The Carnival of Herman Melville's Moby Dick

A New Companion to Herman Melville

A New Companion to Herman Melville, 2022

[Note that the attached PDF only shows the front matter. Please contact me if you would like access to any chapter PDFs.] A New Companion to Herman Melville delivers an insightful examination of Melville for the twenty-first century. Building on the success of the first Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville, and offering a variety of tools for reading, writing, and teaching Melville and other authors, this New Companion offers critical, technological, and aesthetic practices that can be employed to read Melville in exciting and revelatory ways. Editors Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge create a framework that reflects a pluralistic model for humanities teaching and research. In doing so, the authors highlight the ways that Melville himself was concerned with the utility of tools within fluid circuits of meaning, and how those ideas are embodied, enacted, and mediated. In addition to considering critical theories of race, gender, sexuality, transatlantic and hemispheric studies, digital humanities, book history, neurodiversity, and new biography and reception studies, this book offers: - A thorough introduction to the life of Melville, as well as the twentieth- and twenty-first-century revivals of his work - Comprehensive explorations of Melville’s works, including Moby-Dick, Pierre, Piazza Tales, and Israel Potter, as well as his poems and poetic masterpiece Clarel - Practical discussions of material books, print culture, and digital technologies as applied to Melville - In-depth examinations of Melville’s treatment of the natural world - Two symposia sections with concise reflections on art and adaptation, and on teaching and public engagement A New Companion to Herman Melville provides essential reading for scholars and students ranging from undergraduate and graduate students to more advanced scholars and specialists in the field.

“Or, the Whale”: Unpopular Melville in the Popular Imagination, or a Theory of Unusability

Leviathan, 2009

I recently saw a local band playing in San Francisco whose name is “Or, The Whale,” an in-joke for Melvilleans, or perhaps part of a tradition going back to the late 1960s, when another local band named itself Moby Grape. (They played, incidentally, in the Castro, not far from the bar Moby Dick, creating a kind of Melville enterprise zone.) That once unpopular novel has had a surprising influence on popular music, ranging from Led Zeppelin’s fifteen-minute drum solo indulgence titled “Moby Dick” to the techno-musician Moby (Richard Melville Hall), who claims to be distantly related to the author. In the late 1960s, the record label of the folk-rock group the Turtles was called White Whale, presaging a contemporary indie band of the same name. Before the digital age, one could find numerous Moby Disc record stores in the Northeastern United States, and even a Moby Disques near the Panth´eon in Paris, which one imagines would have amused Melville. The musician-artist Laurie Anderson staged a performance piece inspired by Moby- Dick, and Stanley Crouch situated Melville’s opus as a proto-jazz novel for its improvisational verve. Emblematically, it is as if Moby-Dick can be “played” in many keys, or is amenable to many arrangements. However, as I elaborate, almost all references to Melville in popular culture rely on Moby-Dick and a few other sources whose useful indeterminacy or ambiguity allows them to be adapted to as many uses as artists and critics can devise. In the United States, Melville is known in the popular imagination for relatively few works: the “B” trilogy of “Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” and “Billy Budd”; and the well-known but not necessarily well-read Moby-Dick. (In the nineteenth-century, Typee was popular partly through its notoriety, but has receded from public consciousness). On the other hand, relatively few, perhaps even within the academy, read Mardi, the almost wholly ignored Israel Potter and Clarel, and to some degree Pierre and The Confidence-Man. A useful context might be to think of film adaptations of Melville’s work: one could contrast numerous Hollywood productions of Moby-Dick with Leos Carax’s intriguing but singularly inaccessible French adaptation of Pierre, POLA X (an acronym for Pierre Ou Les Ambigu¨ıt´es X, referencing the fact that Carax filmed his tenth screenplay, though perhaps, as with the amplifiers in Spinal Tap, he should have gone to eleven). It is hard to imagine that contemporary Hollywood would bring Pierre to the screen.

