Moby Dick

For these and other reasons the reading of Moby-Dick -coming before psychology - left a stupendous imprint, too vivid to be dimmed by the long series of relentless analytical operations to which I subsequently subjected it. Today, after twenty-five years of such experiments, The Whale is still the whale, more magnificent, if anything, than before.

To be explicit: psychologists have been recognizing in the dream figures and fantasy figures of today's children and adolescents more and more family likenesses of the heroes and heroines of primitive myths, legends, and fables - figures, in other words, who are engaged in comparable heroic strivings and conflicts and are experiencing comparable heroic triumphs and fatalities. Our ancestors, yielding to an inherent propensity of the mind, projected the more relevant of these figures into objects of their environment, into sun, moon, and stars, into the unknown deeps of the sea and of the earth, and into the boundless void of heaven; and they worshiped the most potent of these projected images, whether animal or human, as superbeings, gods, or goddesses.

On any clear night one can see scores of the more luminous of such divinities parading up and down the firmament. For example, in fall and winter, one looks with admiration on that resplendent hero Perseus and above him the chained beauty Andromeda, whom he saved from a devouring monster, ferocious as Moby Dick.

What seems decisive here is the passage in Melville's celebrated letter to Hawthorne : "A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book." From this we can conclude that there are meanings to be understood in Moby-Dick, and also - may we say for our own encouragement? - that Melville's ghost will feel secure forever if modern critics can find them, and, since Hawthorne remained silent, set them forth in print. Here it might be well to remind ourselves of a crucial statement which follows the just quoted passage from Melville's letter: I have written a wicked book." The implication is clear: all interpretations which fail to show that Moby-Dick is, in some sense, wicked have missed the author's avowed intention.

A few critics have scouted all attempts to fish Melville's own meaning out of The Whale, on the ground that an interpretation of a work of art so vast and so complex is bound to be composed in large measure of projections from the mind of the interpreter. It must be granted that preposterous projections often do occur in the course of such an effort. But these are not inevitable. Self-knowledge and discipline may reduce projections to a minimum. Anyhow, in the case of Moby-Dick, the facts do not sustain the proposition that a critic can see nothing in this book but his own reflected image.