Moby Dick by Herman Melville with Christina Bieber Lake Artwork

Christians Reading Classics

Christians Reading Classics is a podcast about classic books being read through a distinctly Christian lens. Hosted by author and classicist, Nadya Williams, Christians Reading Classics introduces—or should we say—re-introduces listeners to classic works that have inspired generations. Interviewing experts who know these books well, the hope is to inspire listeners and awaken their imagination to God's world through literary, theological, and even children's works that have stood the test of time. Christians Reading Classics is a Mere Orthodoxy podcast. Find out more at mereorthodoxy.com

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Christians Reading Classics

Moby Dick by Herman Melville with Christina Bieber Lake

April 02, 2026 • Mere Orthodoxy • Season 2 • Episode 9

0:00 | 57:25

Nadya Williams and Christina Bieber Lake discuss Moby Dick — why Americans should read it, what Melville understood about arrogance and the uncontrollable, and how the novel's humor, sprawling cetology chapters, and the famous doubloon scene all serve a single theme: the tragedy of trying to master what cannot be mastered.

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00:00 - Introduction & Opening Reading
01:58 - Christina Bieber Lake's Background
05:17 - What Makes a Classic?
10:01 - Why Americans Should Read Moby Dick
14:02 - Melville: Who He Was and What He Believed
18:08 - Approaching a 625-Page Novel
21:54 - Plot, Characters, and the Ship's Crew
25:51 - The Doubloon Chapter: Melville's Theme of Reading
28:39 - Humor in Moby Dick
31:50 - The Cetology Chapters and Language
34:43 - Ahab, Job, and the Desire for Control
36:00 - Ishmael as Survivor and Narrator
39:39 - The Masculinity of the Novel
49:01 - Reception and Why It Flopped
50:15 - Long Books and the Muscle of Attention
54:30 - Closing Question: A Classic You Wish You'd Written

Apply for fall 2026 admission to Beeson Divinity School's MDiv and be considered for a full-tuition scholarship. https://bit.ly/beesonscholarships

SPEAKER_02 0:18

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago. Never mind how long precisely, having little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coughing warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet. And especially whenever my hypose gets such an upper hand of me that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people's hats off. Then I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish, Cato throws himself upon his sword. I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, or at some time or other, would cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me. So wrote Herman Melville in opening Moby Dick, his most famous novel, published in 1851. Welcome to season two of Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Muir Orthodoxy. The theme for this second season is Classics American Christians Should Read in honor of America's 250th. I am Nadia Williams, the book's editor for Muir Orthodoxy, and the author of the book Christians Reading Classics, Out This Past Fall with Sondervan Academic. And today, it is my absolute delight and privilege to talk about America's best-known literary whale with Christina Bieber Lake. She's professor emerita of English at Wheaton College, where she taught for 25 years. She is the author of many books and essays, and her big passion is to get everyone to fall in love with reading, and especially reading American literature. So, Christina, thank you for being here. It's my pleasure. Let me ask you first your story, because you've had quite uh quite a journey, uh a literary odyssey of your own in your vocation. So tell us a little bit about your story.

SPEAKER_03 2:52

Indeed. I always was planning to get a PhD in English way back when I taught high school English for a little bit after I graduated from college. And so went right on, got my PhD, got a job at Wheaton College in 1999, did that for 25 years, and then my husband, who is an Anglican priest, has been unemployed or underemployed for the last 10 years to support my career. So things got harder in academia, higher ed, and things were harder for him, not being able to fulfill his vocational dreams. So when our son started college, he started looking for jobs, and that brought us to Texas. So he is rector of Church of the Resurrection in Flower Mound, Texas. And as you know, anybody in academia knows you don't just get a job at the full professor level somewhere else. And so I took that as an opportunity to retire from teaching and to pour my energy into writing a Substack. So, in a way that's kind of scratching the itch of teaching because I also hold online book conversations with a lot of my former students, but anybody who wants to join and allows me to write what I want to write. And since I've worked for you before, when you were on current, you know, I just like to write about a lot of different things, but mostly about how the imagination is essential to spiritual transformation. You've got to be able to imagine a different life before you can live it. And and since literary works, that's what it's all about, right? What are the different possibilities for existence, for thinking, for thoughts that that govern our our way of being in the world? So what better place to do that than um than through literature and in a in a very malleable um social media, as you know, milieu? It's it's kind of nice uh being able to have the immediate interaction with uh readers on Substacks. So I write Art and Soul is the name of my publication. So I would love to have anybody out there as a subscriber.

SPEAKER_02 5:03

Yes. So if you're listening, you can look this up. Uh and I read Arts and Soul, Art and Soul, and I really appreciate it. You uh you have a way of talking about literature that is accessible and beautiful.

SPEAKER_03 5:17

Thank you. I really appreciate that because that is my goal. I want to invite people in because the writers are inviting you in, right? The writers are always saying, This is important, look at this. And Melville being chief among them, look at this, pay attention to this, because if you don't, you'll be missing something important.

SPEAKER_02 5:33

And I love this because we don't typically think of Mommy Dick as a book that just invites you in, you know, all like um 10 pounds of it.

SPEAKER_01 5:42

My weight. Don't drop it on your foot, readers.

SPEAKER_02 5:45

Um, but um, and we'll get to that in a second. But first, I always start with kind of a general conversation, which I think uh with a general question, which I think is the sort of question that you've been tackling your entire career. And that's what is a classic anyway?

