Smashing the quadrant

OK - Moby Dick... The most extreme, glorious novel you could hope to read and that's even though you know where it's going..

And Captain Ahab, now there's a protagonist for you. Garralous, lyrical, spiteful and absurdly proud - and determined to grab hold of his story for himself.

Check out Chapter 118 - The Quadrant" . The Pequod is crusing in "that Japanese sea" - where summer days are "as freshets of effulgences. That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy ocean’s immeasurable burning-glass. "

Ahab goes to take a measurement with his quadrant, but even though he's got some rather snappy tinted lenses on the instrument, they aren't enough to prevent him working up a , wholly-in-character, complaint at the sun - an old foe :

“Thou seamark! thou high and mighty Pilot! thou tellest me truly where I am—but canst thou cast the least hint where I shall be? Or canst thou tell where some other thing besides me is this moment living? Where is Moby Dick? This instant thou must be eyeing him. These eyes of mine look into the very eye that is even now beholding him; aye, and into the eye that is even now equally beholding the objects on the unknown, thither side of thee, thou sun!”

But then Ahab goes up a gear and after the unfortunate quadrant.

You might call it a quadrant-rant..

Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered: “Foolish toy! babies’ plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores, and Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but what after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds thee: no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence thou insultest the sun! "

Is Ahab defending his old enemy the sun, although he put the same case to it only a moment ago? Actually, no, the quadrant stands accused not so much of insulting the sun but encouraging us to look up ..

"Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man’s eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun! "

And he begins to destroy the precursor of a sat-nav even though it hasn't made a squeak! Shades of Basil?

"Curse thee, thou quadrant!” dashing it to the deck, “no longer will I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship’s compass, and the level deadreckoning, by log and by line; these shall conduct me, and show me my place on the sea. Aye,” lighting from the boat to the deck, “thus I trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!”

Ahab doesn't want to know where he is - he doesn't want to be where he is. He needs to know where he will be, what's going to happen, how it's all going to end...

He's on story crack and magnificently so.

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For a very clever person's take on The Whale or Moby Dick, check out Jeremy Harding's article in the London Review of Books, where he tries out environmental readings of this tumultous book . I'm afraid he doesn't go for Ahab like I do, preferring the Ahab-as-George W. Bush model. But it's good stuff. And Delbanco's biography of Melville is a joy - read it in league with Melville's major works .

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Ahab and Melville are both patron saints - or patron martyrs? - of Loops of Tarry Gaskin. The hero who wants to take charge of his own story and the man who wrote a work of genius but never saw it appreciated.