Melville’s Relations: Organizer: Elizabeth Duquette, Gettysburg College Chair: Justine Murison, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Participants in “Melville’s Relations” panel at ALA 2015, from left to right: Neill Matheson, K. L. Evans, and John Levi Barnard.

Photo courtesy of Justine Murison.

The fact, and problem, of relation is one of the chief philosophical concerns orienting Herman Melville’s varied writings. His novels, stories, and poems all consider the kinds of relation that people construct, as well as those they inherit or inhabit. The tension between kinds of social relation—those that we choose and those that are chosen for us—raises questions about ethics and politics, duty and love, choice and necessity. While American literary scholars have been deeply interested in recent years in the implications of particular forms of relation, like those created by sympathy or through political engagement, there has been less investigation of relation itself, the structures that make kinds of co-existence visible or impossible, as well as modes of relation that extend beyond a narrow focus on the human. These latter questions were of deep interest to Melville, both as a problem of content and as an issue of form. The innovation and experimentation of his prose and poetry all demonstrate his abiding and persistent concern in understanding how structures of relation shape what can be said about the world, as well as what it is possible to do and see in it. Each paper on this panel approached Melville’s thinking on relation differently, either focusing on overlooked moments of relation in the works or providing a new reading of relations that had seemed settled, in order to demonstrate Melville’s nuanced understanding of the complex structures of relation that organize life, human and nonhuman alike.

Voided by the Wound: Bare Life and the Kindness of Sharks
John Levi Barnard
The College of Wooster

As Geoffrey Sanborn observes in “Melville and the Nonhuman World,” the “explosion” in the past decade “of analytic approaches to the subject of the non-human world … makes this an ideal moment to return to Melville’s peculiar and frequently misunderstood relationship to ‘nature.’” Much of the scholarship on Moby-Dick that has constituted this return has focused on the material and symbolic dimensions of human relations with the whale itself. This paper will extend the inquiry into Melville’s complex vision of human-animal relations through an examination of the neglected figure of the shark. While the shark has primarily been read as metaphorically revealing the “sharkish” violence of “humanity” in Melville’s work, the shark is not precisely analogous to human appetite or human violence, but is indeed—quite like the whale—subjected to them. But where the whale is or can be a commodity, sharks are merely waste, collateral damage in the pursuit of the whale and the monetary value it represents. But in Moby-Dick, human behavior is never more “shark-ish” than it is in relation to sharks yet, importantly, sharks figure prominently in the deliverance of the human at the novel’s close. In that conclusion, the whale, the shark, and the human achieve and express particular forms of freedom; but it is together—in a relation we might take as exemplifying Gary Steiner’s non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism—that they keep Ishmael afloat and therefore to produce the narrative that finally bears witness to the “sharkish business” of humanity (as Melville terms it in “Stubb’s Supper”) and to the bare life and ultimate kindness of sharks.

Allan Melvill’s Melancholy: Errant Books, Blocked Mourning
Neill Matheson
University of Texas at Arlington

This paper explores a curious, apparently minor episode: Melville’s 1851 discovery that his copy of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, purchased a few years earlier in a New York City used bookstore, had once been owned by his father, who sold it in financial distress before his death. Pierre, which Melville began writing a few months later, seems to contain several altered versions of this anecdote, as if he were fascinated by its implications, exploring them through the novel’s thematics of hidden inscriptions, errant...