MELVILLE, HERMAN. - American novelist and poet, b. in New York City on Aug. 1, 1819, d. there on Sept. 28, 1891. The fruit of his experiences as a cabin boy and of an adventurous life were his exotic novels, the greatest of which is Moby Dick (1851); the following 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.
But he was not sufficiently appreciated while he lived and was disliked by many for his unscrupulousness in judging his fellow countrymen. Of his contemporaries only Hawthorne understood and appreciated him. In England Stevenson took his start from him. But only in the 20th century was he fully reassessed and ranked among the greatest American writers. Moby Dick is a chaotic work, in many parts cumbersome and stuffed with heterogeneous knowledge, yet at times it rises to the tone of epic, and it is most powerful and unique for the vigor of its representation and for a religious and visionary symbolism that makes the "white whale" 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 upon in the most arbitrary manner, is perhaps the author's principal source. The whale incarnates the demonic element of nature, and the protagonist Ahab fights and pursues it with a hatred and a ferocity out of proportion to human strength. The relentless struggle of the two protagonists, the man and the monster, may recall the episode of Polyphemus. But, in keeping with the author's fundamental pessimism, the final victory belongs not to man and his reason, but to the irrational leviathan that sweeps everything away. The pessimism and the morbid aspects of M.'s nature and imagination are shown even more markedly 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 missing, 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 not a chance fact that the author afterward wrote only short stories. The most evocative part of the work consists of the first chapters, where the adolescence of the protagonist (and indirectly of the author) in his mother's house is described. Of M.'s short stories one of the finest, Billy Budd, was published posthumously in 1926.
Bibliography
Augusto Guidi