Twenty-First Century Melville

Navigating Herman Melville’s work in the early twenty-first century increasingly implies passage from mouse to whale. At websites such as Powermoby.com, which aspires to attract students, teachers, and general readers alike, hyperlinks guide browsers not only to annotated chapters from Moby-Dick but also to the myriad eruptions of Melville in global popular culture: a teenager’s crocheted Moby Dick hat; a puppet version of Moby-Dick in Erfurt, Germany; the story of Moby Dick rendered in fifteen haiku. A proposed Melville Electronic Library (MEL), conceived by Melville scholars John Bryant and Haskell Springer, will digitize Melville’s letters, journals, manuscripts and published works as well as a wide array of secondary sources. The Library, “one large fluid text, still evolving,” will provide “more access than ever before to the Melville Text in its entirety” (Bryant 2006, 565) and might well assist in bridging the gulf between scholar and tyro that postmodern literary scholarship has probably exacerbated—a gulf that seems like “the many cubic feet of solid head” that for Melville divides the whale’s eyes (Melville 1988, 330). Although the three studies by Sterling Stuckey, Kevin J. Hayes, and Wyn Kelley discussed here presume different audiences, the accessibility of Stuckey’s scholarship and the suggestiveness of Hayes’s and Kelley’s introductions also bridge the divide and contribute tellingly to readerly accessions of Melville—and indeed to some larger fluid and evolving “Melville Text.”

Central, in fact, to historian Stuckey’s important and provocative African Culture and Melville’s Art is his delineation of Melville’s “fluidity of cultural thought and practice” (5). Positing Melville as a “serious student of black culture” in the book’s introduction, Stuckey argues that crucial aspects of Melville’s art “are based on his intimate knowledge of descendants of Africans in America” (7). For Stuckey, both Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno “largely turn on an African cultural axis” (18). Likely exposed in his youth to African song and dance in both New York City and Albany, Melville incorporated these elements of slave artistry into his own texts, where, in the case of Moby-Dick, they function both as overt influences on the narrative and as “subterranean forces” (8) that intensify the work’s complexity and value. According to Stuckey, Pinkster music and dance and the Ring Shout, “the most influential slave dance in nineteenth-century America” (33), served as particularly important black aesthetic touchstones for Melville. In his “demonstrations” (a word he pointedly emphasizes) of how Melville used his African and African American sources to forge his aesthetic, Stuckey offers a particularly cogent reading of the “Midnight, Forecastle” chapter of Moby-Dick. This chapter, which follows the Pequod crew’s frantic acquiescence to Ahab’s quest for vengeance on the whale, is written as if it were a scene from a play and emphasizes the geographical diversity of the sailors, all of whom are singing in chorus. The superintendent of the chapter, however, is cabin boy Pip, technically “the most insignificant of the Pequod’s crew” (Melville 1988, 411), whose tambourine playing anchors and directs the singing and dancing of the chapter. Pip’s music itself generates a Melvillean Ring Shout among the sailors, despite the “marked insularity” (32) and prejudice of some of them. That Melville’s sailors attempt “black dance steps” (33) suggests the “universal appeal of African dance and music” (31), as “African culture reaches beyond the black community to dazzle even those not particularly friendly towards blacks” (31).

Stuckey also locates a number of imaginatively recomposed Ashantee sources in Melville’s fiction, especially Benito Cereno. He finds, for example, a new genesis for the character Atufal in Joseph Dupuis’s 1824 Journal...