In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Review Article Hawthorne and Melville: Some Recent Studies in Classic American Literature F.J. ASALS Nina Baym. The Shape ofHawthorne's Career Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1976. 283. $15.00 Edgar A. Dryden. Nathaniel Hawthorne: Th e Poetics of Enchantment Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1977. 182. $10.00 Richard H. Brodhead. Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1976. 216. $11.50 cloth, $4.50 paper William B. Dillingham. Melville's Short Fiction 1853 - 1856 Athens: University of Georgia Press 1977· 3<)0. $16.50 From the Second World War until the mid-1960s some of the liveliest criticism of American literature had a distinctly 'American Studies' cast to it. The trend had its clear beginnings in the publication in 1941 of F.O. Matthiessen's imposing American Renaissance, but it was not until after the war that the books of Henry Nash Smith, R.W.B. Lewis, Leslie Fiedler, Leo Marx (and, from a more strictly literary perspective, Charles Feidelson, Richard Chase, Roy Harvey Pearce, and Hyatt Waggoner) solidified and extended it. All were attempts, in very different ways and often from very different premises, to encompass whole forms or entire realms of the imagination that might be classed as peculiarly 'American.' In the very confidence that there was such an entity as 'Americanness,' in the selfconsciousness and largeness of scope of these ambitious works, this critical enterprise has been related to the international expansion of American power in the two decades that followed the war. Observing that in the past decade there has been a notable contraction, a dear falling off in important all-encompassing works of criticism, the same argument would no doubt relate this literary retreat to the debacle of Viet Nam. It may be so, although the very glibness of the simple equation makes it suspect. But whatever the larger political implications of trends in criticism, in this case there seems a more direct and likely explanation for the shift. UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME XLIX, NUMBER I, FALL 1979 0042-0247179ltooo-oo6S$oo.oo/o © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 66 F./. ASALS Following Matthiessen, most of those earlier studies were centred in the literary and cultural myths of nineteenth-century America, and as that particular expanse was worked over again and again, the soil may well have seemed to have given up most of its nutrition. That the exhaustion was more apparent than real, that this period was still fertile under new approaches, may of course be one of the implications of Ann Douglas's recent Feminization of American Culture. Nevertheless, books of the past few years by Larzer Zitf, Richard Slatkin, Sacvan Bercovitch, and John Seelye suggest that the territory opened up by Perry Miller in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may just now prove a richer source for large speculation than yet more expeditions into the nineteenth. At any rate, two types of reaction against the arguments and assumptions of that earlier criticism seem likely to continue. One of these is the revisionist work, as seen, for instance, in Nicolaus Mills's and James W. Tuttleton's very different ways of taking issue with Chase's placement of the romance at the centre of American fiction. The other, a c1earlegacy ofthe 1960s that shows no signs of languishing, is the enlargement of 'the tradition' by the promulgation and study of works from neglected 'minority' groups (blacks, natives, women, etc). But for Americanists literary empire-building in the last decade or so has not been happening on the playing-fields of criticism at all, but in the cathedrals of scholarship, in those monumental editions of established American authors appearing first under the imprimatur of the CEAA and now of its less opulent stepson, the CSE. Perhaps too the detailed attention to individual writers such editions necessitate is related to the fact that much of the best recent critical activity has again focused in a rather traditional way on single authors - Of , as in the case of Lawrence Buell's Literary Transcendentalism, on a group of writers with close historical connections. The prevailing atmosphere has been one of consolidation rather than expansiveness, solemn scholarly shoring-up rather than critical risk-taking, the extension and revision of existing approaches and methods rather than the breaking of new ground . If this does not make for the most eXciting criticism, it nevertheless produces its own genuine achievements. These generalizations are tested by the four recent books here under review, books which might give the uninitiated the impression that economic austerity has had the benign effect of improving the state of the academic presses, for the very least one can say about all of them is that they are distinctly worth publishing . They are concerned with Hawthorne and Melville, those two classic American writers whose names are probably forever linked because of their brief (and apparently rather one-sided) friendship, yet who have had such curiously divergent fates at the hands of critical posterity. Melville is of course the archetypal 'neglected American writer,' largely ignored during the last halfofthe nineteenth century, 'rediscovered' around the end of the First World War, and the reCipient of a steady and heterogeneous stream of critical attention ever since. Hawthorne, in contrast, was hailed in his own lifetime and has never lost his position of eminence, but, oddly, during the first half of the twentieth century