The Pleasures of Reading Moby-Dick

The Pleasures of Reading Moby-Dick CAROLYN L. KARCHER Temple University Melville Society Lecture, New Bedford Whaling Museum, January 3, 2008 S tudents or general readers confronting Moby-Dick for the first time often feel as terror-stricken as sailors at the sight of the legendary white whale heading for them “with open jaws, and a lashing tail” (NN MD 558). Those undaunted by the book’s vast bulk and towering reputation find themselves frustrated by what appear to be continual digressions from its ostensible plot—the story of Captain Ahab’s vengeful hunt for the Leviathan that chewed off his limb. To appreciate Moby-Dick, we must heed the cue its subtitle, “The Whale,” furnishes: the book’s subject is not just the monster Captain Ahab tries in vain to slay but “the whale” as a species; hence, the cetology chapters, far from being intrusive padding, are integral to the larger story the narrator Ishmael relates, of whaling as a commercial enterprise and of his own unfulfilled quest to “know” the whale, a creature whose “living contour” can only be glimpsed at the “risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him” (264). Readers’ enjoyment of Moby-Dick will also be greatly enhanced if they realize how often Ishmael is teasing them when he seems to be straying from the plot or feeding them dry natural history. A vein of irreverent, bawdy humor runs through the novel, from the rollicking comedy of the scenes that describe Ishmael and the cannibal Queequeg in bed together to the sexual jokes and roguish parody that enliven the cetology chapters, poking fun at the nineteenth century’s religious, philosophical, scientific, social, and racial assumptions . Humor erupts as well in wild tonal shifts, both within and between chapters, which playfully upset reader expectations. These tonal shifts, along with the remarkable range of styles Moby-Dick exhibits—poetic, meditative, colloquial, punning, oratorical, scientific, legalistic, nautical, tragic, comic— call attention to the book’s experimental form. Defying critics’ efforts to fit it into a single genre, Moby-Dick mixes novel, romance, epic, drama, farce, travel narrative, anatomy, and scientific treatise. It also flouts the novelistic convention of maintaining a consistent narrative point of view. Ishmael disappears for long stretches, giving way sometimes to a third-person omniscient narrator, sometimes to stage directions, soliloquies, and full-cast theatrical C
2008 The Authors Journal compilation C
2008 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 104 L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S T H E P L E A S U R E S O F R E A D I N G performances. Through such experiments with form, Moby-Dick extends the project of challenging tradition to the domain of literature itself. Biographical and Historical Contexts “I f I shall ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world” of great literature, writes Ishmael in the chapter “The Advocate ,” speaking for his creator Herman Melville (1819–1891), “I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to whaling; for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard” (111–12). A whale-ship was likewise the crucible of Melville’s literary imagination. Embarking aboard the whaler Acushnet on 3 January 1841 (ten days after his fictional persona’s Christmas 1840 departure aboard the Pequod), Melville spent three and a half years at sea, during which he made three whaling voyages before returning home on a man-of-war. He based his first five novels—Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), Mardi (1849), Redburn (1849), and White-Jacket (1850)—on his adventures as a sailor, indicating the extent to which they molded him into the writer he became. Not until his art reached maturity in Moby-Dick, however, did he attempt the feat of rendering “blubber” into “poetry,” as he put it in a letter of 1 May 1850 to the fellow sea novelist Richard Henry Dana Jr. (1815–1882). Moby-Dick took Melville uncharacteristically long to complete. Its composition stretched over some eighteen months, and its design expanded...