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Visionary of the Word: Melville and Religion

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Visionary of the Word: Melville and Religion BOOK REVIEWS 625 and positively of very few things, except of Matters of fact.” As a reference work, focused on “matters of fact,” Guthery’s book shines, but the fragmented nature of the text clouds the results of his research. Amy Fisher is assistant professor of the history of science and technol- ogy in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at the University of Puget Sound. Visionary of the Word: Melville and Religion. Edited by Jonathan A. Cook and Brian Yothers. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017. Pp. 296. $99.95 cloth; $34.95 paper.) Jonathan A. Cook and Brian Yothers begin their volume of ten es- says by calling religion “an often neglected subject in contemporary” Melville studies (3). This is odd since the second part of their use- ful introduction (the first part deals concisely with Melville’s life and reading in religion) traces a critical concern with the subject begin- ning with Raymond Weaver’s biography of 1921 and accelerating in the last forty years or so, with increasing attention to Melville’s late poetry. Religion is currently a hot subject; the difference between older and more recent discussions is that the latter tend to be more cul- tural than intellectual—a mixed blessing with Melville whose engage- ment with religion, while grounded in an intimate possession of the Bible, belongs more to the European and especially Anglophone in- tellectual context than to the native social and denominational one. In this respect the essays in Visionary of the Word are a mix of the tra- ditional and the new. The longest and most scholarly of the group, Cook’s “Clarel and the Victorian Crisis of Faith,” adopts the view of many (myself included) that Clarel is “more a western or Victo- rian than an American poem” (23). Cook’s knowledge is extensive, his prose clear and unencumbered. Even when Melville did not or could not have read one of Cook’s British authors, well-chosen quo- tations (from Leslie Stephen, in particular) establish the intellectual zeitgeist of Melville’s poem in a way that is indispensable to its histori- cal appreciation. Writers on Clarel have a problem; they can’t assume their audience has read the poem and may feel obliged to include a good deal of character analysis and plot description. Cook manages this about as gracefully as possible. What’s missing from his intelligent Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_r_00652 by guest on 24 September 2021 626 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY summary-and-context approach is a strong indication of what he thinks about Clarel, that is, original interpretation. This seems not to have been Cook’s aim, however, and despite its self-chosen limi- tations (or perhaps because of them) his essay takes its place as an essential resource for studying Clarel. “Essential” is not a word applicable to other essays in the collec- tion, though some are well-researched, thoughtful, and instructive. Martin Kervorkian’s “Faith among the Weeds: Religious Wildings be- yond These Deserts” makes fine use of Dante to expand upon John Bryant’s reading of Melville’s late unpublished Rose poems as a cel- ebration of physical and sacred love. Though seldom addressed by critics, the Rose poems are a major accomplishment and should be considered in any estimate of Melville’s late career, commonly lim- ited to readings of Billy Budd, Sailor. Dawn Coleman’s “Melville and the Unitarian Conscience” is also a meritorious essay that takes up Melville’s reading of William Ellery Channing and describes his atti- tude of “mingled appropriation and resistance” (137) toward Unitari- anism generally. The focus on “conscience” seems to me unfortunate, first, because it results in a moral at the expense of a subtly psycholog- ical reading of Pierre and a reductive account of Vere in Billy Budd and second, because it diverts attention from the larger issue of liberal religion as a possible via media between orthodox Christianity and humanistic unbelief. Coleman neglects mention of Serenia, Melville’s paradise of rational religion in Mardi, and of Derwent in Clarel, a far more complex portrait of the accommodating progressive clergy- man than Falsgrave in Pierre. Given Melville’s family background in Unitarianism and his own late membership in a New York Unitarian church, his patronizing of Derwent (in whom as artist he visibly de- lights) seems more significant than his treatment of conscience, which cannot be separated from his representation of the workings of the mind. Darwinism is also a live critical subject and, for the later Melville, a complicating factor in an already ambivalent relationship to natu- ralism and supernaturalism. In “‘Change Irreverent’: Evolution and Faith in ‘The Encantadas’ and Clarel,” Eileen McGinnis argues that Melville engaged himself with Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle in his sketches of the Galapagos by avoiding all mention of it, “trans- form[ing] Darwin’s naturalistic observations and proto-evolutionary insights into meditations on artistic craft” (77). Darwin is present, that is, because he is conspicuously absent. McGinnis links Clarel to “The Encantadas” by their shared focus on blighted and spiritually Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_r_00652 by guest on 24 September 2021 BOOK REVIEWS 627 portentous landscapes, but almost perversely she dismisses the con- flict of “science-versus-faith, as something of a ruse” (83) despite Melville’s pointed invocation of Darwin as a challenge to faith in the poem’s Epilogue. Her discussion of Clarel is solid enough, but aside from describing Melville’s resistance to would-be reconciliations of science and faith, it is not the path-breaking discussion of Melville and Darwinism that might freshly illuminate the poem. Rich and varied, Melville studies are an imposing front for any scholar-critic to scale. One method (hardly new) is to take up a pass- ing allusion and run with it. Zachary McLeod Hutchins’s “Melville and the Mormons” does just that, eliciting Melville’s supposed atti- tudes toward Mormonism from the scantiest of evidence. Somewhat more persuasive is Brad Bannon’s “Coleridge, Edwards, and the Pe- culiar Progress of Melville’s Free Will Problem,” which reads flu- ently but has little new to say about any of the terms in its title, and which, in trying to locate Melville between the poles of free will and determinism, neglects Mardi, whose philosopher Babbalanja ag- onizes over the problem, and Pierre, Melville’s most searching explo- ration of it. Another oft-considered subject is revisited in Richard A. Garner’s “Melville among the Heathens,” which leaves one nostalgic for Charles R. Anderson’s good sense in ascribing Melville’s inconsis- tent attitudes in Typee to his competing authorial purposes as he set about making a book out of his Marquesan experience. Brian Yothers’s “Melville’s Asia, Melville’s Missionaries” also suffers by comparison with earlier studies, in this case John W. Davis’s The Landscape of Be- lief (1996), Hilton Obenzinger’s American Palestine (1999), and Bar- bara Krieger’s Divine Expectations (1999). Yothers’s prime example of the missionary, Nehemiah, is not, strictly speaking, a missionary at all (he has no organizational affiliation) but something quite different, a holy fool, which bears on the question of faith in Clarel but not on Melville’s attitude toward missionary efforts in Palestine or mis- sionaries in general. The final essay in the collection, Hasein Park’s “The Apocalypse of Pain,” is intellectually engaging but tautological in arguing that “the absence of Christ” in Moby-Dick “is intentional, for the author is . investigating a world that remains bereft of di- vine pathos” (280). In what Melville work isn’t Christ absent? Per- haps this is Melville’s vision, not simply a “theological experiment” (280). Altogether, Visionary of the Word is a worthy effort but intellec- tually spotty and uneven in quality. Co-editors Cook and Yothers and their supervisors at Northwestern University Press might have done Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_r_00652 by guest on 24 September 2021 628 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY a better job in conceiving the scope and originality of their contri- butions and holding them to standards worthy of Melville’s CEAA publisher. Robert Milder, professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, has published widely on Melville and other American Renais- sance writers and is the author of Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine (2006), among other books. He is cur- rently at work on a study of spirituality in the American Renaissance that includes Melville. The Boston Trustee: The Lives, Laws & Legacy of a Vital Institution. By Thomas E. Bator and Heidi A. Seely. (Boston, MA: David R. Godine, 2015. Pp. 176. $29.95.) Swirling amid the undulations and vibrancy of New England his- tory, the story of the indefatigable Boston Trustees has remained hid- den in plain sight. At first glance too quotidian to prick the interest of the layperson, yet too complex a subject for the untrained, this unique Boston institution has now received its due attention. In a concise vol- ume containing eighteen brief sections, Thomas E. Bator and Heidi A. Seely have deftly presented the compelling story of individual pro- fessional trustees and the Bostonian high society they served. The authors task themselves with exploring why this brand of trusteeship developed only in Boston and failed to find a match in other jurisdictions. In addition to their descriptive project, they also present a normative argument for the continued relevance of the Boston Trustee as a potent choice for modern potential settlors, de- tailing the benefits associated therewith.
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