Inside Narrative Research Articles

Herman Melville’s Ecological Vision and the Limits of Language

When Herman Melville began writing, publishing his first work in 1846, he joined an illustrious group of American authors defining American literature. Five years later in 1851, as he wrote what would become his best-known work, Moby-Dick, or The Whale, Melville began working to express a scientific understanding of the world beyond what language would allow. This led to Melville’s greatest writing experiment: to write beyond the limitations of language. Through his intimate relationship with the written word and a sustained effort to reproduce in language his ecological philosophy, Melville tried to mold language into an instrument of his will. He strove to represent how humans experience the world but found himself limited by language’s capacity for illustration; instead, he would have to write how humans experience the world. This “how” is evidenced in the poetics of three of Melville’s stories: Moby-Dick, “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street,” and “Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative.” In “Billy Budd, Sailor,” his final work, published posthumously, Melville successfully frees himself from the “oppressive totality of language” (Delbanco, 1993, p. 5), having evolved his writing past the need for language—something akin to what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger will later call “undergoing an experience with language” (1971, p. 57). To fully grasp the nature of this ultra-linguistic literary feat, this essay analyzes the evolution of Melville’s writing styles and poetics through the lenses of scientific, linguistic, and Heideggerian philosophy, in effect understanding Melville’s most ambitious undertaking through the discourses that came after him.

Lettere a Hawthorne by Herman Melville

Reviewed by: Lettere a Hawthorne by Herman Melville Gordon M. Poole Herman Melville Lettere a Hawthorne Giuseppe Nori, Ed. and Trans. Macerata: Liberilibri, 2019. lvi + 118 pp. Giuseppe Nori's revised edition of Melville's letters to Hawthorne from late January 1851 to December 1852 produces the original text, from Lynn Horth's critical edition of Melville's Correspondence (NNE), and facing Italian translation. It includes two letters to Hawthorne's wife, Sophia, and one to their son, Julian. It also furnishes an extensive, updated bibliography, including Italian contributions, an appendix with entries from the 1856–1857 Journal, entries from Hawthorne's English Notebooks, and recollections by Julian Hawthorne. Although most of these letters have previously been translated into Italian, notably by Gianni Celati (in a section of Bartleby lo scrivano titled Lettere di Melville 1850–1852), Nori's edition offers not only an original translation in facing-page format, but also an in-depth study through the book's copious explanatory notes. Nori's 22-page introduction reveals him to be an attentive reader and exegete of the letters, which he sees, convincingly, as documenting a critical transformation in Melville's hopes for a flourishing literature worthy of the United States and, at the same time, an emotionally charged change in his personal relationship to the older writer. Nori's translation captures the complexities of Melville's style, that mix of colloquial discourse, even slang, with wittingly overblown prose—the Goethean "flummery" Melville confesses to in his June 1, 1851 letter—often to be jocular, but other times to overwhelm Hawthorne with fulsome praise. Nori's explanatory notes to the letters (23 pages of small print) draw on a great number of biographical, bibliographical, geographical, and critical sources. But he also went the rounds of Salem, Boston, Cambridge, West Roxbury, Concord, Lenox, and other places in the Berkshires for his own research on Melville and Hawthorne. His notes will surely be of use to the casual reader, for they define words that require clarifying, including Melvillean neologisms and puns or other word-play that are lost in translation. Nori identifies literary [End Page 114] references, persons mentioned, and events alluded to. But many notes go further afield: they will be useful for Italian scholars of American literature, for Nori has plumbed scholarship not only on Melville's life and works but also on Hawthorne's. Note 49, for instance, is an exhaustive discussion of the Agatha question and the Isle of the Cross. The issue is whether, after Hawthorne rejected Melville's proposal that he write the Agatha story, Melville himself ever wrote it. Nori is critical of what he considers Hershel Parker's overconfident assertion that Melville did indeed write it and that it was The Isle of the Cross (see Hershel Parker's "Herman Melville's The Isle of the Cross: A Survey and a Chronology" American Literature, 62, 1990, 1–16; Herman Melville, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002; and Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative, Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2012). Whichever way one comes down on this question, one must appreciate the breadth and seriousness of Nori's attention to the letters and to the matters raised by them. In reviewing Nori's work, I wonder that he did not recall the social context in the biennium during which the correspondence was conducted. Boston, in particular, was the scene of militant, increasingly violent uprisings, with black and white abolitionists organizing against the restitution of escaped slaves to their Southern masters. Not that this is mentioned or even alluded to in Melville's letters, but that is just the point: certain events are conspicuous by their absence. One might wonder how Melville reacted to such events. Well, had we only his letters to Hawthorne to judge by, one might conclude that he did not. Melville biographers are not of one mind about how he felt about race. In any case, it is easy to guess why he would not have broached the subject, not only in these letters but in any public statement. His father-in-law, Judge Lemuel Shaw, was in charge of the cases in Massachusetts. He summarily rejected lawyer Richard Henry Dana's petition for habeas...

Polish History in the Wake of the Holocaust

Abstract This essay responds to the question, “Is there a history of Poland beyond the Holocaust?” It introduces an approach developed by historian Christina Sharpe and argues that this approach may contribute to a reframing of historical work on Poland. Specifically, Sharpe’s metaphor of “in the wake” is helpful in identifying how violence operates inside historical narrative, generates effects beyond that narrative, and creates openings for challenging dominant historical frameworks. Movement in this direction has already become evident in some recent scholarship on Poland and the Jewish experience in the World War II and prewar periods. This essay presents Sharpe’s approach, discusses its application to Poland, and points to work that promises hope in moving beyond entrenched political positions on Polish-Jewish relations.

The Specter of Infanticide in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor

This essay argues that in Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative, Herman Melville draws on the 19th-century reading public’s repugnance towards infanticide to both construct his narrative and inspire readers’ emotions to critique capital punishment. The connections between child murder and the execution of Billy in Billy Budd emerge out of the transatlantic literature and culture of capital punishment reform, which includes, significantly, George Eliot’s novel Adam Bede. A reading informed by the literary and cultural history of child murder reveals that Melville’s critique of sovereign power draws on the emotional dynamics of the infanticide narrative. Billy embodies elements of both the infanticidal mother and the murdered child, while Captain Vere exhibits a parental sympathy that might be associated with 19th-century sentimental reformers. Dramatizing how Vere’s personal connection with Billy ultimately supports the aims of sovereign power, Melville provides a compelling enactment of the corrosive effects of biopolitics on human relationships. Beyond that, Melville’s use of the infanticide topos ultimately likens Billy’s execution to a coolly rational infanticide by the state.

