Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Moby-Dick: Interpretations never end

Herman Melville (1819-1891) is a 19th-century American novelist, short story writer, essayist and poet. He is best known for his Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851). “No American writer has been more puzzled over and written about, more lambasted and lionized than Melville” (Robertson-Lorant 1996: xiv). Melville’s fame in literary history has undergone a rollercoaster ride in the past 150 years.

Melville gained much contemporary attention for his first novel Typee (1846). His second book, Omoo (1847) was also well-received. But after a booming literary success in the late 1840s, his popularity declined dramatically in the mid-1850s. Mardi (1849) was considered a critical and commercial failure. Then Redburn (1849) and White Jacket (1850) followed suit. Moby-Dick (1851), though demonstrated Melville’s great artistic techniques and imaginative powers, was poorly received by the Americans. When he died in 1891, he was almost completely forgotten. Some of his poems and a short story Billy Budd (1924) were left unpublished.

Moby-Dick, which is generally recognized as the first Great American Novel,[1] has been read by both the highly educated, sophisticated literary experts and those with little formal education, and can be well deemed as Melville’s masterpiece. However, the reception of it is rather dramatic. When it was published in 1851, the majority of the reviews were perfunctory or even negative. During the next decades, this novel, along with other works by Melville, was seldom mentioned in American and English literary journals. This public neglect and disfavor were not terminated until 1921 with Raymond Weaver’s publication of Herman Melville, which announced the “Melville Revival” in the 1920s. From then on Moby-Dick has drawn numerous attentions and been read with numerous interpretations.

The formidably long book tells an obsessive pursuit of Moby Dick, the white whale, by Ahab and his crew on Pequod. The book was ambiguous, symbolic and metaphoric in nature and even a minor character or the name of a negligible inn invites different interpretations, let alone the whole allegorical adventure. D. H. Laurence (1923), E. M. Forster (1927), and Virginia Woolf (1929) all published articles on their understanding of this sea chase. Along with the aspects of philosophy, religion, characters, structure, narrative, almost every detail of the novel has been dealt with since then. More recent studies have applied fashionable academic approaches, including Freudian, Marxist, New Critical, reader-response, New Historicist, etc. to find new meanings of the sea epic.

However, these studies are far from reaching a consensus, even on the smallest trifles. What does Moby-Dick represent, God, Evil, Truth, or something else? Is Ahab more of a Faust, a King Lear, a Macbeth, or an anti-hero of Job? Does Moby-Dick show racial prejudice? What is Melville’s attitude toward women? Was it friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg or homosexual partnership? Is it an ecocentric or anthropocentric novel? Critics give contradictory answers to each of these questions. Melville packed as much into the narrative as he could, and the novel appears to be fragmented and unorthodox. Therefore, it seems quite unlikely that one can supply a satisfactory answer.

“I look, you look, he looks; we look, ye look, they look” (Melville 1967: 434). Just as Pip repeats, to get a purely objective looking (or interpretation) is impossible. However, just because of this, the novel fully demonstrates how one objective text can invite multitude of understandings.