An Approach to Melville
RICHARD CHASE
LET's
SAY
that Melville was in certain demonstrable ways an art–
ist, that he succeeded in writing certain great books. This will keep
us from being too preoccupied with the Heroic Failure, the Inspired
but Frustrated American-the Wounded Titan who lies athwart
the vision of so many writers on Melville. Finally, of course, we must
consider Melville as the Wounded Titan: one part of his personality
is
like Ahab, the Hero with the wound and the harpoon, and like
Pierre, the Hero with the wound and the pen-turned-into-a-pistol.
But if we see Melville's works as a whole, a total concept of personal–
ity begins to emerge and of this totality Ahab and Pierre represent
only one of several parts, one person in a multiple personality which
also includes Pip, Ahab's cabin boy ; Bartleby, in the short story
called "Bartleby the Scrivener"; Benito Cereno; Bulkington in
M oby
Dick,
Jack Chase in
White jacket,
the Confidence Man, and Billy
Budd.
Our assumption that Melville was an artist cannot be fully
explored so long as we make up our minds about Melville's books from
the facts of his life, concluding, because he failed in certain ways,
that
therefore
his books are all magnificent botches.
It
is easy to
misrepresent these American creators and culture heroes who ·crack
up in a riptide of alcohol or in an apocalypse of chromium and
splintered glass or against the battering-ram head of the White
Whale. Melville had his crack-up, in his own Victorian way; and that
is our strongest image of him.' But we owe it to any writer whom we
profess to admire to try the experiment of looking at his books
objectively. To begin, nevertheless, with the wounded Hero.
The Maimed Man in the Glen.
Typee,
Melville's first novel, is not just the young author's South
Sea adventure story, separate in method and meaning from the later
"philosophical" novels (which in any case are not philosophical in
any strict sense of the word, but, rather, symbolic and allegorical ) .
