Warning of the destruction of the natural world
Today an excerpt from the forthcoming The Manifesto of Herman Melville by Barry Sanders (available for pre-order via OR Books). Sanders is the founding co-chair at the Oregon Institute for Creative Research-E4, a two time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and the author of fourteen books.
"Moby Dick does not so much require reading as it demands tolerance—for the way it disorients readers and provokes them into reflecting," Sanders writes. "Moby Dick does not require readers as much as it demands thinkers and activists, those who can hear and overhear with a certain clarity. Which is to say, it aims for a slowed-down, contemplative rumination on the sorry state of nature, the crooked hearts that took it down, and an extrapolation into what might pass for a future."
"Moby Dick is America’s first manifesto, a tocsin sounded to warn us about the encroaching end of nature," OR explains. In the book he "argues that Moby Dick needs to be recognized as Melville's manifesto: a bold statement warning of the destruction of the natural world."
Melville’s injunction is mighty, huge, and distended—perhaps even impossible. Every suggestion and solution to the devastation of the Earth must be oversized, fueled by the intensity of Ahab’s rage and the distortions of Melville’s prose, from Ishmael’s demands on us, to Moby Dick’s percussive power against the Pequod, from the length of the book to the overwhelming injunction to halt killing now. In our catastrophic epoch, we cannot back away from the impossible, for the end is closing in fast. To cap global warming at that 1.5 degrees C. over pre-industrial times, we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions 45 percent by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050.
Because life on Earth is under threat of extinction, we must radically reinterpret our spirit and destiny. Intent on stopping eco-murder, Melville Shanghaied the reader out to sea—a practice popular in the 1850s—to a new horizon and perspective, to witness the killing of the mighty and the majestic. Melville reveals his revulsion by situating the name of the whaler, the Pequod, within one of the country’s most shameless acts of killing. The Pequot people lived on territory that would become Connecticut. In 1636, a coalition of colonists who needed more land for their crops attacked the Pequot village, burning down their homes and killing over 700 people.
The Pequod departed Nantucket on Christmas Day, turning its back on the birth of Christ in favor of the death of whales, and listing dangerously from its heavy cargo of hatred and rage. When the Pequod sinks, so does an era and an attitude, providing Melville the chance to revitalize language and literature. Dispensing with the familiar in storytelling, along with acceptable sentence structure, grammar, and at times, logic, Melville abandoned style, making both the power of the Manifesto and the wonder of the natural world to come fully alive.
Melville underscored his experiment, perhaps in homage to those sonic wonders, the whales, with a literary trope called Voice. Whereas style can be conscripted from any period and imposed on prose, voice takes its life from reactions in the moment. For style to be effective, some crisis must prompt people to speak out loud. Something shockingly elusive, and even frightening forces that shout into being. Voice makes people brazen, prompting both immediacy and intimacy, resonance in a single word that describes speaking and writing, lungs and language: volume. Voice makes itself most apparent in our first cry for life, our tiny crowning or breaching, akin to some water-based mammal, forgoing the amniotic bath for fresh air, announcing our arrival: I am here, a power as yet uncontained. Take heed and, quick, call me something.
And because Voice, above all else, relies on breath and breathing—sentences, too, must come up for air—vowels over consonants, assonance over alliteration, pitch over persuasion, the elegiac over the meditative. Such an emphasis on breath, oddly enough, favors consonantal languages, like Phoenician, Hebrew, and Arabic, as opposed to, say, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, or even English. Consonantal languages can only be read aloud, breath a living substitute for vowels—vowel and its variants, vow and avowal, provoke and invoke, share a root in voice—and, like God breathing into clay and bringing Adam to life, the speaker’s breath animates the consonants, bringing inert characters to life as words, and then bringing words to life as characters.
