Melville’s initial publication of Moby Dick was in three volumes released in London in October 1851. The text had been subjected to considerable censorship, and many manuscript changes had been made unseen by the author. In addition, Melville’s Epilogue had been lost and was not published. The Epilogue had made it clear that Ishmael had survived. Without the Epilogue, readers raised a chorus of protest. If there was no survivor, who was narrating the novel?

In November 1851, the novel was published in New York with the Epilogue intact.

The error in London, whatever its nature, is interesting from a psychological point of view. Readers experienced a complete disaster without the “comfort” of a surviving narrator.

As we enter the Sixth Extinction, with the distinct possibility that humans will not survive, the “error” edition of Moby Dick begins to add depth to a question I posed back in 1979: What whale does America pursue? 1

That article began as a review of Edward Edinger’s Melville’s Moby Dick: A Jungian Commentary. I said at the outset that Edinger’s commentary was “definitive,” meaning that nothing further need be said. Everything was clear, explained, understood. While I understood and practiced interpreting art psychologically, I was more interested in what art contributed to psychology. Edinger’s analysis, while brilliant and definitive, left me feeling “high and dry.” I wrote in the margin: …why am I so thirsty while reading this commentary about such a story of water and passion? I asked a lot of people about Edinger’s analysis. Except for one or two, all had read Edinger but not Melville. I found this dispiriting because analysis does not excite the imagination in the way art does. What happens in your imagination while reading Moby Dick, is the “fruit” of the artistic seed. That is when psyche gives birth to images that will guide and nourish.

Melville’s Ahab puts everyone in peril as he pursues revenge on Moby Dick for having injured him. If we think of much of the world as embodying Ahab’s revenge, what does this lead to? We can clearly see that profit and power are leading to the destruction of much of life in various forms, in its mad passion for “more.” If we think of Moby Dick as much of the embodying much of the spirit of life, then if we try to “do in” life, life will do us in instead. Thinking this way suggests that what underlies the massive juggernaut of profit and power is an injury, some form of trauma. This is no doubt why profit and power become severe addictions and seemingly incurable.

What is at work in the world today is incurable which is why it cannot and will not change course as it adds to the inevitable consequences of climate change, economic inequality, and a threat to life itself.

Like the London version of Moby Dick, there will be no Epilogue, no survivors to tell the story of our demise.

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1. Russell A. Lockhart. “What Whale Does America Pursue?” Los Angeles: Psychological Perspectives, Spring 1979.