Resolución de problemas (taller matemático)

The following chapters are arranged around the thematic focus points of the three wisdom books that most overtly address religious skepticism: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes. Far from authoritatively positivist, all three books contemplate the human condition as an experience of suffering, frustration, and ambivalence. In doing so, they deploy an abundance of literary forms which are interconnected through their content. Although I am explicitly not offering an authorial reading here, it is worth noting that Melville’s annotations to the OT suggest that he recognized the wisdom books’ literary character and identified them as a unique entity within the Bible’s spiritual anthology. The appeal of Solomonic wisdom lies in its

blending of ethical meditations and literary form. The thematic focus of the following chapters frames my investigation of how Melville reflects the content and form of these texts. His

dealings with the wisdom books impact his literary poesis. His responses to the Bible evolve over time and even influence the way he conceives of literary genres as fluent.

Building my analysis around wisdom themes rather than Melville’s texts, however, does not mean that I emphasize one over the other. My interest is primarily in Melville’s literary response to OT wisdom. This text-centered approach requires that I not hamstring my readings by forcing them into generic categories but rather follow Melville’s formal experiments beyond the categorical lines of literary criticism. For example, one suspicion I harbored from early on in this project was that Melville’s experimentation with literary form was rooted in his interaction with wisdom literature. Apothegms, riddles, prose frames and poetic dialogs constitute the formal vocabulary of OT wisdom. Melville’s gradual turn from prose to poetry, I suspect, correlates with his continuous engagement with this literary and moral tradition.

Each chapter begins by explicating what I consider the themes and questions that each of the wisdom books authorizes. Subsequently, my analysis will investigate the ways in which Melville mediates the Biblical text in his writing in order to characterize his literary exegesis. Direct and indirect references, explicit and implicit allusions, thematic borrowings, typology, and stylistic and linguistic parody, and inversion form the literary vocabulary Melville brings to bear on these texts. Moreover, by historicizing Melville’s literary dealings with the OT, I characterize the theological points he makes in his writing. Frequently, these assertions appear theologically archaic, nostalgic, or even melancholic. Specifically, Melville references many of the major tenets of free-inquiry discourse associated with late eighteenth century deism. And while scholarship has long documented his irreverence toward any form of authoritarian doctrinism, many of the spiritual frustrations that his fiction and poetry address seem to emerge from a place of nostalgic longing towards a Biblical text that provided a moral center for a universe that

increasingly appears to be defined by contingency and a social space dominated by market economy.

In essence, I deviate from the conventional one-book-per-chapter structure in favor of a theme-centered approach. The obvious advantage of this strategy is that it allows for a truly diachronic view of a predefined group of thematic literary elements in Melville’s literary thought. Beyond that, this approach helps tease out the productive ways in which Melville navigates intertextuality and genre lines. For example, the somewhat opaque observation that Melville’s “experimentation with the magazine pieces contributed formatively to the rhetorical control” of his later novels may be embellished by considering the ways in which Melville considered OT Biblical language a formal repository that could help him express fundamental truths about the human condition (Milder Billy, vii).

Not taking thematic consistency for granted each chapter investigates anew the overt and covert ways in which Melville connects the Bible to other intellectual phenomena. Scientific empiricism, folklore, and subversive humor influence public sensibilities toward the value of Solomonic moral axioms. Melville essentially contemplates the Bible’s metamorphosis from authoritative historical record and moral standard to cultural document. While Melville is an astute observer of these trends, he is also a lonely voice in the wilderness. His characters often expresses displeasure over the irreverence, superficiality, insidious hypocrisy, and, at times, willful ignorance towards Biblical wisdom as they lament the loss of mythical relation to life that has been diminished by the erosion of Biblical authority.

Chapter 1 constructs a historiographical platform on which I will confront Melville’s texts. My technique of display here is necessarily that of assemblage as I am interested in the connections between several scientific, philological, sociological, and historical discourses.

