Of Dissolution and Water-Proof Wolf

Whalers and other seamen inhabit a liminal territory, a kind of enclave in which the law of the land does not apply, regular morality principles are suspended and this naturally attracts all sorts of dubious characters. In this environment, mutiny is an ever existing threat, let alone desertion. Ahab, his monomania notwithstanding, is well aware of this, and is forced to make compromises to prevent unrest among his crew, such as actually chasing and lowering for whales who are not Moby Dick, and stopping the ship to repair the oil-leakage.

The literary experience of lawlessness, writes Yoni Dayan, is imminent to life confined exclusively to the sea, for a long period of time. The watery world in which boundaries are continuously broken – boundaries of law, moral and also personal and private boundaries – is an appropriate environment to a story in which the characters collapse and dissolve into something impersonal, a water-body.

To this most thesis, I would like to add a comment and to claim the kind of collapsing and dissolution Dayan speaks of, occurs especially or even exclusively in "open-Sea novels" like Moby Dick, in which the focus is mostly or in large parts on the sea and the whale. In this all-encompassing  watery solution, it is inevitable that the small insignificant humans will dissolve.

But this is not the case in a different kind of sea novels, which we may tag as "ship novels" as opposed to "open sea novels". Such a novel is Jack London's The Sea Wolf. Much like Moby Dick, London's novel radiates the same lawlessness, the sense of broken boundaries and violence, both latent and manifest. But unlike its predecessor, The Sea Wolf gives very little space and thought to the sea itself. The happenings are taking place, almost without exception, inside the ship which functions as a kind of microcosm, the central and essential quality of which is its tight closeness, tight to the point of suffocation: nobody can escape from it. In that regard, the ship is a kind of prison or military camp. The atmosphere generated is therefore highly compressed, as far away as possible from Ishmael and Queequeg's musing over the Loom of Time. And so, in The Sea Wolf nobody dissolves. All characters remain as tightly enclosed within themselves as can be, fighting day in and day out to maintain their sense of independence, their manly pride and especially – to safeguard their personal boundaries from intrusion. This goes of course to the main characters – the narrator-protagonist Humphrey Van Weyden and to his foe Captain Wolf Larsen, but also for others like the young mutineer Henderson and even the low-life cook. Each and every one of them remains whole and defined until his (or the novel's) end.

The conclusion may be – if we continue Dayan's image of chemical reactions - that the sea can dissolve a person into a water-body only when this person is in a rickety, leaking container (ship), whereas a strong insulated one can hold even against mighty storms (but not always against maniac captains. But that's another story).