(This is an edited and slightly expanded version of a paper I wrote in grad school some years ago; again, the explanation for the tiresome MLA flourishes.)
Herman Melville’s seventh novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities can be said to be a work with more defenders than admirers, and therefor a work that attracts modes of criticism that emphasize justification instead of explanation; that is to say, the business of shedding some hermeneutical light is intimately bound up with the task of explaining (wishing) that the light will catch something worth seeing. The reader of such criticism is assumed a skeptic. Indeed, Pierre has generally only been judged worthy as a kind of post-Moby-Dick hangover (a metaphor for Melville’s psychological disturbances, which we hope weren’t overly determined by alcohol), or as a parody of contemporaneous novelistic modes, or as a precursor to broadly ‘modernist’ literary techniques, or simply the predecessor to Melville’s strong short fiction and poetry. Very few have taken the book to be of value in itself, and matters are not helped by Pierre’s lurid subject matter (The plot briefly summarized: A young man breaks it off with his fiancé so he can marry his sister.) or its oblique approach to its thematic concerns. Oftentimes, the emotions and subjects Melville evokes seem to exist at a right angle to the events of the story, especially the transparently autobiographical later chapters of the book in which the titular hero embarks on a doomed writing career. Pierre, whatever its eccentricities as a story or as a work of art, is too rich and profound in many of its sections to be dismissed outright, but a significant challenge to any critic, still having to play the role of a defender, is to elucidate on the ‘ambiguities’ alluded to in the title. The most effective way to do this is to consider, at least in part, the circumstances under which it was written and the motivations Melville had in writing it in the first place.
It is not unreasonable to suggest that Melville’s writing was every bit as exploratory as it was declarative; its sermonic tendencies may have obscured this point for some readers. Putative statement need not be lacking in a capacity for ambiguity. Melville wrote to work through his moral, aesthetic, spiritual, and psychological obsessions, and occasionally, over the course of a single work, his thematic and philosophical subjects would alter significantly, shooting off on discursive courses over which the author felt he may not have had full control. Of the most importance, Melville would leave the shifts in theme apparent to his readers, as they were easily trackable through the alternating generic modalities of his style; the attentive reader could trace Melville’s thought process, or at least a literary proxy of it, over the events of a story. Moby-Dick is the paradigmatic example of this tendency. The critic Andrew Delbanco put it quite well:
“He [Melville] was the first to understand that if a literary work is to register the improvisational nature of experience, it must be as spontaneous and self-surprising as the human mind itself. …by concealing the existence of earlier versions of his work, he ran the risk of falsifying himself. In this sense, Moby-Dick was like an active archeological site in which the layers of its own history are left deliberately exposed. (146)
I will argue that while foregrounding the writing process is useful for understanding many of Melville’s works, it is absolutely essential for understanding Pierre. Pierre is the novel where the act of composition is considered in a direct, literal fashion, and the value of writing is confronted and interrogated at length. The mental process revealed over the course of the plot is one of disillusionment, but that assessment in itself is incomplete. There are in fact multiple types of disillusionment on display, running from loss in faith in the security of the family unit, the viability of Christian morals, the achievability of an ideal artistic expression, the ability to communicate anything of oneself to others, and even the possibility of knowledge. In writing Pierre, Melville displayed a forfeiture of faith in writing itself, or in the creative act which had sustained him for many years. Considering his productivity after the publication of Pierre, it is safe to say that Melville recovered from this disenchantment to some degree, but his seventh novel represents what is probably his biggest crisis in faith; namely, his faith in his artistic mission. My task will be tracking the psychological and emotional trajectory of this crisis as presented in Pierre.
The origins of Melville’s ‘Kraken’ book lay in his frustrations concerning readers’ expectations. Pigeonholed as a relatively frivolous travel writer and “resident authority on things nautical and places exotic” (Higgins and Parker 5) Melville was keen to make the best use of his newly-discovered literary talents. The genesis of his first post-Moby-Dick outing was part of his expanding effort to attain artistic and intellectual autonomy and uniqueness: “…in mid-November 1851… Melville was ripe for an attempt at a new, non-nautical genre through which he might make a bid for a high, less specialized literary reputation and through which he might satisfy his internal needs to surpass his previous literary achievements” (Higgins and Parker 5-6). Inevitably, such ambition is accompanied by anxiety, and Melville was (oddly?) predisposed to exacerbate it by modeling the dysfunctional dynamic of the Glendinning family, the focus of his novel’s incestuous drama, after his own family’s internal scandals. Specifically, there is some reason to believe that Melville’s father, Allan Melville, had fathered an illegitimate daughter. In addition, he had died in a state of delirium not dissimilar to that of Pierre Glendinning’s father (Higgins and Parker 6). These disparate anxieties would coalesce to generate the story of Pierre. The symbolic capacities of the subjects already existed in incipient form, as observed by Higgins and Parker:
In Pierre, the plot involving the sudden appearance of an unknown young woman, supposedly half-sister of the hero, had the great advantage of being easily allegorized within Melville’s psychological preoccupations: in the “boundless expansion” of Pierre’s life and mind Isabel would represent the invading unconscious. (6)
This “invading unconscious” would prompt an internal unfolding that would disrupt every vestige of security the character of Pierre possessed. Once Pierre comes to recognize the needs of his inner life, he becomes inescapably dissatisfied with his hollow existence at his estate, Saddle Meadows. The story’s tragic dénouement is the revelation that Pierre is incapable of satisfying his social and psychological needs due to both his circumstances and personal flaws.
The parodic tendencies of Pierre are most conspicuous in the early parts of the book, where the pastoral quaintness of Pierre’s home at Saddle Meadows is too overtly saccharine to be taken seriously. As one critic described it, “…we can suspect that nature has been too thoroughly domesticated… This place is too soft a pastoral… its very lushness a symptom of unresolved and unrecognized problems” (Brodhead 226). The picturesque environment is meant to symbolize the infantile falsity of Pierre’s youthful mindset at the start of the story. Pierre’s troubles are clearly not meant to be contingent or avoidable, but a permanent feature of his condition that, in his ignorance and youth, he is initially unable to recognize. Saddle Meadows is only edenic in appearance because Pierre has yet to acquire necessary knowledge, and this knowledge significantly prompts an inward-directed psychological investigation that comes to generate very external social consequences.
As the great, exploratory symbol of Moby-Dick is the whale, the image that centers and structures the symbolic order of Pierre is the human face. This implies many things, including a thematic concern for communication (Human expressions are ‘read,’ after all.) and human subjectivity (Human expressions reveal inner emotional truths, after all.). It is a human face that initially disrupts Pierre’s harmonious existence. Attending a social gathering with his mother, Pierre observes a young woman whom the reader later learns is Pierre’s half-sister Isabel. Observing Isabel’s melancholy features exerts a profound influence on Pierre that proves life-altering: “…my creed of this world leads me to believe in visible, beautiful flesh… but now! – And again he [Pierre] would lose himself in the most surprising… ponderings, which baffled all the introspective cunning of his mind. Himself was too much for himself” [Italics mine] (Melville 49). Furthermore, Isabel’s face is said to “mystically appeal to his own private and individual affections… challenging him in his deepest moral being…” (Melville 49). It is important to bear in mind that all of these ponderings occur well before Pierre has any way of knowing who Isabel is or her relation to him and his father. Yet all of Pierre’s future anxieties are already present in incipient form, implying either an origin from within or a kind of mystical sympathy between the characters. The challenge of Isabel’s countenance is that of an authentic image- perhaps kindred to a Platonic form, or deeper truth- that disrupts the superficial (some might say degraded to artificiality) appearances of Pierre’s immediate environment. This initial shock prompts further, eventually self-destructive, reflections and discoveries.
Upon learning of Isabel and her illegitimate origins, Pierre relocates the portrait of his father, whom he had previously venerated, and pauses a while to observe his features as the painting mediates them; this is the novel’s second considered ‘reading’ of a human face. It prompts the first lesson of Pierre’s development, and that is the essential artifice and hypocrisy of the adult world and social environment he is about to enter as a young man coming of age. Imagining the portrait speaking to him, Pierre hears: “I [the image in the painting] am thy father as he [Pierre’s actual father] more truly was. In mature life, the world overlays and varnishes us… we, as it were, abdicate ourselves, and take unto us another self… in youth we are, Pierre, but in age we seem” (Italics Melville’s) (Melville 83). The painting of his father reinforced Pierre’s heroic conception of the Glendinning family dynamic, and the recognition of the hollowness and inauthentic nature of its idealized portrayal signifies a simultaneous loss of faith in the possible accuracy of artistic expression. In this section, Pierre learns that his social existence is false and that the lie is reinforced with the misleading idealizations of art.
The possible meanings of this revelation and their implications are temporarily deferred and the subsequent courses Pierre’s psychological development takes are significantly different. They primarily concern a repudiation of contingency, or the efforts of Pierre to locate an eternal, transcendent principle in his inner self that owes nothing to the circumstances of his lived, social reality or the material world. Pierre even asks himself, “How shall I steal yet further into Pierre, and show how this heavenly fire was helped to be contained in him, by mere contingent things… but I shall follow the endless, winding way… careless whither I be led, reckless where I land” (Melville 107). Pierre makes this declaration with the intention of acting on the dictums issued from within his soul, to forsake mere propriety for eternal Truth. The actions Pierre ends up taking are done with the purpose of creating a ‘pure’ social order in line with the eternal truths of God. The impossibility of achieving such an order is supposed to be the crux of the story’s tragedy, but the resemblance of Pierre’s mission to Melville’s own literary endeavor is unmistakable. Not content with his privileged but limited lot, he seeks alternatives courageously but recklessly, valuing the journey perhaps due to an intuitive understanding that the destination does not exist.
The manner by which Pierre seeks his alternative social and moral being was and remains the most controversial aspect of his story. He dissolves his relationship with the respectable young woman Lucy Tartan and arranges a false ‘marriage’ with his newly-discovered half-sister Isabel and then flees to a nameless city to pursue a career as a writer. The incestuous subtext is immediately apparent, and the fact that Pierre seeks to justify his actions with broadly moral rhetoric makes the arrangement that much more grotesque and bizarre. Amy Puett Putters put it quite well: “The work evolved… into a scathing portrayal of a young man consciously bent on doing right- honoring an obligation to support a girl he believes to be his late father’s illegitimate daughter- but unconsciously driven by incestuous love for this same girl” (239). It is important to understand, however, that Pierre’s ethical concerns are not mere sublimation of sexual desire. Rather, the two feelings coexist and amplify one another. Richard Brodhead aptly described the tendency as a “holy feeling” that increases with its combination with a sexual desire and the suppression of the awareness of that desire (235). The result is an often confusing but fascinating yearning that is both authentically holy and genuinely profane. Such a yearning is rearticulated in the later section in the form of Pierre’s attempt at beginning a career as a writer, a move that excites his inner desire for truth-telling but which he undertakes at least in part for vulgar (or at least practical), material reasons. He needs to earn money for his new family. However authentic each half of his desire may be on its own, practical demands work so that they cancel each other out, and Pierre is forced to lie to himself and others in order to pursue his ‘Truth.’ “The necessary deception,” observed the critic Lawrance Thompson, “to the effect that Isabel and Pierre are married, is but the first of innumerable subterfuges and lies which Pierre is forced to make… as he tries to imitate God…” (280). The result is that both Pierre’s publishers and the relatives of his surrogate family correctly brand him a liar, and Pierre’s final self-recognition is the novel’s tragic ending.
