BOOKS
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Melville's annotations in the edition of Shakespeare he read in 1'849
pointed not merely to relatively direct correspondences in structure and
language, but to Melville's imaginative fusion, with his own image of
American democracy, of the revenge motive of
Hamlet,
the gloomy
and magically ominous world of
Macbeth,
and above all the tragedy of
madness, discovery and final purgation in
King Lear.
By contrast the rest of the book seems not less interesting, but
certainly more tentative. The first part (in which I include the Pro–
logue) tells the terrible history of the wreck of the
Essex
with the con–
sequent measured cannibalism; and it recites a series of facts and
statistics that testify to the industrial importance of whaling to Amer–
ica
in
the first half of the nineteenth century. Taken together these
suggest the ordered and directed brutality at the root of the world of
Moby-Dick;
and they relate it as microcosm to the America of the
melting-pot, the violently marching frontiers (of which to Olson the
Pacific is the last), the costly conquest of the productive resources of
nature, with its enormous drive, its exploitation, and its human waste.
Olson nowhere makes these implications explicit, nor does he clarify the
ambivalence in the attitudes; perhaps he is right that it is unnecessary
to empty them out with the exhaustions of demonstration.
The last sections of the book, whose more particular subject mat–
ter is Melville's later work and its decline in power, deal with symbols,
and there is a bewildering variety of them. For Olson the chief appears
to be space vs. time, and about each there is a hierarchy of attendants
whose interrelation I but vaguely understand. The opposing symbols
ramify in a number of directions: they begin as a comparative study
of the earlier and the later Melville, they involve a psychology of the
man himself, and they end as a kind of master clue to human history,
if more particularly American history. ·
"In
Moby-Dick,"
Olson writes, "when Ishmael has said all he can
about Ahab, he admits that the larger, darker, deeper part of the man is
obscure." It is tempting to call Olson Ishmael. Yet I would add that I
doubt whether he really wants to articulate the obscurity: I suspect
that he values the vitality of mystery over the mortality of dissection:
Olson's symbols, it seems to me, are finally at work on a myth whose
embodiment is Melville, but whose function is not so much the explicat–
ing of Melville himself as the vitalizing of a way of grasping the ex–
perience of America, or even the world. Such large matters are likely
to be cloudy, and they are unlikely to correspond exactly to their
source. The mythical Melville is probably not the actual Melville. But
the myth is clearly actively at work in Olson's imagination, transforming
what it touches. A certain ambiguity and ambivalence in application
and scope are probably the conditions of live myth.
ANDREWS WANNING
