When I started this book-reading project, Moby Dick was the white whale in the room. I hadn’t read the book, I didn’t want to read the book, and when I chose my list for the first year, I deliberately ignored it. When I came up with the second year’s list, I knew I couldn’t put it off forever: it was the one novel almost everyone asked me about.
In fact I had no actual reason to avoid it because I knew nothing about it besides the usual cultural touchstones. If someone had told me, “Hey you should read this highly metaphorical Romantic novel criticizing man’s hubris in his quest to defeat nature, featuring wild style shifts and random asides about marine biology,” I’d say hey sign me up. Plus the opening narrative is pretty engaging so I thought this was going to be a breeze.
…they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.
I always enjoyed high school literature class but I was often skeptical that the metaphors we uncovered were the product of authorial intent. Put in the context of this project, I can see that probably many of them were, but that was largely a consequence of reading so much 19th century American fiction. I’m happier decoding the repressed passion expressed in English aristocratic pleasantries than worrying about the symbology of Ahab’s, uh, pipe (if you know what I mean). It’s probably litcrit blasphemy but for the most part I gave the allegorical stuff a miss and just kept reading.
The biology digressions are probably interesting to history-of-science types but mostly I found them tiresome because I know it’s all wrong. Also I realize this is lame of me but I could not stop being annoyed by Ishmael calling the whales fish.
I did get a kick out of the Gothic Romanticism of it all: the more heavy-handed, the better. For example, I loved this:
For all [the whale's] old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.
I give Melville props for rolling this all into one sentence: compassion for animals, criticism of organized religion, and “gay bridals.” In fact I loved the style of the prose throughout, but it just wasn’t enough to carry my enthusiasm: less ambergris, more action.
I didn’t watch any adaptations but apparently there’s a 1998 TV movie version starring Patrick Stewart. One of the few user comments on IMDB is, “She blows.”
