Moby-Dick: The World's First Imperial-Gothic Novel?

Illustration from H. Rider Haggard's The Ivory Child (1916).

Today it's no great revelation that Melville uses a number of typically Gothic elements in Moby-Dick.  There's even a Yahoo! Answers answer on the subject.  Back in 1949, Newton Arvin -- a far greater authority than any of us anonymous Internet wayfarers -- wrote a highly readable article on Melville's Gothic touches, "Melville and the Gothic Novel" (New England Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 1, 33-48 [available at JSTOR with free registration]). As Arvin observed, Melville's imagination was "profoundly Romantic, in one of the largest senses of the word, ... and to say so is to say, especially for an English or American writer, that the Gothic or Radcliffean was almost certain to be a minor ingredient in its complex totality."

Consider, for instance, the (usually female) protagonist who slowly begins to realize, with ever increasing dread, that she has become caught in the power of a man both tyrannical and malevolent.  For post-Moby-Dick examples, think of Laura Fairlie in The Woman in White (1859) or Maud Ruthyn in Uncle Silas (1864) or Jonathan Harker in the first four chapters of Dracula (1897).  In Moby-Dick, Ishmael's misgivings about the voyage and about Captain Ahab in particular slowly accumulate as he considers the "wicked king" who bore Ahab's name, the dark hints from Elijah, and other red flags.  By the time Ishmael's fears are confirmed in "The Quarter-Deck" (Ch. 36), he has effectively no escape from Ahab's grasp.

(Critics have noted the overall passivity of Jonathan Harker -- a male narrator filling the Gothic role of the young maidenly heroine around whom older, stronger figures are spinning their webs.  In one of Dracula's most memorable scenes, Harker lies supine at the mercy of three predatory females, fearing and desiring their kisses/bites.  Interestingly, the passivity of the mild-mannered Ishmael, another male narrator in the role of the Gothic heroine, becomes explicit in his relations with Queequeg. Awaking in bed with the thoroughly masculine Queequeg's arm around him, Ishmael acquiesces in the embrace, and later he figuratively becomes Queequeg's wife.  And in both narrators, their passivity is abetted by the vulnerability of their positions as employees -- Harker the young solicitor who wants to please a rich client, Ishmael the lowly greenhand put upon by mates and captain.)

While Moby-Dick carried forward much of the Gothic machinery developed in the previous century by Ann Radcliffe and others, it also paved the way for what is sometimes termed Imperial Gothic.  Imperial Gothic is a sub-genre that flourished around the end of the nineteenth century.  It is best exemplified by the lost-world fantasy-adventures of Conan Doyle and H. Rider Haggard, in which intrepid explorers venture beyond the farthest reaches of the English Empire, into such as-yet-unexplored regions as central Africa, and there confront "the Other" in the form of prehistoric peoples, dinosaurs, giant crabs, witches, and supernaturally vicious elephants and apes.

A modern example of the Imperial Gothic form that will be more familiar than Conan Doyle's and Rider Haggard's ripping late-Victorian yarns is the 1933 film King Kong.  Following the standard structure, the film uses the trip to a distant, uncharted location to instill in the audience Gothic terror -- i.e., the fear of the unknown, of an evil that is sensed but cannot (yet) be fully articulated.  From the start, we are given hints that the protagonists are on their way toward something horrifying: movie director Carl Denham, famous for wildlife films made at great personal risk, is outfitting for his greatest undertaking yet; he's been having trouble finding any actress willing to appear in the film; the ship he's chartered is loaded with enough explosives and ammunition to blow up New York harbor; the island he's headed for is not shown on any map, its only inhabited portion cut off from the rest by a gigantic wall built centuries ago by a people far more civilized than the current natives -- evidently to "keep something out."

Melville did much the same thing 80 years earlier.  The United States at the time did not have an empire strictly speaking, but whalemen were the pioneers of its commercial empire in the Pacific, as Ishmael explains in "The Advocate" (Ch. 24).  The Pequod travels to the farthest ocean wastes to encounter Moby-Dick, the unnatural, the monster, the Gothic horror.  Like the scriptwriters for King Kong, Melville builds up in his audience a fear of the approaching unknown.  The monstrous painting in the entry of the Spouter-Inn, the cenotaphs in the Seamen's Bethel, the backstory of Ahab's disfigurement and ensuing delirium, the spirit-spout, all the sidebars about the great size and strength of the sperm whale and the dangers involved in hunting it -- these are just a handful of ways in which Melville creates dread in the reader as the Pequod sails farther from the safe world of civilized America and closer to the deadly clash with Moby-Dick.

