AFTER HIS JUVENILE, unsuccessful efforts at ekphrasis in the “Fragments from a Writing Desk,” Melville did not attempt to use this literary technique for the next ten years. For a substantial part of that time, he was working as a schoolteacher, a “boy” on a merchant ship, and a sailor aboard whalers and naval vessels. Returning to shore in 1845, he began immediately to convert some of his experiences into imaginative novels that had a firm basis in fact. Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), and Mardi (1849) all used the conventional novelistic device of scenic setting with appropriate landscapes or seascapes, shipboard or jungle, native huts or calabooses. But in none of these did Melville link his scenic description with artworks or describe them as if they were works of art.
There are complex reasons for this neglect of what would become a valuable tool in his building of literary technique. He did not, as an apprentice author, know very much about the art analogy. Even as he wrote his first books, he was busy absorbing pictorial ism as part of his language of literary description, mostly by finding examples in the fiction and poetry that he was reading. When he had become familiar with its method and its manipulation of detail, he began using it confidently in Redburn during the summer of 1849. But another change could be seen in this new book, a change in his use of a narrator. In the first three novels, the first-person narrator, Tommo or Taji, was a rather breezy sort of person, an extrovert, an adventurer, an action-impelled and action-describing personage. In his fourth novel, he created a new type of personage, perhaps indicative of another side of his nature. Wellingborough Redburn might very well participate in actions, but he is essentially a sensitive, inward, bookish, thoughtful young man who survives to become a sensitive, inward, bookish, thoughtful, reminiscent older man capable of rendering his early experiences with the added advantage of hindsight, experience, and the ability to interpret, or to conceal interpretation of, what he has witnessed. The way of looking at the world changed from what it had been in the earlier books. Artistic, even painterly in his apprehension of shapes and tints, Redburn sees the world as artwork and so interprets it to the reader. Ishmael is this sort of character in Moby-Dick, and in Pierre and Clarel, both of which treat the protagonist from a third-person point of view, the pattern continues. Pierre Glendinning is youthful, sensitive to painting, sculpture, engravings, and architecture, and he is unprepared for the rigors of experience. Unlike Redburn and Ishmael, however, he does not survive to recapitulate and meditate upon all that happens to him. Clarel is another such character who finds the pilgrimage to Palestine his own Yale and Harvard and who is abandoned by his creator before he can reflect very much upon his recently gained experience of life and art and deliver himself of carefully considered opinions.
That Melville has not, in his first three novels, quite absorbed the dimensions and possibilities of the art analogy can be seen in his management of scenic description. A passage from Typee may make the distinction clear: “The long, measured, dirge-like swell of the Pacific came rolling along, with its surface broken by little tiny waves, sparkling in the sunshine. Every now and then a shoal of flying fish, scared from the water under the bows, would leap into the air, and fall the next moment like a shower of silver into the sea” (10). Something similar can be seen in the scenic writing in Mardi some three years later: “How changed the scene! Overhead a sweet blue haze distilling sunlight in drops. And flung abroad over the visible creation was the sun-spangled, azure, rustling robe of the ocean, ermined with wave crests; all else infinitely blue” (66). These are interesting, even excellent, examples of novelistic scenic description, a necessary part of a writer’s arsenal of literary devices. But they are not examples of ekphrasis, except incidentally as they qualify as “a description of anything.” There is no link to the world of art objects, and there is no attempt to make such a link. At best, Melville depends upon some lightly handled art allusions in his writing. In Typee, for instance, the reader encounters “monstrous imps that torment some of Teniers’ saints” (211), without a reference to a specific Teniers painting. In Omoo, “a folio volume of Hogarth” (310) is alluded to, again the barest of hints. In Mardi, Taji speaks of a picture into which “Gudin or Isabey might have thrown the blue rolling sea” and invokes the names of Wouverman and Claude to offer a clearer view, perhaps, of his picturable scene (42). But these scrappy beginnings leave the reader unprepared for the extensive and distinguished application of pictorialism in Redburn.
In some of its aspects, Redburn is another “sketch book,” its artist providing, as Washington Irving’s Geoffrey Crayon had done thirty years before, a “port folio filled with sketches.” Like Geoffrey, Redburn provides an introductory account of himself. Geoffrey is “fond of visiting new scenes, and observing strange characters and manners.” Redburn “frequently fell into long reveries about distant voyages and travels, and thought how fine it would be, to be able to talk about remote and barbarous countries” (5). In his discussion of the novel, Hershel Parker has noted a number of details from Irving’s book that Melville may have borrowed and remarks that Evert Duyckinck believed that Melville was influenced by the older writer (Redburn 327–28). Irving’s careful depiction of such an architectural masterpiece as Westminster Abbey, with its carved arches, columns, sepulchers, and monuments and, in particular, the tomb of Mrs. Nightingale, the work of Roubillac, forms an ideal model for ekphrasis—that is, pictorial writing linked carefully to a work of art. However, “Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.” is a young man of leisure while Redburn, the son of an impoverished gentleman, has to earn his way across the sea.