A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire by Hiram Pérez

Reviewed by: A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire by Hiram Pérez Darin Kerr A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire. By Hiram Pérez. New York: New York University Press, 2015. xii + 180 pp. $26.00 paper. Hiram Pérez's A Taste for Brown Bodies, a recent addition to the Sexual Cultures series from New York University Press, has at its heart a provocative thesis that invites further development by future scholars. In his work, Pérez draws on queer theory and critical race theory to examine the inflection(s) of gay identity in a variety of texts. Through such representative (and historicized) exemplars of masculinity as the sailor, the soldier, and the cowboy, Pérez argues for their "queer cosmopolitanism" as the basis for a gay modernity uniquely suited to deployment by the forces of American imperialism. In his lucid introduction, Pérez rightfully takes queer studies to task for its failure to sufficiently incorporate race into its critiques. The role of whiteness in relationship to an erotic politics of gay modernity provides a lever by which to destabilize naturalized and institutionalized accounts of the development of homosexual identities. Structurally, Pérez's text consists of five chapters, each a close reading carefully attuned to the complexities of the intersection(s) of sexual, racial, and political economies. Chapter 1, a close reading of Melville's novella Billy Budd, Sailor: An Inside Narrative, centrally positions nostalgia as part of that which "defines the gay cosmopolitan imagination, staging exotic miseen-scènes vital to the emergence and perpetuity of gay modernity and its collusions with U.S. empire" (25). To this end, the "brown bodies" of Pérez's title often manifest as representative(s) of an idyllic primitive state, sometimes literally "brown," sometimes only figuratively so. In this reading, even Billy's blondness serves as a stand-in for the primitivism that serves as an object of desire for gay cosmopolitanism. Understandably, this occasionally makes the complex parsing of racialized identities [End Page 328] in Perez's argument somewhat challenging, though this challenge doesn't blunt the edge of his argument. Chapter 2 focuses on the juxtaposition of James Baldwin's short story "Going to Meet the Man" with the (in)famous photos of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Here Pérez provides a compelling examination of "the relation between the homoerotics of racist violence and modern gay identity" (51). His reading of the Baldwin text convincingly argues for a triangulation of "homoerotic interracialism" as foundational to modern male identities, both heterosexual and homosexual (66). This insight provides the basis for a reading of the Abu Ghraib photos that argues their homoerotic content as indicative of the instrumentalization, rather than the marginalization, of modern gay identity. Although at nineteen pages it stands as the shortest chapter, chapter 3's close reading of the film Strawberry and Chocolate provides a clear example of the importance of critically situating works within their historical and local contexts. Indeed, Pérez argues that to fail to do so occludes an understanding of "how … local sexualities already form part of a more historically dynamic erotic circuitry" (80). Here Pérez's approach serves as an effective rejoinder to dominant critical voices that efface the local in favor of the global. Chapter 4 is perhaps the most tantalizing and the most frustrating for those interested in performance. Pérez offers an account of his experience as a panelist at 2003's Gay Shame conference at the University of Michigan. As the only invited queer panelist of color present at the conference, Pérez offered a critique of the conference's "unacknowledged centering of white gay male experience" that met with resistance from some of the conference's participants. While his account of the conference clearly centers on his own experience, and while that experience makes for some troubling reading, particularly in his relating of how "brown" bodies were performatively deployed through visual and verbal constructions related to the conference presentations, I found myself longing for a more thorough accounting of how Pérez's challenge to the conference presenters, and their resistance to that challenge, manifested physically. Despite...

Private Narratives / Public Texts: Steinbeck's Journals

Abstract Treating his journaling as a habitual tic necessary to the technology of his novel writing, rather than as a co-opted or anomalous venture, allows insights into Steinbeck's self-created authorial history—that elusive entity approaching what scholar Leigh Gilmore has, in a different connection, handily called “autobiographics.” Steinbeck wasn't explicitly embarked on a project of confessional “life writing” in these journal texts, but even so in each one he manages to fashion a revealing and dramatic (though often piecemeal and covert) inside narrative that historicizes three different eras in his creative and personal life.

Marginalised: An Insider’s View of the State, State Policies in New Zealand and Gang Formation

Following the annexation of Aotearoa/New Zealand by the British in 1840, Māori, as the Indigenous people of that country, experienced loss of sovereignty through the imposition of and application of new and transformative policies, including the law and unfamiliar legal and social codes. This paper considers the state and the influential legacy of an imposed, Settler-state social welfare and criminal justice system on Māori. An explicit, insider narrative will highlight how suppression, disconnection and abandonment, made manifest through particular and abusive state policies, has informed and constructed the life pathway of a member of a culturally and socially-submerged population, the Mongrel Mob gang.

Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative by Hershel Parker (review)