Moby-Dick Written in the Style of White-Jacket

White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of War is, needless to say, Melville's fifth book and the one that immediately preceded Moby-Dick.  Some critic somewhere (Newton Arvin perhaps?) characterized White-Jacket as not fiction, but journalism.  Whoever said that, it's a fair characterization -- the book is, at least on its surface, a straightforward account of Melville's experiences serving on the USS United States in 1843-44, lightly dramatized and padded out with stories he'd picked up from other sailors and with some editorializing about the U.S. Navy (including his celebrated condemnation of flogging).

Only a year after White-Jacket's appearance (in 1850), Melville gave the world Moby-Dick.  I'm sure no one interested in the New Bedford MDM has to be told that the two books are as different as night and day. Or maybe distant thunder vs. lightning just outside your window would be a truer contrast.

It is widely believed, I think, that Moby-Dick started out as another White-Jacket, this time set on a whaler and with a bit more excitement to improve sales.  But along the way -- as happened with Mardi (1849) and Pierre (1852) -- something in Melville took over, and the work was transformed.

Yet what if Melville had been able to stick to the White-Jacket formula?  What would a "journalistic" Moby-Dick be like?  You can get a rough idea by reading Nimrod of the Sea; or, The American Whaleman.  Published in 1874 and now readily available on the Internet, Nimrod is a memoir by William M. Davis (1815-91) of his voyage on the whaler Chelsea in 1834-38.   It is based on a journal Davis kept intermittently during the voyage, but (as he explains) he fleshes that out with "the experiences and adventures of others, such as I have been enabled to pick up in the form of yarns on board the Chelsea," incorporating "the experiences of a quarter of a century."

Nimrod describes countless details of the work that whale hunting and processing involved (many of which will be familiar to Moby-Dick fans) and aspects of the whaleman's life in the Pacific that Moby-Dick doesn't touch (such as stopping at the Galapagos Islands for tortoises that would later be killed for fresh meat at sea, and dealing with the "land sharks" who inhabited barely civilized ports on the west coast of South America).  And Davis recounts the conclusion of the hunt, the demolition of the try-works (when its bricks were joyously thrown overboard), and the return home -- topics that Moby-Dick doesn't get into, for obvious reasons.

While Davis doesn't mention Moby-Dick or Melville anywhere in his memoir, he has a few passages so reminiscent of the earlier work that it's hard to imagine he hadn't read it.  One example is the semi-erotic "spermaceti bath," when Davis and his mates use their bodies to process the material from the "case" in the sperm whale's head:

With our hands blistered yesterday by the oar, and all on fire to-day by the harsh friction of the handspike, it was luxurious to wade deep in the try-pots filled with this odorous unguent, in order to squeeze and strain out the fibres, which, if allowed to remain, would char with the heat, and darken the oil. No king of earth, even Solomon in all his glory, could command such a bath. I almost fell in love with the touch of my own poor legs, as I stroked the precious ointment from the skin.

Another example is the cautious, halting way in which the mates go to dine with the captain:

The steward comes up the companion-way, and touching his greasy Scotch cap, announces, "Captain B----, dinner is on." "All right;" and the captain takes a turn by the binnacle, if we are running a course, and peeps at the compass. Then in the companion-way, on his way down he stops, takes a long look at the sails, and, as it were, a last farewell of the light of heaven. "Mr. F----, dinner is on." "Ay, ay, sir," says the mate, as he strolls to weather-deck. Now Mr. F---- takes a shorter peep at the compass, and, pausing in the companion, he, too, takes his upward survey. The two other mates go through precisely the same performance, only according to their respective ranks they take yet shorter peeps at the compass and glance heavenward. They then arrive simultaneously at the table, to find the captain and Mr. F---- leisurely in their second plateful. Now, the misery of the arrangement is in this: the officers must come up in reversed order -- third, second, first mate, and lastly the captain. A third mate has thus only about seven and a half moments to dispose of his grub. The old man last of all appears on deck, picking his satisfied teeth in the most tantalizing manner, and the four boat-steerers next make a dash for the table, and make clean sweep of the remnants.

Don't those descriptions sound familiar! 

