I got to visit the Seamen's Bethel in New Bedford, Massachusetts this week, a church where young Herman Melville attended services before shipping out on his own round-the-world voyage, and which appears as a slightly fictionalized version of itself in Moby-Dick. The walls of the Seamen's Bethel are covered in marble plaques that memorialize those who were lost at sea; Melville must have looked around from his pew in the back--marked today with a much smaller, humbler plaque--and known what a risk he was taking on. As Nathaniel Philbrick notes in his book Why Read Moby-Dick?, New Bedford had surpassed Nantucket as the American capital of the whaling industry by the time Melville wrote his novel, but Melville still Ishmael travel to Nantucket to see the old icons of the whaling industry. Melville had never been to Nantucket when he wrote Moby-Dick, so it might be said that the New Bedford chapel in Moby-Dick is where Ishmael leaves the real world behind, launching off into the world of Melville's rich imagination.
Why Read Moby-Dick? is a series of short essays about what Philbrick, a writer otherwise known for books about sailing like In the Heart of the Sea, finds valuable in Moby-Dick. These essays more or less follow the novel's chronology, beginning in New Bedford and Nantucket, moving through the introduction of Ahab to the grand voyage, and finishing with the dramatic conclusion when the Pequod is destroyed by the infamous White Whale. The essays have brief, explanatory titles like "Queequeg" and "Chowder," and they spend a fair amount of time summarizing the essential points of the novel. As the title suggests, the book might be seen as pitched to people who have not read Moby-Dick, although I can't imagine someone reading a book like this in order to decide whether or not they want the undertaking. More properly, the audience is probably people like me, who have a fondness for the novel but aren't going to re-read it any time soon. Along the way, Philbrick provides a little bit of historical information, about whaling, about Melville's relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, etc., but for the most part it's a straightforward and not particularly revealing exegesis of the novel.
It's a little funny, I think, the way in which Why Read Moby-Dick? is so opposite to the novel it's about. It's a tiny little book, in form as well as spirit; almost universally I thought the essays were a little short and seemed to stop before they were through. If the spirit of Moby-Dick is to delve into long, digressive passages like "Cetology" that overflow the banks of narrative efficiency; Why Read Moby-Dick? is a no-nonsense operation with little interest in luxuriating alongside the novel's richness--only briefly describing the luxury. The enthusiasm comes through, but the exegesis can be a little stale; I didn't come away with what felt like any new insights. Philbrick's central contention, that the novel contains the seeds of all American history, and that it is in some deep sense about the national pre-Civil War conflict over the slave trade, seemed to me very thinly supported. And it was funny to hear Philbrick, after insisting that the novel points to these ideals and conflicts, say at the end that "The White Whale is not a symbol. He is as real as you or I."
I hold to the opposite reading, which I think is probably Harold Bloom's: the whale is a symbol, but it's a symbol who points toward too many things, and ends up a kind of maddening blankness--white, the color of all colors. That's the brilliance of Moby-Dick; it points every way you want to look. Presumably, even toward the Fugitive Slave Law, if you were willing to make the case. As for Why Read Moby-Dick?, I think the answer to the question is obvious: because the Cliffs Notes version isn't going to cut it.
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