We Look Deep Down and Yet Believe

Caitlin Smith Oyekole. Photo courtesy of Oyekola Oyekole.

At the Eleventh Annual International Melville Society Conference, I saw a new interest in the kinds of community that spring up around Melville's works. The "Looking for Melville" event at the British Library highlighted three different kinds of ongoing engagement with Melville. John Bryant's biography, which focused on transatlantic slavery's impact on Melville's life and literature, demonstrated the constant discovery of Melville's contexts. Caroline Hack, Philip Hoare, Shelley Piasecka, and Michael Hall showed how Melville's concepts, characters, and literary style continue reverberating through artistic production, inspiring new adaptations, art forms, and ways to re-envision and represent the world. David Shaerf's documentary, Call Us Ishmael, particularly struck me. Shaerf focuses on collective readings of the novel, like New Bedford's annual Moby-Dick Marathon, and the communities they create. Call Us Ishmael emphasizes what I heard repeated from all quarters: Melville's work attracts an unusually diverse audience, a fitting parallel, perhaps, to the racial, religious, and cultural diversity of the Pequod's crew.

Reminiscing on the Moby-Dick Marathon at the conference, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards told me, "There is no 'type' of Moby-Dick reader." This remark instantly brought to mind a 2015 thinkpiece by the Australian writer Mikaella Clements, entitled "Moby-Dick and Me: A Teenaged Love Story" (The Toast, 12 November 2015, <http://the-toast.net/2015/11/12/moby-dickand-me-a-teenaged-love-story>). Explaining her decision to add a second middle name, "Melville," Clements writes that her teenaged self—queer, displaced, deeply unhappy—identified with first Ahab, then Melville himself: "I felt Melville could have written [Moby-Dick] about me." And then she describes becoming not just a reader of Moby-Dick but a Melvillean: "I met Melville, and he already knew me inside and out sympathized with me … it is always comforting to meet someone that is made of the same stuff as you." Moving from text to author, Clements joins the larger, trans-institutional community organized around Melville's contexts, literary works, and life. This community caught my interest, not just in terms of its productions (new artwork, scholarship, museums, biographies) or organizational forms (MobyDick marathons, internet forums, the Melville Society), but how it functions as a community. What allows this community to hang together in its diversity? Where does it derive norms of conduct? And how does it relate to newcomers and outsiders?

I am particularly interested in the last question because the Melville Society international conferences stand apart in my knowledge and in that of many of my colleagues as a kind of exemplary intellectual community. "The Melvil-leans are very convivial," a friend told me, before my attendance at my first Melville Society conference in 2015, "I can't recommend a better experience for your first presentation." And indeed my experience during both conferences has been overwhelmingly positive. I came to the 2015 conference as a first-year PhD student presenting to senior scholars, and I received extensive feedback, welcome, and encouragement. The Melville Society's conviviality shone, as it did again this summer: discussing the future of religion and literature over drinks, chatting about Melville's reception in Japan on the bus to Oxford, or learning about the Society's history while touring London. Convivial—living together—was the adjective that best describes the conference. I suspect I am particularly attenuated to the small gestures of inclusion, honesty, or acceptance because intersectional feminism provides terminology (the microaggression) to name and contextualize nuances of harm and exclusion. But there are no terms for the small welcomes, the thousand ways that those older, more well-established, and more powerful can show inclusion to the newcomer.

Of course, the question "why does the Melville Society work so well as an intellectual community" is easily answered by looking at the exemplary individuals that compose it. But I am not satisfied in treating as pure coincidence the existence of a healthy intellectual community—the Melville Society—centered around Melville's life; the diversity of...