Call Me Ishmael, But Don't Call Moby-Dick "Boring" (Moby-Dick, Part 2)

 In part 2 of our conversation on Moby-Dick, editor Jeffrey Insko breaks down his favorite lines and highlights the pleasures of uncovering the novel's endless layers of humor and meaning—even (especially?) in the dreaded Cetology chapter...

Jeffrey Insko is Professor of English at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, where he teaches courses in nineteenth-century American Literature and Culture and the Environmental Humanities. He is the editor of the Norton Library edition of Moby-Dick and the author of History, Abolition, and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing (2018). 

To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Moby-Dick, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/moby-dick.

Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.

Listen to our Spotify playlist inspired by Moby Dick: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/219UwEXN1UxNUmKpu2A8Vl?si=0473970620f34686.

Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.

Episode transcript at: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/mobydick/part2/transcript.

Transcript

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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library Podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino with Michael Von Cannon producing, and today we present the second of our two episodes devoted to Herman Melville's whaling epic, Moby-Dick, as we interview its editor, Jeffrey Insko. In part one, we discussed who Melville was, the novel's humor, the challenges the novel poses, and the unforgettable characters that populate the Pequod. In this second episode, Jeffrey Insko explains how he likes to teach the novel, a Moby-Dick playlist, his favorite line, and much more. Jeffrey Insko is professor of English at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He is the author of “History, Abolition, and the Ever-Present Now in Antebellum American Writing.” Jeffrey Insko, welcome back to the Norton Library Podcast! 

[Jeffrey:] I am so happy to be back talking to you again, Mark. 

[Mark:] It's good to see you, Jeff. So, we'd like to learn a little bit more about Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, but also your personal engagement with that novel. So, why don't we start at the very beginning. Do you remember when you first encountered this novel? 

[Jeffrey:] I know exactly when I first encountered this novel, and my story is a little bit different than the ordinary one. I think most people's, uh, story is, um, they read it in high school because they were forced to and they hated it, or something like that. And that was not my experience at all. I did not read the novel until I was probably 23, I think? And I was, um, in a graduate program. Uh, I had been studying, at that time – I thought I was going to be a scholar of contemporary American literature at that time. Uh, and I was at a symposium that the department had organized. Um, it was about cultural studies – this was the 90s, and that was a new thing. Uh, and at one point or another, and I don't even remember how it came up, the name “Moby-Dick” was raised, and I'm sitting in this room full of scholars, professors who I admire and aspire to be like, and the mere mention of the name Moby-Dick caused them, one after another, in turn, to talk about how much they hated the book. 

[Mark:] Oh, wow.  

[Jeffrey:] And what a terrible experience it was— [Laughter] —for them to have read it. And I just thought to myself, I needed to find out what all the fuss was about. So, I went and got it, like, almost – probably that day – and I have to say, I was in love with it from the very beginning. From the first paragraph, I was in love with it. 

[Mark:] When I was reading your introduction, your notes to the Norton Library edition of Moby-Dick, it occurs to me, since 1851 there have been many editions of this novel, there have been many things written about it. Is there something that draws you to it? As a scholar, do you have a particular entrance into Melville and his work that continues to stimulate you? 

[Jeffrey:] It's the kind of book that is so… capacious and so all-encompassing, um, that it is, um, kind of lends itself to endless renewal. And so, it seems to be that I don't know the extent to which – because I read it probably almost every year – and I don't know the extent to which I keep discovering new things in it that drive new interest for me, or if whatever new interests I obtain elsewhere inevitably wind up getting imported into Moby-Dick. And probably it's a little bit of both of those things. Um, but, um, so, in other words – so I don't think, um, I've yet to encounter the, um, intellectual passion that somehow or another does not lead me back to Moby-Dick. There's something in it for everything and everyone. 

[Mark:] There are probably as many readings of Moby-Dick and interpretations of the novel as there are people who read it. Are there any interpretations that you would actually call misreadings? That you think that you object to, and would warn readers against? 

[Jeffrey:] I think the kind of readings that bother me about Moby-Dick are the ones that, um, attempt to invest the whale – the hunt for the whale with a kind of singularity of meaning. Um, I … to say that “Moby-Dick is God,” or “Moby-Dick is evil,” I think those are the kinds of reductive readings that, I would say, constitute misreadings. Um, and, in fact, they're exactly the kind of reductive readings that the novel itself, uh, is devoted to preventing in the first place. That's what all the other stuff in the novel is about, is refusing reductiveness. 

[Mark:] And Moby-Dick doesn't mean the same thing to even the characters in the novel. 

