Composition as Explanation of Moby-Dick

This essay addresses two issues, one bearing on scholarly method, the other on what might be called the aesthetic and political character of a literature that embraces failure as a necessary condition of its work rather than perfection as an aspiring goal. Melville’s work, in particular Moby-Dick, provides the exemplary case in each instance. Implicit in the argument is the view that American Literature (classically so-called) has a distinctive commitment to, and not infrequently an anxiety about, its practical social usefulness. This orientation is grounded in what Constance Rourke long ago saw as the axiological ground of American writing: the “practical letters” that dominated the nearly two-hundred years of colonial founding.