Composing Moby-Dick: What Might Have Happened : The Astman Distinguished Lecture Moby-Dick 2001: An International Celebration

Abstract

Composing Moby-Dick: What Might Have Happened THEASTMAN DISTINGUISHED LECTURE MOBY-DICK 2001:A N INTERNATIONAL CELEBRATION HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY E. L. DOCTOROW for one, appreciate my courage in speaking here this evening. For what can I presume to say about Melville’sMoby-Dick to a congregation of literary harpooners who have heaved their darts time and time again into the textual hide of this Leviathan? I suspect that while I seem to be standing in an academic setting facing a company of scholars, I am actually in the foc’sle of the Pequod with the oil lamp swinging from the headbeam and throwing lights and shadows over the faces of a crew of savage old salts who have lit their pipes and downed their drams of literary theory and await the words from me that will persuade them to throw me to the sharks. For we know from Melville that we are never in one place alone at any given minute, but in two -in the present that is the past, or on the land that is the sea, or in the sea that is the soul, or in the novel that is Gods ineffable realm. There is only one recourse for me, and that is to speak of Moby-Dick as a working writer looking at another writer’swork. I will leave the profoundly ambiguous art object to you. I will leave the thematics, the influences, the symbols, the historico-ideological contexts to you. I will attempt to see what is being done in this book and perhaps why it is being done. I think that is the only way I can sensibly and truthfully go about this talk, as a writer seeing the writerly things, making the practical if awed, and envious observations in presumptive collegiality of one literary tradesman with another. I can claim a personal relationship to Melville and his works, having read Moby-Dick three and a half times. The half time came at the age of ten when I found a copy in my grandfather’slibrary. It was one of a set of great sea novels all bound in green cloth, and it was fair sailing until the cetology stove me in. I first read the book in its entirety, (and rypee, Omoo, Billy Budd, and “The Encantadas,” and “BenitoCereno,” and “Bartleby,”for that matter) as an OCopyright E L Doctorow L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 5 E . L . D O C P O R O W undergraduate at Kenyon College. Later, as a young editor at the New American library, a mass-market paperback publisher, I persuaded a Kenyon professor, Denham Sutcliffe, to write an afterword to the Signet Classic edition of Moby-Dick, and so read the book again by way of editorial preparation. In anticipation of this evening I have after too many years read Moby-Dick for the third time. And the surprise to me, at my age now, is how familiar the voice of that book is, and not merely the voice, but the technical effrontery, and not merely the technical effrontery, but the character and rhythm of the sentences. And so with some surprise, I’ve realized, how much of my own work, at its own level, hears Melville, responds to his perverse romanticism, endorses his double dipping into the accounts of realism and allegory, as well as the large risk he takes speaking so frankly of the crisis of human consciousness, that great embarrassment to us all that makes a tiresome prophet of anyone who would speak of it. Hawthorne I have always understood as a writer who affected me deeply and I have realized my sometime inclination to write romances in the Hawthornian sense -novels set in the past that would cure LIP real life into a gamier essence. But whatever rule breaking I have done in my work I probably owe to Melville, Hawthorne’s devoted admirer, but also his saboteur, in taking the elements of the well constructed novel and making a cubist composition of...