![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=thesheivari-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1503280780\")
by Herman Melville<\/p>\n![\"0679725253.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/0679725253.jpg\")
I’m going to have to do a couple excerpts on this one.<\/p>\n
The book is dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne: “In token of my admiration for his genius this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne”. That moves me. They were dear friends and there were many dark years in Melville’s life, when his work was either not being published or being published and ignored when Hawthorne was one of Melville’s only champions. Melville opened his heart to Hawthorne, in letters – about what he was going through, what he was working on with Moby Dick<\/i> – and, like a great artistic friend and mentor should, Hawthorne never said, “Don’t you think you need to scale it down a bit?” or “Who will want to read 20 consecutive chapters about the etymology of blubber?” No. Hawthorne basically just kept saying to his friend, “Keep going. It’s brilliant. Keep going.”<\/p>\n
Michael Dorda wrote, in 2005, about this extraordinary friendship: “In Melville’s lifetime few recognized or even suspected the writer’s exceptional genius — but Nathaniel Hawthorne came close, and the two men established a long-lasting friendship. After their first encounters, the writer of Polynesian adventures went back to his romantic tale about “Whale Fishery” and, in Delbanco’s words, “tore it up from within.” Melville deepened and amplified his novel, enlarged it in every sense, with the obvious hope of joining what he called, in an essay on Hawthorne, that fraternity where “genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.” With wonderful appropriateness, then, the author of The Scarlet Letter — which appeared in 1850 — became the dedicatee of the following year’s Moby-Dick.”<\/p>\n
After Hawthorne read the entirety of the book, in draft form, he let Melville know that he was finished – and not just that he was finished, but that he thought it was a work of genius – and Melville responded, “A sense of unspeakable security is in me at this moment, on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.”<\/p>\n
Wicked? Why? Well, as EM Forster notes (in an excerpt below), the world of Moby Dick<\/i> is a godless one. Even the sermons said on the ship have nothing to do with Christ. The God here is the sea. And – with Ahab – the God is his own mad ambition. That is all he worships. And yes, it warps his soul, makes him go crazy. There is no redemption possible. Only oblivion. Which, of course, is what happens.<\/p>\n
In this biographical sketch of Melville<\/a> it is said:<\/p>\n Moby-Dick<\/em> was misunderstood by those who read and reviewed it and it sold only some 3,000 copies during Melville’s lifetime. The book can be read as a thrilling sea story, an examination of the conflict between man and nature – the battle between Ahab and the whale is open to many interpretations. It is a pioneer novel but the prairie is now sea, or an allegory on the Gold Rush, but now the gold is a whale. Jorge Luis Borges has seen in the universe of Moby-Dick<\/em> “a cosmos (a chaos) not only perceptibly malignant as the Gnostics had intuited, but also irrational, like the cosmos in the hexameters of Lucretius.” (from The Total Library<\/em>, 1999) Clare Spark has connected in Hunting Captain Ahab<\/em> (2001) different interpretations with changing political atmosphere – depending on the point of view Ahab has been seen as a Promethean hero or a forefather of the twentieth-century totalitarian dictators. The director John Huston questions in his film version (1956) which one, Ahab or the whale, is the real Monster.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It is not a book that can be easily classified. It still stands alone, so many years after publication. It’s an anomaly. It’s not a regular novel. The point of view switches. The book starts with the famous line “Call me Ishmael” (which I’ll get to in a minute) – which sets us up strongly in a first-person universe. But then there are events on the boat that Ishmael tells us of – that Ishmael was not a party to, was not present for – and then the long omniscent professor of marine-biology sections where the whale is broken down into its separate parts. There is no real plot, per se – although the over-riding thrust is, of course, Ahab’s pursuit of the whale. But when you stand Moby Dick<\/i> next to the other great sweeping novels of the 19th century – Middlemarch<\/i>, Jane Eyre<\/i>, all of Dickens, all of Hawthorne, all of Austen – you can see how different Moby Dick is … it is almost like a voice directly from the future – from our post-modern future. Where the narrator is fluid, where the events are commented on – not only by the narrator but by an outside eye … where things are broken down and taken apart to be examined – and then put back together again. I still don’t think today’s authors have caught up to Melville, though. He still stands alone in what he accomplished in Moby Dick<\/i>. It is a singular event, this book. A comet across the sky – that appears only once in a millennia.<\/p>\n I read Moby Dick<\/em> in high school and despised it. I thought it was one of the most boring pointless things I had ever read. It was on our summer reading list, and I clearly remember forcing myself to read the damn thing, during the dog days of August … nearly crying from the psychological boredom. Whatever, man … Moby Dick, Captain Ahab, endless discourses on blubber … I was 16. I DIDN’T GET IT.<\/p>\n Cut to many many years later. 2001, to be exact. I read it in the spring of 2001. Around that time I decided to systematically go back and re-read all of the books I had been forced to read in high school (which, obviously, made me despise them at the time). I read The Scarlet Letter<\/em> (excerpt here<\/a>) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles<\/em> (excerpt here<\/a>) and many others. Moby Dick<\/em> is such a massive book, and I had hated it so much when I first read it that I hesitated to put myself through it again.<\/p>\n And honestly – it blew the top of my head off. Every page. Every page.<\/p>\n I have rarely had such an exciting reading experience as that one. I didn’t want it to end. I underlined passages feverishly. I put exclamations points in the margins next to particularly amazing sentences. Honestly. It blew me away.<\/p>\n Re-reading Scarlet Letter<\/em>, et al, was also really fun – and yes, I renewed my appreciation for those old books, and realized: “Ohhh, okay, yup. THAT’S why the dern thing is a classic” … but none of them flattened me as much as Moby Dick<\/em>.