In the first chapter of Redburn, Melville takes great care to establish a reasonable basis for his protagonist’s fascination with the arts. Redburn, like Melville himself, grew up in a home well furnished with art objects, including oil paintings, engravings, portfolios of prints, and a considerable library that included many illustrated books (Gilman 177), but the Melville of 1849 knew more about the arts than Redburn. Living in New York since 1847, Melville had many opportunities to encounter the bustling art business of the city and to profit from all he saw, perhaps with limitations. As a result, the art young Redburn knows seems to be mostly French. The “oil paintings and rare old engravings” at his home come from the Paris that his father visited; two of the paintings, given the benefit of brief ekphrases, are sea scenes. Melville had developed considerably from his earlier generalized references to artists and paintings to a specificity in his description of a picture’s contents, layout, and color. A fishing boat “with three whiskerandoes in red caps,” “high French-like land in one corner,” and a sea in which the “waves were toasted brown” could be the work of Théodore Gudin, who painted such pieces as Return of the Fishermen (1827) and was one of the painters especially noticed in Mardi. The second painting in Redburn’s home is also subjected to a close scrutiny. It shows “three old-fashioned French men-of-war with high castles like pagodas, on the bow and stern, such as you see in Froissart.” A number of the paintings of Eugéne Isabey, another favorite Melville mentions in Mardi, would serve well as examples of the art he has young Redburn admiring. In contrast to the brown of the sea in the first picture, this one features “a bright-blue sea, blue as Sicily skies,” and the seaman’s point of view, still strong in Melville, emphasizes such details.1
There were ample opportunities for Melville to study French art in New York. In 1848 the French firm of Goupil, Vibert & Co. had established a gallery at 280 Broadway. The advertisements that Goupil ran in The Literary World demonstrated the company’s enterprise. Their “splendid gallery of paintings” included “works by Delaroche, Ary Scheffer, Muller, Landelle, Court, Mozin, Guet, Girarded [sic], Waldmuller, Groenland, Brochart, &c, &c, &c.” Goupil nevertheless had competition from other firms. At 353 Broadway, Williams & Stevens, “Importers and Dealers in English, French and German line and mezzotint engravings, lithographs, studies, views &c.,” also offered prints of works by Delaroche, Vernet, and other artists. William Colman, at 304 Broadway, had “many hundred fine paintings” of ancient and modern artists as well as “beautiful engravings of every variety of subject, many of which are equal if not superior to paintings.”2
After the details of the paintings, Redburn is excited by the portfolios of colored French prints in his home and enumerates hastily their partial contents. Sea pictures, rural scenes, and views of Versailles; natural history illustrations of rhinoceroses, elephants, and tigers; and “a great whale, as big as a ship, stuck full of harpoons, and three boats sailing after it as fast as they could fly” (6–7) are prominent stimuli for his visual imagination. But the central exhibit of the first chapter is a glass ship, “of French manufacture,” kept in a square glass case upon a special table in the sitting room of his home. This piece of naval sculpture, “the admiration of my father’s visitors in the capital” and “the wonder and delight of all the people of the village where we now resided,” receives a detailed ekphrasis that encompasses almost half of the first chapter and signals some of Redburn’s developing talents, his exactitude in matters of observation and memory, and his obvious appreciation of aesthetic values and visual symbolism in the details displayed in an art work. Dolphins and sea horses disport themselves about the glass ship as it plows through a heavy sea. Crew members are rendered imaginatively, and we are made to visualize the sailor in the foretop with “a coil of glass rigging” on his shoulder, the steward with a plate of glass pudding, a glass dog with a red mouth, and the captain with his glass cigar. The dust and down that have collected upon the piece for many years appear, to the young observer, to add a generally artistic effect to the little sculpture, in much the way that a general dirtying and darkening of a painting will change it and inspire an interpretation different from the one that the work in its original state might have excited. The ship does for Redburn what a work of art should do: it pleases his sense of order and beauty and arouses his curiosity beyond the limitations of its surface appearance. It offers a complete and satisfying aesthetic experience. Like any genuinely artistic work, the ship offers the imagination the opportunity to furnish force and action to the still and glassy object. It is capable of inspiring fear. The older man tells us that the boy, alarmed about the ship’s predicament, “used to be giving her up for lost and foundered every moment, till I grew older, and perceived that she was not in the slightest danger in the world” (9).
Redburn’s glass ship is usually treated as a symbol of the narrator’s trouble-some condition. William Dillingham sees it as a controlling image for the motif that he traces throughout the book, the boy’s hunger (An Artist 35–36). Rogin links the ship with Redburn’s voyage, “a sign not of the power Redburn will inherit from his father, but of the doom” (64). The glass ship is all of these things, but, far more than a symbol, it is an objet d’art, a sculptural masterwork available to eye and memory. It is the subject of Melville’s first fully realized ekphrasis, and he treats the pictorial events skillfully. Commentators upon the sister arts insist that detail is an element of crucial importance in painting and sculpture; Ruskin points out that “the limit of detail is—visibility.”3 The little ship’s glass construction mimics reality, as “masts, yards, and ropes were made to resemble exactly the corresponding parts of a real vessel that could go to sea.” Its port-holes and black guns and even its crew members “were all made of glass, as beautiful little glass sailors as any body ever saw, with hats and shoes on, just like living men, and curious blue jackets with a sort of ruffle round the bottom” (Redburn 8). The sculptor detailed the mariners’ activities in the rigging or their chopping wood or preparing dinner. As Gilman has observed, there was a glass ship at the Melvill home that the boy Herman visited (38–39), and in his writing he calls upon his marvelous visual memory to recreate it as Redburn is led from description of the artwork to his meditation upon its significance. He has looked at the ship as a boy, but he speaks of it as a man, unsettled by his later life and experience: “We have her yet in the house but many of her glass spars and ropes are now sadly shattered and broken,—but I will not have her mended; and her figure-head a gallant warrior in a cocked-hat, lies pitching head-foremost down into the trough of a calamitous sea under the bows—but I will not have him put on his legs again, till I get on my own, for between him and me there is a secret sympathy” (9). The glass figurehead is both artwork and mirror image. Its calamity is a foreview of the calamitous life that Redburn is destined to live. The fact is, that even with the passage of time he has not quite regained his sea legs and cannot quite manage in the pitching, heavy sea of life. Having lost his youthful innocence, he has not yet gained the calm of experience and wisdom he has been seeking. The little work of art, the ship in the sitting room of his youth, epitomizes for him the lengthy and essentially fruitless struggle of his life up to the point when he relates his story. Changed, debilitated by the blows of time, the ship is an objective correlative for his own perilous and uncompleted journey, not only to Liverpool and London but also through years of life when “I found myself a sailor in the Pacific” (312). The episode of the glass ship offers an unusually clear idea of how Redburn’s aesthetic imagination reacts to and plays upon a specific art object.
Aboard ship, Redburn is sensitive to whatever is offered by way of art, and, like others of Melville’s sailors, he is impressed by figureheads and takes care to describe the one on the bow of the Highlander. It is a handsome piece, “a Highlander, ‘in full fig,’ with bright tartans, bare knees, barred leggings, and blue bonnet and the most vermilion of cheeks.” Redburn immediately personifies the figure, “game to his wooden marrow,” “standing at his post like a hero,” and “a veteran of many wounds of many sea-fights.” The piece has been repaired by a figurehead builder who mends it as he would an ancient sculpture, replacing a left leg and a nose and giving it a new paint job (116).
This cheerful ekphrasis of one of the important examples of marine art is prelusive to a much more difficult pictorial event in the novel, the depiction of the dying sailor Jackson as if he were the figurehead of a ship in some imagined painting:
Brooding there, in his infernal gloom, though nothing but a castaway sailor in canvas trowsers, 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-pictures, 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 figure-head, seamed and blasted by lightning. (275)
Looking at a man, Redburn sees a painting, a sort of reaction typical of his thought processes. But on his first encounter with Jackson, in the twelfth chapter of the novel, Melville’s description of the sailor’s appearance and manners resides entirely within the realm of conventional novelistic character portrayal. Redburn’s comment on Jackson’s “subtle, infernal looking eye” is a good example of this fictive convention. The eye “must have belonged to a wolf, or starved tiger,” it outdoes any glass eye for deadliness, and, as Redburn concludes, with Melville’s less-than-original novelistic emphasis, “it haunts me to this day” (57). This view of Jackson is certainly pictorial, but it is does not seem inspired by any picture by Salvator Rosa or indeed by any other painter. At this point in the narrative, the infernal Jackson has not struck Redburn so forcefully as to serve as the subject of an artistic conception.
