[In the following essay, Hall discusses Melville's unconventional use of the maturation process and the construction of individual identity in Redburn.]

Redburn (1849) is the closest Melville had ever come—or ever would come—to obeying the formal conventions of the mid-nineteenth-century novel. Yet for years criticism often centered on the difficulty of describing the relation of the young protagonist to the older narrative voice which claims a continuity with him. Melville was found guilty of “neglecting to keep his center of consciousness in Redburn's inexperience, … adding reflections that could only have occurred to someone much older” (Matthiessen 397), of a “disrupting shift in the angle of vision” (Gilman 208), of “abrupt transitions from youthful, ingenuous narrator to thoughtful, mature critic of society” (Gross 584).¹ It would be easy enough to write off these comments, from the 1940s and 1950s, as retrospective attempts to impose a post-Jamesian aesthetic and terminology—unintrusive narrator, consistent “center of consciousness”—on Melville's early Victorian practice. But beneath this concern with what they experienced as a formal incongruity, I suspect, these critics were really worried about something more substantial: Melville's unorthodox conception of the self. Their reaction—and that of another group of critics concerned with the question (discussed in the second part of this essay) of young Redburn's “initiation” (or failed initiation) into adult knowledge—seems to suggest that somehow even this most conventionally novelistic of Melville's works manages to challenge our cherished notions about ourselves. Somehow Melville calls into question basic assumptions, both modern and those specific to the 1840s, about the process through which a boy is supposed, by progressive stages, to become a “mature” man, and about the way in which a “mature” man looks back on the events of his childhood and adolescence. Somehow the relation of young Redburn and older Redburn violates our usual sense of the relation between past and present in the internal text of selfhood which not only first-person narrators in books, but each of us every moment, are constantly composing.

1. THE SON-OF-A-GENTLEMAN

The fiction of identity which young Redburn has adopted at the outset of his voyage is that of the “son-of-a-gentleman.” He relies on a system of hereditary privilege to define himself adequately, both in his continuing internal dialogue of selfhood and in relation to other persons. But Redburn quickly finds that despite its illustrious heritage, this method of identification is entirely powerless on board ship; indeed, when asserted naively by Mr. Jones, it costs Redburn a badly-needed advance on his wages, and when sporadically put forward by Redburn himself, it exposes him to vigorous ridicule. For the dominant system of identity on board the Highlander, like that on the Julia in Omoo, depends on a radical rejection of all land-based identifications, and especially of those which involve a genealogical metaphor. Having proclaimed himself the new and unchallenged source of paternal authority, the captain is jealous of all other fathers; he demands that his sailors be re-born aboard his ship and carry names which bear the imprint of that context. As agent of the captain, the chief mate, in a procedure reminiscent of similar pseudonymous moments in Melville's other works, deflates the pretensions of Redburn's inherited identity, his reliance on a continuous paternity independent of his present condition, by verbally equating this “son-of-a-gentleman” with a piece of his clothing:

“… What's your name, Pillgarlic?”

“Redburn,” said I.

“A pretty handle to a man, that; scorch you to take hold of it; havn't you got any other?”

“Wellingborough,” said I.

“Worse yet. Who had the baptizing of ye? Why didn't they call you Jack or Jill, or something short and handy? But I'll baptize you over again. D'ye hear, sir, henceforth your name is Buttons. And now do you go, Buttons, and clean out that pig-pen in the long-boat. …”

(28)

This re-“baptizing” of Redburn is even more unceremonious than that to which Wymontoo, a recruit from a Marquesan island, was subjected aboard the Julia (Omoo 34), for here the application of a nickname to a green recruit is not performed as part of a communal act of self-identification by a peer circle of common sailors, as it was in Omoo, but arbitrarily by a single man, acting under the established authority of the chief mate. As Jonathan Katz argues, this shipboard baptism “simultaneously unmans and eroticizes” Redburn, not even conceding him his conventional gender identity—“why didn't they call you Jack, or Jill”—and choosing for him a new name which carries with it a history of usage as a slang term for sexual organs (10). Aboard the Highlander Redburn has both his given and family names taken away from him, his sexual identity is questioned, and his claims to an exalted paternity as a “Son-of-a-Gentleman” are repeatedly ridiculed and turned against him as a rhetorical weapon.

