Moby-Dick—Undiscovered Masterpiece
In October 1851 a new novel titled The Whale was published in England. Almost nobody noticed. A little less than a month later, 155 years ago today, it came out in the United States with a different title, Moby-Dick. It got some good reviews, but it still didn’t bring its author fame or fortune.
Herman Melville, born in New York City in 1819, had an unusual youth. His father’s death in 1832 left him disaffected and listless, and he began his career heading away from civilization on a whaling ship, the setting he would use for his greatest novel years later. Aboard the vessel Acushnet, he sailed to the Pacific and the South Seas, visiting Hawaii, Tahiti, and the Marquesas. On returning to the United States, he began to write about his travels abroad and succeeded in publishing several books. Typee, a story of romance and adventure in the South Pacific printed in 1846, caught the attention of Americans eager to learn about his unusual travels.
But in the half-decade separating Typee and Moby-Dick, his writing changed. Where Typee was a fairly straightforward narrative, full of exciting and strange observations, Moby-Dick was a very different and new kind of novel. It follows the voyage of the whaling ship Pequod under Captain Ahab. Maimed in an earlier encounter with a white whale, Ahab obsessively redirects his crew from hunting whales and collecting their oil to finding and killing his underwater nemesis. Melville digresses and punctuates the story with long discourses on the practices of the whaling industry. For every dramatic confrontation with a dangerous sea creature, there are dozens of pages of almost scientific discussions of marine biology. By the time the novel reaches its dramatic conclusion, and Ahab finally joins battle with the white whale, Moby Dick, the reader has learned a very great deal about whaling—too much, for many readers.
Moby-Dick (the hyphen in the title was an error in the first printing that has stuck ever since) failed to excite Melville’s popular audience, many of whom would have preferred another Typee, but some critics saw something special in it. One London reviewer declared that it had “an unusual power of enchaining the interest, and rising to the verge of the sublime, without overpassing the narrow boundary which plunges the ambitious penman into the ridiculous.” In time, that view would come to predominate, particularly in the first decades of the twentieth century, as more novelists began to take inspiration from Melville’s style.
The change began in the late 1910s, around the time of the hundredth anniversary of Melville’s birth. Between the unsuccessful publication of Moby-Dick and the turn of the century, the author largely disappeared from the popular eye. By the time he died, in 1891, he considered himself a failure. Then in 1917 the young American critic Carl Van Doren published an essay in the Cambridge History of American Literature that helped start rehabilitating Melville’s reputation.
“Description can hardly report the extraordinary mixture in Moby Dick of vivid adventure, cloudy symbolism, thrilling pictures of the sea in every mood, sly mirth and comic ironies, real and incredible characters, wit speculation, humour, colour,” he wrote. “. . . The immense originality of Moby Dick must warrant the claim of its admirers that it belongs with the greatest sea romances in the whole literature of the world.” Van Doren, who would later become one of the country’s most prominent scholars, urged other critics to reassess Melville’s work, and they did. They began to reexamine his personal papers and manuscripts, which fortunately had been been preserved by his granddaughter, Eleanor Melville Metcalf. The writer Raymond Weaver wrote an article in The Nation on Melville’s hundredth birthday and produced a full-scale biography only a few years later.
Though academics were warming to Melville, it took a longer time for Moby-Dick to win the approval of his fellow novelists. British ones, caught up in the innovations of writers like Joyce and Woolf, grew fond of his experimentations during the 1920s. But for Americans like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, Moby-Dick was still a fairly obscure work. They never would have encountered Melville in their formal educations, despite having studied contemporaries of his such as Emerson and Hawthorne. Still, his writings, and Moby-Dick in particular, began to win over twentieth-century readers, and novelists also started to appreciate the book as an unconventional and psychologically sophisticated work. William Faulkner announced in the late 1920s that Moby-Dick was the one novel he would most have wanted to have written himself.
Today the world agrees that Melville’s unpopular masterpiece was far greater than any of his earlier works, financially successful though they may have been. The author had taken a big risk in abandoning his earlier style to produce a more expansive and wide-ranging novel. Moving past the simple exoticism of his youth, he took on truly universal subjects as far-ranging and weighty as the limits of human possibility. When Moby-Dick first appeared, in the autumn of 1851, few appreciated it, but in the long run readers have come to understand it as a groundbreaking piece of writing and a deep meditation on life itself.