Congreve and Akenside: Two Poetic Allusions in Melville's "Fragments from a Writing Desk"

Congreve and Akenside: Two Poetic Allusions in Melville’s “Fragments from a Writing Desk” PETER NORBERG St. Joseph’s University H erman Melville’s “Fragments from a Writing Desk” is interesting for its evidence of the author’s formative years. Published under the pseudonym “L. A. V.” in two installments (4 and 18 May 1839) in the Lansingburgh Democratic Press, the “Fragments” are Melville’s first published fiction.1 The two numbered parts anticipate in form his later diptychs: “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs,” “The Two Temples,” and “The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids.” They also provide a wealth of information about his early reading, much of which he probably pursued independently during the time he was a member of the Albany Young Men’s Association from January, 1835 through the spring of 1837.2 Forecasting the allusive nature of Melville’s mature work, the narrator of the fragments weaves into his prose quotations from writers including Shakespeare, Byron, Milton, Thomas Campbell, Edmund Burke, Coleridge, and Sheridan. But, according to the Northwestern-Newberry Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, two quotations are unidentified.3 Both occur in the first fragment and pertain to the narrator’s description of three of the fairest “blushing damsels” in the village of Lansingburgh (NN PT 193). The first, “Sail in liquid light, And float on seas of bliss,” is taken from William Congreve’s tragedy The Mourning Bride (1697), and the second, “Effuse the mildness of their azure beam,” from Mark Akenside’s didactic poem “The Pleasures of Imagination” (1744).4 C
2008 The Authors Journal compilation C
2008 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, 2 vols. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 and 2002), 1:138-39. 2 William H. Gilman, Melville’s Early Life and Redburn, (New York: New York University Press, 1951), 73. 3 Herman Melville, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1987), 623; hereafter cited as NN PT. 4 Hershel Parker has also identified the sources of these two quotations in his book Melville: The Making of the Poet (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 53. My identification and Parker’s were made independently. 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 71 P E T E R N O R B E R G Simply identifying the sources of these quotations adds to our knowledge of Melville’s reading. Yet, when read in context, as integral parts of Melville’s first foray into fiction, they further illustrate an ironic attitude toward literary conventions that can help us better appreciate two aspects of his craft: Melville’s facility for appropriating source materials, and his persistent interest in moments of discursive disjunction—moments of miscommunication, or non-communication that occur when one person fails to recognize the conventions of discourse being spoken by another. Such moments are crucial in many of Melville’s mature works. Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to,” Babo’s silence, or Billy Budd’s inability to respond in words to Claggart’s accusations, each of these moments indicates a lacuna in public discourse, a gap in communication that occurs when the terms of one discursive community cannot be translated into the terms of another.5 “Fragments from a Writing Desk” ends in just such a moment of baffled silence, one that reveals the disjuncture between the discourse of romanticism and the culture of courtship among the middle class. More specifically, Melville used these two poetic quotations to establish the tropes of romanticism that structure the narrator’s aborted tryst with the mysterious woman in the second fragment. As Leon Howard first observed, “Fragments” is a parody of the romantic and sentimental fiction that was in vogue with Melville’s peers, and the narrator ’s affected allusions to poetry are integral to the story’s humor.6 In the...