Virginia. He has a B.A. from Harvard College and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has taught literature and writing over the span of three decades at various institutions. His major field of concentration as a literary scholar is nineteenth-century American literature, and he is a specialist in the writings of Herman Melville. He has published an extensive roster of books, articles, and reviews, and has recorded numerous one-hour podcasts on selected works of American and English literature, available on YouTube and SoundCloud.
Cook applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Neither Believer nor Infidel: Skepticism and Faith in Melville's Shorter Fiction and Poetry, and reported the following:
On page 99 of Neither Believer nor Infidel: Skepticism and Faith in Melville’s Shorter Fiction and Poetry I argue that the character of Hunilla in the eighth sketch of Melville’s “The Encantadas,” set on one of the Galapagos Islands, plays the role of a modern female version of the Old Testament Job while also being inspired by the real-life history of Agatha Robinson, another comparable Job figure in Melville’s imagination. Melville had heard about the latter figure on a trip to Cape Cod and Nantucket in July 1852 during which he became acquainted with the long-suffering wives of the region, and more particularly, in Agatha’s case, the suffering she uncomplainingly endured because of her morally remiss bigamous husband. In this chapter I trace a genealogical line of literary descent from the character of the Job-like “patient Griselda” of Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, to the abandoned wife in Hawthorne’s story “Wakefield,” to the contemporary Cape Cod abandoned wife Agatha, to the abandoned Chola widow Hunilla, who loses her husband and brother to drowning in the ocean while they are harvesting turtle oil on one of the uninhabited Galapagos Islands. All these figures represented a type of passive female suffering that appealed to Melville’s imagination in the wake of his creation of the heroic male rebels of his two most recent novels, Moby-Dick and Pierre, whose moral and metaphysical rebellions led to their suicidal (Pierre) or quasi-suicidal (Ahab) deaths. As the longest sketch of “The Encantadas,” “Norfolk Island and the Chola Widow” conveys the aura of unjust divine punishment that seems to overhang the desolate history of the Galapagos Islands in Melville’s imagination.Visit Jonathan Alexander Cook's website.
The contents of page 99 of my book provide a small hint of my larger argument regarding Melville’s religious skepticism and his use of biblical themes and motifs to critique the injustice of the Judeo-Christian god, but the page is largely devoted to evoking the contents of the eighth sketch of “The Encantadas” and so does not suggest the full range of my argument. My larger aim in this book is to examine the nature of Melville’s religious skepticism in the wake of the two outspoken tragic narratives, Moby-Dick and Pierre, that nearly ended his career as a novelist. Like other Victorian-age writers, Melville exemplifies the division of head and heart in his loss of religious faith, but Melville critics are often baffled to explain the seemingly paradoxical nature of his attitude toward religion as an author whose fiction regularly attacked the injustices of the Judeo-Christian god and critiqued the failings of Christian dogma while relying on the Bible to frame many of his themes and narrative structures. An explanation of this paradox can be found in his religious skepticism which renounced any personal commitment to Christianity even as many of his literary works explored the ineffectual or oppressive influence of evangelical Christianity within the mid-nineteenth-century world.
Recognizing that he had to disguise his ongoing critique of Christianity in his writings following the critical and commercial disaster of Pierre, Melville produced a series of shorter works in the 1850s that reflected his idea of the obsolescence of Christian dogmas such as Pauline ideas of charity (in “Bartleby, the Scrivner”) and the doctrine of the Resurrection (in “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!”). Relying on the skepticism implicit in the Old Testament books of Job and Ecclesiastes, Melville also produced in the sketches of “The Encantadas” and in his Revolutionary War novella Israel Potter similar challenges to the providential history of the nation’s Protestant heritage. Examining his mid-career shift to poetry, I similarly demonstrate that in the poems memorializing the Union dead of the Civil War, Melville used a modified form of forensic Christianity along with motifs derived from literary and cultural forms of memorialization from ancient Greece and Rome. In his penultimate book of poetry Timoleon etc., Melville again mixed Christian and classical motifs in a collection of poems exemplifying the increasingly pluralistic religious universe of the late nineteenth-century. Finally, in an examination of the Christian paradigm of the Fall in Billy Budd, I trace the impact of Melville’s literary models in Genesis and Paradise Lost while demonstrating the appropriateness of Melville’s reading of the works of Schopenhauer as he worked on the novella left unfinished at his death. Eschewing academic jargon, Neither Believer nor Infidel is a work of literary criticism that will appeal to both the educated general reader and the Melville scholar interested in a key aspect of the author’s literary creativity.
--Marshal Zeringue
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