 | A WRITER'S WIT |  H. Melville |
MY BOOK WORLD
Author's Copy of Moby-Dick Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick: An Authoritative Text | Reviews and Letters by Melville | Analogues and Sources | Criticism. Hayford, Harrison, and Hershel Parker, eds. New York: Norton, 1967.
I first read—if you want to call it reading--Moby-Dick when I was a sophomore in college. The instructor was not very inspiring, and, as a nineteen-year-old music major I wasn’t very receptive either. The novel seemed, at the time, like a ponderous and boring text. Having grown up in the Air Capital of the World, Wichita, Kansas, and its surrounding prairies, I didn’t have much curiosity about whales, whaling, being at sea (unless it were to have been aboard a cruise ship), blubber or that particular sort of sperm. Least of all, did I care for Ishmael, the narrator. How could a character about my age know as much about whales and whaling (and its many component parts and activities)? I noted that in the margin. Was young Ishmael speaking or was it Melville? I still believe it is a bit problematic; perhaps it is idiomatic of that period of writing that the author’s voice and character/narrator become blended as one.
After recently enjoying Melville’s Typee, I wondered what it would be like to peruse his masterpiece, Moby-Dick, once again. I located the very copy I’d read over fifty years ago—since that time having earned an MA in English and having taught AP English for ten years—and read it with different eyeballs, so to speak. I noticed right away my original underlining—I’d used a fountain pen with black ink, an indelible record of what I thought was important at the time. During this reading I annotated with pencil, as is my habit now—so much easier to expunge if I’ve made an error or said something stupid in the margins. Even pencil marks made fifty years ago can be erased today.
I still believe the text is ponderous, but with the caveat that it is also profound (although a few scholars cited at the back of this Norton text seem to disagree on its profundity). Shakespearean in scope? Odyssey-like in its structure? An inspired purpose? To demonstrate to readers the lengths to which a monomaniac (Melville repeats this nineteenth-century word many times) like Captain Ahab goes to avenge having lost his leg to the monstrous Moby-Dick. At one level it seems unreal to believe that having been injured in the Atlantic, Ahab can then locate the selfsame whale in what seems to be the South Pacific—thousands of miles away—and years down the line when Ahab is an old man.
Seems to be quite a stretch. I mean, even today, if you equip a whale with a GPS tracker, you might not necessarily locate the creature. (I must now account for the science, not clear back then, that whales swim not randomly around the globe but, like birds, have set “highways” and migration periods.) Yet the beauty of the novel and its pacing is that if you follow Ahab, through Ishmael’s eyes, that if you, too, have boarded the infamous Pequod and journeyed with those intrepid sailors to locate and kill this gigantic whale—you, as well, can experience this mighty expedition. At once I now feel that I have indeed read the novel, but at the same time, I might read it every year until my death and still not fathom either the journey it takes or its profundity.
Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Fiona Hill
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Martin Duberman
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Anne Fadiman
FRI: My Book World | TBD
I first read—if you want to call it reading--Moby-Dick when I was a sophomore in college. The instructor was not very inspiring, and, as a nineteen-year-old music major I wasn’t very receptive either. The novel seemed, at the time, like a ponderous and boring text. Having grown up in the Air Capital of the World, Wichita, Kansas, and its surrounding prairies, I didn’t have much curiosity about whales, whaling, being at sea (unless it were to have been aboard a cruise ship), blubber or that particular sort of sperm. Least of all, did I care for Ishmael, the narrator. How could a character about my age know as much about whales and whaling (and its many component parts and activities)? I noted that in the margin. Was young Ishmael speaking or was it Melville? I still believe it is a bit problematic; perhaps it is idiomatic of that period of writing that the author’s voice and character/narrator become blended as one.
After recently enjoying Melville’s Typee, I wondered what it would be like to peruse his masterpiece, Moby-Dick, once again. I located the very copy I’d read over fifty years ago—since that time having earned an MA in English and having taught AP English for ten years—and read it with different eyeballs, so to speak. I noticed right away my original underlining—I’d used a fountain pen with black ink, an indelible record of what I thought was important at the time. During this reading I annotated with pencil, as is my habit now—so much easier to expunge if I’ve made an error or said something stupid in the margins. Even pencil marks made fifty years ago can be erased today.
I still believe the text is ponderous, but with the caveat that it is also profound (although a few scholars cited at the back of this Norton text seem to disagree on its profundity). Shakespearean in scope? Odyssey-like in its structure? An inspired purpose? To demonstrate to readers the lengths to which a monomaniac (Melville repeats this nineteenth-century word many times) like Captain Ahab goes to avenge having lost his leg to the monstrous Moby-Dick. At one level it seems unreal to believe that having been injured in the Atlantic, Ahab can then locate the selfsame whale in what seems to be the South Pacific—thousands of miles away—and years down the line when Ahab is an old man.
Seems to be quite a stretch. I mean, even today, if you equip a whale with a GPS tracker, you might not necessarily locate the creature. (I must now account for the science, not clear back then, that whales swim not randomly around the globe but, like birds, have set “highways” and migration periods.) Yet the beauty of the novel and its pacing is that if you follow Ahab, through Ishmael’s eyes, that if you, too, have boarded the infamous Pequod and journeyed with those intrepid sailors to locate and kill this gigantic whale—you, as well, can experience this mighty expedition. At once I now feel that I have indeed read the novel, but at the same time, I might read it every year until my death and still not fathom either the journey it takes or its profundity.
Up Next:
TUES: A Writer's Wit | Fiona Hill
WEDS: A Writer's Wit | Martin Duberman
THURS: A Writer's Wit | Anne Fadiman
FRI: My Book World | TBD
RSS Feed