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3 Melville
Dennis Berthold

The major event this year is Andrew Delbancos one-volume biography, a


work that makes Melville accessible to a wide audience and should spur
greater recognition of his accomplishments. Among other publications,
as usual, Moby-Dick receives the most attention, and little significant
appears on the poetry, the less-read novels, or even the stories, with the
exception of Benito Cereno. It is a banner year for Billy Budd criticism,
however, both in single-text articles and in two books that connect it to
Melvilles other works. There is somewhat more attention to Melvilles
rhetoric and style this year among narratologically inclined critics, and
one can only hope more readers will exercise their hermeneutic skills
on the poetry as well as on the prose. These less familiar methodologies
challenge us all to rotate the Melvillean prism so it refracts the orange
alongside the violet tints.
i Biographies, Editions, and Reference Works
Delbancos biography Melville: His World and Work (Knopf) is the years
most important book, a compact and eminently readable account that
balances nicely the discoveries of recent scholarship, particularly those
of Hershel Parker, with the popular demand for unimpeded narrative.
Delbancos primary concern is placing Melvilles work in the context of
his life and times, an aim he achieves by interspersing generous quotations from the major works with discourses on South Seas colonialism,
Indian removal, the Mexican War, European revolutions, antislavery

American Literary Scholarship (2005)


doi 10.1215/00659142-2006-002 2007 by Duke University Press

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Melville

politics, labor unrest, the Melville revival, and Melvilles iconic status
today. Over fifty illustrations embellish the book and widen its appeal.
Delbancos Melville is a born and bred New Yorker whose art and life
resonate with the citys cycles of prosperity and poverty, progress and
violence, self-absorption and global outreach, aristocratic pretension
and democratic ideals. Although Delbanco gives Melvilles Pacific years
their just due in a perceptive analysis of the conflict between savagism
and civilization that permeates his work, it is New York that fosters
Melvilles literary career and provides the intellectual climate necessary
to urge him beyond adventure tales to the heights of Moby-Dick and the
best of the short fiction. Melville is, in Delbancos view, an author who
should be included in discussions of the New York School along with
Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, and Norman Mailer. The Pequod is like a
floating city testing the claims of urban democracies, Pierre satirizes the
New York literary scene, Bartleby records the inanition of city life,
and even Billy Budd echoes the conflicts between capital and labor rife
in late-19th-century New York. Melville engages his time and place even
during the so-called silent years after the Civil War and palpably merges
life and art in almost everything he writes.
Delbanco makes Melville approachable and understandable for a wide
contemporary audience through a familiar style and recurring reminders
of his relevance: New York in the 1840s offered a nineteenth-century
preview of what twentieth-century Democrats were to experience in
the 1960s; Pips leap into the open ocean compares to the astronaut
tumbling into space in Stanley Kubricks 2001; and Pierre is a horny
boy whose opening melodramatics conjure Tiny Tim singing Tiptoe
Through the Tulips. Some cross-century comparisons clearly work better than others. Usually, however, the books stylish prose captures the
essence of Melvilles achievement, as when Delbanco finds that the more
Long Ghost delights in his own cleverness, the more one feels a dark
belligerence in his charm; when he concludes that it was not so much
on Melvilles plots or characters or settings that New York left its mark
as in the nerve and sinew of his prose; or when he describes Ishmael
as a mobile consciousness, extracted from his own singular identity,
then multiplied and redistributed into the mind of every man aboard.
These are good sentences and good insights. Delbanco approaches the
vexed matter of the inner Melville with similar aplomb, acknowledging
the limits of psychoanalytical readings even while probing delicately
into questions of Polynesian sexuality, homoeroticism, marital discord,

Dennis Berthold

57

father-son quarrels, alcoholism, and depression. The quest for the private Melville has usually led to a dead end, Delbanco admits, but we
still seek the inner man because it can help us understand problem
novels like Pierre, where the outer conflict between individual impulse
and social custom reprises the pleasures of Tahiti remembered within the
constraints of New York, an inner longing that leads Melville to discover
that there is, after all, no salvation in the release from culture. When
the historical record is slim, the biographer inevitably turns to fiction
for evidence, a dangerous tactic with a writer who so carefully distances
himself from his narrators and one that Delbanco deploys with varying
success. Sometimes Melville speaks through the voice of a character,
such as Father Mapple or Redburn, while at other times the author and
character merge, as when the sick man in chapter 16 of The ConfidenceMan (1857) captures Melvilles intentions for sailing on the Meteor in
1860a distant connection I find dubious. Similarly, Delbancos otherwise judicious reading of Billy Budd perhaps overemphasizes Guert
Gansevoorts role in the Somers affair and Vere and Billys analogy to
Herman and Malcolm to explain the storys psychological power.
Delbanco seeks to overturn the notion that Melvilles final years were
silent, but his inattention to Battle-Pieces and Clarel blunts this worthy
aim. He devotes more pages to Billy Budd than to the two books of
poetry combined, and he disdains Melvilles formal accomplishments.
The House-top hits false notes because Melville did not witness
the draft riots; yet, I would observe, neither did he witness the sinking
of the Pequod, a fact that does not prevent Delbanco from considering
Moby-Dick a masterpiece. The images in Battle-Pieces tend to be formal and inert, as if they have been dusted off after long storage in some
Depository of Poetical Tropes, and Clarel is finally a hopelessly talky
poem, two comments I find dismissive rather than analytic. Many of
Melvilles finest poems such as Malvern Hill, Shiloh, John Marr,
and Timoleon are not even mentioned, a choice that belies the rising regard for Melvilles verse and reinforces precisely the traditional
view that Delbanco wants to change: Melvilles late years were a time
of failure and imaginative exhaustion, except of course for the supernova Billy Budd. Some of these decisions may have been driven by
demands to compress Melvilles long and varied career into 322 pages, a
good length for a wide audience: Delbancos biography clocks in at half
the length of Laurie Robertson-Lorants one-volume Herman Melville
(see AmLS 1992, p. 52) and one-sixth the length of Hershel Parkers

