Melville's Democracy: Radical Figuration and Political Form 9781503634329

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
INTRODUCTION Ruthless Democracy
PART ONE Democracy Is Green
1 Verdure, Imperial History, and State-of- Nature Theory
2 Verdigris and Radical Democracy
PART TWO Democracy Is Round
3 Round Robins and Founding Violence
4 Circles and Sovereignty
PART THREE Democracy Is Groundless
5 Gravity, Slavery, and Political Prophecy
6 Unplanted to the Last
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Melville’s Democracy

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M E LV I L L E ’ S DEMO C R AC Y Radical Figuration and Political Form

J EN N IFER GR EI M A N

S TA N F O R D U N I V E R S I T Y PR E S S

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2023 by Jennifer Greiman. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free, archival-­quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­P ublication Data Names: Greiman, Jennifer, author. Title: Melville's democracy : radical figuration and political form / Jennifer Greiman. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022022351 (print) | LCCN 2022022352 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503633322 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503634329 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Melville, Herman, 1819-­1891—Political and social views. | Politics and literature—United States—History—19th century. | Democracy in literature. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. Classification: LCC PS2388.P6 G74 2023 (print) | LCC PS2388.P6 (ebook) | DDC 813/.3—dc23/eng/20220525 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022351 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022352 Cover art: Herman Melville, “The Round Robin,” from Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas. Cover design: Rob Ehle Typeset by Elliott Beard in Adobe Caslon Pro 10.25/15

For Harley and for Barry, with love and gratitude

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Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations

ix xiii

Introduction Ruthless Democracy 1 PA R T O N E

Democracy Is Green

1

Verdure, Imperial History, 31 and State-­of-­Nature Theory

2 Verdigris and Radical Democracy 76 PA R T T W O

Democracy Is Round Round Robins and Founding Violence 119 3

4 Circles and Sovereignty 160

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Contents

PA R T T H R E E

Democracy Is Groundless Gravity, Slavery, and Political Prophecy 205 5

6 Unplanted to the Last 249 Notes

293

Index

323

Acknowledgments

In writing this book, few things have become clearer to me than how fully my own individuality is merged with a plurality of other mortals (to borrow from Ishmael) and how much I owe to them all. Ten years in research and writing, this book took shape in conferences and presentations around the world, in early published versions, and in two different institutions and communities, all of which contributed immeasurably to it. From Rome to Washington to Tokyo, London, New York, and Paris, the International Melville Conference and the generous company of Melville scholars worldwide have enriched my work. I am grateful to the friends, colleagues, and scholars who have read, listened to, and engaged with this work: Branka Arsić, Mary K. Bercaw-­Edwards, Munia Bhaumik, Chis Castiglia, Russ Castronovo, Dawn Coleman, Brian Connolly, Kenneth Dauber, Jeanine DeLombard, Paul Downes, Elizabeth Duquette, Bert Emerson, Kim Evans, Meredith Farmer, Jason Frank, David Greven, Christopher Hager, Bonnie Honig, Paul Hurh, Gordon Hutner, Jeffrey Insko, Michael Jonik, Wyn Kelley, Greg Laski, Caroline Levine, Robert Levine, Ronan Ludot-­ V lasak, Laila Mansouri, Giorgio Mariani, Cody Marrs, Edouard Marsoin, Dominic Mastroianni, Justine Murrison, Dana Nelson, ix

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Acknowledgments

Christopher Ohge, Cécile Roudeau, Shirley Samuels, Geoffrey Sanborn, George Shulman, Michelle Sizemore, Derick Spires, Edward Sugden, Lenora Warren, Nathan Wolff, Elisa Tamarkin, and Brian Yothers. I am especially grateful to Sam Otter for more than two decades of his incredibly precise readings and absolutely stellar advice. For inviting me to present from this project, I am grateful to Johannes Voeltz, Rieke Jordan, Winfried Fluck, and all the organizers of “The Return of the Aesthetic” conference at the University of Frankfurt and to Alex Moskowitz and Boston College’s Clough Center for Constitutional Democracy. Early versions of the material have appeared in J19, Leviathan, REAL, and Textual Practices; and in The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert Levine; The New Melville Studies, ed. Cody Marrs; and Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-­ Century United States, ed. Shirley Samuels. At the University at Albany, SUNY, I received vital early funding for research trips to the Houghton Library and New York Public Library in 2013 from the Faculty Research Award Program and from the New York State / United University Professions Joint Labor Management Committee Individual Development Award. A key chapter took shape through the Political Theory Workshop run by Torrey Shanks and Mort Schoolman at UAlbany’s Rockefeller College, and I began to conceive the full scope and outline of the book during a fall 2014 graduate seminar on Melville’s work with some of the sharpest and most engaged students I’ve known. Both I and this project were sustained by innumerable hours of conversation with the most brilliant of dear friends and colleagues, especially Bret Benjamin, Leona Christie, Eric Keenaghan, Kir Kuiken, Vesna Bogojevic Kuiken, James Lilley, Paul Stasi, Megan Stasi, and Laura Wilder. Wake Forest University offered generous support through a 2017 Archie Grant, a 2019 summer travel grant from the Bitove Family Faculty Fund, and a 2019–­20 Reynolds Leave, all of which enabled me to complete the project. A book development grant from the Wake Forest Humanities Institute—­and a generous and meticulous reading of the manuscript by Paul Downes—­made the completed book far better. To Gail Adams and Anna Willis I owe tremendous thanks (and probably a few apologies for being so deadline-­challenged). Friends and colleagues in the English Department and beyond have provided invaluable sounding boards and feedback in talks,

Acknowledgments

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presentations, and faculty seminars since my arrival in 2016. Thank you to Lucy Alford, Laura Aull, Rian Bowie, Michaelle Browers, Chris Brown, Jay Curley, Matt Garite, Susan Harlan, Omaar Hena, Sarah Hogan, Zak Lancaster, Judith Madera, Barry Maine, Joanna Ruocco, Ryan Shirey, Jeff Solomon, Christina Soriano, Corey Walker, Eric Wilson, and Mir Yarfitz. I owe particular and extensive thanks to Dean Franco and Jessica Richard, for their friendship, for their guidance, and for immeasurable intellectual and institutional support. And because writing books is a shocking sharkish business, I am so very grateful for my writing group: Lisa Blee, Monique O’Connell, Morna O’Neil, and Jessica Richard. At Stanford University Press, I have been fortunate to find two editors whose engagement and efficiency makes me marvel: thanks to Erica Wetter for her initial interest in the book and to Caroline McKusick for her careful and thoughtful work in taking it up and carrying it through. Thank you to both Gigi Mark and David Horne for their skill, precision, and care with the manuscript. And I am incredibly grateful to the two anonymous readers for giving the book such detailed, generous, and comprehensive readings. And finally, my family has given far more to this project than they will ever know or than I can ever thank them for. My boundless love and thanks to Judy and George Robertson for their tireless grandparenting and to Jeannie Masquelier for sharing her California sanctuary with us. Harley Simone Trachtenberg arrived in the middle of this book and has, in eight years, far surpassed me in her command of whale facts. Barry Trachtenberg has given me a lot of sea room in which to write this book, doing more than his share of dog walks, PTA meetings, and meals, all while writing two books of his own. I love them both more than I can say, and so I dedicate this book to them.

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Abbreviations

All works by Herman Melville are cited parenthetically, using the following abbreviations. BB

Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Uncompleted Writing. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Robert A. Sanberg, and G. Thomas Tanselle, eds. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press / Newberry Library, 2017. Cl Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, eds. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press / Newberry Library, 1991. CM The Confidence-­Man: His Masquerade. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, eds. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press / Newberry Library, 1984. Corr. Correspondence. Lynn Horth, ed. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press / Newberry Library, 1993. IP Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, eds. Evanston and Chicago: Northxiii

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Abbreviations

western University Press / Newberry Library, 1982. J Journals. Howard Horsford and Lynn Horth, eds. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press / Newberry Library, 1989. M Mardi: and A Voyage Thither. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, eds. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press / Newberry Library, 1970. MD Moby-­Dick; or, The Whale. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, eds. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press / Newberry Library, 1988. O Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, eds. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press / Newberry Library, 1968. PT The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle, eds. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press / Newberry Library, 1987. P Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, eds. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press / Newberry Library, 1971. PP Published Poems: Battle-­Pieces, John Marr, Timoleon. Robert C. Ryan, Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall Reising, and G. Thomas Tanselle, eds. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press / Newberry Library, 2009. R Redburn: His First Voyage. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, eds. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press / Newberry Library, 1969. T Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, eds. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press / Newberry Library, 1968.

Melville’s Democracy

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I N T RODU C T ION Ruthless Democracy

On a rainy morning, sometime in May of 1851, Herman Melville wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne with the strangest of excuses for his failure to visit his friend: the ruthless work of democracy, it seems, had detained him.1 Specifically, Melville reports that he has been “completely done up” by his work on the farm—­“ building and patching and tinkering away in all directions,” planting his “famous” corn and potato crops—­and for this reason, unable to drop by “in my pine-­board chariot” (Corr., 190). But if he has been kept from such easy familiarity by “my day’s work from sun to sun,” the delay is also owing to the far more extensive labor that he elaborates over the course of this wild, circuitous, and often-­quoted letter. That work includes planting more storied crops than corn and potatoes, such as “those seeds taken out of the Egyptian pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil . . . grew to greenness and fell to mould” (sic, 193). It includes planting oneself, as if one was also an ancient seed, “on the green grass on a warm summer’s day” until “your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth” and “your hair feels like leaves upon your head” (194). It includes writing the final chapters of Moby-­Dick while being “pulled hither and thither by circumstances” because “the calm, the 1

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coolness, the silent grass-­growing mood in which a man ought to compose—­ that, I fear, can never be mine” (191). Ultimately what has detained him, Melville proposes, is his participation in a process through which plants, books, thoughts, and bodies all assume equal weight and urgency as they seed, root, grow, mold, and go to seed once again, all caught up in the work of becoming something else. Melville’s own part in this project is at once agricultural, philosophical, literary, and political, and he calls it “my ruthless democracy”:2 I am told, my fellow-­man, that there is an aristocracy of the brain. Some men have boldly advocated and asserted it. Schiller seems to have done so, though I don’t know much about him. At any rate, it is true that there have been those who, while earnest in behalf of political equality, still accept the intellectual estates. And I can well perceive, I think, how a man of superior mind can, by its intense cultivation, bring himself, as it were, into a certain spontaneous aristocracy of feeling,—­exceedingly nice and fastidious,—­similar to that which, in an English Howard, conveys a torpedo-­fish thrill at the slightest contact with a social plebian. So, when you see or hear of my ruthless democracy on all sides, you may possibly feel a touch of a shrink, or something of that sort. It is but nature to be shy of a mortal who boldly declares that a thief in jail is as honorable a personage as Gen. George Washington. This is ludicrous. But Truth is the silliest thing under the sun. Try to get a Living by the Truth—­and go to the Soup Societies. Heavens! Let any clergyman try to preach the Truth from its very stronghold, the pulpit, and they would ride him out of his church on his own pulpit bannister. It can hardly be doubted that all Reformers are bottomed upon the truth, more or less; and to the world at large are not reformers almost universally laughing-­ stocks? Why so? Truth is ridiculous to men. Thus easily in my room here do I, conceited and garrulous, reverse the test of my Lord Shaftesbury. It seems an inconsistency to assert unconditional democracy in all things, and yet confess a dislike to all mankind—­in the mass. But not so.—­But it’s an endless sermon,—­no more of it. (Corr., 190–­91)

Melville introduces the idea of “ruthless democracy” as corollary and counter to the “aristocracy of the brain” that might make a man like Hawthorne both thrill at and shrink from intercourse with “a social plebian” like himself, but the concept is far stranger than a simple assertion of equality among intellects. For one thing, Melville claims this democracy as both

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“ruthless” and his own—­that is, as something he possesses without sentiment or pity which another may “see or hear of ” in him. As a concept that is both personal and impersonal in this way—­attached to him as a faculty of detachment—­it dispenses with moral and social distinctions and enables him to declare, “boldly,” the absolute equality of a common thief with a nation’s founder. What is more, he declares this fundamental equality not as a feeling but as a fact that is true and ludicrous at the same time—­indeed, the truth of equality is measured by how ridiculous it appears to a world committed to distinctions (“exceedingly nice and fastidious”) of order, value, and class.3 Such seeming inconsistencies breed further inconsistencies in the concept: the fact of absolute equality is a ludicrous truth that demands one relinquish partiality and preference while still allowing a basic misanthropy, “a dislike to all mankind—­in the mass,” to persist. If Melville’s democracy is both unconditional and ruthless, it is also both given as a truth and produced by relentless, pitiless work. That work is “an endless sermon” of declaration and assertion, of telling jokes and truths, of preaching and living. Invoking it in the opening lines of this letter to Hawthorne, moreover, Melville posits ruthless democracy as the principle that joins farming, reading, and writing; seeding, rooting, and thinking; living, growing, and dying; comedy, terror, and fact in an ongoing sermon that, by the time of his death in 1891, had produced nine novels, three collections of poems, an eighteen-­thousand-­line verse epic, and more than a dozen tales and novellas—­in short, an unsurpassed archive of democratic art and thought by an American author. This book argues that democracy is at once Melville’s perennial theme and the political, aesthetic, and philosophical problem that connects his writing across five decades. It is at stake in the “tacit common-­sense law” and “unanimity of feeling” through which the Typees work collectively to preserve their green home in Typee (1846) and in the “murmurous indistinctness” that passes through the crew at the execution of martial law in Billy Budd (1891). It is the name Melville gives to mutiny in Omoo (1847); to hell in Redburn (1849); and to the “great democratic God” that exalts every mariner, renegade, and castaway in Moby-­Dick (1851).4 Connecting mutuality and mutiny, heaven and hell, peace and war, democracy is changeable and capacious, carrying with it the potential to transform one thing into what would seem to be its opposite. Indeed, so forceful are its transmutative powers

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that democracy belongs to the human and the inhuman alike in Melville’s writing, exceeding the limits and capacities of human agencies while demanding constant effort and arts to maintain.5 In Pierre (1852), democracy appears as a chemical agent through which natural processes and human activities become indistinguishable from each other, while in Battle-­Pieces (1866), Clarel (1876), and Timoleon (1891) democracy’s history must be measured on geologic scales and comprehended in the temporality of volcanoes, landslides, and the “brutal claim” of matter itself.6 But even when Melville roots his thinking about democracy in organic processes, vast scales of time, and the activities of all manner of nonhuman things, it remains for him a matter of action and articulation: it is work, and it requires both politics and art to sustain. As “ruthless democracy” first names a character trait that he claims along with the “endless sermon” in which he is caught up, so in Melville’s writing from the 1840s to the 1890s democracy shapes his characters and plots as well as the very experiments in narrative and poetic form that often subordinate character to characteristics and plot to descriptive figuration. Further, if the “endless sermon” continues in his prose and poetry long after this letter’s final postscript, it also precedes the letter and includes it. In other words, while Melville most clearly reveals the contours of his aesthetic practice in the letters that he writes to Hawthorne over the course of 1851, those letters belong to the project they describe. They materialize and perform the aesthetic work that, Melville explains, emerges from the double commitment that ruthless democracy demands: on the one hand, to a principle of absolute equality among the beings and powers of the world, and on the other, to a process of endless transformation. In an April 1851 letter, Melville describes “the man who, like Russia or the British Empire, declares himself a sovereign nature (in himself) amid the Powers of heaven, hell, and earth. He may perish; but so long as he exists he insists upon treating with all Powers on an equal basis.” Such a sovereign nature stands at once equal to all power and implicated in the processes of decay and transformation to which all entities, powers, and beings are subject. Powers meet on equal ground because, he continues, this equality is simply obvious: “there is no secret,” he continues, because gods and states and the universe itself are like “the Freemason’s mighty secret . . . a triangle, an apron, and a mallet—­nothing more!” (Corr., 184). To stand as an equal with all the powers of the earth demands an

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aesthetic commitment to truth and transience at once, and several months later, in thanking Hawthorne for his praise of Moby-­Dick, he submits even himself to the transience that equalizes all powers: “This is a long letter, but you are not at all bound to answer it. Possibly, if you do answer it, and direct it to Herman Melville, you will missend it—­for the very fingers that now guide this pen are not precisely the same that just took it up and put it on this paper. Lord, when shall we be done changing?” (Corr., 213). What emerges from these letters is a philosophy and practice of writing in which Melville makes equality both manifest and forceful by showing the ludicrous truth behind the secrecy of symbols and by recognizing the ongoing work of transformation and transience, of differencing and pluralization, on the most basic levels of the seed, the root, the body, and the self. Writing both about and in the midst of a process of change that equalizes powers, materializes symbols, and transforms even the fingers and character of the writer, Melville carries his ruthless democracy into a full-­ blown aesthetic practice. Because there is no philosophy or political theory, no thought or context or portrait in Melville’s work that is severable from the strangeness and specificity of his aesthetics, the egalitarian principle and transformative process of democracy join Melville’s most radical thinking with his strangest formal experiments in characterization, categorization, juxtaposition, figuration, and more. Thus if democracy does not always appear in expected or familiar ways in his work—­as representations of self-­ governance or popular sovereignty or individual freedom—­its meaning is nevertheless precise and its operation is forceful: Melville’s “ruthless democracy” is the “endless sermon” that joins literary art to politics, philosophy, work, and life in the ongoing, creative process of being equal and becoming different. Ruthless, Radical: Melville and Democratic Theory Given the significance that his letters to Hawthorne occupy in Melville scholarship and given his decades-­long commitment to the “endless sermon” that he describes in them, it is hardly surprising that “democracy” has been a foundational term in Melville criticism since the field’s inception. But for all the term’s persistence over a century of Melville studies, “democracy” has come to signal a variety of tendencies in his life and work (and the relation

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between these) while serving an incongruous set of critical and political aims. Launching the Melville revival with his 1921 Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic, Raymond Weaver also launched the study of democracy in his life and work. Weaver slyly conflates the author with the protagonist of Pierre to describe Melville’s ambivalent relationship with his family history, using the narrator’s arch commentary on Pierre Glendinning: “And believe me, you will pronounce Pierre a thorough-­going Democrat in time; perhaps a little too Radical altogether to your fancy.” The radical democracy that Weaver attributes to Melville serves the needs of biography and literary history at once, enabling him to craft an egalitarian persona for Melville while making claims for the exceptional literary status due to both author and work: “Radical he came to be, indeed: it was the necessary penalty of being cursed with an intelligence above that of the smug and shallow optimism of his country and his period. Democratic he may have been, but only in the most unpopular meaning of that once noble term. He was a democrat in the sense that Dante or Milton were democrats.” 7 With this, Weaver established a series of tensions that became recurrent tropes for subsequent studies of Melville and democracy—­those of author and work, radical and democratic, exceptional and common—­to craft this portrait of a Melville who was “cursed” with an uncommon intellect and numbered among the “aristocracy of the brain,” but who nevertheless rejected the aristocratic pretensions of his family. Two decades later, in The American Renaissance (1941), F. O. Matthiessen reframed the tension between what Melville had called “political equality” and “the intellectual estates” in his letter to Hawthorne, arguing that Melville joined radical aesthetics to political democracy to create, along with Emerson, Hawthorne, and Whitman, a “literature for our democracy” and a “culture commensurate with America’s political opportunity.”8 For Matthiessen and his mid-­century colleagues, that project of political and cultural creation was ongoing and so deeply shaped by the era’s competing politics of anticommunism and antifascism that both Richard Chase, in Herman Melville: A Critical Study (1948), and C.L.R. James, in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953), could identify countertotalitarian politics in Melville’s body of work from opposing positions.9 For Chase, the countertotalitarian project meant deriving a “new liberalism” from Melville’s model

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of “a continuous act of imaginative criticism” and rejecting “facile ideas of progress and ‘social realism.’ ”10 For James, by contrast, it meant discovering the “miracle” of Melville’s writing in the precision with which “he painted a picture of the world in which we live . . . the totalitarian madness which swept the world . . . the great mass labor movements and colonial revolts . . . the world the masses of men strive to make sense of.”11 But despite identifying near-­opposite political imperatives in Melville’s work, their accounts strangely concur on two points: Melville’s commitment to “democracy” and the necessity of separating the author from his characters. Chase calls the conflation of Melville with his protagonists “a grievous mistake,” and James cautions against ascribing any political philosophy to Melville himself from the views of his characters, while taking it as a matter of course that he was “an extreme, in fact, a fanatical democrat.”12 Melville’s earliest and most influential twentieth-­century readers have thus taken for granted the obvious significance of “democracy” to his writing, with little agreement about whether the term signifies anything certain about his personal beliefs, political preferences, or even the cultural and political function of his radically democratic art. Rather than defining a clear set of critical methodologies for reading Melville’s work or establishing biographical details about his beliefs, “democracy” has instead functioned as the name that a century’s worth of scholarship has given to a set of questions and problems that Melville’s writing continues to raise concerning the relationship of politics and culture; of biography and work; and ultimately of aesthetics, history, and representation. Is democracy principally a cultural or political descriptor in reference to Melville and his work? Does it lie, that is, in Melville’s “intensely democratic urge to absorb and fuse contradictory elements in American culture,” as David S. Reynolds argues? Or does it lie in the tensions of a “political egalitarian” who wrote and thought as a “cultural aristocrat,” as Robert Milder claims? If, as generations of scholars have suggested, Melville’s work must be read in relation to his biography and rooted in personal history and belief, is the story of democracy then one of defeat, as Michael Rogin characterizes it, the triumph of fathers and monarchs over “Melville’s dream to speak for American democracy”? Or is the story of Melville’s career instead that of his embrace of an imperial autonomy and authorial sovereignty, as

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Wai Chee Dimock claims? Finally, if “democracy” can be read as a feature of Melville’s writing that is independent of biography, where does it appear? Are the democratic elements of his prose and poetry embedded in the culture and politics of the nineteenth century and measured in Melville’s thematic engagements with “nascent capitalism, aristocratic nostalgia, literary elitism, constitutional monarchies, populist economics, workers’ rights, mob violence, and socialist revolutions,” as Dennis Berthold claims? Or does democracy appear instead in those moments of Melville’s writing that sound the very limits of representation, as a principally “aesthetic interest” that, Nancy Fredericks argues, “corresponds to his political commitment to represent the unrepresentedness or marginal status, of . . . social groups”?13 If scholarship has long centered the problem of democracy in Melville studies, placing the concept firmly at the foundations of his work, it has nevertheless yielded little in the way of consensus about the term’s exact meaning. And certainly, as metacritical accounts of the Melville revival and Cold War canon-­building have shown, this is owing in part to the specific political imperatives that come with changing critical movements and historical moments.14 But it would be a mistake to attribute the shifting signification of democracy to perennial blindspots of historicism, presentism, or ideological presupposition on the part of Melville’s critics, just as it is a mistake to assume ambiguity or ambivalence about democracy on Melville’s part. Instead, the very absence of consensus on where Melville’s ruthless democracy appears, whether it succeeds or fails, and what it ultimately means tracks very closely with his own sense and use of the term. Indeed, taken together, the consistent critical attention to democracy coupled with the absent critical consensus on its meaning point to some of Melville’s most significant and concrete insights about democracy. To borrow his own formulation, the significance of democracy across Melville’s writing lies in what is most true and ludicrous about it: the very tension between its obviousness and its instability, its fundamental and ubiquitous presence joined with the constantly shifting forms and meanings that mark it as evanescent and fragile, all of which place unrelenting demands on those who participate in its processes of endless transformation. Ultimately, if studies of Melville’s engagement with democracy do not agree on whether democracy is a matter of culture or politics, biography or

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philosophy, history or aesthetics, this is because, for Melville, democracy is something more foundational—­it is a matter of being equal and becoming different. As such, democracy appears in Melville’s work as both a principle (of equality) and a process (of change) so fundamental to life that it belongs to art, philosophy, politics, culture, and history all at once—­not to mention cetology, geology, chemistry, physics, and farming. Reading Melville’s work for the presence and force of democracy does not carry one through the text to biography or history or even to a consistent political philosophy because there is no single source to which Melville himself turned in writing his endless sermon. He derived his ruthless democracy as much from his work and his world as from his eclectic readings in revolutionary history, political philosophy, natural history, aesthetic theory, prose, poetry, and scripture. In this, Melville’s May 1851 letter to Hawthorne is again instructive: “ruthless democracy” grows as much out of his wry readings of Shaftesbury, Solomon, and Goethe as it does from the grassy thoughts that he grows along with corn, potatoes, and those ancient seeds that sprouted millennia and continents away from the Egyptian tomb from which they were taken.

Such an account of democracy is idiosyncratic, to be sure, but it is also “radical” in the basic etymological sense of that word: “radicalis, relating to or forming the root, original, primary . . . of or connected with the root of a plant.”15 Radical democracy, in this sense, concerns the foundations of political communities and actions, but not only in the sense that political theory has long defined these. The radicalism of democracy that shapes Melville’s work lies in the variety of ways in which he interrogates and reimagines the foundations of political life, which I will examine in the chapters that follow as a phenomenological experience of green and grassy life, as an endless cycle of beginning something again, and as a common world (akin to what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call “the surround”16) that precedes and exceeds the legal and political orders that seek to combat and contain it. Certainly, Melville is captivated by the pathos and paradoxes of political founding in the traditional sense: the constitutive acts, whether of contract or violence, through which states and peoples come to be. From Typee’s meditations on state-­of-­nature theory through Mardi’s rehearsal of

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each island’s founding myth, to Melville’s persistent interest in the French Revolution debates that culminates in the chapter on Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine in Billy Budd, Melville’s work reveals a fascination with the origins and foundations of political life that rivals Hannah Arendt’s. Indeed, Arendt clearly recognizes this affinity in her discussion of Billy Budd in the pivotal chapter “The Social Question” from On Revolution (1963). Melville, she writes, “knew how to talk back to the men of the French Revolution and to their proposition that men are good in a state of nature and become wicked in society.” In Arendt’s account, Melville understood that “absolutes” of good and evil—­and all elemental qualities beyond the law—­“spell doom to everyone when [they are] introduced into the political realm.”17 Like the mid-­century critics who identified Melville with their own countertotalitarian politics, Arendt also enlists Melville in her political-­philosophical project, tracing the “perplexities” of the rights of man back to the failure of the eighteenth-­century revolutions to found freedom and equality in the acts of pledging and promising through which, she argues, the polis and its citizens are constituted.18 What Arendt finds in Melville’s Billy Budd is the image of her own distrust of philosophy’s myth of a natural state prior to political life, and of the absolutisms that lie beyond and outside of politics and law. However, she overlooks the aspect of Melville’s work that is most challenging to her own—­namely, the persistence in his prose and poetry of the idea that founding actions are not irreducibly human but participate in and alongside the basic processes of nature and matter. In other words, Arendt may be right that Billy’s “absolute, natural innocence  .  .  . can only act violently,”19 but neither philosophy’s state of nature nor Arendt’s can fully capture the complex of processes that Melville associates with seeds and roots, rocks and weather, life and matter, all of which he brings to bear on the radical ideas of founding to which he returns in his work over and over again. Or, as he puts it in the first stanza of Timoleon’s “Fragments of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the 12th Century” (1891): Found a family, build a state The pledged event is still the same: Matter in end will never abate His ancient brutal claim. (PP, 284)

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Founding families and states are “pledged events”—­promises that can bind a multitude into a polis—­but they work in collaboration with matter’s “brutal claim,” not in opposition to it. The colon between the second and third lines is the key; rather than pointing to the inevitable dissolution that matter wrecks on human actions and formations, the colon opens a relation between founding and erasure. They are “the same.” Pledged events do not found permanence in a bid to stop matter’s entropic work of dissolution; they operate along with the transience of matter in a fraught tension of ludicrous inconsistency that calls back to Melville’s insistence, in his letters to Hawthorne over the course of 1851, that like seeds and grass and the fingers of his hand, there is no end to transformation or to the work that must be done amid its throes. “Lord, when shall we be done changing?” A deeper affinity between Arendt and Melville may lie in their shared interest in what Arendt calls the “pathos” of beginnings.20 What is ruthless and radical about Melville’s conception of democracy is also revolutionary in Arendt’s strictest sense of that word: both writers reimagine political foundations in terms of actions that begin something new, bind a plurality together to create equality, and continue on without any presumption that anything permanent will remain.21 This shared emphasis on the fragility of the political and the need always to begin again positions Melville and Arendt in a lineage of radical democratic theory that has long resisted the liberal-­ democratic foundation in representation that, in Raymond Williams’s account of democracy, transformed the meaning of this “very old word” at the end of the eighteenth century: “One of the two most significant changes in the meaning of democracy is this exclusive association with one of its derived forms [representational democracy], and the attempted exclusion of one of its original forms, at one time its only form [direct democracy].”22 In Democracy and Political Theory (1988), Claude Lefort highlights Arendt’s understanding of revolution as “a moment of beginning and beginning again,” along with her view that modern representation was “repugnant,” to argue that her work is essential to the project of rethinking “the political” and developing a theory of radical, pluralist, agonistic democracy. The political in Arendt, he argues, “is the sign of a radical beginning, and, moreover, it appears and then disappears without trace.”23 Fundamental to Lefort’s influential elaboration of radical democracy in that book is his claim that

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democracy is founded in a vacuum of power as a vacancy. He writes that, in contrast to monarchic power, “the revolutionary and unprecedented feature of democracy” lies in the fact that “the locus of power is an empty place; it cannot be occupied . . . and it cannot be represented.”24 Beginning with Lefort’s “empty place,” radical democratic theory in France has taken shape around such invocations of absence. In 2002, Jacques Derrida argued that democracy, understood in its most fundamental sense, is always “democracy to come” because “it is what it is only by spacing itself beyond being and even beyond ontological difference.”25 In a 2010 response to Derrida, Jacques Rancière defined democracy as groundless because, understood in its strongest political sense, “the very ground for the power of ruling is that there is no ground at all.”26 Empty, to come, groundless; defined by both spatial and temporal gaps; and resistant to representation: “radical democracy” emerges as the form of the political that is founded not in particular constitutional or representational forms, but in an ontology of self-­difference. “Radical democracy” is the name for the thesis that democracy’s most fundamental trait is that it is always becoming something else and beginning something new. A parallel development among political theorists (mainly in the United States 27 ) has emphasized paradox, rather than absence and deferral, as the constituent feature of radical democracy. In the work of Sheldon Wolin, modern democracy’s central paradox is its fugitivity: rather than a “form of government,” he argues, democracy should be reconceived as “a mode of being which is conditioned by bitter experience and doomed to succeed only temporarily, but it is a recurrent possibility as long as the memory of the political survives.”28 For William Connolly, Bonnie Honig, and Jason Frank, political paradox begins with crises of legitimation and temporal priority at moments of founding, crises that cannot be overcome or reconciled, but which can become productive and unsettling as they persist through a series of proxies—­antinomies of origins and beginnings, authorization and contestation, immanence and transcendence, norm and exception, and so on. In The Ethos of Pluralization (1995), William Connolly derives the “paradox of sovereignty” from the duplicitous origins of popular sovereignty in Rousseau’s Social Contract: “For a general will to be brought into being, effect (social spirit) would have to become cause, and cause (good laws) would have to become effect. The problem is how to establish either condition with-

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out the previous attainment of the other upon which it depends. This is the paradox of political founding.”29 In Emergency Politics (2009), Bonnie Honig translates Connolly’s paradox of politics into the politics of paradox, which radically engage such constitutive impasses: “The paradox of politics posits democracy as always embedded in the problem of origin and survival: how to (re)shape a multitude into a people daily.”30 Honig seeks to reorient political theory away from states of emergency toward ongoing processes of emergence, in which the people and the nation are not understood as gradually realizing the deferred promise of their founding but as always becoming different.31 Jason Frank, writing on post-­revolutionary America in Constituent Moments (2010), encapsulates this model of democratic becoming with the phrase “the people who are not . . . yet.” Combining Connolly and Honig’s formulations of paradox with Rancière’s concept of dissensus, Frank describes a specifically American history of political constitution and contestation, in which the paradox of the people, both doubled and incomplete, is less “a continually reiterated formal problem” than one that persists and transforms across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.32 What these formulations of paradox add to the theorization of radical democracy as empty, to come, and groundless is that the basic notion of self-­difference that stands at the root of radical democracy is itself unsettled: it can take the forms of fugitivity, accumulation, and pluralization, as well as forms of absence and rupture. Taken together, these diverse theories of “radical democracy” do more than assert stronger, more egalitarian, or more direct expressions of democracy’s normative forms—­constitutional, liberal, representative, and so on. For one thing, what is “radical” about radical democracy according to this tradition is precisely its opposition to the presupposed foundations—­a constitution, a nation, a presumptive people—­that claim to give democracy its formal endurance. But beyond this, theories of radical democracy open up qualitative and sensible distinctions in the ways that democracy contests its own foundations and produces unsettling self-­differences, and those distinctions might best be termed “aesthetic.” “There is an aesthetics in all things,” Melville’s Ishmael reminds us as he considers the color and texture of “the magical . . . horrible” whale line that threatens to strangle him (MD, 278). To take Ishmael seriously and locate “an aesthetics in all things”

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requires attention to the ways that modifiers such as “radical,” “direct,” “emergent,” “fugitive,” and “ruthless” all figure differences within democracy’s basic transience. Whether radical democracy is primarily temporal or spatial, accumulative or emptied, it operates with an aesthetic force that is as creative as it is unsettling. Of course, aesthetics has long been invoked as the enemy of the political, threatening democracy on the one side with a mystification that evacuates it of all political force and on the other with a reduction to either sovereign or fascist violence. But if radical democracy has “an aesthetics” in Ishmael’s sense of the word, it may become alternately magical and horrible like the whale line but it also demands different modes of thought, attention, and engagement. And this, I argue in the chapters that follow, is precisely what Melville’s ruthless democracy accomplishes across his body of work. Conceptualizing democracy as both principle and process, as a mode of being that is fueled by a commitment to equality and transformation, Melville shows that democracy has textures and colors, shapes and situations. Democracy also has movement and force: it seeds and roots and grows and falls. By holding magic and horror, heaven and hell, war and peace together, moreover, democracy does what Melville claims that all art does, in Timoleon’s poem of that name: In placid hours well-­pleased we dream, Of many a brave unbodied scheme. But form to lend, pulsed life create, What unlike things must meet and mate: A flame to melt—­a wind to freeze; Sad patience—­joyous energies; Humility—­yet pride and scorn; Instinct and study; love and hate; Audacity—­reverence. These must mate, And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart, To wrestle with the angel—­A rt. (PP, 280).

The poem’s tidy pairing of unlike things, each meeting and mating across an em dash, explodes as even stranger forms of unlikeness enter into new varieties of relation—­flames and patience, winds and humility, love and audacity. Perhaps the most “radical” aspect of Melville’s ruthless democracy,

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then, is the very property it shares with his art: the meeting and mating of unlike things from which “form,” “pulsed life,” and a figurative profusion of other unlike things follow. Call it ludicrous truth, inconsistency, perplexity, or paradox, this steady accumulation of unlikeness, so central to his art, is also what Melville’s work shares with the most influential theoretical elaborations of radical democracy. And like that body of political theory, Melville’s writing also imagines radically democratic alternatives to the core assumptions of liberalism—­ assumptions that, for example, the contradictions of founding can be subsumed and overcome, or that violence can be repressed by politics, or that inclusion preserves a people rather than transforming it. However, if Melville also thinks through the power of political fungibility and the productivity of democratic paradoxes, it is not as a fellow theorist, notwithstanding the rich body of political theory that has developed in conversation with his work.33 Melville may well offer (in Jason Frank’s words) “nineteenth-­century America’s most sustained interrogation of the American political imaginary” because he “articulates political critique at the level of philosophical principle and deep cultural presupposition,” but his ruthless democracy is neither a theory of politics nor a thematic representation of political philosophy or history.34 It is instead a forceful aesthetic performance that gives form and life to a radical, foundational reimagining of democratic relations, possibilities, and ways of being. Representation, Form, Figure: Democracy and Aesthetics Radical, fugitive, empty, to come, groundless: the range of modifiers and attributes that political theory has attached to democracy’s transience attests to the fact that, though it has no permanent form, democracy has crucial aesthetic attributes and functions. But in emphasizing such modifiers, I do not mean to suggest that “democracy” is a substantive ground that lies behind or beneath terms that represent sensible distinctions within a single form’s diverse iterations. Instead, I want to highlight how essential modification has become to democracy as long as the term retains a notion of perpetual self-­difference or revolutionary beginning. Each of these modifiers signals something more than a qualitative change to a common referent,

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and they complicate terms like “representation” and “form” that are most frequently invoked to read democratic politics and aesthetics together. To call democracy radical or fugitive—­to call it ruthless in Melville’s particular sense—­is to unsettle the aesthetic and rhetorical functions of representation just as surely as these theories unsettle the political form of representative democracy, because all of these modifiers emphasize the varieties of transformation that democracy unleashes. Without losing sight of how aesthetic accounts of representation and form have sharpened literary critics’ inquiries into democracy, I want to propose that Melville’s work gives us another idiom for democratic aesthetics, one that emphasizes figuration and creativity, artifice and materiality in order to show how the literary can approach the literal through the force of a creative process that is equal parts aesthetic and political. Of course, from the Round Robin mutiny in Omoo to the crew’s oath to Ahab in Moby-­Dick, Melville’s work offers memorably strange scenes of collective representation in which he repeatedly highlights the centrality of aesthetic production. Whether they create or delegate authority, the force of these acts lies in the generation of an artful artifice that exceeds the collective that has created it—­a pictographic image of signatures, a vow that transforms everyone who utters it. Paul Downes has detailed the radicalism in such an understanding of representation as the collective production of an artificial supplement, showing how it is both key to Hobbes’s democratic view of sovereignty in Leviathan and the reason for Hobbes’s recurrent repudiation in the long tradition of American liberalism.35 As the political philosopher F. R. Ankersmit argues, representative politics always carry some aesthetic component, and the question is whether it is embraced or repressed. Ankersmit contrasts the concept of “mimetic representation,” which presumes a mirrorlike depiction of a people in terms of identity categories, with “aesthetic representation,” which operates under the presumption that “the absence of identity of the representative and the person is as unavoidable in political representation as the unavoidable difference between a painted portrait and person portrayed.”36 For Ankersmit, representation necessarily produces something both artificial and new, and he argues for a political philosophy that can take the non-­identity of political representation as a virtue, in the manner of art, rather than as an obstacle.

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In very different ways, Downes and Ankersmit both underscore how the aesthetic dimensions of representational acts and mechanisms can privilege the nonrepresentational as means of preserving, rather than threatening, democracy. Nancy Fredericks proposes something similar in Melville’s embrace of nonrepresentative aesthetics in her groundbreaking work Melville’s Art of Democracy. Fredericks argues that on a formal level, Melville marks the limits to representation by his use of such devices as the oxymoron, diptych structure, dramatic form, and collage. These structures of multiplicity work in Melville’s texts to decenter discourse and open a space for various perspectives and voices. On a thematic level, Melville explores limits to representation in his engagement with sublime aesthetics, his critique of typology and fanaticism, his representation of marginalized women, his valorization of music as a non-­representative art form, and his generic interest in melodrama, a form that valorizes music and that, in Melville’s time, represented the interests of the unrepresented and voiceless—­the underclass, women, and ethnic minorities. Melville’s aesthetic interest in exploring the limits to our powers of representation corresponds to his political commitment to represent the unrepresentedness, or marginal status, of these social groups.37

In Fredericks’s account, Melville pushes the limits of representation formally and thematically as a means of representing those who are excluded from full participation in the American political community (“the underclass, women, and ethnic minorities”). Melville’s nonrepresentational aesthetics thus assume the function of political representation, producing in art the difference that an expanded and inclusive iteration of the people would make. Fredericks’s emphasis on the political significance of the nonrepresentational dimensions of Melville’s writing (which she roots in philosophy rather than history and biography) stands out for the ways that she resists the tendency to read politics in his work in largely thematic and characterological terms. But she preserves a relation of priority between democracy and Melville’s art—­where the politics of democratic representation is prior to and outside of the work—­that is complicated by both radical democratic theory and more recent work on literary aesthetics.

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As political theorists have come to emphasize the “ontological” dimensions of radical democracy—­that is, its fugitivity, paradoxes, and self-­ difference—­so they have also treated democracy less as a political form than as a force that equalizes and transforms all who participate in it, even itself. (Sheldon Wolin is explicit about this: democracy is better conceived as a “mode of being” than as a “form of government.”38) In theorizations of radical democracy, it cannot be treated as a stable ground prior to the qualities that modify it, even when that modification emphasizes characteristics such as artifice and nonrepresentational aesthetics.39 Caroline Levine advances a similar argument about the relation of all political and aesthetic forms: literary forms, she argues, “do not simply reflect or contain prior political realities” but work alongside political forms at “different scales of our experience” to produce “comparable patterns on a common plain.” Political and literary forms can be juxtaposed and nested together, she continues, so that “each is capable of disturbing the other’s organizing power.”40 Placing forms on “a common plain” and refusing to prioritize social or political forms over literary ones, Levine calls upon critics to think less in terms of structuring causes and more in terms of reforming rearrangements in order to untangle the political meanings and uses of form. Forms can collide and overlap, can impose order and unsettle it while always remaining open to countless unpredictable “affordances.” But forms in her analysis are also somewhat rigid, versatile but durable kernels that do not themselves undergo fundamental change in these rearrangements, and so (by design) her capacious formalism does not take into account forces such as transience and transformation that render a form like “democracy” fragile and evanescent. Indeed, it seems an open question whether democracy can be properly termed a “form” according to her model, if it is empty, yet to come, or simply if its derived representational meaning has historically supplanted its original direct one. Levine is clear in her reasons for bracketing off what she calls nonforms—­“fissures and interstices, vagueness and indeterminacy, boundary-­crossing and dissolution”—­from her study.41 These are, she notes, already overemphasized in literary and cultural theory. But in positing form and nonform as the operative categories, she leaves little room for those aesthetic modes that are not exactly forms but not exactly formless either because they emphasize a movement into or between forms—­modes such as figuration, creativity, or transformation.

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Thinking of the relationship between aesthetics and democracy in terms of “representation” and “form” remains critical, but these concepts do not fully capture the ways in which, for example, democracy may rely upon aesthetics to assume and change forms, or aesthetics might derive social and political force from democracy’s transformative egalitarianism. While theories of representation hold political and aesthetic acts together, and while Levine’s formalism offers an essential reimagining of “the political force of forms,”42 we need to lean into other terms as well, if we are to capture the aesthetic meaning of democracy in its fullest and most radical sense. One such term is “creativity” as William Connolly has defined it. In his 2013 book, The Fragility of Things, he has proposed a “very difficult”—­and, I would add, very Melvillean—­combination of practices, in which “attention to differing degrees of creativity in the domains of human culture, nonhuman force fields, and culture-­nature imbrication” might be “linked to a more militant democratic politics.”43 Connolly’s democratic militancy dovetails in compelling ways with what Judith Butler describes as “the force of nonviolence” in her 2020 book of that name: both seek to reimagine the foundations of political life by rejecting the theoretical state of nature in favor of attention to shared fragility and vulnerability, and both suggest that nonrepresentational aesthetics are crucial to such a task. Where Connolly invokes “creativity,” Butler proposes “counter-­realism” as the necessary aesthetic force for radical, nonviolent democratic politics: “Perhaps nonviolence requires a certain leave-­taking from reality as it is currently constituted, laying open the possibilities that belong to a newer political imaginary.”44 An expanded aesthetic lexicon has also emerged in recent years from scholarship focused on Melville’s experimentalism in both his poetry and prose, complicating and enriching accounts of how philosophy and politics appear through his art. As Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn note in their introduction to Melville and Aesthetics, Melville’s literary experiments lend themselves especially well to experimental critical analysis that attends to particularity: “Only by becoming more particular and less determinately political can the phenomenological approach to aesthetics in literary criticism acquire the kind of internal consistency that will enable it to stand alongside—­not displace—­the ideological approach.”45 Such attention to the particulars of Melville’s form has yielded a stunningly rich account of the

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ways in which his idiosyncratic aesthetics carry out his strangest experiments in thinking. Otter has described Melville’s expansive view of form, arguing that formlessness itself takes on distinct and potent properties in Moby-­Dick; it has “different tones and textures” and opens up different “possibilities of extension, rhythm, and substance.” Sianne Ngai derives her theory of literary tone from Melville’s elaboration of capitalism’s amplification of unfelt feeling in The Confidence-­Man. K. L. Evans has proposed a mode of “Melvillean mimesis,” defining it as a realism that belongs neither to the phenomenal nor the noumenal but to a third ontological realm of language—­a realm which Melville himself defines in chapter 33 of The Confidence-­Man as that of “more reality than real life itself can show.” And, building on Sharon Cameron’s reading of the impersonal materiality of character in Billy Budd, critics such as Branka Arsić, Stuart Burrows, and Michael Snediker have developed powerful accounts of the ways in which Melville’s nonrepresentational aesthetics perform his radical engagements with philosophy. Taken together, these scholars—­and many others—­detail ways in which Melville’s writing opens into new dimensions of aesthetic analysis that attend to the material, literal, and ontological, as well as to the phenomenal, rhetorical, and ornamental.46 My own experimental approach to Melville’s broad corpus of writing often resolves on the particularity of figuration as the literary device that most clearly reveals that the connection between his aesthetic practice and his ruthless democracy is one of creative formation and transformation. In other words, Melville’s ruthless democracy is not a determined, prior political ideology that is represented in his prose and poetry, but neither can his aesthetic practice and his democratic principle be described as separate and stable forms that assume various relations with each other. Instead, Melville’s literary art is the primary means by which he puts his ruthless democracy into practice as a process of figurative creation, accumulation, and change. Indeed, even in that rambling May 1851 letter to Hawthorne, Melville makes it clear that his ruthless democracy is less what the letter is about than what the letter is doing: transforming as it moves from one topic to another, held together by a single connecting figure of steady and repeating transformation—­the figure of grass. As Melville wanders in the letter from the farm to “the Whale,” from Solomon to Goethe, from money woes

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to posthumous champagne picnics, the letter’s circuitous digressions and strange non sequiturs transform it as it gathers the most disparate of topics together and treats all as equally worthy of serious thought and writing. Beginning with his longing for “that silent grass-­growing mood,” then shifting into dreams of sharing champagne with Hawthorne on “the celestial grass,” transplanted Egyptian seeds, and the germs of German Romanticism from which his hair sprouts and his legs take root, grass figures in this letter as the root and radical from which writing grows. Ruthless democracy thus emerges in a practice of figuration that artfully approximates the growth and seeding of grasses, an artificial-­organic hybrid that equalizes, accumulates, and transforms. Figuration names something very particular in Melville’s aesthetic practice, because it captures the way that his penchant for analogical excess yields its own kind of materiality and literalness. Rather than opposing the figural to the literal, that is, Melville seems attentive to their common roots in aesthetic production, where “figura” describes an assumption of form and “litteralis” a relation to letters and literature.47 Both K. L. Evans and Michael Snediker have described the ways in which Melville’s approach to figuration produces something especially tactile and material. Evans invokes it as a key aspect of Melville’s realism, which depends less on “Melville’s sharp observation of the material world” than on his production in language of a world of figures that, she writes (quoting Erich Auerbach), “have their ground and limit in ‘the very definite event that is being related.’ ”48 According to Snediker, Melville’s figuration crafts characters who are “ontologically stylistic,” thereby subordinating characters and persons to the characteristics and attributes that always exceed them, while prioritizing descriptive lavishness over plot and theme.49 In this, he argues, figuration appears in Melville’s work as the production of “transitional matter” that “arrives and unfolds without this promise of . . . vehicular complement.” Snediker’s larger project lies in the correlation of figuration with chronic pain, where both operate asymptotically, approaching a forceful phenomenology and a vital physicality by refusing the opposition between likeness and being, metaphor and reality.50 Figuration thus becomes something other than a category of representation, as it opens up a mode of nonrepresentational aesthetic formation that creates and literalizes a counterreality.

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If democracy is radical and fugitive, if it is militant and nonviolent, if it is ruthless and unconditional, then it is figurative. But this does not mean that democracy is a fiction or a metaphor. On the contrary, democratic figuration speaks to the powerful creative force through which democracy’s unconditional equality and radical self-­difference are literalized in the counterreality of Melville’s vast aesthetic project. Green, Round, and Groundless: Figurative Democracy The argument and methodology of Melville’s Democracy are rooted in the claim that, if we are to understand the full meaning of democracy that comes out of Melville’s five decades of writing, we must take him at his word and read his figures literally. Specifically, in structuring this book around the most vivid figurations of democracy in his work, I proceed from the claims of Melville’s own prose and poetry that democracy is green, it is round, and it is without permanent ground. Thus, if “ruthless democracy” accompanies those elusive grass-­growing moods when “your legs seem to send shoots into the earth” (Corr., 194), then it bears a relation to self-­organizing organic processes of growing and rooting and going to seed, and it feels most sensibly accessible in spaces of “verdant recess” like the secluded Typee Valley. But, as the narrator of Pierre tells us, democracy is also a chemical agent that “operates as a subtle acid among us; forever producing new things by corroding the old; as in the South of France verdigris, the primitive material of one kind of green paint, is produced by grape-­v inegar poured upon copper plates” (P, 9). That is, the very claims to nature that are made under the name of democracy derive from a potent artifice that both accelerates and corrodes democracy’s transformative work, combining verdure and verdigris, nature and art, into new formulations of politics and action. But however fungible democracy is in Melville’s writing, it does crystallize briefly in precise formations of collective and transcendent sovereignty, as in the Round Robin mutiny and in Ishmael’s celebration of “that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates from God; Himself! The centre and circumference of all democracy!” (MD, 117). Democracy is round in these moments, and its roundness is both spatial and temporal. It takes the circular shape of rippling capillary waves that drive recurrence across time, relating scenes and

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books across Melville’s corpus just as he loops distant historical events and eras together. Ultimately, the transience of democracy in Melville’s work is not a singular feature that appears in different contexts but a capacious process that takes on color and tone and assumes precise shapes and forms. Democracy remains a force of equalization well into Melville’s later writing, but as such, it is without permanent ground or foundation. In the derisive words of Clarel ’s Ungar: “Democracy / Lops, lops; but where’s her planted bed?” (Cl, 4.19.125–­26). Melville’s ruthless democracy takes shape and dissolves, it rises and falls, but in its recurrence and persistence across his prose and poetry, it always demands that we begin all over again. Taking Melville’s figures literally as the material form of his radical democratic aesthetic practice, I trace the roots of the figures themselves by following Melville’s eclectic readings in state-­of-­nature philosophy, revolutionary and imperial history, and aesthetic theory. Part of the argument of this book is that there is no single source in his biography, cultural milieu, or extensive reading from which his thinking on democracy derives, because the most basic meaning of the term as he employed it involves the transformative power of accumulation. As excellent studies of Melville’s intellectual formation have shown, he read deeply in European philosophy and political history, citing Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, Réné Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Baruch Spinoza, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and others throughout his prose and poetry.51 But he also pursued the idea and history of democracy into unexpected archives: the color theories of Johann W. von Goethe and John Ruskin; histories of Pacific explorations and pirate rebellions; and the sciences of vortices, cylindrical mechanics, and geology. Melville’s Democracy recovers an eccentric archive to demonstrate how inextricable Melville’s far-­reaching political imagination is from his experimental aesthetics. Anchoring each chapter around Melville’s engagement with particular political philosophers (Hobbes, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Paine, Sieyès), aesthetic theorists (Goethe, Ruskin), and contemporary writers (Emerson, Douglass, Whitman), I take a somewhat circuitous path through his writing, reading against strict chronology in order to show how his figurative imagination reveals new conceptual configurations within his work.

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Part 1 proposes that democracy is green. What does it mean for the narrator of Pierre to assert that democracy is a particular shade of verdigris, a paint that mimics nature through the corrosion of copper? Exploiting the duplicitous ontology of the color green, Melville captures the classic paradox of foundations (does political community begin with nature or with art, in a state before history or within it?) and proposes instead a phenomenology of color that neutralizes the question. If colors have life and agency and if human actions are always bound to nonhuman processes, then both politics and art must be attuned to other forms of creativity. Chapter 1, “Verdure, Imperial History, and State-­of-­Nature Theory,” traces this problem back to the very beginning of Melville’s corpus—­indeed, to the opening paragraph of Typee, his 1846 narrative of freedom and captivity on the Marquesan island of Nukuheva. Melville’s first novel is as much a book about state-­ of-­nature theory—­specifically the work of Rousseau and Hobbes—­as it is a fictionalized account of his own sojourn among the indigenous people of Nukuheva in 1842, as French and American empires both laid brutal claim to the island. Toggling between his situation in imperial history and his readings in state-­of-­nature theory, Melville’s protagonist emerges as the strange subject of a political paradox, inhabiting two distinct worlds with irreconcilable visions of human life—­one founded in primary individuation and one in a common vulnerability that opens toward a new political being. Chapter 2, “Verdigris and Radical Democracy,” argues that Melville carries this duplicitous foundation into the assertion that democracy is the green of verdigris in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. If Typee was Melville’s most popular and critically praised novel in the nineteenth century, Pierre was his most derided for its treatment of incest and its ambiguous tone, and it continues to be read as one of Melville’s darkest and most pessimistic works. Rejecting this assessment, this chapter asks what it would mean to accept the narrator’s claim that Pierre is “a thorough-­going Democrat; perhaps a little too radical altogether.” By recovering the sources of Melville’s verdigris analogy in the color theories of Goethe and Ruskin and the tonal studies of J. M. W. Turner, chapter 2 argues that Melville’s novel pursues an experiment in radical creativity in which both art and politics appear in the play of human and nonhuman forms of action. In this, the chapter proposes a new account of radical figuration as a vital democratic form.

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In part 2, democracy is round. Where the tones and shades of green dominate the democratic figures of Melville’s more terrestrial novels, Typee and Pierre, in the oceanic novels that culminate with Moby-­Dick, democracy is decidedly circular, cyclical, and spherical. It has a center and circumference, and like revolution itself, it revolves around and threatens to return to where it began. Part 2 traces the roots of Melville’s famous circular image of democratic dignity in Moby-­Dick to show how Melville’s understanding of democracy as a process of ongoing revolution, failure, and repetition is reflected in the cyclical connections between his novels from the late 1840s. Chapter 3, “Round Robins and Founding Violence,” finds the first iteration of Melville’s democratic circle in the Round Robin mutiny from his second novel, Omoo. Referring both to revolutionary debates between Abbé Sieyès and Thomas Paine over the “vicious circle” of the people’s self-­constitution and to the tradition of pirate democracy in the early decades of the eighteenth century, the Round Robin establishes both a political problem and an aesthetic form that repeats and transforms across several of Melville’s earliest works. Chapter 4, “Circles and Sovereignty,” argues that Melville’s circular image of democratic dignity rivals Alexis de Tocqueville’s analysis of the people as a great sphere, “the cause and the end of all things,” in Democracy in America. Both Tocqueville and Melville use circles to stage the paradox of democratic sovereignty—­namely, its recourse to a tautology that identifies the people as both origins and ends of power. But even as Tocqueville and Melville recognize the possibilities for the perversion and destruction of democracy in such circles, both also identify circles with the art of common action. For Tocqueville, this art appears in the local politics of townships, while Melville finds the fullest expression of this artful circle in a giant pod of whales, which though brief, is the fullest realization of a democratic community in all of Melville’s work. With this, the chapter argues, Moby-­Dick figures a sovereignty that is aesthetic, egalitarian, collective, and nonhuman—­a “cetocracy.” Finally, in part 3, democracy is groundless. When, late in Melville’s epic poem of American pilgrims in Palestine, an embittered former Confederate soldier proclaims “the Dark Ages of Democracy” and denies that there is any settled form, foundation, or “planted bed” in which it can endure, none of his companions disagrees. Critics have long cited this exchange as evi-

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dence of Melville’s own lost faith in democracy after the Civil War, but read in the context of his thirty years of writing on the duplicitous foundations and endless repetitions that are essential to democratic politics, it instead suggests both a continuity and an evolution in Melville’s thinking about the process of democracy. Where parts 1 and 2 circle through the first decades of Melville’s writing, to show him returning to and revising questions about foundation and revolution, part 3 focuses on his writing after the Civil War to argue that, without abandoning his ruthless democracy, Melville begins grappling with a new problem—­an understanding of democracy as the practice of politics without foundation or ground. Chapter 5, “Gravity, Slavery, and Political Prophecy,” pursues this problem into Melville’s writing just before the Civil War and during Reconstruction. In the context of the Fugitive Slave Law, John Brown’s execution, and the Civil War, “gravity” becomes a crucial figure of political inevitability and necessity for Melville as it was for Frederick Douglass. However, as both of them show, gravity also introduces contingencies for political actions and actors that cannot be prophesied. In the final story of The Piazza Tales and throughout the poems of Battle-­Pieces, gravity becomes both a mood and a motive force, as tropes of falls, landslides, and floods keep sweeping away all foundations leaving only a sense of misgivings that counters the determinate desires of prophetic politics. This suspension of determinate political affect—­neither optimism nor pessimism, neither idealism nor cynicism—­becomes characteristic of Melville’s later writings, from the endless dialogues of Clarel ’s pilgrims in a landscape blasted by history to the hanging of Billy Budd according to the law of war. With the final chapter, “Unplanted to the Last,” this book comes full circle to show how the exiled confederate’s slur against democracy’s lack of a “planted bed” rejects the liberal vision of Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas while perversely affirming the very premise of Melville’s ruthless democracy—­namely, that the only “bed” for such a principle lies not in a founded people, past, or state, but in the lived fact of equality and the demand for creative, ongoing action to secure it amid perpetual, unpredictable change. Across these chapters, I aim to demonstrate the urgency of Melville’s challenge to political theory and to our own conceptions of democracy. Melville returns again and again to that ruthless principle that joins equal-

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ity and transformation in order to figure ways of mobilizing the politics of transience against the politics of permanence. Such politics refuse the temptation to retreat into founded states and formal institutions and instead demand that we imagine radically new modes of living democracy as a collective and creative practice, one rooted in the equality of human and nonhuman life and committed to ongoing transformation. Such politics do not presuppose that democracy exists as either a lost idyll or an unrealizable ideal. Instead, the politics of transience accept democracy’s nonexistence as what the filmmaker and activist Astra Taylor describes as “something more emergent and experimental, a combination of order and flux” that demands “vigilance, invention, and struggle.”52 Or, as Melville would have it, democracy is precarious, it is premised on an unconditional equality that is treated as ludicrous, and so it must be “ruthless”: uncompromising, unrelenting, and utterly unsentimental.

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PA R T O N E Democracy Is Green

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1 Verdure, Imperial History, and State-­of-­Nature Theory Yet we hope, by means of our arrangement and by the nomenclature before alluded to, to bring color once again into credit, and to awaken the conviction that a progressive, augmenting, mutable quality, a quality that admits of alteration even to inversion, is not fallacious, but rather calculated to bring to light the most delicate operations of nature. Johann W. von Goethe, Theory of Colours To advocate such a sense of color is not to say color is really this or that. Instead it is to speculate on some of the implications of the way that the West has talked about color, what relationship such talk has to world history, and what wonder lies obscured within, such that if we think about color as heat or even as weather that propels you into the image, we might never think the same about thinking itself. Goethe did not go far enough. Michael Taussig, What Color is the Sacred?

Vibrant Inversions Next to “Stubb’s Supper” in Moby-­Dick (1851) and “The Paradise of Bachelors” (1855), Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) may be Herman Melville’s most sustained treatment of binge eating. So intently does Melville’s narrator detail his every meal—­devouring a “golden-­hued bunch of bananas” while engaging in “philosophical reflections” (41), or lingering over the details of every dish of coconut, pork, and poee-­poee prepared for him by a commu31

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nity whose own culinary preferences he deeply suspects—­it is easy to forget that he begins his narrative in privation and hunger, craving fruits and vegetables. From the first, Melville’s narrator is ravenous for something fresh to eat after six months at sea—­a banana, a sweet potato, an orange, anything but salt-­horse and sea biscuit. Over the course of a paragraph, however, he converts that concrete craving into a hunger for something more abstract and, it would seem, difficult to smell, touch, or taste. He wants to eat the color green: Oh! For a refreshing glimpse of one blade of grass—­for a snuff at the fragrance of a handful of the loamy earth! Is there nothing fresh around us? Is there no green thing to be seen? Yes, the inside of our bulwarks is painted green; but what a vile and sickly hue it is, as if nothing bearing even the semblance of verdure could flourish this weary way from land. (T, 11)

If the object of the narrator’s hunger seems to shift in a few sentences from the concrete and corporeal to the abstract, this need for some “green thing” nonetheless registers as substantial, the desire for something to glimpse, grasp, taste, and sniff all at once. Such a craving will not be satisfied by any painted bulwark, he insists, with its “vile and sickly hue,” because the green for which he hungers is not found in a tint or a tone. With nothing but “the sky above, the sea around,” the thing most lacking on the Dolly is “verdure,” the lush and substantial green of grass and trees growing from “the loamy earth.”1 Rather than a sickly hue painted on the surface of dead wood, the narrator longs for a living green, a green that is not merely a sign of life or its semblance, but “the living earth” itself (12). Typee opens with a study of cravings painted in shades of green that one can feel, taste, smell, hear, and see. Like the “troubled grey” of the waves, sky, vapors, and fowl that shadow forth the plot of “Benito Cereno” (1855) from its opening paragraphs, the greens of Typee’s first section color the entire narrative, and the hunger for them is not limited to the narrator alone. Indeed, every living thing on the ship—­including the ship itself—­hungers for verdure. The mossy bark that “once clung to the wood we use for fuel” was devoured by the ship’s pig, “and that so long ago, too, that the pig himself has in turn been devoured” (12). With the moss-­eating pig now eaten

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and only a single living cock left to consume, neither the sailors nor even the ship will “go any more to windward” (12). This craving for the living green earth has become generalized, and once it ceases to be confined to individuals, it also ceases to be felt by humans or animals alone, as the ship becomes the locus of the longing felt by everything it carries: “Poor old ship! Her very looks denote her desires: how deplorably she appears! The paint on her sides, burnt up by the scorching sun is puffed out and cracked” (13). Once denoted, those desires seem to the narrator to be every bit as substantial and corporeal as his own: “Didn’t every one of her stout timbers grow on shore, and hasn’t she sensibilities as well as we?” (12). Not only does the Dolly become at once vehicle and subject of the hunger with which Typee opens, but the ship also registers this in the most concrete and most abstract senses at once. As soon as the narrator identifies his own cravings with the “sensibilities” of the ship, what he wants most for her is what he wants most for himself—­some green. “Poor old ship! I say again . . . I hope to see thee soon within a biscuit’s toss of the merry land, riding snugly at anchor in some green shore, and sheltered from the boisterous winds” (13). As a single hunger traverses man, pig, and ship, joining them together in one sharp craving for some green thing, the first paragraphs of Typee inaugurate one of the most characteristic of Melvillean gestures—­a blurring, crossing, or inverting of perspectives that, once begun, generates more fundamental shifts. If the desires of sailor, pig, and ship become one, for how long can the distinction hold between the living verdure of the “loamy earth” and the “vile, sickly” green of a painted bulwark? From the moment the ship’s swelling and cracked paint “denotes her desires” as clearly as the narrator’s craving hunger does his, the novel has already begun to trouble foundational tensions between the living and the manufactured, the natural and the ornamental—­or, in the narrator’s idiom, between “verdure” and “verde-­antique”—­and it is precisely the elaborate inverting and unraveling of such distinctions that compose the principal plot of Melville’s first novel. Running away from the broken social contract of the modern, manufactured world, epitomized by the privations and tyrannies of the Dolly, the narrator who will soon answer to the name Tommo plunges “diver-­fashion” (39) into the liquid green forests of Nukuheva, hoping to find “the same state of nature in which [its inhabitants] were first beheld by white men”

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(21). What he finds instead is art, performance, history, and as Mitchell Breitwieser puts it, “an independent social whole equipped with unanticipated resources.”2 As Breitwieser, Samuel Otter, Geoffrey Sanborn, Sophia Mihic, and Bruce Harvey have all shown, the central drama of Typee is not that of Tommo’s discovery of and ultimate flight from (in Harvey’s words) “an originary culture, which lives by the foundational law of the state of nature”;3 it is of a civilization whose traditions, arts, and range of cultural performances have their own history and cannot function as the mythic foundation of Tommo’s. Beginning with a craving for something so fundamentally and essentially green that it would only seem to grow in such a mythic natural state, Tommo must go hungry. But if green is the color given to what Tommo most desires at the beginning of his narrative, it is also the color of what he finds instead—­the aesthetic and political order that he discovers in the place where a “state of nature” was supposed, by both Tommo and political philosophy, to reside. In rejecting the “vile and sickly hue” of the painted bulwarks in search of something more than a “semblance of verdure,” Melville’s Tommo makes a distinction between natural and artificial colors that was never designed to hold, at least not as any static binary or ontological priority. From the green things of the opening sketch to the “verde-­antique” look of faded tattoos on aged skin (114), to the “light green color” that the plant-­based cosmetic papa temporarily gives to the complexions of young girls (215), Typee’s studies in green instead highlight the plurality of sensations, relations, and actions that disparate states and things have in common. In Melville’s vibrant green palette, that is, living color and peeling paint, verdure and polished stone, dyed and undyed skin all come into other relations than simple opposition. Indeed, once colored green, such states and things begin to behave in all of the ways that colors do, according to the most influential nineteenth-­ century account of color, Goethe’s Theory of Colours. In his famous polemic with Isaac Newton, Goethe defines color not as a secondary quality of light, but as “an elementary phenomenon in nature  .  .  . which, like all others, exhibits itself by separation and contrast, by commixture and union, by augmentation and neutralization, by communication and dissolution.”4 Color is busy in Goethe’s theory, which John Gage describes as “a rich amalgam of physical and metaphysical ideas,” and it keeps both body and mind busy too,

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manifesting directly as sensations, moods, and moral states.5 For Goethe, color is not simply a phenomenon in nature but one that discloses fundamental processes of nature: “[a] progressive, augmenting, mutable quality, a quality that admits of alteration even to inversion, is not fallacious, but rather calculated to bring to light the most delicate operations of nature.”6 Goethe’s theory thus posits color as a substantial quality of vibrant actions and alterations (“even to inversion”) that follows “nature” precisely by eroding the ontological difference of the “fallacious” and the artificial. According to Michael Taussig, such an erosion is part of the peculiar agency of color, which can name both authenticity and artifice, both nature and second nature, precisely because it is “fundamentally involved in the making of culture from the human body.” 7 And, Tommo might add, from the bodies of pigs and ships and the loamy earth itself. Years before Melville first read Goethe’s theory, his use of colors in Typee suggests a clear affinity with it.8 Treating green as something substantial to be tasted and touched as well as seen, he both highlights its capacity for “alteration even to inversion” and suggests that the experience of color involves sensations, moods, and actions that are not confined to individuals or persons. In this, green highlights a key aesthetic gesture in Melville’s fiction, one that both draws attention to and unsettles foundational distinctions that are at once philosophical, aesthetic, and political, and it is a gesture that Melville carries well beyond the narrative of Typee. In Typee, Moby-­Dick, Pierre (1852), “Bartleby” (1853), and “The ’Gees” (1856), green becomes the color of a difference that is rendered vibrantly, only to be inverted, eroded, or joined to another state which is its necessary counterpart. Thus Tommo’s hankering for some vegetables and the smell of the loamy earth at the beginning of Typee becomes for Ishmael an existential longing for “the green, gentle and most docile earth” that one can only imagine from the perspective of the “appalling ocean,” that “insular Tahiti” surrounded by “all the horrors of the half-­k nown life” (MD, 225). Or, where Typee subtly troubles the distinction between verdure and verde-­antique, Pierre opens with the claim that green is at once “the signet of all-­fertile nature itself ” and the color of verdigris, a “kind of green paint . . . produced by grape-­v inegar poured upon copper plates” (P, 9)—­a process which “by apt analogy” illustrates how American democracy transmutes death into life. In “The ’Gees,”

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green is the color through which an absurdist racial science punningly converts the Cape Verdean into the ideal and yet much-­maligned sea-­laborer, “a green ’Gee being of all green things the greenest” (PT, 348). With such consistent attention to shades of green, it is no idle detail that green is also the color of the screen with which Melville’s attorney divides his office in two, separating his desk from Bartleby’s so that “privacy and society were conjoined” (PT, 19). As the attorney well knows, green does more than mark a boundary; it also mediates a process through which privacy and society—­ along with persons and objects, nature and artifice, life and death, and so on—­separate, blur, combine, mutate, and change places. If green can be counted in this way, as a discrete property of Melville’s writing that links the many ways in which radically distinct things relate, invert, or collapse, it is a property that has gone by many other names. In Timoleon, Melville simply calls it “Art”: “But form to lend, pulsed life create, / What unlike things must meet and mate” (PP, 280). Melville’s poem concisely names his process of playing with oppositional states and things, defining aesthetic practice itself as the capacity to lend “form” and “pulsed life” to the place where “unlike things” come to touch. What Melville called “art,” generations of his readers have characterized variously as a “moral chiaroscuro,” as a “mingled brew,” as a “tragicomic blend,” and so on.9 Colin Dayan has described Melville’s “translation between ontologically disparate points of view” as central to an ethical refusal across his work to divide and rank forms of life, while Breitwieser has pointed to “a sensation of flipping, or repeated reversal” that speaks to Melville’s perpetual interest in a specific failure of human knowledge: “Life sometimes stabs and sometimes blesses, and which of the two is more fundamental is a recalcitrant hieroglyph.”10 Such readings suggest just how much is at stake in the method of Melville’s perspectival shifts, which disclose both the strangeness and the rigor of his thinking on ethics, epistemology, and ontology. Following on this work, my own interest in these “unlike things” that “meet and mate” is, perhaps, narrower. For one thing, I am suggesting that the color green is something like a special case in a more general aesthetic practice: green is one of the countless “forms” that Melville lends to this meeting, one of the many ways he gives it “pulsed life.” For another, in that green place where nature and artifice, life and death, the singular and the plural all mate and meet, I will argue, Melville finds the paradoxical beginnings of democracy.

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In what follows, I draw on the work of anthropologists and historians who study color in general as a social and historical phenomenon, but I focus on green in particular as a color that has, as Michel Pastoureau notes, long “been associated with all that was changing, changeable, and fleeting.”11 As a peculiarly unstable and fleeting color, at once ubiquitous in nature and difficult to produce and preserve, green becomes the color of a fundamentally political gesture of Melville’s writing that enables him to take up the problem of political foundations in two key ways. On the one hand, as the color scheme of Typee shows, Melville is deeply interested in the paradox of the founding of political relations, and this plays out thematically in Tommo’s reflections on state-­of-­nature theory, revolution, and colonial contact. On the other hand, Melville’s greens operate on levels other than the thematic, both in Typee and beyond it, performing vibrant connections and inversions that, at their most basic level, amount to an investigation into what sensations, affects, and lives are possible in a given political order and what are not. In other words, these inversions amount to an inquiry into who and what can and cannot appear in a particular political relation or order—­a foundational question of politics that cannot be relegated to a time of origins and that continues to set the limits of political communities in chromatic terms, usually of black and white.12 The first chapter of Melville’s first novel paints a foundational question of political theory (the foundation of a political community in a mythic space and time called “nature”) in shades of green that return over and over again in his writing. But even as Melville’s Tommo indulges in familiar “philosophical reflections” on natural and social life and on “primitive” and “civilized” men (41), Typee also pursues strange ways of thinking about state-­of-­nature theory, about the history of post-­revolutionary republican empires and colonial contact, and more broadly about the paradoxes of nature and history that trouble all political thinking. From its opening in a sailor’s craving for green that becomes generalized, Tommo’s narrative is strangely preoccupied with the minutiae of moods, desires, pleasures, and sufferings that would seem far removed from any serious inquiry into the large-­scale political relations that the novel addresses. But Typee’s synaesthetic studies in green initiate an elemental gesture and motif of Melville’s art, through which he begins to rethink the foundations of political relations and communities as the felt, sensible experience of all that politics can neither rec-

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oncile nor disentangle—­nature and history, joy and violence, freedom and necessity, democracy and domination. As Taussig argues, if color is “fundamentally involved in the making of culture from the human body,” then it must also be taken seriously as an index of world history.13 In the two chapters of part 1, I hope to show just how seriously Melville takes the color green as an index of post-­revolutionary America’s history in the world. In Typee and Pierre, I will argue, Melville’s greens tell the story of an American theory of democracy in practice, from the “verdant recesses” of the glen of Tior and the Typee Valley to the caustic splash of “verdigris” that covers Saddle Meadows. Melville colors democracy in a broad palette of greens across these works as he explores its theory and its history, and if in some shades of green there is some light in the gloom (to borrow a phrase from Pierre), in others the gloom clearly dominates. Parsing the tones and shades of green in this way, Melville explores both the aesthetics of democracy and the subtleties of the sensations it produces, like the joy and terror that seem to meet and mate in the states of nature imagined by Thomas Hobbes and Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, or the feeling that comes from attention to democracy’s history that there is a palpable connection between emancipation and domination. But ultimately, in proposing that democracy is green, Melville radically refigures it as a way of being that engages all the sensations, roots the body in its world, and imagines new foundations of political life. “This Verdant Recess”; or, the Politics of Paradox in the Glen of Tior In the narration of colonial history as “the experience of colored Otherness,” Taussig notes, “first contact means color contact,” and the arrival of the Dolly in Nukuheva Bay in the summer of 1842 is no exception.14 Hungry for some verdure, the Dolly and her crew find other colors obstinately blocking their view of the island’s “green eminences” as they enter the bay: Towards noon, we drew abreast the entrance to the harbour, and at last we slowly swept by the intervening promontory, and entered the bay of Nukuheva. No description can do justice to its beauty; but that beauty was lost to me then, and I saw nothing but the tri-­colored flag of France trailing over the stern of six vessels, whose black hulls and bristling

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broadsides proclaimed their warlike character. There they were, floating in that lovely bay, the green eminences of the shore looking down so tranquilly upon them. (21–­22)

In Melville’s version of the primal scene of colonial history, first contact occurs between two hungry empires, descending on the same lovely bay. With this abrupt redirection in the chromatic scheme of the opening chapters from green to blue, white, red, and black, color comes to define a set of problems in Typee that are political and aesthetic in equal measure. Like the Spanish colors that Babo repurposes, as he drapes the flag over Benito Cereno in the manner of a barber, a sculptor, and a headsman all at once, the French tricolor is empire’s ornament, and it prompts Tommo to think in terms of beauty, war, and history at once. Specifically, when Tommo sees blue, white, and red instead of green, the beauty that is “lost” to him is one that he believed might be unburdened by history. With this loss comes another: he has not in fact arrived in the timeless land of “naked houris—­ cannibal banquets—­groves of cocoanut” (13) promised by the Polynesian Researches of Ellis, or the Voyages and Travels of Langsdorff and Visit to the South Seas of Stewart, any more than he has arrived in the natural state promised by Rousseau.15 Instead, he has stepped into the island’s political history at a decisive moment in its encounter with France’s ostentatious imperial adventure: Admiral Du Petit Thouars’s seizure of the island in June 1842 as part of France’s extension of its overseas territories in Polynesia.16 As soon as blue, white, and red blot out green, the narrative shifts the frame of Tommo’s inaugural desires. No longer cast solely against the sickly green artifice of a painted bulwark, the green for which Tommo continues to long now stands against a broader imperial history that appears in distinct opposition to a state of nature theorized as timeless and absolute. The theoretical construct of nature, though first felt by Tommo as corporeal craving, seems to disintegrate in the face of concrete history. Beauty is lost, green recedes from the bay to the mountaintops, and the state of nature dissolves into a mere theory that cannot withstand the force of gunships. Tommo, in short, receives from the French tricolor a rebuke that Hannah Arendt delivers more than a century later: “the assumption of a pre-­political state, called ‘state of nature’ . . . never was meant to be taken as a historical

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fact.”17 But of course such fictiveness only renders this theoretical state all the more alluring, and Tommo reveals his plan to run away from the Dolly only after discovering that the French have occupied the island, casting his decision in the revolutionary language of a dissolved social contract (30–­31) and a regressive plunge into the “gurgling, trickling, liquid” verdure of the island (39). In this sense, the story that Melville’s colors begin to tell in the opening chapters of Typee appears to be that well-­k nown tale of the novel’s ambivalence—­desires foreclosed and then redoubled, timeless absolutes shattered by history and then sought all the more vigorously.

Indeed, as national-­imperial colors play off the deep verdure of the island, the chromatics of Typee’s opening chapters highlight two stylistic features of Tommo’s narrative on which critics have long focused attention: its ambivalence and its digressiveness. In this section, I read the opening chapters of Typee very closely to argue that both of these features derive from the novel’s robust engagement with political theory and post-­revolutionary imperial history. More precisely, I suggest that Tommo’s many expressions of ambivalence and his many interruptions to narrative time become part of the aesthetic method of a novel that is grappling with the paradox of political foundations and the endless proxies that follow. The iterations of Tommo’s ambivalence, in particular, have been tracked by generations of Melville scholars, who have tended to approach it in two general ways. In one, critics have pursued Tommo’s wildly oscillating patterns of desire and panic to locate something like the text’s most primal fear or trauma—­cannibalism, tattooing, lost identity—­amid the constant changes in his condition and knowledge.18 In the other, readers have hewn closely to Tommo’s relentless recourse to binaries in his efforts to interpret the world he finds in the Marquesas through competing registers of a timeless nature and transitory historical conditions, in order to identify the play of larger social tensions in his narrative voice.19 Both traditions of reading Tommo’s ambivalence capture his basic hermeneutic dilemma, caught up in enjoyment and terror, absolutes and contingencies, as they also show Tommo to be well-­versed in the debates and dilemmas that preoccupy later critics torn between “theory” and “history.”20 Tommo thinks perpetually between these registers, as he finds occasion after occasion, scene after scene, through which to exercise apparently incompatible hermeneutics, fueling what John Bryant describes

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as the novel’s “amiable digressions.”21 But where critics’ accounts of Tommo’s ambivalence and digression have emphasized the conflicted feelings, unconscious desires, and ideological equivocalities that divide Tommo’s narrative voice, I want to argue that Tommo’s penchant for paradox is both less subtle and more deliberate than these accounts suggest. Rather than wavering between two competing interpretive frames, Tommo enthusiastically and alternately endorses them both by developing and embellishing the structural disruptions of narrative time that such a doubled framework produces. “Digression” does not really capture the circuitous narrative path that Tommo follows in the first four chapters of Typee. The tension that first appears as a clash of colors—­blue, white, and red obscuring green—­morphs into the competing interpretive registers of history and nature, a conflict which in turn plays out narratively in a series of forward and backward temporal shifts so complex they border on the convoluted. Chapters 1 through 4 of Typee include no fewer than five different temporal intervals separated by a few years and all occurring on the island of Nukuheva. First, there is the unfolding narrative time that Tommo is recounting, beginning with Captain Vangs’s decision to go to the Marquesas and including the languid interval of chapter 2 and the arrival in the bay of Nukuheva eighteen to twenty days later where they encounter the French fleet. Second, there is the brief span of time “a short time before my visit to the Marquesas” (14), which Tommo describes in chapter 1 in order to relay second-­hand the anecdote of the disrobing of a missionary’s wife by curious Marquesans (15). Third, and immediately following that story, Tommo gives his firsthand account of another disrobed lady, this one occurring “between two and three years after the adventures recorded in this volume” (15) and involving the Nukuhevan queen’s eager display of her ornate leg and buttocks tattoos to a group of foreign sailors. Fourth are the various incidents of the French occupation described in chapter 3, which occur both immediately before and during the summer of the Dolly’s arrival. These include the story of yet another “spirited lady” and her prized drapery (namely, the English “colors” that Mrs. Pritchard refuses to allow Du Petit Thouars’s representatives to lower [29]). And finally, there is the uncertain interval of chapter 4, during which Tommo resolves to leave the ship, visits the glen of Tior, plunges “diver-­fashion” into its shade baths, and observes another flashy cross-­cultural encounter—­a meeting between

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the foppish Du Petit Thouars and the “patriarch-­sovereign of Tior”—­a ll while enjoying “a golden-­hued bunch of bananas” (40–­4 1). Tommo leaps forward and backward in time in these chapters, deferring the advancement of his own plot, in order to recount a series of incidents which so clearly echo each other and so closely repeat the same themes—­ comparative adornment, women divested of drapery—­that it becomes difficult to make narrative sense of them.22 We are made to look, again and again, at similar scenes of contact—­French and Marquesan, American and Marquesan, English and French—­which do little to advance any sort of mutual knowledge or comprehension. Played largely for laughs (and notably at the expense of everyone), these scenes both stall the time of the narrative and indicate that however far the French have pursued their conquest of Polynesia, this history keeps getting stuck in repeating moments of “first” contact, each of which bears out Taussig’s claim that first contact is always a meeting of colors.23 Taken together, these scenes suggest that the temporal confusion of the novel’s first four chapters is not due to the idiosyncrasies of the narrator in his troubled navigation of the historical present as he longs to escape to a natural state beyond imperial history. Instead, like the craving for green that becomes generalized on the Dolly or the tricolor flag that frustrates that hunger, these temporal shifts are broader than Tommo’s limited perspective, and they bring to light something fundamental about the specific contact zone in which he finds himself. In the summer of 1842, on an island in the Marquesan archipelago, French, English, American, Nukuhevan, Typee, and Happar peoples encounter one another in a perplexing temporality in which the imperial time of “first” contact and the revolutionary time of Tommo’s desertion intersect with the rather different, emphatically present-­tense, temporality that Tommo seeks in the theoretical state of nature and the pleasures of the island itself. Unfolding in a series of overlapping and competing temporalities that intersect on the island, the distinct political situations of revolution, imperial contact, and state-­of-­nature theory share a connection in the ways that each of them stages what William Connolly calls the paradox of politics: the conflation of causes and effects that plagues questions concerning the origins of political subjects, relations, and communities.24 Tommo’s narrative is clearly invested in questions of origin, but more than that—­w ith his

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repetition of contact scenes and his constant bewilderment about whether to view the island through the lens of history or of nature, along with his presumption that these are mutually exclusive—­the narrative also begins to take on the structure of paradox that the question of origins introduces. Citing Connolly, Bonnie Honig remarks on two structural features of the paradox of politics that shed light on the narrative peculiarities of Typee’s opening chapters. First, she argues that since this paradox is never really just a problem of origins, but a permanent feature of politics, it is relentlessly analogical, playing out in a series of “proxies” for what she claims to be the more fundamental paradox of democracy—­the constitution of a people from a multitude that is not identical to it.25 Second, she notes that, given its many proxies, political paradox manifests itself most clearly and consistently through temporal disorder. “Indeed,” she writes, “the first thing to go when we face the chicken-­and-­egg paradox of politics is our confidence in linear time, its normativity, and its form of causality.”26 Through the “proxies” of contact scenes, desertion, and the competing frames of nature and history—­ and especially through the disruption of linear narrative time—­the paradox of politics shapes Typee both thematically and formally, not only around the problem of identifying origins and foundations, but also around the permanent and recurring problem of how political subjects, relations, and communities come to be in the novel’s vision of the stratified and conflictual contact zone of the Marquesas in 1842. Certainly, such a claim casts political paradox as a historical problem in Typee, one that concerns the transformation of the age of revolution into the age of imperialism. But to say this is not merely to choose one side of the nature-­history dyad to which Tommo clings and dismiss the other. Part of what Melville makes so vivid in his account of post-­revolutionary French and American imperialism on Nukuheva is that the political history of this fraught encounter is also the history of the West’s grappling with its own theoretical construction of “nature” understood as a timeless and ahistorical absolute, an imaginary state both prior to and outside of its own political foundation.

Nowhere is the thematic and structural role of paradox more apparent in Typee than in the novel’s rambling fourth chapter, which begins with Tom-

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mo’s declaration of independence from Captain Vangs, includes his sensational full-­body immersion in the shade baths of Tior, and ends with another iteration of the primal scene of the contact zone in the meeting between Du Petit Thouars and the sovereign of Tior.27 Linear time is indeed the first thing to go in this chapter, which opens with an ambiguous temporal marker that establishes a sequence—­“Our ship had not been many days in the harbor of Nukuheva before I came to the determination of leaving her” (30)—­only to be followed by a series of scenes in the glen of Tior that occur at a time that is sequentially unaccounted for by the narrative. Whereas Tommo positions the stories of contact he relates in chapters 1 and 3 clearly in relation to the present narrative, he never says precisely when the scenes in the glen of Tior occurred. After he arrives at Nukuheva Bay? Before he determines to leave the Dolly? “Between two and three years later” (15), when he returns to the island? Ultimately, the difficulty of locating the episodes of chapter 4 clearly within the larger plot exposes how fully integrated into the narrative the paradoxes of the political situations it explores are. The narrative’s flashes backward and forward, along with its scenes of indeterminate time, perform the competing temporalities at work within the politics of revolution and imperial conquest that bookend the chapter, along with the mythic temporality of corporeal immersion in gurgling green nature that falls, crucially, between them. With this structure, Typee’s fourth chapter does not stage a narrative of “return” or “regression” to a foundational state, but instead finds that the theoretical state of nature is one proxy among others for the paradox of politics, present alongside and in tension with multiple others. First among these are the paradoxes of revolutionary time, particularly as they play out in relation to the broken promises and craving hunger that prompt Tommo’s decision to run away from the Dolly. Tommo opens chapter 4 with an enumeration of his complaints against Captain Vangs, arguing that his flight from the ship has been necessitated by Vangs’s failure to uphold his agreement with his crew: “In all contracts, if one party fail to perform his share of the compact, is not the other virtually absolved from his liability?” (30). Though bound by the agreement made before he shipped, Tommo insists that the contract will not bind him into an indefinite future. Mimicking the rhetorical form of the Declaration of Independence, Tommo lists his grievances against the captain—­t yrannical usage of the crew, neglect

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of the sick, scanty dispersal of provisions, and “unreasonably protracted” cruises (30)—­to cast Vangs as the King George–­like agent who necessitates Tommo’s own desertion.28 In this, Tommo partakes of the historical specificity and precision for which Arendt praises the Declaration of Independence, while also performing the paradox of its simultaneous reliance on self-­evident necessity, which erodes the agency of the revolutionary actor. Arendt argues that the greatness of the Declaration of Independence “owes nothing to its natural-­law philosophy . . . [but] unfolds when the list of very specific grievances against a very particular king develops into a rejection on principle of monarchy and kingship in general.”29 For Arendt, it is the specificity of the Declaration’s articulation of broken promises that makes it a political act, one that remains within the temporal context of a mutual compact whose “content is a promise,” as distinct from the “so-­called social contract between a given society and its ruler . . . a fictitious, aboriginal act on the side of each member.”30 Promises transcend the present moment but remain within the time of history and action, whereas social contract theory depends upon the “fabulous retroactivity” (in Derrida’s phrase31) of a foundation that precedes history. Nevertheless, even as Tommo’s declaration clearly partakes of the historically bound action of the Declaration, it also relies on the claim of self-­evident necessity which, Arendt argues, is the chief internal contradiction of the Declaration—­its reliance on an absolute that transcends the time of a compact whose “content is a promise.” Running away is necessary, Tommo claims, not only because Vangs has broken the promise of the ship’s articles to which all aboard the Dolly must be bound, but also because there is no redress for him on the ship itself—­none of law nor of equity nor even of collective resistance.32 In contrast to the crew of the Julia in Omoo, all of whom sign onto the “Round Robin” to grieve their case against Captain Guy and mutually pledge to each other in the same gesture,33 Tommo’s crewmates on the Dolly are “only united in enduring without resistance the unmitigated tyranny of the captain” (T, 31). Tommo’s desertion is thus, at first, both necessary and private, even as he announces it in the political language of mutual promises and compacts. For this reason, his declaration owes as much to the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen as it does to the Declaration of Independence. Along with his claims of a broken promise and the specific temporality that this implies, Tommo’s other principal justification for running away is

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his appetite—­or, more precisely, the undeniable duration of time measured out in the copious stores of unappetizing food in the Dolly’s hold. “Oftentimes, when we had occasion to break out in the hold, and I beheld the successive tiers of casks and barrels, whose contents were all destined to be consumed in due course by the ship’s company, my heart has sunk within me” (32). It is not the prospect of starvation, but that of survivable time away from land that Tommo sees measured out in those portions of salt beef and biscuit, “affording a never-­ending variety in their different degrees of toughness” (31). Tommo here pries apart the dual meanings of “survival”—­at once “mere life” (salted meat and biscuit on the Dolly) and “more life” (the innumerable corporeal satisfactions promised by the island).34 Alarmed by this vast quantity of unappetizing sustenance, Tommo becomes insatiably hungry for green, and this hunger propels both his decision to run away and the opening of his narrative. Thus, as much as Tommo advances his very specific grievances against a very particular captain to justify his right to run, he also cites his hunger, both a real need grounded in his existence as a natural being and a preference for something more than basic sustenance. Such appeals to hunger and private need take on revolutionary urgency, according to Arendt, with the Déclaration des droits de l’homme of 1789: The new body politic [of the French Déclaration] was supposed to rest upon man’s natural rights . . . upon his right to “food, dress, and the reproduction of the species,” that is, upon his right to the necessities of life. And these rights were not understood as pre-­political rights, that no government and no political power had the right to violate, but as the very content as well as the ultimate end of government and power.35

Hunger has its own temporality and revolutionary history in Arendt’s theory, one that begins when the needs of the poor of Paris “invaded” a political realm that could not remedy them, making political rights out of corporeal necessities and spinning the revolution into cycles of violence and terror.36 Hinging her thesis on a series of distinctions between the temporality of the political (the time of actions and promises) and that of the “pre-­political” (to which she consigns necessities and absolutes), Arendt tries to pry a historical account of political beginnings apart from a mythic origin in an idea of “nature,” but she can only do so by conflating philosophy’s absolute “pre-­

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political” state of nature with the necessities of life. In this, she presents as a choice between two distinct revolutionary models—­one historical and one absolute—­what she nevertheless acknowledges to be present at the same time in the Declaration of Independence. For Honig, such a contradiction is characteristic of the paradox of politics itself, which is not only present within every revolutionary act, but irresolvable by the act of founding and thus a permanent feature of the political. Rather than two alternative temporalities, Honig argues, both of these are essential to the paradoxical and agonistic operation of politics, revolutionary and otherwise, which always unfold in a plural temporality that is timeless (“in the beginning”) and historical (“once upon a time”) at once.37 If the temporality of Tommo’s narrative is emphatically plural, then, this is partly owing to the layered political meaning that he gives to his decision to run away from the Dolly. He reveals an absolute necessity impelling him to act in the face of a broken promise, just as he reveals that broken promise to be the grounding condition of his hunger; although it manifests as a bodily craving for some green thing, the conditions of deprivation that produce it are entirely man-­made. And so, within sight of the French tricolor, Tommo draws on the Declaration of Independence to “declare the causes that impel [him] to separation” from Vangs’s Dolly, joining historical reason and natural right to initiate a narrative beginning that owes its own origins equally to American and French models of revolution. Having it both ways, Tommo emerges as something like the paradoxical subject of the rights of man whom Jacques Rancière describes in his rejoinder to Hannah Arendt: rather than the theoretical natural man who has no rights at all, or the historical citizen who has them already, subjects of political right are best understood as “those who have not the rights they have and who have the rights they have not.”38 In other words, if Tommo emerges as a political subject in these pages, it is because he has located and made a political claim—­here, a claim of his rights to a kept promise and fresher food—­where none would appear to be. But even as a complex process of political subjectivation can be read in Tommo’s simple decision to leave the Dolly, this is barely the beginning of the political story that the peculiar fourth chapter of Typee tells, at least in the original English edition.39 Rather than pursuing an allegory of revo-

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lution that tracks Tommo’s emergence as a political subject with his self-­ emancipation from Vangs, the chapter instead swerves toward a corrective history of South Seas imperialism—­one with its own history of French and American declarations—­a ll the while tracing Tommo’s continued search for a taste of green nature that persists within and alongside these histories. With this, chapter 4 locates both theoretical and historical continuity between America and France, not only in their revolutions, but also in their projects of imperial conquest. Read for this continuity, Typee’s fourth chapter appears less as a collection of digressions than as a concerted study of accumulating proxies for an unresolved paradox at the center of post-­ revolutionary history that fuels imperial violence. Tommo opens his revised history of Pacific imperialism by implicating America in the conquest of Polynesia, which he has thus far coded as French. Singling out the Typees from among the tribes of the island for the “ferocity” with which they have met foreign invaders—­“their very name is a frightful one; for the word ‘Typee’ in the Marquesan dialect signifies a lover of human flesh” (35)—­he quickly provides some backstory for that reputation. Not only has their reputation been conferred by neighboring tribes who are the “unappeasable enemies” of the Typees, but it has also taken shape in the context of imperial violence—­specifically the “atrocities” committed in the Typee Valley by the crew of the U.S.S. Essex under the command of Captain David Porter. Porter landed in the Marquesas in 1813, in the midst of his Pacific campaigns against the British whaling fleet in the War of 1812, and as T. Walter Herbert argues, this “first American imperialist” was also engaged in the post-­revolutionary project of securing “the new nation as a member of the community of nations.”40 As Porter himself describes it, his sojourn on the island he calls Nooaheevah is of vital national importance, offering both a place to store his “prizes”—­British whale ships he had captured in the Galápagos—­and a prize in itself: “I believed that the possession of this island might at some future period be of importance to my country, and I was desirous of rendering her claim to it indisputable.”41 Thus, within a month of landing on the island, Porter and his crew had entangled themselves in hostilities between tribes, killed several of the island’s people, and issued a formal “Declaration” on November 19, 1813, which renamed the island “Madison’s Island” and claimed it as an American possession.

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Our rights to this island being founded on priority of discovery, conquest, and possession, cannot be disputed. But the natives, to secure themselves that friendly protection which their defenseless situation so much required, have requested to be admitted into the great American family, whose pure republican policy approaches so near their own. And in order to encourage these views to their own interest and happiness, as well as to render secure our claim to an island valuable, on many considerations, I have taken on myself to promise them they shall be so adopted . . . and they have given assurances that such of their brethren as may hereafter visit them from the United States, shall enjoy a welcome and hospitable reception among them, and be furnished with whatever refreshments and supplies the island may afford. . . .42

A primer in the imperial application of state-­of-­nature theory, Porter’s “Declaration” bends time to “found” America’s right of possession on “priority,” invoking the “fictitious, aboriginal” (in Arendt’s words) temporality of pre-­political history all the while it describes an entry into contract for purposes of “friendly” protection. Porter’s “Declaration” then reproduces the language of revolutionary declarations in reverse, as he makes promises, secures a guarantee of nourishment, and joins one “pure republican” family to another, all in the service of declaring dependence and securing dispossession. Porter’s “Declaration” establishes the right of American possession on a hallucinated political relationship that is created retroactively through an asymmetrical contract that yokes the imperial project to the revolutionary one and reveals imperialism’s consumption of other peoples to be cannibalistic at its root. Porter’s narrative of his annexation of Nukuheva thus offers as succinct an account as one could want of the means by which the post-­revolutionary American republic redirects the paradoxes it cannot avow into imperial designs, but it is specifically Porter’s treatment of the Typees—­the one tribe which refuses to join his alliance of republican peoples—­that drives the history Melville’s Tommo narrates in chapter 4. Porter describes the Typees as both the most warlike tribe on the island and the most democratic. Their valley was, he says, “more highly cultivated than any other,” and their villages run as “a democracy without a chief,” but they stood in relations of open hostility with the other tribes as well as with those tribes’ American allies.43 Determined to “render all the tribes subservient to my views,”

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Porter seeks to negotiate with the Typees, who mock his overtures, calling the Americans “white lizards, mere dirt, and the most contemptible epithet they could apply . . . the posteriors and privates of the Taeehs.”44 Believing that, unanswered, such a provocation would dissolve his tenuous alliance, Porter determines to march on the valley, and after fierce fighting halts their advance, he and his allies respond by destroying several Typee villages: “We continued our march up the valley, and met in our way several beautiful villages, which were set on fire, and at length arrived at the capital, for it deserves the name of one.”45 Not for the pleasures of digression alone, then, does Tommo’s account of Porter’s “unprovoked atrocities” in the Typee Valley follow so closely on the heels of his own revolutionary endeavors: the conversion of “pure republican policy” into annihilating colonial warfare is simply the story that volume 2 of Porter’s Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean tells. Porter’s narrative of what he calls the “Typee War” requires little embellishment from Tommo. Indeed, as John Bryant has shown in his study of Melville’s drafts, so closely does Melville’s narrator follow Porter’s account that he reproduces key language directly from it—­just as he does with the colonial narratives of Amasa Delano in “Benito Cereno” (1855) and Judge James Hall in The Confidence-­Man (1857).46 And as Melville does with Delano and Hall, so in telling Porter’s story through Porter’s own tone and idiom, Tommo lays bare its most violent and perverse strains. Specifically, Porter repeatedly pauses in his narrative to appreciate what he is about to annihilate—­or, as he puts it before the first assault, “to take a breath and view, for a moment, the delightful valley, which was soon to become a scene of desolation.”47 To this brutal aesthetic experience, Porter adds a repeated denial of his own agency in the destruction of the Typees, insisting that “the evils they experienced were brought on by themselves, and the blood of their relations and friends must be on their own heads.”48 In short, as Porter labors to justify his actions in the “Typee War,” he explicitly articulates all of the contradictions in his account, asserting in his own defense both his capacity to appreciate the stunning beauty of the valley and the absolute necessity of his laying waste to it: Never in my life did I witness a more delightful scene, or experience more repugnancy than I now felt, for the necessity, which compelled me to make war against this happy and heroic people. Many may censure my conduct as wanton and unjust. In the secu-

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rity of the fireside, and under the protection of the laws which are their safeguard, they may question the motives of my conduct and deny the motives which compelled me to pursue it.49

Porter rebukes those armchair imperialists who would pass judgment on him—­a ll the while enjoying their firesides and their freedoms—­by juxtaposing his own ambivalent feelings of enjoyment and repugnancy to theirs. In this, Porter normalizes “ambivalence” itself as the attitude of an imperial republic, the basic affective response to the “necessary” atrocities that follow from the enactment of “pure republican policy” abroad. By contrast, when Melville’s Tommo traces over this very rhetorical ground, he exposes not only Porter’s atrocities, but also the perversity with which Porter seeks to normalize his ambivalence in committing them. To be more precise, Melville confronts Porter’s self-­serving feelings of conflictedness with the irreconcilable perspective of the Typees themselves. In this perspectival inversion, he confronts ambivalence with the paradox that follows from taking the historical view from all sides.50 The invaders, on their march back to the sea, consoled themselves by setting fire to every house and temple in their route; and a long line of smoking ruins defaced the once-­smiling bosom of the valley, and proclaimed to its pagan inhabitants the spirit that reigned in the breasts of Christian soldiers. Who can wonder at the deadly hatred of the Typee to all foreigners after such unprovoked atrocities? (37)

The invaders may find “consolation” for their retreat in the burning of the valley—­and as Porter insists, they may even feel some “repugnancy” over that consolation—­but the ambivalence of conquerors occludes what the Typees felt in the wake of this wanton destruction. Melville does more here than expose Porter’s contradictions in his devious retelling of Porter’s story: he forces Porter’s version to face, in a single paragraph, the “deadly hatred” of those whose villages he burned and opens up two worlds where only one appeared to be.51 In this, Melville manages to shift both the terms of colonial representation and the conditions of political relation, by contending that the ferocious reputation of the Typees is not the cause of their conquest (made “necessary” by some recalcitrant cannibal “nature”) but a direct consequence of and response to acts of war.52 Carrying this shift in historical perspective even

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farther, Tommo then goes on to show how all imperial history perpetuates itself through such manipulations of perspective—­how, that is, the temporal and spatial gaps of empire consign imperial violence to near silence, while magnifying acts of reprisal by the colonized. Sometimes vague accounts of such things reach our firesides, and we coolly censure them as wrong, impolitic, needlessly severe, and dangerous to the crews of other vessels. How different is our tone when we read the highly-­w rought description of the massacre of the crew of the Hobomok by the Feejees; how we sympathize for the unhappy victims, and with what horror do we regard the diabolical heathens, who, after all, have but avenged the unprovoked injuries which they have received. (38)

Tommo directly answers Porter’s rebuke to those who judge him from the comfort of their firesides with a reminder that there is another perspective from which to view imperial violence, and it is one that cannot be accounted for in the debates between those who commit such violence and those who “coolly censure” it. In pointing to such an irreconcilable and unambivalent view, Typee’s fourth chapter begins to develop a narrative perspective, even an aesthetic, out of paradox itself. That is, from history and nature to contract and hunger to enjoyment and violence, Tommo unfolds one after another of what the narrator of Pierre will call “impossible adjuncts”—­those conflicts that political relations produce but cannot reconcile because they form the outer edge of those relations. Such impossible adjuncts do not lie in some uneasy, ambivalent relation. There is nothing ambiguous about them. Instead, they produce ways of seeing and knowing that are existentially opposed, if vital and necessary, to one another. Ultimately, Porter’s appreciation for the valley that he burns must be read as an antecedent to Tommo’s own intense desire to devour—­and be devoured by—­the island’s green pleasures. As Tommo’s critical retelling of Porter makes clear, such enjoyment stands alongside imperial desolation. But rather than partaking in the consolations of ambivalence that allow Porter to enjoy what he destroys, Tommo does not reconcile these two feelings into a single one. Instead, he flips from atrocity to enjoyment, making almost no attempt to transition between them. “But to return” is all he says by way of transition between his rigorous rehistoricizing of Nukuheva and

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the puzzling account of his visit to the glen of Tior—­a place that is, he adds, “altogether shut out from the rest of the world” (39). To “return” to a place he’s never been, one that is so secluded from this brutal history, one must go by way of the sea in the past perfect tense: “I had come from Nukuheva by water on the ship’s boat and when we entered the bay of Tior it was high noon” (39). With a marvelous mix of specificity and vagary, Tommo’s past perfect locates him in a time that seems not only to precede the narrative of his recent desertion, but also to carry him back before the larger imperial history he has been telling. And it is in just such a remote past where he finally satisfies his gnawing, multisensory craving for green: I rushed forward across the open ground in the vicinity of the sea, and plunged, diver-­fashion, into the recess of the first grove that offered. What a delightful sensation did I experience! I felt as if floating in some new element, while all sort of gurgling, trickling, liquid sounds fell upon my ear. People may say what they will about the refreshing influences of a cold-­water bath, but commend me when in a perspiration to the shade baths of Tior, beneath the cocoa-­nut trees, and amidst the cool, delightful atmosphere that surrounds them. (39)

Diving into “masses of leafy verdure” (39), Tommo achieves a rapture of corporeal immersion in an experience of green that has texture, temperature, and sound all at once.53 All of this produces a synaesthetic ecstasy, which is only possible in what he calls “this verdant recess” (39)—­a retreat or withdrawal that opens backward in both space and time.54 Certainly, Tommo seeks an escape from history in “this verdant recess.” Coming as it does immediately after his brief history of imperial violence, it may be that the only way to answer the brutal treatment of the islanders by successive invaders—­even those, like Porter, who also appreciate its beauty—­is to bathe himself in the greenness of “nature” that lies on the other side of such contact. But with this plunge, Tommo also begins to redefine the natural state itself. Rather than the aboriginal time of philosophy’s mythic, pre-­political or precontact state, it appears here as another dimension within the present, one that he locates in parallel with historical time. With this, the concept of “nature” can be parsed and divided into something other than that unified ground or absolute beginning that is subject to the manipulations of founding right. Splitting off the notion of “nature” as the

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prehistorical foundation of political community from a notion that refers to present bodily needs and necessities, hungers, desires, and cravings, Tommo begins to understand “nature” less as a theoretical or mythic state of priority and more as a sensational, corporeal state of vitality. Throughout the opening chapters, the most frequent and capacious proxy of political paradox is that of nature and history, and Tommo flips between these like the sides of a coin that he turns over and over again. But even if Tommo continues to hold to an understanding of nature as a time of recess and retreat, he also begins to loosen it from the sense that it is outside of time, that it precedes or exceeds history altogether. Indeed, once he attaches it to his own bodily sensations and needs, the time of nature begins to function as a time within history. More precisely, the abstraction of “nature” becomes “this verdant recess,” designating both that past-­perfect “once upon a time” within the history of imperial conquest to which Tommo has become a firsthand witness and the precise space and standpoint from which he views it. For Tommo plunges diver-­fashion through gurgling greenness only to come face-­to-­face once again with the French navy. Looking out from his verdant recess, Tommo sees both “the loveliest vale eye ever beheld” and “the French admiral, attended by all the boats of his squadron” who had come “to take formal possession of the place” (40). In the tableau that closes chapter 4, Tommo returns to the situation of contact, staging the primal scenes of state-­of-­nature theory and imperialism at once, and this time he makes explicit all the cultural manipulations and misrecognitions that were implied in the contact scenes he has already recounted. “The next moment they stood side by side, these two extremes of the social scale—­the polished, splendid Frenchman, and the poor tattooed savage” (40). Laying bare all the stakes of such comparisons, Tommo takes the measure of “the immeasurable distance” between these men, first in terms of adornment, and then in terms of time. On the one side, he sees the Admiral Du Petit Thouars foppishly decked out in ribbons and laces and “all the paraphernalia of his naval rank,” and on the other, he sees the sovereign of Tior (notwithstanding his ornate tattoos) “in all the nakedness of nature.” And predictably, the “immeasurable distance” from which “these two beings” are “removed” from each other is temporal: “long centuries of progressive civilization and refinement . . . have gradually converted the mere creature into the semblance of all that is

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elevated and grand while the other, after the lapse of the same period, had not advanced one step in the career of improvement.” Seeming to forget the history of imperial contact and conflict that he has just related, Tommo casts the patriarch of Tior back in time, if not as the aboriginal foundation of the French Admiral, then firmly as his historical past, as he parrots a Rousseauian model of cultural evolution in which the “savage” succeeds “natural man” as the creature of contact with the “civilized” world.55 Then, adding romantic racialism to the casual, stages-­of-­civilization racism of his reflections, Tommo wonders whether the man of Tior is nonetheless the “happier man of the two” (40–­4 1). Tommo’s remarks in this scene would appear to be exemplary of what scholars have described as his persistent ambivalence about “civilization,” which manifests in his vacillation between damning critiques of American and French imperialism and wan reiterations of imperial racial discourse, as well as in the alternating modes of desire and aversion with which he later engages the Typees.56 But as Herbert notes, more than anything, this scene stages the strange position of Tommo himself: “What deserves emphasis in this depiction is the location of the observer himself, not a member of the civilized or the savage order, but standing ironically aside and holding a ‘golden-­hued bunch of bananas.’ ” Stressing the “whimsy” and “irony” with which Tommo frames this encounter, Herbert seeks to draw attention to the “tenuous” position outside of both civilization and savagery that Tommo carves out and lampoons at the same time.57 Indeed, Tommo so strains the conventions of philosophical observation that are at work in this scene, he ultimately does more to undercut the content of his reflections than the assertion of his ambivalence alone suggests. What Tommo says about “these two extremes of the social scale” is only part of what this scene actually performs. All the while Tommo repeats the claims of the West to its “advancement” through time, he is also confronting that presumptuous temporality with what it understands to be its past. Staging a meeting between “extreme” social temporalities in this way, Tommo exposes the perversity of such thinking and instead renders visible a fundamentally political—­and thus paradoxical—­set of relations. Put another way, he shifts the basic frame of this encounter away from that of “civilization” and “savagery”—­where the former is the realm of properly political actors and the latter that of the

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pre-­political—­to that of politics—­where the very arrangement of the world according to such terms becomes visible and thus contestable. Indeed, Tommo does not just render such arrangements visible; he makes them audible, touchable, and edible: I can recall even now with vivid distinctness every feature of the scene. The umbrageous shades where the interview took place—­the glorious tropical vegetation all around—­the picturesque grouping of the mingled throng of soldiery and natives—­and even the golden-­hued bunch of bananas that I held in my hand at the time, and of which I occasionally partook while making the aforesaid philosophical reflections. (41)

Tommo adds yet another temporal layer—­the narrator’s “even now”—­to a scene that he claims to have witnessed firsthand from the verdant recess of the past perfect tense. Observing in the meeting of Du Petit Thouars and the patriarch of Tior the temporal collision of state-­of-­nature theory with post-­revolutionary imperial history, Tommo also describes this as the time of “philosophical reflections” experienced by a hungry body present at the scene. In this, what becomes clear is that the absurdity of this final tableau is precisely where its politics are, but not because Tommo is an ironic or ambivalent observer. If Tommo’s much-­remarked-­upon ambivalence describes his desire to combine a series of binary terms—­history and nature, desire and fear, civilization and savagery—­the individual terms ultimately signify less than the form of the vacillation itself. Understood in the terms of political paradox, such a movement reveals not just the impossibility of origins but a permanent antagonism and oscillation. But even as Tommo refuses to choose between the binary of history and nature, preferring to oscillate between them, he nevertheless finds a common ground for both in the sensations and cravings of the body. If the opening of Typee is fundamentally “political,” then, this is not because it interrogates the histories of revolution and imperialism from a position of priority to them—­that is, from a pre-­ political state called nature to which one might return through a broken social contract or contact with a soon-­to-­be colonized people. Instead, these chapters fundamentally reinterpret political beginning and belonging from the site of the visible, the touchable, the audible, and the edible. Rejecting the notion that politics and political communities originate outside of

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historical time, but unwilling to cede either the needs of the body or the experience of nature as a “verdant recess” within history, Tommo imagines political relations to emerge from a series of conflicting temporal frames that intervene in one another. Through this process of paradox, Tommo comes to feel the arrangement of the sensible world and the gaps in it, in Rancière’s sense, discovering that world to be the result of broken promises, fabricated compacts, declarations of dispossession, and the presumption of a time and a space “before” politics to which some peoples are consigned.58 Thus, as Tommo and Toby take flight into the “one unbroken solitude” (58) of the island’s interior, they are not fleeing into that state of “nature” that philosophy posits as a pre-­political condition, but seeking out a sensible and material realm where political relations can be enacted in which all bodies might participate. But as they quickly learn, regardless of how beautiful the island’s “green eminences” appear from the shore (22), the sensations encountered there are not quite as delightful as those found in the “verdant recess” of Tior. Furthermore, even as Tommo begins to imagine a political relation grounded in sensation, that relation is not without the abstractions and paradoxes of political theory, nor can we be certain exactly which theoretical sensation he is feeling at any given point. Does he experience the sensation of a Hobbesian nature, which feels like a persistent “inclination” to war, just as the “nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together”?59 Or does he feel that blissful and “all-­pervading sensation”—­which Tommo attributes to Rousseau—­of “the mere buoyant sense of a healthful physical existence” (152)? “The Important Question” that plagues Tommo and Toby as they traverse the mountains of Nukuheva, deliberating on which of its valleys appears to promise “a frightful death at the hands of the fiercest of cannibals” and which “a kindly reception from a gentler race of cannibals” (84), translates fairly obviously from “Typee or Happar?” into “Hobbes or Rousseau?” But as Samuel Otter points out, the “anxious refrain” of the question is really moot.60 So it is with Melville’s reading of state-­of-­nature theorists. Ultimately, Melville’s great political-­philosophical intervention in Typee lies in the imagination with which he reframes the question for which “Typee or Happar?” seems clear proxy, answering “both” and “neither” at once, all the while deriving from notoriously conflicting philosophies the materials for

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an emerging politics of bodily sense and need—­that is, a countertheory of the natural state that locates the pleasures and vulnerabilities of all bodies at both the origin and end of politics. “The Important Question”; or, Hobbes, Rousseau, and the Sensations of Theory What ROUSSEAU in his famous Dijon thesis, traced out in theory, MR. MELVILLE endeavours to exhibit in practice. Both are wrong. The first adopted his views solely from a love of paradox, . . . The last, and lesser, of the two, fails in his attempt from a want of comprehensiveness in argument. . . . It is true he gives us charming descriptions of savage life . . . [but] the isolated facts he offers are so tinged with the colouring through which he perversely beholds them as to be little better than worthless, so far as the question he supports is concerned.61

As it turned out, Melville’s fears of being read as “a Rousseauian throwback” (in Geoffrey Sanborn’s phrase) were well-­founded.62 Contemporary readers of Typee were quick to identify Melville’s theoretical investments with those of Rousseau and even quicker to compare the natural man of Rousseau’s theory with the living subjects of American and European empire in the Pacific.63 As the reviewer for the London Critic complains here, in a second notice on Typee published March 14, 1846, “The predominant and most objectionable characteristic of this book is the obstrusive earnestness with which its author supports a favourite notion that savage is preferable to civilized life.”64 Comparing the errors of Rousseau’s first discourse and Melville’s Typee, the Critic finds in Rousseau a simple “love of paradox” and in Melville an excess of “colouring,” but where Rousseau pursues an incorrect theory merely for love of intellectual perversity, according to the reviewer, Melville’s “colouring” threatens something more insidious, as Typee tries to advance a case for the “practice” of “savage” life. More interesting than the judgment of the reviewer in the Critic is the precision with which he names—­and hints at the relationship between—­ Rousseau’s penchant for paradox and Melville’s use of color. I want to suggest in this section that what Melville does with color is intimately related to what Rousseau does with paradox, though neither paradox nor color mean for the reviewer in the Critic precisely what these terms mean to Rousseau and Melville. Paradox and color describe specific aesthetic methods of these

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writers, through which each of them stages particular contradictions, indistinctions, and indeterminacies that neither seeks to reconcile.65 If the Critic means “paradox” to describe Rousseau’s gleeful devil’s advocacy—­just as the term does in the entry on Rousseau in the 1841 Penny Cyclopaedia66 —­it also names a more productive problem that emerges from Rousseau’s account of the constitution of political society, one that appears both in the conflation of cause and effect in The Social Contract and in the impossibility of animosity in the solitary state of nature in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality.67 Clearly, the reviewer from the Critic believes that Melville’s account of the Typee Valley is “tinged with the colouring” of such philosophy, but in the novel’s deployment of color from its opening passages on as something that can be touched, heard, and tasted, as well as seen, Typee also rethinks the possibilities of Rousseauian paradox. Thinking through the ways in which both nature and history are experienced by sensing bodies in the opening chapters of Typee, Melville posits color, or the hunger for it, as first among the realms of the sensible that make vibrant those points of connection between supposedly contradictory political concepts and hermeneutics. In this, he identifies in competing ideas about the foundation of “civilized life” not only the co-­presence of apparently antithetical conditions, but also a specifically intricate relationship between them, from which he begins to unfold one “Important Question” after another. Nature or history? The body feels both, intensely, and thus may be the only sure foundation for political relation. Typee or Happar? Both are cannibals—­as are the American and French nations that seek to devour the island. Hobbes or Rousseau? Although contemporary readers of Typee found Rousseau everywhere in Melville’s narrative, the book is also profoundly shaped by Melville’s engagement with the work of Rousseau’s purported opposite, Thomas Hobbes. More than that, in Melville’s reading, Hobbes and Rousseau appear less as antagonists than as complementary thinkers of political feeling, sense, and sensation. If Hobbes and Rousseau were understood by antebellum readers as near opposites, neither was exactly free from infamy and suspicion. Maurice Lee and Paul Downes have both traced the shaping presence of these philosophers in nineteenth-­century American political culture. Lee argues that Hobbes was “notorious” among antebellum Americans “for suspect piety . . . anti-­democratic tendencies and cynical views of human nature.”68 This bears

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out Downes’s thesis that Hobbes is the “defining other of the American Puritan and liberal tradition . . . an alibi or decoy deployed to prevent us from having access to a valuable critique of this tradition’s failings.”69 By contrast, Rousseau seemed to offer what Lee describes as “a more catholic” vision of the social contract preferable to republicans, but from the evidence of the Critic, Rousseau was every bit as “notorious” a thinker as Hobbes, and not just for Melville’s London readers. In Evert Duyckinck’s 1846 review of Typee in the New York Morning News, he remarks on “a dash of romantic Rousseauism” in Melville’s novel, and he does not mean it as a compliment. Quickly adding that there is also “now and then a shadow of the Cannibal as corrective,” Duyckinck seems relieved to report that Melville balances his romantic primitivism with racial demonology.70 Simply put, both Hobbes and Rousseau were read with a degree of suspicion because their work circulated in an antebellum political culture that interpreted philosophy in terms of present political exigencies. Hobbes not only served as the “Hobbesgoblin” around which “a racialized, liberalized capitalist hegemony consolidated,” as Downes argues. He also offered abolitionists like Richard Hildreth and antislavery rebels like Nat Turner a precise allegory for the failure of the social contract under the institution of slavery and the right to antislavery revolution.71 In a similar way, Rousseau’s oft-­repeated narrative of human declension from the “primitive” to the “social” state was understood as an indictment of America’s permanent war on native peoples. By finding Rousseau in Typee, reviewers like Duyckinck and the writer for the Critic identified Melville as both a Romantic, besotted with French theory, and a partisan in debates over slavery, Manifest Destiny, and imperial expansion.72 But what such breezy associations of Melville with state-­of-­nature theory by Typee’s contemporary readers miss is the depth and strangeness of the engagement with Hobbes and Rousseau that Melville’s first novel performs. Certainly, Melville’s Typee is saturated with his broad reading in political philosophy—­just as it is saturated with his readings in South Seas exploration and with his own recollections—­and clearly, it is a novel whose concern with politics is historically precise and urgent. However, in approaching the contemporary state of American imperial expansion by recasting the terms of political philosophy, Melville rejects those flattened interpretations that are burdened by the partisan exigencies of an expansionist America to put

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this philosophy to very different use. Specifically, Melville does not invoke the natural men of Hobbes and Rousseau in order to analyze the natives of Nukuheva. Instead, he throws his American protagonists into the “natural” states that Hobbes and Rousseau respectively imagine in order to scrutinize overdetermined and familiar ways of thinking about states of nature and primitive ways of life by those who have read too much theory. Ten years before “The Metaphysics of Indian-­Hating”—­Melville’s mock-­philosophical excoriation of frontier discourse in The Confidence-­Man—­Typee offers both a phenomenology of imperial expansion and (as the London Critic feared) a practicum in state-­of-­nature theory, both of which fuel Melville’s thinking about the possibilities for a different political ontology.

Did political community arise out of war or peace, depravity or innocence? Ultimately, Melville does not really care. In Tommo and Toby’s arduous trek through the interior of Nukuheva, Melville lampoons the central debate of state-­of-­nature theory as a choice between fierce and gentle cannibalisms, while at the same time he exposes the impoverishment of a philosophical imagination that has so diminished Americans’ capacity to perceive indigenous peoples in the South Pacific and North America alike. Dispensing with the question of whether the state of nature is Hobbesian or Rousseauian—­ dispensing with the question of the “state of nature” altogether after chapter 4—­Melville does not, however, dispense with Hobbes and Rousseau. Instead, he produces in Typee another way of practicing their philosophy, finding in their writings both a model for thinking in contradictions and paradoxes and a privileging of corporeal sensation as the foundation of political ontology. Thus, the moment Tommo poses “the Important Question” of whether they are descending into the valley of the Typee or the Happar in chapter 8, the question is treated as both a philosophical problem—­Toby’s optimism versus Tommo’s skepticism—­and an issue that is of “vital importance” to two starving runaways (68). Fittingly, they both debate the sides of this question and enact them physically through the wild vacillations of sensation that they feel and the vertiginous landscape of “steep ridges” and “dark ravines” that they traverse (67). Ascending and descending, driven by raging thirst at one moment and a visceral aversion to cold water in an-

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other (70), Tommo describes these “perpendicular episodes” (68) as an experience of extremities that both alternate and combine. In one moment, the island appears as a primitive Rousseauian paradise: “The whole landscape seems one unbroken solitude, the interior of the island having apparently been untenanted since the morning of the creation” (58). But in another, the island renders their condition utterly Hobbesian—­solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and (they fear) alarmingly short: “Wet, half famished, and chilled to the heart with the dampness of the place, and nearly wild with the pain I endured, I fairly cowered down to the earth under this multiplication of hardships, and abandoned myself to the frightful anticipations of evil” (82). As he climbs and falls, thirsts and freezes, finds refreshment and yet continues to ail, Tommo no longer believes himself to be reasoning or acting with volition but instead feels that he is being acted on by the very landscape they are traversing. “I scarcely knew whether I was helplessly falling from the heights above or whether the fearful rapidity with which I descended was an act of my own volition” (69). Given the extremities they endure in these “perpendicular episodes,” it might seem that Tommo and Toby are forced to abandon all deliberation of the question at hand. But what the repetition of their agonies instead makes clear is that they continue to deliberate, only they do so primarily with their bodies. Where Tommo’s “philosophical reflections” in the glen of Tior laid bare the presumptive asymmetries of cultural comparison through his own enjoyment of “golden-­hued” bananas at the scene of imperial dispossession, the vital philosophical question posed by the island’s interior is thought mainly through an agonizing physical ordeal in which Tommo and Toby come to feel the very extremes that their question has projected onto the land and its inhabitants. Such a model of deliberation as a corporeal or embodied activity is, furthermore, explicitly in dialogue with Hobbes’s materialist inquiry into sensation, imagination, and reason in part 1 of Leviathan. Beyond the overt ways in which Melville parodically exposes his travelers to Hobbesian miseries in the wilds of Nukuheva, these scenes also perform a strange, yet serious reading of Hobbes that highlights the philosopher’s materialist account of thinking as an embodied encounter with the physical world. Leviathan famously opens on a body, that of an “Artificiall Man . . . in which the Soveraignty is an Artificiall soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; the Magistrates, and other Officers of the Judicature and

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Execution, artificiall Joynts; Reward and Punishment (by which, fastened to the seat of Soveraignty, every joynt and member is moved to perform his duty) are the Nerves, that do the same in the Body Naturall.”73 However, long before that artificial, corporate body is created in the generation of the Common-­Wealth in part 2 of Leviathan,74 the body that most concerns Hobbes is that “Of Man,” a natural body that first senses, then thinks, imagines, deliberates, decides, and acts. Indeed, the body, its sensations, and the sensible realm it navigates precede even the state of nature in the text of Leviathan (chapters 1 and 13, respectively), which instead opens on those objects and properties of the world “which presseth on the organ proper to each Sense.” In Hobbes’s account of the senses, objects press “either immediately, as in the Tast or Touch; or mediately, as in Seeing, Hearing, and Smelling,” thereby producing in the brain and heart what he calls a “counter-­pressure” that projects outward a seeming or a fancy, “which men call Sense; and consisteth, as to the Eye, in a Light or Colour figured.” What is called “sensible,” Hobbes argues, is thus both a quality that lies within an object and the product of the “motion” of pressure and counterpressure that comes from the sensing organ. For this reason, he continues, color is not stably lodged in an object or body, but is instead the outcome of a relational movement between mind, body, and the objects of the world: “For if those Colours and Sounds, were in the Bodies, or Objects that cause them, they could not bee severed from them, as by glasses . . . where we know that thing we see, is in one place; the appearance, in another.” 75 Just as color and sound can separate from the objects that press these sensations on the mind, so the mind also separates from, and yet retains impressions of, these objects in a process that Hobbes illustrates with an image that Melville famously invokes in chapter 35 of Moby-­Dick. Hobbes writes, And as wee see in the water, though the wind cease, the waves give not over rolling for a long time; so also it happeneth in that motion, which is made in the internal parts of man, then, when he Sees, Dreams, &c. For after the object is removed, or the eye shut, wee still retain an image of the thing seen.76

Such a “blending cadence of waves with thoughts” is not only for the absent-­ minded, pantheistic youth at the mast-­head, as Ishmael would have it (MD, 159), but in Hobbes’s account, it is the very pattern of the mind in motion,

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pressed upon, pressing back in turn, and rippled with its senses. For Hobbes, then, all thinking and “all fancies are motions within us; reliques of those made in the sense”—­indeed, “life itself is but motion,” with both mind and body moved about first by objects and properties, and then by appetites and aversions, hopes and fears.77 But if such a vision seems to posit the sensing body and mind as primarily receptive, pushed about and pushing back against what it receives from the world, Hobbes nevertheless identifies a specific liberty in the motions of thinking, one that he defines negatively through the process of deliberation. “And it is called Deliberation because it is a putting an end to the Liberty we had of doing, or omitting, according to our Appetite, or Aversion.” Taking deliberation literally, Hobbes describes a mind that continues to move between its desires, aversions, and fears, preserving liberty along with motion, until it arrives at the will, “the last Appetite in Deliberating,” and acts. As the hinge between liberty and its end in the constraint of an action, deliberation is in many ways the ultimate expression of the motion that Hobbes equates with life itself, the essential “felicity” of continually moving “from one object to another; the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the latter.” 78 Typee or Happar? Even as Tommo is unsure whether he is “helplessly falling from the heights above” or climbing from the depths of ravines out of his own volition (69), even as he is trapped in the flattened binary of two imaginary extremes, his movements are deliberations, and in a Hobbesian view of deliberation, his movements prolong his liberty. That liberty of movement is, of course, rather slowed by Tommo’s mysterious leg ailment, a painful swelling with no evident cause aside from his “exposure” to the island itself (63), as if his swollen leg were pressing back too vigorously against the reeds, bushes, and ravines that press against him. Furthermore, Tommo and Toby’s deliberations over whether they are descending into the valley of the Typee or that of the Happar quickly become almost comically unfree. Once they opt to follow a particular stream to its end—­essentially, letting gravity lead them (73)—­they are deliberating nothing but the outcome of a choice already made to surrender to the geography of the island. Thus, while they endlessly deliberate “the Important Question,” they never exactly decide it, and for this reason, it might seem ludicrous to locate any kind of political act in their hobbled surrender to the island’s topography—­

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except that this is precisely what Melville does. Tommo and Toby deliberate, descend, and enter into a wholly new political relation by virtue of their descent. On arriving in the valley and meeting the sustained gazes of several members of a tribe “who appeared to be reading” Tommo’s mind (89), the question recurs and turns out to be of equal political significance (if very different meaning) to the tribe: Typee or Happar? I asked within myself. I started, for at the same moment, this identical question was asked by the strange being before me. I turned to Toby; the flickering light of a native taper showed me his countenance pale with trepidation at this fatal question. I paused for a second, and I know not by what impulse it was that I answered “Typee.” The piece of dusky statuary nodded in approval, and then murmured “Motarkee?” “Motarkee,” said I without further hesitation—­ “ Typee motarkee.” (90)

First contact is color contact once again, as Tommo employs a familiar palette of imperial encounter—­Toby’s pallor playing off Mehevi’s dusk—­to describe a scene of felicitous miscommunication. What to Tommo appears to be a question of absolutes (gentle cannibal or ferocious?) is a more relative one for Mehevi (my friend or my enemy?), but in arriving at the answer he gives as he does, by moving through the “perpendicular episodes” of the island’s interior and answering Mehevi by “I know not what impulse,” Tommo has unwittingly entered into Typeean politics on the tribe’s own terms. Political life in Typee is not only governed by historical relations but by geographical ones as well: friends arrive in this green valley from one direction and enemies from another. (A lesson Toby learns, in a rather harder way, when “the mere fact of coming from the Typee Valley” on his way to seek French medical aid gets him struck in the head by a Happar spear [124].) Further, tribal decisions are governed by a simple “unanimity of feeling” by which “everything was done in concert and good fellowship” (238), and they largely concern “household” matters of physical well-­being (240). Characterized by constant warfare with its neighbors and a state of democratic consensus within the tribe, and by relations that are at once directional, affective, and corporeal, but rarely conflictual, the political life of the Typee is at first almost unrecognizable as politics to Tommo and Toby. Nonetheless, where their trek across the mountains and valleys of the is-

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land’s interior has exposed them to all the physical miseries of a Hobbesian natural order, as they were pressed upon and moved about by the environment prior to entering into a political relation, their arrival in the valley seems to plunge them into some decidedly Rousseauian sensations, those feelings of unanimity, fellow-­feeling, and healthful buoyancy that prove to be the “greatest blessing and highest pride of the social state” (235)—­and, at least at first, almost intolerable to Tommo. For while their arrival in the valley marks an end to the “perpendicular episodes” Tommo and Toby suffered in the mountains, it has not yet liberated them from the vacillations of hope and doubt that have plagued them; they’ve merely switched the principal register of this vacillation from the physical to the affective. Where chapters 6 through 10 are characterized by the men’s relentless, grueling, and prolonged physical movements, chapters 13 through 17 are characterized by an answering stillness, but it is a stillness that initially lacks any quality of rest or peace. Over and over again, Tommo opens these chapters with both an enumeration of the comforts and kindnesses extended to him by the Typees and a rehearsal of the crippling doubts and moody melancholy to which he remains prey. Fed and oiled and rubbed and pleasured in every conceivable way, Tommo nonetheless sinks into gloom, dejection, and melancholy that, even he acknowledges, are wildly inappropriate to the scenes he describes. “In looking back to this period, and calling to mind the numberless proofs of kindness and respect which I received from the natives of the valley, I can scarcely understand how it was that, in the midst of so many consolatory circumstances, my mind should have been consumed by the most dismal forebodings and have remained prey to profoundest melancholy” (142). Where mind and body moved through the mountains in concert, however painfully, it would seem that they separate in the valley. In this, Tommo’s anxious mind responds to the calm pleasures offered to his body like the frantic Ishmael responds to Queequeg’s motionless observance of his “Ramadan”—­that is, with a feeling both inappropriate and way out of proportion with its cause (MD, 82). But Tommo also amends his remark somewhat, insisting that it is not his mind that plagues him during this time, or not only his mind, so much as it is the sore and swollen leg that has all but immobilized him and is “my chief source of anxiety” (142). Tommo’s leg becomes an overdetermined affective

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organ here, both the origin and locus of all anxiety around which all his sensations and thoughts gather. Like the “raging toothache” that, Melville jokes in his May 1851 letter to Hawthorne, prevents a fellow from following Goethe’s injunction to “live in the all” (Corr., 194–­95), Tommo’s aching leg pulls him into himself, just as he seeks to “get out of ” himself altogether. As long as Tommo’s leg pains him, he cannot feel where he actually is: “When I looked around the verdant recess in which I was buried and gazed up to the summits of the lofty eminence that hemmed me in, I was well disposed to think I was in the Happy Valley, and that beyond those heights there was nought but care and anxiety” (149). Like political relations, moods and feelings are geographical on Nukuheva, and just as the glen of Tior opened to him the “delightful sensations” of “some new element” (39), so the Typee Valley is a “verdant recess” (149) that promises a radically different way of feeling. But Tommo can only access these green sensations when he enters into what he calls “an altered frame of mind” (151), which begins with a lost sense of time and a feeling of apathy, both of which coincide with the healing of his leg. “Gradually I lost all knowledge of the regular recurrence of the days of the week, and sunk insensibly into that kind of apathy which ensues after some violent outbreak of despair. My limb suddenly healed, the swelling went down, the pain abated, and I had every reason to suppose that I should soon recover from the affliction that had so long tormented me” (148). Tommo’s ailment, it seems, was temporal as well as affective, corporeal, and even spatial, his anxious and swollen limb a disease of futurity that afflicted him as long as he counted the regular recurrence of days and weeks and swung between feelings of foreboding and hope. The apathy that succeeds Tommo’s affliction is, by contrast, the Stoic feeling of the absence of suffering in a state undisturbed by changing passions. But Tommo’s apathy here is even more precise: when combined with the end of his anxieties and forebodings, it comes closer to the feeling that Rousseau imagines in the “Second Discourse” might characterize the state of a being who has “no idea of the future.” “I know that we are told over and over again that nothing could have been so miserable as man in the state of nature,” Rousseau argues, “But, if I really understand this word misery, it is a word which has no meaning or which signifies only a painful privation and the suffering of body and soul. Now, I would like someone to explain

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to me what misery there can be for a free being whose heart is at peace and whose body is healthy.” 79 “Pitié” may be the affect most closely associated with Rousseau’s “Second Discourse”—­the feeling of compassion “prior to all reflection” that carries one to the aid of a fellow creature in pain80—­but apathy is the near-­constant state of feeling in which Rousseau imagines his primitive protagonist to live. For this reason, when the pain of Tommo’s leg abates and his anxieties about the future have been stripped away, he begins “to experience an elasticity of mind” that initiates Typee’s most sustained engagement with Rousseauian tropes. Tommo’s newfound health and mental elasticity allow him to wander farther into “this verdant recess in which I was buried” (149), which in turn leads him to entertain new ideas about “primitive” happiness and “civilized” misery (all cut from the American Edition). For Tommo, that happiness derives both from the bounty of nature (“the source of pure and natural enjoyment”) and the absence of “the ills and pains” caused by civilized life, beginning with the ills and pains of thinking and reflecting: “What has he to desire at the hands of Civilization?” Tommo asks, “She may ‘cultivate his mind,’—­may ‘elevate his thoughts’—­these I believe are the established phrases—­but will he be the happier?” (149). Tommo follows some of the most famous assertions of the “Second Discourse” here to argue that natural happiness is predicated on the health and comfort of the body, which are ruined not by injury or illness, but by the thinking that “cultivates” and “elevates” the mind out of its “apathy.” “If nature destined us to be healthy,” Rousseau claims, “I venture to affirm that the state of reflection is contrary to nature and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal.”81 To reflect is to suffer and become depraved, and that depravity, Tommo adds, can be measured in the ingenuity with which men devise means of inflicting even greater suffering on each other: The fiend-­like skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-­ dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough to distinguish the white, civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth. (150)

As Tommo’s anxious leg heals, it alters his mind and renders it newly “elastic,” prompting him to reflect on the relationship between suffering and

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reflection. This produces a familiar catalogue of primitive absence—­the lack of meditation, suffering, futurity, and money that together constitute “happiness”—­while it also yields a less familiar catalogue of civilized crimes, beginning with mere “social rivalries” and culminating with solitary confinement, in which thought itself becomes a form of punishment. “How feeble is all language to describe the horrors we inflict on those wretches whom we mason up in the cells of our prisons, and condemn to perpetual solitude in the very heart of our population” (150). With this, Tommo carries Rousseau’s critique of the social malady of self-­reflection to its logical end: civilized ferocity, he proposes, has perfected itself in the institutionalization of the suffering experienced by a confined, isolated body condemned to ceaseless thought. But just as Tommo begins to reckon all the suffering that follows from Rousseau’s malady, he also reaches something of an impasse, where the reflective thinking that has produced the crimes and ills of civilization remains bound up with the very attempt to illustrate the gap between “primitive” felicity and “civilized” misery in the world. Rousseau reaches this impasse himself in the “Second Discourse” when he seeks to describe the imaginary state of his protagonist by invoking the example of an indigenous Caribbean man about whom he has read in the writings of a seventeenth-­century French missionary. Trying to imagine a being who “has no sense of the future” and thus remains free from the suffering of self-­reflection or meditation, Rousseau cannot help but valorize the reflective mind that thinks about the future, even as he hints at its depravity and its crimes: His soul, which nothing can agitate, is wholly given over to the sentiments of its present existence, with no idea of the future, however near it may be, and his plans, as limited as his views, hardly extend to the end of the day. Such is the Carib’s degree of foresight even today; he sells his cotton bed in the morning and comes weeping to buy it back in the evening, having failed to foresee that he would need it for the next night.82

The moment Rousseau seeks his primitive protagonist in a man who lives “even today,” speculative theory becomes a fable of colonial dispossession. Rather than substantiating his claim that the absence of self-­reflection and meditation on the future secures both health and happiness, Rousseau’s example instead reveals the grief of a man who has been defrauded of his bed

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by a marketplace that is predicated on the difference between present and future value (the bed presumably becoming more expensive by nightfall). Denied his foresight, Peter Melville argues, “the Carib loses everything—­ his finitude, his humanity, his very ability to possess anything whatsoever.”83 Rousseau briefly departs his imaginary state to separate the contemporary world into those who think about the future and those who do not, but instead of illustrating the felicity of the latter state, he reveals how the denial of the Carib’s future becomes the very means by which he is denied a claim to the present, as well. Certain kinds of thinking thus become both a weapon and a disease, and in order to think about such thinking without wielding the first or succumbing to the second, Tommo must enter even more fully into that “altered frame of mind” that gives his thought a new “elasticity.” To do this means to think Rousseauian thoughts without reproducing the method that leads Rousseau to separate the world into those who do and those who do not have a future. This requires a turn away from Rousseau’s primitivism, but not away from Rousseau. Melville is clearly working in Rousseau’s idiom throughout chapter 17, invoking the key claims and tropes of the theory of the natural state that Rousseau lays out most fully in the “Second Discourse,” but his one explicit reference to Rousseau comes when Tommo illustrates the happiness of this verdant valley by citing a feeling that, he says, Rousseau once experienced himself. But the continual happiness, which so far as I was able to judge appeared to prevail in the valley, sprung principally from that all-­pervading sensation which Rousseau has told us he at one time experienced, the mere buoyant sense of a healthful physical existence. And indeed in this particular the Typees had ample reason to felicitate themselves, for sickness was almost unknown. (152)

Rather than a feeling that belongs to a theoretical state of nature, this happy well-­being is one that is temporally and spatially capacious. It is a feeling of enjoyment that is not confined to a theoretical past, nor is it one that forecloses the future. Indeed, it is not even a feeling that is confined to the members of the tribe, but one that overtakes the whole valley as well as anyone who allows himself to be “buried” in its verdant recesses. And

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while this happiness is prevalent in the valley, it is by no means limited to it. Indeed, it is the feeling once experienced by a young Genevan runaway, fleeing to Turin: No accident troubled our journey; I was in the most happy situation of body and mind I ever was in my days. Young, vigorous, full of health, security, and confidence in myself and others, I was in that short but precious moment of life, when its expansive plenitude extends in a manner our being over all our sensations, and embellishes, in our eyes, all nature with the charms of our existence.84

So explicitly is Melville in conversation with state-­of-­nature theory in Typee that both his contemporary reviewers and his more recent critics have assumed that he derives this “all-­pervading sensation which Rousseau has told us he at once experienced” from the Discourses or The Social Contract.85 But Melville turns here to Rousseau’s own account of a sexually adventurous young runaway ravenous for a wider liberty in The Confessions. The happy sentiment that Rousseau describes above comes at a pivotal moment in the second book of The Confessions, after his escape from a tyrannical apprenticeship and his eager submission to the influence of Mme. de Warens. On the road to Turin, young Jean-­Jacques experiences this “most happy sensation”; it is a feeling that, he says, begins with a sense of his body as “young, vigorous, and full of health,” extends a sense of security and confidence over his whole psyche, and then expands outward to include “all nature.” In Rousseau’s account, this feeling also releases him from the conflicted mental state that has plagued his adolescence—­the wild passions that he cannot reconcile with his longing for simplicity 86 —­as his sense of his particular existence expands into all that surrounds it. In this Rousseauian precursor to Goethe’s “all-­feeling” (at least as Melville recalls it to Hawthorne in May 1851), the edict is not to “get out of yourself ” (Corr., 193–­94) but to allow your “being” to expand. Rousseau thus describes feeling the “expansive plenitude” of all life when it extends a sense of his being over all of his senses and sensations. Tommo takes his own liberties with this passage. Preserving Rousseau’s link between bodily health and mental well-­being, as well as the expansion of this sensation beyond a single body and mind, he nonetheless alters the direction of its expansion and embellishes it with a feeling he describes as

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“buoyant.” For Tommo, the feeling of “continual happiness” does not center on a particular body because it “prevails” in the valley. Happiness is still primarily corporeal, but it is a feeling of health that begins in the verdant recess of the valley and then extends to all of the bodies that reside there. What the valley confers on those who can feel it is this very precise feeling of one’s body buoyed by what Rousseau called the “expansive plenitude” of being—­that is, the feeling of one’s body floating on and through an element that might simply be described as life. “I felt as if floating in some new element, while all sorts of gurgling, trickling liquid sounds fell upon my ears” (39). Melville recasts Rousseau’s “most happy situation of body and mind” through the primary aesthetic experience of Typee—­the sensation of floating on a living green element to which one’s entire body is alive—­and he locates an ontology here, as well. To feel oneself buoyed by life, floating across the liquid green earth, is to feel that “nature” is not a state of temporal priority or geographic remoteness but simply the “all-­pervading sensation” of one’s living body in the world. With this reimagining of Rousseau’s Confessions as a primer in the lived feeling of nature, Melville lays bare two of his most vital interventions in the uses of state-­of-­nature philosophy. First, by transposing a feeling that Rousseau experienced to Tommo, Melville refuses to consign the living Typees to the condition of Rousseau’s weeping Carib, who is himself consigned to the fiction of a theoretical state that is violently expelled from the present. As the reviewer for the London Critic feared, Melville’s Typee does “exhibit in practice” what Rousseau “traced out in theory,” but not because Melville applies a theoretical state to a living community. Melville does not read Hobbes and Rousseau as his contemporaries did, to advance a thesis about the foundations of “primitive” life in order either to justify or to censure “civilized” empires. Instead, state-­of-­nature theory both guides and describes Tommo himself in his encounter with the Typees, providing a phenomenology, a biography, and a history of the narrator’s thoughts, sensations, and actions. Second, when the novel’s strange practice of reading Hobbes and Rousseau through the movements and sensations of its protagonist culminates in Rousseau’s feeling of “expansive plenitude,” Melville emphasizes once again that the body is an organ of thought. There are, Typee suggests, Hobbesian as well as Rousseauian ways of thinking with the body,

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and “the mere buoyant sense of a healthful physical existence” both answers and remedies the miseries of corporeal deliberation that trapped Tommo in the moot question of “Typee or Happar?” as well as the anxious brooding that lodged him in his injured leg. Buoyancy describes the condition and attitude of a body that thinks with an “elastic” and “altered” mind, one that is neither stuck in the isolating prison of its reflective moods nor inclined to think other bodies out of the present or future. Green Homes and Leveled Spears: Democracy in Nukuheva In The Force of Nonviolence, Judith Butler calls for a thorough rethinking of state-­of-­nature theory that dispenses with its layered fictions, beginning with the fiction of its individual adult male protagonist. By reimagining the foundations of sociality instead around our radical interdependency and shared vulnerability, she argues, the mythic origins of the liberal political order give way and more egalitarian political possibilities appear: Equality is thus a feature of social relations that depends for its articulation on an increasingly avowed interdependency—­letting go of the body as a “unit” in order to understand one’s boundaries as relational and social predicaments: including sources of joy, susceptibility to violence, sensitivity to heat and cold, tentacular yearnings for food, sociality, sexuality.87

Melville’s Tommo may seem a strange figure to hold up as exemplary of what such a reimagined state-­of-­nature theory might offer. He is, after all, an individual adult male who initially fights bitterly against the dependencies that his sojourn among the Typees reveals to him. But as he is fed and healed and carried around the island, as he relinquishes anxiety for apathy and comes to feel the healthful buoyancy that the valley imparts, he gets out of himself, lets go of his body, and briefly becomes something other than an individual. And if this pervasive feeling of healthful buoyancy suggests an ontological shift, Tommo reveals that it offers him a powerful political insight as well.88 Even as Tommo experiences this buoyancy as a new form of being—­the dissolution of the individual self and its capacities as he is floated by the valley—­he also comes to recognize that this state is not “natural” at

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all. Instead, it is both the foundation and the result of what Butler emphasizes as an “avowed interdependency”—­the collectively agreed-­upon work that sustains the Typee political community. Where Tommo first sees little more than sleepy indolence and inactivity in the Typees (112), he gradually comes to recognize the collective action that comes from the perfect unity of feeling that this action also perpetuates in turn. Laboring primarily toward the health and well-­being of all members, the Typees “worked together so unitedly, and seemed actuated by such an instinct of friendliness, that it was truly beautiful to behold” (239). The relations and activities that he describes lack the qualities of antagonism and dispute that Tommo expects from politics—­“I do not conceive that they could support a debating society for a single night” (238)—­but these actions nonetheless serve a governing function to which each member has some claim. The tribe is ruled, he argues, not by councils or chiefs but by “tacit common-­sense law” and taboo (201), the effects of which Tommo can see but which he cannot comprehend.89 Taken together, tacit law, taboo, unanimity of feeling, and collective labor all produce “the buoyant good health” and “continual happiness” that, in turn, support the common sense, feeling, and labor of the community. That is, the Typees do not simply float felicitously on the beauty and bounty of their green valley. Instead, like the surfers of Ohonoo in Mardi, they are both tranquil and active as they work to “preserve their place on the very crest of the wave,” sustaining both it and each other (M, 273). Still, for all of Tommo’s celebration here of a “social order that is the greatest blessing and highest pride of the social state” (235), he also acknowledges that unanimity of feeling and action neither precludes nor contradicts antagonistic relations and uses of force. The buoyant political life of the valley is also structured by the Typees’ relations with their long-­standing enemies, the Happars, and their newer ones, the French and Americans. Indeed, if Tommo finds that his encounter with the islanders has been overdetermined by the theoretical imaginations of Hobbes and Rousseau, he also knows that the Typees’ encounter with him has been shaped by the imperial encroachments of Admiral Du Petit Thouars and Captain David Porter. Peace and good fellowship may rule the valley, but this is also owing to the warriors who wait with leveled spear at the passes and on the shore.

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By many a legendary tale of violence and wrong, as well as by events which have passed before their own eyes, these people have been taught to look upon white men with abhorrence. The cruel invasion of their country by Porter has alone furnished them with ample provocation; and I can sympathize in the spirit which prompts the Typee warrior to guard all the passes to his valley with the point of his leveled spear, and standing upon the beach with his back turned upon his green home, to hold at bay the intruding European. (240)

With this image of a warrior “standing upon the beach with his back turned upon his green home,” Melville may arrive at his most concise depiction yet of the paradox of democracy in the valley. Just as the Typee Valley is a verdant space of sensational pleasures, altered states of mind, and unparalleled experiences of buoyancy and elasticity, so it is also a verdant space of “tacit, common sense law” and “unanimity of feeling,” so it is also a verdant space of conflict in the ongoing imperial adventures of France and the United States. If Tommo cannot, in the end, depart the valley without taking part in Porter’s violence himself, this is because both he and the Typees are still playing out an ongoing history, one that he comes to feel as profoundly as he does the pleasures of buoyancy. Truth, as Tommo claims, may love to be centrally located between imagined extremes (241), but life is a paradox of constant inversion between vibrant, irreconcilable sensations and conditions. It is, in other words, the paradox of turning one’s back on one’s “green home” in order to face history.

2 Verdigris and Radical Democracy The picture of American society is, if I may put it this way, overlaid with a democratic patina beneath which we see from time to time the former colors of the aristocracy showing through. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America Chemically unstable, as much in painting as in dyeing, through all the centuries, [green] has been associated with all that is changing, changeable, and fleeting: childhood, love, hope, play, chance, money. It was only in the Romantic period that it definitively became the color of nature and thus of freedom, health, hygiene, sports, and ecology. Its history in the West is, in part, one of a reversal of values. Long unnoticed, disliked, or rejected, now it is entrusted with saving the planet. Michel Pastoureau, Green: The History of a Color

Radical, Grass-­Growing Democracy “That all-­pervading sensation which Rousseau has told us he at one time experienced” enables Tommo to enjoy a new feeling—­“the mere buoyant sense of a healthful physical existence” (T, 152)—­and a new understanding of what might found and animate life and community. But though it pervades all, this feeling can be neither generalized nor sustained outside of the Typee Valley and the “avowed interdependency” through which its people maintain their vitality and felicity.1 Five years after the publication of Typee, Melville revisited the sensation that he attributed to Rousseau in 1846, and in his 76

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most famous letter to Hawthorne, mocked it as a cliché of Romanticism popularized by the “votaries” of Goethe. As Melville ranges in his letter from his own avowal of “ruthless democracy” to his work on “the Whale” to his excurses on farming, writing, and literary fame, he confesses some suspicions about Goethe’s “ ‘all’ feeling.” But, as in the opening chapters of Typee, Melville’s digressions here prove instructive, reanimating central problems of Typee even as he distances himself from the book that made him famous as the “man who lived among the cannibals” (Corr., 193). Toward the close of the letter, Melville tells Hawthorne that he has tried to be philosophical “on this matter of Fame,” first reading in Solomon, and then turning to Goethe. But where Solomon’s words have become more legible to Melville in the years since his belated “development,” the maxims of Romantic philosophy have become less so: In reading some of Goethe’s sayings, so worshipped by his votaries, I came across this, “Live in the all.” That is to say, your separate identity is but a wretched one,—­good; but get out of yourself, spread and expand yourself, and bring to yourself the tinglings of life that are felt in the flowers and the woods, that are felt in the planets Saturn and Venus, and the Fixed Stars. What nonsense! Here is a fellow with a raging toothache. “My dear boy,” Goethe says to him, “you are sorely afflicted with that tooth; but you must live in the all, and then you will be happy!” As with all great genius, there is an immense deal of flummery in Goethe, and in proportion to my own contact with him, a monstrous deal in me. (Corr., 193–­94)

The pain that weighed Tommo down in self-­absorbed anxiety amid the buoyant good feelings of the valley migrates from leg to tooth to become a joke that Melville turns on Goethe and himself. If a toothache can overpower any “tinglings of life that are felt in the flowers and the woods,” then Tommo’s trajectory from the gravitational pull of the suffering “I” toward the buoyancy of the “all” is easily reversed, since pain, in Branka Arsić’s words, “gathers together the formless and separates it from everything else.”2 But if Melville inverts and even mocks one of Typee’s central insights as “flummery,” he does not abandon the possibilities of the “all” in this letter. Instead, he dismisses the notion that this is a feeling that some “you” (or some “I”) can simply achieve, and he rejects it as a permanent, universal

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sensation. As Michael Jonik notes, Melville admits “the possibility of losing oneself in the all, yet he shrinks back before positing this as an eternal or universal transformation.”3 In his vivid postscript to the letter, Melville both amends and extends his initial assessment of the “ ‘all’ feeling”: N.B. This “all” feeling, though, there is some truth in it. You must often have felt it, lying in the grass on a warm summer’s day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the all feeling. But what plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon a universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion. (Corr., 194)

If there is “some truth” in the feeling of the “all” that turns your legs into roots and your hair into leaves, that truth lies in the transience of the feeling, rather than its “universal application” as a permanent state. To feel the “all” is to feel that impermanence and dissolution. In this sense, there is truth in flummery: like the airy, whipped confection of that name, the sensation of a fleeting and evanescent pleasure can be a delicious nothing and a taste of plenitude at once. Melville takes his jokes seriously, so read in the context of his concession earlier in the letter that his “ruthless democracy” is actually “ludicrous,” the flummery with which he charges both Goethe and himself here takes on more substantial—­and more overtly political—­meaning. If “truth is the silliest thing under the sun,” then what is ludicrous in democracy and nonsensical in a “temporary feeling” does not undermine these beliefs and sensations so much as indicate their paradoxical importance. The assertion of his ruthless democracy, the complaint that “dollars damn” him and make “botches” of his books, the account of the tortured composition of “the Whale,” the assessment of the reputation that Typee has left him, the narrative of his own belated “development,” and the charge of flummery leveled at Goethe and himself: each of these famous statements has been singled out from Melville’s “meandering” assessment of his mind, his writing, and his fame in his May 1851 letter. But when read for the through-­lines that link his “ruthless democracy” to the temporary truth of the “all-­feeling,” this letter narrates Melville’s thinking on the relation between writing and democracy, as well as on the “I” and the “all,” in the years between Typee and Moby-­Dick. Throughout this letter there runs a figurative

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motif of grass that grows to greenness, goes to seed, and grows again. In this, Melville’s letter pursues the problem of democracy’s paradoxical, even ludicrous, meaning well after he claims to put the “endless sermon” to rest, placing that sermon at the center of his work, his philosophy, and his aesthetic practice. Shifting into a vegetable idiom, Melville’s letter reveals that “ruthless democracy” is a process that is true and ludicrous, personal and impersonal, organic and artificial. Through the green grass that grows throughout the letter, bringing with it a series of sensations that relay between the “I” and the “all,” biography becomes botany. Each of Melville’s invocations of grass hinges on what the individual “I” can and cannot feel, know, or own. Lamenting the distractions of family and farm that pull him out of “the Whale,” he longs for the very mood of grass: “The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-­growing mood in which a man ought always to compose—­that, I fear, can never be mine” (191). Noting that he had “no development at all” before his twenty-­fifth year, he insists that he is now becoming a plant: “I am like one of those seeds taken out of the Egyptian pyramids, which, after being three thousand years a seed and nothing but a seed, being planted in English soil, grew to greenness, and then fell to mould. So I” (193). And finally, when he concedes some truth in the flummery of the all-­feeling in his postscript, he begins to sprout and take root: “Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth” (194). Hoping to make the “silent grass-­growing mood” his own, he turns grassy, becoming a seed that sprouts, “grows to greenness,” and goes to seed, only to lay himself down in the grass, sprout once again, and concede some truth to Goethe. In this way, the grass that winds its way through the disparate claims of this letter models a process of sustaining transformation that Melville cannot fully claim or direct, even as it is peculiar and particular to him. The “I” and the “all” dissolve into each other and then separate; truth becomes ludicrous as flummery becomes truth; and a suspect universalism disappears into a series of fleeting experiences of totality. Call it “ruthless democracy,” the “all-­feeling,” or ludicrous flummery, this process conforms to the mode of being that Melville first articulates in Typee and resumes in Pierre, as he continues to link abundant vegetal life with the actions that declare and secure particular truths and ludicrous sensations

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over and over again. For all of the grass that sprouts, grows to greenness, and goes to seed in this letter, Melville makes an equally forceful appeal here for the work that remains necessary to life, politics, and art—­work that includes endless sermons on equality, botched books, and reveries in the grass on warm summer days. Such work accompanies the process of vegetable life, in part because the aesthetic and political tasks that are necessary to “ruthless democracy” are endless. “Ruthless democracy” involves a process that is recurrent and self-­organizing, like the growth and going-­to-­seed of grass, but it demands the constant effort of a “never-­ending sermon” because there is no final action or assertion that can fix equality on a permanent foundation even as the equality of lives and “personages” manifests itself everywhere. In this, Melville’s “ruthless democracy” captures the transient quality of democracy that Sheldon Wolin calls “fugitive,” that Bonnie Honig aligns with “emergence,” and that William Connolly describes as a politics of “becoming” which disrupts the opposition between natural force and human agency.4 For Wolin, Honig, and Connolly, attention to the transience of democracy, its rarity and fragility, is fundamental to a radical theory of democracy as (in Wolin’s words) “a form of being which is conditioned by bitter experience [and] doomed to succeed only temporarily.”5 In this chapter I argue that Pierre, perhaps more than any other of Melville’s works, is the narrative of “ruthless democracy” as just such a bitter, doomed, transient “form of being.” Although this letter to Hawthorne is usually read for its insights into Melville’s final work on his “Whale,” its vegetable idiom and notion of democracy as unconditional, yet fungible and fleeting, also serve to link Typee to Pierre in one common inquiry into the ruthless life, work, and color of democracy. Pierre’s Book I employs the same verdant palette that this letter shares with Typee to paint the “green and golden world” in which Pierre Glendinning will emerge as “a thorough-­ going Democrat in time; perhaps a little too Radical altogether for your tastes” (P, 13). Pronouncing Pierre both a “thorough-­going” and “Radical” democrat after gleefully knocking him off the family pedestal, the narrator is clearly mocking his protagonist, but he also invites the reader to take him at his word. To find Pierre “a little too Radical” is literally to understand that his democratic principles are both extreme and perfectly natural because they are “of, belonging to, or from roots; fundamental to or inherent in the

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natural processes of life.”6 Indeed, like Melville lying in the grass on a warm summer day, Pierre is both root and sprout in a ruthless democratic process that fuels the narrative: “In the country then Nature planted our Pierre; because Nature intended a rare and original development in Pierre” (13). Playing on the dual political and botanical meanings of “radical,” Melville sets Pierre in motion with the democratic principle that he describes in his letter to Hawthorne and then pursues it to its extremest end. For many critics, that end looks like abject failure. Confronted with an illegitimate and beautiful half-­sister, whose very existence threatens the Glendinnings’ claim to aristocratic legitimacy and authority, this account goes, Pierre fails because he seeks to preserve the good name of his family on the one hand while undermining the foundation of all law in his violation of the incest taboo on the other.7 In such readings, Pierre is at once insufficiently radical and “a little too Radical altogether” precisely because he is too rooted to family—­too loyal to the Glendinning name and too attracted to his half-­sister. But does Pierre—­and with him a particular vision of radical democracy—­really fail in this novel? In what follows, I propose to read the radical democracy of Pierre as a process that cannot be understood through Pierre’s actions and decisions alone because it is not contained by the thematics of the novel’s incest plot. At once “ruthless” and “radical,” democracy is a process that is self-­organizing as well as artful, and it entails Pierre in the endless and ludicrous work of asserting something that is fundamental, transient, natural, and extreme all at once. Such work both requires and exceeds individual capacities like acting and deciding, but rather than annihilating political agency, it demands other ways of thinking about political terms such as deliberation, decision, and action. Indeed, from the novel’s first pages, the narrator cautions that a really radical democracy involves a creative interaction of human work with natural processes: For indeed the democratic element operates as a subtile [sic] acid among us, forever producing new things by corroding the old, as in the south of France, verdigris, the primitive material of one kind of green paint, is produced by grape-­v inegar poured upon copper plates. Now in general, nothing can be more significant of decay than the idea of corrosion, yet on the other hand, nothing can more vividly suggest the luxuriance of life than the idea of green, as a color, for green is the peculiar signet of

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all-­fertile Nature herself. Herein by apt analogy we behold the marked anomalousness of America, whose character abroad, we need not be surprised, is misconceived, when we consider how strangely she contradicts all prior notions of human things; and how wonderfully to her, Death itself becomes transmuted into Life. (9)

Often read as derisive of democracy—­a bitter joke on the corrosion of nature’s nation into aristocratic artifice8—­this passage instead performs one of Melville’s most “radical” political and aesthetic visions. Is the chemical process by which verdigris forms the basis of a paint that approximates a “signet” of nature a natural one? Then who pours the vinegar? Is it then an artificial one? Then how to account for the way it “contradicts all prior notions of human things”? Breaking down “the luxuriance of life” into a chemical reaction that is both natural and artificial, the passage dissolves such distinctions. The democratic process described here is ruthless in its transformations of nature into artifice, of life into death, and of the very agents of such transformations (vinegar, nature, democracy, aristocracy) into transformed things and substances themselves. As a descriptor of democracy, Dominic Mastroianni argues, this passage yields a vision of a permanent revolution rather than a founded state.9 But the “democratic element” does more here than “transmute” social and political forms; it corrodes ontological distinctions. And alongside the transformative process that the passage describes, there is the one that it performs: the elaboration of an analogy between democracy and the color green that implicates both of these in the transformative effects of figuration. Put another way, this passage pushes its analogy so far that the very relationship on which analogy relies—­where the production of green paint stands as a figure for the process of democracy—­ breaks down and the two terms assume something like ontological parity. Democracy no longer simply has a color, as it did in Typee. In Pierre, color has politics. In recent years, criticism on Pierre has taken something of an ontological turn attuned to such parities and inversions, with scholars such as William Spanos, Michael Snediker, Dom Mastroianni, and Michael Jonik pushing back against earlier accounts of Pierre’s many failures as a subject of history, politics, and aesthetic labor. Focusing on Pierre’s emergence from a hegemonic subject position (Spanos), his experience of revolutionary passivity

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(Mastroianni), his existence as an essentially stylistic being (Snediker), and his transformation into an inhuman and stony materiality (Jonik), these critics have overturned the morbid readings of Pierre as a failed novel about failure by highlighting its most extreme revisions of life and personhood.10 My claims for Pierre align with such critical aims while also taking seriously the narrator’s insistence on Pierre’s radical democracy. But the idea of democracy that I track in Pierre is a process that cannot be read thematically because it does not come from the acts or decisions of presupposed subjects. Instead, it proceeds from the novel’s combination of natural cycles with creative acts, and in this it cannot be grasped without an account of art, action, and work, in which human agents, natural processes, and aesthetic forms are all implicated. Nature does the work of cultivation by “planting” Pierre like a seed in the country (13); flowers, trees, and grasses become “conscious of [their] own profound mystery” (3); and the materials of art—­figures and analogies, colors and tones—­are constantly performing both aesthetic and political labor. In a novel in which plants, chemicals, colors, and analogies all assume such capacities, I argue, any account of democracy demands very close attention to Pierre’s strangest aesthetic experiments.11 In what follows, I pursue an unusual path toward a reading of radical democracy in Melville’s novel by focusing more attention on his engagement with the visual theories of Johann W. von Goethe and John Ruskin and the paintings of J. M. W. Turner than on his many references to political theory and philosophy. Many scholars have examined the primacy of painting in Pierre—­ specifically, the novel’s references to landscape painting and the pivotal roles played by several portraits—­but few have studied Melville’s debt to visual theory and, moreover, the surprising political insights that Melville draws from Romantic color theory. Melville turns to visual theory, I argue, in order to experiment in writing with color and tone as aesthetic forms that are particularly sensitive to the range of creative agencies that emerge between opposing qualities. In experimenting with the aesthetic possibilities of tonal polarity, I argue, Melville’s Pierre takes up what William Connolly has described as the most radical of political challenges: the novel combines “an enhanced sensitivity to non-­human processes” and a range of creative agencies with a “militant democratic politics.”12

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Goethe’s Revolution and Melville’s Theory of Colors The “verdant trance” (P, 3) into which Pierre Glendinning emerges in the opening paragraphs of Pierre would seem to be as far from the “verdant recess” (T, 39) into which Tommo plunges as the Hudson Valley is from the Valley of the Typees. Where Typee opens with a craving for lush vegetation that is mocked by the “sickly hue” of a painted bulwark, Pierre opens onto a vision of “a green and golden world” that is so still it can only be pictured as a perverse landscape painting: “Not a flower stirs; the trees forget to wave; the grass itself seems to forget to grow” (3).13 Throughout Typee, green is something that Tommo wants to taste and smell, something in which he can bathe himself, as he seeks a somatic basis for the paradox of political beginnings in the temporal plurality of revolution, colonialism, nature, and history. When Typee’s “verdant recess” becomes Pierre’s “verdant trance,” the living landscape slows to stillness and becomes two-­dimensional, coated all over in the Dolly’s “sickly hue.” Indeed, Pierre’s narrator insists, this is a landscape painted in “verdigris, the primitive material of one kind of green paint,” produced by a chemical process of corrosion to yield “the peculiar signet of all-­fertile Nature herself ” (9). With Melville’s 1852 return to a palette of greens both vegetable and chemical, he resumes all of the paradoxes and inversions, perspectival shifts and incommensurable sensations that characterize Typee, but he changes the tone, quality, and capacity of his colors. Melville attributed a form and body to color in 1846—­the greens of Typee have taste, texture, and sounds all their own. In 1852, they have all that and a strange capacity for action, too. From the “trancelike aspect of the green and golden world” (3) to the production of verdigris that tells the history of aristocracy and democracy in America (9), the greens of Pierre’s Book I open the narrative, slow it to stillness, and then accelerate it. Color emerges immediately in the novel as a narrative force bound up with the forces of history, desire, kinship, and nature, all of which propel and impede young Pierre at the same time. Put another way, the greens of Pierre exhibit all the “dynamic flow of life and action” that Goethe attributes to color in his Farbenlehre (1810).14 Melville’s interest in Goethe prior to his 1851 letter to Hawthorne has been well documented, with two scholars in particular establishing the influence

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that Goethe’s color theory had on Moby-­Dick. Zur Farbenlehre was translated in abridged form as Theory of Colours by Charles Lock Eastlake in 1840 and widely read in the United States. Robert Wallace has shown that Melville almost certainly read excerpts from Eastlake’s translation in Boston in early 1849, a period of his deepening interest in the science of color—­its dependency on qualities like light and matter as well as its historical function and moral associations.15 As Wallace argues, just as J. M. W. Turner responded both implicitly and explicitly to Goethe’s Farbenlehre in his canvases from the early 1840s, so Melville began to engage with Goethe indirectly in Redburn and White-­Jacket, offering his most “explicit response” to Goethe’s theory in “The Whiteness of the Whale.”16 Wallace moves through that chapter sentence by sentence to show how each of Melville’s postulates and queries about whiteness cites and responds to the theories of Aristotle, Leonardo, Ruskin, and Goethe to lay a “white ground” for the novel that is at once no color and all color, a blinding light and a degree of darkness.17 Michaela Giesenkirchen expands on Wallace’s account of Melville’s studies in Goethe to show how Melville also engaged Goethe’s theory throughout Moby-­Dick’s elaboration of analogies between nature and mind.18 She argues that Melville entertains Goethe’s attempt to forge a “symbolist method” through color theory, in which nature could be read as an “in-­itself symbolic system,” and he carries that method to its logical end in the convergence of all epistemological categories at the “vanishing point” of whiteness.19 With this, Giesenkirchen argues, Melville ultimately rejects the transcendental promise of Goethe’s color theory, just as he had mocked the “all-­feeling” in his letter to Hawthorne.20 But if Giesenkirchen is correct and Melville’s experiments with Goethe’s color theory do replicate his engagement with the “all-­feeling” in his 1851 letter, then Melville’s postscript to that letter becomes all the more significant. As Melville’s nota bene revisits and revises the possibilities of Goethe’s “all” by grounding it (pun intended) in the transient feeling of growing leaves and roots to become grass, so his engagements with color theory after Moby-­Dick reassess the possibilities of Goethe’s work to emphasize color’s materiality—­its forms, sensations, and actions—­a long with its history. Rather than the culmination of Melville’s thinking through and with color, that is, “The Whiteness of the Whale” is best read as a climactic

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chapter in four decades of such thinking, which begins in Typee with a craving hunger for some “green thing” and ends with the rainbow that spreads over the opening lines of Billy Budd ’s twenty-­first chapter as an image of the ineffable made visible. Indeed, the first two books of Pierre show Melville responding to Goethe’s theory at least as explicitly as he did in chapter 42 of Moby-­Dick, pursuing the aesthetic and metaphysical implications of color theory into questions of democracy and revolution, romance and history as Melville develops his own theory of colors.

