A Strange Fantasy of Wai Chee Dimock, Editor of the Publications of the Modern Language Association

 

    In the 2021 The Rebirth of American Literary Theory and Criticism H. Aram Veeser printed a 2019 interview with Wai Chee Dimock, the editor of PMLA, the most important publication in literature.  He asked if there were any particular moments that shaped or changed her own writing style. She replied with an astonishing set of lies about me. “Once I was on a panel with Hershel Parker, a card-carrying Melvillean, someone who had dedicated himself to just one author, who knew Melville inside and out.” The truth is that for many years I worked little on Melville: I did major essays on textual histories of writers such as Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Norman Mailer, pursuing mainly the questions involving textual evidence, textual theory, literary criticism, literary theory, and creativity theory.  At the 1990 panel, she told Veeser (of me): “He was outraged by my first book, Empire for Liberty. He thought it was the pits, just abysmal. We were on that panel together; I wasn’t especially terrified, but it did bother me that he hated the book so much.”  She wasn’t especially terrified of me? Well, I did not like her fondling my hand at one point, and moved it away. She invented my complaint that she was demystifying Moby-Dick. Did she actually remember the panel this way? Before the interview in 2019, Dimock had been hit by a car while crossing the street. “Without a team of nurses, nurses’ aides, and physical therapists,” she “would still have been in that wheelchair.” She was confused, perhaps, rather than deliberately falsifying her account. Perhaps someone gave her a dramatic reading in the hospital of my 2012 Melville Biography: An Inside Narrative where I did indeed expose her ignorance of facts and her contempt for research.

        I remember very well what happened at that momentous panel, for there in December 1990 in the Melville Society meeting in Chicago the death of truth came home to me. The room was packed with fresh New Historicists, second-generation New Leftists (who had fervor but less purpose than the first), and a large group of second- and third-generation New Critics (John Bryant was on the panel) who had never done archival research and had not been taught to do responsible research of any sort. I misread the atmosphere in the room as one of free-floating political correctness, not sharply focused, but the mood of the audience was hostile from the start. When Wai Chee Dimock resurrected Lewis Mumford’s long-refuted claim that Hawthorne had based Ethan Brand on Melville (before he met him or read anything but Typee), Harrison Hayford mildly reproved her, saying that if she thought it was acceptable to bring forth the Ethan Brand claim as a serious possibility, she was using a different standard for evidence than he used. At that, there was a subterranean muttering of anger in the audience like the incipient rebellion in Billy Budd, the mood hardening into fury that anyone’s idea could be considered invalid on grounds of biographical evidence. In the new post-scholarly climate to point out errors was to violate the playground rules: one should always enhance one’s playmate’s self-esteem. The audience was further incited when an interloper, a satanic red-bearded stranger (described by Robert K. Wallace in Melville and Turner as “the petulant stranger in the doorway”) kept crying out, with regard to Melville and biography, ‘THE FACTS DON’T MATTER.’ So in 2016 Wai Chee Dimock became Editor of the Publications of the Modern Language Association and in 2019 said that on the panel she had not been “especially terrified” of me. Good Lord!  Had Hayford and I been invited as sacrificial victims in a lions den? I did not talk with Hayford after the meeting but instead walked more than two hours in the intense cold of Chicago. I know who I felt like: Daniel. Knowing when scholarship was scorned and banished, I never attended another MLA Melville Meeting in the United States.