A Companion to Herman Melville (review)

Abstract

R E V I E W WYN KELLEY, ED. A Companion to Herman Melville Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Cloth $179. 582 pp. I n one hilarious moment in the otherwise bleak tale of Bartleby, the exasperated lawyer proposes to his taciturn scrivener: “How then would going as a companion to Europe, to entertain some young gentleman with your conversation,—how would that suit you?” (NN The Piazza Tales 41). Blackwell’s Companion to Herman Melville is a much more promising preference than such a miserable match. Melville himself modeled a more convivial intellectual companionship when he crossed the Atlantic in 1849 with Professor of Philology George Adler “‘talking of Fixed Fate, Free-Will, foreknowledge absolute’ &c.,” and when continuing his “ontological heroics” with Nathaniel Hawthorne as they met together for the last time on a dune near Liverpool “to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken” (NN Journals 4; NN Correspondence 196; NN Journals 628). Editor Wyn Kelley celebrates this more “expansive, inclusive, and exuberant” (xxiv) embodiment of literary companionship that Melville himself favored in his more voluble and less ironic modes. The thirty-five essays that comprise the Companion represent a deep and extended conversation that John Bryant rightly claims is “itself a conference on contemporary thought on Melville.”1 The Blackwell Companion expands, updates, and advances the work of several other useful companions to the life and work of Herman Melville published over the past twenty-five years, and is the broadest and most substantial encapsulation of approaches to understanding Melville’s life and career since A Companion to Melville Studies that Bryant edited for Greenwood Press in 1986.2 Kelley, Senior Lecturer at MIT, has been an indefatigable contributor to Melville Studies, and, among many other services, has been Associate Editor of the Melville Society since the publication of her fine book Melville’s City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York in 1996. Her efforts C 2009 The Authors Journal compilation C 2009 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 John Bryant, “Melville Cosmopolite,” Leviathan 11:1 (March 2009), 120. 2 Giles Gunn, ed., A Historical Guide to Herman Melville (Oxford 2005); Robert S. Levine, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville (Cambridge 1998); John Bryant, ed., A Companion to Melville Studies (Greenwood 1986). Kelley has also published Herman Melville: An Introduction (Blackwell 2008). 106 L E V I A T H A N R E V I E W here have generated a symposium of free-lancing critics in a large and revealing volume that delivers on its promise as a “model of capacious appraisal” that explores the diversity of Melville’s “concerns, sources, and significances” (xxv). The contributions from a diversity of featured scholars range from distillations of larger book projects and long-term passions of career Melvilleans to younger scholars demonstrating innovative new angles into the social significances of his art. The scope of the essays also varies widely from broad-ranging readings of Melville’s entire career and reputation, to the exposure of new contextual dimensions and thematic issues for making sense of Melville, to in-depth analyses of one of his books or a phase or genre of his writings. A thorough perusal of the Companion provides such a powerful and in-depth assessment of the vitality, importance, and continuing complexity of Herman Melville in the new millennium that it behooves readers to become bosom friends with it. In the Companion’s concluding essay John Bryant provocatively asserts that Melville’s work and life “exists only in the form of words” (555). These include not only the printed words of the various editions of his literature but also the revisionary process of “wording,” by which he means the full process of literary labor and thought that produced different versions of any edited text. Bryant’s own insightful contribution reveals new motives and meanings for his writing by focusing on the sometimes invisible processes of rewriting that informed changes made to Melville’s own works. The larger implications of this approach to the “Melville Text” powerfully dramatizes the dynamic accomplishment of Kelley’s Companion in charting the evolving critical and cultural...