In considering Melville’s long response to Goethe, it is important to note that the Farbenlehre begins where much of Melville’s own work does—­w ith the French Revolution. In the preface to the complete 1810 edition (which Eastlake included), Goethe argues that the theory of color advanced by Newton had attained such ascendancy that it “impeded a free inquiry into the phenomenon of color.” So fully had Newton and his adherents propagated the theory that color is an objective property of light, each hue having its own distinct ray without regard to observer or tone, that even though this theory could not give an adequate account of color, it “still retains a traditional authority.” To explain how vital it is that “the old errors must be cleared away,” Goethe continues, “a sort of allegory in a lighter style” is called for.21 Goethe describes Newton’s theory as an old, decaying fortress, one so continually altered, enlarged, and secured against attack by the heirs of the man who built it that it had at last “become uninhabitable.”22 But the prismatic theory is not just any “deserted piece of antiquity” in this allegory. It represents such “aristocratic presumption” and “intolerable arrogance” that the initial metaphor of an uninhabitable castle is insufficient. Newton’s theory, Goethe concludes, is nothing less than the Bastille. It must be dismantled, stone by stone, and overthrown like the ancièn régime: Should we succeed, by a cheerful application of all possible ability and dexterity, in razing this Bastille, and in gaining a free space, it is thus by no means intended at once to cover the site again and to encumber it with a new structure; we propose rather to make use of this area for the purpose of passing in review a pleasing and varied series of illustrative figures.23

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As Goethe sets out (cheerfully!) to tear down Newton’s Bastille, he makes no claims to erect another fortress in its place. His revolutionary theory, he insists, is a clearing rather than a structure. It opens a space where “pleasing and varied” figures might play out before anyone who wishes to look. Where Newton erected a theoretical fortress that relegated color to the status of a secondary effect and made its observer almost irrelevant, Goethe proposes to “restore [color] to the general dynamic flow of life and action which the present age loves to recognize in nature.”24 The politics of Goethe’s Theory of Colours are revolutionary, then, both because the book begins with the deliberate dismantling of a fortification whose only claim to authority was “aristocratic presumption” and because Goethe installs nothing in place of that structure but a vibrant procession that shows nature in action. Goethe’s theory does the work that allows color’s natural processes to “flow.” Goethe’s full polemic with Newton is so extensive (taking up part 2 of his three-­part study), that Eastlake omitted it from his 1840 translation. As John Gage notes, it largely targets Newton’s attempt to “put the study of light and color on an objective, quantitative basis.”25 In Newton’s prismatic scale, all colors are unmixed effects of refraction, which excludes tones of light and dark that appear within particular hues, as well as all observations of color that can be attributed to the physiology of the eye or to the imagination of an observer.26 To remedy what he saw as Newton’s errors and omissions, Goethe proposes in part 1 of his Farbenlehre three distinct classes, or “exhibitions,” of color, all of which emphasize its corporeal and material properties: the physiological colors that derive from the action and reaction of the eye, the physical colors that can be perceived through otherwise colorless media, and the chemical colors that belong to particular substances.27 In asserting color’s triple materiality—­restoring to color its forms while reattaching it to the sensations of the body—­Goethe inverts the optical theories that dominated the seventeenth century, which Gage calls “the century of light par excellence when color had finally been relegated to a derivative, subordinate position.”28 Instead, Goethe insists on color as an ontologically primary form with peculiar actions and processes proper to it: “colour is an elementary phenomenon in nature, which . . . exhibits itself by separation and contrast, by commixture and union, by augmentation and neutralization, by communication and dissolution.”29 In thus asserting color’s capacity

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to exhibit itself and act in ways specific to it, Goethe further argues that its mutability is not a sign of its fallibility or artifice, but the force of nature itself, because “a progressive, augmenting, mutable quality, a quality that admits of alteration even to inversion, is not fallacious, but rather calculated to bring to light the most delicate operations of nature.”30 Goethe thus uses the “free space” that he clears from the wreckage of Newton’s Bastille to let color exhibit its peculiar activities: alteration, cooperation, combination, augmentation. In Goethe’s account, the physiological colors are the most unstable and transient because they appear through the action and reaction of the eye, which can make colors suddenly appear in otherwise colorless objects, like “black letters which in the evening light appear red.”31 Physical colors are at once more permanent and more passive than physiological colors, appearing as “acts of light” in a cooperative relationship that gives color “extraordinary beauty and force.” Light is thus “the cooperative cause” of color, “its basis or ground,” but it is also indefinite and general, where “color is at all times specific, characteristic, significant.” The “definite nature of color,” he argues, is most apparent in its chemical exhibitions, “where we can securely pronounce them as permanent and inherent in bodies.”32 But if color is most defined in chemical exhibitions, Goethe argues that its “specific, characteristic, significant” quality is nonetheless present in all three classes because color is always “determined towards one of two sides . . . which we may fitly designate by the expressions plus and minus”: Plus. Minus. Yellow. Blue. Action. Negation. Light. Shadow. Brightness. Darkness. Force. Weakness. Warmth. Coldness. Proximity. Distance. Repulsion. Attraction. Affinity with acids. Affinity with alkalis.33

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The tonal polarity of color, its appearance through modifications of lightness and darkness, “plus” and “minus,” is the “Urphänomen” of Goethe’s theory, the basic principle from which all the qualities of color might be derived.34 Placing yellow and blue at the tonal extremes of his spectrum, rather than white and black, Goethe not only derives all colors from color, but all of its actions, sensations, and associations, too. Darkness has a color in his theory (blue) as do action, force, and repulsion (yellow). What is more, these poles don’t simply neutralize each other or stand locked in opposition but interact in various ways to produce the full chromatic spectrum in all of its exhibitions. “If these specific, contrasted principles are combined,” he claims, “the respective qualities do not therefore destroy each other.” Instead, they unite and balance so that they sometimes appear “as a quality by itself in which we no longer think of combination. This union we call green.”35 If the tonal poles of yellow and blue can unite in harmonious combination to produce green, they can also achieve an even “more perfect” result through augmentation, the process through which yellow and blue intensify to their deepest respective hues, forming at the junction of their augmented extremes the purest red, which Goethe calls “purpur” for its nobility.36 Goethe’s theory reduces the number of primary colors from three to two (he claims that purpur, or pure red, is erroneously understood as a primary color) and derives from the polarity of yellow and blue a variety of actions that require no external forces or agents. That is, by union, combination, intensification, augmentation, mutation, and inversion, color essentially acts by itself to produce physical, emotional, moral, and even historical effects.37 To read the opening chapters of Pierre for their colors is to see Goethe’s polarity in its narrative effects as well. In the first two books of Pierre alone, green and purple, yellow and blue show themselves in all their exhibitions and actions. Green clearly dominates the early pages, as golden light touches the “enkindled” eye of young Pierre and lays a “verdant trance” upon Saddle Meadows (3), the history of which the narrator paints in a chemical verdigris (9). But the full debt that Melville’s greens owe to Goethe’s theory becomes obvious when Lucy Tartan appears for her date with Pierre in Book II—­“Love, Delight, and Alarm”—­as a study in yellow and blue. Pierre’s beloved is the color of color itself:

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Wondrous fair of face, blue-­eyed, and golden-­haired, the bright blonde, Lucy, was arrayed in colors harmonious with the heavens. Light blue be thy perpetual color, Lucy; light blue becomes thee best—­such the repeated azure council of Lucy Tartan’s mother. (33)

Embodying a Teutonic racial archetype and tonal polarity at once, Lucy emerges as the living effect of her polar coloring. To describe “who Lucy Tartan was” (23), the narrator first offers up a rainbow blazon of yellow hair, white teeth, blue eyes, and skin “tinted with the most delicate white and red,” all of which combine into a queenly and imperial beauty that prompts the narrator into a digression on female sovereignty (24). Such reflections, he admits, are rather out of keeping with the character of a quiet, humble girl who “hath floated as stilly through this life as thistle downs over meadows” (25), but the intensity of Lucy’s coloring carries the narrative into the imperial realms of Goethe’s purpur. Lucy’s mother is also keenly aware of color’s power, as her “repeated azure council” suggests. Indeed, Mrs. Tartan gives sartorial advice in the very shade of her perpetual matchmaking, which “burn[s] blue and bright” like the flame of a “Lucifer” match, the narrator puns, though it has also “kindled the matrimonial blues in certain dissatisfied gentlemen’s breasts” (33). Attired in blue and lit by her mother’s blue flame, the blue-­eyed Lucy is saturated in the negative hues of coolness, weakness, and attraction, while the yellows of her golden hair bring warmth and brightness—­a long with the capacity to generate all other colors, too. “This may seem rather irregular sort of writing,” the narrator confesses, “but whither indeed should Lucy Tartan conduct us . . . ?” (25). As it turns out, irregular writing is pretty basic color theory. If Lucy’s beauty and character emerge through the carefully managed effects of color’s agency, so too does her romance with Pierre. The story of Pierre and Lucy’s love has little in the way of plot to it, but it provides a solid primer in Goethe’s polarities, their exhibitions, and a few of their psychic effects—­ specifically, love, delight, and alarm. Partly plotted by her matchmaking mother and partly the fated tendency of “two Platonic particles” (33), the romance between Lucy and Pierre may be the perfect product of natural affection and deliberate design, but tonal polarity nevertheless has a cruel joke to play on them. From the moment Lucy’s tones are introduced, yellow

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and blue get busy, intensifying, uniting, and transporting the lovers through such extremities of feeling that the narrator’s prose races and strains to keep up. As the lovers sink into each other’s eyes, hummingbirds paint lily-­leaves with peach juice (33–­34). As Lucy and Pierre ride through Saddle Meadows in the family phaeton (built long ago for “the mildest-­hearted and most blue-­eyed” killer in the world [30]), her heavenly colors combine with the atmosphere to form a green that is “variously shaded” and ubiquitous, redundantly coloring everything in the landscape: “Overgrown with verdure,” the “green slopings” of the distant hills show the “vividest green, betokening . . . the greenest bounty of this earth . . . making green and glad many a humble mortal’s breast” (35). And yet, for all this peach juice and green gladness, blue remains the dominant hue of Book II. It is the color of the lovers’ intense attraction—­Pierre’s “mad, unbridled merriment,” Lucy’s “extreme love” (35)—­but also of the shadows, distance, and coldness that alters the mood and alarms the two lovers by chapter’s end—­“Something seizes me,” Pierre says as Lucy weeps. “I feel icy cold and hard” (37). Even before the mysterious face appears to Lucy and fills her with “nameless sadness,” the chapter has turned blue, and she and Pierre have learned the hard lesson of colors that, Goethe argues, “are immediately associated with the emotions of the mind.”38 As the blue of Lucy’s eyes draws Pierre deeper and deeper into “veritable seas,” it exhibits all three of Goethe’s classes of color at once: blue resides in the physiology of the eye, it mirrors the physical modifications that atmosphere makes to light, and it inheres in chemical substance. Exhibiting three discrete material forms at once, blue transports Pierre and Lucy through their extremest sensations yet. Now, reckless of his horses, with both arms holding Lucy in his embrace, like a Sicilian diver he dives deep down in the Adriatic of her eyes, and brings up some king’s cup of joy. And as if, like veritable seas, they did indeed catch the reflected irradiations of that pellucid morning; in Lucy’s eyes, there seemed to shine all the blue glory of the general day, and all the sweet inscrutableness of the sky. And certainly, the blue eye of a woman, like the sea, is not uninfluenced by the atmosphere. Only in the open air of some divinest summer day, will you see its ultramarine,—­its fluid lapis lazuli. Then would Pierre burst forth in

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some screaming shout of joy; and the striped tigers of his chestnut eyes leaped in their lashed cages with fierce delight. Lucy shrank from him in extreme love; for the extremest form of love, is Fear and Wonder. (35)

Lucy’s azure eyes seem at first to be the most potent force in the chapter. Samuel Otter suggests that this is because they are “the living embodiment” of a landscape that “rises up and embraces [Pierre] in the form of an inordinate, geomorphic angel.” (Little wonder Pierre screams and Lucy shrinks.) In such surreal transports, Otter argues, Melville maps the extremities of sentiment at the limits of verbal and pictorial representation, “straining” the novel’s optics until its landscape tilts.39 What further enables such straining and tilting, I would simply add, is Melville’s mobilization in this passage of the peculiar capacities of color to exceed even the strange agency of the eye. Color doesn’t only reside in the eye in “Love, Delight, and Alarm.” Here, blue seeps out of the pool of the eye and into the atmosphere, which then reflects back to both eyes and oceans the truest and purest of chemical blues, a “fluid lapis lazuli.”40 In this, color takes on a life of its own, emerging from Melville’s strange optics as a cooperative cause that acts alongside bodily functions, natural forces, and aesthetic systems. The colors of “Love, Delight, and Alarm”—­and of Pierre in general—­don’t belong solely to eyes, bodies, attire, landscape, minds, paintings, or prose but instead relay between all of these in a dynamic process that drives and transforms the work of the narrative itself. To be clear, my claim here is not that Pierre can be read as something like applied color theory, nor do I mean to insist that color is the dominant aesthetic strain that governs the ridiculously intricate literary experiment that is Melville’s seventh novel. Instead, in tracing Melville’s engagement with Goethe’s theories on the materiality, polarity, and agency of colors, I want to highlight the way in which Melville’s colors both emerge from and reflect back on the process of the narrative itself. Color cooperates with prose to accomplish some of Pierre’s stranger narrative feats, from Book I’s halts and accelerations to Book II’s phaeton ride through the extremities of lovers’ moods. In this, Melville uses color to introduce a peculiar set of actions and other seats of agency into a narrative in which acts originate almost everywhere but with human persons. In Book I, chemical color works alongside

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the mutations of analogy to yield some of the novel’s most complex, almost inarticulable connections between nature, art, family, property, history, and revolution. In Book II, tonal polarities collaborate with verbal excesses to dislodge Lucy and Pierre from the center of their own romance plot. Taken together, these colors introduce into Pierre impersonal agencies that cannot be described in terms of the natural or the artificial, the human or the nonhuman, and yet they participate in an aesthetic process that moves freely between all of these. Gloom and Light, Tone and Form: Turner, Ruskin, and Pierre’s Polarity Melville converts Goethe’s chemical colors and tonal polarities into narrative agents in Pierre, and in this he pursues in prose fiction something very like what J. M. W. Turner undertook in two of his late paintings, Shade and Darkness—­The Evening of the Deluge and Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory)—­ The Morning after the Deluge—­Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (Figures 1 and 2). Described by John Gage as “the purest essay in practical theory that Turner ever made,” the paired Deluge paintings constitute the artist’s full response to Eastlake’s 1840 translation of Goethe’s Farbenlehre.41 According to Gage, Turner’s reaction to Goethe’s theory was complex. He was particularly taken with Goethe’s table of polarities and the claim that “colour, unlike light, was ‘at all times specific, characteristic, significant,’ ” but he also emphasized two of his own terms, writing “light and shade” in the margins of his copy next to the table.42 Viewed together as a single response to Goethe’s theory of polarity, the two canvases would seem to fit neatly into Goethe’s table, with the deep blue-­blacks and prone figures of Shade and Darkness under the negative column and the brilliant yellow-­reds, iridescent bubbles, and prophetic Moses figure of Light and Color under the positive column. But the relationship of the paintings to Goethe’s theory is by no means so straightforward. Noting that only the second painting names Goethe’s theory explicitly, Gage argues that the paintings are better regarded as a “visual rejoinder” to Goethe’s emphasis on light over darkness, which he defined as the absence of light.43 Indeed, when viewed in narrative order, the two paintings don’t fit into Goethe’s table so much as they reverse the sequence it imposes, placing Shade and Darkness before Light

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and Color to show that dark is neither the negation nor the absence of light but its precursor and equal in significance, substance, and specificity.44 If Goethe’s main provocation was in his rejection of Newton’s claim that all color derived from white light and his assertion that color was both primary and substantive, then part of Turner’s reply to him lies in the reassertion of darkness as equally material and substantial. In this, the Deluge paintings function as illustration, allegory, and argument all at once, less an application of Goethe’s theory than a transformation of it into a visual form that extends and expands it. But beyond Turner’s assertion that darkness is light’s substantial equal, the Deluge paintings also incorporate Goethe’s claims about the agencies

Figure 1. Shade and Darkness—­The Evening of the Deluge, exhibited 1843, Joseph Mallord William Turner. Turner Bequest, 1856. Photo: Tate.

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of color into the thematic depiction of the Flood and Covenant. Central to these paintings is a dense and layered referentiality that blurs the distinction between aesthetic theory, scriptural theme, and verbal and visual forms. With his long, multipart titles, Turner asserts that color, tone, and Goethe’s theory are as much the subjects of the two paintings as the Flood and the postdiluvian Covenant are, making it impossible to say whether Turner is using light, shade, and color to paint Moses or using Moses to paint light, shade, and color. The titles clearly foreground tone and hue, but they also promise that these will disclose both biblical narrative and Goethe’s theory. Peering into darkness and shade, Turner invites the viewer to see through it and discern both the chaos of the coming flood and the small human and

Figure 2. Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory)—­The Morning After the Deluge—­Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, exhibited 1843, Joseph Mallord William Turner. Turner Bequest, 1856. Photo: Tate.

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animal figures at the bottom about to be submerged or saved. In Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory), the figure of Moses is minuscule and shrouded in fog as he sits above a bright and foaming sea that bubbles with iridescent human heads. Where the human and animal figures are obscured by darkness, fog, and reflected light, their colors and tones come to dominate as the painting’s explicit content. That is, what both paintings show most vividly is light, shade, and color as actors in both biblical narrative and visual theory. Writing on the relationship of Turner’s two sources, Gerald Finley argues that Turner brings the Farbenlehre and the story of the Flood together through a common theme of cyclical, nonteleological transformation. Arguing that the Deluge paintings depict a cycle of “permanence in change,” Finley suggests that Turner registers that process both scientifically and theologically in the rainbows that appear on the surfaces of the bubbles in Light and Color (rather than arcing through the sky) as the symbol of a fragile, transient covenant. Light, darkness, and color assume representational priority in the paintings, Finley argues, because they “illustrate [the] process not permanence” of natural phenomena and divine covenants alike.45 But in Finley’s account, this process is strictly representational: light and color function as figures illustrative of a process of natural and theological transformation external to the paintings and to which they refer. Light and color, shade and darkness certainly take on representational functions in Turner’s Deluge paintings, but they do not do so at the expense of their formal function. In other words, if color and light illustrate a “process” as Finley claims, that process must also be understood to include the one by which they come to illustrate it—­the formal means by which painted canvas comes to register biblical exegesis and aesthetic theory. As he often did, Turner exhibited both paintings with his own verses, and in the lines he placed under the title of Light and Color (Goethe’s Theory), he describes a process of returning to form that further complicates the paintings’ blending of aesthetic abstraction with thematic representation: The ark stood firm on Ararat; th’ returning sun Exhaled earth’s humid bubbles, and emulous of light, Reflected her lost forms, each in prismatic guise Hope’s harbinger, ephemeral as the summer fly Which rises, flits, expands and dies.

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God and Moses are both absent from these lines, which come from Turner’s manuscript poem “Fallacies of Hope,” but as “th’ returning sun / Exhaled earth’s humid bubbles” in a flood of light, so the emergence of form itself stands at the center of the paintings’ narrative. In Turner’s verses, the light and color that are also the media of the painter’s art restore “lost forms” in reflections that become both material and ephemeral. If Turner gives substance to darkness in the Deluge paintings, then he also asserts the form of painting itself as a reflection of lost forms on the surfaces of “humid bubbles.” As Gage argues, the “relationship of the two designs is not one of optimism and pessimism” but one of bubbles, seen as both the exhalations of “the waterlogged world” and “the emblems of fallacious hope.”46 Indeed, both paintings are composed as giant bubbles: originally exhibited in octagonal frames, each one is dominated by a large circle, inside of which water and air churn out additional circular forms where light, darkness, and color all take on shape and substance. Bubbles thus register the evanescent substance of shade and darkness, color and light at the same time they resist both the teleological narrative of the Flood and Covenant and the presumptive affects—­pessimism and optimism—­that attach to hues and tones. In this, Turner’s paired paintings have as much to say about the ambiguities of tone—­understood as light, shade, quality, and attitude all at once—­as they do about the substance and polarity of color. With the chromatic and tonal experiments of the Deluge paintings in mind, one might be forgiven for mistaking the title of Pierre’s Book IX for that of a late, forgotten Turner. Like Shade and Darkness and Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory), “More Light, and the Gloom of that Light—­More Gloom, and the Light of that Gloom” announces itself explicitly as a study in light, shadow, and visual theory. For a chapter with a pivotal narrative function—­it spans the long night of Pierre’s deliberations before his “unprecedented final resolution” to assume the role of Isabel’s husband—­Book IX bears a title that is excessively opaque. Literally, it describes the opacity that results when excesses of illumination and obscurity are reciprocally related to one another through the verbal mirror of a chiasmatic construction. Where Turner’s Deluge paintings substantiate darkness and thematize color and tone through a paired set of giant bubble-­fi lled bubbles, the title of Pierre’s Book IX combines chiasmus with tautology to suggest that light

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and gloom feed and fuel each other without end—­w ithout, that is, either termination or clear point. There is good reason to read Book IX’s title as a nod to Turner’s titles. As Robert Wallace has documented, Turner was one of Melville’s most potent aesthetic influences from the mid-­1840s on, and Melville had both interest in and access to the English journals in which Turner’s “octagon-­shaped daubs” were reviewed.47 But if, as Wallace argues, it is Turner’s “powerful aesthetic of the indistinct” that registers so strongly in Melville’s work leading up to and including Moby-­Dick, Melville appears to pay Turner a somewhat different homage here, recasting abstracted elements of visual form into prose fiction much as Turner had done in paint. Still, where Turner’s titles guide their spectators back to the Farbenlehre and Genesis, Melville’s title seems to offer no such guidance. Instead, Melville’s title is a tautology that turns back on itself, reiterating in its reversal the reciprocity of light and gloom and proposing this as the chapter’s subject and theme. In other words, Melville’s title is legible not only as a reference to Turner’s titles, but also as a mild joke about them: Turner promises that looking at light, color, shade, and darkness will also show “Goethe’s Theory,” “The Morning after the Deluge,” and “Moses Composing the Book of Genesis,” but Melville promises only that more gloom will show more light, which will in turn show nothing but more gloom. What is more, although the “gloom” and “light” of Book IX’s title strongly evoke Turner’s two Goethe paintings, they do so in a way that bypasses Goethe. In the greens, blues, and yellows of Pierre’s first two books, Melville clearly registers the influence of Goethe’s claims about color’s materiality and agency, but in Book IX he marks Goethe’s absence just as clearly by highlighting terms (“gloom” and “light”) that are incidental for Goethe, mere subcategories of the primary yellow-­blue polarity at the core of the color theory. Goethe’s colors fuel the delightful and alarming love affair between Lucy and Pierre, but once the raven-­haired Isabel makes her claim on Pierre, it is as if Goethe’s influence diminishes along with the novel’s palette, which starts to be dominated instead by tones of black and white. Thus, in the very place where he cites Turner’s Goethe paintings, Melville does not follow Turner back to Goethe but instead returns to the work in which Melville himself first studied Turner’s art: John Ruskin’s Modern Painters.48 Showing nothing but gloom and light and the reciprocity between them,

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Book IX’s title makes no explicit mention of Turner, Goethe, or Ruskin, but it foregrounds light and shade in the precise terms in which Ruskin theorizes “the truth of tone” out of Turner’s paintings. With this, Melville weaves Pierre into an intricate knot of reference and response through which the qualities of color, light, and shade pass between visual and verbal art forms. As Turner paints Goethe’s theory in Light and Color, and as Ruskin theorizes Turner’s painting in Modern Painters, so Melville writes Ruskin’s theory into Book IX of Pierre as an experiment in the visual roots of literary tone. Ruskin opens the first volume of Modern Painters by asserting the primacy of form over color in painting. Against Goethe’s insistence on the ontological priority of color, Ruskin cites Locke to argue that color is a secondary property of bodies, a changeable and uncertain quality that cannot disclose the basic elements of a body’s form—­its bulk, figure, situation, and motion.49 Arguing that form cannot be subject to the ambiguities and instabilities of color any more than it can be conveyed by the starkness of a line, Ruskin claims that form can only be rendered in light and shade as these disclose the relation of bodies to each other, their surroundings, and their atmosphere. In other words, he suggests that form in painting derives largely from tone, which conveys two things: first, the “exact relief and relation of objects against and to one another in substance and darkness, as they are nearer and more distant,” and second, “the exact relation of the colors of the shadows to the colors of the lights, so that they may at once be felt to be different degrees of the same light.”50 For Ruskin, then, a key measure of the “truth of tone,” and thus of the relative excellence of a painting, lies in the visible distinction it makes between a darkened brightness and a brightened darkness—­between, that is, the light of gloom and the gloom of light: A very bright brown, for instance, out of sunshine, may be precisely of the same shade of color as a very dead or cold brown in sunshine, but it will be totally different in quality; and that quality by which the illuminated dead color would be felt in nature different from the unilluminated bright one, is what artists are perpetually aiming at, and connoisseurs talking nonsense about, under the name of “tone.”51

At stake in the difference of quality that Ruskin calls tone is a painting’s capacity to differentiate between objects of distinct sizes and positions as they

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fall under varying intensities of the same light. In short, tone is the means by which a painting is “true” to its own atmosphere—­not mimetically accurate as a representation of natural light but faithful to the overall sense of light, air, and mood that it constructs.52 In Ruskin’s assessment, Turner’s superiority over both his predecessors and his peers is measurable in the priority he gives to tone, never permitting a “brilliancy of hue [to] interfere with the depth of a determined shadow.”53 Turner does this, Ruskin claims, not by attempting some misguided imitation of the infinite gradations of light and shade that appear under natural light, but by abstracting from natural light and darkness proportional degrees of difference in paint. Ruskin praises Turner, that is, for the “truth” of his capacity to render in painted tones the distinctness of an artificial atmosphere or a climate. But all the while Ruskin extolls the art of Turner’s tone, he downplays the artist’s use of color: “Powerful and captivating and faithful as his color is, it is the least important of all his excellencies, because it is the least important feature of nature.” Color thus assumes a strange place in Ruskin’s aesthetic theory, at once the medium of the painted artifice whose truth he extols and a confused, indistinct, and changing natural quality. Though the imitation of nature has little to do with the truth and “excellencies” of Turner’s art by Ruskin’s own account, he nevertheless attributes the primacy of form and tone over color in Turner’s work to “nature”: “Were it necessary, rather than lose one line of his forms or one ray of his sunshine [Turner] would, I apprehend, be content to paint in black and white to the end of his life.” A strange claim to make about the supreme colorist of English painting! But with this, Ruskin affirms both the fact of Turner’s medium and a central paradox of his art: sure Turner “paints in color,” Ruskin concedes, “but he thinks in light and shade.”54 When Melville takes the second characteristic of tone in Modern Painters for the title of Pierre’s ninth book, he pursues an extended experiment in what it might mean “to think in light and shade” while painting a person out of printed words. With this, Melville takes up the basic relation of form and medium that goes largely unaddressed in Ruskin’s account of tone and color in Turner and repurposes it to foreground the aesthetics of prose fiction. As in Turner’s Deluge paintings, Melville’s title highlights Book IX’s central concern with tone as an element of form. But at the same time the title blurs

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the distinction between plot, character, and tone before the chapter even begins, it insists on the far more elusive distinction between the gloom of light and the light of gloom—­something that would seem nearly impossible to convey in prose or print. It is one thing for prose fiction to trace the roots of Pierre’s moral crisis through his distracted reading of The Inferno and Hamlet during the long night of his deferred decision. It is another thing to do so through the painterly elements of light and gloom. What, exactly, can verbal gloom illuminate and verbal light obscure here—­Pierre? The night? His room? His “mood of mind”? To paraphrase Rancière’s response to Deleuze’s claim about the murmuring hum of Isabel’s guitar: in vain does the text say that it distinguishes between the gloom of light and the light of gloom. In vain do light and gloom make visible the substance, situation, and movement of Pierre’s mind.55 In contrast to Turner’s bubbles, which vividly render the form-­giving properties of shade, light, and color, it would seem that Melville’s gloom and light can only speak as figures for narrative form. And it is indeed as a figure that Melville first treats the polarity of light and gloom here. The chapter’s title establishes a conceit of tone, which its first paragraph immediately begins to elaborate as a figure for Pierre’s mental state. Sharon Cameron and Michael Snediker have described Melville’s extravagant use of figuration in Billy Budd and Pierre, respectively, as a hallmark of his aesthetic practice, in which characters and their attributes emerge at the end of elaborately conjured figurative scenarios to which they can only correspond imperfectly.56 In keeping with what Snediker describes as Pierre’s “idiosyncratic aesthetic criteria,”57 Book IX opens with the extended metascenario of an arctic atmosphere in which a mind reaches the outer limits of the thinkable: In those Hyperborean regions to which enthusiastic Truth, and Earnestness, and Independence, will invariably lead a mind fitted by Nature for profound and fearless thought, all objects are seen in a dubious, uncertain, and refracting light. Viewed through that rarefied atmosphere the most immemorially admitted maxims of men begin to slide and fluctuate, and finally become wholly inverted; the very heavens themselves being not innocent of producing this confounding effect, since it is mostly in the heavens themselves that these wonderful images are exhibited. (165)

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A good reader of Ruskin, the narrator begins by establishing “the rarefied atmosphere” in which his lights and shadows can become dubious and uncertain while preserving “truth of tone.” However, any truth or consistency of the visual conceit would seem to come at the price of the passage’s narrative function as an account of Pierre’s state of mind. The light the narrator describes here doesn’t just establish a metafigure for a mind that is like Pierre’s mind—­“the example of many minds forever lost, like undiscoverable Arctic explorers”—­but it also figures itself explicitly as a distortion, “since it is mostly in the heavens themselves that these wonderful mirages are exhibited.” That is, the uncertain and dubious atmosphere of Hyperborean regions cannot convey the paradoxical truth of an uncertain and dubious light because that atmosphere is itself the medium of uncertainty and dubiousness, much like the chapter’s eponymous conceit. Light and gloom operate not only as figures for the atmosphere in which we see Pierre begin to lose his mind, but also as figures for the work of figuration that they are doing as they give substance and form to Pierre’s mental state, all the while relaying between the visual and literary meanings of tone. Turner may think in light and shade while painting in color, but Melville’s figuration of light and gloom—­in short, his figuration of tone—­as both atmosphere and medium makes such distinctions of content, referent, and form all but impossible to sustain. Book IX thus opens by illuminating the work of figuration in the novel at the same time it figures the visual polarity of light and gloom as a conceit for literary tone. But the title operates on more levels than the figurative: it also functions rhetorically as the first iteration of a repeating syntactical form that combines recursive inversion and reciprocity throughout the chapter. In this, it proposes the chiasmatic relationship of light and gloom as something like a rhetorical or verbal analogue for Ruskin’s tone. If, as Ruskin claims, true tone will show the exact relation of things to each other and make distinctions between the gloom of light and the light of gloom, Melville uses chiasmus to do just that—­repeating the terms and inverting their order—­and then he uses this basic syntactical structure throughout the chapter. From the sliding, fluctuating, and inverting maxims of men in the “rarefied atmosphere” of “Hyperborean regions” (165), to the “turning round in acts of wanton aggressiveness” toward previously held opinions by youth-

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ful minds who have experienced some “advance” (166), to the “reciprocity and partnership of Folly and Sense in contributing to the moral growth of the mind” (167), the narrator offers up multiple versions of a mind that advances, turns back on itself, and in flipping, retraces its motions in reverse. In the process, Pierre might be said to allegorize visual tone in much the way that, Sianne Ngai argues, The Confidence-­Man allegorizes aural and affective tone. According to Ngai, tone functions as the formal counterpart to mood, in part through Melville’s intricate syntactical constructions—­anaphora in The Confidence-­Man or chiasmus here—­which replicate in their structure the queasy, confused, ambiguous affective states that Melville narrates.58 If Pierre can be said to exploit the spasmodic reversals of chiasmus in a similar way, then what this chapter allegorizes as tone is “precisely [the] mood of mind” in which “Pierre now crossed the private threshold of the mansion of Saddle Meadows” (168). That is, tone propagates Pierre’s mood beyond the diegetic world of the novel to produce as narrative the zigzagging polar thinking in which Pierre is lost. In describing the experimentalism and formal self-­reflexivity of Melville’s prose, both Ngai and Snediker have done much to reinvigorate the seemingly fusty formalist category of tone as a key aspect of Melville’s aesthetics. Ngai traces a complex of aural, affective, and aesthetic resonances through which, she argues, The Confidence-­Man allegorizes tone within “a holistic matrix of social relations.”59 Specifically, she argues that, in raising to the level of plot the problem of a vague, diffuse feeling “which no one actually feels,” The Confidence-­Man propagates another feeling—­unease about the unfelt feeling of confidence—­as its chief aesthetic effect. Though Snediker tends to speak more in terms of “style” than “tone,” he also highlights the ambiguity of tone as one of the key problems that Melville poses in Pierre: it has long proved difficult, he says, for critics “to care about a novel whose author may or may not have intended the book seriously.”60 Where Ngai reads the tone of The Confidence-­Man allegorically, Snediker focuses intently on the style of “figuration” in Pierre, through which Pierre emerges “as a person who is ontologically stylistic.” Pierre’s character conforms less to standards of human psychology than to the novel’s own “idiosyncratic aesthetic criteria,” and for this reason, he argues, analysis of Pierre would do well to confine itself to the “rhetorical ecosystem” of the novel.61 But even

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as both critics have produced nuanced analyses of Melville’s tone, a wide gap opens up between Ngai’s centrifugal account of allegory and Snediker’s centripetal theory of figuration. What is more, this gap mirrors the very structure of tone as Melville defines it in Book IX of Pierre—­specifically, tone’s polarity. Where Snediker turns the reading of Pierre inward toward the indistinction of figures that are “always verging on something else,” and Ngai turns her reading outward toward the proliferation of aesthetic and rhetorical structures as affective and ideological ones, Melville’s insistence on the inverse reciprocity of gloom and light instead posits tone as a form by which prose captures the relations and movements between just such polar extremes. When the strange tone of Pierre is returned—­by way of Ruskin, Turner, and Goethe—­to its essential polarity, Melville’s adaptation of visual aesthetics to literary ones emerges in full. Both figure and allegory, tone in “More Light and the Gloom of that Light—­More Gloom and the Light of that Gloom” is also something, well, more: it is a relation of augmenting extremities that gives form (bulk, figure, situation, and motion) to the way that the novel thinks Pierre and his thoughts. In Book IX’s opening conceit of the atmosphere, the air is at once the medium of uncertainty and the bearer of a determinate and very humanlike affect—­malice—­that drives a hypothetical mind through the vertiginous reciprocity of folly and sense. “But it is through the malice of the earthly air, that only by being guilty of Folly does mortal man in many cases arrive at the perception of Sense” (167). When the narrator describes the reciprocity of light and gloom as “precisely” characteristic of the mood in which we find our protagonist, he also makes it clear that none of these moods actually belongs to Pierre. Instead, they are simply part of the malicious atmosphere whose dubious light and chiasmatic structure drive Pierre though a series of mental states about which he knows nothing because, as the narrator cautions, “the thoughts that we here indict as Pierre’s are to be very carefully discriminated from those we indict concerning him” (167). But by what means, exactly, are we to “discriminate” between Pierre’s thoughts and thoughts about Pierre? By means of tone. Much of what light and gloom show in this chapter is everything that Pierre—­or someone like him—­might be thinking but cannot know or think himself. Tone shapes

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and forms and situates Pierre’s precise “mood of mind,” but all the while Pierre the narrative renders these thoughts in light and gloom, Pierre the character cannot know what he thinks because he is painted in words—­a fact that the narrator makes explicit at the moment Pierre tries to distract himself from his moral crisis with a little reading: By the light of that gloom, Pierre now turned over the soul of Hamlet in his hand. He knew not—­at least, felt not—­then, that Hamlet, though a thing of life, was, after all, but a thing of breath evoked by the wanton magic of a creative hand, and as wantonly dismissed at last into endless halls of hell and night. (169)

Of course Pierre cannot know or feel anything about Hamlet. Like Hamlet, he thinks no thoughts. He is not human. He’s “a thing of breath evoked by the wanton magic of a creative hand.” Ultimately, what the light of gloom reveals in Book IX is the polarity of form itself. Like Turner’s bubbles, Melville’s tones show how form functions as a thing of breath and a thing of life at once—­that play of shadows and colors, words and figures through which thought assumes living form. The light of gloom and the gloom of light, Pierre’s thoughts and thoughts concerning Pierre, a thing of life and a thing of breath, allegories and figures: tone emerges between these poles as that distinct quality of Melville’s Pierre through which the aesthetic deforms Pierre precisely by giving him form—­bulk, shape, situation, and motion. With this, Pierre’s status as an aesthetic creature appears as inversely proportional to what Isabel might call his “humanness” (122), but with the decline of Pierre’s humanity comes the emergence of other sites of creativity in the novel, including that of the novel itself. From its tautological title, to its foregrounding of tone, to the acknowledgement of Pierre’s status as a written fiction, Book IX is a chapter of meta-­aesthetics. In this, it reads like a precursor to the three metafictional chapters that break into the episodes of The Confidence-­Man. Each of those chapters bears a circular, even tautological, title which calls attention to the question of how much attention a reader ought to pay to it, and each proposes a kind of thesis about the aesthetics of fiction and the ontology of character. But where those chapters break from the episodic encounters of the other chapters to address the reader directly about the nature of fic-

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tion, Pierre’s Book IX remains within the larger narrative frame of Pierre’s great life revolution—­indeed, it narrates the long night during which Pierre ostensibly makes his most momentous decision. In this difference, Pierre emerges in his own narrative as one of the duck-­billed beavers, nobodies exactly, and Drummond Lights which exemplify fictional artifice in chapters 14, 33, and 44 (respectively) of The Confidence-­Man—­that is, Pierre becomes both an allegory of and a figure for Melville’s ontology of fiction. Impossible Adjuncts, Apt Analogies, and Verdigris Democracy If Ruskin defines tone in the visible difference between the gloom of light and the light of gloom and Goethe in the polarity of yellow and blue between which all the capacities of color emerge, then Melville comes to define it through that legible difference between Pierre’s thoughts and thoughts concerning Pierre which enables a thing of breath to be also a thing of life. Tone, that is, makes it possible for Pierre Glendinning to appear to the novel’s reader as a specific kind of polarity—­at once highly contrived artifice (a paper man who thinks in light and gloom) and living thing. But in what sense can it be said that Pierre lives? Pierre’s narrator maintains throughout the novel an intense self-­reflexivity about the process of fictional composition in which he is engaged (“I write precisely as I please” [244]), but he also addresses Pierre as an independent and living agent, chastising him and questioning his actions and motives at every turn: “Did he, or did he not vitally mean to do this thing? Was the immense stuff to do it his, or was it not his? Why defer? Why put off?” (170). The narrator becomes particularly incensed at Pierre’s apparent inability to take decisive action at the end of Book IX, a chapter in which Pierre’s mind has shaded off into the atmosphere where the poles of folly and sense meet and invert. Given what happens to poor Pierre’s thoughts here, what could actually pass for decision and “vital” action on his part? Ultimately, the narrator says, it lies in reading himself like a book: Tear thyself open, and read there the confounding story of thy blind dotishness! Thy two grand resolutions—­the public acknowledgment of Isabel, and the charitable withholding of her existence from thy own mother—­these are impossible adjuncts.—­Likewise, thy so magnani-

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mous purpose to screen thy father’s honorable memory from reproach, and thy other intention, the open vindication of thy fraternalness to Isabel,—­these also are impossible adjuncts. And the having individually entertained four such resolves, without perceiving that, once brought together, they all mutually expire, this, this ineffable folly, Pierre, brands thee in the forehead for an unaccountable infatuate. (171)

Telling his protagonist to go and read his own story while castigating him for his blindness and infatuation, the narrator makes it possible to enter into the fiction he creates. He orders Pierre to “read there the confounding story of [his] blind doltishness,” as if it has already been written because, in at least two senses, it has been. On the one hand, this marks yet another moment of narrative self-­reflexivity: Pierre, like Hamlet, is “but a thing of breath” who has already been emplotted “by the wanton magic of a creative hand.” On the other, though, Pierre’s decision, his “unprecedented final resolution,” is cast as an action that follows as a matter of course from his own prior avowal of impossible adjuncts. All action in this part of the narrative is retroaction, as Pierre simply follows through on what he has already convinced himself he is constrained to do. The narrator writes Pierre as having written himself into a series of mutually expiring things, and this facilitates the narrator’s stance of behaving toward Pierre as a fictional creation and an obstinate fool at once. But as the narrator exposes Pierre’s delusions of paralysis, so he also explores the range of other agencies the novel mobilizes both with and against his protagonist. Book IX does to Pierre’s mind what Book II did to his romance with Lucy, evacuating Pierre of all the capacities for thinking, feeling, and acting that would seem to be necessary to his plot. At the same time, however, these chapters foreground the novel’s exploration of a set of aesthetic strategies that are aptly termed radical—­both because they deal in extremities and because they concern the very roots of what fiction is and does. Colin Dayan has described Melville’s “translation between ontologically disparate points of view” as a hallmark of his aesthetics and philosophy.62 In the previous chapter I argue that, in Typee, this negotiation of ontological disparity appears in the perspectival shifts through which Tommo inhabits the foundations of political life and community in the paradoxical relations of nature, art, and history. In Pierre, Melville goes further, rendering the

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movement between ontological poles in tonal shifts that are explicitly attuned to the nuances of his novel’s own artifice. The tonal polarities of color, light, and gloom, that is, establish an aesthetics by which Melville writes the distinction between the text and the world into the narrative itself. Throughout Pierre, Melville entangles the aesthetics and artifice of his own novel with the basic political paradox of nature and art that both Typee and Pierre evoke in their palettes of verdure and green paint. For this reason, I argue in the final section, the very aesthetic features of the novel that erode Pierre’s capacity for thought, decision, and action do not undermine a political reading of the novel so much as they point the way toward the fulfillment of the narrator’s promise: “Believe me, you will pronounce Pierre a thorough-­going Democrat in time; perhaps a little Radical altogether for your fancy” (13).

If there is a thematic arc in Pierre that justifies the promise that the reader “will pronounce Pierre . . . a little too Radical altogether,” it would seem to center on the history of Isabel’s disinheritance, Pierre’s dubious efforts to remedy it with a feigned marriage, and the incestuous relationship that results. But for most critics, this plot is precisely what condemns Pierre as a failed political actor. Priscilla Wald argues that, rather than making a break from the past, Pierre “draws [Isabel] into the prewritten manuscript of his identity” and then fails to register this as a paradox.63 Similarly, Sacvan Bercovitch concludes that Pierre’s failure lies in his conformity with, rather than rejection of, paternal laws and norms.64 Perhaps most damningly, Michael Rogin reads Pierre as Melville’s Eighteenth Brumaire: decked out like Louis Bonaparte in the finery of dead revolutionaries, Pierre Glendinning hesitates on the one hand, stepping back from the full consequences of Isabel’s recognition, and goes too far on the other, conflating liberation with incest.65 Writing against the grain of this critical tradition, Dominic Mastroianni argues that, at least in its incest plot, Pierre does tell a “radical” story: “If radical democracy destroys the power of family history—­the basis of monarchy and aristocracy—­then it also destroys the prohibition of incest, which cannot exist without knowing and valuing lineage.”66 For Mastroianni, incest is “clearly” what Melville’s narrator means when he predicts

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that Pierre will prove “too Radical altogether for [the reader’s] fancy.” But while Pierre’s assault on the incest taboo is undeniably radical, even revolutionary in its annihilation of the Glendinning line, by what measure is it democratic? What new arrangements of the demos or its rule, what new world, follows from Pierre’s “final resolution” and his “great life-­revolution” (225)? Incest may be radical, but the full force of radical democracy in the novel is neither betrayed by nor exhausted in the incest plot because it is precisely at this point in the novel—­w ith Pierre’s vow to assume the role of his half-­sister’s husband—­where the multiple aesthetic processes at work in Melville’s narrative reveal some of their keenest divisions. In other words, Pierre’s resolution of “impossible adjuncts” at the end of Book IX represents not only a climactic point in the plot, as measured by the decisions and actions of the protagonist, but also a turning point in the aesthetics of polarity and the relations and actions that arise from it. When Pierre resolves to incorporate Isabel into the Glendinning family without revealing her parentage, he performs “impossible adjuncts,” not only because each resolution contradicts the others, but also because he violates the very meaning of an “adjunct.” As the OED defines it, an “adjunct” is both a thing “joined to or connected with another” and “a qualifying addition to a word or name,” and it is clearly this latter sense of “adjunct” that Pierre is hoping to avoid with his mutually expiring resolutions.67 Pierre resolves “impossible adjuncts,” that is, because he is making one of Isabel as he tries to forestall the transformation that her addition to the family must necessarily bring about. But even as Pierre tries to stop a transformative addition, his declaration of “impossible adjuncts” introduces an anomalous set of actions and relations into the narrative. Pierre’s plot seems to stumble here, at the very moment of decision, because the decision he makes is engulfed by prior resolutions, omissions, and mutually expiring intentions. And just when Pierre finds himself at the mercy of previously avowed contradictions, he also gives new meaning to the phrase “fabulous retroactivity” by pretending publicly that he and Isabel have already been married. That is, he attempts to remedy her prior nonrecognition by his father and omission from the family by projecting his own remedial action backward in time, claiming that she has already become his wife (173). In a sense, Pierre’s decision duplicates, on the level of plot, the chiasmatic course of his polar thinking in Book IX,

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“turning round in  .  .  . wanton aggressiveness upon sentiments and opinions now forever left in the rear” (166). But read as the culmination of the polar aesthetics that Book IX has detailed, the phrase “impossible adjuncts” seems to function quite differently from the “reciprocity and partnership of Folly and Sense” (167) or the mutually augmenting opposition of light and gloom. If tonal polarities produce a range of motions and creative actions, the relation of impossible adjuncts is unusually static. Indeed, the narrator’s rebuke to Pierre represents the first time in the chapter—­perhaps even in the novel—­where seemingly contradictory things cannot be either transmuted into or reciprocally augmented by one another. The phrase “impossible adjuncts” decisively marks Pierre’s decision as an impasse. And, indeed, the narrator concedes that something anomalous has happened here: “His resolution was a strange and extraordinary one; but therefore it only the better met a strange and extraordinary emergency” (172). Casting Pierre’s retroactive, constrained resolution of impossible adjuncts in terms of the strange, the extraordinary, and the emergent, the narrator indicates that the ensuing crisis is, as William Spanos puts it, “essentially ontological.”68 Concerning as it does the basic question of who can be included in a specific relation and how, as well as the question of what can be decided under conditions of emergency, Pierre’s crisis is also, of course, essentially political. As political theorists from Carl Schmitt to Giorgio Agamben have argued, emergencies constitute the most existential of political crises, because they pose the limits of decision and sovereign power to determine the inside and outside of a political community. However, as Bonnie Honig argues in Emergency Politics, the state-­of-­exception version of sovereign power tends to overdetermine political thinking on the emergency and occlude other ways of framing and narrating it—­specifically it occludes those most consistent with radical democracy. “Schmitt’s accounts of emergency and sovereignty have captured the imagination of political theory” for much of the last two decades, and she argues that this thinking has often foreclosed “the possibility of any worthwhile democratic politics.”69 For Honig, liberal political thinkers in particular have too easily accepted the equation of emergency with sovereign exception, a concession that she measures in the narrowed political narratives that they tell. Focusing on the divergent narrative strategies of liberal and radical democratic theory,

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Honig offers a frame through which to reconsider the political implications of Pierre’s “strange and extraordinary emergency.” Honig offers several correctives to what she describes as the fallacious narratives posited by liberal theories of democracy. First, she argues that liberal theorists have reduced all serious thought about the politics of emergency to the time leading up to a decision, focusing on the legitimacy of who makes a decision, rather than on the far more consequential question of what happens after one has been made. The urgent question for radical democracy, she argues, is not “Who decides,” but “How can we live with what has been done?” 70 Second, she argues that in reducing emergency to decision and exception, liberal theory has not contended with the myriad other ways in which “emergency” lives within the political. Specifically, liberalism tends not to conceive of new rights and new subjects of right as truly “emergent” political fronts, but as parts of a linear narrative of recognition and inclusion. With Jürgen Habermas as her chief foil, she describes the fallacy of a “chrono-­logic” narrative through which each generation needs only to return to the moment of constitution to extend new rights as the fulfillment of a past that never needs to be overcome, transformed, or reinterpreted. In this, she argues, rights take on the character of property that descends and accumulates according to a logic of generational passing, while also assuming a perverse political agency, as a predetermined trajectory of rights is credited with the work of inclusion and expansion.71 Such narratives misconstrue the ways in which new rights emerge, and for this reason, they cannot contend with the ways in which identities, relations, and worlds are necessarily rescripted by them. A new right brings about a new world, Honig argues, and the failure of liberal democracy’s chrono-­logic narrative to contend with this traps our politics in a vicious circle of resentment, backlash, and submission, in which conservatives cry that their identities and rights have been reduced by each new right and liberals insist on the stasis of all identities in the fulfillment of a past promise.72 In contrast to this liberal narrative, Honig argues that William Connolly’s “politics of becoming” proposes a radical democratic alternative in which “each new right inaugurates a new world. It transforms the entire economy of rights and identities, and establishes new relations and new identities, new promises and potentially new cruelties.” 73

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Honig’s account of the plural narratives of emergency plays out rather neatly in the plot of Melville’s Pierre, from the excruciating focus (fully half of the novel) on the catastrophic aftermath of Pierre’s decision, to the false premise of Pierre’s great resolution that the Glendinning family must survive the inclusion of Isabel unchanged, to the retroactive temporality of Pierre and Isabel’s fake marriage. If Pierre’s avowal of impossible adjuncts marks both a reversal and an impasse in the narrative, that is, it seems clear that at least part of what is blocked is a particular story of how new subjects enter into existing communities to claim existing rights. More precisely, this blockage is the story, as Melville’s phrase “impossible adjuncts” carries us right to the narrative limits of liberal, chrono-­logical politics as Honig describes them. This becomes abundantly clear when Pierre’s attempt to include Isabel in the family—­w ithout a corresponding transformation of it—­ literally hits the wall: “He dashed himself in a blind fury and swift madness against the wall, and fell dabbling in the vomit of his own loathed identity” (171). But beyond functioning as a concise (and memorably visceral) image for the ways in which mere inclusion blocks emergent democratic processes, the narrator’s derisive phrase—­ “ These are impossible adjuncts!”—­ a lso makes vivid the gap between Pierre’s strangest decisions and the narrator’s commentary on them, as well as what might be at stake in this gap. When the narrator excoriates his protagonist, he not only registers the fallacy of Pierre’s actions but also enters into his own fiction by treating Pierre as both a thing of breath and a thing of life. That is, the narrator behaves as if the world he imagines is real, foregrounding the ways in which existentially distinct worlds emerge in and through the narrative and allowing them to coexist. Honig describes one key strategy of radical democracy as “work[ing] the paradox of politics”—­or acting as if one already lived in the emergent world one wants to bring about.74 For Honig, enacting counterfactuals is among the most potent ways in which alternative narrative strategies can emerge as radical democratic practice. In chastising Pierre for failing to create a world in which Isabel’s addition transforms the Glendinning name, the narrator creates that new world. But neither the novelty nor the power of this emergent world can appear to Pierre because, like him, it exists at the conceptual limit of the novel itself. In other words, the novel’s most radical aesthetics and its most radical

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politics coincide at precisely the same point—­where Pierre appears as an entirely created thing acting among other creative agencies. If Honig’s work details the ways in which narrative plurality and complexity might reframe the politics of emergency as radically democratic, then William Connolly’s recent elaborations on the “politics of becoming” paint the contours of what new worlds might emerge. Connolly calls for a shift away from the focus on recognizable actors and actions to propose a broader understanding of political agency that is attuned to the entanglement of “differing degrees of creativity in the domains of human culture, nonhuman force fields, and culture-­nature imbrications.” 75 In attending to the ways in which all actions take place in a fragile world amid multiple creative forces, Connolly moves beyond a simple call for sensitivity to nonhuman processes, agencies, and temporalities. Rather than proposing nonhuman, self-­organizing processes as alternatives to the “politics of democratic activism,” that is, he insists that radical democracy derives from the “difficult combination” of both.76 Such a “difficult combination” precisely describes what is both radical and democratic in the politics and aesthetics of Melville’s Pierre, where the actions of the protagonist are explicitly portrayed as entangled in other processes and worlds. This entanglement is nowhere more apparent than in the novel’s most colorful description of democracy: “For indeed, the democratic element operates as a subtile acid among us, forever producing new things by corroding the old; as in the South of France verdigris, the primitive material of one kind of green paint, is produced by grape-­v inegar poured upon copper plates” (9). The “apt analogy” through which Melville’s narrator joins “the democratic element” to the production of a paint so green that “nothing can more vividly suggest the luxuriance of life” stands as the novel’s signal example of a transformative addition. As such, this passage defines the world that democracy makes, but it does so through a process so complex that it is almost inarticulable. Involving the creative interaction of several “culture-­ nature imbrications”—­chemical color, tonal polarity, metal, acid, nature, history, political theory, and so on—­Melville’s elaborate analogy comes to operate according to the very process it describes. Within the terms of the conceit, the pouring of vinegar onto copper plates sets off a chemical reaction that is corrosive and productive at once, destroying the plate but pro-

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ducing verdigris. Like all chemical colors as Goethe defines them, verdigris is durable, definite, and fixed in a substance, but it also remains subject to all manner of transformations.77 As Melville’s chromatic conceit hinges on the transformative interaction of all of the elements in it, so too do the elements of the larger comparison that the narrator is elaborating. According to the logic of the analogy, democracy is to the old as acid is to copper, but when verdigris emerges at the other end of this reaction, it does so as both a substance and an idea, both corrosion and luxuriance. With this, verdigris does not terminate the analogy, but instead sets off another analogical reaction through which other terms—­A merica, life, death, nature, art—­are produced, corroded, and transformed in turn. In other words, if the production of verdigris stands at the end of the conceit through which “the democratic element” is said to produce a new world, that end is the figurative process of analogy itself. Rather than proposing this process of corrosive production as Melville’s analogy for democracy, I want to suggest that the paragraph instead holds up analogical figuration as a democratic process, the very aesthetics of radical democracy. Creative, analogical anomaly is both the process described in the conceit and the mode by which the paragraph elaborates its conceit. In a series of conjunctive and prepositional clauses—­“ for indeed,” “as in,” “yet on the other hand,” “herein”—­the passage moves analogically between figures that are in the midst of figuring, figures caught in the very the process of becoming illustrative of something else. This would seem to be a very unstable terrain in which to develop an analogy for “democracy” except that it is precisely this terrain on which democracy becomes both possible and necessary. The world that democracy makes and responds to is figured here as one of multiple creative agencies, all becoming something else in the process. In such a world, Pierre must radically act—­Isabel’s poverty and dispossession are intolerable and must be remedied. But when Pierre acts in and alongside the “democratic element,” he participates in its processes of creative, anomalous analogy as one “agent”—­whether a brother, a husband, a vinegar, a color, or a metaphor—­among others, all of which must be transformed, refigured by the world they help to make. This is where the aesthetics of Melville’s novel become inextricable from its engagement with political theory—­particularly that long history of theory

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that attempts to derive “political institutions which . . . seem above all things intensely artificial” from “the divine virtue of a natural law” (9). Melville’s verdigris analogy is also, of course, a corrosive revision of Edmund Burke’s famous description of the process by which the English constitution guarantees the rights of Englishmen in Reflections on the Revolution in France: Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein . . . the whole, at one time, is never old, middle-­aged or young, but in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenour of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. Thus by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve, we are never wholly new; in what we retain, we are never wholly obsolete.78

Melville posits analogy as a radically democratic process of transformative addition, and so the verdigris passage must also transform its most obvious source, at once echoing and undermining Burke’s claims by “transmuting” them. Introducing into Burke’s composting theory of the organic-­monarchic state an artificial accelerant he calls “democracy,” Melville ostensibly converts Burke’s emphasis on “unchangeable constancy” into an emphasis on constant change. But rather than attributing that constant change to either natural processes or political history, Melville erodes the distinction between these by mobilizing a third term: art. If verdigris democracy introduces anything anomalous into a history of politics that derives legitimacy and exceptionalism from claims to nature, it is in the assertion that aesthetic forms—­colors, tones, figures, analogies—­must play a role in the process of politics. “In history as in nature,” Bataille quotes Marx as saying, “decay is the laboratory of life.” 79 But in Melville’s Pierre, art is the laboratory of democracy.

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PA R T T W O Democracy Is Round

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3 Round Robins and Founding Violence Quand même la nation aurait ses États généraux régulier, ce ne serait pas à ce corps constitué à prononcé sur un différend qui touche à sa constitution. Il y aurait à cela une pétition de principes, un cercle vicieux. Abbé Emanuel Joseph Sieyès, Qu’est-­ce que le tiers état? A nation is not a body, the figure of which is to be represented by the human body; but is like a body contained within a circle, having a common centre, in which every radius meets; and that centre is formed by representation. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man The king, we are told, exclaimed, “C’est une révolte!” And Liancourt corrected him: “Non, sire, c’est une révolution.” Here we see the word still, and politically for the last time, in the sense of the old metaphor which carries its meaning from the skies down to the earth; but here, for the first time perhaps, the emphasis has entirely shifted from the lawfulness of a rotating, cyclical movement, to its irresistibility. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution

Vicious Circles If democracy is green in Melville’s more terrestrial novels, Typee and Pierre, in the oceanic novels that culminate with Moby-­Dick it is decidedly round. It revolves around and presupposes its own beginning, like the “cercle vicieux” with which the Abbé Sieyès characterizes the paradoxes of authority and 119

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legitimacy of constitutive political bodies in 1789. It has a center and circumference like the image of representation that Thomas Paine proposes in the second part of Rights of Man in 1792. And in this roundness, democracy remains linked with revolution in its original sense, as Hannah Arendt describes it, of a “cyclical, rotating, ever-­recurring movement.”1 But if Melville draws on some of the most enduring tropes of democratic revolution and representation—­the vicious circles and revolutionary rotations that have characterized it at least since the eighteenth century—­he also makes democracy’s circular form entirely his own across works like Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, White-­Jacket, and Moby-­Dick. In the most famous image of democracy in Melville’s writing, Ishmael ends the first “Knights and Squires” chapter of Moby-­Dick with a vision of “democratic dignity” as a laboring body irradiated by a celestial sphere: But this august dignity I treat of is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity that has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality! (MD, 117)

As Ishmael pulls back from the prospect of Starbuck’s “complete abasement” in chapter 26, he begins to generalize, to find in “man in the ideal” the “immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves.” Where Thomas Paine mocks the “hat or cap” in which the English invest their sovereignty, Ishmael simply strips “this august dignity” of all “robed investiture.”2 Though ideal, the naked man who bears it is no abstraction: he has a body—­or at least a hand and an arm—­as well as a job wielding picks and driving spikes among “meanest mariners, and renegades, and castaways.” That is, “this august dignity” is situated in a world of men, even as it appears as an endless radiance, arms and hands illuminated by “the great God absolute!” Envisioning a circle with a divine absolute at both its center and circumference, Ishmael mixes metaphors of shape and light to define “democratic dignity” as something both celestial and terrestrial while locating it clearly within the idiom and history of the French Revolution. When Ishmael celebrates “the great God absolute” as “the center and

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circumference of all democracy,” he both reprises and revises the same “vicious circle” that later political theorists—­from Hannah Arendt to Giorgio Agamben, Eric Santner, and Slavoj Žižek—­derive from Sieyès’s 1789 pamphlet Qu’est-­ce que le tiers état?3 Sieyès defines the third estate as coextensive with the nation itself to develop the famous argument that no existing political body has the authority to decide on its own constitution. Even if the full États-­généraux were to meet continuously, he argues, it would not have the power to settle any disputes concerning itself or the relative powers of its three constituent estates because any such question would pose a “pétition des principes, un cercle vicieux.”4 According to Sieyès, it is only by making a distinction between pouvoir constituant and pouvoir constitué—­ between the “extraordinary” representative power of the whole nation and ordinary representative bodies—­that revolutionary France can avoid begging the question of its own constitution and trapping itself in a “vicious circle” whose end is its beginning. Arendt refers to this “vicious circle” at least half a dozen times in On Revolution as the paradox that plagues all political beginnings, especially revolutionary ones. Citing Sieyès as a peerless thinker of the French Revolution, she argues that he “broke the vicious circle” by naming the nation as the pouvoir constituant that remains in a perpetual state of nature prior to constitution.5 However, though Sieyès broke the circle, Arendt claims that he nevertheless failed to solve the perplexity of founding authority that it marked because such constituent assemblies of extraordinary representatives at once relied on the absolute ground of nature for their legitimacy and “lacked the power to constitute by definition; they were themselves unconstitutional.” According to Arendt, Sieyès’s broken circle set in motion the chain of failed constitutions that mark “the great and fateful misfortune of the French Revolution.”6 Sieyès also set in motion an irresistible trope. Taken up by Arendt and countless others, this “vicious circle” functions as a synonym for both the paradox of political foundations and a more general petitio princippi that appears in any closed or self-­authorizing system. It describes the circular trap of all self-­grounding foundational claims, and with few exceptions the vicious circle is cited by political theorists as the shape that forms around an absence of legitimacy or authority which can be neither overcome nor permitted to remain in place.7 It therefore remains as a reminder of a founding

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illegitimacy whose persistence in all political communities goes by a variety of names: violence, exception, sovereignty. Thus, in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, Sieyès’s “vicious circle” is one of the clearest expressions of sovereign exception. It is the place where, as Eric Santner puts it, “the viciousness of the vicious circle at the core of the life of such institutions comes to the fore.”8 But if Sieyès’s circle has come to function in twentieth-­and twenty-­ first-­century political theory as a shorthand for the founding illegitimacy that revolutionary movements must repudiate or repress, Melville puts this trope to very different uses. He not only invokes the circle of democratic dignity as a tautology of self-­authorization that must be endlessly evaded and repeated, but also imagines circles as capacious shapes through which to explore all the claims to power, authority, and community that are made in the name of political, and particularly democratic, right. Often, Melville’s circles look a lot like Sieyès’s, as he spins viciously repeating, tautological forms to capture the paradox of self-­grounding claims of sovereign power, whether monarchic or democratic. Where Mardi’s chapter 79, “The Center of All Circumferences,” describes “the insphered sphere of spheres” that so snugly houses Donjalolo’s absolute rule (241), White-­Jacket’s chapter 31 penetrates “the mysterious circles” deep beneath the decks of the Neversink where “all the kegs of powder and packages of cartridges” carry the sovereign force of American empire around the world (128). But rather than proposing ways to break such circles by locating absolute spaces outside of them, Melville instead proposes countercircles. Thus for every circle of self-­grounding sovereignty or cyclical violence there is a circle of democratic dignity, as in “Knights and Squires,” or a collective circle of anti-­authoritarian action, like its precursor, the Round Robin mutiny in Omoo. Refusing to break or repress the “vicious circle,” Melville exploits the productivity and creativity of the paradoxes it describes.9 Indeed, a certain paradox is the very premise of “democratic dignity” in “Knights and Squires,” where Ishmael both insists on that “dignity which has no robed investiture” and “weaves round [it] tragic graces”: “If I shall touch that workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics, bear me out in it thou just Spirit of Equality” (MD, 117). Though stripped of its robes, this dignity does not remain unadorned. As in Melville’s articulation of his “ruthless

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democracy” in his letter to Hawthorne, Ishmael acknowledges equality as a ludicrous truth that must be constantly proclaimed, exalted, and even ornamented precisely because it is both manifest everywhere and denied by everyone. In “Knights and Squires,” Melville carries the aesthetics of this ruthless work even farther. Ishmael underscores the circularity of democracy not to escape it, expose its tautological fallacy, or break it, but to grace, exalt, and illuminate it because, for Ishmael, this circle is the extraordinary representation of democratic dignity. And so when he places “the great God absolute” at both its “center and circumference,” he does not break the circle by positing a transcendent outside. Instead, Ishmael insists that “divine equality” is the absolute of democracy, its center and circumference. Melville’s difference here from Arendt is worth underscoring. According to Arendt, once the vicious circle was broken, the “chief perplexity” of democratic appeals to the authority of an unconstituted people “was where to find an absolute from which to derive authority,” only to confront the violence of that absolute later on.10 Indeed, she praises Melville in her analysis of Billy Budd because, she argues, he recognizes that “the absolute spells doom to everyone when it is introduced into the political realm.”11 But in “Knights and Squires,” Melville’s Ishmael brings the absolute into the circle it was meant to break, combining what Arendt sees as the two great errors of revolutionary thought—­circles and absolutes—­into a single vision of democratic dignity as the divine and mundane equality of all. This is not to say that the circle of democratic dignity is not “vicious”—­ after all, within a few chapters, Ahab’s “one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve” (MD, 167). But if “democratic dignity” shares its shape with “the center of all circumferences” where Donjalolo’s absolute sovereignty lies in Mardi, and if the Round Robin mutiny in Omoo echoes “the mysterious circles” where the naval ship holds its war powers in White-­Jacket, such geometrical affinities don’t necessarily “spell doom” for revolutions or democracies—­or, they do not spell only doom. Instead, these correspondences reveal Melville’s persistent political concern with the fragility of all democratic forms, as well as his persistent interest in those aesthetic forms where “unlike things must mate and meet.” Indeed, the significance of Melville’s repeated return to the vicious circle that political thinkers since Sieyès have sought to repress lies in his understanding of the

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transience of all democratic claims, acts, and communities. Circles are not just closed systems, tautologies, or fallacies of petitio principi in the nautical works leading up to Moby-­Dick. They are also cycles of repeated collective action that repeatedly fail to establish enduring democratic communities in the face of manifest equality. For this reason, I argue in this section, the political significance of Melville’s circles never appears in any single image, episode, or work from this period. Instead, these circles must be read as part of a larger cycle of thinking across multiple books in which the meaning of Melville’s grappling with collective action, representation, founding, and violence is particularly difficult to characterize, in part because with each of these narratives he seems to start all over again, resetting the political clock back to another beginning. To read Melville’s circles and to move along with them means resisting the urge to impose a political telos where there is only another circle. Whether we find in Melville’s circles a tautology of sovereign violence or a collective, even democratic, action that breaks from it simply depends on which point in a series of constantly oscillating cycles we choose to look at. But if there are no ends to Melville’s circles, there are always new beginnings, and with each new beginning a new circle forms that is never quite the same as the ones that gave rise to it. In this chapter and the next, I examine both the prehistory and the afterlife of what Ishmael finds at the “center and circumference of all democracy,” looking at the disparate sources for Melville’s circular images of collective action, sovereign power, and revolution while developing an account of Melville’s circular figures and the cyclical aesthetics that continue across his books. Where chapters 1 and 2 argue for the political force within some of Melville’s key aesthetic gestures—­examining his use of color and tone to trouble ontological distinctions of art, history, nature—­chapters 3 and 4 move in a somewhat different direction, showing how Melville derives a nonprogressive, circular aesthetics that revises and reimagines the political trope of the vicious circle, the problem of founding violence, and the relationship of sovereignty to democracy across multiple novels. If Melville’s greens disclose his persistent interest in the double foundations of political theory in nature and history—­as well as his proposition that art may provide alternative sources of creative democratic agency—­his insistence that democracy is round carries

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that interest in foundations into questions of what it is that politics might be said to found—­equality, freedom, legitimacy, a demos, kratia?—­as well as what cannot endure and what must mutate. Round Robins: Extraordinary Representation and Rogue Democracy in Omoo Few of Melville’s novels foreground the cyclical relationship between his books as sharply as Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas. In the preface to his second novel, Melville offers an explanation of this work’s relationship to its wildly successful prequel, claiming that “the present narrative necessarily begins where Typee concludes, but has no further connection with the latter work” (O, xiv). Melville would seem to be drawing a line connecting Omoo to Typee here only to sever it, but really both of these gestures are misdirections. For one thing, although Omoo does pick up Tommo’s narrative just after he has fought his way out of the green valley of the Typees and shipped from Nukuheva on an Australian whaler, in many respects Omoo resets the narrative of Typee right back to where it began. Melville returns his protagonist to a whale ship under the command of a tyrannical captain in order to tell the story of a sailor’s rebellion and desertion on a Polynesian island at the precise moment of that island’s annexation by the French in the person of Admiral Du Petit Thouars. Given all of this, Omoo’s relationship to its predecessor is far more complicated than Melville’s “no further connection” indicates.12 Although the itinerant protagonist and narrator of Omoo does take a new name, as if to underscore his difference from the largely immobile Tommo, that name is “Typee,” and it is bestowed upon him by his new companions just as Tommo’s was by Mehevi. No longer the captive Tommo whose mind was read by Mehevi but whose body escaped Karky’s indelible writing, the narrator of Omoo is nevertheless marked by the people he has just left, since he now carries with him the reputation of themselves that the Typee wish to circulate abroad: “Ay, Typee, my king of the cannibals, is it you!” (8). In some sense, the first twenty chapters of Omoo renarrate the story of the first four chapters of Typee as if they happened to the person that Tommo became in the valley, the person whom the Typees have made. But such a narrative is, of course, impossible, both a petitio prin-

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cipi and a vicious circle because Tommo cannot begin again the narrative through which he becomes Tommo. Critics often remark on the nonlinear structure of Omoo, whether they treat it as a narrative continuation of Typee or as a picaresque romance largely confined to itself.13 Sophia Mihic, in particular, has emphasized the political significance of the circular relationship between Melville’s first two novels, treating the “Typee and Omoo pair” as one book and borrowing her title, “The End Was in the Beginning,” from Ralph Ellison. Indeed, Mihic argues that together Typee and Omoo constitute “the same book as Invisible Man” for the ways that Melville and Ellison both reject linear narrative progress in the service of what she terms “democratic maturity”—­a recognition that “the democratic struggle for self-­rule is never the struggle, progressing toward emancipation, but instead daily struggles to define ourselves.”14 Such daily struggles include the perspectival shifts that Tommo undergoes as he comes to see what Mihic calls the “state of artifice” on Nukuheva; this enables him to form connections with the people of the valley so that he is “poised between friends and friends” as he flees the valley.15 Mihic’s argument about the circular nature of democratic maturity and Melville’s critique of progress rests on a double assumption about Melville’s two books: first, that the narrators of Typee and Omoo are one and the same, and second, that the political significance of this common narrator lies in his removal from world-­ historical political forces like revolution and imperialism. Along with Mihic and others, I argue in chapter 1 that Tommo’s narrative is emphatically not one of “return” to the primitive state of nature promised by political theory, but instead one of recognition, through which he comes to see both his own formation by European state-­of-­nature philosophy and the independent world in which the Typees thrive—­precisely because they “guard all the passes to [the] valley with the point of [a] leveled spear” (T, 240). But where Mihic reads Tommo’s awakened recognition into a politics of mutual friendship and provisional action that sets itself apart from world history, I argue that Tommo undergoes an experience of political subjectification in the valley that is inextricable from the histories of revolutionary thought, emancipatory struggle, and imperial violence that have shaped both the island and his sojourn on it. Ultimately, Melville’s quarrel with the narrative of linear democratic progress leads him back into the circular history of

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post-­revolutionary empires, but this is not the same as a simple identity of ends and beginnings. If the end of Typee is the beginning of Omoo, as well as a return to the conditions that set Typee in motion, Omoo nevertheless draws new narrative circles that are told from the perspective of an altered narrator who is in the process of becoming someone else. As in Typee and Pierre, so in Omoo much of the political thinking in Melville’s work begins with the strange physical and affective states through which he drives his characters. In the Typee Valley, Tommo becomes the strangely buoyant subject of two distinct, agonistic worlds living in parallel with each other, but as he moves violently from one world to the other at the end of Typee, that buoyant mood is replaced by a melancholic suspension that looms over the opening chapters of Omoo. Named Typee by the crew of the Julia who have ostensibly rescued him, the narrator of Omoo is neither resuming a deferred voyage nor starting a new one because he is stuck between worlds: But how far short of our expectations is oftentimes the fulfillment of the most ardent hopes. Safe aboard the ship—­so long my earnest prayer—­ with home and friends once more in prospect, I nevertheless felt weighed down by a melancholy that could not be shaken off. It was the thought of never more seeing those, who, notwithstanding their desire to treat me as a captive, had, upon the whole, treated me so kindly. I was leaving them forever. (7)

With the prospect of returning home now in sight, Typee can only look backward toward those he will never see again—­including Tommo himself. That is, Typee’s narration is marked by both the loss of the people whose name he now bears and the loss of the name that they gave to him. Such a divided narrative persona and perspective forecloses the possibility of return to a now-­lost beginning—­he’s left the Typee Valley forever—­but this break nevertheless produces another kind of circularity, a series of narrative loops and backward views that carry Typee across oceans and years. These circles sometimes appear as temporal and spatial figures that disrupt the forward movement of the narrative by referring to events outside its frame—­as, for example, when Typee recognizes two sailors on the Julia from one of his previous voyages. “And here we were again:—­years had rolled by, many a

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league of ocean had been travelled, and we were thrown together under circumstances which almost made me doubt my existence” (6). Or, these circles literalize the divided perspective that this suspended, melancholic narrator experiences—­as, for instance, when he sees the wreck of a ship in Tahiti’s “Papeetee Bay” [sic] bearing the name of a small Hudson River town near his birthplace. “In an instant, palm trees and elms—­canoes and skiffs—­church spires and bamboos—­a ll mingled in one vision of the present and the past” (102). What links all of these examples are peculiar experiences of loss and recurrence that are specific to the circular itinerancy of sea narrative: leaving some things forever while periodically encountering the familiar in the midst of the strange, Typee wanders back and forth across time once he returns to the sea.16 In short, Typee is “omoo,” “borrowed from the dialect of the Marquesas Islands, where, among other uses, the word signifies a rover, or rather, a person wandering from one island to another like some of the natives, known among their countrymen as ‘Taboo kannakers’ ” (xiv).17 With its three round O’s, the word “omoo” casts Typee’s wandering condition and narrative as a series of looping returns and repetitions that enable the white sailor to move like Marnoo, the taboo kannaker of Nukuheva, as he carries traces of the Typees throughout the Pacific. Caught between the dueling prospects of the people he’s left and the home he’s yet to return to, seeing the past and the present at once, and bearing two Marquesan names wherever he goes, Typee is defined as much by his movements as by his continued suspensions between places and conditions. For most readers of Omoo, the novel’s roving and wandering quality—­its picaresque style—­begins on Tahiti when Typee and Dr. Long Ghost leave the genial prison of the Calabooza Beretanee and start to travel without aim around the islands.18 But the novel really joins the picaresque form to its appropriation of the omoo figure as soon as Typee boards the Julia in chapter 1 because, at that moment, a self-­styled omoo boards a ship of picaros—­rogues and pirates and “villains of all nations and dyes” (14). When Melville appropriates the Polynesian word for rover to describe the eponymous narrator and wandering style of Omoo, he mirrors the etymological derivation of the “picaresque” from the Spanish word picaro, for the itinerant and knavish protagonist whose episodic adventures define the form.19 Taken together as terms that join literary style to the

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character and trajectory of its protagonist, they also signal Omoo’s sharpest departure from its predecessor. Where Typee isolated Tommo on the island of Nukuheva to explore the possibilities and limitations of state-­of-­nature thinking, Omoo moves its protagonist through a series of fleeting, defining relations with others. That is, the key difference between the two books is not simply that of captivity narrative from picaresque romance, but the difference of a protagonist who seeks foundations not in theoretical states of green nature but in communities of people. That said, for an omoo among picaros Typee has surprisingly little control over the trajectory of his roving narrative for the first third of the book, and he may indeed be more a captive on board the Julia than Tommo ever was in the Typee Valley. The Julia has a lot of problems. It is a “slatternly” ship in an “ill state of affairs” (5); it is captained by an incompetent syphilitic, piloted by a drunken first mate who monopolizes the tools of navigation (61), and worked by a disgruntled crew of “villains” many of whom are also dying of syphilis. Making matters worse, while there is just enough pisco to keep the crew tipsy and compliant, the food is stale and insufficient, and the ship is completely overrun by rats and roaches: “They did not live among you, but you among them” (40). But the most significant problem on the Julia is that no one can get off. When the captain’s health worsens, he abandons the whale hunt to land at Tahiti; this seems to promise freedom for the crew who believe that they will be released from their contracts, or at least given shore leave. Tahiti offers the men a sojourn on the most storied and spectacular island in the South Pacific. As Typee describes it, Tahiti’s peculiar attractions are both historical—­“Here the famous Transit of Venus was observed in 1769. Here the memorable mutiny of the Bounty afterward had its origin”—­and timeless—­“Such enchantment, too, breathes over the whole that it seems a fairy world, all fresh and blooming from the hand of the Creator” (66). But when the captain goes ashore this historical fairy island alone, he orders the mate Jarmin to take command and resume the whale hunt, trapping the crew within sight of paradise. With this, “the villains of all nations and dyes” fully emerge as a “democracy in the forecastle” (36) and “begin breathing nothing but outright mutiny” (73). The political story of what happens when the Julia enters Papeetee Bay at first appears to replicate the story of the Dolly’s arrival in the bay of Nu-

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kuheva in Typee: looking forward to fresh food and free movement, a hungry crew is quickly disappointed, and their disappointment is signaled by the ominous presence of French warships in the bay. “With all our light sails wooingly spread, we held our way, until, with the doctor’s glass, Papeetee, the village metropolis of Tahiti, came into view. Several ships were descried lying in the harbor, one which loomed up black and large; her two rows of teeth proclaiming a frigate” (69). Indeed, at the very moment of the Julia’s arrival, Admiral Du Petit Thouars’s Reine Blanche bares its teeth and fires a salute to mark “the forced cession of Tahiti to the French” (69). As in the second chapter of Melville’s first novel, so in the nineteenth chapter of his second a view of French imperialism interrupts sailors’ aspirations of liberty, an analogy is drawn between island and sailors under tyrannical command, and the narrator begins to speak of desertion in the language of the American and French Revolutions. But where Typee’s narrator frames his plans for desertion in terms of individual rights—­the right to fresh food and freedom from a broken contract—­Typee and the crew of the Julia join mutiny with democracy to take a collective approach, one that is all the more remarkable for the condition and relation of these men to each other. Though they have spent much of their time at sea mercilessly tormenting and pranking each other, once they are all forbidden to land on Tahiti, they combine and collaborate, establishing a “forecastle parliament” to debate the question of mutiny (74). Then, as members of this parliament consider how to take the ship and whether or not to kill the mate, Typee proposes a political alternative to violence that hinges on an act of extraordinary representation, in the strong sense of the term that Sieyès introduces. Typee’s description of the process, document, and action that he calls the “Round Robin” merits both a long citation and an illustration: At last, by way of diverting their thoughts, I proposed that a “Round Robin” should be prepared and sent ashore to the consul by Baltimore, the cook. The idea took mightily, and I was told to set about it at once. On turning to the doctor for the requisite materials, he told me he had none; there was not a fly-­leaf, even, in any of his books. So, after great search, a damp, musty volume, entitled “A History of the Most Atrocious and Bloody Piracies,” was produced, and its two remaining blank leaves being torn out, were, by help of a little pitch, lengthened into

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one sheet. For ink, some of the soot over the lamp was then mixed with water, by a fellow of literary turn; and an immense quill, plucked from a distended albatross’ wing, which, nailed against the bowsprit bitts, had long formed an ornament of the forecastle, supplied a pen. Making use of the stationery thus provided, I indicted upon a chest-­ lid, a concise statement of our grievances; concluding with the earnest hope, that the consul would at once come off, and see how matters stood, for himself. Right beneath the note was described the circle about which the names were to be written; the great object of a Round Robin being to arrange the signatures in such a way that, although they are all found in a ring, no man can be picked out as the leader of it. (74)

The episode of the Round Robin is remarkable for several reasons. For one, it is a rare successful mutiny in Melville’s corpus, and it marks the accomplishment of something inconceivable on the Dolly, where the crew members are so sunk in their individual miseries that they “are only united in enduring without resistance the unmitigated tyranny of the captain” (T, 31). By contrast, the equally miserable crew of the Julia unite to assert their common demands, overthrow the rule of the captain, and eventually secure their freedom from the ship. But Typee also goes to great lengths to underscore the political meaning of this mutiny as an act of representation. Beginning in a “council upon the forecastle” (71), which grows into a “forecastle parliament” (74), the Round Robin marks the culmination of a scene of debate among the sailors about the merits of violent and nonviolent resistance. It yields a concrete, collective act of representation that does not delegate the crew’s authority because, by design, the Round Robin works by pluralizing authorship and dispersing leadership among the signatories. That act of representation produces both a collective body acting in concert and a visual representation of that action—­another rarity in Melville’s work—­which Typee first describes at length and then reproduces on the page: “The annexed, therefore, as nearly as I can recall it, is something like a correct representation of the signatures. It is due the doctor, to say, that the circumscribed device was his” (75). In reconstructing the Round Robin, Typee does not list the sailor’s demands or grievances but simply shows the image of fifteen names ringed around a circle, inside of which appear fifteen crudely drawn hands, each pointing to a name, and the underlined words

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“all Hands” (Figure 3). Typee gives credit to Long Ghost for that “circumscribed image,” but everything about the Round Robin reinforces its collective authorship. The phrase “all Hands” indicates the figured hands, which point to the names raying out along the circumference, which are themselves collectively owned and authored.20 Like “Typee,” all of the names

Figure 3. Herman Melville, “The Round Robin,” from Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas, Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, eds., Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press / Newberry Library, 1968. This image is from the remaining fragment of the Omoo manuscript, and appears in the appendix to the Northwestern-­Newberry edition (379).

