Moby-Dick, THE Book for Our Times

I can’t be serious. Moby-Dick? Am I really suggesting that, a few days out from this American prurience we just experienced, from this dis-Americanization of America–or re-Americanning, depending on how you see it–that Moby-Dick is the most relevant fish to fry right now? Worse, that in this damp, drizzly November of our souls, it’s the best thing you could read? Not read about, but read itself, its 135 chapters, its 700 pages, its encyclopedia of cetology (of what?), its spermy subversions of symbolism and metaphor in our pridefully tawdry day?

That is what I’m suggesting.

If you’re applying for a passport or blade-running your warm Roman bath to despair, stop. This is the book for you. If you’re exulting in finally getting another chance to take America back from what had seemed like the Pequod’s crew (“chiefly made up of mongrel renegades and castaways and cannibals”), don’t stop. But if and when you decide to think about tomorrow, this is the book for you. If you’re “tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote,” and are searching for seven highly effective habits to win back friends and influence reconciliations, this is the book for you.

We can’t afford permanent enmity or exile from each other. Secession and civil war might be a nice distraction but consumer splurging suggests barricades would be thinner than lines for Guardians of the Galaxy. So for all of us patriots, fanatics, liars, saints, renegades, heroes, pinheads, eggheads, racists, castaways, weirdos, hardhats, recluses, rapists, apologists, addicts, asexuals, trisexuals, suckers, saviors, snobs and saps, all of us grass-leaved Americans, this is the book for us, in this moment, in this whale of whiteness delirium. Moby-Dick is our book of revelation.

Enough with the fentanyl and pass the narcan. I’m merely writing an invitation away from the gallows, whichever side you, victim or executioner, may be on. For starters, Moby-Dick is one of the funniest books you’ll read. Of course it’s not presented that way in school. It’s presented as that eternal buzzkill: a classic. Reject the label. Imagine you’re seeing Melville for the first time. You’ll get the jokes. You’ll ROFL. You’ll realize that Melville wants to be the most entertaining thing on earth since King David was getting his jollies peep-tomming Bathsheba. Melville, a comic at heart, wants an adventure and wants to take you along.

Page-turning but controlled adventures is all he’d written until then. Typee and Omoo were the predecessors of National Geographic’s topless spreads of the South Seas. The often hilarious Redburn and the more militant White-Jacket mixed tales of sea life, character sketches and travelogues with comparative-culture asides and social criticism. Redburn’s account of a pauper and her children dying under a street in Liverpool out-sorrows Jack London’s descriptions of poverty in People of the Abyss. White-Jacket includes pages on corporal punishment that’ll make you forever condemn spanking, or whichever way you brutalize your child in the name of that cruel Proverb.

Each of those early books has its occasional transcendent moments as Melville’s style or power of observation soars beyond the imaginable, humbling us with wonder (“No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses”). They hint at what’s to come in the better book ahead now that we have the benefit of hindsight. “I found myself a sort of Ishamel in the ship, without a single friend or companion,” Redburn says in one of the great teases in literature. But they are still on the whole conventional, more simmers than eruptions, and at times dull.

Moby-Dick is all eruptions, a Krakatowa of transcendence from start to finish, all as if written in defiance of the black-and-white absolutes that appear to be its foundation. There’s an imprisoning good-and-evil duality in much of what we’re fed: in scriptures, in Hollywood movies, in party politics, in elections, in police stories or journalistic investigations, even in life and death. It’s the all-or-nothing, good-guys-bad-guys, split. We love it. We depend on it. It’s even reflected in our dual–our manichean–all-or-nothing political system, which would have been more parliamentary if it could stand a touch of gray.

This is why Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a goofy and terrible book, sold 1.5 million copies in its first year, while Moby-Dick, published nearly at the same time, would end up selling 3,000 copies in Melville’s lifetime. (His eight books combined had sold just 35,000 copies in the United States by the time he died, earning him a combined total of $5,900, and a bit more from sales in Britain. Keep that in mind when you look at voting tallies: Adlai Stevenson was still the better candidate.)

In Moby-Dick, none of it, certainly not even Ahab or the whale, the deceptive Ishmael, the endlessly surprising Queequeg, and especially that “palpable obscure” the Pequod is sailing through (our creation, our presumed creator), none are so easily cut out. We like to cling to made-up certainties as we approach these characters. But just as he does with the “savage” and heathen Queequeg, who turns out to be the most spiritual and regal of the crew, the most courageous and the most humane, Melville is going to harpoon our certainties. He won’t leave us adrift. He’s not a cynic. He’s a seer. Moby-Dick is not didactic, like Uncle Tom. It is–and I hate to put it this way because it sounds so crass–therapeutic, in the sense that Meleville invites you to your own discovery. He’s just illuminating the way. And what illumination.

