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‘Call me Ishmael.’ The famous opening words of Moby Dick echo with a peculiar resonance, even before we fully grasp their meaning. A few pages more and we are plunged in negritude, recognising an archetypal protagonist, another Job, fugitive from God, preparing to embark on a hazardous sea-journey. (‘It was … a very dark and dismal night, bitingly cold and cheerless. I knew no one in the place.’) The original Ishmael, rejected illegitimate son of Abraham, is one of the great outsiders, akin to Satan, Faust and other malcontents; hence, as the writer of this concise psychological commentary on the novel points out, Melville's hero speaks to the alienated, including all Americans who share an inherited sense of painful exile or uprooting.
Dr Edinger, author of Ego and archetype and a practising psychotherapist at the C. G. Jung Clinic in New York, brings insight, knowledge and skill to bear on the elucidation of this vast, rambling, mid-nineteenth century work of flawed genius. I found almost all his interpretations helpful and convincing. They show us very clearly how Melville himself experienced the ‘Ishmael complex’ both at a personal and a universal level: feeling himself disliked by his mother and less favoured than his elder brother, he was thrust on the world to earn a living from the age of twelve, when his hitherto prosperous father went suddenly bankrupt, then psychotic, and died. In Moby Dick he draws heavily on his experience as a young man voyaging for four years on a whaler in the South Seas and spending some months among cannibals on the Marquesas Islands. It is an extraordinary book, now pitching us with grotesque semi-comic realism into an authentic seataring world and the turbulent vicissitudes of a prolonged whale-hunt, now lighting up with flashes of poetic splendour a more obscure inner drama of suffering and transformation. As with other capacious odysseys—Byron's Childe Harold, Joyce's Ulysses or those great Russian novels described by Henry Jame