WHEN I WAS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL in Tokyo, I was once assigned to defend the ethics of Japanese whaling during a classroom debate. I recall not being thrilled that I was cast as the defense. Even at that age, I knew being pro-whaling was the much weaker position. My team and I dutifully compiled a list of talking points that the industry had marshaled at the turn of the millennium: that endangered species were supposedly unharmed; that contemporary whaling was done for “scientific purposes”; that Western civilization was hypocritical to pick on whaling while propping up the comparably inhumane and environmentally detrimental cattle industry.

What I recall most clearly, however, was that when my teammates and I put on our best conservative-pundit hats—defending “Japanese tradition” and regional industries, fielding rousing attacks on the harms of whaling and the outdated values of our argument—a strange feeling overcame me. It seemed like we were debating something else entirely. The whales may as well have been house-size squirrels or mermaids. In the mouths of urbane schoolchildren in little gray blazers and plaid trousers, for whom even the taste of whale meat was our grandparents’ memory, not ours, the whale seemed to stand in for something else, the idea of obsolete traditions, perhaps, or the fight over who gets to set the terms for the future.

This tendency for the whale to become a vessel for human meaning—expanding in symbolic scale even as one attempts to anchor it—is the driving force of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. In the beginning of John Huston’s film adaptation of the novel, several shots are devoted to Ishmael standing, entranced, before a painting of a whale at a New Bedford inn, where his journey begins. In the novel, Melville describes the painting as “a boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly . . .Yet there was a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvelous painting meant.” Before a cozy fire, the painting can be contemplated from a distance. The whale can be grasped in its entirety. From such safety, one’s interpretations of the creature can multiply. But once Ishmael sets out on board the Pequod, the painted whale’s “unimaginable sublimity” is replaced by the mystery of Ahab and his obsession with Moby Dick.

Want to keep reading?

Subscribe and help keep Orion independent, nonprofit, and ad-free.

Subscribe Now

Already a digital subscriber? Sign in here.