HERMAN MELVILLE

by Richard Chase'3J. Macmillan Co., 1949, 305 pages, $4.50.

Melville has become the great whale of our literature into whom critic after critic is sinking his iron. Once fast the critic may be off for a Nantucket sleigh ride across the wide surface of Atlantic and Pacific, as in the recent Trying Out of Moby Dick, by Hugh Vincent, or he may pursue his fast fish as he sounds through level after level of ostensible meaning until he comes to the opaque depths of symbol, myth, and the unconsciousness as Mr. Chase does.

This study has a double purpose: to understand Melville as artist and personality, and to examine him as one who performed a "continuous act of imaginative criticism" on the facile progressivism of his America such as we must now undertake to rescue liberalism and make of it a mature "Promethean" assertion. This latter focus returns Melville from the isolation into which the 1930's set him and brings into fascinating scrutiny such works as The Confidence Man and Clarel. The analytic focus on the artist sees through the explicit to the metaphorical and uncovers consistent symbols, and mythical themes such as the Fall and the Search, the true and false Promethean Hero, the disinherited son (Melville-Ishmael), withdrawal and return, Oedipean guilt and acceptance, and so on.

It may jolt the innocent reader to learn, say, that "the real theme of Billy Budd is castration and cannibalism, the ritual murder and eating of the Host," but by the time he has reached consideration of this last of Melville's books he will have come to a high re- gard for Mr. Chase's perception, critical subtlety, and true seriousness. Even if he feels that there are other ways of reading Melville's work than as a palimpsest of overlaid and interacting themes and symbols, he will be grateful for deepened understanding of the early books and particularly for this acute analysis of Pierre and the neglected works which followed it.