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Why Melville Matters NowA Transdisciplinary Celebration in Albany, New York

MARY VALENTISDirector, Center for Humanities, Arts, and TechnoSciences

(CHATS), University at Albany

Melville tourism can be as exotic as the South Sea Islands or aspicturesque as the shoals and jetties of Nantucket Harbor. But forone weekend last November 16-19, 2006, the tourists stopped in

Albany, New York, for a three-day transdisciplinary celebration and scholarlysymposium called “Why Melville Matters Now.” The upstate capital city andits Chamber of Commerce have been claiming Melville as one of their ownfor many years and for good reasons. Albany was home to the Gansevoorts,Melville’s mother’s family and prominent citizens of Dutch heritage; MariaGansevoort and Allan Melvill met at the 1813 Albany Society Ball; and Albanywas where Allan Melvill transported his family after his business reversals inNew York City. The young Herman Melville attended the Albany Academy intwo separate stints, one in 1830-31 and the other in 1836-1837. It was the lastschool he ever attended.

Planning for the celebration started almost a year before when AlbanyAcademies Head, Caroline Mason, flush with ideas after hearing AndrewDelbanco lecture on Melville in New York City, invited the author of Melville:His World and Work (2005) to the school to give a lecture. She also reachedout to the University at Albany and its Center for Humanities, Arts, andSciences, Yaddo, the Albany Institute of History and Art, and to Academyalumni and parents to collaboratively produce a unique, multi-faceted explo-ration of Melville’s world, his works, and why he remains so germane forcontemporary readers and critics. Add to that a twenty-four hour marathonreading of Moby-Dick kicked off by the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist WilliamKennedy and finished by CBS commentator and Albany Academy alumnus,Andy Rooney. Just before noon on Saturday morning, as Mr. Rooney read how“the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago,” therewere over two hundred listeners—students, scholars, alumni, community

C© 2007 The AuthorsJournal compilation C© 2007 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc

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members—all gathered to hear the book’s ending, standing in respectful silencein the Academy’s William K. Stanford Library.

The weekend also featured an original art installation, a dance perfor-mance, a trolley ride tour of Melville’s Albany and environs, including a tripto the original day school Melville attended, an arts panel, and an exhibit ofthirteen prints from the collection of Frank Stella’s The Waves at the AlbanyInstitute of History and Art. To promote the symposium, a publicity firmprovided the celebration committee with three images: a traditional portrait,a whale poster, and the one we chose, the 1885 portrait of Melville—his eyescovered by dark Armani sunglasses. The intent of the publicity materials wasnot to “hipsterize” Herman Melville but to signify his contemporary relevanceand to mark Melville’s uncanny ability, like most great writers, to anticipatehis own imaginative and critical futures.

Over sixty scholars responded to our request for papers that were to takea transdisciplinary approach to Melville, his life, and his works. We decided toframe the symposium as an interdisciplinary conference to afford participationfrom a diverse cross-section of Melville scholars and to demonstrate howscholars of all persuasions can read Melville through multiple lenses. A teamof educators from the university and the Academies selected forty papers thatcame together into fifteen panels with three or four presenters in each one.Moderators for the panels were drawn from a pool of Academy alums, andUniversity and Academy faculty.

Scholars arrived at the Marcus-Reynolds-designed Albany Academycampus from as far away as Lisbon, Stockholm, Cologne, as well as from colleg-es and universities across the U.S. and Canada to present papers on such topicsas the question of boredom in Moby-Dick, open spaces, archipelagos, and themonstrous in Melville. Panel attendees learned about cetology and Melville’senvironmentalism; they discovered how to teach Melville; they considered theissues of blackness, whiteness, cosmopolitanism, and domesticity as expressedin Melville’s Moby-Dick, Benito Cereno, Billy Budd, and the more obscure texts.All of the panels were reportedly very well attended and the papers generatedmuch lively debate among scholars and from those outside the Academy.

Keynoter Andrew Delbanco presented a compelling overview ofMelville’s centrality to the American canon through four psycho-biographicaland theoretical frames. He touched on the novelist’s emergence as an iconicfigure in the twentieth century, his appeal to postmodernists, Melville’s popculture presence, and his themes that seemed particularly gripping post-911or, in Delbanco’s words, as “the writer who saw the ship of state sailingtowards disaster under lunatic leadership as it tries to conquer the world”(Delbanco: 16).

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Saturday afternoon’s arts panel, essentially four improvisational “perfor-mances” on Melville and the arts, featured presentations and slides by authorand cultural critic Stanley Crouch, Professor Robert K. Wallace of NorthernKentucky State, a Stella expert and scholar who has written extensively onMelville and the arts, the playwright R. L. Lane, who wrote the off-Broadwayplay, Bartleby, and artist Robert del Tredici, whose striking woodcuts, inter-pretations of Moby-Dick, are being donated to the Academy. The weekendwas rounded out by Professor Wallace, who gave a public lecture and slidepresentation on Frank Stella’s The Waves before a packed audience at theAlbany Institute of History and Art.

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