The Political Unconscious of the White Whale: Moby Dick and the Politics of Reading

This essay will apply Fredric Jameson’s Marxist hermeneutics as outlined in The Political Unconscious to a reading of Hermann Melville’s Moby Dick in order to test the efficacy of his interpretive method. Jameson maintains that literary texts by definition encode ideologies, and hence it is the critic’s task to decode them, thereby revealing their true content. In his eyes, “the political perspective” is “the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation” (1). The analysis will focus on Moby Dick itself as well as secondary sources: such a strategy will reveal the innate ideologies within interpretive methods, demonstrating how the assumptions underlying our interpretive methods determine the conclusions that we reach about the text. Jameson’s Marxist reading strategy will be applied as an extension to the conclusions of Walter E. Bezanson’s New Critical reading in order to show how a historical-political emphasis on texts is not detrimental to an appreciation of them as aesthetic objects. Hence Marxist hermeneutics will be shown as superior to those of New Criticism.

Genre Debates in Moby-Dick Scholarship, 1950-2015

Summarizes the debate surrounding the genre of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick since 1950, concentrating on its status as an anatomy (via the tradition of Northrop Frye) and as an encyclopedic novel (via the tradition of Edward Mendelson). Includes an interpretive essay, alphabetical bibliography of sources, and chronological annotated bibliography.

Melvilleʼs New Seafarerʼs Philosophy in Moby-Dick

ATHENS JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES & ARTS

is often viewed as a philosophical work, the paper argues that though it deals with philosophical issues, it is not a philosophical work in the traditional sense of producing arguments for theses. Rather, inspired by ancient Greek philosophy and ancient Babylonian myths, Moby-Dick seeks to disclose a kind of poetic philosophical truth that is more basic than propositional truth per se. The fundamental philosophical conviction that underlies Moby-Dick is the microcosmic view that traces to ancient Greek philosophy, roughly, the view that all mortal living organisms, including human beings and whales, are miniature images of the whole cosmos. The paper begins with a discussion of the main character and narrator of the book, the "ideal democratic man" and wanderer, Ishmael. Second, the paper explains the neglected microcosmic view in Moby-Dick. Third, the paper explains the "moral" dimension of Moby-Dickʼs microcosmic view, specifically, its view that knowledge of these ultimate cosmic truths is unattainable by human beings and that it is even dangerous to attempt to fathom such ultimate truths. Fourth, the paper argues that Moby-Dick is best seen as a kind of philosophical poetry rather than a standard argumentative philosophical work. Fifth, referring to the "old quarrel" between philosophy and poetry discussed by Plato, the paper invokes certain Heideggerian ideas to explain how, in opposition to Plato, there can be a coherent kind of philosophical poetry of the sort found in Moby-Dick. Finally, the paper argues that it is one of the fundamental aims in Moby-Dick to distinguishes between the safe, civilized, rational philosophy of the "landsman" and the more adventurous dangerous poetic philosophy of the seafarers, thereby anticipating some of Nietzscheʼs views about a new kind of seafarerʼs philosophy in Thus Spake Zarathustra by almost a half century. I look upon metaphysical ideas as … flashes of light in … a dark night; and that … is all we can hope of metaphysics. It seems improbable that the first principles of things will ever be thoroughly known. The mice living in a few little holes in an enormous building do not know if the building is eternal, who is the architect, or why the architect built it. They *only+ try to preserve their lives … We are the mice; and the divine architect who built the universe has not … told the secret to any of us. Voltaire 1 Moby Dick is generally known as an adventure story about a monomaniacal Captain Ahab who sets off on a suicidal mission of revenge to kill a giant white whale (Moby-Dick) that took his leg in an earlier voyage. However, Ishmael, the narrator of the book, raises numerous philosophical issues. 2 Indeed, some of 

Herman Melville’s Use of Nautical Folklore

none, 2013

Perhaps it was fate that sent Herman Melville on his first sea voyage in 1839, the same year of his first publication, “Fragments from a Writing Desk.” Melville sailed aboard various vessels, including whalers and naval vessels before his marriage in 1847, and later drew on his experiences at sea for the majority of his work. His early travelogues proved popular because they were not overly taxing to read and they appealed to the popular thirst for adventure. Melville’s timing was perfect as narratives of exploration became increasingly popular among early 19th-century readers who sought to escape through stories. Melville drew his inspiration from sources beyond his own experience and research suggests he looked to Shakespeare, Goethe, Chaucer and the Bible. In addition, a prominent feature of the language and the maritime social hierarchy that Melville draws upon involves nautical superstition and folklore, a defining characteristic of all sea stories, and two clear influences on Melville in this regard are Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast. This paper examines the origins of Melville’s understanding of sailor’s lore and superstition in Moby Dick, and then looks ahead to Melville’s impact on Conrad’s work.