SPEAKER_03 6:00

Yes, well, I was laughing about that because uh that's the first thing I said. Well, what do you mean by a classic, Nadia? Um, because of course, one of the things you last learn when you're an English major is to question the whole idea of a classic, and it's the thing that's grounded into you when you're getting a PhD in English. But since you are a classicist, um as you well know, the term studying the classics means a very certain thing, these sort of ancient Greek and uh, you know, texts and and so on. And so I think that that term get morphs over, right, into other literary realms and replaces or challenges the word masterpiece, which has its own, you know, history to it. So I think like a lot of things in literary studies and literary theory, you kind of have to recognize that once you realize that somebody decided somewhere along the way that this is a classic, and that's usually in the past, white guys, you know, uh older, middle-aged white guys deciding that this is something worth reading. Once you get past that recognition, then you also can understand that there's just a way in which when something survives all of that and is still continuing to be read for whatever reason, then it's doing some important cultural work. It's done that work in the past and it's still doing it. So there's classics, for instance, that really formed early America, like Longfellow's poetry, that nobody would really read right now. Not that they shouldn't, right, but they aren't. And then you've got a classic like Zoranil Hurst and Their Eyes Were Watching God, which is now like probably taught more than any other text in the classroom of in American Lit, and was not discovered until much, much later. As the as with uh Moby Dick, right? It was buried in the ocean, if you will, because it didn't come off contemporary for as a contemporary very well, and it wasn't until the 1920s that people started reading it. So just as long as everybody understands that somebody somewhere is deciding this is a classic and that there is some sense in which its enduring existence and being talked about, and its ability to start conversations is a part of that.

SPEAKER_02 8:19

I like that, the idea that uh a classic book is one that starts conversations.

SPEAKER_03 8:24

And it starts conversations um generation after generation, it can't just be like in the one time it did because it was, you know, one of my professors used to tell me that the best definition of pop culture is something that you consume once and you kind of use it up. Um, and you can't use up a classic, you can't lose up something that would be considered, you know, high literature or whatever, but the way that you can use up something that's that's pop.

SPEAKER_02 8:51

I appreciate that. And a lot of times I bring up Homer as kind of like the obvious example. Uh and it's also a reminder that a classic, yes, it starts conversations generation after generation, but the conversations may be different.

SPEAKER_03 9:06

Completely. Just like as with the Bible, right? I mean, it's it's different people have different things they need to get from it. We correctives. I I call in literature, I call it a prophet, prophetic corrective, that there's a writer that writer wants us to see something that we're either ignoring or just failing to understand, and that becomes a corrective to the way that we think about the world. And and that's what a good piece of literature does.

SPEAKER_02 9:33

So and perhaps that's part of make it's makes it transcendent.

SPEAKER_03 9:38

Correct. Yeah, because it one would one should one could argue, and I have argued and will continue to argue, that if you touch on the true, then the good and the beautiful are right there with it, because if you're telling the truth, those are there, either in abstentia or actual in, for instance, good, you can only recognize evil by understanding a sense of what the good really is, right? So uh the good and the true and the beautiful are these transcendentals that are always together. They're always found together. And so if the writer is speaking truthfully, those things are there and they will endure.

SPEAKER_02 10:16

I love that. Well, so moving from there to Moby Dick, why should American Christians read Moby Dick in The Year of America's 250th?

SPEAKER_03 10:27

Well, that's a huge question, but this is a huge book, right? Um and Melville writing at the time that he did in the in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s, of course, is now a complicated term, just like everything else in literary studies, but the American Renaissance was what it was called for a number of years, where it's like, okay, we've broken away from Britain politically and economically. What does it mean to culturally break away from Britain and be the United States of America? What are our defining features? And so it is important that a country has its own literature, right? And Melville certainly knew that. The ambitions were to write that big book, which we from which we get the great American novel kind of idea, you know, uh that the book that defines, you know, our country. And in that way, Melville reminds me a lot of um Whitman. And and Whitman famously took up Emerson's call to, we need a great poet to sing, you know, all the great virtues of America. And Melville's like, I'll do it. You know, and I mean, Whitman's like, I'll do it. You know, and I write this huge book called Leaves of Grass that's constantly expanding. It's definitely a male thing, and I'm sure we'll get into that. Uh, and it's like, I'm gonna write this big book that is really talking about so many things that you can't even identify what the whale really is, but the ship of the Pequod could be the ship of state. And where is it heading? You know, and all of these things. So it's like to be an American and not understand how Moby Dick entered into our discourse and our way of thinking about what it means to be an American is to miss an important part of our uh cultural heritage.

SPEAKER_02 12:17

I appreciate that, and just the idea of the reminder that American literature is still so young.

SPEAKER_03 12:24

Well, just like America. Yes. Just like America. And we, you know, thought at the time, and this is one of the great themes that I'm sure we'll get into because this is what I think is important about Melville, is that Americans have been famously always looking forward, uh, famously not aware of um sort of hidden things in the past that could swamp us sins and things. So in early American literature, you get this division between the just to simplify it, sort of more optimistic transcendentalist types, and then the types who are saying, hey, wait a minute, it doesn't work that way. And Melville's definitely in the type of, wait a minute, it doesn't work that way. So you've got sort of Emerson and those guys up here who are like floating up in the ether, and then you've got the downward sort of Melville and Hawthorne and Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy, who are all influenced along the way there, saying uh there's a dark side here. And if we don't pay attention to it, well, it has swamped us and it will continue to swamp us if we don't deal with it. From which you also get what I think is the masterpiece, if you will, of the 20th century Beloved by um Tony Morrison, which is really talking about that sin and how it's destroyed the ship state.

