Book review: Moby Dick

From hell’s heart I stab at thee

I read Moby Dick, and you’re going to hear about it.

Deciding to review a book 175 years after its publication is an act of almost unbelievable hubris. Obviously we have all had a chance to read it in those 175 years. It’s free to download on Project Gutenberg. Everyone who reads for pleasure knows it’s a Great Book, and most of us have at least considered mounting what we imagine the challenge of reading it, not unlike summitting Kilimanjaro. That so few of us do has been no barrier to Moby Dick leaving a leviathan-sized imprint on the culture. Captain Ahab and the devilish white whale survive as universally recognized references parodied and alluded to in countless other books, films, and television shows, a truly astounding legacy in a culture as illiterate as our own. Hundreds of scholars have built their careers in whole or in part on the study and discussion of Melville’s opus, including, apparently, the father of the author of the afterword of my Penguin Classic’s edition (which I did not read — it was surprisingly long and the book itself is quite long enough). This book is one of the single most well-trod novels ever published.

So in approaching the question of a review of Moby Dick, one must first ask himself: why? Whom is such a review for, and what can its author hope to achieve by it? I can only speak for myself, but I hope to record here what I so enjoyed about the book, what surprised me about it, how it subverted or fulfilled my expectations, how it made me feel. I’m sure none of my thoughts are original in the least, and may even be judged hackneyed by true Dick-heads. But I also think most of my audience probably haven’t read the book and have no plans to read it, and if I can exhort a few dozen of them off the fence and onto the decks of the Pequod, then it’s well worth the effort.

First things first: is Moby Dick, as so often alleged, a dense or challenging tome? I was fully prepared for this to be the case and was somewhat surprised to find that Melville’s language is essentially modern, his style perfectly straightforward if somewhat grandiose most of the time, his idioms and metaphors and allusions all recognizable — in short, the prose is eminently legible to a modern audience. Take this passage from a section about sharks feasting on a slaughtered whale tied alongside the ship (emphasis mine):

Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a sea-fight, sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship’s decks, like hungry dogs round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed man that is tossed to them; and though, while the valiant butchers over the deck-table are thus cannibally carving each other’s live meat with carving-knives all gilded and tasselled, the sharks, also, with their jewel-hilted mouths, are quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat; and though, were you to turn the whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all parties; and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave ships crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently buried; and though one or two other like instances might be set down, touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most socially congregate, and most hilariously feast; yet is there no conceivable time or occasion when you will find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a whaleship at sea.

This is about as dense as Moby Dick gets. If you can handle long sentences of semicolon-separated parallelism and the occasional archaic word choice, it won’t give you any trouble. Most of the language could pass as modern, if a bit floral in places. Consider the the idiom “pretty much” in the passage above, used exactly as it would be in modern speech. I had no idea how far back to date that turn of phrase, but if I had to take a guess I would have placed it more recently than 1850. But in fact this usage was clearly well established in Melville’s time, as well as related phrases like “pretty nearly”, “pretty plainly”, “pretty soon”, “pretty large”, etc. Perhaps I’m dating my reading choices a bit with this admission, but I was surprised by how close Melville’s English is to our own — I was prepared for a slog through the kind of tortuous grammatical constructions I’d encountered in certain other authors of the 19th century. But in fact Melville’s prose is nearly always straightforward and easily digested, the passage above being an example of the more difficult end of the spectrum.

And more than that, I was surprised to find that Moby Dick is frequently quite funny, often in a very dry and understated way, but written with a particular joie de vivre that bleeds through the page this many centuries later. Melville is palpably having the time of his life writing about whaling and whalers, bubbling over with enthusiasm for the subject matter and the dramatic personae. This comes through from the first and continues throughout the narrative (not withstanding some very maudlin turns that you can nevertheless tell Melville enjoys writing immensely). Take for example this passage from the opening paragraph, just after the narrator’s famous introductory first sentence.

… I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.

