Abstract: “Ishmael, Oil Baron”
At first glance, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) seems to narrate a great American catastrophe. It depicts a multi-year extractivist endeavor that not only culminates in the demise of the whaling ship Pequod and its entire crew save one, but also of the entire quantity of whale oil extracted. Only Ishmael, the novel’s notoriously elusive autodiegetic narrator, survives the wreck to relay this cautionary tale. As such, Moby-Dick has been read as foreshadowing not only the demise of the U.S.-American whaling industry and, possibly, the whole of ist democratic project. Moreover, it seems to mirror Melville’s own career as a Romantic author: After this novel underperformed commercially and the subsequent one, Pierre, or, The Ambiguities (1852) was a downright disaster, he struggled to secure another publishing deal, started working first as a customs inspector, and all but retreated from the public eye: yet another cautionary example of the disaster that can strike in pursuit of a White Whale.
In this paper, however, I undertake to read Moby-Dick not as a story of net-loss, but of the proliferation of value. A singular focus on the Pequod’s fatal end often obscures not just Ishmael’s survival, but the fact that he subsequently becomes a writer himself. He uses his experiences aboard Ahab’s ship as raw material from which he by turn crafts and extracts a monumental work of fiction which, within the diegesis, is framed as considerably more successful than Melville’s own novel. In other words, even though large quantities of spermaceti are lost and the whalers suffer the consequences of their hubris, Moby-Dick can be understood as a story of successful extraction, of value derived from the whale —another, inky kind of oil. It showcases how even the failure of industry and the fatal effects of greed can be looped back into a capitalist system. Even more importantly, it dramatizes the profit of an individual at the expense of the many: In this reading, it is not monomaniacal Ahab who ultimately cannibalizes his crew and leads them to a watery grave, but Ishmael himself. Artistic inspiration becomes reconfigured as labor, the act of writing as a process of extraction and refinement, and Moby-Dick itself becomes metonymical for a whole other trajectory of Melville’s career: After all, even though the novel was a commercial disappointment from its publication until the mid-1920s, it was ultimately canonized as the ‘Great American Novel’ par excellence, and Melville himself, once viewed as yet another failed Romantic, has been positioned at the pinnacle of literary value.
Bio: University of Jena, Germany
Andrin Albrecht is a writer, composer, and lecturer in American literature at Friedrich Schiller University Jena. They studied in Zurich, Colorado, and Singapore, and will defend their PhD thesis “Tyrannous Eyes: Performances of Romantic Genius in the Wake of Moby-Dick” in spring 2025. They have published peer-reviewed articles in the field of the Blue Humanities, as well as on Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Kubrick’s The Shining, and rurality in the works of Nathanial Hawthorne. In summer 2024, they spent three months working in the Public Diplomacy section of the U.S. Embassy to Berlin.