Articulating the Whale: Moby Dick and the Writer’s Journey Through Linguistic Ambiguity
The living whale, in his full majesty and significance is only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters… his precise expression the devil himself could not catch…
- HERMAN MELVILLE
It is often easier to discover a truth than to assign to it its proper place.
-FERDINAND de SAUSSURE
1. LOOMINGS
The summer I left high school, I became obsessed with Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. I hadn’t read it, but this did nothing to calm my passion; if anything, the fact that I hadn’t read the book—not all the way through, at least—made my monomania for it all the more urgent. The love I feel for unread books, at times, rivals the love I feel for read ones. It’s a quirk I have, like being unreasonably excited by the potential of empty envelopes; the reams of multi-textured paper my mother kept stowed in the makeshift storage unit under her bed when I was growing up. My gangly, teenaged obsession erupted when I read the fateful paragraph:
Say, you are in the country; in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand him on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water… Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded forever.
The first chapter of Moby Dick, which I’ve read and reread over the years, is composed of the most beautifully written pages that I have ever encountered. Even a decade later, this chapter reminds me—continually, achingly—why I want to be a writer. It convinces me, against all logic, that I must drop everything immediately and take to the sea.
2. BIOGRAPHICAL
I was born in Vancouver and, growing up, I never lived more than ten kilometres from the ocean. I spent my summers on stone beaches; I stacked rocks into lopsided towers and prodded unsuspecting jellyfish with slimy, tentative fingers. I soaked in the chilled water until the skin on my feet grew so soft it sloughed off on the jagged ground. I was a sea child through and through.
In those days, I did not want to be a writer. I could not even read. I was convinced that I would be a painter. Language was austere but impenetrable. I communicated in shapes, colours, lines. I communicated in an entirely symbolic language of my own creation.
All this changed when I began to read.
For most of my elementary education, I was an undiagnosed dyslexic and my reading, comprehension and spelling were woefully out of sync with my intelligence: Senica is a bright child, my teachers would report, but she has trouble expressing her ideas. When I was moved into a special class in the fourth grade and finally learned to read, my relationship with language shifted drastically. Though in many respects as impenetrable as before, language became a new kind of line, a new shape, a new colour that I could harness. Language became my shiniest artistic tool and, from that moment on, I knew that I wanted to be a writer.
At first, my decision to become a writer was entirely noncommittal. I wanted to be a writer the way young girls wanted to be princesses or mermaids. I wanted to be a writer, but I never thought of writing as an actual job. It never occurred to me that writing was work.
When I read Harry Potter or Narnia or The Hobbit, I never imaged their authors sitting for hours—writing, struggling to put the words down, realizing they hadn’t put the right words down, going for a walk, crying in public, taking a bath, rewriting, then coming back the next day to do it all again. I think I truly believed that a whole book just happened: that you could stumble across a book that hadn’t yet been written as easily as one that had been.
I was enamoured with the spontaneity of reading—I still am—and I expected writing to be equally spontaneous. In some respects, it is. When I set out to write a new story, I go in blind and I’m usually surprised by what comes out; however, this is a completely different breed of spontaneity. Picking up a book is like getting a piggyback ride from a trusted stranger. You can be as active or passive in the journey as you please, but ultimately you are trusting a set of legs that you can’t control: the course is already set. But when you begin writing yourself, you become that trusted stranger and the rider all at once. It’s exhausting. You find yourself simultaneously in two minds, at a minimum: when you are writing fiction, as many as four or five at any given moment.
It’s enough to drive a person mad. It compresses the spine.
Between the ages of thirty and thirty-seven, Herman Melville is rumoured to have lost over an inch in height, and some scholars argue that he suffered from ankylosing spondylitis, a form of spinal arthritis, which triggered immense back pain. Melville was an active and weather-tried man, but I am hopelessly fanciful and in my darker moods, I imagine that writing—not sea voyaging, not years of hard, bodily labour—cropped his spine.
