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3 Melville
Dennis Berthold
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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,
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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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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
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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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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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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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