Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)

What to say. One of the most magnificent sustained feverings in all literature? That about sums it up. Most people, it seems, can do without a lot of the talk about species of whales and whale- and whaling- and whaleship-lore. I don't find that problematic at all. Melville writes at a pitch which confounds most criticism, or at least leaves it behind swirling and submerging in his wake. I'd dare to say that the only people who can legitimately cavil are those who won't handle poetry, and won't countenance reaching for the stars. This solid earthboundness is this book's enemy. Every now and then his English will lose him in a net of sparring impressions, where so much is being attempted that the resolution seems to dim, like the gravitational drop as a wave crests. And, given that endings are important, I'll say that there's something in Tashtego continuing to try to nail the flag to the mast once he and almost all of the Pequod are underwater that niggles me a bit. There's not quite this level of nutso anywhere else here. This portrayed, to then go on to the nagging descent of the skyhawk and the accidental intercession of its symbolic wing between one hammerblow and the next from the drowning harpooneer seems an appropriate extravagance. All of the talk of raving encoded homosexuality seems wildly out, and typically ahistorical. Have these people never read into history? Seen how people talked back then? What lights they seemed to live by? The differences between then and now, in terms of how emotion was let out, and the terms of connection between men, in particular? And in those sorts of circumstances? How common was sharing a bed, and what did it signify? Beyond history, in terms of Melville's own territory of the mind as evidenced in the book itself, these assertions seem over-egged. Seem a wish to claim to this book an underlying gangway physicality which it rarely, if ever, explores. Moby-Dick is not a novel of downstairs. It may even be one of the pre-eminent novels of the metaphysical upstairs. Terrible old intellectuality, questing into the great unknown via the assaulting knowns of humanness and fallibility. It's an old recipe, and most barbarously tasty.