The worlds of Herman Melville and James Joyce – the most towering literary icons of their respective centuries – would appear to exist – aesthetically, philosophically and textually – in two different universes, each beyond the known or measurable boundaries of the other. Over and above the obvious shared values of fame and its evil twin misunderstanding, both authors come first to mind when that mysterious and barely tenable term “genius” is being ladled out. In the spirit of Melville’s anthemic statement in praise of Hawthorne, “For genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round,” could these twin peak universes be parallel, awaiting only the spark of identification to bring them both into parallax focus as one?

That the current raging interest, fashion or sincere appreciation revolving around these titans did not come to concretion for several decades after their deaths is the ironic aftermath of two lives lived in poverty, pain and obscurity and a measure of how slow we, as a race, are on the uptake. As we speak, both authors’ works and reputations are caught in the crossfire of the scholarly community, which tends to complicate the simple, and the public at large, which tends to view the complex simplistically. Much of this high regard stems from the monumental hot air balloons – code named White Whale and Dirty Book – which carry their names and images around and into every nook and cranny of the media-saturated world. But intimacy with an image often tends to obviate intimacy with a text, and despite exponentially increasing familiarity and enormous attention, there remains much in the works of both authors defying examination, evaluation and elucidation, both severally and collectively.

In that Melville’s audience had virtually disappeared by the end of the 1850’s and interest in his work was not revived for nearly thirty years after his death in 1891, Joyce would have had no way of knowing him until well into the writing of Finnegans Wake, in which he acknowledges his existence with at least two references: “Groot hwide Whalefisk “(1) and “queckqueck.” (2) Thus if there is any intrinsic and inalienable common ground between them, it lies entirely outside the realm of influence, and one must plumb a bewildering array of obvious differences in order to locate and establish it. Reared as he was in Calvinism, Melville’s views can be traced back through Neoplatonism and Plotinus to Plato himself; and reared as he was in Roman Catholicism, Joyce’s modes and methods can be traced back through Aquinas to Aristotle himself. Far more erudite in matters of formal philosophy than Melville, Joyce probably knew more about Plato than his Platonic forerunner but tended to treat with irony and skepticism, if not outright rejection, this worldview as a controlling factor in the art he had envisioned for himself. Among Melville’s early commentators, the general consensus was that had he but taken even an elementary course in philosophy, he would not have written any of his works, or at least in the same way.

The old dichotomies of highbrow and lowbrow, redman and paleface, concocted to explain the diverging American purposes represented by Whitman and Emerson, can be invoked with like utility to frame the larger contexts of these contrapuntal figures born an ocean and a century apart. Like Whitman, Melville was essentially an unformed artist – an adherent to the lyrical mode of expression throughout his canon who shot from the hip and wrote from the seat of his pants and off the top of his head – from the heart, so to speak: “I stand for the heart. To the dogs with the head. I had rather be a fool with a heart than Jupiter Olympus with his head.” (3) While Joyce was not as pale of face as Emerson, the Jameses or the Bloomsbury group, his work lies at the terminus of the track that actually began with Hawthorne – a formal voice and acute psychologist from Melville’s neck of the woods.. Thus, the initial connection of Melville to Joyce may be seen to commence with the former’s 1852 novel Pierre, the fractured formalities and psychology of which are rightly viewed as an obeisance to and an attempt to emulate and reconcile with his elder idol Hawthorne.

