"And I only am escaped alone to tell ye." Job
I will say that I’ve been of mixed mind about it while at it. I pondered, as I plodded through, that I
must be in error in my opinion; greater minds than mine, Harold Bloom's for
instance, extoll the virtues of this American masterpiece. But despite repeated
rereading I found the prose to be perplexing, inscrutable, and exhaustingly difficult,
and passages, if not whole chapters, unfathomable. Just words. There were, to
my mind, a great number of inexplicably pointless chapters, at the end of each,
I've paused and wondered what I'd just read. Descriptions of paintings, erroneous
exclamations on anatomy and history, pontification, passages describing the
hunt, the tools of the trade, the skinning the whales, none of which I could
actually picture by means of the text.
Yet, there are
passages that are fluid, truly brilliant: The rift and struggle between Ahab
and Starbuck, for instance. Yet these are widely spaced by those inexplicable
chapters noted above that have nothing to do with the narrative of the tale.
There are aspects of its being a masterpiece, which I
cannot deny: It's positively Shakespearian in its scope and its climax. Indeed,
it's replete with soliloquies towards the end, Ahab's, Starbuck's, Stubb's,
even Pip's; but none from Ishmael, not a one.
My criticism, if I may be so presumptuous, is in its voice: Ishmael is its
initial narrator, and he remains as much, mostly; yet there are whole passages
where he could never be; and by the novel's end, Ishmael is but an
afterthought, the voice having passed to third-person omnipotence. Ishmael and
Queequeg, who loomed so large in the first 150 pages are all but abandoned for
the greater and decidedly more important tale: Ahab's blind obsession, and
Starbuck's opposition to it.
How would I, in my hubris, have imagined this epic saga? I'd have kept
Ishmael's voice and woven the tale of Ahab's obsession and his seduction of the
crew as it unfolds from Starbuck's whaling boat and crew, seeing that Ishmael
was Starbuck's oarsman, and Queequeg, Starbuck's harpooner. Why should Starbuck confide in so lowly an oarsman? Because Ishmael is a New Yorker, an educated man by all accounts, and he would appear worldly to a Nantucketer. Thus, we are given insight into Starbuck's views, just as we experience Ahab's monomaniacal obsession from afar, looming large and increasingly shadowing their limited macrocosmic view of the world, that of the microcosmic deck of the ship.
Shall I revisit this American masterpiece? I shall. Immediately, in fact,
albeit more slowly, even if this rereading takes a year (although, I doubt that
will be the case). I've only done this once before, with Falkner's "As I
Lay Dying," which I found as equally incomprehensible as this book until
its very end. Then, as now, I plumbed the final chapter, closed the covers, and
then cracked them again, at the beginning, with an understanding that
enlightens the text that was altogether shrouded in its initial unfolding.