However, in chapter 55, Jackson is “still a picture” and is now to be seen as a possible subject for Salvator Rosa. In this ekphrasis, which may contain elements from several Salvatorean paintings, Redburn’s sense of scale is allowed to veer from the panoramic to the close detail work of facial expression. An imaginary painting is put before the reader, and a human figure is placed in it and described as if he were a work of art. By this device, Melville introduces a sensitive allusion to the paintings of Salvator and awakens in the reader a whole repertory of responses to the kind of art that might be aroused by Salvator’s wild images of landscape and seascape, rocks, dead trees, banditti, and stressful scenes.
Melville could be sure that an allusion to Salvator would bring forth the expected reaction in a reader of the 1840s. The Neapolitan master (1615–1672) was extravagantly admired for a long time, from shortly after his death to about the middle of the nineteenth century. Ruskin led an attack upon Salvator in his first volume of Modern Painters (1843), but his lesson sank in slowly and at midcentury Salvator was still regarded as one of the greatest of painters, his work recognized and frequently mentioned.4 Art patrons in America frequently ordered copies of his paintings. Thomas Cole, among others, was urged to imitate his work. Engravings of his paintings were available for display and purchase. Melville could have seen some prints of Salvator’s works by the time he wrote Redburn, including Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, Banditti in a Desert, and Hagar and Ishmael as well as copies of paintings then in England, either at galleries like the Dulwich or in private collections. He would have had opportunities to see some originals when in 1849, after completing Redburn, he voyaged to England and the Continent. His journal of the voyage contains references to his seeing such “gems” as Titians, Claudes, Salvators, Murillos” (Journals 20, 298–99).
Salvator’s paintings were admired for their “dash” and colorful qualities in portraying wild and savage scenes, replete with rocks, gnarled trees, cataracts, lakes, castles, and a few well-placed and picturesque brigands. James Thomson, an eighteenth-century admirer, had such works in mind when writing “Whate’er Lorrain light touch’d with softening Hue, / Or savage Rosa dash’d, or learned Poussin drew.” It was that savagery, picturesquely roughening the ordinary sights of neat house and formal garden, that was most appreciated by those who loved Salvator’s art, and it was surely this aspect of his work that Melville had in mind when he gave himself the pseudonym of “Salvator Tarnmoor” for the magazine serialization of “The Encantadas” in Putnam’s Magazine. Tarns and moors were almost the private preserves of Salvator’s art, and, though the Galapagos featured neither, the volcanic savagery of landscape thrust against the violence of the sea must have been reminiscent of what the Italian painter projected.
Figurehead sculpture, by its very nature, is a far from delicate art, but for Melville it carried the force of prophecy. In the tiny glass ship La Reine, the figurehead, “a gallant warrior in a cocked-hat,” tragically falls from its optimistic place ahead of all other figures aboard, signaling the stormy accumulation of life’s blows. The Jackson figurehead is seamed and blasted by lightning, again the victim of storms. In “Benito Cereno” the San Dominick carries a draped figurehead, as a work of art might be draped to conceal it before an exhibition; when finally exposed, it reveals “death for the figure-head, in a human skeleton; chalky comment on the chalked words below, ‘Follow your leader.’”
An important element in Redburn’s art education is the study of “some outlandish old guide-books,” European and English, from his father’s library, and in chapters 30–31 he takes great care to describe them as art objects. These chapters extend our respect for Redburn’s visual imagination, for, working with what might well be inferior products, he is able to salvage impressions of unusual beauty and significance. The mind customarily takes in impressions from the whole range of visual objects, whether they be of greater or lesser aesthetic value. The uncritical mind cannot distinguish the good from the bad, but the critical mind can make the distinction. The encompassing mind makes the distinction and goes further, appreciating the good and appropriating what is useful from the mediocre. Redburn’s mind works in just this way, sometimes turning obvious defects into actual enhancements. A lengthy ekphrasis of the books offers carefully selected, exact details:
Among others was a Parisian-looking, faded, pink-covered pamphlet, the rouge here and there effaced upon its now thin and attenuated cheeks, entitled, “Voyage Descriptif et Philosophique de L’Ancien et du Nouveau Paris: Miroir Fidèle;” also a time-darkened mossy old book, in marbleized binding, much resembling verd-antique, entitled, “Itinéraire Instructif de Rome, ou Description Générale des Monumens Antiques et Modernes et des Ouvrages les plus Remarquables de Peinture, de Sculpture, et de Architecture de cette Célébre Ville;” on the russet title-page is a vignette representing a barren rock, partly shaded by a scrub-oak (a forlorn bit of landscape), and under the lee of the rock and the shade of the tree, maternally reclines the houseless foster-mother of Romulus and Remus, giving suck to the illustrious twins; a pair of naked little cherubs sprawling on the ground, with locked arms, eagerly engaged at their absorbing occupation; a large cactus-leaf or diaper hangs from a bough, and the wolf looks a good deal like one of the no-horn breed of barn-yard cows; the work is published “Avec privilege du Souverain Pontife.” There was also a velvet-bound old volume, in brass clasps, entitled, “The Conductor through Holland,” with a plate of the Stadt House; also a venerable “Picture of London,” abounding in representations of St. Paul’s, the Monument, Temple-Bar, Hyde-Park-Corner, the Horse Guards, the Admiralty, Charing-Cross, and Vauxhall Bridge. (Redburn 141–42)
The passage, about half of a long paragraph giving such details of books presumably influential in young Redburn’s life, is rich in humor, some of it jovial, some quite sharply satirical. It is clear that Redburn likes illustrated books redolent of the sister arts and featuring examples of paintings, sculpture, and architecture with interesting artistic bindings and elaborately decorative title pages. With his apparent mastery of the language of bibliographical description, he is fully aware that he is not talking about masterpieces of book production, but his eye is that of an art lover, transforming what is almost beneath notice into suggestive pictures. He takes great pleasure in transcribing the lengthy titles of books, with all their quirks and prolixity. The pamphlet comically metamorphoses into a faded madam. The cactus-leaf diaper, the wolf that, with poor artistry, resembles a cow, and the vignette of barren rock all please his eye and tickle his funny bone. To his imaginative vision, Romulus and Remus will not be served by strong wolfish milk but by the pale imitation variety from a cowlike creature.
