Melville as Novelist: The German Example

Abstract

MELVILLE AS NOVELIST: THE GERMAN EXAMPLE Gustaaf Van Cromphout* Criticism of Herman Melville has found few questions more baffling than that concerning his relationship to fiction. Though now internationally recognized as one of the greatest American novelists, he is at the same time thought by many not to be a novelist at all. R. P. Blackmur anticipated much current criticism when, in "The Craft of Herman Melville" (1938), he stressed Melville's "radical inability to master a technique—that of the novel—radically foreign to his sensibility." Janet Giltrow has recently argued that to regard Melville's early narratives as novels is to engage in generic misclassification since they are "composed in the expository mode of the travel genre." For Howard Mumford Jones, Moby-Dick is neither a novel nor a romance but a "journey book." According to Ann Douglas, Melville was "profoundly distrustful of fiction," and Mardi and Moby-Dick are "neither factual chronicles nor fictions . . . [but] heightened imaginative explorations of significant events and emotions." Nina Baym also believes that Melville had a quarrel with fiction and that none of his longer works "are wholly or even mainly fictive." Michael Davitt Bell, on the other hand, regards Melville's writings as the culmination of the American romance tradition , but he has serious doubts about the term "romance" being useful at all as a generic label. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker reflect a similar distrust of traditional categories when they state that Melville was "never a novelist or romancer within the ordinary definitions."1 Mid-nineteenth-century reviewers of Melville's works expressed themselves in much the same way.2 In his boldest and greatest experiments—Mardi (1849), Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre (1852), and The Confidence-Man (1857)—Melville confronted his contemporaries with problems in literary taxonomy which nothing in their English or American reading experience had prepared them to solve. The reviewers often perceived a connection, however, between Melville's problematic achievement and German models.3 This perception deserves to be taken more seriously than it has been, for most of what appears confusing or eccentric in Melville's practice is supported by German novelistic theory and by the example of the German Romantic novel. *Gustaaf Van Cromphout is a Professor of English at Northern Illinois University. He has published widely on American and German literature. 32Gustaaf Van Cromphout The German influence reached Melville largely through intermediaries . Henry A. Pochmann has examined Melville's debt to German philosophy, which reached him through Coleridge and Carlyle among others.4 More relevant to the present investigation is the spread of German literary awareness in the America of the eighteen-forties. In October, 1840, the North American Review, discussing Wolfgang Menzel 's controversial History of German Literature (1840), testified to the widespread interest in German letters: "Translations from all the distinguished authors, and imitations of every sort, already abound. A German mania prevails . . . manifesting] itself not only in poetry, but in various departments of literature and philosophy." A year later the same journal, reviewing Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern by Friedrich Schlegel, who in his earlier years had been the chief German theoretician of the novel, claimed that "the services rendered to literature " by Friedrich and his brother August Wilhelm "are known wherever literature exists. Their most important works in the department of criticism have been well translated into English and have excited universal admiration." In January, 1848, The Literary World asked itself the rhetorical question: "What man or woman of cultivation does not, at this epoch," take an interest in "the fanciful and fascinating literature of the Germans[?]" The journal praises Frederic Henry Hedge's Prose Writers of Germany (1847), a massive anthology of selections from twenty-eight authors, but adds, "many oí these are well known."5 Equally well known by the 1840s were the peculiarities of the German novel: "The Germans are more given to speculate than to narrate. Their very novels, Lafontaine's, Lamotte-Fouqué's, Jean Paul's, Tieck's, are not so much stories as they are theories of life." According to the North American Review of January, 1844, Jean Paul's "productions are all strict transcripts of his inward life. . . . His...