TIPS for Reading MOBY-DICK - Better Book Clubs
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- čas přidán 2. 08. 2024
- Ready to tackle one of the greatest classics in American literature? Here are some tips to get you started!
See here a short documentary on the making of an incredible one-man production of Moby-Dick, which I was privileged to see about a decade ago in New Haven, CT: • Gare St Lazare Players...
And click on the Community tab to take my new quiz and tell me which classic book you'd most like me to do a tips video on next!
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Great tips, I live in New Bedford and was born and raised here, so it's almost a crime that I've never read it. Reading through it now on audible while I work, it's very enjoyable, it just requires a lot of brain power to really enjoy it. It's near impossible for me to read if I am tired, but it is very enjoyable when my brain is alert and at 100 percent.
So glad you're enjoying it! I might be wrong, but I think the church in the beginning is still standing in New Bedford. I'd be curious whether that's true.
The Symphony of the Supernal Power
Melville needed a mighty theme for his “wicked book”. When one goes about accusing God, hunting the Divine Spector and mocking all the various and naive beliefs concerning the Supernal Power, dissembling the accusation of God and the judgment that your fellows are fools requires layering to hide your sacraligious and misanthropic zeal.
So Moby Dick is a multi-layered monstrosity of powerfully poetic prose, using a combination of voices, styles, and narrative adjustments that disrupt the narrative and allow for reconsiderations, correctives, and commentary upon the level of interpretation offered.
In the Judaic and Christian scriptural interpretations there are four levels of explication: the literal; the allegorical; the moral (tropological) ; and the eschatological (analogically). Very few novels or other works of literature are complex enough to encompass and require these four levels of interpretation.
Melville's tale had a source in reality-- the whale ship Essex, and Melville utilizes this tale as a means of establishing a verisimilitude that allows for a literal understanding of his novel as merely an adventure tale. Melville goes to extreme measure to present all the details of whaling and whales, turning chapters into those one might feel belong to a whaling manual rather than a novel. Going even further to provide that very stringent voice of facts and skepticism Melville found insufficient in those who promoted science as if only nature and the scientific method offer us reality--Melville has an entire list opening his book of the etymology of whales. He mocks this simplistic, materialistic view periodically. His description early on of butterflies pinned to a board and labeled by a lepidopterist shows how the very essence of what it means to be a butterfly (its wild, unpredictable flight and vitality) are utterly removed by the time the scientist is ready to label it as the animal it no longer is, but merely resembles.
Melville will make fun of those who see Moby Dick as only a whale, and as Moby Dick is God, Melville extends his ridicule to those who do not believe in God or imagine Him as some impersonal, Deistic Deus Abscondis.
The water is the spirit world where God dwells, thus "meditation and water are wedded forever".
But Melville has no sympathy for those whose view of God as a benevolent, loving Lord either. It is clear that Moby Dick has been the source of great suffering. Ahab's missing leg and the psychological damage he endured in his previous encounter with the divine cetacean show God, in Melville's view, as far from the saccharine, whitewashed loving Heavenly Father of so many simple-minded believers. So the literal and the allegorical interpretations of God and, consequently, of Melville's marvelous novel, both prove insufficient. The moral view fares little better as Ahab's accusations against God, like a violent and angry anti-Job, blast away any idea that there are easy moral lessons behind the workings of Moby Dick's mysterious mannerisms.
The eschatological view also suffers ridicule from Melville as he creatively sneaks an epilogue into the middle of his novel in The Town Ho chapter. Here Melville, through a post-Pequod Ishmael, describes a story filled with gospel images and is disbelieved by all in his company. He has them drag in a copy of "The Four Evangelists" (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) upon which Ishmael will put his hand and swear to the "gospel truth" of his tale. But as his tale is, though hidden, the gospel itself, there is a circular, tongue-in-cheek contradiction in his swearing on the gospels that the gospel is true.
