Is Moby-Dick Worth Reading?
Final Thoughts on the Classic and a New Whale of a Project
A Page at a Time: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, or The Reading of a Daunting Classic
Progress: Days 131, Pages: All of Them
Final Thoughts
One-hundred-and-thirty-one days, a full third of the year has gone by since we started this daunting classic back in January. So, in honor of all the time it took us, I’ll be sharing my 131 favorite facts about whales.
1. Whales have existed for over 50 million years
2. Just kidding…
As we wrap up this marathon—swimming long distances, to my chagrin, doesn’t get its own word with a colorful ancient Greek backstory—it is worth asking three questions that you should always ask when you finish a book, whether it is a classic or not:
A visual representation of conquering Moby-Dick
Is Moby-Dick Worth Reading?
Yes, if you have time. It’s a much more fun book than many of the scary, dense, dull classics. Melville is by far weirder than most of his popular contemporaries that have survived from the 19th century to still be read today.
That said, no one is going to pat you on the back, intellectually, for reading Moby-Dick. It’s more of a box-ticker on the classic scale. So, if you want to be obnoxious and read classics as a way looking for transference of genius, you’re best to invest your time elsewhere or possibly in therapy.
If you read classics for a sense of literary history or stylistic evolutions, Moby-Dick is also not your book. As a cultural reference point, it retains huge significance, but as a gateway to modern storytelling or writing it doesn’t offer a lot of straight-line parallels (if you read, say, Anna Karenina or Jane Eyre, for example, you’ll not only see a lot of how we got from here to there, but technique that remains reused and even unimproved upon, in some cases, to this day). If you’re looking to take writing or style cues from Moby-Dick, in all likelihood it will go very poorly.
Is Moby-Dick Good?
Moby-Dick passes the most important test as a novel, which is originality without devolving into incomprehensibility. You may not like the meandering whale parts; you may love them. You may find the plot points clunky and the characters one-dimensional; you may find all of the gams and oddballs incredibly charming. But overall, there’s an intensity of focus that is admirable and interesting regardless of whether you end up liking the book. If you don’t try to take Moby-Dick too seriously and divine some greater meaning from the fact that this book has stood the test of time, then you will allow yourself to just enjoy an author who is only trying to impress Nathaniel Hawthorne and lets the English language absolutely rip when it comes to his other true love: whales.
What Are the Best Parts of Moby-Dick?
If I had to guess I’d say the greatest frustration of modern readers with Moby-Dick is that the story just isn’t that interesting. We spend roughly 100 pages getting on the boat and meeting Ahab, one of the most famous characters in literature who is largely absent until the very end of the book, as is the titular Whale. That’s a fair frustration by my estimate. The best part of Moby-Dick for me as a reader was the aforementioned idiosyncratic, unencumbered, but still purposeful writing. The epic whale hunt is what lives on in popular imagination and probably creates some misleading expectations in modern readers, but it’s the fantastic obsessiveness, grandiosity, and quirks that are a good reason why this novel is about as unkillable as Moby-Dick.
A New Edit of Melville’s Classic Novel
That’s right. I am going to make an attempt at editing this piece of literature that has survived in this form for almost two centuries.
This idea has been brewing since about 4/5th of the way into this monster of a novel. More and more as you read Moby-Dick you notice a fairly stark divide between the plot parts of the book and the obsessive whale digressions. Early on we identified how instead of submerging( forgive the puns) his research like modern novels often do, Melville dedicates whole chapters to the nonfiction elements in which he rarely, or never, mentions the character or story. Thus, without changing a word of Moby-Dick, I’ve decided to do what we call, in editorial parlance, a structural edit of Melville’s 170-year-old novel. Being that Moby-Dick is public domain and the author is long dead, we can do this without any practical or moral difficulties. I planned to post and discuss that edit this week, but it turns out editing a 600-page book, even just structurally and cosmetically, takes more than a week.
Whale Brain
Starting to edit Moby-Dick has offered an interesting thought exercise. It’s surprising how much space these “scientific” and whaling asides feel like they take up in the book as a reader when put next to the actual count when you sit down to look at them as an editor. About 140 of 660 pages—or about 1/5th of the book— are chapters that begin with something like “Concerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems as good a place as any to set down a little domestic peculiarity on shipboard.” My impression while reading was that when separated out, the remaining “plot chapters” would be more like 400 and not 500 pages.
This is a fairly common occurrence as an editor, and it happens when a sore thumb part of a book appears to be a larger piece in your mind than it actually is. Call it Whale Brain. An editor spends tireless nights to hone, sharpen, and trim a manuscript down only to realize they’ve suggested cutting 5 pages out of 400. Whale Brain probably has something to do with our reading experience, which is that we experience time very differently when flying through pages from when we’re stopped in our tracks by a difficult, or in Moby-Dick’s case, an entirely different kind of reading. It’s like putting a poem written in math equations in the middle of a novel—the abrupt switching tracks can make one page loom like it’s twenty. We’ll contend with this issue of Whale Brain more as we dive deeper into what Moby-Dick would look like as a pure adventure novel with a personal whale encyclopedia and manifesto tacked on to the end. Stay tuned.