The Whale and the World: The Moby-Dick Big Read Project
Abigail Carney
Photo: Boyd Webb, Nourish, 1984. Courtesy of Sonnabend Gallery.
In Chapter 41 of his great novel Moby-Dick, Herman Melville writes, “Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured into some still subtler form.” Moby-Dick, with all its madness, is a book that has yet to leave us. Despite high schoolers’ suspicions at its length when it is placed on their summer reading lists, despite the great numbers of people who have not read it, the whale and its hunt is a myth that continues to obsess us, whether as the myth itself or in its myriad artistic manifestations.
The Moby-Dick Big Read project, created by writer Philip Hoare and artist Angela Cockayne, aims to rescue the book from its place as “the great unread American novel.” As Cockayne told OOO, “This will be a very contemporary, visual and digital response to a text which is as pertinent today as when it was first written in 1851, and perhaps arguably even more so.” The Moby-Dick Big Read is an online collection of audio and artistic renditions of each chapter of the novel—135 readers and 135 artists. One chapter will be released each day with an accompanying inspired piece of art. Tilda Swinton reads the first chapter, “Loomings,” Prime Minister David Cameron reads Chapter 30, “The Pipe,” and a range of actors and unknowns read the other 133.
The art so far includes an oil paint on aluminum representation of Queequeg by Timothy Woodman, a bed constructed by Pae White, and a photograph of the London Aquatic Center. Cockayne asserts that, “in all its unedited, interdisciplinary rawness,” the book “remains incredibly refined and a wonderful muse for artists, as the curation of the project has identified.” Cockayne’s first collaboration with Hoare, Dominion, was the central piece of the Dominion exhibition and Whale Festival, which explored the vast history of this animal with films, poetry, biology, music, and talks by scientists and artists. Cockayne’s pieces use the fantastical melding of natural and unnatural objects to create a dream kingdom of birds made of bottles and fins, boats made of pig bones, whales made of wax, and even tampon applicators found on beaches.
The realm of her work is not exactly the one we inhabit, but we recognize our own world in it. Like Melville’s ocean, it provokes questions and warnings about our relationships with our environment and each other. About her latest project, Cockayne states, “One ambition is to raise awareness of the current threats to marine life; by protecting the oceans, we not only protect the few remaining whales but [also] an entire ecosystem on which our own future depends.” We have come dangerously close to conquering the whale with our undying ambition, plastic islands of garbage, and carbon dioxide waste that is quickly acidifying the oceans.
The idea behind Dominion was that art and science should not be separated, that to recognize the history and importance of the whale today, we have to look at it through many disciplines. Melville did this; his book is a sprawling, sometimes erratic journey through the ocean and religion and cetology, among other things. It is perhaps this colossal scope that is so intimidating to readers (Even Cockayne, who has something of a mania for Moby-Dick, admits that it took her several attempts to finish the book).
Nonetheless, reading or listening to Melville’s story is important and not as trying as one might expect. It is a story that continues to captivate us because it gets at so many of our contemporary and eternal problems and because it is also incredibly entertaining. It is truly fun to listen to Melville expounding on the anatomy of a whale’s head or the construction of a harpoon, especially when brilliant actors and people from Stephen Fry to Captain R.N. Hone are voicing it. But at the heart of these varied ruminations, and the Moby-Dick Big Read, is obsession, the desire for dominion.
Perhaps we can find comfort in the fact that, despite all our inventing and conquering and polluting, the whale and our relationship with it still enthralls us, that even if we have yet to redeem ourselves for our dangerous, raw human ambition, we are still attempting to understand it. As Hoare writes in “The Whale’s Dominion,” “forever I am haunted by the procession of mothers she leads into my mind, as I close my eyes, unable to dispel her image in my head. Oh the whale, ah the world.”