Why Read Moby-Dick? by Nathaniel Philbrick, and: Chasing the White Whale: The Moby-Dick Marathon; or, What Melville Means Today by David Dowling (review)

“And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?” —Moby-Dick

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick reached few readers in his lifetime—only 3,715 books were sold between its publication in 1851 and Melville’s death forty years later in 1891. These two accessible books celebrate the value of reading Moby-Dick today and testify to the continued breaching of Melville’s Whale into full prominence in the 21^st century. These volumes enhance appreciation of Melville’s work of art—especially for those anxious about engaging the actual text—by elucidating such important contexts as Melville’s own financial and familial struggles, the political situation of the nation, and the inspiration and intimacy of his relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne. Philbrick and Dowling are both invested in how Melville draws upon the dislocating power of the sea for his creative surges and how Captain Owen Chase’s narrative of the tragic destruction of the Essex by a whale serves as the popular origin of the story of Moby-Dick. Both also argue how Melville’s masterpiece serves for the reader as a living literary embodiment of Queequeg’s coffin that preserves Ishmael’s life and allows him to tell his tale.

After winning the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2000 for In the Heart of the Sea, an account of the Essex and the drama of its survivors, Philbrick was invited to write an introduction to a 2001 edition of Moby-Dick which he has expanded into this reflective companion piece. Philbrick’s slim volume of 28 chapters in 120 printed pages serves as a sleek pilot fish to Melville’s ponderous Whale. While Melville’s art spirals from material artifact into philosophical meditation, Philbrick anchors his own observations in the vitality of Melville’s own language and artistry. At its best moments, Philbrick’s own language rises with the “propulsive poetry” (107) of his subject: he describes how Melville “luxuriated in the flagrant and erratic impulses of his own creative process” (7) while “conveying the quirky artlessness of life” (65) through Ishmael’s “improvisational magic of words” (76). Philbrick intuits insightful interpretations of the “magnificent mess” (65) of Moby-Dick: he compares Queequeg’s apoplectic fast in “The Ramadan” with Melville’s own isolation while penning the novel in Pittsfield (24–25), links the dissolution of the whales’ calm serenity in “The Grand Armada” with the tenuousness of Melville’s own domestic happiness (81–82), and extracts a political lesson from Fedallah about a demagogue’s dependence upon “an inner circle of advisors” (35). Philbrick is less convincing in his oracular pronouncements that Melville’s book contains the “genetic code of America” (6), constitutes “a metaphysical blueprint of the United States” (62), “deserves to be called our American bible” (9), or that it is like his grandparents’ Oldsmobile (65–66).

Philbrick’s ultimate answer to Why Read Moby-Dick? honors Melville’s “genial stoicism in the face of a short, ridiculous, and irrational life” (127). He offers that Moby-Dick delivers an “unflinching portrayal of reality” (124) that “achieves perspective within the tumult of the moment” (116). However, this focus, particularly on the “unmatched sense of immediacy” (112) in the final chase and chapters, leads Philbrick to conclude that Melville’s vital portrayal of the drama of Ahab’s defeat was “psychically corrosive” (48) and enacted “the disintegration of his talent” (115). Such a comment privileges the accomplishment of Moby-Dick without acknowledging the continuation of Melville’s Ishmaelian buoyancy as he found courageous ways to write and survive as an artist during the next forty years.

In Chasing the White Whale, David Dowling meditates on the many meanings of Melville’s text by comparing it with a wide variety of other literary works, by channeling...