The name of Melville's notorious whale was suggested to derive from the name of a real-life sperm whale, Mocha Dick. The first part of the name is after the island of Mocha, located off Chile's southern coast; the second part is a generic name often used to call deadly whales, as cited by Melville in Chapter 45 of Moby-Dick. Like the fictional whale, Mocha Dick escaped capture several times and ferociously attacked whaler ships and their crews (8).
Herman Melville's Moby-Dick holds a distinctive position in the American literary tradition that no other work can match. Andrew Delbanco, a Melville biographer, points out, [Other] writers were kept alive mainly as classroom assignments; but Melville is different: he is a living presence in the larger culture (1, p 12). Who has not heard of Moby-Dick's infamous opening line, Call me Ishmael? From political satire to the name of seaside restaurants, Moby-Dick references are ubiquitous. Yet despite Moby-Dick's current, solid position in the American canon and culture, during the book's early publication in 1851, it was in danger of being lost to obscurity. The book was received, at best, by mixed reviews (7,8). Melville's 19th century readers found it a disappointing follow-up to his earlier works, Typee and Omoo, light-hearted accounts of young Melville's adventures to the tropical Marquesas and Polynesian Islands. Moby-Dick's experimental, digressive composition, which combined cetological learning, philosophy, poetry, bawdy humor, and Shakespearean soliloquies, was lost on the 19th century audience, who was accustomed to a unified narrative.
In writing Moby-Dick, Melville attempted a narrative altogether different than what he had written before and he was aware of the possible consequences. In a letter written to his friend and contemporary, Richard Henry Dana, dated May 1850, he expressed some doubts:
It will be a strange book, tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a maple tree;-& to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing must be as ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves (4, p. xiv).
He feared his experiment to combine a factual discourse on cetology with philosophical speculations on humanity was in danger of becoming an ungainly catastrophe. Later, in June 1851, he expressed in a letter to his friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, What I most feel moved to write, that is banned,-it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot (4, xi). Melville knew that his writing about whaling would go against 19th century sensibilities. It was assumed that readers were mainly modest young ladies, who were unaccustomed to sailors' vulgarity (1). He faced the dilemma of writing to please his audience or writing for the sake of writing. This could not have been an easy decision as Melville's life was burdened with financial woes. As expressed in his letter, ultimately, Melville bravely chose to write what he felt moved to write, despite its potential financial consequence. Unfortunately, the book's reception turned out as Melville feared: parts of the book were indeed banned and it was unprofitable. Moby-Dick's first printed version was subjected to further revisions and censorship by the publisher, who expurgated certain passages without Melville's consent. In Melville's lifetime, Moby-Dick's total sales reached only $556.37 and it was last reprinted in 1876 (1,8).
Moby-Dick marked a decline in Melville's career as a writer, though he continued to write short-stories, poems, and novels until his death. In 1891, he passed away without ever knowing of his eventual fame. The novel was not widely appreciated until a revival of 19th century writings in the 1920s. Moby-Dick finally took its place in the canon in the 1940s, nearly a century after its first publication.
Many critics attribute the book's initial failure and late success to Melville's precocious modernity (1, p 10). In the words of Delbanco, Moby-Dick was a work of a twentieth-century imagination (1, p 175). Had Melville been born a hundred years later, he would have enjoyed the book's tremendous success. Recognizing Melville as a man far ahead of his time, D.H. Lawrence called him a futurist long before futurism and E.M. Forster described Melville's Moby-Dick as a prophetic song (1, p 11). His experiment with mixed forms and stream of consciousness narration, more similar to the mode of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, predated the 20th century period of experimentation known as Modernism (2). He was a century ahead of his time, distinctively different from the writers of his era, the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose styles were more closely aligned with 19th century Romanticism.
What makes Melville so different from his colleagues? One theory purports that Melville's writing reflects his eclectic background and influences (3). He came from a genteel family, but his father squandered the family's fortune and passed away early, leaving his mother as the sole provider for eight children. As a result, their family was in constant debt and Melville was deprived of his class' upbringing. At the age of 19, Melville took to exploring the seas as a cabin boy and later boarded a whaling ship. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael claims, a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard (4, p 93), a point that is also applicable to Melville. Without a formal education, Melville gained his general education from the seas and his literary knowledge from being a voracious reader and essentially becoming an autodidact. One critic contends that when Melville wrote Moby-Dick, he was in a state of intellectual frenzy that was inspired by his readings: the more Melville read the more he wanted to find a way of writing that would enable him to meld together all that he found valuable in other works (4, xi). Moby-Dick was partly a melding of Melville's extensive reading list, which included the Bible, Plutarch, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Browne, Milton, Pope, Goldsmith, Jefferson, Rabelais, and many others, partly drawn from his experiences at sea, and partly a daring experiment to look for philosophy in whales [and] poetry in blubber (6,8).
