Dragooned! Ten Traces of
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Riffs William Gibson, USN Augustus Ely Silliman |
4 NUMBER FOUR exposes a cover-up. Revisions to "Scenes Beyond the Western Border" for the 1857 book version Scenes and Adventures in the Army include the careful deletion of material that connects the December 1851 installment of “Scenes Beyond the Western Border” to Moby-Dick, the book that Melville had just published, and his next one, Pierre. December 1851 1857
In dialogue with his imaginary friend, C. capitulates to the demand for a more factual narrative. Not, however, without slipping in a critique of realism that mysteriously slips out the 1857 book version: "I submit. But the Reality I think is too darkly, coldly real, the earth very earthy; but to please you, mark—I now attempt a lower level." (729)
A close approximation of the deleted remark had found its way into Book 6 of Pierre (1852): “But imagination utterly failed him here; the reality was too real for him . . .” (111). Both Melville and the Captain were alluding to canto 7 of Byron's poem "The Dream," where the poet images melancholy as a sobering "telescope of truth" that "brings life near in utter nakedness, / Making the cold reality too real!" The Byronic language that Melville applied to Pierre, that formerly had been spoken by our Captain of U. S. Dragoons, is gone in the 1857 revised version. Also gone is the Captain’s Quakerish grammar in the construction thou hast done, which occurs three times in Pierre. Several direct echoes of Moby-Dick similarly vanish in revision. "Mark,―I now attempt a lower level" echoes Ahab to Starbuck, "Hark ye yet again,―the little lower layer," in Moby-Dick (chapter 36: The Quarter-Deck). But the telling word mark has been expurgated from the 1857 book version: "Well, I must submit, to please you, and attempt a lower level" (270). The deletion of mark removes a colloquialism that Ishmael employs repeatedly in Moby-Dick. The expression Thou knowest not is likewise dropped. Ahab had used the same words in chapter 119 (The Candles) of Moby-Dick: "Thou knowest not how came ye….” In the last chapter of Moby-Dick, Ahab begins a passionate outburst with the words now I feel: "Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief." The same words “Now, I feel,” spoken by the Captain in December 1851, were also censored in revision. The most plausible and maybe the only logical explanation for all of the deletions cited above is that in each case, the 1851 text was uncomfortably close to the text of Moby-Dick or Pierre.
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