"Autobiography Even in the Loose Sense": F. O. Matthiessen and Melville

“Autobiography Even in the Loose Sense”: F. O. Matthiessen and Melville JAY GROSSMAN Northwestern University Autobiography, then, is not a genre or a mode, but a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts. —Paul de Man (921) I want to begin with three examples of F. O. Matthiessen’s critical vocabulary in American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941) in order to raise questions about the continued influence of his criticism on American literary studies during the past three decades of counter-canonical scholarship and canon-busting archival work. At the outset let me say what I take to be axiomatic: Matthiessen’s treatment of Melville has as much to tell us about Matthiessen as it may about his ostensible subjects, including Melville. The quotation in my title appears near the beginning of Matthiessen’s account of Melville in book three of American Renaissance. Later Matthiessen challenges unnamed critics he believes are inappropriately reading Melville’s corpus biographically. But, as we shall see, this curious objection, paradoxically , grows out of exactly the opposite premise: namely, Matthiessen’s earlier acknowledgment that, without doubt, Melville as a novelist drew upon numerous personal experiences. That was certainly the case for his first books Typee and Omoo, both of which preceded the account Melville offers in Redburn of “his first voyage, the passage to Liverpool he had made at seventeen,” and which appeared before “he based White Jacket on his months in the navy” (AR 371-72). “The one large part of [Melville’s] experience that was still left untapped” by the time of Moby-Dick, Matthiessen notes, “was the knowledge he had acquired of the whaling industry before he had jumped ship at Typee.” Nevertheless, Matthiessen insists that Moby-Dick ranged farther from his personal history than even Mardi had, since the turgid conversations of that romance had often been the debates of his own developing mind, whereas Ahab and his crew were more completely an imaginative projection. When he decided at last to represent life in America, he was no longer writing autobiography even in the loose sense that Redburn can be so called; though because of the scantiness of information c  2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N 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 45 J A Y G R O S S M A N for Melville’s early years, Pierre has been unjustifiably so taken by most of his biographers. In the volumes that remained, Israel Potter, the bulk of The Piazza Tales, The Confidence Man, he was not drawing on his own actions at all. (AR 372) Over the long haul of the Melville chapter—not to mention, to a very large extent, in American Renaissance as a whole—many of Matthiessen’s analytical terms do not bear extensive critical scrutiny. This passage, for example , is founded—and founders—upon a distinction between the “turgid conversations . . . of his own developing mind” and the valorized, “more completely . . . imaginative projection.” But do not both the “conversations” and the “projection” take place within Melville’s “mind”? Are not both an amalgam of lived experiences and their alchemical transformation in writing? As a second example of inconsistencies in Matthiessen’s critical vocabulary , consider this description of what we might call Melville’s allusive promiscuity, and what Matthiessen calls “the most characteristically Melvillian . . . intermingling . . . of allusions to Pan with the others to Abraham and St. John” in Moby-Dick: Ahab’s savagery, not unlike that of a Hebrew prophet, has rejected the warmly material pantheism of the Greeks; but Melville’s breadth has effected, not a fusion, but a unique counterpoint of both. The reason why the values of both Pan and Jehovah were not merely words to him, as they are to most men, is that he had relived them for himself in his own body and mind, and especially in his imagination. This means that he had cut through the dead tissues of the culture of his day, and...