After the dismal reception of his 1851 magnum opus, Moby Dick, into which he had poured his life’s blood, it is amply demonstrable that Melville, who had now lost his standing as a major writer of his own age, had become in point of fact, if not epoch, a modern writer. As T.S. Eliot said of Joyce, Melville was out to “kill the nineteenth century, expose the futility of all styles and destroy his own future.(4) From the outset Melville’s sole purpose as a writer was not merely to tell the truth as he saw it and experienced it but to fathom its infinite depths—like Dante, to wade through the fires of hell in order to understand if not to embrace the idea of heaven. The niceties and formalities of the novelist’s craft hardly mattered in this pursuit of the awful, uncivilizable truth. This “derangement in his own relation to his work,”(5) as Newton Arvin calls it, may be rooted in his dogged pursuit of what he reckoned to be the “truth”—“... his aspiration was to do justice both to visible objects, masks as they are, and to the immaterial reality that, as he believed, lies behind them. It was an impossible task.”(6)

It may be proposed that Melville’s ethos of and adherence to the raw truth and the hardcore language of this truth as he perceived it had become the antithetical worm which eventually was to devour the primary apple of his art from the inside out. Too honest and unpretentious to be an artist proper, Melville the man was yet too close to Melville the artist, unable to remove himself sufficiently from his material rhetorically, psychologically, or emotionally to achieve or maintain mastery. It may be said that artifice for good or ill was never his intention. His writings were merely the exquisite excrescences from a wounded soul.

Telling or pursuing ultimate truths was never Joyce’s purpose as an artist beyond the mawkishly philosophical Stephen Hero, his only known barbaric yawp, the baptism in fire of which left us with less than a third of its original heft. His purpose was to display in intimate and precise detail and in all its kaleidoscopic refraction life itself, hypothesized in fiction, and simply allow whatever truth may exist to manifest itself without authorial interference or interpretation. None of Melville’s novels, like Joyce’s ungainly first attempt in the form, makes any pretense to rhetoric, authorial detachment or dramatic presentation as an aesthetic term. They are simply vehicles for ideas, any action being thereto subsumed.

Just as Joyce’s fictional canon begins with the rejection of this initial false step and with the completion of Dubliners, so Melville’s emergence as a protomodernist writer begins with the turning of his back on the six works of his early maturity – works which were essentially just fictionalized documentaries based on his experience before the mast, neither fish nor fowl in terms of conventional categories – and, as with Joyce’s boyhood manuscript, taking the plunge into a pit of fire, out of which he was eventually to rise like a phoenix, singed but not consumed.

Like Stephen Hero, Pierre is a blunder replete with brilliant lines and pithy ideas – for more than a hundred years regarded as an embarrassment of precious little worth as a novel. Yet since that time, Melville’s dogged apologists have, like Stubb, begun to plunder the fetor of this corpse for the purse of ambergris which clearly lies buried therein: “. . . suddenly from out the very heart of this plague, there stole a faint stream of perfume, which flowed through the tide of bad smells without being absorbed by it . . .” (7) “Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be found in the heart of such decay: is this nothing?” (8) Heretofore, Melville’s claim to fame was his highly unconventional, individualized approach to his subject – one which kept him from serious consideration as an artist but made him interesting as “the man who lived among the savages.” Pierre signals his coming to heel, accepting the bridle and the mantle of the novelist proper and seeking to please a civilized readership by including women of his own class and culture for the first time in his fiction. If, as Baudelaire quipped, “the true public of the nineteenth century is women”, (9) Melville in a pet of remorse and desperation offered up this “rural bowl of milk” to atone for his wild and wooly “botched” works of yore, only to collapse as an artist beneath the same conventions which were to be his salvation.

It is precisely this acquiescence to femininity and domesticity which leads Melville into the falseness of artifice for the first time, and though his attempt to dissemble fails on many levels, it is accurately perceived as the first faltering steps toward Joyce’s supreme achievement in the same mode with Nausicaa. It could be argued that both Joyce and Melville viewed their female characters as vessels of frippery, deceit and convention, the former responding with parody and the latter with hostility, masking as fawning hyperbole. A possible reason Melville wrote so fraudulently in Pierre, wallowing in such stilted, overblown language and hollow good cheer is that he was unable to decontextualize his work, never letting up from beginning to end, except for periodic anthems of profound wisdom, the soap box puffery of which only adds to the ludicrous unreeling of tiresome twaddle. Ulysses, on the other hand, is in its ultimate context a series of decontextualizations fitting together in a resonating mosaic in which language controls action and thought and fuels the slow cascade of decontextualizings which eventually erode and corrode the language itself as the day of June 16, 1904, turns into night.

