A Historical Guide to Herman Melville (review)

R E V I E W GILES GUNN, ed. A Historical Guide to Herman Melville New York: Oxford UP, 2005. Paper $19.95; 272 pages. T he Oxford Historical Guide to Herman Melville situates Melville’s life and writings firmly within the various literary, philosophical, political , economic, and spiritual movements and crises that occurred during Melville’s lifetime, which “straddle[d] an era of incomparable, almost cataclysmic, historical change in America” (4-5). Most of the essays in the volume contextualize Melville’s ideas not just in terms of significant events in the United States, but in reference to a broader transatlantic, even global, perspective. In the wonderful opening “brief” biography by Robert Milder, for example, Milder reminds the reader that for Melville, history “did not begin spatially at the American shoreline and temporally in 1776” (30). Rather, Melville’s take on history and art was inflected through the entire Western tradition, from the classics up through Melville’s own wide ranging and sometimes esoteric interests. Milder eschews the widely held but largely erroneous view of Melville as a writer whose extraordinary early productivity was followed by a lifetime of disillusionment, melancholy brooding, and authorial inertia. Rather, Milder describes three “acts” in Melville career: a “first act” that included the major writings from Typee (1846) through The Confidence-Man (1857), “a distinguished second act” that included Melville’s poems on the Civil War and his epic spiritual and theological poem Clarel (1876), and a “final (albeit abbreviated) third act” that included, along with several verse collections, Melville’s nearly completed manuscript for Billy Budd (ca. 1884). In Milder’s portrayal, Melville emerges as an extraordinarily gifted man whose early exposure to alternative ways of life in the Pacific awakened him to the narrow-minded provincialism of many American practices and institutions, but whose familial and social allegiances nevertheless limited his ability to turn that early awakening into direct, praxis-oriented critiques of some of the most egregious injustices (such as slavery) in American society. Because so much of Melville’s “inner life” must be inferred, Milder’s psychoanalytic methodology is especially provocative. In describing the death of Melville’s father Allan when Herman was only twelve, for example, Milder wonders “to what extent the mature Melville’s feeling of God the Father’s C
2006 The Authors Journal compilation C
2006 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 67 R E V I E W indifference, abdication, or nonexistence was rooted in the boy’s sense of paternal undervaluation and desertion” (20); he reads Pierre as generated from “some buried compulsion,” evidence of Melville “vivisecting himself in public or submitting as analyst and analysand to an unusually drastic and humiliating form of psychotherapy” (35-6); and, in a nod to Herbert Marcuse, Milder suggests that Melville’s early experiences in the Pacific awakened him to the fact that phenomena such as imperialism, missionary activism, and economic exploitation in “the newly colonized Pacific” were replacing “the pleasure principle (spontaneity, freedom, sensuality, immediate gratification) [with] the reality principle (discipline, toil, austerity, delayed gratification).” For the most part, Melville saw this process as “tragic and wasteful,” but at the same time it allowed him to maintain hope in his life and in his writings, at least for a time, for a “better, because more conscious, paradise to be regained” (23). Despite his essay’s brevity, Milder covers virtually every phase of Melville’s life and career, from his early enthusiasm and elation about being a published author, through his psychically trying and physically exhausting struggles to find a spiritual base (the frustration of which, as Milder notes, may have resulted in Melville’s abuse of his wife, Lizzie), through his final years, the primary achievement of which was “to live for the light guided only by spiritual instinct, as an underground shoot might grope its way towards the sun” (51). Calling Melville a “skeptical idealist” (27), Milder effectively encapsulates a productive tension that characterizes so much of Melville’s writings. On one hand, Melville often seemed to espouse...