"Or, the Whale": Unpopular Melville in the Popular Imagination, or a Theory of Unusability

“Or, the Whale”: Unpopular Melville in the Popular Imagination, or a Theory of Unusability RICHARD HARDACK The novelist Herman Melville’s work went largely unnoticed after Moby-Dick. Critics thought that he crossed the literary line and recommended burning Moby-Dick. Bob Dylan, Chronicles1 Consequently, in the production of Pierre, Mr. Melville has deviated from the legitimate line of the novelist. Review of Pierre (1852)2 Crossing the Line: Jumping the Shark, or the Whale I recently saw a local band playing in San Francisco whose name is “Or, The Whale,” an in-joke for Melvilleans, or perhaps part of a tradition going back to the late 1960s, when another local band named itself Moby Grape. (They played, incidentally, in the Castro, not far from the bar Moby Dick, creating a kind of Melville enterprise zone.) That once unpopular novel has had a surprising influence on popular music, ranging from Led Zeppelin’s fifteen-minute drum solo indulgence titled “Moby Dick” to the techno-musician Moby (Richard Melville Hall), who claims to be distantly related to the author. In the late 1960s, the record label of the folk-rock group the Turtles was called White Whale, presaging a contemporary indie band of the same name. Before the digital age, one could find numerous Moby Disc record stores in the Northeastern United States, and even a Moby Disques near the Panthéon in Paris, which one imagines would have amused Melville. The musician-artist Laurie Anderson staged a performance piece inspired by MobyDick , and Stanley Crouch situated Melville’s opus as a proto-jazz novel for its C  2009 The Authors Journal compilation C  2009 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume I (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), 123. A version of this essay was presented to the Melville Society at the 2006 MLA Conference in Philadelphia. My thanks to M. Thomas Inge and the panel participants. 2 Southern Literary Messenger, September 18, 1852, in Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 436. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 7 R I C H A R D H A R D A C K improvisational verve. Emblematically, it is as if Moby-Dick can be “played” in many keys, or is amenable to many arrangements. However, as I elaborate, almost all references to Melville in popular culture rely on Moby-Dick and a few other sources whose useful indeterminacy or ambiguity allows them to be adapted to as many uses as artists and critics can devise.3 In the United States, Melville is known in the popular imagination for relatively few works: the “B” trilogy of “Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” and “Billy Budd”; and the well-known but not necessarily well-read Moby-Dick. (In the nineteenth-century, Typee was popular partly through its notoriety, but has receded from public consciousness). On the other hand, relatively few, perhaps even within the academy, read Mardi, the almost wholly ignored Israel Potter and Clarel, and to some degree Pierre and The Confidence-Man. A useful context might be to think of film adaptations of Melville’s work: one could contrast numerous Hollywood productions of Moby-Dick with Leos Carax’s intriguing but singularly inaccessible French adaptation of Pierre, POLA X (an acronym for Pierre Ou Les Ambiguı̈tés X, referencing the fact that Carax filmed his tenth screenplay, though perhaps, as with the amplifiers in Spinal Tap, he should have gone to eleven). It is hard to imagine that contemporary Hollywood would bring Pierre to the screen. Recently, Paul Lauter has assessed why several of Melville’s other works became staples of the pre- and post-war canon, situating their popularity in terms of their appeal to new critical pedagogy. And Donald Pease has evaluated their hegemonic function in reifying a Cold War American resistance to communism.4 But the equally relevant question is why most of Melville’s works remain unknown or unpopular, not just resistant to interpretation, but almost...