That book kicks ass. That’s what my friend said when he heard I’d finally finished it. And in many respects, it does. The novel is dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne. William Faulkner said he wished he’d written himself. It’s so infused with Shakespearian poeticism that you can’t tell when he’s quoting directly, indirectly, paraphrasing or inventing wholly new material. And of course as final evidence of it’s ass-kickingness, all the best parts of all the best Star Trek movies are lines from Moby Dick. Lines like this one (click the link to see for yourself…) “Towards thee I roll, though all-destroying but unconquerable whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee!” Or This One from First Contact. Moby Dick is the longest, heaviest book I’ve read in years. I’d forgotten what literature looked like before the twentieth century and boy is it florid. Melville masters everything from songs, poems and soliloquies to exhaustively encyclopedic analyses of all known cetology. Moby Dick could’ve served as an academic text book for any naturalist or marine biologist circa 1850. He not only covers every conceivable species of cetacea, and their outer feature but also their inner workings down to their bones. And not just that but their complete historical record through the ages and also the history of paintings of them, even. He details the process of capture, dismemberment and converting to casks of oil and the culinary intricacies of a nice whale steak eaten under the light of a whale-oil lamp. These didactic digressions decidedly kick very little ass. But they serve as an amusing window into the mid 19th century, when this would have been cutting-edge realism in literature. Maximum verisimilitude. Melville spends his energy trying to convince you the extent to which these massive leviathans actually exist as he also becomes an ardent apologist for the whaling industry as a whole that devours them. But lest you become bored with these diversions, he’s always careful to come back to the action, draw us deeper down Ahab’s ominous monomaniacal obsession. “Call me Ishmael” the narrator opens. It’s not his name and we never learn who he really is. Like the Great Gastby, he only exists to testify to us this story he has witnessed during his voyages aboard the whaling vessel Pequod. (Ishmael is a reference to Abraham’s first son, before Isaac, the one he cast out, a wanderer.) Ishmael is honestly not much of a character, as character’s go. Instead of suicide, he decides to go whaling instead, to keep busy, and despite being a novice, spends most of the wordcount being something of a know-it-all about whales. Not to the other characters, mind you. That would’ve been interesting. Simply to the reader, until you forget he’s a character at all, and you just assume Melville really likes whales and wants us to know how much he knows about them. Ishmael makes a good friend in Queequeg, the cannibal harpooner, who sets sail with him and their... familiar... friendship leads to some fascinatingly progressive observations on religion and humanity, but yields almost no narrative relevance. It doesn’t end up serving any particular point in the plot and neither Ishmael as an amateur whaleman nor Queequeg as a renowned harpooner end up doing much of anything when it comes to hunting Moby Dick. As an editor, I see tons and tons of story potential in having a novice and an expert in a tale about hunting whales, but Melville uses none of it. In fact, the more the story shifts to the hunt for Moby Dick, the less they appear at all in the narrative. If it weren't for Ishmael's epilogue declaring himself the sole survivor (spoiler! sorry-not-sorry!) I would've forgotten he was there at all. Ahab’s hunt. This is the good stuff. This is why in the back of your mind you're even pretending to consider maybe picking this one up at the library sometime down the road when you're less busy. Without this, you’d have never heard of Moby Dick. In fact, you almost didn’t. The book was not a hit in it’s time and wasn’t “discovered” in the literary community until the 1930’s, a generation or so later. But forget those literary snobs, it’s a classic tale of vengeance and obsession with a dose of hubris that truly brings life to this novel and that's something even a petty proletariat Philistine like yourself can get behind. Ahab’s fixation on the whale that wounded him is as primal as Hercules and the hydra, Theseus and the Minotaur or David and Goliath. A hero verses a monster -- no! -- a force of nature. A hurricane. It's visceral and emotional but with the clarity and brilliance of a singularly focused sociopath. Melville uses the term monomania. Ahab is little more than a reference point for the first hundred pages or so. A ghost. It's as if Melville anticipates the cultural weight that his name will have a hundred years later on millions of people who haven't even read the book yet. When will he show himself? What will he do? Who is this being who's absence is the most interesting character in the story thus far? And when Ahab appears, he's like a god among mortals. Superior. Supernatural. He changes the course of the entire novel's narrative to be about himself. He is everything you hope for and expect and more. The only true Shakespearean tragic hero outside of Shakespeare. His speeches and diatribes read like Shakespeare dipped in blood, lit on fire and harpooned into the side of the ocean's most insolent sea monster. No less epic than Agamemnon shouting at Troy, Churchill speaking against Nazi Germany or Iron-Man fighting Captain America. "Who told thee that?" cried Ahab; then pausing, "Aye, Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye," he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose; "Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!" Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: "Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave."
2 Comments
8/8/2018 09:56:07 pm
“These didactic digressions decidedly kick very little ass. But they serve as an amusing window into the mid 19th century, when this would have been cutting-edge realism in literature.”
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C
8/9/2018 07:11:26 pm
Is it even possible to be post-modern in the mid 19th century when modernism was still just getting going? Or do you think that he was so ahead of his time? Maybe that's why he wasn't appreciated until after WWI...
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