{"id":43,"date":"2019-05-08T10:40:33","date_gmt":"2019-05-08T10:40:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/engp05.epgpbooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/?post_type=chapter&p=43"},"modified":"2019-05-09T10:31:46","modified_gmt":"2019-05-09T10:31:46","slug":"herman-melville-moby-dick","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in\/engp05\/chapter\/herman-melville-moby-dick\/","title":{"rendered":"Herman Melville: Moby Dick"},"content":{"raw":"
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\r\n\r\nHerman Melville<\/strong>\r\n\r\n \r\n

Herman Melville was born in New York City on 1st August, 1819, to Allan Melvill and Maria Gansevoort Melvill. He belonged to an aristocratic family. But, the failure of business and poor planning by his father caused a rapid decline of fortune. As a result, Herman Melville\u00a0and his seven siblings were soon deprived of the privileges that aristocracy would have provided. Melville attended the Albany Academy, from October 1830 to October 1831, where he took the standard preparatory course, studying penmanship; arithmetic, English grammar, geography, natural history, universal, Greek, Roman and English history, classical biography, and Jewish antiquities. But, he had to leave when the family was no longer able to pay for his education. With the death of his father in 1832, Melville forever left the life of a student. Already, at the age of 14, Melville had to work at a bank for sustenance. Thereafter, he shifted through a series of jobs, including teaching. It is thus that Ishmael comes to suggest for himself a reputed ancestry like his creator\u2019s that makes him out of place as a sailor: \u2018True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one\u2019s sense of honour, particularly if you come of an old family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes.\u2019 The Danish-English Van Rensselaers happened to be cousins of the Melvills.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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On June of 1839, Melville signed abroad St. Lawrence<\/em>, a merchant ship, and embarked on the first of the many maritime journeys he would be a part of. Redburn: His First Voyage <\/em>(1849) was the consequence of this experience. Thus, his experiences at sea began to serve his fictions, and, in time, produced Moby-Dick. <\/em>Probably, inspired by Richard Henry Dana\u2019s Two Years Before the Mast, <\/em>Melville first signed for a whaling ship, the Acushnet<\/em>, which also acquainted him with the natives of the South Pacific. In July 1842, Melville deserted the Acushnet <\/em>and spent three weeks on the Marqueseas Island. The immediate result of it was Typee <\/em>(1846). <\/em>On his return, he boarded the Australian whaler Lucy Ann<\/em>, and also participated in the mutiny abroad. Melville was imprisoned for that. Finally, he returned to America on the frigate USS United States<\/em>, in 1844. He later drew on these experiences to write Omoo <\/em>(1847) and White-Jacket <\/em>(1850).<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Melville\u2019s experience as a sailor was significant not only for providing the first hand material for his fiction, but also for making him a self-taught scholar. In White-Jacket<\/em>, Melville devoted a chapter to \u2018A Man-of-War Library\u2019 where he made it clear that much of his time on the sea was spent on reading. Likewise, Ishmael insists that \u2018a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.\u2019 Thus, as an autodidact, Melville brings the anti-institutional suggestion that life has much more to teach than any established institute. In another anti- establishmentarian move, he shocked his readers with his sympathy for pagan society and contempt for Western civilization in his novels, especially Typee<\/em>. Despite this controversial element, his novels up to White-Jacket <\/em>sold well enough to provide financial support. When, in 1851, he published Moby-Dick<\/em>, however, the sales dropped. This was anticipated by the writer who knew that he was attempting something different and more ambitious in this novel.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

It was not till the second half of the nineteenth century that the novel gained the attention of the English readers. In America, Moby-Dick <\/em>started to be counted among the greats afterwards, in the 1920s, when F. O. Matthiessen recognized it as one of the representatives of the \u2018American Renaissance\u2019. Melville, who died in September 28, 1891, could not witness his own rise to greatness.<\/p>\r\n

Summary<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\r\n \r\n

Ishmael decides to go on a whaling expedition. At Nantuket, he and Queequeg \u2013 a savage from the South Sea Islands he has befriended \u2013 join the whaler Pequod. <\/em>Before the ship sets sails, Ishmael hears mysterious warnings from a man named Elijah, and in Father Mapple\u2019s sermon on the prophet Jonah and the whale. In the sea, he comes to know Ahab, the captain of the ship, and a monomaniac bent on hunting Moby-Dick, the legendary sperm whale that\u00a0had ripped apart one of Ahab's legs. Ahab's oratory flourish convinces the crew aboard \u2013 a combination of men from diverse ethnic groups \u2013 to pledge themselves to his cause. Only Starbuck has his reservations about the fate of such an expedition.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Ahab, later, reveals his own boat crew, led by Fedallah, who have been secretly there on the ship. The novel swings between the story of Pequod's <\/em>voyage and the reflections by the narrator. These private reflections involve details of the whaling business, popular representations of the whale, and philosophical meditations. On the other side, incidents occur, like Pip\u2019s falling overboard and his lapse into melancholic insanity, and Queequeg\u2019s ordering a coffin following a fever. He, later, revives from fever and discards the coffin. Following the news of sighting Moby-Dick by the British whaler, the Samuel Enderby, Pequod <\/em>comes across Moby-Dick and chases it for three days. In the course of it, Fedallah drowns and Ahab's artificial leg is snapped on the second day of the chase. On the third day, Moby-Dick smashes Pequod, <\/em>drowning all aboard. Ahab gets entangled in the line of the harpoon that he stuck into the whale and is taken down with the whale. The only survivor is Ishmael who operated as Ahab's bow man. He floats with Queequeg's empty coffin and lives to tell the tale.<\/p>\r\n