he received more sound scholarly attention than vigorous critical scrutiny, with the result HAWTHORNE AND MELVILLE 67 that he seemed rather remote as a writer, a little gray and faded , respectable but a bit duJL Clearly he was ripe for the 'Hawthorne revival' of the 1950S and early 19605 (bracketed by the studies of Richard Harter Fogle at one end and Frederick Crews at the other) during which time his fiction was given energetic examination by formalistic, archetypal, and psychoanalytic methods. More traditional scholarly work of course continued during that period and since the mid-1960s has again become dominant: most recent study of Hawthorne has returned to viewing him firmly in the context of his own times and its assumptions. Hawthorne studies of the past decade thus seem almost a paradigm of the trends I suggested earlier - often sound and discerning scholarship, frequently corrective of some excesses of earlier ahistorical interpretations, solid rather than innovative . Again, it seems hardly accidental that these tendencies in Hawthorne criticism cOlTespond to the period of the publication of the Centenary Edition of his collected works. Nina Baym's The Shape of Hawthorne's Career seems both the culmination of these trends in Hawthorne studies and a transcendence of them. It is a revealing book. Baym is fully in possession of the findings that have arisen around and through the Centenary Edition as well as ofearlier secondary commentary, and as a skilled Hawthorne scholar she is thoroughly familiar with the entire canon, not only the tales and romances. But beyond these credentials, she brings the combination ofa post-1960s sensibility and a sharp, polemical intelligence to bearon all Hawthorne's work. The book is clearly written and vigorously argued, and since much of that argument deliberately sets itself against prevailing views of Hawthorne , there is a good deal here that is provocative. Baym's unifying contention that Hawthorne's career has a discernible shape is itself no commonplace. The usual assumption, following Hawthorne's own lead, is that (after the youthful Fanshawe, at least) both his concerns and his techniques remained pretty much unchanged, the only shift of any importance being the decisive move from short to long fictions. But Baym sees his career as developing through several phases, reaching its culmination in the novels (or, in the term both she and Hawthorne prefer, the romances) of the 1850S. Yet since her argument commits herto commenting on everything, she gives fruitful attention to works that rarely receive critical treatment. In this respect her inSights into the children's books - especially The Whole History of Grandfather's Chair - are particularly welcome, and her speculations on Hawthorne's movement towards realism in the late unfinished works are highly suggestive. All this - and there is more - is both original and useful, but the book has another thesis which is far more contentious. The Hawthorne that earlier readers thought they had discerned - the w riter of the haunted mind, obsessively turning over the dark complexities ofguilt, suffering, and alienation, probing the secret places of the psyche - this figure bears no resemblance to Baym's version. Her Hawthorne is ever the profeSSional author whose only abiding obsession is with making a successful career for himself by creating fictions that he hopes will please his audience (even when he seems uncertain just who that audience is or 68 P.]. ASALS what its expectations are). Writing of the usual dismissal of the children's books as merely a kind of hack work, Baym comments: 'The criterion of sincerity is particularly inappropriate for Hawthorne. His deepest, and most sincere, literary feeling was the drive to be a successful author.' It is of course healthy to be reminded that the romantic sketch of the gloomy and withdrawn writer - that still-popular portrait first promoted by Hawthorne himself - ignores the man with bills to pay, a growing family as his responsibility, and a lasting ambition to succeed at his profession. But the obverse view of Hawthorne as cafeecist, 'haunted' by nothing deeper than making it in the literary marketplace, has its own difficulties. This version of Hawthorne runs into trouble when Baym reaches the novels, partly because of the high value she herself places on these works and partly because of what we know of Hawthorne's own reactions to The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. Although she speculates that even in the former book he was perhaps 'accommodating himself to the taste of the times,' she nevertheless finds it mysteriously 'far richer and more vigorous' than anything he had done earlier. Further, since The Scarlet Letter was both a critical and a popular success, Baym is left with the difficulty of explaining Hawthorne's well-known uneasines~ with its 'sombreness' and his deliberate attempt in his next book to move away from the winning formula he had found. Here she has nothing more to offer - and it does not address the problem - than the commonplace that Hawthorne would have liked to be a somewhat different writer than he in fact was. But if at the moment of his greatest success the singlemindedness of Hawthorne's commitment to pleasing an audience cannot be substantiated, then the entire thesis begins to totter. The evidence we have suggests that in 1850, at least, Hawthorne was not merely a literary careerist; why, then, should we accept Baym's speculations that he had been one earlier? It is unfortunate that Baym both overstates and overextends this argument, for her central perception of Hawthorne as