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Melville and His Chimney
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Despite the large body of Melville criticism, Melville's short stories still await a critical reappraisal. The attention the tales have received—and it is slight in relation to their importance—has frequently been marred by the critic's idée fixe on Melville which causes him to bend the material he works with to fit preconceived notions, or to approach Melville's symbolic art from so oblique an angle that he ignores dramatic and thematic elements central to Melville's perception. “I and My Chimney” is a significant case in point. In miniature this story embodies, among other things, several themes explored in Melville's other works, an implied criticism of America's “infatuate juvenility,” and particularly Melville's recurrent insistence upon what one recent critic has called “an inductive and empirical evaluation of experience.” In fact, “I and My Chimney” may be considered a thoroughgoing symbolic expression of Melville's basic epistemology.
- Type
- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1960
References
1 Milton R. Stern, The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville (Urbana, 1957), p. 17. This recent and judiciously focused study is especially valuable in its analysis of Melville's anti-transcendental opposition to cosmic idealism and its discussion of the true significance of the “quest” in Melville's books.
2 Herman Melville: The Tragedy of Mind (Cambridge, Mass., 1944), pp. 194, 195.
3 Herman Melville: A Critical Biography (New York, 1957), p. 204.
4 Herman Melville: A Critical Study (New York, 1949), p. 169.
5 “Herman Melville's ‘I and My Chimney’,” AL, xiii (1941), 142.
6 American Renaissance (New York, 1941), p. 479.
7 In this connection one thinks immediately of the undernourished “dehumanized” Ahab, but even more significantly, the passage conjures up an image of the angular, ascetic-looking Emerson, whose naively optimistic description of the joyous sailor's life so irritated Melville. See Jay Leyda, The Melville Log (New York, 1951), ii, 648. One of Melville's principal objections to the Transcendentalists—and especially Emerson—was that their theories were cultivated in too narrow and isolated a plot of ground. Moreover, he felt that they never would look closely enough at a body of the kind of evidence he had encountered.
8 Richard Chase has observed the importance of Eccle-siastes in the story. See Herman Melville, p. 171.
9 The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville, p. 148.
10 The relevancy of the “secret closet” to Melville's own most deeply felt beliefs is indicated in one of the famous letters to Hawthorne: “If any of those other Powers choose to withhold certain secrets, let them; that does not impair my sovereignty in myself; that does not make me tributary. And perhaps, after all, there is no secret. We incline to think that the Problem of the Universe is like the Freemason's mighty secret, so terrible to all children. It turns out, at last, to consist in a triangle, a mallet, and an apron,—nothing more I” Quoted by Eleanor Melville Metcalf in Herman Melville, Cycle and Epicycle (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 105.