Moby-Dick <\/em><\/strong>as an Epic<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n

In his introduction to the novel, Alfred Kazin enumerates the characteristics that raise Moby- Dick <\/em>to the standard of an epic: \u2018the spaciousness of theme and subject, the martial atmosphere, the association of these homely and savage materials with universal myths, the symbolic wanderings of the hero, the indispensable strength of such a hero in Captain Ahab.\u2019 It is the Protestant imagination in Melville, with its \u2018habit of moralizing and the transcendental passion for symbolizing all things as examples of higher laws that has\u00a0contributed a symbolical dimension to this otherwise realistic prose narrative. Thus, in his essay on Melville, Albert Camus observes: \u2018if it is true that talent recreates life while genius has the additional gift of crowning it with myths, Melville is first and foremost a creator of myths.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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The arrival of the European Romantic movement appealed to the revolutionary spirit of the Americans and brought about American Transcendentalism through the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The two movements came to provoke Melville in his private reflections to divinity and the essence of existence. Though guided by Emerson, Melville\u2019s own reflections were more complex and troubled than what Emerson could arrive at. \u00a0Hence, \u00a0after \u00a0once \u00a0attending \u00a0a \u00a0lecture \u00a0by \u00a0Emerson, \u00a0Melville \u00a0gave \u00a0his \u00a0ambivalent appreciation: \u2018I was very agreeably disappointed in Mr. Emerson. I had heard of him as full of Transcendentalism, myths and oracular gibberish [\u2026] To my surprise, I found him quite\u00a0\u00a0intelligible, tho\u2019 to say truth, they told me that night he was unusually plain [\u2026] I could readily see in Emerson, notwithstanding his merit, a gaping flaw.\u2019 Moby-Dick, <\/em>in response,\u00a0\u00a0consists \u00a0of \u00a0Melville\u2019s \u00a0own \u00a0account \u00a0of \u00a0the \u00a0nature \u00a0of \u00a0existence, \u00a0in \u00a0which \u00a0evil \u00a0and \u00a0the unintelligible are much more persistently present.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Hence, as an epic, Moby-Dick <\/em>is an unusually ambitious work. It brings together two traditions of epic. On the one hand, there are aspects of the ancient or primitive national epic tradition that centres on a (physical) conflict (as in Iliad <\/em>and Beowulf<\/em>). It focuses on Ahab. On the other hand, there are aspects of the modern epic tradition that centres on a spiritual quest, on the search for a transcendental order or significance of human life (as in the Divine Comedy <\/em>and Paradise Lost<\/em>). Ishmael represents this epic tradition. Thus, Alfred Kazin writes, \u2018two rhythms \u2013 one reflective, the other forceful \u2013 alternate\u2019 in the text. For Ishmael, the entire journey is a pursuit of knowledge. That knowledge dislodges Emerson\u2019s optimistic notion that human beings can make sense of Nature and reality. Chapters on \u2018the whiteness of\u00a0the whale\u2019 and on the classification of whales repeatedly lead Ishmael to surrender before the inexhaustibility of his material: \u2018God keeps me from completing anything. This whole book is but a draught \u2013 nay, but the draught of a draught.\u2019 Ahab, on the other hand, demands a finished text, a perfect mastery of his subject, and a victory over Moby-Dick. Kazin writes: \u2018He seeks to dominate nature, to impose and to inflict his will on the outside world\u2014whether it be the crew that must jump to his orders or the great white whale that is essentially indifferent to him. As Ishmael is all rumination, so Ahab is all will.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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If Paradise Lost <\/em>is an epic on man\u2019s fall, Moby-Dick <\/em>is an epic where humanity is condemned to a purposeless existence without God. Neither is Moby-Dick a symbol that will yield to Ahab, nor will Ishmael\u2019s reflections penetrate it at all points. For instance, in the 76th Chapter, \u2018The Battering Ram\u2019, the forehead of the sperm whale presents such a metaphorical dead-end of investigation: \u2018the front of the sperm whale\u2019s head is a dead, blind wall, without a single organ or tender prominence of any sort whatsoever.\u2019 In his Introduction, David Herd explains in a reference to this passage, \u2018it is the same blind, dead wall by which Ahab batters on towards his purpose.\u2019 Unresolved as their subject is, Ishmael and Ahab exhibit two modes of approach that come together to form the novel: \u2018So whereas Ishmael\u2019s sensibility is formed by the act of inhaling, his narrative taking all things in, Ahab\u2019s sensibility is formed by this act of piling, a process which hardens him to everything but his object\u2019.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

We have this passage in Chapter 28: \u2018There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. [\u2026] [M]oody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.\u2019 Behind his might and his woe alike stands Ahab\u2019s monomania concerning Moby-Dick. In \u2018The Madness of Ahab\u2019, Henry Nash Smith, shows how monomania was a term of much consideration at the time, considerations to which Melville was not unrelated: \u2018Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the\u00a0Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (whose daughter would become Herman Melville\u2019s wife in 1847) stated in an opinion written in 1844 that in cases of monomania, \u201cThe conduct may be in many respects regular, the mind acute, and the conduct apparently governed by rules of propriety, and at the same time there may be insane delusion, by which the mind is perverted.\u201d\u2019 Thus, Ahab is not a simple madman. Simple madness goes beneath the dignity of a hero, and would have been ludic rather than of epic standard. He has his wits upon himself, and is aware enough of the \u2018rules of propriety\u2019<\/span>. <\/em>Monomania is something of a spiritual malady that makes him able to display a tragic hero\u2019s <\/span>hubris<\/em>. Ishmael tells us: \u2018Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Moby-Dick <\/em><\/strong>as an American Novel<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n

