Week 3--Encountering Moby-Dick

I wasn’t in class last week, so I really can’t build on the existing discussion much, but I can offer my opinions.

Moby-Dick is actually one of my favorite books.  I read it in an American Lit class in 11^th grade, though I didn’t actually get to discuss it with the class (it was for one of those independent reading projects where everyone chooses their own book off a list).  I think I like it for the same reason that a lot of people hate it: I expected it to be a novel, and it wasn’t.  It was probably the first thing I ever ready that really surprised me in that way.  I decided I liked it for this rather enigmatic quality that makes it not quite a novel when I came to my favorite chapter, Cetology.  (Interesting how that rather mirrors this class…)  I suppose I first liked this chapter because it’s unexpected and subtly humorous.  I like it now after having read the book once and going back with a different perspective, because it truly makes the work a story from out of a man’s mind.  I don’t mean fabricated, I mean remembered and reconstructed.  Ishamel isn’t just giving a list of events, he’s somehow allowing us into his memories and all the opinions he has of them and all the information he associates with them.  I think this “organic form” as we seem to be calling it allows us to see the events of this story unfold in a very unusual way.  I don’t feel like I’m reading the story of Ahab and the white whale as told by Ishamel.  I feel like I’m reading the story of Ishmael remembering these events, which includes his careful consideration of how to classify whales, something he clearly considers important.  It also includes the Etymology and Extracts at the beginning.  Knowledge colors memories.  It includes stage directions and soliloquies, which makes me feel that at these times, Ishmael’s memories focus more on the words of others and not necessarily on his own thoughts at the time.  The story does begin as though he is merely telling it to someone as he’s told it to many people, but it’s really only the exposition that reads this way.  Once he gets to the darker story itself, it becomes more a developing collection of thoughts.  He’s run through how it all began in his head many times, but this is the first time he’s really stopped to tell the story of his time on the Pequod.  It’s interesting that Ishmael goes on this voyage as a sort of suicide, wanting to be isolated from the rest of the world, yet we as readers are later granted access to everything that was going on in his mind during that period of isolation.

This is my first time reading Moby Dick. So far, I have found it to be a fascinating journey. As we discussed in class, we all came (or had to actively tried not to come) at this novel with certain expectations. I found it interesting, particularly in the case of us who had never picked up Moby Dick, that we could still have such distinct opinions of it. We had heard it was boring. We had heard it was a classic. We had heard it was about some obsessed guy, and his obsession.

What I think is so interesting is that within all of these expectations, stereotypes if you will, we also find generalization. I once had a psychology professor tell me that paying attention to stereotypes is important, because they tell the story of group interactions. We cannot ever entirely rid ourselves of stereotypes, because our brain wants to classify information on a generalized, categorized level. What we can do is change our method of categorization. However, that is not the purpose of this post.

What I mean to say is that, can this idea hold true for the stereotypes/generalizations about literature? Can we learn anything about how literature functions in our society by the categories we place it in? There are many elements of the piece that could have been generalized about. The story has comedic and satirical elements; there’s adventure; there’s religion. However, what we have heard about Moby Dick, is that it is another scholarly work, part of “the classics.” Perhaps, Moby Dick isn’t considered a comedy, because it doesn’t function as one. I could with my new experience of this novel attempt to change this, but students will still be reading it in English classes around the country. I can’t currently foresee, therefore, this notion changing without some evolution of how we deal with texts.

So far my favorite thing about Moby Dick, far above the "organic form" and the gorgeous writing, has to be the ample servings of wit, irreverence, and humor. I suppose I still don't expect to giggle my way through 19th century works, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.

My former roommate, current roomate, and I read to each other at night- and I find myself stopping mid-sentence, quite amused by what humorous insight I've just read. I said in class that I went into reading the novel with as few pre-conceptions (or as many contradicting ones- so as to cancel each other out) that I could manage. While I still hold this to be true, I'm pretty sure no one had ever told me that Moby Dick was funny, even though plenty of people had told me how dull and drearily boring it was (as they would humorously take on the woebegone and histrionic habit of the very Victorian feel they had been complaining about).

I also mentioned in class that one of the few true associations to Moby Dick I had was through a website that parodied "The Bible Code", which while entirely irreverent, seems to fit what we discussed of Moby Dick on Tuesday. Not only is Moby Dick in "conversation with" the Bible (okay, so I'm making a jest there, but it's still making a commentary on the Bible as an authoritative source), but the website furthers the spirit of Moby Dick to give up questionable meaning to those questing. I suppose, I saw it as one-upping the "multiple choice" answers and making a mockery of the whole inevitable process of searching for meaning, which the novel also does.