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two-volume biography (see AmLS 1996, p. 52; AmLS 2002, p. 39). As


an engaging introduction to Melvilles life and times, it provides a
compelling flesh-and-blood portrait of a writer who deserves the broad
readership Delbancos biography will surely attract.
Parker makes key biographical information available in Damned
by Dollars: Moby-Dick and the Price of Genius, which first appeared
in the 2001 Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick and is reprinted in
Living with a Writer, ed. Dale Salwak (Palgrave, pp. 20222). The essay
is a lively conspectus of Melvilles lifelong financial difficulties and helpfully translates 19th-century sums into todays dollars to illustrate the
enormous size of Melvilles debts.
Another contribution to biography is Robert K. Wallaces Douglass
and Melville: Anchored Together in Neighborly Style (Spinner), which
exhaustively examines the evidence for a personal and literary relationship between the two men between 1845 and 1855 and turns up a surprising number of possibilities, although none are attested. Well drawn
period maps of New Bedford, Albany, and New York establish the two
mens close physical proximity in 1840, 1845, and 184750. The black
church Ishmael enters could have been where Douglass preached; while
writing Typee Melville could have heard Douglass speak in Albany; and
in New York Melville had several opportunities to hear Douglass at the
Broadway Tabernacle or next door at the New York Society Library,
where Melville held a membership. Thurlow Weed, Richard Henry
Dana, and Charles F. Briggs knew both mens work and praised it in
print, sometimes in the same publication, and a long excerpt from Typee
on tattooing, an illustrative quote from Moby-Dick, and several notices
of Israel Potter appeared in Douglasss newspaper. After assembling
the physical evidence, Wallace spends about half the book scouring
Melvilles first five novels and Benito Cereno for traces of Douglasss
person, rhetoric, values, and ideas and finds a considerable number of
convergences and affinities. Some of these strike me as improbable,
such as Marnoo in Typee recasting Douglass, or the shaving scene in
Benito Cereno alluding to a jibe in a Douglass speech. Others are more
persuasive, such as the contrast between the black steward Lavenders
unhindered walks with a good-looking English woman in Liverpool
(Redburn, ch. 41) and Douglasss harassment when he promenaded with
two English women in New York, an event that made all the papers in
1849 just as Melville was composing Redburn. However speculative some
of Wallaces linkages may be, they all serve larger ends: to establish the

Dennis Berthold

59

historical presence of an antislavery audience for Melvilles fiction, to


decipher more concretely the racial allusions, rhetoric, and characters
in the early works, and to encourage more research into antislavery
literature for references to Melville. Richly illustrated with period photographs, engravings, and cartoons, Wallaces study shows that new
revelations await scholars who combine imagination with painstaking
archival work.
In a text designed for undergraduate audiences Giles Gunn compiles
a useful selection of new and reconceived essays in A Historical Guide to
Herman Melville (Oxford) that embeds Melville deeply within his literary and cultural milieu and comments, at least in passing, on most of his
major works. Like other volumes in this series the book includes useful
illustrations, a timeline, and a selective bibliography. Robert Milders
biographical essay nicely balances the early and late Melville and shows
a keener appreciation for the poetry than does Delbanco; Leon Chai
compares Melville to British writers in tracing the Romantic and Victorian impulses in his career; and Myra Jehlen focuses on Moby-Dick and
a few stories to analyze the conflict between individualism and class.
Sheila Post redacts Correspondent Colorings (see AmLS 1996, pp. 5455)
in an informative essay about the literary marketplace, especially among
periodicals, and Emory Elliott broadly surveys Melvilles religious attitudes from Typee through Billy Budd. One essay moves beyond generally
accepted views to fashion Melville for the 21st century: Timothy Marrs
Without the Pale: Melville and Ethnic Cosmopolitanism (pp. 13365)
traces the oscillations between hope and despair in Melvilles lifelong
pursuit of a universal ethnic cosmopolitanism that would fold in one
embrace the varied cultures he encountered from Polynesia to the Holy
Land. As befits introductory works, the essays are accessible, evenhanded, and reasonably comprehensive, and they will admirably serve
instructors who seek a background text for a course in Melville.
ii General
Two books use Moby-Dick and Billy Budd as exemplary texts of legal
and political dilemmas that confronted the early republic. Torn between
its revolutionary origins and increasing demands for national authority,
the United States experimented with differing strategies to harmonize
competing political philosophies, and Melvilles works offer key registers
of the struggle. W. C. Harris compares the two novels in But Arent

