"The Excellently Illustrated Re-Statement of a Problem": Recent Work in Melville Studies

BOOK REVIEWS "The Excellently Illustrated Re-Statement of a Problem": Recent Work in Melville Studies Stan Goldman University of Louisville Christopher S. Durer. Herman Melville, Romantic and Prophet: A Study of His Romantic Sensibility and His Relationship to European Romantics. Fredericton, Canada: York Press, 1996. 188 p. Elizabeth Renker. Strike through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. 182 p. Laurie Robertson-Lorant. Melville: A Biography. New York: Clarkson Potter Publishers, 1996. 710 p. William V. Spanos. The Errant Art of "Moby-Dick": The Canon, The Cold War, and The Struggle for American Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. 375 p. Christopher Sten. 7Yie Weaver-God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1996. 361 p. John Wenke. Melville's Muse: Literary Creation and the Forms of Philosophical Fiction. Kent: Kent State University Press, 1995. 251 p. 1 he narrator of Melville's novel Pierre introduces Plotinus Plinlimmon's pamphlet on "Chronometricals and Horologicals" with the following words: "it seems more the excellently illustrated re-statement of a problem, than the solution of the problem itself" (Northwestern/Newberry 210). These words accurately describe all but one of the five critical studies and the one biography that came out in 1995-96. William V. Spanos makes two crucial missteps in his study entitled The Errant Art of Moby-Dick. First, by digging a little lower layer beneath his contextualization of Moby-Dick in terms of Foucault and Heidegger, the reader discovers that Spanos merely repeats the Antinomian theory of American literature that reigned in the 1970s. Spanos' claim that MobyDick criticizes the prevailing majority American culture is not new. Spanos is so immersed in theory that he hasn't done his homework; he has not adequately studied the scholarship on Melville since the 1920s. Yet he calls himself a "New Americanist." More specifically, Spanos' claims that Melville wrote an antiromance (Spanos apparently hasn't read Perry Miller) and that Ishmael parodies the Linnaean system in the cetological chapters are not new. Spanos' claim that the Pequod represents a critique of American industrialization and 69 70Rocky Mountain Review expansionism is also not new (see Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden). Spanos even takes Father Mapple's rhetoric as representative of the dominant , repressive Puritan culture, but ignores the possibility of an ironic reading of Mapple's sermon (well established in Melville Studies). And beyond all else, to claim that Ishmael questions Ahab's view of the whale is to set Melville Studies back fifty years to before Bezanson's classic article "Moby-Dick as Work ofArt." Spanos' second misstep is that his prose is not just stylistically uninspired ; it is deadly and unreadable. Spanos' jargon is also a New Americanist 's attempt to travel with the false passport of a philosopher, as in the "grounding in the ontological spatialization of temporality" (37) or "the disabling internalization and resolution of existential contradictions incumbent on the reduction of being-in-the-world miniaturized representation" (60). Spanos' use of neologisms and hyphenated words has a long tradition in much European philosophy. Sometimes you need such words (such as absence -in-presence) to designate something that confronts an interpreter for which there is no accepted English term. But Spanos' elaborate neologisms often take the place of turning to the text. In other words, his translation of Moby-Dick into the Gestalt of a twentieth-century interpretive paradigm situates Spanos intellectually in our time but offers no new interpretation of Melville's cosmic novel Moby-Dick. In fact, one has to read 75 pages of alien, hypothetical taxonomies and philosophical jargon before Spanos ever turns to Moby-Dick. Spanos also has no intellectual qualms about jumping centuries and contexts . New Historicists and New Americanists want to deflate the importance of the individual author, discredit any kind of transcendence or universalism in literature, and place the text within the sociopolitical context of history. But do the leaps from Moby-Dick to Watergate indicate a New Historicist belief that a nineteenth-century text is imbedded in all of world history—past, present, and future? Melville may be an early postmodern writer in...