"Ungraspable Phantom": Essays on Moby-Dick (review)

R E V I E W JOHN BRYANT, MARY K. BERCAW EDWARDS, AND TIMOTHY MARR, EDS. “Ungraspable Phantom”: Essays on Moby-Dick Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006. Cloth $59.00. 373 pp. I n October 2001 an international group of Melville scholars and aficionados assembled at Hofstra University to celebrate the sesquicentennial of the publication of Moby-Dick. With the World Trade Center still a smoldering ruin in the background twenty miles away, the participants at the conference celebrated the historic appearance of Melville’s masterwork, which now offered tangible proof, at the onset of the nation’s War on Terror , that the author’s thematics of evil and revenge were still relevant to the modern world—indeed, more so than ever. Five years after the Hofstra conference, a selection of twenty-one papers from the event was published, edited by conference organizer John Bryant with Mary K. Bercaw Edwards and Timothy Marr. Reflecting the diversity of methodologies and nationalities that informed the conference, the resulting collection offers a barometer of the current state of Melville studies, the global reach of Melville’s celebrated novel, and its continuing vitality as an inspiration to artists in other media. The three editors provide useful orientation to the conference and the collection. In his preface, John Bryant sets forth the rationale of the title, “Ungraspable Phantom,” in the paradoxical interplay of body and spirit, including the irreducible corporeality of human life, that Ishmael postulates in the novel—a concept that Bryant whimsically associates with the fraternal hug that Queequeg bestowed on Melville’s narrator. In their joint introduction, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards and Timothy Marr then formally review the various headings and individual papers, providing an attractive and fluent overview of the volume’s contents while offering useful interpretive bridges between sections. The first section of the collection, “Constructing Moby-Dick: Breakdown and Redemption,” addresses compositional issues. In the opening essay (which originally appeared in Leviathan), the novelist E. L. Doctorow provides a hypothetical enactment of Melville’s creative process in the writing of MobyDick while mixing the self-deprecating humor of a non-specialist with the C
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2008 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc 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 53 R E V I E W occasional insights of a fellow practitioner. Lori Howard then discusses Melville’s digressive style of narration, which includes what she terms the “breakout” chapters on cetology and other non-dramatic topics. After canvassing other critics on the ultimate rationale for these chapters and citing some examples from the text, she disappointingly opts for the theory that “part of Melville’s plan was to cope with and write through his blocks, to keep stabbing at the white page until he could face the next chapter and ultimately the ending . . .” Yet the idea that Melville suffered from writer’s block has no empirical foundation; indeed, it goes against everything we know about Melville’s extraordinary rapidity of composition. According to the testimony of a knowledgeable contemporary, Oakey Hall, White-Jacket was “dashed off in a score of sittings”; and during the composition of Moby-Dick, Melville wrote to his friend Duyckinck of the need for “fifty fast-writing youths” to keep up with the flow of his inspiration for new works. Melville’s fact-laden narrative style and encyclopedic erudition in his fiction were the result of a deliberate aesthetic strategy—one might call it mimetic plenitude—that had nothing to do with fear of the blank page. Giorgio Mariani’s ensuing discussion of Father Mapple’s sermon and the book of Jonah draws on René Girard’s theories of sacred violence and the scapegoat. After identifying the biblical Jonah as a scapegoat figure who is anomalously not killed, Mariani focuses on the white whale as Ahab’s “monstrous double,” a sacrificial victim whose death allegedly will restore peace to the world. Extending his analysis, Mariani sees a variety of scapegoat mechanisms and examples in the novel, including Ishmael’s final escape from the wreck of the Pequod. Even...