Review: Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

Alright, so, Moby Dick!

I mentioned here how ecstatic I was to finally harpoon the great white whale that has taunted me ever since 7^th grade English. And now it’s time to actually review the son-of-a-gun.

The last thing I was expecting from this bad boy was that it would be laugh out loud funny in parts, yet there I was, just a few pages in, and our narrator Ishmael finds himself apoplectic that he has to share a bed with a heathenistic, cannibal harpooneer, who against all odds becomes his best friend and shipmate. And Stub, good grief! I could listen to the Pequod’s second mate talk to his crew all day long. The man’s hilarious.

But the book is more than just colorful. Melville builds mystery and bad omens into the story from the beginning. The reader goes to sea with the same reservations about the ship and its captain as Ishmael. It’s a well-spun yarn.

Now, the most frequent criticism I’ve heard of Moby Dick is that it’s cumbersome. Not just that it’s long, but that it’s full of meaningless tangential information that doesn’t move the story forward. But after reading it, I’m convinced that people who say this suffer from a general lack of curiosity.

Does he dedicate entire sections of the book to whale taxonomy? Sure he does. Does he mention every piece of art, and list every literary reference that touches on whales, sea monsters and “leviathans” of all orders? You bet. Does he painstakingly document the notorious generosity  of English and Dutch ships to other ships in the whaling trade, and uncover the origin of the “crow’s nest” that adorned the ships of his day? Absolutely. But my  question is, why don’t  you want to know about all of that? It interesting stuff.

If you’re like me, you’re helplessly drawn to Wikipedia by any book you read- fiction or non-fiction- because they open up new ideas, teach you new things and fill in your paltry knowledge of the world around you. But hey, guess what, I didn’t have to do that with Moby Dick  because Melville already did it for me. His tangents were my tangents, his obscure whaling trivia, my obscure whaling trivia. If that’s not your thing, bless your bored little heart.

Now, I do have plenty of my own criticisms. How Ishmael forges a bond, and goes to sea with Queequeg, and then fails to mention him for nearly the remainder of the book. How he jumps from head to head like an omniscient narrator, even though he’s just one of the shiphands. How the Pequod was able to track down and encounter a single, solitary whale in the vast natural range of his species. 

(Just take a look at that map- the blue isn’t just ocean, it’s the almost limitless habitat of the sperm whale. Talk about a finding needle in a haystack!) 

So yes, there were plenty of problems. And yet…  I enjoyed the hell out of it. It was a very pleasant surprise.

Author Look-Alikes: Round 6

The almond-shaped eyes with the little crease underneath, the rounded eyebrows and flawless complexion… they might hail from geographical antipodes, but I think it’s safe to say there’s a little Ashley Judd in Jhumpa Lahiri:

And how about a very young Margaret Mitchell? With those cheekbones and that ultra-serious gaze, she reminds me more than a little of Olivia Wilde:

Another certified looker in her youth, Pearl Buck matured into an amiable Aunt Bee type in her later years:

Now, this kind of match is rare. Look at the hairline, the eyebrows, the ears, the nose, the heavy eyelids- heck, look at everything but that beard and tell me Herman Melville and Hugh Grant aren’t one and the same:

Finally, we have to deal with David Foster Wallace and his persistent bandana at some point. Take away the scruff, the half-smirk, the glasses and about thirty years, and DFW could be reborn as Danny Laruso, AKA the Karate Kid:

Sweep the leg? I don't think so.

It's all been done before... even the experimental stuff

Having spent some time in art museums lately, the subject of originality has been on my mind.

In literature, as in the visual arts, one can probably make a good case that no matter what an author sets out to do, it’s all been done before. Plots, themes, devices, styles, character types- they all get recycled and repackaged- all the time. Now, this doesn’t mean that a work of literature can’t still reach us on some level if it happens to repurpose the age-old hero’s journey, or retell an old Greek myth, or follow every trope in a given genre. After all, we still listen to music and go see movies even though there are no new chord progressions and no new ideas in Hollywood.

But what if a writer wants to be an innovator and a visionary and a literary trailblazer? What is that author to do? Well, a few authors I’ve read this year spring to mind as examples.

