A Literary Critic or a Biographer?

Sometimes people are prone to nosiness. Nosiness is a disease for the literary critic but a prerequisite for a biographer. After reading the chapter “Wife Beating and the Written Page” from Elizabeth Renker’s Strike through the Mask I must say that I am disappointed. It is far too biographical to be considered as literary criticism and not factual enough to be a biographical piece about Herman Melville’s life.

It almost seems that due to the lack of female characters in Melville’s writing Renker turns to hearsay, personal letters, some mysterious “dirt” a Henry A. Murray knows about Melville only to let the secret be buried with him upon his dead in June 1988; As though the absence itself doesn’t speak loudly enough. Apparently, it doesn’t and we need proof! But this kind of proof, the kind of facts or conjectures that are being proposed in Renker’s “Wife Beating and the Written Page” cannot sustain an entire analysis.

   

The argument that takes into account Melville’s personal life as being an influence on his writing is problematic because it is not prolific, critically speaking. Once you identify the absolute “key” to Melville’s works in his relationship with his wife there is nothing left to do – the work is dead and buried. What you do have is a scandalous biography, though.

I really think that is what Renker does. Once I read her analysis of the “Fragments” where she says: “the whiteness of paper is ultimately figured as a blankness or dumbness that terrifies the narrator/writer” (60) it almost seems that the / just turned a literary endeavor to a ‘mystery of origin’ of sorts.

Although her actual analysis was interesting at parts once I got to the ‘“strike through the mask!”’ (67) part where she discusses Melville’s “inability to penetrate the surface of the text” (67) it really seemed to me that she is demonstrating the same inability she is describing here: she wants to penetrate into the very core of Melville’s creative effort and find a battered wife but this desire is voyeuristic at best…