The fact that Pierre receives two nasty letters near the story’s end accusing him of being a liar and a fraud is significant. They repudiate not so much Pierre’s moral mission as his inability (or possible unconscious unwillingness) to properly communicate its importance and legitimacy to anyone else. The letter from Stanly and Frederic attacks Pierre’s pursuit of an alternative family and corresponding social structure, and the letter from the publisher attacks his artistic integrity, on moral grounds (Melville 356-357). Neither set of accusations reflects the true motivations of Pierre, but rather the social compromises he had to make to pursue those motivations, and our protagonist is left with the reputation of possessing those familiar faults- that is, essentially fraudulent modes of expression- that he had previously ascribed to the social milieu he has come to reject and that were interrogated at length vis-à-vis the painting of Pierre’s father. The most intriguing thing about Pierre is the manner in which Melville expands and alters the trajectory of its tragedy. The surface plot involves a young man learning the impossibility of leading a holy and truthful life in line with God’s eternal laws because the material and contingent social concerns of the world make such a life impossible. In pursuing this line of thought, Melville seemed to recognize a parallel with the creative desire, and the inherent uncertainty about whether art could codify and make coherent many of life’s mysteries. He also came to recognize art’s capacity to be frivolous or fraudulent, and this led to at least a temporary state of disillusionment with his creative capacity. The worst possible thing that could happen to an artist in Melville’s position is to be accused of inauthenticity, and this is exactly what happens to Pierre. The split nature of the book’s tragedy is somewhat confused, but undeniably rich and possibly the single most revealing and autobiographical sequence in all of Melville’s works. The depiction of the anxiety of the religious mission is partially abandoned for the portrait of the artist as young martyr.
Works Cited
Delbanco, Andrew. Melville: His World and Work. New York: Random House, Inc.
Print.
Melville, Herman. Pierre, or the Ambiguities. New York: Penguin. 1996. Print.
Higgins, Brian, and Hershel Parker, eds. Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s Pierre,
Or the Ambiguities. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co. 1983. Print.
Brodhead, Richard. “Conscious Idealizings and Unconscious Sexuality.” Higgins and
Parker 226-236.
Emmers, Amy Puett. “New Crosslights on the Illegitimate Daughter in Pierre.” Higgins
and Parker 237-240.
Higgins, Brian and Hershel Parker. “Introduction.” Higgins and Parker 1-27
Thompson, Lawrance. Melville’s Quarrel with God. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
(Note: I have fallen behind on my promised follow-up to my post on Michelle Remembers, so here is a little something to tide over all zero of my regular readers. It is a slightly edited version of a paper I wrote for an independent study back in grad school, so of course MLA formatting is present in all of its glory. I had previously posted on Herman Melville and his third novel, Mardi,hereandhere. Enjoy! I hope to have the MR post up sometime in October.)
Herman Melville’s literary ambitions underwent a significant change in character between his second and third novels, shifting away from the genre of fictionalized (though how fictionalized is still debated) travelogue to the romantic, philosophical, and more self-consciously ‘literary.’ The change is announced from the author’s note that precedes the title page of Melville’s third production, Mardi (1849):
“Not long ago, having published two narratives of voyages in the Pacific, which, in many quarters, were received with incredulity, the thought occurred to me, of indeed writing a romance of Polynesian adventure, and publishing it as such; to see whether the fiction might not, possibly, be received for a verity: in some degree the reverse of my experience. This thought was the germ of others, which have resulted in Mardi.” (xvii)
Though the broad and expansive genre of the nautical adventure ostensibly remained the baseline for this literary project (Melville even promises to focus his attention on Polynesia, the setting of his first two works, Typee and Omoo.), Melville clearly intended for there to be dramatic formal, stylistic, and thematic alterations to the nature of his writing. In that respect, Mardi does not disappoint. Though Melville advertised an intention to compose a ‘romance,’ not necessarily in the Hawthornian sense of that word, there really is no pinning down the generic orientation of Melville’s third novel. The author’s note foregrounds, right from the outset, an interest in the relationship between truth and fiction, a topic which inevitably summons the larger subject of epistemology. Melville was notably frustrated by critics who took his Typee and Omoo as fabrications when he intended them to be reflections of his actual lived thoughts and experiences. The fact that a literary mediation cast doubt on what Melville understood to be the truth would be the first ‘germ’ in the cultivation of a radically new way he had about how he understood and ‘thought with’ literature. This was no doubt helped along significantly by the immense volume of new books he was reading in the months leading up to and during the composition of Mardi. Melville, being an expansive if occasionally confused thinker, must have noticed immediately that the problem of genre is at the heart of the question concerning the relationship of fiction and truth. The formal conventions of genre and the specific, often constraining storytelling elements that go along with it, impose a degree of artifice on the vagaries, disunities, and contradictions that mark human thought. Human thought may not necessarily be ‘the truth’ of the universe (in fact, it quite probably is not) but it is quite obviously the only material human beings have to work with for comprehending themselves and their environment, or whatever other phenomena they may care to ponder. While composing Mardi, Melville discovered with an intense zeal his capacity for intellectual, spiritual, moral, and aesthetic exploration, and this led inexorably to a frustration with genre, more specifically his chosen genre of the seafaring romance. The consequence of this struggle is a book that is of multiple genres, and which possesses little formal unity. The critic Merrell R. Davis isolated no fewer than three distinct books within Melville’s ostensibly single volume: “The Narrative Beginning,” “The Romantic Interlude,” and “The Travelogue-Satire.” It may be possible to isolate further books still. Overall, Mardi gives the reader a vivid sense of the circumstances of its writing; when Melville seemingly exhausted the epistemological potential of one genre, he would move on to another, leaving the attentive critic with the over-arching impression of a meditation whose structural integrity hinges on the ongoing act of literary composition.
For these reasons, what ‘standard’ formal coherence exists in Mardi is, I would argue, a product of Melville‘s engagement with his major theme: knowledge. Mardi can be taken as an intelligible record of an artist’s intellectual growth, but not as a fully-realized aesthetic achievement. Melville’s favored rhetorical devices for the exploration of the range and limits of the human mind, especially in the later sections of the book, were the allegory and the philosophical dialogue. The shifts in genre that occur throughout the novel, for the most part, can be tracked through the alteration of these rhetorical devices and related stylistic shifts; it is a compositional approach that has the effect of altering the ‘reality’ (that is, the superficially realistic qualities of the story and how they relate to the putative reality of the reader) of the narrative. If one were to merely consider the events of the narrative, then Mardi would seem to be a more easily classifiable text. As the scholar Chris Sten noted, Mardi can be understood as an “imaginary voyage,” or “one of the principal forms of the novel before the twentieth century. The precursor of the modern genre of science fiction, which proposes to describe life in a distant time, the imaginary voyage pretended to describe life in a distant place…” (64) This narrative form proved to be sufficiently expansive to accommodate the full range of Melville’s developing obsessions, leaving room for philosophical speculations, mythopoeic questing, rugged nautical adventure, pointed political satire, and much else besides. The imaginary voyage would seem to have allowed Melville the opportunity to think about the world through a representation of the world (arguably the business of all literature) in the fluid and multifaceted way he desired.
As I have indicated, the chief theme of Mardi is knowledge, and the cumulative effect of the narrative is that of a journey inward, into the life of the mind. The story’s essentially tragic orientation is recognition of the frustrating insecurity that comes from an awareness of the limitations and frequent unreliability of human thought and perception. The basic plot, or the bulk of it anyway, consists of the narrator Taji’s efforts to recover the maiden Yillah (a symbolic personification of a utopian or spiritual ideal) within the mythical South Seas archipelago of Mardi. Assisting him is an entourage from the island kingdom of Odo whose members are each representations of certain human intellectual and creative faculties. As Merrell Davis observed, “The voyage through Mardi is both a quest and a sight-seeing expedition, at once a grand tour of the innumerable islands of a mythical archipelago and a quest to recover a phantom… the voyage affords an opportunity for presenting… satirical characterizations which are directed toward the exposure of the follies and vices of man and the institutions which man has created” (142). Mardi is a world in itself, an arena to be explored or mapped out. Yillah can be taken as an ideal clarifying principle, or a vision of utopia. Her perpetual elusiveness illustrates both the limitations of human knowledge, and the un-achievability of a utopian social order. The relationship between the world and the means of representing the world, and by extension understanding the world, has central importance in Mardi. The proliferation of diverse social orders and personalities in conjunction with a proliferation in symbolic representation is, I will argue, the principal reason behind its stylistic changes; as the world changes (that is to say, as we perceive more and more of the world’s varied constituent parts), so must the mode of representation, and any shift in representation in turn informs how the world comes to be understood, and how new information about it is processed. The practical effect of this unfolding in the context of Melville’s novel is a drift away from representing reality into representing representation, or the patterns of human thought itself. The ‘voyage thither’ of the subtitle could just as easily be ‘a voyage inward.’
As I have established, Mardi is conspicuously lacking in a formal structure from a strictly ‘literary’ point of view, but some unity becomes legible if one thinks of it as less a novel and more a creative representation of an intellectual development. In some respects, Mardi is a bildungsroman (or a confessional) masquerading as a romantic quest. One critic who has gone further than most in tracking the elusive formal unity of Mardi is Bruce L. Grenberg, who reasonably observed, “Surely it is foolish to think that the shift from adventure-narrative to allegorical quest slipped into Mardi undetected by Melville… it seems manifest that Melville saw a unity in the book that has eluded most readers, a unity that comprises more than a simple consistence of narrative point of view” (27). The narrator of the story, who will eventually adopt the moniker Taji, begins his tale as a bored and listless crewmember on a whaling ship becalmed at sea. His dissatisfaction stems not just from mere boredom, but a more deeply felt spiritual malaise. His vision of the universe is monistic, and perhaps panentheistic: “Thus all generations are blended: and heaven and earth of one kin… the nations and families, flocks and folds of the earth; one and all brothers in essence… All things form but one whole; the universe a Judea, and God Jehovah its head” (Melville 12). The narrow and circumscribed world of the whale ship Arcturion is hardly a fitting place to become better acquainted with the expansive divinity of the wider world. This line also marks the first unambiguous evocation of a Neoplatonic conception of the world, a view that Melville granted a number of his narrators, most notably Ishmael from Moby-Dick. In the Neoplatonic scheme, the Great Chain of Being, the most perfect being sits atop a metaphysical hierarchy and governs the apparent plurality of all things, including the principles of change and evolution. The unity of the plurality can be understood in terms of the most perfect being on top- God. “[F]or certainly in this conception of the universe, angels and earthlings… and human ‘nations and families’ can indeed be ‘brothers in essence… for all these creatures have in common their spiritual selves (their essences) and all emanate from the Supreme Being” (Zimmerman 39). This understanding of ultimate truth deeply informs Taji’s quest and helps explain the seemingly endless proliferation of island nations explored in the later chapters of Mardi; from the Neoplatonic standpoint, one arrives at ultimate truth through an engagement with the diversity of forms- and concludes that they are ultimately One.
