Bowers, Melville (Vs. Giant Shark VS Golden Gate Bridge, March 15)

Our discussion of Hawtorne and Poe revolved around the differences between the nature and expression of guilt and remorse. The writings of both authors, whether meditations or encoded neuroses, seem to bubble up out of an unresolved relationship with the past, with a sense of history that is fraught with either incoherence or regret.
Melville gives us an entirely new kind of bad feeling. Rather than dwelling on history, Melville’s shovel strikes neurotic gold right beneath the surface, in the undercurrents of (then) current events. As things seemed to calm down on the eastern seaboard, the still-young nation had begun to carry a new kind of horror across the great insulating sea – our own brand of complicit colonialism.

The sea, then, isn’t just a setting in “Benito” or the “Encantadas” – it’s a character. The way the Americans see their ‘innocence,’ or lack of knowing or involvement, depends on the effect of the ocean; by distancing the urban Americans of the heavily-populated Northeast from the atrocities of colonial activity, the sea allows for a comfort-zone of ignorance wrapped in naïveté. As we see in Melville’s stories, though, the sea can be both deep and treacherous, and the islands surrounded by its waters aren’t the “insular Tahiti’s” of paradise, but barren and hostile lands seething with a kind of sentient biological terror. To Melville, innocence is always ignorance, a thin and cracking wall holding back a wave that threatens gloom, doom, and a breakdown of order.