Line | Critics maintain that the fiction of Herman Melville |
| (1819–1891) has limitations, such as its lack |
| of inventive plots after Moby-Dick (1851) and its |
| occasionally inscrutable style. A more serious, yet |
(5) | problematic, charge is that Melville is a deficient |
| writer because he is not a practitioner of the “art of |
| fiction,” as critics have conceived of this art since the |
| late nineteenth-century essays and novels of Henry |
| James. Indeed, most twentieth-century commentators |
(10) | regard Melville not as a novelist but as a writer of |
| romance, since they believe that Melville’s fiction |
| lacks the continuity that James viewed as essential |
| to a novel: the continuity between what characters |
| feel or think and what they do, and the continuity |
(15) | between characters’ fates and their pasts or original |
| social classes. Critics argue that only Pierre (1852), |
| because of its subject and its characters, is close to |
| being a novel in the Jamesian sense. |
| However, although Melville is not a Jamesian |
(20) | novelist, he is not therefore a deficient writer. A more |
| reasonable position is that Melville is a different |
| kind of writer, who held, and should be judged |
| by, presuppositions about fiction that are quite |
| different from James’s. It is true that Melville wrote |
(25) | “romances”; however, these are not the escapist |
| fictions this word often implies, but fictions that |
| range freely among very unusual or intense human |
| experiences. Melville portrayed such experiences |
| because he believed these best enabled him to |
(30) | explore moral questions, an exploration he assumed |
| was the ultimate purpose of fiction. He was content |
| to sacrifice continuity or even credibility as long |
| as he could establish a significant moral situation. |
| Thus Melville’s romances do not give the reader |
(35) | a full understanding of the complete feelings and |
| thoughts that motivate actions and events that shape |
| fate. Rather, the romances leave unexplained the |
| sequence of events and either simplify or obscure |
| motives. Again, such simplifications and obscurities |
(40) | exist in order to give prominence to the depiction of |
| sharply delineated moral values, values derived from |
| a character’s purely personal sense of honor, rather |
| than, as in a Jamesian novel, from the conventions of |
| society. |