Comments & Thoughts on Moby Dick (First 45 chapters only!)

Sadly, I’m going to miss the book club tonight because family stuff. Looking forward to watching the VOD though!

The theme of contrast is one that really sticks out for me. The dichotomy of Christianity/Paganism, good/evil, black/white is pervasive, but I think Melville is also hinting at the gray area that surrounds these contrasting ideas. The sea itself symbolizes the Eldritch horror of the unknown/unknowable, the cosmic ocean from which gods and demons are born. I’ve been reading a lot of sci-fi lately so maybe that has influenced my approach to this novel, but not for the worse! I’m sure Melville had some sort of influence on Lovecraft. Just to give one textual example, I’m thinking of at the end of Chapter 10, “A Bosom Friend,” when Ishmael is determining whether to join Queequeg in praying to Yojo. His Christian faith instructs him to not worship idols, but also to do unto others as he would have done unto himself. This type of moral contradiction is central to the story, and is extremely compelling.

I also wanted to mention how slowly I have been making my way through this work, bc I became obsessed with fully understanding every little bit. Even from the jump, “where the noble mole is washed by waves” - I did not know what “mole” meant in this context. Sent me down a rabbit hole about the battery walls that surrounded the southernmost tip of Manhattan in the 18th century (of course, Battery Park, but I hadn’t much thought about what it once looked like), sent me looking at maps from that era, and learning how these walls were only recently excavated, from 10ft below the city streets. Kind of wild to imagine a semi-recent history being buried and rediscovered in that way. I ended up buying the Norton Critical edition as a companion, since I was finding myself so interested in every detail. Anyway, this is actually the most fun I’ve had with a book in a long time, though one could argue I’ve missed out on the flow to some degree. I’m just giving in to the fun and think I will immediately reread it once done, with all of my questions and deviations out of the way, and then maybe experience the flow a little better.

Reading this as a child, the HUMOR was entirely lost on me. And you never hear this book spoken about as being actually very funny. Is this not a common opinion? A coworker assured me I was only imagining the humor (but, he has not read Melville and is basing that opinion off of what the book is ABOUT). I think it helps that I very recently reread Bartleby the Scrivener for the first time since being a child, and while I’d known they were both Melville, I hadn’t really given that fact much thought as a kid, not comparatively. Anyway, it helped me immediately recognize in Moby Dick that thing Melville does with language. How he leans into the pomp sometimes, for HUMOR. The way he chooses words and crafts phrases, it reminds me of Stephen Fry, especially his playful loquaciousness and creative use of words and phrases in “A Bit of Fry & Laurie.” Melville set the tone right away, with his bit about the “sub-sub librarian.” And from there you can just see it clear as day.. his prose is earnest and beautiful, but sometimes he seems deliberately very playful and overwrought, seemingly in a self-aware sort of self-reference, as though he is winking to the reader and maybe even anticipating critiques of garrulity. Leaning in to affectation, light-heartedly mocking his own rich mastery and creative use of language. Amusing HIMSELF in this way. While the work is very sincere, his sense of humor is woven throughout. Does everyone get this vibe, and why does no one talk about it? It was a DELIGHT!

Starbuck is the moral center of the book. "'I came here to hunt whales, not my commander's vengeance. . . . Vengeance is a dumb brute! . . . that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous." (pp.177-78 in the PCDE). That passage could be the thesis of the novel.

This is not the worst way to read Moby-Dick: each chapter is read by someone different, like Tilda Swinton for Chapter 1, Sir David Attenborough for Chapter 105, and Mary Oliver for the Epilogue: https://www.mobydickbigread.com/

I was fascinated by the Essex shipwreck and the Constantinople real life whales calamities. i love Melville using almost a documentarian style for the novel. I feel he has that obsessiveness to give yo as much as information as combining it with his experience in the sea. I remember reading Robinson Crusoe and hating it. i think there is honesty trrying to convey how incredible that experience at sea was.

There is at least a small faction that holds: the book needs editing! by which I assume it is meant that the book needs sections cut (I don't think peeps mean that the book needs a spell check). I want there to be at least another camp that maintains the book is the perfect length. The meandering gives me the feeling I am on a whaler in the middle of the ocean. The journey is fits and starts. This is not a 2 hour adrenaline adventure movie novel, it's a 3 year long slog novel. Thank god there are some whale taxonomy and the metaphysics of whiteness to get through!!!

