Midway through "Touching This Leviathan"—part chronicle on whale-watching, part literary criticism, part personal memoir—Seattle Pacific University writing professor Peter Wayne Moe writes that Moby Dick isn’t just a book about whaling. It is also “about reading, about writing, about a writer and his sources, about a writer learning to use the words those sources offer.”
Though more concise, more personally immediate, and more overtly theological than Melville’s classic, Touching This Leviathan matches much of that description. It is an illustration of Moe’s literary philosophies put into practice. Those philosophies include the idea that authentic originality occurs only through the discovery and re-application of something that already exists. Writers build on the work of their ancestors, using the same materials—words—that those ancestors passed down to us.
Even the arrangements of those words are not as unique as some might think. Moe reminds us that Melville began Moby Dick with a list of passages collected from various literary sources—a chapter called “Extracts”—and that he ended the book with clauses and phrasing that he “borrowed” from authors writing before him. Melville “reads like a pirate,” Moe tells us, “pillaging from wherever he can.” He quotes a scholar who wrote that Moby Dick can be considered “the original product of the assimilation of many other books.”
“Saying something new isn’t a matter of inventing ideas from scratch, but of composing those gathered,” Moe explains, introducing the Roman rhetorical term inventio—not “inventing something out of nothing but finding something that already exists . . . and putting it to use.”
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