Handsomely Done: Aesthetics, Politics, and Media after Melville ed. by Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz, and: Melville among the Philosophers ed. by Corey McCall and Tom Nurmi (review)

More than a decade ago, Eric Slauter called attention to the "trade gap" between literary and historical studies of the Atlantic World ("History, Literature, and the Atlantic World," Early American Literature 43.1 (2008): 153–186). Borrowing Slauter's formulation, we might ask questions like this: What is the disciplinary balance of trade in Melville studies? What, in particular, does the theoretical and philosophical significance of Melville's work and Melville scholarship mean for the interdisciplinary relations among literary studies, American studies, philosophy, and (aesthetic, political, media, "high") theory? Two recent collections—Melville among the Philosophers, edited by Corey McCall and Tom Nurmi, and Handsomely Done: Aesthetics, Politics, and Media after Melville, edited by Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz, both bear witness to an active trade in Melville's work and Melville scholarship and offer revealing pictures of trade relations, international and interdisciplinary, in Melville studies. Both volumes launch themselves on seas that are at once sublimely dangerous and prosaically mercantile, and both manage to do justice to deep thinking even as they keep an eye on the ledger of imports and exports. And importantly, both do so in a spirit of consonance with Herman Melville's own resistance to fixity, via his oceanic biographical trajectory, his literary and philosophical antecedents, and the far-flung geographical and generic coordinates of his work: what we might characterize, borrowing a trope prominent in both collections, as landlessness. Following the consequences of Melville's work for philosophical, aesthetic, and political theory, both collections echo Ishmael's assertion that "in landlessness alone resides highest truth" (NN 107).

Ishmael's insistence that "all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea" might risk the status of coffee-mug platitudes, but for its speaker this realization amounts to a "mortally intolerable truth," a forced homelessness that is experienced as pain rather than freedom (NN 107). Landlessness, as "The Lee Shore" reminds us, is the condition of the ship in the face of a cruel wind, whose "intrepid effort" is directed against being smashed into the once welcoming land. In this spirit, and with considerable effort, both Melville among the Philosophers and Handsomely Done situate Melville not only among but, with salutary discomfort, between the home ports of disciplines. The truth that Melville locates in-between—"shoreless, indefinite as God," a "howling infinite" in which we might perish at any moment—invites pathos that can swerve easily into heroic self-aggrandizement or self-caricature (NN 107). Just in case things start to feel too sublime, though, the tragedy of the lee shore recurs as the farce of Billy Budd's spilled soup, occasioned by the temporary failure of his sea legs as the Bellipotent, "rolling in her course," gives a "sudden lurch" (NN 25). Landlessness can be terrifying, but it is also awkward. The mess that it makes inspires Claggart's arch words—"handsomely done"—and thus gives the title to Hoffman-Schwartz's volume.

The contrasting strategies of these two collections can be seen in their divergent titles. Melville among the Philosophers gathers thematic multiplicity around a disciplinary center by considering Melville at once as a figure in the history of philosophy and a provocation to which philosophy—particularly contemporary Anglo-American philosophy—needs to respond. Handsomely Done, in contrast, emphasizes Melville's mediality—both the way his texts fall between disciplinary approaches and the way they relentlessly illuminate the potentials of various media and forms of mediation—from ocean to text to film to political representation—and spark further re-mediations. As Hoffman-Schwartz notes, the essays in Handsomely Done "position 'media'—paradigmatically, the medium of language—as the 'common root' of aesthetics and politics" (5). At the same time, the list of contributors to Handsomely Done and its consistent field of...