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"What is the pertinence of Moby-Dick (1850) for the narrative technique, political concerns, and lingering guilt of Arthur Koestler (1905-1983), a reformed Communist Party member and Hungarian-British novelist who was also a reporter, historian, and autobiographer?1 The novel details the ordeal of Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, an old-guard Bolshevik whose zeal for theoretical Marxism and Party loyalty remains constant despite his awareness of the failures and betrayals of latter-day Stalinists. Thus, when falsely charged with treason, Rubashov eventually confesses, a suicidal tribute to the idealized Party of his imagination.2 The narrative rendering of his self-deception is, I propose, indebted to Koestler's fascination, over many years, with the monomania of Melville's Ahab and even, in some subconscious measure, to Ishmael's narrative habit of compensating for having earlier surrendered his bestjudgment to Ahab's totalitarianism. The case for aligning Rubashov and Ahab, and then Koestler (as autobiographer), with the narrative voice of a penitent Ishmael finds support in scholarship relating MobyDick to Cold War scrutiny. The earliest and most provocative of such studies is that of political activist and social theorist C.L.R. James (1901-1989).James saw in Ahab a foreshadowing of both Hitler and Stalin (10); pegged Ahab as a forerunner of Communist thinkers who impose a "totalitarian" (43) vision through an energetic and theory-based "program of action" (9); and deemed Ishmael a "disoriented intellectual" susceptible to, and an abettor of, tyranny: "No wonder that, with terror in his soul, Ishmael follows Ahab, as the guilt-ridden intellectual of today, often with the same terror, finds some refuge in the idea of the one-party totalitarian state" (46-47).3 This claim is suggestive, though not so much as a definitive reading as because James's anti-Stalinist outlook on Moby-Dick approaches what I take to be Koestler's intimate but ultimately self-deceiving encounter with the novel, since Koestler appears not to apprehend what may be Melville's own dissatisfaction with Ishmael's retrospective sense of ethical absolution. Exploring the relation between democracy and Communism and analyzing Ishmael's occasional lightheartedness and equanimity as deflections of guilt and selfcastigation support this conclusion. To gauge Koestler's failure to understand the narrative artistry of Moby-Dick, I detail the difference between Melville's apparent skepticism of Ishmael's self-exoneration and Koestler's unquestioning, rehabilitative identification with the novel.
One must, of course, be mindful of different...