Samuel Otter on Melville's Anatomies

[Otter, Samuel. Melville's Anatomies. U of California P, 1999.]

"My claims about Melville have been shaped by theoretical accounts of the anatomy provided by Frye and by Mikhail Bakhtin: the heterogeneous, omnivorous, encyclopedic, rhetorically experimental, stylistically dense form, in which linguistic features--diction, syntax, metaphor--become the vehicle for intellectual inquiry. According to Bakhtin, these features express orientations toward society, time, nation, and tradition that are laid bare in the literary anatomy. I use the term anatomy to describe the material analysis of consciousness conducted by Melville [...]. The relentless borrowings and turnings in Melville's prose give heft to thought: the incorported passages, incessant allusions, layered symbols, and eerie personifications. The excess in Melville's anatomies derives, in part, from the scope and reach of this task. Melville analyzes what Raymond Williams has called 'structures of feeling,' the complex dynamics through which form and response shape meaning and value." (5)