3 Melville

It was an unbalanced year for Melville studies, with the early work and the late writings receiving virtually no critical attention and Moby-Dick the subject of a whale-sized body of criticism, including five very diverse books. The tales and sketches—particularly "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "Benito Cereno"—received a number of fine readings. Also notable is a special issue of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies devoted to pedagogy.

i General

Several works deal with biography. Elizabeth Hardwick's Herman Melville (Viking) adds little to scholarly knowledge of Melville, but it is a lively, gracefully written introduction. Hardwick surveys Melville's life and career, often reading the biography through the works. She particularly praises Moby-Dick, "the fantastic explosion of genius," and says, "but of course it is Ahab's tale; Ahab's and Moby Dick's gladiatorial, hand-to-hand battle, a heathenish defiance. Ahab: nothing to stand with him in our literature, before or after." However, Hardwick also confesses that reading Mardi, Pierre, and Clarel is "a task" she passed over "with abruptness." Richard Hardack's "Bodies in Pieces, Texts Entwined: Correspondence and Intertexuality in Melville and Hawthorne," pp. 126–51 in Epistolary Histories, describes a pattern of "physical intertextuality" in Melville's correspondence with Hawthorne, for Melville repeatedly associates texts with bodies and intertextuality with physical connection. The letters serve as the ultimate fraternal bond, as Melville searches not only for this link to another, but also for a stable sense of self. Hardack then applies these ideas to a reading of Pierre, which he contends is a "blatant rewriting" of "Rappaccini's Daughter." In the novel "Isabel serves as the nexus for Melville's desire to merge with Hawthorne, his feelings of pantheism, and his anxieties about influence and reproduction." Robert K. Wallace in "Melville's Prints: The E. Barton Chapman, Jr., Family Collection" (Leviathan 2, i: 5–65) describes a collection of 37 art prints owned by Melville. The collection "reflects his life as a traveler, book collector, and writer, and it illustrates interrelations among these activities." Wallace discusses six categories of prints: classical landscapes after Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and others; female subjects after Del Piombo and Boucher; Dutch painters; English painters and subjects; literary subjects by Leslie and Nahl; and Mediterranean scenes. In each category Wallace relates the prints to aspects and events in Melville's life and career. Particularly significant is Wallace's analysis of the impact of Claude Lorrain and his followers, who make up much of this collection and who had a considerable influence on Melville's aesthetic of landscape. Steven Olsen-Smith's "A Fourth Supplementary Note to Melville's Reading (1988)" (Leviathan 2, i: 105–11) describes finding Melville's copy of Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry, from the Eleventh to the Seventeenth Century in the Brooklyn Public Library. Heavily marked and annotated, the volume should reveal much about Melville's knowledge of and response to poetry.

Two studies range across a number of Melville's works. Zbigniew Bialas, in "Cogitation on the Line: Herman Melville and Text/ure" (EJES 4: 49–65) applies the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to address the "issues of the relationship between the text and the representation of the line in Moby-Dick, Typee, and Redburn. The exemplification concerns 1) operations on text/ure and tattoos, 2) uses and abuses of border/lines, 3) critique of framed representations and finally 4) manipulations with charts understood as conceptual nets used in screening secrets of conventional signs." Bialas sees Melville's texts as blurring attempts, such as Ahab's, to establish linearity, well-defined borders, and accurate maps as centers of significance and of rooted hierarchies. Focusing primarily upon Moby-Dick, Bialas discusses the fabric of the text as a patchwork having no center or regular geometric pattern, an "amorphous collection of juxtaposed pieces, non-homogeneous and non-formal." In "Melville's Puritan Imagination" (Prospects 25: 69–114) Marcus L. Sheffield asserts that modernist critics of Melville were wrong in seeing him as a religious skeptic and that "Melville invited his readers to abandon 19th-century America and cross over a...