[From Ten Novels and Their Authors, Heinemann, 1954, pp. 179, 199-200:]

I have read Raymond Weaver’s Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic, Lewis Mumford’s Herman Melville, Charles Roberts Anderson’s Melville in the South Seas, William Ellery Sedgwick’s Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind, and Newton Arvin’s Melville. I have read them with interest, profited by most of them, and learnt from them a number of facts useful to my modest purpose; but I cannot persuade myself that I know more about Melville, the man, than I knew before.

[…]

Professor Stoll* has shown how ridiculous and contradictory are the symbolic interpretations of Moby Dick that have been hurled at the heads of an inoffensive public. He has done it so conclusively that there is no need for me to enlarge upon the topic. […] According to your proclivities, you may take a snow-clad Alpine peak, as it rises to the empyrean in radiant majesty, as a symbol of man’s aspiration to union with the Infinite; or since, if you like to believe that, a mountain range may be thrown up by some violent convulsion in the earth’s depths, you may take it as a symbol of the dark and sinister passions of man that lour to destroy him; of, if you want to be in the fashion, you may take it a phallic symbol. Newton Arvin regards Ahab’s ivory leg as “an equivocal symbol both of his impotence and of the independent male principle directed cripplingly against him”, and the white whale as “the archetypal Parent; the father, yes, but the mother also, so far as she becomes a substitute for the father”. For Ellery Sedgwick, who claims that it is its symbolism that makes the book great, Ahab is “Man – Man sentient, speculative, purposive, religious, standing his full stature against the immense mystery of creation. His antagonist, Moby Dick, is that immense mystery. He is not the author of it, but is identical with that galling impartiality in the laws and lawlessness of the universe which Isaiah devoutly fathered on the Creator.” Lewis Mumford takes Moby Dick as a symbol of evil, and Ahab’s conflict with him as the conflict of good and evil in which good is finally vanquished. There is a certain plausibility in this, and it accords well with Melville’s moody pessimism.

But allegories are awkward animals to handle; you can take them by the head or by the tail, and it seems to me that an interpretation quite contrary is equally possible. Why should it be assumed that Moby Dick is a symbol of evil? It is true that Melville causes Ishmael, the narrator, to adopt Ahab’s crazy passion to revenge himself on the dumb beast that had maimed him; but that is a literary artifice which he had to make use of, first, because there was Starbuck already there to represent common sense, and second, because he needed someone to share, and to an extent sympathize with, Ahab’s tenacious purpose, and so induce the reader to accept it as not quite unreasonable. Now, the “empty malice” of which Professor Mumford speaks consists in Moby Dick defending himself when he is attacked.

“Cet animal est très méchant,
Quand on l’attaque, il se défend.”**

Why should the White Whale not represent goodness rather than evil? Splendid in beauty, vast in size, great in strength, he swims the seas in freedom. Ahab, with his insane pride, is pitiless, harsh, cruel and vindictive; he is evil; and when the final encounter comes and Ahab and his crew of “mongrel renegades, castaways and cannibals” is destroyed, and the White Whale, imperturbable, justice having been done, goes his mysterious way, evil has been vanquished and good at last triumphed. This seems to me as plausible an interpretation as any other; for let us not forget that Typee is a glorification of the noble savage, uncorrupted by the vices of civilization, and that Melville looked upon the natural man as good.

Fortunately Moby Dick may be read, and read with intense interest, without a thought of what allegorical or symbolic significance it may or may not have.

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*Elmer E. Stoll, “Symbolism in Moby-Dick”, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Jun., 1951), pp. 440-465. Ed.
**“This animal is very malicious; when attacked it defends itself.” Ed.