Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 185deeper issues, he had to wed meaning to action, to twine them together so closely
that they became inextricable from and gave strength to each other. The next two
novels concentrated on action: first, Redburn: His First Voyage, and then White-
Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War (1850) based, like Redburn, on Melville’s own
experience. It was after completing these that Melville turned to the work that was
to be his masterpiece, dedicated, in “Admiration for His Genius,” to the man who
had become his friend and neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Melville had moved with his wife to Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1850, where he
soon became acquainted with Hawthorne. Prior to the move there, he had written a
highly appreciative review of Mosses from an Old Manse, in which he explained how
much he admired the author of the stories contained in that volume for the tragic
dualism of his vision. Melville was now reading widely, and Hawthorne was to be
only one of a multitude of influences that fed into what was first titled “The Whale”
and then Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. For the narrative incident, he drew on his own
experiences and a host of books on whales and whaling, probably including an
article published in The Knickerbocker Magazine, “Mocha Dick; or, The White Whale
of the Pacific” by J. N. Reynolds, and a book, Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and
Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex by Owen Chase. For the approach and
treatment, he drew on the complex symbolic practice of Hawthorne, of course; epic
stories of voyaging from the Odyssey to the Lusiad, a poem by the Portuguese poet,
Camoens, about Vasco de Gama; and the work of William Shakespeare. Melville
took to rereading Shakespearean tragedy at the time of preparing the story of
Captain Ahab’s pursuit of the great white whale; and he drew on that experience in
a number of ways. There are local resemblances. Ahab addresses the skeleton of a
whale, for instance, in a fashion that recalls Hamlet’s famous meditation over the
skull of Yorick the jester; some conversations between Ahab and his black cabin boy
Pip, who has been driven mad by immersion in the sea (but “man’s insanity is
heaven’s sense,” the narrator reminds us), recollect dialogues between King Lear and
his Fool; while the sense that Ahab is at once free and the victim of some “hidden
lord and master,” a defiantly willful man and “Fate’s lieutenant,” rehearses a paradox
at the heart of the portrait of Macbeth. There are stylistic resemblances. Few writers
deserve comparison with Shakespeare on this score. But the author of Moby-Dick
surely does. The language of the novel is extraordinarily variable, but there is a
ground bass, as it were, that is richly metaphorical but vividly direct; dense, allusive,
packed with neologisms, it manages the seemingly impossible feat of being both
deeply philosophical and almost unbearably dramatic. And there is, above all, the
conceptual, structural resemblance. “All mortal greatness is but disease,” Ishmael
observes early on in the narrative. That observation, as it happens, is borrowed from
an essay by Samuel Taylor Coleridge on Shakespearean tragic heroes. Even without
the help of such borrowings, however, it is possible to see that the conception of
Captain Ahab is fundamentally tragic. Ahab makes a choice that challenges – the
gods, or fate, or human limits, the given conditions of thought and existence. That
choice and challenge provoke our fear and pity. And they lead, it seems inevitably, to
a catastrophe that compels similarly complex, contradictory emotions: the sufferingGGray_c02.indd 185ray_c 02 .indd 185 8 8/1/2011 7:54:42 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 42 AM