Melville’s Philosophies 9781501321016, 9781501321047, 9781501321030

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Figures
Introduction: Reconstructing Melville Branka Arsić and K. L. Evans
Part One World-Making
1 Gospel Cetology K. L. Evans
2 Billy Budd, Billy Budd Stuart Burrows
3 Science, Philosophy, and Aesthetics in “The Apple-Tree Table” Maurice S. Lee
4 Clarel, Doubt, Delay Paul Hurh
Part Two Love Stories
5 The Lawyer’s Tale: Preference, Responsibility, and Personhood in Melville’s “Story of Wall-street” Rachel Cole
6 Pierre in Love Kenneth Dauber
7 Phenomenology Beyond the Phantom Limb: Melvillean Figuration and Chronic Pain Michael D. Snediker
8 “Learning, unlearning, word by word”: Feeling Faith in Melville’s Clarel Rhian Williams
Part Three Arts
9 Fateful Gestures: On Movement and the Maneuvers of Style in “Benito Cereno” James D. Lilley
10 Melville, Poetry, Prints Samuel Otter
11 A Final Appearance with Elihu Vedder: Melville’s Visions Elisa Tamarkin
12 La téméraire littéraire: Reckless Adaptation in Pierre and Pola X Paul Grimstad
Part Four Communities
13 Melville’s Leviathan Paul Downes
14 Bartleby’s Screen Colin Dayan
15 Melville’s Misanthropology Michael Jonik
16 Desertscapes: Geological Politics in Clarel Branka Arsić
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Melville’s Philosophies

Melville’s Philosophies Edited by Branka Arsić and K. L. Evans

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Branka Arsić, K. L. Evans, and Contributors, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the editors. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Arsiâc, Branka, editor. | Evans, Kim Leilani, editor. Title: Melville’s philosophies / edited by Branka Arsiâc and K. L. Evans. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016045112 (print) | LCCN 2016051033 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501321016 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501321030 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501321023 (ePUB) Subjects: LCSH: Melville, Herman, 1819-1891–Criticism and interpretation. | Melville, Herman, 1819-1891–Philosophy. | Philosophy in literature. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / General. | LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General. Classification: LCC PS2388.P5 M45 2017 (print) | LCC PS2388.P5 (ebook) | DDC 813/.3–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045112 ISBN:  HB: 978-1-5013-2101-6   ePub: 978-1-5013-2102-3   ePDF: 978-1-5013-2103-0 Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Whiteman, Maria Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Contents List of Figures Introduction: Reconstructing Melville  Branka Arsić and K. L. Evans

vii 1

Part One  World-Making 1 2 3 4

Gospel Cetology  K. L. Evans Billy Budd, Billy Budd  Stuart Burrows Science, Philosophy, and Aesthetics in “The Apple-Tree Table”  Maurice S. Lee Clarel, Doubt, Delay  Paul Hurh

17 39 61 79

Part Two  Love Stories 5 6 7 8

The Lawyer’s Tale: Preference, Responsibility, and Personhood in Melville’s “Story of Wall-street”  Rachel Cole Pierre in Love  Kenneth Dauber Phenomenology Beyond the Phantom Limb: Melvillean Figuration and Chronic Pain  Michael D. Snediker “Learning, unlearning, word by word”: Feeling Faith in Melville’s Clarel  Rhian Williams

107 129 155 175

Part Three  Arts 9

Fateful Gestures: On Movement and the Maneuvers of Style in “Benito Cereno”  James D. Lilley 10 Melville, Poetry, Prints  Samuel Otter 11 A Final Appearance with Elihu Vedder: Melville’s Visions  Elisa Tamarkin 12 La téméraire littéraire: Reckless Adaptation in Pierre and Pola X  Paul Grimstad

201 219 261 301

Contents

vi Part Four  Communities 13 14 15 16

Melville’s Leviathan  Paul Downes Bartleby’s Screen  Colin Dayan Melville’s Misanthropology  Michael Jonik Desertscapes: Geological Politics in Clarel  Branka Arsić

Contributors Index

315 337 353 377 403 407

List of Figures 7.1 © Richard Misrach, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; Pace/ MacGill Gallery, New York, and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles. 9.1 Beau Travail. Directed by Claire Denis. France: La Sept-Arte, 2000. 9.2 Beau Travail. Directed by Claire Denis. France: La Sept-Arte, 2000. 9.3 Beau Travail. Directed by Claire Denis. France: La Sept-Arte, 2000. 9.4 Beau Travail. Directed by Claire Denis. France: La Sept-Arte, 2000. 10.1 The title plate from a later edition of the Carceri. This image and those in Figures 10.2 and 10.9–12 have been photographed from volume 17 of Piranesi’s Opere Varie, purchased by the Astor Library in 1849 and now held in the collections of the New York Public Library. In his visits to the Astor Library, Melville could have had access to this edition of the Carceri. Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Le Carceri d’Invenzione. [Opere] [1788] [plate 26]. Etching and engraving. Photo: Art and Architecture Collections, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. 10.2 Plate 14 from a later edition of the Carceri. Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Le Carceri d’Invenzione. [Opere] [1788] [plate 33]. Etching and engraving. Photo: Art and Architecture Collections, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. 10.3 Title plate from the first edition of the series Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), 1749–60. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Italian, 1720– 78. Etching and engraving with ink-dabbing. Image: 54.4 x 41.4 cm. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Osgood Hooker, 1957.186.3. 10.4  The Arch with a Shell Ornament, plate 11, from the first edition of the series Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), 1749–60. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Italian, 1720–78. Etching and engraving with inkdabbing. Image: 40.5 x 54.3 cm. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Osgood Hooker, 1957.186.11. 10.5 Detail from the center right of the image in Figure 10.4. Plate 11 from the first edition of the series Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons),

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1749–60. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Italian, 1720–78. Etching and engraving with ink-dabbing. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Osgood Hooker, 1957.186.11. 10.6 Detail from the lower right of the image in Figure 10.3. Title plate from the first edition of the series Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), 1749–60. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Italian, 1720–78. Etching and engraving with ink-dabbing. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Osgood Hooker, 1957.186.3. 10.7 Detail from the lower left of the image in Figure 10.3. Title plate from the first edition of the series Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), 1749–60. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Italian, 1720–78. Etching and engraving with ink-dabbing. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Osgood Hooker, 1957.186.3. 10.8  The Drawbridge, plate 7 from the first edition of the series Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), 1749–60. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Italian, 1720–78. Etching and engraving with ink-dabbing. Image: 547 x 410 mm (21 9/16 x 16 1/8 in.). The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Osgood Hooker, 1957.186.7. 10.9 Plate 7 from a later edition of the Carceri. Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Le Carceri d’Invenzione. [Opere] [1788] [plate 26]. Etching and engraving. Photo: Art and Architecture Collections, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. 10.10 Detail from the upper left of the image in Figure 10.9. Plate 7 from a later edition of the Carceri. Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Le Carceri d’Invenzione. [Opere] [1788] [plate 26]. Etching and engraving. Photo: Art and Architecture Collections, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. 10.11 Plate 11 from a later edition of the Carceri. Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Le Carceri d’Invenzione. [Opere] [1788] [plate 30]. Etching and engraving. Photo: Art and Architecture Collections, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. 10.12 Plate 13 from a later edition of the Carceri. Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Le Carceri d’Invenzione. [Opere] [1788] [plate 32]. Etching and engraving. Photo: Art and Architecture Collections, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach

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List of Figures Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. 10.13 The Well, plate 13 from the first edition of the series Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), 1749–60. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Italian, 1720– 78. Etching and engraving. Image: 40.7 x 55.2 cm. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Osgood Hooker, 1957.186.13. 11.1 Elihu Vedder, Cover. 1883–84. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Photograph of Melville’s copy of the Rubáiyát, with drawings by Vedder. Houghton Library. Harvard University Libraries. 11.2 Elihu Vedder, The Great Hill of Assisi, from Villa Ansidei, Perusia in The Digressions of V. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 413. 11.3 Elihu Vedder, The Inevitable Fate. Verses 55–58. 1883–84. Chalk and pencil on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson. 11.4 Elihu Vedder, Torre Di Schiava, Roman Campagna. 1868. Oil on wood. Gift of Robert Palmiater. Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, NY, USA. Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute/Art Resource, NY. 11.5 Elihu Vedder, The Questioner of the Sphinx. 1863. Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Mrs. Martin Brimmer. 11.6 Elihu Vedder, The Questioner of the Sphinx. 1875. Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Stuart Riley, Jr. 11.7 Elihu Vedder, The Present Listening to the Voices of the Past, and detail. Verses 67–69. 1883–84. Chalk, pencil, ink, and watercolor on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson. 11.8 Elihu Vedder, Omar’s Emblem. 1883–84. Chalk, pencil, and ink on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson. 11.9 Elihu Vedder, Spring. Verses 93–95. 1883–84. Chalk, pencil, ink, and watercolor on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson. 11.10 Elihu Vedder, Youth and Age. Verse 96. 1883–84. Chalk, pencil, ink, and watercolor on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American

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Art Museum. Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson. 11.11 Elihu Vedder, Theology. Verses 25–28. 1883–84. Chalk, pencil, and watercolor on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson. 11.12 Detail from Elihu Vedder, Theology (Figure 11. 11); Elihu Vedder, Cover. Digressions of V. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910). 11.13 Elihu Vedder, The Heavenly Potter. Verses 43–45. 1883–84. Chalk, pencil, ink, and watercolor on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson. 11.14 Elihu Vedder, Death’s Review. Verses 52–54, 1883. Chalk, pencil, ink, and watercolor on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson. 11.15 Detail from Elihu Vedder, Death’s Review (Figure 11.14); photograph of Elihu Vedder, Advertisement for Omar Khayyám, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Melville’s clipping in his edition of the Rubáiyát, with accompaniments by Vedder. Houghton Library. Harvard University Libraries. 11.16 Elihu Vedder, Throne of Saturn, 1883–84. Chalk, pencil, ink, and watercolor on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson. 11.17 Odilon Redon. Eye-Balloon, 1878. Charcoal and chalk on colored paper. Gift of Larry Aldrich. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. 11.18 Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn. The Stoning of Saint Stephen, 1635. Basan impression, etching. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Mary B. Regan. Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA. 11.19 Elihu Vedder, The End of Ramazan. Verse 90. 1883–84. Chalk, pencil, ink, and watercolor on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson.

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List of Figures 11.20 Elihu Vedder, Fisherman and the Genie, ca. 1863. Oil on panel. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Mrs. Martin Brimmer. 11.21 Elihu Vedder, Pardon Giving and Pardon Imploring Hands, 1883–84. Chalk, pencil, and ink on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson. 11.22 Elihu Vedder, “The Pardon-Giving and Imploring Hands.” Photograph. Digressions of V. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 409. 11.23 Elihu Vedder, The Song in the Wilderness. Verses 11–12. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson. 11.24 Elihu Vedder, The Soul to Solitude Retires. Verses 4–6. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson. 11.25 Elihu Vedder, The Cup of Despair. Verse 31. 1883–84. Chalk, pencil, watercolor, and ink on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson. 11.26 Elihu Vedder, Cliffs of Voltarra. ca. 1860. Oil on panel. The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio. Gift of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1955. 11.27 Elihu Vedder, “The Ladder and the Hole” in The Digressions of V. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 29. 11.28 Elihu Vedder, The Plague in Florence in The Digressions of V. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 31. 11.29 Elihu Vedder, The Lost Mind, 1863–64. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bequest of Helen L. Bullard, in memory of Laura Curtis Bullard, 1921. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY. 11.30 Elihu Vedder, Memory, 1870. Oil on mahogany panel. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. William Preston Harrison Collection. Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA. 11.31 Katsushika Hokusai, Tama River in Musashi Province (Bushu Tamagawa), from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjurokkei), ca. 1830–32. Polychrome woodblock print; ink and color on paper. Henry L.

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Phillips Collection. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY. 295 11.32 Elihu Vedder, Limitation. Verses 75–76. 1883–84. Chalk, pencil, and watercolor on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson. 295

Introduction: Reconstructing Melville Branka Arsić and K. L. Evans

How can we tell air from water, whale from Ahab, mind from body, or word from thing? Unassuming as the question may seem, for Melville it goes deep—for what commands his attention is the point at which these different things merge or meet. For instance, in a characteristic passage, Moby-Dick’s narrator considers whether a whale’s spout is really water or nothing but vapor, a visible exhalation, before interrupting his deliberation, frustrated by its feebleness: “But why pester one with all this reasoning on the subject? Speak out! You have seen him spout; then declare what the spout is; can you not tell water from air?” The answer can perhaps be understood as giving voice to problems with Melville’s thinking: “My dear Sir, in this world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. I have ever found your plainest things the knottiest of all. And as for this whale spout, you might almost stand in it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely.” The answer captures what many readers have registered as the quintessential trait of Melville’s thinking: his conviction that what is true resides in a network of relations so complex that they render it inscrutable, and his insistence that what is inscrutable must be addressed without ever making an effort to simplify it artificially. However, that is not to say that the intricate complexity of the world paralyzes Melville into vagueness of thought, nor to suggest that he fails to finely distinguish philosophical claims one from the other. For there are many occasions when he fully inhabits dueling intellectual positions in order to show why one of them is philosophically or ethically indefensible. Despite instances of definitiveness in his work, the widely accepted picture of Melville is nevertheless that of a spiritual wanderer. This view of Melville was perhaps initiated by Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose journals comment on Melville’s propensity for philosophizing, noting that “it is strange how he persists—and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.”1 While it might be the case that Hawthorne diagnoses Melville’s thinking habits accurately, the generality of his observation verges on the allegorical and so prevents us from seeing more specifically just how those habits are contrived, and what philosophies they in fact manage to generate. The persistent impulse behind this collection of essays is that this exaggerated portrait of Melville’s thought has obscured a more nuanced view of his philosophical achievements.

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Melville’s Philosophies

Even those critics who started, as of the 1920s, to manifest more intense and attentive appreciation for his work were predominantly guided by what they correctly saw as Melville’s bucking of literary convention, his restless experimentation with genre, and the continuous reinventions of his style.2 However, such positive appraisals lacked the conviction that what they classified as literature also amounts to an unprecedented philosophical achievement. For such a conviction might have led to an investigation of how the difference in Melville’s narrative style implies a corresponding difference in his habits of thought, or how it fashions different methods of thinking. The absence of such investigations might derive from the understanding, by even some of his most ardent admirers, that whereas Melville was somebody who “loves to philosophize,” as one prominent critic put it, it was difficult to render his philosophical propositions consequential, which is why they remained “less interesting for their intellectual content than for the animated activity of thinking they manifest.”3 That devaluation of Melville’s philosophical abilities is corroborated by Richard Chase’s claim that “as a thinker, Melville was an inspired amateur.”4 In spite of those judgments, one does find remarkable readings of Melville’s philosophy. Many of them were formulated by some of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, resulting in astonishing insights into Melville’s thought: we have in mind Maurice Blanchot’s extraordinary reading of Ahab; Gilles Deleuze’s reconstruction of Melville’s philosophy of life as entailing forces of individuations that Deleuze terms “originals”; Jacques Derrida’s interpretation suggesting that in Melville’s ontology—emblematized by Bartleby—being is always thought of as shaken and trembling; Giorgio Agamben’s reading of the philosophy of immanence, again in “Bartleby,” which fashioned a vitalist understanding of the living; Catherine Malabou’s extraordinary engagement with Deleuze’s reading of Melville; or François Zourabichvili’s interpretation of Ahab’s becoming the whale.5 Still other influential readings that approached Melville’s philosophical thinking in a non-trivial way were offered within the American interpretative tradition. We think of F. O. Matthiessen’s claim that Melville was working toward a new way of thinking that would fuse “the immediate with the abstract, the concrete event with the thought rising from it”; Charles Olson’s estimate that the new thought Melville was fashioning would cancel the distinction between “right reason” and black magic; Sharon Cameron’s contention that regardless of Moby-Dick’s literary excellence, the novel has an “independent philosophical status” and that its investment is in formulating a non-dualistic ontology; or, more recently, Elizabeth Duquette’s argument that Ishmael articulates an epistemology that revises both Locke’s empiricism and Kant’s idealism, proposing knowledge premised on the insight that truth can’t be possessed any more than the world can be (cognitively) mastered.6 It is on such a tradition that our collection of essays desires to build. For what unites the contributors to this volume is the conviction that Melville was a rigorous philosopher, a thinker of great caliber. This is, of course, not to say that the authors whose essays are gathered in this volume agree among themselves about Melville’s philosophical temperament or targets. It is also not to suggest that they practice similar

Introduction: Reconstructing Melville

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styles of reading or that they are connected by comparable methodologies. On  the contrary, there is much difference of opinion in the pages that follow, as well as a series of different strategies for interpreting Melville’s texts. But our contributors do all share the conviction that a new engagement with Melville’s writing—one that would take into account new formalisms as well as varieties of new materialism—can throw light on the most pressing current debates in literature and philosophy and by the same token help us to a deeper understanding of Melville. In the readings collected here Melville thus emerges as a thinker of genuine philosophical significance for current critical agendas fashioned by philosophies vaguely and often inadequately identified by the terms “materialist turn,” “post-humanism,” “the ontological turn,” “the aesthetic turn,” or “ecocriticism.” This volume seeks to initiate a new sense of how Melville used every resource of thought and language of the time in order to make philosophical contributions that belong to all time. Rather than make him easier to appreciate or introduce readers once more to the same time-honored views, we wish to re-envision our understanding of Melville’s philosophical achievement. Readers of this volume will thus discover that our contributors do not mine Melville’s literature for philosophically interesting generalities or use the occasion of Melville’s writing solely in order to enact the history of ideas. On the contrary, they try to hear the philosophical arguments themselves— often very strange and quite radical—that Melville never stopped articulating and reformulating. To understand just how comprehensive Melville’s engagement with philosophical thought was, the collection is divided into categories that vaguely mime traditional divisions among philosophical disciplines into ontology, epistemology, psychology, aesthetics, and politics. But we have decided to name those categories differently— “world-making” for epistemology, for instance, or “love stories” for psychology—to indicate that Melville departs from neat and customary taxonomies. As our authors keep suggesting, Melville’s positioning of long-established philosophical problems is always, even if only slightly, decentered, always complicating easy divides between mind and matter, words and things, art and the natural, body and feelings, or arts and the real. It is precisely such decentering, highlighted in the essays that follow, that makes Melville’s thought uneasy, risky, and daring. *** Why start with world-making? Why suggest that what is traditionally understood as ontology and epistemology is in Melville fused in the concern with fashioning the world, a fashioning that is not executed exclusively through ethics and aesthetics but also requires palpable and concrete remakings of material environments? In part because each of the authors in this section abandons—or, rather, follows Melville’s abandonment of—those dilemmas that emerge from pitting a stable “self ” against an unwavering (and yet unknowable) world. Instead we see what Paul Hurh calls “the destabilization of individual identities into a more immanent dispersal within the

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Melville’s Philosophies

environment.” We see innovative, rigorous attempts to account not for seemingly irresolvable differences but sustainable and sustaining paradoxes—for example what Stuart Burrows identifies as “the paradox of substance and continuity,” which explains how proper names can continue to be meaningful even after their bearer’s death so long as associations live on in collective memory. We see productive ways of keeping “literature and philosophy going on” as Maurice Lee writes. And everywhere we see a new openness; this is theorizing in which the old oppositions have no purchase. In our inaugural essay, Kim Evans reads Moby-Dick and in particular “Cetology” through Wittgenstein’s insight that linguistic knowledge (e.g., what is grasped by someone who understands the word or concept “whale”) isn’t a matter of knowing something in the empirical world but of knowing how to operate with signs. This conclusion is fortifying since its implication is that, though concepts or the meanings of our words are indeed human artifacts—and not mutely proffered to us, as it were by Nature herself, in sensory experience—they are artifacts not of “the mind” but of practical life. For Evans, the ingeniousness of Moby-Dick’s “Cetology” chapter is the way it works out both what concepts are and in what ways concepts are embedded in human activity—because as Melville would have us discover, our concepts are not arbitrary, not notions we can take up or abandon at will. For Melville, in short, there can be no question of dismissing the concept “whale” as meaningless on the ground that it fails to stand in some putatively required relationship to empirical reality. As Melville’s investigation into the way concepts are seated in our lives reveals, concept possession as such dependably reveals our knowledge and understanding of “what the world is like.” In “Billy Budd, Billy Budd,” Stuart Burrows addresses the historical and political outside to Melville’s “inside narrative,” his Billy Budd, Sailor. The novella’s narrator contends he is “restricted … to the inner life of one particular ship and the career of an individual sailor” (supporting the illusion that a ship at sea is “not just its own world but its own planet,” as Burrows writes), yet Melville’s language has such density of signification that the stress exerted on the story by outside forces can hardly be underestimated. Of particular interest to Burrows is “the strange wandering behavior displayed by proper names in the novella, which detach themselves from their purported referents and reattach themselves to others.” Seen in conjunction with other distinctive features of the text (images recycled within “markedly different, even antithetical” contexts; references that deliberately miss their mark; a text littered with errors Melville seems not likely to have made) such errant—or as Burrows suggests, mutinous—signs do not only “confuse the boundary between order and disorder.” They usher in what Burrows (following Sharon Cameron) calls a “breakdown of the stability of reference” upon which, we had supposed, meaning depends. However, by tracing the extended ambivalence Melville’s work displays toward the ability of names to refer to what they designate, Burrows does not assemble an account of language in which (as Thomas Carlyle worried) “names fall short” of the things nature is capable of producing. For Burrows, as for the sailors on the Bellipotent or the namers of ships like Rights of Man, names are calls to action. Instead, Burrows locates the associative power of names in a

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network wholly outside of the subject/object relationship. Like Melville, he envisages “a language … which does not originate within the subject” or in which it is not individual consciousness that determines the continuity of identity. Maurice S. Lee considers one of Melville’s lesser-known tales, “The AppleTree Table,” a charming minor production that, in contrast to the extravagant philosophizing of Melville’s longer works, “activates without scrambling one’s critical sensibilities.” As Lee demonstrates, Melville’s story handsomely repays rereading for the way it directs our attention to an ongoing concern in the philosophy of science, namely, a question about “what sorts of methods might justify inferences of an unobservable world.” Melville’s interest (confidence, even) in the unobservable world is what gives “The Apple-Tree Tale” its potency. Thus, rather than attach Melville’s story to a hackneyed scholarly tradition which draws distinctions between the natural and the supernatural, scientific reason and religious superstition, or empirical descriptions and literary aesthetics, Lee follows Melville in finding support for what Hillary Putnam calls the necessary “entanglement of facts, theories, and values” in our (thoroughly scientific) attempts to speculate about invisible wonders. Much like the author of “The Apple-Tree Table,” Lee gently and humorously shows the needlessness of positing irreconcilable differences in our struggle to know the unseen world. In his study of Melville’s monumental Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, Paul Hurh addresses the poem’s sustained engagement with doubt. As Hurh explains, however, the kind of doubt to which the poem is given over has a special sense, since it emerges “not from the self ’s own limitations” but rather from the limits of the physical and temporal world itself. Doubt—unlike skepticism, which is a personal issue requiring a psychological resolution—is by this account a material and impersonal phenomenon. In Hurh’s view, “to read the doubt of Clarel as inhering not in psychology but in physics makes Clarel indispensable to the continuing re-assessment of the nonhuman and impersonal currents in Melville’s work.” Doing so moreover transforms doubt from a religious or philosophical crisis “into a kind of aesthetic event.” To the history of Melville scholars whose attempts to resolve the philosophical stakes of Clarel’s skeptical/epistemological dilemma unintentionally makes this 18,000-line poem even more ponderous, Hurh contributes “a way of reading the poem that accounts for the wait, the doubt, the matter of the poem as itself constitutive of the question of faith rather than being merely an external gauntlet to be run in pursuit of it.” *** Love broadly conceived unites the essays in our next section—love as investment, as Kenneth Dauber frames it, even or especially when it is not returned; love as a means of queering subjectivity, our name for the “collapse of personages,” as Michael Snediker writes; love, even, as a commitment to feeling, a mode of engagement Rhian Williams explicitly associates with the way poetry works, poetry’s dynamic mediation between self and world. First, though, Rachel Cole finds a love story in Melville’s desolate story of Wall Street, his “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”

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For Deleuze and Agamben, Bartleby stands as a figure of indeterminacy and indifference: a man without preferences. But Derrida emphasizes both Bartleby’s melancholy and the burden of his ethical demands; for Derrida, Bartleby is a figure of responsibility. In “The Lawyer’s Tale,” Rachel Cole considers Derrida’s Bartleby and the question of “how we should, and whether we can, fulfill our obligations to other people.” Cole’s subject is responsible personhood. She works to show how, for Melville as for Derrida, personhood is a social phenomenon—“a matter of how one presents oneself to, and is then experienced by other people.” Personhood (“located within the experience of others, not the self ”) is likewise a material phenomenon, manifest “in the actions taken (or not taken) by the person in the world, actions which simultaneously follow from and obstruct others’ access to the reasons which determined them.” In an attentive, vigilant reading of Melville’s story, Cole then distinguishes between responsibility on the Derridean model, in which insufficient resources limit our ability to act responsibly (“because in committing ourselves to be responsible we are committing ourselves unconditionally and without reserve to meet the other’s needs, whatever those needs may be,” and thus “responsibility towards one person entails favoring that person at the expense of others”), and responsibility on the Melvillean model, in which the difficulty of accommodating other people and their needs isn’t limited resources but the fact that “our own status as persons depends on our ability to monopolize those resources.” For Cole, Melville’s “Story of Wall-street” anticipates Derrida’s discussion of the scarcity of material resources and consequent inequity. However, for Melville, “the problem is not that every other is wholly other and thus demands all, but, more modestly, that any other, even one as minimal as Bartleby, is materially other and thus demands something. This something cannot come out of nothing and will thus require the preferential redistribution of resources.” Because “Bartleby” traces our responsibility for other people’s material demands, slight as they often are (Bartleby requires only “a few square feet of office space”), the lawyer’s tale as Melville tells it doesn’t hollow out an ever-expanding zone of indetermination or indifference, as Deleuze and Agamben suggest. Rather, it is “a tale of concrete occupation,” as Cole writes, “a bleak little tale” which shows how hard it is to meet the needs of other people “even when those demands are minimal.” For Rachel Cole, Melville’s “Bartleby” offers an alternative model not just of personhood, but of love. An inventive or pioneering kind of love is precisely what Kenneth Dauber finds in Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, which Dauber reads as a tale of attachment—that is, an extended experiment not in satire but in satire’s opposite: a deadly serious work of sentimentality. In a radical revision of the logic of sentiment, Dauber argues that the true sentimentalist like Melville “knows the lie of sentimentality”—the lie that love is an exchange (that “because God loves you, you will love each other”) or that there is an economics of love. Melville knows that “there is no economy in love at all,” or that love must be given outside any hope of return. For Dauber, “Melville—and not only, though especially, in Pierre—is an extremely sentimental case. Quite simply, he is a lover, and beyond the conventional

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sentimentalists who loved only what was or what they could make lovable, he loves virtually everything and everywhere.” To be a sentimentalist in the most extreme sense is like Melville to exhibit love that will not be deterred—“not by misreading, not by neglect, indeed not by differences (or indifferences) of any sort.” Dauber supplants the picture of Melville as modernist skeptic (which misses entirely the point and the poignancy of Melville’s terrible investment in a world and its people he could not stop believing in) by showing how, for Melville, indifference could become the very basis of love—our name for those investments or engagements that are “always in excess of any possible return.” Melville’s Pierre is also the work to which Michael Snediker turns in his reflections on chronic pain. For Snediker, the “figurative intensities” of Pierre and of certain passages from Moby-Dick—Melville’s propensity for subjecting textual surface to a series of aesthetic maneuvers in order to produce depth—posit a way to think about chronic pain from the perspective of the person experiencing it. Describing one’s chronic pain is a fraught enterprise, Snediker explains, “because it’s only in the iteration of pain, over and over, that it becomes a thing.” Less an object than a predicament (one that “inflicts a particular damage to what one calls a self ” since one’s pain “both is and isn’t one’s own flesh”), chronic pain has no empirical presence; pain itself cannot be seen and thus it cannot be adequately depicted through the convention of verisimilitude. In his essay, then, Snediker meditates on Melvillean figuration in order to complicate one of the founding assumptions of disability studies: that literature’s capacity to speak to the experience of another person’s physical pain is predicated on the contrivance of characters who movingly articulate (from the vantage of an interiorized, coherent self) such experience. For Snediker, it isn’t the presumed correspondence between characters and persons that can assist the ordeal of describing what chronic pain is. Rather it is figuration itself which lends adequate expression to the sufferer’s pain—that excessive attention to the surface of writing which one early critic of Pierre associates with the “viscous and somewhat cloying quality” of Melville’s “billowy” style, his “purple” prose, and Snediker more shrewdly identifies as writing that “inches toward being an event (and more simply, toward being).” Is chronic pain tenor or vehicle? Is it part of what Merleau-Ponty describes as “the sensible world” and as such “visible and relatively continuous,” or is it part of “the universe of thought, which is invisible and contains gaps”? As Snediker demonstrates, chronic pain, “dazzlingly confounding” to the extent that it is experienced as simultaneously central to and absent from the sensible world, illuminates and is illuminated by the vigor with which Melvillean figuration compulsively out-materializes the non-material world. The figurative vitality of Melville’s writing—and the relationship between material presence and ineffable, enduring affect—is also Rhian Williams’s subject. In her finely calibrated account of Melville’s Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, Williams understands Clarel’s generic instability not as a measure of Melville’s failure as a poet but of his commitment to “feeling faith”—his persistent responsiveness to (and sensuous apprehension of) the changing conditions of belief. As Williams reveals, the “learning, unlearning, word by word” advanced by Clarel—the way the

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poem requires from readers “an openness to learning that is experienced affectively through wonder and intimacy”—points to the conception of poetry Melville learned from his near-contemporary Matthew Arnold. To Arnold, poetry is the medium through which the divine and mortal realms are brought together. (Or as Williams frames Melville’s Arnoldian inheritance, poetry evidences “the work of sharpening the senses to affective knowledge.”) In the kind of startling turnaround in insight we have come to expect from Melville’s most sensitive readers, Williams shows how Melville’s Clarel, which Lawrence Buell calls “the great Victorian epic of faith and doubt,” is rightly understood as a means to discern the experience of faith not despite but because Clarel is interested in the effects of history on sensibility. In Williams’s account, that is to say, “the experience of faith” which Melville’s poem traces inheres in material conditions and so “emerges not as subjective, but historical.” *** Just how slippery the distinctions are between affect and form, love and style, or psychology and aesthetics is one of the main points made by James D. Lilley’s “Fateful Gestures: On Movement and the Maneuvers of Style in ‘Benito Cereno.’” Starting from Giorgio Agamben’s diagnosis that modernity could be understood as a catastrophe that befalls the “gestural sphere”—a disaster that resulted in novel ways of classifying movements of the body—Lilley raises the question of bodily gestures in Melville’s “Benito Cereno” to make us understand very differently the major stakes of the novella. As Lilley argues, starting from Evert Duyckinck’s review there was a remarkable critical consensus that “Benito Cereno” is about a failure of reading and understanding gestures that various characters are busy manufacturing to communicate secretly what exactly is occurring on the ship. In contrast to that dominant critical tradition, Lilley argues that if so much remains unread in Melville’s narrative, it is not because of the writer’s “unwillingness to unlock the puzzles of the text at hand.” Rather, it is because the narrative is taking place in an utterly different domain of pre-modern allegory, one that renders gestures manufactured by various characters literally inaccessible to modern minds. Lilley understands that the premodern allegorical realm in which Melville works transcends a whole range of dichotomies upon which our own search for meaning is predicated. Thus, Melville’s answer to the question of meaning that everybody raises—“What do the veiled signs and gestures of the sailors really mean, and when will Delano unlock their truth?”— constitutes, Lilley argues, “a drippingly baroque and properly allegorical style that mutinies the concerns of the plot and simply ignores the edicts that propel its weak aesthetic logic.” Starting from the nature of gesture Lilley proceeds to read the encounter between the two captains “as a meeting of opposing styles and different syntaxes of motion,” in order to propose answers to the following questions: “To what extent is it possible to register and recognize gesture in life and in language? And if our language is so often propelled by an aesthetic logics of abstraction and equivalence, what modes of style best animate or most inhibit the immanent difference that gesture’s maneuvers make?”

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Charting a way through the history of ideas and science—and even, albeit somewhat unexpectedly, through opera—Lilley’s close readings convincingly demonstrate that “Benito Cereno” “reminds his readers of what is lost when experience is reduced to the empty echoes of modern allegorical aesthetics.” And mindful of that loss Lilley proposes that instead of understanding Delano as a bad reader who fails to resolve the problem at hand we examine the veracity of our own reading—one that looks for secret meanings and problem solving—since it might be “that it is the very form of [this] problem-solving technique … that Melville seeks to parody.” Lilley will therefore propose instead a way of thinking that operates precisely by frustrating dichotomies such as question and answer, problem and solution, transparency and opaqueness, form and deformed. And it is through complex interpretations of the relation between reading and understanding, style and obscurity that Lilley’s essay powerfully demonstrates the intricate codependence of affectivity and aesthetics. If Lilley details how affect—muted or gestured—searches for aesthetic form, Samuel Otter’s “Melville, Poetry, Prints” charts how in Melville’s Clarel one aesthetic form searches for another. As Otter reconstructs, Clarel has recourse to visual arts vocabulary, specifically the terminology “of prints and printmaking: mezzotints (1.36.30), lithographs (3.26.19–20), etchings (2.35), the qualities of impressions and copies (3.7.16–24), and the durability of plates (3.21.289),” in order to think about aesthetic form in its various manifestations. But Otter’s focus is on canto 2.35, titled “Prelusive,” where Melville reflects on eighteenth-century etchings of imaginary prisons, the Carceri, by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, to introduce us in a particularly complex way to his thinking about the relationship between the visual and the literary. Otter shows how Melville was less concerned with psychological states, or the vast Gothic halls represented in the Carceri, than with theology, temporality, and reproduction. In a poem about the return to a Holy Land, the search for origins, and the discernment of prospects, about the meanings of sequence and repetition, Melville’s interest in Piranesi helped him imagine a series that develops in complex rhythms of constraint and maneuver, and repetitions that progress through multiple recessions. Printmaking offered an understanding of reproduction in which copies were not static or degraded but involved expressive partiality and intensification. In demonstrating how Melville’s rhetoric and perception rearticulate “the relationships between originals and copies,” and how his insistence on repetition affects the labor of difference, Otter’s analysis of the aesthetic also offers illuminating possibilities for interpreting Melville’s ontology. By having a series of close readings intersect with a rich archive, Otter makes the argument that Melville joins “the visual and the verbal not in hierarchy or antagonism but through their distinctive intimacies.” Corroborating this insight, Elisa Tamarkin’s “A Final Appearance with Elihu Vedder: Melville’s Visions” focuses on the relationship between Melville’s late poetry (Timoleon) and the ways in which it reflects on the visual art of Elihu Vedder, to whom Timoleon is dedicated. The problematic of the visual in Melville’s late poetry is, as Tamarkin reminds us, raised by the poems themselves, many of which record visual impressions. They are thus linguistic visualizations of moments that Melville makes “appear to us in visions as if they are really there.” Yet, even if

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“the claim of the poems seems to be that art will be visionary like this,” the Timoleon poems, Tamarkin argues, radically complicate the intricate relation between the visual and the linguistic, memory and presence, letter and image, for “the images they draw to the surface in solid, intensifying form” are less memorials to discrete experiences of the real than “hallucinations from a life that is lost or loses meaning by the day.” Because Timoleon is so pervasively concerned with how loss relates to art it should be understood, Tamarkin proposes, as “Melville’s most sustained reflection on the effects of art,” giving “shape and substance to something like a philosophy of art across its poems.” Tamarkin’s essay is thus about mapping a philosophy of art predicated on loss and lateness over what is sometimes called Melville’s pessimism. Through a series of readings of Vedder’s paintings, Schopenhauer’s propositions on the will, and Melville’s poems, Tamarkin reconstructs how Melville’s philosophy of art enacts a veritable ontological wizardry. For it fashions poems that enable illicit ontological fusions (between dreams and matter, for instance) while engendering art whose evanescence paradoxically manages to render the “thickness” of ordinary life. By embodying the philosophy of art they simultaneously formulate, the Timoleon poems are thus, in Tamarkin’s words, “hypnotic and dreamlike, but still hang thickly on the material world. They cleave to its brevity. Melville wanted his poems to have the special effects of Vedder’s drawings, but to do this they had to acknowledge the vaporousness of art’s whole enterprise and then make a case for the experience of this sort of illusion in the face of a world so lost to us and devastating that only illusions can redeem it.” Paul Grimstad’s “La téméraire littéraire: Reckless Adaptation in Pierre and Pola X” is concerned with how Melville’s writing encounters and generates what is unrepresentable, what in escaping visualization or avoiding explicit meanings comes across, thanks largely to the style Melville intentionally employs, as obscure and inscrutable. As Grimstad puts it, “Melville has his characters raise philosophical problems—say, about Evil, or about appearance and reality—and then pose answers to those questions in and as style.” This strategy is explicitly revealed in Pierre because its style “is bent toward a sustained preoccupation with the problem of that which escapes depiction.” The privileged status of Pierre for any investigation of those questions is earned by the fact that in that work the inscrutable is converted into “inscrutableness,” which renders what might previously have been a practice of writing into an epistemological and ontological category. For as Grimstad argues, “‘inscrutableness’ will come to indicate both a certain powerlessness of the literary to get at certain features of human experience, and an example of the sort of invention Melville concocts as compensation for this powerlessness. It is as if he wants to put … extra flesh on words, to append substance to them in order to get them to become objects.” Grimstad’s essay will trace how such a “transubstantiation” of style into flesh is enacted. *** Melville never wrote anything that wasn’t marked by intense investment in the political. His politics are ambiguous and sometimes so complex that to discern in

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them an overarching philosophy verges, as Tamarkin notes, on the hallucinatory. Yet serious treatment of those politics is exactly the undertaking of the authors whose essays appear in the last section of our book, “Communities.” We chose that title not just to signal that when Melville thinks about politics he typically thinks about what makes communities disastrous, albeit necessary, but also to mark the diversity of our authors’ approaches to what might be called the “political” in Melville. However, if there is something that connects the essays despite their diversity, it would be a concept of sovereignty in its multiple meanings. In examining a wide range of conceptions of sovereignty—from the sovereignty of the state to the sovereignty of human personhood; from the question of terror to the question of ethnic violence; from the question of law to the question of borders—the essays in this section analyze how in Melville power violates integrity. How sovereignties affect commonalities is perhaps most explicitly asked in Paul Downes’s “Melville’s Leviathan.” Melville’s Leviathan is, of course, an animal that, unlike Hobbes’s, dwells in a dominion that seems to escape or even oppose the political. And, similarly, Hobbes’s political Leviathan might be understood as a social animal designed to protect us from the natural. Thus, on the face of it, Melville and Hobbes can’t easily be thought together, if at all. Downes confronts that interpretative prohibition. For he precisely asks, What would happen if we were to try to think two fabulous creatures together, binding Moby-Dick’s malice to the commonwealth’s force? The aim of such a conceptually illicit bonding is to get at “the democratic potential in Hobbes’s ostensibly authoritarian theory of sovereignty,” and in so doing “to re-imagine the political philosophy implicit in Melville’s account of Moby Dick.” Downes detects in both Hobbes’s and Ahab’s commonality a logic of supplementarity. By that he means that, in Hobbes, sovereign power protects community by instituting itself as a surplus of personhood, as what “bears the person” of all. In Melville, in a structurally similar way, the whale works as “a supplementary or prosthetic sovereignty,” for the bone of a whale slaughtered by Ahab “bears his person” in the form of a prosthetic limb. And while this logic of supplementarity might at first sight be perceived as canceling the possibility of egalitarianism, Hobbes’s Leviathan, as Downes argues, “reminds us that a more egalitarian social order (a commonwealth in the best sense of the term) requires an egalitarian relationship to surplus value and to the representational supplement of the political sovereign.” His essay will thus investigate how, through the conceptual apparatus afforded us by Hobbes, “Ahab’s prosthetic leg figures the ‘artificial soul’ of democratic sovereignty and the whale’s attack on the Pequod imagines a revolutionary violence that bears a complex (or deconstructed) relationship to intentionality and justice.” Just how uncertain the nature of justice is in Melville’s thinking is the concern of Colin Dayan’s “Bartleby’s Screen,” which asks us to consider justice through the operation of the law—that is, the very force that is supposed to enable it. But Dayan doesn’t imagine the law in any easy and straightforward way. In her thinking the law is never just about clusters of regulative propositions mandating or frustrating certain behaviors; it is nothing less than the ontological machinery capable of producing realities and reconfiguring beings. Focusing on “Bartleby, The Scrivener,” Dayan

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concentrates on how “the consequences of law, once exercised in the narrator-lawyer’s office on Wall Street, also suggest alternative ways of seeing body and spirit, and, ultimately, natural and unnatural death.” Her reading of the operation of the force of the law reveals those alternatives, for it shows a law endowed with a terrifying capacity for “transubstantiation,” turning persons into mere human material or rendering the fictional concrete and palpable. Thus, “what is legally possible or impossible demands give-and-take between categories such as public or private, thing or self, physical or incorporeal.” The central claim of Dayan’s argument, however, is that “Bartleby” describes how such conversions are “not possible [inasmuch as] the meanings of legal terms such as persons, things, property, and possession are thwarted, held in suspension before Bartleby who stands both as body and spirit, the impeccable icon of matter who is also a ghost.” While Dayan takes us to the site of the law by revealing how Melville adheres to the community between body and spirit, Michael Jonik’s “Melville’s Misanthropology” begins from the premise that Melville invites us to think about communities through manifold figures of disaggregation and non-commonality. From Ahab to Claggart, the Dog-King to Timophanes, or the Marquesan missionaries to the metaphysicians of Indian-hating, Melville’s “communitarians,” Jonik argues, are often difficult to discern from man-haters and misanthropes. The guiding concern of his essay could thus be summarized in the following questions: What would happen if instead of taking the communally adapted Ishmael as our starting point for thinking about commonality, we instead took Melville’s misanthropes? How might they mark the limits of the common or revise our understanding of Melville’s scenes of commonality? Do misanthropes merely thwart the intersubjective possibilities of the common—through egotism, paternal power, mistrust, or hatred—or do they open another space of difference (not-sameness) and/or irreducible singularity? Jonik’s answer to those questions is articulated through what he calls “Melville’s misanthropology,” most explicitly realized in The Confidence-Man through a series of interwoven philosophical guises and interlocutors—Pitch, Charlie Noble, Moredock, Judge Hall, Francis Goodman, Charlemont, a cosmopolitan, and a stranger. His essay explores how “misanthropology” works as a critique of “genialization” insofar as it self-justifies Indian-hating on the basis of Christian philanthropy, and includes a careful analysis of Melville’s “metaphysics of Indian-hating” as well as the figure of the “genial misanthrope” adumbrated in The Confidence-Man. Branka Arsić’s “Desertscapes: Geological Politics in Clarel” investigates how, after law and whaling, the office and the ship, it is the desert that, in Clarel, becomes the privileged standpoint from which Melville deliberates on ontology and politics. Her essay investigates Melville’s political and cultural readings of the dynamic between desert and green lands in the Palestine he visits on his 1857 trip and records in Clarel. As Arsić argues, at a certain point in the poem the desert no longer represents a natural terrestrial condition but a cultivated one, witnessing to the devastating effects of the Christian disregard of the body and whatever is materially concretized. To the condition of Christian desert Melville juxtaposes the Arab custom of planting cypress trees into cemeteries, which is read not just as an effort to include the dead

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in the (natural) world of the living but also as a cultural enterprise of resistance to the desert. Moving between the geological and the political, the essay thus ends by considering how Melville interprets the desert in his late poetry—especially clearly formulated in Timoleon—as a veritable ontological force manufacturing not a void or abysmal absence of meaning but, on the contrary, a plethora of differences and new beginnings.

Notes 1 2

3 4

5

6

Herman Melville, Journals, ed. Howard Horsford and Lynn Horth (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 628. This short passage represents a highly compressed tour of Melville scholarship at the height of deconstruction, for example, Henry Sussman’s “The Deconstructor as Politician: Melville’s Confidence-Man,” Glyph 4 (1978): (54) or new historicism, for example, Michael Paul Rogin’s Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York: Knopf, 1983), as well as more recent aesthetically minded criticism, for example Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn, eds., Melville and Aesthetics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Richard H. Brodhead, Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 119. The American Novel and Its Tradition (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 20. Chase continued the tradition of treating dismissively what in an early study Charles Anderson had disparagingly called Melville’s “sailor metaphysics.” Melville in the South Seas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 4. Maurice Blanchot, “Prophetic Speech,” in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 79–85. Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby of the Formula,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Michael A. Greco and Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 68–90. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” in Potentialities, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 243–74. Catherine Malabou, “Who Is Afraid of Hegelian Wolves?”, in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton, trans. David Wills (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 114–38. François Zourabichvili, “Six Notes on the Percept (On the Relation between the Critical and the Clinical),” in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton, trans. Ian Hamilton Grant (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 188–216. F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance, Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 388; Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1947), 56; Sharon Cameron, The Corporeal Self, Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 1; Elizabeth Duquette, “Speculative Cetology: Figuring Philosophy in Moby-Dick,” ESQ 47 (2001): 33–57, 42.

Part One

World-Making

1

Gospel Cetology K. L. Evans

Words are like a film on deep water.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916

In this chapter I aim to make sense of Moby-Dick’s startling conclusion—by which I mean not the demise of the Pequod and its crew but the resolution to the philosophical puzzle that gives Melville’s book its momentum. What connects the word “whale” to the situation outside in the world it picks out? What is the relation of our words to those aspects of reality irreducible to mental representations? Melville, after all, is convinced that there is a solution to this puzzle, one that does not entail accepting the deeply problematic view that the words in our language have bearing on reality only when they enjoy what William James calls “cash value in experiential terms”—when they can be shown to designate some aspect of the extra-mental, extra-linguistic world. As it happens, Melville rejects in all of its forms the doctrine that a proper name or general term has bearing on reality only when it corresponds to some entity whose existence owes nothing to language. This is not to say that for Melville reality is merely a projection, as readers who think him hospitable to skepticism have often argued—a widely held assumption that has resulted in Moby-Dick’s misdirected reputation for being existentially bleak. On the contrary, Melville’s great accomplishment is to have convinced his readers that even though there is nothing in the natural world to which the word or concept “whale” directly corresponds, there is something more than just made up or chimerical about this concept—that this concept is sufficiently deserving of the label “real” to drive out the worry that it is the mere projection of a human mind. The author of Moby-Dick is, of course, aware that when we speak of the entities referred to or designated by the word “whale” we speak not of things but of things-inlanguage, figments of discourse. And to make this concession, as Bernard Harrison writes, is to raise the specter of “the Prison House of Language,” as philosophers since Locke have conceived it: “For it makes it appear that the main obstacle to the achievement of a language capable of representing accurately how things stand in Reality is the creative fertility of the mind in the elaboration of concepts. And that in turn raises the possibility that that very fertility might shut the mind off from

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Reality, blinding it, to employ a graphic phrase of Berkeley’s, with a ‘false imaginary glare.’”1 As Melville’s whaling narrative invites us to recall, language speakers are subject to a special kind of worry, belonging to the category of skeptical doubt.2 The worry is that since we think and speak in language, and language is a creation of the human mind, the concepts fabricated within language—the things our words name—are, likewise, creations of mind. As philosophers gripped by such doubt might wonder, “what assurance have we that, when we speak, we speak of the furniture of the universe, of Reality itself, rather than merely of the homely, and home-made, furniture of our own minds?” How are we not condemned to converse solely with the conceptual fictions fabricated entirely within language?3 In Moby-Dick, Melville frames the worry this way: How does the thing signified by the sign “whale” (“the living whale in its full majesty and significance”) not as a matter of course evade the grasp of language speakers? My suggestion is that Melville’s rejoinder to this age-old anxiety is surprisingly heartening. For the problem disappears, as he demonstrates, when we finally stop acting as if the things our words name are bits of extra-mental reality, creatures of the purely physical universe, and yet hold out against the suspicion that our words name merely mental entities. In Moby-Dick, Melville dispels the illusions systematically developed by Locke and Kant. That is, he shows how our ability to form the concept “whale” is not a consequence of using this word to label some recurring feature of experience (as Locke contended), not a result of the human mind imposing its order on supposedly incoherent materials (as Kant claimed). Indeed, with his whaling narrative Melville attacks the entire multifaceted philosophical tradition enthralled by the belief that forming a concept (e.g., bestowing meaning upon a general name in a language) is an activity of mind. Melville’s vital discovery is that the conceptual object the word “whale” names is neither an object of our senses nor is it an inhabitant of the subjective, private, “inner world” philosophers since Descartes have associated with the world of ideas. For Melville, the admission that concepts are fabricated within language comes as a great relief because it forces the conclusion that the meaning of a word doesn’t issue from the mind, as it were, but from the role the word plays in language—a role established by the needs and relevant interests of people engaged in specific practices. Without the need for the word or concept “whale” in a way of life, Melville’s whaling narrative makes clear, we would not start forming the concept or using the word, and the word would not acquire meaning.4 Melville’s discovery that concept formation is a public process—that we form and use concepts according to interpersonal rules (otherwise people could not use this word in the same way; the word could not become part of our language) supports his conclusion that concepts can be objective, as Plato first suggested. Melville’s drawn-out hint in Moby-Dick that the concept “whale” is objective and indeed that objectivity is a general feature of concepts offers a powerful reorientation, a lesson of great magnitude, because showing how concepts are not formed in the theater of the individual mind is a way of restoring to the human mind its power and dignity—of rescuing it from the

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corner to which much post-Cartesian philosophy has relegated it, as Henri Bergson writes, “like a schoolboy in disgrace.”5 For many philosophers, the thought that concepts can be objective seems farfetched. And yet as Melville understood the crucial point about concepts is that they are what enable us to function rationally.6 They must therefore be true outside of a subject’s individual biases, interpretations, feelings, and imaginings. To put it another way, the author of Moby-Dick does not hold with the view that our concepts are merely mental representations, from which follows the disabling conviction that the conceptual fertility of the mind continuously threatens to bar us from an adequate knowledge of “what the world is like.” The revelation in Melville’s whaling narrative is that even though there is no extant being standing over against the word or concept “whale,” nor any possibility of explaining this word’s meaning by correlating it with any constituent or aspect of the natural world, it is incorrect to think that our possession of the concept—what it is to be in a position to understand the word “whale”—depends on the operations of mind. What we might call Melville’s philosophical achievement in Moby-Dick is thus related to the way he works out in concert what concepts are and in what ways concepts are embedded in human activity: how our concepts are situated in complex ways within the instinctive—unconscious, involuntary—dimension of our lives. For as the philosopher Hugh Knott writes, “our concepts are placed centrally in our lives. They are not in this sense a tool which we may pick up or leave as we wish: our possession of them is constitutive of our lives, and their constitution too is a function of the way they are embedded in our lives.”7 Melville’s preoccupation with concept possession, with how our concepts are seated in our lives, in this way takes us far beyond the opposing theories (generally represented by Locke and Kant) that presently dominate investigation into the nature of human knowledge. Melville knows what he is doing, that is to say, when he throws the “thunderheads” overboard—when he summarily dispenses with both empiricist and rationalist attempts to establish contact between thought and the world.8 The marked consequence of Melville’s decisive break with these contesting accounts is that he clears the decks for a more practicable reason for trusting that concept possession as such dependably reveals our knowledge and understanding of “what the world is like.” In Moby-Dick, Melville shows how our concepts, in addition to being creatures of the fertility of the mind, are tools for handling reality. Such a view of Melville’s philosophical acuity is not prevalent, but this chapter aims to encourage it. To that end my strategy will be to enlist the descriptive vocabulary of an investigative tradition equally determined to work out the relation between a word or sign (“whale,” in Melville’s illustrative example) and a situation outside in the world (the living whale in its full majesty and significance). I mean the tradition associated with Wittgenstein’s work in logic, as understood by some of Wittgenstein’s most ingenious readers.9 In what follows I consider Wittgenstein’s provocative intervention in (what he calls) the “study of sign language” in the hope of throwing more light on Melville’s own theory of concept formation—of what it is to be in a position to understand a sign when it is said or written.10 Enlisting Wittgenstein’s

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wariness about the empiricist tradition in English-speaking philosophy (his sense that some philosophers were looking in just the wrong place for answers to the question of how language is related to reality) should, at the very least, help us to read Moby-Dick’s notorious “Cetology” chapter with more pleasure and profit.

I Wittgenstein changed the course of philosophy when in his Tractatus and its accompanying notebooks he showed that sentences or propositions have sense despite the fact that the words they comprise do not correspond to extra-linguistic entities. Like Plato and the great American logician C. S. Peirce, Wittgenstein saw the futility of trying to match linguistic expressions to some category of extra-linguistic objects. For as he came to understand, the relation of identity between signs and things signified—what makes it possible to “read off ” a situation from a sign, without making a mistake—attests to an internal or logical relationship between written or spoken signs and the situations they pick out. We say that signs and things signified are internally or logically related to each other because they are only intelligible in relation to one another. For Wittgenstein, that is to say, the relation between a sign and the situation outside in the world it heralds cannot be what Hume called a “natural” relation, a conventional association between some element of language and some aspect of extra-linguistic reality, because if it were a natural relation, it would have to be—absurdly, as Wittgenstein sees it—established by empirical inquiry. In consequence, Wittgenstein argued that a sentence must be a logical portrayal of its meaning, and thus that philosophers trying to completely analyze sentences—to conceive of the link between linguistic expressions and the extra-linguistic entities they supposedly designate—had been hunting chimeras.11 Wittgenstein’s discovery is trailblazing because its essential thrust is that what allows a well-formed sentence to make sense isn’t determined by the relation between the words or signs that figure in the sentence and the nature of the objects they pick out. It is determined by the relation, internal to the sentence, between signs and things signified. For Wittgenstein the “thing signified” by a sign isn’t the sign’s referent (the natural object it indicates) but the sign’s sense, what is expressed by the sign. On this point Wittgenstein departs radically from his teacher, Bertrand Russell. Russell thought that knowing whether a sentence had sense depended on knowing its truth conditions, and since the truth condition of a sentence is the condition of the world under which the sentence is true, stipulating truth conditions ultimately requires an appeal to the nature of things. For Russell, determining the sense of any sentence in which the word or sign “whale” figures requires a complete analysis of the concept “whale”; that is, it depends on finding a connection between the word “whale” and what philosophers after Hume called natural facts. In Wittgenstein’s theory of logical portrayal, in contrast, grasping the nature of the whale is inessential to grasping the thought expressed by a sentence employing this word. That is because the meaning of the word “whale” is not conferred through what Hume called a natural

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relation. The meaning of the word, if by that we indicate not its referent but its sense, what the word expresses, is not determined by the nature of the object that bears the word as its name. As Wittgenstein explains in his notebooks, the difficulty of his theory of logical portrayal was always the difficulty of accounting for the relationship between a sentential sign and the situation that can be read off from it. As he notes, “The difficulty of my theory of logical portrayal was that of finding a connection between the signs on paper and a situation outside in the world. I always said that truth is a relation between the proposition and the situation, but could never pick out such a relation.”12 But accounting for this relationship is precisely what Wittgenstein achieves in his so-called picture theory of language when he insists that there is a logical relation between the written or spoken signs that make up a proposition and the situations (Sachverhalten, the Tractarian term commonly translated as “states of affairs”) the signs pick out.13 When Wittgenstein says that there is a logical relation between signs and things signified, he is saying that knowing the meaning of a sign as it figures in a sentence has nothing to do with knowing the nature of the sign’s referent, and everything to do with knowing the role the sign plays in our vast and continually ramifying language. What Wittgenstein in effect argues with his theory of logical portrayal is that philosophers’ problems disappear when they stop enshrining the correspondence theory of meaning, or stop acting as if the meanings of words must in some way be determined by the nature of things. For Wittgenstein, what we know as the “meaning” of a word is quite simply not the result of associating the word with some natural fact. (Nor is it contrived privately, as it were, in the theater of the mind.) As Wittgenstein makes clear, there is something illegitimate about the way philosophers talk about the “meaning” of a word, as if meaning was a function of matching names to natural entities. This is a funny way of talking, since as Wittgenstein points out in his Philosophical Investigations, “For a large number of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.”14 Now, the certainty that the meaning of the word “whale” is its use in the language is what Melville’s “Cetology” chapter demonstrates. The whole of Melville’s chapter is committed to advocating a version of the belief that “meaning is use,” introducing a precept dear to Wittgenstein, but at present, unfortunately, “one of the more threadbare and overworked philosophical clichés of the twentieth century.”15 Melville’s “Cetology” chapter offers what is therefore a much-needed illustration of precisely what is to be understood by the slogan “meaning is use.” For Wittgenstein, “meaning is use” is intended to spell out the certainty that meaning isn’t determined by the nature of things. (Or as a philosopher might say, it is meant to make clear that linguistic competence is non-epistemic in character.)16 In Harrison’s reading of Wittgenstein, the claim “meaning is use” is the claim that meaning is a function “not of the bare association of elements of language with elements of reality essentially fitted to become their referents, but rather of the roles assigned to words in the conduct of socially devised and maintained practices.”17 This is the sprachspiel or “language-game” Wittgenstein tried to make understandable.

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Wittgenstein emphasized the human action into which language is woven because he came to understand that the way meaning is bestowed on a word isn’t by associating the word with some bit of the natural world but by specifying a role for the word in the conduct of some practice. In coming to this conclusion, Wittgenstein jettisons the founding principle of the empiricist tradition. As Locke argues in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), when any man uses a term he must “have in his mind a determined idea which he makes it the sign of.”18 As Locke writes, we can expect nothing but “obscurity and confusion” from a person who uses a proper name or general term in language (“Moby-Dick,” “whale”) unless it can be shown to be what Locke called a “determined idea,” a way of thinking demonstrably in touch with empirical reality.19 For Locke and for philosophers sufficiently Lockean in their assumptions, such as Bertrand Russell, to be in a position to understand a proper name or general term in language is to possess the ability to identify items or characteristics of the sort to which the name or term applies. The problem with this view is that it forges an intimate link between the meanings of words and the nature of things.

II The baselessness of the presumed connection between the meanings of words and the nature of things is the subject of Melville’s “Cetology” chapter. In “Cetology,” being in a position to understand the meaning of the word “whale” does not involve knowing the nature of this sign’s referent. The theory of meaning put forward in “Cetology” relies heavily on the notion of practice. Most readers of “Cetology” can agree that Melville’s chapter does battle with reductionism. Reductionism is the idea that advances in the understanding of complex phenomena always involve showing the latter to be constructions out of simple elements, themselves self-evident for the reason that they can be established on empirical grounds.20 Reductionism, now very deeply rooted in the practice of both science and philosophy, was seeded by Descartes’ notion that if we are to “perfectly understand a problem we must abstract it from every superfluous conception, reduce it to its simplest terms and, by means of an enumeration, divide it up into the smallest possible parts” and spread by Locke’s theory that if complex ideas aren’t to be dismissed as phantoms of the mind, they must be analyzable into “simple ideas” originating in experience.21 Misgiving about the method fostered by Descartes and Locke is introduced in “Cetology” when Ishmael describes the pointlessness of attempting a clear classification of the leviathan founded upon the whale’s observable features—even those that seem designed to afford the basis for a regular system of cetology, such as the whale’s baleen, hump, fin, or teeth. The problem, as Ishmael reports, is that the baleen, hump, back-fin, and teeth “are things whose particularities are indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of whales, without any regard to what may be the nature of their structure in other more essential particulars.” (The naturalist’s difficulties

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increase, as Ishmael points out, if he attempts a classification of the leviathan founded upon the whale’s internal, anatomical parts. For “if you descend into the bowels of the various leviathans, why there you will not find distinctions a fiftieth part as available to the systematizer as those external ones already enumerated.”) For Ishmael, the only avenue open to the would-be systematizer is “to take hold of the whales bodily, in their entire liberal volume, and boldly sort them that way.” This Bibliographical system, as Ishmael calls it, is “the only system that can possibly succeed, for it alone is practicable.” Ishmael accordingly lays out his unfinished cetological system, from the hump backed whale to the mealy mouthed porpoise. The unstated purpose of Ishmael’s report is to overthrow the whole philosophical aesthetic according to which the breakdown of an object into distinct and separable elementary parts renders it interpretable. But in “Cetology” Melville also goes further, laying out in full the dispute between what David Charles McCarty calls semantical atomists, philosophers whose account of meaning in language is governed by their faith in the analyzability of complex objects, and semantical wholists, who shun the comforts both of semantical atomism and of the scientifically based worldview.22 For a semantical atomist, the content of a sign (like “whale”) is fixed exclusively by a vertical linkage between some element of language and some bit of the world. The semantical atomist assumes that there is a direct referential relationship between words and things.23 As I argue, semantical atomists are anathema to Melville because their basic assumption is that “the world’s structure tells us how to speak,” as McCarty w ­ rites— that it is possible to explain and justify the inner character of language by pointing to the way the world is.24 In “Cetology,” Melville’s inspired repudiation of reductionism and the semantical atomism to which it gave rise commences when Ishmael’s “science of cetology” can’t get off the ground without a generalizing definition of the word “whale”— or as Ishmael says, without defining the whale “by his obvious externals, so as conspicuously to label him for all time to come.” As Melville’s chapter makes plain, Ishmael’s definition of a whale (“a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail”) is not the outcome of his systemized exhibition of the whale but the guiding principle that makes such exhibition possible. For how else would Ishmael know to include a porpoise in his list of whales? Ishmael’s statement of the meaning of the word “whale”—his abbreviated account of precisely that nature of the whale in its “more essential particulars” that can’t be hit upon by classifying a whale’s baleen, hump, fin, or teeth—cannot be the result of his “systematization of cetology” because his definition itself is what allows that kind of arranging to get under way. In other words, Ishmael’s generalizing definition of “what a whale is” does not derive from his efforts to examine methodically and in detail the constitution or structure of individual whales. Instead, his definition is “the result of expanded meditation.” “Cetology” is thus a recitation of Plato’s argument that when speakers of language understand the meaning of a word, they understand something that is not discoverable through empirical investigation. “Cetology” calls attention to Plato’s reminder of what the speakers of language must already know in order to start classifying any object.

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“Cetology,” I argue, lays emphasis on two interrelated logical claims: first, that there may be no empirically similar characteristics between many creatures rightly called whales; and second, that we cannot see why creatures with different characteristics amount to the same thing (“whale”) unless we understand why they do, for unless we understand why they do we cannot follow a rule in finding further examples.25 Disclosing why a sperm whale, a narwhal, a killer whale, and a porpoise are all examples of “whale” is what Ishmael’s generalizing definition that “a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail” accomplishes. Ishmael’s attempt to classify the whale shows why we must have a definition of the word “whale” before we start sorting whales into groups and families. However, it also makes clear how certainty about the meanings of words comes before the construction of definitions. As Plato first pointed out, the generalizing definition of any object is an instance of knowing incomplete for the reason that it is parasitic upon always understanding more than the definition can provide on its own.26 As readers of MobyDick are well aware, “whale” means more than “being a spouting fish with a horizontal tail.” The whale boat captain, the perfumer, and the Biblical scholar would all rightly object that what “whale” really means is a certain sort of observable shape, or that “the observable shape is the fact” as Julius Kovesi writes, “and the rest is added theory.”27 What, then, is the generalizing definition of any object parasitic upon? To solve the riddle of how we start forming a notion, which must be in place before we start constructing generalizing definitions, scientists and many philosophers have ­argued— just as Plato worried they would—that the meaning of a word can be explained by pointing to its bearer. When the constitution of meaning in language is explained this way, as if the content of a concept is modeled on the template of “some real being from which it is taken,” as Locke argued, or as if sentences make sense because they are composed of “constituents with which we are acquainted,” as Bertrand Russell maintained,28 the supposition is that the meaning of a word or name just is something in the phenomenal world that bears the name.29 In Melville’s “Cetology” chapter this deeply intuitive thought (that knowing what the whale is means knowing that bit of the world to which the name “whale” refers—knowing, in short, the essential nature of a whale, as discoverable through empirical investigation) is represented by “those lights of zoology and anatomy,” as Ishmael calls nineteenth-century naturalists: “the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson.” And yet under scrutiny the view that the word or name “whale” means the object cetologists divide into groups and families doesn’t hold up either. The reason (again, as Plato argued) is that we cannot define what a whale is in terms of its material elements. Deducing what a whale is from its material elements is impossible because the whale’s material elements, all the many and diverse ways in which something can be a whale, cannot be enumerated in a final list. That is why, in “Cetology,” the claim put forward by the nineteenth-century naturalists—essentially, that we may discover from the material elements of the object “whale” its formal element, “what a whale is,” or the basis upon which we decide what is and what is not a whale—is mocked and ridiculed by Ishmael and his friends in the whaling industry. In fact, as the whalers point

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out, the meaning of the word “whale” is not determined by the connection between this  word and some bit of the world this word names. In the argument waggishly put forward by the whalers, meaning is use. In the argument that meaning is use, meaning is not something passively “read off ” from the face of natural reality.30 The meaning of a sign is not fixed by the bare fact of its standing in a denotational relation to some bit of the world.31 Meaning is rather a product of our system of signs, for it is the logical role of the sign in the whole structure of explanatory narrative that determines the sign’s meaning. It follows that the sign’s logical role isn’t determined apart from the situations in which the speakers of language find themselves, but is generated out of those situations; linguistic practice is intimately woven into social practice, ways of engaging with the world as it presents itself to creatures with the physical constitution and perceptual powers of human beings.32 In “Cetology,” the idea that meaning is use (that language is intertwined with social practice, and thus that meaning in language is more connected to our constitution as living, active persons than can be understood from the naturalists’ oversimplified point of view) gets underway when Ishmael reports having submitted Linnaeus’s definition of a whale to former messmates Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin of Nantucket, who are united in the opinion that the naturalist’s reasoning is “altogether insufficient,” even “humbug.” In the first edition of his Systema Naturae, published in 1735, Swedish botanist, zoologist, and physician Carl Linnaeus had classified whales as fishes. But in the tenth and most important edition, published in 1758 (considered the starting point of zoological nomenclature) as well as the much-enhanced twelfth edition of 1776, the last under Linnaeus’s authorship, whales were moved into the mammal class. As Ishmael reports, “the grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished the whales from the waters, he states as follows: ‘On account of their warm bilocular heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem intrantem feminam mammis lactantem,’ and finally, ‘ex lege naturae jure meritoque.’”33 It is with Linnaeus’s classification of the whale as a mammal that Ishmael and his friends take issue. For as they in effect argue, if the generalizing definition of a whale (the way to “define the whale … so as to conspicuously label him for all time to come”) is going to avoid being false talk or basically gibberish, it should not be forgotten that there is a vast web of socially created and maintained practices in connection with which the word “whale” acquires meaning. Words acquire meaning when they serve the purposes of language speakers engaged in procedures and activities of one sort or another—established human practices (measurement, for example) which generate the systems of meaning in terms of which we live. The practices in which the meanings of our words are enmeshed are themselves carried on in a matrix of natural conditions and circumstances.34 And as the whalers emphasize, the predominant condition or circumstance underwriting the various practices that all together make up the whale fishery is being at sea, as Ishmael says in Moby-Dick’s opening pages, or later and more darkly, being “launched upon the deep.” In “Cetology,” Ishmael and his fellow whalers represent people who use the word “whale” with the most riding

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on it and what they wonder is why a whale should be associated with dry land when everyone knows that a whale is, as Milton writes, “Hugest of living creatures, in the deep … and at his gills / Draws in, and at his breath spouts out a sea.” This bone of contention triggers the whalers’ impatient irritation with Linnaeus’s whole methodology, since it begs the question of why the naturalist wants to make the word “whale” into a name for a natural object when it is evidently not a name for a natural object. For the very fact that the material elements of a whale are unspecified or vary widely suggests that the concept “whale” has a formal element. As the whalers point out, the concept’s formal element is what enables someone to decide what will or will not amount to a whale. This vital observation is what the naturalists seem oblivious to. The formal element of the concept “whale” is what allows anyone to answer the question of why a large variety of creatures may be called “whales” and other creatures may not. Not that the formal element of the concept “whale” is something over and above its material elements; there is no extra quality, being-a-whale, which may be present in one object but not in another.35 Nevertheless we rely on the concept’s formal element when we say what a whale is and the concept’s formal element should be understood in terms of the role the word “whale” plays in language. Consequently in their dispute with Linnaeus the whalers call upon the same logical principle Wittgenstein will work to explain: that linguistic knowledge (what is grasped by someone who understands the word or concept “whale”) isn’t a matter of knowing something in the empirical world, but a matter of knowing how to operate with signs.36 As I understand it, the misguidedness of the whole line of inquiry represented by the naturalists with whom Ishmael and the whalers take issue—the attempt to say how a word or name is directly related to the natural object that bears the name—is what Melville’s “Cetology” chapter is designed to reveal. For as Melville’s readers are free to discover, “the fundamental thing settled” in “Cetology” (when, “waiving all argument,” Ishmael takes “the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish”) isn’t the whale’s identifying nature; it is the hopelessness of trying to define linguistic expressions the way naturalists do. Defining the word “whale” the way naturalists do is “humbug” because they assume that the empirical similarities between whales are what give the word “whale” its meaning. But as Ishmael insists, it is not the recognition of empirical similarities between different instances of whales that enable us to follow rules in the use of this term (i.e., to know a whale when we see one, or to be able to find new examples of a whale). The whales on Ishmael’s “ground plan of Cetology” are, of course, similar to each other: but as Melville’s chapter makes clear, even Ishmael and his friends in the industry did not arrive at their notion of a whale by having discovered similarities between species. As the whalers’ amusing hostility to nineteenth-century naturalists brings to light, asking and being able to answer questions like “Is this a whale?” is important to those whom Ishmael tauntingly calls “the best and latest authorities,” the “lights of zoology and anatomy.” But we thwart our own understanding when we project this pastime onto the rest of mankind as if this were our main activity in using words. As Kovesi explains, people use language as part of all sorts of activities, and not just when

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we are arguing over the inventory of the universe.37 Being able to answer a question like “Is this a whale?” doesn’t in any case help to answer the question of how we start forming the notion “whale.” For as Kovesi writes, “Of course we do not start forming a new notion by first inventing a new word … and then trying to think how we could use the word or what rules we could give for the proper use of that word. We start forming a new notion by a process which is the reverse of this.”38 For Kovesi, “It is our wants and needs, aspirations and ideals, interests, likes and dislikes that provide the very material for the formation of our notions.”39 This is what “Cetology” emphasizes. Linnaeus’s willingness to banish the whales from the waters invites the whalers’ especial derision because in addition to getting the whole process of forming a notion backward it separates the meaning of the word “whale” from the environment in which whaling practices necessarily take place and thus shows no consideration for the actual, material (and treacherous, and slippery) activity of whaling.

III What we find in Melville’s “Cetology” chapter is an account of meaning, of what it is to be able to understand a concept when it is said or written, wholly at odds with the idea that meaning is empirically determined. The belief that the meaning of the word or sign “whale” is empirically determined is in “Cetology” so ludicrous as to be amusing. Or as the whalers point out, what the naturalists’ justificatory project laughably leaves out are the wellsprings of language—the “deep water,” as Wittgenstein writes, over which words glide.40 By my count, “Cetology” is therefore one of the earliest (and most entertaining) assessments of what Harrison, following Wittgenstein, describes as “philosophers’ persistent, not to say ingrained, habit of looking in just the wrong place for an answer to the question of how language is related to reality: at the supposedly unique relationship between words and things, rather than at the multifarious relationships between words, practices, and the world.”41 As Wittgenstein was instrumental in showing (but many philosophers still have a hard time believing), the relationship between words and the world “cannot,” as Harrison writes, “without the risk of serious misunderstanding, be described as any kind of ‘linkage’ connecting ‘items’ drawn respectively from two ‘realms,’ on the one hand, that of language, and, on the other, that of the extralinguistic.”42 Such a view “is crucially incomplete … because it leaves out of account practices.” It neglects, therefore, precisely what must be taken into account when we are trying to understand the formation of a concept.43 What actually relates words and the world, as Patricia Hanna and Bernard Harrison argue in their Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language, “is better conceived as a two-level process of engagement, or embedding: at the first level the engagement, or embedding, of linguistic expressions in practices; at the second level the engagement, or embedding, of practices in the matrix of natural

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conditions and circumstances, in and with respect to which they are carried on.”44 What Hanna and Harrison in effect argue is that “the content of a thought cannot be viewed in isolation from the language in which it is expressed, and that language per se cannot be viewed in isolation from the substratum of practices through which its expressions gain whatever meaning they possess; and that in consequence we have no means of representing ourselves, as beings capable of knowledge, in abstraction from practical life: the life we enjoy as physical, embodied beings, manipulators of an equally physical world.”45 Harrison and Hanna’s two-stage model represents a significant innovation to anyone worrying about how considerations outside language affect the constitution of meaning in language. For it posits that the meaning of a linguistic expression can’t be divorced from the wide array of socially devised and maintained practices in which the speakers of language are engaged, and that a practice “just is a mode of engaging with the contents of reality, as they present themselves to creatures with the physical constitution and perceptual powers of human beings.”46 For a word to be enmeshed in a practice, therefore, Harrison writes, “is for it to acquire a use with respect to a system of procedures, responses, and results of one sort or another, which is always already ‘connected to the world,’ and that would not otherwise be of the slightest value or interest to those who make use of it.”47 Accordingly, if a name has a use in connection with which it has a meaning, it has an application to sensible reality. There is no further question of whether a name is or is not reflective of reality. “Its business with Reality was already concluded when it entered the language. It was concluded in, and by, its acquiring a use in connection with some practice that speakers find or have found, perhaps only temporarily, to be useful.”48 As Harrison writes: Language gives its expressions meaning by sowing them across the face of a vast web of socially created, possessed, and maintained practices … . The vast majority of the practices in question—measurement, for instance, or counting, or differentially comparing colors, or sorting animal or plant populations into species—have nothing particularly “linguistic” about them. They are not, at least on the face of it, games played with words; rather, they are techniques of mensuration, or mathematics, or color-theory, or biological science. Nevertheless, they remain procedures in whose conduct words play a role, are given a role, and it is only because such roles exist for words, are bestowed by words, that we become beings who speak, beings with something to say about the world, rather than silent manipulators of the world …. 49

It is for this reason, as Harrison explains, that Wittgenstein’s choice of the term “language-game” was an unfortunate one, “one which sits ill with the entire tenor of the arguments in which it is employed, and tends to distort the reception of those arguments.” For “the apparent implication of the term is that a language-game is a game played with words.” For Wittgenstein, however, language-games are not wordgames. As Kovesi writes, “they are activities in which language is a part.”50

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The point that requires emphasis, after all, is that it is the logical role of the sign, the role bestowed on a word relative to the practices in which the word is enmeshed, that fixes the tenor of any relation which strikes us as word-to-world.51 The immense advantage of understanding why what we call the “meanings” of words are really the roles that we bestow on words relative to practices (or that the meaning of a name isn’t the bearer of that name) is that it settles the question of how and to what extent the spontaneities of language are constrained by sensible or material life without arguing, the way many contemporary philosophers of language have, that if language isn’t to be a hermetic game at least some of our words must be equipped with extra-linguistic reference. There is a problem with this latter conclusion, as Hanna and Harrison, following Wittgenstein, have taken pains to show, because it requires that we forge an intimate link between meaning and the epistemic—that we argue once again that if the objects we speak about are real (real in the sense of having the power to escape and to frustrate any representation we may make of them; real in the sense of being outside the “inner world” of the mind), then the nature of these objects must somehow or other enter into the determination of meaning.

IV As Alan Tapper and T. Brian Mooney note, many philosophers have accepted three key points from Wittgenstein: that our words or concepts are public, not private; that their meaning is in some way a matter of how they are used; and that their usage involves some form of rule-following.52 And yet because it is evidently possible to accept these points and still find far-fetched the claim that concepts can be objectively articulated, or that concept possession as such dependably reveals our knowledge and understanding of “what the world is like,” I have used Melville’s account of concept formation to throw light on an aspect of Wittgenstein’s logic that is yet to find a proper audience. Because for Wittgenstein, the idea that objectivity is a feature of our concepts is not far-fetched. For Wittgenstein, concepts are not constituents of extramental reality—but neither are they mental entities in the usual sense. To read Wittgenstein’s work in logic is to find an account of meaning radically unlike the traditional account entrenched for many centuries in Western philosophy. As Harrison reports, “According to that traditional account, … to bestow meaning on a noun is, simply, to associate it conventionally with some item or aspect of the real world.”53 Put this way, though, the relationship between words and the world comes to seem strange and uncanny, as Wittgenstein says, making us feel “as if we had to penetrate phenomena” or leading to the notion that naming is “some remarkable act of mind.”54 According to Wittgenstein’s new account of meaning, however, it is socially instituted and maintained practice which lets the speakers of language know what any given term means. The account of meaning provided by Wittgenstein and referenced by the phrases “meaning is use” and the more unfortunate “language-game” does not, in other words, leave the whole business of meaning strangely disconnected from the

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world of our experience or the life we enjoy as physical, embodied beings. Quite the opposite, actually, and that is what Melville’s “Cetology” chapter reveals. What Melville’s chapter brings clearly into view is the cavernous understory of language, as Wittgenstein and his most sensitive readers conceive it: the vast fabric of socially devised and maintained practices that underpin the meanings of words.55 For as Wittgenstein reasons, “the game with these words, their employment in the linguistic intercourse that is carried on by their means, is more involved—the role of these words in our language other—than we are tempted to think.”56 “Cetology” bears this out. What the naturalists have failed to account for, in their definition of the concept “whale,” is what Wittgenstein calls the “logical space” a concept occupies, which must also be understood if the concept is to be understood.57 The difficulties we experience when reflecting on the meaning of a word, like the word “whale,” have a great deal to do with how words are embedded in our lives. The reason the meaning of the word “whale” can’t be grasped simply by pointing to some feature of the natural world, or by learning how to distinguish one object verbally from another, is because the concepts we command sit in a system of concepts as a whole—a conceptual armory from which they cannot be extricated. The more deeply a concept is lodged in layers of concepts, the understanding of which we take for granted, the less the system and structure that gives a concept meaning can be given a satisfactory treatment in purely descriptive terms. On this point Knott (aiming, like Wittgenstein and Melville, to understand what it is to have concepts) is pleasingly clear: If I am learning to compare the lengths of objects by measuring with a ruler and am learning how to describe the lengths of objects, and so on, I am learning the concept length. But we may also express this by saying that I know, or am getting to understand, what length is. It is informative to express the point in this way because it reminds us that to have a concept is not merely to operate with a sign or to have command over a technique; rather, the concept pervades our intelligent relations to the world. My understanding of the concept shows not only in the methods I use to measure and compare, but is distributed throughout my ways of speaking, throughout the sense I make of things by means of language. It is not difficult to imagine the breakdown of a person’s grasp of the concept length and the loss of understanding and general intellectual collapse in the person’s life that would manifest it. It would not be adequate in these circumstances to say that the person had merely lost the use of a word. Neither could it be accounted for as the loss of knowledge of any fact that might be referred to in the application of the concept. No, she no longer understands what length is, and in an important sense she is losing her grip on reality, on “what the world is like.” Likewise, if a child is getting hold of the concept cause, this cannot be shown merely by an ability to make simple judgments of the relation of one event to another. Rather, it is something that has to work its way into the whole of her thinking and is manifested in the myriad ways in which she is able to make connections between things that are said and things that are done. If, on the

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other hand, the child failed to become fluent in all these connections, again it would not be adequate to say that this was simply a failure to grasp how to use a word (indeed, she might fail to grasp the use of the word even if her grasp of the concept showed in others things that she said). Here again we would have the right to say that there was a failure at the conceptual level to grasp the nature of the reality in which she lived. Beyond the reportage of facts, a person shows she has a grip on reality in being able to talk sense.58

The enormous benefit of this account is the discovery that something’s being a conceptual object—or as we have learned to say now, a linguistic construct (“whale,” for example) makes it no less real. For as Melville would have us discover, our concepts are not arbitrary, not notions we can take up or abandon at will. As an investigation into the way concepts are seated in our lives reveals, concept possession as such dependably reveals our knowledge and understanding of “what the world is like.” There can be no question, then, of dismissing the word or concept “whale” as meaningless on the ground that it fails to stand in some putatively required relationship to empirical reality.59 As a handful of philosophers working within and extending the Wittgensteinian tradition have helped us see, words acquire meaning by our involving them in specific ways in some of the many practices by which human beings attempt to achieve control over their environment. The meanings of our words are thus neither arbitrary inventions of the human mind nor mutely proffered to us by Nature herself in sensory experience. The meaning of a word is a human artifact, but it is an artifact not of “the mind,” but of practical life. In “Cetology,” Melville brings this point home. As he would have us remember, what we know as the meaning of the word “whale” is not something read off from the face of nature (as Ishmael swears the whale “has no face”) but something elaborated over long centuries by collective human effort.60 Of course, in Melville’s extraordinary book only one figure has the temerity to insist upon this certainty—Melville’s muchmaligned Captain Ahab. When we understand Ahab in terms of Erich Auerbach’s notion of figura, as a character whose imagined principle of unity manifests some larger feature of a common, if not universal, human condition (as opposed to thinking with Starbuck that the captain is simply a madman who has chosen to pursue an absurd campaign of vengeance against a brute beast, without regard to the cost to his men, his ship, and his backers), we are well positioned to understand the Melvillean lesson: that we can ultimately make sense of the world only through our entanglement or immersion in practical and social life.

V The formal lesson of Melville’s “Cetology” chapter, then, is that when we speak of the entity referred to or designated by the expression “whale” we speak of a linguistic construct, a figment of discourse. When Starbuck declares that he will have no man in his boat “who is not afraid of a whale,” the state of affairs identified by the word

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“whale” in Starbuck’s expression is not a corporeal thing with the power to injure or be injured but a thing-in-language, an object postulated to bring to experience coherence. The whale in Starbuck’s expression is not a natural object but what Harrison calls a “nomothetic object”—a creature “not of physis but of nomos.” The whale has no existence in nature because it has no existence prior to the institution of the systems of convention that call it into being.61 But has Melville, in insisting that the entities designated by our expressions are figments of discourse, embraced the conclusion that our minds never pass beyond the circuit of their own linguistically forged conceptions? Is Melville arguing that the generation of meaning in language just reels arbitrarily onward, or is a function purely of the shifting relations of linguistic signs among themselves, uninfluenced in any way by considerations arising outside language? Is the author of Moby-Dick arguing that language (or thought enmeshed in language) cuts us off from truth and certainty? Absolutely not. For as I hope to have made plain, letting go of the idea that the bearing of reality on language must take the form of a direct associative link between a linguistic expression and an extra-linguistic entity in fact sets in motion our genuine understanding of the relation between words and “what the world is like.”62 When Wittgenstein posits a relation of identity between words and existing states of affairs (or as he also says, between signs and things signified) he strikes out genuinely new paths of thought. But Wittgenstein’s central argument, fully developed only in the twentieth century in the work of Merleau-Ponty, Cavell, Harrison, and others, can already be encountered in embryo in Melville’s Moby-Dick.63 The question around which Moby-Dick revolves—a question as central to recent philosophy as to that of the mid-nineteenth century—is whether the human mind can credit itself with access to reality. I have argued that in his whaling narrative Melville shows why, and by what means, it can. Melville saw the thought of his age stranded between two options. On the one hand, an empiricism derived from Locke teaches us that sensory experience shows us things as they really are. On the other hand, an idealism derived from Kant teaches us that since the system of concepts in terms of which experience structures the world is provided by the mind itself, the real nature of things—the Kantian noumena—is in principle inaccessible to human knowledge. In my view, Melville rejected both of these options in favor of a third. According to this third option, the connection between language and reality is forged neither on the level of sensory experience nor on that of the intellect but rather in relation to our fumbling attempts to manipulate the world in practical ways. So, to begin with, the reasons for the recurrent use of a word or concept must be publically testable and acceptable by anyone. In other words it is our concrete wants and needs that provide the material for the formation of our concepts. As  Harrison writes, a bit of curved steel wire with a barb is a fish hook “not because that word is the one arbitrarily attached to a certain abstract intellectual pattern to which the object corresponds, nor because the word is arbitrarily attached to a collection of qualities that happen to recur from time to time in sensory experience; but rather because fish can, as a matter of practical fact, be caught with

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such a device.”64 It is also the case, however, that what we find when we try to give an account of the meaning of the term “fish hook” is that a concept always employs other concepts on which it is logically dependent. The use of the expression “fish hook” is not isolated from the way we use other expressions, like “fish.” The use of the expression “fish hook” forms part of a whole network of related trains of thought; this too is a hallmark of a concept.65 Intriguingly, the embeddedness of language in a vast number of socially engineered practices and the extent to which any single concept is inextricable from a system of concepts is what supports Ahab’s claim to Starbuck that he, the captain, is one with his crew both in terms of the practical concerns of whaling and in the systems of significance that emerge from them. Ahab’s repeated remonstrance to his first mate is that it is Starbuck, and not Ahab, who is out of sync with the whalers: “The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. ’Tis but to help strike a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back, when every foremost hand has clutched a whetstone?”66 As Ahab frames it, the genesis of meaning is communal. In other words it is Ahab and not Starbuck who lends moral force to Melville’s story because in distinct contrast to Starbuck (for whom the whale has no meaning, and for whom the world exists for men to make of it what they will) Ahab is certain that the concept “whale” does have objectively articulated meaning. However, Ahab shows how meaning is accessible to human beings only at the cost of two kinds of immersion, each involving a certain surrender of individual control: immersion in the world through practical involvement with it, and immersion in the communities in which the practices in question must be pursued. In such an account, the world becomes one in which we are fully at home, but also one in which we are never fully cognitively in control—hence one to which responses of awe and wonder of the kind that pervade Moby-Dick are both natural and reasonable.

Notes 1

2

Patricia Hanna and Bernard Harrison, Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 17 and 23. Much of my thinking in this chapter comes directly from this extraordinary book, particularly from Harrison’s Parts I–III and Epilogue. My ambition in this chapter, in addition to defending Melville’s philosophical ability, is to make Harrison’s reexamination of the interrelations of language and social practice (founded on his singular reading of Wittgenstein) feel like a necessary resource for serious readers of Moby-Dick. This doubt has been the source of enduring intellectual anguish. As Harrison notes in a dry understatement, “a good deal of philosophy” has consisted in the attempt to resolve or allay it. Word and World, 17–18.

34 3 4

5 6 7

8

Melville’s Philosophies See Hanna and Harrison, Word and World, 17. My own understanding of concept formation is indebted to Julius Kovesi’s remarkable Moral Notions (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1967) and the valuable recent study of Kovesi’s work edited by Alan Tapper and T. Brian Mooney, Essays in the Philosophy of Julius Kovesi (Leiden: Brill, 2012). The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (New York: Citadel Press, 1992; originally published 1946), 65. Merleau-Ponty similarly criticizes what he calls the “intellectualism” of most modern philosophy. See Tapper and Brian Mooney, Essays in the Philosophy of Julius Kovesi, 6–7. My sense of what is at stake in a conceptual investigation is indebted to Knott, and the picture I present here is beholden to Knott’s luminous PhD thesis, An Instinct for Meaning, which in general argues that our use of concepts (qua linguistic practice) is more intimately woven into instinctive action than is often understood (iv, 14, 10, 28). Hugh Andrew Knott, An Instinct for Meaning, PhD Diss., University of Wales, Cardiff (2002). This thesis was later published as Wittgenstein, Concept Possession and Philosophy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). In Chapter 73 of Moby-Dick, Melville recounts the unhappy condition in which a right whale’s head is hanging to the Pequod’s larboard side and a sperm whale’s head is hanging to its stern: As before, the Pequod steeply leaned over towards the sperm whale’s head, now, by the counterpoise of both heads, she regained her even keel; though sorely strained, you may well believe. So, when on one side you hoist in Locke’s head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back again; but in a very poor plight. Thus, some minds forever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! Throw all these thunderheads overboard, and then you will float light and right.

9

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick: Or, the Whale, in The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1988). These readers include moral philosopher Julius Kovesi, professor of mathematics and logic David Charles McCarty, and the “Swansea school” Wittgensteinians, for example Rush Rhees and H. O. Mounce. But it is Bernard Harrison who most ably translates—and builds on—Wittgenstein’s philosophical project for a larger audience. The kind of approach Harrison has taken to reading and writing about Wittgenstein is enjoyably summarized by Harrison himself in the introductory essay to Reality and Culture: Essays on the Philosophy of Bernard Harrison (New York: Rodopi, 2014), 9: Wittgenstein’s work is, notoriously, aphoristic and arcane to an extent that encourages exegetical disagreement on a grand scale. Though Wittgenstein worried incessantly that his work was misunderstood, his cavalier disregard for the usual means of preventing misunderstanding is brandished with cheerful insouciance in the opening sentence of his Cambridge lectures for the Michaelmas Term of 1934, “What we say will be easy, but to know why we say it will be very difficult” (1979, p. 77). At the moment, the fashion in Wittgenstein exegesis—pioneered three decades ago by Richard Rorty’s celebration of Wittgenstein as an “edifying” rather than a “systematic” philosopher (1980, pp. 367–368 and passim), and now

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represented by James Conant, Alice Crary, Cora Diamond, and others of the “new Wittgensteinians” (Crary and Read, 2000)—is to read Wittgenstein as a principled opponent of anything in the nature of philosophical “argument.” My approach has been the contrary one, which I share with some other recent interpreters, including Daniele Moyal-Sharrock (2007). Its founding impulse is to take it for granted that Wittgenstein’s work, like that of any other major philosopher, is rich in arguments and to try to articulate them by a reading that, eschewing pleasing but premature generalities, stays obstinately close enough to the detail of his admittedly difficult texts to stand some close chance of exposing their workings. 10 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. David Pears and Brian McGuiness (New York: Routledge, 1961), 4.1121. 11 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, second edition, ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, with an English trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 3.9.14 and 4.9.14. 12 Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 27.10.14. 13 Hanna and Harrison, Word and World, 87. “Picture theory” is the name given to Wittgenstein’s argument but his own more precise language—for example that “the sense of a proposition is what it images” Notebooks 26.10.14 is more instructive. 14 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1958), §43. 15 Hanna and Harrison, Word and World, 49. The belief that “meaning is use” has figured “in such a diversity of mutually incompatible philosophical enterprises,” Bernard Harrison writes, “that one might reasonably despair of attaching to it any clear unitary sense at all, let alone a useful one.” 16 Hanna and Harrison, Word and World, 72. 17 Bernard Harrison, What Is Fiction For?: Literary Humanism Restored (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), xvii. 18 Quoted in ibid., 119. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid., 118. Also René Descartes, Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach (London: Nelson, 1963), 20, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, 3.9.14 and 4.9.14. 21 René Descartes, Selected Philosophical Writings Rule 13 from “Rules for Direction of our Native Intelligence,” trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, with an introduction by John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 18. Locke is quoted in Harrison, What Is Fiction For? 118. 22 David Charles McCarty, “The Philosophy of Logical Wholism,” Synthese 87 (1991): 51–123. McCarty’s long essay “is one installment in a lengthy task, the replacement of atomistic interpretations of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus by a wholistic interpretation.” 23 McCarty’s general arguments against atomism are in the first part of his essay directed toward a specific target, the four aspects of the atomistic reading of the Tractatus given in Merrill B. Hintikka and Jaakko Hintikka, Investigating Wittgenstein (Hoboken: Blackwell, 1986). The phrase “vertical linkage” is employed by the Hintikkas in order to describe this word-to-world connection (65). As McCarty makes clear, however, for a logical wholist like Wittgenstein the logical role of a sign is not “fixed exclusively by the bare fact of its standing in a denotational relations to some bit of the world.” Rather, the sign’s logical role “consists in the play of the sign

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against the background afforded by the system of all the signs. This background is in flux; there is ‘nothing fixed there’ by a denotational relation which coerces the logical role” (65). 24 McCarty, “The Philosophy of Logical Wholism,” 55–56. 25 Kovesi, Moral Notions, 30. 26 Robert E. Allinson, “A Rectification of Terms in the Epistolary Plato: Re-Reading Plato’s Seventh Epistle,” The CUHK Journal of Humanities 2 (January 1998): 137–41. 27 Kovesi, Moral Notions, 43. 28 Or, as Bertrand Russell subsequently insisted, as if sentences make sense only because they are “composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted,” Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, 1912). 29 McCarty, “The Philosophy of Logical Wholism,” 55–56; Hanna and Harrison, Word and World, 65–69. 30 Harrison, What Is Fiction For? 150. 31 McCarty, “The Philosophy of Logical Wholism,” 65. 32 Hanna and Harrison, Word and World, 50. 33 As Melville writes in his footnote, the Latin phrases translate, respectively, as “a penis that enters the female, who gives milk from her breasts,” and “From the law of nature, justly and deservedly.” 34 That the human world is essentially a system of socially devised and maintained practices, and that words acquire meaning in the context of the roles assigned to them in the conduct of one or another such practice, is the view offered by Bernard Harrison in Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language, and also in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 of What Is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored. 35 Kovesi, Moral Notions, 7. 36 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 5.552: “The ‘experience’ that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that however, is not an experience.” See, in addition, Gilbert Ryle’s argument that linguistic knowledge isn’t a form of “knowing-that” but of “knowing-how,” specifically of knowing-how to operate with signs. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963), 28. 37 Kovesi, Moral Notions, 42, 19. 38 Ibid., 42. 39 Ibid., 42, 40, 53. 40 McCarty, “The Philosophy of Logical Wholism,” 59. 41 Hanna and Harrison, Word and World, 51. As Harrison notes, a statement like this one can, in a way, represent Hanna’s and Harrison’s conclusion to the 400 pages of Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language, a complex, detailed, and ground-breaking study that makes it possible for literary theorists to engage in an informed manner the sometimes-convoluted, often quite technical, always contentious philosophical debate on the nature of language. But it also offers an elegant summary of the problem Melville runs up against in his thinking for MobyDick, and indeed what he discovered regarding its solution. 42 Hanna and Harrison, Word and World, 48. 43 Ibid., 348. 44 Ibid., 48. 45 Ibid., 363. 46 Ibid., 50.

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47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 348–49. 50 Kovesi, Moral Notions, 42. 51 McCarty, “The Philosophy of Logical Wholism,” 65. 52 Tapper and Brian Mooney, Essays in the Philosophy of Julius Kovesi, 5. 53 Harrison, What Is Fiction For? 171. 54 Philosophical Investigations, §90, §37–38. 55 Harrison, What Is Fiction For? 150, 152. 56 Philosophical Investigations, §182. 57 See Knott, An Instinct for Meaning, 18. Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the logical space of a concept runs throughout his Tractatus, beginning at 1.13: “The facts in logical space are the world.” 58 Knott, Wittgenstein, Concept Possession and Philosophy, 82. 59 Hanna and Harrison, Word and World, 57. 60 Ibid., 150. 61 Ibid., 96–97. 62 Ibid., 113–14. For another reasoned argument against the view that language or thought enmeshed in language “cuts us off from truth and certainty,” see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Prose du Monde (Paris, 1969). Translated as The Prose of the World, trans. Claude Lefort and John O’Neill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 17. As Bernard Harrison notes, Word and World offers “a rich series of amplifications” of Merleau-Ponty’s views. 63 That it is possible to work out the philosophical point I am associating with Wittgenstein by attending to the logic of Melville’s “Cetology” chapter requires some justification, since I am neither arguing that Wittgenstein ever undertook a reading of Moby-Dick, nor that we can only understand Melville if we take him to be making the same philosophical points that some readers associate with Wittgenstein. Still, Melville’s observations about the way we make the world intelligible to ourselves— and the difficulties we get into when reflecting on such things—seem to me to be remarkably consistent with Wittgenstein’s observations. Rather than claim that Melville’s chapter is intended to make the philosophical point I associate with Wittgenstein, I need only point out that if Wittgenstein’s account of our life with language is correct, then any writing having to do with the nature of discourse that hasn’t gotten muddled (by the empiricist tradition, for example) will be consistent with that account—even if an author is not himself attempting to put forward any thesis to that effect. 64 Bernard Harrison, personal correspondence, 12 May 2016. 65 Hugh Knott, Wittgenstein, Concept Possession and Philosophy, 207. 66 Moby-Dick, chapter 36 “The Quarter-Deck.”

2

Billy Budd, Billy Budd Stuart Burrows

I ought to give a different name to each of the selves who subsequently thought about Albertine; I ought still more to give a different name to each of the Albertines who appeared before me, never the same, like those seas—called by me simply and for the sake of convenience “the sea”—that succeeded one another and against which … she was silhouetted. —Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove

Part one: The sweet and pleasant fellow Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative). Inside in what sense, the reader wonders.1 Though written just before the advent of modernism, there is no suggestion in Herman Melville’s novella of “the move inside”—the emerging interest in psychological depth evident in the work of contemporaries such as Joseph Conrad and Henry James. After all, of the three characters in Billy Budd, one (Billy) does not appear to have an inside; one (Claggart) has an inside that the narrator admits can never be known; one (Captain Vere) has an inside that discretion forbids the narrator from penetrating. But if the narrative of Billy Budd is not inside its characters, what is it inside? Perhaps Melville is claiming to be narrating from inside a sailor’s life—an insider’s narrative, as it were, one sailor telling the tale of another. The primary problem with this explanation is not that the story is set in 1797, exactly forty years before the author went to sea, nor that it takes place during a time of war rather than during the peacetime era in which Melville sailed, nor even that the setting is a British rather than an American ship. It is that none of Melville’s many other sea narratives posits itself as an “inside” narrative. So what makes Billy Budd distinct? A possible answer lies in the narrator’s contention that his story is “restricted … to the inner life of one particular ship and the career of an individual sailor.”2 The narrator’s focus on Billy’s tragedy necessitates placing everything else outside the text—most notably, the war with France. “At the time of Billy Budd’s arbitrary enlistment into the Bellipotent,” we are informed, “that ship was on her way to join the Mediterranean fleet . … [where it was] dispatched on separate duty as a scout and at times on less temporary service. But with all this the story has

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little concernment” (BB 54). The Bellipotent, like the sailors who man her, is inside a much larger story, but one too large to be told.3 This essay is in part concerned with this story, with the historical and political outside to Melville’s “inside narrative,” the various events Newton Arvin refers to dismissively as “matters of the surface.”4 My concern is less to tell this story so much as to gauge the pressure it exerts on the language used by and about Melville’s characters. What makes this pressure traceable is a distinctive structural feature of the sea narrative, though one that, to my knowledge, has never been remarked upon: namely, its depiction of a world viewable as a totality from a point of view external to it. This view is memorably described in Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus: “the ship, a fragment detached from the earth, went on lonely and swift like a small planet . … A great circular solitude moved with her, ever changing and ever the same.”5 The absoluteness of the ship’s detachment as Conrad describes it—not just its own world but its own planet—lends life on board an extraordinary intensity. Cut off from family, history, even geography, it can seem to the officers and crew that they exist only for one another, saturating every space, almost every action, with meaning.6 Yet although life at sea offers the illusion that it is all “inside,” the density of signification aboard the Bellipotent is precisely what allows the stress exerted by outside forces to be determined. This pressure can most clearly be tracked by means of the strange wandering behavior displayed by proper names in the novella, which detach themselves from their purported referents and reattach themselves to others. This behavior itself has a name, though one under a strict embargo within the text: mutiny. To refer to the possibility of revolt aboard ship is to acknowledge that a captain’s authority can be contested, which is why Captain Vere assiduously avoids using the term in front of the crew. Yet, despite the fact that “[t]he word mutiny was not named in what he said” (BB 117), the names that the text does use might be said to perform a mutiny of their own. Vere shares his wariness about stating the word “mutiny” with the narrator. Indeed Melville devotes a whole chapter to confessing his reluctance to refer to the two mutinies staged by British ships at Spithead and Nore in the spring of 1797, the same year in which Billy Budd is set—despite the fact that, as Sharon Cameron points out, Captain Vere’s behavior is only “intelligible,” within the context of the fear provoked by the “Great Mutiny” (BB 59).7 In the words of Eve Sedgwick, mutiny is the text’s “open secret.”8 The narrator explains that his disinclination to refer to the Great Mutiny is dictated by the unwillingness of British naval historians to discuss it: Such an episode in the Island’s grand naval story her naval historians naturally abridge, one of them (William James) candidly acknowledging that fain would he pass it over did not “impartiality forbid fastidiousness.” And yet his mention is less a narration than a reference, having to do hardly at all with details. (BB 55)

The reason why such abridgment is natural, Melville submits, is that nations, like people, recognize the advisability of not airing family secrets: “If a well-constituted individual refrains from blazoning aught amiss or calamitous in his family, a nation

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in the like circumstance may without reproach be equally discreet” (BB 55). Melville’s approbation is somewhat undermined, however, by the image with which he pictures James’s discretion, the language of which also applies, all too markedly, to the situation of his characters themselves: Billy, “a well-constituted individual”; Claggart, clearly hiding something “calamitous in his family”; Vere, the epitome of discretion, concerned above all to “refrain from blazoning aught amiss.” This recycling of an image within a markedly different, even antithetical context is far from an isolated instance—indeed it might well be called the distinctive feature of the text. Melville’s description of the British navy as “the right arm of a Power” (BB 54), for example, anticipates the account of Billy’s “right arm” striking Claggart “quick as the flame from a discharged cannon at night” (BB 99), the repetition bringing together opposed forces as if to suggest that authority and mutiny carry the seeds of the other within it. Barbara Johnson, in a deft reappropriation of her own, describes such moments as a form of textual stuttering. She claims that Melville’s allegory of good and evil ends not with a moral lesson but with nothing more than “the empty repetition of a name”—the stuttering last words of Captain Vere, “Billy Budd, Billy Budd” (BB 129), the effect being to “eclipse … referential content.”9 Melville’s text is thus an “inside narrative” by virtue of having rendered itself incapable of referring to the world beyond it. For Cameron, conversely, reference breaks down in Billy Budd not because the text constantly repeats itself but precisely because it cannot. The problem is that words fail to be “self-identical,” their meaning differing from instance to instance.10 This breakdown of the stability of reference upon which meaning depends can be traced, Cameron argues, to the killing of the master-at-arms, as a result of which, in the narrator’s words, “innocence and guilt personified in Claggart and Budd in effect changed places” (BB 103). Since up until this moment Billy has been represented as the embodiment of virtue and Claggart as the embodiment of vice, their transposition of identities would seem to disable all attempts to assign meaning. Johnson’s and Cameron’s accounts seem fundamentally opposed. Read within the context of the dual semantic threat posed by mutiny, however, they begin to appear less antithetical, indeed even complementary. Mutiny represents both the canceling of reference highlighted by Johnson (sailing under a crossed-out flag) and the disruption of continuity pointed to by Cameron (the crew assuming the authority of the captain). Billy Budd confronts the threat to continuity via repeated allusions to Theseus’ paradox: the question, that is, of whether a ship every part of which has been replaced can be said to still be the same ship; it confronts the threat to reference via a series of signs that deliberately miss their mark, errant signs which confuse the boundary between order and disorder that Captain Vere goes to such lengths to uphold. His strategy for doing so is to install himself as the arbiter of reference. Despite being reluctant to don “the perils of moral responsibility, none at least that could properly be referred to an official superior” (BB 104), Captain Vere makes an exception in Billy’s case, a case his subordinates believe “should be referred to the admiral” (BB 101). He does so out of a fear that the feelings of injustice which provoked the Great Mutiny continued to be held: “unless quick action was taken on it, the deed of the foretopman, so soon as it should be known on the gun decks, would tend to awaken any slumbering embers of the Nore

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among the crew” (BB 104). Despite dismissing Claggart’s fears of a possible revolt by the crew, Vere invokes the Mutiny Law in dealing with Billy, seemingly believing that even a complete absence of mutinous behavior is no guarantee of safety. Ironically, of course, Vere’s decision to execute Billy is precisely what provokes mutinous thoughts in the crew. Revolt is only prevented by Billy’s last words, “God bless Captain Vere”—or, more accurately, by the repetition of these words by the crew: Without volition, as it were, as if indeed the ship’s populace were but the vehicles of some vocal current electric, with one voice from alow and aloft came a resonant sympathetic echo: “God bless Captain Vere!” And yet at that instant Billy alone must have been in their hearts, even as in their eyes. (BB 123)

The sympathy felt by the crew, clearly, is for Billy rather than for Vere. But to have uttered the words undoubtedly “in their hearts”—“God bless Billy Budd”—would have been an act of mutiny. Yet despite the fact that the sailors’ repetition of Billy’s benediction is “empty,” since it is uttered without volition—that it is “not self-identical,” to use Cameron’s phrase, since Billy and the sailors mean different things by it—the effect is the same as if the phrase had been uttered willingly and truthfully: order is restored, continuity maintained. The sailors’ misidentification is particularly ironic in light of the fact that Captain Vere misidentifies the law he invokes as justification for executing Billy. As Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts were the first to point out, Captain Vere has no basis for invoking the Mutiny Act, since the statute covered the army, not the navy. Naval regulations in 1797 made no provision for the kind of drumhead court Vere convenes; a British naval officer faced with a mutinous act would have been required to refer the case to a superior. Hayford and Sealts come to the obvious conclusion that Melville “simply had not familiarized himself ” (BB 176) with naval law. Stanton Garner’s strangely neglected essay “Fraud as Fact in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd” offers a very different account. For Garner, the mistake is intentional, part of a pattern in which Melville substitutes the wrong name for the right one. Garner insists that the novella contains an “unusual number of factual errors”: Melville misquotes poems by Milton and Tennyson, makes mistakes with Nelson’s biography and with the executions on board the USS Somers, and even puts a ship where it should not be, since no British force sailed the Mediterranean during the summer of 1797. One of Melville’s most glaring errors is the substitution of the name of the novelist G. P. R. James for that of the naval historian William James in his reference to the “Great Mutiny,” a confusion later “corrected” by Hayford and Sealts. Yet, as Garner points out, the novelist “had a clear idea of who James the novelist was and may have known him personally,” suggesting that the mistake was deliberate.11 It is hard to believe, after all, that Melville could have made a mistake with the very name he gives his hero. What reason could Melville have had for littering his text with errors? He is careful, after all, to set Billy Budd at a specific time and place and to base it in part on a well-known historical controversy, one very close to home: the hangings on board the Somers as a result of a guilty verdict reached by a court presided over by

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Melville’s first cousin, Guert Gansevoort. Yet Melville places this event almost half a century earlier, where it unfolds in the shadow not just of the “Great Mutiny” but of the cataclysmic event which directly inspired that uprising: the French Revolution. The centenary of the revolution was celebrated just a year after the author began work on the novella in 1888, so it is no surprise that one of the principal forms of engagement with the French Revolution in Billy Budd has to do with the question of memory, of how history gets recorded, of the present’s continuities with the past. According to Hershel Parker, the French Revolution was “the war which counted most” for Melville, an extraordinary remark considering that the author of Billy Budd lived through and wrote movingly about the Civil War.12 Whether Parker overstates the case or not, the importance of 1789 to the events recorded in Billy Budd has been clear since Hannah Arendt’s forceful reading of the novella in On Revolution, where she claims that “without the French Revolution … [Melville would not have dared] to undo the haloed transformation of Jesus of Nazareth into Christ, to make him return to the world of men” in the form of Billy Budd.13 Garner’s detective work reveals that the French Revolution (and perhaps the American one too) makes itself felt in other, far less dramatic ways, such as in a number of facetious references to the British monarchy. In his address to the drumhead court, for example, Vere reminds his fellow officers that the buttons they wear attest that their allegiance is to the king. Garner points out that the choice of insignia becomes less innocent in light of the fact that the king to whom Captain Vere is referring, George III, bore the nickname “the Button Maker” in the belief that he preferred spending his time manufacturing buttons instead of attending to affairs of state.14 The conservative Captain Vere is an unlikely figure to be caricaturing the king, and his reference, like his classical allusions, goes unnoticed by his officers. Yet Vere’s tendency to “cite some historic character or incident of antiquity” (BB 63) during conversation results in another, equally sly joke at the king’s expense. An “unnamed sailor” describes Captain Vere’s habit as evidence of “a queer streak of the pedantic running through him … like the King’s yarn in a coil of navy rope” (BB 63). Garner observes that the phrase “King’s yarn” has been accepted as a naval term by Melville’s readers, despite the fact that Billy Budd is the “only known source” for the designation.15 The British navy certainly did weave “a distinctively colored yarn into its rope” to discourage thieves, yet “for this reason the odd strand was invariably termed the ‘rogue’s yarn,’” not the King’s yarn. “King” replaces “rogue,” as if the two were interchangeable.16 Melville’s joke is woven so deep within his sea yarn that only one critic has ever noticed it. There are good reasons, however, for believing the substitution of “King” for “rogue” (or “rogue” for “King”) to be intentional, for it accords with one of the most famous incidents in the novella, the moment when Billy cheerily calls out “goodbye to you too, old ‘Rights of Man’” (BB 49) as he is being taken aboard the Bellipotent. Because “double meanings” are “foreign to [Billy’s] nature” (BB 49), the shadow of insubordination carried by the remarks would seem to be merely accidental. Yet since both the captain and the crew of Billy’s former vessel “abbreviated [the name] in sailor fashion into the Rights” (BB 48), and since sailors are “of all men the greatest sticklers

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for usage” (BB 117), Billy’s use of the ship’s full name represents a signal departure from his fellows. The potential for subversion lies coiled even within the uttering of something as seemingly stable as a proper name, from the Rights of Man to the King’s yarn. But then proper names are never stable in Billy Budd, applying either to more than one subject, as in the two Captain Veres—the one who commands the Bellipotent, and “another Vere his senior, a distant relative, an officer of like rank in the navy” (BB 61)—or, more strangely still, to less than one—as in the Handsome Sailor, a generic name conferred upon Billy whose proper application is to the unnamed figure on the Liverpool docks the narrator describes in the first chapter. The proper names in the text carry their own cancelation within them, like “rogue” for “King.” Each time Billy is compared to a historical, mythical, or theological figure, for example, the comparison becomes less convincing; if Billy is Hercules, he cannot also be Apollo; if he is Christ, he cannot also be Adam. The comparison Melville’s narrator makes most frequently is to youth: “young Alexander” (BB 44), “young Joseph” (BB 96), “young David” (BB 78), “young Achilles” (BB 141), “young Isaac” (BB 115), and of course “young Adam” (BB 96). The shared adjective underlines the failure of proper names to refer unambiguously to a single subject; is young Achilles the same as the Achilles we find in The Iliad? Why refer to Isaac as young, since this is already how we think of him? Stephen Ullman notes that “only the context will show whether, when speaking of Queen Victoria, we are referring to the young Queen advised by Lord Melbourne, to the aged monarch reigning at the time of the Boer War, or to any other stage in the 82 years of her life.”17 Billy, being always the same, would seem to possess a referential stability that Queen Victoria lacks. Yet being removed from history does not prevent Billy from possessing a series of aliases: in the naval chronicle, he is “one of those aliens” (BB 130); to Captain Graveling, he is the “peacemaker” (BB 73); for Captain Vere, a “King’s bargain” (BB 96); for the narrator, almost everything, from “barbarian” (BB 120) to “cynosure” (BB 44). On board the Bellipotent, meanwhile, Billy goes by many names: the “Handsome Sailor,” of course, but also “the new recruit” (BB 49), “Beauty” (BB 48), “the foretopman” (BB 97), “Budd” (BB 108), “William Budd” (BB 130), and finally, “welkin-eyed Billy Budd—or Baby Budd, as … he at last came to be called” (BB 44). One name, “the sweet and pleasant fellow” (BB 71), is conferred upon Billy by his first antagonist, Red Whiskers, and then adopted by his second, Claggart; it reaches the master-of-arms, presumably, via Lieutenant Ratliffe, who hears the epithet from Graveling, the captain of Billy’s first ship.18 But since the narrator does not recount the scene in which Ratliffe passes on the name to Claggart, he leaves open the miraculous possibility that Red Whiskers and the master-at-arms independently light upon the description. Evidence for this possibility is supplied by the narrator’s confusing notion that the description “sweet and pleasant fellow” is “Claggart’s own phrase” (BB 73). Were the phrase indeed Claggart’s own, it would suggest that for Melville descriptions are equivalent to names, that sweet and pleasant are not merely attributes of Billy but unambiguous means of identifying him. Such a notion runs contrary to the theory of names with which Melville would have been most familiar, that outlined by John Stuart Mill in his 1843 A System of Logic. Here Mill defines terms such as “sweet”

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and “pleasant” as connotative: they denote a subject by way of attributing a quality to them. Proper names, by contrast, “have, strictly speaking, no signification”; they imply no attributes, they impart no information.19 Proper names are thus different in kind from descriptions: I call a certain man by the name Sophroniscus: I call him by another name, the father of Socrates. Both these are names of the same individual, but their meaning is altogether different; they are applied to that individual for two different purposes: the one, merely to distinguish him from other persons who are spoken of; the other to indicate a fact relating to him.20

Mill’s account has a number of flaws, one of which is that he simply omits proper names that lack denotation—those belonging, for example, to fictional characters such as Billy Budd. When Claggart calls Billy “the sweet and pleasant fellow,” moreover, he is not simply indicating (whether ironically or not) a fact relating to him, but distinguishing him from other persons, since he continually repeats the phrase. Claggart might be called a descriptivist, someone for whom descriptions are equivalent to names; in R. M. Sainsbury’s definition, for a descriptivist, “the meaning of a name is given by or is equivalent to some body of associated information.”21 Descriptivism is a central tenet of the work of Bertrand Russell, who argues that proper names should not be distinguished from descriptions in the way Mill believed: “When we use the word ‘Socrates,’” Russell claims, “we are really using a description. Our thought may be rendered by some such phrase as, ‘The Master of Plato,’ or ‘The Philosopher who drank the hemlock.’”22 Russell’s position is indebted to the work of Gottlob Frege, in particular his famous distinction between sense and reference in the 1892 essay of that name. Frege notes that proper names connote different things to different people, or even different things to the same person at different times. In the case of the proper name Aristotle, for example, one person might think of Plato’s pupil, another of Alexander the Great’s teacher. The referent is the same, but the sense is different. Sense can even exist in the absence of a referent, as in the expression “the least rapidly convergent series,” which, Frege points out, “has a sense but demonstrably has no reference, since for every given convergent series, another convergent, but less rapidly convergent, series can be found.”23 Fictional characters such as Billy Budd, meanwhile, constitute a case all of their own, since, although they certainly have a sense, their referential status is uncertain. A powerful objection to descriptivism can be found in Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, which challenges the idea that names are simply abbreviated descriptions. Kripke points out that whereas all descriptions of identity refer to something that need not necessarily have been the case, a proper name refers to something that necessarily is the case. To recognize this fact is to recognize that descriptions cannot simply be substituted for proper names. The sentence “Nixon lied” is not the same, Kripke argues, as “The U.S. President in 1970 lied,” because whereas the U.S. President in 1970 might have been someone else (such as Hubert Humphrey), Nixon could not

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have been anyone but Nixon. Names for Kripke are rigid designators, to be applied to the object “even if the cluster of descriptive features which initially determined the meaning of the word changes completely.”24 The name “Billy Budd” is a rigid designator because Melville’s hero continues to answer to it even after losing the defining characteristic (or description) associated with that name—innocence. Except, of course, that he never does lose it, despite performing an act antithetical to it—the killing of a man. This, for Cameron, is the central paradox of Billy Budd: how it is that Billy’s innocence “withstand[s] the murder that should have spoiled it.”25 If innocence is merely a description of Billy’s character, then it can no longer function as a means of identification after the killing of Claggart. But perhaps innocence is not simply a description; perhaps, following the example of the phrase “sweet and pleasant fellow,” it is functioning in Billy Budd as a proper name, in which, according to Kripke’s formula, it would continue to apply to Billy even after he has committed murder. This notion of descriptions being treated as rigid designators obviously turns Kripke on his head. Novels have their own logic, however, and Melville’s worlds at sea have qualities all their own. As the narrator of Redburn observes, “sailors have their own names, even for things that are familiar ashore.”26 And so, we might add, do novelists. Consider the following example. Near the end of Billy Budd the narrator prefaces a reflection on the difference between reading about historical events and living through them with the following attribution: “Says a writer whom few know” (BB 114). The reason few would know the writer of the remarks that follow is because the source is Melville himself. Melville’s self-deprecating reference to himself subtly ironizes his ostensible point about the value of firsthand experience. It also makes an equally subtle point about self-reference. To refer to oneself in the third person when speaking is common enough, but to refer to oneself by name in writing, and particularly in a piece of fiction, cancels out the reference. The reason is twofold: first, every piece of writing is defined by what Jacques Derrida vividly describes as “[t]he absence of the sender … from the mark that he abandons”; second, a work of fiction cannot but turn proper names into characters, even one’s own—within the novella, the name “Melville” possesses no more referential truth than the name “Billy Budd.”27 Fiction converts names into descriptions. The only way for Melville to refer to himself, in other words, is with a description, which makes it all the more apt that he should choose such a self-erasing one. Melville’s self-citation is part of an extended ambivalence displayed by his work toward the ability of names to refer to what they designate, from the taxonomic crisis suffered by Ishmael in Moby-Dick to the seeming abandonment of proper names in The Confidence-Man. Strikingly, descriptions are frequently the only form of designation available in The Confidence-Man; Melville’s narrator deliberately withholds the names of the various con men aboard the steamer Fidèle, since names are easily changed and thus of little use in distinguishing one swindler from another. What remains constant are the props these con men use in their performances, the full range of which are detailed in the black cripple’s inventory of all the men able to “speak a good word” for him early in the novel:

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dar is aboard here a werry nice, good ge’mman wid a weed, a ge’mman in a gray coat and white tie, what knows all about me; and a ge’mman wid a big book, too; and a yarb-doctor; and a ge’mman in a yaller west; and a ge’mman wid a brass plate; and a ge’mman in a wiolet robe28

These “ge’mman” subsequently appear in the text answering to these descriptions, as if such seemingly trivial facts about them as their wearing of a yellow vest adhered to them with the tenacity of proper names—as if, that is, a yellow vest could somehow function as Kripke’s rigid designator. In Pierre, conversely, another novel obsessed by names, descriptions do not function as proper names so much as proper names function as descriptions. Pierre imagines the New World as a place in which names possess the curious property of being able to bring into being the thing they designate. “The Delectable Mountain,” for example, a feature of the landscape not far from Pierre’s ancestral home, is said to have “insensibly changed its pervading aspect within a score or two of winters” to correspond to the name bestowed upon it.29 Both the American landscape and the American people are depicted as existing in a state of perpetual transformation, adapting themselves to the names bestowed upon them. The novel could thus be said to take place in a revolutionary world, of the kind perhaps called for by Thomas Paine, who in the Rights of Man urged the abolition of aristocratic titles, dismissing them as mere “nick-names … Through all the vocabulary of Adam, there is not such an animal as a Duke or a Count.”30

Part two: The ship of Theseus Paine’s dream of a world in which name and referent corresponded was soon to become reality. Near the end of Billy Budd Melville’s narrator reflects upon some of the new names brought into being by the French Revolution: In the general rechristening under the Directory … the St. Louis line-of-battle ship was named the Athée (the Atheist). Such a name … [is] the aptest name, if one consider it, ever given to a war-ship; far more so indeed than the Devastation, the Erebus (the Hell) and similar names bestowed upon fighting-ships. (BB 129)

In the case of the Athée, description and proper name coincide. Although names such as Devastation and Hell describe what the warship does or what life is like for those who sail on them, they fail to signal its ultimate horror: that it constitutes “a world without God.”31 Jean-Luc Nancy’s description of the world of Billy Budd accurately diagnoses many of Melville’s various worlds at sea: Ahab crowing “Who’s over me?” to his terrified crew in Moby-Dick; Babo’s Satanic pantomime of authority in Benito Cereno; Vere’s usurping of the Last Judgment in Billy Budd.32 As the narrator of WhiteJacket observes, “a ship is a bit of terra firma cut off from the main; it is a state in itself; and the captain is its king.”33 Indeed few monarchs can dream of the power wielded by

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a ship’s captain, the “lord and master of the sun,” able to exercise dominion over even time itself. “It is not twelve o’clock till he says so,” Melville reflects, the sailing master’s report of the time being nothing more than a “respectful suggestion”: “Twelve o’clock reported, sir,” says the middy. “Make it so,” replies the captain.

