Melville, Three Ways

The books discussed in this review take very different critical approaches to Herman Melville’s fiction. The essay collection “Whole Oceans Away,” edited by Jill Barnum, Wyn Kelley, and Christopher Sten, presents a variety of contextual or historicist approaches to understanding Melville’s time in—and use of—the Pacific in his writing. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker expand upon their earlier biographically-inflected textual investigations into the version of Pierre that they claim Melville originally intended to write, before his personal and professional disappointments compelled him to insert distracting passages on Pierre’s history of authorship. Branka Arsić offers a sustained meditation on passivity and Melville’s “Bartleby,” engaging with a range of theoretical works. Each succeeds in its own terms; yet each could benefit from some consideration of the perspectives offered by the other modes of analysis. Reading these three books together suggests that the challenge is to produce scholarship that is responsive to Melville’s own sustained theoretical meditations on the categorizations and taxonomies that structure such thinking.

“Whole Oceans Away”: Melville and the Pacific emerged from the Fourth International Melville Society Conference in Lahaina, Maui, 2003. The conference was timely, as American literary studies has been looking toward the Pacific after recent work in transatlantic and hemispheric studies has reoriented the field away from the continental borders of the nation. Melville was one of the nineteenth-century American writers most engaged with the Pacific, and thus the conference contributed to the expansion both of Melville studies and of transnational or oceanic studies more broadly. The twenty-two essays in “Whole Oceans Away” all were originally presented at the conference, and the aim in collecting them into this volume, write Barnum, Kelley, and Sten, is to explore the variety of forms taken by Melville’s “engagement with the Pacific as subject” (xviii). The book is organized into four parts with necessarily overlapping thematics: Pacific Subjects; Colonial Appropriations and Resistance; Empire, Race, and Nation; and Postcolonial Reflections. Essays focusing on Melville in relation to Hawai’i and to Japan comprise a good portion of the volume and bring a welcome attention to islands that have been critically underexamined in U.S. literary studies. These include meditations on Native Hawaiians and other Polynesians by Charlene Avallone, Amy S. Greenberg, Monica A. Ka’imipono Kaiwi, Paul Lyons, and Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo’ole Osorio as well as discussions of Japan by Ikuno Saiki and Elizabeth Schultz. (The recent special issue of Leviathan [8:3, October 2006] on “Melville and Japan” includes Saiki’s essay among other groundbreaking work.) The final essays in the volume look to Melville’s legacy in a variety of recent artistic and political events, such as W. S. Merwin’s poetry, the television show Survivor: Marquesas, and the post-9/11 war on terror.

The strongest essays in the volume speak both to Melvilleans and nonspecialists alike, and work within existing critical conversations across American literary studies. Wyn Kelley’s “Rozoko in the Pacific: Melville’s Natural History of Creation” is a standout, moving fluidly among discourses of science, religion, sexuality, race, and authorship in making a persuasive larger claim for the Pacific as “a critical ground for Melville’s subversion of a Western universe that, terrified by new scientific theories, expresses its anxiety in anthropocentric, hyper-Christian, racist, and homophobic ways.” Kelley continues, “Nowhere but in the Pacific, Melville implies, or rather beyond it, could such a radical critique safely occur” (139). Kelley’s attention to Mardi is particularly welcome, as is her astute recognition of the sea’s exemplarity in Melville’s writing as a space “where all men’s bodies eventually lay themselves down together” (152). Another compelling essay is Christopher Sten’s “‘Facts...