Even in the early, realistic chapters of Melville’s novel, Taji’s quest has a clear intellectual component, and the reader receives some subtle hints of the future dissolution of the recognizable ‘real’ world and the entrance into the fanciful world of the mythical archipelago. Taji’s motivation for abandoning the Arcturion with his simpleton companion Jarl sets up the eventual generic shift: “We are asked to join a narrator who… flees a known and secure reality in search of self, tries simultaneously to penetrate and transcend the facts of the world in an effort to grasp the comprehensive meaning of those facts. We are asked to enter the world of the mind” (Grenberg 28). However, such an abdication of security, both physical and social (Jarl aside), cannot have immediate rewards. Abandoning one’s ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is not a soft measure, and the most immediate effect is not one of transcendent experience but an encounter with the raw, brutal reality of the natural order. Here the reader gets their first epistemic model- Empiricism. More precisely, an empiricist approach to the natural world is joined with a Transcendentalist sensibility in Taji’s character. “With the security of social order and custom behind him, the narrator finds himself frighteningly close to the dense reality he would transcend… Melville is asking us to join his narrator in exploring the world as it truly is, not as it seems to be through habit and common perception” (Grenberg 28). This intimate encounter with reality is perfectly matched with a relatively realistic (but typically rhapsodic and allusive) narrative style in the early chapters, and Taji’s method of epistemic mastery is careful observation and classification. This is on display in chapter 13, where Taji describes the various species of shark observed from his and Jarl’s boat. This task has a peculiar sense of urgency: “Ever present to us, was the apprehension of some sudden disaster from the extraordinary zoological specimens we almost hourly passed” (Melville 40). The use of the term “zoological specimens,” as well as the explicit reference to the great German naturalists Muller and Henle, implies a solid grounding in the empirical or natural sciences. Taji is classifying to conquer, to gain a knowledgeable basis for making his way in an apparently hostile and volatile environment. Taxonomy is just the first of a plethora of knowledge-organizing models to come in Melville’s narrative. It proves inadequate in itself as a means for truly achieving transcendent knowledge. As Grenberg observed, “The mind can work upon, but not control, the reality that exerts itself suddenly and without warning… it is this quality of nature’s unpredictability, with its implicit unconcern for human concerns, that most thwarts the narrator’s efforts to control his existence” (29).
It is tempting to mark the Aleema sequence of the novel as the first major generic transition Melville imposes. It is the point where Taji confronts and kills the priest Aleema who is about to sacrifice the fair maiden Yillah as part of a religious ceremony. This seems to be the moment where the far-fetched, but nonetheless reality-bound sailor’s yarns of the early chapter give away to the mythopoeic constructs of the romantic quest. However, Chapter 38 (“The Sea on Fire”) may be a more appropriate marking point since it features a major epistemic shift for the narrator-protagonist. After the events on the Parki, Taji, Jarl, and new companion Samoa come upon a phosphorescent patch of sea late at night. It has a strange, otherworldly, ethereal majesty that prompts much speculation: “Now, sailors love marvels, and love to repeat them. And from many an old shipmate I have heard various sage opinings…” (Melville 123) Taji then proceeds to list the possible explanations for the sea’s luminescence, which include Jarl’s formulation that it is the consequence of “commotion among the mermaids,” Faraday’s theory that an electrical phenomenon in the atmosphere is responsible, and the theory that it is the product of dead matter in the sea itself. “But these are only surmises; likely, but uncertain. After science comes sentiment…” (Melville 123) When it comes to assigning significance or meaning to an observed phenomenon, mere description or classification will not do. Sentiment, or the peculiar, emotionally-charged vagaries of the human heart, seeks to inflict its own logic. “The narrator’s gloss upon the fiery sea has multiplicity as its most salient feature… As logical explanation, scientific or otherwise, the narrator’s argument and conclusion are muddle-headed. As poetic statements of Melville’s larger purposes, however, they are pure revelation” (Grenberg 31-32). The poetic principle here is of a strongly Romantic character: the imaginative engagement with nature. Such a program introduces an additional lair of multiplicity through the introduction of ambiguity. The poetic principle lends itself to a peculiar personifying power when applied to the natural world, and in a manner that prefigures the far more violent quest of Captain Ahab, Taji is imbued with the desire to find the ultimate secret at the heart of nature. “Yillah is nature’s prized secret, which the narrator is determined to possess at whatever risk or cost” (Grenberg 32-33). Many a reader may find the introduction of such a romantic, mythopoeic entity like Yillah into a narrative that heretofore had been more-or-less realistic somewhat jarring, but her arrival could be said to have been subtly foreshadowed by the phosphorescent sea, since that is a point where the recognition of the desirability, if not necessity, of a new form of knowledge occurs.
The arrival of Yillah and Aleema on the scene prompts an action from Taji that parallels his abandonment of the Arcturion at the beginning of the novel. Taji confronts and kills Aleema and “rescues” Yillah. There follows a stretch of ten chapters where Yillah and Taji are together. It is important to give this portion of the novel some attention, since it in large part defines the scope of Taji’s quest for Yillah following her disappearance. The significance of the young lovers’ interactions corresponds to an ideal or idealized state, when nature is fully apprehended and in perfect harmony with the engaged imagination. This engagement is dialectical, and in Melville’s story occurs in the arena of social interaction. The foundational unit of this perfect state is two people- Taji and Yillah. Yillah can take on a social existence- that is, she can come to symbolize an ideal of social organization- in the later travelogue-satire sections of Mardi in part because of the dialectical quality of her introduction and early development.
The murder of Aleema is not the only sin Taji commits when it comes to Yillah. He also fabricates a story that brings Yillah’s mythical identity in line with his own. Upon their first meeting, Yillah tells a story about how she is a native of Oroolia, “the island of delights,” and how in youth she was ensnared by a sentient vine and transformed into a blossom, which in time rebirthed her and cast her ashore on the island of Amma, the home of the priest Aleema. She indicates that she has no actual memory of these events, but that they were revealed to Aleema in a dream. Taji is skeptical of the literal veracity of this story, and believes, not unreasonably, that Aleema has deceived Yillah as part of the sacrificial rites: “For ulterior purposes connected with their sacerdotal supremacy, the priests of these climes oftentimes secret mere infants in their temples; and jealously secluding them from all intercourse with the world, craftily delude them, as they grow up, into the wildest conceits” (Melville 139). Taji, with his Neoplatonic orientation and its demands for a plurality of experience as the chief means of acquiring authoritative knowledge, strangely has no compunctions about indulging Yillah’s fantasies for personal gain; whatever his interest in Yillah, he does not have any immediate inclination to lift her veil of delusions. “To possess her finally, the narrator does not discredit her dream world; he enters it by claiming for himself a divine origin in Oroolia and a dream past in which he was her lover” (Grenberg 33). This induces a state of “Romantic ecstasy,” or of seeming intimacy with Nature’s divine secret, the ultimate aesthetic goal of the Romantic imagination. What this might suggest is an end to all strivings, if not for the complicating factor of time. Romantic ecstasy is always fleeting, but leaves its mark to the effect of a restless epistemology. “In conception, and perhaps in aspiration, Melville was… akin to Emerson and Thoreau; if these elevated moments were to be accepted as anything more than hallucination or willing self-deception, they had to be integral to one’s persistent experience of the world” (Grenberg 34). Significantly, Taji and company make landfall on the island kingdom of Odo not long after acquiring Yillah. The domain of the sea, unencumbered by the social conventions represented by the whale ship Arcturion, could be a credible arena for the development of dreams, or the imaginative faculties. Sure enough, Taji manages to achieve an ideal in the form of Yillah, but such an ideal needs to be tested against the persistent, lived experience of the world in order to be authoritative and truly transcendent. In a turn of events at once predictable and indicative of yet another epistemic shift, Yillah vanishes not long after the group arrives in Odo. This sets the stage for the final section of the novel, the travelogue-satire with conspicuous shades of allegorical significance.
The sequence of events from Aleema’s murder at the hands of Taji to the disappearance of Yillah at Odo bears the character of an Edenic fall from grace, most conspicuously in the psychological effect it has on Taji. He ponders to himself and to the wider heavens, “To you, ye stars, man owes his subtlest raptures, thoughts unspeakable, yet full of faith. But how your mild effulgence stings the boding heart. Am I a murderer, stars?” (Melville 179) Taji now has the stain of an original sin, and he now must dwell in a world which constantly reminds him of his fallen state. His soliloquy to the stars reflects an awareness of, and a certain faith in, a heavenly, transcendent sphere, but at this point in his story the loss of Yillah has effectively cut him off from it. Here there is an epistemic shift towards the moral, and the moral compass Taji adopts is of a special significance itself: “Melville’s Mardian world and Taji’s ensuing search for Yillah throughout that world are irredeemably humanistic, and the ensuing search for Yillah… the attempt to realize humanity’s highest dreams, takes place in a context almost totally devoid of religious and transcendental implications…” (Grenberg 35) It is no longer the transcendent but the social that is held up for scrutiny by Melville, and appropriately enough, the generic orientation of the text transforms from romantic adventure yarn to travelogue-satire. Though there is a shift to the social, the world Melville depicts does not get any more noticeably earth-bound; this is the section of the narrative where Taji acquires his name and takes on the role of a Polynesian Demigod from the sun. This role involves Taji taking on yet another fictional backstory which he cannot substantiate or expound upon at any length, and one that, oddly enough, strengthens his new-found social role within the kingdom of Odo. While interacting with King Media (a self-styled Demigod himself) Taji remarks, “As for anything foreign in my aspect, and my ignorance of Mardian customs: – all this, instead of begetting a doubt unfavorable to my pretensions, but strengthened the conviction of them as verities” (Melville 174). The transcendent realm may be remote from social existence, especially in terms of knowledge, but it still exerts an authoritative influence. Furthermore, the social is no less mythological in potential. When Taji becomes a demigod, he assumes a cultural significance to the Mardians, and soon his desires and aspirations, his grand Yillah-oriented narrative, assumes a social significance which prompts action and questing among other parties. As H. Bruce Franklin observed, “This penultimate abdication [Taji leaving the ocean and arriving in Mardi] is his [Taji’s] penultimate allegorical death… From this point on, ironically and appropriately the Mardians become far more important than the narrator. ‘Taji’ as a Mardian conception becomes more significant than the player of Taji. The three mythologists and their king make Taji’s quest their own” (44). When personal transcendent knowledge assumes a social significance, it becomes myth, and myth prompts knowledge-seeking of a related, and perhaps cyclical, character. Taji’s quest for Yillah becomes a kind of epistemological compass by which the Mardian explorers navigate their archipelago, and a frame of reference which helps, at least in part, to contextualize the information they acquire on their journey. The journey has social significance not just because it is different and often conflicting social orders that are held up for scrutiny over the course of the travelogue-satire, but because the questers who adopt Taji’s obsessions are ideals and constituent parts of a civilized social order. Grenberg is again quite helpful: “Taji and his companions in the quest, Media, Yoomy, Babbalanja, and Mohi, constitute not only the multifaceted individual personality… but also the multifaceted structure of civilized society… it is natural to stress the characters’ identities as functions of the mind… but it is also noteworthy that Melville draws an analogy between the individual and his society” (35). Roughly, the questing characters can be taken as representations of mental faculties: Media is volition, Mohi is memory, Yoomy is creativity or imagination, and Babbalanja is reason and, occasionally, mystic perception. The social analogues of these mental functions are the philosopher (Babbalanja), the historian (Mohi), the poet or artist (Yoomy), and the politician (Media). Additionally, it is quite tempting to conceptualize these characters as the disparate parts of Melville’s artistic sensibilities, which he needed to synthesize in the space of the text in order to carry off a truly great feat of the literary imagination. Taji fades into the background in order to give these new arrivals center stage, and this robs the quest for the missing Yillah of a great deal of dramatic urgency, but it can be argued that Taji does not fade from the narrative so much as he is fragmented into this new set of personalities which dramatize the conflicted and multifaceted nature of his epistemological quest. Furthermore, Taji’s psychological and spiritual division can be understood as the inevitably and dramatically appropriate response to his fallen state and the loss of his Yillah: “[The] elastic relationship among the questers- threatening to break altogether periodically throughout the quest- reveals the disintegration of Taji’s personality in a world without Yillah” (Grenberg 36). By this point in the novel, Taji’s orientation toward knowledge has changed significantly. In the beginning, his endeavors were marked by a general sense of intellectual restlessness and social isolation. The latter quality in part informs Taji’s sense of independence, which aids his abilities as an inquirer, and his receptivity to the outside world. A broad sense of curiosity and a desire to absorb information marks the early stage on Taji’s intellectual journey. The encounter and communion with Yillah and her subsequent disappearance radically alter the manner in which Taji seeks understanding. “Before he first discovers Yillah, his wanderings have no definite object. After he loses her, he no longer drifts; he then searches specifically if futilely. In Mardi, therefore, the hero’s life is presented in two stages: he is a wanderer, and then a searcher” (Dillingham 105). A search implies an object or goal. It is essentially a teleological project, and the structure of Melville’s allegory makes it clear that his protagonist eventually develops a strong desire to believe that human striving for knowledge and understanding would eventually yield fruits. The epistemological goal, here represented by Yillah, serves an interpretive function in this quest; it is the standard by which new information is measured and contextualized.
