"Handsomely Done": Aesthetics, Politics, and Media After Melville ed. by Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz (review)

This wide-ranging and engagingly cosmopolitan collection captures Melville's resonance beyond both the United States and the English language. Melville is so often regarded as an essentially "American" writer and taught so frequently in classes on American literature that Americanists can easily forget the larger, more comparative frames in which Melville is read. "Handsomely Done" appearing as it did in Melville's bicentennial year, provides a welcome reminder of how large the world of Melville studies can be.

"Handsomely Done" is distinguished by its philosophical rigor and its linguistic range. Melville is often taught at studied as a quintessentially American writer, with the modifier "American" often associated directly, and at times almost exclusively, with the United States, and when Melville is recognized as a transatlantic figure, this recognition often is based in the global circulation of the English language via the British Empire. Yet in this volume, we find German and French and Spanish Melvilles, in terms of language as well as nationality. We also see Melville in connection with political philosophy, as well as the richness of his connections with film and the visual and performing arts across multiple decades.

As valuable as the comparative scope of the volume is, I might be inclined to quibble a bit regarding the title, as the placement of aesthetics at the head of the title might seem that aesthetic questions are given priority, when in fact the volume tends to stress political questions much more consistently, and the space given to media, while not as pervasive throughout the volume, seems more firmly established than does the formal aesthetic dimension.

The first five essays are grouped under "Melville and the Limits of the Political," and include two essays on Moby-Dick, two on "Benito Cereno," and one on "Bartleby, the Scrivener," thus focusing their attention on the center of the Melville canon in the 1850s. Sorin Radu Cucu and Roland Vegso consider Moby-Dick in relation to the militarization of US culture in the Cold War and the post-9/11 period as well as, more surprisingly, the significance of Moby-Dick for the Red Army Faction in Germany in the 1970s. Barbara Nagel's considers the question of cowardice in Melville's representation of Pip in relation to philosophical investigations of the language of cowardice and the way in which imputations of cowardice become racially inflected. Emily Apter considers the connection between Bartleby's preferences and the practice of civil disobedience, attending to the ways in which Bartleby's "radical refusal" could function across the political spectrum, including, in a compelling closing image, the Black Lives Matter movement. "Benito Cereno" makes more intuitively evident connections with Black Lives Matter in our present moment than "Bartleby," and Paul Downes's "From Lima to Attica" traces those kinds of presentist connections adroitly in considering "Benito Cereno" in relation to the Nixon White House tapes and the 1971 Attica prison uprising. Walter A. Johnson takes "Benito Cereno" in a very different direction by examining the use to which the German political philosopher Carl Schmitt (an influential figure tainted by his Nazi associations) put Melville's story during the Second World War as he reflected on the sea "as an element mediating human existence" (57).

The second half of the book, "Audiovisual Melville," focuses on responses to Melville in various media. Here Billy Budd predominates, appearing as the main text under consideration three of the articles. Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz's "Belle Trouvaille" is the most aesthetically oriented piece in the entire collection and it offers a substantial consideration of Claire Denis's adaptation of Billy Budd in her 1999 film Beau Travail, which as Hoffman-Schwartz points out is a direct translation of the quotation that gives the collection its title. David Copenhafer's "A Sound Not Easily Rendered" also tends more toward the aesthetic than the rest of the collection with its incisive analysis of the sonic qualities of Billy Budd. Jean-Luc Nancy's...