This is Melville’s Ishmael explaining, by means of introduction to why he finds himself on a whaling ship for most of the novel, that going to sea is his way of not killing himself. He goes on to impart his opinion that the sea fascinates all men, and that his particular means of dispelling his depressive tendency and preventing himself from assaulting strangers in the street is just good sense; that other foolish men actually pay for the privilege of a sea voyage whereas he always finds paid work on a ship’s crew, earning a wage while being cured of his melancholy. Our narrator has some very romantic notions about the sea and ships, going so far as to insist on crewing with a whaling ship out of Nantucket for no other reason than the vibe of authenticity:

For my mind was made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine, boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island, which amazingly pleased me.

Ishmael, despite or maybe because of his own self-seriousness, is a comic character and even something of a clown, suffering pratfalls and getting pranked for the entire first section of the novel before the Pequod sails. This begins in earnest with the innkeeper of the Spouter Inn in New Bedford. There is no room at the inn, but Ishmael is dead set on staying at the most thematically appropriate inn in town. So the innkeeper invites him to share a bed with a harpooner variously described as a cannibal, a savage, or just a heathen. This is Queequeg of course, who arrives home to his room after a long day trying to peddle some surplus shrunken heads (really), discovers Ishmael in his bed, and attacks him with the tomahawk pipe he had just begun to smoke before the innkeeper runs in to intervene.

After this bad start, the two become best friends — bosom friends, in fact, which is the title of Chapter 10 — and after sharing a pipe and feeding Queequeg’s heathen idol some bread crumbs they climb into bed together and proceed to cuddle and gossip until dawn.

How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.

We had lain thus in bed, chatting and napping at short intervals, and Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back; so entirely sociable and free and easy were we; when, at last, by reason of our confabulations, what little nappishness remained in us altogether departed, and we felt like getting up again, though day-break was yet some way down the future.

I have vague impressions of people describing these scenes in homoerotic terms, and of course modern readers think all physical affection between men is essentially homosexual, but in reality the scene is a farce. Ishmael’s cuddle puddle with the tattooed savage he was mortally afraid of just the day before is hilarious in its absurdity and abrupt juxtaposition, and marks Ishmael as a bit of a rube, easily swayed by those around him, trusting to the same mad romantic notions of fate that made him choose the Spouter Inn and insist on a Nantucket whaling boat. This is underscored when Queequeg insists that Ishmael find a ship for the two of them to sail on without his help, despite the harpooner being a veteran of multiple whaling vessels and Ishmael completely inexperienced with whaling and naïve of what to look out for. But Ishmael accepts this bizarre request as simple fate, which leads him to choose the Pequod, where he is promptly swindled by two of the owners, Bildad and Peleg, playing good-cop / bad-cop.

“Well, Captain Bildad,” interrupted Peleg, “what d’ye say, what lay shall we give this young man?”

“Thou knowest best,” was the sepulchral reply, “the seven hundred and seventy-seventh wouldn’t be too much, would it?

“Why, blast your eyes, Bildad,” cried Peleg, “thou dost not want to swindle this young man! he must have more than that.”

“Seven hundred and seventy-seventh,” again said Bildad, without lifting his eyes; and then went on mumbling—“for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

“I am going to put him down for the three hundredth,” said Peleg, “do ye hear that, Bildad! The three hundredth lay, I say.”

Whalers weren’t paid a wage at the time, instead signing onto an expedition in exchange for a certain percentage of the overall profits, as well as being given room and board. The seven hundred and seventy-seventh lay means 1/777th of the total profits, which Peleg generously increases to 1/300th¹. We know from Ishmael’s narration that this is less than he heard he should be offered, but he mutely accepts it, again seemingly resigning himself to fate rather than trying to seek a better bargain on another ship. (Queequeg demonstrates his skill with his harpoon the next day and is offered the 90th lay.)

And then the Pequod pulls away from harbor and Ishmael almost vanishes from the plot altogether. He’s still there on the ship, presumably doing his duty as a sailor, acting as our chronicler of all the events yet to come, but after the Pequod sails his part in the story, as an actor performing explicit actions in the story, taking part in conversations, and so on is essentially over. We occasionally catch him performing some job like squeezing spermaceti in a tub on deck or hauling a line, but he’s usually absent from a scene, with no dialogue or stage direction, replaced by a fresh batch of actors. Queequeg plays a far greater part in the narrative from this point forward than Ishmael. I didn’t recognize this shift as it was happening, but only in retrospect, while thinking about the book I’d spent over a month reading after its somewhat abrupt dramatic climax, and once I made the realization the force of it struck me. Ishmael begins the novel as protagonist but is quietly and sharply demoted to simple semi-omniscient narrator, all of his considerable personality up to this point evaporating, or maybe shifting onto the crew of the Pequod — his melancholy onto first mate Starbuck, his dry humor onto second mate Stubb, and his strange romance for the sea and whaling, his curious trust in fate, onto the mad Captain Ahab.

