NP Melville has never looked better

[Terrance]

Melville Has Never Looked Better

By ANDREW DELBANCO

NY Times Books

In our own moment of horror
and heroism, it is a book more
salient than ever -- unflinchingly
honest about the human capacity for hate and brutality, yet
filled with an undiscourageable love of humanity. In its own
day, it was received by many critics as a half-mad rant.

According to a failed and now forgotten novelist, Henry F.
Chorley, chief critic of The Athenaeum in London, ''Mr.
Melville has to thank himself only if his horrors and his heroics
are flung aside by the general reader, as so much trash
belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature.''

Initially, their tale is told by a young sailor
named Ishmael -- a close relative of the sailor boys who had
been in charge of Melville's previous books -- but the
first-person narrative soon fractures into multiple voices
contending with each other as if taking turns in a stage play.
Littered with truncated episodes that Melville left in the final
text as tantalizing fragments of what might have been,
''Moby-Dick'' is a restlessly experimental book -- by turns
playful, ironic, somber and uproariously funny, sometimes
dropping into bawdy comedy, sometimes soaring into
soliloquies worthy of ''King Lear.'' One of its themes is the
overwhelming improvisational power of its author.

Long before Joyce or
Woolf made their formal innovations, here was a writer who
jumped from omniscient to first-person to choral narration, who
mixed the proper speech of well-bred officers with the obscene
songs of illiterate sailors and, anticipating the modernist
technique of stream-of-consciousness, wrote of repressed
memory and sublimated desire as forces of the unconscious. By
rendering in meticulous detail the art and craft of whaling, he
paid homage to ordinary men engaged under duress in the
dangerous work of cutting up majestic animals into
commodities. Yet he also satisfied the human craving for an
allegorical dimension to life -- for finding large meanings in
small quotidian events -- without resting those meanings on
religious beliefs that had become implausible already in his day.
For modern readers, ''Moby-Dick'' forecast the future in which
they found themselves living. Melville took as his subject the
first international industry dominated by the United States, and
thereby bore witness to the ''manifest destiny'' of a nation just
beginning during his lifetime to grow from a continental into a
world power. In recounting the love between an American boy
(Ishmael) and a tattooed cannibal (Queequeg), he intimated,
long before it was common to think so, that human sexuality
ranges freely along a continuum of desire and cannot be
contained within established norms. In his grisly account of the
business of killing whales, he anticipated today's
environmentalist indignation at people who have a purely
instrumental relation to nature; but he also treated all pieties and
pietists with proto-postmodern irony -- as when he asks, ''With
what quill did the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression
of Cruelty to Ganders formerly indite his circulars?'' And with
eerie prescience, he foresaw in ''Moby-Dick'' the most
gruesome phenomenon of modern times -- of which we have
been so terribly reminded by recent events -- how a demagogue
can fuse his personal need for vengeance with the popular will
by promising his followers a huntable enemy in which evil was
''made practically assailable.''