The Revival

The Melville Revival has become an iconic event in American literary history, and I won't even try to discuss all the debates over it that I have read (or, at the very least, perused). Suffice it to say that Melville went from being a minor mention (how minor to be debated) in America's literary history to a grand central figure of the 19th century by the mid-1920s, and that this revival of interest in him began slowly and surreptitiously somewhere in, depending on who you talk to, the parlors of Paris, academies by rivers, or the hotel lounges and walk-ups of New York in the teens. The telling and retelling and examining and rexamining and debunking and rebunking of the elements of the story is an important part of today's Melville industry. But the immediate impact of the revival, besides the development of more contemporary forms of torment for young students to replace the dwindling interest in beating them repeatedly with Latin copies of the Aeneid, was a raft of fairly interesting books. Let's look at a few.

Raymond Weaver is always mentioned first. His 1921 biography of Melville, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic, is still in print, and still reads well. Even if most of the biographical details are subject to debate and questioning, the book has held up well. Much of Weaver's detail can be glossed or expanded or the basis of the his opinions and biases questioned, but he generally did his work well and the core narrative remains fluent, interesting and useful. Weaver was also responsible for the first publication of Billy Budd in 1924 as part of an edition of the Complete Works of Herman Melville put out by the London publisher Constable. Weaver, however much he desired to do a complete biography and collect the complete works, was completely entralled by Moby Dick and less overwhelmed by Melville's other work; indeed, his narration of Melville's tragic decline has been persistent, and we are still reviving Melville's later works.

Another work that helped secure the broader reputation of Melville and Moby Dick was D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature, also still in print and likely to be Lawrence's most lasting and significant contribution to literature. Lawrence is quite animated in the book, and includes an interesting chapter on Typee and Omoo as well as one on Moby Dick. Lawrence begins another grand tradition: that of Melville as inspiration for critical works with no small literary virtue of their own, a tradition that reaches its height in Charles Olson's eclectic Call Me Ishmael, where Olson's critical discussion spontaneously bursts out in verse in several places. It is worth a little quote from Lawrence to see how Melville inspires him:

But it is a great book, a very great book, the greatest book of the sea ever written. It moves awe in the soul.

The terrible fatality.

Fatality.

Doom.

Doom! Doom! Doom! Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America. Doom!

Doom of what?

Doom of our white day. We are doomed, doomed. And the doom is in America. The doom of our white day.

Ah, well, if my day is doomed, and I am doomed with my day, it is something greater than I which dooms me, so I accept my doom as a sign of the greatness which is more than I am.

Melville knew. He knew his race was doomed. His white soul, doomed. His great white epoch doomed. Himself, doomed. The idealist, doomed: The spirit, doomed.

The reversion. 'Not so much bound to any haven ahead, as rushing from all havens astern.'

That great horror of ours! It is our civilization rushing from all havens astern.

The last ghastly hunt. The White Whale.

What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature.

Such Marvelous, Beautiful, Strange Bombast! Lawrence outdoes himself, and part of the fun of a good Whale obsession is seeing some of the literary figures and critics who go virtually mad with glee at this odd book.

Two other books from the 1920s revival worthy of mention are Carl Van Doren's The American Novel early in the decade and Lewis Mumford's Herman Melville: A Study of His Life and Vision late in the decade.

The revival continued to gather steam, slowly extending to Melville's other works; in 1945 Robert Penn Warren somewhat carefully and reluctantly recognized a kernal of genius in Melville's poetry in his essay "Melville the Poet", still available in his New and Selected Essays; Elizabeth Foster rescued The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade in the late forties and early fifties, ultimately coming out with a new edition in 1954 from Hendricks House as part of a broader Melville publishing project; and Bruce Franklin elevated Mardi to a central place in the Melville pantheon in his 1963 The Wake of the Gods. Beginning in the 1960s, the Northwestern-Newberry complete scholarly edition begins coming out at a laconic pace, providing the foundations for the vibrant Melville industry of today. Indeed, fetishizing Melville's more obscure work has become so fashionable that Harold Bloom even added Clarel to his The Western Canon.

Of useful false dichotomies

Critics seem to split into two camps: those who read Moby Dick as part of the Western tragic tradition, a camp that notably includes Charles Olson and Hershal Parker, and those that read Moby Dick as part of a legendary epic tradition, a camp whose strongest voice is Bruce Franklin, the student of the group's founder, Yvor Winters. These camps do love to spar.