Moby-Dick <\/em>evokes a picture of solitude, a picture of man left on the mercy of natural elements, desperate to know and master nature. Beside this metaphysical drama, Moby-Dick, <\/em>however, is not a novel without any bearings on contemporary American society. In \u2018Hawthorne and His Mosses\u2019, Melville notes that: \u2018Great geniuses are parts of the times, they themselves are the times, and possess an correspondent coloring.\u2019 The novel captures the importance of sperm whaling to the American economy. Charles Olson, writing on this point, notes that in 1844, the whaling industry amounted to a hundred and twenty million dollars, a figure that ranked high among the industries of the time. Until the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvanian in 1859, it was an essential source to the country. So, in Chapter 24, \u2018The Advocate\u2019, Melville is justified in his claim that in writing on the whaling industry, he is encompassing considerably multiple aspects of American as well as European societies.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Hence, it will not be an exaggeration to see Pequod <\/em>as a representative of America on its way to gain economic prosperity. The people of different races and languages in it \u2013 French, Icelander, Red Indian, Chinese, Portuguese, English \u2013 have come together under the banner of one country to chase the American Dream. The novel dramatizes the inevitable self- destructive consequences when a society is so bent on economic dreams.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

In the essay \u2018Cannibalism, Slavery, and Self-Consummation in Moby-Dick<\/em>\u2019, Homer B. Pettery shows how this motif of self-destruction is brought out in the novel as the idea of \u2018cannibalism\u2019 is extended to the status of \u2018a sociopolitical metaphor\u2019: \u2018In Moby-Dick, <\/em>Melville uses cannibalism in order to attack the cruel institutions of slavery and capitalism which were eating away at American culture.\u2019 Melville makes use of the fact that the actions related to cannibalism are simultaneously present as whaling activities \u2013 hunting, killing, possessing, dismembering, and consuming. Pettery further suggests that: \u2018Structurally, the novel moves from ritualized exocannibalism to narcissistic autocannibalism.\u2019<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Moby-Dick <\/em>addresses the questions of social order and democracy that were on rise in the nineteenth century America. The crew appears to go by Ahab\u2019s cause wilfully. As such, the organization on Pequod <\/em>portrays a society, a fraternity, as expected in a democracy. However, there is an undercurrent in Ahab\u2019s hypnotic command to the crew. As Ishmael notes, there is in Ahab\u2019s charisma a \u2018sultanism that became incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship.\u2019<\/p>\r\n \r\n

In \u2018Its wood could only be American!: Moby-Dick <\/em>and Antebellum Popular Culture\u2019, David S. Reynold relates Melville\u2019s connections with the popular radical democrats of his time with Melville\u2019s \u2018willed fusion <\/em>of the justified criminal and the oxymoronic oppressor\u2019. These radical democrats like George Lippard, A. J. H. Duganne, George G. Foster, and George Thompson carried out social protests \u2018to expose what they regarded as the prevailing\u00a0depravity of America\u2019s ruling class\u2019. Their target was the self-contradictory figures like \u2018the outwardly respectable but inwardly corrupt social leader who variously appeared as the churchgoing capitalist, the religious slaveholder, the unctuous reverend rake, and so on.\u2019 And hence, we have in <\/span>Moby-Dick <\/em>this ambiguous assessment of the democratic order. The final taking over of democracy by the sultanic will of Ahab happens in the course of the journey. This is what finally leads to the falling apart of the whole society on the ship. Thus, Melville delivers his pessimistic apprehension of the future of the country.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Another current in American society that Reynold identifies as influencing Melville is what he calls \u2018dark\u2019 or \u2018immoral\u2019 reformers of the 1830s. These reformers engaged with the murky sides of society to bring about reformations. Often, they were reveled to have fraudulent objectives, as with the anti-prostitution reformer John McDowall and the dramatic orator John B. Gough. Particularly relatable to Melville is the post-Calvinistic temperament and the mythic metaphors that they often used in their oratory. Thus, addressing the social vises that troubled America, a writer writes in Liberator <\/em>(edited by Garison): \u2018The whale which swallowed up the recreant prophet [Jonah] may be likened to the many monsters which swallow up the aberrant sinner of our own days.\u2019 The similarity with Father Mapple\u2019s sermon is unmistakable.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Reynold notes that \u2018Temperance, antislavery, socialism, anti-Catholicism, antiwar\u2014these and other popular reforms provide a wealth of images to Melville in Moby-Dick<\/em>.\u2019 However, Melville regarded these popular reformists somewhat ironically. His ambiguous attitude towards them is visible in a letter from Melville to Hawthorne: \u2018It can hardly be doubted that all Reformers are bottomed upon the truth, more or less; and to the world at large are not reformers almost universally laughing-stocks?\u2019 This accounts for the fact that Melville approaches the reformative purposes with such a deal of impersonal voice, not directly endorsing them.<\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Among these motives, the Abolitionist discourses are particularly relevant. Melville shows a determined endeavour for overhauling racist prejudices as he makes the South Sea cannibal, Queequeg the narrator\u2019s friend and spiritual guide. Ishmael\u2019s preconceptions about this \u2018infernal head-peddler\u2019 are dismissed as he comes to know the savage towards the beginning of the novel. He is impressed by his \u2018not only a civil but a really charitable\u2019 behaviour, and comes to the conclusion that \u2018the man\u2019s just as human as I am.\u2019 With reassurance, he concludes that it is \u2018Better [to] sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian\u2019, and on the next morning he finds himself in Queequeg\u2019s \u2018bridegroom clasp\u2019, as if \u2018I had been his wife\u2019. Melville thus dismisses the demarcation of race upon which slavery could justify itself.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Moby-Dick<\/em>, however, allegorizes the fact that antebellum Massachusetts shipping and industrial interests outweighed Afro-American and fugitive slaves\u2019 rights. A digressive fugitive account can be seen to occur with Pip\u2019s jumping overboard. The Alabama cabin-boy leaps out of Stubb\u2019s boat to become a loose fish, and is accidentally rescued by Pequod <\/em>since he got entangle in a whale line. Stubb ignored Pip in favour of hunting whales. The novel registers the evolving definition of slavery following the Abolitionist movement. As Reymond cites: \u2018Ishmael\u2019s ironic query \u201cWho aint a slave?\u201d would seem to owe much to the fiery New York radical Mike Walsh, who in the late 1840s famously universalized the notion of slavery by stressing that both <\/em>Northern wage slaves and Southern chattel slaves were equally oppressed.\u2019<\/p>\r\n

