The Confidence-Man, Herman Melville's last novel, was a critical and commercial failure when it was published in 1857. Critics panned it as an unreadable book. The reviewer in the New York Dispatch finished it “wondering what on earth the author has been driving at.” The London Literary Gazette called it “a book professing to inculcate philosophical truths through the medium of nonsensical people talking nonsense.” The London Illustrated Times commented: 'We can make nothing of this masquerade, which, indeed, savours very much of a mystification. We began the book at the beginning, and, after reading ten or twelve chapters, some of which contained scenes of admirable dramatic power, while others presented pages of the most vivid description, found, in spite of all this, that we had not yet obtained the slightest clue as to the meaning (in case there should happen to be any) of the work before us.'

Sexuality is a concept we owe to Melville's time. As the theorist Michel Foucault has argued, prior to some point in the later nineteenth century, there were no sexual identities, but only sexual acts that could be committed by anyone. What sexuality does is to associate acts and “tastes” with identity, to say, for instance, putting it simply, that there are those who prefer the same sex and those who prefer the other sex, and that these “preferences”are crucial to the construction of the self. The effect of the creation of this binary of sexuality is at once an enlargement of possibility and the assurance of an identity that may serve to create community, as well as an augmentation of the power of social discipline through the creation of manageable, confinable groups. Melville's career coincides with these developments, both reflecting them and participating in their elaboration. The Melville of the earliest travel writings still operates largely in a realm of undifferentiated sexuality, while his final work, Billy Budd, is an enactment of a drama figuring the exclusion and execution of the homosexual.

“He” in James's parable of authors and readers is novelist Hugh Vereker, “I” an unnamed young critic who gives himself to deciphering what Vereker calls “the organ of life” in his work (James 234). "A triumph of patience, of ingenuity" (James 231), Vereker's "figure in the carpet" is discoverably present in his novels, and among James's objects in the story is the professed one of rebuking a criticism that "is apt to stand off from the intended sense of things, from such finely-attested matters, on the artist's part, as a spirit and a form, a bias and a logic, of his own."

This essay is not, strictly speaking, about Melville's reception in the nineteenth century, but rather about the discourses constituting that reception and what those discourses have to say about certain fundamental aspects of antebellum culture and Melville's relation to them. Labor is the crucial category which organizes readers' responses to Melville as well as Melville's replies to his readers. I should like to begin with two brief examples that illustrate the symbiotic relations between labor and reception in Melville's writing: the first, an unsigned Boston Post review (though we know Charles Gordon Greene to be the author) of White-Jacket (1850), and the second, a letter written by Melville to his father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw. Greene's review questions Melville's ability to discuss naval discipline and the Articles of War, and of particular interest is the language he uses when denying Melville's credentials as a cultural critic: “The mind as well as the body is subject to the 'Division of Labor,' and, in most cases, those gifts and acquirements which enable one to produce a good romance unfit him for the calm, comprehensive and practical consideration of questions of jurisprudence or policy.” Here White-Jacket is attacked on the grounds that Melville's labors as author not only should be, but emphatically are, subject to precisely those divisions of labor that pertain to any other mode of labor, literary or otherwise.

In his first eleven years, Herman Melville lived in an environment in which slavery was being gradually legislated out of existence, its shadow receding across New York State. Despite the movement to abolish slavery, however, denials of freedom less severe but no less real were much in evidence. There was, for that matter, little indication that racial equality was being considered by northern whites, most of whom did not oppose southern slavery.

Melville was born in August 1819, a time when slave music and dance enjoyed brilliantly ironic expression in public and private, North as well as South. In New York City and across the state, slaves were observed dancing and making music on street corners and in marketplaces, as if preparing for the Pinkster Festival that, once a year in May for several days and at times in multiple locations, engaged the attention of white spectators. As in expressions of black culture in America generally, participants in festivals revealed but a portion of their art because it was dangerous to communicate clear signs of African spirituality.