I was bowled over, for instance, after plowing through 75 straight pages of powerpoint slides in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad  and realizing at the end of it that she had managed to form a pretty cohesive narrative that both moved the plot forward and revealed the innermost thoughts of one of the characters. Then in May of this year Egan serialized a short story on Twitter and it was… just okay. More than anything it struck me as a “gimmicky” publicity ploy.

Dana Spiotta’s novel Stone Arabia  is another book I read this year that aspires to innovate and break new ground. She employs a “collage” style that incorporates interviews, transcripts of YouTube videos, emails and other things into her regular narrative. I’ll admit that it worked for me, and it’s not something you see every day. But for all the praise these techniques inspire as 'experimental next steps in storytelling,' the problem with efforts like these is that- you guessed it, it’s all been done before.

Jump back 80 years and John Dos Passos was basically doing the same thing in the early ‘30s. His U.S.A  trilogy is peppered with newspaper clippings, song lyrics and biographies, intermingled with passages of his own stream of consciousness writings.

Jump back another 80 years and you’ve got Herman Melville spicing up his first-person narrative in Moby Dick  with historical treatises, zoology primers and all sorts of Shakespearean literary devices: soliloquies, asides and even stage directions.

I imagine that if you jump back another 80 years or more, you’ll find someone else doing something “new and innovative” in their day, as well. 

"Wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured..."

-Image source

One more Chicago-inspired post. 

On Saturday we made the hike out along the Lakefront Trail to the Adler Planetarium (and the best views of the Chicago skyline, by the way.) The weather was turning, there was plenty of spray coming off the seawall, and lots of whitecaps out on the Lake. Having finished Moby Dick  so recently, the scene brought to mind the following passage, where Ishmael tells a group of Peruvian sailors about that special breed of sailor known as a ‘Lakeman.’ (The paragraph breaks are mine- I just put them in where Melville should have:)

“Now, gentlemen, in square-sail brigs and three-masted ships, well nigh as large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to far Manilla, this Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, had yet been nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions popularly connected with the open ocean. 

"For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours,-Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,- possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean’s noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and of climes.   

"They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies in the East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw; they have yet heard the fleet thundering of naval victories; at intervals, they yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capital of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, and the beech canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew. 

"Thus gentlemen, though an inlander, Steelkilt was wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured; as much of an audacious mariner as any.”

What's your white whale?

The white whale from Moby Dick  is one of the great enduring symbols from the world of literature.

For Captain Ahab it represented everything menacing and evil in the world. For others on board the Pequod it illustrated Ahab’s monomaniacal obsession with revenge at the cost of all else. But the white whale has also come to conjure up images of some ultimate dread, of ill-fated unfinished business, and of hopeless, lost causes and predestined disasters.

As readers, we’ve all got a white whale. We’ve all got at least one book that taunts us mercilessly from the shelf- one that has conquered and defeated us, and that hangs ominously over us for years after our failure to read it. As I mentioned in this previous post, the book that became my personal Moby Dick, was none other than Moby Dick  itself. This seems like an appropriate place to leave one of Hollywood’s greatest motivational speeches:

Today, I am proud to say that I have finally defeated my own Moby Dick,  who also happens to be the ‘actual’  Moby Dick.  That’s right, fellow readers, pick your metaphor: I have harpooned the great white whale, exercised the demon, shaken the monkey off my back, and filled El Guapo so full of lead he’ll be using his... well, you get the picture.  

I HAVE READ MOBY DICK!

So what about you? What’s your white whale?

Or, if you’d prefer, what’s your favorite Three Amigos quote?

The Travel Narrative: In pictures

You thought I was done with this theme? Well, maybe just one more post. Here are a few literary journeys for those of you with a cartographer’s bent. 

From On the Road,  Sal Paradise’s path through the US and Mexico:

Steinbeck’s rambling jaunt from Travels with Charley:

William Least Heat Moon’s roundabout roamings in Blue Highways:

The ill-fated wanderings of  Alexander Supertramp (Chris McCandless), from Krakauer’s Into the Wild:

The Pequod’s journey on the high seas in Moby Dick:

And Phileas Fogg’s mad race across the globe in Around the World in 80 Days:

What other great literary maps are we missing?