All these attempts to humiliate young Wellingborough into anonymity are chronicled with loving indignation by the narrating Redburn, who makes it clear that he still smarts under the memory of these abuses, and whose subsequent history suggests that in a dark corner of his mind he is not entirely sure that he didn't deserve them. “My First Voyage,” as he calls the text he writes, may thus be seen as an attempt on the part of the narrator to re-gain all these lost identities through the mechanism of writing, to re-establish his claims to masculinity, to gentility, to the very name of “Wellingborough Redburn” which was wrested from him on the deck of his first ship. Redburn attacks the shipboard system of identity, with its insistent erasure of personal history, its attempt to base personal identity on the mere contingency of the present moment of the present cruise. He attempts to reverse this denial of the past, to re-assert more traditional norms which emphasize the continuity of the self and the validity of familial definition. But the more he tries to contact the past and to establish a connection between the accounts of those who came before and what he finds in his present experience, the more he encounters not reassuring continuity but disorienting gaps between the various discourses which define his identity at the present moment of writing and the vanished gentility of his father's lost world.²

The most complex of these episodes may be found in the much-discussed “guidebook chapters” (ch. 30-31). In Chapter 30, Redburn the narrator attempts to make nostalgic contact not only with his father's memory but also with the departed ghosts of several of his younger selves. Along with a record of his father's expenses while in Liverpool, he finds some “sketches of wild animals and falling air-castles”:

Some of the scrawls are my own; and as poets do with their juvenile sonnets, I might write under this horse, “Drawn at the age of three years” and under this autograph, “Executed at the age of eight.”

Others are the handiwork of my brothers, and sisters, and cousins; and the hands that sketched some of them are now moldered away.

But what does this anchor here? this ship? and this sea-ditty of Dibdin's? The book must have fallen into the hands of some tarry captain of a forecastle. No: that anchor, ship, and Dibdin's ditty are mine; this hand drew them; and on this very voyage to Liverpool. But not so fast; I did not mean to tell that yet.

(143)

The narrating Redburn easily identifies the “handiwork” of his siblings and the sober jottings of his father. The three-year-old Wellingborough and the eight-year-old Wellingborough dreaming over the guidebook and making a place for himself within that dream are likewise objects of ardent nostalgia, evoked as ghosts of an innocence long destroyed by circumstance, of a time when he still believed in the dream of gentility and the possibility of finding a place in an orderly procession of ancestors and descendants. Redburn lingers over these traces of departed selves and attempts to integrate them into an evolving fiction which both unifies his past and defines himself toward the future: he figures himself as a “poet” labelling “juvenile sonnets,” engaging in the double process of at once making an attribution of self-continuity (a somewhat-embarrassed acknowledgement that, yet, I, the famous poet, once wrote that) and distancing the present writing self from that juvenalia by marking it off as belonging to an earlier, childish, primitive self, long left behind.

The reference to the shipboard self, however, threatens to undo the reverie: there is a rhetorical hesitation here in recognizing these drawings and attributing them to himself, a hesitation which at the very least emphasizes the radical and painful disjunction between his father's genteel respectability and his own immersion in tar and brine, and possibly suggests a more fundamental disruption at the center of Redburn's fiction of himself. These “scrawls” and drawings done on the Highlander are not as easily assimilated and acknowledged as belonging to a continuous consciousness as are the earlier ones; he somehow feels more intimately connected to his childish selves than to his pubescent self, whose drawings at first seem the work of another, “some tarry captain of a forecastle.” It requires a ringing declaration of identity between “this hand” which “drew them” and the “hands of some tarry captain,” to banish this threatened discontinuity—and then even this is taken away again: “But not so fast; I did not mean to tell that yet.” He must, however, tell us, must loudly assert an identity of hand and hand, must claim the origination for himself precisely because what he clearly felt was not an easy continuity of selfhood, as in the earlier “scrawls,” but a momentary and inexplicable alienation, a reluctance to take this “forecastle” self into himself. The retelling of the arrival in Liverpool, it seems, must have aroused images which Redburn does not want to remember: the poverty unto death of Launcellott's-Hey? The astonishingly-explicit (for 1849) scene of attempted seduction when Redburn has a tete-a-tete below decks with the “bachelor” skipper of a salt-drogher, only three chapters away? Or something to do with the ambiguity of Harry Bolton? There's no real way of telling, but it is at around this point in the book that the problem of the “angle of vision” comes into play, when Redburn begins putting some distance between his younger self and himself as narrator, “adding reflections that could only have occurred to someone much older.” Redburn becomes somewhat more wary, more self-conscious; he begins to have a careful literary “plan” of what to “tell” and when—and what not to tell. We begin to sense that Redburn has something he both wants and doesn't want to tell us about, a mystery which he is cautiously circling around.

