To see how they are so requires some attention and some explanation.

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Herman Melville was a writer who made himself at home in a tremendous range of idioms and genres, both established and emergent. This is so much the case that reading Melville can feel at times like an exercise in astonishment. He had an ear tuned to the cadences of classic literature—no one who rides out Moby-Dick’s storms of grandiloquence can doubt this. (“I’d strike the sun if it insulted me,” says Captain Ahab, in the iambic pentameter toward which his speech often tends.) But his sentences could be spare as well as orchestral, his figures at once outlandish and indelible. And he was capable, too, of inhabiting a great breadth of dispositions and emotional climates, moods of spirit. To read widely in Melville is to find that he could be mordant and melancholy; that he could be fantastically comic, in ways as energized by slapstick and dashes of teasing obscenity as by the intellectual imperatives of satire; that he could trace out passages of otherworldly tranquility as well as of rending desolation, of a sorrowfulness without hope of consolation; and that he could well be said to specialize in the depiction of a kind of awe, a half-horrified amazement in the face of a universe full of beauty and warm abundance but punctuated, too, by a cold, frightful vacancy. Any of these moods we might properly call Melvillean.

But Melville was not, for all his erudition, a bookish sort of writer. His attentiveness to the mysteries of language and consciousness, to the knottiest dilemmas of soul, was matched by a riveted interest in the things around him, the world of the nineteenth-century near-to-hand. This is especially so in the short fiction. In truth, it was necessarily so: Melville began writing stories in the 1850s chiefly because he needed money. Magazines would pay. But the magazine offices of New York were no less marked by the internecine political feuds of the 1850s (between Whigs and Republicans and Democrats, around the all-rending question of slavery) than the halls of Congress. No writer hoping to profit from his magazine fiction could afford to be anything but an attentive student of the midcentury world the magazines served. And Melville was attentive. Think of the moment in “Benito Cereno” when Delano gives a command to the slaves on deck the San Dominick and accompanies it with a “half-mirthful, half-menacing gesture”: “Instantly the blacks paused,” Melville writes, “each negro and negress suspended in his or her posture, exactly as the word had found them—for a few seconds continuing so—while, as between the responsive posts of a telegraph, an unknown syllable ran from man to man.” Telegraph posts had begun appearing in Massachusetts in about 1848.

His was an American world, certainly, and if only for this reason the notion that Melville is a distinctively American writer—for some, the distinctively American writer of fiction—makes a kind of sense. But this insight can be disabling. Few writers had as elastic a sense of the “American” as Melville. Fewer still among his countrymen diagnosed as precisely as he America’s entanglement in systems and circuits much larger than itself, or knew better its place in frameworks not merely national but transatlantic and, as a scholar like Hester Blum shows us, oceanic. And Melville, though he could sometimes sound like it, was no cheerleader. (He had moments of grandstanding, as in his impetuous review essay entitled “Hawthorne and His Mosses.”) What we most find in his work, instead, is a genuine assessment of the scale of American promise—of possibilities for new forms of living and thriving, beyond the confinements of Old World modes of authority and imagination—balancing itself against something nearer to horror. We tend to think of Melville as a poet of inscrutabilities, of charged ambiguity and unresolving mysteriousness. He was that. But he was also a writer of scorching fury. He addressed himself to the stories mid-nineteenth-century America had taken to telling about itself—about its exceptional destiny, its heroic innocence—with a lethal skepticism. Especially in the inner depiction of the trauma of race in the New World, and of the epic delusions of a particularly American whiteness, Melville touched as intimately as any writer of his day upon the violence of American origins. Again and again, he said NO!, in thunder.

In our own moment, distinguished as it is by the empty echo chambers of talk shows and their shouty platitudes, it can be easy to believe that outrage, if often a wholly appropriate response to the world’s manifold horrors, is not much conducive to clarity, or for that matter to generosities of spirit. Melville’s anger, like our own, could sometimes take conventional forms: broadside satires of the easy hypocrisies and self-satisfactions of the well fed; caustic accounts of corruption and chicanery, of laws that subdue and persecute under the promise of “freedom.” But Melville’s fiction gives the lie to the easy opposition of outrage and incisiveness. He was a writer who savored insolubilities, it is true, and who inhabited ambiguity and ambivalence with exquisite philosophical poise. Yet it is difficult to think of another writer in the American tradition whose anger was so nourishing. From wellsprings of fatalism and dread, and driven by an implacable determination to be unseduced by the ruses of the powerful, Melville fomented his rage into fictions of breathtaking clarity and power.