Early Modern Poetics in Melville and Poe

Memory, Melancholy, and the Emblematic Tradition

William E. Engel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138261631
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317146858
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Bringing to bear his expertise in the early modern emblem tradition, William E. Engel traces a series of self-reflective organizational schemes associated with baroque artifice in the work of Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe. While other scholars have remarked on the influence of seventeenth-century literature on Melville and Poe, this is the first book to explore how their close readings of early modern texts influenced their decisions about compositional practice, especially as it relates to public performance and the exigencies of publication. Engel's discussion of the narrative structure and emblematic aspects of Melville's Piazza Tales and Poe's "The Raven" serve as case studies that demonstrate the authors' debt to the past. Focusing principally on the overlapping rhetorical and iconic assumptions of the Art of Memory and its relation to chiasmus, Engel avoids engaging in a simple account of what these authors read and incorporated into their own writings. Instead, through an examination of their predisposition toward an earlier model of pattern recognition, he offers fresh insight into the writers' understandings of mourning and loss, their use of allegory, and what they gained from their use of pseudonyms.

Chapter 1
Melville’s Melancholy Landscapes

Brooding there, in his infernal gloom, though nothing but a castaway sailor in canvas trousers, this man was still a picture, worthy to be painted by the dark, moody hand of Salvator. In any of that master’s lowering sea-pieces, representing the desolate crags of Calabria, with a midnight shipwreck in the distance, this Jackson’s would have been the face to paint for the doomed vessel’s figurehead, seamed and blasted by lightening.

—Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage (1849)

Conventions of symbolic expression—such as emblem, metaphor, and allegory—are as much a part of everyday speech as they are of literary language. The ways they are used, however, and attitudes toward their relative effectiveness in communicating one’s ideas are neither constant nor uniform. Studies in the history of rhetoric and documentable changes in aesthetic assumptions as pertain to literary style indicate that something happened to allegory over the centuries, especially where issues of mortality are concerned.1 Whether or not it is a result of a crisis of faith as some Reformation scholars have suggested,2 a detectable shift can be demonstrated regarding how allegory carried out its function of inversion, of using one thing to stand for another.3 Zeroing in on the traits and characteristics of baroque allegory will give us a basis for assessing what exactly Melville accomplished by virtue of having exhumed and reanimated this symbolic form of expression—often, as we shall see, with grotesque and uncanny results. My ensuing discussion of Melville’s appropriation of certain elements of style designated as “baroque” is grounded in René Wellek’s sensible warning:

One must acknowledge that all stylistic devices may occur at almost all times. … Much better chances of success attend the attempts at defining baroque in more general terms of a philosophy or a world-view or even merely emotional attitude toward the world. … One must admit that stylistic devices can be imitated very successfully and that their possible original expressive function can disappear. They can become, as they did frequently in the baroque, mere empty husks, decorative tricks, craftsman’s clichés.4

The activity of recycling representative baroque tropes and commonplaces on the part of writers of the mid-nineteenth century, such as Melville and Poe, bears comparison to mid-seventeenth-century essayists who reassembled the building blocks of classical rhetoric—sententiae and exempla, memorable sayings and deeds—to achieve different ends from how they were used in the books from which they were filched. Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is a good case to consider in this regard both owing to the transparent way it partakes of just this practice and also because Melville looked steadily to Burton as a model.

Recent studies in Burton’s textualization of melancholy have brought to light various methodical traces of the underlying plan governing the absorption of scholarly learning.5 Douglas Trevor has argued that “in the Anatomy, prose style itself ventriloquizes cacophony, authenticating the professed melancholy of the author while also freeing him to say whatever he wants, however he wants to say it.”6 Behind these gestures of calculation we can see, Trevor continues, “a discerning, adept author: one who is well-read and hence familiar with the kinds of discursive possibilities offered by books.” The same can be said of Melville, but especially so in the light of his own ventriloquization of the layering of sententious commonplaces typical of baroque literary artifice that reached its apogee in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, a work with which, as is seen in what follows, Melville was intimately familiar. Indeed, as Samuel Otter has observed, “Melville combines the encyclopedic form and extravagant rhetoric of the literary anatomy with nineteenth century ideological critique. … Melville performs anatomies of anatomies. He tests the limits of analysis and critique.”7

In speaking of the encyclopedic form and other typical features of thought and style that baroque polymaths such as Robert Burton and Thomas Browne inherited from the medieval grammarians and which Melville, after his own fashion, imitated, it should be mentioned that the terms baroque and Renaissance used in this investigation are not to be taken either as an implicit championing or indictment of periodization in literary criticism. Rather, they are used as a convenient way to continue the dialogue about literary style using the terms in which, historically, it has been cast and carried out. A recent continuation of this use of the term in literary discussions can be found, for example, in Robert Alter’s argument that the King James Bible “is a strong thread” in Melville’s prose that is freely intertwined with Shakespeare, Milton, and “the English Baroque prose writers.”8 Along these same lines, Jonas Barish wisely cautioned that the energy expended at differentiating such terms “has only compounded confusion and darkened counsel.”9 Judith Anderson, likewise, invokes the practices of writers such as Spenser and Donne “as points of reference on a linguistic map of Renaissance England.”10 Such distinctions, she reminds us, are “indeed, have to be heuristic. There is no such ‘thing’ as a ‘period.’ Such reifications are fictive” (6).11