And the bell is struck eight by the messenger-boy, and twelve o’clock it is.34 The captain is the figure for continuity itself, which literally depends upon his person; if the captain does not order the bell to be struck, it is not twelve o’clock, no matter the position of the sun. Ahab’s boast to “all ye nations before my prow” that “I bring the sun to ye!” is nothing more than a simple expression of the absolute authority he bears.35 The threat mutiny poses is thus not so much to the person of the captain as to the coordinates of space and time embodied by him, a power Captain Vere deploys to ward off a possible revolt in the dangerous moments immediately following Billy’s burial. As the men register their anguish at seeing Billy’s body consigned to the sea, Captain Vere orders the drum beat to quarters at “an hour prior to the customary one” (BB 127). The men obey, force of habit triumphing over the evidence of their senses. Time and space remain within the captain’s possession. The crew’s subjugation to habit seemingly underlines the veracity of one of Vere’s favorite sayings: “With mankind,” he would say, “forms, measured forms are everything; and that is the import couched in the story of Orpheus with his lyre spell-binding the wild denizens of the wood.” And this he once applied to the disruption of forms going on across the Channel and the consequences thereof. (BB 128)

Yet Vere’s analogy is perplexing, indeed disingenuous. The “measured forms” to which he is referring—the martial beating of the ship’s drum in the wake of Billy’s death—do indeed restore order, but given that this is itself a “disruption” of customary procedure aboard the Bellipotent he would appear to be guilty of the very offense for which he condemns the French. What, after all, was the “disruption of forms going on across the Channel” if not a remaking of time itself—the introduction of a new calendar, the renaming of days, months, and years? What makes the French Revolution the modern event above all others, Rebecca Comay argues, “is not [that] it provides a fixed or objective standard of comparison, but rather [that] it introduces untimeliness itself as an ineluctable condition of historical experience.”36 The mark of this untimeliness is a world in which innocence can somehow come after guilt, as with Claggart, or not be banished by guilt, as with Billy. As Thomas Carlyle ruefully observed, the French Revolution seemed to have overturned the entire notion of continuity. History’s task, Carlyle suggested, was “to name the new Things it sees of Nature’s producing,”

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But what if History were to admit … that all the Names and Theorems yet known to her fall short? That this grand Product of Nature was even grand, and new, in that it came not to range itself under old recorded Laws-of-Nature at all; but to disclose new ones?37

In order to understand the new, the historian needs to be able to compare it with what has come before. But when the new cannot be accounted for by the existing laws of nature, the process of comparison proves impossible. The result goes beyond even the reordering of the relation between names and what they designate imagined by Paine and anticipated by Pierre. For the world brought into being by the French Revolution is not merely one in which things come to resemble the names they bear, as in the “Delectable Mountain,” but “a world … of magic become real,” as Carlyle puts it, in which the transformative power invested in names has been transferred to the day-today functioning of society itself. The French Revolution claims the absolute authority exercised by the sea captain and turns this power upon itself, abolishing all authority, “from King down to Parish Constable.” The historian is thus confronted in the French Revolution with what Carlyle calls “the Event,” which he defines as “some disruption, some solution of continuity.”38 The phrase is a plausible source for Vere’s reference to the “disruption of forms going on across the Channel.” Melville makes his most explicit reference to the French Revolution in the novella’s brief Preface, subsequently excised from the novella with the publication in 1962 of the authorized version produced by Hayford and Sealts: “The year 1797, the year of this narrative, belongs to a period which … involved a crisis for Christendom not exceeded in its undetermined momentousness at the time by any other era whereof there is record” (BB 377).39 The subject of the Preface is the contradictory effects of 1789: terror and continent-wide war bring with them “a political advance along nearly the whole line for Europeans” (BB 377). The paradox is an inherent product of the world brought into being by the French Revolution, an event that disrupts any sense of continuity between present and future, name and object. 1789 twists history into contradictory forms, in which unparalleled monstrosities result in unimaginable progress, and continual war ushers in an era of unparalleled peace. What the Preface refers to as the “analogous” (BB 378) mutinies in the British navy in 1797 obey the same contradictory logic, resulting in important reforms despite being “naturally deemed monstrous at the time” (BB 378). Unlike the French Revolution, the “Great Mutiny” failed to rise to the level of Carlyle’s “Event”; 1797, unlike 1789, does not name “a world … of magic become real.” Yet although the laws of nature remained undisrupted by the events at Spithead and Nore, the Great Mutiny raises problems of continuity of its own, as William James notes in his brief reference to the episode: If we decline, any more than we can avoid, to mention by name the individual ships whose crews were so disaffected, it is because the mere naming of a ship, as connected with so disgraceful a proceeding, may tend to cast an undeserved

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Melville’s Philosophies stigma on a future ship of the same name, or even on the same ship, with a new and very differently disposed ship’s company.40

The slightly pedantic manner in which James details his reluctance to name the ships involved gives a sense of the associative power of the names he refuses to divulge. The Naval History of Great Britain was published in five volumes between 1822 and 1824, more than twenty years after the “Great Mutiny,” yet James clearly believes that the names of the ships involved retain their power as synonyms for revolt. This is certainly how Captain Vere sees it, judging by his reaction when Claggart, in the course of accusing Billy of treason to Captain Vere, almost names one of the ships himself: God forbid, Your Honor, that the Bellipotent’s should be the experience of the— “Never mind that!” here peremptorily broke in the superior, his face altering with anger, instinctively divining the ship that the other was about to name … he was indignant at the purposed allusion. (BB 93)

Captain Vere clearly regards the vessel in question, the HMS Sandwich, as a synonym for mutiny, hence the embargo upon its name. But his caution fails to avert a similar catastrophe: the leader of the Nore mutiny, Robert Parker, was hanged from the yardarm of the Sandwich just as Melville’s hero is hanged from that of the Bellipotent. Claggart’s “purposed allusion” is surprising for a man “who never made allusion to his previous life ashore” (BB 65). Unlike his fellow sailors, described as direct in speech and act, Claggart is circuitous: hinting at, alluding to, but rarely naming his object. Indeed the rest of his speech to Vere, almost all of which is reported rather than direct, is a model of circumlocution: What he said, conveyed in the language of no uneducated man, was to the effect following, if not altogether in these words, namely that … at least one sailor aboard was a dangerous character in a ship mustering some who not only had taken a guilty part in the late serious troubles, but others also who, like the man in question, had entered His Majesty’s service under another form than enlistment. (BB 92)

Claggart’s speech might be read as another instance of Johnson’s textual stuttering, were it not for the care and precision with which the master-at-arms picks his words. Although willing to do the very thing James (and Melville) refuse to do—that is, name the ship at the center of the revolt—Claggart stops short of naming Billy, preferring instead to use descriptions such as “one sailor,” “a dangerous character,” “the man in question.” At least he appears to refer to him by these terms, since the narrator, like Claggart, is strangely circuitous, admitting that the words he attributes to the masterat-arms are not quite the ones used by his character. Vere’s exasperated response to Claggart’s mealy mouthed accusation, “Be direct, man” (BB 92), might well be echoed by the reader, exasperated in turn by the narrator’s declared policy of “indirection” (BB 74)—the classical allusions, the excurses on the law.

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The most infamous of the “bypaths” (BB 56) taken by Melville’s narrator concerns the question of whether Admiral Nelson’s decision to wear his medals during the battle of Trafalgar “savored of foolhardiness and vanity” (BB 57), since it allowed the French to identify him. Why, given the seeming irrelevance of Nelson’s acts to the story Melville wants to tell, would he invoke Trafalgar when he fights shy of referring to events that have a direct relevance—those at the Nore? The answer has to do with the question of continuity. Claggart, in the course of accusing Billy to Captain Vere,  hazards a daring allusion to those sailors under his command who, as he puts it, “had taken a guilty part in the late serious troubles”—that is, the mutinies at Spithead and Nore. Who these sailors are is never made clear. But their existence is alluded  to, again rather circuitously, during the narrator’s discussion of the men who  served under Nelson: “[among those] mutineers were some of the tars who not so  very long afterwards … [helped to win] the naval crown of crowns for him at Trafalgar” (BB 55–56). The danger Claggart apprehends on the Bellipotent is the same as the one Nelson  himself faced, that of maintaining the allegiance of former mutineers. But the famous admiral’s mode of  dealing with this danger forms a striking contrast to that of Vere, a man who prides himself on “wearing no pronounced insignia” (BB 60). Captain Vere’s judgment is dictated by his fear that clemency toward Billy “would tend to awaken any slumbering embers of the Nore among the crew” (BB 104). Nelson, conversely, commands allegiance on board the HMS Theseus, one of the ships involved in the “Great Mutiny,” not by “terroriz[ing] the crew into base subjection, but … by force of his mere presence” (BB 59). Critics have  speculated that Melville’s reason for juxtaposing Nelson’s “heroic  personality” (BB 59) with Vere’s understated one is to underscore the failings of his captain’s policy of  discretion. I want to propose  another reason, one prompted by the name of the ship of which Nelson takes command “in the same year with this story,” as the narrator is  careful to observe. That ship, the Theseus, is not only the actual name of the ship of which Nelson became captain, but also the name, needless to say, of the philosophical paradox of continuity—the same problem Carlyle associates with the  writing of history in the aftermath of the French Revolution and that Cameron defines as the central issue raised by Billy Budd. There seems to be no “solution of continuity,” to quote Carlyle, between Billy as he is before killing Claggart and Billy as he is after killing the master-at-arms; the political problem faced by Nelson and Vere, conversely, is the need to trust in a “solution of continuity” between the ships and crew involved in the Great Mutiny and the ones under their command.41 The paradox of the ship of Theseus concerns both these questions—that of personal identity, and that of political necessity. In his autobiography, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, the French critic offers the following reflection: A frequent image: that of the ship Argo (luminous and white), each piece of which the Argonauts gradually replaced, so that they ended with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either its name or its form . … Argo is an object with no other cause than its name, with no other identity than its form.42

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Barthes is here engaging in some canny substitution of his own, replacing the ship of Theseus with the Argo, the name of the ship Jason commands in his quest for the Golden Fleece. Whereas the ship of Theseus was slowly replaced plank by plank as it rotted on land, the Argo, in Barthes’ retelling of the paradox, is imagined as being rebuilt during the journey. But there is another, even more significant, difference with Theseus’s ship. Roger Gathman notes that at the center of the prow of the Argo was a piece of “divine timber taken by Athene from the oak of Dodona.” This wood possessed the power of human speech, a power Athene’s gift confers on Jason’s ship. “So, in fact,” Gathman notes dryly, “the Argo is the one instance of a ship in which there is something irreplaceable.”43 The unique nature of the ship Barthes chooses to exemplify the replaceability of substance suggests that, as with Melville in Billy Budd, he has not simply made a mistake. Instead, he appears to be doing something quite strange: not retelling the paradox, but reversing it. The Argo, he states, has “no other cause than its name … no other identity than its form”; yet since the ship he describes goes by a different name and has a different form from the one named in the paradox to which he is referring, the Argo would seem to have ceased to be itself after all. But this is not simply a philosophical joke. The ship of Theseus can serve as a philosophical paradox about substance and continuity precisely because it is safely insulated from the temporal realms of history and politics; it is no more than a museum piece, destined never to sail again like “the decaying monument” (BB 57) of Nelson’s famous former ship Victory to which Melville refers in Billy Budd. The Argo, in contrast, is imagined as becoming a new ship while at sea, where it matters what name the ship goes by since this is the means by which other boats will identify it as friend or foe. If the Argo is not recognized as the Argo, Gathman speculates, it “becomes a pirate ship, an illicit ship.” A philosophical question is thus transformed into a political one. Bernard Williams makes the same move from the philosophical to the political in order to find his way out of the problem of continuity, arguing that the description “the ship of Theseus” “refers not to a particular ship but to a role, rather like the role of the Admiral’s flagship; as in that case, the role can be discharged by various particular ships at different times.”44 Williams admits, however, that this notion of role proves less helpful in the case of personal identity. The classic example here is supplied by Thomas Reid, the case of the brave officer—perhaps not coincidentally, an example drawn once again from the experience of war: Suppose a brave officer to have been flogged when a boy at school … to have taken a standard from the enemy in his first campaign, and to have been made a general in advanced life: Suppose also … that when he took the standard, he was conscious of his having been flogged at school, and that when made a general he was conscious of his taking the standard, but had absolutely lost the consciousness of his flogging.45

If personal identity depends on the consciousness of self, as John Locke proposed, it logically follows, Reid argued, that “the general is, and at the same time is not the

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same person as him who was flogged at school.”46 But if personal identity does not depend on consciousness, what exactly does guarantee it? Clearly the brave officer’s various “roles” are of no help here; indeed they almost exacerbate the problem, for if we suppose that the brave officer was motivated by his shame at being flogged, and that the general is proud of having taken the standard from the enemy, then the fact that the general does not remember being flogged suggests that he is misremembering what it was like to be the brave officer and thus misrecognizing what it is to be the general, that is, himself. Billy Budd, for its part, is the story of a man without a past, a foundling with no knowledge of his parents and seemingly no memory of anything before the events recorded in Melville’s novella. It is all the more remarkable then that the text should engage so explicitly, on both the level of substance and on the level of personhood, with the paradox of the ship of Theseus. For it is not just Billy’s strangely unlosable innocence that raises the issue of continuity. The paradox of personal identity is also the subject of the odd, seemingly irrelevant debate between the Surgeon and the Purser over whether Billy somehow maintained control of his body after death. When the Purser asks whether “the absence of spasmodic movement” (BB 125) in the body hanging from the yardarm was evidence for Billy’s death being a form of “euthanasia”—the “willful sacrifice of one’s self for one’s country” (BB 193)—the Surgeon mockingly derides the term for being “imaginative and metaphysical—in short, Greek” (BB 125). Greek indeed. For the actions of Billy’s body relocates the paradox of the ship of Theseus inside, as it were, the ship itself, within the body of a single sailor. The same set of questions are asked of the dead Billy as of the living one: did he mean to do what he seems to have done? If Billy’s acts are unintentional, then his life is a kind of living death; if they are intentional, then he appears to have survived his own death. Melville’s paradox transposes the question of continuity from the personal to the political in much the manner as Barthes and Williams. The difference, however, is that the political realm invoked by Billy Budd is not merely theoretical. Billy Budd reflects upon the highly contemporary problem of how the very event which disabled historical continuity should be remembered. Is to memorialize 1789 also to remember the events of 1797 that it made possible, or is it merely another means with which to erase from history the unsuccessful mutinies of Spithead and Nore? Melville addresses this question by animating the cardboard figures of philosophical example, such as Reid’s brave soldier, in the form of the unforgettable Billy. What allows Billy’s actions to serve as the proper means of attempting to think through philosophical questions is the fact that he is himself cut off from history even as he is placed inside it, since he is depicted as eternally innocent, untouched by events around him. He is both inside and outside history, which is why his identity remains intact even after his death. Billy’s corpse is eventually consigned to the sea. But Melville fills this absence with a metonymic sign for his hero, one that can be tracked as if it were an actual body: The spar from which the Foretopman was suspended was for some few years kept trace of by the blue-jackets. Their knowledge followed it from ship to dockyard

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Melville’s Philosophies and again from dockyard to ship, still pursuing it even when at last reduced to a mere dockyard boom. To them a chip of it was as a piece of the Cross. (BB 131)

The spar remains invested with Billy’s presence in much the way that James feared that the names and the crew of mutinous ships would remain associated with their crime. What allows the spar to continue to be taken as a sign for Billy is the “knowledge” of the blue-jackets, a knowledge that seems to know no limits, since they are able to identify the spar even when it is no longer a spar but a boom. The fate of this “piece of the Cross” suggests that neither form nor function is decisive in the question of identity, that only memory can confer continuity, as if what guaranteed the continuing existence of the ship of Theseus was not the substance from which it was made or the role it was asked to play but that there be someone able to testify to its being the ship in question, to call it by its name—the very thing Barthes fails to do. Melville thus rewrites Locke’s notion of personhood far more dramatically than Reid’s example of the brave officer. For it is not consciousness of self that determines continuity of identity within Billy Budd, but the consciousness others have of that self. For Locke, “if the same Socrates waking and sleeping do not partake of the same consciousness, Socrates waking and sleeping is not the same Person.”47 For Melville, conversely, Billy is the same awake and asleep, alive and dead, as long as there is someone to remember him, to speak one of his many names, indeed to remember him by speaking in his name. This is why the novella ends with the voice of “another foretopman, one of his own watch” (BB 131), whose poem “Billy in the Darbies” happily speaks of “the likes just o’ me, Billy Budd” (BB 132). The poem imagines Billy’s thoughts as he lies on the ocean floor, suggesting in both its content and in its form that the foretopman’s identity continues after death. The same might be said of Vere’s last words, “Billy Budd, Billy Budd,” which are neither empty repetition nor self-canceling but a fitting form of remembrance—the saying of his name as if it were itself a description. As was the case in the renaming of the French ship the St. Louis as the Athée, names can sometimes function as descriptions better even than descriptions can. Yet despite calling the Athée “the aptest name … ever given to a war-ship,” Melville’s preliminary notes refer to the ship as the Directory—the name, surely not coincidentally, of the revolutionary organization responsible for renaming the St. Louis. In fact, a number of the ships referred to in Billy Budd either began with different names, or refer to very different vessels. Parker relates the fact that Melville changed the name of Vere’s ship from the Indomitable to the Bellipotent at a late stage of composition, while Garner points out that two of the three names Melville used for his English ships were taken from French ones (the Droits de l’Homme and the Indomptable) and that the name he toyed with using for his French ship, the Directory, was actually taken from an English one (the Director).48 Names in Billy Budd are not merely double in the sense that names function as descriptions and descriptions as names; they are double in the sense that they hide French subjects under English names, English subjects under French ones; they cross “the deadly space between.” The text’s mode of designation

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aligns it, ironically, with the wretched naval chronicle’s description of the killing of Claggart: tho’ mustered into the service under an English name the assassin was no Englishman, but one of those aliens adopting English cognomens whom the present extraordinary necessities of the Service have caused to be admitted into it in considerable numbers. (BB 130)

The text’s repeated insistence on Billy’s Englishness renders the newspaper account patently false—indeed the description obviously applies to Claggart rather than to the Handsome Sailor. In the wake of the tragedy on board the Bellipotent descriptions begin to drift as far from their referents as proper names did while they were alive. The chronicle’s reference to the impressing of foreigners into the British navy echoes an earlier discussion of the practice by the narrator. Noting that the government never admitted to the existence of what he calls “sanctioned irregularities,” the narrator, with an irony by now familiar, confesses to possessing “some scruple” (BB 66) about referring to them himself. The narrator’s avowed reluctance to discuss impressment echoes the account of his reticence to refer to the Great Mutiny. And, as in that case, the reason for such coyness is hard to discern, given that Melville is writing a hundred years after the fact. He is frankness itself, after all, when discussing the practice a full forty years earlier, in White-Jacket: According to an English estimate, the foreigners serving in the King’s ships at one time amounted to one eighth of the entire body of seamen. How it is in the French Navy, I cannot with certainty say; but I have repeatedly sailed with English seamen who have served in it.49

Melville was to devote an entire novel, Israel Potter, to the sad fate suffered by men forced to fight for the very country against which their own nation was at war. The hero of that novel, an American patriot and veteran of Bunker Hill, finds himself at one point “clinging midway” to a plank of wood placed between an American and British ship. The image nicely illustrates the confusion of nationalities and identities involved in naval warfare, whose battles are fought so close at hand that the inevitable result is a merging and confounding of individual identity, as in this description of a battle at sea: “The belligerents were no longer … an English ship and an American ship. It was a co-partnership.”50 Neither names nor descriptions serve to pick out one ship from the other. Melville’s insistence on the impossibility of dividing English sailor from French sailor, English ship from American ship, makes it hard to see how he could call any narrative set at sea an “inside” one, let alone one as shaped by outside forces as Billy Budd. These forces are not only historical and political, they are also textual.51 As we have seen, the narrator shares his habit of alluding to classical, biblical, and historical precedents with Captain Vere, whose imperviousness to the fact that his hard-headed

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crew fail to catch his “remote” (BB 62) references is likened to “a migratory fowl that in its flight never heeds when it crosses a frontier” (BB 62–63). The extravagance of Vere’s analogies contrasts with the stolidity of his convictions, beliefs he holds to as “a dike against those invading waters of novel opinion social, political, and otherwise, which carried away as in a torrent no few minds in those days” (62). The two images put the form and content of Vere’s speeches at cross-purposes, just as they describe the conflicting movements of Melville’s text. For despite being “restricted … to the inner life of one particular ship and the career of an individual sailor,” Billy Budd ranges far afield, noting that at the height of Napoleon’s triumphs, “there were Americans who had fought at Bunker Hill who looked forward to the possibility that the Atlantic might prove no barrier against [his] ultimate schemes” (BB 66). William V. Spanos has recently argued that Billy Budd insists upon “the ultimate continuity” between a young American democratic state and the “counterrevolutionary” British one.52 But there are other continuities suggested in the text—attenuated, distant, but discoverable nonetheless. One model for these connections is offered by the “contemporary shipowner, Stephen Girard of Philadelphia, whose sympathies, alike with his native land and its liberal philosophers, he evinced by naming his ships after Voltaire, Diderot, and so forth” (BB 48). Nomination is here not simply indistinguishable from description; it is a call to action. Melville’s account of Napoleon’s trajectory tallies with contemporary views of the French Revolution, which, in the words of Hannah Arendt, embodied “[t]he notion of an irresistible movement.”53 Billy Budd records this irresistible movement in a series of metaphors depicting the crossing of “the deadly space between” revolutionary France and monarchical England, from “live cinders blown across the Channel from France in flames” (BB 54) which spark the “Great Mutiny” to the extraordinary image detailing the reaction of the sailors to Billy’s funeral moments before the drum beats them back to quarters at “an hour prior to the customary one”: Whoever has heard the freshet-wave of a torrent suddenly swelled by pouring showers in tropical mountains, showers not shared by the plain; whoever has heard the first muffled murmur of its sloping advance through precipitous woods, may form some conception of the sound now heard. The seeming remoteness of its source was because of its murmurous indistinctness since it came from closeby, even from the men massed on the ship’s open deck. (BB 125–126)

Nancy Ruttenberg points out that Captain Vere instantly recognizes this murmuring as “the sound of the word never uttered: mutiny,” which explains why the narrator describes it as “a sound not easily to be verbally rendered” (BB 126).54 The narrator’s admission puts sound and speech strangely at odds, as if one could sound the word “mutiny” without saying it, which is, of course, what the text does. Melville seems to be imagining a language here which does not name or describe things but enacts them, a language which both originates within subjects and, like the revolution seen from the shores of Britain—or even from America a century later— advances toward them, indistinct but close by, threatening to abolish the distinction

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between inside and outside, signifier and signified.55 1797, unlike 1789, might have failed to result in “a world … of magic become real,” but even writing a century later, Melville can still conjure up its ghost, which, like all specters, needs simply be called by name.

Notes Paul Giles reflects upon the novella’s subtitle at length in Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), outlining the ways the text “plays with discrepancies between outward appearance and inward psychology” (82). 2 Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, eds., Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962), 54. Hereafter abbreviated as BB. 3 For an account of the complex relation between Billy Budd and the history which encases it, see Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983). 4 Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (New York: Sloan Books, 1950), 294. 5 Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 21. 6 This is what Eve Sedgwick has in mind when she refers to the text’s intense “spatioepistemological choreography” (Epistemology of the Closet [Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1990], 111). 7 Sharon Cameron, Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 186. 8 Sedgwick, Epistemology, 101. Geoffrey Hartman’s punning formulation, “Billy Budd’s mutiny is … a rising up of his muteness” (The Fate of Reading [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1975], 267) nicely captures the paradoxical shape assumed by mutiny in the text. 9 Barbara Johnson, “Melville’s Fist: The Execution of Billy Budd,” Studies in Romanticism, 18.4 (Winter, 1979): 583. The claim is strikingly similar to Gilles Deleuze’s contention that Bartleby’s refusal to copy “severs language from all reference” (Essays: Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco [Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997], 73). 10 Cameron, Impersonality, 190. 11 Stanton Garner, “Fraud as Fact in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd,” San Jose Studies 4.1 (February 1978): 83, 100. 12 Hershel Parker, Reading Billy Budd (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 18. 13 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, ed. Jonathan Schell (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 72. 14 Garner, “Fraud as Fact,” 97. 15 Ibid., 97. 16 Ibid., 97. Garner’s findings challenge readings such as that offered by John Wenke, who argues that Melville’s commitment to ambiguity and indeterminacy “avoid[s] putting the narrator in overt opposition to the British crown” (“Melville’s indirection: Billy Budd, the genetic text, and ‘the deadly space between’” New Essays on Billy Budd, ed. Donald Yannella [New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 120). 1

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17 Stephen Ullman, Semantics: An Introduction to the Science of Meaning (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), 52. 18 Marty Roth briefly refers to Claggart’s use of the phrase in “The Disruption of Forms in Billy Budd,” Boundary 2 15.2 (Autumn 1986/Winter 1987), 113. 19 John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive (London: John W. Parker, 1843), 40. 20 Ibid., 45. 21 R. M. Sainsbury, Reference without Referents (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2. 22 Bertrand Russell, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism,” in Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901–1950 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 201. Proper names are not, however, exact equivalents to descriptions, which is why Russell refers to them as “disguised” ones. In his droll example,



If a is identical with b, whatever is true of the one is true of the other, and either may be substituted for the other in any proposition without altering the truth or falsehood of that proposition. Now George IV wished to know whether Scott was the author of Waverley; and in fact Scott was the author of Waverley. Hence we may substitute Scott for the author of “Waverley”, and thereby prove that George IV wished to know whether Scott was Scott. Yet an interest in the law of identity can hardly be attributed to the first gentleman of Europe. (“On Denoting,” Mind 14.56 [October 1905], 485)

23 Gottlob Frege, “On Sense and Reference,” in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. Peter Geach and Max Black (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960), 58. 24 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 90. 25 Cameron, Impersonality, 187, 26 Melville, Redburn (New York: Library of America, 1983), 76. 27 Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 5. 28 Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (New York: Library of America, 1984), 852. 29 Ibid., 10, 342. 30 Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, ed. Claire Grogan (New York: Broadview Press, 2011), 113. 31 Jean-Luc Nancy, “A-religion,” Journal of European Studies (2004) 23.1/2: 15. 32 Melville, Moby-Dick (London: Penguin, 1992), 178. 33 Herman Melville, White-Jacket (New York: Library of America, 1983), 72. 34 Ibid., 371–72. 35 Melville, Moby-Dick, 561. 36 Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010), 7. 37 Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 677. 38 Ibid., 454, 561, 24. In an illuminating discussion of Melville’s varied influences, Robert Milder contends that “Like Hawthorne, Carlyle was not an instructor for Melville so much as a reagent who quickened and developed tendencies within him” (Exiled

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Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine [New York: Oxford University Press, 2006], 66). 39 Given that, as William V. Spanos observes in The Exceptionalist State and the State of Exception: Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), “the historical matter of chapter 3 … more or less repeats that of the earlier ‘Preface’” (6), the excision is open to question, on thematic grounds at least. 40 William James, The Naval History of Great Britain, Vol. II (London, 1837), 67. 41 The term is used in surgery to refer to the division of bones or soft parts that are normally continuous. 42 Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 46. 43 http://limitedinc.blogspot.com/2012/12/barthes-freudian-slip.html. 44 Bernard Williams, Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 61. 45 Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, ed. Derek Brookes (College Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 276. 46 Ibid., 277. 47 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 342. That Melville had the Essay in mind as he was writing Billy Budd is clear from the fact that he directly borrows his central act from John Locke’s discussion of free will in Book II: “a Man striking himself, or his Friend, by a Convulsive motion of his Arm, which it is not in his Power, by Volition or the direction of his Mind to stop, or forbear, no Body thinks he has in this Liberty; every one pities him, as acting by Necessity and Constraint” (239). 48 Garner, “Fraud as Fact,” 92–93. For Edgar Dryden, “The ‘Bellipotent’ is the ‘Athèe’ hiding behind the cloak of the impostor chaplain she carries; and the Articles of War merely cover with an official mask the same irrational forces which are found undisguised ‘across the Channel’” (Melville’s Thematics of Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968], 215). 49 Melville, White-Jacket, 748. 50 Melville, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (New York: Library of America, 1984), 575, 568. 51 For a fascinating account of the novel’s wide range of reference in the context of American literary self-fashioning, see Nancy Ruttenberg’s “Melville’s Handsome Sailor,” American Literature 66.1 (March 1994): 83–103. 52 Spanos, The Exceptionalist State, 4. 53 Arendt, On Revolution, 38–39. 54 Ruttenberg, “Melville’s Handsome Sailor,” 92. 55 Cameron places this lack of differentiation at the level of character, arguing convincingly that Melville refuses to render persons distinct from other phenomena, as if he regarded personhood as “not different from a stone or a manifestation of light” (182).

3

Science, Philosophy, and Aesthetics in “The Apple-Tree Table” Maurice S. Lee

Man is the Interpreter of Nature, Science the right interpretation. —William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences Founded Upon Their History (1840) “Progress” in philosophy need not consist in “settling” issues once and for all … . [I]f the questions of philosophy are indeed “unsettleable,” in the sense that they will always be with us, that is a wonderful thing, not something to be regretted. —Hilary Putnam, “Science and Philosophy” (2010) Melville knows there are many ways not to know or not to know precisely and with certitude. The epistemological limits he traces in his writings can be approached through theological crises, etiological ambiguity, perceptual doubt, cultural misprision, and problems of representation. Less attention has been given to Melville’s interests in scientific reasoning, even as literary critics continue to revisit the relationship between science and romanticism. Melville does tend to undermine, playfully and powerfully, specific cetological, geological, and ethnographic claims, but he also turns his critical eye to the methods that constitute scientific knowledge as such. This is not to say that he has an anti-positivist animus once typically associated with romanticism; rather he recognizes how his era’s scientific advances can perpetuate and generate skeptical challenges from within the history and philosophy of science. Baconian empiricism may not be a flood subject across Melville’s long career, but it plays a role in many of his writings from the 1850s and seems to me a main commitment of one short story that deserves somewhat more credit than it currently enjoys. After discovering a “satanic-looking” table in his garret, after hearing a mysterious ticking from inside it, after witnessing a marvelous bug dig its way out of the tabletop, and while watching with his supremely rational wife and superstitious daughters for the emergence of a second insect, the narrator of “The Apple-Tree Table” (1856) reports, “In a strange and not unpleasing way, I gently oscillated between Democritus and Cotton Mather.”1 From Mardi (1846), to Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852),

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to The Confidence-Man (1857) and Clarel (1876), Melville can overwhelm critical faculties with the extravagance of his philosophizing. The speculative eclecticism of these long works wonderfully frustrate desires for certitude as so many positions are considered, set aside, conflated, and ironized by so many characters and in such manifold tones that organizing the philosophical possibilities, let alone reconstructing some kind of positive system, feels like an unfinishable task that threatens to become a fool’s errand. Melville challenges ideals of philosophical progress, not with carefully crafted antinomies but with an excess of potentiality. “The Apple-Tree Table,” however, may operate differently, for the more constrained allusive patterns of Melville’s short fiction support more focused discussion. Just as nods to Jonathan Edwards and Joseph Priestley point toward specific lines of inquiry in “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853), Democritus and Mather in “The Apple-Tree Table” offer an ostensible structure: the former is presented as a figure of reason, materialism, and what one critic has called “shallow utilitarianism,” while the latter can stand for superstition, religion, and the panic of the Salem witch trials.2 Were this so—that is, if the narrator’s self-diagnosis also describes the tale’s philosophical architecture—it would be easy to follow a scholarly tradition that sets at the center of “The Apple-Tree Table” the “tension between natural history and supernatural mystery.”3 Accordingly, it would be reasonable to admit what the thinness of the story’s critical history ­suggests—that “The Apple-Tree Table,” like other domestic tales such as “The Lightning-Rod Man” (1854) and “I and My Chimney” (1856), is not without its comic pleasures, cultural coordinates, and skeptical curiosities but remains in the end a minor production more committed to dramatizing intellectual dualisms than pursuing the great Art of Telling the Truth. The problem with reading “The Apple-Tree Table” in this way is that the narrator’s description of his philosophical situation—of his oscillating between Democritus and Mather—will not bear scrutiny any better than the self-interested accountings of the narrator of “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Just as the lawyer’s dalliance with Edwards and Priestley foregrounds the subject of fate and freewill but brings more confusion than clarity, “The Apple-Tree Table’s” allusions to Democritus and Mather (as well as to Roger Bacon and natural history) direct our attention to a question that proves stubbornly unsettled both within the logic of Melville’s story and in the ongoing history of the philosophy of science. The question concerns what sorts of methods might justify inferences of an unobservable world, and Melville’s response in “The AppleTree Table” anticipates an argument that Hilary Putnam makes when discussing the limits of scientific reason and the claims of a more pluralistic philosophy: Because knowing involves facts, theories, and values, science requires some epistemology outside of itself. *** Despite its seemingly binary structure, the philosophical plot of “The Apple-Tree Table” conjures a complicated history of science. At immediate issue is what to make of the table’s inexplicable ticking, which may have a knowable natural cause or

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remain a supernatural mystery. The narrator leans toward the former explanation, repeatedly invoking Democritus to support “the foregone conclusion, that any possible investigation of any possible spiritual phenomenon was absurd.”4 While the obvious joke is that the fitfully superstitious narrator cannot maintain such a priori confidence, the lower layer of Melville’s irony is that Democritus was by no means a rational materialist who denied the existence of invisible realms. As critics have discussed, and as Melville indicates in Mardi, Democritus was often figured in the antebellum period as a “laughing philosopher” who accepted the inevitability of death without the comfort of spiritual hope.5 But more important for interpreting “The Apple-Tree Table” is that Democritus was an early theorist of atomism whose legacy challenged Enlightenment notions of philosophical positivism, mechanistic order, and scientific progress. It is not simply that Democritus’s penchant for hilarity subverts the serious enterprises of reason; nor is it only that he believed that pulling out the tongue of a living chameleon would improve one’s chances in court. What Democritus was best known for in the nineteenth century was that, prior to Epicurus and Lucretius, he speculated that the physical world is composed of invisible, indivisible particles that cluster themselves in shapes and patterns but also (by some accounts) move according to chance.6 “The Apple-Tree Table” hints at this metaphysic when the narrator discovers at the top of his garret “millions of butterfly moles swarming,” “thousands of insects clustered in a golden mob,” and “scores of small ants and flies … frisking around.”7 These motile masses seem less insects for entomological study than the corpuscular stuff of atomism; and if the narrator finds their multiplicity and randomness threatening, he is nonetheless enchanted, for (as Jane Bennett has more generally argued) classical atomism “speaks to our intuitive sense that the world is open-ended, that the future is not determined until the moment of its arrival, that chance is in the nature of things.”8 Melville cites one theory of atomism when Ishmael risks falling into “Descartian vortices,” and a similar dynamic may be in play when Pip witnesses “the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects” heaving minute orbs from the unseen foundations of the world.9 “The Apple-Tree Table” will imagine what it might mean to observe a single atom in isolation, though for now let it suffice to say that when understood within the context of atomism, Democritus figures not only materialist disenchantment and (in the narrator’s words) “scornful incredulity” but also the wonderfully unsettling possibilities of an invisible, unpredictable world.10 Democritus’s atomism also raised doubts about the progress of science in the nineteenth century. Whether grandly theorized as in Comte or traced along stricter disciplinary lines, histories of science from the antebellum period were overwhelmingly Whiggish—in their celebrations of ever-increasing knowledge, in their optimistic sense of human destiny and godly design, and in their metaphors of teleological advancement (steps taken along a pathway, the construction of an edifice, the dawning of light over darkness, and so on). William Whewell in his influential History of the Inductive Sciences (1837) elaborates a linear narrative in which “Preludes” of factual and theoretical work culminate in “Epochs” of scientific revelation that are followed by “Sequels” in which new knowledge spurs developments in other fields. One complication that required accommodation in

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such models was that some scientific discoveries had been anticipated centuries and even millennia before, only to drop temporarily from view before being revisited or simply reiterated. Ralph Waldo Emerson made the point that throughout human history new discoveries “have been many times found and lost,” while another antebellum commentator more specifically complained that the atomistic theories of Priestley and Roger Boscovich were precisely “the same” as those of Democritus and Lucretius and that, because “modern systems and discoveries are predicated upon those of ages long past,” they should not be ascribed to “inventive genius” and emplotted in progressive narratives of science.11 By contrast, most nineteenth-century historians of science insisted on the difference between good guesses and good methods, between what Whewell called “the acute, but fruitless” intuitions of the ancients and “the comprehensive systems and demonstrated generalizations … of modern times.”12 A prime example of this difference was atomistic theory, as when Dupin in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) refers to Epicurus’s atomism as “the vague guesses of that noble Greek.”13 More stringently, an 1850 review of Alexander Von Humboldt’s first two volumes of Cosmos (1845–47) proclaimed, “[I]n all ages, ingenious and restless minds, impatient of the laborious and slow investigation of the laws of nature … have attempted to burst the barriers of the inductive method, and to anticipate the discoveries of the later age by a bold guess.”14 Or, as an 1853 article titled “The Atomic Theory” claimed of modern scientists, “We make a long course of observation and strict induction, climbing every step of the ascent slowly and surely, while they [the ancients] sprang to the tops of thought at one bound … . Democritus and Empedocles foresaw such things [atoms] at once, but it was ‘as in a glass darkly.’”15 The language and logic of such passages echo Francis Bacon’s empirical gradualism and suggest how nineteenth-century histories of science required also a philosophy of science that distinguished between patient, verifiable induction, and merely intuitive guesswork. Here again, however, “The Apple-Tree Table” complicates such dualisms, for if the tale ironically takes the chance-believing, lizard-abusing, invisible-world-speculating Democritus to stand for a proto-Enlightenment scientist, the fact that he is set in opposition to Mather only muddles the situation further. Sitting on the apple-tree table in the garret is a moldy edition of Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), which the narrator initially reads for amusement until its invocation of witchcraft becomes a source of terror when the table starts to tick. Especially troubling for the narrator is that the “learned doctor” Mather cannot be dismissed as some pre-modern religious fanatic, for in the Magnalia he discusses the supposed deviltry in Salem with calm and careful reasoning, including efforts to corroborate secondhand knowledge with direct eye-witness accounts.16 Melville cannot match Hawthorne’s study of Puritan history in general and spectral evidence in particular, but his depiction of Mather in “The Apple-Tree Table” is relatively nuanced for the time.17 In the nineteenth century, Mather was notoriously and somewhat unfairly remembered as a leader of the Salem witch panic. He did defend the Salem court in The Wonders of the Invisible World (1692), and the Magnalia acknowledges the possibility of witchcraft, affirming the admissibility of spectral evidence and radically inferred

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causation (for instance, Mather credits victims who feel tormented in the presence of supposed witches, though no direct cause of their suffering can be seen). In this way, Mather can appear to be in the grips of a hysterical and superstitious faith, but the Magnalia’s account of the events in Salem also proceeds with a measure of empirical care. Mather denies that spectral phenomena are “infallible Evidence of Guilt,” and he is moved by experiments in which supposed witchcraft victims are systematically exposed to an array of people so as to ascertain if their felt torments correlate with the presence of the accused.18 Moreover, Mather was a member of the Royal Society; his Christian Philosopher (1720) has been called “the finest example of the way Newtonian science came to America”; and his atomistic theories of “insensible corpuscles” followed scientific norms of the time.19 Sarah Rivett has described the Puritan struggle to know the unseen world as an “evidentiary crisis” in which “theologians and natural scientists eventually became students of each other’s methodological variations.”20 Thus, Mather should no more stand for faith run amok than Democritus should stand for rational materialism, and the narrator cannot oscillate between supernaturalism and science, because neither pole is stable nor entirely distinct. That “The Apple-Tree Table” understands Democritus and Mather within a nonteleological history of science is suggested in the opening sentence of the story when the narrator imagines that his “necromantic little old table” might have at one time belonged to “Friar Bacon.”21 Roger Bacon’s reputation underwent a shift across the nineteenth century as the medieval friar formerly famous as an alchemist, astrologer, and demonologist came to be seen, in the words of Amanda Power, as “a precocious figure in the development of modern scientific method.”22 Humboldt, Whewell, and Victor Cousin were among the prominent thinkers who recast Roger Bacon as an antitype to Francis Bacon, as a prophetic figure pointing the way toward but never quite entering the promised land of empirical science. Like Democritus and Mather, Roger Bacon mixed superstition and induction when discussing invisible objects and forces; and because his proto-empiricism seemed neither to build directly on existing knowledge nor serve as a foundation for subsequent advances, he often occupied an anomalous place in nineteenth-century histories of science. Cursory narratives could sketch a rough line from Aristotle to Roger Bacon to Francis Bacon to modern luminaries, but more careful accounts worried that Friar Bacon’s work was inexplicably isolated in terms of chronology and influence. Whewell wrote of Bacon’s Opus Majus (c. 1267), “I regard the existence of such a work at that period as a problem which has never yet been solved,” and an anonymous 1858 essay tried to penetrate the mystery of Roger Bacon’s precocity by arguing that Francis Bacon borrowed heavily from him while clandestinely covering his tracks.23 In this instance, the desire for a continuous, progressive history of science led to a conspiracy theory. Given his skepticism toward manifest destinies and other forms of modern selfcongratulation, it makes sense that Melville in “The Apple-Tree Table” subverts Whiggish histories of science. Democritus, Roger Bacon, and Mather do not trace an arc from ignorance to enlightenment, from faith to positivism, or from superstition to science. Nor does clarity ensue when the “eminent naturalist” Professor Johnson arrives to account for the seemingly miraculous bugs.24 The professor’s explanation

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generally accords with Melville’s historical sources: the insects, he says, hatched from eggs laid inside a living tree before it was made into the table.25 Yet such reasoning falls under doubt when—after estimating that the eggs were laid ninety years before the tree was felled and that the table itself is eighty years old—Professor Johnson confidently concludes that the eggs lay dormant for a total of “one hundred and fifty years.”26 Some egregious versions of “The Apple-Tree Table” silently correct this math, though it is clear that Melville intended the error when the narrator comments, “Such, at least, was Professor Johnson’s computation.” With this cheap shot at scientific arrogance and the rising authority of quantification, Melville indicates that nineteenth-century scientists are as fallible as Democritus, Friar Bacon, and Mather. “The Apple-Tree Table” thus inscribes the antebellum present in an unprogressive history of science, though Melville’s critique may also go deeper, for even if Professor Johnson were to calculate correctly, his methods remain narrow and suspect. A bit of scraping with a penknife, a counting of cortical slabs, a quick estimate regarding the age of the table, and shockingly scant attention to the insect itself—the professor’s science is rife with conjecture, interpretation, approximation, and elision as he endeavors to observe, infer, and hypothesize from the limited evidence at hand. The professor accedes to the narrator’s insistent daughters that the case is “unusual” and “very wonderful,” but he cannot countenance their supernatural explanation, which he calls a “crude spiritual hypothesis.”27 For their part, Anna and Julia do not deny Professor Johnson’s logic, but they remain unmoved by his positivist worldview, concluding, “If this beauteous creature be not a spirit it yet teaches a spiritual lesson” that they now regard with “delight” instead of “terror.” And so with this stubbornly pious possibility on the table, the story nears its end. It is tempting to find in the conclusion of “The Apple-Tree Table” the nonoverlapping magisteria of science and faith, for the rational naturalist and spiritual juveniles prove immune to each other’s epistemologies. Or because Melville provides such excellent reasons to distrust both parties, and given his skeptical habits of mind, we might more accurately take “The Apple-Tree Table” to dramatize the persistence of non-overlapping ignorancia. Ahab, Pierre, Amasa Delano, the narrator of “Bartleby,” and most passengers aboard the Fidèle—all show how overdetermined interpretation precludes wiser and more corrigible attitudes. The stakes are lower in “The Apple-Tree Table” (a point to which we will return), but the peremptory professor and excitable daughters are no more open to their own fallibility than the structural integrity of the Brattle Street Church is at risk from a few stray cannonballs. As is often the case in Melville’s work from the 1850s, people believe what they want to believe regardless of evidence and looming disaster. And yet we should not judge the characters of “The Apple-Tree Table” too harshly when their convictions outrun good reason, for the narrator invites anyone who “doubts this story” to come and see with their own eyes the two wax-sealed holes in his parlor table and the second bug “embalmed in a silver vinaigrette.”28 Would such evidence—resembling the preserved specimens of a naturalist, and perhaps pointing to the Higher Criticism’s efforts to secure harder proofs of Christianity—actually verify the facts of the narrative, let alone the potential meanings of the bugs and our tale? Or might Melville—as he does in The Confidence-

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Man, which he wrote concurrently with “The Apple-Tree Table”—be suggesting that we can never fully verify the inferences we prefer to regard as truths? To ask such questions is to move from the history of science to the philosophy of science (and its history). *** In his short essay “Science and Philosophy” (2010), Hilary Putnam sums a larger effort to steer between two extremes—postmodern claims that science has no more purchase on truth than any other kind of narrative, and the logical positivist desire to settle philosophical questions by adopting the methods of the sciences. The postmodern extreme does not long concern Putnam in the essay (he finds the argumentation of Derrida and Rorty in such matters too loose). Instead, he focuses on the failed attempts of Carnap and others logical positivists to disallow philosophical statements that cannot be verified in scientific modes. When insisting on the need for philosophy to remain independent of science, Putnam uses the example of “nonobservational” entities such as atoms to argue that “physics and metaphysics flourish most when they interact and interpenetrate.”29 Here Putnam draws on Wilfred Sellars’s distinction between our “manifest image” of reality (commonsensical, methodologically impure, instrumentally useful models of the world) and our “scientific image” (“the postulation of imperceptible entities, and principles pertaining to them, to explain the behavior of perceptible things”).30 This later image is postulational insofar as it relies on correlations and inferences, not direct observations. Putnam thus follows Sellars in deploying unobservables to mark the limits of positive science; and he concludes: “[W]e are unavoidably dealing with the entanglement of facts, theories, and values. It is like a three-legged stool—all three legs are needed, or it falls over.” This metaphor only coincidentally echoes Melville’s three-legged apple-tree table, but the possibilities of unobservables and the methodological entanglements they entail form a longstanding—which is to say, historical—challenge in the philosophy of science. In the nineteenth century, unobservables raised fundamental questions about Baconian empiricism, for even as experimental scientists increasingly established the existence of invisible particles and forces, they necessarily did so not by appealing to direct sensory experience, but by making inferences to the best explanation. Historians of science have shown how the atomistic speculations of Democritus and other ancients were revived by seventeenth-century mechanists such as Newton, Pierre Gassendi, and Robert Boyle, all of whom used experiments in other aspects of their work but could only speculate about unobservables.31 This began to change in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when Antoine Lavoisier demonstrated how chemical compounds can be reduced to fundamental elements, which laid the groundwork for John Dalton’s experiments with the weights of gasses and liquids that helped him infer the actuality of atoms and their combinatory proportions in molecules. In the field of physics, Michael Faraday and James Maxwell developed their theories about the force and motion of atoms beginning in the 1840s; and by the

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turn of the nineteenth century, Jean Baptiste Perrin and J. J. Thompson used cathode rays to prove the existence of atomic and subatomic particles, though again (to use Sellars’s terms) as scientific, not manifest, images. The popular press reported on all these advances with varying degrees of accuracy, and so “The Apple-Tree Table” appeared during a time when scientists and lay readers increasingly attended to the legitimacy of using empirical experiments to draw inferences about unobservables. For instance, Lavoisier recognized but remained agnostic about potential analogies between his chemical discoveries and atomistic theory, while an 1852 article titled “The Known and Unknown” praised telescopes and microscopes for revealing new truths but noted that atoms and molecules, because they escape the human eye, evoke “an overpowering sense of man’s ignorance.”32 Discussions about the methodological implications of unobservables also appeared beyond traditional scientific domains in discourses such as spiritualism. “The Apple-Tree Table” explicitly indicates this context when referring to the “Fox Girls,” an allusion that can be taken to align the celebrated table rapping of the Fox Sisters with the supernaturalism of Mather and the witch trials.33 Yet mesmerism, animal magnetism, clairvoyance, and spirit rapping should be understood as extensions of, not reactions against, the rising authority of empirical science, especially in the rapidly developing areas of atomism, caloric energy, electricity, and magnetism.34 Theorists of spiritualism compared their new “science” to the work of chemical and physical atomists, particularly when asserting analogies between the unobservable affinities connecting unobservable particles and the invisible forces supposedly linking spiritual essences (and causing seemingly inexplicable phenomena such as knockings from a table).35 When justifying his atomistic metaphysic in Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations (1847), the American spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis set his system within a progressive history of science: Theories founded on facts visible, men have labored to reduce to science. Believing that the fact which existed was attributable to some cause invisible, search has been made, and the real cause evidently demonstrated. From this men have reasoned to the effect, which was visible and manifest. This reasoning is the true ­reasoning—proving visible effects by imperceptible and invisible causes. Sciences have been founded upon this ground, which can not be overthrown.36

Skeptics insisted to the contrary that séances were not controlled experiments and that spiritualism relied on “insufficient evidence, or evidence sufficient only for the sheerest credulity.”37 And yet spiritualist claims proved hard to debunk, for at a time when natural scientists increasingly inferred scientific images of unobservables, spiritualists made analogous speculations about the wonders of the invisible world. The validity of such reasoning was not to be settled by some normative appeal to logic, particularly as nineteenth-century philosophers of science questioned the adequacy of Baconian empiricism as a method for describing the real work of scientists and determining the validity of natural laws.38 Laura Snyder has discussed how Whewell and John Stuart Mill disagreed over the legitimacy of inferring unobservables,

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a conflict stemming from basic differences in their systems of logic and philosophies of mind.39 In keeping with his belief that inductive processes require intuitive knowledge of what he called “Fundamental Ideas,” Whewell held that unobservables can be known through trains of inferences that include analogical reasoning.40 Whewell’s Fundamental Ideas differ from Kantian categories in that they are not preconditions of experience, but they do form a basis for intuitively synthesizing new knowledge from observable facts.41 By contrast, Mill denied all forms of intuitionism, arguing that because all knowledge is drawn from experience and “direct evidence,” any inferential argument about unobservables is by definition flawed.42 The distinction here is between philosophical realism and positivism, between a method that allows for knowledge of unobservables and one that disallows leaps of inferential logic. Realism would triumph in the twentieth century within scientific domains, but for mid-nineteenth-century logicians and philosophers of science the question was far from closed. Melville seems at least casually aware of the epistemological limits of inference. Moby-Dick uses the word to describe conjectures about the “unknown zones” of the sea; and when Amasa Delano entertains the theory that Benito Cereno is in league with his slaves, the narrative calls it an “incredible inference” but also a “legitimate one.” When “The Bell-Tower” (1855) recounts various rumors about the unobserved death of Bannadonna, Melville writes that “less unscientific minds” offered reasoned speculations, though in “the chain of circumstantial inferences drawn, there may, or may not, have been some absent or defective links.” And the pamphlet that appears in The Confidence-Man—“Ode on the Intimations of Distrust in Man, Unwillingly Inferred from Repeated Repulses, in Disinterested Endeavors to Procure His Confidence”—points to the novel’s larger obsession with the risks of making inferential leaps under conditions of insufficient evidence, moral impulse, and social predation.43 “The Apple-Tree Table” does not use the word “inference,” but the authority of inferential reasoning remains suspect. Mill’s main objection to intuitionbased inference is that it opens the way to subjective biases that are resistant to counterevidence, a problem exhibited by Anna and Julia—not only in their comic hysteria (“Spirits! Spirits!”; “Oh, oh, oh!”; “Spirits can get anywhere”), but also in their specious interpretations that initially regard the first bug with horror but then suddenly take the second as a delightful analogy of the “glorified resurrection for the spirit of man.”44 Whewell recognized the potential abuses of intuition, attempting to restrain inference and interpretation under mathematical and metaphysical controls. For him, “Necessary truths” such as “7 and 8 are 15” serve as “corrective[s] of our subjective imperfection,” and science extends such protections when new truths are discovered (here Whewell uses the example of atoms). Whewell also argues that “the mark of a necessary truth [is] that we cannot conceive the contrary,” but “The Apple-Tree Table” complicates such claims, not simply with Professor Johnson’s bad math, but also by displaying the extravagant potential of imaginative conception.45 In the antebellum era, positivists denied spiritualist inferences, Mill demanded direct evidence of truth, and even Whewell (Kantian leanings notwithstanding) restricted the purview of intuition. Melville, however, more readily acknowledges that facts and

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theories are entangled with intuition-based inferences, particularly when “The AppleTree Table” insists on the epistemological work of aesthetics. *** In “The Apple-Tree Table,” the unobservable is seemingly observed in so marvelous and beautiful a form that the significance of the discovery extends well beyond the verification of fact and the vindication of theory. We witness the wonders of an invisible world made visible—not just once when the narrator sees the first bug, but again when he and his family watch the second insect emerge. The process unfolds under a kind of scientific method: the narrator observes, hypothesizes, records events in a journal, and captures the bugs under glass tumblers, while the family’s vigil suggests how the formation of scientific knowledge entails replication and public demonstration.46 When the narrator compels his daughters to witness the second bug so that “the evidence of their senses [will] disabuse their minds of all nursery nonsense,” we see how he and, more aggressively, his wife take up the work of positivist disenchantment before Professor Johnson even arrives.47 Given the narrator’s own flightiness and the silliness of his daughters, such measures might be in order, though the bug turns out to be so wonderful as to reveal how inference, imagination, and aesthetics cannot be replaced by empirical science. My favorite sentence in “The Apple-Tree Table” comes just after the emergence of the second bug: Had this bug had a tiny sword by its side—a Damascus sword—and a tiny necklace round its neck—a diamond necklace—and a tiny gun in its claw—a brass gun—and a tiny manuscript in his mouth—a Chaldee manuscript—Julia and Anna could not have stood more charmed.48

It’s always possible that Melville is playing some intricate intertextual game. For instance, Naaman, a nemesis of King Ahab, extols the healing powers of “the rivers of Damascus” (a line Melville quotes in Clarel), and Blackwood’s oft-reprinted “Translation of an Ancient Chaldee Manuscript” (1817) reflects the popular appeal of mystical texts and the competitive shenanigans of print culture. Melville’s passage might also cycle back to the question of unobservables, for a conundrum that atomistic thinkers faced was how homogeneous particles could make up a complex world of such diverse things as brass guns and diamond necklaces. Some theorists posited a variety of atomistic shapes (including some with claw-like hooks), while Democritus began a long tradition of distinguishing between primary and secondary qualities (thus particles can be identical in their essential shape and size and still exhibit a diversity of secondary attributes realized in the senses of the perceiver). Sellars would later leverage such distinctions with his example of a pink ice cube whose pinkness exists in the manifest image of the senses but not at the postulational level of atoms.49 By offering so curious an array of manifest images, and by so insistently adding on

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adjectives, Melville’s passage can dramatize Sellars’s conclusion: the homogeneous particles of atomistic theory feel incommensurate with the varied richness of life, and so we should seek not some kind of uniform materialism but instead a more pluralistic philosophy capable of accounting for our diversity of experiences. Every atom belonging to me may as good belongs to you, but what requires our fullest descriptive powers are multitudinous people and things.50 And fiction may be especially well suited for narrating the Many instead of the One. Whether or not Melville has atomism in mind when describing the second bug of “The Apple-Tree Table,” the pleasure (which is also to say, the meaning) of his curiously overwrought passage lies for me less in its specific imagery than in the absurdity of its fancifying. At odd moments in the mid-1850s—say, the scarecrow scene from Israel Potter (1855) or the metacritical flights of The Confidence-Man or the manic allegorizing of “The Bell-Tower”—Melville revels in, and thereby exposes as such, a literary extravagance unbounded by verisimilitude and free to conceive of almost anything. Because our “Apple-Tree Table” passage is patently ridiculous, it might be taken to criticize Anna and Julia, whose naivety (both gendered and generational) makes them susceptible not only to spiritualist humbug but also to the clichés of sensational literature (jewels, swords, guns, and lost manuscripts). Yet the narrator himself falls under enchantment when he privately encounters the first bug, for even while attempting “to look at the strange object in a purely scientific way,” he also—like Anna and Julia—is “becharmed.”51 Indeed it is he, not his daughters, who actually imagines the weaponized and accessorized bug; and his fancy continues to run away with itself in a hyper-linguistic register: “[I]t was a beautiful bug—a Jew jeweler’s bug—a bug like a sparkle of a glorious sunset … . [T]his was a seraphical bug; or, rather, all it had of the bug was the B, for it was beautiful as a butterfly.”52 I believe the apposite critical term is “Yikes!” Perhaps such sentences seek to valorize literary aesthetics, for just as the spirited allegorizing of Julia and Anna survive Professor Johnson’s positivism, the narrator’s word play (like his superstition and drinking) remains unextinguished by science, reason, and wife. One might even suspect that “The Apple-Tree Table” is exceptionally insistent in its will to embellish, despite the fact that the story’s frequency of adjectives is among the lowest of Melville’s short fiction.53 Whatever the case, the narrator’s account of the bug helps mark the limits of empiricism by pointing out challenges also acknowledged in nineteenthcentury philosophies of science: the subject cannot suspend its subjective activity; inferences are required in the study of unobservables; intuition is necessary for Baconian induction; there are really few bounds to imaginative conception; and scientific writing remains susceptible to becharmed expression—even as heroic romantic discoverers gave way to Victorian professionals, even though Whewell in his Philosophy of Science hoped to “preserve the purity and analogies of scientific language from wanton and needless violation.”54 The problem with taking Melville’s jubilant description of the bug as a triumph of literary aesthetics over positive science is that the prose is so poor as to impel an admirer of Melville to seek some saving intention—to, as Alex Calder puts it, “demonstrate[e] that what only looks like bad writing is really much cleverer than it

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seems.”55 Which is justified, I think, by the litotic irony of the passage: “Had” the bug a brass gun, Damascus sword, the daughters “could not have stood more charmed.” That is, the bug is maximally charming without any sensational trappings, as if bare nature is every bit as marvelous as anything one might fancy in superfluous prose. In this way, the narrator’s description of the second bug shows how baseless inference, wanton analogy, and needless adjectival excess compromise scientific objectivity and scientific wonder alike. Even so, we should note that neither Professor Johnson, nor Julia and Anna, nor the narrator in his sober or enchanted moods actually provides what might be considered an accurate description of the bug. How many legs does it have? What of the thorax? Can it be classified and related to other species? If figurative and more realistic nature writing impose what Lawrence Buell has called a “dual accountability” on each other, and if (as Jennifer Baker has argued) Moby-Dick recognizes that aesthetic enchantment is based in empirical fact, then Melville’s story of a late-hatching bug indicates a kind of joint failure.56 The non-overlapping ignorancia of Professor Johnson and the daughters can govern the entirety of “The Apple-Tree Table,” which has at its center a persistently unobservable bug that escapes both literary and scientific description. Here the skepticism of “The Apple-Tree Table” seems to depart from Sellars and Putnam in that Melville does not insist on entangled epistemologies so much as he dismantles all methods. Just after comparing the project of philosophy to a threelegged stool, Putnam in “Science and Philosophy” surprisingly names Tolstoy and George Eliot as writers who show that the complexities of human language and experience cannot be rendered in purely scientific terms. It is unusual for Putnam to engage or figure in discussions of nineteenth-century literature, but in “Science and Philosophy” he follows Stanley Cavell in turning to literature as a defense against logical positivism, and he quotes Sellars on the primary goal of philosophy: “[T]o understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” This usage of hanging together can be traced to Wittgenstein and back to William James, a genealogy Putnam owns when reasserting his influential claim that “knowledge of facts presupposes knowledge of values.” He writes, “I heard this in my undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania from my teacher C. West Churchman, who attributed it to his teacher E.A. Singer, Jr., who was in turn a student of William James.”57 In his efforts to maintain a pluralistic philosophy in an age of rising scientism, James charged that the sciences of his day had become so narrowly positivistic as to detach themselves from human values, and so he combined spiritualism, science, and literature when attempting to enrich, not simply curtail, the explanatory possibilities of empiricism. Melville is not among the literary authors James discusses in Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), but “The Apple-Tree Table” still might be placed within a pluralistic tradition of James, Sellars, and Putnam. It is not simply that by challenging progressive histories of science Melville denies that science possesses the master key to all knowledge. Nor is it only that he stereoscopically views the world from physical and metaphysical points of view. The obverse side of Melville’s skepticism in “The AppleTree Table” is that the tale’s shifting, overlapping, and inadequate modes of inquiry

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preclude the possibility of settling anything—a lack of closure that can be regarded as a good. The narrator can sporadically attempt to proceed as a Baconian scientist, but he remains buffeted by other forces—not only intuition, inference, superstition, imagination, and other aspects of the problem of unobservables, but also fear of his wife, annoyance at his daughters, resentment over his disrupted routines, and the temptations of witches, rum punch, purple prose, and charming moments of beauty. The domestic setting of the “The Apple-Tree Table” in this sense figures in very human terms the entanglement of facts, theories, and values, for if the narrator is to hang together with his family, their different epistemologies must somehow hang together, too. One way of getting along with others that one wishes to keep close is to resist insisting on one and only right way. Superficially, the narrator’s wife seems to be a rational “female Democritus” and his daughters spiritualist affiliates of Mather, but “The Apple-Tree Table” denies their irreconcilable differences, for—as we have seen— the historical figures of Democritus and Mather are not so different after all.58 Whereas the narrator for most of the story swings violently, anxiously, and unhappily between supernaturalism and science, when anticipating the appearance of a second beautiful bug, he oscillates—“gently” oscillates—between Democritus and Mather in a new way—a “strange and not unpleasing” way. These adjectives hint at a pluralistic and aesthetic comportment within a nonprogressive history of the philosophy of science. The narrator’s moment is not sublime—no stunning paradoxes, wonder at the infinite, or radical alterations of subjectivity and self. As if re-reading a charming story that activates without scrambling one’s critical sensibilities, the narrator’s anticipation of the second bug promises a tolerable sort of entertainment, a gentle and not unpleasing sway without synthesis or end. To describe such entertainment as a more heightened experience is to risk the dishonesty inherent in some bad prose. To make instead a truly radical break—epistemologically and aesthetically—may have, as Emerson knows in “Experience” (1844), painful analogies in one’s domestic life. Such at least is my experience re-reading “The Apple-Tree Table,” a story that can be taken to dramatize and even justify its status as a minor production and that might even caution a literary critic against inferring genius too much. Like a pluralistic philosophy that offers no elegant method, grand synthesis, or passionate conviction, “The Apple-Tree Table” settles for less while still remaining productively unsettled insofar as Melville found a not-unpleasing way to keep his literature and philosophy going on.

Notes 1 2 3

Herman Melville, “The Apple-Tree Table,” in Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence-Man, Uncollected Prose, Bill Budd, Sailor (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1346. William B. Dillingham, Melville’s Short Fiction: 1853–1856 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), 355. Marvin Fisher, Going Under: Melville’s Short Fiction and the American 1850s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 127. See also Jonathan Cook, “The

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6

7 8 9

10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Melville’s Philosophies Typological Design of Melville’s ‘The Apple-Tree Table,’” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 40.2 (1998): 121–41. Melville, “The Apple-Tree Table,” 1339. For Democritus in “The Apple-Tree Table,” see Thomas Pribek, “‘Between Democritus and Cotton Mather’: Narrative Irony in ‘The Apple-Tree Table,’” in Studies in the American Renaissance, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 241–55. See also Christopher Freeberg, Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 58. For relevant histories of atomism, see Alan Chalmers, The Scientist’s Atom and the Philosopher’s Stone: How Science Succeeded and Philosophy Failed to Gain Knowledge of Atoms (New York: Springer, 2009); and Robert D. Purrington, Physics in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 113–31. Melville, “The Apple-Tree Table,” 1329–30. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 100. Herman Melville, “Moby-Dick,” in Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick (New York: Library of America, 1983), 1236. Melville had access to atomistic theory (ancient and modern) through a number of potential sources, including Diogenes Laertius’s The Lives of Philosophers, Pierre Bayle’s Dictionary, and accounts of atomism in the popular press. See also Paul Douglass Waddell, “‘Ye Cannot Swerve Me’: Ancient Atomic Theory and Moby-Dick,” Explicator 67.1 (2008): 61–63; and Tyrus Hillway, “Melville’s Education in Science,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 16.3 (Fall 1974): 411–25. Melville, “The Apple-Tree Table,” 1343. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Quotation and Originality” (1859, 1868), in Collected Prose and Poetry, ed. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 320; John Picket, “The Past and the Present,” Western Academician and Journal of Education and Science (November 1837). See also Reed Gochberg, “Novel Inventions: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and the U.S. Patent Office Gallery,” forthcoming in J19. William Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences, Vol. 1 (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1858), 41. More specifically, Whewell admits that Democritus’s atomism “points to the corpuscular theories of modern times,” but he concludes that such insights are “quenched and overlaid by the predominance of trifling and barren speculations” (79). Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984), 404. “Baron Humboldt’s Cosmos,” Christian Examiner and Religious Miscellany (January 1850). “The Atomic Theory,” The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature (May 1853); rpt. from Westminster Review. Melville, “The Apple-Tree Table,” 1332. For Hawthorne, see Michael J. Colacurcio, Province of Piety: Moral History in Hawthorne’s Early Tales (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), esp. 283–313. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, Books I and II, ed. Kenneth Ballard Murdock and Elizabeth W. Miller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 334. Quoted in introduction to Mather, Magnalia, 21 (“finest”); Cotton Mather, The Christian Philosopher (Charlestown, MA: J. McKown, 1815), 52.

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20 Sarah Rivett, The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 43. 21 Melville, “The Apple-Tree Table,” 1328. 22 Amanda Power, “A Mirror for Every Age: The Reputation of Roger Bacon,” English Historical Review 71 (June 2006), 657–92, 657. 23 Whewell, History of the Inductive Sciences, 513; “Friar Bacon and Lord Bacon,” The Methodist Quarterly Review (January and April 1858). 24 Melville, “The Apple-Tree Table,” 1348. 25 Melville’s likely sources for the story include David Dudley Field’s A History of the County of Berkshire, Massachusetts (1829) and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854). 26 Melville, “The Apple-Tree Table,” 1349. 27 Ibid., 1348–49. 28 Ibid., 1349. 29 Hilary Putnam, “Science and Philosophy” (2010), in Philosophy in an Age of Science: Physics, Mathematics, and Skepticism, ed. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 39–50, 47. 30 Wilfred Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” (1960), in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 1–40. 31 Chalmers, The Scientist’s Atom and the Philosopher’s Stone; Purrington, Physics in the Nineteenth Century, 113–31. 32 “The Known and Unknown,” Scientific American (April 1852); rpt. in Monthly Literary Miscellany (July 1852). 33 Melville, “The Apple-Tree Table,” 1332. 34 Christine Ferguson, “Recent Scholarship on Spiritualism and Science,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult, ed. Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 19–24; and Justine Murison, The Politics of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 136–70. For spiritualism and “The AppleTree Table,” see Gregg Camfield, Necessary Madness: The Humor of Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 85–90; and Ellen Weinauer, “Hawthorne, Melville, and the Spirits,” in Hawthorne and Melville: Writing a Relationship (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 297–320. 35 See, for instance, “Researches of Baron Reichenbach on the ‘Mesmeric,’ Now Called the Odic Force,” American Whig Review (June 1852). 36 Andrew Jackson Davis, Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations (8th ed.; New York: S.S. Lyon and W.M. Fishbough, 1851), 22. Davis also writes: Abstract experiments and observations upon the laws and principles that govern the sublime works of Nature, have gradually prepared the way for the unfolding of knowledge concerning the mode in which each particle [atom] assumes its specific and destined position. And here again the sciences of Chemistry, Anatomy, and Physiology take a position as the most useful and important among all others, especially as these have determined upon many substances between every component atom of which there exists a demonstrable chemical affinity. (236–37) 37 J.L., “Spiritual Mechanics,” Christian Examiner (July 1853); “Chemico-Spiritualism,” National Magazine (March 1856).

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38 For the decline of “naïve Baconianism,” see Jonathan Smith, Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 11–44. 39 Laura J. Snyder, Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 40 William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences Founded Upon Their History, Vol. I (London: John W. Parker, 1840), xiii. 41 See Snyder, Reforming Philosophy, 40–51. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Whewell is also helpful (especially section 2, “Philosophy of Science: Induction”). 42 John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence and the Methods of Scientific Investigation, Vol. II (London: John Parker, 1843), 115. Note, too, that Mill uses the example of Dalton’s chemical composition to show that, despite his claims about “the laws of corpuscular action,” the existence and causes of atomism remain “imperceptible” and hence unknown (49–50). As Snyder notes (124), Mill would later change his mind about molecules but only in the 1872 edition of his Logic after Maxwell’s publication of The Theory of Heat (1871). 43 Melville, Moby-Dick, 1090; Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno,” “The Bell-Tower,” and The Confidence-Man in Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The ConfidenceMan, Uncollected Prose, Bill Budd, Sailor (New York: Library of America, 1984), 699, 829, 895. 44 Melville, “The Apple-Tree Table,” 1346, 1349. 45 William Whewell, “Of the Fundamental Antithesis of Philosophy” (1848), in Theory of Scientific Method, ed. Robert E. Butts (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1968), 54, 64, 71. 46 See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s classic Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 47 Melville, “The Apple-Tree Table,” 1345. 48 Ibid., 1347. 49 Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” 26–27. 50 For Whitman and atomism, see Mark Noble, “Whitman’s Atom and the Crisis of Materiality in the Early Leaves of Grass,” American Literature 81.2 (2009): 253–79. 51 Melville, “The Apple-Tree Table,” 1340–41. 52 Ibid., 1347. 53 A basic analysis of Melville’s short stories using Stanford’s Part-of-Speech Tagger shows that “The Apple-Tree Table” has the second-lowest frequency of adjectives (ahead of only “The Lightning-Rod Man,” another tale about the relation of science and supernaturalism). Frequencies of adjectives in the tales range from 7.4 to 11.4 percent; “The Apple-Tree Table” comes in at 7.8 percent. Such, at least, was my computation. 54 Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, xv. For a brief overview of more lyrically descriptive science becoming increasingly objectivist across the nineteenth century, see Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge II: From the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 69–73. 55 Alex Calder, “Blubber: Melville’s Bad Writing,” in Melville and Aesthetics, ed. Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 11–32.

Science, Philosophy, and Aesthetics in “The Apple-Tree Table” 56 Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 92; Jennifer J. Baker, “Dead Bones and Honest Wonders: The Aesthetics of Natural Science in Moby-Dick,” in Melville and Aesthetics, 85–102. 57 Putnam, “Science and Philosophy,” 49. For Wittgenstein’s “Zusammenhangen” and James’s hanging together, see Russell B. Goodman, Wittgenstein and William James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 141–43. 58 Melville, “The Apple-Tree Table,” 1346.

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Clarel, Doubt, Delay Paul Hurh

During his tour of the Holy Land in 1857, Herman Melville reported in his journal of being “again afflicted with the great curse of modern travel—skepticism.”1 The poem inspired by that journey, Clarel (1876), takes those skeptical afflictions as its overarching dramatic conflict, depicting through the peregrinations of its characters a search for faith. Yet in Clarel the word “skepticism” never appears; the problem of belief is instead signified by the round monosyllable, “doubt.” This subtle turn in Melville’s locution marks a shift in the philosophical stakes of his career-long interest in varieties of disbelief. In his fiction, Melville explores the drama of epistemological skepticism and its concern for impenetrable divisions between self and other, subject and object, human and nature. In Clarel, however, Melville’s treatment of doubt turns from such Kant-inflected epistemological dilemmas—where skepticism emerges from the limits of our knowledge—to the onto-theological dilemma of doubt—where doubt emerges from the physical nature of the world and our increasing knowledge of it. Making doubt into physics, Clarel does not return us, as epistemological skepticism does, to the limitations of our individual selfhood, but rather ventures toward a profound outside and finds in the world as it is the constitution of an impersonal disbelief. Clarel, the nearly 18,000-line poem about a young American pilgrim journeying through the Holy Land, was hardly read in Melville’s day and remains, due to its length and its syntax-twisting tetrameter, daunting to today’s readers. Although the poem raises issues that range from modern science to revolutionary politics to scriptural exegesis and religious debate, they all orbit a central question: the meaning and plausibility of Christian faith. Thus, critics have often read the poem as a depiction of Melville’s own search for faith, yet they disagree about its conclusions. Some read the poem as transcending the tension of the religious dilemma, and drawing, in its epilogue, a renewed faith from that tension.2 The alternative is to read the poem as fundamentally antithetical, as ultimately depicting the failure of Clarel’s search for faith while considering the epilogue, in which the poem encourages Clarel to “keep heart” despite the failures, as not really a new faith but either an ironic capitulation to more of the same or a necessary preparation for a climax in the undetermined future.3

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Because the poem depicts a search that may or may not be fulfilled, the critical desire to resolve this question is understandable. However, such questions unintentionally make Clarel even more ponderous, since the ambiguous final lines of the epilogue are forced to answer for the bulk of the poem that goes before.4 What is wanting, I hazard, is a way of reading the poem that accounts for the wait, the doubt, the matter of the poem as itself constitutive of the question of faith rather than being merely an external gauntlet to be run in pursuit of it. What if the temporal delay of the poem, rather than being significant in its teaching of the self its limitations, a kind of torturous and merely preparatory humiliation, were more positively read as the substance of the question itself? Such would not turn Clarel into a more optimistic poem by any means, but might better account for the poem’s dilemma by showing how the poem neither sutures the division between searcher and his object nor makes the severing of the two eternally disabling. Such a reading is possible because doubt in the poem is not only a personal or psychological issue, but also a worldly one. To read the doubt of Clarel as inhering not in psychology but in physics makes Clarel indispensable to the continuing reassessment of the nonhuman and impersonal currents in Melville’s work. Revising Walter Bezanson’s initial and influential reading of the poem as introverted and deeply personal, Michael Jonik, following Sharon Cameron and Branka Arsić’s explorations of impersonality in Melville, has recently argued that Clarel is an “impersonal poem.”5 Jonik foregrounds Clarel’s spatial and geographical features, noting that “[a]s the relationship of character and space is emancipated from the fixed identity-coordinates of subjects in relationship to substances or things, characterological identity disperses into relations of movements and affects.”6 The destabilization of individual identities into a more immanent dispersal within the environment is tacitly not transcendent in a romantic sense. “[N]ot fused into a cosmic unity,” these entities “are erased or dispersed and thus freed to move past the coordinates of the human and personal to transact with the varied non-human spaces of Melville’s Holy Land.”7 The spatialized sense of Jonik’s reading of impersonality maps Clarel’s itinerancy as charting such a dispersal, in which person and nature are not united in the transcendental ideal but rather in which the romantic subject is degraded and dispersed into the raw materiality of the nonhuman world. What makes Clarel unique as an experiment in impersonality, however, are two elements whose relation it is this essay’s purpose to examine: the poem’s sustained engagement with doubt and the poem’s preoccupation with time. For the question of time hangs over the entire poem, as the journey to the Holy Land brings into relief both the lapse of centuries between ancient and modern as well as the problem that deep time poses to scriptural chronology. Moreover, Clarel’s journey is riddled with bad timing. Characters and events miss one another in time, and, in a wider sense, time itself unbinds into multiple and uncoordinated temporalities. Time, in theories of the nonhuman and impersonal, has often been understood through Alfred Whitehead’s processual temporality that replaces static being with continual “becoming.” Yet, as Cody Marrs has shown, Clarel is a poem in which time regresses and repeats: “Instead of prizing the sublime advance of technology and science, or embracing a vision of

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freedom’s expansion through time and space, Melville creates a poetics of regression.”8 By bringing Marrs’s observation to bear on the question of nonhuman temporality, this essay seeks to show how Clarel rejects linear progressive temporality. Yet rather than a poem in which such rejection yields becoming, Clarel endorses a strangely regressive delay, discontinuous yet nuanced in its preservation of the periodicity of contingency. My hypothesis is that the unique delayed aspect of Clarel ’s sense of time is both determined by and determinative of the specialized sense of doubt as a state of disbelief that emerges not from the self ’s own limitations in the world (as it does in epistemological skepticism) but rather from the limits, the physical and temporal contours, of the world itself. The consequence is that this doubt, functioning primarily in and through time, unfolds the problem of disbelief outward from a withdrawn personal dilemma to the problems of change and contingency in the physics of the universe.

Time Melville’s interest in time, its measurement and its metaphysics, develops over his career and is shaped by his maritime experience, where the tremendous distances of oceanic travel brought him firsthand knowledge of the changing and fraught stakes of standardized time in the nineteenth century. As media technology such as the electric telegraph and the railroad shortened the time it took for information to travel over distance, the problem of non-standard localized times became more pressing.9 The corresponding development of a standard time, kept by means of electric telegraph, helped to solve the problems, but also, as Edward Sugden has pointed out in his recent analysis of Melville’s use of time, laid out a homogenizing infrastructure for global commerce and the agendas of imperialism. Sugden finds that Melville, in his early career fiction, joins alternative temporalities “into a vision of temporal flux … which overcomes linear time.”10 Such alternative temporalities, for Sugden, are “planetary”11 because they draw from Melville’s experience of the multiple and overlapping temporalities in his oceanic travels, the fluidity of which opens heterogeneous routes of access to the historical past or future.12 According to this account, Melville’s interest in time is positive and liberal, a project of generating alternatives to his age’s turn toward more and more homogeneous modes of temporal measurement.13 Yet in the works that immediately follow Moby-Dick, Melville’s engagement with multiple times becomes both more strained and more philosophical. In the philosophical pamphlet on morality and temporality in Pierre, Melville continues to draw upon an oceanic experience of time, yet he uses it to emphasize the discrepancy between standardized and local times, refusing to invalidate either by the other. In that pamphlet, entitled “Chronometricals and Horologicals,” Melville analogizes the difference between heavenly Christian morality and earthly human practice as the difference between Greenwich standard time kept on chronometers (mechanical timepieces) and Chinese local time kept on horologues (astronomical

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timepieces like sundials). Christ, accordingly, is like a chronometer keeping Greenwich meridian time in China, a moral timekeeper that shows the miscalibration of our local ethics. This doesn’t mean that our earthly time is wrong, but rather “that though man’s Chinese notions of things may answer well enough here, they are by no means universally applicable, and that the central Greenwich in which He dwells goes by a somewhat different method from this world.”14 And though this would suggest two discrete orders of morality, out of alignment, and perpetually on other sides of the globe, the author of the pamphlet concludes: “And yet it follows not from this, that God’s truth is one thing and man’s truth another; but—as above hinted, and as will be further elucidated in subsequent lectures—by their very contradictions they are made to correspond.”15 This resolution, that irreconcilable temporal difference is constitutive of correspondence, is later extended: “For he will then see, or seem to see, that this world’s seeming incompatibility with God, absolutely results from its meridianal correspondence with him.”16 Melville distinguishes between celestial and terrestrial times, but rather than vindicate one, he imagines their “meridianal correspondence” as being constituted by their absolute difference.17 Melville never provides the “subsequent lectures” that would substantiate such a meridianal correspondence, and it is arguable from Pierre’s later disillusionment that the pamphlet is meant as a satire of transcendentalism. Yet whether or not the claim for meridianal correspondence is made in earnest or in irony, “Chronometricals and Horologicals” shows that the problem of homogeneous, standard time had become, for Melville, an issue of calibration rather than liberation.18 If we take his “celestial time” to be absolute, standardized like Greenwich meridian time, then the issue is not really that this absolute time belies more local and relative “terrestrial time.” Rather, the problem of temporality is the correspondence, or lack of correspondence, between mutually exclusive temporal orders. Plinlimmon, the fictional author of “Chronometricals and Horologicals,” optimistically (and perhaps ironically) pronounces that the difference between them is their relation. In Clarel, Melville returns to the disjunction between absolute and relative temporality he had opened in Pierre, but rather than prematurely suture that gap, he dilates upon the intervals between them, the delays, lags, hiatuses, that will inform a radical ontology of doubt. The question of correspondence between celestial and terrestrial temporalities is crucial to Clarel’s staging of doubt. Modifying the hemispheric conception of time that he explored in Pierre, Melville considers the difference, not between the times on two sides of the globe, but between the time of the globe itself, in its geological and astronomical history, and the time of scripture. In this, Melville rehearses one of the more powerful challenges to scriptural history: the geological and astronomical alternative calendars that stretch far longer than the 6,000 years accounted for in the Bible. The first step in seeing how doubt and time are related in Clarel is to acknowledge how the new astronomical theories of sidereal time, time as reckoned by the stars, were themselves a cause for doubt. The complicated problem that sidereal time presents to scripture is most explicitly presented in a poem the pilgrims find scrawled on a rock during their descent to the Dead Sea. Speculatively attributed to Mortmain, the despair-addled doubter, the verse

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laments the disappearance of the Southern Cross constellation from the northern hemisphere’s night sky. Marking one of the lowest points in the spiritual trajectory of the pilgrimage, a period in the poem that Bezanson describes as the move “from light into a darkness where companionship gives way to separateness, hope to despair, life to death,”19 the embedded poem treats the disappearance of the Southern Cross as an emblem of departing faith: Emblazoned bleak in austral skies— A heaven remote, whose starry swarm Like Science lights but cannot warm— Translated Cross, hast thou withdrawn, Dim paling too at every dawn, With symbols vain once counted wise, And gods declined to heraldries? Estranged, estranged: can friend prove so? Aloft, aloof, a frigid sign: How far removed, thou Tree divine, Whose tender fruit did reach so low— Love apples of New-Paradise! About the wide Australian sea The planted nations yet to be— When, ages hence, they lift their eyes, Tell, what shall they retain of thee? But class thee with Orion’s sword? In constellations unadorned, Christ and the Giant equal prize? The atheist cycles—must they be? Fomentors as forefathers we?20

Though the disappearance of the cross as a sign of the loss of faith is easily seen, perhaps less conspicuous is the reference to sidereal time. Visible from the northern latitudes until the time of Ptolemy, the constellation of the Southern Cross can no longer be seen from such latitudes due to the precession of the equinoxes (the tilting motion of the earth’s axis).21 The earth’s precession meant that the Southern Cross, if hypothetically observed from a point in northern latitudes over the previous two millennia, would have appeared to have slowly shifted southward, disappearing beneath the southern horizon. Noting that the Southern Cross “will at some future time be visible in our northern latitudes, and that in 12,000 years, the north pole’s star will be Vega in Lyra,” Humboldt notes that the precession of the equinoxes can “give us some idea of the extent of the motions which, divided into infinitely small portions of time, proceed without intermission in the great chronometer of the universe.”22 Humboldt’s “great chronometer” here is a timepiece that outscales the decades or even centuries of human timescales. Linking this wider timescale to the loss of Christian faith, the embedded poem suggests that the problem with faith

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is not that the nearly two thousand years since Christ is too long, but rather that it is so cosmically brief. The Southern Cross, from this perspective, becomes a “translated cross” that symbolizes religious relativism in time. In the northern hemisphere of scriptural history, the cross is invested with Christian meaning and its nearness to the horizon could be seen as a sign of tantalizing proximity, its fruit reaching “so low.” Yet when the cross withdraws, the poem itself speculatively reverses its geographic and temporal polarity, turning to the southern hemisphere and leaping from the past to a speculative future “ages hence” in which the constellation is no longer a privileged symbol. Such geographic and temporal reversals prepare for the consideration of “atheist cycles,” in which a return to mythological paganism indicated by Orion, the giant, suggests a cycle of historically relative belief that undercuts the absolutism of religious faith. Moreover, this cycle of faith is linked to the oscillation of the earth’s tilt; as the cross sinks and rises in the southern horizon over thousands of years, it becomes “atheist” for only unfixing the bases of belief, either Christian or pagan, without endorsing either. The poem describes the loss of present faith in deep time, pivoting temporally from ancient past to deep future through a geographical shift. Such relative time travel may explain the poem’s question—“fomenters as forefathers we?”—since in their own present moment the doubting pilgrims could be seen as both inciting rebellion from belief and at the same time generating the conditions for a future belief. Melville’s poem locates this doubtful present between eras of belief, in the long, protracted oscillation of the stars. The nonhuman timescale of the precession of the equinoxes not only eclipses religious temporalities in magnitude, but also was one of the significant challenges, in the late eighteenth century, to orthodox scriptural belief. In what became known as the Denderah controversy, the precession of the equinoxes was used to argue that the age of the horoscope on the ceiling of the ancient Egyptian temple of Denderah predated Moses’s scriptural chronology. Following the approach of solar mythologist Charles François Dupuis, continental astronomers and physicists used the precession of the equinoxes to date the depicted arrangement of constellations on the horoscope, yielding a result that placed (incorrectly, as was later discovered) the zodiac’s construction in the third millennium BCE.23 This result was used by religious skeptics to question scriptural chronology, the Mosaic calendar that held that the earth itself was created only 6,000 years prior.24 Melville knew about the controversy for which the Denderah horoscope was known, using it in “The Fossil Whale” chapter of Moby-Dick to date the age of the whale before scriptural history, or “centuries before Solomon was cradled.” And it is likely that he would have been aware of the precession of the equinoxes at the root of the controversy.25 Thus, the allusion to the precession of the equinoxes in the depicted descent of the Southern Cross has the double sense of suggesting not just that faith has been lost over time, but that its loss is tied to a changing conception of time itself, from a limited chronology fixed by scripture and tethered to the belief of humanity’s exceptional nature in a divine plan, to the potentially unlimited chronology of a universe in which such beliefs are reduced to myths and humiliated pretensions.

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The temporal dilemma of Clarel recasts the question that Melville had opened in Pierre. What had been staged as a discrepancy between God and human becomes a discrepancy between the God and nonhuman. In such a turn, the temporal and physical nature of earth and stars goes from metaphorical vehicle for doubt to doubt’s substantial cause. And the human, as a consequence, falls out of a place of privilege in the debate, relegated to an exhausted, estranged present of futility and doubt. In such a fallen state, however, human doubt may be seen as less a limit and ignorance but rather as possibly constitutive of the temporal discrepancy itself. That is, facing an insoluble gap, Melville does not write Clarel to once again try to straddle the divide but rather to consider the divide’s contours.26 Rather than see doubt as a human problem of facing the world, Clarel approaches doubt as a worldly problem, the face of the world itself. The question then becomes: how can these temporal gaps, these discrepancies between alternate chronologies, become constitutive, rather than simply the cause, of doubt?

Doubt The recognition of deep time can cause personal religious crisis on the individual level, but writing a broader doubt into the temporal fabric of the universe suggests that such doubt could be impersonal. Melville’s skeptical interests, as Maurice Lee has shown, developed out of the challenge that chance, as a worldly, nonhuman, element—“a real power that cannot be dismissed as mere ignorance of providential designs”27—posed to linear narratives of cause. If chance is real for Melville, then the skepticism that derives from it could itself be read as external: not a miscalibration of the self to the world, but a variable calibration of the world with itself, enfolded in the temporal dimensions of real contingency. But what does it mean to say that doubt, which we are used to thinking of as a personal disposition, is not actually in us at all? If Melville is going to restage doubt as an ontological rather than epistemological issue, then the clue to how this outer doubt would work may be found by parsing carefully the relation of time to doubt in a non-causal way. This more immanent relation of time and doubt is given through Clarel’s explicit figure of doubt: Celio. Celio, the “young St. Stephen of the Doubt,”28 is introduced as a complementary opposite to Clarel. After seeing Celio the first time, Clarel is intrigued, but upon seeing him a second time, at daybreak, Clarel again doesn’t hail him and later discovers that Celio has died. Thus, like Bulkington in Moby-Dick, Celio is introduced as a major prospective character whose narrative never actually coincides with Clarel’s story and is dispensed of well before the end of the first book. As the poem’s most conspicuous figure of searching doubt, Celio is primarily significant in his not meeting Clarel. They do not meet, the poem suggests, just as one side of the earth will always miss the other in time. A Catholic Italian, Celio considers searching the New World for the answers that the Old World couldn’t provide: “This side the dark and hollow bound / Lies there no unexplored rich ground? / Some other world: well, there’s the New— / Ah, joyless and ironic too!”29 But he decides against it, considering that “The Past, the Past is half of time, / the proven half.”30 Celio’s characterization as an “Old World” doubter,

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lodged in the nighttime side of the earth, and associated with the past symbolically infuses his opposition with Clarel, the “New World” believer. The multiple valences of this opposition—dark and light, unbelief and belief, past and future, Old World and New—figure doubt within the planetary rotation of the earth. Such binding of doubt to the planet’s geography thus explains why the climax of Celio and Clarel’s near meeting occurs at daybreak, a temporal “frontier” when the darkness of past doubt and the brightness of new belief might coincide at the specific instant when the two sides of the earth exchange position relative to the sun: Can these a climax share? Mutual in approach may glide Minds which from poles adverse have come, Belief and unbelief? may doom Of doubt make such to coincide— Upon one frontier brought to dwell Arrested by the Ezan high In summons as from out the sky To matins of the infidel?31

In this moment, Clarel and Celio become emblems of belief and unbelief mapped globally, oppositional in their relation as “poles adverse” and coming together at the “frontier” of dawn, here signaled by the early morning ezan, or call-to-prayer. This moment, moreover, is the hypothetical “doom/Of doubt,” which figures the difference between Clarel and Celio as measured out by doubt itself; they will coincide when doubt comes to its doom. Melville’s use of “doubt” here thus indicates a secondorder skepticism. For where in other places “unbelief ” and “doubt” might be read as synonymous, Melville suggests that this globally situated doubt is sustained by the polar difference of belief and unbelief. This spatial arrangement, organized according to the hemispheres of the earth and its day/night opposition, makes doubt temporal. Belief and unbelief are the two sides of the earth, and doubt is determined by the fact of their continual non-convergence in time. The frontier on which they might meet is not, therefore, primarily a place, but rather an instant in time. Yet Celio and Clarel miss the instant. For in the crucial moment of their mutual recognition, Clarel hesitates, a delay that ultimately precludes their meeting and any “climax” that could eradicate doubt. In delay, Clarel recognizes the instant, but does not grasp it: “The instant proffer—it is fled!”32 Such a loss recalls a secondary delay in the scene, for the prayer-leader responsible for the morning call-to-prayer also misses his mark. In what at first seems an unrelated detail, Melville inserts into the Clarel and Celio scene the description of a delayed call-to-prayer: “the muezzin’s cry— / Tardy, for Mustapha was old, / And age a laggard is”33 is described as a “summons shrill, / Which should have been called ere perfect light.”34 Why would Melville include in the description of Celio and Clarel missing their instant this detail about the muezzin being late with his morning call? Melville may be noting the tardiness in order to preserve the instantaneousness of the daybreak, since

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in Islamic tradition the ezan would traditionally be called before sunrise. Yet, in recalibrating the time of the ezan to be simultaneous with the time of the earth’s rotation, Melville achieves a dramatic synchronicity only by introducing another lag. The fact that the instant of possible synchronicity between Celio and Clarel is marked by a chance synchronicity between global and religious time suggests the possibility of a momentary fullness and the erasure of doubt. But the consideration that such synchronicity itself is a mistake, a delay, implies that delay itself is fundamental to the dream of coincidence. Balanced at a tipping point between night and day, and lent significance by the tardiness of the ezan, which further aligns the global temporal structure with a religious (though non-Christian) one, this potential moment of fullness dissolves in delay. Instead, a new relation between time and doubt arises, in which the eradication of doubt is imagined as the end of time. The “doom/of doubt” carries overtones of a fatalistic end of days. Thus the preservation of the gap between belief and unbelief, between the old, darkened half of the world and its new, illuminated other, becomes an impersonal, globally situated source of doubt. The specter of hemispheric and deep time evolves from being merely a cause of doubt (the evidence of a geological history that belies scripture) to being implicated in the mechanics of doubt itself. Melville’s temporally conditioned ontological doubt may be read as an instance of the inversion to Kantian philosophy that Quentin Meillassoux enjoins: to “put back into the thing itself what we mistakenly took to be an incapacity in thought.”35 If we take doubt to be what was previously thought to be an incapacity, then we could read Melville’s invocation of doubt as the temporal period between opposite sides of the globe as a way of figuring the planetary space and time of the earth as invested, substantialized, by an entirely impersonal doubt. What if the origin of doubt is not found in our own limitations, not in the smallness or hardness of heart, but rather in the shape and contours of the spinning, dipping, circling stone on which we find ourselves? By being understood within time rather than space, what is often referred to as a gap between human and world is recast as a lag or lapse between asynchronous temporal events. This shift reveals the limitations of merely spatial figurations of philosophical impasse; when we describe the philosophical problem of skepticism as emerging from the gap or distance between ourselves and the world, the problem becomes one of transit, of how to get from one place to another. But the moredifficult-to-visualize figuration of doubt as a temporal lag underlines a different sort of ontological inaccessibility; miscalibration in time cannot be solved, figuratively, by jumping a chasm, crossing a line, or striking through a mask. Rather, to say that the absolute lies inaccessible to us in time, as either in the unrecoverable past or in the unimaginable future, means that it is less a problem of where we are than of when we are. In the temporal schematization, the substance of doubt is a function of our immanence in an impoverished present that is unsurmountable through any human capability. Or, what is more to the point, the problem of doubt becomes inimical to our situatedness in time, and thus becomes something both wholly outside of us, impersonal to the widest degree, yet also something fundamentally basic to the constitution of the world in our experience.

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To grapple then with doubt would be to try to escape both time and the planet whose motion relative to the sun gives us its measure. Melville suggests as much when depicting the struggle of another doubter in Clarel, Nathan. Nathan, rebelling against factional religious strife as “the latest shame of time,” is driven to grapple with doubt: “Alone, and at Doubt’s freezing pole / He wrestled with the pristine forms / Like the first man.”36 Nathan’s struggle with doubt is significantly located at the one place on earth where, conceptually at least, the time of day should have the least bearing. This figurative physical relocation on the globe becomes a spatialized attempt to get out from the “shame of time,” just as the Adamic reference to the “first man” attempts to resituate Nathan’s struggle as preceding, rather than following from, human history. Doubt here is figured as a location—the “freezing pole”—that is both outside of time and axial to it. Such is reinforced by the reference to Genesis’ Eden, a story that not only seems to be outside of time, but also essential to the explosion of time that is triggered by the fall. Nathan’s solution is to convert to Judaism and to relocate his family from the United States to Jerusalem. The poem explicitly stages this as a doubter’s imaginative travel in time: “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.”37 This becomes Nathan’s ultimately tragic attempt to escape the timeliness of doubt by fixing fast to an idealized past and an idealized location of faith. Thus Jerusalem becomes, temporally, another “freezing pole” in scriptural imagination, a place where doubt might be confronted because of its historical character, its symbolic importance as the location where Christian time and calendar begin: “Like the ice-bastions round the Pole, / Thy blank, blank towers, Jerusalem!”38 Yet these polar references are touched with estrangement and inscrutability, doubt’s pole is “freezing,” Jerusalem’s polar site is marked by “blank, blank towers,” and later in the poem Ungar will describe viewing the cathedrals at York as “‘Towers, peaks, and pinnacles sublime— / Faith’s iceberg, stranded on a scene / How alien, and an alien time; / But now’—he checked himself, and stood.”39 The polar regions become a consistent location within Clarel of a nonhuman temporality, now inscrutable, that is contrasted with our own present “now” as an “alien time.” The alienness, the estrangement, of a temporally inaccessible absolute is figured through the conceptually rich delay at the heart of doubt in the Celio encounter. To understand Clarel’s doubt, then, we must consider closely its delay.

Delay Delay is the primary temporal mode of Clarel as a whole.40 The poem’s individual delays, lapses, and lags occur within the frame of a broader delay: the ten days of Clarel’s journey. Though the poem begins with Clarel’s courtship of Ruth, the romantic plot is interrupted by the death of Ruth’s father. Prohibited from seeing Ruth during her observance of Shiva, Clarel decides to join a group of pilgrims leaving Jerusalem on a tour of the Holy Land. Clarel’s subsequent travels become the

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remaining three books of the poem, thus turning the hiatus in the romantic plot into the temporal condition of the rest of the poem. If delay takes on a formative role in the constitution of Melville’s ontological doubt, then such a framework may not be simply an exigency for the plot but rather the ground for a conceptual understanding of Clarel’s temporally situated doubt. In Clarel’s decision to leave Ruth, Melville’s compressed language suggests a complicated relationship between delay and time. The deciding factor is Clarel’s consideration that “Shouldst thou abide, / Cut off yet wert thou from her side / For time.”41 Though the meter may necessitate the omission of a clarifying article before “time,” the consequence is that this statement could be saying (1) that Clarel will be separated from Ruth “for a time,” or (2) that Clarel will be separated from Ruth “for the sake of her mourning time,” or, most remotely, (3) that Clarel will be separated from Ruth “for the sake of time itself.” Though the first reading is the most intuitive, the second is bound up with it. For if Clarel is leaving Ruth for a time, he is also leaving to give her time, specifically the seven days of Shiva. And from this consideration, it is not as far an interpretive leap to the third sense, for since Shiva is a traditional mourning ritual that interrupts the flow of daily time, to separate for the sake of it is also to generate something like an alternative time. Cut from Ruth’s side like Eve from Adam, Clarel is loosed into a hiatus within the progressive temporality of ordinary time, the genesis of an alternate temporality. Such separation may be said to give time, not just in Clarel’s alternate time, but also in the way that such interval, such internal dilation within linear temporality, makes linear temporality perceptible as such. Thus, Clarel may be read to separate from time “for time.” The longer passage framing Clarel’s choice illustrates how this deliberation about time converges with doubt. This moment of doubt occurs after Clarel has already sent Ruth a letter informing her of his imminent departure. Hardly is the letter sent when Clarel is beset with worries: “But what!—nay, nay: without adieu / Of vital word, dear presence true, / Part shall I?—break away from love? / But think: the circumstances move, / And warrant it. Shouldst thou abide, / Cut off yet wert thou from her side / For time.”42 Interrupted by an Armenian funeral procession at this point, Clarel takes it as an ill omen (and in fact will return to this omen at several times later in his pilgrimage, symbolically returning to this interval of doubt) and seems on the verge of reversing his intention before finally reasserting his original intention to leave: “But yet again he thought it o’er, / And self-rebukeful, and with mock: / Thou superstitious doubter— own, / Biers need be borne; why such a shock / When passes this Armenian one? / The word’s dispatched, and wouldst recall? / ‘Tis but for fleeting interval.”43 Just as time can be read as both the impetus and the outcome of Clarel’s journey, the ambiguity of the “fleeting interval” here links the time of Clarel’s deliberation to the time of the ensuing interval, the journey to come. For the “interval” could refer to (1) the interval of Clarel’s proposed journey, the fleeting time that he will be away from Ruth, (2) the interval of his doubt, the fleeting moment in which his superstitious doubt has postponed his decision, or (3) the interval between his sending of the letter and his current moment. Referring to all equally, the fleeting interval joins the doubt attending the specter of death with the abeyance of the letter in transit, the period between its sending and its

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receipt. And this doubt between moments is further linked to Clarel’s journey as both its conception and its recurring emblem. In the temporal rupture afforded by Shiva, and in the momentary indecision of Clarel caught in the “fleeting interval,” Melville sets the action of the poem within an alternate, delayed time. The ambiguities that attend the staging of this time underline both the instability of the time of the journey and, paradoxically, the sense of its inevitability. Caught up in that dead time between dispatch and arrival, Clarel lives out the period of his doubt. Over the course of the ten days of his journey, this fleeting interval of Clarel’s momentary doubt recurs, expanding to include the land itself as temporal event. For Clarel sees the land he crosses as an undifferentiated potential for the end of the alternate, delayed, mourning time. Obliquely referring back to both Ruth’s observance of Shiva and the Armenian bier, Clarel muses that: “On the hills of dead Judaea / Wherever one may faring go, / He dreams—Fit place to set the bier / Of   Jacob, brought from Egypt’s mead: / Here’s Atad’s threshing-floor.”44 In Judaic tradition, Shiva follows from the seven days of Joseph’s mourning for his father Jacob and his removal of Jacob’s body from Egypt to its eventual resting place at Atad’s threshing floor. Clarel’s reference, near the end of his journey, to the scriptural origins of Shiva recasts the pilgrimage from a voyage of discovery and search for faith into a ritual of mourning; what the dreamer dreams is that any site in “dead Judaea” could fittingly serve as the place where the interval of mourning could cease. In such a turn, Clarel becomes a version of Joseph, searching not for the real historical site where Joseph mourned Jacob, but rather rehearsing Joseph’s wandering and performing again his act of designation. Yet because this designation could occur anywhere, the utterance “[h]ere’s Atad’s threshing-floor,” does not signify a special location in space, but rather in time. Rather than look for an historical site, the voyager in Clarel’s fantasy finds the threshing floor in the present. The time of Shiva is diffused across the surveyed land, extending the fleeting interval of delay into a ubiquitous and undifferentiated present. Rather than flowing in a linear progression, time, in the context of the poem’s major delay, pools. Fleeting, when viewed from an external and assured perspective, and flooding, when experienced from within, the interval of doubt becomes the empty, but inescapable, present tense of Clarel’s trip. The tension between these two temporal frameworks, one progressive and linear, the other recursive and cyclical, engages Clarel within both contemporaneous and contemporary thinking about the metaphysics of time. For, in distinguishing between a forward-moving time and a time that is immersed in the present, Melville anticipates the distinction between tensed and tenseless theories of time.45 Proponents of a tensed theory hold that the past, present, and future order temporal events, and they are sometimes called presentists (for the present is ontologically privileged as the moment where change is possible). Proponents of a tenseless theory, on the other hand, hold that events are temporally ordered only by our subjective perspective and, for that reason, are sometimes called eternalists (since all events, not just present ones, are equally real). Melville’s temporality of delay could thus be understood as the positing of a tenseless order of events within a tensed sequence.

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Although Melville would not have known these alternative theories of time by these terms, he would become familiar with the distinction through his reading of Schopenhauer. In his copy of The World as Will and Idea, Melville marked liberally the sections in which Schopenhauer distinguishes between the “time of the common man” (tensed) and the “time of genius” (tenseless), beginning by underscoring the clearly tenseless maxim: “Time will not produce anything new and significant.”46 Rather than a progressive, linear time, which Schopenhauer associates with the linear nature of history, science, and the common man, Schopenhauer’s eternalist time is always present; each moment of our time is a fragment of a uniform whole. Schopenhauer’s metaphor for the distinction, also underscored by Melville, describes tensed linear time as restless and the tenseless time of art as at rest: “The first [the time of science and experience] is like the innumerable showering drops of the waterfall, which, constantly changing, never rest for an instant; the second [the time of art] is like the rainbow, quietly resting on this raging torrent.”47 The comparison between tensed and tenseless times, between what Schopenhauer elsewhere describes as “a line infinitely extended in a horizontal direction” and “a vertical line which cuts it at any point,”48 allows a geometric figuration of Clarel’s temporal arrangement. In Clarel, tenseless, vertical, delayed time cuts into and dilates within the linear horizontal progression of tensed time.49 In Schopenhauer, the eternalist temporal mode is clearly privileged; it is the uncommon but genius approach of art. Yet in delay, Melville’s temporal mode in Clarel seems less a placid lingering, less a peaceful oneness with the phenomenal world than an anxious disposition, a questioning attitude that is arrested rather than restful. For rather than consider tensed and tenseless theories of time as two different ways of looking at the same thing, as Schopenhauer does, Melville’s conception of delay would thrust both into a single framework: periods of tenseless delay dilating within the intervals between tensed events. The ten-day journey itself becomes timeless, participating in an eternal search for Atad’s threshing floor within the hiatus of worldly progression. Such arrangement is periodic: the tensed and tenseless versions of temporal reckoning in Clarel do not smoothly conjoin, but rather stutter in oscillation. This periodic conception of time, in which the present is not viewed as an instant but rather as a limited duration, brokers a tenuous compromise between presentism (tensed) and eternalism (tenseless). Such a resolution is similar to one made in Alfred Whitehead’s epochal philosophy of time, and noticing this resemblance illuminates the stakes of delay in Clarel. For just as Melville’s delay operates to turn the present instant into a duration, Whitehead theorizes time as a “succession of epochal durations.”50 By drawing from theories of discontinuity at a quantum atomic level, Whitehead divides time into epochs, limited occasions that preserve the concept of becoming within a tenseless theory of time.51 Epochal time preserves a capacity for change, potentiality, within what would otherwise seem a deterministic and oppressive universe of force. Like Whitehead’s epochs, Melville’s delays also encompass both the continuous and the discontinuous. Yet rather than preserve potential in becoming, delay emphasizes rather an estrangement, a state of being out-of-sync with the time in which becoming unfolds.

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The implicit theory of time in Clarel may thus be understood as both a polarization of the tensed version of time and an inverted version of Whitehead’s epochal version of time. For in Melville’s construction, the present is not just emptied of ontological being, but is extended as a duration suspended between inaccessible instants. Yet rather than, as Whitehead does, deny the existence of the instant and raise the epoch to the essential ontological becoming of time, Melville degrades the epoch of the present. The  present is the substance of our phenomenal experience of time, our subjective time, as it were, but its essence is rather elsewhere, in those limit points that are projected both into the future and the past. The time of the present is not an instant, but an epoch of delay, the difference between absolute temporalities. In this unlikely variant, time remains eternal (since time is determined by relations between earlier and later), but it is also discontinuous (since the rifts between absolute continuous temporalities becomes the substance of our own), and finally it is real (since the measurement of time between absolute realities must therefore also be real). In the section of Clarel most directly concerned with time and doubt, “The High Desert,” Melville explores the consequences of such epochal delay, outlining its periodic, asynchronic, and dilatory character. In addressing the problem that historical difference poses to belief, “The High Desert” portrays time as a periodic oscillation of action and reaction. Broaching the skeptical question of whether “Science and Faith, can these unite?”52 this section turns significantly to a consideration of how time operates in a world without belief: “If time both creed and faith betray, / Vesture and vested—yet again / What interregnum or what reign / Ensues? Or does a period come? / The Sibyl’s books lodged in the tomb? / Shall endless time no more unfold / Of truth at core?”53 The problem posed is that of continuity: if faith perishes, then what follows? Time would apparently keep on, as it is “endless,” yet it is at the same time at an end, unfolding “no more.” Before the final line, it seems that endless time will no longer unfold itself, coming to a paradoxical end with “a period” (which itself ambiguously wavers between its double sense of being both a unit of time and the full stop at the end of it). But the addition of the final line, “of truth at core,” suggests that the endlessness of time will put an end only to the unfolding of knowledge. The double move executed by these lines gives the effect of opening up a delay between periods in which it is not clear whether time is moving and faith has run out or whether time has halted until faith is refreshed by some new revelation. Melville imagines Christianity receding into the past, supplanted by new beliefs, new superstitions that maintain the form of progress: “Must these recoil… / Before the march in league avowed / Of Mammon and Democracy.”54 Yet the secular march replaces the ends of Christian teleology with movement prized for its own sake. Caught between faith in endings and endless marches of secular progress, history is an oscillating periodicity, perishing and becoming in turn: As years, as years and annals grow, And action and reaction vie, And never men attain, but know How waves on waves forever die; Does all more enigmatic show?55

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This periodicity in Melville’s scheme suggests a repetitious time, yet one that pessimistically focuses on the perishing rather than the coming-to-be. Melville describes on the one hand a continuing linear accumulation of history, “years and annals grow,” but on the other instills in it a continual frustration, turning the growth of years into waves that “forever die.” This movement at cross-purposes, drawn along the lines of eternalism and presentism, renders periodic and stuttering the uncertain epoch of Clarel’s empty present. Though delay mediates multiple senses of time, it doesn’t fuse them in synthesis. Rather, in being asynchronic or always out-of-sync, delay relates absolute temporalities through a perpetual and consistent irrelation. This is especially clear in Melville’s description of those lagging moments of overlap between historical eras in “The High Desert.” For though such overlap seemingly promises continuity, Melville instead describes it as another form of delay, a protracted perishing: “In change / Dead always does some creed delay— / Dead, not interred, though hard upon / Interment’s brink?”56 Illustrating this delay, Melville recalls the overlap between Roman and Christian calendars, separate temporal measures that share time even as they give exclusive reckonings of it: “Still laggeth in deferred adieu / The A. D. (Anno Domini) / Overlapping into era new / Even as the Roman A. U. C. / Yet ran for time, regardless all / That Christ was born, and after fall / Of Rome itself?”57 Not cleanly accomplished in an instant, the historical shift between Roman and Christian temporalities is delayed in “deferred adieu.” Caught between calendars, the overlapping present lags, mediating rather than synthesizing. For it isn’t that the perishing creed here is both dead and not-dead (as it would be in synthesis), but rather it is dead but not interred. Recalling again the origins of Shiva in Jacob’s delay of Joseph’s burial, the passage emphasizes how death may be prolonged, how the emptiness of an end in time can become an epoch of present time. Delay holds different temporalities apart, making of difference the substance of the present. Ultimately, “The High Desert” portrays the dilatory operation of delay as a nonhuman drama of canyon, sun, and shadow. The section begins by describing a fissure in the canyon through which sunlight passes only once a year: Where silence and the legend dwell, A cleft in Horeb is, they tell, Through which upon one happy day (the sun on its heraldic track Due sign having gained in Zodiac) A sunbeam darts, which slants away Through ancient carven oriel Or window in the Convent there, Illuming so with annual flush The somber vaulted chamber spare.58

Yet this illuminated instant is fleeting; it is a “brief visitant” that “makes no lasting covenant.”59 The cleft in Horeb is thus associated with an instant of fullness in time, such that the subsequent pilgrims’ exploration of the canyons retains a sense

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of investigating the empty gaps that are left after the instant, their grappling with temporal doubt described as “Imagination wildering on / Through the vacant halls which faith once kept.”60 The emergence of the pilgrims, in the final two lines, above the rifts and valleys, completes the section’s expansion: “While unperturbed over deserts riven, / Stretched the clear vault of hollow heaven.”61 The illuminated “vaulted chamber spare” that began the section is eclipsed, by the end, by the dark emptiness of the “clear vault of hollow heaven.” Dilating from the happy instant in the cleft in Horeb, through the vacant hallways of the fissured desert, to the clarity of a transcendent hollowness, “The High Desert” opens and empties, as it investigates, the fleeting instant of faith’s time.

