Moby Dick

When Melville published Moby Dick in 1851, the educated world was divided between two answers to one question: can the universe be known? Empirical science said yes — patient observation would eventually yield the hidden order of things. The Romantic and Transcendentalist tradition said something older and stranger: that the deepest truths lay beyond any method, accessible only through vision or catastrophe.
Melville tested every available framework — empirical science, Emersonian self-reliance, Shakespearean tragic form, the Book of Job — against the white whale. Every one of them fails. Not for the same reason, and not in the same way, but each arrives at the same conclusion: the whale swims on, indifferent. The three thousand years of human testimony assembled at the novel's opening cannot tell you what the white whale is. Neither can the six hundred pages that follow.
Ahab's obsession is not a deviation from the novel's epistemological argument. It is the argument's extreme case: what a human being looks like when the demand that suffering have a cause that can be named and punished — that the universe owe an answer — cannot be surrendered. He names his enemy, commands the ship, and hunts it to the bottom of the sea. Melville wrote this in 1851. MAGA arrived a hundred and seventy years later with the same conviction: that the world's refusal to respond to will is a conspiracy against greatness rather than a condition of being in the world. The ship sinks. The whale swims on.