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Article Excerpt
In certain chapters of Moby-Dick, as Nancy Fredricks, Barbara Glenn, and Richard S. Moore point out, Herman Melville strives for sublimity. (1) Pip, for example, experiences the overwhelming depth and extension of the sea and is, as a result, transported into an "unwarped primal world" in which he sees "God's foot upon the treadle of the loom." (2) The incident displays Melville's turn to "that play of freedom & invention accorded only to the Romancer & poet," (3) and its heightened rhetoric, to use a Longinian hyperbole, "shatters everything like a bolt of lightning and reveals the full power of the speaker." (4) Pip provides a clear instance of a textual mode popular during the century and a half preceding the appearance of Melville's masterwork. (5) Less clear is Melville's understanding of how the sublime works and its implications for his developing art. Pip, like Fedallah, traduces Melville's own apparent decorum; Romantic as Moby-Dick is, its events are presented as falling within the realm of possibility. Ishmael often goes out of his way to offer rational explanations of apparently strange phenomena. Pip's experience thus works against the realism of the novel. In breaking through the pasteboard mask that separates the supernal from the sensible, he signals a shift in Melville's literary method from symbolism to allegory--the intrusion of an aesthetic register related to, but defined differently and employed more movingly than in the "metaphysics" of Mardi and Redburn. (6)
Melville's turn to sublimity and to allegory in Moby-Dick go hand in hand; this turn indicates an understanding of sublimity at odds with his Romantic milieu, and its ultimate source is Milton. (7) The sublime became important to aesthetic theory in Europe following Boileau's translation of Longinus, appearing in 1674, seven years after the initial printing of Paradise Lost. As a result of Boileau's influence, Longinus's [GREEK TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (hupsous) got rendered into English as "sublime." In enthroning Milton's epic as a prime English example of sublimity, Joseph Addison, who along with John Dennis popularized the term in Britain, singled out for praise the "allegorical" characters Sin and Death in Paradise Lost. (8) From the early eighteenth century well into the Romantic period, the idea of sublimity in British and American letters was both shaped and complicated by responses to what was seen as Miltonic allegory. Yet, as recent studies by Theresa M. Kelley and Catherine Gimelli Martin admirably demonstrate, not only did neoclassicism read Milton in terms of its own aesthetic predilections but also Milton's version of allegory was itself radical enough to "ruin" (Martin's term) the genre as it had been traditionally defined. (9) The sublimity and corresponding allegory prominent in Moby-Dick, and to an even greater extent in Pierre, depart from the more conventionally allegorical sections of Mardi. The Melvillean allegory draws directly on both Milton and neoclassical readings of Milton, with which Romantic theorists like Wordsworth and Coleridge continued to contend. Melville's comment about Moby-Dick to Sophia Hawthorne, that "I had some vague idea while writing it, that the whole book was susceptible of an allegoric construction, & also that parts of it were," suggests his awareness of his aesthetic turn (NN Correspondence 219).
Pip demonstrates Melville's engagement with a tradition of sublimity reaching beyond the well-known formulae of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke and into what Samuel H. Monk, citing Croce, calls the "chaos" of Enlightenment British aesthetic theory (Monk, The Sublime, p. 3). (10) Fredricks bases her intelligent reading of Melville's sublime on Kant, although she admits he "probably never read" the German philosopher (19). Indeed, nothing in Melville's enthusiastic 1849 conversations with Germanist George Adler, nor in the contrast of Locke and Kant in chapter 73 of Moby-Dick suggests familiarity with the Critique of Judgement. (11) Glenn, in contrast, relies almost entirely on Burke. Melville owned and read A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, but Glenn's analysis of Moby-Dick leads her to conclude that the "quest for the sublime" in the novel fails, a judgment which calls into question Melville's commitment to the mode to begin with. Moore, who treats Melville's eighteenth-century sources, ignores the rhetorical theory bequeathed by Longinus to critics like Addison, Burke, Hugh Blair, Archibald Alison, and Thomas De Quincey in order to focus on Melville's "aesthetics of nature," and thus he turns attention away from the complex legacy of Milton. (12)
A clear parallel to, and ostensible source of, Melville's Pip is Wordsworth's great ode, "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." Ishmael, as Fredricks indicates (62), uses Pip's experience to predict "what like abandonment befell myself" (NN MD 414); so Wordsworth's prophetic child, who like Pip "read'st the eternal deep," points ahead to the narrator-poet's adult sense of loss. Pip, "most insignificant of the Pequod's crew" (NN MD 411), calls to mind not just "Intimations" but other Wordsworthian characters--leech-gatherer, blind beggar, discharged soldier--who, as Steven Knapp points out, personify the possibility of transcendence (99). Moore sees Wordsworth as subordinating the sublime to a more humble and accessible "moral picturesque" (27), another way of describing the poet's desire to break down the urbanity of the neoclassical sublime voice, well described by Marshall Brown, and thus escape the artificial expectations of the grand style. (13) Melville's choice of Pip as spokesperson for the sublimity of the sea appears at first glance to follow a Wordsworthian path.
