MLA 2016—Austin, Texas Radical Inhabitation: Melville’s Late Fiction

Participants in “Radical Inhabitation: Melville’s Late Fiction” panel at MLA 2016, from left to right: Justine Murison, Colin Dayan, Michael Snediker, James Lilley (who delivered a response to the panel), Kim Leilani Evans.

Photo courtesy of Brian Yothers.

In responding to the brilliant weave of talks on this panel, James Lilley seized upon “figuration” as the unifying thread that joined them—the distinct ordinariness of what we might ordinarily call “supernatural” and the radical materiality of what we consider the stuff of spiritual life:

[A]t stake in Melville’s late fiction is a different mode of opacity, a different aesthetics of abstraction, that isn’t simply equated with the non-real, the non-particular, or the non-personal—an aesthetics that, instead, involves the practice of strangely impersonal and imparticular forces of figuration.

Melville looked for faith, as Ishmael put it in Moby-Dick, “among the jackals,” on a terrain of fragments and waste. To give spirit the color and shape of matter, the most sodden if dark embodiment was his goal. What thrills most about these papers, then, is the challenge to commonplace notions of opacity and abstraction.

Each speaker dwelled on the problem of the figurative. Justine Murison, in “Converting the Heathen at Home,” reflected on the revelation of what lurks under cover of civility. In Pierre to be stripped of the veneer of “decency” is also to expose the “moral contradiction of privacy.” Clothing thus “operates figuratively to evoke the embedded relation of privacy and morality throughout the novel.” In Michael Snediker’s “The Iron Cross of Lombardy,” Pierre was again the focus, this time for an extended meditation on chronic pain, phenomenology, and figuration as a craft of “the excrescence.” Melville’s prose generates the unique relation between matter and not-matter that “gives rise to a landscape of phenomenology without persons.” Finally, Kim Evans’s “Melvillean Mimesis” turned to Moby-Dick in order to examine Melville’s capacity to depict what she calls “the indisputably real” that is nothing other than what Melville calls “the living whale in its full majesty and significance.” What, in other words, is that something “real” in Melville’s figurations and abstractions?

Let me conclude by quoting James Lilley’s initial e-mail response after receiving the papers—a lovely prelude to his response at the MLA: “I can, in fact, GUARANTEE that our panel offers all the wonders of wackiness, the ample proportions of angelic beauty, and the unending and undying immanence of excess.” What happens, we might ask, when writing itself churns out the degraded and despised excess of its own operation? Through what I once described as Melville’s “broken aesthetic,” Lilley reconfigures our sense of the gothic by casting these late-coming fictions as a yoking of the discarded and cherished, the universal and particular, matter and spirit. If Melville does indeed turn to abstraction, to the opaque, and to the gothic in his late fiction, it is not a gothic veiled by the same comfortable terrors of an immaterial “Other” world or a “Super” natural but, rather, a gothic that haunts because of its everydayness, because of its excessive, even hyper-materiality. Melville’s American gothic continues to haunt, as these speakers demonstrate, because the very sinews of his writing (and its stubborn excrescences) continue to penetrate and fracture any utopian dream of perfection or instrumental moralism.

Converting the Heathen at Home
Justine Murison
University of Illinois, Urbana

Melville’s Pierre provides one of the most compelling fictional representations of an emerging discourse of privacy in the mid-nineteenth century, compelling, first and foremost, because Melville perceives, as few others did, the way aesthetic surfaces became rife with moral meaning. As I show, Melville perceives the question of privacy to be as much a problem of morality as of style. Through the process of disestablishment, I suggest, “religious freedom” came to stand for a rejection of hypocrisy and secrecy and, in action, functioned as the opposite of sin (sexual and otherwise). Privacy, therefore, operated by...