The result of Melville's aspirations is the emblematic tale of Captain Ahab's monomaniacal hunt of Moby-Dick. The qualities of the story, which had captured the 20th century audience (and perhaps what had turned away the 19th century audience), were its immense scope and complexity. Captain Ahab is not an ordinary captain, this is not an ordinary chase, and Moby-Dick is not an ordinary whale. The hunt for Moby-Dick, who Ahab repeatedly refers to as the inscrutable thing who is simultaneously a simple animal and a complex representation of an equivocal force, reflects our own collective human search for elusive meaning (5). Unlike a typical man, who, for the most part, is content with the vagaries of the universe and humbly accepts his powerlessness and insignificant role in the grander scheme of things, Ahab contemptuously defies higher forces with the audacity of mythical figures like Prometheus and Oedipus. He claims, I'd strike the sun if it insulted me (4, p 136). Whether such brazenness is heroic or absurd, Ahab's hubris is a hyperbolic reminder of the indignant part of our nature. Whether we approve of or reject him, Ahab is more a part of us than apart from us (1, p 12).
Melville once fondly said of Shakespeare that through his dark characters, Shakespeare could insinuate the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true (1, p 131). With Ahab, Melville achieved such a character. Through Ahab's exasperations and bitterness towards the whale for destroying his ship and maiming him, Melville examines our own indignation towards our futile suffering and our incapacity to understand the meaning of life's afflictions. In a speech persuading his crew to join his obsessive chase, Ahab argues:
All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event-in the living act, the undoubted deed-there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the moldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me (4, p 174).
Ahab uses the metaphors of the mask and the wall to represent barriers preventing us from crossing the threshold of meaning. Then, drawing a connection between what the whale represents to him and the impenetrable mask which covers all visible objects, Ahab appeals to the human impulse to struggle to understand things beyond our understanding. He urges his shipmates to act on that impulse by forcibly breaking through the threshold. For Ahab, the threshold is embodied in Moby-Dick. Ishmael, the narrator, explains, All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified and made practically assailable in Moby-Dick (4, p 174). As Ishmael points out, Ahab not only sees the whale as a metaphorical representation of the barrier between the known and unknown, he believes it to literally be the barrier. To Ishmael, Ahab's view seems absurd. Although Ahab's madness is hyperbolic, it strikes a note that resonates a certain truth, the understanding of which is dependent upon each person's experience and the degree of our personal imperative to assail the barrier we face. Doubtlessly, it is this ability to resonate truth that preserved Moby-Dick from the obscurity of time.
Each has his own Moby-Dick, his own wall to assail. For Melville, the novel itself was his Moby-Dick. Though Melville originally intended to write another short account of his sea-faring experiences in the same fashion of his previous, well-received works, he instead labored much more intensively over Moby-Dick. His preoccupation with writing bordered on obsession at times. He often shut himself up in his room for days, calling the book my 'Whale' (4, xvi), and working well past the manuscript's intended deadline even at high financial costs. In an encounter with Melville in 1856, Hawthorne said of his friend,
Melville has not been well, of late;…and no doubt has suffered from too constant literary occupation, pursued without much success…It is strange how he persists-and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before-in wondering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief (8).
As evident in Hawthorne's observation, Melville approached writing with untiring intellectual zeal. In the middle of writing Moby-Dick, Melville commented on the frustrating endeavor of taking a book off the brain: it is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel-you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety (1, p 145). Having to search for the right words within one's mind while they slip and slide from conscious grasp is no doubt difficult, but having to scrape off the whole brain to produce a book makes writing seem an impossible task. In addition, Melville had to worry about money, publisher's approval, and public reception. Against these seemingly insurmountable odds and with Ahab-like ambition, Melville created Moby-Dick, a tour de force encompassing in one novel both the common experience of being a sailor on a whaling ship and the metaphysical reflection on the voids and immensities of the universe (4, p 162). The product of Melville's ambition and genius proved not only to be ahead of its time, but also time enduring. Moby-Dick is an impenetrable mystery that haunts not only Ahab, but also generations of readership. Ahab's obstinate pursuit of Moby-Dick is paralleled by the continual attempts of multitudes of critics, artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers, readers, and various other enthusiasts to dissect and capture the meaning of this great literary work more than a century after it was written.
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