I've been waiting nearly two months to say: What an incoherent book!
Moby Dick was not at all what I expected. And maybe that was my fault: I came in knowing very little about it, save its celebrity.
But celebrity? This hulking tome (this monstrosity!) is a book in search of itself. It's part encyclopedia; part travelogue; and part, I guess you could say, novel. And then, too, there's the tedious attention paid to cetology - which makes the book part hack biology as well.
Melville was writing at a time before much was known - I mean really known - about whales. And he goes to great lengths to educate his readership. The trouble is that he writes in such a circuitous manner, and with such unyielding detail, that only most avoid whale enthusiasts can stick with him. It's like Melville's conducted an unending Google search: and by the end, the various queries start to resemble each other. That's the confusion: there's so much here, and yet there's not enough form or rhetorical consistency to endow the book with meaning.
Moby Dick is essentially divided in three: the first bit provides a dusty, candle-lit view of nineteenth-century New Bedford. I enjoyed this section and thought there was something there. The second part, though, which stretches for more than four hundred pages, amounts to a quest gone wrong. At nearly every turn, where adventure might reasonably lurk (and assume narrative form), we're confronted with impossibly arcane characterizations of whales. All a reader can do is keep swimming ahead of the sharks. The third, and final, part of the book was actually the most enjoyable: here, Melville describes the chase, and says something (enfin!) about the effects of megalomania.
There are sections when Melville writes quite beautifully, and his depiction of Ahab's thrusting his harpoon into the White Whale was a moment of great catharsis - for Ahab, I imagine, and the reader: "As both steel and curse sank into the socket..." writes Melville. There were other moments, too, of beauty and insight.
But by and large, it's hard for me to understand how this book ever appealed to a wide readership. Today, it seems like an attempt to record a great deal, but in a style that obfuscates what it's found. That nineteenth-century impulse to catalogue everything is definitely part of Moby Dick, but so too is the regrettable tendency to overwrite.
I'll leave the final word for Melville, who, when he gets it right, can evoke great emotion (but when he gets it wrong, can put a man to sleep):
"...and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve around me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy."
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