Subversive, queer and terrifyingly relevant: six reasons why Moby-Dick is the novel for our times (2019)

Such a leviathan of a book—I say to thee, "Thy size, great like the whale; thy depth, an infinite sea! I shall read for-ever!" Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is a masterpiece in literary structure, radical cultural and philosophical commentary, layered meaning, historical and religious allusion, and diverse social empowerment. It's also much funnier than you would anticipate, and as the article points out, more erotic.

Though sometimes derided by classes of high school students forced to wade through encyclopedic descriptions of whale anatomy, those very sections contain some of the most magnificent pieces of writing I have yet to come across. The anatomy itself often contains great allusions to literature which enhance our understanding of both whale and whaler. Melville takes every opportunity to double up on semantics. If one were to skip the "boring" chapters involving the routine of the whaling vessel, one would miss out on sublime, psychedelic passages such as this:

Chapter 94

A Squeeze of the Hand

That whale of Stubb's, so dearly purchased, was duly brought to the Pequod's side, where all those cutting and hoisting operations previously detailed, were regularly gone through, even to the baling of the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case.

While some were occupied with this latter duty, others were employed in dragging away the larger tubs, so soon as filled with the sperm; and when the proper time arrived, this same sperm was carefully manipulated ere going to the try-works, of which anon.

It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine's bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was such a favorite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener! such a delicious mollifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize.

As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, lie the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger: while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulence, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,—Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect of the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.

From page 308 of the Third Norton Critical Edition (2018). What a remarkable passage, creating space for such emotional, complex, and varied interpretation; and just one of many. The entire book is filled with pieces like this. There are so many I could not even begin to name them; I could speak for hours, days, weeks about this book and be unfinished. In college, I took an entire class on just this one novel, having already read it and seeking inevitable new perspectives—I found them, and yet more awaits to learn and realize. Impressed by its magnitude, its capacity to interlink with the literary tradition and modern ideas of living and being, I even wrote a thesis on it, contributing a very little bit to a very large body of academic material on the writing; a quantity well-deserved, I would say. That was fun.

But Moby-Dick is a novel you have to want to read. You have to be in the mood to go on a journey through time and consciousness, to relax and allow yourself to drink this elixir of eloquence and insanity and riddles and metaphor. It is not merely a story nor an encyclopedia, nor merely an interaction of characters nor a development of social critique, nor explosion of camaraderie or sexuality or inner light, nor is it merely a love letter, memoir, fantasy, and so on. It is all these things, and more; an emergent sum as recognized subjectively by the audience whose nature, being created anew upon each reading, I cannot describe. It is a book to which you can return indefinitely; the "comfort read" of a friend of mine, actually. I certainly do recommend it! I am particularly fond of my edition from Norton, for its same-page footnotes, which I feel give it much more practical richness. I have another copy as well with beautiful illustrations, and a few others.

Fine, I'll read it I guess.

This article has finally convinced me to give it a go!

I first read Moby Dick as a 9th grader bc my Dad convinced me to pick it from the options on our reading list... I would not recommend reading it with a time limit to finish it and I think I'd appreciate it more now than I did at age 14. But even in those less than ideal circumstances there were parts of that book that really left an impact on me. I definitely missed the gay subtext though lol. Highly recommend experiencing it if you're a lover of literature, even if the chapter on "what sea creatures count as whales" is probably still gonna be hard to get through.

If Moby-Dick isn't my favourite book, that's because it's inspired so many others vying for the spot. One thing this essay doesn't prepare potential readers for: nearly the entire work is satire. There is a huge amount of sincere love for humanity and the universe as a whole, but almost everything the narrator says and thinks is best taken as Melville mocking himself. Ishmael is brash and socially incompetent, and while many have treated the novel as a manual to whaling with a plot shoved in, most of the informative chapters were at-best misguided when it came out. I've seen too many people complain about the scientific inaccuracies in an "encyclopedic" novel to believe that leaving this sort of disclaimer out is prudent.

It's hilarious, constantly. Ishmael is always making vast and absurd assumptions about the universe and the people around him, takes people's mockery of him as sincere, positions himself as an expert in all things despite an obvious and explicit lack of real experience. If you find yourself bored out of your mind at the long, digressive chapters about random tools, resist the urge to find an abridged edition. The plot itself is paper-thin, and it is not what anyone enjoys the book for. Obviously if you can't wait to see what happens in a realistic story of whaling, go for it, I love those chapters too, but if you don't like those tangents, you probably don't like the book, and I can't imagine loving it on the basis of the story.

Those features of the book mean that it does something else that I think may have become a larger selling point than Hoare here assumed it'd be: it tackles demogoguery in politics and the illusive nature of Truth much more coherently and presciently than anyone would expect from a novel so old. Like this author says, it predicts mass extinction and the end results of our own limitations combined with the ambition our species embraced during the enlightenment, but somehow it's still joyous and lovely to read. You might assume a totally-ironic work training manual that centers on humanity's failures might not be, but that's exactly why Melville deserves the respect he gets to this day.

This is interesting timing for me, as I just finished reading it today.

I'm pretty astonished by the book in a lot of ways. It tells precisely the story I thought it would, but the way the story is told is truly something else. For a hundred and thirty chapters the tension just ramps up and up as Ishmael stubbornly veers off into literally any possible thing that can be said about whales.

It's a masterpiece of trolling, really. I was heavily reminded of the long scenes of sweeping the bar in Twin Peaks season 3. Moby Dick just isn't a book that would arise from any ordinary money-making kind of process. It's a labor of love that's thick with symbolism, scientific observations, and philosophy.

I really adore the story. It wasn't exactly easy to read, but it was really, really worth it.

I didn't realize Shelley's Frankenstein partly influence Moby-Dick. I feel like I should give the book a go -- I just picked up the audiobook by Frank Muller. Wish me luck.