentalist. And so too metal shares with science the meeting point between technician and experimentalist: the leveraging of technique in the search of novelty. In those days music was all new to me, an infinite valley of previously unheard sounds and musical ideas, a wilderness to be discovered. Every week in those years I heard something I hadn’t heard before. I will never hear Fugazi for the first time again, but oh how I wish I could. Amongst this cacophony of novelty was Mastodon, whose 2004 album Leviathan I took a particular shine to. Leviathan is an entire album about Moby-Dick. I played the record on repeat: I listened to it on my iPod constantly, listened to it while studying (so much the worse for my grades), vainly tried to learn the songs on guitar (they’re fairly hard) and in the process learnt phrases, words and moments of plots from Moby-Dick, some less than faithfully transliterated. For example, “snap your oars” becomes the much more metal “crack your oars”, “hearts alive”, a phrase in the first lowering chapter appears as the name of the final track depicting the end of the Pequod. To this day ‘Hearts Alive’, the fourteen-minute closing track, remains a favorite of mine, a song with all the centrifugal force of a whirpool. I’d be remiss here not to also mention Ahab, the German band who exclusively write songs about novels of the sea (including two albums just on Moby-Dick) and who are widely credited with inventing the absurdly named genre “Nautical Doom Metal”.
A decade later after that I was back in New York. It was Jan 2021, and NYC was desolate. The Covid Pandemic meant there was fuck all to do. It would have been a great time to read Moby-Dick, but alas my copy was back in Australia. So instead, I went around to my brother’s place (he was living around the corner) and we watched the 1956 film adaptation of Moby-Dick, directed by John Hurston and with a screenplay by Ray Bradbury. It stares Gregory Peck as Ahab and Richard Basehart as Ishmael (with a short but stunning appearance by Orson Welles as Father Mapple). As you can imagine for a movie made in 1956 the technical production leaves much to be desired. The infamous white whale, Moby-Dick himself, moves like a large piece of polystyrene, but the performances save the film. Peck’s Ahab is incredible (but distracting insofar as he looks uncannily like Abraham Lincoln). Old films were less worried about their audiences turning them off – a problem video, DVD and then streaming have introduced – and as such they tend to be slower. Hurston’s Moby-Dick makes great use of this, giving us Ishmael’s opening monologue and allowing the film to truly build a slow inescapable descent into the whirlpool of Ahab’s madness. The literal whirlpool in the final scene, however, does look a bit shite.
Sometime shortly after, or before, this I went to see my friend B. give a paper at an academic conference in New York. The conference was on animality – philosophers are still trying to figure out our relationship to animals and nature, in the way that only the idiocy of the intellect can produce – and B. had an old essay on Moby-Dick he had transformed into a suitable paper. The paper is heavy with quotations from the book, and given the conference was on zoom, it was possible to read along with B.’s presentation. B.’s paper was a real masterpiece of close reading: pointing out that in the background of Melville’s democratic and homoerotic poetics is animal violence; it is this violence which brings men together, which forms the basis of their being-in-common. One quote from Moby-Dick was central to B.’s presentation, from the ‘most celebrated’ Squeeze of the Hand chapter:
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long, I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this advocation beget….let us all squeeze ourselves into each other.
Here the crew are squeezing whale spermaceti back into fluid after it has congealed. What a passage, I thought. It’s buoyancy and poetic charm is enough to make one at least consider reading the unabridged version of Moby-Dick.
This brings us to my final and most recent encounter with Moby-Dick. Tsang’s film adaptation irked me because it seemed to not understand Moby-Dick. The film opens with an introduction to our narrator, who reads from a mixture of quotations from Moby-Dick and C.L.R. James’ book length study of Melvilles masterpiece, Marines, Renegades and Castaways. The narrator is played by Fred Moten, and they are located in what looks like the deep hull of ship – one review suggested it was the a whale’s belly - surrounded by tomes, presented as some mixture of queer sailor and voodoo priestess. We are promptly told that Tsang’s The Whale seeks to displace a tale of revenge with the story of the communal bond of the sailors; the bond of the crew against the perilous bloody mindedness of Ahab and his first mates.
Here the problems begin. After our introduction by our narrator the first scene commences. We start at chapter four: Counterpane. Readers of Moby-Dick (not I) can preempt the dimension that will unfold from here. Earlier I cited a passage from Moby-Dick I first heard at my friend B.’s talk. One known fact about Moby Dick is that is extremely homoerotic. Counterpane is the chapter after Ishmael meets Queegqueg, who is forced to share a bed with him because the inn is full. Ishmael’s fear of Queegqueg gives way to a rather intimate friendship (let’s say). Counterpane opens thus: “Upon waking next morning around daylight, I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife.” So Tsang’s retelling begins here but transforms strong suggestion into explicitness: Ishmael and Queegqueg are clearly presented as lovers in the opening scenes of The Whale.
