Melville; or, Both Sides Now

Ask a group of traditionally educated Americans to name the great American novel, and a fair handful of them will say Moby-Dick. Then ask how many of them have read it. . . . Yeah.

Not that I'm one to judge. I personally didn't read the book until graduate school, having experienced a highly non-traditional undergraduate education. And then I didn't actually like it until I read it for about the fourth time. (Why did I read a book I didn't like four times, you ask? Well, first there were MA exams, and then there was a class, and then there were PhD exams. And still old Melville found no love for his epic in my cold, cold heart.)

Then last fall I was teaching a class on Melville, and everyone (i.e., my department chair. And my conscience maybe) would have noticed if I'd skipped his most important book. And you know, when I asked my students for their first responses to the book, steeling myself for 600-assigned-pages-worth of fretfulness . . . they really liked it.

It was utterly disarming. And the attentive reading I had to give the book to teach it taught me to love it too. The book has these infamous whaling chapters, where Melville describes in minutest detail the anatomy of the whale, the economics of the whaling industry, etc. He connects these details to an array of stunning insights about the Plight of Man (though not before losing a lot of readers in his lifetime, unfortunately).

For example, he considers the position of the whale's eyes on either side of the head, so that the creature can see on both sides, but not directly in front--like having your windshield blocked but seeing out the side windows. In his darkly dazzling way, Melville ponders whether the whale's brain is also able to hold two entirely separate, even opposing ideas at the same time--in a way that men simply cannot, for we must turn to look at one thing, then turn away to look at something else.

And it spoke to me, Melville's anguish over his--our--inability to reconcile opposing ideas, even (especially!) those we know to be absolutely true. I feel that inability acutely in my own life--the constant, uneasy jostling of Justice and Mercy. Fate and Free Will. Hope and Acceptance. Desire and Contentment. Sometimes I feel I'm always shuttling back and forth, and yet even that Uncertainty has its own perfect counterpart in Faith.

Melville could never have been a relativist, because he believed in truth, and yet he also knew that the mere existence of truth did not make it knowable . . . and so he made the whale white, "indefinite as God," its pursuit as mysterious as faith.