[...]... Ground, 41 3 The Example of Irving, 52 Irving's Comic Debate, 53 Salmagundi and Some Versions of the Bachelor, 55 A Rip in the Canvas: Irving' s Picturesque, 63 Irving's Goldsmith and the Rhetoric of Geniality, 66 4 Playing Along: America and the Rhetoric of Deceit, 70 The Deep Thought of Laughter, 70 A Veracious History of Lying, 72 The Lie of our Land: Forms of Comic Lying, 82 5 E A Poe and T B Thorpe:... to one's Being The first step to understanding an aesthetics of repose, then, is to grasp the ontological status of humor 6 A Great Intellect in Repose Humor and Being If the power, but also the fault, in Wit derives from a reduction of idea to a play of words, then Humor is that playful impulse to plunge beneath language to the fundamentals of life: being, creation, awareness, and death.9 Humor familiarizes... Melville' s increasing detachment was not a result of failure in the literary marketplace but rather was in keeping with his most fundamental aesthetic views, his aesthetics of repose The word "repose" does not appear in the King James Bible, nor in much of Shakespeare It had its vogue in the Romantic era, losing the richness of its meaning in our rather less-than-reposeful century Like Hawthorne, Melville strove... that can contain the fiery union of "unlike things," the artist's contrary instincts of "Humility—yet pride." Similarly, form and passion fuse within the heart The final effect is a tense repose This crucial element in Melville' s aesthetic the subsuming of head within mystic heart, the fusion of light and dark, the ascendency of art over self—indicates a movement toward restraint rather than Poe's terror-ridden,... consciousness are inextricably linked in the struggle for repose Melville' s aesthetics occupies a middle ground between the beautiful and the sublime, comedy and tragedy, inland and sea And that middle ground is best articulated in terms not of the sublime but of the picturesque Melville' s Picturesque: Toning Down the Green The general view is that Melville disdained the picturesque as symptomatic of America's... "sorrow and delight" are contained in this reposeful draught, but the resultant "sleep," while it hushes the "lips of Care," does not end caring itself There is only the cessation of complaint: "And they complain no more" (5) Thus, in his waiting repose (and before he must be "up and doing"), Longfellow transforms life's stream of sorrow and delight into "the trailing garments of the Night," a languorous... even to the edges of creation Carlyle envisions humor as a pool of water in the crater of a volcano that reflects the distant light of the highest stars and simultaneously transmits from below "glances from the Region of Nether Fire." Humor' s watery, volcanic fusion of transcendent 8 A Great Intellect in Repose idealism and the self-negating sublime corresponds to the Professor's own containment of variant... Fusion and Repose "Repose" connotes a kind of peaceful stasis, or pliant recumbency of will, a careless state of mind: mild, silent, calm It implies both release and dependence: a reasonable sleep of anxiety; a sweet surrender of ourselves into the hands of God, nature, or society In the religious parlance of the nineteenth century, we repose faith in God In the secular world, we repose confidence in ourselves... natural and imaginative It is the evocation of a single lyric mind and heart: Cide Hamete Benengeli reflecting on Don Quixote, or Shandy on Toby, or Ishmael on whales When, in America, different strains of humor grew out of the frontier's oral tradition, the heroes and voices changed in manner, but the lyrical dimension of their laughter remained the same As Walter Blair notes, American humor is the sound... "speaks" and "sings"; it is to be heard, and like a musical instrument this human organ can harmonize the dissonances of our lives in both the creator's and the auditor's minds The comic voice, then, not only enables the mingling of satire and genial modes but also invites writer and audience to combine Laughter empowers both For Melville, humor was inalienable from his aesthetics and rhetoric because . Melville and Repose This page intentionally left blank MELVILLE AND REPOSE The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance John Bryant New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1993 Oxford. A Great Intellect in Repose, 3 Humor and Being, 6 Melville& apos;s Aesthetics of Repose, 8 Melville& apos;s Rhetoric: Voicing the Voiceless, 19 Melville and the Reader: "Lord. otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging -in- Publication Data Bryant, John, 1949- Melville and repose : the rhetoric of humor in the American