SPEAKER_02 13:40

So to talk about the Great Great American novel means to talk about spiritual themes.

SPEAKER_03 13:47

Correct. Because spiritual things were extremely important to the founding of this country, uh, with the Puritans, of course, but also just the early, you know, formers of the Constitution. Uh spiritual things were a part of the way that they saw the world. And then debates about that, right? Thomas Jefferson cutting out the miracles out of the Bible, and you know, how much say should uh God or Jesus have in our country is a debated point.

SPEAKER_02 14:18

So tell us more about Melville himself. Who was he? What did he believe?

SPEAKER_03 14:23

Well, you know, I'm not a Melville scholar, and I do mostly 20th century American literature. So I'm not an expert on that, but I don't think that it's he's similar to me, not only to Whitman, but to um Cormac McCarthy in this kind of cosmological interest in in spiritual and philosophical issues without committing to any of that. He's interested in a larger question of epistemology, is the fancy word for it, but how do you know what you know? And where do you get that knowledge from? And the question of reading and interpretation, which is paramount for Melville. How do you read the texts, the great text, but also the texts of the world, the world itself? So he is very hard to pin down because he was a genius in that regard. Um, he's from New York City and lived in Albany, I think, for a period of time. And not again, like not unlike Whitman, who was also a New Yorker. And he did have some time on the seas. So he's not just pulling this out of his rear. You know, he had been on a whaling ship, he had been on a merchant vessel, in fact, he jumped ship uh the whaling ship that he was on. So he knows what he's writing here. And he had been a travel writer earlier. Travel writer, that's kind of a big designation for the early novels that he wrote, and he had some success with them, and then did not with Moby Dick. And it was kind of panned, and and really everybody acknowledges now it was just a novel before its time. Uh it's certainly in a lot of ways modern, and we can go into what that means, but some people even think it's post-modern. Uh, and so it it makes sense that people would be like, What? I don't have a category for this, because he didn't mean for there to be a category for it.

SPEAKER_02 16:15

So, what led him to write this, considering that he had success with earlier works? Like, why do this experiment?

SPEAKER_03 16:21

Well, he's he thought of himself, I think, as a genius. Uh and he was right. And you'll see at some point later in Moby Dick, and by the way, thank you for the excuse to reread it. It's been uh been a good 15 years since I looked at it, and I really appreciated that because of course I'm different. My understanding is different than when I first read it. But there's a point in a later chapter where he says, if you want to write a big book, you have to have, if you want to write a great book, you have to have a great theme. And if the theme is all of truth or reality, which I think is one of the themes, and how you read it and how you understand it, and the desire to control it, which is Ahab's problem, I think, uh, then you you have to write a big book. It takes that much. You have to spend that much time getting your reader inside of these issues. It's not plot as much as it is the encounter through these very various experiences you have with reading and understanding and and and life itself, right? And what way to better way to do it than on this ship, this kind of self-contained ship with this monomaniacal Ahab, then to explore, you know, what better place to explore it? And so it works. It absolutely works. And once you start getting into it, you just in a in a weird way you can't put it down.

SPEAKER_02 17:46

Yeah. And your uh description of your own experience with it reminds me another definition of a classic that uh several people have brought up on this podcast before is books that you can reread and you see something new every time.

SPEAKER_03 18:00

Yes, it's like that that idea of the pop definition, right? Like it you read it once and it's it's it it's exhausted, it's expired. You can't do that with a classic. It just it's always opening up new venues depending on where you're at, too, you know, where the country is at.

SPEAKER_02 18:16

So again, those conversations that it prompts are different, even for individuals. Indeed. So this novel is 625 pages in the edition I have. So even the length alone can make it kind of intimidating for a lot of people. So how do you introduce it to someone who hasn't read it before or hasn't read it in a while? Like what should we pay attention to going into it?

SPEAKER_03 18:42

Well, I think if you like a lot of big books, um like Infinite Jest or something like that by uh David Foster Wallace, um or James Joyce, right? Or even The Odyssey, a big book, you know, something that's you you kind of have to go with the flow. You know, I don't know how else to say it, but if you sit there and you try to like control your reading of it, you're doing the thing that Ahab uh died over, really, basically. You know, so it's like uh just let it kind of flow over you and and then get into the stream of it, if you will, and see what it is that Melville wants you to see. And if you open up your eyes to that, you're already ahead of three-quarters of the population, I would argue, um, who really wants, we want things to be controlled. So when you think about form, and uh, this is a lesson that I taught a lot in my well, I taught it at the end of my career in every single class, that forms genres uh are one just a part of many forms, right? Forms are never neutral. They're always making an argument, they're always imposing a worldview, uh, something like that. So if you have a big book, a big novel, the form is making the argument that some things cannot be contained in just like a small capsule. They have to re it requires a large book. Like detective fictions that makes the makes the argument that the world is understandable and evil will be caught. And, you know, I mean, it makes these arguments whether they want it to or not. So when you approach a big book like Moby Dick, you just have to say, what why does he feel like he needs this big book? That's what I want to pay attention to. And for for a contemporary example, a really excellent one of a big topic requiring a big book would be Richard Powers' novel, The Overstory. I don't know if you're familiar with that one about the trees. And uh are you familiar with that one?