an aspiring writer very much engaged in the literary marketplace of his time is an important and original one. What seems to distort hercase here is her general devaluation of the earlier and shorter works: it is the Hawthorne of the long romances who is the hero of this book, very much at the expense of the Hawthorne of the tales and sketches. Her discussion of the pre-1850 work - and the insights here are often sharp and subtle at once - focuses on developing narrative personae, all of which she sees as inhibitory, designed in various ways to conciliate Hawthorne's supposed audience, each successive one being discarded as it proved an inadequate integration of his rhetorical and imaginative aims. In her impatience with these short works Baym at times oversimplifies, but her central points are cogent enough that those who care for the tales and sketches will have to take them into account in any reappraisaL The novels, however, are another matter. Baym reads them as expressions of Hawthorne's romanticism, but that romanticism is refracted through the lens of her own post-196os sympathies. This Hawthorne, somehow freed from his earlier conformist inhibitions, is secular, pro-feminist, and concerned with the HAWTHORNE AND MELVILLE 69 individual's .struggle for liberation from a repressively authoritarian society. Baym's readings of the four completed longer works are always provocative and interesting even if they are not always wholly persuasive. For instance, in her discussion of The Scarlet Letter she demonstrates convincingly the power of the Puritan patriarchy and its decisive effect on the actions and responses of the major characters. But when she comes to The Marble Faun she makes the much more dubious claim that 'the symbol system is precisely the same' in the two works, that 'the Puritan and Catholic oligarchies are one and the same,' and that therefore the murder of the model in the later book is not 'evil' but merely 'self-expressive behavior' on the part of Miriam and Donatello that 'threatens the power structure' in Rome. Question-begging jargon aside, the 'Catholic oligarchy ' of Th e Marble Faun hardly appears to possess the embodied and ever-present reality of the Puritan regime of the earlier novel, and all Baym seems able to offer is the 'great weight and age of Rome' itself as somehow suggesting that 'power structure.' Again, Baym argues that in The Blithedale Romance Zenobia, despite her wealth, 'operates in a frame independent of money,' thatshe represents 'naturalness ' in the novel, and that her famous hothouse (!) flower is not 'unnatural or evil' but simply indicates her feminine sexual force. But if all this is so, one wonders why Hawthorne has Coverdale point out the jarring 'costliness' of that daily flower amid the simplicities of Blithedale, why he claims it is indicative of Zenobia's 'pride and pomp,' why both in Blithedale and in Boston she strikes him as a 'great actress,' always capable of shifting 'illusion,' and how, if Zenobia is indeed 'natural woman,' such a function is consonant with the air of manipulation that surrounds her relationship with Priscilla. One answer, of course, is that Coverdale is an unreliable witness, but to replace on such a scale his doubtful interpretations with alternative certainties of one's own comes close to rewriting the book. Such questions are hardly niggling; they reach to the centre of Baym's interpretations of these works. Yet if these readings are not, to me at least, wholly convincing as overall arguments, they are always strong and often suggestive, full of incidental perceptions whether or not one accepts the central thesis. In her discussions of all the romances, for instance, she has fresh contributions to make to the hoary subject of Hawthorne's view of the artist; she draws perceptive connections between the works of this period (including the children'S books); and her reading of The Scarlet Letter, which best accommodates her preoccupations , is generally fine. One broader question, however, remains. Why, after Baym has so laboured the development of the Hawthomian persona through the short works, does she include no consideration of narrative voice in the romances ? One wonders whether - or how - Baym's readings would have been modified had she taken it into account. No rationale is offered for its absence; consideration of narrative voice simply disappears from the discussions of the romances (although not, strangely, from the parallel examinations of the children 's books of the same period). 70 F.). ASALS But the very doubts, questions, and disagreements that Baym's arguments raise are a testimony to the provocativeness of her reading of Hawthorne. The Shape of Hawthorne's Career does what we are always told interesting criticism should do - send us back to the work itself, reassessing and testing our own responses as we go. In its vigour, comprehensiveness, and challenge it is a useful contribution to serious study of the man. If Baym's book seems closely related to recent scholarly and textual activities in the American academic world - to have its roots there, if not its branches - Edgar A. Dryden's Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Poetics of Enchantment reflects in a very individual way the critical attempts of the past several years to assimilate and apply such European strategies as structuralism, phenomenology, semiotics, henneneutics, existentialist psychology, and so on. Indeed, with all the ferment in these areas lately it is surprising that Dryden's is the first book-length work to bring some of these assumptions and methods to bear on the classic American