MELVILLE, HERMAN. – American novelist and poet, born in New York City on 1 August 1819, died there on 28 September 1891. His exotic novels were the fruit of his experiences as a cabin boy and of his adventurous life, the greatest of them being Moby Dick (1851); the following year he published Pierre, a novel with a complex sentimental plot, much debated by critics and also partly autobiographical. Later he wrote verse and short stories.
But he was not sufficiently appreciated during his lifetime and was disliked by many for his outspoken judgments of his fellow countrymen. Of his contemporaries, only Hawthorne understood and appreciated him. In England Stevenson took his starting point from him. But it was only in the twentieth century that he was fully reassessed and ranked among America’s greatest writers. Moby Dick is a chaotic work, in many parts cumbersome and stuffed with heterogeneous learning; nevertheless, it occasionally rises to the tone of epic, and is immensely powerful and unique in the vigor of its representation and in a religious and visionary symbolism that makes the “white whale” not merely an allegorical character but a terrible instrument of vengeance. The entire narrative is charged with allegorical meanings, and the Bible, although interpreted and commented upon in the most arbitrary manner, is perhaps the author’s principal source. The whale embodies the demonic element of nature, and the protagonist Ahab combats and pursues it with a hatred and ferocity disproportionate to human powers. The fierce struggle between the two protagonists, man and monster, may recall the episode of Polyphemus. But, in keeping with the author’s fundamental pessimism, final victory does not belong to man and his reason, but to the irrational leviathan that overwhelms everything. The pessimism and the morbid aspects of M.’s nature and imagination are even more pronounced in Pierre or the ambiguities (the subtitle is highly significant), a novel that has been interpreted in modern times in a Freudian sense. Here the exotic settings are absent, and perhaps for this reason the book is more disconcerting. On the other hand, it is no less inorganic than the other, and it is perhaps no coincidence that the author subsequently wrote only short stories. The most evocative part of the work consists of the opening chapters, in which the protagonist’s adolescence (and indirectly that of the author) in his mother’s home is described. Among M.’s short stories, one of the finest, Billy Budd, was published posthumously in 1926.