SPEAKER_02 20:45

I have not read that one.

SPEAKER_03 20:46

Okay, yeah, that's that's just the example that came into my mind of a contemporary big novel.

SPEAKER_02 20:53

I just recently reviewed uh Tom uh not Tom Mark Danielewski's new novel, um Tom's Crossing, which was 1200 1,228 pages.

SPEAKER_03 21:05

That's the Leaves of Grass, dude, right? Yes. The House of Leaves. House of Leaves, yes. Yeah. Which is the same kind of idea, right? It's such a big expansive topic that just requires, you know, it it's it's expanding, it's not contracting.

SPEAKER_02 21:21

And yet the plot in itself, like if you had to summarize the plot, you could do it in a sentence. Like in this new novel, it's just uh two teenagers are trying to rescue two horses. That's it. Well, right. But it's 1228 pages.

SPEAKER_03 21:36

Right. Uh and depending on who you talk to, there's only seven of them that just get reiterated, right? So the question is how you interpret those plots. What does it mean that that happened? And you know, what happens along the way, the journey?

SPEAKER_02 21:49

Well, and that brings us right back to Moby Dick, because that's exactly here. Like you could say, you could summarize the plot in one sentence, and you would totally lose the whole point of what this book is. So I guess what Walk us through it. Like, what is the basic plot? But of course, like what are the complexities we should be looking for? And like, what is going on, even?

SPEAKER_03 22:10

Well, the basic plot is it's a it's a journey, right? Like of the seven plots, the the big journey is the sort of bare bones of it. Uh so it starts in Nantucket with Ishmael, the famous call me Ishmael, which there's no reason to think that he is Ishmael, right? He just say call me Ishmael, which of course has all those biblical associations with it, uh, where he's like joining a whaling ship because, as the part you read at the beginning, he wants to see the world. He's got an itch, right? And this is so American, and it's so American male too, right? Like, I can't, Aunt Sally, she's gonna civilize me. I've been there before and I can't stand it. You know, I gotta be on the river, I gotta, I gotta be on the road. If you're Jack Kerouac, I mean, this is a theme that I've had to visit and revisit because it's so deeply American male. And so to get on this ship, have adventures, and seeking, having a purpose, like their ostensible purpose is to do commercial whaling, right? To get the oil and the stuff from the whales. But you've soon discovered that their real purpose is Captain Ahab, who has been injured by this great white whale called Moby Dick and wants vengeance on it. He wants to vanquish this whale, and that is the plot. And you know, if you everybody knows what happens at the end, but I won't go into it. Just read it for yourself.

SPEAKER_02 23:38

So walk us a little bit more through these characters because they're really rich characters. Part of the wealth of this book is that you have this development.

SPEAKER_03 23:47

Yes. Well, in fact, one could argue, since I've said that the great theme of Melville is how you read, how you read other people, how individual people read other people, you know, because they're different. We're all different. Um, in fact, we might want to get to that issue right away because it's so central. But um, Ishmael is the narrator, and he is, like Henry James said, the novelist should be the person on whom nothing is lost. So it's pretty clear that he is, it's not autobiographical, but he is Melville, right? I mean, he's the narrator, he's the one who sees, he's the one who understands, or who's trying to report what's going on. I'm not saying he understands it all, but he knows what he doesn't know, right? And he meets Queequeg at the very beginning, who is this lovable cannibal. Just don't know how to describe him. And these opening scenes are just so charming where there's no place to sleep in this inn. So he has to go in bed with this guy. And of course, now everyone's arguing about homoeroticism and all that, but it's just really very much like with the weirdness of finding yourself suddenly bedfellows with a person who becomes a friend of yours. Uh, you know, and it's it's he is Queakwag is such an interesting person because you don't get much under the surface of him to Melville's credit, because it's not like he's going to be able to take somebody Polynesian and figure out the in inner workings of this person. So, but you do get into the inner workings of Ahab, the captain who has just gone crazy, and the inner workings of Stubb and Starbuck. And I just had a little funny moment where I was like, well, I'm glad Starbucks went for Starbucks than Stubbs. I think Stubbs might sell a little fewer cups of coffee than Starbucks, but but uh you do learn that they have very different personalities, and they are sort of like, okay, Captain, you know, whatever, and have different experiences on the ship of the same things that everybody experiences. And then you got the character Pip, who is an African American boy who ends up like tossed overboard, and they barely rescue him, and then it it messes his with his head a little bit, and and then he plays a big role in the debloon chapter that I was talking about. So should we talk about the doubloon chapter? Go for it, yes. Yes. Um famously uh it's about reading, and it it's a chapter, it's chapter 100. So it's it's deep in there. But Ahab has taken this doubloon from uh I believe it's from Ecuador, and it is what the person who spies the whale will receive. So it's like payment for finding the white whale, because this is all that matters to to Captain Ahab. So they've he's pinned it up on the mast, and so it's like a reminder, this is what you get if you find if you cite this whale. Well, the scene is everybody comes in and takes a look at this tabloon, and Ahab looks at it, and I'll just turn to it here and show you what he says because it's really important. And he sees all of these scenes in the coin, you know, like there's mountains and other stuff. There's it's a it's a coin that's very elaborate. And he pauses, Ahab does before it, and this is what he says. There's something ever egotistical in mountaintops and towers and all other grand and lofty things. Look here, three peaks as proud as Lucifer, the firm tower, that is Ahab, the volcano, that is Ahab, the courageous, the undaunted, and victorious foul, that too is Ahab. All are Ahab. And this round goal is but the image, gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician's glass, to each and every man in turn, but mirrors back his own mysterious self. Okay. Narcissistic, romantic, capital R romantic, like the whole world is just sort of reflecting my own egotistical, you know, view on it. And that's what Melville wants us to see. Because the other shipmen, they look on it too, and they don't see the same things. And one person just sees what it could translate in terms of the number of cigars that he could buy with it if he got, you know. So it's like, I think that's the character flask who has that experience. And then Pip comes around and looks at, he's been seeing all these interpreters, and this is what Melville calls them, and and Ishmael says, myself included, and says, I look, you look, he looks, we look, ye look, they look. And everyone's looking at it and all reads something, something different inside of it. This, that in again, you can't say in a nutshell, but that is Melville's great theme. Um that the text of the world and the text of things that are inscrutable and mysterious, some people try to control it, and they they do that to their doom.