"...the condemnation of Christian religions and pretty much all organized religions in general..." I don't think that's the right description. Melville certainly criticizes religious hypocrisy and dogmatism and ritualism. He doesn't single out Christianity but treats it as one tradition among many. Ishmael is fascinated by Quakers, Catholics, indigenous religions, Islam, Hinduism, Polynesian spirituality, etc. "condemnation" feels too simple. Take Father Mapple's sermon. It's one of the most powerful pieces of Christian preaching in American literature. It's not written as satire. He writes it with enormous respect. Likewise, Ishmael's friendship with Queequeg is remarkable because he learns to see genuine dignity in someone whose religious practices are entirely foreign to him. That isn't anti-religious as much as anti-sectarian. Melville seems much more interested in asking whether human beings can encounter truth without believing they possess all of it.

Ishmael, at the start, "Man, what even IS religion, you know? Queequeg is just all right with me." Ishmael, after having to break down a door, "Bro, your religion is fucked. You can't just squat for a whole day after locking me out and then get all cuddly with me like nothing happened."

I found it surprisingly difficult to read at times, I didn't really think about how much English has changed in 175 years; sometimes I'd get a chapter that I could read at normal pace, other times it might as well have been in Spanish. But that does make sense, given that this book was written at a time as distant from us as from the Great Fire of London. It was also quite something to read one scene that was "Queequeg and I slept together like a couple, as men do" and then another that was "well of course white men are the best, that's just how things are." As interesting as some of the chapters have been, it does seem as though Melville could have used a good editor. There were quite a few paragraphs that went on about 3-5 sentences longer than they needed to.

If I can't make it to the live stream, will it be recorded for later viewing?

Something I never really hit on in my prior reads of the book is how near to its end of primacy whale oil was when the book was published; I think about eight years if I'm reading my history right. Quite interesting how much praise Ishmael lavishes on the whaling profession and on the virtues of whale oil for lighting and then poof it was all (mostly) gone so soon after. In several respects that way the book kind of winds up feeling like a last gasp of pre-modernity. James Maxwell was only a couple decades from publishing his equations, the partially-mechanized war of the Civil War was right ahead, and frankly I felt that Melville swung back and forth between a modern attitude of cosmopolitanism and a retrograde earlier concept of race several times in the narrative. Edit: Oh yeah and the prose from 'The Quarter-Deck' still stands out as electrifying even after multiple reads.

Enjoyed it so far, I’m plodding through it to the finish. A few points: - I find this a tricky read, not read many books this old - chapter nine ‘the sermon’ is my favourite so far - Herman loves describing everything in detail - And odd book with the World’s most famous opening line - I now know loads about killing whales

Started off way more homoerotic than I was expecting, not how I was expecting it to go. I'm only about half way through it myself, but seeing as chapters are quite short that's probably quite a high chapter count. Really interesting style of language, makes it all feel a bit surreal. It inspired me to attempt to cook up some cosy chowder too.

