Blue (Moby Dick), 1943 by Jackson Pollock
November 14 marks the 150th anniversary of Melville's salty saga of vengeance and obsession. Now a contender for the great American novel, this book was harpooned at the time of its 1851 publication by critics who found it overly long and boorish (observations no doubt still shared by countless high school students). They felt that like Ahab, the story didn't have much of a leg to stand on. The once lucrative whaling industry also was in its death throes and of little interest to readers. The book was forgotten for decades before being rediscovered in the 1920s by scholars who understood and appreciated the multilevel symbolism and allegory dismissed by their 19th-century predecessors. Melville published little after the failure of Moby-Dick and made his living as a customs inspector in New York City, where he was born in 1819 and died in complete obscurity in 1891. He is buried in the Bronx.
London Literary Gazette, December 6 1851
Thrice unlucky Herman Melville!...
This is an odd book, professing to be a novel; wantonly eccentric; outrageously bombastic; in places charmingly and vividly descriptive. The author has read up laboriously to make a show of cetalogical learning.... Herman Melville is wise in this sort of wisdom. He uses it as stuffing to fill out his skeleton story. Bad stuffing it makes, serving only to try the patience of his readers, and to tempt them to wish both him and his whales at the bottom of an unfathomable sea....
The story of this novel scarcely deserves the name.... Mr. Melville cannot do without savages so he makes half of his dramatis personae wild Indians, Malays, and other untamed humanities.... What the author's original intention in spinning his preposterous yarn was, it is impossible to guess; evidently, when we compare the first and third volumes, it was never carried out....
Having said so much that may be interpreted as a censure, it is right that we should add a word of praise where deserved. There are sketches of scenes at sea, of whaling adventures, storms, and ship-life, equal to any we have ever met with....
Mr. Herman Melville has earned a deservedly high reputation for his performances in descriptive fiction. He has gathered his own materials, and travelled along fresh and untrodden literary paths, exhibiting powers of no common order, and great originality. The more careful, therefore, should he be to maintain the fame he so rapidly acquired, and not waste his strength on such purposeless and unequal doings as these rambling volumes about spermaceti whales.
Magill Book Review, 1991
Magill Book Review: The novel focuses on Captain Ahab's complex quest to find and kill the huge white whale, Moby Dick, that has physically robbed him of his leg and metaphorically deprived him of his manhood, of his sense of individual importance and identity. Set in the mid-19th century during the heyday of American whaling, the story is told by Ishmael. His own quest for "the ungraspable phantom of life" parallels Ahab's for the white whale. His style of storytelling, which includes action, meditative passages, exposition on whales and whaling, dramatic scenes modeled on Shakespeare, high tragedy and low comedy, is as various and as unstable as Melville's watery world.As Ahab becomes increasingly drawn to and obsessed by the whale, Ishmael becomes similarly attracted to the monomaniacal captain, who is at once a tyrant and a tragic hero. Ahab's greatness arises from his insatiable need to do battle with and to know the most dangerous and the most legendary of all whales, a natural as well as supernatural creature that Ahab comes to view as the embodiment of evil in the world. To accomplish his goal, the wily Ahab first has to seduce his crew into accepting his quest as their own.Of the Pequod's crew, only Starbuck, the first mate, withholds his support, attempting unsuccessfully to convince Ahab of the wrongness of his quest (since his antagonist is a mere brute) and of the essential goodness of creation.Failing to heed Starbuck's appeal, Ahab dies, his neck caught in his own whale line, caught, that is, in the fate he has unwittingly yet inexorably fashioned for himself by defining too narrowly the white whale and the world of which it is a part.Ishmael, on the other hand, survives because unlike Ahab he achieves a healthy balance of Ahab's skepticism (even nihilism) and Starbuck's faith, of the tragic and the comic, of self and society. For Ishmael, as for Melville, life is an unending series of voyages out, whose meaning lies beyond the comprehension of even the noblest of men.
London Leader, November 8 1851
This is an odd book, professing to be a novel; wantonly eccentric; outrageously bombastic; in places charmingly and vividly descriptive. The author has read up laboriously to make a show of cetalogical learning.... Herman Melville is wise in this sort of wisdom. He uses it as stuffing to fill out his skeleton story. Bad stuffing it makes, serving only to try the patience of his readers, and to tempt them to wish both him and his whales at the bottom of an unfathomable sea....
The story of this novel scarcely deserves the name.... Mr. Melville cannot do without savages so he makes half of his dramatis personae wild Indians, Malays, and other untamed humanities.... What the author's original intention in spinning his preposterous yarn was, it is impossible to guess; evidently, when we compare the first and third volumes, it was never carried out....
Having said so much that may be interpreted as a censure, it is right that we should add a word of praise where deserved. There are sketches of scenes at sea, of whaling adventures, storms, and ship-life, equal to any we have ever met with....
Mr. Herman Melville has earned a deservedly high reputation for his performances in descriptive fiction. He has gathered his own materials, and travelled along fresh and untrodden literary paths, exhibiting powers of no common order, and great originality. The more careful, therefore, should he be to maintain the fame he so rapidly acquired, and not waste his strength on such purposeless and unequal doings as these rambling volumes about spermaceti whales.
Magill Book Review, 1991
Magill Book Review: The novel focuses on Captain Ahab's complex quest to find and kill the huge white whale, Moby Dick, that has physically robbed him of his leg and metaphorically deprived him of his manhood, of his sense of individual importance and identity. Set in the mid-19th century during the heyday of American whaling, the story is told by Ishmael. His own quest for "the ungraspable phantom of life" parallels Ahab's for the white whale. His style of storytelling, which includes action, meditative passages, exposition on whales and whaling, dramatic scenes modeled on Shakespeare, high tragedy and low comedy, is as various and as unstable as Melville's watery world.As Ahab becomes increasingly drawn to and obsessed by the whale, Ishmael becomes similarly attracted to the monomaniacal captain, who is at once a tyrant and a tragic hero. Ahab's greatness arises from his insatiable need to do battle with and to know the most dangerous and the most legendary of all whales, a natural as well as supernatural creature that Ahab comes to view as the embodiment of evil in the world. To accomplish his goal, the wily Ahab first has to seduce his crew into accepting his quest as their own.Of the Pequod's crew, only Starbuck, the first mate, withholds his support, attempting unsuccessfully to convince Ahab of the wrongness of his quest (since his antagonist is a mere brute) and of the essential goodness of creation.Failing to heed Starbuck's appeal, Ahab dies, his neck caught in his own whale line, caught, that is, in the fate he has unwittingly yet inexorably fashioned for himself by defining too narrowly the white whale and the world of which it is a part.Ishmael, on the other hand, survives because unlike Ahab he achieves a healthy balance of Ahab's skepticism (even nihilism) and Starbuck's faith, of the tragic and the comic, of self and society. For Ishmael, as for Melville, life is an unending series of voyages out, whose meaning lies beyond the comprehension of even the noblest of men.
London Leader, November 8 1851
The book is not a romance, nor a treatise on Cetology. It is something of both: a strange, wild work with the tangled overgrowth and luxuriant vegetation of American forests, not the trim orderliness of an English park. Criticism may pick many holes in this work; but no criticism will thwart its facscination.
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