Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile - Herman Melville (week 1)
Details
It is tempting to interpret Israel Potter (1855) as Melville described it: "very little reflective writing in it; nothing weighty. It is adventure." That is, in many ways it is conventionally picaresque.
The titular character, loosely based on a real-life 18th century figure, is chased from one situation to the next, changing clothes with the circumstances, demonstrating a survivor resourcefulness, and (like an American Revolutionary-era Forrest Gump) episodically meeting an array of conspicuously famous figures, including Ben Franklin, King George, John Paul Jones, and Ethan Allen.
But Brian Rosenberg calls it "more than it merely appears to be": an "anti-history" and "one of the most thoroughly overlooked full-length works by any major writer of the last two centuries." Comparing it to a slave narrative, Stephen Matterson calls it "an ironic bildungsroman" centred on "someone for whom an identity framework and contexts for self-understanding are disrupted."
Indeed, from the opening dedication--a satirical paean to "His Highness, the Bunker Hill Monument"--to the last chapter--where our hero returns home, only to die anonymously near the very monument intended to remember him--the book offers ironic commentary on the nature of history and memory. Israel experiences imprisonment and escape (without truly being free), entombment and "resurrection" (without truly being alive), and sacrifice and veneration (without truly being honored). Through the sharp contrast between fame and forbearance, Melville draws attention to the ways in which lives are fragmented, and the many are relegated by the few.
Note: This meetup will be recorded for private use.
Week 1 (April 12): Chapters 1 - 13
Week 2: Chapters 14 - 27
Israel Potter:
Supplemental:
- Noetic podcast with Jonathan Cook
- The Almost True and Truly Remarkable Adventures of Israel Potter, American Patriot - play adaptation, Act Two
This meetup is part of the series In the Belly of the Whale.