Chapter 31 mainly concerns young Redburn's attempts to make the Liverpool of his day conform to that of his father's guidebook; it chronicles his failure even to locate the now-demolished “Riddough's Hotel,” from which his father began his wanderings. Redburn's desire to re-trace his father's footsteps is an effort to recapture the past, to turn the clock back fifty years, in essence to become his father, because it is now so difficult to be Wellingborough. He aspires to a single unbroken consciousness, a shared identity of father and son which endures despite time and even despite death, in the manner of Captain Bob in Omoo, who after years of ritual narration has come to share his father's memory to such an extent that he can see no point in making a distinction between the two as individuals, despite the differences in bodies (Omoo 119). But Redburn's failure to reach his father's point of origin prevents him from affirming a continuity of familial consciousness, leaves him adrift in the present without any meaningful connection with his dead father, though he tries to imagine Walter Redburn's struggle against bankruptcy, and his ultimate succumbing to it. The past has failed him, and when he sits down to contemplate the failure of his guidebook to make sense of contemporary Liverpool, he also needs to reassess his reliance on his heritage as a “Son-of-a-Gentleman” as the primary component of his fiction of identity. The Highlander has succeeded in destroying his myth of paternity, his allegiance to his dead and absent father, his attempt to define himself by the family name. The ship's system of identity has made him into just another orphan, doomed to rove fatherlessly through seas and islands, taking a name and a history only for the duration of the cruise, a floating signifier in search of a final authority which can give it meaning.

Unable to live in either the past or the future, Redburn begins to suspect the futility of attempting to construct a relation to temporality which will make experience tolerable, and this leaves him easy prey for the shipboard attempt to trap identity in a continual present moment. The metaphor of the nautical self as an anthology of sea stories, implicit in Omoo, is made explicit in Redburn: “Every man of them almost was a volume of Voyages and Travels round the World. And what most struck me was that like books of voyages they often contradicted each other …” (46). If “every man” is a “volume of Voyages,” then “My First Voyage” is Redburn's attempt to write himself into a “volume” and thus into a “man,” to construct a fiction of self-development over time that will arrange his past and present in a meaningful relation.

Stripped of family, Redburn falls into language, into narrative, into the necessity of fashioning a self through the deployment of discourse. He falls as well into a crucial transition in the history of identity, described by Michel Foucault as a shift from an old regime in which “the individual was vouched for … by the demonstration of his ties to the commonweal (family, allegiance, protection)” to a new one in which “he was authenticated by the discourse of truth he was able or obliged to pronounce concerning himself. The truthful confession was inscribed at the heart of the procedures of individualization by power” (58-59). Redburn would still prefer to define himself in terms of “his ties to the commonweal,” to inscribe himself within a seamless narrative of family and class, but he now finds this impossible. Instead he is “obliged to pronounce” his avowedly truthful “Sailor-boy Confessions” as a rather desperate attempt to create himself—in a form acceptable to the powers-that-be—through an approved discourse of individuality.

2. A SECRET SYMPATHY

The outward form of Redburn is that of a nautical novel of education, which leads us to expect that we will see an older, more mature narrator leading a young protagonist through the process of becoming himself. Consequently, Redburn has often been read as a novel of initiation, though more recent criticism has tended to view that initiation as unsuccessful, superficial, and incomplete.³ In either case, Redburn would be concerned with what we would now call norms of adolescent male development, either by way of exemplary illustration of the approved methods of maturation, under the first reading, or, under the second, as a critique and even a possible literary subversion of these prevalent fictions of the self.

