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Go shoppingI’ve been haunted by whales this week. It all started with Dave from my writing group trying to list songs about whales, which spawned an eclectic playlist. Then I turned on the TV to be confronted by a whale being dissected. (They’d just gouged out something called the glove finger – a bit of the ear shaped like a pointing hand in a glove.) Then the next day I wandered into the brilliant Judd Books in Bloomsbury, picked up a collection of Ted Hughes’s poems for children and found his beautiful Moon-Whales poem. Three whales in a row must be a sign, so I set out on a quest for whales in literature.
I started with Ted Hughes’s whales, which swim across the surface of the moon, ‘lifting the moon’s skin / Like a muscle’. It’s a beautifully visual poem, its whales huge, mysterious and geologically slow. The poem’s repeated ‘oo’ and ‘m’ sounds echo the whales’ calls.
Sometimes they plunge deep
Under the moon’s plains
Making their magnetic way
Through the moon’s interior metals
Sending the astronaut’s instruments scatty.
Next, I went back to an early example of whale-lit: Jonah’s Biblical encounter, which already contains all the motifs of the genre – swallowing, fate, death, rebirth and existential angst. In the whale’s stomach for three days and nights, Jonah shouts at God to let him out. “Out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice.” God obliges, after Jonah makes some rash promises about keeping the faith. The whale vomits him up and then sadly disappears from the story, which concentrates on the frankly less exciting Jonah.
Then I listened to some whale folk-songs. Once people worked out how to build boats big enough to catch whales, but not quite big enough to be safe from being capsized by them, they started singing about the perils and pleasures of whaling. One of the best-known whaling songs is the Greenland Whale Fisheries, first sung in the 18th Century and covered loudly by The Pogues on our playlist. I love the rhythm of the lyrics, even without the music.
The harpoon struck and the line played out,
With a single flourish of his tail,
He capsized the boat and we lost five men,
And we did not catch that whale, brave boys,
And we did not catch that whale.
Next, I read the story Mocha Dick by J. N. Reynolds. Now, I already knew that Herman Melville based Moby Dick on a real incident – the wreck of the whaleship Essex in 1819. (The First Mate, Own Chase, published an account of the disaster, also a brilliantly horrific read.) But I’d always assumed that the characters were fictional, any resemblance to persons living or dead coincidental. Turns out I was wrong – Moby himself was based on a real whale, Mocha Dick, who roamed the Pacific in the early 1800s. Like Moby, Mocha was white, and notorious for capsizing boats with his tail. Mocha wore a jaunty headdress of barnacles, which apparently gave him a ‘rugged’ appearance, which he accessorised with 20 broken-off harpoons sticking out of his back.
Reynold’s story is about the final slaughter of Mocha Dick by Nantucket ‘blubber-hunters’, which you can’t help feeling is a bit of a waste of a good whale. (I guess that’s what Melville thought too.) Reading it, I tended to side with the whale – “… in impotent rage, he reared his immense blunt head, covered with barnacles, high above the surge; while his jaws fell together with a crash that almost made me shiver; then the upper outline of his vast form was dimly seen, gliding amidst showers of sparkling spray; while streaks of crimson on the white surf that boiled in his track, told that the shaft had been driven home.” The description of the ‘cutting in’ of the whale’s carcass after the kill, and the 100 barrels of clear oil and gruesomely euphemistic ‘head-matter’ collected, reminded me unpleasantly of that TV whale dissection.
Then I dabbled briefly with D.H. Lawrence’s poem Whales Weep Not, which is about sex and obsession, the whales rolling through the sea and joyfully mating. It didn’t really do it for me, until I found a recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it to a whale-song backing, which made my week. (His intimate whisper of “there they blow, there they blow” has to be listened to.) It’s on the playlist too.
Then I remembered the marvellous opening to Rudyard Kipling’s Just So story, How the Whale Got His Throat – “In the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved, there was a Whale, and he ate fishes. He ate the starfish and the garfish, and the crab and the dab, and the plaice and the dace, and the skate and his mate, and the mackereel and the pickereel, and the really truly twirly-whirly eel.”
Kipling follows the biblical theme of being swallowed alive by a whale – the man the whale swallows, who is a person of “infinite-resource-and-sagacity”, uses his broken boat and suspenders (“do not forget the suspenders”) to give the whale its sieve-like throat.
But searching for Kipling brought me right back to Ted Hughes– he also tried his hand at a creation story about the whale in his children’s collection How the Whale Became, which I’d forgotten about entirely. Reading it again, the images were as odd as they were when I was a kid – a whale growing as a plant in God’s back garden and being pulled up by the root and thrown in the sea because he’s too big. His anguish at his fate is still rather upsetting. “’Help, help!” cried Whale-Wort. “I shall drown! Please let me come back on land where I can sleep.’”
That brought my week of literary whales to a close, with the feeling that whales are paradoxes: gentle, but with the power to crush up a boat, monstrously ugly but breathtakingly beautiful. They’re so inscrutable, insatiable and different from us that they make versatile symbols for everything from fate and obsession to the power and mystery nature itself.
You can listen to our whale song playlist here, if you’re so inclined.
About Emily Cleaver
Emily Cleaver is Litro's Online Editor. She is passionate about short stories and writes, reads and reviews them. Her own stories have been published in the London Lies anthology from Arachne Press, Paraxis, .Cent, The Mechanics’ Institute Review, One Eye Grey, and Smoke magazines, performed to audiences at Liars League, Stand Up Tragedy, WritLOUD, Tales of the Decongested and Spark London and broadcasted on Resonance FM and Pagan Radio. As a former manager of one of London’s oldest second-hand bookshops, she also blogs about old and obscure books. You can read her tiny true dramas about working in a secondhand bookshop at smallplays.com and see more of her writing at emilycleaver.net.
