Melville Moby-Dick

Literary animal studies are confronted with a systematic question: How can writing, as a human-made sign system, represent the nonhuman animal as an autonomous agent without falling back into the pitfalls of anthropomorphism? Against the backdrop of this problem, this paper asks how the medium of film allows for a different representation of the animal and analyzes two of Werner Herzog's later documentary films. Although the depiction of animals and landscapes has always played a significant part in Herzog's films, critical assessments of his work—including those of Herzog himself—tended to view the role of nature imagery as purely allegorical: it expresses the inner nature, the inner landscapes of the film's human protagonists. This paper tries to open up a different view. It argues that both Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World develop an aesthetic that depicts nonhuman nature as an autonomous and lively presence. In the close proximity amongst camera, human, and nonhuman agents, a clear distinction between nature and culture is increasingly blurred.

The purpose of this essay is to address the multimodal nature of Matt Kish’s project “Every Page of Moby-Dick, Illustrated”, where Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece is set as paratext. Particular focus is set on the portrayals of Captain Ahab, specifically “Page153”, “Page 465” and “Page 469”. The basic theoretical framework has been offered by Alice Gibbons’ theorization of multimodal cognitive poetics and Sigrid Norris’ systematization of multimodal (inter)action. Useful insight has been lent by Sharon Cameron’s work on allegories of the body in Melville’s writing. The given analysis aims to pinpoint the elements of innovation in Kish’s work with respect to the canonical formal features of the illustrated book and renewing of literary classics in multimodal terms.

In Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, the American whaler the Pequod encounters a fierce typhoon in Japanese waters. Melville’s novel contains many sublime descriptions of the ocean’s physical force and other natural phenomena, yet the force of the typhoon is registered less through direct description than through its effects on the structure of the text and its pivotal role in the plot. Melville is seemingly more interested in the typhoon’s symbolic potential than in its concrete actuality. This essay argues that the location of the typhoon sequence in the Pacific Ocean, when the Pequod has been “penetrating further and further into the heart of the Japanese cruising ground”, is crucial to understanding its meaning, as a symbol of both political and natural resistance to the United States’ imperial ambitions. In this respect, it bears comparison with another of the novel’s multivalent symbols—the white whale.

Heroes come in all shapes and sizes. Captain Ahab is no exception. Forget for a second Ahab's villainous qualities and look instead to the classical tradition. Shakespeare's Macbeth was not a very nice guy. Neither was Milton's Satan. Still, we find qualities within these antagonists that conform to ancient ideas of the epic and tragedy. Let us, then, look at Ahab in this same light. Ahab may be a monomaniac, but we still adore him despite all of his faults. Therefore, this essay explores the heroic qualities of Ahab which have made him into the American lit icon he is today.

In the wellspring of classic nineteenth-century American literature, a spectacular theme unites our greatest authors. They, in various ways, challenge the naïve optimism of the “American Adam” and American liberalism. They are deeply conservative in their skepticism toward human and civilizational progress and perfection.

Construit comme une préparation au voyage, ce livre a d’abord été conçu pour donner à entendre la lecture francophone, ininterrompue et inédite des 139 chapitres du roman de Melville, Moby-Dick ou le cachalot. Cette performance de trente-deux heures dessine une ligne continue entre lire, dire et faire et donne à penser que réécrire Moby-Dick est impossible. Mais à partir de Moby-Dick, on peut construire une nouvelle écriture artistique basée sur une actua-lisation nécessaire de notre relation au Léviathan, qui mise sur une attention durable, écologique et éthologique à l’égard des objets du roman. Pendant un an, une équipe de chercheurs et étudiants artistes, écrivains, traducteurs et acousticiens ont scruté systématiquement les objets, les gestes et les sons du roman pour comprendre les enjeux de l’écosystème melvillien. L’observation attentive de cet écosystème pose les bases de travaux sur l’implication des processus de création artistique dans un contexte environnemental élargi et tente d’avancer des propositions de définitions de ces objets particuliers — des objets libres — produits dans le cadre de ce programme de recherche en art basé sur le développement des intelligences collectives et l’écopoïétique.

In this essay, I read Moby-Dick as an allegorical description of the process of Ishmael’s healing from melancholy. Ishmael’s inane reveries at the beginning of the story evolve into a productive and self-creative narrative power. His initial melancholy reverie is represented in the novel as the narcissistic tendency of the subject to withdraw into oneself and sink into its own interiority, as well as the tendency to believe in a sentimental universal brotherhood. Ishmael manages to get free of his sterile daydreaming and regain contact with reality through a close experience of mortality and the confrontation with the power and complexity of writing.

