A Few Words on Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

I finally got around to reading Moby-Dick last fall. Getting to the end of it, I felt a sense of accomplishment at having completed the struggle, since the author seems to have done his best to lose his less hardy readers before delivering his best stuff. That feeling of accomplishment, combined with the excitement and obliteration of the climax and ending, left me with a euphoric thrill; but there was much that was dry or irritating on the way. Melville presents a thrilling sea-adventure, with lots of action, interesting characters and colourful detail about life on 19th-century whaling ship; and, connected to and symbolised by the story, a philosophical treatise full of ideas that are still exciting now, and must have been shattering at the time it was published. Grafted on to this duality is a an exhaustive description of whales, whaling, and all things whale-related. This description is packed among the already weighty cargo of the adventure and the treatise, and I found myself frustrated that the pacing was frustratingly broken. Melville spends a lot of time elaborating on his symbols, discussing all their possibilities, their antecedents, their mythical and religious importance, and so on until sea-sickness sets in. I’m a child of a different age, and I don’t admire his explicit dwelling on his own symbols. I prefer, as writer and reader, that an author lets things stand on their own rights, and leaves the reader to decide on their symbolic values. In other words, I think the book might be just as good if it were simply the tale of Ahab’s hunt for the white whale, and we were left to deduce the nature of the symbolic rudder steering the story. Melville, however, had definite ideas he wanted to impart, and he couldn’t just say them aloud, due to the repressive culture (Calvinist upper-class America) that was his audience. I can see why he would choose this treatise-within-an-adventure structure: the desire to get through the suspense of the plot forces one to continue on through the drier tracts, where he imparts the ideas his readers might not have wanted to hear. The taught keel of the adventure cuts through the stormy waters of his ideas. (I apologize for my watery puns. After reading this book, one can’t resist them, just as one can’t help greeting friends with ‘Ahoy!’) But when further burdened by an abundance of dry, factual information, modern, attention-reduced readers may be forgiven a sense of impatience.
I loved the beginning, consisting of some 10 pages of citations regarding whales, though others have said they found this to be a cruel introduction. It appealed to the encyclopaedia-reader in me, and in its lack of thematic organization, seemed to open up a world of possibilities. By the time I got to his chapter, “The Whiteness of the Whale”, less than a third of the way through, discussing all the meanings and occurrences of whiteness was starting to seem like more of an obfuscation than the presentation of an argument. Later, after learning more than I perhaps cared to know about the physiology of whales, starting with the erroneous declaration that they are fish, and constantly referring to them as murderous monsters (I’ll sit proudly on my seat of historical perspective, here), he antagonized me further with such chapters as “Measurement of the Whales Skeleton”, “The Fossil Whale”, and “Does the Whale Diminish?”, and I began to suspect him of deliberate cruelty. It is true that his readers were unfamiliar with whales, and he needed to both fully describe them and support his descriptions as much as possible with facts. But the story might have functioned just as well if the creature in question had been imaginary. Why not? If one of his ideas is that the pursuit of God is destructive, and makes us mad and even evil (especially when God does not want to be found), why not have God symbolized by a creature of the imagination?
It is interesting to me that many consider Moby-Dick to be the quintessential American Novel, and that I consider Moby-Dick and certain other examples of the American cultural gift to the world to be too explicit. That being said, Melville does not narrow the reader’s choices, does not force them to accept a single, happy outcome or meaning; rather, he explains all the potential meanings until the hapless reader (me) feels he is drowning in a tepid sea of meaning. This, as with most criticisms, comes down to a matter of taste. I have no doubt that Melville accomplished what he set out to do with this great novel; and therefore, it can only be called a success. My tastes, however, are for the implicit, the unspoken, and the inferred. It is the hidden nature of his true argument that intrigue me.
Let there be no doubt that I consider Melville to be a great writer. I may dislike his pacing, but I love his prose. It is powerful, and this force, combined with his meter and rhythm, are Shakespearean in effect. There are lines and passages that made me want to leap up and shake my fist at the sky. It is a rare gift to be able to express the true passions of the tortured human soul in mere words, and Melville shows his mastery again and again, unleashing storms of prose to express the madness of his demented Captain Ahab as he bends both man and the gods to his obsessive ends.
I may not be a great scholar with a hyphenated last name, and I have dedicated no more effort to the study of this great novel than to read it once through, but I present my reactions as humble reader of books. I’ve flipped through a few short commentaries on Moby-Dick, most of which were dead boring (D.H. Lawrence’s being the readable exception), and Edward F. Edinger’s “Melville’s Moby-Dick: An American Nekyia”, whose title I don’t even understand, has been sitting on my bedside stack for some time. I’m sure there’s more to be gleaned from further study. Some Great-And-Weighty Novels inspire further pursuit of the author’s work (War and Peace, for example,) but despite my sense of awe when finishing the book, I’m not inclined to read more Melville. Not yet.