looking back on Moby Dick

I sat down this afternoon with a bottle of wine and my ocean view and finished, at long last, Moby-Dick.

What a remarkable work of fiction – truly, and without doubt, one of the greatest American novels to date. There is nothing I have found remotely comparable in scope and breadth – nothing as encyclopedic in nature; nothing as purely, beautifully and strikingly allegorical.

The book itself is like the sea – calm and docile at times, with occasional gusts of wind that kick the waves to frenzy, but always on the horizon the potential for a devastating storm. And when this potential is realized in the final chapters – when the pace quickens and the chase is on, when the winds pick up and the pages turn through your fingers like a weather vane in a tornado – you feel as if you are riding the Pequod, holding fast the rigging line, a slave to Ahab’s maniacal modus operandi.

And the symbol of the great white whale, and one man’s crazed quest to conquer that beast – what more perfect allegory exists in literature for the struggle between man and his desire than this? Because I am, at this stage in my life, concerned with finding love – especially as the intensity of residency looms ahead – and concerned with my own expectations and needs as an aspiring artist, I have taken Moby Dick to represent the seemingly unattainable and potentially destructive things I seek. But such is the fundamental simplicity of the whale as a symbol that it represents so much more – infinitely more. Human avarice and greed, for example; temptation, time and the end of time, a purity which the darkest of dark cannot and will not taint. Religion and faith. The naturalist’s credo; the inability of man to change something ultimately greater and far superior to himself. Inspiration, and the fleeting nature of.

And Melville surely, at some point in his life, aspired to be a pathologist. He dissects his subjects with such surgical precision and attention to detail – his chapters on whale cetology, on the minutiae of the inner workings of the ship – that he, at times, seems to chart the anatomy of his own fiction. And the novel is so delicately paced that the 650 odd pages seem to flow by effortlessly – and when the final chapters unfold you feel as if: “yes, this is how it must be. There is no other way.”

Reading these pages I could not help but wonder if it was all by design. Did Melville intend for the whale to represent so much? Or did he simply set out to write a book about whaling and a mad Nantucketer, and mean no allegory by this? Did he just happen to pick a subject with so much endless potential for interpretation? Or have we the readers – as with so much of artistic interpretation – ascribed more meaning to the work than the artist originally intended?

The answer is, of course, moot in point: art has no more meaning than that which the viewer feels in viewing. Such is the infinite beauty of art – as there are billions of people on this planet so too are there as many possible interpretations of one man’s art. And what is beautiful or meaningful to one person may seem trite and plain to another.

But I – I have been moved by this artist’s work. And if you feel the same, then please –we have so very much to talk about.