Things to Know Before Reading Moby Dick
That's to exist expected. It'south non supposed to be an piece of cake read. Right now, you could exercise a lot worse than to read along with my colleague and co-blogger Cyrus Patell, who is offer daily commentary on the podcasts currently beingness posted by the Moby-Dick Big Read.
But herewith I offer my own elevation v pieces of advice for taking up the volume and living to tell the tale. I culled these hints from my notes for six lectures and codified them in listicle grade for a McNally Jackson/TimeOut NY consequence I participated in last fall. I'd honey to hear your responses, amendments, and additional suggestions in comments.
So:
i. Think of the book as ii books, really. Melville's biographers will tell you that Moby-Dick emerged in its final form from a significant human activity of revision. By most accounts, he drafted an chance narrative — Ishmael'southward voyage on the Pequod, the encounter with the whale — but and then spent a full year rewriting, turning it into an encyclopedic masterpiece. Two interventions seem to have prompted the rewrite: he met Nathaniel Hawthorne, his favorite living writer, who was 15 years or then older and to whom he would ultimately dedicate the novel; and he undertook a major study of Shakespeare's plays. Reading these writers helped Melville broaden his ambitions and strop his skills every bit a writer of tragedy. If you experience like Moby-Dick contains two books straining confronting one another, with the action story going missing on occasion, this year-long revision probably explains why.
2. Try to go on runway of the two books as yous become. Remember of them as forming axes along the lines of thought/action, or transcendental/material worlds. I is hands adaptable to movie or graphic novel form, the other is a fiddling more than ponderous. My colleague Tom Augst refers to these as horizontal and vertical axes, running forth the sea's surface and climbing the transport's masts, and the novel itself uses a vocabulary of surface and depth. Melville routinely compared reading — really reading — to diving. After hearing a lecture by Emerson, he wrote to a friend in admiration of "the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving & coming up once again with claret-shot eyes since the world began." When y'all hitting the idea/transcendental/depth chapters, welcome the invitation to dive, expecting to resurface with blood-shot eyes. Melville was an gorging reader of current philosophical thought, and sea voyages, if you lot were a passenger, were apt settings for long stretches of reading and thinking. He in one case sailed to London with the German philologist George Adler, an NYU professor, in the 1840s: "Nosotros talked metaphysics continuously," Melville wrote in his journal, "& Hegel, Schlegel, Kant &c were discussed nether the influence of the whiskey." A bit of sub-sub-advice here: Go along an eye on Ishmael. He disappears for whole stretches of the book, and is rarely an actor in events. Those places where he fesses upward to action are important, but when he goes missing for a stretch ask yourself why information technology matters.
3. If you start to experience bogged down in the whaling chapters, attempt looking for whatsoever'southward not a whale. Lots of readers have trouble with Chapter 32, "Cetology," for instance, and assume they but don't care to know that much about whales. Only the affiliate, if you lot pay attention, is actually about books, libraries, and nomenclature systems. Ishmael leaves his system unfinished. Why? In Chapter 96, "The Try-Works," a meditation on melting blubber gives way to speculations about Ahab'southward soul, by manner of Ishmael's framing the transport'southward labor forcefulness as diabolical "savages." I event of this comparison is to remind u.s. that the Pequod was named after a native tribe whose villages were burned to the ground by New England's Puritan settlers, in ane particularly vicious case with 400 people trapped within. The Puritan chronicler William Bradford'southward second-hand account runs thus: "It was a fearfull sight to see them thus frying in the fyer, and the streams of claret quenching the same, and horrible was the stinck and sente ther of; but the victory had wrought so wonderfuly for them, thus to inclose their enimise in their hands, and give them and so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enimie." When information technology comes to Moby-Dick, in other words, a whale's probably never just a whale, dead or live. And in any instance, rest assured that the action novel is sure to resurface before also long.
4. Remember that Moby-Dick doesn't simply inaugurate the tradition of the Great American Novel; information technology'due south too the the culmination of many histories, American and global. Melville's novel undertakes deliberate engagements with many histories: national, economic, literary, and more. It's obsessed, equally the "Extracts" at the front propose, with older systems of knowledge and forms of writing. For decades, Moby-Dick was taught primarily as a struggle between nineteenth-century New England transcendentalism and American's putative Puritan/Calvinist origins. Only it's perhaps equally mutual now to teach information technology as a profound reflection on the colonial exploitation of the new world. When we read the novel in my survey of American literature, which ends in the 1850s, it functions as a one thousand finale, and nosotros spend a lot of time talking about how information technology sums up all sorts of discussions we've had along the way, about colonialism, nationalism, slavery, global capitalism, and transatlantic literary markets as well as America's Puritan-origins myth. The truth is, it's all of these things and more than. Like the sea, it refuses to yield all its secrets to any ane reader. Just pay close attending to the ethnic, racial, national, and religious backgrounds of the coiffure and I think you'll meet that the scope of the novel's meditations tin't be contained by the the describing word "American." Information technology's a global text.
5. Think that the book was a failure in its own day. If yous cease it, this should help y'all experience smug in your power to recognize its genius. But information technology'southward also of import to retrieve about why information technology failed. Generically information technology was hard to pin down. Some contemporary readers didn't even seem to recognize it equally a novel; it was originally catalogued in libraries as a non-fiction account of the whaling industry. Melville, who had been a pop writer of South Seas take chances novels, found his reputation in reject, a process that accelerated after he published his bizarre novel Pierre before long after. He didn't fully get his due until modernist readers and writers, including D. H. Lawrence, recovered Moby-Dick starting in the 1920s. They were attracted to the precision of his language, his exquisite craft on a sentence level, and to the complication of his prose. Finally, Melville'south ambiguities and difficulty were a plus. These aren't attributes that pop mid nineteenth-century authors were known for: think Dickens and Stowe by contrast. To illustrate, and to conclude, I'll offer 1 niggling morsel, a description of whale mothers nursing their infants, though the language should also remind us of the tension betwixt Melville's ii books, discussed above:
Just far below this wondrous world upon the surface, another and nevertheless stranger earth met our eyes as nosotros gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I take hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and every bit human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, every bit if leading two different lives at the time; and while still cartoon mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence;- nonetheless did the immature of these whales seem looking up towards united states, but not at u.s.a., as if we were just a bit of Gulfweed in their new-born sight.
With whatsoever luck that will get you every bit far as Chapter 87, at least.
Posted on Monday, October 15, 2012 nether Book Club, Words | RSS
Source: https://www.greatwhatsit.com/archives/18405
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