Literary Influences on Moby-Dick<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\r\n\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>\r\n

Formal education for Melville ended at the age of 12, due to the failing economy of his family. Following that, Melville has been an autodidact, and his readings came to have a\u00a0direct influence on his writings. Referring to him, the poet Charles Olson says, \u2018He read to write\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

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Behind Moby-Dick <\/em>lies as much a body of literary voices as his personal experiences. The \u2018Extracts\u2019 at the beginning of the novel is an indication of that. It contains references to William Shakespeare, Edmund Bruke, Oliver Goldsmith, Charles Lamb, Rabelais, John Milton, newspaper accounts, and also the Bible. Written about the same time when he was composing Moby-Dick, <\/em>Melville\u2019s essay \u2018Hawthorne and his Mosses\u2019 (1850) shows how he absorbs influences. Referring to Hawthorne\u2019s connection with \u2018the dark half of the physical sphere\u2019, he writes: \u2018this great power of blackness in him derives its force from its appeal to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free.\u2019 Certainly, this great power of blackness comes to taint Ahab in his Faustian pursuit of the whale. This is what makes Melville claim for Moby-Dick <\/em>the title \u2018wicked\u2019 in a letter to Hawthorne himself.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Along with Hawthorne, the essay is a testimony of Melville\u2019s indebtedness to Shakespeare. The circumstances and consequences of the pursuit of the mysterious and that of knowledge form the core of the novel, and this model gets its prototype in Shakespeare: \u2018But it is those deep far-away things in him; those occasional flashing-forths of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probing at the very axis of reality: these are the very things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare.\u2019 This has its direct bearing on the language and characterization of Ahab, giving him the loftiness and tragic dignity of a Shakespearian hero.<\/p>\r\n \r\n

At the end of January 1848, Melville began reading the second book of Rabelais\u2019s Gargantua and Pantagruel. <\/em>As David Herd notes in the Introduction of the Wordsworth edition of Moby-Dick<\/em>, Rabelais did prompt Melville in the conception of the novel: \u2018And it was reading Rabelais that enabled Melville to become this kind of writer, Gargantua and\u00a0<\/em>Pantagruel <\/em>provided him with a model of a structure within which to make the kind of loosely associated philosophical and observational digression which would eventually so charaterise <\/span>Moby-Dick.<\/em>\u2019 Rabelais, therefore, provided not only the epic proportions of the whale and the novel, but also \u2018a way of handling his reading.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\r\n\r\n<\/div>\r\n

In \u2018<\/em>Its wood could only be American\u2019, David S. Reynold traces Moby-Dick <\/em>in a current of popular fictions of whaling expeditions. Among them are J. N. Reynolds\u2019s \u2018Mocha Dick, or The White Whale of the Pacific,\u2019 a story in the May 1839 issue of the New York Knickerbocker, <\/em>and \u2018Whaling in the Pacific. Encounter with a White Whale,\u2019 a tale published in October 8, 1842, in the popular Boston weekly Uncle Sam<\/em>: these stories are similarly about the chase of a legendary sperm whale. Some of these books get mentioned among the \u2018Extracts\u2019 - Joseph C. Hart\u2019s Miriam Coffin <\/em>(1834), William Comstock\u2019s The Life of Samuel Comstock, the Terrible Whaleman <\/em>(1840), and Harry Halyard\u2019s pulp novel Wharton the Whale-Killer! <\/em>(1848).<\/p>\r\n \r\n

Melville\u2019s novel, however, differs from these in its realistic treatment of whaling expedition, as well as in the mythic dimension that he incorporates into this issue. In fact, a regular intention of the novel has been that of correcting the rumors, and the fantastic accounts that cloud the reality of the sperm whaling. Hence, Reynold writes: \u2018On the one hand, Melville includes an unprecedented amount of factual information about the whale in order to counteract what Ishmael calls the \u201ccurious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the present day confidently challenge the faith of the landsman\u201d\u2019<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
you can view video on Herman Melville: Moby Dick<\/strong><\/td>\r\n\"\"<\/a><\/td>\r\n<\/tr>\r\n<\/tbody>\r\n<\/table>","rendered":"
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Herman Melville<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Herman Melville was born in New York City on 1st August, 1819, to Allan Melvill and Maria Gansevoort Melvill. He belonged to an aristocratic family. But, the failure of business and poor planning by his father caused a rapid decline of fortune. As a result, Herman Melville\u00a0and his seven siblings were soon deprived of the privileges that aristocracy would have provided. Melville attended the Albany Academy, from October 1830 to October 1831, where he took the standard preparatory course, studying penmanship; arithmetic, English grammar, geography, natural history, universal, Greek, Roman and English history, classical biography, and Jewish antiquities. But, he had to leave when the family was no longer able to pay for his education. With the death of his father in 1832, Melville forever left the life of a student. Already, at the age of 14, Melville had to work at a bank for sustenance. Thereafter, he shifted through a series of jobs, including teaching. It is thus that Ishmael comes to suggest for himself a reputed ancestry like his creator\u2019s that makes him out of place as a sailor: \u2018True, they rather order me about some, and make me jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first, this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one\u2019s sense of honour, particularly if you come of an old family in the land, the Van Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes.\u2019 The Danish-English Van Rensselaers happened to be cousins of the Melvills.<\/span><\/p>\n

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On June of 1839, Melville signed abroad St. Lawrence<\/em>, a merchant ship, and embarked on the first of the many maritime journeys he would be a part of. Redburn: His First Voyage <\/em>(1849) was the consequence of this experience. Thus, his experiences at sea began to serve his fictions, and, in time, produced Moby-Dick. <\/em>Probably, inspired by Richard Henry Dana\u2019s Two Years Before the Mast, <\/em>Melville first signed for a whaling ship, the Acushnet<\/em>, which also acquainted him with the natives of the South Pacific. In July 1842, Melville deserted the Acushnet <\/em>and spent three weeks on the Marqueseas Island. The immediate result of it was Typee <\/em>(1846). <\/em>On his return, he boarded the Australian whaler Lucy Ann<\/em>, and also participated in the mutiny abroad. Melville was imprisoned for that. Finally, he returned to America on the frigate USS United States<\/em>, in 1844. He later drew on these experiences to write Omoo <\/em>(1847) and White-Jacket <\/em>(1850).<\/p>\n

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Melville\u2019s experience as a sailor was significant not only for providing the first hand material for his fiction, but also for making him a self-taught scholar. In White-Jacket<\/em>, Melville devoted a chapter to \u2018A Man-of-War Library\u2019 where he made it clear that much of his time on the sea was spent on reading. Likewise, Ishmael insists that \u2018a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.\u2019 Thus, as an autodidact, Melville brings the anti-institutional suggestion that life has much more to teach than any established institute. In another anti- establishmentarian move, he shocked his readers with his sympathy for pagan society and contempt for Western civilization in his novels, especially Typee<\/em>. Despite this controversial element, his novels up to White-Jacket <\/em>sold well enough to provide financial support. When, in 1851, he published Moby-Dick<\/em>, however, the sales dropped. This was anticipated by the writer who knew that he was attempting something different and more ambitious in this novel.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It was not till the second half of the nineteenth century that the novel gained the attention of the English readers. In America, Moby-Dick <\/em>started to be counted among the greats afterwards, in the 1920s, when F. O. Matthiessen recognized it as one of the representatives of the \u2018American Renaissance\u2019. Melville, who died in September 28, 1891, could not witness his own rise to greatness.<\/p>\n

Summary<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ishmael decides to go on a whaling expedition. At Nantuket, he and Queequeg \u2013 a savage from the South Sea Islands he has befriended \u2013 join the whaler Pequod. <\/em>Before the ship sets sails, Ishmael hears mysterious warnings from a man named Elijah, and in Father Mapple\u2019s sermon on the prophet Jonah and the whale. In the sea, he comes to know Ahab, the captain of the ship, and a monomaniac bent on hunting Moby-Dick, the legendary sperm whale that\u00a0had ripped apart one of Ahab’s legs. Ahab’s oratory flourish convinces the crew aboard \u2013 a combination of men from diverse ethnic groups \u2013 to pledge themselves to his cause. Only Starbuck has his reservations about the fate of such an expedition.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Ahab, later, reveals his own boat crew, led by Fedallah, who have been secretly there on the ship. The novel swings between the story of Pequod’s <\/em>voyage and the reflections by the narrator. These private reflections involve details of the whaling business, popular representations of the whale, and philosophical meditations. On the other side, incidents occur, like Pip\u2019s falling overboard and his lapse into melancholic insanity, and Queequeg\u2019s ordering a coffin following a fever. He, later, revives from fever and discards the coffin. Following the news of sighting Moby-Dick by the British whaler, the Samuel Enderby, Pequod <\/em>comes across Moby-Dick and chases it for three days. In the course of it, Fedallah drowns and Ahab’s artificial leg is snapped on the second day of the chase. On the third day, Moby-Dick smashes Pequod, <\/em>drowning all aboard. Ahab gets entangled in the line of the harpoon that he stuck into the whale and is taken down with the whale. The only survivor is Ishmael who operated as Ahab’s bow man. He floats with Queequeg’s empty coffin and lives to tell the tale.<\/p>\n

Moby-Dick <\/em><\/strong>as an Epic<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

In his introduction to the novel, Alfred Kazin enumerates the characteristics that raise Moby- Dick <\/em>to the standard of an epic: \u2018the spaciousness of theme and subject, the martial atmosphere, the association of these homely and savage materials with universal myths, the symbolic wanderings of the hero, the indispensable strength of such a hero in Captain Ahab.\u2019 It is the Protestant imagination in Melville, with its \u2018habit of moralizing and the transcendental passion for symbolizing all things as examples of higher laws that has\u00a0contributed a symbolical dimension to this otherwise realistic prose narrative. Thus, in his essay on Melville, Albert Camus observes: \u2018if it is true that talent recreates life while genius has the additional gift of crowning it with myths, Melville is first and foremost a creator of myths.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The arrival of the European Romantic movement appealed to the revolutionary spirit of the Americans and brought about American Transcendentalism through the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The two movements came to provoke Melville in his private reflections to divinity and the essence of existence. Though guided by Emerson, Melville\u2019s own reflections were more complex and troubled than what Emerson could arrive at. \u00a0Hence, \u00a0after \u00a0once \u00a0attending \u00a0a \u00a0lecture \u00a0by \u00a0Emerson, \u00a0Melville \u00a0gave \u00a0his \u00a0ambivalent appreciation: \u2018I was very agreeably disappointed in Mr. Emerson. I had heard of him as full of Transcendentalism, myths and oracular gibberish [\u2026] To my surprise, I found him quite\u00a0\u00a0intelligible, tho\u2019 to say truth, they told me that night he was unusually plain [\u2026] I could readily see in Emerson, notwithstanding his merit, a gaping flaw.\u2019 Moby-Dick, <\/em>in response,\u00a0\u00a0consists \u00a0of \u00a0Melville\u2019s \u00a0own \u00a0account \u00a0of \u00a0the \u00a0nature \u00a0of \u00a0existence, \u00a0in \u00a0which \u00a0evil \u00a0and \u00a0the unintelligible are much more persistently present.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Hence, as an epic, Moby-Dick <\/em>is an unusually ambitious work. It brings together two traditions of epic. On the one hand, there are aspects of the ancient or primitive national epic tradition that centres on a (physical) conflict (as in Iliad <\/em>and Beowulf<\/em>). It focuses on Ahab. On the other hand, there are aspects of the modern epic tradition that centres on a spiritual quest, on the search for a transcendental order or significance of human life (as in the Divine Comedy <\/em>and Paradise Lost<\/em>). Ishmael represents this epic tradition. Thus, Alfred Kazin writes, \u2018two rhythms \u2013 one reflective, the other forceful \u2013 alternate\u2019 in the text. For Ishmael, the entire journey is a pursuit of knowledge. That knowledge dislodges Emerson\u2019s optimistic notion that human beings can make sense of Nature and reality. Chapters on \u2018the whiteness of\u00a0the whale\u2019 and on the classification of whales repeatedly lead Ishmael to surrender before the inexhaustibility of his material: \u2018God keeps me from completing anything. This whole book is but a draught \u2013 nay, but the draught of a draught.\u2019 Ahab, on the other hand, demands a finished text, a perfect mastery of his subject, and a victory over Moby-Dick. Kazin writes: \u2018He seeks to dominate nature, to impose and to inflict his will on the outside world\u2014whether it be the crew that must jump to his orders or the great white whale that is essentially indifferent to him. As Ishmael is all rumination, so Ahab is all will.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

If Paradise Lost <\/em>is an epic on man\u2019s fall, Moby-Dick <\/em>is an epic where humanity is condemned to a purposeless existence without God. Neither is Moby-Dick a symbol that will yield to Ahab, nor will Ishmael\u2019s reflections penetrate it at all points. For instance, in the 76th Chapter, \u2018The Battering Ram\u2019, the forehead of the sperm whale presents such a metaphorical dead-end of investigation: \u2018the front of the sperm whale\u2019s head is a dead, blind wall, without a single organ or tender prominence of any sort whatsoever.\u2019 In his Introduction, David Herd explains in a reference to this passage, \u2018it is the same blind, dead wall by which Ahab batters on towards his purpose.\u2019 Unresolved as their subject is, Ishmael and Ahab exhibit two modes of approach that come together to form the novel: \u2018So whereas Ishmael\u2019s sensibility is formed by the act of inhaling, his narrative taking all things in, Ahab\u2019s sensibility is formed by this act of piling, a process which hardens him to everything but his object\u2019.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We have this passage in Chapter 28: \u2018There was an infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrenderable wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. [\u2026] [M]oody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face; in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.\u2019 Behind his might and his woe alike stands Ahab\u2019s monomania concerning Moby-Dick. In \u2018The Madness of Ahab\u2019, Henry Nash Smith, shows how monomania was a term of much consideration at the time, considerations to which Melville was not unrelated: \u2018Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the\u00a0Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts (whose daughter would become Herman Melville\u2019s wife in 1847) stated in an opinion written in 1844 that in cases of monomania, \u201cThe conduct may be in many respects regular, the mind acute, and the conduct apparently governed by rules of propriety, and at the same time there may be insane delusion, by which the mind is perverted.\u201d\u2019 Thus, Ahab is not a simple madman. Simple madness goes beneath the dignity of a hero, and would have been ludic rather than of epic standard. He has his wits upon himself, and is aware enough of the \u2018rules of propriety\u2019<\/span>. <\/em>Monomania is something of a spiritual malady that makes him able to display a tragic hero\u2019s <\/span>hubris<\/em>. Ishmael tells us: \u2018Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Moby-Dick <\/em><\/strong>as an American Novel<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Moby-Dick <\/em>evokes a picture of solitude, a picture of man left on the mercy of natural elements, desperate to know and master nature. Beside this metaphysical drama, Moby-Dick, <\/em>however, is not a novel without any bearings on contemporary American society. In \u2018Hawthorne and His Mosses\u2019, Melville notes that: \u2018Great geniuses are parts of the times, they themselves are the times, and possess an correspondent coloring.\u2019 The novel captures the importance of sperm whaling to the American economy. Charles Olson, writing on this point, notes that in 1844, the whaling industry amounted to a hundred and twenty million dollars, a figure that ranked high among the industries of the time. Until the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvanian in 1859, it was an essential source to the country. So, in Chapter 24, \u2018The Advocate\u2019, Melville is justified in his claim that in writing on the whaling industry, he is encompassing considerably multiple aspects of American as well as European societies.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Hence, it will not be an exaggeration to see Pequod <\/em>as a representative of America on its way to gain economic prosperity. The people of different races and languages in it \u2013 French, Icelander, Red Indian, Chinese, Portuguese, English \u2013 have come together under the banner of one country to chase the American Dream. The novel dramatizes the inevitable self- destructive consequences when a society is so bent on economic dreams.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In the essay \u2018Cannibalism, Slavery, and Self-Consummation in Moby-Dick<\/em>\u2019, Homer B. Pettery shows how this motif of self-destruction is brought out in the novel as the idea of \u2018cannibalism\u2019 is extended to the status of \u2018a sociopolitical metaphor\u2019: \u2018In Moby-Dick, <\/em>Melville uses cannibalism in order to attack the cruel institutions of slavery and capitalism which were eating away at American culture.\u2019 Melville makes use of the fact that the actions related to cannibalism are simultaneously present as whaling activities \u2013 hunting, killing, possessing, dismembering, and consuming. Pettery further suggests that: \u2018Structurally, the novel moves from ritualized exocannibalism to narcissistic autocannibalism.\u2019<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Moby-Dick <\/em>addresses the questions of social order and democracy that were on rise in the nineteenth century America. The crew appears to go by Ahab\u2019s cause wilfully. As such, the organization on Pequod <\/em>portrays a society, a fraternity, as expected in a democracy. However, there is an undercurrent in Ahab\u2019s hypnotic command to the crew. As Ishmael notes, there is in Ahab\u2019s charisma a \u2018sultanism that became incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship.\u2019<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In \u2018Its wood could only be American!: Moby-Dick <\/em>and Antebellum Popular Culture\u2019, David S. Reynold relates Melville\u2019s connections with the popular radical democrats of his time with Melville\u2019s \u2018willed fusion <\/em>of the justified criminal and the oxymoronic oppressor\u2019. These radical democrats like George Lippard, A. J. H. Duganne, George G. Foster, and George Thompson carried out social protests \u2018to expose what they regarded as the prevailing\u00a0depravity of America\u2019s ruling class\u2019. Their target was the self-contradictory figures like \u2018the outwardly respectable but inwardly corrupt social leader who variously appeared as the churchgoing capitalist, the religious slaveholder, the unctuous reverend rake, and so on.\u2019 And hence, we have in <\/span>Moby-Dick <\/em>this ambiguous assessment of the democratic order. The final taking over of democracy by the sultanic will of Ahab happens in the course of the journey. This is what finally leads to the falling apart of the whole society on the ship. Thus, Melville delivers his pessimistic apprehension of the future of the country.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Another current in American society that Reynold identifies as influencing Melville is what he calls \u2018dark\u2019 or \u2018immoral\u2019 reformers of the 1830s. These reformers engaged with the murky sides of society to bring about reformations. Often, they were reveled to have fraudulent objectives, as with the anti-prostitution reformer John McDowall and the dramatic orator John B. Gough. Particularly relatable to Melville is the post-Calvinistic temperament and the mythic metaphors that they often used in their oratory. Thus, addressing the social vises that troubled America, a writer writes in Liberator <\/em>(edited by Garison): \u2018The whale which swallowed up the recreant prophet [Jonah] may be likened to the many monsters which swallow up the aberrant sinner of our own days.\u2019 The similarity with Father Mapple\u2019s sermon is unmistakable.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Reynold notes that \u2018Temperance, antislavery, socialism, anti-Catholicism, antiwar\u2014these and other popular reforms provide a wealth of images to Melville in Moby-Dick<\/em>.\u2019 However, Melville regarded these popular reformists somewhat ironically. His ambiguous attitude towards them is visible in a letter from Melville to Hawthorne: \u2018It can hardly be doubted that all Reformers are bottomed upon the truth, more or less; and to the world at large are not reformers almost universally laughing-stocks?\u2019 This accounts for the fact that Melville approaches the reformative purposes with such a deal of impersonal voice, not directly endorsing them.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Among these motives, the Abolitionist discourses are particularly relevant. Melville shows a determined endeavour for overhauling racist prejudices as he makes the South Sea cannibal, Queequeg the narrator\u2019s friend and spiritual guide. Ishmael\u2019s preconceptions about this \u2018infernal head-peddler\u2019 are dismissed as he comes to know the savage towards the beginning of the novel. He is impressed by his \u2018not only a civil but a really charitable\u2019 behaviour, and comes to the conclusion that \u2018the man\u2019s just as human as I am.\u2019 With reassurance, he concludes that it is \u2018Better [to] sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian\u2019, and on the next morning he finds himself in Queequeg\u2019s \u2018bridegroom clasp\u2019, as if \u2018I had been his wife\u2019. Melville thus dismisses the demarcation of race upon which slavery could justify itself.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Moby-Dick<\/em>, however, allegorizes the fact that antebellum Massachusetts shipping and industrial interests outweighed Afro-American and fugitive slaves\u2019 rights. A digressive fugitive account can be seen to occur with Pip\u2019s jumping overboard. The Alabama cabin-boy leaps out of Stubb\u2019s boat to become a loose fish, and is accidentally rescued by Pequod <\/em>since he got entangle in a whale line. Stubb ignored Pip in favour of hunting whales. The novel registers the evolving definition of slavery following the Abolitionist movement. As Reymond cites: \u2018Ishmael\u2019s ironic query \u201cWho aint a slave?\u201d would seem to owe much to the fiery New York radical Mike Walsh, who in the late 1840s famously universalized the notion of slavery by stressing that both <\/em>Northern wage slaves and Southern chattel slaves were equally oppressed.\u2019<\/p>\n

