Der Grundgedanke Schopenhauers bei Melville. Entwicklung und Dynamik der ontologisch-metaphysischen und epistemologischen Thematik. [Schopenhauer's Fundamental Idea in Melville. Development and Dynamics of Ontological-Metaphysical and Epistemological Themes.] (review)

Abstract

R E V I E W S jumping off from Browne to wander in his own more desert places. Grey’s final brief chapter, in part previously published in Milton Quarterly, deals with Melville’s annotations of his copies of Milton’s poetry. Melville appears to see in Samson Agonistes “a tragedy of a God so inscrutable to his followers that they cannot distinguish inspiration from delusion, paternal chastisement from abandonment and betrayal” (217). Melville’s Milton, like that of the Romantics, is inclined, in Andrew Marvell’s phrase, to “ruine the sacred truths,” although he falls short of “the English Romantic poets’ angered certainty of divine sadism” (221). Clearly, Melville’sMilton points in the direction of Pierre, where the key question is “how can a man get a Voice out of Silence”when silence is “the only Voice of our God” (NNPierre 208, 204). Seventeenth-century influences after Moby-Dick part company with Browne’s genial Latitudinarianism to take on a wormwood taste. It is at this point that I want to revisit Melville’sdebt to Montaigne and to that greatest of skeptical mental travelers,Jonathan Swift. Bryan C . Short Northern Arizona University Der Grundgedanke Schopenhauers bei Melville. Entwicklung und Dynamik der ontologisch-metaphysischenund epistemologischen Thematik. [Schopenhauerk Fundamental Idea in Melville. Development and Dynamics o f Ontological-Metaphysical and Epistemological Themes.] American Studies -A Monograph Series, 76 KARINSPRANZEL Heidelberg:Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1998, viii, 402 pages. n the New York Critic of 3 December 1892, an unsigned review of Arthur Stedman’snew edition of Typee ends with the words: “Mr.Arthur Stedman furnishes a welcome biographical and critical introduction...,and gives us interesting personal glimpses of the recluse-author who latterly abandoned himself to Schopenhauer and philosophy” (Melville: The Critical Heritage 435). Melville’s metaphysical quests now have scholarship keenly following in their wake, and references to Schopenhauer are now more serious in tone, but, for the most part, no more enlightening, than the 1892 comment. Melville’s “great interest in Schopenhauer,”or the “remarkableaffinity”between them is noted usually only in passing. Laurie Robertson-Lorant even speculates that “Melvillemust have been struck by the uncanny parallels between their lives” (Melville: A Biography 605). Studies that compare Melville and Schopenhauer 1 2 4 L E V I A T H A N R E V I E W S in some detail do so only in limited contexts. The tendency in recent works on Melville’s famous questioning of the nature of knowing and of being has been to focus upon purely epistemological aspects, to the neglect of the metaphysical , which is usually characterized negatively as “the ineffable,” “blankness,” “emptiness.” The self-referential qualities of Melville’snarratives are read as postmodernist features, and Melville’s novels as metafictions lacking all reference to an outside world. Karin Spranzel takes issue with such interpretations, arguing that they remove Melville from his own historical context and ignore the premises of his thinking. Whether or exactly when Melville read Schopenhauer is not an important question for Spranzel, for her book is not a study of influence or reception . Der Grundgedanke Schopenhauers bei Melville offers what has been missing in Melville scholarship until now: a literary interpretation exploring the development of epistemological as well as ontological-metaphysical themes in Melville’sworks against the background of Schopenhauer’scomplete philosophy . Schopenhauer’s“Grundgedanke,” his “fundamental idea” of the world as blind, irrational will, and the world as representation, in which will manifests itself, is the central interpretive instrument in discussions of five works, MobyDick , Pierre, Silly Budd, “Benito Cereno,” and The Confidence-Man. Two introductory chapters include a review of relevant Melville criticism, and a summary of Schopenhauerb philosophy, particularly of his major work, The World as Will and Representation, which Thomas Mann once described as a “novel about the mind (“Geistesroman”).The result is a thorough demonstration of a philosophical affinity so remarkable that Melville, in the unfolding of his own two-world theory of reality, even “duplicates”a Schopenhauerian inconsistency . As Spranzel shows in her summary (22-281, Schopenhauer begins with an analysis of the world as representation, the entire world as object in reciprocal (not causal) relation to a subject, the world that...