Queering Moby-Dick is not objectionable, it is unnecessary. Perhaps Tsang is doing a service, making queerness the explicit theme of the story, reversing the polarities. A revenge tale with a queer side is now a queer tale with a revenge side. Except Tsang doesn’t achieve this. Tsang, who was born in Massachusetts, suffers from a great North American hermeneutic miasma. This is the belief that everything must be explicit. The miasma is paradoxical because the great theme in American scholarship is the alternative, the underside, the untold, the unsaid. Yet these two tracks run parallel to each other: a society in which the terms ‘words of affirmation’ and ‘ghosting’ circulate with similar velocities in popular consciousness.
Tsang’s Queequeg is not Melville’s hulking figure. Repeatedly throughout The Whale the rough and tough sailors are transformed into softer specimens of masculinity. Not so much a queering of Moby-Dick as a twinkification. This might all be part and parcel of Tsang’s goal to tell the underside of Moby Dick, to tell a softer story. This is the heart of the problem, for at the same time Tsang still tells the irreducible, unescapable and hypermasculine story of Moby-Dick, a story of revenge and obsession. The story and its presentation become, all of a sudden, at odds with each other. Such tensions can be productive, but tension is not inherently productive. Duress can bind, but it can also shatter. Throughout The Whale things fall apart more often than they cohere.
Tsang’s film has its moments – I am, as always, being both belligerent and hyperbolic – but there is much that either fails to land or becomes cringeworthy. Here’s one moment that works: an early scene, all sailors upon the deck, moving on the ship’s deck which arranged is a little too much like a theatre stage. This moment has a sense of exaggeration and falsity to it which gives it a quality of musical theatre to it. It helps reinforce the idea that there is a different, more queer and more joyous, story that Tsang wants to tell. And indeed the more off script Tsang goes, the more Tsang wants to exploit the medium of cinema in retelling a novel, the more promise The Whale shows.
More common, however, are the moments of tedium. The sea turns red in the film’s climatic moments, in order to represent the blood of the whale but instead the ocean looks more like cranberry juice. The only horror being invoked here is the horror of the kidney stone. The infamous scene of a crew member falling into a whale’s headless corpse occurs not on the side of the ship but in the try works in Tsang’s retelling. The try works are a kind of in-ship factory, designed for processing the products of slaughtered whales. Melville describes the try works as factory like and so Tsang sets the scene as a literal factory, with an automatic conveyor belt and blast furnaces in the background. This kind of literalness is nauseating. Earlier, before Ishmael and Queequeg board the Pequod, Queequeg says something akin to “Not you and I, but us.” Tedious teenage romanticism. Then occurs the scene where the prophet warns them of their fate. Here’s another moment of tedium. In silent movies movements are exaggerated. With no audio something has to grab attention. Looking at mouth silently gaping for too long between intertitles produces an artifice that counteracts absorption. The prophet’s lines are long, and the camera fixates on a mouth moving for what soon feels like an eternity. Not unsettling but disengaging. These moments, and the whole film suffering from what can only be described as the aesthetics of the video installation, get in the way of moments of genuine promise.
One moment in particular is enough to make one blanche. Have just shown the scene in which Ahab reveals to his crew that Pequod’s actual purpose is to hunt Moby-Dick, he brushes off the objections of First Mate Starbuck and declares that the plan is to hunt Moby-Dick. Here our narrator interjects with: “The Plan? Shit, the Nazis had a plan.” The analogy is jarring in its absurdity. What follows from this is a quote extracted from C.L.R. James’ study of Moby Dick. Here’s the James quote in full:
Their primary aim is not war. It is not dictatorship. It is the Plan. In pursuit of what they call planning the economy, they have depopulated Russia of tens of millions of workers, peasants and officials, so that it seems as if some pestilence sweeps periodically across the country. In pursuit of their plan, they have placed and intend to keep millions in concentration camps. Their purpose is to plan. And they will carry out their plan or, like the Nazis, bury themselves and Europe in the ruins. But even this by itself would not cause the international crisis. What causes it is the fact that in every type of country, the most highly developed and the most backward, have arisen tens of thousands of educated men, organizers, administrators, intellectuals, labour leaders, nationalist leaders, who are ready to do in their own country exactly what the Communists are doing in Russia and look to Russia as their fatherland. This is the problem. The most futile of innumerable futile debates is the quarrel between Democrats and Republicans as to whose policy was responsible for the fact that China has gone Communist. Neither of them could have done one single thing to stop it. The madness spreads irresistibly.
In the context of James’ first chapter however, the claim isn’t nearly as absurd. For James is setting up a strong claim: the Melville’s world is the dawn of the same world which produced the dual horrors of Nazism and Stalinism. He sets up the claim with care. Just as tension is not productive in lieu of being tension, juxtaposition is not inherently meaningful. Bringing James’ broader socio-political reflections into the mix at this precise point does not form the beautiful intelligibility of a hitherto unknown constellation but the white noise of a broken receiver.
