As it turns out, I am not the only person looking to literature in order to get my mind around the recent oil disaster. Randy Kennedy has written a superb article in the New York Times that points out parallels between the Gulf oil spill and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Kennedy says that, in the 19th century, New England whalers had to venture further and further afield to find oil-producing whales (they had depleted the local stock). Melville’s apocalyptic vision is eerily prescient:
A specially outfitted ship ventures into deep ocean waters in search of oil increasingly difficult to find. Lines of authority aboard the ship become tangled. Ambition outstrips ability. The unpredictable forces of nature rear up, and death and destruction follow in their wake. “Some fell flat on their faces,” an eyewitness reported of the stricken crew. “Through the breach, they heard the waters pour.”
The words could well have been spoken by a survivor of the doomed oil rig Deepwater Horizon, which exploded in the Gulf of Mexico in April, killing 11 men and leading to the largest oil spill in United States history. But they come instead, of course, from that wordy, wayward Manhattanite we know as Ishmael, whose own doomed vessel, the whaler Pequod, sailed only through the pages of “Moby-Dick.”
Kennedy concludes the article by quoting Columbia University’s Andrew Delbanco, author of Melville: His World and Work. Delbanco identifies one of the novel’s principle themes as “people ashore don’t want to know about the ugly things that go on at sea.” He goes on to say,
We want our comforts but we don’t want to know too much about where they come from or what makes them possible. The oil spill in the gulf is a horror, but how many Americans are ready to pay more for oil or for making the public investment required to develop alternative energy? I suspect it’s a question that Melville would be asking of us now.
[My thanks to Meghan O’Meara of Speaking Globally: Thoughts on Global Issues in Context for steering me to this article. O’Meara is looking for metaphors that are being used to describe the oil disaster and links to one of my own posts on “The Dangerous Power of Metaphor.”]
Shifting gears from apolcalyptic 19th century novels to 20th century Theater of the Absurd, I notice that Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen invokes Edward Albee to describe recent Congressional hearings on the spill:
Several years ago, I saw Edward Albee’s wonderfully inventive play The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?. It’s about a man who falls in love with a goat, which sounds preposterous, I know, until either you see the play or watch what is happening in Washington. There, from time to time, we get a procession of scapegoats who take their lumps, usually in relative silence, and then go back from whence they came — the Land of Oil, the Land of Auto, the Land of Finance — and everyone feels better but almost nothing happens as a direct result. It is not even particularly good theater.
Cohen’s solution?
Instead of having busy chief executives come to Washington to be used as fodder for sound bites, why not send one goat? It could sit, chew some paper or tin cans, and let the congressmen have their fun.
Previous posts on Better Living through Beowulf that look at the Gulf oil spill through the lens of literature include:
Doctor Dolittle vs. the Oil Spill: A Fantasy
After the Mess, Can Obama Be Fortinbras?
Finding Resolve in the Face of Brokenness
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