Melville and His Critics: A Special Issue

Melville and His Critics: A Special Issue CHRISTOPHER CASTIGLIA, GUEST EDITOR The Pennsylvania State University A s anyone who has paid even passing attention to criticism of nineteenth-century U.S. literature knows, Herman Melville, in an inversion of his contemporary reception, became over the course of the twentieth century a literary rock star. The story, in some respects a critical myth, goes something like this: having struggled through the dark days of colonial influence and mythic anemia, having flickered but failed in the likes of Emerson, Whitman, and Hawthorne, American literature finally found its apotheosis when the dark clouds parted and there, on a throne of prose innovation and democratic glory, sat Herman Melville, glowering down at us but with the glower that, saying no! in thunder, says yes in lightning. Most Melville scholars know that in his own day Melville enjoyed no such deifications. Running the gamut from revilement to obscurity, Melville stood in danger of the same literary back-shelving that assigned many of his contemporaries to dusty neglect. Melville arose in glory from the ashes, however, with the advent of modernity. D. H. Lawrence hailed Melville as a genius of “uncreation” and praised the aesthetics of undoing that brought us finally past the dreary inheritances of the Enlightenment into a glorious “consciousness-struggle” comprising, like Lawrence’s own modernism, “fierce discord and intermittent harmonies” (Lawrence 145, 152). Even though ultimately the Bard of Arrowhead fell short for Lawrence, since “the desire for a ‘perfect relationship’ is just a vicious, unmanly craving”—and Melville had that nasty craving in abundance—nevertheless Lawrence heralded Moby-Dick as the expression of “our deepest blood-nature” (151). While it is true that Melville “died before the great European war, so his shock was comfortable” (147), Lawrence set Melville firmly at the center of the American canon, where he has remained ever since. For early Marxist critic V. F. Calverton, writing nearly a decade after Lawrence, Melville saw through the petty bourgeois corruption of his countrymen and women. Taking us beyond Emerson’s flimsy idealism, Hawthorne’s nostalgic Europeanism, and Whitman’s naı̈ve celebration of consumerism, Melville stumbled only in his inability to free himself from the “frontier c  2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, 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 5 C H R I S T O P H E R C A S T I G L I A force” that lured American literature toward the competitive individualism that turned class interest into a mystical mythology. Maintaining Lawrence’s observation of Melville’s fraternal democracy (although now more highly valued from the perspective of Popular Front Socialism) and combining it with Calverton’s observations about Melville’s anti-bourgeois counter-individualism, F. O. Matthiessen countered Ahab’s destructive Emersonianism, writing of “Melville’s hopes for American democracy , his dread of its lack of humane warmth, his apprehension of the actual privations and defeats of the common man, and his depth of compassion for courageous struggle” (Matthiessen 444). Reconnecting “the life of the mind and the life of the body” within “a quickened imagination” that revealed through “intuitive vision” what was “hidden from common sense” (395, 434), Melville hovers poignantly between knowledge and innocence, thought and intuition, sexuality and secretiveness in ways that make him, in Matthiessen’s portrait, the prescient representative, not of a nineteenth-century nativism so much as of a post-war epistemology of the closet. The same tensions, although with a divergent evaluation, preoccupied Newton Arvin, whose 1950 Herman Melville won the first National Book Award for nonfiction. Arvin saw in Melville “the clash between consciousness and the unconscious, between mind and emotion, between anxious doubt and confident belief” (Arvin 88). For Arvin, however, Melville was not tossed about by these conflicts, but confronted and transcended them, becoming in the process “a romantic idealist with a passion for actuality” (169). Whereas Matthiessen’s Melville seems, in my reading, to represent the agonies of the closet, Arvin’s embodied the triumphs of sexual liberation. Arvin...