So it is with the critical study, a natural history, of Melville’s work conducted by Richard King’s Ahab’s Rolling Sea from University of Chicago Press, as well as the pastiche of Cervantes executed by Graham Greene in his Monsignor Quixote, and even one quirky evocation by Sena Naslund called Ahab’s Wife. Sometimes the greatest thing about great books is the way in which they spawn spin-offs in the form of other great books which are either about them or else evoke them via ekphrastic (and ecstatic) inspiration. I’ll go further still, and claim that Jack Kerouac’s masterpiece On the Road similarly echoes the obscure characters of both Quixote and Ishmael, especially in the way it celebrates outcasts on a nebulous mission to achieve an impossible end. I’ll go so far as to claim (almost) that they are the same novel in some salient ways, and that the twisted times we currently are living through contain psychological and even spiritual echoes of each in the same way that Melville himself evokes Cervantes for me.
But I also claim that my excuse is a valid one (don’t we all?) and situate them in a parallel track which becomes obvious once the reader temporarily accepts my obsession with both. It often appears as if some people will literally find any excuse at all to read once again and then write again about two groundbreaking novels in particular, Don Quixote by the Spaniard Miguel de Cervantes and Moby Dick by the American Herman Melville, and I readily admit to being one of those people. Such recursively magnetic books might be touchstones from our youth, such as On the Road or Howl, for me, or they might be lighthouses that show us the way out of some dark storm or other, such as all of the poetry ever written by Wallace Stevens. Of course, which pieces and which authors vary from person to person: for some it’s King Lear or Jane Eyre or For Whom the Bell Tolls (all of which leave me utterly cold, despite the fact that I appreciate their greatness). It’s almost as if their authors are stalking us and offering up new reasons for rereading and rediscovering whatever it was about them that mesmerized us during our initial encounter. “Call me Ishmael.” – Nameless narrator of Moby Dick.Ĭertain pieces of great writing seem to haunt us throughout our lives. “Tell me your company, and I will tell you what you are.” – Sancho Panza, Don Quixote.
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