Moby-Dick

It came to be, in the winter of this year, that, having finished Herbert’s Dune and seeking something new to read, though not yet ready to read Dune Messiah, I came upon an untouched paperback in my bookcase, and, willing to plunge into a nautical adventure, I began reading Moby Dick. This being so, I, prepared to read a legendary classic and unaware of the Goliathan task before me, embarked upon a thee month navigation of dense prose which, in the end, I juggled with five other books; Stoker’s gothic masterpiece Dracula, for I am subscribed for the Dracula Daily newsletter; Crummey’s Sweetland, a novel I read with utmost haste to catch its adaptation ere it departed the silver screen; the aforementioned Dune Messiah, which I began late one evening when, finding myself tucked snugly in my bed and missing my copy of Moby Dick, I reached for the nearest book I had on hand; and ultimately God’s own Holy Bible, which I began reading for the express purpose of understanding the myriad of biblical references Miller employs. Nor was my reading in any way hastened — or indeed unimpeded — by the twisting, winding sentences one must reread twice ere grasping fully; a poetic labyrinth of prose one cannot parse without losing oneself of times; and the White Whale himself more terrible, more loathsome than any mere bull-headed Minotaur that Pasiphaë could muster! Alas, humble thyself Daedalus! Thy labyrinth may house a beast of Neptune’s own twisted design, but the Minotaur could do not but flail and drown when met with his elder brother, the leviathan!

I made a conscious effort to read more classic literature this year and this was top of my list. Unfortunately I was disappointed. What I was expecting was a swashbuckling high-seas adventure. What I got was an over-long, plodding narrative stuffed with excessive pseudo-scientific descriptions of the whaling industry. One hundred pages in and our narrator still hadn't set foot on a boat which only caught up with the fabled white whale in the last three chapters of the book (from page 514).

"A great meter is no mere implement, like pen or typewriter, but a keyboard a young poet learns to master, exploring its range and subtleties, stretching its capabilities of harmony and expressiveness. Merely to accept the meter as given by one's predecessors, to write one's verses “in” iambic pentameter, is to assist at the death of a metrical form and perhaps one's own poetry. The demise of iambic pentameter as the chief meter of English poetry probably owes much to its coming to be understood even by poets themselves as an available prosodic form, a meter to write poems “in,” a Roman road, rather than as a kind of heroic adventure or even a haunted house."[1]

Melville's Moby-Dick: or, the Whale is like the “Roman road” for the English novel. It's wildly inventive, riotously funny, excellently written, has an almost mystical sense of atmosphere, introduces one of the most transcendentally fascinating characters in the whole of world literature in Captain Ahab. And above all, it's simply a great joy to read.2

The greatest novels in the English language are not only excellent narratives; they enrich the language and show its beauty. They're exhilarating, they energize, they inspire. Melville's Moby-Dick certainly fits the bill, and only McCarthy's Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) has recently come close to replicating said grandeur of reading, and in many ways I believe it's a worthy companion to this book. They go hand in hand, and for this reason I invoked Wright's quotation. Melville is so all-encompassing here it's difficult not to think of Moby-Dick as an emblem of creative writing. I think Joyce's Ulysses (1922) is the logical continuation of the inherent complexity of Melville's thought, something we might call modernism. In Moby-Dick there's a sermon, essayistic, encyclopedic descriptions of whaling, sudden leaps into play acting, multiple points of view in narration, soliloquies. And the feeling one has is that all of this belongs there and without which it wouldn't be Moby-Dick. That's a sign of a great novel: that there's no superfluity, everything belongs, every particular creates the essentials.[3]

And then there's Captain Ahab. “He's full of riddles”, says Stubb after being told off by the Captain, and that's exactly what so fascinates in him. Cormac McCarthy definitely modeled Judge Holden after Ahab, so alike are the two with their diabolical and mystical aura. They're mere men but still beyond the narrative. His grandness is Shakespearean[4] It's boisterous, energetic, mesmerizing.

The Penguin that I own is quite nice, it has a good introduction and some supplements at the back: a list of variants between editions, annotations as well as maps and images. The annotations at their very best give insight into Melville's writing that becomes essential in reading the novel. Such is the gloss on Ahab's “Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!”: “Melville remarked in a letter to Hawthorne (June 29, 1851) that this is the secret ‘motto' of the book.”

I have also listened to an audiobook version of the book, narrated by Frank Muller. It's one of the best audiobooks I've heard. He reads it a bit fast at times, but it's his rhythm and the voices he produces that make it so utterly enjoyable.

Endnotes:

[1] George T. Wright, Shakespeare's Metrical Art, 18.

[2] I know there are people who would rathe jump out of the window than read it, so there.

[3] Again I hear somebody trying to jump out the window.

[4] “I'd strike the sun if it insulted me” in chapter 36; “What I've dared, I've willed; and what I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad—Starbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer” in chapter 37.

2 October, 2011