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This is the first in a series of four for the Moby Dick Readalong hosted over at The Blue Bookcase.

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Most of what I’ve read about Moby Dick seem to be negative as others say that Melville can go on and on about the sea and write about things that deviate from the plot.  These speak true from the day it was published up to this day.  However, there are some who appreciate Melville and his work.  This is from the introduction provided by Charles Child Walcutt in the Bantam Classics edition:

Its first readers were shocked and startled by the strange world it revealed to them.  It was greeted by most English and American reviewers with respect but also with impatience and bewilderment.  More than half the leading periodicals ignored it.  The reactions of the rest ranged  from glowing praise for its lively and vigorous style to severe censures  for its bombast and its unnovelistic form.  The consensus of reviewers described it as a wild mixture of philosophy, blasphemy, fancy, wit, exuberance, and adventure.

Walcutt continues

His book is difficult and complex because Melvill does not reduce the dilemmas of the world and life to childish simplicities.

Now, I for one, was concerned with starting this book because of what I have been reading and hearing about the book.  But that introduction by Walcutt seemed interesting enough to go on and give it a try.  And after reading the first twenty-eight chapters? I’m loving it … so far.  :)  I also loved reading the Etymology and Extracts.

I honestly don’t know how to view Moby Dick.  I’d like to think of it as a diary since the events that have happened are in a sequential manner.  But somehow it also seems like a recollection as the narrator says in the beginning “Some years ago–never mind how long precisely“.  Since Owen Chase’s chronicling of the events that happened when their ship was rammed by a large sperm whale was one of his inspirations for this tale, it might be the latter.  A sort of survivors tale. :) I dunno.  What do you guys think?

Anyway, since I mentioned earlier that one of the complaints was that Melville could go on and on about the sea, I found that I actually liked reading about Melville go on and on about the sea/ocean in the first Chapter (“Loomings”).  I have also underlined quite a few of those passages about the sea and learned quite a few things from them.

In this story, our narrator who asks as to call him Ishmael, itches for the sea as he is feeling rather depressed.  He adds that instead of taking his own life, he opts to sail the sea:

I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off–then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.

In the passage above, Ishmael mentions driving off the spleen.  And though a bit of Googling, I found that the spleen was thought to be the seat of melancholy and thus driving off the spleen would mean to do something that would make one person less sad or depressed.

I also love that the narrator is rather observant:

Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. … But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster-tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.  How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here?

I could somehow relate to that passage above since going to the beach is one of the ways we Filipinos love to unwind after a weeks labor.  :)

I also loved Ishmael’s reasons for going to sea as a sailor rather than a passenger:

For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something in it.

…

Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must
pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But BEING PAID,–what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

I also liked this passage towards the end of the first chapter:

 I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on
barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it–would they let me–since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.

In this novel, we also get to meet Queequeg who becomes Ishmael’s “bosom friend” and companion on his whaling voyage.  Queequeg is a rather odd character as he observes Ramadan yet he worships an idol.  Ishmael keeps referring to him as a savage and a cannibal despite Queequeg’s displays of civilized behavior.  I also found this comment rather interesting: “Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.“

Another topic that keeps popping up in the novel is religion, religious belief, and religious attitudes.  When Ishmael arrives in Nantucket, he walks into a church in Chapter 2 (“Carpet-Bag”) where the sermon was about the “blackness of darkness” and the Whaleman’s Chapel in Chapters 7-9 (“The Chapel”, “The Pulpit”, and “The Sermon”) where the preacher used Jonah’s story from the Bible as the topic for his sermon and told the attendees “to preach the Truth to the face of Falsehood.”  Also seemingly unavoidable in those chapters are the constant references to the sea or ships: the pulpit was in the “likeness of a ship’s bluff bows,” the preacher being a former sailor and harpooner, the painting that Ishmael describes as being of a whale attacking a ship, the preacher’s referring to the congregation as Shipmates and his treatment of the church as a ship when he mentions starboard and larboard.

Getting back to the topic of religion, I don’t know much about Melville’s beliefs but if I were to think that Ishmael’s were the authors own, I think this passage says a lot:

I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth — pagans and all included — can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?— to do the will of God? that is worship. And what is the will of God?— to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me — that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator.

Another seemingly unavoidable topic is the somewhat homoerotic overtones mentioned in the book with regards to the relationship between Queequeg and Ishmael.  I don’t know if Melville intended for his readers to think of it that way but he definitely wasn’t to scared of putting it in the book either.  Of course, I don’t know the extent of male bonding in the 19th century but things like the passages below can’t help but rouse suspicions:

  • “I found Queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner.  You had almost thought I had been his wife“
  • “and when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said henceforth we were married“
  • “Thus, then, in our heart’s honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg–a cosy, loving pair“
  • “… and blowing out the light, we rolled over from each other, this way and that, and very soon were sleeping“

I don’t know yet how this is played out in succeeding chapters but it would be interesting to find out.  And with that I will end this rather long post and looks forward to the next couple of chapters.