![]() In the years since the Melville revival, several more biographies have appeared, with Hershel Parker’s two-volume epic standing as the most exhaustive. From there, critical approaches proliferated, as did the sheer volume of material, a trend that continues unabated to the present day. In the aftermath of World War II and its attendant atrocities, and at the dawn of the nuclear age, critics looked to Melville to address these newly relevant issues convulsing the world. Mumford’s approach continued to influence the course of Melville studies, which fully exploded after the Moby-Dick centennial in 1951. As he wrote, explaining his approach, “A society lives in a man: a man is a creature in society the inner world is less private and the outer world less exclusively public than people habitually and carelessly think.” As such, Mumford presented a Melville who was shaped by the conflicts of his time, particularly the modernization of a rapidly industrializing America and the crises leading up to the Civil War, and whose work reflected these concerns. In addition to devoting full attention to the later stages of Melville’s career, Mumford emphasized the social context of his subject’s work. According to Aaron Sachs, author of Up from the Depths, a dual study of Melville and Mumford, the 1929 biography instantly supplanted Weaver’s efforts and remained the standard source for Melville studies for the next two decades. Eight years later, though, Lewis Mumford would come out with a comprehensive volume. This thrilling, perpetually slippery book of rhetorical dead-ends would await a later, postmodern audience to receive its full due.)Ī renewed interest in the author led to the reissue of most of Melville’s major novels in the early 1920s.įor all its historical importance, Weaver’s biography only covered the first few years of Melville’s career in any kind of detail, essentially ending its discussion after the career-killing publication of Melville’s 1852 novel and Moby-Dick follow-up, Pierre. (In the United States, though, his final novel, The Confidence-Man was not republished. This renewed interest in the author led to the reissue of most of Melville’s major novels in the early 1920s. In addition to publishing the first biography of the author in 1921, he helped arrange for the posthumous publication of Melville’s late novella Billy Budd. Weaver, in particular, was an important figure in the so-called Melville revival, which began in earnest during Melville’s centennial year of 1919. Still, most of the early critics, such as English novelist Viola Meynell and American critic Raymond Weaver, were more concerned with Melville’s aesthetic breakthroughs than the political implications of his works. The shifting, collage-like nature of Moby-Dick, alternating tragic monologues with low-rent sailor ditties, realistic descriptions of whaling with semi-parodic disquisitions on cetology, spoke to the moment aesthetically while the book’s depiction of a doomed, hyperviolent enterprise reflected the world-historical one. Remembered primarily as a travel writer when he was remembered at all, Melville was soon recast as a proto-modernist, anticipating the literary developments soon to be undertaken by writers like James Joyce. The process of rediscovery was a slow march that began in earnest just after World War I. When Herman Melville died in 1891, Moby-Dick had been out of print for decades. ![]() That includes critics who never tire of probing his depths as well as hot-take newspaper columnists looking for an easy hook.īut it wasn’t always that way. (Unless, in a reading popular in right-wing media, Trump is actually the white whale and the Democrats who impeached him are Ahab.) This imperious commander who speaks in Shakespearean monologues, this New England fallen Quaker who masterfully manipulates his global, multiracial crew into sacrificing their lives for his doomed quest, who heroically (or anti-heroically) refuses to accept the meaningless of the world, is everything to everyone. Calhoun, the Pequod’s monomaniacal commander has been likened to everyone from Hitler to the nuclear scientists responsible for the atomic bomb to, inevitably, Donald Trump. Writing in 2005, Andrew Delbanco observed, in his critical biography Melville: His World and Work, that the author of Moby-Dick “seems to renew himself for each new generation.” Since the mid-twentieth century, Delbanco notes, “there has been a steady stream of new Melvilles, all of whom seem somehow able to keep up with the preoccupations of the moment.” He lists a few:Īnd then there’s his deathless creation, Ahab, the man who, per Elizabeth Hardwick, “has no ancestor in literature other than all of literature.” Inspired in part, Delbanco speculates, by former vice president and staunch slavery defender John C.
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