Tales from the Bitface

Took me a few months to get through this, and with a couple of interruptions — actually three. Why the interruptions, given I really enjoyed it? It’s a dense work, if not fantastically long at some 530 old-school paperback pages in the Penguin Popular Classics edition I have. Sometimes I felt like reading something a bit easier.

Which suggests it’s hard work, for which it does have a bit of a reputation. But actually it’s mostly not. But that ‘mostly’ goes to the heart of what’s so fascinating about it.

Mention Moby Dick to most people and they’ll think of the eponymous white whale and the infamous monomaniac Captain Ahab. Which is fair enough. But most of the book is not actually about Ahab and his obsession or quest at all. There is one early scene where he insists the whole crew take an oath to hunt the titular whale as their highest priority — it chomped off his leg, and he’s out for revenge, after all. But before that, and for much of what follows, Ahab hardly features in the story.

It’s the last fifth or so, maybe quarter, where he comes to the fore and we get the real hunt for Moby Dick.

Most of the rest — by far the bulk of the novel — consists of Melville’s, or the narrator ‘Ishmael’s’ — disquisitions on life, humanity, philosophy, religion, the sea, sailing, and of course, whales. ‘Call me Ishmael’, though, that famous opening line:¹ it tells us we’re getting a first-person narrative. Which is true in part.

But it isn’t long before Ishmael — or Melville — sets that aside and tells us what’s going on in another character’s head. And then we’re off to the modernist, if not postmodernist, races, because this book cheerfully switches between first and third, turns into a play script or a dictionary, and generally uses any writerly techniques of Melville’s/Ishmael’s choosing to say what needs to be said.

It sounds, and could be in hands of a lesser writer, chaotic. If a first-time author today submitted such a manuscript to an editor — or to a friendly writers' group — they would be advised to go back and decide what one type of thing they wanted to write, and to focus on that. And watch their persons and tenses.

Here, though, it feels to me incredibly modern; almost avant garde.

It was published in 1851.

I loved it.

And not to forget: it’s also very funny in places.

Its major flaw is its total absence of women. There are no female characters at all. (Maybe a proprietress of a boarding house in the earliest, land-bound chapters.) Which is not surprising given the environment in which it’s set.

Another oddity to me, and I plan to look this up, is that one chapter lists and describes the forms and habits of the various types of whale. But the blue whale, which I believe is still the biggest, is not mentioned. Is it possible the species was unknown to whalers in Melville’s time? That seems odd. Moby Dick is a sperm whale, which to Ishmael (and the other Nantucket whalers) is the king of the beasts.

Also you’ll often see the title rendered with a hyphen, as Moby-Dick. I don’t know why, as the whale is always named without it, and the edition I have doesn’t hyphenate the title, so that’s how I’ve presented it.

I’m off now to read lots of articles about it.