[Jeffrey:] Right, absolutely.—  

[Mark:] Different perspectives is different definitions. And what about, uh – is it a misreading of the novel to identify certain chapters as being – and you refer to this in your introduction – as either boring or irrelevant or skippable, as opposed to others?  

[Jeffrey:] I suppose it – it depends upon what one understands a novel to be. If a novel is simply about, uh, the unfolding of a narrative, then I suppose that one could designate everything else as extraneous, uh, and therefore skippable. Um, but I think that without all of that other stuff, without all of the digressions, without all of the, um, the verbal play and the jokes and the flights of philosophical exploration, um, and the epistemological preoccupations of the novel – those are all the things that lend that, um, narrative – the hunt for Moby-Dick – um, with its many, many meanings. Uh, and so I suppose that one way that you arrive at, um, those – that kind of singular, reductive reading is by pretending that all that other stuff doesn't exist.  

[Mark:] In episode one, you mentioned chapter 32 as sort of the “crossing the Rubicon” moment for reading this novel. The cetology chapter. I'm wondering if there – in your experience teaching the novel and talking about it – if there are other challenges that seem to be common to new readers, teachers, students of this novel, and if you had any advice for overcoming those challenges? 

[Jeffrey:] Uh, I think – I think that there are a couple of them in particular. One is Melville's sentences. They're long and they're show-offy and they're packed, often densely, with allusions to historical figures and works of literature and philosophy. And, um, and even when he's telling a joke, the setup for the joke can be of, like, densely layered. And Melville's, some thick prose. And so, um, one has to – I think the way around that difficulty, like, that can just pose challenges at the level of basic comprehension. Um, but I think it helps, um, if one understands that, partly, Melville constructs the sentences that he does because he just loves language so much, and if part of what makes literature pleasurable for us is the fact that it's made out of words, um – whether we know or not, we, too, are lovers of language – um, and and to, um, give ourselves over to the kind of indulgence, um, in putting words together, I think can help – is a way of beginning to, sort of, appreciate rather than simply just, kind of, feel the frustration of Melville's superior knowledge or intellect or whatever. One other thing I would add, too, that can be difficult for first-time readers, um, is it can also be hard to catch the subtlety of the narrator's tone. That Ishmael is a tricky sort of figure, because the – you know the novel swings wildly between being deadly serious, and outlandishly irreverent, and, um, comical. Um, and it can be hard to follow those swings, and it can be hard to know at times when Ishmael is joking and when he's not, or the way that – actually, I think more precisely, the way that he sort of rides the line all the time between being serious and being jokey. And, you know, if you can imagine someone who's always got their tongue a little bit in their cheek. Like, that's Ishmael. 

[Mark:] That's great. You mentioned the sentences and all the words, and there are a lot of both of them in this novel. Of all the sentences, do you have a favorite line in this novel? 

[Jeffrey:] Oh my gosh. There's a running joke in my classes, because I will say that a hundred times when we're reading Moby-Dick, “This is my favorite line in the book,” and, “This is my favorite line in the book.” Um, but I think, okay, I'll say two. There's the funniest line in the book, and then there's my favorite line in the book. And the funniest line in the book is – what I maintain is the funniest passage, um, in any work of literature that I've ever read. And it's this outlandish passage, um, where Ishmael is talking about, um, the consuming of whale meat. And, uh, he recognizes that people might find it gross and disgusting, and this leads him to a kind of, um, thinking about, uh, the human consumption of animal flesh. So, here's the moment for – by the way, something for everyone in this novel – here's the moment for the vegetarians and the vegans. And he says, at one point, he says that, um, it's going, “in the final day of judgment it's going to be better for the Fijian, the islander who has salted down a lean missionary against a coming famine, than it will be for the civilized gourmet who eats pate de fois gras.” [Laughter] It's an outrageous joke. Um, and it never ceases to crack me up. 

[Mark:] That’s great.  

[Jeffrey:] My favorite line, though, comes from the very beginning of the novel. And this is when Ishmael is explaining and justifying his reason for going to sea in the first place, and he recognizes that, um, ships are not always, um, uh, pleasant places to work, and the captains can be tyrannical, and he says, um, you know, in recognition of this, he says, “so what if some old hunks of a sea-captain thumps me about?” He says, “we are all, in one way or another, um, mistreated and so the universal thump gets passed around and we should all just rub shoulder blades and be content.” And it is just such a statement of companionability and sociability and generosity and mutual recognition of life's difficulties. Um, that I find myself quoting it all the time.  

[Mark:] That's, yeah, that's a great one. What techniques would you advise other teachers to use, or what have you found to be particularly effective in conveying some of the challenges of this novel? 

