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Propaganda? Tangent Time!

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Reading the article “Melville Reborn, Again and Again,” nothing particularly stood out to me. I read the entire piece, reflected on the points that Wills made, and then moved on. However, the end made me curious:

“…O.W. Riegel (1903-1997) was renowned as an expert on propaganda who amassed a world-class collection of propaganda posters over his long life.”

Why was a renowned expert on propaganda focused on Moby Dick? Was there any aspect of the novel that leaned into propaganda or served as a vessel in some way?

The novel was written as a response to Emerson’s call for American national identity. Melville writes, in significant detail, about the dying art of the whaling industry. It is through Melville’s work that the American whaling industry and its success are encapsulated in time and can be meticulously recreated through his meticulous detailing. While propaganda experts obviously have other interests and topics they focus on, this made me wonder about the connections between Melville’s depiction of American identity and propaganda. As members of this course and students who closely read every single critique and subtle sociopolitical commentary, we understand the many radical positions that Melville took throughout the 624 pages of Moby Dick, but to others, who take this novel at face value or entirely miss the not-so-subtle jabs at the American political system, could the novel be taken as American propaganda?

Personally, I started by saying, “No way, it is not American propaganda,” but then I thought about it a little more. The Pequod represents American identity, with a strict hierarchy of order and authority. While one could argue that the hierarchy of the Pequod represents a democracy focused on diversity, propaganda doesn’t have to be accurate in any sense. Still, it does have to portray the primary focus in a positive light. This is a fantasy realm that stars a fake sense of American unity, both politically and socially. Additionally, Ahab’s complex character could portray the ideal American identity, one that prioritizes individuality and ambition over reason, almost a romanticization of transcendence and vision. He’s mythocal, he’s so unbelievable and mysterious that he seems made up, yet he exists entirely as himself.

Even after these reflections, I was still doubtful that it could function as American propaganda until I considered what propaganda truly is. Propaganda doesn’t have to end with a win for the intended country, but it’s based on the myth of the cultural ideals and suggestions. Moby Dick could be argued to be a piece of cultural propaganda just as much as someone could say that it isn’t. While I was initially quick to shut the idea down, the more I think about it, the more it grows.

EC: Melville Reborn

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I believe that the book is able to get its credit after the antebellum period in America, because, much of the reason why the book had failed was because much of our nation’s foundation relied on the very things Melville attested against in the big book. This left the American conservatives offended and the British audiences to be spectators amused by the entertainment it brought to them. Majority of both sides ruled out the big book as excessive and not moving. It is mentioned that only some critics saw the significance of Moby Dick for what it embodied to them at a critical time: a social commentary that is striking because it is broad and extensive, confronting multiple perspectives of an underlying issue without constructing the focal point down to one commentary.

Reigel indirectly points out this marveled technique of Melville, stating that, “From what that ‘Herman Melville’ character is which has been discovered by recent critics, and its meaning to modern life, one must go to the works and autobiographies”(Reigel 200). This book is not just action packed and blood-gore filth entertainment that some Americans and British readers thought this was; but, it is a book that memorializes and fossilizes human record and tragedy in order to preserve the real horror of humanity in the world. The author does not completely remove himself from the destruction, but being seen as a “character” in his own novel, he alters how novels are merely narrative for narrative’s sake; he represents and volunteers as the active agent in American society. One can be acceptive of this meditation, or one can be instantly offended by its general exploitation in all accounts and write off this novel as excessive. Whatever the case, many critics during the 19th century have kept this book as a way to pave the American consciousness that is direct and instigative, moving the era where post-modernism emerges.