Bookbinding is an old and honorable art, and fine bindings are to be prized as much as pictures, statues, and furniture. Melville, with the bibliophile’s fascinated attention to the details of binding, would soon write a review of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Red Rover entitled “A Thought on Book-Binding,” which was published in The Literary World on March 16, 1850. Using some of the same language as he had in Redburn, he expressed the wish that the book had been given “a flaming suit of flame-covered morocco, as evanescently thin and gauze-like as possible,” or, perhaps, “bound in jet black, with a red streak round the borders (pirate fashion).” Still, the actual binding was to be praised, for “In the mysterious cyphers in bookbinders’ relievo stamped upon the covers we joyfully recognize a poetical signification and pictorial shadowing forth of the horseshoe, which in all honest and God-fearing piratical vessels is invariably found nailed to the mast” (Piazza Tales 237–38). The “pictorial shadowing-forth” is a particularly telling phrase, for Redburn displays the same rather professional approach as Melville to the binder’s art, noticing the marbelized look of a binding and understanding that “verd-antique” is the proper designation for the green mottled effect of some covers. And sometimes Redburn simply dismisses an uninteresting binding. In a later portion of his discourse upon travel books, he passes quickly over “a bulky book, in a dusty-looking yellow cover,” spending his best efforts upon its elaborate but tedious title page. He notes a green pamphlet “with a motto from Virgil, and an intricate coat of arms on the cover, looking like a diagram of the Labyrinth of Crete.” A book in “a classic vellum binding” and a pamphlet “with a japaned sort of cover, stamped with a disorderly higgledy-piggledy group of pagoda-looking structures,” complete his roll call of guidebooks. Of the eight volumes mentioned in the paragraph, Redburn has taken care to specify and describe the bindings of seven, leaving out only the binding of the venerable “Pictures of London.”
Beyond the simple fact of Redburn’s sophisticated knowledge is the careful artistic disposition of his materials, both visually and verbally. Though there is an apparently casual arrangement in his discourse about the eight guidebooks, a seizing of what first comes to hand, this initial impression gives way to a conviction that the passage has been carefully thought out and arranged for maximum aesthetic effect. Redburn is not growing “intolerably flat and stupid,” as Melville ironically puts it in the chapter title, when he can so cunningly create, dispose, edit, and exhibit his materials. He is sensitive to colors, moving the reader through a lavish rainbow effect produced by a pink-covered book, a mottled verd-antique, a russet title page, the textures and tints of velvet and brass, a dusty yellow, another green, and the blackness of a japanned effect. The shapes and sizes of the volumes, including pamphlets, a fat bulky tome, and “a small scholastic-looking volume” and the decorations that encompass such things as brass fixtures, a coat of arms, a Latin motto, and a vaguely Oriental illustration offer a pleasing array of bookshelf pleasures to the eye. Willard Thorp, examining volumes of the kind that Melville was describing, indicates that there are changes from the originals that Melville must have seen. The first volume, for instance, called by Redburn a pamphlet, is actually a fat duodecimo. The second volume’s title-page illustration of Romulus and Remus suckled by the odd wolf is one of Melville’s clever inventions. The pictures in “Pictures of London” do not correspond to what is actually in the volume. The Cambridge guide, with its Virgilian motto and a design like the labyrinth of Crete, appears to be mostly another Melvillean fabrication. “What Melville has done in almost every instance,” says Thorp, “is either to exaggerate humorously some pretentious phrase in the title-page or to invent some feature for the book” (1147). Invention is crucial in ekphrasis, for it permits avoidance of literal transcription of what the artist has seen and depicted. But even beyond such uses, an inventive and fanciful process applied to apparently meticulous scholarly description and reference is a feature, from the first, of Melville’s writing. He delights in creating a seamless web of verifiable erudition mingled with the most charming deceptions that his fertile imagination can conceive.
We should probably not take too seriously Redburn’s assertion that “In my childhood, I went through many courses of studying” the guidebooks from his father’s library (141). If we accept the dates of publication of the seven books that Thorp has identified as the originals of those that Redburn studied, they range from 1798 (The Great Roads …) to 1845 (The Cambridge Guide). Thorp concedes that the guide to Cambridge that he cites does not exactly fit Melville’s title, and there may indeed be another guide of a date early enough to coincide with Redburn’s childhood (1147). But the volubility and exactitude of Redburn’s bibliographic description argue for an 1846–49 range of dates when Melville, returning from his sea travels, could learn about the visual and aesthetic qualities of the books that he seemed to be devouring with such intensity.
By way of increasing the reader’s aesthetic pleasure, Melville presents expansive, appealing titles for his guidebooks from French and English. Again, Thorp has demonstrated that the author tinkers with real titles rather than simply recording the existent, sometimes intolerably verbose appearance of the originals. The result is visually delightful on Melville’s pages as he moves the reader’s eye, with careful casualness, through a “Voyage Descriptif,” an “Itinéraire Instructif,” a fancy description of “The Great Roads, both direct and cross,” and a “Description of Blenheim, the seat of His Grace.” Visual and tonal qualities merge here and, with the painstakingly orchestrated descriptions of the appearance of the books and their decorations and illustrations, offer a richness of visual effect too complex for ready assimilation. The passage must be studied as one studies a painting, analyzing its parts and its balances and shadings in order to come, finally, to a full comprehension of its individual excellences and the ways in which they bind themselves together.
This chapter seems, at first look, to be a good example of Melville’s quickly developing literary pictorialism used simply for decorative effect; and, indeed, it fills such a function in a pleasing way. But Melville’s carrying out such a venture would offer only a filler chapter that would not advance the narrative in any important way. However, he has something more immediate in mind. Guide-books, as Edgar Dryden points out, “profess to be faithful mirrors of reality and hence reliable guides to experience” (63–64). Redburn’s most painful discovery is that the usual guides to experience that he so cherishes are anything but reliable, and this is especially true of the “outlandish” travel books that have given him pleasure. The chapter is prelusive to important matters, and Melville here institutes a procedure that he will often follow, that of using art descriptions as introductions to his central themes. In Moby-Dick, for instance, Ishmael will require three chapters of prelude on artistic portrayals of whales before he can undertake his own singular ekphrasis of leviathan. In order to present Mortmain’s impassioned explication of the Pauline text of sinful mankind’s iniquitous mystery, Melville will devote a whole canto of Clarel, fittingly entitled “Prelusive,” to a careful description of Piranesi’s most elaborate etchings of mazelike dungeons and prisons that mirror, visually, “man’s heart, with labyrinths replete.” In Redburn, the long ekphrasis of guidebooks ends with the sentence “And lastly, and to the purpose, there was a volume called ‘The Picture of Liverpool.’” The purpose, it becomes clear, is to introduce the travel guide that Redburn’s father had used during one of his visits to England. Using the language of booksellers, Redburn describes the tiny volume: its size is octodecimo; it is bound in green morocco; its corners have triangular red patches; there is no title on the binding. The book was once adorned with some of the childish Redburn’s drawings of “wild animals and falling air-castles,” the juvenilia of the art-trained youth. The father’s marginalia of places visited, dinners eaten, and books bought are a further kind of artwork, added to the book’s street map, elaborate title page, poetry by John Aiken, and excerpts from the Aeneid and Falconer’s poem The Shipwreck. Redburn lingers over the book; for although it is not anything special in the way of the bookmaker’s art, it carried personal associations for him that help “to dim and mellow down the pages into a soft sunset yellow” (143–49).
