Any story about a hunt for a Great White shark is bound to invite comparisons with the hunt for the Great White Whale.
Herman Melville's Moby Dick was published in 1851 and, like many original works of art, its genius was not immediately recognised. The story of Captain Ahab's hunt for a white whale received mixed reviews on publication and then drifted in the doldrums of critical opinion for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Disillusioned with the increasingly hostile reception his subsequent novels received, Melville abandoned the literary scene and spent the latter part of his life in obscurity, working in a customs house in New York . He died in 1891, well before the early twentieth century reassessment of his work placed him where he belongs - in the front rank of American writers.
Of all the stories of the sea, Moby Dick is perhaps the greatest. Melville had spent his early life sailing around "the watery part of the world" and crammed those years of experience into his books. Like all great authors, he had a distinctively individual voice. His sentences were like the currents of the sea - long and flowing and pulling in all directions - and he wrote in a peculiar idiom that combined the voice of the folksy pioneer with the sermon of a firebrand preacher. Here is a paragraph from Chapter 48 of Moby Dick in which the boats are lowered in pursuit of a whale:
"It was a sight full of quick wonder and awe! The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;- all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood;- all this was thrilling. Not the raw recruit, marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his first battle; not the dead man's ghost encountering the first unknown phantom in the other world;- neither of these can feel stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm whale."
Into the charmed, churned circle of his narrative, Melville stirred myths and facts about the whale, giving over entire chapters to Wikipedia-type entries on the operation of the nineteenth century whaling industry. The novel starts as a first person narration - famously opening with the words "Call me Ishmael" - but employs multiple points of view as it progresses, appropriating theatrical devices such as soliloquies and stage directions. It's not surprising that this cut-and-paste text should have had Melville's contemporaries scratching their heads. An anonymous English review complained that it was an "ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact. The idea of a connected and collected story has obviously visited and abandoned its writer again and again in the course of composition." Melville was clearly ahead of his times.
Reviewers of both the book and the movie of Jaws were quick to draw comparisons with Moby Dick. None of them went so far as to suggest that Benchley's novel had any of the literary merit of Melville's, but both books clearly shared some narrative tropes. The most obvious point of comparison was between the characters of Quint and Ahab.
In the final chapter Quint is dragged to a watery death when he is caught by the lines attached to the dying shark. At the climax of Melville's novel Captain Ahab meets a similar though more violent fate:
"The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the grooves;- ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths."
Screenwriter Carl Gottlieb recognised that Quint's almost elegiac end ("Through the stinging saltwater mist [Brody] saw the fish sink a slow and graceful spiral, trailing behind it the body of Quint - arms out to the sides, head thrown back, mouth open in mute protest.") was not cinematic enough, and so in the movie Quint goes mano-a-mano with the shark, dying a bloody death like the ones he witnessed in the Pacific.
Quint's initial motive for killing the shark is purely economic ("I'll find him for three, but I'll catch him and kill him for ten.") but is later driven by a crazed monomania ("You're certifiable, Quint!"). This has echoes of Ahab's own journey from a whaleboat captain with business responsibilities to a madman possessed by all-consuming vengeance. Both men have been emotionally and physically scarred by earlier experiences with the creatures they are hunting. Just as Quint endangers his crew mates on the Orca in order to kill the shark, so Ahab is prepared to risk the lives of all aboard the Pequod in pursuit of the whale. Indeed, the scene where Quint smashes the radio to prevent Brody from calling the coastguard has a direct parallel in Chapter 118 of Moby Dick when an unhinged Ahab destroys his sextant, the instrument used to plot the ship's course.
On the Inside Jaws feature on the two disc DVD Steven Spielberg tells how he had intended to include a scene in which Quint visits a local movie theatre showing John Huston's 1956 film version of Moby Dick. Quint ends up laughing so hard at the absurdity of the ending -which Spielberg describes with his typical filmmaker's precision - that the other patrons get up and leave. The scene, which has a grandstanding performance from Gregory Peck as Ahab stabbing his harpoon into a model whale's flank, is a patchwork of live action and miniatures with location and studio shots, and no doubt would look fake to a real fisherman. Peck, sensitive to the criticisms that met his performance as the Pequod's captain, was unwilling to allow the film to be used and so Spielberg dropped the idea.
One final piece of trivia that almost links the two books together is the curious fact that Herman Melville's publisher went by the name of Peter Bentley.
