olohamji

What a completely weird book this is. Moby Dick seems like it could have easily have been just a conventional sea-faring adventure, it's full of really cool set pieces and (surprisingly to me) a really keen sense of humor. It can be a very boisterous book, which is good because when it isn't it kind of scared the crap out of me. Melville is just so fixated by whales, by their size (huge), their behavior (impenetrable), and by the arcane, terrifyingly violent history that humanity has foisted on them (We boil their bodies down into oil. OIL.). He's able to weave this bizarre, pseudo-mystical rumination around them that reinforces the narrative and at the same time gives it an inscrutable, portentous sense of menace. The two main aspects at work in Moby Dick slowly bleed into each other, so that by the end the human beings are trapped in a... what exactly? A Trajectory? A Plateau? A Downward Spiral? At any rate, some kind of primordial doomed place. And the whales, the sharks, the ocean, hell, even the seagulls, just sort of become something else, lurking and attacking out of some other creepy aesthetic/naturalist dimension that might be totally sybmolic or might be totally real, or might be both. Or neither. I wonder if H.P. Lovecraft had this in mind when he wrote some of his tales. Because the weird, metaphysical terror vibe you sometimes get from his stuff is out in full force all over this book. Forget the Great American Novel. Moby Dick is the Great American Freak-out.

2023-02-03 04:21