So complicated were all of Melville's own dealings with God that even these four levels of interpretation prove insufficient to analyze this novel well. We need another level here, and it comes to the fore in the novel when Melville describes in the chapter The Symphony the stepmother kindness of God that almost saves Ahab from his mad quest and his terrible end. The lightning and fire and madness return, but for just a moment we see the other level. That beyond the foolishness of atheism, and beyond the simple-mindedness of easy-belief, with all the horrors of our human helplessness before God, and with all the admitted anger resulting from our dealings with the realities He has left to us, there is something in our humanness that is only answered by that terrible, white, hooded phantom who, from time to time, reveals the only possible healing for our helpless humanity.
Melville’s beast of a novel was postmodern before postmodernism in that it deconstructed modernism before it ever got defined. It then dismantled even postmodernism, revealing the vapidness of trying to deconstruct the world as an empty pursuit. If there are any post-postmodern novels, this was certainly the first and remains the most powerful. And all the things people call tedium in the novel are necessary to both reaching this power and familiarizing the readers with the world in which they are engaged.
Great tips. I've just started reading this novel. Was feeling a bit guilty on passing around the 'extract' and 'etymology' sections, and now that guilt is gone too. Thanks for that too!
If you end up enjoying it, you can always circle back! Some people read this one again and again.
Great tips! Thank you very much
My pleasure!
I'm really glad I found your channel, I'm reading dracula thx to you, maybe I will read mobydick next
Go for it!!
I think you can also be proud of reading Frankenstein or Don Quixote, which both also become sometimes a chore.
I'll admit I didn't even finish Don Quixote. I never made a video on it, but I wrote about it here, on my Substack newsletter: betterbookclubs.substack.com/p/the-solitary-reader?
Great video and great tips! I found it a good introduction to the book and its themes. I struggled through it the first time, but I felt the magic in it and I wanted to know more so after a period of time had passed I gave it another go and it has since become my favourite book and if the police were to search me they would probably find a copy about me somewhere! The best tip I ever got for reading Moby Dick (forgive me I can't remember who said it or where I heard it) was that it can be read from cover to cover as a whaling adventure OR it could be read in the way that people read the bible and other religious texts; i'.e keeping a copy to mark favourite passages, opening at random pages or random chapters and maybe even sometimes even just reading one sentence. I would keep the book with me and just get it out when I had a free moment and glance at it or sometimes if I had 10 free minutes I could mull over a shorter chapter. Anyway thank you for a great video!
I think CZcams was reading my comments as it recommended the video that the quote came from next!
czcams.com/video/x-wITHYusRk/video.html
So glad you kept at it! I've also heard people say that on their first reading, they just skipped all of the chapters about whaling and enjoyed the story. And yup, I'm sure You Tube's AI is hard at work recommending the next thing, for better or worse.
Your edition of the book looks lovely.
I am currently reading Moby Dick for the first time and map of the journey would be really useful. I skipped the first "midchapter" part about whales but I'll rethink it for the next chapter of this kind I'll come across. Thank you for all the tips and the context of the book, I feel like I was missing that at the beginning.
You're so welcome! Have you finished?
Did you buy it at The Strand by chance???
I'm not sure where this one came from--but I do love to shop at The Strand when I'm in NYC!
@@BetterBookClubs I am sad to say I did not. It just felt too heavy and long for me, not sure why since usually I like long books.
I think I might give it another try in autumn/winter again though. It feels like a book which needs the right time to be read.
It's a bit odd that you say this was a significant book and then present it as a whale book. Seems you've missed all of the symbology, Biblical relationships, etc. that truly make it an important and truly amazing novel.
My aim in offering these videos is not to explain the book to readers. I hope people will read and experience these classics for themselves, so it's not my aim to share symbols, draw connections, point out themes, etc. My intent is to help people get past the challenges that I think might be barriers for them to experiencing the works for themselves. There are other videos you can go to if you want to learn about the Biblical relationships, for example, in Moby Dick. Heck, you can go to Cliff's Notes! What's much harder to find is a little bit of help figuring out how to navigate the initial stumbling blocks that might prevent you from reading the book in the first place. It sounds like you may not be a reader who needs that kind of encouragement, so these videos may not be for you!