Moby Dick Monday: First Impressions

It’s shameful; this is the sixth week of Moby Dick Monday, a read-a-long I signed up for, and the first time I’m posting about it! I’ve been worried about starting this one, then frantically scrambling to finish it by December 31st (because I strongly prefer having all books finished by midnight). But on Saturday night, I thought I’d go ahead and check out my copy to see how many pages/day I’d have to read to finish it. And I was in for a surprise:

Moby Dick is much shorter than I thought it was! My copy is 443 pages (granted, the type’s small and the pages are large), and I had a heart attack thinking it was abridged. But the copyright page said the text was unabridged. I still didn’t believe that, so I compared some of my chapters to ones on Project Gutenberg, and they seemed complete. So finally I went to Amazon and looked at the table of contents for those huge editions I’d been seeing (600-800 pages) and realised that much of those were literary criticism and explanatory notes! In the Oxford World Classics edition, the text itself is about 500 pages. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the book’s rather short.

So, there are 136 chapters plus an epilogue, and to avoid the page numbering issues, I’ll be talking about this based on chapter. :) I finished chapter 55 last night (which puts me close to halfway through the total pages), and I’m seriously loving this story. Ishmael, the narrator, is just great; he’s got a sense of humour as well as a streak of nerdiness about a mile wide. Along with telling the story normally, he sometimes plays with forms (one chapter was styled as a play) and he often pauses to go into a digression on whales themselves. With funny footnotes! :) And he’s got a life philosophy that I can’t help but agree with:

But I am one of those that never take on about princely fortunes, and am quite content if the world is ready to board and lodge me.

That, and his spirit of adventure and desire to see the world makes me feel we’d be friends!

This is my first experience with Meville, and I think he’s a wonderful novelist. The story flows well, and the characters are all quite singular and well-drawn. Here’s the introduction to Starbuck, the first mate of Ishmael’s ship (the Pequod):

He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time of general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for which his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength, like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure for long ages to come, and to endure always. as now; for be it Polar snow or torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to do well in all climates.

There are so many things I love about this passage: Melville’s diction, the completely unexpected descriptions that are both fanciful and precise, the detailed image I have of Starbuck at the end of it…I think it’s simply marvelous!

Captain Ahab himself is an old-fashioned kind of man, and his speech reflects that. Here’s him talking about Moby Dick:

“Aye Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye.” he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose; “Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lumber of me for ever and a day!” Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: “Aye, aye! and I’ll chse him round GOod Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Malestrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave.”

Now, if the whole book was written in that kind of dialect, I’d be dying inside. But since it’s only Captain Ahab, and since he doesn’t actually talk very often, I just revel it in. I think Melville has quite the ear; I can hear Ahab inside my head when I read that, and his voice sounds so different from Ishmael’s. And there’s those unexpected comparisons again; “heart-stricken moose”?! But it totally works. :) And ‘dismasted’ might be one of my new favourite words! (Although I don’t think it’s a ‘real’ one, but isn’t it perfect for a sea captain describing the loss of a leg?!)

Now, even though I’m really loving the book, I do think I need to address one more thing. Meville Moby Dick, being of the nineteenth century, was contains an occasional racist passage (edited based on some insightful comments). Here are the two descriptions in the book that made me cringe:

With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face-at least to my taste-his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim.

and

The figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart, with one white tooth evilly protruding from its steel-like lips. A rumpled Chinese jacket of black cotton funereally invested him, with wide black torwsers of the same dark stuff. But strangely crowning this ebonness was a glistening white plaited turban, the living hair braided and coiled round and round upon his head. Less swart in aspect, the companions of this figure were of that vivid, tiger-yellow complexino peculiar to some of the aboriginal natives of the Manillas; -a race notorious for a certain diabolism of subtilty, and by some honest white mariners supposed to be the paid spies and secret confidential agents on the water of the devil, their lord, whose counting room they supposed to be elsewhere.

Pretty awful, right? And I’m not even going to attempt to excuse it. But all the same, I’m surprised by how Queequeg, the man being described in the first passage, has become a fully-fledged character. Ishmael and he, after a rocky start, end up bosom buddies. And at other moments, Melville shows quite a bit more self-awareness on race issues than I would expect. And after Ishmael laughs at some story of Queequeg’s, in which Quuequeg didn’t understand how to use a wheelbarrow and thus ended up carrying it on his shoulder, they have this exchange:

“Why,” said I, “Queequeg, you might have known better than that, one would think. Didn’t the people laugh?”
Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his island of Kokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant water of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl; and this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on the braided mat where the feast is held. Now a certain grand merchant ship once touched at Kokovoko, and its commander-from all accounts, a very stately punctilious gentleman, at least for a sea captain-this commander was invited to the wedding feast of Queequeg’s sister, a pretty young princess just turned of ten. Well; when all the wedding quests were assembled at the bride’s bamboo cottage, this Captain marches in, and being assigned the post of honor, placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and his majesty the King, Queequeg’s father. Grace being said, -for these people have their face as well as we-though Queequeg todl me that unlike us, who at such times look downwards at our platters, they, on the contrary, copying the ducks, glance upwards to the great Giver of all feasts-Grace, I say, being said, the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of the island; that is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingesr into the bowl before the blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself placed next the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and thinking himself-being Captain of a ship-as having plain precedence over a mere island King, especially in the King’s own house-the Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punchbowl;-taking it I suppose for a hunger fingerglass. “Now,” said Queequeg, “what you tink now? -Didn’t our people laugh?”

Interesting dichotomy, right?

Well, somehow this post has become much longer than I expected it to be! So I’ll wrap it up for now. But I think Moby Dick‘s reputation is undeserved, and if the rest of the book is as good as this part has been, I’ll be searching out more Melville in the future!