Moby-Dick

Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851)
During the thicker, chewier novels, I'll occasionally take a break around the half way mark to read something—or even anything which feels a bit less like being at work; because I like to enjoy what I read, that usually being the entire fucking point of reading something in the first place. Sometimes if I discover that I've actually been reading an overextended gusher of piss bladdered by an idiot who doesn't deserve my patronage - as occurred with Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, I'll give up, just stop reading, perhaps even hurl the book across the room and switch to something better. This didn't really feel like an option with Moby-Dick, given that the first hundred or so pages are astonishing and that it has a certain reputation, but I reached the point where I needed a break, and in fact ended up taking two separate holidays - about half way and then again just before the end - still with no fucking whale in sight. I read no less than ten other, considerably more enjoyable books during those two periods of rest. Some of them were comic books, although I'm not sure that necessarily has any bearing on Melville's inability to hold my attention, aside from that Superman was, on this occasion, more interesting than - off the top of my head - the entire chapter describing a bit of stick against which harpoons may be propped when not in use.

Actually, the chapter about rope was probably worse.

Fucking rope.

To start at the beginning, I assume we all know what Moby-Dick is and what it does, more or less. Of course, it's worth keeping in mind that, having read Superman comics, my twenty-first century expectations may perhaps be unfairly accustomed to the sweet, sugary taste of an instant populist fix, meaning I'm unlikely to be well disposed towards an entire fucking chapter about a piece of rope the more plodding, archaic narratives of the nineteenth century; although actually I've read plenty of novels approximately contemporary with this one and haven't had a problem, or at least no problem of the kind I encountered trying to frog march my attention span towards the chapter in which shit actually happens. It may be that Moby-Dick had less work to do in 1851, back when the world's oceans were as much unknown territory as outer space became during the century which followed; and it's worth remembering that the majority of the novel inhabits the realms of water, air, fire to a lesser extent, and with earth as nothing more reliable than the deck beneath the feet of its unfortunate cast. So it's a novel which creates a world of its own, far removed from anything familiar, and maybe that was enough in 1851.

The first one-hundred or so pages, during which Ishmael meets and forges a rudimentary friendship with Queequeg, his future shipmate, are wonderfully vivid, strange and engrossing, and seem to promise much for the rest of the book. Then we set sail, meet Ahab, and settle into a droning testimony about whales and how to kill them which surely didn't need to be anything like so long as it was, and which feels as though the author is desperately scrabbling for fascinating facts by which to keep us interested while nothing happens due to no-one having yet spotted the whale which took Ahab's leg. I can see how the immersive level of detail - mostly gore and slaughter reduced to an industrial process - and the duration of its long-winded delivery might serve to impress upon the reader just how much of a whaling trip is spent hanging around, and how much is at stake, but it nevertheless reads like the work of someone without anything much to say who nevertheless doesn't know when to shut up. Even D.H. Lawrence noted:

Nobody can be more clownish, more clumsy and sententiously in bad taste, than Melville, even in a great book like Moby-Dick. He preaches and he holds forth because he's not sure of himself. And he holds forth, often, so amateurishly.

Melville will tell us that at this juncture the delivery of my news must apply itself to a more earthy subject than might delight listeners' ears, namely that I would deliver information concerning and detailing my intent to adjourn to a secluded spot so fashioned for the broad and impolitic custom of its dispensation, rather than guys, I'm going for a shit, okay?; and it becomes exhausting, just as America's love of ceremony, capes, ionic columns, and the longest, long speeches ever has always been exhausting, and an overcompensation. Should any of it deliver us unto anything of consequence, it would be fine or at least appropriate, but it doesn't. The Ahab of myth may be a man driven by his own mania, but the guy in this book is just a bit of a cunt, and probably less nutty than you would expect of a man who once had his leg bitten off by a whale; and the novel may well be about the death of God, or proof of how little the universe cares about any of us, but Melville seems to depend on scale alone for the communication of his message, whatever it was - if he even knew.

The literary potential of whaling as a metaphor is astonishing, at least as of the mid-nineteenth century, given the whale as the largest living creature then known to mankind - something more like an ecology than an animal. A few years ago, an acquaintance of mine developed a theory about the influence of the whale on human history - all founded on many world cultures supporting creation myths based around giant oceanic monsters - Tiamat and Cipactli to name but two - and the apparent global prevalence of solar symbols combining a circle with a chevron which, my friend suggested, might be derived from whale vertebrae. There was more to it, and although it was overly reliant upon coincidental resemblance and didn't really explain anything which wasn't already supported by a decent explanation, the idea was nevertheless an impressive attempt to grapple with our experience of reality and the assumptions we make about it; and I really feel that Moby-Dick should have done the same thing, but better.