2 - Literary Aesthetics and the Visual Arts

Summary

The Thread of Experience that runs through biographical and textual studies of Melville serves also to connect these studies with criticism and scholarship that are more explicitly aesthetic in their orientation. If the biographical critics emphasized the importance of comprehending the experiences and reading out of which Melville developed his literary art, more formally oriented critics wrestled with the methods by which Melville transmuted experience, both personal and vicarious, into enduring works of literary art. It has become a commonplace in Melville studies to bemoan the insufficient attention paid to aesthetics in discussions of Melville’s work, but the direness of the situation is belied by the incredibly rich and varied work that has been done on Melville as a consummate verbal artist and by the upsurge of work in recent decades on the relationship between Melville’s verbal artistry and the visual arts.

There are a few recurring strands in the efforts of critics to engage with Melville’s artistic qualities. First, and earliest chronologically, there is a tradition of examining Melville’s craft as a writer — his appropriation of sources, his process of writing, the genesis of each of his works, particularly of Moby-Dick. Second, there is a tradition of formalist criticism of Melville, which examines what R. P. Blackmur referred to as Melville’s tendency to “use words greatly” and what Warner Berthoff summed up in a brilliant chapter as Melville’s use of “words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters.” Third, there is an approach to Melville that seeks to take his measure among the giants of world literature. This tendency connects Melville to the great British and German Romantics of his own era and to earlier figures in British and Continental literature like Shakespeare, Milton, and Dante, who are regarded as central figures of Western culture. A fourth tendency is to find in Melville a peculiarly American aesthetic, one which does not so much connect Melville to Shakespeare, Dante, and Goethe as to make him their rival on the basis of his membership in an emerging democratic literature that could challenge the masterpieces of the Old World. A thread that runs across all of these strands is an intuition on the part of many critics that it is precisely the visual qualities of Melville’s work that most essentially constitute his artistic greatness.