All Astir Mary K. Bercaw Edwards The title of this column, “All Astir,” refers to what is going on in the Melville world. As I write this, however, not much is astir. The whole world is shuttered because of COVID-19. Conferences, dramatic productions, and research have been cancelled. Most American universities have switched to online classes for the rest of the spring semester. Yet the beginning of the year was not so inauspicious. The American Repertory Theater mounted a “World Premiere Musical Moby-Dick,” written and composed by Dave Malloy, at the Loeb Drama Center in Boston that ran December 3, 2019, through January 12, 2020. Everything about the production was impressive, including its length of 3 hours and 25 minutes. The tickets were sold-out long before most Melville scholars (including this writer) had a chance to buy one. Andrea Shea of WBUR called the show, “Crude, Hilarious and Deep” (December 11, 2019). “In the re-imagining,” she notes, “Malloy and director Rachel Chavkin set out to emulate the sprawling form of ‘Moby-Dick.’” Carolyn Clay, also of WBUR, calls the musical “as passionately and quirkily unwieldy as the novel” (December 13, 2019). Although he begins his review, “Call me Exhausted” after “205 riveting, infuriating, audacious minutes,” David Gordon goes on to write that the musical is “all unapologetically Malloy, encompassing intelligent lyrics, soaring melodies, and polyrhythmic sounds used to mirror the communication style of whales. There’s no theater composer writing today whose work is as thrilling to me as his” (“Dave Malloy’s Moby-Dick Musical Is a Whale of a Time,” December 31, 2019, <https://www.theatermania.com/boston-theater/reviews/moby-dick_90373.html>). The musical, writes Jed Gottlieb of the Boston Herald, “aims to put America and its struggles on the Pequod with Ishmael, Queequeg and mad Captain Ahab. The piece turns over issues the so-called New World has wrestled with in the 170 years since Melville wrote the novel” (“ART reimagines ‘Moby-Dick’ as musical party with a message,” December 5, 2019). Don Aucoin of the Boston Globe, brings the musical back to Melville, calling it “an ambitiously conceived and superbly executed musical, if occasionally self-indulgent,” then adds, “Heaven knows what Melville—an onstage bust of whom silently observes the proceedings—would make of this creation” (“A captivating ‘Moby-Dick’ that ripples through time,” December 12, 2019). [End Page 105] Jennifer Baker, who directed the Twelfth International Melville Society Conference in New York last June (2019), was fortunate enough to see the production. She writes, “I thought it did a marvelous job of ‘reckoning’ with the book (it is subtitled a ‘musical reckoning’), particularly the philosophical and non-narrative chapters. I was also impressed by how much of the language is woven into the dialogue and songs. The writer obviously knew the book well.” Natasha Hurley won the Hennig Cohen Prize for “Acquired Queerness: The Sexual Life and Afterlife of Typee.” The Cohen Prize Committee writes: The Melville Society is pleased to announce that this year’s Hennig Cohen Prize for the year’s best chapter or essay on Herman Melville goes to Natasha Hurley for “Acquired Queerness: The Sexual Life and Afterlife of Typee,” chapter 1 of her monograph Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Hurley’s fresh and methodologically innovative analysis situates Typee’s publication and circulation as a paradigmatic instance of “acquired queerness”—a phenomenon that occurs when sexual details accumulated in the text interact with shifting dynamics of circulation and reception across time. Hurley argues that, just as Typee accumulates missionaries’ accounts of sexual perversion in the South Pacific, the novel’s own descriptions of queer attachments between men become recirculated in later writings—such as Charles Warren Stoddard’s South Sea Idyls—that helped produce the conditions of perceiving queerness. Blending formalist analysis with queer theory and reception history, “Acquired Queerness” illuminates “how it is that queerness becomes legible through the proliferations of sexual language that take place when . . . social groups and writers cohere through acts of reading texts; when one author cites another in an effort to produce a new frame of reference through a consolidation of...
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Nov 4, 2024
Anna Tee 
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