Melville and the Question of Meaning

David Faflik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780815362975
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351110815
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This rich volume of essays restores meaning itself as the focal point of one of our most thoughtful modern writers, Herman Melville. Melville and the Question of Meaning thinks about thinking in Melville. For if Melville's concerns with interpretation (the contributors to one recent collection variously read the author for "the 'meaning' of the characters," the "meaning" of the "body," "recesses of meaning," "deepest levels of meaning," "double meaning," and the "meaning" of "being" and "everything else") overlap with our own concerns, at a cultural moment when meaning feels especially strained, we have lost sight of the central place of meaning making in Melville's work. My own readings in Melville are a pedestrian's guide through the self-conscious complications of meaning we meet with in Melville across a range of different disciplines and endeavors. Combining aesthetics and sociolinguistics, history and theory, rhetoric and politics, philosophy and film studies, Melville and the Question of Meaning demonstrates that the project of making meaning in Melville remains as vital as ever.

1 Young American Puns

Antebellum Wordplay and Democratic Manhattan

In 1845, a small group of New York Democrats declared themselves “Young Americans.” So began a new phase in a campaign on behalf of their nation’s literature. Founding members Evert Duyckinck, Jerry Auld, William Jones, and Russell Trevett had banded together as early as 1836 to argue that America’s domestic letters surpassed Europe’s. By the middle of the next decade, their nationalist rhetoric had reached fever pitch. As essayists and editors based in antebellum Manhattan, they kept their cultural critique on the front pages of the city’s magazines and newspapers. Long-term aims were a bit vague but seemed to hinge upon the domestic production and democratic dissemination of truly American belles lettres. The high-profile nature of its message has earned the group a spot in recent literary histories (Bender 1988; Miller 1956; Widmer 1999). Less noted has been Young America’s contribution to American speech.

Part of this contribution stems from what I call the Young American pun, pun being defined here as “the open-ended use of a word to suggest its variant meanings and/or likeness to another word.” Young Americans were never explicit about the connection between puns and literary nationalism, and yet the two full-fledged literary practitioners among them—authors Cornelius Mathews and Herman Melville, both subsequent additions to the group’s original four—were notorious for playing with the sounds and meanings of words in their steady stream of publications. Michael West (2000) explains that many early nationals, Young Americans included, practiced puns as a linguistic side effect of the rapid social, political, and economic changes sweeping the country between the Revolution and the Civil War. As their country was in flux, early Americans’ language was literally up for grabs. Puns were a product of that linguistic instability (Andresen 1990, 69; Gustafson 1992, 1–20; Kramer 1992, 1–14; Redfern 1984, 9–15; Sim 1987; West 2000, xi–xv). Young America took the not-so-obvious next step of using puns to patriotic effect. On the one hand, puns were funny. Young Americans believed that a people so blessed as to inhabit such a vast territory had a naturally broad capacity for humor (West 2000, xi). We the people must be inclined to pun. On the other hand, puns played with words just enough to make Standard English better fit native conditions. Puns could even result in new words for a new nation, which turned them into an important vehicle for the much sought-after cultural independence from Britain (Jones 1845; West 2000, 3–11).¹

Yet Young American puns were not just national in their orientation, they were also place-specific. For all their talk of America’s mission, or of what one Young American called the country’s Manifest Destiny, members felt that New York typified what was great about the nation. New York was the only true metropolis on the eastern side of the Atlantic, and so it contained (the reasoning went) all of America’s exciting diversity in one location (Duyckinck 1840).² As Manhattan was thus an ideal site for puns, Young Americans accordingly practiced English as rabid Manhattanites. They grounded their discourse in New York street life, littering their speech with its landmarks, customs, and local jokes. Likewise, they punned using New York itself as a source of inspiration. Time and again, Young Americans employed New York references for the substance of their puns. Metropolitan puns presumably expressed what was most American about Young America.

