E. M. Forster on Moby Dick and Prophecy
from Aspects of the Novel (1927)
Moby Dick is an easy book, as long as we read it as a yarn or an account of whaling
interspersed with snatches of poetry. But as soon as we catch the song in it, it grows difficult and
immensely important. Narrowed and hardened into words the spiritual theme of Moby Dick is as
follows: a battle against evil conducted too long or in the wrong way. The White Whale is evil,
and Captain Ahab is warped by constant pursuit until his knight-errantry turns into revenge.
These are words—a symbol for the book if we want one—but they do not carry us much further
than the acceptance of the book as a yarn—perhaps they carry us backwards, for they may
mislead us into harmonizing the incidents, and so losing their roughness and richness. The idea
of a contest we may retain: all action is a battle, the only happiness is peace. But contest between
what? We get false if we say that it is between good and evil or between two unreconciled evils.
The essential in Moby Dick, its prophetic song, flows athwart the action and the surface morality
like an undercurrent. It lies outside words. Even at the end, when the ship has gone down with
the bird of heaven pinned to its mast, and the empty coffin, bouncing up from the vortex, has
carried Ishmael back to the world—even then we cannot catch the words of the song. There has
been stress, with intervals: but no explicable solution, certainly no reaching back into universal
pity and love; no “Gentelmen, I’ve had a good dream.”
The extraordinary nature of the book appears in two of its early incidents—the sermon
about Jonah and the friendship with Queequeg.
The sermon has nothing to do with Christianity. It asks for endurance or loyalty without
hope of reward. The preacher “kneeling in the pulpit’s bows, folded his large brown hands across
his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling
and praying at the bottom of the sea.” Then he works up and up and concludes on a note of joy
that is far more terrifying than a menace. […]
Immediately after the sermon, Ishmael makes a passionate alliance with the cannibal
Queequeg, and it looks for a moment that the book is to be a saga of blood-brotherhood. But
human relationships mean little to Melville, and after a grotesque and violent entry, Queequeg is
almost forgotten. Almost—not quite. Towards the end he falls ill and a coffin is made for him
which he does not occupy, as he saves Ishmael from the final whirlpool, and this again is no
coincidence, but an unformulated connection that sprang up in Melville’s mind. Moby Dick is
full of meanings: its meaning is a different problem. It is wrong to turn the Delight or the coffin
into symbols, because even if the symbolism is correct, it silences the book. Nothing can be
stated about Moby Dick except that it is a contest. The rest is song.