But still, is this obsession with a preludium only a throat-clearing exercise, a pause before plunging into important matters? It would be superficial of Melville to employ all his technical astuteness upon unimportant things, for his sense of needed elements in structure is always a crucial matter. Redburn tries to give voice to what haunts him in his researches into the oddities of guidebooks. Reading his father’s Liverpool guide, he is “filled with a comical sadness at the vanity of all human exaltation” at the thought that the vividly significant present is shortly to be the ruinous past. St. Peter’s is built of the ruins of ancient Rome; New York will be a Nineveh; and “explorers” will “exhume the present Doric Custom-House, and quote it as proof that their high and mighty metropolis enjoyed a Hellenic antiquity” (149). The arts in their ruinous condition are a storehouse of error in the past, and the outlandish guidebooks that do not quite lead one to a view of past glories portray, instead, a foreign and bizarre world that is certainly an “out-land.”
This careful preparation leads into the next chapter, in which Redburn takes the old guidebook as his tour guide through the city. The chapter abounds in passages of pictorialism, for the observant Redburn encounters sculptural and architectural objects of virtu at every turn of his journey. A large piece of statuary catches his eye, a work
in bronze, elevated upon a marble pedestal and basement, representing Lord Nelson expiring in the arms of Victory. One foot rests on a rolling foe, and the other on a cannon. Victory is dropping a wreath on the dying admiral’s brow, while Death, under the similitude of a hideous skeleton, is insinuating his bony hand under the hero’s robe, and groping after his heart. A very striking design and true to the imagination; I never could look at Death without a shudder. (155)
The passage offers the author the opportunity to embellish his narrator’s character and let us understand Redburn’s attitudes and convictions. As the description of the statue continues, the figures at the base of the pedestal assume importance. They are captives, emblematic of Nelson’s victories, and Redburn is “involuntarily reminded of four African slaves in the market-place.” This involuntary reminder permits him to contrast his views of the inhumanity of slavery with his father’s rather more practical view “of the unhappiness that the discussion of the abolition of this trade had occasioned in Liverpool” (156). Redburn’s almost offhand remark is the first in a series of reflections upon his relationship with his father. For a good portion of the book, while we were learning that the boy was apparently unhappy, his attitude toward his father seemed ambivalent, since nothing pointed directly to the father. In chapter 30, for instance, he read the old guidebook and “what a soft, pleasing sadness steals over me, and how I melt into the past and forgotten” (143). The contradictory words imply a deep repression of important memories. And when, a few pages further on, he invokes “my father’s sacred memory and all sacred privacies of fond family reminiscences,” the invocation has no more serious use than preventing quotation at length from the old tour guide.
James Duban perceptively associates Redburn’s walk through Liverpool with “Christ’s agonizing procession along the Via Dolorosa” (Melville’s Major Fiction 39), noting the use of images from Palestine here and elsewhere in the novel—”Sodom-like,” “the brink of the Dead Sea,” and “the Pool of Bethesda” (40). He conjectures that Melville may have read William H. Bartlett’s Walks About the City and Environs of Jerusalem much earlier than 1870, when he acquired a copy of the volume, a likely proposal that underlines Melville’s tendency toward a kind of thematic echolalia enriched with each new repetition. Redburn’s pilgrimage is entirely bookish, as far as Melville’s actual knowledge in 1849 of the Holy Land is concerned, and it concentrates its detailed pictorial effects upon a clear knowledge of Liverpool. The 1857 tour of Palestine, noted carefully in Melville’s journal, adds the necessary burden of direct experience, and so the pilgrimage recounted in Clarel is resonant with the accumulation of the visual imagination, the reading, and the years of meditation. It is true, however, that Redburn’s pilgrimage through the English city, following the elusive father, is as agonizing as any dolorous way in the Holy Land.
Trusting the outdated guidebook, Redburn pursues his father’s path only to find that his confidence in it is a “dear delusion.” That, of course, is not the father’s fault. But the son uses the occasion to point out the differences between his father’s financial and social position and his own. While the elder Redburn, as the son imagines, had dressed well for his tour of the city, “little did he think, that a son would ever visit Liverpool as a poor friendless sailor-boy,” a thought that leads to the further “reflection that, he then knew you not, nor cared for you one whit” (154). A dismal reflection, indeed, to come from thoughts of the battered guidebook, cherished as an artwork. But Redburn goes further. The Nelson memorial, with its pedestaled captives reminding him of slaves, gives rise to memories of the discussions at home and the unhappy thought “that the struggle between sordid interest and humanity had made sad havoc of the firesides of the merchants, estranged sons from sires, and even separated husband from wife” (156). Pictorialism moves from the decorative and biographical to the ideological in Marianna Torgovnick’s continuum of pictorial significance, for Melville’s strategy here is to use the family memories of Redburn to reflect upon the historical effects of the slavery depicted on the monument.
“A sadder and a wiser boy” who at last holds a useless guidebook, Redburn still insists that he “did not treat with contumely or disdain, those sacred pages which had once been a beacon to my sire” (157). The artistically arranged tour guide has called up unwonted, perhaps unwanted, memories of a past that he has resolutely buried in a haze of conventional filial reminiscence. He insists upon finding aesthetic values in the volumes he has turned over in his father’s library and in the cheap little guidebook that he values beyond its worth because he does not quite trust his own impressions, repressed feelings, and angers. Arguing with himself, he at first declares that he must “follow your nose throughout Liverpool.” But, on second thought, he believes that he “can not expect to be a great tourist, and visit the antiquities, in that preposterous shooting-jacket.” He concludes, “I am not the traveler my father was. I am only a common-carrier across the Atlantic” (159–60). If these are the words of an older Redburn, assessing his youthful past, he has not yet been able to find much room for self-esteem or even forgiveness for a father who clearly does not deserve acquittal.
Redburn observes most things as if they were art objects. He is quick to note decoration in unlikely places and to describe it in his usual painterly fashion. When he visits another ship, the Irriwaddy, in Liverpool’s harbor, he makes the most of its romantic strangeness. On the deck, “I thought I was in Pegu, so strangely woody was the smell of the dark-colored timbers.” The name of Pegu, a river and city in Burma, coupled with the obvious alien charms of the ship’s name and the darkness of timbers, conjoin to offer as rich a fulfillment as ever the boyish Redburn had hoped for in dreaming about his travels. A moment later he is musing on the oddity of a ship divided between Christianity and paganism: “As if to symbolize this state of things, the ‘fancy piece’ astern comprised, among numerous other carved decorations, a cross and a miter; while forward, on the bows, was a sort of devil for a figure-head—a dragon-shaped creature, with a fiery red mouth, and a switchy-looking tail” (171). Shipboard art always impresses the sailor Redburn. Aboard a brig from the coast of Guinea, he notices an ancient cannon “covered with half-effaced inscriptions, crowns, anchors, eagles…. The knob on the breach was fashioned into a dolphin’s head, and by a comical conceit, the touch-hole formed the orifice of a human ear” (175). Melville would always be captivated by the fantastic embellishments of antique cannons. In a note to the poem “The Temeraire,” he speaks of old cannons “that were cast in shapes which Cellini might have designed.”