As Joseph F. Kett has shown, America was just beginning to discover adolescence as a distinct stage of life during the period when Melville was composing Redburn. Though the full psychological apparatus and pedagogical structure surrounding the concept of “adolescence” would not be fully in place until the early twentieth century, didactic writers of the 1840s were already beginning to address “young men” as a distinct audience with distinct problems and temptations. Mid-century “youth counsellors,” seeking a new strategy to counter what was increasingly viewed as a young man's excessive susceptibility to external stimulations such as sex, drink, and gambling, frequently adopted John Foster's notion of “decision of character.” Foster, a turn-of-the-century English clergyman, had emphasized the self as possessor of its own life (“A man without decision can never be said to belong to himself …” [Foster 56]) and as origin and agent of its own actions: “Some men seem to have been taken along by a succession of events. … Others, advancing through life with an internal invincible determination, have seemed to make the train of circumstances, whatever they were, conduce as much to their chief design as if they had, by some directing interposition, been brought about on purpose” (57). Imported to America, Kett argues, Foster's doctrine was updated to suit the agenda of mid-century capitalism: “Intolerance of self-indulgence in youth compensated for tolerance of self-assertion as part of the intricate process of value trading that introduced Victorian morality to America” (107).

Thus although the youth counsellors argued from an explicitly Christian viewpoint, they were cagey enough to offer a carrot as well as a stick. By setting up the self as the central agent of an original desire, the counsellors hoped to present their strictures against indulgence in the sensual pleasures of youth, previously tolerated to some degree, in a light more pleasing to the high-spirited adolescent: he would be expected to assert conscious control over his impulses, not so much in the service of some abstract Christian morality (which had less and less of a hold on the youthful imagination), but as a deliberate choice made by the ambitious young man who scorned frivolous debauches because they sapped the strength and will he would need in his battle to get ahead.

Under the emerging norms of adolescent development, then, young Redburn would be expected, at about his depicted age, to begin creating a self that could somehow fill the need for direction originating from within, a self that would possess a clear and specific worldly ambition which it could pursue in a forceful, even obsessive manner. Viewed from this perspective, young Redburn is a figure in awkward transition from the old, pre-Victorian regime of what Kett calls “semidependence, … a jarring mixture of complete freedom and total subordination” (29)—Redburn on ship without parental guidance but subject to everyone's whim—to a new world of self-assertive adolescence filled with new and difficult demands.

The youth counsellors, needless to say, would not have been pleased with the literary self Melville presented in Typee and Omoo. Tommo's responsiveness to momentary stimulation (Fayaway, breadfruit, the pleasures of the lagoon) and his tendency to lose his sense of self-continuity and self-purpose in the course of his encounter with an alien method of structuring temporal and personal relations would certainly bring their condemnation, and “Paul's” aimless drifting along the beach of Immeo might be even more disturbing to an advocate of forthright “decision of character.” Young Redburn, however, might, to a degree, be more to their liking. Certainly he is far too embarrassed by his own sexual desires to venture into licentiousness, and his puzzled inability to comprehend the dissipations at the mysterious house in London where he is taken by Harry Bolton undoubtedly testifies that he is not very far advanced in other varieties of depravity. And this the youth counsellors would heartily approve. But they would probably wonder about him, too, as many modern readers of the book have wondered. They might worry about Redburn's apparent indecision of character, pointing to the all-too-symmetrical circularity of the plot, which leaves Redburn precipitously returning home without any wages, not very much older and arguably not very much wiser.

Redburn, a member of the “Juvenile Temperance Society” (229) in his hometown, would feel deeply the disapproval of the youth counsellors and the social forces which they represent, and his storytelling is partially aimed at redeeming himself in the eyes of such a respectable audience. Redburn's initial generic model may be suggested by his description of his first intimations of adventure:

As years passed on, this continual dwelling upon foreign associations, bred in me a vague prophetic thought, that I was fated, one day or other, to be a great voyager; and that just as my father used to entertain strange gentlemen over their wine after dinner, I would hereafter be telling my own adventures to an eager auditory. And I have no doubt that this presentiment had something to do with bringing about my subsequent rovings.

