MLA 2022—Virtual Panel for Hybrid Convention (Washington DC): Melville and the Cultures of Antiquity

Abstract

MLA 2022—Virtual Panel for Hybrid Convention (Washington DC)Melville and the Cultures of Antiquity Paul Downes, CHAIR From Bartleby, brooding “among the ruins of Carthage,” to three giant turtles surviving like “Roman Coliseums in magnificent decay,” to Billy Budd, who “showed in face that humane look of reposeful good nature which the Greek sculptor in some instances gave to his heroic strong man, Hercules,” Melville repeatedly turned to Greek and Roman art and history to analogize the people (and other animals) populating his stories and poems. But even before visiting the Levant in 1856, Melville had also demonstrated a fascination with the culture and iconography of ancient Egypt and Palestine, and he regularly drew on a rich bibliography of ancient art, mythology, and history to analogize his protagonists, inform his figurations, and lend gravitas to his poetry and fiction. Scholars have documented these allusions in great detail, but recent debates in the discipline of Classics might prompt us to revisit Melville’s relationship to ancient culture. Princeton Classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta, for example, has suggested that “the production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrow of classics” (New York Times Magazine, February 2, 2021). For Padilla and others, ancient Greece and Rome have, for too long, and in a disturbingly resurgent way in recent years, fuelled racist fantasies of white European supremacy while concealing—and providing tacit consent for— various forms of exclusionary political and cultural practice. “Melville and the Cultures of Antiquity” will consider how we might read Melville’s attachment to and treatment of the culture of antiquity in the light of such re-evaluations. Reflecting on the full range of Melville’s written work, this panel will ask if Melville’s oeuvre betrays a familiar predilection for Greco-Roman [End Page 121] (white) exemplars or if his wide-ranging allusions reveal a more idiosyncratic relationship to the ancient past. Did Melville contribute to the nineteenth-century European determination to distinguish a “western” tradition of superior civilization reaching back to the Greeks and forward to a contemporary Anglo-American elite? Or did Melville take different lessons from ancient culture, including, among other things, a keen sense of the latent violence and fragility of western political and ethical ideals? Is there anything in Melville’s use of ancient figures and motifs, in other words, that might rub against the grain of hegemonic nineteenth- or twentieth-century European classicism? “The blocks in symmetry congealed”: Melville’s poetic response to American (neo)classicism in Timoleon, Etc. Ronan Ludot-Vlasak Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Classical antiquity was often invoked to provide the citizens of the early United States with a set of stable political, philosophical, and aesthetic models—the foundation upon which the nation might fulfill its destiny. This paper explores the extent to which Melville’s classical imagination in his late poetry disrupts such dominant views and might be investigated in terms that challenge humanist approaches to Greco-Roman cultures. Instead of celebrating a fantasized cradle of Western civilization, the poet’s discovery of the formal perfection of Greek temples—what he styles a “reverence for the Archetype”—manifests itself as an experience of extreme otherness. Not only does the depiction of ancient monuments resist analogies between human subjects, the environment, and mineral artifacts, but these forms “that do [ . . . ] of Plato tell” morph into a “circumambient spell” in which the world of ideas and the shadows of the cave coalesce. The barrenness of Greek isles as well as the silence of ancient stones prompts us to apprehend the links between the American nation and the classical legacy in terms of cultural and historical discontinuity. In this respect, Melville’s poetic dealings with antiquity challenge the teleological narratives in which American citizens could claim their “Manifest Destiny” and picture themselves as the rightful heirs of ancient Greece and Rome. At the same time, the pleasure elicited by ancient artifacts unveils the gendered politics of Melville’s classical imagination. While it unsettles neoclassical representations that evacuated the sexual energies of Greco-Roman antiquity, it paradoxically reterritorializes the experience of pleasure according to androcentric and heteronormative principles. [End Page 122] “Like a sachem petrified”: Clarel in...