Melville does a particularly good job characterizing the mates, with much of the novel being a long study in contrast of their three very different personalities. You can get a very good sense of who they are from just a brief passage of their different manner of encouraging the rowers of the small boats that are lowered to chase, harpoon, and kill the whales, a frequent motif that comprises most of the action sequences in the novel. Serious-minded Starbuck whispers exhortations to his crew; playful Stubb taunts and teases; practical third mate Flask tries to entice them with the profit of the barrels of oil the whales ultimately yield. In the instance below they’re racing with boats from another whaling ship piloted by a Captain Yarman, trying to be the first to reach a wounded whale to claim it for their own.

“The ungracious and ungrateful dog!” cried Starbuck; “he mocks and dares me with the very poor-box I filled for him not five minutes ago!”—then in his old intense whisper—“Give way, greyhounds! Dog to it!”

“I tell ye what it is, men”—cried Stubb to his crew—“it’s against my religion to get mad; but I’d like to eat that villainous Yarman—Pull—won’t ye? Are ye going to let that rascal beat ye? Do ye love brandy? A hogshead of brandy, then, to the best man. Come, why don’t some of ye burst a blood-vessel²? Who’s that been dropping an anchor overboard—we don’t budge an inch—we’re becalmed. Halloo, here’s grass growing in the boat’s bottom—and by the Lord, the mast there’s budding. This won’t do, boys. Look at that Yarman! The short and long of it is, men, will ye spit fire or not?”

“Oh! see the suds he makes!” cried Flask, dancing up and down—“What a hump—Oh, do pile on the beef—lays like a log! Oh! my lads, do spring—slap-jacks and quahogs for supper, you know, my lads—baked clams and muffins—oh, do, do, spring,—he’s a hundred barreller—don’t lose him now—don’t oh, don’t!—see that Yarman—Oh, won’t ye pull for your duff, my lads—such a sog! such a sogger! Don’t ye love sperm? There goes three thousand dollars, men!—a bank!—a whole bank! The bank of England!—Oh, do, do, do!—What’s that Yarman about now?”

Irreverent second mate Stubb is easily my favorite character. Possessed of a manic energy and joyful spirit, he’s incapable of being serious for even a moment, except to Ahab, of whom he lives in obvious holy terror. But Ahab keeps council chiefly with Starbuck, leaving Stubb free to joke and insult and soliloquize to the rest of the crew. The most memorable and comic scene in the novel for me occurs in Chapter 64, titled “Stubb’s supper”, after Stubb gets the harpooners to cut him a steak from the tale of the whale he killed in Chapter 61 (“Stubb Kills a Whale”) and eats it standing at the capstan at midnight. In a jubilant mood, he spends five or six pages hassling the ancient negro cook Fleece for overcooking it, and won’t let him go back to bed before delivering a sermon to the sharks feasting loudly on the massive whale carcass tied alongside the Pequod.

“Well then, cook, you see this whale-steak of yours was so very bad, that I have put it out of sight as soon as possible; you see that, don’t you? Well, for the future, when you cook another whale-steak for my private table here, the capstan, I’ll tell you what to do so as not to spoil it by overdoing. Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live coal to it with the other; that done, dish it; d’ye hear? And now to-morrow, cook, when we are cutting in the fish, be sure you stand by to get the tips of his fins; have them put in pickle. As for the ends of the flukes, have them soused, cook. There, now ye may go.”

But Fleece had hardly got three paces off, when he was recalled.

“Cook, give me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch. D’ye hear? away you sail, then.—Halloa! stop! make a bow before you go.—Avast heaving again! Whale-balls for breakfast—don’t forget.”

“Wish, by gor! whale eat him, ’stead of him eat whale. I’m bressed if he ain’t more of shark dan Massa Shark hisself,” muttered the old man, limping away; with which sage ejaculation he went to his hammock.