Recent cultural criticism tools such as the concept of metanarrative or of deconstruction seem to find their forerunner in Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick. Specific references in the text imply that the idea of completeness seemed both an impossible and an undesirable task. Thus, the American author appears to be an adept of a philosophy of shipwreck, both in terms of criticizing Protestant theology and in terms of dismantling linear narrative. Instead of monotheism, he seems to favour cultural relativism and develops a loose narrative structure. Midway through the novel, a hermeneutic reading of the whiteness of the whale is provided; as a consequence of this fact, epistemology and ethics break down. Anthropology is yet another lens through which the novel can be read, as the narrator Ishmael seems to promote the values of religious tolerance and respect for cultural difference, themes Melville had been exploring since his first published novel, Typee.

L'epico libro di Melville, tra i più significativi della letteratura nordamericana.  Oggi considerato un classico fu al centro di varie vicissitudini editoriali.
Considerato un simbolo della lotta dell'uomo con la natura.
The epic book by Melville, one of the most significant in North American literature. Today considered a classic was at the center of various editorial vicissitudes.
Considered a symbol of man's struggle with nature.

Counting on his own experiences as a seaman aboard whaling ships, American novelist Herman Melville (1819─1891) comments on the complex human relationship with the sea and its uncertainties in his masterpiece, Moby Dick (1851). To this end, in his maritime novel, Melville tells the story of the obsessive quest of Captain Ahab of the whaler Pequod for revenge on Moby Dick, the albino sperm whale that destroyed his vessel and bit off his leg at the knee on the previous whaling voyage. In creating a character like Ahab, Melville seems to emphasize the evil and destructive side of humanity, focusing on the limitations and potential destructiveness of human nature. On the other hand, the narrator of the novel, Ishmael, displays many aspects of American transcendentalism throughout the novel. Thus, the two opposite protagonists are reflected in the structure of the novel as the transcendental idealism and optimism that Ishmael displays in the early part of the novel are replaced by Ahab's obsession for revenge and dictatorial leadership in the second half of the book, which is also appropriate for Shakespearean tragedy. This paper seeks to explore how the characters of Ishmael and Captain Ahab in Moby Dick match American transcendental idealism with dark romanticism in the form of a Shakespearean tragic plot.

In 1839, after a long chain of dead-end jobs necessitated by his outwardly prosperous but privately profligate father’s debt-ridden death seven years earlier, the 19-year-old Herman Melville did what many other disaffected and adventurous young men had done before him and ran away to sea. He signed aboard the merchantman St. Lawrence as a ship’s boy (the lowest ‘green hand’ rank), for a round trip from New York to the then vast trading port of Liverpool. Returning to New York in the autumn, he took a teaching position but left after one term because he never received any wages. After a trip up the Ohio River in an unsuccessful quest for employment and inspired by Richard Henry Dana’s nautical memoir Two Years Before the Mast (1840) and Jeremiah N. Reynolds’ 1839 article ‘Mocha Dick: Or The White Whale of the Pacific’ in the Knickerbocker magazine, Melville headed for New Bedford, Massachusetts, the ‘Whaling City’. There, he signed aboard the whaler Acushnet, again as a ‘green hand’, for a 1/175th share of the profits, setting sail at the beginning of January 1841. 

It was the custom of whaling vessels to ‘gam’ if their paths crossed in the open ocean, meaning that the captains and first mates would meet for drinks and to share intelligence on the movements of whales, while the crews also got together and swapped stories. The Acushnet regularly gammed with the Lima from Nantucket, whose company included William Henry Chase, the son of Owen Chase, who had been the first mate on the whaler Essex, sunk by an abnormally large sperm whale approximately 2,000 nautical miles west of South America in 1820:

I turned around and saw him about one hundred rods directly ahead of us, coming down with twice his ordinary speed of around 24 knots, and it appeared with tenfold fury and vengeance in his aspect. The surf flew in all directions about him with the continual violent thrashing of his tail. His head about half out of the water, and in that way he came upon us, and again struck the ship.

Chase had survived the appalling aftermath of the wreck, when the ship’s 20-man crew had spent three months at sea in three leaky whaling boats, eventually resorting to cannibalism, with survivors drawing lots to see who would be sacrificed and who would kill them after the corpses of the men who died of exposure ran out. (In another macabre twist, one boat carrying three men became separated from the group. It was found years later washed up on Ducie Island, an uninhabited atoll in the Pitcairn Islands, the skeletons of the crew still onboard.) Chase wrote an account of the ill-fated voyage in 1821, Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, after which he returned to sea for another 19 years. Despite a distinguished seafaring career which saw him captain first the whaler Winslow and then his own ship, the Charles Carrol, Chase was haunted by his experiences. He spent eight years in an asylum after retiring, and when he died in Nantucket in 1869, he was found to have been hiding food in his attic. William lent Melville a copy of his father’s book, of which he would later write: ‘The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea, & close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect upon me.’

