building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

Mumford’s search for the characters of the American Mind 104 . Mumford’s attempt
to clarify this was forever present in his analysis.
If we read the opening passage of Moby Dick once again, we discover how Melville
transferred “by sea” all the passions, anxieties and expectations of those who left
for America, the New Continent in which they could put their hopes and search for
fortune. The peculiarity of Melville lies precisely in this specific transliteration from
the land to the ocean. Other great American intellectuals of that time, such as
Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau and Whitman, had found stimuli in everyday
experiences and places (although some of them had travelled in Europe). It was
probably those very limits and sudden socio‐political changes which had occurred in
New England and the States of the Atlantic Coast, pushing migration flows towards
the West, which provided a kind of inspired source for reflection.
Marcus Cunliffe, in his book The Literature of the United States, observes how
“years at sea, however, took Herman Melville far from the familiar world of New
York and Albany" 105 and proposes a parallel with his contemporary Flaubert.
In the writers’ minds, the sea recalled the epoch of the literary classics and, more
prosaically, the treasures and mysteries lying in the abysses and men’s efforts to
recover or reveal them.
In a letter dated March 3 rd , 1849 to Evert Duyckinck, an associated editor of the
Young America Movement, Melville confessed his admiration for such researchers:
“I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great
whale to go down stairs five miles or more […] but the whole corps of thoughtdivers,
that have been diving & coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the
world began” 106 .
The indirect reference was not only to men, such as Emerson, whom Melville
mentioned in his letter to his friend, but ideally also to the explorations and voyages
of the first Americans, who set out for the wild, unexplored lands of the West. It
104 See MUMFORD, Lewis, “Origins of American Mind”, American Mercury, vol. VIII, July 1926, pp.
345‐354
105 CUNLIFFE, Marcus, The Literature of the United States, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1969, p.
115 (Italian translation Storia della letteratura americana, Torino, Einaudi, 1970, p. 119)
106 MELVILLE, Herman in HORTH, Lynn, (ed.), Correspondence: The Writings of Herman Melville, Vol.
14, Evanstone and Chicago, Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1993, p. 923
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