Unlike Moby-Dick, Nimrod doesn't involve a white whale or a stove ship (although Davis does provide a yarn about the sinking of the Nantucket whaler Union after being rammed by a whale).  Also unlike Moby-Dick, Nimrod does include illustrations -- quite a few, and quite detailed.  If some of them look familiar, it's probably because you've seen them in the commentary at the end of the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick (with appropriate credit, of course).

(For the details on William Davis, thanks to Honore Forster's annotated bibliography on 19th-century whaling in the Pacific, The South Sea Whaler, published in 1985 by the Kendall Whaling Museum, Sharon, Mass., and Edward J. Lefkowicz, Inc., Fairhaven, Mass.)

A Very Early Posthumous Assessment of Melville

William Gilmore Simms

Every Melville fan has a basic idea of the arc of his career and the critical reception of his work. It goes something like this: Melville achieved early fame with his first book, Typee (1846), after which he entered upon a slow, steady, life-long decline into obscurity. By the time of his death, he was barely a footnote even in the minds of professional critics. His greatest work, Moby-Dick, was little appreciated when it was published and for some 70 years thereafter. But then, in the late 1910s, Moby-Dick was rediscovered and finally began to be recognized as the masterwork it is. The low point of Melville's literary standing can easily be exaggerated, however. This struck me recently when I was reading an old biography of the South Carolina novelist, poet, playwright, controversialist, and mad Secessionist William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870). The biography, by William P. Trent (an English professor at Columbia), was published by Houghton, Mifflin in 1892 -- the year after Melville's death. In a work of that vintage, I never expected to come across a reference to Melville. But there it was, in Trent's closing evaluation of Simms's output. Trent asks (at pg. 329) whether Edgar Allan Poe was right "when he ranked Simms above the herd of American romancers, just after [James Fenimore] Cooper and [Charles] Brockden Brown." In Trent's opinion, Poe was right:

With regard to romancers like Dr. [Robert Montgomery] Bird, [John Pendleton] Kennedy, and [James K.] Paulding, to say nothing of writers like Miss [Catherine] Sedgwick or Dr. [William Starbuck] Mayo or Melville, Poe would appear to have stated Simms's position correctly. Both with regard to quantity as well as quality of work [Simms] is their superior. His style at its best is not inferior to theirs, and with none of them is it safe to make much question of style. He was more frequently slipshod than they, but that is all that can be said in their favor. In imaginative vigor, in power of description, in the faculty of giving movement to his stories, he leaves them behind. He strikes one as being a born writer, a professional; their works read like those of amateurs.

When I first read this passage, I thought Trent couldn't possibly mean our Melville. Who spared a thought for Melville in 1892? But the book's index confirms that, yes, he means Herman Melville. And I'll take Melville's amateurism over Simms's professionalism any day.

Virtual Stump the Scholars

Lucretius?

A couple of years ago, I came up with what I thought would be a great question for the annual Stump the Scholars session at the MDM. Because that question never was used (and probably is too long to ever be used), I'll post it here for anyone who might care to take a shot at it:

This question relates to an image employed by Melville to capture the appearance of sunlight.

In their critical edition of On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura) by the Roman poet Lucretius, the classical scholars William Ellery Leonard (who was himself a poet) and Stanley Barney Smith compared an image used by Lucretius to similar images in a poem by Rudyard Kipling, a poem by A. E. Housman, and Moby-Dick. I will provide below a translation of what Lucretius wrote and then the comparable lines from Kipling and Housman, and my question will be, What metaphor did Melville use in Moby-Dick to describe something similar?

First, this is Lucretius:

Neither the spokes of the sun nor the shining spears of day

can dispel the fearful shadows from our soul,

but only the face and law of Nature.

The image that Leonard and Smith focused on is "the shining spears of day." They compared it to these lines by Kipling:

Far to Southward they wheel and glance,

The million molten spears of morn

And they also compared it to these lines by Housman:

And where the light in lances

Across the mead was laid

The question is: What metaphor did Melville use that is comparable to "the shining spears of day," "the million molten spears of morn," and "the light in lances"? Extra credit if you know what chapter it's in.

One hint: It's not "harpoons." That would be way too easy. But it is an edged weapon.

Another hint: He uses the same metaphor once to describe the spouts of a herd of sperm whales.

Gift idea! (even if it's for yourself)

Released this year: Melville Biography,
An Inside Narrative

For the Melvillian on your list is this unclassifiable tome by Hershel Parker: Melville Biography, An Inside Narrative.