Voice is the Sh’ma of literature, the idea that, to understand, one must push beyond the sometimes-listless act of listening, to the intensity of hearing. Voice is a lure, or maybe merely alluring, with its promise of intimacy. As we set sail, propelled by its booming shouts and epithets of hate, unsettling prose rhythms, and more, Moby Dick seems freighted with voice and perhaps even overwhelmed by it: Everyone and everything speaks, from the waves to the terns, from the whales to the wind, and even to the listless creaking of the Pequod’s keel: The world is alive. We have sailed into the past, into a time when nature spoke.
From every direction, there comes noise and notes of discord—gulls screeching in maddening circles, whales blowing air and water, and a crew shouting demands that negate prior demands. The water-logged vessel moves at the will of the wind; each greenhand demanding a witness; nobody and nothing there does not yearn to be heard. Killing aboard a whaler is deafening and chaotic, a messy and clumsy spree of killing, a victory over life, sounded in huzzas of horror, in days freed from the usual twelve-hours of wakefulness.
We meet the sentences of that New England brooder at the depth of full-fathom five, those grave lines of Herman Melville, in his unmuzzled state—far from any trace of Boston Brahmin aloofness—breaking the bonds and boundaries of literature. As albino, even the whale betrays logic. On deck of the Pequod, there are a parade of people of different colors and countries—thirty or more crew members building their own towering babble.
Voice is much more than mere speaking. Voice is the expression of Melville, not just as an author with the volume turned up, but as an authority pitched to the whale’s ear with a warning; and here, voice is Melville at his most direct. To hear him requires more than listening, something closer to sacred hearing from the bible—again, the Sh’ma of understanding. We must pay strict attention, learning anew how to comprehend the word, for Melville is in charge certainly as author, but much more as authority and seer.
And so, voice is Herman Melville’s way of declaiming what he knows, an outspoken loudmouth waking and warning his readers; and voice is Herman Melville, as a character staring directly back at us, whose truth echoes with manifest immediacy. Finally, with a voice pitched so high and so loud, Melville’s words linger and hover, making certain we read him correctly. Herman Melville has crafted his own language of knowing: A voice of insistence in the might of the Manifesto.
The Industrial Revolution was looming, and people felt the change of rhythm in their daily lives, in their stride, in their speaking, and the rapidity with which they made their choices and their purchases, transactions suddenly stripped bare of barter and banter, and eventually of money, itself–demanding a different way of seeing and thus knowing, a new rhythm of breathing, and a new vocabulary able to apture those new and radical dislocations.
People needed to be informed of change in so-called real time, which meant stripping events of their complexities and subtleties of interpretation. The ticker tape, new in the 1860s, allowed stock brokers to transact in real time—profit in an instant. A grand robbery was taking place, and the precious object, stolen in plain view, was nothing less than reality, itself. Once the old pace of life had been supplanted, it would prove impossible to retrieve it, for dynamos grew more powerful, revolved more rapidly and more loudly—with few or nobody wanting them to slow down. People took comfort in the new power and its purported dependability. By 1851, the word horse-power had lost its hyphen and its animal connections, so that the catalog for the Great Exhibition could refer to “an oscillating steam-engine of ten horsepower.” And people knew it meant something other, something more than ten horses pulling a wagon. Horsepower meant engine capacity, measured in cubic inches, power made audible in a new measurement called revolutions-per-minute, or RPMs.
The wreckage of the Pequod symbolizes the end of a world but also the beginning of a new and protracted time, one that dismantled and destroyed the familiar—an incredibly brittle period, in which trust got replaced by the new-fangled promise to revolutionize people’s lives into something remarkable through the mechanization of the everyday.
