No Life You Have Known”

Mid-nineteenth century evaluations of Herman Melville's work share a common attention to what many reviewers—and it can seem like all of them—called the “extravagance” of his writing and his imagination. Critics remarked on his general “love of antic and extravagant speculation” (O’Brien 389) and found that his imagination had a “tendency to wildness and metaphysical extravagance” (Hawthorne and Lemmon 208). In their estimation the “extravagant” Mardi featured “incredibly extravagant disguises” (“Trio” 462) and contained “a world of extravagant phantoms and allegorical shades” (Chasles 262), while Redburn was notable for “episodic extravaganzas” (“Sir Nathaniel” 453). “Unlicensed extravagance” (454) characterized even White-Jacket; and “the extravagant treatment” (454) given to whaling in Moby-Dick stood in for the novel's “eccentric and monstrously extravagant” nature (“Trio” 463), containing as it did “reckless, inconceivable extravagancies” (“Trio” 463) in addition to “purposeless extravagance” (A.B.R. 364). These surpassed the only “passable extravagancies” of his earlier works (“Book Notices” 93). The critical account offered above was assembled from fragments of criticism of the novels of Melville's mid-career; readers of Pierre will hear in it the echo of Mary Glendinning's equally insistent—and equally regulatory—catalogue of her son's qualities: “A noble boy, and docile... I thank heaven I sent him not to college. A noble boy, and docile. A fine, proud, loving, docile, vigorous boy... . His little wife, that is to be, will not estrange him from me; for she too is docile,—beautiful, and reverential, and most docile... . How glad am I that Pierre loves her so... the fine, proud, loving, docile, vigorous boy!” (NN Pierre 19-20). In the cases of both Melville's contemporary critics and Mary Glendinning, the unstinting replication of the descriptor reveals less a judgment of some intrinsic quality in Melville (or Pierre) than a substitution of linguistic performativity for subtlety of critical acumen. The repetitions indicate that the speech act of labeling Melville's prose is, in fact, more desirable than the critical act of describing it. The lack of synonyms for “extravagant” and “docile” suggests both the critics’ and Mary Glendinning's tautological refusal to recognize other possibilities, other governing structures at work in Melville's career. In the anxious repetitions uttered on Melville's behalf, we can sense a desire less to will the term to be appropriate than to arrest any slippage of meaning, to stabilize or to familiarize Melville's writerly character through reiteration, just as Mary Glendinning's reiteration strives to insist upon the docility it describes. The word “extravagance,” signifying a mode of excess to avoid, has been on many tongues since the economic downturn of 2008. Used this way, extravagance refers primarily to something that exceeds the “bounds of economy or necessity in expenditure,” something that is wasteful or excessive or unnecessarily elaborate (OED). Yet Melville's critics were using the word in its earlier sense—one still economic, but tied more explicitly to an economy of limits. The primary definition of extravagant from the seventeenth until the mid-nineteenth centuries was “to wander, stray outside limits; to go beyond bounds; to exceed what is proper or reasonable”; to be irregular. Whereas a lively imagination could certainly be a desired quality in an author, Melville's extravagance was presumed to wander beyond the comfort of a boundary. And aside from his transgressions of taste and propriety, the limits that Melville was judged to have exceeded were formal: not just the parameters of narrative form, but those of imagination, as well. He was thought to possess what William Dean Howells called (in a review of Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War) “the negative virtues of originality,” to such a degree that Battle-Pieces “not only reminds you of no poetry you have read, but of no life you have known” (Howells 252). Melville the outsider, the outlier, the man out of time: scholars have embraced this view precisely because of the peculiar extravagance of both his literary vision and the rhetoric of its contemporary reception.1 In crafting such an image, critics have turned to the moments in Melville's correspondence in which he gives voice so acidly to the stresses of his position in the literary marketplace, especially in the presumptions, taxonomies, and forced classifications of its genres. Yet rather than categorize Melville's work as resisting the generic expectations of the day, I read his novels as exploring what happens when the expectations of a literary genre are stretched to their farthest point—yet not violated. What Melville found most provoking was the market's judgment that his novels