Why I Went a-Whaling

"Call Me Ishmael."

Those three words resound down the corridors of American literature like the voice of the principal calling a student into his office to be confronted with an unpleasant truth. Like the whale itself, this tome is out there, under the surface, malignant, stealthy, and to be avoided if at all possible. After all, there's so much of the sea that is navigable: we don't have to go courting the behemoth, hurling our tiny intellectual harpoons at its leathery hide (unless you've bought paperback), all the while fearing in your heart that they will bounce off as so many toothpicks, and that it will swim on, primal, unassailable, indifferent to us.

Well, that's the way I've always felt. I wrote that I picked this up when I was twelve ("Quite a reader, that boy"), and I remember being interested the way a child is interested in an antique shop: curiosity keeps him going, the novelty of the experience sustains him for a while; but ultimately, there needs to be a car crash, er, pay-off somewhere, and this plot just doesn't do any paying off for about eight hundred pages: building suspense and developing character and grappling with our place in the Universe can't carry a kid's interest by themselves. So I bailed out on it, and returned to the comfort of Bradbury and Asimov: a different captain, a different ship, and a different whale.

I threw myself upon Moby-Dick, and he tore my leg off and spit me out. But I knew I'd be back someday to hunt him down.

That is how this book became one that I have always thought I should read, if I'm going to be a good disciple. It's on The List: in terms of American literature, arguably it heads The List, but there are so many other ShouldReads that can we can play with: Twain, and Poe, and Faulkner, and that's all 19th C., which is the ground we're treading here. I'm not even going back to Cooper and his ilk. It's so much easier to laconically float down Ole Miss on a raft wth Jim while someone on shore plays a banjo than it is to roam the Indian Ocean wth Queequeg, deck pitching, spray in your face: it's work, Man. Work, I tell you!

So that was my attitude when I cracked open the cover thrity-five years later. And I'm surprised.

Melville (oh! the dark clouds that appear on the horizon at the mere intoning of that name!) can be vague and oblique, but no more so than Poe, and I teach that to sixteen-year-olds. He's not impenetrable, just metaphysical at times, but that's the age he lives in, so I shan't fault him for that. And it's a sign of a high intellect, it is. I can't be afraid to stand in the penumbra of his radiance for fear of being blinded. I have to walk out into the full blaze of his Melville-ness, and if I am burned, I will have the comfort of knowing that the redness will soon suffuse into a smooth even tan.

You can praise all your Moderns and Post-Moderns, but how sturdy is the house built on a bad foundation? I'm down in the cellar, shoring up the foundaton.