Savage Eye: Melville and the Visual Arts ed. by Christopher Sten (review)

104Rocky Mountain Review CHRISTOPHER STEN, ed. Savage Eye: Melville and the Visual Arts. Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1991. 338 p. 1 he relationship of literature to the visual arts is one that urgently requires the attention of contemporary theorists of art and literature, especially at a time when many contemporary critics might reasonably argue that such attention of late has been readily forthcoming—even that such attention has perhaps become orthodox. Nothing could be more untrue. The relation of the visual arts to literature—or of visual art to figurative language as a whole, including the languages of "criticism"—gets by all but unexamined , particularly in historicist studies that proclaim to address this relation in the most researched and exhaustive terms. Christopher Sten's book, Savage Eye: Melville and the Visual Arts, is an important contribution to Melville studies. Sten's collection examines the influence that visual arts had on Melville's literary aesthetic, and specifically looks at Melville's readings on art, his knowledge of architecture, the place of the visual "picturesque" in his work, his aesthetics of the sublime, his interest in Dutch painting, the influence of classical iconography on his writing, and more. Each of the fourteen essays reconstructs some encounter Melville had with the visual arts, speculates about other possible encounters, and finds evidence in the texts of Melville or in records of his extensive travels to support its claims. As Sten writes in his overview, criticism needs "to reassess not only the whole question of Melville's 'sources,' which even most specialists continue to think of in strictly literary terms, but also . . . the question ofMelville's use ofthe other arts in his own work" (3). The book covers Melville's researches into the visual arts in New York, Boston, Albany, and throughout Europe, and spends considerable time examining not only major works such as Moby-Dick and Billy Budd, but also Israel Potter, The Confidence Man, Timoleon, and others. A fine list of illustrations supplements the various essays; works by J. M. W. Turner, Honoré Daumier, Adrian Brouwer, Frans Hals, Gaetano Guilio Zummo, Claude Gellée de Lorrain—as well as a reproduced bust ofAntinous—to name but a few, appear throughout the text. Most interesting, perhaps, among the essays are Sten's fine introduction to the volume, Douglas Robillard's study of Melville's reading on the visual arts, Wyn Kelley's study of Melville and John Vanderlyn, and John M. J. Gretchko's discussion of the sublime—with its inventive play on the terms "subliminal" and "sublimated"—as it figures in Melville's work in comparison with Thomas Cole's The Notch ofthe White Mountains. Dennis Berthold's essay "Melville and Dutch Genre Painting" addresses Melville's art poem "At the Hostelry" in a way that associates his interest in "domestic and fraternal values" (37) with a tradition of Dutch painting; this essay suggests that paintings provided the material foreground for certain ideological notions that recur in Melville's work, notions that cannot be reduced to literary recastings of the Romantic "picturesque." Where the book traces how Melville's precise historical involvement with the visual arts produced ideological attitudes that contributed to the world view we find in his literature, it is indeed compelling and informative. Book Reviews105 My one reservation about the collection is a theoretical one. Contemporary studies of the relation of visual art to literature need to address the emergence of "literature" and "visual art" as received categories that are perpetuated by novelists, poets, painters, and the like, and which are likewise reproduced in the work of critical "historians" who rarely historicize these overdetermined categories themselves. This volume never examines the figurative conditions (in a double sense) for the "critical" language that establishes the distinction between literature and the visual arts—a reified distinction taken for granted not only by Melville, but by the thirteen critics in this collection. As Jean-François Lyotard suggests in his foreword to Joseph Kosuth's Art After Philosophy and After (another text that addresses the relation of writing to the visual arts), "Sentences . . . are events that happen in the world of speakers, under the same rubric as resonant, plastic, visual, or tactile...