Many of the scenes that Redburn witnesses in Liverpool remind him of like scenes in New York and cause him to consider that “all this talk about travel was a humbug; and that he who lived in a nutshell, lives in an epitome of the universe, and has but little to see beyond him” (203). Guidebooks are not trustworthy, for all their vivid words and engravings. Travel is not trustworthy if it offers the traveler hardly more than a repetition of the sights he can readily see at home. The questing intelligence is thrown upon its own devices, unaided by antiquity, history, or even the early experiences of others. That the questing intelligence, in this instance, is the property of a boy, hardly fitted by his own skimpy experience to come to a just assessment of what he observes, is an irony that the mature Redburn, recounting his early adventures, can wryly savor, considering that he will spend much of his life at sea and pass “through far more perilous scenes.”
The more mature Redburn has the opportunity to use his hard-earned irony to its fullest degree in chapter 46, “A Mysterious Night in London.” The youthful Redburn has struck up a friendship with Harry Bolton, a boy far more worldly and sophisticated. A major theme of the novel is Redburn’s passage from the new world to the old, from ignorance to knowledge, from naivete to a measure of worldliness, with its accompanying disillusion. To the extent that it is a study of a boy’s education by experience, the novel offers Harry Bolton as a crucial part of that education, although the young Redburn seems reluctant to communicate what he learns from Harry, or perhaps he does not fully understand the knowledge he has acquired. Youth learns quickly but cannot always absorb what it learns and make that a vital element in its actions. Redburn’s friendship with Harry is unforced but ambivalent; Harry is attractive but not quite trustworthy; and, to accept him, Redburn has to “drown ugly thoughts” (225) and must “hold back my whole soul from him; when in its loneliness, it was yearning to throw itself into the unbounded bosom of some immaculate friend” (223). Harry is far from immaculate, as the trip to London proves, and, for Redburn, the journey is a disaster, both for what it provides and for what it falls short of offering him in aesthetic experience.
From Liverpool, with its soured offerings, Redburn is eager to visit London, feeling that it will offer the best that travel can give, and he is “half delirious with excitement” as they enter the great city. But Harry’s constricted view of such a pilgrimage permits only a visit to a “semi-public place of opulent entertainment,” as Redburn designates it, giving it the name of “the Palace of Aladdin” (228). Here, more than anywhere else in the novel, the young Redburn receives only half-formed impressions of an air of corruption and venality, and he cannot quite articulate even these impressions. The older Redburn, as narrator of the adventure, is aware of what the boy does not fully understand, but he too will not articulate his knowledge.5 Melville, knowing all, is careful not to be too explicit. Instead, presenting the “Palace” as a place for the entertainment of “gentlemen,” offering food, drink, gambling, and homosexual entertainment, Melville resorts to a careful interweaving of art allusion and ekphrasis to make his case. The first room the young men enter is depicted in detail:
The walls were painted so as to deceive the eye with interminable colonnades; and groups of columns of the finest Scagliola work of variegated marbles—emerald-green and gold, St. Pons veined with silver, Sienna with porphyry—supported a resplendent fresco ceiling, arched like a bower, and thickly clustering with mimic grapes. Through all the East of this foliage, you spied a crimson dawn, Guido’s ever youthful Apollo, driving forth the horses of the sun. From sculptured stalactites of vine-boughs, here and there pendent hung galaxies of gas lights, whose vivid glare was softened by pale, cream-colored, porcelain spheres, shedding over the place a serene silver flood; as if every porcelain sphere were a moon; and this superb apartment was the moon-lit garden of Portia at Belmont; and the gentle lovers, Lorenzo and Jessica, lurked somewhere among the vines. (228)
Deception is the motif of this entire section of the novel, and deceiving the eye with painted colonnades and false marble is its pictorial correlative. Redburn finds the scene overwhelming and, as a result, is willing to follow Harry’s lead in all matters. He can scarcely be expected to understand all the complexities involved in the setting. It is the elder Redburn, writing years later, who deftly weaves into the description a knowledge of scagliola, the clever imitation marble; one of Guido Reni’s mythological paintings; household furnishings that combine utility with the aesthetic; and a reference to The Merchant of Venice. Since Venice is a corrupt city, the image of the young, innocent lovers offers an oblique perspective upon Redburn’s situation in this contaminated den.
As the scene progresses, however, Redburn becomes increasingly uncomfortable, made so by the behavior of the people he observes. He sees a waiter “eying me a little impertinently, as I thought, and as if he saw something queer about me.” Looking at the patrons of the establishment, he notices “that every now and then little parties were made up among the gentlemen, and they retired into the rear of the house, as if going to a private apartment” (229). Since they use terms like “Rouge” and “Loo,” they are gamblers. But then Harry conducts Redburn not to the rear of the house but to an upstairs room, and the young man is struck by the extraordinary, changed appearance of its decoration:
As we entered the room, me thought I was slowly sinking in some reluctant sedgy sea; so thick and elastic the Persian carpeting, mimicking parterres of tulips, and roses, and jonquils, like a bower in Babylon.
Long lounges lay carelessly disposed, whose fine damask was interwoven, like the Gobelin tapestry, with pictorial tales of tilt and tourney. And oriental ottomans, whose cunning warp and woof were wrought into plaited serpents, undulating beneath beds of leaves, from which, here and there, they flashed out sudden splendors of green scales and gold.
In the broad bay windows, as the hollows of King Charles’ oaks, were Laocoon-like chairs, in the antique taste, draped with heavy fringes of bullion and silk.
The walls, covered with a sort of tartan-French paper, variegated with bars of velvet, were hung round with mythological oil-paintings, suspended by tasseled cords of twisted silver and blue.
