When Melville writes of the ‘subtleness of the sea,’ its ‘remorseless tribes,’ its ‘universal cannibalism’ and ‘eternal war,’ when he writes of the ‘most docile earth’ couched within ‘all the horrors of the half-known life,’ he writes of an ordered space precariously balanced atop a far greater body of disorder and distortion, but when we limit our understanding of this passage – and indeed, of Moby Dick as a whole – to a somewhat mystified intimation of the sea as conceptually unknowable to the point of being beyond any real-world discursive touchstones, we elide not only a complex engagement with a long tradition of Western maritime literature, but a reading of the novel as wholly embroiled in the question of (American) imperialism. Melville’s body of water, his subtleness of the sea, is a force of destabilisation not because Moby Dick is some eldritch unknowable horror, but because Moby Dick represents at once the dream of the American empire couched in the fetishism of whiteness and the relentless, obsessive process of production and plunder and slaughter axiomatic to its existence; the novel is a horror story that moors its horrors in a discourse centred on nineteenth-century colonialism.
Let’s talk about water a little.
HELLO at long last, the promised substack piece, on moby dick and water and what it actually means to put an epigraph at the beginning of your novel. please enjoy in all its 6.5k monstrosity. thanks everyone.
One week left in our book giveaway contest! If you’ve ever left a review of the show or feel led to do so, message me your username and that will get you entered for a chance to win.
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More details are available on the website or on older posts from the Tumblr page. Don’t miss your chance to be a part of the drawing!
The basic rules for entry to the book giveaway contest are:
1. Contest began on May 30 and runs until the end of the day on June 13, 2015, EST.
2. Entry limited to residents of U.S. and Canada w/a mailing address therein. (Sorry everyone else! Int'l shipping is just more than I can currently afford)
3. Method of Entry - Either leave a review of the podcast on iTunes or your pod catcher of choice, or tell a friend about the podcast.
4. Notification - Message me on Facebook or Twitter, or email me at [email protected] with the username you used to leave a review or how you told a friend about the podcast.
5. Drawing - I will verify review entries and enter all participants in a random drawing that will be conducted during the week of June 13.
6. Winner - I will notify the winner via the method they entered within a day of drawing. The winner has one week to accept the prize. If it is not accepted by initial winner, I’ll conduct a second drawing with the remaining entrants.
7. Prize - The prize is one (1) copy of the ‘Wreck of the Whale Ship Essex: The Complete Illustrated Edition: The Extraordinary and Distressing Memoir That Inspired Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.’ More info about the book can be found at http://www.amazon.com/Wreck-Whale-Ship-Essex-Extraordinary/dp/076034812X. The Maritime History Podcast will pay for shipping costs involved in getting the prize to the mailing address provided by the contest winner.
Today marks the 200th birthday of Herman Melville. His epic novel, Moby-Dick, is one of the most important and enduring masterworks of the 19th century.
Did you know? Harper & Brothers—champions of the author’s unique American voice—published Moby-Dick; or, the whale in 1851. However, Melville didn’t earn the critical acclaim he sought in his lifetime. It wasn’t until the centennial of his birth in 1919 that brought newfound appreciation for his work. The previously unpublished Billy Budd emerged in 1924 and sold quickly along with the rest of his canon, and Moby-Dick took its rightful place as a cornerstone of American literature.
the homoerotic undertones of moby dick are ridiculous so i made it worse by turning the whale into a merman and therefore reframing ahab’s obsession with hunting him. k gnight
C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades, & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953)
A great part of this book was written on Ellis Island while I was being detained by the Department of Immigration. The Island, like Melville’s Pequod, is a miniature of all the nations of the world and all sections of society. My experience of it and the circumstances attending my stay there have so deepened my understanding of Melville and so profoundly influenced the form the book has taken, that an account of this has seemed to me not only a natural but necessary conclusion.