failed because of incoherence or inaptitude. Rather than straying outside the precincts of fiction's formal expectations, Melville's real extravagance lies in his turn to a structural innovation that tests the elasticity of possibility within a given genre. Take Pierre. A convention of the mid-century sentimental novel is that the heroine ultimately marries a man who had figured in her early life as a brother, father, or cousin.2 If we approach Pierre as Melville's attempt to try the outer limits of the genre, then Pierre Glendinning's relationships with his half-sister Isabel, mother, and cousin Glen Stanly take the logic of the sentimental novel to its most literal extreme: they must be incestuous. Not an attack on the form of the sentimental novel, Pierre instead makes provocative claims for the possibility of innovation within conventional forms.3 In what follows, I discuss Melville's engagement with the formal terms proposed by his contemporary critics in the early years of his writing career. In the final section, I read Mardi as Melville's intervention into a critical conversation in which “genre” sustains an expansive critical potential. By this I mean that Melville is using the very idea of “genre” as a staging ground for debate, finding its narrow application by critics to be a misreading of the formal category—not his own place within it. In 1849, with White-Jacket in proofs and Redburn just published, Melville memorably wrote to his father-in-law Lemuel Shaw, “So far as I am individually concerned, & independent of my pocket, it is my earnest desire to write those sort of books which are said to ‘fail.’—Pardon this egotism” (Melville to Lemuel Shaw, 6 Oct. 1849; NN Corres 139). His rejection of the standards of success—critical and popular approbation—can be read as more than the flip or defensive posture of one misunderstood. This desire not so much to fail but to be “said to ‘fail’” underscores Melville's keen attention to the duration of the critical conversation about his works. And in recognizing this desire as an “egotism,” Melville stakes out a space for himself on the perimeter of that critical conversation. In the extant correspondence produced by Melville between the composition of Omoo and of Pierre, we see him nimbly shifting from sales pitches to his publishers, to defenses of his formal choices, to alternately defiant and despairing proclamations to friends about the efficacy and longevity of his fictional efforts. His attunement to his works’ formal reception is more than a byproduct of the professionalization of authorship in mid-nineteenth-century America. Melville in fact shares his awareness of the limits and possibilities of literary convention with those sailors whose own sea writings—with which Melville is in constant conversation—demonstrate an attunement to the forms and expectations of maritime literature. Self-conscious reflections on the requirements of the sea narrative were a hallmark of the genre.4 Melville's experiments within the restrictions of genre began with his first novel, Typee. The genre of the Polynesian romance, as Jonathan Lamb describes it in Preserving the Self in the South Seas, takes an ethnographic approach to travel; yet this perspective is oriented less towards the presumably elevated religious and political beliefs of white, Western travelers than towards the disordered, unsettled sensations they experience. Typee stages these concerns—nakedly—from its opening chapter. An early missionary to the Marquesas had brought his young wife with him, Tommo reports, and the islanders viewed the woman as “some new divinity.” But in their curiosity “they sought to pierce the sacred veil of calico” that robed her, and the islanders tore off her undergarments. “Her sex once ascertained,” Tommo continues, “their idolatry was changed into contempt” (NN Typee 6). As a counterpart, he offers another scene of expectation and exposure, which he claims to have witnessed several years after his own island sojourn. The “king and queen” of the Marquesas made a state appearance aboard Tommo's American ship, along with the French officials who by then had possession of the islands, and who believed that they had imparted to the islanders “proper notions of their elevated station.” Spying a well-tattooed old “salt,” the Polynesian queen caressed the sailor to the embarrassment of her French mentors, and, “eager to display the hieroglyphics on her own sweet form, bent forward for a moment, and turning sharply round, threw up the skirts of her mantle, and revealed a sight from which the aghast Frenchmen retreated precipitately” (8). In both scenes of exhibition, the aesthetic judgment privileged is that of the islanders rather than that of the Westerners, and the trappings of respectability are presented as false and idolatrous. The paired scenes reveal