Moby d**k or the Whale

Preface By Giancarlo Rossini

Preface By Giancarlo Rossini

Yes, there is death in this pursuit of the hunt, the unspeakably lightning-fast, chaotic expedition of a man into Eternity. But what about this? I believe we have made a great mistake in this matter of Life and Death. I believe that what they call my shadow on earth is my true substance. I believe that in looking at spiritual things we are like oysters who observe the sun through the water and consider that dense water the thinnest of atmospheres. I believe my body is just the scum of my best being. In fact, take my body whoever you want: take it, it's not me at all. And then three cheers to Nantucket, and the spear is smashed, and the body smashed, when they want, because not even Jupiter is capable of breaking through my soul. There is no more powerful and complete metaphor to describe human life than that of the journey across the sea. Sails unfurled, a boat never sturdy enough to plow the frightening and irresistible vastness of the ocean, the constant danger of storms, the risk of shipwrecks, the awareness of being able to rely only on one's own abilities to complete the crossing. In Moby d**k, the great American novel by Herman Melville (1819-1891) published in 1851, the voyage on the sea is a metaphor for life and death and goes further, becoming a religious sermon, epic, mystical torment, yearning for infinity, literature and romance. And the very reading of him can only be approached as a journey. The power of the book, the richness of its allegory, the evocative capacity of the eternal story of the struggle between man who often represents evil and nature too often raped by man, between Captain Ahab and the gigantic whale, make Moby d**k a classic among the classics. "What is it, what nameless, inscrutable and otherworldly thing ever is; as lord and hidden master and deceiver, what merciless tyrant commands me, because against all human affections and desires, I must continue to push, to agitate, to elbow relentlessly, recklessly preparing myself for what in my heart, true, natural , have I never even dared to dare? Is it Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, sir, raising this arm, or who is he? But if the immense sun does not move by itself, and is only a messenger of the sky; if not even a star can rotate except by an invisible power, how then can this little heart beat, and this little brain think, if it is not God who gives that beat, who thinks those thoughts, who lives that life, and not me? " Moby d**k is a difficult, long book full of scientific, biological, theological and philosophical digressions, explanations on whaling and navigation. Before the famous incipit Call me Ishmael (Call me Ishmael in the original version) there is an entire chapter of the novel in which dozens of quotes on whales are collected, from the Bible to Shakespeare, from Paradise Lost to, of course, Hobbes' Leviathan, from Edmund Burke to Thomas Jefferson, up to seafaring songs. In the cinema and in the popular imagination Moby d**k's simple yet powerful plot made the work a bottomless pit from which twentieth-century popular culture drew relentlessly. A first silent film version was made in 1926, The Sea Beast starring John Barrymore as Ahab, a role he reprized in the 1930 sound film Moby d**k, in which the captain strangely returns home to his beloved after managing to kill the white whale. But what book had the film's authors read? In 1956 a new film adaptation of the novel, much more faithful to the spirit of the original, was brought to the screen by John Houston. In the film Gregory Peck is a magnetic and insane Captain Ahab, while Orson Welles plays Father Mapple in a poignant sermon on the final destiny of man. Welles himself had staged in 1955 a play inspired by Mellville's opera, Moby d**k - Rehearsed (Christopher Lee was also in the original cast), and in 1971 he would be the author of a never-completed film, Moby d**k precisely, in which he read extracts from the novel, on a blue background animated by optical effects to create the illusion of the sea. The making of John Houston's 1956 film was problematic: the costs of the film soared exponentially, and were never fully recovered after its theatrical release. In 1957 Peck and Houston tried to bring another Mellville work, his debut novel Taipi, to the screen, but they couldn't find the funding and this led to a never mended break between the actor and the director: the legend. He also wants the two to fight fiercely when Peck discovered he was never the first choice for the role of Ahab in Moby d**k, Houston wanted at all costs to give the part to his father Walter, who died in 1950. Another legend related to the film tells of a gigantic reproduction of the whale, more than 22 meters long and weighing over 12 tons that drifted in the fog on a day of filming and was replaced by a barge used as a sea monster for the occasion. ; the rest of the Moby d**k shoot was done with scale models in London's Shepperton Studios. Moby d**k by Herman Mellville is one of the most cited works of pop culture: from cartoons to comics, from songs to movies, running into the white whale or Captain Ahab is quite common. One of the most famous quotes from Melville's novel was written by Steven Spielberg in his masterpiece Jaws in 1975. Quint's character's obsession with sharks is clearly borrowed from Captain Ahab's legendary obsession with Moby d**k. In the original script, Quint was to be introduced while watching John Houston's film on TV, criticizing all its weaknesses: it was probably Gregory Peck himself who prevented the use of the scenes in the film in which he had starred. Also, in the original script, Quint, instead of being devoured by the shark, was supposed to die in a very similar way to Ahab: dragged to the bottom of the sea by a harpoon tied to his leg. A major source of inspiration for Melville was the tragic story of the whaling ship Essex, told by Ron Howard's 2015 film Heart of the Sea - The Origins of Moby d**k (original title In the Heart of the Sea), starring Chris Hemsworth. In 1820, off the Pacific Ocean, during a hunting trip, the ship was sunk by a huge sperm whale: the crew escaped on lances (the small boats used to capture cetaceans), drifting in the open sea. After landing on a tiny atoll (Henderson Island), and leaving three sailors there, the shipwrecked left, but storms and disease decimated the survivors to the point of pushing them to the extreme: drawing lots of one of the companions to kill him and then feed on the meat. Subsequently some shipwrecked were rescued and also recovered the companions on the atoll (after a year), but the experience marked the few survivors so much that one of them, the first officer Owen Chase, author of the memoirs Narration of the sinking of the Essex Whaling Nantucket, which was sunk by a large Sperm Whale offshore in the Pacific Ocean, was declared insane in old age. The white whale and respect for nature «There it blows! Over there it blows! The hump like a pile of snow! It's Moby d**k! " Another key source for the novel was the story of Mocha d**k, a gigantic albino sperm whale who lived in the Pacific waters at the beginning of the nineteenth century who seems to have survived fights with whaling vessels over the center before being killed. The explorer Jeremiah N. Reynolds, a direct witness to the infamous whale, wrote a famous article well known by Melville: Mocha d**k: Or The White Whale of the Pacific: A Leaf from a Manuscript Journal ("Mocha d**k: Pacifico: a sheet from a handwritten newspaper ") . Biologically, the term "whale" indicates any large cetacean: more specifically, Moby d**k is a sperm whale. There have not been many sightings of white whales throughout history. Today, the existence of a white humpback whale near Australia is documented: it is called Migaloo, and it also has a dedicated site. We hope that at least she and her environment are respected.