Moby-Dick

"My favorite book."

"Paul Kahn’s book suggests that evil derives from the violent avoidance of the realisation of our own mortality and there could be few better examples of this in literature than Melville’s portrait of Ahab in Moby-Dick. On first appearance the evil Ahab represents would seem to be that of obsession and delusion: he’s unable to let go of his need for revenge against the great white whale that took his leg from him and he’s willing to risk the lives of his men to taste that revenge. But the wound, of course, is about more than a missing limb. The whale has robbed him of his own sense of deathlessness and mastery over his world and he would sooner die trying to avoid that recognition than accept it. Others will be caught up by and killed in that very avoidance. The blindness of the powerful is always more dangerous than the blindness of the powerless. What sets Moby-Dick apart and makes it a great work of literature is that, like Milton in Paradise Lost, Melville paints his villain with such a richness of language that the portrait becomes a kind of celebration of the figure despite his actions. The entire adventure is bathed in reverence for the natural world through which Ahab, Ishmael and the rest of the sailors move. Ishmael’s descriptions sing with awe for the ocean and the whales. And in this light Ahab’s fixation, however distorting it is of life, comes to be seen as a kind of respect for the majesty of the creature he’s pursuing. And so there is nothing simple about his avoidance. It has its own dark dignity. Again, as Kahn points out, evil and love are deeply intertwined."

"I thought about responding to your call for a list of the top five American novels with “1) Moby-Dick 2) Moby-Dick 3) Moby-Dick ”—an obsessive answer that would be true to the spirit of this monomaniacal book! I won’t go full Ahab and claim that it is THE great American novel, but I will confess it is my favorite. There’s something about its dizzying mix of high and low, Herman Melville’s exuberant love of language, and the novel’s remarkable capaciousness (everything reminds me of Moby-Dick !) that makes me love to read it, reread it, teach it, joke about it, tweet about it, reference it at the slightest provocation. It is a brilliant, innovative experiment blending first- and third-person narrations and forays into dramatic form that is also full of spermaceti squeezing and other -Dick jokes. It manages to find material in whaling for a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. It also contains a very memorable chapter about chowder. It doesn’t get much more specific than a narrative about a guy who hates one fish in particular, and yet the novel’s thematic concerns are big and broad. Melville’s dramatization of a crew drawn into the vortex of their captain’s mad quest seems so obviously an allegory for a conflict between the democratic masses and tyrannical autocrat, even as—following C.L.R. James’s well-known reading—Ishmael and Starbuck look too complicit in Ahab’s quest to anchor a reassuring, egalitarian alternative. And it’s a novel about an extractive industry fueling an emerging modernity with animal flesh, processed aboard a floating sweat shop. Melville’s novel deftly captures a whale fishery on the cusp of its obsolescence that also prefigures a new era of fossil fuels and the ongoing environmental devastation that we are living through today. OK, you’ve convinced me. It is the great American novel."

"In recent decades, many scholars have been committed to reexamining declarations of literary and historical greatness, primacy, or supremacy, recognizing that notions of transcendence have always been rooted in subjective and structural biases. To call a work timeless may be a shorthand for elitist judgments, but it can also suggest how each time period brings a fresh perspective to the text. This is what makes reading Moby-Dick exciting now, whenever your now is. “The humming restlessness of his writing speaks to me” Lovers of nature writing may not have seen in Moby-Dick’s cetological chapters an explicit rejection of extractive fossil fuel industries, for instance. But present-day readers can read the novel as attending to natural resource depletion. Ishmael sees “honor and glory” in whaling even as he wonders—in a chapter entitled “Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish?—Will He Perish?”—whether “the humped herds of whales,” like the “humped herds of buffalo,” face “speedy extinction.” Ahab’s visible and invisible physical and psychological disabilities have had a new explanatory power within current conversations about disability; Ahab’s wounds in this sense are less deformations or determinants than opportunities for adaptation. Understanding the special violence and horror inherent in whiteness, which Melville writes about at length, has new urgency as critical race theory attends to the historical invention of whiteness and the Black Lives Matter movement calls for renewed attention to structural racism. These examples can go on and on, and I haven’t even talked about the novel’s chapter focusing on homoerotic sperm squeezing as a man’s height of “attainable felicity.” I’m continually discovering phrases and sentences that I had not noticed before, or had not fully assimilated, or had not fully appreciated. Here are some that leapt off the page in my most recent rereadings: “ostentatious smuggling verbalists” (those who borrow/steal the ideas of others); “His pure tight skin was an excellent fit” (a commentary on Starbuck’s tense righteousness); “how I wish I could fist a bit of old-fashioned beef in the forecastle” (Flask’s regret, now that he is an officer, that he can’t eat more casually with the common seamen); “pale loaf-of-bread face” (the hapless steward of the Pequod); and the “anonymous babies” strewn throughout the world by an imagined Lord Whale. I’m also particularly alert to the novel’s riot of odd phrases thanks to a Moby-Dick version of Cards Against Humanity created by Tim Cassedy . As the card game made me realize, there are a surprising number of references to cheese and butter in the novel."