(7)

The desire to narrate is, Redburn admits, at the base of all his “subsequent rovings,” yet what he picks to narrate is the least ‘adventurous’ of his “adventures.” He has apparently had “adventures” in a conventional buccaneering sense—we find out later that he has served on a “South Seas whaler” (312) and also in an unspecified, perhaps military capacity where “I expected to be killed every day” (23)—but he chooses merely to allude to these and to concentrate instead on a tale which has as its background only a routine North Atlantic crossing. He renounces his claim to first-hand experience of the exotic, the foundation of both Typee and Omoo, in favor of telling a story which, on the surface at least, needn't either excite or upset anyone when told as after-dinner entertainment. It is the closest approximation that Redburn can make to the genre of traveller's reminiscence which formed his earliest memories and literary models, the polite and touristy chit-chat of a provincial businessman returned from abroad, the nineteenth-century equivalent of showing after-dinner slides of a summer vacation. For his father's voyages, we should remember, did not involve perilous adventures in Africa, the South Seas, or “Stony Arabia,” as Redburn's own later would; the elder Redburn “had several times crossed the Atlantic on business affairs” (5), and this was the material with which he would “entertain strange gentlemen over their wine.” For the compulsively-drifting Redburn, inured to poverty, jaded by long sordid exposure to the distant and the exotic, bourgeois respectability is the wildest fantasy of all, an inaccessible condition wrapped in all manner of romantic nostalgia. Little wonder, then, that his father's former prosperous security exercises such an appeal to his imagination, especially in light of his father's later bankruptcy and death, which left young Wellingborough with little choice but to follow the “vague prophetic thought” brought on by his “continual dwelling upon foreign associations.” Poverty breeds adventure, but the projected reward of surviving dangerous rovings is the opportunity to “tell my own adventures to an eager auditory” in a cheery and comfortable drawing-room.

Thus the text of “My First Voyage,” as Redburn calls his “Reminiscences,” is an attempt to appeal to that respectable audience not as a deviant curiosity but as one of their own, not by recounting what happened to him on South Sea islands where he lived with cannibals, but by asserting that, in spirit at least, he never left home. The parallels with Melville's well-documented desire, in Redburn and White-Jacket, to write books that would sell, are obvious (though tricky: Melville would probably have made more money writing another Typee than a Redburn). But this choice of material also has literary consequences beyond this sometimes poignant yearning for respectability. By selecting the prosaic instead of the exotic as his subject matter, though he frequently asserts that he has access to both, Redburn focuses attention, undiluted by the colorful distractions of spirited adventure, on the psychological and moral development of his younger self. He presents this younger self not as an exemplary figure for adolescents to emulate, but as a dissection of a failure to progress ‘normally’ under a model of maturity which emphasizes “decision of character.” He hopes that the writing of this narrative, at the very least, may be shown to have originated from inside himself, that these “confessions” will demonstrate that he has within himself that power which the youth counsellors want him to use as a source of action, to prove his existence and increasing potency as an independent agent. The problem is that he can't quite believe this, can't quite see his self as a dynamic origin of purposeful action in the way all those other young men's selves are purported to be constructed. The older Redburn insists on the incompletion of the self, on the continual deferral of any defining “decision of character,” on the impossibility of originating a gesture of maturity from a self which paradoxically would only be created by that gesture.

Early on the older Redburn, discussing the glass ship in his father's sitting-room, suggests that his own process of maturation has not proceeded as smoothly or as successfully as the youth counsellors would like:

So much for La Reine. We have her yet in the house, but many of her glass spars and ropes are now shattered and broken,—but I will not have her mended; and her figure-head, a gallant warrior in a cocked-hat, lies pitching head-foremost down into the trough of a calamitous sea under the bows—but I will not have him put on his legs again, till I get on my own; for between him and me there is a secret sympathy; and my sisters tell me, even yet, that he fell from his perch the very day I left home to go to sea on this my first voyage.