Open Pierre at any page at random and you find the style of Gerty McDowell running amock. Open Ulysses at just those passages which stem from the mind of Gerty and, having no prior knowledge of Joyce’s methods or the book as a whole, you might suspect that he was a banal, thoroughly bad writer who had not moved a jot from the popular romances of Melville’s day which Melville was, consciously or not, in the process of turning on their heads while ending his own career thereby. In attempting to dignify Melville’s floury flummery by identifying it with Joyce’s treacly stirabout, virtually none of Melville’s major commentators have been able to construct a convincing argument as to exactly how the one prefigures the other. Richard Chase states that “in writing Pierre Melville became a sort of drastic and flamboyant Joyce – as in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, the characters of Pierre embody the élan of myth and the mana of magic. Like Joyce’s books, Pierre has a universal allegory, based on family relationships and the search for the father, which is often connected with the narrative by means of puns. There is a kind of half attempt to make Pierre a portmanteau character, like Leopold Bloom or Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker.” (10) “Pierre is not the systematically conscious production which Joyce might have made of it. But my contention is that Pierre is very much more a Joycean artwork than has hitherto been established.” (11) “But whereas the larger meanings of a book like Joyce’s Ulysses are readily available because presented to us in created form, the larger meanings of Pierre are for the most part less immediately clear.” (12) These remarks were published in 1949 and now seem quite naïve. Yet terms such as “systematically conscious production,” and “created form” come close to describing Joyce’s use of irony, shifting vantage points and the protean use of style, cadence and rhythm to evoke the interior minds of his characters.

Joyce wrote perhaps the greatest Bilsdungsroman of all time with the Portrait, though Stephen Hero is an indication of what he had to go through in order to do it. Melville wrote one Bildungsroman after the other, many times as Ishmael, the ultimate and most extreme outsider, and then as Pierre, whose story is, ironically, written by a man weary of life. Just as Melville never escaped the bonds of Joyce’s lyrical mode, so his developing characters never really develop; and instead of moving on, as Joyce did with Ulysses, he aborted and splintered off in several bizarre directions. If Ulysses is a masterly dance of the hours, the accelerating dizziness of which is controlled on high through language, Pierre is a mad waltz, like Ravel’s La Valse, which spins off the rails and ends in cataclysm.

As with Baudelaire’s Albatross, Melville’s majesty arose from his proper elements of open air and open sea. Once he landed on a man-made stage, he became “awkward and ashamed, pitiably letting his great white wings drag at his side like oars. This winged voyager, how gauche and weak he is. Once so handsome, how comical and ugly he is – this invalid who once flew!” (13) Losing his dignity, Melville also lost much of his humor in this debacle, and unlike Joyce whose humor both deepened and expanded through the writing of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, he was never to find it again, though the ghost of it still hovers inertly in many of the stories and minor pieces which followed.

A prime example of Melville’s scaled down genius, still in tact, though overrunningly flamed over and wasted like a man cut away from the stake, is the story “Bartleby” – a tragic tale wrapped in the gossamer of a lapsed comic device and a significant step toward modernity from Pierre in that the false voice of the narrator is for the first time crisply appropriate to the narrative. No longer engulfed, enraged and awash in the plangent black waters of self- compounded deceit and self -destruction, Melville’s approach here, like Joyce’s, is detached, cool, distant. Also for the first time, Melville attempts in this tale dramatic detachment, in that the narrator-- a lawyer declaiming in strict lawyerese-- waxes prolix about a subject he knows next to nothing about: “. . . I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature. Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable. . . What my own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby, that is all I know of him . . .” (14) Melville thus passes through a kind of vanishing point of minimalism in telling a story about a story that cannot be told.