SPEAKER_02 28:54

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SPEAKER_00 29:35

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SPEAKER_02 30:31

So much of this also reads like humor.

SPEAKER_03 30:34

Oh, it's very funny. Oh my goodness. The most people don't realize how funny Moby Dick means. And I certainly didn't the first time I read it, because you know, I as a young undergraduate studying English, you're just trying to make sense of the whole of the whole, you know, and you can't get the humor until you start to, oh my goodness, Ahab's hilarious.

SPEAKER_02 30:54

He is. But also just Melville, it seems like almost like a practical joke that so much of the book almost feels like a practical joke he's playing on the reader.

SPEAKER_03 31:03

It is a practical joke he's playing on the reader. And the reason why that's such an important thing to recognize is that Melville, remember, I was talking about this dark underside of American optimism. American optimism can be called naivete and has been called naivete by Melville. He wrote a book called The Confidence Man, and that's the term for con man, that is super important to understanding this critique of American naivete and narcissism, right? Because if you're self-centered, then you think everything's about you, it's also going to give you a certain naivete. And by the way, if you're really interested in this issue, Jeff Bilbro, um, who you might know, has written a book called Words for Conviviality that that talks about this theme. And he, of course, talks about Melville quite a bit. So that misreading a situation because of your own biases, your own prejudices, and your own needs will cause a downfall, you know, every single time, will cause you to be taken. And so he's trying to show you that. And okay, another another great example. In fact, I didn't, I've never taught Moby Dick in its entirety because it would take up too much of my syllabus. And I taught surveys, American surveys, that you start with the Native American texts and go up to the Civil War. You can't fit that in. So I would teach Benito Sereno, which is a short story by Melville that is I I really think every American should read Benito Sereno. Okay, so even over Moby Dick, because people don't have time for things like Moby Dick. But this, if I could just for a moment explain the scenario in Benito Sereno, it's a captain of a ship, his name is Captain Delano, and he's American, and he runs into another ship that's a slave ship. And he can't really understand what's going on because he's reading it through his American eyes and not being able to understand, not being able to question appearances. Okay. The slaves have taken over the ship and they are threatening the actual ship uh captain. And and he can't figure it out. And it's it's a book about how we fail to read situations for what they really are, which by the way was one of Henry James's big themes as well. That Americans are gullible. Right? Especially when you got these ancient cultures that are wrapped into it. You know, so oh those Italians, they're so cool. Yeah, this one is manipulating you, you know, kind of thing.

SPEAKER_02 33:39

So in the mix of all of this, all of the inside jokes and kind of um manipulating the reader a little, but also this incredible character development, we also have a whole bunch of Setology chapters, like all things to do with whale science, if you will. So can you explain like what is going on here? Is this another part of like making fun of the reader?

SPEAKER_03 34:02

Yeah, yes, it it's that. Um, but I have come to also think that the point of all of that, especially the opening etymology, and then you, you know, everyone, the first line of the novel is not call me Ishmael, right? Everyone thinks it is. That's the first line of the narration.

unknown 34:22

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 34:22

It's really this etymology. So he goes back and says, here's where the word whale has been used. Here's where it came from, and then other quotations that feature the word whale, and then the CD, the Catholic chapters, all the insides, the descriptions, the outside of a whale, whatever. What Melville is saying is like you take the biggest physical thing that there is, the biggest physical living thing that there is, because dinosaurs no longer exist, right? And that's a whale. And it's biblical, the Leviathan. And you try you want to say something about it. As soon as you say something about it, you're saying all of these other things that have been said about it. Okay, which this is basic literary theory that we get to in the modern period with Saussure and people like that. And that's why the doubloon is so important too, because language is like that. It just as soon as you signify one thing, you signify all of the other things that that word has signified in the past. So that when you say whale, you don't just get to say whale and mean this whale. All of the other whales that have ever been written about, and all of the physical descriptions, they all are a part of whale. Do you see what I'm saying? So it's like it's not just the physical description, it's not just the metaphysical description, and it's not just uh what you can say about it now, it's everything that's ever been said about it. And so now, and he knew this. Now, when we say whale, we think this, you know, and and it can't be otherwise until we culturally forget ourselves, right? And in which case that would be a problem too. And by the way, if you're interested in that problem of like you're your culture erasing, that's what Cormac McCarthy picks up from the questions that Melville raises, especially in a novel like The Road, where in the road the culture is kind of disappearing. You know, so once you don't have words for things that are connected to previous words spoken about it, or all that gets lost, then then you are lost too.

