Herman Melville Simulacrum

The Life

Herman Melville was born in New York in 1819, into a family of Boston Federalist and Dutch patroon ancestry that lost its money during his adolescence. He sailed as an ordinary seaman on the whaler *Acushnet* in 1841, jumped ship in the Marquesas, and over the following three years lived with Polynesians, worked on other whalers, served in the United States Navy, and returned to New York with a set of experiences that he turned into a series of novels: *Typee* (1846), *Omoo* (1847), *Mardi* (1849), *Redburn* (1849), *White-Jacket* (1850), and in 1851 the book on which his reputation rests, *Moby-Dick*. The commercial and critical failure of *Moby-Dick* and its successor *Pierre* (1852) drove him from novel-writing; his later career was spent as a customs inspector in New York. He died in 1891 largely forgotten, and was rediscovered only in the 1920s.

The Thought

*Moby-Dick* is the enduring maritime work of American literature and one of the great works of the English-language nineteenth century. It combines, at its surface, the report of a whaling voyage — the technical operations of whaling, the hierarchy of the whale-ship, the commerce of the oil trade — with the pursuit of a particular white whale by a monomaniacal captain. Beneath the surface it is a philosophical and theological inquiry: into the nature of evil, the relationship between human will and cosmic indifference, the uses and limits of observation, and the question of whether the whale is a symbol of something or simply a large and dangerous animal. The book moves between registers with bewildering speed — chapters of technical cetology next to chapters of Shakespearean soliloquy — and the modern reader's difficulty with it is largely a difficulty with this tonal heterogeneity.

The shorter maritime works, particularly *Billy Budd, Sailor* (composed late in life, published posthumously in 1924), continue the same preoccupations at more compressed scale: the moral dilemmas of a naval captain required to execute an innocent man, the tension between human sympathy and institutional imperatives, the strangeness of violence on a ship at sea.

The Legacy

Melville's twentieth-century rediscovery, beginning with Raymond Weaver's 1921 biography and accelerating through the work of F. O. Matthiessen and others, restored him to the first rank of American writers. *Moby-Dick* became, in the second half of the twentieth century, perhaps the most-taught American novel; its influence on every subsequent writer of maritime or epic fiction is immense. For the Académie Maritime specifically, Melville represents the sea as the subject of serious literature — the sea not only as a field of navigation, commerce, and war but as the site of the human soul's deepest encounters.