This is not to say that all Young Americans punned alike. The Young American “movement”—which involved no more than a dozen individuals, and which broke ranks in 1851—regularly registered its internal political differences in the puns its members produced. A writer like Melville worked demotic discourse, which was at times disguised; he punned for “the people” in line with the egalitarian ideology of the Democratic Party’s rough-hewn standard bearer Andrew Jackson, who entered mainstream politics to become president in 1829. Melville’s puns, moreover, reflect the city’s pedestrian life. They turn on the city itself. Other Young Americans, whose members were to a man (the group admitted no women) well-educated sons of prominent families, would have to shed their aristocratic pretensions before they could pun with “the people” at the grassroots (Reynolds 1976; Widmer 1999, 111–20). Their puns lacked that freer speech, those popular idioms and vernacular expressions prized by a writer like Melville. Theirs was as an elite brand of old-school Knickerbocker humor practiced exclusively by and for New York’s upper crust. The upshot is that certain Young Americans never could settle their differences, and “politico-literary” disputes reappeared in their puns.

Those disputes, as has been suggested, came down to questions of class. Wordplay was all the rage in New York’s high society. Its merchant princes punned in order to signal their ties to England’s polite literary punsters (Miller 1956, 30–31). The working classes also punned. Manhattan’s nineteenth-century street speech—a lingua franca for the city’s day laborers—afforded multiple meanings for words that were more reliably straightforward outside the city’s limits. It was this linguistic ambivalence that put puns within reach of the masses. Like any Young American pun, democratic puns actually “turned” on Manhattan or rather on the anomalous ways in which locals used words. Yet instead of referencing well-to-do precincts uptown, such puns restricted themselves to those parts of the city’s downtown, like the Bowery, that were inhabited by “the people.” And in place of formal English, they took rough-and-tumble urban lingo as their starting point. Again, punning seems to have imparted some kind of class identity—but in this case, for the working, not the leisured, classes. Historian Sean Wilentz (1984, 3–19) sees antebellum New York as the primary testing ground for an emerging class consciousness in America. Against that historical backdrop, the process by which early forms of street slang infiltrated mainstream speech begins to emerge as the linguistic front of an ongoing cultural struggle, another way for “the people” to articulate their sense of solidarity. Plebeian punsters were frustratingly silent on the reasons behind their puns. Still, we might speculate that puns served in part as playful cover for a proto-proletarian subversion of the English language (Allen 1993, 3–6).³ Regardless, Young American puns remain valuable indices of populist impulses in both nineteenth-century American life and American speech.

While Young America pledged to bring domestic letters to “the people” (see “Poetry for the People” 1843),⁴ it favored an elite brand of pun. Young American author Cornelius Mathews is a case in point. Although not one of Young America’s original four, Mathews was the group’s first literary exemplar, the only early member to devote himself to writing full time. More important, Mathews left behind him a trail of “high-end” Young American puns that open a window into antebellum speech. As an ardent New Yorker, Mathews played with words in a heavy Manhattan accent. The forcefulness of his manner—a mannerism, really, in which puns attach themselves to the physical city—appears most notably in his Big Abel and the Little Manhattan (1845). Mathews puns throughout that work, ostensibly on behalf of all Americans, and yet his puns betray a certain disdain for New York’s working classes.

At the center of Mathews’s work is the place he indicates in his title. Big Abel begins in Manhattan at what was then the upper end of Third Avenue. We immediately meet the novel’s two main characters: “Little” Lankey Fogle, a descendant of the Indian chief who sold the island to the Dutch, and “Big” Abel Henry Hudson, a New York Dutchman. Both men have been battling the authorities in court for ownership of the island. They finally decide to divide Manhattan between them and proceed to do so on a weeklong walking tour of the city and its suburbs. All the while, readers receive a panorama of Manhattan. They also watch as Mathews puns from a host of tangible landmarks. Taking his cue from the city’s literal signs, he creates a narrative that is rich in New York wordplay.

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (1987, 63–64) defines wordplay as any one of a number of “types of linguistic deviation and incongruity” (cited in West 2000, xv), a definition that just barely accommodates Mathews’s puns. His puns do play with expected pronunciations and usages but in a straitlaced, conservative way—a method that is by no means “deviant” or “incongruous.” Some examples will help to illustrate. Early in Mathews’s allegory, his protagonists race past a few notable locations: City Hall, New York’s old Shot-Tower, and the working-class Bowery Theater. At the first of these, Mathews describes a “swarm” of “fly-away” boys pestering Lankey with goods for sale (3). At that time, fly-away was New York-speak for underaged peddlers, and so swarm appears to be a pun—a literal type of trash can humor—on peddlers who come across as pests. Street life again registers in the vernacularized hanging out encountered at the Bowery Theater (6). The term works as a pun in that “hanging out” might refer to either the flags hung out on display from the theater’s facade or the idlers just hanging about its front to stare at passersby.

