The Truth of the Thing: Nonfiction in Moby-Dick

Abstract

One of the myths of our tribe is a story that gets told over again, each semester, in literature classes: how Genius came before the critics in 1851, and was jeered; how Moby-Dick went unsold, and Herman Melville fell into despair; how the greatest epic in American literature went unread and unappreciated until it was rediscovered nearly a century later, and then became the focus of a thriving cottage industry in literary scholarship. Like all significant myths, this one is a story freighted with meanings, complete with a tragic hero, and reflective of the values of the group by whom the tale is endlessly retold. Some of the tale is even true. Melville's own truths were enigmatic and subtle, Janus-faced, ambiguous, and overlaid with ironies. There were truths of the spirit he meant to demonstrate, and those were often effectively couched in fictions. But he needed to express other kinds of truths as well, descriptions and matters of actual experience, which needed to be told as nonfiction-what the rhetoric books today would term expository prose, in the referential mode. Moby-Dick, after all, is as much a book about whaling as a book about good and evil. From the very beginning, the fictional narrator of the book maintains stoutly that the material on whales is accurate, derived from reliable sources and his own experience. He takes every opportunity to establish his veracity, larding his descriptions with extensive allusions to authorities-some authentic, some dubious-in much the same manner as Melville himself apparently worked, digging through the works of Scoresby and Beale among others, choosing and changing his source materials as he wished, and sifting through the memories of the single, long-past whaling voyage that had already provided so much of his material. Thus, the readers of MobyDick are presented with onion-like, translucent layers of truths: real stuff about whaling, fictionalized and fancied-up, an extraordinary combination of romance and textbook, and all of it simultaneously a massive exercise in point-of-view, a tale told by a pedantic ex-schoolmaster who goes to sea to escape the dreary November of his soul and gets somewhat more adventure than he bargained for. Generations of publishers have persistently tried to simplify Moby-Dick into easy reading versions by scissoring out the sections on cetology and leaving only the story, a practice encouraged by students who find a 500-page whale chase disheartening. But there is also an attitude at work among scholars that is