MOBY-DICK: OR, THE WHALE

 

WELL, I FINALLY GOT AROUND TO THIS ONE FOR YOU, LADIES!  Shown above is the edition I read, ISBN 978-0-14-243724-7.  I have been meaning to do this for YEARS, for a variety of reasons:

>> When I was fully human and COULDN'T BREATHE WATER YET AT ALL, a college professor informed me that this is "the perfect American novel."  This actually PUT ME OFF reading it, because I've always found that any book getting that much praise is bound to be disappointing.  But I remained curious.

>> A different teacher, years before that, said there are only 3 different plotlines in literature: man against man, man against nature, and man against himself.  This is THE "man against nature" story, he said.  Speaking to you now as the female leader of an army of female fish, half-fish and fish associates, that PUTS MY DANDER UP and I wanted to read it just to be contrary.

>> A man I know told me some years later that Moby-Dick is a love story between Ahab and the whale.  That is really what got me thinking about finally reading it.  Piscatorial love!!!

>> This is not the sort of book that I can just IGNORE, considering the subject matter.  So many ladies at our chapter meetings are too intimidated to try reading this thick novel from an earlier century.  I thought it would be helpful to TAKE THE PLUNGE MYSELF and SHOW YOU THE WAY.

CLIFFIE'S NOTES ON THIS "MAN AGAINST NATURE" CLASSIC:

>> It's really not that hard to read.  While I HATED Herman Melville as a high schooler, I found this 625-page doorstop to be PRETTY EASY GOING, partly because it's broken into 135 chapters, most of them very short and punchy.  It doesn't hurt at all that the subject matter -- the slaughter of our Sperm Whale sisters, one of whom proves to be an irresistible draw to a human sailor -- is DEAR TO MY HEART.

>> That doesn't mean it's an especially FUN read of course.  There is some very close-up experience of the killing and butchering of our sisters.  One thing I did almost, sort of, LIKE is that these sailors appeared to make use of every single scrap of their murder victims, not just taking the spermaceti for lighting people's houses but finding a use for EVERYTHING, down to making a nice new peg for Captain Ahab to stand on after he smashed the original one. 

>> The ship itself is made with whale parts, some of them practical, some purely decorative.  When looking for a ship to sign onto, this is the reason Ishmael chooses Ahab's ship, the Pequod. I guess he has a touch of the piscatorial love in him?  He does at least have a healthy respect for the ship's quarry and a desire to find out everything he can about us.

>> Ishmael certainly has MUCH more piscatorial love than Pip, the cabin-boy, who on his first trip out in one of the whaleboats leaps out into the water in terror, and is looked down upon by everyone from then on.  He also goes completely mad at that point and talks about himself in the 3rd person for the balance of the voyage.  Man against himself, indeed!

>> A LOT of this book is philosophy.  Ishmael makes it seem as if following the disaster with the white whale, he did a lot of studying, and this book is the result.

>> We don't meet the title character until the VERY END and we have surprisingly little interaction with whales in this story overall -- just enough for Ishmael to show us everything about the daily life of a sailor on a whaling ship.  He points out that because Ahab's ship was incredibly well-provisioned, they NEVER CAME ASHORE even though they were out there for YEARS, so what did he have to do but tell us about but swabbing the decks and coiling the ropes?

>> In this one sense, at least, this is a VERY American novel: the crew comes from all over the world, and they somehow make it work.  The harpooneers are a Native American, a Parsee, a man from Africa and another who hails from the Pacific islands.  There's a guy from Scotland named "Steelkilt," a special team of Asian men secretly brought aboard to accompany Ahab in his whaleboat, Spaniards, Italians, Pip and the cook are African-American...on and on.  And of course the men in charge are all white Yankees.  Why are they all there?  Ishmael and Queequeg are there for the adventure, but the others are there to earn a buttload of money.  What could be more American than that?  Oh, and Ahab wants revenge of course.

>> One surprise in here is the fact that the script of Jaws refers to this book over and over.  There are even some bizarre musical numbers in Moby-Dick, and at one point a sailor breaks into that one song about Spanish ladies that Quint keeps singing in the movie.  This filled in gaps for me about the movie that I never knew existed in my understanding about the shark epic.

>> I also understand now why Dana Scully, in The X-Files, is called Starbuck by her dad and why her pomeranian lap dog is named Queequeg.  I also see for the first time that Fox Mulder is the Captain Ahab in that series!

Not everyone will want to tackle this book, partly because of the horrors of whaling described herein, but it's not a bad study of the wrongheaded relationship humans have with our operatives that have aged well in 150 or so years.  I figure if Heather Duke in Heathers  can handle reading it, SO CAN YOU.