January 26, 2025 by Amy
“Moby Dick”: a Review
This is a review of Moby Dick, as I’m reading Moby Dick.
Yeah, I’m not even finished yet, but at 40% read, I think I know enough to pontificate about it. Because isn’t that the American way? “I’ve read the title of this one article, I’m now a goddamn expert!”
In short: Herman Melville was a brilliant writer who desperately needed an actual editor. (See: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt.) He has incredible lines like these:
- For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal.
- Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
- The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.
- But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself.
- Queequeg gave me to understand that, in his land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas of all sorts, the king, chiefs, and great people generally, were in the custom of fattening some of the lower orders for ottomans; and to furnish a house comfortably in that respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy fellows, and lay them round in the piers and alcoves.
- “I will have no man in my boat,” said Starbuck, “who is not afraid of a whale.” By this, he seemed to mean, not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
- More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.
- While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over his head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead.
Funny, pithy, and/or thought-provoking sentences that I would be proud to craft.
On the other hand, I’ve now also read two entire chapters about various species of whale, none of which was elucidating to the storyline. We don’t even meet Captain Ahab until 30% in. He’s kind of the point, Herman. Like, dedicate more time to Ahab and his mental state and less to whale descriptions of any whale that isn’t Moby Dick. Also, I’d like to know how Moby Dick got his name. That should be a whole chapter right there. (I googled it, because of course I did, and it seems that Moby Dick was inspired by a real White Whale named Mocha Dick, spotted off the island of Mocha, which, where is that because it sounds like a place I would like to visit/live.) (Also, that doesn’t answer the question of where “Dick” came from, but Melville notes that other whales were named Tom and Jack so perhaps Dick was just another dude’s name to use, but since he took Ahab’s leg then maybe, just maybe, it’s not simply a name but also a description. As in, “That whale ate my leg. What a dick!”)
I’m enjoying getting to know Starbuck, of course, but Melville should have known that eventually a beloved and often controversial coffee company would take its name from this character and therefore should have fleshed him out more. I mean, honestly he seems like one of the few characters who is of sound mind, besides Ishmael and Queequeg. Everyone else is batshit.
Note: any future pet may or may not be named Queequeg. Or Pequod.
So where I am right now is that they finally spotted some whales and went after them, but in small boats because apparently you send whalers in tiny boats and not the big boat to chase and try to kill an enormous whale as if that makes any sort of sense. But a squall came up and Ishmael and his small-boat mates almost didn’t make it but yay they did. So now I suppose they will keep sailing along and I’ll learn reams about crustaceans or something before we finally meet Moby Dick. I have a rough idea of the ending (it doesn’t go so well for Ahab) but I still have 60% of this tome to digest to get there.
Thank goodness it’s in serial form or I’d have given up after the first non-Moby Dick whale description.
Serial form, today anyway, is where an app or a site burps out sections of a text in regular intervals, like how magazines used to published chapters of books one at a time for their readers. It’s akin to “How do you eat an elephant?” One bite at a time. How does one read Moby Dick? One excruciating chapter at a time.
Today’s art is by Friedrich von Martens, after Louis Garneray, published by Goupil & Vibert, and is called Pêche de la Baleine, Whale-Fishery. Totally stoked about finding art that is now in the public domain, especially since I am in no position to make a whale picture myself today.
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