"This is probably a bit of a long shot, as I read this long before I became a fully paid-up greenie. I first read it at university, and have re-read it many times. What I love about it and what makes it so utterly compelling is the strength of the characters. Through the whale, as I see it now (and this is something that has changed in me over the years), we feel the power of the relationship between man and nature, exposing man’s urge to control the natural world – all reflected in the whaling fleets and their prey. It’s an extraordinarily intense book: the descriptive writing is particularly powerful, the account of the Eastern seaboard and the oceans, and how they can change so dramatically. Nobody would say Melville was an ‘environmental writer’, but Moby-Dick is primarily about how we are going to have to re-think our relationship with the natural world. A lot of people don’t think that doing small things differently would make a big enough difference. They are not sure that those little things they do add up to enough. People think: ‘Surely if it was that serious, then governments would be involved?’ Unilever has a great strapline – ‘Small Actions, Big Difference’. The fact that governments seem ambivalent is part of the reason why people’s doubts are constantly reinforced. So the little things do matter."

"Let’s start with Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. It’s an extraordinary novel in all sorts of ways, and the scale of it reflects the scale of the sea. Melville had this great wealth of experience from his own whaling days and he wanted to express that in some way, but came up against the same problem every writer who tackles the sea faces. You have this huge subject, but not a lot of contours; not a lot to differentiate it all, with which to forge a narrative. “One of the interesting things about the sea as a subject is that it doesn’t hold history. As soon as a ship passes through the water the water closes up and that’s it.” The sprawl of Moby Dick reflects that, the apparent randomness of the chapters, the jumble of fiction and non-fiction. Like all writers on the sea, he’s intrigued by the practical problems, seamanship, fishing techniques. But underlying it all is this great, undifferentiated mass. One of the interesting things about the sea as a subject is that it doesn’t hold history. As soon as a ship passes through the water the water closes up and that’s it, whereas the land, whether it’s urban or rural, has great layers of history visible to the eye… Yes, Ahab pits himself against this infinite element which will never be conquered or changed by man. That’s what the story’s all about. I wrote a novel about the sea some years ago and watched it form itself into a shape similar in some ways to Moby Dick. I realised then that it was perhaps the only story you could write about the sea. A man is drawn to it, is seduced by it, gets a living by it but is eventually destroyed by it. That’s the basic plot structure of Moby Dick. It’s also that which Peter Benchley chose when he wrote Jaws – he famously took Moby Dick as a template. That’s part of the novel’s power – it established a great myth and that’s why it endures."

