Twenty-First Century Melville

Abstract

Hayes, Kevin J. 2007. The Cambridge Introduction to Herman Melville. New York: Cambridge University Press. $75.00 he $22.99 sc. x + 140 pp.Kelley, Wyn. 2008. Herman Melville: An Introduction. Maiden, MA: Blackwell. $94.95 he. $34.95 sc. XV + 228pp.Stuckey, Sterling. 2009. Culture and Melville's Art: The Creative Process in Bento and New York: Oxford University Press. $27.95 he. 154 pp.Navigating Herman Melville's work in early twenty-first century increasingly implies passage from mouse to whale. At websites such as Powermoby.com, which aspires to attract students, teachers, and general readers alike, hyperlinks guide browsers not only to annotated chapters from Moby-Dick but also to myriad eruptions of in global popular culture: a teenager's crocheted Moby Dick hat; a puppet version of Moby-Dick in Erfurt, Germany; story of Moby Dick rendered in fifteen haiku. A proposed Electronic Library (MEL), conceived by scholars John Bryant and Haskell Springer, will digitize Melville's letters, journals, manuscripts and published works as well as a wide array of secondary sources. The Library, one large fluid text, still evolving, will provide more access than ever before to Text in its entirety (Bryant 2006, 565) and might well assist in bridging gulf between scholar and tyro that postmodern literary scholarship has probably exacerbated - a gulf that seems like the many cubic feet of solid head that for divides whale's eyes (Melville 1988, 330). Although three studies by Sterling Stuckey, Kevin J. Hayes, and Wyn Kelley discussed here presume different authences, accessibility of Stuckey s scholarship and suggestiveness of Hayes's and Kelley s introductions also bridge divide and contribute tellingly to readerly accessions of - and indeed to some larger fluid and evolving Melville Text.Central, in fact, to historian Stuckey s important and provocative Culture and Melville's Art is his delineation of Melville's fluidity of cultural thought and practice (5). Positing as a serious student of in book's introduction, Stuckey argues that crucial aspects of Melville's art based on his intimate knowledge of descendants of Africans in America (7). For Stuckey, both Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno largely turn on an cultural axis (18). Likely exposed in his youth to song and dance in both New York City and Albany, incorporated these elements of slave artistry into his own texts, where, in case of Moby-Dick, they function both as overt influences on narrative and as subterranean forces (8) that intensify work's complexity and value. According to Stuckey, Pinkster and dance and Ring Shout, the most influential slave dance in nineteenth-century America (33), served as particularly important aesthetic touchstones for Melville. In his demonstrations (a word he pointedly emphasizes) of how used his and American sources to forge his aesthetic, Stuckey offers a particularly cogent reading of Midnight, Forecastle chapter of Moby-Dick. This chapter, which follows Pequod crew's frantic acquiescence to Ahab's quest for vengeance on whale, is written as if it were a scene from a play and emphasizes geographical diversity of sailors, all of whom are singing in chorus. The superintendent of chapter, however, is cabin boy Pip, technically the most insignificant of Pequod's crew (Melville 1988, 411), whose tambourine playing anchors and directs singing and dancing of chapter. Pip's itself generates a Melvillean Ring Shout among sailors, despite marked insularity (32) and prejudice of some of them. That Melville's sailors attempt black dance steps (33) suggests universal appeal of dance and music (31), as African culture reaches beyond community to dazzle even those not particularly friendly towards blacks (31). …