Fargo Public Library

Everyone who’s reading Moby-Dick for the second time, or who jumped right in without any problems, can feel free to ignore me. Next time I’ll actually dip my toe into actually reading the book: I swear! But if you’re having some issues, or are hesitant about getting started, read on.

While I am the first person to enthuse about how great Moby-Dick is, I’m not going to deny that it’s long, or gloss over the fact that a lot of the words are going to be unfamiliar. The book has some special challenges in that there’s a lot of factual info wedged in between pieces of the story, so there are whole chunks of stuff talking about whaling, for example.

As someone who reads a lot of old-timey books, my advice is: if you get bogged down in harpoons, or the details of whale biology – feel free to skip over it! There’s no shame. A book this size is written in big, bold strokes, so there’s no need for you to feel anxious about the details. Well, unless you really want to, then go ahead and obsess. That’ll put you in more of an Ahab-like frame of mind.

I always say that a big fat book is like a really good soap opera. If you watch every day, there’s nuances that you’ll get, character stuff you’ll pick up on. But if you miss a week, you can pick it up without having really missed all that much. Some people love pages of descriptive detail, and some are driven crazy by it. If you hate it, skim it. You’re not being graded or judges, so if you just want to get back to the story, go for it!

It’s the same with unfamiliar vocabulary. Word meanings change, and context makes a difference. There’s never a reason to beat yourself up for not knowing that a “packet” was a kind of boat, and not a bundle of some sort, like any normal person today would think it is. You can note words to look up later, in a notebook, or even with a little mark in the margins, or an underline – but not, obviously, if you’re reading a library book. Some people like to have a dictionary handy. Do whatever you’re comfortable with!

There are some handy resources on the 3.2.1 website (scroll down to “Additional ways to access Moby-Dick for free”). One my faves is Power Moby Dick, where you can read the book with the “Show Notes” feature, so a strip of annotation runs along the side. These tell you about places, historical context, Biblical allusions, and definitions of unfamiliar words. The site also has links to a huge amount of random Moby Dick-related goings-on (puppet theater, t-shirts, art shows, rock songs) to get lost in.

The good thing about a site like this is that it makes it easier to pick up on the things that might otherwise slow you down, and get you past them with no muss or fuss. You do have to see it online, though, but even though I’m reading a physical book, I have popped back to it, as a one-stop shop for things like New England geography and references to contemporary events (that is, contemporary to Melville).

And now: onto the Great White Whale!

“To me, Moby Dick is a book about everything. God. Love. Hate. Identity. Race. Sex. Humor. Obsession. History. Work. Capitalism. I could go on and on. I see every aspect of life reflected in the bizarre mosaic of this book.” – artist Matt Kish, from the Foreword to Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page

When I was in college, I once dropped a class so I wouldn’t have to read Moby Dick. I’d already bought the book, but when I flipped through it at home, I came across the chapter on “cetology” and illustrations of harpoons, and I just couldn’t do it. It was years later that I bought an edition at a Friends of the Library book sale, just because I thought it had a cool cover. “What am I thinking?” I thought, and put it on a shelf with other random purchases.

The next time I moved, while packing up hundreds of books, I held that Moby Dick and told myself that if I was really, truly committed to not reading it, I should just get rid of it. Somehow I took this as a challenge, and I decided to keep it.

My first act in the new apartment was to start reading it, and I discovered that the book does NOT actually begin with one of the most famous first lines in literary history (that would be “Call me Ishmael”), but rather with an introduction about “a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School” and a lengthier one “Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian.” What the?

I was particularly intrigued because, at the time, I was the modern equivalent of a “Sub-Sub-Librarian” (or, in Melville’s terms, a “poor devil of a Sub-Sub”) — although by now I may have advanced up to a Sub. These opening paragraphs, even apart from the pages of strange quotes about whales that Melville put before the book actually gets started, opened my eyes to the fact that this was not going to be one of those things a person “should” read because it’s a classic and it’s good for you.

This book is nothing at all like eating your vegetables. The best reason to read Moby Dick is because it is completely insane. And I mean that in the best possible way!

Here’s what I mean: that poor Sub-Sub doesn’t just have a dull job in an ill-lit, Dickensian library, which is the kind of thing I envision. He’s “a mere painstaking burrower and grub-worm,” of “that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm.” The information he supplies to the author consists of “higgledy-piggledy whale statements” that shouldn’t be taken “for veritable gospel cetology.”

I know, the language is kind of off-putting, so it may be hard to tell for people who aren’t used to it. But the 19^th century is one of my areas of expertise. Among his immediate contemporaries, like Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, and even my favorite Gothic writer, J. Sheridan Le Fanu – this sounds mighty peculiar. Just the style and the sound of it! Even so, it’s only the first hint of how weird the book is actually going to be. Which totally makes sense, for something that’s “about everything.” Because the world is full of weirdness; no doubt about that!

I’ll be blogging about higgledy-piggledy whale statements and general Melvillean madness throughout the 3.2.1 project. Feel free to use the Comments section to ask questions about the book — no promises, but I’ll do my best to steer you in better directions than Ahab would.