Operaciones con fracciones y números racionales

With the advent of the New American Studies, Lawrence Buell’s aforementioned concept of literary scripturism became the new paradigm for studies dealing with literary depictions of all forms of religion and arguably jump-started the secularization narrative. Years before Buell, David Reynolds had drafted an alternative model of varying levels of literary engagement with the Bible and religion in Faith in Fiction (1983). Reynolds teases out the animosity between traditionally restrictive Puritan standards of taste, but he also unearths the productive

engagements with Scripture that cleverly subverted religious orthodoxy and doctrinism to salvage the moral utility of religion (Faith 4). Unfortunately, Reynolds does not count Melville amongst the authors in this category. On the flip side, chroniclers of American literary history often dismissed Melville’s poetic exploits on formal grounds. For instance, Hyatt Waggoner

considers Melville an inferior poet but relegates him to the category of religious poets, such as Taylor, and compares his best poetry with Puritan anagrams (American Poets 233).

Stan Goldman’s Melville’s Protest Theism (1993) and Christopher Sten’s The Weaver- God; He Weaves (1996) attest to the continued interest in Melville’s religious thinking, yet combine that topic with critical investigations of Melville’s compositional method. Goldman reads Clarel as the work in which Melville offers a “Biblical way to God” via an epistemological

stance Goldman terms protest theism (4):

Protest theism explains what kind of biblical protester (Protestant) Melville was and represents an attempt at finding or establishing the limits within which faith is possible and life endures and has meaning. The theological reflection represented in Clarel is not atheistic, nihilistic, nor agnostic, but a biblically rooted,

nonsectarian, non-dogmatic faith that empowers human beings to protest and to lament human fate but nevertheless to give the human heart in love to God. [. . .] Although the theology offered in the poem [Clarel] is enhanced by and unfolded within the context of the Bible, it is not a normative biblical faith, but a distinctive theological reflection. (4)

Goldman fails to contextualize why such a position may not have boded well with the

contemporary reading public. This may be because it could not be defined positively in any of the major popular sources of theology for most Americans; i.e. the congregation or the pulpit. Still, his analysis is text-based and lucid. Goldman is also the first to systematically characterize Melville’s overall theological project by recognizing how the Bible becomes a way of unlocking Melville’s writing aesthetically as well as thematically. While I do not fully accept his final verdict on Melville’s supposed theism, I am extending Goldman’s succinct OT-based approach to Melville’s whole oeuvre. In the same decade, William Dillingham continues Thompson’s work and reconstructs Melville’s European Romantic intellectual influences during his last years with Melville and His Circle (1996). Generally, Dillingham provides what I consider the best close reading of Melville’s texts, and I will rely on him throughout my analysis.

Hawthorne expert Michael Colacurcio sets a critical impulse in his article “Excessive and Organic Ill” (2002) by calling for a fundamental reexamination of Melville’s alleged skepticism and by demanding that more attention be paid to the underlying idealist potential in his writings (22). A number of scholars have responded to Colacurcio’s call. Many built their arguments on both Nathalia Wright’s work as well as to Jenny Franchot’s superb essay “Melville’s Traveling God” (1998), the first in-depth investigation of Melville’s oscillating cosmology. Ilana Pardes discusses Melville’s use of OT motives and themes in several essays as well as in her monograph

Melville’s Bibles (2008). Pardes suggests along the lines of Buell’s argument about literary scripturism that Melville not only performs original exegesis in Moby-Dick but attempts to create a new American Bible. While Pardes’s analysis of the Joban DNA in Moby-Dick is compelling, her thesis is problematic insofar as it postulates a radically dismissive attitude towards the Biblical text that I do not find supported by the literature. In Faith in Fiction (1983), Reynolds had observed that much of early nineteenth-century anti-Calvinist and liberal fiction—such as Lyman Beecher and Susanna Rowson’s—presented as “a prolonged effort at improving the Bible—improving it by mixing sacred and profane” elements, yet Reynolds does not include Melville in his observations (130). In a recent essay, Zachary Hutchins argues more productively concerning Moby-Dick that

Modern readers break up the Bible into Old and New Testaments, but each section contains multiple genres. The Old Testament is composed of the Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim—the law, the prophets, and the writings—and the New Testament includes the gospels, the acts, and epistles of the apostles. At different points in the narrative of Moby-Dick, Melville adopts the conventions associated with each of these biblical divisions, bringing to life the literary modes of the Old and New Testaments. (26)

Hutchins’s approach is the only study to my knowledge that takes seriously Melville’s engagement with OT theology; however, as with most studies, Hutchins limits his scope to

Moby-Dick. The idea of reading Melville in the tradition of wisdom writers is also advanced by Hilton Obenzinger who considers Melville “a wisdom writer, in the tradition of Solomon’s

Ecclesiastes [. . .] Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, Chuang Tzu’s Writings, and other classical wisdom texts” (181). Pardes, Obenzinger, and Hutchins all assemble part of the puzzle, yet none is able to produce a cohesive and in-depth analysis of Melville’s interaction with Biblical

wisdom. So far, responses by literary scholars have been scarce: Robert Milder’s Exiled

Royalties (2006) is widely considered the most fruitful analysis of Melville’s unique intellectual engagement with both philosophy and Biblical exegesis. With emphasis placed on Pierre and Melville’s turn to melancholy, Milder attempts a diachronic, exploratory review of Melville’s later thoughts on society and theology. However, his analysis retains the traditional method of authorial readings. Recently, Bradley Johnson has furthered David Reynold’s observations about masquerade—which Reynolds articulated in Beneath the American Renaissance (1986)—in his own study The Characteristic Theology of Herman Melville (2011). Johnson theorizes Melville through the lens of French poststructuralism and argues that between his composition of Typee

and The Confidence-Man, Melville turns to a cosmology of manipulating and producing appearances, which he positions as defensive armaments against a cynical God. Johnson’s analysis ends rather abruptly, leaving his readers wondering about the implications of his

compelling thesis for Melville’s poetry. Johnson’s book thus is another example of the restrictive effect of genre segregation in Melville studies. In contrast, Maurice S. Lee’s Uncertain Chances

(2012) comprehends the skepticism in Melville’s major novels as a response to the advent of a stochastic model of reality. According to Lee, Melville registers how public theological sensibility veers towards notions of contingency. However, Lee does not investigate how

Melville attempts to depict this phenomenon within the confines of Romantic theological language.

Another scholar who traces Melville’s engagement with the Bible is Jonathan Cook, who has two studies, on The Confidence-Man and Moby-Dick respectively, in which he considers more seriously Melville’s critical reflection of theological principles and exegetical context. In his latest book, Inscrutable Malice (2013) Cook argues somewhat broadly that “the biblical themes of theodicy and eschatology give distinctive shape and meaning to Moby-Dick” (6). Yet

Cook frequently seems too concerned with context in his studies, delivering a mosaic of very useful information that often does not quite connect with his readings of the primary texts.

As far as Melville’s poetry is concerned, the debate has become livelier in the last

decade: between late 1999 and early 2000, American Literary History has housed a controversial debate between Elizabeth Renker und William Spengemann. Beyond that, Hershel Parker has been a proponent for integrating Melville’s poetry into analyses of his works. Parker has been a vocal advocate against what he calls the creation of verbal icons in literary scholarship, which are erected at the cost of historical and archival research. He has long advocated that Melville became a poet as early as the late 1850s, and republished his notes on the subject from his two- volume biography, Herman Melville (Vol. I, 2005 and Vol. II, 2002), in Melville: The Making of a Poet (2007).