In the spring of 1851, Melville wrote to his Pittsfield neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne, pretending to review his new novel:

This witty letter develops into Melville's famous characterization of Hawthorne as the tragic hero who “says NO! in thunder, but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes” (186). Melville's opening, however, lingering as it does over the household images the novel inspired, suggests his acute awareness of Hawthorne's private side.

This collection is both a handbook to Melville and a provocation. As expected of a Cambridge Companion, it provides readers with comprehensive analyses of the major writings and motifs of a canonized master of world literature. At the same time, this volume has been conceived in a Melvillean spirit of suspicion and revision. Accordingly, it is animated by a dialectical interplay between traditional and newer approaches to Melville. This is a particularly opportune time for such a volume. Over the past two decades or so, the “American Renaissance” has been dramatically reconceived by feminist, African-American, new historical, and other critical approaches. Such key works as Michael Rogin's Subversive Genealogy (1983), Waichee Dimock's Empire for Liberty (1989), and Eric Sundquist's To Wake the Nations (1993) are but three of the many books that have offered new ways of thinking about the ideological and political implications of Melville's art.There have also been major developments in more traditional, archivally based Melville scholarship. Recent discoveries of Melville family papers (now at the New York Public Library), the publication of such important works as John Bryant's Melville and Repose (1993), Stanton Garner's The Civil War World of Herman Melville (1993), several volumes in the nearly completed Northwestern-Newberry edition of Herman Melville, and biographies by Laurie Robertson-Laurant (1996) and Hershel Parker (1996) have helped us to make better sense of Melville's compositional practices, aesthetics, sources, biography, and relation to contemporaneous literary debates.

TWO MOBY-DICKS: LEGEND AND FORM

Legend has it that there are two Moby-Dicks. The story varies, depending upon who tells it, but the facts behind this theory of composition are constant. Returning home in February 1850 from London, where he had peddled White-Jacket, Melville contemplated basing his sixth book on the neglected Revolutionary War hero Israel Potter. He had retrieved Potter's autobiography from a London bookstall and thought a narrative of the luckless patriot (like that of alienated White-Jacket) would allow him to question democratic hero worship and revolution itself. But the heated events of 1848 might have persuaded him to avoid politics for a while. He put Potter and the seeds of his revolutionary critique aside and turned to what he told his British publisher, Richard Bentley, would be nothing more than “a romance of adventure founded upon certain wild legends in the Southern Sperm Whale Fisheries.”

Melville began this new book by writing out of himself. Still, he was quick to invent. Although he could describe the ports of Manhattan and New Bedford from personal experience, he had never been to Nantucket, so he made his own Nantucket. And even though he would be on more familiar "ground" when his narrative took to sea, he knew enough about whaling to know that he did not know it all: not its history, science, practices, or lore. Inevitably, he needed facts. He got himself a library card, checked out William Scoresby's tome on whaling, and began mixing fact and fancy. Or, as he put it on May Day 1850 to Richard Henry Dana, Jr., this "strange sort of book" would pull "poetry" out of "blubber." Given "the nature of the thing," it must itself be as "ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves" (Correspondence, 162). Moreover, "the thing" was already halfway done, so that when he wrote Bentley on June 27, he said it would be ready for publication by late autumn. The "thing" was Moby-Dick.

In the first phase of his career, the extended fiction from Typee (1846) through Pierre (1852), Melville is fascinated with “race.” This fascination animates his literary practice, fueling his rhetorical excess and provoking questions about identity and intersubjectivity that he pursues across his texts. Melville inquires into the science and politics of “race,” the constitution and the boundaries of human bodies, and the deep structures of identity. In a remarkable series of texts excessively linking bodies, discourse, and ideology, Melville examines the ways in which human bodies have become written and overwritten with racial meaning.

