Reviewed by: Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies: An Aesthetics in All Things by Cody Marrs Geoffrey Sanborn CODY MARRS Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies: An Aesthetics in All Things Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. xi + 148 pp. It is fairly well known at this point but worth restating: Melville, lout-genius of political thought and tragedian of defiance, was powerfully oriented toward aesthetic experience. In his poetry, he often seeks formal pleasures in an almost line-by-line way—which is, I think, the main reason why many readers of his poetry feel impeded in their progress, slowed down by waves of concise formulations, rhythmic shocks, grammatical inversions, and allusions. In his prose fiction of the 1850s, especially Moby-Dick and Pierre, he frequently aspires toward a greater and greater complexity of reference through cascades of modifying, vivifying clauses; there are sentences in Moby-Dick, Pierre, "Benito Cereno," and The Confidence-Man that I look forward to in the same way that I look forward to certain songs in musicals. And everywhere in his work, aesthetics and thinking—sensing beauty and seeking knowledge—are phases of a single process, a process that is, Melville thinks, too often oversimplified, too often arrested in one phase or the other. For the last thirty years, however, most literary critics have insisted that an attraction to aesthetic form signifies an attraction to totalized control. "In a formalist sense," Russ Castronovo writes, "the aesthetic object aspires to wholeness and unity, criteria that in a geopolitical sense supply the logic for the expansion of world markets underwritten by U.S. militarism" (Castronovo, Russ. "Geo-Aesthetics: Fascism, Globalism, and Frank Norris," boundary 2, 30.3 (2003): pp. 163–64). Most critics have insisted, as well, that it signifies an exclusionary connoisseurship. "Exclusion," Amelia Jones writes, "is the primary function of aesthetics and the rhetoric of beauty as these have conventionally been wielded" (Jones, Amelia. "'Every Man Knows Where and How Beauty Gives Him Pleasure': Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics." In Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age. Eds. Emory Elliott, Louis Freitas Caton, and Jeffrey Rhyne. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. 215–40. p. 218). In the mid- 2000s, Samuel Otter and I coedited a collection of essays entitled Melville and End Page 85 Aesthetics as a means of showcasing the various ways in which certain Melville critics were integrating historical, political, and theoretical perspectives with aesthetic modes of response. Our own experience had been that aesthetic modes of response were unpredictable, intellectually stimulating, and deeply woven into more obviously social styles of analysis. We knew very well that "wholeness and unity" had been the primary determinants of literary value during the Cold War and that "aesthetics and the rhetoric of beauty" had been mobilized to exclude works with wilder hearts, especially when the writers of those works were not white, straight, and male. But we did not believe that aesthetics and beauty were inherently imperialist and exclusionary. They could be made to serve the interests of consolidators, but they were too chance-like, glance-like, and unruly to be defined by those kinds of uses. In Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies: An Aesthetics in All Things, Cody Marrs similarly attempts to expand beyond the dominant conception of aesthetics by modeling a different way of approaching beauty. "For Melville," he writes, "beauty is an experience of non-sovereignty, a feeling of weakened or blurred autonomy that reconnects us to the world" (1). Or, put another way, "every time we happen upon beauty, it makes us suddenly and intensely aware of something or someone beyond the self 's previously narrow purview—some corresponding vibrancy that had previously gone unnoticed" (43–44). According to Marrs, Melville's attention to such vibrancies represents "a significant departure from the possessive strains of Euro-American aesthetics, which tend to grasp beauty as a function and result of the ego's independence" (82–83). For Melville, Marrs writes, beauty is not "a rarefied property felt solely in the mind" (96); it is, instead, "the substance and spirit of intersubjectivity, a kind of sensus communis without individuated subjects" (viii). The heart of the book is a series of three...
Geoffrey Sanborn (Fri,) studied this question.