"Not altogether human": pantheism and the dark nature of the American renaissance 9781613761977, 9781558499560, 9781558499577

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgments (page vii)
Introduction (page 1)
1. "The Seductive God": Pan and the Emergence of a Transcendental America (page 15)
2. The "Not Me": The Black Nature of an Animated World (page 61)
3. "A Democracy of Devils": The Limits of Individualism in Emerson and Melville (page 117)
4. The Melancholy of Anatomy: The Body Politics of American Pantheism (page 149)
Notes (page 225)
Works Cited (page 261)
Index (page 279)

Citation preview

“Not Altogether Human’

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Not Alto gether 9

Human

Pintheism and the Dark Nature of the American Renaissance

Richard Hardack

University of Massachusetts Press ¢ AMHERST AND BOSTON

Copyright © 2012 by University of Massachusetts Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America LC 2012007993 ISBN 978-1-55849-957-7 (paper); 956-0 (library cloth)

Designed by Dennis Anderson Set in 11.5/13, Garamond Premier Pro by Westchester Book Printed and bound by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hardack, Richard. Not altogether human : pantheism and the dark nature of the American renaissance / Richard Hardack.

p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-55849-957-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-55849-956-0 (library cloth : alk. paper) 1. American literature—1g9th century—History and criticism.

2. Transcendentalism in literature. 3. Pantheismin literature. I. Title. PS217.T7H37 2012

810.9 384—dc23 2012007993

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data are available.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction I

1. ~The Seductive God”: Pan and the Emergence of a

Transcendental America 15

2. The “Not ME”: The Black Nature of an Animated World 61 3. “A Democracy of Devils”: The Limits of Individualism in

Emerson and Melville lI7 American Pantheism 149

Notes 225 Works Cited 261 Index 279

4. The Melancholy of Anatomy: The Body Politics of

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Acknowledgments

SOME TRANSCENDENTALISTS, and Emerson in particular, viewed debt with anxiety and suspicion, but debt is also a mark of friendship and camaraderie. In recognition of what I hope is the academic potlatch that helped produce this book, I want to express my thanks and gratitude to my parents,

whose unconditional support has meant everything; Carolyn Porter, my adviser at Berkeley, for many years of guidance; Kim Benston, for his perennial generosity as a teacher, colleague, and correspondent; Joanne Hutchinson, whose example led the way; Peter Briggs, who truly is a gentleman and a scholar; Sam Otter, for his much-valued assistance; Marilyn Gewirtz, who

has been not only my teacher, but mentor, friend, and confidante; Janice Gerton and the Arts and Letters Foundation, for their generous support of my research; James Martin, for persevering in friendship even after reading more of my work than anyone should have to; Anna Hellén, fellow Melvillean and farthest-flung friend; the late Katrin Burlin; Stephen Finley; Ursula K. Le Guin, for her wisdom and humor; Jenny Adams, for being Jenny Adams; Leila May, Don Palmer, and Toni Wein, for being cherished companions in travel and for their steadfast encouragement; Sabina Knight, for her years of kindness and friendship; the once and future members of Marilyn Monroe Doctrine; Pam Thurschwell, especially for her comments on my fourth chapter; the Pripstein family; Dr. Deborah Luepnitz; Steven Morse; Ernest Machen; the late Michael Rogin; Jon Myerow; the poet Elline Lipkin; Colin (Joan) Dayan, Jana Argersinger, Leland Person, and Sandy Marovitz, for their edifying comments on my work; Debora Sherman;

Justine Tally and Walter Hoelbling, for their hospitality and camaraderie; Geoff Nunberg; Mitchell Breitwieser; Scott Bolton; A. C. Christodoulou; Brian Halley, Carol Betsch, Amanda Heller, and Mary Bellino at University of Massachusetts Press, for their patience, insights, and considerable assis-

tance; Martin Griffin, for his thorough and thoroughly helpful input; and Wyn Kelley, for her exceptionally thoughtful suggestions.

Vil

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“Not Altogether Human

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Introduction

If the age be full of pantheistic tendencies, if the metaphysical, moral and social sciences be infested with them, though their maintainers and teachers ignore or conceal the fact, then must it be a matter of prime importance to trace the influence and operations of the system wherever they may be observed and to show how men may have been tempted, seduced... by it almost unawares.... [A] system may exercise great power even where its theoretic shape is not understood. The Reverend Morgan Dix, Lectures on the Pantheistic Idea of an Impersonal Deity (34)

I believe pantheism to be one of [the philosophies] most fitted to seduce the human mind in democratic times. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (2:32)

Very seductive are the first steps from the town to the woods, but the End is want & madness. Emerson, Journals (10:34)

Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world’s whole bulk about; makes all coasts one bay to it; seems the tide beating heart of earth. Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs must own the seductive god, bowing your head to Pan. Melville, Moby-Dick (482-83)

it

WRITING TO Nathaniel Hawthorne in June 1851, in a letter full of pantheistic images, allusions and self-representations, Herman Melville repeatedly invoked what he experienced as “the a// feeling,” a sense of intoxicating oneness with nature and everything outside himself. But Melville immediately qualified what he considered the addictive exhilaration of such moments by situating them as instances of unacknowledged cognitive dissonance: “But what plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion” (Correspondence, 193-94). I

2 ¢ Introduction

In November, Melville elaborated on his never wholly ratified, but never wholly relinquished feelings of pantheism: Now I can’t write what I felt. But I felt pantheistic then—your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s. .. . Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome’s Pantheon. ...I speak now of my profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling. Whence come you Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips—lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling. Now, sympathizing with the paper, my angel turns over another page.... [T]he very fingers that now guide the pen are not precisely the same that just took it up and put it on this paper. Lord, when shall we be done changing? ... The divine magnet is on you, and my magnet responds. Which is the biggest? A foolish question—they are One. (Correspondence, 212-13; emphasis in original)!

Ishmael in Moby-Dick is overtaken by the same temporary sensation, a feel-

ing of infinite fraternity with other men and the world achieved through a pantheistic fusion of bodies: I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, —Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities. ... [L]et us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into

the very milk and sperm of kindness. Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now... I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity. ... [In] the

visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti. (Moby-Dick, 416)

Written at nearly the same time, these passages invoke fantasies in which

men can exchange, combine, and transcend their individual male bodies and subjectivities by immersing themselves in a collective and primitive nature outside conventional society. In that respect they emblematize a rhetoric of pantheistic merger in American Renaissance discourse. These excerpts

also point to a remarkably pervasive pattern of seduction and betrayal in American transcendentalism. As we shall see, Melville’s iterated visions of infinite fraternity and angelic merger with another representative man in nature, and Ishmael’s attendant fantasy of angels, give way to a dark materi-

Introduction e 3

alization in the image of Pan as a cloven-hoofed devil. Blissful reverie turns out to represent the lure of a confidence trick. Universal feelings and “sociality’ in nature are revealed as ephemeral, and each temporary felicity is inverted; “transcendence” of the male body, for instance, ends in a loss of self control and even of parts of that body. Precisely as Ishmael’s hands merge above deck, digits are amputated below, as the discourse of abstract union becomes one of actual fragmentation: “Toes are scarce among veteran blubberroom men” (400). The dream of infinite fraternity/merger ultimately leaves the male self as dismembered as Melville’s many Pan figures. For Melville, the failure to merge in transcendental nature reflects the inability of men to interact in American society. I introduce these passages here as representa-

tive of pantheistic exposition in antebellum culture, as well as Melville’s profoundest feelings and sense of being. I reassess them in my final chapter.

In THIS book I reevaluate American Renaissance pantheism, a system of representation and a form of religion that codified mankind’s relationship with nature and a surprisingly wide-ranging set of identity politics.” I define American pantheism as a distillation of Emersonian transcendentalism that deified a “racialized” nature as universal natural law. Many white pantheists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, racialized their conception of the divine by associating primeval nature, and especially its material aspects, with Af rican Americans and Native Americans. These writers philosophically constructed nature not simply as god but as everything that was “Other” or opposite to white men, which included, to varying degrees, the feminine and all other racial identities. Nature served as a mirror that reflected or externalized the denied aspects of white male subjectivity, or, in Emerson’s terms, the “not me” of the white male self that also defined the boundaries of that

identity. Even the figure or idea of Pan was often connoted as black, and characters who identified themselves as pantheistic were frequently depicted as living outside white society, and as primitive and racially distinct from the white male Protestant self of New England. If the individual male self in society was white, the self merged into collective nature was dark. Pantheists do not worship a god with human qualities but rather deify a

nature that is impersonal yet still sentient at some level; they believe that this form of god is, is in, and controls or regulates everything. At first, this benign incarnation of the All—the universe itself—seems to allow men to transcend their solipsistic individualities and local conflicts, even their self contained bodies, and attain a transpersonal and “infinite” identity in nature. Pantheists pursue a feeling of oneness with that nature, a sense of belong-

ing that they lack in society. A palliative for white male isolation and an

4.¢ Introduction

imagined separation from the world, nature offered a route of access to the universal no longer afforded by a Judeo-Christian god. Pantheism also represents a utopian endeavor to undo the Adamic fall and the fragmentations of Babel by imagining a harmonious translation of all cultures. Instead of elevating the particular truth of one religion or culture to the status of a universal, pantheists fantasize that they can translate all particular, inchoate beliefs into the universal—and make them commensurate—through the transcendent laws of nature. Positing no sin, judgment, redemption, heaven or hell, or even evil, pantheists seek not personal salvation but the transcendence of atomized white male consciousness, of all separations between subject and object, perceiver and perceived, and self and world. But as it turns out, nature is not just impersonal and indifferent but antagonistic to the pantheist’s very vision of transcendence. Pantheism functions as both a screen before and a point of access to some unpalatable or unassimilable aspects of American cultural history that seem to hide in plain sight: for example, the fact that Emerson identified himself above all else as a pantheist, but considered his most fundamental beliefs to be too radical to express openly; that Melville in his deepest self felt seduced and finally betrayed by the tenets of Emersonian pantheism, a condition he inscribed in many of his novels and repeatedly professed to his would-be mentor, Nathaniel Hawthorne; that Hawthorne in his last published novel, The Marble Faun, addresses the new republic on the verge of dissolution by chronicling the downfall of a highly racialized Pan figure; that the tenets of pantheism were so common in antebellum society that they were blamed for everything from corrupting the nation’s youth to precipitating the Civil War; and that conceptions of a divine, racialized nature were intertwined with attitudes regarding the American character, slavery, cultural geography, exceptionalism, and the parameters of white male individuality and all the identities against which it was constructed. For many readers and critics, pantheism remains a mysterious and archaic term, but it can help us reassess a range of texts and issues central to understanding the development of American identities.

Por American writers, nature provides an arena for staging the contradictions of republican democracy, federalism, and the precepts of individualism—manifested, for instance, in conflicts between the parts and wholes of selves, bodies, and nations. Pantheism at first offers a way to reconcile these parts and wholes; symbolically, this process is represented by _ the physical merger of fragmented or isolated male bodies. As I later elaborate, pantheism allows men to merge with other men in and through nature, but at the expense of their individuality. Not to merge precipitates the alien-

Introduction e 5

ation of extreme American self-reliance, which is figured as a form of amputation or severance from society. To the pantheist, ideas of union typically

become conflated with physical merger and ideas of individuation with physical dismemberment. In keeping with their pantheism, Emerson and Melville have trouble determining where their own bodies begin and end. Each uses a variety of Platonic fables of an original, divided man or a fragmented god, couched in an American context. Each is attracted to pantheism because it seems to offer a way to transcend the painful isolation of male individuality—what Melville describes to Hawthorne as part of the attempt to “get out of yourself” and into “the All” (Correspondence, 193)—and a union

with nature more nearly perfect than any politics could provide. The transcendentalist sought to transcend the constraints of nation and history and the borders of the individual male self; the pantheist believed he could actually merge into divine Nature to do so. Unlike many of his peers, Melville views American individualism as potentially pathological as well as destabilizing, and as generating a sense of extreme isolation and fragmentation. But the alternative, represented by forms of pantheistic merger in which men transcend individual identity, turns out to be as pernicious. Melville was deeply attracted to, but increasingly suspi-

cious of, Emersonian reveries in which the white male self figuratively merges with other bodies, beings, and racialized nature itself. He grew more disturbed by those fantasies, which turned to fugues of dismemberment in his fiction.

In chapter 1, I provide a historical introduction to pantheism in midnineteenth-century discourse. As evident in such works as Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, the philosophical tracts of General Ethan Allen

Hitchcock, and Melville’s Pierre, many American writers in this period overtly and covertly oscillate between pantheism’s mutually defining poles of extreme merger and isolation. I contend that the inadequacies of pantheism’s system of self-representation first surface in, and help determine the spiral of, Emerson’s writings. In ensuing chapters, I explore how the contradictions of Emersonian pantheism are caricatured but finally reinscribed

with bitter irony in Melville’s fiction from Mardi onward. Hawthorne is Melville's idealized reader and even co-laborer in writing, but Emerson is his dark twin, the icon with whom he wages his metaphysical struggles. Melville was exceptionally conscious of Emerson’s work, throughout his fiction inscribing and parodying not just his ontology and beliefs but even his distinctive phrasing and imagery. Emerson might take to the woods and Melville to the waters, but they are both seduced by what Pan represents. Pantheism provides an infernal logic

6 e Introduction

governing their writings and careers, periodically leading to remorse and selfrenunciation. A fter this narrative of reversals has run its course, most fantasies of universality can be voiced only with extreme naiveté or extreme cynicism. In the first half of this book I pursue the seduction, the allure, the reverie with pantheism, hinting at its “demonology’—the systematic inversion or unravel-

ing of its central tenets. In the second half I track the breakdown of the romance, focusing on how once animated bodies are mutilated and marketed, and why pantheistic gender identifications fail so dramatically.

From the 1830s to the 1870s, writers in the popular and religious press laud or vilify the unprecedented influence of pantheism on American writers and naturalists. They broadly warn that pantheism—designated as the “modern infidelity” and often conflated with atheism, early theories of evolution, and forms of radical politics—was the greatest threat to morality and even national identity that Americans faced; and both family and critics routinely attribute a socially irresponsible pantheism to Emerson. Even a relatively sympathetic review of contemporary religion in an 1844 issue of the United States Democratic Review stresses that “the tendency to merge the universe and man in God—to make all things deity, and Deity all things—is the peculiar pantheism of the present day,” which narcissistically aggrandizes the self and self-sufficient reason, promotes an esoteric philosophy of transcendental materialism and radical egalitarianism, and loses god in nature.’ Emblematically, Emerson substituted the word “nature” for his original draft references to “Pan” in the final version of his first major essay, “Nature.” Such

a simultaneous evasion and incorporation at the outset of Emerson’s most prominent period of publication proves an endemic trope for much of his work, and a model for the way pantheism operates as a sometimes hidden, but socially embedded, discourse through much of antebellum culture. We might then consider pantheism the politically unconscious wing of American transcendentalism, doing its underlying cultural work. While several critics have assessed Pan as a figure in Romantic literature in the United States, primarily in Emerson’s poetry, none has undertaken a systematic study of pantheism as a coding of gender and racial identity and a discursive “translation” of natural science in nineteenth-century America. Ironically, for many foreign critics of the American Renaissance—from Tocqueville in his admonitions about pantheism in Democracy in America to D. H. Lawrence in his modernist response in “Pan in America’—the tenets of pantheism have always distilled the contradictions of an American self that is excessively individuated and self-reliant yet democratic, universal,

and egalitarian. Though its proponents are sometimes amorphous in their Romantic effusiveness, pantheism represents a highly specific and delimited

Introduction ¢ 7

set of masculine assumptions and rhetorical devices that use nature to define gender identity; male relations; merger; isolation; manifest destiny; universal law; the primitive and the cultured; economic relations; taxonomy;

reproduction; the development of mankind and its relation to all other living and even nonliving things; and the relationship between the particular and collective aspects of identity, which included the unconscious, hereditary traits, and racial “fate.” Distinct from pluralist polytheism or Universalism, pantheism envisions an inhuman consciousness imbued in all things, an inaccessible will behind language, history, and natural laws. AImost always when a writer at this time describes the ways “the All,” universal

nature, or natural law regulates an aspect of culture, we encounter some form of pantheism. The terminology of pantheism—which Pan, as I will show, comes to personify—permeates much of the literature of this period with a startlingly consistent grammar and even a cast of representative characters. As one example, Goethe was perhaps the most notorious pantheist of the previous era. He provides an extended linguistic and philosophical blueprint for the descriptions of animated nature developed throughout the American Renaissance, is repeatedly designated one of Emerson’s representative men, and even makes an extended cameo appearance in Melville's

Pierre.

