We close out the week with Alan Bernstein’s revisiting of Melville’s classic story of men and the sea.
I just finished reading Moby Dick for the first time in more than 40 years. My recollection was a work that was lengthy, ungainly, ponderous, and poorly structured, containing long stretches of boring material dealing with whale science and whale hunting, within the plot framework of a revenge-obsessed madman seeking release by finding and killing his nemesis, the great white whale.
I cannot tell you how great was my surprise to have formed an utterly different assessment after rereading the book. Instead of the heavy read I expected, I found a work that had logic and structure, very little feel of a 19th-century canonical literary masterpiece, stretches of humor and high comedy interspersed throughout, exciting action episodes, and an engrossing discussion of whale science and whale hunting tailored to the demands of the book and the needs of the reader. Even Captain Ahab comes across as more than a one-dimensional man haunted to the point of insanity by his monomania. I also found a self-contained minor theological and literary masterpiece in chapter 9, “The Sermon,” inspired by and modeled after the spiritual sustenance provided by those who ministered to communities of seafarers.
I also found impressive the sheer exuberance of Melville’s writing. His is a powerful, playful, and joyous prose employed masterfully to propel his story from its famous opening sentence, “Call me Ishmael,” to its inevitable and tragic conclusion. On one level Moby Dick can be read as a general meditation on evil, madness, and obsession. On another, the book chronicles Captain Ahab’s destruction of his own body and soul. On still another level the book attempts to make sense of mass psychology in a setting where a group of men (in this case the crew of the Pequod) willingly follows a course of action that they know will lead to their own destruction. And probably because Melville was interested in individual human psychology as well, he peopled his book with an array of human beings from all corners of the globe brought together for a fateful voyage.
While there is a degree of caricature and stereotype in his depiction of these people, the point that Melville emphasizes repeatedly is their basic common humanity and decency despite their individual foibles and differences. For ultimately, Moby Dick is a book about people, not about a whale.
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I wholeheartedly agree with your assessment of MD. I read it a little under three years ago (for the first time) and was so blown away with what I found. I had started the book several times but the first time I finished it it totally made sense. Melville wrote the book with several little traps that make it seem that the book is about a whale (i.e. the chapter on Cetyology, etc.) when it reality it is about people and especially the difference between land lubbers and real seamen.
One of the first projects I had to do in library school at Queens College revolved around Meville’s life and times and I was so surprised to learn about his “failings” and “successes”. I especially liked the fact that the book was torn to shreds by critics and Melville’s career really winded down after the “commercial failing” of MB. Funny thing is that he started his career with such pomp and circumstance and fame with those sea faring novels that he wrote. But, they were way more fluff than the amazing and poetic prose of MB. Anyways, here’s to Melville and MB…
Wow what a great review and more so because I hated it so much I missed just about everything you found in it. I guess that is why it is great to see so many different reviews on one book because so many people can take different things from it.
[…] illustrates his skill as a teacher with numerous literary references, most often to Moby-Dick, although he vacillates to his sense of childhood frivolity with frequent mentions of Carle’s […]