Dysfunction of some sort marks every social order encountered by the questers in the kingdom of Mardi. For Grenberg, there is a recurring pattern to the seemingly diverse range of social problems Melville presents through his Mardian kingdoms- the inability of their rulers and citizens to properly integrate knowledge and experience into a coherent sense of self, a necessary prerequisite for a stable social identity. “The disintegrated world of Juam, Willamilla, Ohonoo, and Vivenza is presented as a product of the disintegrated personalities of its rulers. Thus, the quest for Yillah is both internal and external, the search for unity by the unintegrated self in a disintegrated world” (36). Isolation combined with stasis creates the inadequacies present in the island kingdoms. For Melville, relativism of a sort colors his assessments of different sociocultural landscapes, not because he felt there were no standards for judgment (Yillah’s presence would determine a utopian order) but because he felt that only comparisons among different social possibilities could yield sufficient information about the range of human possibility, understanding, and capacity to live and work in cohesive groups. This understanding may very well be a reflection of Melville’s conception of perfect knowledge, the ability to integrate and properly contextualize and comprehend the essence of the full range of baffling and frightening information the external world hurls at human subjects. “The individual islands clearly signify the isolated and fragmented nature of individuals and states who through ignorance, weakness, stubbornness, or pride have cut themselves off from the world… the beliefs and behavior of all those they meet are presented as direct products of the ways they look at their world” (Grenberg 36-37). The lack of utopia in Mardi is reflective of a lack of unity to human experience and perception, and thus signifies the impossibility of grasping any kind of ultimate knowledge. This has profound implications for the eventual emotional effect of Melville’s novel. Taji’s seeking after knowledge leads him to a greater incoherence, which strikes at the very unity of his sense of self; and yet he presses on. “Taji simply refuses to accept the implications of his own experience. His dream of attaining oneness with the universe is so intense that it blinds him to the facts of the world’s recalcitrance. Melville wants us to see these dreams as both irresistible and impossible… Taji’s quest is as hopeless as it is necessary to his self-definition.” (Grenberg 47) It is well worth mentioning that Taji’s transition from wanderer to quester inevitably entails a more active and opinionated engagement with the world. In short, the more he learns, the more he is prompted to act towards a focused end. The result of this development is a gradual articulation of the theme of the relationship between knowledge and action. How does what we know (or think we know) encourage us to act, or not act? For Melville, Mardi served as a sort of dry run for this theme, which would receive its greatest treatment in Moby-Dick, but the question has tragic implications in the context of Mardi as it is.
No consideration of Mardi would be complete without some attention paid toward Hautia, the mysterious and sensuous queen of Flozella. Her heralds pursue Taji and his companions all over Mardi, attempting to entice him to Hautia’s lair. Additionally, a trio of Aleema’s former associates pursues the band in an effort to kill Taji in retaliation for the murder of the priest. Respectively, these different pursuers represent forces that would halt meaningful intellectual exploration; Hautia is the realm of comfortable illusion, while the vengeful companions of Aleema are potent reminders of the fallen state that inevitably tortures and limits the experiences of human beings. Hautia is of slightly greater interest for the simple reason that she serves as a double for Yillah, or antithesis to Yillah’s thesis. If Yillah is a poetic ideal, then Hautia is the folly of poetic illusions, or the superficially beguiling sights and sensations that distract people from the pursuit of real truth; artifice as opposed to art. In her own way, Hautia represents the hazards of investing oneself too much in a beautiful illusion, much like Madame Bovary or Dorian Gray, and in that respect is the exact opposite of Yillah, who offered a ‘genuine’ vision of truth and beauty. “As the symbol of fathomless creative power, she serves as both inspiration and nemesis to Taji and… to Melville, for as creative imagination she on the one hand offers the possibility of all things, while on the other hand she denies to all things any status other than that of possibility” (Grenberg 55). This problem goes right to the heart of Melville’s project, which is fiction. Fiction, when in thrall of Yillah, is in harmony with the governing principles of nature. When it takes its cue from Hautia, fiction consists of nothing more than the meretricious beauties of mere fantasy and wish-fulfillment, superficially attractive, but lacking the permanent, self-sustaining value of truth.
Taji’s quest to recover Yillah, and achieve what he most desired from intellectual exploration- the perception of, and communion with, the ultimate truth or governing principle of the universe, is a failure. His consolation is to continue in his pursuit beyond the realm of both quotidian reality, social responsibility, and the circumscribed nature of human thought itself. His final defiant declaration as he leaves the Mardian archipelago pursued by Aleema’s former companions is quite telling- “Now, I am my own soul’s emperor; and my first act is abdication! Hail! Realm of shades!” (Melville 654) This intensely Miltonic line, which recalls Satan’s outburst upon his banishment in Paradise Lost, can be understood as a kind of spiritual and intellectual suicide. As Yillah cannot be found in Mardi, ultimate truth cannot be comprehended by ordinary human thought processes and habits. Surrendering to the wide unknown strangely enough does not end Taji’s forward momentum; he has reached the limitations of earthly knowledge and then sets out for parts unknown. It is quite tempting to consider this in light of Melville’s growth as a writer. As the critic Harold Beaver remarked, “Fiction was the one centre where all divergencies might converge and where all inconsistencies must necessarily consist. That was to become Melville’s task: not to resolve the dichotomies of love and hate, male and female, fact and fiction; but to calibrate their mutual tension” (39). In the end, such a project could be emotionally powerful, intellectually edifying, and aesthetically pleasing, but never attuned to any revelatory promise. For Melville, that was the tragedy of thought but the triumph of his fictional art.
Works Cited
Beaver, Harold. “Mardi: A Sum of Inconsistencies.” Herman Melville: Reassessments. Ed. A.
Robert Lee. London: Vision and Barnes and Noble, 1984. 28-40. Print.
Davis, Merrell R. Melville’s Mardi: A Chartless Voyage. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1952. Print.
Dillingham, William B. An Artist in the Rigging: The Early Work of Herman Melville.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972. Print.
Franklin, Bruce H. The Wake of the Gods: Melville’s Mythology. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1963. Print.
Grenberg, Bruce L. Some Other World to Find: Quest and Negation in the Works of Herman
Melville. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Print.
Melville, Herman. Mardi, and A Voyage Thither: The Northwestern-Newberry Edition.
Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library,
1970. Print.
Sten, Christopher. The Weaver-God, He Weaves: Melville and the Poetics of the Novel.
Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1996. Print.
Zimmerman, Brett. Herman Melville: Stargazer. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s
(Note: This piece was originally a paper I wrote for a lit course on Ralph Ellison I attended while in grad school, hence the fidelity to MLA citations. I present it here with some edits.)
When considering the issues surrounding the matter of literary inheritance, the writer’s process of interpretation coupled with creative application stands out as especially interesting and complex. When a writer is influenced by another writer, they bring their understanding or interpretation of a text to the task of the creative process. The demands of the writer’s particular project (which can be in part determined by their literary influences) govern how an influence is incorporated into a new composition, and how an influence functions as a literary device that signifies to the reader. The procedure is never neutral or arbitrary. The challenges adjacent to the puzzle of influence can seem especially urgent when a writer engages essential ethical, moral, and political questions and themes. The black American author Ralph Ellison, most famous for the only novel he published in his lifetime, Invisible Man (1952), was particularly invested in the related issues of American identity, race relations, and citizenship, and he understood his project to be in line with the “continuity of moral purpose” that centered the nineteenth century American literary classics. He was attracted to the works of Herman Melville especially, and Invisible Man is peppered with allusions to Melville’s works, and many other writers as well. The most explicit reference to Melville comes even before the narrative proper commences; a quotation from Melville’s novella Benito Cereno (1855)serves as the epigraph (along with a quote from T.S. Eliot) to Ellison’s novel. It is a line of dialogue, spoken by the protagonist Amasa Delano, the captain of an American merchant ship, to the traumatized titular character near the end of the narrative: “’You are saved,’ cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; ‘you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?’” The answer, not given in the epigraph, is, of course, “the negro.” Benito Cereno is in essence a story about the moral evil of New World slavery, and Ellison’s decision to utilize a quote from that work as an epigraph announces from the outset that one of the chief themes of his novel will be the legacy of that moral evil and the challenge that legacy poses in modern American life and American identity. In fact, I would argue that the question of American identity is of central importance to Invisible Man, and that the position Ellison takes on the matter is an affirmation of the founding principles supplemented by a greater commitment to cultural pluralism. Ellison rejects the legitimacy of class and race-centered ideological critiques of “the principle” of American citizenship, while also challenging the pervasive racism characteristic of American cultural life by troubling the centrality of whiteness in the wider national dialogue. A creative engagement with the works of Melville generally and Benito Cereno specifically at least partially informs Ellison’s cultural commentary and his novelistic aesthetic.
