238). A man cannot be fully independent, nor should his identity be submerged in the crowd (p. 462). The only certainty is that there is unending change, and the mind can only ask, “Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more?” (p. 565). There is none in Moby-Dick, nor anywhere else in Melville.

No other American work approaches Melville’s ability here to alternate convincingly between complementary states, or even radical opposites, evoked with such imaginative force and conviction that we are for a time swept along in a contemplation of each possibility alone, or of a mixture so intertwined that the knot is not to be undone. Ahab is an arrogant, dictatorial, and insane figure who leads his world to destruction, yet Melville makes us think of him not simply as a madman, but as a great man gone mad.

There are similarities here to the poet John Keats’s praise of Shakespeare as one who “is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (letter to George and Thomas Keats, December 28, 1817). By this criterion, Moby-Dick is the great masterpiece of our literature, but with a large difference: Shakespeare was born into this condition, so to speak, while the narrator of Moby-Dick comes to it after arduous but failed attempts to resolve the mysteries. The imaginative calm to which Keats is pointing is, for the novel’s voice, a hard-won condition that in Melville’s career returns only intermittently after this work.

In the later novels, Melville colors man’s problems more darkly, the subtitle of Pierre, or the Ambiguities signaling the shift, and in The Confidence-Man, life becomes a puzzle to be parsed. Only in the great stories “Bartleby the Scrivener,” “Benito Cereno,” and Billy Budd do the dramatizations of ambiguity return with the balance of Moby-Dick, and by that time the humor is gone and the tone is somber. But in Moby-Dick, he portrays a world where good nature, intelligence, and good humor throw a light on experience that is both interesting and entertaining. Despite the looming disaster, the novel is in many ways a happy book because of the narrator’s infectious pleasure in telling the tale.

Melville’s importance in American literature is now so great that it is hard to realize that by the early decades of the twentieth century only a small group of devoted readers considered Moby-Dick the major work we now hold it to be. Though never entirely neglected, Melville had become a special interest rather than the widely read author he is today. His last novel, The Confidence-Man, had appeared in 1857; by then he had pretty much written himself out as an author of fiction, and he later supported his family by working as a customs inspector at New York harbor. From his death in 1891, it was thirty years before Raymond Weaver published the first full-length study, Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic (1921), and this was seventy years after the appearance of Moby-Dick, the book whose freshly assessed stature brought new attention to the rest of Melville’s work.

When published, Moby-Dick received a good many reviews favorable in whole or in part as well as some dismissive ones, and brief approving accounts continued to be published from time to time into the next century. But it is interesting to ask why the great attention devoted to the novel and to Melville in general developed in the 1920s. Source studies have shown that Melville drew heavily on the popular literature of his day and that his readers found in the book much that was familiar to them; but this only makes more interesting the question about the slow general recognition of a great masterpiece.

This came about in part because the study of American literature was by then beginning to be respectable in university English departments, but it is no accident that the “rediscovery” of Melville coincided with the new experimentalism in all the arts in the years before and around 1920. The innovative work of artists like Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot made fresh demands on methods of interpretations. Change was in the air; Joyce’s Ulysses appeared the year following Weaver’s study. In literary study there began to be less emphasis on historical context, and more attention to the character of a writer’s rhetoric, the suggestiveness of symbolic structures, and the apparent fragmentation of traditional patterns of organization. When this kind of interest was given to Moby-Dick it stood up to every scrutiny that the period we call modernism could bring. It was not that Melville and his major novel were “before their time”—they were very much part of it—but that certain kinds of literature came to be examined in somewhat different ways.

Since that time, a large body of historical and critical work has enabled us to understand Melville much better than was possible more than eighty years ago, much less a century and a half ago when Moby-Dick appeared. This inquiry shows no sign of diminishing in our day, testimony to the continuing fascination he holds for us. As always with the greatest works, the novel is so many-sided that over time it mirrors back the shifting concerns of those who read it, and that is the definition of a classic.

 

Carl F. Hovde is Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Emeritus, at Columbia University, where he served as Dean of the College from 1968 to 1972. He has also taught in Brazil, Germany, and Sweden. Specializing in American literature, he was principal editor of Henry D. Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers for the Princeton University Press, and has been particularly concerned with the implications of high rhetoric in such figures as Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and William Faulkner.

IN TOKEN

OF MY ADMIRATION FOR HIS GENIUS THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED TO

 

 

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE1

ETYMOLOGY

(Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School.)

[The pale Usher—threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now.