Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies

Cody Marrs opens Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies with a pointed answer to the predictable questions raised by the study of beauty under the conditions of the present: how to speak of beauty during a time of pandemic, war, climate change, and pervasive inequality? Rather than an inappropriate evasion of suffering or an alienating aestheticization of violence, Marrs argues, beauty—as Herman Melville revealed and engaged it in his work—instead offers a means of confronting suffering, violence, and injustice. Across Melville's prose and poetry, beauty is woven together with pain and violence, never as negation or compensation, but as a corollary and counterbalance. From the terrible beauty of the white whale to the crush of the handsome sailor's fist, Melville reveals how specific forms of beauty are bound to terror and pain because all these experiences are outgrowths of life itself. What Melville finds in beauty is the fundamental experience of life as mixture, impermanence, and non-sovereignty. Beauty undoes and disperses the autonomy of selves as surely as it does the distinctions of nature and art, philosophy, and aesthetics. And as Marrs demonstrates over this brisk and bracing book, such an understanding of beauty—at once philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic—not only revises critical accounts of Melville's work; it also offers a model for literary criticism more broadly, one that “reconceptualizes beauty in ways that are of the utmost relevance to emerging discussions about citizenship, ecology, personhood, race, sexuality, and ethics” (xi).Anchored in meticulous close readings of three texts—Melville's final two volumes of poetry, Timoleon and Weeds and Wildings, and Moby-Dick—the book unfolds three distinct forms of beauty: ancient beauty, floral beauty, and appalling beauty, respectively. In each chapter, Marrs shows how these iterations of beauty all reveal the diverse and distinct ways that Melville revised the aesthetic theories of Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and others to explore beauty most fundamentally as an experience of non-sovereignty. In “Ancient Beauty in Timoleon,” Marrs examines Melville's perennial interest in the art, architecture, and histories of ancient Greece, Rome, and the Mediterranean as “one of his major philosophico-aesthetic modes.” Antiquity is “at once a style, a way of thinking, and an interpretive framework” (27) through which Melville explored forms of combination and mixture against pervasive nineteenth-century myths of classical purity. Closely reading the poems of Melville's most eclectic book, which Marrs describes less as a single volume than as a study in mixed contrasts, Marrs reveals how Melville mingles human acts and nonhuman forces to propose art itself as a form of nature, as in his poem “Art”: In placid hours well-pleased we dreamOf many a brave unbodied scheme.But form to lend, pulsed life create,What unlike things must meet and mate[. . .] (qtd. on 41)The effect of this blending is an experience of “pulsed life” given material form, one that pulls us out of ourselves to “join us to the world” (48). In “Floral Beauty in Weeds and Wildings,” Marrs shows how the experience that Melville details in “Art” is not limited to the ruins of Athens and Rome but can be found among the humblest of botanical forms. Marrs reads Melville's least characteristic and most understudied work as “Melville's Calamus” (72), and he details the myriad forms of common beauty that pulse with life and eros and dissolve all egotism across poems that dwell on bluebells, clover, roses, daisies, and chipmunks. But rather than yielding a capacious, Whitmanesque personality, Marrs suggests, these poems may offer the clearest performance of what Sharon Cameron, in Impersonality (2007), first identified as Melville's philosophy of the impersonal: “Like a series of vines, the poems in Weeds and Wildings wrap around the idea that the self is a collective formation that inheres less in individualized thoughts than in shared experiences and entanglements” (58). This is Melville's philosophy of life, in which beauty is an experience “so widely distributed and radically non-hierarchical” (59) that it cannot be thought of in aesthetic terms alone. Melville's beauty is ethical, political, and, most of all, it is a philosophy. Following Cameron through Melville's readings of Arthur Schopenhauer late in his life, Marrs shows how Melville responded to Schopenhauer's account of inescapable suffering through his attention to beauty as a vital part of what grounds “the metaphysical identity of all beings” (65), extending this insight to assert that both the creation and experience of art belong to human and nonhuman worlds alike.The capacity of nonhuman creatures to make and experience beauty is, of course, an insight that lies at the center of Melville's most important work, which Marrs reserves for his final chapter, “Appalling Beauty in Moby-Dick.” By reading Melville's books against chronology in this way, Marrs shows how persistently the problem of beauty's entanglement with terror, violence, and suffering preoccupied Melville for forty years. He writes, “At their core, terror and beauty are different versions of the same experience: feeling the self dissolve as you come under the sway of someone or something else. Moby-Dick asks, What should one do with such experiences?” (79). What Ahab does, of course, is rage against that dissolution, separating himself into a violent and untenable individuality and blinding himself to “whale beauty.” The appalling beauty of the whale is what Ishmael experiences on first seeing that the monster Ahab has promised is instead both an artist and a form of art himself—“powerful, alluring, intricately patterned, and capable of eliciting a wide range of ideas and emotions” (81). The capacity to elicit and experience such beauty “anchors the book's moral architecture” (86) as well as its philosophy of life's radical entanglement. Tracing the book's recurrent metaphor of weaving as the very image of Melville's “philosophico-aesthetic mode” throughout Moby-Dick (80), Marrs demonstrates how essential it is for critics to recognize the inseparability of Melville's philosophy from the patterns and forms of his aesthetic project. With this, Marrs offers an important corrective to scholarship that seeks Melville's philosophy in the content of his writing, rather than in the effect and experience of his densely allusive, tightly braided prose and verse.Indeed, by prioritizing effects and experiences of literary aesthetics in his critical methodology, Marrs makes a forceful case for a pragmatist literary criticism, which he outlines in a brief postscript to the book. American literary studies formed as a field around cultural history rather than aesthetics, and it has long retained a particular distrust of beauty as a category of valuation and analysis. But by drawing on the insights of American pragmatists like John Dewey, who defined criticism as the education of aesthetic perception, Marrs both proposes and beautifully models a critical practice that “participates in that creation of ‘pulsed life’ by recovering the myriad ways in which literature elicits curiosity, passion, recognition, joy, and surprise” (114)—without losing its capacity to engage ethically and politically in the world.