Composing Cultures by Aronoff Eric; Newman Robert D.;

Author:Aronoff, Eric; Newman, Robert D.; [Eric Aronoff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SUBJECT
ISBN: 3444128
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2013-07-24T04:00:00+00:00

Lewis Mumford, Moby-Dick, and Regional Culture

While Raymond Weaver’s Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic decisively launched the Melville revival in 1921, Lewis Mumford’s Herman Melville (1929) could be said to have solidified Melville’s place in the literary canon, with Moby-Dick as his masterpiece. When he began writing his Melville biography, Mumford was already an important young critic, enmeshed in the intellectual circuits of American modernism. As a young man growing up in New York City, he had been inspired by the radical social and aesthetic criticism of the Seven Arts group of Van Wyck Brooks and Randolph Bourne; by the early 1920s, he had become a regular contributor to a number of journals crucial to the formation of American modernism, including The Dial, The Freeman, The Nation, and The American Mercury.45 A generalist whose interests and writings spanned sociology, philosophy, architecture, and literature, by 1929 he had already published his Story of Utopias (1922) and the first full treatment of American architecture, Sticks and Stones (1924), and served as an editor at both The Dial and The New Republic, during which time he published, often in the same issues as his own articles, pieces by a range of intellectuals including such anthropologists as Franz Boas and his student Edward Sapir, as well as the rising critic Allen Tate. Most important for his work on Melville, Mumford had just completed his critically praised assessment of American literature and thought in the mid–nineteenth century, The Golden Day (1926), which promoted Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Melville as the key figures in American literary history.46 That the Doubleday publisher George Doran approached Mumford for its series of literary biographies indicates both Melville’s and Mumford’s rising stock in the years since Weaver’s book. When Mumford’s book became too big for the series, Harcourt, Brace and Company took it up, and then Carl Van Doren’s prestigious Literary Guild adopted it, further establishing Melville as a canonical author.

In his biography, Mumford draws on many of the same materials as Weaver, but he changes Weaver’s reading in two important ways. First, as opposed to Weaver, who saw Melville descend into “silence” after the public rejection of Moby-Dick and Pierre, Mumford analyzes Melville’s later poetry and prose to suggest Melville’s “acceptance” of the dark aspects of the universe, an acceptance that culminates in “Billy Budd.” Whereas Weaver spends more than 100 pages on Melville’s South Seas experience, and only 50 for the last forty years of his life, Mumford compresses Melville’s sea adventures to about 25 pages and spends about 140 pages on the material after Moby-Dick. The departure from Weaver that perhaps has the most significant impact on the course of Melville studies is Mumfords devotion of the central chapter of the book to an extensive analysis of the form and content of Moby-Dick as a literary composition rather than, like Weaver, subsuming it into Melville’s biography. In the context of the debates over culture and form that I been tracing, Mumford’s reimaging of the relation between Melville and the world he inhabits is even more important.

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