Melville's Allusions to Religion: A Comprehensive Index and Glossary (review)

R E V I E W GAIL H. COFFLER Melville’s Allusions to Religion: A Comprehensive Index and Glossary Praeger, 2004. 261 pages. P reparing to review Gail Coffler’s new reference work, I found myself thrust back to those days when I was writing my Melville Encyclopedia (1990), and I once again experienced all of those peculiar problems associated with “compiling” a reference book, including the constant carrying of pounds of sorted index cards in my pockets. Most people have no idea of what this kind of work is; many people presume, for example, that one starts researching with the letter “A” and proceeds to “Z.” Not so. In my case, I had sorted allusion cards according to the reference works I was likely to use: “geographical,” “literary,” “nautical,” “food,” etc. I am sure that Gail Coffler hit upon her own rubrics as aids to research. (As a matter of fact, I think that the many thousands of index cards I used are still in my basement somewhere—a commentary not only on my ridiculous scholarly cautiousness, but also on my housekeeping.) Alas, one of the reviews of my book dismissed it as “done on a computer, probably.” As you may know, my tepid respect for the Internet makes this an absurd claim—especially twenty years ago, when there were even fewer reliable sources on the Net. Coffler’s book is the result of some twenty years’ effort in a pursuit that is bound to be humbling, for reasons I shall enumerate. First of all, with a reference book, one wants to deal almost exclusively in factual truth. But “‘what is truth?’ asked Pilate.” We are assisted today by computers and concordances and other reference works, but these often contradict each other, and so we often counsel ourselves, “Give it up, Sub-Subs.” But even before we confront the dusty vaticans and street stalls, we Melvilleans must face the large size of the Melville oeuvre and the density of allusiveness therein and realize that we are attempting to draw out Leviathan with a hook. At first, we are not really sure of what we are doing. My book, for example, arose from a mixture of ignorance and curiosity; I simply did not understand what many of the allusions referred to, but I really wanted to know. Had I ever dreamed that my habit of “looking it up” would lead to many years and many index cards, I might not have started. Second, we are not sure of how much we want to say about a given allusion; reference books are dated and “insufficient” the very day they are published, and in that sense and others, all our reference books are botches. 72 L E V I A T H A N R E V I E W Especially in the case of Melville, as Coffler notes in her preface, there is the problem of shifting “boundaries” (xi). One allusion relates to another and unless, like Casaubon, we are aiming at a Key to All Mythologies, we have to draw our own perimeters. Furthermore, Melville’s references to religion may be taken as “pious,” “ironic,” or “blasphemous,” and the same allusion may be taken as “pious” in one place and “blasphemous” in another. Coffler wisely refuses to interpret Melville’s usage and instead gives us relatively neutral identifications , following in the path of Merton Sealts’s Melville’s Reading and Jay Leyda’s Melville Log. These identifications tend toward what was the commonly accepted wisdom; she aims to give us “the perspective favored in Melville’s time” (xiv). To define allusions as they were defined in Western cultures in Melville’s day requires knowing not only a good deal about Melville’s canon, but also a good deal about those times, and Coffler knows both. Especially in modern days, we must exercise caution because the subject of religion has become an even hotter potato than it was in earlier centuries. Ironically, to be a “neutral” writer on religious subjects today leaves one open to charges of Agnosticism, or the other A-word. And Big Brother is alive and well and living in many places. So Gail Coffler gets a high...