The first camp begins with Shakespeare, and when you begin there, really, how far do you ever need to travel? They generally see Melville (and his friend, Hawthorne) facing a fundamental problem: how do you write tragedy, which is dependent on having grand characters whose fall carries weight and so fitting for societies filled with nobles and royals, in a Jacksonian leveling democracy? I will confess, I find it baffling how this could be a problem. One need only look to General Jackson for a grander-than-life figure with tragic implications in a Jacksonian democracy: there is an Ahabian cast to the fellow. Moreover, Melville lived in a world where romantics agag at the sublimity of the American frontier coexisted with practical settlers continually afear of the endless dangers there. And, as if we need yet more tragedy for a young democracy to handle, he wrote during the decade when slavery was showing its local obstinancy even as much of the rest of the world had retreated from it a generation or two before, and the civil war loomed on the horizon, increasingly undeniable and as grand a tragedy as could be imagined. It doesn't seem hard to find tragic subjects in that place and time, though, still, it seems not just a noble but a very useful and practical goal to fashion a true American tragedy in such a world, a tragedy which might even provide a bit of a survival manual for such a world. This camp of critics has a particular fascination with Ahab and his drama; for them the Whale seems vastly less of a character than Ahab, a mere foil rather than a subject of its own. Ahab, however, is the incarnation of every Shakespearian tragic hero, from Lear and Cesar and Anthony right on, with several of the historical figures thrown in.

The second camp seeks all over the edges of the watery parts of the globe for answers to where the inspiration came for the epic legend that is Moby Dick, and almost seems to merge in the Whale all the shadowy looming figures of the world's legends. For this camp, the Whale is as much at the center of the book as Ahab; the book has two demi-gods entwined in a divine and fatal minuette. They find answers from the Ancients of India, Israel and Egypt, from Milton, from everywhere where man contemplates unknowables and unapproachables, horrible, divine and both. For this camp, those long chapters on Whales and Whaling loom large and the philosophical asides become central.

Let us consider the tragedians our strings and the mythologists our brass, and see what music we can make. I will be musing more on both camps.

Melville and My Critics

Melville hated the critics and, for the most part, they hated him. Thanks to Kevin Hayes and Hershel Parker, we have a whole book that is a Checklist of Melville Reviews, and many of the contemporaneous reviews are available on-line, at
http://www.melville.org/estimate.htm, in particular.

Melville did not live to see the emergence of the Melville industry we have today, and one wonders if he would have softened at all in his hostility toward the critics. He certainly yearned for admiration and praise; it is written all over his letters to Hawthorne and all of the other letters and writings collected by the Parker and Harrison Hayford in the Northwestern-Newberry edition of his Correspondence and Journals. But he also did not suffer fools lightly, and had little truck for those who were not "deep, deep, deep".

In the industry that has emerged, endless academic squabbling often seems to occur over how one "solves" Moby Dick. Several keys to the solution are suggested. Careers are built on their advocacy.

Parker and Hayford, in their commentary in the Northwestern-Newberry Moby Dick and elsewhere, each are fond of explaining much through the analysis of textual irregularities: their discussion of "doubles", places where there is unnecessary duplication of material, and "hide-outs", places where a character who logically ought to be in the mix is not,is at least fascinating, even if it ultimately adds little to my personal appreciation and understanding of the book. These theories are related to their broader speculation that Moby Dick was the combination of two different book projects, and that Melville began writing the book conceiving of the captain as Blakenship and later grafting Ahab to an already growing stock. Likewise, they speculate that Queequeg came to occupy a position of importance only as the conception of the book changed midstream, and that at first he was but part of a Savage Chorus of three and not a boon companion to Ishmael.

Parker and Hayford also are fond of imposing an extraordinary level of what I call Shakespeare-determinism on the book, seeing at the core of Moby Dick an attempt by the ship-wright to virtually mimic the play-wright. This is a popular "key" to Moby Dick; they are hardly the only ones pushing this approach, and some of it comes from the wonderful Call Me Ishmael of Charles Olson (of which more anon). Bruce Franklin's counterproposal of the Isis/Osiris myth as the critical core of the book is a refreshing anti-dote, even if he comes perilously close to overplaying his hand in positing it as an alternative "solution".

As I approach the critics, Franklin, Olson, Yvor Winters, and a few others are my heros (even if Olson actively aspired to Ahabian anti-hero status and even if Winters said few things with which I actually agree). Each is a writer who I think fundamentally gets Moby Dick and helps us in our reading. These guys are "My Critics", and you can expect to hear more of them as we read.

As to Parker and Hayford, well, I really don't think they are sub-subs merely compiling random bits that shed little light; they are more simple sub-librarians, a step above the lowly sub-subs, finding information that is at least relevant if not always revealing. What is their fundamental flaw? How do we solve them?

I think in each case they don't fully get this book at the meta- level at which Melville dwelt; before diving in to figure out his meaning, that is, the fundamental theology of the book, one must pause to reflect on Melville's epistemology, and I think this book is at least as much epistemology as theology. The theology that some critics try to solve is all obscured by the biases of each of Melville's characters (including the author) and each of Melville's constructs. Cetology is a wonderful expample, where in classifying whales the learned Cetologists focus so heavily on commercial and gastronomic aspects. Part of that theology emerges from needs and desires of the characters: what do they need to see in the Whale, and what do they need in Ahab. In many ways, the book contains an homage to the yet-undiscovered uncertainty principle, and is thus purposefully insolvable. The critic who doesn't get this becomes but a librarian or a cetologist; the critic who gets it joins Melville at the Treadle of the Loom.