Synchronicity At this point, I have argued that throughout Clarel multiple temporal registers are miscalibrated, missing one another by moments or millennia, and that the gap between is the temporal lag that constitutes doubt. However, the poem also offers a few rare exceptions to this rule in isolated moments of mirth, when doubt recedes in the face of a present “now.” The poem’s conception of doubt may be marked by delay, but these moments of synchronicity punctuate the temporal span, rendering delay periodic. Rather than merely languish in eternal delay, the poem envisions instants, like the illuminated chamber under the cleft of Horeb, in which separate temporal registers, for a single fleeting instant, align. The “now” which elsewhere in the poem is truncated, emptied, and continually deferred, presides over the celebration that the pilgrims witness at Mar Saba. The epicurean Lesbian, at the center of the revelry, is described as “Holding to now, swearing by here, / His course conducting by no keen / Observance of the stellar sphere.”62 His “now” being held distinct from the sidereal timescale, the Lesbian’s temporal register is entirely in the local present. His quasi-blasphemous singing may mark him as having no faith, but Rolfe finds him an “excusable sinner” because his living-in-the-moment is drawn from his position between multiple “polyglot” religious beliefs: “In such variety he’s lived / Where creeds dovetail into each other; / Such influences he’s received: / Thrown among all … He’s caught the tints of many a scene, / And so become a harlequin / Gay patchwork of levities.”63 The Lesbian, offering in the poem the figure of a doubtless present, located entirely in the “here” of the immediate environ, is the product of a polytheistic history. Unlike the doubt that opens up in the temporal lags between creeds, as in “The High Desert,” the Lesbian, freed from the imperative to believe, promises a sutured now, a “gay patchwork,” that reverses doubt. Without doubt, the overlapping of creeds can become a scene of inclusion, dismissive of the radical scales of time and space given by that “stellar sphere.” The Lesbian’s synthetic moment does not last, however. Though the revel closes with an image of stasis in the Lesbian’s now—“[a]rrested, those five revelers there, / Fixed in light postures of their glee”64—the poem immediately hollows it out, imagining them as engraven figures on “Greek sarcophagi.”65 And Melville depicts the

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return, in the proceeding lines, of temporal movement in cyclical oscillation: “The roller upon Borneo’s strand / Halts not, but in recoiling throe / Drags back the shells involved with sand, / Shuffled and muffled in the flow / And hollow of the wallowing undertow.”66 Returning to the “wallowing” hollowness of the delayed present, the Lesbian’s prospect of living in the here and now, without doubt, becomes another transcendent yet ultimately unsustainable dream. Melville reprises the question of whether such moments of instant fullness and faith are sustainable in Clarel’s conclusion. The section that depicts Clarel’s ultimate return to Jerusalem begins with the single totem-like word, “Delay!”: “Delay!—Shall flute from forth the Gate / Issue, to warble welcome here— / Upon this safe returning wait / In gratulation?”67 Not hearing the flute to welcome him back, Clarel fears that the delay of his journey will not end with his return. These fears seem to be confirmed when Clarel’s discovery of Ruth’s death turns his delay tragic and unresolvable. Yet Clarel may not be doomed to wait forever, for in the further delay even after Ruth has died (“Why lingers he, the stricken one?”68), Melville offers another version of a synthesis, one based upon periodicity rather than eternity. The Easter celebration with which the poem concludes becomes a moment of periodic synchronization, yielding, in what is otherwise an arid and craggy poem, something like a climax: And when the day, The Easter, falls in calendar The same to Latin and the array Of all schismatics from afar— Armenians, Greeks from many a shore— Syrians, Copts—profusely pour The hymns: ‘tis like the choric gush Of torrents Alpine when they rush To swell the anthem of the spring. That year was now.69

The “now” in this passage is somewhat different from the Lesbian’s “now.” Rather than be simply a persistent state of living in the moment, the now of Clarel’s Easter is periodic; it occurs when the Gregorian and Julian calendars align (which happened only seven times while Melville was composing Clarel between 1856 and 1876). It is just as full as the Lesbian’s now, marked by an overflowing abundance, but its cause is temporal rather than geographical. What Melville imagines here is a different model of a full present, one that depends upon discrete moments of temporal synchrony. In  this image of synchronic synthesis, Easter not only coincides with multiple calendars but with the natural calendar of seasonal change: “Nature times the same delight, / And rises with the Emerging One.”70 The calendars coinciding with “now,” and that “now” coinciding with the terrestrial season, the poem becomes the most optimistic since the here and now of the revelry at Mar Saba. It is in this momentary gush that multiple scales of time come together, fulfilling the long delays of the rest of the poem.

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Yet this fulfillment is also unsustainable. Even though it offers a mitigated hope to Clarel “Christ is arisen: / But Ruth, may Ruth so burst the prison?”71 the close of Easter leaves Jerusalem like “a depopulated mart”72 in autumn: “more like some kirk on weekday lone, / On whose void benches broodeth still / The brown light from November hill.”73 What remains is an impoverished trickle of time: “But though the freshet quite be gone— / Sluggish, life’s wonted stream flows on.”74 Rather than end with the climax of synchrony, a temporary harmonization of different periodicities, Melville ends on the emptiness of church pews during “week-day lone.” The spiritual aridity of the span of the weekdays, those periods between the rites of worship, becomes another temporal figuration of the emptiness of the lagging, estranged, present. The momentary alignment of different temporal scales offered by Easter recedes. In that absence, we are left with a sense of our own time’s “sluggish” procession in which the ongoingness of life seems bleak. Melville’s conception of time here adjusts the tenor of philosophies of becoming. For though this image testifies to how we experience time as a “flow” of life, the sluggishness and the barren emptiness of that time we proceed through does not celebrate the flux of change. Rather, it suggests that this flow of time is generated by the disalignment, the miscalibration, of human scales of time from absolute ones. To live in the “now” of the divine would be to live in no time at all. So our experience of time as change is not only the evidence that we are out-of-alignment with absolute time, but also the ontological condition of the failure of belief. Time is the stuff of doubt. Returned to this sluggish time, the poem slows again, even seeming to reverse time, Clarel retreating from Easter Sunday to, in the final section of the poem, the Via Crucis, the road up which Christ carried the cross. In this final scene, Clarel is pulled back to Good Friday, back to the beginning of the interregnum between Christ’s death and resurrection at the very time that the world around him jumps ahead to Whitsuntide, the Pentecostal celebration seven weeks after Easter: The Via Crucis—even the way Tradition claims to be the one Trod on that Friday far away By Him our pure exemplar shown. ‘Tis Whitsun-tide.75

Whitsuntide, a festival celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit onto Jerusalem allowing all of the various peoples of nations to understand, with perplexity, one another’s language, betokens the communal formation of belief. Overlaying the “Friday far away” with Whitsuntide, the poem offers that temporal distortion as the context for community. The poem closes by describing a motley community sharing not belief but the burden of following in time: “In varied forms of fate they wend— / Or man or animal, ‘tis one: / Cross-bearers all, alike they tend / And follow, slowly follow on.”76 The sluggish flow after the instant of synchronic harmony here becomes a slow train in which all are related, not in the instant, but rather in an enduring tardiness in which they are all somehow behind, left to “follow, slowly follow on.” And Clarel, fittingly and finally, becomes a part of this oneness in being behind: “But, lagging after,

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who is he / Called early every hope to test, / And now, at close of rarer quest, / Finds so much more the heavier tree?”77

Contingency Aware of how Clarel operates within alternate delayed temporalities, we are now in a better position to understand how the epilogue uses time to relate, without sublimating, belief and unbelief. While it is natural to ask, at the end of this search for faith, whether Clarel found what he was looking for, the periodic and delayed nature of time in Clarel makes sense of the epilogue’s ambiguous response. The epilogue begins with what seems to be a description of the central antagonism of the day, Christian belief versus scientific discovery: “If Luther’s day expand to Darwin’s year, / Shall that exclude the hope—foreclose the fear?”78 By figuring the relation of Christian and scientific belief in terms of an expansion of time, Melville opposes them through temporal scale. For it isn’t that Luther’s day is followed by Darwin’s day, which would suggest that one merely replaces the other, but rather that the day of Protestant faith expands, on a different scale, to the year of scientific skepticism. This scalar jump alludes to the difference between the deep time of evolution and the relatively brief moment of Christian history. Thus the anticipatory attitude of the two questions— “hope” and “foreclose” both looking forward in time—seems to ask: can we continue to think of the future, either in hope or fear, when we consider the blink of our own historical moment in the expanse of deep time? What becomes of the future at all without hope or fear, without an affective regard for what will occur? As the frame of time expands, we seem forced to accept a kind of continual, but barren, ongoingness. The epilogue describes the irresolvable antagonism between faith and unbelief as not just occurring in time, but constituting it. Noticing the mirrored and perpetual debate carried on by Despair, who “[s]crawls undettered his bitter pasquinade,”79 and Faith, who “[i]nscribes … The sign o’ the cross,”80 Melville does not take sides. Instead, he outlines the temporal conditions of that debate: “The running battle of the star and clod / Shall run forever—if there be no God.”81 Set in terms that recall the difference between sidereal and terrestrial temporalities, the “running battle” becomes something like a celestial clockwork, running forever if, it seems to say, God does not intervene. But there is something asymmetrical and puzzling about this formation. For the “clod,” if we take that to be unbelief in God, would seem to never be able to win. If God exists, then the “star” would succeed and the battle would end. But if God doesn’t exist, then the battle would run forever. Such asymmetry means that the battle is waged just as much over whether time ends as it does over whether God exists. Taking this to its furthest consequence, the antagonism between belief and unbelief— doubt—would thus be the maintenance, the running, of time. The final stanza of the poem, which has often been read as an optimistic return to faith and hope, may thus be read as an escape from the time of doubt. The speaker enjoins Clarel to “keep thy heart … That like the crocus budding through the snow— / That like a swimmer rising from the deep— / That like a burning secret which doth go / Even from the bosom that would hoard and keep; / Emerge thou mayst from the

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last whelming sea, / And prove that death but routs life into victory.”82 On the one hand, this encouragement suggests perseverance in the hope of a future event; Clarel should keep searching, keep struggling with his doubt, for things may change. Yet, on the other hand, the speaker does not encourage Clarel to keep his troubled faith because doing so would lead to redemptive discovery. Instead, the crocus, the swimmer, and the secret all share in being impelled from within; they burst into being despite outward resistance. If this future confirmation of faith were to occur, the poem suggests, it would happen of itself, seizing Clarel regardless of his resistance. Thus there is a fault in the logic of the enjoinder: why should Clarel keep heart to emerge from doubt when such emergence is figured as a force of nature rather than an achievement of will? The emergence from the time of doubt is given, ultimately, in the death that “routs life into victory.” This enigmatic final line moves in two directions at the same time. Death’s destruction of life becomes life’s victory over death. The most intuitive reading is that, at death, Clarel will find the confirmation of his faith, perhaps in an afterlife or heaven. We can also see, however, how this line, by putting life’s victory in death’s eradication of life, anticipates that death, in itself, could finally prove faith and God’s existence. Here it is not death as an introduction to an afterlife that proves God’s existence, but rather death as an absolute end of time, and, as such, an end of doubt. We should not read death as cynicism and life as faith, but rather the other way around. For the Melville of Clarel, living is doubting, and true belief is found only in death; the fact that one no longer exists to enjoy such discovery should not be seen as ironic but necessary. Yet death as the end of doubt and the emergence from time, is not, as the poem hedges carefully, itself necessary. For the key verb of the stanza is “mayst.” If the poem ended with certainty, with “will” or “shall,” then the end of time would foreclose the potential contingency. By turning on “mayst,” the final stanza leaves open the running battle. This opening of contingency at the end of the poem may not be, however, a deflating “to-be-continued” non-ending. By considering how, in Clarel’s temporal philosophy, doubt is time, we might more positively read the lack of closure and the opening of contingency at the end of the poem as a discovery, not of the object of belief, but rather the object of doubt. Keeping heart is thus not exactly the hope for the future, but rather the maintenance of contingency. It may be seductive to parse the final lines as reading, “then keep heart so that you may emerge.” But more stringently parsed, the lines read, “Then keep heart that you may emerge.” Clarel is not being told to believe in God for those beliefs may turn out to be confirmed, but rather, to believe in the possibility of significant and time-breaking change. Keeping heart in such a case is not the same as keeping faith. For Clarel’s heart is not full of faith, but mindful issues: “Clarel, thy heart, the issues there but mind.”83 To mind the issues of the heart is, on the one hand, to turn inward, but as composed of “issues,” the heart would seem the locale of continued debate. Could the poem be saying that Clarel keep his doubting heart? That is how I read it, such that to keep doubting is to keep open the possibility of change and the maintenance of time. Thus the poem ends not quite with a “we won’t know what happens in the future” but rather with “our ignorance of the future is the origin of the

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doubt that gives us time to live in.” In what may seem perverse, but, I hope to have shown, is also supported by the way that doubt becomes in the poem the substance of time, the final lines seem to read that Clarel keep believing in his doubt. To keep believing in doubt, to continue to live in that aspect of deferral that can only be figured through hope or fear of potential futures, is to live in a limited and contingent time. Death, the end of one’s own time, becomes then the proof not only of God, but of doubt’s ontological necessity. In Clarel, Melville offers a temporally situated definition of doubt, derived from the difference in multiple absolute temporalities, and providing an epochal, regressive philosophy of time. Such a doubt is no longer just a feature of one’s psychology or even a philosophical stance but rather a fundamental part of physical nature, a feature of the discontinuity that perforates time. What is perhaps most remarkable about Clarel’s treatment of temporality is that it attempts to give a positive account of negative difference—it delivers a mode of relation, delay, that does not operate through connection or even simple disconnection. In its periodic, lagging, outof-sync character, Clarel’s ontology of doubt disperses pretensions of human exceptionality and embraces contingency, not in an ecstatic transcendence of the immediate present but rather in the sluggish trickle of perpetual delay.

Notes 1 2

3

Herman Melville, Journals, ed. Howard C. Horsford and Lynn Horth, The Writings of Herman Melville 14 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1989), 97. For synthesis in Clarel, see Joseph G. Knapp, Tortured Synthesis: The Meaning of Melville’s Clarel (New York: Philosophical Library, 1971), William Potter, Melville’s Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2004), and Robert Penn Warren, introduction to Selected Poems of Herman Melville: A Reader’s Edition, ed. Robert Penn Warren (New York: Random House, 1967). Knapp: “In Clarel, finally, [Melville] found his dynamic synthesis which once and for all integrated his famous polarities” (18); Potter: “[Clarel] succeeds in transcending the relatively parochial concerns of the faith and doubt genre to discover what the poem calls, ‘The intersympathy of creeds / Alien or hostile tho’ they seem,’ that is, those eternal truths shared by all religions beneath their orthodox differences” (xiii); Warren: “[Clarel] is now prepared to find his fate as a man among men, and this is the climax in which the theme of the philosophical quest and that of human growth are merged” (41). See Hilton Obenzinger, American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), Potter, Melville’s Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds and Vincent Kenny, Herman Melville’s Clarel: A Spiritual Autobiography (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1973). Obenzinger reads the epilogue as a panacea of individual and unfounded hope within a narrative of convenantal devastation: “… only manaolana, that sensibility of hope oddly borne from the discontinuities, displacements, and disjunctures of colonial contact, can sustain [Clarel] or the pilgrim-reader. In Clarel—and throughout his entire poempilgrimage—Melville unravels the covenant, disobeying both Jehovah and himself,

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14 15 16 17

Melville’s Philosophies and is thus more alone than even Jonah” (83). Potter considers the poem an exercise in the “tempered heart,” so that the trial of Clarel and, by proxy, the reader, is a mode of necessary preparation for a climax in the future. Another version of this argument is articulated by Kenny: “This confidence in human resiliency and a faith in nature’s balm provide the only measure of peace and hope for civilization. In no way does this explain the purpose of human existence. But prevailing in a world where the answer is not forthcoming is an answer in itself ” (226). See Warren, introduction to Selected Poems: “Clarel comes to life in what we may call Melville’s lyric poem about his epic poem, the philosophical lyric which is the Epilogue” (44). See Branka Arsić, Passive Constitutions or 7 ½ Times Bartleby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007) and Sharon Cameron, Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Michael Jonik, “Character and the Space of Clarel,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 13.3 (October 2011): 79. Ibid., 67–68. Cody Marrs, “Clarel and the American Centennial,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 13.3 (October 2011): 109. For an overview of the changes in timekeeping and the attempts to standardize time in the nineteenth century, see Ian Bartky, Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). Edward Sugden, “Different Time Zones: Newtonian Time, Herman Melville and Omoo,” Comparative American Studies: An International Journal 9.2 (June 2011): 103. Ibid., 103. Ibid., 93. For another argument about the liberal function of Melville’s use of multiple temporalities, see Christopher Looby, “Of Billy’s Time: Temporality in Melville’s Billy Budd,” Canadian Review of American Studies 45.1 (Spring 2015), 23–37. Looby considers how Billy Budd, through which multiple sexual regimes “overlapped temporally,” produces a “complex and layered history of sexuality” (27). Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, The Writings of Herman Melville 6 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press and Chicago: Newberry Library, 1971), 212. Ibid., 212. Ibid., 213. See Hester Blum, “Melville and Oceanic Studies,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Blum defines this meridianal time as “oceanic,” and emphasizes how it draws from the conception of the world as planet: [B]oth terms—the terrestrial and celestial—are in play simultaneously in Melville’s conception, and mutually constitute the grounds for the third space—call it oceanic—in which actors move in a skew trajectory, keeping the horologue at one hand and the chronometer at the other. An oceanic sense of planetarity allows for differentiation and fluidity, indeed a protean understanding of space and time alike. (35)

18 See Dominic Mastroianni, Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum American Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Mastroianni’s reading of Pierre

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concludes that the discontinuous nature of “revolutionary time” functions passively and is politically disruptive. In this reading, time is tumultuous and out of human control, composed not of a standard measure, but rather of radically novel events to which Pierre is subjected (61–82). 19 Walter Bezanson, “Historical and Critical Note,” in Clarel (1876), ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, The Writings of Herman Melville 12 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press and Chicago: The Newberry Library, 1991), 782n. 20 Herman Melville, Clarel (1876), ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. The Writings of Herman Melville 12 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press and Chicago: The Newberry Library, 1991), 238–39, lines 2.31.50–70. 21 See Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, 5 vol., trans. E.C. Otté (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1850–60). The case of the Southern Cross’ apparent shift and its explanation were widely known through Humboldt’s discussion in Cosmos. Melville himself may have been influenced by Humboldt’s rhapsodic treatment of the phenomenon. Humboldt notices for instance that the Southern Cross and Orion will replace one another in the span of thousands of years, which may contextualize Melville’s use of Orion as the Southern Cross’ opposite (Cosmos, vol. 1 [1850], 139). And Humboldt describes the effect the precession of the equinoxes may have had on primitive peoples— we are powerfully reminded of the impression that must have been excited, even in the rudest nations, when, at a certain part of the earth’s surface, they observed large, hitherto unseen stars appear in the horizon, as those in the feet of the Centaur, in the Southern Cross, in Eridanus or in Argo, while those with which they had been long familiar at home wholly disappeared. (Cosmos, vol. 3, [1852], 138n)

which could accord with Melville’s description of “the planted nations yet to be / ages hence” seeing in the southern sky new constellations. Humboldt describes the region of the Southern Cross as a “stellar swarm” (Cosmos, vol. 3, 136) which parallels Melville’s “starry swarm.” 22 Humboldt, Cosmos, vol. 1, 149. 23 See Jed Z. Buchald and Diane Greco Josefowicz, The Zodiac in Paris: How an Improbable Controversy Over and Ancient Artifact Provoked a Modern Debate Between Religion and Science (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010). 24 For the controversy as it was received in the nineteenth-century United States, see “Notice sur le Zodiaque de Denderah,” The North American Review 16.41 (October 1823): 233–42. 25 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale, eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, The Writings of Herman Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 458. 26 See Samuel Otter, “How Clarel Works,” in A Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Wyn Kelley. Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Blackwell Reference Online, http://www. blackwellreference.com.ezproxy4.library.arizona.edu/subscriber/book.html?id =g9781405122313_9781405122313 (accessed September 8, 2016). Otter’s reading of Clarel emphasizes how the poem explores divisions and gaps. Rather than

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“contain[ing] contradictions” or “suturing what it severs,” Clarel’s prosody, according to Otter, “often convey[s] a divided spiritual, political, and sexual condition.” What emerges then is a “surprisingly spacious poem,” a poem in which the space between substances can become poetic substance itself. 27 See Maurice S. Lee, Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in NineteenthCentury American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 61. 28 Melville, Clarel, 44, line 1.14.4. 29 Ibid., 38–39, lines 1.12.101–04. 30 Ibid., 39, lines 112–13. 31 Ibid., 48–49, lines 1.15.53–61. 32 Ibid., 49, line 1.15.80. 33 Ibid., 48, lines 1.15.23–25. 34 Ibid., 48, lines 1.15.33–34. 35 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 53. 36 Melville, Clarel, 60, lines 1.17.193–95. 37 Ibid., 60–61, lines 1.17.213–18. 38 Ibid., 5, lines 1.1.60–61. 39 Ibid., 419, lines 4.19.170–73. 40 Robert Penn Warren reads the characteristic delays in the poem as a defect, commenting that “[a]t the very end, after the death of Ruth, Clarel himself does come to life, but he comes to life after the action, such as it is, is over. The passion here is that of a man looking back on action, not that of a man involved in action” (Warren, Selected Poems, 44). 41 Melville, Clarel, 130, lines 1.43.5–7. 42 Ibid., 130, lines 1.43.1–7. 43 Ibid., 131, lines 1.44.50–56. 44 Ibid., 470, lines 4.26.74–78. 45 See J. Ellis McTaggart, “The Unreality of Time,” Mind 17.4 (October 1908): 457–74. McTaggart’s terms for tensed and tenseless theories of time are “A-series” and “B-series.” 46 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, vol. 1, trans. R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Trübner & Co., 1883), 236. Information about Melville’s marginal marks is drawn from Walker Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 2 vols., Harvard Dissertations in American and English Literature (New York: Garland, 1987). 47 Ibid., 240. 48 Ibid., 239. 49 Schopenhauer also, like Melville, associates tenseless time with lagging, though rather than the term “delay,” Schopenhauer uses the verb “to linger.” The “ordinary man,” according to Schopenhauer, “does not linger long over mere perception” (Schopenhauer, The World as Will, 242), “[h]e does not linger; only seeks to know his own way in life, together with all that might at any time become his way. Thus he makes topographical notes in the widest sense; over the consideration of life itself as such he wastes no time” (243). In contrast to the ordinary man, Schopenhauer describes the lingering of the genius in a section that Melville not only underscored but checked (a much rarer marking of emphasis in his marginal iconic lexicon): The man of genius, on the other hand, whose excessive power of knowledge frees it at times from the service of will, dwells on the consideration of life itself, strives

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to comprehend the Idea of each thing, not its relations to other things; and in doing this he often forgets to consider his own path in life, and therefore for the most part pursues it awkwardly enough. (243) 50 Alfred Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 197. 51 See Alfred Whitehead, “Time,” in Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy, ed. Edgar Sheffield Brightman (New York: Longman’s, Green and Company, 1927): 59–64 and Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). Whitehead: “Thus there is also a continuity in time, arising from indefinite divisibility. This continuity is an instance of the potentiality which is an essential element in the actual world … . Thus there is no continuity of becoming, but there is a becoming of continuity” (Whitehead, “Time,” 64). Shaviro: “being is subordinated to becoming; yet becoming is not an uninterrupted, universal flux, but a multiplicity of discrete ‘occasions,’ each of which is limited, determinate, and finite” (Shaviro, Universe of Things, 3–4). 52 Melville, Clarel, 278, line 3.5.64. 53 Ibid., 279, lines 3.5.99–105. 54 Ibid., 280, lines 3.5.152–54. 55 Ibid., 280, lines 3.5.159–63. 56 Ibid., 278, lines 3.5.86–89. 57 Ibid., 280, lines 3.5.137–143. 58 Ibid., 276, lines 3.5.1–10. 59 Ibid., 276, lines 3.5.13.12–13. 60 Ibid., 279, lines 3.5.124–25. 61 Ibid., 281, lines 3.5.203–4. 62 Ibid., 312, lines 3.13.40–42. 63 Ibid., 311–12, lines 3.13.26–39. 64 Ibid., 318, lines 3.14.136–37. 65 Ibid., 318, line 3.14.140. 66 Ibid., 318, lines 3.15.1–5. 67 Ibid., 486, lines 4.30.1–4. 68 Ibid., 491, lines 4.32.17. 69 Ibid., 494, lines 4.33.7–16. 70 Ibid., 495, lines 4.33.27–28. 71 Ibid., 496, lines 4.33.65–66. 72 Ibid., 496, line 4.33.71. 73 Ibid., 496, lines 4.33.72–74. 74 Ibid., 496, lines 4.33.75–76. 75 Ibid., 497, lines 4.34.18–22. 76 Ibid., 497, lines 4.34.41–44. 77 Ibid., 497, lines 4.34.45–48. 78 Ibid., 498, lines 4.35.1–2. 79 Ibid., 498, line 4.35.7. 80 Ibid., 498, lines 4.35.10–11. 81 Ibid., 498, lines 4.35.16–17. 82 Ibid., 499, lines 4.35.29–34. 83 Ibid., 499, line 3.35.28.

Part Two

Love Stories

5

The Lawyer’s Tale: Preference, Responsibility, and Personhood in Melville’s “Story of Wall-street” Rachel Cole

Over the past twenty-five years, Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener; A Story of Wallstreet” has become what Timothy J. Deines and Steven Goodman call a “quilting point” for poststructuralist philosophers.1 In many of these accounts, Bartleby stands as a figure of indeterminacy and indifference: a man without preferences. Gilles Deleuze, for example, writes that Bartleby’s “formula”—his famous “I would prefer not to”—“hollows out an ever expanding zone of indiscernibility or indetermination between some nonpreferred activities and a preferable activity.”2 Deleuze imagines this zone of indifference as a space of liberation, of “unlimited becoming.”3 Giorgio Agamben agrees, but takes the concept one step further or, more precisely, one step back: “As Deleuze suggests, the formula … opens a zone of indistinction between yes and no, the preferable and the nonpreferable. But also … between the potential to be (or do) and the potential not to be (or do).”4 For Agamben, the freedom of indifference is not the freedom to become, which suggests a movement forward through time, but the freedom to remain temporally suspended, in the fullness of a moment before some things are done, and others not. In his view, indifference spares us the exclusion that comes with actualization as some potentialities are realized at the expense of others; it spares us the impoverishment of actuality itself. But not all poststructuralist readings of “Bartleby” are the same. Jacques Derrida’s relatively fleeting reference to the scrivener in The Gift of Death gestures toward a significantly different account. Derrida’s Bartleby is a figure of responsibility, a condition of surprising determinacy synonymous with preference, not indifference. As we shall see, Derrida’s identification of Bartleby with responsibility is compelling. It recalls the story’s interest in accountability and charity—how we should, and whether we can, fulfill our obligations to other people—and suggests new terms with which to articulate Melville’s treatment of these themes. Derrida’s Melville associates obligation with both preference and personhood. Bartleby, on this account, exemplifies the fact that the responsibility we assume for others reflects the values and priorities that constitute the self. But Derrida’s reading also leaves many of the details of Melville’s Many thanks to Jerry Harp, Molly Hiro, and Mark Knell for their responses to earlier drafts of this essay.

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thinking about responsibility, preference, and personhood unexplored. And if we attend to those details, we find a startlingly dark vision of social life—much darker than that proposed by Derrida. As we shall see, for Melville as for Derrida, responsible personhood is a social phenomenon, a matter of how one presents oneself to, and is then experienced by, other people. For both of these philosophers, moreover, the social world is not abstract but concrete—a world of persons whose constitutive preferences, and thus whose very selves, are made manifest in material stances and actions. On the problems posed by this world, however, Melville and Derrida disagree. According to Derrida, we define ourselves as persons by acting responsibly toward others; we constitute our personhood by recognizing theirs. But, he argues, we can never fully enact such responsibility because all persons deserve to be prioritized, and we cannot prioritize one person without deprioritizing all the rest. Any material resources devoted to one, he explains, must be denied to all others, each of whom has an equivalent claim. None of us has enough resources to respond to such universal demand. Even if we did, it would do no good, for the magnitude of the demand is a function not only of its universality but of its exclusivity. Again, on Derrida’s definition, personhood demands not equal treatment but priority: to be a person is to be placed above or before others. As a result, the recognition of one person’s personhood, which coincides with the assertion of our own, will always entail a denial of any other person’s personhood, and will thus compromise our own. Melville has a different understanding of the problem facing those who would live as and among persons. In “Bartleby,” the competition over resources plays out on a much narrower scale. The material demands people make on one another are quite small and well defined (they amount, in the story’s paradigmatic case, to a few square feet of office space) and they are contested between two or three or five persons rather than Derrida’s “all.” This difference in scale is significant. From Melville’s perspective, it is difficult to accommodate others not because the claim on any given resource is both universal and exclusive but because our own status as persons depends on our readiness to publically monopolize all the resources we find to hand—especially real estate. It is difficult to meet the needs of other people even when those needs are minimal because the conflict is not among all the persons we might recognize but between each of those persons and ourselves. In Melville’s darkly critical vision of sociality, to share with others, even when resources are abundant and claimants relatively few, is to risk social nullity.5

“I like to be stationary”: Bartleby and preference Because Deleuze’s and Agamben’s descriptions of Bartleby have been so influential, I want to begin by reviewing the case for Bartleby as a figure of preference rather than indifference. Deleuze identifies Bartleby with a “formula,” but Bartleby’s dialogue is not in fact formulaic. At the beginning of the story his signature expression—his frequently iterated “I would prefer not to”—is, as Deleuze observes, negative, intransitive, and grammatically conditional. But by the end of the story Bartleby’s statements have

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become quite different: positive, transitive, and grammatically unconditional. By the end of the story, Bartleby no longer “would prefer not to.” Increasingly, Bartleby prefers. Moreover, he exercises this preference materially, by coming to occupy a particular space. What Bartleby prefers is to be stationary and, more specifically, to stay where he is, in what we would now call his cubicle at No. — Wall Street. It is easy to read Bartleby’s remarkably static presence as inert, but this is largely an effect of the story’s relatively narrow narrative scale. In fact, his presence is dynamic: Bartleby’s relationship to the place where he is develops, and the ways in which it changes over the course of Melville’s story represent a significant element of the work’s minimalist but not irrelevant plot. Attending to this development, we find not the abstract indifference described by Deleuze and Agamben but a tale of concrete occupation, material dispossession, and—above all—preference. When Bartleby first appears, in apparent response to an advertisement for help, the lawyer establishes a “retreat” for him within his (the lawyer’s) own inner office, placing a desk close up to a window and enclosing both behind a green folding screen.6 At first all seems well as Bartleby performs “an extraordinary quantity of writing.”7 But after Bartleby begins to “prefer not to” the narrator begins to notice another oddity about the new scrivener. Bartleby “never went anywhere … . He was a perpetual sentry in the corner.”8 “One prime thing was this,—he was always there;—first in the morning, continually through the day, and the last at night.”9 The one time Bartleby leaves the office serves more to underscore than to relieve his constant presence. One Sunday, the narrator drops in on his way to church and cannot fit his key into the lock. Bartleby has somehow acquired his own key, and it now occupies the keyhole from the inside. Nor will Bartleby allow the narrator to enter the office until he himself has left.10 This experience affords the lawyer an important revelation: the reason Bartleby is there first in the morning and last at night is that he doesn’t go home; he doesn’t have a(nother) home but is living in the office; he really is always there. Moreover, he is not simply there at the pleasure of the man who initially installed him. He has begun to exercise control over the space, first denying and then permitting the lawyer’s own presence. He has begun to act, in other words, as though he had a claim to this little bit of real estate; he has occupied it and effectively declared it his. His possession, asserted in and through a gesture of exclusion, implies the lawyer’s dispossession, or at the very least introduces the notion of competition between them. At this moment, the “Story of Wall-street” becomes a property dispute. Bartleby’s declaration of exclusive possession touches off the first of two extended conversations in which the scrivener departs from his famous verbal formula. In  reviewing the changes to Bartleby’s speech in this scene, I want to note that Melville pairs those changes with references to occupation and the contest over space at No.  —. As the scene opens, the lawyer, piqued and pained by the idea of Bartleby living at No. — rather than in a proper home, decides to press him “touching his history, &c.” He asks Bartleby where he was born.11 In doing so, he hopes to fix Bartleby elsewhere in space—to locate him with respect to some natal spot rather than the office. At first, Bartleby gives his by-now standard “I would prefer not to,” but when the lawyer continues to press, the scrivener reacts. Rather than continue to

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reiterate his negative, intransitive, and conditional “I would prefer not to,” he states a positive preference for a particular object, albeit one that is limited to a certain time frame and almost immediately resolves into a negative: “At present I prefer to give no answer.” The lawyer is “nettled” by this response. He decides to retreat a bit on the matter of Bartleby’s history but advances on the scrivener physically, “familiarly draw[ing]” his own chair into Bartleby’s cubicle in order to press him on the topic of examining papers: “Say now you will help to examine papers tomorrow or next day: in short, say now that in a day or two you will begin to be a little reasonable:—say so, Bartleby.” Bartleby seems to recognize the ambiguity in the lawyer’s behavior. He takes a full step back from his brief sally into the positive, but maintains his new interest in the transitive mode, again specifying an object: “At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable.”12 This might have been the end of it. The lawyer might have retreated physically as well as rhetorically, back to his own desk; the scrivener might have returned to his original rhetorical ground—all the way back to “I would prefer not to.” But the conversation is interrupted, first by Nippers and then by Turkey, who crowds himself into the space behind Bartleby’s screen, causing the lawyer to “jostle” him. Bartleby responds to this now concussive spatial incursion with his strongest statement yet, one that is, though conditional, positive and transitive, and neither resolves into a negative nor is qualified in terms of its temporality: “‘I would prefer to be left alone here,’ said Bartleby, as if offended at being mobbed in his privacy.”13 The next morning, he refuses not only to examine but also to write. Bartleby departs from his formula a second time in a conversation that takes place not in the office but just outside, in the stairwell of No. —. In the pages leading up to this exchange, the lawyer, frustrated with Bartleby’s occupation of his office rooms, has abandoned the space to the scrivener, and taken new rooms elsewhere in the neighborhood. I will discuss the lawyer’s attempt to escape Bartleby’s presence at some length in the section “The lawyer’s tale, part II.” For now, it is sufficient to recall that it fails. The old office’s new tenants call the lawyer back to No. — Wall Street. “[Y]ou are responsible for the man you left there,” they complain.14 “I was the last person known to have any thing to do with him,” the narrator acknowledges, “and they held me to the terrible account.” He returns to his “old haunt,” and to the man who has continued to haunt it in his absence. Finding the scrivener, who has been thrust out of the office proper, sitting on the banister of the building’s stairway (“‘What are you doing here, Bartleby?’ said I. ‘Sitting upon the banister,’ he mildly replied”), the lawyer tries to entice him into some different occupation.15 Significantly, his proposals represent not only professional but spatial alternatives—clerk in a dry-goods store, bill collector in the country, gentleman’s companion in Europe. Bartleby refuses them all. “I would prefer not to make any change,” he explains with another transitive, albeit negative statement. And then, with a bald assertion of affinity that gives the lie to Deleuze’s and Agamben’s descriptions of his indifference, particularly with regard to his physical location: “I like to be stationary.”16 At the end of Melville’s story, Bartleby dies in the Tombs. The coincidence of his dying with his removal from the office suggests his death is a result of the new tenants’ refusal to accommodate his preference to be stationary. This reading may

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seem to go too far. Bartleby’s markedly abstract preference may seem to dissolve into the theoretical or even the hypothetical. He follows it, after all, with a caveat: “But I am not particular.”17 The scrivener’s qualification, however, is a red herring. The preference to be stationary is irreducibly indexical. It is a markedly abstract statement that makes paradoxically strict reference to a particular, concrete place. Whatever attitude one purports to have toward particularity, if one likes to be stationary, one prefers to stay in a particular place: here, just here, in this place rather than any other. The experience of being stationary somewhere else—for example in a prison, which would seem to promise more stasis than any other location—entails movement, at least initially, in the form of relocation. As such, it represents a loss. Bartleby’s behavior changes in the wake of that loss, in two ways: he refuses food, going from a minimal diet of ginger nuts and cheese to nothing at all, and he refuses society. In prison, he refuses even to look at the lawyer: “I know you, … and I want nothing to say to you.” Tellingly, Bartleby associates his recognition of the lawyer with his rejection of him. The lawyer is not just anyone, but someone in particular (indexed here by the pronoun “you”), and Bartleby wants nothing to say not just to anyone, but to this one, this you. Bartleby’s rejection of this particular person is echoed by his rejection of the particular space he now occupies. “I know where I am,” he says in response to the lawyer’s exhortations regarding the prison’s amenities (“there is the sky, and here is the grass”).18 The lawyer is not just anyone, and the prison is not just anywhere, not just any here. It is some place specific and, the parallel syntax of the two rejections suggests, not where Bartleby wants to be. Having declared his particular preference, Bartleby acts on it, and dies.

Paramount considerations: Preference and personhood I turn now to Derrida’s Bartleby, and to the difference between his reading and those of Deleuze and Agamben. Derrida’s brief treatment of the scrivener, in the third chapter of The Gift of Death, initially resembles others’, but very quickly turns in a different direction. Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to,” Derrida writes, “utters nothing fixed, determinable, positive, or negative.” But in saying nothing general or determinable, Bartleby doesn’t say absolutely nothing. I would prefer not to looks like an incomplete sentence. Its indeterminacy creates a tension: it opens onto a sort of reserve of incompleteness; it announces a temporary or provisional reserve, one involving a proviso. Can we not find there the secret of a hypothetical reference to some indecipherable providence or prudence? We don’t know what he wants or means to say, or what he doesn’t want to do or say, but we are given to understand quite clearly that he would prefer not to.19

Like Deleuze and Agamben, Derrida describes Bartleby’s strange speech as “indeterminate.” Its indeterminacy, moreover, indicates a “reserve of incompleteness” that anticipates both Deleuze’s talk of “becoming” and Agamben’s interest in

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potentiality. But for Derrida this reserve is “provisional”; it “involves a proviso”: “Can we not find there the secret of a hypothetical reference to some indecipherable providence or prudence?” With this question, Derrida invokes a different sort of indeterminacy than that described by Deleuze and Agamben. Derrida’s indeterminacy results not from indistinction and indifference but from obstruction, from secrecy. Bartleby’s preference may be negative—it may be a preference “not to”—but it is positively and as such distinctly and determinately articulated (“we are given to understand quite clearly that he would prefer not to”). Indeterminacy enters the picture because this distinct, determinate preference points in turn to something else—a positive but inaccessible and as such indeterminable “providence or prudence.” With this talk of secret references, Derrida invokes one of “Bartleby”’s central themes—reasons. Quite early on, the lawyer develops a strategy for coping with Bartleby and his eccentric behavior. He assumes the scrivener has reasons for acting as he does: It seemed to me that while I had been addressing him, he carefully revolved every statement that I made; fully comprehended the meaning; could not gainsay the irresistible conclusion; but, at the same time, some paramount consideration prevailed with him to reply as he did.20

It’s not that the pale man is beyond sense, the lawyer suggests. It’s not that he’s incapable of or resistant to logical thought and action. We just don’t know what premises inform his conclusions, making them different from our own: “some paramount consideration prevailed with him” (my emphasis). At times, the lawyer attempts to guess at Bartleby’s reasons and respond appropriately, as when he assumes that Bartleby has something wrong with his eyes, and spares him text-work in order to provide relief. More frequently, he simply humors Bartleby’s deference to his paramount consideration, whatever it is. He charitably accommodates Bartleby’s strange behavior, suffering it by making room for it, giving it office space. Derrida, then, is following the lawyer’s lead when he assumes, or “hypothesizes,” that Bartleby has some “paramount consideration,” that the scrivener is keeping a “secret.”21 Derrida’s suggestion that Bartleby has a consideration—a reason—that is both actual and indecipherable not because it cannot be deciphered but because it is inaccessible to ciphering is part of a broader argument. All reasons, Derrida suggests, are indecipherable in this way; Bartleby’s inscrutability exemplifies what it means for a person to have a reason. In order to understand this claim, which goes against a familiar account of why reasons are important—because they represent common ground among rational beings, allowing us to understand others’ behavior or persuade them to act differently—we need to review a bit more of Derrida’s thought. Bartleby enters Derrida’s discussion in the course of a chapter whose primary figure is the biblical Abraham. Derrida is interested in Abraham’s language, the fact that Abraham speaks “in order not to say anything or to say something other than what one thinks … in such a way as to intrigue, disconcert, question …”22 Abraham, too, keeps secrets; specifically, he avoids telling his wife Sarah why he is ready to kill their

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son Isaac. Because of Abraham’s silence, Derrida notes, his actions appear senseless. Abraham does not explain why the child is to be killed. More precisely, he does not explain why he, Abraham, is going to kill him: he does not say that a command has come from God.23 This last distinction, between why the child is to be killed and why Abraham is going to kill him, is important. Abraham keeps a secret, but the secret he keeps is not why Isaac is to be killed. Derrida is insistent on this point. Abraham doesn’t know why Isaac is to be killed. That is God’s secret. What Abraham keeps secret is the fact of God’s command, and more precisely the fact that God’s command is the reason for his (Abraham’s) behavior. Abraham keeps this secret in order to make that behavior his own. He does it, in other words, in order to achieve responsibility. If Abraham’s behavior could be justified—with reference to a divine command or any other reason—if it were decipherable, accessible to others’ understanding, it would not be absolutely his. It would be a common conclusion, something anyone would do. It would refer to a commonly held standard for ethical behavior, not solely to himself. “[I]f decisionmaking is relegated to a knowledge that it is content to follow or to develop,” Derrida argues, “then it is no more a responsible decision, it is the technical deployment of a cognitive apparatus, the simple mechanistic deployment of a theorem.”24 Only by keeping such ­secrets—inserting ourselves between our premises and the logical conclusions anyone would draw from them, substituting ourselves for that rational causality—do we become responsible beings. This model of responsibility is central to Derrida’s definition of personhood. A person, he explains, is “precisely the place and subject of all responsibility.”25 The person is an entity who, in order to count as a who, places herself between premise and conclusion, taking from the premise its power to dictate the conclusion, or replacing that power with her own readiness to submit to the conclusions dictated by the premise according to logic, without ever admitting the fact of that submission, the fact that logic is even involved. Derrida observes that Bartleby’s inscrutable assertion, his “I would prefer not to,” is “haunted” by the “silhouette of a content.” If I am following Derrida’s thinking correctly, this silhouette is personhood itself: a figure, created or asserted by an agent who does not exist as an agent until he asserts it, that blocks our ability to see the details within its outlines—the agent’s reasons, his paramount considerations—and yet retains the shape of those details—those reasons—since it (or he) acts in accordance with them even as he obscures them from view. The person, on this model, is both the one who casts a silhouette by imposing himself between light (knowledge) and an object (a reason) and the silhouette itself, the shadowy outline of the reason, or, more precisely, its manifestation in the person’s actions or behavior.26 In sections “The lawyer’s tale, part I” and “The lawyer’s tale, part II”, I will discuss facets of Melville’s story that complicate both Derrida’s reading of Bartleby and his account of what is at stake in responsible personhood. Before doing so, however, I want to highlight a few additional features of Derrida’s discussion that resonate with elements of Melville’s thought. First, Derrida’s model of personhood is social in two senses. One: personhood always takes place, is declared and constituted, in the eyes

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of other people. As a phenomenon, it is located within the experience of others, not the self, those whose access to reasons is blocked, not the person doing and created by the blocking. Two: personhood is constituted as a commitment to another person. What Abraham refuses to let others see in the interest of asserting his own responsible personhood is the fact that his reason for killing his son is God. His reason is not God’s reason, of which Abraham has no knowledge because God, too, keeps secrets. Abraham’s reason for killing his son is that he is ready to defer to God. He is ready to submit to God’s command without demanding to hear God’s reasons, to secretly accept God’s assertion of personal responsibility for or authority over the events that follow, even as he (Abraham) takes responsibility for those events in the eyes of other human beings. Abraham’s reason, in other words, is God himself, God as secret-keeper, God as person. Abraham’s own personhood, then, refers to another’s: it is in recognizing God as a person that Abraham establishes himself as one. The fact that the person to whom Abraham defers in order to constitute his own personhood is God—as opposed, for example, to another human being—adds yet another dimension to Derridian personhood. God, unlike Abraham, depends on secret-keeping not only for his individuality per se, but for the specific content of that individuality, his identity as the divinity. “God doesn’t give his reasons …,” Derrida notes at one point; “he doesn’t have to give his reasons or share anything with us: neither his motivations, if he has any, nor his deliberations, nor his decisions. Otherwise he wouldn’t be God …”27 Derrida makes this comment rather casually, but it is significant. What we recognize when we recognize God’s divinity is not merely his ontology but his position in a hierarchy. His secret-keeping is both responsibility and privilege, status as a being apart from and above humankind. And with this privilege comes power. From one perspective, this power looks like the power to command. But Derrida asks us to understand it more specifically. What God requires of Abraham, Derrida explains, is not murder but priority. God demands that Abraham put his commitment to God above his commitment to his only son. Abraham’s response to this demand, of course, is never in question. God, after all, is God: a superior being; the superior being. Of course he will take priority, even over Abraham’s own child. But perhaps the most challenging facet of Derrida’s thinking about personhood is that while God is a special instance of the figure of the secretkeeper, in that he is divine rather than human, he is also, for Derrida, just another instance of that figure—as much and no more of a secret-keeper than any other. What Abraham recognizes when he recognizes God as divine—his declared singularity, his claim to be an exception to any rational standard or generally applicable rule—is no more than personhood itself. Thus, on Derrida’s model, all persons, all recognized secret-keepers, partake in the superiority of divinity. In the end, “what can be said about Abraham’s relation to God can be said about my relation … to my neighbor or my loved ones who are as inaccessible to me, as secret and transcendent as Jahweh …”28 This means that all personhood, not just divine personhood (the phrase has become redundant), entails priority—the right to be put before others. And this,

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Derrida explains, is a problem, as it means personhood poses an irreducible ethical paradox: What binds me thus in my singularity to the absolute singularity of the other, immediately propels me into the space or risk of absolute sacrifice. There are also others, an infinite number of them, the innumerable generality of others to whom I should be bound by the same responsibility.29

Persons rarely demand that we demonstrate our recognition of their personhood by committing murder. But because personhood is privilege, not just value but relative value, the act of recognizing the personhood of one will always amount to violence against the personhood, if not the life, of another.30 For Derrida, personhood is a material phenomenon, manifest in the actions taken by persons in the world. This means that the ethical violence associated with personhood on his model is never merely abstract. To assert priority is to command the material resources needed for action—Derrida alludes to food and medicine as well as less tangible material goods like time and attention. To acknowledge priority, however, is to distribute those resources unequally. To feed your own child but not a stranger is to both fulfill a duty and fail to fulfill one. In the end, Derrida argues, he cannot avoid betraying even his own sons, “each of whom is the only son I sacrifice to the other, every one being sacrificed to every one else in this land of Moriah that is our habitat every second of every day.”31 The last thing I want to emphasize before turning to my own reading of “Bartleby” is that in its materiality Derrida’s model challenges two familiar and frequently opposed definitions of personhood: that which awards personhood on the basis of rationality (which the Derridian person possesses but will never admit), and that which associates personhood with freedom, especially the freedom to be irrational (which the Derridian person does not claim). Both of these definitions emphasize the importance of the content of reasons, that which would be articulated or deciphered if we were to articulate or decipher them. In his own work on responsibility and personhood, Charles Larmore suggests a different approach. What we generally call a reason, he explains, that articulable or decipherable content, is more accurately described as a belief. “It is … the relation of these beliefs … to our options, their bearing on the question of what we ought to believe or do, the fact that they count in favor of a certain conclusion, that makes them reasons.”32 What makes something a reason, Larmore argues, is not its content but its relationship to action, “the fact that it counts in favor of ” doing this rather than that. Reason by Larmore’s definition is thus a matter of arithmetic rather than articulation. The factors—the beliefs—that are being counted, he suggests, may not even be fully articulated in the moment the counting occurs. Somewhat surprisingly, the paradigmatic example of reason on Larmore’s model is the purely affective experience of desire. Desire for an object may “impel” us to “think about” beliefs, to consider what exactly counts in favor of the desired object and the action of pursuing it.33 But that consideration is not the same as desire itself. Desire involves valuation rather than deliberation.

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Larmore’s reference to “options” recalls both Agamben’s discussion of the exclusion entailed by actualization and Derrida’s concern over mutually exclusive demands. Valuation, insofar as it determines action, is always comparative. Desire entails the weighing of one action—or the belief that counts in favor of that action—against another. In sum, being reasonable, on this model, amounts to the quantitative experience of something mattering more than other things and enough for us to act one way rather than another. Its antonym is not irrationality, a lack of or freedom from logical thinking, but indifference, a lack of or freedom from caring. To put all of this in Melville’s terms, reason is preference. Reading Derrida’s work alongside of Larmore’s gives us a richer sense of the responsible personhood Derrida sees in Melville’s Bartleby. Again, Derrida defines a person as someone who locates the cause of his behavior in rather than beyond himself, who—like Bartleby—refuses to acknowledge the external factors which have determined his actions, and who keeps those factors and the very existence of those factors secret, even as he reflects them in his own figure and gestures. Larmore’s work suggests that a person—say, Bartleby—is one to whom those unacknowledged factors matter enough to determine action. He is one who experiences their significance and, in his silence, insists on that experience itself as significant, so significant that it overshadows the universality of logical consequence. Larmore, like Derrida, recognizes logic as imperative: certain beliefs, certain considerations, certain premises dictate certain actions. Larmore, like Derrida, argues that it remains important to assert that those premises are mine specifically. For Larmore, however, the fact that they are mine means more explicitly that I value them, that they move me (in Bartleby’s case, to stand still). The experience of their value, the experience of preference, is not only what makes them mine, but what makes me, me—an individual and this individual in particular—a person.

The lawyer’s tale, part I Derrida’s reading of Melville’s story is insightful on several points: it recognizes that Bartleby both has and exercises preference; it offers an account of how one might, as Melville does, associate preference with reasons; and it assumes that “Bartleby” is both a character study and a reflection on social life. But Derrida’s reading also overlooks several significant elements of Melville’s work. In Derrida’s account, the story’s social dynamic plays out across the boundary between text and world: the person who responds to Bartleby’s preferential actions is Melville’s reader. This ignores the fact that the story itself models such response in the person of a second character—Melville’s lawyer-narrator. As many readers observe, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is as much about its narrator as it is about the subject of his narrative: it is also the lawyer’s tale. And if we attend to the lawyer—both his response to Bartleby’s manifest preferences and the ways he enacts his own—we find that Melville’s thinking diverges significantly from Derrida’s with regard to the challenge, if not the structure, of responsible personhood.

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The need to acknowledge the lawyer’s role in the story prompts us to reconsider Derrida’s analogy between Bartleby and Abraham. The notion that the inscrutable Bartleby is comparable to Abraham locates Melville’s reader in the position of Sarah, Abraham’s wife: “she to whom nothing is said.”34 This overlooks the fact that there is already a Sarah-figure in Melville’s tale—the lawyer-narrator. It also fails to recognize that from our perspective as readers, the stronger analogue to Abraham in Melville’s story is the narrator himself. As readers of the Bible, we, unlike Sarah, have access to Abraham’s reasons; we know about the commandment from God. Similarly, as readers of “Bartleby,” we have ready access to the lawyer’s thoughts and considerations. At least once in Melville’s tale, moreover, the lawyer’s considerations actually recall Abraham’s: like Abraham, the lawyer acts, or at least says he acts, in deference to God. The passages in which the lawyer refers to God are worth rereading: they take us to the heart of Melville’s thinking about responsibility, both for ourselves and toward other people. As we have seen, the lawyer initially tries to cope with Bartleby by assuming the scrivener has reasons for his odd behavior. Unfortunately, this strategy fails. The  lawyer thinks that humoring Bartleby would “cost me little or nothing, while I lay up in my soul what will eventually prove a sweet morsel for my conscience.”35 But Bartleby proves just too irritating. The lawyer’s initial cost-benefit analysis of living with the scrivener underestimates the costs to the lawyer’s nerves. Midway through the story, his resentment of the man becomes nearly homicidal. Will I become another John C. Colt, he thinks, driven to kill Bartleby in the “unhallowed” inhumanity of the office as Colt killed Samuel Adams? These murderous reflections are probably only half-serious—the lawyer is nothing if not melodramatic. But even half-serious homicidal mania represents a significant crisis. Fortunately for everyone, the lawyer manages to avoid becoming a murderer, “grappling” and “throwing” not the Adams Bartleby plays to his Colt but his own human weakness, “this old Adam of resentment.”36 How? Why, simply by recalling the divine injunction: “A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another.” Yes, this it was that saved me. Aside from higher considerations, charity often operates as a vastly wise and prudent principle—a great safeguard to its possessor. Men have committed murder for jealousy’s sake, and anger’s sake, and hatred’s sake, and selfishness’ sake, and spiritual pride’s sake; but no man that ever I heard of, ever committed a diabolical murder for sweet charity’s sake. Mere self-interest, then, if no better motive can be enlisted, should, especially with high-tempered men, prompt all beings to charity and philanthropy. At any rate, upon the occasion in question, I strove to drown my exasperated feelings towards the scrivener by benevolently construing his conduct.37

It is tempting, when reading this passage, to focus on the narrator’s continued economic reasoning—his attempt to construct a second cost-benefit analysis in favor of generosity. The self-interested man, he suggests, will “safeguard” his interest by opting for charity over murder; charity is ironically not only the “sweet” but the

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“prudent” option. But I would argue that self-interest is not the lawyer’s only, or even his paramount consideration here. He protests too much on this point for it to be convincing, and his awkward attempt at a casual segue after making the case for selfinterest (“At any rate …”) suggests his next attempt to justify a charitable agenda may be more important. Stepping away from economic analysis, he reads a bit in Edwards and Priestly and with the help of those texts “slid[es] into the persuasion” that his charity refers to the very “higher considerations” the previous paragraph so blithely set aside: these troubles of mine touching the scrivener, had been all predestinated from eternity, and Bartleby was billeted upon me for some mysterious purpose of an allwise Providence, which it was not for a mere mortal like me to fathom … . At least I see it, I feel it; I penetrate to the predestined purpose of my life. I am content. Others may have loftier parts to enact; but my mission in this world, Bartleby, is to furnish you with office-room for such period as you may see fit to remain.38

With this avowal that accommodating Bartleby is his destiny, that he is taking commands from God, the lawyer places himself rather than the scrivener in Abraham’s position. His responsibility for Bartleby is a function of his responsibility toward God, a way of recognizing God’s “all-wise” and immortal superiority. This introduction of God in to the proceedings has obvious strategic benefits for the lawyer. First, it introduces a third party to the real estate dispute, one who can recognize the lawyer’s authority over the property. If, with blatant disregard for “earthly rights,” Bartleby’s occupation of the office threatens to outweigh the fact that it is the lawyer who pays the rent and taxes, Providence itself ratifies his status as landlord (or at least first tenant): “billeting” the scrivener upon the lawyer, God recognizes the fact that it is the lawyer’s name and not Bartleby’s on the lease.39 As we have seen, at the moment Bartleby refuses the lawyer entry to the office, Melville seems to conflate occupation with authority. Here, he complicates the question by having his narrator suggest, and look to God to guarantee, a potential distinction between occupation and authority, between the use and management of real estate. More importantly, by referring to God the lawyer is able to discount the possibility that he has come to favor Bartleby, to value him in some untoward way. His decision to accommodate Bartleby in the office looks at the very least like favoritism. The lawyer seems to prefer Bartleby to anyone else in the story. He does not merely furnish Bartleby with office room; he grants that room to Bartleby at other people’s expense. Those other people include both himself (Bartleby gets a portion of what used to be his private office) and the rest of his employees. Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut (the two other scriveners and the office boy) bear the cost of Bartleby’s office room by assuming Bartleby’s share of the office work. If Bartleby is to live rent-free, if he is to live without laboring for the lawyer’s practice, which must pay rent as part of its overhead, others have to labor more, producing and proofing more copies of the legal documents that are the practice’s stock-in-trade. The lawyer’s employees feel the

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pain of this redistribution of labor. They complain vehemently. “‘Prefer not, eh?’ gritted Nippers—‘I’d prefer him, if I were you, sir,’ addressing me—‘I’d prefer him; I’d give him preferences, the stubborn mule! What is it, sir, pray, that he prefers not to do now?’”40 And, as we saw in the section “ ‘I like to be stationary’: Bartleby and preference,” they complain physically. “[C]rowding” into the cubicle, causing the lawyer to “jostle” Bartleby in their eagerness to make themselves heard, they take back a little bit of the contested office space as recompense for their pains. Here Melville anticipates Derrida’s references to the distribution of material resources and the problematic fact that responsibility toward one person entails favoring him at the expense of others. Such favoritism suggests some paramount consideration, and God’s divinity provides a more acceptable one than that the lawyer just likes Bartleby best. But Melville, like Derrida, complicates this reference to the distinction between God and human beings. He does so not by questioning the singularity of God but by refusing to allow us to take the lawyer’s declaration that he really favors God, and not Bartleby, at face value. If the lawyer is an Abraham in his respectful submission to God, Bartleby should represent a relatively lucky Isaac, a prop rather than an actor in the serial drama of divine commandment and human obedience. And yet Bartleby is not another Isaac. Isaac’s preferences, which presumably include not being slaughtered by his father, find no place in Abraham’s story. Bartleby’s preferences, in contrast, are central to the lawyer’s understanding of what he must do: “furnish you with office-room for such period as you may see fit to remain” (my emphasis). The scrivener’s preferences enter into the lawyer’s understanding of his sacred mission, of course, because the lawyer, unlike his biblical predecessor, does not enjoy direct communication with the divine. He can only deduce God’s commandments—God’s preferences—from Bartleby’s stubborn assertion of his preference. Unlike Abraham, in other words, the lawyer is actually in relationship not with God but with another human being. By referring Bartleby’s preference back to God, the lawyer proposes that it counts toward the same actions as God’s. He assumes that God, like Bartleby, wants Bartleby to remain “for such period as [Bartleby] may see fit.” This relieves the lawyer of the need to probe Bartleby for reasons or resist his demands. God’s preferences are, by definition, the last word. God is he who, in his superiority, brooks neither question nor refusal. God, as we have seen in our discussion of Derrida, is the ultimate person.41 But God, in this story, remains a figure in, if not a figment of, the lawyer’s imagination. He makes no appearances in the world described by Melville’s tale. Within the context of that world, as opposed to that of the lawyer’s imagination, he (the lawyer) acts as though the scrivener’s preference were sufficient to determine his actions. He treats Bartleby as though the scrivener himself held sufficient authority or worth to command his preference, without reference to a higher power. In this way, again, Melville anticipates Derrida’s suggestion that the distinction between divinity and humanity in such scenarios is tenuous at best. Referring to God without actually experiencing his presence apart from that of Bartleby, the lawyer dissembles. He attempts to conceal his readiness to award Bartleby—a human being— the putatively divine privilege of keeping secrets. He tries to disguise his willingness to accommodate Bartleby’s preferences for the sake of the scrivener alone, out of some

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sense of the man’s own worth, which is to say out of his (the lawyer’s) preference for Bartleby as a person.

The lawyer’s tale, part II The complexity of the lawyer’s appeal to God as the ultimate referent of his relationship to Bartleby sets the stage for what happens next, in what for me is the most crucial passage for understanding Melville’s thinking about preference, responsibility, and personhood in a material social world. As we have seen, about midway through the story the lawyer decides literally to accommodate Bartleby by furnishing him with office space. But he is comfortable with that accommodation only so long as it is between him, Bartleby, his employees, and (allegedly) God. When other lawyers—his colleagues and professional neighbors—observe that accommodation and question it, he quickly loses his nerve. When a Reference was going on, and the room full of lawyers and witnesses and business was driving fast; some deeply occupied legal gentleman present, seeing Bartleby wholly unemployed, would request him to run round to his (the legal gentleman’s) office and fetch some papers for him. Thereupon, Bartleby would tranquilly decline and remain as idle as before. Then the lawyer would give a great stare, and turn to me. And what could I say? At last I was made aware that all through the circle of my professional acquaintance, a whisper of wonder was running round, having reference to the strange creature I kept at my office. This worried me very much.42

Confronted with Bartleby’s presence, the lawyer’s colleagues “turn” to the lawyer to explain. This would seem to be what the lawyer wants: his colleagues do not bother to question Bartleby; they recognize the lawyer as the authority in situ. But this recognition and his response to it raise more questions about the lawyer’s earlier references to God. When his colleagues ask him to explain or account for Bartleby, he has no answer: “And what could I say?” From one angle, this response makes sense. He doesn’t know why Bartleby is the way he is. Bartleby won’t say, and in any case the lawyer has allegedly accepted Bartleby by referring the scrivener’s preferences back to God, whose own preferences are beyond explanation. The lawyer thus has no choice but to ask his colleagues to accept a certain amount of silence. But he takes that silence further. He denies his colleagues even the explanation that he has accepted Bartleby in obedience to divine command. In other words, the lawyer himself becomes a secret-keeper. In Derridian terms, he acts like Abraham (or Bartleby) and asserts his own personhood. He asks his colleagues to accept his silence, and with it his decision regarding the disposal of his office space. Unlike Abraham or Bartleby, however, the lawyer assumes absolute responsibility only for a moment. Apparently, he is unable to persist in the stance. Willing to act as if Bartleby’s (or God’s) preferences were his own by allowing the scrivener to live free

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and idle in his offices, the lawyer is not willing to be regarded by others as if Bartleby’s (or God’s) preferences were his own. Is the problem that the other lawyers’ desire for an explanation for Bartleby’s behavior recalls his own earlier longings to have an account of the scrivener’s reasons? Perhaps. “[T]o be sure, when I reflected upon it,” he remarks, “it was not strange that people entering my office should be struck by the peculiar aspect of the unaccountable Bartleby, and so be tempted to throw out some sinister observations concerning him.”43 And yet something more seems to be at stake in the way Melville portrays the lawyer’s response to his colleagues’ queries. For one thing, the lawyer experiences his colleagues’ questions, which as we have observed would seem to acknowledge his authority, as one more encroachment upon his private professional space. His office becomes vulnerable to further occupation as his colleagues obtrude their “unsolicited and uncharitable” comments and “intrude[] their relentless remarks upon the apparition in my room,” “wear[ing] out” the lawyer’s “best resolve” with “constant friction.”44 If recalling his own desire for explanation suggested sympathy with his colleagues, these complaints suggest sympathy with Bartleby as a fellow victim of invasion (the syntax of the second complaint leaves unclear whether Bartleby is the object of the “remarks” or the “intrusion”). This new sympathy with Bartleby is peculiar on its own terms. It is even more peculiar given the way it is intertwined, in the lawyer’s thoughts, with new worries about the scrivener’s own invasion of the lawyer’s space. In the second of the two paragraphs that detail his colleagues’ intrusions, the lawyer observes that he also feels himself “crowded upon … more and more” by the idea of Bartleby “possibly turning out a long-lived man.” He imagines that Bartleby will keep “soul and body together to the last upon his savings (for doubtless he spent but a half a dime a day), and in the end perhaps outlive me, and claim possession of my office by right of his perpetual occupancy.”45 He and Bartleby may stand in solidarity against the intrusions of the other lawyers but this is only because our lawyer is supporting Bartleby against himself in a war of financial attrition over the office room. This new version of his relationship to the scrivener represents an intensification of the two men’s property dispute. Sharing space with Bartleby threatens the lawyer’s claim to his little parcel of rented real estate not because the scrivener now physically occupies part of his inner room and at times denies him access to the office as a whole (problems which he seemed to have solved by driving a wedge between occupation and management), but because the scrivener will later prove less mortal than himself, better at conserving the resources that support survival because the lawyer (with help from his other employees) has allowed him to live rent-free. This thought, it seems, is enough to drive the lawyer back toward homicide. His unwillingness, in the next paragraph, to turn Bartleby out into the street quickly becomes a readiness to “let him” not only “live” but “die here, and then mason up his remains in the wall.”46 In the end, however, having also rejected the possibility of charging Bartleby with either vagrancy or “no visible means of support,” he chooses instead to exile himself:

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What! he a vagrant, a wanderer, who refuses to budge? … No visible means of support … . Wrong again: for indubitably he does support himself, and that is the only unanswerable proof that any man can show of his possessing the means so to do. No more then. Since he will not quit me, I must quit him. I will change my offices; I will move elsewhere; and give him fair notice, that if I find him on my new premises I will then proceed against him as a common trespasser.47

Leaving No. — Wall Street to the scrivener, the lawyer reestablishes himself in a new office, where Bartleby has not already breached his borders and laid claim to the space within. The lawyer fears that Bartleby will follow and perhaps even occupy the new space in turn: Established in my new quarters, for a day or two I kept the door locked, and started at every footfall in the passages. When I returned to my rooms after any little absence, I would pause at the threshold for an instant, and attentively listen, ere applying my key.48

“But those fears were needless,” the lawyer admits. “Bartleby never came nigh me.”49 The trouble he fears comes not from Bartleby but from the new tenants of No. —, who, as we have seen, call the lawyer back to deal with Bartleby, holding him responsible as the prior authority over the space Bartleby continues to occupy. He answers their call, but when this last attempt to convince Bartleby to leave the premises fails, the lawyer leaves No. — for good: effectually dodging every one by the suddenness and rapidity of my flight, [I] rushed from the building, ran up Wall-street towards Broadway, and jumping into the first omnibus was soon removed from pursuit … So fearful was I of being hunted out by the incensed landlord and his exasperated tenants, that, surrendering my business to Nippers, for a few days I drove about the upper part of the town and through the suburbs, in my rockaway; crossed over to Jersey City and Hoboken, and paid fugitive visits to Manhattanville and Astoria. In fact I almost lived in my rockaway for the time.50

Fleeing not only No. — Wall Street but his new office and his home, the lawyer abandons real estate, and even fixed physical location, all together. Living in his rockaway, he becomes the vagrant that Bartleby never was. I have reviewed this series of events in such detail to register the full magnitude of the peculiarity of the lawyer’s response to his colleagues’ questions about Bartleby. This peculiarity can be summarized in three points: First, the lawyer experiences his colleagues’ recognition of his authority over Bartleby as a threat to that authority similar to that posed by the scrivener: he experiences both as physical crowding. Second, though the lawyer would seem already to have resolved the physical crowding issue when it comes to Bartleby by separating the management of his office space from its occupation, the problem has not only returned but intensified; it has become a

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matter not merely of crowding but of mortality as the lawyer’s support of the scrivener in terms of room threatens eventually to starve the lawyer out of life itself. Third, the lawyer’s response in the face of all of these threats to his authority over his professional space is not to cling to his property but to abdicate it: if the lawyer feels his proprietary authority threatened, why cede all claim, not only to this or that bit of real estate, but to spatial location per se? Melville’s handling of these passages suggests that from the lawyer’s point of view, the greatest threat to his authority comes from the scrivener. In his dark vision of the future, the lawyer’s management of his rental property morphs from a condition in which generosity is made possible by wealth to one in which such generosity drains away treasure, eventually threatening survival with abject poverty. To a certain extent, the lawyer’s logic here is sound. Real estate—a resource that might seem to be non-consumable, and as such relatively easy to share with other people—belongs to the same monetary economy as food (that which “keeps soul and body together” day-to-day). As such, it does or at least can translate into consumable resources, the sort most subject to scarcity. If all resources are essentially consumable resources, the lawyer concludes, the fact that he is sharing some with Bartleby means that poverty—and with it death—will come to himself that much sooner. But Melville almost immediately insists that we judge these anxieties hysterical. The lawyer’s fear that Bartleby will plague him far into the future, follow him through time, resonates with his fear that the scrivener will follow him across lower Manhattan, to his new office space. And Bartleby doesn’t. The ones who track the lawyer to his new place of business are the other lawyers. This suggests that, in Melville’s view, the more pressing of the lawyer’s problems is not with Bartleby but with his colleagues. Again, the lawyer senses that those colleagues are intruding upon him even as they recognize him as the person in charge of No. —. With this facet of the lawyer’s experience, Melville defines the challenge of social life differently than Derrida. Derrida suggests trouble comes from failing to act responsibly, from the fact that we are forced to say no to some people (as the lawyer says no to Turkey and Nippers) because we say yes to others. Responsibility, on the Derridian model, is inextricable from betrayal. Melville, in contrast, suggests that what is difficult about social life is being recognized by third parties—people who themselves have no stake in a given preferential transaction—as a responsible being. The lawyer’s experience suggests a sense, on Melville’s part, that responsibility is a defensive posture. It is not an easy thing, he hints, to command acceptance for your silence. There is no refusal to speak without first a request that you do so, but every question is not merely an opportunity to refuse to speak but a challenge to your right—and as such your worthiness—to maintain silence. And that silence, again, is an assertion of yourself as a person. Recalling Larmore’s account, it is an assertion of your preferences, of your sense that certain things matter. We might think that the challenge, in the lawyer’s case, is more to the content of his beliefs than to his experience of them as valuable. Perhaps his flight from what he previously claimed, in private, as his destiny is just an unwillingness to own publically the particular substance of his beliefs. Perhaps he is unwilling to publically admit his

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convictions—his belief in charity, for example. But his earlier substitution, however artificial, of God (the deity) for Bartleby (a man, and an odd one) as the reference for that belief would seem adequately to have addressed this problem. If God isn’t sufficient as a reference point for valuative belief, who is? Perhaps this, however, is Melville’s point. The only thing that could explain the lawyer’s refusal to admit a devotion to God to his colleagues is an assumption on his part that his colleagues judge deference—even deference to the deity—incompatible with self-assertion. The lawyer seems to think, in other words, that the only interest or preference his colleagues would accept as grounds for personhood is self-interest: a preference that translates into the monopolization of all resources for one’s own use. He  cannot, like Derrida’s Abraham, establish his own personhood with reference, however cryptic, to the personhood of some beloved other. If the lawyer is correct, the only way to be in good standing with his colleagues will be to prefer no one beside himself. To put this in practical terms, if he wants their recognition as a legitimate member of the social world, he will have to thrust Bartleby out. On this point in contrast to so many others, Melville hints, the lawyer might be right. Thrust Bartleby out in favor of themselves is exactly what the new tenants of No. — eventually do; it is also what they continuously expect the lawyer to do, in spite of the fact that he hasn’t and doesn’t (which suggests he would really, for whatever reason, prefer not to). Another way to say this is that the lawyer’s colleagues do not recognize the distinction between management and occupation the lawyer took such pains to draw. The only managing they recognize is that which coincides with occupying—fully occupying, such that one absorbs into oneself the whole good of the resource. In the end, I argue, the lawyer’s fantasy that Bartleby will starve him out of tenancy and into death gestures toward a different and more realistic nightmare. Bartleby’s presence, Melville suggests, threatens not the lawyer’s material but his social capital, his standing in the eyes of his otherwise disinterested colleagues. In this acutely critical vision of the lawyer’s social world—which I take to be synonymous, given its location, with American capitalism—to give unto others, even when there is plenty to go around, is social suicide.51 *** Observing the lawyer’s response to his colleagues’ demands, we gain further insight into his own preferences. At first, he appears to value his colleagues, or their recognition, on par with his scrivener (to say nothing of his God). Faced with what must be two equally balanced as well as mutually exclusive commitments, he goes on the lam from all preferential stances and indeed from standing itself—living, for a time, in his rockaway, on the road. He cannot stay in that non-place, however, any more perhaps than Deleuze, for all his efforts to evoke a land of indeterminacy, can avoid describing America in terms of delimitation, as a “zone.” He may never have belonged there, truly torn, in the first place. With an uncharacteristic lack of melodrama, the lawyer returns to his new

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office and opens his mail. The letter awaiting him informs him that Bartleby has been removed from No. — for good. In the lawyer’s absence, the willingness of the new tenants to exercise their values and preferences has effectively resolved the conflict among his own. It is as if he had acted upon that earlier urge to have Bartleby “collared by a constable” after all, and sent the man away himself.52 His visits to Bartleby in prison do nothing to change this fact, in our eyes if not his. However many dead letters fail to reach their destinations, the lawyer’s address—his acknowledged place as an inhabitant of the American social world—was never really in question.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Timothy J. Deines and Steve Goodman, “Bartleby the Scrivener, Immanence and the Resistance of Community,” Culture Machine: Generating Research in Culture and Theory 8 (2006), http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/39/47 (accessed October 8, 2015). 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), 71. Ibid., 84. Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller Brown (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 255. “Bartleby’s” emphasis on the significance, for personhood, of real estate as opposed to other material resources (e.g., the more expansive list of food, medicine, time, and attention mentioned by Derrida) speaks to Melville’s interest in the social dynamics of a specific time and place: lower Manhattan in the 1830s and 1840s. “Bartleby” really is “A Story of Wall-street.” (For a discussion of the historical context of “Bartleby,” especially its interest in real estate, see Barbara Foley, “From Wall Street to Astor Place: Historicizing Melville’s ‘Bartleby,’” American Literature 72.1 [2000]: 87–116.) However, given Wall Street’s status, then and now, as a metonym for American capitalism and American culture, and the persistence, from Melville’s time to our own, of questions regarding the distribution of resources in this country, we should not immediately discount the social philosophy elaborated in this tale as historically distant from and thus irrelevant to social life in America today. Herman Melville, “Bartleby, The Scrivener; A Story of Wall-street” (1853), in Melville’s Short Novels (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), 10. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 30.

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17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 32. 19 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 75, emphasis in the original. 20 Melville, “Bartleby,” 12. 21 For his part, Bartleby alternately resists the notion that he has reasons—“I prefer not to be a little reasonable”—and teases the lawyer by dangling them just out of reach—“Can you not see the reason for yourself?” (Melville, “Bartleby,” 20–21). 22 Derrida, Gift, 76. 23 Derrida’s reading of Abraham engages Søren Kierkegaard’s. See Derrida, Gift, 56ff. But whereas Kierkegaard’s focus is on what it means for a human to have faith in the divine, Derrida is more interested in what remains unknowable and indecipherable between human beings. I will have more to say on the role of the divine in Derrida’s social philosophy below. 24 Derrida, Gift, 24. 25 Ibid. 26 Critics argue with some frequency that Bartleby’s inscrutability carries an ethical charge. But they tend to align that inscrutability with the sort of indeterminacy or refusal to mean described by Deleuze. Branka Arsić, for example, reads the scrivener’s statements and behavior as a form of indeterminate and as such ethically provocative silence: refusing to mean, as well as to speak or act meaningfully, her Bartleby eludes the definitiveness even of personality and demands that we respect his impersonality by respecting his right not to respond (Branka Arsić, Passive Constitutions or 7 ½ Times Bartleby [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007]). Amit Pinchevski is explicit about the ramifications of such a stance, arguing that Bartleby, as a “subject of incommunicability,” “calls into question … the production of communication as a social value” and presses us to imagine—with Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Giorgio Agamben, and others—a sociality based on the sharing of difference rather than similarity (Amit Pinchevski, “Bartleby’s Autism: Wandering along Incommunicability,” Cultural Critique 78 [2011]: 28, 52–53). Naomi Reed describes Bartleby’s refusal to be understood as more specifically a refusal of commodification, of reduction to the terms of a capitalist system, and Andrew Knighton argues that Bartleby, in his inscrutable idleness, “demystifies” and as such “unworks” that system itself (Naomi Reed, “The Specter of Wall Street: ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ and the Language of Commodities,” American Literature 76.2 [2004]: 247–73; Andrew Knighton, Idle Threats: Men and the Limits of Productivity in 19thCentury America [New York: New York University Press, 2012], 26). The line I would draw between such readings and Derrida’s (as well as my own) is fine but significant. All of the former emphasize a negative—what they see as Bartleby’s refusal to mean (to articulate or even hold a particular belief or concept), to communicate (to explain that concept to another), or to cooperate (to act on or represent that concept within a system)—rather than a positive—the silhouette of the person who blocks access to the reasons that shape his actions in order to insist that those actions are his own. 27 Derrida, Gift, 57. 28 Ibid., 78. 29 Ibid., 68. 30 On these points, Derrida’s thought is consistent with and indebted to that of Emmanuel Levinas. See, for example, his reference to Levinas in footnote 6 (Derrida, Gift, 78).

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31 Derrida, Gift, 69. 32 Charles Larmore, The Practices of the Self, trans. Sharon Bowman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 73. 33 Ibid., 78. 34 Derrida, Gift, 76. 35 Melville, “Bartleby,” 14. 36 Ibid., 25. 37 Ibid., 25–26. 38 Ibid., 26. 39 Ibid., 25, 26. 40 Ibid., 20. 41 It is a point of faith for the lawyer that God’s preferences are his own—that they do not refer back in turn to something or someone else. For Melville, as for Derrida, God seems to be the name we give to the point at which we are content not to require further reference. 42 Melville, “Bartleby,” 27. 43 Ibid., 26. 44 Ibid., 26–27, my emphases. 45 Ibid., 27. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 28. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., 31. 51 This conclusion puts me in company with other critics who have found, in Melville, a tension between self-interest and charity. But no one else, to my knowledge, has observed that Melville imagines the cost of charity in terms of social capital. Elizabeth Barnes’s discussion of the economics of sympathy, for example, centers on emotional capital (Elizabeth Barnes, “Fraternal Melancholies: Manhood and the Limits of Sympathy in Douglass and Melville,” in Frederick Douglass & Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, ed. Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter [Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008], 233–56). John Matteson’s work on prudence and liability focuses on material capital as a good in and of itself, not as a criterion for social capital (John Matteson, “‘A New Race Has Spring Up’: Prudence, Social Consensus and the Law in ‘Bartleby the Scrivener,’” Leviathan 10.1 [2008]: 25–49). And Shira Wolosky argues that the denizens of Wall Street are isolated from, not burdened by the terms of, social intercourse (Shira Wolosky, “Bartleby, Foucault, De Tocqueville: Contradictions of Individualism,” in Modes and Facets of the American Scene: Studies in Honor of Cristina Giorcelli, ed. Dominique Marcais [Palermo, Italy: il Palma, 2014], 181–200). 52 Melville, “Bartleby,” 27.

6

Pierre in Love Kenneth Dauber

“HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY.” The headline over the review by the Philadelphia Public Ledger pretty much encapsulates what has been the continuing reaction to Pierre since its release.1 It is “very much more calculated for popularity than anything you have yet published of mine,” Melville wrote to his English publisher, Richard Bentley, bargaining for better terms after the disappointing reception of Moby-Dick, insisting that this book, unlike the last, would be bound to sell. It is “a regular romance, with a mysterious plot to it, and stirring passions at work, and withall, representing a new and elevated aspect of American life.”2 And, in fact, stirring passions there are, involving incest, seduction, infidelity, a menage a trois, even murder. But incest and murder as an “elevated aspect of American life”? And a novel that represents them as elevated as a novel “calculated for popularity”? “Herman Melville crazy,” indeed. It is not surprising that Pierre virtually ended Melville’s career. In the current vernacular, “what was he thinking?” For ever since the great Melville revival of the l920s when he became established as a canonical figure of American literature, Pierre has been the most difficult of Melville’s works on which to get a grip. Of course, it is not the incest, infidelity, and murder that disturb any more. We have become used to them, even fond of them. Besides, they are pretty familiar elements of the sentimental fiction of Melville’s era, the “rural bowl of milk,” as he called it in a letter to Sophia Hawthorne that he was writing in Pierre.3 Yet, though he engages these elements with a passionate intensity, as a family they seem so constricted, compared to Melville’s usual range, that Pierre remains hard to place. Gone are the sprawling canvases of the earlier work. The book is narrow in its setting. (It is a domestic novel, Melville’s only novel that does not take place on a ship.) It is narrow in its range of characters. (There are no cannibals, no South-Sea islanders, no “Anarcharsis Clootz deputation from all the isles of the sea,” as he puts it in Moby-Dick [ch. 27], but people who know each other from the start or know the people who know each other.) It is narrow, or at least unified, in its narrative stance. (It is his first novel told in the third person, with nothing like the shifting voice we get in Moby-Dick.) It is even, in terms of its story line, the most straightforward of his works until Billy Budd, and—except, as some critics take it, for the material on writing—with the fewest uncontrolled divagations. As Leon Howard and Hershel Parker put it, though “he had recast Moby-Dick after one version of it was nearly finished”—the so-called two Moby-Dicks thesis—and though “there is

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positive evidence that he had done so in Typee, Mardi, and Redburn; he may have even done so in White-Jacket,” in Pierre, “he seems to have been firmly determined to follow his original plot.”4 So the general effect is of a sort of mad coherence, a tremendous expenditure of energy at variance with the scope of the subject matter to which it is confined, and it has been a recurring question whether Melville is serious or not, if he meant it or if he is not, rather, writing some sort of parody, striking out at his audience by giving it a manifestly exaggerated version of the kind of conventional sentimental fare that, having decided it would no longer read him, it claimed it really wanted to read.5 The difficulty is not easy to evade. The book really does seem “crazy.” Pierre, focusing too intently on a narrow and increasingly vicious circle, draws that circle tighter and tighter until it vanishes. Trying to succor one he believes to be his illegitimate sister, yet trying, as well, to protect the reputation of his father and shield his mother, he pretends to a marriage that destroys everybody he is trying to help. Pierre acts rashly. Pierre acts foolishly, indulging his feelings unconstrained by the perspective that the larger canvases of Melville’s other books provide. Surely Melville’s point is to offer us an object lesson. Here, he seems to say, is what happens if you take sentimentality at its word. And yet, indulgent as they may be, the demands of sentiment are not to be slipped by recourse to the very dispassion they attack. After all, who would not act rashly and foolishly for the love of sister, mother, father? Or what sort of a person, reader, are you if you would not? The situation is impossible. Damned if we do and damned if we don’t. It is certainly absurd to take seriously such over-the-top remarks as “Love is … a volume bound in rose-leaves, clasped with violets, and by the beaks of humming-birds printed with peach-juice on the leaves of lilies” (34), only one of the many egregiously sentimental remarks in the book. But such foolery notwithstanding, Pierre, “the fool of Truth” (P, 358), is deadly in earnest, and Melville, throughout his career, is most earnest about his most foolish characters, and increasingly from Wellington Redburn through, memorably, Captain Ahab. One common approach has been to read Pierre as barely repressed autobiography, to rationalize the craziness as an upwelling of a troubled psyche.6 Melville had a mother problem. He had a father problem. He especially had a wife problem. All of which, in fact, he did have. And yet, of all Melville’s works—Typee, or Omoo, or White-Jacket, say, or even Moby-Dick—Pierre is the least manifestly autobiographical. “Leviathan is not the biggest fish,” he wrote to Hawthorne, after finishing MobyDick and as he was beginning work on Pierre. “I have heard of Krakens,”7 indicating a different trajectory for his literary ambitions. And, indeed, since Mardi, Melville had been trying to give up autobiography and the reputation built upon it. The autobiographical Redburn and White-Jacket he regarded as mere hackwork, “forced to it, as other men are to sawing wood.”8 In Pierre itself he writes disdainfully, no doubt thinking about his reputation as the man who lived among cannibals, about the fame of “very young writers”: “it will be almost invariably observable, that for that instant success they were chiefly indebted to some rich and peculiar experience in life, embodied in a book, which because, for that cause, containing original matter, the author himself, forsooth, is to be considered original” (P, 259), a book

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“plagiarized from his own experiences,” as he puts it later (P, 302). And already in the “Preface” to Mardi he gives a brief rather for fiction almost pure: 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.

This passage, too, raises the problem of knowing how seriously to take it. And once again, we might suspect something like parody. Thus the shadow of romantic justification that hovers over it—that facts are mundane and that fiction deals in the transcendent—is manifestly a convention he is using as a reproach. He offers a dare, after all, not a manifesto. And, besides, Melville is an artist of the mundane. “The Try-Works” in Moby-Dick and the whole process of whale hunting, whale killing, with harpoons, boats, and all the appurtenances, are rendered in the minutest detail. The Typee in their dances, taboos, eating, and tattooing are rendered with an almost anthropological eye, a kind of “thick description” before its time. No less than the so-called realist writers of Europe of the period and of America of the period after ­him—Trollope, say, or Eliot or Flaubert, or even Twain—is Melville capable of “realistic” writing, and he invests himself in the particulars of realistic description with a gusto that far exceeds theirs. But then, in Melville, it is that very investment that overwhelms what it is he is investing in. It is how one takes the reality that one is writing about, how one responds to it, that is manifestly his concern, so that in his linking of the fiction of Mardi to the question of audience response Melville would seem to be offering a version of the sentimental belief that to know someone is to love him, only reversing terms. Or, to put it in another way, if the foundation of sentimentality, the reason for its descriptions, its placing us, as it were, in the event, is ostensibly a belief that fact commands interest, Melville knows that sentiment’s real claim, as he makes it in Mardi’s preface, is rather that interest commands fact. And by the time he came to write Pierre, in the wake of the reception of Moby-Dick, when he had learned that his interest in his readers could not command that most important fact of his readers’ interest in him, what he presents us with, remaining true to sentiment still, in effect doubling down, is a writing that would represent interest nevertheless and, in particular, interest in a readership that was no longer interested in his writing altogether. Melville—and not only, though especially, in Pierre—is an extremely sentimental case. Quite simply, he is a lover, and beyond the conventional sentimentalists who loved only what was or what they could make lovable, he loves virtually everything and everywhere. As we may say, he loved even unto death. So if the chief problem for sentimentality, to use a phrase from Stanley Cavell, is that the world in which one is invested is always in danger of going dead,9 Melville, though dead to the world, never finds that the world is dead to him. Melville is a lonely man, the very condition that sentimental sympathy is supposed to cure. But Melville’s loneliness is thus the

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function not of his lack of sympathy but of his having too much of it—sympathy, that is, always in excess of any possible return. This is the real meaning of Pierre’s parody, if that is what it is. For parody is an expression of love even in its abjection. It is a love “crazy” with a vengeance, seizing on difference and making it the same with a passion, the difference of a reader who makes himself the writer and more than the writer, who refigures the otherness of what he reads through a self whose exaggeration is the mark of his love of reading.10 It is the response to a discourse received, as it were, from the outside, that rewrites it from the inside, collapsing the saving distance even of irony or, when ironic, collapsing it as it re-forms by exaggerating the ironic internally and therefore unironically as well. Parody is not simple satire with all its comforts of a self established above or against the world. The parodist, disappearing into the conventions of his readership, does not, like the satirist, assert himself in himself. Yet reproducing those conventions in the most exaggerated of ways, he marks himself all the more by his very exaggeration of them. In a certain sense, he ceases to exist, a non-existence, in Melville’s case, that will grow increasingly notable as his career continues, from the “We are off ” of Typee, in which his autobiographical self is front and center; to “Call me Ishmael,” in which his existence is dependent on the investment of the reader in him; to Israel Potter, which is the autobiography of someone not himself at all; to The Confidence-Man, where there is hardly any self to speak of;11 to the posthumous Billy Budd, a voice, as it were, from the other side. Yet “he” is there nevertheless, the author of those selfless texts. And in Pierre, the hinge of the move from self to no-self, he exhibits his love of his readers by living the life of the no-self into which they had cast him, loving those who had balked him and loving even the balking—that is, suffusing a readership who had rejected him with love rendered even in its own rejectionist terms. What was Melville thinking? He was thinking sentimentality, which is belief in the face of disavowal, of commitment in the face of denial, which is love that will insist on itself in all circumstances, that will not be deterred, not by misreading, not by neglect, indeed not by differences (or indifferences) of any sort. Only Melville is thinking it not as sentimentality more usually thinks it, in the abolition of difference, but in difference’s very teeth. As we might put it—and this is my thesis—Melville knows the lie of sentimentality that, in mid-century Christian terms, because God loves you, you will love each other or, in secular terms, that the other may be conceived as the self, the subject as an object or the object as a subject, that all selves are the same self, converging toward the average self Adam Smith proposes in The Philosophy of Moral Sentiments. He knows the lie that love is an exchange, that it inheres in the economy of selves, as Smith sees it in The Wealth of Nations, and that the economy of selves is what holds us together. Quite simply, he knows that there is no economy in love at all and that it is the subject alone who loves, that nothing holds us together but the subject who does, if he does, love. Yet knowing that there are subjects who do not love him in their own turn, he would grant them that subjectivity and love them still. In terms I have developed elsewhere,12 Christian sentimentalists like Stowe theologize love, sublating

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sentimentality’s contradictions by putting them beyond our vision. Sentimental critics of sentimentality like Hawthorne speak love as anatomy, distinguishing what they do and do not love so that sentimentality is delimited on the side of its attenuation. But in Melville, the indifference of selves to each other becomes but another ground of their attachment, constituting sentimentality’s limit from the other side. And, as we may now proceed to see, this means that Melville would build community in recognition of the very loneliness that sentimentality was meant to obviate in the first place.

There are some strange summer mornings Who tells this story? Who writes this book? “I write precisely as I please,” says the narrator, in a much-quoted passage. Yet, as he immediately continues, “In the earlier chapters of this volume, it has somewhere been passingly intimated” (P, 244), as if there is no narrator but the book just is narrated or, at least, as if the narrator is not quite in control of his narration, can’t quite remember where he said what he said or even be certain how much he meant it. In this light, it is difficult to know what purchase “I” can possibly have, what kind of a writer it articulates and what his authority over what he writes might be. The “I,” here, is certainly not the “I” of self love, not an “I” writing under the sign of Emersonian self-reliance—writing as feeling not what the other feels but what you feel in your independence from the other—a kind of writing which sentimentality everywhere opposes. On the other hand, neither is it an “I” sublated in the sentimental way by a conception of love as love of the self become the other. Self-assertion and self-surrender neither support each other here, nor quite hollow each other out. They are related not dialectically, but paratactically, and even that soft dialectic of the Smithian economy of selves and others is made impossible by what appears to be flat-out contradiction. Rather, the narrative voice is both asserted and effaced, so that to read under the authority of the narrator is to find oneself wondering what makes him think anything he may say can be taken as authoritative and how much, therefore, we should give ourselves over to him, whether he is himself or us or both or neither. Love lists where it will. This, from a sentimental point of view, is the meaning of “as I please.” Love sustains Melville’s writing of Pierre. It is what supports the people, the things, even the reader to which he is attached. But having given his love, it is as if he can claim it no longer as his. There is something of a reversal, here, of what Sharon Cameron calls “impersonality,” which she finds especially in Billy Budd and by which she means something like love without interest, in the double sense of that word, love no longer rooted in the self, interest no longer interested.13 For, at least in Pierre, it is the self ’s interest that is precisely what is insisted upon, so that the self does not so much cease to exist as lose itself to the things which it loves. As we might put it, it is not that the self no longer has any stake in its love, but that it has staked its love and lost. Its voice has become, in effect, the voice of an “it,” and like an “it,” it is just what is. And yet “it” remains subjective through and through. The voice of “it” remains the voice of love. And, indeed, although beyond that power of the subject to negotiate the world, to

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effect or even to affect what he has affection for, that love is yet the love on the basis of which the world stands—a burden rather than a blessing, and a burden introduced to us in the very opening of the book: There are some strange summer mornings in the country, when he who is but a sojourner from the city shall early walk forth into the field, and be wondersmitten with the trance-like aspect of the green and golden world. Not a flower stirs; the trees forget to wave; the grass itself seems to have ceased to grow; and all Nature, as if suddenly become conscious of her own profound mystery, and feeling no refuge from it but silence, sinks into this wonderful and indescribable repose. Such was the morning in June, when, issuing from the embowered and high-gabled old home of his father, Pierre, dewily refreshed and spiritualized by sleep, gayly entered the long, wide, elm-arched street of the village, and half unconsciously bent his steps toward a cottage, which peeped into view near the end of the vista. (P, 3)

This is a passage virtually classic in the way that it lays out the frames of reference through which the reader may identify with the proceedings, through which the self may position itself closer to or further from the events of the novel, as more like or more different from the characters. “There are some strange summer mornings … when he who is … .” So Melville rewrites Pride and Prejudice’s “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife.” Or, in James’s ironization of Austen’s irony at the beginning of Portrait of a Lady, his sort of meta-rendition of the same classic opening, “Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not—some people of course never do—the situation is in itself delightful.” Identity and difference, near and far: these are the poles of placement, here—universal or particular in Austen and, in James’s addition of a level of self-consciousness to Austen’s consciousness, participant or observer. And yet, after all, in the passage in Pierre, what kind of consciousness, exactly, are we invited into, for what are we to make of the association of a nature “conscious” of herself with a Pierre who is, rather, “half unconscious”? And, for that matter, what are we to make of the very frames we are given for a calculus of identification and disidentification when, as it were all indifferently, “There are some mornings” which are like this morning, not different from it and, at the other end, when Pierre, a country boy, is not “a sojourner from the city,” at all? As Michael Snediker has pointed out, “the terms of correspondence [in Pierre] … seem less analogous than provocatively indistinguishable.”14 So to what purpose the analogies, the generalizations, the categorizations? It is hard to get a handle on the writing in Pierre, or hard to get a handle on the handles. It is not, that is, that the handles are not there. Melville accepts the terms available to him for describing his world. We might even say he has come to terms

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with them, lived within them, so that they have become his own. But the terms are so involved in each other, they so circle round, the one describing the other and the other the one, that there appears no bottom to description, no possibility of resting in it. In effect, identification and disidentification, given the little that they accomplish, have now become virtually the same. So in Pierre, the near is also far—this particular morning which is, however, like many other mornings. But, as well, so is the far also near—Pierre, who is not a sojourner, yet is analogized to a sojourner nevertheless. The problem is not the epistemological one of the world out of focus. It is not that the world is neither sufficiently subjective nor objective and that, to bring it into some clear view, we must make it one or the other. Rather, it is too objective and subjective simultaneously. Too near and too far, both: the world, in Pierre, is not, as skepticism about epistemological knowledge might have it, unreal, but it is too real, and at both ends. It is in a kind of intimate estrangement. That is why Melville invokes “wonder” and “mystery”—the nearness of the far or the farness of the near, precisely. That is why the morning is “strange”—unheimlich, if you will. As Wittgenstein puts it, “a philosophical problem has the form: I don’t know my way around,”15 and we might suppose that Melville, too, does not know his way around. Except that, manifestly, he does. Or to render it in other terms, the difficulty with which the descriptions of Pierre ask us to come to terms is not the difficulty with which Redburn must come to terms when he attempts to use his father’s outdated map to chart a hopelessly changed Liverpool, but that, finding the world charted perhaps even more accurately than we are used to, we cannot settle ourselves in that world. The difficulty of Pierre’s narration, that is, is not the difficulty of reference but of our relation to what we refer. It is the difficulty of engaging a world that does not return any engagements. And this difficulty, if we would take it up, if we would place ourselves, in love, in the narrator’s position, turning our “I” and our “you” into the “we” of the novel’s speaking, is such that we must come to terms with a “we” of a sort which we have refused to acknowledge. In effect, we become like the camping partners of William James. Circling a tree in an attempt to see the back of a squirrel holding onto its trunk, they find that the squirrel, too, has circled, so that returning to their starting point without seeing its back they wonder whether they have gone “round” the squirrel or not. So in Pierre, as well. It is not, any more than the campers, that we do not know our way round, but that we must come to a new understanding of what, in Pierre, “round” means in the first place.16 Here James’s answer to his friends’ quandary is instructive, both for what it will and will not do. It all depends, James says, on what you mean by “round.” This is a pragmatic answer that challenges the idealistic idea of reference that James thinks his friends need to abandon. Reference, James wants to say, is not ideal, but situational. “Round” is not a kind of Platonic form, but refers to this or that, depending on the instance. And yet, Melville has already abandoned such an idea, has abandoned, in fact, the idea of language based on reference of any sort, even a pragmatic one, so that to be bothered by the question of reference is to miss the point. For what really bothers is that reference cannot stabilize the shaky ground of interest in whatever it is that is referred to, which the situation of finding the far near and the near far has established.

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Accordingly, the problem with which we are confronted is not an inadequate ostensivity but a confused relation to what is ostended that renders the ostensive itself inadequate. Solving any skepticism about reference cannot allay skepticism about disposition toward what is referred to, which cannot be solved. And, as it seems to me, this is what really bothered James’s friends, as well, and why James must admit that his answer did not entirely satisfy them. For what has happened to them is that their sense of themselves as subjects and the squirrel as object has been called into question by the movement of the squirrel. In a certain sense, clearly, they no longer know where they stand. But this is not because they do not know what territory they or the squirrel have covered, but because they no longer know how the world “stands” in relation to them or how they “stand” in relation to the world. They have, no longer, any perspective on the ground they have covered, because, we might even say, they no longer know whom “they” includes, what “they” really means, and to come to terms with this, a different definition of “we” and of “they” is what Pierre demands. There is something, accordingly, vertiginous about the opening paragraph, as of almost all of Pierre. And when, later in the book, “Pierre,” the stone, writing a novel about a writer writing a novel, crawls under the Memnon stone, another writer of sorts, and dares it to fall upon him, we may be reminded of the vertiginousness of the opening of Moby-Dick, where murder (“knocking people’s hats off ”) and suicide (“following coffins to their warehouses”) blend into each other; where taking to ship instead of throwing himself on his sword like Cato is both a saving of himself from killing himself and, given the dangers of whaling, is a kind of killing himself in an available nineteenth-century way; and in general where it is never clear whether the joking that drives especially the first part of the novel is on the narrator or on the reader—whether, for example, “Call me Ishmael,” whose reference is also clear, Abraham’s cast-out son, wandering the deserts as Ishmael wanders the seas, is yet an address rendered in openness (as in my name is Ishmael Smith, but call me Ishmael) or concealment (I write under a pseudonym) or, for that matter, whether the whole of the book is a serious story about man in pursuit of truth or a colossal tall tale, a fish story about the big one that got away.17 Only the difficulty in Pierre is that it is not clear if there even is a joke—another instance of Melville’s peculiar “parody.” For whether it is directed at us or at himself, “Call me Ishmael” bespeaks a faith in calling, and such that it grounds both the something and the nothing referenced by the novel. This is why, writing perhaps about nothing, after all, in Moby-Dick, Melville yet can write, quite precisely, of “nothing in particular.” And so throughout the rest of Moby-Dick’s opening paragraph. Ishmael may be impoverished, but he is scrupulous in distinguishing the “little or no money” that constitutes his poverty. He may have no funds, but he can locate the no funds that he doesn’t have “in his purse.” It is not surprising, therefore—as Melville puts it, in fact, “There is nothing surprising in this”—that trusting in calling, still, despite all its uncertainties, he can describe just exactly the uncertainty of identification and disidentification in his finely calibrated appeal to “almost all men, sometime or other, in their way.” And it is not surprising, since it is just that loss of trust that Pierre addresses, that such an appeal is difficult to locate in that novel.

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And yet, finally, an appeal remains. For although, as we have said, Melville now finds that he simply has nobody any longer to talk to, nobody is exactly whom he does talk to. Nobody is the one to whom he insists on talking. Moby-Dick is dedicated to Hawthorne, but Pierre is dedicated to a mountain, “The Most Excellent Purple Majesty of Greylock,” whether that majesty “benignantly incline his hoary crown or no.”18 So it is not that in Pierre identification and lack of identification are longer desiderata, but that, either way, conversation continues. It is as if Pierre can make a stone speak or, better, as if, in Pierre, Melville takes its not speaking as, equally, a kind of speech.19 No wonder the tone of Pierre is so confounding. No wonder, though Melville keeps asking us for a response, it is so difficult to know how to respond. For Melville offers us a sort of negative rhetorical address, a call presuming in advance its not being answered. As J. L. Austin might have put it, it is a call made in “infelicitous” conditions,20 a call that can accomplish nothing because the conditions of ordinary calling—knowing our way round, so to speak, knowing what we mean by a subject and what we mean by an object, knowing who is addressing us and whom we are addressing, and knowing that knowing these things makes a community of the caller and the called—no longer obtain. Except in Pierre, it is an infelicity that is itself accomplished. Pierre, not less than Moby-Dick, that is, finally is a call, but it is a call that becomes intransitive, and it sustains a community of the intransitive in which sentiment, in Melville’s understanding of it, achieves a felicity as well. To put it simply, in Pierre, Melville takes “no” for an answer, “no” as an element of a dialogue in which he continues to engage. And we are held by the narrative—and by its “crazy” narrator, like Coleridge’s crazed ancient mariner—in a communication without, as it were, communion, in a discourse that we cannot go on with but from which we do not know how to extricate ourselves, either. For prior to any matter that it might communicate, it is the requirement of any communication that it open a line of communication. And the problem of the line of communication in Pierre is that even as it is closed, Melville takes it to be open. This is why, for example, “the trees forget to wave,” where it is unclear if they, too, wave intransitively or whether they have forgotten to wave to us and, more importantly, if, since they have forgotten to wave, they might, like us, have remembered. The projection, here, of human responsiveness onto nature is conventional enough. It is a staple of romantic and sentimental writing. We feel what the other feels and respond accordingly. Everything feels what every other thing feels, and everything responds accordingly. Only what Pierre asks us to feel is not what the other feels, but his lack of response to our feelings. So when the trees are supposed to be able to remember as well as forget, their now humanized non-responsiveness is modeled on ourselves whose rather inhuman non-responsiveness, in turn, is modeled on the non-responsiveness of nature. To put it simply, where non-responsiveness has become our response, a lack of identification must do the work of identification. And it is the articulation of this non-identificatory identification—its discrimination of subjects, each independent of each other, yet discriminated in love—that constitutes the discourse of the book.

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“Nemo contra Deum nisi Deus ipse,” as Melville will put it later, speaking of the “sweet whispers” of that demi-god “love” that will yet play Pierre false (P, 14). “Nothing is against God, save God himself.” For if, as Stanley Plumly puts it, in a paraphrase of a remark by J. D. Salinger,21 the god of sentimentality cares more than God cares, then, as Pierre reminds us, he must also care less. And so, if, in sentimentality, because God cares about us we must care about each other, then the “we” who live in the grace of Pierre’s god, “we” who abide in the light of a sentimentality lived from the refusal of care, must care about our non-caring as well. As we may now proceed to see, it is just this “we” that presides over the book. It is what generates its rhetoric, what mediates the relations between its characters. And it is what, finally, as a kind of negative providence, as caring precisely about not caring, brings us together in our very difference from each other.

“Or the Ambiguities” Perhaps nothing in Pierre has been so distracting as its subtitle. A certain modernist view of literature coextensive with the Melville revival, which has continued, in its various iterations, to see the great works of literature as questioning the “truths” of the realist tradition, has found support in “or the Ambiguities” and in the series of apparent oppositions it seems to reference—the twin portraits of Pierre’s father, the horologicals and chronometricals of Plinlimmon’s pamphlet, the dark lady/light lady divide of Isabel and Lucy, Saddle Meadows and the city, and so on. In this view, Melville, from his cultural comparisons in Typee and Omoo, through his attack on the Whig myth of American history in Mardi, and on into the “ontological heroics” of  Moby-Dick,22 explodes the forms of his world’s beliefs and, in Pierre, the social forms of bourgeois life. What we take as our world is a fiction. What we know as truth is but our society’s view of truth. And Pierre, in particular, a captive to the fiction of that truth, throws away his life and everyone else’s, as well.23 Poor Pierre. And poor Pierre, as well. For as we can now see, such readings but evade the “we” of Pierre, succumbing to an alienation that the book simply refuses at every turn. Difference becomes a comforting ambivalence and, as it proliferates, an ultimately irresolvable ambiguity. And yet, in Melville, neither ambivalence nor ambiguity seem involved, as he devotes himself, with equal energy, to each of the items in his binaries, almost as if he did not see them as binaries, at all. Thus, undoubtedly, Melville does take up different ways of constructing the world, even compares them. And undoubtedly, too, that the ways appear different is the result of the loss of sentimental community with which Pierre contends. But, then, Melville recaptures those differences for sentiment by not playing them off against each other and investing in them serially. The terms of his pairs are not marshaled in opposition to each other. Rather, opposition serves as a prompt by one term in which he is invested for his investment in another nearby—perhaps, we might even say, in a conceptually far term made, thereby, rhetorically near. To put it as Melville puts it, “Pierre, or the Ambiguities”: you can have, in sympathy, Pierre and all that he

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sympathizes with, or you can have, in sympathy’s withdrawal, ambiguity. But more accurately, in the estranged intimacy of Pierre, willy-nilly you will have them both, as does Pierre, as does Melville. You will have the “or” itself, with its sense simultaneously of equivalence and difference, its double pull of conjunction and disjunction, identity and separateness. And to miss this is to miss the very force of Pierre as insisting on sentiment in very despite of estrangement. To take, for example, the deconstructive version of such readings of ambiguity, which at first blush might seem to be less critical of—even less unsympathetic ­to—someone like Pierre, caught up in the structures of what he cannot see his way through, as deconstruction would have it, than those readings that find him merely benighted.24 Such a version no longer sets its author—or the author’s readers—at a remove from his characters, for characters, authors, and readers alike, we are all benighted. Yet it proposes an ambiguity that, if it no longer comforts us, creates an “us” who can be comforted in the overcoming of ourselves. It displaces our distance from the language we speak onto a language impersonally spoken, onto the distance inherent in the language of being itself—or, more properly, the language of an inauthentic “being-there”—which, as a sort of grand and inevitable fiction opposed to an even grander but inevitably ineffable “truth,” would be worse than idle to sympathize with, after all. In Paul De Man’s classic formulation, it is a choice between irony and allegory, and really, because each is so tied to the other, to choose one is to deny that choice with the choice of the other that it brings in its train.25 It is only that in Pierre, the terms between which one cannot choose are related in another manner, so that nothing is denied. For irony, as we have said, in Pierre, is never merely ironic. And allegory, in De Man’s understanding, is a kind of extended metaphor, while what characterizes Melville’s rhetoric is not really metaphor at all but figure or, better, metaphor as figure—in the case of the putative pairs of opposition, a kind of chiasmus or zeugma—where the opposition between fiction and truth simply has no purchase. This, as it seems to me, is one implication of Bryan Short’s Cast by Means of Figures, a brilliant reading of the rhetoric of Melville’s career, which even goes so far as to read his development as an experiment in nothing but figure. Typee engages primarily in metalepsis, Omoo in synecdoche, The Confidence-Man in parabasis. Short’s analysis, extraordinarily sensitive to the language of Melville’s representations, is of a finer grain than we need here or, for that matter, than I can hope to summarize, but the thrust of his argument is extremely pertinent for our purposes. As he puts it, speaking of MobyDick, Melville’s “[f]iction depends not on what has been interiorized but on what can be given to memory by thought.”26 Accordingly, I should say, what Melville thinks is not the metaphoric expression of some ever absent and therefore ironizable truth, but his relation to such truths as are almost too present to him, his relation to everything in itself, one by one and all together, too. His representations are expressions not of a memory he can only construct, not an anamnesis of an elusive interior knowledge before which his reference can only fall short, but a construction of what is given to his memory by his investment in the things he references with an almost analytic clarity.27 In the terms of the early structuralists, it is a matter of syntagm over paradigm or, better, syntagm as paradigm. That is, if poetry, as the formalists used to say, is

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a projection of the axis of similarity onto the axis of difference,28 in Pierre what we are given is a projection of the axis of difference onto the axis of similarity. Difference is everywhere, brought to thinking by the incommensurability, in Pierre, of everyone with everyone else. But thinking difference in sentiment still, Melville invests in everything and everyone equally. Understanding them in this way, let us even say that metaphors abound in Pierre. But they are metaphors that do not function quite metaphorically. That is, the “or” of “Pierre, or the Ambiguities” is not the “or” of “Moby-Dick, or the Whale,” in which Moby Dick is to the whale as a representative instance of the class. In Pierre, nothing represents anything but itself, so that the metaphors quickly take off on their own, and what are related in Moby-Dick by their reference to whales and whaling or, at least, by their standing as items of a catalogue, an encyclopedia entry under the word “whale” or, as in “in a whaler wonders soon wane” (ch. 50), under the letter “w,” quickly become independent of the things to which they ostensibly are being compared in the first place. Only investing himself as he so thoroughly does in those independencies, he turns the world of Pierre into a catalogue, after all, only a catalogue of investments in independencies, precisely. So, for example, in a much-cited passage, Melville speaks of Pierre’s reverence for his father: There had long stood a shrine in the fresh-foliaged heart of Pierre, up to which he ascended by many tableted steps of remembrance; and around which annually he had hung fresh wreaths of a sweet and holy affection. Made one green bower of at last, by such successive votive offerings of his being; this shrine seemed, and was indeed, a place for the celebration of a chastened joy, rather than for any melancholy rites. But though thus mantled, and tangled with garlands, this shrine was of marble—a niched pillar, deemed solid and eternal, and from whose top radiated all those innumerable sculptured scrolls, and branches, which supported the entire one-pillared temple of his moral life; as in some beautiful gothic oratories, one central pillar, trunk-like, upholds the roof. (P, 68)

And so on, for a long paragraph and more. Or again, somewhat more briefly: In the cold courts of justice the dull head demands oaths, and holy writ proofs; but in the warm halls of the heart one single, untestified memory’s spark shall suffice to enkindle such a blaze of evidence, that all the corners of conviction are as suddenly lighted up as a midnight city by a burning building, which on every side whirls its reddened brands. (P, 71)

Here, beyond attention to what is analogous in the vehicle of the metaphor to its tenor is an extraordinarily detailed attention to the vehicle in its own right. But it is precisely the intensity of that attention, the manifest equality of its strength evidenced in the detailing of the analogy and the detailing of what it is analogous to, that holds together the analogies whether they are sufficiently analogous or not.

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So Pierre’s lineage is as good as the Pharaohs’ (P,  12). Courting Lucy, “Chaldaic improvisations burst from him” (P, 35). The boyhood letters that pass between him and Glen are “the letters of Aphroditean devotees” (P,  217). Isabel’s hair is like the “Saya of [a] Limeean girl” (P,  149). The short references, taken together, reference the known universe or, at least, a sort of literary version of the universe. The long references, like Homeric similes, are almost universes in themselves. But, then, the world, not the unitary world of “our” poet, of Homer, the poet of “we,” the Greek world as “our” world or even of the whaleman as poet of the whaler’s world, is thus broken into worlds, each never quite one with the other. “We” become rather a set of “I’s” held together in just the elaboration of that non-oneness that Pierre’s investment in each of them authorizes. In Pierre, in effect, the inability of interest in the facts of our world to command those facts turns interest into but a fact itself. Yet it is precisely Melville’s interest in that fact, rather than the facts in their conceptual connection, that keeps Pierre’s world together, that makes its “we” a “we” nevertheless. Hence a feature of its typical rhetoric even more salient than the peculiarities of its metaphorics, a feature mocked contemporaneously, in the words of a reviewer for the Whig Review, as “this great eureka, this philological reform … [which] consists in ‘est’ and ‘ness,’ added to every word to which they have no earthly right to belong.” Or, in the list provided by the Literary World: [s]uch infelicities of expression, such unknown words as these, to wit: “humanness,” “heroicness,” “patriarchalness,” “descendedness,” “flushfulness,” “amaranthineness,” “instantaneousness” … “protectingness,” “youngness,” “infantileness,” “visibleness,” et id genus omne!29

It would not, I think, be reading too closely to hear in the term “infelicities” shades of Austin’s “infelicitous” conditions. Here, too, after all, is language incapable of accomplishing anything, language still referring, but both bringing the things to which it refers close and putting them further away. What is the meaning, say, of “patriarchalness”? Is the thing to which it refers patriarchal because it is a patriarchy, or is patriarchy so called because it is simply a socially concrete instance of the patriarchal? What is the essence and what the quality? What is a description as it were from the inside and what from the outside? Once again we are in the condition of not knowing our way round, which is something like what the reviewer, it seems to me, means by “philological reform.” For in the condition of such a “we” as underwrites Pierre, there is a non-normativeness of interest. There is a variability of criteria for fixing even what we are presumably interested in, a dissociation of one fact of interest from another, each existing in its different worlds. We might seem to be, here, on the road to the situation we find in The ConfidenceMan, where nothing seems to exist even in its own world, where the man is “a man with the weed” (ch. 5) or “a man in a snuff-colored surtout” (ch. 20), but never the man himself, and where the confidence man, especially, the focus of the book’s descriptions, is never identical with himself, either. Only, in Pierre, unlike The Confidence-Man, description is not offered in the mode of substitution or disguise.

