“Or, the Whale”: Unpopular Melville in the Popular Imagination, or a Theory of Unusability

Abstract

Crossing the Line: Jumping the Shark, or the Whale I recently saw a local band playing in San Francisco whose name is “Or, The Whale,” an in-joke for Melvilleans, or perhaps part of a tradition going back to the late 1960s, when another local band named itself Moby Grape. (They played, incidentally, in the Castro, not far from the bar Moby Dick, creating a kind of Melville enterprise zone.) That once unpopular novel has had a surprising influence on popular music, ranging from Led Zeppelin’s fifteen-minute drum solo indulgence titled “Moby Dick” to the techno-musician Moby (Richard Melville Hall), who claims to be distantly related to the author. In the late 1960s, the record label of the folk-rock group the Turtles was called White Whale, presaging a contemporary indie band of the same name. Before the digital age, one could find numerous Moby Disc record stores in the Northeastern United States, and even a Moby Disques near the Pantheon in Paris, which one imagines would have amused Melville. The musician-artist Laurie Anderson staged a performance piece inspired by MobyDick, and Stanley Crouch situated Melville’s opus as a proto-jazz novel for its