By Jon Blandford, Ph.D. 

 

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick has long occupied a special place in the popular imagination as the great American novel. When I explain that I study 19th-century American literature, it’s the book people tend to bring up the most, often accompanied by an anecdote about how they were assigned it in high school but maybe didn’t get through the whole thing because wow, it is long and difficult and there’s only so much you can read about sailors tying knots before you find something else to do with your time.

 

And yet, college-educated Americans, especially of a certain age, seem to think that they should read Moby-Dick, that there’s something distinctive or important about this novel that deserves our attention even now, more than 170 years after it was written. But should they? And should you?  

 

The first thing to know about Moby-Dick is that it was a notorious commercial and popular failure at the time of its publication. It wasn’t until the early 20th century, when scholars at universities started making a career out of studying American literature, that it was canonized as a novel everyone should read. These scholars, fishing for examples of American literature on par with Shakespeare or Homer, thought they had caught the big one with Melville’s philosophically and aesthetically complex magnum opus. Here was a novel that proved American literature could rival and perhaps even surpass the classics—one that justified including American novels, stories and poems in college courses, writing about them in books and journals, and arguing about them at professional conferences.                   

 

 

Ishmael, the novel’s narrator, is named after the Biblical son of Abraham who was exiled from his home to wander in the wilderness; Ahab, the ship’s doomed captain, has, we are told, spent the better part of four decades at sea; and the African-American Pip, who is from Connecticut but referred to as the “Alabama boy,” reminds us that America’s economic growth was built on the backs of people kidnapped and brought overseas as part of the transatlantic slave trade and their descendants.

 

The conspicuous absence of women notwithstanding, the ship functions as a microcosm of sorts for a 19th-century world increasingly interconnected by the global flows of commerce, trade and cultural exchange, a blurring of national boundaries that has only accelerated in the decades since.                

 

The fact that this supposedly most American of 19th-century American novels is, upon closer inspection, cosmopolitan in ways that anticipate the 20th and 21st centuries is indicative of how it constantly challenges us to reorient and reexamine our perspective. Ahab’s view of Moby-Dick is, it turns out, tragically limited. As we often do with nature, he anthropomorphizes the white whale, seeing it as a version of himself, a creature that took his leg on purpose, that plots and seeks to acquire as he does. And, as we also often do with nature, he sees the whale as something to be dominated, conquered, mastered, overcome. These ways of seeing are not only deeply flawed but also (spoiler alert!) eventually lead to Ahab’s own destruction.  

 

Ishmael, by contrast, employs a kaleidoscopic, constantly shifting set of perspectives. He interrupts the main narrative with seemingly digressive chapters on the science of whales, on the whale in art, mythology and religion, and on the whale as commodity. It may be tempting to skip over these chapters to get to the action, but I would argue that they are where the action ultimately lies. Each of these chapters represents a lens through which Ishmael attempts to see, understand and represent the whale; each shows him something new, but each alone is inadequate to capture the whale in its inscrutable and essential whaleness, in its mystery, majesty and wonder. Moby-Dick, both the whale and the novel named after the whale, exists both within and outside all these interpretive schema, approachable through an impossibly wide range of discourses but irreducible to any single one.

 

In that regard, Moby-Dick is not just a great work of literature. It is a novel about what makes great literature great. It is a novel that, like the whale at its center, invites us to look and look again, to revisit and revise our assumptions and interpretations while remaining always alive to new possibilities and discoveries.  So yes, you should read Moby-Dick. And if you have read it already, you should read it again. Its depths may be unplumbable, but they are well worth diving into.