I am now a third of the way through Melville’s Moby-Dick, and it has quickly become one of my favorite novels. Melville writes with such wit and humor, and such a keenly educated, referential insight that I often find myself shaking my head in amazement. That, combined with its almost encyclopedic knowledge of whaling and the sea-faring life, both of which are completely foreign to me, makes the book hard to set down.
But more than that, I like the white whale as a metaphor for life and the artist’s aspirations, and for love. The Pequod’s journey is one I think all of us can relate to on some level – and just as she is populated with a crew of contrasting characters so too do we each handle the journey differently. We each search – and some of us are fortunate enough to find.
I look out now from the train to Hallstatt – book in hand – onto rolling green and brown hills, rising and falling like the swells of some great earthen sea. And I sit here, a mast-hand at his post, looking out for any break in the surf. The skies darken briefly and the soft ebb and flow grows thrashing mad and violent, and suddenly the Alps tower above the horizon, their foam-tipped waves smashing against the earth, the spray jetting upward to form the clouds. I watch it all with a keen eye.
And I wonder what it is exactly that I am looking for, and if I find it – or spot it slowly diving in the distance, out of reach but accessible on a strong wind – will I recognize the thing for what it is, and accept it and sing it out, or look to the next patch of sea? Is there, then, a great white whale that I hunt? And if so – do I chase it with the madness maddened of Ahab, or Starbuck’s bitter hesitation?
Or with a chuckle, like Stubb?
3 comments:
I'm going to add Moby Dick to my list of books to read.
Whatever problems critics may have with Melville: his propensity for high-sounding stylish phrases; his predilection for adverbs formed out of participles - the most ill-sounding according to W. Somerset Maugham is 'whistlingly', although another critic,Professor Stoll has quoted others, such as burstingly, suckingly; his desire to show off the vast knowledge he had painfully acquired by digressions and references throughout the novel, I'd like to quote Maugham in his view of Melville: 'every author has the right to be judged by his best. How good melville's best is the reader can judge for himself by reading the chapter entitled 'the Great Armadda.' When he has action to describe, he does it magnificently, with force, and then his formal manner of writing grandly enhances the thrilling effect." Maugham also said that "you must put up with his vagaries, his faulty taste, his ponderous playfulness, his errors of construction, for the sake of his excellencies, the frequent splendour of his language, his vivid and thrilling descriptions of action, his delicate sense of beauty and the tragic power of his 'mystic' ponderings which, perhaps because he was somewhat muddle-headed, with no striking gift for ratiocination, for just that reason are emotionally impressive."
Also, Melville himself was apprehensive that Moby Dick would be construed as an allegory.
mom
does moby dick come on audio tapes?
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