Reviewed by: Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative by Hershel Parker John Matteson HERSHEL PARKER Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012. xix + 587 pp. Book reviews, like biographies, should never be about the people who write them. However, the book under review metes out extremely harsh treatment to two American Renaissance scholars of wide reputation, Andrew Delbanco and Brenda Wineapple, with regard to whom a brief disclosure feels appropriate. Professor Delbanco was the second reader on my dissertation. Professor Wineapple was the director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography while I was there as a resident fellow. Both of them have been kind to me in my career, and I consider them my friends. I do not believe that those relationships have influenced my commentary on Parker’s book, but the reader is entitled to some candor on this point. It is likely impossible for anyone to read Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative without experiencing strong feelings. For the person with an independent knowledge of the subjects on which Parker’s massive and erudite volume touches, it is also impossible to read without profoundly mixed emotions, for it is a book that combines the highest standards of scholarship with reckless expressions of pettiness and professional rancor. Having previously given us the indispensable two-volume Herman Melville: A Biography (Hopkins), Parker now offers still more fascinating material on his inexhaustible subject. The third and final section of his book adds details and side narratives that Parker could not fit into the biography, as well as emendations based on subsequent discoveries. But in Melville Biography he also gives us a great deal of himself. The book is as much a personal memoir as a scholarly addendum to the biographer’s contributions to our knowledge of Melville. It takes us on the long and winding road of Parker’s development as a scholar, more or less beginning with a months-long struggle with tuberculosis at the age of twenty, during which the author read Shakespeare’s plays over and over again: Hamlet ten times; King John, seven. We discover that Parker’s biography of Melville had its genesis long before the author was aware that he was being led toward biography. The process began in the early 1960s, when Parker, only in his mid-to-late twenties, accepted three successive offers from [End Page 83] über-scholar Harrison Hayford: first to edit Moby-Dick as Doubloon: Essays and Extracts (1851–1970), next to co-edit the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick, and finally to become Associate General Editor of The Writings of Herman Melville for Northwestern-Newberry. Parker’s approach to scholarship is powerfully grounded in archival research and in, as he puts it, “the fact which stirs the biographer to responsible imagination” (140). Though Parker decided to write Herman Melville long after he began his association with Hayford, biography as he has practiced it has been a focused, lifelong pursuit, demanding formidable sacrifices of time and treasure. Parker is highly unusual among current biographers in that his whole energies have been devoted to telling the story of a single subject. Even Robert A. Caro, who has given nearly forty years and counting to writing the definitive Lyndon Johnson biography, warmed up with a book on Robert Moses. Parker argues correctly that the ideal biographer “should be omnivorous, omnipresent, immortal, and strong as a horse” (164). He believes as a matter of conscience that excellent scholarship derives only from work, work, and more work. The most gifted literary thinker, Parker maintains, will fail if he or she has not “year after year, soiled his or her own hands in devoted labor in the archives” (5). For Parker, however, digging in the archives is not a soiling at all, but a holy immersion. He writes, with no intended hyperbole, “There is something sacred about the search for something closer to the truth of Melville’s life” (240). Conversely, ignorance or avoidance of the historical record is nothing less than a sin: “disregarding or distorting the history of scholarship is a violation of morality” (300; his emphasis). The expectations to which Parker holds the scholar are, to say the...

The Federal Reserve Engages the World (1970-2000): An Insider's Narrative of the Transition to Managed Floating and Financial Turbulence

This paper traces the evolution of the Federal Reserve and its engagement with the global economy over the last three decades of the 20th century: 1970 to 2000. The paper examines the Federal Reserve’s role in international economic and financial policy and analysis covering four areas: the emergence and taming of the great inflation, developments in US external accounts, foreign exchange analysis and activities, and external financial crises. It concludes that during this period the US central bank emerged to become the closest the world has to a global central bank.

