"(Im)Possible Gifts in Herman Melville's Typee and The Confidence-Man"

Abstracts ALA—BOSTON Melville and the Ends of Philosophy CHAIR: MAURICE LEE, BOSTON UNIVERSITY A t the American Literature Association’s annual conference held in Boston this May, the Melville Society sponsored the panel, “Melville and the End(s) of Philosophy.” Organized and chaired by Maurice S. Lee of Boston University, the panel addressed a set of interlocking questions. To what ends does Melville put philosophy? Does he see philosophy reaching a telos or losing its legitimacy? How does Melville draw on philosophical traditions and anticipate changes in philosophy? What are the boundaries of philosophy, particularly in relation to other domains of thought and social practice? “American Socrates: Melville and the Sacrifice of Philosophy” John Levi Barnard Boston University I n Pierre and “Bartleby,” the philosopher is always marked, like Socrates, for execution. Socrates disarms this violence by claiming that philosophy is nothing more than preparation for death. By sacrificing the disturbing philosopher, then, the state only facilitates her apotheosis; in this sense, if to philosophize is to prepare for death, our confrontation with death is the ultimate test of our philosophy. Melville ritually enacts his death as a philosopherartist in the closing of The Confidence-Man, just as he enacts his exclusion from the American literary canon. Melville figuratively consigns his work to the Apocrypha as the Cosmopolitan disappears, cheerfully and fearlessly as Socrates in the Phaedo, into the blinding darkness. This moment illustrates Melville’s final sense of the word “confidence.” In a world that would sacrifice the philosopher as, ironically, Socrates would have sacrificed the poet, he C  2009 The Authors Journal compilation C  2009 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 118 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 A B S T R A C T S keeps faith with an indeterminate future that could be otherwise. Melville does for his own work what Plato does for the philosophy of Socrates: by writing the sacrificial death of philosophy, he expresses confidence in the survival of “philosophy” on the “life preserver” (or, “life-buoy”) of writing. “Pierre, Social Reform, and the Agony of Moral Perfection” Christopher Freeburg University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign I n Pierre (1852), on the way to the city, Pierre reads the pamphlet, “Chronologicals and Horologicals,” which takes up the fundamental difficulties of Christians or others who try to follow the Christian gospels—to consistently think and do as Jesus did. It is no accident that Melville takes up this question (of praxis via Christ), which addresses one of the most vigorous debates in the intellectual life of the antebellum U.S. It is also no coincidence that Pierre’s sister Isabel stands as a symbolic conglomeration of racial confusion , poverty, foreignness, and religious uncertainty. She exemplifies the social objects that need rescuing by those loyal to the moral philosophies of Christ or others who believe in the possibilities of perfecting society. Thus, the pamphlet’s discussions of the existential capacity to do the right thing socially not only has a theological corollary in debates about historical Christianity; it also corresponds to the dangerous classes many Christian reform movements tried to influence. Pierre’s relation with his racially ambiguous, mystical, and poor sister, defines and makes visible the conflict between knowing and doing the word, sacrificing and living as Christ did—which for Melville is at once a question of existence and racialized social difference in the mid-nineteenth century. “(Im)Possible Gifts in Herman Melville’s Typee and The Confidence-Man” Hildegard Hoeller CUNY, The Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island I examine nineteenth-century American fiction through the conversation about gifts that spans from anthropological renditions of non-monetary tribal “primitive” cultures to Jacques Derrida’s obsessive ruminations on the (im)possibility of the gift. This conversation illuminates Melville’s economic and philosophical concerns in both Typee and The Confidence-Man. 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 119 E X T R A...