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Any struggling author might find consolation in knowing that Herman Melville (1819-1891) didn’t have it so easy, either. His story of literary success and failure is as relevant now as it was in his time. An author makes a splash on the literary scene, and the public demands more of the same, only to find that the author has moved on. His growth as a writer no longer allows him to produce the same type of work that the public wants, and his stardom begins to fade. This is how we understand Melville today as a misunderstood genius. His stardom extended beyond the circumference of his readers’ taste.
Travel narratives were once the most popular genre in the nineteenth century. Americans were fascinated by foreign cultures, specifically, as a means to understand their place in the global world. Today, we recognise Melville for his whale of a masterpiece, Moby-Dick. But it was his first two works, Typee and Omoo, that made him most famous. Typee was an autobiographical travel narrative based on his real-life experience of being held captive by cannibals after he deserted the whaling ship Acushnet in 1841. The cannibals on the Marquesas Islands were fortunately friendly and fun-loving, and Melville was able to leave and find his way back home. People were captivated by the exotic story, and the title Typee made Melville an immediate sensation. He followed it up with “Omoo,” another adventure story set in the Polynesian islands, and it appeared as though Melville had a long way to literary fame ahead of him.
With new fame, a new wife, and a blossoming friendship with fellow writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville began working on another novel. In 1849, he published Mardi, a novel that marked a shift in style and substance. Like Hawthorne, Melville also became interested in writing romance, in which he was free to create a work based on symbolic representations of ideas rather than specific facts from his real life.
Mardi was a forerunner to Moby-Dick. The book was panned by readers and rejected by the public, who just wanted to hear exciting sea-faring adventures.
Melville’s masterpiece, Moby-Dick, in many ways was a patchwork. It was a mix of styles, narrative, points of view, and literary forms. It contained dictionary entries, word etymologies, whaling manual entries, elaborate, contorted sentence structures, and biblical allusions. It was part comedy, part tragedy, and part epic. For all its complexity, the book was a masterful mix of all these features and was regarded as a work of genius.
Moby-Dick starts with that iconic line in literature: “Call me Ishmael.” Ishmael, the narrator of the book, decides he has had enough of land and joins the crew of a whaling ship, named Pequod. As he waits to set sail, he finds himself sharing a room at an inn with another crew member, Queequeg, a cannibal and harpooner from the South Seas, and they quickly form an unlikely friendship. They don’t meet their mysterious captain, Ahab, until after the ship sets sail. Ahab announces to the crew that this will not be a run-of-the-mill whaling trip. They are on a mission to find a formidable white whale named Moby Dick, which once claimed Ahab’s leg in a violent attack and destroyed his ship. The crew is now part of Ahab’s monomaniacal quest to avenge his attack. They encounter Moby Dick three times, until the great White Whale finally crushes the ship, taking Ahab down with it into the vortex of the sea after the rope of Ahab’s harpoon catches his own neck. Ishmael is the only crew member who survives to tell the tale, floating atop Queequeg’s coffin.
At its core, Moby-Dick is an allegorical quest narrative, but the complexity of the book lends itself to multiple interpretations. Some readers view it as a cautionary tale about the hubris of humanity in attempting to control nature, while others see Ahab’s mission to kill Moby Dick as a fight against evil. Others interpret it as Ahab’s obsession as a battle against evil, or even as a search for God or divine truth. For both Ahab and Ishmael, the whale is the centre of the book, a mysterious, gigantic creature that symbolises the ineffability of nature. Both try to come to terms with the whale – Ahab with his harpoon and Ishmael with his exhaustive lists of whale anatomy, dictionary of whaling terms, and passages clipped from whaling manuals.
The name “Ishmael” itself is symbolic. In the Bible, Ishmael is the outcast son of Abraham, suggesting that Melville’s narrator is a kind of societal outsider, observing life from the margins.
Moby-Dick barely made a ripple when it was published. It took more than seventy years for it to come into its own, finally recognised as the literary masterpiece it is. Hawthorne, to whom the book was dedicated, was one of the few people who praised the book.
After the early success of Typee and Omoo, Melville never again found popular acclaim. The rest of his life was spent writing in obscurity, disillusioned by the need to cater to the public’s tastes in order to survive. Many of his works after Moby-Dick, such as the short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” a parable about the incompatibility of commerce and the human spirit, and The Confidence-Man, a book satirising the level of faith people like Emerson put in the goodness of human nature, are testaments to his bitterness. Melville died relatively unknown but has now become recognised as the author of (in some minds) “the great American novel.”
The next time you go to pick up that cup of Starbucks, remember this fun fact: Starbucks is named after Starbuck, the first mate of the illustrious Pequod.
Written and posted by Kamlesh Tripathi
Author, Poet, & Columnist
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https://kamleshsujata.wordpress.com
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