[Jeffrey:] I have this fantasy of teaching Moby-Dick, that I actually say to my students all the time, and which is that the ideal way of teaching Moby-Dick is simply to read it out loud. And if I could do a class where we didn't do anything but read the novel out loud, I sometimes think that that would be better – far better than all of my explaining of the novel's jokes, which is sometimes like a the task of a teacher [Laughter] in teaching Moby-Dick, is you just have to explain that these are jokes. Um, so I think hearing the novel, um, is a terrific entry point into the novel. Um, the other thing that I say to students from the beginning, that I think is important, um, is to have an awareness of how, um, Moby-Dick – there are a few novels, I think, that have the kind of culture, um, reach of Moby-Dick, um, such that, everybody knows something about it even if they've never read it. And, oftentimes, what they know about it is that it's daunting and long and boring. And so, um one challenge is to simply confront the novel's cultural reputation and to, sort of, invite students to, um, disregard those expectations. And I try to offer them some other entry points into the novel. Uh, most especially, uh, the fact that it is just funny. It is the funniest book I've ever read. It is so full of all manner of, uh, subtle, and outlandish, and sometimes crude, and often body humor, that to go in it with the spirit of play and fun, as opposed to work and drudgery I I think is the best entry point into the novel. 

[Mark:] That's excellent.— [Jeffrey:] It's a blast. 

[Mark:] Yeah. Here's our own “crossing the Rubicon” moment of this episode. We ask our Norton Library editors for a hot take or something controversial, uh, about the book that they have edited. Do you have something counterintuitive or controversial to say about Moby-Dick? 

[Jeffrey:] Okay, here's my hot take. This might not be a hot take for everybody, but maybe it is. Um, especially in recent years, maybe it's less of a hot take. I don't know. But yeah, my hot take would be this: that Ahab is not the bad guy. That Ahab has long been cast as the novel's villain, because he's either, because he's either crazy or he's manipulative or he's, um, authoritarian. Um, and because Ahab is the villain, um, it's one of the reasons that, um, in American political cultural – American political culture, um, uh, political figures, about whom we disapprove, often get cast as Ahabs. You know, so like President Bush was Ahab during the Gulf Wars, and people have called, uh, the previous president before the one we have now an Ahab figure, um, because Ahab is cast as the bad guy. Um, but one reason I bristle at those comparisons, um, is because Ahab is so much more interesting than that. 

[Mark:] Yeah. [Jeffrey:] That Ahab – For one thing, Ahab is brilliant. Uh, he's a brilliant rhetorician, um, he's an incredibly thoughtful, uh, person. Um, uh, he … and so yeah, I think that's my hot take.— [Mark:] Ahab— [Jeffrey:] —Ahab’s not the bad guy. 

[Mark:] —He understands human nature and the psychology of his crew. That's – No, that's excellent. And, in fact, Jeff, we've all heard someone say that, “this is your white whale.” This is, you know, it's just the human quality of being obsessed. Now, ideally, you wouldn't drag other people down to their deaths, uh, in fairness, but, um, that is something else that Ahab represents, right? Just the monomania that sometimes afflicts us all? 

[Jeffrey:] Yes. You know, it's – But it's a monomania that takes a lot of different shapes. And so here I might go back to the 1851 context. Um, and, you know, 19th-century abolitionists were often cast as monomaniacs, um, who, uh, were single-mindedly in pursuit of emancipation, even if it was going to cause, um, violence and destruction. Um, and I think to imagine Ahab in that way, um, I think places a slightly different valence on what it is he's up to. 

[Mark:] That's excellent, yeah. And so – Well, this is a great question to ask about Moby-Dick in particular. Uh, I'm wondering about how the book has been adapted or repurposed since its original publications? How else can we experience this story and this novel, but in addition to reading the original book?  