writers. One can be sure that it will be far from the last, although Dryden's own use of these approaches may be too eclectic and too personal - Sartre, Poulet, Foucault, Laing, Barthes, Hillis Miller, Ricoeur, Said are among his acknowledged predecessors - to be a genuinely typical example of what the future is almost certain to bring. Dryden's study is a pursuit of nothing less than 'Hawthorne,' the self both revealed and concealed in his works, which is in turn 'a partofthe larger problem of the relation between man's inner and social beings.' Dryden sees this problem as setting up a dialectical tension between what he calls 'enchantment' and 'disenchantment' which manifests itself in an 'alternating movement' between characters within a work, between narrator and characters, and between writer and reader. His ambition is thus to encompass the various aspects of 'Hawthorne ' within a single (if complex) perspective. Necessarily, this enterprise demands a broad conceptual framework, an often abstract theoretical machinery, and an appeal to extra-fictive statements (prefaces and letters) at least as often as to the fiction itself. The result is a rarification that frequently makes it difficult to breathe and a longing on the part of this reader that Dryden will somewhere descend to a direct and fun engagement with a text. Of course he gives good reasons for not often doing so. Following Hawthorne's suggestion in the Preface to The Snow Image, he 'look[s] through the whole range' of the work, culling passages designed to reveal 'obsessions and attitudes' that will disclose 'the writer's relation to himself and others.' Particularly in the early chapters, among the theory and speculation one repeatedly encounters bare sentences and isolated paragraphs from apparently untitled works. A latent irony thus seems to lurk in Dryden's methodology. He speaks winningly of the 'enchantment ' of the act of reading fiction, of being 'caught up' in the spell of the writer's world, and of the 'disenchantment,' the sense of loss one feels when a novel ends. The task of criticism, he concludes, 'begins here and seeks to recover and order the experience of reading.' But the violent intellectualism of the 'ordering' mocks this professed aim, for one hardly 'recover[s] ... the experience HAWTHORNE AND MELVILLE 71 of reading' Hawthorne here. In its unrelenting cerebralism The Poetics of Enchantment offers us (to borrow Dryden's Keatsean metaphors) not the elfin grot but the cold hillside. Dryden's prose is sometimes numbingJy abstract. 'Detachment,' we learn, 'may not be the result of an involuntary, instinctive act that expresses a condition natural to the mind. Rather, it implies that such a perspective may be a form of enchantment generated by the desire to enjoy a privileged relation to the world. In other words, distance for Hawthorne is not the source of desire. Desire for him is dialectical in the sense that its objects are always testimonies in reverse to the value of the condition which initiated it. It is the energy that both generates enchantments and destroys them.' When one realizes that such a passage is at the service of making a familiar point about the pattern of withdrawal and return in Hawthorne - the desire for contemplative solitude, the need to come into human contact - the game may not seem worth the candle. Similarly, when Dryden does descend to commenting on specific works, his observations are sometimes not very fresh. Hawthorne's concern with isolation and with the violation of the self by others is hardly news, nor is the point that in The Blithedale Romance Hawthorne both is and is not Coverdale. Other arguments are not very convincingly made. Hawthorne'S belief in 'the power of love' is necessary to the dialectic Dryden has set up, but most of the examination of this form of 'enchantment' ironically demonstrates that as a writer (rather than as Sophia's epistolary husband ) Hawthorne hardly portrays a love relationship that is both successful and 'transfiguring.' All of the positive evidence here comes from the letters, not from the fiction. In one sense none of this is to the point. Dryden is concerned with the overall pattern or, rather, interlocking patterns that, as he sees it, make up 'Hawthorne,' not with offering new readings of the fiction itself. In fact the very familiarity of some individual observations might be justified on the grounds that at last these accepted 'truths' about Hawthorne can be seen as part of the larger design Dryden perceives in all his writing. Nor indeed would it be accurate to imply that his comments on specific works turn up only received ideas. He has interesting and fresh things to say on such matters as 'voyeurism' in the fiction (particularly in Coverdale), on the larger implications of the repeated images of masks and veils, and on the relation between narrator and narrative in the novels; and his analysis of society and history in The House of the Seven Gables is a model of its kind. Yet if the book seems to ask to he taken as a whole rather than in part, to stand or fall by the persuasiveness of its overall argument rather than its individual insights, one can nevertheless ask that such an elaborate structure justify itself in local applications. For this reader Dryden is most provocative in his final two chapters when, having considered the dialectics of 'distance,' 'the other,' and 'love' within the writing, he turns to the problems of the relationship between writer and reader and the ontological status of fiction for Hawthorne. Here Dryden brilliantly examines the strategy of the prefaces and their relationship to 