Amherst Reads Transcript

James Shepard: Hi! I’m James Shepard and I’m talking today to Gef Sanborn about his new book, The Value of Herman Melville. Geoff is currently the Henry S. Poler '59 Presidential Teaching Professor of English at Amherst College and author of Plagiarama!: William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions, Whipscars and Tattoos: The Last of the Mohegan, Moby Dick and the Maeyorie, The signs of a cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial reader, and also co-edited a book, Melville and Aesthetics, published cultural historical editions of William Wells Brown’s Clotel and Melville’s Typee, as well as essays on writers like Edgar Allen Poe, Sandra Cisneros, James Fennimore Cooper. And he’s won the Foerster Prize for Best Essay in General American Literature and the Parker Prize for Best Essay in PMLA. So, with all of that I guess were just about out of time here Geoff. *Laughs* I’m kidding you know it’s just you got a lot of achievements there. Ah—this new book in many ways seems like kind of a wonderful attempt to recruit, to bring together, and I guess in some ways to train readers both in and out of the academy to move beyond the various inhibitions generated by Melville’s canonical status so they can experience for themselves the unexpected joys involved in reading somebody like Herman Melville. But given that listeners are tuned in to hear you Geoff, and not me, maybe I should let you tweak that characterization of the book project.

Geoffrey Sanborn: No that’s a definitely where the whole thing starts through the inhibitions around reading Melville that are really–I talk about them in the introduction of the book and it might seem like they are just the ordinary inhibitions that people feel about what they’re supposed to read but they’re especially intense with Melville. Whenever I tell people that I write about Melville or teach Melville they go “OH MY GOD  I meant to read Moby Dick but I just read a little and then  I put it down and it was too hard and you know” and they are a little bit mad and are like, “ugh Melville’s the worst you know major in Moby Dick in high school and there’s something about that” and what I — so what I would say in those circumstances is “oh you can live a rich and full life without haven’t ever read Melville”, or like ‘it’s okay don’t feel bad you know” but really more what I was telling them was you know there may be some writers who want be difficult and unapproachable in these responses but Melville is not one of them.

JS: Yeah that’s one of the things that’s lovely about your book is that it communicates the poignancy of that. The way you would’ve gone “ahhh I want a reader”

GS: Boy do I want a reader and not because I want to be famous you know but because like I’m thinking all these thoughts, I’m seeing all these things, and I want to tell somebody about them and he’s overcome by his desire to share and he kept hearing in various kinds of way like that’s enough but he’s like, “did you ever read Montagne, Montagne is incredible and Shakespeare! I think I got the true meaning of Shakespeare,” and people do not know what to do with it and he’s like well maybe I can write and that’ll be the place where you can say these things that you can’t say at a dinner party in 19^th century new York city and that turned out to be not quite the case unfortunately.

JS: You know he really does occupy a sort of a weird luminal cultural space for us in that he’s so ubiquitous in one hand because there such a collective consciousness about the plot and characters because of the pop culture versions of it and here’s is such intimidation in the other because it feels so much because this is about as high arc and as much status as American literature could get. Between the two of them there’s this sense that you’re pushing uphill against like well I kind of know that story and that story is going to make me feel dumb anyway because I’m not gonna be able to get all of it and all that kind of stuff

GS: Right and the idea is that because its canonical it must mean that there is like a knowledge base on or like it’s a work of like wisdom literature and that what  you should be reading for is not like anything like pleasure or the just the joy of having a mind or having a pair of mind but learning really important things that you can’t learn in any other kind of way and that you’re going to need special help and like a critical editing that tells you all the special secrets for understanding the novel and its just—I mean I’m saying this to everybody that if you open up Moby Dick and start reading (not the excerpt just chapter one) It’s just a guy talking to you. Like just call me Ishmael, I went to see a while ago and I can’t remember exactly how long ago, why did I do it? I don’t know I was in a weird mood and that’s literally how it starts and it continues in that direction. Then it turns into like a project called Moby dick where he’s just going to try it on a bunch of chapters on subject related to whaling and just see what happens. It’s kind of like this experimental where its chapter after chapter he’s trying something different that falls under the umbrella of the Moby Dick project. But as you say, we think about in such though based terms in popular culture so there’s these popular little funny cartons with you know the white whale and you can’t pick it up. It’s not really a plot based book any more than it is kind of like wisdom literature. It’s like a joyride you know. When I’m saying this I’m not speaking from the heart Melville criticism, this is an argument that I am making about Melville so that people can get where I am coming from but it’s definitely not what people in the field of novel scholarship tend to emphasize about him. The book is churning up several experiences I think.

