Melville

Nationality: American

Major Work: Moby-Dick

Publication date: 1851

Setting: Mainly the open sea, also New York and Massachusetts

Format: Prose

Length (time to read): 7hrs 56mins (word count: 206,052)

Influences: Plato, Bible, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Browne, Milton, Goethe, Hawthorne

Themes: Nature, Fate, Faith, Race, Revenge, Madness

Quotes (a selection from Moby-Dick): “To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme” / “Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian” / “Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope” / “In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers” / “For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab” / “The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails whereon my soul is grooved to run” /  “There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness” / “And I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam, while in the act of thinking deep thoughts” / “Top-heavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle in his head” / “There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke”

Literary Echoes: Melville’s influence is vast and wide-ranging, especially on American literature, with William Faulkner citing him as a primary inspiration, while the likes of Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison and Philip Roth have all echoed Moby-Dick in their own work. Melville was also widely read by existential philosophers like Albert Camus and Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac, while Bob Dylan cited him extensively as an inspiration in his acceptance speech for the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature

Album accompaniment: Led Zeppelin II, including John Bonham’s drum instrumental Moby Dick, which like the book is an exhilarating mix of virile riffs and mysticism

Film accompaniment: From what I can gather, the most acclaimed adaptation of the novel is John Huston’s 1956 film (of the same name), starring Gregory Peck as Ahab and Orson Welles as Father Mapple, while the short French film Capitaine Achab – about Ahab’s early life – also looks interesting

Rating (out of 100): 92

Whenever I think of Moby-Dick, two things come to mind: the whale and the Bible. So it’s fitting that one of the key moments in the book combines both – Father Dapple’s sermon on Jonah – which you can see enacted by Orson Welles in the video above, or voiced in full by Simon Callow in the Moby Dick Big Read (chapter 9). Father Dapple holds Jonah up as a “model for repentance”, and this is instructive when looking at the different paths charted by the book’s two main characters – Ishmael (rebirth, with a coffin as his ark) and Ahab (demise through arrogance, madness and folly).

“Call Me Ishmael” is one of the great opening lines in literature, and the book begins with a calling to life at sea for Ishmael, who describes the ocean as a tonic “whenever I find myself feeling grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul”. Ishmael is described as a man of modest means and education (“for a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard“), a former school teacher who has a restless soul, a perceptive eye and a philosophical bent.

Before reading Moby-Dick, I expected it to be full of folk wisdom and philosophical musings, and that’s the case, but the humour was a surprise. I laughed at Ishmael’s little conversations with himself and especially liked chapter 3, The Spouter-Inn, a heady mix of comedy, suspense and a wonderful eye for detail. Melville’s description of the mariners was a particular highlight – “enveloped in their shaggy watch coats, and with their heads muffled in woollen comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and their beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador”. As you can see from my lengthy quotes section above, Moby-Dick is an infinitely quotable book.

It’s also undoubtedly a challenging read. There’s a main thrust to the plot – the journey of the Pequod whaling ship from Nantucket on Christmas Day, down to the southern tip of Africa and then up again towards Japan, before the final events of the novel take place near the equator in the Pacific Ocean – but also many digressions into cetology, the history of whaling and the practicalities of life aboard a whaling ship. Some are interesting, some less so (the science of cetology has obviously advanced a great deal since Melville’s day) – as ever, I had the support of an online reading group to thank for helping overcome some of these headwinds.

Edward Everett Henry’s The Voyage of the Pequod, courtesy of the Osher Map Library

“Now, as I before hinted, I have no objection to any person’s religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don’t believe it also“

One of the aspects of Moby-Dick I love most is its liberal attitude to religion and race, and its deep humanity. In the early chapters, Ishmael strikes up a bond with Queequeg, a South Sea islander who practices some form of animism, even agreeing to be his “bedfellow” (there’s a hint of homoeroticism) and to engage in Queequeg’s spiritual offerings towards a wooden figure. In fact, the crew of the whaling ship Pequod (named after an Indian tribe) is a wide spectrum of humanity, from Native Americans (Tashtegos) to Africans (Daggoo), Parsees to Manxmen, all of whom are under the stewardship of three shipmates (Starbuck, Stubb and Flask) and captain Ahab.

The one-legged sea captain’s growing and all-encompassing obsession with the “White Whale” (an albino sperm whale notorious for sinking ships) ends up seeming like life under totalitarian rule for this motley crew of sailors, harpooners and tradesmen. At the end of chapter 26, Melville comes across as quintessentially American in his emphasis on democracy and equality, in his ability to see “high qualities”, “ethereal light” and “tragic graces” in the common man and the “meanest mariner”. By referencing an Englishman (Bunyan), Spaniard (Cervantes) and an American (Andrew Jackson), Melville also seems to be making a wider point about how genius and heroism is not the sole reserve of knights and squires. Ahab stands as the antithesis of these democratic values.

That said, there’s something darkly romantic about Ahab too, similar to Milton’s Satan, and oddly inscrutable – in chapter 70, Ahab addresses the whale’s head, stating his belief in an interflow of spiritual energy between the human mind as perceiver and the phenomena of nature as the objects of perception. His language is also comic and Shakespearean at times, notably in chapter 108 (Ahab and the Carpenter), when he makes an order for a giant man (“fifty feet high … chest modelled after the Thames Tunnel … no heart at all … a sky-light on top of his head to illuminate inwards”). At the final reckoning, however, we see Ahab as a monomaniac so resolute in his mission that he rejects a grieving father looking for his son (who was swept overboard from a boat called the Rachel, another Bible allusion).

In sum, it’s a powerful seafaring tale about the dangers of hubris, mixed with philosophy, virtuoso writing and a deep love and respect for nature. Among my favourite chapters is 105 – Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? – which is read by Sir David Attenborough for the Moby Dick Big Read (perhaps the best accompaniment to reading the book, along with Philip Hoare’s Leviathan). It’s a philosophical and quasi-scientific investigation into whether whales have grown larger or smaller over the ages (the best answer I’ve found online is here), which draws on ancient wisdom and the Bible, but more than anything it’s a showcase for Melville’s wonderful writing and his deep love for the whale.