Another writer of African ancestry roughly contemporaneous with Ellison was the Trinidadian cultural critic C.L.R. James, who was similarly admiring of Melville’s work. Although James demonstrated aptitude, and even mastery, in multiple forms, including fiction and poetry, his most overt engagement with Melville came in the form of literary and cultural criticism. In 1953, the same year Invisible Man won the National Book Award, James published the book-length study of Melville entitled Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. It was a study, as implied by the title, with an explicitly political dimension. At the time James was writing his book on Melville he faced deportation from the United States courtesy of the Immigration and Naturalization Services (Pease viii). The motivation for this punitive move was James’s “subversive” political activities, and the justification was the McCarran Act, a piece of Cold War-inspired legislation that gave the federal government more powers concerning the monitoring, detainment, and deportation of political subversives, often understood to be synonymous with communists (Pease xxv). Although James addresses multiple works in Melville’s oeuvre, including Benito Cereno, he focuses most of his attention on Moby-Dick. The crux of his critique begins with the familiar assertion that the megalomaniacal Captain Ahab represents a totalitarian type, but James eschews the then-standard critical line that Ishmael represents the democratic opposition to authoritarianism (an untenable view since Ishmael explicitly identifies with Ahab’s quest to slay the white whale) and instead insists on the heroic centrality of the Pequod’s diverse crew (who also identify with Ahab’s quest but exhibit moral potential beyond it). This analytical gesture reflects James’s then-current political and legal situation; he wished to protest the state mechanisms that denied him both citizenship and due process, and he did so by reformulating the concept of citizenship in the American cultural milieu. For James, a critical reading of Melville allowed him to rethink race and nation and articulate a post-national and transnational conception of citizenship. James is less inclined than Ellison to affirm American exceptionalism, and his sensibility is much less individualistic, but it is quite remarkable that Melville served as an intellectual ‘in’ for both writers to approach questions surrounding American race relations and national identity in the context of the Cold War. I would like to argue that both Ralph Ellison and C.L.R. James used the works of Herman Melville, most notably Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick to interrogate the concept of American citizenship, especially as it pertained to race, but that each writer, owing to somewhat different ideological orientations, arrived at markedly different creative social visions which nonetheless had some intriguing points of overlap. In the case of Ellison, the aspiration was a more inclusive, pluralistic American identity buttressed by the doctrine of American exceptionalism and the supremacy of the American creed, while James gestured towards a transnationalism that eschewed the telos of a nation state-oriented identity. For Ellison, pluralistic multi-nationalism served as the raw material for a revised American identity, while for James American identity could potentially serve as a starting point for an enlightened world citizenship beyond nation; but first, the contradictions needed to be engaged, and the writings of Melville served as exemplary conceptual aids to think through the pertinent issues.
The Picture Desk Ltd
Rebel slave on a slave ship
One of the more noteworthy analyses of the kinship between Benito Cereno and Invisible Man is the essay “The Variations on a Masked Leader: A Study on the Literary Relationship of Ralph Ellison and Herman Melville” by Stuart E. Omans. Omans is more interested in identifying the myriad ways Benito Cereno manifests itself in Ellison’s novel than in connecting it to a single theme or idea; this is perfectly legitimate of course, since Ellison would seem to wish to keep his acquired literary material flexible and thematically fluid. “He [Ellison] has carefully reworked, varied, and remolded Melville’s themes so that they finally become a unique part of his own creation” (Omans 15). However, interested critics could perhaps narrow their focus in order to link Benito Cereno to Invisible Man’s sense of American citizenship. The antagonist (not necessarily the villain- critical interpretations are legion) of Benito Cereno is Babo, the leader of an African slave revolt aboard the Spanish slave ship San Dominick in the later part of the eighteenth century. After the failure of the revolt, Babo is captured, tried, and executed by Spanish authorities in Peru. The description of the legal proceedings is quite revealing: “Seeing all was over, he uttered no sound, and could not be forced to. His aspect seemed to say, since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words… On the testimony of the sailors alone rested the legal identity of Babo” (Melville 315). The “legal identity” being referred to here is in accordance with Spanish law of the period, which, unsurprisingly, did not grant the slave Babo anything by the way of legal rights, autonomy, or self-definition. In the absence of legal rights, the authority of the state over the individual can be said to lack legitimacy, and this condition tends to create a potent sense of alienation and rage in the person whose rights are not recognized. In Lima, Peru (the destination of the San Dominick) Babo would have the social status of a slave; his solution is to secure his freedom through violent rebellion and return to Africa with his fellow freed captives. An attempted change in social status is pursued through action. When the mechanisms of the enslaving state prevail, Babo performs his citizenship in accordance with its underlying logic. He is voiceless and inert, robbed of the right to self-definition and agency. The unnamed protagonist of Invisible Man (whom I will refer to as “Invisible Man”) experiences a set of conditions that are not identical to those experienced by Babo, but are clearly related both historically and structurally to similar cultural factors (racism, most obviously) and force similar challenges to his identity, social status, and sense of self-worth. As Omans observes, “Constantly Ellison looks to Melville for his views concerning the democratic American experience but particularly for his searching portrayal of the Negro’s implications within that experience” (16). The experiences of Invisible Man are more multifaceted than Babo’s, or indeed, any of the characters’ in Benito Cereno. Invisible Man is a much longer work with a more epic and expansive scope, so the range of citizenship possibilities presented is much wider. Invisible Man experiences, and comes to reject, both the racialized social hierarchy of the Jim Crow South, the materialist internationalism and more subtle racism of a thinly-disguised communist party, and the apocalyptic exhortations of Black Nationalism (If Melville had granted Babo the opportunity or inclination to speak at length about his experiences or views, he may have sounded much like Ras the Exhorter.). Ultimately, Invisible Man is left dejected and alienated by his experiences, and his alienation is articulated through the apt metaphor of invisibility. When pondering the sense of self he has cultivated over the course of his experiences near the end of the novel, Invisible Man recalls his grandfather’s enigmatic advice and links it to a social and political identity- “I’m still plagued by his [grandfather’s] deathbed advice… Perhaps he hid his meaning deeper than I thought… Could he have meant- hell, he must have meant the principle, that we were to affirm the principle on which the country was built and not the men…” He goes on: “Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? – diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states… America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain… Our fate is to become one, and yet many” (Ellison 574 and 577). This is he foundational political principle of the United States harmonized with a pluralistic conception of American cultural and social life, an aspirational condition that is the closest Invisible Man comes to a foundation for a secure identity. Tellingly, this position comes in the form of a creative utterance, and invisibility is mitigated through the discovery of a coherent artistic voice.
The self-originating quality of this voice is of central importance, and again Ellison engages Melville’s novella as a means to represent its development and eventual articulation. The phrase “Follow your leader” recurs throughout Benito Cereno, being the words written on the bow of the slave ship by Babo after the initial and short-lived success of the rebellion. Leadership and social power are manipulated by Melville in Benito Cereno to create ambivalent and disquieting effects. Throughout the story, Babo forces Don Benito to make a show of being in charge in order to deceive Captain Delano. Captain Delano, for his part, is incapable of seeing Babo as a possible, credible figure of authority because of his slave status; Babo effectively utilizes his invisibility to his own advantage. The instability of social power and its relation to identity is explored by Ellison through an engagement with Melville’s text. “Ralph Ellison was so affected by the implications of the phrase [“Follow your leader”] that he revised it to become a repetitive note in his own hero’s search for identity. It became, in fact, the major theme of Invisible Man… Nearly every character in the novel claims to be the protagonist’s leader” (Omans 17). All of these claims turn out to have a cumulative deleterious effect on the protagonist, of course. A preacher at one point tries to uphold the authority of the corrupt and draconian Negro university president Dr. Bledsoe, the man who leads a system representative of Booker T. Washington-style racial reform. The preacher utilizes especially fulsome language: “For has not your present leader become his living agent, his physical presence? Look about you if you doubt it… How can I tell you what manner of man this is who leads you?” (Ellison 132) Bledsoe, of course, betrays Invisible Man and reveals himself to be a morally bankrupt and self-interested little Caesar. A similar pattern holds for other would-be political and spiritual leaders the protagonist encounters. Following one’s leader proves to be a consistently unfulfilling and occasionally dangerous business. As Omans observed, “The boy searches for some stable force throughout the book to lead him to freedom, or visibility. In his attempt to find a visible identity he at first wishes to follow an outside force, to have his identity defined for him by others” (17). The motif of “leadership” is an echo of an aspect of the earlier Melville work, one Ellison, as an admirer of jazz music, appropriates as a theme on which he can riff in several different variations.
The dominant theme of invisibility generates much ambiguity in Ellison’s novel, particularly in the arena of social relations. Invisibility and obscuration occur in multiple forms, and masking is one of them. Symbolic masks are featured throughout Benito Cereno as well. The San Dominick has a stern-piece that Melville likens to “a dark satyr in a mask, holding his foot on the prostrate neck of a writhing figure, likewise masked” (qtd. in Omans 18-19). This is clearly a symbolic representation and a foreshadowing of the deceptive pose adopted by Benito Cereno and Babo during Delano’s visit on the ship. It is a social mask crafted out of the violence of slavery. Similarly, socially masked figures appear in Invisible Man. As the critic Valerie Bonita Gray observed, “Babo, Bledsoe, and [Invisible Man’s] grandfather are all black characters who wear masks. In order to function in the white world in which they find themselves, they recognize the need to hide their real selves” (37). Masking can become a habit, and soon enough one which assists the condition of total invisibility. Of course, masks are not intrinsically limiting throughout Invisible Man. The memorable episode near the end of the novel where the narrator acquires a pair of dark sunglasses and wanders around Harlem and is routinely mistaken for a man named Rinehart is probably the best example of a potentially empowering mask. Although Invisible Man is initially ambivalent about being mistaken for somebody else, he eventually comes to see in Rinehart an expansive world of possibilities. The ambivalence at the beginning emerges from the lack of social stability intrinsic to the process of masking. Invisible Man muses, “Perhaps I’m out of his territory at last, I thought and began trying to place Rinehart in the scheme of things. He’s been around all the while, but I have been looking in another direction… What on earth was hiding behind the face of things? If dark glasses and a white hat could blot out my identity so quickly, who actually was who?” (Ellison 493) Masking has the disquieting potential to obscure identity to the point that it becomes doubtful that there is any “real” self at all. In this conception, social performance is such a powerful, potent, oppressive force that self-definition is all but impossible, and stability and a sense of certainty regarding the self and one’s relation to others is all but obliterated. However, this uncertainty and fear concerning Rinehart does not remain with the protagonist for long. He begins to see the possibilities in Rinehart’s protean social presence, and how a multiplicity of masks may overcome the limitations of a singular, imposed mask. Rinehart is still a condition of invisibility, but he is the one manifestation of invisibility that is something other than tragic and disempowering. The narrator concludes, “Can it be I thought, can it actually be? And I knew that it was… could he be all of them: Rine the Runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend?… What is real anyway?… His world was possibility and he knew it. He was years ahead of me and I was a fool… The world in which we lived was without boundaries” (Ellison 498). The mask morphs from a set of restrictive boundaries to a world of freedom and expansive possibilities once it multiplies. This empowering and multi-faceted brand of masking is not really present in Benito Cereno (Babo is temporarily granted power by his mask, but it has a somewhat singular quality), but animates another Melville text centered on a character very much like Rinehart- The Confidence-Man. “A fraud and a trickster, Rinehart is reminiscent of Melville’s Confidence Man. Just as the Confidence Man can be a deaf-mute, a cripple, or an agent for an orphanage, Rinehart too changes” (Gray 52). An important difference between the two characters, however, is the nature of their roles in their respective texts. The Confidence Man is essentially a villain whose protean qualities serve as a commentary on the corruption and rootlessness present in American society, while Rinehart more optimistically suggests a strategy for survival in an often hostile cultural landscape. This trickster condition suggested by Rinehart opens up the possibility of agency and a viable range of identities for black Americans in the United States, although his lack of stability still leaves the protagonist with a lingering feeling of ambivalence. He says in the epilogue of his story, “But what do I really want, I’ve asked myself. Certainly not the freedom of a Rinehart…” (Ellison 575) Masks may aid the development of the citizen-subject, but they cannot be an end in themselves.
