True confession: I have an extremely fraught love relationship with the writings of Herman Melville.
It’s not even a love-hate relationship, it’s a love-love relationship, but I can’t finish Melville’s most famous book. I have never felt so embarrassed about anything in my life.
Not finishing Moby Dick felt like breaking up with a perfect man - a perfect man who is not only sensitive and funny but also incredibly good-looking and smart.
And he loves to work out and volunteer and help children with their homework. He’s not just a surface, he has depth, man, like real depth.
And I am over here, by comparison, a total scrub, wringing my hands, thinking: “This guy is way, way too good for me! He’s outta my league by like six leagues! Why is he still here talking to me? Is this a kind of joke?”
Like talking about the Perfect Man, talk about Moby Dick in front of anyone and you’ll probably get an overwhelmed groan or an eyeroll accompanied with “Oh, not that fucking guy!”
But hear me out.
Hear me out, Moby Dick is actually great.
Yet, any high school English teacher or curriculum with Moby Dick on the list has expectations beyond this world. Anyone who thinks that anyone, let alone a 15 year old, could read Moby Dick has Galaxy Expectations or Universe Expectations.
Moby Dick is not a book that teenagers or very young people should read, unless the teenager is explosively full of life experience and their favorite thing is to be immobilized for hours with nothing else to do but read Moby Dick.
It’s not intelligence needed to get through this book, its … life experience and an appreciation of life, in addition to extreme diligence and dedication, and possibly drugs that make it impossible for you to move your limbs. Its not that it’s rare to find such dedication in a teenager or a young person - it’s rare to find such dedication in any person of any age.
Ironically, dedication is what the book is about, only a feverish kind of dedication aimed towards the White Whale.
Otherwise, how could you stay with Melville’s … anything. There are amazing quotes and sentences in Moby Dick, brilliant moments that just make me fawn and swoon, but getting to the end seems as unreachable as Everest for me. Heck Everest almost seems easier.
The epic Melville book I did finish was Mardi, which I only gruelingly got through because it was for a class. I think I was the last person to pick a book to write a paper on, and the last book left to choose was Mardi. Getting tasked with Mardi as a last resort was sort of like being paired with the last person picked for Soccer Team, but then they end up being the underdog rookie star.
Mardi is a fun and exciting Melville book, it’s like an island-hopping romance novel, where the main character, Taji, just sort of meets different people on different Polynesian islands. He doesn’t aim at falling in love but he does.
Mardi truly reminded me of some kind of video game where you visit different islands, talk to the people on the islands and learn about them, solve a few problems for them, and then you depart, onwards to the next island. If I ever go to Fiji, I will reread Mardi.
In the way that the Poe book, “Arthur Gordon Pym” contains puzzles, maps, and treasures like a proto-videogame, Mardi feels like a Banjo-Kazooie vacation. At least compared to Moby Dick.
In a way you’d rather be Taji of Mardi than Ahab of Moby Dick. Chasing a white whale while you pull down wads of cash on blubber is all right, but what if you actually catch the white whale? Would it matter? What’s funny too is Taji just sort of floats through life and everything works out for him, while we all know what happens to Ahab …
Melville talking about fish in Mardi, he sometimes just goes off about fish for six pages
Ultimately I think I finished Mardi because it made less sense as a piece of art, and I read it hoping that it would eventually make sense. I was hoping the ribbon would bow, but it was just a trail of very alluring ribbon. But that is okay in my book - life doesn’t make sense, either!
Mardi is more free, and looser, than Moby Dick, if less refined. Mardi is a younger Melville writing with younger themes. Moby Dick was an older wiser (yet still exuberant) Melville writing about the crueler themes of life: obsession, those along for the ride of obsession, and the wreckage therafter.
I remember staring at my half-finished copy of Moby Dick on my nightstand in Boulder and thinking “What will it take?”
What would it take for me to finish this book? I love Melville so much, I just … physically can’t. It’s like loving mountainclimbing, or loving ultramarathoning, and crashing at the last mile. Physically can’t.
I think if you told me that if I finished Moby Dick, that Keanu Reeves would come to my house and look at my paintings and say nice things about them, yes, I would do it. But for anything less than that, the white whale goes free, forever.
Related blogs:
Books I Didn’t Finish: Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past
Who wrote this?
I’m a painter, I make comics, and sometimes I do computer stuff!
- Becky Jewell