Revolution, Counterrevolution, and Natural Law in <i>Billy Budd, Sailor</i>

Revolution, Counterrevolution, and Natural Law in Billy Budd, Sailor Philip Loosemore (bio) Hans Morganthau [sic]: What are you? Are you a conservative? Are you a liberal? Where is your position within the contemporary possibilities? [Hannah] Arendt: I don't know. I really don't know and I've never known. And I suppose I never had any such position. You know the left think that I am a conservative, and the conservatives sometimes think I am left or I am a maverick or God knows what. And I must say I couldn't care less. I don't think that the real questions of this century will get any kind of illumination by this kind of thing. 1 Near the opening of Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), the great moral parable and political allegory left unfinished at Herman Melville's death in 1891, the naive and good-hearted merchant sailor Billy Budd, a so-called Handsome Sailor whose one "imperfection" is a liability to stutter under the stress of "sudden provocation," is pressed into service aboard the Bellipotent, a massive warship fighting against the fleet of the French Directory in the summer of 1797 under the command of the strict but upright Captain Edward Vere. Anxiety is elevated and discipline harsh aboard the ship, for it is just a few months since the mutinies of the Spithead and the Nore. Though Billy is generally very well liked in the service, for mysterious reasons he arouses antipathy in the Bellipotent's master-at-arms, John Claggart, who proceeds to "lay little traps" for Billy, including sending an afterguardsman one night to provoke him with whispers of mutiny. At length, Claggart lays before Vere a false accusation of Billy's suspicious behavior and intention to mutiny. When Vere arranges for Claggart to repeat the accusation to Billy's face, a tongue-tied Billy unintentionally kills the master-at-arms with a blow to the head that substitutes for the utterance he cannot make. Cognizant [End Page 99] of the potential for rebellion among the crew, Vere coerces his drumhead court into delivering a guilty verdict and sentence of execution. Despite everyone's compassion for the fundamentally loyal Billy Budd, the latter, exclaiming "God bless Captain Vere!" at the penultimate moment, is hanged at dawn. It would never be possible to determine once and for all whether Billy Budd, Sailor sympathizes more with the commencement and expansion of radical reform in the name of the revolutionary rights of man, or with its containment; whether the novella is finally Melville's "testament of resistance" or "testament of acceptance." 2 Much as Billy Budd himself is at once the embodiment of British loyalism (upon his "forced enlistment," he "with . . . loyalty makes no dissent") and also the exemplary figure or "jewel" of the Rights-of-Man, so the novella as a whole seems to stand on both sides of the opposition between antiradical or "old" Whig ideology and French revolutionary theory that Melville reconstructs, an opposition alluded to in the narrator's well-known reference to Edmund Burke (antiradical defense of the achievements of the Glorious Revolution) and Thomas Paine (defense of the natural rights theory of political authority): "The hardheaded Dundee owner [of the Rights-of-Man] was a staunch admirer of Thomas Paine, whose book in rejoinder to Burke's arraignment of the French Revolution had then been published for some time and had gone everywhere." 3 Melville at once sympathizes with and closely interrogates both of his most direct political intertexts. Setting the novella in the immediate aftermath of the Nore mutiny, he also draws out the implications of the British debate from the perspective of 1797 and the unleashing and harsh repression of revolutionary terror, employing the mutiny as a trope for radicalism ("the enemy's red meteor of unbridled and unbounded revolt" [BB, 54]) and the reaction as a trope for authoritarian repression ("Final suppression, however, there was" [55]). But if, in the novella, monarchical authority repeatedly wins out over popular uprising, Melville's concern is clearly with the ways in which the currents of revolution and counterrevolution, popular sovereignty and authoritarian order, the violence of radical liberty and the...

Pregnant Men: Modernism, Disability, and Biofuturity in Djuna Barnes

This essay investigates the idea of biofuturity within modernism, focusing specifically on the figure of male maternity in Djuna Barnes's Nightwood. Although the figure of the pregnant male occurs in ancient and classical literature, it surfaces significantly in modernist works—Joyce's Ulysses, Pound's Cantos, Freud's Schreber case—at a moment when biological life was being reimagined through the optic of eugenic science and comparative anatomy. The essay extends Lee Edelman's critique of reproductive futurity in No Future to suggest that dystopic biological futures were being imagined around figures such as Dr. O'Connor whose desire, as he says, to “boil some good man's potatoes and toss up a child … every nine months” reinforces his queer identity and annexes the importance of disability in many of the novel's characters. Modernist cultural representations of the pregnant male foreground the spectacle of reproduction loosed from its putative organic site in the female body and displace it elsewhere—the test tube, the surrogate womb, the male body, and, not insignificantly, the novel. This displacement is both a queering and cripping of normative attitudes toward reproductive health and the futures that such embodiment implies. It also warps traditional narrative attitudes toward biological futurity when the family romance no longer reproduces the heterosexual body. Barnes's novel is not a baroque anomaly among stream of consciousness narratives but perhaps the representative modernist novel because it offers an inside narrative of individuals interpellated within biological and racial science.