JS: One of the things the book does really beautifully is provide a vivid sense of just how crucial a kind of headlong improvisation was to Melville’s message and how he sort of needed to generate a requisite intensity in those improvisation while he was cranking that stuff out. And you quote I think its Stanley Crouch imagine Melville sort of getting to the end his chapters and going “AH! I don’t know about that” Can you talk a little more about how that version of Melville’s work sort of evolved to you because it is clearly very crucial to your project.

GS: I mean yeah I love that passage and it comes from Crouch who did a radio interview who teaches a course at Julliard about jazz and talks about Moby Dick and his students always respond with “Why are we reading Moby Dick” and he says its jazz. And what makes it most jazz-like for him it’s what he calls the absolute fearlessness of the improvisation that he finishes some of his chapters and then he’s like now what do I do? Oh I know, I’ll do this. And so the fearlessness in (?) you go into this territory and you’re not just playing the usual kind of scales you’re in this very different territory that opens up all these possibilities and you can’t count in advance how many of them there are or figure out which one is going to be the best one to go down and so you just like trust yourself. You throw yourself down on to like the airstream and then you see where you get carried and in the book he tried that in 1848 and 1849 in this book called Mardi where he’s just like let himself go and is kind of lost. And it’s instructed to read and it makes Moby Dick feel more like a miracle than you can see when you just read it on its own. Because he had written something so terrible just a couple years before on the same principal so part of what I was trying to do in the book was not just say Melville is like a God and he writes in godlike ways all the time but to talk about passages from earlier books or later books where something goes off the rails or for me and I try to write convincingly about the way it goes of the rail so that you can appreciate even if you didn’t to back up on Melville’s other writings, what’s so special about his best work. And I think that it’s not just that there is a kind of gorgeousness to the whale chapters or where he gets at the end of those chapters but that the spirit of it nobody writes a chapter like that, nobody gets to do that if they haven’t just sort just thrown themselves into this story.

JS: I mean yeah and what’s amazing and moving about what you point out is he did it and it was a more or less complete failure in the case of Mardi and he was indefatigable, you know he was like, “alright I’m going to do it again, I’m gonna try again” and for the benefit of those would-be Herman Melville’s out there can you talk a little more about what was different in the two cases because the book is very clear about using its close readings to go, “here’s why that message doesn’t work with Mardi and here’s why it fuses so spectacularly with Moby Dick.”

GS: One of the things that the editor let me do with this book is that it’s part of a series called the Value of the Cambridge University Press and the editor that approached me told me that he wanted a strong voice to value criticisms and that he wanted to use open and all kinds of forms with it, and as I wrote to him I asked him, “do you really mean that?” and he said yeah so I was like, “OK here we go.” And one of the things he let me do was two quote at much greater length from Melville’s text than people tend to in works of criticism because what I wanted to go was give readers what it’s like to be in the midst of an extended run of Melville because so much depends on that. You know the actual reading experience is not snippet by snippet it’s like your inside something while it’s moving. So when the kind of example from Marti, Typee, or White Jacket that amusing for me are just several examples towards what’s working something like in Moby Dick. So like in Typee kind of like where there is a lot of descriptive  he would separate out a series of details for one by one itemization so the sky loos like this, the albacore looks like this, and by the time I’m Moby dick he’s taking single sentences like a series of things kind of like on the fly and fly and sort of jabbering them up with this amazing precision and speed at the same time into a single complicated sentence that wills suddenly take a further flight at the end and lift you into some kind of a larger version of the scene or some kind of like metaphorical other space and so in terms of craft—one of the things I like about peoples responses to the book is that they hadn’t read a work of criticism that seemed so focused on craft as this one. And I am really interested into how he made these things. For me is the improvisation that work best are the ones that have the kind of particularizing vividness of making each individual element of the scene shine if it’s a descriptive passage about he also constellates the things that he’s causing to shine into some kind of pattern or some kind of form melodically in the way that Jazz soloist would string a bunch of notes and you can feel the way it hold together without ever really being able to put your finger on it. A lot of the book is just presenting passages and trying to evoke something like that.

JS: Some of that is clearly a kind of miraculously evolving facility but some it too is what he’s learning around his improvisations in. I mean you’re talking also about the difference between Marti and Moby dick being called something like productive subject and immediately when you said that something useful locked in when I was thinking about my dim memory of Marti and my dim memory of Marti is that the improve are ranging across lots and lots of abstraction and when he makes those breathtaking or sideways moves in Moby Dick its always something where you’re like that’s perfect for the usefulness of the book. Does the productive subject thing seem to predicate the greater facility or have I got it backwards?

