John C. Wright's Journal

MOBY DICK -- pagan masterwork
I have just this minute finished reading MOBY DICK, and by salt and hemp I am awed and impressed. What a work! This monstrous book, this whale of a book (no other phrase will do) deserves its fame.

I read somewhere that Melville confessed the book was a wicked work, and for a time, I could not puzzle out his meaning. By now, I see it.

Melville, with the wild, almost drunken humor of a poet, a mad poet, fixed his heart on the purpose of writing a modern pagan epic, to capture the stern grandeur of ancient Jewish tales, the majesty and sorrow of Achilles and Agamemnon. He wrote of the fall of Icarus, or, if you will the Fall of Lucifer, except that his Ahab (absurdly) was a sea captain instead of a King, and his Greek demigods of old were (absurdly) whaling men of Nantucket.

Wicked? To a pious Christian, yes, because the tale is Homeric. It is pagan work from start to finish, no, I must say, from stem to stern.
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Whatever this great white whale of a book might be, Christian or pagan, this is certainly is: The work plucks at the very heart and center of human suffering. Once only, does Ahab hesitate in his mad, doomed quest, the huge white Death he is seeking, for a mild day causes him to remember his wife and child waiting back in Nantucket for him.

Starbuck pleads with him to turn again. To repent. For Starbuck has loved ones too: his wife promised that his boy, every morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father's returning sail.

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