In Chap. 89 of Herman Melville ’s Moby-Dick (1851), “Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish,” the narrator Ishmael speaks of a situation in whale fishery when “a whale may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and be finally killed and captured by another vessel.” ¹ To avoid conflict on such occasions, American fishermen, who “have been their own legislators and lawyers in this matter,” have decided that “I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it” and “II. A Loose-Fish is a fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it” (MD 308). Not content with the literal significance of his maritime observations, of course, Ishmael proceeds to allegorize this simple doctrine of “Blubber Capitalism ” by thinking in terms of the world that his captain Ahab was bound to explore and exploit: ²

What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish. (MD 310)

Speaking as sole survivor of the Pequod’s wreck at the heart of one of the most encyclopedic novels of American literature in the United States, Ishmael incorporates the antebellum ideology of Manifest Destiny (to embrace “Mexico” among “the United States”) into “the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World” (MD 310). For this aspiring whaler, granted with the epistemic power of the pen to write what his heart desires, the human condition itself is a “Loose-Fish” that will soon be harpooned by the victors of history. Looking us readers in the eyes, the bold narrator even flags “the great globe itself” as fair game and declares: “what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?” (310).

Recasting American and Persian Literatures, I have throughout this book maintained an intimate association with what the novelist Chad Harbach words “a thriving cult of Melvilleania.” ³ Therefore, I could not as an Iranian observer ignore Ishmael’s remarks on the politics of the harpoon while reading Kermit Roosevelt Jr .’s political memoir Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran . In July 1953, at a time when the liberal anti-communist consensus was at work normalizing a “scenario”—in Melville scholarship as well as US political culture—“that privileged Ishmaelite America as the symbolic agent of the ‘free world’ in its self-ordained efforts to resist Ahabian communist aggression,” ⁴ the Cold Warrior and CIA agent Roosevelt went out of his way to cross the western borders of Iran and sow what some historians consider the first seeds of extremism and terror in the Middle East. ⁵ With direct orders from then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles , a pillar of the American Empire during the Cold War, ⁶ Roosevelt was scheduled to arrive in Tehran, work out alliances, and conspire against the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh so as to perform the “vital dirty work of freedom” and, by reinstating Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi to power, thwart the threat of communism from Iran’s northern neighbor, the Soviet Union. ⁷ Countercoup, the account of Roosevelt’s sponsored espionage, Operation AJAX , is chillingly dedicated to “the long-standing friendship” between the peoples of the United States and Iran, “albeit under different circumstances.” ⁸ Treating his Iranian audience as Melvillean Fast-Fish, Roosevelt evokes the canonical backdrop of Moby-Dick into the twentieth century and during the Cold War , when the novel was celebrated to pit Ishmael’s liberalism against Ahab’s totalitarianism. While Roosevelt emerges to share Ishmael’s haughty idealism, the local population ranging from the citizens of Tehran in August 1953 to those of Baghdad in March 2003 come to represent the Pequod’s crew. In a literary twist of fate, in fact, after accomplishing his mission Roosevelt chose to return home via Nantucket (the nineteenth-century capital of the whaling world), albeit following a short stop in London to convey the fantastic news to Sir Winston Churchill . ⁹

The Anglo-American coup of 1953, staged over oil in the formative years of the Cold War, ¹⁰ marked a special relationship between Iran and the United States, one that lasted on friendly terms until the Islamic Revolution in 1979, before turning fatefully sour in later decades. Specifically since the 444-day Hostage Crisis at the US embassy in Tehran (1979–1981), during which course 52 American diplomats were held hostage in part as a result of the events of August 1953, the two nations “have been locked in a deadly embrace.” ¹¹ More poignantly, the strife has borne within it an ideological divide between “Islam and the West ” which has, through the media frenzy surrounding the Hostage Crisis, marked an American response to what Edward Said terms the “part fiction, part ideological label, part minimal designation of a religion called Islam.” ¹² American as well as Iranian formations of social neurosis over the equally shared Islam-West divide continue to occupy public and cultural realms, for instance, during the annual state-sponsored rallies at the site of the former US embassy in Tehran, ¹³ and the more bizarre occasion of First Lady Michelle Obama , broadcast live from the White House, presenting the Best Picture of 2013 Academy Awards to Ben Affleck’s Argo (2012), a thriller recounting the escape of six American diplomats from Tehran during the Hostage Crisis . ¹⁴

In what follows I will be concerned with the Islam-West divide from a drastically radical angle, from the perspective of comparative literary studies. In Moby-Dick, Fedallah the Parsee is one of the Pequod’s harpooners of South and West Asian origins—bearing Zoroastrian roots, Indian descent, Persian genealogy, and Arabic etymology. Fedallah is at once the most dehumanized figment of Ishmael’s narrative, a greatly resourceful character in Melville’s novel, and by virtue of the conflict between author and narrator a literary catalyst in my book. According to the untold story I seek to retrieve from the telltale margins of Moby-Dick and Melville scholarship, Fedallah is a minor character with the intertextual and comparative capacity to swim against the odds, speak despite long odds, and offer a bracing reading of the novel delimited to no center or circumference. In between the local histories and formative geographies of American and Persian literatures, Fedallah is a literary messenger dwelling beyond dichotomized minds and traumatized imaginations. He jostles his way past Ishmael (and the liberal Roosevelt), beyond the crew (and the Islamist hostage takers), in order to join Melville’s fellow literati throughout West Asia who have been observing history unfold with acute critical vision.

An initial sketch of the Parsee Fedallah, sailing across the borders of American and Persian literatures from Iran to the United States, is not one of the native representations in Ben Affleck’s blockbuster, appropriated in neo-Orientalist fashion to serve American soft power through Michelle Obama’s retrospective glance at a geopolitically traumatic past. A gift of Melville’s “subversive imagination,” ¹⁵ Fedallah rather parallels one of the central characters in Shirin Neshat’s Women without Men (2009), a film that foregrounds the lives of four women at the height of the events in 1953. ¹⁶ These women do not corroborate the gap between “Islam and the West” as do “Iranian” and “American” characters in Argo , but participate in a journey of self-discovery, conscious and critical of the historical events that are shaping their destinies as citizens of a postcolonial nation. Focalized in one unforgettable shot from Women without Men is the protagonist Munis (Shabnam Toloui), standing out among a crowd of male protestors as she asserts her femininity, and negotiates her autonomy, in a pro-democracy rally in August 1953. Munis and Fedallah’s counterparts in this book are literary and cinematic representations spanning from India to Palestine en route to contemporary Iran, who envision a new road map for texts traveling the world. Among these pilgrims are Javid in Esmail Fassih’s The Story of Javid (1981), Yezad in Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters (2002), Mergan in Mahmoud Dowlatabadi’s Missing Soluch (1980), the title character in Ghassan Kanafani’s Umm Saad (1969), and Amiru in Amir Naderi’s film The Runner (1984).