August 2, 2014 IX - The Correct Use of Whales The influence of Turner’s sublime vistas, numinous with storms and shadows, emerges in Moby-Dick from the first. When Ishmael arrives at the Spouter Inn, he sees ‘a long, limber, portentous, black mass of something…floating in a nameless yeast’. Through the gloom, he makes out a whale launching itself over a storm-tossed ship, seemingly about to impale itself on its masts. ‘A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted,’ Ishmael allowed, with ‘a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant’. It was a dream version of Huggins’s graphic scenes; a fantastical Turner, seen through Ishmael’s ostensibly amateur eyes. All Excerpts From Hoare, Philip. “The Whale.” HarperCollins. iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.
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