"No Life You Have Known": Or, Melville's Contemporary Critics

“No Life You Have Known”: Or, Melville’s Contemporary Critics HESTER BLUM The Pennsylvania State University M id-nineteenth century evaluations of Herman Melville’s work share a common attention to what many reviewers—and it can seem like all of them—called the “extravagance” of his writing and his imagination. Critics remarked on his general “love of antic and extravagant speculation” (O’Brien 389) and found that his imagination had a “tendency to wildness and metaphysical extravagance” (Hawthorne and Lemmon 208). In their estimation the “extravagant” Mardi featured “incredibly extravagant disguises” (“Trio” 462) and contained “a world of extravagant phantoms and allegorical shades” (Chasles 262), while Redburn was notable for “episodic extravaganzas” (“Sir Nathaniel” 453). “Unlicensed extravagance” (454) characterized even White-Jacket; and “the extravagant treatment” (454) given to whaling in Moby-Dick stood in for the novel’s “eccentric and monstrously extravagant” nature (“Trio” 463), containing as it did “reckless, inconceivable extravagancies” (“Trio” 463) in addition to “purposeless extravagance” (A.B.R. 364). These surpassed the only “passable extravagancies” of his earlier works (“Book Notices” 93). The critical account offered above was assembled from fragments of criticism of the novels of Melville’s mid-career; readers of Pierre will hear in it the echo of Mary Glendinning’s equally insistent—and equally regulatory— catalogue of her son’s qualities: “A noble boy, and docile. . . I thank heaven I sent him not to college. A noble boy, and docile. A fine, proud, loving, docile, vigorous boy. . . . His little wife, that is to be, will not estrange him from me; for she too is docile,—beautiful, and reverential, and most docile. . . . How glad am I that Pierre loves her so. . . the fine, proud, loving, docile, vigorous boy!” (NN Pierre 19-20). In the cases of both Melville’s contemporary critics and Mary Glendinning, the unstinting replication of the descriptor reveals less a judgment of some intrinsic quality in Melville (or Pierre) than a substitution of linguistic performativity for subtlety of critical acumen. The repetitions indicate that the speech act of labeling Melville’s prose is, in fact, more desirable than the critical act of describing it. The lack of synonyms for “extravagant” and “docile” suggests both the critics’ and Mary Glendinning’s c  2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 10 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 M E L V I L L E ’ S C O N T E M P O R A R Y C R I T I C S tautological refusal to recognize other possibilities, other governing structures at work in Melville’s career. In the anxious repetitions uttered on Melville’s behalf, we can sense a desire less to will the term to be appropriate than to arrest any slippage of meaning, to stabilize or to familiarize Melville’s writerly character through reiteration, just as Mary Glendinning’s reiteration strives to insist upon the docility it describes. The word “extravagance,” signifying a mode of excess to avoid, has been on many tongues since the economic downturn of 2008. Used this way, extravagance refers primarily to something that exceeds the “bounds of economy or necessity in expenditure,” something that is wasteful or excessive or unnecessarily elaborate (OED). Yet Melville’s critics were using the word in its earlier sense—one still economic, but tied more explicitly to an economy of limits. The primary definition of extravagant from the seventeenth until the mid-nineteenth centuries was “to wander, stray outside limits; to go beyond bounds; to exceed what is proper or reasonable”; to be irregular. Whereas a lively imagination could certainly be a desired quality in an author, Melville’s extravagance was presumed to wander beyond the comfort of a boundary. And aside from his transgressions of taste and propriety, the limits that Melville was judged to have exceeded were formal: not just the parameters of narrative form, but those of imagination, as well. He was thought to possess what William Dean Howells called (in a review of Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War) “the...