But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking about the Present as If It Were the Past

by Chuck Klosterman

Melville publishes Moby-Dick in 1851, basing his narrative on the real-life 1839 account of a murderous sperm whale nicknamed “Mocha Dick.” The initial British edition is around nine hundred pages. Melville, a moderately successful author at the time of the novel’s release, assumes this book will immediately be seen as a masterwork. This is his premeditated intention throughout the writing process. But the reviews are mixed, and some are contemptuous (“it repels the reader” is the key takeaway from one of the very first reviews in the London Spectator). It sells poorly—at the time of Melville’s death, total sales hover below five thousand copies. The failure ruins Melville’s life: He becomes an alcoholic and a poet, and eventually a customs inspector. When he dies destitute in 1891, one has to assume his perspective on Moby-Dick is something along the lines of “Well, I guess that didn’t work. Maybe I should have spent fewer pages explaining how to tie complicated knots.” For the next thirty years, nothing about the reception of this book changes. But then World War I happens, and—somehow, and for reasons that can’t be totally explained2—modernists living in postwar America start to view literature through a different lens. There is a Melville revival. The concept of what a novel is supposed to accomplish shifts in his direction and amplifies with each passing generation, eventually prompting people (like the 2005 director of Columbia University’s American studies program) ...