Melville the Metaphysical

FO Matthiessen notes the influence of the metaphysical style “of being ‘totus in illo’” both in individual lines (blubber burning “smells like the left wing of the day of judgment”; Ishmael working on nets imagines it all as “the Loom of Time” and himself as “a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates”) and in longer passages like Father Mapple’s sermon.

Matthiessen also recognizes that Melville’s ability (in Coleridge’s words about Thomas Browne) to metamorphose “everything, be it what it may, into the subject under consideration” comes from his life experience: “The range of sensations possible to an author in Donne’s time had narrowed with the nineteenth-century’s division of labor. The most learned Victorian author was not a man who had also been a bricklayer, had fought in the Low Countries, and had narrowly escaped the gallows for killing an actor in a duel, while all the time he was amassing the kind of knowledge that enabled him to approximate the most polished Roman poets and also to shape the plot of The Alchemist.” Melville, “coming to literature from rough life, relived rapidly the earlier experience of the race.”