So, I finally got around to reading Moby Dick. Trump was seeming like Ahab to me. The library where I work is having its summer reading program, and I had already downloaded it onto my phone. And maybe finally I’m old enough and bashed around enough to truly appreciate it. It made for some interesting breaks and lunch hours.
Images from the John Houston movie kept flashing through my brain. It never was a favorite of mine, but it did leave impressions. I was surprised that a lot of my favorite lines and scenes weren’t in the novel–Ray Bradbury created them in his screenplay, condensing and visualizing Ishmael’s voluminous interior monologue. Ray did say that the screenplay is poetry.
It probably is the Great American Novel, at least for the Nineteenth Century. It’s all there. The whaling industry is the perfect metaphor for the U.S. of A: our relationship to nature, capitalismo, the role of nonwhite peoples, and where are all the women? Largely absent. Most of the shes are ships and female whales.
Obsession is the primary theme. Ahab’s madness, of course, but also Ishmael’s. It’s not Moby Dick that puts the hook through Ishmael’s brain but whales and whaling. The heavy tome is mostly a nonfiction book with a story threaded through it.
Yeah, there’s a lot of what we call infodumping in the sci-fi biz, but it’s really amazing infodumping and keeps segueing smoothly into action scenes. Damn clever, Herman.
The line between fiction and nonfiction is blurred, long before the Swinging Sixties and New and/or Gonzo Journalism. There’s a foreshadowing of Kerouac on the road, Wolfe with the Merry Pranksters, and, of course, Thompson among the Hell’s Angels and looking for the American Dream. A good novelist is a reporter. Reporters also make good viewpoint characters when fiction is set in a world removed from most readers' everyday experience.
This world is exposed with amazing detail. How long has it been since the economy, and most people’s lives, were tied to products harvested from slaughtered whales?
If a science fiction writer could do the same with an invented world, that would be something. Yeah, there’s Dune, but readers get lost in the Flash Gordon action and lose track of Frank Herbert’s lofty message.
Of course, the whaling economy doesn’t exist anymore. We are now dependent on petroleum. But that, too, is changing.
What would the Moby Dick of our era be? What will replace it as the century grinds on? Will there be any great novels in either?
Moby Data . . .
And yes, I’ll say it again, Trump is our Ahab. Do I have to mention that the book does not have a happy ending?
I wonder, are most of us Ahabs or Ishmaels? Am I an Ahab or an Ishmael? Can you be both?
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