Facing Melville, Facing Italy: Democracy, Politics, Translation ed. by John Bryant, Giorgio Mariani, and Gordon Poole (review)

Herman Melville set out on his 1856–57 journey through Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Holy Land ostensibly to restore his health. Possibly more to the point was his desire to escape the pressures of a failed career and a troubled home life. In his travels, he would come to see new experiences through world-weary eyes. In one revelatory instance, Melville left Naples and traveled by train down the coast to visit Pompeii. In his journal entry for 18 February 1857, he makes cryptic and mordant observations: “Pompeii like any other town. Same old humanity. All the same whether one be dead or alive. Pompeii comfortable sermon. Like Pompeii better than Paris” (Journals 101). While one might parse the critical implications of these unguarded thoughts—how might Pompeii and its ruins be comfortably sermonic?—one must first recognize that these journal entries seem to be condensed aids to memory designed for subsequent recall and enlargement, perhaps even for a travel book he never came to write. The journey’s impact on his creative life was less direct than these impromptu irruptions might portend and only intermittently and gradually emerged in his work. In ways he could not foresee, he was beginning the second half of his artistic life. As he moved from place to place, flea-bitten as he too frequently was, Melville was filling deep wells and laying foundations not so much for his truncated career as a lecturer, but for his slow-growth development as a poet—a process that was to center his artistic life for the next thirty-five years.

Melville’s tour through the Mediterranean and the Levant as well as his homeward passage through Greece and Italy gave him experiences that would help shape his Burgundy Club poems and sketches, Clarel, Timoleon, and, to a lesser extent, Billy Budd, Sailor. While the impact of Melville’s travels in the Holy Land on the creation of Clarel cannot be overstated, the influence of Italy on Melville’s artistry, both before and after his travels there, has only recently received the attention it deserves, most profoundly in Dennis Berthold’s magisterial American Risorgimento: Herman Melville and the Cultural Politics of Italy (2009). Facing Melville, Facing Italy provides a timely complement to Berthold’s groundbreaking study. Facing Melville, Facing Italy collects nineteen essays that successively examine the following topics: “Word and Revision: The Creative Process,” “Rhetoric and Rome,” “Democracy and Its Discontents,” “Exceptionalisms,” “Cosmopolitanisms,” and “The Politics of Translation.” The revised essays here made their first public appearance during The Melville Society’s Eighth International Conference in Rome in 2011. The editors develop their conception of Melville’s entangled cross-cultural achievement from the evocatively disjunctive image gleaned from Ishmael’s meditative delineation of the Erie Canal and its surrounding forests of “Roman arches over Indian rivers”—an image that brings together old world constructs with new world forms, both natural and indigenous. The volume seeks, the editors remark, “to capture the ways in which Italy, Italian art, Italian culture, and Italian history have penetrated into Melville’s forest and the forest—some might call it a wilderness—that is America and American culture” (2). These essays not only explore numerous links between Melville and Italy, but they also engage the more expansive reaches of Melville’s art, especially regarding the contradictions, ambiguities, and paradoxes of democracy as they play out on a global scale.

The six-part arrangement of the essays indicates the dialectical cohesion among pieces authored by nineteen separate hands. In “Word and Revision: The Creative Process,” two essays pursue aesthetic implications associated with voice and two essays examine literary consequences deriving from Melville’s presence in Naples during a period of social and political upheaval. This deft arrangement of these introductory essays suggests the foundational importance of voice and place in Melville’s art. In “‘Sing in Me, Muse’: Speech and Power in Typee and Melville’s...