A Wayward Art: Battle-Pieces and Melville's Poetic Turn

Marrs's essay considers how Melville's Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) provides an immanent account, or inside narrative, of the author's transition from novelist to poet. Focusing on the relation between his figurations of time and the structures of his verse, Marrs argues that Melville's turn to poetry originates not in a politico-aesthetic reversal or withdrawal—as some critics have argued—but rather in a revised understanding of historical change. In his experience of the Civil War, Melville comes to perceive history as an agent of destructive repetition. This altered historical sensibility, Marrs demonstrates, not only leads him to conjoin the South's rebellion to an extended series of upheavals, from the bloody coups of ancient Rome to the peasant rebellions of medieval France, but also stimulates the very form of his poetry, in which damaged rhymes, broken meters, and twisted syntax attempt to carry the weight of the war and its chronopolitical meanings. In Battle-Pieces, the war's historical significance becomes a matter of intense formal interest, as Melville connects the mechanics of his verse to an idea of aesthetic time according to which poetry's aleatory and self-determined temporality exceeds or escapes the force of historical necessity. What Melville creates in Battle-Pieces through this fusion of politics and aesthetics is nothing less than a novel lyric form, one whose strange capaciousness has everything to do with its refractions and rearrangements of historical time.

Minding the Body: Benito Cereno and Melville’s Embodied Reading Practice

Minding the Body: Benito Cereno and Melville’s Embodied Reading Practice Matthew Rebhorn Almost every aspect of Herman Melville’s 1855 Benito Cereno contributes to the menacing atmosphere aboard the ghostly San Dominick: Atufal’s theatrical scene of contrition, the slave’s attack on a Spanish sailor, the tossing of a knot to Delano, and, perhaps most famously, Babo’s shaving of Benito Cereno in the cuddy. Crafted with such sinister effect, these events do two things simultaneously. First they reveal that there is another narrative, an “inside narrative,” to borrow a phrase from Melville’s Billy Budd, on board the San Dominick that flickers at the edge of Delano’s clouded vision. Second they offer the savvy reader distinct opportunities to unravel the gnarled lines of the narrative. As most critical studies of the story have suggested, however, our failure to unknot the narrative–to separate the inside narrative from the outside one–merely clarifies the way our reading practices, like Delano’s, are implicated in the narratives of power.1 This essay focuses on another one of these deeply meaningful moments from the narrative. Near the beginning of Benito Cereno, when Delano is invited to accompany Cereno on the upper deck, Melville relates: As during the telling of the story, Captain Delano had once or twice started at the occasional cymballing of the hatchet-polishers, wondering why such an interruption should be allowed, especially in that part of the ship, and in the ears of an invalid; and moreover, as the hatchets had anything but an attractive look, and the handlers of them still less so, it was, therefore, to tell the truth, not without some lurking reluctance, or even shrinking, it may be, that Captain Delano, with apparent complaisance, acquiesced in his host’s invitation. The more so, since with an untimely caprice of punctilio, rendered distressing by his cadaverous aspect, Don Benito, with Castilian bows, solemnly insisted upon his guest’s preceding him up the ladder leading to the elevation; where, one on each side of the last step, sat for armorial supporters and sentries two of the ominous file. Gingerly enough stepped good Captain Delano between [End Page 157] them, and in the instant of leaving them behind, like on running the gauntlet, he felt an apprehensive twitch in the calves of his legs. (58–9) This moment has not been given the critical attention the others have, one imagines, because nothing really happens here, certainly nothing so theatrical as the scenes mentioned earlier: there is no barely contained violence, no exotic ritual, no melodramatic charade. Yet this scene’s rather innocuous set of events effectively communicates a crucial aspect of Melville’s writing, even as it throws a new, revealing light on Melville’s antebellum American culture. This moment is emblematic of Delano’s espousal of rational discourse throughout the narrative to solve the mystery onboard the ship even as it reveals that the tale’s “inside narrative” and its critique of our reading practices are actually one and the same. We can witness the failure of this rational discourse in the moment I have singled out from Melville’s text in two ways–in its confusing rhetoric and, ironically, in its strange silences. Consider the following: “[M]oreover, as the hatchets had anything but an attractive look, and the handlers of them still less so, it was, therefore, to tell the truth, not without some lurking reluctance, or even shrinking, it may be, that Captain Delano, with apparent complaisance, acquiesced in his host’s invitation” (58–9). Deployed by Melville to underscore Delano’s confusing narration, the structure of this sentence is tangled and confused; the subordinate phrases obscure the main point of the clause; the commas act not as speed bumps but rather as bumpers that send the language ricocheting off along numerous tangents; and the double negative (“not without”) and qualifications (“to tell the truth” and “it may be”) blur a rather simple description of Delano’s lurking fear. Melville emphasizes here at Delano’s expense how discourse is failing to be rational: the more language we get here from our narrator, the more information we as readers expect from more...

