As President Bush was wailing about the war on terror, University of California at Berkeley Associate Professor of English Samuel Otter was busy whaling at the connections between Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece, Moby-Dick, and America’s political landscape. In last Friday’s lecture, called “Moby-Dick and the World We Live In: Literary Scripture and Political Crisis,” Otter discussed the uncanny coincidences between the story of Captain Ahab looking for the whale Moby Dick and the pursuit of Osama bin Laden by the American government.

“The text [Moby-Dick] insists that it’s about America and that close attention will reveal secrets of America,” Otter pronounced.

Wearing wire-rimmed glasses and an understated blue tie, Otter’s friendly demeanor made him an engaging speaker; he animatedly discussed the similarities between the significance of capturing Moby Dick to capturing bin Laden.

He quoted scholar Edward W. Said, who expanded upon this idea: “Osama bin Laden’s name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any history he and his shadowy followers might have had before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination. Inevitably, then, collective passions are being funneled into a drive for war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick, rather than what is going on.”

According to Otter, in post-9/11 America, bin Laden’s character had become synonymous with everything evil. He agreed with Said, stating that making the capture of bin Laden such an important issue meant attributing higher qualities to a man who should not have deserved any attention.

As an allegory, Otter said, Moby-Dick contains qualities that easily reflect and encompass society. “Moby-Dick provokes our interpretive excess, joining literature and politics, then and now,” he said.

Otter visited campus to give a series of lectures in Oberlin’s week-long Lectures in English and American Literature series. His other three talks in the series were titled: “Philadelphia Stories: Experiments in Freedom, 1790 – 1860,” “Fever: Narratives of Race and Conduct During the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793;” “‘Condition’ and ‘Complexion:’ Debates about History, Character and Disenfranchisement in the 1830s;” and “Freedom: Social Violence and Literary Scene in Webb’s ‘The Garies and their Friends’ (1857) and Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno.’”

Otter has taught at UC Berkeley since 1990, focusing on 19th century American literature.  In 1999, he published Melville’s Anatomies, which discusses how Melville’s works are examinations of humans, in terms of race, self and national identity. The book won the Hennig Cohen Prize for the best work in Melville studies.