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signed to the Round Robin belong as much to the crew as a whole as to the individual men because, in lieu of their legal names, all have chosen to sign according to how they “went among the crew.” Taken together, Typee’s narrative description and visual reproduction of the Round Robin show that it is a clear precursor to Ishmael’s radiant circle of “democratic dignity” in “Knights and Squires”: it is a circle that places “all Hands”—­those that wield picks and drive spikes—­in the center, and all of the names by which they are known to each other around the circumference. And in this circle of hands and names that point only to themselves, they bring forth a new collective being. Collective, but not comprehensive. Missing from that “all Hands” is the cook, Baltimore. Named for the place of his birth and enslavement, from which he has escaped (41), Baltimore does not sign the Round Robin, but his hand is enlisted to carry it to the consul, thereby providing it its ultimate force. The Round Robin amounts to an act of “extraordinary representation” in Sieyès’s terms because it is constituent in so many senses of the word—­it constitutes an action, a statement, and a collective actor that does not presuppose its own authority or beg the question of its own constitution. But the Round Robin nevertheless draws a circle that points back to itself as an act of mutual pledging and collective self-­authorization. In embracing rather than repressing a circular representation of the crew’s triple act, Melville crafts an image that combines two eighteenth-­century accounts of constituent representation: Sieyès’s extraordinary representation and Thomas Paine’s image of “modern” representation from the second part of Rights of Man. Where Paine’s famous polemic with Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France sets the tone of part 1 of Rights of Man, part 2 is addressed to the Abbé Sieyès and largely devoted to debates around the constitution of post-­revolutionary governments. Dispensing with the “childish names and distinctions” that preoccupy “Mr Burke,” Paine turns in the second part to a more substantive debate with Sieyès over “the old and the new systems of government.”21 Paine begins by disputing the notion that the post-­revolutionary governments founded in the United States and France are “new” at all; “being found on the original inherent Rights of Man,” they are instead restorations of an “original” principle of rule. What is new, he claims, is representative government with its wholly modern system of

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delegating rule to “an assemblage of practical knowledge.”22 At pains to distinguish representative governments from ancient democracies as much as from feudal monarchies, Paine rehearses well-­k nown Federalist arguments about the impracticality of direct democracy. He advocates the “ingrafting” of “representation upon democracy” to balance interests and extend rule over a vast territory.23 Then, indirectly citing the problem of the “vicious circle” and the extraordinary representative body of the whole nation Sieyès proposes as remedy, Paine introduces his own circular counterimage: “A nation is not a body, the figure of which is to be represented by the human body; but is like a body contained within a circle, having a common centre, in which every radius meets; and that centre is formed by representation.”24 With this, Paine rejects the anthropomorphic figuration of the nation as either an absolute state of nature or a corporate Leviathan and replaces the symbolic power of the human figure with a geometric abstraction of the centripetal act of delegation itself. As the radii meet in the center, so they point the direction in which authority and legitimacy travel—­toward a circumscribed, representative body that both supplements and supplants the people. Like Paine, Melville proposes a circle of representation that abstracts from the human body rather than figuring it whole. But Melville complicates the symbolic movement of authority in two ways: first, by refusing delegation in both the verbal and visual descriptions Typee gives of the Round Robin, and then by requiring an actual human body—­that of a self-­emancipated former slave—­to carry that representation to the consul. Rather than meeting in the center, “all Hands” point away from it, back toward the names that ray outward along the circumference and, implicitly, to the hand that carries it. This turns Paine’s closed circle of representation into a radiant and centrifugal sphere that “ingrafts” democracy back onto the Federalist model of delegated authority. But rather than dispensing with the representational mechanism and reifying the Federalist caricature of direct democracy as too simple, Melville reimagines representation, reasserting the constituent collective as both source and agent of authority. Put simply, the Round Robin represents democracy as a representation, but one that consists of an action, an agent, and a work of art all at once. To borrow F. R. Ankersmit’s distinction between mimetic and aesthetic representation,

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Melville’s Round Robin emphasizes representation as a generative act that creates a new political reality apart from its constituent parts, each of which is also transformed.25 Melville’s circle figures its constitutive members nonmimetically: nicknames and scrawled hands point to each other as distinct figurations of persons, while the all and the each remain visible in a balanced paradox. With this, the Round Robin episode amounts to much more than the story of a moderately successful shipboard mutiny. It enters into key eighteenth-­century debates about revolutionary foundation, governance, and claims-­making in order to propose a radical democratic alternative to the constitutive perplexities of representation—­namely, it proposes that the people must generate those extraordinary, supplementary bodies through which they can speak and act with authority. And this is where Baltimore’s role becomes key. Ultimately, what the Round Robin lacks on its own is precisely what he supplies: the force of a supplemental body. The fact that this force is delivered by a former slave who is neither represented by it nor excluded from it does place the burden of embodiment on a Black man, but at the same time this detail underscores how such representation is necessarily provisional and uncompleted.

Despite the broad political implications of the Round Robin episode, surprisingly few critics of Omoo linger over it. Even political theorists who engage with Melville’s early work, like Michael Rogin, Sophia Mihic, and Keenan Ferguson, tend to downplay its significance, with Mihic barely noting it and Rogin and Ferguson largely focusing on its difference from “the historical document on which [it] was based—­the adjudicated mutiny that involved Melville himself ” on the Lucy Ann in 1840.26 Indeed, the Round Robin is often discussed by scholars only in the context of its relationship to Melville’s biographical experience despite the fact that its defining feature—­ the circle of signatures—­has no historical basis in the Lucy Ann mutiny in Tahiti.27 Katie McGettigen, one of the few critics who looks closely at this episode apart from the Lucy Ann story, focuses on the ruses of authenticity it poses as “proof of a thing that never happened.”28 McGettigan highlights the overt fictiveness of the Round Robin, which is made clear by Typee’s lingering description of its haphazard fabrication and the joke that its material

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form seems to be playing on the content of the document: “So, after great search, a damp, musty volume, entitled ‘A History of the Most Atrocious and Bloody Piracies,’ was produced, and its two remaining blank leaves being torn out, were, by help of a little pitch, lengthened into one sheet” (74). The Round Robin is indeed a layered fiction: an invented device hastily scrawled on the torn flyleaves of a pirate book that does not exist, since even this damp, musty volume is a partial fabrication of Melville’s. Given all of this, McGettigan resolves on a question: “Is it an honest expression of grievance or an act of piracy?”29 The answer, of course, is both. For multiple generations of critics, the Round Robin has posed a legitimacy problem that has made it difficult to take seriously as a political act.30 Unfaithful to its most obvious source in Melville’s biography, the document is instead cobbled together from some loose leaves of a fake pirate book that seems to be fabricated precisely to undermine it. But if Typee appears to delegitimize the Round Robin mutiny by suggesting that it is an act of piracy, this is instead the precise place where its political significance lies as a democratic alternative to both violence and delegated authority. Melville’s almost certain source for the Round Robin is decades older than the revolutionary debates between Paine and Sieyès: Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates from their First Rise and Settlement in the Island of Providence, which was first published in 1724 and for much of the twentieth century attributed to Daniel Defoe.31 With dozens of accounts of ships and crews rampaging around the seas and shores of the colonial world, including early narratives of Captain Roberts, Black Beard, Mary Read, and Anne Bonny, Johnson’s General History is, in Srinivas Aravamudan’s words, the “ur-­text for studies of piracy.”32 Though the book mixes fictitious with historical accounts, it has long served as a significant repository of both maritime history and pirate lore, the earliest printed source for everything from the Jolly Roger flag to the icon of the wooden-­legged, eye-­patched pirate. It is also one of the earliest sources for the use of the phrase “Round Robin” to describe a document of demands or grievances signed with a circle of names to disperse or share leadership.33 In chapter X of the expanded 4th edition, “Of Captain Antsis and His Crew,” Johnson describes the short, violent career of one Thomas Antsis, a former member of Captain Bartholomew Roberts’s crew who became captain of

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the Brigantine in 1721 and was murdered by his men in 1723. After making prize of a second ship near Bermuda, Antsis found himself in command of a divided crew and “Kingdom”: “Now that they had two good Ships well mann’d, it may be supposed they were in a Condition to undertake something bold: But their Government was disturbed by Malecontents, and as a Kingdom divided within itself cannot stand, they had such a Number of new Men amongst them, that seemed not so violently inclined for the Game . . . therefore there was nothing to be done, but to break up the Company.” After a majority of the new men voted to leave Antsis and piracy for good, they petitioned the crown for a pardon, signing the petition “in the Manner of what they call a Round Robin, that is, the Names were writ in a Circle, to avoid all Appearance of Pre-­eminence, and least any Person should be mark’d out by the Government, as a principal Rogue among them.”34 Melville tears a page from the book of piracy to draft his Round Robin, just as the crew of the Julia does. Both the reason Typee gives for the Round Robin in Omoo—­his plan to petition the “crown” in the person of the colonial consul for release—­and his description of the strategy behind the circular signatures come directly out of Johnson’s account of these reluctant rogues. In both Johnson’s and Melville’s definitions of the Round Robin, too, it is the collective nature of the device—­to avoid “all Appearance of Pre-­eminence”—­that is its most significant feature. Writing on Johnson’s account of Antsis’s crew, Aravamudan argues that “the Round Robin testifies to a political formation that is collective at its very origin . . . the petition highlights the equal individual responsibility alongside the collective security of numbers, in case the conspiracy is abortive.”35 In this, the story of Antsis’s crew is further evidence of the surprisingly democratic culture of piracy in the early eighteenth century, which prized collective organization and decision making, along with an equitable distribution of all spoils. As Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker argue, such radical collectives of pirates and sailors belong to the long history of eighteenth-­century revolutions even though this history culminated in their suppression: “The actions of the motley crew, and the reactions against it, help to illuminate the clashing, ambiguous nature of the American Revolution—­its militant origins, radical momentum, and conservative political conclusion.”36 In Johnson’s stories of how pirates organized and governed themselves, that is, Melville would

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have found both a negative origin for and—­more important—­militant democratic alternatives to those forms of modern representation that worked to repress and contain far more radical possibilities. More than just a textual rogue’s gallery, Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates functioned as something of a guidebook to sailors who might “find themselves reduced to great Distresses” and in need of some direction as to “what lengths they may venture to go, without violating the Law of Nations.”37 Johnson gives various accounts of collective actions taken by sailors to change their conditions and the full texts of several documents, including one pirate constitution—­a “Set of Articles” drafted in 1721 by Captain Bartholomew Roberts’s crew “for the better Conservation of their Society, and doing Justice to one another.”38 Promising each man a vote on major decisions, access to fresh food, and an equal opportunity to claim prizes, while also regulating daily activities like card playing and bedtime (lights out below decks by 8 p.m.!), the articles drawn up by Roberts’s crew are emblematic of what Marcus Rediker elsewhere describes as the “new social order under different governing assumptions” that pirates sought to create at sea. Rediker argues that the democratic culture of piracy that thrived in the early decades of the eighteenth century was both new, a response to the colonial expansion of mercantile capitalism, and “a long time in formation,” rooted in seventeenth-­century fights by sailors over wages, conditions, and impressment.39 Creating “a new social order” based on older models of collective organization, the articles and contracts through which these deliberate pirates formed their communities were equally concerned with foundation and preservation. Every attempt to constitute a new shipboard society was also an effort toward the “better Conservation” of the culture of collective governance and shared profits that came to distinguish piracy from buccaneering, privateering, and legitimate mercantile trade.40 Pointing both forward and backward at once, founding new collectives on prior models of sailor resistance, these articles skirt the paradox of beginnings while presupposing nothing about their constituent members—­except that they be rogues who lived in “Defiance . . . to the laws of God and Man.”41 In contrast to the constituent articles developed by Captain Roberts and his crew, the petition to the crown that Antsis’s mutinous men signed with a Round Robin was aimed at disbanding their immediate society and leav-

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ing piracy altogether. But in doing so, the men placed themselves in the strange position of rogue rogues and reproduced the very acts of constitutive defiance that founded other pirate communities. Rebelling against the “ignominious Name and Denomination of Pyrates,” all signed the petition together as a mutinous collective with each man unwilling to be singled out “as a principal Rogue among them.” Johnson first describes and defines the Round Robin and then reproduces in full the men’s petition to the crown in which they declare themselves both loyal subjects of the King and unwilling participants in that “impious Way of Living.” The result is a paradoxical statement of loyalist mutiny by a collective of rogues who continued to live together for months on an otherwise uninhabited island while awaiting the king’s reply. Surviving on turtles and fish and performing daily theatricals—­ including “a Mock-­Court of Judicatory to try one another for Pyracy”—­the men created with their Round Robin another version of their pirate collective along with a comic negation of England. In his account, Johnson juxtaposes the text of their formal petition to the king with the dialogue from one of these “merry Tryals,” as he claims it was described to him: Judge. Then heark’ee, you Raskal at the Bar; hear me, Sirrah, hear me.—­ You must suffer for three Reasons: First, because it is not fit I should sit here as Judge, and no Body be hang’d.—­Secondly, you must be hang’d, because you have a damn’d hanging Look:—­A nd thirdly, you must be hang’d because I am hungry; for know, Sirrah, that ‘tis a Custom, that whenever the Judge’s Dinner is ready before the Tryal is over, the Prisoner is to be hang’d of Course.—­There’s Law for you, ye Dog.—­So take him away, Gaoler.42

For Johnson, the joke of the trial is its scandal, and he ostensibly reproduces the scene in full “only to shew how these Fellows can jest upon Things, the Fear and Dread of which, should make them tremble.”43 But in juxtaposing their petition with their theatricals, he also underscores their critique of law’s tautologies as well as the reciprocity of law and piracy that their mock trial highlights. The accused will hang simply because the law is the law and a pirate is a pirate: the defendant has a “damn’d hanging Look” to him and execution is law’s ultimate fulfillment. “There’s Law for you, ye Dog.” More than simply lampooning the law as the mirror of piracy, the mock trial further suggests that equality and justice lie with the pirates alone,

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among whom “he that was a Criminal one Day was made Judge another” thanks to the force of theatrical artifice. Even as the men disavow the life of piracy, their Round Robin reveals the radical democracy in such piratical representations, linking their commonly authored petition to the creation of a new collective actor and a work of political art. The fact that this work of art makes a mockery of the legal and political order they seek to rejoin does not undermine their appeals and claims so much as it deepens the political resonance of their story. As rogue rogues, these men understand—­perhaps even better than truly committed pirates can—­that every foundation occurs in “Defiance . . . to the laws of God and Man.” In Arendt’s account, all founding acts are the work of rogues in part because, by definition, constituent bodies “lack the power to constitute; they themselves [are] unconstitutional.”44 Even more apt here, of course, is Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the force of law and the “reason of the strongest” in Rogues. Derrida considers the phrase “rogue state” as the mark of American global sovereignty because rogue states are effectively whomever the United States says they are, while the actual practice of U.S. foreign policy makes it the most roguish state of all.45 In Derrida’s account, the rogue thus becomes analogue to the beast, a key figure around which sovereignty takes the form of the force of law that punishes those who commit acts on which the sovereign entity maintains monopoly. In effect, all states, all sovereignties, all “-­cracies” are rogues for Derrida, not because all states are founded out of illegitimacy, but because all states “in their most legitimate sovereignty” use force and abuse power: “As soon as there is sovereignty there is abuse of power and a rogue state.”46 But if the sovereign state is always rogue, what then is a rogue rogue? It is the name for those who seek to preserve all that the law emerges to suppress, as well as the name for a democratic formation that meets sovereign force—­which calls itself right, law, and legitimacy—­with the force of collective artifice. This is what both Johnson and Melville identify with the Round Robin form: while embracing the vicious circle of self-­constituted authority by making a virtue of their illegitimacy—­only rogues need apply—­the men also ensure that “no one can be mark’d out as principal rogue among them.” There is no delegation, preeminence, or rank among rogue rogues, because in constituting themselves as such they found nothing that claims absolute legitimacy or right.

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Ultimately, Melville’s recovery of the Round Robin—­scrawled as it is on the pages of the pirate book from which it was torn—­has a legitimacy problem, and this is precisely its power. Legitimacy is the currency of kings and captains, not of the picaros, omoos, and “villains of all nations and dyes” who constitute the “democracy of the forecastle.” Everything in Omoo points to the primacy of piracy, from its picaresque style to the epithets Typee lays on the Julia’s men to this mutinous act by the crew, because in all of these Melville locates the constitutive power of democratic illegitimacy—­not just in the “unconstitutional” actions of constituent communities, but also in their preservation and reenactment of all that law exists to repress. If the Round Robin is to create a new collective being, action, and art, it can only do so in defiance of legal authority. For this reason, the Round Robin must be read as both a serious political act and a potent political joke, just like the mock trial performed by the rogue pirates as they awaited a royal pardon that never arrived. Indeed, on the level of plot, what is perhaps most remarkable about the Round Robin in Omoo is how fruitless it appears to be. Although the men remain in solidarity with each other, they find that no matter how radical their collective formation is, the simple representation of themselves as an aggrieved collectivity has little force. The consul ignores the Round Robin and orders them to ship immediately, so they move onto the more militant action of a work stoppage. As strikers, they become criminally culpable, and the consul finally takes them seriously enough to arrest and imprison them until the Julia gathers another crew and departs Tahiti. But once they are freed from both ship and prison, they find themselves in a colony. That is, the Round Robin delivers its intended effect: the sailors are eventually liberated into the so-­called “fairy world” of Tahiti where, as Typee describes it, the Tahitians starve as their breadfruit harvests are sold to passing whale ships; where the French have overthrown and exiled the queen, Pomoree; where the widespread effects of Western diseases are fast depopulating the island; and where wholesale ecological destruction is being wrought by the introduction of invasive cattle, hogs, and mosquitos. The freedom that Typee and the others secure by representing and enacting themselves collectively casts them into a much wider political situation of fragility and violence—­and the second part of Omoo clearly shows that the devastating combination of environmental degradation, capitalist ex-

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pansion, and racist violence that William Connolly calls “the contemporary condition” and Étienne Balibar calls “extreme violence” was fully at work in 1840s Tahiti.47 As Typee witnesses the ongoing destruction of the island and the violation of its people by the Protestant missions and the French colonial government, he becomes a kind of misery tourist who sees and records the state of the island, all the while he keeps looking for his “fairy world,” that one corner of Tahiti he imagines is still untouched by colonial violence.48 The political imagination he shows in the Round Robin cannot contend with the complexity and extremity of colonial rapine, where sovereignty and authority are decentered and dispersed among rival empires, Christian missions, and private enterprises; and where deprivation and suffering encompass human and nonhuman life on the island, defying all of the modes of political representation and action that Typee understands. The Julia’s Round Robin was a single circle, shaped and fitted to the specific conditions of the captain’s tyrannical incompetence. Once Typee moves beyond that circle, he can do little more than hear and record the cries of the Tahitians as he moves through the islands: “Lies, lies! You tell us of salvation; and, behold, we are dying. We want no other salvation, than to live in this world. Where are there any saved through your speech? Pomaree is dead; and we are all dying with your cursed diseases. When will you give over?” (191). But however fleeting and limited the Round Robin proves to be in terms of plot, what matters most about it may be that it is a circle, and there are always more circles to form. If the Round Robin frees Typee to wander the colony as an omoo and picaro, to hear the suffering of the colonized, and to witness the crimes of the missionaries, it also enables the novel to show the circles that the Tahitians themselves are collectively drawing, breaking, and expanding in defiance of colonial authorities. As with Melville’s greens, so with his circles—­the full political meaning of these figures exceeds the thematic. For even as the Round Robin fails to inaugurate a narrative of wider collective anticolonial defiance after Typee leaves the Julia, it nevertheless introduces a vital, capacious motif and motion into Omoo­—­and all of Melville’s nautical works leading up to and including Moby-­Dick. Here, the full significance of Melville’s visual illustration of the Round Robin becomes clear: by setting this “circumscribed device” off from the text, he also loosens it from the plot to underscore the aesthetic and political work circles

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continue to do. More than simply releasing Typee from the Julia, the Round Robin supplies Omoo with a figure through which to show how the islanders also act in collectively formed circles. In two scenes in particular, the natives of Tahiti and Tamai defy colonial knowledge and authority by enacting circular forms—­in the first, a pedantic missionary tries to explain circumnavigation and standardized time to skeptical Tahitians, and in the second, the young women of Tamai perform a prohibited circle dance called the “Lory-­ Lory.” Though Typee makes no effort to connect these episodes narratively, both echo and expand on the form of the Round Robin to demonstrate once again how circles enable a series of collective actions and utterances, commemorations, and new beginnings with real political significance. In chapter 42, “A Tahitian Casuist,” Typee recounts a debate over whether Tahitians are bound to keep the same Sabbath as European sailors “in preference to the day set apart by the missionaries and so considered by the islanders in general” (163). The episode is, in some sense, a first draft of Plotinus Plinlimmon’s chronometrical and horological conceit from Pierre, since it purportedly illustrates the temporal tensions between a European standard and a local practice. However, as Typee describes it, the problem is really owing to two competing versions of European time—­that of the sailors who travel eastward by the Cape of Good Hope and lose “one precious day of their lives all round” and those who travel west by Cape Horn and do not. To illustrate how spatial navigation can yield temporal disruption, an elderly missionary draws a large circle in the sand: “Here,” says he, “you see this circle” (drawing a large one on the ground with a stick) “very good; now you see this spot here” (marking a point in the perimeter): “Well, this is Beretanee” (England), “and I’m going to sail round to Tahiti. Here I go then” (following the circle round); “and there goes the sun” (snatching up a bandy-­legged native to travel round with it in a contrary direction). “Now then, we are both off going away from each other; and here you see I have arrived at Tahiti” (making a sudden stop); “and look now, where Bandy Legs is!” But the crowd strenuously maintained, that Bandy Legs ought to be somewhere above them in the atmosphere; for it was a traditionary fact, that the people from the Duff came ashore when the sun was very high overhead. (164).

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Reading this scene, Edward Sugden notes how many different temporal registers are at work in it—­the two different reckonings of time to which missionaries and sailors adhere, even as both agree on the flat spatial abstraction, and the experiential time of the Tahitians who reject both in favor of a time that is “fundamentally unmeasured, cyclical,” and three dimensional.49 That is, in addition to rejecting the standardization of time, the Tahitians reject the two-­dimensionality of the missionary’s abstract circle, insisting instead on a multidimensional sphere in which solar time and the time of “traditionary facts” coincide. Expanding a circle into a sphere, the skeptical crowd creates a counterrepresentation of colonial history, where time is plural and non-­linear and where the days of present and past generations overlap in order to account for something utterly new. Flat circles open into three dimensional spheres in Tahitian representations, and they also move, break, and restore themselves. Late in part 2 of the book, Typee describes a visit that he and Long Ghost take to the Valley of Tamai, where they watch, practically panting, as twenty young women perform the Lory-­Lory—­a ring dance staged in secret defiance of missionary prohibitions. In it a large circle of dancers surrounds a pair in the middle, moving slowly at first, quickening, and then “fly[ing] round and round” with “bosoms heaving, hair streaming, flowers dropping, and every sparkling eye circling in what seemed a line of light” (241). Predictably, Typee eroticizes the scene, as he and the perpetually randy Long Ghost are lead into a secreted grove, peep at the dancers as they prepare, and then gape at their heaving bosoms. But as Typee attempts to describe this complex dance in full—­taking up almost the whole chapter—­titillation gives way to a marveling admiration for the hard aesthetic work the women are doing, dancing circles within circles over and over again. As the two central dancers spin on one foot while circling their hands, the dancers in the ring repeatedly form, break, and enlarge their circling formation: Ahloo! Ahloo! Every link of the circle is broken; and the girls, deeply breathing, stand perfectly still. They pant hard and fast, a moment or two; and then, just as the deep flush is dying away from their faces, slowly recede all round; thus enlarging the ring. Again the two leaders wave their hands, when the rest pause; and now, far apart, stand in the still moonlight, like a circle of fairies.

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Presently, raising a strange chant, they softly sway themselves, gradually quickening the movement, until, at length, for a few passionate moments, with throbbing bosoms and glowing cheeks, they abandon themselves to all the spirit of the dance, apparently lost to everything around. But soon subsiding again into the same languid measure, as before, they become motionless; and then, reeling forward on all sides, their eyes swimming in their heads, join in one wild chorus, and sink into each other’s arms. Such is the Lory-­Lory, I think they call it; the dance of the backsliding girls of Tamai. (241)

In Typee’s lengthy description of the Lory-­Lory, the dancers’ concentric and repeating circles consist of both movement and structure with spatial and temporal dimensions: holding hands in a ring, they run round, break apart, pause, start again, and enlarge the original ring. With each iteration, the circle changes, expanding until its final collapse as the dancers come together to “sink into each other’s arms,” moving in concert right up to the end. Typee makes a point of describing every circling gesture, pause, and repetition, so the full irony of his final joke about the “backsliding girls of Tamai” is not lost: there is neither forward nor backward movement in a forbidden ring dance that exceeds the moral and political frame of the Protestant mission. Although “backsliding” may defy the prescriptions of the missionaries, it would also reinforce their narrative of recalcitrant islanders and serve to perpetuate the mission. The Lory-­Lory, by contrast, joins defiance to cultural preservation and a counterrepresentation of female agency as collective, potent, and recurrent—­a ll that the mission seeks to eradicate. The Lory-­Lory is, in this sense, as strongly political a representational act as the Round Robin: both episodes present circles as the shape and structure of collective agencies and actions, as well as of the necessity of resistant preservation and of endlessly beginning all over again. But if the Round Robin is the inaugural example in Melville’s novels of the circle as a constitutive, collective act of representation, it is nothing so simple as the original to which all later examples refer. Instead, what the Lory-­Lory dance shows so powerfully is that all circles are both repetitions and alterations, each one appearing as both the ripple of a capillary wave and a new beginning, a fragile formation whose end is always another circle. And so, while the Lory-­Lory

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echoes in movement and gesture the circle of hands and names that Typee re-­creates from memory in chapter 20, the dance also heralds the complex of interlocking, concentric circles that structure Melville’s subsequent novel, from its setting in a round archipelago with a vortex at its center, to the repetitions of its episodic plot, right down to its deictic and tautological title, Mardi: and A Voyage Thither. But where the circles of Omoo describe transient formations that are constituted along with collective agencies, those of Mardi more often describe the insphered spheres and vicious circles in which founders, sovereigns, and their subjects are all caught. Founding Violence and Insphered Spheres in Mardi Because Melville writes in circles, in Mardi’s preface as in Omoo’s he begins by turning back. But where he opens Omoo with the promise that it supplies a sequel to Typee, only to circle back to another version of his first novel’s beginning, he opens Mardi with a straightforward admission of reversal: “Not long ago, having published two narratives of voyages in the Pacific, which in many quarters, were received with incredulity, the thought occurred to me of indeed writing a romance of Polynesian adventure, and publishing it as such; to see whether, the fiction might not, possibly, be received for a verity: in some degree the reverse of my previous experience” (xvii). Assuming that the generic contract with his readers is void since the facts of his earlier captivity and picaresque narratives were taken as fictions, he claims to offer romance as a gesture of expectant reverse psychology. This reversal is often described by critics in terms of both thematics and aesthetics: in his third book, Melville replaces narration with allegory and philosophical speculation, while experimenting with a literary language that is verbally dense and “archly extravagant.”50 This reversal takes a particular narrative form, too: the early chapters of Mardi offer neither a repetition nor a clean inversion of the openings of Typee and Omoo but a stalling-­out as the book opens (“We are off!”) and then stops short in a dead calm that, perversely, produces manic shifts in moods and thoughts. “To a landsman, a calm is no joke. It not only revolutionizes his abdomen, but unsettles his mind” (9). Forced to endure a calm, such a man will cease to believe in “the imaginary lines drawn round the earth’s surface,” the captain’s competence, and the

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immortality of his own soul. He will choke on his thoughts, regret his marriage, and be unable to sit still. A calm, that is, unleashes its opposite—­an unsettling agitation that sets everything in motion. Taken together, the preface and second chapter suggest that the form of Mardi is just such an experiment in unsettling and conflicting effects, as the calm itself becomes a figure for the gap between thematic content and aesthetic effect that grows ever larger in Mardi. Indeed, this tense joining of stillness with agitation might serve as a concise description of Mardi as a whole: a romance that is at once stalled and frantic, packed with the stories of every island in the archipelago and linked by a protagonist (sometimes narrator) who is stuck in a cycle of pursuit and flight. Compounding this effect is the fact that both the stories of each island and the framing narrative tell versions of the same story over and over again—­a ll involve some violence that cannot be contained or converted into something else, like just action or political legitimacy. On Odo, “a little round world by itself ” ruled by the demigod Media, a peaceful and prosperous coast rings a center where impoverished and immiserated serfs are scourged for denying Media’s divinity. On Juam, a large island “engirdled” by several others, the line of descent carries the trace of fratricide that founded the monarchy. On Ohonoo, a republic formed by pirates conducts periodic “housekeeping” to purge itself of the knavery it reveres in its founders. As Mardi’s political allegories become more explicit in volume 2, we see the ruling class of Dominora bind its poor to the industrial wheel, while the poor of Franko rise up and fuel the revolutionary volcano. And, of course, in the new island world of Vivenza, where those with no title or estate rule, a footnote to the constitution nullifies the text: all are free and equal, it declares, except those who are perpetually enslaved (513). Finally, what links all of these tales of political violence is a protagonist who cannot adopt a distanced view from which to assess it because he is himself a killer. As Taji tries to outrun the vengeance of his victim’s sons while pursuing the woman he has either rescued or kidnapped, Mardi’s framing narrative is set in motion by an act of violence that is both obvious and ambiguous. Taji stabs an elderly priest in a fight that is either scandalous in its gratuitousness or justified by the exigencies of rescue. In his own uncertainty about his act—­“I asked myself, whether the death-­deed I had done was sprung of a virtuous

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motive . . . or whether beneath the pretense, I had engaged in this fatal affray for some other, selfish purpose” (135)—­Taji stages, again and again, all of the interpretive problems posed by violence throughout the book. But even as Mardi is filled with such stories of killing, warfare, usurpation, immiseration, and enslavement, one of the most remarked-­upon of its aesthetic features is how utterly, intensely boring it is. Wai Chee Dimock, Cindy Weinstein, Geoffrey Sanborn, and Jordan Alexander Stein have all included among the peculiarities of Mardi’s aesthetics and form its elaborate tediousness. It tortures its readers by introducing characters only to kill them off summarily, as Dimock argues; it makes us labor over its seemingly mechanical allegories, as Weinstein proposes; it denies us all the narrative satisfactions of escape, as Sanborn argues; and as Stein generously puts it, “it demonstrates the limits of [our] interest” in remarkably interesting ways.51 Chief among the remarkably interesting ways in which Mardi is boring, I would argue, is its relentless depictions of the varieties of violence that both found and persist in each of the discrete political communities of the archipelago. Put another way, Mardi proposes that the most foundational and mythic of all the stories that are told about communities—­the story of founding violence, its recurrence, and its persistence—­may also be the most repetitive, stalled, and boring of all. Certainly in 1848, the year of revolutions and their overthrow in which Melville was slowly completing the book, the story of founding violence recurring through revolution and counterrevolution was being told everywhere. Hershel Parker notes that Melville wrote the bulk of Mardi between February and December of 1848, arguing that he delayed completion as he tried to make his romance responsive to the unfolding revolution in France.52 Both Parker and Dennis Berthold read this response allegorically, arguing that in the portraits of Dominora, Franko, and Vivenza in chapters 145–­68 Melville voiced his own ambivalence about this moment—­joy at the overthrow of kings and fear of the power of what he figures as the revolutionary volcano.53 Without a doubt, 1848 returns Melville’s thinking to 1789 and the circularity of a revolutionary history that restores kings in what looks like the final defeat of the eighteenth-­century revolutions.54 As the narrator of “The Piazza” puts it, “somehow, about that time all round the world, these kings, they had the casting vote, and voted for themselves” (PT, 3). Not only

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do the kings return, Melville suggests, they do so through the very mechanisms (revolution, the franchise) that had signaled their end. The endurance of sovereign force and the refounding of monarchies through means both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary clearly drive the brutality of the stories Mardi tells. But if Mardi is, as Parker and Berthold argue, responsive to the events of 1848, plot and allegory constitute only part of that response. The circles of revolutionary history, which in 1848 appear everywhere, also fuel Melville’s stranger circular imaginings in the book, from the round geography of the archipelago, to chapter 79’s image of nesting sovereignty, to Bardianna’s theory of “Cycles and Epicycles” which Babbalanja summarizes in chapter 143: “All things revolve upon some center, to them fixed; for the centripetal is ever too much for the centrifugal” (460). What in Omoo becomes the common shape of those disparate, transitory, collective formations that counter the legitimacy claims of captains, missionaries, and kings is, in Mardi, bound tightly to a concentrated, centripetal sovereignty. But in figuring the myriad ways that ruling powers hold onto and continue the violence that founds them, these circles also spiral out, becoming both uncontainable and productive as Melville reimagines what the vicious circles of 1789 had become in 1848.

If Melville develops different political meanings out of circles across his novels, his work is consistent with the shifting circular figures of political theory from the eighteenth century to the present. As Arendt argues of Sieyès, the vicious circle of constituent authority is as much about the problem of founding violence as it is about the problem of founding illegitimacy: “Cain slew Abel, and Romulus slew Remus; violence was at the beginning and . . . no beginning could be made without violence, without violating.” If Sieyes “broke” the vicious circle, he did so “by putting pouvoir constituent, that is the nation, into a permanent state of nature.”55 To break the circle, she argues, another line or limit must be drawn so that the power that violates in order to found can be consigned to the realm of nature and violence, outside of politics. For Derrida, by contrast, there is no such outside because all sovereignty is “rogue,” predicated on “a force that is stronger than all the other forces in the world” from which it must inoculate itself. That self-­

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inoculation, or autoimmunity, takes the form of yet another “vicious circle,” one that can never be broken because it is the very shape of sovereignty: “Sovereignty is round; it is a rounding-­off.”56 In Derrida’s account, all sovereignties and “-­cracies” take circular form because of the way that they hold the force they monopolize as law, revolving it back into themselves. But where one circle casts violence out of politics and another holds it tight, Étienne Balibar finds that political philosophy has reached a limit in its capacity to account for the relations of politics and violence. In Violence and Civility, Balibar pushes back against the assumptions that guide both Arendt’s and Derrida’s formulations, dispensing first with the idea that violence can ever be eliminated from politics and second with the presumption that all forms of violence are homogenous and capable of being comprehended under the sign of sovereign force. “It is precisely the fact of conferring ‘universal meaning’ on violence . . . that makes it possible to posit the convertibility of political violence in advance.”57 Balibar instead sets out to map more complex “topographies” of violence in its relations with politics, first by distinguishing political strategies of nonviolence from those of counterviolence; second, by describing configurations of extreme violence that neither nonviolence nor counterviolence can address; and finally, by proposing new political strategies of antiviolence that might disrupt them. But even as he maps out new ways of conceptualizing the relation of violence to politics, Balibar both returns to and reinvents the vicious circle: the topographical figures that he proposes for these reconceived relations are, respectively, a circle, a Möbius strip, and an “infinite circularity.” For Balibar, the story political philosophy tells of a generalized, universal violence that politics can somehow eradicate overlooks the distinction between those historical processes that seek to “negate” it, on the one hand by “striving to create the external and internal conditions for making violence impossible” and those that seek to “counter” it, on the other, “by turning it against those who perpetuate it.” But if nonviolence and counterviolence speak to distinct interpretations of violence and strategies of conversion, he argues, they also exist in a relentlessly cyclical relationship with each other: Politics has never ceased to go round in the circle of the “double” negation of violence. . . . This negation is “double” . . . in the sense of the two

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forms of practical negation that would seem to be elicited by the reality of violence and its inherent powers of dissemination. They may be called “nonviolence” and “counterviolence.” It would not be hard to show that each of these “strategies” or “logics” . . . is permanently sustained by the shortcomings or failures of the other. . . . It would also not be hard to show that this circle pertains to both the revolutionary perspective and the perspective of a state-­centered politics  .  .  . the insurgent and the constitutional perspective alike.58

Where liberal theory might locate the circularity of mimetic violence on the side of revolutionary counterviolence alone (as Arendt argues of France), Balibar also places abstract nonviolence in the circle (as Derrida does) to account for all of the ways in which state-­centered politics cannot eradicate violence as long as it perpetuates it. But what ultimately matters for Balibar is that these two circular strategies of negation have themselves become locked in a cycle of failure because neither can address “the kind of violence that eludes both control from above and transformation from below.”59 The name that Balibar gives to the contemporary forms of violence that elude the political strategies inherited from the eighteenth century is “extreme violence.” Ubiquitous, “cruel,” and “banal,” extreme violence oscillates between an ultraobjective form that treats “masses of human beings as things or useless remnants,” disposable and vulnerable to biological and ecological catastrophe, and an ultrasubjective form that “requires individuals and groups to be represented as incarnations of evil, diabolical powers that threaten the subject from within and have to be eliminated at all costs, up to and including self-­destruction.”60 For Balibar, racism is both the paradigmatic example and “the metonymic name” for the oscillation between these two “strategies of elimination.” The racism of mass expulsion and murder is never identical to that “meted out daily” as exclusion, immiseration, and social death, he argues, but they coexist in the complex topography of a Möbius strip. And taken together, he writes, they “call the very possibility of politics into question,” at once “mak[ing] the demand for politics imperative and depriv[ing] it of its usual benchmarks.”61 Instead, he argues, politics must take a new form, which he calls, alternately, antiviolence or “civility.” Balibar proposes civility as a “political innovation” that might disrupt the oscillations of extreme violence between its ultraobjective and ultrasubjec-

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tive forms.62 But he insists that, unlike nonviolence and counterviolence, antiviolence is not prescriptive, nor can its forms be determined in advance. It is not an instrument of an existing politics, nor does it presume that politics is the constitutive end of a process of converting violence into legitimate sovereignty. What antiviolence is, he says, is an “infinite circularity” through which politics confronts the “irreducible alterity” it “carries within itself.”63 Against the double negation of violence by nonviolence and counterviolence, which circle round and round each other and fail to produce a political strategy that can disrupt extreme violence, Balibar proposes a further circling, an infinite one. Elsewhere in the book, he describes this as “a circularity of political practice,” in which politics remains precarious but never impossible as it becomes “a work of art.”64 This infinite and precarious practice of circularity does not repeat or get locked in a single cycle, alternately failing to sublimate or counter violence, but becomes something else—­a circling through which politics becomes an improvisation, a collective distancing,65 and an internal displacement of the violence that is always inseparable from it. In thus figuring an infinite, improvisational, and artful circularity to disrupt an oscillation precisely where a circle has failed, Balibar enters fully into Melville’s political idiom and helps to make clear all that is at stake in it. From Omoo to Mardi and into Moby-­Dick, as circles give rise to infinite countercircles, Melville reimagines political founding not as an institution that monopolizes violence, nor as an endless cycle of counterviolence, but as an ongoing process in which the constitutive possibilities of political community become as infinitely variable as the forms of political violence that he maps. And Melville maps the topography of violence in Mardi explicitly and extensively: a massive round archipelago (567) with a vortex at its center (651), in which almost every form of force, injury, and violation that appears across his writing is thematized in the stories told of the individual islands. Like the conditions that Typee finds on the island of Tahiti, that violence is extreme according to Balibar’s definition, toggling between subjective and objective poles, but rather than coinciding in a single place at a single moment, distinct configurations of force, injury, and violation are spread across the archipelago. Violence thus appears intensely subjective in one plot and objective in another. Taji’s crime and its narrative consequences are

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deeply personal and hinge on the concentration and reduction of identities to singular, even allegorical meanings (Yillah’s maiden innocence can only be preserved by the total elimination of Aleema the evil priest and Hautia the vengeful witch). By contrast, the crimes Taji encounters on islands like Odo, Dominora, and Vivenza are more often impersonal and structural: the immiseration of entire populations who are either dispensable or held in reserve for exploitation by kings and ruling classes. While violence appears in its forceful negation on one island—­the republican pirates of Ohonoo simply “banish all objectionable persons” (270)—­it appears as an insurgent counterviolence on another—­the multitudes of Franko burn the monarch’s palace to destroy both the sovereign and his seat (498). In part, this is what the archipelagic romance enables Melville to do: by disentangling different formations of violence and politics, Mardi treats each one in isolation, as discrete political stories, all of which are connected in the ways they show the transformation of founding violence into forms so extreme that no single politics can confront or convert them.66 In chapter 63, “Odo and Its Lord,” we seem to have a contained story in which the characters of island and sovereign emerge as figures for each other. Media first appears as “a gallant gentleman and king” of “endless pedigree,” and his island first presents the castaways with lush vegetation, fruitful plenty, and leisured ease: “A pleasant ramble found it a little round world by itself, full of beauties as a garden” (190). But as their tour takes them from periphery to center, the chapter discloses the “secret places, hard to find” where “the common sort, including serfs, and Helots, war-­captives held in bondage” all dwell in “concentric” trenches, “the isle well-­nigh surrounding” (191). As the circular topography of Odo yields a map of its sovereign structure, so a tour to the center of the island reveals the hidden “serfs” who curse Media and deny his divinity, all the while they fuel his reign and rule. “But when man toils and slays himself for masters who withhold the life he gives to them—­then, then the soul screams out, and every sinew cracks” (191). Toiling to give life to the sovereign who denies it to them, the men and women at the center of the island inherit misery as surely as Media inherited his semidivine station, their groans and defiance gaining them nothing but another generation of toil. The circle of Odo is both temporal and spatial, revealing the permanence of the monarchy’s violent foundation,

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generation after generation, in its topography of brutality and concealment, which is restored even after the gruesome truth at its center appears. “But let all pass. To look at and to roam about of holidays, Odo seemed a happy land. The palm-­trees waved—­though here and there you marked one sear and palsy-­smitten; the flowers bloomed—­though dead ones mouldered in decay; the waves ran up the strand in glee—­though, receding, they sometimes left behind bones mixed with shells” (192). The shock that Odo delivers does not lie in the discovery of all the misery that its beauties conceal, but in the return to the island’s pleasures with full knowledge of that misery and in full sight of its sufferers. Where the map of Odo becomes a portrait of sovereignty as that which conceals, reveals, and then conceals, over and over again, all of those whom it exploits, a different—­indeed, inverted—­circular map describes the foundations of sovereignty in Juam. In the twelve-­chapter sequence that culminates in chapter 79, “The Centre of Many Circumferences,” Taji, Media, Babbalanja, and the other travelers visit this island ruled by a young monarch named Donjalolo whose seat at the center of his island is also his prison. As the travelers walk from the coast into the secluded valley of Willamilla where Donjalolo must remain as long as he rules, Babbalanja tells the story of the monarchy’s origin in a long-­past dispute over succession between two brothers, Marjora and Teei: “With fratricidal hate, singled out by the ferocious Marjora, Teei fell by that brother’s hand. When stripping from the body the regal girdle, the victor wound it round his own loins, thus proclaiming himself king over Juam” (220). In Willamilla, in other words, Cain slays Abel and Romulus slays Remus all over again. But rather than relegating that act to a pre-­political past, legitimizing the usurpation as the right of conquest, or simply erasing the crime from historical memory, the islanders devise a peculiar solution to preserve the monarchy’s violent founding. Following the proclamations of an oracle, the islanders invest the usurper’s line of succession with sovereign right, but only at the price of the monarch’s freedom: “Since the conqueror has slain his brother in deep Willamilla, so that Teei never more issued from that refuge of death; therefore the same fate should be Marjora’s” and his sons’ “to the uttermost scion of his race” (220). Imprisoning its kings in the valley where its founder committed his original crime, Juam literalizes the state’s monopoly on violence, preserving

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the founder’s act in and as its sovereignty. As on Odo, so on Juam is violence turned inward and held at the center of the island. But on Juam both the right to violence and its brunt are borne by the sovereign alone because there is “no slave in Juam but its king, for all the tassels round his loins” (221). Pushing the limits of political theology, sovereignty in Juam joins mortal to immortal flesh as the living king is invested with a neverending crime through which he must incarnate both murderer and victim as long as he reigns. With this, the sovereign is held in a state in which violence is perpetually converting into political legitimacy, and Donjalolo becomes something like the reductio ad absurdum of sovereignty itself, so tautologically autonomous here that he becomes its only possible subject. Trapped in this narrow state, Donjalolo begins to take on the properties of his island prison as he travels daily with the sun from the east to the west sides while his moods pass between similar extremes (224). As the narrative follows Donjalolo’s diurnal path, “we hie to and fro” along with him across the valley, returning at the end of the night to “the most private retreat of the prince.” In Melville’s final image of this concentrated sovereign state, he places Donjalolo in a “nest,” a chamber concealed in a triply walled maze the only opening in which is directly above him: And here in this impenetrable retreat, centrally slumbered the universe-­ rounded, zodiac-­belted, horizon-­zoned, sea-­girt, reef-­sashed, mountain-­ locked, arbor-­nested, royalty-­girdled, arm-­clasped, self-­hugged, indivisible Donjalolo:—­the husk-­inhusked meat in a nut; the innermost spark in a ruby; the juice-­nested seed in a golden-­rinded orange; the red royal stone in an effeminate peach; the insphered sphere of spheres. (240)

Circling from the outermost celestial sphere down to the self-­hugging arms of the sleeping monarch himself, Melville presents sovereign power as a layered containment, a centripetal encircling that renders Donjalolo “indivisible.” But just as the passage reaches “the center of many circumferences,” Donjalolo becomes so intensely concentrated in his undivided singularity, he explodes. The indivisible Donjalolo becomes nut, germ, seed, and sphere as Melville’s passage counters one set of circles—­concentric, centripetal, closed—­

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with another—­diffuse, centrifugal, and productive. With a colon and a dash, Melville’s figuration of sovereignty’s enclosed singularity splits open, yielding a proliferation of figures that themselves figure more fruitful proliferations. At the center of a closed circle that enshrines founding violence are the seeds through which other circles might germinate, thereby reminding us that not everything begins in violence. Just as in the seeming “failure” of the Round Robin in Omoo, one political story unfolds here on the level of plot, thematics, and characterization and another on the level of figuration. Donjalolo may bear the concentrated power and penalty of the fratricidal violence with which the story of founding always begins, but as long as he is seed and nut, he also bears in him the capacity to begin something new. As the “insphered sphere of spheres,” Donjalolo thus serves at once as a single example of Melville’s diverse accounts of founding violence, as an image of the connections between these stories, and as a figurative alternative to them. The archipelago is an insphered sphere, as is the romance. But beyond underscoring the structural homology between Mardi and Mardi, the insphered sphere of spheres also names the aesthetic process at work in Melville’s circular politics, in which repetitions always yield something new. Balibar argues that the “infinite circularity” of antiviolence might be imagined as an art, a distancing displacement of violence through which politics confronts “the element of irreducible alterity that it carries within itself,” and here Melville gives some insight into what he might mean. Confronting the alterity that politics carries within it cannot mean simply acknowledging that violence is always contained within politics (as either nonviolence or counterviolence, sovereignty or revolution) because that is as obvious and unexceptional as the manifest miseries on Odo. The real alterity of politics must lie elsewhere, in what is not expected of it, in that which is not yet known and cannot yet be described. Just as Balibar argues that the politics of antiviolence cannot be prescribed or presupposed, so Melville can only gesture to something that might be seeded by this confronting and concentrating of sovereign power and penalty. That seed germinates aesthetically, not thematically, as a proliferation of figures. In this figural bounty, Melville might be said to be offering aesthetics as redemption from violence—­if, that is, “violence” is conceived as an aberration and an abstraction.67 But Mardi treats violence in its countless specific

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manifestations not as an abstract scandal, as force and injury become more ubiquitous than aberrant in the romance. Further, the meaning that such actions carry can never be contained by a single perspective, as Taji’s relentless scrutiny of his actions shows, so they cannot be regarded as only “scandalous.” As Mardi reanimates the scene of founding violence on island after island, literary form and aesthetics do not work as the means of abstracting us from the politics that allow such scenes to have distinct meanings. Instead, the aesthetic register models a process in which shifts of perspective, unpredictable transitions, and strange figurative associations show how new things may always begin. Put another way, founding in Melville’s third novel is not only an act of violation that is converted by the form-­giving action that institutes politics as sovereignty, legitimacy, or right. Instead, founding is joined to a process of creativity as it becomes part of an ongoing, circular story through which figures, actions, and forms are generated even as counterforces work to break, erode, and transform them. Rogue Waves So intensely concentrated is Mardi on the persistent myths of political founding, even its rogues and pirates become sovereigns and state-­builders. In chapter 89, Babbalanja recounts yet another founding myth, the origin story of Ohonoo, “The Isle of Rogues.” Originally a penal colony comprising the “buccaneers, filibustiers, thieves, and malefactors” who were banished from the neighboring islands, the original inhabitants decided to form a nation and choose a king, but first, he says, they had to do a bit of “political housekeeping” and “banish all objectionable persons to still another isle” (M, 269–­ 70). The question, of course, is whom to banish and for what—­rogues for reasons of “superlative knavery” or rogue rogues for “comparative honesty” (270)? Unable to answer the question, Babbalanja merely notes that now “the men of Ohonoo had canonized the derelictions of their progenitors, though the same traits are deemed scandalous among themselves.” Time “makes the difference.” As with wine, fame, cherries, and ruins, so with the rogues of long ago, time “smooths, levels, glosses, softens, melts, and meliorates” (270). With the story of the founding of Ohonoo, we would seem to find Mardi’s most decisive reversal of Omoo’s Round Robin mutiny and Lory-­Lory

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defiance, but taken together, these episodes form the early chapters of Melville’s political theory of rogues. Beginning with the Round Robin and culminating with the “permanent Riotocracy” (PT, 149) of Charles Island in “The Encantadas,” rogue formations carry political situations to their most radical extremes in Melville’s writing, without ever resolving into a single political narrative of foundation, revolution, or counterrevolution. Instead, what links these rogue stories is how all of them reframe the paradox of constitutive political action (which is always “unconstitutional”) by proposing various temporalities through which to describe the co-­presence of permanence and transience in all political communities. If the Round Robin and the Lory-­Lory are marked by their transience, they are also acts of restoration that return obsolete forms of collective resistance to the world. If the founded state of Ohonoo is defined by its reverence for an enshrined origin, it also depends upon the work of time to transform that origin into something reverential. Regarding Charles Island in “The Encantadas,” Melville captures this temporal duplicity precisely with the term “permanent riotocracy.” As Michael Jonik argues, this “is an insurrection without institution, a process of making permanent a series of interruptions to any foundational national narrative.” Over and over again, Melville seems to ask, how shall we reconcile “the apparent paradox of this temporary community’s permanence”?68 On the Isle of Rogues, the answer seems to be “go surfing.” If the Isle of Rogues initially appears as yet another installment of Mardi’s endless parodies of founding mythology, like the story of Donjalolo’s sleeping sovereignty, it is one that also resolves on something radically new. In chapter 90, “Rare Sport at Ohonoo,” the narrator describes the felicitous geography of the island: located at the outer edge of the archipelago, Ohonoo faces the “flood gate” of the sea where a reef forms a break on which “the waves muster for the onset, thundering in water-­bolts that shake the whole reef, till its very spray trembles” (273). Waiting on their boards of polished wood, the Ohonooans rush into the surf: Here, throwing themselves upon their boards, tranquilly they wait for a billow that suits. Snatching them up, it hurries them landward, volume and speed both increasing, till it races along a watery wall, like the smooth, awful verge of Niagara. Hanging over this scroll, looking down

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from it as from a precipice, the bathers haloo; every limb in motion to preserve their place on the very crest of the wave. (273)

In this counterfigure to the “calm” that launches the romance into a state of agitated stillness, Melville’s narrator rhapsodizes on this sport of tranquil dashing. Where outward stillness brings inward chaos, the outward rush of the sea demands that every limb be mobilized to hold one’s place “on the very crest of the wave.” To ride the wave, that is, the surfing rogues must simultaneously give themselves over to its force and work furiously to hold their place on it. If “A Calm” is Mardi’s inaugural figure for the unnerving, frantic boredom that comes with endlessly repeating myths of founded states and sovereign violence, then surfing proposes an entirely different orientation to the relentless cycles of politics and history. Melville describes this cycle succinctly, four decades after Mardi, in the first stanza of “Fragments of an Ancient Gnostic Poem from the 12th Century” (1891): Found a family, build a state, The pledged event is still the same: Matter in end will never abate, His ancient brutal claim. (PP, 284)

Where the forces of time and matter continue to do their ruthless work, there is neither foundation nor calm, only pledged events in the midst of change and movement. But to give oneself over to that movement is not to concede to determinism or fatalism, so much as it is to accept the demand that one act in concert with those forces, creatively and collectively, because “should they fall behind, the squadrons that follow would whelm them” (273).

4 Circles and Sovereignty The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle, another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-­noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles”

“The centre and circumference of all democracy!” Beyond where the rogues of Ohonoo “preserve their place on the very crest of the waves” that break against the outer reef of Mardi (M, 273), whales roll and wallow with “the great shroud of the sea” that rolls “as it rolled five thousand years before” (MD, 572). Moby-­Dick opens and closes with this rolling motion. In “Etymology,” a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School derives the roots of the English word “whale” “more immediately from the Dut. and Ger., Wallen . . . to roll, to wallow” (xvii), and in the final line of “The Chase—­Third Day,” Ishmael watches the sea roll over the wreck of the Pequod as it spins to the center of a vortex created by a spiraling whale. “Named from roundness or rolling,” the etymological whale rises from dusty 160

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lexicons and grammars as a force, a motion, and a shape that rolls with the sea as ships and surfers ride its cresting surface. As each whale moves in concert with a timeless, unfathomed power, so the smallest and most ephemeral scale of action is joined to the most vast and relentless of forces. With this, the whale becomes cetacean counterpart to Melville’s rogue mariners and Lory-­Lory dancers, his renegades and castaways whose concerted acts and pledged events partake of the very forces of matter and history that erode them, and the whale’s roll signals another iteration of the great circle that Ishmael will call “democracy”—­“that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy!” (117). With this rolling of Pequod, whale, and sea, Melville introduces another shape and motion for democratic aesthetics that both does and does not belong to the cycle of nautical novels from Omoo to White-­Jacket, in which the possibilities of democratic politics circle between collective beginnings and violent foundings, revolutions and counterrevolutions. Certainly, “Knights and Squires” supplies the figure in which much of Melville’s circular thinking about democracy culminates: the center and circumference of democracy holds together all of the tensions of transcendent power and collective action, the divine and the mundane, sovereignty denuded and ornamented, that Melville imagines against the backdrop of revolutionary history, 1776 to 1848. But where I argue in chapter 3 that Omoo and Mardi narrate these tensions cyclically—­w ith each novel circling between phases of beginning, failing, and beginning again, while endlessly rediscovering the same old myths of founding violence—­Moby-­Dick rolls all of these circles together into new shapes and motions: a cylinder that transfers and translates motive force between individuals and collectives, a double enclosure of calm and commotion, and a revolving vortex in which everything is happening everywhere at once. Put another way, Moby-­Dick breaks with Omoo and Mardi for precisely the reason it culminates the political stories they tell. In it, Melville shifts from narratives that are shaped by a history that cycles between the centrifugal collectives of Round Robin mutineers and the centripetal concentration of “self-­hugging” sovereigns like Donjalolo to a narrative form that approximates the “enigma” of democratic sovereignty itself.1 Layering “circles upon circles,” combining centrifugal and centripetal motions, and

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spinning bubbly spheres out of vortices, Moby-­Dick imagines configurations of demos and kratia that open into multiple narrative possibilities at once—­ violence and collapse but also expansion and proliferation. Melville is, of course, not alone in proposing that democratic sovereignty is round in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Nearly twenty years before Moby-­Dick, Alexis de Tocqueville described a giant circle as he sought to show how equality, “the creative element from which each particular fact” of American life derives, could be coupled with sovereign power.2 In Tocqueville’s famous description of the principle of popular sovereignty in the United States in Democracy in America’s first volume, he portrays that roundness principally in terms of movement. Demonstrating how the sovereignty of the people has, in the United States, “been detached from all fictions in which it has elsewhere been carefully wrapped,” he imagines a self-­contained, closed system that receives back into itself everything to which it gives rise, drawing with its constant movement a vast sphere that encompasses its own origins and ends: “It is the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it.” This dynamic, three-­dimensional sphere is Tocqueville’s image of a “society that acts by and for itself,” generating from within all its own authority. But even as Tocqueville crafts with this image the portrait of a society in which the sources of political authority are wholly immanent, he speaks of this autonomous, self-­originating, and self-­contained power in terms that transcend it: “The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe.”3 Where the “great God Absolute” stands at both center and circumference of Melville’s circle, Tocqueville’s God hovers nearby as a metaphor. Few passages have been more influential to the intellectual history of what Derrida calls “the old-­new enigma of sovereignty . . . whether it be called democratic or not” than Tocqueville’s metaphoric substitution of the people for God.4 In the 1930s, in Political Theology, Carl Schmitt cited Tocqueville’s circular image of popular sovereignty to assert liberal democracy’s preservation of transcendence; in 1988, Claude Lefort invoked Tocqueville’s “extraordinary insights” to argue that democratic power belongs to no one and occupies an “empty place”; and, at the turn of the twenty-­first century, both Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida rooted their distinct analyses of democratic sovereignty in Democracy in America.5 For the better part of a

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century, that is, Tocqueville has been understood to address the “enigma” of democratic sovereignty with particular clarity, supplying the most enduring metaphor for the symbolic transformations that sovereign power is said to undergo in the wake of the American and French Revolutions. Sovereignty’s enigmas always concern the symbolic because sovereign power is, as Eric Santner argues, a dynamic “symbolic system” that is either lacking or excessive in relation to its objects and subjects (it breaks the law it legitimizes, it fails to contain the people it represents, and so on), and popular sovereignty only exacerbates the problem.6 Where monarchic sovereignty secured its inadequacies symbolically in the duplicitous (divine and mortal) body of the king, democratic sovereignty is often said to leave a symbolic space, gap, or emptiness.7 As power migrates into the body of people, that is, it leaves an “empty place” where that symbolic power once stood (as Lefort argues) at the same time it invests the people with a surplus of symbolic flesh that must be managed (as Santner does). But whether democracy is understood in terms of either absence or excess, the continuity of sovereignty across monarchic and democratic forms is generally measured in its recourse to real violence and its reliance on tautologies of power when symbolic inadequacies reveal themselves.8 While both Tocqueville and Melville invoke the conventional analogy of divine and popular authority (vox populi, vox dei), they also make it clear that democracy brings about something more than a symbolic adjustment within political theology, and they do this specifically through their circular figures. When Tocqueville claims that popular sovereignty “is neither hidden nor sterile” in America,9 he alludes to the crises of constituent power that Abbé Sieyès calls “un cercle vicieux”—­the crisis that demands extraordinary recourse to an unconstituted authority outside of the political body. In Sieyès’s account, that once-­divine authority has been secularized in the “nation,” which exists in a permanent state of nature. Throughout “The Principle of the Sovereignty of the People in America,” Tocqueville refers to the “nation,” “society,” and the “people,” but he never places any of these in a pre-­political state. Instead, in describing how the circle of popular sovereignty emerged out of the revolution, he narrates a process that unfolds within historical, not transcendent, time: “From their origin, the sovereignty of the people was the fundamental principle of most of the British

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colonies in America.”10 Initially practiced on a small, local scale, he argues, “the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people came out of the townships and took possession of the state” when the revolution ended. In other words, in Tocqueville’s account of the American Revolution the circle of popular sovereignty was never “vicious” because it was never ex nihilo constituent; small circles of democratic action and governance were already in place, ready to propagate and expand. Tocqueville’s revision to the vicious circle of constituent power is thus both temporal and geometric—­the myriad small circles that precede the revolution expand and combine to constitute the people as “the cause and the aim of all things.” In the circle that Ishmael draws in “Knights and Squires,” Melville reimagines democratic sovereignty by joining the meanest to the most exalted, the smallest actions of hand and arm to the omnipresent, the eternal, and the divine. When Melville revives Omoo’s Round Robin in Ishmael’s circle of democratic dignity, he sidesteps the symbolic history of vicious circles and founding authority from the debates of Sieyès and Paine to resurrect a prerevolutionary history of small-­scale democratic formations much as Tocqueville does. Rather than pointing to a recurrent paradox of founding that returns in revolutionary cycles, “Knights and Squires” refigures democracy itself as a fragile and ruthless principle that joins equality to sovereignty: “The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!” At the very moment when Ishmael seems to slide into the symbolic conventions of political theology, he instead brings God and democracy into a poised balance in which divinity and equality become mutually constituting terms with neither functioning as metaphor or ground for the other. Ishmael’s reasoning here becomes defiantly, even gleefully circular: to be sovereign, equality must be omnipresent and eternal; to be equal, sovereignty must be mundane and unexceptional. Ultimately, if Tocqueville’s circle of popular sovereignty and Melville’s circle of democratic dignity seem to replicate the symbolic substitution, the people for God, through which a transcendent power democratizes and secularizes, what I want to argue is that these circles do something quite different because they shift from the symbolic to the figurative. More than examples of symbolic substitution, that is, these circles are also figures, and in this they have a generative function that enables both Democracy in Amer-

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ica and Moby-­Dick to reimagine the aesthetics of democratic sovereignty. Symbols and figures are, of course, both supplements that highlight the artifice necessary to all forms of sovereignty. But where symbolic substitution presumes that the structure of sovereignty persists even as its composite forms change (the place of power is empty but power is everywhere; divine flesh becomes biopolitical flesh, and so on), figuration introduces a process of accumulation and proliferation that reveals all of the ways in which democracy and sovereignty transform each other (for better and for worse). Figuration, not substitution, enables Tocqueville to propose that the sovereignty of the people in the United States emerges both from the sovereignty of God and that of colonial townships. Figuration, not substitution, enables Melville to imagine the circle of democratic dignity out of both the Round Robin mutiny and the concentrated sovereignty of Donjalolo. With this, Tocqueville and Melville propose a different narrative for democratic sovereignty as well, one that does not entirely free it from the symbolic legacy of classic sovereignty but which opens it to other forms both existing and as-­yet unforeseen. Circles repeat but they also proliferate and accumulate, and they stage the precarious relationship between limitation and limitlessness that is central to the structures and forms of democracy in both texts. That is, both Tocqueville and Melville understand democracy to be at once a self-­limiting political structure, in which power and legitimacy may turn tautological and violent, and a potentially limitless one, which can pluralize, expand, or transform. Moreover, as circles call attention to the forms and figures through which Tocqueville and Melville think and write about democracy, so they also underscore how democracy is defined for them both, not only through a fatal symbolic entanglement with tautologies, exceptions, and absolutes, but also as the product of collective forms, practices, and arts. Indeed, both reinvent the very textual forms in which they write in order to reimagine democracy as what Tocqueville calls “the art of pursuing in common the objects of common desires.”11 And yet, even as their circles disclose a formal coherence that makes Tocqueville’s popular sovereignty essential to understanding Melville’s democratic dignity, and vice versa, circles also reveal the sharpest of distinctions between two different theories of equality. Tocqueville’s presumption of equality is the result of a violent,

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racialized sovereignty, while Melville’s ruthless assertion of equality is a primary, existential fact that enables democratic forms and figures to pass even beyond the human. Democracy in America is thus necessary to the reading of democracy and sovereignty in Moby-­Dick that I propose in what follows, but not because their claims align clearly or contrast neatly. Indeed, because Tocqueville and Melville both circle around the circles that democracy forms, I will show how their insights sometimes intersect and sometimes diverge in equally instructive ways. And so, if Melville’s circle of democratic dignity reimagines a fundamentally Tocquevillean figure, this is just the first and most ephemeral of Moby-­Dick’s circles, which transform and proliferate until, in the final lines of the “Epilogue,” the vortex swirls and “the black bubble upward burst[s]” (573). Because the circling shapes of Moby-­ Dick are so fleeting while its rolling motion is so ubiquitous, the geometry and dynamics of democracy it proposes do not belong to a single tradition of thought. As much as these shapes and movements derive from the vicious circles of political theory, they also come from the circles of Emersonian transcendentalism, innovations in cylindrical machines, and Cartesian cosmology. Rolling with all of these circles, I argue, Moby-­Dick devises democratic aesthetics beyond thematics—­beyond, that is, the characterization and actions of the crew that have typically anchored political readings of Moby-­Dick.12 Democracy does not exactly “happen” or “appear” in Moby-­ Dick, nor is it the political-­historical background that renders characters, scenes, and symbols meaningful. Democracy is what moves and shapes the text as one of its chief aesthetic forces and figures—­the rolling, revolving, and circling that carry us, spinning along with sailors, ships, and whales. Tautology, Circle, Tangent: Equality and Sovereignty in Democracy in America The shape that Tocqueville gives to popular sovereignty early in the first volume of Democracy in America is neither the first nor the last rhetorical circle that he draws in order to describe the social and political forms he finds in the United States. Throughout both volumes, he frequently identifies some element of democratic life—­equality of conditions, the tyranny of the majority, individualism—­whose significance is such that he assigns it a

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priority over all others. But as each of these elements takes on the status of motivating cause, so each assumes the position of an effect of all the other aspects of democratic society to which he has assigned a similar primacy. For example, Tocqueville opens the first volume with a strong assertion that “equality of condition” is the “creative element from which each particular fact” of American social and political life derives, so that “all my observations constantly returned to this nodal point.” As “creative element,” equality appears here as something like a first cause, which “creates opinions, gives birth to feelings, suggests customs, and modifies whatever it does not create.”13 A “nodal point” seemingly confined to itself, “equality of condition” nevertheless emerges here in a dynamic and circular relationship with the civil society and government to which it gives rise and which, in turn, secure and guarantee it. Further, as social equality gives rise to everything, so Tocqueville himself must continue to return to it, and this opening assertion also establishes a kind of circular form for the text. But even if one grants this “nodal point” the original creative status that Tocqueville assigns to it in the opening lines, equality of condition is quickly supplanted in the text by subsequent original causes, such as popular sovereignty. When Tocqueville turns to the sovereignty of the people a few chapters after the introduction, his discussion does not unfold as a demonstration of the ways in which equality of condition, as the principal “creative element” of U.S. life, also produces a sovereign popular power. Instead, he reproduces the same formulation as if reiterating his earlier claim while substituting another creative element entirely: “I have already said that from the beginning the principle of the sovereignty of the people was the creative principle of most of the English colonies in America.”14 Popular sovereignty is neither synonymous with equality of condition nor a consequence of it, but another “creative principle” of U.S. democracy altogether. It is the text’s second first cause, which both follows the first and seems to displace it: “The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it.”15 Furthermore, as Tocqueville’s formulation of popular sovereignty appears to displace equality as the cause and end of everything, it also contains within the analogy it develops its own displacement. The people, he seems to say, can only be understood

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as a self-­originating and self-­sustaining entity in light of a similarly autonomous divine will that transcends it. Taken on its own, this passage would seem to bear out what Carl Schmitt finds in it in Political Theology—­namely, a simple substitution that transforms the immanent power of the people into the transcendent and singular sovereign of monarchy in disguise. Schmitt writes, “It is true, nevertheless, that for some time the aftereffects of the idea of God remained recognizable. In America this manifested itself in the reasonable and pragmatic belief that the voice of the people is the voice of God.” As Schmitt traces the loss of what he calls “the decisionistic and personalistic element in the concept of sovereignty” under constitutional democracies, he also argues that the replacement of transcendent political doctrines with doctrines of immanence was never absolute. The exceptional power of sovereignty, understood as a kind of secular miracle, lives on for Schmitt in the vaunted divinity of popular voice, and Tocqueville furnishes him with his clearest evidence of this: “Tocqueville in his account of American democracy observed that in democratic thought the people hover above the entire political life of the state, just as God does above the world, as the cause and the end of all things, as the point from which everything emanates and to which everything returns.”16 Looking at Tocqueville’s analogy, Schmitt sees the circle within the circle that Tocqueville draws and finds in it proof of democracy’s lingering attachment to a sovereign form that is both singular and transcendent. However, Schmitt overlooks the countless other circles that Tocqueville draws. Read as one of many formulations of a self-­originating and self-­ sustaining power, Tocqueville’s definition of popular sovereignty is far more than the covert reinsertion of classic sovereignty—­transcendent, singular, and indivisible—­into democracy that Schmitt claims. For one thing, this passage is neither singular nor exceptional in the text and cannot alone define Tocqueville’s understanding of democracy. From the equality of condition that gives rise to the opinions and institutions that preserve it; to the principle of popular sovereignty that is the cause and end of “everything”; to the problem of individualism that, he claims in volume 2, is both the cause and result of a collective power that isolates the subjects whom it gathers together, Tocqueville draws not one circle but many. Sometimes these circles are concentric; sometimes they appear to overlap and coincide; and some-

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times, they combine and fan out into something that might be imagined as a giant sphere. Taken together as a structuring trope of his text, Tocqueville’s circular formulations derive from tautologies, and yet they are also productive, generating with each repetition and return other, different versions of the basic shape. Ultimately, such repetitions suggest how the democracy that Tocqueville imagines tautologically might be able to stand outside itself without transcending itself, as it generates a series of circular formations that are linked together in their apparent self-­sufficiency. Tocqueville layers tautologies on tautologies throughout Democracy in America, but rather than simply repeating to the point of meaninglessness, this formula ends up functioning in multiple ways. For example, the most basic of Tocqueville’s tautologies are similar to the formulation “very unique”—­the insistence that singularity requires intensification. Repeatedly identifying particular “creative elements” and “creative principles” from which “all things” in the U.S. derive, Tocqueville undercuts the singularity he claims for each of these elements by adding to them. Thus, rather than a principle of limitation only, which always returns to its origins, tautology begins to open into a force of pluralization. Tautologies in themselves (“the cause and the end of all things”), they accumulate tautologically as each one recalls the others, repeats the basic formula, and introduces something new. Some of Tocqueville’s tautologies also contain tautologies, as in the analogy he draws between the sovereignty of the people and that of God. But more than simply undermining the self-­contained structure of popular sovereignty by linking it to another, similarly self-­contained power, his tautological formulation also destabilizes the analogy that links these two things together in the first place. In other words, repetition unsettles the analogy that appears to undermine his claims about the self-­motivating people by highlighting the differences between these two conceptions of sovereignty, divine and popular. As both cause and end of “all things” the people function in a manner that is similar to, but not identical with, the function of God in the transcendent view of sovereignty because the people have become both the subjects and the objects of sovereign power, as well as the force that seems to secure it by standing outside of it. With this, the circle of democracy expands and becomes three dimensional. Tautological, spherical, and expansive, Tocqueville’s democracy also remains sovereign, but what

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that means for Tocqueville is not what it means for Schmitt. Rather than the singular, “decisionistic and personalistic” sovereign of Schmitt’s Political Theology, Tocqueville’s democratic sovereignty is characterized by both an insistent autonomy and an expansiveness that must repeat, proliferate, and multiply without limit. Such an expansiveness is also at the center of Derrida’s meditation on the essential roundness of democracy in Rogues. Doubting that “it was ever possible to think and say . . . ‘democracy’ before the rotation of some wheel,” Derrida finds in the circle of popular sovereignty a great deal more than what Schmitt describes as the mere “aftereffect” of political theology.17 Rather than presuming a contradiction between democracy and sovereignty, Derrida argues that both are predicated on the circular, self-­authorizing principle of “ipseity”—­“the power, potency, sovereignty, or possibility implied in every ‘I can.’ ”18 Derrida argues that this roundness is repeated in the sovereignty of nation-­states, monarchs, and democracies, but throughout its various forms, he claims, sovereignty remains predicated on an “autopositioning” that makes a thing whole with itself through a motion that begins and ends in the same place. In some sense, “ipseity” can be understood in terms of Schmitt’s singularity of sovereign power insofar as it turns away from and returns to itself in an assertion of sameness. But, like Tocqueville’s popular sovereignty, Derrida’s “ipseity” combines autonomy with tautology, as democratic sovereignty repeatedly circles around itself in such a way that it produces something different and separable from itself. Now, democracy would be precisely this, a force (kratos), a force in the form of a sovereign authority . . . and thus the power and ipseity of the people (demos). This sovereignty is a circularity, indeed a sphericity. Sovereignty is round; it is a rounding off. This circular or spherical rotation, the turn of the re-­turn upon the self, can take either the alternating form of the by turns, the in turn, the each in turn . . . or else the form of an identity between the origin and the conclusion, the cause and the end or aim, the driving cause and the final cause.19

The “ipseity” that Derrida identifies with democracy in this passage involves much more than the simple assertion, “I can.” The force of democracy that Derrida describes here instead involves a proliferation of figures and phrases that repeat and produce alternatives. The roundness of democracy (in con-

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trast to the roundness of sovereignty) is not one thing but many, and its repetitions do not yield the same thing: the shape he describes is both a “circularity” and “sphericity”; it is both a “roundness” and a “rounding off”; its rotating movement alternates between “the by turns, the in turn, [and] the each in turn.” In his multiplication of phrases to describe democracy’s roundness, Derrida suggests that the form of circularity that reveals a structural connection between democracy and sovereignty does not limit the meaning of democracy to one sovereign political form among others, but shows it to be always something more. The basic self-­difference that Derrida embeds in his concept of “democracy to come” is thus discernible even when he allies democracy with sovereign ipseity.20 However, Derrida does not underscore this point, nor does he note a similar effect in Tocqueville’s circular formulation of popular sovereignty, which he cites in the next sentence. Derrida notes that Tocqueville “speaks of this circular identification of cause with end” and concludes “with the trope of a theological figure that he believes to be conventional and purely rhetorical but whose necessity seems to me much more serious and important.”21 Like Schmitt, that is, Derrida reads into Tocqueville’s analogy of the people with God the return of a singular, transcendent power. In emphasizing the content of Tocqueville’s analogy over its form, Derrida follows Schmitt, missing how Tocqueville’s metaphor divides the image of the circle in two.22 The sovereignty of the people is not identical to the sovereignty of God but analogous to it, another version whose repetition of the same basic structure nevertheless creates a new one. Schmitt and Derrida both look to Tocqueville’s circular image of popular sovereignty to identify the place where democracy begins to fail, either by revealing itself to be formally identical to classic sovereignty (Schmitt) or by turning against itself (Derrida). However, when linked to all of the other circles of Tocqueville’s text, this passage suggests something quite different. Ultimately, Tocqueville’s circular model of democracy cannot be reduced to a single, divine sovereign form as readily as Schmitt and Derrida claim because Tocqueville insists that democracy always tends toward expansiveness, repetition, and growth. Democracy still risks failure in Tocqueville’s analysis, but it is not the limitation of its authority to “the ipseity of the One” that destroys it, so much as the possibility of its limitless expansion as state power.

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Beyond disclosing a different path to democracy’s self-­destruction, Tocqueville’s circles also reveal the promise he sees in democracy—­what he calls the “art of pursuing in common the objects of common desires.” In a famous chapter from the second volume of Democracy in America, “On the Uses which the Americans Make of Associations in Civil Life,” Tocqueville traces a full circle from the “highest perfection” of democracy in the small circles of voluntary association to the “vicious circle” of a limitless state and back again.23 In this, Tocqueville briskly reproduces the larger argument of the second volume. Beginning with the assertion that by “associations” he means those “in civil life which have no political effect,”24 he then goes onto to define the success of those associations in terms that are all but indistinguishable from the “real active political life” that he identified in colonial New England townships, where “interests, passions, duties, and rights took shape.”25 Thus the most democratic country in the world now is that in which men have in our time carried to the highest perfection the art of pursuing in common the objects of common desires and have applied this new technique to the greatest number of purposes. Is that just an accident, or is there really some necessary connection between association and equality?26

For Tocqueville, associations reach their “highest perfection” in American democracy because he believes they are the only means of democratic action. Thus the “necessary connection between association and equality” is in no way accidental. As he has detailed in the early chapters of volume 2, social equality yields democratic subjects who are weak, isolated, and “incapable of acting on their own.”27 Associations both derive from and combat what he sees as the most pernicious effects of that isolation, bringing people together to develop “the habits of acting together in the affairs of daily life.” Without the associations through which weak, isolated individuals can act in common, Tocqueville argues, either “civilization would be in peril” or the state would expand without limits in order to provide “the commonest bare necessities of life.”28 The task of government must therefore perpetually increase, and its efforts to cope with them must spread its net even wider. The more gov-

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ernment takes the place of associations, the more will individuals lose the idea of forming associations and need the government to come to their help. That is a vicious circle of cause and effect.29

The circular identity of cause and effect that defines popular sovereignty becomes a “vicious circle of cause and effect” when the people no longer stand at the origin and end of democratic politics but find themselves displaced by the state, unable even to associate. Where this “vicious circle of cause and effect” foreshadows the later chapter on “democratic despotism”—­in which Tocqueville projects democracy’s apocalyptic end in a biopolitical state and a passive citizenry30 —­ the chapter on associations still finds hope for democracy in the limitation of state power and the preservation of common action—­and, therefore, of politics itself—­in the pluralization of local associations. Although Tocque­ ville insists on the distinction of the social and moral from the political in his analysis of associations, everything that those associations take to the “highest perfection” maximizes the potential for democratic politics. As I noted above, Tocqueville describes these associations in terms that both replicate and update the township model of colonial New England where “real, active political life” first appeared. Further, they make possible the action in common that defines the form of politics for Tocqueville, even if the content of political acts differs from those of the associations he mentions (like Temperance). Finally, and most significantly, these associations foster the politics of democracy because they involve an “art”—­namely, “the art of pursuing in common the objects of common desires.” In Tocqueville’s account, American democracy so empowers the majority that it poses a threat to the common, which can only be preserved through the art of association: “I have shown how these [reciprocal influences of men on each other] are reduced almost to nothing in democratic countries; they must therefore be artificially created and only associations can do that.” 31 In other words, the politics of democracy can best be propagated through limitation and artifice, understood as the deliberate fabrication of conditions under which citizens can reciprocally influence each other and act in common toward potentially limitless ends (“the greatest number of purposes”).

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With this, the meaning of democratic politics for Tocqueville becomes most legible, not through its symbolic reduction to a singular sovereign power as Schmitt and Derrida suggest, but through Arendt’s account of the politics of revolution. For Tocqueville, as for Arendt, the twin enemies of the political are absolutes and necessities: those transcendent powers which render human action irrelevant on the one hand, and that bare need which renders humans subject to their bodies on the other. While the former shows that there is a politics of direct, participatory democracy to be found in both Tocqueville and Arendt, the latter reveals the conservative strain that runs through each of their work: Tocqueville’s fear of a state that administers the lives and welfare of its citizens, and Arendt’s insistence that the “surrender to necessity” dooms revolutionary politics to cyclical violence.32 Rather than pulling against each other, however, these two strains are tightly bound together because, in order to theorize common spaces where collective artifice enables democratic politics to thrive, both Arendt and Tocqueville must violently limit the appearance of misery, poverty, domination, and violence itself in American life. Arendt employs a visual metaphor to insist that neither poverty nor slavery appeared on “the scene” of the American revolution because both were consigned to “obscurity,”33 while Tocqueville maintains his geometric trope and describes a figure that touches but cannot enter any of the vast and various circles that he draws: a tangent. In the tenth chapter of volume 1, “Some Considerations Concerning the Present State and Probable Future of the Three Races that Inhabit the Territory of the United States,” Tocqueville concedes that “there are other things in America besides an immense and complete democracy,” but he continues, “these topics are like tangents to my subject, being American but not democratic.”34 Tocqueville performs textually the precise relationship of Black slavery and indigenous genocide that he theorizes, excising both from his analysis of “immense and complete democracy,” appending this discussion instead in a (dangerously) supplemental chapter, and reinforcing this whole performance of inclusive exclusion with his image of that which can touch democracy without entering into it. As William Connolly argues, the violence of American sovereignty is never really external to Tocqueville’s theory of American democracy because it is the precondition of both popular sovereignty and its pluralization in the local democracy of associ-

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ations. Writing specifically of Tocqueville’s erasure of indigenous peoples, Connolly argues, “ ‘the people’ can be officially sovereign in America only because those human beings who diverge from the essence of civilization have been displaced from the land on which they previously wandered and because the territorialization of civilization sets the parameters of popular sovereignty.”35 Where Tocqueville inscribes the violence of popular sovereignty spatially through the expulsion of native peoples, he inscribes that violence physically and “spiritually” in the enslavement of Blacks who are held within the American polity as permanent “strangers.”36 Democracy becomes potentially limitless for Tocqueville—­capable of being either monopolized or pluralized—­only when it is first limited by territory and race. This predicates both equality and action—­“the art of pursuing in common the objects of common desires”—­on a violence that he insists is tangential to the vast circles of democratic sovereignty. Equality, sovereignty, and “real active political life,” with all of its common arts and desires, emerge for Tocqueville in the wake of a foundational violence—­racial and spatial territorialization—­that cannot “enter” democracy. When Melville imagines democracy as a vast circle in Moby-­ Dick, he too proposes that democracy is an art and a potential for common action that is poised between limitation and limitlessness. But for all their similarities, the circles of “Knights and Squires” describe something very different—­the sovereignty of equality itself. Rather than following from a foundational act that circumscribes a demos as sovereign and equal, it is equality that is sovereign in “Knights and Squires,” a primary fact that stands at the “center and circumference of all democracy.” But once equality becomes primary to democracy—­and not secondary to a circumscribing limit—­the circle expands until nothing can be said to be tangential to it, neither misery, nor domination, nor violence. As in Tocqueville’s America, so on the ship that bears the name of an exterminated people: violence is indeed what carries the mariners, renegades, and castaways of the kingly commons around the globe to pursue a common object—­which, in the case of the Pequod, is the hunting, killing, and boiling of whales. What ultimately distinguishes Melville’s Pequod from Tocqueville’s territorialized America is not only how Melville underscores the racial plurality of the crew, “an Anacharsis Clootz deputation, from all the isles of the sea, and all of the ends of the earth” (121).

