The Great Final Hash of Moby-Dick

Although celebrated as a masterpiece, this greatest work of American fiction was most truly described by Melville as a “final hash.” The phrase is important because it goes to the heart of Melville’s commitment to a literature whose “topmost” aspiration was, in Beckett’s famous declaration, to “fail better.” Melville’s “quarrels” with God, America, and fiction are all related to this sublime and paradoxical ideal. Moby-Dick is not a final hash by intention but by necessity. It is a realized forecast of Laura Riding Jackson’s late-twentieth-century view of “the common risks of language, where failure stalks in every word.”