To the Expanding Community of Melville Readers

Abstract

To the Expanding Community of Melville Readers Maki Sadahiro Following John Bryant’s reading of passages from his Melville biography and the lively responses and interactions of the Melvilleans in attendance, the exhibition hall had mostly emptied out. Bryant’s voice, passionately recreating and reliving Melville’s life, had seemed to fill the space, and Melville’s energy was in the air, magnified by the artworks inspired by Click for larger view View full resolution Maki Sadahiro. Photo courtesy of Maki Sadahiro. [End Page 95] and responding to his literary works. Enshrined at the center of the exhibition room was Jos Sances’s 14-foot x 51-foot scratchboard drawing mural Or, The Whale, inspired by Moby-Dick and C. L. R. James’s interpretation of the novel. Peter Martin’s Call Me Ahab series of black-and-white photographs taken with an iPhone camera portrayed Captain Ahab as a sexy, nude young man with a harpoon, casting his melancholy eye on the viewer. Ishmael was also there with his face hidden behind a whale’s skull mask. Embracing him was Queequeg (Peter Martin & David Rosenthal, Altered Visions). On the other side of the room, Matthew Cumbie and Tom Truss’s ReWritten, in which Melville’s writing of Mobyo-Dick is contextualized in the author’s affectionate interactions with Hawthorne, was being broadcast. I attended the exhibition with a fellow Melvillean from Korea, Misook Lee, and could not help feeling haunted by the artistic renderings of Melville’s spirit featured at the event. I watched and recorded Lee’s dance performances, which both responded to and interacted with the artworks at the exhibition. At first I was mostly an observer, standing still to capture the performance in the frame of my iPhone screen, but as I followed Lee moving in front of the whale mural, from its head to tail, I gradually realized that my own body was beginning to move as well, as if we were dancing collaboratively. It is not an overstatement to say that it was simultaneously a transcorporeal experience and a transtemporal one because our dancing traced Sances’s historical vignettes of US capitalism, which were depicted within the space of the whale’s body. The whale motivated us to recapture history—from the massacre of the Pequot Indians to mining, the Civil Rights Movement, and ecological destruction such as water pollution and climate change—and made us ponder all the associated violence, injury, and suffering. While recording the dance, I immersed myself in “Melville’s Energies,” the aptly evoked title of the Thirteenth International Melville Society Conference in Paris. At this conference in Paris, I felt more Melville energy and saw his works generate more new thought and artworks than at any Melville conference I had participated in since the one held in Jerusalem in 2009. I arrived in Paris ready to read a paper on Benjamin Britten’s operatic adaptation of Melville’s Billy Budd and Melville’s attitude toward “postcolonial” American literature, which inspired the opera production team. That team included Britten, E. M. Forster, and William Plomer, who together created a “British” opera from within the strong influence of continental music traditions. The transhistorical, transnational, and transcorporeal relationships between scholars and artists at the exhibition impressed me deeply and motivated me to look further into the diverse and multilayered interpretive community of Melville. [End Page 96] Click for larger view View full resolution Matthew Cumbie and Tom Truss perform a scene from ReWritten during the “ReWritten: Exploring Melville Through Dance, Performance, and Experiments in Pedagogy” session, June 29, 2022. Photo credit Alan Van Brackel. For me, a decisive culmination point at the conference, in which an organic interpretive community had taken shape, occurred during the session “ReWritten: Exploring Melville through Dance, Performance, and Experiments in Pedagogy,” which explored the aesthetics manifested through bodies in motion. The panel consisted of Brian Yothers, a Melville scholar, Katherine Stubbs, a Hawthorne scholar, and dance professionals Matthew Cumbie and Tom Truss, who examined Melville’s engagement with the dancing body and the process of translating literary texts into somatic performances. Yothers traced Melville’s interest in dance throughout his career, from Typee to Moby-Dick...