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Nor does the difference lie only in the way that Melville explicitly shows such a community carrying its violence inside it (while that violence also carries its community). The radical proposal that Melville makes in Moby-­ Dick is that under conditions of a foundational, primary equality, democracy can no longer be limited to the acts, desires, and needs of humans alone. It must contend with the inhuman forces in which all human actions are entangled and, ultimately, account for the acts, desires, and needs of those whales whose killing both constitutes the multiracial community of whalers and transforms their collective work into violence. One Cogged Circle: Ahab’s Revolving Sovereignty The figure of democracy that first appears in chapter 26 of Moby-­Dick as a vast circle, with “the great God absolute” at its center and all along its circumference, is both spatially limitless and temporally limited. Introduced along with the chief mate to alleviate “the complete abasement of Starbuck’s fortitude,” the “abounding dignity” that Ishmael associates with both democracy and the mate seems to be all but annihilated within a few chapters. The end of this formation is often pinpointed to the moment Ahab stands on the quarter-­deck and announces to the crew that the mission of the Pequod is not what they imagined it to be: “And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out!” (163). The circle of a divinely sanctioned democracy, first associated with Starbuck’s dignity and his abasement, quickly gives way to Ahab’s intent to circle the globe in pursuit of a single whale. For readers of Moby-­Dick from C.L.R. James on, this moment has commonly signaled a defeat for democracy and the advent of another political order, which goes by a variety of names—­t yranny, dictatorship, totalitarianism, and so on.37 Wai Chee Dimock articulates this view succinctly: if “Starbuck’s battle is the battle to enthrone democracy and to unseat ‘the dignity of kings and robes,’ ” she argues, then his defeat by Ahab is “generalized as the defeat of American democracy” in the text.38 But such a generalization too quickly elides a number of complications in this narrative of democracy and its defeat on board the Pequod. For one thing, while it would seem that Starbuck’s “democratic dignity” cannot

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withstand the force of Ahab’s “irresistible dictatorship” (147), it is not with the force of “dictatorship” alone that Ahab redirects the mission of the ship, and for another, Ahab’s mission cannot be described simply in terms of a defeat or a usurpation of the Pequod ’s “democratic” crew. Although Ishmael suggests that Ahab embodies a power that would require no sanction from his crew, Ahab’s announcement produces just that, as everyone but Starbuck voices assent: “The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? . . . Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck!” (164). If, as Dimock and others argue, this moment marks the defeat of democracy in the text, it is not simply the sovereign force of a dictator or despot that defeats it, but neither is it exactly “democracy” that defeats “democratic dignity.” Instead, a particular mutation within “democracy” is at work—­just as a mutation within whaling underlies Ahab’s determination of their mission. Instead of killing whales in general, the crew will now hunt one whale in particular, and as Starbuck realizes with a great deal of trepidation, this changes everything about both whaling and the whalers themselves. Rather than a totalitarian power grab, Ahab’s desire for vengeance against a “dumb brute” is a powerfully equalizing gesture, one that solicits assent from the crew and pits human against whale on the same ontological field: “There is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations” (164).39 His singular decision on the exceptional purpose of the Pequod ’s voyage may resemble the muscular view of sovereign power (the return to “the ipseity of the one”), but Ahab acts from a position of immanence, not transcendence. If the crew is “one and all with Ahab in this matter of the whale” this is because, as Ahab himself describes it, he acts through them not over them: “My one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve” (167). Melville refuses us the comforts of a “dictatorship” usurping a “democracy” in these pages because, from “Knights and Squires” to “The Quarter-­Deck” and beyond, sovereignty and democracy, figured as centralization and equality, swirl around each other with increasing velocity and intensity. Indeed, it is chiefly through circular figures that Melville underscores the intimate connection between all of these terms as circles, spirals, and rotations abound in these chapters. If “the centre and circumference of all democracy” designates a circle where equality is

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sovereign and sovereignty equal, it also marks out the space of the “kingly commons” from which Ishmael singles out “a poor old whale-­hunter” and artfully endows him with all the “majestical trappings and housings” of Emperors and Kings (148). Such circles first move centrifugally, raying out to sustain equality and elevate all, but they are met with the countermovement of powerfully centripetal circles, spiraling vortices whose gravitational pull becomes that “tremendous centralization” through which “the ringed crown of geographical empire encircles the imperial brain” (148). Put another way, Melville’s circular figures work both sides of seemingly opposed forces and concepts (“unlike things must mate and meet”), revealing their proximity and intimacy and spinning them into each other.40 In “The Quarter-­Deck” alone thoughts turn, harpoons corkscrew, the ship rolls, flagons circle, and rum spirals, as circular figures and rotational motions drive the text’s primal political scene of decision and contract through its alternating phases of singular and collective action and speech. Beginning with Ahab’s thoughts, which “turn in him as he turned” (160) and render all but audible the “mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality” (162), everything on the rolling ship begins to rotate. Ahab first names the white whale, and then Queequeg notes the irons in him are “all twiskee-­be-­twisk” (162). Ahab calls the mates and harpooners forward, and then “the ship’s company formed a circle,” the equalizing formation of “Knights and Squires” (165). Ahab fills and refills the flagon and then narrates the way it passes both through and into the crew: “so, so it goes round excellently. It spiralizes in ye; forks out at the serpent-­snapping eye” (165). Again and again, Ahab initiates an action that the crew takes up and circles back to him, amplified and altered. Certainly, this scene stages one of the book’s principal spectacles of sovereignty: a transcendent symbol is brought to earth, a ritual is completed, and an oath is sworn that makes all of them “parties to this indissoluble league” (166). But rather than a usurpation of democratic sovereignty by dictatorial sovereignty, the “Quarter Deck” shows the forms for democracy and dictatorship circling each other as they constitute something new—­an extension and an amplification of what Ahab and the crew already are. Where Tocqueville narrates a process through which democracy may expand from a plurality of small-­scale localities into a limitless state despotism, Moby-­Dick is instead a study in

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the intricate co-­presence and simultaneity of democracy and sovereignty, of ruthless equality and “tremendous centralization.” In other words, while it seems as if Melville designs the circle of democratic dignity to fail when his “mariners, and renegades, and castaways” (103) turn their collective power over to their singular captain with their oath, both the practice of democracy and its apparent “defeat” by Ahab’s sovereign concentration are happening at the same time on the Pequod. In recent years, critics have thoroughly complicated the narrative of Ahab’s autonomy and totalitarian control first articulated in James’s Mariners, Renegades and Castaways and pursued by critics like Dimock into the 1980s.41 Rather than seeing Ahab as a counterforce to the crew who defeats their democratic potential, political theorists such as George Shulman and Susan McWilliams have argued that Ahab is himself a creature of American democracy. In Shulman’s analysis, Ahab and Ishmael form the two sides of “democratic dignity,” which names both a paradox and a Tocquevillean tragedy: “Ahab thus reveals the structure of feeling and ideological grammar whereby equality invests people in ideas of self-­determination and, by extension . . . in popular sovereignty,” as well as the ways in which an excess of democratic dignity isolates and maddens.42 For Bonnie Honig, by contrast, the structuring political tension is not between Ahab and Ishmael or Ahab and the crew but is instead balanced between a triangulated set of epistemes that center on differing interpretative uses of whale flesh: Ahab’s political theology makes meaning of the whale’s flesh, Starbuck’s political economy makes money of it, and Ishmael’s democracy makes collectivity. “Democracy” emerges for Honig as a potentially countersovereign alternative to the powers of both states and Capital, and although she identifies this alternative with Ishmael’s voice, she argues that this democratic collectivity is charged by the flesh of the whale as it is worked by the crew.43 In this, Honig’s reading traces a trajectory similar to Cesare Casarino’s account of the limits to the sovereignty of Capital that appear in Moby-­Dick—­w ith Ahab striking for the limit that brings on a crisis within Capital (one that Capital will eventually overcome) and the crew standing as “the other limit” where the potentia of the laboring multitude may be found.44 Taken together, such readings dislodge Ahab from the position of self-­determined sovereign subject and return him to a position of immanence among the crew, attending

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to all of the ways in which Ahab exists in intimate and precarious relations with them and subject to a range of forces—­what Michael Jonik calls the “subversive commonality” of prosthetic relations through which Ahab’s actions mingle and amplify.45 The circles that connect the crew and Ahab—­ surrounding them, passing between them, and holding them together in a common figural arrangement—­underscore the entanglement of agencies that fuel the politics of the quarter-­deck oath while giving particular form and force to these entanglements. Specifically, as circles spiral, wheels roll, and everything revolves together, Melville emphasizes the co-­presence of different agencies and political configurations—­sovereignty conspires with equality to produce an indissoluble league centered on a singular purpose—­as well as the power of those forms to combine, mutate, and transform. Across these chapters, Melville’s circles assume a function that is both metapolitical—­ reflecting on what founds and dissolves a community—­and metafigural—­ foregrounding the process whereby figures act on one another, combine, separate, and become something other than what they appeared to be. Ahab captures this dual metapolitical-­metafigural function in his own interpretation of how he has moved the crew to the turning of his thought: “Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at the least, but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve” (167). While critics like Casarino cite Ahab’s “cogged circle” as the image of his control over the men,46 this figure also places Ahab firmly among the crew, the one wheel among others with the capacity to transfer movement to them and thus refound the Anarcharsis Clootz federation and the circle of democratic dignity as an “indissoluable league.” (With apologies to Ishmael and Nantucket: these extravaganzas only show that Ahab is no Donjalolo.) Ahab’s cog-­and-­wheel figure occupies a particular place in the genealogy of collective circles across Melville’s nautical novels, in which sailors are alternately described as the mutinous agents of the Round Robin in Omoo and as the component parts of a deterministic social wheel in Redburn. Proposing a specifically mechanical frame for his capacity to redirect both the sailors and the voyage from his position among them, Ahab’s cogged mechanism doesn’t isolate him so much as it carries him into this larger figural cycle through which Melville conveys, across several novels, the variations

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and mutations of democratic formations and agencies. When Ahab imagines his crew as a set of “various wheels” revolving with the movement of his “one cogged circle,” he explicitly echoes and extends Wellingborough Redburn’s description of sailors in general as wheels, as well as the process of figuration through which that wheel mutates and transforms. The wheel that Redburn initially introduces as a figure for social determinism becomes by the end of the passage the prime mover of all human activity and, with that, the collective means by which political action appears as a potential disruption to social inertia: There are classes of men in the world who bear that same relation to society at large, as wheels do to the coach; and are just as indispensable, but however easy and delectable the springs upon which the insiders pleasantly vibrate; however sumptuous the hammer-­cloth, and glossy the door-­panels; yet, for all this, the wheels must still revolve in dusty, or muddy revolutions. No contrivance, no sagacity can lift them out of the mire; for upon something the coach must be bottomed; on something the insiders must roll. Now, sailors form one of these wheels: they go and come round the globe; they are the true importers, and exporters of spices and silks; they carry missionaries, embassadors [sic], opera-­singers, armies, merchants, tourists, and scholars to their destination: they are a bridge of boats across the Atlantic; they are the prime mobile of all commerce; and, in short, were they to emigrate in a body to man the navies of the moon, almost everything would stop here on earth except its revolution on its axis, and the orators in the American Congress. (R, 116)

Beginning with the elaboration of an analogy of society as a posh coach in which inequality and class divisions are naturalized, the passage pivots (as Melville’s do) into something very strange and very different. Wheeled coaches on muddy roads become boats circling the globe, then bridges spanning the Atlantic, then spaceships carrying sailors to the moon and leaving humanity bereft of its chief motive energy and force. The sailor-­ wheels which “no contrivance, no sagacity can lift . . . out of the mire” run off the road as the mechanical rotation of a wheel is revealed as the “prime mobile” that generates all other movements—­a ll the motion in the world except for the rotation of the earth and the orations of Congress—­and thus

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the power of a collective to bring everything to a halt by abandoning the social relation that defines them as mired wheels. Wheels start as analogies and then become vehicles and drivers that disclose the very process of figuration—­here, a transformation that proceeds through extension and relation—­through which an apolitical situation becomes a political possibility by the end of the passage. Like Ahab’s cogged circle, Redburn’s sailor-­wheels figure a means of transmitting motion, force, and energy. But the difference between Redburn’s wheel and Ahab’s is the difference between a carriage and a locomotive, and this is crucial. Carriage wheels and axles are simple machines, and while the figurative force of the analogy converts sailor-­wheels into prime movers of human commerce, they are ultimately translating animal energy (first equine, then human) into the force that moves and stops the world. Ahab, by contrast, figures himself not as a wheel-­and-axle on a road, but as the “cogged wheel” of a machine that moves by its own power and on its own track, unstoppable and unswerving: Swerve me? Ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! Man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents’ beds, unerringly I rush! Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way! (167)

Ahab’s unswerving wheel becomes a locomotive engine through a metonymic process that proceeds from one mode of translating motion to another—­he is at once the cogged wheel that turns other wheels and the resulting locomotive engine that runs on the infinitely extended cylinder of its fixed rails. In other words, Ahab’s cogged circle can be more precisely described as a cylinder, which Helmut Müller-­Sievers defines as any circle with extension that “allows the isolation, transmission, conversion, and application of rotational and translational (straight-­line) motion in machines”—­the shape, he argues, which transformed the science of motion, metaphysics, and narrative form in the nineteenth century.47 As with colors, all shapes have their histories, and Müller-­Sievers connects the history of the cylinder to the secularization of transcendent power across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because “nothing in our

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life-­world turns continually around its own axis, least of all parts of our own bodies.”48 Before the widespread introduction of the cylinder in steam engines and the rise of the science of kinematics, he argues, perpetual rolling and rotation were “associated with transcendence and divinity.” Once made mechanically possible, rotation became mundane and ubiquitous, but it remained inhuman. Because cylinders move in ways that no human can, they are neither tools nor prostheses but “qualitatively discontinuous with the motions of the human body.”49 Müller-­Sievers traces both the political implications of such cylindrical motion (through a reading of revolution in Marx) and its literary implications (through the development of the realist novel).50 In both Marxism and realism, he argues, objective and inhuman processes stand against subjective and moral forces as the century’s key image of motive power becomes fundamentally technical and rotational. Such an account of cylindrical motion goes a long way toward describing Ahab’s peculiar capacity to move his crew as that power emerges in “The Quarter-­ Deck” and “Sunset.” At once nontranscendent and inhuman, Ahab’s cogged wheel transmits motion to the crew while seeming to have no other motive force beyond it but the turning of thought and life within him: “[He] was meanwhile lowly humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and inarticulate that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality in him” (162). Understood as a cylinder among wheels, Ahab does not stand apart from the crew or over them, but instead becomes the means of driving an inhuman motion into their potentially revolutionary, democratic formation. But where Müller-­Sievers would describe that inhuman motion as fundamentally technical, Melville proposes that it is also aquatic and cetacean. If, as Müller-­Sievers argues, “rolling was the characteristic machine motion of the nineteenth century,” it is also the characteristic motion of Moby-­Dick and everything in it, from the whale in “Etymology” (“this animal is named for roundness or rolling”) to the Pequod, Ahab, the crew, and the rolling sea that “rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago” (572).51 Rolling may well be inhuman, but in Melville’s hands it is very much of our “life-­world” because it connects all of these forces through the circular figures of revolving, turning, and spiraling. Ahab has indeed captured a motive power that is “qualitatively discontinuous with the human body,”

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but he does so through an aesthetic process rather than a technical one. He may claim that “my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve,” but this is not because Ahab literally becomes a cylinder powering a steam engine, but because he acts through the force of a figure that extends into and transforms what it touches. Figuration locks Ahab into the crew, translating his motion to them while also revealing that all rotational motion is, as Ishmael discovers in “The Mast-­Head,” “borrowed from the sea” (159). In this way, figuration discloses how every rotation of a circle is primary and borrowed at once, introducing something new through the very process of mutation that connects it to what it leaves behind. Ultimately, this is how Melville’s figural process opens into a political one through “Knights and Squires,” “The Quarter-­Deck,” and “Sunset”: circles figure seemingly opposed relations and forces as intimately connected and co-­present, so “democratic dignity” and “irresistible dictatorship” borrow from each other in order to turn toward something else. Thus whaling is at once dignified and the work of “butchers of the bloodiest badge” (109, 111); Ahab is at once “a poor old whale-­hunter” and an “Emperor and King” (148); and the Pequod is at once a democracy of sovereign equals and “an indissoluble league” moved by Ahab’s revolving thought and constituted to kill (166). Circles Upon Circles: Emersonian Forms and Leviathan Covenants So far I have characterized the circles of Moby-­Dick through a series of balanced oppositions: limitation and limitlessness, centrifugal and centripetal motion, primary and borrowed form. Implicit in all of these is also their dual temporality: every circle in the text is transient even as circling, rotating, and rolling become the characteristic and ongoing motions of the book. From the “Descartian vortices” over which the dreaming Ishmael’s “identity comes back in horror” (159), to the “concentric circles” that spin the Pequod “all round and round in one vortex” until it disappears into the sea (572), circles in the text appear as fleeting as they are powerful, as fragile as they are destructive. When the circle of “democratic dignity” begins to revolve with Ahab’s “cogged circle,” it marks one of the text’s first instances of a process that iterates throughout Moby-­Dick until the vortex of the final catastrophe. Once the circle of democracy in “Knights and Squires” mutates

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into the rotating wheels of Ahab’s sworn league, its collapse both anticipates and makes room for the appearance of other circular forces, all of which are similarly potent and similarly short-­lived. Like Tocqueville’s circles, that is, Melville’s expand at their peril and tend toward self-­destruction, but in their transience, these circles are also irrepressible, repeating, and seemingly limitless. In this, the deep debt that Melville’s circles owe to Emerson’s becomes clear. Not only does Ishmael paraphrase St. Augustine’s image of God as center and circumference with which Emerson opens his essay “Circles,” but circles also disappear and reappear with such frequency that Moby-­Dick itself becomes an “apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn.” Indeed, Melville’s circles behave so much like Emerson’s that the first paragraph of “Circles” reads like a synopsis of Moby-­ Dick, from the water-­gazers of “Loomings” to the buoyant bubble that rises from the vortex of the wreck in the “Epilogue”: The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature, this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already deduced, in considering the circular or compensatory character of every human action. Another analogy we shall now trace; that every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-­noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.52

Citing “Circles,” Stanley Cavell argues that every sentence of an Emerson essay “may be taken to be its topic”—­“a something ‘whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere’ ”—­and each of these sentences bears out that claim.53 As Emerson moves from the “eye” to the “lower deep,” these lines convey the cumulative movement that the essay as a whole traces—­a perpetual proliferation in which something new begins by returning over and over to that “primary figure” and “first of forms.” Emerson balances several counterforces in each of the circles he draws here. Where “every action admits of being outdone” and “every end is a beginning,” the

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necessity of acting joins the fact of transience because every circle creates a circumstance that must be abandoned and overcome. Where “our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn” and “there is no end in nature,” the circle becomes the form in which art inheres in nature because the act of drawing another circle follows the method of nature. Where “this primary figure is repeated without end,” the distinction between primary and borrowed forms blurs because the originary always generates repetition and return. The tensions that Emerson captures in the figure of the circle are manifold—­primary and repeatable, everywhere and nowhere, beginning and ending, transient and fixed—­and they are precisely those that reverberate throughout Moby-­Dick. Moreover, much of the difficulty of Emerson’s essay, like that of Moby-­Dick, lies in discerning the precise relationship between acts (drawing new circles, outdoing previous actions) and processes (dawns rising, lower deeps opening). Or, as Cavell puts it, the difficulty lies in discerning how we move among and between such circles: “What is the motive, the means of motion, of this movement?”54 Branka Arsić takes up the temporal dimension of Cavell’s question, arguing that, though these tensions proliferate as the circles we draw encircle us until we abandon them to draw new ones, the dynamic that Emerson describes cannot be understood as dialectical, “because [it is] not appropriative of the ‘has-­been,’ as is the case with Hegel’s speculative dialectics.”55 Instead, she argues, the drawing of circles and their abandonment happen in two distinct temporalities that attenuate and split the subject: “We move through two different speed zones simultaneously—­the slowness of thought, the quickness of the heart.”56 Understood as a figure for this nonsynchronous simultaneity, in which two movements operate at the same time but at different speeds, Emerson’s circles are concentric and serial at the same time, a daisy-­chain of rings that briefly link before giving way to new ones. In this way, the actions and processes that make new circles relate to each other both spatially and temporally, coinciding with each other in brief concentric rings and succeeding one another every time a new circle is drawn. The “first of forms” captures the split temporality of such becoming: “Whilst the eternal generation of nature proceeds, the eternal generator abides.” Emerson’s circles cannot be described as simply the containers of other circles because every circle is also the first in a series, but neither does

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any single circle offer transcendence of another because circles have “no outside . . . no circumference.”57 Instead, they combine a processual structure (the geometry of linked but not fully concentric rings) with ongoing actions (drawing, abandonment, and becoming), to describe the motions of nature, mind, and life in ways that carry us right up to the complex of rolling, revolving, and circling that moves Moby-­Dick. After “Sunset,” more circles revolve and dissolve, wheels rotate and whales roll, and what Cavell says of Emerson—­“the figure of the circle is the self-­ image of an Emerson essay”58—­a lso seems true of Moby-­Dick. But if circles serve as metafigures for both Emerson and Melville, they also disclose fundamental differences between them. The first of those differences is tonal: Emerson greets the circular process of nature and mind with a determinate optimism—­“this way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment”59—­because, as Arsić argues, Emerson’s circles only revolve into the new. Melville’s circles, by contrast, explicitly deny such determinate affect in the way that they bind together centrifugal and centripetal motion, possibility and foreclosure. The second of those differences is structural: Emerson’s circles are both concentric and serial, like smoke rings, because their movement is simultaneous but nonsynchronous as they proceed through different speeds of generation and abandonment. The basic structure of Melville’s circles, by contrast, is closer to that of mutual containment or double enclosure—­the wheel that revolves the wheels that surround it, the calm that surrounds the storm that contains it.60 Like Emerson’s circles, Melville’s are both primary and borrowed, limitless and limited, transient and ongoing. But because they also contain what contains them, Melville’s circles become the metafigure for the counterpoise of beauty and terror, calm and commotion, centralization and dispersal that characterizes so much of Moby-­Dick, from the unfolding of individual analogies to the shape of the book as a whole. Distinct in subtleties of tone and structure, the difference of Melville’s circles from Emerson’s might best be explained aesthetically, “since” (as Ishmael parenthetically reminds us) “there is an aesthetics in all things” (279). Understood in Ishmael’s phrase, this difference is akin to the distinct pleasures he takes in the varieties of color and texture he finds in whale rope—­pleasures that, Samuel Otter argues, themselves stage the problem of what lies inside and what lies out. “We think the pleasures that we take and the judgments we

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make are our own, but they are also the products of a market and culture that we imagine to be outside us.”61 Introduced parenthetically as a comprehensive quality that is “in all things,” aesthetics in general adhere to the structure of mutual containment that characterize Melville’s circles, while the specific aesthetics of the “magical, sometimes horrible” whale line also capture the duplicity of his tone. And this is just the first of Ishmael’s geometric perversities: he also offers the clearest statement of his philosophy of circles in the chapter called “The Line.” That is, to discourse on the color, texture, shape, and ambiguous racialization of the “magical . . . horrible” line, he must first describe that line lying “spirally coiled . . . [in] layers of concentric spiralizations” in and around the whaleboat (278–­79). Combining coils and spirals in its “hempen intricacies” (280), the dormant line is a circle that merely hints at the horrors to come. Once it begins to run out with a fleeing whale, its “manifold whizzings” convert the whaleboat into “a steam-­engine in full play” (280). Like Ahab’s cogged wheel, the line is less tool or machine than figure—­or rather, because lines contain circles and vice versa, it functions as another of the book’s key engines of figuration. Figuring the relation of “form, aesthetics, and the ‘literary,’ ” in Otter’s words, this coiled, spiralizing, whizzing line foregrounds the process whereby formal elements (a line of text, the color of a rope, the contour of a coil) unfold relations and distinctions that carry us from the aesthetic to the philosophical, the political, and back again. Curved parenthetical lines contain the aesthetics that “all things” contain, coiled lines envelop and involve both boat and crew in hempen intricacies, and when the spirals of the line start to run out so too does the full meaning of its magic and horror: Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophecies the storm, is perhaps more awful that the storm itself; for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and contains it in itself, as the seeming harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into actual play—­ this is a thing that carries more true terror than any other aspect of this dangerous thing. But why say more? All men live enveloped in whale lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-­present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though

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seated in a whale-­boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon by your side. (281)

Aesthetics open into metaphysics in “The Line,” as figures run out of the whaleboat philosopher faster than line runs out of the tub. Coiled lines become calms containing storms, guns containing explosions, grace containing horror, and life containing death. And yet, as fast as the figures come here, we don’t really move from one to the other. Instead, by the end of the chapter, Ishmael wants us to see all of these at once as they are held within the circle of the line. The temporality of lines and circles is thus not the same as the nonsynchronous simultaneity of Emerson’s evolving circles, but one of dynamic stasis in which calm and commotion coincide briefly while becoming silence and explosion, or repose and action, or death and life. As Ishmael says in another chapter about what rope precariously holds together, the time of the line “spirally coiled away” is also the time of a rope that merges one’s individuality with “a plurality of other mortals” (320), as well as the time of whaling itself and the narration of it—­one in which “at one and the same time everything has to be done everywhere” because everything is always happening somewhere (319). This is the time, structure, and tone of democracy in Moby-­Dick: a common circle that contains the irresistible dictatorship that contains it in turn because both are happening at once. Such a view of democracy frustrates even the slowest and most incremental of political narratives and, with it, the determinate affects of both Emersonian optimism and Tocquevillean anxiety. Or rather, Melville ensures that such political affects are themselves subject to the laws of lines and circles: none is permanent or determinate, and none stands alone. If Melville insists that democracy holds in it everything that counters it, just as the calm holds the storm, then it cannot be said that democracy’s foundational equality is either neutralized or defeated any more than it can be said that calms cease to exist because commotions are ongoing. At one and the same time, everything is happening everywhere, and everything must be done. And beyond the tonal, structural, and temporal differences between Melville and Emerson, that demand for action—­“everything has to be done”—­discloses their key political difference.

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Nowhere in Moby-­Dick does this dynamic mutual enclosure of forces and counterforces—­a long with its political demand to do—­appear with greater power than in chapter 87, “The Grand Armada.” A chapter in which the principal narrative arc consists in the emergence, overlapping, and collapsing of a series of circular formations, “The Grand Armada” is nothing less than the entirety of Moby-­Dick as it might appear from the whales’ point of view. From the gaze of baby whales into another element to the swearing of a solemn oath, the formation of a fragile political circle, and its collapse into something else, “The Grand Armada” offers both a cetacean mirror of and a cetacean alternative to what happens on the Pequod. Like the opening sentences of Emerson’s “Circles,” that is, the chapter contains in itself the entirety of what both precedes and follows it—­not in the manner of “The Town-­Ho’s” jokey narrative fold (“ ‘Whom call you Moby Dick?’ . . . ‘[T]hat would be too long a story’ ” [256]), but in the manner of the coiled line containing both beauty and terror. Indeed, “The Grand Armada” holds together one of the text’s most beautiful moments and one of its most horrific, and in it Melville sketches with the sparseness of a line drawing all of the possibilities for violent, tautological power and collective, egalitarian art that the text as a whole imagines. “The Grand Armada” opens with the Pequod ’s entry into the “vast walled empire” of the Java Sea through the Straits of Sunda, having half-­circled the globe without once touching land. Ishmael invokes a series of images of enclosed autonomy and forges a link between what he sees as the fortress-­ like geography of Southeast Asia (“guarded from the all-­grasping western world” [380]) and the self-­sustaining powers of whale ship, captain, and crew: How now? in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land? does his crew drink air? . . . For a long time, now, the circus-­r unning sun has raced within his fiery ring, and needs no sustenance but what’s in him. So Ahab. Mark this, too, in the whaler. While other hulls are loaded down with alien stuff, to be transferred to foreign wharves; the world-­ wandering whale-­ship carries no cargo but herself and crew; their weapons and their wants. (381)

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The chapter’s first circle links the self-­sustaining capacities of the Pequod, the sun, and Ahab himself, and while this chain of analogies implies autonomy, it also hints at transience and conditionality. Though the constant motion of the “circus-­r unning sun” might seem perpetual, to carry all one’s “weapons” and “wants” and to consume only what is “in” one predicates autonomy on self-­consumption and eventual self-­depletion. In Ishmael’s elaboration of the first of several circles to come, he indicates that such formations always contain their own limits, and at first those limits are temporal. But beyond the temporal limit, this circular image of autonomy emerges as relational. Ishmael describes the Pequod ’s passage into the straits, where they suddenly stumble upon a vast herd of sperm whales, “broad on both bows, at the distance of some two or three miles, forming a great semi-­circle, embracing one half of the level horizon.” This giant herd partly echoes in its shape the “circus-­r unning” motion of sun, ship, and Ahab, which promises a self-­ sustaining capacity (382), and it partly stands as a challenge to such associations. After the crew has “almost renounc[ed] all thought of falling in with any game,” the sudden appearance of “thousands on thousands” of whales formed into one vast semicircular herd leads Ishmael to speculate on its cause. “Owing to the unwearied activity with which of late they have been hunted over all four oceans,” Ishmael suggests, “numerous nations” of sperm whales have begun to gather in “sworn solemn league and covenant for mutual assistance and protection” (382). The vast semicircle of whales thus evokes the earlier image of autonomous self-­sufficiency, only to transform that circular structure into an image of relation, cooperation, and defense. As Ishmael pulls back from his focus on Ahab to reveal the “spectacle of singular magnificence” that the Java Sea presents, we see not one circle but many, each partially enclosed in the others. The initial conceit of autonomous self-­sufficiency is dislodged as the intricacy of the lines circling Ahab, the boat, the sea, the sun, and the whale all come into view. The “zoned quest” for whales that whalers like Ahab have pursued in their “unwearied hunt” has forced the whales into a new defensive formation. But whose formation is it? Does it belong to the whales who have “sworn solemn league and covenant,” to the whalers who have chased them around the globe with the circus-­r unning sun, or to both at once? Wai Chee Dimock argues that the image of Ahab “chasing and being chased” is a “narrative tautology” in

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which everything is wholly contained by the structure of vengeance that Ahab initiates, a closed circuit of self-­v ictimization and self-­determination that territorializes the sea.62 But “The Grand Armada” makes it clear that the whales have also shaped both Ahab’s ostensibly autonomous personality and the Pequod ’s itinerary. Leading those who chase them, the whales are also pushed into collective actions and formations by virtue of their relation with their human hunters. Action—­whether rolling, revolving, chasing, or being chased—­is a collaboration of human and cetacean actors, each circling the other to create an entirely new view of what forms a collective agency and a political relation might take. Describing the herd as a “solemn league and covenant” formed of “numerous nations,” Ishmael evokes the language of democracy and sovereignty at once and suggests all that is at stake in his scrutiny of these circles. From the opening of the chapter, these circular forms present meditations on the tensions of autonomy and plurality, as these indicate competing models of both power and common life. Although it might be argued of Ishmael that he simultaneously anthropomorphizes the whales (by likening the giant herd to a mutual assistance society) and slips into a kind of political organicism (by seeking natural foundations for human political forms), as Philip Armstrong points out, there is a “material influence” at work which so deeply “interfuses the supposedly separate domains of the natural and the cultural that human economic and industrial enterprise shapes the animals’ social formation” and vice versa.63 Beyond the material processes of human-­whale interfusion that Armstrong describes, the chapter also describes an indisputably political formation. Ishmael’s language of “nations,” “leagues,” and “covenants” underscores that the whales have not just assumed this collective formation in response to deadly material stimuli; they have really done something. Indeed, these whales have done the very thing that Western political thought has long held to be the hard limit of worldly action—­they have made a leviathan covenant: Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? Or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? Canst thou put a hook in his nose? Or bore his jaws through with a thorn? Will he make many supplications unto thee? Will he make a covenant with thee?64

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These jeering questions to Job establish both God’s absolute sovereignty and the limits of human action and speech by designating a field of ontological inequality across which neither a whale line nor a covenant can reach. Job can no more covenant with leviathan than he can with his God, and this incapacity to bind both the divine and the animal defines his humanity. Hobbes transforms Job’s quandary, combining the sovereign and the animal to make leviathan into a very worldly thing, but although he is the artificial supplement of a human covenant, Hobbes’s Leviathan remains absolutely unreachable. As Paul Downes argues, Hobbes’s sovereign (like Job’s) is a noncontracting one, even as he is entirely the product of a covenant.65 In “The Grand Armada,” Melville doesn’t just carry Hobbes’s humanizing gesture one step further; he transforms the entire conceit. Leviathan is no longer the noncontracting animal-­god that carries sovereignty out of human reach (even as it owes its existence to human artifice). It is now a collective body of whales whose capacity to covenant with each other brings a new political formation into existence, one that bears many of the marks of democracy but few of sovereignty. Bonnie Honig argues that the mere fact of the whale’s flesh transforms the symbolic history of political theology: “The head is the body and so the very whale that has long emblematized sovereignty itself as, precisely, singular head ruling over unruly body, the Leviathan that (very differently) from Job to Hobbes licenses the rule of god over man, ruler over subjects, and head over body, turns out to be a creature in which precisely this separation is not at all clear.”66 For Honig, the whale is both symbol and flesh: it subverts sovereignty symbolically by combining head and body, and as its flesh is worked by the crew, that flesh incites new forms of democratic collectivity. However, as all of the whaling chapters that culminate in “The Grand Armada” make clear, whales are far more than the symbols and flesh out of which humans manufacture political relations. Having moved us through every part of the whale’s body, Ishmael ushers us into “The Grand Armada” with the “mystic gestures” of the tail through which the whale “intelligently converses with the world” (378–­79). Once “The Tail” has shown us whale intellect, whale language, and whale art, that is, we are finally prepared for the prospect that “The Grand Armada” opens: a whale democracy that exceeds human action and imagination.

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The chapter proceeds on two levels—­one above and one below the water’s surface—­and while circles form and collapse in both spheres, as relations and formations pass back and forth between the human and the whale, humans and whales do very different things with their circles. What opens the chapter as a figure for the self-­sufficiency of Ahab and the crew transforms into an image of cetacean cooperation and mutual defense, only to transform yet again into a figure for Ahab’s condition in his pursuit of the white whale. As the Pequod chases the herd, the pod again shifts its shape, “gradually contracting the wings of their semicircle, and swimming on, in one solid, but still crescentic center” (383). Closing the circle of the whale’s formation by its pursuit, the Pequod suddenly finds that it is being pursued itself by Malaysian pirates seeking tribute, as another, rather different circular form takes shape that is both contiguous with and contingent upon the circle of whales. If the whales close ranks in a move of cooperative self-­ defense, this next circle forms in the image of Ahab’s tautological self: “He glanced upon the green walls of the watery defile in which the ship was now sailing, and bethought him that through that gate lay the route to his vengeance, and beheld, how through that same gate he was now chasing and being chased to his deadly end” (383). Chasing and being chased: what Dimock describes as the tautology of the autonomous, sovereign self becomes the condition of the whale ship and the crew, as long as a structure of individuality (Ahab’s) binds itself to a collective (the Pequod). Though they believe they are in pursuit, they find themselves to be in flight, and what once appeared as their linear, singular end reveals itself to be as circular as that of the whales, who quickly become “gallied” and panicked into a state of “inert irresolution” by the chase (384). No circle is autonomous in this chapter because each is both linked to and shaped by all the others. Thus, in their mutual constitution and dependence, these circles contain their own limits as each gives rise to a plurality of other circles. In this, Melville’s circles function textually like Tocqueville’s tautologies do in Democracy in America: though each may insist upon its uniqueness, together these circles expand and proliferate. Even in Ishmael’s efforts to describe a particular circular form—­A hab’s self-­sufficiency, for example—­he ends up spinning several homologous circles in order to illustrate it (“the circus-­running sun,” the “world-­wandering whale-­ship”). Indeed,

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with its strings of analogies, the very prose of the chapter performs the productivity of these formations, as circles beget other circles both literally and metaphorically (“As marching armies, approaching an unfriendly defile in the mountains, accelerate their march . . . even so did this vast fleet of whales now seem hurrying forward through the straits, gradually contracting the wings of their semicircle, and swimming on, in one solid, but still crescentic centre” [383]). But even though each of these circles ultimately reveals its relation to all the others, they are by no means identical. If the condition of “chasing and being chased” becomes the chapter’s most cogent image for a concentration of power whose pursuit of violence threatens to turn on itself, that circle nonetheless produces another with profoundly different ends: “that enchanted calm which they say lurks in the heart of every commotion” (387). Once the whales become “gallied”—­that is, panicked in a way that Ishmael describes as “characteristic of all herding animals,” particularly humans—­the pod neither breaks apart nor flees but “collectively remain[s] in one place” as the already vast circle expands into multiple “irregular” ones, creating a chaos of commotion around the perimeter but preserving an absolute calm within the center. After the boats are lowered to hunt, Queequeg harpoons a whale that draws their boat furiously through the surrounding commotion into the “innermost heart of the shoal” (386), and while “still in the distracted distance we beheld the tumults of the outer concentric circles,” Ishmael and the others find themselves in the center of “that enchanted calm.” At first, Ishmael marvels at the vastness of the structure they have entered, seeing it in only two dimensions: “Inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving outer circles, and inclusive of the spaces between the various pods in any one of those circles, the entire area at this juncture, embraced by the whole multitude, must have contained at least two or three square miles” (387). But when he sees the expansive circle’s third dimension, he realizes that both the enormous size of these circles and the “tumult” of the perimeter are not accidental but purposeful: “Far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers” (387–­88).

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As Emerson says, “under every deep, a lower deep opens.” Even though it has formed in the panic of the hunt, the vast circle of “gallied” whales neither replicates the tautology of “chasing and being chased” nor reproduces the circle of a society that revolves with one cogged wheel. Instead, Ishmael finds within the Grand Armada a structure that responds to violence and commotion by dedicating itself to inclusivity, freedom, and joy, as well as new and future life. The line-­and-­circle formation returns here, along with the mutual enclosures of life and death, calm and commotion, peace and peril that it holds. Looking into the lower deep, Queequeg sees a line, briefly mistaking a newborn whale’s umbilical cord for that deadly whale line with which it sometimes becomes entangled. Seeing the line in the cord and the cord in the line, Ishmael also sees a circle: And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments; yea serenely reveled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still forever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy. (388)

Ishmael discovers in the center of “consternations and affrights” a world of peaceful beauty so astonishing that his prose can hardly contain it. To convey what lies at the center of this circle, he must beget other circles, layering literal circles upon metaphorical ones, while passing breathlessly between the human and the whale, the individual and the plural. As human violence alters whale society, so the whales’ defensive response informs a conception of human life that Ishmael embraces. As the tautological drive of sovereign individuality proliferates and multiplies itself, so a structure dedicated to the plurality of life (“those inscrutable creatures at the center”) yields an alternative structure for the singular, insular “I.” Further, this final circle in the chapter reveals the circle of a chapter that is itself structured according to both clear symmetry and stunning difference. Though an individual human—­first Ahab, then Ishmael—­stands in a homologous relationship to an inhuman plurality at both ends of this chapter, these individuals are linked to radically different images of communities. Where Ahab and

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the crew of the Pequod are bound to the image of a self-­consuming sun, “chasing and being chased to his deadly end,” Ishmael reimagines himself in the image of the pod of whales who have covenanted themselves into a protective sphere, the primary purpose of which is its dedication to joy, freedom, life, and (to borrow from Arendt’s lexicon67 ) plurality and natality, rather than to autonomy and force. In this, Ishmael does not witness an allegory for human democracy so much as he discovers cetocracy—­democracy’s brief realization by a community of whales. Against one circular structure whose self-­fueling drive to violence is consuming it, the Grand Armada proposes another: an artificial political structure whose principal drive is the life of the future. Such a structure joins the naturalizing force of Emerson’s “illimitable” circles, identifying them with a figure for democracy, to the art and artifice through which democracy retains its capacity for what Tocqueville calls “real, active political life.” Put another way, Melville finds real, active democracy in a place where neither Tocqueville, nor Emerson, nor Arendt would likely look for it—­in the form of a purposeful association of whales, acting together out of necessity and desire. But even as this chapter provides a powerfully different view of what the circle of democracy might be, it also offers a sobering meditation on how transient all circles are and, by extension, how tightly bound together all of the possibilities for the life of any community can be. Circles figure the precariousness of democracy, its balance of centrifugal and centripetal forces, its fragility and repeatability, just as the calm contains the storm that contains the calm. Thus the circular power that chases the chasing Pequod to its deadly end also penetrates the circle that defends and protects the new life of the whales in such a way that it becomes almost impossible to pinpoint a moment or place of separation between them. To mix Melville’s shapes with his colors, the mutual containment of calm and commotion produces the same effect as the rainbow in Billy Budd: though “distinctly we see the difference of the colors . . . where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other?” (BB, 49). At what point does a politics that finds its cause and end in the “art of pursuing in common the objects of common desires” become bound to a violent purpose whose future is self-­destruction? Though Ishmael can no more locate such a point of transformation than the

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narrator of Billy Budd can, “The Grand Armada” makes it clear that this entanglement is certain. Thus one of the text’s most peaceful scenes “blendingly enters into” one of its most terrible because each contains the other. After a moment’s entrancement by the vision of the nursery, Ishmael and the others are startled by “one of the unimaginable accidents of the fishery” in the frenetic fight of the outer circles. A wounded whale, “entangled in the harpoon-­line that he towed” and dragging a cutting spade along with him, comes “churning through the water, violently flailing with his flexible tail, and tossing the keen spade about him, wounding and murdering his own comrades” (389). As the wounded whale retreats to the safety of the inner circle, he brings the violence done to him along with him and unwittingly inflicts it on his fellows. “This terrific object seemed to recall the whole herd from their stationary fright” (389). First, Ishmael sees that the whales began crowding together, then the lake itself began faintly to heave and swell; the submarine bridal-­chambers and nurseries vanished; in more and more contracting orbits the whales in the more central circles began to swim in thickening clusters. Yes, the long calm was departing. A low advancing hum was soon heard; and then . . . the entire host of whales came tumbling upon their inner centre, as if to pile themselves up in one common mountain. (389–­90)

Limited and limitless like the circles that precede it, this circle proves as fragile as it was vast and dynamic when the violence that led to its formation eventually gets inside it. But if Ishmael clearly mourns the collapse of this center, he qualifies his grief in two ways. First, he makes it clear that the calm he loved was inside a commotion that had gallied the whales into an “inert irresolution” of fear. Second, he notes that the terror of the wounded whale, rather than intensifying the collective inertia of the herd, rouses it to action. Though it seems like the circle collapses, it instead appears by the end of the chapter that the whales have acted to save themselves by transforming their circle: “Riotous and disordered as the universal commotion now was, it soon resolved itself into what seemed a systematic movement; for having clumped together at last in one dense body, they then renewed their onward flight with augmented fleetness” (390).

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However “riotous and disordered” it may appear, a collective can nevertheless act to continue a systematic and onward movement by resolving to transform itself. With this, cetocracy does not mirror the democracy of mariners, renegades, and castaways so much as it remedies their failure. “The Grand Armada” tells an alternative history of the Pequod and all that the crew loses on the quarter-­deck. When the circle of democratic dignity rotates to Ahab’s cogged circle, they don’t give themselves over to an irresistible dictator (because Ahab himself is dictated by the thought of his hunt and moved by the motion of whales in the sea), but they do bind themselves to kill. Though they may create a new laboring collective out of the flesh of the whale (as Honig argues), and though they may find a new form of “being-­in-­common” as they squeeze the sperm (as Casarino does), first the crew must make a “vast corpse” (286).68 Swearing their oath, the crew reveals how such work is violence, regardless of whether the corpse they make is particular or general, and it is ultimately inconvertible to either political legitimacy or collective power. By contrast, the alternative that the Grand Armada proposes is not just a negation of such violence (through what Balibar calls nonviolence or counterviolence) so much as it is a displacement of violence that makes politics possible through the herd’s confrontation with its own radical alterity. In other words, in Moby-­Dick only whales act collectively and decisively within the larger field of forces that chase and lead them, pull them apart and concentrate them into herds, because only whales have resolved to transform themselves in order to live rather than kill. Vortical Democracy It is easy to see tragedy in the contraction of the vast circle of whales, a collapse into chaos that foreshadows the final spiral of the Pequod in “The Chase—­Third Day.”69 Ishmael’s description of the whales tumbling “upon their inner centre” is vivid and brutal, and it overshadows his more measured account of their resolution into “systematic movement” and successful escape two paragraphs later (390). It is as if the very figure of the whales’ vortical motion—­a spiraling inward that accelerates as it contracts—­overtakes Ishmael’s prose and pulls on the arc of the chapter. This effect is, in many ways, true of the whole of Moby-­Dick. When the Pequod sinks, all of the circling,

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spiralizing, and rolling that has moved sailors and whales alike appear as little more than the outermost rings of a whirling vortex that will pull everything into nothing. As Ishmael warns the dreamy Platonist on the mast-­ head, “over Descartian vortices you hover” (159), and the force of their pull seems as certain and inexorable as gravity itself. But if “The Chase—­Third Day” reveals that all of the circles upon circles that Moby-­Dick has drawn ultimately combine to form a vortex, the “Epilogue” suggests that vortical motion is far from certain or inexorable. In the entry on “Vortex” from the Penny Cyclopedia (Melville’s favored source on sperm whale anatomy and non-­Euclidean geometry70), Descartes’s vortical model of astronomical movement is less a relentless spiraling descent into emptiness than a complex of whirlpools in a cosmic sea. “The heavens are filled with fluid matter,” with the sun moved around “in the manner of a whirlpool” spinning smaller whirlpools which, in turn, move other, even smaller bodies: “Each planet is the center of a smaller vortex in which its satellites are carried round their primary.”71 Moreover, none of these myriad vortices spins around or into a vacuum because, the Penny Cyclopedia continues, Descartes’s vortex is both a powerfully centripetal force and a centrifugal one that generates new bodies. Descartes posited that space is a fluid, not a vacuum, comprising various particles of primary matter and those “worn off” from the spiraling bodies of stars. This residual matter is then “forced to the centres of the vortices, where it formed certain very spherical bodies.” If the movement of vortices share “a common motion . . . the same must not be said of the spherical particles,” which take shape at their centers and—­in a manner the Penny Cyclopedia calls “fanciful in the extreme”—­rise straight out of them. Ishmael does not just hover over Descartian vortices; he is spun furiously into their rotation, but at the moment he reaches the center, he discovers that those vortices are neither empty nor irresistibly centripetal but vital and buoyant: Round and round, then, and ever contracting towards the button-­like black bubble at the axis of the slowly wheeling circle, like another Ixion, I did revolve. Till, gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin-­like life-­buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. (Melville’s italics, 573)

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Ahab’s cogged circle spins the wheel, the wheel revolves, the Pequod spirals into a vortex, and Ishmael becomes another Ixion. But Ishmael does not become another Pip, the castaway whose soul is “carried down alive to wondrous depths” as “his ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably” (414). When a bubble rises from the vital center with the fanciful force of a newly formed planet, the vortex in which Ishmael spins becomes a composite of circle, sphere, and line that holds life and death, calm and commotion, centralization and proliferation all at once. Ishmael is buoyed, that is, by the culmination of his own book’s aesthetic assemblage, the figural complex of circles, spheres, spirals, and wheels that roll ship, whale, and book alike. This is the work of neither necessity nor contingency. This is the work of form. The very condition of the book’s possibility is the bubble that rises out of the vortex to float Ishmael, and that bubble is a life-­buoy coffin built with a “cunning spring” by the carpenter and left vacant by Queequeg, who has decorated it with the “complete theory of the heavens” that cover his skin (481). Melville both adheres to Cartesian theory (at least as the Penny Cyclopedia summarizes it) and submits “Descartian vortices” to the work of aesthetics and form, both his own and that of his characters. With this, the vortex becomes something more than an image of natural force out of which metaphysical and political meaning can be made. To be sure, vortices are powerful metaphors for radical democratic politics. As Michelle Sizemore has shown in the context of early republican historical romance, vortices designate the absence of the people, holding open the empty place of power that Lefort posited as the shape of democratic sovereignty to portray democracy as an ongoing generative power.72 In Michael Jonik’s reading of projective geometry in Moby-­Dick, he describes the final vortex as the shape in which Melville’s “multifarious thinking of forms of physical immersion, transformation, and disidentification” converge and open an ethopolitics “of endeavoring in common, of striving, living, and surviving.” 73 For Sizemore and Jonik—­and for Melville, too—­the vortex emphasizes constant movement and uncertain ends, a means of imagining new political agencies and collective formations that refuse determinate form. But when Queequeg’s coffin bursts from the center of the vortex, Melville also insists that art collaborates with geometry, cosmology, and nature to make such political

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possibilities imaginable. The rising coffin both thematizes and figures what Moby-­Dick formalizes: the force through which aesthetics (whether a line, a circle, a coffin, or a book) holds open that demand to do, to act, and to begin again amid “circle upon circle of consternation and affright,” through contingency and necessity.

PA R T T H R E E Democracy Is Groundless

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5 Gravity, Slavery, and Political Prophecy When a man flings himself from the top of some lofty monument, against a granite pavement, in that act, he forfeits his right to live. He dies according to law, and however shocking may be the spectacle he presents, it is no argument against the benevolence of the law of gravitation, the suspension of whose operation must work ruin to the well-­being of mankind. Frederick Douglass, “Is It Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper?” For the truth is that there is no reason for anything to be or to remain thus and so rather than otherwise, and this applies as much to the laws that govern the world as to the things of the world. Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude

Gravity and Groundlessness Late in Book IV of Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), as Melville’s pilgrims depart Mar Saba for Bethlehem and then Jerusalem, a scarred and embittered ex-­Confederate joins the group. Self-­exiled from Reconstruction-­era America and bearing his statelessness as a series of wounds (a saber scar, a powder burn, a morose temper), Ungar voices what would seem to be a decisive rebuke of the “ruthless democracy” for which 205

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Melville refused to apologize in his May 1851 letter. In that letter, Melville connects the fact of unconditional equality with the “endless sermon” that must declare it over and over again, rooting both of these in the images of grass sprouting, growing, going to seed, and sprouting once again. Twenty-­ four years later, between the end of the Civil War and the overthrow of Reconstruction, Melville’s pilgrims assess the legacy of eighteenth-­century revolutions and the progress of nineteenth-­century equality. As they talk of the Old World and the New, of reform and revolution, of liberty and progress, the Anglican priest Derwent’s optimism plays genially against the Spaniard Don Hannibal’s cynicism until Ungar interrupts them: But Ungar, earnest in his plea—­ Intent, nor caring to have done; And turning where suggestion led At tangent: “Ay, Democracy Lops, lops; but where’s her planted bed? The future, what is that to her Who vaunts she’s no inheritor? ’Tis in her mouth, not in her heart. The Past she spurns, though ’tis the past From which she gets her saving part—­ That Good which lets her Evil last.” (Cl, IV.19.123–­32)

Ungar casts democracy as a principle of anarchic negation, a process of “lopping” off heads and limbs that carves the present away from both past and future. Lacking a “planted bed,” a firm foundation in property or title, democracy cuts the people off from all inheritance and leaves nothing to carry into the future.1 For generations of critics Ungar has stood as Melville’s most “anti-­democratic” character and Clarel as his sharpest “critique of democracy.”2 Without claiming to hear Melville speak through Ungar exactly, readers have nevertheless heard in Clarel ’s endless dialogues about revolution, counterrevolution, democracy, and empire Melville voicing his own doubts about (in Dennis Berthold’s words) “the claims of democracy, republicanism, and individualism that he had once championed.”3 But while Ungar is the strongest critic of democracy in Melville’s late work, it is not the claims of republican individualism that he fears so much as the principle of ruthless equality itself—­what he calls “dead-­level rank of commonplace”

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(IV.21.136)—­which Melville embraces in his letter to Hawthorne. That is, Ungar clearly emerges in these lines as an antidemocratic reactionary, but in this, he precisely echoes and even amplifies the strange and radical conception of democracy that Melville imagines and elaborates in his writing throughout the 1840s and 1850s. “Ay, Democracy / Lops, lops; but where’s her planted bed?” The answer, of course, lies at the core of Melville’s understanding of democracy: nowhere. The grass that figures ruthless democracy in Melville’s letter is not planted in any permanent ground but grows sporadically wherever its seeds chance to land: it sprouts millennia and continents away from the Egyptian pyramids where it was entombed; it sends shoots into the earth from human legs and leaves from sun-­bathed heads; and it springs forth out of the silent moods “in which man ought to compose” (Corr., 191). With “ruthless democracy,” Melville proposes that the only “bed” for such a political principle lies not in a founded people, past, or state but in the lived fact of equality and the demand for ongoing work to secure it amid perpetual, unpredictable change. As Melville nears the completion of Moby-­Dick—­the ostensible occasion for his letter to Hawthorne4 —­that unplanted grass spreads from the earth to the rolling seas, and the possibilities for his ruthless democracy expand, passing from the “kingly commons” to a crew of sailors to a pod of whales who, in the 87th chapter of Moby-­Dick, carry it further than any human community in Melville’s corpus. Ungar’s question—­a long with his repeated denunciations of “the Dark Ages of Democracy” throughout Clarel ’s final book (IV.21.139)—­may repudiate the democratic visions that emerge from Melville’s letter, “Knights and Squires,” and “The Grand Armada,” but it is just as crucial to understanding Melville’s long preoccupation with democracy as a political, philosophical, and aesthetic principle. If there is little change in Melville’s fundamental definition of democracy between 1851 and 1876, there is clearly a shift in tone and mood from his unapologetic embrace of “my ruthless democracy” to the gravity and misgivings with which the characters of his later poetry and prose confront the radical implications of democracy’s unplanted bed. Ungar is exemplary of this tonal change: humorless and wrecked by the war, he is—­w ith apologies to both Melville and Jacques Rancière—­a democracy-­hater par excellence.5 That is, he combines the deep cynicism of The Confidence-­Man’s most

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virulent man-­haters with what Rancière calls “la haine de la démocratie” in both its modern and ancient forms. When Ungar laments that democracy is “no inheritor,” he speaks in the familiar lexicon of a post-­revolutionary reactionary, pining for a Burkean state in which the past maintains its hold on the present, “grasped as in a kind of mort-­main forever.”6 But when he asks where the “planted bed” of democracy lies, he goes back further, rooting his hatred in Plato’s denunciation of democracy’s radical (intergenerational and interspecies) equality and anarchic foundation.7 For Rancière, the hatred of democracy is original to the concept, so it serves as a key register of democracy’s historical meaning and development. Beginning with the “Platonic fable of the untamable democratic ass,” he argues, that hatred recurs again and again into modernity because it both addresses and conceals democracy’s essential “scandal”—­namely, that democracy poses the paradox of “anarchic ‘government’, one based on nothing other than the absence of every title to govern.” Rather than grounding the right to rule in birth, wealth, age, or strength, democracy derives that right from the merest chance of lots cast among equals.8 Though modern democracy has abandoned lots, Rancière argues elsewhere, it retains as its most “astonishing” feature this absent title for its sole foundation and ground: Democracy is the institution of politics as such, of politics as a paradox. Why a paradox? Because the institution of politics seems to provide an answer to the key question as to what it is that grounds the power of rule in a community. And democracy provides an answer, but it is an astonishing one: namely, that the very ground for the power of ruling is that there is no ground at all.9

Melville grapples with democracy’s groundless ground across his entire career—­when he reimages the foundations of politics in that shade of green that blends grassy verdure with corrosive verdigris; when he refigures the vicious circles of constituent authority and founding violence as double enclosures and vortices; and when, after the Civil War, he crafts a poetics of falling, hanging, and floating that treats the figure of that absent ground almost literally. Moving from Melville’s green earth to his rolling seas to those “slimed foundations” and “core[s] of fire” that appear when the ground gives way in his work over and over again (PP, 55, 130),10 I have aimed to

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show how Melville’s most complex engagements with democracy lie less in the plots and characters of his works than in the aesthetic experiments through which he converts color and tone, shape and figure, force and mood into modes of political thinking. To move beyond a representational understanding of democracy, that is, Melville subverts and transforms the literary aesthetics through which democracy can be represented. For this reason, while Ungar’s bilious diatribes point to the unsettling paradox of democracy’s groundless ground, the true measure of Clarel ’s investment in the history and idea of democracy lies neither in Ungar’s rages nor in the wanly dissenting voices of the liberal-­minded characters who spar with him. Instead, it lies in Clarel ’s elaboration of a groundless world composed of cracked foundations, landslides, and earthquakes—­a poetics of gravity that Melville first explores in the Piazza Tales and fully develops in Battle-­Pieces. Gravity becomes both the mood and the motive force of Melville’s later writings because he takes so seriously what it is to live in a world where the ground keeps falling away. Rather than signaling a reactive, antidemocratic turn in his thinking, Melville’s darker assessments of democracy’s groundlessness instead mark one of the major intellectual and aesthetic achievements of his later work: the recognition that moments of upheaval are auspicious for thinking through the meaning and practice of democracy because, at its root, democracy’s most radical definition is that nothing about it can be presupposed—­ not a territory, not a community, not even a subject. Melville treats such conditions with gravity—­a pervasive mood of solemnity, uncertainty, and misgivings—­as his writings interrogate that strange affective place where the hatred of democracy collides with the politics of democratic prophecy. If Rancière demonstrates how democracy-­hating responds to the “astonishing” absence of a title to rule through which a people stakes its claim, George Shulman shows how democratic prophecy finds redemptive potential in that absence, most forcefully in the radical abolitionist and antiracist traditions of American political thought from Frederick Douglass to James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.11 The seemingly oppositional traditions of hatred and prophecy both come into play, that is, when the foundations of a political community (both the people and the polis) collapse, when the constitutive exceptions and violations that have held it together appear,

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and when future configurations for the people come into view. Jason Frank calls these “constituent moments” as a people appears on the horizon that is “not . . . yet,” and with that ellipsis, he stages the temporal gap to which prophecy speaks as the people perpetually “enact and transcend their own self-­representations.”12 Such a prophetic rhetoric for the people may seem as deterministic a figure for politics as gravity, but like the force of gravitation under conditions of groundlessness, prophecy accounts for what is necessary and contingent at the same time. When prophecy announces an unacknowledged condition of violence and dispossession or sounds a warning that the foundations of a polity are eroding, a metapolitical process begins to unfold that is both necessary and unpredictable, both certain and uncertain, because it can never yield a fully self-­present people in which democracy locates its firm ground or planted bed.13 In the poetic idiom that Melville developed between the 1850s and 1870s, gravity conspires with groundlessness and necessity with contingency in ways that reveal surprising connections between the prophets of democracy and its haters. But rather than claiming that Melville becomes either prophet or hater in the wake of the Civil War, I will show in this chapter and the next the ways in which his late work deploys both types of political voice while developing a poetics in which overwhelming, even inevitable, forces yield unpredictable ends. To do this, I trace out two distinct directions in which Melville carries his groundless aesthetics: in chapter 5, I connect Melville’s interest in the poetics and politics of gravitation with Frederick Douglass’s radical abolitionist writing from the 1850s, and then, in chapter 6, I return to Melville’s botanic idiom to show how the figuration of uprooted and uncultivated grasses fuels an “unplanted” democratic vision that departs sharply from Walt Whitman’s liberal poetics in both Leaves of Grass and Democratic Vistas. Where Whitman’s manifestos on democratic poetics are obvious counterparts to Melville’s writing, Douglass’s most militant antislavery writings may seem perverse companions for the polemics of Melville’s exiled Confederate and the political equivocations of his prose “Supplement” to Battle-­Pieces. However, I argue, Melville and Douglass both mine radical democratic critiques from those prophets and haters who feel the pull of gravity in the groundless political world of the “long Civil War.”14 From “The Bell-­Tower” to Battle-­Pieces and Clarel, Mel-

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ville echoes Douglass in exploiting the surprisingly multivalent politics and poetics of gravity in order to challenge liberal orthodoxies that presume political change will follow necessary moral laws within the prescribed limits of founded institutions. Deploying gravity as force, figure, and mood, both writers show how seemingly inexorable forces can activate other agencies, how centers of gravity can shift, and how the apparently inevitable can produce the unanticipated. Ultimately, what Melville shares with Douglass is the insight that democracy follows the law of gravitation as surely as it does the dictates of prophecy, but this in no way determines that a particular political outcome will follow. To understand that democracy is falling is not to believe that it exists in some founded state that is now collapsing, but to insist that its grounding condition lies in how we contend with its suspended plunge. “The benevolence of the law of gravitation”: Prophecy and Militancy in Douglass Frederick Douglass’s July 5, 1852, address in Rochester, New York, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” has become the key text for scholarly elaborations of his role as prophet of American democracy. In David Blight’s monumental Prophet of Freedom, the address merits its own chapter as “nothing less than the rhetorical masterpiece of American abolitionism” for its joining of sacred and secular narratives of suffering, punishment, and redemption. Blight argues that while Douglass was “a man of the nineteenth century, a thoroughgoing inheritor of Enlightenment ideas . . . he reached for the Old Testament Hebrew prophets of the sixth to eighth centuries BCE” in order to sound at once an epochal warning about American slavery and a note of hope that joined the prophetic to the political—­an optimism that Douglass rooted in both the “inevitable . . . downfall” of slavery under a just God and the openness of the Constitution to an antislavery interpretation.15 For George Shulman, Douglass’s Fourth of July lecture is exemplary of the prophetic tradition in American political discourse more generally: in it, Douglass announces an unacknowledged reality, bears witness to the nation’s crimes, and warns of a coming penalty. And though, Shulman argues, the prophetic voice of “the most powerful and artful jeremiad in American

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history” may seem antipolitical in the “theist absolutes and redemptive rhetoric” that are characteristic of the jeremiad form, he places Douglass at the head of a lineage of thinkers who “revitalize [prophecy] as a form of political theory and practice,” one that reimagines authority, judgment, community, and history.16 Jason Frank describes the politics of Douglass’s prophetic speech in even more precise terms as a powerful staging of dissensus according to Rancière’s formulation. While Douglass had “no authorization to speak for the people,” Frank argues, he nonetheless claimed the right to do so, and in this, he does more than simply indict an uncompleted process of legal recognition; he demonstrates that the enactment of the people itself is incomplete, that the democratic subject of the nation is lacking, while “setting the stage for a new political subject’s emergence.”17 Prophecy thus emerges for these scholars as Douglass’s most powerful political mode in the early 1850s—­one in which his departure from Garrisonian moral suasion is measurable in the ways he joins the prophet’s role of announcing, witnessing, and warning to a vision of a radically reconstituted, multiracial democratic people. For Frank and Shulman, in particular, the speech is radical indeed, and that radicalism lies not only in the political vision it articulates but also in its achievements on the level of figuration and address. What Frank calls Douglass’s “staging” and what Shulman calls his “art” derive from the combined rhetorical force of “the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake” that Douglass invokes to break the foundations of the guilty nation and from the pronouns—­“I,” “you,” “we”—­that he uses to pry open a gap in the as-­yet uncompleted people to whose transformation, he insists, the Constitution remains open. Speaking with “scorching irony,” Douglass figures rhetorical force as natural catastrophe in order to convey how extraordinary such a political transformation must be. It requires a politics of breaking apart and founding anew, of return to revolutionary origins and constituent actions, but as his deft wielding of pronouns suggests, the subject of this transformation is necessarily suspended because transformation is the very process needed to bring that subject into being. For this reason, the rhetorical forces that Douglass summons here are both impersonal and exceptional as they seek to pry open a break where a new people can appear. But as Douglass’s tactical vision continues to shift in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Law, from radical constitutionalism to an increasingly

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militant vision of antislavery resistance, his politics of prophecy begin to transform into a politics of gravity. “There are forces in operation that must inevitably work the downfall of slavery,” he writes at the end of “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” The ground is shifting, new forces are at work, and that suggests new, more militant actions are also required.18 Moving rhetorically from the power of exceptional forces—­storm, whirlwind, earthquake—­to the most mundane and omnipresent force of all—­gravitational pull—­Douglass also begins to describe how a process of activating new political subjects can follow from an inevitable fall. In a July 2, 1854, editorial in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Douglass responds to the failed attempt by a group of radical abolitionists to free Anthony Burns from the Boston Courthouse where he was awaiting certain reenslavement under the fugitive law. Asking “Is it right and wise to kill a kidnapper?” he answers both components of the question in the affirmative to advance one of his most sustained and unyielding defenses of the right to antislavery violence. Douglass’s increasing contempt for the tactics of moral suasion and nonresistance in the early 1850s is well documented, part of what Kellie Carter Jackson calls “a calculated pivot” on the part of Black abolitionist leaders in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Law toward the more direct, militant activism that had been advocated by David Walker in 1829 and pressed consistently by Henry Highland Garnet since 1843.19 But where Walker speaks prophetically of a violence that will be visited on the United States for the crime of slavery, and Garnet speaks directly to the enslaved as individual agents who must “use every means” to resist slavery, Douglass folds these modes together, deriving a collective political and moral right to militant resistance from the law of gravitation.20 Specifically, what Douglass argues is that when James Batchelder consented to be deputized to aid in Anthony Burns’s imprisonment under the Fugitive Slave Law, he committed an act that was morally and politically analogous to leaping from the top of the Bunker Hill tower: When a man flings himself from the top of some lofty monument, against a granite pavement, in that act, he forfeits his right to live. He dies according to law, and however shocking may be the spectacle he presents, it is no argument against the benevolence of the law of gravitation, the suspension of whose operation must work ruin to the well-­ being of mankind.21

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Of course, Batcheldor died not from a fall but from a wound sustained while guarding the courthouse on May 26, as Burns was awaiting trial. That day, a group of abolitionists led by Lewis Hayden and Thomas Wentworth Higginson undertook a plan to storm the courthouse and rescue Burns from state custody. The crowd grew over the course of the day, and as fighting broke out between the abolitionists and the thousands of federal troops that Franklin Pierce had ordered to guard the courthouse, Batchelder was killed in the fight, most likely shot by Lewis Hayden himself.22 In his editorial on these events, Douglass takes up each aspect of his titular question in turn as he methodically reasons that violence in the face of the fugitive law is right, wise, and entirely predictable. Batchelder essentially forfeited his own life by seeking to “wrest from [Burns] his very person and natural powers.” Published on the day that Burns was marched through the streets of Boston to a waiting ship, the essay does not replay the scene of Batchelder’s death nor does it locate it at the courthouse. Instead, Douglass situates all of these events across the river on Bunker Hill, which he invokes throughout the essay as a monument to all of the forces of necessity—­moral, physical, and political—­that he marshals in support of an emerging political theory of antislavery militancy. Douglass moves us all around and over the monument in this essay: Bunker Hill looks down upon the bloody streets in his opening image, false patriots look up to its “somber pile” in his final one, and in his essay’s central argument, Douglass treats the symbolic tower as a literal elevation from which to test the law of gravitation. Douglass divides the essay tightly in two parts, each taking up a part of the question he asks in his title. He begins by deriving the right to kill a kidnapper by elaborating an extended analogy between moral and physical laws. The right to life, like the right to liberty, he reasons, can be forfeited because both rights “stand on the same ground.” That ground is also both moral and physical, the fixed location of principle as well as the foundation of granite on which whoever “flings himself from the top of some lofty monument” will land. There is, he says, no arguing the law of gravitation, no questioning its force or benevolence. All must observe the law, and any who try to violate it will simply perish. Both the content and the form of Douglass’s analogy reinforce the claims of necessity: “As human life is not superior to the laws for the preservation of the physical

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universe,” he argues, “so, too, it is not superior to the eternal law of justice which is essential to the preservation of the rights and the security, and happiness of the races.” As Batchelder “took upon himself the revolting business of a kidnapper,” so he turned from “a common laborer” into “the common enemy of mankind.” If chiasmus often provides Douglass a syntactical form that mirrors in order to invert, analogy here supplies the syntactic force that pulls the state’s agent to his death. David Blight argues that “Is It Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper?” is largely consistent with Douglass’s defense of forceful resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law in his speeches and writing from the early 1850s, but he highlights two key differences: first, Douglass’s recourse to moral philosophy in reasoning out the justness of violence and, second, his claim that violence is also wise political action. For Blight, these claims are at odds: How can the inevitable be wise? How can the necessary be strategic?23 In voicing these questions, Blight echoes Hannah Arendt’s suspicions about analogies drawn between revolutionary processes and mathematical laws in the eighteenth century. Douglass’s gravitational analogy certainly fits into the history of invoking mathematical and astronomical metaphors to assert the right to revolution that Arendt traces in chapter 5 of On Revolution, in which she argues that such “axiomatic and self-­evident” claims are potent but ultimately fallacious. In the context of revolutionary thought, she writes, “it is important to note that only mathematical laws were thought to be sufficiently irresistible to check the power of despots. The fallacy of this position was not only to equate this compelling evidence with right reason . . . but to believe that these mathematical ‘laws’ were of the same nature as the laws of a community.”24 For Arendt—­and for Blight too, it seems—­the figure of physical law functions too forcefully and too literally to be politically effective because it compels consent by laying claim to necessity (which, of course, Arendt names as the enemy of the political). But even as Douglass invokes and intensifies the analogy by joining the necessity of physical law to the necessary process of revolutionary history (it’s not just any lofty monument from which the kidnapper falls), he is also intent on advancing the right to antislavery violence as both a moral and a political one that is key to the emergence of new subjects and a new community. After developing the analogy between moral laws and the laws of

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physics, he shifts from the language of foregone conclusions to that of tactics and strategy. Specifically, he argues that the pursuit of just and necessary violence is also wise action because it functions as a powerful process of political subjectification: “Submission on the part of the slave has ceased to be a virtue. . . . Every slave-­holder who meets a bloody death in his infernal business is an argument in favor of the manhood of our race. Resistance is, therefore, wise as well as just.” Rather than invoking physical laws toward an axiomatic assertion that resistance must follow from violation as effect follows from cause, Douglass takes pains to show how gravitation may also generate new subjects and agencies. Insisting at once on violent resistance as absolute necessity and wise political action, Douglass proposes Bunker Hill as a complex and layered figure: a monument to the combined revolutionary force of inexorable physical laws and militant political action. Ultimately, Douglass argues, the law of gravitation is no neutral principle of math and matter but a moral and political force of real “benevolence.” It will certainly kill whoever refuses to obey it, and the results may indeed be “shocking,” but its universal suspension would “work ruin to the well-­ being of mankind.”25 With this insistence on the benevolence of gravity, Douglass significantly revises his use of the figure from his December 1, 1850, lecture, “Slavery and the Slave Power,” which he in turn seems to have adapted from Elihu Burritt’s essay “Force of Gravity in the Moral World,” which he had published in Frederick Douglass’ Paper in September 1848.26 Burritt pursues an extended analogy between the material force of gravitation and the moral force of love—­both, he argues, are powers of attraction and adhesion. As gravitation is the “one grand, royal law upon which hang all the laws that govern matter or motion,” he argues, so “the great law of Love, the law of gravitation in the moral world, attracts and centers . . . all hearts.” In “Slavery and the Slave Power,” Douglass borrows the form and figure of Burritt’s analogy to detail the workings of conscience: “Conscience is to the individual soul what gravitation is to the universe. It holds society together. . . . Without it, suspicion would take the place of trust; vice would be more than a match for virtue; men would prey on each other like the wild beasts of the desert; and earth would become a hell.”27 As Douglass takes up and revises this analogy, the figure of “gravitation” remains stable while its ground shifts—­Burritt’s “love” becomes Douglass’s “conscience” in 1850 only

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to transform into “right” and “wise” action in 1854. Preserving the figure but moving its ground, Douglass is able to refashion the “moral universe” into an urgently political one. No longer an adhesive principle of love to which all will yield in time, gravitation names the force of a right to militant action that will forge a new community acting in collective resistance toward their own liberation. Indeed, one of the more remarkable aspects of “Is It Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper?” lies in the way that Douglass develops an argument for antislavery force that aligns with the militancy of activists like Henry Highland Garnet in the very language of pacifists like Elihu Burritt.28 As Kellie Carter Jackson shows in her history of militant abolitionism, radical abolitionists in the 1850s increasingly theorized violence in the layered moral and political terms that animate Douglass’s editorial on Burns and Batchelder. Antislavery violence, she argues, “had a democratizing effect; it created opportunities for any enslaved or oppressed free person to engage in political and physical pushback to their oppressive conditions.”29 For Douglass, that opportunity for resistance was more than individual: figured through the adhesive and attractive properties of gravitation, resistance was a means of forging new political collectives that need not rely on the benevolence of the moral universe or natural law. With this, Douglass emerges as a complicating figure in the history of what Michelle M. Wright calls the “physics of Blackness,” in which, she argues, epistemologies grounded in Newtonian mechanics have structured political rhetoric in the Black radical tradition to its detriment. Specifically, Wright argues that “Newtonian laws of motion and gravity” govern “the linear spacetime that shapes and informs the Middle Passage epistemology.” That epistemology has powerfully negotiated the complex origins of Blackness in the African diaspora, she argues, but it has also “mistranslated Newton’s concept of linear time into a . . . progress narrative” that can be inverted (as in Afropessimist critique) but that cannot account for the plurality of diasporic identities, histories, and experiences of Blackness with its multiple temporal lines, collectivities, and political potentialities.30 By contrast, when Douglass invokes a version of Newtonian gravity, he does so not only in the service of a linear, cause-­ and-­effect narrative of resistance, but also with a vision of the formation of unanticipated democratic collectivities. The creation of new political sub-

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jects and collectives is nothing so simple as a linear extension of the bounds of the existing polis for Douglass, as he makes clear in both “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” and “Is It Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper?” Both the lecture and the essay pose with their interrogative titles rhetorical questions that require no response, but they also supply answers that push well beyond the obvious and the axiomatic in order to pry open the Constitution in the former and to resanctify Bunker Hill in the latter. That is, Douglass deploys his rhetorical questions and forceful analogies not to demonstrate that the promise of the Fourth of July, the Constitution, and the Bunker Hill Memorial must be realized, but to insist that they must all be transformed and remade. Beginning with Arendt’s critique of the axiomatic fallacy of mathematical laws in revolutionary discourse, critics of gravity as a figure for political force tend to treat it quite literally regardless of whether they call for the metaphor to be abandoned or reclaimed. Where Michelle Wright calls on Black studies to abandon Newton’s theory of gravity for Einstein’s, Christopher Peterson argues that the disparate fields grouped under the sign of “speculative realism” have done just that in philosophically and politically untenable ways. By giving “equal ontological weight to all objects,” he writes, theorists posit a zero-­gravity world in which no object pulls with greater force on any other, arguing that such a world—­w ithout distinction, without alterity, without gravity—­is a world without politics.31 Taking gravity literally, these theorists follow Arendt’s lead in treating it as an antipolitical figure: when present, its force is too linear and irresistible, while its absence (to borrow Douglass’s words) “must work ruin to the well-­being of mankind.” But in Douglass’s gravitational conceit, he treats it as both force and figure, maintaining as certain the fate of whoever falls from a lofty monument while fragmenting the figurative meanings of that monument as he moves us all around Bunker Hill. Put another way, Douglass allows the literal and figural dimensions of “the law of gravitation” to play off one another in order to refuse as false the choice between antislavery militancy and democratic politics, both of which are necessary to the emergence of the radically new people he envisions. In what follows, I show both how Melville invokes gravity in contexts startlingly similar to Douglass—­specifically, in treating the relationship of slavery, force, and democracy—­and how Melville’s

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gravitational figures also counter the liberal axioms of an inevitable natural or moral force that neutralizes politics. Douglass and Melville share a vision of gravity as a political force with democratic potential as well as an understanding of how the literal and the figural conspire with and counter one another in the representation of democracy. Gravity combines with wisdom and strategy for Douglass, art and mood for Melville. But there are key differences in how Douglass and Melville invoke gravity as figure and force. For one thing, in Melville’s hands, analogies generally fail to deliver on promised equivalencies and meanings as figures proliferate and deform what they were imagined to designate. For another, many things fall from lofty heights in Melville’s fiction and poetry, but not everything that is subject to gravity hits the ground, as bodies simply fall without end, sway back and forth, or pause in prolonged moments of suspension. In Melville’s writing, that is, gravity operates without ground, and it figures a world of radical contingency which may never yield those radical democratic collectives that Douglass envisions in his most prophetic and militant political modes. “Gravity is the air of all, but diversified in all”: Necessity, Contingency, and the Law of Art in “The Bell-­Tower” Between its title and the three epigraphic fragments appended to the tale in its first printing in Putnam’s Magazine—­fragments that invoke slaves plotting revenge against masters, a fall from monumental heights, and the power of necessity in the pursuit of liberty—­the opening of Melville’s “The Bell-­Tower” reads like a supplement to Douglass’s essay on Batchelder, Burns, and Bunker Hill published the previous summer.32 Indeed, as Russ Castronovo argues, Melville’s tale of monumental overreach in Renaissance Italy also unfolds in the long shadow of Bunker Hill.33 Interrogating the imbrication of slavery, violence, and founding as it opens on the “cankered bloom” and “lichened ruin” of a now-­fallen republic, the tale centers on “the unblest foundling Bannadonna,” who creates an “iron slave” to work atop the monumental bell tower he builds to commemorate the founding of the republic. Throughout, the story plays off the rhyming pattern of founding, foundling, and foundering in ways that echo Douglass’s critiques of revolutionary commemoration to suggest how the past iterates into the present,

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how founding violence is compounded and repeated over time, and how (in Castronovo’s phrase) “the monumental history of the fathers slays itself in its own contradictions.”34 But as with Douglass’s theory of political gravity so in Melville’s parable of a fallen republic; the very forces that seem to produce such outcomes—­r uin following from original crime and resistance from domination—­a lso move in unpredictable ways that scramble presumed narratives of political causality along with presumed relations of figure and ground, allegory and history. The closing story of the Piazza Tales, “The Bell-­Tower” initially appeared in the August 1855 issue of Putnam’s, two months before the magazine ran the first installment of “Benito Cereno,” and it has long been read as an allegorical, picturesque companion to Melville’s historically grounded fictionalization of the slave revolt on the Tryal. Indeed, the critical history around “The Bell-­Tower” as a tale of mastery overthrown hinges on its relationship to “Benito Cereno.”35 But if “The Bell-­Tower” seems to call back to “Benito Cereno” in the collected tales, echoing and amplifying all of the meanings in Babo’s command to “follow your leader,” it is “The Bell-­Tower” that leads in Putnam’s. The shifts that Melville makes in The Piazza Tales—­first in the original published order of the two stories and then in his omission of the epigraphic fragments that seem to connect them—­show how the relations of reference and original, of allegory and history, of allusion and ground can invert and change. And this reversibility, in turn, highlights something entirely appropriate to a pair of stories whose plots occur in the strange intervals of time around revolutionary, founding events—­the hidden insurrection in “Benito Cereno,” the republic’s thwarted refounding in “The Bell-­Tower.” “Uncertainty falls on what now followed,” the narrator of “The Bell-­Tower” notes in a phrase which could just as well have been scrawled alongside “Seguid vuestro jefe” beneath the San Dominick’s cloaked figurehead. For if both stories invoke the certainty with which founding violence recurs through time—­and more precisely, if both show the necessity with which violence against masters follows from violence done to the enslaved—­ both also dwell in those unanticipated contingencies that scramble political narrative and intertextuality alike. After all, it is not the story of the insurrection that “Benito Cereno” tells but of its concealment upon the unexpected arrival of Amasa Delano on board the San Dominick; and it is not the

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foundling’s overreaching ambition that brings down the monumental tower in “The Bell-­Tower,” but an earthquake a year after Bannadonna’s death. If “The Bell-­Tower” is frequently read as an allegory of slavery and resistance for which “Benito Cereno” is historical ground and key, this is in large part because “The Bell-­Tower” so loudly announces itself as an allegory. Opening (in Putnam’s) with a trio of aphorisms and concluding with an enumeration of proverbial lessons, the tale is book-­ended by assertions of interpretive clarity that both contain it and belie it. These features have further made “The Bell-­Tower” seem to critics like something of an awkwardly monochromatic shadow of “Benito Cereno”’s artfully, ambiguously shaded layers of grey on grey: the tale is “desperately striving for significance” and “hackneyed,” according to Dennis Berthold; “over-­w rought” to Ivy Wilson; and in Alex Calder’s memorable phrase, it is the very “allegory of Melville’s bad writing.”36 On the one hand, the tale’s gestures to allegorical transparency make it seem like “bad writing”—­heavy-­handed, monologic, clichéd—­ but on the other, these very gestures all appear to fail because it is never clear of what exactly the story is an allegory. Certainly, as its proximity to “Benito Cereno” suggests, there is reference to 1850s America in what Castronovo aptly summarizes as a tale of “a republic that authorizes the erection of an overtopping edifice adorned with a mechanical slave named Haman.”37 But that plot is also entangled with several other founding crimes: Bannadonna’s murder of a frightened workman, the magistrates’ cover-­up of the murder as an “esthetic passion,” and even the apparent subjugation of the “foundling” artist and engineer to the noble magistrates. If “The Bell-­Tower” sounds an allegorical warning about dialectical reversal in the master-­slave relation, is Haman more truly Bannadonna’s enslaved victim than the murdered workman? What, too, to make of the abstraction of the “iron slave” in relation to the enslaved Africans who are obliquely referenced in the epigraph? Further, if the story is an allegory of how a republic that is flawed at its founding must fall, then how to read the apparent success with which the magistrates conceal both Bannadonna’s crime and the cause of his death? And, finally, if the eventual fall of the tower in an earthquake does belatedly register the political consequences of all these crimes and cover-­ups, does it do so from the perspective of democratic prophecy, as Castronovo suggests, or democracy-­hated, as Dennis Berthold does?38

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Ultimately, for any of these allegorical readings to succeed, there must be not only a presumed stability between allegory and meaning, but also a discernible narrative continuity between founding actions and the present from which a lesson of political and moral clarity might be drawn. But from the very beginning of the tale in the three syntactically strange epigraphic fragments, everything in “The Bell-­Tower” works to complicate the promised clarity of each allegory it teases. Portentous in tone, Melville’s invented epigraph functions less as a preview of the tale’s mood, plot, or theme than as a suite of aphoristic absurdities that become almost agrammatical as they mimic the axiomatic.39 That is, if the axiomatic is supposed to work like allegory to assert what is self-­evident and to produce a meaning and a conclusion with the logic of mathematical law, Melville’s fragments invoke the force of those forms only to twist and veer wildly away from representational transparency: “Like Negroes, these powers own man sullenly; mindful of their higher master; while serving, plot revenge.” “The world is apoplectic with high-­living of ambition; and apoplexy has its fall.” “Seeking to conquer a larger liberty, man but extends the empire of necessity.” From a Private MS. (Melville’s italics, PT, 174)

The first of Melville’s three fragments has, understandably, gotten the most critical attention for its apparently intertextual gesture to Babo’s mute gaze at the end of “Benito Cereno,” but its strangely dangling modifiers complicate that intertextuality along with the contextualization of “The Bell-­ Tower” in Black slavery it would seem to provide.40 The problem is that both the governing metaphor (“like Negroes”) and the adverb (“sullenly”) hang around the substantives (“powers,” “men,” “own”) without really attaching to any of them. The first clause opens up a meaning—­Black resentment of the power of masters—­that it also denies syntactically by making “powers” the perverse grammatical subject of this sullen ownership. The first clause thus invites a reading against syntax that the second and third clauses seem to reinforce, even as the “mindful” subject of serving and plotting remains obscured. As Ivy Wilson argues, the first fragment of the epigraph makes

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analogies between the story’s mechanical slave and enslaved African Americans at once tenable and illegible, “problematizing the relationship between the primary and the sub-­textual.”41 With all potential subjects subsumed under the grammatical subject of “these powers,” the sentence can equally be read as a statement of white America’s worst fears of slave insurrection, a rehearsal of the powerless mastery trope, or a claim for the justice of antislavery violence in the eyes of a higher law. The difficulty is that it opens up all of these readings and allows all of them to remain equally legible—­but by no means compatible. And things don’t get any more straightforward with the next two fragments. In the second one (“The world is apoplectic with high-­living of ambition; and apoplexy has its fall.”), a fall clearly follows from ambitions, but who falls and into what? Melville substitutes the expected aphorism—­ “ambition has its fall”—­w ith ambition’s symptom, a hidden hemorrhage that strikes from within. By contrast, the third fragment of the epigraph is the most syntactically standard: “Seeking to conquer a larger liberty, man but extends the empire of necessity.” The gerund clause clearly modifies “man,” which is clearly the subject of “extends,” but this clarity is ultimately put in the service of the larger obfuscations of the epigraph as a whole. In clearly stating the untenable proximity of liberty to necessity that appears in all three fragments, the third supports very different interpretations of the relationship of the epigraph and the story as a whole to historical context and representational content. Two recent readings of the third fragment are instructive for how sharply they differ on the question of what these epigraphs do to the tale that follows. On the one hand, Greg Grandin takes the phrase “the empire of necessity” as the title of his history of the Tryal revolt, finding in it the encapsulation of his thesis that modern liberty is rooted in the extractive capitalism of New World slavery in which “free trade of blacks” is less a paradox than the explicit object of liberal capitalism in the Americas. On the other, Paul Hurh reads each sentence of the epigraph as a steady movement away from that history and into metaphysics: “Are the metaphysical questions about freedom and necessity to be seen as figurations of slavery, or is the reference to slavery meant to exemplify a deeper metaphysical problem?” Pursuing the latter reading, Hurh argues that the epigraph links the “fundamental principle” of slavery to that of metaphysics and to the phe-

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nomenological inquiry into dread that, for him, is the ultimate object of the story.42 Both find coherence in the epigraph, but for Grandin that coherence derives from its representational power to evoke history, while for Hurh it derives from the nonrepresentational mood it conjures. I agree that the epigraph establishes a coherent and essential portal into the tale that follows, but rather than a historical-­a llegorical or philosophical coherence, I want to argue that the epigraph establishes an aesthetic coherence that arises specifically from the play of the representational against the nonrepresentational, of the aphoristic against the ambiguous, and of the axiomatic form against the agrammatical formulation. It may seem strange to describe the effect of such conflicting aesthetic modes as “coherent,” but taken together, they enable the epigraph to serve a powerfully counteraxiomatic function that erodes self-­evidence through its very assertion as the point of entry into what amounts to an allegory of accident and contingency. In the epigraph, human actions and ambitions are foregrounded and then subsumed under the very powers, moods, and forces that they would seek to control. Causes and effects appear but the lines between them swerve and twist; forces of necessity and gravity pull in one direction while moods and drives pull in others. And (appropriately enough) the story both does and does not follow the various trajectories the epigraph maps: a master does die at the hand of a slave, ambition does reach for heights, and ponderous things do come crashing down to earth, but it cannot be said that Haman plots, and for all of the apoplectic heights Bannadonna climbs, he neither falls from his tower nor has a stroke. When the tower finally does fall, it is not from flawed design or overreaching ambition but from an earthquake. That is, both epigraph and story set in motion a series of forces and prefigure a set of conclusions only to jumble and twist the lines between them. At the end of the tale, the narrator echoes the epigraphic fragments and translates each of them into the terms of the tale: “So the blind slave obeyed its blinder lord; but in obedience slew him. So the creator was killed by the creature. So the bell was too heavy for the tower. So that bell’s main weakness was where man’s blood has flawed it. And so pride went before the fall” (187). Seeming to fix the conclusion as the necessary outcome of an infallible process of justice, the tale’s closing lines instead register how halting, broken, and unpredictable that process is, drawing attention instead to all the forces that are at work both with and against it.

