In the White House the first lady builds a literary room of her own

Gainesville-Sun ^ | 10/10/2002 | Elizabeth Busmiller

[AnAmericanMother]

True enough, but the New England writers were a separate group unto themselves (although Melville was a bit of an outlier). Their culture was so separate and distinct (of course it's gone now. Old New England is dead), and very self-consciously not "typical American" - they held themselves apart.

Moby-Dick is indeed a great novel, but I don't see it as speaking with a distinctly American voice as Clemens did. If anything, it's Melville's individual voice, not typical American. (I can't imagine that very many Noo Bedford whaling captains spoke the way Ahab does. They tended to be men of few words, not Old-Testament style rhetorical diatribes.) I mean . . .

"Hark ye yet again, - the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event - in the living act, the undoubted deed - there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends' glarings is a doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn - living, breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan leopards - the unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel! The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. 'Tis but to help strike a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back, when every foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone? Ah! constrainings seize thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak! - Aye, aye! thy silence, then, that voices thee. (Aside) something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion."

Do you remember when a young Mark Twain went to N.E. to speak at a dinner, and made a little gentle fun of Emerson, et al? He talked himself into being embarassed about it, afterward, but I think he was right. And as he said in his "Literary Offenses of Fenimore Cooper", no Scottish general would talk this way . . . and neither would an old whaling captain.

That said, I think Melville was a brilliant (but deeply troubled) man, and Moby-Dick is a great book. But it's a massive personal creation/hallucination, not a record or comment on America.