There are so many little chapters that have beginnings which inform you that this tale is off the cuff; there are things like chapters with paragraphs that begin with lines like, this is a good a time as any to tell you about whale digestion, etc. The story is so electric and alive that it is as if the encyclopedic information, the biological asides, the historical interjections are all fighting for recognition. Yet, not all asides and background information are arranged equally.
There are thirteen short consecutive chapters in which the majority of the text adheres to Ishmael's narrative, then chapter fourteen decides that the narrative has grown stale, and some historical backstory is due
Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it.
Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was settled by the red-men.
Moby-Dick reads like an attempt to synthesize all knowledge about whaling as an American enterprise, formal knowledge, and then subvert this knowledge with informal organization and presentation. As recently as this year a respected Harvard academic was still asking, what constitutes literature? And the usual is advertising, movie scripts, or comic books literature arguments ensued. Melville, with Moby-Dick, integrates all forms of writing into Moby-Dick, even including dream imagery and symbolism, news paper headlines, native American oral tradition, advertising, his contemporaries' fiction, paintings, poetry, and drama. Before the great debate over reading Shakespearian drama as literature, Melville insists that dramatic format be included as part of the text in Moby-Dick. Moby-Dick is almost beyond revolutionary as a novel. The narrator is also so struck by the novel itself, as the story digresses to emphasize extremes that you might have overlooked, or not been smart enough to appreciate. In chapter 65 the narrator "fishes" you directly
That mortal man should feed upon the creature that feeds his lamp, and like Stubb, eat him by his own light, as you may say; this seems so outlandish a thing that one must needs go a little into the history and philosophy of it.
Is this and the chapter that ensues the stuff of an adventure novel? Or is it the desperate synthesis of a crazed philosopher, made mad by the compounding crimes of a consumer-mad capitalist country? "The Whale as a Dish" is amazing. What is the tone of the text? Consuming animals is the stuff of Moby-Dick. Hunting whales, real whales, is what the story is about, from all angles. And yet, to look at all angles at the same time is more than our three-dimensional perspective can really absorb. It is like a story translated from the higher dimensions.
The more I read the novel, the further it travels from my grasp. I find it more and more along the lines of the work of Walt Whitman, who wrote to fuse romance and science, sexuality and philosophy. I used to find Moby-Dick saturated with dread, and I still believe that there is a vast amount of existentialist nausea that overpowers the different narrators as they try to reconcile knowledge and experience, the past and the present and the unknown, but now I'm starting to really cave to the idea that this is Melville's Odyssey, his allegory of sexuality and psychology, his to be or not to be, with no real answer, and no homecoming.
Sometimes I see such a loathing in Melville's work, such a terrifying cynicism that I translate to mean that he feels America is doomed -- orphaned and generating more momentum than it can control.
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