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Specifically, they draw attention to the force that, Bannadonna claims, can alter even gravity: the law of art. Early in the story, two esteemed magistrates climb to the top of the tower to inspect Bannadonna’s progress, and one notes a slight difference in the expression of the allegorical figure, Una, from the others engraved on the bell. Bannadonna responds: You know that there is a law in art, which bars the possibility of duplicates. Some years ago, you may remember, I graved a small seal for your republic, bearing for its chief device, the head of your own ancestor, its illustrious founder. It becoming necessary for the customs’ use to have innumerable impressions for bales and boxes, I graved an entire plate, containing one hundred of the seals. Now, though indeed, my object was to have those hundred heads identical, and though, I dare say, people think them so, yet, upon closely scanning an uncut impression from the plate, no two of those five-­score faces, side-­by-­side, will be found alike. Gravity is the air of all; but, diversified in all. In some, benevolent; in some, ambiguous; in two or three, all but incipiently malign, the variations of less than a hair’s breadth in the linear shading round the mouth sufficing to all of this. (PT, 180)

“Bar[ring] the possibility of duplicates,” the law of art necessitates accidental variety and sets the work loose from artist and intent. In this, Bannadonna recognizes aesthetic law as a counterforce to mechanical or mathematical law, with “gravity” as the connecting link between them. As physical force, gravity would seem to dictate a predictable and necessary outcome, but as a quality of ponderous mood and seriousness, it dictates variety. Gravity thus does complex analogical work in “The Bell-­Tower.” Represented as material force, it establishes ground for the analogy of moral necessity through which Bannadonna gets what is coming to him, underscoring how necessity is inscribed in the very relation of analogy and how the figural always conspires with the literal. But when treated as a quality of mood, gravity infuses analogy with variety, as “less than a hair’s breadth in the linear shading” of each figure opens up unanticipated relations and possibilities. Founding, foundling, foundering: with a hair’s breadth of shading, the act that begins the republic becomes its internally displaced subject as well as the tremor that brings its monument down, and so it seems political history obeys the laws of art and gravitation at once. Creating seals, bell towers, and mechanical slaves for the glory of “your republic,” the foundling artisan

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emphasizes to the magistrates that their founder is not his, while openly declaring that the only law he obeys is this “law of art.” Bannadonna addresses himself to the magistrates here in the second person plural that Douglass puts to such radical use in “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” As Douglass transforms the Fourth of July with each iteration of “your national holiday,” so Bannadonna varies the authorizing gravity of the founder’s face with each copy of the commemorative seal. But where Douglass (in “Is It Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper?”) finds benevolence in a law of gravitation that might found an unanticipated people, Melville’s Bannadonna finds that when gravity becomes a mood that is subject to the law of art, it produces not just benevolence, but ambiguity, and even incipient malignity. The reproduction of the image meant to guarantee the currency and authority of the republic depends upon a process of representation that subjects everything to art’s prohibition against duplication. With each commemorative act proliferating variety, neither the founder nor the founding of a republic can iterate perfectly into the future but can only do so unpredictably. There is, in other words, nothing that occurs in a founding that can recur with certainty or bring about a determinate end—­neither a fatal flaw that will topple a corrupted republic, nor an assured justice that will be realized at long last. With what Alex Calder calls his “genius for striking the wrong note,” Melville ends both “The Bell-­Tower” and The Piazza Tales in a false gesture of closure that recites political history as moral fantasy.43 “So the blind slave obeyed its blinder lord; but, in obedience slew him. So the creator was killed by the creature. So the bell was too heavy for the tower. So that bell’s weakness was where man’s blood had flawed it. And so pride went before the fall.” So what? With the manifest falseness of these gestures, with the dissonant clang of that note, Melville unsettles all political thinking that assumes foundational flaws, original sins, and internal contradictions will necessarily bring about predictable political outcomes. This has grave consequences indeed for the assertions of moral, historical, and political necessity that the tale invokes—­particularly for the fates of violated workers and slaves, corrupted masters and magistrates. But in refusing the consolations of necessity, whether as axiomatic thinking or political allegory, Melville’s strangely discordant tale does not exactly foreclose the possibilities that masters will be slain or hubristic monuments toppled. Instead, in insisting that under the

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law of art, politics and history are necessarily subject to contingent variation, the tale rejects a deterministic political narrative while still holding open other lines of possibility, each of which yields a view of a world that is no more or less likely than any other. Thus a world in which slaves revolt successfully against their masters remains as possible as one in which masters sullenly resent the preservation of their power; a world in which a republic’s foundational flaws bring about its monumental failure remains as possible as one in which corruption and decay yield a prolonged decline. Though it ends on that final “fall,” “The Bell-­Tower” does not close with the certainty of Douglass’s granite pavement but in mid-­air, subject to a force that pulls toward a ground that remains unsounded: “Gravity is the air of all but diversified in all.” This falling with no ground in sight becomes characteristic of Melville’s writing at its most antifoundational and counterprophetic—­that is, when the predictive power of the past fails even when the present is inexorably subject to forces set in motion by history’s institutions and processes. This is the precise situation that Melville describes in the aftermath of the Civil War. The sensation of falling pervades Battle-­Pieces and Aspects of the War because everything has been prophesied and yet nothing is known, everything hangs in mid-­air and yet nothing stands still. “ w isdom is va i n , a n d proph ec y ”: The Falling Poems of Battle-­Pieces and the Politics of Misgivings “What sort of a poet is Melville?” Helen Vendler asks in her 1999 essay, “Melville and the Lyric of History,” and her famous reply is that he is one who looks down: “Melville’s gaze is not upward like Dickinson’s, nor directed in a democratic horizontal, like Whitman’s; it is pitched downward, to the drowned under the sea, or to the fiery hell at the core of the earth.”44 For Vendler that downward gaze serves as the fulcrum where Melville’s declining career and “inner crisis” meet the external fragmentation of the Civil War, becoming both symptom and cause of the critical neglect of his later work.45 Rather than perpetuating the narrative of Melville’s artistic decline after 1857, however, Vendler’s influential essay marks a turning point in the lachrymose conception of Melville’s poetic career, finding subversiveness in his “tragic sense of history” and innovation in his inversions of lyric form.

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Looking downward, evacuating his poems of lyric subjects and speakers, and articulating a tragic philosophy, she argues, Melville “fold[s] the epic matter of history into lyric.”46 The two decades since Vendler’s reassessment have seen something of a late-­career Melville revival, in which critics have returned his poetry, particularly Battle-­Pieces and Clarel, to the center of his canon. But what has succeeded the old narrative of aesthetic failure is an account that both redeems and complicates Battle-­Pieces. For, if Battle-­Pieces has been redeemed aesthetically from the narrative of Melville’s literary decline, it has not been redeemed politically from its prose “Supplement,” which has been described by critics as “politically moderate,” “reconciling,” “conservative,” “convoluted and defensive,” a “foreclosure of political possibility,” and a “failure of vision regarding America’s racial future.”47 Politically, that is, Melville’s poetry is still read in terms of a fall from his prose works of the 1840s and 1850s. In turning to Battle-­Pieces and its “Supplement” in the final two sections of this chapter, I want to argue that “falling” is precisely the right term for the political situation that characterizes Melville’s first volume of poetry. But rather than an assessment of a reactive shift in his own political thinking after the Civil War, falling better describes Melville’s poetic distillation of gravity as the specific mood and movement of a political moment that is weighted by the accumulated past as it is propelled like Benjamin’s angelus novus into an unknowable future which lies not ahead but below.48 Indeed, falling becomes the characteristic sensation of the Civil War and Reconstruction in Melville’s book, one that Battle-­Pieces registers thematically (in all of the downward gazes that Vendler notes), metrically (in lines of trochee-­dactyl pairs), and visually (in stanzas that cascade diagonally down the page and in italicized lines of text). But rather than registering the futility of politics in general under the inexorable drag of history’s necessities, Melville’s falling poems issue a counterprophetic warning against all politics of determination, whether they are rooted in a skeptical certainty that the past will recur or in a sanguine faith that the future will redeem. With the 1866 publication of Battle-­Pieces and Aspects of the War, Melville not only pitches his gaze downward, he pitches his poems into an abyss as he brings both sides of gravity’s law—­force and art—­to bear on a volume that opens with a fall and a hanging. The fall of Richmond and the hanging of John Brown are separated by six years and the Civil War, but Melville

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joins and inverts these in the frontmatter of the book, so that the capture of the Confederate capital in 1865 opens a backward view onto Brown’s 1859 execution as “portent” of everything that follows. Melville here invokes the inverted prophetic structure of backshadowing, in Michael André Bernstein’s word, sketching out the contours of “an inevitable and linear unfolding” in which the defeated Confederacy can be read as the fulfillment of the martyr’s prophecy and the redemption of his death.49 But just as he does in “The Bell-­Tower,” Melville blurs and twists the very narrative lines that he draws by pluralizing the forces that connect these events. More precisely, he shows how two moments in recent history are both necessarily bound to one another and subject to all the uncertain moods and forces of a present in which the foundations of the republic cannot guide or determine events because they have shifted and given way. Prefacing the volume with an untitled note enclosed by parenthetical brackets, Melville first registers this shifting ground rather quietly, as he puns on the figurative and literal meanings of a “fall.” With few exceptions, the Pieces in this volume originated in an impulse imparted by the fall of Richmond. They were composed without reference to collective arrangement, but, being brought together in review, naturally fall into the order assumed. (PP, 3)50

Swaying between the figural and the literal, the note appears to credit both recent events and the force of gravity with composing the book. The Confederate capital “falls” figuratively, but it generates such a force that it causes an almost physical impact, first generating the poems and then pulling them “naturally” into an “order.” Poetic form and order thus follow from the reverberations—­the “impulse”—­of a powerful collapse that also signals the end of civil war and the prospect of national reunification. Both poems and pieces, they are already broken, uncompleted, and “composed without reference to collective arrangement.” And yet, the note continues, they still bear reference to “events and incidents of the conflict” insofar as these “chanced to imprint themselves on the mind.” Where the eponymous “pieces” of the text “fall” into place with some relation to places and events, the “aspects” of the subtitle are “assumed” in the manner of whatever moods happen to accompany memories of “the strife”: “The aspects which the strife as a memory assumes are as manifold as are the moods of involuntary meditation—­moods

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variable and at times widely at variance.” What is remarkable about all of the falling and feeling that characterize these poems is that they seem to occur without much in the way of a poet. Throughout the note, a speaker yields to the impulse of events and the moods of memory, but the “I” is syntactically suspended until the next-­to-­last clause, where it hangs long enough to “seem to place” a poetic cliché in the “wayward winds.” Rather than positing a speaker to frame the poems in relation to the history and politics of the war, the prefatory note demonstrates that both the poems and their speakers are subject to the material impulses of the earth itself, the winds that “sweep storming” (7) across it, and the pull of gravity. Ungrounded and falling through a gap in the world, the grammatical subject that Melville withholds in the note never emerges in the volume as anything more concrete than a speaking voice that has been activated by a material force. If the basic condition of Battle-­Pieces is the absent foundation of a political community, then the voices that speak in the prefatory note, the poems, and even in the “Supplement” are not lyric subjects exactly but speakers who are at once in freefall and in suspension. The book’s strange frontmatter reproduces and amplifies both sensations, moving from the falling poems of the note to “The Portent,” the poem on Brown’s hanging which hangs rather oddly itself between the table of contents (which does not list it) and the first poem: Hanging from the beam, Slowly swaying (such the law), Gaunt the shadow on your green Shenendoah! The cut is on the crown (Lo John Brown), And the stabs shall heal no more. Hidden in the cap Is the anguish none can draw; So your future veils its face, Shenendoah! But the streaming beard is shown (Weird John Brown), The meteor of the war. (Melville’s italics, PP, 5)

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Cody Marrs describes Melville’s Brown as “the most ambiguous of human augurs,” one who appears in the poem about his own execution as a parenthetical deictic and “portends a future that has, in a sense already occurred.” His execution is prophetic for Melville, Marrs argues, in the sense that “violence’s events do not expire; they create patterns of change that extend through the present and beyond.”51 But even as the poem looks (and, as Marrs notes of the italics, leans) forward toward the war and the fall that occasions the impulse behind the book, it also captures the peculiar stasis of such prophetic moments. Enclosed, hanging, and swaying, Brown is a suspended meteor who has defied the very laws that killed him—­those of both the state and gravity. Such a view of the politics of gravity pulls us far, it would seem, from Frederick Douglass’s unyielding defense of antislavery violence as both natural justice and wise political action. Indeed, in “The Portent” we find a very different fulfillment of “the law of gravitation,” one that cannot be greeted as “benevolent” in the way Douglass argues the death of James Batchelder ought to be. John Brown “dies according to law” for enacting precisely the right to antislavery violence that Douglass insists is just, necessary, and wise, and this indifference of gravitational law to moral justice in Melville’s poem would seem to signal a foreclosure of both the revolutionary possibility and the insurrectionary politics that Douglass advocates. But “The Portent” is not only a poem of falling; it is also a poem of suspension—­and it is one of very few in the book that actually looks up. The Brown of the poem is a meteor, captured by the planet’s gravitational field but held briefly and vibrantly aloft in order to figure a future that “veils its face.” That future appears in the poem specifically as one that cannot be known even when much of it lies in the past. Brown’s prophecy is both undeniable and indecipherable because its future is still unfolding. In this way, the prefatory note and “The Portent” set up Brown’s hanging and the fall of Richmond as events held together by a forceful gravitational pull that makes history look like prophecy, but they also deny the predictive lines they trace through the forces of chance, variance, swaying, and suspension which confound even the assurances of retrospection. The pull of gravity thus proves to be “variable and at times widely at variance” in Battle-­Pieces, producing a mood at once overwhelming and indeterminate which Melville names “misgivings.” The title of the volume’s

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first poem and the subject of a footnote to its second, misgivings describe an apprehensive loss of confidence, a portentous sense of mistrust in oneself and one’s own thoughts and knowledge, that take on a powerfully political connotation in Melville’s book. In both “Misgivings” and the note to “The Conflict of Convictions,” misgivings arise in the context of post-­ revolutionary history, as democracy both falls and wanes with the changing weather (first a gloom and then a sweeping storm). In the opening stanza of “Misgivings,” clouds gather, winds sweep inland, and spires “fall crashing” to the ground as the speaker describes the dizzying coincidence of current events with timeless horror as the feeling of an impending nor’easter: When ocean-­clouds over inland hills Sweep storming in late autumn brown, And horror the sodden valley fills And the spire falls crashing in the town I muse upon my country’s ills—­ The tempest bursting from the waste of Time On the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime. (PP, 7)

The politics of original sin and foundational crime appear here as the link between democracy and slavery, but as in “The Bell-­Tower,” histories that begin in crime determine nothing certain for the future, save a certain sense of dread.52 As Thomas Dumm argues, “where there is mistaking there is also misgiving” because both of these rely on a prior action or thought that has failed and been incompletely withdrawn.53 In this, both mistakes and misgivings defy determinate acts and effects and instead hover suspended between two moments in time, two actions, or two thoughts. For Melville, misgivings follow not just from mistaken historical actions—­like the founding of a republic in exploitation and expropriation—­but also from the mistaken feelings that conceal those acts—­a misplaced optimism about political institutions, a misgiven hope. Following directly on Brown’s meteor, “Misgivings” thematizes the mood that derives from a specifically American history of political mistakes, as Melville situates these in the double institution of freedom and slavery. But misgivings do not simply follow from the placing of hope in institutions that have failed; they arise instead from the far more malignant act of placing hope in a corrupt institution that

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has succeeded. “Nature’s dark side is heeded now,” the poem ends, “(Ah! Optimist-­cheer disheartened flown)—­/ A child may read the moody brow / Of yon black mountain lone.” Melville carries this history of mistakings and misgivings back to the French Revolution in the footnote to “The Conflict of Convictions,” linking “the final disaster to our institutions” and the “eclipse of the French Revolution” in a single political history of foundation, revolution, and dissolution that joins 1776 to 1789, 1793, and the dark calm of 1860–­61 which lies inside the larger storm: The gloomy lull of the early part of the winter of 1860–­61, seeming big with final disaster to our institutions, affected some minds that believed them to constitute one of the greatest hopes of mankind, much as the eclipse of the French Revolution affected kindred natures, throwing them for the time into doubts and misgivings universal. (PP, 173)

Melville’s footnote captures in a few lines one of the principal tasks of Battle-­ Pieces: to trace the macropolitics of war, revolution, and political foundation in the micropolitics of mood and sensation. In “The Conflict of Convictions,” Melville pursues this task chiefly through the poetics of gravity, at once mood and force, as the poem moves from a footnoted instruction to read it as a reflection on political gloom to an opening stanza that gazes into a “deep abyss” and marks “man’s latter fall” (8). Although the poem is sometimes read as a debate between two voices that correspond to competing political subject positions—­one derisive and cynical and the other hopeful and idealistic 54 —­the footnote suggests that such incommensurable feelings are at once transhistorical and containable in a single mind. In shifting the focus of history from actors to moods, the note reframes the voices that speak in the poem, suggesting that they are the utterances not of two speakers but of a single discontinuous voice that is subject to shifting convictions, which are themselves subject to historical eclipse and change. Only the idealist whose mistaken belief in revolutionary transformation as a progressive force of history has given way to “doubts and misgivings” can become the disappointed and derisive cynic. Moreover, once such faith in progress is blasted, not even these moods can be represented as successive or progressive. Instead, the poem simply allows “convictions” in “conflict” to speak. Playing on the

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double sense of “conviction,” the poem shows how beliefs become judgments that perpetually turn back on prior belief in accusation and mockery. Rather than a dialogue with responding chorus, or the clamorous impasse that closes the poem with “yay and nay—­ / each hath his say ” (11), the conflict alluded to by the title is both larger and smaller than the dialectics of idealism versus cynicism or yay versus nay. It is larger in the sense that it concerns deep, almost geologic time, the large-­scale politics of generations “inured to pains,” acting out of “strong Necessity” while gaping at the world’s “slimed foundations.” Yet the conflict is also smaller in the sense that the poem measures such macropolitical forces through the micropolitics of moods and convictions, “widely at variance,” which sway the mind about. The political relations and figures that would seem most recognizable—­the contesting of positions or claims, the image of the “Iron Dome”—­cede to the forces of age and necessity, rust and wreckage, leaving only inchoate, incongruous moods behind. Even when a concrete political subject seems to appear—­like “the People,” which enters robustly with “strong Necessity”—­it too ends up wrecked on “Time’s strand”: The People spread like a weedy grass, The thing that they will bring to pass, And prosper to the apoplex. (9)

Melville’s “weedy grass” offers a stark counterimage to Walt Whitman’s “leaves of grass”: instead of the common ground that Whitman’s poet finds “growing among black folks as well as white,”55 Melville’s weeds signal the inexorable force of “the People,” bringing to pass what it wills and prospering “to the apoplex.” That is, the People spread their will and thrive on their own expansion, up to the point where a hemorrhage strikes them down as a body from within. “The world is apoplectic with high-­living of ambition; and apoplexy has its fall.” As in “The Bell-­Tower,” so in “The Conflict of Convictions” do gestures toward expected meaning and predictable resolution instead swerve in strange directions. True to Bannadonna’s “law of art,” Melville’s poems play out the aesthetics of false notes, frustrated expectations, and unanticipated variations on every level. Thematically, allegorical figures of hope, enthusiasm, faith, and action are called forth in the face of fallen angels,

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dashed aims, and timeless wrecks only to be derided and wrecked in turn. Metrically, stanzas begin in classic verse forms like iambic pentameter, only to shift, lose feet, and reverse into falling trochees. In this way, for example, the seventh stanza ends on an image of hopeful light in regular iambs and rhyming couplets—­“Senior wisdom suits not now / The Light is on the youthful brow” (9)—­and then the poem plunges in the italicized lines of the eighth stanza into both falling meter and a dark cave: “(Ay in caves the miners see: His forehead bears a blinking light; Darkness so he feebly braves—­ A meagre wight!) (9)

Peter Coviello describes Melville’s penchant for shifting meter as the “battle music” of the poems—­a pervasive stylistic incongruousness “whose cumulative effect is to unsettle the entire structure of rhythmic expectation.”56 These unsettling rhythms and meters do more than simply echo the poem’s investment in frustrating the expectations of thematic progress, though. They also counter the poem’s portrayal of the expected more broadly—­specifically, the expectation and determinism that underlie the dialectical play of conventional political feelings and sentiments. With convictions of optimism and cynicism volleying back and forth, neither one can set the larger mood of the poem, but nor does the locked clash between them. Instead, as the clang of their protracted conflict reverberates in metrical shifts and swerves, the verses themselves sound the moods and movements of a poem that is able to stand witness to the abject futility of predictable responses in the face of the unexpected. Jodi Dean has described such an impoverished range of political affect as the “knot of hope and despair” that has captured the future and absorbed it into a “field of already given political possibilities.”57 Tangling its speakers in this knot, “The Conflict of Convictions” responds to such a foreclosure with the scream of its final line: “wisdom is vain, and prophecy ” (11). But in this shouted warning against claims of knowledge that absorb both the past and the future, this line also breaks free of the meter and the AABB rhyme scheme of the five previous lines, and with this (and with some misgivings), it sounds the presence of what is not yet captured by either.

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Where wisdom and prophecy fail, cynicism and optimism futilely bash against one another, and familiar subjects and relations flee like “the Founders’ dream,” “The Conflict of Convictions” mobilizes other figures and forces to observe this ongoing process of catastrophe, collapse, and resurgence: William Blake’s Urizen, drawing the world; nature indifferently thriving; a God who “keeps the middle way”; and the metrical tones and moods that the poem itself produces. To different degrees, all of these forces stand apart from the cacophony of “yay and nay / each hath his say,” but they do not either transcend or abandon politics. In the cataclysmic forces the poem depicts and the moods and sensations it produces, “The Conflict of Convictions” generates another set of political attitudes and dispositions that do not follow the determinations of political expectation but derive instead from the impulses of the world it describes, a world of vast gulfs opening, comets returning, waves crashing, and rust slowly eroding the iron domes of empires. I want to argue that those moods and dispositions push beyond Dean’s “knot of hope and despair,” beyond the captured politics of “already given possibilities,” because they belong not to politics as it is known but to what Jacques Rancière calls “the politics of politics”—­democracy itself. Democracy appears as metapolitics precisely when founders flee, when a people collapses in apoplexy, and when foundations are revealed to be chasms, because, he argues, the “astonishing” meaning of democracy is that its only foundation and ground is “no ground at all.”58 For Rancière, astonishment is the affect with which to meet democracy’s politics of politics, while the poems of Battle-­Pieces meet it with misgivings. If these seem very different affective responses, both are nevertheless attuned to an incomplete, indeterminate, and open political situation. Over and over again, “The Conflict of Convictions” generates images of ground located and ground lost. But because nothing ever changes in the conflicting voices that survey the resulting gulfs, Melville suggests that it is not optimism and cynicism that are truly in conflict but convictions and misgivings. Where convictions mark a mode of political thinking that attaches to presupposed outcomes, misgivings instead concern the metapolitics of moods. Put another way, Melville proposes misgivings as a frame of mind that forecloses nothing but conviction itself. Hanging in suspension between optimism and cynicism, and turning back on both as mistakes,

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misgivings remain attuned to a genuinely unknowable situation, one in which the most fundamental grounds of politics are not given but open to ongoing transformation and struggle. Melville proposes both a figure and a motion for misgivings in the poem’s eleventh stanza—­that of “a wind in purpose strong” that “spins against the way it drives”: The Ancient of Days forever is young Forever the scheme of Nature thrives; I know a wind in purpose strong—­ It spins against the way it drives. What if the gulfs their slimed foundations bare? So deep must the stones be hurled Whereon the throes of ages rear The final empire and the happier world. (Melville’s italics, 10)

Invoking William Blake’s famous print of his Urizen prophecy, “The Ancient of Days” (Figure 4), in rising meter, the stanza does precisely what it describes as it shifts into falling meter when the wind spins back and the poem asks “What if?”59 What if we found over and over again, what if we keep throwing stones into the gulf, knowing only that they will fall indefinitely or, if they land, ultimately founder? The optimist may take comfort in the “scheme of nature” that renders all rulers, empires, and revolutions evanescent and subject to a supplementary countermovement, a “spin” back against the prevailing drive of power. The cynic may see nothing in all of this but the endless return of the same catastrophe. But the counterprophetic question “What if?” can only be asked in the falling mood and meter of misgivings that regard prior convictions and foreclosures as grave mistakes. In this, the poem (and the volume as a whole) speaks from the radical space of political groundlessness to stage something like a metapolitical dialogue. Distinct from the “yay and nay ” that masquerades as political speech in the midst of catastrophe, “The Conflict of Convictions” draws attention to the question of what counts as truly political speech, action, and event and, moreover, to the problem of how democracy must always be founded in a world where the ground keeps falling away.

Figure 4. William Blake, “The Ancient of Days,” Europe: A Prophecy. 1794. Trustees of the British Museum.

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Democracy’s Supplement: Blackness and the Superfluous People In reading Melville’s Battle-­Pieces as a poetic meditation on the groundlessness of politics after the Civil War and pairing it, by way of Melville’s deployment of a common set of themes and figures, with Frederick Douglass’s most militant writing on antislavery resistance, I have been making claims for the volume’s engagement with a radical vision of democracy that the infamous “Supplement” to the text seems to explode. In the face of what I have described as the poems’ rejection of determinate political narratives and affects and their openness to the uncertain, Melville’s prose “Supplement” closes the volume with a prescription for racial exclusion: “In our natural solicitude to confirm the benefit of liberty on the blacks, let us forbear from measures of dubious constitutional rightfulness toward our white countrymen” (PP, 185). In the face of the ungrounded and unconstituted poetic voices who speak from conditions of suspension, Melville’s “Supplement” presumes to speak from the position of the first-­person plural, as if a stable national “we” was somehow extant and manifest. In the face, ultimately, of the poems’ studious rejection of the knots of prophecy and wisdom, hope and despair, which constrain political possibilities, the volume ends with an appeal to Human Progress: “Let us pray that the terrible historical tragedy of our time may not have been enacted without instructing our whole beloved community through terror and pity; and may fulfilment verify in the end those expectations which kindle the bards of Progress and Humanity” (188). In short, the “Supplement” stands as precisely the kind of speech that, in “The Conflict of Convictions,” necessarily fails the political situation to which it ostensibly responds. And so this ought to be the point in my argument where I fall in with the tradition of critics who have advanced complex redemptive accounts of the poems by reading the verse against the prose, bracketing the “Supplement” off from the rest of Battle-­Pieces not just as an exceptionally cynical, even reactionary piece of writing, but as exceptionally bad writing at that. Instead, in closing, I want to offer a counterreading of the “Supplement” as essential to understanding Melville’s decades-­long performance of “ruthless democracy” for precisely the reasons that Melville scholarship has tended to treat it as exceptional and scandalous: its strained and convoluted political speech, its extravagant incompletion, and its utter superfluousness.

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Michael Rogin set the tone for subsequent readings of the “Supplement” by noting how awkwardly it fits within the text of Battle-­Pieces, because it ventures answers to all of the questions that the disparate voices of the poems raise about the future of postbellum America. Maurice Lee, echoing both Rogin and Edgar Dryden, remarks that the “Supplement” “is so apparently free of irony and subtext as to leave close readers little work to do.”60 Beyond its unsettling directness, the “Supplement” also seems strangely unreadable because it expresses views that fit so poorly into the established critical narratives of Melville’s political thinking—­the presumptions of his radicalism and subversiveness on the one hand, and the demonstrations of his ambiguous partisanship and unarticulated positions on the other. The “Supplement” directly addresses the most pressing political question of Melville’s era—­the immediate expansion of the franchise to newly freed Black Americans—­and he hesitates, voicing a gradualist approach to full Black citizenship. Though he condemns slavery and secession as “against Destiny,” that is, he “slowly retreats from an empathetic interest in Black rebellion and toward an overriding concern for fraternal reunification, placing the psychic needs of white southerners above the political demands of emancipated Blacks” as William Gleason puts it.61 Free from irony and answering more questions than it asks in a voice that, Rogin argues, is “perhaps more reliably . . . his own voice than anywhere else in his work,” the “Supplement” stands as simultaneously the most and the least Melvillean thing that Melville ever wrote. To contend with the “Supplement’s” inscrutable clarity, critics have pursued various strategies of pitting it against the poems, identifying both continuity and dissonance in the book while highlighting the gap between the elusive intricacy of the verse and the awkward clunk of the prose.62 Russ Castronovo, Dana Nelson, and Carolyn Karcher articulate the possibilities of this approach with great clarity in their contributions to Samuel Otter and Robert S. Levine’s volume of essays on Douglass and Melville. Do the “poetic voices and patriotic voice work at odds with each other,” as Castronovo and Nelson maintain? Or, as Karcher counters, do these voices “work together” to reveal a fundamental shift in Melville’s racial sympathies that implicates the entire work?63 Both approaches highlight Battle-­Piece’s precarious balancing of conflicting voices and thereby refuse, as Karcher puts it, to “reduce Battle-­Pieces to its failure of vision regarding America’s racial

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future.” But in developing reading strategies that ask the poems to speak back to the “Supplement,” whether to complicate, echo, or refute its expressions of racial partisanship, such methods risk what Michael Warner calls “the traps of redemption,” which both burdens the poetry and narrows the horizon of the political in Melville’s response to the war and Reconstruction.64 Even as this approach emphasizes the persistence of disagreement in the text without any presumption of consensus (“yay and nay—­e ach hath his say ”), it also seeks to contain within Battle-­Pieces what cannot be reconciled under a single perspective—­namely, fundamentally opposed visions of who will stand on that ground and who can speak from it. In other words, since the “Supplement” turns on the question of Black citizenship, it exposes one of the hallmarks of democratic politics—­the persistence of agonistic dispute—­to depoliticization and abstraction by presuming to debate a question that erodes the very ground on which any such debate might take place. Who will take part in the reconstructed political life of the postwar United States? Former confederates? Former slaves? Ultimately, what makes the political meaning of the “Supplement” at once so disturbingly clear and so maddeningly inscrutable is that it repeatedly assumes the polis—­both the ground and the subject of politics—­the very absence of which is its point of departure: “Events have not yet rounded themselves into completion. Not justly can we complain of this. There has been an upheaval affecting the basis of things; to altered circumstances complicated adaptations are to be made; there are difficulties great and novel” (PP, 181). If the scandal of the “Supplement” lies in the answer it ventures to the question of who should and should not take part in a reconstructed polis, then Melville’s impossible adjunct to his poems also reveals that the basic political condition of Battle-­Pieces—­both poems and “Supplement”—­is an absent, unconstituted people. And as with Pierre Glendinning’s vow to assume the role of his half-­sister’s husband in order to protect his family name, the “Supplement” is an “impossible adjunct” that can only work to transform and uncomplete what it augments. With this in mind—­and without obscuring or diminishing the passages that privilege ethnonationalism over multiracial democracy—­I want to argue that the “Supplement” must be counted among Melville’s elaborations of ruthless democracy for its presentation of democracy as radically incomplete and for the difficult tasks that

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it shows such incompletion demands: the capacity to practice politics under conditions of groundlessness and to greet those conditions without determinate affect but with the knowledge that “events have not rounded themselves into completion.” Although the speaker of the “Supplement” fails in the face of this difficulty, grasping at certainties and solidities amid suspension and upheaval, everything in the structure, language, and figuration of the essay points elsewhere, toward what democracy means in its most radical and ruthless sense—­its ongoing transformation under the constitutive incompletion of the polis. Melville stages this condition of incompletion in a number of passages—­as for instance, when through clipped sentences he tries to produce out of warring armies a single political subject: “The clouds of heroes who battled for Union it is needless to eulogize here. But how of the soldiers on the other side? And when of a free community we name the soldiers, we thereby name the people” (182). In one sense, such passages offer a sweeping vision of a polis made of enemies, a transformation of warring soldiers into “the people” that is realized rhetorically through the absent transitions between sentence fragments and lingering questions. But even as Melville’s prose awkwardly achieves this “complicated adaptation” by withholding the collective subject who eulogizes as long as the status of the enemy dead remains uncertain, he quickly comes to assume the very subject—­the people—­that is being contested by speaking in the voice of an ungrounded “we.” To be sure, there is nothing simple or straightforward about the “we” that speaks here or anywhere else in the “Supplement.” But in imagining the possibility that a reconstructed people could include former enemies, this “we” hesitates and halts at the possibility that this people could also include former slaves: The blacks, in their infant pupilage to freedom, appeal to the sympathies of every humane mind. The paternal guardianship which for the interval Government exercises over them was prompted equally by duty and benevolence. Yet such kindliness should not be allowed to exclude kindliness to communities who stand nearer to us in nature. For the future of the freed slaves we may well be concerned; but the future of the whole country, involving the future of the blacks, urges a paramount claim upon our anxiety. Effective benignity, like the Nile, is not narrow in its bounty, and true policy is always broad. (185)

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This passage is jarring in its caviling, but familiar: it is the very language of liberal benevolence, kindliness, and philanthropy that, in The Confidence-­ Man, converts again and again into exploitation, enmity, and misanthropy. Here, it seems, is the “moderate man” so derided by Pitch in chapter 21, who, “being a man, feels for all men, slaves included, and by any lawful act, opposed to nobody’s interests, and therefore, rousing nobody’s enmity, would willingly abolish suffering (supposing it, in its degree, to exist) from among mankind, irrespective of color” (CM, 112). The passage speaks in the voice of that liberal cosmopolitanism which slides seamlessly into democracy-­hatred in order to stamp out equality with kindly benevolence. But all the while the “Supplement” speaks in the voices of those confidence men whose appeals to universality claim abstract benignity and betray incipient malignity, it also delivers a complex performance of political paradox that cracks such universalist claims open. Melville here invokes a debt of sympathy that designates a broad human community, while at the same time marking out a narrower community as political—­that is, artificial—­and yet at the same time “nearer . . . in nature.” He both underscores and racializes the distinction between fellow man and fellow citizen, as well as that between the social and political senses of democracy, so that a humane sympathy governs the former while “true policy” governs the latter. In detailing these anomalies so explicitly, the passage (like the “Supplement” in general) hinges on the non-­identity of the polis with the people at large and traps itself rather precisely in the “vicious circle” that Rancière identifies with Arendt’s formulation of political life. Because, Rancière argues, Arendt and other political philosophers assume that that there are subjects and ways of life that are “proper” to politics as well as those that are not, they beg the question of politics and presume the very thing that constitutes it—­namely, the basic contest over who will take part in governing from which all political relations and subjects follow. “Politics, in a nutshell, comes to be seen as the accomplishment of the way of life of those who are destined to it. The very partition that in fact forms the object of politics thus comes to be posited as its foundation.”65 For Rancière, the only escape from this vicious circle derives from the claims and actions of those who have no presupposed grounds on which to rule—­claims he describes as supplements: “The essence of politics consists in disturbing this arrange-

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ment by supplementing it with a part of those with no part, identified with the whole community.”66 Groundless and supplemental: the qualities that Rancière identifies with the politics of politics that he calls democracy are the very conditions out of which Melville composes Battle-­Pieces and then decomposes it with his “Supplement.” But “reconciling,” “conservative,” “convoluted and defensive” though the “Supplement” is, the vision of democratic politics that emerges from it is—­“ like the Nile”—­not narrow. Indeed, the political meaning of the “Supplement” hinges on the gap that opens up between the horizon of democracy that Melville clearly sees in the prospect of Black citizenship and his own halt on the verge of that prospect. This gap shapes the structure and the language of the “Supplement” by undermining it, so that the text yields far more in the way of strange, opaque, and doubled meanings than critics have assumed. As the “Supplement” presupposes the political subject of Reconstruction that is under dispute, deeming Black Americans unprepared to participate in a government that instead paternally tutors them, so it also mimics what Rancière calls the “supplementary” structure of politics. The whole essay is structured around the political question that it cannot concede: that the real politics of Reconstruction lie in the claim to the polis made by those whose right to take part in governing Melville both recognizes and suspends. In this, the “Supplement” is not only an impossible adjunct to Battle-­Pieces, but also an open ending: “Were I fastidiously anxious for the symmetry of this book, it would close with the notes. But the times are such that patriotism—­not free from solicitude—­urges a claim overriding all literary scruples” (181). Unconcerned with such symmetry, Melville incompletes the volume with an essay that disjoins Battle-­Pieces from itself by widening the gap at the center of the people that it both presupposes and seeks. The “Supplement” thus functions as a structural homology for the uncompleted people that is its political condition and basic problem, but it also imagines something more. Beyond its supplementary, asymmetrical structure, the essay develops an aesthetics of superfluity that marks the whole of the “Supplement”—­its syntax, language, imagery—­and which exceeds and overflows the text’s narrowest passages. This superfluity is all but literalized when Melville invokes the strange image of the Nile at the very moment he

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racializes the distinction between fellow men and fellow citizens—­when, that is, he introduces a superfluous image whose very meaning is superfluousness. “For the future of the freed slaves we may well be concerned; but the future of the whole country, involving the future of the blacks, urges a paramount claim upon our anxiety. Effective benignity, like the Nile, is not narrow in its bounty, and true policy is always broad.” The argument of the passage hinges on its fluctuations of breadth and narrowness: urging a “broad” policy that takes “the future of the whole country” into account, Melville masks his narrow constriction of political community to those who stand “nearer to us in nature” under the claim of “benignity.” But at just this point, the Nile enters as an analogy, not for breadth exactly, but for a “bounty” that overflows its narrow banks. That is, the Nile carries African waters into this halting articulation of natural proximity and national kinship, only to submerge the ground that has been laid and do very little to clarify what exactly “effective benignity” and “true policy” might be. Like a wind that “spins against the way it drives,” the Nile carries a new set of forces and movements into the passage with striking effects on the political scene it describes. In one sense, the sudden overflowing of the Nile into this passage recalls the aesthetics of accumulation and transformation that mark the strange movements of the Mississippi River in The Confidence-­Man, along with the political process of pluralization that it figures: “Here reigned the dashing and all-­f using spirit of the West, whose type is the Mississippi itself, which, uniting the streams of the most distant and opposite zones, pours them along, helter-­skelter, in one cosmopolitan and confident tide” (CM, 9). With the Mississippi as its model, the community of strangers that the Fidèle gathers along its route—­replacing those who disembark with “strangers still more strange” (8)—­is defined by a process of movement, accumulation, and change rather than a presupposed ground, territory, or people.67 But where Melville’s Mississippi is accumulative, transforming itself as it gathers waters and creatures from “the most distant and opposite zones,” his Nile is broad and overflowing, breaking its banks and submerging all that surrounds it until the boundary between river and land erodes. In this, the Nile has a very specific effect on the political situation into which it figuratively floods: it turns it inside out and inverts the very appearance of politics.

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When Melville locates Blacks “in their infant pupilage to freedom,” he falls into the Arendtian error of presupposing the subjects proper to political life, begging the question of the political, and walling off the realm of politics from those whose supplementary claim defines it. The politics of “paternal guardianship” deny that supplementary structure and emerge as explicit antiblackness—­the combined forces of governance, regulation, and law that fortify against what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call the “an-­originary drive” of Blackness, which precedes that drive and persists all around it.68 Metapolitics does not lie for Moten and Harney in the relation of part and no-­part, as Rancière describes, but instead in what they figure as the relation of the colonial fort to all that surrounds it, where the political does not consist in supplement movements but sustains “an ongoing attack on the common . . . from within the surround.”69 In Melville’s strange figuration of the broad Nile, I want to argue, both of these distinct metapolitical scenes come briefly into view. In the midst of a passage that defines the politics of white paternalism as fortified antiblackness, the superfluous figure of the Nile appears as a reminder that all such boundaries will be washed away once the river breaks its banks. In its figurative flow, the Nile refocuses the passage to show everything that American politics was founded to constrain and contain. Put another way, where the supplementary structure of the people initiates metapolitics by uncompleting and opening the polis, the superfluous people submerges that polis altogether to show how it is contained in and by the ongoing life that surrounds it. In an essay on the “antiblackness that infuses and animates” Hannah Arendt’s critique of the school desegregation and Black Studies movements, Moten offers yet another way to consider the metapolitics of Melville’s “Supplement.” 70 Throughout both “Reflections on Little Rock” and On Violence, Arendt rejected the linked projects of desegregation and curricular transformation as nonpolitical claims to state recognition in ways that resonate with Melville’s hesitation at the prospect of full Black citizenship. Moten argues that Arendt cannot legitimize students’ claims for desegregation and Black Studies, not because the students themselves do not belong to political life (as Rancière might say), but because of the nature of their demand to be recognized by an existing polity that does not desire their inclusion. However, what Arendt fails to recognize, he argues, is how

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deeply these students are already desired by that polity as precisely that which is unwanted. They are, in Moten’s formulation of the political, the surrounding terrain and precondition of that polity’s existence, and there is no way “to withdraw from the zone in which [one] is unwanted” as long as that zone is also the place where one is violently desired.71 With her insistence on a bounded view of the political as the space of appearance, Arendt’s whole political philosophy thus consigns to darkness everything that a political community refuses to see (making Black students disappear just like the social question of slavery in the American Revolution). But Moten does more here than simply show that Arendt reinscribes politics as antiblackness: he also details the ways that Arendt’s “antiblack refusal of black political subjectivity makes black refusal of political subjectivity appear.” 72 That is, Arendt’s antiblackness reveals desegregation to be far more than an appeal for political inclusion and recognition. Instead, her refusal shows that appeal to be a fundamentally abolitionist project, a path out of a political theory that defines itself as the walling-­off of politics and political life from “the surround.” “This groundlessness, this (over)turned and aerated (under)ground, this open and nonparticulate gravitational field, is the surround”:73 in refocusing the gaze of political theory from the fortress of the polis to the surround of the social, Moten leans into the very metaphors of falling, groundlessness, and gravity that shape Melville’s Battle-­Pieces, sharing Melville’s emphasis on chance, incompletion, and the erosion of individualities.74 For Moten, however, both democracy and the political more broadly are dead-­ends for a philosophy that is centered on moments of distress, incompletion, and deindividuation because, he argues, politics occurs in a settled and fortified sphere “where inequality is maintained through negotiation,” not in the surround where assembly, improvisation, and being are held together by the gravitational pull of the common. Throughout Melville’s Battle-­Pieces and its “Supplement,” certain voices do call for a retreat into such fortified structures of national politics, but because the basic premises of the book are the incompletion and groundlessness of conditions, those forts cannot hold. Indeed, Melville’s book stages the collapse of such fortified spheres over and over again—­as the failure of wisdom and prophecy, as the core of fire beneath the crust of solidity, as the ground flooded by the overflowing

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Nile, and ultimately as the book’s generalized condition of a suspended fall. Democracy is no more settled or fortified in Melville’s Battle-­Pieces than it is in Douglass’s most radical writing. It is falling, and in its fall, it opens into the time and space of the common, subject to gravitational forces that pull inexorably but unpredictably in multiple directions at once.

6 Unplanted to the Last I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies, I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each others’ necks, By the love of comrades, By the manly love of comrades . . . Walt Whitman, “For You, O Democracy” This groundlessness, this (over)turned and aerated (under)ground, this open and nonparticulate gravitational field, is the surround. Fred Moten, The Universal Machine

The Vertiginous Surround In 2016, Fred Moten and the artist Wu Tsang collaborated on a performance and installation called Gravitational Feel, which they imagined as a way to “intensify” the experience of what they called “social gravity.”1 Rather than a sensation of falling, the feeling they sought to maximize was one of attraction, the experience of the social fabric materialized and reimagined as a gravitational field. Combining layered sound with poetry, Moten and Tsang performed in a room hung with loose, knotted ropes, meant to evoke Incan quipus, while visitors moved through the space, hearing and feeling the forces exerted by other moving bodies. In Who Touched Me?, the exhibition catalogue, Moten and Tsang describe the project as a way to render 249

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quantum physics tangible in the manner of mechanics: “There’s a reason why the Newton-­and-­the-­apple-­tree story is so compelling. It links physical law with experience. But do we have a haptic experience of quantum mechanics / gravity?”2 Gravity is a recurring figure across Moten’s philosophy. Rather than the drive of necessity or the overwhelming force of counterinsurgent power, it signals the diffuse and shifting attractions among the particulate materials of the common, and in his collaboration with Wu Tsang, it becomes something more concrete. Multisensory, multidimensional, and transpersonal, gravity is the very feeling of the surround, the experience of all the forces that defy the prevailing pull of capital, law, and the state as these wage ongoing warfare on the common. A field as well as a force, Moten’s gravity is distinct from the power exerted on a falling body, but it describes an impulse that is no less compulsory than the power that pulls Frederick Douglass’s monument-­jumper to the ground. Combining the chance of unpredicted encounters with the forces that necessarily connect entangled bodies, the gravitational field that Moten describes is durable and omnipresent, persisting on and underneath the ground, beyond and beneath all circumscribed and settled politics. For all of Melville’s downward-­gazing poems, falling sailors, hanging prophets, collapsing towers, and slimed foundations, such multidimensional gravitational fields operate across his writing, too. Whether rendered as the attraction of the sea in “Loomings”; the superfluity of rivers in The Confidence-­Man and the “Supplement”; or the “profound impulsion” that draws masses of whales, birds, and humans into vast migrations across the four books of Clarel (I.5.203–­5), these forces pull horizontally as well as vertically, meeting the drives of necessity and prophecy with spins of contingency and perpetuity. But where Moten locates a kind of joy in “this open and non-­particulate gravitational field” as it renders material and empirical all of the forces that hold the surround and form the common, Melville has as many misgivings about the philosophical, moral, and political implications of diffuse gravitational fields as he does about the unidirectional force of gravity. Indeed, in Melville’s treatment, the horizontal counterforces that spin alongside and against gravity’s drive are no less powerful or vertiginous than the “Descartian vortices” that open up beneath dreamy masthead-­ standers. Such forces of impulsion and attraction are spatial counterparts

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to the sensations of falling and hanging through which Melville challenges prophetic political narratives and determinate political affects. Rather than opposing one law of gravity (the necessity of a fall) with another (the contingency of unpredictable and diffuse attraction), Melville imagines these forces in combination and in tension, both with each other and with other forces and figures. Potentially benevolent or malign, all of gravity’s powers are ongoing and omnipresent in his work, defying convictions of cynicism and optimism and suspending such feelings in misgivings. With this, much of Melville’s work could, like Moten’s, be described as an experiment in exploring and intensifying the experience of gravity under conditions of groundlessness, but for Melville the lines that Moten draws between the surround of the common, held together by social gravitation, and the fortress of politics are far less distinct. As gravity’s fields and forces clash and combine in Melville’s writing, so too do the politics of revolutions and counterrevolutions, insurgencies and states. Two recent accounts of how Melville figures the forces of history in spatial and temporal terms are helpful here in teasing out the political and philosophical implications of such combinations: Cody Marrs’s description of historical recurrence and violent supercession in Melville’s poetry and Jeffrey Insko’s account of Melville’s multidirectional “now” in Israel Potter. For Marrs, “history’s principle is supercession” in Melville’s late work, with each recurrent event resurrecting the past with greater and greater brutality, and he finds the key spatial figure for this temporality in “The Apparition (A Retrospect)”: So, then Solidity’s a crust—­ The core of fire below; All may go well for many a year, But who can think without a fear Of horrors that happen so? (PP, 116)

Marrs argues that Melville’s philosophy of history lies in this principle of brutal recurrence rendered vertically as the certainty with which we come to realize the hollowness of our solidity as we fall again and again into “the core of fire below.”3 By contrast, Jeff Insko emphasizes the horizontal spatialization of what he terms “hither and thither history” in Israel Potter, which

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he describes as Melville’s “attempt to write a history as if he didn’t know its outcome.” Resisting the consolations of backshadowing, Insko argues, Melville “modalizes now” to cast Potter’s present-­tense as a long moment of “contingency and unpredictability . . . [that] tends in multiple directions at once, no one of them any more certain or likely than any other.”4 Though they offer contrasting figures for Melville’s philosophy of history, I would argue that both Marrs and Insko are exactly right. History (especially revolutionary history) across Melville’s work is recurrent and contingent at once because he plots the “now” in three-­dimensional space. Every moment is pulled on by the ongoing force of unrelenting powers that will erupt and crack the crust of solidity again, while at the same time, every moment is pulled “hither and thither” by unpredictable attractions and impulsions that never cease. For this reason, the dizzying narrative of Israel Potter’s long exile can be plotted right alongside the migrations of Clarel ’s pilgrims, refugees, and settlers, as well as those of Billy Budd ’s impressed sailors: all follow vertiginous trajectories across and through a groundless world. Indeed, although Potter is never elevated to the foretop heights of Melville’s other flaxen-­haired sailor, his career is just as much a measure of all the forces and counterforces at work in the history of revolution and counterrevolution. Opening with a dedication that drags our gaze down from the lofty “Highness” of the Bunker Hill memorial to the mossy mound beneath which Potter lies buried, Israel Potter unfolds as a narrative of raucous chance and predictable continuity at once: Thus repeatedly and rapidly were the fortunes of our wanderer planted, torn up, transplanted, and dropped again, hither and thither, according as the Supreme Disposer of sailors and soldiers saw fit to appoint. (IP, 95)

As Insko argues, Israel’s rapid changes of clothing and condition—­from farmer to trapper to soldier, prisoner, spy, sailor, and pauper—­underscore the random dispositions of his fortune. But they also follow the dictates of a “Supreme Disposer,” which takes the form here not of a god but of a state whose ongoing warfare against common sailors and soldiers never ceases across Melville’s writing. Israel’s chance encounters with King George,

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Benjamin Franklin (“the man of gravity” [108]), and John Paul Jones cannot save him because contingency and chance are the very conditions of his exile. Israel’s role in the revolution is less that of an antimonarchic insurgent than of the victim of the state’s counterinsurgency, the perpetual counterrevolution that England wages against the common people in Melville’s work. “Planted, torn up, transplanted, and dropped again” (95) before he comes to a final rest under “ever-­new mosses and sward” of his native Berkshire (1), Israel Potter experiences counterrevolutionary warfare as deranged agriculture. As with Potter, so with Clarel ’s Nathan and Ungar, and Billy Budd: to be an exile, a refugee, or even a settler is not only to be uprooted, but also to be planted at random, torn out, and replanted over and over again in dizzying succession. In part, this is because Melville narrates political history not only as the revolutionary disruption of settled politics or the introduction of chance into founded seats of power, but also as the state’s deployment of archē and anarchy at once. Across texts separated by three decades, Melville shows how states wield a power that is both preservative and destructive, pursuing at one and the same time principles of order and chaos. For this reason, the openness and contingency that Moten privileges do not always carry liberatory and egalitarian potential for Melville and do not lie on the side of revolution and democracy alone. At the same time, though, if the founded state operates across registers of order and disorder, necessity and contingency, a similar capacity to toggle between principles of archē and anarchy also defines the forces Melville associates with revolution and democracy. I have been arguing that there is a remarkable consistency in Melville’s depiction of democracy as radically unfounded and ungrounded. Across the diverse figural imagination on display in Melville’s five decades of writing, democracy is that political formation which can always become something other than what it appears to be at any given moment. If such an understanding of democracy seems to privilege the contingent, disordered, and anarchic, it also includes the expected, ordered, and well-­formed. From the ruthless egalitarianism he asserts in his letter to Hawthorne to the balanced shapes of the Round Robin and the Grand Armada, Melville figures democracy in terms of articulated principles and ordered forms that take shape, dissolve, and then quickly pass into others. This is not to say that democracy replicates

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and mirrors the state in passing between states of order and disorder. Melville makes qualitative and essential distinctions between particular kinds of order and disorder even when they resemble one another as closely as two shades of green, two circles, or two gravitational forces. If democracy can pass between order and disorder, necessity and contingency, this is owing to its peculiarity as a political, aesthetic, and philosophical force of transience, whose only permanent characteristic is the capacity of moving between forms, shapes, and figures. Ultimately, the important political distinction for Melville is not between established order and revolutionary disruption, between the necessity of rule and the contingency of revolt, or between form and formlessness. The radical difference of democracy lies in its capacity to mobilize the politics of transience against the politics of permanence. In other words, the key characteristic of democracy in Melville’s later writing is precisely what Ungar most fears: “Democracy / Lops, lops; but where’s her planted bed?” In chapter 6 I continue chapter 5’s inquiry into the implications of Ungar’s indictment of democracy as an unplanted, groundless political form that does not endure in any one permanent state. Where chapter 5 examined the consequences of this groundlessness for abolition and multiracial democracy through Melville’s deployment of gravity as a figure for the prophetic and counterprophetic claims of political history, chapter 6 returns to Melville’s botanical figuration of ruthless democracy from 1851 to examine the implications of this groundlessness for poetic and aesthetic form. Taking Ungar’s figure literally, I trace this claim that democracy cannot be permanently planted into Melville’s later writings, showing how the “endless sermon” he began in 1851 carries on to the end of his career. If Israel Potter’s exile is measured in the misery of being “planted, torn up, transplanted, and dropped again,” so too is Ungar’s, but both men are moved by other forces, as well—­specifically, those “profound impulsions” that pull tribes, flocks, and herds together across seas and deserts. Amid the relentless play between archē and anarchy, order and chaos, form and formlessness that animates Melville’s poetry and late prose, democracy persists as a political force that moves between all of these. But it nevertheless stands distinct from the recoil of violence that, in works like Clarel and Billy Budd, belongs to those who seek to plant permanent foundations and secure orders, both new and old: Nathan’s efforts to settle Palestine as his

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ancestors did the North American colonies, Ungar’s desire for a power that holds its planted bed, Vere’s execution of the law of counterinsurgent warfare.5 In other words, precisely because the transience of democracy continues to define it in Melville’s later writing, democracy continues to function as a counterforce to founders, settlers, and state-­builders. With apologies to Ishmael, democracy is what must remain unplanted “to the last” (MD, 264). And if what is true of Ishmael’s unpaintable whale is also true of Melville’s unplantable democracy—­namely that “there is no earthly way of finding out precisely” what democracy looks like in the fullness of its expression—­then the most radical aesthetic possibilities emerge from what cannot be fixed in any comprehensive or permanent form. If the figures on which these final two chapters focus tend to proliferate, this is owing to the nature of the groundless aesthetic that, I argue, Melville devises around an understanding of democracy as a political force and form that must remain unplanted to the last. As I move in chapter 6 from gravity to grasses and landslides and movements of migration and recoil, I will show how this proliferation of figures is connected through Melville’s diverse meditations on what it means to embrace the groundless, unplanted, and unplantable as a way of collective life. In particular I argue that, in devising an aesthetics of all that is groundless and unplantable over five decades, Melville pursues a vision of democracy that is distinct from that of the other poet of democracy’s grassy vistas, Walt Whitman. While both Melville and Whitman develop experimental aesthetics from the adhesive powers and gravitational pulls of democratic sociality and the figurative bounty of grass, Whitman’s poetics and prose after the Civil War are explicitly committed to the very question of how poetry might seed and plant an enduring democratic union: “I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America. . . . For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!”6 To do justice to Melville’s experimentation with the aesthetics of the unplantable and groundless, my final chapter takes a structural cue from the tripartite ending of Billy Budd. Introducing the three chapters that follow Billy’s execution with the conflicting accounts of Vere’s final words, the reports from a naval chronicle, and the sailors’ ballad “Billy in the Darbies,” the narrator writes:

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The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial. (BB, 68–­69)

This chapter resists symmetries and finials in a similar way as I follow Melville’s lead by proposing three distinct conclusions to this book: one by way of the democracy of grass in Whitman and Melville, one by way of the groundless aesthetics of Clarel, and one by way of the figurative abundance that Melville unleashes when “forms measured forms” meet “ragged edges” at the end of Billy Budd. From his letter to Hawthorne and Israel Potter in the 1850s through Clarel two decades later and Timoleon, Weeds and Wildings, and Billy Budd at the end of his life, Melville connects the work of literary aesthetics to the cultivation of democratic figures and forms. But where “planting” is a key gesture for Whitman’s democratic poetics, Melville’s poetry works instead to till and aerate, to overturn and unsettle the groundless ground, so that the “profound impulsions” that pull creatures together in shifting gravitational bonds can maintain open range, “stable in time’s incessant change” (Cl, I.5.204). From a discussion of Whitman and Melville’s democracy of grasses, I’ll move into a reading of Clarel as at once Melville’s most wide-­ranging inquiry into democracy’s nineteenth-­century history and his most sustained experiment in the aesthetics of groundlessness. Finally, in a brief coda on the endings of Billy Budd, I will show how, in the final gestures of his last, uncompleted work, Melville mobilizes the figurative arrangement of colors, shapes, and forces to project ruthless democracy’s endless sermon well beyond Billy’s execution. The speaker of “Billy in the Darbies” may fall sleeping into the sea, as “oozy weeds about [him] twist,” but if democracy remains unplanted to the last, neither that fall nor those oozy weeds decides its ending. Democratic Grass and the Poetics of Planting in Melville and Whitman There is so much planting, uprooting, and transplanting in Israel Potter that the novel all but turns its eponymous would-­be farmer and reluctant gardener into a plant himself as it narrates revolutionary history in terms of an agri-

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cultural memoir gone horribly awry. Born on a farm in the Berkshires, but without the means to establish himself on his own land, Israel is driven by a desire to plant, and finally be planted in, the verdant mountains and valleys of Berkshire from which he was uprooted by the war. But Israel’s subsequent exile is less an experience of rootlessness than of forced transplantings that convert him first into a farm laborer and then into an unwilling gardener to King George before “the Supreme Disposer of sailors and soldiers” plucks and replants him over and over again (IP, 95). The book’s brutal botanic conceit both precedes and follows Potter’s forty years of English exile, so that the figural associations of war with planting and uprooting move between its American and English settings, blurring the lived experiences of revolution and counterrevolution just as the “imprisoned verdure” of a grimy London park calls up memories of New England “like the grass of deserted flagging upsprouting through its closest seams” (186). When Israel finally returns from England to be buried at last in American soil, however, he does not find the green home he left behind but a transformed landscape and a continuation of his impoverishment and exile. Throughout Israel Potter, Melville figures political processes in terms of botanical ones, but as in Typee and Pierre, he refuses the most predictable associations of democracy with nature and revolution with regenerative progress because plant life is more than a metaphor for political history in his work—­it is also a complex register of it. On the one hand, this preoccupation with the politics of plant life plays out in the macrohistories that Melville’s landscapes often tell. Both the Berkshires of Israel Potter and the Hudson Valley of Pierre, for example, do more than contain or commemorate the history of the American Revolution and its aftermath. They also transform along with it, belying the very myths of agrarian republicanism that the land is often invoked to maintain. In Pierre, the persistence of feudal landownership has impoverished tenant farmers by extracting extreme wealth from their labor, while the unrecognizable Berkshires region to which Israel Potter returns reveals an over-­farmed land and exhausted soil. In both books, as recent work on Melville and ecological sustainability has shown, histories of agriculture unsettle narratives of post-­ revolutionary progress and democratic renewal.7 On the other hand, Melville also attends to the most minute processes of botanic life as sources for other

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aesthetic and political possibilities. Specifically, when he elaborates his ruthless democracy to Hawthorne, he does so through the letter’s linked figures of seeding, sprouting, growing, and decaying grasses that, taken together, root Melville’s radical egalitarianism in those passing sensations of the “all.” In that letter, Melville foregrounds the entanglement of human labor and natural processes, just as he does in the agrarian subplots of Pierre and Israel Potter. But rather than describing human-­plant relations only in terms of cultivation and extraction in that letter, he proposes a relation of mutually responsive creativities. In other words, humans are not just farmers who plant but also seeds and roots who, in “the calm, the coolness, the silent grass-­growing mood,” can begin to “compose” (Corr., 191). If large-­scale agricultural histories disclose the post-­revolutionary betrayal of democracy in Melville’s writings, then his fascination with the minutiae of vegetable life introduces new ways of thinking about the relationship between aesthetic creativity and democracy. In the summer of 1850, Melville accompanied his Pittsfield cousin, Robert Melvill, on an agricultural tour of western Massachusetts that, several scholars have shown, turned Melville’s attention to the macrohistories of agriculture as an index of post-­revolutionary decline.8 That trip also scaled his attention down to the creative and figurative potential of various and particular grass species. While Robert gathered information for his report to the Berkshire Agricultural Society (which Melville either parodied or ghost-­w rote, or both9), Melville pored over and made copious notes in the copy of David Dudley Field’s A History of the County of Berkshire, Massachusetts that he carried with him as both guide and notebook.10 He marked pages on the region’s history of indigenous peoples, colonial settlements, and modern emigration; on stories of famous personages and obscure anecdotes; and on accounts of the strange behaviors of animals, insects, and plants.11 In the back of the volume, he transcribed a Shaker poem, without attribution, and on the facing endpaper, he composed the grasses of western Massachusetts into a list poem: Redtop. Ribbon Grass. Finger Grass Orchard Grass Hair Grass12

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The list repeats two of the names of grass varieties that Melville had marked in the chapter “Catalogue of Plants,” where he made marginal inscriptions on the color, appearance, and texture of orchard and hair grass.13 But without any accompanying page numbers (as appear on the previous page: “Table bug—­Black bug 39,” “Old man—­soldier 118,” and so on), this list becomes something other than a simple mnemonic, more significant than what Hershel Parker describes as a way of “reminding himself of the names of grasses, or learning the names of introduced varieties.”14 Facing his transcription of the untitled Shaker poem extolling the “Valley of Berks” on the rear pasteboard, the list assumes both cultivation and poetic form. It includes both native North American grasses (ribbon, finger, hair) and transplanted European and North African varieties (redtop and orchard), all of which were being raised into what the “Report of the Committee of Agriculture” describes as “a carpet of herds-­grasses” to replace the region’s native wetlands and “afford exuberant crops of hay” (PT, 750). Melville thus records the mixing of artificial and natural processes in the fields of the Berkshires—­a practice that may well have been accelerating the degradation of the region’s soil and land, but one that also enables him to capture that “grass-­growing mood” and compose a verbal pasture of his own with elements of poetic form and play. With the first and final lines comprising two feet and the middle lines three each, there is both symmetry and meter to the proliferation of the wild and the cultivated in this list, all of which combine into an incantation of grassy variety that resonates through Melville’s letter to Hawthorne a year later, as he seeds and roots his claims to ruthless democracy in art, philosophy, and farming. These grasses also spread into Pierre in the fields of amaranth that overtake the pastures of the Glendinning estate’s tenant farmers and threaten the stability of the aristocratic rent-­deed system.15 They echo, too, through Israel Potter’s lament at the indifferent conversions of orchards into fields and farms back into forests, which herald his own fading “out of being” and historical memory (IP, 191). And that poetic invocation of the wild and transplanted grasses of Berkshire morphs once again in The Confidence-­Man, modeling a process of pluralizing combination and figurative transformation through which a forest becomes a river which in turn becomes the constantly changing community of passengers

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on the Fidèle: “As pine, beech, birch, ash, hackmatack, hemlock, spruce, bass-­wood, maple, interweave their foliage in the natural wood, so these varieties of mortals blended their varieties of visage and garb” (CM, 15). Melville’s analogies of grasses, trees, and humans work by way of proliferation and transformation, in which any question of what is figure and what ground is rendered moot. Put another way, Melville cultivates in his writing those groundless figures that, once introduced, begin to propagate on their own, defying easy distinction between the natural and the artificial, the literal and the metaphoric. Grass “means” in Melville’s writing—­just as in Walt Whitman’s—­but not because it stands for something else.16 In their growing and spreading, Melville’s grasses and trees are involved in a process through which every addition, every new relation, transforms the very being of a living collective, whether a forest, a river, or a people. Melville’s list of grasses thus has a long aesthetic reach, “upsprouting through [the] closest seams” (IP, 186) of his work for decades after his Berkshire summers, precisely because these grasses function less as figures for something stable, like the people or the nation, than as metafigures for the transformative accumulation that figuration and analogy perform in his writing. Melville jots down his grassy list in the back of Field’s History of Berkshire a full five years before Whitman published his far more influential experiment in the poetics of lists, the aesthetics of grass, and the relationship between poetry and democracy. From the 1855 Leaves of Grass to Whitman’s final 1891–­92 version of “Song of Myself,” the child’s question, “What is the grass?” propels the poet’s explosion of replies virtually unchanged.17 At once dispositional flag, divine handkerchief, baby vegetable, uncut hair of graves, and uniform hieroglyphic, the grass is ultimately the common ground on which the poem’s egalitarian vision stands: Or, I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive the same.18

Grass “means” in all senses of the word for Whitman: uniform and ubiquitous, it averages and equalizes while serving as the poetic “hieroglyph” that

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symbolizes and communicates those processes of regeneration whereby “All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses.”19 The poem thus speaks from the grass in the language of grass, growing and curling and moving “onward and outward” in the accumulative, expansive, and progressive process that becomes a hallmark of both Whitman’s poetry and his claims to the cultivation of democracy through that poetry. Indeed, for both Whitman and Melville, grass becomes one of the key figures through which to capture paradoxes specific to democracy—­those of plurality and universality, of proliferation and containment—­at the same time it evidences the two writers’ distinct aesthetic and poetic modes. Where Melville’s list suggests that he is taken by varietals of grass, Whitman tends to speak simply of “the grass” on which varieties of people both gather and spread. Where Melville’s casual notation assumes a striking metrical regularity, Whitman’s crafted verses defy conventional meter and burst beyond their line breaks. But regardless of whether grass is one thing or many, whether its proper form is regular or irregular meter, “it means” something vital to both aesthetic projects—­ namely, democracy’s capacity to pluralize form and formalize plurality. If grass is what Melville and Whitman have in common as both of them radically reimagine literary aesthetics and democratic forms in the second half of the nineteenth century, grass is also a subtle indicator of the writers’ distinct visions of democracy and poetry, one that pushes beyond their obvious and often remarked-­upon differences of mood, persona, voice, and style. There is a venerable tradition in Americanist scholarship and critical theory of pitting Whitman and Melville against one another, beginning with F. O. Matthiessen’s contrasting of Whitman’s enduring optimism with Melville’s confrontations of “bitter truths,” and persisting into recent work by Thomas Claviez comparing Whitman’s consensus-­driven poetics to Melville’s dissensual aesthetics.20 In an essay surveying the parallel careers of Melville and Whitman, Betsy Erkkila reads against this long tradition, arguing that “the scholarly emphasis on the essential differences between Melville and Whitman has kept us from recognizing the similarly democratic and dystopian impulses out of which their work emerged, and the ways their imaginative writings overlap and intersect in their struggle to come to terms with the political and economic tribulations of democracy in the mid-­nineteenth century.”21 Erkkila is right to note how significant and instructive these mo-

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ments of overlap and intersection can be. She focuses specifically on both writers’ pursuit of the “all” through their representation of those sensuous, corporeal connections that prove and promote the radical human equality on which both of them premise democracy. Erkkila invokes Moby-­Dick’s “A Squeeze of the Hand” to argue that “the sexually fluid and masturbatory image of men merging and coming together  .  .  . is at the very center of Melville’s vision of social community and the possibility of democracy,” and in it, “Melville sounds uncannily like Whitman.”22 Indeed, Melville comes closest in “A Squeeze of the Hand” to that feeling of sensual merger that Whitman calls “adhesiveness”—­which Erkkila has long identified as Whitman’s most radical political idea 23—­but she concedes that adhesiveness is a fleeting feeling for Melville. “Melville’s dreams of comradeship are always momentary rather than enduring” because these dreams are “immersed in the flow of capital and slavery, as instanced by the fact that Ishmael’s vision of homoerotic community is produced by and within labor for capital.”24 Reading Moby-­Dick and the 1855 Leaves as linked “epics of democracy,” that is, Erkkila finds a shared egalitarian vision of democracy in the experience of erotic, corporeal merger in which the principal differences are durational. But Erkkila’s insight—­that Melville’s depictions of adhesive comradeship are temporary because these moments occur under conditions of extractive capitalism, racism, and sovereign power—­a lso points to two more subtle and fundamental differences in how Whitman and Melville conceive of democracy in political and aesthetic terms. First of all, the distinction between a conception of democracy as enduring or transient is more than temporal (that is, the same basic form of adhesiveness operating across different durations of time); it is foundational. Neither Whitman nor Melville presumes an absolute distinction between democracy and imperial expansion, but where Whitman believes the same adhesive, progressive power drives both in an “unending procession” (“Is Whitman Ahab?” Erkkila wonders25), Melville premises the difference of democracy from imperial and sovereign power on its transience and self-­difference. That is, the sensual experience of comradeship in “A Squeeze of the Hand”—­like the “all-­feeling” that Melville briefly experiences while “lying in the grass on a warm summer’s day”—­is significant precisely because it does not last and cannot expand or progress without changing essentially. Such an experience thus demands

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other modes of feeling, thinking, and acting. Melville’s democracy is not “ruthless” because it is yoked to an expanding imperial power but because of all the work that its impermanence demands—­it cannot be fixed in any one experience, no matter how erotic and communal. This points to the second key difference between Melville’s conception of democratic aesthetics and Whitman’s. Whitman’s poet may not be a personal subject (nor even necessarily a human being26), but that poet is a planter whose relationship to democracy is one of cultivation. The poetic subject that Melville imagines in his ruthless democracy letter, by contrast, may best be conceived as a plant, one which sprouts from ancient seeds, grows leaves and roots, decays, falls to seed, and all the while composes through “those silent grass-­growing moods.” Political readings of Whitman tend to focus on the concept of adhesiveness as the central idea of Whitmanian democracy. Both Erkkila and Jason Frank, for example, cite the fifth of Whitman’s Calamus poems, later titled “For You, O Democracy,” as a key articulation of how the poet’s speaker addresses democracy primarily as a form of sensual attachment among promiscuous multitudes. With many of Whitman’s well-­k nown gestures of expansiveness and union on display—­“Come, I will make the continent indissoluble . . .”—­“For You, O Democracy” cements the political meaning of “adhesiveness” as both Erkkila and Frank define it. For Erkkila, adhesiveness helps to resolve the paradox of liberty and union “through the erotic force of physical love and intimacy between men,” and for Frank, it models an impersonal and promiscuous love that “destabilizes and overcomes identitarian difference” without demonization of others.27 But the poem also raises questions of priority and agency. The poem’s speaker addresses “democracy” in the repeated offerings, “I will” and “For you,” but the very thing that the speaker offers is that which ostensibly constitutes democracy—­ adhesive attachment. Rather than a voice of desire seeking attachment to another (and thereby forming the relation of promiscuous adhesiveness out of which democracy will be made), that “I” addresses itself to “Democracy” as the force that attaches comrades to each other like magnets and plants them like trees:

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I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies, I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each others’ necks, By the love of comrades, By the manly love of comrades, For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme! For you, for you, I am trilling these songs.28

Planting companions thick as trees and twining cities in inseparable hugs, the speaker offers the poem as both song and vow to “you ma femme.” The poet’s speaker is wed to democracy, but it does not participate in the adhesive ties of comradeship so much as it cultivates them for the sake of democracy’s endurance. Still, as in “Song of Myself,” so in “For You, O Democracy!” Whitman’s speaker is open and receptive; it gives and receives “the same,” “for you these from me.” For this reason, that speaker may be a planter, external to the adhesive bonds the poem makes, but these actions cannot be described in terms of individual, personal agencies. Instead, the speaker who plants and offers operates in the manner of the “solar” poet that Jane Bennett has described as “a quivering, traversing beam of light,” which falls on everything without discernment or agency but with the capacity to “spur on an already existing lively body.”29 Whitman most fully elaborates on the relationship of poetry, cultivation, and democracy in Democratic Vistas, but in that long essay, democracy’s existence seems less secure and Whitman sounds more doubtful about the power of adhesiveness alone to foster its development. Describing a “hollowness at heart” and an “atmosphere of hypocrisy” in American democracy in 1871, Whitman seeks to cultivate a democratic aesthetics beyond politics—­or, rather, he seeks to cultivate a democracy “deeper” than politics that will grow literature at the same time literature grows democracy: “I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology.”30 To a degree, Whitman accepts both the conventional slur against American aesthetic production and Edmund Burke’s demand that “one’s country ought to be lovely,”31 as Whitman calls on literature to “till its crops in many fields” until American democracy gets as “firm and warm” a hold on hearts as feudalism once had:

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For not only is it not enough that the new blood, new frame of democracy shall be vivified and held together merely by political means, superficial suffrage, legislations, &c., but it is clear to me that unless it goes deeper, gets at least as firm and warm a hold in men’s hearts, emotions, and beliefs as, in their days, feudalism or ecclesiasticalism . . . its strength will be defective, its growth doubtful and its main charm wanting.32

For all of the tropes of planting, cultivation, and growth throughout Democratic Vistas, the essay does not posit the poet as an individual agent any more firmly than “For You, O Democracy!” does. But neither does it conceive cultivation principally in terms of fostering those promiscuous adhesive relations between people that both Frank and Erkkila describe as the most radical of Whitman’s democratic ideas. Instead, the essay describes a mutually enhancing relationship of fertilization and growth between poetry and democracy, both of which presuppose a common ground that becomes increasingly literal as the essay progresses. In the end, that ground is property itself: “The true gravitation-­hold of Liberalism in the United States will be a more universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general comfort—­a vast, intertwining reticulation of wealth.”33 In Democratic Vistas, the task of planting and cultivating a poetic democracy becomes a surprisingly Burkean project that seeks to secure both the beauty and the endurance of the nation, “grasped as in a kind of mort-­main forever.”34 As Whitman asserts in the essay’s final sentence, “the main thing being the average, the bodily, the concrete, the democratic, the popular, on which all the superstructure of the future are to permanently rest.” Whitman’s poetry seeks to plant a democratic future on an enduring relation of radical, sensual adhesiveness that binds “hearts, emotions, beliefs,” and bodies together, to form a common and expanding ground that is secured by property. Such a poetry retains its pluralizing form as accumulative and expansive, even as it aims at the endurance and permanence of a democracy that, in turn, “founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art.” For Whitman, that is, democracy and poetry preserve a mutually reinforcing relationship of “luxuriant” growth in which, as he says in “Song of Myself,” “all goes onward and outward, nothing collapses.” Perhaps the sharpest distinction between Whitman’s political vision and Melville’s lies in such

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a vista of democracy’s onward and outward endurance without collapse. Where Whitman conceives endurance as the “succession in time” of expansion and progress, 35 in Melville’s writing, all that endures are those repeating cycles of foundation and collapse, composition and decomposition in which attempts at the erection of permanent “superstructures” appear, at best, as delusions and, at worst, as violence: Found a family, build a state, The pledged event is still the same: Matter in end will never abate His ancient, brutal claim. **** Indolence is heaven’s ally here, And energy the child of hell: The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear But brims the poisoned well. (PP, 284)

In Timoleon’s “Fragments from a Lost Gnostic Poem of the 12th Century,” Melville casts this cycle explicitly in terms of founding acts, in which each pledged event is not merely a gesture of futility but a violation of matter’s most basic, most “brutal claim” to entropic dissolution and transformation. Any political act that seeks to plant its forms on solid ground pursues the negation of matter itself in a hellish act that poisons the well. Only indolence can answer matter’s brutal claim to perpetual transformation, that process of composition and decomposition which ensures no endurance but the persistence of transience itself.