"Unclassifiable" because it is part autobiography, part rebuttal of his critics, part explication of his approach to biography, part continuation of his monumental Melville biography.

More than that I hesitate to say—because I've only just started reading it, and because my ignorance in these matters is vast. For a real review, see this one by Carl Rollyson, himself an accomplished biographer. (You may need a Wall St. Journal account to load the review. I was able to view it once; no longer. If you have access to back issues, it's in the 3/29/2013 WSJ.) A slightly condensed version of Rollyson's review is here, about halfway down the page.

I can tell you that it is interesting reading. (Be sure to read the Notes in the back, too.) 

Occupy Johnny Cake Hill

From Chasing the White Whale, David Dowling's examination of the MDM:

...the all-night feature of the Moby-Dick Marathon reading functions not as an eccentric solipsistic dare so much as a way to collectively expose the cultural anxiety about the death of literature, the death of reading great works unabridged, sans Cliff's Notes, summaries, digital or online shortcuts of any sort. In this light, the New Bedford reading functions almost like a sit-in protest [emphasis mine] against the technological threat posed to the love of long, difficult literature and the patience, endurance, and long attention span it demands.

The death of literature, the erosion of human potential by technology; and our collective struggle against these forces... Here's that clip again:

"Mentally ill"

Searching the online catalog of my local library for a PlayAway (something like a pre-loaded MP3 player) to accompany my geezer-walks, a listing for Moby-Dick jumped out. Scanning the entry, I was struck by the phrase "mentally ill" as one of ten keywords (keyphrases?) for our beloved text.

My metaphorical knickers began to twist themselves...

I can't blame the esteemed staff of the Minuteman Library System—clicking a link at the bottom of the webpage, it appears that these online entries are generated by Syndetic Solutions, a division of R.R. Bowker, LLC. This "service"... 

...gives libraries more than 40 million unique, descriptive data elements relating to books, audio books, videos, CDs, and DVDs, which deliver richer, more informative results and create a significantly better catalog search experience.

A wise man once told me, "Everything that does something for you, does something to you." Syndetics spares libraries the task of summarizing M-D by distilling it for them to: an "epic saga," a "heroic conflict between man and his fate," that deals with the psychology of a whaling ship captain who is mentally ill.

You call that a "better catalog search experience"? Feh!

Was Ahab mentally ill, or merely "obsessed"? Was he manic-depressive (bipolar), as David Dowling outlines in Chasing the White Whale (p;146)? How about Starbuck, who comes close to murder? Or Ishmael, who ships out to avert suicide?

Wendy Stallard Flory writes (as quoted by Dowling), "No romance writer has dramatized the experience of manic-depressive mood swings more comprehensively than Melville in Moby-Dick." Flory sees the other characters in M-D embodying ways of dealing with manic-depression: Starbuck through conscious will, Stubb and Flask through "substance abuse," over-indulgence, and willful ignorance. The anti-Ahab, the "integrated personality," is Queequeg.

So, sure—M-D about mental illness. It's also about the tension between capital and labor, ambergris, and whale anatomy; but would you expect to see "Marxism," "perfume," or "cetology" among the top ten keyphrases?

A review of M-D on Amazon is emblazoned on my memory. Under the headline, Do NOT Read This Book, an aggrieved student's précis was: "Boringest book ever!"  Now there's a keyphrase for Syndetics, though none of us M-D devotees would concur.

Years ago, I fell into a discussion with a colleague about one of the Jasper Johns "target" paintings. At one point he looked at his watch and said, "We've just spent 45 minutes talking about it. We could do that because it's Art." I'd bet that most Marathon attendees share the feeling that the more you look into M-D, the more there is to discover. You think you have a good grasp on it until you hear someone like Wyn Kelley field audience questions during "Stump the Scholars."

To reduce a work as substantial and multifaceted as M-D to a list of search terms is not an easy matter. But "mentally ill" would not be in my top ten.

Would it be in yours?

Many Books in One

According to Robert Finch in the introduction to The Norton Book of Nature Writing, "no less a nature writer than Annie Dillard has called [Moby-Dick] 'the best book ever written about nature.'"  It may seem odd at first to view a book about killing whales as nature writing, but in view of "Cetology," "The Grand Armada," etc., Dillard's claim makes sense.

Indeed, Moby-Dick can be considered "the best book ever written" about a lot of things.  Depending on which chapters you turn to, it's:


- A ripping sea story.

- A psychological drama.

- A philosophical novel.

- A meditation on religion.

