Tag Archives: Moby Dick

Exhausted by Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita”

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The accolades for Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1940 novel The Master and Margarita book are buoyant: “A 20th Century masterpiece!” “One of the greatest Russian novels!!” It is certainly wild and gripping at the start, a most unexpected and oddly humorous decapitation and talking cat setting the scene.

Here Ivan was struck by the conductress’s behavior. As soon as she saw the cat getting on the tram-car, she shouted with a malice that even made her shake, “No cats alllowed! Scat! Get off or I’ll call the police!” Neither the conductress nor the passengers were struck by the essence of the matter, not just that the cat was boarding a tram car, but that he was going to pay!

It is important to remember that the novel was written during the horrors of 1930’s Russia and Stalin’s death squads. But to read it for the story and art? There just isn’t enough to make it work. The narrative a ragtag outline, the dialogue wooden and the characters cartoonish, especially that of Satan (Woland), it is just confounding in the end.

The liquid, hot as lava, burned her hands, but Margarita, without wincing, and trying not to cause any pain, rubbed it into his knee. “My attendants insist it’s rheumatism,” Woland was saying, not taking his eyes off Margarita, “but I strongly suspect that this pain in my knee was left me as a souvenir by a charming witch with whom I was closely acquainted in the year 1571, on Mount Brocken, on the Devil’s Podium. Trifles! In another three hundred years it wll all go away!”

By the last hundred pages – especially in Bulgakov’s exhausting attempt to recreate the Faustian Walpurgis Night – it becomes an unending slog. While I did finish the book, I did not do it because I wanted to see how it turned out, but only to say, much like completing the same arduous task in reading the entirety of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, “Yes, I had indeed read the book all the way through. Give me credit for that.”

The Kittle Fash of Stevenson’s “Kidnapped”

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Like Moby Dick, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped is one of those books I had never read and thought everybody else had. Like Moby Dick, I found the book exhausting and dense and eventually learned that few have actually read it.

The problem with the book is three-fold, the biggest challenge being the archaic language, with words like slockens (moisten), gliff (look), clour (hit), kittle (difficult) and argle-bargled (argue) permeating the text. On top of the language is the convoluted politics of the 1700’s where you were either a Whig, a Jacobite or a repressed Highlander, Stevenson assuming the reader understood the background to all of this. (Which I didn’t.)

View of the highlands from Ben Nevis

At the heart of the problem however is the narrative, which is a story of a young man who is knocked on the head and put on a ship for the slavery in the Carolinas only to escape and find his way tediously back through the highlands. It’s a never-ending journey that plugs on and on, like Ahab and his whale, until it doesn’t.

Beached Pilot Whales on Sanday Island, Orkney

I eventually made it to the end but with little satisfaction. And I would not recommend the journey to anyone else, unless you know bauchle and kittle and can thole fashious things.

The Voyage of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”

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As I started out on my epic reading journey of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, I wondered why I had never read it. Eventually, all became clear.

So far as what there be of a narrative in this book; and, indeed, as indirectly touching one or two very interesting and curious particulars in the habit of sperm whales, the foregoing chapter, in its earlier part, is as important a one as will be found in this volume; but the leading matter of it requires to be still further and more familiarly enlarged upon…(141)

It was an impossible read, more a meandering collection of musing on whales, whaling and nautical life than anything to do with narrative. Having already in various ways put before you the skull, spout-hole, jaw, teeth, tail, forehead, fins and diverse other parts, I shall now simply point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of his unobstructed bones. (302)

And yet, despite the ramblings, there were moments, the minutest of hooks scattered about, that made me seek the distant spout.

Nothing seemed before me but a jet gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern. (284)What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? (357)

Until the end, at the sinking of the Pequod, the vanishing of Ahab and crew, Moby with them, when I realized I had survived just to tell the tale.

Moby Dick: Learning Through Herman Melville

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A few things I’ve gleaned from the opening 100 pages of Melville’s opus:

  1. Maritime jargon such as “lee of land” and handspike.
  2. Surprisingly non-traditional views espoused by Ishmael: What is worship? To do the will of God. That is worship. And what is the will of God? To do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me. That is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator.
  3. Building a story takes time. Captain Ahab does not appear until page 85, with Moby Dick not even on the horizon. 
  4. That said, Mr. Melville also would have benefited from an editor.