MELVILLE'S SEA CHANGE: FROM IRVING TO EMERSON

In Moby-Dick Melville offers the Pequod as the uncouth emblem of a problem in epistemology, adding philosophical freight to a ship already overloaded. The occasion is a Sperm Whale and a Right Whale simultaneously lashed to the ship's sides, leaving Ishmael free to entertain either view: "So, when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in a very poor plight."1 Melville deplores the constant "trimming" required to keep men afloat by such ponderous means and recommends they cut loose and travel light. Not that the whale may be overlooked or ignored, for "unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth."2 But whether confronted empirically or transcendentally, as natural phenomenon or metaphysical mask, the whale overwhelms any partial perspective. Two years earlier, in Redburn, Melville had hoisted the heads of two American writers on either side of a ship as ill-fated as the Pequod. When "The Highlander Passes a Wreck," Melville trims his narrative first to coarsen the polite particulars of a similar episode from The Sketch Book of Washington Irving, and finally to rudely challenge certain seafaring metaphors current in Emersonian "Circles." Specifically, it is in respect to the last extremity of the wreck's crew that both Irving and Ralph Waldo Emerson are revealed as provincials and sentimentalists in Truth. Both turn a blind eye to those fatal limits of the natural world not easily assimilated to a genteel sketch or a transcendental vision. The sentimental remembrancer deploys death for effect, adding chiaroscuro to his local color. For the idealist prophet as well, death seems essentially a trick of the light, a shadow play that must yield to Illumination. But Melville views death more simply, less superficially, as the end of all voyages through time and chance, a fact looming and potentially terrible as leviathan itself. And however distasteful a true sight of this end,