Law's Bonds: Eros and Identification in Billy Budd

This essay offers an interpretation of Herman Melville's novella, Billy Budd, Sailor (an inside narrative), that contests and supplements canonical accounts in legal theory emphasizing the relation between law and violence. Melville's narrative illustrates the ways in which subjects are bound even to an unjust law not only by fear but also by love. The judgment against and execution of Billy Budd, a signal enactment of legal violence, require the repression of powerful erotic bonds between Captain Vere and Billy; and Billy's execution is legitimated by the reassertion of those bonds via a chain of homoerotic identifications at the moment of his death. Melville's novella shows the relation between subjects and the law to be constituted and maintained by an ambivalent fusion of violence and love.

Joyce's Argument with Himself/Or, Reading Joyce's Inside Narrative

James Joyce's argument with himself about where he should practice his art and with what literary tradition he should identify—Irish, British, or European—is represented by several of the characters and episodes in his short story “The Dead.”

On language games and statutory interpretation: an inside narrative

Journal Article On language games and statutory interpretation: an inside narrative Get access J Stark J Stark Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Statute Law Review, Volume 20, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 144–153, https://doi.org/10.1093/slr/20.2.144 Published: 01 August 1999

The Wealth of Abner Spragg: An inside Narrative

The Wealth of Abner Spragg: An inside Narrative

Essaying Antebellum Prose

Hard on the heels of volume 1 of Cambridge History of American Literature, which covered early American literature from initial European contact with native peoples through the early Republic, comes this volume, devoted to all forms of prose writing the antebellum period. Those who found the first installment of this long-awaited series a useful, though hardly complementary, collection of monographs should be more pleased with this effort, for herein the general editor assembled four sophisticated contributions that reassess the remarkable literary achievement of the period.' Keeping his introductory comments to a minimum, Bercovitch sets the agenda by reiterating he observed the first volume the series. Briefly put, he argues that, as we approach the millennium, consensus about America's literary history broken down and been replaced by dissensus, with any invocation of the former sounding rather like appeal for compromise, or nostalgia. Further, what used to be a relatively clear division between criticism and scholarship, aesthetic and historical analysis, he observes, has blurred and then subdivided over and over again (in various combinations) into a spectrum of special interests (p. 2). Thus, with American literary history now defined in the plural, each contributor was given free rein to approach relevant texts through whatever points of view seemed to him or her most productive, the whole volume integrated mainly through the ways that each scholar's authority would complement that of the others. Happily for posterity, the intellectual gamble worked well; the book's four sections are a hand difficult to beat for overview of antebellum prose. volume succeeds so well because of the strength of each contribution, for, as Bercovitch had hoped, all four scholars demonstrate themselves full control of general methodologies as well as the range of prose literature germane to them. So do we have here? Michael Davitt Bell contributes a piece on The Conditions of Literary Vocation, essentially overview of the literary marketplace or, as Bercovitch puts it, an inside narrative of literature

