Moby Dick

 

Moby Dick.

Writer: Herman Melville. Field: novel. Composition: one hundred and thirty-five chapters.

Main theme : The epic at the time of industrialisation.

Secondary themes: Leviathan, the colour white, the sea, revenge, obstinacy, good and evil, death, disappearance, vanity. Symbolism.

Historical context: At a time when America was taking hold of its Wild West and trying to establish itself as a nation, Melville emphasised the country's maritime character. Whaling was in full swing. People wanted to make money by exterminating cetacean populations. All this is taking place in an atmosphere of greed for money, driven by the acquisitive impulse of individual egoism. Melville was not unaware of these problems, and he addresses them when he reports on Ismaël's recruitment onto the boat: Ismaël negotiates his bounty. But Melville did not focus on the inefficient and evil nature of capitalism. He elevated the work to the level of an epic and turned it into a form of legend. While the conquest of the West found its imaginary apotheosis in the Western, the domination of the seas and the heroism it implied found in Melville's novel a work that raised it to its highest summit. The references to biblical texts highlight how Americans like to present their own history: not in terms of the drudgery of industrial labour, but in terms of myth and the sublime.

Why is this novel of interest to us today? 

Is it possible to present as sublime an activity as cruel and savage as whaling? Melville had the genius to present the epic of the water. Like every American, he left his Europe to reach the promised land in the United States, and like every white American, he retained the religion of the old continent. He knows the Bible better than any white American and knows that Jonah was saved in a whale or a big fish. He knows that leviathan exists and also instinctively knows that water is the origin of life and the source of death. Hamlet's blond Ophelia lies in calm water. Melville's waters are angrier. They reflect this confrontation with death. To go to the water is to go to the uncertain, to what is obviously frightening. The heart of the novel is based on ambivalence and the constant balancing act between good and evil. It highlights the problem of the monstrous. First of all, the whale is monstrous. It is monstrous because of its size and its colour. White appears to be both the synthesis of all colours and the colour of non-colour: the colour of death. It's as if we were dealing with an albino whale. From a literary point of view, it is interesting to note that the novel ends with the impossibility of verifying the story: the only witness to the story, the only one to escape the final shipwreck, will also be the narrator of the story. But Ismaël is precisely the one who flees the world: he joins the Pequod to make his fortune, he says, but probably more to escape a world he loathes. The novel alternates between realistic scenes and complete fantasy. It is truly allegorical: the epic of the sea is, in the end, the one from which nothing remains: Moby Dick is killed, Ahab the captain disappears in a deafening silence, the Pequod sinks in the distance, the men on the whalers see the ship engulfed and almost all of them die, and the only survivor produces nothing more than a story in literary form. It doesn't seem inappropriate to say that literature is the kind of narrative that produces the conditions for its own disappearance. But the disappearance of what? Let's look at the other great monstrous figure in the book: Ahab. Ahab is driven by an immense desire to take revenge on the whale that took his leg. But Ahab is not just Moby Dick's enemy. He is also Moby Dick's human double: the heroic, Homeric character of the two beings is absolutely parallel. Moby Dick is the monstrous leviathan, but he is also the hunted animal and the admirable monster who does everything in his power to survive. Ahab is also a being with these good sides: his immensely wild air and accents are offset by an unrivalled ability to command men. He will not be seen as a debonair man, but as a man driven by a certain sense of justice, or at any rate of vengeance, a human sentiment, all too human. This fight for revenge is perhaps what literature must purge.