Editing Moby-Dick (section)

===Composition===
[[File:Arrowhead farmhouse Herman Melville.jpg|thumb|[[Arrowhead (Herman Melville House)|Arrowhead]], the house in [[Pittsfield, Massachusetts]] where Melville wrote most of ''Moby-Dick'' over the winter of 1850-1851]]
Scholars have concluded that Melville composed ''Moby-Dick'' in two or even three stages.<ref>Tanselle (1988), 583, 656-58, 832, 849</ref> Reasoning from biographical evidence, analysis of the functions of characters, and a series of unexplained but perhaps meaningful inconsistencies in the final version, they hypothesize that reading Shakespeare and his new friendship with Hawthorne, in the words of [[Lawrence Buell (academic)|Lawrence Buell]], inspired Melville to rewrite a "relatively straightforward" whaling adventure into "an epic of cosmic encyclopedic proportions".<ref name="Buell 2014, 364">Buell (2014), 364</ref>

The earliest surviving mention of what became ''Moby-Dick'' is a letter Melville wrote to [[Richard Henry Dana Jr.]] on May 1, 1850:<ref>Melville (1993), 160</ref>

{{blockquote|1=About the "whaling voyage"—I am half way in the work, & am very glad that your suggestion so jumps with mine. It will be a strange sort of book, tho', I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho' you may get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree; — & to cook the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.<ref>Melville (1993), 162</ref>}}

Bezanson objects that the letter contains too many ambiguities to assume "that Dana's 'suggestion' would obviously be that Melville do for whaling what he had done for life on a man-of-war in ''White-Jacket''{{-"}}.<ref name="Bezanson ">Walter E. Bezanson, "''Moby-Dick'': Document, Drama, Dream," in John Bryant (ed.), ''A Companion to Melville Studies'', Greenwoord Press, 1986, 176–180.</ref> Dana had experienced how incomparable Melville was in dramatic storytelling when he met him in Boston, so perhaps "his 'suggestion' was that Melville do a book that captured that gift".<ref name="Bezanson"/> And the long sentence in the middle of the above quotation simply acknowledges that Melville is struggling with the problem, not of choosing between fact and fancy but of how to interrelate them. The most positive statements are that it will be a strange sort of a book and that Melville means to give the truth of the thing, but what thing exactly is not clear.<ref name="Bezanson"/>

Melville may have found the plot before writing or developed it after the writing process was underway. Considering his elaborate use of sources, "it is safe to say" that they helped him shape the narrative, its plot included.<ref>Bryant and Springer (2007), ix</ref> Scholars John Bryant and Haskell Springer cite the development of the character Ishmael as another factor which prolonged Melville's process of composition and which can be deduced from the structure of the final version of the book. Ishmael, in the early chapters, is simply the narrator, just as the narrators in Melville's earlier sea adventures had been, but in later chapters becomes a mystical stage manager who is central to the tragedy.<ref name="Bryant and Springer 2007, xi">Bryant and Springer (2007), xi</ref>

Less than two months after mentioning the project to Dana, Melville reported in a letter of June 27 to Richard Bentley, his English publisher:

{{blockquote|1=My Dear Sir, — In the latter part of the coming autumn I shall have ready a new work; and I write you now to propose its publication in England. The book is a [[Romance (literary fiction)|romance of adventure]], founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries, and illustrated by the author's own personal experience, of two years & more, as a harpooneer.<ref>Melville (1993), 163</ref>}}

Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family had moved to a small red farmhouse near [[Lenox, Massachusetts]], at the end of March 1850.<ref>Miller (1991), 274</ref> He met Melville on August 5, 1850, when the authors met at a picnic hosted by a mutual friend that included, among others, [[Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.]] and [[James T. Fields]].<ref>Cheever, Susan. (2006). ''American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work''. Large Print ed. Detroit: Thorndike. 174. {{ISBN|0-7862-9521-X}}.</ref> Melville wrote an unsigned review of Hawthorne's short story collection ''[[Mosses from an Old Manse]]'' titled "[[Hawthorne and His Mosses]]", which appeared in ''[[The Literary World (New York City)|The Literary World]]'' on August 17 and 24.<ref>Miller (1991), 312</ref> Bezanson finds the essay "so deeply related to Melville's imaginative and intellectual world while writing ''Moby-Dick''" that it could be regarded as a virtual preface and should be "everybody's prime piece of contextual reading".<ref name="Bezanson"/> In the essay, Melville compares Hawthorne to Shakespeare and Dante, and his "self-projection" is evident in the repeats of the word "genius", the more than two dozen references to Shakespeare, and in the insistence that Shakespeare's "unapproachability" is nonsense for an American.<ref name="Bezanson"/>

The most intense work on the book was done during the winter of 1850–1851, when Melville had changed the noise of New York City for a farm in [[Pittsfield, Massachusetts]]. The move may well have delayed finishing the book.<ref>Springer and Bryant (2007), xi</ref> During these months, he wrote several excited letters to Hawthorne, including one of June 1851 in which he summarizes his career: "What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the ''other'' way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches."<ref>Melville (1993), 191</ref>

This is the stubborn Melville who stood by ''[[Mardi]]'' and talked about his other, more commercial books with contempt. The letter also reveals how Melville experienced his development from his 25th year: "Three weeks have scarcely passed, at any time between then and now, that I have not unfolded within myself. But I feel that I am now come to the inmost leaf of the bulb, and that shortly the flower must fall to the mould."<ref>Melville (1993), 193</ref>

Buell finds the evidence that Melville changed his ambitions during writing "on the whole convincing", since the impact of Shakespeare and Hawthorne was "surely monumental",<ref name="Buell 2014, 364"/> but others challenge the theories of the composition in three ways. The first raises objections on the use of evidence and the evidence itself. Bryant finds "little concrete evidence, and nothing at all conclusive, to show that Melville radically altered the structure or conception of the book"<ref>Bryant (1998), 67</ref> and scholar Robert Milder sees "insufficient evidence and doubtful methodology" at work.<ref>Milder (1977), 215</ref> A second type of objection is based on assumptions about Melville's intellectual development. Bryant and Springer object to the conclusion that Hawthorne inspired Melville to write Ahab's tragic obsession into the book; Melville already had experienced other encounters which could just as well have triggered his imagination, such as the Bible's Jonah and Job, Milton's Satan, Shakespeare's King Lear, Byron's heroes.<ref name="Bryant and Springer 2007, xi"/> Bezanson is also not convinced that before he met Hawthorne, "Melville was ''not'' ready for the kind of book ''Moby-Dick'' became",<ref name="Bezanson"/> because in his letters from the time Melville denounces his last two "straight narratives, ''[[Redburn]]'' and ''[[White-Jacket]]'', as two books written just for the money, and he firmly stood by ''Mardi'' as the kind of book he believed in. His language is already "richly steeped in 17th-century mannerisms", characteristics of ''Moby-Dick''. A third type calls upon the literary nature of passages used as evidence. According to Milder, the cetological chapters cannot be leftovers from an earlier stage of composition and any theory that they are "will eventually founder on the stubborn meaningfulness of these chapters", because no scholar adhering to the theory has yet explained how these chapters "can bear intimate thematic relation to a symbolic story not yet conceived".<ref>Milder (1977), 208</ref>

Buell finds that theories based on a combination of selected passages from letters and what are perceived as "loose ends" in the book not only "tend to dissolve into guesswork", but he also suggests that these so-called loose ends may be intended by the author: repeatedly the book mentions "the necessary unfinishedness of immense endeavors".<ref name="Buell 2014, 364"/>