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Melville

It All a Sham? Herman Melville and the Critique of Unity, pp. 11151
in E Pluribus Unum. Harris believes that Melville, unlike Whitman in
Leaves of Grass or Poe in Eureka, questioned the compulsory national
impetus toward unity as the valorized term of identity, the default category for social formation, the orthodox reading of the Constitution,
the Federalist Papers, and the Civil War. Unity is certainly a worthwhile
ideal in rational societies for, as Stephen Toulmin writes, the cosmological and social order are, or should be rendered, consonant, which is
precisely what Ahab desires. Even Ishmael tries to impose unity through
his masthead reveries and his experiments in cetology and phrenology
(when he reads the whales forehead), and the novels ending seems to
support a unified worldview because only one person survives. Finally,
however, Harris believes that Moby-Dick describes the failure of a unity
metaphysics and points toward the pragmatism of William James.
Harriss reading of Moby-Dick reinforces accepted views but his analysis
of Billy Budd challenges critical orthodoxy: Budds death is necessary,
Harris writes, in order for Melville to destroy the obligation to unity
[he] has been fighting to escape throughout his career. The true domain
of the story is logic, not law, morality, or epistemology (as famous readings by Brook Thomas, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Barbara Johnson
contend), a logic that requires Billys death in order to resist totalizing
readings and encourage pluralism (pluris, or manyness) in life and art.
Had Billy lived there would be no debate, no agonizing questions about
innocence, guilt, evidence, motive, or authority, precisely the questions
the text raises and readers endlessly discuss. Billys death is so troubling
that it forces readers to posit multiple explanations for it, a process that
inevitably calls into question issues normally closeted behind an overarching unity: military law, political authority, homosexual taboos, and
the act of reading itself. Billys death makes him a religious icon to the
sailors, a dying obsession to Vere, a knife-wielding villain to the Naval
Chronicle, and a figure of endless fascination to readers. He achieves
what Ahab could not: the defeat of totalizing social formations and
ideologies. Harris is well versed in the critical literature and engages
it productively to merge historical and reader-response criticism in a
valuable analysis of Billy Budd.
My university library classifies Elizabeth D. Samets Willing Obedience: Citizens, Soldiers, and the Progress of Consent in America, 1776
1898 (Stanford, 2004) under political theory, presumably because the
book explores the tensions between self and society as they evolved

Dennis Berthold

61

through the presidencies of Washington, Lincoln, and Theodore Roo


sevelt. About one-third of it, however, employs Melvilles texts to illustrate the ethical complexities of requiring obedience from citizens of a
republic. Chapter 2, Lincolns Electric Cord, moves from Lincolns
emphasis on reason rather than passion as the motive for political order
through Thoreaus disillusionment with society in Civil Disobedience to
the political pessimism of Moby-Dick. Where Edmund Burke glorified
the whaling industry as a commercial analogue for economic democracy and Ishmael deliberately seeks a Nantucket vessel to capture this
traditional ideal, by Ahabs time whaling has lost its democratic traditions, making the Pequod resemble less a floating republic than a ship
of fools. The conflict between Ahab and Starbuck shows the collapse
of Emersonian individualism in the face of an increasingly corporate
and illiberal American society as the first mates lack of intellectual
courage prevents him from murdering Machiavellian Ahab when
he has the chance. Starbuck places prudence before conscience and
so fails Emersons test of the upright man as formulated in Politics
and Self-Reliance. Such a harsh view may surprise some, but the
political context Samet provides offers an almost allegorical reading
of the relationship between captain and mate that finds support in
other critics analyses of the novels political symbolism. Chapter 5, A
Singular Absence of Heroic Poses, poses White-Jacket and a few poems
from Battle-Pieces as intertexts for Billy Budd to reveal Melvilles shift
from sympathy for abused sailors to an insistence on rational obedience
under the law. The touchstone of comparison is their portrayal of the
Royal Navy. When the British Admiral Collingwood declines to flog a
sailor as recounted in White-Jacket, his arbitrary mercy reinforces naval
authority just as much as Captain Clarets arbitrary punishments aboard
the Neversink. In contrast, Veres considered adherence to measured
forms restricts nautical tyranny and leads toward the democratic liberal obedience American society sought after the Civil War. By purging
emotion and intention from the judicial process and concentrating on
consequences, Vere accepts the authority of law even at the expense of
his own feelings. He emulates thoughtful and deliberate American leaders like Washington, Lincoln, and Grant in contrast to charismatic and
emotional leaders like Lord Nelson. Like Thomas Paine, Vere follows
enlightenment theories of justice by placing principle before individuals,
and like Melville in The House-top, Vere understands that only law
can manage the organic depravity that exists both in Billys anarchic

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republican innocence and Claggarts tyrannical evil. Either extreme can


