Part of the ongoing series on Ethics and Culture in The Matterhorn.
Whales
Wisdom, fear, and beauty within the sea
I remember going on slews of whale watches as a kid and into my teen years in Massachusetts. My parents loved the sea but had grown up in Minnesota and Texas; they wanted to let us experience its full splendor, and they were intrigued by it themselves. We didn’t only plan these trips when a relative was in town or we had a birthday celebration. Sometimes, we would be groggily eating our raisin bran cereal or Dunkin’ Donuts Boston Creams, when somebody would say, ‘Hey, let’s go on a whale watch today!’
The build-up was always the same. We packed Dramamine and snacks to ease the stomach when everyone ran to one side of the boat…then the other. We threw on sunscreen and hats (one of which would get lost at sea each time). There were always bets in the car — how many whales would we see? (My dad felt more comfortable paying knowing that seeing a whale was always guaranteed, or your money back. Although we were paying for a fun day out, he could classify it under educational expenses.)
I guess it was an educational experience. Scientists ran the boats. They were tracking certain whales and told us all sorts of information about them between sightings. But when the whales actually came — sometimes humpbacks just up to the side of the boat, looking at us with their huge, kind eyes — the researcher on the speaker would simply squeal with delight and say the things we were all thinking: ‘It looks like she’s waving to us!’ / ‘What a beauty!’ / ‘I wonder where she will go next?’
It felt more like art than science to me. Not that there can’t be crossover between the two. Both the scientists and tourists were focused on taking photographs and creating a story of their interaction. There was the beauty of the lines outlining the whale’s tail or striped over its belly; the dancing display of strength and playfulness; the mystery of what happened when the whale dove down deep. As the researchers tracked family lineage, they created stories of royalty inhabiting New England waters, creating homes as well as going on long journeys in the winter. What new stories would they come back with? It was the stuff of ancient Greek tales.
We went on these trips from the North Shore or Cape Cod and took other excursions to Nantucket where ‘whale culture’ is ubiquitous. But it wasn’t until I was much older when I realized that all this whale paraphernalia from rich Nantucket homes was linked to the whaling industry, in other words: killing whales.
Death and the whale
Of course, we know it still happens in a few places. Japan, Iceland, and Norway are the only countries to continue commercial whaling. Japan left the International Whaling Commission just three years ago in order to resume its commercial whaling: “Japan argues hunting and eating whales are part of its culture. A number of coastal communities in Japan have indeed hunted whales for centuries but consumption only became widespread after World War Two when other food was scarce.”
“Whale hunting at the island of Goto in Hizen” by Hiroshige Utagawa (1859) is a print of a woodcut like many Japanese works of this time, the same period when Hokusai was working (I wrote about “The Great Wave” in the last newsletter). You can see in this image the way man vs. nature was viewed in epic proportions with the whale. This was probably first because the animal is large but also because of man’s instability at sea. They had to use even more creativity to kill and there was a kind of beauty to the act of finding the invisible in the water.
Some might say there was beauty in the kill itself, but I personally wouldn’t go that far. I would consider it perhaps a grotesque challenge of masculinity or a way to show one’s dominance over nature. I’m not sure at all about this…but I’ll explore some of these ideas more in general (not about whales) in a different newsletter through Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea.
Back in the days when Nantucket was the “Whaling Capital of the World,” hunting was carried out in order to make oil from the sperm whale’s blubber. And because they were good at it with a sustainable labor force (although often indentured servitude), it then became part of the culture, finding itself in art and narratives of that time.
Most countries killed whales for different reasons in the past and some indigenous populations are still allowed to, such as the the Inuit in the Arctic, who began killing whales 4000 years ago. Their continuance is currently under debate as it was banned recently only to be reinstated. They kill an amount of whales deemed sustainable each year for the main purpose of food. (Check out some beautiful Inuit whale art here.)
But that doesn’t mean it’s not a difficult task to accomplish and one that may have to be revisited again. Research shows that “[w]hales and dolphins ‘lead human-like lives’ thanks to big brains.” When should cultures change because of scientific knowledge? Is tradition and the preservation of art more important than progress? We’ll come back to these questions with a New Zealand film.
I couldn’t finish watching the recent arctic exploration television series called The Terror after a grotesque whale killing. (To be honest, it wasn’t only because the whale killing scenes were gruesome but also because the drama on the boat just wasn’t that compelling. Maybe supernatural arctic exploration just isn’t for me; isn’t the arctic surreal enough without zombies and spooky stuff?) But one could argue the purpose of whale killing in this series (at least as far as I was able to watch) was more consistent with the metaphor of searching in the vast for one’s own soul…and for humanity at large…and taming the beast within ourselves. These are all echos of the many lessons we investigate as we read the wonderful whale tome: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale.
Moby Dick, a category all its own
It is a story of a whale hunt, or is it? I first encountered Moby-Dick as a grad student in a class simply titled “Melville.” We read pretty much everything he had published, entering his strange and philosophical world that was loaded with references to all kinds of arts as well as the sciences and also documented what life was like at sea in the 1800s. There is a plot about chasing a whale, sure, but as the Melville professor said: this is not a novel but a Book. It is reflections on culture; it is art; it is…too elusive to define. Yes, there is a fictional narrative and a protagonist and some resolution to the conflict, but the 135 chapters take us on many types of journeys.
Read the rest of this article in The Matterhorn: intersections of literature & art.
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Kathleen Waller is a novelist with a PhD in Comparative Literature. She previously taught literature, cultural studies, art, ethics, and epistemology to high school and university students for twenty years. For more information: kathleenwaller.com