much about Melville's generic method. One of the formal elements of the South Sea romance is the white traveler's curious or scandalized response to indigenous bodily contact and sexual conduct. Tommo is terrified of having his face tattooed by the artist Karky, for example, but is willing to adopt an inked arm, which Western clothing would conceal. But from the narrative's opening pages, Melville strips all pretenses to observational restraint. Typee presents to the public's face the formal skirts of its construction as well as the provocative “sight” of its undercarriage. The critical response to Typee, while largely positive, focused on the narrative's veracity. Even though it was marketed as a personal narrative of the author's South Pacific experience, not a novel (as was Omoo), its authenticity was called into question by many critical notices. As one reviewer held, “We cannot escape a slight suspicion... that there is an indefinite amount of romance mingled with the reality of his narrative” (Rev. of Typee, Harbinger 263). A representative sentiment can be seen in a review in the Christian Parlor Magazine: “We have borne with the pretensions of this book as though it were a narrative of real events. It may be, and likely is, though somewhat highly colored” (Bourne 202). The lack of surety in this reviewer's conception of the generic requirements of a “narrative of real events” is evident from the weird, almost nonsensical modification of the tale's degree of “color” or artifice: it is seen as “somewhat highly” achieved. Melville's response to this discourse on genre (best seen in his correspondence with his London publisher, John Murray, who challenged the authenticity of Typee) responds in kind, calling attention to the affective value of the narrative's verisimilitude—Melville writes of himself “one really feels in his very bones that he has been [in Typee]” (Melville to John Murray, 2 Sept. 1846; NN Corres 65). His explanations to Murray also invoke the structural facts of the sea narrative form—specifically, the literariness both of American sailors and of the narrative accounts they produced. Such terms were suggested by a review of Typee in the London Examiner, which had wondered at the meaning of young, educated Americans such as Melville and Richard Henry Dana enlisting as common seamen: “The precise meaning or drift of this custom, we confess we cannot arrive at,” the notice offers, “unless it be to qualify for the writing of interesting books” (Rev. of Typee, Examiner 11). During the composition of Mardi, when Murray was still looking for “documentary evidence” of Melville's South Seas sojourn, Melville took up the point made in the Examiner, writing to his publisher: “will you Britons not credit that an American can be a gentleman, & have read the Waverly Novels, tho every digit may have been in the tar bucket?—You make miracles of what are commonplaces to us” (Melville to John Murray, 25 March 1848; NN Corres 107). Melville's follow-up to Typee had produced a similar conversation about narrative reliability within the context of the sea narrative. Although the narrator of Omoo, like Melville in his own wanderings, confesses that he kept no journals, he assures the reader that the frequency “with which these incidents have been verbally related, has tended to stamp them up on the memory” (NN Omoo xiv). An analogous claim had been made in the preface to Typee, and in many other sailors’ narratives: the sailor maintains that the degree of repetition of the yarn or the nautical history is an argument for its truth.5 As was the case with Typee, this nautical verisimilitude provoked both praise and uncertainty for Omoo. Called by one reviewer the “American Rabelais” (Chasles 89), Melville himself described the narrative as presenting “the ‘man about town’ sort of life, led, at the present day, by roving sailors in the Pacific” (Melville to John Murray, 29 Jan. 1847; NN Corres 78). The digressive nature of this form of narration was observed in a review credited to Walt Whitman, who wrote of Omoo, “All books have their office—and this is a very side one” (Whitman 212). Yet this same picaresque tone was a cause for some rebuke, such as the American Whig Review's judgment that “Omoo finds it easier to address himself to the pit of the world than its boxes.” The Whig reviewer saw not lightheartedness in Melville's tone but “cool, sneering wit... . The writer does not seem to care to be true” (Rev. of Omoo, American Whig Review 37). Coolness and wit are hallmarks of the sea narrative genre within which Melville worked, as is the form's structural reliance on the “yarn,” or the oft-repeated and frequently tall sailor tale, to an of What the Whig Review in the genre of his early novels is sea to on what is about maritime life and In both and the repetition of narrative elements of