Where's the Rest of Me?: The Melancholy Death of Benito Cereno

GEOFFREY SANBORN Where's the Rest of Me?: The Melancholy Death of Benito Cereño * * * that, during the three days which followed, the deponent, uncertain what fate had befallen the remains of Don Alexandro, frequently asked the negro Babo where they were, and, ifstill on board, whether they were to be preserved for interment ashore, entreating him so to order it; that the negro Babo answered nothing till the fourth day, when at sunrise, the deponent coming on deck, the negro Babo showed him a skeleton, which had been substituted for the ship's proper figure-head—the image of Christopher Colon, the discoverer of the New World; that the negro Babo asked him whose skeleton that was, and whether, from its whiteness , he should not think it a white's; that, upon discovering his face, the negro Babo, coming close, said words to this effect; 'Keep faith with the blacks from here to Senegal, or you shall in spirit, as now in body, follow your leader,' pointing to the prow; * * * that the same morning the negro Babo took by succession each Spaniard forward, and asked him whose skeleton that was, and whether, from its whiteness, he should not think it a white's; that each Spaniard covered his face; that then to each the negro repeated die words in the first place said to the deponent; * * * "Benito Cereño" 'here's the rest of Don Alexandro Aranda? The horror of Babo's question—whose was the body that once surrounded these bones?—is prolonged by the reverberation of this second question , never exactly asked and never exactly answered. By forcing the Spaniards' attention to die absence ofeverything that had personalized the dead man's body, Babo invites them to begin imagining what might have become of those missing parts. That imaginative process is set in Arizona Quarterly Volume 52, Number 1, Spring 1996 Copyright © 1996 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004- 1 6 10 6oGeoffrey Sanborn motion again, diis time only in the minds of the readers of "Benito Cereño," when we hear that an Ashantee named Yau "was die man who, by Babo's command, willingly prepared the skeleton ofDon Alexandro , in a way the negroes afterwards told the deponent, but which he, so long as reason is left him, can never divulge" (irr-12). As before , Melville solicits our desire for an inside narrative, a reliable account of what happened to Aranda's body during its thtee days below decks. But as always, in diis story that is staged almost entirely in the public domains of the deck and die courtroom, he ultimately offers us nothing but uncertain, external signs: we don't know what the Africans told Cereño, and even if we did, we wouldn't be sure that they told him the truth. The interiors of the San Dominick remain as inaccessible as the interiors of Babo's head, "that hive of subtlety" diat ends the story "fixed on a pole in the Plaza," where it meets, "unabashed, the gaze of the whites" (1 16). We gaze at the evidence that might tell us where the rest of Aranda is and it gazes back at us, opaque and unchanging as the ocean that the San Dominick is dtifting into, an expanse of water so perfectly still that it seems, like a coffined corpse, to be "laid out and leaded up, its course finished, soul gone, defunct" (78). But we have found it difficult to leave it at that. Beginning with Sidney Kaplan in 1957, at least nineteen critics have inferred from this fragmentary evidence that Aranda's body was in fact consumed by his former slaves.1 Two ofthese critics, John Harmon McElroy and Barbara Baines, have devoted entire essays to the argument that an off-stage act of cannibalism is at the dark heart of this narrative. The potential meaning of such an act has been a matter ofdebate: some critics have followed Kaplan in arguing that it is part of Melville's racist evocation ofblack savagery in the story as a whole, while others have argued that cannibalism is "a generalized metaphor for the sins ofmen against each other" (McElroy...

‘Twisted relations’: Method and meaning in Britten's Billy Budd

In Herman Melville's story, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), the potentially mutinous reaction of the Bellipotent's crew to Billy's execution is quelled by a call to order:For suddenly the drum beat to quarters, which familiar sound happening at least twice every day, had upon the present occasion a signal peremptoriness in it. True martial discipline long continued superinduces in average man a sort of impulse whose operation at the official word of command much resembles in its promptitude the effect of an instinct.