“Can I really tell anyone why, let alone how, to read Moby Dick? It’s a book that, perhaps more than any other, people feel they should read, but struggle when they take it on. Many give up along the way, others claim to have read it without turning a single of its pages.
Perhaps those that avoid this legendary book have a point. Reading it is a weird, often exasperating experience. The reviews that greeted its publication were tepid at best. During Melville’s lifetime, it sold barely 3,000 copies. Moby Dick can seem overwhelming. It’s not just its length—it has forced successive generations of readers since it first appeared to see their own moment as a decaying, crumbling present, slaughter and shame slowly foreclosing the future. The notion of time vanishes across the horizon in this story.
Moby Dick can have no beginning, and indeed it opens in a most off-hand way, with that famous three-word command as a casual but insistent nudge: “Call me Ishmael,” and we are coaxed into a time before time. Melville turns reading into something disorienting, even frightening, for under such strange conditions making a mistake in interpretation can feel close to sinning or committing a supreme act of disobedience.
How, then, to read Moby Dick? Can one even read it? It might be that people were right to shun the book when it was first published: it demanded a communal mea culpa, a dip into a kind of literary despair or a dismissal, a shedding of its awful author-ity, before it was safe to be read and accepted, let alone be criticized. Melville’s Homeric emotion was necessary to face a faltering world, and the emotion is rage.
Moby Dick is a book, then, that must be read over the shoulder, that is, backward in time, not in the way one might read, say, a poem from the 14th century, but the way we read precise details about the thirst for oil long after the air in many parts of the world is no longer safe to breathe; the way we read about drilling and fracking after so much greed and anger have rendered the natural world poisonous; the way we read fiction after those most amazing Leviathans of the sea have been hunted down, run over, poisoned, and slaughtered.
This is a book about the loneliness that comes from missing creatures we did not even know existed, that have never been pets or playmates, but creatures that pursue mysterious and miraculous lives out of view, far under the sea. Melville may have made reading frightening but stick with it and he makes it so damned magical. Learn the lesson about the dying that persists beyond death, about extinction.
Melville knew the killing and greed would never stop, so had to write about the end of life—slow down the prose to a crawl, change its direction from linear to circular, reading and linearity, meaning and meanness, dissolved by Ishmael staring at his own life sinking beneath the surface, hoping to be rescued.
Melville the Miser holds onto the truth, unwilling to give it away easily. His manifest requires work, hard work that becomes an exercise in self-fashioning of the mind and thus in creating a vision. So dear reader, here is the only advice possible: Take a breath and forge ahead, read on, head for the only port that offers true shelter, that of truth. Good luck.”