Moby Dick, or, The Whale (1851/This edition 2001) by Herman Melville

Moby Dick... blasting off into space...

Moby Dick, or, The Whale (1851/This edition 2001) by Herman Melville; introduction by Nathaniel Philbrick: Moby Dick destroyed Herman Melville's ability to make a living as a writer when he was in his early 30's. Such was the power of the novel's mostly hostile literary reception. Over the decades, though, it would be rehabilitated canonically, first as a boy's adventure novel (the mind boggles!) and then as The Great American Novel.

Even without knowing which American novels were critically acclaimed in 1851, one can see why Moby Dick bombed: it's one of the two or three weirdest, most forward-thinking canonical English-language novels ever written. Calling it a workplace tragicomedy covers some of it. It's also an encyclopedia of whaling knowledge shot through with conspicuously Shakespearean stretches of dialogue. And musical stretches. And lengthy cosmic speculations. And the first novel to combine cosmic horror with detailed visceral horror.

Ah, horror. Stretches of Moby Dick anticipate H.P. Lovecraft and later horror writers in their alternating concerns with the vast and threatening cosmos and with the nuts and bolts of the rendering down of a physical body. Here, the men are the Conqueror Worms. One can see why generations of genre writers in horror have come back to Melville.

So too science-fiction writers, for Moby Dick's doomed quest narrative and for its pages upon pages of exposition on How Things Work. The whaling ship is an alien world to most people; Melville explains how everything works. There are a thousand thousand science-fiction novels that balance in some way a hurtling plot and reams of explanations of science and technology. 

Fantasy writers? Sure, in much the same way as science fiction. Moby Dick is an epic of world-building.

It's also probably the most supernatural novel in the American canon. Signs, portents, and the arcane workings of nemesis and fate. A prophecy of Captain Ahab's death that riffs on all those prophecies misinterpreted in Greek and Roman myth. Pip, the boy who haunted the house of his own mad body. The feeling that the whale may be leading the Pequod on to its fate, an echo of the Creature and Frankenstein in the North.

And generations of youngish readers have been paralyzed by all the references to 'sperm' in the novel. Moby Dick is a Sperm Whale, the wandering oil well of the 19th century. And he's got 'Dick' in his name! And there's even a section of the novel in which Ishmael rhapsodizes about being elbow-deep in sperm! OK, that is objectively hilarious.

Ah, our philosophical, ruminative narrator Ishmael, telling the story from some point decades after the main events of the story, with all his potential unreliability as to certain speeches and conversations he was not present for (and the electronic bug still a century away from invention). He seems to digress into philosophy and exposition, but he really does not. Everything feeds the main line of the plot, informs it.

There is of course Ahab, whose sin may be that he treats a brute beast as if it were a person, or may be that he takes up arms against a Sublime reality that cannot be beaten. Maybe it's hubris. He's the Shakespearean monologist, the doomed speechifier.

And Tashtego and Stubb and Flask and Starbuck, Queequeg and mad Pip. Very few female characters once we leave port. And Moby Dick doesn't leave port until about 20% of the way through its considerable length.

Melville, seemingly aware of the readerly challenge of that length, divvies things up into about 130 chapters, one ever five pages or so on average. I found the whole enterprise a lot less ponderous than reading Faulkner, Henry James, or David Foster Wallace, to name three other American literary luminaries. That may be because Melville writes in paragraphs that are generally less than several pages long. I've really grown to hate endless pages of paragraphs. That's just me.

Is it the Great American Novel? No, because there is no such beast. It's a great novel, containing multitudes, maybe weirder and more idiosyncratic now than when it first appeared nearly 170 years ago. Long may Moby Dick run. Highly recommended.