destroy the freedom that republics guarantee. Samet directly addresses
critics with opposing views and presents a discerning, well-written, and
unusually contextualized defense of Vere.
Hans B. Lfgrens Melvilles Stories as Novel Alternative, pp. 19199
in Per Winther, Jakob Lothe, and Hans H. Skei, eds., The Art of Brevity:
Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis (So. Car., 2004), distinguishes the traditional Romantic narrations in Moby-Dick and Pierre
from the ironic, unreliable, and self-reflexive focalizations in Bartleby,
Benito Cereno, and The Confidence-Man. Lfgren praises Melvilles
innovations in short story narrative and his elaboration of them in the
episodic structure of The Confidence-Man where the readers simple
ironic reversals of narrative meaning appear to become indefinitely
repeatable, a technique that results in an almost perfected artistic
achievement. Charles Waughs We Are Not a Nation, So Much as a
World: Melvilles Global Consciousness (SAF 33: 20328) offers little
new in its readings of Redburn, Moby-Dick, and more briefly Pierre and
The Confidence-Man, but it does valuably contextualize the works in the
globalist criticism and theory of Martin Albrow, Eric Hobsbawm, Arjun
Appadurai, and Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari. The article extends
and critiques Lawrence Buells notion of Melville as a postcolonialist (see
AmLS 1992, p. 51) and, contra Hobsbawm, makes a good case for locating
the origins of globalism in the early rather than the late 19th century, a
move that positions Melville as one of its first advocates.
iii Early Works
Melvilles first five novels attract little attention this year. Cinzia Schiavinis Is It Down on Any Map? Space Symbols and American Ideology in Melvilles Typee, pp. 55972 in How Far is America From Here?
approaches Typee through cultural geography and finds that Tommos
preconceived notions about the South Seas mirror American myths of
the Promised Land and the West. These kinds of cultural blinders prevent Tommos understanding of such Marquesan practices as taboo and
tattoo that, in their obscurity, give Typee Valley the aura of liminality.
A. C. Christodoulous The Demigod Taji: Commentary on an Episode
from Melvilles Mardi (Leviathan 7, ii: 324) attempts to decipher the
novels secret ideas through multicultural and multilingual analysis.

Dennis Berthold

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Christodoulou identifies Melvilles protagonist with both the Hawaiian


and Aztec demigods Lono and Quetzalcoatl; because the Hawaiians
treated Captain James Cook as an avatar of Lono and the Aztecs thought
Hernando Cortes was Quetzalcoatl, Cook and Cortes become historical precursors of Taji and help explain his penchant for exploration and
violence. Polynesian, Nahuatl (a Mexican indigenous language), and
English etymologies suggest multiple connotations of Tajis name that
include (among others) lamentation, intellect, the verb to request, and
the notions of mind, intellect, death, and pure conceptualization or
language itself. Christodoulou concludes that Taji is the personification
of self-destruction. Milton Reigelman in Melvilles Mardi as Literary
Pompidou Center (KPR 19: 5862) finds that the simultaneous journey of body and mind so fluently integrated in Moby-Dick is presented
in a disconnected, fragmented form in Mardi that exposes its inner
workings, much as does the superstructure of the Pompidou Center.
Two articles stress the parallels between Melvilles early sea fiction and American society as a whole. Peter Belliss Discipline and
the Lash in Melvilles White-Jacket (Leviathan 7, ii: 2540) is a wellstructured argument that distinguishes Melvilles egalitarian rhetoric
from his authoritarian themes and locates the contradiction in the political discourse and economic tendencies of the 1840s. Bellis applies Michel
Foucaults distinction between public and private forms of punishment
to Melvilles famous attacks on flogging and the Articles of War and
finds his attacks less revolutionary than they seem. Melville justifies his
opposition by citing the Constitution but deemphasizes congressional
precedents that supported flogging and Constitutional provisions that
validated distinctions between civil and naval law. Similarly, Melville
deemphasized the popular link between flogging and slavery, perhaps
to compensate for his antislavery arguments in Mardi. (I should note
that Samet finds antislavery linkages in White-Jackets citations of John
Randolph in chapter 34 of the novel.) The Massacre of the Beards,
in which the old sailor John Ushant is both flogged and imprisoned,
merges Foucaults two types of punishment and undermines Melvilles
calls for reform as White-Jacket himself escapes punishment only to see
the father figure Ushant suffer in his place. As egalitarian republicanism
began to founder, a highly structured society like that on a man-of-war
increasingly mirrored industrializing American society at large, and
Melvilles novel is unable to resolve the conflict. Bellis seamlessly blends

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theory, text, and historical context to offer a conservative reading of one


of Melvilles most politically outspoken novels. His analysis would have
been enriched by consulting James Dubans satirical reading of WhiteJacket in Melvilles Major Fiction (AmLS 1983, pp. 6567). In Vital Contact
Patrick Chura discusses Redburn and Ishmael as genteel heroes caught
in mediatory roles between management and labor. Unlike Richard
Henry Dana, who maintains his aristocratic perspective in Two Years
Before the Mast, Melvilles protagonists permanently descend into the
forecastle and illustrate the irreparable confinement between shipboard
labor and management functions. As impostors and idealists, the two
metaphysically inclined young men expose their egalitarian pretensions
but nevertheless mature as they show how deep social bonds [can]
develop from industrial processes. What Churas analysis does not
explain, of course, is how each man returns to write novels far beyond
the capabilities of most sailors.
iv Moby-Dick
In the revised sesquicentennial Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick,
ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (2001), Geoffrey Sanborn
made public his discovery that Melville based Queequeg on the Maori
chief Tupai Cupa in George Lillie Craiks The New Zealanders (1830). In
yet another of his must-read articles, Whence Come You, Queequeg?
(AL 77: 22757), Sanborn boldly extends his finding to examine the
nature of the love between Ishmael and Queequeg. The New Zealanders
is a travel narrative that idealizes the relationship between Tupai Cupa
and the English captain Richard Reynolds, a friendship that develops
through many of the same incidents as Queequeg and Ishmaels. Melville
must have encountered this story while he was writing Typee because
Craik describes a fire-lighting scene precisely like the one in Melvilles
novel, and while Sanborn produces no external evidence that Melville
knew Craiks narrative, he adduces so many thematic, descriptive, and
dramatic similarities that they compel assent. Both Craik and Melville
portray an image of interracial male friendship that transcended or suspended those oppositions, Sanborn declares, and he strongly counters
Robyn Wiegmans and Benjamin DeMotts view that such friendships
usually enforce conservative values (as they do in The New Zealanders).
Rather, in Moby-Dick male interracial bonding becomes both an idealization of autonomy in friendship and an effort to use that perspective to

