“Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick! On deck there! — brace sharper up; crowd her into the wind’s eye. He’s too far off to lower yet, Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake! Stand over that helmsman with a top-maul! So, so; he travels fast, and I must down . . . “
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick was published in America on November 14, 1851 (a partial British edition had come out a month earlier in England). The passage above is from the final chapter, Captain Ahab pausing a last time before he steps from the Pequod to the whaleboat that will deliver him to his fate. As many commentators have noted, the commercial failure of Melville’s novel — by the time of his death in 1891, fewer than 4,000 copies had been sold — all but sealed his own fate. What little he published over his last forty years was also poorly received, forcing him into a full-time job as customs house inspector, rubber-stamping ocean commerce rather than imagining high-sea adventures.
The reevaluation of Moby-Dick gathered momentum in the 1920s, with both the critics and the filmmakers jumping aboard, if only to commit narrative mutiny. The popular 1926 silent film The Sea Beast, for example, lashed Melville’s story to the Hollywood mast with an ending in which a heroic Ahab, played by John Barrymore, not only gets his whale but marries his sweetheart. But today, 165 years onward, many put Ahab’s whale chase ahead of even Huck Finn’s river float as the essential American quest novel, even “our American bible,” says Nathaniel Philbrick in Why Read Moby-Dick?:
Contained in the pages of Moby-Dick is nothing less than the genetic code of America — all the promises, problems, conflicts, and ideals that contributed to the outbreak of a revolution in 1775, as well as a civil war in 1861, and continued to drive this country’s march into the future. This means that whenever a new crisis grips this country, Moby-Dick becomes newly important. It is why subsequent generations have seen Ahab as Hitler during World War II, or as a profit crazed deep-drilling oil company in 2010, or as a power-crazed Middle Eastern dictator in 2011.
George Cotkin’s Dive Deeper: Journeys with Moby-Dick also makes a case for the relevance of Melville’s classic. After framing each chapter of the novel in a reader-friendly “chowder” of connected events, ideas, adaptations, and allusions, Cotkin agrees that Moby-Dick is indeed a tale of America — as, he notes, even the recent Nobel laureate dubiously recognized. Cotkin’s last chapter is a riff on “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” in which “Captain Arab” and his men, who are also Mayflower pilgrims and crew for Christopher Columbus, try to land a continent:
“I think I’ll call it America”
I said as we hit the land
I took a deep breath
I fell down, I could not stand
Captain Arab he started
Writing up some deeds
He said, “Let’s set up a fort
And start buying the place with beads”
The legendary sinking of the whale ship Essex, inspiration for much of Moby-Dick, is also tied to this week. Rammed several times by a large white whale, the Essex sank on November 20, 1820, some 2,000 miles west of South America. Philbrick’s 2000 bestseller, In the Heart of the Sea, tells that story of leviathans and cannibals, and his more recent Away Off Shore tells the history of Nantucket Island, home to generations of whalers, including Melville’s Ahab. David Kirby’s Death at SeaWorld tells the shameless history of man’s attempt to cage and commercialize killer whales, while Joshua Horwitz’s award-winning War of the Whales tells the true story of how the U.S. Navy, until just recently ordered by the courts not to do so, used sonar to drive hundreds of whales to their death.
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Sig Nordal 