White Whale
M®. SIMMANCE chose the other evening to read from Herman Me!ville’s Moby Dick. This must be the most variously judged book of the last
century. There on the one hand are those who hold it to be the greatest of romantic epics and on a par with Faust and the Aeneid; there on the other are massed those who present it to their offspring of school age as a thrilling adventure story. It is not impossible that the work will end as Gulliver did,
being read by the intellectuals for what it is and by the young for what their parents tell them it is. This is in some considerable part Melville’s own fault. When I last returned to the reading of Moby Dick I found long passages of it quite unreadable. For one reader at least those interminable passages dealing with the by-products of the whaling industry serve no purpose, not even the ostensible one of building up a background against which the Whale and the Captain move to their rendezvous. Again, at the climax the figures of the three savages-African, Indian, and Polynesian -who are the ship’s harpooners attain tremendous significance, but the earlier chapters are filled with that depressing facetiousness about primitive man _ in which the 19th Century compares so badly with (say) Robinson Crusoe. But Melville’s great secret-that of creating a storm of violence and fate, a demonic atmosphere like nothing else in litera-ture-remains his own.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 366, 28 June 1946, Page 14
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242White Whale New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 366, 28 June 1946, Page 14
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