"I actually have quite an idiosyncratic reading of this great metaphysical masterpiece. Michael Della Rocca, a philosopher at Yale, has a new Oxford handbook on Spinoza. He asked me to do a chapter on the literary influence of Spinoza, and it was in the course of writing that chapter that I discovered the astonishing role Spinoza played in literature: German and English and American. My view of the Enlightenment is that it was seeded by Spinoza, who died in 1677, a hundred years before the Enlightenment. He was pounced on, denounced, he became the most dangerous man in Europe to acknowledge, even after his death, because he thought that ethics could be grounded on purely secular grounds. The two greatest reasons for believing in God—God as giving the answer to why is there something rather than nothing, and also as grounding morality—Spinoza pulled the rug out from. So he was declared the great Satan on Earth, but, in order to denounce him, everyone was reading him. To get your degree in European universities and your entrance into ecclesiastical circles you had to have your refutations of Spinoza lined up. “Goethe said that, when he was young, he never left the house without a copy of The Ethics in his back pocket.” Then in 1785, in the midst of the Enlightenment, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, who was actually a convert to Christianity from Judaism, said that to be a Spinozist is to be an atheist, an immoralist, and a fatalist, and to sign on to the Enlightenment is to be a Spinozist. Ergo, the Enlightenment should be renounced. This attack on Spinoza, as the essential figure in the Enlightenment, was a huge phenomenon in Germany that then spread to England. It was called the Pantheismusstreit —pantheism controversy—and it put Spinoza front and centre. First in Germany, starting with Goethe, the German Romantics—the Sturm und Drang crowd—declared, one after the other, ‘If to be for the Enlightenment means to be a Spinozist, then I’m a Spinozist!’ Goethe said that, when he was young, he never left the house without a copy of The Ethics in his back pocket. Then Hölderlin and Novalis declared that they were Spinozists. In the process, Spinoza got transformed—one can say he got deformed —into a figure that a German Romantic could love. This is all background to Moby Dick . Coleridge was immersed in German intellectual thinking, and, at first, was a Spinozist. But there was an aspect of Spinoza that bothered him. As you make progress in Spinoza and identify more and more with Deus sive Natura —the thing that can be thought of as God or Nature—you lose your sense of identity and personality. He didn’t like that. He said it was the “swamping of personality by Infinity.” And yes, that’s what Spinoza wants for us, for our personality to be swamped by infinity. That’s how we save ourselves. But Coleridge rebelled against this and wrote about it in his intellectual journal, Biographia Literaria. “It’s amazing to me that the two greatest philosophical novels written in English in the 19th century, Moby Dick and Middlemarch , come out of a preoccupation with Spinoza.” This was, in turn, read by Herman Melville, on the other side of the Atlantic, and he became obsessed with the same question: If we are Spinozists and persuaded by his deductive argument, what happens to our autonomy? We’re swamped by infinity. That, I believe, is at the heart of what’s going on in Moby Dick . What that great white whale represents is impersonal, logically constituted reality that has no regard for our autonomy, that would swamp us, that would reconstitute our individuality in its image, and it’s an insult to our very beings. It may be reality, but it’s a personal insult. Ahab is defiantly denying this swamping. If you go back and look at the crazy, nutty things that he is saying—“Talk not to me of blasphemy,” he says to Starbuck, “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me”—he’s defiantly against the Spinozist logic that constitutes all of nature, including our nature. He’s not going to be determined! That defiance is the essence of his character. The great irony is that it’s his defiant determination not to be determined that determines him and ultimately dooms him. He’s driven by his maddened desire not to be driven. Spinoza had entered deeply into the literary consciousness by way of the attacks on the Enlightenment that he came to represent. It’s amazing to me that the two greatest philosophical novels written in English in the 19th century, Moby Dick and Middlemarch , come out of a preoccupation with Spinoza. All of the crew of the Pequod are doomed. Except for Starbuck and Ishmael, they all yield their responsibility to Ahab. At first they try to fight him, and then they just give up and become instruments of his will. The tricky thing that Spinoza asks us to do is to both have our minds completely reordered by the logical order of reality, while also maintaining responsibility for ourselves, both intellectually and morally. We must hold ourselves accountable, for our beliefs and our actions, even in the face of the most powerful determinism. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So you both lose yourself and yet can’t lose yourself. This is incredibly tricky, and maybe itself logically incoherent. In any case, it’s what Spinoza requires and what The Ethics is trying to carry us toward. Everybody in the crew gives up their authority, their accountability, their responsibility to Ahab and that’s something you’re not allowed to do. They all go down with him. Ishmael is the objective observer. He pulls back, he observes and he doesn’t get pulled into the orbit of Ahab’s madness. He maintains his own identity and his own judgement and he is saved. He is the only one who survives the catastrophe. The way he survives it is also interesting. It’s one of the most amazing scenes in all of literature. There is a casket that Queequeg has prepared for himself, which is scribbled all over with his tattoos. Queequeg is a Polynesian, who at first Ishmael is horrified by. He thinks he’s perhaps a cannibal and he’s also covered with grotesque tattoos. He is the embodiment of the Other. But then Ishmael grows to love Queequeg and his individuality. When Queequeg is deathly ill, he prepares a casket for himself that can float because he doesn’t want to be submerged in the sea. He transfers all of his tattoos—that express his individuality—onto this casket. And that’s the thing that saves Ishmael. So there’s a clinging to individuality. In this extraordinary scene, with the casket floating and saving Ishmael, there is an embrace of individuality in the face of everything and also an embrace of our coming, in whichever strange and unpredictable ways, to the aid of one another. The instrument of Ishmael’s survival is Queequog, Queequog’s casket, inscribed with his superstitious beliefs, yes, but with his individuality, which is precious. A novelist has got to believe in the moral supremacy of the irreducibly individual. You can’t write novels without embracing the something sacred in individuality. As with Middlemarch , I could go on indefinitely about the way in which this novel wrestles with very specific philosophical problems."

