Stumbling upon Edward Said’s Reflection on Exile and Other Essays, I intended to read the eponymous essay; and yet ‘Introduction to Moby Dick’ got my attention on the content page. In Moby-Dick, the protagonist Ishmael actually experiences a self-exile. He banishes himself to the sea ‘to prevent [himself] from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off’. Melville's humour is juxtaposed with the seriousness of self-banishment. It is hard to know whether his name is really ‘Ishmael’ which he tells us so. Now, I see the theme linking Moby-dick and the whole collection of essays here.
But the case in Moby-dick is not as grim as the Palestinian one. The Palestinians, as Edward Said in his ‘Reflection on Exile’ poignantly puts it, are banished by the other group of exiles, the Jews. The Middle East still witnesses bloodshed and bigotry these days. The fact that some of my lovely viewers and students come from there evokes in me a special sentiment. Hong Kong is another home for them; perhaps it is a place of ambitious pursuits for them, just as the watery kingdom is to Ishmael? Ishmael’s marine exile in Moby-Dick stems from wanderlust and ambition. He has built friendship with Queequeg, a Polynesian harpooner, with whom he once shared the same bed. As Said suggests, exile is only made glorious in literature, say, Homer’s Odyssey and Shakespeare’s tragedy Coriolanus. Exile is always heavy in real life.
In his ‘Introduction to Moby-Dick’, Said thinks that Melville, in his Moby-Dick, ambitiously creates a new world deviant from the Europe, the Old World. Henry James, an American novelist and critic himself, often preoccupied by the tension between the American world and the European, reveals the hollowness of the American culture and literature in his time.
As Henry James said in his brilliant, affectionately patronizing little treatise on Hawthorne, Americans are necessarily conscious “of not being of the European family, of being placed on the circumference of the circle of civilization rather than at the centre, of the experimental element not having as yet dropped out of their great political undertaking.” (Said, 422)
The ‘elephantineness’ of Moby Dick is forgivable for Said because it reflects not just Melville’s literary endeavour; but also corresponds to the deviant upstart American culture. The Americans strived to deviate from the Europe, but how? Many of them were European descents; there was not much cultural antiquities they could cling to apart from the country life, as Henry James exaggerates. James strongly believes that a network of social, historical, cultural products (like the ones in Europe) is important for writing. Henry James very likely never read Moby Dick, which immediately failed into obscurity after its publication and only enchanted critics after James had died. Although James definitely did read Whitman, he did not think he was enough to stand alone before the sophisticated Old World.
With “no sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces…no literature, no novels, no sporting class—no Epsom nor Ascot,” James says that the American writer must fall back either on humor or on a rather limited pastoral style, best for describing “walks in the country, drives in stage-coaches.” (Said, 422)
Said also draws attention the maleness of Moby Dick. Throughout the book, the masculine tone reinforces the American determination to shake off the European influence and found their own.
Wives and families are left behind. Whaling is an industry kept going entirely by men. Ahab, Moby Dick, Ishmael, and all the others are males, some of whom like Queequeg can sometimes play the role of wives. It is fascinating to note that all of Melville’s allusions to the Orient—and the presence in the novel of such people as Fedallah and his Parsee associates—are also all masculine; there are no harems, no gardens of sensual delight here. If Ahab shares somewhat in the Faustian quest, his Gretchen is no Helen but a roughly, boyishly named male animal (Melville’s model was a legendary sperm whale called Mocha Dick). There is great poignancy at the end therefore when the Pequod, named after an exterminated Indian tribe, goes down like a coffin with its entire crew, leaving Ishmael to be rescued by the “devious-cruising Rachel.” Renegades, mariners, castaways, and orphans, the cast of Moby-Dick is, as many critics have suggested, a microcosm of America, but an America seen by Melville in very partial, purposely skewed and eccentric terms, the country’s deviance intensified with a sort of maniacal deliberation. (Said, 427)
Although the name of Said often reminds us of the subversion of Oriental stereotypes, I do not think it is his motive to bring the gendered aspect up. The maleness is the manifestation of adventure, ambition, pride, and more importantly, deviation from the Old World. This ‘maniacal deliberation’ shows how America has no order and sanity at sea; which the Europeans may enjoy on land.
Reference list
Edward Said. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (2025). Vintage Books.