Hi friends,
I’ve spent the last six weeks immersed in the reading of Moby-Dick. As a result, this edition is slightly cetacean.
If you haven’t read it, I would describe it as a blend of delightful, bizarre and profound. And if you still have PTSD because you had to read it in high-school, trust in the endurance you've earned over the years to carry you through.
Until next time,
Florian
The wisdom of Moby-Dick
Moby-Dick pulls off literature's greatest bait-and-switch. You sign up for a thrilling tale of a captain's vengeful whale hunt, but find yourself caught in the net of Melville's PhD in whaling. Yet this “switch” is the book's true gift.
Three aspects stuck out to me in particular:
First, you quickly realize that a cetacean tale branches out into a variety of fields from economics to ecology, art and religion. The lesson Melville teaches us is that no topic is inherently boring if we learn how to pull on its many threads. And sure, the specifics of whale blubber might feel tedious at first. But soon enough you’re learning about American society’s dependence on whale oil for lighting in the 19th century. Perhaps more importantly, Melville’s multidisciplinary examination of whales serves as a warning about the limits of human knowledge. In a chapter entirely dedicated to denigrating artists for their “erroneous pictures of whales”, he concludes that “the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of [the whale’s] living contour, is by going a whaling yourself.” Ultimately, there is no substitute for direct experience.
Second, while on the surface, Moby-Dick is a tale of revenge, it is also the Swiss Army Knife of metaphors. Melville uses the whale to dispense wisdom and social commentary.
Take this passage, one of my favorites, where he suggests we should model our behavior on a feature of whale physiology:
“Oh man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.”
In other parts of the book, Melville deploys his whale-as-a-metaphor to share his take on a variety of topics from the quest for truth to the limits of science and the greed of men. American linguist George Lakoff offers this brilliantly simple definition of a metaphor as “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another”. It’s a fascinating paradox that we humans seem to be better at understanding one thing through the lens of another and entirely different thing. It’s no coincidence that from the Bible to Aesop’s tales, wisdom has traveled across centuries on the back of good metaphors.
Finally, the book is an ode to a childlike wonder and curiosity. In one of my favorite chapters, “The Fountain”, Ishmael seeks to understand whether the spouting of the whale is water or vapor, a question that science seems not to have resolved at the time of writing. It’s not so much the answer that’s interesting but how Ishmael puts on his scientist hat to formulate a hypothesis. We’re lucky to live in an age where curiosity can be instantly gratified by a query and a click. But it also means we have relinquished the joy of scientific inquiry. The next time my five year old asks me why it’s dark at night, I’ll summon Melville before turning to Claude.
So on the surface, Moby-Dick is about a guy chasing a whale. But as soon as you take the plunge, it turns into a philosophical blue hole. It’s an invitation to be curious about the world and to look at it from different lenses. It encourages us to seek the truth but remain cautious about the blinding effect of theory versus experience.
Moby-Dick: First Reactions
Melville’s book was a bit of a flop when it came out. Here are some extracts from scathing reviews it received when the book was published in 1851 (Source: Lit Hub):
“The author has read up laboriously to make a show of cetalogical learning … Herman Melville is wise in this sort of wisdom. He uses it as stuffing to fill out his skeleton story. Bad stuffing it makes, serving only to try the patience of his readers, and to tempt them to wish both him and his whales at the bottom of an unfathomable sea …”
London Literary Gazette, December 6 1851
“This is an ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition. The style of his tale is in places disfigured by mad (rather than bad) English; and its catastrophe is hastily, weakly, and obscurely managed …”
–Henry F. Chorley, London Athenaeum, October 25 1851
“We have no intention of quoting any passages just now from Moby Dick. [...] But if there are any of our readers who wish to find examples of bad rhetoric, involved syntax, stilted sentiment and incoherent English, we will take the liberty of recommending to them this precious volume of Mr. Melville’s.”
–New York United States Magazine and Democratic Review, January, 1852
Moby-Dick: Illustrations
In 1930, a new edition illustrated by Rockwell Kent largely contributed to bringing the maritime tale back from the abyss. Sometimes a picture truly is worth a thousand words.
Lateral Thought
“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation.”
Vladimir Nabokov
I read (and enjoyed) Moby Dick as an adult. I am at a loss about why, out of all literature in English, a teacher would choose this one to inflict on teenagers. *Billy Budd* maybe, but not the meandering whale tale. That one should only be read by choice.
Dark Flashback. He of course wrote in the language of the day, which during those confused teen years I found not just hard to understand, but I really didn't want to understand. It was the 70s. It was bad enough that we had to read one of Shakespeare's plays a year.
On the topic of rereading I agree, it just isn't all there the first time. I'm almost finished reading the scroll version of Kerouac's On The Road. Idiot publishers.