Hoare's Whale, or the Monstrosity Hidden Among the Ocean's Dangers

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Out of sheer need for escape and an almost physical desire to explore something grandiosely unknown and remote, I began avidly and with some difficulty reading a book like Philip Hoare's "Leviathan or the Whale," which I received a week ago from Il Saggiatore (506 pages, €26). Added to these motives is another: the nostalgia for a youthful reading like that of Melville's masterpiece, with its peremptory, lightning-fast, and unforgettable opening: "Call me Ishmael," which continues: "Some years ago—it doesn't matter when exactly—having little or nothing in my pocket, and nothing in particular that could interest me on land, I thought I'd go to sea for a while, and see the watery part of the world. It's a way I have of driving away sadness, and regulating my circulation."

I certainly can't identify, except for sadness, with the narrator and protagonist of Moby Dick ; I'm neither his age nor his energy, his freedom, his originality, and his courage. And besides, the world has changed so much, and today you don't flee Manhattan to board a whaling ship. Since then, in the mid-nineteenth century, we believe there has been extraordinary material, social, and mental progress, while instead... But I'll stop here, because I don't feel like praising the virtues and vitality of the past for the umpteenth time compared to a present like ours today: world politics gone haywire, the climate out of whack, and crowds of human beings up and down the streets, about to plummet into the hell of sloth, while meanwhile staring at a small, omnipotent telematic device that never lets you truly stay where you are, believing instead that you are always in hundreds of elsewheres. Our world, to be realistic, never improves, it never progresses. Like rheumatoid arthritis, the disease moves from one part of the body to another, getting better here, then worsening there. The most intelligent inventions are associated with the most stupid behaviors.

Of course, Ismael wasn't happy when he decided not to commit suicide by shooting himself, but to escape into the vast, unknown ocean to hunt whales. I've never liked the sea much; it's never conveyed to me the idea or sensation of freedom, as Baudelaire preached. I had a disagreement about this with an expert sea lover like Raffaele La Capria. He was incredulous and annoyed when I told him that for me, the sea was nothing more than a terrifying and boring mass of liquid matter in whose depths one drowns. The earth, with its hills, plains, trees, and waterways, is much more entertaining and varied than the monster that is the boundless, deserted, and desolate sea, on whose surface one can only dream of spotting an island and which hides who knows what horrors within. I told dear "Dudu'" La Capria that he thought he loved the sea, when in fact he loved only the meeting point between sea and land, that is, along the coasts and around beautiful islands like Capri. I found myself more in tune with another friend, Magnus Enzensberger, who, having been born in the Bavarian Alps, distrusted the sea, feared it, and perhaps for this reason wrote his catastrophic and anti-progressive poem "The End of the Titanic," an event that in 1912 seemed to herald the many catastrophes of the twentieth century. The collision of the gigantic, superb, and luxurious ocean liner with an iceberg was fatal.

The accident, which resulted in the deaths of 1,600 passengers, was immediately mythologized as the most serious event in history up to that time. This is proof that the sea, with its boundless oceans, hides the most unpredictable and terrifying dangers. But certainly the most enduring myth about the sea's terrifying dangers is embodied by the "sea monster" that is the whale, whales in their variety of shapes, sizes, and temperaments. Hoare's "Leviathan, or the Whale" is a veritable naturalistic and historical encyclopedia on the living creature unsurpassed in size, the one that best represents the enormity of the seas: "Anyone who sees the expanse of the ocean for the first time never forgets it, just as it is impossible to describe it to someone who doesn't know it. I always have it in my head; it's my obsession," says Hoare. But already Henry David Thoreau, more or less Melville's contemporary, wrote: "The ocean is the wildness that encircles the whole globe, wilder than a Bengal jungle, and fuller still of monsters." And Melville adds: "Man has lost that sense of the full terribleness of the sea which he originally felt [...] Yes, O foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet over: two-thirds of this world is still submerged in it."

This is where Philip Hoare begins his research and accumulation of knowledge, memories, anecdotes, and historical data on whaling and the story of the author of “Moby Dick” himself, a genius unknown among his contemporaries and whose value American literature only became aware of around 1920, some thirty years after his death. Among killer whales, humpback whales, blue whales, sperm whales, and other cetaceans, the slaughter of whales for economic gain, coupled with ancestral terrors and various mythologies, has continued to this day in unrelenting competition between American, English, Norwegian, Dutch, Russian, Japanese, and Brazilian whaling companies. Despite the conscious fear that whales will become extinct, people continue to persecute, adore, and fear them, drawn by the great physical richness they contain within their bodies and by the ever-renewing emotion that arises from their sudden sighting on the sea's surface, when their ineffable tails emerge for a moment and then disappear. Melville devotes a lyrical chapter to the whale's tail in his encyclopedic poem: "Other poets have sung praises of the antelope's sweet eye, and the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights. Less ethereal, I celebrate a tail [...] In no living creature are the lines of beauty more exquisitely defined." May such physical or metaphysical beauty cure the whalers of their demonic folly, one of the many that are leading us to self-destruction.

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