On Friendly Terms With All the Inmates

I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it—would they let me—since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.- M.D.

I think there are few lines in the early chapters more Melvillean than these. The mix of bravado, humor and genuine curiosity about the "horrors" of the world strikes me as so damned American. He's tongue-in-cheek, of course, parodying others' ideas of what a horror actually is. Ishmael is, after all, literally prepared to sleep with cannibals, as we'll soon see.

But Melville is also in earnest about the horrors of the world, a heritage he has long since passed on to his literary descendants. Faulkner, Heller, Vonnegut, Pynchon, DeLillo and McCarthy, to name a few. Where would they be without this freaking, freaky New York genius?

Oh, I know, Those writers owe plenty of other debts, as did Melville himself. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Defoe, Dickens, to name a few. But there are so many things utterly unique about Moby Dick, an artistic ambition that gave other American writers the chutzpah to take on their English betters. In the field of literature, Melville was as much a revolutionary as Washington, Adams, or Madison.

The result helped transform American lit, as many scholars have already proven. But Moby-Dick did more than that. Allow me to make an extraordinary and no doubt absurd-seeming supposition: I contest that Melville makes us all better, braver human beings. I don't just mean writers or Americans. I mean any global citizen with real experience of the planet. He has, through some miracle of literary homeopathy, changed the ocean of humanity with his particle.

We are, as a result, not just less bigoted (though American bigotry retains a faithful following) but better able to meet the actual horrors of the world with a brave face. Take our fellow inmate Death, for example.  I've seen people salute Death on the street during their morning constitutionals. I've even witnessed some joshing with their dark neighbor, as if they were were throwing an arm up over his bony shoulders and pretending to grab his nose. Of course, Death himself has a grim sense of humor. Maybe he asks us to pull his finger and we dare it, knowing full well it could be our extinction.

We need a philosophical mind for such dark shenanigans, overlaying a deeper but not unalloyed belief in human redemption. Melville has played a role in forging the macabre hilarity of the modern mind. It is one of many inheritances from The Whale.