Many of Emerson’s and Melville’s assumptions about male identity and democracy are predicated on the existence of an immanent, deified Nature, which provides a universalizing “enormous system” of inclusive representation.* Seeking to “yield [him]self to the perfect whole,” Emerson repeatedly calls the eternal Pan the “meaning of each feature” of creation, the world’s and his own? Melville’s Ishmael is never immune from “a transcendental and Platonic application” of his thoughts, and such transcendental Platonism becomes a reliable cover for Emersonian pantheism and the signature of much of Melville’s writing (446).° Pantheism, then, offers a way to restore the resonance of a contentious drama of American self-definition, and to

reinterpret not only the relationship between Emerson’s and Melville's writing

but the ideological consequences of their work as well. (In their consonant pantheism, Emerson and Melville by no means represent American society, but they emblematize a persistent formulation of American identity politics.) Many contemporary critics might be wary of metalanguages and master narratives—and especially the master narrative of pantheism, which imag-

ined not only the entirety of American culture through the lens of New England transcendentalism but also the immutable laws of nature that transcended and controlled all cultures. But many antebellum writers used these

overarching tenets to shape their worldviews. One needs to take their

8 ¢ Introduction

assumptions seriously to explain how and why these master narratives were once persuasive. In addition to delineating its consequences, I hope to determine why pantheism, and the varieties of transcendental idealism one can bracket under this term, forms a deep structure for some of what was once treated as ca-

nonical American Renaissance literature. My intent is not to justify this canon but to elucidate a less understood context for its creation and some of its lasting influence. For example, some of the significance of Emerson's “Nature” and Melville's Moby-Dick emerges only against the historical backdrop of pantheism. I am also presenting these arguments only in relation to the texts and discursive contexts I invoke, not the breadth of American literature; while I consider these works emblematic of an important facet of American self-representation, I would by no means argue that they reflect the nation’s only primary tradition. Many authors didn’t engage in any pantheistic

discourse because, among other reasons, they didn’t have any interest in “transcending” a white male individuality they had yet to attain. (The dominant antebellum culture defined individuality, including self-reliance and legal personhood, in terms of white male subjectivity.) While some women writers evoke its precepts, pantheism remained, for reasons I hope to clarity, an almost exclusively white male form of sel&representation. White women such as Catharine Sedgwick and Harriet Beecher Stowe attribute a lost pantheism to dispossessed “aboriginal” cultures, but many white men claim to experience that deprivation, and reclaim that lineage, as their own. Pantheism, then, reflects the survival of what some would see as premodern discourse, but as a postcolonial ghost in the machine.

Pantheism locates a cultural shift from a discursive system of continuities and analogies to one of dissimilarities. In other words, it emerges at a moment when many natural scientists are still seeking universal theories—ones that unify the forces and laws of matter, energy, and even history—even as some social theorists are beginning to posit disjuncture as the basis for comprehending cultural paradigms. Pantheists systematize and naturalize these continuities in new guises, for instance, in advancing a comprehensive theory of natural science and natural law, or proposing that strict analogies exist between metaphysics and physics, and between natural law and social relations. Especially in its demonology, pantheism serves as a locus for some troubled transitions from premodern, Romantic notions of an external organic whole to postmodern notions of intertextuality and self-division. While I don’t intend to assert that the United States is unique in its transcendental exceptionalizing, I do treat pantheism as an index of a distinctly American persona. Some antebellum theorists of U.S. politics try to configure

Introduction ¢ 9

the nation as universal, even universally representative or egalitarian, through its alliance with nature or natural law. It is by way of that process, particularly as expressed in the pantheistic transcendence of nationality, that America—in many aspects of its culture, politics, and business—tries to exceptionalize itself. Its literal and metaphoric “colonizations,” or claims for all-containing universality, begin while the country is still in the process of demarcating itself, and such conditions could be considered atypical. Unlike most of its European counterparts—with the notable exception of Germany, from which America derives a vocabulary for much of its pantheistic rhetoric—America does not yet know where its own border (like the pantheist’s body) begins and ends. Yet America is already configuring itself as a nation without boundaries, universal through a nature that both transcends and defines it.’

Pantheism also functions discursively like a web—without beginning, middle, and end—in theory and in practice. And transcendental writers often defy assumptions about biographical or rhetorical “progress.” While pantheists respond to historical issues such as abolition, pantheism as a worldview tends to operate under its own atemporal logic, one that imagines itself as an unfolding of a priori principles unaffected by cultural specificity. Here I try to provide contextual and historical explanations for how and why Emerson’s and Melville’s views do alter with regard to the prospect of a nature that purportedly transcends culture. Because I seek to account for the way pantheism helps inform the course of antebellum intellectual history, this book requires a slightly different way of reading, as it develops, by necessity and design, several arguments that are accretive or cumulative rather than exclusively linear. Except for moments when Emerson acknowledges the dark underside or demonology of nature—for example, in “Experience” and “Fate”—his work can seem repetitive or even purposefully static. Both early and late essays are

drawn from a common source of journal entries and lectures, creating a hodgepodge that does not necessarily demonstrate narrative “development.” While Emerson experiences moments of doubt, and does modify his theories, his work does not offer clear progression; ironically, given his professedly contradictory assertions, Emerson’s writing is unusually consistent in its range of assumptions. Because some material in late essays is taken almost verbatim from journal entries written decades before, it is often difficult to assess when an essay was “written,” as opposed to published. Some assessments of the transformation of Emerson’s mid- and late-period work focus on a limited number of essays and overlook the “regressive” tone of other essays written, or at least appearing, at the same time or later. Still, even in Emerson's writing, pantheism documents the hazards of Romantic

10 ¢ Introduction

disenchantment—of youthful idealism undermined, union fragmented, and the promise of transcendence relinquished. By contrast, most of Melville’s works follow a spiral arc in which characters become more mistrustful, and the overall trajectory of his novels reflects an increasingly anti-transcendental vehemence regarding the prospect of a benign nature. Whereas Melville’s early novels voice a playful enthusiasm mixed with skepticism, his later works convey a sense of betrayal and resentment. Melville’s work narrativizes the demonology of transcendentalism as a form of violent reflexivity, auto-machia, or self—civil war, which Emerson only sporadically brings to the fore, but whose presence grows in virtually each of Melville’s texts from Mardi to The Confidence-Man. In later chap-

ters I focus on the fictional staging, parody, and failure of pantheism in Moby-Dick and Pierre. Beginning with Leon Chai’s grounding of American pantheism in a de-

clining European Romanticism, in Spinoza and Coleridge, and in the idea of “matter and spirit as part of one vast continuum” (8), I trace how “all deihed Nature,” as Ishmael calls it, first promises to elevate men to the status of gods, but then “paints like the harlot” in a process dramatized as a philosophical ruse or long con (Moby-Dick, 195).° Emerson’s and Melville’s works

of experience, then, do not represent breaks with their early writings but constitute what Emerson would call a gradual “unfolding” of the disillusionment already inscribed in the idealism. We will see a narrative sequence that repeatedly moves from seduction to sedition, from optimism to disaffection, first emerge in Melville’s dramatizations of Emerson’s theories of

nature and natural law. These narrative aspects of pantheism, and the broader ideas they represent, will help us reevaluate not just the works of Emerson and Melville but some of the important underlying political, cultural, and sociological assumptions of their era. II The inviolate soul is in perpetual telegraphic communication with the source of events. Emerson, “The Progress of Culture” (8:228)?

What keeps up the perpetual telegraphic communication between my outpost toes and digits, and... my brain?... I feel the great God himself at work in me. Melville, Mardi (538)

“Perpetual telegraphic communication” is an appropriate phrase to begin my discussion of pantheism, because it encapsulates what I contend is

Introduction « 11

Melville’s largely unacknowledged relationship not just with Emerson’s ideas but even with his idiosyncratic syntax and rhetoric. Using Melville’s novels and his relationships with other writers, I first explore how and why Emerson and Melville, respectively transcendental and seemingly antitranscendental writers, continually converge on the issue of pantheism. When Emerson and Melville not only repeatedly invoke the same ideas but also use the same phrases, it almost suggests a “perpetual telegraphic communication” between them regarding “the great God” Pan, a heuristic for a whole system of transcendental male selfrepresentation. In this case, Melville might have heard this telegraphic phrase in Boston in early 1849 while attending one of Emerson’s lectures, to which he refers several times in letters to his publisher, Evert Duyckinck (Correspondence, 119, 121). A full copy of the lecture Melville attended has not survived, but we know that Emerson gave a talk at Waterville College in 1863 that included the same phrase; but as Emerson appropriately writes of “Natural Aristocracy, the lecture Melville might have heard, “I have interpolated beside some old webs with patches of new tapestry” (Cabot, Memoir, 2:518).'° In other words, because as noted Emerson cut and pasted bits of journal entries and essays into old and new lectures, it’s quite possible that he used the line in 1849 as well. This phrase is also especially apt in the context of Melville’s incorporation of transcendental rhetoric regarding an immanent, impersonal, and deified Nature. It describes what David Lodge in his novel Changing Places terms a “duplex,” in which “electrical telegraphy ... [sends] messages simultaneously in opposite directions” (8-9). The confluence of such overlooked passages suggests the almost literally charged nature of Melville’s interest in Emersonian transcendentalism.

Throughout this book I highlight what has been the relatively unaddressed syntactical evidence that indicates that Melville was responding to transcendental theories generally and Emerson’s work directly. Far from being hostile or indifferent to Emersonian idealism—as many critics, from F. O. Matthiessen to William Dillingham, have contended—Melville was strongly influenced by a pantheism that he increasingly longed to refute, especially in his later years. Melville’s ambivalence concerning pantheism emerges particularly in his fluctuating opinion, in letters and comments, regarding Emerson’s depth, nobility, coldness, “crackedness,” and aesthetic and general merit. Despite Melville’s increasingly sardonic treatment of pantheism, his characters through Pierre remain subject to its assumptions, and his metaphors are often systematically transcendental. I treat Emerson's and Melville’s development of pantheism as both parallel and a form of call and response. (It is important to remember, however,

12 ¢ Introduction

that pantheism is a discourse that Emerson helps formulate and codify, and to which Melville for the most part responds.) From Mardi on, a betrayed and betraying Judas to Emerson’s hierophant, Melville dramatizes the rhetoric and consequences of pantheism. When, for example, Pierre asserts that the institutions of a contradictory America seem to “possess the virtue of a natural law,” and that “green is the peculiar signet of all-fertile Nature her-

self” (9), he feigns to contradict “Nature,” where Emerson claims: “The whole code of [nature’s] laws may be written on... the signet of a ring. ... Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own laws” (3:180-81). As he evaluates the possibilities of radical, anti-hierarchic democracy, Melville transcribes the forces of division in his society; but he decides that transcendental theologies that attempt to circumvent conflict by invoking the universality of nature maintain the very social structures that cause discord. Melville’s nature provides a testing ground in which ideas concerning gender, epistemology, and social and political economies are played out. At a crucial midpoint in a sometimes masked but self-conscious tradition of Romantic American pantheism stretching from Emerson to Pynchon and Annie Dillard, Melville questions whether the transformations of American nature, and its ulterior guise of the market economy, lead to a sublime transcendence or a nightmarish fragmentation of the male self. I provide neither an image study nor a history of pantheism, and address

only certain aspects of the discourse, since Pan in the American Renaissance threatens to become all things to all men. Instead, through close readings of text against larger context, I attempt to uncover the deep logic of a transcendental system of male self-representation and examine how it helps shape the careers of two of our most incisive and tragic writers. Here | introduce many of the terms and images to which I return throughout the book, especially with regard to formulations of transcendental male identity. Pan and pantheism appear with surprising frequency in literal form in Emerson’s and Melville’s works; but they are critically present not just when overtly

designated but when invoked through a series of identifying keywords, tropes, assumptions, and consequences. I focus in this introduction on the religious rhetoric that establishes the concerns and terminology of pantheist discourse; but I apply and more fully analyze these ideas and images in subsequent chapters. The significance of some of this prefatory material, which might seem abstract and arcane, should become clearer once I show how it can be used to reevaluate Emerson’s and Melville’s work. Mimetically, pantheism, the discourse of an omnipresent but hidden god, should never be seen in operation but only through its effects. (The premises and consequences of pantheism are also often best seen when they are

Introduction « 13

being parodied.) Pan’s presence can be detected like that of a star whose gravity pulls at a nearby planet but for a variety of reasons can only sometimes be viewed directly. Equated with “modern science,” and especially con-

cepts of development and evolution, pantheism was intertwined with nineteenth-century discourses of philosophy, racial anthropology, politics, and popular media. In pantheism, for example, the eternal circulation of indestructible matter supplants personal death with impersonal transformation. In the closed male system of pantheism, we encounter no genuine creation or reproduction, only recycling, amputation, abortion, and parthenogenesis (and—as Melville takes this concept to its extreme in Pierre—a form of “self-reliant” or self-creating incest). Melville treats this pantheism as a kind of Rosetta Stone: a code not just of science but of architecture, geography, geology, hermeneutics, anatomy, and finally consciousness. Pantheism provides a precursor of a universal, or naturalized, psychology, a grid for Emerson's dream of universal translation; it is an epistemology we have as yet only partly historicized and evaluated. The familiar and sometimes obscure writers I address often serve as glosses and reflections of Emerson and Melville. For the nineteenth-century pantheist, the nature of identity becomes increasingly dependent on the identity of nature. A question to which I repeatedly return is whether individuality is a trait of divinity or a curse visited exclusively on men: how white male individuation is figured as a form of fragmentation, and union with a racialized nature as its feminized cure. One purpose of my book is to argue that Emerson should not be read as a prophet of self-reliance or Christian virtue, as he is commonly conceived in the public mind. Emerson emerges here as an exemplar of self-negation, a man for whom all individuality and particularity are illusory, and whose male individuality must be transcended and merged into the All of a non-Christian nature. Tragically complicit with America’s

geographic and ideological expansion, pantheism is a doctrine that recognizes no borders, individual or national, and in which “self-reliance” is only a

euphemism for “god-reliance”: for dependence on an immanent, transcendental Over-Soul, or on an impersonal “aboriginal Self” that becomes universalized (“SelfReliance,” 2:63). Selfreliance is not only a misnomer for what Emerson means but also a cover for the dispossession of identity that his views entail. Emerson advocates only transcendental self-reliance, which requires the transcendence of the self. At the center of transcendentalism is the conflict between Nature and person, which the early Emerson tried to reconcile by translating the “individual” into a purely representative entity. For Emerson and Melville, in differing degrees, pantheism seems to offer the cure for male isolation. Each of Melville’s “isolatoes,” for instance,

14 * Introduction

lives in his own incomparable, incompatible world; yet under a pantheistic worldview, each would become representative of all men. As a result, Melville’s protagonists fluctuate between pathological self-reliance—inordinate individuality—and pathological indeterminacy: fraternity that comes at the expense of identity. Emerson epitomizes his version of this conflict in his invocation of “the great average man” (“Plato,” 4:61). Like Schopenhauer, Emerson acknowledges the “porcupine impossibility of contact with men,” and admits that “most of the persons I see in my own house I see across a gulf” ( Journals, 5:324-25). As Richard Poirier remarks, that part of “Emerson’s susceptibility to some ‘impersonal God’ was the re-

sult of his incapacity for personal intimacy” (33). Emerson emphasizes his country’s “eternal loneliness. ...{[H]ow insular & pathetically solitary, are all the people we know! .... /M/y bareness, my bareness! Seems America to say” ( Journals, 8:260). An isolate in society, Emerson becomes whole only by merging into pantheistic nature; he describes himself as a “young soul wandering lonely, wistful, reserved, unfriended up & down in nature” ( Journals, 7:79).\* In “Nature” itself, Emerson becomes the transparent eyeball, and one with god, by “crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky. ... I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear .. . my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infnite space” (1:9). The man friendless in society is merged into All things in nature. (Ishmael is precisely this nameless, friendless isolato in society, figuratively uplifted into infinite space and “infinite perspective” on the masthead and merged with other men only through nature [308].) But the surprising bareness and barrenness of Emerson’s nature is coterminous with his social isolation. Though the words have a modified legal resonance for us, Emerson is already formulating a sociological notion of a “bare commons,” a civic social space evacuated into infinite nature. The contiguity between such passages reminds us, not surprisingly, that Emerson’s nature and society are only analogues for each other—seen across a gulf, but also through mirrors.

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“The Seductive God”

Pan and the Emergence of a Transcendental America

To their great honor, the simple and free minds among our clergy have not resisted the voice of Nature. Emerson, “Character” (10:116)

The name most frequently applied to Emerson’s form of belief is Pantheism. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Lothrop Motley: Two Memoirs (317)

AN UNOFFICIAL literary religion transmitted through a kind of Masonic male fraternity, pantheism enjoyed an unprecedented resurgence throughout the American Renaissance. The significance of that often studied cultural period is partly connected to the emergence and influence of pantheism. Practiced primarily in literary abstraction, pantheism became a surrogate, subterranean creed for many nineteenth-century writers in the United States, encompassing less a theology than a methodology of male self-representation.

Predicated both in reaction to and extension of American antinomianism, in which each man constitutes his own incommensurate and isolated world, pantheism posits a universal and sacred nature. Because each isolated “antinomian” becomes representative of nature, he putatively becomes aligned with the All. But most surprisingly, pantheism leads instead to the figurative evisceration of individuality. Imagining god as equivalent to nature initiates a series of unifications and

ruptures. American pantheism becomes a discourse centered on both somatic and psychic mergers and fragmentations. Particulars (such as individuals) are merged with universals (such as democratic masses). But the process moves in both directions, and wholes, such as nations and bodies, are dismembered. Caught between versions of the One and the All—between the individual and the state, body parts and whole bodies, the specific form and the ideal type—the pantheist is left in flux between the extremes of any

16 e Chapter 1

representation. Pan embodies a logical contradiction that defines his subjects: a god who is One, an all-inclusive single thing, and who is All, all things merged into one. Pan asa figure and pantheism as a discourse reflect disparate etymological

traditions, but they are conflated throughout the American Renaissance; the bacchic goat-god comes to represent the All of an impersonal, universal nature and the natural law that regulates everything. Antebellum pantheism generally invokes not wild sensuality but a “seductive” system of represen-

tation based on Neoplatonic idealism, the animation of a divine nature, and the systematic reification, or literalization and generalization, of particular metaphors. (Even here, however, Pan retains some of his wild danger, his association with the “antisocial” antinomianism of the rebellious Morton

of Merrymount, and the threat of demonology.) Emerson’s foundational pantheism, which amalgamated European and aboriginal views of nature for a U.S. audience, was formulated when questions of originality and rela-

tion were becoming crucial to American self-definition. At this nexus there was almost universal agreement that America had become a kind of transformational machine—a country that synthesized materials, ideas, and personalities—but discord as to whether these transformations created anything new. The works of pantheist apologists and theological historians provide a social and hermeneutic context for the metaphysical speculation found throughout Emerson’s and Melville’s writing. I refer to the relatively obscure

works of pantheist tract writers throughout this book, and particularly in this chapter, to demonstrate the extent to which this seemingly marginal exposition permeated mainstream nineteenth-century discourses. Little is known of some of these writers, who might appear to us as fanciful and eccentric, yet many are barely distinguishable from Emerson in their specula-

tions. I cite this array of familiar and forgotten American authors—and several salient European counterparts—to recapture the prevalence of pantheism in the mid-nineteenth century. For example, the theologian Theodore Parker writes in 1841: “Pantheism seems to be the bugbear of some excellent

persons. They see it everywhere except on the dark walls of their own churches. ... [Maret] finds it the natural result of Protestantism, and places before us the pleasant alternatives, either the Catholic Church or Pantheism! The rationalism of the nineteenth century must end in skepticism, or leap over to Pantheism!” (Discourse, 77).! To combat this recurring specter of rationalism, men turn to pantheism, which, ironically, winds up itself being attacked as a form of “rationalism”; pantheism becomes the natural vice of American Protestants, who cannot resist its influence and sin in thought if

“The Seductive God” « 17

not in deed. Detractors and proponents equally stress the allure of pantheism. A contemporary of Emerson and a lifelong critic of transcendentalism, Enoch Pond contends in 1852 that for pantheism to spread among his countrymen, they have only to learn the sounding phraseology of the sect; to talk of the me and the not me, of the heights of the absolute, and the profundities of the human consciousness.... For the professed liberalist... Pantheism is the most convenient thing in the world; for it can assume any shape, appear in any form.... [W]e wonder not that it begins to raise its demoniac front and boast of numbers and threaten to swallow up every thing which stands in its way. (“Religion,” 131; emphasis in original)

Above all nationalities, Americans are alleged to have a defining desire to reach this whole, One or All. In his journal, Emerson says much the same thing from the opposite perspective, noting, “In the woods, this afternoon, it seemed plain to me that most men were pantheists at heart, say what they might of their theism” ( Journals, 10:175). (Such assertions about a naturalized American character were widespread and help locate another context for many epistemological debates in mid-century discourse. Susceptibility to pantheism is reflected not just in Emerson’s and Melville’s writing but in the development of an American ideology of nature, self, national boundary, gender, race, and representation.) In 4 Plea for Pantheism, published in 1857, the California naturalist John Hittell recapitulates the claim of many tract writers that pantheism poses the most dangerous threat to Christianity, and will inevitably overwhelm anthropomorphism, a system that assumes a Christian maker. Hittell is “ready to confess with Emerson” that attempts to introduce a new church with rites and forms to replace a failed Protestantism would be futile, but that pantheism offers the most comprehensive form of spirituality available (1).

For James Buchanan—a Catholic defender of the faith and author of Modern Atheism: Under Its Forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws, also published in 1857—pantheism is “the most formidable rival of Christian theism at the present day” (iv).* According to Buchanan, no one who has observed the recent tendencies of speculation and modern literature could fail to notice a “remarkable change,” the unforeseen resuscitation of pantheism, a system of thought, like Pan, once believed dead (129). Acknowledging that dramatic revival, he notes,

“Many thoughtful men have recently avowed their belief that the two grand alternatives in modern times are Christianity and Pantheism.” In answer to philosophies that fuse the two beliefs, and writers such as Hittell who call for their concordance, Buchanan insists, “There must be no truce,

18 « Chapter 1

and no attempt at conciliation between the two” (140, 186). In Pantheism and Christianity, first published in some form in 1866, John Hunt insists on the universal influence of pantheism yet, more optimistically, considers that conventional “Christianity will be the great gainer by the reconciliation [with it]” (iii); but this is the resolution that Emerson attempts and Melville discovers to be impossible.

For the pantheist, Nature cannot be separated from divinity; for Goethe, whose natural science provides an all-purpose rhetoric for many American Renaissance writers, “to discuss God apart from nature is both difficult and perilous; it is as if we separated the soul from the body” (Manning, 189).° (Separation from the All or nature is routinely configured as a form of psychic and physical division and traumatic loss.) Following Goethe’s example, Emerson repeatedly avers that men’s religious opinions are based on their views of Nature (“Progress,” 8:211). In an early lecture implicitly advocating anew “natural” reformation, Emerson generalized: “There has never been since Luther a great man of the first class who believed as he did.... All

others... Milton, Newton, Leibniz... Goethe have joined Nature to Revelation to form their religion or like Spinoza, Rousseau, Laplace have worshipped like the Indian, Nature alone” (“Martin Luther,” Early Lectures, 1:132). Nature emerges in the American Renaissance as a once denied but suddenly irrepressible facet of god. This succession of great men implicitly culminates in transcendentalists.

As an immanent nature is deified, the Puritan view of existence is both taken to its logical extreme and overturned, supplanted by a natural theology resonant with the ideas of those its practitioners had dispossessed. As General Ethan Allen Hitchcock, grandson of the Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen, writes in 1840 in his voluminous military diary: “Goethe was a pantheist, and I see that a pantheist may be a Christian, a Mohammadan, and a heathen at the same time. Pantheism ought to be regarded as the very

reverse of atheism, being the admission of everything and the denial of nothing. He has the most accurate knowledge of God who has the most comprehensive knowledge of Nature. ... God is Nature: Nature is God.... [All] my books... are studies to reach the One Thing” (Fifty Years, 121, 422, 483).4 Pantheism infiltrates most aspects of literary mid-nineteenthcentury America—its religious, scientific, political, and aesthetic sensibility. Virtually any male writer who imagined himself as formulating or contesting the idea of American selfhood confronted the issues pantheism raised, if not some form of pantheism itself.

The now virtually forgotten Hitchcock published numerous works of philosophy (as well as military history) on Emerson’s heels, including

“The Seductive God” « 19

Swedenborg, A Hermetic Philosopher. n his diary, Hitchcock makes frequent reference to his transcendental mentor, whose works are indecipherable “except to readers of Plato, Swedenborg [etc.].... Emerson over-saw multitudes

of people. There is but one universe which contains, or is the totality of causes and likewise the totality of effects. These two are one” (Doctrines, 4.05). Hitchcock was so prolific a transcendental writer that William Tecumseh Sherman wrote the general to persuade him to focus his next book

on martial rather than spiritual instruction: “I notice in your letter that your mind still delights in metaphysics. ... [But] where one would indulge

in a delightful dream in contemplating the abstract beauties, the moral truths of Swedenborg, or the almost heavenly fancies of your old friend Goethe, a thousand would bound with throbbing hearts at contemplating the struggles of armies” (Doctrines, 487). (Hitchcock admits to spending a good part of each campaign, including the war against Mexico, buying cartloads of rare philosophical tracts and shipping them to his next post.) Such were the times that scientists, poets, and generals could commiserate on the implications of finding god in nature. Continually reading the “Godintoxicated Spinoza,” Goethe, and Swedenborg, “a refiner upon Spinoza,” Hitchcock considers Emerson the greatest American mystic. After being Poe's drill instructor at West Point (just before Poe was kicked out), Hitchcock visits and corresponds with “Emerson and his Oracle, Mr. Alcott,” and carries on a long correspondence with Sophia Hawthorne (Doctrines, 186, 331, 444). Pantheists didn’t just influence many aspects of American letters; they composed one branch of it. Pantheism was also thought to pose a particular threat to U.S. democracy almost from the nation’s inception. Fears about the danger of pantheism to the American state arose periodically, perhaps linked to the cycle of Great Awakenings, but became most feverish in the middle and latter years of the nineteenth century (many of them voiced after the fact of its immediate influence). Against a Christian belief in salvation from sin, pantheists imagine that they can redeem evil by redefining it as part of the greater good. Pan embodies the repeated return of the repressed as alternative reawakenings in American culture and helps locate a syncretic religious rhetoric that is radi-

cally incommensurate with Christian doctrine. (The angelic mergers of Melville’s characters, for example, are with nature.) Much as Melville complains of Emerson’s idealism, James Buchanan objects that pantheism is “a system of syncretism, founded on the idea that error is only an incomplete

truth, and maintaining that truth must necessarily be developed by error, and virtue by vice” (186-87). Emerson maintains in “Fate” that intellect can convert any evil into a wholesome force (6:32); so does Charles Bray argue in

20 ¢ Chapter 1

Illusion and Delusion; or, Modern Pantheism versus Spiritualism, using the

quintessential from of pantheist synecdoche that destabilizes parts and wholes, that “as each cell in the human body has a separate life, and yet constitutles] the life of the whole, so the aggregate of individual creatures makes one great nervous system, every beat or change in which produces intense enjoyment, so great, indeed, that the necessary pain which we call evil disappears and is lost” (43). Pantheistic reverie, the feeling of oneness with the All that the individual or cell momentarily experiences, becomes a universal feeling of bliss so pow-

erful that evil is transformed into good. For the pantheist, the individual becomes the evil for which merger with nature is the panacea. But for Melville, particularly as he ages, vice instead develops out of virtue, and heresy from orthodoxy; with growing vehemence Melville renounces Emerson’s conviction that every evil, even death, is but good disguised, especially when the disguise involves the masks of Pan. For Abraham Kuyper, author of the late-nineteenth-century Pantheism’s Destruction of Boundaries, “the pantheistic tendency of our age and the evolution doctrine” are confirmed when the boundaries between nature, god, and nation disappear: “And by this boundary falls away [that] which separates the authorities, as the powers ordained by God, from the people, who by the same God, are appointed to be subject unto them. Both are dissolved into one all-sufficient state. The state takes the place of God” (23)® For critics of pantheism, transcendental unification entails a form of melting or dissolution.’ One of a long line of Catholic anti-pantheist tract writers, the New York-based Reverend Morgan Dix asks us, in his 1864 Lectures on the Pantheistic Idea of an Impersonal Deity, to imagine “this indescribable, this immense condition, or mass, or state (or by whatever name you wish to call it) and you have before you the only eternal being. Let us apply to it, for the sake of convenience, the term God” (22). This divine, primordial “mass” body or aggregate becomes the naturalized embodiment of the American nation in the figure of Moby Dick, one of Melville’s versions of a pantheist deity. The American state has often been precariously corroborated by versions of that immense body of nature. The obscure Dix might be paraphrasing a more influential critic of U.S. culture. In “What Causes Democratic Nations to Incline towards Pantheism, appearing in Democracy in America in 1840, Tocqueville defines the most widely shared tenets of American pantheism: “If there is a philosophi-

cal system which teaches that all things material and immaterial... are to : be considered only as the several parts of an immense Being, who alone temains eternal amidst the continual change and ceaseless transformation of

“The Seductive God” « 21

all that constitutes him ... such a system, though it destroy the individuality

of man, or rather because it destroys that individuality, will have secret charms for men living in democracies. ... It naturally attracts and fixes their imagination” (2:31-32). In pantheism, men renounce their individual identities so that a god of nature can be maintained, and so in turn maintain the very possibility of identity. For Tocqueville, pantheism’s false egalitarianism poses a potentially insidious, and later more widely perceived, temptation to men in Christian democracies. As Americans come to perceive their Jackso-

nian individualities as the parts of an immense Being, or of the technological state, which both ceaselessly transform them, pantheism becomes a “secret charm” and a dangerous epistemological gamble. Men turn over their burden-

some individual autonomies to nature for safekeeping, but they find this move renders that individuality forever inaccessible to them. Among the contradictory impulses of nineteenth-century American democracy, one would provide equal representation and hence elide difference, and one would accentuate individuation and hence elide relation. At first Pan seems to reconcile these antagonistic strains of American self-configuration.

Advancing the same question as Tocqueville and Dix, James Buchanan asks, “May not nature itself be the one Being whose endless transformations constitute the history of the universe?” (139-40). (To appreciate the extent of this debate, we need to pay attention to a surprisingly consistent, detailed rhetoric, whereby, for example, Tocqueville cites a Being of “ceaseless transformation, and Buchanan cites a Being of “endless transformations.” These critics, variously familiar and obscure, converge on the issue of pantheism in ways

that indicate they shared not only influences but also a formative cultural anxiety.) Buchanan is alarmed by how frequently “the most daring advocates of pantheism ascribe to nature many of the attributes which belong to God only” (164). In pantheism, the All is that Being that must “be the condition of all other beings, and must virtually contain them all; nay, it must be capable of becoming all things” (182). Since god both is and is in all things, any individ-

ual, when he transcends individuality through nature, becomes god. For Buchanan, the pantheistic divinity must be without fixed identity as the precondition for its assumption of any identity. As Melville works through the permutations of such pantheism, he becomes unable to determine whether these attributes constitute god, Mephistopheles, or the Confidence Man, and finally, what the constitutive differences among those figures would be. As Tocqueville abstractly predicts, the contradictions of pantheism destabilize many aspects of Emerson’s writing and even his belief in a self. Able to see only the parts of an immense being of Nature, or what he calls “the fleeting forms of Pan,” Emerson “wish[es] to speak with all respects of persons,

22 ¢ Chapter 1

but... /t/hey melt so fast into each other, that they are like grass and trees, and it needs an effort to treat them as individuals. ... [T]he divine man does not respect them: he sees them as racks of clouds, as a fleet of ripples which the wind drives on the surface of the waters” (““Nominalist and Realist,” 3:235— 36).° As Emerson remarks in “Fate,” the Law of Nature “dissolves persons” (6:49). (This dissolution is what Ishmael experiences while rather more sensually squeezing the whale sperm that he almost “melts into.”) As that divine man of nature, Emerson almost never imagines his representative men as distinct, stable individuals, but envisions them instead as a series of animals, types of vegetation, and temporary forms of the divinity; they blend,

intertwine, and are welded together in an overarching pantheistic nature. Pastor of the Old South Church in Boston, and author of Half Truths and the Truth—a comprehensive and unusually lucid 1871 treatise on the history of representative pantheists from Spinoza to Emerson and Theodore Parker, partly delivered in a series of lectures at Andover Theological Seminary—

Reverend Jacob Merrill Manning deftly identifies pantheism as “the universal solvent,” immanent, transitive as light, and somehow behind everything (185). For Emerson, “on this power, this all-dissolving unity, the emphasis of heaven and earth is laid” (“Progress,” 8:223). “the universal solvent,” imma-

nent, transitive as light, and somehow behind everything (185). For Emerson, “on this power, this all-dissolving unity, the emphasis of heaven and earth is laid” (“Progress,” 8:223). Emerson’s phrase captures the promise and demonology of pantheism: nature brings all things together, but only by destroying individual identities. This “all-dissolving unity” functions like the corrosive acid Melville uses to symbolize U.S. democracy in Pierre; it unifies absolutely and so levels, lowers, or liquefies all things. In America, this conception of melting and merging also produces the often repeated image of man as a “representative,” non-individuated plant. The allegedly self-reliant Emersonian individual is assimilated into a proto-

modernist, mass body of nature (or later the state). In pantheism, man becomes a botanical collective, unable to exist or procreate as a Cartesian subject; he is without beginning or end to his life, his identity, or even his body. The borders separating men alternate between being appealingly and appallingly permeable. The contradictions of Emerson’s abstract pantheism are played out in Melville’s socially grounded fictions; Melville dismisses yet perpetually reinscribes these seductive elements of pantheism, particularly in an exaggerated form of Christian egalitarianism. Melville’s characters are

first typically merged with a larger, unified All, but then fragmented into rebellious, finally autonomous pieces. Melville criticizes, while simultaneously extending, Emerson’s notions of pantheism to the point where he finds

“The Seductive God” « 23

they have become inextricably grafted onto his own writing. Part of my goal in this chapter is to begin to show how Melville’s novels respond to issues raised in Emerson’s writings, and throughout the religious tract writing of the period.

As I explore more fully in subsequent chapters, transcendentalism can function as a reification—of slavery, economic and political fragmentation, and gender politics. It might also be seen as a transitional discourse between humanism and post-humanism, or what Slavoj Zizek describes as a chronicle of “the passage from ‘human person’... to subject gua $” (Plague, 205), mirroring the Kantian split between subject and person, with the modern subject not the high point of creation but deterministically constituted. The Emersonian question of whether nature exists or is only an apocalypse of the mind implicates both these personal and impersonal poles. Emerson at

first imagines that the person and impersonal universal subject can and must coincide (presided over by the same truth), but the two become increasingly incommensurate and antagonistic entities. The Emersonian self is a form of poststructuralist subject determined by discourse (in this case, natural law and the impersonal and dispossessive effects of what is still, by now almost atavistically, designated as nature). Zizek notes that in “transcendental idealism, ‘objective reality’ itself is constituted through the subjective act of transcendental synthesis,” and that these phenomena are also supposed to coincide (215). When they do not, characters split in two, or polarized figures such as Ishmael and Ahab emerge. The resurgence of pantheism is concurrent not just with the importation of European transcendentalism but with the resuscitation of “pre-Western” or hybridized forms of religion. A form of Platonism and gnosticism never

wholly eradicated from the early church, pantheism remained latent in American Protestantism. As depicted in Emerson and Melville, many of its characteristics—Manichaeanism, animism, and vitalism—recall the elements that Christianity absorbed from pre-Western religions, newly invigorated by contact with the beliefs of Native American and African American cultures. A transcendental animism especially came to be associated with black-

ness and African American culture, to some degree heuristically and to some degree in recognition of actual religious beliefs and practices. Critics, however, typically denied or vilified the influence of “aboriginal” thought on American religion, and situated pantheism as a regressive or static heresy. In James Buchanan’s eyes, “pantheism, although recently revived and exhibited in new forms, has made xo real progress” from “the earliest and most invet-

erate principles of paganism” (185-86). As Emerson asked, situating such natural religion as restoration rather than regression, “Were not a Socratic

24 ¢ Chapter 1

paganism better than an effete superannuated Christianity?” ( Journals, 4:27).

