Tom McCarthy in The Yale Review:
A day or so after agreeing to give a talk about Moby-Dick to mark that novel’s 175th anniversary, I awoke from a dream of my own, the details of which escape me, but which prompted me, at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., to jot down an outline for my lecture under the heading “The Indefinite Sublime.” “Look,” I said on Zoom the next day to my friend Sina Najafi, editor of the wonderful Cabinet magazine. “I’ve got Moby-Dick mapped out on a single sheet of paper. “That’s nothing,” he replied. “I’ve got it on an envelope.”
He held the latter to the camera; it was white and entirely blank. My version turned out to be bullshit, but Sina’s was bang on the money. Moby-Dick, despite being crammed with larger-than-life figures (the manic and hubristic Captain Ahab, scouring the world’s oceans for the beast that’s bitten off his leg; the gentle-giant harpooner Queequeg, who declares himself married to Ishmael, the melancholically philosophical narrator, after they share a bed at the Spouter Inn in the whaling town of New Bedford; the whaling ship Pequod’s conflicted mates Starbuck and Stubb; the multinational, multiracial crew they oversee), is nonetheless a book that’s full of blanks.
More here.
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