The Secret Joy of Reading Page 9

and readily identifiable lead, although Ishmael turns out to be little more than a bland narrator: the protagonist is Ahab, the deuteragonist the whale. In the opening pages we learn to like and trust Ishmael. We flatter ourselves that he resembles us, an ordinary person doing his best, though sorely afflicted with the wanderlust that lurks in us all. The familiar continues when he arrives at the inn. Just as we would be, he is disgruntled to learn that he must share a bed with a stranger. But when Queequeg appears, things start to get interesting. He could hardly be less familiar, a hideously tattooed cannibal carrying a lethal harpoon and worshipping a homunculus. Ishmael is terrified. Then, slowly, as Queequeg’s admirable personality emerges, Ishmael’s prejudice evaporates and the two men become friends.

  Melville transforms Queequeg into part of the familiar. We come to like him just as much as we like Ishmael, or even more; and a little of our own adamantine prejudice is thus wafted away. This is clever writing, for it also solves a technical problem. Queequeg’s transformation prepares us for the easy absorption of further extreme unfamiliarity. Before we know what has happened we feel at home aboard the Pequod. We are of the crew. Our own fate is bound up with Ahab’s obsession.

  Just as Queequeg was transformed, so now is much of the unfamiliar in Moby-Dick. Ahab’s thirst for revenge is allowed to dominate, while the setting and the supporting cast become familiar, accepted, relegated to the background. Everything and everyone on board are subordinate to and focused upon the captain’s monomania, so that when the whale is finally engaged what results is a clash of two incomprehensible titans. It is a wonderful story, adumbrating mysteries of morality that have no name. These mysteries cannot be retrieved from the realm of the unfamiliar, so cause us to reflect on them once we have finished the book. In its unexpurgated version Moby-Dick is a highly sophisticated work, revelling in the joys of language and in knowledge for its own sake. An extended vocabulary is another benefit for the persistent reader. He is further enriched by an awareness of literary tropes and allusions, but a more important side of his progress is his growing ability to see into another’s mind.

  In the whole field of art, I can think of no rival to literature in its capacity to let us share someone else’s psyche. A story is superficially divided into the familiar and the unfamiliar; its composition is divided into the conscious and subconscious. The subconscious part, like Kipling’s assumptions in Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, is usually the more interesting. Unlike most human discourse, including the conscious part of an author’s output, it is entirely free of deceit. After Animal Farm or Nineteen-eighty Four, we know more about George Orwell than his biography can ever tell us. He was a professed man of the Left, but so fastidiously honest and self-effacing (this is borne out by the transparency of his prose) that he would make no apology for the failures of socialism. We see through the tribal Labour Party badge: we see the humanitarian underneath, and our world-view – whatever our political beliefs – is ameliorated as a result.

  Those two novels are an exercise in polemic, preserved – elevated – from that dreary genre only by Orwell’s ability as a storyteller. Moby-Dick is higher, towering, inspired, transcendent. Huston’s film threw nearly all of that away. The script was written by Ray Bradbury, who disliked the novel and didn’t get on with his autocratic director. What remains is little more than a time-passing thriller, exciting enough in the communal atmosphere of an auditorium, but ultimately unsatisfying.

  The young Melville’s seafaring adventures provided the ideas for some fairly conventional stories, like Typee and Omoo. They were commercially successful; his later books were not. His declining sales warred with the urge to satisfy his muse, and he must have seen how far short, in that respect, he fell compared with his friend Hawthorne. Moby-Dick was published in 1851, when he was thirty-two. For the next forty years his writing became increasingly mystical and, at the last, impenetrable.

  The secret joy of reading, its greatest pleasure, is this: by merging our psyche with an author’s, we keep our grip on reality while temporarily renouncing what eastern philosophy terms “the self”. In quiet solitude we open our heart and join the commonalty of mankind. Queequeg becomes a brother whose death we mourn. Fiction may entertain and even educate, but above all it is a tool to help us grow. That is why we leave Enid Blyton behind and long for our tickets to the grown-ups’ library, and that is why we are drawn to the unresolved mysteries of the unfamiliar in fiction, for these are the very mysteries of existence itself.

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