(9)

The “secret sympathy” between the narrating Redburn and the fallen figurehead is the solidarity of failure, the consciousness of having been thrown from a ship of dreams—but without every quite getting outside the “square glass case” (7) which enclosed it. What Redburn discovers when he falls off the ship is that he's not even drowned, only broken; what he loses forever is the illusion of forward movement, progression toward an attainable goal, and what ambition he'd ever had is replaced by an intense awareness of continuing captivity. “I had learned to think much and bitterly before my time,” Redburn tells us in the early going, “all my young mounting dreams of glory had left me; and at that early age, I was as unambitious as a man of sixty” (10). The “narrator's” age falls, we may infer, somewhere in between the two extremes he describes, since he still hopes “to get on his own legs.” But by projecting a collapse of youth directly into old age, thus completely eliding what under a conventional model of self-development would be a man's ‘productive years,’ Redburn's metaphor essentially erases himself, a middle-aged man, from the text he is writing. Despite “having passed through far more perilous scenes than any narrated in this, My First Voyage” (312), Redburn remains nonetheless immured in the failures of the earlier self he depicts. Redburn looks very much like a nautical novel of education, but the model of self-development usually assumed by such productions, the gradual process of an artist, even “an artist in the rigging” (121), coming into his full mature powers, is interrupted to a degree. At the end of Redburn we are given not a young man poised on the brink of a successful adulthood but an arrested adolescent doomed to failure, to eternal circular repetition of his worst mistakes.

Most sentimentally, this difficulty in moving from one normative stage to another may be symbolized by the “moral failure” which ends the book, with which Redburn has been taxed by several censorious critics.⁴ I refer, of course, to his abandonment of Harry Bolton in New York in favor of unspecified circumstances which “compelled my departure homeward” (304). Certainly the Biblical echoes of the “stranger's” question on the last page, “Harry Bolton was not your brother?” (312), calls attention to the sense in which Redburn's rather smug piety fails to be translated into active Christian brotherhood—this is perhaps a lingering effect of his disillusion in the Launcelott's-Hey incident, where such efforts to intervene produced only a slight prolongation of misery—and its prominent position at the close of the narrative does signal a certain awareness on the “narrator's” part that he might have done more. Redburn's continuing familial text—the disturbing letters from home—interferes with what he at one point calls the “Holy Guidebook” (157); he continues to swear loyalty to his inherited discourse of identity throughout Redburn, despite the apparent failure of that discourse to define him adequately.

But a different sort of problem in Redburn's “decision of character” has to do, I think, with a piece of himself which he left in London, and which he has been trying to recover all these years—hence his obsession with innocence, his desire to recapture his childhood, and even the period before his childhood, hence his attempts to erase himself as he now exists. This failure is not so much “moral” as it is epistemological—although the knowledge in question is the knowledge of depravity. In Alladin's Palace, Redburn encounters a youth counsellor's worst nightmare: “A semi-public place of opulent entertainment” (228) dedicated to uninterrupted, around-the-clock drinking, gambling, and aberrent sexuality.⁵ It is not a place that encourages forthright “decision of character”; in fact it contributes markedly to the unravelling of what “character” Redburn has managed to put together up to this point. His entire trip to London is full of images of the instability of identity. In preparation for the trip, Redburn's new acquaintance Harry Bolton, whose apparent generosity in inviting him along had only shortly earlier convinced Redburn that “he was then indeed what he seemed” (224), has unaccountably “metamorphosed himself,” adopting a disguise of false “whiskers and moustache” (226), and Redburn writes later that “from the moment we had sprung into the cab, he had seemed almost another person from what he had seemed before” (233). In the cab on the way to Alladin's Palace, Redburn “thought New York a hamlet, and Liverpool a coal-hole, and myself somebody else: so unreal seemed every thing about me” (227), and once ensconced in front of a bottle of wine “I almost began to fancy I had no friends and relatives living in a little village three thousand five hundred miles off, in America; for it was hard to unite such a humble reminiscence with the splendid animation of the London-like scene around me” (229). Here Redburn freely admits that his habitual fiction of himself has been interrupted, if only temporarily; he finds it “hard to unite” the successive settings of his life's events and the various components of his shifting loyalties together in one coherent text.

