New age Melville

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.

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.

There is still, unfortunately, the obligatory (and one hopes insincere) jousting about "dead white males." Everybody religiously avoids i-he word great. Everybody is being scrupulously multicultural, ;,training in almost every essay for some way to compare Melville to, God help us, Toni Morrison, or even to Harriet Beecher Stowe. (In what must surely be a fit of political correctness, editor Bryant asserts that Pip is the "center" of MobyDick.) In his introductory overview essay,John Bryant goes out of his way to refight such skirmishes in the canon wars as the one relating to Melville's "gayness." I suppose Bryant is merely trying to be current, but this is a ridiculous waste of print and paper. The evidence for Melville's alleged homosexuality appears to be only in his famous letter to Hawthorne declaring devotion, and the facit that there is no other evidence. Indeed, the lack of evidence is posited as proof of Melville's closeted status. Poor boy, his wife and children would not let him come out and play. To do so, he would have had to go through the looking glass. By this line of reasoning (and I use the term loosely), one might argue that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the USSR are proof of the continuing power of Marxist ideology. Lenin lives (at Stanford and Harvard) !

With relief and seeking more reason to have hope for the profession, one turns to Christopher Sten's Sounding the Whale, which is the chapter on Moby-Dick from his excellent 1996 study, The Weaver-God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel, also from Kent State University Press. What a nice piece of work this, is. What a useful little book for students, a coherent and consistent extended essay on the structure of Moby-Dick through an orderly analysis of its major scenes, applying genre criticism in the sense that the analysis is all about the epic. Sten is adroit in the use of archetypal criticism, and his understanding (and occasional explanation) of the relevant notions of Eliade,Jung, and Joseph Campbell is always appropriate and clear. As is fitting for such an approach, Sten's interpretation is synthetic, an overview of the major themes of the novel blended with sharp insights into particular scenes. He focuses on the major symbols of the novel-for instance, the quest, the anatomy olf the whale, the doubloon, the compass, the masthead, the crew's racial identity.

Christopher Sten's analysis is a very good example of the best of the Ishmael-centered school of Moby-Dick criticism. Since mid-century, this psychologistic theory of the novel has been growing in importance, challenging the old reading, which focused on the drama of Ahab's challenge to God and Nature. One might call the old theory Shakespearean, since it assumed that the issues of tragedy are important in the analysis of the book. Sten assumes that the novel is about what Ishmael does and does not know, understand and learn. It's about ontology, metaphysics. Ishmael is one of the thousand faces of Joseph Campbell's epic hero. The novel about his archetypal quest is "a religious text, a world-redeeming epic" (82), as Sten's conclusion puts it.

Other than The Weaver-God, He Weaves, Mr. Sten's previous major contribution to Melville studies is his editing of a rather ingenious collection of essays using an interdisciplinary combination of literary studies and art history, Savage Eye: Melville and the Visual Arts (Kent State UP, 1991). It should serve as a precedent and context for Douglas Robillard's Melville and the Visual Arts: Ion;,an Form, Venetian Tint (the subtitle is a line from Claret); both books instruct us as to Melville's dedication to painting, sculpture and architecture. In fact, Robillard has an essay in Savage Eye. For the use of most students of Melville, Mr. Sten's Savage -Eye is a much better treatment of the topic of Melville and art, because of its general nature. The collection of essays in Savage Eye presents a panorama; for example, it contains the excellent essay by Gail Coffler, "Classical Iconography in the Aesthetics of Billy Budd, Sailor, " from which we learn how fully Melville had come to appreciate Praxitelean sculpture and its Roman imitations. Melville knew that dual informing results from mixing art and literature, thus achieving mutual enrichment.

Robillard's specialized but very incisive argument is that the parallel use of plastic and literary arts is an approach sanctioned by classical and by Romantic usage. He is particularly interesting when he discusses Wordsworth, Heine, Irving and Hawthorne. He argues that Ishmael's imagination is not only dramatic but also ekphrastic, continually alluding to the plastic arts, and to the ways in which painters see as opposed to the ways in which contemplative, depressed sailors-landlocked, and with the hypos-see. Any reader who remembers Ishmael's struggles with presenting "a true picture of the whale" is certainly familiar with the pictorial aspects of Melville's imagination. Pictorial description is one of the confusing, frustrating but fascinating aspects of Moby-Dick, and also of Typee, White Jacket and Redburn. Its absence irritates many readers of The Confidence Man. Robillard's is a narrow book, but clear and direct in its approach to an esoteric issue. Its single flaw, apart from some rather elliptical discussion of the later poems, is the scarcity of illustrations-no small problem, given the topic-no doubt owing to the great expense of reproduction.

Finally, the only real point to all this Melville commentary and new publication is to assert for another generation of readers and students the fact that Melville is a rich, deep (and great) writer. In many of his works, notably in his Civil War poems, Battle Pieces (1866), Melville demonstrates that he is not ideology bound. Even though it is clear that he disapproves of secession and slavery, still he takes notice in his poems of the simple humanity of Confederates. As another generation has discovered, his is a complex sensibility, an ambiguous mind. In his late poems, as Douglas Robillard points out in his discussion of "Art" in Timoleon, Melville asserts his belief that contradictions-patience and energy, humility and pride, love and hate, audacity and reserve-can be resolved (174). It is a lesson for our time:

These must mate,

And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart,

To wrestle with the Angel-Art.

Christopher Sten. Sounding the Whale: Moby-Dick as Epic Novel Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP, 1996. 92 pp. Paper $9.50.

John Bryant and Robert Milder, editors. Melville's Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays. Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP, 1997. 419 pp. Cloth $45.00.

Douglas Robillard. Melville and the Visual Arts: Ionian Form, Venetian Tint. Kent, Ohio: Kent State UP, 1997. 205 pp. Cloth $32.00.

Copyright Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville Summer 1998
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