And so what, then, is the grass? Ultimately, for both Whitman and Melville, it is the figure through which two radically distinct visions of democracy assume poetic form. The prairie-­grass dividing, its special odor breathing, I demand of it the spiritual corresponding, Demand the most copious and close companionship of men, Demand the blades to rise of words, acts, beings . . .36

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In Whitman’s “The Prairie-­grass Dividing,” blades and leaves become the “words, acts, beings” that make poetry out of the “never quell’d audacity” of men who “look carelessly in the faces of Presidents and governors . . . Those of inland America.” Far more than a metaphor, Whitman’s grasses become the very language of a poetry that speaks, enacts, and founds democracy in companionship and equality. Like Whitman’s grasses, Melville’s figure democracy’s creative, pluralizing, and equalizing drives; like Whitman, too, Melville imagines aesthetic, poetic work as drawing from these drives and participating in this proliferation. But Melville’s poems plant nothing and his grasses offer no firm ground. Instead, these grasses enable him to figure forth the idea of an antifoundational democracy, a democracy that must be unplanted “to the last,” across four decades of writing. In 1851, this unplanted democracy arises along with his desire for “the calm, the coolness, the silent grass-­growing mood in which a man ought always to compose” (Corr., 191). In 1855, this unplanted democracy appears in the narrative of Israel Potter’s uprooting and transplanting, which finds at the end of the American Revolution both a founded state and a “pledged event” that are at war with matter and the common. And in 1891, the last year of his life, that unplanted democracy takes final poetic form in Weeds and Wildings, a privately published collection of poems on the commonest, wildest, and “dearest of the flowers of the field.” Like Israel Potter, Melville returns in his final years (at least in memory) to the grassy Berkshires, where he also discovers his former homestead “in serene contentment of natural decay” as the surrounding plant life flourishes. With poems on goldenrod and maple trees, red clover and white, the collection carries the specificity of Melville’s interest in grassy varietals to a culmination forty-­one years after his summer tour of pastures. Redtop, ribbon grass, finger grass, orchard grass, and hair grass may not merit their own poems in Weeds and Wildings, but Melville’s 1850 notation in the back of Field’s History of the Berkshires hovers over the later book as its herald and compositional model. There is no principle of structure or organization other than the existence and growth of some wild vegetable thing, and that mere fact of growth suffices as the material and matter of life, memory, and poetry. In the collection’s “Clover Dedication” to his wife, Melville offers the poems as a gathered “handful” of all that is unplanted, wild, and common:

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But, tell, do we not take to this flower—­for flower it is, though with the florist hardly ranking with the floral clans—­not alone that in itself it is a thing of freshness and beauty, but also that being no delicate foster-­ child of the nurseryman, but a hardy little creature of the out-­of-­doors accessible and familiar to everyone, no one can monopolize its charm. Yes, we are communists here.37

As one of the final works of his “endless sermon,” Melville’s Weeds and Wildings reimagines his “ruthless democracy” as something more radical than the equality of presidents and thieves, something more fundamental than the capacity to become a plant and feel the “all.” That grassy incantation to democracy becomes the poetry of a commonly held beauty and an unmonopolized, unowned, unplanted life because “we plants are all akin / Our roots enlock.”38 Pluck, Slide, Recoil: Clarel’s Groundless Ground Where the “Clover Dedication” and “A Ground Weed” in Weeds and Wildings suggest that to be an unplanted plant is to grow beauty that is both wild and common, enlocking roots with the most cultivated varietals of roses, Clarel ’s Vine suggests another mode of living an unplanted life: Ere yet, they win that verge and line, Reveal the stranger. Name him—­Vine. His home to tell—­k in, tribe, estate—­ Would not avail. Alighting grow, As on the tree the mistletoe, All gifts unique. In seeds of fate Borne on the winds these emigrate, And graft the stock. (CL, I.29.1–­8)

A wafted seed and a grafted mistletoe, Vine grows without roots. Though he migrates along with the tides of pilgrims who range across Palestine, he belongs to no “kin, tribe, estate,” and none of these would “avail” to characterize him beyond what his name already tells. In a book of stones, Vine is a man of weeds, who is often found sitting on the ground at the margins of the travelers, pulling up plants and overturning rocks. In Jerusalem: “For Vine, he twitched from ground a weed, / Apart then picked it seed by seed”

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(I.34.69–­70). Again in Jericho: “The student turned, awaiting Vine; / Who answered nothing, plaiting there / A weed from neighboring ground uptorn / Plant common enough in Palestine, / And by the peasants named Christ’s Thorn” (II.18.159–­63). And in the high desert of Mar Saba, where plant life is scarce: “For Vine, from that unchristened earth / Bits he plucked up of porous stone, / And crushed in fist” (III.5.183–­85). Vine’s signature gesture supplies the place of his speech. As Rolfe, Derwent, and others talk on and on of novelty and history (I.34), of penance and peace (II.18), of “Mammon and Democracy” (III.5), Vine holds his tongue and pulls up weeds. That silent uprooting looks to Clarel like thoughtful prudence and seems to indicate an alluring, unreachable depth of character. But it also functions in the poem as something very literal. While the others debate and argue and stake their claims (“yay and nay—­e ach hath his say ”), Vine is a weed who weeds. He plucks and digs, uproots and unplants, focusing the poem back on the ground that both it and he diligently work to turn over. As Samuel Otter argues, Clarel is a finely wrought work, its diction precise and literal, its repetitions purposeful: “Repetition reveals or regenerates the qualities of the noun, makes it vivid to perception. Such a vividness [is] not only . . . an end in itself, but also . . . a means to comprehend the nouns, proper and improper, at the center of the poem—­Palestine, America, democracy, revolution, science, God, Christ, the Jew, sin, sexuality. . . .” Poetic form works in the service not just of artful opacity, but also of clarity—­or, more precisely, as Melville’s repetitions restore a materiality and literalness to the figurative, so the poem’s artful opacity becomes clear and sharp. Otter’s key example is the motif of stones, which he argues must always be read as words and things at once, each stone “a meditation on the relationship between literal and figurative meanings and between parts and wholes.”39 This applies, too, to scenes and gestures and characters. Each time Vine sits on the ground and digs in the dirt, the weeds, the ground, and the action of plucking and braiding and crushing all become at once more literal and more figuratively charged. Clarel is a poem of literal figures, where characters without roots pull weeds and turn over the ground on which all the pilgrims meet, where earthquakes upend philosophies, and where landslides bury theologies. It is a poem of migrations and motions, too, in which characters are “permeable to the extrapersonal,” in Michael Jonik’s phrase, be-

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cause they are defined by the actions and gestures and movements in which they are caught up.40 Vine is thus not just a figure of ambiguity who says very little and belongs to no “kin, tribe, estate,” so much as he is one of the poem’s most concrete figurations of rootlessness—­a long with Nathan, Mortmain, and Ungar—­whose habit of uprooting plants speaks clearly in response to the other pilgrims’ constant debates about faith and doubt, history and science, certainty and chance, revolution and democracy.41 If we take Melville’s figures literally, then, Clarel may well be Melville’s masterpiece of groundlessness—­more so even than Battle-­Pieces or any of his sea narratives. From Typee to Moby-­Dick to Pierre, the sea is the place where Melville locates that formless, unfathomable, howling infinite, where all “the horrors of the half-­k nown life” reside (MD, 225) and where “drowning men do drown” (P, 303), while the land often stands as that “insular Tahiti full of peace and joy” (MD, 225). In Battle-­Pieces, that insular peace gives way, catastrophically, as the land cracks open in yawning gulfs and cores of fire. In Clarel, the ground remains every bit as unstable as it is in “The Apparition (A Retrospect),” while it also takes on the properties of the sea. On the one hand this oceanic quality is specific to the desert—­after all, “Sands immense / Impart the oceanic sense” (CL II.11.36–­37)—­but on the other, it speaks to the poem’s generalization of groundlessness as both a recurrent historical condition and an emerging modern ontology. Cody Marrs argues that Melville’s shift between terrestrial and oceanic terrors in Battle-­Pieces registers the “bond between repetition and destruction” that persists in Melville’s poetry after the war, as he increasingly grapples with the knowledge that “the Civil War, instead of occurring in history, is history, and we are all swept up in its waves.” War remains present and ongoing throughout Clarel, John Marr, and Timoleon, in Marrs’s account, as the abstract and concrete name that Melville gives to “history’s violent cyclicality.”42 The features of Melville’s poetry that Marrs associates with “war” include his formal enactments of cyclical patterns of destruction and creation and his very definition of “art”—­in the poem of that name—­as constituted in antagonism, “a medium rather than a reinvention of strife.”43 Jonik identifies many of these same tendencies with Melville’s “poetry of monumentalization and erasure,” but for him, these evolve out of Melville’s ontology of the inhuman in “the new stone age of modernity.”44 Whether they signal the permanence of war as a philosophy of history or the inhuman materiality of character

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as an ontology, Melville’s concrete abstractions and literal figurations make poetry out of the antagonistic play of formation and dissolution, creation and destruction, ground and groundlessness as the very conditions of being. Put another way, though it may seem perverse to describe a poem that is so intently preoccupied with stones, sands, mountains, riverbeds, and geology as a master-­work of “groundlessness,” in Clarel ’s poetics of strife and contradiction, all that ground is laid in order to fall and slide away, to roll and upheave. In formalizing the permanence of “strife” and cycles of “monumentalization and erasure,” Melville’s poetics of ground and groundlessness pose a clear political challenge: how to live and act collectively in such a world? Long before Ungar castigates democracy’s unplanted bed and indifference to both the past and the future in Book IV, the pilgrims’ lengthy dialogues on secularization, science, history, and scripture have already lodged Ungar’s questions about democracy at the center of the poem. Does democracy signal progress into a novel future or the recurrence of a failed past? Does it ensure the elevation of the common or the reduction to it? And always: must democracy found something that endures? For example, early in the poem, while Vine is twitching weeds and plucking seeds in “They Tarry” (I.34), Rolfe delivers a monologue in which he decries the historicization of holy lands in terms of a double disenchantment—­the reign of “King Common-­ Place” and the impossibility of novelty—­and he unfolds a metaphor that reads time and history through a conceit of the earth split open and overturned by rolling waves: But, nay, what novel thing may be. No germ being new? By Fate’s decree Have not the earth’s vitals heaved in change Repeated? some wild element Or action been evolved? the range Of Surface split? the deeps unpent? Continents in God’s cauldrons cast? And this without effecting so The neutralizing of the past, Whose rudiments persistent flow, From age to age transmitting, own, The evil with the good. . . . (I.34.47–­58)

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In Rolfe’s conceit the constant roiling of “the earth’s vitals” signals continuity and recurrence more than instability and change. But the continuity of the churning earth is nevertheless violent in its transmission of the past, foreclosing the possibility of any truly novel thing. By contrast, while Rolfe soliloquizes on split surfaces, heaving vitals, and “deeps unpent,” Vine replies silently, simply pulling up weeds and plucking out seeds. Against Rolfe’s figuration of time as the perpetuation of violent upheaval that churns the ground like the sea, that is, Vine proposes a counterfigure of calm uprooting and scattering. Vine first literalizes and then transforms Rolfe’s question: “What novel thing may be / No germ being new?” Both would seem to agree that the world offers neither novelty nor permanence, only a recurrence of change and disruption that might be figured in a variety of ways. Splitting, heaving, digging, uprooting: none of these can “neutralize” the past or secure the future, but taken together they suggest vastly different ways in which to live in a world where no ground is solid. Another of those ways is pilgrimage itself, a form of migration that both gathers the characters together to travel sacred ground and loosens them from all grounding definitions and identifications.45 The poem’s pilgrims are at once a “human wave” (I.5.185) and an animal migration that follows “a hint or dictate, nature’s own / By man, as by the brute obeyed” (IV.34.5–­6). Pilgrimage becomes one of Clarel ’s central forms for the counterpoise of opposing things—­faith and impulse, transience and permanence, sameness and strangeness. Early in Book I, Clarel marvels at the seeming universality of pilgrimage and wonders at the impulses and agencies at work in it: . . . What profound Impulsion makes these tribes to range? Stable in time’s incessant change Now first he marks, now awed he heeds The intersympathy of creeds, Alien or hostile tho’ they seem—­ Exalter thought or groveling dream. (I.5.203–­9)

As in The Confidence-­Man, so in Clarel are pilgrims promiscuous assemblies of strangers who, in flowing together in a single direction, take on the qualities of a river, “ever overflowing with strange waters, but never with

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the same strange particles in every part” (CM, 8). Like the passengers of the Fidèle, Clarel ’s pilgrims depart the group or (with alarming frequency) die off as new strangers join, but the constantly changing collective remains stable: “But as men drop, replacements rule: / Though fleeting be each part assigned / The eternal ranks of life keep full” (IV.1.34–­36). In the lines from Book I above, Melville’s enjambments make it possible to read the clause “Stable in time’s incessant change” as modifying both “tribes” and “he” (that is, the marveling Clarel) so that, whatever his anxieties and doubts, Clarel cannot separate himself from this profound impulsion that moves these changing tribes of strangers. What is constant, incessant, continuous in Clarel is the aquatic motion of the earth itself and of migrating collectives over it and with it—­the roiling waves that liquefy the ground, the rivers of life that flow over it forming traces and paths and thoroughfares. By the end of Book IV, Melville makes this analogy of ranging pilgrims to rivers as literal as possible: migrations flow across the rolling earth because they are guided and directed by it, because migrants trace and retrace paths that follow the natural movements and gradations of the earth itself: Some leading thoroughfares of man In wood-­path, track, or trail began; Through threading heart of proudest town, They follow in controlling grade A hint of dictate, nature’s own By man, as by the brute, obeyed. (IV.34.1–­5)

By the end of the poem, Clarel has his answer: the “profound impulsion” that “makes these tribes to range” is neither “exalter thought” nor “groveling dream” but the very ground they walk, pulling generations down its “controlling grade,” which is grooved and carved in turn by those endless processions of tribes. Pilgrims and migrants thus become the key figures through which the poem holds the opposition of ground and groundlessness as an abstract and a concrete thing at once. The ground is a liquid and a solid. It rolls and flows, splits and cracks. It is the thinnest of surfaces, easily carved by foot and hoof and paw and claw (“Solidity’s a crust . . .”), and it is a prime agency behind the collective behaviors of human and “brute” alike.

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If pilgrims and migrants follow the impulses of the earth in its grounding groundlessness, marking with their paths all of the ways they are pulled across its surface, the poem proposes a complicating figure in the settler.46 Like the pilgrims along the Via Crucis, who follow the grade of the earth in obedience to the law of gravity, settlers also respond to “a hint, or dictate, nature’s own.” But where the poem’s pilgrim-­migrants are defined in their constant movement, “stable in time’s incessant change,” its settlers are often pilgrims who seek to plant foundations, secure new political forms, and stall that change.47 In the seventeenth canto, the narrator describes how geology and theology combine in the story of Nathan, as earthen mounds and rockslides precipitate a series of spiritual conversions and emigrations that send him in desperate search of “adamant.” “Nathan” practically captures the whole of Clarel in a single canto. Tracing the vacillations of a single mind from faith to doubt to terror and, ultimately, to violence, the narrator translates Nehemiah’s “tangled thread” into a story of how stones, hills, prairies, and deserts become the material of spiritual biography and world history. Nathan is born to generations of North American settlers, each moving further west, and he is raised in a liquid earth amid the oceanic prairie grasses of the American Midwest: “But who the gracious charm may tell—­/ Long rollings of the vast serene / The prairie in her swimming swell / Of undulation” (I.17.27–­30). With the “swimming swell” of this sea-­like surround broken by “three Indian mounds,” he also resides on storied, ancient land that yields both grain and antiquities: “bones like sea coral; one bleached skull / A vase vined round and beautiful / With flowers” (ll.67–­69). As the narrator tells it, Nathan’s character is made and unmade in a series of encounters with this undulating, historical, unstable ground, both through his own experience and in remembered stories of his family. Specifically, Nathan becomes “unhinged” by his discovery of that “one bleached skull” and his recollection of an uncle’s death in a New Hampshire landslide:48 The great White Hills, mount flanked by mount, The Saco and Ammonoosuc’s fount; Where, in September’s equinox Nature hath put such terror on That from his mother man would run—­ Our mother, Earth: the founded rocks Unstable prove: the Slide! the Slide! Again he saw the mountainside

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Sliced open; yet again he stood Under its shadow, on the spot—­ Now waste, but once a cultured plot—­(ll.82–­91)

Neither the mountain nor the “cultured plot” of his uncle’s farm have any permanence, and “this reminiscence of dismay” recurs to Nathan as both evidence of God’s absence and an inversion of the narrative of permanent settlement. With all foundations proving hollow, temporary, and unstable, Nathan is plunged by these visions—­“The White Hills Slide! The Indian skull!” (ll.135)—­into “an altered earth” (ll.138). At first, Nathan follows the intellectual history of enlightenment and English political philosophy, turning from such Burkean figures of sublime dissolution and decay to Thomas Paine’s “hearty unbelief sincere” (l.118). When he discovers a copy of the Age of Reason in the home of a Scottish miller, Paine’s “blunt straightforward” prose grabs him “much like a hand / Clapped on the shoulder,” and the book seems to offer him stable ground: “Here he found / Body to doubt, rough standing ground” (ll.120–­21). But what first seemed a new foundation for thought in reason proves instead to be nothing more than a cleansing fire: “tho’ the Deist’s sway / Broad as the prairie fire, consumed / Some pansies which before had bloomed / Within the heart; it did but feed / To clear the soil for upstart weed” (ll.145–­49). Melville’s narrator tells Nathan’s story in the mixed idiom with which Clarel interrogates and literalizes the ground that faiths and philosophies lay and then lose. The ground conceals and reveals exterminated peoples and past civilizations; it cracks, slides, and buries families and their “cultured plots”; it is transformed by fires that clear the way for new weeds. Nothing that is settled, cultured, or planted endures in Nathan’s story, or in the stories of his New England ancestors, but what marks Nathan as a settler is his ongoing search for an ultimate grounding belief in which to plant his thought. He seems to find that in Judaism: If backward still the inquirer goes To get behind man’s present lot Of crumbling faith; for rear-­ward shows Far behind Rome and Luther—­what? The crag of Sinai. Here then plant Thyself secure: ’tis adamant.” (ll.213–­18)

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Nathan imagines his search for faith here in terms of a reversal, a linear path through which he can proceed backward through the Judeo-­Christian tradition as if Luther has superseded Rome and Rome Sinai, each planting itself on the foundations laid by the older tradition. But if Nathan conceives his quest in terms of a steady procession backward to “plant” himself in theological “adamant,” the narrator counters that he is instead careening wildly between extremes of doubt and belief, each of which he holds with equal zeal. Blaming his latent Puritanism, the narrator argues that Nathan’s discovery of “adamant” is not a secure planting of faith in firm ground but a movement of wild “recoil”: ’Twas passion. But the Puritan—­ Mixed latent in his blood—­a strain How evident, of Hebrew source; ’Twas that, diverted here in force, Which biased—­hardly might do less. Hereto append, how earnestness, Which disbelief for first-­fruits bore, Now in recoil, by natural stress Constrained to faith—­to faith in more Than prior disbelief had spurned; As if, when he toward credence turned, Distance therefrom but gave career For impetus that shot him sheer Beyond. (ll.227–­40)

Melville’s strange breaks and enjambed lines heighten the force and energy in Nathan’s vacillations of faith: diverted here, constrained there, the stanza pulls Nathan’s mind like a taut bow and cocks it like a pistol. Indeed, so violently does Nathan shoot from belief to doubt to something “sheer beyond” that the movement of “recoil” the narrator invokes propels his intellectual migrations from the figural into the literal and physical. Rooted in the French, “recul,” for the rebound of a firearm, Nathan’s “recoil” is no simple “act of retreating, retiring, or going back,” nor is it a withdrawing in horror, but the term clearly resonates here as a gun’s kickback.49 Like Emily Dickinson’s loaded gun, Nathan becomes at once shooter, bullet, and gun, as a rebounding Puritanism propels him not just to conversion, but also from

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North America to an armed settlement in Palestine: “A tract secured on Sharon’s plain. / Some shed he built and ground walled in / Defensive; toil severe but vain” (I.17.ll.281–­92). There, Nathan resurrects the early wars of the Massachusetts Bay colony. “[A]s erst / His sires in Pequod wilds immersed,” so Nathan builds his fortress and deems the surrounding Bedouins “foes pestilent to God” (l.306) and “slaves meriting the rod” (l.309). But though Nathan has pursued this settlement as a means of contending with the sliding, rolling earth, grounds that are secured in this way, “walled in / Defensive,” can have no other function or meaning. They cannot be settled or lived on because they are “grounds beleaguered” (l.314) in the most literal, root sense of the word: surrounded and besieged. In Nathan’s story, distinctions between the concrete and the abstract, the figurative and the literal meanings of words blur as he rehashes settler histories in the bluntest of terms. In one sense, this bluntness can be measured in the story’s deployment of allegorical figuration, its demonstration of how seamlessly settler mythologies migrate from place to place as allegories swallow contexts and overtake histories. The conversion of Arabs first into the allegorical “Hittites, foes pestilent to God,” facilitates the blurring of New England and Palestine, Pequod and Arab.50 But in another sense, Melville recasts the story of settlement in the most literal terms of physical and material impulses. Recoiling faiths shoot believers like bullets into forts; beleaguered ground is claimed as sacred right; and the violence of settlement rebounds onto those in the surrounding desert, or forest, or prairie who are held off at gunpoint. If pilgrims migrate like rivers, following the natural grade of the earth and carving out tracks and beds as they go, then those settlers who seek to stall or reverse “incessant change” may divert or constrain that flow for a time, only to feel the full force of its recoil in the end. Melville does not fully materialize the impulse toward settlement here, which would evacuate the agency of colonizers and founders, but neither does he grant them the capacity to settle unstable ground. Settlers become not agents but counteragents who siphon off the energies and forces they wish to contain. And in this, they become the poem’s atomic figures for founders and state-­builders, brimming the poisoned well. In both his religious faith and in his political philosophy Nathan recoils from Paine “sheer beyond” Burke, to found the politics of the colonial fort as “an ongoing

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attack on the common . . . from within the surround.”51 In Clarel ’s idiom, this attack is also against matter and the moving earth itself. Unhinged by an unearthed skull and a rock slide, Nathan seeks adamant, but in planting a settlement and securing a fortress he founds chaos rather than order and achieves no permanence. Nathan’s move to secure and to settle is the originary violence in the poem’s telling because founding actions are recoils, defensive acts that do violence amidst the necessary contingencies of time and matter and strangers. But Nathan is a founding figure of the poem in more ways than one. As Hilton Obenzinger notes, Nathan’s story is Clarel ’s impetus because it is his death and Ruth’s subsequent period of secluded mourning that determine Clarel’s decision to follow the itinerary that the poem narrates.52 The poem thus unfolds as a means of mourning and grieving a life and a death that are marked by Nathan’s own violent recoiling from grief and terror. In this, Nathan provides Clarel (and Clarel) with “a profound impulsion” not only on the level of plot, but also on the level of figuration. At first sighting Nathan, praying at the Western Wall beside the Indian Abdon, Clarel too feels the ground beneath him turn liquid and swell: “Gazed Clarel with the wonderment / Of a wight who feels the earth upheave / Beneath him, and learns, ill-­content, / That terra firma can deceive” (1.16.134–­37). Nathan’s story grounds the narrative in groundlessness and the deceptions of “terra firma” in the double sense that it does not exist and cannot be created with reason or law, faith or force. This loss of terra firma also inaugurates what Branka Arsić terms the “geological politics” of Clarel. Arsić makes a distinction between fast and slow politics, arguing that Clarel is most invested in the latter: “A whole layer of the narrative . . . turns the desert into an accomplice of fast politics that make swift historical events; it depicts the contemporary political relations among different populations. . . . But there are also strata of the poem that tell the story of slow politics—­one whose effects are not immediately perceptible but only eventually start to register—­that fabricate the desert.”53 If Nathan’s “recoil” into violent settlement speaks to the register of fast politics, then the figural schema of the sliding, groundless earth that his canto also initiates speaks to the ways in which the slow politics of an always moving, liquid ground both fuels and stalls the fast politics of settlement and siege—­which, in turn, slowly register on the changing

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land. Rather than two distinct strata of the poem, that is, these geological-­ political registers blur and blend in the manner of the river-­like migrants who carve the pathways along which the gradations of the earth pull them. But where migrants “follow in controlling grade / A hint or dictate, Nature’s own” (IV.34.3–­4), settlers like Nathan recoil from that dictate. Both fast and slow, both flowing and recoiling, the geological politics of Clarel are also the politics of groundlessness, and as Nathan’s recoil passes onto other characters after his death—­specifically, Mortmain and Ungar—­the poem becomes increasingly explicit that what is at stake in all of these speeds and motions is the meaning and practice of democracy. Nathan’s recoil is repeated in the narrative trajectories of Mortmain and Ungar, both rootless strangers who join the pilgrimage as misanthropes and monomaniacs. Like Nathan, Mortmain and Ungar are key characters in what Walter Bezanson describes as the poem’s “ominous sequence of monomaniacs,” characters who are bitterly enraged “beyond compromise or peace.”54 But unlike Nathan, whose path ends on the “grounds beleaguered” that he dies trying to hold, Mortmain and Ungar join the flow of pilgrims across the desert, recoiling all the way against “time’s incessant change” and the upheaving earth. Rather than avatars of Ahabian monomania, that is, Nathan, Mortmain, and Ungar might better be read as distinct figurations of the motion of recoiling through which the poem tells different political stories of post-­revolutionary democracy.55 Specifically, where Mortmain figures a European narrative of counterrevolutionary recoil from a youthful faith in “that uncreated Good  .  .  . whose absence is the cause of creeds and Atheists, mobs and laws” (II.4.49–­51), Ungar is another scion of North American settler violence. Descended from royalists and Native Americans and a veteran of the Confederate Army, Ungar exhibits the political grief of a Lost Causer in the throes of “a strong recoil / Whose shock may wreck them or despoil” (IV.5.58). Both men recoil out of calamity and grief that is less personal or existential than political.56 But rather than an expression of Nietzschean ressentiment against those powers that overwhelm them, their recoiling marks their failure to stall or reverse those powers.57 Moreover, their recoils are never confined to these characters because they create further reverberations, affecting all the pilgrims around them much as the sight of Nathan affects Clarel, making the ground upheave and swell and slide

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away. Ultimately, Mortmain and Ungar make explicit the poem’s investment in democracy not simply because they are characters who have recoiled against “Arcadian” schemes (II.4.31) and “paper pacts” (IV.5.87), but because they threaten the stability of democracy’s meaning for all of those around them with the force of their recoils, because they pose the metapolitical question of democracy’s possibility.

Dennis Berthold argues that the Mortmain and Ungar plots in Clarel mark the poem as Melville’s “strongest critique of democracy,” but he also cautions against assigning to Melville any “philosophically consistent ideology” based on the articulated positions of specific characters.58 With this in mind, I want to return one last time to those cantos in which Ungar launches his most virulent attacks on democracy in order to argue that, while no character is Melville’s mouthpiece, the poem does nevertheless yield some philosophical consistency on the question of democracy when it allows its democracy-­hater par excellence to speak. This is not to say that the democracy cantos of Book IV endorse Ungar’s critique or even that they stage something like democratic practice in scenes of robust debate by allowing conflictual dialogue to occur. “The Conflict of Convictions” is clear on this point: the cacophony of debating political positions and dispositions, the clash of “yay and nay,” is not where democracy lies. Democracy does not name one political position among many to debate and deliberate, and neither does the word designate a presupposed polis, an already constituted place and people in and among which such a debate may occur. As I’ve been arguing, Melville’s ruthless democracy instead emerges from the larger play of forces that make politics possible or impossible by subjecting it to genuine transformation. Indeed, rather than creating a vigorous political dialogue, Ungar’s raging polemics against “the monster of a million minds” (IV.5.109) and the “dead-­level rank of commonplace” (IV.22.136) have the opposite effect, unsettling the incessant discussions and debates that have continued across three books. Time and time again, the other characters respond to Ungar’s startling beliefs and shocking comments with silences, abrupt changes in subject, and deliberate misunderstandings. Rolfe, in particular, goes out of his way to divert and deflect Ungar’s speeches, attributing every-

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thing he says to grief and bitterness: “Reply / Came none; they let it go; for why / Argue with a man of bitter blood?” (IV.9.160–­62). But ultimately, it is not only what Ungar says that so unsettles the poem’s prolonged dialogues but also the measurable force of his speaking on everyone and everything around him. To put this in the poem’s own terms, the force of Ungar’s aggrieved democracy-­hatred undermines the very grounds of their protracted dialogue along with the beliefs they debate and defend. Throughout the twenty-­eight cantos in which Ungar accompanies the pilgrims, the poem contends more directly with “democracy” in its social and political forms than anywhere else. Or rather, because Ungar quarrels explicitly with democracy as the name for all that he hates in the modern and secular world, he reveals that democracy has been central (along with science and faith and history) as a defining problem for the pilgrims all along. Ungar does this by giving democracy a series of distinct forms, all negative, so that it can no longer be idealized or abstracted, and as one who is caught up in the “surge / Reactionary” (IV.5.182–­83) of his rage against the reconstructed United States, he also speaks with the force of a wave and a wind that sweeps everyone away. “What’s overtaken ye pale men?” he asks at one point, pausing briefly to notice the aghast others before returning to his monologue (IV.10.160). Ungar explicitly rejects all egalitarian and universalizing movements in history and pines for a restoration of vertical powers that are, Derwent notes, basically medieval. He rails against universal literacy and the Protestant reformation (“Twas harder to mislead / The people then, whose smattering now / Does not the more their ignorance show” [IV.10.103–­5]), and he praises the humility of Charlemagne and Louis IX (who were meek “in high estate, / Not puffed up like a democrat” [IV.10.113]). When he is joined by another reactionary, the jovial Mexican war veteran and “reformado reformed,” Don Hannibal, Ungar is relentless and humorless in pushing his case against democracy even with one who fully agrees with him. “But what is in this Democracy?” Don Hannibal asks, “Eternal hacking! Woe is me, / She lopped these limbs, Democracy.” Ungar takes up Don Hannibal’s phrase—­“Ay, Democracy / Lops, lops; but where’s her planted bed?”—­and then launches into a long rant against a feminized allegory of the popular and the new: democracy becomes a “harlot on horseback,” an “arch strumpet of an impious age,” and an “upstart from ranker

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villanage” (IV.19.135, 138, 140). Don Hannibal pronounces all of this “a brave vent” but then beats a hasty retreat (“I’m sorry, but I must away” [IV.19.153]). Like the others, Don Hannibal cannot answer Ungar, even in agreement, because Ungar doesn’t speak so much as he forecloses speech with a force that shows them what cannot be said, heard, and comprehended in this community of pilgrims. But Ungar is not some right-­w ing provocateur who delights in exposing the limits of liberal tolerance and free debate (clearly, the man delights in nothing); instead, he repeatedly reveals that democracy cannot consist in liberalism’s discursive terms of free and equal speech alone. As Rancière shows, the hatred of democracy is rather incoherent: on the one hand, democracy-­haters mischaracterize it as an apolitical force of social leveling, and on the other, they recognize (and recoil from) its most fundamental political meaning in ways that democracy’s liberal apologists cannot—­namely, that “the very ground for the power of ruling is that there is no ground at all.”59 Ungar is incoherent in precisely these ways. In one diatribe, democracy describes the most general egalitarian tendencies of enlightenment humanism as the creation of “the monster of a million minds” (IV.10.109). In another, democracy’s evil is that it lacks a “planted bed” and “vaunts she’s no inheritor”—­lacking, that is, precisely the founded permanence that he believes condemned the American South to slavery: “The system an iniquity / To those who plant it and begin; / While for inheritors, alas / Who knows?” (IV.5.151–­53). In yet another, it is the threat of “dead level rank of commonplace,” a homogenizing social force that will bring about “the Dark Ages of Democracy.” Democracy lops all titles and negates all claims to rank; it has no planted bed or inheritance to entail future generations; and it reveres no higher authority than the fact of equality: however incoherent he is, Ungar is not exactly wrong about the changing meanings of democracy. Indeed, it may be that what he hates most about democracy is its transient and mutable forms—­and it may be that very transience which most unsettles his interlocutors. After several cantos of engaging Ungar, deflecting and demurring, Rolfe makes one final push to convince him that there are grounds for believing in historical progress and human benevolence. Against Ungar’s insistence that the world is unchanging in its “long defiles of doom” (IV.21.68), Rolfe lists the arts and the New World as examples “to oppose your dark extreme,” and as his final point, he holds up the expanding, imperial United States as the

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emblem of progress. “To an old thought I’ll fly,” he says as he opens a vista onto the North American continent’s “waste-­weirs,” “inland freshets,” and “free vents” (IV.21.86–­88)—­in other words, onto that surround which American imperialists and expansionist poets alike hold out as the as yet unsettled foundation for American democracy: The vast reserves—­the untried fields; These long shall keep off or delay The class-­war, rich-­and-­poor man fray Of history. From that alone Can serious trouble spring. Even that Itself, this good result may own—­ The first firm founding of the state.” (IV.21.90–­96)

With this hope that new settlement and a firmly founded state will stave off “class-­war,” Rolfe articulates a vision of American democracy that closely follows Whitman’s (“all goes onward and outward, nothing collapses . . .”). Though Rolfe has voiced many of the poem’s reminders that foundations are shaky and novelty impossible, when pressed by the force of Ungar’s rage against democracy to define and defend it, he seeks “adamant” as surely as Nathan does. Ungar’s “surge reactionary” overwhelms Rolfe and the others and forces them into their own brief recoil, the defense of democracy as a planted politics of settled property and founded states that can resist the transience and transformations that Ungar fears. With this seeming victory, Ungar more or less takes over the rest of the canto, and Rolfe can barely muster a groan—­“Oh, oh!” (IV.21.133)—­as Ungar serves up a racist trope in his final tirade against progress and the leveling forces of democracy. But as the final stanza of the canto suggests, in driving Rolfe, Vine, and Derwent into silence, Ungar does not necessarily secure concession or assent from them. He pauses the dialogues that have continued over several cantos and, the narrator suggests, leaves them with “some misgivings of their own”: “Yet knowing all self need to know In self ’s base little fallacy; Dead level rank of commonplace: An Anglo-­Saxon China, see, May on your vast plains shame the race In the Dark Ages of Democracy.”

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America! In stilled estate, On him, half-­brother and co-­mate—­ In silence, and with vision dim Rolfe, Vine, and Clarel gazed on him; They gazed, nor one of them found heart To upbraid the crotchet of his smart, Bethinking them whence sole it came, Though birthright he renounced in hope, Their sanguine country’s wonted claim. Nor dull were they in honest tone To some misgivings of their own: They felt how far beyond the scope Of elder Europe’s saddest thought Might be the New World suddenly brought In youth to share old age’s pains—­ To feel the arrest of hope’s advance, And squandered last inheritance; And cry—­“ To Terminus build fanes! Columbus ended earth’s romance: No New World to mankind remains!” (IV.22.133–­50)

After Ungar announces the “Dark Ages of Democracy,” the narrator enters to describe the silence of the others and to offer some account of it. Beginning with an interjection—­“America!”—­he shows the men “in stilled estate,” that is, in the same condition of pause, all gazing on Ungar who has, it seems, unsettled their faith in the founded permanence and progress of New World democracy. No longer denying “some misgivings of their own,” the men find themselves suspended in the very mood of overwhelming uncertainty that characterizes the political situation of Melville’s Battle-­Pieces. As in Battle-­Pieces, so in Clarel; misgivings follow a specific realization of a misplaced or mistaken political belief i­n America’s founding—­in “Misgivings,” that mistake is “the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime” (PP, 7), and in Book IV of Clarel, it lies in “their sanguine country’s wonted claim” to novelty and endless “advance.” The narrator suspends them, that is, in the realization that the very idea of the “New World,” and all that it implies about regeneration and progress, has been a grave mistake. “No New World to mankind remains!” Across these cantos, Ungar removes

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one after another of the grounds in which Rolfe, Vine, and Derwent have planted their hopes for democracy—­first, he erodes the space of open debate with the force of his hatred, and then he explodes their Whitmanesque faith in the “New World” progress myth itself. With this, Ungar forces them to contend with his key insight that democracy has no planted bed. But in the end, when the ground beneath them slides and heaves, when they see once again that “terra firma can deceive,” they do not recoil. Misgivings mark a mistaken act or belief but do not answer it in the responsive action of a new, corrective conviction. Instead, their misgivings hold them “in stilled estate,” suspended in a moment where both novel contingency and certain recurrence collide, and in a place where firm ground has again fallen away. In short, their misgivings hold them in the recognition of democracy’s radical groundlessness. When “No New World to mankind remains,” the poem leaves us no choice but to reimagine democracy without settlement or foundation, without any permanent form but the common estate of a world that is neither old nor new which we must share equally and remake over and over again. Force and Form: Billy Budd’s Ragged Edges In The Force of Nonviolence Judith Butler reimagines the politics of nonviolence around a reinvigorated conception of equality, and in doing so, she describes a mode of vulnerable, conflictual sociality that might have served Clarel ’s quarreling pilgrims well. Specifically, Butler argues that we must rethink political formation from the premise of an original interdependency and a mutual vulnerability that is not to be overcome: In other words, we hardly need a new formulation of the state of nature, but we do need an altered state of perception, another imaginary, that would disorient us from the givens of the political present. Such an imaginary would help us find our way towards an ethical and political life in which aggression and sorrow do not immediately convert into violence, in which we might be able to endure the difficulty and the hostility of the social bonds we never chose. We do not have to love one another to be obligated to build a world in which all lives are sustainable. The right to persist can only be understood as a social right, as

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the subjective instance of a social and global obligation we bear toward one another. Interdependent, our persistence is relational, fragile, sometimes conflictual and unbearable, sometimes ecstatic and joyous.60

Faced with the violence of Ungar’s rage and grief, Melville’s pilgrims do not have to love him or appease him or even engage him in constant debate, but they are obligated to recognize their bonds with him and the mutual vulnerability those bonds entail. Melville makes that vulnerability quite clear: they have been forced by Ungar’s reactionary recoil into “some misgivings” about the possibility of democracy as they conceive it, and they find themselves disoriented and without a clear path toward a recognizable political relation or action. But in their disorientation they are also obligated not to recoil in turn with matching violence. Melville suspends both the pilgrims and his readers here in the “stilled estate” of groundlessnesss and misgivings. Confronted with an altered view of the world, born of mutual vulnerability to the grief of others, the poem demands a new political relation, but the canto ends like the Battle-­Pieces “Supplement” does—­namely, with no clear indication of what that relation might be or what force it might have to defeat reactionary, racist violence. Butler suggests that such indirection may be precisely what is needed for a truly egalitarian politics to displace the violence of aggrieved recoil. Specifically, she argues, those moments of vulnerability that “disorient us from the givens of the political present” must bring about a forceful unsettling of reality itself. In describing the political force of nonviolence, that is, Butler argues that something like a counterrealist aesthetic is needed: “Nonviolence requires a critique of what counts as reality, and it affirms the power and necessity of counter-­realism in times like these. Perhaps nonviolence requires a certain leave-­taking from reality as it is currently constituted, laying open the possibilities that belong to a newer political imaginary.”61 Such an assertion of counterreality is neither passive nor individual, but it is forceful because “very often it is an expression of rage, indignation, and aggression,” which becomes most necessary just when violent resistance “seems most justified and obvious.”62 In this, Butler describes the potential for an egalitarian, democratic force at work in aesthetics that contrasts usefully with what Caroline Levine has analyzed as the “political force of form” in her study

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of aesthetic and social forms. More precisely, while both Butler and Levine attend closely to the ways in which aesthetic practices can be mobilized to critique and combat the structures that condition and curtail politics, Butler’s counterrealism yields a different force than Levine’s formalism. Levine asks, “What if the organizing forms of the world do not—­cannot—­unify experience?” For her, the very fact that no single form is capable of “imposing its own dominant order” makes it possible for a formalist critic to attend to the disarray and collision between superimposed forms, a critical practice that, in turn, enables us to rearrange and redeploy those forms toward other political ends—­in short, to reform our conditions.63 Where the political force of Levine’s formalism lies in its discerning analytic practice of disentangling superimposed social forms and rearranging them to bring about different ends, the political force of Butler’s counterrealism lies in its capacity to alter perception itself and transform what constitutes reality altogether.

In my third and final conclusion, I want to argue that the political force of Melville’s aesthetic project emerges in the tensions between such modes, producing at once a disorienting, destabilizing discernment of colliding forms and a powerful counterrealist imaginary, both of which are key to the problem and possibility of ruthless democracy that propels his writing for five decades.64 This play of formal precision against the unreal, contingent, and formless is everywhere apparent in Melville’s work, from the cleanly drawn “circles of consternation and affright” across Moby-­Dick, to the falling poems of Battle-­Pieces and chaotic couplets of Clarel. But in closing, I want to take the endings of Billy Budd—­w ith their “measured forms,” “ragged edges,” and unfinished “finials”—­as emblematic of Melville’s larger project and the significance of ornate incompletion to his work. Specifically, I want to propose that yet another ending emerges from the contending forces of clashing aesthetic modes in the final chapters of Billy Budd. As Captain Vere asserts the power of “forms, measured forms” to restore order to the ship, the narrator introduces a series of “ragged edges” that resist “the symmetry of forms attainable in pure fiction” (BB, 68–­69). Those ragged edges refer most directly to the three different endings that uncomplete the plotted narrative, but they also call our attention to the figurative arrangement of colors, shapes, and gravitational forces that disorient and unsettle those three endings as well. Taken together, I want to argue, these ragged

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edges refuse the absolute foreclosure of democracy even in the face of its clear and brutal defeat on the Bellipotent. Just after the execution of the flaxen-­haired, childlike, “upright barbarian” Billy (BB, 10) has confirmed that, indeed, “No New World to mankind remains” (Cl, IV.22.150), the initial silence of the watching sailors is “gradually disturbed by a sound not easy to be verbally rendered” (BB, 66). Chapter 27 describes this “muffled murmur” or “murmurous indistinctness” erupting and passing through the crew twice, first at the moment of Billy’s execution and again as his body is dropped into the sea. “Being inarticulate, it was dubious in its significance further than it seemed to indicate some capricious revulsion of thought or feeling such as mobs ashore are like to do, in the present instance possibly implying a sullen revocation on the men’s part of their involuntary echoing of Billy’s benediction” (66–­67). Billy’s “God bless Captain Vere!” and the crew’s “resonant sympathetic echo” (64) are withdrawn as the crew seems to recoil from the law’s execution. Billy is dead, but this “strange human murmuring” suggests that something new has come to life, created by the very force of the Mutiny Act in its attempt to apply the terms of war to the impressed sailors on the ship. When that “child” of war—­the law of naval discipline under the Mutiny Act—­fails to put an end to all signs of subversive resistance, Captain Vere has quick recourse to other means: whistles (“shrill as the shriek of the sea hawk”), drum beats, and morning prayers “dissolved the multitude” as the men respond instinctively to the familiar signals of naval order (68). If Billy Budd is Melville’s final meditation on the relationship of law and war, politics and violence, states and revolutions, it is also his most intense examination of the formal entanglements between all of these. “ ‘With mankind,’ [Vere] would say, ‘forms, measured forms, are everything’ ” (68). Vere, in other words, is a formalist who believes that “the organizing forms of the world” can and do unify experience. He sails under “the flag of founded law and freedom defined” (12); he is distrustful of social innovations that are “insusceptible of embodiment in lasting institutions” (18); he views the French Revolution as “the disruption of forms going on across the Channel” (68); and he relies upon the forms of music and religious rite, as much as on martial law, in “subserving the discipline and purpose of war” (68). Vere understands the murmurous indistinctness that emanates from the crew as a formlessness which the

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overlapping forms of sovereign authority—­from religion and music, to law and war—­must order and measure. But, of course, Vere’s attempt to organize and unify the world with forms cannot succeed, because as he executes the law and measures out military discipline, he only sews chaos, insanity, and violence. Innocence and guilt have “changed places” (51), the Angel of God has been hanged, and law has turned the war against the people themselves. As Vere insists to the drumhead court, all such forms are simply “martial law operating through us” so that the people do not believe “that we are afraid of them” (55–­56). Vere’s phrase—­“ forms, measured forms, are everything”—­thus becomes the axiom of the counterrevolutionary state in its ongoing warfare against the people. But immediately following this account of how “forms, measured forms,” returned the people to “their wonted orderly manner” (68), the narrator opens chapter 28 by dispensing altogether with formal order and symmetry as narrative possibilities when “truth” is “uncompromisingly told”: The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial. (68–­69)

Against the “symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction,” Billy Budd ’s narrator proposes an aesthetic of ragged edges which uncompletes the narrative ornately like an inverse finial—­an ornament that somehow leaves the work “less finished.” The relationship between fiction and truth described here echoes and extends the aesthetic theory that emerges from the metafictional chapters of The Confidence-­Man, where inconsistency (chapter 14), unreality (chapter 33), and nonrepresentational originals (chapter 44) become the hallmarks of a fictional project dedicated to “truth uncompromisingly told.” Such truth is neither pure fiction nor representational realism but ludicrous in the manner of that state of “more reality than real life itself can show” in which fiction opens up “another world, but one to which we feel the tie” (CM, 182–­83). Plotting its way into that other world, Billy Budd extends itself beyond Billy’s death as the narrator tells the perhaps apocryphal story of Vere’s own deathbed murmur, “Billy Budd, Billy Budd” (69); notes the cir-

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culation of a counternarrative of Billy’s criminality and Claggart’s innocence in the naval press (70); and memorializes the “rude utterance of another foretopman” in “Billy in the Darbies” (71–­72). As Nathan Wolff has shown, none of these endings fully supports either side of the decades-­long critical debate between readers who argue the novella ratifies Vere’s execution of martial law and those who argue that it resists and subverts it.65 However, by rendering Vere’s execution of the Mutiny Act “less finished,” they do produce within the text a forceful disruption of “forms, measured forms,” initiating something like what Butler calls for: a “certain leave-­taking from reality” through which other responses to state violence become thinkable. That “leave-­taking from reality” exceeds the open endings that the narrator plots through the ragged edges of Billy Budd ’s three final chapters. Melville, that is, does not just open up the ending to multiple possibilities, leaving the story’s conclusion “less finished”; he also ornaments that opening, filling it with a figurative arrangement of the colors, shapes, and forces central to the aesthetic project of his ruthless democracy. From the enigmatic question that opens the long twenty-­first chapter—­“ Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? (49)—­to the circling birds that take up the “strange human murmur” when the people are silenced by “forms, measured forms” (67–­68), to the tangle of forces that elevate Billy and then drop him into the oozy weeds of the sea, figuration counters the determinations of plot and character over and over again. More precisely, these figures generate an aesthetic register that explicitly undercuts all the assumptions of narrative finality and characterological integrity that derive from the measured forms of fiction and law. Who, exactly, is in that rainbow? Only those who assume an impossible vantage in order to see the vibrancy and brilliance where distinction, discernment, and judgment fail at the very moment when the drumhead court convenes to render its foregone conclusion. “Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the first blendingly enter into the other?” (49). What action could possibly follow from a “murmurous indistinction” so “dubious in significance” and almost inhuman that it sounds like “the freshet wave of a torrent” and the “inarticulate sound proceeding from certain larger sea-­fowl” (66–­67)? Only a circle that begins “when the tilted plank let slide its freight into the sea” (67) and, from the impact of Bil-

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ly’s corpse, gives rise to capillary waves of water, sound, and circling birds. “As the ship under light airs passed on, leaving the burial spot astern, they kept circling it low down with the moving shadow of their outstretched wings and the croaked requiem of their cries” (67). And, finally, what future remains for a people against whom all the forms of martial law have directed their force? Only the certainty that contingencies will erupt out of necessities, that (like John Brown in “The Portent”) as Billy hangs suspended between an ascent and a fall, an indecipherable future may already have begun. Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I’ll dream fast asleep. I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there? Just ease the darbies at the wrist, And roll me over fair. I am sleepy; and the oozy weeds about me twist. (72)

Indeed, the fullest measure of figuration’s power in Billy Budd appears in all of the forces that converge around Billy’s body after his execution. His body rises into color (“in ascending took the full rose of the dawn” [65]) and falls into circles. It remains preternaturally still at the moment of his death while muffled murmurs and inarticulate, inhuman sounds erupt powerfully around it, filling ship and sky. Finally, in the ballad that closes Billy Budd, another Billy rises from the spar only to drop “fathoms down, fathoms down” into the sea as “oozy weeds” carry him into the figurative counterreality where Melville’s ruthless democracy rolls on. Green, round, groundless; vibrantly colored and precisely shaped; falling and unplanted to the last: democracy survives the stories of the people’s silence and the state’s violence, of common actions neutralized and sovereign singularities restored across Melville’s fiction and poetry because it persists at the edges of form and representation. The realm of “more reality” and “ludicrous” truth, democracy figures forth “another world but one to which we feel the tie.”

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Notes

Introduction 1. Melville’s letter was transcribed and published by Julian Hawthorne in 1884, but the original has not been located and the date is uncertain. The editors of Melville’s Correspondence give a date of June 1, 1851, but Hershel Parker dates the letter to early May, before Sophia Hawthorne gave birth to their daughter, Rose, on May 20 and before Melville traveled to New York City in early June (Corr., 188–­89). See Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 1, 1819–­1851 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 841–­4 4. 2. Like Timothy Powell, I am drawn to Melville’s startlingly precise phrase, “ruthless democracy,” for all of the ways that it captures the paradoxes and tensions of Melville’s complex account of democracy as something at once personal, historical, and theoretical. See Timothy Powell, Ruthless Democracy: A Multicultural Interpretation of the American Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 3. The editors identify Melville’s reference to Lord Shaftesbury’s “Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour,” in which he asserts that truth must be tested to withstand “raillery” (Corr., 189). 4. T, 201; BB, 66; O 36, R, 276; and MD, 117. 5. I borrow the term “inhuman” from Michael Jonik as a means of characterizing the force of the natural, the animal, and the material that are always present in the human across Melville’s work. Michael Jonik, Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman (Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 6–­7. 6. P, 9; PP, 284. 7. Raymond Weaver, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic (New York: George H. Doran, 1921), 37. 293

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8. F. O. Matthiessen, The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1941), xiv–­x v. 9. See Donald Pease’s introduction to C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, ed. Donald E. Pease, xiii–­x iv (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2001). 10. Richard Chase, Herman Melville: A Critical Study (New York: MacMillan, 1949), vii, 20–­21. Pease provides a thorough account of the diverging politics of this generation of critics, detailing Chase’s anticommunism and use of Melville to advance conservative politics and contrasting both Chase’s and Matthiessen’s with James’s radical reading of Moby-­Dick, in particular (Introduction to James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, xiii, xxix, and xxxifn7). 11. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, 3, 75. 12. Ibid., 75. 13. David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 275–­76; Robert Milder, Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 63; Michael Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 221; Wai Chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Politics of Individualism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 24; Dennis Berthold, American Risorgimento: Melville and the Cultural Politics of Italy (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009), 24; Nancy Fredericks, Melville’s Art of Democracy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 4. This is a mere gloss; a more comprehensive list of the key claims about Melville and democracy would include Eric Sundquist’s work on revolution and slavery in “Benito Cereno” in To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Nancy Ruttenberg’s account of innocence and popular voice in Billy Budd in Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Timothy Powell’s study of multiculturalism in Melville’s work in Ruthless Democracy; Jonathan Elmer’s work on Melville, race, and sovereignty in On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Ivy Wilson’s reading of the artful shadows of democracy in “Benito Cereno” in Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics in the Antebellum US (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and countless other studies with which the chapters that follow are in close dialogue. 14. Brian Yothers’s Melville’s Mirrors: Literary Criticism and America’s Most Elusive Author (Rochester, NY: Camden House Press, 2011) offers the most comprehensive examination of Melville criticism; also see Chris Castiglia’s introduction to “Melville and His Critics,” Leviathan 13, no. 1 (2011): 5–­9. 15. The root sense of radical thus connects origins and foundations to that which is “fundamental to or inherent in the natural processes of life; vital.” OED Online, s.v. “radical, adj. and n.” (accessed January 5, 2021). With gratitude to Dom Mastroianni for pointing me to this etymology. 16. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney compare politics to a colonial fort waging warfare on the common land and life that surrounds it. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 17. 17. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1991), 73–­74.

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18. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1976), 290–­ 293. Arendt also enlists Billy Budd in her critique of violence in both On Revolution and On Violence (New York: Harcourt, 1970). For an incisive reading of Arendt’s use of literary examples, see Munia Bhaumik, “Literary Arendt: The Right to Political Allegory,” The Yearbook of Comparative Literature 61 (2015): 11–­34. 19. Arendt, On Revolution, 74. 20. Ibid., 24. 21. “[P]ower comes into being only if and when men join themselves together for the purposes of action, and it will disappear when, for whatever reason, they desert one another” (Ibid., 166). Also see On Revolution, 136–­39, 161–­67, 210, 223–­24. 22. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 93, 95. 23. Claude Lefort argues that her emphasis on revolution as “a moment of beginning, or beginning again” differentiates Arendt from twentieth-­century liberal theorists and calls for a reevaluation of her work as part of the post-­Marxist turn toward radical democracy in the 1980s. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 45, 54–­55. 24. Ibid., 17. 25. “Democracy is what it is only in the différance by which it defers itself and differs from itself. It is what it is only by spacing itself beyond being and even beyond ontological difference; it is (without being) equal and proper to itself only insofar as it is inadequate and improper . . . behind and ahead of itself. . . . That is why, once again, it is not certain that democracy is a political concept through and through.” Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pasqaule-­A nne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 38–­39. 26. Jacques Rancière, “Does Democracy Mean Something?” in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2010), 50. 27. Though not entirely—­Jacques Rancière and Chantal Mouffe are the principal French theorists of political paradox. The activist and filmmaker Astra Taylor also uses paradox as an organizing principle of Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019). 28. Sheldon Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” Constellations 1, no. 1 (1994): 23. 29. William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 137–­38. 30. Bonnie Honig, Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), xvii. 31. Ibid., 49–­50. 32. Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 33–­34. 33. Arendt is among the first of the long tradition of political theorists thinking through Melville’s work, including Michael Rogin, Thomas Dumm, Bonnie Honig, Jason Frank, and the contributors to Jason Frank’s edited volume A Political Companion to Herman Melville—­not to mention the Bartleby-­theory tradition, which I discuss in more detail in “Melville and the Conceits of Theory,” in The New Melville Studies, ed. Cody Marrs, 138–­50 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 34. See Jason Frank’s introduction to A Political Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Jason Frank (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2013), 2–­3.

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35. Paul Downes, Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 61. 36. F. R. Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics: Political Philosophy Beyond Fact and Value (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 28. 37. Fredericks, Melville’s Art of Democracy, 4. 38. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” 23. 39. For this reason, Paul Downes’s work has long emphasized the structure of supplementarity, as well as artifice, in representation, highlighting its retroactive effect of uncompleting what it augments. See both his Democracy, Monarchy & Early American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature. 40. Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 16–­17. 41. Ibid., 9. 42. Ibid., 80. 43. William Connolly, The Fragility of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 10. 44. Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence (New York: Verso, 2020), 10–­11. 45. See Otter and Sanborn’s introduction to Melville and Aesthetics, ed. Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 3. 46. Sam Otter, “Reading Moby-­Dick,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert Levine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 80; Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); K. L. Evans, One Foot in the Finite (Evanston, IL: Nortwestern University Press, 2018), 21–­22; Sharon Cameron, “Lines of Stone,” in Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). See essays by Branka Arsić, Stuart Burrows, and Michael Snediker in Melville’s Philosophies, ed. Branka Arsić and K. L. Evans (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). 47. OED Online, s.v. “figure, n.” (accessed January 22, 2021); OED Online, s.v. “literal, adj. and n.” (accessed January 22, 2021). 48. Evans, One Foot in the Finite, 8. Evans gestures toward the political significance of understanding fiction as an opening into another world, with other possible ways of living (22). 49. Michael Snediker, “Pierre and the Non-­Transparencies of Figuration,” ELH 77, no. 1 (2010): 217–­35. 50. Michael Snediker, Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021) 3, 13–­1 4. “Thinking about figuration as an evolving substance interrupts the convention by which description is treated as subordinate to the textual verisimilitude of characters and plot” (43). 51. See in particular Robert K. Wallace, Melville and Turner: Spheres of Love and Fright (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992); Samuel Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Cameron, “Lines of Stone,” Branka Arsić, Passive Constitutions; or, 7-­1 /2 Times Bartleby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); and Jonik, Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman, in addition to seminal bibliographic work by Merton Sealts and Mary K. Bercaw-­Edwards, and others. 52. Taylor, Democracy May Not Exist . . . , 12–­13.

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Chapter 1: Verdure, Imperial History, and State-­of-­Nature Theory 1. Tom Nurmi also focuses on “verdure” as part of Melville’s lexicon, defining it as a term that describes a landscape so dense with life that “it is difficult to discern where individual species begin and others end.” Tom Nurmi, Magnificent Decay: Melville and Ecology (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2020) 29–­30.” 2. Mitchell Breitwieser, “Pacific Speculations: Moby-­Dick and Mana,” Arizona Quarterly 67, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 1–­46. Breitwieser follows Sam Otter, Geoff Sanborn, and Bruce Harvey, all of whom argue that what Tommo is least able to contend with among the Typee is the evidence of their civilization, their art, and their history—­ tattooing in Otter’s account, the performance of ferocity in Sanborn’s, history and common law in Harvey’s. Samuel Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 49; Geoffrey Sanborn, The Sign of the Cannibal (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 116; Bruce Harvey, “ ‘Precepts Graven on Every Breast’: Typee and Forms of Law,” American Quarterly 45, no. 3 (1993): 394–­4 24. 3. Harvey, “ ‘Precepts Graven on Every Breast,’ ” 410. 4. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Locke Eastlake (New York: Dover, 2006), xxvii. 5. John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 8. 6. Goethe, Theory of Colours, xxx. 7. Michael Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 8. 8. Most scholars agree that Melville encountered Goethe’s color theory in the late 1840s, before he composed “The Whiteness of the Whale,” but date his serious engagement with painting after his 1857 trip to Europe. See Wallace, Melville and Turner: Spheres of Love and Fright; Michaela Giesenkirchen, “ ‘Still Half Blending with the Blue of the Sea’: Goethe’s Theory of Colours in Moby-­Dick,” Leviathan 7, no. 1 (2005): 3–­18; Elisa Tamarkin, “Melville with Pictures,” The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert Levine, 169–­86 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 9. Writing in 1991, John Bryant summarizes several decades of critical analysis of this property, quoting Edward Rosenberry on the challenge of “finding the right language to express this fundamental tragicomic blend.” Rosenberry also called it a “mingled brew,” while Bryant ultimately opts for the “aesthetics of repose,” which he argues Melville derived from the picturesque tradition in order to “express this chiaroscuro . . . and stress liminal and perpetually interpenetrating states of mind.” Like Bryant, I am interested in the visual and painterly aspects of Melville’s bifurcated aesthetics in this chapter; indeed, his essay’s title, “Toning Down the Green,” points to the significance of green to the visual field of Melville’s writing. However, where Bryant traces the development of Melville’s authorial voice as an “accommodation” of these tendencies—­his “narrative voice in its many tonalities is a hard-­fought accommodation of the conflict of impulses” (161)—­my reading concerns how these aesthetic tendencies allow Melville to return again and again to recurrent crises in democracy that cannot be resolved or reconciled. John Bryant, “Toning Down the Green: Melville’s Picturesque,” in Savage Eye: Melville and the Visual Arts, ed. Christopher Sten, 145–­61 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1991). Tamarkin follows Bryant in reading Melville’s “picturesque” aesthetic as one of balancing and accommodating

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differences, but she takes a step further to point out that, in this, “the picturesque is a political proposition” (“Melville with Pictures,” 178). 10. Colin Dayan, “Melville’s Creatures,” American Impersonal: Essays with Sharon Cameron, ed. Branka Arsić, 45–­56 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 54; Breitwieser, “Pacific Speculations,” 32. 11. Michel Pastoureau, Green: The History of a Color, trans. Jody Gladding (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014): 9. 12. I am invoking a term here that is closely associated with Hannah Arendt’s “space of appearance,” but in what follows I will also be pushing it in the direction of what Jacques Rancière calls “a gap in the sensible itself.” For Rancière, politics have no stable or proper space as Arendt claims, but come into being at the moment of disruption, where a gap in what can appear is suddenly staged or revealed (Dissensus, 38). 13. Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred?, 8. 14. Ibid., 66. 15. Melville’s sources on the exploration of the Marquesas include William Ellis, Polynesian Researches, During a Residence of Nearly Eight Years in the Society and Sandwich Islands (London: Fisher, Son & Newgate, 1831); G. H. von Langsdorff, Voyages and Travels in Various Parts of the World . . . (London: Henry Colburn, 1813–­1 4); Charles S. Stewart, A Visit to the South Seas in the USS Vincennes . . . (New York: John Haven, 1831). 16. Parker, Herman Melville, 211; Harvey, “ ‘Precepts Graven on Every Breast,’ ” 412. 17. Arendt, On Revolution, 9. 18. Otter details the ways in which the fear of cannibalism is a textual diversion from the full-­on panic that Tommo experiences at the prospect of tattooing and its consequences for his whiteness (Melville’s Anatomies, 19, 45–­47). Jason Berger proposes a similar reading, arguing through Lacan that this fear is itself a mask for a lost identity and place in the “West’s symbolic schema.” Jason Berger, Antebellum at Sea: Maritime Fantasies in Nineteenth-­Century America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 114. 19. Thus T. Walter Herbert describes a “subtle, ambivalent balancing” in Tommo’s voice as he contemplates the contradictions of what is called civilization; Harvey examines the co-­presence of a “historically determined set of positive law codes and a transhistorical law of the heart” in Tommo’s ethnography of the islanders; and Sanborn identifies in Tommo’s narrative “the ambivalence at the heart of the discourse on colonialism, as embodied in the discourse on cannibalism.” T. Walter Herbert, Marquesan Encounters: Melville and the Meaning of Civilization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 155; Harvey, “ ‘Precepts Graven on Every Breast,’ ” 396; Sanborn, Sign of the Cannibal, 77. Also see Michael Rogin’s account of Tommo’s competing desires, “the alternative of patriarchal domination and passive absorption into nature” (Subversive Genealogy, 48). 20. Indeed, Sanborn portrays Melville as something of a conscientious historicist, “anxious throughout Typee to avoid the taint of ‘theory’ ” and concerned that “he was setting himself up to be attacked as a Rousseauian throwback” (Sign of the Cannibal, 87). 21. Bryant reads Chapter 4 for the liabilities of its “amiable digressions,” most of which were cut from the American edition. John Bryant, Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 136–­39.

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22. Sean Goudie reads the narrative analepsis and prolepsis of chapter 1, arguing that such moves are purposeful means of “hybridizing” the text to highlight the gap between the narrating Tommo and the new arrival to the Marquesas. Sean X. Goudie, “Fabricating Ideology: Clothing, Culture, and Colonialism in Melville’s Typee,” Criticism 40, no. 2 (1998): 217–­35. Also see Justine Murison’s analysis of the disrobed women of these chapters in “ ‘Nudity and Other Sensitive States’: Counterprivacy in Herman Melville’s Fiction,” American Literature 89, no. 4 (2017): 697–­726. 23. Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred?, 66. Nukuheva, in the eyes of Melville’s Tommo, is a contact zone in the fullest sense of Mary Louise Pratt’s phrase as well: “a social space where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.” Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 34. 24. Connolly traces this paradox to the impossible emergence of the general will in Rousseau’s Social Contract, for which to occur “effect (social spirit) would have to become cause (good laws), and cause would have to become effect” (The Ethos of Pluralization, 138). 25. Honig, Emergency Politics, xvii–­x viii. 26. In Honig’s expansion upon Connolly’s claim that the paradox of politics in Rousseau is fundamentally temporal, she shows how this paradox does not confine itself to founding moments in Rousseau’s theory of the social contract or Arendt’s theory of political beginnings. Instead, the paradox of politics (“how to (re)shape a multitude into a people, daily”) is something that constantly shifts registers, remaining a permanent component of the political (Ibid. 15). 27. In his exhaustive account of the composition of Typee in Melville Unfolding, John Bryant divides this chapter into six sections and writes that the sequence of their composition is “anybody’s guess” (213). Still, on the basis of his account of the stages of Melville’s revisions and additions to the manuscript, Bryant hypothesizes that the print chapters 4 and 5 were originally a single, unwieldy chapter, which Melville cut in two as he added research from Stewart and Porter, before sending the manuscript to England in care of his brother Gansevoort in July 1845 (35–­36). My long reading of this chapter presumes a continuity between these segments, regardless of the sequence of their arrangement, through which Melville develops a complex argument about the relationship between the politics of revolution in America and France, and their imperial expansion in the South Seas. John Bryant, Melville Unfolding: Sexuality, Politics, and the Versions of Typee (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008). 28. Thomas Scorza and Bryant both remark on the echoes of the Declaration’s language in this passage, with Bryant reading it as exaggerated mock-­political discourse, and Scorza arguing that Tommo “indicates his enlightened understanding that the Dolly’s society was created by a social contract and founded upon natural rights philosophy” (105)—­terms which, I argue, Tommo understands to be decoupled. Bryant, Melville and Repose; Thomas Scorza, “Tragedy in the State of Nature: Melville’s Typee,” Interpretations: Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 1 (1979): 103–­120. 29. Arendt, On Revolution, 120. 30. Ibid., 161. 31. Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” New Political Science 7, no. 1 (1986): 10.

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32. Harvey develops a similar point to argue that the Dolly operates in a lawless state (“ ‘Precepts Graven on Every Breast,’ ” 403). 33. Omoo, 402. 34. See Honig, Emergency Politics, 10. 35. On Revolution, 99. When, Arendt continues, the Déclaration des droits de l’homme makes the “pre-­political” realm of necessity the “very content” of politics (rather than the historical act of promising), “Rousseau’s ‘natural man’ ” is reconceived as a historical subject. 36. Ibid., 104. 37. Honig, Emergency Politics, 37. Where Honig argues that Arendt incorporates the paradox of politics into her account of the American Revolution (36), Jason Frank argues that Arendt misconstrues the role of constituent power in America out of her drive to “disenthrall” political theory from “the spell of paradox and the absolute,” both of which she associates with the French Revolution and not the American (Constituent Moments, 43). 38. Rancière is responding to and revising Arendt’s critique of the “perplexity” of rights, which amount to a void on the one hand and a tautology on the other (Dissensus, 67). 39. Everything following the first description of the Typees was cut from the first American edition; for an extremely detailed account of the changes, see Bryant, Melville Unfolding. 40. Herbert, Marquesan Encounters, 79; also see T. Walter Herbert, “Melville Among the Cannibals and American Empire,” Leviathan 11, no. 2 (2009): 71–­80. 41. David Porter, Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean, Vol. II, (New York: Wiley and Halstead, 1822), 71. 42. Ibid., 79. 43. Ibid., 31. 44. Ibid., 69–­70. 45. Ibid., 102. 46. Bryant offers a painstaking account of what he calls “the complex imbrication” of Melville’s text with Porter’s Journal, which he shows Melville first read and responded to in a late stage of revising the manuscript. Bryant identifies key language that Melville appears to lift directly from Porter: Tommo’s exclamation, “How often is the term ‘savages’ incorrectly applied!” is drawn from volume two of the 1815 edition, “they have been so stigmatized by the name of savage; it is a term wrongly applied.” Bryant, Melville Unfolding, 235–­38, 235. 47. Porter pauses both before and after the invasion to appreciate the valley: “When I had reached the summit of the mountain, I stopped to contemplate that valley which, in the morning, we had viewed in all its beauty, the scene of abundance and happiness. A long line of smoking ruins now marked our traces from one end to the other; the opposite hills were covered with the unhappy fugitives, and the whole presented a scene of desolation and horror” ( Journal of a Cruise, 98, 105). 48. Ibid., 100. 49. Ibid., 99. 50. Here, I depart from Bryant’s reading: “Melville’s version of Porter exposes Porter’s self-­contradictions. This stigmatized monster and snake could see beauty and know that falsity of the word ‘savage,’ but he could not acknowledge his own com-

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plicity in the destruction of a people. What enhances the critical values of Melville’s fluid text is that his construction of a version of Porter is also a reflection of himself. He, too, has been complicit in the conditions of the colonial encounter. He, too, was opposed to imperialism, and yet a part of it” (Melville Unfolding, 239). 51. Rancière, Dissensus, 37. 52. Indeed, as Sanborn argues, the Typees themselves have become artful in the deployment of this reputation as a way to secure their valley and resist foreign incursions (Sign of the Cannibal, 116). 53. Also interested in Tommo’s description of synaesthetic rapture, Branka Arsić offers a bracing reading of this passage—­and of Typee as a whole—­as a drug narrative, where nature itself “is an endless source of drugs” to be put in the service of a new perception (Passive Constitutions, 186n14). 54. The Oxford English Dictionary further notes an archaic connotation of “recess” that links it to natural forces and processes: “With reference to a natural phenomenon, as water, the sea, the planets, etc.: the action or an act of withdrawing or receding (from a certain point).” OED Online, s.v. “recess, n.” (accessed May 12, 2013). 55. Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origins of Inequality,” 39. 56. Herbert describes the narrator as one who “finds his mind radically divided between horror and profound admiration for the islanders, as it is also divided between a hatred for civilization and a frantic desire to return to it” (Marquesan Encounters, 158). Otter traces the persistent readings of Tommo’s ambivalence to D. H. Lawrence (Melville’s Anatomies, 9), and Sanborn frames it as the ambivalence of colonial discourse itself (Sign of the Cannibal, 116). 57. Herbert, Marquesan Encounters, 157. 58. To be clear, though I am claiming here that Tommo “feels” the arrangement of the sensible world, I do not mean to suggest that Rancière’s term refers to individual sensation, but that Tommo comes into contact with those feelings that are possible and those that are impossible according to a specific imperial arrangement of the world (Dissensus, 38). 59. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Penguin, 1985), 185–­86. 60. Both tribes, it seems, practice cannibalism. Otter, Melville’s Anatomies, 11. 61. Critic [London], March 14, 1846, in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 15. Emphasis in original. 62. Sanborn, Sign of the Cannibal, 87. 63. In Evert Duyckinck’s more favorable assessment of Typee in the March 18, 1846, New York Morning News, he makes both gestures: “Curiosity is piqued, good sense flattered; there is a dash of romantic Rousseauism, with now and then a shadow of the Cannibal as corrective” (Higgins and Parker, Herman Melville, 18). 64. Higgins and Parker, Herman Melville, 18. 65. Dan Latimer also remarks on the “peculiar affinity” between Rousseau’s tendency to “entertain on any given subject at least two irreconcilable points of view” and Melville’s “ambivalence toward ‘natural man’ ” (218–­19), arguing that Melville’s ambivalence is drawn straight from Rousseau’s, and both are symptomatic of both writers’ lingering reliance on Calvinist views of sin and paradise (231). Dan Latimer “Oedipus in the South Seas: The Case of Herman Melville’s Typee,” Essays in Literature (1994): 218–­34.

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66. The story of Rousseau’s insistence, at Diderot’s urging, on arguing against the favorable influence of the arts and sciences on mankind in his Dijon thesis is recounted in the Penny Cyclopaedia entry on Rousseau, which uses this as illustration of Rousseau’s “bias for paradox and exaggeration.” “Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques,” The Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, Vol. XX (London: Charles Knight & Co., 1833–­43), 194. 67. Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, 138; also see Deleuze’s account of Rousseau’s “comic genius,” in Gilles Deleuze, “Jean-­ Jacques Rousseau, Precursor of Kafka, Céline, and Ponge,” in Desert Islands and Other Texts, trans. Michael Taormina (Los Angeles: Semio(texte), 2004), 52. 68. Maurice S. Lee, Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830–­1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 149. 69. Downes, Hobbes, 70. 70. Higgins and Parker, Herman Melville, 18. Of course, that “shadow of the Cannibal” owes a great deal to the relativizing view of Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals,” and may not be as “corrective” as Duyckinck hopes (Otter, Melville’s Anatomies, 47–­49; Scorza, “Tragedy in the State of Nature,” 110–­11). 71. Downes, Hobbes, 70, 219–­20; Lee, Slavery, 148–­49. 72. Michael Rogin argues that “Herman Melville entered literature as a spokesman for the aboriginal victims of Manifest Destiny” (Subversive Genealogy, 48). 73. Hobbes, Leviathan, 81. 74. The famous first paragraph of Part 2, “Of Common-­Wealth,” collapses causes and effect in the creation of a social contract, describing “The final Cause, End or Designe of men” as “the foresight of their own preservation . . . that is, to say, of getting themselves out from that miserable condition of Warre” (Hobbes, Leviathan, 223). 75. All emphasis in original; ibid., 85–­86. 76. Ibid., 88. 77. Ibid., 94, 130. 78. Ibid., 127–­28, 130. 79. Rousseau’s emphasis. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau’s Political Writings, ed. Alan Ritter and ed. and trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 20, 25–­26. 80. Ibid., 28. 81. Ibid., 13. In addition to referencing Rousseau’s theory that the reflective mind produces bodily suffering, Tommo also paraphrases Rousseau’s response to Hobbes’s claim that there is no primitive idea of “virtue”—­namely, that such a claim is founded on the “inappropriate inclusion” of crimes and passions that are “social” and not “natural” (Rousseau’s Political Writings, 26–­27; Typee, 151). 82. In explaining the lack of a sense of futurity in the natural state, Rousseau draws from the writings of the missionary Jean-­Baptiste du Tertre (Rousseau’s Political Writings, 20). 83. Peter Melville, “The Sleepy Carib: Rousing the Native Informant in Rousseau, European Romantic Review 13 (2002): 183–­89. 185. 84. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, Vol. I (London: J. Bew, 1783), 76–­7 7. “Je m’acheminois gaiement avec mon dévot guide et sa sémillante compagne: nul accident ne troubla mon voyage; j’etois dans la plus heureuse situation de corps et d’esprit où j’aie été de mes jours. Jeune, vigoreux, plein de santé, de sécurité, de confiance en moi

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et aux autres, j’etois dans ce court mais précieux moment de la vie où sa plenitude expansive étend, pour ainsi dire, notre être par toutes nos sensations, et embellit á nos yeux la nature entire du charme de notre existence.” J.-­J. Rousseau, Les Confessions, tome premier (Paris: Charles Gosselin, et. al., 1822), 117. Melville’s journal entry from London on December 15, 1849, records his purchase of “the much-­desired copy of Rousseau’s Confessions for eleven shillings” ( J, 40). 85. Scorza, “Tragedy in the State of Nature,” 112; Harvey, 417. 86. Rousseau, Confessions, 44–­45. 87. Butler’s italics, Force of Nonviolence, 45. 88. Cast in Rancière’s terms, one might say that Tommo comes to perceive a new distribution of the sensible that is the foundation of Typee politics: “Politics, before all else, is an intervention in the visible and the sayable” (Dissensus, 36). 89. Breitwieser reads Tommo’s experience of the unintelligibility of taboo in the context of other South Seas narratives to argue that, whereas writers like Stewart tried to decipher it like “a sort of deranged copy of Calvin’s Providence,” Melville’s Tommo happily decides not even to try (“Pacific Speculations,” 9, 12). Chapter 2: Verdigris and Radical Democracy 1. Butler, Force of Nonviolence, 45. 2. Identity always returns in “horror,” Arsić argues, because it is the endpoint of the gathering of pain into an “I”: “I is the pain that incessantly returns to itself to pain itself more, to be more intimate with itself ” (Passive Constitutions, 85–­86). Also see chapter 2 of Michael Jonik’s Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman for the most extensive exploration of Melville’s reference to the “all-­feeling”—­a phrase which, Jonik shows, Melville likely gleaned from Thomas Carlyle’s misquotation of Goethe, but which he imbues with specifically Spinozaist vitalism where “the all is immanent to the one” (83, 86). 3. Jonik, Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman, 84. 4. See Wolin’s “Fugitive Democracy,” Honig’s Emergency Politics, and Connolly’s Fragility of Things (9). 5. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” 23. 6. OED Online, s.v. “radical, adj. and n.” 7. See, for instance, C.L.R. James’s reading of Pierre as a narcissistic bourgeois intellectual in chapter 5 of Mariners, Renegades and Castaways; Priscilla Wald’s claim that Pierre is unprepared for the task of authorship and the autonomy it demands (107–­8) ) in “Hearing Narrative Voices in Melville’s Pierre, boundary 2 17, no. 1 (1990): 100–­32; Michael Paul Rogin’s argument that Pierre’s self-­referentiality is the mark of his political failings (Subversive Genealogy, 179); and Sacvan Bercovitch’s emphasis on Pierre’s antidemocratic conformity (301) in “How to Read Melville’s Pierre,” in Herman Melville: A Collection of Critical essays, ed. Myra Jehlan (New York: Prentice Hall, 1994). More recently, Elizabeth Duquette has offered an astute reading of Pierre’s “underauthorized” performatives and failed speech acts in the “nominal conversion” of sister into wife (124) in “Pierre’s Nominal Conversions,” in Otter and Sanborn, Melville and Aesthetics. 8. As Alexis de Tocqueville suggests with his image of “un couche démocratique” (which Gerald Bevan translates as “a democratic patina”) that covers the true colors of an aristocratic society. Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, tresième

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edition, tome premier (Paris: Pagnere, 1850), 55; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, tr. Gerard Bevan (New York: Penguin, 2003), 58. 9. Dominic Mastroianni, “Revolutionary Time and the Future of Democracy in Melville’s Pierre,” ELH 56, no. 4 (2010): 391–­4 23, 408. 10. See William Spanos, “Pierre’s Extraordinary Emergency: Melville and the Voice of Silence,” boundary 2, 28, no. 2–­3 (2001): 100–­155; Snediker, “Pierre and the Non-­Transparencies of Figuration” and Contingent Figure; Dominic Mastroianni, Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Jonik, Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman. 11. Paul Grimstad describes the experimentalism of Pierre in terms of Melville’s “refusal of the criteria of unity and verisimilitude” and his embrace of an opaque, dense, and intensely self-­reflective novel. Paul Grimstad, Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson to the Jameses (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 67. 12. Connolly, Fragility of Things, 10. 13. Pierre has been widely read for its engagement with painting, from the Hudson Valley school to the dueling portraits. In Melville’s Anatomies, Otter develops the richest reading of the novel’s disruptive view of American landscape painting, describing the “stubborn, recalcitrant landscape” that draws its viewer in only to pry open and penetrate the viewer’s eyes (172–­73). 14. Goethe, Theory of Colours, 163. 15. Eastlake included excerpts from his Goethe translation in Contributions to the Literature of the Fine Arts (1848), which Wallace shows was checked out to Lemuel Shaw from the Boston Atheneum during Melville’s visit in January and February of 1849 (Wallace, Melville and Turner, 168, 170). 16. Wallace, Melville and Turner, 169–­70. On Turner and Goethe, see Gerald Finley, “ ‘Pigment into Light’: Turner and Goethe’s Theory of Colours,” European Romantic Review 2, no. 1 (1991): 39–­60; John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (New York: Little, Brown, 1993), 204. 17. Wallace, Melville and Turner, 398–­99, 400. 18. Michaela Giesenkirchen, “Still Half Blending with the Blue of the Sea”: Goethe’s Theory of Colors in Moby-­Dick,” Leviathan 7, no. 1 (2005): 3–­18. For an account of Melville’s later readings of Goethe, see Tamarkin, “Melville with Pictures,” 169–­70. 19. Giesenkirchen, “Still Half Blending,” 6, 14. 20. In both cases, she claims, Melville finds that the self-­transcendence promised by a noumenal “all” can offer “no livable alternative to our wretched ‘isolato’ identities and an exasperating universal light ‘that only calls forth but gives it not again’ ” (Ibid., 18). 21. Goethe, Theory of Colours, xix. Eastlake’s translation—­the only one available in English—­includes both the Preface and the Introduction to Goethe’s original three-­ volume study, but includes only the first part, “Zur Farbenlehre,” omitting parts 2 and 3, Goethe’s full polemic with Newton and his history of scientific and philosophical inquiries into color. 22. Ibid., xx. 23. Ibid., xxi. 24. Ibid., 163. 25. Gage, Color and Culture, 191. Gage notes that Goethe regretted the vitriol of his polemic against Newton by the end of his life (202).

