Moby Dick

Herman Melville

Description

When the young Ishmael gets on board Captain Ahab's whaling ship, little does he suspect that the mission on which he is about to embark is the fulfilment of his master's obsessive desire for revenge on Moby Dick, a white whale who has already claimed countless human victims and destroyed many fleets. With some sinister crew members in their midst and the hazardous conditions of the sea to contend with, the expedition becomes increasingly dangerous the closer it gets to its quarry.One of the great American novels, if not the greatest, Moby Dick epically combines rip-roaring adventure, a meticulously realistic portrayal of the whaling trade and a profound philosophical disquisition on the nature of good and evil.

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780714547534
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Moby Dick
or
The Whale
Herman Melville

ALMA CLASSICS




alma classics ltd
London House
243–253 Lower Mortlake Road
Richmond
Surrey TW9 2LL
United Kingdom
www.almaclassics.com
Moby Dick first published in 1851
First published by Alma Classics (previously Oneworld Classics) in 2011
This new edition first published by Alma Classics Ltd in 2013
Edited text, notes and background material © Alma Classics Ltd
Introduction © Jay Parini
Cover image: nathanburtondesign.com
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-274-6
All the materials in this volume are reprinted with permission or presumed to be in the public domain. Every effort has been made to ascertain and acknowledge their copyright status, but should there have been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to rectify the error in subsequent printings.
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Contents
Introduction
Moby Dick
Etymology
Extracts
Epilogue
Note on the Text
Notes
Extra Material
Herman Melville’s Life
Herman Melville’s Works
Select Bibliography


Introduction
By Jay Parini
Moby Dick is the great American novel. Its imaginative power and ferocity, its humour and pathos, lift it high in the world of Western literature, and Herman Melville ranks among the likes of Tolstoy and Dickens as a master of this form. Nevertheless, it remains a difficult book in many ways, in part because of its encyclopedic nature, in part because of the density of language, which is poetic in its aspirations and effects, with its many echoes of the Bible, Milton and Shakespeare.
Melville was writing out of deep experience. Born into a relatively poor family with aristocratic origins in 1819, the author was forced to drop out of school for economic reasons (his father died when he was twelve, leaving the family without resources). He never attended a university, so opportunities for gainful employment were limited. At nineteen, he crossed the Atlantic on a packet ship, working as a “green boy”. Two years later, he signed onto a whaler, the Acushnet , sailing from New Bedford – the American capital of the whaling industry – on 3rd January 1851. He worked his way up over some eighteen months to the position of bow oarsman, the position held by the narrator of his novel, Ishmael. He may possibly have tried his hand as a harpooneer as well.
Captain Valentine Pease of the Acushnet served vaguely as the model for the mad Captain Ahab of Moby Dick , although one can assume that Pease and Ahab were very different men. Ahab becomes, in Melville’s fantasy, a figure of immense weight, a symbolic figure whose name is synonymous with fanaticism. Ahab wants to kill Moby Dick, the white sperm whale who has caused him to lose a leg on a previous expedition. His pursuit of this particular whale becomes an allegory – the story of how obsession leads to destruction. Ahab’s thirst for vengeance threatens to destroy everything in his command. He has no regard whatsoever for the lives of his men. Everything lies in submission to his iron-clad wish to destroy this whale, whose whiteness itself is symbolic, as Melville suggests: while one usually associates whiteness with purity, as in a wedding dress, here whiteness stands for emptiness, a lack of meaning, or a meaning so complex that it remains beyond anyone’s comprehension. To Ahab, the great whale is nothing short of evil, although the reader must wonder at this interpretation, as nothing in nature can really be evil of itself. This whale is simply a creature of the deep, bent on survival.
Melville abandoned the Acushnet in the South Seas, jumping ship with a friend to explore an exotic island called Nuka Hiva, where he was kidnapped by cannibals – the subject of his first book, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846). He wrote several books based on his experience in the Pacific, including Omoo (1847) and Mardi (1849). Redburn (1849) was published shortly after Omoo , and it tells the story of the author’s first venture aboard ship on the crossing to Liverpool. White-Jacket (1850) is an account of Melville’s journey aboard a naval frigate that took him from Hawaii to Boston on the final leg of his great journey. Taken as a whole, these early books represent a vast exertion of artistic energy by Melville.
By the time he sat down to write Moby Dick , he had become accustomed to mining his experiences of a decade before. His various passages by sea, and his adventures aboard a variety of ships, offered a huge trove of source material for his books. Beginning Moby Dick , he assumed he would write a straightforward account of whaling. It would be an adventure story, and he hoped to make a great deal of money from his book, as he lived in genteel poverty, always having to borrow money from friends and relatives.
In the summer of 1850, Melville moved his family from New York City to the Berkshires, a lovely area of western Massachusetts where he had spent time as a boy on his uncle’s estate. He bought a farmhouse in Pittsfield, and he called it Arrowhead. His wife, mother and first child lived with him in this rambling homestead, with its barns and surrounding fields and forests. From the window of his study, he could see the luminous hump of Mount Greylock to the north. Melville wrote in a letter: “I have a sort of sea-feeling here in the country, now that the ground is all covered with snow. I look out from my window in the morning when I rise as I would out of a porthole of a ship in the Atlantic. My room seems a ship’s cabin; and at nights when I wake up and hear the wind shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, and I had better go on the roof and rig in the chimney.”
One of Melville’s close neighbours in the Berkshires was Nathaniel Hawthorne, fifteen years his elder, who had recently published The Scarlet Letter , one of the finest works of American fiction. The two quickly became friends. In fact, Melville grew obsessed with Hawthorne – pursuing him with a tenacity worthy of Ahab. He wanted Hawthorne’s approval, even his love. Hawthorne was himself less than receptive to such intimacy, and he withdrew, although he urged Melville to create in Moby Dick a novel of allegorical scope, with spiritual and moral depths. The younger author responded to this call from Hawthorne, and he dug deeper and deeper, fashioning a profound narrative that explores the isolation of the human soul. (The American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson had famously likened the soul to a ship at sea, and this association was hardly lost on Melville.)
The novel was written in a frenzy of composition and published in 1851 (to mixed reviews and few sales, much to the author’s disappointment). At work in Pittsfield, Melville surrounded himself with books about whaling and tales of adventures at sea. He was reading, for example, Thomas Beale’s Natural History of the Sperm Whale as well as Etchings of a Whaling Cruise by J. Ross Browne. In 1820, the Essex , an American whaler, was attacked and destroyed by a sperm whale. A first mate on this ship, Owen Chase, published his Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale Ship Essex only a year later, and this book fascinated Melville. Another important source for him was an account by the explorer Jeremiah N. Reynolds, who in 1839 published a description of another whale who attacked ships. This was called Mocha Dick, “an old bull whale, of prodigious size and strength.” Mocha Dick was also “white as wool”. One sees here the literal origins of Melville’s legendary whale.
The novel came quickly but not without difficulties: “I am halfway in the work,” he wrote to a friend. “It will be a strange sort of book, tho’, I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho’ you might get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree – and to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.”
The novel moves inexorably from its initial opening salvo, in which the voice of the narrator is established firmly:
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet, and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
In a sense, everything you