Israel Potter: Sketch Patriotism

Israel Potter: Sketch Patriotism GALE TEMPLE University of Alabama at Birmingham S ince the early days of the Melville revival, critics of Israel Potter (1855) have commonly followed the lead of F. O. Matthiessen, who viewed the novel as evidence of Melville’s mental and physical exhaustion after the publication and poor reception of Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852). The “structure” of Israel Potter, according to Matthiessen, indicates “a man not at all able to write the kind of books he wanted to, but under a miserable compulsion.” Nevertheless, Matthiessen suggests that there are redemptive qualities to the novel, particularly Melville’s “sketches” of Benjamin Franklin and John Paul Jones, which indicate “how much Melville had reflected on the American character, and on what it needed most to bring it to completion.”1 Newton Arvin expanded upon Matthiessen’s view, calling Israel Potter “hardly more than a heap of sketches, some of them brilliant ones, for a masterpiece that never got composed. . . . Naturally the product is not a narrative with any profound unity or serious inner coherence of its own.”2 More recent critics have echoed these themes, referring to the novel, variously, as “a loose stringing together of set pieces,” as “among neither the most ambitious nor the most successfully realized of Melville’s novels,” and as “seriously botched by [Melville’s] changes of mind and mode.”3 These critiques point to similar issues: a withering of desire or fortitude in Melville; a failure to follow through on his presumed intentions for the novel; a resultant “sketch”-like quality to the work, which seems to leave key questions and themes unresolved or underdeveloped; a lack of narrative cohesiveness that Melville, in better days, could certainly have brought to the text (to bring its subject matter, the “American character . . . to completion,” as Matthiessen might say). C  2009 The Authors Journal compilation C  2009 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), 491, 493. 2 Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (New York: Sloane, 1950), 245. 3 Clark Davis, After the Whale: Melville in the Wake of Moby-Dick (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1995), 60; Brian Rosenberg, “Israel Potter: Melville’s Anti-History,” Studies in American Fiction 15 (Spring 1987): 175; George Dekker, The American Historical Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 191–92. 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 G A L E T E M P L E While a great deal of criticism has been devoted to Israel Potter’s flaws, much less has been said about the serialization of the novel.4 Appearing in Putnam’s Monthly in installments ranging from six and a half to as many as thirteen and a half pages from July of 1854 through March of 1855, Israel Potter represented one of Melville’s first attempts to harness the immediacy of the periodical form.5 Although, as Walter Bezanson suggests, Melville probably did not craft installments to meet the demands of serialization, the magazine publication of Israel Potter did establish Melville “as one of the leading contributors to Putnam’s,” with “all but three of the seventeen issues” including his work (“Historical Note” 211). It seems crucial, therefore, to understand Israel Potter as developing out of a particular phase in Melville’s career, one informed by the aesthetic demands of the periodical marketplace and by the various consumer expectations and reading practices that gave rise to the popularity of literary periodicals (and, correspondingly, the literary sketch) in the mid-nineteenth century. When viewed from this perspective, critics who fault Israel Potter’s fragmentary structure or thematic disunity run the risk of oversimplification, for they neglect to consider the social, political, and economic factors that underpinned the popularity and influence of both the literary sketch and the serial novel.6 Rather than viewing Arvin’s designation of Israel Potter (“hardly 4 One notable exception is Sheila Post-Lauria’s “Magazine Practices and Melville...