Dennis Berthold

65

rethink the nature of love. Where Craik uses the Maori-English friendship to serve imperial and colonial aims, Melville does just the opposite,
removing Queequeg from an actual space to Kokovoko, a mythical
island forever free from Western exploitation. Sanborn concludes with a
philosophical discourse on the nature of love in Moby-Dick as he draws
on the work of Leo Bersani to suggest that Ishmael and Queequeg
establish a sensual correspondence of forms that blends the sexual and
nonsexual in an extensive identity like the feeling Melville described
in his famous 17[?] November 1851 letter to Hawthorne. Sanborn has
again blended source study with nuanced moral inquiry to produce
an article of lasting importance. Another fine article that extends the
implications of a source is Ilana Pardess Remapping Jonahs Voyage:
Melvilles Moby-Dick and Kittos Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature (CL
57, ii: 13557). Melvilles reliance on John Kittos volume (1845) has been
long established, but Pardes hones in on the Jonah entry and shows
its centrality to Melvilles critique of biblical exegesis: If nineteenthcentury biblical scholarship followed traditional readings in construing
Jonah as a text about a repentant prophet-sinner, Melville paves the
road to postmodern reflections on the text as a critique of the unbearable discrepancy between the concept of divine justice and reality. The
Cyclopedia maintains traditional interpretations even while acknowledging the nascent higher criticism that challenges biblical literalism, a
debate that Melville dramatizes by offering multiple interpretations of
Jonah: Father Mapples conservative reading, Ishmaels parodic chapter
Jonah Historically Regarded, Pips deeply troubling experience as a
black Jonah stigmatized by slavery and racism, and Ishmaels final
convoluted identification with a redeemed Jonah. Melville duplicates
his Jonahs, as he does other biblical figures, to deny the sufficiency of
any single hermeneutic, traditional or contemporary, and so anticipates
Terry Eagletons view that the Book of Jonah is a surrealist farce. Like
Sanborn, Pardes demonstrates that Melville exploits his sources in multiple, even contradictory, ways, and that he understands their contemporary significance as well as their deeper philosophical potential. These
are two solid, well-researched articles that identify Melvilles materials
and explicate their significance.
Four articles pursue the whale in its relation to the natural world.
Philip Armstrong continues his explorations of animality in What
Animals Mean, in Moby-Dick, for Example (TexP 19: 93111), which
distinguishes three predominant modes of relating animal to human:

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animals as projections of human interests, humans as simply other animals, and animals as active agents of meaning and action. Armstrong
finds this third, less common view in Moby-Dick and believes Melville
uses it in its most sophisticated form to question the nature of agency
itself. Rather than simply granting motive to either whales or humans,
Melville disperses it among both species and the nonhuman artifacts
that make up their world. As Armstrong showed in Leviathan Is a
Skein of Networks: Translations of Nature and Culture in Moby-Dick
(AmLS 2004, p. 56), the much-maligned whaling chapters are crucial
to the narrative, in this case because each introduces one implement,
or one part of the whales body which will prove vital in the climactic confrontation, thus multiplying rather than limiting sources of
agency, an idea that conforms to Bruno Latours notion of collectives.
Armstrong offers an unusual justification for the cetological chapters,
but without providing a sounder philosophical basis for attributing
agency to the nonhuman, he could encourage mystical and allegorical
readings that require little evidence. Michaela Giesenkirchens Still
Half Blending with the Blue of the Sea: Goethes Theory of Colors
in Moby-Dick (Leviathan 7, i: 318) finds that Melvilles use of blue,
yellow, white, and black repeatedly evoke Goethes symbolic associations of these colors and their mystical convergence of epistemological
and ontological categories. Giesenkirchen acknowledges that some
of these ideas may have reached Melville through J. M. W. Turners
paintings or Emersons essays as he meditated on the relations between
noumena and phenomena, subject and object. Almost a companion
piece is Jill Barnums Melville, Lorenz Oken, and Biology: Engaging
the Long Now (Leviathan 7, ii: 4146), which positions Melville
between the ideas of the German Romantic scientist Oken and those
of the contemporary environmentalist Stewart Brand, who advocated
long-term views of nature. Melville was reading Okens Elements of
Physiophilosophy (1847) while he wrote Moby-Dick, and its specific influence is evident when Ishmael contends that the vertebrae are absolutely
undeveloped skulls, a notion straight out of Oken. Jennifer M. Wings
Defining Women in Moby-Dick, pp. 11123 in Britta Zangen, ed.,
Misogynism in Literature: Any Place, Any Time (Peter Lang, 2004),
makes the tired argument that Melville portrays women, even the nursing whales, in terms of patriarchal stereotypes that reveal his confusion
over the feminine mystique, a phrase that suggests the anachronism
of her argument.

