The Epistemology of the Wonder-Closet: Melville, Moby-Dick, and the Marvelous

The Epistemology of the Wonder-Closet: Melville, Moby-Dick, and the Marvelous CHAD LUCK Indiana University I n 1847, four years before the publication of his whaling masterpiece, Herman Melville wrote the first of what would eventually be five book reviews for the New York magazine Literary World. The subject of this first review is Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, an autobiographical tale of life on a New Bedford whaler by J. Ross Browne. At first, Melville’s treatment comes across as uninspired, as if he is bored and unwilling to devote much energy to the book. “From time immemorial,” he ponderously begins, “many fine things have been said and sung of the sea.”1 Browne’s book, we quickly determine, is not one of them. As the review continues, however, one particular shortcoming begins to emerge as Melville’s central concern. Browne’s matter-of-fact book, he complains, “tends still further to impair the charm with which poesy and fiction have invested the sea” (NN PT 205). An austere factualism, he believes, has overtaken the genre of sea writing: “The days have been, when sailors were considered veritable mermen; and the ocean itself, as the peculiar theatre of the romantic and wonderful. But of late years there have been revealed so many plain, matter-of-fact details connected with nautical life that at the present day the poetry of salt water is very much on the wane.” Browne’s narrative is contrasted with an earlier tradition of sea-writing in which “charm” and “wonder” were integral aspects of the text. Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, Melville tells us, is “a book of unvarnished facts,” and as such it is symptomatic of a larger movement away from the qualities of wonder and poetic resonance. Once he warms to this theme, Melville’s book review becomes more interesting. After again chastising the work for its “disenchanting nature” (NN PT 206), he shifts to a more sarcastic register, poking fun at the credulity of the narrator and undercutting Browne’s authority: “Give ear to Mr. J. Ross Browne, and hearken unto what that experienced young gentleman has to say” (208). But Browne’s stature is only an incidental (albeit amusing) casualty of the larger point that Melville wants to make about the crucial importance of C
2007 The Authors Journal compilation C
2007 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc 1 Herman Melville, The Piazza Tales, and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1987), 205; hereafter cited as NN PT. 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 3 C H A D L U C K enchantment and wonder. Browne’s false authority is set up in opposition to the bits of poetry that Melville quotes (from Barry Cornwall’s “The Sea”) and in so doing, Melville is able to revalue and reemphasize what he sarcastically terms the “lamentable delusion” of a “glorious sea” (208). The image of an enchanted sea, a wondrous sea, is precisely the understanding that readers ought to cultivate, he suggests, rather than accepting Browne’s flat, matter-offact rendition, which drains the ocean of any poetic charm. Toward the end of the piece, under the pretense of reinforcing Browne’s claim that whaling is a brutal life, Melville begins contributing his own carefully crafted descriptions of hardship on a whaler. “We shudder at all realities of the career they will be entering upon. The long, dark, cold nightwatches , which, month after month, they must battle out the best way they can,—the ship pitching and thumping against the bullying waves—every plank dripping—every jacket soaked—and the Captain not at all bland in issuing his order for the poor fellows to mount aloft in the icy sleet and howling tempest” (NN PT 209). At first the descriptions would seem to be adding weight to Browne’s disenchanted perspective, but it quickly becomes apparent that Melville is taking pleasure in...