Last summer, I gave myself a bit of a break from my self-imposed publishing schedule with a few ‘lighter’ posts about the Billy Budd breadbox, a Google Doodle celebrating Moby-Dick, and noted Melvilleans Beavis and Butthead. With posts scheduled weeks in advance, the blog was essentially on auto-pilot and I was free to go biking, paddleboarding, and just generally drink outdoors for a change of scenery. Call it an homage to the lines that end Chapter 28, as the Pequod heads south to warmer waters:
For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such glad-hearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.
Red-cheeked April and May are long past, and so is Farmer Tan June, but to celebrate full-on Sunburn July we’ll return to some less weighty programming for a month or two so we can all spend more time outside. Even Ahab might crack a Grinchy smile.
Today we’ll look at a Moby-Dick parody from the cartoon that’s done it all: The Simpsons. Way back in November 1997, the show — or rather, the Simpsons ‘universe’ — took on the white whale in Simpsons Comics #8 with story titled “Call Me Homer.”
What always fascinates about these seemingly half-baked Moby-Dick parodies is that they often contain small details which could be written off as a writer who knew the plot from a movie or TV adaptation, or simply through cultural osmosis, but taken together suggest the hand of someone who actually knew the book quite well. In this case, it didn’t take much digging to find that this admittedly low-brow parody was, like so many others, an attempt from a mega-fan hoping, if obliquely, to draw more eyes to the book.
The setup to the story is a bit long and overwrought so I’ll skip to the chase as it were, but in short the premise is that Grandpa Abe Simpson tells Homer, Bart, and Lisa about their distant ancestor who was a whaler. Call him Homer.
Homer is assigned to man the try works, but like Ishmael who writes about the Dutch delicacy of crispy, brown whale fritters in Chapter 65, he develops a taste for fried whale blubber. This gets him in trouble when he’s discovered devouring the fruits of the crew’s hard-earned labor. Another crew member complains, as one only would aboard a whaling ship: "He just ate my 130th% of the profits!"
Captain Burns ties Homer to the mast, but at just that moment the crew spots Moby Dick, who has come to attack the ship on behalf of his murdered whale brethren. Smithers suggests they all play dead in hopes the whale passes them by.
Moby Dick does indeed start to pass them by, but the plan is foiled when Homer, monomaniacally obsessed with that delicious whale blubber, escapes his ropes and lunges to take a bite out of the whale’s flukes. (Maybe that’s how his tail became “scalloped out like a lost sheep’s ear”?)
Grandpa Abe ends the story by explaining that Homer was still attached to the mast by a rope. Refusing to let go, he hangs on to the tail and drags the ship all the way to the Bermuda Triangle where all they disappear forever.
With a nod to the original English edition, which omitted Ishmael’s epilogue, Lisa asks how they know the story is true if no one lived to tell the tale.
After some bickering between Bart and Lisa (cut here for space), they all go down to dinner — but not before Bart finds a harpoon stashed away in a treasure chest.
The end? No, not before a double “it was all a dream” sequence in which Bart wakes up with Moby Dick in his bed, then wakes up fort real and finds the harpoon — which he uses to terrorize the great white couch potato, Moby Homer.
OK so it’s pretty low brow stuff but Melville certainly wasn’t above a bit of low-brow humor in Moby-Dick. The real question was whether there was anything more going on beneath the surface. Being paid in lays, fried whale blubber, the omitted epilogue? Were these just coincidences in an otherwise lazy parody?
The title page of the comic lists cartoonist Jeff Smith as the story writer, and all it took was a glance at his Wikipedia page to find that he “has cited Moby Dick as his favorite book, citing its multi-layered narrative and symbolism.” In fact, he inserted numerous references to the book in his comic book series Bone. He also gave the name Bartleby to a character in his graphic novel Crown of Horns.
Smith has said that he learned to read through comics, and intentionally uses graphic novels as a way to bring reluctant readers to literature.
"Librarians and teachers have let me know they are getting reluctant readers to read with Bone. So people can actually see there are benefits to graphic novels, vs. the stigma that always was attached to comics. . . . I knew it wasn’t true. I learned to read because of comics." Smith says he loved reading about Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes when he was younger; he later turned to The Iliad, The Odyssey, Le Morte d’Arthur and Moby-Dick. "I really like epics. Moby-Dick is honestly my favorite book. I’m just fascinated by the literary structure," he says. (BookPage.com)
He’s talked elsewhere about how he approaches thinking about themes through the lens of Moby-Dick and how it inspires his work.
SPURGEON: When I think of your work with theme with Bone, I think of you putting together different elements from the genres with which you were working, but not really pushing a very specific lesson or moral. Certain themes very gently revealed themselves, and really had to be engaged by the reader… Do you think in terms of theme?
SMITH: I do. Some things will drift to the surface, and you can decide to highlight them or not. But yeah, I definitely think of theme. My favorite book is Moby Dick. And it's a genre book. It's a high seas adventure book. But you can read it on many levels -- I'm not saying anything new there, Tom. [laughter] But it's not an accident that it works that way. Melville really layered it in a certain way, and used symbolism -- some of it heavy-handed, but some of it very subtle. It's meant to be open-ended. When you're working in genre and you're using those kind of symbols, the idea is not to give someone a lesson, but to leave these portals open for people to go into and experience the story and have it reflect something in their own lives and things they're going through. So even though the story has forward motion and has themes and arcs, the stories I like is where the themes are created specifically to be open to the reader.
According to the Simpsons wiki, “Call Me Homer” was the only comic Smith ever produced for the Simpsons comics. In other words, he was a hired gun to write a single story for that universe, and he used the opportunity to entice readers to learn something about Moby-Dick. Maybe they’d even be inspired to pick up a copy.
So once again we find a little lower layer to what looks to be merely an inane caricature, but yet again was actually produced by a proud Melvillean.