A response to Amy Kaplan
Kaplan's three main points concern the transnational circulation of knowledge, the retrospective
construction of national histories, and imagining non-national modes of collectivity. In a very
convincing way she shows these to be at the heart of Melville's narrative, across several of his works.
To a large extent, her analysis is based on the particular angle from which a story is told, what is
chosen and what is omitted, and the type of narrative used.
Her first claim, concerning the transnational circulation of knowledge is especially tied up with
the issue of story telling as it relates to questions of truth and of convention. Amy Kaplan
demonstrates that Melville was interested in the way knowledge travels and translates.
He devoted large portions of MD to the exploration of different modes and sources
of knowledge.
At the same time, Melville mitigates their importance by undermining,
parodying, deconstructing them,
and by their shear plentitude.
I suggest that we add to this point another dimension: the multiplicity
of genres. It is implied by
Kaplan's tracking of Melville's different types of
story-telling, although Kaplan focuses her interest
on the social realm. Melville
both enacts and deconstruct social and national categories, such as
North
American whites as oppose the Dons of Lima. This is achieved, among others, by
a shift
between different modes of telling. Moreover, the mere fact that there
are a number of different
genres is, in a modern – like way, a device which
rattles and shakes our "willing suspense of disbelief"
and opens up a possibility of thinking, as it were, outside of the box.
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