The Chart Your Voyage
By Dave Read, 05-25-26, Lenox, MA – Moby-Dick is the voyage of Herman Melville’s American imagination. If his was an English, or European, imagination, then Ishmael would’ve been Gulliver and the Pequod would’ve been sailed by Yahoos to such ports as Liliput and Brobdignag.
As an American, however, Melville was free of being censored into conforming with the sensibilities of the sovereign. Such fear inspired Jonathan Swift to fantacize about Gulliver’s Travels. (It also produced Swift’s indictment of Englnd’s treatment of the Irish people, A Modest Proposal. Today, that treatment would be labelled “genocidal.”)
By 1851, when Moby-Dick was published, English printers had so internalized fear of censorship, that they made more than 1,500 cuts before printing a London edition; even eliminating the Epilogue, which is essential to the book’s structural integrity. They made those cuts just to remain in business.
Moby-Dick is so great a book that even as butchered by typesetters, ex-pat Englishman D. H. Lawrence said this about it, in 1923, at the dawn of the Melville Revival:
But he was a deep, great artist, even if he was rather a sententious man. He was a real American in that he always felt his audience in front of him. But when he ceases to be American, when he forgets all audience, and gives us his sheer apprehension of the world, then he is wonderful, his book commands a stillness in the soul, an awe.
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Melville manages to keep it a real whaling ship, on a real cruise, in spite of all fantastics. A wonderful, wonderful voyage. And a beauty that is so surpassing only because of the author’s awful flounderings in mystical waters. He wanted to get metaphysically deep. And he got deeper than metaphysics. It is a surpassingly beautiful book. With an awful meaning. And bad jolts.
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Melville is a master of violent, chaotic physical motion, he can keep up a whole wild chase without a flaw. He is as perfect at creating stillness. The ship is cruising on the Carrol Ground, south of St. Helena.—”It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow——”
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But it is a great book, a very great book, the greatest book of the sea ever written. It moves awe in the soul.
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