Name: A timely comment on Moby Dick
Item: Moby Dick
Author: court_talisman

Moby Dick →

by Herman Melville

A timely comment on Moby Dick

court_talisman

Jul 8, 2024 4:28 PM

What insight can I possibly give on Moby Dick? Moby Dick is a huge book: always sweeping between the most general and philosophic all the way down to the particular and poetic. It's moody, immersive, expanding, contemplative, ironically reflexive, sincerely emotional, demanding, relaxing, cautious and boisterous.

It meets the heuristic for a literary epic by being more or less about everything. That's a tall order by the 19th century (an impossible one now, but whatever). The set of all possible literary considerations has grown (and grows) since the time of Homer.

But, what I personally find most interesting in Moby Dick is Melville's (or maybe Ishmael's) spergy encyclopedic approach. In fact, if you check the wikipedia page I believe Moby Dick is claimed to be something called an encyclopedic novel. This shit really captures my imagination. Melville had no qualms about including digressions from the narrative to offer social, historical, and zoological commentary.

You might think this could make the reading awkward. I mean, it can, if you're not already a wikipedia warrior. I might have glossed over some of the longer sections on whale biology, but in general I loved this. It all feels strangely modern (DFW is Melville-esque, I guess), and all the while the prose has the anchor-heft of the old testament. Structurally and thematically it's a book for the ages.