The Overture: Chapter 1

"Call me Ishmael"

"Are the green fields gone?"

There are three questions that structure "Loomings," but themes and moods interweave that make the musical metaphor of an overture apt as an introduction to this strange, and to my eyes, wonderful book.

Moby-Dick is a strange book in several ways. When Melville, who had made a name for himself as the writer of popular sea-stories, started the book it seems as if he intended to write a popular kind of story—an adventure story with a doomed pseudo-Bryonic seeker among a semi-comical cast of characters who were configured in relationships very different from those they inhabit in the novel as published. We'll explore that strangeness. But another kind of strangeness arises from why, seeking to escape his sense of estrangement from the world, Ishmael chooses to join the bloody, predacious business of killing and boiling down for their oil the great awe-inspiring creatures he seems to revere. The mood, the key signature, of the chapter in a way that evokes that strangeness just after the adolescent joke about "Beans, beans, the wonderful fruit".

• • • But wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage; this the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way—he can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this:

"Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States

"BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHANISTAN."

• • • Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces—though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.

    • Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.

In the "romance of adventure" he promised to his British publisher characters seemed to play different roles, traces of which were not removed in the final version. We'll explore the change as we encounter these traces. The romance of adventure evolved into "a wicked book" for a variety of reasons—Melville immersed himself in Shakespeare's tragedies and Milton's Paradise Lost as he worked on the book (while carrying out the tasks of a semi-hobbyist farmer). The sub-pages "The Questions" and "The Moby-Dick World" (in the Home Page) might be helpful in thinking about what was going on in his mind.