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Some Techniques of Melville's Perception
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In the 1930's after Melville's vessels had begun to display their ample accommodations, R. P. Blackmur wrote in somewhat hostile fashion that Melville “made only the loosest efforts to tie his sermons into his novels: he was quite content to see that his novels illustrated his sermons and was reasonably content if they did not.” In the 1950's after the ship plans were better understood (albeit some specialized new quarters—particularly nurseries, bathrooms, and bedrooms complete with one-way glass—had been added from the outside), R. W. B. Lewis opined that “Melville understood the nature of plot, plot in general, better than any one else in his generation.”
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1958
References
1 “The Craft of Herman Melville,” VQR, xiv (1938), 281; The American Adam (Chicago, 1955), p. 133.
2 While from the final point of view it is true that technique (instrument) cannot be divorced from theme (function), yet heretically I suggest that in practical criticism they always are divorced. They have to be, for the critic arbitrarily must decide upon his own starting point among all the possible starting points offered by a work in order to make an entering break in the circle. For the purpose of this article I do not handle technique for a discussion of aesthetic success or structural analysis, but am quite willing to use technique and theme as ancillary to one another.
3 See Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale (New York, 1956), esp. pp. 23–25, et passim.
4 Alfred Kazin, one of the few critics to emphasize Melville's basic naturalism, mistakenly concentrates upon the misanthropic shudder. But contrary to Kazin's contention that Melville adopted nature's rather than man's point of view, one must recognize Melville's emphasis upon brotherhood, not isolation, as a prescription for man thrown back upon himself—became of a view of nature. This is the sense of life in the midst of horror which allows Ishmael to rejoin humanity and lack of which makes Ahab villainous as well as noble. The inexplicable joy which Kazin appears to find in the loneliness of “man losing his humanity and being exclusively responsive ... to the trackless fathomless nothing that has been from the beginning ...” seems to inhibit his ability to see Ahab's villainy or to see that what Ishmael has learned is what allows him to be saved. (Kazin suggests that the only real reason for Ishmael's salvation is the necessity for a narrator.) Missing Ishmael's true stake in the game, he confuses Ahab's heroic stature with the role of the hero: Melville's sense of life disappears in a concentration upon Melville's sense of loss. In his generally perceptive discussion of Melville's naturalism, Kazin does not discover the lesson Melville learned from idealistic thought, or that Melville found a transcending dignity for humanity on naturalistic grounds. In Melville's statement about “the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort,” Kazin does not see that the endlessness and intolerableness also become nobility. See Kazin's Introduction to Moby-Dick (Boston, 19S6), pp. v–xiv.
5 Lewis (The American Adam) poses this problem centrally in bis brilliant contribution to American studies.
6 Two articles in an issue of AL, xxviii (1956), offer a discussion about the relation of perception to surface and to submerged meaning. For the stylistic implications of appearance and reality in the later 19th century generally, see Leo Marx, “The Pilot and the Passenger: Landscape Conventions in the Style of Huckleberry Finn,” pp. 129–146. Marx discusses the levels of reality that the century found beneath the surface. For a discussion of the nature of these levels as viewed by Melville, see J. A. Ward, “The Function of the Cetological Chapters in Moby-Dick,” pp. 164–183. Ward skirts close to, but never states, what I take to be the overall demonstration of his article: Melville used fact to provide a basis for a naturalistic perception that he expresses romantically, poetically, and symbolically.
7 To weave this thread into its proper place, it might be suggested that it is this that differentiates Melville's from Ahab's view of science, for Ahab replaces the cosmos with himself and thus replaces facts with his own demonized idealism.
8 My debt to Matthiessen is obvious.
9 See Charles Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago, 1953), passim.