SURVEY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

Handout Five

R. Bontil

Herman Melville (1819-1891)

Typee (1846); Omoo (1847); Mardi, Redburn (1849) White-Jacket: or The World in a Man-Of-War (1850); Moby-Dick (1851); Pierre: The Ambiguities (1852); The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857); Short-stories: Benito Cereno; The Encantadas; Billy Budd (1922); Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853).
A romantic character > a wanderer (physically and spiritually); a rebel/nonconformist; a threshold man (living at the intersection of several opposing worlds). Melville possesses the art of fusing fact and symbol, conferring mystic stature to an old occupation, the whale hunt, transforming mans plunder of nature into the struggle to fulfill humanitys potential under conditions threatening apocalyptic destruction. He is an intertextualist and parodist > Shakespeares plays etc.; telescoping genres (essay, poetry, scientific article, magazine article, philosophic writing). Literature, for Melville, is the great Art of Telling the Truth and you must have plenty of sea-room to tell the truth in (Hawthorne and His Mosses, 1846). Moby-Dick can be read at different levels of perception, as a: (a) thrilling adventure story: a Pacific whalehunt; (b) work of metaphysics: a fictional journey, at once reflexive and self-reflexive; (c) parable of journeying to the brink of the unknowable through heavy symbolism. Here are some elements of Melvilles symbolical mappings: the sea > a microcosm of life; Ahab, the ungodly old man > a vengeful American Faust, with an ancestry in the over-reaching figures created by Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Milton; Moby-Dick, the white whale > both actual, literal creature pursued by a literal Nantucket whaler and crew, and the staff of legend, the opposing other; the non-self/nature, the source of endless etymologies, extracts, loomings (Ishmaels potentous and mysterious monster; Ahabs inscrutable malice; Gabriels Shaker God incarnated; Starbucks poor dumb beast); a source of all light and energy, of all mankinds truths and languages; Ishmael > a Narcissus, an isolato who withholds his name (Call me Ishmael) in favour of the pseudonym of a classic Biblical outcast; the manner of story-telling as embodied in Ishmael, full of double-talk, detached and involved at the same time, forces us to look long and deep into the mirroring face of the sea; illusion of polyphony (Bakhtins many-voicedness) > to create a vision of human society dominated by the dialogue and play between voices and utterances: the ruminations of Ishmael; the Shakespearean idiom of Ahab; the mock antiquarianism whereby whaling is classified in Folios and Aquarios>> the whale as text and the text as whale; the essentially intertextual quality of the novel >> Melvilles practice of double-voiced discourse: all utterances contain within themselves the dialogic force of competing interpretations, definitions, social and ideological inflections; light > (1) literal meaning = whale blubber (fat for the oil which brought light to America; (2) figurative meaning = i.e. the light, as Ishmael suggests, which will illuminate no less than each and all of the elusive, often contradictory, hieroglyphics of Truth; method of designing such intricate architecture revealed by the author through Ishmaels observation: There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method. peritexts introducing the twin personae of A Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School then a SubSub-Librarian whereby Melville exhibits his Etymology and Extracts (two bold playful sequences emphasizing the proliferative references in Literature and the Bible occasioned by the Leviathan; Chapter 1, Loomings > weaving, the process of making a text, things seen dimly at a distance: The great flood-gates of the wonder world swung open and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, Ishmael confides in the last paragraph of Loomings; Melvilles real method: to make things equally equivocal, ambiguous (see the picture in the carpet, Ishmaels attention is captured by in the Spouter-Inn); Queequeg > embodies the very textual spirit of Moby-Dick through his elusive beliefs, practices, even identity/origin (in Kokovoko, an island far away to the west and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.

Key words/ideas and useful quotes: