Parables of Creation: Hawthorne, Melville, and Plato's Banquet

Parables of Creation: Hawthorne, Melville, and Plato’s Banquet BEVERLY R. VOLOSHIN San Francisco State University F rom the time of Marcilio Ficino’s influential fifteenth-century Latin translation of and commentaries on Plato’s dialogues through most of the nineteenth century, The Symposium was widely referred to in English as The Banquet. Melville, who became familiar in 1848 with the Taylor and Sydenham edition of Plato’s works and who in 1850 began acquiring the new scholarly edition of Plato’s works published by Henry Bohn, knew The Banquet through the translation by George Burges (Sealts, Pursuing Melville 280-81, 299).1 At various historical moments, the translations by Ficino and others of the two dialogues on love, The Banquet and Phaedrus, and Ficino’s commentary on The Banquet would stimulate interest in and debate about Platonic love. While The Banquet was regarded as one of the most important Platonic texts, many nineteenth–century readers no doubt shared the ambivalence of Burges, who wrote that The Banquet is the most beautiful of Plato’s works if one overlooks its subject—love between men—which the scholar cannot bring himself to name (Plato 3.471-72). The subject of desire between men cannot be excised from The Banquet because, as we shall see, it is the foundation of the concept of male creativity that is developed in Socrates’s discourse near the end of the dialogue. The connection between erotic desire and creativity in The Banquet resonated for Hawthorne and even more for Melville in a crucial period of their careers. Melville slyly drew on Hawthorne’s allusion to The Banquet in The Scarlet Letter to explore and elaborate his own responses to Hawthorne, beginning with “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” Robert Milder’s trenchant analysis of Melville’s allusion to Plato’s Symposium in Melville’s 17 November 1851 letter to Hawthorne is part of a brilliant psychosexual study.2 But we will gain a fuller understanding of the rich conceits in Melville’s responses to Hawthorne and in Melville’s daring conception of his own creative process in the watershed period 1850-51 if we keep in mind The Banquet as the text and title that Melville knew. This thread of allusion to The Banquet also appears years later in Melville’s fictive refiguration of his relationship with Hawthorne in Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. c  2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 18 L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S P A R A B L E S O F C R E A T I O N In The Banquet, Apollodorus retells the story of a dinner party held years earlier to celebrate the prize won by the tragic poet Agathon. Socrates stops on the way to the banquet, arrested by thought (or, as other dialogues relate, listening to the voice of his daimon—demon in English—a spirit that connects him with the divine).3 Meanwhile, the guests at the banquet turn from the usual after-dinner drinking and entertainment (the symposium proper) to give panegyrics on eros, or love understood as sexual desire. The stated subject is the nature of love but also, we infer from the discussions, the problem of pederasty, for the love of a youth is an asymmetrical relationship in which the youth is the passive sexual partner, an inferior position suitable for women and slaves but not for someone who is going to become a free man (see Dover; Foucault, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self; Halperin; and Bowersock). The fourth speaker is Aristophanes, the comic poet, whose discourse prefigures the sixth and key discourse, that of Socrates. In his well-known and captivating fable, Aristophanes relates that humans were originally of three types—male, female, and androgyne—each a round body with two Janus-like faces pointing outward, and four arms and four legs. “They were terrible in force and strength and had high aspirations, and they made an attempt upon the gods” (Plato...