At least on the surface, the spirit of these passages is in harmony with “the people.” Both instances find Mathews using new vernacular terms popular with New York natives. Moreover, he orchestrates his puns so that Manhattan itself remains verbally central. His wild plot runs all over the island; the city that his heroes inhabit exists before New York adopted its uniform grid in 1850. Crooked streets and blind alleys are still the order of the day, and so New York affords just the right kind of dynamic environment for a lively, urban attitude toward language (Allen 1993, 47–50, 228). In other words, by having his characters wander about an intricate space and in the meantime run up against all sorts of street-talking obstacles, Mathews establishes a fictional equivalent of New York wordplay. He calls this approach “Crooked and gad-about and whimsical” (3), referring specifically to local Doyer Street but also describing the necessary linguistic conditions for puns. In essence, he is mapping cultural geography onto speech.

Mathews gets into trouble by not sustaining the verbal antics that he advocates. In the earlier examples, Lankey has to fend off those pesky “fly-away” boys, a possible indication that “the people” and artists like Mathews are somehow at odds. And at the Bowery Theater, one of the city’s raucous venues for working-class recreation, the author’s protagonists rush by a group of what appear to be Bowery b’hoys, or local young toughs, who are “hanging out” in front. These puns might come from “the people,” but Lankey and Henry never actually stop and talk to those New Yorkers who contribute to Mathews’s wordplay.

Late in the novel, Mathews makes another attempt to pun with “the people,” this time in the form of an elaborate set piece along New York’s East River. There, our protagonists come across a cemetery where New York seeps into the speech stream:

They [Big Abel and the Little Manhattan] came to a cemetery; and along its walls of brick a choice company of boys were met, some at play, some throwing somersets against its side; some at marbles; some hop-scotching; among them all was one who, standing near the iron gate, wrought out with chalk, a name, letter by letter slowly.

(79)

Boys at play approximates Mathews’s wordplay, and the youngster’s “wrought” signature—an antebellum instance of graffiti—makes a possible pun on the rotting corpses underground. The passage is otherwise rife with meaning specific to Manhattan. First, by having that signature appear on the cemetery walls at all, Mathews indicates this is not New York’s potter’s field, where the city’s unidentified indigent lay. Second, given that the cemetery’s gate is made of wrought iron, wrought refers as well to the city’s iron foundries, which, along with other heavy industries, lined the banks of the very East River that forms the setting for this scene (Wilentz 1984, 112–14).⁵ Although the passage operates on several levels, in the end, it relies on Young America’s Manhattan. As before, however, Mathews’s pun misses its mark. The ironworks he mentions would have employed a number of the city’s skilled craftsmen, fair representatives of New York’s working classes. One suspects that stylized words like wrought seldom passed from their lips, or if they did, it was not for the sake of perpetrating puns.

The problem was endemic to Young Americans like Mathews. For all his talk of verbal “mirth,” he recoiled from city speech (72). Consider the climax of his protagonists’ walking tour of the city, their thanksgiving banquet in Union Square. No number of homonymic puns can save the scene from bombast:

The company all assembled; and what have we hear? A table spread … with every city growth, and every city dainty; piled high, stretched out, and deep with row on row. Take to! Take to! You are all welcome. Big Abel has a good heart for you all (for it is he that gives this feast; though the Little Manhattan in his poor way is one of the entertainers). A joyous time, a cheerful time …

(86)

Mathews’s dilemma is in attempting to celebrate city speech (using “hear” for here and “to” for two) while using the awkward, formal cadences of a gentleman. As a result, even his Young American puns—those with a New York orientation—come across as stilted, something for the urban aristocrat out on a lark. By trying to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Young American Puns: Antebellum Wordplay and Democratic Manhattan
• 2 Melville’s Little Historical Method
• 3 Antebellum Apathy: A Study of Indifference in Melville
• 4 “Those Occasional Flashings-Forth”: Melville and the Art of Understatement
• 5 Stuart Hall and the Whiteness of the Whale
• 6 Melville at the Movies
• Index