Melville and Aesthetics

261 Pages·2011·3.216 MB·English

by  Samuel Otter, Geoffrey Sanborn (eds.)

Melville and Aesthetics
Melville and Aesthetics
Edited by
Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn
MELVILLE AND AESTHETICS
Copyright © Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn, 2011.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-11379-4
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
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this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
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Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
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ISBN 978-1-349-29556-2 ISBN 978-0-230-12004-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230120044
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Melville and aesthetics / edited by Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn.
p. cm.
1. Melville, Herman, 1819–1891—Criticism and interpretation.
2. Aesthetics in literature. I. Sanborn, Geoffrey. II. Otter, Samuel,
1956– III. Title.
PS2388.A35M45 2011
813(cid:2).3—dc22 2011005463
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: September 2011
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Transferred to Digital Printing in 2013
Contents
List of Abbreviations vii
Introduction: Aesthetics and Melville 1
Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn
1 Blubber: Melville’s Bad Writing 11
Alex Calder
2 Melville’s Ornamentation: On Irrelevant Beauty 33
Theo Davis
3 Melvillean Provocation and the Critical Art of Devotion 49
Andrew DuBois
4 Strange Sensations: Sex and Aesthetics in “The Counterpane” 65
Christopher Looby
5 D ead Bones and Honest Wonders: The Aesthetics of
Natural Science in Moby-Dick 85
Jennifer J. Baker
6 Pulled by the Line: Speed and Photography in Moby-Dick 103
Laura Rigal
7 Pierre’s Nominal Conversions 117
Elizabeth Duquette
8 “The Silhouette of a Content”: “Bartleby” and
American Literary Specificity 137
Nancy Ruttenburg
9 The Revolutionary Aesthetics of Israel Potter 157
Robert S. Levine
10 Theatricality, Strangeness, and the Aesthetics of Plurality in
The Confidence-Man 173
Jennifer Greiman
vi ● Contents
11 Battle Music: Melville and the Forms of War 193
Peter Coviello
12 Melville’s Song of Songs: Clarel as Aesthetic Pilgrimage 213
Ilana Pardes
Works Cited 235
Notes on Contributors 249
Index 251
Abbreviations
BB B illy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative). Ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton
M. Sealts, Jr. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962.
Cl Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Ed. Harrison Hayford,
Alma A. MacDougall, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston
and Chicago: Northwestern UP/Newberry Library, 1991.
CM The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel
Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern
UP/Newberry Library, 1984.
Corr Correspondence. Ed. Lynn Horth. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern
UP/Newberry Library, 1993.
CP C ollected Poems of Herman Melville. Ed. Howard P. Vincent. Chicago:
Hendricks House, 1947.
IP I srael Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel
Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern
UP/Newberry Library, 1982.
J Journals. Ed. Howard C. Horsford with Lynn Horth. Evanston and
Chicago: Northwestern UP/Newberry Library, 1989.
M Mardi; and a Voyage Thither. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and
G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern UP/Newberry
Library, 1970.
MD M oby-Dick; or, The Whale. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and
G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern UP/Newberry
Library, 1988.
O Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas. Ed. Harrison Hayford,
Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago:
Northwestern UP/Newberry Library, 1968.
PT The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma
A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago:
Northwestern UP/Newberry Library, 1987.
P Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and
G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern UP/Newberry
Library, 1971.
viii ● Abbreviations
PP Published Poems: Battle-Pieces, John Marr, Timoleon. Ed. Robert C. Ryan,
Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall Reising, and G. Thomas Tanselle
(Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern UP/Newberry Library, 2009).
T T ypee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and
G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern UP/Newberry
Library, 1968).
Introduction: Aesthetics and Melville
Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn
F
or the last quarter of a century, “aesthetics” has been something of a dirty
word in American literary criticism. At a time when the profession as a whole
has been moving in the direction of a greater textual and methodological
inclusiveness, aesthetics has seemed like the relic of another age, at best, and a
dangerously reactionary fetishization of dead white men’s art, at worst. “Exclusion,”
writes one critic, “is the primary function of aesthetics and the rhetoric of beauty
as these have conventionally been wielded” (Jones 2008, 218). The aesthetic is