- A book about ships and the days of sail.

- An in-depth study of an industry.

- An exploration of the life of the working man.

- A travelogue.

There are probably others I'm forgetting.

During the marathon, I sometimes amuse myself by wondering which aspect of Moby-Dick attracts the people around me.  There are the aging environmentalists and the emo youths; the culture vultures, subclass bohemian, and the culture vulture, subclass bourgeois.   There are haunted souls draped in black, doughy book nuts in sweatpants and untucked shirts, and autodidact laborers whose New England accents you could cut with a knife.  And maybe even a Marxist academic faux-laborer in a blue workshirt and steel-toed boots.  Nevertheless, we all get along and take pleasure in the mix.

Ahab and the Village of Morality

It's common to view Melville more as a proto-modern than as a writer of his time. The lack of interest his masterpiece attracted until the twentieth century, when it quickly became seen as one of the peaks of American literature, certainly suggests that Melville was specially attuned to what would be the concerns of a post-Great War, post-Darwin, post-Freud world. His antipathy toward Christian missionary work in the South Pacific, and his relative openness to the native island cultures, further marks him in our minds as one of us, not one of them, those stiff and repressed men of the nineteenth century.

But we oversimplify his art if we ignore the Christian, and largely Calvinist, worldview that still saturated the United States of his day.  There's no question, of course, that Melville knew his Bible.  He also appears to have had some familiarity with Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, which is included in the list of Melville's reading at the end of the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick (2d ed.).  Actually, it would be surprising if Melville were not familiar with Pilgrim's Progress, since every 19th-century Protestant who could read at all read Bunyan's allegory at least once (or it very often seems that way).

In any event, Moby-Dick maps with surprising ease to the Calvinist theology taught by Pilgrim's Progress.  Moby-Dick invites the reader to consider why Ahab and all the crew except Ishmael die, while Ishmael lives.  In Christian imagery, death is damnation, while life is eternal life in the Kingdom of Heaven.  Further, under Calvinist theology, damnation is the ultimate fate of anyone who does not accept Jesus as Christ, the Savior and Redeemer.

The episode in Pilgrim's Progress involving the Village of Morality provides one explanation for Ahab's damnation. Pilgrim's Progress tells the story of Christian as he struggles to make his way from the City of Destruction (the state of unrepentant man) to the Celestial City (heaven). Christian must begin his pilgrimage by passing through the "wicket gate," representing the individual's acceptance of Jesus Christ. On his way to the wicket gate, however, Christian is led astray by Mr. Worldly Wiseman, who persuades Christian that the path beyond the gate is needlessly dangerous, and that he can more easily and safely put himself right with God by going to the Village of Morality. Christian then heads toward the Village. But as he approaches it, he sees that the road leading into the Village passes close under a mountain that is rumbling and spitting fire. While Christian stands in the road, looking at the mountain and wondering whether it's safe to pass, Evangelist comes upon him. Evangelist (representing the Gospel) explains to Christian that he has been duped, that the Village of Morality offers no hope, and that he must proceed through the wicket gate if he wishes to gain eternal life.

The object of all this, from Bunyan's standpoint, is that mere morality can never be sufficient for reaching heaven.  God's moral law (represented by the fiery mountain) demands more than man is capable of.  Those who, like Mr. Worldly Wiseman, think they can be virtuous enough to be saved without Christ do not understand the superhuman demands of God's law.  Hence the importance of Jesus Christ: he offers forgiveness that enables man to reach Heaven despite man's inevitable failings.

It's possible to view Ahab coherently in these terms.  He (along with the crew he misled) was damned because he put his trust in the Village of Morality.  Instead of accepting God's morality and the need for Christ's mediation, Ahab relied upon his own morality.  And in doing so, he carries the error of Mr. Worldly Wiseman to its logical conclusion -- Ahab takes his human conception of morality as the standard for judging not only himself but also God.  He refuses to accept God unless God conforms to his mortal ideas of right and wrong.

Any interpretation of Moby-Dick that purports to explain why Ahab was damned is not complete unless it can also explain why Ishmael was saved.  One Christian explanation for Ishmael's salvation is his humility.  Unlike Ahab, Ishmael accepts his fallen state, his inescapable human frailty and ignorance.  He does not condemn God because God fails to arrange things to suit man's limited sense of fairness.

Another explanation, more strictly Calvinist, is that Ishmael was saved for reasons we can't hope to understand; all we know is that God's grace was given to him and not the others.  His salvation seems random to us because there is no cause-and-effect relationship between our conduct and God's saving grace.