The film makes an interpretive error early on, declaring that we will not be focusing on the story of Ahab’s vengeance. Moby-Dick is not so much about vengeance as it is about obsession. Vengeance here appears as merely one aspect of obsession. The obsession is what unites the multitude of the book’s aspects. Ahab’s obsession and Ishamel’s obsession with the crew, with his desire to go out to sea. Ahab’s obsession and the crew’s obsession. Ahab’s obsession in ,as James’ points out, contradistinction to obsession with wealth that drives Starbuck and society write large. It is about obsession, and how obsession can drive one to self-destruction. Tsang has her own obsessions and they run The Whale aground. What The Whale fails to do is get beyond the surface of Moby-Dick; it is in this way that it fails to understand.
While understanding might come from a deep and, to borrow a term, completionist engagement, such engagement does not guarantee understanding. In Raymond Geuss’ essay “Teaching Nietzsche” he outlines a plan of reading Nietzsche that follows a completionist model as the guide to understanding. He tells us:
My advice to beginning students of Nietzsche is: if you want to understand what Nietzsche is really concerned with, what forms the essential background against which his work should be studied, do not read Kant (or Hegel), but study the real history of what was happening in the 19th century in Central Europe and spend the three or four years you will need to learn Greek sufficiently to follow what is going on in an ancient text. Then start reading Homer, Hesiod, the Presocratics, early elegiac and iambic poetry, tragedy and comedy, Herodotus and Thucydides, and especially Plato as systematically as you can…If, after reading Theognis, Plato, and Sophocles, you still have time, read Schopenhauer and Wagner. If, then, you still have time on your hands, it will not hurt then to read Kant and Hegel, although I would wager that by that time you will find nothing in them to help you further in understanding Nietzsche.
Such a move is common: if you really want to understand someone you better read all their predecessors too. And it is true that such a move will aid in understanding. But so too can one dapple and dip in the murky waters of intellectual history and have something insightful to say. I haven’t taught Nietzsche as long as Geuss has, but when I have, insight abounds from those who have just come to him. Geuss is being deliberately provocative and perhaps a little ironic, but his model is an underlying assumption of much intellectual life. Yet this model of study renders teaching – study’s counterpart activity – impossible. Jacques Rancière, in his text The Ignorant Schoolmaster, points out the infinite regress at play such discourses. For let us take Geuss seriously here. If this is what it takes to understand Nietzsche what hope do students have? Perhaps they can reach for a tome by someone who has undergone the Geuss immersion. But then on what grounds could they make sense of it, given all the work necessary for understanding. The secondary literature can only be properly assessed by someone who has done all the reading, and so we need another text and another master. This is also, partly, the problem of Immanuel Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?”; at some point my understanding has to be self-generated or its not really understanding at all. Rancière’s solution, incidentally, is to move from question of intellect to question of will, but we can stay in the realm of the intellect here and make sense of the perplexities of understanding. For, just as one could read all there is and still not have understanding, one does not need all the pieces in front of them in order to gain insight. Nothing promises understanding but nor does anything prevent insight.
Theodor Adorno, in his “The Essay as Form” tells us something insightful. The essay as form is held in ill-repute by academics, for it starts wherever and ends wherever and it is against the academic requirements of originality and rigour. It also allows us to bring quickly into view the whole. In its lack of careful, slow, methodical argumentation so common of the monograph, the essay unfolds a complexity and a whole. As Adorno writes:
The essay as form will be a good guide for the person who is beginning to study philosophy, and before whose eyes the idea of philosophy somehow stands. He will hardly begin by reading the easiest writers, whose common sense will skim the surface where depth is called for; he will rather go for the allegedly difficult writers, who shed light on what is simple and illuminate it as a "stance of the mind toward objectivity." The naiveté of the student, to whom the difficult and formidable seems good enough, is wiser than the adult pedantry that admonishes thought with a threatening finger to understand the simple before risking that complexity which alone entices it. Such a postponement of knowledge only prevents knowledge. In opposition to the cliche of the "understandable," the notion of truth as a network of causes and effects, the essay insists that a matter be considered, from the very first, in its whole complexity; it counteracts that hardened primitiveness that always allies itself with reason's current form.
Notice here, however, that for this model to work, one may proceed piecemeal; understanding comes via understanding, knowledge via knowledge, insight via insight. There is no preparation necessary other than literacy. Since insight is always possible, insight can also be generated from the partial. And just as the whole does not guarantee understanding, the partial does not prevent insight. In this we might have the basis for the great democratic equality, formal and immanent, of which Melville was so fond. Or so I’ve been told.