Does the 21st Century still need Herman Melville?
1st August 2019
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In the 200 years since his birth, Herman Melville has accumulated a wide array of epithets – the great American novelist, overrated, underrated, obscure, tedious, crazy, that-guy-who-wrote-about-that-whale-one-time – but how much do you really know about the man behind Moby Dick?
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Etching of Joseph Oriel Eaton's portrait of Herman Melville, via Wikimedia Commons
In New York in 1819, Herman Melville was born. Melville worked as a clerk, a sailor, a whaler, a teacher, a lecturer, and a customs inspector to make ends meet when his career as an author proved fairly unsuccessful. It was not until the early 20th Century that public interest in his writing piqued for what was probably the first time since the release of his first novel, Typee. In 1919, on the centennial of his birth, Melville was rescued from the obscurity that he had fallen into. It might surprise you to find out that he had faded into insignificance during his own lifetime, the relative success of his first few novels waning quickly and giving way to lukewarm reviews that considering his writing crazy at best and dull at worst. Then again, why should that surprise us, when Melville still exists in relative obscurity these days, too? Despite the infamy of Moby Dick’s opening line, ‘Call me Ishmael’, and the academic interest in Melville that lingers, popular culture has relegated the author to the abyssal periphery of our world. Why do so few of us know anything about Moby Dick beyond the opening line and the titular character? Melville is somehow simultaneously an infamous author and entirely unknown, both in his own lifetime and ours, and I want to rescue him from these watery depths of oblivion and return him to the limelight. The title of this article is rhetorical (as the answer from me is a resounding ‘yes’, as I hope it will soon be from you), so I will instead answer the question, why does the 21st Century still need Herman Melville? The tip of the Melvillian iceberg Let’s begin with the tip of the Melvillian iceberg: where can we find Melville already? Our culture is already saturated with references to the man, though they’re often hard to spot. Did you know, for example, that Starbucks got its name from the first mate in Moby Dick? Do you remember when Khan from Star Trek used his last breath to quote Ahab? Do you remember when Homer and Lisa disagreed over the true meaning of Moby Dick in The Simpsons? Did you ever listen to Mastodon’s album Leviathan, Led Zeppelin’s album Moby Dick, or anything by the band Ahab? Did you see that Futurama episode where they discover a four-dimensional whale that Leela becomes obsessed with hunting? Or, maybe you've seen the carefully curated Twitter bot that churns out lines from Moby Dick at random? Whether you’re aware of it or not, you’ve probably seen something that referenced Melville or, more specifically, Moby Dick. Think of him next time you order that skinny vanilla latte from Starbucks.
Image credit: AWeith via Wikimedia Commons
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Portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne by Charles Osgood, via Wikimedia Commons
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