Herman Melville

1819-1891

Herman Melville was born in New York city. In 1839 the family moved to Albany, where Herman went to the local academy. After his father's death in 1832, the family was left in poverty. Melville worked as a clerk in Albany, sailed to Liverpool, and worked as a schoolteacher. In 1841 he shipped on a whaling vessel bound for the South Pacific, but in 1842 he deserted and spent about a month among the cannibals of the Marquesses Islands. This experience became the substance of his first novel "Typee" (1846). Another whaling vessel carried him to the Hawaiian Islands, which provided the material for his second novel "Omoo"(1847).

The two novels were highly successful and made Melville a favourite of the New York literary circle. The novels that followed, however, apart from "Redburn" and "White Jacket", had comparatively few readers, and were received with mixed feelings. Yet it is the writings of this period, the 50's, that survive as great literature. They are "Moby Dick", the supreme work of Melville's life, "Israel Potter", one of his best books, "The Piazza Tales", which contains such masterpieces as "Benito Cereno and Bartleby the Scrivener".

Melville's first volume of poetry, "Battle Pieces and Aspects of War", was published in 1866. Ten years later he published his long poem "Clarel", based on a trip to Palestine. Melville continued to work and publish through all the eighties. He was still working on "Billy Budd", preparing it for the press, when he died, on September 28, 1891. In "Moby Dick" Melville managed to combine an exciting narrative about the whaling industry with the eternal questions of human being. His novel is not merely a story about the men who went down to sea for whale hunting, but about the men viewed under the aspect of the universe and eternity, for Melville was deeply concerned with problems of man's life and soul. [70]

Symbolical figures, details and atmosphere seemed suitable to transfer the ideas to make them grand. The White Whale represents all the world's evil. The strange crew of the "Pequod", being made up of different races, might symbolize the humanity itself. Through Captain Ahab, a Prometheus- figure or anti Christ, Melville tried to get to the heart of the life force. Was there a benign God, or was there merely a blind and inscrutable force.

For most of his life Melville quarrelled with God. The seeds of his quarrel with religion as well as with civilization may be found in his first novels "Typee" and "Omoo", in which he notes the contrast between the happiness of the benighted heathen and the corruption he found among his shipfriends, the Christians.

In a narrative heavily weighted with symbolism as well as with factual and mythological details, in a style at times overdramatized, Melville dares to ask what was the unaskable, for the mid-nineteenth century America at least. And all the asking personages are destroyed. Of all the crew of the "Pequod", only one is saved-but on a coffin.

An undercurrent of urgency, even of anguish, distinguishes Melville's writing for no positive answers to the eternal questions could he found in his self, in his experience and life, no positive means to change that "civilized world".

Herman Melville is a symbolical figure of the artist, the isolated man, the potential spiritual leader who sees and feels greatly but whose voice, while carrying across a hundred years is not heard by his own generation.