Book Review: Herman Melville - Moby Dick or, The Whale (1851)

Herman Melville - Moby Dick (1851)

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Welcome back!

In this blog post, I will be reviewing Herman Melville's 1851 classic, Moby Dick, the bane of high school seniors the world over. I read this book because it received unusually high praise from Jorge Luis Borges - an Argentine short story writer, novelist, and translator - and, since I love Borges, I pay attention to anything that he recommends. Borges wrote The Ficciones and Aleph, both of which collections of short stories are eminently readable and uniquely innovative in their respective styles and formats.

But that's enough about Borges. As relevant here, Borges called Moby Dick the "Infinite Novel," going on to write that "[p]age by page, the text becomes more powerful until it occupies the scope of the cosmos." Faulker called it the greatest work in American literature; renowned literary critics have dubbed it a "triumph."

Yet it is equally as critically acclaimed as it is reviled by students who are forced to read it.

And students' reasons for disliking Melville's masterpiece are valid: it's long (in most printings, Moby Dick stands somewhere between 750 and 900 pages), and Melville's repeated digressions into facts and maritime or whale-related anecdotes of questionable interest and limited bearing on the actual story can leave the reader feeling as though he or she was reading a novel that was made intentionally dry, and that whatever literary merit Moby Dick might otherwise have possessed is secondary to its being a novel that is too long, too tediously written, and excessively expansive in its prose.

But I did not come away feeling this way about the novel.

In fact, quite the opposite. Captain Ahab, the captain of the Pequod (the whaling vessel in the service of which the narrator - Ishmael, of "[c]all me Ishmael" fame - finds himself) is a wonderfully written character. He mixes a profound understanding of life with a deeply flawed conception of in what way one ought to spend one's limited time alive. That being said, at least he possesses such a conception: while Melville uses several of his characters to criticize Ahab, Melville also draws a distinction between (i) the system of values and motives which Ahab clearly has with (ii) the nebulously-defined and uncertain tenets which govern the terms of the other characters' lives.

Ahab shines in his grim statements about his own mortality and what he's accomplished with his life. "'Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood; and I feel now like a billow that's all one crested. I am old; shake hands with me, man.' Their hands met; their eyes fastened; Starbuck's tears the glue." (810 (note that page numbers referenced herein refer to the page numbers set out in the Modern Library Paperback Edition of Moby Dick published in 2000).) While perhaps somewhat overwrought, in the above scene, Ahab evinces a calm acceptance of his own mortality in the face of an adversary which very well might kill him. There is no discussion by Ahab of ever giving up his quest, for to do so would be to sacrifice Ahab's single, "monomaniacal" purpose for living: hunting and killing Moby Dick. Ultimately, all characters (save the narrator, who escapes the wreckage of the Pequod in a wooden coffin built by a fellow crewmate) perish in connection with the hunt.

And when the dust settles, nothing remained of the quest, or of Ahab, or of the Pequod; nothing but waves and the roiling sea. This image of stark dereliction, and a sea that is unchanged by the (with perspective, seemingly) trivial agonies of the sailors aboard the Pequod, is conveyed well to end the book: "Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great white shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago." (822.) For a book which deals in no small part with the power of man to exert his will upon nature, to end the book in this way is a recognition that the scope of what man can accomplish is insignificant from the perspective of nature, which is old; permanent. This book was written in 1851; how would Melville have ended his book had he been alive today to bear witness to the myriad ways in which we have altered our landscape through sheer exertion of human will?

Leaving that alone, Melville succeeds in richly characterizing all of his characters. In a scene relating the death of a member of the crew, Pep, due to his abandonment by the crew, Melville writes exceptionally well, and he ties the description of Pip's abandonment to traits of Pip's which had been expounded upon in an earlier section of the book: "Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-present eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs." (599.)

Excellent.

Superficial description of the characters in connection with giving the lay of a specific scene is similarly done well. Of sailors before a fire: "[t]heir tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of their works." (610.)

Captain Ahab is a figure integral to the Western literary canon. And even accepting that the dual forces of nature and time erode the fine points of what man once sculpted, Ahab's firm conviction that he, and men of similar stock, are immortalized through their actions, presents an interesting theme that Melville explores well, and to completion. "Ahab is for ever, man. This whole act's immutably decreed." (804.) Ahab's conception of immortality, though, is only debatably born out. Because in one way, Ishmael immortalized Ahab through no credit of Ahab's, but simply because Ishmael narrated the tale of Mody Dick. But on the other, when Melville characterizes certain scenes and events, the only things that are divine, permanent, "multitudinous, [and] God-omnipresent" (599) are reflections of nature. And, as stated above, "the great white shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago[,]" (822) offering a vision of immortality based more in the permanence of Earth and Ocean as opposed to man's capacity to wrestle nature into submission and stamp his mark upon his surroundings.

I rate it, for the above reasons and because of the general impression I had of Moby Dick immediately after finishing the book, an 8.

Thanks for reading, and, as always, I welcome reader engagement! Please write to me at will.b.eaton.00@gmail.com to discuss this book, other books, writing, or any other subject matter you believe would be of interest to me.

(Main Image: A German-language cover of Moby Dick as published by Diogenes.)