Subversive Genealogy

Melville's work as an allegorical mode of wrestling with the painful dilemmas and tragic ironies of personal, familial, and national history: a tour de force so ingeniously argued and densely written that the reader's admiration turns into exhaustion. Rogin (Fathers and Children) is a Berkeley political scientist, but this long study out-mandarins most of his literary colleagues. He starts out from the reasonable assumption that Melville's fiction belongs under the category of romance, and that romance, "because it does not aspire to record the social world, offers space for a critical perspective on it. Melville's romances do not escape society; they penetrate and symbolically rework the social order." Thus Moby Dick treats, among other themes, capitalism's insanely heroic attempt to transform the natural order (a process whose victims included Melville's father, an old-fashioned clothing merchant), as well as resurgent American imperialism (Melville's cousin Gansevoort was a fanatical champion of Manifest Destiny) and the omnipresent fact of slavery (Melville hated America's exploitation of non-white peoples, but he knew that the country's wealth and even its freedom grew out of it). In Billy Budd, Captain Vere - cruelly righteous like Melville's father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, and his cousin Guert Gansevoort - serves as proof that "Drained of religious meaning, state authority offered no redemption, but religion blessed it nonetheless." Rogin's notion of Melville's career as a lifelong exploration/explanation of self by an agonized "subversive" is useful, but he draws so many fine symbolic parallels in presenting it that the text becomes intolerably knotted. He's forever saying things like, "Pierre, echoing the Rover's 'sister-mother' in his flirtation with his 'mother-sister,' discovers a lost half-sister of his own. But this disastrous recovery, which destroys Pierre's family, suggests that Cooper's happy ending was simply another mask, a re-covery as covering over rather than as real return." At this point readers unfamiliar with the plot of Pierre will be utterly at sea, and even those better informed may be confused. A technically dazzling but very trying performance. (Kirkus Reviews)