Citario. Derived from the Latin “citāre” (to quote) plus the suffix “-ārium” (repository), similar to “bestiary.” A 21st-century neologism, it emerged among Spanish-speaking scholars at Bookish & Co., with roots in ancient anthologies and florilegia. “Citario” is related to medieval books of commonplaces (such as Erasmus’s) and proto-examples from the 19th century, such as “Familiar Quotations.” This «Citario Melville» commemorates the 206th birthday of that cartographer of the abyss and scribe of stubborn silence.
Tensions and extremism are frequently found in the works of elderly artists (just think, in painting, of the late Michelangelo or Titian), and are often classified by critics as mannerisms. The Alexandrian grammarians already observed that Plato’s style, so clear in his early dialogues, becomes affected and exaggeratedly paratactic in his later works. Similar observations (although here we are talking less about senility than dementia) have been made about Hölderlin after his translations of Sophocles, torn between the harsh technique of the hymns and the stereotypical sweetness of the poems signed with the pseudonym Scardanelli. Similarly, in Melville’s last novels (think of Pierre, or the Ambiguities or The Confidence-Man), mannerisms and digressions proliferate to the point of breaking the very form of the novel, dragging it towards other genres of more complex reading (the philosophical treatise or the erudite anthology).
Giorgio Agamben, “Inappropriate manner” (The End of the Poem)
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The translation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, supposedly begun on November 16, 1936, was completed on December 10, 1939. But long before I began that work, for at least five or six years, that book had been my foreign companion. I regularly took it with me on my walks in the hills. And then, when I sometimes had to face those great solitudes, undulating like the sea but motionless, I had only to sit down, lean my back against the trunk of a pine tree, and take that book, which was already beginning to stir, out of my pocket to feel the multiple life of the seas growing around and above me. How many times did I hear the hissing of the rigging above me, the movement of the earth beneath my feet like the deck of a whaling ship, the groaning of the pine trunk swaying against my back like a mast, weighed down by its fluttering sails! And when I looked up from the page, it seemed to me that Moby Dick was snorting there in front of me, on the other side of the foam formed by the olive groves, in the agitation of the tall oak trees. But when night deepened our inner spaces, the pursuit to which Melville was dragging me became more general and at the same time more personal. The imaginative flow projected amid the hills could collapse, and the illusory waters, receding from my dreams, could suddenly dry up the high ground on which I stood. In the midst of peace (and therefore also in the midst of war), formidable battles take place in which one participates alone and whose clamor is silence to the rest of the world. There is no need for terrestrial oceans or monsters that apply to everyone; each of us has our own oceans and personal monsters. These terrible internal mutilations will eternally irritate men against the gods, and their pursuit of divine glory is never in vain. Say what you will. When night left me alone, I could better understand the soul of that purple hero who dominates the book entirely.
Jean Giono, Homage to Melville
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Herman Melville is a very unusual writer whom literature lovers casually take for granted, having already read him, almost because he is too obvious. We have a vague memory of having read Moby Dick at some point in the distant past, and if we aspire to a certain sophistication, we declare ourselves enthusiasts of “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” but in reality we know very little about the rest of his work and almost nothing about his life: merely that his voyages in his early youth provided him with material for his maritime novels, in the manner of Joseph Conrad, and that he then led a monotonous existence as an office worker, like an early Kafka, which inspired him to invent that meek scrivener who one day refuses to obey a trivial request with the most timid declaration of rebellion ever known: “I would prefer not to.” Kafka is always quoted in connection with the story of Bartleby, and it is recalled that Borges alluded to it when he formulated the paradox that a writer creates or influences his predecessors by forcing us to change our view of them with his own work.