GS: I think there is two things coming together. So after Marti failed he had a growing family and wrote a couple of books for money and you know as a writer you only become a better writer by writing more and you can see in Redburn and White jacket even though he’s writing fast In some places he’s also figuring stuff out along the way in terms of just basic stylistic command. You know he gets more and more confident in his ability to start a sentence and finish it with finesse or whatever it is he’s more in command of his instrument and I think that that was happening and at the same time that he really got what he screwed up in Marti where things were very abstract and he just started from concepts  and the concepts had no obvious relation to one another and it just looked like someone meandering but in Moby Dick he says like at one point, “out of the trunk comes the branch and out of the of the branch comes the twig.” So in productive subjects, chapters grow out of chapters, and he’s trying to think in a quasi-organic way about how things are moving rom one kind of dis-worldly subject to another. You know he’s not starting from concept he’s starting from the whale line, you know the whale’s tale, the whale as a dish or whatever it is. He’s not starting from the fear of dying or whatever it is or how much mosquitoes bug him.

JS: I love that Williams Carlos Williams you use at the start of an epigraph where it says we a s human beings are just looking for company and understanding and the book is just relentlessly moving about the resourcefulness of Melville’s attempt to do absolutely whatever it takes to build a relationship with his readers you know like I’m gonna come at the reader from 19 different directions. Can you talk a little bit more about that resourcefulness because the book is just wonderful on that subject?

GS: Yeah, you can’t write about Melville for very long without getting interested in Melville as a person even though the life isn’t equivalent to the writing but in his life he especially in his twenties and his early thirties—he wrote Moby Dick when he was 31— he was by all reports a really great guy to talk to at dinner. People would be like Herman Melville with his cigar and Spanish eyes and he would raconteur his book out in front of you. And when Melville would write about himself, he would say things like I brought this person to life through clever talking. He had a sense of himself as having among his resources the ability to animate people who were suffering from a failure of animation. He does a really moving painful letter that he wrote to his brother Gansevoort who was very very depressed and sick in England 1846 and he’s just trying to cheer him up and it’s very exclamatory and it’s about the Mexican war which he was against but Gansevoort was for and he’s like “what’s going to come of the Mexican war?” or “when’s the next war going to be,” in this sort of like expansive way but the letter got sent back to him because by the time it got to Gansevoort, he was dead. So it’s like Bartleby and the unerring of life, these letters speak towards death, and the thrill of absence of a readership for Melville during his lifetime. These works really were unerring of animation and it takes two. There has to be someone to animate. One of the things that is true about Melville is that there is this sort of moroseness post Moby Dick and I talk about it in the book about how at one point I kind of fetishized the sort of means of access to the terrible truth about the human experience and human relations. But increasingly so, that’s almost like you’re breaking faith with the Melville that believe in those things when you side absolutely with the Melville who can only see the worst.

JS:  Yeah the absolutely is key. You know the poignancy of attempting to transmit a capacity for imaginative vitality to the reader is so heightened when you realize that on one hand in the personal life there’s a brother who will never answer and in the other hand—the professional life—there’s the reader who will never answer. And that notion of a greater imaginative vitality being engendered in the reader’s life is very touching and relates to something else your book does that I think is flying in the face of the accepted or at least the more stereotypical view of Melville and that is that the way it attempts to build a relationship with the reader it relates to the giving and receiving of care. Because when you think about the way Moby Dick is taught in high school, at some point or another the English teacher usually grindingly gets around to that notion of the implacable uncaring universe. So the way in which you bring those two together is one of the crucial parts of the book. Can you talk a little more about that?

GS: The profound uncaring universe you know casts him away and that I am extensively bleak and relationally hopeful and those two things go together. And that so when he’s writing things like that passage from the Castro, there’s two things you can say about it one, it is existentially bleak and two it is gorgeous and it is unforgettable. Every time I am reading it, I’m like oh boy, here we go.” It’s like getting to a moment in a movie or a song that you just love and you cannot wait for it. It’s also taking that moment and just re-seeing and restaging it so that it can be taken in and not just taken in progressively but with a kind of urge of joy. Because it’s like you have human beings alone in the uncaring universe and yet they can care about one another. You know one thing I love about Melville is that he’s not a guy who went to school until the age of 12, but he was still fearless in his reading. He would just pick up anybody. He would pick Montane, Paradise Lost. In his notion of Paradise Locks he’d write, “Satan is a teacher and Messiah, I think Milton had a twist in him.” So he’s like reproducing the whole romantic reading of Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost clearly without knowing it had already been done. So the idea that god invented this world with evil and suffering in it and invented human beings and cursed them with original sin but also made it possible for them to pass judgement on god and evil and be and be resistance to evil and suffering and create characters and have Satan have really good lines about the problem with god. And so in some ways the heart of the issue is that in this world with so much bleakness and pain we are capable of loving one another and loving things other than ourselves even like ideas or static objects and caring. And what’s even more miraculous when you think about it is that is mostly understood I the context of a universe that is understood as basically uncaring.

