Introduction: Seeking Melville

Summary

The Summer and Fall of 2010 and the early months of 2011 saw unlikely portents of the persistent allure of America’s most thoroughly canonized novel and the elusive author behind it. Television viewers and web surfers contemplating the purchase of a smartphone were assured that a major cell-phone provider’s latest offering could take the place of Captain Ahab’s charts in tracking Moby Dick around the world. Readers of Nature learned that a particularly fearsome fossil whale, similar to a sperm whale but with teeth on its upper jaw, had been discovered in Peru, and given a name that reflected the author of Moby-Dick’s ongoing fascination for cetologists: Leviathan melvillei. America’s forty-fourth president confessed via his Facebook page that Moby-Dick ranked with Toni Morrison and the Bible among his favorite literary works. Indeed, even as I was putting the finishing touches on this introduction in February 2011, the New York Times reported that a sunken ship named Two Brothers commanded by George Pollard, whose whale ship Essex served as one of Melville’s models for the story of the Pequod, the doomed vessel on which Ishmael sailed in Moby-Dick, had been discovered six hundred miles off the coast of Honolulu. It seemed that “the invisible police officer of the fates” was not done with Herman Melville yet (Moby-Dick 7).

And yet, the author who was responsible for Moby Dick, Captain Ahab, Bartleby, and Billy Budd seemed oddly obscure. Unlike the white-haired, white-suited Mark Twain or the broad-browed, melancholy Edgar Allan Poe, Melville’s image was not immediately recognizable, nor did the mention of his name conjure a specific list of character traits that students and the general public could use to orient themselves to the man. The images of Melville resided rather behind his books, and in the portions of libraries and bookstores frequented mainly by scholars. The names of Moby Dick, Captain Ahab, Bartleby, Billy Buck, and even Starbuck, are widely known among the reading public, but the neither the name nor the image of Melville himself seems to come to mind as quickly as do his titles or characters.