All Astir

All Astir To you, perhaps, I seem Babbalanja; but to myself, I seem not myself. All I am sure of, is a sort of prickly sensation all over me, which they call life; and, occasionally, a headache or a queer conceit admonishes me, that there is something astir in my attic. But how know I, that these sensations are identical with myself? For aught I know, I may be somebody else. (Mardi, Chapter 143) S ince Extracts stopped being an independent journal, it has become “somebody else,” and for a few of us old-timers, it may seem a queer conceit to have it swallowed up, like Jonah, by Leviathan. I have not been feeling my editorial self lately, what with the new production schedule, new ways of proofing and editing online, new methods for handling text and pictures. Most oddly of all, I no longer lay out the magazine. I have a sort of prickly sensation all over me, knowing that I will probably never use PageMaker again, and I feel I may have become somebody else without noticing. But at least something is still astir in my attic, and that tells me that I am still (I think) identical with myself. In fact, things are all astir in the Melville Society, and the last six months have seen a tremendous amount of activity in our community. Melville Lyceum O ur lecture series at the New Bedford Whaling Museum entered its fourth season with the topic “Melville and Science.” The first speaker, Robert Scholnick, from the departments of English and American Studies at the College of William and Mary, delivered a paper titled, “After Adam: Melville, Evolution, and the Fall of Language.” Professor Scholnick discussed the Scotsman Robert Chambers’s pre-Darwinian volume on evolution , Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), and its influence on Melville. In particular, Scholnick showed that “Chambers broke decisively from the ‘Adamic’ view of language, the belief that there is a necessary (and divinely inspired) connection between word and thing.” So too, Scholnick argued, did Melville confront the “‘the fall of language.’ Melville bravely faced the metaphysical consequences of linguistic indeterminacy. Like his character Bulkington in Moby-Dick, he sailed into the ‘howling infinite’ of living and writing in a world where language had lost its divine sanction.” The talk inspired lively responses to its historical content and to current debates over Darwinism and intelligent design. C
2006 The Authors Journal 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 101 E X T R A C T S Robert Scholnick Bruce A. Harvey The second lecturer was Bruce A. Harvey, from Florida International University, speaking on “Melville the Seeker: Science and the World of Ruins, or Digging Towards Eternity.” Professor Harvey also referred to Darwin and to Melville’s “melancholy” sense of the world as a fallen place but concentrated 102 L E V I A T H A N A L L A S T I R Jennifer Baker more on the importance to Melville of geology and images of mining the earth both spatially—digging endlessly downward—and temporally, plumbing the abysses of earth’s “deep time.” Harvey emphasized that this concept of deep time changed Melville; his “sensibility expanded beyond the local or parochial—beyond New England and its conservative values—not only because he saw many of the world’s cultures in his travels, but also because he saw a vertical, planetary dimension, an immensity of scale that amplified even as it diminished the mystery of humanity itself.” For Harvey, this “ecological” Melville could make his peace with the physical world. Professor Jennifer Baker, from Yale University (and now at New York University), had to postpone her March talk until June because of a snowstorm , and so she became the last speaker in the series. Her paper, “The Art and Science of Moby-Dick,” looked closely at the cetology chapters in light of the Victorian encyclopedias of zoology and natural history that...