Myth of the Whale

Its weirdly prescient opening chapter refers to a “Bloody Battle In Affghanistan” and a “Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States.” Several hundred pages later, in the harrowing denouement, a madman seizes control of a commercial vessel and steers it toward mass destruction.

He’s believed to be acting under the spell of a mysterious, white-turbaned Middle Easterner, surrounded by shady accomplices serving as the “paid spies” and “secret confidential agents” of the devil. Meanwhile, our narrator, a solitary Manhattan survivor, puzzles the meaning of these tragic events in the grander scheme of things.

A Hollywood screenplay ripped from yesterday’s headlines? No, it’s a rough synopsis of “Moby-Dick,” Herman Melville’s sprawling metaphysical yarn about a doomed whale-hunting expedition. Marking its 150th birthday this fall, “Moby-Dick” is once more mirroring some of our most up-to-the-minute anxieties and spiritual yearnings--as well as some of our most timeless ones. Or so contends a crew of hardcore Melville scholars, many of whom have been setting aside time to commemorate Melville’s cosmic seafaring saga and chart its ongoing ripple effects on American culture and society.

“Moby-Dick, the whale, is almost America’s Rorschach test. You can see within that myth of the whale a vision that you have of the nation,” says Timothy Marr, an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and participant in a recent interdisciplinary conference on “Moby-Dick” at Hofstra University in New York.

And though few readers are likely to confuse Melville’s rich, mytho-poetic prose with Jeanne Dixon’s tabloid prognostications, “Moby-Dick” is stocked with characters, plot points and themes--revenge, the nature of evil, the clash of Christian and non-Christian worldviews--that eerily evoke the terrifying attacks and global conflicts of recent weeks.

“It speaks to a lot of issues today, and it’s actually come up in a lot of the debates on Sept. 11 and after,” says Hilton Obenzinger, who teaches English at Stanford University and is helping coordinate a flurry of Melville-related activities this weekend at San Francisco’s Maritime Park.

“This isn’t Nostradamus, thank God,” concurs John Bryant, a professor of English at Hofstra. “But this novel was written at a time of crisis in America, as the Civil War and issues of slavery were heating up, and it politically has always spoken to many audiences in the many decades since then.”

Considered Blasphemous by Some Critics

Published in the United States in November 1851, the book initially baffled many readers and was dismissed or even reviled by some critics as a rambling, blasphemous affront to Protestant beliefs and flinty Yankee tastes. In fact, “Moby-Dick” is many books rolled into one.

First and foremost, it’s a rollicking adventure story. Inspired in part by the real-life sinking of a whaling ship called the Essex, the book is a densely detailed account of the monomaniacal Captain Ahab and his ragtag crew’s vengeful pursuit of the great white whale nicknamed Moby-Dick. Years before, the whale “had reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field.” From that moment, the captain made Moby-Dick the personification of worldly evil, a symbol of the brute indifference of the universe toward human suffering.

Beneath the book’s choppy narrative surface, however, lie dark and ambivalent philosophical currents. “Moby-Dick” is Melville’s encyclopedic meditation on the nature of God, the nature of nature, the place of man in the universe and the national odyssey of the United States within the shifting tides of human history. As with most classic books, every generation has searched for its own particular meanings in “Moby-Dick,” especially when troubles arise, scholars say.

Structurally symphonic, narratively fragmented and rhetorically all over the map, Melville’s book has been touted as a precursor of modern and postmodern fiction. Its influence can be detected in works as dissimilar as Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow,” Ralph Ellison’s “The Invisible Man,” and, of course, Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” whose rabble-rousing protagonist, Randall P. McMurphy, wears boxer shorts imprinted with whales, he explains, because someone told him he was a symbol.

For many artists, “Moby-Dick” has been a deep creative well where the restless, the reflective and the tormented come to cast about for their souls. Abstract Expressionist painters Jackson Pollock and Frank Stella engaged with “Moby-Dick’s” dark phantasms in order to grapple with their own demons. Two years ago, the avant-garde performance artist Laurie Anderson fashioned a dreamy, impressionistic multimedia piece, “Songs and Stories From Moby Dick,” in homage to a writer she has described as “a 19th century William S. Burroughs.”