<\/p>\n By a weird coincidence, my friend Kate was also re-reading Moby Dick<\/i> at the same time – a fact we discovered during one of our phone conversations – and we both got SO excited – because, honestly, who in your real life wants to sit around talking about Moby Dick<\/i>? Who will believe you unless they have read it themselves? So when she said, “I’m reading Moby Dick<\/i> now …” I FREAKED OUT. I remember I was living in our ridiculous apartment on Willow at the time – where my room was the size of a closet – and speaking of which, I had no closet – and I had a fold-up bed which HAD to be folded up every day in order for me to have the room to walk to my damn door. Mkay? And I remember I sat perched on my fold-up bed, talking with Kate for a couple of hours about Moby Dick<\/i>. We both got our copies of the book out, and read passages to each other, and talked about them. The chapter that freaked me out the most (and yes, I mean freaked out) was one called “The Whiteness of the Whale” – which I’ll get to later … and I hadn’t even mentioned it, and at one point Kate said, in a tone of hushed awe, “What about that chapter ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’??” This is one of the MANY reasons why Kate and I are such good friends. <\/p>\n The book, in high school, seemed so far from relevant … to my life … and also: there was nothing even remotely recognizable. At least in Scarlet Letter<\/em> you deal with social issues and sexual issues – stuff I could latch onto as an adolescent … but Moby Dick<\/em>? I’m supposed to give a hoo-hah about the spout-hole and what it means and why it’s important?<\/p>\n Also, except for the blowsy woman who serves Ishmael chowder in the 2nd or 3rd chapter, and the brief mention of Ahab’s new wife at home, there are NO women in this book. NONE. Now: I wasn’t a big girlie girlie book reader – Huck Finn <\/em>was one of my favorite books growing up … but there are at least SOME girls in that book. Women are not completely banished to the sidelines. Not at all. But Moby Dick<\/em>? This is a universe not just of men – but a conscious rejection of the female. If you look at the book in another light (as Camille Paglia does so brilliantly and so bizarrely in her chapter on it in Sexual Personae<\/em>) – the whale could be seen as the “spirit” of female energy in the world. It is obvious that the great white whale is a male – but Paglia theorizes that something else might be going on there. Whaling boats were 100% male, they lived out on the ocean for 3 or 4 years at a time. There were no women. None. But nature? The earth? Aren’t these things often referred to as “she”? Paglia thinks that although there are no actual women human beings in Moby Dick<\/i>, the female is not just present, but omnipresent. She is the sea, the waves, the fish, the storms … she is what cannot be controlled, no matter how hard the men try. This does make sense, in light of Melville’s off-screen life, and his issues with women. It’s a fascinating way to look at the book.<\/p>\n E.M. Forster said, in his wonderful published lecture, Aspects of the Novel<\/i>:<\/p>\n “Moby Dick<\/em> is an easy book, as long as we read it as a yarn or an account of whaling interspersed with snatches of poetry. But as soon as we catch the song in it, it grows difficult and immensely important. Narrowed and hardened into words the spiritual theme of Moby Dick<\/em> is as follows: a battle against evil conducted too long or in the wrong way. The White Whale is evil, and Captain Ahab is warped by constant pursuit until his knight-errantry turns into revenge. These are words — a symbol for the book if we want one — but they do not carry us much further than the acceptance of the book as a yarn — perhaps they carry us backwards, for they may mislead us into harmonizing the incidents, and so losing their roughness and richness. The idea of a contest we may retain: all action is a battle, the only happiness is peace. But contest between what? We get false if we say that it is between good and evil or between two unreconciled evils. The essential in Moby Dick, its prophetic song, flows athwart the action and the surface morality like an undercurrent. It lies outside words…we cannot catch the words of the song. There has been stress, with intervals: but no explicable solution, certainly no reaching back into universal pity and love; no ‘Gentlemen, I’ve had a good dream.’<\/p>\n The extraordinary nature of the book appears in two of its early incidents — the sermon about Jonah and the friendship with Queequeg.<\/p>\n The sermon has nothing to do with Christianity. It asks for endurance or loyalty without hope of reward. The preacher “kneeling in the pulpit’s bows, folded his large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.” Then he works up and up and concludes on a note of joy that is far more terrifying than a menace…<\/p>\n Immediately after the sermon, Ishmael makes a passionate alliance with the cannibal Queequeg, and it looks for a moment that the book is to be a saga of blood-brotherhood. But human relationships mean little to Melville, and after a grotesque and violent entry, Queequeg is almost forgotten. Almost — not quite…<\/p>\n Moby Dick<\/em> is full of meanings: its meaning is a different problem. It is wrong to turn the Delight or the coffin into symbols, because even if the symbolism is correct, it silences the book. Nothing can be stated about Moby Dick<\/em> except that it is a contest. The rest is song.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Brilliant. “The rest is song”. And yes, once you catch the tune of Moby Dick<\/i>, once you stop looking for conventional pathways, and plot, the things we are used to … all you can hear is the song. I love his point about how if you try to pin down the symbolism – you “silence” the book. I think that is right on.<\/p>\n I’ll be doing a couple different excerpts – choosing them as I go. The book is so rich, so detailed, every page has a psychological gem on it … It’s an extraordinary accomplishment, and, like I mentioned before, still stands all by itself.<\/p>\n William Blake once wrote:<\/p>\n …and now we saw it, it was the head of Leviathan, his forehead was divided into streaks of green and purple like those on a tyger’s forehead. Soon we saw his mouth and red gills hang just above the raging foam tinging the black deep with beams of blood, advancing toward us with all the fury of a spiritual existence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ahab would have totally understood that.<\/p>\n This excerpt is from the first chapter: “Loomings”.<\/p>\n