This must be one of those books where if one cannot connect to the protagonist then he cannot enjoy it at all. To me the problem is rather the opposite. I always feel Ishmael is my kind of guy and I am so biased towards him that it probably makes me insensitive for a lot of subtle nuances. But I'm with him, mostly because he is the man of many failures just like me. He is a very average guy in appearance who is perfectly unable to get a college degree, to hold a decent job, to start a family, to achieve even mediocre success anywhere in life or even just to get any sort of attention. Yet all of those failures never corrupt or harden his soul, he remains a very soft, a very kind and a very curious individual. I like his quirky and unnecessarily complicated ways, like the fact he refuses talking and thinking in clear, idiomatic English, he just cannot resist enriching his language with the weirdest kind of materials he finds in old and exotic books - he is obviously a very educated and very literate man. His only aspiration in life is to leave a manuscript behind as a posthumous author. (Nowadays when ChatGPT writes 10x better and 100x faster than the best of us it never will happen to anyone any more, but that's how our great-grandfathers organized their lives.) Ishmael is also a very self-sufficient and self-contained man. I don't think I am at such a high level in those sports as he is, and while I would not necessarily strive for anything like that (because that's kind of pointless and ridiculous), still, I feel we approach life very similarly. Yes, I am the type of guy who is destined to end up on a ship named after a portentous, extinct Indian tribe with a captain named after a mad biblical king. These are the things that naturally happen with me all the time. I also must say Moby Dick is the kind of book I would never read as some kind of elaborate allegory, and not just because I want to connect to Ishmael very directly. It's also because it's very good historical fiction, it is almost a documentary - when there is a detailed explanation of how whaling is financed or there is a casual remark that an ounce of gold is worth sixteen dollars, I want be 100% there. So when I encounter vivid and poetic elements in the text, I attribute those to the the mental health issues of certain characters and I do my best just to move forward. Moby Dick, the albino whale makes a lot of sense to me as a living, biological creature: as an albino he probably cannot hide and cannot fit in, therefore he must fight all the time, so he only survives because he is the strongest and the toughest, but those fights leave him grumpy and traumatized. Again, this is the kind of text where I never would contemplate how the fighting spirit of the whale matches to the fighting spirit of the men, whether there is a good side or a bad side, whether there is some philosophical statement about nature and domination, whether there is some sort of sh*tty yin and yang between the captain and Moby Dick. (As a side note, I always enjoy Jack London's wild statements about nature and survival, he always does it with such a grandeur and with such an elegant triviality that he never fails to make my day and I don't care he tends to be utterly wrong. But I never would consume or take Moby Dick in such a way as I do for example Call of the wild.) For Moby Dick, I prefer a bare-bone, materialistic approach, probably because the text is very rich in facts and I always prefer my own spirituality over the spirituality of the others, including the author. Nevertheless, I still appreciate fact that about half of the story plays out in the human soul - Ishmael says he wants to see the world and I think it's good he gets not just the miracles of the nature but also the entire spectrum of madness in his fellow men. That's how you see everything. Again, I never would interpret that through poetic or philosophical lenses. To me the quality of the text speaks for itself, I'm pretty sure it endures even the most materialistic analysis. I couldn't abandon the idea that there are certain demographics out there who should never ever read this book. One such cohort is the burned-out, fortysomething men with midlife crisis - to them, reading Moby Dick is a direct path to ruin, buying a sailboat and ending up in the middle of the ocean, continuously screaming "death to Moby Dick!" after drinking way too much rum. Another vulnerable cohort is the prepper type - Ishmael has such an indestructible joyfulness that he is a natural role model for them and they may wake up one day in the Jamaican Inn to realize Captain Redbeard looks back from the mirror with a parrot on his shoulder. In general, I'm very glad this book won the vote, I never thought about reading it before. It will keep me busy way into August and I don't mind it at all, although I understand the crowd may find it boring. I'm sure every literate person in the English-speaking world is very familiar with the text, but fortunately I am foreigner, so the words penetrate my feeble mind with such an impact and force as the harpoons penetrate the flesh of a whale. It also helps me to empathize with Queequeg who never understands more than 30% of the conversations around him.

I just finished chapter 40. Wow, I wasn't expecting a little playlet in the middle of a novel.

A few things that stand out. Melville was a capital-S Smart guy. There are at least three levels to the book: the fairly clear and linear adventure story; the condemnation of Christian religions and pretty much all organized religions in general that's still pretty clear but is told as fragments and observations; and philosophical/metaphysical story told in small bits and pieces with short segments or quick phrases, or sometimes not made explicit and are left for the reader to figure out. The writing itself is masterful but doesn't resort to gimmicks. There are the allusions to the bible, history, philosophy, etc., that are sometimes obvious but other times almost like echoes. Two things that jumped out on a closer reading. First, how he moves from specific physical, to sort of universal, to metaphysical. Second, how fast he can make transitions. Sometimes in just a short paragraph or two, to sometimes in just a single sentence. Constant use of juxtapositions (took me two days to remember that word), sometimes literal, sometimes more subtle. Peleg and Bildad are physically juxtaposed on the Pequod. A more subtle one is the juxtaposition of the Spouter Inn and the chapel, with the street as intermediary. The "hazy" world vs. the "clear" world. Look closely at the (implied) comparison between the Spouter Inn and the chapel. Start with the paintings. The real world is "hazy", open to interpretation, and this haziness makes it more aligned or connected to the metaphysical world. In contrast, the chapel -> religion -> philosophies that claim to have clear answers, are shown to be hypocritical. We can't really see The Truth but we feel it in the connection between the "hazy" real world and the "hazy" metaphysical one. In contrast, the "clear" world, the one that claims to have The Truth, is distorted, false, and harmful. The sermon by Father Mapple is part of this comparison. Despite the seemingly obvious connection between Jonah and whaling, Father Mapple gets the story of Jonah and its lesson completely wrong.