Recourse to aphoristic “turns of phrase” typical of early modern practices (as the etymology of the word trope implies) was a constant source of inspiration to Melville. He looked back steadily to baroque literary artifice so thoroughly that, as C. A. Patrides has argued, “for a time, indeed, his imitation of Browne’s style bordered on ventriloquism.”12 Further, Melville’s stylistic eccentricities, which throughout his literary career take him from the world of realistic descriptions to “symbolic thresholds,” are rooted in his “discovery of Rabelais, Robert Burton, and Sir Thomas Browne.”13 Robert Alter has characterized what he terms “the astonishing stylistic achievement of Moby-Dick” to be the result of Melville’s having found “rich stylistic veins to mine in the English literature of the seventeenth century.”14 And so, given Melville’s well-known affinity for literature of the period, it is not surprising to note how often he applied to his own tales the dominant themes and techniques associated with Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.15

For Burton, as for Melville, melancholy was both a topic worthy of literary exposition as well as a physiological condition with corresponding psychological effects. Neal Tolchin has speculated further in this regard that “Melville’s stylistic experimentation relates to the influence of an obstructed but urgent grief. To render his voice fluid to the conflicts that surrounded the memory of his father, he tried to break through both the forms of Victorian American fiction and the ideologies implicit in them.”16 As a pathological condition, then, it is impossible to separate effect from cause when melancholy figures into one’s writing. As both a theme and also a motive for writing in the early modern period, melancholy materialized in terms of an essayist’s effort to write sensibly about a world which was recognized ultimately as defying worldly sense. Essayists like Burton and Browne rose to this challenge and, in an effort to be faithful to this attempt at rendering an authentic understanding of the nature of their subject as well as their design for presenting it, purposefully left traces in the structure of the work that reflected or otherwise hinted at this subtle point.

Morris W. Croll observed as much in his discussion of Montaigne, Burton, Pascal, and Browne who were, he argues, keenly aware that:

an idea separated from the act of experiencing it is not the idea that was experienced. … The ardor of its conception in the mind is a necessary part of its truth; and unless it can be conveyed to another mind in something of the form of its occurrence, either it has changed into some other idea or it has ceased to be an idea, to have any existence whatever except as a verbal one.17

Croll’s insight into the seventeenth-century drive to approximate something of the immediacy and authenticity of one’s “experienced” ideas is absolutely fundamental to my conceptualization of what Melville is going for when he veers into the diction, digressions, and tropes typical of baroque literary artifice. The interplay of melancholy and the problems attending this aspect of literary production in general is central to Melville’s attitude toward and his self-conscious use of an aesthetic of chiasmus, broadly conceived as a viable philosophy of composition. More specifically, for Melville, the chiastic turn initially takes the form of looking back to earlier texts and models of texts—and even memories of and fantasies about those texts—and then situating them with respect to his own resonant literary “sketches.” This term, borrowed from the visual arts, is suggestive of tentativeness, a quick and hastily rendered drawing in hope of bringing out and conveying something of the movement and life of the subject being depicted.

Precedent for this recourse to “sketches” in the American literary tradition can be found in Washington Irving’s Sketch Book, published serially throughout 1819–20 and then released as a book in its own right.18 Moreover, this work likewise is linked to a pseudonymous author—in this case Geoffrey Crayon, a nom de plume (and one incidentally involving the very tool required for sketching or drawing) that Irving continued to use throughout his literary career. Two of the more popular tales, “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” are doubly pseudonymous, being attributed to Irving’s earlier alter ego, Diederick Knickerbocker, and included in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Given Melville’s familiarity with Irving’s humorous method of engaging the reader in authorial games,19 and taking into account the importance of Burton in Melville’s project, it is worth noting that the epigraph to Irving’s Sketch Book is a passage from the Anatomy of Melancholy: “I have no wife nor children, good or bad, to provide for. A mere spectator of other men’s fortunes and adventures, and how they play their parts; which methinks are diversely presented unto me, as from a common theatre or scene.”

Melville’s ludic ruse of retreating to a position of confessing incompleteness recalls the early modern rhetorical gesture familiarly known as the “inexpressibility topos,” one to which he resorted time and again, whether with Ishmael’s “cetological System standing thus unfinished” and characterized as “a draught of a draught” (MD, XXXII, 195–6),20 or Salvator R. Tarnmoor’s apology for not being able adequately to frame in language the absolute forlornness of the Encantadas. Moreover, by nominating each of the 10 installments making up the “The Encantadas” as a sketch (another word for “draught”), Melville evokes the pictorial analogue to supplement in other terms what words fail to convey. This reference to sketches, especially as pertains to the picturesque, is an important consideration not only for this magazine piece but also as regards Melville’s approach to representational schemes more generally in his writing throughout his career.21 Closely linked to his recourse to this figural conceit, which brings into play the visual register of thought, Melville relied also on chiastic patterning to suggest an implicit organizational scheme underlying and animating the 10 sketches comprising “The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles” (1854), as is discussed in detail in what follows (Table 1.1).

For all of these reasons “The Encantadas” is ideally suited to serve as a case study of Melville’s philosophy of composition, even though, as observed in the Introduction, this piece may seem at first glance unusual among Melville’s works owing to its overtly thematized resistance to formal unity.22 On closer examination, this apparently discontinuous text can be seen as a distillation or refining of the compositional method used in Moby-Dick, which is a more sustained and sprawling effort than “The Encantadas” at weaving together emblematic vignettes set against mnemonic backdrops and highlighted by means of intense dramatic spotlights. Like The Piazza Tales (in which “The Encantadas” later would feature as a constitutive part); and like Melville’s volumes of poetry (most notably Battle-Pieces, John Marr, and Timoleon), “T...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Stylistic Choices and Intellectual Armature
• 1 Melville’s Melancholy Landscapes
• 2 Poe’s Mirrored Memory Palaces
• Conclusion: Reclaiming Irredeemable Loss
• Appendix: “The Raven,” Richmond Weekly Examiner, September 25, 1849, col. 4-5.
• Bibliography
• Index