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Pierre, in any description of him, remains Pierre, which is to say that no representation of him is replaced by representation of something else—a weed or surtout. The first fact with which the narrative is concerned is not abandoned for a different fact where concern is not really a desideratum. Rather, the facts of concern are simply different, unassimilable to each other because they are no longer shared, and this is precisely Pierre’s problem. In other terms, “explanations,” as Wittgenstein puts it, “come to an end somewhere.”30 And, where we do, indeed, know our way round, where “we” is not in question, that somewhere is the world measured on a scale of investments we hold in common with others. Accordingly, in Pierre, where the world is just the world in which investments are not held in common, Melville, investing himself in that world, ends everywhere. Here Lacan on the “real” may be of help, though by way of an argument against him. As Lacan takes it in the wake of Saussure, meaning resides in the chain of signifiers given by the language of a community. To put a finer point on it, meaning, which ought to be a matter of the relation of signifier to signified, of language to the real, instead is deferred along the chain. For the signifying subject, at least, the real does not really exist. It is empty, has vanished before it is established. It is created, even, by the very system that would signify it. It is always already absent. For Lacan, accordingly, love is doomed. Because any signified, the object of any desire, or what he calls the “objet petit a,” is but a kind of valorization of deferral, it is fated to be unsatisfactory. And yet, just what Melville, in Pierre, finds, given to him by the absence of any mutuality of desire, is that it is rather the chain which does not exist, the chain which is always already absent, and he is faced with the real alone, which, in Melville, we might define, contra Lacan, as that in which one’s investment, try as one might, cannot be deferred. In other terms, what Melville finds is that language is meaningful through and through, that it signifies everywhere, which is the fundamental reason for the nominalizations noted by the contemporaneous reviewers. The objet, for him, is not so petit, after all. As Freud put it, in a psychological critique of Lacanian psychology avant la lettre, “sometimes a cigar is only a cigar.” Or, even better, as Jake will put it, at the end of The Sun Also Rises, when Brett, reminding him of the relations they cannot have, tells him not to drink, “I like to drink … . I like to do a lot of things.” “A lot of things,” precisely. In the understanding to which Jake has come, drinking and eating are not substitutes for sex. For love is not a matter of substitution. It is not love of the other as a stand-in for the love of self—the object as the subject that is general to the discourse of sentimentality. It is not love of the other as an ideal or type of himself nor love of the average self, as in Smith. Rather, it is love now, commitment to this. And if, as Lacan implies—and as Melville knew—love is doomed, then it is love committed to that doom, too. Or better, if as sentimentality would have it, love is love of everything, love of some all, which is the truth to which Lacan is pointing, then what Melville loves is, rather, every thing.31 This is the sense in which Pierre does not live a fictional life and why the issues of Pierre are not epistemological ones. Thus although he does, indeed, conceive of himself in highly literary terms—in “fictions,” if you will—as Lucy’s chevalier, as

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Isabel’s knight in armor, and then, as his career darkens and his choices become less attractive, as Hamlet and even as Dante, these conceptions are rather expressions of his disposition toward the difficulties of his life than fictions in any pejorative sense. For the problem with them is not that they do not agree with the facts of his case, that they are not viable or true representations—call them, even, “real” representations—of his life, but that no structure or chain of agreement links them together in a whole, so they do not, in effect, agree with each other or with what others might agree to. And this non-agreement is all the more apparent in the one fiction in the worst sense that he does tell, a sort of exception that proves the rule, that Isabel is his sister. Strolling a picture gallery with Isabel, Pierre is brought up short by a portrait, “Stranger’s Head by the Unknown Hand.” The portrait looks like the chair portrait of his father, a key piece of evidence on which he has based his belief that Isabel is his father’s daughter. But, as he realizes, the figure in the gallery portrait might not even have existed, and so his father might be no more Isabel’s father than the figure in the portrait. Moreover, at the same time, Isabel is struck by the resemblance of the portrait not to the chair portrait, which she has never seen, but to her memory of the man she did, indeed, call father, so that, as they speak together of their wonder at the portrait, “though both were intensely excited by one object, yet their two minds and memories were thereby directed to entirely different contemplations; while still each, for the time … might have vaguely supposed the other occupied by one and the same contemplation” (P, 352). Here, certainly, is an epistemological problem, and a double one at that, the classical philosophical skepticisms concerning knowledge of things and knowledge of other minds. Yet, as Melville would tell us, epistemology is a blind, and clarification of the problem would solve nothing. For Pierre does not love Isabel because he thinks she is his sister. Indeed, he falls in love at first sight, before he receives her letter and she tells him her story, as a number of Pierre’s most careful readers have pointed out.32 Rather, he decides she is his sister because he loves her, which is to say that he would assimilate his love for her into the sphere of his other loves, into the totalizing world of sentiment, the homogeneity of which his love for Isabel—a dark-eyed beauty, an outsider, a low seamstress, insufficiently “docile,” as his mother complains—threatens. He would turn an essentially exogamous relationship into an endogamous one.33 He would bring a passion illicit because its object is unacceptable to Saddle Meadows into the world of Saddle Meadows, the sentimentalized world where the mother is the fount of love, its theologos, exactly, and so where love is of the mother, or love is of the mother as “sister,” as Pierre calls his mother, following a long sentimentalized line of interchangeably called mothers and sisters and lovers from Arthur Mervyn’s lover in Brockden Brown, whom Mervyn calls mother explicitly; to “Mother Bunch,” the sister in Eugene Sue’s The Wandering Jew; and on through Agnes, the “sister” soon to become wife in David Copperfield, published just two years before Pierre; to “Mother Hubbard,” one of the pet names given to Richard and Ada’s stepsister and Jarndyce’s betrothed, Esther Summerson, in Bleak House, published a year after.34 Isabel’s sisterhood really is a fiction, that is, and indeed, it is a

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fiction because it would defer the real. But the real is not itself a fiction. Isabel herself and Pierre’s love for her are not fictional, and his love stands despite all attempts to defer her, despite the insistence of the fiction of her sisterhood on a substitutability that will not recognize love for this one and that one, but would maintain that all loves are for the same one. This is why, despite Pierre’s doubts about Isabel’s consanguinity in the picture gallery, nothing changes from when he was certain about it, neither his passion for Isabel nor, on the other side, what we might have expected would have changed—say on the model, or on its inversion, of The Power of Sympathy, where it is the brother-sister relation between the two central characters that prevents consummation—his inability to marry her. For it is fact, Pierre has wished to say, that has commanded his interest, denying that it was his interest that was attempting to command fact. And that neither can command either is, accordingly, the real discovery in the gallery. It is the discovery of the utter independence of interest, love’s loneliness, its contingency, its ultimate inefficacy, especially its inefficacy in the formation of community, and such that even being loved in return becomes a contingency, merely a happy circumstance, which is also why Pierre is rather more forlorn when he is with Lucy and Isabel, together, in his garret— “solitary as at the Pole,” in Melville’s description (P, 338)35—than when he is dreaming about them at Saddle Meadows. Once again, what is poor Pierre to do? None of the ready alternatives are attractive. All are evasions. Thus, to consider those within Melville’s orbit, we might imagine him turning stoic, as in Cameron’s reading of the Melville of Billy Budd. Or we might consider a better instance, Melville’s poetry, which despite a real sea change in its critical estimation since Howells’ panning of Battle-Pieces in an 1867 review, still seems to me not so unlike Pierre’s own youthful poetry—poetry, as it were, of the left hand, which Pierre disowns for its basic lack of authorial investment.36 Especially might we consider Clarel, for although, in Clarel, what we get is a kind of measured melancholy more appropriate to middle-aged lack of investment—what Melville, with his usual selfcriticism, though also not without sympathy, calls the “slipperily alluring … sadness” that comes “because we have found a snug sofa at last” (P,  259)—the situation is fundamentally the same. That is, in both works we really do find interest without interest: in the case of Billy Budd, a sort of dispassionate framing of legal possibilities, of natural law versus positive law, that has made it one of the go-to texts of law-school courses on literature and the law; in the case of Clarel, a sort of Arnoldian rumination on freedom and fate, faith and unbelief—fiction in both cases, in other words, of just the kinds of binaries that critics have insisted on in Pierre. Only Billy Budd is written, as we have noted, as it were after death, and Clarel, whatever its merits, is far from the writing that Pierre has in mind when he proclaims, “I will write it, I will write it” (P, 273). Indeed, perhaps that was even Clarel’s attraction for Melville. Not really a poem, at least in Emerson’s sense—not, in Emerson’s phrase in “The Poet,” “a metre-making argument” but an argument set to rhythm and rhyme—it provided for Melville, I imagine, a kind of labor enabling him to separate himself from himself, to worry about techniques less troubling than the kinds of engagement exhibited in his prose, somewhat

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like a painter puttering around with pigments rather than painting, or a literary critic in his labors on his footnotes.37 But the kind of writing Pierre proclaims—a writing that no one will read (“of all things least calculated for pecuniary profit”), loving in the face of rejection (“with the feeling of misery and death in him, he created forms of gladness and life”), too earnest to be taken seriously (an “attempt at a mature work” yet written “in the hour of mental immaturity”), and in general weird, intense, pulling against itself, and simply hard to get hold of, written in “deathful faintnesss and sleeplessness, and whirlingness,” and, in Melville’s word, the word, as we have seen, used especially by contemporaneous readers, “craziness” (P, 338–39)—sounds, instead, a lot like Pierre itself. So although those of us who care about Melville the person, as well as Melville the writer, might be happy for his reaching, at last, in his later career, a kind of sanity, that sanity, is achieved through the dispossession of just that interest which Pierre and the Melville of Pierre simply refuse to renounce and of which the simulacrum of interest that is Plinlimmon’s “Chronometricals and Horologicals” would make such a mockery. For a sort of epicurean twin to Clarel’s stoicism, “Chronometricals and Horologicals,” too, deals in binaries, with a reversal of valance. Thus a running after pleasure opposes the enduring of pain. The fleeting opposes the permanent. We might even say that love of the now opposes love of the eternal, a preference for which is the burden of Plinlimmon’s argument and which bears a superficial resemblance to the argument for loving what is there itself that we find in Pierre as a whole. Only Plinlimmon’s love is rather the love of anything than the love we find in Pierre of everything, which is to say that it is not love at all. That “Chronometricals and Horologicals,” accordingly, is not actually written by Plinlimmon, that it is rather put together by his disciples, is perfectly in keeping. Plinlimmon does not “write it, write it,” does not write, in fact, in even an attenuated way—“he would not even write a letter”—for he is invested in no one and nothing. Indeed, in Melville’s term, what characterizes Plinlimmon is “non-Benevolence” (P,  290). In his room high atop the Apostles, watched by his disciples but never himself watching, in effect turning the Apostles into a sort of anti-Foucauldian nonopticon, he is not so much a sentimental Fitzgerald’s deus absconditus, not the eyes of a vanished T. J. Eckleburg, but a god of the very absence of sentiment. Unlike Eckleburg, that is, Plinlimmon is very much present. He does have a face. But, in a reversal of Fitzgerald, his face has no eyes to look at others. As Melville describes it, “that face did not respond to anything. Did I not say before that that face was something separate, and apart; a face by itself?” (P,  293). And so, the community over which he presides is no community at all. Writers as most of the Apostles are, their writing is uniformly utopian. It speaks to no one living “nowhere,” and they are a collection of odd characters, misfits, people working away in isolation on their incompatible systems of philosophy, so that even those who yet remain benevolent, such as Pierre’s old friend Charlie Millthorpe, can do no one any good. In the event, Pierre kills himself. But that is because he will not be one of Plinlimmon’s acolytes. He will not live “separate, and apart,” and if he cannot love, at least he will hate. Turning his rejection letter into wadding for his pistols, he commits, materially, what Ishmael commits in imagination, both murder and suicide. But he

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does so not because he cannot, as Ishmael says, find anything “particular” to keep him on shore or, like Bartleby—“I am not particular,” Bartleby repeats any number of times—because he has given up looking. Unlike Bartleby, in fact, Pierre is, indeed, particular, and committing suicide not because particularities are, for him, absent but because they are too much with him, everywhere and always, he takes a more aggressive way of giving up writing that foreshadows what is Melville’s own version of literary suicide in the years of what used to be called his “silence,” “the long quietus,” in Raymond Weaver’s term, though that view of Melville, too, has been increasingly challenged.38 But in any case, that suicide is not yet, and it remains for Melville, in Pierre, to fulfill Pierre’s pledge of “I will write it, I will write it.”

Secrets deeper than the apocalypse What is the “it” in question in Pierre’s pronouncement? To what does it refer? And why the repetition? Pierre decides to “write it” when, exiled forever from Saddle Meadows and contemplating the hash of the novel which he has been attempting to turn out and which he had thought would earn him and Isabel their keep, he dedicates himself to working on another. He will give up trying to earn a living through his writing. He will give up any idea of his readers responding to him. He will write what he now realizes no one will read, abandoning the popular verse of his adolescence in order to “gospelize the world anew” (P, 273). It is only that in the condition of his inability to commune with that world, what can the gospel be but non-communion itself? This is why the proclamation doubles back on itself. And this is why to what the “it” refers seems so elusive. A little like the idealist “It” of D. H. Lawrence’s critique of Melville and American literature of the period as a whole, that transcendent “spirit” that is outside the self because it is inside, it is an “it” of the subject projecting its interests onto the universe and so lacking the distance to describe in any greater specificity.39 And a little like the realist “It,” say of Tolstoy’s “Ivan Ilyich,” that great fact of death, it is the final objectification of the subject that spells the subject’s end and so the end of the possibility of his describing anything at all. Only both one and the other, it is what we have called interest become fact, interest communicating its failure to compel the interest of any other, yet interested still. To put it in our previous terms, in the intransitivity of the call that is Melville’s writing, to write and to write “it” are virtually synonymous, so that “it” is but the pronomial marking of the condition of that intransitivity.40 We might even say that “it” is another of Pierre’s nominalizations. Like them, it is difficult to grab hold of. Too immediate, it disappears and seems, rather, too distant. Without any general frame of reference, its particularity makes it unassimilable. Yet unassimilable, it can achieve no referential particularity, either. For no more than with Pierre’s “nesses” is its problem one that could be solved by a finer ostensivity. Rather, given the lack of agreement about what counts in Pierre’s world, of what is marked as a fit subject for ostensive noting, “it” becomes another marking of the inadequacy for community of ostensivity itself, however finely drawn. As we

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might put it, Pierre can tell us nothing. But telling nothing, like addressing no one, is what the book everywhere attempts. This is why the burden of what Pierre writes, what, speaking of its audience, Pierre says he will “show them,” is “deeper secrets than the Apocalypse” (P, 273). As Gordon Hutner notes, the mystery, secret, is the sign of the unreachable other,41 and so it is unrepresentable. In Pierre, however, the other is Melville’s very own other, so that the owning of that unreachability is exactly what Pierre does represent. And that is why there is a good deal of discussion of secrets in Pierre, from the beginning of the book to the end. For example, there is Mrs. Glendinning, Pierre’s mother, who tells Pierre, at a point where he is keeping from her what she will later find out is his attraction to Isabel, “Come, I hate a mystery; speak, my son” (P, 47). Mrs. Glendinning is a sentimentalist in the disciplinary tradition of the panopticon, a tradition that Richard Brodhead has analyzed in detail from a cultural studies perspective.42 She will acknowledge no separation between herself and Pierre and so would banish secrets altogether. Then there is Lucy, who tells him, “Thou must be wholly a disclosed secret to me” (P, 37). Lucy, who in sentimentality’s redemptive mode, would resolve difference in love, does acknowledge secrets, but she conceives of them as what must be shared by the lovers and which will disappear in their union. And, of course, there is Isabel, for whom “mystery of Isabel” is a virtual mantra she sings over and over again as she plays her guitar. Only Isabel, who nominalizes not at all, who does not even know the proper referent of the word “father”—“father only seemed a word of general love and endearment to me—little or nothing more; it did not seem to involve any claims of any sort, one way or the other” (P, 145)—knows nothing of herself or of anyone else as separate persons. She has no consciousness of who or what she is or what others are in relation to her, so that her mysteriousness, no secret after all, is rather a function of the impossibility of her having any secrets, thus evading distance from the other side, avoiding being “lonely as the Pole” by having no self that even can be lonely. This, in fact, is why she can be so imperious when singing her narrative—“Do not speak to me,” she says, repeatedly, whenever Pierre threatens to interrupt (e.g., P,  148, 154). Never really owning what she is singing, singing as no one in particular to no one else in particular, her narrative must have its way, and she, along with everyone else, must simply lose herself in it. To put it in plainer terms, without an I and a You, the book that Isabel, in effect, is writing, can have no “we.” But in Pierre, with both an I and a You, indeed with its peculiar Melvillean “we” where I-You is a kind of I-It, the “we” is itself the secret, but one that accordingly speaks its name. So, to compare Melville with Hawthorne, who manages the secret of identity by compartmentalizing it in various modalities: in Pierre, as in The Scarlet Letter (where the secret is the identity of Hester’s partner), the secret of Isabel’s identity is known, if not from the start, then very quickly after the start, once Pierre receives her letter. And what is known, as in The Blithedale Romance (that “I–I–loved Priscilla”), is false, or at least may be false, as we learn in the gallery scene about Isabel’s not being Pierre’s sister. And, too, as in The House of the Seven Gables, true or false (whether there is or is not a deed to the landmass of Maine), it can make no difference, at least for the plot

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or the novel’s denouement in a revelation, for as we have seen, one way and the other, Pierre cannot marry Isabel. In The Scarlet Letter, that is to say, love fails. And a certain aesthetic dispassion blunts the force of that failure, so that the novel’s progress, a return to its beginning that can do no more than ameliorate the self ’s distance from the other, is basically a displacement of love onto a form that can have, therefore, nothing more to reveal than the failure of love that it has revealed already. In The Blithedale Romance, love is impossible from the start. And there its impossibility, represented as cognitive, philosophizes the problem away. Alienation results in a gap—in philosophy since Descartes, between self and other; in the narrative, between idealistic truth and realistic truth—and any revelation is simply untrue. In The House of the Seven Gables, a sentimental critique of sentimentality obviates the problem. One loves only what one does love, what one is already close to, and the novel marks what is close and what is far, so that the book goes nowhere and any revelation is irrelevant. But in Pierre, where love is love despite of its impossibility, where there is no dispassion and where, instead, the distance of the self from the other, the absence of any chain or agreement in which all may be located, only proliferates the things and the ones to be loved, there really is a secret to be revealed, but it is the secret as secret. No wonder the plot of Pierre seems, as we have called it, so madly coherent, which we might here define as a coherence yet difficult to account for in the ordinary diegetic way by relating facts to each other until they reach some epistemic foundation for them all. For in Pierre, where sentimentality is founded on the basis not of the resolution of difference in some common knowledge but on knowing knowledge’s inadequacy, it is the problem that itself induces the narrative. What motivates Pierre? What causes him to do what he does throughout, and in particular why does he pretend to a marriage with one he takes to be his sister? Melville gives us an extraordinarily full account of the facts, including Pierre’s youthful desire to act the hero, his calling his mother sister, his suspicions about his father’s bachelor activities, his chafing at his mother’s control—a combination of psychic and social reasons, of will and determinism painstakingly detailed. And yet, finally, none of these reasons, nor all of them together, ever quite amounts to a cause, for his feelings are a “specializing emotion” (P, 50), and his pretended marriage is, as Melville calls it, “unprecedented” in its nature (P,  172). As that great skeptic of causality Hume argued, without precedent we can determine nothing. We know that the sun will rise tomorrow in the east only because it has risen all our yesterdays in the east. But it is on the very basis of lack of precedent that Pierre’s determinations are, after all, taken. Analysis circles round and around, here, resulting in nothing but analysis itself, and attempts to break through founder. So, to take up the issue of will and determinism, William Dillingham, for example, dialecticizing, maintains that “Fate is not principally an external force but an internal one.”43 Or Parker, the chief partisan of the view we have mentioned that the chapters on fiction in Pierre are a mistake and who argues that they carry the book away from its more essential psychological focus, purifies Melville’s account by maintaining a Pierre who is all internal.44 Yet neither dialectic nor purification will really do. What impels Pierre remains a secret not because our view of him is insufficiently internal

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or external, but because it is too much of both. This is why each step he takes is so unpredictable, even as, in retrospect, his progress seems so fated. Too near and too far once again. Our cognition of Pierre and our investment in him, in the condition of our otherness, do not agree, and Pierre, as the figure of invested otherness, is a secret even from himself. Thus, Pierre is “secretly annoyed, and not a little perplexed” by what he does (P, 50). “By his eagerness all objects are deceptively foreshortened” (P, 105). “He saw or seemed to see” (P, 138). The problem Pierre has is not that he is not in touch with himself, but that his knowledge of himself and his commitment to that knowledge— whether that commitment is too little or too much—are incommensurate. For Pierre is not unconscious of his thoughts and his actions, but, as Melville says quite precisely, rather “wrapped from his consciousness” instead (P, 105). And this is why, although he knows that he is virtually possessed by Isabel, yet “this conceit was very dim in Pierre” (P, 51). Or, concerning his father’s libertinism, though it is clear to him that his father’s deathbed words acknowledge a love child, yet was this a “still more nebulous conceit” (P,  71). Or, about what Plinlimmon’s pamphlet says of his own behavior, “Certain it is … that at the time, in his own heart, he seemed to think that he did not fully comprehend the strange writer’s conceit in all its bearings. Yet was this conceit apparently one of the plainest in the world” (P, 210). As is typical of sentimentalists, Melville puts together the two meanings of knowing: knowledge of a thing and identification with that knowledge. Yet he puts them together without, as we have said, sublating either, puts them together skeptically, and it is in the sentimentalization of skepticism, Melville’s investment in it, that Pierre, finally, lives. To put it in the terms of Billy Budd’s subtitle, only an “inside narrative” that acknowledges its outsidedness can place Pierre in some proper relation to us, can give us any knowledge worth sentiment’s knowing.45 And it is Melville’s final pronouncement at the close of Pierre that, after all, just such a knowledge is precisely what love does know, which brings the narrative to its close. The book ends. Pierre is dead, in actuality as he has been dead all along virtually to those who will not read him. The surviving characters, inevitably yet all incongruously, gather around. There is Saddle Meadows, in the figure of Fred, and there is the Apostles, in the shape of Charlie Millthorpe. There is Lucy, the one near to Pierre who becomes far, and Isabel, the far one he would make near. They form, almost, a community: Pierre’s intimates and those who reject intimacy. But as we have seen, near and far, benevolent or indifferent are, for sentiment, but contingencies. And, accordingly, as the novel puts it in its last line, “All’s o’er and ye know him not!” (P, 362). This is Lucy addressing the gathering, those who have attended to Pierre and those who have not, those who have heard him and those who cannot. But in the context of love’s secret, it is more than that. It is Melville, in his intransitive way, addressing us, those of us invested in him and those of us who are not. And in that address, in its reversed locution, the negative becomes a positive. Love as identification is transformed into the impossibility of identification as love nevertheless, and Melville thus calls us to such a love as the only basis on which community can be founded, after all.

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Notes 1

A generous quotation from the full review is printed in Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, eds., Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s “Pierre; or, The Ambiguities” (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983), 35. 2 Quoted by Leon Howard and Hershel Parker in their “Historical Note” to the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Pierre, in The Writings of Herman Melville, v.7, ed. Parker Harrison Hayford and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971), 367. All citations from Pierre are to this edition, hereafter abbreviated as P. 3 Quoted in Howard and Parker, 366. 4 Howard and Parker, 372. Their own view is that, nevertheless, there is a change in tone as the book progresses, but I do not think most readers will agree. Howard first proposed the two Moby-Dicks thesis in “Melville’s Struggle with the Angel,” MLQ 1 (1940): 195–206. For a revision and expansion—in effect, despite its title, three MobyDicks—see George R. Stewart, “The Two Moby-Dicks,” AL 25 (1954): 417–48. 5 Perhaps the first academic to speak of parody is William Braswell, “The Early Love Scenes in Melville’s Pierre,” AL 22.3 (1950): 283–89. Braswell can already cite, as those who take Melville’s sentimental excesses as an unfortunate seriousness, no less important figures in early Melville studies than Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville (New York: The Literary Guild of America, 1929); F.O. Matthiessen, The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941); and Henry Murray, in the introduction to his important edition of Pierre (New York: Hendricks House, 1949), rpt. in Endeavors in Psychology: Selections from the Personology of Henry A. Murray, ed. Edwin S. Shneidman (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 412–81, and the debate has continued since then. For an interesting reading of the seriousness of the parody that effectively turns the debate inside out, see Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993). 6 See Mumford, Matthiessen, and Murray. 7 Melville, letter of November [17?], 1851, in Correspondence, 213. 8 Melville, letter of October 6, 1849, to his father-in-law, in Correspondence, 178. 9 Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 10 As Edgar Dryden puts it, in The Form of American Romance (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 96, speaking of Pierre himself, “The life of its hero is the story of a reader who attempts to become a writer,” an exemplar of the condition of writing, especially in America, a point Dryden elaborates in relation especially to Melville’s later work, in Monumental Melville: The Formation of a Literary Career (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). If I differ from Dryden, it is in the valence of that attempt. For Dryden, Pierre, in its recognition of the unresponsiveness of the reader, is the beginning of Melville’s confrontation with the lie of fiction’s construction of a natural order in which writers and readers find themselves in proper relation. Accordingly, it is the beginning of his turn to a more private form of writing and to the silence of living—or writing—as a kind of death that takes its fullest form in Melville’s poetry. Dryden argues a strong case and offers strong readings throughout.

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12 13

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But from the point of view of sentiment, it seems to me, a sort of publication of the private is what Melville still works to accomplish in Pierre, and his poetry, as I discuss it later, is something he undertakes as rather a respite from his career-long struggle than as his career’s next step. Or where, as I have spoken about it in a somewhat different context, a Melville who is no longer being read keeps faith with his readership by writing a technically “unreadable” novel. See The Idea of Authorship in America: Democratic Poetics from Franklin to Melville (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 220–21. Kenneth Dauber, The Logic of Sentiment, forthcoming. Sharon Cameron, Impersonality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). See also April Alliston, Virtue’s Faults: Correspondence in Eighteenth-Century British and French Women’s Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 78, who notes the double meaning of interest. My thanks to Maayan Dauber for pointing out to me Alliston’s remarks. Michael D. Snediker, “Pierre and the Non-Transparencies of Figuration,” ELH 77.1 (2010): 217–35. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 123. In Anscombe’s British inflected translation, “about.” The story is recounted as, in effect, the scene of origination of his new philosophy in William James, Pragmatism, 1907, reprinted in “Pragmatism” and “The Meaning of Truth,” ed. A. J. Ayer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 27–28. The history of the reception of Moby-Dick has shown a wavering back-and-forth between the two positions. As a reviewer of the London Morning Post, November 14, 1851, put it, “there are occasions when the reader is disposed to believe that the whole book is one vast practical joke,” which was followed in the early days of the Melville revival by the high romantic view of his transcendental seriousness, say as in Raymond P. Weaver, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic (New York: George H. Doran, 1921). This opposition was combined by Richard Chase, Herman Melville: A Critical Study (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 77, in the opinion that “it looks like a hoax, but woe to him who allows himself the comfortable belief that it is a hoax,” and on. The passages quoted are cited in William B. Dillingham, Melville’s Late Works (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 29, 31. And so, too, his next novel, Israel Potter, is dedicated “To His Highness the BunkerHill Monument,” only with more overtly satiric intent. The reader may recall the incident in the Odyssey when Odysseus addresses the Cyclops in the person of “Nobody,” and the Cyclops, telling his fellows that “Nobody” has injured him, fails to communicate what has happened. Homer’s ethnically charged view of the division between the Cyclops and the Greeks, however, is considerably different than Melville’s sympathetic view of his division from his readers. Odysseus’s “Nobody” can never invest himself in the Cyclops’s “Nobody.” Below, we will discuss the related matter of the uses to which Melville puts something like Homeric similes. J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Stanley Plumly, “Sentimental Forms,” in James Wright: The Heart of the Light, ed. Peter Stitt and Frank Graziano (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 374. “Caring more for a thing than God does” is Plumly’s epigrammatic rephrasing of J. D. Salinger’s definition of the sentimental, in “Franny and Zooey,” “giving to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it.”

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22 Herman Melville in a letter to Hawthorne of June 29, 1851, in Correspondence, 196. 23 A convenient summary of the position written for student-readers, which thus marks the ubiquity of the position, may be found in Peter West, “Pierre and the Ambiguities of Antebellum America,” in Critical Insights: Herman Melville, ed. Eric Carl Link (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2013), 244–63. 24 See, for example, William Spanos, “Pierre’s Extraordinary Emergency: Melville and ‘the Voice of Silence’” part I, boundary 2 28.2 (2001): 105–31, and part II, boundary 2 28.3 (2001): 133–55. 25 Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, rev. ed. (1971; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187–228. 26 Bryan C. Short, Cast by Means of Figures: Herman Melville’s Rhetorical Development (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 37, 44, 147–49, 106. 27 For a fascinating account of memory as itself a kind of thinking—an account in a very different context, but where, too, the distinction between the fictive and the real loses all purchase—see Sergey Dolgopolski, The Open Past: Subjectivity and Remembering in the Talmud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). 28 See, especially, Roman Jakobson, “Concluding Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 350–77. 29 Reprinted in Critical Essays on Herman Melville’s “Pierre,” 64, 43. 30 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 1. 31 As Mitchell Breitweiser puts it about Moby-Dick, “Pacific Speculations,” Arizona Quarterly 67.1 (2011): 1–46, what drives Melville is not the fear of a meaningless universe, but a surfeit of meanings irreducible to cognitive classification. I would say, only, that in Pierre, whose concern is rather ethical than epistemological, “meaning” becomes “interest,” and cognitive classification becomes the normativity of interest. 32 Beginning with Murray, Introduction to Pierre, 439ff. 33 Cf. the contention of Gillian Silverman, in Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 86, that despite its disruptions, incest “maintains … a commitment, perverse in its extremity, to the institution of the family.” 34 And, in French literature, there is Rousseau’s Mme. de Warens, in The Confessions (pub. 1782), the woman Rousseau calls “maman” before, during, and after the period of their intimacy. The relation between Rousseau and Mme. De Warens, however, seems more closely related to Greek paideia, as in Plato’s Symposium, than to sentimental endogamy. And, in fact, Brockden Brown’s portrayal of the relation between Mervyn and his “mother” owes not a little to this tradition, as well, though he has moved far in a sentimental direction. 35 Here is the full description: “On either hand clung to by a girl who would have laid down her life for him; Pierre, nevertheless, in his deepest, highest part, was utterly without sympathy from any thing divine, human, brute, or vegetable. One in a city of hundreds of thousands of human beings, Pierre was solitary as at the Pole.” 36 See, for example, the special volume on Melville’s poetry, Leviathan 9.3 (2007). The Melville Society has also sponsored a number of conference sessions at recent MLA and ASA conventions. For extended treatments see, especially, Dryden, Monumental Melville; Hershel Parker, Melville: The Making of the Poet (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008); William C. Spengemann, Three American Poets: Walt

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Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010); and, earlier, Joyce Sparer Adler, War in Melville’s Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 1981). Much of the revaluation has taken the form of praising what might otherwise seem like prosodic awkwardness in Melville’s poetry as resulting from an “underlying transgressive modality,” in the words of Dan Fineman, “Margins of Poetry: The Character of Character in Melville’s ‘The Temeraire,’” Leviathan 8.3 (2000): 83 (extract). Or as summed up by Faith Barrett, in a headnote to Fineman and the other extracts from a symposium for the ALA printed in the volume, Melville was “exploring the generic limits” of various poetic forms (83). This is Melville as proto-modernist. But I do not think the gaps and discordancies in Melville’s poetry sound very much like “The Wasteland.” And that a not inconsiderable number of the new appreciations argue, rather, that Melville’s poetry has been underappreciated because critics, attuned to modernity, fail to understand that its aesthetic is a popular Civil War aesthetic, seems to me not just a difference of opinion but a sign of a genuine difficulty. 37 Consider, however, John Bryant’s wonderful reading of poems from the unfinished Weeds and Wildings, including evidence of Melville’s labors in revising and rearranging, “Melville’s Rose Poems: As They Fell,” Arizona Quarterly 52.4 (1996): 49–84. As Bryant sums it up, “At first I saw these materials merely as evidence of a poet tinkering with words, and there is no doubt of this fundamental fact . … But I quickly recognized, too, that here was an artist in love with his wife, in love with sexuality, in love, too, with his lost son Malcolm” (50). For Bryant, Melville, as his life drew to a close, had at last found, in his wife Lizzie, a reader who despite everything would listen. 38 Weaver, Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic. “The long quietus” is the title of Weaver’s chapter on the poetry. 39 D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, 913. 40 Cf. Roland Barthes, “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?” in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 134–56. 41 Gordon Hutner, Secrets and Sympathy: Forms of Disclosure in Hawthorne’s Novels (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988). 42 Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in NineteenthCentury America (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993). 43 William B. Dillingham, Melville’s Later Novels (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 175. 44 Hershel Parker, introduction to The Kraken Edition of Pierre (New York: Harper Collins, 1995). In the text of the novel itself, Parker goes so far as to excise some of the major discussions Melville offers on writing and publishing. 45 Cf. Samuel Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999): “Billy Budd is an ‘inside narrative’ about the inability of a narrator to get inside, to read surface in depth, to gain full access to the character of his characters” (260).

7

Phenomenology Beyond the Phantom Limb: Melvillean Figuration and Chronic Pain Michael D. Snediker

Introduction This is an essay “about” chronic pain and phenomenology. Unlike many Melvillean explorations of disability studies, it is only incidentally about Ahab’s prosthetic leg. It is about Moby Dick only insofar as the whale’s relation to Ahab figures the impossible ontology of chronic pain. These pages hypothesize the obscure labor of that verb, “figures.” Not quite verb of being and not quite transitive, it is a transformative selvedge, stitching itself repeatedly to itself from the outer edges. Chronic pain’s relation to the figurative echoes the body’s more general relation to language. The scene of this encounter isn’t mystical; it’s Purell and long-expired magazines in a pain doctor’s waiting room. It’s examination rooms decorated with promotional pharmaceutical swag and plastic models of vertebrae. And it’s everywhere one passes as a pain-free person. As Judith Butler writes, Although one might accept the proposition that the body is knowable only through language, that the body is given through language, it is never fully given in that way, and to say that it is given partially can be understood only if we also acknowledge that it is given, when it is given, in parts—it is, as it were, given and withheld at the same time.1

The back-and-forth of “given and withheld,” like the rhetorical pivot of “as it were,” is the mark not only of “language,” but also of figurative language. This essay will suggest that the literally quintessential, figurative lavishness of a text like Pierre can teach us something elemental about the experience of chronic pain, both ours and the “sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump”2 to which Peleg attributes Ahab’s singular rancor. The figurative language that interests me here has less to do with the “sharpness” of Ahab’s pain than it does with pain’s chronicity, the proleptically endless-seeming interval in which the “shooting” occurs. While it’s not entirely clear whether “sharp

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shooting pains” originates as formulation in Ahab or Peleg, himself, Melville is careful at least to give it to us in Peleg’s own words. Peleg tells Ishmael: I know Captain Ahab well; I’ve sailed with him as mate years ago; I know what he is—a good man—not a pious, good man, like Bildad, but a swearing good m ­ an— something like me—only there’s a good deal more of him. Aye, Aye, I know that he was never very jolly; and I know that on the passage home, he was a little out of his mind for a spell; but it was the sharp shooting pains in his bleeding stump that brought that about, as any one might see. I know, too, that ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he’s been kind of moody—desperate moody, and savage sometimes, but that will all pass off.3

Peleg’s account is meticulous. He knows Ahab well; indeed, the word “know” appears no fewer than four times. What he doesn’t know, what he formulates as the “good deal more of him” is the pain. Thinking about what Peleg has told him, Ishmael, in turn, tells us, “As I walked away, I was full of thoughtfulness; what had been incidentally revealed to me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain wild vagueness of painfulness concerning him.”4 Ahab’s experience of pain is experienced by Peleg epistemologically, as though what the latter did or didn’t know were a loose translation not of what Ahab knows but of what he experiences, of what pain is. In turn, Peleg’s words fill Ishmael as though one could experience a description of someone else’s pain as one’s own interior. On the first page of The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry writes that “when one hears about another person’s physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person’s body may seem to have the remote character of some deep subterranean fact, belonging to an invisible geography that, however, portentous, has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth.”5 Ishmael’s “certain wild vagueness of painfulness” corresponds to Scarry’s “subterranean fact,” fact and subterranean nearly canceling each other out. Does a fact exist for itself? Does pain exist when the body it’s in goes anesthetic? At the bottom of the sea, the fact may as well be a dream, the route from the “vagueness” to the “painfulness” as innavigable as a ship through fog. How then for Ahab? Throughout the book, the captain all but disappears. As much as he is driven to search the pain out, he is already alone with it. If pain is a subterranean fact, this is where Ahab lives: “the isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain humming silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the roar of the elements.”6 The sea, in turn, becomes the inexorable fantasy of the body hyperbolically flayed. When one suffers chronic pain, one answers to (and sometimes, so it seems—so it feels?—is ontologized by) the very thing one can’t see. And so the sea’s hyperbole figures the sufferer’s fantasy of seeing of what the agony consists: And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into view; surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and contracting his spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations. At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frightened air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea.7

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Because we’re talking chronic pain, such scenes bleed into each other, a rhythm of activity and quiet corresponding to the quotidian of how pain looks from the outside (the calm, the withdrawing) and how it might feel from the inside. Usually, however, how it feels looks like nothing at all, a photograph by Misrach: Or rather: how it feels like it looks, these subtle distinctions overlaying each other like a diaphanous tissue.

Figure 7.1  © Richard Misrach, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles.

And so, the boat’s final encounter with Moby Dick realizes the impossible moment when both the external world and our words for it are adequate to both one’s imagination and the pain that fills it: Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles; then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes, leaving the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the whale.8

On January  8, 1852, Melville famously writes to Sophia Hawthorne (Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife) that “I shall not again send you a bowl of salt water. The next chalice I shall commend will be a rural bowl of milk.”9 Traditionally, critics take for granted that the bowl of milk (whether sincerely or not) refers to Pierre. I’d like to hold onto the possibility, however, that the milk-bowl also looks backward to this

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incredible scene. The above lines feature neither Ahab nor his crew; everyone is reduced to pronouns. The whale himself is reduced if not to figuration then to form: “shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping deep.” For all the words churning around it, the figurative, milk-like creaming almost evades nouns altogether. The milk-like substance is the momentary energy of the interior of the deep moving through and into the exterior of the sea’s surface. Swelled, upheaving, sliding, submerged, rumbling, hum, bedraggled, trailing, obliquely, shrouded, drooping, hovered, rainbowed, swamping, crushed, flashed, brokenly, leaving, circling: the substance of these lines is a series of gestures left by the whale like a thread through the eye of a needle. Incommensurate but nearly synchronic, blooming out of each other: this is an instance of the sort of figurative vitality that Pierre will further refine. Like the newly creamed surface of the sea, my sense of figuration belongs to neither the self nor the world. It’s neither metaphorical nor allegorical, but it’s also not “merely” descriptive. What makes it figurative is its movement, its strange autonomy. If trying to think about Ahab’s pain leaves Ishmael feeling filled with the “vagueness of painfulness,” I want to suggest that perhaps the closest we can get to how Ahab feels are these such moments of disastrous, figurative bloom. As Melville writes, “subsided not, but deepeningly contracted,” as though the irruption presented a scene of agony we were being trained not to follow but to believe in after it had vanished; vanished, at least, for us. The figurative intensities of Pierre and these later passages from Moby-Dick posit ways of thinking about phenomenologies of chronic pain from the orientation of the person feeling them—how pain looks as it’s being felt, how it feels. Ahab’s “madness,” in this light, is a figure for our chronic suffering. My suffering. In the vanity of chronic pain, that Ahab can’t remember a time before the whale figures my own inability to remember a time before the pain. It feels less dramatic so much as tedious (from taedere to weary) but no less shakeable. Ahab’s amnesia is prosthetic: it fits where my memory is missing. Trying to remember is an ongoing process even as (like a favorite song) it never goes old. In place of remembering it feels like shuffling through the outside of one’s own image repertoire. Writing “about” chronic pain is always on the verge of becoming a figure for chronic pain: “yet, to any monomaniac man, the veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings.”10 These pages don’t quite answer the questions that “about” implies. Etymologically, “about” is traced to the Old English onbutan, which by the thirteenth century had displaced ymbutan, which had meant “in the neighborhood of.” Originally, however, it meant “on the outside of.”11 To say what a story is about presumes one grasps it from beginning to end, that it can be paraphrased. When it comes to chronic pain, I can neither remember its beginning nor visualize its end and what happens in between only sometimes dovetails with the interest of these pages. Like a difficult poem, pain resists the question of “about.” It’s the wrong question. Melville is a fiction writer who understands precisely this difference between genres, poem, and story. Moby-Dick and Pierre produce continuities generically associated with the novel only so they can be interrupted. This essay begins with “chronic pain and phenomenology” rather than “phenomenology of chronic pain” because the pain is never simply the object of

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inquiry. If phenomenology describes a relation to an interior, the way the world feels on the inside, then the phenomenality of chronic pain lies further interior to that. Phenomenally speaking, inaccessible interiority is indistinguishable from a radical exterior; it equally falls short of purview. If it broke the surface a little more, it might be less difficult to describe if not what it is then what it’s about. Imagine: we begin with a surface. Parallel or perpendicular to a wall, a window, a whale (Old English walu “ridge, bank” of earth or stone, later “ridge made on flesh by a lash”12) is the interruption of a surface, its opening up, anticipated by the fin. “Even if not the slightest other part of the creature be visible, this isolated fin will, at times, be seen plainly projecting from the surface. When the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked with spherical ripples, and this gnomon-like fin stands up and casts shadows upon the wrinkled surface, it may well be supposed that the watery circle surrounding it somewhat resembles a dial … . On that Ahaz-dial the shadow often goes back.”13 The fin, the syllable it gives to finitude, turns the surface into a clock. Melville’s writing—Moby-Dick and Pierre, but also “Bartleby” and others— illuminates a scene of phenomenological edge-work. Not where phenomenon meets logos, but where logos, beveled, meets λύπη, the Greek word for pain, the extremity where phenomenology swerves because there’s no way through pain’s impasse. If it doesn’t go without saying, this essay is about chronic pain rather than pain per se, because it’s only in the iteration of pain, over and over, that it becomes a thing. As Levi R. Bryant writes, “Qualities inhere in or belong to a substance, but do not make the substance what it is. Substance is therefore that which persists throughout time.”14 At its most general, pain interrupts the temporal quotidian. In the case of chronic pain, however, pain is the quotidian. Along these lines, its chronicity parodies the incessant, naturalizing engine of repetition described in Judith Butler’s account of performativity. The ontologizing iterations of pain only serve to deteriorate the self, as though the interiority that pain installed were its own. It is for itself. This is where a phenomenology of chronic pain opens onto object-oriented ontology, registering the humbling incongruity of this thing that both is and isn’t one’s own flesh. Chronic pain might feel most like an object (as opposed to an apparatus, a syndrome, a condition) in the interminability of figuring it out: a series of concentrically maddening or humiliating medical encounters spiraling around this un-interpretable thing—this stone thrown into the lake of the neck. Over time, its imperviousness to these failed interventions renders our relation to it interpretive. At the same time, the imperviousness is felt as a failed interface between one’s self and one’s self, not one hand resting gently on the other so much as an impinging. Is one encountering in this impinging a discontinuous object or some continuous part of one’s self, or some quality belonging to one or the either? “In short, differences,” Levi R. Bryant writes, “are always differences belonging to objects.”15 For Graham Harman, the name for this very predicament is metaphor: “Instead of metaphor giving us a simulated experience of the executant cypress or flame, thereby turning the withdrawn into the visible, what it really does is make the visible seem withdrawn: that is to say, metaphor converts the qualities of objects into objects in their own right.”16 Another word Harman associates with this process is “allure,” which he describes as that which “invites us into a world

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that seemed inaccessible, a world in which the object must be even deeper than what we had regarded as its most intimate properties. Whereas black noise unfolds entirely within a single world, allure resembles a whirlpool or black hole sucking us into another.”17 And we are back to Moby-Dick, “floating on the margin of the ensuing scene, and in full sight of it, when the half-spent suction of the sunk ship reached me, I was then, but slowly, drawn towards the closing vortex.”18 Like many of Melville’s other constitutive sounds and surfaces, the feel of the “invitation” that allure makes isn’t instantaneous. Allure doesn’t merely invite us into the inaccessible anymore than a whirlpool merely obliterates. It’s a process slow enough to respond, coral-like, to our powers of attention. I think here of this 1930 description of Pierre by early Melville critic, E. L. Grant Watson: [t]here is a viscous and somewhat cloying quality about the style, which like the substance of the subconscious world, with which it deals, is at first repellent. Like some alien particle, unable to fuse or to accommodate itself to this deliberate artifice, the mind, which cannot at once shake off the values of normal existence, rebels against the exaggerated virtuousness … . 19

In the startling rhetorical turn of Watson’s second line, the mind discovers only after it has named or recognized that it is itself the alien particle. Reading along, we are surprised by this elegant pivot into becoming the very thing we think, the spatial propinquity of “the mind” and “deliberate artifice” uncannily luring us into associating the latter as the mind’s own attention being studied. “[T]he mind” is caught in the incessant propulsion/repulsion of a figuration beholden to neither itself nor the world. Melville’s style reproduces this suction-like movement as the membranous surface through which we read. Melville’s style, that is, is a membranous surface that we travel through (rather than across, from A to B along a two-dimensional line). Thinking about figuration as an evolving substance interrupts the convention by which description is subordinate to the textual verisimilitude of characters and plot. A subsequent section will return to the suctioning quality of text in terms of the literal and figurative lubricity of moistness. On some other speculative register, I am imagining these textual vicissitudes of lubrication in terms not only of sexual arousal, but also of chronic pain’s difficult movement of joints. Cartilage acts as a shock absorber between vertebrae. Joint tissue is enclosed by a facet, lined with a thin material called the synovial membrane, which releases a slippery or sticky fluid called synovial fluid into the joint space. In other words, if the secret around which Pierre is organized is too thinly drawn and emotionally ersatz for me to believe in, I’m nonetheless convinced—as by my own joints responding to weather—that the baroque of Pierre feels all the more adrift from itself because it’s built on a series of secretions. “With kisses I will suck thy secret from thy cheek!” threatens Lucy Tartan. And so Pierre “slid himself straight into the horrible interspace [of the Terror Stone]” like pain in a synovial membrane.

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“An ordinary fellow”: The manifold Figuration’s disruption of textual verisimilitude speaks to some of the limitations of first-wave disability studies. The disruption, in turn, illuminates where theorists of chronic pain and disability alike might rethink the very interface in which the terms of  engagement, however imagined, come to be. For instance, I recently read a 2014 essay  on Moby-Dick and disability whose opening remarks exemplify the sort of  work my writing about chronic pain is not. Citing foundational first-wave disability  scholarship from the past twenty-five years, the essay notes that “Ahab is repeatedly represented as ‘a product of his own physiological condition,’ the victim of a  physical injury that seems to situate him outside of the parameters of the ‘traditionally able-bodied profession’ of whaling.”20 None of this is untrue, per se, but the vigor of its paraphrase scrubs the passage clean of what R. P. Blackmur calls Melville’s “excessive sophistication of  surfaces.”21 Readings such as this one depend on an assumed  equivalence between Melville’s characters and ourselves, as though there  were an Ahab in Melville’s text capable of being rehabilitated once extricated from the novel’s effulgent figurative  dynamo. But there is no Ahab if there is no dynamo. Readings of Ahab are unable to speak to let alone inhabit the novel’s textual universe to the extent that they assume, in Sontag’s words, that “[t]he most truthful way of regarding illness … is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.”22 It’s in this spirit that Rosemarie Garland-Thomson produces the following stupendous counterfactual, whose approach to correcting Melville’s text reminds me (with all due respect to Garland-Thomson) of the eighty-four-year-old Spanish pensioner who found herself famous after correcting a church fresco: The plot or the work’s rhetorical potential usually benefits from the disabled figure remaining other to the reader—identifiably human but resolutely different. How could Ahab operate effectively if the reader were allowed to see him as an ordinary fellow instead of as an icon of monomaniacal revenge—if his disability lost its transcendent meaning?…. Thus the rhetorical function of the highly charged trait fixes relations between disabled figures and their readers. If disabled characters acted, as real people with disabilities often do, to counter their stigmatized status, the rhetorical potency of the stigma would be mitigated or lost.23

There is no universe in which we are “allowed” to see Ahab as an “ordinary fellow,” because there is no universe in which he is one. Figuration isn’t external to what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder call “the variable experience of lived embodiment”;24 in Melville, it is lived embodiment. In its movement between phenomenology’s phenomena and logos, figuration feels more palpable than the non-figurative language for which “logos” stands. I imagine phenomenology as an axis rather than the merging of two disparate elements. If phenomena and logos are at opposite sides of a line, the non-figurative appears closer to logos, whereas the figurative, as an event (in both time and substance), occurs nearer the phenomenal. Figuration describes writing itself as

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it inches toward being an event (and more simply, toward being). More importantly, however, figuration also describes what happens to pain, its infinitesimal movement between being felt constantly and constantly being thought. Character and plot work toward minimizing the force of figuration to the extent that it hypostasizes the energy of language in terms of a character’s traits, or a plot’s surprising turn. Melville’s writing is a lesson in relinquishing characterology and the forms of identification it seems to promise, disabusing us of the notion that a character’s resemblance to persons is our only hold in the ethos of learning from each other. It’s the lure of characterology that cozens critics into suspending their disbelief that Ahab’s humanness is coextensive with their own. To take a different example, Melville’s playful soldering of radical queerness and domesticity impels readers to treat the scene of Ishmael in bed with Queequeg as an image of inclusiveness avant la lettre. What is most interesting about the scene, however, might well be its transposition of queer embodiment onto characters too thinly drawn to sustain it. When Ishmael wakes with Queequeg’s arm thrown over him, “tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a figure,”25 it is a crash course in queerness beyond the guarantee of subjectivity. Without subjectivity, where does sexuality go, into what is it dispersed? In the genial absence of both, queerness is autonomous from the bodies in and on which it ordinarily resides. Intimated by the “labyrinth of a figure,” queerness disencumbered from bodies is queerness transfigured. But it is also queerness interminable. I understand this lesson as both an example of and model for my thinking about chronic pain as something that doesn’t simply reside in the ontological structures it inherits. Rather, chronic pain alters the very shape of the ontological. No less radically, thinking about chronic pain becomes an occasion to rethink thinking ecologically. Toward the end of Pierre, Melville writes, “Is Pierre a shepherd, or a bishop, or a cripple? No, but he has in effect, reduced himself to the miserable condition of the last. With the crook-ended cane, Pierre—unable to rise without sadly impairing his manifold intrenchments, and admitting the cold air into their innermost nooks … .”26 If the passage is alluring if not to some extent too convenient in its hypothesis of Pierre’s explicitly (i.e., literally) “cripple[d]” state, it is arresting in its understanding of the latter not only as a “miserable condition” but in the more literally pressing manner of “manifold entrenchments.” However else we imagine its metabolism of materialism and figuration, Moby-Dick enjoins its readers to understand the fact of Ahab’s injury in material terms: a whaling captain with a leg made from “the polished bone of the sperm whale’s jaw”27 dedicates his life to killing the whale that took the first one. Contra reports that “Ahab” signifies an “all-encompassing, all-responsible individual self ”28 who happens to have lost his leg, Ahab “is for ever Ahab” not despite but because of his loss. Pierre, by contrast, is for ever Pierre, not on account of any single injury or outcome, but because his constitution from the beginning is (at best) equal parts literal and figurative. Figuration unremittingly riddles Pierre’s body long  before any “actual” tribulation occurs. To be sure, the narrative indeed posits the consequences of Pierre’s decision to flee Saddle Meadows as an extended period of  unhappiness and bodily ailment. Narrative notwithstanding, however, Pierre’s self (bodily  and  psychical  alike)  has

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already been rendered so entirely figurative that suffering, present and future, has no body to attach to. Textual exorbitance absorbs narrative and characterology (or at least our expectation of them) in its excrescent ooze, as though the figurative logic of Pierre were the counterintuitive corporealization of Moby-Dick’s famous,  decorporealizing squeeze of the hand: It had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others, I sat down before a large Constantine’s bath of it, I found it strangely concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous duty! No wonder that in old times this sperm was such a favorite cosmetic. Such a clearer! such a sweetener! such a softener! such a delicious mollifier! After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize.29

Indeed, there is perhaps no better description of the acyrological purple of Pierre— what the novel’s dedication winkingly calls “the Most Imperial Purple Majesty”—than the passage just following Melville’s readily (and non-coincidentally) queerable account of the “abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling” that comes with squeezing the hands of fellow whalers while squeezing out the “gentle globules”: First comes white-horse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering part of the fish, and also from the thicker portions of his flukes. It is tough with congealed tendons—a wad of muscle—but still contains some oil. After being severed from the whale, the white-horse is first cut into portable oblongs ere going to the mincer. They look much like blocks of Berkshire marble. Plum-pudding is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the whale’s flesh, here and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and often participating to a considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is a most refreshing, convivial, beautiful object to behold. As its name imports, it is of an exceedingly rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked snowy and golden ground, dotted with spots of the deepest crimson and purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures of citron. Spite of reason, it is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I confess, that once I stole behind the foremast to try it. It tasted something as I should conceive a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might have tasted, supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison season, and that particular venison season contemporary with an unusually fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne. There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up in the course of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling adequately to describe. It is called slobgollion; an appellation original with the whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance. It is an ineffably oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs of sperm, after a prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting. I hold it to be the wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case, coalescing.30

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Nominally about the knots of flesh from which the spermatic cure-all is separated, these extraordinary lines hyperbolically suggest that if Ahab is made of ivory, Pierre no less than the whales he follows is larded. Melville’s jubilant taxonomy implies that the difference between literal blubber and figurative blubber is one of degree rather than kind. Along these lines, that earlier passage’s “manifold” anticipates a later chapter’s “manifold wrappings,” the multiple insufficient blankets with which Pierre girds himself against “the permanent chill of his room.” Some scenes later, however, Pierre’s “manifold intrenchments” seem equally continuous with the abstraction of Pierre’s “manifold and inter-enfolding mystic and transcendental persuasions.”31 Twice, we find him in the process of “setting all these [persuasions]” aside, in favor of what the narrator calls “plain, palpable facts” (i.e., concerning the supposed paternity of his “sister,” Isabel). These facts might be “plain[er]” than the mystic persuasions he sets aside, but as far as palpability goes, they are hardly more persuasive than the blanket-thin plot through which figuration, like weather, seems to interrupt from both sides. It’s not that these folds are either literal (wrappings, blanket) or figurative (intrenchments, persuasions), but that the fold, like an ambergris, is a substance of its own. In the words of Deleuze’s prescient figuring of Leibniz, the text also fashions a way of representing what Leibniz will always affirm: a correspondence and even a communication between the two levels, between the two labyrinths, between the pleats of matter and the folds in the soul … . And the same image, that of veins in marble, is applied to the two under different conditions. Sometimes the veins are the pleats of matter that surround living beings held in the mass, such that the marble tile resembles a rippling lake that teems with fish. Sometimes the veins are innate ideas in the soul, like twisted figures … caught in the block of marble. Matter is marbled, of two different styles.32

Pierre and his implicitly diaphanous dermis experience them equally. When one’s dermis is as thin, literally and figuratively, as Pierre’s, every fold and inter-enfolding matters. Each morning, Pierre subjects himself to the “raspings of flesh-brushes, perverted to the filing and polishing of merest ribs.”33 This painful ablution is almost literal, the bones of his emaciated body are nearly as visible as the polished bone of Ahab’s leg, or the “barbaric Ethiopian emperor[’s] neck … heavy with pendants of polished ivory,”34 to which the Pequod itself is compared. At the same time, however, this emaciation is a figure for Pierre’s susceptibility to the novel-at-large. To call the condition of his embodiment thin-skinned is to note, seeing through it, the extent to which he embodies (such as that is) a mode of italicized being: easy enough to imagine Pierre’s “lean philosophical nudity” tilting into the italics of Pierre. The “lean nudit[ies]” to which Pierre and his fellow Apostles are reduced further distill bodies to typography, as though the spines and spurs and stems of typeface prefigured that sodality of bones: “Oh, the rheumatical cracklings of rusted joints, in that defied air of December!” This skeletonizing of character renders all the more astonishing the effulgent, figurative largesse that washes over it: or creeps through it, all those rusted rheumatisms.

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Moist eyefish with wings The introduction of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s foundational Epistemology of the Closet is comprised of seven axioms that inform what Sedgwick calls “the methodological, definitional, and axiomatic groundings of the book’s project” (22). Ask any queer theorist for Axiom 1 and they’ll tell you that “People are different from each other” (22). Loved for both its salubrious obviousness and its incitement toward specifying texture, Axiom 1 has been indispensable for literary critics in the field of disability studies no less than queer theory. No less so, however, is a similarly axiomatic supposition that for a literary text to resonate with or inform the vicissitudes of lived experience, it must be predicated on a verisimilitude drawn to the scale of our own waking world, a 1:1 ratio of persons and characters. Pierre, on the other hand, is at the heart of my chronic pain archive even as its non-equivalence to our own world (as I and others have elsewhere noted) is nothing less than legendary. All the same, no text comes closer to illuminating my chronic pain than Pierre, and this has everything to do with what I’ve been describing as figuration. For persons whose lives are absorbed with constant pain, there’s a certain but incalculable sense (on both literal and idiomatic registers) that pain has depleted the very lineaments of which something like subjectivity is comprised— their energy, stamina, libido, attention, and/or sense of agential capacity; and that what is left in this depletion’s place is less or at least substantively different from bare life as we’ve come to know. Sometimes, of course, the depletion is so drastic as to feel like an endless proscenium. As often as not, this diminishment (which, again, is inseparable from the acuity of constant pain, but likewise not equivalent to it) is something to which the person in pain acclimates; and each time the pain and the depletion worsen the person acclimates again, often, for the world they inhabit, in unremarkable ways. How does a text depict this ongoing, unfolding eventlessness beyond its being dropped in the mouths of the sufferer, the narrator, and the others? How does a text depict then when the crux—the rub—of chronic pain is that no communication comes close to describing it—to describing, that is, how it feels for the person in it. How does a text envision this, the feel of it (as opposed to the representation of chronic pain’s exhaustion of discursive speech), when the thing itself (such as that is) hardly seems to exist in the waking world at all? What’s more, how does a novel depict it—for the person in pain and the critic alike (not least when they are one and the same)— in a manner that enriches rather than merely repeats the frustration of chronic pain’s intransigence? Pain inflicts itself at the perceived edge of interface between multiple extremities (one’s own, the world’s). The task of describing let alone living with chronic pain from this damage grows more difficult as the self, over time, feels lost in it.Trying to see past the pain is like trying to see the world through the glass of which one only grows aware in the difficulty of seeing past its scratch or crack. Not quite part of the outside, and not quite a part of the apparatus of the interior, the glass—the pane, the lens— occupies what Henry James calls the middle distance. Chronic pain correspondingly feels neither literal nor abstract, not least because the experience of chronic pain takes these two formerly discrete, bipolar categories and returns them as a constantly shifting sliding scale. What’s more, unlike instantaneous injuries like burns and cuts or worse,

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chronic pain mostly lives in the interior. To this end (even before a text attempts to do it justice), it isn’t part of the waking world so much as part of the mechanism by which that world is apprehended. We might think about pain in terms of Emerson’s understanding of “life” as “a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain.”35 Except, of course, that pain is like the same damn bead, a bead within a bead. To return to this notion that pain “lives” in the interior, it’s adjacent to those concepts we conceive (and in doing so, spatialize) as thought and feeling, or feeling and emotion. But unlike these categories, the pain isn’t ours. It doesn’t answer to us. To the extent that my relation to chronic pain is nothing without my prior attachments to queer theory, I think of Judith Butler’s theorization of Freudian melancholy as a correlative to the way pain takes over one’s interior without feeling like it’s one’s own. Chronic pain, like melancholy, narrates how the pearl of ontology becomes itself out of this alien, obstinate grit (except that pain, unlike the pearl, never stops being felt). And only over time; the making of a pearl is a myth of chronicity. But I digress. When the body isn’t in pain, it disappears into the effortless elegance of what it does. Chronic pain is most ghostly in its deranging possession of one’s own senses. Its invisibility means we can never see it; a surgeon can view a spine with his own two eyes but pain itself has no empirical presence. As Merleau-Ponty writes, What if our eyes were made in such a way as to prevent our seeing any part of our body, or some diabolical contraption were to let us move our hands over things, while preventing us from touching our own body? […] Such a body would not reflect itself; it would be an almost adamantine body, not really flesh, not really the body of a human being. There would be no humanity.36

“Almost adamantine, not really flesh.” The subject of chronic pain becomes an object, yes, but an object of affliction carried out centrifugally from its own inner surface. Unlike the simple, constative grammar of non-chronic injury, the syntax of chronicity is baroque. Folding into itself, fallen from the reductive grammar of subordination, chronic pain is a hard poem impinging on a body trained in prose.   “Smell I the flowers, or thee?” cried Pierre. “See I lakes, or eyes,” cried Lucy, her own gazing down into his soul, as two stars gaze down into a tarn. No Cornwall miner ever sunk so deep a shaft beneath the sea, as Love will sink beneath the floatings of the eyes. Love sees ten million fathoms down, till dazzled by the floor of pearls. The eye is Love’s own magic glass, where all things that are not of earth, glide in supernatural light. There are not so many fishes in the sea, as there are sweet images in lovers’ eyes. In those miraculous translucencies swim the strange eye-fish with wings, that sometimes leap out, instinct with joy; moist fish-wings wet the lover’s cheek.37

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My premise, in part, is that chronic pain does particular damage to what one calls a self that feels like the experience of disappearing into it. In this context, the task of articulating, let alone understanding, the pain from the vantage of the self becomes all the more fraught, like trying to cultivate attention to the cracked lens through which one sees the world. A quiet attention to the scratches and abrasions of a lens is the very effect of Melville’s “moist fish-wings.” Held up close, I imagine them like the wings of a fly, divided like panels of stained glass. The passage suggests that the difficulty of looking at what we are accustomed to looking through is, more precisely, a figurative strain. We only imagine the distance from the lover’s eyes to the beloved’s eyes from the depths (“ten million fathoms down”) back to the surface as oceanic because it is conjured as the metaphorical tenor to which the metaphorical vehicle of the Wordsworthian sea corresponds: “There, sometimes does a leaping Fish / Send through the Tarn a lonely cheer.”38 I.A. Richards writes of “18th Century assumptions that figures are a mere embellishment or added beauty and that a plain meaning, the tenor, is what alone really matters and is something that, ‘regardless of the figures,’ might be gathered by the patient reader.”39 By contrast, the two-part structure of metaphor from which figuration pours all but conceals the extent to which the passage stripped bare of figuration posits nothing at all. It’s not clear if these “miraculous translucencies” are what the beloved amorously beholds in the lover’s eye or if they are the reflection or amorous response (to what he sees in the eyes of the beloved) in his own. If these translucencies leap out “instinct with joy,” is this the joy of the beloved or is it the joy of the fish, the translucencies, themselves, an affect to which we—let alone Pierre and Lucy—might not be privy? These tear-like fish wetting the wet paint of a two-dimensional character’s besotted cheeks anticipates Marianne Moore’s famous conjuring of real toads in imaginary gardens. If R.P. Blackmur associated Marianne Moore with the likes of Melville and Henry James on account of their shared attachment to “an excessive sophistication of surfaces and a passionate predilection for the genuine,”40 it is precisely this sort of passage, I believe, that Blackmur has in mind. Such real tears, perhaps asphyxiating in their piscine exposure to the air (i.e., our air) of the page, invert the logic of the lachrymose rhinestone glued to a drag performer’s cheek (I’m thinking especially of Justin Vivian Bond’s mesmerizing performance of Kiki). In the latter case, the tear is a visual pun on the ersatz integrity of both affect (of cabaret sadness) and form (Kiki’s theatricalization not only of gender, but the rage of time-out-of-joint), whereas in Pierre, the tear’s vivacity is the surprising outcrop of deluginous factitiousness as its own peculiarly queer ontic principle. This figurative vigor anticipates Leo Bersani’s account of what he calls “the Jamesian lie,” as well as Eugenie Brinkema’s fascination with the single tear of Janet Leigh’s Marion at the end of the famous shower scene of Psycho. “Hers is emphatically not the tear of the affective film audience,” Brinkema writes, “not jerked out of the productive, expressive body as at a melodrama. Marion’s tear,” Brinkema continues, “is marked by what it is not. It is not expressive of the emotions of a subject, not an external production of an internal state; it does not speak to either its emissive past or to its judged emotional future, and it is ripped from, and sits only ever so gently on the surface of, the body.”41 Marion’s

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tear “is a figure of the outside” insofar as it is less “cried” by than left over or simply attached to Marion’s body after it has died. Ironically, this tear without an inside—what Brinkema calls “a tear that is not a tear”—pulses in the same manner as Pierre’s or Lucy’s insofar as the latter come from no interior, proper, either. The extravagant figuration of this passage both is and isn’t equivocal to interiority, a baroque Rube Goldberg that simultaneously kaleidoscopes and obviates the effect of the tears it “produces.” Just as it’s a tear that both is and isn’t, it is also at once the inflation and deflation of melodrama: what inspires some critics to imagine Pierre as a sincere effort at a failed melodrama and others as an ironizing of melodrama. The hyperbolic discrepancy of interiority and exteriority doesn’t illuminate how internal chronicity is or looks (it doesn’t look like anything) so much as it literalizes the perverse ecology of how it feels. As it happens, some version of the latter’s optical fantasia is borrowed not only from Wordsworth but also from Plato’s Phaedrus. Describing to Phaedrus the physiology of falling in love, Socrates notes that at first a shudder runs through him, and again the old awe steals over him … then while he gazes on him there is a sort of reaction, and the shudder passes into an unusual heat and perspiration; for, as he receives the effluence of beauty through the eyes, the wing moistens and he warms.42

Plato’s passage is as exquisite as Melville’s, and insofar as readers are accustomed to the ingenious richness of neither, they are perhaps unsure as to whether to call it ravishing or ridiculous. This challenge to readerly senses is irresolvable because the middle distance that figurative equivocation inhabits isn’t formed in verisimilitude to anything but itself. Unblinking figurative eye of the storm, this indeterminacy is as much suspended between the ravishing and the ridiculous as between vivid abstraction and the empirical. And if we are held transfixed by this scene of two “persons” transfixed, its particular allure is intensified rather than depleted by its implicit craft-like patching of sources. This is partly the case because the passage compels us to imagine ostensible persons (e.g., literary characters, authors, and ourselves) as cardboard proxies, larger-than-life size proxies if not marbles, absorbingly immersed in a scene of reading past subjectivity. By its own account, the name for this collapse of personages is Love, but by the time these fish-wings wash ashore, it’s not at all clear to what love could refer, to what object love could attach, or to what to be subjected. Were we to consider the qualities of the thing being named (or on only a slightly different register, diagnosed) rather than the nomenclature itself, love might come to look like the duration of pain. Here are the lines in Phaedrus near where we left off: Now during this process the whole soul is in a state of effervescence … and irritation, like the state of irritation and pain in the gums at the time of cutting teeth; in like manner the soul [of the man] when beginning to grow wings has inflammation [is seething], and pains and ticklings, and when looking at the beauty of youth she receives the sensible warm traction of particles which flow toward her.43

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Notwithstanding conventional readings of these lines in terms of desire (Plato invokes Eros a few lines further down), I’m fascinated by this notion of inflammation in the wings as a kind of angelic arthritis. The seething of these wings, like Melville’s fishwings, is intermediate: “of all bodily parts,” these wings have “a share in the divine,” even as their vulnerability to being trampled or otherwise broken suggests they are the closest of divine objects to being human. “Whereas the soul in her totality … soars upward,” the “imperfect soul,” Plato writes, “loses her wings and drooping in her flight at last settles on the solid ground.”44 The nearly kitschy, Bidgood-like splendor of the passage’s bricolage breaks off at the word “moist” not because the lines have reached crescendo or climax but, rather, because the fish-wings happen to surface in the ecology of figuration with the desultoriness of fishes leaping from the sea (if not the tarn from which “Lucy” seemingly views the “lakes or eyes” of her betrothed). Even as a certain inveterate queer impulse inclines me to describe Melville’s “moist” in terms of erotic arousal, its erotic content is undermined, again, by the degree to which the ersatz natures of Lucy and Pierre empty the scene of eroticism if not ultimately render it all but unthinkable. These moist wings wash ashore like jellyfish, like some other seepage beholden to none of the persons in play. They operate less as the exposure of anyone’s psychical interiority than the glimpse of a figurative world unto itself, as though Lucy and Pierre in this moment of mutual reflection had become nothing so much as a glass-bottomed boat, with us along for the ride. One way to imagine our simultaneous attachment to and disidentification with this little word, moist, is to recall Barthes’ understanding of the punctum as a site of aesthetic damage. “It is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me … . A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me…).”45 To paraphrase Leo Bersani, nobody likes the word “moist.” Our aversion to it illuminates the further urgency of why we’re drawn to it in the first place. Our discomfiture has to do with the phoneme it shares with oily, the way the m-sound curls around the sound into a pucker, then into the perhaps unpleasant sheen of the s-sound: as though our experience of moistness began with the slow sense of tackiness, dermally speaking. In the event of its being pronounced—the sound of the word further lubricating our simultaneous aversion and attraction to how it looks on the page—it seems to further lubricate the sheen of the ess as a small pooling of  liquidity. This liquidity’s particularity has less to do with its eroticism per se than with a specific relationality of which the erotic is just one example. Moist, as the Oxford  English Dictionary notes, is “liquid in a state of suspension.”46 Moist, that is, conjures a membrane in the process of either secreting or absorbing as much as it does the residuum itself. To note that the passage has very little on the surface to do with chronic pain bristles against the energy with which it subjects surface itself to a series of aesthetic maneuvers whose iterations seem almost interminable, like they could produce figurative substance nearly without end in sight. This materiality is driven by its titillated capacity to exceed the figurations to which it is conventionally opposed. “In billowy style,” Pierre has driven forth his ancestral phaeton through the ancestral

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grounds of Saddle Meadows, accompanied by his fiancée, “Wondrous fair of face, blue-eyed, and golden-haired, the bright, blonde Lucy … arrayed in colors harmonious with the heavens.”47 As I have written elsewhere, the narrator’s generic descriptions of Lucy Tartan have the effect (whether intentional or unintentional) not of building up the specificity of her character but of depleting it, word by word. The more we learn of Lucy, the more epithets she is given, the more difficult it is for us to suspend the characterological disbelief she inspires. “Her cheeks were tinted with the most delicate white and red, the white predominating.”48 Of course they are, the “most vivid transparency of her clear Welsh complexion, now fairly glow[ing] like rosy snow.”49 Even here, however, the gratuitous deliberateness of rosy cheeks is mostly banal at the level of paraphrase; taken on its own terms, the strangeness of its specificity reduces (perhaps, distills) Lucy’s cheeks to these two colors, one color dominating the other as though beyond Lucy’s or even Melville’s capacity there operated as purely chromatic will. Slowing down what ought to be spontaneous in the cliché of Lucy’s face, Melville’s deconstruction of rosy cheeks turns color into an object of attention, which we experience differently from the over-familiarity of the epithet. Somewhere within white-predominating-red, we watch as though something might happen, the incomplete beginning of a new narrative—narrative and figuration housing each other in turn like dolls. Lucy’s distinction as entity abides in her lack of particularity as character. This lack of particularity opens onto Lucy’s inseparability from the world she might only loosely be said to inhabit. “Smell I the flowers or thee?”50 The clover bloom of Saddle Meadows comes to Pierre from both sides of the hedges, but also from Lucy’s “mouth and cheek[,] … the fresh fragrance of her violet young being.” Even as Pierre’s question seems nothing, if not overearnestly fey (the same holds for Lucy’s reply), it stages the jarring unison of Pierre’s inflated musings with the science-fictional possibility that if Lucy and the landscape are continuous, he might be, as well. In terms of affect and substance, that Pierre’s question (“flowers, or thee?”) and Isabel’s (“lakes, or eyes”) are interchangeable as their respective referents is partly the point. The respective openness of each with the landscape implicitly attenuates the trace they leave as individual entities. Both individuality and the structures of subjectivity it makes possible are eclipsed by the fervor with which figurative description engulfs the novel’s conventional elements. In the wake of description’s own incessant velocity, Pierre’s plot is dead on arrival, like discovering the elements of undersea wreckage. Concomitantly, the novel’s sense of character is both complexly substantial and dubious as the figures of a Francis Bacon painting. The aesthetic industry of Pierre conjures mimetic relation only so figuration’s unbridled affect can throw it off. Pierre and Lucy inhabit figuration as an ongoing chronic condition. As soon as this passage moves from Lucy’s cry to her “own gazing down into his soul,” she has for all intents and purposes disappeared for the duration into the depths her query conjures, in which her love for Pierre is silently transmuted into narrative attention. The hydraulic of figuration that characterizes both this passage and myriad others in Pierre is the flux of chronic pain. Interminable, impossible to escape, it takes the place of interiority (whether displacing some previous anteriority or simply

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supplying what hadn’t existed), replacing the fiction that humans have depth with the even more astonishing fiction that we are dwarfed like stars by the figurative universe coexisting in our place. Chronic pain and Melvillean figuration alike aren’t sufficiently describable because they are description. And they are autonomous: “I have a bad neck,” meaning “my neck isn’t mine; it doesn’t belong to me.” On the other hand: “I have a neck too utterly.” This feeling of besiegement—neither mine nor its—is the consciousness we share.

The iron crown of Lombardy What’s at stake in insisting that figuration is figuratively versus literally material? Even as there’s no way for me to measure or prove it, I seem to experience Melville’s indefatigable figurative engine as though it were real in ways that exceed how I think about abstraction, or how abstraction feels in the moment of its being thought. Like experience’s non-equivalence to our textual approximations of it, the lapse between the event that figuration is and our account of it feels insufficient, even as it’s untouchable, unseeable as a thought. I’ve grown attached to thinking about figuration in these terms because they nearly describe my twenty-year encounter with chronic pain. Early in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty writes that “in terms of its intrinsic meaning and structure … the sensible world is ‘older’ than the universe of thought, because the sensible world is visible and relatively continuous, and because the universe of thought […] has its truth only on condition that it be supported on the canonical structures of the sensible world.”51 Stark as it is, Merleau-Ponty’s distinction suggests that a phenomenology of chronic pain is unimaginable because it’s done in the dark. If figuration so often is imagined as materially distinguishable from the illness or disability Sontag would say it obscures, how in the darkness of feeling chronic pain can one say where the phenomenon of it ends and our thinking of it begins? Like figuration, it occupies an outer edge of materiality that complicates our faith in the substance of its wake. Along similar lines, Nathan Brown invokes Descartes’ experiment with wax and Hume’s account of some never before perceived shade of blue. “Absent Blue Wax,” Brown writes, “delivers the outside of rationalism to the outside of empiricism and lets them mingle in their mutual exteriority” (100).52 I think about this wake between the outer edges at the outset of the Moby-Dick chapter “Sunset.” “I leave a white and turbid wake,” Melville writes, “pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them, but first I pass.”53 Although these lines are usually attributed to Ahab, the start of one of his soliloquies, the fervor of its iambs feels less like the outpouring of a character than of figuration itself pouring in. Its illusion of voice gradually seems to arise from or at least approximate Ahab’s person. The voice is constituted by the words being spoken, or rather, what approximates speech, whipping itself like the wake of water into stiff peaks, less a voice than a hydraulic between “the diver sun—slow dived from noon” and Ahab’s own soul, “mount[ing] up” as the sun sinks into the sea, “gold brow plumbs the blue.”54 What begins to take the shape of Ahab is the text’s movement from sea to

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sun to soul to the Iron Crown of Lombardy, said to contain a nail from the Cross on which Jesus was crucified. But our understanding that these words “are” Ahab’s comes slow, as though to illuminate where figuration enters or becomes phenomenology, where it suffers its sea change. The iron crown of Lombardy marks the site not only where thinking about figuration and chronic pain overlap, but where thought itself grapples with the feel of its materiality: Is, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem; I, the wearer, see not its far flashings; but darkly feel that I wear that, that dazzlingly confounds. ‘Tis iron—that I know—not gold. ‘Tis split, too—that I feel; the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against the solid metal … 55

In terms of the chapter’s opening stage directions, Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out,56 the chapter enacts Ahab gazing out as his loneliness falls in. His and our attention are drawn equally to the sensations that the crown generates—its heaviness, the jagged edge where its inner seams abrade our temples, like the point of a compass inscribing the encounter’s very circumference. And yet within the parameters of the scene, there’s no way for Ahab to measure how it feels against the crown itself. That Ahab feels this darkly opens onto the baroque style of its phenomenological inquiry, an intuitive apprehension of the crown’s dark matter. Knowing that one is wearing the crown ought be knowable as the back of one’s hand; and yet in Ahab’s case it cannot be verified. One almost gets the sense that Ahab “sitting alone, and gazing out,” might be conducting an experiment. That the feeling seems real opens onto the equal possibilities that Ahab wears a crown on his head or that he contemplates one inside it: hence the astonishing supposition of brain beating against solid metal. Echoing this scene, Melville writes in Clarel of “gusts of lonely pain / beating upon the naked brain.”57 This reworking sharpens our sense of the loneliness of Ahab’s enterprise. Supposedly made of the nail with which Jesus was crucified, the crown renders Ahab a king without a kingdom. If one were superstitious, one might worry wearing the crown would summon some of that earlier agony, quickening the pain it was forged in. And on the other side of the crown, as viewed through a periscope, do we readers see those distant far flashings across the long ocean of page upon page.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Judith Butler, Senses of the Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 20. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick: Or, The Whale, ed. by Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, The Writings of Herman Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 79. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 79.

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5 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 3. 6 Melville, Moby-Dick, 514. 7 Ibid., 286. 8 Ibid., 567. 9 Herman Melville, Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth, The Writings of Herman Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 219. 10 Melville, Moby-Dick, 237. 11 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “about.” 12 Ibid., “whale.” 13 Melville, Moby-Dick, 139. 14 Levi R. Bryant, “The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object-Oriented Ontology,” in The Speculative Turn, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: Re.Press, 2009), 271. 15 Ibid. 16 Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Peru/Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company/Carus Publishing Company, 2005), 162. 17 Ibid., 214. 18 Melville, Moby-Dick, 573. 19 E. L. Grant Watson, “Melville’s Pierre,” New England Quarterly 3.1 (1930): 198. 20 Harriet Hustis, “‘Universal Mixing’ and Interpenetrating Standing: Disability and Community in Melville’s Moby-Dick,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 69.1 (2014): 27. 21 R. P. Blackmur, Language as Gesture: Essays in Poetry (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1954), 285. 22 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador/ Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 3. 23 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 12. 24 Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 51. 25 Melville, Moby-Dick, 25. 26 Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, The Writings of Herman Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1992), 301. 27 Melville, Moby-Dick, 124. 28 Wai-Chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 137. 29 Melville, Moby-Dick, 415. 30 Ibid., 416–17. 31 Melville, Pierre, 353. 32 Deleuze Gilles, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, ed. and trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 4. 33 Melville, Pierre, 298. 34 Melville, Moby-Dick, 70. 35 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 473.

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36 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith, trans. Michael B. Smith (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 125. 37 Melville, Pierre, 33. 38 William Wordsworth, “Fidelity,” in Poems of Wordsworth, ed. Matthew Arnold (London: Macmillan, 1892), 36. 39 I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 100. 40 Blackmur, Language as Gesture, 285. 41 Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 19. 42 Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, ed. and trans. Benjamin Jowett (London: Oxford University Press, 1892), 457. 43 Ibid., 458. 44 Ibid., 452. 45 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 25. 46 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “moist.” 47 Melville, Pierre, 33. 48 Ibid., 24. 49 Ibid., 58. 50 Ibid., 33. 51 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 12. 52 Nathan Brown, “Absent Blue Wax (Rationalist Empiricism),” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and the Social Sciences 19.1 (2010): 100. 53 Melville, Moby-Dick, 167. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Herman Melville, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, The Writings of Herman Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 186.

8

“Learning, unlearning, word by word”: Feeling Faith in Melville’s Clarel Rhian Williams

If during the period in which this work has remained unpublished, though not undivulged, any of its properties have by a natural process exhaled; it yet retains, I trust, enough of original life to redeem it at least from vapidity. Be that as it may, I here dismiss the book—content beforehand with whatever future awaits it. —Herman Melville, Clarel Here sit we, and again unroll, Though slowly, the familiar whole.

—Matthew Arnold, “Resignation”

In offering up in 1876 Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, his monumental poem of some 18,000 lines, Herman Melville’s leading thought was of decay—an odd concern, one might say, for a poem of such length, of such material presence, heavy in the hand, weighty on the desk. Yet Melville’s preamble presents a compelling dyad of expiring exhalation with durability. The book’s substance exhaling as a fine mist, a diffusing essence, nevertheless anticipates its unknown future; that which is dematerializing may yet endure. I’d like to suggest that a particular mechanism of permanence ignites the workings of this complex and obscure poem. For Melville’s is a poem that may return regularly to meditative silence, to pulsating moments of disappearance, to the decay and corruption of texts, but it is one that ends on a note of persisting significance: Then keep thy heart, though yet but ill-resigned— Clarel, thy heart, the issues there but mind; That like the crocus budding through the snow— That like a swimmer rising from the deep— That like a burning secret which doth go Even from the bosom that would hoard and keep; Emerge thou mayst from the last whelming sea, And prove that death but routs life into victory.1

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Here I’m concerned with what is at work in this poem that is so long, and yet so precarious. Why does it regard texts as vulnerable, transient, papery (“Books, manuscripts, and—cobwebs too”),2 and yet ultimately still available for faithful experience (“And texts sonorous they intone | From parchment, not plebeian print; | From old and golden parchment brown | They voice the old Septuagint, And Gospels, and Epistles all | In the same tongue employed by Paul”)?3 In important ways, this ambivalent presentation of textual efficacy relates to Melville’s engagement with nineteenth-century biblical exegesis, particularly in the wake of “higher critical” or scientific hermeneutics. This particular context has, in recent years, been touched on by Ilana Pardes and David Watson and I too will read Clarel from this angle—but, contra Watson, for whom the poem’s “lesson” is that of austerity, “or a materiality resistant to figuration,”4 I find less a note of settled restraint and more a series of nagging emotions. This falls closer to Pardes, whose tracing of Clarel’s engagement with the Song of Songs emphasizes Melville’s capacity to regard scripture as literal and allegorical, and thus maintains the aesthetic as dialectically generative: “it is precisely such locked aesthetic potentiality, such ‘burning secrets’—between the body (the ‘bosom’) and the soul, between the literal and allegorical, between faith and skepticism—that Melville craves to set forth in Clarel.”5 I am interested in the poem’s action of setting forth, but not of locked secrets; instead, I find communicated affect. Attending specifically to Melville’s recurring staging of affective collectivity, I am led by my senses in reading Clarel to find its keynote to be gentle persistence, even as the poem’s bleak ending would seem to cast into doubt the notion that anything lasts. This epic poem’s “heroic quest” has been described by Wyn Kelley as “the pursuit of knowledge”6 undertaken by the scholarly quester Clarel. In the context of epic, Kelley’s characterization suggests a focused gathering of information, but Clarel’s acquisition of knowledge is more ambivalent. Arriving in Palestine with the sense that “the desert’s subtle air” had purged his soul of “bookish vapors,” Clarel admits it is an “unlearning” that has accosted him, a process that “to me | Opes the expanse of time’s vast sea!”7 Such opening intimates a revelation not of apocalyptic or messianic event, but simply the exposure to view of “under-formings in the mind,” “the press | Of inklings”: “I am young, but Asia old | The books, the books not all have told.”8 My discussion takes its cue from the narrator’s echo of Clarel’s phrasing when later we are told that, in the company of his fellow pilgrims, particularly the gnomic Vine, the naïve, bookish Clarel, “receptive, saw and heard, |Learning, unlearning, word by word.”9 The learning is dialectical, dynamic, an ambivalent weaving and unweaving that grows through rapt compulsion rather than reasoned enquiry. Clarel’s openness—his “learning, unlearning”—intimates the Kantian principle of free play, hintingly aligning his experience with aesthetic perception, which itself, in Martin Slee’s précis, is a knowing that is “free from the constraints of conceptual knowing, free from the reckoning of instrumental action, free as well from the conflict between duty and inclination.”10 This is not to say that Clarel is the story of Clarel’s being freed (rather, he is “[c]alled early every hope to test”),11 but to suggest that such a mode of perception haunts the poem with its persistence—that it might constitute one of

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the “inklings” that Clarel has come to Palestine to attend to. In line with Kant’s sense that aesthetic experience is inclined toward prolonging the moment—“we linger in our contemplation of the beautiful”—aesthetic perception, furthermore, is a process that generates persistence through collective attunement: “it is a particular givenness of phenomena that can be apprehended intersubjectively (just as the ‘rising’ and the ‘setting’ of the sun remain phenomenologically plausible even after Copernicus).”12 The significance of this stance in the context of nineteenth-century responses to the so-called rigor of higher critical approaches to the Bible, particularly in the case of this poem’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land, I will suggest, aligns Melville specifically with Matthew Arnold (1822–88), whose poems and essays Melville read attentively during Clarel’s composition. Famous perhaps for his assertion that “most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry,”13 Arnold seemingly offers the aesthetic as replacement for religiosity, and for thinking. However, this would be to overlook Arnold’s subtle articulation of aesthetic affect as a means of discerning the emotional weight of experience, by which means faithful feeling persists. To read Melville’s poem through and with Arnold is to extend Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn’s efforts to appreciate Melville’s place within transatlantic crosscurrents, not just through the coordinates of this American poet’s reading of an English contemporary, but also by pointing to our own modes of literary or aesthetic exegesis that might, in fact, constitute Melville’s poetics as an imprint of the European sense of “the unsettlingness of aesthetic experience: its involuntariness, its unendingness, its lack of a determinate origin.”14 In this discussion I will think specifically about the poem’s staging of collective acts of “beauty making,” in the form of singing, chanting, and reading, as heuristic tools in the will to recognize relationships between material presence and ineffable yet enduring affect. There is something lingering here to be said about the way that poetry thinks about the world. In its critical history, however, beauty and Clarel have not always made easy bedfellows. Indeed, Clarel-as-poetry has, undoubtedly, baffled readers. Melville himself described it in a letter of 1884 as “eminently adapted for unpopularity.”15 The New York Times of July  10, 1876, felt it “should have been written in prose”;16 the Independent of July 6 dismissed it as “destitute of interest or metrical skill.”17 The NewYork Daily Tribune of June  16 was “bothered by the lack of ‘distinct conclusions’” and “was baffled by the ‘rough, distorted’ prosody of the rest.”18 In John Middleton Murry’s sonorous description it was “obscure, compressed, craggy”;19 for Andrew Hook, its solipsism (which he attributes to poetry itself)20 necessitates that in “passage after passage […] meaning has to be raveled out.”21 For William Shurr, entry into this “quasi-gnostic document” was reserved only for “the initiated.”22 Even Lawrence Buell, for whom Clarel is “the great Victorian epic of faith and doubt,”23 identifies “a convolution of syntax made all the more impenetrable by the anesthetizing effect that rhymed octosyllables tend to have on a reader.”24 Yet the choice to write Clarel as verse was crucial in Melville’s composition process. Bezanson records how, “in his well-marked copy of Arnold’s Poems, Melville lined a passage in the preface on ‘the indispensable mechanical part’ of poetry-writing,”25 reiterating another heavily marked passage in Madame de Stael’s Germany that suggested, “the effects of poetry

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depend still more on the melody of words than on the ideas which they serve to express.”26 Summarizing his careful tracing of all of Melville’s annotations to Arnold, Bezanson concludes, “consciously or not he was soaking up prosodic patterns, moods, vocabulary, imagery, and themes for his own writing.”27 For Otter, Clarel bears the hallmarks of this investment in its “love of learning and artistic craft,”28 which then directs Otter’s confidence that it is precisely in the modal arrangement of “diction, meter and rhyme”29 that Clarel makes its meaning; for Otter, rather than shy away from its poetics, we should “attend to the manufacture of Clarel—how it means” to thereby “deepen our appreciation of what it means.”30 Accepting this point, it is possible to go further, if we pursue Melville’s reading of Arnold, and to understand this investment in poetry as a mode that can carry out the work of meaning-making as an intervention in the landscape of nineteenth-century religiosity. For Robert Milder, “the world of Clarel” is “the harshly beautiful world of MobyDick … infused with a historicism like that of ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse.’”31 Arnold’s melancholy lyric, set at the French monastery, articulates a complex historicized emotionalism in which the speaker, despite all that he has “unlearnt” from “masters of the mind,”32 comes to shed tears at the site (and sight) of ongoing religious ritual: “Their faith, my tears, the world deride— | I come to shed them by their side.”33 I have written elsewhere of how the lyric is a screen on which is projected the collective, historical experience of faith after higher criticism of the Bible34 and it is this phenomenon, I suggest, that can be obliquely felt through the lines of Melville’s epic treatment of this simultaneously historicized and religious experience. Arnold’s poem both records and diverges from his own visit in September  1851, becoming a mediating fabric through which personal, embodied faithful feeling articulates with the higher critical mode of scientific enquiry. Emblematized for Arnold by David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus (trans. 1846), in response to which Arnold wrote Literature and Dogma (1873), “higher critical” advancement of a “scientific” mode of exegesis—testing events of the Bible against materialist explanation—interfered with the foundation on which faith was built. But despite this, in Arnold’s lifelong aesthetic and emotional reasoning, the mode through which faith was experienced persisted in the “superiority of diction and movement marking [poetry’s] style and manner.”35 What emerges from Arnold’s “Stanzas” is not unscathed belief, and not hopeless loss of faith either, but rather a persistent responsiveness to, and sensuous apprehension and articulation of, the changing conditions of faith. I seek to feel for this sensuous apprehension in Melville’s Clarel. Watson notes that “there is something … in Melville of the German ‘higher criticism’ of Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, Johann David Michaelis, and Johann Griesback that was popular in the New England Unitarian scene of which he was a part for a while,”36 attributing to its influence a “tension between cultural differences and common patterns [that] surfaces repeatedly in Clarel.”37 Certainly, Germanic exegetical strategies were on Melville’s mind during his own experiential mode of interrogating the Holy Land as he committed to a five-month journey to Europe and Palestine, recording his impressions in small notebooks that make up his 1856– 57 journal. Regularly recording a painful gap between expectation and reality (an

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experience that infuses Clarel), Melville’s observations shadow melancholy with frustration: “was here afflicted with the great curse of modern travel—skepticism. Could no more realize that St: John had ever had revelations here [at Patmos], than when off Juan Fernandez, could believe in Robinson Crusoe according to Defoe.”38 The poet ruefully admitted how the bleak Palestinian landscape seemed to acknowledge higher critical austerity: “When my eye rested on arid heigth [sic], spirit partook of the barreness.—Heartily wish Niebuhr & Strauss to the dogs.—The deuce take their penetration & acumen. They have robbed us of the bloom. If they have undeceived any one—no thanks to them.”39 Naturally, Melville’s journals from this period have been treated as important source material for Clarel—expanding on other ways in which the poem has been linked to Melville’s personal experiences and feelings—and evidently higher critical debate feeds into its intellectual crucible. But the means by which such experiences make their way into the poetry is complex. Watson’s reading seeks to move beyond, for example, Clarel as “autobiographical narrative”40 and— in a gesture not unrelated to this aim—presents Melville’s poem as skeptical about “internalized, subjective bas[e]s for faith,”41 arguing from there that “Clarel resists lyricization” and particularly “the lyric poet’s egotism”42 in a formulation that presents the form as an inevitable “flight from history and society toward an autonomous subjectivity realized in language.”43 Yet, as Bryan Short and William H. Wasilewski trace, the lyric is a form that makes flashing appearances across the course of Clarel, importantly exemplifying “the protean nature of Melville’s poetry”44 and contributing to its “organic poetics.”45 For Wasilewski, the lyrics function as punctuation points in the modification of “Clarel’s sensibility”46 and serve as “touchstones of illumination for both Clarel and the reader”;47 for Short, the lyrics’ nod to “the potential emotional attractiveness of art”48 allow them to “undercut the constraint which weighs upon the pilgrimage” and “question [its] asceticism.”49 What we can take from both readers is that Clarel is interested in the effects of history on sensibility—that it is aimed at the senses—and that if the poem bears the marks of higher critical austerity, then it is not at the expense of aesthetics. Indeed, while Watson’s efforts to account for the ambivalent treatment Clarel has received in narratives of American poetry drive his will to recognize Melville’s resistance to a “U.S. national imaginary” predicated on “dematerialization and internalization,”50 it does not follow that such an Americanized understanding of the lyric—and by extension, poetry—as ahistorical drives the poem itself. To recover Clarel’s aesthetic intervention in a historicized religiosity that retains emotionalism after higher criticism, it is necessary to view it in the context of Arnoldian investment in poetry. Certainly, Watson is right to point to Melville’s apparent “suspicions” regarding ostentatious displays of, in William Hazlitt’s words, a “devouring egotism of the writers’ own mind.”51 Bezanson records that in reading Arnold’s Essays in Criticism, likely in 1871, Melville marked particularly the passage in the essay “Maurice De Guérin” that described a literary career as “unreal” and “a secret absurdity,” finding instead “more power and beauty” in the “well-kept secret of one’s self and one’s thoughts.”52 Melville scribbled: “this is the first verbal statement of a truth which every one who thinks in these days must have felt.”53 The markings are richly suggestive in

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the case of a writer who nevertheless enigmatically weaves himself into his text, from an early episode when Clarel finds a piece of verse pasted into one of his trunks—“for all was trimmed, in a cheaper way, | With printed matter”54—(Melville had earlier sold “doggerel” to a trunk maker),55 to the poem’s penultimate echo of the Melville family motto—“Even death may prove unreal at the last, | And stoics be astounded into heaven.”56 Destabilizing any critical impulse to read Clarel as autobiographical narrative, Melville’s annotation, together with his ludic self-referencing, instead intimate an occult relationship between the author and text, a relationship in which even doggerel and mottos—and especially the enormous imaginative work that they frame—signify a powerful mediating force between self and world. Melville’s shifting back-and-forth between revealing and concealing in fact hints at the potentiality of the artwork itself to intervene between categories—self, world, history—and that its particular logic and principles (in Otter’s reading, “the resources of poetry”57 that animate Clarel) determine the work it might thus carry out. My reading here is influenced by Isobel Armstrong’s insistence that “if we refuse to seal the artwork off into an aesthetic terrain, and regard the artwork, not the ‘I’ who supposedly made it, as a form of mediation, a transitive, interactive form, new possibilities emerge.”58 This, I suggest, offers a way to appreciate Ronald Mason’s sense that in Clarel Melville seeks “elucidation of the deepest spiritual problems of his age”:59 that is, that his concerns are historical, material—and spiritual. Rejecting the model of dematerialized subjectivity that Watson finds as definitive of the American lyric, we might instead find that it is precisely in a dynamic, intercessionary action that poetry—aesthetics—mediates (a verb that itself carries the spiritual agency of Christ’s intercession)60 the experience of faith and divinity in material conditions, which then itself emerges not as subjective, but historical. This sense of poetry as active principle sees Melville reach further into Arnold’s essay, in which he writes: The grand power of poetry is its interpretative power; by which I mean, not a power of drawing out in black and white an explanation of the mystery of the universe, but the power of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of them, and of our relations with them.61

Through such formulation, poetry can, in Melville’s composition process, emerge as a hermeneutic principle—poetry itself, for Arnold, interprets—that is simultaneously constitutive of recalibrated relations between knowledge and emotion by requiring of its reader an openness to learning that is experienced affectively through wonder and intimacy. As Armstrong articulates, poetry’s mediation is a “transitive relationship with the world which is built into consciousness and which must involve both thought and affect.”62 Arnold goes on to characterize poetic hermeneutics in terms that, rather than constituting an escape from the austerity of history, in fact gives shape to it, attesting to the material feel of prevailing ideas: Poetry interprets in two ways; it interprets by expressing with magical felicity the physiognomy and movement of the outward world, and it interprets by

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expressing, with inspired conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man’s moral and spiritual nature.63

Arnold’s formulation of a dually operative and plastic emotionalism is apposite to the case of Clarel, whose “main action” is not “the journey at all, but the intellectual and spiritual progress resulting from the analysis of conflicting principles.”64 In Arnoldian terms, Clarel’s poetics conduct an interpretative dialogue between the “outward world” of theological enquiry—made manifest in the physiognomy of an oppressively materialized Palestine—and the “inward world,” wherein meditation on intellectual questions brings about precarious moments of embodied understanding: “withdrawing to this quiet bay | He felt a natural influence glide | In lenitive through every vein, | And reach the heart, lull heart and brain.”65 It is this action that Arnold names when he declares, “poetry is the interpretress of the natural world, and […] the moral world”66 and which he draws on in his much later formulation that “most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.”67 Rather than poetry superseding religion, or making faith ancillary to culture, Arnold is pointing to poetry’s materializing of the sacred process of hermeneutics, through which—as in Christ’s intercession—the divine and mortal realms are brought together. In Mason’s resonant phrasing, in Clarel, “the very texture of the verse, knotted, irregular, nervous, indicates the presence of a mind electrically vital behind every phrase”;68 via Arnold, I suggest, this reading of lyric (in which poetic agency stands behind the verse) is disrupted in Clarel such that it is the poem itself that is conducting a “knotty,” “nervous” intercession, materializing the historical conditions of faith in the context of nineteenth-century “scientific” enquiry. Melville’s reading of Arnold thereby forces an overlapping set of concerns between faith and aesthetics that is dually significant—both for how it opens up Melville’s transatlantic intellectual enquiry and for how it might guide our own exegetical approach to Clarel. What I am proposing here means reading Clarel not (or not only) for its insight into the particularity of Melville’s position on religion or Christianity, or for its relationship to myths of America, but for its aestheticizing of the conditions of faith in the nineteenth century—a species of feeling, as I shall explore below, that is intimated in both Arnold and Melville by male tears. Yet this type of reading is one that feels for flickering moments of affective cognition, moments that intimate a glimmer of understanding, rather than a settled belief, passages that may be painful in their simultaneous apprehension of certainty and uncertainty. The purpose cannot be to determine a mediation that acts as even-handed weighing up of pros and cons, not least since Clarel reserves some of its sharpest censure for Derwent, English cleric and emblem of affable compromise: “Derwent, pray? Ah, he—he is a generous wight, And lets it slip, yes, run out quite. Whether now in his priestly state He seek indeed to mediate

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’Tween faith and science (which still slight Each truce deceptive) or discreet Would kindly cover faith’s retreat, Alike he labors vainly. Nay, And since I think it, why not say— Things all diverse he would unite: His idol’s an hermaphrodite.”69

My reading instead follows Bezanson in hoping to lay aside a type of criticism led by “impatience to extract a thesis,” which thereby fails to deliver “a realization of the values of the poem.”70 Bezanson instead wished to “look at Clarel as a work of imagination”71 and I take this to name work carried out through the imaginative patterning of language, which I take to be poetry’s “magical felicity” with “physiognomy and movement.”72 To appreciate this aesthetic action is to replace mastery with uncertainty, or, to follow Armstrong, to see “a triumphalist dialectic of resolution moving to a new synthesis” replaced with “the point of contradiction, where opposites fail to transform one another … where a painful restructuring of relationships comes about at the site of the middle” since “the broken middle is the constitutive moment of the aesthetic” and mediation names “the structuring movement of thought and feeling.”73 Rather than charting a neat and determined path—a path that in Clarel can only be as bleak as its plot is punishing—this form of reading seeks to open itself up to the poem’s affective potential in the pulsating moments of realization that are interleaved, whisperingly, between the forlorn episodes. This means being open to the work of the aesthetic—not as it stands in for something else (verifiable belief, for example) but as a process that adumbrates (both revealing and concealing) faithful feeling in and of itself. As Jenny Franchot suggests, in Clarel, poetics is “the very trace of faith.”74 Writing in 1985, and seeking to assert the value of Melville’s poetry—which had “remain[ed] largely in parenthesis”75 in critical consideration—A. Robert Lee described Clarel as “a pilgrimage which contains other pilgrimages and storieswithin-stories,” a text that “offers equally a ‘confusion’ of sorts, doubt, and counterconviction pitted against Faith.”76 Clarel opens with its titular traveler “brood[ing] alone”77 in a small room in Palestine, where he has come to face the “actual visage of a place | Before but dreamed of in the glow | Of fancy’s spiritual grace.”78 But intimations of revelation are sparse; Clarel may feel the “yet warm stone”79 beneath his feet as he leans out of the casement to view the town, but beyond this Palestine offers only sensory deprivation: “the houses sloped from him— | Terraced or domed, unchimnied, gray, | All stone—a moor of roofs. No play | Of life; no smoke went up, no sound | Except low hum, and that half drowned.”80 From here, Clarel becomes a channel through which the poem “dovetails a multitude of different individual and cultural perspectives”81 as the initial beatific sighting of Ruth,82 the Jewish-American ex-patriot with whom Clarel falls in love, gives way to despair (itself a prolepsis) as Clarel begins a pilgrimage forced on him by the need to leave Jerusalem to allow Ruth to sit shiva for her father’s sudden death. This pilgrimage-within-a-pilgrimage

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takes place during the ten days between Epiphany and Ash Wednesday—stations within a ritualized, recurring calendar—and sees Clarel fall in with an oftenchanging band of diverse travelers including inter alia the English cleric Derwent; the Swedish former-revolutionary Mortmain; the American adventurer and mariner Rolfe; the reticent artistic American (“a fountain sealed”)83 Vine; and the part-Indian American war veteran Ungar. Their pilgrimage allows Melville to “unfold[] the movements, encounters, and observations of the protagonist”84 as he registers the warp and weft of exegetical debate, storytelling, historicizing, myth-making, and anecdote that these figures contribute during their journey around Jerusalem, to the Wilderness (Jericho, the Jordan, the Dead Sea), to the Mar Saba monastery and westward again to the city via Bethlehem. On their return, however, Ruth and her mother have both died of grief, and as Clarel walks the Via Crucis in isolated grief, the poem ends with an enigmatic riddle that holds together ancient silence with the lacunae of modernity: But, lagging after, who is he Called early every hope to test, … From slopes whence even Echo’s gone, Wending, he murmurs in low tone: “They wire the world—far under sea They talk; but never comes to me A message from beneath the stone.”85

For Buell this monumental exercise in interweaving—carried persistently throughout on lines of sometimes-rhyming iambic tetrameter—serves the end of “exploring as unsentimentally and clear-sightedly as possible the nineteenthcentury (male) obsession to identify a secure foundation of belief (or unbelief) in the possibility of ultimates that might withstand the challenge of science and cultural relativism.”86 Certainly, the poem is haunted by the narrator’s question, “Science and Faith, can these unite?,”87 but the position on clear-sightedness is more ambivalent. The scientific spirit is emblematized most crudely in Clarel by the apostate Margoth, and the critique is aimed at the work of interpretation. In the clumsy geologist, the scientific mode of enquiry parades its hermeneutical tools—all too rough, ready, and literal—before the horrified pilgrims: The stranger closer drew; And Rolfe breathed “This now is a Jew,— German, I deem—but readvised— An Israelite, say, Hegelized— Convert to science, for but see The hammer: yes, geology.” As now the other’s random sight On Clarel mute and Vine is thrown, He misinterprets their grave plight;

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And, with a banter in the tone, Amused he cries: “Now, now, yon hight— Come, let it not alarm: a mount Whereof I’ve taken strict account (Its first geologist, believe), And, if my eyes do not deceive, ’Tis Jura limestone, every spur;”88

Wryly rhyming (believe/deceive; sight/plight) and playfully interchanging geological hammering with obtuse misreading of the pilgrims’ faces, Melville pits voluble certainty against muted agnosticism and, in the poem’s internal schema it is muted agnosticism, emblematized by the mysterious but magnetic Vine that receives lasting approbation. Clarel’s treatment of Margoth’s misplaced materialist clarity of vision—one that looks ahead to “Rails, wires, form Olivet to the sea, | With station in Gethsemane,”89 a materialist commercialism that the poem treats more broadly with disdain—must qualify Milder’s sense that “Melville, like Henry Adams or Yeats, looks grimly ahead to a brutish materialism symbolized by some ‘shapeless birth’ that will command society’s devotional energies,”90 not least because four volumes and thousands of lines is a lot to invest in making only this point. The poem may “look[] grimly ahead” but it also gazes in other more aesthetically productive, affective, and, indeed, damp-eyed ways at the actions of faith. Before this essay’s final movement to feeling the pulse of some episodic manifestations of affective faith in Clarel, I wish to turn once more to Arnold, who, I suggest, gifts Melville the trope of male weeping as a melancholy marker of the mediating work of affect. Arnold’s “Resignation” was included in the first American edition of Arnold’s Poems that Melville purchased in 1862.91 It takes up the issue of whether or not to repeat an action is to thereby stall. Taking the occasion of going for a walk across fields in Cumbria with his sister—a walk that they had also shared ten years previously—“Resignation” is snagged by the nagging concern that to take that walk again is to pointlessly repeat an action, to pursue a painful “thread[ing] back.”92 The speaker’s first comparison is with the pilgrim, among other questers, for whom (the poem imagines) life’s maxim is “die … or attain!.”93 Focused exclusively on achieving the goal of arrival—which alone “may give repose”94—the pilgrim cannot tolerate revisiting since: to stand again Where they stood once, to them were pain; Pain to thread back and to renew Past straits, and currents long steer’d through.95

The stated concern may be couched in terms of religious or national questing narratives, but the larger question of how one uses one’s time surrounds the piece,

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aligning with Arnold’s broad engagement with the work of culture in an increasingly instrumental age of capitalism. The poem turns to those who forge a more peaceful relationship with time—“But milder natures, and more free … mourn not, that their goings pay | Obedience to the passing day”96—pondering, over the course of the poem’s lilting lines of iambic tetrameter, “The something that infects the world,”97 a “something” that intimates the pulsing thread of “general Life, which does not cease.”98 Turning also on the place of the poet in such a configuration—“In the day’s life, whose iron round | Hems us all in, he is not bound”99—the poem takes the pilgrimage as a goal-focused quest and as an occasion to probe the conditions and experience of everyday life, finding, in fact, the poet’s involvement with the means by which we bear recurrence as human condition. The poem is ambivalent, itself precarious, as M.G. Sundell’s sensitive reading attests,100 but within its own (repetitive, recurrent, rhyming) lines, there lies almost buried a recurrence of its own: the lines that form my epigraph here, and those characterizing the poet’s lachrymose view, that Melville particularly checked and underlined:101 tears Are in his eyes, and in his ears The murmur of a thousand years: Before him he sees Life unroll, A placid and continuous whole; That general Life, which does not cease, Whose secret is not joy, but peace.102

Folded into Arnold’s lyric—and thereby into Clarel’s composition period—is an acknowledgment of recurrence, repetition, and rehearsal as the constituent modes of the quiet action of life lived in accord with collective experience: “Enough, we live.”103 It is this poem that Bezanson identifies as the crucial seeding of Clarel’s idiosyncratic versifying: that which has caused such critical consternation is in effect an expansion of “ ‘Resignation’ ’s irregularly rhyming tetrameter.”104 Taking Melville’s marginalia as evidence of his own snagging on its probing of collective, quotidian repetition— and coupling it with his final annotation, “This whole Peice [sic] is admirable”105— Arnold’s lyric functions as a cue to feeling for the otherwise anticlimactic tenor of Melville’s epic poem, whose pilgrim, Clarel, “at close of rarer quest, | Finds so much more the heavier tree.”106 With “Resignation” in the background as a depiction of a mind tearfully working through options, Clarel emerges—even reluctantly—as a poem of process rather than goal, and requires of its reader a form of empathetic engagement not with the pursuit of endings and conclusions, but with the endless round of the mechanics of learning. It is engaged in thinking rather than concluding, meditating rather than knowing. And  such thinking is undertaken through emotional participation in collective processes of unceasing recurrence. In the rest of this discussion, I offer some episodes of Clarel’s meditation on that unceasing recurrence.

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Sepulchre By situating his poem in the dusty streets of Jerusalem, Melville speaks to the heart of nineteenth-century exegetical debate, bringing poetry’s interpretative capacity to bear not only on the material remains of the Holy Land as coordinates of faith, but also on the exercise of pilgrimage—that vocation that Arnold had evoked as pained by repetition in “Resignation”—as a sacred action. Compelling as his narrative could be, the poem’s animus is already set in motion before the particulars of Clarel’s falling in love occurs and all but obscures it: the poem’s energy is driven from the opening by the magnetic potential of being on the spot of Christianity’s inception, a site that, in Clarel’s ambivalent presentation, comes to symbolize the nineteenth-century industrious dyad of embodied faith and commercial materialism. To be “on the spot” is to inhabit the architecture, space, habits, sensory force field, light and warmth of the faithful—to be open to its potential inducements. The poem’s third canto—set at the Holy Sepulchre, the building that brought together all the sacred sites connected with Christ’s death under one roof and which Melville visited daily107—offers the first opportunity for Clarel’s complex presentation of a skepticism that nevertheless is attuned to faith. By focusing on pilgrimage, Melville implicitly raises the question of sacred materiality by gazing on the material spaces and places that have witnessed divine intervention. Within this, the preoccupation of the Christian pilgrim—his commitment—is to rehearse and repeat the unique action of Christ’s entering into history by placing his own body in that space. It is this entangling of Christ’s earthly, quotidian actions, both with those who witnessed it and with those who seek to restage it, that engages the poem’s presentation of Christian particularity: So much the more The contrast stamps the human God Who dwelt among us, made abode With us, and was of woman born; Partook our bread, and thought no scorn To share the humblest, homeliest hearth, Shared all of man except the sin and mirth. Such, among thronging thoughts, may stir In pilgrim pressing thro’ the lane108

In focusing here, Melville obliquely dialogues with Strauss, whose leading concern was to provide a revised account of the “history of events in which the divine enters, without intermediation, into the human; the ideal thus assuming an immediate embodiment.”109 For Strauss this question necessitated sharp deployment of historiographic method, which alone could isolate the “real events” of the Bible from their mythic function in the establishment of religion. In the context of Clarel’s rhyming, yearning poetics, however, such a clear-sighted view on history is haunted by the residual spirit of faith, which garners material efficacy under the echoing dome of the sepulchre (“where now enroofed the whole coheres”)110 and is felt as an

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intermittent, creeping, rustling that steals into singing and establishes a mediating film of tears in the eyes. In such a setting, any distinction between verification through historiography and through affect is dissolved as the holy site—figured as an echochamber that materializes the rhyming poem itself—becomes a potent crucible for an affective, emotional reading of history: What rustlings here from shadowy spaces, Deep vistas where the votary paces, Will, strangely intermitting, creep Like steps in Indian forest deep. How bird-like steals the singer’s note Down from some rail or arch remote: While, glimmering where kneelers be, Small lamps, dispersed, with glow-worm light Mellow the vast nave’s azure night, And make a haze of mystery: The blur is spread of thousand years, And Calvary’s seen as through one’s tears.111

This then extends through the process of pilgrim visitings, recurrences, and rituals (Otter draws our attention to Clarel’s “repetitive poetics”).112 The pilgrim may not individually take their journey more than once, but the significance of that journey is predicated on it ending at a site that is made sacred by hosting of repeated acts of collective faith. The pilgrim thus falls in with repeated, affective ritual and the poem’s sensitivity to this process acts as a contrapuntal historicism that counters higher critical exegesis with a tick-tock time of faith: And, sooth, to think what numbers here, Age after age, have worn the stones In suppliance or judgment fear; What mourners—men and women’s moans, Ancestors of ourselves indeed; What souls whose penance of remorse Made poignant by the elder creed, Found honest language in the force Of chains entwined that ate the bone; … such ties, so deep, Endear the spot, or false or true As an historic site. The wrong Of carpings never may undo The nerves that clasp about the plea Tingling with kinship through and through— Faith child-like113 and the tried humanity.114

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Banks of the river To reduce Clarel to Clarel’s bleak uncertainty and final abandonment (“They talk; but never comes to me | A message from beneath the stone”)115 is to assume a form of reading led by narrative positivism—to read for plot—and thereby to obscure or muffle the poem’s counter-strains of faithful cognition. To feel instead for the poem’s structural response to the question of interpretation, I turn to an episode that again revisits a site of recurrent holy ritual: canto 24 of volume two, “The River-Rite.” Derwent, Vine, and Rolfe fall in together at Bethabara, (“beyond” the River Jordan) near the site of John’s baptisms. Apparently led by the setting’s sacred history, there swells within the poem’s lines the iterative chimes of sacramental process: Rolfe, late enamored of the spell Of rituals olden, thought it well To observe the Latin usage: “Look,” Showing a small convenient book In vellum bound; embossed thereon, ’Tween angels with a rosy crown, Viols, Cecilia on a throne: “Thanks, friar Benignus Muscatel; Thy gift I prize, given me in cell Of St. John’s convent.—Comrades, come! If heaven delight in spirits glad, And men were all for brothers made, Grudge not, beseech, to joy with Rome;” And launched the hymn. Quick to rejoice, The liberal priest lent tenor voice; And marking them in cheery bloom On turf inviting, even Vine, Ravished from his reserve supine, Drew near and overlooked the page— All self-surprised he overlooked, Joining his note impulsively; Yet, flushing, seemed as scarce he brooked This joy. Was joy a novelty? Fraternal thus, the group engage— While now the sun, obscured before, Illumed for time the wooded shore— In tribute to the beach and tide. The triple voices blending glide, Assimilating more and more, Till in the last ascriptive line Which thrones the Father, lauds the Son, Came concord full, completion fine— Rapport of souls in harmony of tone.116

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The lines’ import make clear this is an unexpected moment—for Vine, almost unrecognizable in its feeling of joy—brought about not by the poem’s other habitual actions of dialogue, debate, harried grasping for meaning, or earnest and troubled scholarly exegesis, but by the agency of love (“enamored of the spell”)117 and by a seizing power (“ravished from his reserve supine”)118 whose agency and origin are obscure (“impulsively”).119 By describing a text of Catholic ritual as containing the “spell | Of rituals olden,”120 Melville leads the poem’s modal shift to incantation, wherein, as the voices combine, the rhyming iambic tetrameter allows for a fugue-like display of aural recurrence and shimmering repetition. Combining internal rhymes with end rhymes, assonance with alliteration, the section harmonizes “bound” with “crown,” “joy” with “joining,” “Vine” with “inviting,” “priest” with “cheer.” Held within the loosely rhyming tetrameter (the ghosting of a hymnal measure), Melville hymns the passage’s heralding of slowly dawning light through the echoing sounds that are “illumed” from “obscured,” “in tribute to the beach and shore,” reminding us of the material setting that has provoked this revived ritualistic benediction. As the voices blend and the poem draws together its peculiar “harmony of tone” there are intimations of a complex theology. Through the action of assimilation121—to cause resemblance— an alliterative logic leads to line 50’s “ascriptive line,” an archaic, Latinate term that points to the process of attribution, and thus obscurely to the hermeneutic nub of theological enquiry into the status of the “word of God.” In accord with the passage’s careful patterning through sound, this veiled question of exegesis is bracketed—or couched—in the rolling o-sounds (“more,” “more,” “thrones,” “concord,” “souls,” “tone”) that bring about the episode’s instinctive (because the pilgrims’ decision to join in the singing seems led by reflex rather than cognition) harmony. The pilgrims thus enact a form of faithful understanding of God’s authority for the duration of their experiential commitment to a harmony ascribed to them by the parts they take in ritualized singing, a singing that is built on a logic of restaging previous iterations of faithful sacrament: they release the site’s sacred recurrences. Yet despite this passage’s strikingly lyrical presentation of enacted, ritualized faith, Clarel does not rest at this point of conclusion. Emblematizing the poem’s ambivalent embracing-yet-shying-away from harmonious reassurance (this is, after all, an extended epic, not a lyric), within earshot the American millenialist, Nehemiah, is caught catching himself: Meantime Nehemiah, eager bent, Instinctive caught the sentiment; But checked himself; and, in mixed mood, Uncertain or relapsing stood, Till ere the singers cease to thrill, His joy is stayed.122

Slipping into Nehemiah’s habitual mode of thinking, the poem typically draws back, questioning and comparing different manifestations of belief: “How cometh this? | True feeling, steadfast faith are his, | While they at best do but fulfill | A transient, an esthetic glow.”123 Forcing qualification after qualification, explanation after

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explanation, pitting hermeneutical modes one after the next in an almost tormenting echochamber, the poem puts Nehemiah’s musing then within earshot of Margoth who, “here curled the lip | At hearing Nehemiah: The fool!.”124 But we know Margoth to be a crude materialist and even Nehemiah (who, from his first appearance is associated with “tracts all fluttering like tongues”;125 discrete packets of verses in contrast to Clarel’s expansive epic scale) is to die soon. Through canto 24, what we are left with instead is a compelling residue, hinted in the semantic chain that holds the singing passage together—bloom to flushing to glow—all intimating a delicate excess of vitality and heat that then punningly rhymes with (and compensates for) Melville’s cry of exasperation that “Niebuhr & Strauss […] have robbed us of the bloom.”126 This singing, this “aesthetic glow” recalls the vapor that Melville had imagined lifting from Clarel as it mutely awaited publication. In demonstrating the affective potential of text—“a small convenient book”127—the passage models the act of reading (which Melville’s preface also anticipates) as an aesthetic encounter that nevertheless promotes a collective experience of faith. What is happening here, I suggest, is a dialectical poetics in which overt doubt or skepticism is shaded and shadowed by covert investment in ritualized, aestheticized, affective faith.

