While out walking my dog very early one morning I ran into a frantic woman, beseeching directions to Starbucks.
My reflexive internal response was, “I’m sorry to tell you this, ma’am, but he went down aboard the Pequod,” but I kept the joke to myself, stifled my giggles, and directed the woman towards the coffee shop.
For the most part, everything I’ve ever read about Moby-Dick has been either beautiful and solemn like a dull sermon, or dismissive of it as a baggy boring relic of bygone days. The book invites comparisons to the whale itself: the sheer size and density, a brick of over 600 page, as though its treasures must be gleaned from crosshatched ink scars carved in white slabbed pages.
For many, it is A Book To Be Read, almost a Jonahian duty that cannot be shirked lest the gods be angered, an Ahab-like quest to conquer this giant behemoth of the literary seas, something that must be done and probably won’t be enjoyed. (That was, essentially, how I read Moby-Dick the first time—for literary bragging rights. I’m now trying to be less of a snob and more of an enthusiastic circus barker for its wonders.)
Nathaniel Philbrick’s book, Why Read Moby-Dick, touches on a lot of the lofty themes, joyfully and correctly christening the book one of the great bibles of the American canon for the richness of the language, the scope of its tropes, the seemingly unedited wildness of its narrative structure. Others will talk about the raw masculinity of the book (there are some lady whales mentioned once, and Aunt Charity, but otherwise, this is a book of dudes.)
There are also the sexual currents of Ishmael and Queequeg’s relationship. And the Manifest Destiny parallels of Ahab as captain of a ship on a quest for an elusive and diminishing resource. And a beautiful elegy for the practical work of a bygone industry. And the eternal struggle of Man versus Nature and Man versus Fate. And the bewitching Romance of the sea.
And, because the book’s dedication to Nathaniel Hawthorne furthers interest in the possibility that Hawthorne and Melville may have been lovers, Moby-Dick swims into the queer canon. And the almost chewable, delicious density of the language makes it a pretty pleasant read-aloud (especially if you can track down the recordings of Leonard Nimoy doing so over Paul Winter’s whale recordings!) And, at the simplest, it is a good read because it is a bunch of men on a journey they do not understand but go through the traditions and motions of, even as its futility looms, much like, say, life.
Evidence of all of those and many other points of view can be found. It is a big and wandering book, room exists for all comers and interpretations. And, if any of those themes are the reasons that compel you to read this book, go for it and I wish you many barrels of that sweet intellectual oil to light your way.
For my part, though, I love it because it is equal parts wry humor and transcendent poetry.
It is in the balance—like a sperm whale head and a right whale head hanging on either side to balance, practically, the keel and, spiritually, the omens of a ship—that the truest delight lies.
Past Ishmael and the calling of him that opens Moby-Dick, it is in the next lines that I really find myself bound to the book…”whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet…—then I account it high time to get to the sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.”
Yup. Ishmael has a black moodiness and misanthropy that can only be cured by taking off to a wild place. I am eternally loving to anyone who has that kernel in their soul. It is the familiar hyperbolic drama of so many people I know and so many moods I’ve had that Ishmael melted into my heart faster than he warms up to Queequeg at The Spouter Inn. I feel a companionable protectiveness for Ishmael, even if he is more than a little priggish and pompous at times. And in Ishmael’s odd formality, in Melville’s treatment of Ishmael as narrator, there is an extraordinary amount of humor to be found.
I get the sense that Melville is at once deadly earnest about everything that actually matters, and also caustically mocking those who would profess to be serious about these same things. The sections where many readers get lost—the history of whaling, the folios of cataloging of whales, the biology of whales, etc.—are utterly priceless when read as if Melville is pulling your leg. There are some species of whales he mentions, but doesn’t describe, because either he or a convenient friend from Nantucket doesn’t like that kind of whale. And others that he seems to invent, simply because someone he knows knows someone who once heard that something like this whale might exist.
It isn’t scientific, it isn’t accurate, it isn’t historical. It is hysterical. (Like Gideon Defoe’s The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists, Melville/Ishmael leave whales as fish.)
And then, after all the Nantucketers calling Queequeg “Quohog” and witty mocking of pirates and prayers over angelic sharks and passages about which philosophers which whale species would most prefer and cox-worthy threats that the mates make to urge their crews after the whales and the Ylvis-like line of “but then again, what has the whale to say?” there will be a paragraph or chapter so heart-stoppingly beautiful that I feel like I am spinning on one thin pegleg, my naked heart open to the sharks below.
There is beauty and terror when the little whaling boats are penned in by a wall of whales in The Grand Armada chapter. The Try-Works, when the Pequod is lit up at night to render the sperm oil, is a gorgeous vision of something that seems heavenly and hellish and holy—like being caught in a lightning storm. A Squeeze of the Hand is one of the most sensual things I have ever read. The description of Queequeg’s homeland, “It is not down on any map; true places never are” are words I would (appropriately) consider tattooing on my own skin.
But, my personal favorite is Ahab, sneaking up on deck to beseech a dead sperm whale’s head to give up the secrets of the deep: “Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor’s side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Those saw’st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other when heaven seemed false to them…thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!”
