Melville's Public Voice: The John Marr Monologues, James Whitcomb Riley, and the Question of Popularity

Abstracts ALA 2006–San Francisco Who Speaks in Melville’s Poems? CHAIR: FAITH BARRETT, LAWRENCE UNIVERSITY F rom Battle-Pieces, to Clarel, to John Marr, to Timoleon, Melville works with an extraordinary range of poetic speakers and stances, exploring the generic limits of the lyric and the narrative poem and building both dialogue and personae into his poetic texts. Who are these speakers, and what is at stake for Melville the poet in his exploration of these stances? How do Melville’s poetic voices represent tensions between self and other, North and South, East and West, faith and doubt, past and future? How do Melville’s poetic texts signal transitions or developments in nineteenth-century American poetry? How are we to understand the connections or disconnections between Melville’s speakers and those of his poetic contemporaries? How do Melville’s speakers engage with the commitments of romantic, Victorian, realist, or modernist poetics? These are some of the questions this panel explored through readings of Battle-Pieces, Clarel, and John Marr and Other Sailors. Margins of Poetry: The Character of Character in Melville’s “The Temeraire” Dan Fineman Occidental College A lthough Battle-Pieces otherwise concerns itself directly with the Civil War, “The Temeraire” presents the reader with thoughts “supposed to have been suggested to an Englishman of the old order by the fight of the Monitor and Merrimac.” This intruding consciousness may be a paradigmatic instance of the book’s underlying transgressive modality, one that suggests that poetry arises out of catastrophic historical alteration. The work’s titular topic, the final disposal of the second line ship from Nelson’s Battle of Trafalgar, engages the reader in intersecting arenas of consideration: the end 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 83 E X T R A C T S of the Napoleonic wars, the death of the era of sail, the triumph of steam, and J. M. W. Turner’s innovative techniques in capturing these transitions. All of these prefigure the lyric’s contemporary subject, the battle of the Monitor and so-called Merrimack (really CSS Virginia). The reader is confronted not just with a shift in time and space, but with a reorientation toward a metacritical consideration of the relations between art and war, aesthetics and their historical conditions, and the visual and the verbal arts. Perhaps Melville found in this modality a means out of the decade of silence that had followed his decade of fiction. He could not return to what, as he began Billy Budd, he called “The time before steam ships . . . ” but he could dare—that is what “Temeraire” means, “daring”—to allow poetry (already becoming marginalized by a world of commerce, machinery, and bureaucracy) to become the means by which that world could condemn itself in representation. He could no longer express himself biographically, but he could allow history and its catalyzing technologies to find expression through him. At the turbulent margin between epochs, the contrapuntal meanings of contiguous and contending historical organizations both find poetic voice that either alone would have lost in its own hegemonic isolation. History, Ruins, Voices: Reading Herman Melville’s Clarel Amy R. Nestor SUNY Buffalo C larel abounds in voices, but it has no voice. The voice of the poem finds no certain literary guide for the story it would tell, no position of final redemption—spiritual, national, personal—to assure its form. What holds the poem together, miming the impression of a single voice, is the pounding form of the verse itself: an octosyllabic form whose too-insistent rhythm and rhymes serve, at best, to mark a boundary over which the sites and voices of the poem threaten to spill. Reading both for the lack of voice and the excess of voices, my paper explores the fragmentation of identity and history to which the poem bears witness. Focusing primarily upon the scenes set in Jerusalem, I show how the poem’s voice is wrenched from...