“Maybe I’ll pull it out of my bookshelf and try again. After all, I paid for it”, says Peter, the (Dutch) man leading the poetry session for our group that evening. I suggest he try the audiobook or Moby Dick the big read, a free website on which one can listen to it through the voices of the likes of David Attenborough. I too had abandoned reading it on my first attempt. But my curiosity got the better of me when I learned that some famous writers and book lovers like me, have claimed that it is the greatest American novel ever written. "‘Moby-Dick’ is the book which I put down with the unqualified thought, 'I wish I had written that'…" said Nobel laureate and author, William Faulkner.
So, what is the plot?
Here is the Wikipedia version:
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is an 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville. The book is the sailor Ishmael's narrative of the maniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for vengeance against Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that bit off his leg on the ship's previous voyage.
And here is an excerpt from this tome, intimidating enough with its 650 pages without having to be confronted by the kind of language that Melville sometimes resorts to:
“No, no, no! ye have not a whole-body sir, do ye but use poor me for your one lost leg; only tread upon me sir; I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye,” says Pip, the subservient ‘negro’ servant to the master, captain of the Pequod and God-fearing Christian, Ahab.
So, should you place Moby Dick back on the bookshelf?
You would then also have to throw Shakespeare’s works out of the window. Or, like Peter, allow Shakespeare to adorn your bookshelf, and not contaminate your mind with words we would rather erase from the lexicon.
It isn’t just Pip the ‘negro’ who lights up (if I may) the pages of Moby Dick with his presence. There are Queeqweg, Daggoo and Tashtego - the right-hand men of the one-legged captain Ahab; the harpooneers he sorely needs to kill whales and win the battle against the hated white whale. Because these highly skilled men are not Christians, Melville refers to them and others of their ilk as ‘cannibals’ and ‘savages’.
So, time to put Melville and his book out of your mind?
To quote Arundhati Roy:
“Speaking for myself, I have tried to learn my craft not only from politically irreproachable writers like Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, but also from imperialists like Kipling, and from bigots, racists, troublemakers and rascals who write beautifully…..Shall Lolita vanish from our shelves? Or shall she be recast as an undercover pre-teen activist? Shall old masterpieces be repainted? Shorn of the male gaze? It’s so sad to even have to say all this. Where will it leave us? On a shore without footprints? In a world without history”?
Apart from the colourful (pun intended) sailors and harpooneers with whom you could go on an exciting adventure, there is the antagonist, Moby Dick - 90 feet long, 40 feet around and weighing 90 tons, and others like him. By now it should come as no surprise that you will be confronted with graphic details, not only about the hunting, killing, and dismembering of whales, but also about the whaling industry itself. What it meant in economic terms. And how the numbers of sperm whales dwindled drastically because of their usefulness to the ‘civilizing process’. To see the vast ocean with these magnificent creatures in front of one’s eyes, as Melville shows us, and to know that ‘Moby Dick -The Whale’ may just be one of the only ways we will know them, may be upsetting, much like many other aspects of this narrative. However, as Philip Hoare’s article ‘Six resons why Moby Dick is the novel for our times’ may change some of your perceptions about it. This, along with - try the audiobook/website, and links to just some of what has been written or said about this timeless classic, is what I want to share this month of August 2023, with Peter, and with you.
Six reasons why Moby Dick is the novel for our times
Website - Moby Dick, the big read
Animation video - Something for everyone in Moby Dick
TED talk - A small dose of literature every day to keep the Melville effect flowing