While this “primitive” element will partially appeal to pantheists such as D. H. Lawrence—who sees pantheism as a tragic flaw of the American Renaissance and the United States itself—the reversion to animism proves a fatal one for Melville. As I show in the next chapter, transcendentalism was developed as much

from African American as from European sources. But precedents also existed in Puritanism for an American pantheism. Jonathan Edwards's vision

of a deterministic and immanent god at times appears as the precursor of Emersonian idealism and Unitarianism. For Edwards, objects seen “which exist only mentally” are ideas dispersed from the mind of god: “That which truly is the substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise

and perfectly stable idea in God’s mind together with his stable will that the same shall be communicated to us” (Williams, Wilderness, 103). Earthly

substance incarnates god’s will. Herbert Schneider even claims that “Edwards's doctrine of omniscience [and god’s immanence] represented. .. also a positive argument for pantheism based on Newton and Locke” (20).

As Perry Miller writes, one can treat Edwards’s philosophy as a form of _ “mysticism or pantheism, or both. If God is diffused through nature, and the substance of man is the substance of God, then it may follow that man is divine, that nature is the garment of the Over-Soul. ... [T]ake away the theology, remove the stone of dogma from the wellsprings of Puritan convic-

tion, and both nature and man become divine.” For Miller, Edwards's descendants among the Unitarians would “roll away the heavy stone of dogma”—or perhaps animate that stone—to reveal the pantheism beneath (“From Edwards,” 127, 129). Though some version of divine will still guaran-

teed existence and agency, it is Edwards’s “stability” that has been lost by Emersons time, and for which pantheism seeks to compensate. That the new republic was set in and against nature also helps account for the significance of pantheism to the early American nation. Beyond transcendentalism, however, and despite its ties to seventeenth-century theology, American pantheism becomes a kind of anti-Puritanism: its nature is not evil but divine, animated, and alive; and its god is not hierarchical and possesses no human personality but rather an omnipresent, unconscious, and finally global Over-Soul. In a description of General Hitchcock, we can begin to trace how Edwards’s vision of divine “substance” evolves into nineteenth-century U.S. pantheism. Of Hitchcock his editor W. A. Croffut writes, “he believes there is one Substance in the universe and this Substance he calls God. This is the very definition of pantheism” (Fifty Years, 375). Emerson believes that all substances are part of this god, and that god in-

“The Seductive God” « 25

fuses all substances, every part of nature from the demonstrably sublime to the temporarily silent, the seemingly inanimate or unintelligible. Although the resonance or even existence of a debate about their significance has largely been lost, mid-nineteenth-century writers heatedly contested the sources of these “pantheistic infidelities” in American society. As James Murdock writes in his 1842 Sketches of Modern Philosophy, the prevailing system among the Germans to which [Victor] Cousin and his American followers assent is pantheistic: that is, it resolves the universe into one primordial Being, who develops himself in various finite forms... .[S]ome [Americans] voluntarily assume [the appellation Pantheists]; and they unscrupulously apply it to all Transcendentalists. That the doctrines of the transcendentalists, as well as those of Spinoza, Schelling, and Hegel, are really and truly pantheistic, appears from the fact that they hold to but one essence, or one substance, in the universe. That the epithet pantheistic may be properly applied to such doctrines, seems not to be deniable. As Pantheists, Transcendentalists must behold God, or the divine nature and essence, in every thing that exists... [and] deny the existence of essential evil,

which, for Emerson, is only an illusory manifestation of god (184-86; emphasis in original). (As we can already see in Murdock and Croffut, who both use the phrase “one substance in the universe,” we will encounter a striking and almost numbing consistency in the rhetoric of pantheism.) As Murdock helps us see, the most common designations of transcendentalism might occlude the most extreme of its elements, the pantheism Emerson wants only initiates to comprehend. From roughly the late 1830s to the 1870s, and in a later wave around the turn of the century, a surprisingly large number of theological studies of pantheism were produced, ranging from General Hitchcock’s pamphlets and books on Spinozan idealism, to calls for the reconciliation of pantheism

and Christianity, to full-fledged diatribes against nature worship as the work of the devil. (Though it abates after the Civil War, the rhetoric situat-

ing Americans as dangerously susceptible to pantheism persists into the 1880s.) Scores of theologians reach the same unlikely conclusion: that pantheism poses a dramatic threat to Christianity and American democracy. Adumbrating Henry Adams, Nathaniel Smith Richardson warns in “The Pantheistic Movement” in 1849 that pantheistic ideas “are circulating among ordinary readers, to an extent that is absolutely appalling. ... [And when we add] the prevalency of Pantheistic notions in the popular schools of history, and popular views of religion, we may well be staggered at the danger which presents itself before us” (562). Even in 1874, the Reverend Januarius De

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Concilio, rector of St. Michael’s Church in Jersey City and author of Catho-

licity and Pantheism, emblematically concludes that “pantheism is more prevalent at the present time than ever it was” (23). A range of prominent and obscure proponents and critics also routinely addressed transcendentalism as coterminous with pantheism. (Some recent critics also consider the terms interchangeable. For example, in Dead Letters to the New World, Michael McLoughlin, referring to Ishmael’s invocation

of pantheism, proposes that it is possible “without distortion to translate ‘pantheist’ to mean transcendentalist” [70]. I would argue, however, that, “transcendentalism” is a broader and more inclusive term; all pantheists are

transcendental, but not all transcendentalists are pantheists.) Whatever their approach, these writers almost uniformly acknowledge the prevalence and influence of pantheism. If, as Orestes Brownson claims, Protestantism ends in transcendentalism, then Unitarian transcendentalism ends in pantheism, as part of a progression toward antinomianism—an idealistic belief

in a self authorized not by social contracts but by a divine nature. One achieves salvation not through works or faith but through the immersion of self in the transcendent, transpersonal laws and mass of nature. Pantheism in this context emerges as a particular manifestation, a final stage and the most extreme form, of American transcendentalism, and a logical effect of the dissolution of a centralized American church; it is then embellished by the alleged repatriation of Romanticism and nineteenth-century natural philosophy and/or biology to America; and it finally serves as a nexus for playing

out unresolved tensions in the United States between Protestant and Catholic notions of authority, substantiation, and identity. Pantheism offers no

rituals but rather communal fellowship; pantheists achieve a universal American identity by participating in an esoteric brotherhood based only on what they claim is natural science and natural law.

During the same period bracketing the American Renaissance, the 1830s—1870s, the already imperfect homogeneity of religion in the United States dissipates. Unitarians and Congregationalists were not the only sects challenging the failing hegemony of the New England church. According to Mary Cayton: “Methodists, Baptists, Universalists, Quakers, Episcopalians, and Roman Catholics among others had by this time become forces to be reckoned with as well. So evident was it to Massachusetts citizens that denominational pluralism had come to stay that in 1833 the state became the last in the Union to abandon an official religious establishment,” allowing for what Cayton calls a competition for souls in the spiritual marketplace (134-35). Among these new sects, Unitarianism serves as the precursor to American pantheism; for Reverend De Concilio, only the doctrine of the

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trinity stands between Catholicism and pantheism, and the “class of disguised Pantheists—disguised even to themselves—that is, the Unitarians” (Catholicity, 71). The competition for souls makes pantheism a particular target for what writers from Tocqueville to Hawthorne consider its direct com-

petitor, the Catholic Church. In numerous passages—ones marked by dramatic irony, already conjuring Melville’s depiction of Pan asa Mephistophelean

master of confidence games—De Concilio pinpoints disguise as the crucial attribute of pantheism: “Unitarians are absolutely powerless before Pantheism; nay, their system is disguised Pantheism” (80). Pantheism is again but Protestantism taken to its logical extreme of Unitarian transcendentalism taken to its own logical extreme. In his 1871 History of God’s Church from Its Origin, Enoch Pond writes, “It was not until the Spring of 1815 that the mask of concealment was fairly taken off, and American Unitarianism stood confessed to the world.” As always, a transcendental god is first masked, then revealed (104.4).

Ironically, in its initial stages, the growing influence of pantheism can be traced, through Emerson especially, to the failure of Unitarianism to bridge the gap between Protestantism and Catholicism in America. Pantheism incorporates the mysticism of Catholicism, and a “transubstantial” power to.

transform matter lacking in Protestantism, but without the hierarchy of church authority. For some Catholics especially, Protestantism can only end in the enervation of the church: “Catholic theologians say that Pantheism is

the inevitable goal of Protestantism, and therefore they find it among all sects, ancient and modern” (Hunt, 25). In his survey of pantheism among the English Romantics, H. W. Piper notes Coleridge’s transcendental self-description as “a Unitarian Christian and an Advocate for the Automatism of man,” and an “opponent of materialism, a believer in the corporeality of thought, and the idea that ‘Proper-

ties are God’” (29-30).'° Such a description—linking Unitarianism and automatism—also captures Emerson; one can consider Emerson’s personal history as his carrying of a seemingly disavowed Unitarianism to its poten-

tial conclusion in pantheism. (The peculiarity of opposing materialism while insisting on the materiality of thought suggests how pantheism polarizes familiar assumptions.) This automatism of man and deification of abstractions—such as insight or force, rather than the person bearing those traits—begins with what Emerson describes as the natural automatism of Saint Vitus and ends in Melville’s rebellious, “self-willed” bodies. Emerson’s and Melville’s conceptions of pantheism are derived from Plato, Neoplatonic doctrines of the soul’s exile from the One, and German and English Romantics, particularly Goethe, Coleridge, and Carlyle. In the

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works of many American writers, Goethe’s countrymen are professed to have a special affinity for the transcendental universalizing of pantheism, derived from “the German madness for the absolute one, the monistic all-in-

all” (Manning, 136).’! Though himself a well-known Unitarian minister based in New Bedford, Reverend Orville Dewey, in the September 1845 issue of Boston’s Christian Examiner, warns the orthodox who may be suspected

“of inclining to Transcendentalism”: “The Hegelian school has produced the latest and most dangerous form of Rationalism, in which the doctrine of myths and pantheistic hero-worship are made to play so large a part. ... [I]t must be considered that [some German transcendentalism] is rendered so dangerous, just because it has received into itself, pantheistically caricatured

to be sure, so many truths of Christianity, for which the old Rationalism had no organ whatever” (quoting Philip Schaff, “Blanco White,” 223). That transcendentalism arrives most comprehensively on our shores in the guise of Emerson’s pantheism. In 1839 Andrews Norton writes, “In Germany the theology of which I speak has allied itself with atheism, with pantheism...

[following] Spinoza, whose argument ... [is] that the /aws of nature are the laws by which God is bound, Nature and God being the same” (11). Norton denounces the intuitive assumption of man’s unity with nature, and pantheists’ attempt to “transcend” or bypass Christian resurrection through pagan metamorphosis: [In] the modern German school... [Schleiermacher’s] is a system of pantheism, wrought up in a highly declamatory style, in which... religion is the sense of the union of the individual with the universe, with Nature, or, in the language of the sect, with the One and All. It is a feeling... independent of the idea of a personal God. And the belief and desire of personal immortality are “wholly irreligious,” as being opposed to that which is the aim of religion, “the annihilation of one’s own personality,” ... “Living in the One and All,” ... “becoming, as far as possible, one with the universe.” (4.4)'*

All things to all critics, pantheism is attacked as a manifestation of both extreme rationalism avd pure feeling. Norton claims that American infidelity is prompted by the influence of German theology, which seduces men to rely on intuition and feeling and to merge with the All. To “live in the All” is the phrase Melville uses in his pantheistic letters to Hawthorne, and Norton'’s description would also serve as an excellent character sketch of Ishmael in Moby-Dick. That Melville was responding directly to this lineage is clear from Mardi to Pierre, whose narrator inveighs against “Plato, Goethe and Spinoza,’ and their guild of “se/F imposters ...a preposterous rabble of Muggle-

tonian Scots and Yankees, whose vile brogue still the more bestreaks the stripedness of their Greek or German Neoplatonical originals” (208).

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Cyrus Bartol, who hosted meetings of Emerson’s Transcendental Club, writes in “Transcendentalism” in 1872 that “a shrewd suspicion of German inoculation flung at the movement the word Transcendental, for a disgrace, which, as of all names of good and odious things, turned to fame” (110). In his 1878 “Transcendentalism in New England,” Joseph Cook retrospectively protests that “Emerson has made pantheism a logical outcome of Fichte’s

teachings. ... Concord once listened to Germany....In the footnotes of learned works you will find German authorities a dozen times where you can find English six, or American three.... But here in Germany is a vast stretch of modern philosophical discussion ... [that] never has broken with Christianity, nor been drawn into either the Charybdis of materialism or the Scylla of pantheism” (172-73). René Wellek traces the influence of Ger-

man Romanticism on American thought and posits, inaccurately I would argue, that few Americans had significant contact with German philosophy, save for Orestes Brownson, who was “a formidable critic of [its] subjectivism and pantheism” (322). Insofar as they were read, however, Emerson and Melville alone would have subjected their countrymen to a barrage of

Americanized transcendental German principles. And both their generations of intellectuals and critics are also marked by the influence of German metaphysics. As Leon Chai elaborates, Bronson Alcott, in his transcendental pursuit of “all mysteries in nature and spirit,” imagined the “Teutonic as Greek” (293). Gustaaf Van Cromphout convincingly argues that Melville is strongly influenced by German philosophy and aesthetics. As a result, Melville’s pantheism and narratological strategies also develop as an extension of his Germanic Romanticism: “As an expression of genius, the novel aims at ‘the union of two absolutes, absolute individuality and absolute universal-

ity. The universe, in other words, is subjectivized to the extent that consciousness becomes universal” (“Melville,” 35). Melville’s young writer Pierre,

for example, constructs his body and text on the model of Goethe, and both disintegrate as Goethe’s pantheism fails his protégé. Reverend Dix complains that “the metaphysical systems of Germany are but the old pantheism clad in new forms. No essential progress has been made” (103).’? Between the 1840s and 1870s, anti-pantheist writers tend to reify pantheism as a facet of an immutable human tendency. Reverend Manning generalizes that “whenever the prevailing philosophy of the world has been transcendental, the prevailing infidelity has been pantheistic” (11-12). Many anti-pantheist writers, especially Catholic theologians, paradoxically

situate pantheism as a construct of both heretical empiricism and mysticism. Attacking modern pantheism, the anonymous author of “The Old Testament and Modern Mythicism,” in the August 1842 Catholic Expositor

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and Literary Magazine, contends that transcendental philosophy “merely exchanges the blunted weapons of the last century to carry the warfare to another field... [to trample] upon the ruins of the same belief” (258). A Catholic notion of cyclical history—one tied to original sin—becomes oddly compatible with the atemporality of its modern nemesis. As Pierre concludes, the new (and finally originality itself) isn’t merely in questionable taste but is impossible. Spinoza and Fichte also figure prominently as influences in nineteenthcentury formulations of European pantheism, and hence their American revisions. Fichte’s view of instability recalls Tocqueville’s predication of an American religious sensibility: “The sum total is this: there is absolutely nothing

permanent, either without me or within me, but only unceasing change” (Buchanan,172). (Impermanence remains an essential feature of pantheism; things are never created or destroyed, only ceaselessly transformed from existing identities.) For Fichte, pantheism “represent(s] se/fnot as individual, but as Divine, that is, as the Absolute manifesting itself in Man” (Buchanan, 178;

emphasis in original). Concomitantly, a transcendental divinity is a god of laws, not men; it underwrites identity but cannot possess any human attributes, and its soteriology is wholly impersonal.4

Reverend Manning concludes that “these various infidelities ... seem to me to be reducible to two sources, —Pantheism, represented by Spinoza, and Positivism, represented by Comte” (7; emphasis in original). Historians of pantheism share the tendency of their subjects to universalize, resolve, and reduce their sources. Manning again says, “All these features of modern literature which are repulsive to our moral sense, whether found in the novels

of Charles Read or... [in] Walt Whitman, can find no apology short of pantheism” (383). Just as Emerson is somewhat inappropriately chastised for

weakening institutions, and for producing an intuitively deduced, rather than logically induced, system that transcends socially sanctioned ethics, pantheists are blamed for their postrevolutionary potential to attract the disaffected in America. Manning suggests: “Thus did Goethe and others give the reins to malcontents. ... It was not argument, but the discovery of something favorable to their revolutionary spirit, which brought the masses into love with pantheism. Here was a philosophy which legitimated disorder....So more recently in England, and to some extent in America. If pantheistic teachings have spread among our people, it is because

lawless desire had paved the way for theory.” To the susceptible mind— and especially the mass mind—pantheism poses a perpetual danger, preying on our inner desires. The anti-transcendentalist can merely “bid the newcomer stand afar off, as an infected and deadly thing, if [he] only stimulates

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the thinking faculty. ... Then there will be no stock on which pantheism may ingraft itself among us” (391-93). This natural growth of pantheism threatens to graft itself upon men from some extrinsic source. Manning corroborates Melville in situating pantheism as a pernicious and contagious intellectual disease (instead of a form of purely intuited mysticism). And as borne out in Pierre, and among many of the “fallen” throughout Melville, the “infidelity [of pantheism] welcomes those whom the church repels... . There the disowned and ostracized brethren meet” (24). The outlaw Ishmaelite designated and present in many of Melville’s texts, Pan becomes the god of the disenfranchised. In his lengthy critique of transcendental religion, Reverend De Concilio chides American pantheists for their Germanic tendency never to shrink from any consequences logically deduced from their premises; for to promise the actual and immediate possession of the infinite, nay, the transformation into the infinite, is to entice the very best of human aspirations. ... Protestantism was rightly called a masked rationalism. It soon threw off the mask. The human mind soon saw that it can never be emancipated from the reason of

God unless it is supposed to be independent, and it could never be supposed independent unless it was supposed equal to the reason of the infinite. The result is necessarily Pantheism. And into Pantheism Protestants soon fell. (21)

For De Concilio, this always deduced pantheism abnegates Christianity by restoring divinity to nature, failing to differentiate among aspects of the trinity, and obviating church hierarchy. The proximity of Unitarianism to pantheism is already discernible in William Ellery Channing’s invocation, in 1819,

of an all-representative, post-[rinitarian god; when transferred to nature, this characterization begins to coincide with pantheism: “We understand by [the doctrine of God’s unity] that there is one being, one mind, one person, one intelligent agent, and one only, to whom underived and infinite perfections and dominion belong” (372). Some American writers in the transcendental lineage will extend and literalize that precept to its absurd conclusion. For the Christian faithful, the compression of the trinity produces pandemonium. Channing denounces the circular ascription of divinity to the All, and of the All to the divinity: From such views naturally sprung Pantheism. No being was at last recognized but God.... The universe seemed a succession of shows, shadows. ...