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67

Last year I noted a resurgence of interest in C. L. R. James and his


political reading of Melville in Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways
(1953). The trend gains steam in Betsy Erkkilas Beyond the Boundaries, pp. 17798 in Mixed Bloods and Other Crosses, which places Jamess
reading of Moby-Dick in the context of 20th-century revolutionary class
politics and his personal struggle against the McCarran Act: When
critics of the left and the right were retreating from reality and history
into an aesthetics of form, symbol, romance, and myth, James seeks
to claim (or reclaim) a role for both literature and literary criticism as
forms of social action and power in the world. James created a creolized
social aesthetic that combined literary criticism with philosophy, history, economics, autobiography, and political theory and embedded a
revolutionary novel like Moby-Dick in the material and social world we
live in. Ahab and Ishmael both, in their own way, suppress the protoMarxism represented by the Pequods laboring class or crew, and literary
critics who ignore this tension obscure the novels place in todays emerging global order. It is worth noting that Bill Schwarzs C. L. R. Jamess
American Civilization (Atlantic Studies 2: 1543) finds the Trinidadian
authors Marxist analysis of Moby-Dick one of the best examples of his
methods and ideas.
A final group of short pieces probes sources, pedagogy, and authorship. Todd Prestons Moby-Dick and John Singleton Copleys Watson
and the Shark (MSEx 129: 17) carefully assembles the evidence that
makes Melvilles knowledge of the painting a near certainty and, a bit
less plausibly, suggests that it influenced the iconography and theme of
The Monkey-Rope. Juana Celia Djelal in The Shape of the Whale:
Flukes and Other Tales (Leviathan 7, ii: 4753) reviews Melvilles appropriation of contradictory myths to describe whales and finds in it a
careful disorderliness that attests to myths ambiguities. Robert Paul
Lambs Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish: Teaching Melvilles Moby-Dick in
the College Classroom (CollL 32, i: 4262) inveighs against instructors
who refuse to assign this masterwork and offers several good strategies
for teaching the novel to undergraduates, such as providing a question
guide, using The Doubloon as an example of various critical methodologies, and concluding with a list of binaries in order to discuss whether
the text affirms or denies them. Thomas L. Dumms Who Is Ishmael?
(MR 46: 398414) imaginatively reconstructs Melvilles plot by literally
identifying Pip with Ishmael, a move that focuses the novel on American
guilt for slavery and the loss of self that ensues. And Corey Thompsons

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Did Melville Write The Death Craft? (ANQ ii: 4145) reviews the
arguments for and against this question and rests his affirmative answer
on the storys verbal parallels to Moby-Dick, evidence that seems to me
slender at best.
v Later Novels
Jelena Sesnic in Melville and His Medus: A Reading of Pierre (Leviathan 7, i: 4154) finds that the novels complex sexual politics render women the agents of the male homosocial order through three
triangular relationships: Mary-Lucy-Pierre, where mother and fiance
promote patriarchal order; Isabel-Delly-Pierre, where female degradation empowers chivalry; and most important, Isabel-Lucy-Pierre, where
female sexuality at first threatens traditional gender roles but, with Isabel
posing as Pierres wife, finally succumbs to patterns of male dominance.
This latter triangulation is, of course, the most complex, and Sesnic
turns to the psychopoetics of Medusan myth to gloss the paradoxical
conflations of power and weakness in the novels female characters. Isabel, functioning both as Medusa and Beatrice Cenci, seems to destroy
Pierres male potential, yet her supernaturalism and dark romanticism
undermine her social viability and render her merely an aside in the
continuously enfolding drama of male homosocial relationships. It is
a historical irony, Sesnic concludes, which the novel partly reiterates
and at times critiques, that the most excessive element (femininity)
comes to be perceived as pivotal to the maintenance of the status-quo.
Sesnic does a good job placing Pierre within contemporary discussions
of gender and power and historicizing both its mythic allusions and its
psychological themes. Her work complements Cindy Weinsteins We
Are Family: Melvilles Pierre (Leviathan 7, i: 1940), an adapted version of her similarly titled book chapter reported on last year (AmLS
2004, p. 59).
Two lengthy yet underresearched articles contextualize Pierre in the
aesthetics and economics of its time. Aaron McClendons For Not
in Words Can It Be Spoken: John Sullivan Dwights Transcendental
Music Theory and Herman Melvilles Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (ATQ
19: 2336) links Isabels guitar playing to the popular notion that music
constituted an ideal, universal form of expression beyond the power of
words. No one promoted this view more aggressively than Dwight, who
wrote 110 musical essays in the Harbinger magazine alone and founded

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the long-lived Dwights Journal of Music in 1852. Although Philip Gura


believes Isabels music parodies sentimental culture, McClendon avers
that it invokes a number of Dwights theoretical positions about musics
ability to transcend language, to represent Truths, and ... to become
indispensable to the utterance of the full soul, an aim Melville sought
to achieve in his own art. Although there is no evidence that Melville
knew Dwight firsthand, McClendon believes Dwights ideas permeated mid-19th-century culture and offered the novelist, who was often
frustrated by the inadequacies of written language, an alternative means
of expressing the Truth that he ironically achieves with words (and
silences) in Pierre. Roger Hecht combines aesthetics with economics in
Rents in the Landscape: The Anti-Rent War in Melvilles Pierre (ATQ
19: 3750) and may be forgiven his punning title for calling attention
to the novels overt references to protests by upstate New York tenant
farmers against the feudal system of leaseholds in the mid-1840s. In
contrast to Coopers Littlepage Trilogy, which defends the landlords,
Pierre shows how the system employs picturesque discourse to mask
both the oppression felt by tenant farmers and the illegitimacy of the
land tenure system itself. The amaranth, for example, contributes to
the landscapes picturesque beauty, but it renders pastures unusable
and impoverishes the farmers. Such beauty is no more natural than
the economic system itself, and combined with an oppressive economic
regime, it creates the povertiresque, Melvilles neologism that exposes
how picturesque discourse serves the interests of power. By tackling
such a large subject Hecht skates over earlier scholarship on his topic
and generalizes more than the idea deserves; one can hope for further
investigations along these lines.
Only one article was published this year on novels after Pierre, a difficult piece by James Salazar titled Philanthropic Taste: Race and Character in The Confidence-Man (Leviathan 7, i: 5574). Taking a generally
narratological approach, Salazar argues that progressive, cosmopolitan
attempts to substitute character for race only make character into the
greatest of racializing rhetorics. He focuses on The Metaphysics of
Indian-Hating as a story that forces readers to choose between the
genocidal sincerity of the misanthrope and the philanthropic exploitations of the confidence man Frank Goodman, who claims to love
ethnic diversity but whose unreliability casts doubt on his sincerity.
Goodman has already exploited racialism in his guise as Black Guinea
and fetishized the external markers of race in his later incarnations,

