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Sea-Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea Fiction from Moby-Dick to the Present by Bert Bender

1990; Volume: 18; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/saf.1990.0006

2158-415X

Roger B. Stein,

Arctic and Russian Policy Studies

REVIEWS Bender, Bert. Sea-Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea Fiction from Moby-Dick to the Present. Drawings by Tony Angelí. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. 283 pp. Cloth: $29.95. All students of American fiction are well aware of the central importance of the sea in the literature and culture of the United States, particularly in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. This period, which contains works from The Pilot to Moby-Dick, was defined historically by Thomas Philbrick's landmarkJames Fenimore Cooper and the Development ofAmerican Sea Fiction (1961). The present study is a self-conscious sequel to that work, an attempt to characterize "the tradition of American sea fiction" in subsequent years. The passionate commitment to the sea itself as a repository of values and the place for meditation, and the shipboard voyage as captured by sailor-writers, these are the elements of "the tradition" for Bender. He traces a major shift from the "natural theology," that he mistakenly thinks dominates Moby-Dick, to the Darwinian struggle of later sea fiction. This is the central issue of the book: "Immersed as we are in the violently competitive biological processes of life, . . . how can we perpetuate a sense of brotherhood like that which Melville had idealized in ? Squeeze of the Hand'?" (pp. 202-03). To address this question, Bender devotes three chapters to Herman Melville, tracing the losses of the Ishmaelite perspective. Ahab's centrality is consequently underplayed, and the corrosive function of irony in Billy Budd undervalued, as it is in the following chapter on "The Experience of Brotherhood in 'The Open Boat'." The sea fiction of Jack London, by contrast, vividly enacts for Bender the "essential" biological struggle. For this reader, the freshest material comes in the two following chapters that enlarge the canon and open new perspectives on our maritime fictional heritage through the succinct presentation of the work of the sailor-writers born 1860-79 (Morgan Robertson, Thornton Jenkins Hains, James Brendan Connolly, Arthur Mason, Felix Reisenberg, and Bill Adams) and those born 1880-1899 (William McFee, Lincoln Ross Colcord, Richard Matthews Hallet, and Archie Binns). The book ends with two chapters on Ernest Hemingway, the first focusing on the meaning of the sea in his work, the other on his "sea men" in To Have and Have Not, Islands in the Stream, and The Old Man and the Sea, and a concluding pair of chapters on the work of Peter Matthiessen that argue that Far Tortuga (1975) is the finest work in the genre since Moby-Dick. Methodologically, Sea-Brothers is a thematic rather than an historical study of a pattern of ideas in the fiction of some male writers. Bender's premises are idealist, despite his appeals to William James and John Dewey. Notions of national character, of "essential Americanness" (p. 7), of "the tradition" are posited; and culture is seen, again and again, as "reflected" passively in these works. Although he stresses frequently the importance of the "actual" experiences of voyaging these writers are reporting, as if that were some kind of guarantee of authenticity (and sometimes blurs the distinction between author and character , as he does with the correspondent in Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat"), the book lacks any significant sense of the changing historical context within which ideas function. Bender ducks the problem of slavery as a central issue in "Benito Cereño," dismisses the charge of racism leveled againstJack London in his later work, and substitutes clichés like the "golden age" or the "Strenuous Age" for any historical understanding of the dialectic of cultural debate over some 120 years in which these works aesthetically participate. What is especially distressing in 1988 is his unselfconscious treatment of issues of gender. Though he is aware that women were involved in the sea voyages, this is a book about men, "exploring the implications of our biological reality" (p. 7). Yet the experiences of these men with the sea and with one another was framed historically in highly gendered Studies in American Fiction123 language. Bender's discussion of Jack London cries out for some recognition of the ways in which London's sexual fantasies were given vivid shape...