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26. Ibid., 168. 27. Goethe, xxvii. 28. Gage, 155. 29. Goethe, xxvii. 30. Ibid., xxx. 31. Ibid., 11. 32. Ibid., 149–­50. 33. Ibid., 151. On the influence of this table on Turner’s painting in the 1840s, see Gage, 203–­4. 34. Gage, 202. 35. Ibid. 151. 36. Ibid., 201. 37. Goethe describes the face of a Hessian soldier returned from North America “who had painted his face with the positive colours, in the manner of the Indians” (Theory of Colours, 179). Michael Taussig calls this “the face of world history” (What Color Is the Sacred?, 3). 38. Goethe, Theory of Colours, 167. 39. Otter, Melville’s Anatomies, 203–­4. 40. Taussig, What Color Is the Sacred?, 42. 41. John Gage, Color in Turner: Poetry and Truth (New York: Praeger, 1969), 173. 42. Gage, Color in Turner, 185; Gage, Color and Culture, 203–­4. 43. Gage, Color in Turner, 186. 44. Much as Christopher Freeburg shows Melville does with Blackness across his work. Christopher Freeburg, Melville and the Idea of Blackness (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 45. Finley, “Pigment into Light,” 55. 46. Gage, Color in Turner, 186–­87. 47. Wallace quotes a famously derisive contemporary review of the paintings, and he suggests that Melville would have had access to such reviews through Evert Duyckinck (Melville and Turner, 226). 48. For years before Melville ever saw a Turner “with his own eyes,” Wallace writes, he read about Turner’s work in John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (Melville and Turner, 5). 49. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Vol. I (New York: Merill & Baker, 1873), 67. 50. Ibid., 140. 51. Ruskin’s emphasis, ibid., 141. 52. Ibid., 21. 53. Ibid., 171. 54. Ibid., 172. 55. “In vain does the text say she cannot speak; in vain it speaks to us the sound of the guitar, it is in no way affected by this silence or basso continuo.” Jacques Rancière, The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 154. 56. Cameron, “Lines of Stone”; Snediker, “Pierre and the Non-­Transparencies of Figuration.” 57. Snediker, “Pierre and the Non-­Transparencies of Figuration,” 223. 58. Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 64–­65. 59. Ibid., 43.

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60. Snediker, “Pierre and the Non-­Transparencies of Figuration,” 218. 61. Ibid., 223, 231. 62. Dayan, “Melville’s Creatures,” 54. 63. Wald, “Hearing Narrative Voices in Melville’s Pierre,” 106, 114. 64. Bercovitch, “How to Read Melville’s Pierre,” 301. 65. Rogin, Subversive Genealogy, 169– ­70. 66. Mastroianni, “Revolutionary Time,” 415. 67. OED Online, 3rd ed., s.v. “adjunct, adj. and n.” (accessed August 16, 2017). 68. Spanos, “Pierre’s Extraordinary Emergency,” 109. 69. Honig, Emergency Politics, xv. 70. Ibid., 8. 71. Ibid., 46–­47. 72. Ibid., 49, 54. 73. Ibid., 53. 74. Ibid., 79; see also Jason Frank on Frederick Douglass in Constituent Moments, 224–­25. 75. Connolly, The Fragility of Things, 10. 76. Ibid., 11. 77. Goethe, Theory of Colours, 110–­11. 78. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York: Penguin, 1986) 123. 79. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–­1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 32. Chapter 3 : Round Robins and Founding Violence 1. Arendt, On Revolution, 45. 2. Paine, Rights of Man (New York: Penguin, 1984), 77. 3. See Arendt, On Revolution, 152–­56, 172–­76, 196, 205; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-­Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 41; Eric Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 74–­76; Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do (London: Verso Press, 1991), 201. 4. Emanuel Joseph Sieyès, Qu’est-­ce que le tiers état? (Paris: Éditions de Boucher, 2002), 56. 5. Arendt, On Revolution, 152–­54. 6. Ibid., 156. 7. One key exception is Jason Frank, who discusses Arendt’s critique of Sieyès’s constituent power in the service of a larger argument for the persistence of “fraught and inherently contestable democratic claims” about the constitution of the people in the decades after the American Revolution. See chapter 2 of Constituent Moments, “Revolution and Reiteration.” 8. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 41; Santner, Royal Remains, 76. 9. Frank argues that such productivity is what Arendt misses in her critique of constituent power (Constituent Moments, 93). 10. Arendt, On Revolution, 152. 11. Ibid., 74.

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12. On Omoo as a break from Typee, see Geoffrey Sanborn, “The Motive for Metaphor: Typee, Omoo, Mardi,” in A Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Wyn Kelley (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2008), 369. 13. See Gordon Roper’s “Historical Note” in the Northwestern-­Newberry Omoo, 319–­20. More recent accounts of Melville’s nonlinear narrative include Sophia Mihic, “ ‘The End Was in the Beginning’: Melville, Ellison, and the Democratic Death of Progress in Typee and Omoo,” in Frank, A Political Companion to Herman Melville, 42–­ 69; Edward Sugden, “Different Time Zones: Newtonian Time, Herman Melville and Omoo,” Comparative American Studies 9, no. 2 (June 2011): 91–­105; and Erin Suzuki, “Frauds and Gods: The Politics of Religion in Melville’s Omoo and Mardi,” ESQ 53, no. 4 (2007): 360–­86. 14. Mihic, “End Was in the Beginning,” 43. A political theorist, Mihic asks a question that lies at the center of all of Melville’s work: “What political lessons can we learn . . . when the assumption of progress is thwarted and our faith in it is dissipated?” 15. Ibid., 61. 16. Reading Omoo on its own, Edward Sugden argues that its nonlinearity reflects Melville’s rejection of Newtonian time: “Melville is intensely resistant to deterministic, all-­encompassing and enumerating models of temporality, favouring instead a fluid, intermingling time . . . that is essentially qualitative rather than quantitative’ (“Different Time Zones,” 91). 17. John Samson describes Melville’s use of this term as a likely mistranslation and misattribution; “omoo” does not appear to derive from any Marquesan word, but more likely comes from a Tahitian word for traveling storytellers and the mythic tales they carried with them. John Samson, White Lies: Melville’s Narratives of Facts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989) 65–­66. 18. Suzuki, “Frauds and Gods,” 364–­65. 19. OED Online, s.v. “picaresque, adj. and n. (accessed June 28, 2018). Samson and Suzuki note that Melville derives his picaresque style in Omoo from the narrative accounts of missionaries whose travels through Tahiti Typee and Long Ghost replicate. Given the etymology of the picaresque, Melville’s satire of those pious picaros extends even to his style. 20. Katie McGettigen develops a compelling reading of these signatures through Derrida’s claims about the counterfeit nature of all signatures. Katie McGettigan, Herman Melville, Modernity and the Material Text (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2017), 45–­46. 21. Paine, 171. 22. Ibid., 179. 23. Ibid., 180; see Federalist 10 in particular. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (New York: Penguin, 1987), 122–­27. 24. Ibid., 181. 25. Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics, 28, 46. 26. Keenan Ferguson, “Who Eats Whom? Melville’s Anthropolitics at the Dawn of Pacific Imperialism,” in Frank, Political Companion to Herman Melville, 33. 27. Rogin, Subversive Genealogy, 84–­85, Ferguson, 32–­33. Also see Mark Howard, “Melville and the Lucy Ann Mutiny,” Leviathan 13, no. 2 (2011): 3–­16. Howard gives a thorough account of the Australian whaling industry and the tradition of activism among its crews over their working and living conditions.

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28. McGettigan, Herman Melville, Modernity and the Material Text, 45. 29. Ultimately, according to McGettigan, the answer to this question does not matter, but serves as evidence for Melville’s increasing resistance to the public pressure for “authentic” narratives (Ibid., 48). 30. As Michael Rogin noted in 1981, “mutiny was piracy in international law,” but in Omoo, even piracy seems to be played for laughs (Subversive Genealogy, 85). 31. Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates from their First Rise and Settlement in the Island of Providence to the Present Time, 4th ed., 2 vols. (London: T Woodward, 1726). John Robert Moore first attributed A General History of the Pyrates to Defoe in 1939 on the basis of handwriting similarities in known manuscript pages, but this was later disputed by P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens in The Canonization of Daniel Defoe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). Marcus Rediker concurs with Furbank and Owens, arguing that whoever he was, “Captain Johnson” displays “a deeper and more detailed knowledge of things maritime than Defoe could possibly have had.” Rediker notes that only one chapter of Johnson’s book—­on Captain Misson’s antislavery pirate utopia—­is a confirmed fiction and that A General History of the Pyrates is “widely regarded as a highly reliable source” for maritime historians. Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 179–­80fn24. 32. Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–­ 1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 84. Aravamudan is the only scholar I’ve found who notes the link between Melville’s Round Robin and the account in Johnson’s General History, though he makes no claims about influence (see 351fn16). 33. OED Online, s.v. “round robin, n.” (accessed July 5, 2018). Johnson’s General History is listed by the OED as the second such use, Melville’s Omoo is listed as the fourth. 34. Johnson, General History, 330–­31. 35. Aruvamudan, Tropicopolitans, 84. 36. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-­Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso, 2000), 240. 37. Johnson, General History, “Preface.” 38. That mutual pledge was “excluding all Irish Men,” however, apparently owing to a bad experience with one “Kennedy” (Johnson, General History, 230). 39. Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 60–­1. 40. Ibid., 77. 41. Johnson, General History, 230. 42. Ibid., 338. 43. Ibid. Rediker notes that at least six of these men were hanged in 1723, including the man who played the judge (Villains of All Nations, 160–­61). 44. Arendt, On Revolution, 156. 45. Derrida, Rogues, 96–­103. 46. My emphasis, ibid. 102. Aravamudan cogently calls into question Derrida’s equation of rogue and sovereign in light of the Enlightenment discourses on roguery in political philosophy, economy, and literature—­specifically in the work of Montesquieu, Hobbes, and Defoe. Srinivas Aruvamudan, “Subjects / Sovereigns / Rogues,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 40, no. 3 (2007): 457–­65. Also useful here is Sonja Schillings’s examination of the constellation of figures classed as “hostis humani generis”

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around which jurisprudence and philosophy define the terms of “legitimate violence,” from early modern antipiracy laws to the War on Terror. Sonja Schillings, Enemies of All Mankind: Fictions of Legitimate Violence (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth University Press, 2016). 47. Connolly, Fragility of Things, 10–­11; Étienne Balibar, Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 52–­53. 48. Suzuki also notes the tension between Omoo’s picaresque style and the story of genocide it tells in the central chapters of the book (“Frauds and Gods,” 367–­69). 49. Sugden, “Different Time Zones,” 10. 50. Geoffrey Sanborn, “Motive for Metaphor,” 372. Also see Jordan Alexander Stein, “Are American Novels ‘Novels’? Mardi and the Problem of Boring Books,” in The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-­Century American Literature, ed. Russ Castronovo, 42–­58 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), esp. 49; Dimock, Empire for Liberty, 43; and Cindy Weinstein, “The Calm Before the Storm: Laboring Through Mardi,” American Literature 65, no. 2 (1993): 239–­53. 51. Dimock, Empire for Liberty, 49–­50; Weinstein, “Calm Before the Storm,” 240–­1; Sanborn, “Motive for Metaphor,” 374; Stein, “Are American Novels ‘Novels’?,” 49. 52. Parker, Herman Melville, 592. 53. Ibid., 592; Berthold, American Risorgimento, 84. 54. Rogin, Subversive Genealogy, 103. 55. Arendt, On Revolution, 10, 154. 56. Derrida, Rogues, 13. 57. Balibar, Violence and Civility, 2, 67. 58. Ibid., 4. 59. Ibid., 50. 60. Ibid., 52. 61. Ibid., 53. 62. Ibid., 75. 63. Ibid., 37. 64. Ibid., 97. 65. Ibid., 104. 66. Michael Jonik describes “the form of the archipelago” in Melville’s writing more generally: it creates a “dynamic holding-­in-­tension of fragmentary and often divergent elements, texts, and experiences.” Michael Jonik, “ ‘Isle of Absentees’: The Form of the Archipelago in Melville’s Writing,” in Melville as Poet: The Art of Pulsed Life, ed. S. E. Markovitz (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2013): 166. 67. As Michael Warner argues of the violence in Melville’s poem “Shiloh: A Requiem (1862).” Michael Warner, “What Like a Bullet Can Undeceive?” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 41–­54. 68. Jonik, Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman, 137, 140. In Jonik’s account, Melville resolves this paradox on the level of the community’s constituent members; proposing “an open-­ended, experimental mode of being in common” that requires neither fathers nor founders, riotocracy creates new political subjectivities without presupposing its subjects (140).

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Chapter 4: Circles and Sovereignty An early version of this chapter was published as “Circles Upon Circles: Tautology, Form, and the Shape of Democracy in Tocqueville and Melville,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-­Century Americanists 1, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 121–­46. 1. Derrida specifically roots this “old-­new enigma of sovereignty . . . whether it be called democratic or not” in the ever-­present possibility of violence that gives force to right and law (Rogues, xi). 2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 9. 3. Ibid., 60, for all quotes in this paragraph. 4. Derrida, Rogues, xii. 5. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, tr. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 48–­49; Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 17; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 9; Derrida, Rogues, 13. 6. Santner, Royal Remains, xx–­x xii. 7. Santner, Royal Remains, xi; Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 159. 8. Balibar, Violence and Civility, 77–­7 8. The theoretical history of this enigma is often framed around the degree to which sovereignty and democracy coincide, presuming a gap which always collapses to expose hidden mechanisms that lead to democracy’s self-­destruction—­a residual structure of exception, a tautological presumption of necessity or autonomy—­and reveal it to be just another iteration of sovereignty. Examples include those tendencies that Derrida describes as democracy’s autoimmunity and suicide (Rogues, 33), or what Agamben calls “democracy’s specific aporia: it wants to put the freedom and happiness of men in the very place—­‘bare life’—­that marked their subjection” (Homo Sacer, 9–­10). More recent work has, by contrast, found in both Democracy in America and Moby-­Dick a broader and more complicated set of relations between democracy and sovereignty. See George Shulman, “Chasing the Whale: Moby-­Dick as Political Theory,” in Frank, A Political Companion to Herman Melville, 70–­108; Paul Downes, “Melville’s Leviathan,” in Arsić and Evans, Melville’s Philosophies, 315–­36; and Bonnie Honig, “Charged: Debt, Power, and the Politics of the Flesh in Shakespeare’s Merchant, Melville’s Moby-­Dick, and Eric Santner’s The Weight of All Flesh” in Eric Santner, The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject Matter of Political Economy, ed. Kevis Goodman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015): 134–­35. 9. Tocqueville, 58 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 514. 12. At the same time, in taking up the question of democracy in Moby-­Dick I build on this crucial body of scholarship. This chapter is especially indebted to Dennis Berthold, American Risorgimento; Wai Chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty; Jonathan Elmer, On Lingering and Being Last; C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways; Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy; and Nancy Ruttenburg, Democratic Personality. 13. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 9. 14. Ibid., 58. 15. Ibid., 60. 16. Schmitt, Political Theology, 48–­49. 17. Derrida’s emphasis, Rogues, 10. 18. Ibid., 10–­11.

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19. Ibid., 13. 20. Ibid., 38. 21. Ibid., 13–­1 4. 22. Samuel Weber notes that Derrida turns from what he sees as the singular image of God in Tocqueville to an image of the people as “gods” in Rousseau’s Social Contract, which “leads Derrida to reflect on how this alters the very notion of the divine, and with it, the sovereignty it informs.” Samuel Weber, “Rogue Democracy,” diacritics 38, no. 1–­2 (2008): 104–­20, 116. 23. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 514–­15. 24. Ibid., 513. 25. Ibid., 44. 26. Ibid., 514. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 514–­15. 29. Ibid., 515. 30. For a fuller discussion of “democratic despotism” and Tocqueville’s biopolitical nightmare scenario, see chapter 1 of Jennifer Greiman, Democracy’s Spectacle: Sovereignty and Public Life in Antebellum American Writing (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), esp. 39–­46. 31. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 515–­16. 32. Arendt, On Revolution, 50. Also see her chapter “The Social Question.” 33. “As it is, we are tempted to ask ourselves if the goodness of the poor white man’s country did not depend to a considerable degree upon black labor and black misery. . . . From this we can only conclude that the institution of slavery carries an obscurity even blacker than the obscurity of poverty” (Arendt, On Revolution, 61). 34. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 316. “Tangent” is George Lawrence’s translation for Tocqueville’s description of that which “touches” without entering: “Ces objets, qui touchent à mon sujet, n’y entrent pas; ils sont américains sans être démocratiques, et c’est surtout la démocratie dont j’ai voulu faire le portrait. J’ai donc dû les écarter d’abord; mais je dois y revenir en terminant.” 35. Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization, 170. 36. “You can make the Negro free, but you cannot prevent him facing the European as a stranger” (Democracy in America, 341); “The Americans of the South have . . . spiritualized despotism and violence” (361). For a much more extensive discussion of democracy, sovereignty, and slavery in Tocqueville, see chapter 1 of Greiman, Democracy’s Spectacle, esp. 62–­74. 37. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, 9 and 54. 38. Dimock, Empire for Liberty, 122. 39. Paul Downes reads Ahab’s insistence on Moby Dick’s malice as a recognition of equality akin to what Timothy Morton calls “the ecological thought.” (“Melville’s Leviathan,” 325). 40. Wai Chee Dimock and Cesare Casarino have also focused on Moby-­Dick’s recurring images of circles and circulation, as well as Ishmael’s penchant for circular syntax, but both identify this circularity with tautological forms of power. Where Ahab is the figure who exemplifies the tautology of sovereign selfhood for Dimock, for Casarino, the image of power as “a tautology for itself ” is found in the white whale as the text’s key image of Capital. See in particular Dimock, Empire for Liberty,

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chapter 4, and the third chapter of Cesare Casarino, Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 41. See, for example, the essays in Ahab Unbound: Melville and the Materialist Turn, ed. Meredith Farmer and Jonathan Schroeder (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022). 42. Shulman, “Chasing the Whale,” 87–­88. 43. Honig, “Charged,” 134–­35. 44. Casarino, Modernity at Sea, 97–­104. 45. Jonik, Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman, 39. 46. Casarino, Modernity at Sea, 118. 47. Helmut Müller-­ Sievers, The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012) 3. 48. Ibid., 4. 49. Ibid., 11, 66. 50. Müller-­Sievers argues that Marx makes a distinction between rolling (the motion of a cylinder) and revolution (the motion of a sphere), where the former describes the increasing automation that Marx believed would reduce the accumulation of Capital and ultimately lead to its self-­destruction and the latter describes the agency of the proletariat in seizing the means of production (The Cylinder, 100–­101). In literature, he argues, realism is a kinesmatic innovation in narration, independent of representational claims, measurable in the ways that serialization and free indirect discourse collapse the gap between story and plot in prose fiction by Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, and Henry James (104, 107, 152). 51. Ibid., 67. 52. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles,” Essays and Poems (New York: Library of America, 1996), 403. 53. Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 128. 54. Ibid., 17–­18. 55. Branka Arsić, On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 173. 56. Ibid., 173–­74. 57. Emerson, “Circles,” 405, 409, 413. 58. Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, 127. 59. Emerson, “Circles,” 414. 60. Peter Szendy uses the phrase “double enclosure” to describe the “incredible temporal knot” through which Ishmael weaves the book into the history that is inside it. Peter Szendy, Prophecies of Leviathan, trans. Gil Anidjar (New York: Fordham University Press, 3–­5). 61. Samuel Otter, “An Aesthetics in All Things,” Representations 104, no. 1 (2008): 121. 62. Dimock, Empire for Liberty, 130–­31. 63. Philip Armstrong, “ ‘Leviathan Is a Skein of Networks’: Translations of Nature and Culture in Moby-­Dick,” ELH 71 (2004): 1039–­1063, 1046–­1047. 64. King James Version, Job 41, 1–­4. 65. Downes, Hobbes, 157–­58. Also see Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign Volume I, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-­Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 24 and 55. 66. Honig, “Charged,” 153–­54; also see Downes, “Melville’s Leviathan,” 119.

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67. Albeit in a context she would likely abhor—­birthing and nursing. 68. Honig, “Charged,” 155–­56; Casarino, Modernity at Sea, 170–­72. 69. And critics often do, notably, David Charles Leonard, “The Cartesian Vortex in Moby-­Dick,” American Literature 51, no. 1 (1979): 105–­9. 70. Jonik, Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman, 54. 71. The Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, Vol. XXVI, 454–­55. 72. Michelle Sizemore, American Enchantment: Rituals of the People in the Post-­ Revolutionary World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 149–­50. 73. Jonik, Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman, 59, 64. Chapter 5: Gravity, Slavery, and Political Prophecy Earlier versions of the sections “The benevolence of the law of gravitation” and “Gravity is the air of all, but diversified in all” were published in “Melville’s Gravity: Necessity, Art, Democracy,” Textual Practice 35, no. 11 (2021): 1799–­2014.” An earlier version of the section “Democracy’s Supplement” was published in “Melville in the Dark Days of Democracy,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 18, no. 3 (October 2016): 11–­30. Copyright © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press and The Melville Society. Published with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. 1. By contrast, Ungar conceives that American slavery was “planted”—­indeed, he believes “the system an iniquity / In those who plant it and begin; / While for inheritors—­ alas / Who knows?” (Cl, IV.5.149–­51). 2. Dennis Berthold, “Democracy and Its Discontents,” in A Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Wyn Kelley (New York: Blackwell, 2006): 149–­64, esp. 158–­59. See Walter Bezanson’s “Historical and Critical Note,” reprinted in the Northwestern-­Newberry Clarel, 604–­608; Rogin, Subversive Genealogy, 283; and Berthold on the politics of Clarel in American Risorgimento, 230–­33. 3. Berthold, American Risorgimento, 233. 4. “But I was talking about the ‘Whale’. As the fishermen say, ‘he’s in his flurry’ when I left him some three weeks ago. I am going to take him up by his jaw, however, before long, and finish him up in some fashion of or another” (Corr., 192). 5. CM, 150; Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steven Corcoran (London and New York: Verso Books, 2014). 6. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 120. Burke’s “mortmain” also echoes ironically in the name of Clarel ’s embittered Swedish revolutionary, to whom I turn in chapter 6. 7. Plato, The Republic (New York: Penguin, 2007), in particular, part IX [Book VIII], chapters 6–­7. 8. Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, 41. 9. Rancière, Dissensus, 50. “Ground” appears to be Rancière’s term and not a translator’s; “Does Democracy Mean Something?” was delivered in English at the Birkbeck College, University of London, as part of its series “Adieu Derrida,” in 2005. Jacques Rancière, “Does Democracy Mean Something?” in Adieu Derrida, ed. Costas Douzinas, 84–­100 (London: Palgrave, 2007). 10. From “A Conflict of Convictions” (55) and “Apparition” (130), respectively. 11. George Shulman, American Prophecy: Race and Redemption in American Political Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008): 2–­5. 12. Frank, Constituent Moments, 8, 217.

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13. Shulman, American Prophecy, 2, 5. I am also drawing on the work of Quentin Meillassoux here, whose elaboration of the relationship between contingency and necessity strikes me as deeply Melvillean. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, tr. Ray Brassier (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012): 53. 14. Cody Marrs’s phrase for the transbellum era, through which he reframes the careers of all three of these writers. Cody Marrs, Nineteenth-­Century American Literature and the Long Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 15. David Blight, Prophet of Freedom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 230, 236. 16. Shulman, American Prophecy, 15, 28. 17. Frank, Constituent Moments, 210–­11. 18. Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, Vol. 2, 1847–­54 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982): 359–­88. 19. Kellie Carter Jackson, Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 7–­8. 20. Henry Highland Garnet, Walker’s Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life by Henry Highland Garnet, and also Garnet’s Address to the Slaves of the United States (Troy, NY: J.H. Tobin, 1848). 21. Frederick Douglass, “Is It Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper?” Frederick Douglass’ Paper (Rochester, NY), June 2, 1854. From America’s Historical Newspapers (accessed January 1, 2019). 22. William Channing reported Hayden’s account of this in a letter to Higginson, saying that Hayden had fired on Batcheldor to stop him from beating Higginson with a club. Quoted in Jackson, Force and Freedom, 72. For accounts of the failed rescue of Burns, also see Blight, Prophet of Freedom, 245–­47, and Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 515–­17. 23. Blight, Prophet of Freedom, 245–­47. 24. Arendt, On Revolution, 185. 25. Douglass “Is It Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper?” 26. Frederick Douglass, “Slavery and the Slave Power: An Address Delivered in Rochester, NY, on 1 December 1850,” The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, Vol. 2, 249–­60; Elihu Burritt, “Force of Gravity in the Moral World,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper September 8, 1848. 27. Douglass, “Slavery and the Slave Power,” 255–­56. 28. And this, too, while feuding with both men on and off over the decade. See Henry Highland Garnet to Frederick Douglass, June 16, 1849, and August 31. 1849, The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series Three: Letters, Vol. 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 382–­83, 387–­88. See also Frederick Douglass to Elihu Burritt, December 31, 1859, The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series Three: Letters, Vol. 2 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 288–­91. With thanks to Marcy Dinius for pointing me to these letters. 29. Jackson, Force and Freedom, 5. 30. She concedes that the Middle Passage epistemology has questioned “the very heart and intentions of White western democratic discourses,” and it has countered “anti-­Black discourses of African inferiority” (14–­16). But Wright is interested in exploring the ontological and epistemological possibilities for Black thought that might

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come from a post-­Newtonian framework, and she draws on quantum physics and theories of plural time and multiverses to imagine new ways to “define . . . equality in the midst of diversity” (34). That is, there are clear political implications to her largely philosophical project. Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 31. Christopher Peterson, “The Gravity of Melancholia: A Critique of Speculative Realism,” Theory & Event 18, no. 2 (2015). 32. The epigraph was omitted from the version that he reprinted in The Piazza Tales, though is often restored in later editions. 33. Russ Castronovo, “Racial Configurations of History in the Era of American Slavery,” American Literature 63, no. 3 (1993): 523–­47. 34. Ibid., 540. Founding, foundering, and foundling are not etymologically related: founding and foundering are rooted in the Latin, fundus, for base; founding in reference to the forging of metal is rooted in the Latin, fundere, to pour or melt; and foundling is rooted in the Middle English and Dutch, fundeling, for a deserted child. OED Online, s.v. “founder, v.”; “foundling, n.” (accessed February 25, 2022). 35. Carolyn Karcher details myriad thematic, characterological, and figurative links between the stories, arguing that together they compose one full statement about “the probable outcome of slavery in the New World.” Carolyn Karcher, Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race and Violence in Melville’s America (Baton Rouge, LA, and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 143. Greg Grandin takes the third epigraph from “The Bell-­Tower” as the title of his history of the Tryal revolt and of “slavery-­forged freedom” in the Americas more broadly. Greg Grandin, The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World (New York: Henry Holt, 2014): 290–­91. Ivy Wilson complicates earlier readings with a nuanced analysis of the ways that the characters of “The Bell-­Tower” evoke those of “Benito Cereno” only to scramble lines of reference between the positions of mastery and enslavement, so that Bannadonna, not Haman, evokes Babo through adjectives and symbols. Ivy Wilson, “ ‘no soul above’: Labor and the ‘Law of Art’ in Melville’s ‘The Bell-­Tower,’ ” Arizona Quarterly 63, no. 1 (2007): 27–­47, 40–­4 1. 36. Though, to be clear, neither Wilson nor Calder think these are bad things. In Calder’s words, it displays Melville’s “genius for striking the wrong note.” Alex Calder, “Blubber: Melville’s Bad Writing,” in Otter and Sanborn, Melville and Aesthetics, 30. Also see Berthold, “Democracy and Its Discontents,” 166; Wilson, “no soul above,” 38. 37. Castronovo, “Racial Configurations of History,” 535. 38. Berthold writes that the story’s political allegory is not that republics fail to live up to their egalitarian ideals, but that “unchecked equality and democracy lead to corruption as surely as does despotism” (“Democracy and Its Discontents,” 167). 39. I’m borrowing Deleuze’s word here for Bartleby’s “formula”: a grammatically correct statement that rings so strangely it ceases to have a representational function and instead produces a disruptive silence. Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, the Formula” in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997): 68–­90, 68–­69. 40. See, for example, Grandin, Empire of Necessity, 290, and Paul Hurh, American Terror: The Feeling of Thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 231. 41. Wilson, “no soul above,” 45fn23.

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42. Grandin, Empire of Necessity, 7–­8; Hurh, American Terror, 230–­31. 43. Calder, “Blubber,” 30. 44. Helen Vendler, “Melville and the Lyric of History,” The Southern Review 35, no. 5 (1999): 579–­94, 581. 45. Ibid., 580. The declension narrative is captured in Robert Penn Warren’s 1967 assessment that “we must see [Melville’s poetry] against the backdrop of his defeat as a writer, from which he suffered not only the pangs of disappointment and rejection, but the associated distress of ill health, disturbance of vision, and undoubtedly, since his father after failure had died mad, the fear of madness.” Robert Penn Warren, “Introduction,” Selected Poems of Herman Melville (New York: Random House, 1967), 25. 46. Vendler, “Melville and the Lyric of History,” 583–­85. 47. In order of citation: Hsuan Hsu, “War, Ekphrasis, and Elliptical Form in Melville’s Battle-­Pieces,” Nineteenth-­Century Studies 16 (2002): 51–­71, 58; Maurice Lee, “Writing Through the War: Melville and Dickinson After the Renaissance,” PMLA 115, no. 5 (2000), 1124–­28, 1126; Deak Nabers, “ ‘Victory of LAW’: Melville and Reconstruction,” American Literature 75, no. 1 (2003): 1–­30, 25; Michael Warner, “What Like a Bullet Can Undeceive?,” 42; Russ Castronovo and Dana Nelson, “Fahrenheit 1861: Cross-­Patriotism in Melville and Douglass,” and Carolyn Karcher, “White Fratricide and Black Liberation: Melville, Douglass, and Civil War Memory,” both in Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, ed. Robert Levine and Samuel Otter (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 346 and 351, respectively. 48. In two exquisite readings of history and temporality in Battle-­Pieces, Peter Coviello and Cody Marrs have both noted Melville’s affinity with Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in order to describe Melville’s own philosophy of history—­what Marrs describes as a movement of recurrence and supercession, in which only the capacity for violence progresses (97); and what Coviello calls the collision of “the cataclysmic present, the accumulated past, and the undisclosed future” (198). Cody Marrs, “A Wayward Art: Battle-­Pieces and Melville’s Poetic Turn,” American Literature 82, no. 1 (2010): 91–­119 ”; Peter Coviello, “Battle Music: Melville and the Forms of War,” in Otter and Sanborn, Melville and Aesthetics, 92–­212. 49. Michael André Bernstein, “Victims-­in-­Waiting: Backshadowing and the Representation of European Jewry,” New Literary History 29, no. 4 (1998): 625–­51. 50. The brackets appeared in the original, but they are not reproduced by the editors of the Northwestern-­Newberry edition. 51. Marrs, “A Wayward Art,” 93. 52. In Paul Hurh’s full sense of that word for the prevailing mood of The Piazza Tales (American Terror, 210–­13). 53. Thomas Dumm, “Misgivings: Stanley Cavell and the Politics of Autobiography,” Theory & Event 16, no. 2 (2013). 54. Karcher, “White Fratricide,” 352–­53; Rogin, Subversive Genealogy, 269. 55. Walt Whitman, The Portable Walt Whitman (New York: Penguin, 2004), 8. 56. Coviello, “Battle Music,” 197. 57. Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 76. 58. Rancière, Dissensus, 50. 59. William Blake’s print, “The Ancient of Days,” also served as the frontispiece of Europe: A Prophecy.

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60. For Lee, this absence of irony and subtext indicates a pragmatic turn in Melville’s thinking (401–­2). See Maurice Lee, “Melville, Douglass, the Civil War, Pragmatism” in Levine and Otter, Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville. Rogin is the first to argue that part of the “Supplement’s” failure lies in its clarity: whereas the poems ask questions about the future of the United States in a variety of voices, “Melville answered those questions in the prose Supplement . . . [s]peaking perhaps more reliably in his own voice than anywhere else in his work” (Subversive Genealogy, 280). 61. In an essay comparing images of volcanoes and meteors in Douglass’s poem “The Tyrant’s Jubilee” and Melville’s Battle-­Pieces, Gleason covers ground very similar to my chapter’s, to develop an account of the poems and the “Supplement” that I take as fairly representative of criticism on the volume. William Gleason, “Volcanoes and Meteors: Douglass, Melville, and the Poetics of Insurrection,” in Levine and Otter, Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville, 121. 62. In addition to Castronovo and Nelson and Karcher, see Berthold, “Democracy and Its Discontents,” in which he expands this reading strategy across Melville’s late work to argue that Melville’s writing “provokes radically different interpretations while realistically engaging political, social, ethical, legal, and personal issues from a multiplicity of perspectives . . . the hallmark of democratic debate” (154). 63. Castronovo and Nelson, “Fahrenheit 1861,” 346; Karcher, “White Fratricide,” 351. 64. In his essay “Shiloh,” Warner connects the redemptive burden placed on art to liberalism’s abstraction and depoliticization of violence from a placeless, pastoral vantage (“What Like a Bullet Can Undeceive?,” 41). 65. Rancière, Dissensus, 28. 66. Ibid., 36. 67. William Connolly defines the pluralizing process of democracy in terms of a superfluity that Melville’s Mississippi evokes—­that is, as a community’s “responsiveness to the fugitive flow of surplus and difference” (Ethos of Pluralization, xxv). For a fuller discussion of democracy and pluralization in The Confidence-­Man, see chapter 5 of Greiman, Democracy’s Spectacle, esp. 192–­201. 68. Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 47. 69. Ibid., 17. 70. Fred Moten, The Universal Machine: Consent Not to Be a Singular Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Presss, 2018), 77. 71. Ibid., 80. 72. Ibid., 101. 73. Ibid., 116. 74. See ibid., 82, 87, 116, 135. Chapter 6: Unplanted to the Last 1. Fred Moten and Wu Tsang, Who Touched Me? (Amsterdam: If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution, 2016) 29. 2. Ibid., 31. 3. Marrs, “A Wayward Art,” 98–­99. 4. Jeffrey Insko, History, Abolition, and the Ever-­Present Now in Antebellum American Writing (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2018), 166, 169. 5. All three bear out the claims of “Fragments of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the 12th Century”: “Indolence is Nature’s ally here; / Energy the child of Hell . . .” (PP, 284).

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6. Walt Whitman, “For You, O Democracy!,” in Portable Walt Whitman, 215. 7. For excellent accounts of Melville’s engagement with debates about the political and environmental stakes of agricultural practices, see Abbie Goode on the discourses of population, agrarianism, and unsustainable agricultural practices in Pierre and Ryan McWilliams on the relationship of agriculture to revolution in Israel Potter. Abbie Goode, “ ‘No Rural Bowl of Milk’: Demographic Agrarianism and Unsustainability in Pierre,” Studies in American Fiction 44, no. 1 (2017): 27–­52; Ryan McWilliams, “Uprooting, Composting, and Revolutionary History in Israel Potter,” Leviathan 20, no. 3 (2018): 45–­57. 8. Goode, “’No Rural Bowl of Milk,’ ” 27; McWilliams, “Uprooting,” 47–­48; Kathryn Cornell Dolan, Beyond the Fruited Plain: Food and Agriculture in US Literature, 1850–­1905 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 31–­36. 9. Hershel Parker describes the report as “a spoof agricultural report” and “gleeful parody of the language of Progress” (Herman Melville, 737), and in a note on the text Jay Leyda calls it “the agricultural report to end all agricultural reports” (PT, 790); more recently, scholars such as Goode, McWilliams, and Dolan have begun to take it seriously as a defense of traditional farming practices. 10. Parker suggests he used the book semi-­ironically like a foreign traveler in the farmlands around Pittsfield and Great Barrington (Herman Melville, 735–­37). 11. For example, the story of one bug who “eat its way out of a table” owned by a P. S. Putnam of Williamstown in 1806 undergoes a further metamorphosis in “The Apple-­Tree Table” (1856), becoming the test for an encounter between the Greek philosopher Democritus and the New England theologian Cotton Mather. 12. Endpaper note by Herman Melville in David Dudley Field’s A History of the County of Berkshire, Massachusetts (Pittsfield, MA: S.W. Marsh, 1829), in Melville’s Marginalia Online, ed. Steven Olsen-­Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C. Marnon (accessed November 23, 2020). 13. Ibid., 56. 14. Parker, Herman Melville, 737. 15. See Roger Hecht, “ ‘Mighty Lordships in the Heart of the Republic’: The Anti-­ Rent Subtext to Pierre,” in Frank, A Political Companion to Herman Melville, 141–­61. 16. By contrast, Goode reads Whitman into Melville, arguing that the figure of grass in Pierre functions as a metaphor for the uniformity and equality of the common people (“ ‘No Rural Bowl of Milk,’ ” 32). 17. The only change that Whitman makes to this section of the poem—­whose title changes across various editions, from “Poem of Walt Whitman—­A n American” to “Walt Whitman” to “Song of Myself ” in 1881—­is to set it off as its own canto beginning in 1867. All versions available on The Walt Whitman Archive online. 18. Portable Walt Whitman, 8. 19. Ibid., 7. 20. Matthiessen, The American Renaissance, 179; Thomas Claviez, “Melville, Whitman, Metonymy: Toward a New Poetics of Community,” Textual Practice 33 no. 10 (2019): 1767–­85. 21. Betsy Erkkila, “Melville, Whitman, and the Tribulations of Democracy,” in A Companion to American Literature and Culture, ed. Paul Lauter, 250–­83 (New York: Wiley, 2010), 261. 22. Ibid., 264.

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23. See Betsy Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and “Public Love: Whitman and Political Theory,” in Whitman East and West: New Contexts for Reading Walt Whitman, ed. Ed Folsom, 115–­4 4 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002). 24. Erkkila, “Melville, Whitman,” 264. 25. Ibid., 268. 26. For example, Jane Bennett argues that the poet is “solar,” a “beam of light” that sees, selects, and judges like the sun. Jane Bennett, “The Solar Judgment of Walt Whitman,” in A Political Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. John E. Seery, 131–­34 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2011), 135. 27. Erkkila, “Public Love,” 127; Jason Frank, “Promiscuous Citizenship,” in Seery, A Political Companion to Walt Whitman, 155–­84, esp. 163–­64. 28. The Portable Whitman, 215. 29. Bennett, “Solar Judgment,” 135, 141. 30. Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas: The Original Edition in Facsimile, ed. Ed Folsom (Iowa City; University of Iowa Press, 2010), 5. 31. “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely” (Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 172). 32. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 8–­9. 33. Ibid., 27. He continues in the next paragraph: “democracy looks with a suspicious, ill-­satisfied eye upon the very poor, the ignorant, and those out of business.” Whitman thus finds the limits to democratic adhesiveness in the same place where both Burke and Arendt draw the limits around the political space of appearance—­poverty. 34. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 120. 35. Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 78. 36. “The Prairie-­g rass Dividing” in Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems (New York: Penguin, 1986): 161. 37. Herman Melville, “Clover Dedication to Winnefred,” Weeds and Wildings, Chiefly; With a Rose or Two (Stockbridge, MA: Melville Press and the Berkshire Historical Society, 2016). 38. Melville, “A Ground Vine,” in Weeds and Wildings, 35. 39. Samuel Otter, “How Clarel Works,” in A Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Wyn Kelley, 467–­81 (New York: Wiley, 2006), 472. Melville’s use of words that signal both abstract and concrete meanings at once has been described by Christopher Freeburg in terms of “blackness” and Cody Marrs in terms of “war.” See Marrs, Nineteenth-­Century American Literature, 108. 40. Jonik, Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman, 172–­73. 41. Walter Bezanson summarizes this view of Vine in “A Critical Index of the Characters” (CL, 634–­35). 42. Marrs, Nineteenth-­Century American Literature, 104. 43. Ibid., 121. 44. Jonik, Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman, 201–­2. 45. See Jonik’s etymology of the pilgrim in “per-­agre”—­one who has a right of passage through land which they have no right to farm or till (Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman, 176). 46. Hilton Obenzinger has written extensively on pilgrims and settlers in Melville’s work, distinguishing between pilgrim-­migrants and pilgrim-­settlers. As he

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shows, Clarel ’s Nathan combines American settler colonialism with Holy Land resettlement as a scion of Puritans who becomes a proto-­Zionist. A pilgrim and a settler, Nathan represents Melville’s attempt to “draw out the sense of mutual, providential, settler destinies” in the Americas and Ottoman Palestine (“Melville, Holy Lands, and Settler-­Colonial Studies,” Leviathan 13, no. 3 (2011): 145–­56, 149). Also see Hilton Obenzinger, American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). Both Obenziner and Branka Arsić describe the nineteenth-­century Evangelical Zionist movement that sought to plant an agrarian Jewish community in Palestine (Obenzinger, American Palestine, 103–­7 ; Branka Arsić, “Desertscapes,” in Arsić and Evans, Melville’s Philosophies, 377–­401, esp. 387–­90). I am also indebted to conversations with Eric Marcy, who investigated the relationship of faith and movement in Melville’s work in his brilliant master’s thesis. Eric Marcy, “Movements of Hunters and Pilgrims: Forms of Motion and Thought in Moby-­Dick, The Confidence-­Man, and Clarel ” (masters’s thesis, Wake Forest University, 2018). 47. Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini have elaborated the forms of political sovereignty that operate under settler colonial states. As Veracini argues, settlers are founders of new political orders with specific sovereign capacities, among which is the power to displace and remove indigenous peoples in order to repress and supercede the colonial relation altogether. Lorenzo Veracini, “Introducing Settler Colonial Studies,” Settler Colonial Studies 1. no. 1 (2011): 1–­12. 48. Melville draws this story from Hawthorne’s “The Ambitious Guest” in Twice-­ Told Tales, which is itself an adaptation of the Willey Slide in Crawford Notch, New Hampshire, on August 28, 1826. See “Discussions” in Clarel (735). 49. OED Online, s.v. “recoil, n.” (accessed July 23, 2020). 50. Hilton Obenzinger measures this bluntness in the way that Melville portrays Nathan’s reproduction of Puritan typology and American racism: “Nathan has indeed returned to the poisonous roots first set down by his ‘fathers old,’ while his theological hatred is a counterpart to the phobia Melville already elaborated in ‘The Metaphysics of Indian-­Hating’ ” (American Palestine, 109–­10). 51. Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 17. 52. Obenzinger, “Melville, Holy Lands, and Settler-­Colonial Studies,” 152. 53. Arsić, “Desertscapes,” 379. 54. Bezanson, “Historical and Critical Note,” 573. All three fit within Deleuze’s taxonomy of Melville’s characters, as well, “those monomaniacs or demons who, driven by the will to nothingness, make a monstrous choice” (Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, the Formula,” 79). 55. In Book III, canto 31, titled “The Recoil,” this movement overtakes Clarel, too, as he contends with Vine’s rejection of his sexual advances and, “thrilled by deep dissent, / Revulsion from injected doubt / And many a strange presentiment” (lines 9–­12), vacillates between his betrothal to Ruth and “that other love” (line 53). Here, recoiling seems to describe the violence of Clarel’s effort to reassert heterosexual desires—­what Ishmael calls the “attainable felicity” of a wife after the transports of sperm-­squeezing (MD, 416). 56. Although though they stood for opposing forces within different revolutionary histories, both the disappointed revolutionary and the defeated confederate reside within that “gloomy lull” that Melville describes in the footnote to “The Conflict of Convictions,” and they carry that lull with them into the poem. For Mortmain that

Notes to Chapter 6

321

lull follows the monarchic restorations of 1848, and for Ungar it marks “the dolorous winter ere the war; / True Bridge of Sighs—­so yet ‘twill be / Esteemed in riper history—­/ Sad arch between contrasted eras” (IV, 5, 76–­79). 57. See Sianne Ngai’s gloss on Nietzsche’s concept of “the vengefulness of the impotent” in Ugly Feelings via Stowe’s Uncle Tom and Melville’s Bartleby (Ugly Feelings, 33–­34). 58. Berthold, “Democracy and Its Discontents,” 154, 158. 59. Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, 19–­20; Dissensus, 50. 60. Butler, Force of Non-­Violence, 64. 61. Ibid., 10–­11. With this, Butler’s framing of the politics of nonviolence resembles Étienne Balibar’s antiviolence: both seek to describe a politics that displaces violence through an aesthetic mode of defamiliarization, which Butler calls “counter-­realism” and Balibar “a work of art.” See Balibar, Violence and Civility, 97, and my discussion of Balibar in chapter 4. 62. Butler, Force of Non-­Violence, 21, 27. 63. Levine, Forms, 17, 80–­81. 64. Cécile Roudeau has also turned toward the materiality of Melville’s aesthetics to describe the persistence of democracy through Melville’s Billy Budd; where I emphasize incompletion and figural proliferation, Roudeau finds evidence of democracy’s material and regulated practice. Cécile Roudeau, “Murmur, Mutter, Matter: Verbal Veerings and the Practice of Democracy in Billy Budd, Sailor,” Leviathan 24, no. 1 (2022): 70–­89. 65. Wolff’s essay pushes back against both the “testimony of acceptance” readings and the “testimony of resistance” readings of Billy Budd by showing how closely the accounts of the naval chronicle and “Billy in the Darbies” align with each other given that precisely such “rude utterances” and sailor ballads commonly circulated in state-­ run periodicals like the Naval Chronicle. Nathan Wolff, “’Dead Then I’ll Be’: Billy Budd and the Death of Politics,” Leviathan 22, no. 3 (2020): 3–­24.

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Index

Abolitionists, 60, 213–­17. See also Brown, John; Douglass, Frederick; Slavery Aesthetics: in all things, 13–­1 4, 187–­88; founding violence and, 157; groundless, 210, 268–­70, 271–­80, 286; meta-­, 105; physical laws and, 225–­26; radical democracy and, 13–­15, 114–­15; representation and, 16–­18, 134–­35; “ruthless democracy” and, 5, 13–­15; violence and, 156–­57. See also Democratic aesthetics African Americans, see Black Americans; Douglass, Frederick; Racial issues; Slavery Agamben, Giorgio, 110, 121, 122, 162, 310n8 Agriculture, 1, 257–­59, 318n9. See also Planting American Revolution, 164, 252–­53, 257, 267, 300n37 Ankersmit, F. R., 16–­17, 134–­35 Antiviolence, 151–­52, 156, 321n61 Antsis, Thomas, 136–­37, 138–­39 “The Apparition (A Retrospect)” (Melville), 251, 270 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 136, 137, 308n32, 308n46

Arendt, Hannah: affinities with Melville, 10, 11; antiblackness, 246–­47; on Billy Budd, 10, 123; on constituent power, 149, 300n37, 306n7, 306n9; on Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, 46, 300n35; on Declaration of Independence, 45, 47; on democracy, 11, 123; on French Revolution, 119, 121, 151, 300n37; on political beginnings, 11, 121, 140, 149; on political life, 243, 246; radical democracy and, 295n23; “Reflections on Little Rock,” 246; On Revolution, 10, 119, 120, 121, 174, 215, 311n33; on space of appearance, 298n12; on state of nature, 10, 39–­40, 46–­47; On Violence, 246 Aristotle, color theory of, 85 Armstrong, Philip, 192 Arsić, Branka, 20, 77, 186, 187, 278, 301n53, 303n2, 320n46 Baldwin, James, 209 Balibar, Étienne, 142, 150–­52, 156, 199, 321n61 “Bartleby” (Melville), 35, 36 Bataille, Georges, 115 Batchelder, James, 213–­15, 314n22 323

324

Index

Battle-­Pieces and Aspects of the War (Melville): Civil War context, 228–­30; “The Conflict of Convictions,” 232, 233–­37, 320n56; critics on, 228, 239–­4 1, 317nn60–­61; democracy in, 4, 236, 239, 241–­4 2, 244, 247–­48; “falling” poems, 227, 228–­37, 247–­48; groundlessness, 247–­48, 270; “Misgivings,” 231–­33, 284; “The Portent,” 230–­31; prefatory note, 229–­30; “Supplement,” 228, 230, 239–­46, 247–­48, 317nn60–­61; themes, 233, 234–­35 “The Bell-­Tower” (Melville): as allegory of slavery and resistance, 220, 221, 222–­24; conclusion, 224–­25, 226–­27; contingency theme, 224, 226–­27; critics on, 220, 221, 222–­24, 315n35; epigraphic fragments, 219, 222–­24, 234; founding violence, 219–­20, 221; gravity analogies, 224–­25; opening, 219, 221; relationship to “Benito Cereno,” 220–­21, 222; themes, 219–­ 20, 224–­27 “Benito Cereno” (Melville), 32, 39, 50, 220–­21, 222 Benjamin, Walter, 228, 316n48 Bennett, Jane, 264, 319n26 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 108, 303n7 Berger, Jason, 298n18 Berkshire Agricultural Society, 258 Bernstein, Michael André, 229 Berthold, Dennis, 8, 148, 149, 206, 221, 280, 315n38, 317n62 Bezanson, Walter, 279 Billy Budd, Sailor (Melville): Arendt on, 10, 123; endings, 255–­56, 287–­91; figuration, 101, 290–­91; murmuring of sailors, 3, 288–­91; ragged edges, 287–­88, 289–­91; rainbow, 86, 197, 290; travels of sailors, 252 Black Americans: citizenship, 240–­43, 244–­47; school desegregation, 246, 247. See also Douglass, Frederick; Racial issues; Slavery Blackness, 217, 314–­15n30 Black Studies, 246 Blake, William, 236; “The Ancient of Days,” 237, 238 (fig.), 316n59

Blight, David, 211, 215 Botanical metaphors, see Grass; Greenness; Nature; Planting Breitwieser, Mitchell, 34, 36, 303n89 Brown, John, 228–­29, 230–­31 Bryant, John, 40–­4 1, 50, 297n9, 298n21, 299nn27– ­28, 300n46, 300– ­301n50 Burke, Edmund, 23; Reflections on the Revolution in France, 115, 133, 264 Burns, Anthony, 213–­1 4 Burritt, Elihu, “Force of Gravity in the Moral World,” 216–­17 Burrows, Stuart, 20 Butler, Judith, 19, 73, 74, 285–­87, 290, 321n61 Calder, Alex, 221, 226, 315n36 Cameron, Sharon, 20, 101 Casarino, Cesare, 179, 180, 199, 311–­12n40 Castronovo, Russ, 219–­20, 221, 240 Cavell, Stanley, 185, 186, 187 Cetocracy, 197, 199 Channing, William, 314n22 Chase, Richard, 6–­7 Circles: cogged, 177, 180–­81, 182, 183, 184, 196, 199, 201; in dances, 144–­46; in Mardi, 122, 123, 146, 147, 149, 152, 153–­54, 155–­56; in Moby-­Dick, 161–­62, 164–­65, 166, 176, 177–­85, 187–­89, 190–­ 92, 194–­202; in Omoo, 126–­28, 142–­46; of representation, 134–­35; in Round Robin document, 130–­32, 132 (fig.); temporality, 184–­85, 186–­87, 189; transience, 197; in Turner’s Deluge paintings, 97; in White-­Jacket, 122, 123. See also Cylinders; Roundness of democracy; Spheres; Vicious circles “Circles” (Emerson), 160, 185–­87, 189, 196 Citizenship, of Black Americans, 240–­ 43, 244–­47 Civility, 151–­52 Civil War: aftermath, 227, 228–­30, 231, 240–­43, 270; Confederate veterans, 205–­7, 279, 320–­21n56; fall of Richmond, 228–­29, 231. See also Reconstruction

Index

Clarel: A Poem and a Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (Melville): critics on, 228; critique of democracy, 23, 205–­8, 209, 271, 280–­85; democracy in, 4, 280, 281; geological politics, 278–­79; gravitational forces, 250; groundless aesthetics, 268–­70, 271–­80, 286; migrations and pilgrimages, 250, 252, 254–­55, 268–­70, 272–­74, 279–­80; monomaniacs, 279–­80; recoiling, 276–­80, 283, 286, 320n55; settlers, 274–­79, 319–­20n46; stones motif, 269, 274; weed metaphor, 268–­69 Claviez, Thomas, 261 Collective action, 16, 124, 138, 143, 145. See also Round Robin mutiny Colonialism, see Imperialism; Settler colonialism Colors: blueness, 89–­92; rainbows, 86, 197, 290. See also Greenness Color theory: of Aristotle, 85; of Leonardo, 85; Melville’s interest in, 85–­86; of Newton, 34, 86–­87; Romantic, 83. See also Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; Ruskin, John The Confidence-­Man: His Masquerade (Melville): cynicism, 207–­8; metafictional chapters, 105–­6, 289; “The Metaphysics of Indian-­Hating,” 61; Mississippi River, 245, 317n67; racial issues, 243; sources, 50; tone in, 20, 103; tree analogies, 259–­60 Connolly, William, 12–­13, 19, 42, 43, 80, 83, 113, 142, 174–­75, 299n24, 317n67 Contact zones, 42–­43, 44, 54–­56, 299n23 Counterrealism, 286–­87, 321n61 Coviello, Peter, 235, 316n48 Creativity, democracy and, 19, 20, 113, 166– ­70 Cylinders, 161, 182–­83, 312n50 Darkness, 93–­94, 95–­96 Dayan, Colin, 36, 107 Dean, Jodi, 235, 236 Declaration of Independence, 44–­45, 47 Defoe, Daniel, 136, 308n31 Delano, Amasa, 50

325

Deleuze, Gilles, 101, 315n39, 320n54 Democracy: among pirates, 137–­38, 139–­40; endurance, 255, 262, 265–­ 66; fragility, 12, 123–­24, 197; hatred of, 207–­8, 209; liberal, 15, 110–­12, 162; meanings, 8–­9, 11; as Melville’s theme, 3–­4, 5, 8–­9, 14–­15, 253–­54; as mode of being, 18; modifiers, 15–­16; transience, 14, 15, 23, 27, 80, 123–­24, 254–­55, 262–­63; viewpoints in Melville criticism, 5–­8. See also Popular sovereignty; Radical democracy; “Ruthless democracy” Democracy in America, see Tocqueville, Alexis de Democratic aesthetics: botanical metaphors, 258; figuration and, 20–­22; greenness and, 38; in Melville’s works, 16, 17, 20–­22, 38, 164–­65, 209, 256; scholarship on, 15–­20; Whitman on, 264–­66 Democratic dignity, 22, 120, 122–­23, 133, 161, 164–­66, 176–­7 7, 179, 184 Derrida, Jacques, 45; on democracy, 12, 295n25; on ipseity, 170–­7 1; on nonviolence, 151; on popular sovereignty, 170; Rogues, 140, 149–­50, 295n25, 308n46, 310n8; on roundness of democracy, 170–­7 1; on sovereignty, 162, 170–­7 1, 174, 310n1, 311n22; Tocqueville’s influence, 162 Descartes, René, 23; vortices, 200, 201 Dimock, Wai Chee, 7–­8, 148, 176, 177, 179, 191–­92, 194, 311–­12n40 Douglass, Frederick: on antislavery violence, 213–­17; comparisons to Melville, 210–­11, 218–­19; “Is It Right and Wise to Kill a Kidnapper?,” 205, 213–­18, 219–­20, 226, 231; political prophecy, 209, 211–­13; references to gravity, 211, 213–­19, 226, 250; “Slavery and the Slave Power,” 216–­17; “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” 211–­13, 218, 226 Downes, Paul, 16, 17, 59–­60, 193, 296n39, 311n39 Dryden, Edgar, 240 Dumm, Thomas, 232

326

Index

Duquette, Elizabeth, 303n7 Duyckinck, Evert, 60, 301n60 Eastlake, Charles Lock, 85, 86, 87, 93, 304n15 Egalitarianism, see Equality Ellison, Ralph, 126 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Circles,” 160, 185–­87, 189, 196 Equality: among pirates, 139–­40; democracy and, 3, 4–­5, 9, 27, 165–­66; interdependence and, 73–­74; in Moby-­Dick, 175–­76, 177–­7 8; nonviolence and, 285–­87; racial, 240–­43; Tocqueville on, 162, 165–­66, 167, 175 Erkkila, Betsy, 261–­62, 263, 265 Essex, U.S.S., 48–­51 Evans, K. L., 20, 21, 296n48 Federalists, 134 Ferguson, Keenan, 135 Field, David Dudley, A History of the County of Berkshire, Massachusetts, 258–­59, 260, 267 Figuration: in Billy Budd, 101, 290–­91; in Clarel, 277, 278; democratic, 16, 22–­23, 114; in Melville’s works, 4, 20–­22; in Moby-­Dick, 164–­65, 184; in Pierre, 82, 101–­2, 103–­4; by Tocqueville, 164–­65 Finley, Gerald, 96 Form: in Billy Budd, 288–­89; formalism, 18, 19, 287, 288; in Moby-­Dick, 20, 201; nonforms and, 18; polarity, 105; Ruskin on, 99, 100 Foundations: political, 9–­12, 37, 40, 210; in social contract theory, 45; swept away, 246, 247–­48. See also Groundlessness Founding violence: aesthetics and, 157; Arendt on, 149; in “The Bell-­Tower,” 219–­20, 221; indigenous genocide and, 174–­75; in Mardi, 147, 148, 153–­57; in monarchies, 153–­56; Tocqueville on, 174–­75. See also Revolutions France: flag, 38–­39; imperialism, 38–­40, 48, 54–­56, 74–­75, 125, 130; radical democratic theory, 12; revolution of

1848, 148–­49, 320–­21n56; ships, 38–­39, 130. See also French Revolution Frank, Jason, 12, 13, 15, 212, 263, 265, 300n37, 306n7, 306n9 Fredericks, Nancy, 8, 17 Freeburg, Christopher, 305n44, 319n39 French Revolution: Arendt on, 119, 121, 151, 300n37; Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, 45, 46, 300n35; eclipse, 233; Goethe’s analogy to Bastille, 86–­87; Melville’s interest in, 10. See also Sieyès, Emanuel Joseph, Abbé Fugitive Slave Law, 212–­16 Gage, John, 34, 87, 93, 97, 304n25 Garnet, Henry Highland, 213, 217 “The ’Gees” (Melville), 35–­36 Giesenkirchen, Michaela, 85, 304n20 Gleason, William, 240, 317n61 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, on “living in the all,” 67, 76–­7 8, 85, 303n2 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Theory of Colours (Zur Farbenlehre), 31; classes of color, 87–­88, 91–­93; debate with Newton, 34; definition of color, 34–­ 35; greenness, 89; influence in Pierre, 89–­93, 98; influence on Melville, 23, 84–­87; tonal polarities, 88–­91, 93–­94, 98; Turner’s response, 93–­97 Goode, Abbie, 318n16 Goudie, Sean X., 299n22 Grandin, Greg, 223, 224, 315n35 Grass: in letter to Hawthorne, 11, 20–­21, 78–­80, 258, 259; longing for, 32; lying in, 78, 79; marginalia listing varieties, 258–­59, 260, 261, 267; in Melville’s works, 267–­68; native, 259; prairie, 266–­67, 274; in Whitman’s work, 260–­61, 266–­67. See also Greenness; Nature Gravitational Feel (Moten and Tsang), 249–­50 Gravity: analogies to moral forces, 216–­ 17, 225; Brown’s hanging and, 230–­31; democracy and, 211; “falling” poems,

Index

327

227, 228–­37, 247–­48; in Melville’s works, 209, 210, 218–­19, 227, 250–­51; in Moten’s work, 249–­50, 251; as political force, 218–­19; social, 249–­50, 251. See also Groundlessness Greenness: association with nature, 32, 81–­82; of democracy, 22, 82; in Goethe’s color theory, 89; hunger for, 32–­33, 34, 46; immersion in, 53–­54; instability, 37; in Melville’s works, 35–­38; natural and artificial, 34, 36, 81–­82; in Pierre, 35, 38, 84–­85, 89, 91; in Typee, 32–­33, 34, 35, 37, 46, 47, 53–­ 54, 67, 72, 84. See also Grass; Nature; Verdigris Grimstad, Paul, 304n11 Groundless aesthetics, 268–­70, 271–­80, 286 Groundlessness: in Battle-­Pieces, 247–­48, 270; in Clarel, 268–­70, 271–­80, 286; in “The Conflict of Convictions,” 236; of democracy, 12, 22, 23, 206–­10, 242, 243–­4 4, 253; in Melville’s works, 227, 255, 270– ­7 1. See also Gravity

Hobbes, Thomas: on deliberation, 64–­65; Leviathan, 16, 62–­64, 193, 302n74; Melville’s engagement with, 59, 60–­66, 72–­73; nineteenth-­century American views of, 59–­60; on state of nature, 57 Honig, Bonnie, 12, 13, 43, 47, 80, 110–­12, 113, 179, 193, 199, 299n26, 300n37 Howard, Mark, 307n27 Hurh, Paul, 223–­24

Habermas, Jürgen, 111 Hall, James, 50 Happiness, 68–­72, 74 Harney, Stefano, 9, 246, 294n16 Harvey, Bruce, 34, 297n2, 298n19 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, “The Ambitious Guest,” 320n48 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Melville’s letters to: on equality, 4–­5, 206–­7 ; on Goethe, 67, 76–­7 8, 85, 303n2; grass motif, 11, 20–­21, 78–­80, 258, 259; of May 1851, 1–­3, 9, 20–­21, 67, 76–­80, 85, 205–­7 ; planting metaphors, 1, 207; on “ruthless democracy,” 2–­3, 9, 78, 79–­80, 205–­7 Hayden, Lewis, 214, 314n22 Herbert, T. Walter, 48, 55, 298n19, 301n56 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 214, 314n22 History: Melville’s philosophy, 251–­52; relationship to nature, 43, 53–­54, 56, 59

Jackson, Kellie Carter, 213, 217 James, C.L.R., 6, 7, 176, 179, 303n7 Job, 193 Johnson, Charles, A General History of the Pyrates, 136–­40, 308nn31–­32 Jonik, Michael, 78, 82–­83, 158, 180, 201, 269–­70, 293n4, 303n2, 309n66, 309n68

Imperialism: American, 38–­39, 48–­52, 60–­61, 74–­75, 282–­83; contact zones, 42–­43, 44, 54–­56, 299n23; French, 38–­40, 48, 54–­56, 74–­75, 125, 130; relationship to democracy, 262–­63; settler colonialism, 274, 277–­79, 319–­20nn46–­47 Indigenous peoples: Caribbean, 69–­70, 72; in United States, 174–­75. See also Typees Insko, Jeffrey, 251–­52 Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (Melville), 251–­53, 254, 256–­57, 258, 259, 267

Karcher, Carolyn, 240–­4 1, 315n35 Latimer, Dan, 301n65 Lee, Maurice S., 59, 240, 317n60 Lefort, Claude, 11–­12, 163, 201, 295n23 Leonardo da Vinci, color theory of, 85 Leviathan, see Hobbes, Thomas Levine, Caroline, 18, 19, 286–­87 Levine, Robert S., 240 Liberal democracy, 15, 110–­12, 162 Linebaugh, Peter, 137 Locke, John, 99 Lucy Ann mutiny, 135

328

Index

Marcy, Eric, 320n46 Mardi, and a Voyage Thither (Melville): beginning, 146–­48; circular motifs, 122, 123, 146, 147, 149, 152, 153–­54, 155–­ 56; critics on, 148; island stories, 147, 152, 153–­56, 157–­59; protagonist, 147–­ 48, 152–­56; rogues, 157–­59; surfers, 74, 158–­59; tediousness, 148; violence, 147–­48, 149, 152–­57; whales, 160 Marquesas Islands, 42, 43, 48–­51, 128. See also Nukuheva; Typee Marrs, Cody, 231, 251, 252, 270, 314n14, 316n48, 319n39 Marx, Karl, 115, 183, 312n50 Mastroianni, Dominic, 82–­83, 108–­9, 294n15 Matthiessen, F. O., 6, 261 McGettigen, Katie, 135–­36, 307n20, 308n29 McWilliams, Susan, 179 Meillassoux, Quentin, 205, 314n13 Melvill, Robert, 258 Melville, Herman: experimentalism, 19–­20, 103; on fame, 77, 78; mutiny experience, 135; poetry, 227–­28. See also titles of individual works Melville, Peter, 70 Mihic, Sophia, 34, 126, 135, 307n14 Milder, Robert, 7 Misgivings, 231–­33, 236–­37, 284, 286 Missionaries, 41, 142, 143–­4 4, 145 Moby-­Dick; or, the Whale (Melville): on aesthetics in all things, 13–­14, 187–­88; beginning, 160–­61; “The Chase—­Third Day,” 160, 199–­200; circular motifs, 161–­62, 164–­65, 166, 176, 177–­85, 187–­89, 190–­92, 194–­202; critics on, 176, 179–­80; democracy in, 3, 120–­21, 161–­62, 164, 175–­81, 189, 197–­98, 207, 262; democratic dignity, 22, 120, 122–­23, 133, 161, 164–­66, 176–­77, 179, 184; dictatorship, 176–­77, 178, 184, 189, 199; ending, 160–­ 61, 166; “Epilogue,” 166, 185, 200–­202; equality in, 175–­76, 177–­78; formlessness, 20; Goethe’s color theory and, 84–­85; “The Grand Armada,” 190–­99, 207; greenness, 35; Hobbes’s influence,

63; “Knights and Squires,” 120–­21, 122–­23, 133, 161, 164, 175, 178, 184–­85, 207; “The Line,” 188–­89; “The Quarter-­ Deck,” 178, 183–­84; relationship to Omoo and Mardi, 161; roundness of democracy, 161–­62, 164–­66; “A Squeeze of the Hand,” 262; “Sunset,” 183, 184, 187; violence, 175–­76; “The Whiteness of the Whale,” 85–­86; writing of, 1–­2 Monarchies: founding violence, 153–­56; restorations, 148–­49; sovereignty, 163. See also Revolutions Morrison, Toni, 209 Morton, Timothy, 311n39 Moten, Fred, 9, 246–­47, 249–­50, 251, 253, 294n16 Mouffe, Chantal, 295n27 Müller-­Sievers, Helmut, 182–­83, 312n50 Mutinies: in Billy Budd, 288, 290; Melville’s experience on Lucy Ann, 135; by pirates, 136–­37, 138–­39. See also Round Robin mutiny Nature: analogies with mind, 85; color and, 35; relationship to history, 43, 53–­54, 56, 59; tree analogies, 255, 259–­ 60; weeds, 268–­69. See also Grass; Greenness; Planting metaphors Nelson, Dana, 240 Newton, Isaac: color theory, 34, 86–­87; physical laws, 217, 249–­50. See also Gravity Ngai, Sianne, 20, 103–­4 Nile River, 244–­46, 247–­48 Nonviolence, 19, 150–­51, 152, 199, 285–­87, 321n61 Nukuheva: American annexation, 48–­ 51; cannibals, 48, 51, 57, 125, 298n18, 301n60, 302n70; culture, 33–­34; description of arrival, 38–­40; French occupation, 38–­40, 41–­4 2, 54–­56; glen of Tior, 41, 44, 53; tribal politics, 65–­ 66, 73–­75. See also Typee; Typees Nurmi, Tom, 297n1 Obenzinger, Hilton, 278, 319–­20n46, 320n49

Index

Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (Melville): circular motifs, 126–­28, 142–­46; critics on, 126, 135–­36; depiction of colonialism, 141–­4 4; meaning of title, 128–­29, 307n17; nonlinear structure, 126, 307n16; picaresque style, 128–­29, 141, 307n19; preface, 125; protagonist, 125–­29; relationship to Typee, 125–­27, 128–­30. See also Round Robin mutiny Otter, Samuel, 19, 20, 34, 57, 92, 187–­88, 240, 269, 297n2, 298n18, 301n56, 304n13 Paine, Thomas: Age of Reason, 275; debate with Sieyès, 133–­34; The Rights of Man, 119, 120, 133–­34 Paintings: landscape, 84, 304n13; references in Pierre, 83, 84, 304n13; Ruskin on tone in, 99–­100. See also Turner, J.M.W. Paradoxes, political, see Politics, paradox of Parker, Hershel, 148, 149, 259, 318nn9–­10 Pastoureau, Michel, 37, 76 Pease, Donald E., 294n10 Penny Cyclopedia, 59, 200 Peterson, Christopher, 218 Physical laws, 215–­16, 217, 218, 225–­26. See also Gravity The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces. (Melville): “Bartleby,” 35, 36; “Benito Cereno,” 32, 39, 50, 220–­21, 222; “The Encantadas,” 158; “The Piazza,” 148. See also “The Bell Tower” Picaresque form, 128–­29 Pierce, Franklin, 214 Pierre; or, the Ambiguities (Melville): aesthetic strategies, 107–­8; blueness, 89–­92; botanical motifs, 83; critics on, 6, 82–­83, 103–­4, 108–­9, 303n7; democracy in, 4, 22, 108–­11, 113–­1 4, 115; ending, 81; engagement with Rousseau, 76–­7 7; Goethe’s color theory in, 86, 89–­93, 98; greenness, 35, 38, 84–­85, 89, 91; Hudson Valley farms, 257, 258, 259; impossible adjuncts, 52,

329

106–­7, 109–­10, 112, 241, 244; incest plot, 81, 108–­10, 112–­13; love story, 90–­92; “More Light, and the Gloom of that Light—­More Gloom, and the Light of that Gloom,” 97–­99, 100–­106; narrative self-­reflexivity, 106–­7 ; painting references, 83, 84, 304n13; radical democracy, 6, 80–­82, 83, 108–­10, 112–­13, 114–­15; Ruskin’s color theory and, 98–­99; “ruthless democracy” narrative, 80–­81; tone in, 100–­101, 103–­5, 106, 108; verdigris, 22, 84, 113–­1 4, 115 Piracy and pirates: democratic culture, 137–­38, 139–­40; histories, 136–­40, 308n31; in Mardi, 147, 153, 157; in Moby-­Dick, 194; mutinies, 136–­37, 138–­39; in Omoo, 128, 141 Planting metaphors: for democracy, 258, 263–­65, 266; in Israel Potter, 256–­57, 258, 259, 267; in Melville’s letter to Hawthorne, 1, 207; “planted bed,” 23, 206, 207, 208, 253, 254–­55, 256, 282; unplanted democracy, 207, 210, 254, 255, 267, 271. See also Agriculture Plato, 208 Political prophecy, 209–­10, 211–­13, 230–­31 Political violence: cyclical, 150–­52, 156; extreme, 151–­52; in Mardi, 147, 148, 149; strategies for countering, 150–­52, 156; topographies, 150–­52. See also Violence Politics: alterity, 152, 156, 199; fast and slow, 278–­79; in Typee, 37–­38, 42–­43, 44, 47–­48, 55–­58, 60–­61, 65–­66, 73–­75 Politics, paradox of: in democracies, 43; foundations, 37, 40; at founding moments, 12–­13, 42, 43, 56–­57; permanence, 43, 47, 56, 299n26; proxies, 43, 44, 54; racial issues and, 243; radical democracy and, 12–­13, 112; in Typee, 44, 52, 65–­66, 75–­7 7 Polynesia: French colonies, 39, 125, 130, 141–­43; Tahiti, 128, 129–­30, 135, 141–­43. See also Marquesas Islands; Nukuheva; Omoo; Typee

330

Index

Popular sovereignty: Derrida on, 170; Rousseau on, 12–­13; Tocqueville on, 162–­65, 167–­68, 169–­70, 171, 174–­75 Porter, David, 48–­51, 52, 74, 300nn46–­47, 300– ­301n50 Powell, Timothy, 293n2 Pratt, Mary Louise, 299n23 Prophecy, see Political prophecy Putnam’s Magazine, 219, 220, 221 Racial issues: racism, 151, 262; in “Supplement” (Battle-­Pieces), 240–­43, 244–­46. See also Black Americans; Slavery Radical democracy: aesthetics and, 13–­ 15, 114–­15; emergencies and, 110–­12; foundings, 9–­12; paradoxes, 12–­13; in Pierre, 6, 80–­82, 83, 108–­10, 112–­13, 114–­15; theories, 11–­13, 18; transience, 80. See also Democracy Rancière, Jacques: on democracy, 208, 236; on dissensus, 13, 212; on groundlessness of democracy, 12, 243–­4 4; on hatred of democracy, 207–­8, 209, 282; on metapolitics, 246; on Pierre, 101, 305n55; on politics, 57, 295n27, 298n12, 301n58, 303n88; on subjects of rights, 47 Realism, 21. See also Counterrealism Reconstruction, 228, 240–­43, 244, 281 Redburn: His First Voyage (Melville), 3, 85, 180, 181–­82 Rediker, Marcus, 137, 138, 308n31, 308n43 Representation: aesthetics and, 16–­18, 134–­35; circular image, 120; mimetic, 16, 134–­35; Paine on, 120, 133–­34; in Round Robin mutiny, 130, 131, 134–­ 36; Sieyès on, 121, 133 Revolutions: of 1848, 148–­49, 320–­21n56; American, 164, 252–­53, 257, 267; Arendt on, 10, 11, 47, 215; cyclical movement, 120, 148–­49; justifications, 215; Melville’s interest in, 9–­10; spherical motion, 312n50. See also Founding violence; French Revolution Reynolds, David S., 7

Rights: Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, 45, 46, 300n35; of political subjects, 47; voting, 240, 244 The Rights of Man (Paine), 119, 120, 133–­34 Roberts, Bartholomew, 136–­37, 138 Rogin, Michael, 7, 108, 135, 240, 302n72, 303n7, 308n30, 317n60 Rogues: political theory of, 157–­59; rogue, 139, 140, 157 Rogue states, 140, 149–­50 Rosenberry, Edward, 297n9 Roudeau, Cécile, 321n64 Roundness of democracy: Derrida on, 170–­7 1; in Melville’s works, 22–­23, 119–­21, 122–­25, 161; in Moby-­Dick, 161–­62, 164–­66; Paine on, 120, 134; sources of imagery, 124; Tocqueville on, 162. See also Circles Roundness of sovereignty, 149–­50 Round Robin mutiny: aftermath, 141–­ 42; collective action, 16, 22, 130, 131, 132–­33, 134, 137, 145; critics on, 135–­36; document with signatures in circle, 130–­33, 132 (fig.), 134–­39, 140–­4 1, 142–­ 43; legitimacy, 136, 141; participants, 45, 130; representative democracy in, 3, 130, 131, 134–­36; source, 136–­40 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques: The Confessions, 71–­72; Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, 59, 67–­68, 69–­70; Melville’s engagement with, 60–­62, 64–­66, 67–­ 73, 76–­7 7, 302n81; nineteenth-­century American views of, 59, 60; paradoxes, 58–­59, 302n66; similarities to Melville, 301n65; The Social Contract, 12–­13, 59, 299n24, 311n22; on state of nature, 39, 55, 57, 58 Ruskin, John: on color, 23, 85, 98–­100; on form over color, 99, 100; Modern Painters, 98–­100, 305n48; on tone, 99–­100, 102; on Turner, 100 “Ruthless democracy”: in aesthetic practice, 5, 13–­15; meaning, 5, 8; Melville on, 2–­3, 4, 9, 20, 78, 79–­80, 205–­7 ; in Melville’s works, 23, 26–­27, 80–­81, 207, 268; as process, 80–­81; sources of Melville’s thought, 9, 23; in “Supple-

Index

ment” (Battle-­Pieces), 239, 241–­4 2; use of term, 8, 16 Samson, John, 307n17, 307n19 Sanborn, Geoffrey, 19, 34, 58, 148, 297n2, 298nn19–­20, 301n52 Santner, Eric, 121, 122, 163 Schillings, Sonja, 308–­9n44 Schmitt, Carl, 110, 162, 168, 170, 171, 174 Scorza, Thomas, 299n28 Settler colonialism, 274, 277–­79, 319–­20nn46–­47. See also Imperialism Shulman, George, 179, 209, 211–­12 Sieyès, Emanuel Joseph, Abbé: Paine’s debate with, 133–­34; Qu’est-­ce que le tiers état?, 119–­20, 121–­22, 149, 163 Sizemore, Michelle, 201 Slavery: “The Bell-­Tower” as allegory, 220, 221, 222–­24; escaped slave in Omoo, 130, 133, 135; Fugitive Slave Law, 212–­16; in Mardi, 153; revolts, 60, 220, 223; Tocqueville on, 174, 175, 311n36. See also Abolitionists; “The Bell-­Tower”; Douglass, Frederick Snediker, Michael, 20, 21, 82–­83, 101, 103, 296n50 Social contract theory, 45, 60. See also Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques Sovereignty: democracy and, 163, 178–­ 79, 310n8; Derrida on, 162, 170–­7 1, 174, 310n1, 311n22; divine, 162, 163, 164, 169, 171; monarchic, 148–­49, 153–­56, 163; paradox of, 12–­13; of rogue states, 140, 149–­50; roundness, 149–­50; use of force, 140, 153–­55, 163. See also Popular sovereignty Spanos, William, 82–­83, 110 Spheres, 122, 144, 155–­56, 162, 312n50. See also Circles; Roundness of democracy State-­of-­nature theory: Arendt on, 10, 39–­40, 46–­47; imperialism and, 49, 55–­56; rethinking, 73–­74; in Typee, 43, 44, 57–­58, 60, 61–­62, 67–­74. See also Hobbes, Thomas; Nature; Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques State violence, 140, 253. See also Founding violence

331

Stein, Jordan Alexander, 148 Sugden, Edward, 144, 307n16 Suzuki, Erin, 307n19, 309n48 Szendy, Peter, 312n60 Tahiti: French control, 130, 141–­43; Lucy Ann mutiny, 135; in Omoo, 128, 129–­30, 141. See also Polynesia; Round Robin mutiny Tamarkin, Elisa, 297–­98n9 Taussig, Michael, 31, 35, 38, 42, 299n23, 305n37 Taylor, Astra, 27, 295n27 Theory of Colours (Zur Farbenlehre), see Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Time: circles and, 184–­85, 186–­87, 189; in Omoo, 143–­4 4; in Typee, 41–­4 2, 43, 44 Timoleon (Melville): “Art,” 14, 36; democracy in, 4; “Fragments of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the 12th Century,” 10–­11, 159, 266 Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America, 76, 160; on associations and civic life, 172–­74; circular formulations, 162, 163–­65, 168–­69, 171–­73; on creative principles of democracy, 166–­70; on equality, 162, 165–­66, 167, 175; on founding violence, 174–­75; on popular sovereignty, 162–­65, 167–­68, 169–­70, 171, 174–­75; on slavery, 174, 175, 311n36; tautologies, 165, 169–­70, 194 Tone: in The Confidence-­Man, 20, 103; in Pierre, 100–­101, 103–­5, 106, 108; Ruskin on, 99–­100, 102 Tree analogies, 255, 259–­60 Tsang, Wu, 249–­50 Turner, J.M.W.: “Fallacies of Hope,” 96–­97; Goethe’s color theory and, 85, 93–­97; influence on Melville, 98; Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory)—­ The Morning After the Deluge—­Moses Writing the Book of Genesis, 93–­97, 95 (fig.), 98; Melville’s knowledge of, 305nn47–­48; Ruskin on, 100; Shade and Darkness—­The Evening of the Deluge, 93–­96, 94 (fig.), 98

332

Index

Typee; or, a Peep at Polynesian Life (Melville): ambivalences, 52–­53, 55, 56; arrival in Nukuheva, 38–­40; critics on, 40–­4 1, 58–­59, 60, 71, 72, 301n60; democracy in, 3, 126–­27; ending, 125, 127; engagement with Hobbes and Rousseau, 60–­62, 64–­66, 67–­73, 302n81; fame following publication, 77, 78; food and meal descriptions, 31–­33, 46; fourth chapter, 43–­46, 47–­48, 50, 51–­56, 299n27; glen of Tior scenes, 41, 44, 53; greenness, 32–­33, 34, 35, 37, 46, 47, 53–­54, 67, 72, 84; opening chapters, 38–­43, 56–­57; political themes, 37–­38, 42–­43, 44, 47–­48, 55–­58, 60–­61, 65–­66, 73–­75; protagonist, 31–­32, 33–­34, 37, 39–­46, 126–­27; relationship to Omoo, 125–­27, 128–­30; state-­of-­nature theory, 43, 44, 57–­58, 60, 61–­62, 67–­74; temporal shifts, 41–­ 42, 43, 44; use of color, 58–­59 Typees: democracy among, 49; encounters with Westerners, 48, 49–­50, 51–­52; enemies, 48, 49, 65; happiness, 70, 71–­72; politics, 65–­66, 73–­75; reputation as cannibals, 48, 51, 125, 301n52; territory, 48, 49–­50, 65–­66 United States: American Revolution, 164, 252–­53, 257, 267, 300n37; Declaration of Independence, 44–­45, 47; foreign policy, 140; imperialism, 38–­39, 48–­52, 74–­75, 282–­83; Reconstruction, 228, 240–­43, 244, 281; ships, 48–­51. See also Civil War Vendler, Helen, 227–­28 Veracini, Lorenzo, 320n47 Verdigris: in Pierre, 22, 84, 113–­1 4, 115; production, 22, 81–­82, 84 Verdure, see Grass; Greenness Vicious circles, 119–­22, 123–­24, 149–­50, 163, 173, 243–­4 4 Violence: aesthetics and, 156–­57; antislavery, 213–­17, 223, 231; antiviolence,

151–­52, 156, 321n61; indigenous genocide, 174–­75; nonviolence, 19, 150–­51, 152, 199, 285–­87, 321n61; state, 253. See also Founding violence; Political violence Visual theory, 83. See also Color theory Vortices: archipelago in Mardi, 146, 152; in Moby-­Dick, 160–­62, 166, 178, 184–­85, 199–­202. See also Descartes, René Voting rights, 240, 244. See also Citizenship Wald, Priscilla, 108, 303n7 Walker, David, 213 Wallace, Robert K., 85, 98, 305nn47–­48 War, cyclical patterns, 270–­7 1. See also Civil War; Revolutions Warner, Michael, 241, 317n64 Warren, Robert Penn, 316n45 Weaver, Raymond, 6 Weber, Samuel, 311n22 Weeds and Wildings (Melville), 267–­68 Weinstein, Cindy, 148 Whales: cetocracy, 197, 199; cooperative defense, 191–­94, 196–­97, 199; rolling, 160–­61, 166, 183. See also Moby-­Dick White-­Jacket (Melville), 85, 122, 123 Whiteness, 85–­86 Whitman, Walt: on adhesiveness, 262, 263–­64, 319n33; comparisons to Melville, 255, 261–­63, 265–­67; on democracy, 255, 262, 263–­67; Democratic Vistas, 210, 264–­65, 319n33; “For You, O Democracy,” 249, 255, 263–­64; grass motif, 260–­61; Leaves of Grass, 210, 234, 260, 262; “The Prairie-­g rass Dividing,” 266–­67; “Song of Myself,” 260–­61, 265, 318n17 Williams, Raymond, 11 Wilson, Ivy, 221, 222–­23, 315n35 Wolfe, Patrick, 320n47 Wolff, Nathan, 290, 321n65 Wolin, Sheldon, 12, 18, 80 Wright, Michelle M., 217, 218, 314–­15n30

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