These conversations would normally be considered discrete, yet they are connected by their reciprocal relationship to theology. In a sense, I suggest that the intellectual history of the nineteenth-century is characterized by the interplay of two diametrical disciplinary tendencies: on the one hand, fields formerly considered part of natural theology become secularized and evolve into autonomous institutions. On the other hand, religious institutions try to tighten their grip on these fields by adapting their disciplinary rhetoric and utilizing their respective expertise to spread their theological message. However in doing so, religion and theology inevitably surrender intellectual turf to these other discourses and thus contribute to the erosion of Biblical authority. In assembling these discourses in sketch form, I try to map the spectrum of theological and religious sensibilities in America between 1750 and 1850. For instance, English deism’s challenge to the Bible’s textual authority had rattled Biblical hermeneutics since the early 1700s and even led to the formation of several free-inquiry societies in the American territories. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the decline of Calvinism fostered denominational proliferation. This great spiritual unrest was compounded by the influx of German neology into Biblical hermeneutics. The lack of autochthonous institutions of higher learning equipped to deal with these methodological controversies created several rifts among the American intelligentsia. Yet this is not to say that religious sensibilities before 1800 were ever unified or homogenous to begin with. In fact up to the 1830s, religion and theology had been rather multifarious affairs that evinced regional differences. Still, religious affiliations and communities were not exclusively determined by geography but also existed virtually through written correspondence.

Denominational proliferation and advancements in printing technology caused these communal structures to congeal. And yet the trend was not exclusively to denominational fragmentation either. Religious orthodoxy recognized the danger of atomizing communities of faith and

mounted efforts to regularize not only what people read but rather how they read. In a transnational and cross-denominational venture, printing technology prospered and helped consolidate communal membership. And by 1850, a vast distribution network had been created by several cross-denominational societies that sought to bring Bibles, pamphlets, and books to every home in the U.S. At the same time, innovations in empirical science—specifically,

geology, and biology—further destabilized the Bible’s clout as the authoritative record of natural history. This turn in the valuation of empirical rhetoric proved devastating to the clergy who had long since adopted said rhetoric to formally shape religious truth to contemporary intellectual tastes. All of these developments impact literary forms and foster literary responses.

In chapter Chapter 2, I turn toward Melville’s interactions with the Book of Job, the central themes of which include the causality of suffering and the limits of human understanding of said suffering. As theological text, “Job” investigates God’s character and the moral

dimension of His role as the author of creation. Equally, the Biblical book frames Job as a moral exemplar of unshakable integrity. In front of this thematic backdrop, I argue that Melville conceives several central characters in Moby-Dick according to a typological template of the eponymous Biblical sufferer: Ishmael, Ahab, and Pip must be read as mutually constitutive parts in Melville’s examination of Job’s attributes of patience, defiance, and victimization. Under the latter rubric, I also consider “Bartleby” as an anti-Christian text that juxtaposes the discourses of charity and empathy as being based respectively on NT and OT theology. In an argumentative feat that will recur in the subsequent chapters, Melville conceives these two discourses as diametrically opposed. Accordingly, I show that he uses OT wisdom literature to mount a critique of the corruption of NT theology by market rhetoric. The chapter concludes by

contemplating some of Melville’s latter poetry as exploring what scholars identify as the Joban call to establish an equilibrium with the ontological fact of moral evil as part of the world.

Proverbs is a collection of wisdom aphorisms, and it is equally the most prolific and the hardest to trace influence on Melville’s writing. Formal and semantic variety make this one of the most prolific source texts for Melville. His mediation of that source material is

simultaneously more overt and virtuoso. Chapter 3 examines a selection of texts in which Melville develops these aphorisms in his fiction and poetry. Mardi features many explicit references to Proverbs and Ecclesiastes; however, I focus on a less conspicuous scene between Taji and King Media in which they debate divine sovereignty as it pertains to the related acts of jurisprudence and punishment. Taji reads symbolically the scene of Media on his throne of judgment and in doing so subverts the Proverbial wisdom about royal jurisprudence. In a larger sense, Proverbs is an anthology of aphorisms that deal with ethical and aesthetic judgment as they are grounded in an epistemology underwritten by Biblical lore. Proverbs, then, meditates on epistemology as such. It ponders the categories of knowledge, experience, understanding,

prudence, and trust, and its aphorisms reflect upon the contingency inherent in all the ways human beings make sense of the world. In the second half of the chapter, I expand this theme of epistemological uncertainty by turning it towards the Bible and its textual authority. Specifically, I will be interested in the way Melville conceives of the erosion of Biblical authority by

alternative epistemological models, such as critical historicism and scientism. It is here that I will draw particularly on some of the earlier points I raised in chapter 1. The former, I find most prevalently exemplified in Melville’s short fiction, particularly in “The Apple-Tree Table” and “The Lightning-Rod Man.” Meanwhile, the issue of contingency as played out in interpersonal communication is most elaborately examined in The Confidence-Man. I read the novel’s

concluding scenes as keyed towards Proverbial and Apocryphal Solomonic wisdom to propose that the novel depicts the struggle of the confidence man to overcome and eventually subvert wisdom morality.

Finally, Chapter 4 deals with Melville’s use of Ecclesiastes, which is often polemicized as being the most skeptical of the wisdom books. The book’s speaker, simply named the

Preacher, outlines a number of aphorisms designed to help believers differentiate between moral life in the world and a life that is preoccupied with base, meaningless materialism. The Preacher ultimately advocates for moderation between the two lifestyles and proposes a via media

between secular and spiritual life that allows believers to enjoy worldly existence without taking such joys at face value. Melville, I argue, explores the need for such moderation in his earlier educational novels, particularly in Redburn. Yet, in a curious twist, he also turns these OT axioms against American Protestant institutions in “The Two Temples,” a short-fiction diptych that was barred form publication during his lifetime. Ecclesiastes was famously one of Melville’s favorite books, arguably because it addresses explicitly the frustrations that arise from observing evil—manifested in individuals as wickedness—in the world. Based on the Preacher’s open acknowledgement of this fact, Ishmael performs the most explicit exegetical reading of Biblical text when he examines the Ecclesiastical axiom ‘all is vanity.’ Besides Moby-Dick, with Ahab as his most visible tragic hero/villain, Melville performs an intriguing examination of inherent wickedness over several decades in his writing. Redburn’s Jackson, “The Encantadas”’s Obelus,

and Billy Budd’s Claggart all must be grouped into a typological category of characters who are

victimized by their own evil. In depicting evil thus as instrumental to some overarching—not to say providential—plot Melville conceives these character as Satans, based on the depiction of the character in the Book of Job as an agent of divine justice. In constructing these characters,

Melville combines OT definitions of wickedness with modern clinical pathology about mental and physical afflictions. I conclude with a series of epitaphs that represent Melville’s echoes and parodies of wisdom aphorism. In Battle Pieces, for instance, the poem “The Conflict of

Convictions” contemplates the Civil War as a spiritual crisis as well as a military one. The poem deploys the rhetoric of demonizing the military opponent as satanic, based on NT conceptions of the character. At the same time, it closes by affirming the ultimate human ignorance of the inner workings of providential history and bleakly paraphrases the Preacher’s assertions about

universal vanity as factual. Meanwhile the Story of China Aster, embedded within the pages of

The Confidence-Man contemplates Solomonic wisdom in the form of a fable. The story of the unfortunate candlemaker combines various aspects of Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes to assert, as Melville also does in Billy Budd, that OT wisdom conveys timeless truths through mythical language and meanings that no longer resonate with contemporary audiences.

As I explained earlier, secularization was a narrative applied retroactively to the nineteenth century, one that was neither linear nor universal. Reconsidering his dealings with theology and religion reveals a critical vista onto nineteenth-century intellectual and spiritual sensibilities. Incidentally, this vista also allows us to confront some of the prejudices that twentieth-century scholarship brought to bear on these topics in regards to their presence in Melville’s texts. If anything, Melville sought to express not only his own spiritual discontent, as so many scholars have claimed over the years, but rather a much more profound and systemic issue: he contemplated the contingencies resulting from the rapid rise of new categories of knowledge and truth. And while he respected the intellectual rigor of many of these methods, to the point where he could not help but study up on them despite his apprehensions, Melville also

consistently contemplates what is lost by America’s increasing dismissal of the Bible as a source for truth told emphatically through the medium’s artful language.

2 AMERICAN THEOLOGY & MELVILLE’S AUTHORIAL JOURNEY