Nathaniel Philbrick thinks it part of our country's DNA.
From a piece on NPR...
It's his "favorite book." He refers back to it almost daily. He finds it "full of great wisdom" — and yes, that includes the whale anatomy parts, which Philbrick says are part of a system of what might seem to be meanderings, but are in fact "wormholes of metaphysical poetry that are truly revelatory."
But that's really thinking too small to fully understand why Philbrick thinks you should read Moby-Dick. As he tells Robert Siegel, he thinks you should read it not only because "the level of the language is like no other," but because "it's as close to being our American Bible as we have."
What does he mean by that fairly weighty reference? Moby-Dick, Philbrick explains, published in 1851, was itself born in the pre-Civil-War churn of a very tense American consciousness. While it wasn't a critical or popular success upon publication (critically, he calls it a "great disaster"), Philbrick notes that after World War I, Americans here and abroad came to understand that it contained "the genetic code" for much of what happens in the country where it was written. And he predicts it will cycle back to relevance in difficult times, "whenever we will run into an imminent cataclysm."
1 comment:
I have always wondered what Edgar Allan Poe would have thought of Moby Dick, had he lived a few years longer, and still been
doing literary criticism in 1851 when MD came out.
Perhaps he would have resented its moralism?
Or, would Poe have recognized greatness and vision where others clearly missed it?
Food for thought.
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