The White Whale
Andrew Bertaina
For a long time, he went through life without having read Moby Dick. For most people, this was just the natural state of things, an absence where a book should be. But he wasn’t most people. He had an undergraduate degree in literature and a graduate degree in creative writing. He understood that he probably should have read Moby Dick, understood his lack of reading it as a personal failing. During graduate school, he’d even read a long book about whales, their brains, their historical significance to different cultures. Naturally, the book mentioned Moby Dick extensively, and he felt that it was as close as he’d been to actually reading Moby Dick.
Once, he’d scheduled a coffee date with another graduate student. This student was a graduate student of literature, not creative writing, which meant that the other graduate student had read Moby Dick. The express purpose of the meeting was for the other graduate student to talk him into reading Moby Dick. The other graduate student walked him through the significance of Melvilles’s masterpiece: the adventure, the science, the significance for understanding the American project or maybe even God. The other graduate student paced while he was talking, rising excitedly from the wooden bench they sat on to talk about Ahab and the white whale.
Unfortunately, the graduate student in creative writing was a lot like the rest of the people in his creative writing cohort. He was less interested in the symbolism of the whale, in the historical significance of the novel for the project of American literature. No. Like everyone else in the program, he couldn’t stop thinking about his own novel, which he hoped one day would be ranked alongside a novel like Moby Dick, which, though he hadn’t read it, and probably wouldn’t, he accepted as a sort of model for what his fiction might one day be. He was untroubled by the irony.
So, as the other graduate student spoke, so excited about Moby Dick that it almost brought about that same excitement in the listener, the creative writing student wasn’t really listening. Rather, his excitement was building for a more significant project, which he quietly considered, the idea of his novel, of how it would be received. And it ran beneath their conversation as a great Leviathan beneath the ship, his desire to be a writer as great as Melville, who he’d never read.
Once, he’d scheduled a coffee date with another graduate student. This student was a graduate student of literature, not creative writing, which meant that the other graduate student had read Moby Dick. The express purpose of the meeting was for the other graduate student to talk him into reading Moby Dick. The other graduate student walked him through the significance of Melvilles’s masterpiece: the adventure, the science, the significance for understanding the American project or maybe even God. The other graduate student paced while he was talking, rising excitedly from the wooden bench they sat on to talk about Ahab and the white whale.
Unfortunately, the graduate student in creative writing was a lot like the rest of the people in his creative writing cohort. He was less interested in the symbolism of the whale, in the historical significance of the novel for the project of American literature. No. Like everyone else in the program, he couldn’t stop thinking about his own novel, which he hoped one day would be ranked alongside a novel like Moby Dick, which, though he hadn’t read it, and probably wouldn’t, he accepted as a sort of model for what his fiction might one day be. He was untroubled by the irony.
So, as the other graduate student spoke, so excited about Moby Dick that it almost brought about that same excitement in the listener, the creative writing student wasn’t really listening. Rather, his excitement was building for a more significant project, which he quietly considered, the idea of his novel, of how it would be received. And it ran beneath their conversation as a great Leviathan beneath the ship, his desire to be a writer as great as Melville, who he’d never read.
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Andrew Bertaina is the author of the short story collection One Person Away From You (2021), which won the Moon City Short Fiction Award, and the forthcoming essay collection, The Body is a Temporary Gathering Place (Autofocus). His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Witness Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Orion, and The Best American Poetry. He has an MFA from American University in Washington, DC.
Twitter: @AndrewBertaina Instagram: andrew_bertaina |
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