Lewis Mumford

[Mark Kohut]

Prediscovers (sic. Half-joke) " hysterical realism" in MOBY DICK. With a few Pynchon preechoes. 

In his HERMAN MELVILLE, 1929, written to push and ride the canonical rediscovery and placement of Melville as an American writer of genius, Mumford sees MD in these dual ways:

" the characters are heightened and slightly distorted: Melville's quizzical comic sense is steadily at work on them, and only Ahab escapes; but they all have their recognizable counterparts in the actual world."

But with the " Ahab escapes"  line and the focussing on all of the whale and whaling detail he says, nodding to Monte, that Melville used science ( meaning also technics, it seems) to buttress and ground his great work. " Science did not destroy the myth-making power of man"...." Faraday's ability to conceive the lines of force in a magnetic field was quite as great a triumph as the ability to conceive fairies dancing in a ring" and " as Mr. A.N. Whitehead has shown, the poets who,sympathized with this new sort of imagination...like Shelley, Wordsworth, Whitman, Melville, did not feel themselves robbed of their specific powers, but rather found them enlarged and refreshed. 



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