Herman Melville: Stargazer (review)

R E V I E W S texts add up to a convincing description of the workings of the sentimental novel, one of the study’sstrengths. Yet claims of the fiction’sachievement seem muted. The ambiguity of names in ’Lena Rivers is identified, but not appreciated , as a literary device (33); praise of Pike’s development of her anti-slavery position through a white slavery motif as “creative” is qualified by its also being “hokey” (105, 103); sentimental irony in nonfiction draws more enthusiasm than any in the novels. That even so insightful a study exhibits some gap between its claim for the “surprisingly diverse ideological and aesthetic contributions” (5) of some sentimental novels and the demonstration of it suggests that work remains before the form can recover from its discredited status . It would be unfortunate indeed if Melvilleans were to read exclusively the adaptation of Weinstein’s chapter on Pierre that appears in the March, 2005 issue of Leviathan. That would result in missing her discussion ofJudge Shaw’s sentimental ruling on adoption in the case of Pool v. Gott. Far more importantly , it would miss the fullness and subtly of Weinstein’s thought that unfolds most comprehensively and convincingly only through reading Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature in its entirety. The book is full of discerning insights that well reward the reading of it. Charlene Avallone Manoa, Hawai’i Herman Melville: Stargazer BRETT ZIMMERMAN (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’sUniversity Press, 1998) A 11Melville’s longer works are about voyages, some of them rather long ones. So it comes as no surprise that references to stars and other .celestial phenomena should recur in his works. Some have been commented on by scholars, especially John M. J. Gretchko, to whom Brett Ziininerman feels especially indebted. His, however, is the first, systematic, book-length study of the matter and a valuable source for anyone who is - as all Melville scholars should be - interested in the role of astronomy in Melville’sworks. The book is well indexed and is illustrated with nineteenthcentury star maps and drawings that Melville himself can be assumed to have A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 5 9 R E V I E W S consulted. A thirty-four-page appendix contains a compendium of astronomical references in Melville’sworks that Dr. Zimmerman is quite right to consider “a useful piece of scholarship in itself” (75). Brief excerpts from the entire Melvillean opus, including his letters, are gathered under appropriate headings - covering stars, constellations, and other heavenly bodies, sunspots, eclipses, astronomers and their instruments, and other worlds. What has Zimmerman made of all this data? Perhaps because the study is based on his doctoral dissertation, it starts out cautiously with a chapter documenting Melville’s knowledge of astronomy (using internal and external evidence ), with little exegetical application to his works. Zimmerman becomes less timid as he moves into the following chapters, winding up with a boldly interpretative excursus on Billy-Budd. He ends his first chapter with the conclusion that Melvillewas rather apt and knowledgeable in “observational astronomy,which is concerned with noting the exact positions of celestial orbs and applying this data to something as practical as navigation” (26; cf. 119n.l);he also says, though, that “thereis no evidence that he had very great mathematical inclinations, as Edgar Allan Poe certainly did. A glance through any work on celestial navigation ... shows that a great deal of mathematics is involved in that study, but we have no way of knowing how far Melville’s understanding went into the realm of numbers.. . his knowledge of astronomy was mostly nonmathematical” (23-24). These remarks seem self-contradictory. If Melville could apply uranography to navigation , it would have taken a good knowledge of trigonometry - a knowledge that evidence shows Melville must have possessed. He seems to have had a bent for arithmetic at an early age, winning a first prize in “ciphering” at the Albany Academy when he was eleven; at nineteen he earned a certificate in surveying and engineering from the Lansingburgh Academy (see Laurie Robertson...

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