To Sink or Swim

Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick may contain some of the most stunning prose poetry in the English language, but it also owes its status as a masterpiece to the fact that it is long and weird. Melville begins his opus with pages of epigraphs. He then launches into an unstable mixture of an adventure story, a psychological drama, and an overwhelmingly detailed account of nineteenth-century whaling techniques. With so much grist for the mill, academics have used the 1851 novel to discuss just about everything: the contradictions between American democracy and imperialism, the emergence of queer subjectivities, and the early expression of modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, or ecocriticism — take your pick.

At the risk of incurring the wrath of Melville enthusiasts worldwide, I’d venture to say that much of Moby-Dick is more fun to think about than to read. I smuggle it into mandatory literature courses by assigning exactly two chapters: the first one...