Of course, while Melville was fascinated by metaphysical questions, he was not a religious author.  Ishmael does not find Jesus the way he would if his story had been handled by Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example.  But intentionally or not, as a thesis to be advanced or rebutted, Moby-Dick has a strong Christian thread running through it.

Masked and Maskless Men

In the first chapter of A Reader's Guide to Herman Melville, Prof. Miller identifies a theme that he believes inspired Melville throughout his writing career.  He rejects the view that Melville's central concerns changed dramatically from Typee to Billy Budd:

Heretofore [as of 1962] it has been customary to look at Melville's work as shifting from celebration to pessimism, or from faith to cynicism, or from defiance to acceptance.  This view, which assumes that Melville's books reflected his inner turmoil and conflicting moods at various stages of his life, emphasizes certain peaks of elation and valleys of despair.

[T]his peak-valley view is, if not incorrect, at least misleading....

Although I would not contend that Melville's entire work is one grand emotional monotone, I do desire to cast doubt on the extreme fluctuations now identified in the line of his artistic development. ... Instead of viewing Melville's work as a series of heights and depths, I wish to view it as essentially steady and straight in theme, though shifting radically in focus and form.  

Melville's art focused consistently on this question (as Miller expresses it): "What should be man's response to his situation in the universe, where evil is omnipresent and where man by the involuntary act of birth becomes inevitably involved?"  In answer -- notwithstanding "vital qualifications, extensions, reservations, all in the midst of deep probing" -- Melville "asserted the necessity of man to compromise with his ideals, frankly and without private or public deception, in order to come to terms with the world's evil and his own."

Melville rendered this question and his answer through "an extended drama of masks."  It may be diverting to portray how bad men mask their evil intentions, but what fascinated Melville was the "mask of innocence" that good men don unconsciously:  "[F]or the most apparently innocent may perpetrate the greatest evil.  It was Melville's finest achievement to plunge deep into men's souls and to surface with much that was barely visible to their own inner eye."

Contrasted with the masked characters are Melville's few "maskless men.... Their greatest claim to innocence, ironically, is that they do not don its mask.  They accept with equanimity their share of the world's guilt, trying neither to hide nor disclaim it." 

Finally, between the masked and the maskless are the "wanderers and seekers ... who must decide with what face to confront the world."  Among these Miller places Ishmael. 

"A Reader's Guide to Herman Melville"

It took me three tries before I finally succeeded in making it all the way through Moby-Dick.  If memory serves, I was 12-14 years old when I made my first two attempts (inspired by seeing the 1956 film version on TV).  Both times, I don't think I made it out of New Bedford.  By the time of my third attempt, I was a junior in high school.  My English teacher -- appropriately named Mrs. Fish -- required each of us to write a term paper on an American author selected from a list approved by (I presume) the school board.  We had to research our chosen author's life, read at least two of his or her books, and look into some of the relevant critical literature.

Title page to Syracuse's facsimile reprint

I chose Melville.  To aid me, I borrowed from the school library A Reader's Guide to Herman Melville, by James Edwin Miller, then-chairman of University of Nebraska's English Department.  Published in 1962, this was one in a series of "Reader's Guides" to various authors put out by Farrar, Straus and (it seems; information is sketchy) also distributed by Octagon Books and Thames & Hudson.  Another volume in the series, A Reader's Guide to James Joyce, came into my hands the following year and was still kicking around my parents' house as recently as 10 years ago. 

Recently, I returned to Miller's book to see how much of it, if anything, I retained after thirty-odd years.  It is now available in a paperback facsimile reprint by Syracuse University Press (with a new and very unappealing cover) and can also be found in Google books, surprisingly.

I did not retain much, as it turns out.  I can put my finger on only two things: Miller's map of the overall flow of Melville's output, and his interpretation of White Jacket's discarding his coat as an affirmation of "involvement" in the human condition.

"Something further may follow this Masquerade" -- tomorrow, perhaps.

Moby-Dick and Alien

The 1979 sci-fi film Alien was supposedly pitched to producers as "Jaws in space."  But in some ways it resembles Moby-Dick more than Jaws. 

