In Sunday's NY Times, Canadian author Margaret Atwood shows Moby Dick to some Martians, who interpret America through it, at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/hello-martians-this-is-america.html?_r=1
Here's their analysis:
“ ‘Moby-Dick’ is about the oil industry,” they said. “And the Ship of
American State. The owners of the Pequod are rapacious and stingy
religious hypocrites. The ship’s business is to butcher whales and turn
them into an industrial energy product. The mates are the middle
management. The harpooners, who are from races colonized by America one
way or another, are supplying the expert tech labor... Ahab, is a megalomaniac who
wants to annihilate nature.
“Nature is symbolized by a big white whale, which has interfered with
Ahab’s personal freedom by biting off his leg and refusing to be
slaughtered and boiled. The narrator, Ishmael, represents journalists;
his job is to warn America that it’s controlled by psychotics who will
destroy it, because they hate the natural world and don’t grasp the fact
that without it they will die. That’s enough literature for now. Can we
have popcorn?”
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2 comments:
"You won't stand out in New York, at least not much. If anyone bothers you, accuse them of being specist. Throw in that you're vegans."
By telling her uterus-shaped friends they would fit in in New York, I can't help but wonder if Atwood intended to promote the connotation that vegans are, to use the vernacular, "pussies".
I don't know about that. It occurs to me, however, that the first commercial oil rig went up in 1859, almost a decade after Melville published Moby Dick. That means either he was prescient, or energy industries such as whale oil already had that rapacious, nature-hating quality even before fossil fuels...
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