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.

When the Dog Ate Edgar Allan Poe's Homework

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (Introduction and Notes by Jeffrey Meyers) (1838 version/ This Modern Library Classics Edition 2007): Edgar Allan Poe's longest work doesn't really end. Poe gave up on trying to finish it, stopped writing, and tacked on an ending that is just this side of 'The dog ate my homework.' The ending anticipates many of the postmodern obsessions with closure, metatextuality, and self-reflexivity by more than a century. It's also a weirdly funny and somewhat off-putting. 

Oh, Poe!

Narrative started life as a serialized novel, switched early on to pretending to be a true story (hence the 'Narrative' part of the title, which in the 1830's connoted a true story), and concluded with a fictional argument between Poe and Pym about the authenticity of the narrative. But while academics love the text's quirkiness, it's the horror that has captivated several generations of readers.

We first follow Pym on one short sailing disaster caused by a drunk friend at the helm. Then Pym stows away on that friend's father's cargo ship for adventure. And he really gets some crazy-ass adventure. 

Poe's genius in the first two-thirds of the novel lies in his willingness to move from one carefully though sometimes purple-prose-depicted horror to the next, with little or no pause. Fear of drowning, fear of cannibalism, fear of being buried alive, fear of being attacked by an animal, fear of starving or dying from lack of water... Poe hits them all. Do terrible smells make you vomitous? They're here too. And terrible flavours in your mouth. And drunkenness that actually imperils your life. And sharks. And festering wounds. And painful, debilitating gastric distress caused by eating too many filberts.

Later writers, most notably H.P. Lovecraft, would learn from Poe to hit the reader with uncomfortable environmental details as quickly as possible, and repeatedly -- cold, wet, smells, claustrophobia, and so many others. Show the reader the terror of the environment, not just the terror of the circumstances. 

Two-thirds of the way through the novel, Poe and his pocket Hercules companion Dirk Peters (!), a part-Native American who keeps saving our hero once they meet up, finally get rescued. So begins the final stretch of the novel that has been more influential than any other: the journey to the Southern polar regions. There, Pym, Peters, and the crew of the Jane Guy encounter an undiscovered tribe on an island called Tsalal, various environmental mysteries, and finally the mysteries of the pole itself. 

It seems, per some speculation at the time, that the oceans empty in massive cataracts into some colossal abyss at the South Pole. And there, abruptly, the story ends. Pym and Peters make it home, we're told (indeed, we've known this from the beginning of the tale). But the final mysterious and haunting images are never explained or expanded upon. It's those images, however, and some of the events on the island of Tsalal, that fascinated Jules Verne and H.P. Lovecraft enough (to name just two) to write their own Pym-referencing tales of the South Pole.

The whole thing is dense but fast-moving -- the horrors race by. And Poe's interest in inversions and subversions make the later sections a fascinating study. Characters (Dirk Peters the "half-breed"), ships (the Jane Guy is a hermaphrodite, an actual type of ship melding two different and distinct ship designs), and even the weird water of Tsalal combine disparate characteristics. Whiteness becomes sinister, especially in the strange, frothing, white waste seas as one leaves Tsalal and moves farther South. There are strange white creatures with red teeth. There are giant humanoid figures looming out of the mist. There is a South Pole that is warmer than it should be.

It's a shame Poe never saw his way to truly finishing the novel. However, it's possible that the unanswered mysteries of the final pages have helped keep the work alive in the imaginations of both readers and the writers who have been inspired to follow in its path. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket achieves disparate moments of visceral horror and existential, cosmic mystery. Highly recommended.