Pursuing the White Whale
AHAB’S ROLLING SEA: A Natural History of Moby-Dick
BY RICHARD J. KING
University of Chicago Press, 464 pp., $30
IN SEPTEMBER 1891, retired District Inspector No. 75 for the Port of New York died at home on East 26th Street. Literati shrugged. Herman Melville, once known as “the man who lived with cannibals,” was an antique footnote from the age of sail. His Pacific swashbucklers, Typeeand Omoo,were long out of print, and his meandering seaborne epic Moby-Dicksank on publication in 1851, taking his writing career with it.
But the 1919 centenary of his birth inspired a Melville revival, then a Melville industry. Modernist critics revisited the s bleak and bloody voyage; scholars soon recovered one stashed for decades in a tin breadbox) and recharted Melville’s daring use of race and sexuality, his autodidact’s yen for weird fact, his gallery of American bullies, madmen, and con artists, his profound theological anxieties. (Both Darwin and Melville foraged in the Galápagos on their youthful Pacific voyages; one perceived a vivid laboratory for evolution, the other, a grotesque and sterile hellscape.)
