Moby Dick
- Hipster time
Whether we know their official titles or not, most savvy Charlotteans know where to spot them: sipping chai tea in NoDa, rifling through racks of clothing on Central. They sport thick black glasses and just the right number of bracelets on their wrists. If the Avett Brothers and Grizzly Bear aren’t so much your thing, it would be better to keep that to yourself in the company of these determinedly edgy young people. The hipster movement is on the rise, and these nonconformist replicas of one another are not leaving anytime soon.
Like the members of the crew Ahab gathers for aid in his quest to destroy evil, today’s hipsters come from all different backgrounds. Though predominantly composed of well-educated, middle and upper class young men and women, the artfully arranged devil-may-care attitude hipsters display is accessible to many different social and economic classes. Their ultimate goal seems to be to arrive at individual conclusions about truth and meaning in life, but on the whole, their pathways seem to be remarkably similar. Live in love; keep judgment behind closed doors. They lead lives of casual nobility.
Just as hipsters unite in their struggle for individuality, the Pequod’s crew comes together from all different backgrounds to search for unique truths from a sea too vast to be contained within the boundaries of human comprehension. They imagine themselves a mass of individual entities, but as the novel progresses, it becomes clear that they are merely parts of a whole designed for a single purpose. The novel is structured in such a way that it initially reads as a deeply personal and plot-driven narrative but later becomes more of a parable, discarding the narrator’s individual identity along the way.
The book opens with Ishmael as the protagonist, detailing his thoughts on Nantucket life and the formation of his friendship with the pagan Queequeg. Over the course of the quest to reach Moby Dick (and the one hundred thirty-five chapters), however, Ishmael is slower to mention both himself and his dearest friend. Instead, he narrates the story of the possessor of all his physical and mental faculties, Captain Ahab. Ahab’s command and strange charisma are so compelling that the crew bends to his word easily, no matter whether the cost is their individuality or their humanity. So these hipsters approach the world. Though captured less by a person than an idea, they trade individuality for calm rebelliousness (believing that the two are synonymous) and gather en masse to celebrate their hippie-esque love of love.
The object of Ahab’s quest is Moby Dick, the whale so white his skin terrifies. He represents blankness, emptiness, nothingness to such an extent that there is an entire chapter detailing the horrors of his coloring. His hipster counterparts adorn themselves in bright, flashy colors in such abundance that observers must wonder at the need for clothing so vivid — are they trying to cover an internal whiteness, a terrifying emptiness like the soul of the whale?
Hipsters are intelligent people. They know what they are; they know what they need to be. But why the diligence? Why the need for tea, ukuleles, colors, lowercase letters? Hipsters, like the crew of Moby Dick, seek purpose and meaning. Why agree to sail for an indeterminate amount of time, facing potential starvation and physical pain, leaving family and friends behind? What merit, what reward do these men seek from their quest? It seems that the crew is made up of lost souls who need a guiding hand to set them back on their path. Perhaps this is the essence of humanity; perhaps this is the essence of the lack thereof. Either way, hipsters and sailors seek something more.
There is something less than fulfilling, at times, about the real world: whether it is the blackness of Nantucket or the rigidity of the banking world, life has a way of introducing the kinds of jarring realities to young people that lead eventually to existential crises. Think about it. Everyone, at some point or another, arrives at an emotional state which requires them to reach for something greater. Some turn to religion, some to drugs. Some try to capture the apparent repetition of day-to-day life in music, art, and photographs. Some look to a greater movement, and some look to the sea.
So they board a new ship, prepare for the rawness of a new and yet well-worn adventure. Sometimes common desperation is the only guiding force to bind a group of lost souls together, but other times it takes a leader as lost as Captain Ahab to pull a crew of individuals together into a single ghostly white mass.
The Pequod’s crew were America’s lost souls in the nineteenth century; hipsters are today’s. No one knows where the lost souls of a hundred fifty years in the future will roam, but we can be absolutely certain that uncertainty will always be an undercurrent in American society.
- Maritime
