>>No book more deeply and revealingly explains the spasm of madness through which the United States has passed in recent years than Moby Dick.
Haven't read the article yet, Omar, but can already sense the projecting author, and his prejudices, hard at work. I suggest you take a look at DH Lawrence's essay on _Moby Dick_. In it, Lawrence describes the novel as Melville's commentary on a society that has lost its guiding star, i.e., Christianity, and is lose on wild Ahab's mission, obsessed with the whiteness of the whale. Lawrence suggests that Melville saw American idealism going down with the ship. In that interpretation, the novel isn't attempting more than Ford Maddox Ford's _Parade's End_ books, which seem to show how WWI changed Europe from civilized to barbaric.
Yet the problem with reading any great novel as the schema of recent events is that it violates the integrity of the book, which is meant to be empty enough to serve many sets of eyes. One might map any number of novels like _The Day of the Locusts_, _The Trial_, or _The Great Gatsby_ onto current events.
In fact, for humor's sake, one might want to map _The I Hate to Cook Cookbook_ onto the past ten years.
I will do justice to your post ands read the article later today.
Best, EricPS: Currently reading Machado de Assis's _Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas_ and wondering how it could have been translated into English with such a stupid title as _Epitaph for a Small Winner_. Just at the part where Cubas describes his death ... film at eleven.
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