This was true—as incredible as it sounds—even of language, which towards the end of the nineteenth century developed new words, like train, revolver, pulley, telegraph, camera, and new psychological terms, like agoraphobia, along with the repulsive Negrophobia and, in 1856, a near epidemic of fear and nervousness labelled neurasthenia. Reacting to the proliferation of the neologism, and to the many changes in meaning of old ones, in 1857, board members of the Philological Society of London called for a new dictionary. Close to thirty years later, in 1884, lexicographers produced the first fascicle of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Herman Melville disrupted our entrance into the corrupting, highly industrialized, thoroughly mechanized, and consumptive age, and made us pay attention: Smack in front of us lingered the wreck of our ship of state, the tale of ruin told by someone near drowning, bobbing haplessly in the vastness of the Atlantic. Something has gone terribly wrong, beyond the odd and amusing. In the new industrial age, people had become orphaned, displaced, in need of being called a name and in need of a calling. They were certainly in need of knowing, for even narration turned out to be unreliable, shedding rational, reliable telling for a drowning sailor in Melville, an illiterate adolescent in Twain, a madman in Poe, a Transparent Eyeball in Emerson, a so-called idiot in Faulkner, and “the most terrific liar you ever saw,” Holden Caulfield. The word abnormal entered the language in 1835, appearing first in Richard Hoblyn’s Dictionary of Medical Terms. Only a few years after the swamping of the Pequod, harpoons continued to pierce deep into the flesh of whales, but in the new machine age, human effort was replaced by cannons mounted on the bow of the ship’s deck. Powered by black powder, and fitted with scopes, men fired harpoons with uncanny accuracy, over great distances, each round a guaranteed kill, for as the harpoon pierced the whale’s flesh, a grenade exploded— instantaneous death.
Leave the deck of the Pequod, enter the town and look around: Handiwork of every kind was being scrapped to make way for some new, alluring machine that carried out routine work much more quickly, accurately, efficiently, and most importantly, more cheaply and without complaint.
Wherever people seemed to wander in that accelerated world, they came up against something new, startling, and mechanized: the sewing machine, the telephone, the trolley, the camera, the typewriter, the train, the escalator, the elevator, the safety bicycle, the time clock, the revolver, and the Gatling gun. One might even spot a helicopter or an airship crossing the sky.
Not only were people encountering new machines almost everywhere they turned, but with the introduction of the automobile, they actually sat on or in a machine and assumed the controls themselves, becoming truly auto-mobile. By 1890, an oddity appeared at key intersections, called the stop sign, which instructed drivers to halt their machines for those outmoded pedestrians. On May 12, 1901, Connecticut placed a limit on speed, the first in the country—ten miles-per hour on city streets, and twelve on country roads. Just after the turn of the century, in 1901, Ransom Eli Olds, the son of a blacksmith, introduced his stylish creation, the Oldsmobile.
By design, Moby Dick cannot be read in a single sitting. To be effective, a Manifesto must both agitate and arrest readers, slowing them down more and more until they come to a full stop. Melville’s critique of impending horror must be read as a document of extreme urgency and insistence, a demand to protect all of creation and to pause, think, and then to act. Its title has been ceded, not to a person, but to a mammal, a whale that should not be named. The Manifesto must present reality in such stark terms that its demand for a change in attitude, and then in policy, seems not only reasonable but inevitable. First must come that critical change in people’s own attitudes and then in their own vision.
Literature could no longer disregard the state of the natural world, but it needed a new form. By shedding the traditional outlines of the novel, Melville reached a level of critical independence that was most effectively delivered in a statement of revolutionary intent and will. Melville revealed how gratuitous killing could result in the total erasure of the natural world. He insisted that we listen; he demanded that we pay attention. He cast his eye on society and refused to shed a tear, to acquiesce, or to turn away, for he was, himself, far too outraged, far too much in the know about the consequences of a population under the sway of some unhinged, power-hungry dictator, who he hoisted up the main mast for us to see in all his bellowing and bluster. No one who cares about sanity can suffer a distortion like Ahab. No one who cares about sentient life can tolerate such a madman, his unpredictable eccentricity, or his explosive, destructive willpower.
For Melville, conciliation and compromise are simply not acceptable. As he moved farther and farther away from the expectations of the novel, he sailed off into the uncharted territory of seared and, at times, scorched emotions, under the sometimes-terrifying demands of a version of capitalism rushing full-speed into the unknown, the uncharted. Singularly possessed, he ignored harsh reviews and dismal sales.