JS: Yes that’s the lovely part of it. The miraculous part of it. There is a way in which you’re calling the existential weakness underlined unneeded to ourselves. What’s that great quote you give us from Pierre how he was so helplessly open, the adverb makes clear of something good coming out of it but nevertheless, that we need to do it and we can do it and that is an amazing opportunity that the brutality itself sort of offers.

GS: Well there’s one chapter called susceptibility and it’s about Bartleby and one of the things I really enjoyed about getting the chance to finally write about it was writing about how you have this lawyer who is vehemently safe you know he buttons up his coat to the last button and he’s certainly not helplessly open but even this person faced again and again by Bartleby saying the same thing and in strange ways finds himself becoming open to him. He says, “For the first time in my life an overpowering melancholy overcame me before I experienced un-seizing sadness.” So one of the postulates for Melville is that everybody has those susceptibilities and I think people have defense systems that keep them from sort of being aware of and keeping other people aware of those susceptibilities but that is where the hope lies. Those susceptibilities do exist even in someone like the safe lawyer.

JS: And one of the things that follow from that construction is the way it leads us to the importance of value in diversity in a way that’s both cool and important given what we have in America. Can you talk a little more about how you make that jump from making a fairly small argument?

GS: Yeah, I remember when I think you saw a draft of the book and when you got to the point where Adolf Eichmann shows up you’re like “whoa! I was not expecting to see that there.” And I was so glad that you said it because that was certainly part of the idea. That up to a certain point in the book I am focusing largely on the moment experience of reading Melville but I wanted it to evolve into consideration of the political dimensions and implications of his work­—especially diversity because these things are conventionally opposed to one another its either you talk about the politics of a work or the aesthetic of the work and one of the tins that I hope my book is dramatizing is you know the potential for the relationship between those two.

JS: Well congratulations because you pulled it off. And I think that simultaneity of I am alone and I don’t need to be alone is a really wonderful way of getting from the c raft part of it to the political part. And I cut you off on the diversity thing, do you have any more to say about that?

GS: I think one of the things when I’ve given talks about this book and I’ve read from the end of the book where I talk about Hannah Arendt and her argument that Eichmann wasn’t that he was evil but that he didn’t think. He didn’t use his mind. And I’m just kind of dramatizing how Melville’s mind is constantly in motion and turning things over. And I wanted to use Arendt to show that there’s an ethical dimension of this that bares hard on political questions related to race and diversity that instead of wanting to know the right thing to say about diversity or about race, what Melville’s work indicates for me is that if you have a mind that is sort of like in love with its own potential for motion and takes jo7y in the kind of like unfolding and folding of possibilities and surroundings then it’s just going to lead people to think we’ll look this is an opportunity to make something new of my experience and a way to add more about what I know about the world and subtract a little about what I thought. What I’m arguing is that there’s a like a way of thinking of antiracism as something that has a pleasure principle in it. That antiracism makes it possible to derive joy from your experience that racism does not and racism closes down the avenues of imaginable relational possibilities and antiracism opens them up by one by one and there is potential to that. So instead of a moral argument against racism, there’s almost an aesthetic or experiential argument to it. That is the thing that has gotten the most attention in the question and answer sessions and that is the most sort of, where I am going out on a limb argumentatively so that’s why I am curious about what people are going say about that. And so is the craft part of the book, and the part where I focus on craft the most is in the opening where it becomes sort of like an occasion for me to try out this argument about politics and racial politics.

JS: And one of the nice things is that the first step in that move you are describing is a claim of solidarity with the world and that’s happening at the level of craft and ethics because he’s stepping out of his acknowledgement of his solitude by saying well I might be alone but my mind is always going to go out there and engage the world and as soon as it engages the world it is more likely to share the world with others. What’s great and moving about it is there’s an acknowledgement of the centering of the self and a willingness to de-center oneself and that’s the heart of any diversity project sort of to say, “It isn’t all about me”.