[T]he human spirit was but an emanation, soon to be reabsorbed in its source. God, it was said, bloomed in the flower, breathed in the wind. ... All our powers were but movements of one infinite force. Under the deceptive

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spectacle of multiplied individuals intent on various ends, there was but one agent. Life, with its endless changes, was but the heaving of one and the same eternal ocean.”

(Emerson adapts this rhetoric of shadows, transformations, divine flora, and eternal oceans to depict Nature. Channing’s calumny however, more accurately applies to non-Western or “primitive” accounts of nature, echoing the frequent attribution of such precepts to Native Americans. The views Channing recounts are commensurate with, for example, those of Magawisca in Hope Leslie or Donatello, Hawthorne’s surrogate aboriginal in The Marble Faun.) For the pantheist, one immanent agency, which also reabsorbs man into the mass of undifferentiated nature, overtakes individuals. Channing similarly concludes that Protestantism ends in pantheism, or in what critics frequently considered to be “little better” than or beyond pantheism: In Protestantism, [we see] the same tendency to exalt God and annihilate the creature... . Calvinism will complain of being spoken of as an approach to Pantheism.... [But] the doctrine that God is the only Substance, which is Pantheism, differs little from the doctrine that God is the only active power of the universe ... that matter is an inert substance, and that God is the force which pervades it,... [making men] passive recipients of the Universal Force.... {[Man’s] is a phenomenal existence, under which the One Infinite Power is manifested; and is this much better than Pantheism? (3—4; see also De Concilio, 72-73)

Anxious clergy, from their respective positions, claim that both Protestant ism and Catholicism end in pantheism. By the mid-nineteenth century, the divine “Substance” Jonathan Edwards first invoked in the New World has become the natural force animating all living things and the state. Ironically, in the process of making man divine and exalting a universal deity, the pantheist far exceeds the Puritan in restricting individual will, and finally silencing the writer’s voice so that Pan’s may be heard. PANTHEISM BECOMES a sufficiently influential undercurrent of American society for critics and family to castigate Emerson routinely for straying along its paths. In an 1855 review of a biography of Swedenborg, Edwin Hood levels a typical accusation of pantheism against Swedenborg’s erstwhile disciple: “A

part of an episode on Pantheism we cannot pass by....[A] small book was published some years ago, understood to have been the production of Emerson, with the title of “Nature, which, if we rightly recollect its contents, was altogether of pantheistic tendencies; and yet this book was received with admiration by some Newchurchmen in England” (256). Hood proceeds to quote

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from his review of “Nature,” in language that has dramatic resonance for the reading of Moby-Dick: “There spreads over men’s minds, to a larger extent than many persons have any conception in this age, a misty exhalation, huge and vast, rainbow-tinted, but insubstantial as a rainbow, —PANTHEISM.... [I]ntently and deeply there appears the oneness of all things. .. . Nature is one, awful as the sphinx of old, but lovely as the sphinx. ... [S]he looks out upon man as a beautiful Pantheon.... Man, it is said, must be part of this universal whole. ...[H]e is a Memnon” (256). That rainbow, which arches from Melville to Lawrence to Pynchon, represents the all-color of pantheism, set against the whiteness of a Protestant God that demonizes nature. Again, the critic insists that misapprehended pantheism is more pervasive than the public realizes. Hood also follows the contemporary practice of enumerating the “forms of infidelity,” with pantheism, and its impersonal All of nature, occupying the pivotal point between Christianity and atheism: He who is touched by all must be a part of all, and all must be a part of him. God is not a personality. Paul knew this. Did he not quote with approbation the testimony of the pantheistic poet of old.... The writings of this day are

greatly imbued with the spirit of this great fallacy....The essays of Emer- | son, the writings of Carlyle... the Vestiges of the Natural History of the Creation, ... all have tended to confirm the mind of the age in this great fallacy... lof] philosophical skepticism ... the positivism of science. ... This, it will be perceived, is a state beyond the pantheistic. (256)

(Critics frequently conflate Emerson, who publishes “Nature” anonymously in 1836, with Robert Chambers, who publishes Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, the first widely read proto-evolutionary treatise of “development,” anonymously eight years later. Emerson combines a deterministic scientific positivism with pantheism, seeking an absolute spiritual materialism.) In Hood’s wake, Manning, or his editor, even suggests that Emerson “insinuates that Christ was a pantheist” (308).!° (Melville makes similar insinuations. “Just risen from the dead,” Babbalanja, who serves as a surrogate for Emerson throughout Mardi, implies that nature has taken over the role of Christ; he advises moderation in eating, “thereby [to] give zature time to work her magic transformings, turning all solids to meat and wine into blood” [579].) In an 1845 issue of the Christian Examiner, the Reverend Orville Dewey critiques the primitive animism of Chambers’s anonymous book and the false confidence that a pantheistic nature inspires but must soon extinguish: [The spirit that] pervades a late work entitled “Vestiges of the Natural History of the Creation”... instead of recognizing a paternal presence and care in the creation, looks back upon the Supreme Power as having impressed

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upon all the elements of existence those laws which hold on their course like fate.... What does nature teach?... Earth, air, sunshine, nay more, almost a visible love and joy breathing over the world, seem to demand of every creature a sympathizing confidence. Very instinct yields to it: shall not reason... ?

How can we unite in teaching with him who abjures [authority], razes the very ground on which we stand, and preaches only natural religion? (“Rights,” 94-95, 98)

So does Ishmael worry about pantheistically “tak[ing] the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature” (163). In his early novels, Melville attempts to embrace this “sympathizing confidence”; but by the time he has Isabel paraphrase such sentiments in Pierre, he despairs of the visible love and joy of the world—of a natural law that turns out to be a confidence trick, or fate itself. MANY PEOPLE who encounter Emerson depict him as a pantheist who idealizes the natural at the expense of the sacred. Richard Garnett writes in an early biography that “The Method of Nature” is “one of the most eloquent and pregnant of his productions, a glowing rapture of idealistic pantheism,

a paraphrase of Goethe” (124). Some friends try to safeguard or separate Emerson’s character from his often criticized views of nature. For instance, Frederika Bremer, the Swedish author who becomes fascinated with Emerson and visits him several times in Boston, concludes that “pantheistic as Emerson is in his philosophy,” his moral outlook can still be vouchsafed as sufficiently Christian (Bremer, 1:154; McAleer, 485). Given the number of family members, acquaintances, and critics who consider Emerson pantheistic, it is not surprising that Melville decides pantheism represents the active ingredient of American transcendentalism. The disparagement of Emerson’s persona takes place in the context of a social and theological revolution, where the centralized church has been re-

placed by a centralized natural law, and Christian transubstantiation by theories of development. The absence of an anthropomorphic source of authority in Emerson’s deontology becomes one of the key targets of antipantheist polemicists. Mary Moody Emerson, a devout Calvinist, despairing of her nephew’s insistence that the woods contain the creator, writes to Emerson, “If this withering Lucifer doctrine of Pantheism be true what mortal truth can you preach or by what authority should you feel it?” (Williams, Wilderness Lost, 164). She will later write that Emerson’s ideas are “confused and dark—a mixture of heathen greatness .. . pantheism, Swedenborgianism,

hypotheses of nature, and German rationalism” (Baker, 19). (Again, one of the remarkable things about pantheism is that it could simultaneously be

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accused of inordinate mysticism and inordinate rationalism. One can also treat Emerson's and Melville’s pantheism as a recalibration of elements of their families’ Calvinism, such as its postulations of a predetermined providence and a deity divorced from human consciousness.) Despite the traditional tone of many of his early sermons, those closest to Emerson and those who read him most carefully regard pantheism as the essence of his philosophy. Though less thoroughly castigated on these lines, Melville received some of the same response: the Athenaeum, for example, called Pierre “one of the

most diffuse doses of transcendentalism offered for a very long time to the public” (Log, 1:464)."” Emerson is also one of the original proponents of what Melville terms an

American church without a Christ, a designation that intimates that religions use pretexts of naturalization to claim authority. In Emerson’s pantheism, man needs no mediation to reach god, for nature is an a priori universal that mediates for us. For its detractors, pantheism dissolves the authority of the clerical intercessor. Reverend Dewey insists that without a specific doctrine and church, “every man is a Christian, who claims to be such. Infidelity, pantheism, atheism, may be Christianity” (“Rights,” 94-95, 98).'® Like most historians of pantheism, Reverend Manning also worries that without the authority of the church, speculative thinkers must come to the position of Spinoza or Comte, that is, pantheism, or beyond pantheistic rationalism.

Without institutional sanction, any theosophy becomes heterodox; Manning fears that under pantheism, “the family and society, instead of depending on legislation, should be the unhindered outgrowth of forces which are a law to themselves” (347). Pantheism deifies these natural laws, which transcend social authority. Against this backdrop, Emerson emerges, for those who see the implications of his pantheism, as a threat to the integrity not just of the state but of

the family. Far beyond the familiar appeal to follow Christ, Emerson advises men, intellectually as well as morally, to renounce particular unions in favor of abstract unity (“Intellect,” 2:3.43). For Emerson, family and even the state are manifestations of profanely local, rather than divinely universal, associations: “Great men feel they are so by sacrificing their selfishness and

falling back on what is humane; in renouncing family, clan, country and each exclusive and local connection” (“Demonology,” 10:21). Throughout his essays, Emerson goes beyond Christ’s “new revelations of the incessant soul. He [i.e., one] must hate father and mother, wife and child” (“Compensation, 2:99). Thus one must “say to them, “O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Hence-

forward I am the truth’s.” Emerson acknowledges that this may sound

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harsh, and warns his readers that “the populace [might] think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism”; and indeed such, as we shall see played out in Pierre, is often the response to Emerson’s work (“SelfReliance,” 2:72-74). But as Manning attests, Emerson’s stance doesn’t merely recapitulate a Christian renunciation of the world or worldly authority. For Emerson, nature rather than god or scripture provides the authority for action, and overrides any claims of family, politics, or even self-identity. One forswears family not for Jesus but for the lonely trees—a reverse pilgrimage to the nature the Puritans tried to barricade. The antinomianism of pantheism—even its flirtation with the idea of a Christ without a church—marks it as a seductive but unstable and anarchic epistemology even for some of its proponents. Like revolution, pantheism poses a particular risk to Americans by perpetuating the principles of prior generations of separatists and antinomians. Here pantheism furnishes less a natural philosophy than a naturalized pretext for lawless, antisocial desire. For Manning, “enemies, not only of political wrongs, but of ... the church, the family, the state, wish some plausible premise from

which to deduce their action.... Hence pantheism ... is the fruitful root out of which all their disorder and corruption can grow” (392). Pantheism is consistently imagined as this infiltrating growth, a source of diabolical yet natural corruption. Although Manning fears that “pantheism has poisoned so much of our popular literature for a generation past,” he is just as worried about the public’s continuing susceptibility to the Emersonian adulation of representative men: “Our danger seems to me to arise rather from that worship of intellectual greatness which is so natural to our people. ... The honor [pantheists] yield [to intellect] is sometimes an homage not due to the creature, but only to the creator. ... In this habit lies our special peril. It makes [Americans] too willing to be influenced by men of commanding intellect” (393). Pantheism is frequently scorned as a disease of the unrestrained mind.

For Emerson—as if predicting Ahab’s emblematic quarrel with the sun, which also represents an Egyptian/Osirian pantheism—“it were to dispute against the sun, to deny this difference of brain. ... An aristocracy could not exist unless it were organic” (“Aristocracy,” 10:4.4—45). As writers throughout

this period from Tocqueville to Manning attest, pantheism exacerbates Americans’ susceptibility to what Melville admires, but finally rejects, as “the aristocracy of the brain” (Correspondence, 190).

Allied with modern science, and its concomitant erosion of the authority of religious institutions, pantheism poses a wide-ranging threat: for Reverend De Concilio, “pantheism is the real practical error of the day, the last logical consequence of ... free examination” (9).!? De Concilio is unusually

“The Seductive God” « 37 :

dogmatic, even associating pantheism with “godless communism’; despite its Emersonian (and oddly Strangelovean) anxiety concerning the desiccation of male vitality, his diatribe epitomizes many charges brought against pantheists: “It is the intelligence, the will of man, of society, of the state which are independent, self-existing, absolute, which are the only God... . What is this but Pantheism carried to its farthest consequences? Pantheism... is a living, quickening, tremendous reality... drying up and exhausting the very life of man, sapping the very foundation of society, demolishing the strongest and the most powerful state.” He concludes, “And let none, especially Americans, think they can grapple with it by any other means” than the Catholic Church, the sole remedy for this American form of freethinking.”° Once Unitarians remove the safeguard of objective dispensation, pantheism becomes the logical outcome of a variety of “subjective idealism[s]” (11).7* In 1850, Brownson’s Quarterly Review similarly links “sensism, pantheism, radi-

calism and socialism” (Anonymous, “Vincenzo,” 409). Pantheism posits an authority independent of familiar, validated sources: wills independent from men; limbs independent of whole bodies; individuals independent from the state or church; laws independent from an anthropomorphic god. Pantheism is typically treated as an error carried to its furthest resolution or extreme that disrupts the imperatives of society. What for Emerson offers salvation from the impoverishment of spirit in modern society for De Concilio is its cause; for critics, pantheism transmits the disease it was meant to cure. Pantheism seems to destabilize all the attributes of divine as well as human identity. Manning chastises Spinoza for adducing a divine “being to whom understanding, will, and even personality is denied; a being who does not create, but simply zs; who does not act, but simply unfolds ... by the necessary laws of his own existence, —such a being cannot be a father, a friend, a benefactor; in a word, cannot be a God to man, for man is but a part of himself” (76). In Symbolism and American Literature, Charles Feidelson observes that “in order to become god-possessed, [transcendentalists] deny a personal god. By the same token, in order to unite themselves with nature, they also deny personal identity” (33). For Emerson, relative to the collective and unchanging truth of divine nature, individual “personality is a parasitic deciduous atom” (Journals, 5:272). Pantheists “worship” a God who, though vital, is impersonal; though presiding over transformation, creates nothing; and though omnipresent, maintains no identity. Like Melville, Buchanan views Spinoza, and especially his conception of transcendental identity, as a primary source of American pantheism: “With him, God is not a person but personality which realizes itself in every human consciousness, as so many thoughts of one eternal mind, apart from,

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and out of, the world; therefore there is no god, and so apart from the universal consciousness of man there is no divine consciousness or personality” (134).2* For the pantheist, human personality is particular and illusory; divine “personality,” whether in a collective god or deified natural laws, is impersonal and authentic. In that context, Emerson's representative men are exemplary not by virtue of their individuality but only to the degree that they have transcended it. As Emerson warns in his lecture “Love,” “Thus even Love which is the deification of persons must become more impersonal every day” (Early Lectures, 3:64). The trajectory of pantheism is almost certain to be an arc of disillusionment, a fall from a divine self to an impersonal hell. Even Emerson's acolyte General Hitchcock remarks that “what appeared great has diminished. Generals and great men are pygmies. Principles, laws of nature, truth—these alone seem grand” (Fifty Years, 134). Men are supplanted by these “grand” archetypes and impersonal laws, whether those of natural science or of deterministic heredity. As Mary Cayton observes, early-nineteenth-century use of the word “personality,” still common in Emerson's time, connotes being a person and not a thing; a pantheist god is precisely a thing, an impersonal abstraction, consistent with Tocqueville’s projected outcome of pantheism in America (Cayton, 76-77, 223). For Buchanan, for instance, the pantheistic “system of Spinoza is vicious because it applies a mere abstraction of the human mind to account for whatever is real and concrete” (153). In “Transcendentalism,” Cyrus Bartol— beginning for us to adumbrate poststructuralist debates—writes: Those most stout like Goethe to say all words are inadequate continue to use

them.... But if we discard the Infinite self, we lose the Universe, which is Version of one, or Person translated.... Are events determined by persons, or by laws? ... Personality is nothing, or it is all....If we are personal, we have a destiny; if impersonal, only a doom.... Pantheism is said to sink man and nature in God, Materialism to sink God and man in nature, and Transcendentalism to sink God and nature in man....If no divine, then no human personality, which were a causeless effect. (120-22)?