Both Moby-Dick and Alien take place almost entirely aboard a commercial ship.  The Pequod is a whaler; the Nostromo a merchant vessel.  We enter into the shipboard lives of working crewmen -- people for whom sailing or space travel is just a job.  As their routine trip continues, however, both sets of crewmen discover that they have unwittingly signed up for something other than their jobs.  The men of the Pequod learn that they're serving their captain's plan of revenge, while the Nostromo's crew discover that they're being used as alien-bait by the military-industrial complex.*  Ultimately, both vessels are destroyed, and all the crewmen die but one, Ishmael and Ripley, who escape alone -- Ishmael on Queequeg's repurposed coffin, Ripley in the Nostromo's shuttle.

There is one enormous difference, of course: Moby-Dick, despite the earnest wishes of Hollywood producers and high-school boys, is really not a man-versus-monster story.  The whale, unlike the alien, belongs in our world.  Melville goes out of his way to impress upon us the plausibility of his narrative; we must not view it as "a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory" (Ch. XLV, "The Affidavit").  More importantly, if we believe anyone other than perhaps Ahab, Moby Dick is not out to get the humans.  The alien, on the other hand, will kill the humans if they don't kill it first.

That difference accounts in part for Moby-Dick's greater complexity, even in its stripped-down film version.  The questions Melville asks are not as simple as how to kill before being killed.  Does malice lie behind the forces of nature?  Should we blame Ahab for what happens to the Pequod and its crew?  Do men deserve punishment for daring to be proud?  Should we accept as fact that we are all slaves?  "Who ain't a slave?"  (Ch. I, "Loomings")

*Interestingly, the industrial-individual conflict is reversed in the two stories.  Ahab dies because he has deviated from the business purpose of his cruise, whereas Ripley survives by defying the business purpose laid out for her.  Indeed, one of the movie's most memorable scenes is when the Nostromo's crew destroys upper management's representative on the ship (an android, which would not be killed by the alien and would therefore "survive" to pilot the ship home).  This may say something about differences in how business was viewed in the late 20th century as opposed to the mid-19th.

What Do We Know about "Ishmael"?

During the "stump the experts" program that the New Bedford Whaling Museum held as part of this year's Moby-Dick marathon, one audience member posed a question premised on the assumption that Melville tells us nothing, "nada," about Ishmael.  The experts quickly corrected that assumption, however.  Melville does in fact tell us a number of things about his narrator, as the experts went on to demonstrate.

¶ He was a Presbyterian (Ch. X).  Interestingly, however, he says, "I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church" (emphasis added).   One is left wondering whether Ishmael had subsequently ceased to be a good Christian, or the past tense was used here simply in keeping with narrative convention.

¶ He had a stepmother, who was a stern disciplinarian (Ch. IV). 

¶ He strongly implies that he had been a schoolmaster shortly before going to sea in the Pequod (Ch. I).

¶ He had "repeatedly" sailed as a merchant sailor before signing aboard the Pequod (Ch. I; also Ch. XVI).

¶ He did not attend college -- "a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard" (Ch. XXIV).

¶ He was nearly destitute when he arrived in New Bedford, having only "a few pieces of silver" (Ch. II). 

¶ He was nevertheless a well-read and bookish fellow, as testified by his "Etymology" and "Extracts," by his use of book sizes for classifying whales (Ch. XXXII), by his numerous references to the works of other authors, and by his learned vocabulary and highly literate style.

¶ He traveled to the Arsacides (Ch. CII) and Lima (Ch. LIV).

¶ He "talked with Steelkilt since the death of Radney" (Ch. LIV).

¶ Finally, in telling his story, Ishmael reveals an enormous amount about his private fears, beliefs, doubts, and hopes.  He injects himself unhesitatingly into almost every topic he takes up; we are never permitted to forget for a moment that we're hearing this tale from a man who puts the unique stamp of his worldview on all he recounts. 

Denham Sutcliffe on Moby-Dick

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, the old Signet Classics edition of Moby-Dick included an "Afterword" by Denham Sutcliffe.  Sutcliffe was a Rhodes Scholar and, between 1946 and his death in 1964, a professor of English at Kenyon College. 

His Moby-Dick Afterword, a blessedly straightforward piece of literary criticism, begins with a useful caveat: don't etherealize the book.  "This is a sternly factual story of the men who fill leviathan with fish spears and pull him from the sea with hooks," he writes (alluding gently to the Book of Job).  Yes, Moby-Dick quivers and quakes with meanings below the surface.  But it's not an exercise in pure myth-making.  The work's greatness derives largely from the tensions and reflections between the deeper significances and the solid, prosaic subject matter: "It is not that things 'stand for' something else; they are inexorably themselves, but they begin to accrete meanings and associations."