As Thomas Heffernan, Merton M. Sealts, and others have shown, Melville displayed a lifelong fondness for Wordsworth. (14) However, as Christopher Durer asserts, his "apprehension of the nature and possibilities of the literary imagination, and his conception of the literature in which the governing hand is that of the imagination, are due largely to Melville's reading of Coleridge." (15) If Melville is describing himself with tongue in cheek when he depicts the chaplain of the Neversink in White-Jacket "with Coleridge's Biographia Literaria in his hand," then he is also familiar with the passage in which Coleridge subjects the "Intimations" ode to a scathing critique, accusing it of "mental bombast." (16) As Knapp explains, Coleridge's rebuke of Wordsworth for imbuing an unworthy object with too much meaning carries on the eighteenth-century argument over the characters Sin and Death in Paradise Lost. The "preternatural self-enclosure" (99) of such a figure as Milton's Sin, Melville's Pip, or Wordsworth's philosopher child "has the effect of isolating the agent from its natural context and thus of moving it closer to the condition of a personification--without, however, assigning it a clear allegorical identity" (102). Why pick a child, Coleridge asks, rather than a bee, a dog, or anything else representative of nature, and why credit a child with the philosophical spirit of the adult poet (Biographia Literaria, pp. 291-91)? Coleridge's critique of Wordsworth reflects Dr. Johnson's complaint against Milton "that Sin and Death should have shewn the way to hell might have been allowed; but they cannot facilitate the passage by building a bridge, because the difficulty of Satan's passage is described as real and sensible, and the bridge ought to be only figurative" (186). (17) Coleridge inherits from neoclassic theory a distrust of "allegorical personifications," characters that on the one hand appear to signify abstract meanings on their own terms and, on the other hand, play active roles in the narratives they inhabit. In Knapp's words, "partial or ambiguous allegorization of natural agents prevents the confident sorting out of literal and figurative intentions" (104).
As Theresa Kelley, Angus Fletcher, and other historians of allegory make abundantly clear, both the neoclassical and Romantic traditions expressed discomfort with allegorical personifications, while using them incessantly to embody everything from public credit, to emotions like fear, to the French revolution, to the seemingly cosmic forces of Blake's prophetic books. (18) Coleridge's ongoing theoretical struggle to trammel the reach of allegory and replace it with symbolism (the American implications of which are discussed by Leon Chai) evidences his awareness of its prevalent "modern" (Kelley's term) form, ascendant since Milton. (19) With Milton's rejection, notable in works like Eikonoklastes, of a stable, knowable "other speech" to which allegory can with confidence point, "modern allegory can assist a line of reasoning that breaks open self-enclosed symbols" (Kelley, Reinventing Allegory, p. 11). This is a process akin to the allegorical "breakdown," which Bryant sees operating in The Confidence-Man (Bryant, Melville and Repose, pp. 234-43). The result of this rupture is to redefine the aesthetics of allegory in terms of its relationships with its surrounding textual environment. This effect has four key vectors: 1) pathos; 2) visual or "phantasmic" power; 3) narrative or psychological development; and 4) stylistic elaboration. (20) All four together define the allegorical sublime that links Milton, and neoclassical readings of both Milton and Longinus, to the particular form of sublimity Melville puts in play in "The Castaway."
In the Kantian tradition, the sublime aporia, the thwarting and recoil of understanding in the face of nature's vastness, gives way to a sense of the power of reason, the "eruption of an autonomous subject" (de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime, p. 46). In contrast, Pip's madness amounts to a dissolution of ego that keeps "heaven's sense" behind the mask of the oracular nonsense he speaks. As Bainard Cowan concludes of Pierre, "whereas the Romantic symbol, the expressive form chosen by Goethe in opposition to allegory, turns to inner experience, sealing off all divisive influences, in an attempt to allow the self to commune effortlessly with the divine, allegory reveals within the heart of this interiority a `silence' which, though it may be 'the only Voice of...
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