Derwent and Rome Repeatedly, Clarel strains to sustain stirrings of an affective religiosity, suffering them to be punctuated either by a materialist conscience that tugs at gestures of soaring faith or, perhaps even more troublingly, by the pragmatic worldliness of the English cleric Derwent. For the Protestant Derwent, heady experiences of faith conducted in ritualized engagement with the materiality of a sacred site are embarrassingly excessive. (His instinct for self-preservation slips out in his reluctance to visit Rome: “an instinct makes one fear | Malarial places.”).128 In conversation with Rolfe, he declares: Nor less thy tone, So heartfelt in sincere effusion, Is hardly that more chastened one We Protestants feel. But the illusion! Those grottoes: yes, void now they seem As phantoms which accost in dream— Accost and fade. Hold you with me?129

For Derwent’s brand of broad church Anglicanism, the low-key breaking of bread on which the Eucharist is built has, in Catholicism, been, “Tricked out— embellished—[…] become | Theatric and a form. There’s Rome!”130 Protestantism’s skepticism regarding Catholic modes of faith by ritual is here entwined with English embarrassment in the face of theater; Derwent represents an immunity to aesthetic

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affect, to the logic of poetry as faithful, which acts in itself as censure (elsewhere the narrator significantly asks, “in her Protestant repose | Snores faith toward her mortal close?”).131 In contrast, the poem voices appreciation for the Catholic systems of recurring rites and rituals through the storytellers, Rolfe and the descendant of Anglos-Catholics, Ungar (a pilgrim who is “very close to Melville’s own sensibility”):132 [Rolfe] While states, tongues, manners pass away, How wonderful the Latin rite Surviving still like oak austere Over crops rotated year by year…133 [Ungar] If on the first review Its shrines seemed each a gilded grave; Yet, reconsidered, they renew The spell of the transmitted story— The grace, the innocence, the glory: Shepherds, the Manger, and the CHILD: What wonder that it has beguiled So many generations! Ah, Though much we knew in desert late, Beneath no kind auspicious star, Of lifted minds in poised debate— ’Twas of the brain. Consult the heart! Spouse to the brain—can coax or thwart: Does she renounce the trust divine? Hide it she may, but scarce resign; Like to a casket buried deep Which, in a fine and fibrous throng, The rootlets of the forest keep— ’Tis tangled in her meshes strong.134

For Mason, in Clarel, it is Rome that ultimately holds “sinewy power,”135 offering “just that necessary blend of regulation and rapture that could illuminate an individual,”136 particularly in its corporally focused (“consult the heart!”)137 alternative to Protestant “compromise with the materialist degradation of society.”138 Even if the sense that Clarel has an answer in Rome is a little too definitive, between the two men’s figuring of religiosity through repetition—the overseeing oak tree and the buried casket enmeshed in rooting fibers—is forged an organic network of “under-formings”139 spreading rhizomatically below the poem’s materialist debate. Such spreading intimates—even against the poem’s other images of buried silence (“never comes to me | A message from beneath the stone”)140—the persistence of faith as it is articulated in recurrent, affective ritual.

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The whirr of wings Despite the structural inclusion of an epilogue, and its gestures at an optimistic future, Clarel’s keynote is rather a burgeoning of feeling that settles into silence, a mode caught in anticipation rather than delivery (like the text itself in Melville’s preface, awaiting its unknown future). Couched in terms of patience and waiting, nothing is yet revealed, but the work of sharpening the senses to affective knowledge has already begun. Melville’s poem daringly materializes the struggle of mediation, of interpretation, of the work of art to think through the aesthetic in response to materialist enquiry. If scientific enquiry ultimately careers into positivist instrumentalism, the poem models instead a nascent, numinous, compelling process of understanding through ritual and singing, one that includes doubt, uncertainty, even the engulfing of the waters, not as failure, but as the condition of faith: Hid organ-pipes unclose A timid rill of slender sound, Which gains in volume—grows, and flows Gladsome in amplitude of bound. Low murmurs creep. From either side Tenor and treble interpose, And talk across the expanding tide: Debate, which in confusion merges— Din and clamor, discord’s hight: Countering surges—pæans—dirges— Mocks, and laughter light. But rolled in long ground-swell persistent, A tone, an under-tone assails And overpowers all near and distant; Earnest and sternest, it prevails. Then terror, horror—wind and rain— Accents of undetermined fear, And voices as in shipwreck drear: A sea, a sea of spirits in pain! The suppliant cries decrease— The voices in their ferment cease: One wave rolls over all and whelms to peace. But hark—oh, hark! Whence, whence this stir, this whirr of wings? Numbers numberless convening— Harps and child-like carolings In happy holiday of meaning: To God be glory in the hight, For tidings glad we bring; … It dies; and, half around the heavenly sphere,

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Like silvery lances lightly touched aloft— Like Northern Lights appealing to the ear, An elfin melody chimes low and soft. That also dies, that last strange fairy-thrill: Slowly it dies away, and all is sweetly still.141

Growing, flowing, surging, persistent over distance, assailing, and prevailing— through gentle rhyming this “elfin melody”142 murmurs at the ear, its origin unclear (“Whence, whence this stir, this whirr of wings?”),143 but its heady ecstasy ascending. Although the episodes are short, they are woven into a fabric of recurrence and ritual that will come around again. In Clarel, I have suggested, is a lingering persistence—a silence that, in its punning endurance, is nevertheless sweetly still. In the context of the entire epic, these moments of attunement to a non-sequential, recurring, affective engagement with the past and present of religious ritual are perilous, but they derive their vitality from their being interleaved with the poem’s exposure to other modes of skepticism and probing: “Dawn broke; and from each cliff-hung cell | ’Twas hailed with hymns—confusion sweet | As of some aviary’s seat.”144 Clarel’s “learning unlearning” finally names the “painful restructuring of relationships [that] comes about at the site of the middle”:145 the sorrowful experience of expanding aesthetic—and from there faithful—horizons coinciding with the suffering of recalibrated intellectual ones. By such means, Clarel writes an affective, historicized religiosity.

Notes Hayford et al., Clarel, 4.35: 27–34. Ibid., 3.18: 7. Ibid., 3.18: 23–28. David Watson, “Melville Interrupted,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 57.4 (2011): 372. 5 Ilana Pardes, “Melville’s Song of Songs: Clarel as Aesthetic Pilgrimage,” in Melville and Aesthetics, eds. Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 232. 6 Wyn Kelley, “Pierre’s Domestic Ambiguities,” in The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 96. 7 Hayford et al., Clarel, 1.1: 80–81. 8 Ibid., 1.1: 71–83. 9 Ibid., 2.14: 51–52. 10 Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, trans. John Farrell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 4. 11 Hayford et al., Clarel, 4.34: 46. 12 Seel, Aesthetics, 4. 13 Robert H. Super, ed., The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, 11 vols (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–77), 9.161–62. 1 2 3 4

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14 Samuel Otter, and Geoffrey Sanborn, “Introduction: Aesthetics and Melville,” in Melville and Aesthetics, eds. Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 2. 15 Walter E. Bezanson, “Historical and Critical Note [1960],” in Hayford et al., Clarel, 542. 16 Ibid., 543. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 547. 20 Andrew Hook, “Melville’s Poetry [1984],” in Herman Melville: Critical Assessments, ed. A. Robert Lee, 4 vols (Mountfield: Helm Information Ltd., 2001), 4.75. 21 Ibid., 81. 22 Quoted in Lawrence Buell, “Melville the Poet,” in The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 137. 23 Buell, “Melville,” 135. 24 Ibid., 142. 25 Bezanson, “Critical Note,” 527. 26 Ibid., Melville’s emphasis. 27 Walter E. Bezanson, “Melville’s Reading of Arnold’s Poetry,” PMLA 69.3 (1954): 391. 28 Samuel Otter, “How Clarel Works,” in A Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Wyn Kelley (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 467. 29 Ibid., 470. 30 Ibid. 31 Robert Milder, “Melville and the Avenging Dream,” in The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 270. 32 Matthew Arnold, “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” in Matthew Arnold, eds. Allott and Super, 161, ll. 72–74. 33 Ibid. 34 Rhian Williams, “‘Divine liquidness of diction … divine fluidity of movement’: Reading Poetry after Matthew Arnold and the Higher Biblical Criticism,” Literature and Theology 27.3 (2013): 313–29. 35 Super, Complete Prose, 9.171. 36 Watson, “Melville Interrupted,” 367. 37 Ibid. 38 Bezanson, “Critical Note,” 512. 39 Ibid., 512–13. 40 Watson, “Melville Interrupted,” 357. 41 Ibid., 375. 42 Ibid., 373. 43 Ibid., 361. 44 Bryan C. Short, “Form as Vision in Herman Melville’s Clarel,” American Literature 50.4 (1979): 553. 45 Ibid., 554. 46 William H. Wazilewski, “Melville’s Poetic Strategy in Clarel: The Satellite Poems,” Essays in Arts and Sciences 5.2 (1976): 150.

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47 Ibid., 149. 48 Short, “Form,” 559. 49 Ibid., 561. 50 Watson, “Melville Interrupted,” 360. 51 Quoted in ibid., 373. 52 Bezanson, “Critical Note,” 539. 53 Ibid. 54 Hayford et al., Clarel, 1.2: 103–4. 55 Bezanson, “Critical Note,” 716n. 56 Hayford et al., Clarel, 4.35: 25–26; Bezanson, “Critical Note,” 839n. 57 Otter, “Clarel Works,” 470. 58 Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 59. 59 Ronald Mason, The Spirit Above the Dust: A Study of Herman Melville, 2nd edition (New York: Paul P. Appel, 1972), 228. 60 Oxford English Dictionary, 1b. 61 Super, Complete Prose, 3.12–13. 62 Armstrong, Radical, 17. 63 Super, Complete Prose, 3.33. 64 Mason, Spirit, 233. 65 Hayford et al., Clarel, 1.20: 31–34. 66 Super, Complete Prose, 3.30. 67 Ibid., 9.161–62. 68 Mason, Spirit, 228. 69 Hayford et al., Clarel, 3.16: 163–74. 70 Walter E. Bezanson, “Melville’s Clarel: The Complex Passion,” ELH 21.2, (1954): 146. 71 Ibid., 147. 72 Super, Complete Prose, 3.33. 73 Armstrong, Radical, 17. 74 Jenny Franchot, “Melville’s Traveling God,” in The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 182. 75 A. Robert Lee, “‘Eminently adapted for unpopularity’: Melville’s Poetry [1985],” in Herman Melville: Critical Assessments, ed. A. Robert Lee, 4 vols (Mountfield: Helm Information Ltd., 2001), 4.85. 76 Ibid., 99. 77 Hayford et al., Clarel, 1.1: 6. 78 Ibid., 1.1: 113–15. 79 Ibid., 1.1: 126. 80 Ibid., 1.1: 141–45. 81 Buell, “Melville,” 142. 82 Hayford et al., Clarel, 1.16: 156–75. 83 Ibid., 2.17: 22. 84 Buell, “Melville,” 141. 85 Hayford et al., Clarel, 4.34: 45–53. 86 Buell, “Melville,” 142. 87 Hayford et al., Clarel, 3.5: 64. 88 Ibid., 2.19: 50–65. 89 Ibid., 2.21: 93–94.

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90 Milder, “Melville,” 270. 91 Bezanson, “Arnold’s Poetry,” 368. 92 Allot and Super, Matthew Arnold, 40, l. 20. 93 Ibid., 39, l. 1. 94 Ibid., 40, l. 17. 95 Ibid., ll. 18–21. 96 Ibid., ll. 22–29. 97 Ibid., 46, l. 276. 98 Ibid., 44, l. 191. 99 Ibid., 45, l. 209–10. 100 M. G. Sundell, “‘Tintern Abbey’ and ‘Resignation,’” Victorian Poetry 5.4 (1967): 255–64. 101 Bezanson, “Arnold’s Poetry,” 375. 102 Allot and Super, Matthew Arnold, 44, ll. 186–92. 103 Ibid., 46, l. 259. 104 Bezanson, “Arnold’s Poetry,” 376. 105 Ibid. 106 Hayford et al., Clarel, 4.34: 47–48. 107 Bezanson, “Critical Note,” 518. 108 Hayford et al., Clarel, 1.3: 5–14. 109 David Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined [1846], trans. George Eliot (London: SCM Press, 1973), 39. 110 Hayford et al., Clarel, 1.3: 31. 111 Ibid., 1.3: 43–54. 112 Otter, “Clarel Works,” 472. 113 Recalling Arnold’s “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” in which “we are like children rear’d in shade” (Allott and Super, Matthew Arnold, 164, l. 169). 114 Hayford et al., Clarel, 1.3: 99–118. 115 Ibid., 4.34: 52–53. 116 Ibid., 2.24: 21–53. 117 Ibid., 2.24: 21. 118 Ibid., 2.24: 38. 119 Ibid., 2.24: 41. 120 Ibid., 2.24: 21–22. 121 Ibid., 2.24: 49. 122 Ibid., 2.24: 54–59. 123 Ibid., 2.24: 62. 124 Ibid., 2.24: 78–79. 125 Ibid., 1.8: 42. 126 Bezanson, “Critical Note,” 521. 127 Hayford et al., Clarel, 2.24: 24. 128 Ibid., 4.16: 175–76. 129 Ibid., 4.16: 131–37. 130 Ibid., 4.16: 189–90. 131 Ibid., 3.5: 73–74. 132 Bezanson, “Critical Note,” 634. 133 Hayford et al., Clarel, 4.16: 150–53.

Feeling Faith in Melville’s Clarel 134 Ibid., 4.18: 70–88. 135 Mason, Spirit, 240. 136 Ibid., 241. 137 Hayford et al., Clarel, 4.18: 81. 138 Mason, Spirit, 240. 139 Hayford et al., Clarel, 1.1: 71. 140 Ibid., 4.34: 52–53. 141 Ibid., 4.15: 39–83. 142 Ibid., 4.15: 81. 143 Ibid., 4.15: 62. 144 Ibid., 3.16: 265–67. 145 Armstrong, Radical, 17.

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Part Three

Arts

9

Fateful Gestures: On Movement and the Maneuvers of Style in “Benito Cereno” James D. Lilley

In “Notes on Gesture,” Giorgio Agamben defines modernity as a “generalized catastrophe of the gestural sphere.”1 He claims that the onset of new modes of recording and taxonomizing the movements of the body produces a “staggering proliferation of tics, involuntary spasms, and mannerisms that [make the moderns] incapable of either beginning or fully enacting the most simple gestures.”2 To be modern, then, is to lose control of our gestures, to live as if Tourette’s Syndrome—the discovery of which Agamben identifies as the founding moment of our epoch—has become our everyday somatic norm. Alienated from the immediacy of our most proper and natural movements, the staccato inadequacies of modern gestures obsess over this loss, their fragmented incompletion ineluctably testifying to a freedom no longer immanent in their motion. For a people “who are bereft of all that is natural to them,” Agamben avers, “every gesture becomes a fate.”3 In this essay, I revisit the most famous account of fateful gestures in Melville’s fiction: Captain Delano’s encounter with Benito Cereno on board the San Dominick. While many scholars have explored the implications of Delano’s astonishing blindness to certain signs and gestures that point toward the slave rebellion that has taken place on Cereno’s ship, I am less interested here in the failure of movement to communicate a particular content of meaning than I am with the fact of its fragmented, ruined, and fateful form. In order to advance my claim that “Benito Cereno” is a story about a particular style of movement that remains unreadable in modernity, I begin by discussing the relationship between these fragmented, excessive, and failed gestures and the similarly ruined, ornate, and inscrutable mode of writing that Melville so often turns to in the 1850s: allegory. Echoing the “generalized catastrophe” of failed gestural expression in modernity, Melville was writing during a time in which the expressive potentialities of allegorical aesthetics were being similarly foreclosed—relegated to the kind of “lock and key” mode of symbolic reference that is so powerfully satirized on board the San Dominick. It is precisely this same, weakened sense of figurative encoding that Melville’s friend and influential publisher Evert Duyckinck employs in his stinging criticism of Moby-Dick’s “opaque allegorical veils,” as if the failure of the novel’s author, like the obtuseness of Captain Delano, stems from an incapacity or unwillingness to unlock the puzzles of the text at hand.4 Melville responds to these criticisms of style

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and crises of expression perversely: in “Benito Cereno” he chooses a plot seemingly propelled by and limited to the same kind of diminished allegorical perspective he means to critique: What do the veiled signs and gestures of the sailors really mean, and when will Delano unlock their truth? But as I will show, Melville also chooses to express this plot perversely, adopting a drippingly baroque and properly allegorical style that mutinies against the concerns of the plot and simply ignores the edicts that propel its weak aesthetic logic. Like the scrivener’s famous account of “Wall Street” that accompanies “Benito Cereno in The Piazza Tales, it is as if the text’s style prefers not to obey any commands to decode or unveil that structure its work space. I close by turning to the work of French filmmaker Claire Denis, whose adaptation of Melville’s fiction Beau Travail offers us a way to rethink the realm of the gestural in “Benito Cereno” and to glimpse a revitalized form of movement in between its tableaus of fragmented action. Originally published in the October, November, and December 1855 editions of Putnam’s Monthly, the opening paragraph of “Benito Cereno” quickly introduces the reader to Amassa Delano—a Massachusetts captain who “lay at anchor with a valuable cargo, in the harbor of St. Maria—a small, desert, uninhabited island toward the southern extremity of the long coast of Chili.”5 In addition to stressing the particular vulnerability and isolation of Delano, Melville also introduces us here— and in the sentence that follows—to a particular mode of language that generalizes the singularities of human action: “There he had touched for water” (46). In order to “touch[] for water” and “lay at anchor,” Melville’s language relies on the capacity for movement to be abstracted from its origins in particular human action and recognized by a community as a universally meaningful signifier—a capacity that is emphasized in the story’s next sentence: “On the second day, not long after dawn, while lying in his berth, his mate came below, informing him that a strange sail was coming into the bay” (46). The juxtaposition of “lay” and “lying” (and its rhyming with “day” and “bay”) foregrounds the manner in which a movement, an inclination of the body (to lay, to recline) animates the prose. At the same time, however, Melville repeats this universalized verb with a difference, emphasizing the distinction between its transitive (to “lay at anchor”) and intransitive (“lying in his berth”) sense. By the time we have finished reading these opening sentences, we have witnessed the transformation of a singular human action into an impressively versatile and common sign—a resonant verb that is just as happy taking itself as its own object as it is when transitively reaching out to or “laying at” other things. And the “strange sail” that closes this passage also reminds us that language lives in the abstraction of singular objects as well as human actions, a fact soon emphasized when Delano examines this “sail” through his telescope: “To Captain Delano’s surprise, the stranger, viewed through the glass, showed no colors; though to do so upon entering a haven, however uninhabited in its shores, where but a single other ship might be lying, was the custom among peaceful seamen of all nations” (46–47). In addition to the repeated resonance of “lying”—whose versatility now spans both intransitive nonhuman (the “ship might be lying”) as well as intransitive human activity (Delano was “lying in his berth”)—this sentence relies on the synecdochic abstraction of parts of objects (the “glass” and the “colors”) to function as generalized signs of their wholes (telescopes and flags).

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I begin with these extended comments regarding Melville’s self-consciously figurative prose in order to posit an initial definition of gesture and to foreground what is at stake for language and for movement in the encounter between the two captains. In particular, I am interested in the way that the text sets up this encounter as a meeting of opposing styles and different syntaxes of motion. “It might have been but a deception,” the narrator continues, “but the longer the stranger watched [the ship], the more singular appeared her maneuvers” (47). If gesture names the singularities of maneuver, then these are some of the questions that open “Benito Cereno”: To what extent is it possible to register and recognize gesture in life and in language? And if our language is so often propelled by aesthetic logics of abstraction and equivalence, what modes of style best animate or most inhibit the immanent difference that gesture’s maneuvers make? To be sure, the profound confusion that accompanies Delano’s discovery of the San Dominick functions as the central theme of Melville’s text. But the author is also quick to remind his readers that such bafflement is no simple by-product of impaired cognitive function or Yankee ideological bias: “The wind, which had breezed up a little during the night, was now extremely light and baffling, which the more increased the apparent uncertainty of her movements” (47). Here, and throughout “Benito Cereno,” Melville is also interested in “baffling” as a meteorological form of gesture, as an immanent breezing up of the singular within movement itself. As we will see, Delano attempts to register such “uncertainty” by relying on an aesthetic logic that, like the figurative language of the opening paragraphs, attempts to resolve such peculiarities into comforting irruptions of the same—into weakly allegorical keys that even, and perhaps especially, in their veiled strangeness ultimately lead us back to the locks that have been lying in wait for them. But against Delano’s frenzied attempts to resolve these uncertainties of movement works another style of prose that registers such gestures differently: Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter’s mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come. (46)

In opposition to those sentences that foreground figurative connections between words and their world—connections that move us away from the singularities of objects and the eccentricities of movement toward a more generalized syntax of common, universalized meaning—here we find Melville adopting an aesthetic register rooted in a vibrant relationship between words (shadowed patterns of repetition, flightful fits of alliteration, and the cooled molds of assonance, to take just three examples). Rather than reaching up toward wider, universalizing symbolic figurations, these words revel and resonate in their own unique sonorous

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materialities. While the ocean, for so many nineteenth-century US romancers, functions as an endlessly motile and capacious symbol, here Melville deadens such figurative flow, offering us instead an immobilized slab of swell (like “waved lead” that has been set solid). But though the content of this passage may seem “fixed” in tableau, one can notice movement within form—the eddied incantations of rhythm that punctuate and fragment the frieze for its ever-mournful duration. Resisting any trans-specific symbolic logic that orchestrates these unique rhythms into a blandly unified score, Melville instead insists on piling up the same singular sounds into baroquely staccato patterns and decadent pods of excessively ornamental prose (“Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come”). As Walter Benjamin notes in his influential account of allegorical aesthetics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “it is common practice in the literature of the baroque to pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal, and, in the unremitting expectation of a miracle, to take the repetition of stereotypes for a process of intensification.”6 But why would Melville return to such a seemingly antiquated baroque aesthetic practice in the mid-nineteenth century? And how does such an outmoded and ornately fragmented style of writing register the maneuvers of gesture? One way to begin to answer these questions is to turn to the work of Benjamin—a writer who, like Melville, is drawn to the baroque out of a particular disdain for the aesthetic and historiographical practices of his age. As Dana Luciano has pointed out, the aesthetics of allegory help Melville to critique modes of history and memory that subsume the violent events of the past into smooth narratives of continuity and destiny. In opposition to such modern forms of memorialization, Luciano argues that “Benito Cereno” “intervenes in history by fragmenting it—by breaking it apart and rearranging the pieces so that the very limitations and possibilities of time become visible in its narrative spaces.”7 For Luciano then, Melville “supplants the symbolic appeal of the traditional monument, which severs present from past on the quotidian level in order to unite them on the transcendent level of timeless truth, with the destabilizing effects of allegory, which links past and present without collapsing them and disperses meaning across time rather than gathering it a single transcendental instant.”8 I want to argue that, in addition to the ways in which Melville’s baroque historiography destabilizes such monumentally symbolic and transcendental accounts of time, his return to allegory also exposes the weakness of emerging aesthetic styles of movement and gesture. What complicates this critique from a conceptual standpoint is that one of the names we (still) give to these weakly symbolic aesthetic modes is “allegory.” In his Trauerspielbuch, Benjamin offers a genealogy of this term, in particular focusing on a key transformation that “allegory” undergoes at the beginning of the nineteenth century: Allegory, like many other old forms of expression, has not simply lost its meaning by “becoming antiquated.” What takes place here, as so often, is a conflict between the earlier and the later form which was all the more inclined to a silent settlement in that it was non-conceptual, profound, and bitter. The symbolizing mode of

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thought of around 1800 was so foreign to allegorical expression in its original form that the extremely isolated attempts at a theoretical discussion are of no value as far as the investigation of allegory is concerned.9

The problem is not that the kind of baroque allegory that Melville draws on is “antiquated” but, rather, that it is in the process of being transformed by a “symbolizing mode of thought” completely “foreign” to its “original form.” What Benjamin calls the “destructive extravagance of Romanticism” is debasing this “earlier” sense of the properly allegorical by reducing it to the most straightforward of its own symbolic modes—figurative “locks and keys” that Coleridge famously derides as “empty echoes.”10,11 Captain Delano’s encounter with the “singular … maneuvers” of the San Dominick is not the first time that Melville restages for his readers the “conflict” between these two (“earlier” and “later”) modes of allegorical aesthetics. Indeed, many of the stories collected in The Piazza Tales—not to mention important episodes and aspects of his two previous novels, Moby-Dick and Pierre—also pit the melancholic aesthetics of ornamentation against a commitment to decoding the veiled, weakly allegorical truths of the world. In Experience and Experimental Writing, Paul Grimstad identifies a similar conflict in Pierre between a tendency toward baroque inscrutability and the principle of representational accuracy (“vraisemblance”12). For Grimstad, this struggle had been occasioned by several recent and devastating critical appraisals of Moby-Dick—in particular a November 22, 1851, review in The Literary World written by Melville’s friend and influential New York literary publisher, Evert Duyckinck. While the first part of Duyckinck’s review, which had appeared during the previous week’s edition, is comprised of background information regarding the sinking of the whaleship Essex and two excerpts from the novel that it helped to inspire, the second installment of the review begins as follows: A difficulty in the estimate of [Moby-Dick], in common with one or two other of Mr. Melville’s books, occurs from the double character under which they present themselves. In one light they are romantic fictions, in another statements of absolute fact. When to this is added that the romance is made a vehicle of opinion and satire through a more or less opaque allegorical veil, as particularly in the latter half of Mardi, and to some extent in this present volume, the critical difficulty is considerably thickened. It becomes quite impossible to submit such books to a distinct classification as fact, fiction, or essay.13

As Grimstad powerfully demonstrates, in Pierre’s “impacted layers of pastiche and allusion that obstruct simple access to” meaning,14 we find Melville responding to Duyckinck’s intimation of veiled obscurantism by multiplying rather than removing such “allegorical” layers—“making a term of reproach—allegory—into the guiding formal principle for a novel about the making of a novel.”15 I want to extend Grimstad’s observations concerning Pierre’s conflict between such “opaque” layering and “statements of absolute fact” to the aesthetic battlegrounds of “Benito Cereno,”

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a literary space equally lacking “distinct classification” and similarly layered with an array of fragmented and often contradictory forms of evidence and narration.16 As I will show, the point that both Duyckinck and Delano miss is not that Melville’s or the San Dominick’s allegorical veils are more legible than they think but, rather, that their vivid opacity testifies to the persistence of a deeper vein of allegorical aesthetics—a vein that, despite its medieval origins, proves far better equipped to register the movements, gestures, and novelties of nineteenth-century experience than its more modern, Romantic re-figuration. In “Benito Cereno,” Melville reminds his readers of what is lost when experience is reduced to the empty echoes of modern allegorical aesthetics. Delano’s repeated attempts to solve the puzzle of the text at hand reveal that it is the very form of his problem-solving technique—rather than the flawed content of the conclusions he draws—that Melville seeks to parody. It is not simply that the text ridicules his ignorance, his inability to decipher the opaque inscrutability of its layers: it also mocks his (and his readers’) modes of reading, daring us to reduce the experience of the text to a simple unveiling of hidden truth. For example, when the ringleader of the slave rebellion, Babo, dutifully tells Delano that the “slave there carries the padlock, but master here carries the key” (63), he also foreshadows the fact that the figurative, unveiling logic of modern allegory will itself occupy center stage in the tableaued drama that follows. Even if the key to the lock is so palpably available to Delano and to the readers of his text, Melville reminds us of how much more there is to the experience of the ship’s and the text’s movement. What is so strange, then, about “Benito Cereno” is not that Delano fails to decode its gray layers of lurking significance, but that—even when this mystery has always been unlocked from its very beginnings—there remain forms of movement, gesture, and knowledge that persist in the afterlife of such a resolution. Or to borrow another, knotted metaphor for the lock-in-key logic that the text parodies, even when all the loose ends of the plot have been tied up—exhaustively unveiled by the legal depositions of the actors involved—it is precisely in its act of closure that the text points to all that can never be captured by its logic: “If the Deposition have served as the key to fit into the lock of the complications which precede it, then, as a vault whose door has been flung back, the San Dominick’s hull lies open today” (114). Like the text it purports to fling open and decode, the vivid conditional resonance of this sentence is tied more to its ornate form than its seemingly straightforward content. Instead of foregrounding the ways in which the layers of deposition have ultimately brought to light what was once opaque, the “If ” that begins the sentence puts us in the position of Delano when Babo teases him with the slave’s “padlock”: by daring us to delimit the experience of the text to the logic of such depositional unveiling, we are once again drawn to all that perversely persists in the afterlife of modern allegorical figuration. Melville is less interested in Delano’s ignorance—or even in his refusal or reluctance to know—as he is in the tenacity of his un-knowing, his insistence on reading the San Dominick as a veiled text to which he holds the key. When trying to make sense of the surreptitious whispers between Babo and the deposed Spanish captain, for example,

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“Delano thought he observed a lurking significance in it, as if silent signs of some Freemason sort had that instant been interchanged” (66). As numerous critics have noted, Delano returns again and again to this logic of “lurking significance,” and in each instance he attempts to unveil the novelty of experience through a variety of comfortably mysterious regimes of obfuscation. Instead of decoding the strange maneuvers of Cereno’s ship, each of these attempts ultimately tells us more about the pregiven propensities of Delano himself—his tendency toward politely racist, imperialistic, and xenophobic tropes of romantic savagery, for example. The Massachusetts captain seeks to saturate the singularity of the San Dominick with preexisting allegorical codes that transform its novelty into alluring “signs” silently anticipating resolution: even the lurking aesthetic horrors of the gothic romance work to insulate him from the irruption of the new, and Delano is ever quick to adopt a “haunted mood” with which to filter his experience (75): Presently he thought something moved nigh the chains. He rubbed his eyes, and looked hard. Groves of rigging were about the chains; and there, peering from behind a great stay, like an Indian from behind a hemlock, a Spanish sailor, a marlingspike in his hand, was seen, who made what seemed an imperfect gesture towards the balcony, but immediately, as if alarmed by some advancing step along the deck within, vanished into the recesses of the hempen forest, like a poacher. What meant this? (74)

Delano’s mistake here and throughout the text is not linked to a failure of knowledge—an incapacity to know what this scene “meant”—but rather to his persistent un-knowing, his insistence on reading experience in terms of a succession of weakly-veiled allegorical scenes. The refrain that closes this sublimely gothic vignette, “What meant this?” is repeated throughout the text, and its unusual syntax emphasizes the extent to which knowledge and meaning for Delano hinge on an instrumental and ineluctable tendency to unveil within experience itself. In the same way that Duyckinck insists on accessing the “opaque allegorical veils” of MobyDick and classifying its content as “fact, fiction or essay,” so too Delano inherits these aesthetic assumptions when he asks, “Excuse me, Don Benito, … but this scene surprises me; what means it, pray?” (62). Both Duyckinck’s and Delano’s mistake is to read experience in Melville’s texts as a succession of weakly allegorical scenes rather than a repetition of properly allegorical tableaus. Notice, for example, how Melville sets up Delano’s famous encounter with the “aged” and knotting sailor, the baroque allusion and ruined temporality of his opening prose soon juxtaposed with the insatiably symbolic sleuthing of our American protagonist: Captain Delano, who had now regained the deck, was uneasily advancing along it, when he observed a new face; an aged sailor seated cross-legged near the main hatchway. His skin was shrunk up with wrinkles like a pelican’s empty pouch; his hair frosted; his countenance grave and composed. His hands were full of ropes,

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which he was working into a large knot. Some blacks were about him obligingly dipping the strands for him, here and there, as the exigencies of the operation demanded. Captain Delano crossed over to him, and stood in silence surveying the knot; his mind, by a not uncongenial transition, passing from its own entanglements to those of the hemp. For intricacy such a knot he had never seen in an American ship, or indeed any other. The old man looked like an Egyptian priest, making gordian knots for the temple of Ammon. The knot seemed a combination of double-bowline-knot, treble-crown-knot, back-handed-well-knot, knot-in-andout-knot, and jamming-knot. At last, puzzled to comprehend the meaning of such a knot, Captain Delano addressed the knotter:— “What are you knotting there, my man?” “The knot,” was the brief reply, without looking up. “So it seems; but what is it for?” “For some one else to undo,” muttered back the old man, plying his fingers harder than ever, the knot being now nearly completed. While Captain Delano stood watching him, suddenly the old man threw the knot toward him, saying in broken English,—the first heard in the ship— something to this effect—“Undo it, cut it, quick.” It was said lowly, but with such condensation of rapidity, that the long, slow words in Spanish, which had preceded and followed, almost operated as covers to the brief English between. For a moment, knot in hand, and knot in head, Captain Delano stood mute; while, without further heeding him, the old man was now intent upon other ropes. (75–76)

Where Benjamin highlights the ceaseless piling up of fragments in baroque allegory, Melville’s passage begins by similarly emphasizing the ruined and melancholic features of the “grave” sailor, his busied hands, “frosted” hair, and “shrunk up” skin palpably hollowed out by the passage of time rather than filled in with any immanent allure of symbolic promise. But as we move on to the next paragraph, both the focus and the form of Melville’s prose pivot, the sounding of “knot” against “not” reminding us of the text’s sonorous opening figurations, as does the “not uncongenial” figurative “transition” Delano makes between the sailor’s knotted “entanglements” and his own confusion regarding the San Dominick’s mysteries. And echoing Duyckinck’s desire to unveil and taxonomize the stuff of Melville’s prose, here Delano’s mode of “comprehend[ing] the meaning of such a knot” inevitably involves parceling out its coded “combination[s]” of knotted content. But, of course, Melville’s comic conclusion turns the table on such an enterprise, with the elaborate knot in Delano’s hand allegorizing his un-knowing state of confusion rather than symbolizing any congenial and scenic transition to enlightenment. In the spirit of the event’s tableaued form, Melville suggests that Delano should focus less on solving the mystery of the knot’s content than he should on registering the ornate gesture, the singular maneuvers, of its knotting.

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Delano’s commitment to such a scenic mode of symbolic comprehension also drives the drama of the text’s most famous tableau: “shaving-time” in the ship’s cuddy (82). As opposed to Delano’s more modern appropriation of allegory in the name of the symbol, here Melville adopts allegory in its properly baroque—almost medieval— mode in order to describe the setting for Babo’s “lathers and strops” (82): Under the table lay a dented cutlass or two, with a hacked harpoon, among some melancholy old rigging, like a heap of poor friar’s girdles. There were also two long, sharp-ribbed settees of malacca cane, black with age, and uncomfortable to look at as inquisitors’ racks, with a large, misshapen arm-chair, which, furnished with a rude barber’s crutch at the back, working with a screw, seemed some grotesque, middle-age engine of torment. A flag locker was in one corner, open, exposing various colored bunting, some rolled up, others half unrolled, still others tumbled. Opposite was a cumbrous washstand, of black mahogany, all of one block, with a pedestal, like a font, and over it a railed shelf, containing combs, brushes, and other implements of the toilet. A torn hammock of stained grass swung near, the sheets tossed, and the pillow wrinkled up like a brow, as if whoever slept here slept but illy, with alternate visitations of sad thoughts and bad dreams. (82–83)

Melville emphasizes the “melancholy” singularity of these “stained” relics, refusing to provide his “heap” of mementos mori with any unifying universal context within which their “grotesque” disarray can be comprehended. His cuddy—the putative kernel of one of the most pervasive and Romantic symbols of human experience, the ship—is here haunted by “visitations” from “misshapen” fragments. Quoting Novalis, Benjamin reminds us that allegory likes to make its “tumbled” home in “a magician’s den, a physicist’s laboratory, a children’s nursery, an attic and a lumber-room,”17 and he proceeds by showing how the “disorder of [such] allegorical scenery stands in contrast to the gallant boudoir,” where “[t]hings are assembled according to their significance.”18 We have already witnessed Delano’s commitment to an aesthetics of assembled “significance” in his attempt to unknot allegorical tableau as if it were symbolic scene. So too in the ship’s cuddy—precisely where he might expect to find Cereno at a more comfortable rest—Delano mistakes the littered remnants of allegorical nightmare for the “airy” eccentricity of a “galant boudoir”: The place called the cuddy was a light deck-cabin formed by the poop, a sort of attic to the large cabin below. Part of it had formerly been the quarters of the officers; but since their death all the partitionings had been thrown down, and the whole interior converted into one spacious and airy marine hall; for absence of fine furniture and picturesque disarray, of odd appurtenances, somewhat answering to the wide, cluttered hall of some eccentric bachelor-squire in the country, who hangs his shooting-jacket and tobacco-pouch on deer antlers, and keeps his fishing-rod, tongs, and walking-stick in the same corner. The similitude was heightened, if not originally suggested, by glimpses of the surrounding sea; since, in one aspect, the country and the ocean seem cousins-german. (82)

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Like “The Piazza’s” landlocked sailor, whose revelry in the “picturesque” ultimately blinds him to the immanent material ruin and melancholic decay of Marianna, here Delano attempts to comprehend the confusion of Cereno’s cuddy by amplifying its symbolic context rather than by attending to its “grotesque” singularities.19 Instead of the shock of fractured difference, Delano (Captain of the Bachelor’s Delight) achieves a more comforting proximity with his Spanish double by heightening the figurative “similitude” between “ocean” and “country,” thereby transforming the disorder of Cereno’s cuddy into the gallant boudoir “of some eccentric bachelor-squire” (82). Even when Delano tries his best to focus on the details of its space, he ends up reading each relic in terms of its function rather than its allegorical form: “‘This seems a sort of dormitory, sitting-room, sail-loft, chapel, armory, and private closet all together, Don Benito,’ added Captain Delano, looking round” (83). The drama and aesthetic force of the shaving episode is not only tied to the tensions that Melville establishes between these two different modes of setting— between the singularized disorders of allegory and the universalizing gallantry of the picturesque. At stake in “shaving-time” is also a distinction between two distinct forms of movement. As many critics have noted, this episode provides the occasion for Delano’s most tellingly racist fantasies of blood, as if the prospect of Babo’s razor poised at Cereno’s throat pushes his ideological defense mechanisms into overdrive (85). By invoking a string of contemporary phrenological, romantic, and even abolitionist stereotypes of the slave, Delano famously insulates himself from the dangerous and dissonant singularities of his situation and instead finds “his old weakness for negroes” revivified (84). But rather than focus on these albeit fascinating and vital coordinates of Delano’s romance of racial and colonial difference, I want instead to emphasize the ways in which these fantasies all hinge on a specific form of movement and rhythm: There is something in the negro which, in a peculiar way, fits him for avocations about one’s person. Most negroes are natural valets and hairdressers; taking to the comb and brush congenially as to the castanets, and flourishing them apparently with almost equal satisfaction. There is, too, a smooth tact about them in this employment, with a marvelous, noiseless, gliding briskness, not ungraceful in its way, singularly pleasing to behold, and still more so to be the manipulated subject of. And above all is the great gift of good humor. Not the mere grin or laugh is here meant. Those were unsuitable. But a certain easy cheerfulness, harmonious in every glance and gesture; as though God had set the whole negro to some pleasant tune. (83)

The ease of these gestures has everything to do with the smoothness of their measure— with the “noiseless” grace of their “gliding.” Such tactful congeniality is not to be read as a “mere” product or effect of particular actions (a “grin” or a “laugh,” for example) but is instead tied to a “harmonious” mode of movement—to the generalized servility immanent in its pleasing rhythms. Delano’s fantasy of universalized gestural felicity thus stands in stark contrast with the “singular … maneuvers” of

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the San Dominick that open the text: it is as if “shaving-time,” drawing on the Latin roots of manouevre—manus (“hands”) and opera (“work”)—tableaus this tension in the opera of Babo’s hands. While Delano is drawn to the idea of movement as pure, frictionless function, Babo’s hands instead punctuate the scene with an interruptive and fragmentary force: they “made a gesture as if to begin, but midway stood suspended for an instant, one hand elevating the razor, the other professionally dabbling among the bubbling suds on the Spaniard’s lank neck” (85). The staggered orchestration of Babo’s hands here emphasizes this distinction between two opposing modes of movement: one hand poised to conduct the score in sinister and frozen silence, the other resolved to the idea of movement as an instrument toward an end, all the while shadowed by palpably ornate prose. Melville’s debt to the tradition of blackface minstrelsy is often, and quite rightly, invoked in order to explain the peculiar power of Babo’s gestures, and the playful performativity with which they mime particular kinds of stereotyped actions certainly challenges those logics of identity that rely on essentialized markers of differences such as race and class. But in addition to registering gesture’s power to perform certain actions, “shaving-time” also helps us to distinguish a key difference in gesture’s form—a difference that pits the fragmented operatic tics of the cast of the San Dominick against the smooth ease of a movement that, for Delano, always carries its own continuous rhythmic purpose. Indeed, we have seen how Delano’s commitment to an aesthetic of opaque symbolism is bolstered rather than destroyed by the gothic prospect of action’s veiled form: “what could be the object of enacting this play of the barber before him,” he asks himself, as if Babo’s gestures were only to be registered by unlocking their semantic purpose (87). The point Melville is making here is that Delano mistakes both the content and the form of Babo’s “play,” the baroque opera of his hands. After all, and as Jennifer Gordon Baker has established, “shaving-time” is indebted to Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville) as well as to the minstrel show. But whereas Delano can at least initiate an attempt to read Babo as Jim Crow, he is utterly incapable of interpreting his movement as Figaro’s.20 What is the difference between burlesque and operatic movement? In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche’s answer is “nothing.” While Benjamin laments the eclipse of properly allegorical forms of expression under the regime of the Romantic symbol, Nietzsche singles out the decadence of opera as proof that the modern man “does not sense the Dionysian depth of music” and, instead, clings to the recitative in opera as if it were “the rediscovered language of this primitive man.”21 Opera functions for Nietzsche, then, as a kind of Apollonian burlesque that decadently masks modern man’s vacuous inauthenticity. In his Trauerspielbuch, however, Benjamin attempts to rescue the baroque form of opera’s style while maintaining his critique of modern aesthetics. He does so by claiming that Nietzsche, like the purveyors of the Romantic symbol, empties out the allegorical weight of opera’s ornate gestures: if operatic movement is, for Nietzsche, tied to a logic of burlesque inauthenticity, then from the point of view of literature, and especially the Trauerspiel, opera must seem unmistakably to be a product of decadence. The obstacle of meaning and

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intrigue loses its weight, and both operatic plot and operatic language follow their course without encountering any resistance, issuing finally into banality. With the disappearance of the obstacle the soul of the work, mourning, also disappears, and just as the dramatic structure is emptied, so too is the scenic structure, which looks elsewhere for its justification, now that allegory, where it is not omitted, has become a hollow façade.22

Melville’s decision to set “shaving-time” to the rhythms of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville similarly emphasizes allegory’s and opera’s twinned drift toward decadent banality. As Gordon Baker points out, Rossini’s opera “was sacralized by wealthier theatergoers in an attempt to stave off the influx of so-called lowbrow forms like burlesque and minstrelsy.”23 While the 1773 play upon which this opera was based claims a richly subversive place in the unfolding of the French Revolution, Delano instead “represent[s] the American middle-class theatergoer, for by the 1840s the purpose of Beaumarchais’s satire had been lost on most American audiences [and] Rossini’s Italian operatic version … had become one of the most popular productions of elite dramatic art in the United States.”24 But whereas Gordon Baker goes on to argue that Melville’s “blackface burlesque of an elite Italian opera … encapsulates the class conflict of the American antebellum theater,” I would also point out that the power of the “shaving-time” tableau—like so many of the scenes on board the San Dominick—stems from the refusal of its actors to conform to strictly burlesque maneuvers.25 That is, Melville registers the “hollow façade” of contemporary opera and allegory not by symbolically satirizing its decadence but, instead, by demonstrating the continued, residual potency of baroque operatic gestures. To approach “shaving-time” as an allegorical tableau rather than as a key scene in the plot’s unfolding is to focus less on the novelty of its content than on the singular intensity with which it repeats the same underlying conflict between contrasting forms of movement. In this sense, then, nothing new happens on board the San Dominick, and the repetition of the same confrontation has the effect of emphasizing time’s duration. Even Delano is capable of articulating this “effect of enchantment. The ship seems unreal,” he continues: “[T]hese strange costumes, gestures and faces, but a shadowy tableau just emerged from the deep” (50). Such dreamlike duration attests to a strange, “unreal” dimension of impersonal movement—“shadowy” gestures not tied to any instrumentalized economy of cause and effect but, instead, identified according to their capacity to spatialize and draw out time. Delano is right to link the singularity of these gestures with the performativity of the costume, but not because their function is to veil some hidden identity. Rather, at stake in the form of their movement is the pure immanence of motion, the intensive and infinitive sense of the gesture “to perform.” Delano, on the other hand, prides himself on the felicity with which his movements mask underlying truths and anxieties: he thinks, for example, that he is capable of “refrain[ing] alike from the appearance as from the feeling of resentment” (63). We see this same conflict between contrasting forms of gesture at work in the “gangway” tableau:

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In another moment the casks were being hoisted in, when some of the eager negroes accidentally jostled Captain Delano, where he stood by the gangway; so that, unmindful of Don Benito, yielding to the impulse of the moment, with good-natured authority he bade the blacks stand back; to enforce his words making use of a half-mirthful, half-menacing gesture. Instantly the blacks paused, just where they were, each negro and negress suspended in his or her posture, exactly as the word had found them—for a few seconds continuing so—while, as between the responsive posts of a telegraph, an unknown syllable ran from man to man among the perched oakum-pickers. While the visitor’s attention was fixed by this scene, suddenly the hatchet-polishers half rose, and a rapid cry came from Don Benito. (79)

Never simply a conflict between racialized modes of subjection and the ostensibly benign forms of mastery they help to sustain, Melville also staggers here two different economies of movement. Where Delano only makes use of “half ” gestures that symbolically and meekly “enforce his words,” the “posture” of the “blacks” testifies to the potency of an interruptive, impersonal, and strangely “suspended” gesture— an “unknown syllable” that spans the timeless duration “between” signposts. Melville will enlist the gestural power of this same syllable at the close of the story, when he again emphasizes the electric responsiveness between the actors on board the San Dominick, this time in their death. Instead of a telegraph post, Babo’s head is “fixed on a pole in the Plaza,” but “his voiceless end”—like the perched silence of the oakumpickers—is nevertheless registered as a potent posture that continues to engage “the gaze of the whites; and across the Plaza looked towards St. Bartholomew’s church, in whose vaults slept then, as now, the recovered bones of Aranda; and across the Rimac bridge looked towards the monastery, on Mount Agonia without; where, three months after being dismissed by the court, Benito Cereno, borne on the bier, did, indeed, follow his leader” (116–117). This gesture is silent not because it is empty but because it is overfull, a live current of impersonal connectivity that Melville often likens to the flow of electrical or telegraphic affect. For example, while Delano’s half gestures are rooted in their claim to interrupt and veil an underlying sense of fear, Cereno’s body seems incapable of providing any such affective resistance. “He is like one flayed alive,” thinks Delano. “[W]here may one touch him without causing a shrink?” (93). Cereno is silent, then, because he is “too much agitated to speak” (95), not simply because he is hiding something back from Delano. As such, his body moves with gestures too swift and immediate for any purpose to veil them. Drawing on imagery from medieval allegory, Melville describes Cereno as “like some hypochondriac abbot [who] moved slowly about, at times suddenly pausing, starting, or staring, biting his lip, biting his fingernail, flushing, paling, twitching his beard, with other symptoms of an absent or moody mind” (52). And in addition to the repetitive and “distempered spirit” of such tics (52), Cereno’s movement is often described as eccentric, faulty, and exaggerated. When offered a drink, for example, “the Spaniard quaffed not a drop until after several grave bows and salutes. A reciprocation of courtesies which the sight-loving Africans hailed

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with the clapping of hands” (80). As these passages demonstrate, the form of baroque gesture exaggerates the pure, melancholic passing of time, the performative takingplace of impersonal movement, the opera of clapping hands. Fully “distempered” and set to a rhythm that can never be in time, such fragmented tics strangely ornament any symbolic drive to narrative emplotment. As Benjamin suggests, it is the offensive, the provocative quality of the gesture which is baroque. Where man is drawn towards the symbol, allegory emerges from the depths of being to intercept the intention, and to triumph over it. The same tendency is characteristic of baroque lyric. The poems have “no forward movement, but they swell up from within.” If it is to hold its own against the tendency to absorption, the allegorical must constantly unfold in new and surprising ways. The symbol, on the other hand, as the romantic mythologists have shown, remains persistently the same.26

What is so “provocative” about allegory and its baroque gestures, then, is not a particular content of movement but the eccentricity of its form, its capacity to register the novel flow of intention-free movement. In the sense that these gestures do not move “forward” in time, they enchant by swelling the duration of the story—a dimension that quickly implodes as soon as the reader re-enters the logic of unveiling when, at the close of the story, Delano finally comprehends the slaves’ ruse: “All this, with what preceded, and what followed, occurred with such involutions of rapidity, that past, present, and future seemed one” (98). In her 1999 film adaptation of Billy Budd, Sailor, Claire Denis channels Melville’s fascination with specific forms of movement and the ways in which they help legitimize narratives of imperial, racial, and sexual desire.27 And like “Benito Cereno,” Beau Travail explores how the exercise of purely impersonal and utterly ornate gestures can productively provoke such hegemonic aesthetic emplotments. In its triangulation of the relationships between Billy (Sentain), Claggart (Galoup), and Vere (Forestier), Denis’s film—like “Benito Cereno”—juxtaposes what Leo Bersani calls “two contrasting types of mobility.”28 On the one hand, the “type of movement exemplified by Galoup’s persecution of Sentain is … articulated as a direction and a goal. It seeks to remove and destroy Sentain as the (fantasized) obstacle to Galoup’s possession of Forestier’s desire.”29 But at every stage in the film, the instrumentalized desire of such movement is set against the singular maneuvers of the French foreign legion. Bersani describes their movement as follows: The exercises we now see have no clearly discernible combat function; they prepare the Legionnaires for nothing except the sociality being improvised by their bodies in the choreographed movements. The choreography demilitarizes them; it at once betrays the official mission of documenting the Foreign Legion and is profoundly faithful to the intention of representing another sort of foreignness perhaps always hidden within them as a potentiality and which we now see them dance into the surface of their bodies … .[Such an] exhausting repetition of a strenuous and fundamentally indifferent coming together [initiates] what Foucault calls “a new relational mode,” an as yet contentless sociality that

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seductively sets the stage for the invention of other manifestations of nonsadistic movement.30

Melville already anticipates the potential of such indifferent and repetitive choreography in the impersonal and fragmented gestures of “Benito Cereno.” And so when Denis chooses to set her film in part to the score of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd, she complements what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the film’s “ostentation of image” with a baroque layer of operatic sound whose powerful decadence we’ve already heard loudly on board the San Dominick. It is only fitting, then, that after the film’s most memorable depiction of impersonal movement—when the Legionnaires engage each other in brutally benign hugs (Figure 9.1)—Beau Travail returns us to the “shaving-time” of the cuddy, as we watch the soldiers meticulously lather themselves and barber each other (Figure 9.2). In the opera of these hands—and especially in the metamorphosis of Galoup’s improvised dance in the film’s unforgettable last scene—Bersani reads the possibility of sidestepping the fatalistic and violent emplotments of Oedipal desire. On the one hand, Denis opens this final scene by presenting us with a series of purely functional movements— walking, smoking, making one’s bed—and as our focus falls on Galoup’s pistol, we sense the suicidal and violent direction toward which these movements fatefully tend. But then the film cuts to a dance floor that seems to imprison Galoup in its cage of mirrors and flashing lights, and we watch as the functional form of his movement implodes—his gait transformed as if a different dimension of gesture immanent in the folds, rhythms, and pulses of these everyday movements swells up from within (Figures 9.3 and 9.4).

Figure 9.1  Beau Travail. Directed by Claire Denis. France: La Sept-Arte, 2000.

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Figure 9.2  Beau Travail. Directed by Claire Denis. France: La Sept-Arte, 2000.

Figure 9.3  Beau Travail. Directed by Claire Denis. France: La Sept-Arte, 2000.

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Figure 9.4  Beau Travail. Directed by Claire Denis. France: La Sept-Arte, 2000.

As we have seen, Melville’s attention to the singular maneuvers of baroque allegory similarly foregrounds an aesthetic practice beyond the tyranny of the encoded symbol, a practice in which the new and the singular breeze up and baffle amid repetitive and tableaued fragments of violence, death, and destruction. In “Benito Cereno,” as in Beau Travail, such a practice attends to movement’s form as well as its capacity to convey (or to veil) informational content, orienting us toward an immanently novel mode of movement that flourishes even amid the piled-up mementos of our everyday codes and alienating routines. As inscrutable tics that interrupt Delano’s oppressively instrumentalized logics of significance, prestige, and power, these fragmented gestures necessarily appear fateful and failed. It is only in their afterlife that their movement can be registered and, perhaps, redeemed.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

“Notes on Gesture,” in Means without Ends (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 136. Ibid., 136. Ibid., 137. Evert Duyckinck, The Literary World: A Journal of American and Foreign Literature, Science, and Art. No. 251 (November 22, 1851), 403. “Benito Cereno.” The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860. Vol. 9 of The Writings of Herman Melville (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1987), 46. Hereafter cited in the text. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1998), 178.

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“Melville’s Untimely History: ‘Benito Cereno’ as Counter-Monumental Narrative,” Arizona Quarterly 60.3 (2004): 33–61, 39. 8 Ibid., 37. 9 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 161. 10 The Statesman’s Manual, vol. 1, Lay Sermons, 2 vols., ed. Derwent Coleridge, 3rd ed. (London: Edward Moxon, 1852), 33. 11 In Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2004), Hans Georg-Gadamer calls this same transformation “the subjectivization of aesthetics”, 42. 12 Paul Grimstad, Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson to the Jameses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 68. 13 Duyckinck, The Literary World, 403. 14 Grimstad, Experience and Experimental Writing, 74. 15 Ibid., 69. 16 Ibid., 68. 17 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 188. 18 Ibid., 188. 19 See also Scott Kemp’s “‘They But Reflect the Things’: Style and Rhetorical Purpose in Melville’s ‘The Piazza Tale’” in Style 35.1 (Spring 2001): 50–78 for further discussion of style in “The Piazza.” 20 See Jennifer Gordon Baker, “Staging Revolution in Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’: Babo, Figaro, and the ‘Play of the Barber,’” Prospects: An Annual Journal of American Cultural Studies 26 (2001): 91–107. 21 Qtd. in Benjamin, p. 212. See also James McFarland’s Constellation: Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin in the Now-Time of History for a more extended comparison of Nietzsche’s and Benjamin’s aesthetics. 22 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 212. 23 Baker, “Staging Revolution in Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno,’” 93. 24 Ibid., 92–93. 25 Ibid., 102. 26 Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 183. 27 Beau Travail. Directed by Claire Denis (France: La Sept-Arte, 2000). 28 “Father Knows Best,” Raritan 29.4 (Spring 2010): 92–104, 97. 29 Ibid., 100. 30 Ibid., 101–2. 7

10

Melville, Poetry, Prints Samuel Otter

At the center of Melville’s epic, or I should say anti-epic, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, published in 1876, about a young American student’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem, a Victorian-era poem of faith, doubt, aesthetics, and politics articulated on a global, or at least an American, European, and Middle Eastern, scale—in four parts, one hundred and fifty cantos, and nearly 18,000 lines of mostly iambic tetrameter, one of the longest poems in the English language—Melville places an ekphrasis based on the Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s eighteenth-century etchings of imaginary prisons, the Carceri. What are Italian etchings of imaginary prisons doing in the Judean desert? More broadly, what are the relationships between Melville’s print collecting and poetry writing? The answers, I will suggest, involve the details of process, the discipline of the line, the relationships between originals and copies, the meanings of repetition, and Melville’s rethinking of traditional approaches to verbal representations of visual art. In the Piranesi canto, rather than describing the content of a static image Melville delineates—even attempts a mimetic performance of—the image’s becoming.

Intaglio allure During the last thirty years of his life, in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, Melville wrote poetry and collected prints. His public literary career had contracted and then collapsed with the publication of The Confidence-Man in 1857, and, beginning in the mid-1860s, until his retirement at the end of 1885, he earned a modest income working six days a week as a customs inspector in Manhattan. He read intensively Robert K. Wallace, Brian Yothers, and Kristin Hanson offered indispensable advice about prints, theology, and metrics. In thinking about the topic and materials of this essay, I have benefited from exchanges with Branka Arsić, Anne Cheng, Daniel Clinton, Hsuan Hsu, Paul Hurh, Jeffrey Knapp, Robert D. Madison, Cody Marrs, Ryan McWilliams, Leonard von Morzé, Ross Posnock, Elisa Tamarkin, Erica Weitzman, and Wendy Xin. I am grateful for having had the opportunity to present work-in-progress at the University of California, Berkeley (the Charles Mills Gayley Lecture and the Berkeley Townsend Center for the Humanities), Columbia University, the University of Arizona (the Arizona Quarterly Symposium), Princeton University (the Workshop in American Studies), and the University of Georgia.

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in British poetry, buying or borrowing works by, among others, Arnold, Browning, Byron, Milton, Shelley, Spenser, Tennyson, and Wordsworth.1 A decade before Clarel, he had published Battle-Pieces, a collection of Civil War poems. Like Whitman in his contemporary Drum-Taps (1865, expanded in 1865–66), Melville had sought to reinvigorate a faltering career by assuming the role of national bard in the aftermath of political and military crisis. Clarel had a small print run of 330–350 copies, and it sold poorly. Melville’s biographer Hershel Parker reports that two-thirds of the copies issued by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1876 likely were pulped three years later.2 More than a decade after Clarel, Melville paid to bring out, in twenty-five copies each, John Marr and Other Sailors (1888) and Timoleon (1891). Timoleon was a collection of poetry, and John Marr was a mixture of prose and poetry out of whose experiments developed Billy Budd, the novella left unfinished in manuscript at Melville’s death in 1891. Although Melville had scarce funds during the last decades of his life, by the time he died he had amassed a collection of at least 440 prints, most of them left unframed at his death. I write “at least” 440 because new prints continue to be located in archives or in the possession of his descendants. This number does not include illustrations in the many books about art and artists, such as Alexander Gilchrist’s two-volume Life of William Blake (1863), or pictorial volumes, such as William Henry Bartlett’s 1860s travelogues Forty Days in the Desert and Walks about the City and Environs of Jerusalem, that Melville acquired or consulted. The pioneering research on Melville’s print collection has been done by Robert K. Wallace, who is writing a book in which the images are organized into topical clusters such as “Ancient Greece and the Near East,” “Ancient Rome to Modern Italy,” “French Painting,” and “British Painters and Subjects.” In a series of essays, Wallace has meticulously annotated the images in relation to Melville’s journals and fiction, his reading in art history and criticism, and especially his late poems such as “At the Hostelry” (an extended debate among artists from different centuries on the meanings of the “picturesque”); “Pausilippo” (a topographical poem that refuses the consolations of landscape); “After the Pleasure Party” (a dramatic monologue featuring a female speaker who broods on sexual repression and creativity); and “Art” (a lyric on the tensions of form).3 The approximately 440 images we know that Melville collected span a range of artists and topics: reproductions of paintings by Claude, Poussin, Raphael, Rubens, and Turner; scenes from Shakespeare; portraits of artists, writers, and historical figures; illustrations from books and magazines; marine, landscape, and genre scenes; tokens of remembrance for sights from his travels. To date, Wallace has located one Piranesi etching that Melville owned, a nineteenth-century re-strike of the “Arch of Emperor Marcus Aurelius” from Il Campo Marzio dell Antica Roma (originally published in 1762). Melville collected some of his prints in series, such as Flaxman’s illustrations to Dante and Aeschylus, Cruikshank’s The Bottle and The Drunkard’s Children, and Retzsch’s illustrations to Schiller’s Pegasus in the Yoke—a topic that may have had particular appeal in the 1870s to the forgotten Melville, who once imagined, in his 1850 essay “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” that he might be heralded as the American Shakespeare. Other prints seem to cluster into visual essays: Turner’s paintings reproduced in different techniques and formats, Claude and Turner, effects

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of sunlight, textures of the sea, the art of engraving. Most of the images are British, French, German, or Italian, reflecting Melville’s international turn in the poetry after Battle-Pieces and challenging Americanist scholars to think beyond their usual boundaries and topics.4 Melville left no record of why or how he arranged his collection. Accumulating his prints, he seems to have engaged in an aesthetic obsessiveness similar to his pursuit of genre as he researched and wrote his books. Through his acquisitions and his reading, he taught himself the history of prints and of printmaking techniques: the ways in which images are manually transferred and ink is carried above (relief printing), below (intaglio), or on (lithography) the printing surface. Given the images we have and given Melville’s visual references across his prose and poetry, Wallace’s topical clusters are a logical way to present the evidence. But we also can discern other patterns. When one examines the hundreds of images from Melville’s collection in public archives, one is struck not only by the variety of sizes, topics, and qualities, grand and mundane, by the range of techniques and the gatherings of interest, but also by absences and emphases. Almost all of the prints are black and white, despite the proliferation of affordable methods of color reproduction. There are relatively few wood engravings or lithographs, prominent techniques in the nineteenth century. Or, if Melville had more lithographs than seems apparent (since lithography is a famously imitative technique), most of them were produced to resemble line engravings. Except for family depictions, Melville owned only a small number of images reproduced by the photographic processes that burgeoned across the second half of the nineteenth century and threatened to supplant traditional methods.5 Melville’s collecting eye and mind were drawn to the older intaglio processes, the techniques of metal engraving and etching, which often were combined in single images. Since we may have an incomplete understanding of the scope of Melville’s collection, such judgments need to remain tentative, but in the prints that have been identified the intaglio presence is conspicuous.6 In all printmaking, an image is transferred from a surface to paper in multiple copies. Tools and machinery, and often skilled craftsmen and printers, mediate between the artist’s hand and the finished product. In engraving and etching, the intaglio techniques that caught Melville’s interest, lines are incised below the surface of a metal plate; the plate is inked and wiped; and, under the great pressure of the roller, the dampened paper is forced into the recessed areas and picks up the ink, transferring and reversing the image. In engraving, lines are cut into the metal plate with a graver or burin. In etching, the metal plate is covered with a waxy, acid-resistant ground through which lines are drawn with a needle or other sharp instrument, exposing the metal below; then the plate is immersed in acid, which corrodes or “bites” (in the printer’s idiom) the exposed metal, creating lines that will hold the ink. Copper plates, which were used before the nineteenth century, could produce a few hundred images before the lines cut into the surface deteriorated after repeated printing. The term “engraving” was often used to refer to images that contained lines produced by both engraving and etching. Other intaglio techniques achieve tones not through linear processes but through patterns on the metal plate created by serrated tools (mezzotint) or

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acid-resistant powders (aquatint). William B. MacGregor has shown the influence of intaglio processes, since the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, on ideas about human perception. The engraving and etching of copper plates and the imprinting of lines on paper offered terms for thinking about the qualities of mental impressions.7 While working on Clarel in the 1870s, Melville acquired two lavishly illustrated books with extended sections on printmaking: The Works of Eminent Masters in Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and Decorative Art (1854), which reprinted selected essays and images from The Illustrated Magazine of Art (1853; Melville also owned volume 1 of this collection), and Georges Duplessis’s The Wonders of Engraving (1871), translated from the French. The section “Copper-Plate Engraving” in Works of the Eminent Masters evaluates the history of the technique and its practitioners, distinguishing engraving from other intaglio methods, and explains strategies for using the burin to achieve different effects.8 Most viewers of prints do not attend to the different processes by which the images are produced. Melville did. Such an interest extends his career-long fascination with the painstaking details of manufacture: the designs tattooed by Marquesan islanders in Typee (1846), the transformation of whales into commodities by the sailors in Moby-Dick (1851), and the paper made by the female factory workers in “The Tartarus of Maids” (1855). In these accounts, situated in particular contexts, process animates form and manufacture is tied to meaning. Prints—whether Melville owned them or saw them in books or in the public or private collections that he visited in New York and in England and the Continent during his trips of 1849 and 1856–57—influenced his literary thinking at least since his partly autobiographical novel Redburn in 1849, whose narrator describes the contents of “two large green French portfolios of colored prints” collected by his father. In Moby-Dick, during the second of three chapters on artistic renderings of whales, the narrator Ishmael compares the elaborate carving on scrimshaw to the “maziness of design” in Achilles’ shield and to the “suggestiveness” of lines engraved by Albrecht Dürer.9 In “The Blanket,” a chapter on the whale’s skin, Ishmael develops the cluster of associations with engraving: In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and recrossed with numberless straight marks in thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far other delineations. (306)

“Obliquely crossed and re-crossed in thick array” invokes the technique of hatching and cross-hatching used by intaglio printmakers to create pattern, tone, and depth. In Melville’s simile, the whale’s skin can serve as both plate (typically, sperm whales are of

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a dark hue) and paper (the white whale looms over the passage). As Richard S. Moore has suggested, Melville may have had the dense etching of Piranesi’s Carceri in mind. The phrase “numberless straight marks in thick array” conveys the linear excess of the Carceri more than it does the regulated geometry, lightly etched skies, and paucity of cross-hatching in many of the depictions in Piranesi’s famous architectural Vedute di Roma (“Views of Rome”). The lines in “The Blanket” are not engraved on metal plates or impressed on sheets of paper; instead, they are inscribed on the living body of the sperm whale. In Melville’s conceit, these designs are viewed through “the skin of the skin” of the whale, “an infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat resembling the thinnest shreds of isinglass [or mica]” (305–6)—viewed, that is, as an actual engraving might be, through a thin layer of glass. But these lines, engraved and impressed on a living body by some unnamed agent, are neither framed nor contained. The phrase “veritable engraving” is ambiguous: it either glides over the discrepancy between the two words— “veritable” (genuine) and “engraving” (copy)—or sutures the terms, implying that such copies indicate a kind of  truth. Engraved lines generate reflections on process and intimate additional patterns: “Nor is this all.”10 Melville extends this thought with a touch of polyptoton, writing that “linear marks” give rise to “far other delineations”:  lines upon lines upon lines. In Clarel, which contains Melville’s most sustained reflection on the meanings of intaglio, he turns explicitly to one technique, etching, and to a specific work of art—Piranesi’s Carceri—and he produces an ekphrasis that reimagines verbal and visual form.11

Clarel and the Carceri Across the four books of Clarel, Melville describes the journey of the impressionable young Clarel, a Protestant American theology student who has come to the Holy Land in search of history, companionship, and faith. He encounters a disintegrating, riven Jerusalem and “the expanse of time’s vast sea,” experiencing a process that the poetic narrator describes as “unlearning.” Clarel meets and falls in love with Ruth, a young Jewish-American woman. After her father is murdered, Ruth begins a period of confinement in mourning. Prevented from seeing her, Clarel accompanies numerous characters through the desert to Jericho, the Jordan River, the Dead Sea, the Mar Saba monastery overlooking the Kidron Valley, Bethlehem, and then back to Jerusalem, retracing the descent and return of many nineteenth-century tourists to the area. The  travelers, the latest among the generations upon generations who have come to the Holy Land, look upon sights that have been seen for centuries, hoping to discern significance and in search of authenticity and authority. They confront, in Melville’s Arnoldian lines, “All questions on that primal ground / Laid bare by faith’s receding wave.”12 They debate what the passage of time signifies: stasis? progression? redemption? recursion? disintegration? intensification? infinity? When Clarel returns to Jerusalem, he learns that Ruth has died in his absence. During Easter week, he mourns and broods. After joining a procession on the Via Dolorosa, he meditates on access and silence, and then, another in a parade of Melville’s exiles, he vanishes into obscurity.

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Melville toiled on Clarel from the late 1860s until the mid-1870s, spending more time on it than on any other of his books. Clarel is a dense, syntactically contorted, often dissonant and immensely deliberate poem. A contemporary reviewer for the Chicago Tribune captured the work’s strenuous discipline: “The manufacture of the poem must have been a work of love. It bears internal evidence of having been labored over as a blacksmith hammers at his forge, and only a mastering passion for the severest task-work could have sustained the author through it all.”13 The iambic tetrameter (whose rhyme is irregular and whose meter emphasizes stress rather than exact measure), the mixture of archaic and colloquial language, and the epic length differ from the choices Melville made in his other poetry. The prose yearnings and novel biases of some critics have led them to treat Clarel as though it were “Melville’s last long novel.” But if such critics downplay meter, line, stanza, and rhyme, their generic conflation usefully avoids the split between Melville’s earlier and later careers—his prose and his poetry—typically figured as incongruous projects or sutured in a narrative of decline from vigorous engagement to desiccated withdrawal.14 Even the more neutral “turn,” described in accounts of Melville’s “turn” to poetry, implies a succession that the career itself refutes. Melville’s generic restlessness is a story of change but also of continuity. As Hershel Parker has demonstrated in The Making of the Poet, Melville’s reading and writing of poetry began early. His emphasis on poetry after The Confidence-Man (1857) unfolded new opportunities for him, within and against the discipline of the line, to pursue his inquiries into the heft of words: their origins, contexts, and repercussions. Poetry allowed Melville to focus on words with precision and intensity. It has become a commonplace to describe Melville’s prose as poetic and his poetry as prosaic, and while these adjectives promise more than they deliver (Melville prose is neither measured nor enjambed, his poetry is both), they also convey a shared viscosity and a characteristic bending, even twisting, of generic expectations.15 In Clarel, thinking through questions of time, repetition, and reproduction, Melville invokes a metaphorics of prints and printmaking: mezzotints (1.36.30), lithographs (3.26.19–20), etchings (2.35), the qualities of impressions and copies (3.7.16–24), and the durability of plates (3.21.289). The most sustained attention occurs in canto 2.35, titled “Prelusive,” in which Melville describes and then reflects on Piranesi’s etchings of imaginary prisons. “Prelusive” prepares the way for the next canto, “Sodom,” in which the poet meditates on sin, history, and landscape. In “Sodom,” Melville further evokes intaglio processes, portraying the Dead Sea as though it were a vast reservoir of the nitric acid used in etching, which frothed upon contact with the copper plates: “the lake, / Whose bubbling air-beads mount and break / As charged with breath of things alive” (2.36.8–9). Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78) was best known in his lifetime for the Vedute di Roma, large-plate etchings that precisely rendered and reimagined the eighteenth-century city in its Renaissance and Baroque splendor and Classical ruin. Images were sold individually and published in editions over three decades. Piranesi’s sweeping visual tour of past and/in present came to typify Rome for many foreigners. He also produced architectural and decorative fantasies (including the

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Carceri), archaeological prints (such as Le Antichità Romane in 1756), theoretical works championing ancient Etruscan and Roman architecture over that of Greece (Della Magnificenza ed Architettura de’ Romani in 1761), imaginative recreations of imperial Rome (Il Campo dell Antica Roma in 1762), and late-career portrayals of decorative antiquities (vases, chimney pieces, candelabra). Born in Venice, where he received some training as an architect and a set designer, Piranesi spent most of his working life in Rome.16 He published the second, more widely circulated edition of the Carceri in 1761 with the title Carceri d’Invenzione, which translates as “Invented” or “Imaginary Prisons” (Figure 10.1). The lines in these plates were produced mostly by etching but also by engraving, scratching, burnishing, ink-dabbing, and the direct application of acid. The images are large, measuring 16 by 21½ inches. They were sold in portfolios and also collected in volumes, titled Opere Varie, that combined prints from different series. The sixteen designs were Piranesi’s own, with sources in Renaissance and Baroque architectural fantasies, the diagonal perspectives of Baroque stage design, Italian conventions for representing prisons graphically and theatrically, Piranesi’s advocacy of the early Roman empire, and possibly Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas on the Beautiful and the Sublime (published four years earlier and containing pertinent sections on “Obscurity,” “Vastness,” “Infinity,” “Succession and Uniformity,” “Magnitude in Building,” and “Difficulty”). In individual images and across the series, Piranesi explored formal patterns, surface textures, and spatial ambiguities, multiplications, and recessions (Figure  10.2). In these complex arenas, small figures wander or tour or, in a few instances, inflict or receive punishment.17 By the time Melville wrote Clarel, the Carceri had become touchstones for several late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers such as William Beckford, Victor Hugo, and Théophile Gautier, who tended to interpret them, in overwrought language, as conveying heightened mental states, often with an emphasis on terror and punishment. Thomas De Quincey, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, offered an influential response that has become almost obligatory for modern critics to reproduce. First published in two parts in the London Magazine in 1821 and then in book form in 1822, the Confessions was read by Melville with great interest in 1849. De Quincey filters his version of the Carceri, which he refers to as Piranesi’s “Dreams,” through Coleridge and through his own autobiography. He discusses Piranesi toward the end of the last section, “The Pains of Opium,” after he has compared thought to architecture and when he is describing the effects of the drug on his sleep. His dreams have been filled with interminable processions, theatrical spectacles, descents (“depths below depths”), and vast expansions in space and time.18 De Quincey, unlike several of his contemporaries, focuses not on dread but on imaginative extension, comparing Piranesi’s images to the abysses and the infinite, balked ascents he experienced under the influence of opium: Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi’s Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist, called his Dreams, and which record the scenery of his own visions during the

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Figure 10.1  The title plate from a later edition of the Carceri. This image and those in Figures 10.2 and 10.9–12 have been photographed from volume 17 of Piranesi’s Opere Varie, purchased by the Astor Library in 1849 and now held in the collections of the New York Public Library. In his visits to the Astor Library, Melville could have had access to this edition of the Carceri. Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Le Carceri d’Invenzione. [Opere] [1788] [plate 26]. Etching and engraving. Photo: Art and Architecture Collections, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

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Figure 10.2  Plate 14 from a later edition of the Carceri. Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Le Carceri d’Invenzione. [Opere] [1788] [plate 33]. Etching and engraving. Photo: Art and Architecture Collections, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

delirium of a fever. Some of them (I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge’s account) represented vast Gothic halls: on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, &c. &c. expressive of enormous power put forth, and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a stair-case; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity, except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you suppose, at least, that his labours must in some way terminate here. But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher: on which again Piranesi is perceived, but this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld: and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labours: and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall.— With the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams. In the early stage of my malady, the splendours of my dreams were indeed chiefly architectural: and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as was never yet beheld by the waking eye, unless in the clouds.

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Following this passage, De Quincey quotes eighteen lines from Book 2 of Wordsworth’s The Excursion, in which the Solitary describes his vision of a “mighty city” of infinite depths and heights: “A wilderness of building, sinking far / And self-withdrawn into a wondrous depth, / Far sinking into splendor—without end!… And blazing terrace upon terrace, high / Uplifted.” Joining Piranesi and Wordsworth, De Quincey conveys the “power of endless growth and self-reproduction” in his own visionary architecture. Incorporating Piranesi in his autobiographical reflections, De Quincey asserts that the prints illustrate the Italian artist’s fever-induced visual experiences. De Quincey implies that he has never seen Piranesi’s “Dreams” and is recalling Coleridge’s verbal sketches. Either he or Coleridge seems to be referring in particular to the fractured verticality of the seventh plate in the series, with its spiral stairs and cleft drawbridge (see Figure 10.9). De Quincey’s as-told-to account of the series departs significantly from the details in Piranesi’s Carceri. The “halls” are Classical, not “Gothic.” The “cables” and “pulleys” extend across and down the images, rather than lying on the “floor.” The first nine prints in the series are vertical, but the last seven are horizontal. De Quincey reports a narrative within and across the images, in which a figure representing the artist attempts to climb a sequence of unfinished staircases. In the prints themselves, larger human forms, none of which resembles the artist, may be statues arrayed in tableaux of punishment. The numerous smaller human figures, the tiniest of them created with brief strokes of the etching needle, are dispersed among the massive structures, often positioned on the staircases and balconies. These figures bear no distinguishing features and do not participate in a continuous story.19 The Carceri became known through the words of Gothic and Romantic writers, as well as through the visual circulation of the images. The series, and the works of Piranesi more generally, suffered a decline of interest with shifts in taste in the midand later nineteenth century. Attention to the Carceri would intensify in the twentieth century among collectors, scholars, museum curators, and creative artists. Melville is one of the few American or English writers in the later nineteenth century to discuss these etchings, and, to my knowledge, he is the only literary writer in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries to attend to their medium. Unlike De Quincey, Melville saw the Carceri: In Piranezi’s rarer prints, Interiors measurelessly strange, Where the distrustful thought may range Misgiving still—what mean the hints? Stairs upon stairs which dim ascend In series from plunged Bastiles drear— Pit under pit; long tier on tier Of shadowed galleries which impend Over cloisters, cloisters without end; The hight, the depth—the far, the near; Ring-bolts to pillars in vaulted lanes,

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And dragging Rhadamanthine chains; These less of wizard influence lend Than some allusive chambers closed. (Clarel 2.35.1–14)

Melville takes his details—stairs, tiers, galleries, cloisters, pillars, and chains—from several different images in Piranesi’s series. In the first quatrain, linking “prints” with “hints” across the abba end-rhyme, Melville stresses linear excess. As he did in the Moby-Dick passage about the marks on the whale’s skin, Melville indicates here that the lines cut in Piranesi’s intaglio plates suggest “far other delineations.” The prints may be “rarer” in the sense that the Carceri were not as popular or available as the Vedute di Roma. Melville also may have considered the Carceri “rarer” in terms of qualitative superiority. In this first part of the canto, “thought” is associated with doubt and apprehension through the adjectives “distrustful” and “misgiving,” whose prefixes (and suffix, in the case of “distrustful”) generate effects of privation and reversal.20 Adding prosody to his fascination with technical detail, Melville, a painstaking and studied poet, seeks mimetic effects in his ekphrasis. Portraying the spatial divisions and multiplications in the prints, he employs the beats of his meter (which I mark in bold characters) and the caesurae (which I indicate by vertical lines): “Pit under pit; | long tier on tier,” “Over cloisters, | cloisters without end; / The hight, | the depth—the far, | the near.” Meter, punctuation, and diction sharpen and vary the effects of repetition. In the second line about strange measures, Melville plays with the polysyllabic words, eliding the four syllables of “interior” to a metrical three and situating “measurelessly” athwart the iambs: “In ter/iors mea/sure less/ly strange.” In the fifth line, he builds a rise into the sequence of stresses and final iamb: “Stairs upon stairs which dim ascend.” He weighs down the beginning of the eleventh line with an initial spondee: “Ring-bolts to pillars in vaulted lanes,” with the five stresses and nine-syllables here straining the tetrameter. The eighth line—“Of shadowed galleries which impend”—hangs over the next—“Over cloisters, cloisters without end”—an effect amplified by both etymology and enjambment (impend/Over). In the ninth line, describing an infinite series of enclosures, Melville extends word endings into subsequent iambs, preventing a match between diction and meter: “Over cloi/sters, | cloi/sters with/out end.” In the twelfth line, describing the pull of chains, he employs a similar effect, a forward movement impelled by word endings tethered to adjacent iambs: “And drag/ging Rhad/a man/thine chains.” Across these first fourteen lines, the rhythm of contraries and the elaborate patterns of contraction and expansion—“stairs which dim ascend … from plunged Bastiles drear,” the “cloisters without end,” the conjunction of “hight” and “depth” and “far” and “near”—evoke the spatial dynamics of Piranesi’s etchings.21 The poet then turns the reader’s attention to more intimate precincts: to “some allusive chambers closed.” This fourteenth line seems to announce a break: formally, the first part of the canto resembles a sonnet; visually, it is separated from what follows by an indented fifteenth line; semantically, it seems to conclude with redundant proclamation as the sentence that has been suspended across ten lines is “closed.”22 Yet this first part of the canto is linked by rhyme, structure, and topic to the subsequent lines.

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It is not quite a tetrameter sonnet. Containing the right number of lines (fourteen), its end-rhyme scheme unravels (abba/cddc/cede/cf). The last line of what would be the final couplet in a Shakespearean sonnet is matched not with its partner (“closed” does not rhyme with “lend”) but with the first line of the next part of the canto (“disposed”). The volta—“These less of wizard influence lend / Than some allusive chambers closed”— requires the rest of the lines, and two or three more turns, to comprehend. The almostsonnet at the start, propelling the reader across a verbal maze, seems a deliberate aspect of the canto’s articulation of unexpected parts and its disorienting advance. In the first section of “Prelusive,” Melville offers an ekphrasis in the tradition of many earlier literary responses to Piranesi’s etchings, focusing on architectural details and imaginative ordeals and gesturing to carceral preoccupations through his references to the infamous French prison (the Bastile, made plural) and to the mythological judge of the underworld (Rhadamanthus, turned into an adjective). But in a series of puzzling lines, the canto continues: Those wards of hush are not disposed In gibe of goblin fantasy— Grimace—unclean diablery: Thy wings, Imagination, span Ideal truth in fable’s seat: The thing implied is one with man, His penetralia of retreat— The heart, with labyrinths replete: In freaks of intimation see Paul’s “mystery of iniquity:” Involved indeed, a blur of dream; As, awed by scruple and restricted In first design, or interdicted By fate and warnings as might seem; The inventor miraged all the maze, Obscured it with prudential haze; Nor less, if subject unto question, The egg left, egg of the suggestion. (2.35.15–32)

(We will return to that very strange egg.) The poet announces that he is less interested in the gothic properties of Piranesi’s scenes—in “gibes” and “Grimaces” (spectral jolts and contorted responses)—than in further recession, interior spaces, and the kinds of access that allusion and metaphor can provide. This second section of the canto turns the opening ekphrasis into the vehicle for a suspended metaphor, conveying the tenor of “the heart,” another riddled chamber: “the thing implied” that has been suspended over the first twenty-one lines. The poet has signaled that the spaces he describes in this section of the canto will be allusive, and he invokes the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, attributed to Paul, and the phrase “mystery of iniquity,” in its King James translation. Melville seems, like most of his contemporaries, to have understood Paul to be the author,

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despite scholarly questions about the Second Epistle’s authenticity (or possibly, aware of the doubts, he invokes Paul as a useful convention). Melville was particularly interested in the phrase, referring to it again, twice, in Billy Budd, Sailor. Paul’s “mystery of iniquity”—a locution used nowhere else in the Bible—has posed an elusive interpretive crux, then and now. The epistle that bears Paul’s name addresses a misunderstanding of his earlier message to the Thessalonians, which some had construed to mean that the return of Christ had already occurred or was imminent. In the Second Epistle, Paul clarifies, allusively, that first a series of events must happen, including a period of conduct against God’s will, the appearance of a man of lawlessness, and the revelation of that which was withheld. He writes enigmatically, “For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way” (2 Thess. 2.7). The phrase “mystery of iniquity” and the two letters to the Thessalonians suggest a complex temporality, which Melville draws upon as one of the forms of time explored in Clarel: the evil of the future is already at work, although not yet visible; Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection suffuse the present; and the day of revelation, which will come suddenly, is not so close that mundane activity should cease, but not so distant that it has no practical effect on the present. In contrast to Paul and his audience, the speaker in Clarel and the implied audience for the poem lack an inside knowledge of the mystery before them. The pentameter epilogue to Clarel holds out the possibility of sudden transformation and revelation (4.35.25–34), but renders the prospect less certain than in Paul’s letter.23 Not only time but also sin and lawlessness preoccupy Melville in the phrase “mystery of iniquity.” In Billy Budd, at the end of his career, Melville returns to Paul’s phrase, having his narrator use it twice in his attempts to comprehend the actions of the master-at-arms John Claggart, who pursues and destroys the young sailor. The first instance occurs after Billy’s spilled soup has crossed the master-at-arm’s path, while the narrator speculates on Claggart’s “mysterious … antipathy spontaneous and profound.” The second comes during the investigation by the shipboard court of the circumstances involving Billy’s fatal blow to Claggart. The phrase is spoken by Captain Vere, when he describes Claggart’s perplexing motives as lying outside the scope of their consideration. When Melville’s narrator and character reflect on the master-atarm’s “depravity,” the motifs from Clarel recur: a secret and labyrinthine heart that riots in exemption from law and reason, whose mysteries need to be sought through indirection and Scripture—an inquiry, Captain Vere suggests, best pursued by “psychologic theologians.”24 In Clarel, as critics such as Stan Goldman have suggested, the invocation of Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians is part of Melville’s inquiry into the qualities of sin and the distance of God. In these terms, we can read the line “the inventor miraged all the maze” as Goldman does, suggesting a God who conceals not only himself but the depths of sin and who challenges humans to discern and choose, to pursue the hints, the “egg of the suggestion.” We might extend this analysis, noticing that the lines refer to multiple inventors. The canto begins with the “inventor” Piranesi, who, the second part of the canto surmises, veils his meanings as the result of “scruple” or of being “restricted” or “interdicted.” In his 1850 essay/review “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Melville’s narrator had made a similar Romantic claim, if in more

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melodramatic terms, for Shakespeare’s insinuating artistry: “For in this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth,—even though it be covertly, and by snatches.” In the canto, Melville describes such apprehensions as “freaks of intimation”: sudden, surprising turns of mind. The value placed in “Mosses” on suggestiveness and the visual register of the discussion (a “blackness” in Shakespeare and in Hawthorne “that furnishes the infinite obscure of [their] back-ground”) indicate some of the qualities—the ellipsis and chiaroscuro—that may have fascinated Melville in Piranesi’s “rarer prints.”25 Another “inventor” in the canto is Paul, whose “mystery of iniquity” prompts the speaker’s thoughts on riddles and revelations. Paul’s phrase and his ambiguous eschatology—a “blur of dream,” shrouded in a “prudential haze”—suggest more than they disclose and gesture toward an inexpressible plan. And behind Piranesi’s images and Paul’s locutions is the ultimate “inventor,” a God who, strikingly, may be “awed by scruple” (a divine hesitancy) and “restricted in first design” (possibly a reference to the Fall or to larger forces that might constrain even God). Such a God has wisely “obscured” human vision, with the poet echoing another famed Pauline locution: “For now we see through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor. 13.12). God has left the “egg of the suggestion” to be nurtured by theologians, artists, and writers. The “Prelusive” canto moves from the complexities of Piranesi’s images to the complexities of Paul’s words to God’s intricate maneuvers. Piranesi’s visual and then Paul’s verbal structures hint at truths that cannot be expressed directly, whose developments readers are goaded to pursue. The idea of linked inventors is reinforced by punctuation in the second part of the canto, another long sentence, this one eighteen lines, in which the syntax places the key terms in apposition, connecting or nesting the phrases instead of specifying their relationships. The second part of the canto hinges on a series of terminal colons that anticipate but do not conclude, a sequence that leads to redundant intimation—“unclean diablery”: “ideal truth in fable’s seat”: “labyrinths replete”: “mysteries of iniquity”: “miraged all the maze,” “obscured with prudential haze,” “The egg left, egg of the suggestion.” Verbally echoing Piranesi’s etchings, the second part of the canto contains an elusive series. Not only does the word “inventor” return us to the figure of the artist with which the canto begins, but the phrases “restricted in first design” and “miraged all the maze” continue to describe the Carceri and to amplify Melville’s fascinations with intaglio printmaking.

Piranesi, again Earlier I wrote that Piranesi’s series consisted of sixteen images. That statement was not entirely accurate. The Carceri were published in several editions, states, and issues, with the most significant differences between the first and second editions. In 1749– 50, the first edition was published by Giovanni Bouchard from Piranesi’s fourteen large, unnumbered, lightly etched and bitten copper plates, with the title given on the initial plate, Invenzioni Capric di Carceri all Acqua Forte or “Fanciful Inventions

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Figure 10.3  Title plate from the first edition of the series Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), 1749–60. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Italian, 1720–78. Etching and engraving with ink-dabbing. Image: 54.4 x 41.4 cm. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Osgood Hooker, 1957.186.3.

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of Prisons” (Figure  10.3). “Acqua Forte” (“strong water”) refers to the solution of nitric acid in water that was used to etch the plates. Most of these first edition images explored large architectural forms in structures that were not visually distinguishable as prisons (Figure 10.4). Spatial ambiguities are present across the series. Sometimes these ambiguities might have resulted from the ease with which lines made with the etching needle can cross or miss one another. But, as Patricia Sekler and Andrew Robison have scrupulously argued, given the patterns of ambiguity and the techniques used to achieve them, the uncertainties often seem deliberate. Crucial junctures are obscured: in the center of the eleventh plate, the base of the central vaults is veiled by smoke (Figure 10.5). Patterns of light and shadow allow forms to be read as extending in two directions: in the title plate, the blocks of steps at the lower right of the image can be seen as descending from left down to right in profile or as angled forward and down with the risers of the steps visible (Figure 10.6). Linear tones give objects solidity and also blend them into their backgrounds: in the title plate, above the barred entrance at the lower left, the relationship among the stones—which ones are in the foreground and which are in the background or whether they are on the same

Figure 10.4  The Arch with a Shell Ornament, plate 11, from the first edition of the series Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), 1749–60. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Italian, 1720–78. Etching and engraving with ink-dabbing. Image: 40.5 x 54.3 cm. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Osgood Hooker, 1957.186.11.

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Figure 10.5  Detail from the center right of the image in Figure 10.4. Plate 11 from the first edition of the series Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), 1749–60. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Italian, 1720–78. Etching and engraving with ink-dabbing. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Osgood Hooker, 1957.186.11.

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Figure 10.6  Detail from the lower right of the image in Figure 10.3. Title plate from the first edition of the series Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), 1749–60. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Italian, 1720–78. Etching and engraving with ink-dabbing. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Osgood Hooker, 1957.186.3.

Figure 10.7  Detail from the lower left of the image in Figure 10.3. Title plate from the first edition of the series Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), 1749–60. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Italian, 1720–78. Etching and engraving with ink-dabbing. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Osgood Hooker, 1957.186.3.

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plane—remains uncertain (Figure 10.7). Forms are tied to but also troubled by their contexts.26 In the second edition, which Piranesi himself published in 1761 under the shortened title Carceri d’Invenzione, he added two plates and obsessively reworked most of the original fourteen (compare the two title plates, Figures 10.1 and 10.3). He covered the earlier plates with a translucent ground and used his etching implements to draw over existing lines and to add countless new ones (compare Figures 10.8 and 10.9). Images from the  second edition plates, with continued revision, were issued until 1778, and the plates were then used to print subsequent editions (six total, continuing until  the 1940s). With the second edition images, we are in the presence of what Marguerite  Yourcenar has described as Piranesi’s “strange linear universe”27 and of the intaglio domain that Melville evoked in the “Blanket” chapter of Moby-Dick: the “numberless straight marks in thick array” and “far other delineations” “something like those in the finest Italian line engravings” (Figure 10.10). The reworked plates, more heavily etched and deeply bitten, produced darker and more detailed images with intensified tonal contrasts. Piranesi added further human figures, perpendiculars, spikes, machines, beams, stairs, towers, ladders, arches, and scaffolds. (The more elaborate ropes and pulleys on display in the second and later editions, resembling the gear used to operate the sails of a boat, might have appealed to the former sailor Melville.) Andrew Robison argues that spatial ambiguities in the first edition prints were transformed into spatial impossibilities in the second. In the revised seventh plate, the added bridge supported by Y-shaped pillars that angles up to the left seems to pass between the curves of the spiral staircase and through the round tower (Figure 10.9). In the revised eleventh plate, the new horizontal beams, ladder, and rope at the left intersect in ways that defy conventional understandings of space (Figure  10.11). Piranesi crowded his second edition foregrounds and midgrounds and provided greater detail and clarity in the more distant precincts. He burnished and redrew the backgrounds in several images, opening views through forms, which in the first edition had been solid, to additional stairs, bridges, arches, and galleries,  populated with new figures. In the eleventh plate, new structures and  spaces have been exposed beneath and behind the two arches in the upper half of the image and also behind the  central arch in the lower half (compare the revised design in Figure  10.11 with the  first edition image in Figure  10.4). In the thirteenth plate, new arches and balconies have been created at the lower left, center, and upper right of the image, behind which additional arches, walkways, balconies, and beams have been etched (compare the revised design in Figure 10.12 with the first edition image in  Figure  10.13). Similar disclosures are present in the first, fourteenth, and sixteenth plates of the second edition. These developments call into question assessments of the series as depicting imprisonment  and immobility. Piranesi’s architectural fantasies exceed such terms. “Prisons” they may be, or mazes, or elaborate  cityscapes. The second edition images, especially, reveal “Interiors measurelessly strange” that are distinguished by protracted ambiguities of outside and inside, depth and surface.28 The series became darker and denser but also deeper.

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Figure 10.8  The Drawbridge, plate 7 from the first edition of the series Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), 1749–60. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Italian, 1720–78. Etching and engraving with ink-dabbing. Image: 547 x 410 mm (21 9/16 x 16 1/8 in.). The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Osgood Hooker, 1957.186.7.

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Figure 10.9  Plate 7 from a later edition of the Carceri. Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Le Carceri d’Invenzione. [Opere] [1788] [plate 26]. Etching and engraving. Photo: Art and Architecture Collections, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

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Figure 10.10  Detail from the upper left of the image in Figure 10.9. Plate 7 from a later edition of the Carceri. Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Le Carceri d’Invenzione. [Opere] [1788] [plate 26]. Etching and engraving. Photo: Art and Architecture Collections, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

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Figure 10.11  Plate 11 from a later edition of the Carceri. Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Le Carceri d’Invenzione. [Opere] [1788] [plate 30]. Etching and engraving. Photo: Art and Architecture Collections, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

New sectors emerged. Piranesi amplified the contradictions, extended the represented space, and complicated progress through it.29 Melville had access to the reworked state of the Carceri, since he includes details and spatial arrangements from several later edition prints in his verbal composite. As far as we know, he did not own any examples from the series. He could have seen a later edition at the Astor Library in New York, which he frequented and which held volumes that combined Piranesi’s works. He may have had the opportunity to examine the Carceri in the private library societies in New York or Boston that he visited, in the collections of his friend Evert Duyckinck or his relative Richard Lathers, or in commercial print shops.30 In his Piranesi canto, Melville seems alert to the existence and appearance of the different states, referring to “inventor’s” “restricted” “first” and then subsequent designs, which rework his creation and complicate perception. But whether in considering the prints Melville refers to a “first” and then second design, or he refers only to the spatial qualities of Piranesi’s second edition, the phrase “miraged all the maze” in the second part of the canto—with its doubling of disorientation—brings the reader back to the Carceri and to issues of time and reproduction at the center of the canto and poem.31

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Figure 10.12  Plate 13 from a later edition of the Carceri. Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Le Carceri d’Invenzione. [Opere] [1788] [plate 32]. Etching and engraving. Photo: Art and Architecture Collections, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

Figure 10.13  The Well, plate 13 from the first edition of the series Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), 1749–60. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Italian, 1720–78. Etching and engraving. Image: 40.7 x 55.2 cm. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Osgood Hooker, 1957.186.13.

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The “Prelusive” canto represents an ekphrastic pause within a sequence of cantos (2.23 through 2.29) that suspends action to consider matters of form, time, and art. The characters descend into the topography of the Dead Sea, and within this blasted, seething landscape, the poet finds Piranesi’s etchings. “Prelusive” indicates what follows—the canto “Sodom”—with the title suggesting that the Piranesi canto plays a subordinate role. Yet the ornate diction (“Prelusive” rather than, say, “Introductory” or “Prefatory”) elevates the status of the canto and expands its reference. “Prelusive” serves not only as an introduction to “Sodom” but also as an alternative to its fixations with sin and cycle: a prelude to other possibilities.32 The canto sets the Carceri in motion, describing not a single object but a series of images, and Melville may have in mind not only the series but also its multiple states. “The inventor miraged all the maze” is a peculiar and crucial phrase. Melville turns the noun “mirage” into a verb, and he appears to be one of the first English poets to do so. In the line, the stress falls on the first syllable of “mirage,” a pronunciation favored in British English: “The in ven/tor mi/raged all/the maze.” There seems to have been some variability in emphasis among British speakers as well as between British and American speakers. One can speculate that Melville the poet may have appreciated the fluctuations of “mirage.”33 The coupling of “mirage” and “maze” indicates a repetition that reflects and transforms: a multiplying of obscurity that holds possibility. To “mirage all the maze” is to imagine spaces of constraint that expand: to devise multiple trajectories along irregular diagonals rather than movement toward a focal point and to conjure repetitions that produce more solid forms, textured surfaces, and apparently limitless recession. “Miraged all the maze” also may refer to Piranesi’s return to his original plates, augmenting and unsettling his labyrinthine patterns.34 A similarly disorienting repetition is on display three lines later in the phrase “The egg left, egg of the suggestion.” This “egg” is a curious object: a symbol of biological reproduction in an ekphrasis about mechanical reproduction, an emblem of development in a matrix of confinement, an imprisoned object that itself is a container, a repository of possibilities, apparently out of place, an odd residue or excess. “Left,” offering the strongest stress in the line, is in a weak position and marks a caesura that does not match any syntactical boundary. The proximity of reversed letters in “egg” and “suggestion” hints at a quasi-palindrome, thus evoking the reversal of images between metal plate and paper impression. The visual, sonic, and semantic reiterations in “egg of the suggestion” once again imply the latencies that Melville discerned in engraving and etching: the “far other delineations” resembling Italian engravings on the whale’s skin and the “suggestiveness” found in scrimshaw, evoking the prints of Dürer, in Moby-Dick (306, 270).35 The “egg of the suggestion” also, deliberately or not, recalls a crucial passage in Lessing’s Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1776), one of the most influential modern statements on ekphrasis. Melville’s long-standing interest in ekphrasis, tied to issues of materiality, medium, obsolescence, and endurance, included his verbal depictions of a range of specific objects: the Nelson Monument and Picture of Liverpool guidebook in Redburn (1849); the Turner-like oil painting (ch. 3) and the whales rendered in different media (chs. 55–57) of Moby-Dick (1851); portraits based on images of his father Allan in Pierre (1852); Turner’s Fighting

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Téméraire, Gifford’s Coming Storm, and Vedder’s Jane Jackson in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866); Piranesi’s Carceri in Clarel (1876); and Italian, Greek, and Egyptian architectural landmarks in the “Fruits of Travel Long Ago” section of Timoleon (1891). Across his career, Melville referred to the sculptural group Laocoön and His Sons, the Greek depiction of the Trojan priest and his two boys encoiled by serpents, punished by the gods for Laocoön’s warning to his countrymen about accepting the gift of the wooden horse. The statue was the central image for Lessing’s argument, typifying expressive possibility in the visual arts. Melville knew Arnold’s “Epilogue to Lessing’s Laocoön,” which appeared in the British poet’s New Poems (1867). But we do not yet have any evidence about the specific translation or edition of Lessing that Melville may have read.36 Lessing challenged a philosophical tradition that had come to understand Horace’s comparison of poetry to painting as a mandate for visual description in poetry. Instead of similarities between the verbal and the visual arts, Lessing stressed the distinctive potentials and limits of different media. He outlined a set of contrasts that later interpreters would take as categorical. For Lessing, painting and sculpture were associated with space, fixity, and description, while poetry was associated with time, movement, and narration. The visual arts depicted coexistent actions, while poetry represented consecutive actions. Painting employed figures and colors in space to represent bodies, while poetry made use of sounds in time to represent deeds. Lessing argued that since the visual arts can show only a single moment, that represented instant should be the most suggestive, indicating what precedes and follows it. Poetry, on the other hand, can give access to events in their duration. The phrase Lessing uses to describe the need for the visual artist to select the crucial moment is den prägnantesten wählen, or “choose the most pregnant (with meaning).” The word “pregnant” often has been used, in English translations from Lessing’s German, to describe the replete visual instant; a prominent twentieth-century translator opts, instead, for “suggestive.” Lessing imagines an objection to his claims—that Homer in the Iliad shows Achilles’ shield, the paragon of classical ekphrasis, as a single finished object rather than an array of parts in succession—and responds that verbal accounts of painting or sculpture narrate the object from the viewpoint of its maker. Homer renders Achilles’ shield not complete but in the process of being constructed.37 In the Piranesi canto, Melville dwells on the analogy between poetry and art, joining the visual and the verbal not in hierarchy or antagonism but through their distinctive intimacies. The prolonged ekphrasis includes a verbal picture and also reflection on the images and their manufacture. The object of Melville’s attention is not the singular work of painting or sculpture that had been the traditional concern of ekphrasis but the multiple forms of the Carceri and the processes of intaglio printmaking. We might say that Melville extends Lessing’s “suggestive” or “pregnant” moment across Piranesi’s series, acknowledging the development of forms and of time, relocating the “egg” and “suggestion” from object to medium. Melville does not consider a fixed object, whose “still movement” is conveyed through the plasticities of verbal form and the reassurances of pattern: the “specially frozen sort of aesthetic time” identified by Murray Krieger. Krieger argues that poetic ekphrases transform

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progression into simultaneity, linear movement into circular repetitiveness, and flux into eternal recurrence, arresting and celebrating movement. Instead of endowing fixity with a voice or story, as many theorists of ekphrasis would assert, Melville’s Piranesi canto proceeds according to a linear excess that is both the object of its analysis (the intricate networks of the Carceri) and its literary practice. In his ekphrasis of the Carceri, Melville seeks to capture the movement of the art object and convey how perception is instantaneous but also successive and recursive. As Arnold maintains in his “Epilogue to Lessing’s Laocoön” (to which Melville may have been responding), the poet must be painter (show the aspect of the moment) as well as musician (know the feeling of the moment) and also “must life’s movement tell!” Yet for Melville, the poet does not subsume the work of the painter—or etcher—and transcend its limits. Instead, fascinated with his object, he channels its development.38 Prints in general, and especially the Carceri, present writers of ekphrasis with specific challenges of medium, technique, and reiteration. Melville resists the choice Lessing seemed to pose between the fixed space of the visual and the sequential temporality of the verbal. Instead, he joins a Lessing-like regard for process with his interest in printmaking to suggest what we might call an aesthetics of linear proliferation: “linear marks,” as he wrote in Moby-Dick, that “but afford the ground for far other delineations.” In Moby-Dick, he had figured the rigorous densities of engraving and etching as a labyrinth of marks, and in the Carceri he saw such a conceit worked out in and across the plates and their impressions. The Carceri—“all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless marks in thick array,” etched, regrounded, and etched again, their incised surfaces becoming denser and deeper, appearing in a changing series and multiple editions—evinced the prospects for a complex advance. Critics have depended on metaphors of incarceration to describe Melville’s iambic tetrameter. In his edition of Clarel, Walter Bezanson evaluated the meter in influential terms: “It is an essential part of the poem that the verse form is constricting and bounded, that the basic movements are tight, hard, constrained. This is an unbannered verse, without processional possibilities.” But the Piranesi canto suggests that in Clarel Melville was less interested in a poetics of confinement than in using his verse to imagine alternative ways to proceed.39 Melville’s interest in linear excess should be distinguished from, or at least not collapsed into, an “aesthetics of the indistinct” that Robert K. Wallace has identified in his writing. Taking examples from Melville’s earlier career—Mardi (1849) through the short fiction of the mid-1850s, emphasizing Moby-Dick (1851) and tracing a departure from more realistic works such as Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847)—Wallace chronicles Melville’s recurrent portrayals of an obscurity associated with infinity. He relates this development to Melville’s likely encounter in the late 1840s and early 1850s with the work of J.M.W. Turner, seeing images and reading both censure of his late canvases and John Ruskin’s defense in the first volume of Modern Painters (1843). Wallace suggests the importance for understanding Melville’s evolving career of Ruskin’s counsel that painters should blur their images. Ruskin encouraged artists to take their precisely executed forms and then remove details and add an enveloping mist or darkness or confounding light, thus producing “a startling and impressive

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truth, which the uncertainty in which [the forms] are veiled will enhance rather than diminish; and the imagination, strengthened by discipline and fed with truth, will achieve the utmost of creation that is possible to the finite mind.” There are resonances here with the formal and imaginative practices that Melville alludes to in the Piranesi canto: first and subsequent designs, the type of access provided by obscurity, and the discipline of vision. In “Prelusive,” though, infinity has form and it is perceived not through mist, gloom, or luminosity (the resources of Turner’s pigments and brush) but by means of countless sharply cut lines and multiplied structures (the resources of Piranesi’s burin, scraper, and acid) and in syntax, diction, rhyme, meter, and allusion (Melville’s verbal resources). Infinity has form and it also has a technique: intaglio. Pursuing the “egg of suggestion,” viewers becomes absorbed in the lines.40 In his print collecting and verbal descriptions of visual art in Moby-Dick and Clarel, Melville was intrigued by the linear patterns produced by intaglio techniques more than he was by the continuous surfaces of relief printing. He collected and he wrote about the lines engraved in metal plates by a burin or scratched through a waxy ground with a needle and etched in metal by acid, marks that then were transferred to paper: a shallow depth that, under immense pressure, produced a vivid surface. He was interested in how linear repetition—hatching and cross-hatching, etching and re-etching, the elaborate network of “numberless marks in thick array”—contrived tone, depth, and movement, as epitomized in Piranesi’s series. Melville seems to have had an almost Blakean interest in prints. If not quite the symbolic investment in technique that William Blake revealed in his experiments with relief etching or in the verbal and visual allegories on plates 14 and 15 of his Marriage of Heaven and Hell (the etcher’s acid imagined as burning away the surface of the copper to expose hidden truth and enable its publication), Melville had an intense regard for the details and the implications of printmaking.41 At the center of Clarel, Melville uses Piranesi’s etchings as a metaphor for the heart and the mysteries of iniquity, and he reflects on both tenor and vehicle. Piranesi’s etchings depict and enact distinctive progressions of form over time— individually, in series, and across editions. In the second edition, as “The inventor miraged all the maze,” forms are overdrawn, added, polished away, redrawn, and, despite the claims of many observers who emphasized impediment and punishment, the images become not only denser and darker but also more expansive. Melville seeks a similar effect in his canto. He follows the architecture of the first fourteen lines with allusions to Piranesi and Paul, subsequent designs, and elusive additions: labyrinths viewed as replete, mazes turned into mirages, prudential haze, “the egg of the suggestion.” In his poem about the return to a Holy Land, the search for origins, and the discernment of prospects, about the meanings of sequence and repetition, Melville’s interest in Piranesi helped him to imagine a series that develops in complex rhythms of constraint and maneuver and repetitions that proceed through multiple recessions. Printmaking offered an understanding of reproduction in which copies were not static or degraded but involved expressive partiality and intensification. In his copy of William Hazlitt’s Criticisms on Art (1843), acquired in 1870, Melville underlined a section of a passage in which the author, discussing prints, lamented

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a loss of originality: “Good prints are, no doubt, better than bad pictures.” Hazlitt went on to explain his preferences: “yet they are for the most part but hints, loose memorandums, outlines in little of what the painter has done.” He was commenting on re-presentations of works of art, rather than on original designs such as the Carceri. But Melville valued, in both original and reproductive varieties (and many of the images he owned were construals of existing art), the “hints” generated by “prints.” His collection and his writing demonstrate that he did not view prints as inadequate reminders or mere gestures. Melville’s regard for prints in Clarel seems closer to Coleridge’s understanding of “imitation.” Coleridge valued the “imitation,” as opposed to the merely duplicative “copy,” for the ways in which its forms were distinguished by its specific medium, producing an artifact that was both tied to and different from the nature it sought to represent, stimulating the mind through patterns of relation.42 Melville’s fascination with prints differs from the appraisal given in a book that stands as companion and alternative to Clarel, Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860). Melville owned and marked a copy of Hawthorne’s novel, giving particular scrutiny to the chapter in which Hilda, an exceptional copier of oil paintings, becomes disenchanted by “The Emptiness of Picture-Galleries.” Like Clarel, The Marble Faun returns to primal historical and cultural ground: for Hawthorne, Rome; for Melville, Jerusalem. Both writers represent their cities as layered, burdened, crowded. Both offer various ekphrases and, as if in response to Lessing, they consider the limits and reach of different media. In Hawthorne’s novel about art, travel, desire, and spirituality, the characters and narrator gauge the meanings of aesthetic practices: oil paintings (originals and copies) and sculpture especially, but also drawings, frescoes, stainedglass windows, and architecture. Prints are scarcely mentioned in The Marble Faun. One of the few instances occurs when the painter Miriam catalogs the spurious images of Beatrice Cenci circulating in Rome: “Everywhere we see oil-paintings, crayonsketches, cameos, engravings, lithographs, pretending to be Beatrice.” When Hilda and the sculptor Kenyon view Rome from Pincian Hill, the narrator invokes intaglio techniques: “no land of dreams, but the broadest page of history, crowded so full with memorable events that one obliterates another; as if Time had crossed and re-crossed his own records till they grew illegible.” Cross-hatched over and over by Time, the image blurs. Here linear proliferation leads to opacity. In Hawthorne’s Rome, Piranesi is nowhere to be seen.43

And forever Melville concludes his ekphrasis with an imperative that returns to printmaking: Dwell on those etchings in the night, Those touches bitten in the steel By aqua-fortis, till ye feel The Pauline text in gray of light; Turn hither then and read aright.

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“Aqua-fortis” is the Latin original for the Italian phrase etched in the first edition Carceri title plate (Figure 10.3), referring to the nitric acid that “bites” into the metal. The poet suggests here—and this has been part of the intellectual labor of the canto— that to “read aright,” to comprehend God’s inexpressible design, Paul’s indirection needs to be understood through Piranesi’s labyrinths (“dwell on” shades into “dwell in”). Clarel needs to be seen through the Carceri. Paul’s text should be “felt,” and this verb recurs to “the heart” and, along with “bitten” and “touches,” emphasizes a tactile, not just visual, experience. “Felt” also evokes an aspect of the intaglio process, as the print collector Melville surely knew. The great weight of the roller presses against the blanket and forces the dampened paper into the incisions on the plate, creating a slight relief effect. Such embossing does not result from other graphic techniques, in which ink is transferred to paper from flat surfaces and with significantly less force. In intaglio, the impressions of the darkest lines, having been made from deeper grooves that hold more ink, become elevated into ridges. These ridges of ink—produced by the “touches” of Piranesi’s etching needle, which glides through the soft ground, exposing the metal to acid that will eat away its surface—can be seen with the eyes or through a magnifying glass and also can be “felt” with the tips of the fingers. Part of “the egg of the suggestion” in deeply cut intaglio prints can involve (as the etymology of “suggest” implies) contact with what has been “brought up from below.” The poet’s imperatives—“Dwell,” “feel,” “read aright”—call for an aesthetic experience that is palpable, responsive to the histories and impacts of words and images. The imperatives revise De Quincey’s visual instructions. In Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, De Quincey had guided readers to follow “Piranesi himself ”— “raise your eyes,” “Again elevate your eye”—and witness the artist’s frustrated ascents, his encounters with unfinished stairways and plunging gaps. But Melville redirects attention from an individual figure to the maze of lines, and he points not upward but ahead and within. The last lines of the “Prelusive” canto, after a space break, offer a caution and a choice: “For ye who green or gray retain / Childhood’s illusion, or but feign; / As bride and suit let pass a bier— / So pass the coming canto here” (2.35.38– 41). If you are too innocent, sensitive, or insincere, advises the poet, if you are at a stage of life where you cannot bear calamity, then you should dispense with the next canto, “Sodom.” Instead of turning “hither,” you can turn away. This option, of course, has a literary pedigree. Chaucer in the Prologue to The Miller’s Tale had given similar advice: “And therfore, whoso list it nat yheere, / Turne over the leef and chese another tale” (I: 3176–77).44 Both writers theatrically insulate themselves from blame should the reading experience go awry. Signaling intensity and offering escape, they goad interest in what follows. Although the poet’s directive is to “read aright,” the concluding words on Piranesi contain an error. The Italian artist’s lines were etched on copper plates, not “bitten in the steel.” Copper was the medium for engraving and etching until the 1820s. In later years, steel, a tougher material that furnished more durable plates, came into increasing use. Steel plates, which held marks that could be closely spaced and extremely shallow, were capable of producing images with finer detail and in a wider range of gray tones. The poet may have sacrificed accuracy—Piranesi’s use of

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copper—for rhyme and effect: the match between “steel” and “feel” and the hardening of surface. But given Melville’s interest in prints and printmaking, the intaglio images he collected (made from both copper and steel), and the scrutiny of process in the books he read, another possibility seems more likely.45 At the end of the Piranesi canto, Melville imagines plates whose yield was not limited by the erosion of lines cut into softer copper, damaged by repeated use and incapable of yielding sharp images. Instead, he conceives of a series that extends into the tens and even hundreds of thousands of impressions that steel can produce: “Imaginary Prisons” virtually without end. In his literary career and his print collecting, Melville was attracted to the linear intaglio processes: to the myriad cuts into a recalcitrant surface, the patterns they generated, the convergence of precision and suggestion, the eloquence of repetition, the distinctive physicality and even violence of technique, and the metaphorics of mind and heart: “the numberless straight marks in thick array” and “far other delineations.” In Clarel, Melville’s outmoded graphic interests advanced his thinking about time and reproduction. In his ekphrasis and reflection on Piranesi’s linear inventions, Melville was less concerned with delirium or fever or vast Gothic halls than he was with theology, psychology, aesthetics, and printmaking. Rather than focusing on the static visual object or the struggle between word and image, he sought to convey visual and verbal forms that develop, even proliferate, across space and time. Condensing Piranesi’s series and likely its different editions, Melville imagines intricate recessions without vanishing points.

