ABOUT MELVILLE'S TEXT AND ITS INTERPRETATIONS

My verse, like wine expensive and exquisite,

One day will have its turn.

-      wrote Marina Tzvetayeva, the Russian poetess of the beginning of the XX

century. She was right. Nowadays she is extremely popular both in Russia and abroad, both among the critics and the readers.

Melville could have written the same about his Moby Dick. He did, in fact, in the chapter 104:

One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme!

Melville writes about the greatness of the theme but every theme must be developed and to do so the author must be at least as great as his theme; even more to cope with such a task.

Melville’s book, that very few critics wanted to read and to learn when it was first published, is one of the most popular American novels at present. The critics like it for its epical form, for Melville’s playing with texts, with the narrator who sometimes is explicit, sometimes implicit and for many other features. The book gives a lot of possibilities for interpretations and comparisons; for example, with the Bible, as we did during the last lesson. However, I would like to note that we deal with literature, with fiction where no direct juxtapositions are possible. I mean, we cannot say that, for instance, Pip is Jesus Christ or the Carpenter is Saint Josef. It will not be correct, as in this book Melville wrote about the whales and the whalers, never about G-d, prophets or saints. We do not know whether he meant any comparisons. We can just suppose it from his text. But, as Barthes wrote, the text becomes independent on the author once it is written. Melville’s text is one of the brilliant illustrations of this thought.