Obviously there’s ‘Moby Dick’. Although ‘Moby Dick’ himself rather than just literally being a whale is instead a leviathan-sized metaphor for the American pants industry – Melville’s father having been an importer of French dry goods. The character of Queequeg represents front-buttoned blue cotton pantaloons and we can certainly tell how Melville felt about them.
But there are other, perhaps more surprising examples of the whale in Western Literature, pervading some of the greatest works written.
In an earlier draft of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ Elizabeth Bennett was going to be a beluga whale – hence the original opening line “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a three tonne fish-eating cetacean.”
The ‘Farenheit 451’ in the novel of the same name is, as Bradbury states, the temperature at which book paper catches fire, and burns. It is also the temperature at which whales become a gas. Gaseous whales are a feature of many such dystopian novels. Winston Smith is exposed to them in Room 101 and solidified orca gas is the main ingredient of soma in “A Brave New World”.
The Bard himself was not shy of aquatic mammal motifs. In the appendices to one of the surviving First Folios is an extract from an alternate version of the ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ that Queen Elizabeth herself commissioned as part of the State entertainments for King Christian IV of Denmark-Norway called ‘The Subduing of the Narwhal’. Beneath is that extract:
“Petruchio: Come, come, you narwhal; i’ faith, you are too angry.
Katherine: If I be narwhalish, best beware my enormous protruding tooth horn.
Petruchio: My remedy is then, to pluck it out.
Katherine: Ay, if the fool could find where it lies.
Petruchio: Who knows not where a narwhal does wear his enormous protruding tooth horn? In his head.
Katherine: In his blowhole.
Petruchio: Whose blowhole?
Katherine: Yours, if you talk of heads: and so farewell.
Petruchio: What, with your horn in my blowhole?
Katherine: I’m not that kind of lady.
Petruchio: Nay, come again, Good Kate; I am a gentleman.”
History does not reveal how King Christian IV took this but it is worth noting that when he returned to England ten years later in 1606, his sister having married King James I, he got absolutely rat-arsed at a performance of a masque of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba rather than try to watch English theatre sober. What saved the occasion was that all the actors were rat-arsed too. A tradition that continues to this very day.
Even further back in time we have the work of the great Athenian tragedians who were positively riddled with whale references. The Mediterranean Fin Whale features prominently of course in Sophocles’ ‘Oedipus Rex’, here for example in a moment before the horrific discovery Oedipus finally makes:
“JOCASTA
Ah mayst thou ne’er discover who thou art!
OEDIPUS
Go, fetch me here the Mediterranean Fin Whale, and leave yon woman
To glory in her pride of baleen whales.
JOCASTA
O woe is thee, poor wretch! With that last cetacean
I leave thee, henceforth silent evermore.” (1068-1073)
The lifting onto the stage of a full-sized Fin whale, growing up to 85 feet and 74 tonnes, must have truly tested the mechane in Ancient Greek theatres but would have been well worth it for the awe it created before the horror of him gouging out his own eyes. Truly Deus ex Machina! Of course a later mistranslation of the play led to Keats’ ‘Ode to a Grecian Sperm (Whale)’.
The great Russian writers weren’t immune to the lure of the whale either. Gogol’s ‘The Government Inspector’ is a satire on the heavily bureaucratic blubber industry of the Russian Empire. Chekhov’s ‘The Cherry Orchard’ is heavily reliant on whales or at the very least the broader cetacean family:
“LOPAKHIN:
My father was a porpoise, it’s true, but here I am in a black jacket, white waistcoat and yellow shoes … a penguin out of a porpoise. I’m rich now, with lots of money, but just think about it and examine me, and you’ll find I’m still a porpoise down to the trabeculae of my cancellous bones.”
In a tragic twist, in Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina takes her own life by throwing herself under a passing Blue Whale, an incident the novelist claimed was inspired by the death of a family florist from his youth.
Several decades of GCSE/O-Level students, until the great purging of American Literature by ‘He Who Cannot Be Named’, will be familiar with Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’ but less aware of Steinbeck’s unpublished ‘Of Minke and Men’ which tells of George and Lennie’s time in Weed, where Lennie accidentally kills a minke whale by stroking it too much, a damning metaphorical indictment of the impact of the dustbowl and Wall Street Crash on marine mammal parks.
There is of course a movement in more modern literature towards the vole – a more immediate and convenient motif, first appearing in John Updike’s Vole series, starting with 1960’s ‘Vole, Run’ and re-emerging in novels such as Khaled Hosseini’s ‘A Thousand Splendid Voles’ and Hilary Mantel’s ‘Vole Hall’. But these surely don’t have the same resonance as works such as Goethe’s ‘The Sowerby’s Beaked Whale of Young Werther’ – a remarkable piece of literature, especially considering it was written thirty years before Sowerby classified his whale. Truly Goethe was a polyglot of unique standing! So where now for whales in literature? Well, rumour has it that George R. R. Martin’s ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ will finally end with a melon headed whale of House Stark on the Iron Throne, Stephen King’s Pennywise the Clown turns out actually to be a prehistoric kogiopsis – a pygmy sperm whale in clever make-up, and an adult Harry Potter will have problems when his son marries Shamu in Rowling’s latest wizarding theatrical outing ‘Harry Potter and the Aquatic Bestiality’.
Treatises of Gloria 