This is provoked by Samuel Otter's "Discerning The Confidence-Man." I have already reposted a 2011 piece in which I reproduced one of the many images of The Shade of Napoleon Brooding Over his Tomb (no one knows which Melville saw). Otter beautifully reproduces 2 of the images, one full-page. But what I miss and have missed in LEVIATHAN all along, under John Bryant's editorship and then Otter's, is a sense of the joy of research and discovery and the exultation of understanding literature. This passage below embodies what I have lived my academic life for. It is from the end of the preface to MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE.
THE TOPIC IS “LITERARY DETECTIVES”:
They will try their equivalent of “froward” and “godless” on
Google every few weeks for most of a decade, as Scott Norsworthy did until he
discovered a source for some of Melville’s once-baffling notes in the back of
his Shakespeare. They will boggle at a passage in a Melville text and find
riches, as I did when I Googled “Napoleon” and “outline” and “tree” and
discovered that Melville in The
Confidence-Man was referring to a then-famous example of hidden art. There
will always be a few frequenters of known archives, a few imaginative trackers
of missing archives, a few librarians who recognize gaps in their institution’s
papers and reach out their hands for lost treasures, and a few “divine
amateurs” who believe that the facts matter and that they can identify some of
them from their computers or in raids on distant libraries. And for literary
biography, there will always be readers who want to know about the living man
or woman whose deepest being infuses the books they love.
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