In the Shadow of No Tower: Melville in London

Kathryn Mudgett. Photo courtesy of Michele Mudgett.

Of all the images in my memory of the Eleventh International Melville Conference in London, one stands out: the charred Grenfell Tower rising to the south of the A40 as we headed by bus toward Oxford University for the closing banquet. Its lowest floors appeared unscathed, with every one from the fourth up to the twenty-fourth floor of the public housing apartments bearing the blackened scars of the rampaging fire where at least seventy people died, some of whom may never be found. What would Melville have made of this tragedy (or crime)? Melville, the writer who confronts "unspeakable things unspoken" (in Toni Morrison's words), never shies from interrogating civilization's failures in addressing issues of class and race, something reinforced by the panels and plenary sessions I attended at the conference. Melville's confrontations may be direct, as in his indictment of the Liverpudlian authorities who allow starving mothers and children to die in the cellars of cotton warehouses in Redburn, or by "deliberate misdirections" (Morrison again) under the mask of a seemingly benign servant and an obtuse American captain, as in "Benito Cereno." Melville's activist bent is not news, but the London conference focused for me anew Melville's abiding fury.

The conference that preceded our journey to Oxford and the final grand banquet at Balliol College was organized into "strands" reflecting on the "emblematic and transformative effects of Melville's … Atlantic crossings" (according to the conference program), and I found myself drawn to the panels on Melville "in dialogue"—both with writers of his own and other generations and with our twenty-first-century selves. In panels such as "Melville in Dialogue: Activism," presenters addressed nineteenth-century authorial reactions to urban poverty and (misanthropic) institutional philanthropy not only in Melville and Dickens—in the context of the Lowell and Manchester mills, respectively—but also in Dostoevsky, whose interrogation of Russian exceptionalism in Crime and Punishment was compared with Melville's scrutiny of the exceptionalist ideal in his own land and its British progenitor.

On the "Melville in Dialogue: Melville's Shakespeare" panel, Ali Chetwynd, in "Babo and Another Shakespearean Villain," looked back to the bard for correspondences with Melvillean characters, giving us new ways to look at villainy and its silence. Focusing on Aaron in Titus Andronicus, Chetwynd considered the ways in which Melville could have been affected by the play's unrepentant Moor in developing the leader of the slave revolt on the San Dominick in "Benito Cereno." At the end of Titus, Aaron asks, "O, why should wrath be mute, and fury dumb?" (5.3.186). Eschewing the silence Babo maintained at his arrest and trial, Aaron revels in his deeds, including fomenting rape and committing murder: "I am no baby, I, that with base prayers / I should repent the evils I have done: / Ten thousand worse than ever yet I did / Would I perform, if I might have my will" (5.3.187–190). Aaron's "confession" is, rather, an embrace of his fury and its violent manifestations. Melville wrote of the captured Babo, "His aspect seemed to say, since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words" ("Benito Cereno" 116). Babo has no need for confession; he would do again what he has done to gain his return to Senegal. Babo's silence is a recognition of his defeat by a system secure in its power and certain of its exceptionalism.

Our experience of Melville's engagement with London and British society was not confined to the lecture halls of King's College. The conference organizers, Edward Sugden, Janet Floyd, and Wyn Kelley, astutely alternated morning panels and plenary sessions with afternoon field trips to other locations, such as the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, the Tate Britain, and the London streets Melville once trod. In an enlightening afternoon at the British Library, conference attendees went "Looking for Melville" and were treated to talks by author Philip Hoare (Leviathan), documentary filmmaker David Shaerf (Call Us Ishmael), and Melville...