Antonio Muñoz Molina, “The Mystery of Herman Melville”
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Melville invented a foreign language underlying English, which takes hold of him: OUTLANDISH or Deterritorialized, the language of the Whale. Hence the interest of research on Moby Dick, which draws on Numbers and Letters, in their cryptic sense, to extract at least an outline of this original, inhuman or superhuman language. It is as if three operations were taking place here: a certain “treatment” of language; the result of this treatment, which tends to constitute an original language; and its effect, which consists in contaminating language as a whole, making it flee, pushing it towards its own limits to discover its Outside, silence or music. A great book is always the reverse of another book that is only written in the soul, with silence and blood. This is not only true of Moby Dick, but also of Pierre, in which Isabel adds an incomprehensible murmur to language, like a basso continuo that links the language to the chords and sounds of her guitar. And also of Billy Budd, angelic or Adam-like in nature, who suffers from a stutter that distorts language while revealing the musical and celestial Beyond of all language. It is like in Kafka, “a painful whimper” that becomes entangled in the resonance of words while his sister prepares the violin to respond to Gregor.
Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby or the Formula”
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Bartleby the office worker does not defend himself against the powers that seek to judge him, read him, interpret him, understand him, find some context in which he has a straightforward meaning and can no longer decline, sheltering behind the walls of privacy, but rather camouflaging himself as just anyone: a man, to the letter, plain, simple, and literally any man; thereby expanding his community beyond all context (“Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!” are the last words of the story). And that free transcendence of his voice ritually repeating his refusals is, in a literal sense, his intimacy, his indomitable uniqueness: unspeakable, unbiographable, irreducible to information, and incompatible with argumentation.
José Luis Pardo, “Bartleby or Humanity”
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Yesterday I bought The Origin of Species for sixpence, and I’ve never read such a badly written piece of trash. I only remember one thing: blue-eyed cats are always deaf (correlation from Variations). I finished Vanity Fair and Cunt Pointercunt* [Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point]. A laborious piece of verbiage. The only thing I haven’t forgotten is Spandrell whipping the foxgloves. Today I bought Moby Dick for sixpence. It’s more authentic. White whales and natural mercy.
Samuel Beckett to Thomas MacGreevy, August 4, 1932
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Moby Dick is written in a romantic dialect of English, a vehement dialect that alternates or combines the styles of Shakespeare and Thomas de Quincey, Browne and Carlyle; Bartleby, in a calm and even humorous language whose deliberate application to an atrocious subject seems to foreshadow Franz Kafka. There is, however, a secret and central affinity between the two works of fiction. In the former, Ahab’s monomania disturbs and ultimately destroys all the men on the ship; in the latter, Bartleby’s candid nihilism contaminates his companions and even the stolid gentleman who recounts his story and pays him for his imaginary tasks. It is as if Melville had written: “It is enough for one man to be irrational for others to be so and for the universe to be so.” Universal history abounds with confirmations of this fear.
Bartleby belongs to the volume entitled The Piazza Tales (1856, New York and London). John Freeman observes that another story in that book could not be fully understood until Joseph Conrad published a similar piece almost half a century later; I would add that Kafka’s work casts a curious further light on Bartleby. Bartleby already defines a genre that Franz Kafka would reinvent and deepen around 1919: that of fantasies of behavior and feeling or, as it is now poorly called, psychological fantasies. For the rest, the final pages of Bartleby do not foreshadow Kafka; rather, they allude to or repeat Dickens… In 1849, Melville had published Mardi, an inextricable and still unreadable novel, but whose essential plot anticipates the obsessions and mechanism of The Castle, The Trial, and America: it is about an endless pursuit across an endless sea.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Herman Melville. Bartleby”
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Moby Dick is many books at once: an exploration of the dichotomies of the world between good and evil, order and chaos, land and water; a challenge to the radiant optimism of the transcendentalists; an allegory about class and race in the United States as the country teetered toward civil war; and an encyclopedic anatomy of whales and whaling, conceived as a kind of representation of humanity’s clumsy and ineffective efforts to catalog and make sense of the world.
Melville, who was barely thirty when he began the book, wrote it—astonishingly—in less than two years. And he approached his “colossal book” with every resource in his writer’s toolbox: poetic prose that ranged from the enchanting to the colloquial, the oracular to the comic; a madcap mix of literary devices (including quotations, philosophical digressions, scientific classifications, soliloquies, dramatic dialogues, and a barrage of similes, metaphors, and word-drunk digressions); and astonishingly detailed descriptions of every conceivable aspect of whales and whaling (from the dangers of harpooning to the arduous process of extracting oil from blubber, to a dissertation on whale varieties and anatomy).
