Melville and Mannerism: The Formal Logic of Deformation in Moby-Dick

Abstract

Melville and Mannerism argues that the deformation of inherited form in Moby- Dick is organized by a Mannerist problematic in which measure, matter, and telos pass through a literary order of disproportion, tension, incompletion, and re-formation. The thesis—beginning with the European art made available to Melville and the text’s own sustained attention to painting, sculpture, and architecture—reads Mannerism less as a period in art history and more as a recurrent working method in which a preconceived order endures through stretch, strain, distortion, and unfinishedness. Critics have long recognized Melville’s art-historical engagements; what has yet to be developed is the Mannerist mode by which these concerns gather around deformation. The thesis follows the logic through three primary modes—i.e., disproportion, tension, and incompletion. It is in Chapter II where I argue that disproportion emerges when the whale strains past every available measure, converting scale, ekphrasis, and perception into signs of representational failure. From measure, I then turn to matter in Chapter III, to demonstrate how Ahab’s bronze-cast body—through Cellini, the figura serpentinata, enargeia, and metamorphosis—turns mutilation into Mannerist tension. Chapter IV then takes incompletion—through roughness, indistinctness, and lack of finish—as Melville’s deformation of telos, arguing that he transforms the absence of completion into a positive Mannerist mode. I then conclude the study by arguing that Mannerism names the formal logic through which Moby-Dick deforms scale, matter, telos, relation, and belief in order to make re-formation possible.