Tattoo Art

The Composition of Text, Voice, and Race in Melville's Moby-Dick

Bibliographic Data

ID5804197
AuthorsMatthew Cordova Frankel (corresponding author)
Year2007
Volume53
Issue2
Pages114-147
Publication date2007-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueESQ (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0093-8297 • E-ISSN: 1935-021X
PublisherWashington State University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/esq.0.0002
OpenAlexW2063782147
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited14

Tattoo Art: The Composition of Text, Voice, and Race in Melville's Moby-Dick Matthew Cordova Frankel (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution "A Young Nuku Hivan Not Completely Tattooed." Engraving 8 from Bemerkungen auf einer Reise um die Welt in den Jahren 1803 bis 1807 [Remarks and observations on a voyage around the world from 1803 to 1807], by G. H. von Langsdorff (Frankfurt am Mayn: Verlag Friedrich Wilmans, 1812).Courtesy of Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, Washington State University Libraries. [End Page 114] The skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed; as in my wild wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing-at least, what untattooed parts might remain-I did not trouble myself with the odd inches; nor, indeed, should inches at all enter into a congenial admeasurement of the whale. -Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851) Composition, composition is the sole definition of art. Composition is aesthetic, and what is not composed is not a work of art. However, technical composition, the work of the material that often calls on science...is not to be confused with aesthetic composition, which is the work of sensation. Only the latter fully deserves the name composition, and a work of art is never produced by or for the sake of technique. -Gilles Deleuze, What is Philosophy? (1994) A Vital Aesthetic: Melville, Matthiessen, and Deleuze For many recent scholars of U.S. literature working under the auspices of American Studies, reading certain aspects of F.O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941) can be a bit of an embarrassment. Specifically, [End Page 115] Matthiessen's stated sense of the "imaginative vitality" surging through his chosen masterpieces now tends to strike the dominant critical sensibility as an arcane response, at best a term from our inherited literary past, but more often than not a notion at once analytically vague and, despite Matthiessen's democratic intonations, politically suspect. Apparently lacking any relevance for current research, the concept of vitality has been all but dismissed as a tenable mode of interpretive apprehension, treated oftentimes as a terminological symptom of Matthiessen's intellectual bad faith. So whereas the works Matthiessen diligently defended and defined have endured into our own century, the original criteria of selection he employed and the purportedly inherent properties of the "great art" he dearly valued no longer orient their reception.1 In terms of this now-outmoded quality of "aesthetic judgment," Matthiessen's examination of Melville presents the most troublesome case for students of the romantic period. Moby-Dick, the novel that ultimately secures Melville's spot in the American Renaissance roster of luminaries, abounds with "primal vitality"; and Melville's own monumental quest for what he himself calls the "vital truth" in part provided Matthiessen with the very vocabulary of vitalism that shapes the "method and scope" of his project.2 This line of an American literary vitalism-extending, at least, from the fictions of Melville through certain preoccupations in early twentieth-century literary studies in America-generally has run outside the dominant research constituting American Studies today; or, in an idiom native to the novel, the ship that brought Melville safely to our shores has since been viewed by some as an untrustworthy means of transport. Curiously, however, it is precisely this vitalist current that Gilles Deleuze finds so compelling in Melville, and most powerfully expressed in one special novel; and so, perhaps not surprisingly, Moby-Dick has found new life overseas, a life inhering in its art. In what follows, I hope to further the "invention" of the "new vitalism" that Deleuze explores throughout his work (and that has continued to provoke rich philosophical response since his death in 1995) by putting his writings on aesthetics in conversation with a set of recurrent critical, disciplinary, [End Page 116] and institutional discussions about Moby-Dick. I am particularly interested

Courtesy · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Rhetoric and Communication Studies · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

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