This First Friday lecture explored the Herman Melville’s 1851 classic Moby Dick, a work regarded for its density and difficulty, as well as the context surrounding it.
One salient feature of Melville’s 1851 masterpiece is its sheer magnitude. It isn’t that it’s the longest of 19th-century novels. Shorter than War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment or Bleak House, its reputation for difficulty rivals that of Proust’s prolix Remembrance of Things Past. The natural and nautical history passages (the first to be excised in abridged versions)—the anatomy of whales and of ships, the precise and technical descriptions of processes—bear ambiguous and inextricable relation to the tale of adventure and tempestuous character. It is a novel in the superlative mode, centered around an animal existing on a scale, in a medium, that strains perceptual and descriptive powers.
This First Friday Lecture was supported by the Class Gift given by the 2023 graduates of the Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults.