72 F.J . ASALS the fictions they introduce. He is, I think, entirely persuasive in presenting Hawthorne's stance in those prefaces as that of a mask both inviting and challenging the reader to discover in the ensuing fiction the 'face' beneath, and he is suggestive in pursuing the consequences of that strategy. Confusingly, however, there is no mention here of the role of narrative voice in this transaction. Whereas earlier Dryden had stimulating things to say abou t the distinction between narrator and characters, especially in The House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun, here he distinguishes only between preface and fiction as wholes. One wonders whether he sees the narrative voice as simply an extension of the 'mask' of the prefaces or whether it assumes characteristic qualities of its own, and in either case how it affects the reader-writer relationship Dryden is concerned with. In the final chapter there is an analogous disappOintment. Here Dryden speculates most interestingly on the full implications of the 'search for a home' in Hawthorne, focusing on its prominence in the late unfinished romances. Yet he concludes that Hawthorne's final rejection of these mythically resonant origins is brought about by the banal fact of his Americanness. It is easy enough to believe that Hawthorne's commitment to the freedoms of the New World 'disenchanted' the lure of the old home, but such a prosaic consideration had not entered Dryden's dialectic before, and it hardly seems commensurate with the 'mythic plenitude' he has been examining. But if the resolution of this final chapter is rather anti-climactic, the preceding argument contains a richly suggestive exploration of this Significant theme in Hawthorne. It is disappointing not to be able to praise Dryden's sophisticated study more unreservedly; nevertheless, he is one of the most interesting critics of the classic American authors now working. His earlier book on Melville (Melville's Thematics of Form, 1968) remains one of the past decade's most stimulating considerations of that writer. One can see how the present study developed out of the interests Dryden brought to Melville, for there too he was concerned with strategies of 'indirection.' Based on the debatable premise of the autonomy of Melville's fictions, the earlier book was still concerned to corne to terms with individual novels, and in his attempts to do so Dryden generated many fresh insights. His chapter on The Confidence-Mall, which perhaps best lent itself to his approach, is still one of the most brilliantly original treatments of that elusive book. In comparison, the present study seems to me more ambitious but less satisfying. One critic who has clearly profited from Dryden's earlier work (as he acknowledges ) is Richard H. Brodhead in his fine Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel. Concerned as he is with Hawthorne and Melville's works of 1850-2 as distinct fonns, Brodhead affirms his roots in the tradition of the New Criticism, extended and enriched by the more recent work of Frye, Booth, Harvey, and others. The opening chapter, in which Brodhead compares his two Americans with their European contemporaries, is a dazzling performance, perhaps the most sensitive and probing treatment we now have of those characteristics of nineteenth- HAWTHORNE AND MELVILLE 73 century American fiction which make it distinctive. Brodhead is of course indebted to Richard Chase's pioneering book, but his argument for Hawthorne and Melville's divided allegiance to the characteristic modes of both the romance and the novelis a persuasive extension of Chase. The result, says Brodhead, is the repeated experimental juggling with elements of the experiential and the symbolic in the group of self-conscious fictions under examination. Unpersuaded by the 'finality' of either, Hawthorne and Melville do not attempt to blur or merge the very different modes in which they are working, but to realize each fully, thus creating in their books a deliberately 'mixed medium.' Brodhead is thus more interested in the how than the what of his writers, in the 'process of exploration carried forward in new directions in book after book' as the result of their 'energetically inquisitive habits of mind.' Perhaps no study could quite sustain the brilliance of this opening chapter, but Hawthorne, M elville, and the Novel is none the less consistently fresh and stimulating. Brodhead is generally very fine on Hawthorne, excellent, for instance , in elucidating the differences among the three novels he treats and in arguing (despite certain obviously consistent concerns) for the kind of individuality each possesses. If we are hardly used to thinking of Hawthorne as an 'experimental' writer, Brodhead helps us to see the radical distinctions and innovations Hawthorne makes in the use of his material. And in the skilfulness of its delineations the book is truly useful, for one can dissent from particular conclusions while finding illuminating the discriminations which led to them. For example, Brodhead is superb in clarifying the use of realistic and romantic elements in The House of the Seven Gables, yet not altogether compelling when he comes to treat of the much-debated ending of that book. He defends that ending, in part, almost by claiming that Hawthorne ignores - and asks us to ignore - the full implications of the realistic side of his novel; yet to find this argument unconvincing does not require rejecting the careful analysis which has preceded it. On the whole Brodhead seems to.me more successful with Haw thorne than with Melville, partly because the mixed