Moby-Dick is a work which, having now read it carefully for the second time (I read it when I was probably in my tweens or teens, which was a very long time ago), I can safely say I despise. Not only does it feature an overwhelming proportion of fat and dead weight in the form of lengthy digressions about whales; it also ventures into territory which scholars have indulged as philosophical, but which struck me as blunt, sentimental, adolescent. Nuggets like “…Be sure of this, O young ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease…” (chapter 16) or “…ignorance is the parent of fear…” (chapter 3) point out just how murky the area is between what may be considered a Profound Thought, and what is so obvious it shouldn’t need to be stated.
Melville’s purportedly poetic language is equally underwhelming, with sentences like: “The white whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.” Which might be—if taken in isolation or at least in small doses—striking, but that type of verbiage soon makes an over 200,000-word novel feel overpopulated, flabby, and potentially antagonizing to the reader. Oftentimes on a purely technical level, the managing of word choice feels clumsy, thoughtless: the sheer number of times I encountered the two words “evinced” and “impious” was staggering. I leave the exact count to the superior numerical accuracy of AI, but I would put good money on a bet that each appeared close to a hundred times over the span of the novel.
It should be a foregone conclusion that any piece should be read with a sensibility attuned to the time and context in which the work was written. Therefore, the depictions of the “savage” harpooneers (Queequeg from the South Pacific whose native island, Kokovoko, Melville felt no compunction about inventing out of whole cloth; Tashtego who is native American; Dagoo who is from Africa; and last but not least Ahab’s own harpooneer the “Parsee” Fedallah, prophesying Ahab’s undoing in the cryptic language of exotic mysticism) and of Pip, the Black cabin-boy, should not be considered outside of Melville’s cultural and historical context and climate; nevertheless, their caricature-like depiction reduces them to decoration. They are quaint oddities along the way, comic relief, magical oracle, or a touch of pathos—strange little garden statues (recall the description of Queequeg’s idol) that reflect and confirm Melville’s stature as a Great American Novelist.
One of the least convincing narrative strategies is the use of Ishmael as the third person omniscient narrator. While Melville stops short of allowing Ishmael to venture inside the heads of other characters (at least insofar as tags such as “thought Ahab” are avoided), the reader must nonetheless accept that Ishmael is capable of being able to jump around at all hours of the night or day, closely following any and all members of the Pequad’s crew even to the very tip of a mast. Ishmael, especially after the initial pages, is not a character. He is nothing more than Melville’s harpoon.
In point of fact, none of the characters are real. All of them function more or less as tools for Melville to utilize in quest of his own white whale—to be The Great American Novelist.
Moby-Dick is a novel in which the author’s presence is oppressive. Unless this type of self-staging is done with an abundance of awareness (and possibly a degree of fun), it is truly stifling to the reader. To me, the most affecting—and effective—novels are often ones in which the author themself is fully transparent. For the reader, the author doesn’t exist for the duration of the journey. Or if they do, they have fully entered the environment of the novel as a character themself, in no way living with a foot in both worlds. I have no desire to smell Melville, and yet his work wreaks of him.
The fragility of the 19th century American ego, the American insecurity concerning our contribution to western culture which is so painfully evident in the mawkish symphonies, overtures, and organ concertos of such composers as Louis Gottschalk or Horatio Parker, seems to be the specter that also gnawed at Herman Melville. Melville was determined to make his mark as an American writer; it is the stink of ambition lighting the way for a mediocre intellect that overwhelms. Perhaps if he had been able to shed some of his vaingloriousness, Melville would not have been forever doomed to such middling literary utterances. And yet, we valorize him and his project still, with a society of Melville scholars alive and well today. There is even an operatic adaptation of Moby-Dick written by the (white and male) composer Jake Heggie, with a libretto by (white and male) Gene Sheer, which saw its Metropolitan opera debut just this past March.
Well. For the Grateful Dead, there will always be Deadheads. For Moby-Dick, Dickheads.