I haven’t touched upon Ahab at all, who is of course a fascinating character in his own right, prone to long muttering conversations with himself or perhaps an imaginary interlocutor, pacing up and down the wooden decking on his ivory peg leg or simply standing with it planted in the divot he has bored into the quarterdeck to act as a pivot. For most of the novel he’s more symbol than character, most of his scenes being confined to the final quarter of the narrative when the chase for the white whale actually begins. But like the whale he hunts, Ahab sounds and then surfaces again continually throughout the tale, reminding us that the stakes of the voyage are very different for him than for the rest of the crew. Ahab, alone of all the characters in the novel, speaks in an archaic dialect (ye, thou, hast seen the white whale, etc.), and also refers to himself almost exclusively in the third person. His madness is slippery and hard to define, more than simple obsession but far short of delusion or even mania. Like other mythic men of literature, Ahab hardly sleeps and barely eats, standing or pacing the decks at all hours, an ill omen. He inspires equal parts terror and devotion from the crew.

But even these new characters that displace Ishmael, as well drawn as they are, take a backseat to the true protagonist of the book: whales. Moby Dick is first and foremost a book about whales³ — also the whaling industry, but mostly whales. Melville loves whales, and thinks nothing of spending a few dozen pages at a time info-dumping about his pet topic, totally divorced from the plot. The prologue is some 3000 words of various quotations about whales from other sources. Chapter 32, “Cetology”, is an exhaustive bestiary of every kind of fish and dolphin known at the time of publication, including their physical description, behavior, and their value to fisheries⁴ in terms of oil extracted. Chapters 55 through 57 comprise written accounts of the meager artwork depicting whales and how wholly inadequate they are at conveying the reality of the leviathan, alive in his native watery habitat. Chapters 74 through 80 are given over to lengthy anatomical descriptions of various feature’s of the whale’s body, comparing and contrasting different species, with special attention to those parts sought after by the whalers. In Chapter 78, Melville interrupts his anatomy lecture to describe the procedure for extracting the valuable spermaceti from the whale’s head, which they have previously separated from the body and hung from the side of the ship by block and tackle, still partially submerged. Another of the harpooners, an islander named Tashtego, is conscripted to climb onto the dangling skull and break into the Case, which is what the whalers called the sperm whale’s enormous melon, the organ of echolocation that contains the waxy spermaceti (Ishmael alludes to it as the “Heidelburgh Tun”, a valuable cask of fine wine).

Nimble as a cat, Tashtego mounts aloft; and without altering his erect posture, runs straight out upon the overhanging mainyard-arm, to the part where it exactly projects over the hoisted Tun. He has carried with him a light tackle called a whip, consisting of only two parts, travelling through a single-sheaved block. Securing this block, so that it hangs down from the yard-arm, he swings one end of the rope, till it is caught and firmly held by a hand on deck. Then, hand-over-hand, down the other part, the Indian drops through the air, till dexterously he lands on the summit of the head. There—still high elevated above the rest of the company, to whom he vivaciously cries—he seems some Turkish Muezzin calling the good people to prayers from the top of a tower. A short-handled sharp spade being sent up to him, he diligently searches for the proper place to begin breaking into the Tun. In this business he proceeds very heedfully, like a treasure-hunter in some old house, sounding the walls to find where the gold is masoned in. By the time this cautious search is over, a stout iron-bound bucket, precisely like a well-bucket, has been attached to one end of the whip; while the other end, being stretched across the deck, is there held by two or three alert hands. These last now hoist the bucket within grasp of the Indian, to whom another person has reached up a very long pole. Inserting this pole into the bucket, Tashtego downward guides the bucket into the Tun, till it entirely disappears; then giving the word to the seamen at the whip, up comes the bucket again, all bubbling like a dairy-maid’s pail of new milk. Carefully lowered from its height, the full-freighted vessel is caught by an appointed hand, and quickly emptied into a large tub. Then remounting aloft, it again goes through the same round until the deep cistern will yield no more. Towards the end, Tashtego has to ram his long pole harder and harder, and deeper and deeper into the Tun, until some twenty feet of the pole have gone down.