nature of Melville's forms has hitherto received fuller examination. After Berthoff, Brodtkorb, and Dryden (predecessors Broadhead acknowledges), his elucidation of the nature of Melville's imagination and his studies of Moby-Dick and Pierre seem less novel than his treatment of Hawthorne, who has received less of this kind of attention. He is good on the 'explosiveness' in Melville, on his adoption of various fictional forms and then bursting their generic bounds to achieve a sense of 'open-endedness,' but less persuasive when he attempts to apply his thesis to Moby-Dick, always the test case. Here Brodhead's dualistic scheme seems to rest less easily than it did on Hawthorne. There are nice perceptions throughout this chapter, but the argument for the tension between the realistic and romantic modes is never fully convincing. Must one pose Ahab's symbolic vision against the 'solidity' of an actual whaling voyage presented in other portions of the book? Brodhead cites 'The Monkey-Rope' and 'Stubb's Supper' as instances of the momentariness or 74 F.). ASALS irrelevancy of attempts at 'symbolizing: but what he really demonstrates is the tentativeness of the symbolizing activity there, not the recalcitrance of experience to the symbolic vision itself. In splitting off the examination of Ishmael's narrative method, of his constitutional inability to be final in his explorations of cetoiogy, from the discussion of the 'world' presented in Moby-Dick Brodhead implies that that world is more impenetrably solid than Ishmael suggests. The round earth may indeed be but an empty cipher, meaningless matter good only for dumping, but the book everywhere - and not only in Ahab's fixed vision represents possible symbolic perspectives which, if they do not provide 'certain significance,' do not permit us to rest in the intractably 'realistic.' One may be more or less persuaded by individual arguments here, or more or less sympathetic to the almost inevitable conclusion that Hawthorne's and Melville 's works must be viewed as self-contained and self-reflexive, but it seems to me difficult not to be consistently stimulated by Brodhead's brilliant and lucid explorations of these writers' manipulation of genre. The University of Chicago Press is surely right to be issuing a paperback version; Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel is a useful book and ought to be widely accessible. Since Brodhead is concerned only with Melville's novels, his study does not make contact with one of the more curious manifestations of Melville criticism in the past two decades: the enormous upsurge of interest in the shorter works published in the 18505. Previous critics had paid these tales little - and then mostly biographical - attention, but since the early 1960s there have been innumerable articles and at least four books concerned solely with the stories. Part of the reason for the outpouring is no doubt that earlier neglect, part perhaps the greater manageability of the shorter work (as compared with Melville's sometimes sprawling novels), but part also the recognition of the peculiar kind of achievement in these stories. 'Bartleby' is surely one of the finest tales written anywhere in the nineteenth century and one of Melville's most polished and assured perfonnances; and if the rest do not reach that high standard - some, like 'Jimmy Rose' and 'The Happy Failure,' are pretty tedious - they are as a group fascinating for Melville's 'underground' methods. These stories were all created for popular magazines, and to watch Melville again and again attempt to negotiate the tightrope of mass acceptability while still secretly juggling his own particular concerns is to observe one of the oddest acrobatic feats in American writing. Designed on the surface not to offend, these tales bristle just beneath with the same 'dangerous' obsessions that had driven readers away from Moby-Dick and Pierre and that would emerge again in the malicious duplicities of The Confidence-Man. Between these longer works Melville bided his time, recouped some strength, and made a little money by means of these deceptive tales. No one interested in the period of Melville's maturity as a fiction writer can afford to ignore them. William B. Dillingham in his Melvil1e's Short Fiction 1853 - 1856 has hardly done that. His book is certainly the longest and probably the best single study of these fiteen stories. Since almost all of the stories are first-person accounts, Dilling- ham's approach has been to fix his gaze on the narrators (since in a sense they are the stories they tell), with sporadic excursions down the main-travelled roads of Melville's life. The biographical siren has from the first been apparently irresistible to critics of the stories, and Dillingham, like Benito Cereno, follows his leaders. Once more we wander to and fro over the deserts of Melville's disappointment in the friendshi p with Hawthorne and 'identify' disguised characterizations of the elder writer - a gambit that surely reaches its reductio ad absurdum when we are asked to see the weary Marianna of 'The Piazza' as Melville's portrait of the older artist as a burnt-out woman. Sometimes submerged psychodrama is served up as the piece de resistance, reserved for pride of place at the end of a chapter, as when Dillingham concludes his excellent analysis of 'Benito Cereno' with an anti-climactic account of how it mightbe read as a projection of Melville's emotional condition in the mid-1850s. In that story, Dillingham has convincingly argued, beneath 'appearance' there are only other appearances, and one would like to believe that this rendition of