Melville offers neither a transcendent critique nor a symptomatic recapitulation of racial beliefs. In his fiction, he insists that this is a false choice and that racial assumptions, presumptions, and investments are not so portable or divestible. In Melville's representations, individuals think and feel the strange and often destructive ways they do not because they are benighted or deluded, but because their responses have a history, give definition, fulfill needs. Melville is critical but does not claim, or rather comes to realize that he cannot sustain, the privilege of an outsider's position. Rather than dismiss contemporary beliefs about race, nation, and self, he acknowledges his attractions to those beliefs and examines their sources and sway. He provides an inside sense of the power of racial ideology, its satisfactions and incarcerations. Melville both inhabits and manipulates contemporary racial discourse, giving a material sense of its structures and functions.

We have arrived at a contemplative moment in our relation with the least containable or, to use Melville's own image, most Vesuvian of classic American writers. One sign of this reflective mood is that each contributor to this book takes seriously the word “companion” in its title - a word at odds with the sort of performative criticism in which the literary text becomes a stage upon which the critic feels entitled, even required, to mount a show.

The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, by contrast, is conceived and written in a spirit of deference to, though hardly uncritical reverence for, its subject. We hope the result is a book worth consulting, disputing, and - if it does its job - soon supplanting. One reason a work of this sort may be useful at the present time is that the conditions for thinking about Melville have changed substantially from what they were even a decade ago. Seven years past the centenary of his death, virtually all his writings, including his letters and journals, have now reached print (or are soon to be published) in the Newberry Library-Northwestern University Press edition, which is justly recognized as one of the monuments of modern textual scholarship.

In her Introduction to a 1994 collection of critical essays, Myra Jehlen writes of how in America “Melville has remained canonical through the whole period of canon-busting.” According to Jehlen, new styles of literary evaluation may have found different things to admire in Melville, but they have not sought to devalue his central “importance or brilliance.” Melville has not, however, enjoyed a similar prominence within the British critical domain as it has developed professionally since the Second World War. Whereas Hawthorne and, to an even greater extent, Henry James have evoked a great deal of admiration and explication within British circles, engagement with Melville's more bulbous and erratic texts has remained spasmodic. My purpose in this essay is to suggest reasons for this comparative neglect, and to suggest how some of this discomfort may arise not so much from any simple antagonism on Melville's part toward the British tradition, but from the way he interacts with it in a perverse and parodic manner, turning its apparently legitimating structures inside out.

Readers of Melville cannot help but notice the conjunction of generic innovation, anthropological encounter, and theological quandary that characterizes his fiction. Yet when addressing themselves to the question of Melville and religion, critics have largely viewed these domains separately, agreeing that Melville's fiction is pervasively characterized by his battle, or “quarrel,”with a dying Christianity but that his interests in anthropological encounter and aesthetic experimentation are present because Christianity is absent or, at most, merely vestigial. At war with Christian theology and practice, his literature constitutes an antireligious domain of subversive indictment against a god who has failed man and whose absence has generated a modern voice of recrimination and alienation: “doth not Scripture intimate,”queries the narrator in Pierre, “that He holdeth all of us in the hollow of His hand? - a Hollow, truly!” What is new in Melville is new because it is not religion.

Melville is justly said to be nineteenth-century America's leading poet after Whitman and Dickinson, yet his poetry remains largely unread, even by many Melvillians. Most major studies of premodern American poetry have given him short shrift; the recent Columbia History of American Poetry limits itself to a few passing references. The old impression persists that Melville was “a poet of shreds and patches”who never mastered the art. Such is the curse of being only second best. Among American premoderns, next to Whitman, Melville wrote the best series of Civil War lyrics, Battle- Pieces (1866), and the second-best long poem, Clarel (1876), which indeed is the great Victorian epic of faith and doubt. Only Emily Dickinson surpassed Melville in her development of a gnomic, intellectualized rhetoric that gained intensity by working within the confines of rhymed verse while bending those forms to the limit. Most tellingly, Melville's poetry was second best to his own best prose fiction, which also came first chronologically. Hence it is all too easy to type Melville as “essentially” a prose writer who wrote verse with the left hand.

