Books in Brief

Abstract

Books in Brief Dawn Coleman PETER RILEY Whitman, Melville, Crane, and the Labors of American Poetry: Against Vocation. Kettering: Oxford University Press, 2019. 224 pp. Against Vocation takes to task the still-influential modernist myth that a poet's vocational identity depends on his gendered, raced aloofness from the marketplace: that the true poet is a solitary genius atop Mount Parnassus, alone with his deep thoughts and rapidly filling sheets of paper, set apart from the trade-seared, toil-smeared world below. More precisely, Riley argues that early twentieth-century "classical modernism" (27)—the book's final section, on Hart Crane, points an accusing finger at T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens—advanced the lasting ideology of "vocational modernity": a capitalist-regime valorization of "the exceptional sovereign individual" (read: professionalized white male) that arises in tandem with anxiety about a burgeoning and diversifying contingent labor force (14). He argues that for too long scholars have unwittingly reinforced this ideology by regarding the extra-literary day jobs of Whitman, Melville, and Crane as regrettable distractions from the main event of their literary output. Rejecting the premise that poetry would ideally be untainted by the marketplace, Riley investigates the aesthetic ramifications of Whitman's house-flipping, Melville's custom-house inspecting, and Hart Crane's copywriting to argue that these three poets' literary writing—the "poetry" of the title is a broad canopy—shows them responding in generative ways to the stimuli associated with their embeddedness in the urban labor market. If this argument sounds like it might be an ode to day jobs or to flex work or maybe even to the gig economy, it is not. Riley manages to show that art can arise from workaday economic pursuits even as he keeps plenty of critical distance from capitalist exploitation. In fact, he would like to credit all three poets with some measure of resistance to vocational modernity, but such claims are tricky considering that both Whitman and Melville wrote before this construct fully took shape. Without leaning on an agonistic framework, Riley maintains that these poets' [End Page 103] non-alignment with vocational modernity allows their writing to "represent a nexus of production that signals the potentiality of non-capitalist worlds to come" (21). The book never quite makes good on this teasing utopian gesture but is nonetheless eminently satisfying in its analysis of an intransigent ideology and in its fine-grained close readings. The book's two Melville chapters attempt a heavy lift: challenging the longstanding critical view that Melville's career is "the ultimate parable of frustrated vocational integrity in American literary history" (72). Riley acknowledges evidence for this view, in particular the self-aggrandizing rhetoric in Melville's 1851 letter to Hawthorne about being damned by dollars, but urges us to question a narrative that from the Melville Revival on has reinforced myths of vocational modernity. Instead, he invites us to recognize how Melville throughout his career troubled notions of authorial autonomy and stood in solidarity with contingent labor. This argument is a tough sell for Melville in his most ambitious years, and the chapter on Moby-Dick proceeds with mixed results. An extended reading of "The Grand Armada" as privileging Ishmael's narratorial enmeshment and "receptive distraction" (98) over against Ahab's lyric stasis and selfcontainment feels strained, and although Melville clearly took issue with much of Emerson's "The Poet," as this section contends, his annotations of that essay indicate admiration as well (see Melville's Marginalia Online). Yet this chapter also advances a winning reading of the novel's prefatory matter, which has received surprisingly scant critical attention. Riley convincingly takes the "Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School" and the "Sub-Sub-Librarian" as "experiments … in virtual biography," or the ghosts of Melville's own "counterfactual vocational pathways" (79). He contends that Melville fashions both characters, if one can apply the term to such wispy entities, as individualized and valued collaborators, through which he engages in "the playful staging of a sovereign vocational crisis that acknowledges an often hidden interdependence of labor" (83). "Etymology," for instance, humanizes the Usher through its idiosyncratic selections and gratuitous, non-etymological translations of "whale." Who asked...