The Wrath of Ahab; or, Herman Melville Meets Gene Roddenberry

April Selley writes in "Transcendentalism in Star Trek: The Next Generation" of the second ST series' prevailing ethos: "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?" Ralph Waldo Emerson asks in his quintessentially American manifesto of Transcendentalism, the essay Nature. "Why not, indeed?" seems to be the answer of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which embodies Emerson's philosophy of optimism.... Above all else, Star Trek: The Next Generation suggests that order comes from Emersonian self-reliance in harmony with the goodness of the cosmos.... The Emersonian philosophy of the series is symbolically represented by the structure of the new starship Enterprise. Instead of solid walls, the ship has many huge windows looking into space. These suggest that the barriers between humans and the universe are breaking down.... [Some episodes] suggest that "space" is not "the final frontier"; the frontiers of time and of the current limitations on thought and sensory perception will also be conquered. One recalls Emerson's lines from Nature: "Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy." The "perfection of the creation" suggests that evil is an absence of good rather than a force in itself.... By citing these similarities between Emerson's philosophy and that of ST: TNG, however, I do not mean to suggest that Gene Roddenberry, creator of both the original and current Star Treks, read Emerson and deliberately set out to embody his principles. But Emerson's philosophy is deeply ingrained in our culture, and Roddenberry and other ST writers have had a knack for adapting American headlines, history and myths into entertainment. (31, emphases added) Now, what I'd like to argue is two-fold: first, I would agree that Roddenberry's conception of the Star Trek universe does borrow from 19th century American literature-and more particularly, STII: The Wrath of Khan sits somewhere between mere allusion to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and an outright retelling; it is what I'd like to call an oblique reconfiguration of Moby-Dick. I do believe this reconfiguration is purposeful, as I will argue in a moment. However, while the plot merely borrows some few odd elements, at least one of Melville's original messages is translated wholesale into the ST film. My second point is that while the TNG series is indeed Emersonian, and in the ways described earlier, The Wrath of Khan, in the same way as does Melville in Moby-Dick, severely questions Emerson's Transcendentalism and sounds a warning for the true believer in the infinite progress and goodness of humankind. In fact, Moby-Dick is rather a tragedy, and tragedy does believe in evil-active, malignant evil. One definition of tragedy, in part, would assert that conditions or circumstances cause death and loss, and often those conditions which look suspiciously like Fate have been created by humans in some remote past (we would do well to remember Oedipus). In this vein, so too does The Wrath of Khan invoke such tragedy-a tragedy of the discovery urge. But first, I want to establish that these two texts speak the same language. There are many direct borrowings in The Wrath of Khan, and I'd like to note these quickly. To begin with, we have the seekers, James T. Kirk and Melville's Ishmael, both casting out on a ship for reasons having more to do with themselves than with the mission: Ishmael has his hypos; Kirk his depression on his birthday, the day the film begins. While Ishmael spent a sailor's thoughtless life optimistically plunging forward to explore strange new worlds, in these latter days-after his voyage on the fated Pequod-at Moby-Dick's beginning he goes to sea motivated by something akin to depression: to keep from "methodically knocking people's hats off. …