Moby-Dick: or, The Whale

I couldn't get into this book at various times when I've tried to read it. This time, I listened to the audiobook and I'm glad I did.

I'm not quite sure what to say about it, though. It's very long. It has some aspects to it that I would consider pretty serious flaws in other books.

And yet I found it incredibly tense and thought-provoking.

I'm glad I gave it another try.

«...only like an unreasoning wheel, which also hummingly soliloquizes; or rather, his body was a sentry-box and this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the time to keep himself awake.»

Wow this had a lot of depth to it. The story about a young author joining a whaling expedition quickly turns into a metaphor for the extent man is whiling to go to settle a score and prove a point. Melville does a great job layering great characters, places and imagery along the way. It's a long read but a great one for the next time you're on a cruise or boat trip ;)

I am surprised to say I will likely read this again.

This is such a beautifully written book. The beginning is wonderfully entertaining and fun to read. The middle of the book seems to really drag it becomes very aggressive. I found this book very educational but also very long. It is a book I would recommend reading in several small bites it would be challenging to read in one setting or even over a few days.

I read Moby Dick: 10 Minute Classics, retold by Philip Edwards and illustrated by Adam Horsepool. It's a picture book version of Moby Dick, to be sure, much condensed, thirty-two pages versus the complete 655, but it's a nice abridgment, with all the key happenings, and enlivened by the clever caricatures of Ahab and Ismael and Queequeg drawn by the illustrator.

3,5 stars

I must admit, this was a difficult read and a lot of it likely went over my head. I intend to return it, possibly a couple of years later when I am more knowledgeable and well-read. It???s likely that the book would be more enjoyable if there weren???t so many chapters describing whaling, whale anatomy.
Seeing things from Ishmael's perspective was quite interesting, albeit quite odd, especially when Queequeg was involved. The plot of the book was amazing, especially the final chapters, the intense chase, the ignored omens.

Read it if you???ve read your bible (optimally), like slow-progressing whaling stories, loaded with metaphors and complex motifs, symbols, etc.

This book. I'm not quite sure what to say. I started this book out thinking this was going to be fun. After 140 pages or so, I was glad I found a very well done audiobook (solo recorded) on librivox.org –> Moby Dick read by Stewart Wills

There were quite a few beautiful passages. Perhaps my favourite ones were Chapter 94 - A Squeeze of the hand and the ones about the anatomy of the Sperm and Right Whale. Throughout the book I've been interested by the large mammals and sea life in general. It has inspired me to look up a multitude of stuff.

For the rest of it though. It is dense, terse and does not move along at all. The story is hardly the most interesting part of the book, but it's what keeps coming back. It sometimes feels as if Melville was really trying to show everyone how much he really knows about stuff.

I'm not sure I will ever muster up the courage to reread this ever again.

"A great meter is no mere implement, like pen or typewriter, but a keyboard a young poet learns to master, exploring its range and subtleties, stretching its capabilities of harmony and expressiveness. Merely to accept the meter as given by one's predecessors, to write one's verses “in” iambic pentameter, is to assist at the death of a metrical form and perhaps one's own poetry. The demise of iambic pentameter as the chief meter of English poetry probably owes much to its coming to be understood even by poets themselves as an available prosodic form, a meter to write poems “in,” a Roman road, rather than as a kind of heroic adventure or even a haunted house."[1]

Melville's Moby-Dick: or, the Whale is like the “Roman road” for the English novel. It's wildly inventive, riotously funny, excellently written, has an almost mystical sense of atmosphere, introduces one of the most transcendentally fascinating characters in the whole of world literature in Captain Ahab. And above all, it's simply a great joy to read.2

