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The Epistemology of the Wonder-Closet: Melville, Moby-Dick, and the Marvelous

In 1847, four years before the publication of his whaling masterpiece, Herman Melville wrote the first of what would eventually be five book reviews for the New York magazine Literary World. The subject of this first review is Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, an autobiographical tale of life on a New Bedford whaler by J. Ross Browne. At first, Melville’s treatment comes across as uninspired, as if he is bored and unwilling to devote much energy to the book. “From time immemorial,” he ponderously begins, “many fine things have been said and sung of the sea.”1 Browne’s book, we quickly determine, is not one of them. As the review continues, however, one particular shortcoming begins to emerge as Melville’s central concern. Browne’s matter-of-fact book, he complains, “tends still further to impair the charm with which poesy and fiction have invested the sea” (NN PT 205). An austere factualism, he believes, has overtaken the genre of sea writing: “The days have been, when sailors were considered veritable mermen; and the ocean itself, as the peculiar theatre of the romantic and wonderful. But of late years there have been revealed so many plain, matter-of-fact details connected with nautical life that at the present day the poetry of salt water is very much on the wane.” Browne’s narrative is contrasted with an earlier tradition of sea-writing in which “charm” and “wonder” were integral aspects of the text. Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, Melville tells us, is “a book of unvarnished facts,” and as such it is symptomatic of a larger movement away from the qualities of wonder and poetic resonance. Once he warms to this theme, Melville’s book review becomes more interesting. After again chastising the work for its “disenchanting nature” (NN PT 206), he shifts to a more sarcastic register, poking fun at the credulity of the narrator and undercutting Browne’s authority: “Give ear to Mr. J. Ross Browne, and hearken unto what that experienced young gentleman has to say” (208). But Browne’s stature is only an incidental (albeit amusing) casualty of the larger point that Melville wants to make about the crucial importance of