Abstracts: ALA 2013-Boston

Late Melville
CHAIR: Cody Marrs, University Of Georgia

The shape of Herman Melville’s career is tantalizingly complex. For more than forty years, this literary wayfarer moved between (and out of, and back into) a range of genres, forms, styles, and discourses. This panel focused on the final phase of this movement: the “late” period of Melville’s career, evident in Clarel (1876), John Marr (1888), Timoleon (1891), Weeds and Wildings, and Billy Budd, Sailor. The panelists offered a rich array of responses to the question “What defines Melville’s late style?” Martin Kevorkian argued that Melville’s later writings are structured through a kind of silence, a prayerful quietness that aspires toward spiritual communion. The other panelists analyzed Melville’s late concerns and alternatives to his earlier verbal exuberance: Matthew Rebhorn discussed the conscious body in Billy Budd; Christopher Hager, the visions of sailors’ afterlives in John Marr; and Peter Riley, the rhythms of labor as a customs-house inspector in Melville’s final works.

Late Emerson, Late Hawthorne, Late Melville
Martin Kevorkian
University of Texas at Austin

For some twenty years, the figure of a distinct “late Emerson” has been emerging within Emerson studies (starting with Robinson’s 1993 book on Emerson and the Conduct of Life); more recently, “late Hawthorne” has become the subject of renewed interest; see, for example, the 2009 special issue of Nathaniel Hawthorne Review on “The Later Works,” especially the essay by Ullén and Greven. The 2007 special issue of Leviathan on “Melville the Poet” and the forthcoming volume Melville as Poet, edited by Sanford E. Marovitz, draw attention to a neglected body of work produced by Melville in his later years. I focus on Melville’s response to the late writings of Emerson and Hawthorne. While composing Clarel, Melville acquired and commented upon Emerson’s Conduct of Life and also Hawthorne’s Elixir of Life, a work that highlights these late texts’ shared interest in the need for worship and spiritual communion. Crafting a poetics pervaded by what Edward Said, in On Late Style, terms “allusive silence,” Melville bridges what Said poses as the late career dichotomy between difficulty and reconciliation, expressing “unresolved contradiction” through a return, shared with Emerson, to a ministerial style and purpose modeled upon Hawthorne’s silence.

Billy’s Fist: Neural Science, Embodiment, and Melville’s Late Style
Matthew Rebhorn
James Madison University

Melville’s last novel, Billy Budd, draws together two threads that run through his literary career and that are stitched into his late style: his despair at language’s inability to communicate and his focus on the body’s ability to convey meaning. While language stutters in this novel, Billy’s fist and its crushing of Claggart’s head become the communicative hinge on which the entire novel turns. By situating Melville’s representation of Billy’s fist—and his body more generally—within contemporary scientific discourses (especially Alexander Bain’s investigation of the body’s “will power”), I argue that Melville’s late style is defined by two intertwined dynamics involving the body. First, Billy Budd highlights Melville’s discovery of an ontology of the body that goes beyond materiality. Melville represents his more fully realized understanding of the ways in which the body has a “mind” of its own. Second, in the chapter that explores why Billy’s body does not twitch when hanged, Melville’s nuanced representation of Billy’s “will power” tasks the reader with developing new modes of reading that can make sense of this conscious body. Apart from new ontological understandings of the body, Melville’s late style is defined by his investment in redefining our reading practices: why we read, and how we read the bodies that populate and animate nineteenth-century American fiction.

Styles of Aging: Melville’s Sailor Elegies
Christopher Hager
Trinity College

Over the course of Melville’s career, the cultural meaning of aging and death shifted. Whereas in antebellum America the end of life connoted a (spiritual, intellectual) crescendo, by the late nineteenth century aging tended to be associated with (mostly physical) decline. Melville’s recurrent meditations on...