Melville's pursuit of God (Herman Melville, Bronislaw Malinowski, Georg Lukacs)

From the time of his rediscovery by the moderns Melville has been hailed as the forerunner of a secular age. This dissertation seeks to create an alternative context for interpreting his struggle with religious belief. A brief consideration of the work of two representative moderns, Georg Lukacs and Bronislaw Malinowski, reveals that the modernist break with a religious past did not always, or exclusively, constitute an embrace of a secular present. Their experiences of a fractured reality, seemingly bereft of God, provide a modern parallel to the difficulties Melville experienced in his quest for a spiritual identity.; In Typee, the cultural encounter serves as a preliminary testing ground for exploring the constructs of "familiarity" and "strangeness," which would eventually become the basis for the representation of the approach to God. As Melville developed as a novelist, the task of defining the "vital operations of religion" became more and more intimately associated with writing, with the construction of the novel itself. In Moby Dick the modern problem of "transcendental homelessness" is dramatised in Ahab's struggle with spiritual incompleteness, emblematised by his lost leg. His nihilistic quest is both framed by and contained within Ishmael's search for a doctrinally independent God. In Billy Budd, the narrative horizon has been severely delimited by the secular demands of his age; yet Melville indicates that he has by no means relinquished his investment in the polemical and spiritual possibilities that narrative had once afforded him on a grand scale.