The above passage is a good example of the other kind of non-fiction account that breaks up the main narrative plot, or comprises it, depending on your point of view: essays and vignettes about the business of whaling. Here again Melville’s enthusiasm shines through with autistic ferocity as he describes in loving detail the process of finding, chasing, killing, butchering, and processing the whales. Whether or not you enjoy these sections, along with the various zoological descriptions and metaphysical ramblings (on which more in a moment) will probably determine whether you enjoy Moby Dick as a whole, seeing as they account for the majority of words committed to the page after the Pequod sails from port.

For example, Melville dedicates an entire chapter to the hempen rope that attaches a boat to a harpoon, by which the boat is often towed by a stuck whale (a “fast fish”) during a hunt. The whale-line passes up and down the length of the entire boat, around various knobs and chocks, designed to allow the hunters to easily add more or less friction to the line’s play as the whale spools it out. The entire arrangement is at once delicate and fearsome.

The whale-line is only two-thirds of an inch in thickness. … Towards the stern of the boat it is spirally coiled away in the tub, not like the worm-pipe of a still though, but so as to form one round, cheese-shaped mass of densely bedded “sheaves,” or layers of concentric spiralizations, without any hollow but the “heart,” or minute vertical tube formed at the axis of the cheese. As the least tangle or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take somebody’s arm, leg, or entire body off, the utmost precaution is used in stowing the line in its tub. Some harpooneers will consume almost an entire morning in this business, carrying the line high aloft and then reeving it downwards through a block towards the tub, so as in the act of coiling to free it from all possible wrinkles and twists.

…

Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line is taken aft from the tub, and passing round the loggerhead there, is again carried forward the entire length of the boat, resting crosswise upon the loom or handle of every man’s oar, so that it jogs against his wrist in rowing; and also passing between the men, as they alternately sit at the opposite gunwales, to the leaded chocks or grooves in the extreme pointed prow of the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size of a common quill, prevents it from slipping out. From the chocks it hangs in a slight festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the boat again; and some ten or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being coiled upon the box in the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale still a little further aft, and is then attached to the short-warp—the rope which is immediately connected with the harpoon; but previous to that connexion, the short-warp goes through sundry mystifications too tedious to detail.

…

For, when the line is darting out, to be seated then in the boat, is like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you. It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless in the heart of these perils, because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and you are pitched one way and the other, without the slightest warning…

I’m wary of quoting too much of this material but it’s honestly the most compelling part of Moby Dick. Melville Did The Reading. There is a rich vein of source material for him to mine, and he’s only too eager to share it with us. To us moderns, and presumably to most of Melville’s contemporaries as well, he’s describing another world we’ve never glimpsed or even much thought of, an intricately detailed profession and industry with a hundred specialized skills and terms that are now completely irrelevant, lost to time. But whaling was a serious, major industry that made countless fortunes in his time — somewhere around a quarter million sperm whales were hunted, killed, and butchered completely by hand, one at a time, during the 19th century when Melville was writing⁵, almost exclusively by wind-driven ships without the aid of even steam power. Whalers rowed by hand, threw the harpoon by hand, stabbed the lance that struck the killing blow by hand, towed the whale by hand, and butchered him by hand. It’s almost incredible that this bloody activity was happening at such a massive scale for over a century, that little men in sailing ships really did hunt and kill so many leviathans, clambering around on 70-foot-long floating carcasses with cutting tools to harvest the blubber. It’s unbelievable that this now-alien practice was so common that whale oil was the premium lighting source for most of a century. The value of that oil, rendered from a whale’s thick sheath of blubber, was high enough to compel these years-long, perilous expeditions that circled the globe in the course of filling the barrels in the hold.

I found the entire process of transforming the living whale into a valuable commodity fascinating, and Melville spares no detail. He’s adept at explaining the mechanics of the industry, and they’re still evocative all these many years after this death. Here he describes how the long strips of blubber were peeled off the whale carcass, tied floating alongside the ship, and hoisted onto the deck:

… the huge lower block of the tackles was swung over the whale; to this block the great blubber hook, weighing some one hundred pounds, was attached. And now suspended in stages over the side, Starbuck and Stubb, the mates, armed with their long spades, began cutting a hole in the body for the insertion of the hook just above the nearest of the two side-fins. This done, a broad, semicircular line is cut round the hole, the hook is inserted, and the main body of the crew striking up a wild chorus, now commence heaving in one dense crowd at the windlass. When instantly, the entire ship careens over on her side; every bolt in her starts like the nail-heads of an old house in frosty weather; she trembles, quivers, and nods her frighted mast-heads to the sky. More and more she leans over to the whale, while every gasping heave of the windlass is answered by a helping heave from the billows; till at last, a swift, startling snap is heard; with a great swash the ship rolls upwards and backwards from the whale, and the triumphant tackle rises into sight dragging after it the disengaged semicircular end of the first strip of blubber. Now as the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an orange, so is it stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is sometimes stripped by spiralizing it. For the strain constantly kept up by the windlass continually keeps the whale rolling over and over in the water, and as the blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the line called the “scarf,” simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the mates; and just as fast as it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very act itself, it is all the time being hoisted higher and higher aloft till its upper end grazes the main-top; the men at the windlass then cease heaving, and for a moment or two the prodigious blood-dripping mass sways to and fro as if let down from the sky, and every one present must take good heed to dodge it when it swings, else it may box his ears and pitch him headlong overboard.

From here the enormous strips of blubber are further subdivided and processed by the work of many hands belowdecks, then eventually rendered in the ship’s try-works, a giant masonry furnace bolted to the top deck where the less desirable pieces of blubber serve as the fuel to boil the whale fat in giant cauldrons to make it keep for the rest of the journey without spoiling. It’s all quite interesting, and again the enthusiasm Melville has for his subject matter shines through in every sentence. It’s infectious, and I found myself caring more about the nuts and bolts of whaling than I ever could have imagined prior to reading.

Interleaved with these fascinating historical accounts are several almost post-modernist ramblings, long-winded treatises on tangentially related philosophical or spiritual matters that mostly left me cold. Chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale”, is probably the worst offender in this category, an interminable exploration into the metaphorical significance of Moby Dick’s color. There are several of these scattered throughout the book, and they mostly miss their mark, at least for me. But I found the structure itself to be quite interesting, Melville’s willingness to interrupt his own narrative with asides, to write whatever he pleased at any moment no matter where it might lead, whether that digression was three back-to-back chapters about whale anatomy or a basically standalone short story about another famous whaling boat. This inclination again struck me as quite modern, reminiscent of Neal Stephenson or David Foster Wallace. What Melville has in common with those authors, despite their very different styles and the centuries separating them, is a certain boundless self-confidence leading to a wry self-indulgence, a trust in their own authorial skill to carry the reader’s attention through a ten-page digression into ancient Sumer (looking at you Stephenson) or whatever else is fascinating them as they research their latest book. It works for Melville slightly less well than those other two authors in my opinion, but for the most part he does in fact carry it off. Moby Dick is almost never a slog, and the odd structure adds spice rather than throwing off the dish.

Moby Dick was a commercial failure in its own time, earning mixed reviews and selling only around 3,000 copies in total. It wasn’t until decades after Melville’s death that audiences rediscovered it and took a real interest in it, eventually turning it into the literary legend it is for us today. I like to think Melville himself would be pleased by this twist, that he would turn a wry smile at the vagaries of fate that would propel his opus to immortality so long after he shuffled off the mortal coil. Like his Ishmael or Stubb, he would find the hilarity in the cruel and arbitrary timing of his literary recognition.

At least, I hope he would. Moby Dick deserves its reputation, and Melville should feel proud of the leviathan-sized legacy the book left. I’ve read many Great Books, and not all of them hold up to modern sensibilities or can justify the time invested relative to more modern fare. Moby Dick can, and is well worth reading today.

Recommendation: it’s been 175 years; it’s time to read Moby Dick already.

1. Bildad would have instantly understood the proper vesting schedule for a founding engineer

2. This line kills me, and more than any other sticks in my mind as representative of Melville’s dry humor

3. The title of the UK publication reflects this simple fact: The Whale; or, Moby-Dick

4. Ishmael considers whales a kind of fish: “The uncertain, unsettled condition of this science of Cetology is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish… Be it known that, waiving all argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and call upon holy Jonah to back me… To be short, then, a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail.”

5. That number would triple in the late industrial era, most of the catch between World War Two and the bans of the 1980s.