"Freaky poetical crypto-zoological musings"

Rockwell Kent, illustration from the Lakeside Press Moby-Dick (1930)

A maimed Nantucket whale-boat captain is driven insane, and to his death, revenging himself upon a giant white sperm whale. Captain and whale alike carry a sublime Romantic significance equal in weight to that bourne by any fiction. But—in telling this story the narrator, Ishmael, dithers, delays, and dawdles, bringing Ahab on-stage only in chapter 28, and then spinning out 100 more chapters on whale anatomy, and on the workings of a whale-ship, fit for a textbook or a documentary; all that, hours and days of reading, before the Pequod finally sights Moby Dick. It’s audacious! ... If telling that story is the point, or the only point, of Moby-Dick.

The digressions do advance the story, in their way. The Pequod sails east from Nantucket, around the Cape of Good Hope, through the Indian Ocean to the great Pacific, over the course of many months, maybe a year until its final end. The experience of reading so many chapters cataloguing the varieties of whales distantly mirrors the crews’ experience, as their minds must have wandered during those long stretches of endless blue sea. Be that as it may, it is a mistake, Walter Bezanson argued in a 1951 paper, to think that Ahab and Moby Dick are the only two forces “providing the dynamic” of the novel, or that all the novel’s events and tellings matter only as they bear on those two monsters’ pursuits of each other. Moby-Dick, he wrote,