Finale

It is a time-bound book of distinctively American accent, mainly in the sense that Melville realized, with his great contemporaries Emerson and Whitman and Hawthorne and Thoreau, that the very idea of America entailed an obliteration of the past that placed unprecedented demands on the resources of the self. A.D.

Sorry, I was never going to finish Moby-Dick this way. Now that I’ve finished it I can see that. I still didn’t finish Moby-Dick in a normal way, just by sitting down and reading it. I had to rope someone else into the project, and he and I read about twenty pages a week for nine months, with a final sprint at the end. We didn’t meet and talk, we just read it separately and then emailed each other on Sunday nights, our letters crossing each other and usually going unanswered. He wrote to me about philosophy and his experience in the army, and I wrote to him, often enough, about how I didn’t understand what Melville was doing.

Moby-Dick wasn’t much fun to read, was it? Let’s be honest with each other about that, and all other things. I had to google all the biblical names and most weeks I felt either that I was missing a lot or that I was bored out of my head. Especially after I made it out of the opening chapters, which belonged to a different book than the rest of it, one with narrative thrust and a sense of humor. I had read those once already, in order to write the previous posts on this blog. But once I sailed out of the harbor of those earlier, familiar, more obviously novel-like chapters and into the deep symbolic waters (I’ll stop doing this soon) of the rest of the book, I found myself putting off doing the reading each week until Sunday night, when I made a big deal out of it. I said, I have to go read Moby-Dick now, dramatically and as if everyone, meaning my husband and our younger son, should feel bad for me. As if I were important. Then I retreated to our bedroom in a bad mood and did a Sudoku puzzle on my phone. And eventually read it. And sent an email to my friend, who had already read the chapters and written to me about Aristotle, or Rousseau.

I finished Moby-Dick towards the end of the plague time, which coincided with the conclusion of my children’s childhoods—Henry was in his junior year of college and John finished high school while I read Moby-Dick, and I read the last page of it on a trip we took to Spain to celebrate John’s graduation. The world around me, and inside me, was a world of scarcity and if not depletion, then something that felt like it at the time. But the mode I read Moby-Dick in was one of expectation. I approached the book imagining that as I read on and on, and on, I would see its greatness unfurl, so that when I turned the last page I would lay the book down and, inspired, seek out friends to whom I could say, I have read Moby-Dick, it is fantastic! It changed my life. I would shake them or maybe just bore them a little, talking about how great it had all been. There were moments where I saw something of its significance, I had glimpses of beauty, insight, tenderness. They just didn’t coalesce into a form I understood. So when I turned the last page I found myself sort of lost. I’d seen something, but it hadn’t been what I’d expected, and I was disappointed by it.

I had traveled to Spain with an old, battered, relatively compact copy of Moby-Dick so it was not until we were back in San Francisco that I was able to open my pristine Penguin edition and read the introductory essay by Andrew Delbanco I’d been saving to read at the end. Imagine my pleasure when I read:

As anyone encountering Moby-Dick for the first time will discover, it is a book that struggles to maintain its narrative drive against the impulse to digress and meditate and play.

I actually laughed out loud at that. Because I didn’t think Melville struggled, in the sense of resisting this, at all.

And Delbanco had other criticisms of the “boggy,” dense, inconsistent work, each of which I treasured, even as I knew that Delbanco hadn’t written this introduction to argue that Moby-Dick was a bad novel, poorly written. No. Of course not. The opposite. He was describing what he considered the best novel ever written in the English language. To make this argument, he put the book in historical and literary context, giving it its place, as well, in Melville’s life and oeuvre. And the essay’s good, it’s helpful, you should read it. You’d like it. I liked it. Just forgive me if I’m not convinced by any of it, even though in the end he and I come to the same conclusion about the book’s value. My take is this: I should have read Moby-Dick with the understanding that it was great, and that I was going to have to shift my ideas of what great was to fit with what Melville does in Moby-Dick. Not because someone, or even everyone, had told me what to think about it, but because that’s what you have to do, to make sense of anything. Melville didn’t write Moby-Dick so his readers would understand how a whaling operation worked, although he did know something about that, and he did write those facts into his book. He wasn’t writing an adventure tale, either, although he’d written those before. Melville wrote Moby-Dick to express something complicated but true about his life and the difficult, shifting, conflicting times he had been born into. And if I wanted to understand my current moment and maybe, even, express something about it—to myself or to someone else—I would have to work with what I had. And I’d have to love it.