The greatest novels in the English language are not only excellent narratives; they enrich the language and show its beauty. They're exhilarating, they energize, they inspire. Melville's Moby-Dick certainly fits the bill, and only McCarthy's Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) has recently come close to replicating said grandeur of reading, and in many ways I believe it's a worthy companion to this book. They go hand in hand, and for this reason I invoked Wright's quotation. Melville is so all-encompassing here it's difficult not to think of Moby-Dick as an emblem of creative writing. I think Joyce's Ulysses (1922) is the logical continuation of the inherent complexity of Melville's thought, something we might call modernism. In Moby-Dick there's a sermon, essayistic, encyclopedic descriptions of whaling, sudden leaps into play acting, multiple points of view in narration, soliloquies. And the feeling one has is that all of this belongs there and without which it wouldn't be Moby-Dick. That's a sign of a great novel: that there's no superfluity, everything belongs, every particular creates the essentials.[3]

And then there's Captain Ahab. “He's full of riddles”, says Stubb after being told off by the Captain, and that's exactly what so fascinates in him. Cormac McCarthy definitely modeled Judge Holden after Ahab, so alike are the two with their diabolical and mystical aura. They're mere men but still beyond the narrative. His grandness is Shakespearean[4] It's boisterous, energetic, mesmerizing.

The Penguin that I own is quite nice, it has a good introduction and some supplements at the back: a list of variants between editions, annotations as well as maps and images. The annotations at their very best give insight into Melville's writing that becomes essential in reading the novel. Such is the gloss on Ahab's “Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!”: “Melville remarked in a letter to Hawthorne (June 29, 1851) that this is the secret ‘motto' of the book.”

I have also listened to an audiobook version of the book, narrated by Frank Muller. It's one of the best audiobooks I've heard. He reads it a bit fast at times, but it's his rhythm and the voices he produces that make it so utterly enjoyable.

Endnotes:

[1] George T. Wright, Shakespeare's Metrical Art, 18.

[2] I know there are people who would rathe jump out of the window than read it, so there.

[3] Again I hear somebody trying to jump out the window.

[4] “I'd strike the sun if it insulted me” in chapter 36; “What I've dared, I've willed; and what I've willed, I'll do! They think me mad—Starbuck does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself! The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer” in chapter 37.

2 October, 2011

Just not interesting. Character based, slowly developed plot. Could barely read past the captain's bible sermon regarding Jonah.

Read 1:58/21:18 9%

I was surprised by some of the negative reviews here but after some reflection, I guess I might have reacted that way when I was younger - maybe even worse, since I read only the Cliff Notes. But years later, I found in Moby Dick a fascinating first-hand account of mid-19th Century life (It's fiction, I know, but Melville wrote using his personal experiences.) From the streets of New Bedford to Nantucket to the Seven Seas, this is an intimate account that puts the reader in the experience.

Melville excels at bringing his characters to life with all their quirks and idiosyncrasies, making them fully three dimensional in their humanity with both sincerity and humor.

There's also a powerful spiritual undercurrent that weaves throughout the story involving prophecy, human potential and symbolism that makes this book a great classic.

I know it's not everyone's cup of tea. But if you're on the fence about reading it, I recommend reading another work by Melville first: Bartleby the Scrivener is i think, more relatable to the 21st Century reader and a good way to ease into Melville's world.

Fantastic. An absolute joy to read. I've just this second turned the final page and already I find myself wanting to start the whole journey again.

It is difficult to separate Moby-Dick, the book, from Moby-Dick, the whale.

Both are epic in scale, and both have been met with wildly different perceptions and interpretations.

You only need to browse Amazon reviews to get a taste.

I've now read this book twice, and I can't say that the second time around was any easier than the first, though the second time was a different experience.

The first time I read the book, I was awed by the construction, the different styles of writing, and the numerous, mind-numbing asides that Ishmael takes with the reader.

On my second time through, I found myself thinking again and again about just how sad it all was.

Many years have passed between my first reading and my second and, in those years, I've come a very long way in how I view the animals we share this planet with.

Where once I was content to view the whale as an adversary or antagonist, I now see a creature simply trying to defend himself.

I also see a human species hell-bent on extracting every last living creature from the sea.

And, worse, spinning the entire endeavor into some high-seas adventure.

