1Melville, Beauty, and American Literary Studies sensitively analyzes both what beauty is for Herman Melville and also what beauty does to some of his characters, narrators, or poetic voices, particularly in three of his works: Timoleon (the focus of chapter 1), Weeds and Wildings (Chapter 2), and Moby-Dick (chapter 3). If the corpus selected and its organization within the book might seem initially odd—different genres, different moments (and not chronologically arranged) both in the 19^th century in general and in Melville’s personal development in particular—Marrs’s rationale: “I consider these writings to be among Melville’s very best. As we will see, they are finely crafted, ingeniously conceived, and acutely aware of beauty’s role in everyday life” is both disarmingly honest and also indicative of the overall infectious personal affective tone of his project.

2Regarding the ontological approach to beauty, Marrs’s book is in dialogue with seminal studies by specialists in, among other aspects, the visual arts, the sublime, and the picturesque in Melville’s work (Dennis Berthold, Douglass Robillard, Christopher Sten, Elisa Tamarkin, Robert K. Wallace, to name but a few). The specificity of Marrs’s approach, however, resides in his analysis of Melville’s emphasis on beauty’s radical simplicity and surprising ubiquity, that is, its being not only either exceptional in nature or the result of human art, but also a common part of earthy life, and—as stated in the volume’s subtitle—to be found “in all things” that exist. Beauty is thus both inherent in natural form(s)—non-human animals, vegetable life, natural phenomena—and present in plain matter that, because also endowed with intrinsic beauty, matters aesthetically. Of course, by pointing at how Melville presents beauty as both widely distributed and as radically non-hierarchical, Marrs reveals how “Melville repeatedly disperses and democratizes experience” (60), which has both ethical and political valences and potentials. This is illustrated (in the negative) by Marrs through the analysis of the figure of Moby-Dick’s Captain Ahab who, by making the unrealistic choice of denying beauty as inherent both to the world and to the shared experience of living socially in it, is choosing to deny life itself.

3Regarding the functional approach to beauty as an aesthetic experience connected to other experiences such as pain, suffering, power, hope, and, above all, intersubjectivity, the volume joins the current conversation around Melville’s texts, questioning the boundaries between selves and also between the human and the non-human world (again, to name but a few, texts by Branka Arsić, Sharon Cameron, Cesare Casarino, Jennifer Greiman, Elizabeth Schultz, and, particularly, Michael Jonik, with whose Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman Marrs’s work is in constant dialogue). Marrs opens his book stating that, for Melville, beauty is “an experience of non-sovereignty, a feeling of weakened or blurred autonomy that reconnects us to the world” (1). As the book unfolds, Marrs argues convincingly that beauty is indeed a force that acts as a dissolver of boundaries and, most importantly, as a re-former of individual identities, connecting and criss-crossing the human with the nonhuman realms, with natural phenomena, and with other modes of life, thus binding the world together. In each of the three chapters Marrs reads closely Melville’s texts and persuasively illustrates his thesis that Melville is interested in highlighting the positive consequences of accepting beauty and its capacity to make humans question the limits of personhood. Among those positive consequences are shattering one’s sense of isolation and enabling the self to connect with what was previously considered to be external to the sense of self. These consequences have, for Marrs, clear intellectual valences: beauty “tears down the ‘walled-town[s]’ we construct in our minds” (96); social valences: “the self is a collective formation that inheres less in individualized thoughts than in shared experiences and entanglements” (58); and, of course, ethical valences: “Such entanglements are one of beauty’s primary effects. Every time we happen upon beauty, it makes us suddenly and intensely aware of something or someone beyond the self’s previously narrow purview—some corresponding vibrancy that had previously gone unnoticed. Such moments of recognition carry an ethical charge, since they spark an awareness of one’s alterity” (44). Marrs illustrates and exemplifies the positive consequences of integrating beauty into one’s mode of living with the figure of Moby-Dick’s Queequeg whose opening up to the vastness of the world and to the diversity of the human beings he encounters reveals the connection between beauty and—both inevitable and self-constituting—social bonds and connections, collective experiences, and affective attachments and pleasures, such as affinities and intimacies as well as emotional interdependences.

4Also important in Marrs’s work is the analysis not only of what beauty generates in the self that opens up to it, but also of the self-destructive consequences of the antipathy to or even deliberate rejection of beauty for those characters who insist on the illusoriness of possessively retaining their discrete, separate egos, their untouchable individuality, and their attempted absolute sovereignty over the self. Marrs illustrates this point with his analysis of, again, Captain Ahab as a character that feels threatened by the potentiality of beauty (and) of the vastness beyond the self and who responds to that perceived threat with violence.

5As book reviews never fail to include the desiderata of what the reviewer wishes the book might also have done, this one points at two possibilities. One has to do with how Marrs’s conclusions about the literary expression of the recognition of beauty’s effects on the self as constitutively connected with and (co)dependent on/within the world focus exclusively on the author object of his study: “Melville’s point is not that the loss of identity is an illusion but that identity is not an independent, spiritualized experience in the first place. Indeed, if the world is composed of infinite rings of matter, then everything is literally connected on a microscopic level, and beauty allows us to sense those connections” (99). I wonder, however, if these conclusions about the specificity of Melville’s project would not be strengthened by either explicitly dismissing or making room for Melville’s possible contextualization in a wider landscape of other literary reflections on (beautiful) (natural) material reality as inherent to the constitution of the democratic self at the organic and even molecular level, particularly in the literary projects of Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau. A second possible wish from this reviewer is that Marrs’s volume had engaged more substantially with ugliness and/in its materiality, an issue that seems slightly brushed off by quoting Melville’s claim in Mardi that “‘the only ugliness’ is ‘of the heart’” (10). I ponder, for instance, how to analyze the affects experienced by Melville’s characters who are exposed to ugliness in its materiality and/or corporeality (the perceived-as-ugliness rock deserts in Clarel; the “soul sickening” squalor in which mother and “two shrunken things like children” starve in an alley by the docks in Liverpool in Redburn (252); the aesthetically unattractive New York apartment in Pierre, the examples are innumerable).

6I finish this review highlighting two of the many virtues of this excellent volume. The first one is that it is written not only with intelligence and elegance, but also with humor. Statements such as: “One of Melville’s recurring themes – one might even say the warning lodged in almost all of his works – is that expectations will mess you up” (46); “Weeds and Wildings, the final set of poems that Melville wrote before his death, is a bit strange” (52); and “In a book [Moby-Dick] that is literally named after him and is ardently interested in everything (and I mean everything) he represents, Moby Dick only emerges toward the very end, nearly 400 pages into the novel” (77) generate effective affective entanglements (to use an important word in the book) between Marrs, Melville, texts, and reader. The second virtue is Marrs’s unashamed incorporation into the book of what he personally finds beautiful. For instance, to his explanation of how “[i]n remembrance of Hawthorne, Melville also collected moss from Salem (Hawthorne’s birthplace), which he kept ‘all cosy’ in his personal copy of Mosses from an Old Manse” Marrs adds: “Even years later, that moss still resembles a flame” (73). This is the kind of writing that makes this book organic to its actual object of study (“Melville, beauty”) and a beautiful incorporation of “an aesthetics in all things” to American literary studies.