They were such pictures as the high-priests, for a bribe, showed to Alexander in the innermost shrine of the white temple in the Libyan oasis: such pictures as the pontiff of the sun strove to hide from Cortez, when, sword in hand, he burst open the sanctorum of the pyramid-fane at Cholula: such pictures as you may still see, perhaps, in the central alcove of the excavated mansion of Pansa, in Pompeii—in that part of it called by Varro the hollow of the house: such pictures as Martial and Suetonius mention as being found in the private cabinet of the Emperor Tiberius: such pictures as are delineated on the bronze medals, to this day dug up on the ancient island of Capreae: such pictures as you might have beheld in an arched recess, leading from the left hand of the secret side-gallery of the temple of Aphrodite in Corinth. (230–31)
Here the young Redburn is overwhelmed by the sensuality of his impressions and the older, cooler narrator of a later date must attempt to give credence to his younger avatar’s feelings by citing a bewildering variety and range of references from art, history, myth, and literature. Redburn neglects none of the implications of such description. The apartment pleases, as it is meant to, by its disposition and harmony of arrangement. Carpeting, furniture, wallpaper, and paintings conjoin in Melville’s practically seamless mingling of pictorialism and allusion.
The senses of feeling, sight, and smell are invited to participate in Redburn’s fully imagined depiction of place. Patterns of material in the ottomans evoke a linked series of images. The plaited serpents, in “sudden splendors of green scales and gold,” are a fixture of the iconography of temptation. A passage in Paradise Lost that Melville surely must have known describes the ancestor of all tempting serpents displaying himself to Eve:
his head
Crested aloft, and carbuncle his eyes,
With burnished neck of verdant gold, erect,
Amid his circling spires. (9.499–502)
Further sources can be found in the romantic iconography of Coleridge and Keats. The water snakes in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner have something of the look of Melville’s plaited serpents, with their “rich attire: / Blue, glossy green, and velvet black.” From Keats’s “Lamia,” the snakelike demon is “a gordian shape of dazzling hue, / Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue; / Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard.”6 The case for Coleridge is, perhaps, not entirely clear, but for Keats there are useful hints. Lamia has seen Lycius in Corinth, “where ‘gainst a column he leant thoughtfully / At Venus’ temple porch” (1.316–17). This is the Corinthian temple of Aphrodite, one of the sites of the unmentionable pictures that Redburn recalls. Keats offers the additional hint of “That purple-lined palace of sweet sin” (2.31), the lair of the seductive serpent, Lamia, and could thus give Melville a source for his learned allusion. The serpentine iconography of the Melvillean passage continues in the solidly visual sculptural effect of the “Laocoon-like chairs.” Laocoön is a favored Melvillean theme and will appear in Pierre and Clarel. After observing this great sculptural work during his 1856–57 European art pilgrimage, Melville made it part of his lecture on the statues of Rome, noting the effect of its depiction of “a great and powerful man writhing with the inevitable destiny which he cannot throw off.” The statue “represents the tragic side of humanity and is the symbol of human misfortune” (Piazza Tales 403–4). The chairs in Redburn, immovable pieces, evoke the dynamic impression of serpentining and coiling about a victim.
Melville’s central intention in constructing this chapter of his novel is to leave an overpowering impression of luxurious beauty, coupled with temptation and corruption. The room is certainly not intended as a site for gambling. Instead, it is likened first to “a bower in Babylon,” a place that is an epitome of sensuous immorality. Since corruption proceeds by attraction, the elements of Melville’s picture are rich and appealing, intricate and even contradictory in the cues he furnishes for the observer. In the manner of tapestries, the upholstery offers images of knightly tournaments, all cheerful and innocent enough. But the ottomans, supporting the comfort of the lounges, offer contrary depictions of serpentining splendors and mix the embrace of pleasure and pain. With good reason, too, since the mythological oil-paintings, upon which Redburn lavishes a long, dense, allusive and elaborate paragraph, form the centerpiece of his presentation and make it clear that, whether the young Redburn understands fully all that he sees, there are overwhelming hints of erotic, shameful, and perverse activities. William H. Gilman’s study of Redburn offers a judgment that Melville’s knowledge at this point in his career was “not deep but eclectic,” and this is surely correct. Gilman’s analysis is supported by Thorp’s careful assessment of just how much Melville could extract from the title pages and a few pages of admittedly dreary guidebooks and then convert his remarks into casually learned, allusive, and entertaining prose. Gilman remarks that Melville “uses allusions literally when they help to broaden or intensify the immediate meaning or supply color in an incident that requires it” and cites Redburn’s “meditation” on the Liverpool guidebook as a typical example (223–24).
Redburn’s long, almost breathless account of pictures that he will persistently not describe in detail serves an important structural purpose in the novel. Something wrong about the scene is emerging, allusive and deceptive, before Redburn’s eyes. Alexander bribes high priests to show him pictures similar to the ones the boy is seeing, and, thus, blasphemy mixes with religiosity. When the “pontiff of the sun” tries to hide such pictures from the conquering Cortez, religion and eroticism are conjoined. Looking at other pictures that reflect a secular, rather than religious, view of sexuality, Redburn is reminded of Pompeii and art objects owned by Tiberius. Gilman rightly remarks that “the inclusion of a blatantly pornographic picture is one measure of Melville’s sophistication” (224). He is referring to the Emperor’s picture of “Atalanta performing a most unnatural service for Meleager” and concludes from this example that Melville is inventing allusions (355n.31). Gilman’s judgment is partially true but does violence to Melville’s allusive technique, which would be characterized as mosaic, a painstaking placing of varicolored pieces of tile or stone in a mortar base to achieve an orderly pattern or picture. This carefully worked out technique uses allusion inventively and fancifully, but it depends, finally, upon some bedrock of factual source material.
There seem to be clear lines between the allusion to Cortez at the temple of Cholula and its possible source in William Hickling Prescott’s The Conquest of Mexico.7 The apparently simple reference to Pompeii has a complicated background. Since the middle of the eighteenth century, Pompeii had been yielding up its treasures and tragedies to the shovels of the archeologists. Reports emerged and lengthy articles appeared in magazines that Melville could easily have read. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, searching for new novelistic material, met William Gall, one of the chief excavators of Pompeii, and visited the site in 1832 and, from all he had learned, created one of his most popular novels, The Last Days of Pompeii (1834). Bulwer-Lytton’s novel may be Melville’s most likely source for the Pompeiian allusion, for, although it is not listed among the books that Melville owned at one time or another, there are clear signs that Melville knew the book. Leon Howard suggests that Captain Ahab was based upon the character of Arbaces, Bulwer-Lytton’s villainous high priest. Melville jotted down, in one volume of his set of Shakespeare, a series of notes on magic, “not the (black art) Goetic but Theurgic magic,” and his source seems to be a long note that Bulwer-Lytton appended to the novel dealing with the practice of Goetic magic.8
Redburn’s comment that “such pictures as you may still see, perhaps, in the central alcove of the excavated mansion of Pansa, in Pompeii” is an instance of Melville concocting a convincing allusion from a work of fiction rather than from any factual report or article. Gilman points out that “The house of Pansa in Pompeii is not known to have contained any pictures” (355n.31) and assumes that Melville has fabricated his reference. But we must unravel Melville’s thought processes carefully. In Pompeii, there is a “House of Pansa,” and Bulwer-Lytton used Pansa as a character in his novel, which, like many other historical fictions, is an amalgam of the real and invented. From Bulwer-Lytton and others, Melville no doubt learned the device of combining the real and the invented and employed it effectively in “Benito Cereno” and Israel Potter. Having brought Pansa into his novel, Bulwer-Lytton has him take some friends to the home of Glaucus, where they can admire the art on display. Pansa’s commentary on the artworks is revelatory: “How beautifully painted is that parting of Achilles and Briseis!— what a style!—what heads!—what a hem!” (Lytton 28). Pansa is referring to pornographic art displayed, finally, in the nineteenth century, upon the walls of the houses in Pompeii. Melville takes up the hint from Pansa and Bulwer-Lytton and reconstructs it into his own tempting allusion.
