HAHAHAHAH! I did it! I finished Moby Diiiiiick!
I don’t have any great insight to offer about the novel that I haven’t already shared. The book is a blog. Or maybe in the words of the 19th century, it’s a journal. Over 135 chapters, Melville seeks to answer the questions of why. The big existential question, why.
But even as the book closes, just before the three day chase and final conflict with the White Whale, Ahab looks into the sea; knows in his heart that what he’s doing is wrong; bemoans his salty, hard tack life aboard whaling vessels for 40 years; looks into Starbuck’s eyes and knows that he will kill all those around him; knows that he will leave an orphan and widow behind; and just as Starbuck is begging him “Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home!” Just at that moment when Ahab is finally human, when he is on the verge of doing what is perhaps the only human thing he’s done in his entire life Ahab turns:
“But Ahab’s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.”
“What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the airs smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year’s scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swarths- Starbuck!”
Even at the final moment when Melville could give us something, an answer, he chickens out and says Ahab has no more agency than an albacore. In fact, Ahab isn’t even Ahab and here the line “Is Ahab, Ahab?” reminds me of my favorite line from I Heart Huckabees: “How am I not myself?”
You are yourself. You are always yourself; drunk; stupid; mistake prone; making bad choices; making good choices; seeing the beauty in the rainbow hue of a crow’s feathers in sunlight; you are always yourself, and probably even most especially you are yourself when you think that you’re not yourself. Confused as a child and wondering how you fit into the universe is the most human thing a human can do.
But I reject this Ahab. I reject him conceding his agency to unknown forces. And I reject Melville’s nonsense.
At one point Ahab is the embodiment of arrogance but yet and once again, Melville, because he doesn’t know the answer comes back with yet another, new, fresh, and even contradictory explanation. Melville pulls the rug from under us constantly. I suspect he thought it was funny. But as I have said all along I can’t even begin to understand why people think this is a great novel. Yes, there are some incredibly lyrical passages and I love them but from stem to stern this is a rudderless ship. We don’t even hear Ishmael’s voice in the last 20 chapters and Queequeg is mentioned just once after the coffin scene. Two of the main characters introduced at the start of the novel are never heard from again after Ahab’s madness kicks in. Even the epilogue – where Ish is saved by Queequeg’s coffin – wasn’t in the original manuscript and was added after at the behest of the editor.
I get it, he doesn’t think there are any answers to life; except maybe that all is vanity (ALL!). But this meandering book, lost in the desert for 40 years, picking its navel and telling us nothing is a hell of a long way to say that.
If Melville were alive now, the book would still be going on, his blog would still be written, Ahab would never die, the end would never come. He’d still be sailing.
It wasn’t a waste of time for me to read your impressions as you waded (see what I did there?) through Moby Dick. I got a copy dropped off by my brother and I while it would lying exaggeration of Trumpian proportions to say “I read along with you”, I did read several chapters, some based on your posts.
One of the things that struck me, having recently returned from just north of your neck of the woods (Victoria & Vancouver Island – and I’ve never been more nervous flying even though the plane was 3/4 empty both ways), was one of the questions the book poses:
“Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?” Hundred of thousands of the largest species of whales died in the mass slaughter of the 19th and early 20th centuries. One of the world’s largest non-human mammal populations was reduced to just a few thousand.
Despite the pandemic, a ex-musician friend of mine, now running a whale watching tourism business, insisted we go out “for practice, when things come back”. Just a few miles beyond the Outer Harbor we ran into two distinct pods, Mincks and Grey whales, magnificent bio-masses on display as they doved and played in the warming spring waters.
The whales came back!
At least several species of them. And my thought was that whales that inspired Melville to write his tome, have been around a long time and hopefully will outlive us .
“…the eternal whale will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.”
When I was growing up in the ’80’s, I thought Dave Barry was the bee’s knees. Your final point reminded me of the following bit from one of his magazine columns:
“I’m told that Dostoyevsky wrote ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ to raise the question of whether there is a God. So why didn’t he just come right out and say: “Is there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me.
Other famous works could easily have been summarized in a few words:
* ‘Moby Dick’ — Don’t mess around with large whales because they symbolize nature and will kill you.
* ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ — French people are crazy.
Think of all the valuable hours we would save if authors got right to the point this way. We’d all have more time for really important activities, such as reading magazine columns.”
I don’t mean it needs to be brief but I do think that writing should be clear.
