Moby Dick: The ‘Great American Novel’ as a Questioning of National Ideology
Moby Dick: The ‘Great American Novel’ as a Questioning of National Ideology

Summary/Abstract: Though its subject is contemporary lyric poetry, Philip Metres’ recent book Behind the Lines begins with an observation about that ancient paradigm of the epic, Homer’s Iliad. Metres notes that Thersites, the “only voice of dissent” in the Iliad, is “dispensed with quickly” (Metres 2007: 1), abused both verbally and physically by Odysseus, “much to the delight of the other soldiers” (ib. 2) and, Homer assumes, to the delight of the poem’s audience. One of the key elements Metres identifies in war poetry, “the absence or ridicule of dissenting voices” (ib. 3), also characterizes national epics (such as the Iliad for the Greeks, the Aeneid for Rome, Beowulf for Britain, even the Kalevala for so peaceful a people as the Finns). Typically, a national epic is itself a war poem that features a protagonist who represents the people because of his prowess in battle. It looks, in other words, as though national epics become national epics less because they are belletristic than because they are bellicose. In any case, they seldom grant space to dissenting values. All the more interesting, then, that the “great American novel,” Moby Dick, the closest thing the U.S. has to a national epic, can be viewed (as the Iliad, for instance, cannot plausibly be viewed) as a narrative of dissent, spoken entirely by a dissenting voice. The speaker in Moby Dick asks us to call him Ishmael, the name of a dissenting voice from the Pentateuch, but could have urged us just as well to call him Thersites.

• Details
• Contents