Both the works of Melville and the works of Ellison are deeply invested in the role memory plays in the creation of a political and cultural subject. The dominant metaphor for memories of a troubled past in Benito Cereno is the shadow. The shadow is mentioned in the quote that serves as the epitaph to Invisible Man, and given the name “negro.” The critic James Booth is quite helpful on this point, and persuasively draws the connection to Ellison’s project: “The shadow here is cast by the memory of a slave revolt on his [Benito Cereno’s] ship, or perhaps by slavery itself. Delano’s (characteristically American) appeal to turn away from the past expresses an optimism, and a future-directed gaze, made possible, in part, by forgetting. Ellison, too, wrote of shadows, and in particular, ‘the shadow of the past’” (684). Historical consciousness is no light matter in Ellison’s novel, and it is closely bound to his concept of American citizenship. The climax of Invisible Man involves a destructive riot in Harlem instigated by the perfidious pseudo-communist organization called the Brotherhood, and largely carried out under the “leadership” of the black nationalist Ras the Exhorter, who takes on the more appropriately apocalyptic persona of Ras the Destroyer in his vengeful campaign against the racist institutions of the United States. The episode culminates with Invisible Man experiencing a bleak vision involving his castration at the hands of Brother Jack. The vision involves the protagonist’s confrontation with all the would-be cultural and ideological leaders that “kept him runnin’” over the course of his narrative; he asserts his right to self-determination, and Brother Jack “frees him from his illusions” in the form of a violent castration. Invisible Man witnesses his bloody genitals flung over the river and onto a bridge. This gesture robs the protagonist of the generative possibilities that come with the capacity to self-define, but it also unburdens him of the illusory myths that dominate the social order. He says to his tormentors, “It’s not invisible… that there hang all my generations wasting upon the water… there’s your universe, and that drip-drop upon the water you hear is all the history you’ve made, all you’re going to make…” (Ellison 570) The racial injustice that has been a near-constant feature in American life draws the oppressor into its twisted logic along with the oppressed; when white attempts to negate black, it establishes the conditions of its own negation. As it pertains to history, castration is both the symbol of a denied future and a forgetting or denial of history. White effaces black out of time and space, and from his excluded position, the protagonist can witness the destructive logic of this program. Ellison’s project is at least in part a creative act of remembering that un-erases the black presence in American life and restores an informed historical consciousness.
The castration scene in Invisible Man has a precedent in Melville’s Benito Cereno that Ellison may or may not have consciously drawn on for inspiration. After Captain Delano rescues Benito Cereno, it comes to light that the sword in Cereno’s possession throughout the events of the story was a fake: “The dress, so precise and costly, worn by him on the day whose events have been narrated, had not been willingly put on. And that silver-mounted sword, apparent symbol of despotic command, was not, indeed, a sword but the ghost of one. The scabbard, artificially stiffened, was empty” (Melville 315). Babo had apparently taken Cereno’s sword during the course of the rebellion, and provided a stuffed scabbard as part of his elaborate constructed façade. This is a symbolic castration, as opposed to a castration with a symbolic significance, but like the castration in Ellison’s novel, it is closely linked to social and national status. By taking Cereno’s sword, Babo places Cereno in a subordinate position, wearing the costume of his nation but possessing none of the real status the costume usually confers. Earlier in the story, Babo humiliates Cereno by forcing him to receive a shave in which the Spanish flag is used as a barber’s covering. Cereno’s symbolic castration estranges him from his national/cultural identity and the protections of citizenship, a fate Cereno himself and his associates inflicted on the abducted slaves. Ellison clearly understood the potent effect such a metaphor could have when applied to the question of the Negro in American society, and it would seem that Melville’s example suggested some possibilities for representing such an experience.
When C.L.R. James expressed his appreciation for the works of Herman Melville, it was in the form of a book-length study, Mariners, Renegades, & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. A work of criticism obviously has a different character from the novel, but James’s approach to Herman Melville and his thematic concerns intersected with Ellison’s in a number of ways. From the introduction, James makes it clear that he wishes to place Melville in an explicitly political context:
“The miracle of Herman Melville is this: that a hundred years ago in two novels Moby-Dick and Pierre, and two or three stories, he painted a picture of the world in which we live… the totalitarian madness which swept the world first as Nazism and now as Soviet Communism; the great mass labor movements and colonial revolts- this is the world that masses of men strive to make sense of. This is what Melville coordinates- but not as industry, science, politics, economics or psychology, but as a world of human personalities…” (3)
Despite James’s insistence that Melville does not coordinate the troubling modern world as politics, his linking of Melville’s work to such historically important political events as the rise of Nazism and communism, as well as mass labor movements and decolonization, indicates a deep concern with the then-current political scene, one molded chiefly by the imperatives of the Cold War state. This is the same political landscape in which Ellison was working. For James, the personal is very much political. He wrote his book on Melville while detained on Ellis Island and awaiting deportation. He commented, “A great part of this book was written on Ellis Island while I was being detained by the Department of Immigration. The Island, like Melville’s Pequod, is a miniature of all the nations and all sections of society. My experience of it… [has] so deepened my understanding of Melville and so profoundly influenced the form this book has taken…” (James 3) The authoritarian mechanism of the Cold War state, the paranoid atmosphere of the McCarthy era, and the vagaries of American nationalism all intensely colored James’s interpretation of Melville. What might be the strangest aspect of his study is that it remains so persuasive despite a conspicuous tendentiousness. James wishes to investigate the modern totalitarian social type through Melville. Intuitively, he centers his attention on Captain Ahab of Moby-Dick. “Ahab is no common man… he is a man who wants to live fully and completely according to his beliefs… His basic religion for years has been the religion of his age- material progress” (James 9). Of course, the religion of material progress brings Ahab much success and even more alienation and quasi-existential misery. “His business becomes to reconcile the undoubted advantages of an industrial civilization with what that very civilization is doing to him as a human being” (James 10). This struggle is not at all unlike the struggle of Ellison’s protagonist, who attempts many times to reconcile his attachment to American civilization with the deleterious effects of its racism. Of course, Invisible Man pursues his dilemma towards a frustrated but defiant individualism, which he molds into a creative act of communication that may have the potential to mitigate the effects of invisibility. Ahab is not so fortunate, though he has in common with Invisible Man an instinct toward individualism. “There is a fatal flaw in his [Ahab’s] misery and his challenge and defiance. Never for a single moment does it cross his mind to question his relations with the people he works with… He has been trained in the school of individualism and an individualist he remains to the end” (James 11). The alienating effects of mechanization and individualism create an untenable situation that has the potential to tip over into the genuinely authoritarian in the event of a catastrophic event that prompts men to seek radically different modes of social organization. For Ahab, the catastrophic event is his fateful encounter with the white whale, Moby Dick. This compels a new program of passionate, violent repudiation. James cannot help but link this mindset to the pathological nationalisms and ideologies that proved so destructive during the first half of the twentieth century. James views nations and nationalisms as being founded on dubious concepts of race: “This doctrine is that the national race, the national stock, the national blood, is superior to all other national races… over the last twenty years [the doctrine] has grown stronger in every country in the world. Who doubts this has only to read the McCarran Immigration Bill of 1952, which is permeated with the doctrine of racial superiority” (13). Here we have race, nation, modernity, and the totalitarian type all meeting in the space of Melville’s most famous novel. In this formulation, citizenship is not a desirable status in the least. For James, the possible redeeming factor for this volatile and possibly tragic scenario can be found in the make-up of the Pequod’s crew. The critic Donald E. Pease wrote that James would eventually consolidate his political views into a three-part doctrine: “the rejection of the Soviet Union’s bureaucracy as a form of state capitalism, the rejection of the vanguard party, and the insistence on the relative autonomy of spontaneous social movements” (ix). The latter is especially important when considering James’s reading of Melville. When considering the matter of social change, James rejected the centralizing tendencies of the vanguard party and placed the emphasis on collective action. His earlier book American Civilization brought this view to bear on America’s troubled race relations: “it… advanced the argument that various sectors- the family, the political community, the civil sphere- of American civilization were in crisis along a racial division that could only be resolved through the development of a mass revolutionary movement that would reorganize American culture on an egalitarian and participatory basis” (Pease ix-x). The diverse, subaltern mix of Ahab’s crew can be understood as the necessary action that could be taken against the totalitarian type in incipient form. Of course, in Melville’s novel the actual outcome is tragic, not emancipatory or triumphant. The totalitarian type leads his social order to ruin. However, James’s project is more one of advocacy on the crew’s behalf than an interpretation of an actual conflict in the novel. James sees in the Pequod crew the diverse collection of marginalized individuals who could break the racist and authoritarian model of the modern nation state, if only they could see their dilemma with clarity and unity of purpose. This renegotiation of nationality and citizenship has some similarities and differences with Ellison’s project. Like Ellison, he values cultural pluralism, and considers America’s troubled race relations and efforts to efface pluralism through rigid racial hierarchies and impose a unitary whiteness on cultural life as major social evils. However, Ellison wished to navigate this corrupted landscape and offer his challenge through the cultivation of a renewed brand of American exceptionalism and individualism; Ellison’s ideal America would seem to be its present diverse mix of individuals organized on the same creed but untainted by an artificial racial hierarchy centered on white supremacism. James, by contrast, wants to be a citizen of the world, and gestures toward a transnational and post-national construction of the social subject. Both of these writers, I feel, chose to engage with Melville because of the circumstances of their historical moment, which was dominated by the Cold War and the very recent memory of two brutal world wars. Melville, along with Dostoevsky, was the nineteenth century writer who arguably saw the most keenly that modernity and industrialized society would not be able to eliminate the problem of evil, and in fact, the burdens of history and social alienation may be felt even more acutely in the brave new modern world. Ellison and James, both being writers of African ancestry and deeply concerned with the problem of American racism, responded to Melville’s insights and aesthetics and deployed them in their own work to imagine new possibilities beyond the limits of the then-current sociopolitical order.
Works Cited
Booth, W. James. “The Color of Memory: Reading Race with Ralph Ellison.” Political Theory.
36.5 (2008): 683-707. Print.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Print.
Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1978. Print.
James, C.L.R. Mariners, Renegades, & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World
We Live In. Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2001. Print.
Melville, Herman. Great Short Works of Herman Melville. New York: HarperCollins Publishers,
2004. Print.
Omans, Stuart E. “The Variations of a Masked Leader: A Study on the Literary Relationship of
Ralph Ellison and Herman Melville.” South Atlantic Bulletin. 40.2 (1975): 15-23. Print.