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.

The persuasion that Nature is, in Leopardi's words, not a caring mother but a “malign or negligent stepmother” is a central idea of the Gnostic thought that has haunted Western culture for centuries. Herman Melville and Cormac McCarthy stand out, among the American writers, as those who have managed to revive this tradition of thought, and to rearticulate it for their respective times, in the most striking way. In their works they force the readers to renegotiate their ideas of the relationship between man and environment, interior and exterior, ethics and ethos.
In Moby-Dick, Melville represents the natural environment as the mere superficial layer of an abyss populated by indifferent and ungraspable forces, overwhelming the human being and ultimately crushing him. McCarthy, in particular in The Road, forces his characters to face a natural world that clearly “was not made for man,” and much less for his happiness. In this paper, I evaluate commonalities and differences in the representation of the Gnostic dark side of Nature offered by the two authors. In particular, I focus on the ethical stance taken by the authors in front of the indifference of Nature – namely, Melville's ironic exercise of devotion without faith and McCarthy's elegiac praise of discipline beyond duty – in order to evaluate their potential purport for contemporary ecocritical debate.

Watching "Jaws" after re-reading "Moby Dick" can be a fascinating experience; one senses the interesting currents of Melville's epic swirling through Spielberg's masterpiece.  In this paper, written for a course at the University of Texas at Austin taught by Melville scholar Martin Kevorkian, I look at the ways in which echoes of "Moby Dick" can be found in Spielberg's blockbuster film.

«Più del maggiore romanzo americano mai scritto», «un manuale di sopravvivenza metafisica», «un vero e proprio poema sacro»: anche nel XXI secolo il celebre romanzo di Hermann Melville Moby Dick sembra non perdere la sua attualità nell'interpretare la vicenda umana. Jean-Pierre Sonnet offre preziose chiavi di lettura di un testo scritto «convocando la Bibbia»: sono continui i rimandi scritturistici che intessono e strutturano la sua narrazione. I due testi stanno in un rapporto di valorizzazione reciproca: «se le figure scritturali permettono a Melville di scrivere quello che Pavese ha chiamato un "poema sacro", il genio di Moby Dick si riflette ugualmente sulle Scritture bibliche, ne accentua il potere rivelatore e le mette al riparo da una lettura ideologica o riduttiva». Su questo sfondo, l'impegno del lettore è in qualche modo simile a quello d'Ismaele, il narratore, esposto al male di Achab, ma salvato dall'inusuale scialuppa dell'amico pagano: «Forse bisogna vedere nel salvagente un simbolo del libro di Melville, agganciato a quello delle Scritture: ci permette di navigare dove Achab è sprofondato nella sua follia. Un libro come "gavitello di salvataggio"?».

At the time Melville conceived and wrote Moby-Dick or the Whale , during the mid-19th Century, the United States were entering into a rapid phase of development and transformation. Pivoting from its historical inception as a British colony fighting for the right to self governance, to a fledgling independent nation engaged in a process of radical self-definition, America was now faced with a whole slew of internal, structural, and ideological problems which were beginning to grow in magnitude and complexity. Having survived the birth ordeal of the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, America was able to turn its attention away from external threats of British sails on its horizons, toward the stew of social and political problems brewing within its own borders. America was faced with the task of determining what sort of role it had to play in the world and in what manner it would be structured politically, socially, and economically. Herman Melville's writing during this period focused squarely on these very issues that were at the time so polarizing, reflecting a restless antebellum America in the throes of change: the morality of the slave industry, political science, economics, expansionism, and democracy. All of these are highly visible in Melville's seminal work, perhaps none more so than the issue of political organization. While Moby-Dick is ostensibly a tale of a wild chase on the high seas, driven by a madman and ending in disaster, it is first and foremost an American epic. The novel is concerned as much with the self-contained narrative of Ishmael aboard the fated Pequod, as it is with the still uncertain destiny of American democracy.

The present article analyses the chapter titled "The Doubloon" in Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick by means of the highly ambiguous and – at times – paradoxical meanings of the symbol-coin, methodologically aligned with Jacques Derrida’s theory of de-centering the center. The doubloon is a subjective cipher, whose center is held together by the traditional dialogism of subjective interpretations co-existing congruently inside of it (as per each speaking character’s personality), as well as an all-encompassing system of representation, ultimately prone to be controlled by an outer immanent force – existing independently of the characters’ will –, gleaned by Pip at the end in his prophetical chant. The post-structuralist paradigm will help uncover the various disunities that harmoniously rule the signification of the golden coin, as well as – inside the theme of the novel – reveal man’s despair at his inability to reach it.