[Jeffrey:] Wow. Um, as I mentioned before, the novel has had such an incredibly rich afterlife. And, um, culture producers of all sorts, uh, have responded to it in a myriad ways, um, whether it's film adaptations – which began with the Melville Revival. The first film adaptation was the 1920s, two of them in the 1920s. Um, uh, and visual artists, um, have responded to it and rock bands have written tribute albums to it and, um, there are theatrical productions and, uh, novelistic responses to it. And so – and I like to think of all of those things are – those are a part of the novel's expansive textual life. They're a part of its many meanings. And, um, and I will say this about adaptations. For me, film is hard. The film adaptations are the ones that work, in some ways, the least well, for me, um, because the demands, I think, of this – of cinematic form require, um, a concentration on the novel's plot. And, again – as we talked about in our first, uh, session – to only focus on the novel's plot is to lose so much of what's powerful and moving about the novel. And so, for me, the adaptations that work the best are the ones that are the loosest, that are the less interested in a kind of fidelity. Because that, too, is in the spirit of the novel. Melville was a shameless pilferer of previous works, and he transformed them in all kinds of ways. And if I can just mention, like, I think, um, maybe my favorite adaptation of the novel was, I don't know, 20 years ago or so. Um, this amazing, um, opera composer named Rinde Eckert, um, did a show – it was a little chamber opera, it was just him and another person – um, and it was a show where this opera, um, composer, um, was slowly losing his memory. And so, um, uh, he was trying to complete his magnum opus, which was an operatic adaptation of Moby-Dick before he loses memory entirely. Um, and it's just amazing. And it captures the spirit of the novel and all of its playfulness and its ambition and its weirdness, um, without worrying about trying to be faithful to its plot. 

[Mark:] You mentioned rock bands, Jeff? [Jeffrey:] Yeah. 

[Mark:] What about a Moby-Dick playlist? What kind of music— [Laughter] —does the novel, uh, invite? 

[Jeffrey:] Oh my gosh. Um, you know, there's a, there's a… I don't know what they call it, because it's not the kind of music that I listen to, but, um, like a super – a thrash metal band called “Mastodon”? And they wrote this, um, they wrote this Moby-Dick-themed album – it's a whole album. And it's, um, like, it's intense. And it captures – It captures very much the certain kinds of moods of the novel, and Ahab's kind of raging, propulsive energy. But, to me, it's a hard thing to listen to. But I'll tell you – so, instead, an easy category of, uh, Moby-Dick playlist songs are songs about whales. There are lots of them. Um, Yes has a really great song, um, from the 70s I think it's called, “Don’t Kill the Whale,” I think it's called. Um, but the best one for me is the Lou Reed song “The Last Great American Whale.”— [Mark:] Yes! 

[Jeffrey:] —Um, which is an amazing song, and it captures all of the things that Moby-Dick is interested in. Um, uh, you know, human violence and settler colonialism and racism and ecological disregard. Like, that's what Lou Reed’s song is about. It's – all of that is what Moby-Dick is about. But the last I was thinking, too, um, uh – because I'm a pop music fan, I like pop music – so I was thinking, and I was thinking, too, like, what if the playlist doesn't focus on Ahab and Moby-Dick? What if it focuses on Ishmael? What does that look like? And it led me to like “Call Me,” by Blondie, “Call Me.”  

[Mark:] Ohh! 

[Jeffrey:] And then – or even better, “Call Me Maybe,” by Carly Rae Jepson. I feel like there's like a whole genre of “call me” songs that are – that belong on a Melville, a Moby-Dick playlist. 

[Mark:] Outstanding. That's outstanding. Isn't there also Led Zeppelin's “Moby-Dick?” 

[Jeffrey:] Yeah, of course. Yes, which I almost always play for my students. 

[Mark:] And would there be anything by Moby?  

[Jeffrey:] [Laughter] There must be, yes. I don't know the Moby canon well enough, but I’m certain some songs have to be on there. 

[Mark:] Okay, nor do I. But let's put at least one thing on there. — [Jeffrey:] Yeah. Yeah. 

[Mark:] Okay, that's – those are great. So, in your introduction, you talk a little bit about Melville's relationship, during the conception of Moby-Dick and the writing of Moby-Dick, to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who at that time would have just written “The Scarlet Letter.” What was behind that relationship and how does that have any kind of effect in the novel that we're reading? 

