Both his grandfathers had been heroes of the Revolutionary War, and when his less distinguished father died—a failure in the haberdashery business—the young Melville was compelled to fight his own resentment at being overtaken by men of lesser heritage. Among the novels that preceded Moby-Dick, several were records of this struggle: Redburn (1849), in which a young man journeys down the Hudson from his once-glorious family seat and endures the embarrassment of being unable to pay his passage; White Jacket (1850), in which another gentle youth enters a mariners’ world, where the, only measure of status is competence in the rigging. These books were retrospective meditations on Melville’s years of wandering—first aboard a merchant vessel that took him to Europe, later as a crewman on a United States frigate in the Pacific.

Through these books Melville began to enlarge his private trials into an allegory of the nation’s. In Liverpool, trying in vain to navigate the city with the help of his father’s outdated guidebook, Redburn comes face to face with the dark underside of England’s industrial power. When he encounters the shriveled form of a starving woman, chilled to blueness, and hears her whimper a faint cry from the gutter, he suspects a portent for Americans who were still claiming exemption from such horrors even while moving to challenge Britain for world primacy. In White Jacket Melville went on to explore, through the allegorical dilemma of a seaman about to be flogged for an infraction he did not commit, what it means to be stripped like a slave of all legal recourse and to feel in one’s hatred of the imperial master the very assertion of self that the law forbids. Preparing to rush headlong against the captain and hurl him into the sea, White Jacket reflects that

Nature has not implanted any power in man that was not meant to be exercised at times, though too often our powers have been abused. The privilege, inborn and inalienable, that every man has, of dying himself, and inflicting death upon another, was not given to us without a purpose. These are the last resources of an insulted and unendurable existence.

It was in Redburn and White Jacket that Melville began to confront the gathering crisis of his time—the inevitable collision between industrial and slave culture in the United States—but the books through which he had discovered himself as a writer were his earlier South Sea adventures, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847). Quasi-autobiographical works that recounted (with embellishment) his brief stay in the Marquesan islands and his beachcombing days in Tahiti, these books were full of shameless olive-skinned women and intimately attentive native boys. Received as factual accounts of tribal life in the tropical world, they established (to his lasting regret) Melville’s reputation as “the man who lived among cannibals.” In fact, they were sophisticated explorations of the experience of cultural dislocation, written by a prodigious storyteller who negotiated carefully between his audience’s prurience and its prudery. Yet as late as the Cambridge History of American Literature of 1917, Melville was accorded merely an appreciative paragraph in the chapter on “Travellers and Explorers”—and without Typee and Omoo there may have been no mention at all.

When Melville began work on Moby-Dick, he was, in other words, a young writer (only thirty-one) who had already experienced the flush of literary celebrity and the fickleness of an audience that rejected him when he turned earnest in his huge metaphysical novel of 1849, Mardi. He referred to Redburn and White Jacket as “two jobs, which I have done for money—being forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood,” and although in 1847, with his sailor days behind him, he had married the daughter of a distinguished jurist, he never fully escaped from enervating economic pressure. By 1850 he was settled in substantial domesticity in a Berkshire farmhouse, but “the calm, the coolness,” he wrote to Hawthorne, “the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose,—that, I fear, can seldom be mine. Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar.” Melville was wrong about missing the fertility of tranquillity. In the harried months between the early spring of 1850 and the fall of 1851, he produced the greatest work of imagination in the history of our literature.

 

Moby-Dick opens conventionally enough. Writing in his old marketable mode, Melville begins with the intention to accommodate his estranged readership. But he soon swerves, away from the adventures of a young man in flight from his own despondency, and he finds himself swept up by a larger tale—about a maimed sea captain and the prodigious white whale that has “dismasted” him. Although scholars still disagree over the evolution of the manuscript, there is general agreement that it went through several radically different versions. Melville’s friend, the influential critic Evert Duyckinck, read and approved an early draft but denigrated the final text as an “intellectual chowder” and there is other evidence that Moby-Dick lurched forward in spasms rather than being built systematically according to some initial plan. Yet despite efforts to match allusions to contemporary events, and otherwise to trace the process of revision, it remains impossible to see exactly how Moby-Dick grew from an adventure yarn into the giant work it became. Some of the incendiary events for Melville’s imagination are recoverable—especially his passionate friendship with Hawthorne, whose work and person inspired him beginning in the summer of 1850; and his renewed exposure to Shakespeare, whose blank-verse grandeur stirred him to emulation. But like the painting that Ishmael peers at in the Spouter Inn, Moby-Dick will always remain “a boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted,” at least if one is intent on making out its compositional history.

It is clear enough that as he rushed along, Melville had no particular concern to tidy up his book by sweeping it clean of the traces of its superseded stages. Three chapters into the story, for instance, we meet a figure named Bulkington, “six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam,” who seems a likely candidate to play a major part in the ensuing drama because of his ability to command from his crewmates a reverence that is neither worship nor fear. But Bulkington recedes from view until twenty chapters later: after Ishmael has befriended Queequeg and found his way to the Pequod and Ahab’s service, Melville buries him in a “six-inch chapter [that] is [his] stoneless grave.” Yet it is an open grave. Melville does not conceal Bulkington; he memorializes him, leaving him visible as a hinted alternative to Ahab. He is not revised out of the manuscript but remains as a tremor in the text—an idea of democratic leadership, whose ripples continue to move within the range of our awareness but who finds no fulfilled place within the world that Melville imagines into being.

More than a crafted fiction, Moby-Dick is an outburst of a fluid consciousness in which ideas and persons appear and collide and form new combinations and sometimes drop away. If it begins as a young man’s adventures, by the thirtieth chapter Ishmael has all but vanished, and the narrative voice is no longer subject to laws governing conventional narration. Ishmael describes Ahab, for instance, dining with his officers in his quarters, and later in his cabin “by the stern windows;…sitting alone.” A little later Starbuck, humiliated in his efforts to hold Ahab to the ship’s commercial purpose, delivers a soliloquy by the mainmast where no one can overhear him—and yet Ishmael reports it all with the certainty of a confidant. After these inexplicable witnessings, the narrative, as if breaking under the weight of its improbabilities, gives way to stretches of song from the scattered crew.

Moby-Dick is simply too large a book to be contained within one consistent consciousness subject to the laws of identity and physical plausibility.