Fast-fish and loose-fish: teaching Melville's Moby-Dick in the college classroom.(Critical Essay)

If my own experience teaching at a large state university is at all representative, most high school graduates have never read Moby-Dick. (1) Of the 497 undergraduates to whom I have taught the book over the past thirteen years, only 19, or 3.8 percent, had previously read it. A number of factors, I believe, lie behind these unhappy statistics. First, they reflect an anti-canonical bias that has filtered down from the academy to high school teachers over the past several decades. Although scholars have generally dealt with the complexities of canon formation in a reasonable manner, the indirect effect of these discussions on non-scholars has sometimes led to the reductive notion that canonical books, especially those by "dead, white men," have, at best, little relevance, and are at worst pernicious. Second, many high school teachers perceive insurmountable difficulties in teaching a book like Moby-Dick to students whose small attention spans are increasingly determined by video games, music videos, and shopping mall culture. (It should be stressed that this is more a perception than a reality.) The same view is held by many college teachers; for instance, in our department, Moby-Dick has been taught to undergraduates only once in the past ten years by a faculty member other than myself. (2) But the problem is much greater in high schools, in which, for some time, there has been a reluctance to assign long and complex books of any sort, especially novels. The percentage of my students who have read even such accessible texts as The Scarlet Letter, The Awakening, or The Great Gatsby--or any novel by Melville, Stowe, James, Dreiser, Wharton, Cather, or Faulkner--every year drops noticeably. (The one exception seems to be Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain's magnificent critique of racism that, in the hands of teachers who know nothing of the minstrel mask, the African-American double consciousness, symbolic historical representations, slave narratives, or Reconstruction, is mis-taught in a way that enforces racist attitudes in white students and causes pain to African-American students.) (3) Last, given an increasing lack of knowledge, among both teachers and students, of the many intertexts of Moby-Dick (e.g., Shakespeare, the Bible, Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, political thought, and history), much of the allusive charm and philosophical depth of this particular novel eludes its would-be readers, rendering it but an interminable narrative by a talkative oddball about an angry guy who chases a big fish.

Even those few students who have read Moby-Dick in high school have encountered problems that have, for the most part, ruined the experience for them. Many teachers adopt what I would call a Dead Poet's Society attitude toward the rhetorical situation of Moby-Dick in the high school classroom, in the presumption that they are teaching serious classic literature ("litrachure") to an unappreciative audience. Equally problematic, these same arbiters of literary taste usually do not understand the very classic they adore. Of my nineteen students who read Moby-Dick in high school, seventeen were taught either that Ahab represents "good" and the whale "evil," or that Ahab represents "evil" and the whale "good." Melville himself might have smiled at the delicious irony of readers who, despite his overt warning, view his novel as "an intolerable allegory" (Ch. 45) (4) and cannot rise above the perspectives of Ahab and Gabriel respectively, or he might have despaired that most adhere to the perspective of Flask and seek nothing more spiritually rewarding than a good cigar. Nevertheless the difficulties of teaching Moby-Dick in the college classroom remain, whether students are coming to it for the first or second time.

How, then, can we successfully teach Moby-Dick to undergraduates, and what constitutes "success" in such an endeavor? At the end of each term, I ask students in my course entitled "Great American Books" to rate the seven books we have read, on a scale from one to ten with ten being the highest, according to three categories: how much did you enjoy reading the book? how rewarding do you feel reading the book was? are you glad, in retrospect, to have read the book? Moby-Dick receives a median score of five in the first category, with roughly six of thirty-two students giving it a nine or a ten; but it receives median scores of eight in the second category and nearly nine in the third. What this means is that most students tend to look on it with respect and feel good about having read it, whether or not they found their first reading enjoyable. And a handful of students end up falling in love with it. These responses are not as enheartening as those garnered by, say, Huck Finn, The House of Mirth, Their Eyes Were Watching God, White Noise, or Beloved, but I consider them, along with similarly mixed responses to Absalom, Absalom!, a sign of success. They certainly dispel any notion of the unteachability of today's students, and, in light of those students who do become fast-fish for life, which paradoxically makes them loose-fish in other ways, if you reach one student you reach a world. (5)

In 1994, Paul Lauter persuasively argued that Melville's rise from academic obscurity to a central place in the canon during the 1920s and 1930s was tied to the preference of (male) modernist critics for difficult texts that confirmed their own cultural authority. Over time, he states, "the dominant critical position became ... to test a reader's worthiness by his or her responses to Melville" (1994, 15). Yet, he notes, the literary qualities that initially drew critics and teachers to Melville are the very qualities that are most likely to alienate students, who tend to feel humiliated by Melville's mannered prose and dense web of allusions. He concludes: "I think my students' distaste for Melville needs to be understood in this context. For them, the modernist preference for difficult, indeed obscure, texts is no virtue; it may, in fact, reflect a process deeply inflected by class standards, whose effect is to marginalize them culturally" (19). I find Professor Lauter's analysis of his students' response to Melville's texts intriguing, but it also raises several questions as well. Why, for instance, do so many students in the South respond so enthusiastically to Faulkner? Can this be merely some sort of regional chauvinism? Why is Shakespeare so popular on college campuses? Does this have something to do with the many film adaptations of his plays? And why do so many of my own students, who are overwhelmingly from working class or farming backgrounds (many of them are the first members of their families to attend college), end up both understanding and respecting Moby-Dick rather than feeling humiliated by it? In other words, although I think Professor Lauter's analysis makes sense, I also think that he would agree that it identifies a problem that can be solved rather than a pedagogical venture that is doomed to failure. It is the purpose of this essay to suggest some ways by which this can be successfully accomplished. (6)

In four or five weeks you cannot explore everything, but you can give students a rich first encounter with Melville and Moby-Dick that will be valuable in itself and that will lead many of them to return to it in the future. To do this, I would like to suggest three strategies that I have found effective. The first has to do with getting students into the book. It includes demystifying the author who seems to peer down upon them in contempt like one of Hawthorne's dour ancestors, demystifying the text as some unapproachable icon of high literary culture, demystifying the classroom that for most of their lives has grown into an accepted if resented site of their oppression, and emphasizing such "hooks" as Ishmael's voice, Melville's humor, the character of Queequeg, and the hermeneutic code of Ahab. The second strategy is to develop and distribute a question-guide for them to consult as they read, a guide that will focus their reading and make it more productive. The third strategy is to use the symbolic field of binary oppositions that emerges from Moby-Dick as a way of exploring the indeterminacy of the text in class discussions.

Because most students approach reading Moby-Dick with reluctance or dread, expecting either to be bored or overwhelmed, it is crucial to inspire enthusiasm and build up momentum from the start, in the shore and early sea chapters, before they find themselves buried in whale blubber and metaphysics in the second half of the novel. There are a number of ways of doing this. First, present them with some Melville biography: how his father's bankruptcy and death left the family in dire financial straits; how he first took to sea when he was about their age; how he jumped ship in the Marquesas, was later sent ashore as a mutineer, and enlisted in the navy; how, after early fame, his greatest novel was deemed a failure; and how he descended into…