Melville's Copy of Thomas Beale'sThe Natural History of the Sperm Whaleand the Composition of Moby-Dick

摘要

Aside from what it offers scholarship on Melville's phases of composition, the "Killers" annotation recovered from page 184 underscores an important function of Beale's The Natural History of the Sperm Whale, and of the relationship between Melville's narrative and its other sources. As we have seen, Melville relied again and again on individual passages in Natural History to prompt his imagination and elaborate his thematic intentions-frequently in ways that illustrate his romantic sensibility, with the source passages sooner or later eclipsed by soaring original artistry. In the "Killers" annotation we sense Melville's initial debts not only to Beale, but to Chase and Reynolds-sources he similarly surpassed in the course of composition and ultimately transcended with his own timeless story and its memorable conclusion. With no few instances of imaginative "flight," and notwithstanding his figurative depictions of agonized descent, Melville accomplished the aesthetic struggle he described in his letter to Dana, reaching a level of artistry forever exemplified by Moby-Dick.