Abstracts ALA 2017—Melville and Literary Influence: Reframing Tradition

“The Western Critic” and the Dark Ages of Literary Criticism: Herman Melville, Matthew Arnold, and the Longer Critical Perspective
K. L. Evans
Cornell University

I take up Melville’s prolonged engagement with Matthew Arnold’s aesthetics. My particular interest is Melville’s enthusiastic support for the distinction Arnold draws between the critic’s purpose, as he sees it—namely, to identify the thesis advanced by a critical work, preferably as stated in the author’s own words, and to estimate the degree to which the author’s effort succeeds in throwing light upon his or her chosen subject—and criticism as it had come to be understood in Arnold’s own time: a review written with either reverence or vitriol by a person given the power to make decisions. By putting Melville into dialogue with his transatlantic contemporary, I hope to better understand how Melville conceived of criticism—as it is and as it should be—and how criticism might be transformed by our proper appreciation of what Melville calls “the Western Critic”: Melvillean shorthand for the critic as Arnold imagined him but raised in America—for example on a whaling ship—rather than in England. As several of Melville’s readers have observed, in his marginal comments on Arnold’s writing, particularly his Essays in Criticism (1865) and the preface to New Poems (1867), Melville casts himself in the role of “the Western Critic”: a critic who is peculiarly “American,” in contrast to a well known Anglo-European critic like Arnold, but who, just like Arnold, dismisses modern progress while invoking a deep respect for classical culture. Melville’s respect for the writing of antiquity, discovered through his own reading and reinforced by his study of Arnold, shaped Melville’s negative reaction to “criticism” as it was practiced in his own age.

“Nothing Less is Here Essayed”: Language and Authorship in The Book of Salt and Moby-Dick
Kacie Fodness
University of South Dakota

As he recounts his time aboard the Niobe, Bình—the narrator in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt and the immigrant cook for a fictional Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas—observes that “to take one’s body and willingly set it upon the open sea . . . is not an act brought about by desire but a consequence of it” (57). We understand that what matters for Bình, as it does for Ishmael, is that the story, whether lost to the ocean or stolen by the colonial figure of Gertrude Stein, is reclaimed. This moment, I suggest, is the first of many in Truong’s novel that underscore its engagement with the Melvillean tradition, a tradition defined by possibility and openness, one that invites, and even insists on, this kind of intertextuality. From the slipperiness of classification to the ways in which each author situates the body and attends to the corporeal registers of lost limbs and self-harm, The Book of Salt might be read as a modern prequel to Moby-Dick. Truong’s novel, like Melville’s before it, is not only defined by its experimental form, but also makes suspect the autobiographical enterprise. These texts are, of course, strange bedfellows. And yet, Melville’s story picks up right where Truong’s left us: alone with a nomadic, melancholy—yet deeply revolutionary—figure who has, possibly, tendered his name and whose story, certainly, must be reclaimed.

Black Boys and White Whales: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Conversation with Herman Melville
Caroline Chamberlin Hellman
City Tech, CUNY

In a May 2011 article for The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote that the opening lines of Moby-Dick constitute “the greatest paragraph in any work of fiction, at any point, in all of history.” Coates has taken note of Melville’s interrogation of predator and prey in the novel, observing that the white whale’s refusal to occupy the singular role of the hunted results in the consternation of the hunters. It would be easy to relate Coates’s interest in this dynamic to twenty-first-century race relations, but the author’s observations about the text defy any facile narrative...