Melville and Aesthetics ed. by Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn (review)

In a searching and provocative introduction, Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn articulate the grand motive behind this important collection of twelve essays—”to move beyond the false choices that have bedeviled the profession: form or history, practical criticism or theory, aesthetics or politics” (6). “Literature is,” they continue, “neither a strictly political nor a strictly aesthetic affair. Instead (to rework a passage from chapter 93 of Mardi), literature poses questions that are more final than any answers” (6). The stylistic richness of Melville’s writing; his constant reinvention of narrative, point of view, and structure; his daring use of allusion, metaphor, image, and symbol; his experiments in meter, rhyme, and assonance—in short, his “acute sensitivity to the writtenness of all writing—make him a richly suggestive figure” (5) for re-emphasizing aesthetics as a major preoccupation of literary study that can “stand alongside—not displace—the ideological approach” (3).

Clearly, Otter and Sanborn are after a big fish, and see Melville as the pilot who will guide them to it. The craft they ride on is both vehicle and tenor of their quest, and the varied critical methodologies in each essay give them plenty of sea-room to pursue it. Deliberately emphasizing diverse perspectives not only on Melville but also on the definition of aesthetic criticism itself, the editors seek to foster a “multiplicitous particularity” (3) of views to illuminate the aesthetic richness and ideational complexity of Melville’s writing. The editors fashion an ensemble of twelve scholars whose voices mix the cadences of historical, linguistic, poststructuralist, transnational, biographical, and queer criticism with the demands of formalist analysis and close reading. Although the book has no titled subdivisions, the introduction points out that the first three essays discuss “The Matter of Style,” while the next nine function as “Case Studies” of particular works: three on Moby-Dick; a cluster of four on Pierre, “Bartleby,” Israel Potter, and The Confidence-Man; and two on Battle-Pieces and Clarel.

Alex Calder opens the collection with a metacritical overview of the charge that Melville is a bad writer, an objection familiar to anyone who has read the contemporary reviews of Mardi, Moby-Dick, or Pierre. Rather than mounting a defense against such critique, Calder recognizes “that Melville had a genius for striking a wrong note” (30) as in “The Bell Tower” (one must forgive Calder the pun), yet such ostensible missteps often gave him the artistic freedom to vitalize and deepen his texts. Calder describes how New Critic R. P. Blackmur, in his 1938 essay on “The Craft of Herman Melville,” codified Melville’s bad writing under the rubric of “putative form,” an artificial, stagy, non-dramatic method of writing that undermines the sincerity of Melville’s philosophical skepticism and that drove generations of Melville critics to focus on theme and ideology rather than style. Warner Berthoff, in The Example of Melville (1962), countered Blackmur’s attack by approaching Melville through organicism, the romantic aesthetic that valorizes excess, disorder, invention, subjectivity, plurality, and creative liberty. These schools of thought, Calder argues, polarize Melville’s narratives at the extremes of Chekhovian drama for Blackmur and gothic romance for Berthoff, ignoring the tradition of Rabelais, Cervantes, and Sterne—or what Calder calls “modal discontinuity” (27), a term drawn from the behaviorist aesthetics of Morse Peckham, who considered Clarel Melville’s finest work save Moby-Dick. Still, for Calder, no single aesthetic label can capture the dialogic richness and generic variety of Melville’s textual practice, and if his writing is sometimes “bad,” it nonetheless provided him a “psychic insulation” (31) from literary norms and liberated his stylistic genius.

Theo Davis reinforces Calder’s critique of New Critical aesthetics by praising Melville’s ornamental metaphors: the excessive, “errant, possibly irrelevant” comparisons and elaborations that give pleasure even as they digress from a perceptible narrative trajectory (34). Davis explains that such departures from formal unity troubled W. K. Wimsatt, as they had the eighteenth-century rhetorician Hugh Blair, and both Friedrich von...