The "Wholeness" of the Whale: Melville, Matthiessen, and the Semiotics of Critical Revisionism

MARC DOLAN The "Wholeness" of the Whale: Melville, Matthiessen, and the Semiotics of Critical Revisionism Last year we observed two important anniversaries in the history of American literature: 1991 marked both the centennial of Herman Melville's death and the semicentennial of the publication of F. O. Mathiessen's American Renaissance. In the half-century between those two occurrences, Melville went from being an obscure New York writer of sea stories to his current status as one of the dozen or so American authors who cannot be ignored. In many ways, the path of his posthumous career and his consequent centrality to American literary studies is even more fascinating than the ups and downs of his career while he was alive. In what follows, I would like to re-examine the admittedly familial story of Melville's critical rediscovery by exploring the significance of the "Melville boom" between the two world wars for the growth of American literary studies of the antebellum petiod. This exploration will be bracketed by a general discussion of the process of canon formation and the semiotics of critical rediscovery. Far from deploring the canonization of Melville as a "classic American author," I will suggest that this development was a structural necessity and reflects a larger movement of critical historiography, an oscillation between similarity and difference that typically proceeds by acts ofcritical elevation such as the "Melville boom" of the early twentieth century and the "Hurston boom" of the late twentieth century. Arizona Quarterly Volume 48 Number 3, Autumn 1992 Copyright © 1992 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004- 1610 Marc Dolan There are a number of theories of how literary reputations are built, ranging from the paranoid ("It's all an insidious conspiracy to keep out Lafcadio Hearn!") to the lackadaisical ("Things happened."). Somewhere in between lie interpretations of literary history that see ctitical reputations as part politics and part accident. Texts become classics not so much because they endure over time but because they prove rewarding to a varied succession of critical approaches. As Jane Tompkins notes in her survey of shifts in the ctitical reputation of Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Scarlet Letter is a great novel in 1850, in 1876, in 1904, in 1942, and in 1966, but each time it is great for different reasons" (35). Tompkins's work ably demonstrates the part-accident, part-politics interpretation of literary history, as does Richard Brodhead's similar examination of Hawthorne's critical "uses" in the late nineteenth and eatly twentieth centuries. And yet both Tompkins and Brodhead are somewhat narrow in their view of critics' overt and covert political purposes. Despite the intelligence of their reconstmctions, both authors see literary history as invariably at the service of "larger" political and intellectual systems rather than as an ideological system in its own tight, capable of generating its own purposes and ideological imperatives . Although it is true that literary criticism is often hostage to the pattisan causes of its time, it is also, like any othet discipline, just as frequently concerned with the business of self-perpetuation — with preserving the ctitical status quo or extending the validity of its claims purely for their own sake rather than as an extension of some other ideological agenda. For example, in the much-cited case of Matthiessen, it is equally true that: (a) as Donald Pease and Jonathan Arac have both pointed out, Matthiessen's intellectual and critical principles were firmly grounded in the cultural poetics of the 1930s and 1940s, and (b) those underlying principles were less essential for Matthiessen's students and admirers than the "exterior" ideas presented in works such as American Renaissance and Theodore Dreiser, ideas which those original principles had generated. The number of scholars who revere Matthiessen and his work and yet do not share his distaste for domestic anti-Communism, for example, are legion, as are those whose atheism prevents them from Semiotics of Critical Revisionism29 fully appreciating the central contributions that Matthiessen's religious beliefs made to the shaping of his literary and critical tastes. After a certain point, the critical status quo becomes important precisely because it is the status quo and for no other, underlying reason, just as aftet...