Moby Dick does not so much require reading as it demands tolerance—for the way it disorients readers and provokes them into reflecting. Moby Dick does not require readers as much as it demands thinkers and activists, those who can hear and overhear with a certain clarity. Which is to say, it aims for a slowed-down, contemplative rumination on the sorry state of nature, the crooked hearts that took it down, and an extrapolation into what might pass for a future.
For Melville, in its full-blown, nineteenth-century iteration, the novel had been exhausted. The drawing room, the boardroom, the bedroom, commanded interest no longer. Now, it was the natural world and our callous treatment of it that called for serious attention. Even Walden, a meditation on the glories of nature, written but a mile from Concord, was too much of a retreat from the realities of a ravished Earth.
The new regime, fascinated by mechanical speed, efficiency, and power, chose industrialization over ethics and the protection of the natural world. Melville knew it would be impossible for people to back off from such undoing of the rational: “There is no folly of the beast of the earth that is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.” Such a magnified tale of terror and madness could only be told on that grand Oceanica, on a voyage, up close and in the heart of chaos, madness, and killing, far out of range of eye and ear, beyond the horizon of noticing, in a place without borders or measure—the expanse of the sea—in a ship that may seem calm, but aboard which holds a crew who comes dangerously, dispassionately alive through killing, which comes to port as commerce and cosmetics.
On the ocean, everything normal turns odd and amplified. One remains, continuously, in the middle of its vastness, inside its weather, shouting to be heard, gesticulating to be seen, taking risks just to be acknowledged as a living being. Life gets enlarged and distorted into a caricature of the real and the actual. In the rush to kill, in the rendering of flesh, and in the cult of cash, life gets diminished—for both the killed and the killer. Men rearrange the idea of life by removing the largest, most noble of its creatures. Whales are determined to stay alive; whalers are determined to snuff out their lives.
In the end, Herman Melville left the library for the lectern. What will he deliver, one wonders—perhaps a sermon? More pointedly, Herman Melville will deliver his warning to every last person, in Manifestos of deep concern, of lofty indignation, underscored by a thunderous NO. He insisted that we do more than hear his word and that, in the most highly charged sense, we overhear. In the newly invigorated and recalibrated world, one inspirited by people trying to hang on to their own sense of being against the rapid takeover by dynamos, dynamite, and derricks, it falls not on the politician, and certainly not on the scientist/engineer to act as the people’s seer and the Earth’s savior: It is the artist who sees most clearly.
We will come to our senses only through the insistence of someone like Herman Melville, who takes us back to an earlier time and makes us witnesses to the wonder of everything that is, just as it is. How much mightier, more powerful, and courageous can a creature become than a whale, who will eventually best his foe, survive harpoon wounds, escape yards of encircling, thick ropes, and defeat its killers.
The converted, contrite, and half-dead Ishmael, who has been wronged, wrung out, and finished by the interminable lust for killing and commerce, comes closer to acting as our guide, to narrating our own condition, than anyone even remotely resembling Ahab, blinded, crippled, and deranged as he is, and no longer by rage but, finally, by his misplaced hatred. For Ishmael, the telling of his tale must make him feel that nothing matters much but salt and water, and beyond that, only more salt and much more water. Not even on shaky ground, Ishmael rests on something far less substantial, and yet he is handing us Melville’s will and testament for the Earth, his Manifesto delivered to so-called survivors, while spinning his yarn—in the lingo of the sea, looming it—far from shore. For Melville, the deepest of seas may be the right place for his narrator, for as he put it: “Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded together.”
Barry Sanders is the Founding Co-chair at the Oregon Institute for Creative Research-E4. He has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and is the author of fourteen books and over fifty essays and articles, including Sudden Glory, Alienable Rights (winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award; with Francis Adams), ABC (with Ivan Illich), The Private Death of Public Discourse, and A Is for Ox.