H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e1 2 0for example.) And this makes the business of determining a literary
work’s meaning rather more arduous.
If works of literature were simply historical reports, we might be
able to decide what they meant by reconstructing the historical
situations from which they arose. But they are clearly not. They
have a looser relation to their original conditions than that. Moby-
Dick is not a sociological treatise on the American whaling industry.
The novel draws on that context to fashion an imaginative world,
but the significance of that world is not confined to it. This is not
necessarily to suggest that the book is detached from its historical
situation in a way that makes it universal in its appeal. There may
well be civilisations that would not get much out of it. Some group
of people in the distant future might find it incomprehensible, or
tedious in the extreme. They might consider that having your leg
chewed off by an enormous white whale is unbelievably boring,
and thus not fit material for fiction. Could a future civilisation also
find Horace’s odes or Montaigne’s essays tedious and unintelli-
gible? Perhaps that future has already arrived, to some extent
at least.
We do not know whether Melville’s work is of universal interest
because we have not reached the end of history yet, despite the
best efforts of some of our political leaders. Nor have we consulted
the Dinka or Tuareg on the matter. We do know, however, that
calling Moby- Dick a novel means among other things that it is
intended to say something about what we might broadly call
‘moral’ issues. I mean by this not ethical codes or religious prohibi-
tions, but questions of human feelings, actions and ideas. Moby-
Dick is trying to tell us something about guilt, evil, desire and
psychosis, not just about blubber and harpoons, and not just some-
thing about nineteenth- century America.