By Ilana Pardes
Many writers in antebellum the United States sought to reinvent the Bible, yet not anyone, Ilana Pardes argues, used to be as insistent as Melville on redefining biblical exegesis whereas doing so. In Moby-Dick he not just ventured to style a grand new inverted Bible during which biblical rebels and outcasts think heart level, but additionally aspired to touch upon each conceivable mode of biblical interpretation, calling for an intensive reconsideration of the politics of biblical reception. In Melville's Bibles, Pardes lines Melville's reaction to a complete array of nineteenth-century exegetical writings--literary scriptures, biblical scholarship, Holy Land shuttle narratives, political sermons, and women's bibles. She exhibits how Melville raised with extraordinary verve the query of what counts as Bible and what counts as interpretation.
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Additional info for Melville's Bibles
Example text
No Romantic was as eager as Melville to try out Joban impatience in every imaginable realm. The blasphemous bent of this quest, however, does not preclude a desperate craving for the divine. In Job, more than in any other biblical character, Melville fi nds an admirable model for his own tantalizingly paradoxical position as a blasphemous believer. 18 Playing with Leviathan 25 Hermeneutic projects become vast in Melville’s hands. His attempt to redefi ne the aesthetic heritage of Job is no exception.
He is a Job whose worse fantasies and nightmares come true. 46 In his tragic, lonely grandeur, Ahab defies death until the very end, cursing and chasing the White Whale with his very last breath: “Oh, 40 Playing with Leviathan lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. . Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.
Aye, aye! and I’ll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn . . and round perdition’s flames before I give him up. . All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.