Original 1851 reviews of Moby-Dick

I've called it "an overdose of Dead Poet's Society" before. Shakespeare plays, Steinbeck, Moby-Dick: they'll all make the majority of the class tune out if they're presented as a treatise on the human condition. Shakespeare is meant to be performed on a stage, not read from a book. Discuss his codification of character archetypes and plot tropes, perhaps even some wordplay choices. At 16 years old, "a treatise on the human condition" is pretentious puffery. Even those teacher's pets who take it seriously are merely LARPing as well-rounded individuals.

SPOILERS:

So most of the book is just a beautiful snapshot of a very odd slice of life in the early 1800s, namely whalers. However, not just any whaler, the book is very clear on this, sperm whalers. Also, not just any sperm whalers, nantucketers. Even though the majority of the crew is international, they are on a nantucket ship, with a nantucket captain, and are thus honorary nantucketers. Ok, so anyway, most of the book is just about learning what their life is like, and it's unusual in the way because Melville literally had to teach us everything about this unusual slice of life, to get the rest. My point though is throughout all of this, which is like 90% of the book, the language and tone is somewhat plain and often times light hearted. There are a few moments where its serious, like when there's the electrical storm and Ahab fixes the compass, or when they're towards the end of their journey and they see another ship of nantucketers who weren't driven to kill the whale, but just to make money and they're just rolling in the dough, throwing everything overboard just to make more room for more sperm oil.

MORE SPOILERS:

Any way, then in the end is really where we see a huge dramatic shift in language. For one thing it becomes *hard*, even as a native speaker the sentence structure, word choice, and ideas being conveyed are just harder. Basically what's happening this whole time is Ahab is trying to kill the whale, is failing to do so, and we're sort of consummating what sort of felt inevitable the whole time but from Ahab's perspective. I think in this sense, Moby DIck is really unique because it's almost two stories: there's all the fun stuff about learning about whaling, and then there's the artful part of it. The change is very dramatic.

Any way, I think it's a great book, but it's very different than say Typee, where the whole book stays in the same tone as the first part of Moby Dick that I described. The last 50 or so pages of Moby Dick, are borderline psychedelic.

I love classics and every time I read one there's a moment when I think to myself "I'm so glad no one is going to make me write an essay on this." I don't have to try to pull out the major themes, I don't have to discuss about the character's motivations, I don't have to consider the novel in the context of what was going on in the writer's life time. I can just let it wash over me, I can just enjoy it.

It's a miserable and joy-killing way to approach reading. Even as I look back to the books I read in High School I don't think any every became my favorites. The Great Gatsby is a fine book but when I look back on it I remember all the sections where we had to point out 'symbolism'. What a drag.

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