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Moby Dick - Blog Posts
holding a lightning rod while raving in a typhoon and swinging a harpoon burning with otherwordly fire at his crew: Just Little Ahab Things
Me back in the day, reading Moby-Dick for the first time: Sh*t, another Ahab monologue incoming, better pause to go fetch a bunch of handkerchieves.
Me now a day, rereading Moby-Dick for the [redacted] time: That Ahab monologue incoming today, better load up with a bunch of handkerchieves.
broke: advertising original novels using fanfiction tropes will help market them to younger audiences
woke: booktok and the use of tropes in describing books doesn't actually help the reader and is actively making fiction less original and more tropey
bespoke: using fanfiction tropes in reference to novels is okay but only if done to classic lit. moby dick is an only one bed fic btw.
God i wish i was a super wealthy producer. I want this NOW. RIGHT NOW. Anime about mentally unwell men who haven’t bathed literally ever stuck on a boat with stanky whale carcasses and blood every where?? Yes pls!!
Get in the Pequod Shinji
Someone today will read Shakespeare’s hamlet and say omg he’s just like me fr. Another person will read moby dick and proclaim Ishmael as an adhd king.
A person grieving for their recently deceased lover reads the iliad and they watch as Achilles rages and rages and god how righteous anger fueld by love is so devastating that it’s ramifications still affect the world several thousand years later.
We might one day settle down and read the epic of gilgamesh and watch as a king has to accept the death of the person he loved the most. One of the very first stories ever written and it was about coping with death, and how to grieve.
We don’t read classics because they’re old, we read them because they remind us that we are never alone. That a character created over 500 years ago struggled with the exact same problems we all still have today. That even a king from centuries past had to deal with death just like me. That’s what makes stories so powerful–they prove to us that we are never truly alone in what we are feeling.
Ishmael: Depressed? Contemplating suicide or a homicidal rampage?
Ishmael: have you instead considered
Ishmael: THE SEA?
I don't know about obsession, but if i may ask...
Do you like Moby Dick because it may be based in a true story or because it's written so well??
It's certainly inspired by the true story of the Essex, which was rammed by a sperm whale. Back in the old days it was considered kind of unseemly to write pure fiction. Novels needed to be a travelogue or a biography or a historical account or a religious morality tale - at least on the surface. Pure fiction was too much like a lie, and could get you a dark reputation.
So yes, most of Melville's books were "based" on real events, either others' accounts or stories from his own colourful youth and later travels. But once you read them, you see the narrative is just an excuse for explorations of social or philosophical themes and ideas. Though his first two books were more straightforward travelogues, he couldn't afterwards write anything straightforward to save his life. His readers at the time felt betrayed by this - they'd liked his funny, scary adventures in the South Seas! - but they didn't understand the rest and stopped buying his books. Melville eventually gave up his writing career, got a day job, and died in obscurity.
I mention all this because Herman Melville the man is a big reason why I like Herman Melville's writing. His life was fascinating, sad, and we know a lot about it. It's brilliant stuff to study. His writing, too, is fascinating and sad. I'll just stick to Moby-Dick here but I love all his work.
Moby-Dick was the first novel I ever read that felt like the author was speaking directly to me. I was in high school when I first came across it - I was going through a pirate phase and it was on my list - and it stopped me dead in my tracks. It's not just a novel; it's an anachronistic multimedia experiment. It mixes prose and script and poetry and quotes and dictionary entries with elegant language and salty sailor speak. It's eloquent and disgusting, elevated and deeply down in the dirt and foam. It is an explosion of contrast, a constant seesaw back and forth between the narrative reality of a captain obsessively hunting a whale, and a common sailor named Ishmael reflecting on what that hunt means, what whales mean, what the colour white means, what the sky means, what the universe means. In his ruminations, nothing is dismissed. He wasn't dusty Hawthorne obsessing over the Bible; instead he was a sailor with a wide but naive breadth of knowledge of "Eastern religions," Asian history, "South Seas cannibals," so you never know what he's going to bring up. His was the kind of eclectic thinking that you didn't often see expressed with such eloquence in the 1850s.
So yeah, I like it a lot because it's written really well :)
But also, it's very raw, and you feel the sloppy earnestness of Melville on every page. He's trying so hard to communicate with you and - knowing that so many of his contemporaries didn't understand him - it makes you feel kind of special and connected with him when you do understand what he's saying, and you agree. It's a novel that benefits in a very unique way from NOT murdering the author; from understanding who the author was, what he went through, how exuberant he was for so long and then how much the exigencies of publishing and finances beat him down.
We people who love Moby-Dick tend to really love Moby-Dick. I'm certain Melville himself is a big reason for this. We connect with his struggles. We celebrate the immortality of all artists by raising up his work and reaching back through the centuries to take his tarry hand.