Reading Moby-Dick

I’ve been reading Moby-Dick for the first time since college, and enjoying it more than I did then. It helps to be reading it for pleasure, without a deadline, without the pressure of tests and term papers, and the need to hunt for symbols and allusions. It helps to know what’s going to happen—anyone who’s waiting too impatiently for the white whale to appear is not going to have a good time—and it helps to be reading the University of California edition, with its beautiful typography and a hundred woodcuts by Barry Moser. Moser wisely avoids picturing the characters, but his illustrations of New Bedford streets, whale skeletons, and the specialized gear of a 19th century whaler add to your understanding.

It’s not the melodramatic scenes in Moby-Dick that I like the most, when Ahab nails the doubloon to the mast, or when the Satanic Fedallah makes his predictions, or when Ahab and the others launch into soliloquies that stir together King Lear, Milton, and the King James Bible. In these Melville comes too close to making the story what Ishmael himself calls (in chapter 45) “a hideous and intolerable allegory.”

I much prefer the early chapters before the Pequod sets sail, as Ishmael is getting to know Queequeg, or the glimpses of newborn whales and their mothers in chapter 87, or quieter passages that mingle philosophy and nature, like this from chapter 58:

Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.

Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return.

I had forgotten too, how much humor there is in Moby-Dick. Here’s just one example from chapter 101:

The beef was fine—tough, but with body in it. They said it was bull-beef; others, that it was dromedary beef; but I do not know, for certain, how that was. They had dumplings, too; small, but substantial, symmetrically globular, and indestructible dumplings. I fancied that you could feel them, and roll them about in you after they were swallowed. If you stooped over too far forward, you risked their pitching out of you like billiard-balls. The bread—but that couldn’t be helped; besides, it was an anti-scorbutic; in short, the bread contained the only fresh fare they had.

It was impossible not to think of Captain Aubrey’s joke that in the navy you must always prefer the lesser of two weevils.