I can't say with any degree of certainty that Herman Melville felt sad for the whales — or guilty for his role while he worked on a whaling ship. But several times during the novel I got the feeling he was struggling with this issue. On occasion, Ishmael imagined the oceans from the whale's perspective, and was often amazed by the great intelligence, empathy, and bravery the species displayed through their actions. Melville writes:

The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability to express it. At times there are gestures in it, which, though they would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable. In an extensive herd, so remarkable, occasionally, are these mystic gestures, that I have heard hunters who have declared them akin to Free-Mason signs and symbols; that the whale, indeed, by these methods intelligently conversed with the world. Nor are there wanting other motions of the whale in his general body, full of strangeness, and unaccountable to his most experienced assailant. Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep. I know him not, and never will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how understand his head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has none? Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back parts; and hint what he will about his face, I say again he has no face.

In one passage in particular he calls out not only whale hunters specifically but carnivores in general:

It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras.

But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized and enlightened gourmand, dining off that roast beef, what is that handle made of?—what but the bones of the brother of the very ox you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty of Ganders formally indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two that the society passed a resolution to patronize nothing but steel pens.

I suspect, based on Melville's earlier writings, that he initially set out to write another epic adventure — the type of book that always sells — but at some point found himself writing something quite different, less black and white, more ambitious.

Now, is this book eco-literature?

Absolutely.

While you could argue that the book glorifies whaling, I get the sense — certainly the second time around — that Melville was playing more the role of the documentary filmmaker, displaying the gruesomeness of it all. I'm not sure he was trying to turn people against whaling — for the industry was already seeing its days numbered at that point in history — but I think he was deeply conflicted about the industry and America's role in leading it.

I think Ahab holds the clue to the novel, a man obsessed with the “one that got away.”

And this obsession is with our culture still.

When I finished reading the book I noticed that the Spielberg film Jaws was on the television. And in that movie we see the very same dynamic at work. This demonization of nature, this never-ending need to control that which cannot be controlled, and the irrepressible need for humans to create monsters where monsters do not exist.

This text from Ahab's perspective:

God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.

From sharks to whales to seals and, on land, to wolves and bears and even deer –the pattern repeats.

I believe eco-literature has an important role to play in making this pattern apparent to people so that we may finally one day break it.

As an aside, for years I believed that Moby-Dick received bad reviews simply because the public wasn't ready for such a “modern” work. But I recently read that London readers first experienced a book that was missing entire sections, including the epilogue.

At any rate, the book is a fascinating and challenging read for both its glimpse into the past and its possibility for changing the future.

Reviewed for EcoLit Books:
http://www.ecolitbooks.com/2014/01/book-review-moby-dick/

Spent about 3 months listening to the audio version of Moby Dick done by the Moby Dick Big Read group. Lots of English actors/artists read the chapters, some well-done, some somewhat less-so. But certainly this was the only way I was going to get through the classic novel. The language is difficult to get around. Lots of terms that require consulting the Internet. I'm glad I read it but I'm happy that I'm now through with it.

Still one of the best page turners...

It's been nearly twenty years since I read Moby Dick so I really don't remember much. Just two main things, really.

1. The tattoo guy? Pretty freakin' cool.
2. Entire chapters of blah blah blah... I'm sorry, what where we talking about?

I'm pretty sure that if I had read some children's abridged version of Moby Dick, I would have enjoyed the storytelling a lot more. As it is, the story is derailed entirely by the insertion of essays throughout.

I will not be purchasing a copy to share with my children.

‰ЫПAs I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma, ‰ЫУ literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger: while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulence, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.

‰ЫПSqueeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers‰ЫЄ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, ‰ЫУ Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

‰ЫПWould that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.‰Ыќ

—

‰ЫПIt does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator, keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter‰ЫЄs, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.

‰ЫПBut how easy and how hopeless to each these fine things! Of erections, how few are domed like St. Peter‰ЫЄs! of creatures, how few vast as the whale!‰Ыќ

So beautiful, so bizarre.