You can read Moby-Dick as a story of good and evil, as a Freudian metaphor for the conscious (the ocean’s surface) and the subconscious (the ocean’s depths), as the Rachel Carson of whales, as the clash between the civilized and the barbaric, as the hilarity and tragedy of a human life, as the best and worst of America, as the best and worst of God, or the whale, and so on. You can read it any way you like, because it invites you to fill the spaces between the lines, between illusion and reality, even the spaces between you and the book, as you join that crew so often seemingly at the mercy of “those stage managers, the Fates.”

Of course the only stage manager here is Melville. He outdoes the fates. There are no limits to the book’s reach because it is a summation of Melville’s imagined reality, which, I suspect, will feel as real as yours, whoever you may be. It’s a bold statement, a presumptuous statement, suggesting that it’s impossible to read Moby-Dick and not like it, or that you’re an idiot if you don’t. Neither is true. Even in reading Melville, there are no dualities, there are no is it this or it is that. As in life, it is what you make of it, and as in life, its generosity is boundless.

Read on his terms, free of the “classic”’s assumptions, free of your high school nightmares and the early pages’ struggles with the “thous” and “whilsts” of Melville’s King’s English dialogue (which I happen to find ridiculous), free of the clutter of the present and the definitions of entertainment narrowed to the shortest attention-spanned immersion of a 120-second Disney ride, you may be in for a shocking rediscovery of a form of emotional and mind-bending pleasure of perceptions that it would be a shame not to experience, when it is so handy, so cheap, so much more satisfying than a 120-second ride, and so achievable without a narcotic.

Melville never set out to write the Great American Novel. It was in conversations with Hawthorne that he realized he was writing an afterword to the New Testament with a whale of a god and a tragic lucifer in starring and interchangeable roles. (“Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter,” Melville wrote.) Melville was as unaware as Ishmael, who announces his unreliability from those first three and most famous words in American literature, though I’ve yet to figure out Melville’s strange and not a little bigoted fixation on veiling his main characters in Arab names. (The orientalism of Moby-Dick is not among its better angels, nor its occasional anti-Semitism.)

The result is not a novel in the conventional sense. There is no real story other than: Whale chomps Ahab’s leg off, Ahab hates whale, Ahab wants to kill whale, Ahab chases whale down the abyss and takes everyone with him. Ahab doesn’t appear for the first sixth of the book. Ishmael disappears for a good part of it. Those encyclopedic chapters on whales and whaling seem to take up half the story, appearing to stop the narrative flow every time.

But those chapters are some of the more sublime. They’re what lifts Moby-Dick from adventure to scripture. Each of those chapters go from the literal to the transformative, whether Melville is writing about the whale’s brow, its spout, its sperm, its whiteness or its tail: “Other poets have warbled the praises of the soft eye of the antelope, and the lovely plumage of the bird that never alights; less celestial, I celebrate a tail.” He writes as if God had been given the chance to pen Genesis. There is a conflicted communion between those “cetology” chapters and the characters of the Pequod. Like so much else in Moby-Dick, those chapters evoke the conflicted communion between nature and humanity, between humanity and creation.

As for Ishmael’s role in all this, I see a clue to the book’s construction is in its one-paragraph epilogue, where Ishmael reveals that he is telling the story as the lone survivor of the Pequod’s sinking. Moby-Dick is life’s entire reel one sees flashing before one’s eyes at the moment of death. It is I think what Ishmael sees as the Pequod wrecks on the shoals of Ahab’s monomania, what Ishmael sees as he dies, or thinks he’s dying: not just his life, but the lives of every crew member, the life of the universe. Moby-Dick is the transcription of that flash of lives, of that moment’s trauma.

So what about those 210,000 words, that Pacific immensity of pages that seems to defeat so many readers? Those pages are a bit more than what most high school and college students in their combined eight years of education, at least in Florida, would be required to read. But it’s a fifth the length of the Harry Potter oeuvre, and would add up to no more than 750 tweets. Who among surfers of those shark-infested bogs doesn’t read 750 tweets in a couple of weeks, and who doesn’t regret reading 749 of them, as you would not regret reading a single Melvillian line?

And yes, we have to admit it. When Melville gets lost in the sound of his own hip-hop, it can be trying. It can sometimes be unbearable. He did it for 450 of the 500 pages in Mardi, one of the most incoherent books west of gibberish (imagine Kant without ideas). He only does it for maybe a dozen pages or so in Moby-Dick, so it’s more like an inside joke than a defect.

Melville pulls off the impossible. By the 132nd chapter, when Ahab is face to face with his incurable addiction and delivers that famous line, “Is Ahab, Ahab?” (are we ever who we pretend to be, are we ever in charge? “Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?”), we feel love and forgiveness for Ahab and the whale. They may deserve each other. They do not deserve being the plaything of fates so cruel and so mocking of their free will as to reduce their existence to mortal enmity. We see ourselves in them, and hear Ahab’s ivory stump of a leg pacing the Pequod like a gavel to our own limitations. Melville invites us to beware, and to still believe. Ahab self-destructed so we don’t have to.