Location: [Reed College] [Department of English] [Laura Arnold][ Nation and Narration]Daily Readings
Today Moby-Dick is universally acknowledged to be an American "masterpiece" and is usually deemed the greatest of Melville's novels. Critics such as Robert Martin have argued that
Moby-Dick is Melville's most extraordinary accomplishment, a single novel which would alone suffice to make him one of America's most important writers. Next to it, all the early works seem to grope toward a form, and all the later works to be haunted by the memory of that achievement. The accomplishment of Moby-Dick is to have found a way to transcend the conventional forms of nineteenth-century fiction, as if Melville recognized the extent to which those forms contained within themselves the ideologies that Moby-Dick needed to combat (Hero, Captain, Stranger 67).
We might return to what Martin sees as so noteworthy and transcendent about Moby-Dick later, but let me point out now that Americans have not always felt this was about the novel. In Melville's own lifetime (indeed up until the 1920s) the novel was rejected and dismissed as flawed and out of control. This handout is designed to help us begin to answer some of the following questions: 1. how and why did Moby-Dick become a classic? How did the reception of the book change? What aspects did earlier readers find unsettling and are these the same aspects we cherish in the novel today? To answer these questions, I will be relying upon the essays at the end of our text and upon William Spanos analysis of the reception of the novel in his book The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies.
1. Rejection and Dismissal: 1850s-1890s
Although Melville had been the darling of American literature before the
publication of Moby-Dick, because of his faithful
representations of American life at sea. In books such as Typee,
Melville had striven for a realistic style and had even rounded up witnesses to
authenticated the "truthfulness" of his seemingly autobiographical accounts.
It is important to note the fine line between fact and fiction in early
American novels. Moby-Dick represents a breaking point with
contemporary critics --it was dismissed by early critics as
exorbitant, if not exactly pronounced to be heretical: [it was ] too radical in his departure from the Puritan/capitalist logos. The official custodians of the American Cultural Memory...found Melville's text, especially those baroque stylistic and rhetorical elements usually associated with his representation of Captain Ahab, utterly alien...to the Puritan/capitalist problematic determining their critical discourse; specifically the "realist"/autobiographical form inherited from the Puritan confessional discursive tradition and exploited by Richard Henry Dana Jr. in Two Years before the Mast and by Melville himself in Typee (Spanos 12).
Evert Duyckinck's scathing--and influential--review ("An Intellectual Chowder") was typical of his contemporaries response (see p. 613 in our text). An anonymous reviewer perhaps put it most bluntly when he said that the whale scenes were exciting, but that the rest was "sad stuff, dull or dreary, or ridiculous" (Norton Edition 619). For reviews from this time period see our book pp. 613-21 or click here for on-line reviews from this era.
2. Interim Appraisals, Revival and Reaction: 18902-1920s
After Melville's death in 1891, critics began to reappraise Melville's now
"long forgotten" novel. Such a shift was not due to mere perversity, but
rather had to do with a shift in literary values. As William Spanos explains
The Modernist revival [of Moby-Dick in the 1920s]...chose to celebrate precisely that differential speculative extravagance of style, form, and content which, in the eyes of Melville's early critics, interrupted the promise latent in the documentary veracity of his first romances and disqualified him from a place in the emergent American canon. This shift in evaluative emphasis from "low" to "high" culture [i.e. from true-to life sea ditty to complex novel] resulted in the apotheosis of Moby-Dick not simply as Melville's "masterpiece" but as an American "masterpiece" (Spanos 16).
This change in value changed what critics sought and found in Moby-Dick as well. Suddenly the book had a narrative that is an organic unity and structural economy (Spanos 16). For samples of this early criticism, see our book pp. 622-34.
3. Early Academic Criticism and New Criticism: 1932-62
The period during and immediately following W.W.II marked a shift in the
national self-image and a shift in literary values. We have already discussed
the shift towards aesthetical interpretations in our reading of David Shumway's
analysis of Matthiessen's The American Renaissance, but it is also
useful to think about changes in the notion of nationhood. William Spanos
summarizes the "'new' national self image" as follows:
that which extended and refined the elitist spirit of genius privileges by the 1920s against massification (and the masses) to include an international or geopolitical dimension. In order to compensate for the inevitable leveling cultural and sociopolitical processes endemic to industrial expansion and the materialist ethos latent in the abstract Puritan discipline and to accommodate the cultural and political "enfranchisement" of the hitherto disenfranchised, largely immigrant masses, the Americanist discourse of the Melville revival rendered the transcendent spirit of genius ([Matthew] Arnold's "best self") the measure of all (not only American) things (Spanos 23).
Criticism from this period tends to focus on the artistic merits of the novel and, hence, is still quite useful for understanding the novel as a whole (see pp. 635-727 of our text). For example, the critics discuss issues such as genre, characterization, composition, and point of view.
4. The Cold War Era
Since this is the subject of Donald Pease's article which Jenny will be
reviewing for Friday 3/21 I won't jump the gun here and give away the story.
However let it suffice to say that two of the dominant subjects of criticism
during this period (and continuing into the 1990s) are readings which unpack
the text as either a political or religious allegory. Jonathan will be
discussing political allegory for Wed. and Vanessa will be discussing religion
a week from Wed.
5. Post-Cold War Era: the 1990s
This is a topic which is still up for debate. How do you see us as using
Moby-Dick today? What do we value in it? Who does this reflect our
image of American after the Cold War? (If you want to, you might look ahead
to Spanos' final chapter and see if you agree with his analysis.)
Laura.Arnold@Reed.edu