Literary Influences on Moby-Dick<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Formal education for Melville ended at the age of 12, due to the failing economy of his family. Following that, Melville has been an autodidact, and his readings came to have a\u00a0direct influence on his writings. Referring to him, the poet Charles Olson says, \u2018He read to write\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

Behind Moby-Dick <\/em>lies as much a body of literary voices as his personal experiences. The \u2018Extracts\u2019 at the beginning of the novel is an indication of that. It contains references to William Shakespeare, Edmund Bruke, Oliver Goldsmith, Charles Lamb, Rabelais, John Milton, newspaper accounts, and also the Bible. Written about the same time when he was composing Moby-Dick, <\/em>Melville\u2019s essay \u2018Hawthorne and his Mosses\u2019 (1850) shows how he absorbs influences. Referring to Hawthorne\u2019s connection with \u2018the dark half of the physical sphere\u2019, he writes: \u2018this great power of blackness in him derives its force from its appeal to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free.\u2019 Certainly, this great power of blackness comes to taint Ahab in his Faustian pursuit of the whale. This is what makes Melville claim for Moby-Dick <\/em>the title \u2018wicked\u2019 in a letter to Hawthorne himself.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Along with Hawthorne, the essay is a testimony of Melville\u2019s indebtedness to Shakespeare. The circumstances and consequences of the pursuit of the mysterious and that of knowledge form the core of the novel, and this model gets its prototype in Shakespeare: \u2018But it is those deep far-away things in him; those occasional flashing-forths of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probing at the very axis of reality: these are the very things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare.\u2019 This has its direct bearing on the language and characterization of Ahab, giving him the loftiness and tragic dignity of a Shakespearian hero.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

At the end of January 1848, Melville began reading the second book of Rabelais\u2019s Gargantua and Pantagruel. <\/em>As David Herd notes in the Introduction of the Wordsworth edition of Moby-Dick<\/em>, Rabelais did prompt Melville in the conception of the novel: \u2018And it was reading Rabelais that enabled Melville to become this kind of writer, Gargantua and\u00a0<\/em>Pantagruel <\/em>provided him with a model of a structure within which to make the kind of loosely associated philosophical and observational digression which would eventually so charaterise <\/span>Moby-Dick.<\/em>\u2019 Rabelais, therefore, provided not only the epic proportions of the whale and the novel, but also \u2018a way of handling his reading.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In \u2018<\/em>Its wood could only be American\u2019, David S. Reynold traces Moby-Dick <\/em>in a current of popular fictions of whaling expeditions. Among them are J. N. Reynolds\u2019s \u2018Mocha Dick, or The White Whale of the Pacific,\u2019 a story in the May 1839 issue of the New York Knickerbocker, <\/em>and \u2018Whaling in the Pacific. Encounter with a White Whale,\u2019 a tale published in October 8, 1842, in the popular Boston weekly Uncle Sam<\/em>: these stories are similarly about the chase of a legendary sperm whale. Some of these books get mentioned among the \u2018Extracts\u2019 – Joseph C. Hart\u2019s Miriam Coffin <\/em>(1834), William Comstock\u2019s The Life of Samuel Comstock, the Terrible Whaleman <\/em>(1840), and Harry Halyard\u2019s pulp novel Wharton the Whale-Killer! <\/em>(1848).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Melville\u2019s novel, however, differs from these in its realistic treatment of whaling expedition, as well as in the mythic dimension that he incorporates into this issue. In fact, a regular intention of the novel has been that of correcting the rumors, and the fantastic accounts that cloud the reality of the sperm whaling. Hence, Reynold writes: \u2018On the one hand, Melville includes an unprecedented amount of factual information about the whale in order to counteract what Ishmael calls the \u201ccurious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the present day confidently challenge the faith of the landsman\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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