Why Don't We Do It in the South Atlantic?

Yesterday was the 154th anniversary of Moby Dick. It was published first in Great Britain, then in the U.S. on November 14th, 1851. Longtime readers of this little cereal-box side-panel will recall my month-long rereading last year of what I still think is the best American novel, although I freely confess a fetish for long passages of baroque Victorian prose–and Melville’s style is so different from the moderns (from Twain to Hemingway and Faulkner) that comparing them does violence to both. Still, a sympathetic reader will see a lot of modernity in Moby-Dick, particularly the easy shift from dramatic narrative to pedantic philosophy and didactic science. The allegorical qualities of Moby-Dick (chasing that White Whale–truth–to the death of the Pequod–the world) may be what make it timeless in the literary syllabus. But as far as sailing stories, it also ranks among the best. It’s not a genre I know fabulously well, but Conrad’s “Typhoon” figures promininetly as a post-industrial interpretation, as does Gore Vidal’s “Williwa” (that author’s very first novel).

Moby Dick did not do well in its initial printing. The standard line of thought is that the publisher accidentally left out the epiologue in the British edition–that’s the final chapter that explains how the narrator of the story managed to survive the wreck of the Pequod to tell the story. This supposedly led to bad critical reviews which negatively affected American readers. I have my doubts about that sort of reduction, but it is intriguing to think about how Anglo-centric the publishing world still was, eighty years after the Revolutionary War. If you read the allegedy negative contemporary reviews of Moby Dick, it becomes clear that Melville was a sort of reverse Beatles of his time. An American rock star storming the shores of Olde World, and this was his misunderstood White Album. Coincidentally, the book announced and recorded for posterity the moment when American commercial shipping surpassed the Brits, the Dutch, and even the Norwegians.