William James on Radical Empiricism and Religion by Hunter Brown (review)

278 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 selects Billy Budd, since Moby-Dick seems to draw the greater cluster of references. But even if there were meaningful patterns of reference, the slender remnant of this book fails to confirm that astronomy decisively informs Melville=s literary imagination in Mardi, Clarel, and Billy Budd. Astronomy no doubt engenders philosophical questions about the human condition, but Melville=s literary uses of astronomy have little dignity beyond their service as thematic ornaments. Zimmerman does show that Melville extends the allegorized spiritual quest in Mardi to mythic and cosmic levels with his astronomical references. Moreover, Melville=s allegory (which Melville in Moby-Dick finally disparages as >hideous= allegory) more clearly reflects his debt to literary tradition than to astronomy per se. The distortions Zimmerman imposes on Clarel are less excusable inasmuch as Clarel, as an epic quest for religious fulfilment in age of scepticism, is turned inside out: Melville, in Zimmerman=s hands, thematizes the struggle between the theological and scientific models of astronomy rather than the more broadly occasioned crisis of faith in the nineteenth century of which astronomy furnishes potent symbols. Finally, Zimmerman=s astronomical fixation yields an absurd reading of Billy Budd, Sailor. Here, >Melville=s use of solar, lunar, stellar, and especially constellatory imagery adds a depth of symbolic meaning that takes a tale of nautical misadventure and places it within the cosmic scope of Christian epic.= Billy Budd, of course, doesn=t require an encrusted layer of astronomical reference to stand out as more than a nautical misadventure B any more than Christian epic requires it to achieve a cosmic scope. We reach the reductio of this line of thinking when Zimmerman, conceding that Billy Budd is >unfinished,= clearly supposes that a finished version of the novella would naturally have a greater complement of astronomical imagery. The misconstruction of the literary process evident here and throughout Zimmerman=s book makes one grateful that Melville could still prove a great writer even though he was also a hobbyastronomer . (WILLIAM BARTLEY) Hunter Brown. William James on Radical Empiricism and Religion University of Toronto Press. vi, 186. $40.00 Even those who haven=t read James=s The Will to Believe are likely to recognize it as the work that canonized him as >the patron saint of wishful thinking.= In a century of critical response, James has been accused of mistaking religious conviction for hypothesis-adoption (as if his Varieties of Religious Experience were a guide for religion shopping), of privatizing objectivity, and of loading the dice in Pascal=s Wager. In short, his will-tobelieve doctrine has been understood as a prescription to adopt theism on the grounds of its immediate personal rewards, a knee-jerk pragmatism that HUMANITIES 279 would find truth in whatever >works= for the inquirer. This misconstruction is entrenched, and among its architects are some of the century=s most recognizable names, but in one of those outré moves that spur critical production, Hunter Brown reintroduces us to a thinker whose openmindedness is the very opposite of naïvety, and whose preoccupations seem startlingly contemporary. In a defence of James that is by turns admirably intricate and frustratingly complicated, Brown situates the religious writing B Will to Believe in particular B within a >generally coherent= body of thought running from Principles through Pragmatism to Radical Empiricism. The danger with this contextual approach is that it comes with something like a default setting: when Will to Believe gets ambiguous, an explanation can be back-engineered from James=s more reliable work. If we give Brown the benefit of the doubt, we do so because we give it first to James, whom we want to see vindicated, and because the critical niche for this apology is so vacant. But though his familiarity with James=s corpus never reaches the level of intimacy at which his understanding becomes subliminal B a Rolodex of stock quotations is always on hand B Brown does bring much-needed clarity to James=s religious thought, while accounting for the frequent misunderstanding. In addition to lending authenticity, the term >liveness,= which Brown takes from James to open his study, organizes a collection of topics that might otherwise...