Reading Moby Dick in a Night: The Humanities at Harvard

I remember a white whale and the name Ahab, both decontextualized. It was at around 9:30pm on a Wednesday when I sat down at my desk, curled up in a blanket, and read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. A chapter in, I set aside my physical book and turned to a free version of the text online. I scrolled and scrolled until the words blurred. I finished skimming the book just in time for class the next morning when I stumbled into seminar along with my six classmates. All of us had just read what is arguably American literature’s most esteemed text in a single night.
Fumbling our way through the discussion, we misunderstood major plot points and mixed up the characters. Queequeg, Ahab, and Ishmael, all rather prominent presences within the work, became “his friend,” “the captain,” and “the narrator.” We leapt over important and edifying details and focused on themes and sweeping generalizations about the prose. By posing questions like “Is that scene homo-erotic?” and overanalyzing the secondary source we had also been assigned, we got through the seminar. The class was over and we never mentioned Moby Dick again.
My experience of plowing through Moby Dick reveals problems deeper than procrastination. We shouldn’t have discussed the book in one class session and we shouldn’t have been able to get away with reading it the night before. However, in the humanities, we read at least a book per week per class, and along with it criticism, historical contextualizations, and newspaper articles. After two hours, some of which is spent clarifying plot points or random historical or literary events, we move on. Week after week we make conclusions about masterworks like White Noise, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and The Big Money with little consideration. Most of the time, these conclusions are inevitably superficial.
As an American History and Literature concentrator, I’ve read many books important to the American canon. However, I wouldn’t necessarily call myself well-read. To understand and connect with a text, I need more than a couple days of reading. Real reading means time to process and reflect on a word-to-word level, but this sort of reading is impossible with four or more books on the weekly reading list. Because of the relentless pace of humanities courses, students don’t truly learn the books they’ve read, or worse, they don’t read them at all.
The problem then becomes balancing the important standard of strenuous work with a slower-paced syllabus. This means coursework that demands a detailed knowledge of the book and rejects contribution from those that have not engaged with the text. This means knowing seemingly trivial but extremely telling details like the number of lightbulbs in the narrator’s basement apartment in Invisible Man or the color of Cecilia’s dress in The Virgin Suicides.
In high school English, we dedicated an entire term to reading Hamlet. The first week, we read the whole play. Then, we spent a day on each scene, tearing the pages out from the book and pasting them on printer paper for more room for margin notes. Our teacher expected us to research all references and to pick up on all connotations. By the end of the term, I knew Hamlet exponentially better than my initial reading. However, I also knew that we could have spent two more terms re-reading the play, and still had more to learn.
Appreciating that level of analysis and placing that type of value on a work informs my current opinions on the way Harvard approaches the humanities. If a group of high schoolers could commit to a term-long reading of a 400-page play, Harvard students can and should commit to a similar level of diligent reading. This requires action from both professors and students. Professors must fashion syllabi that emphasize focused and detailed study while students should apply a higher level of accountability to their reading and contribution to discussion. While I do not advocate that humanities courses spend a term on a single book, texts like Moby Dick are owed more than a cursory reading. In order to understand and appreciate literature, students need the time—time to learn, time to consider, and time to fashion their own opinions.