Moby Dick: A Book Before It's Time

At the time of publication, Melville only sold 500 copies of Moby Dick in the UK compared to 6,700 copies of his first book Typee; although it sold fairer in the US with 3,215 copies, it still sold less than four previous books by him (source). Considering how famous the book is now, what is something Ishmael is doing that gets his every day journal entries, random rantings, and mini lectures so many views? Perhaps it isn't the book itself finally getting credit where it's due, but in this day of age the readers have adapted to the book's style. To put in layman's terms: Ishmael is actually a first edition blogger.

We are used to reading the stylistic structures of Moby Dick because it is how bloggers type today. If a blogger is deeply invested in a topic, say cetology for example, that blogger would dedicate at least one entire chapter 32 post as much as he could going on and on about how whales are classified, what they look like, how whalers hunt them, and so on. There is personality to the writing. His first "blog post" introduces him as Ishmael, who's feeling a bit melancholy, "having little or no money in [his] purse, and nothing particular to interest" him (pg 1). He plays with different formats and updates his blog as the book continues (chapter 36 introduces stage directions such as "[ENTER AHAB: THEN, ALL]," chapter 37 has Ahab's soliloquy, chapters 38 and 39 have monologues by Starbuck and Stubb).

Where am I getting at? Successful writing depends on the media. In this case, Ishmael needed to write his account of The Pequod in blogger format in order for his readers to see his journey as clearly as possible, to display his emotional investment in his journey, to show his relationships with his crew mates to the point where readers are wondering if everyone is blind or crazy or all of the above. It needs to be a complete account too. I was looking on Twitter under #mobydick and found one article in The Atlantic tweeted by +Megan Garber about how Moby Dick was initially received with entire sections missing. These missing sections, says a reviewer in the London Spectator, turn the "most ambitious book ever conceived by an American writer" into a "rhapsody run mad...it repels the reader instead of attracting him." The ending kills not only Ahab and his crew boat "but the Pequod herself sinks with all on board." They didn't have the epilogue. So no one even knew Ishmael survived. Not only does this demonstrate the importance of cataloging the entire account, but it shows that by taking out the creator behind of the content, the content falls apart. But back to media. Why does Ishmael have to write as a blogger? What would happen to Moby Dick if it was written using different media?

I mentioned in my posts concerning Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and most recently my prewriting post for our final project that the medium used to create and curate different content changes the meaning of that content. McLuhan argues over and over that by changing the media or technology used to produce information, the information itself changes from hot to cool media and vice versa. Changing the form of words from written to digital was something McLuhan studied intently but also feared. Here with Moby Dick, I want to show examples of how McLuhan was right to some extent. Changing the medium used to portray written words will change the meaning.

On Twitter I found an account called @mobydickatsea that tweets Moby Dick in one line quotes at a time:

By reading the one line quotes, we don't get a full understanding of the novel. We don't feel the arrogance of Ishmael and how much he knows. We don't see the madness of Ahab as clearly. We don't even know who is saying what or what page number to reference from these tweets. But what do these one liners do? Some can be funny, like the "methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death." Perhaps reading Moby Dick in this sense puts a more philosophical outlook. You only read one sentence at a time. It can be interpreted as something like an obscure quote you find from Aristotle that is left to interpretation. What about images though? Another twitter account called @MobyDickInPictures has a picture for every page of Moby Dick. There are page numbers and a quote to go with it. This gives us a better image (no pun intended) of what is happening in terms of the story. Plus, there are visual aids to help readers see what is happening at the same time. How does that make our understanding and reading of Moby Dick different with pictures than simply reading text? It puts images in our head instead of leaving it up to us to envision entirely. Then there's the argument these pictures are abstract. Perhaps it detracts from the reading by giving confusing pictures as a side story. Either way, the media provides different interpretations of the text because it is changing the content it focuses on.

Then we have YouTube (the curation tool I've been researching most recently in this post) where I said authors must put themselves out there in the digital world to be noticed. Ishmael put out his story to the world for people to notice him. Here we have a full movie version of Moby Dick, which like the twitter account with pictures it adds visualization to the book, but it also has edits made by the man uploading himself. He took out the color and added a 16:9 TV aspect ration to improve the quality of the motion picture. How does viewing the book make the story different? Films edit what's said in books all the time. How does changing the view from color to black and white affect the tone of the story? How are you viewing this differently from everything else mentioned above? Because you are seeing Moby Dick differently with each different medium used. The content changes with each new tool used to express the content that comes from one source.

+Mary Wright Layton suggested that exploring how the same content changes with different mediums would be an interesting experiment because I can get people's reactions to each of the different versions of Moby Dick. So what are your reactions? Do you think you would get the same meanings out of Melville's book by seeing it in different forms of media? Does it matter? Should we explore all different types of media for the same content in order to get these different perspectives? +Greg Bayles also mentioned in a comment from the same post that "a lot of the problems in the world exist simply because we haven't learned to appreciate the content (truth) that we already have." I think that's a really great point. But does putting the content we already have in written format change when we make it digital, no matter how much we try to just revitalize the written word without changing the meaning? Maybe the change is inevitable. Maybe that's okay. Maybe there's a way to mitigate that change so the content from written word won't be altered in its transfer to digital worlds. If Ishmael was a born blogger, then maybe putting his book in a blog won't change the meaning so much so that we have to be afraid of making written content digital.