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whereas the Indian-hating backwoodsman (embodied both in Colonel


Moredock and Pitch, the Missourian) embodies the American virtues
of sincerity, self-reliance, and westward movement. Largely through
complex, sometimes opaque discourse analysis, Salazar decides that the
dialectically fused figure of the genial misanthrope, a figure already
represented by the deceptive geniality of the confidence man, thus
becomes the productive figure of the coming centurys aspirations to
progressive reform.
vi Short Fiction and Billy Budd
A source study and a philosophical inquiry mark the best of this years
work on Bartleby. Steven T. Ryan in his elegantly modulated Ciceros
Head in Melvilles Bartleby the Scrivener (ELN 43: 11633) reads the
bust of Cicero that adorns the lawyers office against Ciceros The Offices,
which Melville purchased in 1849 as part of Harpers Classical Library.
When Bartleby fixates on the bust he calls attention to the Ciceronian
values that constitute his employers hegemonyhis invisible lived
reality assumed as naturaland holds them up for interrogation much
as Melville questioned other sententious advice-givers in his fiction,
from Lord Chesterfield through Benjamin Franklin to Polonius. In his
dealings with Bartleby, the lawyer struggles to balance capitalist expedience and rationality with the Ciceronian virtues of prudence, moderation, justice, and magnanimity, and despite his nominal Christianity
he actually follows Ciceros precepts more than Christs. In the lawyer
Melville does not intend to expose a hypocrite but rather to investigate
the unconscious reality of the neoclassical man, a reality that conflicts
both with its times and the lawyers personal psychology. Ryan makes
good use of a neglected source to provide a critical yet sympathetic view
of the lawyer. Alexander Cookes Resistance, Potentiality and the Law:
Deleuze and Agamben on Bartleby (Angelaki 10, iii: 7989) focuses
on the storys philosophical underpinnings by criticizing the numerous
Bartleby commentaries of Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben over
the past 12 years. Cooke shows that both theorists see Melville taking
language to its limits of individual expression or immanence but
believes that neither of them adequately considers the process of a constituted figure saying to the law: I would prefer not to. By extending
the approaches of Deleuze and Agamben to their limits, Cooke finds
that Bartlebys famous phrase opens up the field of immanence that

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is irreducible to the transcendent law and, as appropriated by Nippers


and the lawyer, performs three different events as spoken by each man:
passive resistance, the reinforcement of transcendent law, and the
actualization of transcendent law. Readers familiar with the relevant
theoretical schools will gain the most from this essay.
Two pieces on Benito Cereno promise more than they deliver but
do suggest new contexts for the story, and a third offers a brief but good
reading of its final scene. In The Politics of Perception in Herman
Melvilles Benito Cereno and Charles Johnsons Middle Passage (SAF
33: 22950) Tuire Valkeakari provides long critical summaries of generally accepted interpretations of each work to show (unsurprisingly, to
me) how both writers discover that profound political transformation
requires a thorough process of destabilizing fixed, stagnant views on
alleged Others. She notes Johnsons many borrowings from Melvilles
story but uses them only to justify comparing the two works rather
than explaining their significance to Middle Passage. Sterling Stuckey
in Atufal, Arandas Skeleton, and Moby-Dick (MR 46: 36797) pushes
slender textual evidence hard to argue that Melville based his characterization of Atufal on Journal of a Residence in Ashantee (1824) by
Joseph Dupuis. In his effort to privilege Ashanti culture as an influence
on Melvilles writings, Stuckey notes intertextual similarities between
Moby-Dick, The Encantadas, Benito Cereno, and more remote sections of Amasa Delanos A Narrative of Voyages (1817). More persuasive
is Dan Manheims Melvilles Benito Cereno (Expl 63: 15154), which
reads the final conversation between Delano and Cereno as a struggle to
restore narrative authority once its grounds have been removed by the
competing narratives of the story and the deposition. Having discovered
that their readings of events are provisional, both captains willingly
forsake individual agency in favor of providential authority in order to
retain their otherwise discredited sense of personal virtue and truth.
With the work of Harris and Samet discussed above and five more
articles discussed here, Billy Budd garners the most critical attention
of any Melville work outside of Moby-Dick. In Billy Budd and the
Politics of Prudence, pp. 930 in Democracys Literature, Dan Sabia
interrogates Veres prudence by contextualizing the term within the
competing political discourses of Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine.
Burkean theory ascribed prudenceforesight, flexibility, circumspection, decisiveness, courage, empathyto societys elite. Paine granted
it to the average citizen under the rubric of common sense. While