“Moby-Dick’s” offspring continue to turn up in many guises. In 1999, Sena Jeter Naslund reimagined Melville’s story from a female perspective in her novel “Ahab’s Wife.” The main character in Woody Allen’s 1983 mock-umentary, “Zelig,” suffers from a unique disorder because all his friends have read “Moby-Dick” and he hasn’t--a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of the work’s enduring connection to American culture. And many coffee fanatics unknowingly toast the book every time they raise an iced cappuccino: The Starbucks chain is named for the most god-fearing (and business-minded) character in “Moby-Dick,” the first mate.

“It is depthless, really, and sustains repeated readings all of one’s life,” said the novelist E.L. Doctorow, who gave an address on “Moby-Dick” as part of the Hofstra conference. “It is the novel as collage, a valid principle of composition for our own age, not only for contemporary painting, but for contemporary fiction as well.”

In a recent e-mail interview, Doctorow described “Moby-Dick” as “a revolutionary novel” that “anticipates the 20th century’s dissatisfactions with traditional narrative as in James Joyce, as in Virginia Woolf, or the various practitioners of postmodernism.”

“Melville was ahead of his time,” Doctorow said. “He will tell you about the geology of tectonic plates, about the implications of Darwin’s discoveries, about the structural similarities of Christian and pagan worship, and so forth. He was as much of an existentialist as Sartre or Camus, and of course his grand conception of ‘Moby-Dick’ is finally that of a poet who wrings every possible sort of beauty and meaning from each and every item of information he conveys to us.”

‘I Have Written a Wicked Book’

No one was more aware than Melville that “Moby-Dick” would ruffle feathers when it was published. “I have written a wicked book and feel as spotless as the lamb,” the author wrote to his colleague and friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. “Americans up until that time were pretty much into toeing the line in the moral categories, and Melville was castigated in reviews for his irreligiosity and smarty-pants attitude toward missionaries and implied disrespect or sarcasm for established religions,” Bryant says.

While scholars caution against searching for too many contemporary parallels in “Moby-Dick’s” notoriously slippery text, reinterpreting the book in light of contemporary events is practically as American as apple pie. As “Moby-Dick’s” critical reputation has seesawed over the decades, successive generations of readers have sought understanding and validation of their own viewpoints in Melville’s oceanic vision. “That’s one of the reasons why it didn’t have a readership in its time, because it couldn’t be fit into existing conventions,” Marr says. “‘Moby Dick’ in many ways is sui generis; it’s its own creation.”

“Moby-Dick” flopped in Melville’s homeland, selling barely 3,000 total copies in the author’s lifetime. (By contrast, his first book, “Typee,” based on his youthful travels in the South Pacific, sold twice that amount in its first two years.)

When Melville died in 1891 he was nearly forgotten by the general reading public; his last work, the novella “Billy Budd,” wasn’t published until the 1920s. Many critics considered him a flaky failure. But the book’s reputation stood higher in Europe, and, in 1919, the centenary of Melville’s birth, “Moby-Dick” underwent a profound reappraisal.

To young Americans disillusioned with the waste and betrayals of World War I, “Moby-Dick” expressed a then-fashionable attitude of radical skepticism toward authority. Ahab was recast as a populist hero, and Melville’s sometimes caustic and satirical views were embraced by a generation enamored of jazz, motor cars and the irreverent thrills of secular society.

Others took note of the book’s democratic idealism. English novelist D.H. Lawrence compared the missionary zeal of Ahab and his shipmates aboard the Pequod to Woodrow Wilson’s high-minded delegation to the Versailles peace talks. “Except,” Lawrence observed, “that none of the Peuquodders took their wives along.”

