Melville and the Idea of the City

MELVILLE AND THE IDEA OF THE CITY JAMES POLK Time dissipates to shining etl,er the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine, and even early Rome are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign? London and Paris and New York must go the same way.' [Ralph Waldo Emerson, 'History'] Emerson's essay on 'History' may be the classic statement of an American attitude toward civilization as a historical presence, an attitude which turns upon the desire to eat one's cake and have it.As the native transcendentalist confidently dissolves away the facts of the past into the Oversoul, his practical Yankee side is busy offering up those facts as currency for inclividual use. Since 'all history becomes subjective ... in otl,er words there is properly no hiStory, only biography,'" the individual is urged to become his own myth-maker, to transform historical shapes into private symbols. Here Emerson implies that everyone is potentially capable of creating 'fictions' and 'signs' from ilie past, although in a later essay he will assign ilie Poet as translator of 'the most disagreeable facts' (such as the factory village and the railway) into designs woriliy of 'the great Order." Presumably , then, the Poet will also be able to consecrate the disagreeable facts of history and create a use for the past ilirough his own vision and the word. After all, the cities of antiquity are now 'passing into fiction' and London and Paris and New York must each become 'immortal signs' for iliose with eyes to see. However, nineteenth-century America is Nature's nation, and many of ilie greatest symbols in its literature - the whale, Walden Pond, the leaf of grass, the Mississippi - seem to deny the value of civilization altogeilier. Even as its cities grew, the nation saw little need to ponder the meaning of cities or The City; because America thought itself 'in perpetual touch with Nature,' as Perry Miller has written, 'it need not fear ilie debauchery of the artificial, ilie urban, the civilized." But ilie serious American artist could not easily live on Nature and virtuous villages alone. Hawthorne complained of 'the difficulty of writing a Romance about a country where UTQ, Volume xu, Number 4. Summer 1972 278 JAMES POLK there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong,'"and turned to Rome for suitable atmosphere in The Marble Faun. Melville may be considered fortunate, in that his life as a sailor, away from what Hawthorne called America's 'commonplace prosperity,' its 'broad and simple daylight,'" furnished rich material for his life as an artist. Yet Melville is much more than a romancer of the sea, and his restless search for a symbolic expression to match his vision of truth led him again and again to the City, variously conceived as an image of hell, of heaven, of society, of the past, or of the dark passages in the individual soul. Perhaps he confirms its potential as a symbolic entity most roundly in the Jerusalem of his last major work, the labyrinthine Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, but the image is in evidence throughout the canon, and its many transformations may suggest at once the scope of Melville's explorations as a thinker and the profoundly experimental quality of his art. In T ypee, Melville's first romance of the sea, the City appears only occasionally as an implied alternative to the natural paradise, an image of a corrupt civilization, which, 'for every advantage she imparts, holds a hundred evils in reserve' C r, 166).7 The very concept of a City seems to be refuted by a Polynesian anti-city in the valley of the Typees: There are no villages. The houses stand here and there in the shadow of the groves, or are scattered along the banks of the winding stream; their goldenhued bamboo sides and gleaming white thatch...