Wrestling with Melville, wrestling with myself

FINDING TIME to regularly maintain a blog is hard enough; I work long hours, I do my share of the housework, there’s relationship-maintenance time with my wife and my close friends. I try to keep up on my other reading, prep for my Tuesday night game, and a thousand other little things that distract me from writing. And I try to divide my writing time between Moby&Me and other projects. It’s difficult.

All writers write for an audience. I joked with friends when I first began to kick around the idea of doing this project – back in November of 2007 – that it was really a cynical exercise on my part to write a book without actually having to sit down and write a book, kind of the antithesis of the Julie/Julia Project.

In truth, I wasn’t sure if I had a reading of Moby-Dick in me. I couldn’t get a quarter through The Eustace Diamonds (or for that matter, most mid-nineteenth century male-authored English novels longer than about 220 pages – I don’t seem to have a problem with the George Eliots and Charlotte Brontes). I thought making the kind of commitment that a blog demands would keep me focused on churning though Moby. The fact is, though, that the reading is a breeze – it's the writing that's a chore.

Or to be precise, coming up with something to say is a chore. That is, coming up with something to say that isn’t a synopsis of the action, or some hackneyed observation that a dozen scholars have made more eloquently than I have, or something so esoteric that I come across like a self-aggrandizing prat. I don’t want every entry to turn into a précis of the chapter in question – other people have already done that much more eloquently and succinctly than I ever could (see links on the top of the left hand column). So I read over each chapter twice usually; then I think about it for a couple of days, let it soften up in my mind – slow-cook it until the meaning is falling off the bone. Then I write something that I hope will have some meaning to somebody if anyone ever actually reads it.

It’s a struggle, like Jacob wrestling with the angel. You want the blessing, the kernel of truth hiding in the text, so you keep struggling. But doubts continually dog you. You begin to think, “Do I really get this?” “Do I have anything worthwhile to say?” And eventually, “Am I wasting my time.”

It’s ironic; I don’t know which I find more discouraging – the thought that maybe I’ll get through the whole project without anyone ever reading it, or the thought that someone will read it and realize it’s crap. I’ve written over three hundred reviews, articles and interviews for university newspapers and online magazines. I never worried about what people thought about any of it. Maybe it’s because the weblog is such an immediate, personal medium. Maybe it’s because there’s no editor or proof-reader between me, the “author", and you, reading this. Maybe it’s because I'm a little less than a hundred pages into my second Melville novel and, like any fan, I want to do the book justice.

THE ETYMOLOGY

Note: Entry originally published Thursday, January 3, 2008

It is a popular misconception that Moby-Dick begins with the words “Call me Ishmael.” While these words announce the beginning of the narrative of the novel, but the actual book begins with a look at the word Whale (the “Etymology”) and a survey of references to whales in literature (the “Extracts”).

Melville tells us the Etymology was supplied to him by “a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School.” Did the usher Melville credits for drawing together a selection of words from several different languages from cultures that place some significance on the whale; gastronomic, economic or spiritual.

What is provided, though, is not a true etymological study. The references from Webster's and Richardson's dictionaries seem calculated to confuse the reader, offering two diverse possibilities regarding the origin of the English word whale. The remainder of the entry lists linguistic signifiers of whales beginning with the Greek and Latin. This could be a subtle jibe on Melville's part: knowledge without understanding amounts to the recitation of learned facts, without theme or context.

There's a clue in the opening paragraph, a description of the grammar school usher. Melville paints him as being "threadbare in coat, heart, body and brain", endlessly engaging in the dusting of his lexicographical collection with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world." It's not learning in and of itself that Melville sees fit to criticise, but rather those for whom learning becomes a subsitiute for experiencing the world. A fair assessment, perhaps, but ironic given the author owed the entirety of his early success to two travel narratives, the readers of which, on the main, were unlikely to travel outside of their home state in their lifetimes.

MOBY-DICK; OR THE WHALE, BY HERMAN MELVILLE, AUTHOR OF "TYPEE," "OMOO," "REDBURN," MARDI," "WHITE-JACKET"

Note: entry originally published Monday, December 31, 2007.

The Penguin Classics edition of the text features a facsimile of the first American printing of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. This edition was published by Harper and Brothers (formerly J. & J. Harper). Harper and Brothers was, by 1850 a significant publishing house in New York, having published the first editions of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, and the first American editions of Vanity Fair, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. In 1844 James, the eldest of the brothers successfully campaigned for Mayor of New York City. The company also produced several family magazines, including Harper's Bazar (which was bought by William Randolph Hearst in 1913, and Harper's New Monthly Magazine, still published today as Harper's Monthly by the Harper's Magazine Foundation.

Moby-Dick was first published in 1851, ten years before the outbreak of the American Civil War. It wasn't well-received immediately. In fact, as Andrew Delbanco points out in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, the Cambridge History of American Literature (1917), mentioned Melville only in relation to two earlier books, Typee and its sequal, Omoo, in a chapter concerning travel narratives.

