Herman Melville by Joseph O Eaton.
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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) August 22, 2021: Laurie Robertson-Lorant's 700-page 1996 book Melville: A Biography (New York: Clarkson Potter Publishers) is a deeply researched and superbly contextualized account of the life and times of Herman Melville (1819-1891) and his family and friends and critics.
Dr. Robertson-Lorant (born in 1940) wrote her 1972 doctoral dissertation at New York University on Herman Melville and Race: Themes and Imagery, and one of the strengths of her biography is her ability to provide relevant historical and cultural contextual information succinctly. (See page 621, note 2.)
Her reader-friendly book includes the table of contents (pages viii-ix), the list of illustrations (pages x-xi), Melville's paternal and maternal genealogies (pages xii-xiii), the preface (pages xiv-xvii), the acknowledgments (pages xviii-xxv), 30 chapters (pages 1-615), the afterword (pages 617-620), the notes (pages 621-673), the selected bibliography (pages 675-683), the illustration credits (page 685), and the index (pages 687-710). Because of the enormous cast of real-life persons from Melville's extended family and friends, the genealogies and the index are helpful.
Of her own endeavor as a Melville biographer, and of the similar endeavor of her fellow Melville biographers, Robertson-Lorant says that "despite the voluminous archival material available to scholars, Melville remains an enigma in many ways, his life a Gordian knot tossed to bemused biographers balanced at the edge of a volcano" (page 661, note 109).
However, if we imagine Melville's life as a Gordian knot tossed to bemused biographers, we should acknowledge that his life was also a Gordian knot tossed to Melville himself. As an imaginative writer, he created more than one partial portrait of the artist as a young man. Indeed, he was so pleased to discover himself as an artist as a young man that he never tired of including selected aspects of himself in a certain character and/or the narrator in his imaginative works.
Now, using Robertson-Lorant's imagery about Melville's life, I would also point out that all of our lives can be imagined in terms of the imagery of a volcano - that is, our personal ego-consciousness carries traumatic woundedness that can be imagined a kind of volcano within our psyche, figuratively speaking. However, as we know, not all volcanoes in the earth are active - not all of them are actively involved in eruptions, not even periodic eruptions. But Melville dedicated himself to deep diving in his psyche through his imaginative works, thereby activating the volcano in his psyche. (See the "Index" entry on writing [page 710] for specific page references to this theme in her book.)
For example, as a result of the Melville revival of the 1920s, his 1851 novel Moby-Dick has now long been regarded by critics as an artistic volcanic eruption of a splendid sort. But Melville himself also saw his 1852 novel Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, as a deeper exploration - in terms of the volcano imagery, another artistic volcanic eruption. But it was not well received by readers in his day -- and not many critics have defended it as a work of art on a par with or perhaps surpassing Moby-Dick.
For a Jungian commentary on Melville's Moby-Dick, see the 1995 second edition of Dr. Edward F. Edinger's book Melville's Moby-Dick : An American Nekyia (Toronto: Inner City Books).
But Melville's 1852 novel Pierre has been critically explored using a Jungian conceptual framework by E. L. Grant Watson (1885-1970) in his lengthy article "Melville's Pierre" in the New England Quarterly, volume 3, number 2 (April 1930): pages 195-234, and by Dr. Henry A. Murray, M.D. (1893-1988) of Harvard University in his lengthy introduction to the 1949 Hendricks House edition (pages xiii-ciii). Not surprisingly, Robertson-Lorant is familiar with both lengthy essays (see page 650, note 66; and page 649, note 51, respectively). But she does not mention the original 1978 edition of Dr. Edinger's book - or its 1995 second edition.
In my estimate, Robertson-Lorant's chapter on Melville's 1852 novel Pierre is superb (pages 299-319).
However, I was disappointed in her chapter (pages 539-563) on Melville's long centennial poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876).
I have discussed Melville's Clarel (1876) in the following two OEN articles:
(1) "July 4, 1776; July 4, 1876, July 4, 2020" (dated June 23, 2020): Click Here
(2) "Is Melville's 18,000-line 1876 centennial poem worth reading today?" (dated July 8, 2020): Click Here
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