The Travel Narrative

I mentioned the other day that I’m reading Blue Highways  by William Least Heat Moon, a book that was recommended to me 10 years ago in Cuszco, Peru and which has been nagging to be read on and off ever since. Next to it on my nightstand sits Into Thin Air   by Jon Krakauer, a first-hand account of the Everest disaster of 1996. Meanwhile, on my way to and from work I have been enthralled by Melville’s Moby Dick,  a book that nearly circumnavigates the globe before its finish. 

My favorite book so far this year might just well be Kerouac’s On the Road,  and my favorite author of all time, as any regular readers have probably deduced by now, is Ernest Hemingway- chronicler of European wars, African safaris and Cuban boatmen. If it wasn’t clear to me before, it’s becoming crystal clear now, that I am a hopeless sucker for the travel narrative:

“The travel narrative is the oldest in the world, the story the wanderer tells to the folk gathered around the fire after his or her return from a journey. “This is what I saw” — news from the wider world; the odd, the strange, the shocking, tales of beasts or of other people. “They’re just like us!” or “They’re not like us at all” The traveler’s tale is always in the nature of a report. And it is the origin of narrative fiction too, the traveler enlivening a dozing group with invented details, embroidering on experience.”

–Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel.

Anyone else?

First Line Friday: (Copy)Cat's Cradle

We all know the first line of Moby Dick  by heart.

Melville’s “Call me Ishmael” Is probably the most recognizable first line in all of literature. It’s simple, it’s personable, and it’s got the reader asking  questions right away. It just works.

But that’s not the first line we’re looking at today. No, today’s opening comes to you from Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical, apocalyptic classic, Cat’s Cradle.  Here it is:

“Call me Jonah.”

Hold on- wait a second. Hear me out before you send a fusillade of spitwads Vonnegut’s way. Here’s why it’s brilliant. Cat’s Cradle  is a book about man and his madness- much like Moby Dick.  So it’s an homage to Melville in that regard. But Vonnegut uses the familiar (some would say trite), opening as a pivot into his patented humorous style. It quickly becomes a parody, as he spits out lines 2, 3 and 4 in a kind of bumbling narrative that tips us off to the fact that we are about to read something funny, sad and absurd.

“Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

“Jonah­­­‑John- if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still- not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places at certain times, without fail.”

I think that opening sets the tone of the novel beautifully, even if it is  made from 100% recycled materials. What say you?

So You Wanna Be A Writer? Join the Merchant Marines!

Who among us hasn’t felt the urge to chip paint, swab the poop deck, or keep the midnight watch over a commercial shipping vessel at one time or another? Who can honestly say he’s never heard the call of the sea?

One thing’s for sure, many a great author has been groomed on the high seas. The literary world is replete with writers who have tackled a stint in the merchant marines: Joseph Conrad, Ralph Ellison, Herman Melville, Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, Alex Haley, Saul Bellow, Langston Hughes, Louis L’Amour, Eugene O’Neill, there are simply too many to name… One could throw in Jack London, who worked a sealing vessel, Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a ship's surgeon, or Ernest Hemingway, who hunted U-boats in the Caribbean. They probably all dreamed, like Conrad’s Lord Jim, of a life filled with adventure:

“He could see the big ships departing, the broad-beamed ferries constantly on the move, the little boats floating far below his feet with the hazy splendor of the sea in the distance and the hope of a stirring life in the world of adventure.

“On the lower deck, in the Babel of two-hundred voices, he would forget himself and beforehand live in his mind the sea life of light literature. He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line, or as a lonely castaway, barefooted and half-naked, walking on uncovered reefs in search of shellfish to stave off starvation. He confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas and in a small boat upon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men. Always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book.”

What’s not to love about any of that? Sign me up! But Conrad quickly follows that passage with this dampening dose of reality:

“After two years of training he went to sea, and entering the region so well known to his imagination, found them strangely barren of adventure. He made many voyages. He knew the magical monotony of existence between sky and water. He had to bear the criticism of men, the exactions of the sea, and the prosaic severity of the daily task that gives bread, but whose only reward is in the perfect love of the work. This reward eluded him. Yet, he could not go back, because there is nothing more enticing, disenchanting and enslaving than the life at sea.”

So, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies. So what? It still sounds like a nice gig, if you can get it. And the literary merits have been proven time and time again. Like the great authors named above, you could pluck your ideas and experiences from exotic foreign ports and use the long hours at sea to let your material marinate and develop for our benefit. 

So go ahead. Set sail for literary distinction. Be a writer, be a merchant marine.