Earthquake and Whale

Abstract

This talk puts Herman Melville in dialogue with El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the sixteenth-century chronicler of Inca history and the conquest of Peru, suggesting how particular knowledge of catastrophe has flowed from the Pacific to the Atlantic, from south to north, creating alternatives to the intellectual genealogies that have structured our sense of a Western tradition and celebrated Melville as one of its greatest literary heirs. Garcilaso's influence on the Enlightenment helps explain a convergence of ideas about catastrophe and geography in the eighteenth century that would become a structuring conceit of US-Americanness by the middle of the nineteenth: a supposed American immunity to earthquake. After examining Garcilaso's late sixteenth-century earthquake thinking, the essay considers how Melville—particularly in "The Town-Ho's Story," first narrated in Lima, Peru—explores an inherited geography of catastrophe and shakes its foundations with his own whale-earthquake of a novel, Moby-Dick.