Can We Read Moby Dick?

“But, as I found myself stumbling in my response to my sister, a more elemental question arose: Can we read Moby Dick?”

Recently my sister asked me if I thought she should read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Well educated, literate, and having reached middle age, she had never gotten around to reading Melville’s great novel. But I found myself unsure how to answer: why should she read Moby Dick? Why should anyone read Moby Dick?

2019 marked the two hundredth anniversary of Herman Melville’s birth. This has apparently stimulated a flurry of interest in all things Melville, including many eloquent paeans as to why we should read Moby Dick. But, as I found myself stumbling in my response to my sister, a more elemental question arose: Can we read Moby Dick?

What, then, is Moby Dick? Or, more generally, what constitutes any great work of art?  Moby Dick reflects Melville bearing witness to his experiences, his memories, doubts, hopes, fears, desires—as well as Melville’s life as a seaman and his intense readings of the Bible, Greek mythology, Sufi poetry, Shakespeare, German philosophy, and natural history. In turn, all of these are passed through Melville and transformed by what Emerson would call the “fires of his mind.”  All of  these elements are rendered into a precise, unique, and transcendent whole where every part reflects and enhances every other part. Melville understood his very consciousness as a force of nature, one of an infinite number of “linked analogies.” The written artifact Moby Dick, therefore, can be understood as itself a manifestation of nature. Moby Dick reflects Melville as simultaneously observer of—and a participant in—the world.

Moby Dick was written in a kind of wonder and fearlessness. Melville bears witness to the tragic spectacle of the voyage of the whaleship Pequod and does not shrink from contemplating the depths of despair, annihilation, and meaninglessness. And perhaps above all, Moby Dick was written guided by a kind of faith that all contrary and conflicting elements can be apprehended as a unified whole. Melville’s own “doubts of all things earthly” are complemented by his, “intuitions of some things heavenly.”