Melville: His World and Work (review)

Abstract

R E V I E W ANDREW DELBANCO Melville: His World and Work New York: Random House, 2005. I n his new critical biography of Melville, Andrew Delbanco has accomplished something many literary critics these days wish they could do. Without condescending to his audience or freighting his arguments with the trappings of the academy, yet incorporating recent scholarship, he has written a book about literary value for a wider public. More specifically, he has written a learned, passionate book about why Melville matters: to him, to readers over the past century, and now. Delbanco has some company. Melville: His World and Work resembles two of the best introductions to Melville, the products of another time when literary critics hoped to address a broad reading public: Newton Arvin’s Herman Melville (1950) and Warner Berthoff’s The Example of Melville (1962). Like Arvin, Delbanco tells the story of Melville’s life through his works, with an interest in the unconscious and sexuality. Like Berthoff, Delbanco is fascinated by the textures of Melville’s thought as revealed through his characteristic verbal choices. (Berthoff’s final chapter, “Melville’s Example,” should be required reading for all those writing on Melville, whatever their persuasions.) All three critics are steeped in Melville, sensitive to his distinctive literary achievements, and confident about the value of appreciating those achievements. The concerns of many American literary critics have shifted beyond the individual author and the “literary,” and one senses that Delbanco writes against such changes. In Melville: His World and Work, he seeks to restore a moribund tradition (in Melville studies, at least, there has been no such book for several decades) and to reconnect with its audience. His book proceeds from the hope that, while many literary critics and academic publishers may have left single authors and questions of literary value behind, readers outside the academy have not. With his own incisive accounts of Melville’s prose, Delbanco deepens the tradition of Arvin and Berthoff. He adds an emphasis on historical and political context, and he argues for the importance to Melville’s creative development of his sensory encounters with the ocean and the city, especially New York City. For Delbanco, the ocean and the city—complements rather than opposites—awakened Melville’s senses and altered his prose. In his C 2007 The Authors Journal compilation C 2007 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 69 R E V I E W books, Melville conveyed his experience of contact with the world, an exposure that “shocked him equally with moments of desire and dread” (58). Delbanco’s own style is so clear that readers may underestimate his intricate weave of literary and historical scholarship, biography, and textual analysis (fiction, poetry, letters, marginalia). This weave is one of the achievements of the book, tied to his sense of audience. Delbanco communicates the discoveries and insights of the academy to readers who are outside the profession; he seeks to make that knowledge accessible and important to such readers. For Delbanco, Melville matters because, on the levels of sentence, character , plot, and concern, he is, as Leslie Fielder put it in 1952, “our truest contemporary” (xiv). In his introduction, and his witty opening riff on the “Extracts” section of Moby-Dick (in which he includes quotations from Ray Bradbury, Edward W. Said, former national security advisor Richard A. Clarke, Mad Magazine, and the HBO television series “The Sopranos”), Delbanco suggests the ubiquity of Melville in United States elite and popular culture. During the course of his arguments, he highlights the uncanny reflective properties of Moby-Dick and Billy Budd. He outlines the ways in which Ahab has functioned as “a prophetic mirror in which every generation of new readers has seen reflected the political demagogues of its own times” (165). He shows how the protagonists of Billy Budd have prompted debates about authority and resistance among legal scholars and cultural critics, extending over the second half of the twentieth century. Arguing against historicist desires that seek to pin Melville to specific positions, then or...