3/29/2023 0 Comments Saturday night with kitabuNathaniel Philbrick's superbly readable new work of popular maritime history, In The Heart Of The Sea, gives us, in fascinating detail, the stark, bloodstained true story which Melville raided and then rebuilt to his own grandiose poetical specifications in Moby Dick, yet it never ignores the wider imaginative context - the ingrained, inexplicable superstitions of sea folklore that lend Melville's work its atmosphere of predestined moral tragedy. In Moby Dick the albino sperm whale on which the Nantucket whaling vessel Pequod 's Captain Ahab is seeking revenge for the loss of his leg becomes a living, breathing monster from the id, the embodiment of what Ahab, for all his profane fury, cannot resolve - his ruinous, corrupt, self-maiming ambition.īecause literature thrives on metaphor, it is easy to forget that it begins elsewhere, in the real, tangible and self-evident. In Billy Budd an angelic-seeming young sailor accidentally kills the ship's evil master-at-arms and is then executed by the queasy, temporising Captain Vere - who claims to believe in Budd's innocence, or beauty of soul, but also (as Melville unflinchingly recognises) wants to see him die. His most famous stories are parables of the sea's power to realise a dammed-up, primitive evil which then spreads like a stain. Melville's extraordinary prose - with its restless struggle for a metaphysics of meaning lying deeper than words - makes every action of the human and natural world into a revelation of the battle between heaven and the demonic. Exiled from peace of mind and their own hearts by a lust or curse that they cannot expiate, they break deep and ancient taboos.įew writers have felt this superstition more deeply, or handled it with a more self-conscious and driven intensity, than Herman Melville. The sea, eternally changing and eternally the same, reflects back at them some circularity in their own nature, a longing for fulfilment which recedes further the more they try to achieve it. Out there, upon a wilderness of ocean, the human psyche makes a reckoning with its own essential loneliness.Īll the great sailors of literature - from Odysseus and the Anglo-Saxon Seafarer to Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Melville's Ahab, Tennyson's Ulysses and Conrad's Lord Jim - are fleeing insanity, yet heading into it at the same time. Seafaring is what happens to the human soul when it cuts itself free of the moorings of society and its stabilising codes of permitted behaviour. Of no natural phenomenon is this truer than of the sea, that eternal metaphor for psychological isolation and self-reliance. Great literature always internalises its landscapes: it turns the physical world into a mirror of the mind's private affliction.
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