(In this rhetoric, it is the crucial first term of pantheism, unlike the theories

of materialism and transcendentalism, that has tended to disappear for later readers.) For Edmond Holmes, in Al/ Is One: A Plea for the Higher Pantheism—a title easily confused with Hittell’s Plea for Pantheism—god “entirely transcends” the category of personality as anthropomorphically defined. As if continuing Emerson’s sermon in “Love,” Holmes asks: “But can one give love to an impersonal deity? ... [T]he words personal and impersonal

have gone into the melting pot; and there is no telling what they will mean when they re-emerge from it” (113; emphasis in original). Pantheists try to

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refine this impersonal principle of divinity to more comforting ends. In his discussion of Theodore Parker, Reverend Manning assesses his and Emerson's

belief in “the instinctive intuition of the immortal, a consciousness that the essential element of man, that principle of individuality, never dies.” But pantheists can deliver only the immortality of the principle and not the individ-

ual; Manning attests that transcendental bodies remain immortal because the “particles of matter which make them are forever reappearing in other forms. ... But what [his Christian devotees] took for the immortality of the person as now living and conscious, [Emerson] seems to have meant only for the eternity of the impersonal ‘soul’ which fills all things” (3.45). A central question of pantheism is whether resurrection in nature can guarantee a stable self.

In 1863 the anonymous translator of Modern Pantheism calls its author, Emile Edmond Saisset, above all a disciple of Plato (1:vi). An optimistic French pantheist in the vein of early Emerson, Saisset sees man’s immersion in some version of an Over-Soul as a guarantee of immortality rather than a betrayal of identity: “Beings are transformed; none perishes. And if

death is only a transformation for the plant and the beast, how shall it . scathe man? Nature loses none of its individuals; shall God lose one of his persons?” (2:179).’* According to Saisset, pantheism “begins by wanting to bring God and nature, the finite and the infinite, to the unity of one single, identical existence” (2:102). But man cannot bridge this distance; while

his universal aspect is abstracted and immortalized, his individuality is forfeited.

Saisset’s sentiments epitomize the transcendental longings of the era. Whitman, for example, repeatedly avers that “Nature (the only complete actual poem) ... is the All, and the idea of All... . [from] the pudsation in all matter, all spirit... the eternal beats. ... I feel and know that ... nothing ever is or can be lost, nor ever die, nor soul, nor matter” (323-24). For Emerson and most pantheists, nature can lose nothing, can never be abated: “There is no loss, only transference” (“Perpetual Forces,” 10:71). The older Emerson, however, might be idealizing an impersonal god as a way of “befriending” the death that took his first wife, two brothers, and child in a relatively short time. And in fact, Emerson admits he could not bear to “incur such another loss” (Letters 4:3, 6-9). To turn resurrection into an impersonal process is also to repress grief, to distance oneself from loss by staring it down. The Emerson who looks into Ellen’s and Waldo’s disinterred coffins, and who asserts that the grave has become pleasant to his eye, is responding to intense suffering. It is all the more poignant that Emerson promises in “Monadnoc, “I will give my son to eat / Best of Pan’s immortal meat” (9:71).

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Near the end of his life, even Emerson concedes that only laws and eternal types will abide: “I confess that everything connected with our personality fails. Nature never spares the individual” (“Immortality,” 8:342). Pantheists espouse a doctrine of metamorphoses and eternal returns, where man either

is transformed into a god or loses his individuality as his tithe; congruent with his pantheism, Emerson oscillates between All and nothing, between a nature that transforms and retains and a nature that transforms and eradicates. As Emerson warns, “there is throughout zature something mocking, something that leads us on and on, but arrives nowhere; keeps no faith with us” (“Nature,” 6:189-90). Once Melville begins in Mardi to glimpse the implications of this impersonal Emersonian “transcendence,” he despairs in similar terms: “Through all her provinces, Nature seems to promise immortality to life but destruction to beings. ... Nature is not for us” (210).”? Melville here elucidates Emersonian Nature and the endgame of pantheism. As I later discuss, pantheism prizes the species at the expense of the individual. Contrary to the assumptions of many critics, Emerson’s individual is always wrong, and nature rightfully destroys his particularity. The suppositions of Emersonian transcendentalism are inimical to allegedly traditional notions of male individualism. Common perceptions of Emerson as a champion of self-reliance misread his understanding of “self” and “reliance.” For Emerson, self-reliance is always god-reliance, an absolute dependence on an immanent, transcendental Over-Soul, the universality of nature, or an “aboriginal Self” that bears little relation to the surface particularity most would identify with individual personality (“SelfReliance,” 2:63). For Emerson, “the individual is always mistaken” (“Experience,” 3:69—70); as he succinctly

summarizes, if men seem like individuals, so do pumpkins (“Nominalist,” 3:246). The Emersonian “self” is necessarily as impersonal as the Emersonian god. The only self Emerson wants you to rely on is equivalent to the impersonal laws that transcend the self.

In the American Renaissance, the precepts of transcendental nature become incommensurate with those of a humanistic identity. As Manning remonstrates, “personality is properly but another name for determinateness,” and pantheists, who claim that god is a manifestation of natural law, “deny all personality. Man, to their view, is essentially impersonal; a person only a personification” (372). An impersonal nature winds up as the repository of the personal attributes—the psychological framework of human agency— lost with the disappearance of an anthropomorphic god. From the white whale to the Confidence Man, Melville dramatizes the results of the transcendental “personification” of the impersonal. As Leon Chai notes, “this ‘personified impersonal’ is but another name for God” (324). For Reverend

“The Seductive God” ¢ 41

Dewey, even the perils of nature worship are secondary to the pantheistic fetishization of the impersonal and the consequent personification of the natural: “There is less danger in letting the beauty and majesty of nature minister help to us, than in consulting our own mind to the exclusion of it. There may be a spiritual Fetichism |sic]....|But] if we deny [divine intelligence], rational religion is impossible. Such denial leads directly and inevita-

bly to Pantheism.... The Pantheist... gives up the personality of the Supreme Being” (“Blanco,” 202). With that “spiritual Fetichism” also comes a fetishism of the “personified” material world, as well as the parts of merged and dismembered human bodies. The religious historian Buchanan sees a “twofold development of pantheism in the hands of Materialists and Idealists respectively” (142). Spiritual idealists dismiss matter as a manifestation of the mind, while materialists accord it the same status as the mind or animate life; according to material or “hylozoic” pantheism, Buchanan writes, “the world is a great body, which has sense, spirit, and reason” (135). Save perhaps for the stipulation of reason, the crucial embodiment of this precept can be found in the world of Melville's Mardi, the immense being as animate, sentient, and responsive as its inhabitants, and in the body of Moby Dick. Manning similarly traces pantheism to the Hylozoists, opposed to the Atomists, of Greece, for whom god was a living but senseless nature (59). From the outset, pantheism equates the divinity

with the inhuman laws and forces of the universe—rather than their creator—leaving god the origin and sum of personalities, but without the possession of any. Pantheist idealism and materialism are finally conjoined and revealed as identical in Melville, in a synthesis of post-Cartesian notions regarding living organisms and post-Enlightenment theories of an “organicism” that becomes coterminous with the deterministic and autonomic. For Buchanan, “the fundamental principle of philosophical Pantheism is either the unity of substance as taught by Spinoza [or Edwards], or the identity of existence and thought, as taught, with some important variations, by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel” (180). In other words, things are unified either because they are animated by, and composed of, the same “vital stuff,” or because

thought and existence are coeval and mutually representative. In part, Emerson's pantheism is inconsistent and convoluted because he combines these disparate aspects of pantheism, and relates things both by a priori underlying composition and epistemological or optical relation. For Emerson, material objects demonstrate the preexisting unity of underlying substance while also merely translating the world of pure thought after the fact.

In the Romantic tradition, pantheism is especially reserved for the antiutilitarian tendencies of youthful countries and comes to be regarded by

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critics as a fraudulent epistemology embraced by the naive. Robert Hunt, who in 1849 begins his novel Panthea, The Spirit of Nature with an epigraph from Coleridge—the most renowned of his pantheistic fellow Englishmen—

writes that he has attempted to exhibit the progress of a young and ardent mind “captivated by the beautiful in nature, and allured by the wonders of science, —under the influence of the conflicting views which beset our philosophy. The illusions of youth ...conduce to render pleasing the mystical dreams of visionary thinkers. While, on the contrary, the utilitarian tendencies of the age are coldly repulsive to the young and imaginative mind” (v-vi). Such a description sets the stage for the novel Melville publishes two years

later, which traces the downfall of an ardent young pantheist repulsed by utilitarianism and seduced by transcendental dreams. (It seems a particularly American trait to attempt to use the most recent discoveries of science to ground metaphysical speculation. More so than their European counterparts, American pantheists use botany, optics, taxonomy, and physiognomy to verify a priori ontological claims. Ironically, for all Melville’s encyclopedic forays into natural science, his Luddite tendencies are closely tied to his pantheism.) As in Pierre, critics inveterately situate pantheism as a disease of immaturity

(e.g., Buchanan, 186). Reverend Dewey voices a familiar warning about Romanticism and sounds as if he were describing Pierre and The ConfidenceMan: “In the young especially, in the young America, the young England, the young Germany ... [the world] is growing skeptical, infidel, pantheistic, bold, indocile, rebellious to authority and estranged from trust” (“Rights,” 192). Young America in literature has heeded the call of Pan. Melville might

have described Emerson’s influence on him as Emerson had imagined Thoreau’s on the world: “If we should ever print Henry’s journals, you may look for a plentiful crop of naturalists. Young men of sensibility must fall an easy prey to the charming of Pan’s pipe” ( Journals, 15:268). These pipes seduce the young to natural science, and from family, authority, and “social-

individualism” to an antinomian and transcendental estrangement from _ American society—or rather such estrangement constitutes one significant trait of that society. Yet pantheists themselves, like Emerson, reprove Roman-

tic youth for misreading nature; apologists and critics both cite individual or national inexperience as a problematic pretext for pantheism. As modern science may lead callow minds to put their faith only in the laws of chemistry, so pantheism may seduce the unguarded to fancy. To James Buchanan, “in its ideal or spiritual form, [pantheism] may be seductive to some ardent imaginative minds: but it is a wretched creed notwithstanding” (184). In the second half of Democracy in America, Tocqueville concludes that pantheism is one of the philosophies most likely “to seduce”

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men in democracies (2:32). Devotees and antagonists consistently describe pantheism as a form of social and even sexual seduction. Pan then represents a feminine force operating on men who still exist outside nature. Pantheist

tracts utilize a rhetoric of illusion, delusion, infidelity, and deceit. In the common phrasing even of pantheist proselytizers, men are “seduced” by deduced feelings of pantheism, feminine wiles, reveries, intuitions, and fantasies of merger; they are situated as passive, influenced and possessed by external agency. (Charles Bray, for example, writes of pantheism, “I feel that I can do as I please, that is the language of intuition but it is not the less an illusion and delusion” [35].) Even Emerson concludes that Pan seduces and solicits his followers into a sexual union with nature itself, from which there

is no Melvillean return to society. Thoreau “is like the Woodgod who solic- , its the wandering poet,” writes Emerson, who admits that the initial transition from society to nature is “very seductive” but ends in disillusionment and insanity (Journals, 10:344). As part of his own fraught experience of merger with the All, Ishmael admonishes, “You needs must own the seductive God, bowing your head to Pan” (483). A descent into madness, the one thing the transcendentalist cannot tolerate, pantheism begins as an abstract ~ seduction, but its mergers become reified and unravel the contrivance of selfcontained American masculinity; as Pierre finds out, the end is want and madness, and you still must own the seductive god. Pan never converts his congregation but seduces it (which also helps contextualize why pantheism is a more disruptive force for Hawthorne than for Melville). In Mardi, his first obsessively transcendental novel, Melville begins to narrativize this seduction. Throughout this pivotal but little-read novel, Melville’s metaphysical speculations recall Tocqueville’s warning that the universal “being” of pantheism poses a lure and a threat to the isolated individuals of American democracy. In this playfully Emersonian passage, without ever explicitly mentioning pantheism, Melville defines its most salient principles, and even insinuates that pantheism is indissociable from the conventional Christianity of his country: “But in all things Oro is immutable. ... Those orthodox systems which ascribe to Oro almighty and universal attributes every way, these systems, I say, destroy all intellectual individualities but Oro and resolve the universe into him. But this is a heresy; wherefore orthodoxy and heresy are one.... The universe is all of one mind” (355). (Oro is a Polynesian god whom Melville associates with transcendentalism in Omoo and throughout Mardi, and who serves as a surrogate for both the One and Pan.) This section of Mardi also offers a transcription of many tract writers who assert that nature alone remains immutable while men are ceaselessly transformed. (Some might argue that Melville is only voicing

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ideas to which he does not subscribe, but if so, he voices them throughout his career in similar, though increasingly agitated, fashion.) If American pantheism were briefly defined, it would be characterized as this resolution of individualities in a system of immutable laws. This is the same “resolution” invoked in Emerson’s definition of pantheism, which Melville seems

to have had directly in mind in Mardi. Emerson had written in “SelfReliance,” “This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever blessed One” (2:70). Melville is both parodying and gestating Emerson’s concepts here: for Emerson’s Pan and Melville’s Oro, “all multiplicity pushes to be resolved into unity” (“Poetry and Imagination,” 8:7). As noted, an all-dissolving unity, which repre-

sents the very power of the divinity, disposes of human identity in nature's melting pot (“Progress,” 8:223).

For Emerson, the multiplicity of nature is resolved into the self, but for the later Melville the self is resolved back to multiplicity as duplicity. For critics, the pantheist’s nature is regenerated not through the resolution but through the disintegration of its subjects; as Buchanan complains, “nature, too, is aggrandized and glorified. ... /T/he dissolution of any living organism is but one stage in the process of its further development; and whether it passes into a new form of self-conscious life, or is reabsorbed into the inflnite, it still forms an indestructible element in the vast sum of Being” (185). As Tocqueville elaborates in Democracy in America, “not content with the

idea that there is nothing in the world but a creation and a creator, [the American pantheist] is still embarrassed by this primary division of things and seeks to expand and simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole” (2:31). This “vast sum of Being” is the same “immense being” of Tocqueville’s mass American identity. Proponents and op-

ponents rely on a similar rhetoric, and disagree primarily on whether being absorbed into that vast Being represents transcendence or death. The correspondence of thought, force, and matter in this all-dissolving and unifying nature produces equivalences between every external and internal, physical and metaphysical, like and unlike. Though occasionally skeptical of transcendental idealism, John Hittell, whose “pantheistic evidence” is used against the superstitions of Christianity, most frequently corroborates Emerson: preparing us for Emerson’s and Melville’s radical use of figurative language, Hittell claims that “every thought is accompanied by a change of matter,” evident particularly in electricity (Plea, 30). (Expressed in scientific terms by Hittell, these changes are also governed by forces of magnetic influence and attraction, which for Melville become agencies that threaten to overwhelm the bordered individual.) If thought can be literal-

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ized in matter, little distinction between self and world can be maintained. For Melville too, in a development of what the Puritans called the “outward and visible” manifestation of our spiritual selves, these “strange analogies” suggest that every change of matter must reflect a change of thought: “Like geological stones... [on] his ribbed and dented brow... the foot-prints of his unsleeping, ever pacing thought ... it all but seemed the inward mould of every outer movement” (Moby-Dick, 160). This utterly typical description of Ahab is pantheistic because it assumes the correspondence of matter and spirit; in other words, for Ishmael, Ahab’s face itself is a portal to transcendental Nature. But pantheism also presumes the polarization—the necessary and corresponding inversion—of assertions, values, and surfaces, with their retractions, opposites, and interiors. In this sense, denaturing (and demonology) becomes a primary function of nature. For every change of matter now comes a change in our identities. Much of Emerson’s work is quickly filtered into surveys of pantheism, some of which proved popular, but most of which have been forgotten. Many of these writers’ esoteric theological speculations, however, remain accessible through the writings of Melville and Emerson. John Hunt, for example,. presents a sanitized but still recognizable paraphrase of Emerson: “God is the impersonal—the common nature—which appears in each of us, and which is yet higher than ourselves. We, as individuals, live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles; but within, in the universal-soul ... to which every part

or particle is equally related—the eternal One.... Humanity is a facade of Deity. ... There is but one mind everywhere—in each wavelet of the pool, in each ray of the star, in each heart” (322). Men are partitioned and transformed but eternally related and merged into the stream of continuous nature. But a schism occurs, because the common and impersonal are incommensurate with the requirements of self-reliant American individuality. In Melville, that facade of the omnipresent deity becomes the mask of the ubiquitous Confidence Man. In his lengthier descriptions of pantheistic animism in Evidences against Christianity, Hittell could be speaking for Emerson and Melville, as well as reformulating Jonathan Edwards’s belief in the incarnation of God’s thoughts: the pantheist “says that matter and its properties and conditions are the only existences; ... that these forces are inherent in matter... and that they arrive at consciousness only in the animal kingdom. They are the authors of all that is.... [T]hey embody themselves in the grand form of the monster cypress...

