Melville and Madness

In the fourth of his lectures, Milch starts off with more Kierkegaard, but having made his point, goes off on a tangent about Herman Melville that turns into a graduate seminar:

• Melville the simple travel writer who gives us simple tales of the Pacific, whaling, and pretty island girls.
  
• Melville who in his early career is a big success.
  
• Melville whose greatest work, Moby Dick, is a hopelessly boring novel, cataloging in excruciatingly dull detail every aspect of the whaling business, its tools, rituals, and practices.
  
• The average reader hates it. But feels guilty for hating it. And just wants to finish it so they can read something else!
  
• And why? In order to get to the good stuff, Melville must ground you in that world. He must demonstrate without a doubt that the madness of Ahab and the great White Whale spring only from the unknowable heart of the captain of and the uncontrollable violence of the oceans and the sea. The book is nearly impossible to read because Melville must convince you that Ahab's obsession is his own, and that it goes beyond the rational.
• With the closing chapters, that's what you get. An epic, biblical battle of man and beast.
  
• But, with Moby Dick, Melville himself seems to lose his ability to see the relationship between ideas and things. He abandons logic and his every sentence destroys itself with contradiction and irrationality. He has become alienated from those impulses that made for safe, popular fiction.
• Until, that is, late in life he rediscovers the ability of imaginative association and writes Billy Budd.
  

It's a fascinating reading of the work, and as I am still reading Moby Dick (having for years shared that same guilt over never having finished it) I found it encouraging and look forward to the Chase, First Day when Ahab and the Whale take center stage.