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Herman Melville and liThe Sane Madness of Vital Truth" Alisa von Brentano In "Hawthorne and His Mosses," Herman Melville's review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse, he formulated a phrase which illuminates his own works more than those of Hawthorne. In comparing Hawthorne to Shakespeare he says that Shakespeare through his "dark characters," such as Hamlet, Lear and lago, manages "craftily" to express, directly or by insinuation, "those deep far-away things...those occasional flashings forth of the intuitive Truth ...those short quick probings at the very axis of reality" which we perceive "to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to write, or even hint of them." As an example he cites King Lear who, "tormented into desperation...tears off the mask and speaks the sane madness of vital truth." It was a pervading "blackness, ten times black," which so fascinated him in Hawthorne, the blackness of some unspeakable truth so awesome as to be "maddening" and, when uttered, to be called "madness," for, according to Melville, "The great art of Telling the Truth" is so unorthodox, if not dangerous, as to have to be told "covertly and by snatches."l It is crucial to bear in mind that this notion of "madness" is one of the central themes in all of Melville's major works and without question the only one which unites an otherwise somewhat bewildering diversity of literary approaches and subject matters. The development of this notion, from the society- and heaven-defying "madness" of the main characters in Moby Dick and also in Pierre to the doubly ironic use of it in Billy Budd, therefore best exemplifies and defines Melville's tragic vision. Like many great writers, he varies his perspectives but not the central object viewed from them, and tracing this central concern enables the "eagle-eyed reader" (The Piazza Tales 251) (the only kind Melville really cared about) to arrive at a consistent interpretation of his canon. For Melville the idea of "sane madness" was not only artistic perception but personal experience.2 His family, frightened by his 149 150 Dionysus in Literature father's delirium preceding his death, was constantly concerned about Melville's mental state, especially during and after his work on Moby Dick. Herman's "condition" was at one point thought to be so serious that one or more physicians were called in to examine him-an event which prompted Melville's whimsical defense of his sanity in the sketch "I and My Chimney."l Not that he had ever been considered quite "normal." Even his father had talked about him as being a "slow" boy. His first book, Typee, had dealt with his desertion from the whaler Acushnet, his subsequent stay amongst a cannibal tribe and his dramatic escape to "civilization." Though the work was enormously popular, his insistence that the cannibals were more "civilized" than his own society and his relentless attack on the powerful Christian missionary system in the Pacific islands made his friends uneasy and his critics hostile. Aware of his reputation, he gleefully wrote to Hawthorne: "What 'reputation' H.M. has is horrible. Think of it! To go down to posterity is bad enough, any way; but to go down as a 'man who lived among the cannibals!'" (The Letters of Herman Melville 130). The matter of his "reputation" was far from amusing, however, for even with Typee the clouds of alleged "madness" began to gather. Nineteenth century Christianity was not openly to be assailed; its representatives were influential and relentless. One critic, for instance, found Typee suitable only for a "morally inferior" readership in England and added that he was sorry "that such a volume should have been allowed a place in the [Wiley and Putnam] Library of American Books." Another found Typee's author "actuated either by a perverse spirit [orl ...utterly incapable, from moral obtuseness, of an accurate statement" (Hetherington 47, 49). Thus Melville's best instincts and most humanitarian concerns were destined to clash with the pious pretentiousness of the established order. His outrage at the fact that in Honolulu, for instance, "the small remnants of the natives had been civilized into draught horses and evangelized into beasts of burden" by "devoted self-exiled heralds of the cross" (Typee 196, 198) was described as moral insensitivity or manifestation of a "perverse" mind. In such experiences, which were to increase in hostility on both sides, lay...

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