The Value of Herman Melville

The milieu of buried stimuli: Relational theory and literary studies

“…In The Value of Herman Melville (2018), I tried to bring out this relationship between Bollas and Melville, emphasizing that—as Phillips (1994) puts it—“the aim [for Bollas] is not so much understanding—finding out which character you are—but a freeing of the potentially endless process of mutual invention and reinvention … It is a psychoanalysis committed … not [to] truth, except in its most provisional sense, but possibility” (p. 158). I drew particular attention to a passage in which Bollas (1989) writes, “The patient uses elements of my personality fleetingly, for specific momentary use, in order to forge self from experience.…”

“…I feel one use of me is succeeded by another, in a movement of uses, without this psychical dialectics forming itself into a story” (p. 111). Instead of invariably driving the experience of reading Melville toward a conceptual statement, I suggested, maybe we could conceive of that experience, with Bollas in mind, as a “movement of uses” that never “form [s] itself into a story.” Maybe we could conceive of reading itself as a means of re‐initiating an “unpredictable existential motion, a motion that is partially but obscurely self‐directed, a motion that stimulates an interest not only in what one is about to encounter but in what one is about to make of it.” (Sanborn, 2018, p. 49). And maybe our repeated discovery of the “evocative—transformational—facet of objects” (Bollas, 1992, p. 31), prolonged over time and varied, could awaken us not only to the world's endless beckoning, but also to the world's capacity to survive our assaults on it and swim away.…”