“The White Whales of the Sky.” On Moby-Dick, Airplanes, and Obsessions Past and Present

I was first introduced to Moby-Dick around age ten, when I read an abridged, children’s version of Herman Melville’s masterpiece. One detail from an early chapter stuck with me through the years. Ishmael recalls a childhood experience in which his stepmother sent him to bed in the afternoon as punishment for trying to crawl up the chimney. He drifts to sleep and wakes to perceive “a supernatural hand” placed in his own: “My arm hung over the counterpane, and the nameless, unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed closely seated by my bed-side.” I was so frightened by the possibility of a phantom hand holding mine while I slept that ever since, I’ve been careful never to sleep with my hand outside the covers. 

I would not read the unabridged Moby-Dick until several decades later, while struggling to write my own book. In 2019, I had an idea for a novel about a woman who is sexually obsessed with airplanes. I was inspired by a documentary I’d seen about people with objectum sexuality—attraction to inanimate objects—as well as by some eerie Youtube videos recreating famous aviation incidents. In the animated videos, the planes seem like mysterious, sentient beings; the cockpits are empty of pilots, controls moving on their own, as if by the plane’s own hidden intelligence.

In early drafts, I had trouble finding the right tone. Initially, my narrator was a flight attendant who was married to a pilot, maintaining a double life in which she indulged her sexual proclivities at work, or on her husband’s flight simulator while he was flying. In spite of its strangeness, the story lacked the spark of life, the narrator’s fixation on planes reduced to mere kink. From there I made the common mistake of throwing plot at the story. One version involved the collapse of the global petroleum industry. The more external action I grafted on, the less compelling the story became, as I drew further afield of what had drawn me to the idea in the first place.

Around that time, I happened to check out Moby-Dick from the library, wanting to finally read the unabridged version and amend a shameful gap in my reading history. As I read, I felt a sense of revelation. Melville captures the experience of whaling, the romance and peril of the sea, in the way I’d hoped to depict my character’s love affair with flying. With that, “the great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open,” revealing a path for the novel I was struggling to write.

If Moby-Dick is an anatomy of whales, then my book would be an anatomy of planes. Planes are the white whales of the sky, after all. They have a similar shape, and both are filled with oil, or its derivatives. There is a grandeur to planes and flying that seems similar to whaling. As Melville writes, “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.”

My mistake had been in attempting to add superficial suspense at the level of plot, rather than diving deeper into what fascinated me about the premise—the psychology of my narrator, whom I now called Linda. I wanted to explore Linda’s obsession and spiritual kinship with planes, as well as her ardent belief in a self-annihilating destiny. I was drawn to the voice Melville crafts for Ishmael—whimsical, lyrical, and totally committed to the bit. My favorite chapters are the ones that delve into (factually dubious) whale minutiae, such as the infamous “Cetology.”

I love how opinionated Ishmael is—even a bit catty—about which animals deserve to be called whales: “But as these pig-fish are a noisy, contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on wet hay, and especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials as whales; and have presented them with their passports to quit the Kingdom of Cetology.” I wrote my own version of this chapter, “Aeronautics,” in which Linda catalogues various models of planes, a passage that didn’t make the final cut of the book. Linda reveals her contempt for the Concorde: “To know his beaky face is to despise him.” Like Ishmael, Linda has many opinions about the objects of her fascination: “all planes are male in spirit, just as all boats are female, and helicopters possess the souls of mischievous children.” Moby-Dick provided a permission structure to get weird and silly with it.

I spent a year writing a thousand words a day in Linda’s voice. It was not a first draft, but a zero draft, exploring within the world of the novel. At one point, I made a reverse outline of Moby-Dick, and tried to map my story directly onto it, but I soon realized that this was not the way. I didn’t want to write a direct homage to or parody of Moby-Dick. I wanted to use the book as a jumping off point to create something new.

In “That Crafty Feeling,” an essay adapted from a public lecture, Zadie Smith writes about using scaffolding devices while drafting, such as modeling a novel after the books of the prophets, or Ulysses, or the songs of Public Enemy: “I use scaffolding to hold up my confidence when I have none, to reduce the despair, and to feel that what I’m doing has a goal, some endpoint that I can see.” She goes on to say that it’s important to dismantle the scaffolding once you no longer need it; it has served its purpose, and now it can be removed, and the book will be stronger standing on its own. After writing some 200,000 words in Linda’s voice, I had to begin again, and write my own book.

In the final version of Sky Daddy, Melville’s influence remains embedded in the book’s DNA. Linda is both Ishmael and Ahab: buoyant, gentle, yet with a monomania that is unleashed as she draws nearer to her goal. (Her “white whale” is a 737 named N92823, aboard which she had a formative sexual experience at the age of thirteen.) She is driven, like Ahab, by a distorted belief in fate. As I began what would become the true first draft of the book, two years into the project, I was bolstered by the long hours I’d spent exploring, using Moby-Dick as a companion. Drafting a novel is a journey into uncharted waters. I was glad to have Melville’s hand guiding mine as I embarked into the unknown.

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Sky Daddy by Kate Folk is available from Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.