I attempt to celebrate, or spoil, Herman Melville's birthday by describing him as a conceptual innovator

Happy birthday, Herman Melville.  I honestly thought I was going to spend most of this week writing about Melville, about The Piazza Tales (1856).

Melville was a kind of conceptual writer.  He was not concerned with the process of creativity like Alvin Lucier or Andy Warhol or César Aira (“nowadays, art that does not use a procedure is not truly art”).  Who at the time would have understood that kind of gibberish?  But he was a self-conscious innovator in fiction and verse.

The forms of the novel that were standard in the late 1840s were not a good fit for Melville, so he struggled to find a form for himself.  By his third book, the crazy Mardi (1849) he had assembled the pieces of his style:  short chapters (Mardi has 195!), a wild mix of realism and metaphor verging on allegory, a literally poetic diction, and a de-emphasis on novelistic character.  The latter especially was completely contrary to the contemporary emphasis of English (and French and Russian) fiction, where authors were creating amazingly lifelike, sympathetic characters.  This still drives unsuspecting readers of Moby-Dick crazy, doesn’t it?  Where are the people?

The Melville “novel” I am reading now, The Confidence Man (1857), is even more extreme, with all of the characters replaced by allegorical figures moving in a kind of a procession in a pointedly artificial setting.  It is like The Fairie Queen.  It is slow going.  Perhaps it is no longer a novel, but some other still unnamed form of prose fiction.

I think this wild allegorizing is fairly new, although it is partly borrowed from Nathaniel Hawthorne.  I believe the prose as poetry is new, too, something no one had done to the same extent.  I should keep an eye out for more examples of that.

Curiously, since I am knocking his characterization, two of Melville’s most significant creations are characters.  Even more curiously, they both can be thought of as conceptual innovations.  What I mean here is that some fundamental part of Captain Ahab and Bartleby the Scrivener can be understood without reading the original text.  Heck, without knowing that there is a text.  Ahab is the crazy guy who obsesses over a pointless goal; Bartleby is the office drone who prefers not to do anything.

Whether or not these descriptions match what is in the text is incidental.  They have turned out to be valuable concepts.  Useful shorthand descriptions.  They join Don Quixote, Don Juan, Ebenezer Scrooge, Faust, Sherlock Holmes, and that poor sap who turns into a bug as characters who have escaped their novels, however narrowly, as ideas more than as people.

I feel that movies have muddled this entire line of argument in some way I do not yet understand.

I also have this idea that the ingenious ways novelists have found to plump up the seeming reality of their characters prevents them from becoming free-floating concepts.  So we could call a well-meaning busybody Emma Woodhouse, but Jane Austen’s Emma is too complex or ambiguous, or just too much a part of her own novel to escape it.  I don’t know.  Please substitute your own example.  Imagine Maggie Tulliver independently of The Mill on the Floss, Anna Karenina outside of her book, Charles Kinbote at large.  It seems pointless, almost impossible, but who knows.  Reincarnations of Don Quixote and Captain Ahab show up all over the place.  I know, I know, Captain Ahab is himself a version of Don Quixote.

I wonder what I am going to ramble about tomorrow.