It's definitely funnier than I expected. I really like the well drawn characters.

Having only understood Moby Dick from all the bits that pop culture has settled on as touch-points, I was really unprepared for the fact that this book starts off as - and continues to be - an overly wordy travelogue. Ishmael seems to be very clearly on the autism spectrum as he eagerly lectured me about every possible aspect of whaling, whether direct elements or tangentially connected subjects. A couple of additional observations: - I found the mostly short chapter length helped a lot to maintain my focus. - I had assumed the jokes about the story's homo-eroticism to be overblown, but having read the book, I think they were, in fact, undersold. - While Queequeg is the embodiment of the ‘noble savage’ trope, I tolerated it more since I have some appreciation for the rampant racism that existed among the work’s contemporary readers. As an aside, I realize that we’re confining our discussion to only the first 45 chapters, but it’s striking how the vast majority of elements in the culturally distilled essence of the tale relate to maybe the last 10% of the book.

(Moved here from the previous Moby Dick thread) Just finished the audio book. I'd never read it before and it's much sillier than I expected. Lots of wordplay and sarcasm! A random list of things that stood out to me in the first 44 chapters: * It reads a lot like a tall tale (Paul Bunyan, etc.) * Not really fair of Ahab to ask the crew to take an oath to kill Moby Dick after they're already on the ocean. Not much of a choice. Also, Starbuck seems to doubt Moby Dick was the whale that took Ahab's leg. Not sure if the implication is that Starbuck and Ahab hadn't worked together before or that Ahab is rewriting history a bit. * Melville sure likes to talk about digestion. The line about a philosopher having "broken his digester" sent me down a rabbit hole. Apparently the "bone digester" was an early pressure cooker. He's clearly making some kind of wordplay or joke, a parallel between food and philosophy, but I'm not exactly sure what. An excuse for a poorly cooked "meal"? A mind broken by overuse?

