The Value of Herman Melville by Geoffrey Sanborn

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Value of Herman Melville by Geoffrey Sanborn Elisa Tamarkin Geoffrey Sanborn The Value of Herman Melville Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 161 pp. Geoffrey Sanborn's The Value of Herman Melville appears in "The Value of" series from Cambridge University Press, alongside Garrett Stewart's The Value of Style in Fiction, Mary Loeffelholz's The Value of Emily Dickinson, John Leonard's The Value of Milton, and other volumes. Each of these short, lively books is about literary appreciation; their evaluations want to return us to a moment before our minds were made up about the worth of these writers and topics, even before we took them for granted as worthwhile at all. Why any of them should come to our "valuative notice" is the project in each case, and not the same as the critical notice of scholars or students looking for what, in Sanborn's words, these "works 'say,' with their conceptual 'take-aways'" (33). I would not characterize his book as an exercise in whatever post-critical reading may be—it is too distinctive for that—although he does insist that too many of us fall into the "'old foible'" of "'preaching,'" arguing, or making pronouncements, as Melville describes his own weakness in a letter to Hawthorne (33). Sanborn instead wants to bring to our awareness all the "nonsemantic" revelations and disclosures we get from "the feeling of coming into contact" with Melville's works (42). He wants this book to be an apprenticeship in the energies that arise from gaining access not to any idea behind the works but to their unresolved strangeness and the creative uses we might make of it. He claims that Melville provides us with this kind of generative experience if only we can work with him and feel his resonances and "constitutive force" over time (59). He likens the openness he hopes we gain to that of Pierre, standing before the portrait of his father and "'unconsciously throwing himself open to all those ineffable hints and ambiguities, and undefined half-suggestions, which now and then people the soul's atmosphere, as thickly as in a soft, steady snow-storm, the snow-flakes people the air'" (qtd. on 36). Now, what keeps The Value of Herman Melville grounded in good sense and convincing is the wonderful way in which Sanborn shows how much this process of discovering value for ourselves is Melville's own concern. His larger point is that Melville's writing invites new kinds of perception and [End Page 89] consciousness: that in each of his major works, including Moby-Dick, Melville is interested in the moments in which our minds begin to change and we come to know things that had been insufficiently clear to us or realized. Reading Melville becomes an exercise in how "the not-yet-organized elements of potential thoughts begin to coalesce in ways that add something new to one's consciousness" (45). It is not, for Sanborn, unlike standing in front of that painting in the Spouter-Inn that takes shape the longer you look at it. The emphasis is not on what we see so much as on the process of experiencing a work and the excited perplexity of trying to make it out and finally discovering more than "immediately appears" (113). Sanborn would like for us to see at last how Melville arrests our attention and "court[s] surprise," orienting his reader toward those "fringes" of perception, as William James puts it, where the awareness of once-remote and imperceptible things "makes further thinking possible" (111). How does Sanborn reveal this process in Melville? First, he attends to long passages of Melville's writings, sampled with ingenuity and care. He is especially drawn to weird, interesting, mystifying, vivid passages that are "meant to be a stimulant to thought and feeling" (2). Sometimes he draws our attention to their motion and rhythm: the way a passage in Moby-Dick, for example, carries us along from perception to perception in a single improvisational paragraph as if "to gather up and stall—assemble and momentarily arrest—its successive terms" (13). What we get is the entirety of the effect...