Those perceptions began to shift after World War II, says Obenzinger, when Ahab’s self-destructive obsession with Moby-Dick put some readers and critics in mind of dictators like Hitler and Stalin. Gradually, the book came to be seen less as Ahab’s story than Ishmael’s. It is Ishmael who, alone, escapes the wreck of the Pequod and lives to tell the tale, and it is Ishmael who is saved by his capacity for understanding and brotherly connection with his bunkmate, Queequeg, the tattooed South Sea islander.

As war weariness gave way to prosperity and Eisenhower-era conformity, other allegorical readings of “Moby-Dick” surfaced. The West Indian critic and author CLR James went so far as to liken Ahab to a modern corporate chief executive, , with Ishmael as his flunky yes man.

Still later, “Moby-Dick” was reassessed in the wake of the social movements of the 1960s, when Melville’s critique of the 19th century whaling industry was construed by some as a kind of proto-ecological tract, a prophetic warning against planetary suicide. Today the book can be read for its insights into the American political economy at a time when the nation was beginning to assert its economic world-power status. “The whaling industry was the oil industry of its time,” Marr says.

Osama bin Laden as Moby-Dick

Given the book’s multilayered mutability, some commentators have suggested symbolic parallels with America’s present-day ordeals. Author-scholar Edward Said recently voiced his opinion in the Progressive magazine that Osama bin Laden “has been turned into Moby-Dick ... a symbol of all that’s evil in the world.” This plays into the hands of Bin Laden and his network, Said argued, by inflating his mythic stature. “I think we need to secularize the man.”

Some of “Moby-Dick’s” contemporary echoes, however coincidental, are hard to overlook. Ishmael, named after the Old Testament progenitor of the Arabs, is a universal symbol of outcast peoples. In Melville’s time, Marr says, Muslims were known as Ishmaelites, and by having a character named Ishmael narrate the book and be its only survivor, “Melville is bringing the outcast to the center of his expression.”

Among the book’s most sinister characters is the fire-worshiping Persian harpooner Fedallah, described as “such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams ... but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities....” Possessing prophetic powers, he forecasts Ahab’s death and the destruction of the Pequod.

But like other characters in “Moby-Dick,” Fedallah is a composite, Marr says, more than the sum of his physical, ethnic or religious traits. “It would be a mistake to pin him down ethnically.”

When Melville wrote “Moby-Dick,” the Ottoman Empire was in its twilight as an Islamic world power and was seen by many Westerners as less threatening to Christianity than in centuries past. Some Americans envisioned their country as replacing the Ottomans, morally and religiously, as a leading civilization. “I think Melville was aware of all of this, but not in the political terms that we understand it today,” Marr says.

Stung by the failure of “Moby-Dick” and its follow-up, “Pierre, or the Ambiguities,” Melville embarked on a long pilgrimage to the Middle East in the mid-1850s, passing through Turkey, Egypt, and what was then Palestine before reaching Jerusalem. In 1876 he produced the rarely read epic poem “Clarel,” longer than Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” in which he pondered the problem of faith in a modernizing world. It includes characters of many different religions, including Muslims, possessing many different degrees of faith, “from blind belief to agonizing doubt,” Marr says.

Melville was obsessed with the gray areas of faith, the hazards of interpretation. His books are filled with blustery, larger-than-life characters and opinionated chatterers, like Ishmael.

But frequently it’s Melville’s quietest characters--Queequeg, Billy Budd, Bartleby the Scrivener--who command the greatest moral authority. It’s as if they’d been struck dumb by the depths of their comprehension and had determined to resist uttering simple truths.

Such quiet self-containment may be rare in an epoch awash in slogans and sound bites. But it’s a quality that Melville himself struggled to preserve during his lifelong quest to make sense of a complex world and an equally complex moral universe.

“Melville requires us to work with him, so that interpretation becomes a living act of engagement that does not have any single limit to it,” Marr says. “We must dive with Melville. We can’t make shallow interpretations. The sea is a mystery, and the longer we dive, the more we grasp that it is a mystery.”