SPEAKER_02 36:27

So where does this put Ahab? Is he also a stand-in for something larger than just I think Ahab is um his tragic tragic flaw, if you will, is he's trying to control that which can't be controlled.

SPEAKER_03 36:46

Okay. So the book of Jonah is a really important part uh of this, where the idea that the whale swallows you, not the other way around, that's an important prelude. But also the book of Job, and arguably the book of Job more. Because what happens in the book of Job when Job is like, why is this stuff happening to me? blah, blah, blah, and the counselors are all giving him bad advice. What happens in chapter 38? God shows up and says, Where were you when da-da-da-da-da, and you can't control the Leviathan? Do you see? So it's like Ahab is trying, he doesn't, he didn't learn what you're supposed to learn from Job, that it's not under your control. You don't get to ultimately decide the meaning of your life to eliminate all of evil to, you know, whatever it is that you're trying to do. And if you do, you'll become obsessed with something that will only destroy you.

SPEAKER_02 37:45

So, what about Ishmael? What is he supposed to learn from all of this?

SPEAKER_03 37:49

Well, that, I think, is one of the things that he's supposed to learn. And and don't forget, he's the sole survivor, you know, of the crash of the Pequod. And that, of course, is an ancient trope. Everybody died, and I'm the only one who's here to tell the tale. Uh, and the tale is don't be Ahab, you know, uh, because you you can't control it. And it's so interesting because now, like I said, I've changed so much in the last 20 years, 15 or so, since I've read this book. And I've recently discovered the sociologist Hartman Rosa, who I absolutely adore, and he's talking about the uncontrollability of the world as one of the things we most have to learn about it. And modernism, and that's why I say this is a modern novel, because it talks about that moderns want to control the world, the thing that they can't do. Right. So, what does uh the desire, which is always illusory, uh to control the world lead to? It leads to your inability to experience resonance with it. You will have, you will be alienated from um anything that you could enjoy. Right? Alienated because you're always in opposition to, right? You're trying to control something, which you're also afraid of. Let me add fear into this, right? Fear is leads to the desire for control. Um, he's been hurt, he wants to control this thing, and that's why it's the white whale, too. There's an inscrutability to it, the mystery to it that's encapsulated in this whiteness of the whale. And so he's like, I've got to, I've got to make it smaller than it is so that I can be bigger than it. Not gonna work. It's always going to swallow you, it's always going to be bigger and inscrutable, and eventually your your smallness will be revealed, you know. Because when you think about it, we're so small as human beings. You know, you're you study history in the classics, you know, it's just like we're here for a blip. And um and to think that you can control it is just is is arrogance in the supreme. You know? Yeah. So it gets back to well-ordered anthropology. Right. It does get back to that, you know. But the controllability of the world, you know, it it it's it took me the language of of Rosa to help me to understand that it was depriving us of of something. It was depriving us of us, us of the ability to really enjoy, to feel love and unity and um uh going together. Like it's like about the ship of stake, going together to a good place rather than, you know, just one man's journey for control. I'm not meaning to sound like curtain political leaders, I just am accidentally. You know, it's like the the the this desire just is like put my stamp or my mark on on it, and uh it's it's a loss. It it makes us alienated. Yeah it robs us. So, okay, and this sperm there's a section in there where they're all dipping their hands into the sperm, the oil, and squeezing it, and it's this brotherhood chapter. That's what Ahab can never do. Because they're just like enjoying their connection together to this oil, just experiencing the oil for what it is rather than trying to control it in that moment. That's what Ahab can never experience.

SPEAKER_02 41:24

So let's talk about um just how masculine this novel is. You've mentioned that, and it is noticeable. And of course, whenever you have a novel about a ship, it is going to be very much a masculine adventure novel because no women were allowed there. So walk us through this.

SPEAKER_03 41:45

Well, of course, uh the women as important culture makers and people who are writing novels of their own importance in America were not really a part of it until later, right? I mean, you have Jane Austen and stuff in England, and Jane Austen's 250th birthday, so it's good to mention her. Yes. But even then, they they're sort of allowed certain subjects, right? And of course, the very great women novelists take those subjects and really work them up, right? Whereas men are allowed the big subjects, the big metaphysical, the big journeying, you know, uh uh subjects. And because they're considered to have the transcendent mind and the the woman has the imminent body, you know. And I I don't doubt that Melville had a little bit of that prejudice in him. That was a prejudice of the 19th century. I mean, it just it just was, you know. So, but he's going to be drawn to this a story that's allowed to be purely physical and metaphysical without any of the domestics' worries, like the worries about home and economy, which as a classicist, you know, that's a pretty big deal, right? With Odysseus going away from home and coming back to home, there's a kind of taming that goes on there that can signify a kind of a rest on an idea as well as uh physical rest. And he doesn't want that, right? He just wants it's like I I'm wanting more and more and more, and I want to explore more and more and more. So it's like, don't civilize me. I've been there before and I can't stand it. That I'm quoting Huckaberry Finn in case people don't have American literature dripping out of their veins like I do.

SPEAKER_02 43:32

Well, and that's another very masculine novel.

