Summary
Herman Melville’s novel (fiction), completed in the latter part of 1851, read at introduction length in essay 32 of Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile and Other Essays as the greatest and most eccentric work of literary art produced in the United States, whose quest plot and Captain Ahab catch the imperial motif running consistently through United States history and culture (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.340, p.346).
Details
- The plot is Euripidean, a quest and pilgrimage story connected to Homer, Dante, Bunyan, Cervantes, Goethe and Smollett; no quest narrative is so relentlessly declamatory, its texture clotted with information, quotation, advice and argument (PDF p.340).
- The present text is a grafting of two versions — an embellished autobiographical whaling tale and a second, heightened Moby-Dick introduced retrospectively — with irregularities never completely taken care of, Bulkington among them (PDF p.343).
- It is at once the Pequod’s story, a metaphysical search for the absolute, and a garrulous course in whaling technique, cetology and the history of whalers and whales, dense with allusions to Melville’s “old books”, the King James Bible first (PDF p.343).
- Its narration is dual: Ishmael — “Call me Ishmael.” (quoted PDF p.345) — frames but does not contain the enunciation, Melville himself bolstering him and often taking over (PDF p.345).
- The “Nantucket” passage quoted at length — “two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires” (PDF p.345-346) — is read as the novice imperialist’s discourse: America, a newcomer to imperial competition, claiming sovereignty over water rather than land.
- Ahab is read through C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways as, on one level, the managerial captain of industry bent on American power and success, and as a convincing example of the new imperialism Said ascribes to the United States (PDF p.350).
- With its complete course in whaling history and practice, it is the greatest how-to-do-it book in American literature, like Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon combining the autodidactic with the philosophic (PDF p.350).
- T. E. Lawrence’s 1922 letter, quoted, places it on a shelf of “titanic” books with The Karamazovs and Zarathustra (PDF p.352).
- In the already ingested Culture and Imperialism, Chapter Four, I extrapolates its Ahab to the American empire preparing to take after an imputed evil, with James and V. G. Kiernan cited for Ahab as an allegorical representation of the American world quest (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.315 / printed p.288, and PDF p.322-323 / printed p.295-296).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Culture and Imperialism, Herman Melville, C. L. R. James