Michiko Kakutani, Ex Libris
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Comparisons between Moby Dick (1851) and Arthur Gordon Pym tend to focus on the confused admiration that Melville and Poe felt for whiteness: the former for the whale, the latter for the South Pole. This identification requires some observation. The possibility that Melville had read Poe is suggested by the copies of Poe’s works that the author of Moby Dick gave to his wife on New Year’s Day 1861. The copy bears Melville’s autographed dedication. We also know that both writers lived in New York between 1846 and 1849 and that Poe gave several lectures at the New York Society Library, of which Melville was an active member. Beaver says that Melville strangely omitted Poe and Jeremiah H. Reynolds from the lengthy list of sources for Moby Dick.
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Some think that Melville (1819-1891) moves away from the Calvinist conception of sin, focused on the cosmic struggle between good and evil. But it is no less true to remember that both Ahab and Ishmael exemplify their own predestination: joining evil in death and returning like Jonah to tell the tale. Arthur, on the other hand, is alone. The predestination that leads him to adventure through daydreaming and from there to another cosmic drama has not been prophesied by anyone. Melville writes in the grip of immense biblical anxiety, while Poe, an orphan, operates on the frozen stage of the mind. Ahab enjoys the privilege of being judged by Ishmael and Starbucks, while there is no one to testify for Arthur.
Christopher Domínguez Michael, “Predestined at Sea”
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Melville’s perception of the dangerous extremes of Manichean, Gnostic, and Promethean individualism is surpassed in 19th-century literature only by Dostoyevsky. It is no coincidence that transgression, crime, is the recurring and profound theme in the Russian author’s work. And it is no coincidence that hubris is the breeding ground for crime: Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, Verjovensky, Ivan Karamazov. But if in Dostoevsky the transgressor can, in the end, assume his guilt and redeem himself through punishment—if he can, moreover, find a person or an entire people, Sonia or the Russians, who share his purgation—in Melville no one assumes it, and all the crew members of the Pequod are going to crash into the whale’s back and jaw and sink under the great shroud of the sea. “We are all responsible for everything to everyone.” The great Dostoevskian vital center does not rule in the world of Moby Dick. However, this is all that Queequeg said, in his half-language. This is all that Father Marple said when, in his magnificent opening sermon, he pointed out the difficulty of fulfilling God’s commands: to obey Him, we must disobey ourselves. Melville, like the great spirits of the last century, tears away the opaque veil of positivism and bourgeois good conscience to open the way once again to the radical problems of man. He is, like Marx, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, our contemporary.
Carlos Fuentes, “The Novel as Symbol: Herman Melville”
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In any case (and whatever they say or don’t say), I believe that your fugitive Wakefield and my prisoner Bartleby are and always will be inseparable. Wakefield & Bartleby: their surnames like a wind-blown sign announcing the most spectral and anticipatory of partnerships, not necessarily commercial, not necessarily appreciated at the time, but very influential when it comes to future transactions. Wakefield & Bartleby preferring not to do conservative business now but to wait for the bolder markets of what is to come. The two of them and the two of us, I believe, I am completely sure of it, invented something there. There, in their names, the vague but very novel figure of the non-hero, of the one who is not, of the one who does not do or have anything to do, of the one who prefers not to do and not to be.
Rodrigo Fresán, Melvill
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Impoverished and defeated, Melville lived for three years giving lectures, an activity that came to an end due to poor attendance. Not even the restful trips financed by his father-in-law could lift him out of his deep depression. After the death of Judge Shaw, his father-in-law, benefactor, and friend, Melville was forced to leave Arrowhead for good and move into his brother Allan’s house at 104 East 26th Street in New York. From 1866 until 1885, he earned a living as a customs agent, but this was not a peaceful time either. In 1867, Elizabeth’s family discussed the possibility of divorce with a local priest, citing Herman’s mental instability. That same year, Malcolm, Melville’s eldest son, committed suicide with his father’s pistol.
He was almost completely forgotten. Except for a few American and British admirers, no one remembered the literary whaler.
Vicente F. Herrasti, prologue to Cuentos de la Veranda
