“Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.”

     So begins Herman Melville’s 1851, looming and ponderous, phantasmic and rhapsodical, Biblical and eldritch, defiantly proud, and profound beyond all fathoms of measurement masterwork of a prose poem: Moby-Dick. 

     This was my second time reading this work, although the first time I had read it had been so childish and haphazard, so ephemeral and loose a reading, that to say I read it would be like saying I studied the Mona Lisa from half a league’s distance away and with such blurred and impatient eyesight as to make it seem some hastily scrambled brushstrokes. In truth, this was the first real time I had read–or, more rightly experienced,–or perhaps, most correctly, been overwhelmed with the Noachian, tidal magnitude–of Moby-Dick. 

     Walt Whitman, a contemporary and compatriot of Melville, wrote that “I…/ am not contain’d between my hat and boots.” Just so, and just with all creations of unvanquishable greatness and profundity, Moby-Dick cannot be contained between its front and end bindings. Moby-Dick is a barbaric yawp, a rash and overweening heartpulse, a Promethean snatch at God’s flame and Fate’s incandescent loom, a song, a pensiveness, a battle cry. When D.H. Lawrence reviewed Moby-Dick in his early Studies in Classic American Literature, he did so with the macho and bravado of a writer for the canon himself, too haughty to genuflect or to be awed over by Melville’s genius. The result? Lawrence’s chapter on Moby-Dick reads then like a snooty schoolchild, scrubbing at his wet and runny nose from bawling, wailing that he is smarter, that he can cast the judgement of future ages on Melville, that he can separate the awe and sublime from his own unimpassioned, technical judgement. He cannot squeeze Melville’s genius into a neatly capsuled ball anymore than we can. He can not separate the overwhelming flux of genius at Moby-Dick’s core. To penetrate into Melville’s genius sapiently enough to have mastery over him is a task no more easily accomplished than Ahab penetrating the pasteboard masks that hide the cogworks of Fate and control the human race. A beautiful thought, assuredly, and, all the same, a fruitless endeavor. 

     Coming almost above Bacchae for the greatest literary work I have ever seen penned, Moby-Dick is the most profound and powerful artwork I have conversed with. If Bacchae’s genius is the “slender muse” of Callimachus, refined and artful to the point of tapered perfection, Moby-Dick is the “muddy river” of Homer, a raging, rushing, Achillean vortex with the grace and refinement of Jupiter’s overawing thunderclap in an endless night. 

     At its heart, Moby-Dick could most simplistically be considered a study on man’s search for meaning, along with a meditation on philosophy, God, human nature, whaling and ecosystems, capitalism, literary history, pride, obsession, and so much more. At the center of it all stands Ahab, that “ungodly, godlike man.” Ahab is the child of a four-way parentage: Homer’s Achilles, Shakespeare’s villains, Milton’s Satan, and humankind’s everyday monomania for meaning and God. He is the culmination of human art’s ability to give meaning to the human race. Our true American Prometheus, Ahab can be seen as both villain, anti-hero, and hero in the book, and all three interpretations are valid in their own way. Ahab, having had his leg ripped off by the white whale, Moby-Dick, swears an impious and heroic revenge. The novel as a whole is, for the symbolist critic, a field day, as every single motif in the novel seems to stand semiotically as a signifier of something sublimer. Just the same, Ahab interprets everything as carrying meaning behind it, and tells the crew that he hunts and hates Moby-Dick as a “pasteboard mask,” under which an unnamable something lurks and torments the human race. This “unnamable thing” shares the combined definition of God, Fate and existential, pessimistic meaninglessness, and instead of ignoring it or cowing down to its mightiness, living a cushy, blind, and insufferable human existence, Ahab vows to plunge his harpooning spear deep through that physical mask and into its own, intangible heart. Is Ahab a crazed, monomaniacal fool? Yes. Does he get himself and almost all of his crew killed at the end? Also, yes. But is it not better–really, deep down, on some spiritual, human level in your soul—is it not better that he tried? That he neither prayed nor cursed the Lord, but stared into thunder and tsunami alike and said “I am your equal.” That he said “enough! My people have suffered enough from uncertainty and dread, from death and sickness, and the cruel machinations of Fate. I have had enough!” Is it not better that he tried? 

     Perhaps, dear reader, that is up to you. 

     The book’s sole survivor, however, is our ostensible narrator, Ishmael, a sublime and powerful character in his own right. Ishmael is overwhelmingly human, above all else. I think the two chapters that convey this best are “A Squeeze of the Hand” coupled with, two chapters later, “The Try-Works.” Ishmael’s mood, like Hamlet’s, fluctuates drastically. Sometimes joyous and blinded with divine purpose, sometimes melancholy and pensive, always profound, Ishmael, as he states in the first paragraph, is seeking meaning in life. Like the Biblical Ishmael, banished to the wilderness, he is an adventurer, one who lives life to the fullest truth, wisdom, and bravery as he can. In truth, not a single character in Moby-Dick is not blindingly incredible, nor are any pages, even the long, oft-complained about whaling chapters, out of place. Moby-Dick is an impeccable epic of the Human Will, and that is what makes it divine. I would love to hear your thoughts on it if you have read it, and am so excited to hold this book in my heart as I continue in my reading journey.