Counting on his own experiences as a seaman aboard whaling ships, American novelist Herman Melville (1819─1891) comments on the complex human relationship with the sea and its uncertainties in his masterpiece, Moby Dick (1851). To this end, in his maritime novel, Melville tells the story of the obsessive quest of Captain Ahab of the whaler Pequod for revenge on Moby Dick, the albino sperm whale that destroyed his vessel and bit off his leg at the knee on the previous whaling voyage. In creating a character like Ahab, Melville seems to emphasize the evil and destructive side of humanity, focusing on the limitations and potential destructiveness of human nature. On the other hand, the narrator of the novel, Ishmael, displays many aspects of American transcendentalism throughout the novel. Thus, the two opposite protagonists are reflected in the structure of the novel as the transcendental idealism and optimism that Ishmael displays in the early part of the novel are replaced by Ahab's obsession for revenge and dictatorial leadership in the second half of the book, which is also appropriate for Shakespearean tragedy. This paper seeks to explore how the characters of Ishmael and Captain Ahab in Moby Dick match American transcendental idealism with dark romanticism in the form of a Shakespearean tragic plot.

Ekphrasis is an ancient Greek term that describes a vivid and/or dramatic description of a work of art or object. We find this concept at work in many epic tales, such as with the Shield of Achilles or with the Murals of Carthage. In Moby Dick, Chapter 99 offers its own form of ekphrasis when Captain Ahab nails the gold doubloon to the ship's mast. What this offers in terms of description goes far beyond the images on the coin. Instead, we get various descriptions of what these images represent to the many crew members that reflect on it. For the reader, we gain an insightful look into the minds and the motives of these literary figures.

In this project, I examine the operation of the sublime and the unconscious in Moby Dick. In the sublime, I locate the source of Ahab’s obsession with, and Ishmael’s interest in, Moby Dick. Through sublime experiences, these characters confront the limits of human understanding. Ishmael accepts this limitation, but Ahab rejects it, choosing to pursue Moby Dick in an effort to reassert order in an entropic universe. He blames his loss of control on the whale, which becomes his objet petit a: that object, according to Lacan, that distracts the obsessive from the true source of his anxiety. Employing Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, I compare Ahab’s and Ishmael’s reactions to the sublime, and how these reactions determine their fates.

While Melville’s Mardi has long remained a puzzle to both readers and critics, scholars agree that his third novel marked a significant turning point in his writing career. It is with Mardi that Meville realized the novel as a form suited to grapple the various philosophical and religious questions he would famously explore in his following book, Moby Dick. Although scholars have already pinpointed many various sources for Mardi, this thesis examines the heretofore overlooked connections between Melville’s third book and the esoteric volume of American scripture, the Book of Mormon.

The first chapter of this thesis examines some of the shared narrative structures in the opening chapters of both Mardi and the Book of Mormon, including similar allegorical imagery. The chapter also shows how the openings of both Mardi and the Book of Mormon are structured as a sort of “Old Testament in reverse.” Chapter two takes an in-depth look at the teachings and theology of important character named Alma the Prophet from Mardi—apparently modeled on a character of the same name whose life and teachings make up one-third of Book of Mormon. Chapter three compares and contrasts the climactic scenes from Mardi and the Book of Mormon, both of which employ massive volcanic upheavals immediately followed by depictions of a Christian utopia. The thesis concludes with a look at how the Book of Mormon may have continued to influence Melville after Mardi, including how some of its themes and key phrases seem to make an appearance in Moby Dick.

Amongst what CLR James famously dubbed the " mariners, renegades and castaways " of Melville's fiction are numerous figures of living death. While they resist the imposition of single meanings, they are recurrently associated with the dehumanizing effects of labour exploitation, with overtones of racial domination. Crossing between industrial and plantation settings, they also blur the boundaries of North and South. In this, Melville's undead anticipate the idea of the zombie that crossed into mainstream U.S. culture during the United States' military occupation of Haiti (1915-1934). Distinct from the predatory zombie of contemporary horror film, this Haitian-American zombie was effectively a walking corpse, raised from the dead or deadened in life, and made to work for a zombie master. Exploring these connections  reminds us that nineteenth-century writers were already using figures of living death to express and explore some of the anxieties to which the word “zombie” later became attached, and that the advent of the Haitian-derived zombie slave in American literature and popular culture was a moment of continuity more than rupture. A longer, more detailed version of this essay with extended notes is available on request.

An example of a re-reading of the Book of Jonah is Moby-Dick or the whale (London - New York 1851), so much more than two hundred years after the birth of its author Herman Melville (1819-1891). In spite of an even trivial plot (a paranoid captain engaged in a senseless hunt for a sperm whale that will end up killing him), this cathedral novel is, according to Harold Bloom, "a work of extraordinary originality, together with the Book of Jonah and the Book of Job of the American nation ».

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.