Edinburgh International Book Festival: Stuart Kelly on Moby-Dick

It shouldn’t be possible to get the breadth and depth of a Great American Novel into 90 minutes, but with Stuart Kelly at the helm of the seminar, we just about did it with Moby-Dick. He was unassumingly erudite and completely at ease with the text – ranging freely over it, one minute plunging into its depths for a quote, drawing out the broader patterns the next. Who knew, for instance, that the word ‘hieroglyph’ turns up with unusual frequency? And that the activity of deciphering hieroglyphs and marks runs from the tattoos of Ishmael’s shipmate Queequeg to the scars on the whale himself. The book is deeply concerned with signs and meanings: Melville invites you to interpret everything he says, and then he rebukes you for doing so. Ishmael balks at the idea that some might find in Moby-Dick ‘a hideous and detestable allegory’ – it’s a book about a whale, you ignorant landsman.

It’s a book about industry, too – the whaling ship is on a mission for oil, used to light the factories and thereby extend the working day. The ship is the sharp point of a process that makes capitalism more efficient. It’s also a factory in itself, a floating whale dismemberer, and there is a lot in the book about what it means to become part of the machine.

The language has all the drama and emotion of Shakespeare, and all the scientific exactness of Thomas Carlisle. It reaches beyond and around itself in ways that seem startlingly modern (we took a brief diversion into French literary theory, then tacked back to how funny Melville can be), but it also joins in the ancient urge to catalogue the known world. Binding this great rambling unruly thing together are patterns of imagery and metaphor: one a pattern of loomings, threads, and interweaving – a way of connecting things but maintaining their distinction. The other pattern of imagery is all about melting, smelting, and welding – processes where differences are absolved into the machinery of modernity.

There was more too – enough to make me want to dive straight back into university, or at least book six months off and read everything all at once – but then we had to finish, the time was up, and we left. If you can make it to a writers’ retreat in this series, you must go.