Visionary of the World: Melville and Religion ed. by Jonathan A. Cook, Brian Yothers

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 155 work can challenge the premises of individual fields and yield productive insights that provoke desire for further exploration. Megan Lease Boston College Visionary of the World: Melville and Religion Edited by Jonathan A. Cook and Brian Yothers Northwestern University Press, 2017. vii + 296 pp. $34.95 paper. Herman Melville and religion is a crowded sub-sub-field. From the early arguments about Melville’s views of the bible and Calvinism following the 1920s Melville revival (William Braswell, Nathalia Wright, Lawrence Thompson, and T. Walter Herbert) to 1960s and 1970s studies of Melville and religions other than Christianity (Dorothee Metlitzki Finkelstein and H. Bruce Franklin), to more recent assessments of Melville as a protocomparative religionist or pluralistic religious traveler (Stan Goldman, William Potter, Jenny Franchot, and Brian Yothers), it would seem that few stones have been left unturned. Given this long and full critical history, I was surprised to find Jonathan Cook and Brian Yothers opening Visionary of the Word with a description of “the pervasive influence of religion” as “an often neglected subject in contemporary critical approaches to the writings of Herman Melville” (3). Cook and Yothers are aware of the long history of scholarship on Melville and religion, and they cite all the authors I have mentioned (and many more) in their fine introduction. They square their claim by suggesting that scholars have not yet pursued Melville’s engagement with his “intensely religious yet transitional era” with sufficient attention to religious beliefs and practices as they were held and lived by Melville’s contemporaries. Melville scholars are known for their intense interest in Melville biographical and textual minutiae (Hershel Parker notes, for instance , “On 2 March 1834, [Melville’s brother] avoided church all day” in his 2000-page biography). Cook and Yothers suggest that Melville scholars have not yet brought a similar level of detail and distinction to the religious and theological developments Melville encountered. Visionary and the Word seeks to bring a greater level of precision to the “religion” half of their Melville and Religion subject. Cook and Yothers divide Visionary and the Word’s nine essays into three sections. The essays of the first section will likely appeal more to Melville Religion & Literature 156 specialists than to those who approach Melville and religion from a more general interest; all three dive deeply into close readings of Melville’s poems . In his contribution, Cook argues that the loss of faith that Melville narrates in his long narrative poem Clarel is “more closely allied to historical developments in mid-Victorian England than to related trends in postbellum America” (23). Cook’s argument for a transatlantic reorientation of Melville’s long poem is, in the main, convincing; however, Melville scholars are more accustomed to historical smoking guns (like a NYPL request slip, a Harper Brothers purchase receipt, or a marginal notation) than the echoes, resonances, and affinities that Cook offers as evidence of British influence on Clarel. In the second chapter, Eileen McGinnis reassesses Melville’s engagement with nineteenth-century scientific challenges to faith, specifically the 1839 publication of Darwin’s Journal and the 1859 publication of Origin of the Species. McGinnis acknowledges that Melville created stock characters in Clarel to juxtapose various faith positions, but she views Melville’s stereotyping as disingenuous (90). Rather than viewing these characters as straw men in contest, McGinnis shows us that Melville creates thorny, unresolvable conversations amongst them to show literature’s potential to “bravely pursue the visible truth” (73). At the end of her essay, McGinnis invites scholars to continue the work of “look[ing] beyond the easy opposition of science and religion that Clarel so disingenuously invokes, to explore instead their convergences and productive tensions…” (90). Another fruitful line of further study will certainly be to engage more particularly with the scientific material that McGinnis shows Melville reading so closely. It remains for someone—hopefully McGinnis in a longer work—to tease out the specific geological and botanical concepts that Melville incorporated into his prose and verse. In the third essay of part one, Martin Kevorkian establishes Dante’s influence on Melville’s understanding of spiritual journey and dives deep into the weeds of Clarel and his obscure...