SPEAKER_03 43:35

Correct. And you know, there's a famous um nov uh book by a literary critic named Leslie Fielder. He was a massive critic uh of literature in the 70s and the 1970s. It's called Love and Death in the American Novel. And he basically makes the argument that all of American literature, and of course what it meant back then, it's different now, is this um. Desire of this male figure to always be free from responsibility and just go out into the world and make his own way. And women can have no part of it. Right. So if you map that on to Huckleberry Finn and um, I mean, they can have a part of it, but they have to come along for the ride. Like on On the Road by Jack Kerouac, the women just have to come along for the ride, or else you'll literally get left in a restaurant, you know, in Galena, Illinois, or something. So it's like this, it's um, it's they're in the way, if you will. They're a civilizing impulse that that we don't have any room for.

SPEAKER_02 44:38

And yet, as women, obviously, we can read these novels and really appreciate them.

SPEAKER_03 44:44

Oh, yeah. This has nothing to do with with it's it's it's a gendering, right? Yes. It's less, it's not sexism, it's more gendering. Uh by which I mean, you know, if you want to roughly call certain concepts masculine and roughly call certain concepts feminine, and I would be one who would do that. Um, you know, it's like this kind of outward focus is male, and the inward sort of womb-like, you know, because we are the ones who have to sustain and is is more female. So you get the womb and the road is the way that I describe it. So the womb is the metaphor of gendering something female and the road, you know, gendering something male. And both of these principles, yin-yang is another way to describe it, right? Energy and conservation, yes and no. Both of these prints, not one is not more important than the other, right? You need both. If you're saying yes all the time and you don't say no, you'll burn out. Uh, if you're saying no all the time and never say yes, you won't grow, right? So these are these are principles that I think are equally important spiritually. But they do get gendered, um, which is not to say that no woman ever feels this way and no man ever feels this way. It's just that they, that they, it's an easy way to describe what we're talking about. To gender it. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_02 46:00

Yes. And for some readers, especially when you're younger, like I've noticed this with my kids. Um, when my kids are younger, they gravitate towards novels that have, like for the boys, protagonists who are male. Uh, so my oldest son had a really hard time when he was a teen reading any novels that did not have male protagonists or did not have strong male protagonists. And when we're older, it's easier to just kind of take a book for what it is. And so I would encourage readers who perhaps like if you tried picking up Moby Dick before and you thought, I can't relate to it, try, try it in middle age. It's really just different.

SPEAKER_03 46:37

Yes, and not yeah, that's absolutely great advice. And not only that, I mean, there is a way in which the English novel had to catch up with its readers because its readers have primarily been young women who are just like, what would happen if I marry Mr. Darcy? Is the way that that I put it, you know. And they're young women have always been expected to read and get things out of novels written by male protagonists, but men, it's not the same, it doesn't transfer the same way. For for whatever reason, cultural upbringing, whatever it is, men are just not as likely to go to to read female protagonist stories.

SPEAKER_02 47:16

Although I'm hoping it's it's true, yes. And uh there have been all these articles over the past year, even how men read fewer novels, period.

SPEAKER_03 47:24

Period. Correct, correct. So, I mean, of course, inside of this question and this issue, you've got the interesting question of, well, whatever it takes to get a guy to read, let's do that. You know, but then like, can we also say that, you know, part of what the novel does is build empathy for other perspectives, and you need to get inside of an actual woman, not a woman written by Hemingway. You know, you need to get inside and find out what a woman might actually think, you know, about this. And that's an important task. But first you've got to get them reading, and that requires identification with the protagonist. So you might start with something like uh Ender's Game, you know, for young men who uh I don't know if you've read Ender's Game.

SPEAKER_02 48:10

No.

SPEAKER_03 48:10

Um, you know, our Orson Scott Card. I have a sci-fi thing that's kind of an important thing to me. And uh, and that's a great young male protagonist uh and a good thing to get people interested in reading, and then you build from there, right? So it's always about how do you get somebody to read.

SPEAKER_02 48:26

Yeah. I am encouraged uh to see just over the past few months, perhaps because of Jane Austen's 250th birthday, several really great pieces about Jane Austen, even by men. So it seems like they're reading.

SPEAKER_03 48:40

Oh, yes, they definitely are. And of course, in the academy, right? We've long addressed this question, like back in the late 80s, is I mean, when I went to college, is when that was when I was in college. That was when it was really happening. You know, it was just like exploding. You're reading more uh, for lack of a better word, female masterpieces, you know, like The Awakening by Kate Chopin and things in American literature that weren't just Emily Dickinson and uh Virginia Wolf. And, you know, but like, okay, we've got to find their eyes are watching God, we've got to find these other texts that are that are doing this work. And it hasn't been that long since we've allowed that. And then you open up the question of just because it's not a classic or um high literature in the sense of uh what we're talking about here, where you can revisit and get all these issues out of it, doesn't mean it's not worth reading for the cultural work it did, which of course is the sentimental fiction like Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Nobody I know who would say that that's like worthy of the same kind of study that Moby Dick is, but it's studied because of the cultural work that it did, you know, which was huge.

SPEAKER_02 49:49

Yeah. And I actually did uh there was a podcast episode about it uh that will air as well. Yeah. Okay, yes. Because it was a 19th century. Because I just found out about this podcast. No, no, no. And it's not out yet. It will be out as part of this same season. So um it was a 19th century bestseller.