I actually don’t think the text supports this argument that nature is more powerful than man. Throughout the text Melville liberally celebrates mankind’s dominance over nature. Ahab holds the lightning chains in his hands as the ship is struck by lightning. He fixes the compass after its ruined by lightning. And not only that but Melville celebrates whaling and whalers as one of the most noble professions. Toward the end of the novel it’s only Ahab’s monomonaiacal pursuit of Moby Dick, and specifically Moby Dick, which kills him. He and others on the ship are given ample chances to change course and Ahab’s WILL doesn’t let them.
You might think that arrogance then – and lack of respect for nature – is the problem but then Melville shifts that as well at the end and Ahab just becomes some empty vessel compelled by (God?? Nature???) to pursue the whale to his eventual death.
I think Melville just didn’t have a clear idea of what he wanted to say.
It’s not a shit book because it’s too long, it’s a shit book because it’s poorly constructed, poorly conceived, and full of unclear and contradictory opinions. I think he meant it as some sort of meta-meditation on the human condition but I actually find the way he toys with the readers to be downright disrespectful and possibly even dismissive.
He’s an a-hole.
Yeah, I did get a whiff of Calvinist predestination in the whole albacore bit. If all choices lead to the same outcome, then you don’t really have a choice. You just have an outcome. Or something!
Anyway, thanks for taking us through the book during the lockdown. I will say that regardless of your frustration at the end, this will have been a valuable exercise for your brain. It forced you to contend with a lot, including an idiosyncratic style of writing that will have been formative to your way of thinking.
Shortly after I finished my undergraduate degree, I committed myself to reading the entirety of Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene,” all 35,000 lines of it (the longest poem in the English language). It was a bit tedious at first because of Spenser’s deliberately archaic style, but I soon got the hang of it and got a sense of enjoyment at how the seamlessly the language began to shape my understanding of the concepts. About halfway through, I realized that the poem was changing how I thought about the world, how everything fit together. I can’t for the life of me remember what it was, but I do remember a real sense of joy about it, and it had nothing to do with conclusion / end result of the various narratives.
“I soon got the hang of it and got a sense of enjoyment at how the seamlessly the language began to shape my understanding of the concepts. About halfway through, I realized that the poem was changing how I thought about the world, how everything fit together. ”
An intense winter of reading Shakespeare made feel something similar. More so when I thought to expand beyond the constricted dimensions of just reading and listening. These words were meant to be voiced and acted on a stage. So I saw Lawrence Olivier’s and Kenneth Brannagh’s “Hamlet” films. I saw clips of Lawrence Fishburn as Othello. It was kind of like smoking good weed. Aged 400 years.
Damn! Forgot to put the asterisk in D*ck AGAIN!
Thanks for all the great posts and thoughts about Moby Dick. I certainly admire your persistence and patience. I tried to read it once a long time ago and a few years ago I tried to listen to an audible book during the daily walks with my 2 dogs but I couldn’t make it more the 1/3 of the way. I don’t have nearly enough time to do all the things I enjoy doing and reading that book was not something I found pleasurable. I never would have the patience to spend the time needed to read the book and actually think about what Melville was trying to say
Thank you for confirming my decision not to read Moby Dick. I’ve had a copy sitting on my shelf, staring at me for a few years now, but every time I sample a chapter, it went right back up there.
Interesting that a work about, at least in large part, vanity, seems to a be an exercise in vanity.
What’s next? I’m thinking of revisiting one of my all time favorites: The Master and Margarita. A little magical realism written in secret by a persecuted man seems fitting for the current climate.
Somewhat inexplicably, I had the idea to read this same book around the same time as you. Maybe I heard you mention it but forgot and thought it was my own idea?? Regardless, I admit I quit on the book after… chapter 42, the one about the mystique of whiteness. That bit felt sort of preternaturally connected to recent events, and Melville’s harpooners being sort of chosen as stereotypes of their cultures gave me a bitter taste. Like you I also found myself tuning out as the story began to disconnect from the characters that initially made the book a relatable tale… with scraps of whaling lore (grisly but informative… ambergris, anyone?) and New England whaling culture thrown in (how odd were those Nantucket Quakers? I had no idea) the book was initially compelling. Once the interminable voyage starts though, that same sense of directionless navel gazing that you describe took hold and the book no longer kept my interest or attention. Thanks to you I no longer feel guilty for not finishing it.
