Ifs Eternally

Edwin Haviland Miller. Melville. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1975. 382 pp. Richard H. Brodhead. Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1976. 216 pp. Warrick Wadlington. The Confidence Game in American Literature. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 1975. 331pp. Towards the conclusion of Moby-Dick, Ishmael observes, "There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: - through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally." At summational points in their very different discussions of Melville the authors of the three books under review each quote this passage (Brodhead, p. 150; Miller, pp. 192-93; Wadlington, pp. 78-79). In each case the quotation is shown to be particularly apposite to the author's developing argument. Clearly Melville's statement is as applicable to the knowledge provided by literary criticism as to any other kind. And, of course, in treating material gone over repeatedly by previous investigators, Brodhead, Miller and Wadlington might be said to "trace the round again." At the same time, taken together in the following order, Miller's psychological portrait of Melville, Brodhead's formalis- tic study of Hawthorne and Melville, and Wadlington's largely rhetorical analysis of Melville, Twain and Nathanael West appear to trace the cycle from a more or less closed certainty to a creative sense of "Ifs eternally

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