Notes 1

2

3

On Melville’s reading in poetry and poetics, with relevance to Clarel, see Hershel Parker, Melville: The Making of the Poet (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 153–87 ff., and Herman Melville: A Biography, Vol. 2: 1851–1891 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 673–814; Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville’s Reading: Revised and Enlarged Edition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), 116–22; and Robert D. Madison, “Melville’s Dated Reading in Poetry and Poetics: A Chronological Short-Title List,” in Published Poems: Battle-Pieces, John Marr, Timoleon, vol. 11 of The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Robert C Ryan, Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall Reising, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 2009), 869–74. I am grateful for having had the opportunity to read Madison’s as yet unpublished essay, “For Arva’s Shrine: Melville in the Poetry Classroom.” Parker quotes the jotting made by someone at Putnam’s on Melville’s written authorization for destroying the remaining copies: “Sent to Paper Mill April 18/79 … 220 Sets 110 Pounds of Covers 305 Pounds of Clarel” (Herman Melville 2: 839). “305 Pounds of Clarel” seems a poignantly palpable literary epitaph for the book and its ambitions. Most of the scholarship on Melville and the visual arts has focused on his knowledge and literary use of oil paintings, sculpture, and architecture. See Douglas Robillard, Melville and the Visual Arts: Ionian Form, Venetian Tint (Kent, OH: Kent State

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Melville’s Philosophies University Press, 1997); Morris Star, “Melville’s Use of the Visual Arts” (diss. Northwestern University, 1964); Christopher Sten, ed., Savage Eye: Melville and the Visual Arts (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1991); and Robert K. Wallace, Melville and Turner: Spheres of Love and Fright (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992) and “‘Unlike Things Must Meet and Mate’: Melville and the Visual Arts,” in A Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Wyn Kelley (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 342–61. Wallace scrutinizes Melville’s print collection in “From Ancient Rome to Modern Italy: Italian Art in Melville’s Print Collection,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 15.3 (October 2013): 41–54; “Melville’s Biblical Prints and Clarel,” in Melville as Poet: The Art of “Pulsed Life,” ed. Sanford E. Marovitz (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2013), 36–62; “Melville’s Prints and Engravings at the Berkshire Athenaeum,” Essays in Arts and Sciences 15 (June 1986): 59–74; “Melville’s Prints: The Ambrose Group,” Harvard Library Bulletin New Series 6.1 (Spring 1995): 13–50; “Melville’s Prints: David Metcalf ’s Prints and Tile,” Harvard Library Bulletin New Series 8.4 (Winter 1997): 3–33; “Melville’s Prints: The E. Barton Chapin, Jr., Family Collection,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 2.1 (March 2000): 5–65; “Melville’s Prints: The Giypsies,” Harvard Library Bulletin New Series 8.4 (Winter 1997): 34–36; “Melville’s Prints: The Melville Chapin Collection,” Harvard Library Bulletin New Series 11.2 (Summer 2000): 5–54; and “Melville’s Prints: The Reese Collection,” Harvard Library Bulletin New Series 4.3 (Fall 1993): 6–42. Only a few critics in addition to Wallace have attended to the significance of Melville’s interest in prints. See Dennis Berthold, “Dürer ‘At the Hostelry’: Melville’s Misogynist Iconography,” Melville Society Extracts 95 (December 1993): 1–8; Daniel Clinton, “Mechanical Reproduction in the Age of Immediacy” (diss. University of California, Berkeley, 2013), 48–77; Hennig Cohen, ed., The Battle-Pieces of Herman Melville (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1963), 11–28, 203–95 ff.; Howard H. Schless, “Flaxman’s Dante and Melville’s Pierre,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 64.2 (February 1960): 65–82; Elisa Tamarkin, “Melville with Pictures,” in The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Robert S. Levine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 169–86; and Helen P. Trimpi, Melville’s Confidence-Men and American Politics in the 1850s (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1987). On Melville’s copy of Piranesi’s “Arch of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius,” see Wallace, “Reese Collection,” 4–8. Melville acquired Schiller’s Pegasus in the Yoke, with Explanations of the Illustrations. By Moritz Retzsch (1857) in 1870; eight images from the series were reproduced in reduced form, along with a two-page article, in vol. 1 of The Illustrated Magazine of Art (New York: Alexander Montgomery, 1853), 40–45, which Melville also owned. See Sealts, Melville’s Reading, entry 441. I have reviewed the 276 prints from Melville’s collection at the Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield, Mass., and the 44 Melville prints owned by William Reese, which he donated to the Melville Archive at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. The Berkshire Athenaeum contains many photographs of the Melville family. The great majority of prints that have been identified as once owned by Melville, now held privately and cataloged by Wallace in his series of essays, are engravings or etchings. Wallace refers to the number of Melville’s prints that have been located as “the known portion of an unknown whole” (“Melville Chapin Collection,” 38); he mentions Melville’s interest in engraving and etching in “Berkshire Athenaeum,” 71; “Barton Chapin Collection,” 9; and “Melville Chapin Collection,” 34. Notably, given Melville’s interest in intaglio, his extant collection contains no examples from the later

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nineteenth-century etching revivals, first in Britain and France and then in the United States, including Francis Seymour Haden, Auguste Lepère, Charles Meryon, Joseph Pennell, and James McNeill Whistler, artists whose images were popular among American collectors in the 1880s. Melville may not have acquired any examples from the etching revival for reasons of taste or cost, or such examples may have been sold by or dispersed among his descendants. In Billy Budd, he mentions Haden’s etching “Breaking Up of the ‘Agamemnon’”; see Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), ed. Harrison Hayford, and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 69. Of course, the books Melville owned contained images produced by relief, planographic, and photographic processes; he prized his large-format copy of Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1886) with photographically reproduced drawings by Elihu Vedder. 7 William B. MacGregor, “The Authority of Prints: An Early Modern Perspective,” Art History 22.3 (September 1999): 389–420. 8 “Copper-Plate Engraving,” in The Works of Eminent Masters in Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, and Decorative Art, 2 vols. in 1 (London: John Cassell, 1854), 138–44; “Engraving on Printing and Copper,” in The Illustrated Magazine of Art, 1: 292–97. Duplessis’s The Wonders of Engraving (London: Low and Marston, 1871) contained a final chapter on “Processes” (308–29). 9 Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage, Being the Confessions and Reminiscences of the Son-of-a-Gentleman, in the Merchant Service (1849), vol. 4 of The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1969), 6–7; and Moby-Dick, or The Whale (1851), vol. 6 of The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1988), 270. Subsequent references to Moby-Dick will be given in parentheses in the body of this essay. 10 “Nor is this all” might be taken as the voluble narrator’s motto of amplification in Moby-Dick. The phrase, slightly modified as “But this is not all,” appears also in the chapters “The Affadavit” and “The Decanter”; see Moby-Dick, 205, 444. The cardinal sin for Ishmael is stopping short. Beneath the evocative passage in “The Blanket” are lines from Thomas Beale’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839; rpt. London: Holland Press, 1973), a crucial resource for Melville in writing Moby-Dick. Rewriting Beale, Melville draws out the intaglio hints in his phrase “linear impressions” (31). Melville’s marked copy of Natural History of the Sperm Whale can be viewed in digital facsimile at the website Melville’s Marginalia Online (ed. Steven Olsen-Smith, Peter Norberg, and Dennis C. Marnon). For page 31 of the Beale volume, the site provides an enhanced image of an erased pencil checkmark alongside the “linear impressions” sentence. See also Steven Olsen-Smith, “Melville’s Copy of Thomas Beale’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale and the Composition of Moby-Dick,” Harvard Library Bulletin 21.3 (Fall 2010): 1–77. 11 Richard S. Moore, “Piranesi, ‘The Blanket,’ and the Mathematical Sublime in Moby-Dick,” Melville Society Extracts 47 (September 1981): 1–2, and That Cunning Alphabet: Melville’s Aesthetics of Nature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1982), 148–49. For other intaglio figurations in Melville’s works, see the “engraving” of the gourds in Mardi, and a Voyage Thither (1849), vol. 3 of The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago:

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Melville’s Philosophies Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1970), 180–81, and Isabel’s hatched and cross-hatched heart in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), vol. 7 of The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1971), 158. Herman Melville, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), vol. 12 of The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1991), 1.1.81, 1.1.80, 1.19.27–28. Subsequent references to Clarel will be given parenthetically by book, canto, and line number. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, eds., Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 534. The brief reviews of Clarel in 1876 were mixed to negative; see Higgins and Parker 531–41. All who write about Clarel are indebted to the scholarship and analysis in Walter Bezanson’s pioneering edition of the poem (New York: Hendricks House, 1960). Much of Bezanson’s work has been incorporated into the invaluable Northwestern-Newberry edition of Clarel, volume 12 of The Writings of Herman Melville. I take the phrase from the title of John T. Frederick’s “Melville’s Last Long Novel: Clarel,” Arizona Quarterly 26.2 (Summer 1970): 151–57; see also Stan Goldman, Melville’s Protest Theism: The Hidden and Silent God in Clarel (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993), 6. Cody Marrs analyzes critical narratives of Melville’s decline from prose to poetry, and he provides an alternative, in “A Wayward Art: Battle-Pieces and Melville’s Poetic Turn,” American Literature 82.1 (March 2010): 91–119. Interest in Melville’s poetry has been long-standing, if irregular. In the 1970s, three books were published on the poetry (Aaron Kramer’s Melville’s Poetry: Toward the Enlarged Heart, William Shurr’s The Mystery of Iniquity: Melville as Poet, 1857–1891, and William Bysshe Stein’s The Poetry of Melville’s Late Years) and two books on Clarel (Vincent Kenney’s Herman Melville’s Clarel: A Spiritual Autobiography and Joseph G. Knapp’s Tortured Synthesis: The Meaning of Melville’s Clarel). Recently, there has been a resurgence, partly fueled by interest in Melville’s book of Civil War poems, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866). For recent comprehensive statements on Melville’s interest in poetry, see Parker’s Melville: The Making of the Poet and Sanford E. Marovitz’s edited volume Melville as Poet: The Art of “Pulsed Life” (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2013), which includes three essays on Clarel. On Piranesi’s career, see John Wilton-Ely, The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978) and Piranesi as Architect and Designer (New York and New Haven: Pierpont Morgan Library and Yale University Press, 1993) and also Jonathan Scott, Piranesi (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975). Richard Wendorf connects Piranesi’s fascinations with ruins to the process of etching, focusing on his Prima Parte di Architetture e Prospettive (1743); see “Piranesi’s Double Ruin,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 34.2 (2001): 161–80. Scott speculates on the Burke connection (Piranesi 59–61). On the Carceri, in addition to the sources in the previous note, see Arthur M. Hind, Giovanni Battista Piranesi: A Critical Study, with a List of his Published Works and Detailed Catalogues of the Prisons and the Views of Rome (1922; rpt. New York: Da Capo Press, 1967);

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Philip Hofer, intro. The Prisons (Le Carceri): The Complete First and Second Series, by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (New York: Dover Publications, 1973), vii–xvi; Aldous Huxley and Jean Adhemar, Prisons, with the “Carceri” Etchings by G. B. Piranesi (London: Trianon Press, 1949); William M. Ivins, Jr., “Piranesi and ‘Le Carceri d’Invenzione,’” The Print-Collector’s Quarterly 5.2 (April 1915): 191–219; William L. MacDonald, Piranesi’s Carceri: Sources of Invention (Northampton, MA: Smith College, 1979); Erika Naginski, “Romanticism’s Piranesi,” in The Built Surface, Vol. 1: Architecture and the Pictorial Arts from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, ed. Christy Anderson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 237–59; Andrew Robison, Piranesi: Early Architectural Fantasies; A Catalogue Raísonné of the Etchings (Washington, DC and Chicago: National Gallery of Art and University of Chicago Press, 1986); Patricia May Sekler, “Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carceri Etchings and Related Drawings,” Art Quarterly 25.4 (Winter 1962): 330–63; and Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). 18 Melville describes De Quincey’s Opium-Eater as “A wonderful thing” in a December 22, 1849, journal entry; see Journals, vol. 15 of The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Howard C. Horsford with Lynn Horth (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1989), 46; Sealts, in Melville’s Reading, entry 180, provides details about Melville’s copy. For accounts of Piranesi’s effect on British and French writers, see Jorgen Andersen, “Giant Dreams: Piranesi’s Influence in England,” in English Miscellany: A Symposium of History, Literature, and the Arts, ed. Mario Praz (Rome: Edzioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1952), 49–60; Naginski, “Romanticism’s Piranesi”; and Scott, Piranesi, 55–57. A. Hyatt Mayor observed in 1952 that “De Quincey’s vividness has made it impossible to describe the Prisons in English without paraphrasing him”; see Giovanni Battista Piranesi (H. Bittner and Co., 1952), 7. In the catalog of literary responses offered by art historians, Melville is rarely mentioned, with the exceptions of Mayor (7) and Sekler, who in “Piranesi’s Carceri Etchings” frames her argument with the first ten lines of Melville’s Piranesi ekphrasis and uses his half-line—“what mean the hints?”—as a refrain. 19 Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821, 1822), vol. 2 of The Works of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Grevel Lindop (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000), 68–69. The Confessions appeared first in two parts in London Magazine in September and October 1821; it was published as a book in 1822 and revised and expanded in 1856. J. Hillis Miller labels De Quincey’s recurrent portrayals of the mind being confined in infinite repetitions as “the Piranesi effect”; see The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1963), 67–70. Anthony Vidler has labeled interpretations such as De Quincey’s part of a “rich tradition of Piranesi ‘misreading’ … in which the prison etchings, variously described as dreams, drug-induced deliria, and prisons of the mind, take on aspects of labyrinths through which the artist wanders, metaphors of the Romantic mind”; see The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 37–38. Marguerite Yourcenar, in contrast, describes “De Quincey’s entire fidelity to the spirit of Piranesi’s work and then his extraordinary infidelity to the letter”; see The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays, trans. Richard Howard and Marguerite Yourcenar (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984), 126–27. Twentiethcentury interpreters such as Yourcenar and Huxley have continued the Romantic

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Melville’s Philosophies tradition of emphasizing in the Carceri a psychic architecture, while extending the scope of disorder from the personal to the cultural. They see Piranesi’s visual tropes as anticipating the incarcerations of modernity. Others, such as Hind, Ivins, Robison, and Sekler, resist psychology, narrative, and diagnosis, emphasizing the formal qualities of Piranesi’s etchings and the techniques he used to produce them. The editors of the Northwestern-Newberry scholarly edition of Clarel have corrected Melville’s spelling of the proper name, substituting an “s” in Piranesi for Melville’s “z,” the letter used in the original 1876 printing of the poem. This adjustment is possibly misguided. One can imagine reasons of sound and shape that might have attracted Melville to the “z,” and instances of “Piranezi” can be found in nineteenth-century British and French usage. Reproducing the title plate from the Carceri, the editors suggest that Melville may have had this image in front of him as he wrote the canto “because it is the only one of the sixteen plates to contain all of the images he itemizes in the passage” (790–91). This speculation may be accurate, but, as I will argue, it is the series of prints upon which Melville reflects. Other plates in the series also vividly depict the spaces he describes. Robillard suggests that Melville refers to the Carceri as “rarer” because of their relative scarcity in the United States (Melville and the Visual Arts, 153). Numerous critics have observed the presence of Piranesi’s Carceri in Melville’s canto and several have analyzed its significance for the poem. Sustained attention to Piranesi’s etchings among literary critics, other than in thematic terms, has been rare, as has attention to Melville’s prosody. Christa Buschendorf provides the fullest discussion of Melville’s ekphrasis; she argues that he found in the Carceri an image for the paradox at the center of Clarel and of modern life: the illusion of infinity and the reality of confinement; see “Melville’s Clarel—Irreconcilable Contradictions, or: A Pilgrimage to Piranesi’s Carceri,” in Orient and Orientalisms in US-American Poetry and Poetics (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 81–101. For critics who discuss the Piranesi canto, see also Agnes Dicken Cannon, “On Translating Clarel,” Essays in Arts and Sciences 5.2 (July 1976): 175–77; Edgar A. Dryden, Monumental Melville: The Formation of a Literary Career (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 134–35; Sharon Furrow, “The Terrible Made Visible: Melville, Salvator Rosa, and Piranesi,” ESQ 19 (4th Quarter 1973): 249–51; Goldman, Melville’s Protest Theism, 160–63; Moore, “Piranesi,” 1–3, and That Cunning Alphabet, 148–50; William Potter, Melville’s Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2004), 118–22; Basem L. Ra’ad, “Melville’s Art: Overtures from the Journal of 1856–1857,” in Savage Eye, ed. Sten, 215–16; Douglas Robillard, “Melville’s Clarel and the Parallel of Poetry and Painting,” North Dakota Quarterly 51.2 (Spring 1983): 118, and Melville and the Visual Arts, 153–54; Warren Rosenberg, “Melville’s Turn to Poetry: A Genre Approach to Clarel” (diss. City University of New York, 1981), 91–92, 198–200; Jennifer Scappettone, Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 291–92; William H. Shurr, The Mystery of Iniquity: Melville as Poet, 1857–1891 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972), 113–15; and Wallace, “Berkshire Athenaeum,” 71, and “David Metcalf ’s Prints and Tile,” 4–6. Christa Buschendorf describes the first fourteen lines of canto 2.35 as “presented in the form of a sonnet” (“Melville’s Clarel,” 89). On the context and meaning of Paul’s Second Letter to the church at Thessalonica, see John Kitto, A Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature, vol. 2 (New York: Newman, 1846),

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851–52, and also 380–81 on “Mystery” as applied in the New Testament and by Paul “to something which is revealed, declared, explained, spoken, or which may be known or understood.” Melville likely used Kitto’s volumes as a resource in his writing. For twentieth-century discussions, see Abraham J. Malherbe, The Letters to the Thessalonians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, vol. 32B of The Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 349–434 (Malherbe considers the “mystery of iniquity” on 413–34), and Gerald Hammond and Austin Busch, eds., The English Bible: The New Testament and Apocrypha; King James Version (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 437–50. On the authorship of the Second Letter, see Malherbe, Letters to the Thessalonians, 364–75; Kitto had observed that “the genuineness of this epistle has been called into doubt by the restless scepticism of some of the German critics” (Cyclopedia 2: 852). In Clarel, introducing the character of the Greek banker, Melville refers to Paul’s correspondence with the Thessalonians as “Paul’s plea” (2.1.114). He marked several passages dealing with “iniquity” in his 1846 Bible; see, for examples, Job 6.30, Lamentations 2.14, and Esdras 7.56–57. The markings are transcribed in Walker Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, rpt. 11 vols. in 2 in Harvard Dissertations in English and American Literature, ed. Stephen Orgel (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), 3: 171, 253, 269. William H. Shurr discusses Melville’s interest in the phrase “mystery of iniquity” in Clarel, linking Paul’s “nature of evil which is located in the heart of man” and Piranesi’s “labyrinths of horror” (Mystery of Iniquity, 113–15). Christa Buschendorf argues that Melville recognized in Paul’s phrase a statement about the intimacy between ethics and epistemology: the urgency and difficulty of knowing evil (“Melville’s Clarel,” 93–94). 24 Melville, Billy Budd, 74, 108. 25 Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850), in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, vol. 9 of The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, G. Thomas Tanselle et al. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1987), 244. 26 Sekler (“Piranesi’s Carceri,” 336–41) and Robison (Piranesi: Early Architectural Fantasies, 43) discuss spatial ambiguities in the first edition Carceri. In this paragraph, I am indebted to Sekler’s analyses. On the editions and states of the Carceri, see Robison, Early Architectural Fantasies, 37–63, 139–40, and the entries for specific plates on 138–210. Robison’s meticulous research and his regard for Piranesi’s etching and printing techniques are essential for understanding Piranesi’s achievements. 27 Marguerite Yourcenar, Dark Brain of Piranesi, 94. 28 The smoke in the fourth plate might also be clouds; the ninth plate may depict an exterior. The two plates that Piranesi added to the second edition (two and five in the sequence) include glimpses of sky beneath their arches. 29 Other printmakers, Rembrandt most prominently, had reworked plates to generate a series of different states; see Eleanor A. Sayre and Felice Stampfle, Rembrandt: Experimental Etcher (Boston and New York: Museum of Fine Arts and Pierpont Morgan Library, 1969). In the Dover edition of The Prisons, Philip Hofer reproduces in reduced size on facing pages the first and second state Carceri images. The first nine designs in the second edition and all subsequent editions are vertical, and the next seven are horizontal; in the first edition, the first seven designs are vertical and the next seven are horizontal. Sekler (“Piranesi’s Carceri,” 337) and Robison (Piranesi’s Early Architectural Fantasies, 47–48) describe the expanded depth in the later-state

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images; Robison analyzes the structural impossibilities on 50–51. Twentieth-century scholars and collectors lingered over the different states in the first and later editions of the Carceri; for early examples, see Hind, Piranesi, 10–14, 24–29, 81, and also Ivins, “Piranesi.” Robison shows that, despite claims by Hind and others, sets of the first edition Carceri were not scarce and were available to Piranesi’s contemporaries and to subsequent collectors (43–44). Robison considers twentieth-century emphasis on the increasingly dark and restricted space of the later-state Carceri to be overstatement; his view is that Piranesi solidified forms, specified textures, and expanded the represented space (37–53). 30 On April 7, 1849, the New York Literary World printed ch. 84 of Melville’s third book Mardi on its first two pages (114.7: 309–10); the same issue carried an announcement of new purchases in the fine arts by the Astor Library, which gave primary notice to 22 volumes of Piranesi’s etchings, “with brilliant impressions of the plates, and probably the first complete set in this country” (316). One of these volumes included the sixteen-plate, later-state Carceri, still available today in the collections of the New York Public Library (Piranesi, Opere Varie, vol. 17, call number MQM++). Each image in the series is spread across two facing pages. This Opere Varie set was issued sometime between 1761 and the late 1790s (the title page matches the example in Robison, Early Architectural Fantasies, 135). The title page of the NYPL volume containing the Carceri has inscribed on it a name and the date “1788.” The later-state Carceri illustrations in my essay (Figures 10.1, 10.2, and 10.9–12) have been reproduced from this volume. On Melville’s visits to the Astor and other libraries, see the “Books Borrowed or Consulted” section of “The Online Catalog of Books,” at Olsen-Smith’s Melville’s Marginalia Online. Duyckinck owned many prints, but his inventory appears never to have been cataloged; see Wallace, Melville and Turner, 119–20. Lathers collected Piranesi’s prints, but his catalog does not list specific images; see Hennig Cohen, “Melville and the Lathers Collection,” Melville Society Extracts 99 (December 1994): 8, 23. 31 We know of little written commentary in English before the twentieth century on the similarities and differences between the states of the Carceri. If Melville was aware of both the lighter and the darker states and if the “Prelusive” canto reflects on their relationships, he would be one of the first to address such issues in print. 32 Melville also uses the unusual term “prelusive” in Moby-Dick at the end of ch. 28, “Knights and Squires,” when he exalts the cabin boy Pip’s role in the plot and beyond: “On the grim Pequod’s forecastle, ye shall ere long see him, beating his tambourine; prelusive of the eternal time, when sent for, to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in with angels, and beat his tambourine in glory; called a coward here, hailed a hero there!” (121). On Melville’s use of “prelusive” in Moby-Dick, see Robert Alter, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 62–63. 33 The OED records no appearance of “mirage” as a verb before the second half of the nineteenth century. It lists Melville’s line from Clarel as a second instance. The first example is two lines from a poem, “Drifting Down,” published in the Cincinnati Ladies Repository in 1861. The OED entry notes the difference between British and US pronunciations but also records that its forerunner, the New English Dictionary, gave the stress on the second syllable: “mi rage.” Elsewhere in Clarel, Melville uses “mirage” as an adjective (1.25.18) and a noun (4.15.16), with stress likely on the first syllable.

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34 The cluster of images in the Piranesi canto—“maze,” “haze,” and “mystery”—are also associated in Melville’s poem with Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre (1.3.23–26, 43–54). 35 “Eggs” are unstable and possibly volatile forms in Clarel: the character Ungar, a former officer in the Confederacy, now a mercenary for Egypt and Turkey, predicts social upheaval: “Not only men, the state lives fast— / Fast breeds the pregnant eggs and shells, / The slumberous combustibles / Sure to explode” (4.21.106–09). In The Confidence-Man (1857), Melville, echoing Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet and Sterne in Tristram Shandy, has the swindler Charlie Noble say equivocally (and queasily) to the Confidence Man, in the guise of Frank Goodman, “‘My dear Frank,’ what a funny man you are; full of fun as an egg of meat.” See The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857), vol. 10 of The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1984), 180. 36 Douglas Robillard, in Melville and the Visual Arts, examines Melville’s career-long interest in ekphrasis, and he speculates about his knowledge of Lessing (ix–x). On Melville and ekphrasis, see also Berthold, “Durer ‘At the Hostelry,’” “Ekphrastic Composites in ‘At the Hostelry’: Van de Veldes, Tromps, and Trompes l’Oeil,” Melville Society Extracts 9.3 (October 2007): 97–103, and “Pictorial Intertexts for BattlePieces,” in Melville as Poet, ed. Marovitz, 9–24; John Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 32–34, 55–57, 75–76, 196–203; Michael Jonik, “‘Isles of Absentees’: The Form of the Archipelago in Melville’s Writing,” in Melville as Poet, 178–79; Sten, ed., Savage Eye; and Bryan J. Wolf, “When Is a Painting Most Like a Whale?: Ishmael, Moby-Dick, and the Sublime,” in New Essays on Moby-Dick, ed. Richard H. Brodhead (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 141–79. Melville refers to the Laocoön in Redburn, 230; Pierre, 184–85; his reconstructed lecture “Statues in Rome” (1857–58), in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 403–4; and Clarel, 1.37.113–17. He marked passages having to do with the Laocoön in his copies of Arnold’s Poems (see 10–11 in the digital facsimile of Arnold’s Poems [Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1856] on OlsenSmith’s Melville’s Marginalia Online) and Schiller’s Poems and Ballads (transcribed in Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 8: 250). On Melville and the Laocoön, see John Bryant, Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 12–13; Shirley M. Dettlaff, “Ionian Form and Esau’s Waste: Melville’s View of Art in Clarel,” American Literature 54.2 (May 1982): 226–27; Robert Milder, Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 162–67; and Robillard, Melville and the Visual Arts, 65, 82–83. 37 See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 78–79, 94–95. The “pregnant/suggestive” moment can be found on 78. The editors of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism discuss the choice and use McCormick’s “suggestive”; see Vincent B. Leitch et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 553, 566. W. J. T. Mitchell argues that Lessing’s distinction between the plastic and verbal arts hinges not on aesthetic or semiological difference but on ideological struggle, with Lessing in support of a Western iconophobia, and that subsequent critics have hardened Lessing’s observations into a system; see “Space and Time: Lessing’s Laocoön and the

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39

40

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Melville’s Philosophies Politics of Genre,” in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 95–115. Murray Kreiger, “Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laocoön Revisited,” (1967), rpt. in Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 264; Matthew Arnold, New Poems (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867), 142. Expanding the argument in his 1992 book, Krieger describes ekphrasis as both “miracle” (seeming to fix action) and “mirage” (such apparent fixity is a verbal illusion); see xvi–vii, 11. James W. Heffernan defines ekphrasis as the verbal representation of a fixed object whose implied narratives are made explicit, in Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 4–7. Wendy Steiner considers a Renaissance reaction against pictorial narrative and the return of the multi-episodic canvas in modern art, Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 1–42. Surveying a variety of formalist critical practices, Catherine Gallagher cautions against separating aesthetics from duration and “the partialness and inadequacy of stop-motion formal analyses”; see “Formalism and Time,” MLQ 61.1 (March 2000): 251. Walter E. Bezanson, ed., Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (New York: Hendricks House, 1960), lxvi. Cody Marrs seeks to expand Bezanson’s definition, arguing for a poetics of discontinuity, in “Clarel and the American Centennial,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 13.3 (2011): 98–114. Peter Riley examines the varieties of constriction in Melville’s poem; see “Urban and Metrical Forms in Clarel,” in Melville as Poet, ed. Marovitz, 63–86. Wallace quotes Ruskin in Melville and Turner, 151, and he discusses Melville’s “aesthetic of the indistinct” across the book. Melville’s picturesque aesthetics are taken up by Bryant (Melville and Repose, 3–29) and Tamarkin (“Melville with Pictures”). Shirley M. Dettlaff provides an overview of Melville’s aesthetic interests in “Ionian Form and Esau’s Waste” and in “Melville’s Aesthetics,” in A Companion to Melville Studies, ed. John Bryant (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 625–65. On plates 14 and 15 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Blake’s symbolic investments in relief etching, see Robert N. Essick, William Blake, Printmaker (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 208–10; Michael Phillips, William Blake: Apprentice and Master (Oxford: Ashmolean, 2014), 104–8; and Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 76–81. See the digital facsimile of Melville’s copy of Hazlitt’s Criticism on Art: and Sketches of the Pictures Galleries of England (London: John Templeman, 1843), 3, reproducing Melville’s markings, at Olsen-Smith’s Melville’s Marginalia Online. “Outline,” too, is a word depreciated by Hazlitt but of value to Melville, especially in Pierre and in Timoleon; see Clinton, “Mechanical Reproduction,” 48–77. Coleridge distinguishes between “imitation” and “copy” in Biographia Literaria (1817), 2 vols. in 1, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, vol. 7 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 2: 72–73, and in “On Poesy or Art” (1818), in Biographia Literaria by S. T. Coleridge, edited with his Aesthetical Essays, ed. J. Shawcross. Vol 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), 255–56. Melville had access to both works; see Sealts, Melville’s Reading, entries 154 and 155. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun: Or, The Romance of Monte Beni (1860), vol. 4 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. William Charvat et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), 333, 65, 101. Melville’s

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markings in his copy of the book are transcribed in Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 5: 300-22. On art and aesthetics in the novel, see Steiner, Pictures of Romance, 91–120, and Jonathan Auerbach, “Executing the Model: Painting, Sculpture, and RomanceWriting in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun,” ELH 47.1 (Spring 1980): 103–20. 44 Geoffrey Chaucer, Prologue to The Miller’s Tale, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 67. 45 Melville’s alteration of his visual source raises questions about writerly intention and literary consequence similar to those generated by the frequent changes he made to his verbal sources.

11

A Final Appearance with Elihu Vedder: Melville’s Visions Elisa Tamarkin

In 1891, Herman Melville dedicated Timoleon, his last book of poems, to Elihu Vedder, an artist he likely never met. Melville had based a poem in Battle-Pieces (1866), “Formerly a Slave,” on a portrait by Vedder, and may have seen other pictures by him off and on in magazines, where he also would have learned that the American artist had been living mainly in Italy since 1857. Melville went to Italy that same year; thirty-four years later, he looked back on his trip in Timoleon, so that whatever Vedder’s art meant to Melville, he just as surely associated it with the way that Italy could be at hand for him again. But what inspired the dedication in Timoleon were the drawings for Vedder’s edition of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, which Melville acquired around 1886 (Figure  11.1).1 When Melville died, Elizabeth Shaw Melville sent Vedder a copy of Timoleon with a letter describing her husband’s “absorbed study” of his “artistic rendering of the profound and mysterious ‘quatrains’” of the twelfth-century Persian poet, “of which [Melville] never tired.”2 Timoleon offers us a second sight of moments in Italy and elsewhere, by which I mean that the poems make these moments appear to us in visions as if they are really there. A glimpse of the Milan Cathedral or the Parthenon, swelling and gleaming in the “startled air,” brings forth a presence in the iconic sense.3 The claim of the poems seems to be that art will be visionary like this, but make no mistake: the images they draw to the surface in solid, intensifying form are hallucinations from a life that is lost or loses meaning by the day. Still, these images stand out. Timoleon is Melville’s most sustained reflection on the effects of art, but no one has thought much about the artist who inspired its extraordinary dedication or considered how Vedder’s drawings for the Rubáiyát gave shape and substance to something like a philosophy of art across its poems.4 Imagining Melville looking at Vedder’s drawings helps us see what made him a visionary poet just before he died—how in his poems, too, the most fantastic images have a way of popping out at us suspensefully from the wretchedness of daily life. They are hypnotic and dreamlike, but still hang thickly on the material world. They cleave to its brevity. Melville wanted his poems to have the special effects of Vedder’s drawings, Published simultaneously in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 18.3 (2016): 68–111.

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Figure 11.1  Elihu Vedder, Cover. 1883–84. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Photograph of Melville’s copy of the Rubáiyát, with drawings by Vedder. Houghton Library. Harvard University Libraries.

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but to do this they had to acknowledge the vaporousness of art’s whole enterprise and then make a case for the experience of this sort of illusion in the face of a world so lost to us and devastating that only illusions can redeem it. Melville’s commitment to the magic of art in these years is very much part of his pessimism. Elihu Vedder writes in his memoir, The Digressions of V (1910), that he was introduced to the twelfth-century poet Omar Khayyám’s Rubáiyát while living in Perugia, Italy, in the summer of 1871. His friend Edwin Ellis had brought him a copy of the English poet Edward FitzGerald’s translation, an earlier version of the one that Vedder comes to illustrate and publish, and that Melville buys, in the 1880s.5 From the villa in the distance, Vedder writes, “we saw the level plain of the Tiber stretching to stormy Assisi, always involved in clouds and strange effects and atmospheric troubles;” however, they sat in the shade of “the peaceful twilight and drank to Omar.”6 They poured themselves wine from an old Etruscan cup. Included in Vedder’s memoir is the picture of the strange effects of Assisi that he saw from his Perugian villa when he first read Omar (Figure 11.2); and so later, in the memoir, the view of stormy Assisi and the Etruscan cup and always a lot of wine became associated for him with the idea of his drawings and also with his young son who was with him that summer, “twining himself about my heart,” he says, “with tendrils never more to be relaxed,” but who died not long afterward. That summer in Perugia, Vedder writes, “the seed of Omar … grew and took to itself all of sorrow and of mirth that it could assimilate, and blossomed out in the drawings” (404).7

Figure 11.2  Elihu Vedder, The Great Hill of Assisi, from Villa Ansidei, Perusia in The Digressions of V. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 413.

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Melville’s son Malcolm killed himself a few years before this and his son Stanwix died in 1886, the year that Melville bought Vedder’s deluxe folio edition of the Rubáiyát, one of three editions of FitzGerald’s translation that Melville owned.8 The Rubáiyát (meaning “quatrains”) gives no consolation. The 100 verses are meant to be taken at their adamant word and their themes are hedonist and philosophically materialist; the saints, sages, and mystics in search of truth take many forms and shapes, but “change and perish all,” these verses say, so let’s drink some cups of wine: “Drink! For you know not why you go, nor where.”9 In Vedder’s drawing The Inevitable Fate, a heap of memento mori are stacked in dry carcasses, shards, and shells, as if the great hill of Assisi had been excavated to reveal one of those Etruscan necropoles that Vedder saw over decades across Italy (his Etruscan cup came from one of them)—a scorched world half-beneath the topsoil and torn to bits (Figures 11.3 and 11.4). The all-devouring Sphinx in clouds and atmospheric troubles is the stony monument to the rubble of prophets who go looking for answers, and get consumed; “dust into dust,” says the Rubáiyát:

Figure 11.3  Elihu Vedder, The Inevitable Fate. Verses 55–58. 1883–84. Chalk and pencil on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson.

Figure 11.4  Elihu Vedder, Torre Di Schiava, Roman Campagna. 1868. Oil on wood. Gift of Robert Palmiater. MunsonWilliams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, NY, USA. Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute/Art Resource, NY.

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Then to the Lip of this poor earthen Urn I lean’d, the Secret of my Life to learn: And Lip to Lip it murmer’d—“While you live, “Drink!—for, once dead, you never shall return.”10

Vedder’s 1864 painting The Questioner of the Sphinx shows a solitary pilgrim putting his ear to the mouth of the Sphinx to wait for an oracle that never comes. A decade later, Vedder painted a second version of the same scene and the pilgrim, much older now, still is kneeling and waiting in his skeletal form just as we assume that the hollowed skull in the sand before him once did (Figures 11.5 and 11.6). This rock of ages reveals nothing.11 In the poem “In a Church of Padua,” published in Timoleon, a supplicant kneels just like Vedder’s pilgrim before the holes of a confessional, but “what hollows the priest must sound” from inside the shell of his “sombre box” (295). There are no answers for the seekers of the Rubáiyát or Timoleon either, and no riddles to be solved, even though the will to knowledge never seems to draw a limit to itself. There is only “disappointment,” in Arthur Schopenhauer’s sense of a word that he prefers to use in English, even in the original German of the essays that Melville owned.12 We put faith, Schopenhauer writes, in philosophical concepts and abstractions that are nonetheless “empty shells.”13 Vedder’s drawing for verses 67–69, The Present Listening to the Voices of the Past, is clearly a shell game, too (Figure 11.7). We listen in vain because the ocean of sounds that our little present hears is just the echo of its own moment thrumming through an empty shell. “Strange is it not,” the picture reads (in a quatrain that Melville scored in an earlier edition of the same translation), “that of the myriads who / Before us passed the door of Darkness through / Not one returns to tell us of the Road.”14 So the voices of the past appear as bubbles that we hardly make out beneath Vedder’s box of words—all this seeming like a lot of gas and smoke (“Millions

Figure 11.5  Elihu Vedder, The Questioner of the Sphinx. 1863. Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Mrs. Martin Brimmer.

Figure 11.6  Elihu Vedder, The Questioner of the Sphinx. 1875. Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Stuart Riley, Jr.

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Figure 11.7  Elihu Vedder, The Present Listening to the Voices of the Past, and detail. Verses 67–69. 1883–84. Chalk, pencil, ink, and watercolor on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson.

of Bubbles like us,” writes Omar). Because everything is perishable and starts to vanish as soon as it occurs, we can trust that Vedder will have a light touch in this book and not burden us with anything like wisdom for the ages. His signature “V” appears on a leaf to the left that also is blowing in the wind: “I came like Water, and like Wind I go,” writes Omar. “We are no more than a moving row / Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go” (72, 77).15 Meanwhile, we read quatrain 67 on this page (in another passage that Melville scored): “Oh threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise! / One thing at least is certain— This Life flies; / One thing is certain and the rest is Lies; / The Flower that once has blown forever dies.”16 And one more certain thing is that the sense of brevity applies to this page, too—this leaf of Vedder’s book and really all the paper leaves of a book that will shrivel up as the leaves and petals do around the words of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (in a drawing called Omar’s Emblem [Figure 11.8]). Vedder seems to have let few occasions slip for making the leaves of his book their own temporary subject, showing within the space of the picture something like the sheet of paper on which it’s drawn curling away at the edges. The utterly flat figure in the drawing

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Figure 11.8  Elihu Vedder, Omar’s Emblem. 1883–84. Chalk, pencil, and ink on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson.

Spring (Figure  11.9) is bound so closely to the planar surface of the sheet behind her—a sheet that itself resembles the sheets of paper half-scrolled beneath the celestial sphere at the bottom right and also the wavy pages of the book on which the other figure writes. These sheets are the motif for a drawing that refers so literally to

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Figure 11.9  Elihu Vedder, Spring. Verses 93–95. 1883–84. Chalk, pencil, ink, and watercolor on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson.

the ephemerality of drawing, it almost looks as if its figures will blow away like paper dolls. In the next drawing, Youth and Age, only the sheets of paper on the paper have the illusion of any solidity or relief (Figure 11.10). The girls and goats merely seem to be inked onto their furled surface, and when we glimpse beneath the surface

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Figure 11.10  Elihu Vedder, Youth and Age. Verse 96. 1883–84. Chalk, pencil, ink, and watercolor on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson.

of the sheet all we get is another figure laid down on the surface of another sheet. The quatrain reads, “Yet Ah, that Spring should vanish with the Rose! / That Youth’s sweet-scented manuscript should close;” and then, there, at the bottom on the right, is the artist’s signature “V” on, in fact, a closed book within a picture that links the paper sheets of a manuscript to the fading quality of a rose.

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Throughout the Rubáiyát, the little volume with “V” becomes a character in its own pictorial drama of faded, wasted books in a pile of scraps and remains (Figures 11.11 and 11.12)—a remaindered book, whose only lesson seems to be, in Omar’s words, to “make the most of what we yet may spend / Before we too into the Dust descend … Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and—sans End!”17 We might as well keep pouring wine from the old Etruscan cup and be, well, three sheets to the wind—but don’t mistake the alcoholic high for any kind of poetic flight because what you see is what you get: a literal rendering of a book’s brief moment, a zero-sum conversion of books into rags, “dust into dust” (Figure 11.13). This book does not

Figure 11.11  Elihu Vedder, Theology. Verses 25–28. 1883–84. Chalk, pencil, and watercolor on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson.

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Figure 11.12  Detail from Elihu Vedder, Theology (Figure 11. 11); Elihu Vedder, Cover. Digressions of V. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910).

Figure 11.13  Elihu Vedder, The Heavenly Potter. Verses 43–45. 1883–84. Chalk, pencil, ink, and watercolor on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson.

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Figure 11.14  Elihu Vedder, Death’s Review. Verses 52–54, 1883. Chalk, pencil, ink, and watercolor on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson.

point to any metaphysical truth because underneath each one of its pictures is not an answer but another picture, a reduction to an identity, a “return to the inevitable same with no claim of value-added,” as Herbert Tucker says of the Rubáiyát.18 We peel away at the surface to find more images on a surface. When we try to look into things, we see a hall of mirrors. And then, once, we think we even see, at quatrain 56—or maybe we are hallucinating?—the phantom of Vedder himself in his book, his mirror image (Figure 11.14 ). “A Moment’s Halt,” the quatrain reads, “a momentary taste / Of Being from the Well within the Waste,” and, suddenly, Elihu Vedder momentarily being there, the selfsame, just making an appearance in a self portrait with his walrus mustache and signature smock. He looks exactly like he does in the photograph that Melville clipped of him and kept in his own copy of the Rubáiyát (Figure 11.15). And underneath Vedder’s likeness, his little book with “V” appears as always, although just this once the book has a date (“1883”) so that we know that this “moment” is now. ***

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Figure 11.15  Detail from Elihu Vedder, Death’s Review (Figure 11.14); photograph of Elihu Vedder, Advertisement for Omar Khayyám, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Melville’s clipping in his edition of the Rubáiyát, with accompaniments by Vedder. Houghton Library. Harvard University Libraries.

“C___’s Lament,” in Timoleon, describes the faith and idealism of youth dying with youth: But will youth never come again? Even to his grave-bed has he gone, And left me lone, to wake by night With heavy heart that erst was light? O, lay it at his head—a stone! (l. 16–20; 282)

The “C” in “C___’s Lament” probably refers to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose name was spelled out in earlier versions of the title, and the pattern of the rhyme, ABAAB, recalls most famously the beginning of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan, or, A Vision in a Dream.” Except here, the visionary poem shows how flat the vision really falls with that final metonymic “stone” laid at the “head” of youth, or really ahead of youth—his headstone. The poem grounds the “insubstantial” and “Aladdin-land” flights of its first and second stanzas in their inexorable end, because, finally, all that a poem can do with the visions of youth is set them down in stone. “Found a family, build a state,” another poem in Timoleon reads, but “The pledged event is still the same: / Matter in end will never abate / His ancient brutal claim” (284).19 We build foundations for the future, but in these poems matter is all that matters in the end, our material remains. “A man,” Schopenhauer writes (in an aphorism that Melville marked), “soon accommodates himself to the inevitable … he will see that things cannot be other than they are.”20 I think what Melville never grew tired of in the Rubáiyát, when he grew tired of everything else, is just this kind of reduction, the refusal of any “mysticism” that detracts from Omar’s commitment, in FitzGerald’s words, “to sooth the Soul through

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the Senses into Acquiescence with Things as he saw them.” Having failed to find “any World but This,” Omar sets about “making the most of it.”21 In the preface to an edition that Melville borrowed, FitzGerald insists on taking Omar plainly, which is to say, “literally,” in defiance of all the allegorizers who thought they had found in the Rubáiyát hidden, Sufi messages, “wresting,” in Tucker’s words, “heretic texts into hermeneutic line.”22 These critics include J. B. Nicolas, a French translator whom FitzGerald attacks in his 1872 preface for thinking that Omar is not “the material Epicurean that I have literally taken him for, but a Mystic, shadowing the Deity under the figure of Wine,” when FitzGerald wants us fully to understand that Wine in the Rubáiyát is only ever a figure for wine. “No doubt,” FitzGerald writes, “many of these Quatrains seem unaccountable unless mystically interpreted; but many more as unaccountable unless literally.” The materialist logic, then, of “dust into dust,” finds its correlates in the faithful verses of a poet who is not lost in his song, or “in Allegory and Abstraction,” but in which (in a passage that Melville checkmarks) “we seem to have the Man—the Bonhomme—Omar himself, with all his Humours and Passions, as frankly before us as if we were really at Table with him, after the Wine had gone round.”23 The only vision this poetry manifests is the one in which an intoxicated poet offers us frankly nothing but the fact of its being-there—or, remembering verse 56, the “momentary taste of being there” with him. The poet in Timoleon’s poem “The Age of the Antonines” mourns an Epicurean age, as frank as the Rubáiyát, in which “The sting was not dreamed to be taken from death, / No Paradise pledged or sought”: “They were frank,” Melville writes, “in the Age of the Antonines” (286). Melville’s interest in the Rubáiyát is very much part of his main line of pessimistic thought in the decade before the publication of Timoleon. Other writers he read share Omar’s sense of defeat, but also his levity and ease with it. These include Schopenhauer (in the six volumes Melville bought and borrowed between 1888 and 1891), the poet James Thomson (the so-called Laureate of Pessimism), and Edgar Saltus, who published The Philosophy of Disenchantment in 1885 and whose book on Balzac Melville owned.24 They are all melancholics and realists who, Melville also knew, relished life and tobacco and drank wine, or, in the case of Balzac, too much coffee, calling it the “poison” that also powered his fiction.25 It is a mistake to think that the writers Melville read in the years before Timoleon bear the burden of “disappointment,” because, unlike optimists, they expect nothing. Without reason to hope for a better moment, they have no contempt for this one. In Thomson’s many poems indebted to the Rubáiyát, we surrender metaphysical hope and acknowledge a stiff fate on every page, but we find in return a kind of “vibrancy of existence” that holds the ground gained. Maybe Melville saw in Omar and in Thomson—and also in the poems of Giacomo Leopardi, to whom Thomson dedicates his most famous poem “City of Dreadful Night”—something of a relief in that showing the world just as it is could be a vivacious means of sticking with it.26 The pessimistic poems that Melville read often feel commonplace and cheerful. A critic of Thomson writes, in a book that Melville owned, that “the supreme sufferers are the men who have a profound relish of existence.” Schopenhauer writes of Leopardi’s poems (and Melville marked it) that the “wretchedness of this existence” in them “never wearies us, but, on the contrary, is throughout entertaining and exciting.”27 The poetry and philosophy of pessimism

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made you feel overwhelmingly in a state of disenchantment and boredom, treating only of grimness and death, and yet they managed to bring the pessimist to life. But what about Vedder? I think there must have been a particular disenchantment that Melville saw in Vedder’s drawings for the Rubáiyát and that compelled him to dedicate his own poems to the artist who makes Omar’s remarkable literalness so apparent to us. It is not, after all, FitzGerald or Omar to whom he dedicated Timoleon, but the artist whose mirage-like images materialize before our eyes the ancient quatrains whose subject is the phenomenal insistence of our material world. The pictures here mattered to Melville enormously, at a time when he was collecting so many pictures himself—in fact hundreds of prints and books with prints by Claude Lorrain, Salvator Rosa, Nicholas Poussin, David Teniers, Rembrandt, J.M.W. Turner, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Jean-François Millet, and many more that seem at first to show little in common but the illusionistic glimpses of our vanishing world. In the Rubáiyát the phantasmic images remain wholly within the stretch of the sensible, as if to say that because everything of substance comes to nothing, there finally is no reality except illusions. But Vedder’s pictures are also breathtakingly beautiful. (The Rubáiyát sold out six days after its first edition in 1884. It was considered to be an artistic breakthrough, opening up, in the artist Will Low’s words, a new “era in the history of art publishing” and artist-designed books.)28 Vedder’s drawings give us tender openings onto the fleeting moments that pass us by in the quatrains. As we lean in to the drawings, these moments are made radiantly present—fifty-six kinetic visions that pulse in hyper-real clarity. The images suggest that when art adheres to the world without euphemism, it will feel like a kind of revelation. *** “I am not a mystic,” Vedder writes in his memoir The Digressions of V, “or very learned in occult matters … and so it comes that I take short flights or wade out into the sea of mystery which surrounds us, but soon getting beyond my depth, return, I must confess with a sense of relief, to the solid ground of common sense; and yet it delights me to tamper and potter with the unknowable, and I have a strong tendency to see in things more than meets the eye.” “There is another thing—,” he continues, “the ease with which I can conjure up visions” (408). Vedder is a visionary, but explicitly not a mystic, because being visionary is really a way of grounding the metaphysical flight—of acknowledging that our heavenly visions are spun, as Vedder’s “Saturn” is in the Rubáiyát, entirely out of our own cloth (Figure 11.16). The Throne of Saturn is an illusion on which we pause even though we know that it is an illusion. It also gives us pause because, looking at Saturn still, it even now could be unraveling faster than a ball of yarn. The image of Saturn is a limited vision, cut off abruptly at the edges and suspended in space. It is extracted from the universe and magnified. Mostly, we feel its immediacy. Whatever sorcery brought it forward on shivering wings has created an instant of illumination. Vedder used black chalk for the background of the picture, coaxing an ethereal subject out of his dusty medium by rubbing away at the surface until things started shining, like ghosts. His drawing is reminiscent of Arthur

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Figure 11.16  Elihu Vedder, Throne of Saturn, 1883–84. Chalk, pencil, ink, and watercolor on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson.

Rimbaud’s visionary claim that certain “illuminations” in poetry or art could make things appear from within (letting us “see in things,” in Vedder’s words [408]). The Throne of Saturn resembles other Symbolist works as well: Odilon Redon’s famous Eye-Balloon, for example, also in chalk (and charcoal), which feels both unreal and lifelike, a figment palpably rising out of the dark. Redon gives “objective” form, not

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to anything mystical but to the inner thought or mood that has entered the picture’s space and activated it (Figure  11.17).29 Vedder’s “Throne of Saturn” actually is an eye-balloon of sorts, a giant eyeball of an orb let loose in space—and the mood that it captures is poignant. As Vedder explains in his notes to the drawing, a figure here rises to the heavens to reflect back on the problem of human mortality, ashes to ashes, dust to dust (“And many a Knot unravel’d by the Road; / But not the Masterknot of Human Fate,” says the Rubáiyát).30 Like Redon’s eye-balloon that “mounts toward infinity” while tethered to a skull, The Throne of Saturn gives a form to the idea of a vision that finally never leaves the ground.31

Figure 11.17  Odilon Redon. Eye-Balloon, 1878. Charcoal and chalk on colored paper. Gift of Larry Aldrich. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

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“Shelley’s Vision” may be Timoleon’s most visionary poem along these lines. In the poem, the speaker wanders by the sea in the late morning with a heavy heart. But then, hit with a feeling of self-hatred for feeling so miserable, he lashes out and throws a stone at his shadow: In elf-caprice of bitter tone I too would pelt the pelted one: At my shadow I cast a stone. When lo, upon that sun-lit ground I saw the quivering phantom take The likeness of Saint Stephen crowned: Then did self-reverence awake. (l. 5–11; 283)

In a moment of “elf-caprice,” he throws a stone at his shadow and thinks he sees a phantom quivering and vibrating in the light. It is a vision on the ground. The play of light and shadow, the chiaroscuro of a stone hitting the shadow through the mist of a “sun-lit” morning by the sea, creates a ripple effect. Shimmering, the shadow takes on an aura—a sort of halo—which reminds the poet of a likeness of Saint Stephen, who became a martyr when he was stoned to death. And “then did self-reverence awake”: seeing the vision, the poet becomes a martyr to his pain. In Clarel, Melville says much the same about Leopardi, another pessimist poet, who also “stoned by Grief, / A young St. Stephen of the Doubt, / Might merit well the martyr’s leaf.”32 “Shelley’s Vision” refers of course to Percy Bysshe Shelley who was tormented by visions and hallucinations as Melville must have known from the biographies and criticism he read, especially by Thomson who also wrote a poem called “Shelley” in the form of a “vision.” Thomson says “in what a confusion of dreams or visions or hallucinations with worldly realities he was often involved.” Jane Gibson Shelley, in a book of anecdotes that Melville bought, describes her father-in-law’s “tendency to see visions,” too; “so forcibly had the visions operated on his mind” that she claims Shelley saw “imaginary figures” just as “plainly” as the people he told.33 Once, wandering by the sea, Shelley hallucinated a figure in the white foam at his feet. In Shelley’s poem Prometheus Unbound, the Persian visionary Zoroaster “Met his own image walking in the garden.” Only he sees the “apparition.”34 Out from nothing but a shadow, a “phantom” appears in Melville’s poem vitally swelling and contracting, quivering in the sun’s illumination. It has an aura, like the halo of Saint Stephen—or the white halation around Saturn. Melville might have seen a print of Rembrandt’s etching, The Stoning of St. Stephen, which depicts the martyr’s death in a space that also is made tense by the vibrations of lines and light, the chiaroscuro, for which Rembrandt was famous (Figure 11.18). In the print, above and to the left of Saint Stephen, shadowing him as it were, is—who else but?— Rembrandt, the selfsame, just showing up as a self-portrait in the crook of the arms of the men throwing stones. Or maybe we are hallucinating?35 We might say that, in both the print and Melville’s poem, the artist makes an appearance. What I mean by this is not simply that we have doppelgängers in both, but that making an appearance

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Figure 11.18  Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn. The Stoning of Saint Stephen, 1635. Basan impression, etching. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Mary B. Regan. Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA.

is just what  artists do, in Theodor Adorno’s “pregnant sense of the term.”36 That is, artists or  poets make something appear—a vision—that we hadn’t expected to see right when they are striking at reality at its most grim. In Melville’s poem, this vision has the extraordinary power of inspiring “reverence” and a momentary respite from pain. But there will be no ascension here. We know that it is all a simulacrum as we keep our eyes on the ground. The vision is the special effect of a shadow. It is brought on by a play of light and by an elfish act of caprice. It is the hallucination of someone who is stoned. *** I would like return to the remarkable passage above in The Digressions of V, where Vedder says that, though he is “not a mystic,” it delights him “to tamper and potter with the unknowable (italics mine).” It is hard to think of Vedder “pottering” and not to think about the many drawings of pots and the mouths of pots that appear on

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almost every page of the Rubáiyát, and also of potters shaping out of clay the pots, cups, jugs, bottles, and other vessels that hold the wine, presumably (Figure 11.19). In famous quatrains, the clay pots start to speak—they are speculating in theological terms about who made them—although by now it is well-established that they stand in for us, too, the children of Adam, shaped of “earth” and “clay” and cast by our Maker

Figure 11.19  Elihu Vedder, The End of Ramazan. Verse 90. 1883–84. Chalk, pencil, ink, and watercolor on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson.

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into “Human mould” (we all die, says Vedder in his notes, in our “clay carcasses”).37 The pots try to envision their Maker but for them this is unknowable and, in any case, the whole “loquacious Lot” of pots is completely potty.38 The pots are pot-heads: they are like the speaker in Timoleon’s ode on the tobacco-like weed “Herba Santa,” whose visionary dreams (of world peace) are hallucinogenic (288–290). Our most transcendent thoughts are potted thoughts, spirituous, like liquor flowing freely from a clay vessel—a genie out of its bottle. Vedder painted The Fisherman and the Genie in 1863 (Figure 11.20).39 He painted Aladdin’s lamp as well and a miniature version of a genie’s lamp appears at quatrains 22–24 in the Rubáiyát. Without pretensions, the artist potters with these vapors, casting their gaseous delirium into something like what Vedder calls “the solidity of form” (139). Every picture, by definition, makes something appear which does not really exist, bringing into being, in Vedder’s words, “as realities most delightful things” (408). In The Fisherman and the Genie, we are meant to see that what materializes before our eyes is potent stuff. When, in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno describes a genuine artwork as an “appearance,” he also says it is one most closely resembling “the apparition, the heavenly vision,” since an artwork’s power comes in the paradoxical effort to shape and transfix airy nothings—to make hallucinations firmly pop out from nothing but the surface of a page.40 Look at Vedder’s drawing Pardon Giving and Pardon Imploring Hands, in which the hands, “holding,” as he says, “the tangled skein of human life,” just pop out from the surface of a page! (Figure 11.21).41 Artworks, writes Adorno, “present something nonexistent as existing”; the virtual reality they project “is the presentation of the nonempirical as if it were empirical.” There is something fantastic or weird about reality, unreal about it, and the effect of a work of art is to actualize this unrealness in shining, “thing-like” form.42 Across

Figure 11.20  Elihu Vedder, Fisherman and the Genie, ca. 1863. Oil on panel. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Mrs. Martin Brimmer.

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Vedder’s pictures, the drifts and swirls of vapor flash up incandescently. They also desublimate, and take on lives of their own. Like genies, they manifest themselves. Once again, writes Adorno, artworks “are things whose power it is to appear.” But since Vedder is “not very learned in occult matters,” as he puts it, he also wants us fully to know that he conjured up what we see—that those magic hands, for example, took a certain sleight of hand on his part. The artist can help us “see in things more than meets the eye,” but he is no “seer.” In the Rubáiyát these visions finally always return us to the “solid ground of common sense” which, Vedder continues, is dangerously close to the “highway of the Commonplace” (408). This is why in The Digressions of V he includes a photograph of his own giving and imploring hands just to prove to us that the ink drawing from the Rubáiyát is, well, a work of his hands (Figure 11.22). The big reveal of those enigmatic hands in the Rubáiyát is in the constructivist unveiling—the manual work (handiwork) it took to make them—and especially in the manipulation (or handling) by those Houdini hands of his, the hocus-pocus of—Voila!—making something appear. Vedder is a visionary but, as he says, “not a mystic.” So much of Timoleon is about mirages or apparitions—often from Melville’s trip to the Mediterranean and Middle East in 1857, decades before—that thrill up in the single shimmering moment that art concentrates in solid form. They look like

Figure 11.21  Elihu Vedder, Pardon Giving and Pardon Imploring Hands, 1883–84. Chalk, pencil, and ink on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson.

Figure 11.22  Elihu Vedder, “The PardonGiving and Imploring Hands.” Photograph. Digressions of V. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 409.

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the “liquid mirages” suspended in the poem “Magian Wine,” from the wine lapping the edges of a glass (269). In the poem “The Apparition,” the “supernatural” effect of the Parthenon, as seen on the approach to Athens, seems so real it would convert a cynic, but only momentarily. Its “abrupt” and “vivid” emergence on the horizon makes the Parthenon  appear to the poet just as the Emperor Constantine’s epiphanic vision must have appeared to him. Such visions are the fugitive illusions that “scarce convert” a cynic’s mind, but, in this one instant only, they will “try them, shake them, or molest.” Even Diogenes, Melville writes, “might have swerved / In mood” (313). In another vision, from the poem “In a Bye-Canal,” the speaker, gliding through Venice on a gondola, sees up in a palace window, between the slats of two blinds, a woman’s seductive eye, summoning him: “What loveliest eyes of scintillation, / What basilisk glance of conjuration!” She is a Siren luring him up to her—a preternatural vision that would “[Confute] the Naturalists”—but the gondola doesn’t stop. All he gets is a single glance of an eye between two blinds, a “latticed eye.” In the blink of an eye it is gone. The slats “click” open, in response to the clinking of the gondolier’s oar against the side of the palace, and then they click shut over the eye, as if they are the blink that ends the vision (292–293). The speaker and the woman in the palace window were having a moment. But the boat moves on, and “click,” it’s over—the blinds shut in an instant like the shutter on the aperture of the Kodak camera (a new technology in the 1880s).43 In the 1880s, Friedrich Nietzsche used the term Augenblick, meaning “the blink of the eye” or “the glance of the eye,” to describe something identifiable or nameable as a “moment.” The term appears in Thus Spoke Zarathustra where it is seen in a “vision” inscribed on the top of the gateway to two different eternal paths.44 Augenblick is the gateway moment, or the opportune moment, inflated into a rich ontological concept. It is the contingency of vision that eternally recurs. Augenblick suggests that a visionary like Zarathustra can seize the moment and make it last. The poem “In a Bye-Canal” makes an eternity of a moment in Venice, capturing the blink of an eye with the effect of a snap-shot. The moment happens during a “siesta” at the “swoon of noon”; everything is calm in the canals and the rowing is “languid,” but, suddenly, the oar clinks against the palace. There is a volta between a sestet and an octave, and “lo,” a visionary object—a “glance of conjuration”—that the poet says looms larger for him than all the “whales,” “sharks,” strife, pain, and disease he has ever encountered. “All this. But at the latticed eye— / Hey!” (292–293). He tries to get the gondolier to stop, but we know that all this is in passing, too, except for how the glance takes on a life of its own in the poem, oscillating and vibrating into being here against the rhythm of the oars. Timoleon is filled with visions of things glimpsed accidentally but in extreme closeup. A speaker glides past a view or narrow opening and then some glimpse, pulled out of time in memory, becomes detached and enlarged, an eye-balloon. Timoleon shares with the Rubáiyát’s drawings this feeling for the shivering of time and for the suspension of the laws of space. Take Vedder’s drawing The Song in the Wilderness, where everything seems, dreamlike, to hover on a negative ground that itself appears to float (Figure 11.23). It makes us light-headed to look. The technique of foreshortening intensifies the presence of the jug of wine and the woman with the lute, who looms so

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Figure 11.23  Elihu Vedder, The Song in the Wilderness. Verses 11–12. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson.

large, and also a sense that their picture space extends into our own real space outside the picture. All the overlapping images, including the box of text at the horizon, and the jug, book, and flowers around the box, seem to be on the same shallow plane, so that we feel equally intimate even with the woman in the distance. This is an emotionally charged space. The quatrains in the picture, some of the Rubáiyát ’s most famous, speak to the “Paradise”—the wonderful eternity—of a simple moment: “A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, / A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou / Beside me singing in the Wilderness.”

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Vedder often places the box of Omar’s words right in front of the horizon line where the vanishing point would be, if we simply could see it. This effect condenses the figures in a narrowed space and blunts our perspective. Vedder’s drawing The Thoughtful Soul to Solitude Retires is a good example (Figure  11.24). With the quatrains in the way, we only get a peek at anything out there, which is why the little deer peeks back at us. These are heady images that invite us to look into their ethereal space, but our vision has limits because there is a block (of words) right where the horizon would broaden.

Figure 11.24  Elihu Vedder, The Soul to Solitude Retires. Verses 4–6. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson.

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As blocks of text, the quatrains in the Rubáiyát work on the principle of aphorisms. “Aphorism” is a term that comes from the Greek, ap-horeizen, and means to set a horizon or to give the horizon a boundary—to set a limit. Aphorisms are not maxims (there is, after all, no encapsulating wisdom anywhere in the Rubáiyát). Instead, aphorisms give, as Joshua Foa Dienstag writes, “the experience of the glance to the horizon, of stepping out of the stream of life, if only for a moment.” In a larger context, an aphorism marks out a boundary that contains only “as much as the eye can take in in a moment.”45 Defined by its brevity and its autonomy, an aphorism can be read as a whole straightaway. In the Rubáiyát, the quatrains are entirely free-standing, so that we can glance readily at one then another. (There is one exception: the continuous section of quatrains about those ridiculous talking pots, verses 82–90, where the point seems to be that this kind of philosophizing is always oblivious of its limits.) Because the Rubáiyát’s quatrains are self-contained, it makes no difference at all that Vedder chose to rearrange nearly half of FitzGerald’s translations in his own edition. Each quatrain is perfectly frank in its refusal to draw out an idea beyond the moment it appears. It is no wonder that philosophical pessimism so often takes the form of aphorisms (including the two volumes of Schopenhauer’s “Aphorismen” that Melville owned). They are word blocks that cut us free from the optimist’s habit of looking ahead—or, indeed, anywhere beyond where we are. Timoleon is a book filled with brief pessimistic poems—often as brief as aphorisms— that shuttle us between moments of disillusionment. The “disillusion” of the spurned woman in “After the Pleasure Party,” near the start of the book, is a primary example of this. “Nothing may help or heal” Urania’s frustrated desire and anguish, “Nor Art inanimate for long / Inspire.” Never for long: but for the moment, between the aftermath of pleasure and a doubtful future—“One knows not if Urania yet / The pleasure-party may forget”—in “such an hour / Some pangs that rend might take release” (262, 263, 259). Of course, the suspension of “disillusion” only can come in the form of illusions, so the poems that follow let these illusions flicker one after another in temporary relief. This makes Timoleon one of those works that the pessimist Leopardi would call “genius” for showing us “so powerfully the vanity of illusions, but still preserv[ing] a great fund of them.” The illusions in Timoleon are images of “Art inanimate” that, in such an hour between longings as this poem describes, become objects for contemplation that can release us from the strife of longing by, in Schopenhauer’s words, “fixing forever the fleeting moment and thus extricating it from time.”46 These are poems, in other words, inspired by momentariness, the evanescent instant when, balanced between a feeling of time both diminishing and expanding— and poised, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, in another poem, “hovering, shivering on the verge” of obsolescence—we pause: THE Tower in tiers of architraves, Fair circle over cirque, A trunk of rounded colonnades, The maker’s master-work, Impends with all its pillared tribes,

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And, poising them, debates: It thinks to plunge—but hesitates; Shrinks back—yet fain would slide; Withholds itself—itself would urge; Hovering, shivering on the verge, A would-be suicide! (l. 1–11; 294)

The tower hesitates, shrinks back, withholds. And it is this pause (punctum) at the decisive moment—a pause exemplified, again, in the shivering and pulsing, fully tumescent, stillness of something like a leaning tower balanced on the verge—that Melville calls its “maker’s master-work.” The Leaning Tower of Pisa is the figure of a moment made monumental. It is an instant’s pause that a work of art has set in stone. In his notes to the Rubáiyát, Vedder writes that “the swirl” which appears on its cover and “is an ever-recurring feature in the work, represents the gradual concentration of the elements that combine to form life; the sudden pause through the reverse of the movement which marks the instant of life, and then the gradual, everwidening dispersion again of these elements into space” (Figures 11.25 and 11.1).47 The motif, the theme, that is, of the Rubáiyát is these swirling, calligraphic waves, rising and falling like the movements of an artist’s pen (not unlike the calligraphic letters of the quatrains themselves in the pictures) and then the sudden pause, Vedder says, that gathers and concentrates this flux into a sharply defined instant that gives it “form.” The waves appear in Omar’s Emblem (Figure 11.8) and they appear as that “tangled skein of human life” in the picture of the hands, where the hands (Vedder’s hands!) give them form right at that moment that he says, “marks the instant of life” (Figure  11.21). If artworks are, as Adorno says they are, “the persistence of the transient, they are concentrated in appearance as something momentary. To experience art,” he continues, “means to become conscious of its immanent process as an instant at a standstill.” I cannot imagine a better image, in fact, to illustrate Walter Benjamin’s sense of the concentration of thought as “a dialectic at a standstill” than this swirl as Vedder describes it at the radiant point of tension between the push and pull of forces beyond our control.48 Vedder’s drawing is a perfect illustration of this “pregnant moment,” but no better one than the poised instant between the swelling and contracting of “unlike things,” meeting and mating, that Melville calls Art in his poem “Art”: 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,

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Figure 11.25  Elihu Vedder, The Cup of Despair. Verse 31. 1883–84. Chalk, pencil, watercolor, and ink on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson.

And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart, To wrestle with the angel—Art. (l. 1–11; 280)

In matters of life and love, “few matching halves here meet and mate,” Urania cries in “After the Pleasure Party” (262). But in Art, all these unreconciled forces (love and

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hate, joy and sadness)—the antinomies that grieve and disappoint over time—“meet and mate” in a single radiant image that makes them apparent to us in our placid hours. Art, for Melville, is just where “pulsed life” (or the pulse of life) coalesces in “form.” It is “Not magnitude, not lavishness, / But Form,” writes Melville in another poem, “Greek Architecture,” that offers us relief from “innovating willfulness,” and a serene moment of “reverence” (305). What Melville calls “pulsed life,” Vedder calls “life’s instant.” And throughout the drawings for the Rubáiyát—in the picture, here too, of The Cup of Despair (Figure  11.25)—it always happens to be figured in the mediumistic feel of a vessel (a potter’s cup, pot, or jug) that comes up firm from the current of the waves. It is to the “force of a jug’s form” that Martin Heidegger turns in order to describe how—in a point he also makes about a work of art—some thing of contemplation gathers up the world around it in solid, expressive form. “From start to finish,” Heidegger writes, “the potter takes hold of the impalpable void,” bringing “it forth as the container in the shape of the containing vessel.”49 In Timoleon, art works in a similar spirit, extracting from life’s unfathomable flux something it might crystallize in an image: Gems and jewels let them heap— Wax sumptuous as the Sophi: For me, to grapple from Art’s deep One dripping trophy. (“In a Garret,” l. 1–4; 275)

Art builds up nothing valuable of substance. These poems are not gems. Instead, art reaches into the Nietzschean abyss, where there are no grounds, and delivers something like a vessel that contains it. I think this “dripping trophy” (this vessel) is the vehicle and tenor of Melville’s poetry. Art gathers us around the form it lends to the “nothingness” of things, to use a word that Melville uses elsewhere.50 We are like the peasants in “The Margrave’s Birth Night” who gather at a castle to celebrate the “birth-night,” or coming into being, of some nobleman who isn’t there: “Scarce they mark void throne and cover— / Dust upon the same.” Still, it can be good to celebrate and be contented, “if but for a night” (268). For the poet “in a garret,” both the effects and the reward of art are always already dissolving (the trophy is “dripping” not “wax[ing]”). The poet will bring forth only a memento (a trophy) that partakes of the evanescence it shapes. *** When Melville dedicated Timoleon to Vedder, he probably knew that Vedder was in Italy at the same time as he had been, in 1857, when he first saw those spots—in Pisa, Naples, and elsewhere—whose later appearance in the second half of his book of poems became, what Melville calls together, “The Fruit of Travel Long Ago.”51 What is the fruit of travel long ago? Vedder in these years was closely associated with a revolutionary artist’s group called the Macchiaioli, activist supporters of Garibaldi and the Risorgimento for Italian unification, the republican cause that frames other poems

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by Melville about art, including “At the Hostelry”—but there is no room to expand on this here.52 The Macchiaioli, from macchia, meaning spots or patches (also “ink stains”), became known for sketching momentary things that they saw as in a flash. The things they saw—extracted from experience in sketches taken at the moment—then would reappear later in their paintings in a method of spots or patches, simplified tonal masses flatly patterned on the surface of the canvas, to preserve, not a transcription of nature, but the experience of once sketching it. Vedder’s painting, the Cliffs of Volterra, is a good example of an effort to recreate the feeling of having glanced at something (Figure 11.26). The elimination of detail and the broad contrasting planes of shadow and light are meant to clarify structure and essential form only, or a sense of the whole captured at once. They are the cliffs in a twinkling of the eye. The Macchiaioli were most influenced by painters of the French Barbizon school, such as Corot, Millet, and Charles-François Daubigny, whose landscapes also derived from sketches that, much later in the studio, became the motifs for intimate pictures painted in vibratory patches and tones that shined out from beneath the surface of a dull brown wash. Melville was interested in the Barbizon painters as well, having acquired two volumes on their work by John W. Mollet, The Painters of Barbizon, in 1890. And while Douglas Robillard writes that “it is difficult to know what, if anything, Melville might have learned from volumes such as these,” it is likely the case that he learned what Vedder did.53 While the Impressionists registered the effects of a fleeting moment, the Barbizon painters and the Macchiaioli extracted the moment from its moment so that it might make an impression later—it might present itself, in fact, at any time. To return to Schopenhauer, they forever fixed the fleeting moment by “extricating it from time,” which accounts for the strangely timeless feel of their images of an instant. We might easily imagine why Melville appreciated poetry and pictures that show how, in art, moments that are past or missed can be made to happen. After years of

Figure 11.26  Elihu Vedder, Cliffs of Voltarra. ca. 1860. Oil on panel. The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio. Gift of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1955.

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commercial failure and disillusionment—telling Putnam’s, for example, to sell off all the plates to his works—“to pot with them,” he says, “& melt them down”—Melville certainly felt that he had missed his.54 Melville marked a passage in FitzGerald’s 1878 introduction to the Rubáiyát saying that Omar “has never been popular in his own country.”55 But, then, there was Omar, suddenly appearing everywhere in England and the United States in the 1870s and 1880s: Melville alone owned three editions of his work, and Vedder’s edition sold out in six days. Maybe Melville imagined that, like Omar, he would be having his moment later, in our time well beyond his time, showing up at last. Again, the Macchiaioli would sketch something they glimpsed, and then, on other occasions, carry forward that macchia as a motif in a work of art—making it “solid,” they said, and giving it “relief.”56 Over time, when you look at a picture—draw, as it were, on a picture—you might see, in it, other pictures. In Digressions of V, Vedder, in response to the question of how his “pictures are made,” tells us that, first, he sketches anything that catches his eye in a “spare moment” (29–31). His example is a sketch of a hole in the ground with a ladder reaching out of it that he drew in Brooklyn when he was young: “Please remember the ladder and hole,” he says (Figure 11.27). Why? Because years later they uncannily appear in another picture, The Plague in Florence, that Vedder includes in his memoir alongside “The Ladder and the Hole” just to show us how—in front of a medieval Florentine skyline and behind the outstretched arm of a dead man—we find that same ladder and hole that he captured in a glance on Clinton Avenue, Brooklyn (Figure 11.28). We see a similar mirage in the way that the three cliffs of Volterra in the earlier picture just happen to make an appearance years later behind the mad woman who walks past them in the painting, A Lost Mind (Figure 11.29). This is not exactly what Honoré de Balzac calls “second-sight,” in the mystical novels that Melville read (Seraphita and Louis Lambert), but these second sightings in images share a visionary power to recognize the constant loss of things in our bedrock existence and to manifest them again in spirit.57 No doubt, second sight is an optical illusion. Those cliffs of Volterra that appear in the “after” image (of the before and after) may be only the hallucinations of a woman who has lost her mind. Most of Vedder’s pictures have this hallucinatory quality. But, if we look at his picture Memory, realizing that it, too, was taken from a sketch of a glimpse in a spare moment in Italy, we see that the power of the picture is to give immanance and shape to this evanescence, to suspend the moment so that it is poised just like this vision of Memory in infinite stillness (Figure 11.30). Certain images only appear as afterimages or, as Melville writes, in “Art’s long after-shine.”58 The epigraph to Melville’s poem “Buddha” reads, “For what is your life? It is / even a vapor that appeareth for a / little time and then vanisheth away” (James 4.14; 302). Philosophical pessimism emerged in part from the teachings of Buddhism. Schopenhauer’s belief that “art re-creates the will-less subject … i.e. our intelligence without aims or intentions” suggests that art is where we might go to find a Zen state of detachment and self-denial, a pause from the demands of our desires and wills. The poem “Buddha” reflects Melville’s reading in Schopenhauer and also in popular texts on Buddhist thought, as William Dillingham points out, including Sir Edwin

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Figure 11.27  Elihu Vedder, “The Ladder and the Hole” in The Digressions of V. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 29.

Figure 11.28  Elihu Vedder, The Plague in Florence in The Digressions of V. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 31.

Arnold’s poem on the life of Buddha, The Light of Asia.59 Melville may have recognized in Vedder’s pessimist drawings for the Rubáiyát something of the Zen aesthetic that he also saw in Arnold’s poetry and elsewhere. Vedder and the Macchiaioli were influenced by Japanese ukiyo-e prints, reflecting a “Buddhist habit of mind,” that became so popular in the 1870s and 1880s, in Paris especially, where Vedder showed

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Figure 11.29  Elihu Vedder, The Lost Mind, 1863–64. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bequest of Helen L. Bullard, in memory of Laura Curtis Bullard, 1921. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 11.30  Elihu Vedder, Memory, 1870. Oil on mahogany panel. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Mr. and Mrs. William Preston Harrison Collection. Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA.

his work. In New York, Vedder studied ukiyo-e alongside both John La Farge and William Morris Hunt, who brought Japonisme to the United States and, in Hunt’s case, a popular interest in the Barbizon painters, too. Vedder’s brother, Alexander Madison Vedder, worked as a doctor in Japan in the last decade of his life; when he died, he left his brother trunks of Japanese objects that found their way into his paintings.60

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Ukiyo-e means “pictures of the floating world.” They offer small views onto the impermanent and illusory life that Schopenhauer looked to escape in art. The pictures are often hedonist as well as sad, a floating stage of entertainment that is matter-offact about its pleasure (since the world is vanishing anyway)—like being at the table with Omar after the wine has gone around. Ukiyo-e seem to suspend the laws of time within a moving landscape, giving fullest significance to the presence of the moment they show. In Hokusai’s view of Mount Fuji (Figure 11.31), the little boat appears to hover more than float on its current. The edges of the image are cropped and our sense of immediacy feels enhanced by the way the broad swath of clouds blocks the horizon. Along with the path below that runs parallel, the clouds create an opening onto the vision of the boat that reminds me of the aperture between the two shutters in the window on Melville’s “bye-canal.” Everything moves on, but we get a glimpse. If we put the print next to Vedder’s drawing Limitation, for verses 75–76, we see a similar kind of gateway to a moment in the Rubáiyát, between the lines that nonetheless are meant to show us, as the note to the plate explains, “the irrevocability of the laws of nature” that so “rigidly define” our course (Figure 11.32).61 We also can see how, side by side, the lines of the drawings for Hokusai and Vedder both follow the principles of calligraphy: wavy lines visible on the surface of the page with their own undulating rhythm of motion, rising, falling, and occasionally coalescing. In a passage that Melville checkmarks in

Figure 11.32  Elihu Vedder, Limitation. Verses 75–76. 1883–84. Chalk, pencil, and watercolor on paper. Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase and gift from Elizabeth W. Henderson in memory of her husband Francis Tracy Henderson.

Figure 11.31  Katsushika Hokusai, Tama River in Musashi Province (Bushu Tamagawa), from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjurokkei), ca. 1830–32. Polychrome woodblock print; ink and color on paper. Henry L. Phillips Collection. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

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the introduction to the Rubáiyát, FitzGerald describes how in Omar’s quatrains, “the penultimate line seems to lift and suspend the Wave that falls over in the last.”62 The lines of writing lifting and suspending before they move on to their inevitable finish—“The Moving Finger writes,” says the quatrain in this drawing, “and, having writ, / Moves on”—but, for one abiding instant, we will be buoyed like a vessel on a wave.

Notes 1

2 3

4

5

6

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, The Astronomer-Poet of Persia; Rendered into English Verse by Edward FitzGerald, with an Accompaniment of Drawings by Elihu Vedder (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1886). Melville’s copy of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, with drawings by Elihu Vedder, is at Houghton Library, Harvard University. Publications in the United States that reproduced Vedder’s work in the 1870s and 1880s include S.G.W Benjamin, Our American Artists (Boston, 1897) and Art in America (New York, 1880); William J. Stillman, “The Paris Exposition IX—American Painting,” The Nation (October 3, 1878): 201–11; Russell Sturgis, “The Paris Exposition—XV: The United States Fine Art Exhibition,” The Nation (November 28, 1878): 332; S. G. W. Benjamin, “Fifty Years of American Art,” Harper’s Magazine (September 1879): 495; Charles de Kay, “Elihu Vedder,” Scribner’s Monthly (November 1880): 111–24. Vedder also provided illustrations for several magazines including Harper’s, Scribner’s, and The Century. In his copy of Vedder’s Rubáiyát, Melville inserted a list, published by Houghton Mifflin, of the reproductions of Vedder’s pictures that were available for purchase in photographs and phototypes. David Jaffee, “Sympathy with the Artist: Elizabeth Shaw Melville and Elihu Vedder,” Melville Society Extracts 81 (May 1990): 10–11. Herman Melville, Published Poems: Timoleon [1891], ed. Robert C. Ryan, Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall Reising, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 2009), 313. All subsequent references to Timoleon will be cited internally. William B. Dillingham has a thoughtful discussion of FitzGerald’s translations of the Rubáiyát in Melville and His Circle: The Last Years (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 152–74; Dillingham’s discussion of Vedder appears on 167–74. On visual art referenced in Timoleon, see Douglas Robillard, “Wrestling with the Angel: Melville’s Use of the Visual Arts in Timoleon,” in Savage Eye: Melville and the Visual Arts, ed. Christopher Sten (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1991), 246–56. FitzGerald published translations of the Rubáiyát, in 1859, 1868, 1872, and 1879, revising his composition and prefaces each time. Vedder’s edition of the Rubáiyát is based on FitzGerald’s third London edition and first American edition, published in Boston by James R. Osgood in 1878. All subsequent citations of the Rubáiyát here (unless taken directly from Vedder’s plates) are to the Third London Edition (1872), as it appears in Edward FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: A Critical Edition [1872], ed. Christopher Decker (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008). For a history of FitzGerald’s translations, see Decker’s “Introduction” and “Textual Note” to FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: A Critical Edition. Elihu Vedder, The Digressions of V (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 404. All subsequent references to this text will be cited internally.

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On Vedder’s life and career, see Regina Soria, Elihu Vedder: American Visionary Artist in Rome, 1836–1923 (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970); also, Regina Soria, Joshua C. Taylor, Jane Dillenberger, and Richard Murray, Perceptions and Evocations: The Art of Elihu Vedder (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1979). 8 Along with Vedder’s edition of FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát, Melville also owned FitzGerald’s 1878 edition (the first American edition, based on the third London edition of 1872), as well as a third limited edition based on a “semi-manuscript” copy of a FitzGerald translation that was transcribed by the poet James Thomson and sent to Melville by his English correspondent James Billson, in 1886. Melville annotated his copy of the 1878 American edition: Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, The Astronomer-Poet of Persia. Rendered into English Verse by Edward FitzGerald. First American from the Third London Edition (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1878). See Merton M. Sealts, Jr. Melville’s Reading: Revised and Enlarged Edition (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), 203. Subsequent references to Melville’s marginalia are from this 1878 edition of the Rubáiyát. 9 FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: A Critical Edition, 75, 78. 10 Ibid., 71, 73. 11 For more on Vedder’s two versions of The Questioner of the Sphinx, and on his resistance to mysticism, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 126–34. 12 See, for example, in Melville’s editions, Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism, a Series of Essays, second edition, trans. T. Bailey Saunders (London: Sonnenschein, 1891), 14; Counsels and Maxims: Being the Second Part of Arthur Schopenhauer’s Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit, trans. T. Bailey Saunders (London: Sonnenschein, 1891), 27. See also Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 33, 100. 13 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, second edition, vol. 2, trans. R.B. Haldane (London: Trübner, 1888), 236. 14 Walker Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, vol. 2 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), 259. 15 FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: A Critical Edition, 74, 72, 77. 16 Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 259. 17 FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: A Critical Edition, 71. 18 Herbert F. Tucker, “Metaphor, Translation, and Autoekphrasis in FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát,” Victorian Poetry 46.1 (Spring 2008): 72. 19 From Melville’s poem “Fragments of a Lost Gnostic Poem of the 12th Century” in Published Poems: Timoleon. 20 Schopenhauer, Counsels and Maxims: Being the Second Part of Arthur Schopenhauer’s Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit, 271; Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 311. 21 FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: A Critical Edition, 62–63. 22 Tucker, “Metaphor, Translation, and Autoekphrasis in FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát,” 69. 23 FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: A Critical Edition, 65, 66; Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 258. 24 For an account of Melville’s readings in pessimism, see, Dillingham, Melville and His Circle: The Last Years, especially ch. 2, “Disenchantment,” 32–86; see also Sealts, Jr., Melville’s Reading: Revised and Enlarged Version. 7

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25 Honoré de Balzac, The Correspondence of Honoré de Balzac, vol. 2, trans. C. Lamb Kenney (London: Bentley, 1878), 319. 26 Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit, 77. On what Dienstag calls “cultural pessimism” more generally, especially as it informs the work of Leopardi, see ch. 2, 49–83. 27 Henry Stephens Salt, The Life of James Thomson (“B. V.”), with a Selection from His Letters and a Study of His Writings (London: Reeves and Turner, 1889), 52; Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, vol. 3, trans. R.B. Haldane, second edition (London: Trübner, 1888), 345; Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 331. 28 Soria, Elihu Vedder: American Visionary Artist in Rome, 1836–1923, 188. For more on the American reception of FitzGerald’s translations, including Vedder’s deluxe edition, see John Roger Paas, “‘Under Omar’s Subtle Spell’: American Reprint Publishers and the Omar Craze,” in FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: Popularity and Neglect, ed. Adrian Poole, Christine van Ruymbeke, William Henry Martin, Sandra Mason (London: Anthem Press, 2011), 127–46. 29 On the Symbolists and Rimbaud, see, for example, Henry Dorra, ed., Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) and Timothy Hampton, “Absolutely Modern: Dylan, Rimbaud, and Visionary Song,” Representations 132.1 (Fall 2015): 1–29; on Odilon Redon, see, Jodi Hauptman, Beyond the Visible: The Art of Odilon Redon (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2005). 30 See Vedder’s notes to the drawing The Throne of Saturn, in his edition of Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, The Astronomer-Poet of Persia; from verse 38 in Vedder’s edition, appearing in the plate across from The Throne of Saturn. 31 Redon’s title for subsequent prints of Eye-Balloon is L’Oeil, comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers l’infini (The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity) (1882). 32 Herman Melville, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MazcDouglass, Hershel Parker, G. Thomas Tanselle (Chicago and Evanston: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1991), 44. 33 James Thomson, “Notes on the Structure of Shelley’s ‘Prometheus Unbound,’” Shelley, A Poem: With Other Writings Related to Shelley … To Which Is Added an Essay on the Poems of William Blake, ed. Bertram Dobell (London: Printed for private circulation, by Charles Whittingham and Co., 1884), 68; Lady Jane Gibson Shelley, ed., Shelley’s Memorials: From Authentic Sources (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1859), 207–8. 34 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Prometheus Unbound,” The Poetical Works, vol. 1, ed. Mary Shelley, with a memoir by James Russell Lowell (Boston: Little Brown, 1857), 339. This is Melville’s edition of Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound.” 35 Between 1875 and 1900, Rembrandt etchings were popular with New York collectors, and information on them was widely available. The print of St. Stephen is mentioned in a list of etchings in John William Mollet’s Rembrandt, a book that Melville owned (London: Sampson Low, 1882). A description of the etching, including the selfportrait within it, appears in Charles Henry Middleton, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Etched Work of Rembrandt van Rhyn (London: John Murray, 1878), 188–89. 36 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 79. 37 In Vedder’s edition and FitzGerald’s 1872 edition, they appear as quatrains 82 to 90. 38 FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: A Critical Edition, 79, 80.

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39 The Fisherman and the Genie, 1863, is based on a tale from The Arabian Nights. 40 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 80. 41 See Vedder’s note to Pardon Giving and Pardon Imploring Hands in his edition of Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. 42 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 19, 79, 80. 43 Vedder’s drawings were reproduced by a photographic or photogravure process that was also new to the mid-1880. The drawings of the deluxe folio “Albertype” edition are produced from a photographic negative transferred to a metal plate and then etched. On Vedder’s decision to use the new format, which allowed him to draw the images first on paper first with chalk, pencil, ink, and watercolors, see Soria, Elihu Vedder: An American Visionary in Rome, 1836–1923, 183–86. The images reproduced in this essay are from the original drawings. 44 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, ed. Adrian del Caro, trans. Adrian del Caro and Robert B. Pippen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 125. Augenblick here is translated into English as “Moment.” See also Koral Ward, Augenblick: The Concept of the “Decisive Moment” in 19th- and 20th-Century Western Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), especially 37–52. 45 Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit, 226–27. 46 Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone, eds. Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino, trans. Kathleen Baldwin et al. (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2013), 177; Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1970), 156. 47 See Vedder’s notes to the cover of his edition of Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. 48 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 84. I am working from Adorno’s formulation of a phrase, “dialectic at a standstill,” that appears in various places in Walter Benjamin’s work. Benjamin writes that “image is dialectics at a standstill” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 462. 49 Martin Heidegger, “Das Ding” (1950) as quoted in Bill Brown, Other Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 29. “The force of a jug’s form” is Brown descriptive term in Other Things, 29. 50 From “Buddha” in Timoleon, 302. 51 The section, “The Fruit of Travel Long Ago” (291–316) appears in the second half of Timoleon and contains eighteen poems. 52 See Herman Melville, “At the Hostelry,” in Collected Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Howard P. Vincent (Chicago: Hendricks House, 1947), 313–38; also, Dennis Berthold, “Melville, Garibaldi, and the Medusa of Revolution,” American Literary History 9.3 (Fall 1997): 425–59; On Vedder and the Macchiaioli, see Regina Soria, “An American Macchiaiolo: New Insights into Elihu Vedder’s Florentine Experience, 1857–1860,” in The Italian Presence in American Art, 1760–1860, ed. Irma B. Jaffe (New York: Fordham University Press, 1989), 165–75. On the Macchiaioli, see Norma Broude, The Macchiaioli: Italian Painters of the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 53 Douglas Robillard, “Melville’s Reading in the Visual Arts,” in Savage Eye: Melville and the Visual Arts, ed. Christopher Sten (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1991), 52.

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54 Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, vol. 2 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 355. 55 Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 258. 56 Broude, The Macchiaioli: Italian Painters of the Nineteenth Century, 97. 57 On “second-sight,” I have cited Melville’s edition of Honoré de Balzac, Seraphita, intro. George Frederic Parsons, trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley (Boston: Roberts, 1889), 66; see also Melville’s edition of Honoré de Balzac Louis Lambert, intro. George Frederic Parsons, trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley (Boston: Roberts, 1889), 15, 155. 58 Herman Melville, “The Parthenon,” Published Poems: Timoleon, 302. 59 Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms as cited in Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit, 39; see Dillingham, Melville and His Circle: The Last Years, 32–43. Other works Melville read on Buddhist thought include William Rounseville Alger, The Solitudes of Man and Nature (1867). 60 Christine M. Guth, Hokusai’s Great Wave: Biography of a Global Icon (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2015), 48; see Elihu Vedder, Digressions of V, 471; some of the letters between Elihu Vedder and his brother in Japan are printed in Alexander Vedder, “An American in Japan, 1863–1870,” Archives of American Art Journal 30.1 (1990): 7–12. The artist John La Farge remarked on Vedder’s interest in prints by Hokusai especially (Hokusai: A Talk About Hokusai, the Japanese Painter, at the Century Club, March 28, 1896 [1897]) as quoted in Henry Adams, “John La Farge’s Discovery of Japanese Art: A New Perspective on the Origins of Japonisme,” The Art Bulletin 67.3 (September 1985): 449–85. 61 On Hokusai, see Guth, Hokusai’s Great Wave: Biography of a Global Icon; from Vedder’s notes to the drawing Limitation, for verses 75–76, in the Rubáiyát. 62 Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 258; FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám: A Critical Edition, 64.

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La téméraire littéraire: Reckless Adaptation in Pierre and Pola X Paul Grimstad

Near the beginning of Pola X, Léos Carax’s 1999 film adaptation of Herman Melville’s Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, we see a medium close-up of Pierre Valombreuse (Guillaume Depardieu) working at a computer in a room overlooking his family’s vast Norman estate. A reverse shot shows a Microsoft Word file open with the title “Roman n*2” and Pierre looking at the screen, thinking and smoking. Heightened sound design allows us to hear the burn of wrapping paper on the cigarette as he takes a drag and birdsong coming in through an open window. A medium shot then shows Pierre moving a mouse and clicking it on the following sentence: Car jamais il n’avait eu le courage, ou plutot l’imprudent folie, de ramper dans l’espace vide [for he had never had the courage or rather the mad imprudence to crawl into the gap]. There is then a closeup on the word “l’imprudent” which Pierre highlights. Another mouse click opens a dropdown menu of “Outils” offering a list of choices. Pierre selects “synonymes” and then “téméraire.” A more extreme close-up—so close that individual pixels are visible, making the computer screen merge with the movie screen in a dappled digital pointillism—shows “imprudente” disappear and “téméraire” take its place, turning “mad imprudence” into “mad recklessness.”1 While Pola X takes its cue from, and gently tweaks, the empirical facts of the novel—Melville’s “Pierre Glendinning” becomes “Pierre Valembrouse”; the leisure and luxuriance of “Saddle Meadows” becomes a chateau in the Norman countryside; Pierre indeed works on his own novel within Melville’s novel—it also indulges in an audacious reimagining of the earlier work’s meaning and structure. Here, conspicuous attention to Pierre’s choice of adjective—the move from “imprudence” to “recklessness” (téméraire)—already tells us something about what it means to adapt Melville’s novel for the screen. Recklessness, for Melville circa 1851–52, had first of all to do with his refusal to go on writing the sort of potboiler sea adventures that sold steadily and made him a popular writer early in his career. He had just endured a mostly dismissive round of reviews of his previous novel Moby-Dick by critics who found its digressions into metaphysics distracting, as they had of his previous effort to push the sea adventure into experimental allegory (Mardi). This recklessness became more deliberate in the style Melville devised for the novel he claimed would be “calculated

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for popularity.”2 Indeed, Pierre’s prose style provoked what must be one of the most virulent denunciations of a novel ever recorded in the annals of American literary history. Upon the book’s publication reviewers savaged its style, which most found unwieldy and pretentious at best; at worst absurd, bombastic and insane. Melville’s “calculated” effort to draw upon the generic conventions of the sentimental romance had spawned a monster, part mocking pastiche, part faux Elizabethan tragedy, part unhinged exuberance. Such formal recklessness was not unprecedented in antebellum fiction. Its use as a means for calculating popular success had already been coolly theorized nearly twenty years earlier, in an 1835 letter Edgar Allan Poe wrote to Thomas White. Poe advised White (rightly, it turned out) that he could increase circulation of his paper, the Southern Literary Messenger, if he printed stories in which “the ludicrous [was] heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”3 Poe’s advice amounts to an apt description of what antebellum reviewers found repugnant in Pierre. But Melville’s writing around this time is reckless in a more specific way: it amounts, pace Poe, to a deliberate refusal of the critical and commercial expectations of fiction writing of the time, whose evaluative criteria were “formal coherence, verisimilitude, plausibility and stylistic naturalness.”4 Melville casts his refusal of verisimilitude in explicitly philosophical ways in the novels. Specifically, the “inscrutable” becomes the abiding preoccupation of both Ahab and Pierre, two characters monomaniacally obsessed by something that cannot be shown. Leon Howard identifies this as the central philosophical preoccupation of both Moby-Dick and Pierre—what he calls the attempt to “see the Truth through the mask of the actual.”5 The allusion here is of course to Ahab’s burst of invective against Starbuck when the first mate voices apprehension about his captain’s motives. In response to what he deems Starbuck’s shallow, mercantile concerns, Ahab goes straight into metaphysics: Hark ye yet again—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed— there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.6

It is typically said that Ahab is reckless insofar as he imperils his crew in a personal vendetta against an unreasoning animal he madly views as harboring a special hatred for him (and so fueling his own for it). The prose here turns the hidden whorls of

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psychological speculation into the very “visible objects” Ahab tormentedly broods over. A phrase like “I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it” gives form to—makes “visible” or representable—just what is gnawing away at the speaker. While “inscrutable malice sinewing it” is striking and odd, it has a telling inner logic: the whale’s strength is outrageous because of the malice sinewing it. Strength riven with malice torments because it is both hidden and made to appear in the form of “sinews.” If what “tasks” Ahab about the whale is the inscrutable problem of Evil, he has no problem bringing forth its specificity as “sinewing”—a verb Melville invents to enact Ahab’s obsession. If Ahab’s soliloquy begins with a problem of visual objects as mere masks, then the “living act” that allows a glimpse of the Truth is the invention of a word. The neologism is just what allows an abstraction like “malice” to impress its features into visibility.7 *** The way Melville has his characters raise philosophical questions—say, about evil, or appearance and reality—and then pose answers in and as style becomes more radical and explicit in Pierre. Beyond the self-conscious Elizabethanisms (“Hark ye …” etc.), which attached themselves to Melville’s prose after an enthusiastic immersion in a “glorious great type” edition of Shakespeare, his first ever “close acquaintance with the Divine William,”8 the style of the book is bent toward a sustained preoccupation with the problem of depiction. In Pierre, the inscrutable is converted into “inscrutableness”; an unwieldy substantive of the sort that baffled readers at the time, and which appears, by my count, no less than seven times in the novel.9 Inscrutableness will come to indicate both an inability of words to get at certain aspects of human experience, and the lexical inventions Melville concocts as compensation for that inability. It is as if he wants to inject a willful artificiality into every pore of his sentences, to put extra flesh on words to get them to become strange new objects. How then does Pola X take up this problem of depiction and “inscrutableness”? Consider the task of trying to adapt Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason for the screen. Would you focus on bits of memorable imagery in the book? The dove of reason flying up higher and higher as it speculates about undetermined objects or the house whose rooms may be perused in any order as opposed to a boat moving downstream? But the first Critique is not “about” such images; it is rather about transcendental argument, conditions of possibility, the role of concepts and logical functions in judgment, the antinomies of reason, and so on. So then how would you show that? One approach would be to set up a medium shot of a middle-aged man in eighteenth-century clothes seated at an antique desk, scratching a quill dipped in ink over leaves of paper. That might last for weeks or months or years, a truly epic, and very boring, version. Or imagine a work of CGI animation rendering the Critique’s baroque architectonic as a digitized choreography; space and time unfolding as fluid shapes; concepts in dotted outline merging with glowing intuitions; superimposed outlines of judgments, locking phenomena into syntax, filling up with the texture of perceptual experience; forking and branching vector graphs following out parallel arguments until they cancel in

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antinomy. Here, the animation would be a “depiction” of the arguments—maybe even a depiction of the very thinking of the book. But it would not be a matter of verisimilitude. It would be an act of visual abstraction attempting to get at something in the book that does not lend itself to depiction. Adapting Pierre for the screen raises questions similar to those that come up in the thought experiment of adapting Kant for the screen. In moving from scenes of literal composition (Pierre in front of a computer writing) to sonic and visual abstractions (a few of which I outline and analyze below) the film adopts different formal techniques for putting before us the novel’s “inscrutable.” In this way, I argue here, Carax remains faithful to Melville’s absurdly mannerist style even as he recklessly breaks up and rebuilds the novel’s elements. *** The first sound we hear is a cough, then a well-known couplet: “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right.” The lines are heard over a featureless screen which then cuts to a gauzy, high-contrast image of a revolving Earth. The stark black-and-white patterns of the rotating planet (something like a spherical Rorschach blob) cut to frames of racing, angular white light, and then to the Second World War bombers unloading on targets below, over which we hear a Scott Walker song, “The Time Is Out of Joint.” The song’s single saxophone note and frenzied lead vocal—And this one cracks like that one! / And that one cracks like those over there! / And those over there! And those over there! (we may be reminded of those cracking sinews)—merge with the sound of the bombs demolishing their targets, many of which are grave stones. How does time’s unhingedness, its cracking apart, bear upon a grainy, monochrome, rotating Earth and aerial footage of war planes? And what do these elements have to do with Melville’s concern with the problem of showing the inscrutable? One obvious place to begin is with Melville’s own explicit borrowings from Hamlet, from which the line about time being out of joint is taken. Pierre is marked from the novel’s beginning as a melancholic son, a reluctant inheritor, a brooding intellectual sicklied o’re with the pale cast of thought, a young man of startling and strange eloquence who is tormented by fears of inaction, and who has a cozily physical, at times apparently erotic, closeness with his mother (in the film Catherine Deneuve). The cluster of Hamletian elements Melville surmises in a capsule description of the “nobly-striving but ever-shipwrecked character in some royal youths” (P, 136). Spending a desultory day at the family estate, Pierre at one point meditates on the meaning of the play: His mind was wondering and vague; his arm wandered and was vague. Some moments passed, and he found the open Hamlet in his hand, and his eyes met the following lines: The time is out of joint; Oh Cursed spite / The ever I was born to set it right. He dropped the too true volume from his hand; his petrifying heart dropped hollowly within him, as a pebble down Carrisbrook well.

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If something in the couplet gets at the deepest feelings in Pierre (whatever those may be) that “too true” connection is expressed in an analogy wildly disproportionate to the action it modifies: the dropping of a book turns into a “petrified” heart falling “hollowly within” Pierre, like a pebble down a well. That pattern repeats throughout the novel as interior mysteries give way to extravagant comparisons, which, Ahab-like, press some “mouldings of their features” into view by making depictable something that would otherwise remain hidden. Later, Pierre will rip his copy of Hamlet into “a hundred shreds” and command himself to “tear thyself open and read there the confounding story of thy blind dotishness” (P, 171). We ought to remember here the way Hamlet’s fretting about “setting things right” leads ultimately to his idea of putting on a play with the plan of eliciting a public manifestation of his uncle’s guilt. This meta-dramatic aspect of Hamlet is offered as an example of what Jorge Luis Borges calls “fiction that lives in fiction.” Borges derives the idea from a memory of a “large biscuit tin” he remembers seeing as a child in Buenos Aires, on which was painted a “Japanese scene.”10 Amid the warriors and children of the tableau was the biscuit tin itself, painted in miniature, which would of course contain a reproduction of the whole scene, including the depiction of another tin, and so on in a mise-en-abyme of tins within tins. Borges says he was struck by the “implication that this went on infinitely” and the memory leads him to propose a taxonomy of comparable examples throughout literary history. Hamlet, according to Borges, “erects a stage on the stage; the fact that the play enacted there—the poisoning of a king—in some way mirrors the primary play suffices to suggest the possibility of infinite involutions.” Accordingly, the play within the play “makes reality appear unreal to us.” Presumably by this Borges means that a spectator of Hamlet is newly confronted with the lived reality of sitting in a theater; an internal double that throws the relation of appearance to reality “out of joint.” Also among Borges’s examples is the Thousand and One Nights which he says, “doubles and dizzyingly redoubles the ramifications of a central tale into digressing tales.” One of these redoubled and ramified tales—“The Tale of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp”—is central to the way Pola X depicts Melville’s aspiring novelist. When Pierre arrives at a Librarie-Tabac on his motorcycle with his fiancé Lucy on the back, she immediately notices a large sandwich-board advertisement for an issue of the magazine Télérama. On the cover is a drawing whose composition echoes the earlier scene of Pierre writing in his atelier: a drawing of a person shown from the back seated at a computer screen with a portentious question mark painted on the back of the head. On the screen is the title of Pierre’s first novel A la lumiere, and above that “Le mystere Aladin [sic] le roman d’une generation” (later in the film we learn that the book is the “cult favorite of the younger generation” as a fatuous TV commentator has it). But this is not all: we also see another ad in the display window of the Librarie. Tucked away in the background and slightly out of focus is Herman Melville pictured in an ad for Gallimard’s four-volume Pleiade edition of his fiction. What ramifies in this scene (to use Borges’ words) are the endless ambiguities of adapting prose for the screen. First, the marketing apparatus of the sandwich board

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itself, which creates its own static tableau; the earlier shot of Pierre at his computer, working on whatever it is that will be the follow-up to A la lumiere, here recast as a drawing; then the cartoon rendering of the computer screen itself, illuminated and marked with the title A la lumiere, with Pierre’s pseudonym, “Aladin,” and then finally that blurred image of Melville propped in the background, looking on from under the banner of the Pleiade logo. Carax here sets Melville’s novel in a kaleidoscope of visual ricochets, at the center of which is the looming question mark painted on the back of Pierre-Aladin’s head. Adaptation becomes a matrix for the blending and blurring of literary traditions; an American writer made canonically French, his filmically pseudonymous hero filtered through a classic of Arabic (and world) literature. It is as if Carax raises to reckless hyperbole the “work-within-the-work” structure Melville picks up from Hamlet. *** Soon after Pierre’s encounter with the advertisement for A la lumiere, and his apparent revulsion at the tacky commercial hype surrounding the “Aladin” pseudonym (when Lucy taps Pierre’s motorcycle helmet he looks up through the raised visor, sees the advertisement, then angrily slams the visor shut) we are back in the rural studio and again see him at the computer. Now there is an incomplete sentence on the screen— “Visage, je sais enfin d’où tu viens! … Mais pourquoi toi? fantôme entrevu dans la nuit, il y a quelq|.” Only the blinking cursor at the end of the truncated “quelq” and the ambience of the sound design tell us we are in the medium of film and not just looking at a computer monitor. The sound is Pierre talking on the telephone to his fiancé Lucy. We hear only his side of the conversation and so must infer what Lucy is saying. We are helped in that inference by the words on the screen: “ghost seen in the night [fantôme entrevu dans la nuit].” The “ghost” is a wraith-like, raven-haired girl who has been following Pierre, and with whom he will ultimately flee the countryside to Paris. Their mysterious bond is conveyed through both the overheard conversation and the words on the screen, as if they were electromagnetic or telepathic signals. All of this comes to a head in a scene with Pierre heading out into the night on his motorcycle, ostensibly to talk to his fiancé, but really in demonic pursuit of something not clear to us or to himself. His motorcycle headlight picks out a group of apparently homeless figures walking along the road. Pierre turns around, feeling compelled to address the group. Among them is the mysterious “spectre” that he’s earlier seen following him. He tells her he wants to talk and this sends her running into the forest. Before the camera follows Pierre after her there is a gratuitously deliberate shot which radiates an almost allegoric significance, the kickstand on Pierre’s motorcycle sinks into the mud and the whole bike buckles, its gas tank collapsing onto the helmet Pierre left on the ground, the headlight shattering and sputtering out. Sound now takes a definitive turn to the non-diegetic as synthesizer tones are held over a low pulse: a musical cue reminiscent of early 80s horror movies. The combination of the synth cue and the extinguished motorcycle headlight sets off a generalized obscurity over

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the film, leading to a seven-minute sequence in near total darkness. Beginning with Pierre’s interrogative “Tu est qui?” the girl informs him of the truth in broken phrases: “You are not the only child … House big, I was alone, always alone, Man from France come to us, I not understand his words, I go away with him … .” In her elliptical way, she is telling Pierre that she is his half-sister Isabelle, the result of dalliance between her unknown mother and his now deceased ambassador father while he was in Eastern Europe. After Isabelle recounts her story, we cut back to Pierre speeding in front of rows of fluorescent lights, having rehabilitated his damaged motorcycle, the gas tank scuffed and dented, the handlebars and speedometer bent out of alignment, helmet dangling from his arm, as he races back to the country with the new knowledge of his half-sister. *** The mystic bond established between Pierre and Isabelle leads to a scene taken directly from Melville’s novel but yanked out of joint from its place in the narrative. After Pierre’s visit to the Terror Stone (the topic of the sentence in which he changed “imprudent” to “téméraire”), he arrives home and runs up the stairs as if in a trance. Locking himself is his writing room, he promptly falls asleep and has a dream about Isabel (“I told you the truth,” she says in the dream); and upon waking the next morning walks to another room where he uncovers a secret staircase, at the top of which he finds a plastered-over door. Pierre takes a shovel from the front yard and begins to hack his way into the secret door, ignoring his mother’s orders to “Arrete!” Once inside, he discovers a dusty attic-like room with nothing in it. “There’s nothing here,” he says looking dazed. There is then a cut to a lightbulb spluttering out with a crunch, a sound closely keyed to the earlier sound of the motorcycle headlight going out. “She exists,” Pierre says to his mother, to which the mother replies, “Qu’est ce que tu as dit?” Without answering her question Pierre enters a taxi bound for Paris. The scene of Pierre’s hacking his way into the crypt in the interior of the house is a transposed version of one of the novel’s more extravagant analogies, linked to what Melville calls the “clew-defying mysteriousness of Isabel’s narration” (P,  137). The narrator sounds Ahab-like in his characterization of Pierre’s inner turbulence: Ten million things were as yet uncovered to Pierre. The old mummy lies buried in cloth on cloth; it takes time to unwrap this Egyptian king. Yet now, forsooth, because Pierre began to see through the first superficiality of the world, he fondly weens he has come to the unlayered substance. But, far as any geologist has yet gone down into the world, it is found to consist of nothing but surface stratified on surface. To its axis, the world being nothing but superinduced superficies. By vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid—and no body is there!—appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of a man! (P, 285)

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Here, Melville’s abiding preoccupation with the inscrutable leads to a phrase typical of the novel’s excesses: “superinduced superficies.” A condensed formulation of the problem Ahab imagined on the deck of the Pequod—that “all visible objects” are mere “pasteboard masks”—the hiccupping phrase is given cinematic form in both the buried vault and the hidden chamber which conceals nothing. All is surface. The film version both recklessly experiments with, and at the same time remains faithful to, Melville’s stylistic extremities, in re-imagining the novel’s protracted sarcophagus analogy, recasting them in scene of new density and dynamics; often enhanced with sound design (such as the echo between the extinguished lightbulb and the collapsing motorcycle). *** In both Pierre and Pola X music, and the idea of music, is used to mark that which escapes verbal conceptualization or visual depiction. While it is said at one point in the novel that music may give rise to words, as when Isabel strums her “mystic guitar … till Pierre felt chapter after chapter born of its wondrous suggestiveness; but alas! Eternally incapable of being translated into words; for where the deepest words end, there music begins with its super sensuous and all-confounding intimations” (P,  329). Guitar notes—nearly semantic sounds which both overflow discrete frames of meaning and at the same time capture an ideal of abstract beauty—are here made into the medium of Isabelle and Pierre’s secret connection. In Pola X music becomes both more central to, and a more violent force within, the film’s logic of adaptation. This is first of all a matter of the way music in film is split between diegetic and non-diegetic sources, that is, music that arises within the fictional narrative, on the one hand, and music added as score, inaudible to the characters in the drama, on the other. We’ve seen how non-diegetic music may create a saturating atmosphere (the synth fog in which Isabelle tells Pierre her story), but Isabelle’s (diegetic) guitar playing becomes fused in the film with two other elements of the novel: the musician and cult leader Plotinus Plinlimmon and the bohemian commune he presides over, The Apostles. What is in Pierre a repurposed church in Lower Manhattan is in Pola X an abandoned factory on the outskirts of Paris, filled with millénariste mystics under the command of the charismatic composer, who conducts noise music using a battery of amplified instruments. The music, actually composed by Scott Walker (who wrote and sings the song “The Time Is Out of Joint” that opens the film) is punishingly loud amplified feedback and tribal percussion. The  musicians stare up at the Svengali-like leader with expressions ranging from studious attentiveness to ecstatic, zombified obedience. *** The Apostles set piece in Pola X heightens the contrast between the Arcadian vistas of Pierre’s abandoned family estate and the noisy, churning reality of the city, with its

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anonymous brick structures and grimy scaffolds (farm animals are scattered around the set as if to accent the tension between Pierre’s rural beginnings and his new urban alienation).11 At the same time, the sound of the multi-guitar orchestra hyperbolizes Melville’s lines about the “mystic” power of the Isabel’s guitar. No longer the ghost damsel’s sylvan strumming, the electric guitar orchestra takes to reckless extremes the idea that “where the deepest words end, there music begins with its super sensuous and all-confounding intimations.” What is “super sensuous and all-confounding” here is volume itself: sheer intensity, raw power, which overwhelms the participants and listeners in ways that inflect the inscrutable power Isabelle has over Pierre, but also impress, as sound, the moldings of a hidden past into legible form. The violence of Plinlimmon’s sounds is keyed to Isabelle’s entrance into Pierre’s life, as she reconnects him to the “unspeakable suffering that has underwritten a century of European genocide in which [Pierre’s] father and class are implicated.”12 Hence, the smash cuts from Hamlet, to the spinning earth, to the Second World War bombers, and then to the opulent wealth and tranquility of the Velembreuse estate, all of which imply some inescapable crimes of the twentieth century, whose unrepresentable trauma may be depicted only obliquely, through the sound-image composites of film. Indeed, Isabelle, a Balkan refugee, is a visual and auditory abstraction of the unspeakable recklessness of the twentieth-century violence. When she appears again in one of Pierre’s dreams, while he is still an (increasingly deranged and dissolute) occupant of the Apostles commune, she is naked and copulating with him in an immense river of  blood, tumbling over rapids through great caverns; as if the atrocities of the twentieth century, from the World Wars to the Balkan Wars, had been condensed into an image of carnal oblivion. Shortly after awaking from the dream, walking with Isabelle (and now Lucy, who has joined them) along the quais, he comes across a used copy of a memoir by his father Georges Valebrouse, Splendeurs et Miseres d’un Diplomate (The Rise and Fall of a Diplomat).13 *** If Pola X is in part a ciphered work about some of the atrocities of the twentieth century—a certain recklessness that seems to flare up in history, putting whole nations and people “out of joint”—there is already something violent, whimsical, and arbitrary about parsing an artwork into new units, redistributing its elements, scattering and recasting them, finding new patterns and arrangements in its dismantling and rebuilding. Those sorts of decisions—how to arrive at a logic of filmic depiction from a work of literature composed 150 years earlier—is first of all imagined in Pola X as Carax’s desire to show in real time Pierre at work on a Microsoft Word document, patiently typing, scrolling, and clicking. As a knotty meditation on how to fold prose composition into filmmaking it becomes a yet another move in a game of adaptation, here from Pierre’s own obsessive focus on the solitary moods and habits of writing. What follows from that telescoping of prose and film—heightened sound design, abstract visual semaphores; sequences shot in near total darkness, narrative disjointedness, blurring of the line between diegetic and non-diegetic

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music; audacious historical allegory—led many to treat Pola X upon its release in ways comparable to how Melville’s novel was received, split between “self-indulgent folly” and “an improbable triumph of romantic audacity.”14 A more compressed version of all this may be found in the film’s cryptic title—an acronym formed from the French title of Melville’s novel: Pierre, Ou, L,’ Ambiguities, with the roman numeral “X” added to indicate that it was the tenth working draft of the script. If both novel and film are organized around that which exceeds representation, why not say the “X” marks a recalcitrant blank that resists depiction, and which then provokes recklessness on the part of artists in their search for new techniques.

Notes 1

2 3 4

5 6

7

While it appears twelve times in Pierre, “reckless” is not the word Melville uses in the passage that corresponds to this scene in Pola X. Melville writes: “Yet no mortal being had ever been known to have the intrepid heart to crawl there” (Pierre, 132; from now on P followed by page number in the text). In Pierre Leyris’ recent French translation we find: nul n’avait eu le Coeur assez intrépide pour l’oser. “Intrepid” remains, but the French translator has now added “risk” (oser). The version of the passage in Pola X seems to be the invention of screenwriters Carax, Lauren Sedofky, and Jean-Pol Fargeau. In their version, seen on Pierre’s computer screen, the meaning of Melville’s “intrepid” is combined with that of Leyris’ “risk” to yield, first “imprudence,” and then “téméraire.” “Historical Note,” in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities: Northwestern-Newberry Edition, eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press), 367. Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 211. William Spengemann, “Introduction,” in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (New York: Penguin, 1971), vii. For a more sustained discussion of the relation of verisimilitude, allegory and Melville’s prose circa 1851–52, see my “Unearthing Pierre,” in Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson to the Jameses (Oxford University Press, 2013), 69–95. Leon Howard, “Editorial Appendix: Historical Note,” in Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, The Northwestern-Newberry Edition, 373. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or The Whale, Northwestern-Newberry Edition, eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press). The problem of representation is a concern throughout the novel, from Ishmael’s playful exegesis of the mysterious painting at the Spouter Inn, to his more systematic meditation on the problem of pictorial depiction in chapters on “Monstrous Pictures of Whales,” “Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales,” “Of Whales in Paint, in Teeth, etc.” “Sinews” form a central connecting image and idea throughout the novel: Ishmael’s speculative description of Ahab’s inner states relating to the whale as his “deliriously transferring [the idea of malignity] to the abhorred white whale [in] all that cracks the

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sinews, and cakes the brain” (41); the whale described (86) as a “Dense web of welded sinews”; the English language itself as in part formed from “sinewy Saxonisms” (87), and fatefully anticipating the final confrontation between Ahab and the whale, the announcement “Some sinew cracks!” (135) Herman Melville, Letter to Every Duyckinck, February 24, 1849. On Melville’s apparently quite deliberate abuse of the substantive in Pierre, Philip Jaworski says such prose forces the reader to “feel a strange opacity in words” in Melville: Le desert et l’empire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), 326. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Non-Fictions, 161 (originally: ‘Cuando la ficcion vive en la ficcion’ in El Hogar, June 2, 1939). In an interview (interestingly in Télérama, the magazine with the “Mystere de Aladin” cover) Carax said of Pierre’s move from Saddle Meadows to the Apostles: “Dans le roman, [the Apostles] c’est a communauté … Quand Pierre quitte sa famille, il en retrouve une autre, avec des femmes et des enfants. Il a nouveau besoin de structure [et] il se retrouve dans cette secte dangerouse et séduisante.” (Entretien avec Leos Carax, a propos de la version télé de “Pola X”, Télérama.fr.) Gavin Smith, “Pola X,” in Sight and Sound (June 2000). The titles of the books flanking the memoir are telling indications of his legacy as a diplomat: Chonique des Oubliés; Une haine monumentale; Cercueil de Sarajevo. Smith, “Pola X,” 1.