SPEAKER_03 50:08

Yes, it was. It is. And and of course, then you've got people like Hawthorne saying that damn mob of scribbling women, you know, it's like if you make a lot of money, it couldn't possibly be good. You know, uh, kind of uh bias against that. And and all that changed in the Academy in the 1980s, where we're just like, no, these are important texts, these are doing important cultural work, and we're going to study and read them for that reason. Not alone, but yeah.

SPEAKER_02 50:37

So let's talk a little bit more about reception, because you've you've hinted at that, that when Melville first wrote this book, it kind of landed like a lead balloon.

SPEAKER_03 50:47

It landed like a lead balloon, like a lot of books before their time, right? Yeah. Books that uh people are not in a position to really understand. Because if if Bilbro is right in his thesis, and I think he is, and I've identified reading culture and texts as Melville's primary theme, and arrogance, uh, Americans are arrogant and gullible and interesting combinations and don't think they need the past. All of those things can conspire together for them to just be like, what is the point of this? You know, I wanted to go on an adventure. Take me on an adventure. I don't want deep philosophical ramblings into the nature of epistemology, you know. So they they uh they can't appreciate it. Uh but even, you know, but I think Hawthorne did. I mean, Hawthorne and Melville were friends, and um, Melville was younger than Hawthorne and really admired Hawthorne quite a bit. And like I said, they're of that sort of non-transcendentalist group um in in uh in early American and 19th century American life.

SPEAKER_02 51:59

So that's striking. So do you think longer classics in general just have a harder time finding their readers now?

SPEAKER_03 52:08

That is an interesting question because if it's a classic and people go, Oh, oh yeah, of course, everyone knows Moby Dick, right? No, there's not a single person who doesn't know the title Moby Dick. Well, okay, I shouldn't say that. I really shouldn't say that. Very few. Most Americans could name the scarlet letter Moby Dick, right, off the top of their head, uh, either because it was inflicted on them in high school or just it it caught through culture somehow like Shakespeare did. That the knowing about it and sitting down to read it are two different things. Yes. Right. And one of my big themes is we are being taught, one of my things that I write about, is that we are being taught by our culture, by our digital internet, AI culture to read for information. When large books, you're not reading them for information. You're reading them for transformative experience that requires a bigger book to dive down deep inside of to fully get. So I said a mouthful there, but let's go back to the overstory by Richard Powers. The overstory tells in part the story of a ch the loss of the American chestnut tree. I can sit and tell you, Nadia, there used to be an American chestnut tree back in the 1840s. I don't know if you knew this, and then it died of it. It died of um, it became extinct. It like it got a disease. And so if you grow it at a chestnut, an American chestnut tree in the United States, it will eventually die. And that is like awful, but you will have no emotion about it until you read this 600-page novel, where by the end you'll be just like, that is an incredible loss. We lost this tree, you know, this this tree that we will never have again. So so it takes the experience of the reading of it to see alongside of the writer and what he or she is trying to teach us. So I think the size is prohibitive, and that's a problem. Um, it doesn't mean we should not read it. It means that we should should really start to be a little bit more careful with our digital hygiene, stop the scroll and feed the soul, as I want to say, you know. What can we do? Turn off the TV, like you don't, you're saying you don't have a TV in your house. I'm like, allelujah. You know, I mean I watch TV all the time, so I could never do that. So do what Nadia does, not what I do. But it's like be we excuse, we make excuses for not having the time to read a larger novel because of the distraction, our distractions that are constantly around us. But there are certain things that can only be gotten from a larger novel.

SPEAKER_02 54:54

Yeah. And I find that it's one of those habits you train yourself into if you read longer books. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 55:03

It is a muscle. It's a muscle of attention. And and so it's not only it takes that muscle, but it builds that muscle, as you said. So um we we read it less and less, and then we're able less and less to read it.

SPEAKER_02 55:16

And that's because we're not training it. But that's in some ways also the good news because if you start retraining yourself.

SPEAKER_03 55:23

Correct. Never too old to build muscle, and never too old to build that muscle of sitting down and and reading. And in ironically enough, or whatever, like social media things like Substack, it I've been sort of putting on my page a hub of all the different reading groups that are on Substack all over the world. A lot in England, a lot in the United States that are doing slow readings of these longer books. Simon Hazel out of England, he does this reading of War and Peace and the Hillary Mantle novels. And there's just a lot of of desire because we recognize we've been deprived. Uh, and and in instead of just saying, Oh, I need to, I went to the Grand Canyon, check, here's a photo of it. Oh, I read War and Peace, check, I need to slow down, and maybe there's something inside of this that is actually transformative for me.

SPEAKER_02 56:16

I love that. So, to conclude with the usual question, we always end with what is a classic book that you wish you had written and why?

SPEAKER_03 56:28

Well, the classic book, I'm gonna cheat a little bit, you know, because most people think of a novel when they think of the classic book or you know, epic poem like Paradise Lost or something like that. Um but I I want to take over the 1,774 poems of Emily Dickinson. It's just like if I could have written anything, I mean, I she is I don't even I I I become speechless talking about how important she is to me and the way that I think about literature, about poetry, about life, um, about wisdom, uh, you know, about seeing the world uh the way it is, um, but also using your imagination to understand that there are things you can only understand by power of your imagination. She's where it's at.

SPEAKER_02 57:16

I love it. Thank you so much, Christina.

SPEAKER_03 57:19

Yes, my pleasure.