Moby Dick is Not a Novel
Moby Dick is not a novel. It’s a great book, but to read it properly, you have to understand it’s not a actually a novel.
How to read Moby Dick
If you pick up Moby Dick to read an adventure, prepare to be bored.
Only about a fifth of the book actually advances the plot, that is, the hunt for the white whale. Most of the (generally very short!) chapters are more like blog posts written by a bored whaler (ie, whale-hunter): they delve into some detail of either whales or whaling or life at sea, and invariably conclude with a philosophical reflection. It’s hardly a novel at all. The narrative, such as it is, seems to exist in order to tee up the blog posts that follow.
When I tried to read Moby Dick as a novel, it was a slog, for me as it is for most people. Two thirds of the way through, I realized it was just a whaling blog, and finished the remainder in a week.
What does it mean to write a book in 1851 that has more in common with the Internet than it does with any novel?
What Moby Dick is really about
Over and over again, we’re told: the whale is unknown and unknowable, or the experts are wrong, or Ishmael tells us that (in spite of his compulsively-detailed descriptions) no one can be told what a whale is, we have to see it for ourselves, the words of an antedigital Morpheus. Whales in Moby Dick are the ultimate adventure, not just a confrontation with a monster, not merely an arduous journey into the wilderness of the sea, but a confrontation with the limits of knowledge, the unknown, far from the comforts of civilization and systematic knowledge.
We get symbols, sure — the whiteness of the whale, or the dubloon nailed to the mast — and are immediately furnished with the different characters’ conflicting interpretations. The symbols do not mean anything so much as they mean everything. An event is what it is, but an experience is whatever you make of it.
When Moby Dick does settle down to a narrative, Ishmael dances on the border of fact and fantasy. The whale hunts are the stuff of epic fantasy, yet ostensibly real. They’re fighting monsters on the far side of the world! How true to life are these descriptions? How accurate are his details about how a whaling ship is run? On the one hand, he devotes an entire (infamous) chapter to his own idiosyncratic ontology of whales, which he immediately admits is entirely made up. On the other hand, he gives us the names of real paintings and illustrations, ranking them by realism, in case we’d like to see one in person.
Beyond the veil of real-world citations that saturate the book, we get an utterly subjective view of the world, full of gossip and speculation. Ishmael recounts to us second-hand stories, he gives us chapters from the perspective of one shipmate or another, he questions the veracity of the very stories he just told us. It’s full of characters and ideas from white and black Americans, Indians and Muslims, all the world’s religions, and atheists too — Ishmael’s whaling world is maximally multicultural and completely cosmipolitan, rendering the great European cities of the time positively provincial.
Ultimately, the mood I get from Moby Dick is: “The world is way, way bigger than you can even imagine.” Physically, monstrously, epistemically, culturally — on every dimension, in every direction, Moby Dick insists on showing us something way, way out of bounds.
Oh, and also: he likes whales. And puns, and alliteration. But mostly whales.