Why Read Moby-Dick

publish and read his books. “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay,” he lamented to Hawthorne. “Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches.... What’s the use of elaborating what, in its very essence, is so short-lived as a modern book?” But, of course, more than 150 years after its publication, we are still reading Moby-Dick. Posthumously, Melville achieved the promised land; he is a god in our literary pantheon.
    In the summer of 1851, as he struggled to finish his whaling novel, Melville dared to imagine himself and Hawthorne together in a writers’ paradise. They would find “some little shady corner by ourselves,” and with a basket of champagne they would “cross our celestial legs in the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and strike our glasses and our heads together, till both musically ring in concert.” They would then reminisce about their past lives and compose “humorous, comic songs” with titles such as “ ‘Oh, when I lived in that queer little hole called the world,’ or, ‘Oh, when I toiled and sweated below,’ or, ‘Oh, when I knocked and was knocked in the fight.’ ” As the agnostic writing outside his own uncertain beliefs, Melville is describing the fantasy he desperately needed but could never quite convince himself existed. It is a paradise born of several longings: of the twelve-year-old boy for his dead father; of the author for fame; and of the almost-middle-aged man for a friend. It is the longing that is in all of us, and it is there, in every page of Moby-Dick .

13
    A Mighty, Messy Book
    H awthorne had a lot to do with the making of Moby-Dick, but the novel truly began in February 1849 when Melville purchased a large-type edition of Shakespeare’s plays. The eyes that would become so inflamed during the composition of Moby-Dick were already beginning to bother him. “[C]hancing to fall in with this glorious edition,” he wrote to a friend of the large-type volumes, “I now exult over it, page after page.”
    Melville’s example demonstrates the wisdom of waiting to read the classics. Coming to a great book on your own after having accumulated essential life experience can make all the difference. For Melville, the timing could not have been better, and in the flyleaf of the last volume of his seven-volume set of Shakespeare’s plays are notes written during the composition of Moby-Dick about Ahab, Pip, and other characters.
    Instead of being intimidated by Shakespeare, Melville dared to wonder whether he might be able to surpass him. Given the constraints that existed in Elizabethan England, Shakespeare had to be careful about what he revealed. As a result, Melville wrote, “[i]n Shakespeare’s tomb lies infinitely more than Shakespeare ever wrote.” Fully realizing his own age applied its own set of limitations on a writer, he still wondered whether being an American in the mid-nineteenth century might allow him to push the artistic bar set by Shakespeare to new heights. “[E]ven Shakespeare was not a frank man to the uttermost,” he wrote to Duyckinck. “And, indeed, who in this intolerant Universe is, or can be? But the Declaration of Independence makes a difference.”
    Shakespeare was a critical influence on Moby-Dick, but there is also the Bible, which Melville, in essence, reimagined through the prism of his youthful experiences in the Pacific, providing his prose with an energy and surprise born of a convergence of the Old Testament and pagan exoticism even as he grappled with the issues of his own day. There is the Jonah of Father Mapple’s sermon at the Seamen’s Bethel in New Bedford, who, like a runaway slave in post–Fugitive Slave Act America, attempts to escape God’s omniscient gaze but is stymied at every turn. “In this world . . . ,” Father Map-ple sermonizes, “sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.”
    Embedded in the narrative of Moby-Dick is a metaphysical blueprint of the United States. Melville fills the book with telling similes and metaphors that allow a story set almost entirely at sea to evoke the look and feel of America in 1850. When rowing after a whale, Ahab’s crew of five powerful oarsmen produce