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New age Melville

Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 1998 by Robbins, Fred W

Herman Melville died in 1891, and during the centennial year of his death, a number of conferences on his life and work were held, in such fitting places as New York City and the Berkshires. As John Bryant notes in his "The Persistence of Melville," introducing his Melville's Ever-Moving Dawn: Centennial Essays, no suitable venue at sea could be found, and thus the opportunity for a true test of the nature of the New Historicism's "embeddedness" was lost. We will just have to get by with the novels, stories, poems and essays. Unfortunately, there are many who will insist on reading books about Melville's novels rather than the novels, and they will read essays about his essays, but not his essays. These books from the Press at Kent State are a result of the flurry of scholarly activity generated by the centennial of Melville's death.

More Articles of Interest: paradox of slave mutiny in Herman Melville, Charles Johnson, and Frederick...; Melville's debt to Milton: Inverted satanic morphology and rhetoric in the...; Dusky comments of silence: language, race and Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno."; Other Ghosts: Gothicism and the Bonds of Reason in Melville, Chesnutt, and...; Melville's "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids": a dialogue...

The first important generation of Melville critics came along in the fifties-Newton Arvin, Leon Howard, Perry Miller, Hershel Parker, Harrison Hayford, Willard Thorp and others. Parker and Hayford, along with G. Thomas Tanselle, are finishing one of the most important scholarly projects in American letters, the Northwestern-Newberry project which gives us all Melville's writings in authoritative texts, and all the extant documents about Melville in useful and well organized form. These are the critics-along with a notable few additions, such as Robert Penn Warren-who showed us that Melville is a canny craftsman, a metaphysician, a writer given to pondering on doubleness and ambiguity, and thus someone worthy of serious consideration by twentieth century readers whose sensibilities were honed on Joyce and Eliot.

What new critical insights-as opposed to theoretical hobbyhorse riding-have we achieved since the eminent, thorough and careful scholarship of this generation? Certainly, the Northwestern-Newberry scholars, along with such students of Melville as Howard P. Vincent, have set a very high standard for textual scholarship. Thanks to the efforts of this founding generation of scholars, we know about as much of Melville's tumultuous emotional life as we are ever likely to learn. Yet as Coleridge said of Chaucer, there is "God's plenty" here, in Melville's subtle imagination, and many of the young critics represented by these new Kent State Press books have done very well by that plenty.

John Bryant and Robert Milder are the editors of The EverMoving Da^zn: Centennial Essays. The range of its contents suggests continuing interest in the problems of Melville criticism and scholarship by historicists, rhetorical critics, reader-response critics, biographical and psychological critics, textual scholars and editors Relatively new are the essays by those whose interest is particularly political, who focus on issues of race, politics and imperialism, yet they are certainly the weakest pieces in the book. We see Arnold Rampersad struggle mightily to ride his dark hobbyhorse all the way across the library from Babo to Bigger Thomas. Parallels are not proof; here, they are not even coherent theory. The old sixties Stanford campus radical H. Bruce Fran:klin, whose photo with rifle in hand once graced the front pages of newspapers, argues very predictably that only the race riots and protests of the Vietnam War period have enabled us to read "Benito Cereno" properly, as a comment on the relationship of imperialism, slavery, and racism in America. But this is the sort of thing one expects, as the last helicopters out of the sixties finally begin to run out of gas.

What is encouraging and surprising is what is not here. I see no doctrinaire poststructuralist readings, no strident feminist exhortations, no hints, beyond the very subtle, of deconstructionism, no significant invoking of the French muses (except for editor Bryant). Indeed, one sees fairly coherent readings based on genre criticism, myth and archetypal criticism, reasonable biographical commentary, and (dare one say it? ) some excellent close reading of the formalist sort. The collection is refreshingly free of cant and ideology. Even the avowed New Historicist, Wai Chee Dimock, offers what she calls an alternative to new historicism's insistence on "imbeddedness." The essay reminds me of the broader forma.list approaches:

The accumulating resonances of a text, its subtle shifts in nuance and accent, are a tribute, then, to the socialness of language, to the unending conversations of humanity over time. Inflected by these conversations, inflected by the historical life of language-a life at once more ancient and more recent than any locatable circumstance-the very linguistic character of a text must make it permeable in time, polyphonic over time, its resonances activated and reactivated by each new relation, each mutating meaning. (101)

I prefer Roy Harvey Pearce's eloquent statement, in The Continuity of American Poetry, that he is interested in "the history that poems make, rather than the history of the making of poems," but the point is almost identical.

New age Melville

Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 1998 by Robbins, Fred W

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