1 Living with Digression

It is not that Melville digresses, but rather that every thought of his honestly deserves to be written down.

For every person I meet who has read and enjoyed Herman Melville’s fixture Moby-Dick, I meet twenty who began the novel and gave up.  There is an enduringly consistent reason: Melville’s tendency to digress, his endless narrations.  Which chapter cracked your own sinking spirits?  “The Spouter-Inn,” “The Sermon,” “The Wheelbarrow?”  Or later, “The Advocate,” the redundant “Knights and Squires?”  Surely we must own, if we are honest, that “Cetology” did at one time wreck us all.  Even so, I insist that he does not digress, and I intend to prove it.  There can be no digression where there is such intricate intention.  Herman Melville is a near flawless narrator; Moby-Dick aptly, artfully, and astoundingly told.

(A universal truth: one does not read to know about books—one reads to know human life, and there is hardly any better way of knowing it.  This blog aims to teach the skill of interpreting literature--to really know--indicating the observations necessary to triangulate one’s position in a book, any book.  Melville’s novel is one of those that seem more full of human life, vitally portrayed.)  

The purpose of Melville’s verbosity appears quite early in the text.  In Chapter One, “Loomings,” in the place reserved for introduction, while discoursing on the general significance of the sea and its universal call to every living person, Melville writes, with utmost simplicity: “There is magic in it.”  He goes on to explain:

“Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it?  Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach?  Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea?  Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land?  Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy?  Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and make him the own brother of Jove?  Surely all this is not without meaning.”  (My own emphasis.)

This one last sentence expresses the whole design of Moby-Dick.  At least, as far as concerns digression.  Melville witnesses a world remarkably full of meaning.  He therefore cannot help but remark.  It might really be that simple.  He sees magic.  We will see it too, if we read.  Far from the crusty, rambling, delusional sailor readers might picture, Melville swells in his prose with amazing energy, he sinks with profound gravity.  He laughs.  He writes as though each reader stood by his side, an intimate friend, with whom he shares his ecstatic vision of this meaningful, magical human existence.  (Incidentally, if you passed over the quotation above, please attend to it now.  Melville begs you to.  This is why he goes on and on.  Read the prose, and see if he does not persuade.)

The bigness of his novel, then, does not result from his digression.  Do not believe the rumors about his having been paid by the page—it does not matter if they’re true.  The breadth of Melville’s writing simply reflects the profundity of his vision.  He stands as though upon a ship’s masthead (more on this later), with a wide view of the signifying world, and writes from this vantage.  His expansive chapters, at first glance, seem to cover a hundred varied topics (well, one hundred, thirty-five, precisely).  But this is not the case.  Rather, his one topic—the grandeur of the world and the insistent significance of human life in it, all centered in one Captain Ahab—spans miles and miles of artistic perspective.  Hence, pages and pages, yet intricately knit.   His novel contains so much because he cannot contain himself--more exactly, his words cannot contain his excitement at such abundant significance in our world.  "Surely all this is not without meaning!"

Here, therefore, I plan to discuss his observations each in turn, as I find them in the text.  I invite you to join me, looking with Melville at the wonder he saw fit to inscribe, in toto, in Moby-Dick.