In which Ahab gets smote for hubris
Sep. 17th, 2024 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileToday I finished reading two years’ worth of insane emails from my buddy Ishmael! That’s right, reading Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick over the course of a semester back in college wasn’t slow enough for me, so I have been reading Whale Weekly, an email newsletter that delivers the text of the book stretched out over the course of the whole two-year journey of the Pequod.
In the past fifteen years since I last read this book I’ve considered myself to have a very love-hate relationship with it, and also with whales and whaling, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve had to admit to myself that even the “hate” part of the love-hate relationship is fun. Reading this book again, and reading it in such a format as irregularly delivered emails, has really brought home how true that is. Email is a very weird format for a book such as this and one that is not particularly kind to the long-winded, lyrical, old-fashioned writing. I did occasionally end up skimming some emails because it’s just really hard to read emails that are long walls of text with huge unbroken paragraphs full of incredibly long sentences written in outdated Quaker dialect with lots of thees and thous. There are reasons you’re supposed to write emails using bullet points and white space and stuff. For a good number of the emails, my main emotional reaction was that I ought to buy a nice fancy hardback copy of the book again so I could read it far away from any modern attention-splintering machines and maybe it’d be easier to focus.
Structurally, this book makes some interesting choices, and not just the chapters devoted to incorrect whale facts, which is the sort of thing nineteenth-century audiences were fine with because they didn’t have Google or whaling museums to learn whale facts (correct or otherwise) from. The beginning of the book sets up Ishmael and Queequeg’s relationship in a way that makes you think it’s going to be an emotional throughline that takes up substantial page space throughout the book; instead, it fades very much into the background as the voyage goes on, with Queequeg popping up in a couple of key chapters regarding his illness and the crafting of the coffin-life-buoy but otherwise yielding most of the page space to Ahab, Stubb, Starbuck, Flask, and Pip. In the final showdown with the whale, we don’t even see Queequeg die–it’s Tashtego who, out of the “pagan harpooneers,” is dramatically illustrated as the last man visible when the ship goes down. It’s honestly a little disorienting sometimes, and also Queequeg is a great character (period-typical racial cringe aside) so it’s a bummer when he disappears from the action.
That said it must be admitted that none of the weird shit in this book, so matter how hard it may be to follow at times or how much it doesn’t fit the expected beats of a nautical adventure, or even how much period-typical racial cringe there is or how incorrect the whale facts are, make this any less of a masterpiece. It’s postmodern before postmodernism existed. It’s about God and fate and nature and hubris, and most of what it says about those things is contradictory. Three different people are having three very different mental breakdowns all at the same time. It has more Biblical imagery than you can shake a stick at but a conspicuous lack of a Jesus figure, which is refreshing in Western literature. If I recall correctly most of the Biblical references are pretty Old Testament, especially the names. Not as many Johns and Pauls as you usually get; in addition to our famous Ishmael and Ahab, there’s an Elijah and a ship called the Rachel. I guess the Old Testament vibe makes sense given where the story ends up.
Getting to the end of this has re-sparked some of my (occasionally reluctant) interest in whaling and whaling disasters. My mental list of Age of Sail related books I want to read is expanding and I am distressed that I cannot read like half a dozen of these books simultaneously while also going on another field trip to New Bedford and also checking out the Moby-Dick exhibit at the PEM. Well, I should be able to squeeze in time to go to the PEM at least; maybe next weekend.
In the past fifteen years since I last read this book I’ve considered myself to have a very love-hate relationship with it, and also with whales and whaling, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve had to admit to myself that even the “hate” part of the love-hate relationship is fun. Reading this book again, and reading it in such a format as irregularly delivered emails, has really brought home how true that is. Email is a very weird format for a book such as this and one that is not particularly kind to the long-winded, lyrical, old-fashioned writing. I did occasionally end up skimming some emails because it’s just really hard to read emails that are long walls of text with huge unbroken paragraphs full of incredibly long sentences written in outdated Quaker dialect with lots of thees and thous. There are reasons you’re supposed to write emails using bullet points and white space and stuff. For a good number of the emails, my main emotional reaction was that I ought to buy a nice fancy hardback copy of the book again so I could read it far away from any modern attention-splintering machines and maybe it’d be easier to focus.
Structurally, this book makes some interesting choices, and not just the chapters devoted to incorrect whale facts, which is the sort of thing nineteenth-century audiences were fine with because they didn’t have Google or whaling museums to learn whale facts (correct or otherwise) from. The beginning of the book sets up Ishmael and Queequeg’s relationship in a way that makes you think it’s going to be an emotional throughline that takes up substantial page space throughout the book; instead, it fades very much into the background as the voyage goes on, with Queequeg popping up in a couple of key chapters regarding his illness and the crafting of the coffin-life-buoy but otherwise yielding most of the page space to Ahab, Stubb, Starbuck, Flask, and Pip. In the final showdown with the whale, we don’t even see Queequeg die–it’s Tashtego who, out of the “pagan harpooneers,” is dramatically illustrated as the last man visible when the ship goes down. It’s honestly a little disorienting sometimes, and also Queequeg is a great character (period-typical racial cringe aside) so it’s a bummer when he disappears from the action.
That said it must be admitted that none of the weird shit in this book, so matter how hard it may be to follow at times or how much it doesn’t fit the expected beats of a nautical adventure, or even how much period-typical racial cringe there is or how incorrect the whale facts are, make this any less of a masterpiece. It’s postmodern before postmodernism existed. It’s about God and fate and nature and hubris, and most of what it says about those things is contradictory. Three different people are having three very different mental breakdowns all at the same time. It has more Biblical imagery than you can shake a stick at but a conspicuous lack of a Jesus figure, which is refreshing in Western literature. If I recall correctly most of the Biblical references are pretty Old Testament, especially the names. Not as many Johns and Pauls as you usually get; in addition to our famous Ishmael and Ahab, there’s an Elijah and a ship called the Rachel. I guess the Old Testament vibe makes sense given where the story ends up.
Getting to the end of this has re-sparked some of my (occasionally reluctant) interest in whaling and whaling disasters. My mental list of Age of Sail related books I want to read is expanding and I am distressed that I cannot read like half a dozen of these books simultaneously while also going on another field trip to New Bedford and also checking out the Moby-Dick exhibit at the PEM. Well, I should be able to squeeze in time to go to the PEM at least; maybe next weekend.