GS: Yea, like if you think of the Jazz Soloist that’s certainly a centering of self but also like a de-centering of the self to the movement. Like where does the melody come from in a jazz solo, it’s really fundamentally mysterious because it’s not from a settled personality or subjectivity and yet there’s a person stepping forward so there is this kid of individual self-assertion and it’s that paradox that you’re talking about that I’m coming back to throughout the book.

JS: That’s also kind of what you’re getting at when you’re talking about a way of getting around the psychoanalytic writer when it comes to not communicating parts of oneself like how Melville’s mind is always moving on silence. In terms of that, it sounds absolutely isolating, but is there something about Melville’s preoccupation with that and the ineffable that blends itself to the process of teaching you think?

GS: I like that because today was the first day of classes. But yeah like I mean there’s a certain type of garrulousness on the first day of classes that all teachers know and is preceded by a lot of fire. And then you’re walking down the hallway and miraculously you open the door and you start talking, like where is that coming from? It’s like there’s a way of talking and a way of writing that can give other people the powerful impression that the speech or the writing is grounded in something that can never be spoken or written and that is a décor of the self as Winnicott says. And that it’s the sort of thing that one wants to preserve when they want to preserve the dignity of others. That there’s something in them that goes beyond any attempt of getting to know them or having them speak their truth. One of the thing that programs of dignity should have at their core is a respect for what can’t be brought into words. And so for me the emphasis on improvisation and differentiation between certain kinds of improvisation and ones that work better than others is to inevitably be like what are you improvising from or what is your relationship to the improvisation. Like when you’re talking or your writing, and some stuff is better than others and some stuff feels truer to the deepest parts of you and why is that so the Winnicott stuff towards the final chapters about the non-communicating central self is a way to just gives us simple language about for describing the different theories for describing the moments when you feel truer or less true to yourself.

 JS: I love that anecdote you used to start the book the trading scene between the captain and Moby Dick and his crew and it’s such a great figure for your project but given that so moving a story and it’s also a disheartening reminder of the current status of reading in America does what you’re up to feels both crucial and doomed or does it represent something that we should be more hopeful about.

GS: I mean maybe all crucial things are doomed.

JS: Spoken like a true novelist

GS: I mean if you think it crucial, then that’s how you know it’s necessary and you know obviously literature is receding in cultural significance and you may have noticed this but when I started in grad school in 1988 you read Melville because he was great and you read all these authors because they were great and they were always going to be great and important and there were always going to be jobs for people who read Melville and that turned out not to be the case. In a practical way for me though, this just means that I have a job to get people interested in Melville and think he’s worth reading. These students don’t come in and think,  “I am here because I have to read Melville in order to be a respectable human being,” there like “ugh I have to read Melville or I guess I’ll give it a try” and so I get to be (?)In the way that I teach Melville because I am like it is great, I love it and that certainly wasn’t the case back then.

JS: That’s true but that also gives you the license to be pedagogically wild and unpredictable.

GS: Yeah exactly and in some ways the other writers that I quote in the book are very often not scholars or historians but they’re people like Sylvia Plath and Toni Morrison and that’s because so much of what I’m writing the book comes out of the classes that I’ve taught at Amherst College and students that have been in those classes recognize the bishop or Morrison from my handouts. It’s a book that feels more closely related to my teaching self and not only are you going to love this but you’re going to love reading it and thinking about it afterwards and the implications. And I realized after writing the book that it kind of has the same structure of a semester. It’s grounded in the rhythm of a semester and the movement of thought throughout that time.

JS: There’s a really nice use of a contemporary author to sort of get at the de-familiarizing is so crucial to the pedagogic and scholarly project. There’s the use of Marilyn Robinson in the intro where she ends up being quiet and aloof and watchful sort of as to not scare or startle the strangeness away. There’s this lovely sense of the care and respect that you forward both the paradox and mysteriousness of what’s going on in the classroom and in Melville’s work and it’s a lovely way of bringing those things together.

GS: That part of not startling the strangeness away is right after she’s thinking, “What have I seen what have I seen, the earth and the sky not as they always are.” And I think I feel that about Melville and anyone that I teach that were getting things in these pages things not as they always are and if we are too quick in trying to assimilate them into things we already know we are going to lose that quality.

JS: What’s lovely is thinking about students saying “What have I seen, what have I seen?”

GS: Right! Exactly.

JS: So I think we’ve done as much as we could do with this and we went way beyond everything and congratulations you wrote a really great book.

GS: Thank you I am very grateful that you were the reader.