MELVILLE, Herman. - American novelist and poet, b. in New York City on 19 Aug. 1819, d. there on 28 Sept. 1891. The fruit of his experiences as a cabin boy and adventurous life were his exotic novels, the greatest of which is Moby Dick (1851); the same year he published Pierre, a novel with a complex sentimental plot much debated by critics, also partly autobiographical. Later he wrote verse and short stories.
Yet he was not sufficiently appreciated in his lifetime and was disliked by many for his uncompromising judgments of his fellow countrymen. Among his contemporaries only Hawthorne understood and appreciated him. In England Stevenson took his cue from him. But it was only in the 20th century that he was fully rehabilitated and ranked among America’s greatest writers. Moby Dick is a chaotic work, rambling and stuffed with heterogeneous knowledge in many parts, yet at times it rises to the level of epic, and is enhanced and unique for the vigour of its depiction and a religious and visionary symbolism that makes of the “beautiful white” not merely an allegorical character but a terrible instrument of vengeance. The whole narrative is charged with allegorical meanings, and the Bible, though interpreted and commented on in a most arbitrary way, is perhaps the author’s principal source. The whale embodies the demonic element of nature, and the protagonist Ahab pursues it with a hatred and tenacity disproportionate to human strength. The fierce struggle between the two protagonists, man and monster, may recall the episode of Polyphemus. Yet, in keeping with the author’s fundamental pessimism, final victory does not go to man and his reason, but to the levithan’s irrational force that sweeps all before II. The morbid aspects of nature and of M.’s imagination are shown still more clearly in Pierre or the Ambiguity (the subtitle is most significant), a novel that has been interpreted in modern times in a Freudian sense. Here the exotic settings are lacking, and perhaps for this reason the book is even more disconcerting. It is, moreover, no less inchoate than the other, and it is perhaps no accident that afterwards the author wrote only short stories. The most suggestive part of the work consists of the opening chapters where the protagonist’s adolescence (and indirectly the author’s) is described in his mother’s home. Of M.’s short stories, one of the finest, Billy Budd, was published posthumously in 1926.