The Dark Romantics: Poe, Hawthorne, Melville

This is Unit Eight of American Literature, part two of two: Melville, the friendship that named this camp's position, and a test that separates all three writers. Part one ended on a house carrying a curse laid at the gallows. This part opens on the word Hawthorne insisted on for books like that one. He called them romances rather than novels, claiming a latitude to present truth under circumstances of his own choosing rather than keeping to the probable, and the distinction is his own. That claim about permission is the governing idea arriving at its payoff, because it is exactly what lets this camp work. A writer who has claimed latitude from the probable can put a whale in the centre of a book and surround it with chapters on rope and on colour, can let a clerk refuse everything with a sentence about preference and never explain why, and can hang an innocent sailor lawfully. Melville does all three. Then the friendship: Melville met Hawthorne while writing his great book, dedicated it to him, and wrote an essay naming the blackness in Hawthorne that no deeply thinking mind escapes, which is the dark Romantic case stated exactly. And then the procedure. By the end you will be able to state the romance distinction. To account for Melville's life and the structure of *Moby-Dick*. To read "Bartleby" and its sentence. To place "Benito Cereno" and *Billy Budd*. And to tell the three writers apart on an unseen passage.

Five entries: the permission Hawthorne claimed, the man who used it hardest, and the three things to know about his largest book.

A claim about permission, not genre.

AML 0721 Hawthorne's Romance and His Preface to It

Hawthorne insisted on calling his long fictions romances rather than novels, claiming the latitude to present truth under circumstances of the writer's own choosing rather than keeping to the probable. The distinction is his own, and the exam expects it attached to his name. The term is a claim about permission rather than a description of subject.

A ruined family, a boy at sea.

AML 0722 Herman Melville at Sea

Melville's father failed in business and died when the boy was twelve, which ended his schooling. He shipped out, spent time in the Pacific, and turned the voyages into early books including *Typee*. The sea gave him his subject and his vocabulary. The early books sold well, and the great one did not.

A chase, wrapped in an encyclopaedia.

AML 0723 *Moby-Dick*: The Whale and the Hunt

*Moby-Dick* follows the whaleship Pequod under a captain hunting the white whale that took his leg. Around that chase Melville builds chapters on whale anatomy, on rope, on colour and on the trade itself, so the book is at once an adventure, an encyclopaedia and a metaphysical argument. The digressions are the book rather than an interruption of it.

A narrator, a monomaniac, two others.

AML 0724 Ahab, Ishmael, Queequeg, Starbuck

Ishmael narrates and survives. Ahab commands and pursues. Queequeg, a harpooner from the Pacific, becomes Ishmael's friend in the book's first pages. Starbuck, the first mate, argues for prudence and loses the argument. The crew is drawn from everywhere, which makes the ship a version of the world. Ishmael tells it; Ahab drives it.

A colour that may mean nothing.

AML 0725 The Whiteness of the Whale

One chapter stops the narrative to ask why whiteness terrifies, running through snow, albinos, polar bears and blank pages before concluding that white may signify emptiness rather than purity. The passage is the book's clearest statement that its own symbol refuses to settle. That instability is the point rather than a failure of nerve.

Five entries on the shorter Melville: a clerk who stops, a captain who cannot see, a hanging, and the friendship that named the camp.

A copyist who stops copying.

AML 0726 "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

A Wall Street lawyer hires a copyist who begins refusing tasks with a single sentence, stops working altogether, refuses to leave, and is finally carried to prison, where he dies facing a wall. The narrator, comfortable and decent, never understands him and cannot help him. The story gives no reason for any of it, and means not to.

Preference, where refusal was expected.

AML 0727 "I would prefer not to"

Bartleby's formula is neither refusal nor consent, and its grammar is what defeats everyone around him, because a preference cannot be argued with the way disobedience can. Readings of the story as a protest against office work, as a portrait of depression, and as a parable of passive resistance all start from that one sentence. Those are readings, and they stay readings.

A scene staged for one blind man.

