Orientalism in Moby Dick

Abstract

This article aims to correct some of the basic errors in Melvillian Islamic criticism. One of the classics of Western literature is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. the allegorical story of one man’s pursuit of a great white whale.4 Like all great novelists, Melville was struggling with the great moral issues that transcend individuals and even civilizations. This contrasts with most of modem literature, which exhibits journalistic habits of mind and tends to deal in superficial analysis rather than with the reflective process that gives content to meditation and thought. Modem literary criticism exhibits the same shallowness. George Orwell explained the problem perhaps when he observed that applying the same standards to such novelists as Dickens and Dostoyevsky and to most contemporary writers is like weighing a flea on a spring-balance intended for elephants.” Critics, he added, don’t do this, because it would mean having to throw out most of the books they get for review. The value of Melville’s work is that it is possessed of the moral imperative and is designed to lead the forces of wisdom and balance against the spiritual bankruptcy and anarchy of the encroaching materialism in modem Western civilization. The tragedy of Melville’s work is the superficiality of its reliance on Islamic sources, which Melville had read but only in Orientalist distortion. This tragedy has been compounded by later generations of Orientalists who have used the distortions of Melville to generate their own. Perhaps the most insidious of these latter-day Orientalists is Dorothy Finklestein, author of Melville’s Oriendu, who we shall refer to simply as “the critic." Her study of Melville’s Islamic references devotes a complete section to “Muhammad and the Arabs” in the chapter on “Prophets and Conquerers.” Following this, she presents an exhaustive analysis of “Islamic Characters and Symbols.” She harshly rejects Melville’s immature resort to secondary Islamic sources; namely Carlyle’s Hero, Heroworship, and Heroic History, Goethe’s ...