New age Melville

Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 1998 by Robbins, Fred W

Other than The Weaver-God, He Weaves, Mr. Sten's previous major contribution to Melville studies is his editing of a rather ingenious collection of essays using an interdisciplinary combination of literary studies and art history, Savage Eye: Melville and the Visual Arts (Kent State UP, 1991). It should serve as a precedent and context for Douglas Robillard's Melville and the Visual Arts: Ion;,an Form, Venetian Tint (the subtitle is a line from Claret); both books instruct us as to Melville's dedication to painting, sculpture and architecture. In fact, Robillard has an essay in Savage Eye. For the use of most students of Melville, Mr. Sten's Savage -Eye is a much better treatment of the topic of Melville and art, because of its general nature. The collection of essays in Savage Eye presents a panorama; for example, it contains the excellent essay by Gail Coffler, "Classical Iconography in the Aesthetics of Billy Budd, Sailor, " from which we learn how fully Melville had come to appreciate Praxitelean sculpture and its Roman imitations. Melville knew that dual informing results from mixing art and literature, thus achieving mutual enrichment.

Robillard's specialized but very incisive argument is that the parallel use of plastic and literary arts is an approach sanctioned by classical and by Romantic usage. He is particularly interesting when he discusses Wordsworth, Heine, Irving and Hawthorne. He argues that Ishmael's imagination is not only dramatic but also ekphrastic, continually alluding to the plastic arts, and to the ways in which painters see as opposed to the ways in which contemplative, depressed sailors-landlocked, and with the hypos-see. Any reader who remembers Ishmael's struggles with presenting "a true picture of the whale" is certainly familiar with the pictorial aspects of Melville's imagination. Pictorial description is one of the confusing, frustrating but fascinating aspects of Moby-Dick, and also of Typee, White Jacket and Redburn. Its absence irritates many readers of The Confidence Man. Robillard's is a narrow book, but clear and direct in its approach to an esoteric issue. Its single flaw, apart from some rather elliptical discussion of the later poems, is the scarcity of illustrations-no small problem, given the topic-no doubt owing to the great expense of reproduction.

Finally, the only real point to all this Melville commentary and new publication is to assert for another generation of readers and students the fact that Melville is a rich, deep (and great) writer. In many of his works, notably in his Civil War poems, Battle Pieces (1866), Melville demonstrates that he is not ideology bound. Even though it is clear that he disapproves of secession and slavery, still he takes notice in his poems of the simple humanity of Confederates. As another generation has discovered, his is a complex sensibility, an ambiguous mind. In his late poems, as Douglas Robillard points out in his discussion of "Art" in Timoleon, Melville asserts his belief that contradictions-patience and energy, humility and pride, love and hate, audacity and reserve-can be resolved (174). It is a lesson for our time: