Reading and the Whale

The only book that truly deserves the "you can't understand the country without it" bit is Valley of the Dolls.

I read Moby Dick the easy way, by listening to the unabridged audio version.

Like g.powerll, I found certain chapters are terrific, and others less so.

Teach literary canon though? Does that include a bunch of patriarchal bitter white guys? We tossed them out years ago.

I say we teach Buffy.

Yglesias goes too far, but MOBY DICK is indisputably a great novel. Like America itself, it's very much a melting pot of different styles, themes, attitudes, and elements. Melville really grapples with the microcosm he creates, coming at it from all angles--poetic, prosaic, spiritual, nuts-and-bolts literal, abstract, satiric, modernist, melodramatic. You name a style and he incorporates it. Yet I do think he holds it all together in the grip of his prodigious imaginative sympathy for all the characters (including the whale). And he has a great subject to wrestle with--whaling as a metaphor for the American experiment. I guess if you don't buy that metaphor the book probably won't work for you.

I never liked Moby Dick. But I'm glad I was forced to read it. And I'm glad I was forced to read Gatsby--which I loved and which led me to devour everything Fitzgerald ever wrote. The purpose of being forced to read good books is not just that you might love them all--because you won't--but that you will learn to be a better writer, a better thinker, and will have a broader understand of our country, world, etc.

You don't really get any of those things from, say, the Twilight series, I would guess. Especially having seen how crappily written those books are.

I can't get past the first chapter of Moby Dick. It's clunky and self-indulgent. The first paragraph is strong--though also self-indulgent--and after that it just reads amateurish to me.

I'll quote from my last blog entry, which happened to deal with Moby Dick (among a lot of other stuff):

When you ask people what the "Great American Novel" is, two candidates tend to be mentioned above all others: Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, and Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Huck Finn probably best represents the American condition: two people, one white, one black, floating together down the great American river. Moby Dick, on the other hand, represents in Captain Ahab the American character: the utter refusal to accept failure, the relentless rush towards greatness, regardless of the cost.

It's interesting to look at the 2008 Presidential election as a choice between the two Great American Novels, America's two metaphorical visions of itself. The Moby Dick version presents an America with a white whale to conquer. Patton's generation had the Nazis as their white whale, while Ronald Reagan's generation had the Communists. Those were Moby Dick kind of fights, where the mission is clear and unambiguous, where a single-minded obsession with victory was exactly what was required of us. John McCain, like Captain Ahab, is a salty old wounded and battle-tested captain, who clearly views the War Against Terrorism as another such white whale, where a clear victory over the Bad Guys is the only acceptable outcome.

But America had another choice, the Huckleberry Finn model. In Huck Finn, the enemy is more Ourselves than the Other Guy. Winning does not result in the defeat of the opponent, but in merging with them. Barack Obama is a Black-White-Christian-Muslim-African-Asian-Minority-Elitist-Pragmatic-Liberal-American, the ultimate merger of opposites, a one-man Huck & Jim.

After seven years of fighting terrorism as a Moby Dick battle, America decided to change models, to test if merging with the enemy is more effective than defeating them. America decided to float off on a newly constructed, untested raft, with racially ambiguous leadership, heading whereever the currents take them, with our objectives messy and undefined, into directions unknown.

Moby Dick sucked. Not as much as The Brothers Karamazov sucked, but it sucked. Gimme the movie version with Gregory Peck any day.

The prosaic and the literal are a huge part of American culture and tradition (hey, look at this blog). It was part of Melville's genius to realize this and incorporate it in the form of the nuts-and-bolts whaling chapters--alongside the grandiose and spiritual ones--in his novel.

To the question of whether you should choose your childrens' books. Contrary to Kevin, in grades 1-8 they are NOT "just" learning to read, they are learning to write. The best way is by example. You're just not going to get that example from "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" or a Lego Star Wars magazine. (Any of you with a 3rd or 4th grade boy knows what I mean!)

Which isn't to say you completely disallow such books -- they are the bait for the better books. One step up are books like the Magic Treehouse series which can bring in an interest in history. And any children's book that you remember that is still in print probably has something to reccomend it. (Think, The Call of the Wild or even Harriet the Spy.) Harry Potter is close to being literature despite its trendyness. (But any kid who can read the later Harry Potters can also read The Hobbit independently.) Then there are the Newberry Award books (and the caldecotts for younger kids). What I found is that once I made my kids read a first chapter, they actually got more engrossed in those than in the trendy "lite" books they would read by default. (Examples across many genres -- From the Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiler, Rabbitt Hill, A Wrinkle in Time, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, My Side of the Mountain, Charlotte's Web, The Westing Game, Hoot, etc.)

And if a book is above their heads (or even if it isn't), you can read it to them. Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, any C S Lewis, The Hobbit, Treasure Island, Alice in Wonderland, the Oz books ... it's some of the best bonding I ever did with my kids. And books on disc of any of these make a great alternate to Disney DVDs in the car on long road trips.

In other words, even kids can appreciate quality -- if you expose them to it.

It's a novel about work and how work shapes you. In that it may be the first novel of its kind; amid the titanic moral struggle of Ahab vs. fate/God, there are men working at a trade.
Give yourself up to it--quit demanding that it accomodate itself to your frame of reference, and you'll find it's a time machine.

I love Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn, but as an engineer working for a third tier vendor on the 787, I can’t get through a day without thinking of Sergeant Scheisskopf in Catch 22. The troops won’t march for Scheisskopf because they don’t like him and consider him incompetent. “Tell me what the problem is” Scheiskopf tells the troops. “Am I the problem? I want to know.” And my managers wonder why I smile while I sit through interminable meetings with managers from our first and second tier vendor overseers and our ultimate customer, the esteemed Yoyodyne Corporation.

...

But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded whale, accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at all. For it is one of the more curious things about this Leviathan, that his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape. Though Jeremy Bentham's skeleton, which hangs for candelabra in the library of one of his executors, correctly conveys the idea of a burly- browed utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy's other leading personal characteristics; yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from any leviathan's articulated bones. In fact, as the great Hunter says, the mere skeleton of the whale bears the same relation to the fully invested and padded animal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes it. This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as in some part of this book will be incidentally shown. It is also very curiously displayed in the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer to the bones of the human hand, minus only the thumb. This fin has four regular bone-fingers, the index, middle, ring, and little finger. But all these are permanently lodged in their fleshy covering, as the human fingers in an artificial covering. "However recklessly the whale may sometimes serve us," said humorous Stubb one day, "he can never be truly said to handle us without mittens."

For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.

Beloved by Toni Morrison.

Look at the syllabi for American literature courses taught abroad.

For most readers, the best way to approach Moby Dick is to roam through it and read single chapters such as "The Monkey Rope" or "The Castaway" or "The Grand Armada" rather than starting at the beginning and trying to read the book straight through. The novel is simply too dense, uneven, and craggy to be an easy read.

That said, it's a superb way to look at our earlier religious traditions (Melville often shapes chapters as if they were 18thc. sermons) and at whaling, one of the 19th century's most important industries. Between final exams and graduation from college, I spent five days on Nantucket island, visiting the whaling museum to read ships' logs and absorb the exotic collection of artifacts, walking around the island and reading Moby Dick. It was an unforgettable swim in the dark, exotic seas of our past and a wonderful look at the range of human nature at work on the high seas.

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