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: Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies: An Aesthetics in All Things

2023; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 121; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/728812

1545-6951

Brian Yothers,

American and British Literature Analysis

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewMelville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies: An Aesthetics in All Things. Cody Marrs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. xviii+148.Brian YothersBrian YothersSaint Louis University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreThat Cody Marrs's new book constitutes a challenge to business as usual in both Melville studies and American literary studies writ large is apparent in his introduction, when he slyly asserts, "Furthermore, I consider these writings—Timoleon, Weeds and Wildings, and Moby-Dick—to be among Melville's very best" (17). It is hard to doubt that Marrs had fun writing this sentence, and it is a pleasure to see the counterintuitive and the commonplace anchored together in such neighborly fashion, to borrow from Melville's own words in "Benito Cereno" (1855). Considering Timoleon and Weeds and Wildings as among Melville's very best works reads like hyperbolic provocation, and listing Moby-Dick here, particularly in the third position, reads like an extraordinary understatement. This, it seems to me, is Marrs's point: Melville is often understood in terms rather distant from beauty, and thinking about Melville as a writer vitally concerned with beauty rearranges our priorities in assessing Melville's works in startling and productive ways.Marrs begins his argument for and appreciation of the centrality of beauty to Melville with a reading of the last book that Melville published in his lifetime, Timoleon (1891). This volume occupies a curious space in Melville studies, in that there is a long history among scholars of American literature of dismissing Melville's poetry as being inferior to his prose, and among Melville scholars who have considered his poetry, Battle-Pieces (1866; the Civil War volume), Clarel (1876; sometimes described as the longest poem in American literature), and even John Marr, and Other Sailors (1889; a collection of poems about sailors and the sea) all offer more obvious handles onto which scholars can grasp than the more eclectic and classically oriented Timoleon. Marrs usefully surveys the range of Melville's classical references (this topic has been investigated by previous scholars of Melville's use of sources, particularly Gail S. Coffler in Melville's Classical Allusions [1985] and Mary K. Bercaw Edwards in Melville's Sources [1987], but the focus on Timoleon as a touchstone for interpreting Melville's broader body of work is a new twist). Marrs elegantly describes the convergence of classical sources and the natural world in Timoleon in a chiastic phrase as expressing his attraction to "the beauty of matter and the materiality of beauty" (33). In the service of this claim, Marrs investigates Melville's deep engagement with the visual arts, showing that art and nature play off of each other dialectically in the poems in Timoleon. An interesting avenue for further discussion that Marrs does not pursue here would be the relation between Melville's visual aesthetics in Timoleon to those in Parthenope, a work left unpublished at Melville's death that imagines extended dialogues on visual aesthetics among Dutch and Italian painters of the early modern period.If leading with Timoleon reads as bold, following that discussion with a chapter on Weeds and Wildings is bolder still. This posthumously published collection of poems is among the very least frequently discussed of Melville's works, and it is typically treated as a kind of quirky curiosity when it is mentioned at all. Yet as Marrs argues, in Weeds and Wildings "the poems' commitment to life and beauty has a marked philosophical edge" (54), and our account of Melville's intellectual and emotional life is reduced when we ignore this volume. Marrs identifies connections between this book about varieties of flowers and Melville's late engagement with the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) and with Buddhist thought. Here, as in Timoleon, Melville is deeply concerned with the material world, and beauty and suffering continually intersect, as Marrs convincingly shows. Marrs's suggestive reading of Weeds and Wildings seems to offer an invitation to think through these poems in light of Melville's complicated authorial relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson, an American contemporary who shared Melville's obsession with beauty, as Melville makes materialism a significant element in his marginalia to Emerson's works, now available at Melville's Marginalia Online (https://melvillesmarginalia.org; edited by Steven Olsen-Smith and Peter Norberg).When Marrs turns to Moby-Dick, he is of course turning to the center of the Melville canon, but with a difference. Here Marrs turns his focus to some of the more frequently neglected portions of Melville's great novel, the Cetology chapters, and where critics have often noted the philosophical richness, the humorous asides, and the degrees of biological accuracy in these chapters, Marrs focuses particularly on the beauty of the whale, a creature more easily associated with the sublime. This is true as well in Marrs's treatment of the sea, where he keeps the pleasure as much as the power of the sea consistently in view. Central to this chapter is Marrs's subtle reading of Melville's comparison of the sperm whale to St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in the chapter entitled "The Blanket," where Marrs suggests that the artistry of St. Peter's is of at least as much importance to Melville as the church's astonishing scale.Melville's investment in aesthetic questions was such throughout his career that a book on Melville and beauty only seems counterintuitive because Americanist literary scholarship has made it so. Nonetheless, Marrs's account of the role that beauty plays in Melville's body of work is bracing, not least because American literary studies has historically tended to privilege the cultural over the aesthetic. Marrs's playful, eloquent approach to reading Melville through his multifaceted pursuit of beauty offers the promise of a new way of conceiving, not just of Melville, but of American literary studies writ large. In the course of making this argument about the place of pleasure in literary studies, Marrs makes a compelling case for writing literary criticism that gives as well as analyzes pleasure, through the wit and elegance of his own prose. This book is a study that Melville scholars and general readers alike can savor, and that may have the effect of causing us to like, as well as admire, Melville more. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Ahead of Print Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/728812 Views: 84Total views on this site HistoryPublished online December 15, 2023 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected].PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.