I have decided to take a year and read Moby-Dick closely and in great detail, to really reflect upon what appears on the page, and to see what intrigues and challenges me. My primary goal is to read it from cover to cover, although I am also going to skip about as I see fit. Some chapters will be read again and again. Some chapters will be engaged by bringing them to life.
I imagine eating clam chowder and relating my experience to that of Ishmael and Queequeg eating their clam and cod chowders at the Try Pots in Chapter 15, "Chowder." I hope to spend some of the season of Christmas at the ocean, much as Ishmael and his shipmates spend their "short, cold Christmas" "broad upon the wintry ocean" in Chapter 22, "Merry Christmas."
I hope to make hardtack at home. I hope to visit the Working Waterfront Maritime Museum in Tacoma. I hope to visit the Karpeles Manuscript Museum (also in Tacoma). I hope to visit a tall ship, and perhaps ride on one. I hope to be able to taste whale blubber.
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My interest in reading Moby-Dick once again was piqued by the Dalkey Archive's Summer 2009/Vol. XXIX issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction. This special fiction issue is dedicated to Herman Melville's ; or The Whale, an extract edition of Moby-Dick. It is nearly 400 pages of text that was left out of the Moby-Dick in Half the Time abridged version. It is weirdly enticing to read every paragraph, word, and punctuation mark left out of Moby-Dick during its abridgment.
This play with the text led me to realize that there are three full versions of Moby-Dick—an American edition, first published in 1851 by Harper & Brothers in New York; a British edition, first published in 1851 by Richard Bentley in London, which differs due to revisions of both Melville and Bentley; and the Northwestern-Newberry scholarly edition, first published in 1988, which "created" a new text by trying to determine what would have been the actual corrections and revisions that Melville himself would have made, but ultimately resulted in a new version of the book formed by using bits and pieces from both the American and British versions.
Needless to say, I now have at least four versions of Moby-Dick floating about the home library.
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The name of this year-long reading project, "Cutting In," comes from the chapter of the same name (Chapter 67). This brief chapter describes the crew of the Pequod cutting in to the carcass of a recently captured whale and dissecting it into its component parts. It seemed an apt metaphor for what I find myself doing to the text as I read and reflect and reread. Therefore, "Cutting In" it is.
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I hope you will embark on this journey with me as I engage this great and sprawling mess of a novel in its various incarnations.
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