10/05/2023

In Folha, Viana talks about the work Moby Dick and mathematics.

Moby Dick _ Ilustração do Freepik

Reproduction of Marcelo Viana's column in Folha de S. Paulo.

During my adolescence, I read almost all the classics of children's literature: "Treasure Island," "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," "The Call of the Wild," "The Hobbit," "Gulliver's Travels," "The Three Musketeers," "Robinson Crusoe," "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," and so many others.

Of all of them, only one disappointed me: "Moby Dick," by Herman Melville. Ishmael, a sailor aboard the Pequod, narrates Captain Ahab's obsessive search for the great white whale Moby Dick, which caused the loss of his leg, in a spiral of irrationality that leads to tragedy. It's not the adventure story my teenage self expected to find.

I wasn't the first to do that. The work that brought immortality to Melville was received, at the time of publication, with reactions ranging from indifference to severe criticism. The one about which the Englishman D.H. Lawrence wrote – "it's a great book, a very great book, the greatest book about the sea ever written, it moves our souls" – yielded, during the author's lifetime, a mere US$556.37 in sales.

I was neither the first nor the last to fail to notice the many, often subtle, references to mathematics in the text of "Moby Dick." In fact, this is a striking feature of Melville's writing, though we don't quite know why. In "Mardi," his third book, published in 1849, the character Babbalanja shouts: "Face, face, face! You're harder to understand than integral calculus!" Later, another character, frustrated with Babbalanja's philosophies, complains: "Enough of logic and conic sections!"

But "Mardi" was so poorly received that Melville promised his publisher that his next book would contain "neither metaphysics nor conic sections, only pies and beer!". He even kept that promise in "Redburn", published that same year. But, two years later, with "Moby Dick", he had already forgotten it.

Commenting on the fact that Moby Dick's eyes are on opposite sides of its head, unlike ours, Ishmael speculates whether this will allow the whale to handle two different ideas or objects at the same time. "If so, then it's a marvelous thing about it, as if a man were able to simultaneously think about the proofs of two distinct theorems of Euclid. And this comparison makes perfect sense."

To read the full text, visit the newspaper's website.