Moby Dick and Catching Up on Classics
There’s something serendipitous and surreal about reading Moby Dick at the same time that the Internet blows up in sea shanties. I definitely appreciated Wellerman more, knowing what exactly a right whale is, or what involves a tonguein’ (it is not as fun as it sounds); it also deepened my experience of the book, and more than once did I imagine Starbuck, Stubb and Flask singing their shanties.
One of the things about being an immigrant and moving to this country as an adult is that gap in cultural references, be it whaling culture or, as here, classic literature. Every few months, the content or value of the canon gets debated in the online literary discourse, but I’m not going to get into that here. I feel there is a limited value to the canon, but I also feel the need to fill that gap. My reading list always includes a classic every few books, and this time it was Moby Dick
The Penguin Classics cover
Moby Dick has been touted as one of those classics that hold up, whatever that means, so I had to arrive to it at some point. I also have a very specific connection to it since my middle name is Ishmael, and so it’s a bit surprising to me that it took me this long to get to it. Better late than never, and am I glad I did.
It’s great. It’s part of the canon for many well-deserved reasons, and it gave me so much more than what I thought was going to get from it diving in. The depth of character work is impressive, not just as it pertains to Ahab, whose personality and drives are well-known. The opening chapters about Queequeg felt really specific, and I marveled at how I barely noticed that I was already almost a quarter of the way in and I’ve mostly only spent time with him and the narrator.
The book really gets into the nature of man, and does so with gorgeous prose. This passage, for example, was one of my favorites:
Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from that same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.
The writing is like that all the way through—assured and lyrical—no matter if it’s discussing larger concepts or describing a whale’s tail.
It’s called the fluke, and Melville spent quite a few words describing it, marveling at it, comparing it to an elephant’s trunk, etc.
Moby Dick’s style, structure, depth of research, and themes (including the queer subtext re Ishmael and Queequeg) might have been lost on me if I’d read this as a younger person, as I suspect many Americans did for high school. Even though I’ve always loved reading, I don’t think I would have derived as much as I did from it if I read it in class. i’ve realized that that’s the beauty of playing catch up with a classic: I get to read it when I’m more experienced, more receptive to its style, and readier to derive whatever it can teach me.