Pease, Donald E. Introduction. Mariners, Renegades, & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. By C.L.R. James. 2001. Hanover and London:
(Note: I originally wrote this while I was in grad school, hence the MLA citations; no Works Cited though, as I only drew on one source, a single endnote aside. This is a review of a book-length study published in 1952 of Herman Melville’s third novel. I had previously written about Mardihere.)
Merrell R. Davis’s book-length study of Herman Melville’s third novel, Melville’s Mardi: A Chartless Voyage (1952), engages its subject in a somewhat counterintuitive manner. Mardi has been a problematic text since its publication in 1849, and there has been a pronounced critical tendency, at least since the Melville revival of the 1920s, to consider it in terms of works that would follow, most obviously Moby-Dick. What might be called a “standard” approach to studying Mardi is to analyze its contents and structure as a trying-out phase for Melville to first discover, then explore and hone, his emerging literary ambitions and talents. Mardi is typically regarded as a text of little intrinsic value and more a tantalizing indicator of what was to come. I will admit to a degree of bias; I see little reason to dissent from this critical line. While there are many substantial reasons to challenge the Moby-Dick-centrism that sometimes informs Melville studies, Mardi seems to work best as a record of unfolding and not as a fully-realized literary composition. It is therefore quite interesting that Davis chooses to investigate and analyze Mardi largely on its own terms. This is not to say that context is not an important aspect of Davis’s study, just that the contexts he selects do not extend beyond or much before the composition of Mardi; Melville’s life prior to pursuing a career in letters is given a cursory overview and hardly anything at all is said about what followed the publication of his third book. Understanding Mardi as a self-contained work of literature would seem to be Davis’s priority, with the specific circumstances of composition and the curious qualities of its formal structure being brought to the forefront of the analysis. Within the parameters Davis constructs for his study, Melville’s Mardi is thorough, insightful, and informative, but its narrow focus seems somewhat myopic. Davis would appear to believe that Mardi is best understood in terms of its composition, and while that is undoubtedly an essential, even principle, component to an informed understanding of the text, I feel that more attention could have been paid to the circumstances of Mardi’s critical and public reception, and how its reputation has developed over the years amongst readers, writers, and critics. It is well-established that Melville was attuned to the reactions of his reading public and the critics to his books, and that his responses to these reactions at least partially informed the course of his creative endeavors; the author’s note that precedes the main narrative of Mardi makes this perfectly clear.[i] Davis acknowledges that one of the central reasons Mardi holds some interest is that “the experience… it exemplifies marks a significant growth in an author who came to acknowledge an ambition to write ‘such things as the Great Publisher of Mankind ordained ages before he published ‘The World’” (200). The growth of Melville’s ambition in tandem with his idea of his audience is one of the most fascinating components of Melville’s art, at least partially because it was one of Melville’s chief sources of frustration and struggle. It can be argued that Mardi is the first significant benchmark of that unfolding struggle, and it is somewhat frustrating that Davis does not pay it more attention.
Davis’s study has a conveniently bifurcated structure, with the first half covering Melville’s early literary career (the publications of Typee and Omoo) and the circumstances surrounding the writing of Mardi, and the second half given over to an analysis of the novel’s formal structure and purpose. Appropriately, Davis’s primary sources for the biographical portion of his study consist largely of correspondence among members of the Melville family and between Melville and his publishers in both England and America. Davis effectively proves what most readers of Mardi intuit; that Melville’s ambitions for his third book underwent significant changes over the period from 1847 to 1849 when he was writing it. The skeptical response of some critics to the allegedly true events of Melville’s first two books, Typee and Omoo, apparently rankled Melville enough to encourage a stylistic and thematic shift for his third effort, one which would be more conducive to his developing philosophical interests and thematic concerns and which would also provoke the more literary sensibilities of critics who had previously been preoccupied with biography. There was also, apparently, the more prosaic matter of financial returns. After the (mostly) enthusiastic reception of Typee, Melville resolved to pursue a career as a professional writer, and needed to take into account the practical demands such a decision would entail. While engaging in a discussion with the English publisher of his first two works, John Murray, Melville evidently came to realize that he could anticipate diminishing returns for every reiteration of his South Seas adventures, and that altering the character of his storytelling was a prerequisite for long-term literary success. Ultimately, it would be Melville’s voracious reading, Davis argues, that most strongly informed the character of the change in his writing. Davis writes: “Either by coincidence or design, just at the time Melville was expanding the plan of his book he was beginning to buy new books and to borrow others… in addition to the travel books… Melville was reading Seneca, Proclus, Montaigne, Burton, Sir Thomas Browne, Ossian, Hartley, Coleridge, and Rabelais… These books contributed to the content or the literary manner of Mardi” (62 and 66). In this reading list one can find the inspirations for Melville’s densely allusive style and more conspicuously literary and philosophical orientation. Reading the classics of the Western canon not only changed the stylistic nature of Melville’s writing, but his engagement with life and the world generally, and this in turn would come to inform Melville’s thematics. Davis persuasively demonstrates that the last, or nearly last, material Melville wrote for Mardi was the satirical-allegorical section in which the group of island-hopping questers land on a series of islands that are thinly disguised representations of real countries. In this material, Melville refers to then-current events, like the activities of the Free Soil Party and the 1848 revolutions in Europe. By incorporating current events into his increasingly bizarre and fluid allegory, Melville demonstrated that his active engagement with the world was starting to take on a decisively literary character.
Herman Melville (1819-1891) 1868.
The second half of Davis’s study, as already indicated, is given over to an extended analysis of Mardi itself. Overall, this second section is less edifying than the first and marked by a sterile formalism in its approach to literary criticism. Davis effectively divides the narrative into three sections, “The Narrative Beginning,” “The Romantic Interlude,” and “The Travelogue-Satire.” These sections each possess an internal narrative structure of their own, so much that each can be considered a book in itself. Davis, for better or worse, cannot isolate much worth analyzing in the beginning chapters, the section of the book that most closely resembles Melville’s lighter, early work, and reduces the formal effect of its episodes to the conjuring of suspense. Some appreciation is reserved for its comic aspects as well, particularly the fractious relationship between husband and wife Samoa and Annatoo. Davis argues that the center of the Romantic Interlude section of Mardi is the character of Yillah and her dramatic and transformative effect on the narrator-protagonist Taji. Yillah can be understood primarily as a mythopoeic construct, one who happens to have both a “realistic” and “mythical” life story. The literary antecedents for Yillah can be located in the work of Romantic poets like Byron and Shelley, and as a beguiling representation of an abstract concept (or set of concepts) Yillah also has the archetypal quality of a mythical, goddess-like figure. Thematically, her function is to introduce the theme of guilt (Taji murders the priest Aleema in order to “rescue” her) and provide the symbolic significance that characterizes the third section of the book. The third section, or travelogue-satire, is perhaps the most difficult and unwieldy part of Mardi. Davis splits his consideration of this section into two chapters, one that explores the satirical and symbolic qualities of the island visits, and one that considers the characters that make up the traveling entourage. I am in agreement with Davis that the philosopher Babbalanja warrants special consideration; he is the only character other than Taji with a distinct and independent quest. While it could be argued that both Taji and Babbalanja are seeking “knowledge” of a sort (though it is worth remarking that Babbalanja’s knowledge-goal lacks a symbolic personification) Babbalanja’s orientation is that of the philosopher, not the romantic quester. Davis observes: “Babbalanja has a quest of his own. Throughout the voyage he has exhibited his concern over the problems of science, religion, and philosophy as they relate to the sources of man’s knowledge and his faith. As a philosopher, he would find the philosopher’s stone, and his quest is ended by his humble acceptance of the limitations of his own reason” (198). At least within the context of the travelogue-satire, Babbalanja is the only character aside from Taji who undergoes something resembling a persuasive change (the sudden religious conversion of the other characters at Serenia is less convincing) and therefor is more recognizable as a well-constructed character than the other travelers.
As I have already indicated, Davis’s study is somewhat limited by its adherence to a rote formalism as its principle means of literary analysis and it is somewhat frustrating that Davis does not do more to contextualize Mardi in the entire, completed body of Melville’s works, or give any consideration to its critical reception or how its reputation has developed over the years. However, A Chartless Voyage makes expert use of biographical data to meticulously chart the course of Melville’s development while he was composing Mardi, and the cumulative effect is quite edifying. Whether Davis consciously intended to or not, the significance his study suggests for Melville’s third novel is the development of a conflict between Melville’s professional and artistic ambitions. By seeking alternatives to the travel-adventure mode which initially made his reputation, Melville plunged headlong into the self-consciously literary and the densely philosophical, a mode which allowed for the creation of some authentically timeless works of art, but which he was never able to harmonize with a professional career.
[i] “Not long ago, having published two narratives of voyages in the Pacific, which, in many quarters, were received with incredulity, the thought occurred to me, of indeed writing a romance of Polynesian adventure, and publishing it as such; to see whether, the fiction might not, possibly, be received for a verity: in some degree the reverse of my previous experience.
This thought was the germ of others, which have resulted in Mardi. New York, January, 1849.”
When considering Herman Melville’s third novel Mardi, or A Voyage Thither (1849), an attentive reader is presented with a formidable challenge, or rather set of challenges. Isolating a dominant theme, and relating it to the book’s formal structure, as well as determining if there, in fact, is a formal structure, is not a straightforward task in the least. Like other works in Melville’s oeuvre, the structure is very suggestive of the process of composition, or of a text that grew and changed over the course of its being written. What formal unity exists suggests a tripartite structure, a narrative that evolves from maritime adventure to Romance to Philosophical Dialogue with aspirations to allegory. Perhaps inevitably, there is some generic blending and backtracking along the way (The story reverts to romantic adventure just in time for a climax of sorts), but overall the breaks in genre can be clearly delineated by the reader since Melville includes some helpful signposts along the way, usually in the form of character arrivals and departures. The organic growth of the text is, I would argue, suitable to its dominant theme, which is knowledge. Mardi, more than any other novel I have encountered, gives the impression of a developing thought process. Its true subject is its author, or more precisely, how its author thinks through the construction of a fictional narrative. The artistic problem of Melville’s novel is therefore largely psychological. Its chief pleasure is the experience of witnessing genius discovering its potential; its chief pain, or challenge, is the experience of the error side of the inevitable trial and error process of discovery.
In many respects, Mardi reads like a prototype or draft of all of Melville’s most fully realized artistic achievements. The densely allusive style and seafaring quest narrative anticipate Moby-Dick, as do the enigmatic allegorical elements of the story. The philosophical dialogues look ahead to The Confidence-Man and the metafictional speculations are not unlike the digressive chapters of that novel and the later sections of Pierre. Even the songs routinely strummed out by Yoomy as aesthetic punctuations to the more involved metaphysical conversations seem to prophesize Melville’s late-period turn to poetry. What distinguishes Mardi from Melville’s other works is that, along with Pierre, it demands that the reader be conscious of the relationship between knowledge and fiction. In composing his narrative, Melville is himself questing after an epistemological goal, one tied to his developing identity as a writer. In fact, it is a text so closely bound to Melville’s sense of his development that the average reader can be excused for finding the proceedings somewhat alienating. Mardi is less a work of fiction than a record of Melville’s unfolding.
