MLA Abstracts

MLA 2005–Washington, DC

“Melville: The Aesthetic Turn”Chair: Geoffrey Sanborn, Bard College

For quite a while now, the questions we have asked about Melville’swork have tended to come in two varieties: the first cultural/historical/political; the second philosophical/ethical/psychoanalytic. The idea be-

hind this panel was not to displace either of these categories of questions but tostress a third category of question: the aesthetic. Aesthetic questions have beenenjoying a revival in literary studies over the last decade or so; witness GeorgeLevine’s Aesthetics and Ideology, Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois’sClose Reading, Susan Wolfson and Marshall Brown’s special issue of ModernLanguage Quarterly on “Reading for Form,” Christopher Castiglia and RussCastronovo’s special issue of American Literature on “Aesthetics and the End(s)of Cultural Studies,” and Michael Berube’s The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies.Some of the aesthetic questions that it’s possible to imagine asking of Melville’swork are: What kinds of things provoke aesthetic responses from him? Howdoes he respond to the inherent ambiguities of the aesthetic, i.e., its locationin the subject and the object, its capacity to promote ideology and critique?What kind of relationship is there between his aesthetics, his philosophy, andhis politics? Where might we now re-place the aesthetic, in relation to currentmodes of theoretical and political critique, and how might he help us find thatplace? These are some of the questions that were addressed in the papers for thepanel and in the response offered by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (Yale), each ofwhich suggested the richness of aesthetics as a starting point for investigationsof Melville’s work.

C© 2006 The AuthorsJournal compilation C© 2006 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc

L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 123

E X T R A C T S

“A Squeeze of the Invisible Hand:Materialist Aesthetics and Capitalism in Moby-Dick”Paul GilmoreCalifornia State University, Long Beach

“ASqueeze of the Hand” may not, at first, seem to have much todo with aesthetics, especially given Ishmael’s dismissal of thefancy (as well as the intellect) in favor of the heart, an indication

we should take his use of the word “sentimentally” seriously. But rather thanoffering a sentimental account of people linked together through a divinely-implanted, natural tendency to sympathize with others—as Adam Smith doesin both A Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations—Melville, through-out most of the novel, emphasizes either the impossibility or the dangersof such projective sympathy. In placing this scene where he does in thenarrative, Melville refuses to cloister the possibility of human connection fromthe material senses or from the brutality and destruction of the commercialenterprise the Pequod has undertaken. He insists on this connection takingplace through the production of a commodity, as the dream of squeezing intoone another only emerges through the work of making a merchandisable good.In this way, Melville explores the aesthetic’s potential, as Terry Eagleton putsit, to represent “the first stirrings of a primitive materialism—of the body’slong inarticulate rebellion against the tyranny of the theoretical.” He begins todelineate the way that material objects, commodities, might enable the individ-ual to hold the self and the other in tension, revealing both the embeddednessof aesthetics in capitalist development and its potential to challenge bourgeoisideologies of the interested, possessive self.

“Melville and the Aesthetics of Freedom”John StaufferHarvard University

The paper explores the aesthetics of freedom in Moby-Dick from threeperspectives: as it relates to Ishmael and his friendship with Queequeg;Ahab’s quest to vanquish the whale; and the reinterpretations of the

novel by two contemporaries, a black man and a white woman. All threeperspectives draw on the sublime, an aesthetic that greatly influenced Melville.

For Melville, the sublime could be used to break down racial barriers;it was a black aesthetic, among other things; and Ishmael’s friendship withQueequeg highlights the power that a sublime black vision—in the form of a

124 L E V I A T H A N

A B S T R A C T S

racialized “Other”—can have over a white subject and narrator. Ahab’s sublimevision dominates the entire crew of the Pequod. And the sublime novel upliftedsome readers, enabling them to respond creatively to the text. The blackabolitionist and intellectual, James McCune Smith, and Clara Guernsey, a pop-ular writer and reformer from Rochester, New York, creatively reinterpretedMelville’s sublimity in Moby-Dick. Guernsey, who published six novels andnumerous stories in well-known magazines, was a friend of the Senecas andeventually became an adopted member of their tribe. Two of her novels, TheMerman and the Figure Head (1871) and The Shawnee Prisoner (1876) vividlyreveal Melville’s influence on her as a writer; and The Merman and the FigureHead is the most sustained engagement with Moby-Dick in the Civil War era. Init Guernsey transforms Moby-Dick into a domestic tale of interracial romance;and she focuses on and gives voice to characters who are silent in Moby-Dick:the white whale and sea creatures, especially the protagonist, a merman, wholives in a republican society of mer-people off the coast of Massachusetts,whose fancy for humans is his undoing.

“From Typee to Clarel: ‘Across the Chasm’”Samuel OtterUniversity of California, Berkeley

Neither persistent critical narratives of decline or exhaustion norMelville’s weariness with his typecasting as “the man who livedamong the cannibals” should obscure the importance of Typee in the

epic reflections of Clarel. In Clarel, Melville rewrites his Marquesan encoun-ters. Memories of Nuku Hiva mark the terminus of the poet’s pilgrimage inthe Holy Land. When critics do avoid a narrative of loss in moving from Typeeto the poetry, they tend to interpret Melville’s Pacific depictions as retrievinga balance or repose associated with the South Seas. I would like to suggestsomething different: that the Marquesas continue to disorient and surprise andthat these effects are valued, maybe given the highest value, by the poet.

Tommo’s view of Nuku Hiva at the beginning of Chapter 7—the ascentthat gives access to gaps, the line of sight that turns out to be composed ofprecipitous ridges—seems to have made a deep impression on Melville. Muchof the pleasure and the challenge of reading Typee and Melville’s other proseand poetry involves the longing to, as Tommo puts it, stride “from summit tosummit” and the necessity of heeding gaps. Melville continually figures suchinterrupted rhetorical advances. In Moby-Dick, the narrator describes both thecourse of the ship and an experience of reading: “The strange, upheaving,

A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 125

E X T R A C T S

lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling the hollows of so many sails, madethe buoyant, hovering deck to feel like air beneath the feet, while still sherushed along, as if two antagonistic influences were struggling in her—one tomount direct to heaven, the other to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal.”In “The Conflict of Convictions (1860-61),” from Battle-Pieces, the speakerdescribes both the “scheme of Nature” as it unfolds through time and theoften jagged meter and strained syntax of Melville’s poetics: “I know a wind inpurpose strong–/It spins against the way it drives.” Melville first marks thesecomplicated motions in the views of Typee, and he associates them, especiallyin Clarel, with his experience in the Marquesas.

To attend to Melville’s verbal terrain is not to deny his interventionsand implications in politics, theology, or sexuality but to insist that how theseinvolvements unfold in language is crucial for understanding them. In Typee,the narrator’s sense of having the ground under his feet disturbed and hisperspectives altered is expressed through a burgeoning interest in turns andhistories of phrase, the shape of figures, and the movements from word toword. In Clarel, in the cantos “Rolfe and the Palm,” “The Prodigal,” and theEpilogue, poetry allows Melville to explore his landscapes of belief with preci-sion, to use the resources of meter and rhyme to examine diction, etymology,syntax, and trope. In both texts, protagonists and readers experience a persis-tent, curious, unsettling passage across a discontinuous verbal landscape. Onecan overstate such stylistic differences, but one also can understate them, and,in understating, fail to appreciate the distinct contributions and complicationsa writer poses.