# 69. Chad Beck, Melville's Moby-Dick: A Jungian Commentary: An American Nekyia

Get the white whale 🐳 🐉 (self) before it gets you. Those are the only choices ✌🏻 “I heard Ahab mutter, 'Here some one thrusts these cards into these old hands of mine; swears that I must play them, and no others.' And damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right; live in the game, and die in it!"
#mobydick - #melville “[137] In general, it is the non-psychological novel that offers the richest opportunities for psychological elucidation. Here the author, having no intentions of this sort, does not show his characters in a psychological light and thus leaves room for analysis and interpretation, or even invites it by his unprejudiced mode of presentation. Good examples of such novels are those of Benoît, or English fiction after the manner of Rider Haggard, as well as that most popular article of literary mass-production, the detective story, first exploited by Conan Doyle. I would also include Melville’s Moby Dick, which I consider to be the greatest American novel, in this broad class of writings. An exciting narrative that is apparently quite devoid of psychological intentions is just what interests the psychologist most of all. Such a tale is constructed against a background of unspoken psychological assumptions, and the more unconscious the author is of them, the more this background reveals itself in unalloyed purity to the discerning eye. In the psychological novel, on the other hand, the author himself makes the attempt to raise the raw material of his work into the sphere of psychological discussion, but instead of illuminating it he merely succeeds in obscuring the psychic background. It is from novels of this sort that the layman gets his “psychology”; whereas novels of the first kind require the psychologist to give them a deeper meaning.
[138] I have been speaking in terms of the novel, but what I am discussing is a psychological principle which is not restricted to this form of literature.”
Excerpt From
The Collected Works
v. 15 paragraph 137

http://librivox.us/book/753
https://www.amazon.com/Melvilles-Moby-Dick-STUDIES-PSYCHOLOGY-ANALYSTS/dp/0919123708

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