Melville's supposed psychic state is intended as merely one more mask, the little lower layer of role-playing, rather than the inmost leaf of the bulb. Still, that chapter is the best in the book, partly because of the inherent richness of 'Benito Cereno: but partly perhaps because the story does not employ a first-person narrator: Dillingham is thus freed from his declared focus to consider larger patterns and meanings, which he does very well indeed. In the rest of the book his approach produces mixed results. Too often we hear that although a tale may seem concerned with social or economic problems, with questions of religious or metaphysical truth, what it is 'really' about is the kind of person the narrator is. This vaguely phenomenological assumption tends to make all problems into problems of perception, and the stories thus much alike: studies of the ways in which a few Melvillean types do or do not accommodate themselves to the mysterious and hostile world they encounter. Now, this is a central concern in these tales - as throughout Melville - but Dillingham's persistent emphasiS flattens the considerable variety and suggestiveness of many of the stories. On the other hand, it also produces some persuasive readings. The careful scrutiny of the narrators of 'The Lightning-Rod Man' and 'I and My Chimney,' for instance, gives us the most convincing accounts we now have of those two deceptively 'genial' figures. Dillingham rarely takes up a tale without having something interesting to say about it. whether by supplying useful contexts (Burton's Anatomy for 'Cock-ADoodle -Doa!' for instance, or various accounts of the then-famous bug incident for 'The Apple-Tree Table') or by coming up with illuminating new perspectives, as on that most notorious of the diptychs (which he rechristens ' bipartite stories'), 'The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.' If this long book fails to be entirely satisfying, it is the result of a certain lack of intensity in Di1lingham's method, a tendency towards relying on a few orderly categories which Melville, ofaU writers, is unamenable to, a neatness which blurs or ignores some of the most provocative qualities of the stories. Dillingham insists on the 76 •.J. ASALS tales as discrete entities - he takes them up individually in the order in which they were published (and presumably written) - and although he does make some passing attempts to relate them, these are mostly (when they are not biographical speculation) a matter of seeing similarities in character types. Such important - indeed, obsessive - motifs as those suggesting sinister illusion (magic, wizardry, 'faerie,' the theatre), explicit in such works as 'The Encantadas ,' 'The Two Temples: 'Benito Cereno: and 'The Piazza,' and barely below the surface in virtually all these tales, are left unexplored. No single study can do everything, of course, but surely these persistent preoccupations are more worthy of attention than, say, the lengthy wondering whether Hawthorne was lurking somewhere in Melville's mind while he wrote 'The Encantadas: These reservations about Dillingham's approach take on another dimension when Melville'sShort Fiction 1853-1856 is viewed not simply as an examination of this self-contained group of writings, but as the central portion of a three-volume study of all Melville's fiction. In this context some obvious questions raise themselves. Why is this analysis of fifteen short works well over twice as long as Dillingham's first volume, An Artist in the Rigging (1972), a consideration of Melville's first five novels? Why is chronology so rigidly observed here when it was set aside for thematic concerns in the earlier book and will in another sense have to be broken in the final volume, which is committed to work written before 1853 and after 1856? More pressing than either of these considerations is the question of methodology . Dillingham's detennination to examine all of Melville's fiction in his three volumes is an ambitious project, the most extensive single study of this writer ever undertaken by a critic. Yet in his approach to his subject Dillingham in some ways seems not am bitiDuS enough. The earlier volume had used 'The Lee Shore' chapter of Moby-Dick with its land and sea metaphors to focus there 'on three basic ideas: the nature of experience ... , the thirst for psychological freedom ... , and the paradox of Promethean heroism.' These categories provided a kind of structure for that book, as they do not for the present one, even though they unsystematically recur here. One increasingly comes to wonder whether these ideas are both precise and comprehensive enough to sustain this large project, whether the lack of any clearly defined conceptual base for the study does not lead to such unexplained inconsistencies as the eschewal of biographical speculation in the earlier volume and the wandering in and out of it in the present one. Is a methodology this vague sufficient to float such an enterprise? If the narrowly thesis-ridden study can be the bane ofacademic criticism, has Dillingham leaned too far to the other side, failing to find an adequate structure to focus and sustain his large undertaking? For me, the two volumes so far - but particularly the present one- tend to fall into their individual parts and become discrete readings of works rather than the more comprehensive vision Dillingham presumably intended. As readings they are invariably intelligent, sometimes sharply insightful , rarely startlingly new, The Melville who emerges two-thirds of the way through this project is both blander and tighter than he has usually