Category: Books

Melville does not attack traditional ideas about God with the object of replacing them with better ideas; his mission is prophetic, that of calling us to a deeper life. He is a forerunner of religious writers in our own time, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Elie Wiesel, whose keynote is the maintenance of discourse concerning ultimate realities in the face of horrors so extreme as to confound religious meditation altogether, to threaten it with extinction. Yet unlike Bonhoeffer and Wiesel, Melville does not speak for a community of religious teaching and observance. He invokes traditional theological materials in such a way as to produce a characteristic dissonance, in which conflicting perspectives are pressed upon the reader simultaneously. By this means, Melville continuously establishes and disestablishes the reader’s relation to his narrative; at every point, we find ourselves struggling to find a framework in which to place what is being said.

Melville thus draws us into a religious struggle. The traditional perspectives at work are biblical and theological, pointing toward the ultimate boundaries of experience; and Melville places the unresolvable conflict of these perspectives at the book’s own outermost horizon, embracing within that horizon a discourse concerning final questions, the meaning or unmeaning of life and death. Engaging in that discourse, as it goes on in passage after passage, calls up a religious consciousness; and as we attempt to place Melville’s local meanings within the context of the work as a whole, we are carried to the frontier at which the churning of interpretive frameworks goes on, Melville’s dismantling and re-framing of the world.

— T. Walter Herbert, Jr., “Calvinist Earthquake: Moby-Dick and Religious Tradition,” in New Essays on Moby-Dick, edited by Richard H. Brodhead, pp. 113-114.

Far from being a simple adventure yarn, Moby-Dick is driven by a metaphysical/theological quest: is the universe friendly toward us? Indifferent? Hostile? What is the nature of God and can we peer into that nature through the cracking open of our perception that occurs in certain moments of transcendental insight? The fact that this is the kind of stuff I’ve been obsessed with since I was about 19 may partly explain why this book had such an effect on me.

Finished Moby-Dick this weekend – wow, what a book! The literary genre-hopping, the cosmological speculations, the epic scale, the humor, the unforgettable characters, the ornate, rhythmic splendor of the language – is there any other novel like it? (I’m not even sure it is a novel!) I think it may have supplanted The Brothers Karamazov as first in my heart.

It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meatmarket of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Feejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Feejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy paté-de-foie-gras.

– Moby-Dick, chapter 65

Judge, then, to what pitches of inflamed, distracted fury the minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the white curds of the whale’s direful wrath into the serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal.

— Moby-Dick, chapter 41