"Call me Ishmael"

I started reading "Moby-Dick" last night. I decided it was time for me to tackle another "challenging" book. (I finished "The Black Count," which was not that difficult a read, a while back, had been dabbling in a couple of mysteries and a book on the history of food rationing in WWII Britain)

The version I have is a Modern Library paperback. They've reprinted the Rockwell Kent engravings in it (he was kind of a big deal, back in the day).

Though I suspect an annotated version might have been a better choice. That makes me kind of sad but I suspect I'm not getting all the allusions. The Biblical ones I get (at one point Ishmael refers to having to pay for stuff as being "perhaps the most uncomfortable affliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us" and I admit I chuckled, never having quite thought of Adam and Eve in that way). And I got the Dives and Lazarus bit (even though I don't think the rich man is named in the original Biblical parable).

But I suspect some of the historical ones (the one about a battle in "Affghanistan," I had to look that up), and perhaps some of the classical-mythology ones, I will have to strain a little at.

(Later, in the first chapter, he speaks of "astern winds" and makes a comment about "never violate the Pythagorean maxim" and I remembered about how the Pythagoreans never ate beans - though I think that was for other reasons - and I stopped and went, wait, did Melville just make a flatulence joke? According to this site, he did)

Other things I was able to get from context. I figured "hypos" had to be something like "hypomania," an older word for depression. And that Euroclydon had to be a name for one of the winds, and a name that was perhaps used during Paul's time...

I already knew about "venting one's spleen," if anything, that seems to have become more common in the Internet age....

I also liked his comment about "Who ain't a slave?" Even though some might see that as a commentary on slavery (which still existed in the US at that time, and I don't know Melville's position on it though given he was a New Englander, one assumes he was for its abolition). But the bigger idea - we still use the term "wage slave" today - that many people are in bondage to something.

(Not all of the allusions over at the Genius site - the one I linked - are exactly helpful or apropos, but I'll have to remember it for looking stuff up)

Though I tend to read in bed right before going to sleep, so I may have to remember the allusions and look them up the next day. And yes, I intend to look up the stuff I don't "get," that's the only way you actually learn stuff. (I get frustrated when students won't do things like look up words that are unfamiliar to them.)

But yeah, I can see how this novel would have been easier for someone to read closer to its time of publication than now - people were better educated in the classics (Cato falling on his sword) and some of the "current events" referenced (the contested election of 1848) would actually have been current.

My plan is to read a couple of chapters a night. It will take a while to do this as there are over 100 chapters, but doing a couple a night is better than doing none a night. (And last night I was slowed down because in my edition at least, there were multiple pages of quotations alluding to whales, starting with the Bible and going through travel accounts and accounts from whaling ships and Baron Cuvier's natural history and even down to Darwin's travels....)

I'm wondering if Ishmael is more of the comic hero (in almost a Peter Quill sense) than I had imagined before - if he's throwing off quips about "orchard thieves" and "astern winds" and seems to wear his education fairly lightly. I may wind up liking this a lot more than I would have previously anticipated.