seemed, less driven, less complex, finally less exciting. Among others, Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence-Man are still to be studied, and if it is difficult at this point to anticipate any radical reappraisals of these major works- much less of Melville as a whole - it is nevertheless easy to expect a quiet illumination of them. What final observations might be made on the basis of this rather diverse group of recent books on two nineteenth-century American writers? One somewhat unexpected conclusion is that the many trumpetings of the death of the old 'New Criticism,' ritualistically proclaimed at least once a year for the last decade or so, prove still to be premature. Dillingham's book is hardly ferociously New Critical-it is not fiercely committed to any critical camp - but its best chapter, on 'Benito Cereno,' is essentially a triumph of the old close analysis; and Brodhead's entire study, while it could not have been written in the 1950s, rests firmly on the assumption of the autonomy of the individual text and the efficacy of intense scrutiny of the patterns and methods revealed therein. Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel is clearly indebted to genre studies of the past two decades and to the view of art as process rather than product, but it appears to owe nothing to the newer formalism of the structuralists, and its very vitality suggests that there is life in at least modified forms of older critical methods yet. Baym's and Dryden's books, however, in their very different and individual ways, point to the kinds of criticism we are likely to see much more of in the near future. In paying all her debts to the scholarly activities which have emerged around the publication of the Centenary Edition ofHawthorne, Baym makes clear her lack of sympathy with any assumptions about literary autonomy. Her Hawthorne is firmly rooted in a historical and cultural milieu, and as a writer he is always a fully social creature (even if at first, in the shorter work, a rather unsatisfying one). The author of the novels, the secular humanist (as Baym sees him) who explores the plight of the individual caught in a rigid patriarchal system, who is consequently sympathetic to the oppressed figures of the woman and the artist - this is perhaps the most fully (and modishly) 'socialized' version of Hawthorne we have been given. With the resurgence in social and political criticism, particularly among feminists and neo-Marxists, it would be surprising indeed if we did not find these perspectives soon trained on other classic American writers. Dryden's study, on the other hand, reflects the relatively recent discovery in America of developments in European criticism, and as such it illustrates both the potential promise and current limitation of some of these newer approaches. The amount ofcritical fennent these have stirred -and that not all have come from abroad is demonstrated by such home-grown writers as Norman Holland, Harold Bloom, and Stanley Fish - can be seen in almost any recent literary journal, and the evident stimulation and excitement are all to the good. In their attempts to go 'beyond formalism' many of these developments align themselves with a broadly humanistic enterprise. By trying to widen the perspective, to create methods whereby not only the bare text but the writer and the reader are brought within critical purview, such approaches (structuralism excepted) can be 78 F.J. ASALS seen as an endeavour to enlarge OUf perception of literature as an activity which includes author and reader 'in' the work rather than leaving both outside, contemplating the work-as~object. Dryden himself seems to have followed something like this path, moving from the formalistic assumptions and methods of his earlier Melville book to the attempts in the current study to discover both the characteristic 'Hawthorne' revealed in his work and the reader who is 'created' by that same work. Yet my reservations about The Poetics of Enchantment are related to my reservations about a good deal of this criticism as currently practised. In theory humanistic, in fact these studies are often so abstract or jargon-ridden (though Dryden is generally free of the latter fault) that they contradict their humanistic implications by barring access to all but a small group of initiates. One can well imagine an advanced, intelligent undergraduate picking up Baym's, Brodhead's, or Dillingham's books and profiting by what he discovered there; one can hardly imagine that same undergraduate reading very far in Dryden's book at alL And if this is an inadequate test - why must criticism be written only at a level to be grasped by the best undergraduates? - it does suggest the question of precisely who is capable of being the audience for this newer critical work. The spectacle does raise itself of more and more being written for fewer and fewer. But perhaps the present theoretical phase of these newer strains of aesthetic criticism is merely a necessary stage of development, a station on the way to a fuller and richer encounter with the literature itself. Despite reservations, it is of course good to see signs of rejuvenation in both social and aesthetic criticism. There are obvious dangers - crudity and reductiveness on the one hand, mystification and preciousness on the other - but those dangers are constants, and the only known antidote is the intelligence and tact of the individual critic. The four books under review may not proclaim a critical renaissance, but at least they do testify to some vitality and diversity in current criticism of American writing. ...

pdf

Share