3. GOING ABOARD
In October 2014, I took an intensive theory course as part of my Honours Degree in English Literature at the University of Victoria, and I hated every second of it.
The theory itself was fascinating: in another frame of mind, I would have enjoyed it. What troubled me was this: somehow, without my realizing it, I had become an English major first, and a writer—well, I don’t think I could have called myself a writer at all. I was taking Writing 100, UVIC’s introductory course, but—no—I wasn’t a writer. I was an academic first and I didn’t want to be.
I dropped out of English Honours and became a double major in Writing and English. When I left the Honours program, I left my theory class as well, but not before I read an excerpt from Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, a text that I have since read all the way through, and which has conceptualized the deep, seizing panic that I sometimes feel when I try to put words to paper.
Language, Saussure argues, is not a simple naming process wherein words fit seamlessly with their meanings, but rather a collection of linguistic signs, which arbitrarily link a sound-image, known as the signifier, and a concept, known as the signified. In short, language is built on a fluid and indefinite foundation of cultural sludge.
As a writer, this is both liberating and horribly confusing. Why would I even tell a story when I know the medium to be irreparably faulty? I found the answer when I read Moby Dick from start to finish for the first time since my obsession with the novel began over a decade ago.
This year, I read Moby Dick with Saussure’s notion of language lodged painfully in the back of my mind. Reading with this lens, I saw Ahab’s lust for revenge and Ishmael’s continual exaltations about the indescribability of the mighty whale as two sides of the same linguistic struggle: both Ahab and Ishmael grapple with ambiguity, both endeavour to obtain a purely articulated meaning, and, heartbreakingly, both are doomed to fail in their own right.
But Ishmael, storyteller Ishmael, keeps trying. For over 500 pages, Ishmael circles and re-circles that ineffable whale. This, I would argue, is what makes him a writer. He is stubborn and hopeful and incorrigible. I love him for it.
4. THE WHITENESS OF THE WHALE
In essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour, and at the same time the concrete of all colours; it is for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning.
- HERMAN MELVILLE
Like Melville’s enigmatic White Whale, the blank page has become an insistent and unnerving entity in my life. It is impossible, inexpressible: a dumb blankness, full of meaning. Sometimes, I am driven half mad, a vengeful Ahab seeking retribution for a missing limb. More often, I hope, I am an Ishmael—disheartened, at times, but ever probing the paradox, the ambiguity; ever refining the imperfect medium in which I conduct this lifelong work.
I love language, and I hate it. But whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to the sea as soon as I can.
5. THE CHASE
I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty.
- HERMAN MELVILLE
Like Ishmael, I promise nothing complete. Not in my nonfiction, and certainly not in my fiction. I have a strong desire to explain everything that needs to be explained, and express everything that needs to be expressed, as fully and as clearly as possible; I trust this impulse, though I know it to be doomed.
You will never truly enter my mind and, honestly, you probably wouldn’t want to. It’s an incoherent mess up there, but that’s okay. Most days, it’s a pleasure to bob in my own cerebrospinal fluid and, when it isn’t, I take to the sea. I put my feet in the water and I read a good book. Slowly, surely, I remember that, regardless of its seemingly insurmountable imperfections, I am in love with language. Unabashedly. Unconditionally.
For me, Moby Dick has become a novel of trial and error, of striving, failing and striving again to assign truth to its proper place and to express, in the clearest possible terms, what it feels like to exist among the unspeakable foundations of unfathomable places. To be a writer, you must become comfortable with the knowledge that, though the world believes you never to be at a loss for words, you often are; it is the responsibility of the writer not to present the complete truth—for any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty—but rather to hurl something with enough weight to sink to the unfathomable depths and remind us that, though our very means of expression prevent us from declaring it free of doubt, there is something breathing there and it is well worth the chase.
This essay was first self-published on my website in 2016.