"Of course it was the stutter in Melville's handsome sailor, his 'lurking defect,' that has been at the heart of my lifelong attraction to Herman Melville's late masterpiece, Billy Budd"-so begins Myron C. Tuman's new study of the strange, distant bond between a series of fathers (literary or otherwise) and their mostly inarticulate sons. At the center of this book is Tuman's sense that what at first looked like the relatively minor detail of Billy's stutter might provide a path into a new understanding of his own lifelong struggle with stuttering-that his own stutter, like Billy's, might be part of a larger narrative related to fathers and authority generally. This interest in stuttering and fatherhood soon led to two additional concerns: first, the need to make sense of the peculiar mandate that the story's surrogate father, Captain Vere, feels to oversee Billy's execution-that is, a filicidal impulse that Melville compares to Abraham's mandate to bind and sacrifice his son, Isaac-and, secondly, the aura of homoerotic desire directed throughout the tale towards Melville's "handsome sailor." Into these four seemingly unconnected concerns-stuttering and fatherhood, filicide and homoerotic desire-was added one additional concern, from a second Melville tale of perplexed fatherhood, "Bartleby, the Scrivener," namely, anorexia, which here can be seen as the child's willing acceptance of the father's own filicidal impulse. The result is "literary" study of unusual breadth, one that moves across a wide body of romantic narratives, alternating between Melville and a host of other writers, from Joseph Conrad to Vladimir Nabokov, from Giambattista Vico to Sigmund Freud. A climactic final chapter compares Billy Budd and another knotted tale of an innocent child protected by another filicidal protector, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. Still, for all the literary discussions, Melville's Gay Father begins and ends with a decidedly non-literary interest in the waywardness of male desire-a concern with not just what we can learn from the travails of literary fathers (Vere, Aschenbach, or Okonkwo), or from their authors (Melville or Thomas Mann or Chinua Achebe), but more generally what we can learn about the knotted lives of all men.
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About the Author
Myron C. Tuman is perhaps best known for his work in literacy theory and technology, including the monographs A Preface to Literacy and Word Perfect, as well as the Connect software he helped to develop. Language and Limits (1998) and CriticalThinking.com (2002), extend this analysis of contemporary language education, casting a wary eye on changes promoted as "progress," including the widespread promotion of all things critical. Tuman’s latest work, Melville’s Gay Father, is a literary analysis of the filicidal impulse in a series of fictional fathers, along with a look at two perplexing and possibly related psychological issues: stuttering and anorexia. He has continued his pedagogic interests in technology with his new Web project, ReadingLinks.com. Tuman began his career teaching middle and high school and in 2003 became the first Belle and Leonard Toups Chair in English at Nicholls State University, located in Thibodaux, Louisiana.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Extremely Interesting Book,
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This review is from: Melville's Gay Father and the Knot of Filicidal Desire: On Men and Their Demons (Paperback)
Melville's Gay Father is an extremely interesting book for anyone with an adventurous attitude and the willingness to consider some potentially discomforting ideas about the sexual impulses of men. Professor Tuman presents his ideas partly by explaining his personal history but primarily through brief interpretations of about 10 important literary texts, ranging from the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac to Conrad's Secret Sharer to Nabokov's Lolita. The interpretations are all subtle and intriguing, and you can follow them even if you haven't read the texts being discussed. More than that, you'll want to read these texts. If there is one text you do need to know, it's Melville's short novel Billy Budd--a central work in American literature.
After reading Melville's Gay Father, you may find yourself wondering about your father's homoerotic impulses and--if you are male--about your relationship with your male child. In addition, Tuman draws both stuttering (in males) and anorexia (in females) into his argument in a surprising and very interesting way. You may not accept all the ideas you find in Tuman's book, but you will surely find yourself carried along in the sweep of Tuman's extraordinary intellect.
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