Response Journal Week 6-7

Though Mathiesson’s examination of Moby Dick breaks from the traditions of the new critics, his use of biographical information is very helpful for understanding some phenomena that we have noticed in Moby Dick. For example, Mathiesson points out that everything that Melville wrote previously had simply been “narratives of travel” (Mathiesson 371). When written, Moby Dick was the farthest Melville had ever strayed from the personal, for he followed the old adage, “write what you know.” This preference for autobiographical non-fiction shows through constantly. Often he bases his characters’ experiences and histories upon his own life (schoolteacher, cannibals etc.), yet at the same time, Melville never went whaling, and thus the entire premise of the novel is outside of his realm of experience. His preference for reality also shows through in his frequent digressions into extremely (pseudo)scientific examinations of the whale, and whaling itself.
Mathiesson makes note of the fact that Melville’s primary goal is to write a tragedy, and thus compares him to Shakespeare. He claims that, “Shakespeare’s phrasing had so hynotized [sic] him that often he seems to have reproduced it involuntarily, even when there was no point to the allusion” (Mathiesson 424). However, his plagiarism, whether deliberate or not, does help him break free from the world of travel logs. The allusion to Shakespeare alone serves to suggest that it is a tragedy, but Mathiesson also suggests that, “The most important effect of Shakespeare’s use of language was to give Melville a range of vocabulary for expressing passion far beyond any that he had previously possessed” (425). However, in all seriousness, this makes me question Melville as an author. Mathiesson opens by stating that Melville was barely educated, and had barely any writing background. If anything, he attributes his success to luck. How, then, can we praise Melville, if he was incapable of expressing the emotions that are crucial to a tragedy without taking the language of Shakespeare? This question extends even farther, for many sections of the book have notes which list where Melville took a character or a scene from. Large parts of it were hardly written by him; they were simply lifted from other authors. However, these notes do not accuse him of plagiarism, they merely give his “source” as though it was a piece of non-fiction. Perhaps we ought to praise Melville for his choice of “sources”, or for the way he incorporated them into one novel, but it seems almost wrong to love him for his writing.
A common theme that has run through the novel is that of escaping one’s fate, and relatedly, elevating oneself above god. As Mathiesson points out, Ahab is the ultimate embodiment of this. However, Ahab is also the ultimate contradiction; he is “a grand, ungodly, god-like man.” Though he is god-like, he is also ungodly in his humanity and imperfection. Though Ahab admits that he is a slave to his destiny, he does not allow this to prevent him from attempting to shape what little he can. According to Mathiesson, this echoed a common sentiment and transformation at the time. He writes, “Anyone concerned with orthodoxy holds that the spiritual decadence of the nineteenth century can be measured according to the alteration in the object of its belief from God-Man to Man-God, and to the corresponding shift in emphasis from Incarnation to Deification.” Rather than imagining that all good must come from a higher being, or that humans are naturally worthless, people were instead worshipped as they could become god. This is an almost Nietzschean perspective, in that humans are placed at the forefront, and capable of determining their own morality.