Sutcliffe then provides examples of the multiple, often contradictory meanings that Melville saw in his world.  There's "Queequeg himself, undeniably a tattooed cannibal who peddles human heads, but who teaches Ishmael love and acceptance, and redeems him from his misanthropy."  There are the two sides of the ocean: "As we behold 'the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin,' we must not forget 'the tiger heart that pants beneath it.'"  And there is the whale: "The whale does not 'stand for' the beauty and terror and mystery of the Creation, but he strongly suggests them all, becomes their symbol.  The mystery, and above all, it must be said, the terror, predominate."

Focusing finally on Ahab, Sutcliffe points out his rejection of "mortal interindebtedness" and his chosen aloneness, so different from Ishmael and from Captain Boomer, of the Samuel Enderby, who was also  maimed by Moby Dick yet retained his sociability.  "Yet Ahab is a grand figure. He dwarfs the reconciled Boomer and all other characters in the book. ... If Ahab piles upon the hump of Moby Dick all evil, he takes upon himself all human sorrow; he propounds again Job's question whether this is a moral universe."

Sutcliffe acknowledges that his discussion "mark[s] out only one main line in this rich book," and he glances quickly at other lines of appreciation.  "Conclude from all this," he writes, "that we have here an American masterpiece, a book that rewards constant rereading[.]"

Was Herman Melville a Novelist?

Yes, that may sound like an awfully silly question.  "Of course Herman Melville was a novelist!" you might be thinking.  "What else could he have been?"

Please bear with me. Today, thanks partly to Melville, we're accustomed to thinking of the novel as a highly varied form.  In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses, Life: A User's Manual, and Gilead are all tossed into the "novel" category.  But the essence of the form, its prime examples, are the 19th-century mirrors of society -- books like Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, and Uncle Tom's Cabin.  These focused on realistic settings and plots, with stories driven by the interactions of fully developed characters.

We can look at Moby-Dick and find evidence of the foregoing items: realistic settings? yes; realistic plot? for the most part, yes; character-driven story? to a certain extent.   The answers need to be qualified because so much of Moby-Dick is not a novel.  Great stretches of it more closely resemble philosophy or natural history or even lexicography.  Moby-Dick the novel becomes engulfed in a kind of Reader's Guide to Moby-Dick.

In fact, I would argue that Melville never wrote anything that fits neatly in the novel class.  His first two books, Typee and its sequel, Omoo, were openly autobiographical (though scholars have since detected ways in which Typee uses published materials to embellish what Melville actually experienced).  His fourth and fifth books, Redburn and White Jacket, were lightly fictionalized autobiographical accounts.  In all four books, the plots are not much beyond "what happened to me when I lived with the headhunters/bummed around the South Pacific/first sailed in a merchantman/sailed in a U.S. frigate." 

Whenever Melville attempted to steer away from retellings of his own experiences, he could not bring himself to stick with the traditional novel form.  Mardi starts out comfortably enough as a sea story that brings Joseph Conrad to the modern reader's mind.  But somewhere in the middle, Melville abandons the blueprint he's been following and starts on an entirely different structure, giving us a series of social-political satires in the form of allegories.   Moby-Dick, while much more consistent and carefully planned than Mardi, nevertheless involves a similar massive non-novelistic superstructure resting upon a straightforward adventure story.  After Moby-Dick came Pierre, in which Melville's dissatisfaction with the traditional novel completely boils over.  What begins as a gothic romance in the style of Anne Radcliffe and Charles Brockden Brown turns into a homicidal (and suicidal) attack on popular literature, the publishing industry, and Pierre itself. 

Melville's remaining "novels" don't strengthen the case for Melville = novelist. The novelistic skeleton of Israel Potter was largely lifted from another source. The Confidence-Man, like the second half of Mardi, is a series of vignettes rather than a novel.  Finally, there's Billy Budd, which is barely long enough to qualify as a "real" novel.

One view is that Melville was, at heart, a poet.   He certainly had the talent.  But he also had a critic's drive to pick apart and reinterpret the world around him.  In that regard, he would have fit well with the great Victorian social critics, Carlyle, Macaulay, Arnold, and others.  Sadly, his lack of formal education unfitted him for that role.  He suffered as he struggled to find a mode of expression that would be both artistically satisfying and commercially successful.  That struggle produced at least one masterpiece and decades of agony.