Part Four

Communities

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Melville’s Leviathan Paul Downes

I “This august dignity I treat of,” writes Ishmael, in ch.  26 of Moby-Dick, “is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture.”1 Such treatment demands a muse, and Ishmael invokes it a few lines later: “against all critics bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God!”2 The absence of any “robed investiture” for democratic dignity suggests that democratic sovereignty wears humble garb—jeans and a T-shirt, perhaps. But it might also be read to say that this emperor has no clothes at all, which is to say, has no title to govern. Such a claim anticipates Jacques Rancière’s suggestion that “The condition under which a government is political is that it is founded on the absence of any title to govern.”3 Rancière continues: For politics to exist, a title of exception is required, a title that is added to those by which societies, large and small, are “normally” ruled, and which in the last analysis come down to those of birth and wealth. Wealth aims at endless growth, but it does not have the power to transcend itself. Birth asserts its claim to transcendence, but the price of doing so is to leap from human kinship to divine kinship. It founds a government of shepherds, thereby resolving the problem, but at the cost of eliminating politics. What remains is the extraordinary exception, the power of the people, which is not the power of the population or of the majority, but the power of anyone at all, the equality of capabilities to occupy the positions of governors and of the governed. Political government, then, has a foundation. But this foundation is also in fact a contradiction: politics is the foundation of a power to govern in the absence of foundation.4

How might one talk about or figure such a “foundation” or “sovereignty” for democracy? What does this enigmatic “absence” or “contradiction” or, indeed, Melville’s robeless “royal mantle” of democratic sovereignty look like? In what follows, I want to suggest that for all their important differences, Herman Melville

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and Thomas Hobbes both tried to theorize the enigma of democratic sovereignty via the figure of the Leviathan. The great whale, whether considered as a mythological, scriptural, or zoological wonder, seems to have exerted a powerful conceptual pull on both Hobbes and Melville, even if it might be argued that the former had little interest in the real thing. Melville’s preoccupation with democracy and with what he explicitly refers to as the equality of humanity detours constantly through the magnificent strangeness of the empirical whale, suggesting, albeit never explicitly, that the one cannot be thought without the other. For all its figurative sovereign dignity (as the largest and most powerful of creatures, as ancient and, perhaps, immortal, as the putatively ubiquitous and mysterious “royal” fish), Ishmael’s whale is insistently empirical and fleshy. Most readers, in fact, are surprised if not downright frustrated by the patience with which Ishmael undertakes his historical, ecological, and anatomical study of the whale in the pages of what they thought was supposed to be an adventure at sea. If Melville’s whale, Moby Dick, has something to tell us about democratic sovereignty, then, it is not just as a figure of speech. Something about the living, breathing whale (and thus about all those other nonhuman and nonsentient beings whom this whale also, perhaps, represents) speaks to the question of a democratic sovereignty, as if Melville had also anticipated what Timothy Morton calls “the ecological thought”: “The ecological thought is … a practice and a process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings– animal, vegetable or mineral. Ultimately, this includes thinking about democracy. What would a truly democratic encounter between truly equal beings look like, what would it be—can we even imagine it?”5 Thomas Hobbes’s whale, on the other hand, is a decidedly allegorical creature, figured on the famous frontispiece as a gigantic sovereign body whose scales (an insistent, though scientifically inaccurate, feature of the whale in the pre-modern imagination) consist of the multitude of the people.6 Hobbes’s quotation from the Book of Job running across the top of the same frontispiece (“Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei”; “There is no power on earth to be compared to him” Job 41.33) borrows God’s description of the mighty Leviathan to describe the commonwealth that Hobbes sets out to theorize. But it’s worth bearing in mind that while scripture and mythology had bequeathed Hobbes a figure for enormous sublunary power, the animal itself remained something of a compelling zoological mystery. As Melville himself notes in Moby-Dick, the whale had eluded scientific categorization and accurate representational capture for centuries and so continued well into Hobbes’s time to connote fantastic power and almost demonic ontological peculiarity. This is why it is hard to think of a more ludic, or audacious, metaphorical gesture in the history of political philosophy than Hobbes’s decision to call his Commonwealth a Leviathan: For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was

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intended; and in which the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body.7

There might not seem to be much of the living, breathing whale left in Hobbes’s figurative appropriation of the Leviathan; nevertheless, a trace of the whale, in all his, her, or its empirical strangeness (and here I am specifically thinking of Morton’s use of the terms “strange” and “strange stranger” throughout The Ecological Thought), clings to Hobbes’s description. The titular Leviathan suggests that Hobbes could not theorize a political community, one that sought to resist the perpetual encroachments of a state of nature relationship between persons (or, indeed, between beings), without gesturing toward the nonhuman being of the whale and toward the indeterminacy of the distinction between the human and its sentient and non-sentient others.8 But perhaps it is important to begin by emphasizing what generations of Hobbes’s readers have refused to acknowledge: that, in his Leviathan, the great philosopher definitively set out to theorize community—a community of the all and the anyone, distinctly different from the social order that the “schoolmen” (Hobbes almost spat every time he named them in Leviathan) derived from classical political philosophy. “A Common-wealth is said to be Instituted,” Hobbes writes in ch. 18 of Leviathan: when a Multitude of men do Agree, and Covenant, every one, with every one, that to whatsoever Man, or Assembly of Men, shall be given the major part, the Right to present the person of them all, (that is to say, to be their Representative;) every one, as well he that voted for it, as he that Voted against it, shall authorize all the Actions and Judgements, of that Man, or Assembly of men, in the same manner, as if they were his own, to the end, to live peaceably amongst themselves, and be protected against other men.9

We know the historical limitations on Hobbes’s “all” (who will say that we have left them behind?); nevertheless, the emphasis on the “all” and the “every” in this and other passages of Leviathan (“For Power Unlimited is absolute Soveraignty. And the Soveraign, in every Commonwealth, is the absolute Representative of all the subjects”10) continues to contrast markedly with, for example, Aristotle’s Politics or Plato’s Republic, in both of which we encounter casual and repeated dismissals of the slave, the woman, and the child (never mind the beast) that are completely absent from Hobbes’s Leviathan.11 Furthermore, Hobbes’s resistance to hegemonic Christian invocations of an immortal soul housed in mortal flesh contributes to what I think we ought to call a proto-ecological thought in Leviathan. Mining scripture for support of his position (as was his wont), Hobbes finds this wondrous example in Ecclesiastes 3: “That which befalleth the Sons of Men, befalleth Beasts, even one thing befalleth them; as the one dyeth, so doth the other; yea, they have all one breath (one spirit;) so that a Man hath no praeeminence above a Beast, for all is vanity.” “By the literal sense,” adds Hobbes, “here is no Naturall Immortality of the Soule.”12 Hobbes’s critique of the notion of

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an immortal soul housed in human flesh (a position he primarily associated with the Romish church he despised) contributed to his understanding of sovereignty as an “Artificiall soul” and hence to a decidedly post-humanist articulation of political community: “the agreement … of men, is by Covenant only, which is Artificiall: and therefore it is no wonder if there be somewhat else required (besides Covenant) to make their Agreement constant and lasting; which is a Common Power, to keep them in awe, and to direct their actions to the Common Benefit.”13 Dominant readings of Hobbes from 1651 to the present tend only to hear the words “power” and “awe” in this famous passage, while remaining pointedly deaf to Hobbes’s emphasis on the “Common” and on the peaceful life that all deserve to enjoy. It is almost as if a certain political philosophy, one still invested in something like an immortal human soul and in the various hierarchies that such a concept entails, did not want us to remember the repeated invocations of the “Common” in Hobbes’s Leviathan. The  traditional demonization of Hobbes’s political “absolutism,” I want to suggest, cannot be disentangled from a more or less explicit hostility toward his invocation of the nonhuman supplement, the “Leviathan,” in his account of human social organization. The counter-Hobbesean tradition resists the possibility that living peaceably in a commonwealth might require us to think about (and think with) that “strange stranger,” the great whale, that Hobbes deployed to name a form of living together that he too had “imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.”14

II In the last chapter of Prophecies of Leviathan, Peter Szendy claims to detect “under [Melville’s] Leviathan-text, the shadow or the ghost of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan.”15 This ghost appears at precisely the point in Szendy’s analysis where, he claims, “a political reading of Moby-Dick would begin again.”16 Anyone who has been following Szendy’s intricate reading of Moby-Dick to this point might be anticipating a hospitable reception for this “ghost,” especially one that lurks “under” the text like the whale himself, a breath-taking “shadow” beneath the surface.17 Instead, Szendy turns on Hobbes and, channeling Ahab (or is it Claggart?) accuses him of being a sworn enemy: “Behemoth and Leviathan, but also Moby-Dick against—close up against—Leviathan: Is there not a barely latent conflict here? Is there not a pitiless war of reading raging between Melville and Hobbes?”18 To declare this war would be to identify Moby-Dick with a familiar American antipathy toward Hobbes, an antipathy shared by Puritans and whigs and manifesting as much in the remarkable absence of Hobbes from revolutionary or republican political thought as in the occasional bursts of outright hostility.19 To conscript Melville’s novel for a war against Hobbes would be to line Moby-Dick up with those Puritan revolutionaries and Lockean liberals who have openly or covertly rejected Hobbes’s political philosophy on the grounds of its cynical or atheistical contempt for mankind’s natural sociability and its subsequent defense of tyrannical absolutism.20 But is this really the Melville we want to claim in 2016? A liberal, puritan republican Melville, whose masterpiece would rehearse an

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eighteenth-century war with Thomas Hobbes: or does the ghost of Hobbes’s Leviathan perhaps come to the surface here, in Szendy’s reading, the way Marx says the “specter of communism” appears before nineteenth-century Europe?21 Recalling the first English translation of the Manifesto, we might ask who, precisely, is spooked by this seventeenth-century revenant, this political “hobbes-goblin”? Any consideration of the philosophical relationship between Melville and Hobbes ought to begin by acknowledging certain stylistic affinities between the two writers. Melville’s prose, as is well understood, recalls the vocabulary and the rhythm of Shakespeare, Milton, Thomas Browne, and, surely, Thomas Hobbes, more than it does that of his eighteenth- or nineteenth-century peers and precursors. Both Hobbes and Melville succeeded in crossing class divides: early reviewers failed to believe that someone who could write like Melville could also have been a whaler; Hobbes never really belonged to the class of wealthy and titled Englishmen he spent his adult life teaching and advising.22 Both men’s masterpieces were rejected as unfathomable or atheistical by their countrymen, and both, not insignificantly, seem to have been fascinated by aspects of the Book of Job and the quasi-mythological figure of the Leviathan or great whale. Moreover, antagonism between Melville and Hobbes is not at all apparent in one of the few explicit references to the latter in Melville’s work.23 In Israel Potter, Melville’s hapless revolutionary finds himself in Paris faceto-face with ambassador Benjamin Franklin, “the first, both in point of time and merit, of American envoys.”24 Franklin, whom Melville seems to enjoy, is famous “not less for the pastoral simplicity of his manners than for the politic grace of his mind,” and, as such, he brings to mind another singular philosopher: “In some of his works,” Melville writes, “his style is only surpassed by the unimprovable sentences of Hobbes of Malmesbury, the paragon of perspicuity.”25 But Melville doesn’t leave it there. He describes Franklin as combining the “unselfish devotion” and “deep worldly wisdom” of the scriptural Jacob, and of possessing “polished Italian tact, gleaming under an air of Arcadian unaffectedness.” Franklin, he continues, is a “diplomatist” and a “shepherd,” a “serpent and dove,” a “tanned Machiavelli in tents,” and in all this, too, he reminds Melville of Hobbes: “The mental habits of Hobbes and Franklin in several points, especially in one of some moment, assimilated.”26 Hobbes, Jacob, and Franklin, he goes on, are “three labyrinth-minded, but plain-spoken Broadbrims, at once politicians and philosophers; keen observers of the main chance; prudent courtiers; practical magians in linsey Woolsey.”27 Melville’s comparison is idiosyncratic and intriguing. If Franklin was, and continues to be, something of an anomaly among the founding “fathers” (rumors of his pragmatic disloyalty persist), it is perhaps fitting that he alone should be compared to a philosopher with whom few American republicans would ever want to have been associated. Hobbes, for most of the founding generation, was a philosophical pariah whose apparent defense of sovereign absolutism was corrected (so they would have said) by John Locke, and whose masterpiece, Leviathan, did not actually need to be read before it was consigned to the museum of tyranny. Read Leviathan if you must, said John Adams to his son John Quincy, but beware: “there is a great deal of mischievous philosophy” in Hobbes.28

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To no one’s great surprise, one of the opening lines of Hobbes’s Leviathan appears in the extracts to Moby-Dick: “By art is created that great Leviathan, called a Commonwealth or State—(in Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man.”29 And this initial reference is echoed and redoubled (Szendy actually calls it a “watermark”30) in the scriptural epigraph to Moby-Dick’s “Epilogue” (“And I only am escaped alone to tell thee …”31). It is in the Book of Job, Szendy reminds us, that Leviathan appears as the “teratological figure that forms a sort of monstrous couple with Behemoth, his earthly equivalent.”32 It is this Leviathan, Szendy suggests, that provided Hobbes with his enigmatic symbol of that “artificiall man” called “a COMMONWEALTH or STATE,” and thus Hobbes, in a certain manner, frames Melville’s masterpiece, appearing at both the beginning and the end of the Pequod’s epic voyage.33 Nevertheless, as we have seen, the Hobbesean Leviathan that resurfaces at the close of Moby-Dick, represents, for Peter Szendy, the ghost of a political philosophy that clashes with everything we might want to celebrate in the work of Herman Melville. The version of Hobbes that Szendy invokes here, I want to suggest, is the product of a misreading that has actually served, wherever it has appeared, to conceal a crucially counter-liberal dimension of Hobbes’s thought. Published in 1651, Hobbes’s Leviathan, as Szendy puts it, was “the first grand modern theory of the State,” and it figures the State as a “giant man … [an] oversized artifice … [a] prosthesis or mechanical automaton created by covenant.”34 This reference to a “prosthetic” State “created by covenant” is crucial, because it is around this particular issue that much confusion still remains when it comes to evaluating the originality of Hobbes’s political philosophy. Szendy pursues his antagonistic reading of Melville and Hobbes by quoting from the “Cetology” chapter of Moby-Dick in which he believes he hears Ishmael offer a “parody” of Hobbes’s discourse on sovereignty.35 “I promise nothing complete,” writes Ishmael in this chapter, “because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty … My object here is simply to project the draught of a systematization of cetology …”36 Ishmael then compares his impossible task with the “awful tauntings in Job”: “What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of this leviathan! … ‘Will he (leviathan) make a covenant with thee? Behold the hope of him is vain!’”37 This carefully sutured biblical quotation, says Szendy, exemplifies Ishmael’s characteristic mode of writing about (or reading) the whale, and thereby “manages to make the Bible say that there is no contractual bargaining whatsoever with Leviathan.”38 “In such a fashion,” Szendy asserts, “the reading [Ishmael] offers becomes a weapon against Hobbes”: No assured contract, therefore, no hook, here, to fasten reading to a Leviathan that would have become a “fast fish,” that is to say, anchored, as in Hobbes, in the stable figure of the State. No contract, that is to say, no firm bond or election that, as in Hobbes, delegates the voices of men contractually agreeing among themselves on the sovereign they choose to represent them.39

Ishmael’s failure to wholly account for Moby Dick, his failure to hook the Leviathan, or fully comprehend and master the whale becomes, in Szendy’s reading, the

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equivalent of a valuable refusal to be bound to a political or epistemological figure of sovereign power. No contract, here, means, no binding of a people to a tyrant sovereign and, hence, no impediment to permanent revolution. Curiously, however, this gesture also turns Ishmael into something of a Puritan revolutionary. “No contract,” Szendy explains, implies “No election but a cut. Or better yet, an elision, which will reveal itself to be a beheading”: In a later chapter, Ishmael will in fact take care of staging the beheading of Leviathan (“he was beheaded,” 70:310). Decapitated, the sovereign Leviathan— who served the function of an inflated, meteoric prosthesis to the unattainable totality promised as much by the text as by the social contract—now resembles the chimney of the “I” in “I and My Chimney.” There, the narrator describes it as a “grand seignor,” as the “one great domineering object” of the house, and he relates its being cut down to size by a previous owner. This was the equivalent, he says, of a “beheading,” a “neck-wringing.” It was, he continues, “a regicidal act.”40

If Szendy’s Ishmael (and, by association, Szendy’s Melville) is indeed an enemy of Hobbes, then he is so only insofar as he also sounds like a belated roundhead—an American Cromwell. Szendy’s analysis, in fact, repeats what is perhaps the most pervasive misreading of Hobbes’s Leviathan, namely that it describes (in a protoLockean fashion) a simple contractual foundation for the State. The radical “weapon” that Szendy fashions for Ishmael (the latter’s ability to “make the Bible say that there is no contractual bargaining whatsoever with Leviathan”) misses the appearance of precisely this claim in ch. 17 of Leviathan (“it is no wonder if there be somewhat else required [besides Covenant] to make their Agreement constant and lasting”41) and in the famous passage from ch. 18, “The Right of Bearing the Person of Them All,” Hobbes there insists, “is given to him they make Soveraigne, by Covenant onely of one to another, and not of him to any of them.”42 This was a crucial point for Hobbes and a crucial point of departure from the revolutionary Puritan political philosophy he was watching take hold in England and about which he remained so suspicious. Puritan republicans executed Charles I not because they were suspicious of the language of contract but because they believed Charles to have violated the terms of a sovereign contract and because they fantasized that they might construct a state around the only true contract—the covenant between God and his people. Hobbes, on the other hand, rejected the idea that sovereignty could ever be contained wholly within the logic (or the lie) of the contract or the covenant, and he did not mince his words when it came to condemning the English Puritans who had precipitated civil war by claiming to have entered into a sovereign contract with God himself: “Some men,” he wrote, “have pretended for their disobedience to their Soveraign, a new Covenant, made, not with men, but with God.”43 This seemed to Hobbes to be both scripturally preposterous and politically “unjust”: all sovereign power on this earth, he argued, at least since the time of Jesus Christ, is mortal power, and any claim to have entered into a covenant with God, “is so evident a lye, even in the pretenders own consciences, that it is not onely an act of unjust, but also of vile, and unmanly disposition.”44 The “lye” of a divine covenant

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models, from the perspective of Hobbes’s political theology, the pernicious fiction of contractual sovereignty that would come to define liberal orthodoxy. Hobbes does indeed theorize a founding contractual scene. But that scene is always supplemented by a relationship—between the commonwealth and its sovereign power—that demands a non-contractual language of authorship (“every one, as well he that Voted for it, as he that Voted against it, shall Authorize all the Actions and Judgements, of that Man, or Assembly of men,”) and representation (the sovereignty exercises “the Right to Present the Person of them all, (that is to say, to be their Representative).”)45 Hobbes wrote his Leviathan in order to address the perpetual (and, in his opinion, escalating and evolving) threat of a state of nature relationship between individuals and between peoples. He noted with trepidation the desire on the part of a growing class of political actors (those whom we would now describe as the proto-capitalist, proto-liberal English puritans) to institute such a state as an apparently progressive alternative to monarchic political organization. He decried those who would willingly or blindly usher in such a state in the course of pursuing a theological or divisive political agenda that would put local gain ahead of anything like social well-being (the commonwealth). The Hobbesean state of nature (which by a bizarre turn of historical and intellectual events has come to mean a state that a Hobbesean would somehow endorse or feel at home in) explicitly names a condition in which there is no commonality and a condition that, Hobbes argued, we must perpetually seek to avoid. The “nasty, brutish” state of nature with which Hobbes has become associated is, in other words, the “charnel house” concealed (barely) beneath the painted face of the capitalist free market.46 Hobbes’s “Leviathan” represents an attempt to imagine an alternative to any willed or forced submission to this state of nature. In fact, the imposing strangeness of Hobbes’s figurative Leviathan has everything to do with its overwhelming resistance to the very contract it emerges from and which it supplements in the full Derridean sense. God’s bragging question to Job is also a rhetorical question: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? Will he make a covenant with thee?” The answer is implicit: No! mortal beings cannot make a covenant with their sovereign, which is as much as to say that mortal beings cannot realize the end of politics any more than they can the end of history. “Leviathan” names the power that any commonwealth requires, Hobbes argues, if it is to have any hope of realizing something like contractual equality between its constituent members. The social cannot come into effect, Hobbes argued, without the supplement of a non-contracting sovereignty that he also referred to as the “artificial soul” of the commonwealth.47 Artifice and power (the conjunction is critical) mark the sovereign supplement of contract in the Hobbesean commonwealth, and it is this proto-deconstructive political philosophy that scandalizes the Puritan Republican no less than the divine rights monarchist. The irreducibly strange and fictional Leviathan is not only an emblem of the fallen world; it is the insignia of the political. On the eve of the American Revolution, this prosthetic dimension of Hobbesean sovereignty was registered by the architects of the new republic as the corollary of a cynical and atheistical contempt for man’s capacity for goodness. “Moral

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obligation, according to [Hobbes],” wrote Alexander Hamilton, “is derived from the introduction of civil society; and there is no virtue, but what is purely artificial, the mere contrivance of politicians, for the maintenance of social intercourse.” And Hamilton knew what led Hobbes to embrace this artifice: “the reason he run into this absurd and impious doctrine, was, that he disbelieved the existence of an intelligent superintending principle, who is the governor, and will be the final judge of the universe.”48 Hobbesean sovereignty refuses to disavow the dangerous supplement of the contract that would found and maintain community, and as such it threatens the fantasy of non-violent reciprocity that undergirds the liberal political imaginary and that Hamilton (and others) associated with man’s fundamental capacity for goodness and reason. Something of the difficulty and originality of Leviathan’s theory of sovereignty creeps into Peter Szendy’s discussion when he associates the pejorative aspect of Hobbesean sovereignty with both the contractual and a vacillating invocation of the prosthetic (“Decapitated, the sovereign leviathan—who served the function of  an inflated, meteoric prosthesis to the unattainable totality promised as much by the text as by the social contract—now resembles the chimney of the ‘I’ in ‘I and My  Chimney’”49). The severed head of the whale appears, in the closing pages  of Szendy’s reading, as the surprising figure for a counter-Hobbesean, radically textualized  practice of reading that Melville’s novel calls for and exemplifies. “So, for  Ishmael as for ‘I’ (I, me), it is in this revolutionary gesture that cuts into the crowning of the all that a space opens where reading is without end: without heading, without head. Promised  or delivered unto prosthetic and prophetic rereadings that remain always to come.”50  Is the prosthesis “inflated” or “prophetic”? And shouldn’t we be given pause by  Szendy’s correlation of a “revolutionary” opening onto “prosthetic and prophetic rereadings … to come”  with the work of beheading whales? At such moments, Szendy, like Ishmael, risks identifying too closely with Ahab himself. Confusing the work of (politically or literally) killing the king with the work of producing a community of equals, liberal political philosophy also betrays a desperate desire to rid itself of the prosthesis of sovereignty, the supplement of artifice. The monomaniacal Ahab’s lethal fury at Moby Dick figures the preoccupation with a tyrannical sovereignty that defines republican (later whig or liberal) political ideology. It’s not Melville, in other words, but Ahab who is at war with Hobbes. And that, surely, is why it is not the decapitated whale that Melville triumphantly holds up before our eyes at the end of Moby-Dick but the sociopathic and doomed Captain Ahab, taken down by a whale that refuses to be hooked by a covenant—by what Ahab calls the “indissoluble league”—crafted to effect death: “Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!”51 Ahab’s nihilistic humanism, I would suggest, feeds a hostility toward Moby Dick (the whale) that rehearses three centuries of liberal opposition to the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. By referring to Moby Dick as a “monster” on multiple occasions throughout Moby-Dick, Ishmael recalls one of Hobbes’s most enduring epithets. As Samuel Mintz writes, in his 1962 study of Hobbes’s reception in England, The Hunting of Leviathan:

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Hobbes was the bête noire of his age. The principal objection to him, the one to which all other criticisms of him can ultimately be reduced, was that he was an atheist. He was the “Monster of Malmesbury,” the arch-atheist, the apostle of infidelity, the “bug-bear of the nation.” His doctrines were cited by Parliament as a probable cause of the Great Fire of 1666. His books were banned and publicly burnt, and the ideas which Hobbes expressed in them in his lucid and potent style were the object of more or less continuous hostile criticism from 1650 to 170052

The slippage between Thomas Hobbes, the figure of the tyrant monarch, and the inscrutably malignant sperm whale in the passage from 1650 to 1850 to 2004 deserves to be scrutinized as part of a general investigation into the philosophy of monstrosity and the abjecting of the “animal,” the prosthetic and the supplementary within a liberal humanist political tradition.53 Melville approaches this question by depicting and dissecting both what Ishmael calls “Ahab’s quenchless feud” with the white whale and his own more philosophical struggle with the peculiar ontology of “whiteness.”54 But before looking at Ishmael’s response in more detail, we should clarify what we mean by saying that Ahab is at war with Hobbes, or with something that we might identify with Hobbesean thought. Which is also to proceed by asking a deceptively simple question: what exactly is it that Ahab is furious about?

III On a previous voyage, Ahab and his fellow hunters had tried to kill Moby Dick only to have their small boats staved by this famously “malicious” sperm whale. His crew scattered over the surface of the sea, “oars and men both whirling in the eddies,” Ahab lunged at Moby Dick with a six-inch blade, “as an Arkansas duellist at his foe.”55 Then it was, apparently, that Moby Dick swept his sickle-shaped lower jaw beneath him and “reaped away Ahab’s leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field.”56 Starbuck, however, isn’t persuaded. “Vengeance on a dumb brute that simply smote thee from blindest instinct!”57 Starbuck has heard the rumors. Whalers, more prone than most sailors to dramatic embellishment, have circulated accounts of calculated violence and revenge among the creatures they hunt, and Moby Dick has, in some sense, become the individual personification of this spirit of resistance. Some whale hunters, Ishmael tells us, “were content to ascribe the peculiar terror [Moby Dick] bred, more, as it were, to the perils of the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual cause.”58 But others perpetuated the idea that one whale above all others was to blame for the danger of the profession: No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere transit over the widest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale did in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything that visibly appears.59

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If Moby Dick becomes the individual bearer of all the danger associated with the work of hunting whales, Ahab becomes the preeminent bearer of all the fury felt by these whalers and more: “Ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations.”60 Ahab is a furious Job who decides to pursue God (or God’s oceanic lieutenant), as he would the Sun “should it insult me.”61 But this doesn’t quite account for the peculiarity of Ahab’s anger, which is so intimately bound up with the whale’s nonhuman being and hence with the special kind of insubordination his attack represents. Why was Ahab so completely undone by the prospect of the whale’s resistance if it was not because that resistance also forced a certain equality upon Ahab and the whale. Ahab’s tormentor, in other words, had failed to read Kant’s “Conjectural Beginning of Human History.” In his 1786 essay, Kant revises a biblical scene (Genesis 3:21) and ventriloquizes early man coming into reason via a preposterous speech act: “The first time he said to the sheep: Nature has given you the skin you wear not for you but for me, then took it off the sheep and put it on himself … he became aware of a prerogative that he had by his nature over all animals …”62 Addressing the sheep, Kant’s Adam combines Starbuck’s commercial practicality (“I am here in this critical ocean to kill whales for my living, and not to be killed by them for theirs,” says the first mate of the Pequod63) with Ahab’s “mad” determination to address Moby Dick as a being capable of intentional malice (“I see in him outrageous strength,” Ahab tells Starbuck, “with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate”64). Human history, we might say, begins with this scene between Ahab, Starbuck, and Moby Dick. And it will not end well for at least two of them. To ask why Ahab seeks vengeance on Moby Dick is akin to asking why Kant’s theoretical early man speaks to the animal he is about to shear. These archetypal humanists (Kant’s Adam, Melville’s Ahab) demonstrate, despite themselves, exposure to Morton’s “ecological thought”—a “coexistentialism” that precipitates environmental deconstruction. For Ahab, of course, this opening up coincides with a wound he can’t forgive and a breach that will eventually sink the Pequod. The ecological thought, Melville’s novel suggests, can be hard to distinguish (for the liberal humanist) from a “humanitarian” disaster and from the kind of conceptual disaster that haunts Kant’s early man. It is not so much the threat of a reply from the “animal” (whether that reply takes the form of a rights claim or a headlong charge) that ruins Adam’s speech from within as it is the originary “madness” of its own desire to speak to the other (the other as “animal”) in order to tell this other that it does not have language. Morton’s ecological thought, lurking in Adam’s address, comes up against the violence of a humanism that, detouring through the “animal” other, recoils upon itself (to recall Billy Budd) with all the force and terror of an inscrutable malice. Ahab seeks vengeance on the white whale not for causing but for bearing witness to this humiliation. Insofar as Moby-Dick (the novel) narrates a specifically humanist disaster (allegorized as Ahab’s madness and the Pequod’s destruction), it departs from a Kantian paradigm and gestures toward another way of thinking that I am associating

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(not exclusively, of course) with the political philosophy of Hobbes’s Leviathan.65 To make this point clearer, it might help to stick with Kant for a little longer, and specifically with a certain anti-Hobbesean Kant. There is one other brief reference to Hobbes in Melville’s oeuvre, and it takes place in Book XIX of Pierre, “The Church of the Apostles” when Pierre is describing the artists, indigent students, fugitive French politicians and German philosophers who live in the old Church in the “lower, old-fashioned part of the city”: Their mental tendencies, however heterodox at times, are still very fine and spiritual upon the whole; since the vacuity of their exchequers leads them to reject the coarse materialism of Hobbes, and incline to the airy exaltations of the Berkleyan philosophy. Often groping in vain in their pockets, they cannot but give in to the Descartian vortices; while the abundance of leisure in their stomachs, to fit them in an eminent degree for that undivided attention indispensable to the proper digesting of the sublimated Categories of Kant; especially as Kant (can’t) is the one great palpable fact in their pervadingly impalpable lives.66

It would be a mistake to make too much of this passage. Melville is just displaying his characteristically irreverent (almost silly) wit here (like Hobbes, as Aubrey reports, Melville frequently indulged in a “pleasant facetiousness”). But he’s usually smart with his humor too, and he knows that rejections of Hobbes often participated in an effort to disavow or wish away material reality in favor of a philosophy that, in Melville’s formulation, resembles nothing so much as an empty stomach. There’s a more serious version of this implicit argument between Hobbes and Kant and it takes place, albeit one-sidedly, in Kant’s 1793 essay “On the common saying: that may be correct in theory, but it is of no use in practice.”67 This essay is useful for thinking about Ahab’s preoccupation with the white whale, because here again, much turns for Kant on the relation between the human and the animal. The second section of “On the Common Saying …” is entitled “On the relation of theory to practice in the right of a state.” And it has a subtitle: “Against Hobbes.” Here, Kant articulates three a priori principles for the “civil condition”: 1. The freedom of every member of the society as a human being. 2. His equality with every other as a subject. 3. The independence of every member of a commonwealth as a citizen.68

Kant then expands upon each one of these principles in turn, and in each case, the principle is tied very explicitly to the exceptionality of the human, the adult, and the male. The right of freedom, he says “belongs to [“everyone in a state (its head not excepted)”] … as a human being namely insofar as he is a being that is, as such, capable of rights.”69 And with respect to equality, the member of a commonwealth “cannot, by means of any rightful deed (whether his own or another’s) cease to be in rightful possession of himself and enter the class of domestic animals, which are used for any service as one wants and are kept in it without their consent as long as one

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wants, even though with the restriction (sometimes sanctioned by religion, as with the Indians) not to maim or kill them.”70 And in the section on independence, Kant writes of the citizen (i.e., the member of the commonwealth who has the right to vote): “The quality requisite to this,” he explains, “apart from the natural one (of not being a child or a woman), is only that of being one’s own master (sui iuris), hence having some property …”71 What strikes us now, of course, is that these a priori conditions for the commonwealth do not, as Kant implies, describe a set of natural, pre-political conditions necessary for constructing a civic order. Rather, they describe a particular and pre-existing form of political order. Thus, Kant suggests that there is no need for a group of men meeting these criteria to actually have come together at a certain point in time (in “practice”) in order to found the state (rather, it is only important that they could have done so, “in theory”). The idea of the theoretical possibility of this a priori founding collective coming together is useful Kant says, because it will guide legislators in the exercise of their duty. What Kant calls “an idea of reason” will “bind every legislator to give his laws in such a way that they could have arisen from the united will of a whole people and to regard each subject, insofar as he wants to be a citizen, as if he has joined in voting for such a will.”72 Why does Kant write this section of his essay “Against Hobbes”? There are moments when Kant sounds very Hobbesean, particularly when describing the limits upon resistance to the legislator’s power to decide (“even if that power or its agent, the head of state, has gone so far as to violate the original contract and has thereby, according to the subjects’ concept, forfeited the right to be legislator inasmuch as he has empowered the government to proceed quite violently (tyrannically), a subject is still not permitted any resistance by way of counteracting force”73). But Kant writes “against Hobbes” because he won’t give up on his a priori conditions for contractual political order.74 If it is not possible to say that a pre-contractual right (a “natural right” belonging to the human—to the male? To the adult?) commands the respect of reason, says Kant, then the whole game is up: If there is not something that through reason compels immediate respect (such as the right of human beings), then all influences on the choice of human beings are incapable of restraining their freedom; but if, alongside benevolence, right speaks out loudly, human nature does not show itself too depraved to listen deferentially to its voice.75

Kant closes his discussion “Against Hobbes” with these lines and with a Latin quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid: “Tum pietate gravem meritisque si forte virum quem Conspexere, silent arrectisque auribus adstant,” which the Cambridge edition translates in this way: “If they catch sight of a man respected for his virtue and services, they are silent and stand close with ears alert” (Virgil, Aeneid I. 151–2).76 Kant invokes this scene from Virgil as a little allegory of “human nature” demonstrating its capacity not to be “too depraved to listen deferentially” to the voice of “right.” Human nature, a kind of animal within, stands close with ears “alert.” In Virgil’s original, however, it is not just an abstract human nature that exhibits this deference to right. It is the “common

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rabble” who “rage with passion” when “violent rebellion breaks out in a great nation” and who calm down in the presence of “a great man of virtue.”77 Women, children, nonhuman animals, and the common rabble, all stand with ears alert, barely containing their tendency to depravity, when Right or reason (a priori principles) that cannot but be encoded as male, adult, propertied, “speak out loudly.” “Against Hobbes” positions the author of Leviathan, therefore, among the bad animals—the monsters who won’t close their mouths and prick up their ears before right reason. Maybe, like a certain sea creature, this monster of Malmesbury does not even have any ears to prick up? And he might not only disrespect this “great man of virtue”—he might turn on him (philosophically speaking) and maliciously attack him. Like a rogue. Like a dumb beast. Like a white whale.

IV Ishmael is drawn into Ahab’s orbit of hate because he is still shaped by (even as he questions) humanist assumptions from which he will only gradually (or violently) be weaned. If Ahab is the face of what Cesare Casarino calls a “humanist nihilism,” Ishmael seems at least capable of pondering the source of that nihilism and the logic of Ahab’s self-defeating hatred.78 Ishmael’s whale voyage pursues a partial departure from the pattern of aggression (self-directed and externalized) that had plagued him on land, but it also seems to afford him an opportunity for philosophical reflection, most pointedly in the great chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale.” “What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted,” Ishmael writes at the opening of ch.  42; “what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.”79 His explication comes to focus all its analytic attention on Moby Dick’s distinctive appearance and on the matter and concept of a whiteness that is irreducibly duplicitous. “In essence,” Ishmael writes, “whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors.”80 White is “the colorless, all color of atheism,” and hence, “the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of [Nature’s] hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself.”81 From the fiat lux of Genesis, to Plato’s sun to the enlightenment’s privileged figure for human intellectual superiority, what Ishmael calls the “great principle of light” has guided and reassured us. But the peculiar whiteness of this whale, Ishmael says, prompts another line of thought, one that culminates in a “thought of annihilation” and a shadowing forth of “the heartless voids and immensities of the universe.”82 Ishmael identifies a humanist crisis of meaning with whiteness—“the colorless all color of atheism”—and hence a dizzying opening onto a proto-deconstructive, proto-post-humanist (or ecological) thought. What if light, left to operate “without medium upon matter,” were destructive of difference and identity and meaning? What if all that we love in the colors of “sunset skies and woods … butterflies and … butterfly cheeks” was “not actually inherent in substances” but “laid on from without”? The thought (is it nihilistic? Or radically egalitarian?) prompts a familiar, quasi-misogynist humanist panic: what if there is

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no presence that is not a re-presentation? What if the butterfly cheeks of young girls are really the painted cheeks of the harlot (“whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel house within”)?83 Strikingly, Hobbes begins his Leviathan with a very similar moment of insight, albeit delivered with less panic. “Concerning the Thoughts of man,” Hobbes writes in ch.  1, “Of Sense,” “they are every one a Representation or Appearance, of some quality, or other Accident of a body without us.”84 Seeing, he goes on, is the product of a “mediation of Nerves … continued inwards to the Brain,” which there causes a “resistance, or counter-pressure, or endeavor … which endeavor because Outward, seemeth to be some matter without. And this seeming, or fancy, is that which men call Sense; and consisteth, as to the Eye, in a Light.”85 The point, for Hobbes (and he suggests that he has a reason for prefacing his political philosophy with this apparent digression), is that no matter what we may imagine, the colors we see (like the sounds we hear) are not “inherent in substances”: “And though at some certain distance, the reall, and very object seem invested with the fancy it begets in us; Yet still the object is one thing, the image or fancy is another. So that Sense in all cases, is nothing els but original fancy …”86 Hobbes was not stating the obvious. In fact, in addition to introducing the concept of representation that will continue to be vital to his theory of the commonwealth, this passage also allows Hobbes to assert an early distance between his thought and that of the “Philosophy-schooles, through all the Universities of Christendome, grounded upon certain Texts of Aristotle,” which “teach another doctrine; and say, For the cause of Vision, that the thing seen, sendeth forth on every side a visible species (in English) a visible shew, apparition, or aspect, or a being seen; the receiving whereof into the Eye, is Seeing.” Indeed, he adds, barely containing his contempt, these thinkers take this logic a step further: “Nay for the cause of Understanding also, they say the thing Understood sendeth forth intelligible species, that is, an intelligible being seen; which comming into the Understanding, makes us Understand.”87 If Ishmael is temporarily blinded, or blindsided, by the idea that our vision of the world is a necessarily mediated vision, Hobbes is impatient with any suggestion that it is not. The “intelligible species” of neo-Aristotelian fantasy anticipate the immortal souls conjured by the church in Rome to justify their own powers of exorcism and forgiveness. Objects seem invested with the “fancy” they beget in us, says Hobbes, but to turn that seeming into a science is to disavow the play of force and representation in the construction of a meaningful, sensible world. The world “presseth” itself upon us, says Hobbes, and our various sensory organs “presseth” themselves upon each other, producing the “Representation or Appearance” of thought.88 “Neither in us that are pressed, are there anything else, but divers motions; (for motion produceth nothing but motion).”89 Hobbes’s brief but compelling discussion of the senses at the opening of Leviathan, in other words, anticipates the claims of historical materialism and provides an astute allegory of the irreducibility of the political. For Ishmael, the colorless all color of white and light prompts, as we have seen, thoughts of death and emptiness. His response, at such moments, suggests the influence of Hobbes’s disparaged “schoolmen,” or anticipates certain hyperbolic

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responses (in our own time) to the Derridean deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence. But as such, Ishmael’s panic also reminds us that Hobbes intended a forceful connection between his discussion of the senses and his political philosophy. One of the most disturbing aspects of Hobbes’s account of the “state of nature” was its suggestion (as Jefferson and many others noted) that human kind may not be intrinsically either good or bad and that, indeed, justice and injustice may not have any “inherent” meaning prior to something like the (mediation of the) social. “To this warre of every man against every man, this also is consequent,” writes Hobbes in ch. 13 of Leviathan; “that nothing can be Unjust.” He continues: The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law: where no Law, no Injustice. Force and Fraud are, in warre the two Cardinall vertues. Justice, and Injustice are none of the Faculties neither of the Body, nor Mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his Senses, and Passions. They are Qualities, that relate to men in Society, not in Solitude.90

The figure at the center of this remarkable passage, the solitary person, alone in the world, bereft of any relationship to the just or the unjust, was recognized by those who actually read Hobbes as a frighteningly atheistical and, as we might now say, deconstructive figure.91 Something like the condition of this solitary figure flashes upon Ishmael when he contemplates the whiteness of the whale or “the white depths of the milky way.”92 The “palsied universe” lies before him and “the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him.”93 It is not injustice or war or the malice of the white whale that provokes Ishmael’s ethical and epistemological crisis: it is the “whiteness” of a condition in which “nothing can be unjust.” Ahab goes to war (and Ishmael confesses to joining him) with this very idea as it appears to him incarnate in “the animal”—and in this animal: “of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?”94 For Hobbes, as we have already noted, such reflections on the contingency of justice and morality are indissociable from an account of social organization that is repeatedly ignored in condemnations of his political philosophy. The power that Hobbes invokes here and throughout Leviathan, the power to performatively generate law and justice, is “common Power”; and the ethical figure he refuses is that of the solitary, just individual. There is no justice (and no injustice) outside of the social, said Hobbes, and this, as much as anything he said, terrified and disarmed hosts of readers from his day to ours.95 One of the great achievements of Moby-Dick is to bind this Hobbesean insight into the relationship between sociality (or what Timothy Morton might call the “mesh” of interconnectedness) and justice to the figure of a defiantly nonhuman (non-anthropomorphized) sperm whale. It is not just whiteness, in other words, that threatens to undo the humanist subject; it is all that goes under the name of the nonhuman, the animal, the non-sentient world of matter and waste and finitude. It is the “artificial soul” of the non human other that threatens

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the humanist subject with “annihilation”; but an “artificial” sovereign soul is also what Hobbes claims for his Commonwealth. Moby Dick, to put the point in its most direct form, confronts Ahab and Ishmael with the ecological force of Hobbesian and (as I have been suggesting) democratic sovereignty.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford (New York: Norton, 2002), 103. Ibid., 103–4. Nancy Fredericks declares that “a class-conscious, almost mystical, egalitarianism fuels the democratic thrust of Melville’s art.” Melville’s Art of Democracy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 11. Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006), 44. Ibid., 49. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 7. For a fascinating discussion of the mystical and scriptural background to Hobbes’s enigmatic title, see Noel Malcolm, “The Name and Nature of Leviathan: Political Symbolism and Biblical Exegesis,” Intellectual History Review 17 (2007): 21–39. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 9. When we think the ecological thought, we encounter all kinds of beings that are not strictly “natural.” … The ecological view to come … is a vast, sprawling mesh of interconnection without a definite center or edge. It is radical intimacy, coexistence with other beings, sentient and otherwise—and how can we so clearly tell the difference? The ecological thought fans out into questions concerning cyborgs, artificial intelligence, and the irreducible uncertainty over what counts as a person. (Morton, The Ecological Thought, 8)

9 Hobbes, Leviathan, 121. 10 Ibid., 155–56. 11 In the Politics, Aristotle writes: Now, that man is more of a political animal than bees or any other gregarious animals is evident. Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal whom she has endowed with the gift of speech. And whereas mere voice is but an indication of pleasure or pain, and is therefore found in other animals (for their nature attains to the perception of pleasure and pain and the intimation of them to one another, and no further), the power of speech is intended to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and the unjust. And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state. (Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T.A. Sinclair [New York: Penguin, 1992], 60)

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Note, by way of comparison, Hobbes’s unorthodox reference to an animal’s “natural right” to kill a man in Book VIII of De Cive. See, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck, and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 105–6. Richard Tuck suggests that “[this] whole paragraph draws an interesting parallel between our treatment of men and of animals, admitting that to some extent they may be admitted into the circle of beings whom we minimally respect.” Richard Tuck, Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 132 n.66. 12 Hobbes, Leviathan, 431. 13 Ibid., 120. 14 These are the closing words of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.” Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” in Collected Essays and Poems, ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell (New York: Library of America, 2007), 224. 15 Peter Szendy, Prophecies of Leviathan: Reading Past Melville (New York: Fordham, 2010), 89. Szendy calls Moby-Dick “the Leviathan-text” because, “like the whale, it encloses and contains all” (Ibid., 44). Szendy also writes of the “leviathanic attribute” of textuality (and of this text in particular): it is a “self-tearing” self-interrupting text structured as prophecy and prosthetic (Ibid., 78). 16 Ibid., 89. 17 “To haunt does not mean to be present,” writes Derrida, “and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration.” Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 161. Morton also refers to the ecological thought as (using a phrase from Shelley’s Defence of Poetry) a “shadow from the future” (Morton, The Ecological Thought, 2). 18 Szendy, Prophecies, 90. 19 See my Hobbes, Sovereignty, and Early American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 20 For an entertaining account of the immediate response to Hobbes, see Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996 [Reprint of 1962 Cambridge University Press edition]). 21 Karl Marx, “The Communist Manifesto,” in Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) 245–71, 245. 22 A Judge of the King’s Bench told Hobbes’s first biographer that “notwithstanding his great travels, conversation, learning, etc., yet he spoke broad Devonshire to his dying day.” John Aubrey, “Thomas Hobbes,” in Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898) http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/econ/ ugcm/3ll3/hobbes/life. 23 Despite Melville’s apparent familiarity with Hobbes’s writing, Hobbes does not figure in Merton M. Sealts’ “Checklist of Books Owned and Borrowed,” in Melville’s Reading: Revised and Enlarged Edition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988). References to Hobbes in the scholarship on Melville are scanty: William Braswell suggested, in 1943, that Melville’s interest in Hobbes was a sign of the

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author’s growing pessimism. Melville’s Religious Thought (Durham: Duke University Press, 1943), 13; Leon Harold Craig suggests, without elaborating, that others have “greatly underestimate[d] Hobbes’s importance for Melville.” The Platonian Leviathan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 37, n.17; and Laurie Robertson-Lorant, discussing Melville’s time aboard the Australian whaler Lucy Ann, mentions his respect for the ship’s steward, John B. Troy (a model, perhaps, for Omoo’s Long Ghost): “This erudite and waggish ‘tower of bones’ could quote Virgil, recite canto after canto of Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, and debate the political ideas of Thomas Hobbes.” Melville: A Biography (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 112. Only one reference to Hobbes appears in the Melville Marginalia project database. Melville had marked and annotated an 1872 edition of Aristotle’s Rhetoric that included Hobbes’s commentary. Melville’s Marginalia Online, ed. Peter Norberg Steven, and Dennis C. Marnon (Boise State University) http://melvillesmarginalia. org/browser.php?let=a (accessed December 14, 2015). 24 Herman Melville, Israel Potter, His Fifty Years of Exile, ed. Harrison Hayford et al. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1982), 46. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 46–47. 28 John Adams, “Letter to John Quincy Adams, August 11, 1777,” in The Adams Papers Digital Edition, ed. C. James Taylor (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2008) http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/ADMS-04-02-02-02470007-0001 (accessed March 22, 2016). 29 Melville, Moby-Dick, 10. 30 Szendy, Prophecies, 87. 31 Melville, Moby-Dick, 427. 32 Szendy, Prophecies, 89. 33 Hobbes, Leviathan, 9. 34 Szendy, Prophecies, 89. Szendy, intriguingly, compares the “homunculi” that make up the body of Leviathan on Hobbes’s famous frontispiece with the livid faces that appear on the white paper at the end of Melville’s “The Tartarus of Maids.” Melville had previously referred to the immense mechanical apparatus of the paper mill to Behemoth which, as Szendy points out, was Hobbes’s counter-figure to Leviathan—a figure for “anarchy or revolution” (Ibid., 90). The faces on Melville’s paper, moreover, appear “frontally,” Szendy suggests, and “without forming any configuration that would gather or subsume them.” They “float,” he adds, “drifting” (Ibid., 90). In other words, I would suggest, these faces at the end of “The Tartarus of Maids” come closer to recalling the frontispiece to the edition of Leviathan that Hobbes presented to Charles II in exile. For useful discussions of the frontispiece, see Keith Brown, “The Artist of the Leviathan Title-Page,” British Library Journal 4.1 (1978): 24–36; and, Horst Bredekamp, “Thomas Hobbes’s Visual Strategies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 29–60. 35 Szendy, Prophecies, 88. 36 Melville, Moby-Dick, 116. 37 Ibid.

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38 Szendy, Prophecies, 92. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Hobbes, Leviathan, 120. 42 Ibid., 122. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 121. 46 Ibid., 89. 47 Ibid., 9. 48 Alexander Hamilton, “The Farmer Refuted,” in the Papers of Alexander Hamilton, vol. 1, ed. Harold C. Syrett et al., 26 vols (New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1961–79), 86–87. 49 Szendy, Prophecies, 92. 50 Ibid., 93. 51 Melville, Moby-Dick, 142. 52 Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan, vii. Jon Parkin’s Taming the Leviathan documents the largely negative response to Hobbes’s masterpiece in seventeenth-century England. “And yet as in the man,” wrote Bishop Brian Duppa, “so there ar strange mixtures in the book; many things said so well that I could embrace him for it, and many things so wildly and unchristianly, that I can scarce have so much charity for him, as to think he was ever Christian.” Taming the Leviathan: The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 99. Melville’s great novel, as is well known, met with a similar reception: most reviewers dismissed it as an “ill-compounded mixture,” or an “absurd book,” and leading American critics condemned its “profanity and indecency”: “The Judgment day will hold him liable,” said the New York Independent in November of 1852. See the reviews collected in Parker and Hayford’s Norton critical edition of Moby-Dick. 53 “[The future] can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity.” Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 5. 54 Melville, Moby-Dick, 152. 55 Ibid., 156. 56 Ibid. 57 “To be enraged with a dumb thing,” Starbuck continues, “seems blasphemous” (Melville, Moby-Dick, 139). 58 Ibid., 152. 59 Ibid., 153. 60 Ibid., 156. 61 Ibid., 140. 62 Immanuel Kant, “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” in Anthropology, History, and Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 167. 63 Melville, Moby-Dick, 103. 64 Ibid., 140.

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65 In a lengthy “Afterword” to Szendy’s Prophecies of Leviathan, Gil Anidjar identifies a critical relationship to Kant in both Szendy and Melville. Kant’s Copernican revolution is effected “in terms that produce a recentering in the knowing subject (rather than the decentering of that subject).” “Afterword: Ipsology (Selves of Peter Szendy),” in Prophecies of Leviathan: Reading Past Melville, ed. Peter Szendy (New York: Fordham, 2010), 96–128, 137 n.6. My suggestion is that a critical, post-Kantian approach to the subject might also benefit from a reconsideration of Hobbes’s Leviathan. 66 Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford et al. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1971), 267. Sealts reads this passage as Melville’s satire of the “lesser American transcendentalists.” Pursuing Melville, 1940–1980: Chapters and Essays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 5. See too, of course, ch. 73 of Moby-Dick, which ends with the unforgettable image of two decapitated whale heads hoisted from either side of a whale ship: “So, when on one side you hoist in Locke’s head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! Throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right” (Melville, Moby-Dick, 261). 67 Kant’s essay was published in September 1793 in the journal Berlinische Monatsschrift. Page numbers will hereafter be cited from the Cambridge edition: “On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, but It Is of No Use in Practice,” in Immanuel Kant: Political Philosophy, ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 273–310. 68 Ibid., 291. 69 Ibid., 292. 70 Ibid., 294. 71 Ibid., 295. 72 Ibid., 296–97. 73 Ibid., 298. 74 According to Howard Williams, Kant’s essay is a response to those who were turning against the French Revolution in the wake of the execution of the King and the increasing revolutionary violence (the Terror). For Kant, Williams says, Hobbes was a more worthy spokesperson for the conservative position. “For Kant, Hobbes’s system was an essential starting point in political theory.” Howard Williams, Kant’s Critique of Hobbes: Sovereignty and Cosmopolitanism (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), 11 n.25. Hobbes (unlike Pufendorf), was someone whose “paradoxical” thought had produced what Kant called “writing where genius reigns.” See Williams, Kant’s Critique of Hobbes, 10 and 10 n.24. 75 Kant, “On the common saying,” 304. 76 Ibid. 77 Virgil, Aenied. Trans. Frederick Ahl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), I. 147–48. 78 Cesare Casarino, Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 108. 79 Melville, Moby-Dick, 159. 80 Ibid., 165.

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81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84 Hobbes, Leviathan, 13. 85 Ibid., 13–14. 86 Ibid., 14. Hobbes makes this point at some length: “For if those Colours, and Sounds, were in the Bodies, or Objects that cause them, they could not be severed from them, as by glasses, and in Ecchoes by reflection, wee see they are; where we know the thing we see, is in one place; the appearance, in another” (Ibid.). 87 Hobbes, Leviathan. Hobbes’s next sentence, with which he closes ch. 1, is a hilarious example of what Aubrey referred to as his “facetious wit” (and which, surely, sounds as much like Melville as anyone): “I say not this, as disapproving the use of Universities: but because I am to speak hereafter of their office in a Common-wealth, I must let you see on all occasions by the way, what things would be amended in them; amongst which the frequency of insignificant Speech is one” (Ibid.). 88 Hobbes, Leviathan, 13. 89 Ibid., 14. 90 Ibid., 90. 91 Compare here Branka Arsić’s discussion of the motif of whiteness in Passive Constitutions, or, 71/2 Times Bartleby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 100. See too, Arsić’s discussion of Ahab’s paradoxical attempt at self-affirmation and Ishmael’s struggle with “that failed contrivance called self ” (Ibid., 87). 92 Melville, Moby-Dick, 165. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid. 95 See, too, Casarino’s dense Marxist take on this whiteness. “What horrifies Ishmael, in other words, is not that white power is violent and absolute and meaningless and valueless, but that one day it may finally collapse, thus leaving the door open to as yet unimaginable historical possibilities” (Casarino, Modernity at Sea, 94–95). These “possibilities” include, for Casarino, communist revolution. My reading suggests, instead, that the democratic revolution inheres in the groundlessness of that whiteness, not simply in the possibility of its serving as a violent precursor to a fully present and self-present communist social meaning to come. Ishmael’s meditation on whiteness explains Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit of Moby Dick as a determination to phenomenalize (and thus do battle with) what Derrida, in Specters of Marx, calls the “hauntological” (Derrida, Specters, 161). “The ‘mystical character’ of the commodity,” writes Derrida, “is inscribed before being inscribed, traced before being written out letter for letter on the forehead or the screen of the commodity. Everything begins before it begins.” Hence, the ghost of exchange value haunts use value in advance, “having already hollowed out in use-value, in the hardheaded wood of the headstrong table, the repetition (therefore, substitution, exchangeability, iterability, the loss of singularity as the experience of singularity itself, the possibility of capital) without which a use value could never even be determined” (Ibid.). A marxist approach to Moby Dick would thus also have to think through the relationship between the concept of the proletariat and Morton’s ecological thought, between human labor and the sperm whale as objects of capitalist appropriation.

14

Bartleby’s Screen Colin Dayan

Bartleby holds or occupies space. He sits behind a folding screen, stands in a dead wall reverie, and remains so physical that he stands before the other clerks as an unwelcome tenant, an idler who has nonetheless laid claim to property. Though supremely embodied, a ruined column or an object whose sound behind the screen is most like the scrape of his chair, he takes on all the qualities of a phantom. Both chattel and real estate, movable and immovable, material and immaterial, affixed to the office as if part of its very walls, Bartleby reveals something about the ends of the law, once returned to the claims of spirit. What happens to the person who exists in dialogue with walls? Who stands only to bear witness to his own incapacitation? In self-willed ascesis, Bartleby stands forth as if a monk, a body worked up into spirit, a ghost of impairment that becomes the host of plenitude. What is the meaning of the portable green screen, first put up by the narrator so that he can command as if a disembodied voice, and then removed, leaving Bartleby the motionless occupant of a room? In this time of unrelenting taxonomies, when persons became things—either perishables in the market or fixtures on land—and where felons died in law but lived in fact, Bartleby stands at the limit screen or chancel of these categories, destabilizing the definitions crucial not only to property in slaves but to the regulatory beneficence of civil society. What first seems phantasmagoric is locked into a nature lived as a spectacle of servitude and possession. What we turned into ghosts originated in the legal language of property and persons. These juridical inventions, once summoned in the name of order and civility, were presented as the most natural, the most reasonable things in the world. As I move through these habitats of law’s creatures, I offer grounds for the gothic, a hybrid place into which are seeded legal fictions, spiritual beliefs, and historical fragments. The very notions of character, metaphor, and motive are there transfigured.

A preliminary version of this paper was delivered as part of “New Directions in American Literary and Cultural Studies,” March 7–8, 2008. I thank Deak Nabers for his invitation. I am grateful to the anonymous readers for the acuity and wit of their comments and suggestions, and to Samuel Otter for his generous midwifery during the long gestation and final delivery of this article, which forms part of a larger project, Melville’s Creatures. Faith Barter and Petal Samuel, my research assistants at Vanderbilt, read the manuscript as it neared publication and provided incomparable expertise.

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In 1819, when he publically declared for the complete eradication of slavery from the territories, one of his only public stands on a political issue, Judge Joseph Story, riding circuit for the US Supreme Court, wrote to James Kent, who was still sitting in the New York Court of Chancery. He lamented that if he could only “awaken the ardor of the Bar,” he might be able to convince the public of the positive changes promised by courts of chancery.1 For Story, as for Kent, the law had to be given flesh and blood: not only because they both disapproved of legal slavery, what Kent called that “great moral pestilence,” but also because in nineteenth-century America, the law mattered in ways now unthinkable—well, at least until the lurid legal aftermath of 9/11—to shape matters of the heart, to give or annihilate a sense of identity, to transform individuals alternately into legal subjects and legal objects, and most of all, to literalize property as the origin of rights and the rudiments of personhood.2 The business of property and possession informed the darkest tales of an American gothic fable. In nineteenth-century America, the development of romance was linked in unsettling ways to the business of slavery. The tight weave of dependency evoked by women, children, and blacks introduced the rhetoric of incapacity that forced fiction into engagement with the conceits of love and the tallying of hate. The myth of affectionate service, whether domestic affection or domesticized servitude—what Edgar Allan Poe called “affectionate appropriation”—underpinned much of Melville’s fiction, whether we turn to Pierre, a philosophical exercise in degenerate pastoral, to “Benito Cereno” and Delano’s meditations on benign “naked nature” and on Babo and other Negroes as Newfoundland dogs, or to the posthumously published Billy Budd, Sailor, with Melville’s observation that Billy had as much “self-consciousness” as “we may reasonably impute to a dog of Saint Bernard’s breed.”3 We might also turn to Melville’s undoing of Delano’s wistful analogy in The Confidence-Man. Black Guinea’s crippled legs not only give him “the stature of a Newfoundland dog,” but his “knotted black fleece” quite literally embodies Delano’s icon of “good-natured, honest” affection.4 Not only did Melville find himself in law, he created identities most recognizable in law. Yet he also revealed something ghostly about the law. I take “Bartleby, the Scrivener” as exemplum—that crucible of human materials that has fascinated writers as diverse as Giorgio Agamben, Branka Arsić, Giles Deleuze, Barbara Foley, Elizabeth Hardwick, Leo Marx, Hershel Parker, and John Carlos Rowe. As shadow text to Emmanuel Lévinas’s essay “Freedom and Command,” Melville’s character forces a meditation on the matter of servility and its amalgam of “supreme violence” and “supreme gentleness.”5 But I am getting ahead of my story about this creature that both is and is not “of law.” My greatest concern in the present context is the spectacle of law moving from a situation in a structure of norms and rights to a stern logic of incapacitation, historically situated and rhetorically persuasive. I use the term law generally here and assume throughout that Melville knew Blackstone’s Commentaries, which appeared in America in 1771–72, and according to Edmund Burke, reporting to the House of Commons in 1775, sold almost as many copies as in all of England. What edition of Blackstone Melville used is not established, but if he did not own a copy himself,

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he certainly had access to it in the library of his brother Allan, who practiced law on Wall Street, or in that of his father-in-law Judge Lemuel Shaw. His familiarity with Blackstone on precedent, personhood, and the absolute and unequivocal right of property is most suggestive in Moby-Dick, though digressions on the vagaries of dominium and land law undergird the romance of Pierre as well. Melville used his fictions to enter upon that fascinating and elusive relationship between the notions of right and ownership, and upon the world of language in which “property”—what you owned—and “propriety”—what is proper to a person or situation—became interchangeable terms. Melville’s concern with legal practice in “Benito Cereno,” Billy Budd, and “Bartleby,” in particular, has been much discussed, with varying degrees of success, by Robert Cover, Gregg Crane, Tal Kastner, Deak Nabers, Richard Posner, and Brook Thomas. I want, however, to anchor this developing logic of law in a tenuous theme of transubstantiation. For Melville, the mutations generated by legal inquiry recast his fictional endeavors, transforming his writing in a particularly radical way. In these stories, the rules of law return to their origins both in the social realities of property and possession and in the theological complicities between spiritual and earthly. Seen from this point of view, the consequences of law, once exercised in the narrator-lawyer’s office on Wall Street, also suggest alternative ways of seeing body and spirit, and, ultimately, natural and unnatural death. What is legally possible or impossible demands the give-and-take between categories such as public or private, thing or self, physical or incorporeal. “Bartleby” takes place only because such conversion is not possible. The meanings of legal terms such as persons, things, property, and possession are thwarted, held in suspension before Bartleby who stands both as body and spirit, the impeccable icon of matter who is also a ghost. Something strange is happening to the business of property and personhood, and Melville’s story gets us close to the sites of law I will treat. Melville, in making his character suggest a slave, a felon, or the civilly dead non-person, did not intend us to take these terminological trappings straight. Like Bartleby, they float over the text, moving with him from the Dead Letter Office to the law office, to the Tombs or Halls of Justice. But they do not anchor him in his figurative transit through these identities. For in the relation between the narratorlawyer and Bartleby lies a strange exchange, surely nothing less than sacramental in the way it interrupts easy analogy. Terminologies matter. Bartleby instructs his associates in attending to words: whether the meaning of his “preference” or the narrator-lawyer’s “assumption.” In giving a history to his terms and demanding a more precise use of terms than is common practice, Melville recalls to his readers histories that the comforting abstractions of some transcendentalists—those whom Poe called “those thinkers-that-they-think” and Melville, in Pierre, “speculative nutcrackers”—permit to disappear.6 It is to the matter of legal history that I turn. In the dark skepticism of his “Story of Wall Street,” Melville unearths vestiges of antiquated doctrine in the bustle of progress and the promise of business in nineteenth-century America. “Bartleby” produces a body of flesh and blood that can yet house ancient rules that are apt to seem abstract and quite unreal. Melville knows

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that these deposits of history are alive and well in antebellum New York, and they always find new vessels to inhabit. If civil life in the Americas compelled the unconditional maintenance of a servile order, in “Bartleby” Melville returns to that servility, and it resurfaces transmuted. The  raw materials of legal authority and the disenfranchisement of the majority of citizens become the stuff of spiritual life, both extending and changing the experience of “possession” and “divestment” codified in legal narratives. Bartleby not only becomes law’s creature, but Melville labors to show how the “real presence” of his body redefines the nature of incarnation. In returning law to the spirit that gave it birth, Melville raises up a new definition of the sacred in the middle of an office of law. While urging the presence of law as crucial ground for prompting the conditions of spiritual belief, I turn to a tension that must be held in mind between the archaic and the modern. I am interested in considering, with some hesitation, but also persistence, what I call the true colonial sites: the transatlantic domain of punishment and possession, whether legal or sacred. The practice of law—its rules, fictions, and rhetoric—was indispensable to the politics of repression, but only because it traded on the lure of the spirit. In Peter Goodrich’s words, “the substance of law” could never be “conceived as divorced from its spiritual essence.”7 By choosing two sites of dispossession, I want to consider how the commands of written law continued to offer an alternative history to the idea of civil life in nineteenth-century America. In introducing this thesis, I am driven by the insistence that statute and case law were as important as social practice or spiritual belief not only in effecting strategies of exclusion, but also in stimulating literary production. In considering the disabling narratives linked to the legal fiction of civil death and to the law of Southern slavery, I put to the test some of the questions posed by students in a course on literature and the law last year: (1) What are the stakes when we put legal reasoning next to literary fiction? (2) What is it about the idea of personhood in the Americas that not only demanded a unique definition of persons in law, but also redefined the form of fiction? In taking slavery and civil death as exemplary narratives of human impairment, I confront the problematic juxtaposing of civil bodies and legal slaves.8 Though the person declared civilly dead had property to lose in most instances, the slave never had property, was, in fact, property and could never have any relation to property. And yet even this distinction is not quite adequate to our understanding of these alternatives. To put it slightly differently, there are degrees of servility. For a class may stand, as it were, halfway between that of slaves and that of free men. There were the medieval villeins who without being slaves were still unfree men. The English legal historian Frederic William Maitland argued that the modern legal conception of slave in no way clarified whether the servus of the Domesday Book was considered a person, a thing, or neither. Bound to the soil, as were slaves, this “class of men,” though “in a very proper and intelligible sense unfree men,” yet retained civil rights that they could assert in a court of law.9 In the legal discourse of antebellum America, however, the fiction of the “citizen” summoned an even less certain transit between restraint and freedom, capacity and disability.

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When I extend the treatment of persons and property to both legal and literary texts, I am not partial to the usual understanding of that conjunction “law and literature.” I do not take one or the other as standards against which we can work analogy or comparison, for that copulative exercise too neatly leaves law and literature each intact in their separate corners of thought. The analogic bias eschews or rather assuages the collision and conflict so necessary to their historical specificity and political reach. Instead, in urging the presence of law as crucial ground for the formation of consciousness—and further, for prompting the essential conditions of spiritual belief—I turn to the literary text for its rendering of ambiguities that case law will not put forward.10 In the process, I invoke the oscillation between, or alteration of, the categories that bind. In other words, the world I summon here is that in-between place, the standing at the interstices that prods and dismantles the privileged dichotomies of law and life in the Americas: master and servant, person and thing, sacred and profane, and, ultimately, religious and juridical. Perhaps nowhere in the law are the fictions made in its name stranger than in the legal pronouncement of civil death: the state of a person who though possessing natural life has lost all civil rights. Its legal paradoxes, its gothic turns between tangible and intangible, life and death, became necessary to the idiom of disability in the American social order. In a particularly indelible rendition of legal incapacitation, such an archaic and, one might argue, anachronistic fiction depends on the wager that so powerful is the rule of law that one can be dead when alive. The strict form of civil death in the middle ages, compassing most of the attributes of natural death, was limited to three classes of cases: (1) profession, by entering religious orders; (2) abjuration, as when leaving the realm to escape punishment; (3) banishment, having been attainted, permanently banished from the realm. There were three principal consequences to attainder for treason or felony: forfeiture, corruption of blood, and the extinction of civil rights, more or less complete. “He can be reached only through his body, and hence, in cases not capital, whipping is the only punishment which can be inflicted.”11 So wrote Thomas R.R. Cobb of Georgia in An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America (1858), Cobb’s answer to George M. Stroud’s Sketch of the Law Relating to Slavery (1827), which Cobb condemned as an abolitionist pamphlet. The materiality of the slave, like that of the civilly dead felon, links both in their status as unredeemed corporeality. And  yet Cobb also understood that these creatures of law inhabit a uniquely artificial space that presses thingness quite close to the impalpable. Here is Cobb’s description of the birthing of that legal personality called “slave”: When the law, by providing for his proper nourishment and clothing, by enacting penalties against the cruel treatment of his master, by providing for his punishment for crimes, and other similar provisions, recognizes his existence as a person, he is as a child just born, brought for the first time within the pale of the law’s protecting power; his existence as a person being recognized by the law, that existence is protected by the law.12

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Melville’s narrator-lawyer, pondering what to do about Bartleby and how to explain the turn of “pity” into “repulsion,” decides that the scrivener is in the throes of “an innate and incurable disorder.”13 The disease, written as it is in the context of slavery and through the doctrine of innate inferiority, marks the critical turn in “Bartleby.” In a startling confession, the lawyer admits: “I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach.”14 In a society that deemed slaves things denied souls that can be known only through their bodies, Melville gives us Bartleby’s mystery. The disorder is religious and social, a problem in both faith and manners. In this new nation of commodity and propriety, religious terminologies rang counterfeit. For depending on who wielded the definitions, transitions from body to spirit and back again could be easily manipulated. Which entities, after all, were entitled to the constitutional protections afforded persons? How easily the subject of rights could be turned into the object of rights, persons into things. All humans were not afforded the status or rights of persons, and Melville knew it. In this law office where everything can be digested, where anything can be transformed into the acceptable, easily assimilated—as in the narrator-lawyer’s turning of good deeds into digestibles, while hoarding in his soul what might prove, as he admits, “a sweet morsel for my conscience”—Bartleby alone remains indigestible.15 Let us return for a moment to the conjunction between the civilly dead person and the slave who is dead in law. The two end points of disability mark a continuum between unnatural (civil or spiritual) death and natural (actual and physical) death that preserves a peculiarly American preoccupation with bodies and spirits, matter and mind. As Melville knew—that conjunction translates fully into the preoccupations of theology. Recall that like the slave or convicted felon, the monk may be considered “civilly dead.” It is not merely as “a specially holy person but as a property-less and a specially obedient person that the law knows the monk. He has no will of his own (non habet velle, neque nolle), because he is subject to the will of another”: in eternal law, “the divine will.”16 Even if such legal burial for those committed to the spirit did not exist in America, Melville retrieves this other disabling, not for the ostensibly wicked but for the excessively good. In addition to slaves and felons, there is that other legal personality, the person who has chosen to live a life untroubled by worldly affairs, and, as such, has shuffled off not only the rights but also the duties that the law has cast upon him. These fictions were neatly maintained in the law, and I would like to extend them to our reading. A monk cannot acquire any proprietary rights, and in terms of rights and duties, he is overlooked as though he were no longer in the land of the living. But the ghostliness of this entity is always delimited by a very material world. What, one might ask, does all this have to do with “Bartleby,” and the landscape of material constraint that Melville isolates in a law office on Wall Street? Though in nineteenth-century America the rituals of religion, punishment, and enslavement were treated as isolated phenomena, Melville understood that the very terms of civil life depended on keeping intact and conjoined the relation between the many creatures characterized as disabled. For once the human element gets displaced, we

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are dealing with a process of sublimation, either up or down. If the white male, and let us take the narrator-lawyer of “Bartleby” in this role, stands at the center of these ontological maneuvers, can he remain unaffected by the denaturing of those he most depends on? I am claiming a great deal for “Bartleby,” and more for Melville as legal theorist, who uses his characters and scenes not only to interpret the law, but also to say something about the law that lingers, even if apparently exempt from the jurisprudence of the young republic. In the reforming atmosphere of America after the revolution, some held suspect what James Kent called the “venerable remains of the Gothic system” of the common law.17 Jeremy Bentham coined the word “codify” and argued that French civil law could correct the barbaric and uncouth mass, what he called the “gothic tangle,” of English law.18 He became popular in the United States, as he never could have been in England. Yet the old laws, rude and barbarous, recalling the original meaning of “gothic,” maintained a ghostly presence that had real effects: the “dominion of the one and the few” instead of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.”19 Melville returns to the chaos of English common law, digs through the layers, and exhumes its deposits as the working materials of his fiction. One can never be sure if an old law is dead or alive. In “Bartleby,” he examines matters of terminology and queries a legal metaphysics, as well as returning to the ghostly presence of a history captured in the folding screen or cancelleria put up by the lawyer. “The Chancery (cancelleria),” as J. H. Baker notes in An Introduction to English Legal History, “began as the royal secretariat, and took its name from the latticed screen or chancel behind which the clerks worked.”20 Though others have noted the importance of courts of chancery to the story—the narrator is, after all, a Master in Chancery for the State of New York, a position abolished by the time of his writing—I want to examine why it matters that Melville returns to this court of equity or conscience.21 We should understand “Bartleby” to be organized around Melville’s effort to make his scrivener the site of memory, even as he uses him to reveal an entirely new definition of law. Or to put it another way, the figure of Bartleby is a perfect instance of what it would mean to give a body to a legal fiction. For Melville not only returns to the fictions of medieval jurisprudence, he also transports these relics to American soil: not only the ghosts of civil death, but also the material remnants of the courts of chancery, with the screen that becomes central metaphor for the relation between the scrivener and the narrator-lawyer. Whereas the court of chancery, loosely defined, was to afford relief where the courts of common law were incompetent to give it, or to give it with effect, the cancelli, or lattice or railing that the screen provides, becomes the metaphor for the limits or boundary of the rights and remedies of the suppliant. Behind this screen, Melville creates a character that never supplicates, who never asks for relief. Again and again, the narrator-lawyer refers to that space the screen hides as Bartleby’s “hermitage,” as if the corner of constraint had somehow become holy, not a law office but a monastery. Ground glass folding doors divide the office into two parts, one for the narratorlawyer and the other for the scriveners. But when Bartleby arrives, he is granted yet another degree of separation, just as he is serially confined with great deliberation by

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the narrator-lawyer, who devises his office to contain and control the human person called “Bartleby.” Though the ground glass folding doors, dividing his premises into two parts, can be opened and closed as the narrator-lawyer desires, the second screen, put up before Bartleby in order to separate him from the narrator, does not move. Not only is Bartleby put behind this second screen, “a high green folding screen,” but also the narrator has arranged it so that though Bartleby is set apart and removed from his sight, he is ever present to his voice.22 The narrator can command and urge without being seen or seeing the object of his orders. Where does Bartleby sit? Where is he set in this arrangement? In a corner, by the first set of folding doors, and facing the second screen, Bartleby’s desk is placed “close up to a small side-window,” which offers “no view at all, though it gave some light.”23 Actually, Bartleby looks upon a wall some three feet away. In this contentious space, the narrator-lawyer demarcates the office by separating the one who masters and the one who submits. It is the narrator who throws open or closes the first set of doors, who calls the “quiet man,” who places his desk near a wall, and finally, who procures the unmovable folding screen.24 The false conjunction of “privacy and society,” which the narrator comfortably assumes will be produced by the final screen, becomes only one of the calls to order that Bartleby will subvert.25 Published in 1853, a year after Pierre, “Bartleby” moves readers from the law office to the Halls of Justice in a dislocation not unlike the collapse of the greensward of the Glendinning lands into the city streets of New York. Bartleby’s movement becomes an exercise in tautology, once we realize the nature of his uneven tenure. The narrator-lawyer speaks alternately of disenfranchisement and protectionism. Care and guardianship, even the practice of equity, and the concern with conscience, though at first they seem to be the lawyer’s traits, ultimately suggest something more than a benevolent keeper of the kept. Bartleby’s screen reminds us that the narrator’s protestations of good intent and charitable deeds are ruses of beneficence. For like the screen, these postures work the curtailment necessary to keep Bartleby in his place: definitions conducted by the free in the name of the bound. This vanishing ritual sustains the image of liberal right reason needed to satisfy the lawyer’s conscience. Cheap counterfeits, these words are “nothing but superinduced superficies”: hollowed of meaning, vacant as vast, to paraphrase Melville in Pierre, as the soul of man.26 The original of Bartleby’s employer, though sought by critics among Melville’s lawyer relatives—his uncle Peter Gansevoort in Albany, his father-in-law Lemuel Shaw in Boston, or his brothers Gansevoort and Allan in New York—might also be found in the example of Chancellor James Kent, who died in 1848, two years after the office of Chancery was abolished in New York State. James Fenimore Cooper’s last fictional work, the 1850 Ways of the Hour, presents as main character a civilized New York lawyer, a “copy,” Perry Miller claims in The Life of the Mind in America, “of the recently departed James Kent.”27 Miller describes the import of Christian benevolence, a sentimental contrivance that linked the law to things of the heart: “wisdom,” in Kent’s words, “as much the offspring of the heart as of the head.”28 Known as the American Blackstone, the author of the extraordinary Commentaries on American Law (published in 1826, with a seventh edition appearing to great acclaim

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in 1851) may be the original out of which Melville modeled his fake: the bustling and calculating name-dropper, obsessed by money and security, who, in Melville’s words, does “a snug business among rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title-deeds.”29 Yet, as I have noted, the court of chancery, as experienced in American law, not only in New York but also in notable cases in South Carolina, Virginia, and Alabama, became a court of constant resort for claimants to property: the poor and oppressed, who were not recognized in common law, or the powerful. Bills in equity were delivered on behalf of southern slaveholders who wanted to leave their slaves the choice of freedom in testamentary trust or slave-owners claiming that a bill must lie for the delivery of a particular slave, or a northern felon, imprisoned for life, who, under sign of civil death, yet claimed that he should not be divested of the right to bequeath property to his heirs. In Melville’s New York, civil death and the representation of the criminal imprisoned for life as dead in law set the terms for a new disabling. Though slavery had ended, incarceration had not. Chancellor Kent remained not only a witness to this screen, but the implicit critic of this maneuver when he confessed to a mistake in judgment in an early equity case. Kent, who had once lamented the severity of colonial slavery in New York, argued in Platner v. Sherwood (1822) that the radical incapacities now attached to imprisonment for life were not “declaratory of the common law, but created a new rule.” Kent condemned this deprivation of property and, especially, the ban on inheritability that had never before been extended to persons imprisoned for life. The fate of property—in this case, its loss and transmission—became indispensable to law’s usurpation of personal identity. In the US Constitution, as Kent noted in his Commentaries, honors and crimes were no longer to be hereditary. Yet although acts of attainder, forfeiture, and corruption of blood were claimed to be unknown to American jurisprudence and prohibited by constitutional provisions, civil disabilities—and civil death more or less extreme—continued to play a role in the definition of civil life. The marks of degradation impressed upon blacks oozed into the fabric of civil society. The “little history” that Melville’s “Bartleby” tells is as much about the unforgettable Bartleby as about the forgotten legal history of a republic that not only invented legal slaves but also disabled civil persons.30 Who is Bartleby? Let us take him, first, as a creature of law, not only the hired scrivener of an unnamed Wall Street lawyer in chancery, but also as the person without property, who exists, indeed whose very personhood is defined by the limits of obedience; and second, as the ghost of things past, corporeally holding possession of the office (and, as we shall see, of the narrator-lawyer), as he silently judges the lawyer’s attachment to the market, to money, and to names, such as that of John Jacob Astor—“a name which, I admit, I love to repeat, for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion.”31 Astor’s wealth far outstripped that of Trinity Church. (He was, by the way, a member of Trinity.) According to low-church Episcopalians and evangelicals, Trinity, which fought hard not to relinquish her claim to the descriptive title of Catholic throughout the 1840s, easily accommodated the competing claims of property and piety. During the panic of 1837, Astor bought up foreclosed properties in Manhattan, subdividing older brick homes into small

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apartments, or building wooden tenements for workers and immigrants. By 1850, Manhattan was virtually a private enterprise controlled by the Astor family, who collected as much as $100,000 a year in rents. *** Though the lawyer acknowledges modern legal ideas of ownership and right, Bartleby attaches himself to both lawyer and office. The attachment has less to do with precise laws than with their legal relation, a state of affairs beyond precise definition. We might even say that Melville’s literary history belongs to such a landholding ritual, which is reinforced by another unspoken relationship—that between tenant and lord. In this relation, a tenant holds the land. An occupant for life, he must remain faithful and perform services for his lord. I will return to Bartleby’s specific relation to property, which will characterize his emphatic possession, his singular attachment, and his refusal to quit. But for now, let me urge again that we take these ideas not strictly, but as an aura, a belief that permeates, that clings to these upstairs chambers on Wall Street. Melville’s fiction of incapacitation traces the devolution of natural person into civil nondescript, analyzing the double death of the unpropertied, first psychic and then bodily, like the dead letter, first unclaimed and then disposed of, twice worked over. Yet something like a thwarted Calvinism is at work here. Though Bartleby is deemed relic or refuse by the lawyer—who describes him as “A bit of wreck in the midAtlantic”—it is Bartleby who refuses to be the charge of the lawyer.32 What Melville composes is an absolutely intransitive position, which becomes a tireless occupation. “Yes, Bartleby, stay there behind your screen,” the lawyer thinks to himself. “I shall persecute you no more; you are harmless and noiseless as any of these old chairs.”33 Yet this passivity becomes active and powerful, “a passive resistance,” just as the inanimate objects in “Bartleby”—chair and screen—acquire a strangely animate life.34 Why does Bartleby so affect the narrator-lawyer? What is that “something superstitious,” which he feels “knocking” at his “heart”?35 Why does the lawyer feel that because of Bartleby he is not only haunted, but also cannot continue going to church? I did not accomplish the purpose of going to Trinity Church that morning. Somehow, the things I had seen disqualified me for the time from church-going (29; italics added). What has he seen? What exactly is the relation between these two? And how does their proximity signal a reversal in the relation between objects and thought, between keeper and kept, and between holder and held? Only one of the keys might be held in the archaic legal term seisin. Though the literal past of seisin lies in the ceremonial delivery of possession of land—tenures in fief or estates-in-land— seisin both is and is not possession. Melville understands the stakes of ownership when the body and mind are seized by a corporeal thing, in this case, the ultimate unmovable—land. When the narrator removes the portable green screen, Bartleby is left “the motionless occupant of a naked room” (Piazza Tales 39). Is he now in occupation

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of the office? The standing man in quiet enjoyment of his plot of land: the lawyer interprets Bartleby as nothing but a stasis devoid of entitlement, a “fixture” (32). Whereas he speaks in terms of title, ownership, capture, ousting, and disposal, Bartleby suggests the very opposite of violence; he suggests peace and quiet. Nothing remains more alive to the lawyer than Bartleby’s stillness, his silence. What is at stake in this question of occupancy or occupation is that Bartleby inhabits the language of occupation, both occupied and occupying, but in a sense quite distinct from and sharply opposed to proprietary right. This specific bond of fealty existed in early medieval England until King Edward I destroyed the legal relation of landlords and tenants in fee in 1290. But, as Melville knew all too well, this feudal yoke endured in upstate New York. The tenant rebellion of 1839 centered on the rents charged to tenant farmers holding leases on the vast estate of Stephen Van Rensselear IV, who was distantly related to Melville’s mother and whose family was close to Melville’s sister Augusta. Vexatious no doubt to Melville’s heart were these familial and privileged landlords whose patronage extended over their tenants in semifeudal arrangements.36 This reality became the source for Pierre, which marked the transition from real and vigorously corporeal definitions of property to the streets of New York with its unreal and eerily abstract forms of wealth. In “Bartleby,” Melville returns to the ambiguous effects of manorial tenure. He superimposes the idea of being bound to the soil for life onto the transitory realities of confinement on Wall Street. And there is no doubt which form of bondage Bartleby prefers. If this office seems to be the quintessential Wall Street office, with its employees cabined and cribbed in its concrete surround, it thus recalls other histories that have long since passed away. Less an urban scene than a piece of property in soil, it is as if Melville brought in clods of English dirt and twigs to the office. The narratorlawyer reminds Bartleby of his tenuous hold on rights: “What earthly right have you to stay here? Do you pay any rent? Do you pay my taxes? Or is this property yours?”37 Bartleby ultimately makes his job that of being occupied, as he detains the lawyer, who has arrived unexpectedly on a Sunday morning, with the words, “I am occupied.”38 While nineteenth-century legal thought stressed marketability, treating land as a commodity like any other asset, Bartleby appears as if a ghost of the past, staking his civic existence on the physical contact with the office, as if it were land to have and to hold. The standoff between Bartleby and the narrator-lawyer thus plays out the premodern attachment to something like security in land losing out to new entrepreneurial interests. We might think of an enduring conflict between two ideals: one agrarian and the other commercial, one ancient and the other modern. In a thoroughly commodified world, shored up by novel statutory fictions of property, even the eighteenth-century dialectic of virtue and corruption amounted to little. Further, the notion of the political itself changed and became less the system of relations between citizens and more the system of relations between authorities and subjects necessary to a life lived under law. Moving from the Dead Letter Office to the Law Office and on to the Tombs, Bartleby knows where he is, and he knows what it means to have lost the right to have

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rights. In a text that establishes the strict separation of private and public spheres— with the ultimate prerogative of property firmly in the private camp—those who do not order, ordain, and own are not only excluded, but also incapable of exercising the rights attached to persons. This is the disabling narrative to which Bartleby the scrivener belongs. Any permanent right of a transferable nature is thought of as a thing very much like a piece of land. This is no fiction or speculation. In the popular mind such offices, tithes, or franchises are things. The lawyer’s business is not to make them things but to point out that they are incorporeal. The reason why reality seems so tenuous, so hard to grasp, in the story of Bartleby has a great deal to do with how these general concepts fail to capture what Frederic Maitland called “thinglike” and “thinglikeness.” In a country where slavery had introduced persons as things in the sense of chattels—just merchandise, perishables in the market, a “mere toy” or “snuff-box,” or an “extraordinary wrought piece of plate,” to cite from an early southern case in equity on the slaves’ right to election in testamentary trust (Summers v. Bean)40—Melville through the character of Bartleby reveals the slippery line between the corporeal and incorporeal thing. Bartleby’s “haunting” of the building, which continues long after the narratorlawyer has left the office, forces the lawyer’s return. The manner of reciprocity expressed is captured by the narrator-lawyer’s response to his own question—“Will you, or will you not, quit me?”41 Having put himself in the position of the suppliant, the one who beseeches, asking for right and remedy in chancery, he answers the plea Bartleby will not answer: “Since he will not quit me, I must quit him.”42 He has proposed to care for Bartleby, as he offered him various protections, including offers of new employ, all refuted in Bartleby’s simple, non-particular negations. Finally, the lawyer, with his fantastic exclamation—“Stationary you shall be then … . If you do not go away from these premises before night, I shall feel bound—indeed I am bound—to—to—to quit the premises myself!”—takes on the obligation of leaving the premises.43 In this intimate exchange, Bartleby in remaining silent forces the master in chancery to judge himself. *** What has been seized in the activity of this man who remains unmovable—incapable of being moved? Melville’s story of this creature, who first appears to the narrator as a “motionless young man,” then appears as more like his “pale plaster-of-paris bust of Cicero” than “any thing ordinarily human,” and then “a ghost,” “strange creature,” or “intolerable incubus,” belies a theoretical attachment to matter.44 For Melville, it is precisely this mobilization that, in expressing the nuances of materiality, turns us again to the language of law and theology, rich with incorporeal things. In Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin reflected on the passage in Luke when Christ identifies himself: “See; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.”45 He glosses what T.S. Eliot will later name “a familiar compound ghost”46: “He proves himself no specter, for he is visible in his flesh. Take away what he claims as proper

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to the nature of his body; will not a new definition of body have to be coined?”47 Melville makes his Bartleby neither material nor immaterial. Rather than turning flesh into phantasm, what Calvin wonderfully described as burying the body under the “mask of bread”—“His body swallowed up by his divinity”48—Melville takes the most menial of bodies, described by the narrator-lawyer as “this lean, penniless wight,” and makes him hold the qualities of infinite spirit, disarming, even bewitching the lawyer, who confesses: “there was something about Bartleby that … in a wonderful manner touched and disconcerted me.”49 Enraptured, the lawyer has sought recourse in the safe confines of reason and duty, recalling Bartleby to his role as “hired clerk.”50 But the demands of spirit, the quickening of the flesh, cannot be made to work within the abstractions of a democracy that promises equality but masks oppression. Bartleby hovers obstinately at the interstices. His position between life and death, natural and unnatural, is sustained as he moves from his ghostly occupation of the office—which is also absolute physical possession—to the literal piece of earth in the yard at the Tombs, what the narrator-lawyer calls this “imprisoned turf.”51 By the end of the story, a folded screen, Bartleby lies “huddled at the base of the wall, his knees drawn up, lying on his side, his head touching the cold stones,” as if the portrait of a beloved who has died, turned to the wall.52

Notes 1 2 3

4 5 6

Joseph Story, Life and Letters of Joseph Story: Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and Dane Professor of Law at Harvard University, ed. William Wetmore (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1851), 331. James Kent, Commentaries on American Law, Vol. 1 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1860), 202. Edgar Allan Poe, “Review of Slavery in the United States, by J.K. Paulding, and The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of Northern Abolitionists, by H. Manly,” Southern Literary Messenger 2.5 (April 1836): 338; Herman Melville, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, eds. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1996), 73, 84; Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, ed. Harrison Hayford and Merton Sealts (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 52. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, eds. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1984), 10. Emmanuel Lévinas, Collected Philosophical Papers (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987), 16. Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, eds. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1971), 267; Edgar Allen Poe, Eureka: A Prose Poem. Poe: Poetry and Tales (New York: The Library of America, 1984), 1275.

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Peter Goodrich, Law in the Courts of Love: Literature and Other Minor Jurisprudences (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 9. 8 For a more extended discussion of civil death, see my The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons, especially ch. 2, “Civil Death.” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 9 Frederic William Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England (Cambridge: University Press, 1921), 27. 10 In “Bartleby, Barbarians, and the Legality of Literature,” Faith Barter resists the disciplinary divisions that in segregating law as a neutral discourse unlike any other have undertheorized literature’s role in the rise of law. Faith Barter, “Bartleby, Barbarians, and the Legality of Literature,” in Latour and the Passage of Law, ed. Kyle McGee (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). 11 Thomas R.R. Cobb, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America (Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 2009), 266. 12 Ibid., 85–86. 13 Melville, The Piazza Tales, 29. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid., 24. 16 Frederick Pollock and Frederic W. Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I (London: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 433. 17 Kent, 514. 18 Jeremy Bentham, A Comment on the Commentaries and A Fragment on Government, ed. J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart (London: Athlone Press, 1977), 119–20. 19 Jeremy Bentham, Constitutional Code. Vol. 9 of The Works of Jeremy Bentham (Edinburgh: William Tait; London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., 1838), 77–78. 20 John H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History (London: Butterworth, 1979), 84. 21 See in particular Herbert F. Smith, “Melville’s Master of Chancery and His Recalcitrant Clerk,” American Quarterly 17.4 (Winter 1965): 734–41. 22 Melville, The Piazza Tales, 19. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Melville, Pierre, 285. 27 Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America from the Revolution to the Civil War: Books 1 to 3 (London: Gollancz, 1966), 180. 28 Ibid., 189. 29 Melville, The Piazza Tales, 14. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Melville, The Piazza Tales, 32. 33 Ibid., 37. 34 Ibid., 23. 35 Ibid., 30. 36 For more on the feudal order of land and the anti-rent saga, see Hershel Parker’s Herman Melville: A Biography, vol. 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), as well as Charles W. McCurdy, The Anti-Rent Era in New York Law 7

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and Politics: 1839–1865 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). 37 Melville, The Piazza Tales, 35. 38 Ibid., 34. 39 Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I, 125. 40 See Summers v. Bean, 54 Va. 404 (1856), 411, quoting an English case, Pearne v. Lisle. Pearne v. Lisle, Amb. 75, 27 E.R. 47 (1749), regarding delivery of slaves on the island of Antigua. 41 Melville, The Piazza Tales, 35. 42 Ibid., 39. 43 Ibid., 41. 44 Ibid., 19, 21, 38. 45 Luke 24.39. 46 T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1959 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1971), 140. 47 Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), 1399. 48 Ibid., 1398. 49 Melville, The Piazza Tales, 25, 21. 50 Ibid., 25. 51 Ibid., 44. 52 Ibid.

15

Melville’s Misanthropology Michael Jonik

I am misanthropos, and hate mankind For thy part, I do wish thou wert a dog That I might love thee something. Timon to Alcibiades, in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, Act IV, Scene III

Prolegomena to any future misanthropology In many recent political readings of Melville’s work, representations of the “common” have been a topic for some remark. This is perhaps not surprising given the merged individualities and shared situations that take form in his writing: the “Siamese connexion” that joins Ishmael and Queequeg to the “plurality of other mortals,” the communal jouissance of “A Squeeze of the Hand,” and The Pequod’s outcast enclave of mariners, renegades, and castaways in Moby-Dick;1 the desire for an “infinite fraternity of feeling” he limns in his correspondence with Hawthorne;2 or the brotherhoods of bachelors that populate his short fiction. “In short,” as he writes in The Confidence-Man, Melville sets in motion “a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man.”3 These now frequently cited examples have altered the terms of debate in both nineteenth-century American literary studies and critical theory regarding the aesthetico-politics of community and related issues of sympathy and friendship, cosmopolitanism and indigeneity, the human and the non human, the body and sexuality, or ecology and materiality. Some critics, following a Spinozan-Deleuzian conceptual lineage, have consequently unfolded through Melville a politics of commonality as the shared act of producing a community not of individuals who group themselves along the lines of a unified identity, but rather of a community of non-hierarchical, differential, and impersonal singularities. Thus even the solitary Bartleby has become a conceptual persona for Agamben’s “coming community,”4 or for Deleuze, a “brother to us all.”5 Others have turned to Melville to voice new, pressing forms of commonality; to choose just one striking instance, Ralph Savarese

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has analyzed depictions of neuroatypicality in The Confidence-Man to argue that Melville “conspicuously includes cognitive difference in his ‘pilgrim species, man.’”6 Savarese provocatively adduces a “neurocosmopolitanism” in Melville that entails “an attitude toward cognitive difference much like that of the conventional cosmopolite toward cultural difference.”7 Yet at the same time that it is populated by cozy loving pairs or fraternal allies, universal citizens or de-particularized Bartlebies, Melville’s writing also provides manifold figures of disaggregation and non-commonality. From Ahab to Claggart, the Dog-King to Timophanes, or the Marquesan missionaries to the metaphysicians of Indian-hating, his communitarians are irrevocably complemented by his manhaters and misanthropes. Ahab, for his part, stands “above the common” or is given to moods “too deep for common regardings” (MD, 127). Pierre is given to an “incipient Timonism,” one brought to tragic conclusion by the vanities and betrayals he suffers in New York, the misanthropic city.8 Similarly, we find in the figure of Oberlus in “The Encantadas; or the Enchanted Isles” a “conceited” misanthrope, one whose vanity is fed by his hatefulness, a latter-day Timon displaced to the Galapagos: “Brooding among the ruins of his hut, and the desolate clinkers and extinct volcanoes of this outcast isle, the insulted misanthrope now meditates a signal revenge upon humanity.”9 Other characters are perhaps less proud of their misanthropic status. As the narrator from “I and My Chimney,” for example, explains: It is now some seven years since I have stirred from home. My city friends all wonder why I don’t come to see them, as in former times. They think I am getting sour and unsocial. Some say that I have become a sort of mossy old misanthrope, while all the time the fact is, I am simply standing guard over my mossy old chimney. (PT, 377)

Perhaps he just wants to be left alone with his chimney. Yet, as Giacomo Leopardi holds, and holds true for Melville’s misanthropes as well, “Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is the experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.”10 Indeed, when one begins to look for them, misanthropes begin to appear everywhere within Melville’s societies. And nor are they necessarily limited to his human communities: in Moby-Dick we find the finback whale described as a “whale hater, as some men are men-haters”; its “single lofty jet towering like a tall misanthropic sphere” (MD, 139). (And, of course, elsewhere in the book there’s another whale that would seem to hate at least one man in particular.) In the Galapagos of “The Encantadas,” Oberlus and the Dog-King join a multispecies census of misanthropes comprised of an “incomputable host of fiends, anteaters, man-haters, and salamanders” (PT, 140). Yet nowhere is the “miscellaneous company” of misanthropes in Melville’s work so colorfully portrayed as in The Confidence-Man, a novel notorious for its dissolutions of trust and instabilities of identity. The novel often seems like a catalogue of misanthropic sensations: its characters are given to “uncordial reveries,” “deep abhorrence[s],” or “cruel airs” (CM, 130, 147, 181). They speculate concerning “cheating, backbiting,

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superciliousness, disdain, hard-heartedness,” or tell stories about those “anomalously vicious” natures, and “natural antipath[ies]” that threaten to rend communal bonds (158, 60, 61). If the text is often concerned with the malice provoked by debt and credit, money is shown to be not the only “motive to pains and hazard, deception and deviltry, in this world” (32). Even the young are not spared the judgments of misandry; rather all boys are rascals, regardless of race: “[a]mazing the endless variety of rascality in human nature of the juvenile sort” (117). At the same time, through a series of interwoven philosophical dialogues, Melville performs how misanthropy becomes constellated with concepts of commonality: cosmopolitanism and one-sidedness, trust and skepticism, neighborliness and hermetic villainy, hospitality and hostility often modulate into one another or become mutually indiscernible. If misanthropy is taken to be caused by infidelity, likewise belief, especially religious belief, is indicted as propagating “righteous hate,” if not murderous distrust (27). Philanthropy might evince a love of humanity but it also might prove to be a condescending form of paternal charity; the cosmopolitan’s “genial philosophy” perhaps masks an ungenial, “inhuman” philosophy. Through a series of guises and interlocutors— Pitch, Charlie Noble, Moredock, Judge Hall, Francis Goodman, Charlemont, or a cosmopolitan and a stranger, among others—Melville teases out the contradictions inherent in misanthropy and, through the figure of the Indian-hater par excellence, endeavors to deduce what a pure man-hater might look like. He draws variously on a rich tradition of misanthropic figures, from Diogenes to Timon, or Molière’s Alceste to nineteenth-century American misanthropes like Dow and Moredock. Following how Melville explicitly and extensively presents misanthropy in The Confidence-Man, then, I will examine what could be called Melville’s “misanthropology.” We can understand his misanthropology in three interrelated senses. First, it emerges broadly as a misanthrope-ology, that is, as a performative theory of misanthropy in a series of dialogic exchanges between a series of “equivocal character[s]” (CM, 196) in chapters such as “A Hard Case,” “In the Polite Spirit of the Tusculan Disputations,” or “A Philanthropist Undertakes to Convert a Misanthrope, but Does Not Get Beyond Confusing Him,” among others. As these chapters make clear, Melville’s dramatizations of misanthropy not only respond to a long line of literary misanthropes, but at once animate a political philosophy that takes the multifaceted, if not self-contradictory, figure of the misanthrope as its central focus. I will develop this through Melville’s frequent, if often submerged, references to Timon of Athens. Second, his misanthropology is at once a mis anthropology, one rendered most explicitly in the novel’s exploration of the “metaphysics of Indian-hating.” Again with purposeful equivocality, Melville draws on the misanthrope to provide a scathing diagnosis of the contradictions of an antebellum American culture whose professions of Christian charity sought to legitimize violent imperial expansion, and the dehumanization and tragic genocide of Native Americans. And finally, perhaps most complexly, Melville’s misanthropology gestures toward a form of thinking that decenters the Anthropos as the central Dispositif of the political. By drawing on the ancient school of Cynicism, he outlines an incipient “inhuman” political philosophy that compels us to rethink the anthropocentric biases of our empathetic investments in non human life.

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The sensation of misanthropy Like the Shakespeare he celebrates in his review of Hawthorne, Melville, in The Confidence-Man, could be said to be ventriloquizing, “[t]hrough the mouths of the dark characters … the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them” (PT, 244). Yet in a novel in which the “multiformity” of humanity becomes the basis of a sustained confidence game of identity, one can never be certain whether such dark characters are voicing truths or just further falsifications.11 Melville repeatedly conflates the good man and the dark character, and disallows any straightforward affective responses. Sianne Ngai, in Ugly Feelings, thus relates the series of guises through which the characters pass in The Confidence-Man to a parallel circulation of “‘fake’ feeling”: In foregrounding a throng of functionally analogous characters who endlessly combine and recombine with one another, it is as if the novel systematizes Melville’s earlier fondness for what Harrison Hayford calls “unnecessary duplicates.” Talky, noisy, and characterized by this particular redundancy, The Confidence-Man is essentially atonal. Though it is not hard to come up with affective adjectives to describe the novel—it is, for instance, an unfunny comedy whose politically charged, yet often flippantly treated themes include religious hypocrisy, the “metaphysics of Indian-hating,” and of course the circulation of “fake” feeling—The Confidence-Man’s organizing affective quality remains so ambiguous that at times it even becomes difficult to tell if it tilts more to the negative or positive side of the feeling spectrum. While the novel is crammed with stories about ugly feelings (envy, greed, hate, distrust, misanthropy) and generally unpleasant characters who feel them, we know that these internally represented feelings are not equivalent to its tone, which remains something like a “neutral” if strangely loud or insistent dial tone.12

While some might disagree with Ngai’s description of the novel as an “unfunny comedy” (indeed one might laugh at its pointed caricatures of Emerson and Thoreau, or its risible suggestion that a hangman might make in his next occupation a fine valet tying men’s cravats), it is clear that the novel’s politically charged themes, the very themes through which its misanthropology operates, are closely related to its ambiguous “organizing affective quality.” But to anatomize this ambiguity, it is necessary to complicate Ngai’s claim that the characters in The Confidence-Man represent a system of “unnecessary duplicates.” As a characterological assertion, Melville already refutes this notion of duplication in Moby-Dick: “take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates … [but] the Pequod’s carpenter was no duplicate; hence, he now comes in person on this stage” (MD, 466). Ishmael rather entreats us to understand the carpenter in his singular appearance, as if on stage before us, and specifically not as a duplicate as seen from some sultanic height seated among Saturn’s moons. By the same token, the challenge

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of understanding Melville’s characters in The Confidence-Man is to encounter them as they appear in their specificity—as a series of non-duplicates. The metaphor of the Clootz procession or of a “piebald parliament” is germane here: what Melville offers is an ongoing parade of identity/difference, metamorphosis and de-personalization— in short, a performance of the characterological inconsistencies he theorizes in the novel’s metafictional chapters. Or, to alter the conceit slightly, he creates a series of forgers, each of whom both presupposes, alters, or falsifies the others, and all of whom confront “‘truthful’ men who are no less false than they are.”13 In addition to these, Melville refers us to a multitude of duplicitous historical figures throughout the novel: Dr. Johnson, the devout Christian lexicographer but proud man-hater, Loyola, the soldier-Jesuit, Augustine, the libertine-saint, as well as his own creations, such as the Missourian, the surly philanthropist, Charlemont, the gentleman madman, or Mark Winsome the mystic-moneyman. Such characterological inconsistencies are recapitulated formally in the novel’s various strategies of narratological indirection: scenes often segue through eavesdropping or misunderstanding, speakers remain unidentified or strangers interrupt the dialogue, or stories become nested within stories, placing several removes between the tellers and the tales. Melville ironically presents misanthropy as dissembled through stories known by report or on trust. The stranger, in confessing his inability to understand the misanthrope, claims he can only know him “by report”: “Cold regards tossed over the sinister shoulder of a former friend, ingratitude in a beneficiary, treachery in a confidant—such things may be; but I must take somebody’s word for it” (CM, 158). Distrust only becomes knowable by trusting the story of distrust told by another. This doubleness of a “taking on faith” and misanthropic suspicion, when made immanent to the mode of narration, risks unmasking the artifice of fiction itself. Therefore one implication of the dedication of the novel is that its readers are themselves the victims of autos-da-fé. These persistent equivocations of the novel’s narrative voices at once signal conflicting affective imperatives. Through his complex and multifaceted characters, that is, Melville voices a many-sided “sensation of misanthropy.” Of course, all ugly feelings are not the same, and consequently misanthropy is not necessarily reducible to its associated feelings of envy, hate, greed, and so on, although it often includes them. But what Melville stresses is that misanthropy is much more than a simple feeling of hatred. To be sure, as the cosmopolitan asks, are not misanthropes feeling creatures? What sort of a sensation is misanthropy? Might as well ask me what sort of sensation is hydrophobia. Don’t know; never had it. But I have often wondered what it can be like. Can a misanthrope feel warm, I ask myself; take ease? be companionable with himself? Can a misanthrope smoke a cigar and muse? How fares he in solitude? Has the misanthrope such a thing as an appetite? Shall a peach refresh him? The effervescence of champagne, with what eye does he behold it? Is summer good to him? Of long winters how much can he sleep? What are his dreams? How feels he, and what does he, when suddenly awakened, alone, at dead of night, by fusilades of thunder? (CM, 158)

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Although the stranger replies that “he’s never had” the sensation of misanthropy, he nonetheless offers a series of speculative questions about how the misanthrope might feel, all of which insinuate a sensualist “humaneness” into an otherwise misanthropic sensibility. Like Ahab, even misanthropes have their humanities. More than just a feeling of perceived “nonfeltness” (as Ngai describes the novel’s tone),14 then, Melville’s anatomy of misanthropy emerges as a complex exploration of the affective ambiguities of the man-hater as an inconsistent creature. So what sort of sensation is misanthropy? The answer is that it is a multiple, self-contradictory sensation. If eros, as Anne Carson has shown, is “sweet-bitter,” misos (the Greek word for hatred) might also leave room for the love of a cigar or of refreshing peach, of self-companionship, or even the need for companionship of others, as when awakened by peals of thunder in the night. Misanthropic sentiments thus are not necessarily divorced from empathy or sensuality, companionship or even love, but in Melville’s rendering, might even rely on them. This love-hatred, or at least kind-cruelty, is not surprising, given that Melville often seeks to show how philia and agape (caritas) are themselves duplicitous. In Melville’s satire on Emersonian and Thoreauvian friendship in the chapter titled “The Hypothetical Friends,” Frank Goodman (the cosmopolitan) and Charlie Noble (Egbert) debate how “enmity lies couched in friendship” (CM, 203). In the face of the Pauline apothegm from his “Letter to the Corinthians” that “charity never faileth,” in The Confidence-Man any charity given in confidence might prove a confidence game or be driven by an ulterior self-interest. To take just one example, in chapter three Melville shows how racism and suspicion disallow the passengers’ expressions of charity for the “Black Guinea”: “here on earth, true charity dotes, and false charity plots. Who betrays a fool with a kiss, the charitable fool has the charity to believe is in love with him, and the charitable knave on the stand gives charitable testimony for his comrade in the box” (CM, 14). As Melville blurs foolish or doting charity with false, plotting charity, philanthropy and misanthropy seemingly confuse their affective coordinates.

From Timon to the genial misanthrope The series of encounters in The Confidence-Man do not culminate in the positing of an ideal or pure misanthrope but rather what Melville calls the “genial misanthrope.”15 Melville develops a notion of misanthropy as emboldened—and not opposed—by the “advance of geniality” (CM, 176), despite its apparent opposition to a universalized man-hatred. As the cosmopolitan relates in chapter thirty, “I am not without hopes that [geniality] will eventually exert its influence even upon so difficult a subject as the misanthrope” (176). In response, the stranger exclaims: “A genial misanthrope! I thought I had stretched the rope pretty hard in talking of genial hangmen. A genial misanthrope is no more conceivable than a surly philanthropist” (176). As the flipside of the “surly philanthropist” (one who beneath an ungenial air betrays a love of humanity), the genial misanthrope would be one who “under an affable air” (or behind Christian charity) conceals “a misanthropical heart” (176):

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Now, the genial misanthrope, when in the process of eras, he shall turn up, will be the converse of [the surly philanthropist]. In short, the genial misanthrope will be a new kind of monster, but still no small improvement upon the original one, since, instead of making faces and throwing stones at people, like that poor old crazy man, Timon, he will take steps, fiddle in hand, and set the tickled world a’ dancing. In a word, as the progress of Christianization mellows those in manner whom it cannot mend in mind, much the same will it prove with the progress of genialization. And so, thanks to geniality, the misanthrope, reclaimed from his boorish address, will take on refinement and softness—to so genial a degree, indeed, that it may possibly fall out that the misanthrope of the coming century will be almost as popular as, I am sincerely sorry to say, some philanthropists of the present time would seem not to be. (CM, 176–177)

At first blush, Melville’s “genial misanthrope” might recall Molière’s character Alceste from The Misanthrope who, as Rousseau asserts in his Letter to d’Alembert, is not a “true misanthrope” insofar as his “universal hate” is justified by his disappointment and disgust at humanity’s practice and acceptance of cruelty.16 As Rousseau writes, “it is not of men that he is the enemy, but of the viciousness of some and the support this viciousness finds in the others. If there were neither knaves nor flatterers, he would love all humankind. There is no good man who is not a misanthrope in this sense.”17 For Rousseau, a true misanthrope would be a “monster”: “If he could exist he would not cause laughter but horror.”18 Yet Rousseau’s political point here is the inverse of Melville’s. Rather than positing a good man beneath the misanthrope (one rather closer to the “surly philanthropist”), Melville’s genial misanthrope is a “new kind of monster,” one more dangerous because he or she will take advantage of the “process of genialization,” and “refinement and softness,” to conceal his or her misanthropy. At the same time, this new monster is no mere Timon. To better see this it is worthwhile to briefly consider how Melville’s Timonism in The Confidence-Man responds to the tradition of ancient comedies, satirical dialogues, and biographies, including Aristophanes’ The Birds or Lysistrata, Lucian’s Timon of the Misanthrope,19 Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, or Cicero’s Tusculan Orations (a work Melville alludes to in the title of chapter twenty-two, and in which Timon’s name is synonymous with “the hatred of all mankind which is termed misanthropos”).20 Melville’s novel likewise stands in dialogic relation to Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, which depicts a desperate, embittered Timon, exiled to rove the forest because of his own trusting philanthropy, and left to plot his revenge on humanity. And, like Shakespeare, he selectively adapts elements from Plutarch, Lucian, and even Plato. (Both Shakespeare and Melville, in a sense, rewrite the Platonic script in the Phaedo, in which Socrates describes the origins of misanthropy: “Misanthropy comes when a man without knowledge or skill has placed great trust in someone and believes him to be altogether truthful, sound and trustworthy; then, a short time afterwards he finds him to be wicked and unreliable, and then this happens in another case; when one has frequently had that experience, especially with those whom one believed to one’s closest friends, then, in the end, after many such blows, one comes to hate all men

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and to believe that no one is sound in any way at all.”21) As one likewise “damned” by dollars, Melville was sympathetic with Timon’s tragic decline (C, 191). This is evident in his marginalia to his own edition of the play, in which, adjacent to when Timon throws the dishes at his stunned guests and drives them out, Melville puns “served ’em right.”22 The problem of Timonist distrust in Melville’s work became a politico-philosophical preoccupation, one played out already in terms of Pierre’s “incipient Timonism” or in the Timonesque narrative arc of “Jimmy Rose,” whose protagonist concludes “I can trust no man now” (PT, 341).23 In The Confidence-Man, Timon stands for those whose distrust in humanity has precipitated their own self-destruction. This is the case late in the novel as the cosmopolitan attempts to persuade the barber to take down his “No Trust” sign: “you are no Timon to hold the mass of mankind untrustworthy. Take down your notification; it is misanthropical; much the same sign that Timon traced with charcoal on the forehead of a skull stuck over his cave. Take it down, barber; take it down to night. ‘Trust men’” (CM, 230).24 The cosmopolitan then “ventriloquizes” Shakespeare’s Timon but inverts his formula by declaring “I am Philanthropos, and love mankind. And, what is more than you do, barber, I trust them” (231). Yet Melville envisages a more complex man-hater than Timon (whose character moves from an extreme philanthropy to an extreme misanthropy) in the genial misanthrope, one who, as a “new kind of monster,” improves on the “original one” (i.e., Timon) in his inconsistency and multiformity. Rather than “making faces and throwing stones at people, like that poor old crazy man, Timon, he will take steps, fiddle in hand, and set the tickled world a’ dancing.” In other words, the genial misanthrope will carry out his or her misanthropy not through simple acts of vengeance, but by cultivating public confidence if not mass hysteria. Like those charismatic politicians whose ulterior agendas of war and greed lurk beneath a veneer of “populism,” genial misanthropes conceal behind an amicable smile their malevolent intentions. As epitomized by the genial misanthrope, Melville’s theory of misanthropes in The Confidence-Man relies on a complex heteroglossia of voices, an understanding of the misanthrope as an inconsistent character, and a sensation of misanthropy that is multiple and ambiguous. As I will now turn to explore in terms of Melville’s metaphysics of Indian-hating, the genial misanthrope can at once be a genocidal misanthrope, one who may nonetheless have a loving heart, a touch of philanthropy, or even Christian charity. This blurring between misanthropy and philanthropy becomes the performative ambiguity of the novel, and one through which the question of the common becomes figured. For Deleuze, this points to a duplicity in the Melvillean society of brothers: their trust might always prove false and they could always slip into their “diabolical counterparts,” the band of conmen. Are these false brothers sent by a diabolical father to restore his power over overly credulous Americans? But the novel is so complex that one could just as easily say the opposite: this long procession of conmen would become a comic version of authentic brothers, such as overly suspicious Americans see them, or rather have already become incapable of seeing them. This cohort of characters … is perhaps the society of Philanthropists who dissimulate their demonic project, but perhaps

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it is also the community of brothers that the Misanthropes are no longer able to recognize in passing.25

In the face of so many affected commonalities, we might also ask what this would mean for Melville’s other works: for example, how are the Pequod’s anonymous mob of communitarian castaways at once its meanest mariners and renegades? How are the anti-statist buccaneer utopians in “The Encantadas” at once murderous pirates? Could it be possible, [Melville’s narrator asks] that they robbed and murdered one day, revelled the next, and rested themselves by turning meditative philosophers, rural poets, and seat-builders the third? Not very improbable, after all. For consider the vacillations of a man. Still strange as it may seem, I must also abide by the more charitable thought; namely, that among these adventurers were some gentlemanly, companionable souls, capable of genuine tranquility and virtue. (PT, 146)

Melville’s misanthropology—dramatized most fully in The Confidence-Man, but at work in these other texts as well—serves not only as a means to consider the “vacillations of a man,” but also provides a way to better understand the heterogeneities of the strange “we” that is the common.26

Misanthropology and the microphysics of Indian loving In a well-known footnote toward the beginning of his Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, Rousseau connects misanthropy to the derogatory effects of human socialization: Men are wicked—sad and continual experience dispenses with the need for proof; however, I believe I have demonstrated that man is naturally good. What, then, can have depraved him to this extent, if not the changes that have arisen in his constitution, the progress he has made, and the knowledge that he has acquired? Let people admire human society as much as they wish; it will be no less true that society necessarily brings men to hate each other in the degree that their interests conflict … and, in fact, to do every imaginable harm to each other.27

To this end, Rousseau contrasts the civilized misanthrope with the peaceful “savage,” the one who, “after he has eaten,” is “at peace with all nature and the friend of all his fellows.”28 In Typee, and in the spirit of Rousseau, Melville’s narrator comes to a similar conclusion while examining the “comparative wickedness of civilized and uncivilized people”29: In a primitive state of society, the enjoyments of life, though few and simple, are spread over a great extent, and are unalloyed; but Civilization, for every

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advantage she imparts, holds a hundred evils in reserve;—the heart-burnings, the jealousies, the social rivalries, the family dissensions, and the thousand selfinflicted discomforts of refined life, which make up in units the swelling aggregate of human misery, are unknown among these unsophisticated people. (T, 124)

Melville’s narrator polemicizes against the Anglo-European imperialist arrogance that finds its self-legitimation in bringing “civility” to the so-called barbarians and cannibals of the indigenous world. He decries the “fiend-like skill” with which AngloEuropeans deploy their “death-dealing engines,” “the vindictiveness” of their wars, and the “misery and desolation that follow in their train” (124–125). He thus surmises that “the white civilized man [is] the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth” (125). This has especially been the case for the Christian colonialist settlers who carried out the genocide of Native Americans in North America: “The Anglo-Saxon hive have extirpated Paganism from the greater part of the North American continent; but with it they have likewise extirpated the greater portion of the Red race” (T, 195). In his review of Francis Parkman’s The California and Oregon Trail, Melville again condemns the superciliousness and lack of empathy that cultivates disdain for Native Americans: It is too often the case, that civilized beings sojourning among savages soon come to regard them with disdain and contempt. But though in many cases this feeling is almost natural, it is not defensible; and it is wholly wrong. Why should we contemn them?—Because we are better than they? Assuredly not; for herein we are rebuked by the story of the Publican and the Pharisee.—Because, then, that in many things we are happier? But this should be ground for commiseration, not disdain. (PT, 231)

As Melville raises self-probing questions about imperialism, racism, and genocide, he adumbrates a second modality of misanthropology, viz. a mis anthropology. A mis anthropology is meant to accentuate the manner in which anthropology begins with the derogatory view of the inhabitants of the “indigenous” world as inferior to those of the “developed,” and makes operative this view at the level of a politics. It is to reveal how anthropology itself is founded on an inherently misanthropic gesture, namely that the human subjects that it will take as its object of study are necessarily not those that an anthropologist would recognize in the mirror. Or as French anthropologist Pierre Clastres puts it, “anthropology is a science of man, but not of any man.”30 Although pursuing the implications of this in full would take us beyond the scope of this chapter, suffice it to say that Melville, through his scathing analyses of Euro-American “civilized barbarity” (T, 125), opens a literary counterdiscourse to an anthropology all too complicit in the discourses of dehumanization that make possible genocide.31 In The Confidence-Man, Melville’s science of man-hating becomes most explicitly a misanthropology in his diagnosis of “Indian-hating.” But unlike an anthropology that would seek an empirical, firsthand knowledge of its subject, Melville develops his misanthropology through a series of refracted impressions of Native Americans.

