Melvilleans!!!! (with a nod to the recent punctuation panel at the Twelfth International Melville Conference, "Melville's Origins")

Abstract

Melvilleans!!!!(with a nod to the recent punctuation panel at the Twelfth International Melville Conference, "Melville's Origins") Ralph James Savarese Click for larger view View full resolution Ralph Savarese. Photo courtesy of Ralph Savarese. My first International Melville Conference took place in Szczecin, Poland. My next, in Rome. The ones after that in Washington, DC, London, and, most recently, New York City. Gathering to talk about Melville in an international context began and ended, you might say, on a ship: [End Page 169] the Dar Mlodziezy (or Gift of Youth) in Szczecin and the Wavertree in Manhattan. There will be other conferences, to be sure, and perhaps other ships, but I like the symmetry of these nautical bookends. I became acquainted with the Melville Society in 2003 when I won the Hennig Cohen Prize and received a beautiful letter about my essay, "Nervous Wrecks and Ginger-Nuts: Bartleby at a Standstill," from the late Jill Barnum. At the MLA gathering that year, I not only met some first-rate scholars but I also discovered an academic home, which I sorely needed. From that day forward, I found the luminaries of Melville criticism—John Bryant, Wyn Kelley, Samuel Otter, Christopher Sten, Mary K Bercaw Edwards, Timothy Marr, Robert K. Wallace, Elizabeth Schultz, to name a few—approachable, kind, and supportive. To me, the Society and its conferences have always been about the people I've met or reconnected with. For example, in Szczecin, I encountered a grown-up Paweł Jędrzejko, a former student of mine at Adam Mickiewicz University in the early 1990s who had become a professor and was running the conference. In Rome, I met Pilar Martínez Benedí, a graduate student at the University of Sapienza who would later be my collaborator in the field of cognitive approaches to literature. We presented a paper together on Ahab and mirror-touch synesthesia at the "Melville's Origins" conference. She also presented a paper, a wonderful one, on "Polynesian Soundscapes." In New York City, I met the French contingent of Melville scholars: Edouard Marsoin, Ronan Ludot-Vlasak, Cécile Roudeau, and Anne-Claire Le Reste. The first three presented a terrific panel on "Melville's Textual Veerings"; the fourth delivered a paper on "mildness" in Melville's works. I was astonished to learn just how many times—and just how oddly—Melville uses the adjectival or adverbial form of that word. Our French colleagues will be hosting the next International Melville Conference in Paris in 2021. Based on the dancing skills of Eduoard and Ronan—one night a bunch of us ended up at a Soho bar—I would say that we are most certainly in good hands (or at least feet)! In New York City, I also met Peter Balaam who, like me, teaches at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. He was on a panel called "Ecocritical Approaches" with Richard J. King, Steven Fragano, and David Haven Blake (with whom I taught high school English thirty years ago and who subsequently served as an usher at my wedding). The panel was superb, with each paper demonstrating Melville's awareness of the threat that humans pose to the environment. Like everything else in the author's work, however, such awareness comes wrapped in ambiguity and imaginative invention. Peter's paper really struck me. It adopted a presentist approach, like a number of papers at the conference. (I'm thinking of Rodrigo Lazo's keynote [End Page 170] "Israel Potter Deported" and the excellent panel on "National Origins and Immigration" with Kohei Furuya, Robert Levine, and Kathryn Mudgett). Titled "Melville: Rumors of the Anthropocene," the paper began by ingeniously yoking "the famous image of Earth called the Blue Marble," which was taken by astronauts in 1972, to the image of the lawyer's chambers in "Bartleby, the Scrivener." "One is celebrated for having presented to public consciousness the idea of Earth as an integrated whole, a system," Peter said. "But the other is a world as well." Then the paper asked a series of probing questions: "Is there a way of thinking about Melville, about literature, about meaning-making in this new era named for human...