From Chapter 65 Mardi becomes a quest narrative, with the protagonist/narrator Taji seeking out his lost maiden Yillah throughout the imagined South Seas archipelago of Mardi. The lost Yillah develops symbolic significance almost immediately, with the utopian viability of each visited island being determined according to her presence or absence; as she is always absent, utopia remains an elusive concept all the way to the end of the novel. A serious flaw attends this quest narrative, and that is a significant lack of dramatic urgency developed with recognizable (not necessarily realistic) human characters. Melville allows his protagonist, and his emotional investment in Yillah, to fade into the background for large swaths of the narrative, instead focusing attention on the three great wise men of the Mardian kingdom of Odo and their less-distinguished king/demigod Media. These wise men, named Babbalanja, Yoomy, and Mohi (aka Braid-Beard) are clearly personifications of broad intellectual concepts or disciplines. Babbalanja is the representative philosopher, Yoomy is the poet, and Mohi is the historian. The action of the later chapters of the book concern visits to various islands throughout Mardi that, like most of the characters, have the spectral and fanciful quality of allegorical entities. They are places governed by mores Melville wishes to hold up for scrutiny, or satirical exaggerations of real countries; the most obvious are Dominora, representing England, and Vivenza, representing the United States. The combination philosophical discussion and travelogue frequently places Taji in the background, so for long stretches he is all but absent. The urgency and romance of Taji’s infatuation with Yillah being neglected, the reader is left with the dry, intellectual engagement with what Yillah may be or represent. The discourse is interrupted occasionally by a trio of pursuers, associates of the priest Taji killed in his “liberation” of Yillah, who slay the only two other realistic characters in the book, Jarl and Samoa, and offer a tantalizing glimpse as to what the narrative could have been if Melville paid as much attention to the dramatic side of his project as he did to the philosophical. As it stands, an occasionally oppressive inertia characterizes long stretches of the chartless voyage which makes up the bulk of Mardi; it seems inappropriate that a globe (or at least archipelago)-trotting quest should so often give the reader the sensation of sitting perfectly still. Melville at times seems to skip past telling his story so as to explore its intellectual implications. In this respect, Melville’s representative intellectuals serve his mission well. They all seem to, at various times, articulate the poetic, moral, and philosophical concerns that Melville felt he needed to address and synthesize in order to carry off a truly great feat of the imagination in a literary medium.
Another reason that Taji’s not-quite absence from the later episodes of the novel is so distracting is the marked contrast with his conspicuous presence in the earlier sections. The course of his development flows more-or-less in line with the generic shifts of the narrative, so that the changes in Taji in large part, and appropriately enough, reflect the changes in Melville’s book. In the early, Typee/Omoo-esque chapters, Taji is merely an unnamed narrator. He acquires his name when he enters the mythical domain of Mardi and takes on the role of a demi-god, a shift in the narrative’s generic orientation that takes it away from the real into the realm of the romantic and allegorical. This (admittedly non-literal) change in Taji’s metaphysical constitution occurs simultaneously with a change in motivation; he becomes infatuated with the maiden Yillah, and seeks her all across Mardi after her mysterious disappearance. It would seem appropriate, and desirable, for Melville to develop Yillah as a symbol in tandem with Taji as a character in order to maintain a sense of narrative momentum and dramatic urgency. This approach, at least in part, is manifest in the later construction of Captain Ahab and Moby-Dick. By choosing to grant Mohi, Babbalanja, and Yoomy (and Media) center stage, much is lost in terms of dramatic heft, and instead the intellectual problems Melville saw manifest in his project are given primacy. To his credit, Melville tweaks the generic conventions of his novel accordingly, and presents his ruminations as a series of philosophical discussions; many passages in the second half of the book read like Socratic dialogues imbued with Melvillian rhapsody.
Of Melville’s three wise men, the one that gives the impression of possessing a life apart from the formal and personal demands of Melville’s allegory is Babbalanja, the representative philosopher. I find it quite remarkable that Melville chose him, and only him, as the character to achieve a degree of intellectual fulfillment and inner peace near the end of the quest, and I find it even more remarkable that this inner peace and fulfillment came about through an encounter with a very thinly disguised Christianity. Joining the philosophic impulse of the creative faculty with Christian love strikes me as a decision more personal than aesthetic. It becomes even more attention-grabbing when the reader recalls Babbalanja’s alter-ego Azzageddi, a manifestation of the unconscious explicitly associated with deviltry. Babbalanja’s own conception of his quest is articulated in chapter 189, when he chooses to leave the company and remain on the island of Serenia- “My voyage is ended. Not because what we sought is found; but that I now possess all which may be had of what I sought in Mardi. Here I tarry to grow wiser still…” The quest is explicitly relocated from the physical space of the world into the mind, where perhaps it belonged all along. It is also well worth noting that the remainder of the group also embrace the Mardian analogue to Christianity, but apparently not to the same end or with the same conviction as Babbalanja. Taji in particular is obviously still obsessed with Yillah, and his quest for utopia-through-Yillah has a tragic dimension that, in Melville’s hands, takes on a biblical aspect; Babbalanja makes it clear that Taji cannot reclaim Yillah since he acquired her through the commission of a sin, and Yillah is not for post-lapsarian man. Though the narrative’s seeking for utopia has an ethical component, for Melville it would seem that Yillah was also in part an idea of aesthetic perfection. The world of Mardi, in addition to being a world of flawed and sinning human beings, is also explicitly understood to be a text, and clearly a text Melville wishes to perfect. The beginning of Chapter 191 describes a scene “as if Mardi were a poem, and every island a canto,” a conception which foregrounds the aesthetic dimension in contrast to an earlier passage that likens Mardi to an encyclopedia. Melville clearly had a conflicted relationship with literature, a factor that animates all of his most ambitious works, but it is a tendency arguably at its most conspicuous in Mardi. Whether Melville ever resolved the conflict to his own satisfaction may not be clear, but there is broad agreement among readers that later works would present Melville’s obsessions in more congenial and moving forms.
As of right now, the Melville Electronic Library remains a great idea in theory rather than practice, as it still consists of little more than a set of ‘coming soon!’ notices. Still, once it gets up an running the MEL promises to be one of the most intriguing and helpful scholarly sources on the net. The key to its utility, and the source of its uniqueness, as I have indicated before, is its use of the TextLab software and its application to the works of an established, canonical author. TextLab enables readers, scholars, and students to access a writer’s revisions, in the order s/he made them, thus enabling a kind of ‘fluid text’ analysis that allows a reader to gain a sense of a text’s development through time. In many respects, Melville is the perfect author for this approach, since many of his most celebrated works appeared in different editions, or were left incomplete at his death.
The reader’s engagement with a text is a notoriously complex and mysterious process, and a number of theoretical models are available to critics for understanding it. When considering revisions, the reader is forced to confront the instability of texts, and possibly linguistic acts generally, right at their source. The process of revision is the struggle of an imagination attempting to find the right words for an abstract set of ideas and an imprecise series of events. The effort to find the desired language for a literary project constitutes a fascinating sub-textual narrative in itself on many occasions, and Melville’s studious engagement with his projects was probably marked by more struggle than most.
Another feature of MEL I find quite engaging (again, more in the potential than in the current reality) is the Gallery section. It is a corner of the website that will consist of an image gallery of Melville-related images, with the principle focus being on works of art mentioned in Melville’s texts. Moby-Dick especially drew heavily on the traditional visual arts for inspiration and imagery, and Melville’s rich symbolism was notably enhanced through his engagement with painting. This gallery allows viewers to consider a picture alongside a sampling of a Melville text that explicitly references it with some accompanying scholarly commentary that sheds light on its significance in either Melville’s work or his life. This multimedia approach to scholarship is exactly the sort of benefit brought about by information technology that I value. While there is nothing in the image gallery that is, strictly speaking, dependent on modern technology for its existence (all of the information featured could probably be printed in a book with nothing lost) but the combination of instantaneous access with the ability to rapidly update and augment the information in the gallery streamlines a scholarly process in an immensely useful way, and enables an approach at once fluid and democratic.
As of right now, I can’t say I have a theoretical program to elucidate what precisely digital projects like the MEL “do” to canonical writings. Software may reveal their fluidity and instability, but conventional research methods can do much the same. For now, my appreciation for online digital archives lies almost exclusively with their utility. They are nearly perfect tools.
To make up for the late arrival of this, my first substantial post for High Pressure Days, I will consider two topics instead of the promised one, though one will have to come a little after the other (let’s say we shoot for Friday? Yes, that should work… I hope.). Both will naturally pertain to the ongoing drama that is my first immersion into the world of the Digital Humanities. For somebody as tech-phobic as I am, this is a somewhat vexing process, but one that is already proving to be rewarding in unexpected ways.
To begin, there is the subject of the recent two-day symposium here at the George Washington University that was dedicated to the Digital Humanities in all their multifaceted glory. Running from January 24 through the 26th, with the bulk of the presentations occurring on the latter two days, the symposium illuminated a number of different ways digital and information technology was changing the field, recalibrating how literature is both taught and studied. As someone with an interest in 19th century American literature in general, and the works of Herman Melville in particular, the presentation that most interested me was the one given by Professor John Bryant of Hofstra University. Professor Bryant described a recent, and as of this post, ongoing digital project called the Herman Melville Electronic Library, an online resource dedicated to compiling the works of Herman Melville in addition to criticism and scholarly and biographical resources. This in itself would seem like a prudent, though not particularly original, idea, but the website establishes a unique function through its use of a software program called TextLab. TextLab allows readers to view different versions of a text simultaneously in order to gain a sense of the author’s writing process and approach to revision. The goal is to establish the essential “fluidity” of Melville’s works, which often were published in multiple versions (Typee appeared in both an ‘original’ version and a bowdlerized version that was published after the original version drew protests from religious leaders, and Moby-Dick had both an American and British publication that resulted in two noticeably distinct texts with different endings) or left in a fragmented and incomplete state (Billy Budd, Sailor was never properly finished or published in Melville’s lifetime, and the manuscript consists of over 400 hand-written leaves with multiple textual self-corrections and revisions). I find the idea of this resource helpful both practically and conceptually. Practically, the Melville Electronic Library will enable scholars and students to gain a better sense of Melville’s writing process and the publication history of his works. Conceptually, the Library dispels the essentially illusory sense of permanence and definitiveness that one may have when encountering the texts on the printed page. Even detailed scholarly editions of Melville’s works that feature information about multiple editions of the same story or that include alternative passages in the appendices present a ‘definitive’ or ‘standard’ version of the story that gives the reader no sense of the text’s instability, or its contingency. By being able to view multiple versions of a story, essay, poem or review side-by-side the reader can gain a better understanding of a text’s development and the many possible ways to interpret it. It reveals that Melville’s artistic engagements unfolded in time, and had no precise destination or ‘complete’ form. The essentially unsettled nature of the Melville canon can be presented with unprecedented clarity thanks to the shrewd application of digital technology.
That is the crux of my understanding of tools like the Melville Electronic Library- They ideally reveal the nature of pre-digital texts as opposed to altering them. The medium of presentation broadens and clarifies what the texts were all along.
High Pressure Days 