Moby-Dick: or, The Whale

I came back from a holiday on Nantucket knowing more about 19th-century whaling than I ever expected to. And, because this is the kind of person I am, this inspired me to attempt Moby-Dick after having obligingly owned this copy of it since middle (?) school for reasons now lost to time. Realistically, I never thought I would read it. My track record with anything written prior to 1900 is poor, and, of course, I had been warned it is heavy on the whales and ships and stuff.

An Instagram caption is an improper medium for literary criticism, so all I will say is this. Relative to my priors, I have never been so blown away by a reading experience like the one that engulfed me at the end of each exhausting day, when I would lose myself in this strange & watery world for a few chapters. Set aside the musty overtones that accompany any Great American Novel. With prose that is kin to both Shakespeare's tragedies and Mozart's comic operas and a rambling narrative structure that abounds with sly pre-modern post-modernisms (the footnotes! the cetological asides!), it is as inventive as anything written today. Set aside as well the temptation to dismiss its metaphors as obvious. Melville's writing swings for the fences. It is maximalist and serious in a way that is impossible to imagine of contemporary fiction. As the Pequod wound its way through the southern seas, it struck me that Moby-Dick operates not in a symbolic register but rather a mythical one, with all the elemental wildness that entails. And that, too, makes it a radical book for the 21st-century reader.