"It showcases the susceptibility of this republic and others, to being overcome by populist demagogues—the danger of democracy being usurped by tyranny. In Moby-Dick , the crew are proxies for a cross-section of society. They enter an almost parody version of ‘the social contract’ to ship out with the Pequod. They find themselves at the mercy of Captain Ahab’s regime. During Melville’s day, the plot provided a way of reflecting on slavery; it continues to call attention to the danger of authoritarianism. My book ended before 2016; since then, there were umpteen new readings of Moby-Dick in light of Donald Trump’s election. That’s part of the afterlife of Moby-Dick . It has been seized upon in popular culture and by the media as a reference point for misadventures that overtake the United States. Any interpretative frame can become constrictive. It can keep a reader away from the direct encounter with the text that should be the heart of the reading experience. It can impose a screen. More positively, the halo around a text that you hear is a Great American Novel can create excitement."

"Moby-Dick was the book that really started my love of sea stories. It’s about crews at the extreme facing quite formidable forces and seeing how they behave in those situations. I like the way the sea is treated as a character all the way through the book, even before they get on board the ship. The sea is prevalent in everything, this ominous force in the background. I like the characters and the different dynamics between them. Starbuck, the first mate, is maybe my favorite fictional character of all time. I just really engaged with the journey he goes on. He’s a good man and he’s always trying to do what’s right. But what is right in the circumstances is not the thing he is supposed to do. As a first mate, he’s meant to obey the captain. But to obey the captain in this situation is to put the crew in danger and to go against his own sense of honor and his own ethics. That sort of conflict is really interesting to me, and one I like to explore in my own stories. The conflict doesn’t have to be between two people, it can be inside a person as well. I like characters who are really determined or obsessed with one main goal. For Ahab, it’s hunting down the whale. But it’s not just about him and the whale. It’s about him putting all of the things he thinks have gone wrong in the world onto the whale. He thinks that if he can defeat the whale, he can defeat everything that’s gone wrong in his life. I found that character development through the story fascinating. There is a scene I remember at the end of the book. It’s a small chapter called “The Symphony,” when Ahab is talking to Starbuck. It shows that there’s a bit more to Ahab than just being absolutely obsessed with this one goal. He’s got a wife and a child at home. There’s a glimpse that behind his obsession, there’s an actual man. It’s as if he’s been captured by his own obsession. It’s like an illness he’s got. I also like Moby-Dick because I think of it as the first queer naval fiction. I know you’re always going to bring yourself to a book as a reader, but I think Moby-Dick is as queer as it could be for the time it was written in. At the start, Ishmael meets Queequeg in the inn where he’s staying and they share a bed. Then, the next morning, they divide their possessions up between them, Queequeg proclaims that they’re married now, and Ishmael is perfectly happy to go along with it. For the rest of the book, they’re treated like a partnership—as if they’re married, really. For a book that was written in the middle of the 19th century, it’s surprising it’s that obvious. It’s why queer stories and sea stories interlink. The sea is almost treated as apart from the land. It has its own society, with its own rules and regulations. With queer stories a lot of the time the characters don’t feel like they fit in on land. They go to sea to try and find themselves and maybe find another community out there that they do fit in."

"I picked it up while writing Less Is Lost and couldn't put it down — it's hilarious! Why did no one tell me it was hilarious?"

"Moby-Dick."

"I just finished Moby-Dick, which scared me off for a long time due to the hype of its difficulty. I found it to be a beautiful boy's adventure story and not that difficult to read. I never wanted it to end."

"Last year, I finally read Moby-Dick. I became obsessed by Melville's great novel of obsession. Everyone should be made to read it, using force if necessary."

"One of my favorite reading experiences was standing on the New York City subway, clinging to a pole with one hand and reading "Moby-Dick" on my phone with the other. Sometimes I was so engrossed I'd get off the train and just plop down on a bench to finish a chapter."

""Moby-Dick." I was 22, teaching in a West African village and pretty depressed; at "the palsied universe lies before us a leper" I had to put the novel down. But when I reread it a couple of years ago, I didn't feel like killing myself at all. Books change with us."

"Our great American tragic-epic, Melville’s “Moby-Dick.” This truly contains multitudes of meanings: the Pequod is the ship of state, the radiantly mad Captain Ahab a dangerous “leader,” the ethnically diverse crew our American citizenry."

"Hey! No one had ever told me "Moby-Dick" was funny."

"My wife's favorite book is Moby-Dick, which I finally read last year. I cried several times -- it's a force."

"I came late to Herman Melville — late, therefore, to "Moby-Dick" (wantonly dismissed in its day)"

""Moby-Dick." I read it first, and then I listened to it. I actually preferred having it read to me — having all the voices of the characters acted out was great."

"I listen to the audiobook of Moby-Dick at bedtime. As I'm familiar with the text, I don't ever worry about missing something while falling asleep."

"keep returning to the moment Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" first shook me fully awake. Now I know it was the robust poetry doing its job inside the prose -- that natural convergence of sacred and profane."