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Melville's Quarrel with Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Nina Baym
Nina Baym*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana
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Abstract

Herman Melville began his literary career as the author of popular, presumably ephemeral works. He employed fiction for its entertainment value and, though he was a storyteller of genius, had no respect for the fictional mode. His view of authorship changed and his ambitions expanded over time, but his basic distrust of, and lack of interest in, fiction remained constant—may even have grown stronger—in his works. He accepted an Emersonian view of fiction as an impediment to the direct utterance of truth and found the requirements of fiction—story, character, point of view—a limitation and a distortion of the absolute expression for which he strove. Melville’s impatience with, and lack of regard for, the mode of fiction can be traced through his works from 1846 to 1857, after which he ceased to write for a large public.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 94 , Issue 5 , October 1979 , pp. 909 - 923
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1979

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References

Notes

1 Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870 (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1968), p. 208.

2 The chief sources for facts about Melville's life and the composition of his works remain Jay Leyda, The Melville Log, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, 1951); The Letters of Herman Melville, ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960); Leon Howard, Herman Melville (Berkeley. Univ. of California Press, 1951); and Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville's Reading (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1966). These have been augmented by the historical notes in the completed volumes of Harrison Hayford. Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. eds., The Writings of Herman Melville, North-western-Newberry Edition ( Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1968–), and by Hershel Parker's “Evidence for Late Insertions' in Melville's Works,” Studies in the Novel, 7 (1975). 407–24, and “Why Pierre Went Wrong.” Studies in the Novel, 8 (1976). 7–23. Additional material of pertinence appears in William H. Gilman. Melville's Early Life and Redburn (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1951); Merrell R. Davis. Melville's Mardi: A Chartless Voyage (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1952); Howard P. Vincent, The Trying-Out of Moby-Dick (Boston: Houghton, 1949), and The Tailoring of Melville's White-Jacket (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Press. 1970).

3 Hence in “Hawthorne and His Mosses” Melville refers to the profession as “the great Art of Telling the Truth,” and in Pierre the hero enters authorship partly to make money and partly out of a “burning desire to deliver what he thought to be new, or at least miserably neglected Truth to the world” (Northwestern-Newberry Ed., p. 283 ). The imperatives of much recent theoretically based criticism depart from the facts in two ways: they ignore Melville's own intentions and values with regard to his writings, and they inappropriately apply an almost Jamesian assumption about the preeminence of artistic form.

4 The fullest recent exposition of this all but universally accepted theory of Melville's later life is to be found in Edgar J. Dryden, Melville's Thematics of Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968).

5 See Dryden; Charles Feidelson. Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953); James Guetti. The Limits of Metaphor: A Study of Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1967); and Warwick Wadlington, The Confidence Game in American Literature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975). This type of study should not be confused with conventional investigations of Melville's style dealing with his literary techniques, rhetoric, use of imagery and symbolism, and so on. In this sense many studies of the latter sort can be said to be about Melville's language, including F. O. Matthies-sen's chapter in American Renaissance (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941); Milton R. Stern, The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1957); Werner Berthoff. The Example of Melville (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1962); and Richard H. Fogle, Melville's Shorter Tales (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1960).

6 Nathaniel Hawthorne, English Notebooks (1941; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1962). p. 432.

7 See Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press. 1973).

8 G. Watson Branch, ed., Melville: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 139, 142. 143, 147, 156, 161, 164–65, 185.

9 Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. 1967).

10 A man as perceptive as Hawthorne could hardly have failed to notice the irrelevance of Melville's enthusiasms to his own centers of interest, and this awareness may well have affected the degree to which he could respond to Melville's overtures of friendship. Despite some superficial praise of the works, Melville may well not have read either Twice-Told Tales or The Scarlet Letter at the time of writing “Hawthorne and His Mosses.” The letters indicate that he did, some time later, read Twice-Told Tales, but the absence of references to The Scarlet Letter suggests that he may never have read Hawthorne's masterpiece—an odd piece of behavior for a friend.

11 “Hawthorne and His Mosses” is available in numerous anthologies of Melville's work and of American literature. I cite the text provided in Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York: Norton, 1967). pp. 535–51.

12 Two problems in Emerson's formulation are his failure to distinguish between speech and writing, so that nature is sometimes God's book (a completed record) and sometimes God speaking (an ongoing process), and his failure to decide whether nature represents a compendium of all possible utterances or a collection of discrete statements. So far as I can determine, however, these very significant problems, necessary for Emerson's “philosophy” though ultimately destructive of his “theory,” do not affect Melville's use of Emerson's ideas.

13 Quotations from Emerson, unless otherwise identified, are from Nature, in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, Vol. i of The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward W. Emerson (Boston: Houghton. 1903). pp. 7–77.

14 “For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own. and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations” (Emerson, “The Poet”). Compare this idea, and the celebratory tone in which it is expressed, with the disenehanted commentary of the narrator of Pierre: “The world is forever babbling of originality; but there never yet was an original man, in the sense intended by the world; the first man himself—who according to the Rabbins was also the first author—not being an original; the only original author being God” (p. 259).

15 These ideas are not original to Emerson. Sampson Reed's Observations on the Growth of the Mind was probably Emerson's chief source for the conception of fiction here articulated, but Emerson was Melville's source.

16 In Ishmael's White World: A Phcnomenological Reading of Moby-Dick (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), Paul Brodtkorb, Jr.. concentrates on the voice of the sailor Ishmael rather than on that of the author Ishmael.

17 All quotations in this paragraph are taken from Branch, pp. 251, 253, 257, 262, 264, 268, 274, 276, 280, 283, 288, 260.

18 The view presented here is essentially different from that in Richard H. Brodhead, Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), which begins with the certainty that Moby-Dick is a novel and then studies how Melville extends the possibilities of “the novel” by transforming it (pp. 1, 134–62).

19 Although the theory of “two Moby-Dicks” no longer seems biographically defensible, the idea of “two Pierres” is gaining ground. Hershel Parker, in “Why Pierre Went Wrong” (see n. 2), cites events in Melville's life late in 1851 that had the effect of shifting his attention away from his story and toward himself and his own shaky literary situation. It is not incompatible with a theory of two Pierres, however, to see the eventual disintegration of the work as following fault lines and fissures that were in evidence from the start, and this is the line that I am following.

In talking about Pierre, as well as Melville's other fictions, I am not considering the extent to which it may be distorted by the emergence of very private, even unconscious material. Certainly Pierre has proved amenable to various types of depth-psychology approaches, as have Moby-Dick, Typee, and Redburn. Some critics even maintain that Pierre was intended as a psychological study (see, e.g., Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, “The Flawed Grandeur of Melville's Pierre,”New Perspectives on Melville [Edinburgh: University Press, 1978], pp. 162–96). But to Melville, the eruption of private material into a narrative, the possibly inescapable personal implications of a fiction, would be one more reason for devaluing the mode, since the personal dimension could be perceived only as an intolerable contextualizing of what should be universal utterance. And I would argue (taking issue with Higgins and Parker) that lack of interest in psychological portraiture was one reason for Melville's rapid disenchantment with the task he had set himself in writing Pierre.