Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America

Chapter 3 Textual Sentimentalism: Incest and the Author-Reader Bond in Melville’s Pierre

h Chapter 3 Textual Sentimentalism: Incest and the Author-Reader Bond in Melville’s Pierre In November 1851, Herman Melville received a letter from Nathaniel Hawthorne praising his most recent literary endeavor, Moby-Dick. Shortly thereafter, Melville composed his famous response to his friend.“A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book,” he confessed; and then continued: Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips—lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling.1 For Melville, Hawthorne’s understanding of Moby-Dick (or more accurately, Melville’s projection of this understanding) inspired an intense corporeal bond, a connection so profound it resulted in a vision of merged subjectivity (“when I put it to my lips—lo, they are yours and not mine”). In this fantasy, Hawthorne and he were not discrete individuals but“pieces”of an exalted common being or“Godhead ,” joined by a mutuality of sentiment or“fraternity of feeling.” In recent years scholars have read Melville’s intense response to Hawthorne in a (homo)erotic register.2 While not wishing to displace this reading, I would like to suggest that we can arrive at a more complete understanding of this letter’s libidinal force by considering Melville’s larger fantasy of consubstantiality.As discussed in Chapter 2, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century moral philosophy posited that sympathy 84 Chapter 3 between individuals could result in the momentary experience of bodily merger. When we use the imagination to“place ourselves in [another’s] situation,” wrote Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments,“we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him.”3 Like Smith, Melville imagined a mental convergence with Hawthorne that led to a fantasy of physical unity. The erotic image of shared lips was one component of a larger sympathetic drama in which the boundaries between self, other, and world were dissolved. “Your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours and both in God’s,” Melville continued in this same letter, drawing on a romantic trope to articulate a vision of mutual ensoulment and transcendent interbodily experience.4 But if Melville’s letter expressed the fantasy of consubstantiality, it did so, of course, in specific relation to issues of authorship and audience. Melville experienced writing as a profoundly solitary activity, one that was only offset by the discovery of a sympathetic reader. Although he scorned conventional patrons,“men who go straight from their cradles to their graves & never dream of the queer things going on at the antipodes,”5 he claimed a true devotion to a small group of followers, who both appreciated his work and articulated similar sentiments in their own writing. Hawthorne represented the epitome of this vision, a reader-writer with whom Melville might enjoy an absolute mutuality of feeling.6 Indeed, in the letter of November 1851, Melville wrote of the identification he experienced both in reading Hawthorne’s original letter to him and in envisioning Hawthorne reading the one he was composing in response.7 In an 1850 letter to Richard Henry Dana, Jr.—author of the sea novel Two Years Before the Mast—Melville confessed a fellowship that was similarly inspired. “My Dear Dana—” Melville began, I thank you very heartily for your friendly letter; and am more pleased than I can well tell, to think that any thing I have written about the sea has at all responded to your own impressions of it. . . . I am specially delighted at the thought, that those strange, congenial feelings, with which after my first voyage, I for the first time read “Two Years Before the Mast,” and while so engaged was, as it were, tied & welded to you by a sort of Siamese link of affectionate sympathy—that these feelings should be reciprocated by you, in your turn, and be called out by any White Jackets or Redburns of mine [Melville’s 1850 and 1849 novels respectively]—this is indeed delightful to me.8 Textual Sentimentalism 85 Significant here is the way Melville imagines reading and writing as reciprocal activities that give way to an uncanny sense of oneness between participants...