Such a richness of inventive reference can hardly be the work of the young Redburn, timorously embarked upon his first, disappointed investigation of London. No boy could know so much. One even becomes suspicious of the older Redburn, the consciousness through which the story is being displayed, seemingly a resident scholar as well as tale teller. The passage offers a clear challenge to look beyond the narrator to the concealed, manipulating novelist. The older Redburn certainly understands what sort of den his younger self has been coerced into visiting by the importunate Harry Bolton. He suspects, if he does not entirely believe, that Harry’s virtual abduction of his younger avatar carries confirmation of attempted homosexual seduction, if not violent assault. Harry’s plans, whatever they might be, are not carried out, and Redburn, the boy, is left alone with his emotions, as he admits being “mysteriously alive to a dreadful feeling.” He compares the feeling to what he had felt on observing the “most squalid haunts of sailor iniquity” and epitomizes all the complexities into a powerful pictorial image in which “All the mirrors and marbles around me seemed crawling over with lizards” (234). His feelings are not quite susceptible to articulation, but he can come close by resorting to painterly terms, finding their correlative in the decorative elements in the room, the fascinations of gilt and gold, and the serpentine iconography of evil. Without Redburn’s insistence upon pictorialism and art allusion, important scenes in the novel would remain vague for the reader, who would take the narrator’s word for it that Aladdin’s Palace is only a gambling house and would miss Melville’s carefully wrought point that the boy, reporting accurately what he sees and can comprehend, does not comprehend nearly enough. The contemporary reviewer of Redburn who claimed that such a gambling house “existed nowhere (at least in London) but in our sailor-author’s imagination” came close to the truth (Gilman 192). Subsequent readers seem to have been misled. Raymond Weaver found the passage false, a “brave and unwilling concession to romance” (107). In his study of the book, William Dillingham states that the place is a gambler’s den and fits the episode into an elaborate pattern of “hunger” in the novel. The “description of Aladdin’s Palace,” says Dillingham, “constitutes a highly imaginative and elaborate metaphor for Harry Bolton,” but Dillingham does not say what the metaphor stands for (An Artist 43).9 That Melville used his prose narrative to say that Redburn was in a gambling den merely underlines what he deliberately repressed in his description. Given the restraints of censorship, he could not be literal, and so the only possible technique of presentation would be a system of metaphor that would contradict the narrative assertions. The use of the art analogy made it possible for him to accomplish his aim, concealing it at the level of narrative but revealing it at the level of language.
The working out of such a literary device is important for the development of Melville’s art, and, as he continued to write, he made it even more sophisticated and capable of bearing an extraordinary load of ambivalent, even puzzling, and certainly ironic contradiction. The reader finds himself sometimes confused by the almost infinite contrarieties of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno” or the discrepant, bland-sounding innuendoes of the late poems. But Melville himself made clear what he was about in his discussion of Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse, asserting that “in this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly … and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself.” The glimpses, well concealed, are offered, as often as not, by Melville’s consistent creation of some persona, obsessed by painterly, sculptural, or architectural images that act upon his imagination.
Melville’s skill in rendering scenic description is enriched by his careful disposition of the elements of a scene in painterly fashion. Hence, a narrator such as Redburn can fulfill the requirement Hagstrum demands for a pictorial passage, that, although it may not be the description of a work of art, it should be “capable of translation into painting or some other visual art.” The Floating Chapel in the harbor at Liverpool, with its house, steeple, and balcony planted upon the hull “of an old sloop-of-war,” is carefully depicted (175). The passage offers close-up views next to views of the middle distance and distant sugges-tiveness. Instead of being a scene drawn from a picture the writer has seen, it is the kind of seascape that an illustrator like Cruikshank, Millais, or Darley might use for a magazine illustration. Chapters 31–41 present an extraordinary sequence, rich in pictorialism, that depicts the youthful Redburn making a descent through the Avernus of Liverpool streets into a hell of human misery, “rendered merchantable” by the work of “undertakers, sextons, tomb-makers, and hearse-drivers” who thrive off the dead. The prisonlike miseries of Launcelott’s-Hey and of the booble-alleys, the dock-wall beggars, and “poverty, poverty, poverty, in almost endless vistas” haunt him in his movements through the town. He finally links the world he sees with the quotidian world of illustration, finding the railroad station familiar, although he knows he has never seen it before. Back in America after his voyage, he locates a magazine illustration of the station, where “I saw a picture of the place to the life; and remembered having seen the same print years previous” (206). Art is as much an experience as other sorts of encounters with life, capable of arousing feelings as strong as the primary facts of existence. Here, life, in a turnabout, copies the felicities of illustration, which has come first and made its powerful effect on the viewer. Redburn is presenting a parody of the conventional Liverpool guidebook, based upon his truer experience of the Liverpool that is passing before his eyes.
The Historical Note for the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Redburn argues that Melville did not write the chapters of the book seriatim but made insertions to fill out parts of what was otherwise a strictly chronological record of young Redburn’s voyage. Such additions could well include the guidebook chapters and some of the Liverpool sequence, as well as Harry Bolton and, thus, the London journey. The assertion that “Melville may have had at one point, in fact, a manuscript without many of the more highly colored scenes of the final book” tells us much about the author’s methods of composition (330–32). The novel grew by accretion, and what is added has, almost always, to do with Redburn’s dependence upon the art analogy for the expression of his experiences. Newton Arvin discusses these art analogies as, in part, the “symbolic” elements of the novel “imagined and projected with an intensity that constantly pushes them beyond mere representation.” In his view, “it is a question of endowing ordinary objects, ordinary incidents, with a penumbra of feeling and suggestion” (107–08). To this analysis, one must add that the scenes in which art is at the forefront are part of a deliberately constructed plan of literary pictorialism. Melville’s delight in the beauties of the visual arts causes him to address seriously the techniques of the art analogy as decorative and structural elements in his fiction. Redburn is his first extended attempt in this direction, but hereafter in his writings it will be an ever more important consideration.