What does give the classic Russian novel its power over the imagination? There have been many attempts to define its unique features and to account for its rise to pre-eminence in such unpromising soil. Underlying most analyses is the perception that Russian literature achieved its stature in a dialectic (or dialogue) with Western European literary traditions. Bakhtin has provided a theoretical model for this process in a shift from regarding the Western tradition as “authoritative discourse” to regarding it as “inwardly persuasive discourse”; in other words from a mental attitude which saw Western traditions as providing unsurpassable achievements which could only be imitated or rejected, to one which assimilated them to native Russian experience as part of a process of growth-in-dialogue: a complex dance in which the partners now lightly touch, now embrace and now draw apart, at times melting into a common movement and at times loudly asserting their difference.

The first two great satirical novelists in Russian literature are Nikolai Gogol (1809-52) and Mikhail Saltykov (1826-89), who wrote under the pen-name of Shchedrin. Many major Russian writers, from Aleksandr Pushkin through Lev Tolstoi and Fedor Dostoevskii to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, have used satirical depiction in their novels, but it could never be said that satire is characteristic of their work as a whole. It is Gogol and Shchedrin who between them set the points of reference for the Russian satirical novel.

Of course satire existed in Russian literature before Gogol, but not in the form of a novel of European stature.' An important element in the development of the Russian satirical novel was the picaresque tradition. In its classic form, which originated in Spain in the mid sixteenth century and in the following centuries spread throughout Europe, the picaresque novel is the retrospective autobiography of a rogue, the picaro.

From the very beginnings of modern Russian literature, Russia's writers have consciously dealt with politics. Following Peter the Great's death in 1725, there was a danger that his modernizing reforms would be frustrated by conservative forces. Consequently in 1729 Feofan Prokopovich who had been a fervent panegyrist for Peter, proposed to his younger protigt Antioch Kantemir, a writer of satires against the anti-Petrine reactionaries, that they should consider themselves members of a “Learned Watch” dedicated to the defense of the westernizing reforms. Assuming a distinct ideological position, these Russian writers were not content with being mere reflectors of the political scene, but chose to play an active part in the political process. In future, this had serious consequences. By placing themselves close to the seat of autocratic power, writers inevitably encouraged the Russian autocrats to seek to control their production and their lives. At the close of the century, the minor writer I. F. Bogdanovich could even propose that writers be dressed in uniform and given ranks commensurate with the distinction of their service to the state.' The strict discipline implied by that “uniform” has been present throughout most of the history of modern Russian literature; its links with politics have made its writers subject to the control of censorship and to the sanctions of exile, imprisonment or even execution.

Certainly since the time of Theocritus, and doubtless long before that, weary city dwellers have sought - or at least thought about seeking - escape from their noisy, bustling, confining urban world into the tranquillity, spaciousness, and presumed leisure of the countryside. In such moods nature generally appears to them in her most benign aspects: warm but not hot, green, fertile, vivifying, motherly. The country resident, on the other hand, may feel an equally powerful impulse to escape: from the isolation, boredom, discomforts, and dangers of rural life to the security, social connectedness, and relative cultural richness of the town, where people can collectively defend themselves against a nature often not at all benign, as well as against less than benign fellow creatures.

The anti-urban urge has been a theme of literature almost since literature has existed at all. The Western tradition offers a long procession of passionate pastoralists, from Theocritus and Vergil down to Rousseau and beyond. Despite the fact that only a tiny minority of them actually lived in cities, the Russians absorbed the pastoral tradition enthusiastically if belatedly, themselves producing such elegant poetic celebrations of the bucolic life as Gavrila Derzhavin's delightful idyll “To Evgenii; Life at Zvanka” (1807).