This phenomenal examination of a noumenal subject is precisely the direction Joyce was moving in with Dubliners. The themes of paralysis, inanition, marginalization and unknowableness which arise in the drawing of two of his most resonant and significant characters, James Duffy and Gabriel Conroy, can be traced directly back to “Bartleby”. By this time Joyce had mastered the art of showing rather than telling, and his characters emerge from details presented with economy and precision. Melville never reached this level of art but moved significantly from his own natural voice to that of a character – or caricature, really – similar to the various narrative voices of Ulysses, whose occluded subjectivity leaves ample space for objective observation on the part of the reader. Thus, for the first time in his career Melville achieved an irony roughly relatable to Joyce’s revolutionary achievement of multiple layers of irony in Ulysses.

At midway through his career, though his best work was arguably largely behind him, Melville was now at the threshold beyond which Joyce had already departed with his stories of fictionalized versions of himself he had by now discarded. For one reason or the other those shades were not able to fly by the nets of family, country and religion as their creator had done and are thus case studies of the might have been—of potential artists stillborn and thus incapable of becoming the artist who drew them. With Bartleby Melville was drawing not an aspect of himself that he had moved beyond but one that he had now become. If one element of the Ahab/Moby Dick conflict/confrontation was the valiant artist’s struggle against and ultimate defeat at the hands of his elusive, appalling and all- powerful readership, Melville had now been reduced to a scrivener writing “on silently, palely, mechanically” (15) in a void, the wall shoved near to Ahab now within inches of the face of this gazer into the emptiness of the universe—like Bob Doran, Father Flynn, James Duffy and Gabriel Conroy, among others, a self-contained or imprisoned isolato who can not commit himself or attain to the fellowship of the world—“...alone, absolutely alone in the universe. A bit of wreck in the mid Atlantic.” (16) “...insisting on the soul’s incurable loneliness.” (17)

On a spiritual level Bartleby, Duffy and Gabriel are all variations of the spoiled priest, all lost souls who have lost their souls through loss of faith – in others, in themselves and in God-- folding centripetally into themselves as their stories end. According to Coilin Owens, “ an educated layman with a reserved, withdrawn, haunted look was assigned to the stereotype (of those who fell by the wayside, thus failing to enter the priesthood)...disowned by his family and rejected by his friends, he became a recluse or wanderer.” (18) Rooted as well in the reclusive years of vagrancy in the life of Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, these characters are seen as forming a retrogression: Bartleby having become, Duffy in the process of becoming and Gabriel possibly to become in the not too distant future.

As “The Dead” moves toward revelation and disintegration, we see Gabriel becoming Bartleby: “He stared blankly down the staircase.” (19) “kindly forget my existence . . .” (20) Like Duffy, Gabriel is an ascetic out of pride rather than humility, and their various aversions and abstinence from sweets reveal an early manifestation of Bartleby’s extreme and final stance of total abstinence from any nourishment. Gabriel’s recurring phrase “thought-tormented” provides a trenchant insight into all three characters. Bartleby has become the living embodiment of Gabriel’s “sad memories: were we to brood upon them – we could not find the heart to go on bravely with our work among the living.” (21) Both Gabriel and Bartleby are closely linked with images of Christ. Gabriel is self-sacrificing and generous; he feels “the stress of his nails against the palms of his hands. . .” (22) Bartleby’s first appearance is called an “advent.” He exists outside the realm of cause and effect, like Jesus living by the chronometer of heaven as opposed to the horological time kept on Earth; his removal from the law office is unmistakably the passing of Christ down the Via Dolorosa: . . . “the poor scrivener, when told that he must be conducted to the Tombs, offered not the slightest obstacle, but in his pale unmoving way silently acquiesced. Some of the compassionate and curious bystanders joined the party; and headed by one of the constables arm in arm with Bartleby, the silent procession filed its way through all the noise and heat and joy of the roaring thoroughfares at noon.” (23)

