Seeing Stars

Perspective can make all the difference. Some people look up at the night sky and see a random sprinkling of stars. Others see bears and hunters, crabs and scorpions, the connect-the-dot images of constellations.

When Dan Matlaga reads Moby Dick, he also sees constellations. In lines and paragraphs that have stumped literary critics for years, Matlaga has found stars and planets, galaxies and moons.

“Once you factor the sky into the novel, the story completely opens up,” says Matlaga, planetarium coordinator at Arizona State University.

More than 150 years after Herman Melville’s best-known work was published, Matlaga is finding astronomical references in the book that no critic has ever noticed. Perhaps this is because most literary critics do not approach life with an astronomical perspective.

The definitive edition of Moby Dick includes many pages listing problems and inconsistencies that critics have found within the novel. Those critics claim that Melville was careless about detail.

“Actually, he was obsessed with detail,” Matlaga says. Matlaga believes that many of these “problems” were, in fact, intentional. Readers have simply missed their meaning. Matlaga presented his discoveries during the “Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena” conference in England at Oxford University in August 2003.

One example is a sailor named Bulkington, who appears briefly in the beginning of the book, then disappears suddenly without explanation.

Bulkington first appears in Chapter 3, “The Spouter-Inn.” The crew of the Pequod is carousing at the inn, but Bulkington remains aloof and apart from the crowd. At some point during the evening, Bulkington slips away unnoticed. When the other sailors realize he is gone, they dart off to find him, calling, “Bulkington! Bulkington! Where’s Bulkington?”

Bulkington reappears later in the brief chapter “The Lee Shore.” Here, he is at the helm of the Pequod. Later on, Ahab takes the helm and Bulkington disappears.

Critics have long assumed that Bulkington is an irrelevant remnant from an earlier version of the story. Looking skyward, Matlaga finds a different explanation.

“It turns out that Bulkington is the North Star. ‘The Lee Shore’ is Melville as a sailor paying homage to the North Star. It is magnificent prose to the North Star,” he says.

The North Star is critical to navigation, so the sailors are understandably distressed by Bulkington’s absence at the inn. Later, Bulkington disappears from the novel because the Pequod crosses the equator. The North Star is visible only from the northern hemisphere.

“[Melville] is giving us clues that they’re traveling south. If you map out the ship’s progress, as soon as the ship crosses the equator, Ahab takes over the tiller,” says Matlaga.

Matlaga has, in fact, mapped out the ship’s progress, using astronomical references embedded in the text. Interpreting these references has allowed him to determine the precise dates and locations of almost every event in the book. According to Matlaga, there is no way that all of the variables could line up to provide such precise information coincidentally. In addition, many of the important dates in the novel correspond with events in Melville’s own life.

“Before my work, scholars weren’t sure what year the action in the novel took place,” says Matlaga. “Now that I’ve factored in the sky, I can tell you that Ahab loses his life on January 4, 1840. I can tell you that Captain Ahab was born in the same year as Melville’s father. Dust off the Carl Jung, we’re talking about Herman Melville here!”—Diane Boudreau