Omoo, Melville the and structural elements of sea writing as of a discourse on genre in which he in both his fictional and his It is a discourse suggested in by his who readers to the of Omoo cause readers to question that is a of the imagination, yet the . something very like the to all this of Omoo and Typee. to be and yet the so that will be to question their The is not (Rev. of Omoo, The like the in the by the American Whig these readers are figured as and such attention to the of they are in with the sea narrative genre in which Melville explicitly his the terms with which he Typee and Omoo, Melville a in after the first to Murray, who primarily Melville that Mardi would not with but with his critics’ of he be the work I will in earnest a of Polynesian The is, that the of a in has at into a to those who may take any in the that a real romance of is no Typee or Omoo, & is made of (Melville to John Murray, 25 March 1848; NN Corres than a to the expectations that critics have brought to upon his Melville to the genre of romance within its own and Yet the of his to which Melville in you you to a after Murray on Mardi as his new London publisher, Richard had that sales of Mardi were Melville wrote to him, may in own that a man is to write a work of that kind, when he have one to the general & not in an of or But some of have a something in that this or and be it must or (Melville to Richard 1849; NN Corres or the presented in Melville's correspondence as a of in critical notices. saw an in his works and in the writer the man is a a though he be, in and out of all one reviewer (“Sir Nathaniel” Such Melville's of the forms of And this in his early as a between fact and of Typee and Omoo figured as at with yet the between and fact was for as the preface to his novel, Mardi, makes having of in the in many were with the thought to of writing a romance of Polynesian and it as The of this Melville continues, is “to see the be for a in some degree the of my Although Melville presents and as to we these terms as for his of the expectations of genre. In the Melville presents as a one that the composition of not in so a as the preface the thought that the romance of Mardi would be as “a was only the of which have in (NN Mardi Melville to a of his generic for Mardi in its from the first but in the the his formal The preface the of Mardi, in its to the is a novel that from its opening its own genre as see such in the that the as to in the opening of the The on which has had in and the to make a turn from the in to the of the This new finds to be “a of the between him and the and we see the narrative turn at from the governing a to the Polynesian narrative (NN Mardi What to is the sea that as he to his This is both a and an one in which The narrator his first of the still a he had been unsettled by the the the of his his and what they are as the In engagement of conception would is less than the of as Melville as to not (OED). something it is this that this of In other in Melville's or are but no less the of imagination. The and of a one that that imagination within a Melville's attention to genre takes a similar form, possibility within the of formal in Mardi Melville stages an scene of literary that takes up the discourse on genre in which he had in In in the between my and and describes the of the has been as a for Melville about his not what it would He did not himself in with he wrote and so and into and like a through at was for his (NN Mardi The of of account of his not just a for Mardi, as scholars have but for Melville's of his narrative in the novels that to the formal of the a question in turn of Melville's a so Yet this very on the form, the was a for of his critics’ in are In their not make my not my like a those who would Mardi for its formal The novel after this literary with and the the has this lack of as “a conventional literary is, one that its and in than the of the which would have with the or an and presumably His contemporary critics had about for terms with which to categorize I see as in the possibilities for structural within the genre of the narrative (or the Polynesian romance, or the sea or the novel of If the narrative the of a and what of literary Melville to is produced by that on the of The extravagance of Melville's I within the of the generic to Rather than of Melville's formal innovation as out of we at the and he made of formal

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• Herman Melville

  Open Access•Brian Higgins, Hershel Parker•Herman Melville•1995

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• Mardi

  Lawrance Thompson, Herman Melville et al.•American Literature•1971

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• Typee

  Rollo G Silver, Herman Melville et al.•American Literature•1968

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