AML 0728 "Benito Cereno"

An American captain boards a Spanish ship in distress and fails to see that the enslaved Africans aboard have taken control and are staging the whole scene for his benefit. Understanding arrives late and all at once. The narration is limited to the man being deceived, which is why a reader is deceived alongside him.

An innocent man, lawfully hanged.

AML 0729 *Billy Budd* and the Posthumous Melville

Melville died in obscurity, and *Billy Budd* was found in manuscript and published decades afterwards. A sailor who cannot answer a false accusation strikes his accuser dead, and the captain who believes him innocent hangs him anyway. The revival of Melville's reputation came in the next century, long after he had stopped writing for a public.

One writer naming the other's darkness.

AML 0730 Hawthorne and Melville: The Friendship and the Essay

Melville met Hawthorne in the Berkshires while writing *Moby-Dick*, dedicated the book to him, and wrote an essay praising the blackness in Hawthorne's work that he said no deeply thinking mind could escape. The friendship cooled afterwards, but the essay states the dark Romantic case exactly. The essay is Melville describing himself as well.

Two entries to close: a three-part test for the period's most confused trio, and the unit's capstone.

Ask who the trouble belongs to.

AML 0731 Telling Poe From Hawthorne From Melville

The three are the period's most confused trio, and three tests separate them. The first is where the trouble comes from: in Poe it comes from inside a single disordered mind and the story is usually told by that mind, in Hawthorne it is inherited from a family, a town or a religious past, and in Melville it is built into the universe or the institution, so no one is exactly to blame. The second is the length of the leash: Poe's tales are tight, short and engineered for one effect, Hawthorne's are moral fables of middle length that hold their symbol steady, and Melville's expand, digress and swallow whole essays. The third is the ending: Poe closes the design, Hawthorne closes with a judgment left ambiguous, and Melville closes without resolution at all. All three write first-person narrators with unreliable views, so voice alone decides nothing. The test is the location of evil, which is exactly what these writers were arguing about.

Shared instruments, evil located within.

AML 0732 The Dark Side of the American Renaissance

The years around eighteen fifty produced, within a few miles of one another, a literature that shares Concord's methods and denies Concord's conclusions. Poe supplies the machinery and the theory: a tale read at one sitting with every word serving a single preconceived effect, a rule that made the American short story what it is. His narrators are the period's great unreliable voices, the man who proves his sanity by describing a dismemberment and the murderer telling his story fifty years later without remorse, and his poems are built for the ear with falling rhythms and refrains that stay fixed while the speaker unravels. He also invented the analytic detective. Hawthorne takes the Puritan past his own family belonged to, with a witch-trial judge among his ancestors, and turns it into a body of work about concealed guilt: a man who sees his whole village at a sabbath and can never trust anyone again, a minister who wears a veil until death, a scarlet letter whose meaning the town keeps revising, a house carrying a curse. Melville builds the largest structure of the three: a chase wrapped in an encyclopaedia, a chapter deciding that whiteness may signify nothing, a copyist who prefers not to, a captain who cannot see a rebellion staged in front of him, and a sailor lawfully hanged for an act everyone knows was innocent. What unites them is a refusal to resolve, and the exam's questions about this group are usually about exactly that. The readings named in this unit are readings, attributed to the sources that make them.

That closes the dark Romantics. The next unit takes the writing that was arguing about slavery while all this was being written. You can state Hawthorne's distinction, that a romance claims latitude from the probable where a novel claims probability, and say that the term is a claim about permission. You can account for Melville, whose father's failure ended his schooling and sent him to sea, and for a book that surrounds a chase with chapters on anatomy and rope and colour, narrated by Ishmael and driven by Ahab, with a chapter that asks why whiteness frightens and decides it may mean nothing at all. You can read "Bartleby" as a story that gives no reason on purpose, and name the grammar of the sentence that defeats everyone, a preference where a refusal was expected. You can place "Benito Cereno", narrated from inside the deception, and *Billy Budd*, found in manuscript and published decades later. And you can separate the three by asking where the trouble comes from: inside one mind, inherited from a past, or built into the world.