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Herman Melville: The Freedom of an Artist 12/3/2014 6:15:52 PM
Not too long ago, I listened to an audio recording of Herman Melville's novel "Moby Dick". I liked its originality and scope, its verve and its humanity. I also liked what the novel had to say about the positive and negative sides of the American spirit of enterprise. And then the mythic quality that adds to its stature -- the vast ocean, an eager team of whalers, one indomitable whale, and the implacable, vengeful Captain Ahab, along with the passages that delve widely and deeply into the history of whales and whaling. My recent re-acquaintance with "Moby Dick" confirmed for me its greatness. Nothing new there.
I was interested, then, to read comments by a critic of the novel, who said it was too long and should be brought down from its position of high esteem. I've thought about this man's animadversions and realized that it wouldn't take much to mount a defense of Melville's novel.
For one thing, we can hardly expect a book published a decade before the American Civil War began to conform to standards of brevity that many readers today prefer. Moreover, "Moby Dick" has plenty of distinguished company when it comes to discursiveness -- the discussions of history in "War and Peace", the romantic interludes in "Don Quixote", many passages in Proust's great novels, and the longueurs in Thomas Mann's "Joseph and his Brothers".
Furthermore, one of the benefits of imaginative literature is that it gives us the chance to reach out beyond ourselves and discover what people who don't think the way we do tell us about themselves and their society and indirectly about our own lives and times.
Now, abridgments are available for those who like stream-lined versions, especially audiobooks. I enjoyed listening to cut-down versions of classic works of fiction when I used to drive around central Ontario -- Dickens, Hardy, George Eliot, Homer, and even a six-hour version of "Moby Dick". As useful as they sometimes are, though, shortened versions can't replace the originals.
The question is -- what would we lose if "Moby Dick" were available only as a straight-ahead narrative?
Melville was one of the pioneers of a new literature. I think of him as saying: "I am a free man in a country that has a lot of free people. I am free to write a big novel into which I can put as much as I know about human nature, the world, and life as a whole. I will draw characters and situations that are vivid and memorable and show where I think they fit into the big world and its history.:"
To illustrate -- the opening three words of the novel are famous: "Call me Ishmael." Six men in the Bible are named Ishmael. The most prominent was a son Abraham had by his wife's servant Hagar. Ishmael lost his place of honor in the family after Sarah gave birth to Isaac. Ishmael and his mother were expelled from the family and wandered in the desert for a time. Years later, Ishmael became the father of 12 princes but he never gained a place in the history of Israel. Ishmael was an outsider.
Now, Melville's Ishmael and the crew of the "Pequod" were also outsiders. Moreover, at the time Melville wrote, the United States and her people were outsiders on the world scene, upstarts, without a place in the great world's story. To shorten a complicated argument, I believe that the so-called irrelevant passages in "Moby Dick" about whales and whaling men, who were themselves scorned as outsiders, were Melville's way of locating the boisterous new republic in the center of world affairs. In other words, Melville surely had a dim view of megalomaniacs like Captain Ahab, but he had a strong belief in the vigor of the American people and in the ability of his country to provide outsiders with places in the sunshine.
From this point of view, the length of "Moby Dick" is an asset. It's also an example of an artist showing us what freedom is.
I suspect there are novels today as wide-ranging as "Moby Dick". I have in mind some of the long works of our post-modernists.. The freedom of an artist to follow her or his bent in a responsible way is a fine thing and a sign of a vigorous, healthy culture.