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What is more, he situates these impressions through further descriptions of manysided misanthropy, and again via a series of indirect or enveloped narratives (in this case through a stranger’s recounting of his father’s recounting of Judge Hall’s recounting of Moredock’s story, which is itself based on a text by the historical Hall). First, like his genial misanthropy, Melville’s metaphysics of Indian-hating emerges out of the contradictions of the “progress of Christianization.” Melville diagnoses how Christian charity has built into its psycho-epistemological framework a potentially murderous paternal condescension and dehumanization. This is surely due in part to the violent imperatives intrinsic to monotheism, through which it both enforces the boundaries of its community of believers, and seeks to expand this community. In Pierre, Melville voices this violent aspect of the spread of Christianity in Plinlimmon’s pamphlet “Chronometricals and Horologicals”: “I would charitably refer [one] to the history of Christendom for the last 1800 years; and ask … whether, in spite of all the maxims of Christ, that history is not just as full of blood, violence, wrong, and iniquity of every kind, as any previous portion of the world’s story?” (P, 215). But what type of Christianization not only self-justifies Indian-hating, but draws on Christian philanthropy as its agent? As Thomas Dumm, in “The Metaphysics of Indian Hating Revisited,” explains: “Loving yet hateful, suspicious yet openhearted, the Indian hater can hate Indians only on the condition that he be a lover of Christian mankind … Another dimension of Melville’s critique of confidence has to do with its total complicity with genocidal evil, an evil that wraps itself in the cloak of Christian love.”32 At the same time that it operates as a “metaphysics,” in The Confidence-Man the misanthropy that is Indian-hatred is also realized as a practical politics of distrust. The metaphysical bases of Indian-hating in nineteenth-century America, that is, play out in the novel in terms of a micropolitics of power relationships. In turn, they reveal Indian-hatred itself to be less an emotion or ugly feeling than a set of cultural or institutionalized practices. To explore this, Melville foregrounds his portrait of the contradictory figure of the backwoodsman, a figure at the vanguard of imperial expansion and thus of Native American genocide. Reminiscent of Melville’s other isolatoes and misanthropes, the backwoodsman is a “lonely man” who would sooner remove further into the wilderness than be encroached upon by society (CM, 144). He is “thoughtful” yet “unsophisticated,” “self-willed,” and “self-reliant,” but also “instinctual” and reliant on the “untutored sagacity” of nature: “As with the ‘possum, instincts prevail with the backwoodsman over precepts” (144–145). He is an agent of “civilization,” yet longs to be a figure of the inhuman universe: “Is it that he feels that whatever man may be, man is not the universe? that glory, beauty, kindness, are not all engrossed by him? that as the presence of man frights birds away, so, many bird-like thoughts?” (145). Melville again disallows any one-dimensional characterization in his sketch of the backwoodsman: like the genial misanthrope, “the backwoodsman is not without some fineness to his nature” (145). But when it comes to the backwoodsman’s educating his children about Native Americans, however, the limits of love and charity are clear: “however charitable it may be to view Indians as members of the Society of Friends … to affirm them such to one ignorant

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of Indians … might prove not only injudicious but cruel” (146). Hall argues that, in effect, it would be misanthropic for the backwoodsman not to teach his children to hate the Native American. “The instinct of antipathy against an Indian grows in the backwoodsman with the sense of good and bad, right and wrong. In one breath he learns that a brother is to be loved, and an Indian to be hated” (146). Melville’s exploration of the politics of distrusting Native Americans suggests how their alterity (or indeed non-alterity) prevents the production of empathy beyond identity differences, and thus can serve as ideological self-justification for their hatred and extirpation.33 It is thus ironic, then, that in Melville’s depiction of the backwoodsman, he is shown to be fundamentally indistinguishable from the subject of his hatred. The backwoodsman’s modus vivendi is very close to that of the Native American: he might marry a Native American woman, learn Native American customs, or sit among Native American circles. As seminomads, both embody the immanent outside of the state. Like the Native American, the backwoodsman is cast as a hybrid human-animal figure, a figure both “in” and “of ” nature; he therefore mirrors the paradoxical dehumanization of Native Americans as both animal-like but at once held up as possessing of a type of privileged natural knowledge, be it instinct or “woodland-cunning” (154). And, given their mutual suspicion, the backwoodsman and Indian might find in one another a common misanthropy. In the eyes of the backwoodsman, Native Americans are given to lying, theft, double-dealing, fraud and perfidy, want of conscience, blood-thirstiness, diabolism, and so on (146); the “friendly Indian” may prove to be the vilest of foes (155). Conversely, from their own perspective, Native Americans would contest this characterization, indeed, “one cause of their returning [the backwoodsman’s] antipathy … is their moral indignation at being so libeled by him” (146). Against this duplicitous portrait of the backwoodsman, Melville deduces the figure of “Indian-hater par excellence.” Unlike the “standard” Indian-hater who could be said to be the soul of the age, the Indian-hater par excellence is a soul “peeping out but once an age” (150). Like Ahab, he draws his power from the impersonal and inhuman: after some “signal outrage,” he takes “counsel with the elements” and resolves to carry out his murderous vengeance with such fierce hatred that he becomes like “a vortex from whose suction scarce the remotest chip of the guilty race may reasonably feel secure” (149). Implicitly referencing the Jesuitical missionary presence in the Mississippi valley, Melville implies that he affects the “solemnity of a Spaniard turned monk,” like some latter-day Loyola. He “takes leave of his kin” and “commits himself to the forest primeval” to bring to fruition the “calm, cloistered scheme of strategical, implacable, and lonesome vengeance” against his “Leather-stocking Nemesis” (149–150). The Indian-hater par excellence, in a similar manner to which the backwoodsman mirrors the Native American, mirrors the figure of the vanishing Native American chief: the Massasoit or the Logan. He becomes lost without a trace, another frontier memento mori, impenetrable and unreadable: “there can be no biography of an Indian-hater par excellence, any more than one of a sword-fish, or other deep-sea denizen; or … of a dead man.” His story is never told, as it would be comprised of terrible, unspeakable events; “the powers that be in nature have taken

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order that they shall never become news” (150). In contrast to the Indian-hater par excellence who, like the pure misanthrope, is unknowable, or like Rousseau’s “true” misanthrope would inspire horror (“‘Terror’ is his epitaph” (150)), Melville depicts Moredock as one who, like the genial misanthrope, is not a figure of simple “natural ferocity,” but one whose misanthropy is offset by his “humane feelings” of conviviality, neighborliness, and hospitality (154). As Melville writes, “Moredock was an example of something apparently self-contradicting, certainly curious, but, at the same time, undeniable: namely, that nearly all ­Indian-haters have at bottom loving hearts” (154). As such, he becomes a figure for his era and class. Perhaps paradoxically, Melville therefore suggests how the inconsistent Indian-hater is in fact a deadlier agent of Native American genocide than the Indian-hater par excellence. Through Moredock, that is, Melville probes the banality of genocide: how it can happen and how it was happening under the banner of geniality or philanthropy, and through a host of inconsistent and loving haters. Melville’s archaeology of nineteenth-century violence prompts us to ask how the inherent violence of the “frontier experience” became normalized and indeed institutionalized at the same time that its participants professed philanthropic, humane intentions. To cite just one indicative example of this ideology of philanthropic genocide, Andrew Jackson’s “State of the Union Address” in 1830 argues that it is “true philanthropy” that drives Indian Removal: Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country, and Philanthropy has been long busily employed in devising means to avert it, but its progress has never for a moment been arrested, and one by one have many powerful tribes disappeared from the earth. To follow to the tomb the last of his race and to tread on the graves of extinct nations excite melancholy reflections. But true philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation to make room for another … . Philanthropy could not wish to see this continent restored to the condition in which it was found by our forefathers. What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic?34

In many ways the history of misanthropological politics masquerading as a progressive philanthropy is epitomized by the 1830 Indian Removal Act, but it is also operative in the cascade of treaties that legalized the dispossession and seizure of Native American lands. It is significant in this context that Melville uses a “judge” to voice his metaphysics of Indian-hating (and by one certainly not as “prepossessed as Rousseau in favor of savages” (CM, 144)), given that the nineteenth-century American justice system can easily be seen as a system of injustices perfidiously directed against Native Americans. The assertion in the Judge’s speech, then, that whether Native Americans should be “permitted to testify for themselves” against the libel of the backwoodsman “is a question that may be left to the Supreme Court” (147) can only be heard as bitterly ironic. So, likewise, is Moredock’s reasoning for his non-candidacy for the governorship of Illinois: that he would both refuse to enter

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into “friendly treaties” with Native Americans, and deem it an impropriety to go off shooting them during legislative breaks (155). Thus Melville’s misanthropology, after Rousseau, identifies the complicity of Christian charity with American genocidal imperial expansion. Other times in his work, he seeks to counterforce the metaphysics of Indian-hating with a rival picture of what might be called a microphysics of Indian loving: in Typee in the dalliances of Tommo and Fayaway; in Moby-Dick in the “cannibal love” between Ishmael and Queequeg in which caritas is severed from its bearing in paternal power, or even in the simple fact of a poly-indigenous Pequod as manned by Tashtego, Queequeg or Daggoo; in “The Encantadas” in his tender portrayal of Hunilla’s woe. In The Confidence-Man, however, any caritas or commiseration is revealed as ineluctably given to distrust or even disdain. Its moments of Indian loving are undercut by backwoodsman’s estimation of the “extreme” inconsistency of Indian character, such that “greatest sticklers for the theory of Indian virtue, and Indian loving-kindness, are sometimes the arrantest horse-thieves and tomahawkers among them” (147).35 The “philanthropic” cosmopolitan risks paternal condescension and pathetic identification with the noble savage or the heroic “last man”: Hate Indians? Why should he or anybody else hate Indians? I admire Indians. Indians I have always heard to be one of the finest of the primitive races, possessed of many heroic virtues. Some noble women, too. When I think of Pocahontas, I am ready to love Indians. Then there’s Massasoit, and Philip of Mount Hope, and Tecumseh, and Red-Jacket, and Logan—all heroes; and there’s the Five Nations, and Araucanians—federations and communities of heroes. (140)

But the political force of Melville’s misanthropology in The Confidence-Man, by disallowing any clear-cut difference between lover and hater, lies in its dissection of the contradictory figures of misanthropy that made possible Indian-hating—as it was practiced in the United States just a century or so ago, and as it continues to exert oppressive institutional effects on Native Americans in terms of issues of sovereignty and land access, individual and environmental rights, and social and economic justice. We might put against the misanthropological metaphysics of Indian-hating Melville offers in The Confidence-Man Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s “cannibal metaphysics,” in which he shows that the work that remains to be done is to envisage an anthropology separate from the colonial hegemonic gaze, one ready to “fully assume its new mission of being the theory / practice of the permanent decolonization of thought.”36

“the last dregs of your inhuman philosophy” In another passage marked by Melville in his copy of Timon of Athens, Shakespeare’s Timon discusses with the churlish cynic philosopher Apemantus how misanthropy might also manifest itself as a preference for the non human over the human:

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TIMON: What wouldst thou do with the world, Apemantus, if it lay in thy power? APEMANTUS:  Give it to the beasts, to be rid of the men. TIMON:  Wouldst thou have thyself fall in the confusion of men, and remain a beast with the beasts! APEMANTUS:  Ay, Timon. TIMON:  A beastly ambition, which the gods grant thee t’attain to! If thou wert the lion, the fox would beguile thee; if thou wert the lamb, the fox would eat thee; if thou wert the fox, the lion would suspect thee when peradventure thou wert accused by the ass; if thou wert the ass, thy dulness would torment thee, and still thou livedst but as a breakfast to the wolf; if thou wert the wolf, thy greediness would afflict thee, and oft thou shouldst hazard thy life for thy dinner. Wert thou the unicorn, pride and wrath would confound thee and make thine own self the conquest of thy fury; wert thou a bear, thou wouldst be killed by the horse; wert thou a horse, thou wouldst be seized by the leopard; wert thou a leopard, thou wert germane to the lion, and the spots of thy kindred were jurors on thy life—all thy safety were remotion and thy defence absence. What beast couldst thou be, that were not subject to a beast? And what a beast art thou already, that seest not thy loss in transformation! APEMANTUS:  If thou couldst please me with speaking to me, thou mightst have hit upon it here: the commonwealth of Athens is become a forest of beasts.37

Apemantus’ “beastly ambition” is nothing other than to have an animal relationship with the animal and not a human relationship with the animal. Although Timon parodies this relation as one of a ravenous food chain of beasts eating beasts—one not unlike the vast “vultureism of the earth” that Melville describes in Moby-Dick— what is at stake in Apemantus’ gesture is to give over the human polis to the inhuman animal world (MD, 308). Apemantus thus envisions the commonwealth of Athens as a forest of beasts. For certain, such an inhuman political philosophy has ambiguous implications. On the one hand, a valorization of the animal or nature might prove to be a cover for a distrust, if not a disgust, with humanity: a paralyzed misanthropic zoophilia. As is the case with Timon, misanthropy can be driven by sad passions of vengeance and disdain; it foreswears the “delicate art of constituting a life in common with others”38 in order to recede into a forest exile. For Timon, Apemantus’ animal transformation does not free him in the manner that the Cynics often purport to be free: that is, in an animal life or “bios kunikos” (“dog’s life”) in which the human pretenses to money, vanity, or power are eschewed. Rather he would remain subject to other beasts: “What beast couldst thou be, that were not subject to a beast? and what a beast art thou already, that seest not thy loss in transformation!” On the other hand, the question arises as to what extent the positing of such an inhuman community might also entail a “renaturalizing” of the human—one that could instead cultivate a broader realization of the complex and multiple ways that the human and inhuman are always already entangled in communal relationships and inter-agential collectivities.

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Could a “philanthropic posthumanism,”39 to borrow Hasana Sharp’s Spinozistic phrase, counter the diminishing or melancholic effects of misanthropy through empowering transformative involvements with the inhuman? The ambiguities of an inhuman political philosophy are performed, though not necessarily resolved, in The Confidence-Man. To be sure, Melville’s multiform humanity in the novel often seems given to inhuman transformations or implicated in strange, human-animal collectivities. In his metaphysics of Indian-hating, as we have seen, he presents the misanthropic backwoodsman’s self-removal from society in terms of his non-anthropocentrism: “Is it that he feels that whatever man may be, man is not the universe?” Even more intensely, Melville uses emergent inhuman relationships to show how the Indian-hater par excellence turns his vengeance into a deadly resolve. After experiencing a “signal outrage”—a violent Indian attack upon him or his family—he takes “counsel with the elements” as his unstable hatred becomes a vortex of rage, “much as straggling vapors troop from all sides to a storm-cloud, so straggling thoughts of other outrages troop to the nucleus thought, assimilate with it, and swell it” (CM, 149). His life is lost to the world; he is unknowable, like a sword fish or other “deep-sea denizen” (149). Elsewhere on the stage of the novel a set of liminal human-animal figures appear. The eccentric Missourian is “ursine in aspect; sporting a shaggy spencer of the cloth called bear’s-skin; a high-peaked cap of raccoon-skin, the long bushy tail switching over behind” (106). In ch. 24, as he encounters the colorfully dressed stranger, he ironically asks “And who of my fine-fellow species may you be? … Toucan fowl. Fine feathers on foul meat” (131). The Missourian further insinuates that the stranger is like the African pantomime performer “Signor Marzetti” who “plays the intelligent ape till he seems it” (132). Other characters metamorphose before our eyes: as Frank Goodman confides to Charlie Noble that he is in want of money and needs a loan, the latter “boon companion” undergoes “much such a change as one reads of in fairy-books. Out of old materials sprang a new creature. Cadmus glided into the snake” (180). The novel’s supporting cast of historical characters are given animal traits: St. Augustine seems a “sad dog” (125); and, although they get only passing references, Caspar Hauser, Hairy Orson, or Peter the Wild Boy (for whom Linnaeus created an intermediate taxon, homo ferens) nonetheless signal a broader interest in unfolding a multiform humanity as not separate from “nature.” These human/inhuman figures and relationships point toward a third valence of misanthropology in The Confidence-Man, one which actively dislodges the Anthropos from the center of philosophy and politics. This is given specific bearing in terms of Melville’s use of ancient Cynicism, a philosophical style of life that is predicated on its radical relationship to nature, and that uses the human-nature relationship to criticize the complacencies of societal norms. Similarly to Shakespeare’s Timon, Melville develops his misanthropology in The Confidence-Man through frequent reference to dogs, suggestively punning on the etymological relationship of “cynic” to “canine.” As other critics have noted,40 the word “cynic” occurs often throughout the text. We find “low-born” and malicious cynics; the “boisterous hilarity of the cosmopolitan” is

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compared to “the bristling cynic” (CM, 115, 183). Again confronting others about their species membership, the Missourian puts the question “And who of my sublime species may you be?” to the Herb-Doctor (one who proclaims his absolute confidence in nature), but nonetheless does so with an “air which would have seemed half cynic, half wild-cat” (107). In a sequence that performs the dehumanizing racism that African Americans faced at the hands of white Christian charity, the Black Guinea appears as a dog: “Oh sar, I am der dog widout massa” (10). In the pathetic spectacle of his begging for pennies from distrusting passengers, he is put on “a canine footing” such that “he seemed a dog, so now, [and] in a merry way, like a dog he began to be treated” (11). Melville directly invokes Shakespeare’s Apemantus as the Missourian realizes he has been “betrayed into being an unphilosophical dupe”: In the dank twilight, fanned with mosquitoes, and sparkling with fire-flies, the boat now lies before Cairo … the Missourian eyes through the dubious medium that swampy and squalid domain; and over it audibly mumbles his cynical mind to himself, as Apemantus’ dog may have mumbled his bone . … To what vicissitudes of light and shade is man subject! He ponders the mystery of human subjectivity in general. (129)

The “mystery of human subjectivity” is pondered as part of a dense non human milieu, one fanned with mosquitoes, and sparkling with fireflies. The Missourian, chewing on his gullibility and suspicion, becomes not only like Apemantus but indeed like his dog. In these passages, however, and beyond a mere bibliographic interest in the Cynics, we can begin to see how Melville interweaves Cynic philosophy into his theory and politics of misanthropy. Whereas Melville’s misanthropes might suggest a Machiavellian statecraft or Hobbesian wolfish war of all against all, his frequent references to the ancient school of Cynicism reveal a deeper classical precedent to his misanthropology. In turn, it opens a multifaceted and dynamic position from which his characters can instantiate the novel’s critique of antebellum culture, thought, and capitalism. If the Missourian seems part Spartan wolf and cynic dog, it is Melville’s use of the figure of Diogenes that most perspicuously evokes his Cynicism, and in turn consolidates several of the various political, philosophical, and indeed economic trajectories that constitute Melville’s misanthropology as an inhuman philosophy. Like Timon or Apemantus, the Cynic Diogenes lurks in a variety of “disguises” in the novel, but he is no mere Timonist misanthrope. Diogenes embodies the inconsistencies of the figure of the kosmopolites (the “citizen of the world”). His search for an honest man is rewritten as the cosmopolitan’s search for one who has confidence. The cosmopolitan presents the biting satire of Diogenes’ dog-like philosophy in the polis as a more practical wisdom than Timon’s beastly self-exile: “Was not that humor, of Diogenes, which led him to live, a merry-andrew, in the flower-market, better than that of the less wise Athenian, which made him a skulking scare-crow in pine-barrens? An injudicious gentleman, Lord Timon” (137). Melville reprises the image of Diogenes’ lantern, as when the cosmopolitan scrutinizes a

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stranger beneath a “zoned lamp” (139) in ch. 25, or even in the beaming Drummond Light. And, like Diogenes’ quest, the cosmopolitan’s own quest proves fruitless. In the final chapter, the lamps are left to hopelessly fade out like “barren planets” (240).41 The cosmopolitan is met with continual recrimination: upon asking the Missourian how he could serve him, he is rebuked in the manner of Timon’s response to Apemantus: “By dispatching yourself, Mr. Popinjay-of-the-world, into the heart of the Lunar Mountains” (133). The cosmopolitan thus fails to form a cordial brotherhood (if not its seeming inverse, a genial “brace of misanthropes”), and is seemingly (un) masked: “You are Diogenes, Diogenes in disguise. I say—Diogenes masquerading as a cosmopolitan” (138). If Diogenes represents the becoming-inhuman of the philosopher, the cosmopolitan, as a Diogenes in disguise, becomes a “humanized” Diogenes. He is one who wears extravagant clothes, and rather than make a virtue of natural shamelessness, stresses repeatedly his desire for genial civility. He is thus one who, through another etymological pun, seeks to preserve the human gens (family) by excluding its non human or inhuman others as “ungenial.” He thus denies the possibility that bats could be convivial “[b]ecause bats, though they live together, live not together genially” (175). The cosmopolitan consequently understands himself as an “ambassador from the human race” (138) sent to convert the stranger, who he argues has succumbed to his misanthropic suspicion: “See how distrust has duped you. I, Diogenes? I he who, going a step beyond misanthropy, was less a man-hater than a man-hooter? Better were I stark and stiff!” (138). Despite the cosmopolitan’s apologia, however, the complex figure of Diogenes—as both truth-telling cynic misanthrope and philanthropic protector of humankind—unseats his genial anthropocentrism. Not only does Diogenes expose the suspicions that haunt the optimistic American cosmopolite fantasy of the “fraternal and fusing feeling” in which “[n]o man is a stranger” (132). At the same time, by emphasizing that no man is a stranger, the cosmopolitan forecloses the metamorphoses of a genial humanness into non human forms of otherness that Diogenes’ inhuman life-philosophy, instantiated as the bios kunikos, might open. As “Philanthropos,” the cosmopolitan is rather at pains to maintain the “honor of human nature” and convince his interlocutors to “trust men” (203, 230). The cosmopolitan’s anthropocentric humanism is again tested in his exchange with Mark Winsome, as the two imagine what it would be like to switch personalities with a rattlesnake. As Winsome limns the beauty of the snake, he not only enters the “spirit” of his words but begins “unconsciously to wreathe his form and sidelong crest his head, till he all but seemed the creature described” (190). He then asks the cosmopolitan: When charmed by the beauty of that viper, did it never occur to you to change personalities with him? to feel what it was to be a snake? to glide unsuspected in grass? to sting, to kill at a touch; your whole beautiful body one iridescent scabbard of death? In short, did the wish never occur to you to feel yourself exempt from knowledge, and conscience, and revel for a while in the carefree, joyous life of a perfectly instinctive, unscrupulous, and irresponsible creature? (190)

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For the cosmopolitan, to exchange personalities with a snake would, he claims, compromise his ability to be “genial with men” and leave him “a very lonesome and miserable rattle-snake” (191). The cosmopolitan’s inability to think past the purview of human relationality again emerges as the two debate whether one can “pity” a rattlesnake. In this case, the cosmopolitan cannot understand pity as other than a human empathy, and thus a human affective relation extended to the animal, and not pace Apemantus, an animal relationship with the animal. Thus Winsome rejoins: “don’t you think, that for a man to pity where nature is pitiless, is a little presuming?” (191)—which, in effect, is an assertion of the implacable inhumanity of nature, against which human affect is arbitrary, if not futile.42 When asked by Winsome if the rattlesnake has agency or is “accountable” for its actions, the cosmopolitan dissembles, and holds that “such accountability is neither to you, nor me, nor the Court of Common Pleas, but to something superior” (191). Before he allows Winsome to reply, the cosmopolitan assumes what he will argue, and carries out the rest of the dialogue with himself: “You object to my supposition, for but such it is, that the rattle-snake’s accountability is not by nature manifest; but might not much the same thing be urged against man’s? A reductio ad absurdum, proving the objection vain. But if now,” he continued, “you consider what capacity for mischief there is in a rattlesnake (observe, I do not charge it with being mischievous, I but say it has the capacity), could you well avoid admitting that that would be no symmetrical view of the universe which should maintain that, while to man it is forbidden to kill, without judicial cause, his fellow, yet the rattle-snake has an implied permit of unaccountability to murder any creature it takes capricious umbrage at—man included?” (191–92)

What is at stake here is not how the rattlesnake might have human agency but, via a reductio ad absurdum, how what we think to be human agency is rather “not by nature manifest.” Although, as the cosmopolitan urges, we must “[l]et casuists decide the casuistry” (191), he teases out the implication of Winsome’s thought to be that since humans and animals have the capacity to kill, they each have, implicitly, a “permit of unaccountability to murder any creature.” By holding the rattlesnake unaccountable, by extension, human agency becomes undone, and can no longer be distinguished from the vaster set of agencies and capacities of nature. The rattlesnake, in other words, becomes a synecdoche for humanity’s imbrication in a set of extended agencies. For the cosmopolitan “this is no genial talk” and, ultimately, he deems the philosophy of both Winsome and his disciple Egbert not only ungenial but also inhuman: “Pray, leave me, and with you take the last dregs of your inhuman philosophy. And here, take this shilling, and at the first wood-landing buy yourself a few chips to warm the frozen natures of you and your philosopher by” (223). Although the limits of the cosmopolitan’s genial humanism are put into relief by Winsome and Egbert’s “inhuman philosophy,” in turn (and again in the spirit of

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Diogenes), Melville dramatizes how a Cynical life-philosophy might also reveal their self-contradictoriness. Unlike Diogenes who made his poverty a “natural” virtue, the Stoics became known for their proclivities toward worldly power and wealth. Seneca, Epictetus, Cicero, or Arrian (of whom Mark Winsome claims he is the reincarnation), despite their deep philosophical import in terms of developing an ethics of life, were themselves in close connection with tyrants, kings or emperors (and of course Marcus Aurelius was an emperor himself). Melville extends this critique by including not only Seneca, but also Bacon, Swedenborg, and indeed Mark Winsome who, as a “mystic” and “true New-Englander,” can “turn even so profitless a thing [as mysticism] to some profitable account” (200). During the exchange between the cosmopolitan and Winsome, Winsome thus declares the material wealth that subtends his otherworldly idealism: Mystery is in the morning, and mystery in the night, and the beauty of mystery is everywhere; but still the plain truth remains, that mouth and purse must be filled. If, hitherto, you have supposed me a visionary, be undeceived. I am no one-ideaed one, either; no more than the seers before me. Was not Seneca a usurer? Bacon a courtier? and Swedenborg, though with one eye on the invisible, did he not keep the other on the main chance? Along with whatever else it may be given me to be, I am a man of serviceable knowledge, and a man of the world. Know me for such. (198)

Against this picture of the “philosopher for sale” (to borrow Lucian’s phrase), Melville contrasts the impoverished Cynic, the Diogenes living in a tub, or the poor Black guinea, living like a dog. Diogenes’ Cynic philosophy is a misanthropology insofar as it becomes animated by the bios kunikos. It thus gestures “beyond the totalizing and dialectical politics of the ‘demos,’”43 into other strange, ungenial collectivities. In “The Encantadas,” Melville’s misanthropic Dog-King and Hermit Oberlus also challenge human/inhuman distinctions and form strange collectivities. The DogKing raises an army of “canine janizaries” (PT, 148) to fight the human insurgents resisting his despotic rule. Oberlus, who acts “out of mere delight in tyranny and cruelty” (PT, 165), can be seen as “the central figure of a mongrel and assassin band” and thus becomes “a creature whom it is religion to detest, since it is philanthropy to hate a misanthrope” (PT, 169). The Dog-King and Oberlus thus offer cautionary parables concerning invocations of a human/inhuman commonality. Their vanitas in using animal power to dehumanize those over whom they take their domination leads to their ultimate ruin. Yet in The Confidence-Man, Melville does not render consistent the many-sidedness of the misanthropic inhuman political philosophy his characters dialogically enact. Some of his “duck billed characters” are assuredly satirical caricatures. Yet apropos of his theorization of characterological inconsistency more generally, Melville’s “multiform pilgrim species, man” (9) emerges in the novel as so marked by this multiformity that human/inhuman distinctions become useless, as do any easy notions of “human nature.” Instead, Melville suggests that humanity’s

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ambiguous relationship with the natural world becomes another issue of confidence. We can follow the Herb-Doctor’s unalloyed trust in nature, or the Missourian’s suspicion, for nature is both the cure to human maladies and that which brings on the cholera, or renders Peter the Wild Boy an “idiot” (107). Any imputed magnanimity in nature might conceal its dynamic misanthropy: the calm sea of organic harmony modulates into a howling and driving inhuman sea. In this light, the “ineffable socialities” in which we find ourselves might also be misanthropical, inhuman socialities.

“from the comedy of thought to the comedy of action” As Melville’s characters have become emblematic of recent philosophical investments into the common, they will undoubtedly continue to provide nineteenth-century American literary scholars with radically non-hierarchical, differential, and nonidentitarian personae; they will continue to reorient issues such as identity politics, globalization, labor and dispossession, indigeneity and cosmopolitanism, and animality or posthumanism. But by taking Melville’s misanthropes as the starting points for thinking about commonality rather than Bartleby or Ishmael and Queequeg, we might further test the limits of the common or put into question how we deploy his scenes of commonality. His misanthropes often thwart the intersubjective possibilities of the common through egotism, fear, the desire for paternal power, mistrust, or hatred. And by congregating a “brace or misanthropes” in The Confidence-Man, Melville undertakes a probing political diagnosis of what might be called the complacencies or perceived currencies of commonality (confidence, charity, fidelity, and trust). Yet in so doing he also opens another space of difference, one irreducibly ambiguous. His misanthropology makes legible the set of multiform and often self-contradictory figures of misanthropy—the genial misanthrope, the diluted Indian-hater, the philosopher for sale—who, while not as extreme in their antipathies as “pure” misanthropes, are perhaps even more dangerous as they slip quietly into the politeia, and carry out their misanthropic agendas under the guise of beneficence. Now, at a time when misanthropes are seemingly everywhere, when the lessons of past racist and genocidal political programs remain increasingly and callously unheeded, and when communal networks dangerously risk slipping into societies of control, Melville’s misanthropology in The Confidence-Man is perhaps of ever greater importance. Moby-Dick may be, as Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri agree, one of the best novels about the common.44 But the ambiguities of commonality, as ceaselessly imbricated with misanthropy, are nowhere more vehemently exposed than by the comic force of Melville’s last, strange novel. If The Confidence-Man prompts us to move from the comedy of thought to the comedy of action, our task is to remain ever wary of the advance of geniality, and ever vigilant of those new kinds of monsters, those genial misanthropes who will inevitably appear on our horizons, who “will take steps, fiddle in hand, and set the tickled world a’ dancing.”

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Notes Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or, The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1988), 320, 117. Hereafter abbreviated as MD. 2 Melville, Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1993), 212. Hereafter abbreviated as C. 3 Melville, The Confidence-Man, His Masquerade, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1984), 9. Hereafter abbreviated as CM. 4 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1993), 35–36. 5 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith, and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997), 90. 6 Ralph Savarese, “Neurocosmopolitan Melville,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 15.2 (2013): 8. 7 Ibid. 8 Melville, Pierre or the Ambiguities, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1971), 252. Hereafter abbreviated as P. 9 Melville, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, G. Thomas Tanselle, et al. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1987), 166. Hereafter abbreviated as PT. 10 Giacomo Leopardi, Essays, Dialogues, and Thoughts (Operette Morali and Pensieri) of Giacomo Leopardi, ed. Bertram Dobell (London: Hyperion Press, 1978), 377. 11 For a detailed discussion of many-sidedness in Melville’s novel, see Peggy Kamuf ’s chapter “Melville’s Credit Card,” in The Division of Literature, Or the University in Deconstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 216. 12 Ngai Sianne, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 51. 13 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1989), 134. 14 Sianne, Ugly Feelings, 76. 15 For full discussion of this progression, see John Bryant’s Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 109–12. 16 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert and the Writings for the Theater: The Collected Writings of Rousseau, Vol. 10, ed. and trans. Allan Bloom, Charles Butterworth, and Christopher Kelly (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2004), 278. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 277. 19 In “The Man with the Weed,” Melville groups Lucian among those holding views “injurious to human nature” (CM, 27). 20 From Cicero’s “Fourth Tusculan Oration,” as cited in Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Volume VI (London: Routledge, 2000), 227. 21 Plato, Phaedo in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 77. 1

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22 Walker Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, vol. 2 (New York and London: Garland, 1987), 423. 23 See also Charles W. Watson, “Melville and the theme of Timonism from Pierre to The Confidence-Man,” American Literature 44 (1972): 398–413. 24 Or, again in the context of the debate regarding the Black Guinea, as the Methodist tries to dissuade the passengers of the Fidèle from accepting the wooden-legged man’s vehement distrust in charity, Timon is invoked: “I have been in mad-houses full of tragic mopers, and seen there the end of suspicion: the cynic, in the moody madness muttering in the corner … head lopped over, gnawing his own lip, vulture of himself; while, by fits and starts, from the corner opposite came the grimace of the idiot at him.” “What an example,” whispered one. “Might deter Timon,” was the response. (16) 25 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 89. 26 For a remarkable analysis of the collectivity of strangers in The Confidence-Man, see Jennifer Greiman’s chapter “Theatricality, Strangeness, and the Aesthetics of Plurality in The Confidence-Man,” in Melville and Aesthetics, ed. Samuel Otter and Geoffrey Sanborn (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 188–91. 27 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau’s Political Writings, ed. Alan Ritter and Julia Conaway Bondanella, and trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella (New York: Norton, 1988), 16n3. 28 Ibid., 17n3. 29 Herman Melville, Typee, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1992), 123. Hereafter as T. 30 Pierre Clastres, “Entre silence et dialogue.” L’Arc 26 (Lévi-Strauss, 1968): 77, as qtd. in Eduardo Vivieros de Castro, “Introduction” to Clastres’ Archaeology of Violence, Jeanine Herman, trans. Jeanine (Los Angeles: Semotext(e), 2010), 14. 31 Melville explores the conjunction of misanthropy and anthropology in “The Encantadas,” as well as in the example of Oberlus, about whom he asserts: “the person of a European bringing into this savage region qualities more diabolical than are to be found among any of the surrounding cannibals” (PT, 163). 32 Thomas Dumm, “The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating Revisited,” in A Political Companion to Herman Melville, ed. Jason Frank (University of Kentucky Press, 2013), 318. 33 Yet as Judge Hall portrays the inconsistences of the backwoodsman, his portrait itself is inconsistent. He admits that “[i]t is terrible that one creature should so regard another, should make it conscience to abhor an entire race . … [B]ut is it surprising … that one should hate a race which he believes to be red from a cause akin to that which makes some tribes of garden insects green? A race whose name is upon the frontier a memento mori; painted to him in every evil light” (146). In effect, he realizes the farcical premise of nineteenth-century America racism, namely that outward appearance—the man in the mirror the anthropologist cannot recognize— becomes the driving force of hatred. 34 Andrew Jackson, “Second State of the Union Address, December 6, 1830,” from James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, vol. 2 (New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1896), 519–22. Likewise, the sequence in

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chs 6 and 7 in which the man in gray tries to raise funds for a Widow and Orphan Asylum founded among the Seminoles can be seen as an indirect, ironic allusion to Jackson, himself an orphan, but one who did not hesitate to make orphans out the Seminoles as a general during the first Seminole war, and as the president who ordered their removal in the 1830s. A third Seminole war was still being fought as Melville completed The Confidence-Man. 35 Melville here echoes the line from Timon of Athens in which the moon is characterized as an “arrant thief.” 36 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cannibal metaphysics: Amerindian perspectivism,” Radical Philosophy 182 (November/December 2013). 37 Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, ed. Anthony B.Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2008), 296–98 (4.3.320-47); Cowen, Melville’s Marginalia, 289–90. 38 Hasana Sharp, Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011), 199. 39 Ibid., 219. 40 See especially Hennig Cohen, “Melville and Diogenes the Cynic,” in Melville “Among the Nations”: Proceedings of an International Conference, Volos, Greece, July 2–6, 1997, ed. Sanford E. Marovitz and Athanasios C. Christodoulou (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001), 131–39. 41 Diogenes’ lamp also becomes the “counterfeit detector” sold by a passing boy. 42 This debate is recast in the conversation about friendship between the cosmopolitan (in the guise of Frank Goodman) and Winsome’s disciple Egbert (in the guise of Charlie Noble), regarding the agency of the ocean. For Noble, the “incautious wader out to the ocean” when going out of his depth, chances the ocean’s unfriendly reply: “‘It is just the other way, my wet friend,’ and drowned him.” Yet the cosmopolitan (Frank) thinks that this “fable” is “unjust to the ocean” insofar as the ocean is “a magnanimous element, and would scorn to assassinate a poor fellow, let alone taunting him in the act” (CM, 203). 43 Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014), 239. 44 See Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri, In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 89.

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Desertscapes: Geological Politics in Clarel Branka Arsić

In the summer of 1856 Justice Lemuel Shaw was concerned about the “severe nervous affections” of his son-in-law, Herman Melville. And while the metaphorics of the phrase obscures what exactly was manifested, it is safe to assume that Melville was caught in a cluster of depressive affects from fatigue to irritability that his family attributed to too much thinking and writing.1 To help him out the family decided it would be good for him to travel for “four or five months” in the general direction of the Mediterranean sea. Open spaces, cheerful Mediterranean multitudes, busy southern cities were expected to “be highly beneficial to him & probably restore him.”2 Melville sailed for Europe from New York on the Glasgow and, after a short stay in England and Scotland, headed to the Mediterranean on the Egyptian, on December 2, 1856. At first everything works just as Justice Shaw predicted. Melville is quite taken by Syra and Thessaloniki, recording in his Journal, that everything is “very picturesque,” “in December tables & chairs out of doors, coffee & water pipes.”3 But all of that changes when on his way to Palestine via “Egypt & the Arabs” (J, 72) he visits the Cycladic islands and reads them as the omen of the bareness and abandonment of the earth ahead of him: Contrast between the Greek isles & those of the Polynesan archipelago … The latter are fresh as at their first creation. The former look worn, and are meager, like life after enthusiasm is gone. The aspect of all of them is sterile & dry … No shoals in the Archipelago; you may sail close to any of the isles … Many of islands composed of pure white marble. Islanders retain expression of ancient statues. (J, 72)

The islands appear to Melville less as the earth than as a relic of exhausted terrestrial life: no marine life in their waters, no vegetable life on their surface, some of them sheer marble that pervades humans to the point of petrifying them too. Stones, pebbles, and dust overtake the living. The feel of a devitalized earth only intensifies as Melville approaches Egypt where for the first time, upon seeing the pyramids, he has difficulty differentiating between what is geological and monumental or historical: “Color of pyramids same as desert … . No

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vestige of moss upon them. Not the least. Other ruins ivied. Dry as tinder. No speck of green … Grass near the pyramids, but will not touch them—as if in fear or awe of them” (J, 76). The fusion of monumental and sandy matter appears to Melville so total and irrevocable that he imagines life to be intentionally moving away from it, in terror. “Grass … will not touch [the pyramids],” he writes, and fears that in causing an “instant collision” between two elements, the “verdure” and the “desert,” such a “touch” would enable the desert to reduce life to “dry tinder” (J, 76). In this imagined collision of life and death, the pyramids, abrogated by the dry earth and become terrestrial matter, had already rescinded their monumentality in favor of the purely geological. Instead of being depositions of historical retention the pyramids appear to Melville as something that “might have been created with the creation,” like strata on the surface of the earth, transformable only through a “geological revolution” (J, 76). He thus finds them “awful” not because they testify to the magnificence of memorialization but, to the contrary, because they testify to its failure. If they signify at all it is only to mark the advance of elemental powers that annuls memory and promotes oblivion, canceling the very logic of monumentalization (the pyramids in which “the idea of Jehova [was] born” are now simply a “line of desert” (J, 75, 76)). As he is sailing to Palestine to visit the “ruined mosque & tower of Ramlah,” lodging in the “walled & garrisoned” town of Jaffa, Melville grows increasingly desperate about the earth’s surface. Under the heading “Barrenness of Judea,” his Journal registers shock at seeing it: “Whole tracts of landscape—bleached … bones of rocks—crunched, knawed, & mumbled … You see the anatomy—compares with ordinary regions as skeleton with living & rosy man … The unleavened nakedness of desolation—whitish ashes…” (J, 83–84). Judea thus appears to him as the actual disastrous outcome of the clash between desert and verdure that he had only imagined in Egypt. Here, he observes that desertification doesn’t just turn monuments into stones but progressively encroaches upon the rocks, draining them until they become “skeletal” and “arid,” enacting the becoming cinders (“whitish ashes”) of the earth. After years of frequenting Pacific archipelagoes that showed the earth to be something that couldn’t fail to live, its geology indistinguishable from abundant vegetal life, in Judea Melville witnesses an earth that exhausts its life through its own forces of desertification, making him understand it as perhaps less reliable than he thought while in Hawaii. As of that moment the question of life’s extinction will accompany Melville throughout his journey. But while these initial reactions to the encounter with the desert signal that Melville understood desertification as an outcome of a natural process of denudation and weathering of the continental crust, later entries testify to a desert that becomes progressively more complicated as the journey advances through Jerusalem, the Judean desert, and the Jordan Valley. In fact, the question of what counts as desert became something of obsession for Melville, haunting him years after his trip. Together with the question of faith it will come to function as an obstinate and organizing theme of Clarel, the epic poem based on his trip to Palestine, into which he reworked a number of Journal entries. Destined to become the longest poem in American literature, comprising almost 18,000 lines in cursive

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octosyllabic meter, Clarel, published in 1876, will offer a more complex account of what the desert is. All of the characters in the poem are pilgrims so intensely invested in their experience of faith that the whole poem can be understood as an intricate discussion of the ways new scientific and secular values crack open Christian epistemology. Yet, as the pilgrimage progresses and the pilgrims start their walk to the Dead Sea, the desert takes over, slowly turning into something like the main character of the poem; as Melville puts it, “John’s wilderness augmented doubt”4 (C, 128), and its ashen aspect put extreme pressure on the pilgrims’ theologies. What causes the pilgrims’ minds to waver as they confront the desert is the realization that the desert is also a historical and political entity that often acts against the natural (conceived of by some characters in the poem as divine, by others, more secularly, as purely geological). Moreover, their difficulty in grasping what desert is, is aggravated as they realize that certain politics that create it are slow, whereas others are fast. A whole layer of the narrative thus turns the desert into an accomplice of fast politics that make swift historical events; it depicts contemporary political relations among different populations, registering Jewish communities walled in for fear of Arabs, Arab persecution of Jews, Christians’ segregation from Jews, or the ways the Ottomans rule Jerusalem.5 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. It is this tale of slow politics that will motivate the arguments that follow. Drawing from both the Journal and the poem I will attempt to delineate several figures of the desert outlined by Melville, all of them preoccupied with ways in which human behavior has affected the history of the earth. Starting from sacred and secular geographies, geological interpretations as well as biblical accounts that help Melville to think about the desert, I will move to his consideration of the desert as a site of ecological disasters, colonial conquests, and, above all, as the locale that instructs him about a politics of archivization and commemoration of the past, which will in turn allow him to draw more general conclusions about historical temporality. Finally, I will outline how what might be called Melville’s “ontology of the desert” enfolds the way he navigated the relationship between life and matter in his late thinking. *** The affair that substitutes for plot in Clarel—the pilgrimage through the Judean desert to the Dead Sea—summons a Christian geo-typology in which the desert functions both as the site of sanction and the locale of atonement. Echoing Melville’s own question as recorded in the Journal, it asks whether the nature of the earth’s surfaces hinder or favor acts of God (“Is the desolation of the land the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity? Hapless are the favorites of heaven” (J, 91)). Rolfe—a character whose function in the poem critics describe as ensuring that memory and knowledge of the past bears on the pilgrims6—explicitly identifies desertification as God’s punishment. The Dead Sea’s anomalous waters, their density, the discharge of

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asphalt or the sulfurous vapors that the pilgrims see above them; the emptying of the river Jordan and the destruction of the Five Cities into “floor-stones” of the shore, all appear to Rolfe as signs of divine retaliation: “Yes, here it was the cities stood / That sank in reprobation. See / The scene and record well agree” (C, 244). The desert is thus both remnant of God’s past presence and sign of his abandonment.7 And if the desert thus becomes a locale of radical faith-testing, it is because it withdraws what faith deems necessary to endure, empirical discernment of relics of God’s presence. The desert withholds figures, colors, and stability and above all, it withdraws the signs of life, rendering the earth a wasteland in which all relics are mute with a muteness verging on the meaningless, signaling thereby that desert might portend God’s decreation of the earth, a backward genesis. Standing on the shores of the Dead Sea the pilgrims linger around relics of life that invite questions but refuse answers: “At Vine’s feet / A branchless tree lay lodged ashore, / One end immersed. Of form complete— / Half fossilized—could this have been, / In ages back, a palmshaft green” (C, 243). Whereas in Mardi fossils were “the leaves of the book of Oro [god],” living relics vitally immersed in the present by revealing “the secret memoirs of times past,” how “the worlds are made … from where … furthest histories start,”8 in the Judean desert they are illegible, functioning not as the exposition but as the secretion of life’s archive. If Rolfe’s insistence on the supernatural transformation of geology9 fails to strengthen the troubled faith of his fellow pilgrims, it is because the force of discourses that radically rebut the deific disorients their theologies. An allegorical and typological reading would propose the “desolation of the land” to be “the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity,” but that often recoils in the poem in favor of a purely geological understanding of desert formation. Such an understanding traversed nineteenthcentury secular geographies of Palestine as well as travelogues and handbooks that Melville read, including, for instance, Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Syria and Palestine and Arthur Stanley’s Sinai and Palestine.10 Murray’s handbook especially, offering a series of detailed geological explanations of desert formation, demonstrates that even for a nineteenth-century lay audience the idea that desertification was supernatural extended into the realm of the fabulous. Citing Lartet’s “examination of the geology of Jordan valley,” which amassed evidence “of volcanic action of a date long posterior to the formation of the valley,”11 Murray details at length contemporary findings that the saline and sulfur level of the Dead Sea resulted from “the kindling of … a mass of combustible material, either by lightning … or by other electrical agency.”12 Such credulity that the age afforded to a purely geological understanding of the desert is advanced on many occasions by characters in the poem. For instance, echoing Murray’s accounts, the poem’s narrator opts for a geological interpretation of the formation of Siddim valley (understood by sacred theologies to be the outcome of God’s punitive destruction of Sodom), proposing that it was produced by piling up “calcinated” masses and limestone layers on the earth’s crust (“High over Siddim / … In spirals curled / …Eddies of exhalations light, / As over lime-kilns, swim in sight. / The fog dispersed, those vapors show…” (C, 266)). On this interpretation, the slow

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advance of petrification of the vegetal results from the desert’s indifferent agency, and, as the narrator prognosticates, that process slowly thicken the whole of “Arabia” into rock: It is that ridge, the desert’s own, Which by its dead Medusa stare, Petrific o’er the valley thrown, Congeals Arabia into stone, With dull metallic glint, the sea Slumbers beneath the silent lee Of sulphurous hills. (C, 266–277)

Margoth—a Jewish geologist whose secularism systematically frustrates the pilgrims—also insists that far from being an occult sign of divine aims, the earth’s transformations signify only the utter objectivity of geological processes whose unintentional nature is extraneous to any historical or theological interpretation: “Of aqueous force, / Vent igneous, a shake or so, / One here perceives the sign-of course; / All’s mere geology, you know” (C, 244). On another occasion, and as if to corroborate Margoth’s pan-geological stance, Melville lets his narrator confirm that the bleached earth around Jerusalem is the embodiment of the earth’s purely contingent transformations, similar to the effect of the storm on White Mountain of August 28, 1826, whose disastrous effects he grasps as equally aimless. It is precisely the realization that nature is heedless and indiscriminate that makes Melville’s narrator shudder with horror: “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! / Againe he saw the mountain side / Sliced open; yet again he stood / Under its shadow, on the spot- / Now waste, but once a cultured plot” (C, 57). That Melville wrote “The Slide” under the title of his copy of Hawthorne’s story “The Ambitious Guest” in Twice-Told Tales—in which the same words, “The Slide! The Slide!,” also occur—only confirms how intensely this geological event affected him with the realization conveyed by his narrator, that abrupt realignments of the earth’s crust testify to its unhomeliness.13 Neither the “mother” of humans nor their enemy, the earth reveals itself as a self-sufficient site, the open space of which inscribes a distance that dislocates us from the condition of life on it. Rather than an abode from which humans might start building their world, the earth is experienced simply as a pile of dust in different stages of dispersion. *** But while both typological and geological interpretations of the desert are occasionally voiced by various characters in the poem, its overall investment, I argue, is less in natural or supernatural powers than in how the forces of human politics, of cultivation and memorization, aid in desertification. In fact, Melville is so acutely aware of how

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human-authored disasters have changed the surface of the earth in Palestine that Clarel often verges on an ecological treatise. The case that the Judean desert is not a result of geology only but also of humaninduced dehydration of green lands is made in Arthur Stanley’s Sinai and Palestine, on which Melville heavily drew while writing Clarel. Stanley interprets ancient agriculture less as a mark of progress that transforms the earth from wilderness into cultivated fruitlands than as a practice that exhausts the vitality of vegetal life, coercing it to become desert. Thus, on his proto-anthropocene reading, clearing the woods for agricultural cultivation had in all likelihood “given full scope to the rains, which have left many tracts of bare rock, where formerly were vineyards and cornfields.” … The forest of Hareth, and the thicketwood of Ziph, in Judaea; the forest of Bethel; the forest of Sharon; the forests which gave their name to Kirjath-jearim, “the city of forests,” have long disappeared. Palm-trees, which are now all but unknown on the hills of Palestine, formerly grew, with myrtles and pines, on the now almost barren slopes of Olivet … The very labour which was expended on these barren hills of Palestine in former times, has increased their present sterility. The natural vegetation has been swept away, and no human cultivation now occupies the terraces which once took the place of forests and pastures.14

Stanley’s account is made to pervade the minds of Melville’s pilgrims who are haunted by the realization that human efforts at cultivation have engendered the earth’s decultivation, and that the politics of agrarianization—whereby the earth is educated to produce sophisticated orchards, gardens, and olive lands—end by extinguishing the profusion of the vegetal until it is elementally sterile. Most explicitly, the realization possesses them during their first night in Jericho, when they shudder at the sight of fossilized pines that the narrator declares killed (a verb signifying human agency) rather than beaten by geological forces: Look now a pine in luckless land By fires autumnal overrun, Abides a black extinguished brand Gigantic-killed, not overthrown. (C, 182)

Like Stanley, Melville’s narrator insists that the violent transformation of monumental pines into cinders on the “ashy hills of Judea” (J, 84) was in fact the outcome not of the slow advance of elements that imperceptibly “overthr[ew]” them, but of systematic practices of the earth’s domestication. As he explicitly states when describing the history of the “pit-like glade” the pilgrims see, that transformation is imagined as a violent slaughter of the trees by means of which humans sought to revise the earth: “Clean scooped of last lean dregs of soil; / Attesting in rude terraced stones / The ancient husbandmen’s hard toil,— / All now a valley of dry bones— / In shape a hopper. ‘Twas a sight / so marked with dead, dead undelight” (C, 290).

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The recognition that the human politics of cultivation could trigger a catastrophe that would literally reduce creaturely life to sand dunes (“look, what lifeless hills! / Dead long for them the hymn of rills / And birds. Nor trees, nor ferns they know / Nor lichen there hath leave to grow” (C, 114)) takes hold of the pilgrims’ minds and disorients the aim of their journey, transforming it from a search for God into a search for fossilized remnants of the vegetal, which they come to regard as steles enfolding the fragile writing of dead forests. On many occasions the desert is seen in the poem not as the mere accumulation of arid matter but as a precious palimpsest of plant life, embodying the history of a radical assault on the vegetal that the pilgrims, now become fossil-taxonomers, carefully record. They thus observe “one old tree becharmed / Lean[ing] its decrepit trunk deformed” (C, 141), and mark rare olive trees that appear to them less as a sign of the current vitality of the vegetal than as “monuments” recalling a now extinct life (“In olives, monumental trees, / The Pang’s survivors they behold” (C, 93)).15 Moreover, their persistent tracing of ancient plant life convinces them that none of the trees composing the forests of ancient Palestine— from which Christ’s cross was supposedly made—can now be disclosed: In quiet, and earth seems heaven’s sill About a hamlet there full low, Nor cedar, palm, nor olive show— Three trees by ancient legend claimed As those whereof the cross was framed. Nor dairy white, nor well-curb green, Nor cheerful husbandry was seen. (C, 153)

It is this understanding of the radical transformation of the earth that finally leads Derwent to exclaim, upon encountering a rare tree in the desert, that it can’t be “the tree of knowledge,” can’t date from ancient times, for the radical changes inflicted on the earth will have interrupted the continuous biological history that would connect current plants with those from prelapsarian gardens: “all’s altered—earth’s another scene” (C, 223). However, on his account the catastrophic discontinuity between prelapsarian and current worlds is the outcome not of God’s wrath but of the human failure to understand practices of acculturation as powerful geological agencies. *** As Clarel traverses Palestine he meets many who, far from being discouraged by the realization that cultivation is geo-power, fervently propose fertilization and landscaping as a means of uplifting the desert to the level of a special divine grace, thus adding a new argument to the complexity of the politics of desertification that the poem outlines. For instance, Clarel meets Nehemiah, an American millenarian who “mastered by inveterate zeal” mobilizes others for a project of massive topographic revisions that would transform the desert into a salutary garden. To other pilgrims,

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who observe him fanatically removing stone after stone as if literally to annul the desert, Nehemiah appears mad: “Look, is he crazy? see him there! / The saint it was with busy care / Flinging aside stone after stone, / Yet feebly, nathless as he wrought / In charge imposed though not unloved; / While every stone that he removed / Laid bare but more” (C, 190–195). Nehemiah is a fictional version of American missionaries Melville met in Joppa on his 1856–57 trip to Palestine. Possessed with the same zeal that Melville depicts in the poem, busily changing the desert into floral soil, they, as the editors of Clarel put it, took “literally various biblical admonitions, such as Isaiah 40.3: ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.’”16 Writing in 1907 for The New England Magazine George Walter Chamberlain described the movement Melville then witnessed spreading through Palestine as “A New England Crusade,” and registered its anomalousness: “Ere and there down the ages … moved by zealous religious enthusiasm, have various representatives of the Aryan race sought to turn the hands upon the dial-plate of time backward as they have ever pointed the dominant races of the world westward.”17 Chamberlain’s account is bizarre inasmuch as it is not the movement’s goals of colonization and conversion that he diagnoses as problematic but merely its eastward spatial orientation. Instead of following the fast-forward movement of the “empire” westward (“Westward the course of empire takes its way”18), where the Aryans meet a glorious future, the “few sons and daughters” of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Maine, who established the movement and whom Melville met, went “backwards,” to the Orient, thus moving against the  grain of history, which had already abandoned the east to the realm of indifference. However, Chamberlain seriously misrepresents things when he claims that all that “our New England crusades” wanted to achieve in Palestine was “introduce the Bedouins of Syria to American Ideals and American Customs and Habits,” which he identifies as “religious toleration,” political freedom for “men of many races,” and “material well-being [that] should abound everywhere.”19 For in fact they were concerned neither with the Syrians nor with American ideals of political freedom and material well-being, nor did they ever propose “religious toleration.” Instead, according to the logic of religious intolerance, their plan was to transform the desert into a messianic floral paradise by coercing Jewish minds to bloom as Christian. As Melville’s Journal notes from Joppa rightly suggest, Clorinda S. Minor was “the first person actively to engage in this business, and by her pen incited others” (J, 92). The writing that Melville here references as “inciting others” is a book entitled Meshullam! Or Tidings from Jerusalem (1850),20 in which Minor detailed impressions from her pilgrimage to the Holy Land, especially focusing on the example of the converted London Jew John Meshullam whom she visited in his little Christian colony near Bethlehem. Invigorated by his example that suggested to her how Jews might be mobilized in the fight for Christianization of Palestine, Minor, Melville notes, returned from Palestine “to America for contributions; succeeded in the attempt & returned with implements, money &c. Bought a tract about mile & half from Joppa.

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Two young ladies came out with her from America” (J, 92). Moved by her writings, still others from Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Maine followed, establishing in Joppa the Agricultural School for the Jews designed to operate on the grotesque premise of identity between Jewishness and literal, topographic desertification. Like so many in Antebellum America, Minor was a millenarian, sure of the Messiah’s imminent second coming. But she was millenarianist with a twist. Like other millenarians she was convinced of the “nearness of the time of his coming,”21 but unlike them she worried less about the condition of resurrected bodies than the physical configuration of the new earth announced on several occasions in the Bible. That first transformation was promised by Isaiah, who prophesied that the creation of a new earth would trigger the complete oblivion of the old (“For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind” (Isaiah, 65:72)); and further elaborated on by the apostle Peter, who detailed the new earth’s formation through a proper metallurgical transformation of the current constellation of elements which would combust into a novel physics of revised geographies (“But the day of the Lord will come … in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up” (2 Peter 3:10–12)); John’s Revelation added the final specifications for the new earth, explaining that it would lack oceans and seas and in lieu of the old Jerusalem, a new one would be dropped from the heavens for God to dwell in with the post-humans he had saved (“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven” (Revelation, 21:1–2)). In 1842, in an excited state of mind, Minor heard a “startling voice” clarifying somewhat how the new earth would actually advance. While the voice confirmed the “near and more glorious reality” it also explained that the new earth is not “within you” and therefore wouldn’t arrive through an operation of grace that reworked the believer from “within” by making a new heart for him, as King James translates Luke (“Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke, 17:20–21)). Rather than being “within you,” the voice claimed, the new earth is “at hand,”22 which Minor interpreted to mean that the returning Messiah will not convert the hearts of unbelievers instantaneously and out of sheer grace, while simultaneously conferring a new physics on Jerusalem. Instead, she understood “at hand” to mean that one needs to employ one’s hands to reach for what is near them or, less metaphorically, that manual work is required to start transforming the earth and thereby pleasing God to enable the actual coming of a completely new earth. On her understanding, then, it is not the Messiah who transforms the desert into the garden in which he comes to dwell; it is humans who lure the Messiah into visiting by starting to work the earth: “to cultivate and build the desolate wastes … a moderate economical expenditure is all that is needful to begin the work, which, with the Divine blessing on … manual labor, will soon sustain itself.”23 To prepare the kingdom that is “at hand” is thus to cultivate the earth by hand. But the cultivation she imagines assumes a curious temporal status, since, as she elucidates, it will assume a complex

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position with respect to the flow of historical time: “many of us believed … that ‘the kingdom would immediately appear.’ But we now see that ‘the day of his preparation’ must precede his coming, and ‘in this time of the end many shall be … tried … and the curse of the Lord shall be removed, and it shall become as the garden of Lord.”24 What Minor calls here the “day of preparation” is still in history—because it precedes the arrival of messianic time—while simultaneously being positioned on its outside, marking its ending. And it is during this “time of ending”—the indefinite interval that separates history from messianic stasis, in which only the ending keeps happening— that the obliteration of the desert in favor of the garden occurs, when finally, as a poem that Minor wrote specifies, we “shall restore the lost garden of beauty / at last … shall give to its long desert bowers their bloom.”25 The protracted present that is the potentially endless time of preparation is thus horticultural. Minor’s ontology here gets particularly perturbed, for as she starts explaining the strategies of cultivation it becomes progressively less clear just what or indeed who the desert that is supposed to bloom represents. Minor interprets Paul’s intimation in the epistle to the Romans—that the new earth will include all Israel—as his prognostication that the new landscapes will appear only if all Jews become Christian. In Paul’s botanical metaphor, God grafts Christians onto the originary Jewish olive tree (representing God’s covenant with Abraham) while simultaneously cutting off its Jewish branches (to punish Jews for their rejection of the gentiles’ Messiah). However, as Paul also announces, the maturing of time will bring about a new covenant that will save all Israel, by re-grafting onto the vital—and now Christian—green tree its pruned and dried (Jewish) branches: And if some of the branches be broken off, and thou, being a wild olive tree, wert graffed in among them, and with them partakest of the root and fatness of the olive tree; Boast not against the branches . … Thou wilt say then, The branches were broken off, that I might be graffed in. Well; because of unbelief they were broken off … And they also, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be graffed in: for God is able to graff them in again. (Romans, 17–24)

Minor interprets this as analogous to her interpretation of the transformation of the desert. Just as for the new earth to occur the desert must bloom, so Jews must start greening. The Jews thus appear as a desert that needs to flower into the olive tree of Christianity, in the same way that the stones of Judea need to bloom into orchids to appeal to the Messiah. And just as she believes that humans must cultivate the desert as a garden for the new earth to occur, so Minor understands that God will not convert Jews through an act of grace, as Paul declared (“Even so then at this present time also there is a remnant according to the election of grace” (Romans, 5)). Instead, their conversion must be enacted by Christians who are to cultivate them during the “time of ending.” Since the Jew and the desert are, according to Minor’s reasoning, in need of the same ontological transformation into a flower, the best way to enact both is to make them coincide. The Jews will thus sprout green on the Olive tree

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of the new covenant only as they witness, with an amazement that entrances and converts them, the actual transformation of desert into garden. Thus, the best way to achieve the return of the Jews to life is not to preach but to teach them agrarian and horticultural skills. It is on that basis that there develops the idea of colonizing by means of Agricultural Schools for the Jews (J, 92), which would be something like workshops in preparing the new earth with new Jews. Or as Melville puts it: Be it said, that all these movements combining Agriculture & Religion in reference to Palestine, are based upon the impression (Mrs Minott’s [Minor] & others’) that the time for the prophetic return of the Jews to Judea is at hand, and therefore the way must be prepared for them by Christians, both in setting them right in their faith & their farming—in other words, preparing the soil literally & figuratively. (J, 93)

Melville meets several American agricultural crusaders in the course of his pilgrimage through Palestine. He meets a couple from Rhode Island who have established an agricultural school in Joppa “but miserably failed,” and reported that Minor and “the two young ladies” who came with her also “had troubles. Not a single Jew was converted either to Christianity or Agriculture” (J, 92); he also spends some time with the family of Deacon Dickson “a thorough Yankee, about 60, with long oriental beard, blue Yankee coat, & Shaker waistcoat,” who established a cultivation site “about an hour from Joppa Gate,” which Melville also visited: “Some twelve acres were under cultivation. Mulberry trees, oranges, pomegranates,—wheat barley, tomatoes &c” (J, 93). After the visit, Melville interviewed Dickinson: H.M. “Have you settled here permanently, Mr. Dickson?” Mr. D. “Permanently settled on the soil of Zion, Sir.” …. H.M. “Have you any Jews working with you?” Mr. D. “No. Can’t afford to hire them. Do my own work, with my son. Besides, the Jews … don’t like work.” H.M. “And do you not think that a hindrance to making farmers of them?” Mr. D. “That’s it. The Gentile Christians must teach them better. The fact is the fullness of Time has come. The Gentile Christians must prepare the way. Mrs. D. (to Melville) “Sir, is there in America a good deal of talk about Mr. D[ickinson]’s efforts here? Mr. D. Yes, do they believe basicly in the restoration of the Jews? H.M. I can’t really answer that. (J, 93–94)

In his Journal, where he recorded this interview, Melville made further observations about Dickson’s family, concluding with the remark that “the idea of making farmer of the Jews is in vain. In the first place, Judea is a desert … In the second place, the Jews hate farming. All who cultivate the soil in Palestine are Arabs” (J, 94).

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Melville’s Journal registers two ways in which Arabs are preoccupied with cultivating the soil, both of which contradict the many accounts by British and American travelers and self-appointed geographers of Palestine read by Melville, such as Stanley and Murray, or Eliot Warburton, whose Crescent and the Cross was published by Putnam in 1845, or Thomas Wright, whose edited collection Early Travels in Palestine was published in Bohn’s edition in 1848. All of them portray Arabs as unsettled nomads disinvested in the features of the Earth to the point of not even precisely naming and charting it, let alone cultivating it. Their narratives are filled with stories of the Bedouins moving through a desert that they leave traceless, refusing to name the land by means of appropriative topographical denominators. To such British and American geographers the names the Arabs use to mark desert sites appear as themselves variable or nomadic, and thus merely approximate in contrast to reliable Jewish appellations. The difference between two ways of naming will thus function for them as the difference between being lost and being found, between fallacy and what is authentic. Stanley, for instance, reports that “After all the uncertainty of the Desert topography it was quite startling … to find the localities so absolutely authentic, to hear the names of Carmel, Maon, Ziph….”26 In naming the continuity, if not the very origin of history, the stable names of the Old Testament denote localities of an absolute hence almost natural authenticity that are contrasted with the makeshift sites in the desert through which Arabs simply drift, leaving them unappropriated and utterly inauthentic. One of the major investments of British and American travelers and geographers through the desert will thus be the production of maps according to a principle that would, as the sacred geographer Edward Robinson put it, “admit no name nor position on mere conjecture,” but substitute permanent designations for the nameless surface and imbue the desert with JudeoChristian history.27 But as Stanley observes, the topographic uncertainty of the desert characterizes also the way Arabs distinguish among themselves, for their tribal names do not reflect history and tradition—whether sacred or secular—but merely the geological differentiations of the desert itself. Their names thus are not “particular,” but “general,” given “according to geographic contrast” between high and low elevations in the desert (Amarites are “dwellers on the summits,” Canaanites are “lowlanders”).28 Eliot Warburton’s The Crescent and the Cross, which Melville referenced in his Journal, states that disregard for names is typical even of settled Muslim populations. Like the Bedouins, they have not grasped the logic of proper names, so much so that the “Muslim [Egyptian] infant is the most ill-favoured object in human creation; a name is applied to him with as little ceremony as a nickname is with us; and, indeed, there are not perhaps twenty different names distributed among the two hundred thousand Moslem inhabitants of Cairo.”29 As Warburton sees it, Muslim populations from Syria to Egypt are like plateaus of a large desert, “uncertain topographies,” reduced to groups named by the same

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name that refuses to individualize them as persons (hence his own disconcerting classification of Muslim children as “objects”). The existence of many Arab cities with their monuments and religious sites doesn’t affect this perception of them as the people of a nameless and ahistorical surface, for as William McClure Thomson argues, the names Arabs give to their cites are like figures on the desert sand, contingent and aleatory, “generally derived from some accidental circumstance connected with them.”30 The names change with the alteration of the circumstance that triggered them, deserting the site they name just as nomad Bedouins leave the land without marking it. Thus even Arab history becomes nomadic, as if somehow intrinsically beholden to geography. And it is because Thomson doesn’t consider them as monuments—stable sites gathering the past— but as temporary signposts that he declares “useless to remember these non-historic names which our guide is rattling off at such a rate.”31 Moreover, for Thomson it is not just that Arab names are like desert sand; it is, more literally, that Arabs are somehow elementally composed of the desert into which they corporeally blend: “The Arabs of Jerico and the plain are many shades darker than the same class on the mountains only a few miles distant.”32 The desert thus expands and its substance starts to vary; for Arabs and Jews it is stones and sand that constitute it; for American Christians it is the Jew; for English and American sacred geographers it is the Arab. Against the grain of perceiving Arabs as desert, Melville’s Journal represents them as people of the land preoccupied with its cultivation, and generating significant topographic and agricultural diversity through farming. But when Melville notes that “all who cultivate the soil in Palestine are Arabs” he isn’t referring only to the sight he witnessed while on the road from Jaffa, also registered in the Journal, of Arab men working the land: “Arabs ploughing in their shirt-tails. Some of the old men. Old age is venerable—but hardly in the shirt tail” (J, 91). He also observes their effort to forest the earth, which he understands as closely related to their funerary rites, and which he notes with fascination throughout the part of the Journal that covers his travels in the Middle East, from Turkey via Egypt, Palestine and back to Europe. What he comes to appreciate about those rites is that they affect the deserted aspect of the earth by revising what a monument is. On December  13, 1856, Melville went to see the Pera cemeteries above the Bosphorous and referred to them as “forests of cemeteries” (J, 58) because, as the editors of his Journal clarify, Muslim “custom was to plant a cypress at each grave” so that “all Moslem cemeteries could seem like ‘forests’” (J, 397) to him.33 Emilia Hornby, the wife of Edmund Hornby, an English diplomat in Constantinople from 1855 to 1865 (J, 396), describes what that cemetery—which, like Melville, she calls a cypresswood—must have looked like when Melville saw it: What a vast place it is, and how truly magnificent are its funereal trees! [cypresses] Fancy the effect of a forest of such as these, with innumerable turbaned stonessome slanting forward, some upright, some fallen … Many of the stones seem to be of great antiquity; the inscriptions, in bas-relief, are rapidly crumbling away, and the carved flowers and leaves are almost obliterated.34

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Registering, as Melville did in Egypt, how desert overcomes the monumental, Hornby suggests that the cypresses resist the forces of desert better than monuments, thus eventually coming to function as their traces, like living memorials that commemorate the dead while literally foresting the earth. Similarly, in The Crescent and the Cross, Warburton references time and time again funerary cypresses as rare green sites in the Judean desert, its “waste places” marked by “the ruins, and cactus, and cypress”;35 more explicitly, when the whole of Jerusalem appears to him during a night walk as a silent grave, he as it were transforms them into living beings in the company of spirits (“often have I wondered among the desolate enclosures of Jerusalem … the streets were silent as the grave; the night wind like a wailing spirit alone wondered … among cypresses.”)36 And finally, back in Constantinople, and at the Pera cemeteries, Warburton, like Hornby, understands cypresses planted on graves as an investment in living, for they defy the desert while contriving a forested site where the living gather in the shade: “here [at Pera cemeteries] all the gay people of the Frank city assemble in the evening and wander among the tombs with merry chat and laughter; or sit beneath the cypress trees, eating ice and smoking their chibouqets.”37 But while Emilia Hornby found such gayness at the forest cemetery to be “all noise, bustle … and confusion”—not “silent” as “according to our ideas, Eastern sepulchers should be”38— Warburton registers in the Muslim rite an effort not to expel the dead into desert lands of death but instead to include them in the movement of life by foresting the earth. Life comes to inhabit forested cemeteries because in the desert terrains they are “cultivated” to resist the erosion inflicted by the dry land and, moreover, to offer the shelter to living. The  graves, like pots in which the cypresses grow, come to function as vehicles of greening that protect the living from the elemental power of the desiccating sunlight, creating a borderline between dead and living earth. That is also how Melville understands the cypress planting; for him too, the cypress tree appears as a sort of ontological bridge that channels connections between life and death: “The Cyprus a green minaret, & blends with the stone ones … The intermingling of the dark tree with the bright spire expressive of the intermingling of life & death” (J, 65). What renders cypress forestation more fascinating to Melville than agricultural efforts at domestication of the desert—more fascinating since he mentions it more frequently—is that it promises the recovery of living landscapes that have precisely been extinguished by agricultural agencies. Neither the site of life’s extinction that he understands the desert to be nor the delineated space of acculturated farms— generative of borders and hence, appropriative identifications—the “intermingling of life and death” that he sees in these forestations mark an abundance of life common to “all … people of the city,” living as well as dead, Jew as well as Christian and Muslim. The recovery of forests becomes a recovery of commonality. *** But in Clarel the desert is neither just the effect of an ancient anthropocene—an ecological disaster generated by human agricultural practice—nor the result of purely

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geological forces; neither merely the privileged site of sacred geographies nor the politically charged site of naming and appropriating. For what strikes Melville most intensely about it—the power of that impression will be related on many occasions in Clarel and will be recast as one of the most pressing questions the poem raises regarding the nature of history—is the possibility that it is generated by strategies of memorialization and by the ways in which archival politics deposit the past. Many Journal entries suggest that from very early on in his journey Melville appears unable to discern a stable distinction between a memorial, a rock, or architecture and landscape. In Alexandria, for instance, the thought crosses his mind that the strata of the earth’s surface are all monumental: “Alexandria. Seems Mcadamed with the pulverized ruins of thousand cities. Every shovel full of earth dug over. The soil, deep loam, looks historical” (J, 77). Similarly, the walls built on the hills around Jerusalem become to him indiscernible from the hills themselves, confusing his sense of difference between a religious artifact and a fossil: “The hills. The stone walls (loose) seem not the erection of art, but mere natural variations of the stony landscape. In some of the fields, lie large grotesque rocks—all perforated & honey combed—like rotting bones of mastodons … .” (J, 91). Confusion of taxonomical divides between the historical and the geological becomes pervasive in Judaea, where Melville entertains the idea that all earth’s strata might be composed of monuments: There are strata of cities buried under the present surface of Jerusalem. Forty feet deep lie fragments of columns . … Judea is one accumulation of stones … . In many places laborious attempt has been made, to clear the surface of these stones. You see heaps of stones here & there; and stone walls of immense thickness are thrown together, less for boundaries than to get them out of the way. But in vain; the removal of one stone only serves to reveal three stones still larger, below it. It is like mending an old barn; the more you uncover, the more it grows. (J, 90)

According to that process a stratified earth results from a layering of monuments and their subsequent decay. That idea becomes an obsessive topic in Clarel. Transposing questions raised in Journal entries, Melville’s narrator there proposes that human practices of archiving the past on stone surfaces—rendering stones palimpsests of historical time—are in fact what remakes the earth’s geology: Days fleet. They rove the storied ground – Tread many a site that rues the ban, Where serial wrecks on wrecks confound Era and monument and man; Or rather, in stratifying way Bed and impact and overlay. The Hospitalers’ cloisters shamed Crumble in ruin unreclaimed. (C, 31)

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These “serial wrecks” in which the human is confused with the monumental are read as signs that the history of nations archives itself as if by burying earlier monuments alive, pushing them deeper into the earth. The monuments under whose weight older monuments are pulverized work in that way to extinguish the past such that, contrary to the common sense belief that history builds reservoirs of memory, it is now seen to function through the labor of forgetting. History thus reveals itself not as a continuity in which the present advances from what has been; rather than emerging through the past, the historical “now” appears by means of a radical break from what has preceded it, which it wrecks. This vandalistic of oblivion inherent in history’s ways of remembering turns history into a chain of discrete ruptures as if repeatedly beginning anew on the burial grounds of monuments it has itself eroded into dust. In that way—and that is what awes the narrator more than the fact that some monuments are left unclaimed—history appears as a force as ruinous as any geological catastrophe. For just as—in Clarel’s version—a geological catastrophe extinguishes landscapes by burying them in the depths of the fissured earth (“Our mother, Earth: the founded rocks / Unstable prove”), so by burying the memorials that preceded it the politics of vertical memorization generates an ideology of clean beginnings that fantasizes new histories that will emerge, thanks to God’s special intervention: “Over against the Temple here / A monastery unrestored— / Named from Prediction of Our Lord— / Crumbled long since. Outlying near, / Some stones remain, which seats afford” (C, 105). The distinction in effect here, between monuments that still speak (“unrestored monastery”) and those turned into mute stone posts in the desert (mere stones “affording seats”), points to the more detailed and almost systematic taxonomy that Melville develops throughout the Journal and in Clarel of memorials on their way to becoming purely natural, fit for classification as living rock, dead rock, arid rock, and waste. A living rock is a testamentary stone (grave mark, religious relic or site) that speaks because it is still claimed by memory; for instance Mar Saba, which Melville finds to be an abject place of “discipline and grief,” is called “the living rock: a stone / In low relief, where well was shown, / Before an altar under sky” (C, 348). In contrast, a dead rock is a stone memorial still recognizable as a monument—on it there are traces one can still classify as artificial rather than natural—but it is rendered mute since those traces are illegible. It thus embodies a memory that does not speak of what it remembers. For typically, testifying letters on the dead rock are so disfigured that they remain only as meaningless “wrinkles” written by deep time itself. That would be how Melville describes the monuments that he witnesses in Jehosophat, where “Jew grave stones lie as if indiscriminately flung abroad by a blast in a quarry. So thick, a warren of the dead—so old, the Hebrew inscriptions can hardly be distinguished from the wrinkles formed by Time” (J, 86). In the third place, there are what Melville calls “arid rocks,” monuments from which inscriptions are erased and which are disfigured into rocky heaps. Yet the shape of such heaps suggests to Melville that they might have been monuments (“Near … they saw, in turn abrupt revealed / An object reared aloof by Vine …  / A heap of stones in arid state. / The cairn … yes, / A monument to barrenness?” (C, 289)). In the Journal the whole city of Jerusalem is sometimes

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disturbingly perceived as being on its way to heaping, as if its whole history is already irrevocably caught in that becoming-natural: “Shapeless stone … Jehosophat, shows seams of natural rock—capitals of pilasters rubbed off by Time.—Large hole in front—full of stones inside, heap of stones (cart loads) before it—The maledictory contribution of the pilgrim, one of the melancholy amusements of Jerusalem” (J, 86). Once the heaps of stones are scattered enough to be loaded on carts it is clear that the monuments have become waste. “Waste” is the word that, along with “dust” and “stones,” is among the most frequently used in the poem, and it names the fourth category in Melville’s taxonomy of the disintegration of the monumental. Waste is everything once cultivated, from shrines and tombstones to an orchid or a piece of pottery, but now pulverized into “shapeless stones,” pebbles, or dust and mixed in with the desert mass. Such former relics thus become indistinguishable from the mute neutrality of the natural. They are the waste of an unrecovered history that disorients Melville’s understanding of the desert’s naturalness, making him wonder whether the desert is not perhaps the precise image of human history, evidencing an inexorable course toward abandonment. To Melville, waste appears overwhelming, overtaking everything, being everywhere. As Mortmain remarks as the pilgrims are advancing toward Mar Saba, “everywhere / Descries but worlds more waste, more bare” (C, 178). Many of the sites in Jerusalem are thus experienced as subdued to the extent of being waste, even streets, alleys, and squares: “those alleys passed, / A little square they win—a waste” (C, 71). Similarly, around Mar Saba: “they wheeled, / And toward the abandoned ledge they glanced / Near, in the high void waste advanced” (C, 288). Similarly, in Jericho: “Of blastment, looms the Crusaders’ Tower / On the waste verge of Jericho” (C, 182); and in the mountains: “‘Tis the high desert, sultry Alp / Which suns decay, which lightnings scalp. / For now, to round the waste in large, / Christ’s Tomb rewin by Saba’s marge” (C, 264). As he reconstructs the geology and history of the northern part of the Sinai, Melville comes to see the “plateau of the Tîh”39 not just as the concretization into waste of everything monumental and artificial but also of everything living, whether human, animal, or vegetal. All that ever was finds its afterlife in becoming waste. That image awes him: Then first she thinks upon the waste / Whither the Simoom maketh haste; / Where baskets of the white-ribbed dead / Sift the fine sand, while dim ahead / In long, long line, their way to tell, / The bones of camels bleaching dwell, / With skeletons but part interred— / Relics of men which friendless fell; / Whose own hands, in last office, scooped / Over their limbs the sand, but drooped; / Worse than the desert of the Word, / El Tih, the great, the terrible. (C, 22)

The awe of the desert resides in the scale of abandonment that has bleached differences—among humans and animals, nations and skeletons, relics and stones, bones and tombs, parchments and dust—reducing them to the unspoken blankness of sand, comparable to the horrifying blankness of Moby-Dick. And if throughout the poem Clarel’s faith is rendered volatile by the skepticism that haunts him, it is not because in doubting the meaning of it all he arrives at nihilism, nor because he is

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fearing that the nothingness of it all cannot be successfully combated by human efforts to create meaning; rather, it is because he thinks he is witnessing how human effort mobilizes elements, animals, labor, culture, and politics against the meaning of it all. What the “long line” of the “white-ribbed dead” tells him is that human ­history— exemplified in Canto 5 of the first part of the poem by pilgrims arriving in Jerusalem from different cultural, religious, and historical contexts (Greek, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or Hindu)—is a “wave” that “rolls” like a natural force over the earth moved by “complex passions,” “intersympathy of creeds” (C, 23) and wars whose outcome is a desert of total waste. And that is terrifying. An archaeology of Clarel would attest that Melville’s taxonomy of the dissipation of monuments through different levels of desertification fine-tunes the descriptions he found in Stanley’s Sinai and Palestine. Sometimes he even opts for the same word choice (for instance, adopting the phrase “pile stones” that Stanley proposes for the Hebrew “cairn”). Like Melville’s narrator, Stanley tirelessly comments on how the “ruins of Palestine” can be divided according to the diverse ages to which they belong, “extending … even to the old Canaanitish remains, before the arrival of Joshua,” which deepen and “perhaps create” “the impression of age and decay.” As Stanley explains, Hebrew has even developed four categories to identify the various stages of monumental decay into desert: In the rich local vocabulary of the Hebrew language the words for sites of ruined cities occupy a remarkable place. Four separate designations are used for the several stages … of destruction, which were to be seen even during the first vigour of the Israelite conquest … . There was the rude “cairn,” or pile of stones, roughly rolled together. There was a mound or heap of ruin, which … was composed of the rubbish and debris of a fallen city. There were the forsaken villages, such as those in the Hourân, when “the cities were wasted without inhabitant and the houses without man to dwell therein … .” There were lastly true ruins, such as those to which we give the name—buildings, standing, yet shattered.40

But even if he builds on Stanley, what Melville reads about history on the surface of desert waste is radically original. For while Stanley’s demarcations concerning the relics’ level of destruction (piled stones, shattered stones, rubbish) suggest that dissipation is a successive process immanent to matter itself—because everything made must be unmade by aging, or because everything is always exposed to the forces of oblivion that arrive to it from the quiet ahistorical realms of the natural—Clarel sees the process as an outcome of intentional political agencies. Thus, looking at the Hospitalers’ cloisters in Jerusalem he perceives something like a frozen dialectical image of history that confirms to his intimations that monumentally embodied memory topples into desert waste as a result of an immanently historical operation: The Hospitalers’ cloisters shamed Crumble in ruin… On shivered Fatimite palaces

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Reared upon crash of Herod’s sway In turn built on the Maccabees, And on King David’s glory, they; And David on antiquities Of Jebusites and Ornan’s floor, And hunters’ camps of ages long before. So Glenroy’s tiers of beaches be – Abandoned margins of the Glacial Sea. (C, 31)

What Clarel sees is much like the view that famously enthralls Walter Benjamin’s angel of history: a process crystalized in an instant that stills time to render the truth of fleeting events conspicuous. Benjamin’s angel has his face … turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; … The storm drives him irresistibly into the future … while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.41

Melville too explicitly sees such “a chain of events” as a catastrophe piling serial “wrecks on wrecks.” He too mourns that what has been smashed by the storm of history can’t be mended, and he too would call the violence of that smashing historical progress. But unlike Benjamin, who saves the historical by releasing a storm from paradise that finally draws the angel into the (messianic) future, in Melville’s account of history no storm blows from a promised afterlife and nothing makes it messianic. If there is a storm that resolves the historical in Melville it is not paradisiac but instead earthly. For Melville’s pilgrims see cloisters and “Fatimite palaces,” and “Jebusites and Ornan’s floor” dissipated by a desert storm over the earth’s surface, becoming desert beaches, fragile lines marking where the sea begins or ends (“And hunters’ camps of ages long before. / So Glenroy’s tiers of beaches be—Abandoned margins of the Glacial Sea”). In Melville, the rubble of history is disseminated by the “sirocco” or “Khamsun,” hot desert winds that take it in different directions and transform it into geo-sites. Desert and beaches are terrestrial surfaces occurring out of pulverized monuments. They are reservoirs of deepest memory that don’t simply host or cover monumental smithereens but are literally made of them. Thus when he claims that the desert nature of Jerusalem’s geological bed is produced by the impact of a history that “overlays” “era and monument and man” in a “stratifying way,” Melville is diagnosing what might be called the “desertification of the past” as a literal transformation of the earth’s surface. Deserts are thus remnants of history, traversed by history’s fragile and delicate, yet unreadable traces. For that reason, the desert is not a simple forgetting, but instead the concrete sign of its own occurrence. Desert sand is thus also a sort of the relic that doesn’t testify but merely hints that no archaeology could recover what has remained of the past. This quasi-relic concretizes the outcome of every

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history yet to come, suggesting that what is perhaps most world-forming—archiving and commemorating—becomes indistinguishable from a world-canceling force that extinguishes testaments and dissipates them into muffled terrestrial matter. In Melville, then, the angel of history is always the angel of the desert. However, if the desert takes over history, it is not only because it defies the past but also because in so doing it cancels any future politics. As a space in which political differentiations are turned into a vertigo of indifference the desert comes to function as a post-political site. That is what Melville announces when he makes the Elder—a Scottish Presbyterian, “representative of sectarian intolerance” on a pilgrimage to Palestine with “horse-pistols,”42 and dreaming of revolutionary changes so intensely that “Haytian airs around him blow / And woo and win to cast behind / The harsher and inclement mind” (C, 164)—leave the group of pilgrims as they are about to enter the desert. His refusal to enter the desert results from his sensing it to be that a force that renders politics inoperative. That is at least how Rolfe explains it to the other pilgrims: The desert, see: He and the desert don’t agree …or rather, let me say He can’t provoke a quarrel here With blank indifference so drear: Ever the desert waives dispute, Cares not to argue, bides but mute. Besides, no topographic cheer: Surveyor’s tape don’t come in play. (C, 165)

The desert offers no “topographic cheer” because it combats the surveyor’s dividing lines, preventing the delineation of territories and generation of names that would be necessary for the labor of the political. The canto entitled “The Inscription” is an elaboration of the claim that all strife is resolved by the desert into non-existence. For it relates not only how the “inscription Sinaitic” (C, 237) is erased from a dilapidated cross that the pilgrims encounter but also how Margoth’s chalk inscription on the sand, which was supposed to declare the victory of the geological over the religious in current political and scientific debates about the Judean desert, similarly fades away: With the same chalk (how abused!) Left by the other, after used, A sledge or hammer huge as Thor’s; A legend lending—this, to wit: “I, Science, I whose gain’s thy loss, I slanted thee, thou Slanting Cross.” But sun and rain, and wind, with grit Driving, these haste to cancel it. (C, 240)

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Melville’s angel of history, formed from desert, is here finally rendered radically apolitical since its haste serves only to fashion strife as impassivity. *** But the tableau of desertscapes on display in Clarel reveals something further. In this understanding of the desert what was previously the end of politics will now be its beginning; where previously the desert terrified because it manifested forgetting, now that forgetting will be a force for new political possibilities. That is to say, the desert’s instability, its frustrating the positions required for “strife” to emerge will come to serve positively as the ground for imagining a political without “quarrel.” And finally, where the desert was seen ontologically as extinct life it will now become the possibility of new births. The dialectic of the desert that slowly emerges—starting precisely in the canto entitled “The Inscription” and gaining dominance by the end of the poem, remaining with Melville until the late poetry of Timoleon—is enabled by the realization that the desert’s elision of traces and the end of strife don’t necessarily generate the cessation of happening. To the contrary, Melville’s narrator will come to recognize that if desert destabilizes figures and boundaries, it is perhaps because it is a sheer force of happening that never crystalizes into an event, a becoming never appeased in beings. The desert’s incapacity to negatively discriminate (to generate strife) will thus be affirmatively understood as its capacity to permit fusions of what was previously discrete, alloys that in rendering everything processual, might trigger a very different history. Not a history generated by the agrarian dream of stability and identity, but by a desert-desire for flight and alteration, in which nothing discriminates against anything. Additionally, the idea that in destabilizing figures the desert might conjure new (temporary) ones is also what renders it ontologically appealing, leading Melville, late in Clarel, to understand its unstable materiality not as a vertigo of indifference but as “a splendor diaphanic” (C, 410). The desert’s dusty terrain will be seen, quite explicitly, not as a layering of thick and obscure matter but as a frail “effulgence” whose “tremble” might yet fabricate elusive and nomadic phenomena, a conclusion justified by Melville’s comparison of the desert to the appearance of “shekinah,” the radiance that in Jewish theology “surround[s] and manifest[s] the divine presence.”43 This is how he formulates it: Beheld a splendor diaphanicEffulgence never dawn hath shot, Nor flying meteors of the night;… So (might one reverently dare Terrene with heavenly to compare), So, oft in mid-watch on that sea… Waves, sails and sailors in accord Illumed are in a mystery, Wonder and glory of the Lord,

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Though manifest in aspect minorPhosphoric ocean in shekinah.” (C, 411)

At the end of history and memory desert dust becomes a divine force that moves and gathers its grains to somehow conjure new creation. Far from being the dry land of death the desert now becomes the site of life’s generation, its “oceanic sands,” as Philippe Jaworski put it, “orienting and continually reanimating … unreachable reality of … phenomena.”44 The reappearance, in Melville’s late poetry, of this apprehension of the desert as the principle of animation might perhaps be understood as his last word on what the desert is. Not only will the desert again be seen there as the emergence of life in shekinah, as is the case in “In the Desert,” the penultimate poem of Timoleon, a collection that Melville published only four months before his death, which ends by calling the desert light “Of God the effluence of the essence, / Shekinah, intolerably bright.”45 It is also that, in Jaworski’s words, the desert will become the “sole horizon of … truth.”46 It will be identified as strange matter endowed with the capacity, despite its embodied nature, to host and channel a light emblematic of the radiance and transparency of truth: Never Phroah’s Night, Whereof the Hebrew wizards croon, Did so the Theban flames try As me this veritable Noon.47

Unlike other terrestrial sites where light mingles with shades and darkness, there is nothing obscure in the desert; everything is enlightened (“Holy, holy, holy Light!”48), which is why the desert is the zone of “veritable Noon.” As everything transparent and as every noon, this veritable Noon is also without the shade and shadow whose contrast makes figures and images possible. Thus, one who finds himself In the Desert, as does Melville toward the end of his life and of Timoleon, loses his face in the imageless sand. He is blinded by the intolerably bright desert light but that is a means to gain the glimmer of truth that will perhaps help him find himself again differently. That is why, as Jaworski puts it, in Melville’s desert “the reality of the face disappears,” in order for the desert to become the name for what begins “beyond the enclosure,” a space “without routes, but the principle of one interminable path. Without limits, but an always displaced, postponed, evasive threshold. Without tyrannical order, but instead a reference point still to be refound, a center that is to be relentlessly resituated. Without images or human scales, but a continuous, processional concept: man is unfolded everywhere seemingly different.”49

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Notes 1

Judge Shaw wrote to his son Samuel that “When he is deeply engaged in one of his literary works, he confines him to hard study many hours in the day … . He probably thus overworks himself & brings on severe nervous affections” (cited in Hershel Parker, Herman Melville, A Biography, Vol. 2, 1851–1891 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 289 ). 2 Ibid., 280. 3 Herman Melville, Journals, ed. Howard C. Horsford with Lynn Horth, The Writings of Herman Melville, the Northwestern-Newberry Edition (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 54. All further references to Journals will be quoted parenthetically in text and abbreviated as “J.” 4 Herman Melville, Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle, The Writings of Herman Melville, the Northwestern-Newberry Edition (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 128. All further references to Clarel will be quoted parenthetically in text and abbreviated as “C.” 5 Nathan’s murder outside the walls (C, 128–129) is built on the Journal entry “Arabs and Turks persecute Jews beyond the city walls” (J, 94). 6 “The best-rounded temperament of the group, [Rolfe] represents an ideal union of head and heart … . More than any other pilgrim he brings to bear on the events and problems of the pilgrimage a knowledge of the past, an intense but not uncritical respect for the ancient world” (Clarel, Editorial Appendix, 631). 7 Clarel employs other biblical references that relate desert and abandonment. In fact, the whole second part of the poem calls desert “wilderness.” In the forty-second canto of the first part of the poem the wilderness is identified as “John’s wilderness,” referencing John the Baptist’s sojourn “in the deserts till the day of his shewing unto Israel” (Luke 1:80, 3.3-4). 8 Herman Melville, Mardi and a Voyage Thither, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 415. 9 Even if Rolfe is often a patient listener of different opinions, his interpretation of the destruction of the cities and the formation of the desert is driven exclusively by sacred geographies since he dates the emergence of the lake of Jordan before the destruction of the cities and renders its flooding—responsible for the destruction of fertile land— as the concrete operation of God’s acts of punishment and desertion: “Or say there was a lake at first— / A supposition not reversed / By Writ—a lake enlarged through doom / Which overtook the cities?” (C, 2.33.75-80). 10 As the editors of Clarel reconstruct, Melville read the following editions: Murray, A Handbook for Travellers in Syria and Palestine, 2 vols., Vol. I (London: Murray, 1858), 200–203 and Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Sinai and Palestine in Connection with Their History (New York: Redfield, 1857), 281–285 (Clarel, 787). 11 Murray, A Handbook for Travellers in Syria and Palestine, 192. 12 Ibid., 193. 13 On Melville’s marginal inscription in Hawthorne’s book, see editorial commentary to Clarel, 735. 14 Stanley, Sinai and Palestine, 121.

400

Melville’s Philosophies

15 The olive trees’ status as monuments renders them lifeless and haunted. As Melville remarked in his Journal: “The olive tree much resembles in its grotesque contortions the apple tree—only it is much more gnarled & less lively in its green … . It is a haunted melancholy looking tree (sober & penitent), quite in keeping with Jerusalem & its associations” (J, 89). 16 Editorial comment, Clarel, 767. 17 George Walter Chamberlain, “A New England Crusade,” New England Magazine 36 (1907): 195–207, 195. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Clorinda S. Minor, Meshullam! Or Tidings from Jerusalem (Philadelphia, 1850; second edition 1851), Published by the Author. 21 Ibid., VI. 22 Ibid., VI. 23 Ibid., IV. 24 Ibid., VII. 25 Ibid., X. 26 Stanley, Sinai and Palestine, 102. 27 Edward Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine and in the Adjacent Regions, Vol. 1 (Boston: Crocker and Brewster, 1860), XI. 28 Stanley, Sinai and Palestine, 202. 29 Eliot Warburton, The Crescent and the Cross (London: Maclaren and Company, 1852), 55. 30 William McClure Thomson, The Land and the Book (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1880), 32. The editors of Clarel list Thompson’s book as another source known to Melville. The first edition was published in 1857. Melville used the New York: Widdleton, 1863 edition (Clarel, 705). 31 Thomson, The Land and the Book, 145. 32 Ibid., 348. 33 He returned to the Pera cemetery the next day but was “too late for the Dancing Dervishes. Saw their convent. Reminded me of the Shakers” (J, 62). 34 Emilia B. Hornby, In and Around Stamboul, 2 vol., Vol. 1 (London: Richard Bentley, 1858), 251–252. 35 Warburton, The Crescent and the Cross, 250. 36 Ibid., 266. 37 Ibid., 346. 38 Hornby, In and Around Stamboul, 2 vol., Vol. 1, 251. 39 Melville calls the geology of the northern part of Sinai “the desert of the Word” to reference what in the Bible is identified as the “‘great and terrible wilderness’ of the Israelite wanderings” and what, as Stanley puts it in a remark that attracted Melville attention, is “now … the passage of the Mecca pilgrimage” (Editorial comment to Clarel, 722. The comment reconstructs in detail what Melville means by “the desert of the Word,” and traces his understanding of Stanley’s remarks about “The Plateau on the Tîh”). 40 Stanley, Sinai and Palestine, 119. 41 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History, Trans. Harry Zohn,” in Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2003), 392.

Desertscapes: Geological Politics in Clarel

401

42 “A Critical Index of the Characters,” Clarel, 623. 43 Editorial comment to “In the Desert,” Herman Melville, Published Poems, ed. Robert C. Ryan, Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall Reising, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 858. 44 Philippe Jaworski, Melville, Le Désert & L’Empire (Paris: Presses de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, 1986), 311, my translation. 45 Melville, “In the Desert,” Published Poems, 314. 46 Jaworski, Melville, Le Désert & L’Empire, 311. 47 Melville, “In the Desert,” Published Poems, 314. 48 Ibid. 49 Jaworski, Melville, Le Désert & L’Empire, 311.

Contributors Branka Arsić is Charles and Lynn Zhang Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of Bird Relics, Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (Harvard, 2016), On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (Harvard, 2010), and Passive Constitutions or 71/2 Times Bartleby (Stanford, 2007). She has coedited (with Cary Wolfe) a collection of essays on Emerson, entitled The Other Emerson: New Approaches, Divergent Paths (Minnesota, 2010), and edited The American Impersonal (Bloomsbury, 2014), a collection of essays discussing Sharon Cameron’s thinking concerning impersonality. Stuart Burrows is Associate Professor of English at Brown University. He is the author of A Familiar Strangeness: American Fiction and the Language of Photography (Georgia, 2008). His essays have appeared in such journals as Nineteenth-Century Literature, The Arizona Quarterly, NOVEL, and The Henry James Review. He is currently completing two books: The Way We Were, a study of temporality in Henry James, and The Third Person, an examination of the relation between free indirect discourse and subjectivity in the modern novel. Rachel Cole is Associate Professor of English at Lewis & Clark College. She is currently working on two research projects: Personal Preferences, a study of nineteenth-century literary models of personhood and the distribution of social capital, and Satisfaction: Theories of Contentment, both the sort we find in literature and the kind we find in life. Her articles have appeared in the Yale Journal of Criticism, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and PMLA. Kenneth Dauber is Professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of The Idea of Authorship in American Literature: Democratic Poetics from Franklin to Melville (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) and Rediscovering Hawthorne (Princeton University Press, 1977). He has coedited (with Walter Jost) Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein. He has recently completed The Logic of Sentiment: Sympathy, Skepticism, and Community in Stowe, Hawthorne, and Melville. Colin Dayan is Professor of English, Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities, and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of With Dogs at the Edge of Life (Columbia, 2015); The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Princeton, 2011); The Story of Cruel and Unusual (MIT/ Boston Review Press, 2007); Haiti, History, and the Gods (University of California Press, 1995, 1998); Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction (Oxford, 1987); and A Rainbow for the Christian West (University of Massachusetts Press, 1977).

404

Contributors

Paul Downes is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Hobbes, Sovereignty and Early American Literature (Cambridge, 2015) and Democracy, Revolution and Monarchism in Early American Literature (Cambridge, 2002). He has written on Melville and human rights theory for the South Atlantic Quarterly (2004), and on Melville and the 1971 Attica prison uprising (for a forthcoming collection of essays on Multimedia Melville). K. L. Evans is Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at Cornell University. She is the author of One Foot in the Finite: Melville's Realism Reclaimed (Northwestern, 2017) and Whale! (Minnesota, 2003). Her essays are published in such journals as ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance and Philosophy: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. Paul Grimstad teaches at New York University’s Gallantin School. He is the author of Experience and Experimental Writing: Literary Pragmatism from Emerson to the Jameses (Oxford, 2013). His writing has appeared in such venues as Bookforum, n+1, New Yorker, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Music and Literature, The Brooklyn Rail, and Raritan. Paul Hurh is Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona. He is the author of American Terror: The Feeling of Thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville (Stanford, 2015), which charts the relation between models of Enlightenment method and the development of literary terror as a philosophical affect. His current projects have taken a cosmological turn, and include studies of Edgar Allan Poe’s astronomical aesthetics, spacetime in Herman Melville, and planetary conceptions of death in Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. His essays have appeared in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Style, and Novel. Michael Jonik is Lecturer in English and American Studies at the University of Sussex. His essays have appeared in journals such as Leviathan and The Oxford Literary Review. Currently, he is completing two book projects: Melville’s Uncemented Stones: Character, Impersonality, and the Politics of Singularity and A Natural History of the Mind: Science, Form, and Perception from Cotton Mather to William James. Maurice S. Lee is Professor of English at Boston University. He is the author of Uncertain Chances: Science, Skepticism, and Belief in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Oxford, 2012) and Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830Douglas (Cambridge, 2009). His essays have appeared in such journals as ELH, J19, ESQ, American Literature, and Raritan. James D. Lilley is Associate Professor of English at the University at Albany. He is the author of Common Things: Romance and the Aesthetics of Belonging in Atlantic Modernity (Fordham, 2014). His articles have appeared in ELH and New Literary History. In his next book, Impersonal Movements: On Literature and Gesture, he turns

Contributors

405

to Edwards, Poe and Melville in order to explore how voice, movement, habit, and script can function as vitally eccentric gestures of literary expression. Samuel Otter is Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Melville’s Anatomies (University of California Press, 1999) and Philadelphia Stories (Oxford, 2010). He is the co editor (with Geoffrey Sanborn) of Melville and Aesthetics (Palgrave, 2011) and (with Robert S. Levine) Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). He currently serves as the editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. He is working on a book titled Melville’s Forms, ranging across the writer’s fiction, poetry, and prose/poetry experiments, in which he examines what Melville meant by, and so what twenty-first-century literary critics might more precisely mean by, the crucial term “form.” Michael D. Snediker is Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston. He is the author of Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions (Minnesota, 2009) and the forthcoming Contingent Figure: Aesthetic Duress from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (under contract at Minnesota). He is also a published poet. His most recent book of poems, the Apartment of Tragic Appliances, was published in 2013 by Punctum Books. His next book of poetry, The New York Editions, is a translation of Henry James’s novels into lyric poems. Elisa Tamarkin is Associate Professor of English at University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago, 2008) and is completing a book titled Apropos of Nothing on ideas of relevance and irrelevance in art, politics, and philosophy. She serves on the editorial board of Representations and is past president of C19: The Society of NineteenthCentury Americanists. Rhian Williams is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of The Poetry Toolkit: The Essential Guide to Studying Poetry (revised second edition, Bloomsbury, 2013) and is currently developing new projects that seek to recover the poetics of everyday ecologies since the eighteenth century. Her essays have been published in such journals as Victorian Poetry, Victorian Literature and Culture, Literature Compass, and Literature and Theology.

Index Note: The letter “n” following locators refers to notes. Adorno, Theodor W. 279, 281–2, 287, 299 n.48 aesthetics 179, 180, 181, 193 n.12, 194 n.16 affect 176, 180, 182, 184, 187, 190–1, 192, 193 Agamben, Giorgio 107–8, 201 Arendt, Hannah 43, 56 Aristophanes 359 Aristotle 65, 317, 329, 331 n.11, 333 n.23 Armstrong, Isobel 180, 182, 195 n.60 Arnold, Matthew 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 184–5 Arrian 372 Arsić, Branka 126 n. 26, 336 n.91 Arvin, Newton 40 Astor, John Jacob 345–6 atomism 63–5, 68–71 Bacon, Francis 64–6, 378 Bacon, Roger 65–6 Baker, Jennifer 72 Balzac, Honoré de 274, 291, 298 n.25, 300 n.57 Barnes, Elizabeth 127 n. 51 Barthes, Roland 51–2, 53 Benjamin, Walter 204–5, 208–9, 211, 214–15, 287, 299 n.48, 395 Bennett, Jane 63 Bergson, Henri 19 biblical exegesis 176, 331 n.6 Blackstone, William 338, 344 Blanchot, Maurice 126 n.26 Book of Job 319–20, 324 Borges, Jorges Luis 305 Boscovich, Roger 64 Boyle, Robert 67 Bryant, John 374 n.15 Buddhism 291–2

Buell, Lawrence 72 Burke, Edmond 338 Calder, Alex 71 Calvin, John 348–9 Cameron, Sharon 40, 41, 46, 51 Carax, Leos 301, 304, 306, 309–11 Carlyle, Thomas 48–9, 51 Carson, Anne 358 Casarino, Cesare 328, 336 n.95, 373 Catholicism 189, 190–1 Cavell, Stanley 72, 131 Chamberlain, George Walter 384 Cicero 359, 372 Clarel 278 Clastres, Pierre 362 Cobb, Thomas R. R. 341 Comay, Rebecca 48 commonality or the common 353–4, 355, 373 Comte, Auguste 63 concept formation 18–19 as mental representation 19 objectivity and 18 Conrad, Joseph 39, 40 The Nigger of the Narcissus 40 Cousin, Victor 65 cynicism 355, 367–70, 372 Dalton, John 67 Davis, Andrew Jackson 68 Deleuze, Gilles 57 n.9, 107, 353, 360 democracy 315–16, 331, 331 n.2 Democritus 62–7, 70, 73 Deneuve, Catherine 304 Denis, Claire 214–17 Depardieu, Guillaume 301 De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater 225, 228, 248

408

Index

Derrida, Jacques 107–8, 111–16, 123, 332 n. 17, 334 n.53, 336 n.95 Descartes, René 18 Diogenes 355, 369–70, 372 Edwards, Jonathan 62 ekphrasis 243–9 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 64, 73, 358 epic 176, 177, 178, 185, 189, 190, 193 Epictetus 372 Epicurus 63–4 Faraday, Michael 67 FitzGerald, Edward 263, 264, 273–4, 275, 286, 291, 296, 296 n.4, 296 n.5, 297 n.8 form 261, 276, 277, 281, 282, 287, 289, 290 formalism 139 Fox Sisters 68 Frege, Gottlob 45 friendship 358 Gansevoort, Guert 43 Garner, Stanton 42, 54 Gassendi, Pierre 67 Gathman, Roger 52 Goodrich, Peter 340 Harrison, Bernard 17, 21, 27–9, 33 on knowledge as a two-level process 27 on Merleau-Ponty 32 nomothetic objects 32 Hartman, Geoffrey 57 n.8 Hawthorne, Marble Faun 247 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 147–8, 247, 353, 356 Hayford, Harrison 42, 49 Heidegger, Martin 289 Hobbes, Thomas 316–23, 328–31 Hornby, Edmund 389 Hornby, Emilia 389–90 Howard, Leon 302 Humboldt, Alexander Von 64–5 Hume, David 20 impersonality 133, 151 n.13 inhuman 366–73

Jackson, Andrew 365 James, G. P. R. 42 James, Henry 39 James, William 17, 41, 42, 49–50, 54, 72, 135–6 Jaworski, Philippe 311 n.9, 398 Johnson, Barbara 41 Kamuf, Peggy 374 n.11 Kant, Immanuel 18–19, 177, 303–4, 325–8, 335 n.74 Kent, James 338, 345 Kierkegaard, Søren 126 n.23 Knighton, Andrew 126 n.26 Knott, Hugh 19, 30 Kovesi, Julius 24, 26, 28 on forming a notion 27 Kripke, Saul 45–6 Lacan, Jacques 142 Larmore, Charles 115–16 Lavoisier, Antoine 67–8 Leopardi, Giacomo 274, 278, 286, 354 Levinas, Emmanuel 126 n. 30, 338 Linnaeus 368 Locke, John 17–19, 22, 54 Lucian 359, 374 n.19 Lucretius 63–4 lyric 179, 180, 181, 189 Macchiaioli 289–92 Maitland, Frederic William 340 Mather, Cotton 61–6, 68, 73 Matteson, John 127 n. 51 Maxwell, James 67 McCarty, David Charles 23 Melville, Herman aesthetics of linear proliferation 245–9, 251 n.10 ambiguity 138–40 American capitalism 124–5, 125 n.5, 126 n. 26, 127 n.51 American social life 125, 125 n.5 the biblical Abraham 112–14, 117, 119 Clarel 219–20, 223–4 ecology 379, 382, 390 ekphrasis, interest in 243–4

Index ekphrasis of Piranesi’s Carceri in 228–32, 243–9 form 9, 46, 150 n.10, 153 n.36, 208, 254 n.22, 258 n.40, 289 fossils 380–3, 391 indeterminacy 107–8, 111–12, 126 n.26 intaglio process, interest in 221–3, 246–7, 248–9, 251 n.10, 251 n.11 Jerusalem 378–9, 384–95, 400 n.15 obligation to the self 107–8 obligations to others 107–8 Palestine 382–4, 387, 389, 394, 396 personhood 107–8, 113–16 philosophy of art 10, 261 Piranesi, knowledge of 220, 241, 256 n.30 preference 107–11, 116, 118–20, 124 print collection 220–1, 246–7, 249, 250 n.5, 250 n.6 prints 222, 250 n.3, 250 n.5 reasons 112–13, 115 reductionism 23 responsibility 107–8, 113, 117–18, 120, 123 social recognition 108, 113–14, 120, 123, 127 n. 51 trees 382–3, 387, 389–90, 400 n.15 Melville, Herman, works Bartleby the Scrivener 62, 202, 353–4 The Bell-Tower 69, 71 Benito Cereno 47, 69 Billy Budd 39–59 passim Clarel 62, 70, 144–5, 175–97, 219, 224, 377–401 The Confidence-Man 46, 62, 66–7, 69, 71, 141–2, 353–76 Correspondence 353 The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles 354, 361, 372, 375 n.31 Hawthorne and His Mosses 356 I and My Chimney 62, 354 Israel Potter 55, 71, 319 Jimmy Rose 360 Journal 378–9, 384, 387–9, 391–2 Lightning-Rod Man 62 Mardi 61, 131 Moby-Dick 46, 47, 61, 69, 72, 136–7, 140, 315–36, 353, 354, 356, 366, 373

409

Mr. Parkman’s Tour 362 The Piazza 210 Pierre 47, 49, 61, 129–49, 205, 326, 354, 360 Redburn 46 Timoleon 397 Typee 361–2, 366 White Jacket 47, 55 Milder, Robert 58 n.38 Mill, John Stuart 68–9 Miller, Perry 344–5 Minor, Clorinda S. 384–6 Molière, The Misanthrope 359 Morton, Timothy 316–17, 330, 332 n.17, 336 n.95 Nancy, Jean-Luc 47, 126 n.26 Native Americans (and “Indian-hating”) 362–6 Negri, Antonio 373 Nelson, Horatio 51, 52 Newton, Isaac 67 Ngai, Sianne 356, 358 Nietzsche, Friedrich 211, 283, 289 objectivity 18 as a general feature of concepts 18 opera 211–12 Paine, Thomas 47 Parker, Herschel 43 Peirce, C. S. 20 Perrin, Jean Baptiste 68 pessimism 263, 274–5, 278, 286, 291, 292 philosophy of art/art/aesthetics 261–3, 275, 276, 278–9, 281–2, 286–9, 290–1, 295 pilgrimage 182–3, 184–5, 186, 187 Pinchevski, Amit 126 n.26 Piranesi, Carceri 224–8, 232–42 Plato 18, 20, 23–4, 359 Plutarch 359 Poe, Edgar Allan 64, 302, 338 posthumanism 368, 373 Power, Amanda 65 Priestley, Joseph 62, 64 prints (or under “engravings”) 275, 278, 292, 295

410

Index

Protestantism 190–1 Putnam, Hilary 61–2, 67, 72 Quinn, Arthur Hobson 310 n.3 Rancière, Jacques 315 Redon, Odilon 276–7 reductionism 22 as seeded by Descartes and Locke 22 semantical atomism and 23 Reed, Naomi 126 n.26 Reid, Thomas 52, 54 Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn 275, 278–9 Rimbaud, Arthur 276 Rivett, Sarah 65 Robinson, Edward 388, 400 n.27 Roth, Marty 58 n.18 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 365, 366 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality among Men 361 Letter to d’Alembert 359 Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám 261–96 passim Russell, Bertrand 45, 58 n.22 Ruttenberg, Nancy 56 Sainsbury, R. M. 45 Salem witch trials 62, 64–5 Savarese, Ralph 353–4 Schopenhauer, Arthur 91, 102 n.46, 265, 273, 274, 286, 290, 291, 295, 297 n.12, 300 n.59 Sealts, Merton M. 42, 49 Sedgwick, Eve 40 Sellars, Wilfred 67–8, 70, 72 Seminole wars 376 n.34 Seneca 372 Shakespeare, William 303, 356 Timon of Athens 353, 359, 366–9 Shaw, Lemuel 377, 399 n.1 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 278–9 skepticism 255 n.23 Smith, Gavin 311 n.12 Snyder, Laura 68 Somers, USS 42–3 sovereignty 315–16, 318–23, 323 Spanos, William V. 56 Spengemann, William 310 n.4

Spinoza, Baruch 353 spiritualism 68–9 Stanley, Arthur 380, 382, 388, 394 Strauss, David 178, 179, 186, 190 Stroud, George M. 341 Swedenborg, Emmanuel 372 Szendy, Peter 318, 320, 323 Thomson, James 274, 278, 297 n.8, 298 n.27, 298 n.33 Thomson, William McClure 389 Thoreau, Henry David 358 Timoleon 261, 265, 273–5, 278, 282–3, 286, 289, 296 n.3 Timon 353, 354–5, 359–60, 369–70 ukiyo-e 292, 294–5 Ullman, Stephen 44 Vedder, Elihu 261–73, 275–7, 279–95 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 366 Wallace, Robert K. 220–1, 245, 249–50 n.3 Walker, Scott 308 Warburton, Eliot 388, 390 Wenke, John 57 n.16 Whewell, William 61, 63, 65, 68–9 White, Thomas 302 Williams, Bernard 52, 53 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 19, 20, 72, 135, 142 and account of meaning 29 difference from Bertrand Russell 20, 22 difference from Hume 20 how words are embedded in our lives 30 language game 21, 28–9 linguistic knowledge 26 logical role of the sign 29 meaning is not empirically determined 27 meaning is use 21, 25, 29 picture theory of language 21 signs and things signified 20–1 theory of logical portrayal 20–1 Wolosky, Shira 127 n. 51 Wright, Thomas 388 Žižek, Slavoj 58 n.24