If the plight of Bartleby is a frightening projection of what Duffy is rapidly becoming upon realizing the full implications of the death of Mrs. Sinico—the painful case of the story’s title—and of what Gabriel, who has now lost his wife to the ghost of an old lover, is conceivably to become, Bartleby himself gains a “cadaverous triumph” over his hapless employer as surely as Michael Furey has triumphed in death over the living Gabriel. Bartleby’s pathetic, traumatic past is totally behind him. His present is that of a living, imminently moribund ghost, who, like Furey, controls the story and the fate of the chief characters therein.

Melville’s impending or defacto apostasy, like that of Joyce, often takes the form of flippancy, sarcasm and seeming insensitivity to the grim and tragic in life. His simultaneous descent into popular and critical disfavor and ascent as an artist now recognizable as modern advanced exponentially from Pierre through the stories to his curious Journal of 1856-57, which was cut from an entirely different perspectival and stylistic cloth from any of his previous and subsequent writings. Chase succinctly describes the style of the Journal as “telegraphic, spontaneous and fragmentary. It is indeed a breaking up of style...in order to bring the sense of life as immediately as possible in consciousness.” (24) This telegraphic style of the work bears an uncanny resemblance to Bloom’s interior stream of consciousness. Melville: “Priests at Jerusalem sell them tickets for heaven, divided into seats like plan of theatre on benefit night. Can’t let you have this place – taken up. Nor this but if this here in the corner will do – very good – may have it at 500 piastres, etc.” (25) Joyce: “Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up: and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning.” (26) Melville: “Saw a burial. Nearby saw a woman over a new grave – no grass on it yet. Called to the dead, put her head down as close to it as possible; as if calling down a hatchway a cellar; besought – “Why don’t you speak to me? My God! It is I! Ah, speak – but one word – All deaf – So much for consolation.” (27) Joyce: “Have a gramophone in every grave or keep it in the house. After dinner on a Sunday. Put on poor old greatgrandfather.Kraahraark! Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark awfullygladaseeagain hellohello amawf krpthsth.” (28) Melville: “Resting. Pain in the chest. Exhaustion. Must hurry.” (29) Joyce: “Hurry. Walk quietly. Moment more. My heart.” (30) Melville: “. . . foam on beach like slaver of mad dog – smarting bitter of the water – carried the bitter in my mouth all day – bitterness of life – thought of all bitter things – Whitish mildew pervading whole tracts of landscape – bleached – leprosy – encrustation of curses – old cheese – bones of rocks, crunched, knawed and mumbled – mere refuse and rubbish of creation – all Judea seems to have been accumulations of this rubbish – no grace of decay – the unleavened nakedness of desolation.” (31) Joyce: “A barren land, bare waste, Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind could lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters, Brimstone they called it raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race. The oldest people. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead. An old woman’s: the grey sunken cunt of the world. Desolation.” (32)

As with the characters of both authors’ stories, the existence of the Melville persona of the Journal of 1856-57 and Leopold Bloom has lapsed beyond the hour of glory in the flower and we find them searching their lost way as philosophic minds trying to find some strength in what remains behind. Both are in their late thirties and prematurely feeling the onset of age and debilitation. Both share characteristics of the Baudelairian flaneur and both are wanderers of the gray places of the earth and the gray areas of the mind and spirit, sharing themes of loneliness, rejection and misunderstanding. Melville was never again to write in the spontaneous, cinematic and Joycean style of Bloom’s interior psyche, concerning himself in his late maturity with conventional and archaic verse forms and the plainest prose; but in those horrible yet enchanted years from 1851 to 1857 he was a man in a mackintosh traversing the inwardly spiraling trajectories of self and the outwardly spiraling trajectories of the world and forging in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race. It is a pity Joyce did not know him, or did he?