Recently, I had an opportunity to meet with the editor-in-chief of this publication in a wide-ranging conversation that touched upon Moby Dick and its superlative position in literature—not merely American literature, but all literature. Of course, a full discussion of why Melville’s magnum opus should be considered the greatest novel ever written would necessarily take up far more space than can be provided here. However, there are matters worth considering which intersect with that contention: amongst them, the peculiar genius of Melville that is demonstrated in Moby Dick by Melville conversing fluently within the context of 19th century literature even as he transcends those very conventions. These connexions do not demonstrate an ‘anxiety of influence,’ but rather a willingness to engage in the kind of literary innovation and adaptation that has long characterised the greatest of our writers.
The connexions which exist between Moby Dick and other masterworks can be read in Melville as much as in his antecedents and successors. For example, in a podcast discussion in which I participated, Critical Readings 190 (“Frankenstein, Part I”), we conducted an examination of Captain Robert Walton, a character from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Walton’s character might not seem entirely out of place in Moby Dick: a polar explorer whose letters to his sister constitute the first of the several frames within which the story is revealed, Walton is—like Ahab—driven by a consuming zeal (in this case for polar exploration), and he will brook no obstacle. Moreover, he is somewhat standoffish and finds it difficult to make connexions with other people, including the crew of his own vessel. His similarity to Victor Frankenstein—a character equally driven, equally aloof—is one of the more significant relationships in the beginning of the novel. In fact, it is their similar natures which persuade Frankenstein to relate his unhappy tale to Walton.
Walton, Frankenstein, and Ahab all represent, to some degree, a certain type of Romanticism, at least as embodied in the form of a fictional character. And the podcast panellists noted those similarities, not only between Walton and Frankenstein but also with regard to Ahab. Certain, the two captains—Ahab and Walton—are in some ways so similar that Walton’s declarations might be mistaken for Ahab’s, such as when he confesses to Frankenstein that, “I would sacrifice my fortune, my existence, my every hope, to the furtherance of my enterprise.” Frankenstein, who has nearly made all of those sacrifices himself (and keenly regrets them), can hardly bear to listen. And, of course, Ahab goes further still, to the ruin of all concerned.
Thirty-three years separate the two novels. Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus was published in 1818. Moby Dick; or, The Whale was published in 1851. Certainly, Melville could not have influenced Mary Shelley’s novel, but Melville owned a copy of Frankenstein, purchased in London from Richard Bentley in 1849, probably on December 14, just two months before he set to work on writing Moby Dick. It seems likely, if not certain, that Frankenstein may indeed have had an influence on Melville, along with Shakespeare, Milton, Carlyle, and the Reverend Henry Cheever (author of The Whale and His Captors).
The modern error is to conclude from those connexions that, because Melville’s entire novel did not spring from his mind wholly formed and unbeholden in any way to any extant work, then it is somehow diminished. This is a view so absurd that it cannot stand up to even the most basic scrutiny: language itself is nothing but a series of borrowed and exchanged concepts, endlessly reassembled into novel forms both general and specific. At a larger scale, our greatest stories share not only archetypes but specifics, and we do not account them less for doing so but rather applaud them for using what is familiar in ways which are nevertheless deeply revealing of our shared humanity. Moreover, far from taking anything away from the novel, identifying these connexions inspires discussion and analysis; they are additive to the enterprise.
In his 1973 work The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Harold Bloom makes an argument which he calls ‘outrageous’ but ‘true’ natheless. The argument he makes has since passed into the lexicon of critical theory:
Poetic Influence—when it involves two strong, authentic poets—always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. The history of fruitful poetic influence, which is to say the main tradition of Western poetry since the Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, wilful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist.
Bloom argues that when “one poet’s poems influence the poems of the other” there is indeed a “generosity of spirit” at play, but it is not a cause for celebration. Rather, “where generosity is involved, the poets influenced are minor or weaker.” He may be speaking of poets, but the assertions involved are generally transferable to any supremely creative act, such as novel-writing and the composition of symphonies. Is Melville ‘weaker’ than Shakespeare? Perhaps; but what of Mary Shelley? Is she the superior novelist? Is Melville only a ‘minor poet’? Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War suggests otherwise.
For Bloom, the true genius does not participate in the conversation; Bloom opines that the great poets do not read the poetry of others—they create new works of genius which seek to escape the bonds of influence, embodied in the example of Milton. But to make such an assertion misses the mark entirely; Milton was deeply influenced, and rather than attempting to escape those influences, he wears them honourably. His appeal to the muse at the beginning of Paradise Lost reinvents an epic trope within a Christian context. He is not seeking to escape influence—he is participating in a conversation with the past, a conversation which his participation helps to shape.
Thinking about the foreshadowing of Ahab in the character of Robert Walton, we can see how Melville owed much to the Romantic movement and to authors like Mary Shelley, Milton, and Shakespeare. But these realisations should not harm our impression of Melville’s genius. Instead, they testify to his supreme gift of identifying the common thread of humanity that runs through the great texts and to his ability to pick it up to weave it into a new narrative tapestry—one which reflects the many colours and attitudes of the works that he has read, but also one which is of a shape and mien utterly his own. We can learn much by understanding that to participate in that literary conversation and add to it without diminishing it is no occasion for anxiety; rather, it is the privilege of the great. And, it is necessarily a conservative enterprise to participate in and transmit that great conversation, rather than to seek to shatter it and replace it with something new and self-glorifying instead.
