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| Herman Melville |
The Grandma loves Literature, and it is very difficult for her to choose only one work as her favourite, but she always remembers the first time he watched Gregory Peck in a film called Moby-Dick.
She was as astonished with that performance of Peck as Captain Ahab, a man who was obsessed to hunt a white whale, that she run to the library to search the book that had inspired this classic film. Then, she discovered Moby-Dick, a masterpiece written by Herman Melville that talks about impossible dreams that become obsessions. Since that moment, Moby-Dick is, without any kind of doubt, one of The Grandma's favourite novels.
Moby-Dick was published in the USA on a day like today in 1857 and The Grandma has wanted to remember this event, sharing her opinions and feelings about this novels with Jordi Santanyí, her closer friend and great writer.
Before talking about Moby-Dick, The Grandma has read a new chapter of Katherine Mansfield's The Garden Party and Other Stories.
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is an 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville.
The book is sailor Ishmael's narrative of the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that on the ship's previous voyage bit off Ahab's leg at the knee.
A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance, the work's genre classifications range from late Romantic to early Symbolist.
More information: Good News Network
Moby-Dick was published to mixed reviews, was a commercial failure, and was out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891. Its reputation as a Great American Novel was established only in the 20th century, after the centennial of its author's birth. William Faulkner said he wished he had written the book himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world and the greatest book of the sea ever written. Its opening sentence, Call me Ishmael, is among world literature's most famous.
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| Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1851 |
Melville began writing Moby-Dick in February 1850, and finished 18 months later, a year longer than he had anticipated. Writing was interrupted by his meeting Nathaniel Hawthorne in August 1850, and by the creation of the Mosses from an Old Manse essay as a result of that friendship. The book is dedicated to Hawthorne, in token of my admiration for his genius.
The basis for the work is Melville's 1841 whaling voyage aboard the Acushnet. The novel also draws on whaling literature, and on literary inspirations such as Shakespeare and the Bible. The white whale is modelled on the notoriously hard-to-catch albino whale Mocha Dick, and the book's ending is based on the sinking of the whale ship Essex in 1820.
The detailed and realistic descriptions of whale hunting and of extracting whale oil, as well as life aboard ship among a culturally diverse crew, are mixed with exploration of class and social status, good and evil, and the existence of God.
In addition to narrative prose, Melville uses styles and literary devices ranging from songs, poetry, and catalogues to Shakespearean stage directions, soliloquies, and asides.
More information: Smithsonian
In October 1851, the chapter The Town Ho's Story was published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine. The same month, the whole book was first published (in three volumes) as The Whale in London, and under its definitive title in a single-volume edition in New York in November. There are hundreds of differences between the two editions, most slight, but some important and illuminating.
The London publisher, Richard Bentley, censored or changed sensitive passages; Melville made revisions as well, including a last-minute change to the title for the New York edition. The whale, however, appears in the text of both editions as Moby Dick, without the hyphen. One factor that led British reviewers to scorn the book was that it seemed to be told by a narrator who perished with the ship: the British edition lacked the Epilogue, which recounts Ishmael's survival. About 3,200 copies were sold during the author's life.
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| First chapter of Moby-Dick, Call me Ishmael |
Ishmael is the narrator,
shaping his story with use of many different genres including sermons,
stage plays, soliloquies, and emblematical readings. Repeatedly, Ishmael
refers to his writing of the book: But how can I hope to explain
myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must,
else all these chapters might be naught.
One of the most distinctive features of the book is the variety of genres. Bezanson mentions sermons, dreams, travel account, autobiography, Elizabethan plays, and epic poetry. He calls Ishmael's explanatory footnotes to establish the documentary genre a Nabokovian touch.
A significant structural device is the series of nine meetings (gams) between the Pequod and other ships. These meetings are important in three ways. First, their placement in the narrative. The initial two meetings and the last two are both close to each other. The central group of five gams are separated by about 12 chapters, more or less.
The novel has also been read as being critical of the contemporary literary and philosophical movement Transcendentalism, attacking the thought of leading Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson in particular. The life and death of Ahab has been read as an attack on Emerson's philosophy of self-reliance, for one, in its destructive potential and potential justification for egoism.
More information: Mental Floss
An incomplete inventory of the language of Moby-Dick by editors Bryant and Springer includes nautical, biblical, Homeric, Shakespearean, Miltonic, cetological influences, and his style is alliterative, fanciful, colloquial, archaic, and unceasingly allusive: Melville tests and exhausts the possibilities of grammar, quotes from a range of well-known or obscure sources, and swings from calm prose to high rhetoric, technical exposition, seaman's slang, mystic speculation, or wild prophetic archaism.
Many words that make up the vocabulary of Moby-Dick are Melville's own coinages, as if the English vocabulary were too limited for the complex things Melville had to express. Perhaps the most striking example is the use of verbal nouns, mostly plural, such as allurings, coincidings, and leewardings.
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| Moby-Dick, the white whale |
Equally abundant are unfamiliar adjectives and adverbs, including participial adjectives such as officered, omnitooled, and uncatastrophied; participial adverbs such as intermixingly, postponedly, and uninterpenetratingly; rarities such as the adjectives unsmoothable, spermy, and leviathanic, and adverbs such as sultanically, Spanishly, and Venetianly; and adjectival compounds ranging from odd to magnificent, such as the message-carrying air, the circus-running sun, and teeth-tiered sharks. It is rarer for Melville to create his own verbs from nouns, but he does this.
It is cleat the influence of Shakespeare on the book, specially the influence of King Lear and Macbeth.
More information: National Geographic
Moby-Dick is based on Melville's experience on the whaler Acushnet, however even the book's most factual accounts of whaling are not straight autobiography. On December 30, 1840, he signed on as a green hand for the maiden voyage of the Acushnet, planned to last for 52 months. Its owner, Melvin O. Bradford, resembled Bildad, who signed on Ishmael, in that he was a Quaker: on several instances when he signed documents, he erased the word swear and replaced it with affirm. But the shareholders of the Acushnet were relatively wealthy, whereas the owners of the Pequod included poor widows and orphaned children. Its captain was Valentine Pease, Jr., who was 43 years old at the start of the voyage.
The reception of The Whale in Britain and of Moby-Dick in the United States differed in two ways. First, British literary criticism was more sophisticated and developed than in the still young republic, with British reviewing done by cadres of brilliant literary people who were experienced critics and trenchant prose stylists, while the United States had only a handful of reviewers capable enough to be called critics, and American editors and reviewers habitually echoed British opinion. American reviewing was mostly delegated to newspaper staffers or else by amateur contributors more noted for religious piety than critical acumen. Second, the differences between the two editions caused two distinct critical receptions.
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea,
though many there be that have tried it.
Herman Melville
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