Edit: I used the following site for reference when trying to recall things. The book is in the public domain, so helpful things like this can legally exist! https://mobydick.wales/contents/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Man, what a weird book. So, I read the whole thing, but obviously I won't spoil anything from beyond these chapters. However, know that when I make statements about structure or presentation, know that those are things that are not only true for these first 45 chapters but that hold true throughout the book (in case that's helpful for anyone deciding if they want to continue reading the book after this book club). And why not start there. The structure and presentation of this book is very strange by modern standards. I think the single-most valuable thing I took away from reading it is this glimpse into how weird a book could be when form was so much less standardized for long-form fiction. Fewer than half the chapters are narrative. For a book I've generally heard referred to as a "novel", that's absolutely bananas. The non-narrative chapters are often interesting and are clearly purposeful, but it is still an incredibly odd quirk to adjust to. When we get a handful of these non-narrative chapters in a row, with Melville wearing a fake moustache simply speaking directly to the reader, it's hard to not think of it as a treatise the author has simply inserted as supplementary context, and I think if we were to judge the book by modern standards, most would decry it as an ungraceful use of the medium. I think the modern expectation would be to manipulate the reader into feeling what Ishmael tells the reader to feel through narrative segments rather than directly speaking to the audience; Melville clearly would've hated the phrase "Show, don't tell". Is it really *THAT* much worse for it, though? I'm not sure. I do think that even if you wanted non-narrative chapters that you could probably do it in a less ham-fisted way, but the strangeness of the form is still a delightful oddity to me. The presentation has similarly strange quirks, but its inconsistent in peculiar ways that do leave me thinking the book could've used a couple passes of editing just to more firmly decide on what Melville did or did not want certain parts to be. Ishmael is ostensibly our point-of-view, being the in-universe author of the pages we read, but as we get farther from the start, that pretense seems to largely slip away without explanation. Take, for example, "Chapter 29: Enter Ahab; to Him, Stubb.". This chapter is presented as third-person omniscient, and we *could* generously say that Ishmael was simply a fly on the wall, but (1) this happens repeatedly, with some chapters jumping between characters who are far apart from each other on the ship or providing dialogue that they are said to only whisper to themselves and (2) even more than whispers, some chapters assert knowledge of the thoughts of characters who are not Ishmael and are not speaking. It isn't terribly difficult to reconcile these things ("Ishmael is fanciful and loose in his documenting of events; it's clear that he embellishes the truth for entertainment purposes"), but I find those explanations unsatisfying given how *absent* Ishmael largely seems to be when not directly speaking to the audience. Continuing on the strange inconsistencies in presentation, the aforementioned Chapter 29 has dialogue like the following: “No, sir; not yet,” said Stubb, emboldened, “I will not tamely be called a dog, sir.” Which is something that would be perfectly in-place in a modern novel. But then consider "Chapter 39: First Night-Watch". Suddenly, scenes are written like stage plays? And then many narrative chapters from that point forward largely but not always maintain that style? I can't say I didn't enjoy our weird little play scenes, but Melville's playing with form only sometimes feels deliberate. Mostly, it feels like he had many ideas and simply entertained them as he pleased, continuing or discarding them as they maintained or lost his interest. Shortly before the poll was put up for this round of the book club, I had actually been thinking of tackling Moby-Dick finally. In elementary school in the 90s, we had the "Accelerated Reading" program (AR), where you could read a book from the school library and, afterwards, take a test on the fancy new Windows 95 machines to earn points, which you could then spend once or twice a semester on tchotchkes. Moby-Dick was the thickest book in the library and worth like a thousand points, so I grabbed it, read like half the first chapter, and returned it, realizing I had made a poor choice for a... 7 or 8 year old? So, it has always been one of my few DNFs, technically, and in considering whether or not to clear it from my record, I wondered to myself: "Why do I know so little about this book?". I mean, every person in the anglosphere knows *of* the book Moby-Dick. They know Moby Dick is the whale, they *probably* know it's a white whale, and they *probably* know that Captain Ahab is chasing this whale obsessively. They may even know "Call me Ishmael" is the first line of the book. But the book's quite long. And for such a long book, I found it very strange that cultural osmosis had imparted so little knowledge about its contents to me. Surely I'd know some major plot points or key thematic takeaways against my will for any 800-page novel so firmly embedded in the culture I was raised in. But I didn't. And I think even just reading the first chapter will tell anyone why. A first chapter where *literally* nothing happens. No narrative actions are taken at all. Just a narrator talking directly at the reader. This book is not a strange beast because beasts are natural. This book is a chimera. It is weird experimentation in a dozen things without fully committing to any of them, and that yields some really great moments and interesting food for thought, especially with how odd it is compared to anything modern, but there is absolutely a (much) better book in here. Maybe more than one. But despite all that, I felt compelled to see the whole book through, and I largely enjoyed my time with it. I often found myself pausing mid-chapter to look for images of contemporary equipment or watch modern footage of encounters with sperm whales. Whatever shortcomings the book may have, one thing it unambiguously succeeds at is making Ishmael's (Not-Melville's) passion be felt when he directly addresses you with all the fervor of a dude who just really felt compelled by the water. It was hard to not constantly think "Man, you would've absolutely loved the 21st century. I wish you could've seen it". Sometimes, he was just a guy who really loved his niche interests and wanted you to understand that love, and that's awesome. The rest? Could've used some better editing. Probably could've gotten it if he wasn't beefing with his publisher/the Presbyterians (what a bizarre curveball that was to learn about). What we got was still pretty good.

Can I just say that the Spouter Inn chapter is one of my favorite character introductions ever. Heart Queequeg! I find the balance between the plot and the scientific asides interesting, whereas my partner (with whom I'm listening to the book, it being my second go round) found the chapter about whiteness enough that we had to pause for a week or so.

Many of the chapters seem really silly to me: Ishmael hiding in Queequeg's bed, Queequeg (with his hat on) crawling under the bed to put his shoes on, the Bildad / Peleg comedy duo, Queequeg's Ramadan, the Starbuck / Stub / Flask comedy trio, the Night Watch's Midnight Broadway musical, to name a few. Did others find these chapters silly? Why is there such silliness in a book ostensibly about obsession, destruction, fate, death, etc. ?

You've said on many occasions that you enjoy a short book, something that gets to the point. What makes Homer and Melville exceptions to this heuristic? Is it because of your previous familiarity with the material, is it because they are enshrined as classics?

Ishmael is a queer icon.

In Melville’s own words Moby-Dick is a wicked book. Highlight its wickedness.

It’s about whaling.