And as the mysteries surrounding Harry's behavior deepen and thicken in Redburn's solitude, as he watches through the night, waking at every unexplainable sound, additional competing discourses—or rather calculated absences of discourses—cause further gaps and incongruities. Harry gives him a sealed envelope to hold—then tears it up. He makes him swear never to ask what has happened. And Redburn suppresses from the reader what little information he had: “though I vividly remember it all, I will not give the superscription of the letter, nor the contents of the paper” (234). For Redburn these undisclosed texts remain a central disruption in his fiction of the self, a disturbance which he cannot assimilate, a harrowing secret which he swore never to investigate, even if the person who held the answer were still alive. He is not exaggerating when he tells Harry that “you have made me the most miserable dog alive” (235) in dooming him to live with the awareness of the existence of this knowledge, but always in the mode of privation. He probes around the edges of this secret, this withheld, reserved place in his text of himself, but both morality and friendship forbid him to attempt a full reading of the clues he has, to try to unite them in a speculation. All he can do is to pass the conundrum along to the reader, and this he does very skillfully. Redburn makes the whole chapter a tantalizing puzzle, enlisting for purposes of his narrative the energy of the reader's prurient curiosity about Harry's secret vice. He is still bothered by this passage in his personal history because it continues to emerge as a gap, a contradiction, a failure, a hiatus, an insuperable difficulty, every time he attempts to compose a fiction of the self which would write himself into full maturity.

Edgar A. Dryden observes that “for the Melvillean narrator memory is an imaginative act which makes the present a moment of creative understanding of a past adventure that was experienced initially as an unintelligible and frightening chaos of sensations” (35). For the narrator of Redburn, however, this “chaos” lives on into the “present” moment of composition, making the process of storytelling every bit as dangerous as the experience it depicts. It is not so much a matter of a “creative understanding” as of a continuing failure of understanding, in which the narrator constantly shrinks from examining what is unresolved and unresolvable in the text of his past experience and his ongoing conception of himself.

Thus although the bildungsroman structure of the novel argues for a development of the protagonist according to an appropriate model of education, the function of the narrator in Redburn undermines that sense of personal progress by insisting rather strikingly on his own still-unfinished construction of self. The narrator presents himself as a man stuck in an extended adolescence, unable to make the final movement of inner-originating choice required by prevailing norms of maturity. Despite his apparent wide experience as a sailor and his survival of perilous adventures—or, perhaps, because of them—Redburn's narration of “my first voyage” remains an unsuccessful attempt to match his own experience to accepted models of personal growth. He seems to believe that if he can produce the requisite tone of fond but distant irony toward his earlier self, that literary achievement will somehow create a distance from the ineffectuality of that younger self. But a persistent sense of ostracism and failure continues to dog his steps in what is supposed to be his prime of life, making it impossible for him to write the conventionally optimistic fiction of the self which has long since ceased to be demanded of him by a world that has turned its attention to the promise of achievement by adolescents much younger than himself.

Certainly by comparison with Mardi, its immediate predecessor, and with the later narrative experiments of Moby-Dick, Pierre, and The Confidence-Man, Redburn hardly deviates at all from orthodox expectations regarding literary technique. Redburn is not a Mardi, where the narrative pronouns shift from singular to plural and back again; or a Moby-Dick, where Ishmael narrates scenes at which he was not present as though he were and scenes at which he was present as though he were not; or a self-conscious Pierre, with its eccentric digressions about novelistic form and technique; and even less is it like The Confidence-Man, where the very idea of the self comes under severe attack. Yet Redburn shares with Melville's more radical reconstructions of the form of the novel a preoccupation with the relation between writing and selfhood, with the process by which the present consciousness stretches back into memory to recover—or to invent—a past worth living in, one which might validate the present and point toward the future. More starkly than most novels—perhaps because of its very flaws—Redburn allows us to observe the rhetorical strategies by which the self attempts to narrate itself into existence as a self, by which it tries to assert its continuity over time.

Notes

1. Merlin Bowen added some needed clarity to this discussion by arguing that Melville never intended “to place the controlling center of consciousness anywhere but in the mature Redburn as retrospective narrator” (101). Lawrence Thompson saw three levels of narrative in Redburn: “Wellingborough” (the boy-protagonist), “Redburn” (the older narrator), and “Melville,” who manipulates them, creating “anti-Christian triple-talk” (75-76). Later critics have been more likely to follow Thompson than Bowen, throwing into question the maturity of the “mature Redburn” and emphasizing “the ironic tone, which in turn depends on the separation Melville maintains between himself and the narrator,” as James Schroeter put it (284). See also Dillingham (32-33).