[Jeffrey:] It, uh, it's such a fascinating relationship, um, that, um, has led to all sorts of interesting speculation on the part of Melville scholars for – and Hawthorne scholars, I suppose – for a long time. And so, when Melville, um, moved to Pittsfield, Massachusetts as he was writing Moby-Dick – he bought a house and moved into it. Um, uh, it just so happened that he lived near – this was in the Berkshire mountains in Western Massachusetts – and Nathaniel Hawthorne was living there, as well, and a mutual friend, a New York Magazine editor, um, arranged a picnic, uh, one day for a bunch of literary luminaries, um, uh, in western Mass, and they all took a hike, um, up to Mount Greylock, which Melville could see out the window of his desk where he was writing Moby-Dick. But, um, he and Hawthorne met that day, August 5th, 1850 – this is almost the anniversary of that, um, meeting. Um, and, and, um, it appears that at some point, there was a rainstorm and Melville and Hawthorne found themselves taking shelter together and had what, apparently, was a rather intense conversation. And, uh, Melville was, you know, 15 years younger than him – um, than Hawthorne. But Melville was immediately just smitten with Hawthorne. He was blown away by him. Um, by his, uh, his intellect, um, by his fiction. Um, and he had been given a copy of Hawthorne's book of short stories, “Mosses from an Old Manse,” which he hadn't read yet. But before the editor friend that, um, introduced them left, um, that weekend, Melville asked him to wait while he completed a review of “Mosses from an Old Manse,” which is an amazing document – it was an essay that Melville published, um, anonymously, um, called, “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” And it's, um, like, everything about it is both, um, excessive, sometimes literally erotic praise for Nathaniel Hawthorne, but it's also, like, this incredible statement of Melville’s own ambitions, both for himself and for American literature. Um, it's an amazing document. I suppose, if there's one thing to read as a… you know, if the Norton Library included, um, other documents, “Hawthorne and His Mosses” might be the one thing that I would have published here. But so, they had this kind of intense friendship, or at least intense from Melville’s side. Um, we don't know that much about Hawthorne's response to Melville, because, um, the correspondence between them that we have is all one-sided. There – none of the letters from Hawthorne survive. We only have Melville's letters to Hawthorne, which are amazing and effusive and full of, um, playfulness and affection, that might have, I don't know – seems like, at times, might have freaked Hawthorne out a little bit, because Melville could come on quite strong. 

[Mark:] Yeah, and then – So, the first thing that we see is Melville dedicating— [Jeffery:] Yeah. [Mark:] —the book to Hawthorne! Right? So—  

[Jeffrey:] Yeah, in admiration of his genius. 

[Mark:] In admiration of his genius. So, that's the first thing. And I know this is a – it's my own counterintuitive move to end our second interview the place where Ishmael starts his narrative. And I think one of the – even if you know only a couple of things about this novel, you know that it starts with a very famous first sentence. Maybe the most iconic first sentence in the history of American literature. So, what is that first sentence, and why has it captured readers for such a long time and so powerfully?  

[Jeffrey:] There's that funny, um, kind of famous Far Side cartoon, where, um, there's a hand on a desk with a piece of paper, and then there are a bunch of, um, crumbled up pieces that have been thrown at the trash can and they and they all say, like, “call me Bob”— [Laughter] —and “call me Eric,” and “call me John,” “call me–” That’s a funny cartoon. Um, but, I mean, I, um – well, one, it’s simple. Three words. Uh, and but also, um, it's elusive. It's – it at once, um, manages to be kind of intimate. It sounds like the sort of thing that one might just say to a friend. Uh, “Call me Jeff, um, not Jeffrey,” uh, for example. Um, and yet, at the same time, um, it's standoffish, because his name may or may not be Ishmael. And so we don't know, from the beginning, if, um, this is a kind of persona that he's taking on or not. Um, also, it's, you know, grammatical mode of address is the second person, the grammatical subject of that sentence is “you,” um, and so it's – so that the reader is kind of involved, um, from the from the very opening, uh, line of the novel. And, um, and then, I suppose, also, the name Ishmael itself, uh, is laden with meaning, um, especially in the 19th century, in a culture – a readerly culture, a literate culture that would have been, um, in – possessed biblical knowledge. They all would have, his readers would have recognized the allusion to the biblical Ishmael, um, who's the, you know, castoff son of the hand of Abraham's handmaiden, Hagar. Um, and so, in that way, you know, Ishmael, uh, is suggestive of a kind of outcast and exile, uh, and that too is, um, intriguing, uh, and mysterious. And so, you know, he does all these things, um, with this incredibly, um, simple, uh, announcement from the beginning of the novel. 

[Mark:] So you're three words in, and already you're not quite sure where you stand. And you have an association with the narrator, and then the next sentence is “some years ago, never mind exact–” — [Jeffrey:] Yeah. [Mark:] —So, he's already setting the terms of that reader-narrator relationship. So, the complexity of the narrative perspective is really one of the things that you have to track for the entire novel, isn't it? 

[Jeffrey:] Yeah, the kind of, um, uh, friendly, uh, chatty, familiar mode of address, um, that is also maybe in some ways cagey.  

[Mark:] Yes.  

[Jeffrey:] Um, like, that's a tricky thing to navigate. It's rich and, uh, complicated right from the get-go. 

[Mark:] Jeffrey Insko, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library Podcast and discussing your new edition of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. 

[Jeffrey:] Mark, this has been so much fun. I can't thank you enough. 

[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of “Moby-Dick or, The Whale,” edited by Jeffrey Insko is available now in paperback and ebook. Check out the links in the description of this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles. 

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