Herman Melville: ‘Scaffoldings Scaling Heaven’

Abstract

Of all American writers none is more defiantly and persistently excessive than Melville. From the very outset Melville, almost as a matter of course, arrogated to himself a quite extraordinary freedom. He is one of the very first writers to grasp that the newly opened-up intellectual and imaginative space of literature permits the writer to assume any role he pleases, and that part of his implicit contract with the unwitting reader is that he may play the pied piper and lead his followers a merry dance along a route that is both unpredictable and potentially destructive. Melville never defers to the expectations of the reader but consistently imposes upon him, trying his patience, his credulity and his tolerance to the very limit. Yet Melville’s excessiveness is not simply an imaginative bravado; it is importantly bound up with his claims to speak the truth. What makes Melville outrageous is that he always insists on the truthfulness of his most shameless and whimsical fabrications, like an inebriated anecdotalist who thumps the bar and dares anyone to contradict him. Yet Melville is always deadly serious, and the frantic counterbidding that results between imaginative licence on the one hand and veracity on the other produces endlessly spiralling structures that defy all limits, that are truly ‘scaffoldings scaling heaven’ (Mardi, p. 600). What makes Melville’s novels genuinely deceptive and therefore provocative is that their apparent stability of viewpoint, ‘guaranteed’ by an assertive and confiding narrator, invariably dissolves into a complex and many-sided dialogue that Melville carries on with himself, so that the reader is gradually transformed into a puzzled voyeur.