I read with interest however about Melville’s personal life and the truth vs legend of this, his most famous book. Several nuggets stand out. One, he was a spoiled rotten son of wealthy New Yorkers who spent their entire dowry/inheritance without regard, this forcing preppy little Herman to have to join up with a sailing crew as a young man for four years, thus his experiences at sea that he draws on in his writing. There was an ACTUAL white sperm whale with a mean temper in those seas, whose name was Mocha D*ck (no plagiarism then?). There was also an ACTUAL Nantucket whaler naked the Essex that was rammed and sunk by a different sperm whale. Melville sort of combined these stories and borrowed generously from the detailed journaling of an actual survivor of the Essex in his book, at times word for word.
Anywho, these book club discussions are kind of fun. What are we reading next??
I’ve got Malcolm Gladwell’s “Talking to Strangers” on my shelf.
Somewhat inexplicably, I had the idea to read this same book around the same time as you. Maybe I heard you mention it but forgot and thought it was my own idea?? Regardless, I admit I quit on the book after… chapter 42, the one about the mystique of whiteness. That bit felt sort of preternaturally connected to recent events, and Melville’s harpooners being sort of chosen as stereotypes of their cultures gave me a bitter taste. Like you I also found myself tuning out as the story began to disconnect from the characters that initially made the book a relatable tale… with scraps of whaling lore (grisly but informative… ambergris, anyone?) and New England whaling culture thrown in (how odd were those Nantucket Quakers? I had no idea) the book was initially compelling. Once the interminable voyage starts though, that same sense of directionless navel gazing that you describe took hold and the book no longer kept my interest or attention. Thanks to you I no longer feel guilty for not finishing it.
I read with interest however about Melville’s personal life and the truth vs legend of this, his most famous book. Several nuggets stand out. One, he was a spoiled rotten son of wealthy New Yorkers who spent their entire dowry/inheritance without regard, this forcing preppy little Herman to have to join up with a sailing crew as a young man for four years, thus his experiences at sea that he draws on in his writing. There was an ACTUAL white sp*rm whale with a mean temper in those seas, whose name was Mocha D*ck (no plagiarism then?). There was also an ACTUAL Nantucket whaler named the Essex that was rammed and sunk by a different sp*rm whale. Melville sort of combined these stories and borrowed generously from the detailed journaling of an actual survivor of the Essex in his book, at times word for word.
Also I just have to mention how weird it is that early whalers thought that the white fluid they found in the whale’s, head which they named “spermaceti”, was the whale’s actual sp*rm?? Ishmael himself mentions this as a sort of joke of a bad name that just stuck. Also it can’t be a coincidence that a sp*rm whale is called a D*ck, can it?
Anywho, these book club discussions are kind of fun. What are we reading next??
I’ve got Malcolm Gladwell’s “Talking to Strangers” on my shelf.
Hahaha! yeah, man! Haven’t heard from you on here in a while, glad to see you back. There’s more backstory about Moby Dick that folks may not know. Apparently he saw Nathaniel Hawthorne speak once and basically fell in love like Lysander for Helena – going so far as to relocate his whole family nearer to Hawthorne. The two had quite a correspondence but there’s a reputed “lost letter” which some scholars wonder if it’s Hawthorne rebuffing Melville. Hawthorne is also credited with “opening” Melville’s eyes to Shakespearean character construction (exaggerate the flaw) and providing the inspiration for Ahab. In my Melville-Hawthorne fanfic I have Herman sending Nathan his transcript for M-D and Nathan rolling his eyes at this weird bomb of a book.
He seems like a guy who was deeply religious, loved nature – revered nature even (his short story The Bell Tower opens with one of the most romantic descriptions of a forest scene you will ever read) – but also fell in with some philosophers that he didn’t really understand but wanted to argue with.
Honestly, if he’d never written Moby Dick, I think he would have been one of those “hidden gems” of a writer that we all love discovering in some anthology. As it stands, Moby Dick is somehow both his worst work and his best.
Thank you Tim. It’s been a thoroughly enjoyable eperience to accompany you through the book. You certainly took a more thoughtful approach than I did when I read it many years ago and I learnt much from your analysis. It was one of those books that was on my ‘consider rereading’ list and you have saved me the time. I shall explore Trollope instead.
Will we suck the big kahuna or great whale when it all gets started again? I really, really don’t want us to suck.