The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [257]
After weeks of manic-depression, shot through with fearful death-laden dreams, thoughts of suicide (and Mary's miscarriage of another child), Shelley recklessly took out his boat, the Don Juan, into the teeth of a violent Mediterranean storm, under full sail. The `Modern Prometheus, the `boy hero who could never grow up, had defiantly invited his own destruction, along with that of his two companions. Reading Richard Holmes's comprehensive account of those last years and weeks of his life in Shelley: The Pursuit, one may reflect that few people in history can have turned themselves into their own `monster' more poignantly, more dramatically and more unwittingly than Shelley himself. In this sense his wife's nightmare story in 1816 was like a horrendous premonition of what was already happening to the man she loved; and of how their life together would, only five years later, come to its awful climax.
Moby Dick: The quest to slay the Self
`When, on the last day, they confront each other, which is the Monster? Moby Dick in his "gentle joyousness", his "mighty mildness of repose", or Ahab screaming his mad defiance? In complete contempt of the three-thousandyear-old pattern of myth, Melville permits the dragon-slayer to be slain, the dragon to escape alive; but it is hard to tell whether he really stands the legend on its head, allows evil to survive and heroism to perish. Only Ahab believes that the whale represents evil, and Ahab is both crazy and damned ... it is Ahab who must die, precisely because he has sought the death of the Other ...".
Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel
Hermann Melville's Moby Dick: or The White Whale (1851) is a much weightier work of literature than any of the novels we have looked at previously in this chapter, which is what helps to make it one of the darkest stories ever written.
`Call me Ishmael'. The explosive opening line sets the book's dark tone by invoking the archetypical outcast from Genesis (XVI), `whose hand is against every man, and every man's hand is against him'. But it eventually becomes apparent that the narrator Ishmael is not so much the story's central figure as just a curiously passive observer. A rootless drifter through the cities of East Coast America, he has resolved to escape the depressing aimlessness of his existence by signing on for a long whaling voyage across the oceans of the world. In this respect, the book begins like a Voyage and Return story: an incomplete, inadequate hero is laying himself open to some shattering, life-transforming experience.
The story really divides into two quite separate parts. The first, unfolding through the opening chapters, takes place on land, when Ishmael travels up to New England to find a whaling ship. It is dominated by his encounter with Queequeg, the dark-skinned tattooed South Sea islander with his phallic idol and his collection of shrunken human heads. When the fearsome `savage' first bursts in at night to share his bed, in the inn owned by a man called Coffin, Ishmael is terrified. But by the time they have talked at length, and spent the night with `Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner' so `you had almost thought I had been his wife', they are a 'cosy, loving pair'.
In this bizarre opening we may see an echo of the oldest story in the world, the Epic of Gilgamesh, where the hero is not psychologically ready for his journey across the world to slay the monstrous Humbaba until he has met, fought with and finally learned to love the shadowy other half who is to be his companion on the journey: the `wild man' Enkidu, who has lived among the animals in a state of nature. We also see an instance of that alliance between a white hero and a black or Indian companion which Leslie Fiedler identified as such a recurring theme