they give sensation to the worm... masculinity to the man, beauty to the woman, wisdom to the sage” (2:210). Being—as well as sensation, wisdom, and

our identifying features—accrues through the operation of these material

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forces in nature. (As Emerson incessantly claims, a silent Pan articulates it-

self and achieves consciousness in man. In “The Method of Nature” he writes, “Nature is a mute, and man, her articulate, speaking brother,” at least when ventriloquized by genius [1:218]. But man then becomes a puppet of an endless array of forces—first the laws of nature, then evolution, language, and back to the laws of nature, in an expanding series of impersonal, deterministic discourses.) Hittell defines pantheism as “the doctrine that matter and its qualities or conditions are the only true existences, and that the forces, pervading matter and inherent in it, are the divine existence, which comes to consciousness only in man” (Plea, vii). Similarly for Manning, in pantheism “nature is God struggling towards consciousness” (289). According to De Concilio in Catholicity and Pantheism, pantheists converge on the idea of the metamorphic development of the infinite in the finite: “The genesis of creation in all its components, and the history of mankind, are the successive

unfolding and realization of the infinite in a progressive scale. For, in its necessary development, it becomes matter, organism, sense; and in man it acquires intellect with the consciousness of itself” (29). Matter develops itself until it finds a vessel for its consciousness and voice, a temporary host to chart its own permanent flux. For the idealist, the process, like the expansion of the universe, is finally reversed, so that the “soul generates matter” (Emerson, “Poetry and Imagination,” 8:27). For Charles Bray, “Through the countless ages, one universal plan prevails for the elaboration and orga-

nization of a nervous system, by which unconscious mind shall again become conscious in all the varied forms of animal life” (43). For some pantheists, the universe is an inhuman or prehuman force seeking expression in man. Quoting Heraclitus, Emerson abjures the egotism of dreams because it

fails to provide a universal, transpersonal language: “There is one world common to all who are awake, but each sleeper betakes himself to one of his

own” (“Demonology,” 10:20). (Emerson is careful to depict nature or the Over-Soul not as the individual subconscious but as the collective unconscious. The individual subconscious is irrational and private, but the collective unconscious is rational and universal.) As Tocqueville anticipates, the extreme individualism of U.S. democracy poses a dangerous form of isolation

and antisocialism that must be transcended. As well as the inconsistency and irrationality of the divine, the demoniacal represents the particular, the individual who is cut off from the universal. The genuinely occult falls outside Emerson’s laws, where an unpredictable, protean Pan disrupts a regulated and continent pantheism. Inconceivable to Emerson, the miraculous transcends even nature. Yet Emerson shares the “conviction that be-

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hind all your explanations is a vast and potent and living Nature, inexhaustible and sublime, which you cannot explain” (10:27). Emerson slowly realizes that in accepting Goethe’s pantheism, he has also embraced his demonology, and that the irrational can no longer be confined to particular aberrations but is systemic; the individual nightmare is rendered universal. The agency that comes between things—that merges and amputates or binds and severs them—is the corollary of Pan himself. In other words, the system of representation that polarizes things itself becomes polarized. In Pantheism, the Light and Hope of Modern Reason, Charles Amryc writes that “Pantheism alone opens up a vista of endless reappearances... [man] becoming part of more and more complex phases of Pantheos, realizing and consciofying (rendering conscious) more and more of the world’s forces”; men are like letters iterated and recombined in nature’s attempt to say something intelligible (45). To Emerson, “nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is man precipitated. Man crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated” (“Nature,” 3:196). This claim inverts Emerson’s definition of thoughts as the incarnation of nature; but the terms exist only in a circular — process of mutual definition, with nature embodied in thought and thought an embodiment of nature. The recurring embedded pun is that man is “impersonated,” or rendered impersonal. Everything in the pantheist’s world is both man and divine nature disguised, and can be converted into anything else. The idea that a divine nature comes to consciousness in man is closely tied to the aforementioned loss of a personal god. By the end of this book I hope to show that the writers situating the universe as a determinate, unconscious force evolving into human consciousness often reify social and political imperatives, particularly those of a market economy, as the operation of deified, impersonal natural law. For the Reverend Morgan Dix, in pantheism the personality of God is wholly abnegated (18-19). As Dix continues, again sounding as if he has Emerson in mind, “God developed into trees and animals. ... [W]hen, however, at the last, God took this higher form and passed to consciousness, then for the first time ... God arrived at the knowledge of Godin becoming man. ... God has no personality and no consciousness but in man|,] ... God realized in forms. ... [Man] was God coming to the consciousness of Himself” (25). According to Manning, in “Pantheism in the Form of Self Worship,” pantheism inverts the natural order of things; man does not see and represent the universe—the universe represents itself through man. To the post-Hegelian pantheist, human beings are “but the innumerable individual eyes through which the infinite world-spirit regards itself”; we are just a means for the

48 ¢ Chapter 1 , universe to see and talk to itself (137). It is not Emerson’s eye but the OverSoul’s that sees as a transparent, all-encompassing organ. In a world where god has no personality, but develops into consciousness through man, “each person is only a piece of the universe made alive” (Journals, 9:278). Between

Mardi and Moby-Dick, Melville debates whether we should feel divinely animated or demonologically dispossessed by this immanence of nature. In Mardi, Melville’s slightly deranged staging of Emersonian pantheism, the world itself has begun to achieve this human consciousness and simply longs to see itself. When Mohi is asked if he has seen proof of the divinity, he replies no, “but the whole archipelago has.” Presaging Moby-Dick, the world called Mardi is an Emersonian incarnation of Nature, “a monster whose eyes are fixed in its head, like a whale’s” (395). Despite its imperfect field of vision,

Mardi perceives what individual men cannot: ““Thus,’ exclaimed Babbalanja, ‘does Mardi, blind though it be in many things, collectively behold the marvels which one pair of eyes sees not’” (363). Pantheism accumulates body parts into a giant “sum of being,” imagined as Gaea or a monster that is the

world; god becomes this animated, embodied Nature whose collectivized body accomplishes what man cannot. Mardi is a world alive; but this living “Over-body” starts breaking down the bodies of its individual inhabitants. The world described in Mardi literalizes the tenets of Emersonian pantheism, and the alleged formlessness of the text can be attributed to the jarring collisions of pantheism’s contradictory precepts. Mardi often reads as if it were an impossible narrativization of Emerson’s journal entries (to which Melville of course had no access, yet which he seemed to respond to and anticipate). By reassessing Mardi in this light, one finds many of its most confusing assumptions resolved as part of Melville’s encyclopedic, empirical mapping of a New World governed by transcendentalism.

Through their extreme idealism, pantheists become god by imagining him, for if spirit and matter are interchangeable, seeing and thinking become equivalent to creating. For Dix, pantheism means that “all the thoughts

of any individual mind are divine thoughts. ...[M]an [is] God thinking and acting.... This is what the New England transcendentalists have meant allalong.... [At least] the pantheists abroad are more straightforward” (59). Contrary to Dix’s impression, however, Emerson is perhaps often denigrated for “deducing” his pantheism because critics do perceive him as overtly playing God; whatever his other reservations, Emerson never shies away from suggesting, for instance, that “Empedocles undoubtedly spoke a truth of thought, when he said, ‘I am God’” (“Method,” 1:198). According to Buchanan, idealism passes into pantheism through a transcendental perception of “Identity.” He writes: “The doctrine of Identity... means that Thought

“The Seductive God” * 49

and Being are essentially one, that the process of thinking is virtually the same as the process of creating, that in constructing the universe by logical deduction, we do virtually the same thing as the Deity ...: every man’s reason, therefore, is really God; that Deity is the whole sum of consciousness immanent in the world” (174). As Emerson attests in “Natural History of Intellect”: “I am of the oldest religion. ... I believe the mind is the creator of the world, and is ever creating;—that at last Matter is dead Mind. ...I dare not deal with this element in its pure essence” (12:17). Emerson will not openly

engage in the question of priority, because idealist pantheism destabilizes cause and effect, and the mind that creates god/nature is also created by that immanent god/nature in circular fashion. As usual, Emerson cannot divulge the most esoteric, masked elements of pantheism in their pure essence to the uninitiated, relying instead on the subterfuges of more palatable rhetorical substitutes. For most detractors, the crucial attributes of Emersonian pantheism are an impersonal immortality coupled with self-deification or self-worship. Even sympathetic critics such as Saisset argue that “liberty without responsibility,

morality without duty, immortality without consciousness, mad idolatry of self—these are the practical conclusions of Pantheism. This is what it makes of human personality.” He continues, “There are two poles of all human science—the personal I, with whom all begins, and the personal God, in whom all ends” (2:122). The self becomes the world, the world the self. Egalitarian pantheists try to conjoin the extremes of self and society but are consequently forced to oscillate between them. For Saisset, “Pantheism is condemned

to this alternative, to diminish and impoverish the divine existence in order to give reality to the universe, or to annihilate the existence of visible things in order to concentrate all actual existence in God” (2:105). Such relentlessly polarized alternatives are omnipresent in pantheism; as Pierre protests— even as he succumbs to pantheistic dichotomies—he who has is given more, and he who has little has more taken away. The world, the middle ground, must become a grain of sand or the universe; the individual must become a diminished and fragmented part or an impersonal whole. The problems of original creation, and the distribution from unity into variety, vex pantheism, which can account only for the modification of preexisting matter. Already an embedded principle of pantheism via its theory of correlation and transformation, evolution posits a system of mutations that remains compatible with a unity of origin and composition. As it haphazardly accretes elements of contemporary natural science—particularly of chemistry, biology, and geology—pantheist discourse parallels many of the advancements in the theory of evolution; as Buchanan remarks, the “theory of development,”

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called the “mere doctrine of a transmutation of species,” is often treated as mutually verifiable with pantheism (90; emphasis in original). Since noth-

ing can be created or destroyed, material pantheism “must run into the modern theory of Development if it makes any attempt to account for the origin of new races” (163). Pantheism selectively treats natural processes, from chemical reactions to the operation of gravity, as proof of evolution: “The essential creed of these scientific miners |[Darwin, Haeckel, Spencer, and others] is Pantheism.... Pantheism means ALL IS GOD, not God is in everything; no, it means: EVERYTHING IS SOME FORM OF GOD (Amryc, 97). Throughout the American Renaissance, pantheism is extolled and vilified in ways that adumbrate and echo Emerson and Melville. In familiar and appropriately botanical terms, Theodore Parker describes the inevitably fleeting nature of pantheistic reverie in “The Divine Presence in Nature and in the Soul”: hours of inspiration are “the opening of the flower; the celestial bloom of man.... They are not numerous to any man.... To many a man who have once in their lives felt this, it seems shadowy, dream-like, and unreal, when they look back upon it... ‘now only a God afar off’ This cannot be; for the grass grows green as ever; the birds chirp as gaily....God still is there, ever present in nature” (70). In “Existence of the Deity”’—both a celebration of and

a warning against natural religion published in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review in 1847—A. Arrington similarly writes: “One beautiful evening in May I was reading by the light of the setting sun in my favorite Plato. I was seated on the grass, interwoven with golden blooms...a tumult of radiant thoughts. I took up my beloved Plato from the grass where I had tossed him in a fit of despair. ... In my wild enthusiasm I called out to the little birds... sing on sweet minstrels; Lo! Ye and I have still a God” (104).° Arrington’s emblematic mixture of Plato and a sentimental merger with nature marks his outburst as a typical episode of pantheistic reverie. Arrington is just the kind of delirious pantheist that Dewey chastises in the Christian Examiner, but of course, so is Emerson; here Dewey warns, with Emerson's “Nature” his likely target: “There is a dreamy state of mind, which we comprehend, for we have felt it, in which [God loses his personality]. The man walks forth

in some fair and still autumn day, with eyes half closed perhaps... . [H]is old habitual beliefs sink out of sight; a maze of reverie wraps about him like slumber; the curtains of old, familiar nature are drawn aside. ... The Pantheist, we conceive, does not fairly read the .. . page spread before him” (“Blanco,” 201-2). Such endeavors to transcend individual consciousness by fusing with

nature occur throughout the American Renaissance and especially in Emerson’s and Melville’s writings, from Ishmael’s and Redburn’s explicitly panthe-

“The Seductive God” « 51

istic mergers with, and near loss of self in, the ocean, to Isabel’s yearning in Pierre to be entirely “absorbed into” nature.

Many authors of the period are fixated on the mystical aspirations of pantheists. In the 1842 journal essay “The Old Testament and Modern Mythicism,” the anonymous author—worried about the sources of American infidelity—argues that it is necessary, “particularly in dreamy Germany, to broach systems of .. . spiritualism [and] modern rationalism. ... [W]e are too well acquainted with the tendency of the fine words of the Eclectics and Pantheists... . The reason of [the pantheist’s] being, his end, his destinies, appear to him clearly in this primitive perception ... this pretended spontaneity... a reverie” (257-59). This dreamy reverie is again associated with Germanic pantheism. (More than most of his contemporaries, Melville derives the texture of his language from such theological essays; Melville’s characters describe dozens of these reveries.) In the familiar opening passages of “Nature,” Emerson establishes the pattern for transcendental reveries, experiencing in “the

fields and woods... [this] occult relation between man and the vegetable” world. Emerson finds his divinity “within these plantations of god,” sites of

“sanctity...and faith” (1:9-10).*” Such deduction of god from nature is what Andrews Norton had feared in his 1839 Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity, which is also an attack on the influence of German pantheists on American thought, and on Emerson’s Divinity School address: according to Norton, their religion “exists merely, if it exist at all, in undefined and unintelligible feelings ... awakened by the beautiful and magnificent spectacles which nature presents... [and] excited by a system of pantheism” (53). Arrington, the Platonic naturalist woken by nature, continues his rumi-

nations by examining approaches to cause and effect, including those of Christians, materialists, and pantheists: “All time and eternity form but one vast flowing stream, where [cause and effect] come and go like waves of the

sea.... Well has a distinguished pantheist of the modern German school worded this profound idea: “The soul will not have us read any other cipher but that of cause and effect’” (104). But as a result, the postulation of god/ cause in nature, like Melville’s and Ishmael’s pantheistic trance, dissolves. (In this one continuous stream of nature—a ubiquitous conceit of pantheism— cause and effect are perpetually destabilized or inverted.) Arrington continues by noting the familiar attribution of all heresy to a common doctrinal error: “Universal history shows that the false solution of this radical problem has been the fruitful source of all pestilential heresies. ... If we answer

that emanation is the sole causation, we have landed in pure Pantheism. All individual existence vanishes away” (104). (The critic again falls prey to the rhetorical devices he denounces, citing “universal history” to disprove a

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universal philosophy; this pattern is replayed throughout Melville’s writing.) In the following issue, however, Arrington concludes much like Saisset, who insisted that nature loses none of its individuals: “He paints the wings of the butterflies. He gilds the crimson flower-cups. ... Never a grain of sand has been lost. Shall He then lose me? Can I lose myself?” (266). Even

in trying to militate against his pantheism, Arrington decides that a Christian god exists because he paints nature. To Mary Baker Eddy—the founder of Christian Science, who still worried about transcendental influence in the 1920s in Christian Science versus Pantheism—Pan represents “universal nature proceeding from the divine Mind and providence, of which heaven, earth, sea, the eternal fire, are so many members.” But for Eddy, his incarnation, like Christ’s, is of a specific form, that of the god of shepherds, half animal, half man. Over thirty years

after most pantheist tract writing had died out, Eddy captures the latent paradox defining Emerson’s and Melville’s less Arcadian, as well as less licentious, scapegoat. She writes, “Pan, as a deity, is supposed to preside over syl-

van solitude,” and for her in “nature’s rich glooms, that loneness lacks but one charm to make it half divine”: other people (3).?* Eddy pinpoints the surprising failure of pantheism: men become parts of the One, yet paradoxically are never more isolated than through their subordination to universal nature. “Representing this individualism as he does, and carrying it to the point of selfworship under the lead of pantheism,” Emerson epitomizes the incongruity of pursuing transcendental individualism in a democracy (Manning, 269). Rather than merge men in communal society, pantheism renders them incommensurate solipsists; when Emerson’s and Melville’s male characters attempt to merge with other men in society rather than with abstract nature, they end up fragmented isolatoes and what Emerson terms “infinitely repellent orbs,” unable either to merge into the All of nature or to coexist with any part of society. II Where the name God now appears, Spinoza had written Nature... [he had] been induced to substitute the former word for the latter. Andrews Norton, 4 Discourse (10)

Few writers or speakers in this community would openly profess the pantheistic creed in the terms in which it has been formalized. ... But we claim that the system has attained an influence unsuspected by those who have not looked into this subject with attention. ... The doctrine of which we speak is everywhere and in everything. ... I maintain that this is the system on which all the

“The Seductive God” « 53 speculative infidelity of our age does actually rest... . [But] to be able to recognize | pantheism] in its disguised form, one must know it in its natural shape. Reverend Morgan Dix, Lectures on the Pantheistic Idea of an Impersonal Deity (33-34, 28, 49)

For nature is not always tricked out in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs is overspread with melancholy to-day. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. Emerson, “Nature” (9-10)

The designs were of a festive and joyous character, representing Arcadian scenes. ... Pan, and the god of wine, and he of sunshine and music... all evolving, as their moral, a grim identity between gay things and sorrowful ones. Only give them a little time, and they turn out to be just alike! ... “But I should regret to have suggested so ungenial a transformation ...” continued Kenyon, duly noting the change in Donatello’s characteristics. Hawthorne, The Marble Faun: or the Romance of Monte Beni (227)

Nothing is more suitable to confirm these ideas [of the whole and the assemblage of things] than the ingenious explication which a modern author gives us of the Fable of Pan, as well as the figure under which they have represented him. ... [Pan's] person was composed of parts... [some] suitable to the reasonable animal, that is to say, man, and others to the animal, destitute of reason, such as the goat. Mirabaud (Baron D’Holbach), System of Nature (2:32)

Pantheism has many developments. We cannot even say whether a thoroughgoing pessimism or a thorough-going optimism is the more legitimate outcome of its principles. W.S. Urquhart, Pantheism and the Value of Life (4.4)

Invoked in most of Emerson’s essays, but under a hundred many-colored names, Pan appears as the woodgod, the Over-Soul, the laws of compensation, “the inworking of the All,” natural instinct, and Nature itself (““Compensation,” 2:106). Though Emerson, “shy of names,” and “careful not to give his [creed] to his readers in any formulated shape,” rarely defines his terms, other writers’ equivalent use of a designated pantheism often reveals Emerson’s implicit ideology (Manning, 273). Emerson might agree with, but not openly acknowledge, Manning’s paraphrase of his work: a “definition of pantheism may be given in a few words. It is the doctrine that God includes all reality, and is identical with it, nothing besides him really existing” (74). Emerson and Melville—who are conscious of, but not always straightforward about, their pantheistic impulses—develop idiosyncratic accounts of this one vital agency that inhabits and inspires a multiplicity of forms.

