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Herman Melville: Forever Contemporary--and Modern
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19640 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1991 |
3,414 Words |
| Author
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Milton Birnbaum
Milton Birnbaum is dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and
professor of English at American International College in
Springfield, Massachusetts. |
When Herman Melville died on September 28, 1891, he had fallen into such obscurity that the New York Times referred to him in its story as "the late Henry Melville." Melville remained hidden from public and critical view until Raymond Weaver (inspired by the enthusiasm for Melville of his Columbia University professor, Carl Van Doren) published his Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic in 1921. Since then, interest in and recognition of Melville have increased to a point where today, among Americans writers, only Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry James rival him as subjects of intense scholarly study, both here and abroad.
In an age, however, when the dread of AIDS is greater than the fear of committing adultery, Hawthorne's masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, seems somewhat quaint. Twain's work vacillates between sentimentalized nostalgia and cynical Timonism; Poe's tales of terror have been superseded by the horrors of urban reality; and James' psychological portraits have become lost in his verbal labyrinths, from which few have escaped. But Melville tends to be like Shakespeare's Cleopatra: "Age cannot wither ... [him], nor custom stale ... [his] infinite variety." He remains durably modern.
Now, modernism is a term that is forever being defined and redefined. When Matthew Arnold used the term in his 1857 lecture at Oxford University (a lecture reprinted in 1869 as "On the Modern Element in Literature"), he used the term modern to signify a work of literature characterized by timeless moral, intellectual, and civic qualities. For Arnold, these qualities would remain relevant for all subsequent ages. Thus, Arnold claimed, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Aristophanes are modern; Menander is not; similarly, Thucydides is modern, but the Elizabethan historian Sir Walter Raleigh is not.
Modern vs. Contemporary
Interestingly enough, Lionel Trilling, one of Arnold's biographers, changed the meaning of modern from Arnold's timeless orientation to one limited to the twentieth century. In an essay published in 1961 ("On the teaching of Modern Literature"), Trilling talks about his unhappiness in giving a course that would include such twentieth-century authors as Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Mann, and Gide, not only because he would be forced by the nature of the books being assigned to reveal much about his own personal spiritual confrontations, but also because the "characteristic element of modern [that is, twentieth century] literature ... is the bitter line of hostility to civilization which runs
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