2. Recent criticism of Redburn has explored some of these discourses through which Redburn constitutes his identity, taking up the social/religious (Duban), economic (Samson), and psycho-political (Rogin) implications of Redburn's very American pilgrimage to the Old World. For a discussion of the problem of the missing father in a number of Melvillean texts, including Redburn, see Durand.

3. Newton Arvin argues that Redburn's “inward subject is the initiation of innocence into evil” (101). James E. Miller, Jr., ties Redburn and White-Jacket together in “one story of initiation into the evil of the world, observation, criticism and sampling of that evil, and finally, baptism into evil” (273). See Schroeter's critique of the readings which depend on a “myth” of “initiation.” Michael Davitt Bell attempts a re-formulation of Arvin's “metaphysical” position into “anthropological or psychological terms” (559). Charles J. Haberstroh argues that the narrator of Redburn, and the narrators of Mardi and White-Jacket, “are still drifting in an unresolved limbo of identity, unable, as their author was unable, to move beyond their loss of innocence” (76). Most recently, Wai-chee Dimock has called Redburn “the exact opposite of a Bildungsroman,” in which Redburn on board ship seems to lose knowledge rather than gaining it as he goes along (85).

4. H. Bruce Franklin argues that “in the end Redburn becomes the incarnation of all he has learned to fear and despise” (191) and “shows us, but not himself, what his words really mean” (192). Terence G. Lish suggests that Melville “present[s] Redburn as an unsympathetic figure” (120) by means of “employing the traditional structure of the young seeker tale while departing from its traditional application” (115). John Seelye finds that Redburn “remains essentially a prig at heart” (52).

5. See Katz's reading of this scene, in which he contends, among other things, that “Bolton has wagered his body … [and] lost his gamble” (12).

Works Cited

Arvin, Newton. Herman Melville. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1950.

Bell, Michael Davitt. “Melville's Redburn: Initiation and Authority.” New England Quarterly 46 (1973): 558-572.

Bowen, Merlin. “Redburn and the Angle of Vision.” Modern Philology 52 (1954): 100-109.

Dillingham, William B. An Artist in the Rigging: The Early Work of Herman Melville. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1972.

Dimock, Wai-chee. Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism. Princeton University Press, 1989.

Dryden, Edgar A. Melville's Thematics of Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1968.

Duban, James. Melville's Major Fiction: Politics, Theology, and Imagination. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983.

Durand, Régis. “The Captive King: The Absent Father in Melville's Text.” The Fictional Father: Lacanian Readings of the Text. Ed. Robert Con Davis. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981. 48-72.

Foster, John. Decision of Character and Other Essays. London, 1805.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books, 1980.

Franklin, H. Bruce. “Redburn's Wicked End.” Nineteenth Century Fiction 20 (1965): 190-194.

Gilman, William H. Melville's Early Life and “Redburn.” New York: New York University Press, 1951.

Gross, John J. “The Rehearsal of Ishmael: Melville's ‘Redburn.’” Virginia Quarterly Review 27 (1951): 581-600.

Haberstroh, Charles J., Jr. Melville and Male Identity. Rutherford, New Jersey: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980.

Katz, Jonathan Neal. “Melville's Secret Sex Text.” Village Voice Literary Supplement 13 April 1982: 10-12.

Kett, Joseph F. Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 1977.

Lish, Terence G. “Melville's Redburn: A Study in Dualism.” English Language Notes 5 (1967): 113-120.

Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941.

Melville, Herman. Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

———. Redburn: His First Voyage. Being the Sailor-boy Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman, in the Merchant Service. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969.

Miller, James E., Jr. “Redburn and White-Jacket: Initiation and Baptism.” Nineteenth Century Fiction 13 (1959): 273-293.

Rogin, Michael Paul. Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Samson, John. White Lies: Melville's Narratives of Facts. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.

Schroeter, James. “Redburn and the Failure of Mythic Criticism.” American Literature 39 (1967): 279-297.

Seelye, John. Melville: The Ironic Diagram. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970.

Thompson, Lawrence. Melville's Quarrel With God. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952.