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Vere seems to be a prudent captain, the text repeatedly destabilizes


this characterization and exposes Veres prudence as nothing more than
politics placed in the service of power. What drives his decision to hang
Billy is not the law so much as his political conservatism and his anxiety
over having placed Billy in a situation that led to Claggarts death. To
the moment of Billys execution Vere is the agent of the very disorder he
fears. Since both the Dansker and Captain Graveling are also termed
prudent, Sabia believes that a more democratic (and presumably compassionate) form of prudence is possible. How a democratic prudence
would operate on a naval vessel in a time of war remains unexplained.
Eric Goldmans Bringing Out the Beast in Melvilles Billy Budd: The
Dialogue of Darwinian and Holy Lexicons on Board the Bellipotent
(SNNTS 37: 43042) extends Bert Benders application of Darwinian
thought to the story (AmLS 1988, pp. 5657) by cataloging the dialectic
between two conflicting languages: That of Darwinian discourse,
and that of antebellum, transcendent views of the human mind, as
in the characterization of Billy as both a blood horse and an angel
of God. This hybrid lexicon informs the debate between the surgeon
and the purser over Billys death: was his immobility a physical quirk
of nature or a transcendental act of will? Rather than resolving this
question, Goldman hopes his study will spur further inquiry into Billy
Budd s affinities with literary naturalism, a theme well developed in a
classic study Goldman overlooks, Milton Sterns The Fine-Hammered
Steel of Herman Melville (1957). Kevin Goddards Hanging Utopia:
Billy Budd and the Death of Sacred History (ArQ 61, iv: 10126)
revisits the identifications of Vere with God, of Billy with Christ, and
of Claggart with Satan by rooting them in the sacral history of the
West, particularly England and America. Early in his career, notably in
White-Jacket, Melville espoused Americas messianic role, but after the
sacrifices of the Civil War and the failure of ReconstructionGoddard makes much of the lynchings of Billy-like former slaves in the
American SouthMelville revised his views. In Billy Budd he deploys
typology and biblical archetypes ambiguously, making it impossible, for
example, to determine whether Billys death symbolizes redemption or
oblivion, an outcome that suggests Melvilles skepticism about assigning sacramental meaning. Although Goddard concludes that the storys
narrative and allusive indeterminacies leave readers locked, keyless, in
the prison of interpretation, he nonetheless finds Vere the apotheosis
of self-serving evil in Melville because he assumes the innocence of

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his own action while in fact knowing fully what he is doing. I find that
such insistence on Veres willful malice denies the ambiguities Goddard
purports to find and suggests that behind his analysis, which is particularly rich in elucidating the storys allusions, lies a conviction that sacral
history is inherently superior to some other, unstated paradigm of
historical explanation. Gorman Beauchamp in The Scorpions Suicide:
Claggarts Death in Billy Budd (MSEx 129: 710) unpacks the narrators
comparison of Claggart to a scorpion that recoils on itself to argue that
the Master-at-Arms, motivated by his evil nature, provokes Billys fatal
blow in a deliberate stratagem to commit suicide; and Martin Greenberg
in The Difficult Justice of Melville and Kleist (NewC 23, vii: 2432)
summarizes Billy Budd and Heinrich von Kleists Michael Kohlhaas,
both stories in which innocent men suffer judicial murder, and praises
the calm acceptance in Kleists tale compared to the agitation and unease
in Melvilles work. As an addendum, it is worth noting that David
Grevens article on homosociality in Billy Budd (AmLS 2003, pp.62
63) now appears as a chapter in his monograph Men Beyond Desire:
Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature (Palgrave).
vii Poetry
Except for two articles discussed here and the passing comments in
Samet, Melvilles poetry is virtually ignored this year. In Robert E.
Lee and Melvilles Politics in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of War (MSEx
128: 12, 1823) Paul M. Dowling constructs a thoughtful and wellinformed argument for Melvilles care in arranging his poems, even the
chronologically misplaced Scout Toward Aldie, a poem about guerilla
warfare. The Union Major in that poem dislikes fighting irregulars, a
position that anticipates the historical Lees opposition to prolonging the
war through guerrilla tactics. Thus the poems ideas, if not its actions,
are actually in proper historical order, and they prepare readers for the
poetic Lees plea for Northern magnanimity in the next poem, Lee
in the Capitol. Taken together, the two poems construct an unstated
argument that Lees refusal to support a continuing Southern insurgency
demands Northern generosity, precisely the argument Melville makes
in the Supplement. Dowling links poetic form, historical context, and
authorial voice in an ingenious plea for the unity of Battle-Pieces. Robert
A. Duggan Jr. in Sleep No More Again: Melvilles Rewriting of Book
X of Wordsworths Prelude (Transatlantic Romanticism: A Special Issue

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of Romanticism on the Net 3839: n.p.) focuses on The House-top and


other poems from Battle-Pieces (with a short excursus on Billy Budd) to
contrast Wordsworths gloomy romantic view of the French Revolution
with Melvilles hopeful pragmatic view of the Civil War. Duggan views
Wordsworth as an essential influence upon Melville, but because the
article relies on weak verbal echoes and then emphasizes the two poets
many prosodic and ideological differences, Duggan undermines his
own case and fails to move the discussion of Melvilles poetic affinities
forward.
Texas A&M University

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