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  • 3 Melville
  • Dennis Berthold

Moby-Dick remains Melville's most widely discussed work, but the poetry gains ground in one book on all the published poems and another dedicated to Clarel. Melville's epic poem receives additional attention in three lengthy articles. "Bartleby" and "Benito Cereno" continue to attract insightful critics with well-developed arguments, and Typee, especially its ambiguous and evocative encounter with cannibalism, remains the most popular early novel. Except for Pierre and one good analysis of Israel Potter, Melville's other novels largely disappear from this year's scholarship. Cultural studies critics find new ways of relating Melville's writings to contemporary economic, environmental, social, and ethical issues, an approach that has given new life to the Marxist critic C. L. R. James: he seems to be cited more today than at any time in the past 30 or 40 years as Melville is enlisted as a critic of capitalism and democracy.

i General

The most significant critical book of the year is Edgar Dryden's Monumental Melville: The Formation of a Literary Career (Stanford). A more helpful title would have included the words "published poetry," for three-quarters of the book offers close, often brilliant readings of Battle Pieces, Clarel, John Marr and Other Sailors, and Timoleon. The first quarter of the book, a dense discussion of form in Melville's fiction from Moby-Dick through The Confidence-Man, traces Melville's increasing [End Page 51] dissatisfaction with prose as a medium for speaking the truth and achieving the aims of a shared, national literary discourse. Melville's growing interest in the "epitaphic and the monumental," evident in symbolic figures like Bulkington, Pierre's Memnon Stone, and the Tombs in "Bartleby" peaks in his dedication of Israel Potter to the Bunker Hill Monument. Dryden devotes 20 pages to this neglected novel because he regards it as a significant turning point in Melville's literary career for its demystification of America's self-serving myths. For example, Melville substitutes the savage John Paul Jones for George Washington as "the type of the nation," creating a national "counternarrative" that "through the force of figure both evokes and erases the boundaries that define nation-space." Such figurative excess leads directly to the narrative skepticism of The Confidence-Man, where plot, language, and, most important, character give way to deliberate deception, confusion, and instability, essentially making fiction impossible. Hence Melville turns to poetry not out of desperation but from a deep desire to find more meaningful forms to express universal truths. Dryden makes abundant use of recent scholarship that identifies Melville's debts to the British tradition in poetry, notably Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Gray, and Tennyson and offers rich intertextual readings that stress Melville's meditations on prophecy, mortality, and contingency rather than history or ideology. Dryden employs poststructuralist hermeneutics lightly and effectively in several discussions. He finds that characters, such as John Brown in "The Portent" or the pilgrims in Clarel, "become purely textual entities" who move in a verbal world of literary echoes from the Bible through the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a world that both evokes and critiques literary tradition in an ironic, allusive, challenging intertextuality. Biography too comes into play as Dryden explains how the autobiographical impulses that drive John Marr and Timoleon restore the exhausted poet by memorializing lost comrades and meditating on age, death, and history itself. As the personal intertwines with time, history, and art, the poet attains a kind of immortality through his literary efforts. John Marr and Timoleon, Dryden contends, are carefully arranged collections with high artistic merit, ironic yet earnest monuments to Melville's recognition that a literary career—by which I assume Dryden means a commercial, public occupation as a writer—works against the best interests of a truth-telling literature, one that exists in a universe of language and textuality apart from the constraints of its own time and place and strives to free itself from material forces that [End Page 52] constantly threaten such aspirations. Artistic and intellectual idealism drove Melville toward poetry, Dryden believes, and the published poems constitute a complex body of work that resonates with the best of the English tradition in poetry...

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