Melville and the politics of allusion.

Abstract

Melville's densely allusive prose is the stylistic signature of his fiction. The onrush of prolific allusion in Mardi, coincident with Melville's burgeoning authorial ambition, signals his awakening to the potential of encyclopedic references. Through them, he says, he wishes to convey Mardi's "metaphysical ingredients ... (and) the peculiar thoughts and fancies of a Yankee upon politics." In this context, Melville's second purpose hints at the connection between politics and his mode of literary allusion--the focus of this study. By merging an historical inquiry of Melville's political milieux with close readings of specific allusive patterns throughout his oeuvre, I establish and explore the relationship of his manipulation of literary texts and traditions to his political concerns. Melville, I argue, deploys allusion to critique American political reality and discourse. For example, through deftly placed and contextualized references to scripture, Melville decries the popular American jeremiad as an insufficient social critique, founded on the expedient appropriation of scriptural typology that identifies America as the New Israel. Though Melville might seem the typical American author who poses as a contemporary Jeremiah, in fact, his orchestrated biblical allusions in White-Jacket and Moby-Dick place him outside the outsiders. Melville's selective invoking of other texts to constitute his own is political in another sense, for this practice recalls that past and negotiates its cultural authority, a complex task in a post-colonial state which still shared the language and culture of its founding nation. Through a cosmopolitan dialogue with discursive history, Melville tries to thrust American literature onto the world stage. In the process, he demonstrates that the literary tradition need not serve political conservatism. Renovated and made vibrant through his multicultural allusive play, the tradition can resist the vicissitudes of the literary marketplace, which, Melville fears, threatens to erase the enabling function of human memory itself. Yet his frequently arcane allusions--often the vehicles of his most withering political criticism--cause Melville anxiety. I conclude by exploring his concern that his allusive method contradicts democratic form, especially given the populist connotations of democracy following Andrew Jackson's defining presidency.