In the 1800s and earlier, it was common pratice for publishers to hark back to an author's previous works, hoping to tap into a "brand loyalty" within the reader a century or more before branding became a buzz-word in boardrooms and business schools. Often it was the authors themselves that would add this flourish, more often in the hope of more sales than out of conceit, although in the case of Moby-Dick, it was probably effected by the publishers.

A note on the text

Note: entry originally published Friday, 28 December 2007

COMING IN at around six hundred pages, Moby-Dick is a lot of book. I might question the sanity of the person that would want to read this epic tome with me - as I have at several points questioned my own sanity in setting the task for myself - but as a web-diarist (and as a former scholar) I would be remiss not detailing some salient points of the exercise.

I will be reading from the Penguin Classics edition (2003). My edition was printed in the UK - I believe the page numbers of the Vintage edition, published in North America, correlates to the edition I will be reading. I will try to refrain from using page numbers in my entries. Fortunately, Melville himself has made referencing passages from the book a simpler task by numbering and entitling each of the chapters, and, in the fashion of the time, keeping the length of the chapters to a standard of roughly three to five pages each.

THE TEXT used for this edition is an authoratative text, approved by the Center for Editions of American Authors and the Modern Language Association of America. This means that the text at hand is as true to what Melville intended as can me ascertained.

As for my own text, I will try to differentiate between posts that directly address the book and those that talk around the themes or other salient points-of-interest by the use of distinctive fonts. This should all become clearer as I proceed through the book. I also intend to post at least once a week regarding what I have read of the novel. If I come across anything of both interest and pertinance I'll mention these in separate entries.

As for proceeding, I have ascertained - with the help of a swift calculation in long division - that reading just twelve pages a week should get me through Moby-Dick by Christmas, 2008.* I am aiming for three to four chapters a week. At this rate the whole endevour should take about forty weeks; this also gives me a little slippage-time if Life begins to intrude on my project.

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* Having just concluded the first week of July, the page-count-per-week has risen steeply should the intention be to complete the novel before year's end. While I'm not holding myself to any insistance of completing this project by the end of the year, I will be trying to read more than twelve pages in a week.

Call me Ahab

WHAT FOLLOWS is the original opening post for this rash experiment of mine; but first, a word of explanation.

LAST YEAR I resolved to read Moby-Dick, and I thought it would be an interesting exercise to record the experience of reading this recognised classic through the means of a web-based diary. Alas, as with so many well-laid plans, it initially didn't survive contact with the enemy - in this case, working life. A dozen different distractions impeded my intended path, and after just a few weeks both the reading and the recorded consideration fell by the wayside.

SO WHY try again? And why now? Without going into too much detail, I have found myself at a crossroads, and things are changing in my life in a swift manner. Not ever completely comfortable with change, I am now having just such thrust upon me, and with it a choice; I could postpone this endevour - I had always intended to return to the project - until a more suitable time, or I could once again take up my paperback Melville and set out with Ishmael and Starbuck and the others once more.

This is my intention.

IF I FALTER after a few short weeks or months, then so be it. I have suffered graver humiliations at my own hand in the past. I don't know if there will ever be a better time to begin again. The only time I have come to realise that isn't as certain as we let ourselves believe.

AND SO to the original first posting of my own white whale, Moby and Me.


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THE PLAN For the New Year I've resolved to read Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick. I hold a degree in English Literature, and it has always been a bit of an embarrassment to me that I haven’t got around to reading what some scholars believe to be the most significant novel written in English.

I thought it might be interesting to keep a diary of the reading experience. Moby-Dick is a story about obsession. It seems appropriate that the reading of the novel should be accompanied by a recording of the my impressions of, and reactions to, Melville's prose.

Until now, I have only read Billy Budd, Sailor - for an Honours course on narrative structure - which I enjoyed both for the story and for Melville's writing. In spite of this, I've always found the idea of reading Moby-Dick daunting; it's a novel that comes with a reputation. It's one of those great stories - I'm told - that one can come back to several times in his life and take away something new and unhinted at previously, like Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair, Heart of Darkness, Sons and Lovers, Love in the Time of Cholera... I could go on.

Another part of this process I find somewhat daunting, is the fact that this isn't my first stab at writing a blog. I started writing a movie-weblog a couple of years ago, but after a cpouple of months I couldn't keep it up. I think the subject was just too broad - films I thought I had something to say about - and I ended up writing indulgent essays instead of pithy, thought-through entries. With Moby and Me I'll try to discipline myself to write briefly and often, at least two or three times a week. I'll try to keep it to the book as much as I can, but I can't promise that life won't sometimes intrude. Also, I can't promise it will be interesting, educational or fun - we'll just have to see where Melville takes me.