I get shivers. The recognition that there is power in the wild unknown that would split planets and mend broken hearts and comfort grieving sleepless mothers. I believe this, and I hadn’t expected to find that emotional resonance in this book. Because, along with the humor being sidelined in the cultural conversation of Moby-Dick, people forget to tell you that this book will find a soft space near your heart and bury at least one harpoon in your soul.
Bethany Taylor lives in New England, blogs and blogs at Granite Bunny and Hothouse Magazine, works as a farmer and a librarian, and generally tries to have a good time saving the world and writing about it.
You call it “unedited wildness of its narrative structure.” I call it “endless bloviating.” I can see history buffs loving this for the wonderful detail of the whaling world of the time. As a guy who loves a good story, I thought Moby Dick was incredibly overrated. I just picture a guy with 478 boxes of nails made of Biblical references hammering them into every empty space he can find, trying to figure out one more whaling fact he can write about before Ahab waddles back out on deck to yammer about the “white whale,” only so he can again retreat to his cabin while we read another 50 pages about the details of some obscure piece of the ship. I’ve made this argument before, and I’ll make it again: In the case of Moby Dick people are mistaking an important book for a good one. They can be one and the same (I’m thinking Grapes of Wrath here, but that’s not the only one), but they don’t have to be.
This is written at the tail end of the age of discovery. These guys are the Astronauts of the age. Melville’s endless disquisitions on the technique the seas of the voyage, the lays assigned to each of the ships crew, that’s like talking about how the Lunar Excursion Module has an aluminum wall that is not much thicker than several layers of Reynolds Wrap, and how they weren’t sure as they were landing whether the moon would be solid or whether they’d get stuck in vast drifts of lunar dust. Same Wow factor.
I have to admit i also read Moby for the bragging rights .And i hated it . I mean really it felt more like a marine biology text book with some story attached to it . Most people have heard the story and somehow assume you *know* it , you know? I was not prepared for the language and forgot it was written over a centuary ago ,so i was drowning and evetuallu gave up! But this post ha s made me want to read it again .Really read it . Thank you 🙂
Weirdly enough I have never read Moby Dick, guess I will have download a copy
I’m delighted that this post is making (some) people want to read Moby-Dick! There’s a bit in the book about eating whale steaks, and how even a whaleman who loves whale can be a bit daunted by nearly 100 feet of his favorite dish. Bear that scope in mind as you begin; it’s a lovely long read to be put down, picked up, savored and enjoyed. The chapters are short and sweet, so you can just carve off the thickness of whale-book-steak you want, and not worry about the other 595 pages that day. They’ve kept for a few years already…
One of the best books ever written, one of the best I’ve ever read. An English professor confessed to me that she never read the book, in fact could not get through it. She knew I was reading it in another class. She was surprised to find someone that liked it.
Long books are wonderful and terrible. It is overwhelming to look at them sitting on the shelf. To read the first page is a superhuman effort. For a person like myself, who reads a novel on a train trip, spending weeks reading a book seems like far too great a commitment. Then I read Gone with Wind in ten days over the school holidays while sitting on a hay bale. For ten days I lived completely in another world. And it is the best feeling in the world when you can say, ‘Oh yes, I’ve read the book.’
I like the first sentence you wrote: “Long Books are wonderful and terrible”.
Nice. I agree with you about Melville pulling our collective legs with the cataloging and whale biology. I feel like he’s poking fun too at the tendency toward scientism and encyclopedic cataloging emerging in the nineteenth century as a means to “get to the bottom of things.” As Melville shows with the white whale, this is not only not possible but carries risks. A lot of people dislike Moby-Dick for these very chapters, but I feel they’re central to what he’s getting at in the book. Moby-Dick isn’t a plot-driven story about hunting a sea creature. If you want that, you can skip to the last few chapters. Or rent or stream Jaws. Moby-Dick is a disquisition on philosophy, religion, and the politics of mid nineteenth-century America that were threatening to sink the country (and very nearly did a little more than a decade later).
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Oh, how I’ve tried. I guess I’ll try again looking for those “equal parts wry humor and transcendent poetry” you promise.
I love this - it took me years and years for me to get into Moby Dick, and strangely, you pointed out the passage that finally hooked me. Who could resist, “…and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off…”?
Perhaps the great strength of Moby-Dick is that we can read and enjoy it today despite the fact that most of us would find the whaling industry utterly abhorrent. I’ve read it twice. The first time was a chore, but the second time was much more enjoyable, perhaps because I read it after picking up Leviathan by Philip Hoare. Leviathan is a story of the author’s quest for whales in the modern day, wrapped up in his meditations on Moby-Dick. I highly recommend it.
Many do read it for “literary bragging rights.” I, on the other hand, have struggled to do even that. I think I have read maybe sixty pages a year for the last four years. I still of course have not finished it. While I do actually love the book, I find it hard to keep interest with its wondering and drifting and endless details about every little thing. I WILL FINISH IT ONE DAY!! Maybe in another six years!
Wow, I’ve read Moby-Dick so many years ago, but now I’m thinking that I’ll read it again!
