Between Book and Reality: The Guidebook in Redburn and Clarel

Between Book and Reality: The Guidebook in Redburn and Clarel MARTYN SMITH Lawrence University T he guidebook is not the most widely respected genre of literary composition . Guidebooks such as the Lonely Planet series or the earlier Baedeker series became standard equipment for travel, and they continue to guide our ventures. Rarely do we reflect critically about the guidebook and its relationship to the experience of travel. An exception is Melville’s treatment of it in Redburn (1849) and later in his long poem Clarel (1876). In these two works, Melville is not only mining guidebooks for material but also manipulating expectations regarding the genre to make a larger point about our modern relationship to the world and to religious traditions. It is especially in the act of pilgrimage, imagined or real, that the failure of the guidebook becomes clear in these two works. When protagonist Wellingborough Redburn ships out from New York bound for Liverpool, he brings with him a green morocco guidebook that his father had taken with him on a visit to the city almost thirty years earlier. Melville spends a full chapter describing the guidebook, followed by one in which Redburn is portrayed walking around Liverpool with guidebook in hand (Chs. 30 and 31). In his 1938 source study, Willard Thorp demonstrates that Melville’s description of the guidebook in these chapters was an exact representation of The Picture of Liverpool from 1808. Douglas Robillard gives more critical attention to Melville’s use of visual material and ekphrasis. Both studies center on the useful material that Melville could mine from guidebooks, in terms of content and the physical description of the book itself. In Redburn, the guidebook becomes the type of all literary works. Disenchanted with the effectiveness of the old guidebook to get him around Liverpool, Redburn meditates: Guide-books, Wellingborough, are the least reliable books in all literature; and nearly all literature, in one sense is made up of guide-books. Old ones tell us the ways our fathers went, through the thoroughfares and courts of old; but how few of those former places can their posterity trace, amid avenues of modern erections. . . . Every age makes its own guide-books, and the old ones c  2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 30 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 B E T W E E N B O O K A N D R E A L I T Y are used for waste paper. But there is one Holy Guide-Book, Wellingborough, that will never lead you astray, if you but follow it aright. (NN Redburn 157) In expanding the guidebook to include the Bible as a guidebook for life, Redburn professes his trust in the “Holy Guide-Book,” but Melville is also making the stakes of his discussion clear: the guidebook is a type of all human attempts to set down a permanent record of the world, whether physical or moral. Redburn’s admission that “Yes, the thing that had guided the father, could not guide the son” (157) gestures toward his expansion of the category of guidebook. In Liverpool, Redburn reacts to the gap between book and reality. Leaving the docks, he retraces his father’s footsteps, which have been traced on the map by means of dotted lines. This following in his father’s footsteps is analogous to “a filial pilgrimage to spots which would be hallowed in my eyes” (NN Redburn 154). And again, the guidebook slides into a broader, religious frame of reference. Walking the same streets and looking at the same sights that his father walked and saw give emotional resonance to Redburn’s pilgrimage. He imagines his father touring just ahead of him: So vivid was now the impression of his having been here, and so narrow the passage from which he had emerged, that I felt like running on, and overtaking him round the Town Hall adjoining. (155) The guidebook provokes a psychological movement that is recognizable in contemporary discussion of analogy and metaphor. Gilles Fauconnier...