Reading Moby-Dick

Abstract

Despite the book’s length and digressiveness, the plot of Moby-Dick has the concentration Aristotle recommends in the Poetics for an effective tragedy. Melville’s story can be abstracted so that mere summary conveys its force: a young man, who asks to be called Ishmael, goes to sea to find himself, befriends the Polynesian harpooneer Queequeg, and encounters a captain obsessed with killing Moby Dick, the white whale who severed his leg in an earlier encounter. Captain Ahab lures his crew, with the exception of his reluctant chief mate Starbuck, into that quest, which results in the death of all except the young sailor, who writes the story in retrospect and to comprehend his experience. It is a tale of yearning, obsession, wreckage, and deliverance, and the archetypal captain and white whale and their inexorable fates have become part of world culture. Whether in the mode of tragedy, comedy, or satire (and Melville mixes his genres), the outline of Moby-Dick is potent for those who have never read the book. But Moby-Dick contains much more than its plot. Its narrative is part of elaborate verbal patterns including etymology, philosophy, anatomy, cetology, theology, cartography, allegory, drama, and poetry. Some publishers have brought out editions of Moby-Dick that strip away what they consider its excrescences, resulting in a much slimmer volume. (For a recent example, see Orion Press’s 2007 Moby-Dick in Half the Time and Damion Searls’s 2009 rejoinder titled “; or The Whale.”) The gap between plot and pages raises questions about the form of Moby-Dick and, more broadly, about what we mean by “form.” Raymond Williams points to the complications of the term, which historically has been used to refer to “a visible or outward shape, with a strong sense of the physical body” and also “an essential shaping principle, making indeterminate material into a determinate or specific being or thing.” In Moby-Dick, Melville examines the relationships between shape and principle, part and whole, and substance and abstraction, embodying them in both whale and book. Moby-Dick is distinguished by an elaborate reflexivity (and, as we shall see, a publishing history) that ties its meanings to its materiality. To read Moby-Dick is to consider what kind of a book it is, the magnitude of details, the weight of scholarship, the difference editors make, how plot relates to other trajectories, and a range of formal possibilities, including formlessness.