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A review by tmaltman
Moby-Dick: Or, the Whale by Herman Melville
5.0
Brief Thoughts on Long Novels, entry #5
Of all the long novels I’ve read this year, Moby Dick has been the most thrilling and confounding. Confounding, because Melville bombards the reader with an entire encyclopedia’s worth of 19th-century whaling esotera, from the economics of the industry to every last detail in the known world about the science of cetology. Of all the classic long novels I’ve read this year, none has a lower rating on Goodreads. It equally inspires both love and hate more than a century after its publication. This novel ruined Herman Melville in his lifetime, selling so poorly he took a job as a customs official and didn’t publish another book–the slender Billy Budd–until shortly before his death decades later. Yes, all of this is true, AND YET, I count this book as one of the greatest American novels ever written. Why?
Shakespearian in its majesty, Hawthornian in its darkness, it’s one of the bravest, most fearless books I’ve ever read. And why has nobody ever told me before about Melville’s sense of humor and irony? “Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian,” the narrator Ishmael opines early on, as he shares a bed with Queequeg, a heavily-tattooed pagan harpooner. (Homo-erotic undercurrents run through this book, leading some scholars to speculate about the author’s own unhappy marriage.) This book packs in madness and hilarity, and part of the madness has to do with the sheer damn poetry of it all. Melville had no college education–a whaling ship was my Yale College and my Harvard, he once said–but he had recently discovered Shakespeare and fallen in love with the plays and it shows on nearly every page. (Like King Lear, Ahab glooms with tragic hubris.) This is a book written by a man drunk on language, and the lyrical prose practically sings on the page.
Consider a passage like this, as one of the tragic characters, Pip the stowaway, jumps overboard and begins to drown: “The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.” Wow, I found myself writing in the margins many times. I loved this book. It’s profound, maddening, divisive, a poetic epic that is often read as a foreshadowing of the great tragedy of the Civil War. It's a novel, in short, that will endure for all time. I’ll leave you here with Ishmael’s presentiment: “I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.”
Of all the long novels I’ve read this year, Moby Dick has been the most thrilling and confounding. Confounding, because Melville bombards the reader with an entire encyclopedia’s worth of 19th-century whaling esotera, from the economics of the industry to every last detail in the known world about the science of cetology. Of all the classic long novels I’ve read this year, none has a lower rating on Goodreads. It equally inspires both love and hate more than a century after its publication. This novel ruined Herman Melville in his lifetime, selling so poorly he took a job as a customs official and didn’t publish another book–the slender Billy Budd–until shortly before his death decades later. Yes, all of this is true, AND YET, I count this book as one of the greatest American novels ever written. Why?
Shakespearian in its majesty, Hawthornian in its darkness, it’s one of the bravest, most fearless books I’ve ever read. And why has nobody ever told me before about Melville’s sense of humor and irony? “Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian,” the narrator Ishmael opines early on, as he shares a bed with Queequeg, a heavily-tattooed pagan harpooner. (Homo-erotic undercurrents run through this book, leading some scholars to speculate about the author’s own unhappy marriage.) This book packs in madness and hilarity, and part of the madness has to do with the sheer damn poetry of it all. Melville had no college education–a whaling ship was my Yale College and my Harvard, he once said–but he had recently discovered Shakespeare and fallen in love with the plays and it shows on nearly every page. (Like King Lear, Ahab glooms with tragic hubris.) This is a book written by a man drunk on language, and the lyrical prose practically sings on the page.
Consider a passage like this, as one of the tragic characters, Pip the stowaway, jumps overboard and begins to drown: “The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.” Wow, I found myself writing in the margins many times. I loved this book. It’s profound, maddening, divisive, a poetic epic that is often read as a foreshadowing of the great tragedy of the Civil War. It's a novel, in short, that will endure for all time. I’ll leave you here with Ishmael’s presentiment: “I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing.”