Why Read Moby-Dick? Some more answers.

Chad Harbach, interviewed in the New Statesman, fields the question--well.

And then there's Herman Melville. The baseball team in The Art of Fielding is named the Harpooners, an allusion to Moby-Dick.Moby-Dick is a book that I read in college and was astounded by. I think it's the most musical novel in the English language - the rhythms and the prose are incredible. It surpasses anything that anyone has ever done.
It's also a very funny book, which no one ever gives it credit for. Before I read it, I'd always heard it spoken of in these stern and forbidding tones, as if you were being scared away from reading it. But then you read it and you find it's both bold and musical.

An earlier attempt of mine to answer a similar question, in an interview with The New Yorker's Book Bench blog, here. Another one here. And here's a sampling of what I said of the novel in the talk I gave earlier this month at UCSB:

Sometimes when trying to explain my harebrained quest, I simply blame Herman Melville, whose novel I’d read an unhealthy number of times. People think of Moby-Dick as a difficult book, and it does have hard words, and long sentences, and it can at times seem bewildering, or dense. But it’s also funny, raunchy even, and it is full of marvels, and there’s heart-pounding action. All that, and it also contains passages that read like something out of a biblical book of wisdom, like Ecclesiastes, passages like this: “There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.” That’s like some sort of riddle, isn’t it? Or a Buddhist koan. But turn it around in your head a while.

If you haven’t read Moby-Dick, I highly commend it to you and hope that at some point in your life you give it a go. College is usually a good point in your life to try. You wouldn’t call Melville an environmentalist, in part because that word and idea did not exist in his time. And he does not condemn the whalers he writes about; he celebrates them as neglected American heroes. And whaling as he describes it is a bloody, grisly business. And he takes the whaling grounds—mistakenly, it would turn out—to be an inexhaustibly abundant resource. And yet, there is a kind of proto-ecological awareness in Melville’s book. He’s writing for readers on shore, who are surrounded by whale products—whale oil candles, whale oil lamps, whale oil used to grease machines, whale bone in corsets, all sorts of things carved out of whale ivory. The material lives of Americans in his time was to a huge degree made of whale. There was even a whale product, ambergris, prized for its scent by parfumeurs. Ambergris sounds pretty enough but it is in fact petrified whale dung.

It’s not just the products made of whale that come from the whaling grounds. Ishmael arrives at the whaling town of New Bedford, and remarks: “The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all New England”—meaning the most expensive place. “It is a land of oil, true enough; but not like Canaan; a land, also, of corn and wine. The streets do not run with milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs. Yet, in spite of this, nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came they? how planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a country?"—see what I mean about hard words? "Scoria" means the refuse from the smelting of ores, or else a sort of cindery lava. It derives from the Greek for excrement. It is not a nice thing to say about a country. Melville continues: "Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.”