In his scholarly addendum, “A Critical Postscript: Cyborgs, Whalemen, and Other Voyagers in Moby-Dick,” Steve Mentz notes that it is standard practice to treat the monomaniacal Captain Ahab, his epic quest for the White Whale, as the center of the novel. Yet in this poetic re-imagining of Moby-Dick Ahab is absent. It’s kind of like performing Hamlet without the prince. Yet, as Mentz also points out, the pluralism that the narrator Ishmael represents is no less vital, even as it makes the narrative seem directionless and wandering. Sailing without Ahab addresses this tension among Melville scholars between the Ahab-centered approach to Moby-Dick and the Ishmaelite focus, and it leads Mentz to the “ecopoetry” that makes up the bulk of this book. Sailing without Ahab is still, at heart, an argument, but the condensed poetic re-imagined narrative is at once accessible and compelling, if even less plot-driven than the famous novel.
Ecopoetry is also known as nature poetry and focuses on the environment and the relationship between humans and the natural world. In addition to an interpretive restating of Melville’s novel, many poems are set in Mentz’s own area of the world, the Connecticut shore of the Long Island Sound and the landmark Whale Rock that marks his geographical location. In identifying Ismael simply as “I.,” Mentz also states his own personal point-of-view throughout the narrative sequence. Mentz also identifies Queequeg as simply Q. and the Pequod, the whaling ship, as P.
Just as there are 135 chapters in Moby-Dick, so there are 135 separate entries, most of them in verse form, in Sailing without Ahab. As Suzanne Conklin Akbari points out in her Foreword, the poems whose titles are taken from Melville’s chapters (italicized in Mentz’s book) are “in a particularly intimate intertextual relationship with the novel,” as if “the reader sees Melville’s chapter on the left and Mentz’s answering poem on the right.” Just as Ishmael tells very early in the novel about going to church, in the chapter called “The Pulpit,” so Mentz early on includes a short, 15-line poem called “The Pulpit,” which concludes: “Then I. preaches from my pulpit.”
I. doesn’t exactly “preach,” but his big-picture point-of-view is all over the place. In the prose piece, “Headless Travels,” he writes, “Guided by waywardness and curiosity, these verses seek an ecopoetics of marine depths, a refraction of light, the taste of salt on the skin.” He’s more connected with the natural world than with the hunt for the whale.
“Loomings,” “The Street,” “The Chapel,” “The Pulpit,” “A Bosom Friend” (“No place like a bed and no love like Q.”), “Nantucket,” “Chowder,” “The Prophet,” “The Chase—First Day,” “The Chase—Second Day,” “The Chase—Third Day”: these are some of the fifty-two titles taken from Moby-Dick. Others reflect the author’s thoughts more vividly. “Wooden Bodies,” for example, ends, “We are vast, multitudinous, not-only-human,” and while that may reflect what the character of Ishmael represents in his plurality, it also seems to express Mentz’s own perspective. Preach! “Order is not our guiding principle,” he likewise informs us in “Headless Travels.”
The second poem in the sequence, “Sailing Without,” begins:
We left without him.
It was snowing. The next day was a holiday
We thought better to encounter offshore.
No one thought much about him.
As we sailed out to sea.
I’m not going to tell you it wasn’t confusing
To sail headless into chaos
And never feel that burning drive
Or the pegleg’s tapping rhythm
On the wooden deck.
Moby-Dick with Ahab seems wrong, inconceivable. But indeed, in his lengthy concluding essay, Mentz tells us that “Focusing on Ishmael puts Melville’s maritime epic in touch with twenty-first century ecotheoretical modes that reject traditional values of individuality and coherence.” In other words, the monomaniacal Ahab’s quest for the white whale, which drives Melville’s novel, is absent here. In its place we encounter nature. Ahab’s absence throughout is indicated with bracketed ellipses: [...]. The poem with that very title begins: “He’s the center but he’s not here.”
In some poems, “I.” is clearly Mentz and reflects an engagement with nature. “Whale Rock,” for instance, describes a swim along the Connecticut shore.
Just yesterday I. swam in my bay,
Out past a rocky headland where a neighbor’s
New grandson led him a merry chase,
Along a house-filled coast until my path
Crossed Whale Rock.
“I. splashes past awkwardly,” he writes later in the poem. And yet, Sailing without Ahab does conclude with the Chase, that thrilling conclusion to the novel in which Ahab goes down with Moby-Dick. Only here, after the Pequod encounters the Rachel, as happens in the novel, it’s just Flask, Pip, Starbuck, Queequeg and the rest of the crew, and of course I. is set adrift on Queequeg’s coffin in the Epilogue to tell his tale like the Wandering Jew or like the Ancient Mariner. “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee,” Melville quotes from Job to start his own Epilogue, and both accounts end with the words (describing Ishmael/I.), “another orphan.”
Steve Mentz’s Sailing without Ahab carries its own weight as a narrative adventure, and could introduce a new audience to Moby-Dick. As the Melville scholar Emilio Degrazia has written, Moby-Dick is “the most well-recognized, and unread, American ‘great’ book.” But make no mistake, Sailing without Ahab is, like most academic work, an argument within the scholarly world of literary criticism, agreeing with and/or disputing prevailing critical theory. In some poems, indeed, Mentz cleverly mentions other scholars’ work. In “Squid,” one of the poems after a Melville chapter, he refers to Richard J. King’s Ahab’s Rolling Sea (“The title of which I can’t reproduce here,” I. coyly says).
Steve Mentz presents a cogent argument for his reading of Moby-Dick, though he assures the reader he would never mean to distort the novel for the sake of some latter-day cause or theory. As he writes, “Ishmaelism may not represent a path, or even a fully coherent direction, but its counter-song within Moby-Dick connects to new ways ecotheorists and humanities scholars are describing the human-environment relationship in our warming present.” Preach!
Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore, where he lives with his wife, Abby. The two are retired from federal government service. Rammelkamp is the author of several collections of dramatic monologues. A Magician among the Spirits, which borrows its name from magician Harry Houdini’s nonfiction exposé of spiritualism, is the winner of the 2022 Blue Lights poetry prize.