I think what people fail to realize, is that the book is hilarious. This post makes a good point about that. There are so many funny moments among the crew. Stubb, Quequeg, the cook, Pip, Flask. These are funny characters. And Ishmael is the weirdest narrator in any book. Herman Melville makes great use of comic relief. I think it is similar to Shakespeare, in that it is way more enjoyable when you get the jokes.
I have read it three times, and it only started to get funny the third time through. More of the references come through as you reread it. Sometimes you do have to skip chapters, though. I’m sure HM wouldn’t mind. If you’re bored with the book, just skip ahead a few pages, and something funny will happen.
Oh, God, for a second there I was afraid you might make me read it again. I gotta say, I read it and didn’t get it. I think all its storied symbolism must be the symbols for another culture, or a past culture. I suspect for someone not raised in such a Bible-full environment, the symbols may just not evoke what they did to his people in his day, perhaps except among the religious . . .
Funny, I never thought of it as long. I’ve read “Don Quixote” since, and that was long, and have you ever read “Islandia?” That felt long. Both those books were labours of love just to read them, but both seemed worth it by the end, as did “The Brothers Karamazov.”
Maybe it didn’t seem long because I read a pretty fancy copy with very thin pages, the whole book was not much thicker than one inch . . .
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It took me six months to finish this book. I would read one paragraph or even one sentence up to five times. It’s not an easy book. But it’s worth it. I didn’t read it to brag about it. I read it to understand the love one of my friends has for this book. And I get it now. at least better. And I liked it. It’s a passionate story that left me thinking I might be as passionate with the things I say I love. It might hurt, but that’s how you make it count.
I just read this book for the first time this summer. Like you, I was delightfully surprised to learn how incredibly funny this story is.
There is a chapter where Ahab is having a long discussion with the ship’s carpenter and, as I was reading it, it occurred to me to think of it as Ahab having a conversation with Melville, himself. I couldn’t stop laughing.
People who don’t enjoy this novel are usually laboring under the impression that the book is as serious as the film adaptations make it out to be or that Moby Dick is an attempt at accurate historical preservation.
Melville is just pulling your (peg?) leg for 600 pages.
Basically, Melville is just messing
sry. I meant to delete that last line.
I read MD initially for research about Ahab, being the first major amputee in literature. Melville gives deft details.I too captured the playfulness and irony in his writing. I even performed one of Ahab’s soliloquies. You’ve inspired me to try and blog about it at stumpthelibrarian.com
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Have you read The Art of Fielding by chad harbach? M-D was his muse.
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It’s great to hear so many modern folks having a fun reaction to Moby-Dick. That happened to me on first read a few years back. There’s just so much going on in the book, and the wild structure enhances everything. Melville just seems so damn excited to be sharing all his thoughts.
Some talk about the whale anatomy chapters as a slog, but I didn’t think so. I hadn’t considered he might be writing in a wry tone there-I’ll keep that in mind next time through. When he describes the whale as a fish I thought he was being as scientific as possible, with the limited knowledge of the day. Recall that this book was published the same year as the Origin.
I agree with some commenters that this book is not nearly as lengthy as some other classics. It’s a shame it gets a reputation as intimidating. There is both the connection to a budding America that seems easy to relate to, and also the comfort that the horrors of whaling are far in the past, at least in our part of the world. It’s such a strange world, and I agree with your assessment of the bloody, oily decks being this fantastical, intense, very physical type of experience we can only know through this book.
I need to check out that Philbrick book you mentioned. I loved his In the Heart of the Sea. Highly recommended for any MD lover.
My full analysis is here: http://leviathanbound.wordpress.com/2014/07/14/moby-dick/. Thanks again for posting!
Oops, MD was published eight years BEFORE On the Origin of Species.
I read this book in high school and loved it for all its weird detail and its long meandering bullshit sections. I had never heard of Melville and Hawthorne possibly being lovers, though - it doesn’t seem to me that a friend dedicating his novel to another friend, when both of them are writers, suggests anything sexual, but then maybe there’s more to it I don’t know about.
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This post is worthy of reblogging because it’s words made me run to purchase the novel “Moby Dick” and simultaneously shamed me for having never read it.
I confess, the wandering-about-style of narrative loses me. I know a few who love the book, but I’ve never been able to stick with it. The quote you mentioned - It is not down on any map; true places never are - calls to me, so I might have to try again for that alone. Thank you for sharing your thoughts! Definitely a perspective I’ve not heard before…
Recently forced myself to read it, again. For pure raw emotion, I actually preferred London’s “Sea Wolf.” Great post!
Oh yes, Moby Dick…I am an English major and was made to read it. I think the fact that it was assigned and studied in that way took the heart out of it for me at that time (or maybe it was simply where I was in life…). But later on in life I picked it up again, a little older and as pure leisure (well I admit there weren’t any other choices around) and I began nibbling at it and I found myself enjoying the story of the journey. Thanks for the post.
Finding this post was perfect timing! I’m an English major and will be reading Moby Dick in a few weeks. It’ll be my first time and I’ve heard so many mixed feelings about it, so this post has made me look forward to it a little more. 🙂 And the bragging rights, oh yes.
this is amazing. i adore it.
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