Thar she blows! Some random thoughts on completing Moby Dick

 

“There she blows! - there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!” from The Chase – First Day, chapter 133 in Moby Dick

Well, I've done it. Check it off the list. For the last several months I've been a virtual stowaway on the Pequod participating vicariously in the adventures of its crew and their crazy, obsessed captain, Ahab, searching the seven seas for his nemesis, the white whale, Moby Dick. My copy of Herman Melville's most celebrated novel has laid on my book shelf for a couple of decades now since I first purchased it and sometime this winter I had the notion to take it down and actually read the thing through. And now that I have, honestly it's likely to lay there again for another couple of decades untouched or until one of my children inherit it following my death or my wife drops it off at Good Will after she's buried me.

It looks exactly like this

It's considered a great American classic but now having read all 615 pages of my leather-bound Easton Press edition copy, I'd like someone to explain to me why that is so. It's long but so is Tolstoy's War and Peace or Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Melville broods on the nature of evil but so does Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment. But reading Moby Dick or the Whale more often than

the Calypso

not is like sailing on Calypso (of oceanographer Jacques Costeau fame) only way more dark and without the pleasant French accent. Consider some of the chapters: Monstrous Pictures of Whales (chapter 55), Less Eroneous Pictures of Whales (chapter 56), Of Whales in Paint, in Teeth, etc.(chapter 57). Or The Measurement of the Whale's Skeleton (chapter 103), The Fossil Whale (chapter 104) or Does the Whale Diminish? (chapter 105). My response to all these sidebars (and there are many more) is, ask me if I care? Because I don't.

As I painstakingly plowed through erroneous chapters replete with long run-on sentences and minutia of all things cetology that in my opinion adds absolutely nothing to the plot, I frequently contemplated returning my big black volume to the shelf there to sit unfinished. But once I start a thing – even a simple task of finishing a book that is on at least one 100 Books to Read Before You Die list on the web – I want to finish it, even if its like enduring a root canal in slow motion. (According to this same list, the editor writes “...this 700-page story... remains one of the grandest works about morality and the nature of obsession. A must-read, and not just for the adventure”). Hmmm, I think not.

General Woundwort taking on
the big black dog named Bob

I read the story because I wanted to know about Ahab's quest to wreck vengeance on Moby Dick for biting off his leg on a previous voyage. Instead, I show up at a lecture on whaling boats and practices of the early 19^th Century. Yawn. Except, perhaps the last five chapters which brings the story to its fitting climax when Ahab in his whaling boat and Moby Dick are on a collision course toward one another, sparring off mano a mano. Think General Woundwort in the movie Watership Down going head to head with the big, black dog or, Khan

and Kirk fighting it out in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (where as he fires on the Enterprise Khan actually quotes Ahab's curse as he bore down on the whale in the exciting last chapter : “from hell's heart I stab at thee!”)

“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.” (Chapter 104: The Fossil Whale, p. 487)

Moby Dick is a morality tale about obsession run amok and how bitterness can cause a person to go crazy to their own detriment as well as those who may be under their care. Whether you need 600 pages (even if they are gold-leafed as mine are) to get that point across is a matter of opinion. In fact, if you ask me, you could lose about 400 pages of this book and pretty much tell the same story. But then again I'm not a literary critic.

An Ahab if there ever was one

I can't help but wonder that when Steven Spielberg cast Robert Shaw as Quint, the grizzled, veteran shark hunter in the 1975 movie Jaws, he was looking for a guy akin to Captain Ahab to take Brody and Hooper out “sharkin'”. Haunted by the memories of his shipmates who were harassed and eaten by sharks after their cruiser the Indianapolis was sunk in 1945, Quint is obsessed with hunting this Great White man-eater and giving him is just reward. If you've seen the movie you already know how that all ended.

As I return my copy to its place on my book shelf it occurs to me that maybe the reason Easton Press always gave first-time subscribers to its The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written collection a complimentary copy of Moby Dick is that they have so many on hand and are just trying to pawn them off any way they can. The funny thing is the image of a beatiful leather-bound volume on my book shelf makes it look like I'm real smart when in reality paying $50 for this tale (when you could get a used paperback copy for a fraction of the price) shows how gullible I can be when it comes to things like this.

Pretty to look at but I don't know if
the price justifies what you read within