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Reflections - Moby Dick

Has anyone read all of Moby Dick?

Congratulations if you have. I hope you enjoyed it. I've started it half a dozen times; it was required reading for at least three courses I took over the years, but I never finished it.

Each time I began, I felt that this was a wonderful book, to be read at the pace that a whaling ship travelled. If you read it carefully and let it go at its own speed, you can feel the roll and pitch of the Pequod, and catch the fresh scent of the sea, and the stale smell of Ishmael, Queequeeg, and the crew.

Forget the interpretations people have told you about the symbol of the whale; of Ahab's vision of a malevolent God. Let the whale and Ahab explain themselves. Try to listen to Ishmael, and put your own urgencies and the 21st century world out of your head, and slow to that pitch and roll.

The detail about whales and whaling is almost overwhelming. Melville is like the best of hunters: he knows - and one suspects, loves - his prey. Ahab is the same. He's an experienced captain, and you didn't get to be captain of a whaler by racing around the channel buoys or helping old sailors across the road. Whaling was a commercial enterprise; the ship an extremely valuable asset that was risked for two or three years on the hope of recovering the profitable whale oil. 

Don't be tempted to follow ecological red-herrings about how sad it was to kill these great mammals. Flush that from your minds and listen to what is being said. The whale has no more right to life than the krill it feeds on. 

Whale oil kept our great great grandparents warm and alive; whale bone (baleen) staves made great great grandma look good enough for someone to marry, and without it we might not be here. Men were killed chasing whales for those things; it was a different world then, and late today's values wouldn't have meant much to them then. 

There is a great inevitability about Moby Dick. Ishmael is warned at the beginning that he will be the sole survivor; the sermon in the chapel about Jonah underlines this survival theme and also prophecy, destiny and inevitability. The same story is told in Queequeeg's bones that cause him to order his coffin - the ironic vehicle for Ishmael's survival. Melville didn't worry about spoiler alerts.

Ahab is a bitter man. He is the Jonah figure: he has been tested but cannot feel Jonas' bond with God. (It is ironic that the Pequod is owned by Quakers). For Ahab, there is only revenge. While Jonah foreshadows the forgiveness and life of Christianity, Ahab is firmly rooted in Old Testament vengeance and hatred.

If you must look for symbols, there are a lot of candidates here. The Pequod is life itself: different people, thrown together with their different beliefs and destinies. Similar to some views of life, people get what they expect. Queequeeg expects to die; Ishmael expects to live. Ahab expects satisfaction, and he gets it with the death of Moby Dick.

Is Ahab's victory over Moby Dick a satisfactory end for him? In that it is his obsession, his sole reason for living, that the end of his quest should bring the end of his life is right.

Ahab's 'soliloquy' gazing on the dead whale has been likened to Hamlet's apostrophe to Yorick's skull. Ahab is not Hamlet; Ahab's soliloquy is not ironic, nor is it punctuated with the wit and humor of Hamlet's, so I've never been wholly convinced. Still, it's two doomed men talking to a dead head. 

So, why did I never finish the book? Good question. I'm not sure I know the answer. It's very long. I hate rushing through wonderful literature. There's also something of the 'I want to come back to it' feeling. To finish Moby Dick is almost to close a part of one's life. So, my bookmark is still in place, and from time to time, I read another chapter and continue the voyage.

One day, I'll get there.

Comments

  1. IanJuly 6, 2018 at 5:42 PM

    I cannot believe how much I got through in my finals year (1970/71). I read Moby Dick, Ulysses and Paradise Lost and much of the drama written between 1660 and 1700. I enjoyed it all but couldn't remember enough to offer a critique now. Ulysses I found joyous; I lectured on Paradise Lost in later years; Moby Dick I remember less well. I remember that I was often gripped and that I was reading a vast polyphonic epic, but I also remember longueurs. Maybe I was too callow a reader. Maybe Melville was sometimes orotund. Maybe I wasn't American enough. I doubt I'll revisit it at my age. So much else to read and one is conscious of Time's unrelenting algebra. But I'm glad I gave it a bash.

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    Replies
    1. trumbull73July 6, 2018 at 11:25 PM

      How we managed such reading! As a graduate student I was doing a course in the contemporary novel and the Victorian novel simultaneously - with the same professor. I had to read Vanity Fair and Ulysses in same week. Mercifully (or not, depending on your point of view), I had read Ulysses as an undergraduate.

      I may or may not write something on Ulysses; I really believe that it only got the attention and reputation it has because it was nearly supressed. As time goes by, I think it's perceived merits are harder to defend.

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