Morning Read: Researches

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¶ This morning, just a few chapters of Moby-Dick. In my effort to understand the fame of this dog’s-breakfast of a book, I flail about not unlike Melville’s leviathans, sure of only one thing: I can’t wait to put the remaining fifty-odd chapters behind me and be done with the thing. Today, though, I had a more interesting idea than the desperate need to escape. That it took so long to dawn is perhaps itself the best indication of how uncongenial Moby-Dick is.

Moby-Dick is essentially a boy’s own book about hunting, but with this difference: it’s hunting for democrats. No scions of ancient noble houses figure in its narrative, unless of course you count the noble savages who excel at harpooning. The hunt is open to anyone who can talk his way aboard a ship.

That is the only difference. Like any boy’s own book, Moby-Dick is liberally peppered with miscellanies, such as the two chapters that follow the excitement of the chase in which the Pequod’s men outmaneuver some Dutch whalers. “The Honor and Glory of Whaling,” followed by a pendant, “Jonah Historically Regarded,” is the sort of pep talk that “reminds” boys that they’re special:

The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it, so much the more am I impressed with its great honorableness and antiquity, and especially when I find so many great demi-gods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have shed distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I msyelf belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity.

Note the keywords: “honorableness,” “antiquity,” “emblazoned.” “Fraternity” sounds a strong note, too, but all I can think of is: where’s Tinkerbell? Is Melville even halfway serious about the divine (or semi-divine) origins of whaling? It doesn’t really matter, because this “history” is entirely extraneous to the story of Ahab’s obsession with the White Whale — a story, I am beginning to see, almost as dwarfed by Melville’s “researches” as the whale’s brain is by the adjacent spermaceti.

It would be tolerable, and perhaps even amusing, if Melville’s language were not the excruciating mashup of jocular humor and King James poesy that it is. Blackboard screech!