"one of the darkest stories in American literature"

May 16, 2014 1:03 PM

In Moby-Dick, Melville portrayed whaling as the American industry. Brutal and bloody but also humanizing, work on a whale ship required intense coordination and camaraderie. Out of the gruesomeness of the hunt, the peeling of the whale's skin from its carcass, and the hellish boil of the blubber or fat, something sublime emerged: human solidarity among the workers...

Sealing was something else entirely. It called to mind not industrial democracy but the isolation and violence of conquest, settler colonialism, and warfare. Whaling took place in a watery commons open to all. Sealing took place on land. Sealers seized territory, fought one another to keep it, and pulled out what wealth they could as fast as they could before abandoning their empty and wasted island claims...

In other words, whaling may have represented the promethean power of proto-industrialism, with all the good (solidarity, interconnectedness, and democracy) and bad (the exploitation of men and nature) that went with it, but sealing better predicted today's postindustrial extracted, hunted, drilled, fracked, hot, and strip-mined world.

The Other Moby-Dick: Melville's "Benito Cereno" Is an Analogy for American Empire by Greg Grandin

Full text of "Benito Cereno" (Project Gutenberg)

posted by Atom Eyes (3 comments total)

That was truly excellent. Thank you!
posted by Catchfire at 1:15 PM on May 16, 2014

Great article, but also a double.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 1:19 PM on May 16, 2014

Benito Doppio
posted by ardgedee at 1:32 PM on May 16, 2014