History is fiction, fiction history : questions of history formation in Melville's Moby-Dick
- UNCW Author/Contributor (non-UNCW co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Daniel P. Walden (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW )
- Web Site: http://library.uncw.edu/
- Advisor
- Cara Cilano
Abstract: Golo Mann, who is recognized in a recent article as one of the first historians to realize that
their work “does not reproduce ‘what actually happened’ so much as represent it from a
particular point of view (Burke, “History of Events” 290), describes the ideal historian as
someone who must “swim with the stream of events” and tell the story as if he was there when
the events occurred while analyzing them as an outside “better informed observer.” In
combining these two methods, the historian must be sure to “yield a sense of homogeneity […]
without the narrative falling apart” (Mann 7).
While most contemporary criticism surrounding Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick focuses on
various metaphorical readings, if we return to a more literal reading we see that Ishmael is
Mann’s ideal historian. Not only is Ishmael carried along with the events “as though he was
present” (7), he actually was present, and he does return to the events a later, better informed
observer. With this in mind, an often decried literal reading of Moby-Dick adds to the current
metaphorical scholarship because it sees Ishmael as a common man in a rapidly chancing society
and explores how that man comes to terms with his own existence in such an impersonal world.
However, because Ishmael is unsure of how to deal with the events of his past and how to
capture the meaning of those events on paper, he has problems with what Mann calls the
“homogeneity” of his history and cannot keep his narrative from falling apart. Through an
analysis of the similarities and differences of the assumptions underlying both the creation of
history and the creation of fiction, and a subsequent look at how those conventions are both
obeyed and subverted in Moby-Dick, we can enhance an understanding of Melville’s novel as
the narrator’s attempt to come to terms with his own traumatic past.
History is fiction, fiction history : questions of history formation in Melville's Moby-Dick
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Created on 1/1/2009
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Thesis
- A Thesis Submitted to the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts
- Language: English
- Date: 2009
- Keywords
- Historical fiction American, History in literature, Melville Herman 1819-1891 Moby Dick
- Subjects
- Melville, Herman, 1819-1891. Moby Dick
- History in literature
- Historical fiction, American