A Competing Triumvirate

William Glasser opens his new monograph with this sentence: "Across the capricious happenings of our history on earth, we have been incessantly perplexed by a question that is central to our understanding of the nature and workings of our existence." Educators assigned the task of teaching composition to college freshmen will recognize instantly the standard template for an ineffectual broad-to-specific introductory paragraph, but at least the central question Glasser refers to is an appropriately weighty one. "Who or what," he continues, "is ultimately responsible for causing the events that take place throughout our world?"

That introduction is still somewhat misleading, though, as is the book's title, with its reference to literary thieving. Rather than examining copyright infringement in the publishing world, Glasser considers the extent to which Herman Melville and J. D. Salinger were influenced by William Shakespeare's Hamlet while writing Moby-Dick and The Catcher in the Rye. And rather than tracing what happens "throughout our world" to its ultimate source, Glasser merely asserts that the authors under review conclude their greatest works with a flurry of activity that implies no single cause is responsible for what happens in their fiction: God (or Fate), the will of men and women, and chance—all have a hand in the outcome.

Glasser has an easier time connecting Melville's novel to Hamlet than he does Salinger's for a number of reasons. Melville made no secret of his admiration for Shakespeare, whose plays Melville did not read until he was in his late twenties when he was composing Moby-Dick. In "Hawthorne and His Mosses" Melville had already compared the "great power of darkness" in his fellow American's tales to the same quality in Shakespeare's works: "I do not say that Nathaniel of Salem is a greater [artist] than William of Avon, or as great," wrote Melville. "But the difference between the two men is by no means immeasurable." It is no huge leap for Glasser to assume, therefore, that in Melville's most ambitious book the novelist was consciously attempting to match Shakespeare's achievements.

More specifically apt is the "Mat-Maker" section of Moby-Dick, in which Ishmael explains how forces of human will, chance, and "necessity" (as Melville calls the workings of the divine) are not incompatible but, rather, are woven together on the "Loom of Time." Using this passage as a map, Glasser arrives at the convincing assertion that the final battle between Ahab and the whale closely parallels the scene in which Hamlet duels Laertes—a scene propelled by otherworldly apparitions, devious human plotting, and simple misfortune (for Gertrude, most obviously).

But these authors, one could argue, were merely engaging in skillful Aristotelian plotting by making use of all potential sources of conflict. Why emphasize Melville's debt to Shakespeare when both consulted the same rule book (The Poetics)? Glasser has an answer: under Elizabeth and James, events such as the defeat of the Spanish Armada or an outbreak of the plague were widely interpreted as manifestations of divine will, which was understood to trump all other forces. Shakespeare may have been less concerned with obeying Aristotle than with correcting the conventional wisdom of his time. Conversely in Moby-Dick Ishmael seems preoccupied with the nature of free will. It follows, then, that Melville—steeped in Shakespeare's plays—may have been exposing his narrator to the brutal limits of human agency and opening his mind to the greater forces at play.

More substantial objections to Glasser's argument arise in the Salinger section of the book for the simple reason that The Catcher in the Rye is a complete outlier to this discussion. Yes, Salinger is known to have admired the works of Shakespeare and Melville, but his novel's climactic scene, according to Glasser himself, shows Holden Caulfield calmly accepting his sister Phoebe's inevitable passage from uncorrupted childhood to adulthood, with its putrid atmosphere of decay (both physical and moral). The competing triumvirate of...