Herman Melville’s Ecological Vision and the Limits of Language

Abstract

When Herman Melville began writing, publishing his first work in 1846, he joined an illustrious group of American authors defining American literature. Five years later in 1851, as he wrote what would become his best-known work, Moby-Dick, or The Whale, Melville began working to express a scientific understanding of the world beyond what language would allow. This led to Melville’s greatest writing experiment: to write beyond the limitations of language. Through his intimate relationship with the written word and a sustained effort to reproduce in language his ecological philosophy, Melville tried to mold language into an instrument of his will. He strove to represent how humans experience the world but found himself limited by language’s capacity for illustration; instead, he would have to write how humans experience the world. This “how” is evidenced in the poetics of three of Melville’s stories: Moby-Dick, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street,” and “Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative.” In “Billy Budd, Sailor,” his final work, published posthumously, Melville successfully frees himself from the “oppressive totality of language” (Delbanco, 1993, p. 5), having evolved his writing past the need for language—something akin to what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger will later call “undergoing an experience with language” (1971, p. 57). To fully grasp the nature of this ultra-linguistic literary feat, this essay analyzes the evolution of Melville’s writing styles and poetics through the lenses of scientific, linguistic, and Heideggerian philosophy, in effect understanding Melville’s most ambitious undertaking through the discourses that came after him.