“always on guard against things foreign,” declares another critic, “its privileging
of certain forms negatively articulated against what lies beyond the horizon of a
presumably unified self or homogenous populace” (Castronovo 2003, 169). Since
the 1980s, the effort of critics like these to “exorcize this spirit of elitist formalism,
of political aloofness, and of repressive value judgment by emphasizing the cultural
and political” has been one of the defining elements— perhaps even the defining
element— of American literary scholarship (Ickstadt 2008, 265). Aesthetics, once
the field of inquiry to which literary criticism was thought to belong, has become,
for many critics, the fallen condition from which literary criticism must struggle to
arise.
Throughout this period, however, there have been critics who have opposed
the basic premise of that argument: that “aesthetics” necessarily signifies a quasi-
religious absorption in high- cultural artifacts.1 Drawing on the work of Kant,
Schiller, Adorno, Merleau- Ponty, Arendt, and others, these critics have argued
that aesthetics should be located not in the sphere of “absolute, universal, or even
transcendent values” but in “the mixed, impure conditions characteristic of every
social practice and experience, however privileged or marginalized” (Matthews and
McWhirter 2003, xv). By defining aesthetics as the “sensuous consideration of what
is indeterminable in things” (Seel 2004, 16), these critics make it possible to conceive
of aesthetics not as “a monumentalizing of the self” but as “a renewable retreat from
the seriousness of stable identities and settled being” (Bersani and Dutoit 1993, 9).
2 ● Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn
They make it possible, moreover, to conceive of aesthetics as the basis of a radically
democratic politics. In Aesthetic Democracy, for instance, Thomas Docherty claims
that “it is in art and in aesthetics that we find a privileged site or a paradigm of the
very potentiality of selfhood that establishes [the] democratic condition” (Docherty
2006, xviii). More famously, in The Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancière declares
that “man is a political animal because he is a literary animal who lets himself
be diverted from his ‘natural’ purpose by the power of words,” by a “literarity”
that “overflows the institution of literature and leads its products astray” (Rancière
2004, 39). Far from affirming settled judgments, critics like Docherty and Rancière
emphasize the unsettlingness of aesthetic experience: its involuntariness, its unend-
ingness, its lack of a determinate origin. Far from consolidating the power of the
elite, moreover, they return the process of political subjectification to the swim of
time, opening up the possibility of discovering in that process an “aesthetic anticipa-
tion of the future,” an “invention of sensible forms and material structures for a life
to come” (Rancière 2004, 40, 29).
It is hard to say how much of an effect this counter-a rgument has had on
the understanding of aesthetics in American literary criticism; so far, most of the
scholars who have articulated it have been Europeans, philosophers, or both. In
the last few years, however, a small but significant number of literary critics in
the American academy— specialists in romanticism and modernism, for the most
part— have begun to contribute to its development, identifying aesthetics not
with exclusion but with openness, not with isolation but with a richly disputatious
sociality, and not with transcendence but with the unfolding of an immanent poten-
tial.2 In The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750–1815, for instance,
David Marshall breaks with the conception of aesthetics as “the professional, disin-
terested, isolated contemplation and evaluation of the museum- quality work of art”
in order to focus on “the pervasive presence of an aesthetic perspective in everyday
life” (Marshall 2005, 6, 13). Similarly, in Ashes Taken for Fire: Aesthetic Modernism
and the Critique of Identity, Kevin Bell asserts that “aesthetic investigations undo
the essential logic of cultural identity,” taking us not on a “flight from reality
into formalistic ephemerality” but on a path into the thicket of “our own internal
enigma” (Bell 2007, 1, 5, 40).3 Such arguments have made it imaginable, at the very
least, that discussions of aesthetics in American literary criticism will eventually
be located on a new axis, one that plots the relationship between ideological and
phenomenological approaches to the subject.
In order for that to happen, however, the phenomenological approach will
have to become even more phenomenological. One of the unfortunate effects of
the polemical environment in which this approach has been articulated is that its
defenders rarely venture beyond the rhetorically powerful tradition of philosophical
aesthetics. As Eric Rothstein observes in a review of one such work, Alan Singer’s
The Aesthetics of Reason, although Singer’s book “praises ‘the aesthetic’ for its partic-
ularity, it is itself Platonic,” insofar as it devotes itself to abstract thought, presents its
readings as illustrations of its thesis, and bases its politics on an idealization of “that
rarefied, intermittent creature, the Close Reader” (Rothstein 2005, 143–44). Part of
the reason for these paradoxically generalized arguments on behalf of particularity