{"id":37243,"date":"2019-09-01T02:13:04","date_gmt":"2019-09-01T02:13:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/navytimes\/uncategorized\/2019\/09\/01\/op-ed-why-herman-melville-is-200-years-old-and-still-relevant\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T19:39:31","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T19:39:31","slug":"op-ed-why-herman-melville-is-200-years-old-and-still-relevant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/navytimes\/news\/your-navy\/2019\/09\/01\/op-ed-why-herman-melville-is-200-years-old-and-still-relevant\/","title":{"rendered":"Op-ed: After 200 years, Herman Melville is still relevant"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Outside of American literature courses, it doesn\u2019t seem likely that many Americans are reading Herman Melville these days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But with Melville turning 200 on Aug. 1, I propose that you pick up one of his novels, because his work has never been more timely. This is the perfect cultural moment for another Melville revival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The original Melville revival started exactly a century ago, after Melville\u2019s works had languished in obscurity for some 60 years. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, scholars found his vision of social turmoil to be uncannily relevant<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once again, Melville could help Americans grapple with dark times \u2013 and not just because he composed classic works of universal truths about good and evil. Melville still matters because he was directly engaged with the very aspects of modern American life that continue to haunt the country in the 21st century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Herman Melville, most likely in 1860. (Library of Congress)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Finding fellowship<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Melville\u2019s books deal with a host of issues that are relevant today, from race relations and immigration to the mechanization of everyday life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet these aren\u2019t the works of a hopeless tragedian. Rather, Melville was a determined realist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The typical Melville character is depressed and alienated, overwhelmed by societal changes. But he also endures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately, \u201cMoby-Dick<\/a>\u201d is about the quest of the narrator, Ishmael, the story\u2019s lone survivor, to make meaning out of trauma and keep the human story going.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ishmael goes to sea in the first place because he\u2019s feeling a particularly modern form of angst. He walks the streets of Manhattan wanting to knock people\u2019s hats off, furious that the only available jobs in the new capitalist economy leave workers \u201ctied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.\u201d The whaling ship is no paradise, but at least it affords him a chance to work in the open air with people of all races, from all over the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the crewmen sit in a circle squeezing lumps of whale sperm into oil, they find themselves clasping each other\u2019s hands, developing \u201can abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then there\u2019s Melville\u2019s novel \u201cRedburn<\/a>,\u201d one of the author\u2019s lesser-known works. It\u2019s mostly a story of disillusionment: A young na\u00eff joins the merchant marine to see the world, and in Britain all he finds are \u201cmasses of squalid men, women, and children\u201d spilling out from the factories. The narrator is abused by the ship\u2019s cynical crew and swindled out of his wages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But his hard experience nonetheless broadens his sympathies. As he sails home to New York with some Irish families fleeing the famine, he remarks:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLet us waive that agitated national topic, as to whether such multitudes of foreign poor should be landed on our American shores; let us waive it, with the one only thought, that if they can get here, they have God\u2019s right to come\u2026. For the whole world is the patrimony of the whole world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Melville\u2019s fall and rise<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In November 1851, when \u201cMoby-Dick\u201d was published, Melville was among the best-known authors in the English-speaking world. But his reputation started to decline just months later, when a review of his next book<\/a>, \u201cPierre<\/a>,\u201d bore the headline, \u201cHerman Melville Crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That opinion was not atypical. By 1857, Melville had mostly stopped writing<\/a>; his publisher was bankrupt; and those Americans who still knew his name may well have thought he\u2019d been institutionalized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet in 1919 \u2013 the year of Melville\u2019s centennial \u2013 scholars started returning to his work. They found a writer of grim, tangled epics delving into the social tensions that would ultimately lead to the Civil War.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It just so happened that 1919 was a year<\/a> of labor strife, mail bombs, weekly lynchings, and race riots in 26 cities. There were crackdowns on foreigners, privacy, and civil liberties, not to mention the lingering trauma of World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the ensuing three decades \u2013 an era that included the Great Depression and World War II \u2013 Melville was canonized, and all of his works were reprinted in popular editions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI owe a debt to Melville,\u201d wrote critic and historian Lewis Mumford<\/a>, \u201cbecause my wrestling with him, my efforts to plumb his own tragic sense of life, were the best preparations I could have had for facing our present world.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
“Moby Dick,” a collection of nose art from B-24s from the 90th Bomb Group. (San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive)\n\n \n\nRepository: San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Why Melville still matters<\/b><\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n

America is now dealing with its own dark times, full of foreboding over climate change, extreme class divisions, racial and religious bigotry, refugee crises, mass shootings, and near-constant warfare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Go back and read Melville, and you\u2019ll find apt depictions of white privilege and obliviousness in \u201cBenito Cereno<\/a>.\u201d Melville paints consumer capitalism as an elaborate con game in \u201cThe Confidence-Man<\/a>,\u201d while excoriating America\u2019s imperial ambitions in \u201cTypee<\/a>\u201d and \u201cOmoo<\/a>.\u201d He was even inspired to break his silence at the end of the Civil War and write an earnest plea<\/a> for \u201cRe-establishment\u201d and \u201cReconstruction.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThose of us who always abhorred slavery as an atheistical iniquity,\u201d he wrote, \u201cgladly we join the exulting chorus of humanity over its downfall.\u201d But now it was time to find ways for everyone to get along.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His 1866 book \u201cBattle-Pieces<\/a>,\u201d though full of bitter fragments, has a final section dominated by idealistic nouns: common sense and Christian charity, patriotic passion, moderation, generosity of sentiment, benevolence, kindliness, freedom, sympathies, solicitude, amity, reciprocal respect, decency, peace, sincerity, faith. Melville was trying to remind Americans that in democracies there is a perpetual need to carve out common ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not that society doesn\u2019t or shouldn\u2019t change; it\u2019s that change and continuity play off each other in surprising and sometimes bracing ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In dark times, the rediscovery that human beings have almost always had to confront terrible challenges can produce powerful emotions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You might feel like knocking someone\u2019s hat off. But you might also feel like giving the Ishmaels of the world a gentle squeeze of the hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And in doing so, you might help to keep the human story going.<\/p>\n\n\n\t