Michael Dirda

Sailing ships offer a confined space, almost a stage, upon which to examine the human condition. But so do business offices. Long ago, Borges recognized in Melville a precursor of Kafka, especially in the great short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853), that tale of the mousy clerk who one day, when asked to perform a simple clerical task, quietly says, "I would prefer not to." The result is an unforgettable account of existential loneliness and of our failure to connect with the less fortunate among us, but also a study in the (all too contemporary) frustration resulting when people in power, people of goodwill who view themselves as "civilized" or as upholders of propriety and tradition, must suddenly confront those who adamantly refuse to recognize their values, their authority.

Bartleby chooses a kind of civil disobedience in the face of the inhumane, but in "Benito Cereno" (1855) Melville takes this silence, this dumb-show recalcitrance, even further: He reveals what Delbanco calls "the mirroring relations between oppressor and oppressed." In this haunting masterpiece, a Capt. Delano comes to the aid of an obviously distressed slave ship, where he meets its Spanish captain and his black man-servant Babo. He is particularly impressed by the devotion demonstrated by Babo for his master -- the black man never leaves Don Benito's side. Nonetheless, the obtuse Delano feels that something on board the San Dominick isn't quite right. Today's reader will guess the truth long before he does: that the slaves have taken over the ship, and that Babo controls the captain, not the other way round.

This is, then, one of the first major works of American fiction to address the question of slavery and racial injustice, and Melville adumbrates much of our literature's exploration of this unhappy theme. Ralph Ellison, for example, took the epigraph for Invisible Man from this story:

" 'You are saved,' cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; 'you are saved; what has cast such a shadow upon you?' 'The negro.' "

Readers will note that I have said nothing very much about Moby-Dick . But what can anyone say? Its quietly portentous first sentence is as famous as any in world literature ("Call me Ishmael"), and some of Ahab's monologues, like the one beginning "Is Ahab Ahab?," achieve an eloquence rivaling that of the Bible and Shakespeare. There are longueurs, but even in the midst of tedious cetological lore, one comes across such disturbing passages as that in which the Pequod's sailors squeeze and squeeze and squeeze handfuls of white spermacetti. Then there are the marvelous portraits of the crew -- the black cabin boy Pip, who goes mad and loses his sense of self, the well-meaning but weak Starbuck, the mysterious harpooners Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo. There are the haunting encounters with other ships, especially the Rachel "searching for her lost children." And throughout there is philosophizing that at times rises to a kind of prose poetry:

"All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in a whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side."

In Melville's lifetime few recognized or even suspected the writer's exceptional genius -- but Nathaniel Hawthorne came close, and the two men established a long-lasting friendship. After their first encounters, the writer of Polynesian adventures went back to his romantic tale about "Whale Fishery" and, in Delbanco's words, "tore it up from within." Melville deepened and amplified his novel, enlarged it in every sense, with the obvious hope of joining what he called, in an essay on Hawthorne, that fraternity where "genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round." With wonderful appropriateness, then, the author of The Scarlet Letter -- which appeared in 1850 -- became the dedicatee of the following year's Moby-Dick .

In the end, perhaps the most important use of literary biography is to send us back to a writer's books with increased understanding and renewed excitement. This Andrew Delbanco certainly does for Herman Melville. We are his beneficiaries. ·

Michael Dirda's e-mail address is mdirda@gmail.com. His online discussion of books takes place each Wednesday at 2 p.m. on washingtonpost.com.