Moby Dick!
Extras
"It is the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ship's cables and hawsers. A Polar wind blows through it, and birds of prey hover over it"
So Melville wrote of his masterpiece, one of the greatest works of imagination in literary history. In part, Moby-Dick is the story of an eerily compelling madman pursuing an unholy war against a creature as vast and dangerous and unknowable as the sea itself. But more than just a novel of adventure, more than an encyclopedia of whaling lore and legend, the book can be seen as part of its author's lifelong meditation on America.
Melville began work on Moby-Dick in the spring of 1850, with its completion in the autumn of the following year. The novel opens conventionally enough, but soon Melville swerves away from the adventures of a young man and finds himself swept up by a larger tale Ishmael can hardly be located, while Ahab stands immovable, undeterred from conquest, possession and revenge.
Moby-Dick can be read as a 'disorderly elegy' to democracy, which Melville saw threatened on many sides: by the spirit of utilitarianism, by America's accelerating pace of expansionism, and by the drive towards industrial power. Written with wonderfully redemptive humour, Moby-Dick is also a profound enquiry into character, faith, and the nature of perception.
As Melville says of the Sperm whale's brow "I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can."
"Call me Ishmael. Some years ago never mind how long precisely having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can"