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Pan usually remains abstemious and benign for Emerson, at least on the surface: “I wondered at the continence of Nature under the sky, and truly

Pan ought to be represented in the Mythology as the most continent of gods” (“Nature,” 3:177; see also Journals, 7:545). Emerson’s Pan is less a bac-

chic trickster than a surrogate for the Christ who replaced him; in an 1842 journal entry Emerson adds, “A thousand years hence it will seem less monstrous that those acute Greeks believed in the fables of Mercury and Pan, than that these learned & practical nations of Europe and America... [believed] this famous dogma of the Triune God” ( Journals, 8:196). Emerson, however, begins his Essays, his most significant and influential body of work, by masking the socially unacceptable extent of his own belief in Pan as the symbolic principle behind each facet of nature. Pantheists will not speak of their arcane precepts “in their pure essence,” as Dix warns and Emerson confesses. In the published version of “Nature,’ Emerson, as noted, replaces most of the original references to “Pan” with the word “nature.” This censoring marks a self-imposed extension of the way

Spinoza, as Andrews Norton indicates, was compelled to revise all his references to “nature” by changing them to “God.” Perhaps appropriately, such elisions disguise the figure of Pan but leave pantheism embedded, ubiquitously if euphemistically present—in discourses of natural law, ani-

mation, transformation, universality, and other principles of Romantic taxonomy—throughout Emerson’s writings. If Spinoza’s and Emersons societies were not ready to deify nature or natural science directly, they could al-

most deify their effects. Before he glimpses an opposite end in want and madness, Emerson sees “in the woods perpetual youth... [a] return to reason and faith,” elements that for Emerson usually are surprisingly contiguous in Pan (“Nature,” 1:9—10).

Throughout the American Renaissance, Pan presides over hidden domains of wood and stone. Emerson’s Monadnoc, the mountain of the All,

pilgrims know |

prefigures Melville’s association of Pan with “sleeping” sentient rock. Gentle The gamut old of Pan And how the hills began. ... Enchantment fixed me here.... How the chemic eddies play Pole to pole

And what they say... : Can thy style-discerning eye

The hidden Builder spy? | (“Monadnoc,’ 9:68)

“The Seductive God” « 55

While often vicariously designated, and thus overlooked by critics, Pan suffuses the transcendental literature of the American Renaissance. Emerson admits that Pan can be seen only beneath the surfaces of American society (extending sometimes even to his own work): “Pan, that is, All. His habit was to dwell in mountains. ... [H]e was in the secret of nature... [and] was only seen under disguises”; he is the “one hidden stuff” of Emerson’s universe (“Natural,” 12:36). Emerson and Melville often represent Pan mimetically, by hiding him in the structures of their texts. (Spoken of elliptically, divine nature is visible only to an elect, but an elect of nature, not society.) Pan is, for example, endemically associated with stealth, concealment, and invisibility. The changing connotations of these attributes, and of animated rocks and trees, in Melville’s novels reflect the changing fortunes of pantheism in their author’s thought. Emerson's understanding of human identity is tethered to his conception of Pan, who encapsulates the potential of representative men: “The great Pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to signify the beautiful variety of things, and the firmament, his coat of stars—was but the representative of thee, O rich and various man” (“Method,” 1:205). One of Emerson’s key tenets, representativeness is bound up with “great” Pan and pantheism. The unity of the All paradoxically connotes this many-colored “coat” of variety (the same “many-colored coat” that, in “Poetry and Imagination,” later reveals to Emerson the absolute poverty of nature). Each man embodies a version or translation of the whole but is only on a kind of furlough from the divinity. In “Woodnotes,” Pan the builder is the force driving the world, responsible for its universal pattern of growth and transformation: Onward and on, the eternal Pan, Who layeth the world’s incessant plan, Halteth never in one shape, But forever doth escape, Like wave or flame, into new forms, Of gem, and air, or plants, and worms. I that to-day am a pine, Yesterday was a bundle of grass.

(9:68)

In its depiction of the processes of natural transformation and self-difference, this poem serves as a blueprint for the teleology of much of transcendentalism. The forms of individual identity are fleeting, though the concept of archetypal identity remains immutable. In “The Patient Pan,” in “Fragments on Nature and Life,” “Pan, half asleep, rolling over / His great body in the grass, / Tooting, creaking, / Feigns to sleep, sleeping never” (9:335). Nature is

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never still, and hence cannot be identified by man; this serpent in the grass feigns and conceals, is always inconsistent because he embodies contradiction. An individual can merge with great Pan's great body of nature, but he must lose himself in the process. At the nexus of the transcendental recuperation of American identity, Emerson sends writers off into a nature seeded with its own mutability. Emerson and Melville both struggle with feelings of deduced pantheism.

A striking correlation exists between this journal entry by Emerson and Melville's letter to Hawthorne of June 1851, right down to Melville’s preoccupation with alimentary discomfort: “Pantheism,” to be sure! Do you suppose the pale scholar who says, you do not know causes, or the cause of causes, any better for often repeating your stupid noun, deceives himself about his own powers? Does he not... suffer by trifles? Does he not shake with cold, & lose days by indigestion?... A Mr. Schaad... says that “Mr. Emerson is a pantheist by intuition, rather than by argument.” So it seems our intuitions are mistaken. Who then can set us right? ( Journals, 13:105)

Bodily functions, diseases and anomalies—from cold and indigestion to pain

and dismemberment—disrupt the reveries of the pantheist.”? In the letter to Hawthorne, one can observe the pattern of metaphysical seduction and physical repudiation that increasingly demarcates Melville’s writing: In reading some of Goethe’s sayings, so worshipped by his votaries, I came across this, “Live in the all.” That is to say, your separate identity is but a wretched one, —good; but get out of yourself, spread and expand yourself, and bring to yourself the tinglings of life that are felt in the flowers and the woods, that are felt in the planets Saturn and Venus, and the Fixed Stars. What nonsense! Here is a fellow with a raging toothache. “My dear boy,” Goethe says to him, “you are sorely afflicted with that tooth; but you must live in the all, and then you will be happy!” As with all genius, there is an im-

mense deal of fummery in Goethe, and in proportion to my own contact with him, a monstrous deal of it in me. (Correspondence, 193-94)

(With the persistent uncanniness or monotony that pertains to pantheism, Channing had formulated this same divine sequence of flowers to fixed stars in 1828: “We discern more and more of God in every thing, from the frail flower to the everlasting stars” [Works, 292].) An individual identity, and afflictions and aches, are wretched, but the alternative might prove worse. In the terminology of Emerson, Goethe’s greatest votary, Melville is tempted

to spread and expand his body until it becomes the entire world of nature, but he perpetually oscillates between owning and disowning his impulses.

“The Seductive God” ¢ 57

(Melville tends to use Hawthorne as a rhetorical springboard to try to argue himself out of the positions by which he is involuntarily compelled, and by which he feels he is being seduced. It is ironic that Melville seeks to enlist the aid of Hawthorne to resist, but then to confirm, the influence of Goethe and Emerson, since Hawthorne is among the least transcendental of American Renaissance writers, and the one most concerned with Pan’s demonology rather than continence.)

Again and again, teething and digestion, along with defecation and amputation—which also remind us that our bodies lack integrity and can be partitioned as well as merged—threaten the “all feeling.” Nevertheless, in pantheistic proportion to his proximity to Goethe’s and Emerson’s representative genius, Melville too succumbs to the universal life; when he writes to

Hawthorne of “this a//’ feeling” that will not abate, his sense of transcendent oneness with the grass, flowers, and even planets, Melville worries that men will try to extrapolate from transient feelings of universality. (Correspondence, 194). Or as Melville adds in a letter a few months later, speaking of

his pantheistic feelings: “In me divine magnanimities are spontaneous and instantaneous—catch them while you can. The world goes round, and the other side comes up” (Correspondence, 212). A universal application is what Emerson and Pan require; pantheism induces a totalization of the temporary, much as Pierre proposes a universal index for conduct derived from a particular experience. Even worse, temporary feelings might be not temporary but reversible: the true demonology of pantheism is not just the loss of the all feeling but its inversion. Even Emerson acknowledges that after losing ourselves in nature, “by and by we fall out of that rapture” (“Intellect,” 2:329). Demonology, disillusionment, despair: especially for Melville, these are the ends of pantheistic fervor. As Ishmael warns, at the end of your enchanted reverie, after you have merged into time and space like “pantheistic ashes, “your identity comes back in horror” (Moby-Dick, 159). Ironically, since Emerson emphasizes the evanescence of individual experience, this feeling of impermanence is itself the universal mischief of pantheism. In 4// Is One, for example, Edmond Holmes recuperates Melville’s and Ishmael’s lament: “What of the vision of cosmic unity which I tried to describe in the opening pages of this book? That experience was limited and transient; and only the memory of it remains” (194). If you can retain your transcendental oneness with nature, you never had it. Yet Melville cannot escape this All feeling, as virtually all his works demonstrate; he is far less ironic than many critics assume when satirizing transcendentalists, for he more often than not gives them his own words. If Melville is being sardonic, he is also the target of his own barbs. As we have seen, Melville even imagines himself asa

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pantheistic plant at the moment when he is giving Isabel those precise sentiments in Pierre. For most of its apologists and critics, pantheism is a religion of manic depression, oscillating from optimism to pessimism. Pan represents antithetical things for both Emerson and Melville, as he binds and severs men and families, alternates between the sublime and the savage, and offers redemption and false confidence. In describing the inconsistency of Pan in “Demonology,” the later Emerson quotes Goethe directly: “I discovered in nature, animate and inanimate, intelligent and brute, somewhat which manifested

itself only in contradiction....It was not god-like, since it seemed unreasonable. ... This, which seemed to insert itself between all other things, to sever them, to bind them, I named the Demoniacal” (10:17). (I return to this key passage in my final chapter.) Pan is the immanent but now brutish and irrational god who, in mediating representation, inserts himself between all things, and defines the contradictions of transcendentalism. As I later explore more fully, Emerson also consistently uses the word “brute” to connote race. Though he sometimes ambiguously attributes such sentiments to abolitionists, the early Emerson was not above writing: “When intellectual law prevails, it will then appear quickly enough that the brute instinct rallies and centres in the black man. He is created on a lower plane than the white, and eats men” (Cabot, 2:429). This racialized demonology becomes critical to the operations of Nature. In “Demonology,” as in “Experience,” the demo-

nological characterizes the new god. In this sequence from seduction to disillusionment, the traits of Pan and pantheism continue to be conflated; and as Lawrence confirms in “Pan in America,” “lurking among the leafy recesses, [Pan] was almost more demon than god” (Phoenix, 22). Pan’s demonic, contradictory aspect helps contextualize Emerson’s inconsistency and Melville’s ontological mood swings as intrinsic and essential to their

projects. Pantheism also helps us track where Emersonian inconsistency becomes Melville’s demonology.

If, as Emerson testifies, “every day, every act betrays the ill-concealed deity,” every act of the ill-concealed deity betrays us (“Experience,” 3:78). Par-

ticularly in “later” Emerson, Pan does become spiteful and uncontainable. A divine pantheism and a trickster Pan remain the more consistently contradictory poles of Melville’s hermeneutics. Like Emerson, Melville at intervals imagines a benevolent and reassuring Pan, such as in “Pausilippo”—where “such the charm of beauty shown / [that] Even sorrow’s self they cheerful weened / Surcease might find and thank good Pan”—but ultimately concentrates on and is himself overcome by nature’s demonology (Collected Poems, 142). When he writes to Hawthorne in November 1851, five months after

“The Seductive God” « 59

telling him that they formed a chain of god’s posts around the world, Melville

asserts anew that he felt “pantheistically” linked to him, would dine with him in old Rome’s Pantheon, and speaks “now of [his] profoundest sense of being, not of an incidental feeling,” that is, not that accidental, “temporary feeling” he had resisted before (Correspondence, 212). (Reviewing one of his lectures, the Ohio Farmer describes Melville’s disturbing “affection for heathenism [as] profound and sincere. He speaks of the heathenism of Rome as if the world were little indebted to Christianity” [Sealts, Melville, 34]. Mel-

ville’s frequent references to the heathenish pantheism of Rome and the ancient world reveal his nostalgia for a pre-Christian religion of nature.) But the drive to make his profound feelings permanent fails, and Melville is left

with a receding vision of unity, a sense of lost connection: as Hawthorne drifts away; as his books do not sell; as he, like Pierre, leaves nature behind for the city, Melville finds his pantheism disintegrating, and with it his ability

to sustain a narrative, faith, or the possibility of progress. The selferoding and introspective tendencies always present in Melville’s writing are no longer

balanced by any belief in a restorative divinity or a community—a divine ageregate—to which he can belong. He becomes a man who has gambled his hopes on an all-inclusive belief system that collapses upon itself, a revolutionary who no longer believes in his platform.

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The “NOT ME

The Black Nature of an Animated World [In this] “idealist” tendency of [pantheist] hylozoism|,] everything that exists, the whole of the universe; is alive—it suffers and enjoys. There is no death in this universe; what happens in the case of “death” is just that a particular coordination of living elements disintegrates, whereas Life goes on, both the life of the Whole and the life of the elementary constituents of reality. Slavoj Zizek, Organs without Bodies (120)

In the world of Pan, among the powers of the living universe .. . everything is alive and active. ...{But] we cannot return to the primitive life... . The Pan relationship, which the world of man once had with all the world, was better than anything man has now. The savage, today .. . will become more mechanical and unliving than any civilized man.... [L]ife itself consists in a live relatedness between man and his universe: sun, moon, stars, earth, trees, flowers, birds, animals, men, everything. D. H. Lawrence, “Pan in America” (30-31)

I see the unity of thought and of morals running through all animated Nature. Emerson, “The Sovereignty of Ethics” (10:184)

No truth can be more self evident than that the highest state of man, physical, intellectual, and moral, can only coexist with a perfect Theory of Animated Nature. Emerson, “The Naturalist” (Early Lectures, 1:83)

The entire body of my savage valet, covered all over with representations of birds and fishes, and a variety of most unaccountable-looking creatures, suggested to me the idea of a pictorial museum of natural history, or an illustrated copy of Goldsmith’s Animated Nature. Melville, Typee (83)

I

PANTHEISM REPRESENTS the return of a repressed American animism.

Transcendental pantheists believe that a racialized, primitive nature is animated and even sentient; that all matter is alive; and that a “vital” spirit 61

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or soul presides over even inorganic matter. For the pantheist, nature suffuses and “animates” all things with an impersonal principle of life and connects them to one another. Pantheistic animism is typically precipitated by the following steps: god is incarnated as the natural world and becomes indissociable from any aspect of creation; nature is then deified and in turn animates man. When nature animates people, it moves, inspires, possesses, controls, and finally “speaks” through them. (Such assumptions prompt Melville’s fabrication of dispossessed characters—evacuated shells momentarily animated by a “suprapersonal” god that increasingly represents historical determinacy dressed in the guise of transcendental nature.) In this process, Pan is that which remains external to common American definitions of white male individuality; that is, nature represents a system of desire and economy that is impersonal and universal in structure, and is consequently incommensurate with notions of self-reliant white male identity. In this chapter I connect what might seem to be several discrete subjects that together produce pantheist discourse: for example, parthenogenesis and primitivism, taxonomic universality, the animation of black nature, and the animation of inanimate matter are all governed by a rhetoric which assumes that god is a universal, impersonal form of natural law. The transcendental fascination with nature represents less a form of worship than of reification: a deified nature—associated with Native Americans, African Americans, and the primitive—becomes a collective and racialized unconscious of white society and helps structure how men define identity, reproduc-

tion, and knowledge. Coding “primitive” nature as black, pantheism is a partly postcolonial discourse that reveals the suppressed predicates of white American self-definition. Animated nature represents all that the dominant figures of antebellum society are not: their “not us,” their political shadows

and demonologies, projected onto black nature. “Animation” is a kind of umbrella term used in a wide-ranging discourse of natural science, religion, anatomy, identity politics, aesthetics, and racial “sociology.” Perhaps most surprisingly, an animated and finally feminized black nature speaks for and through white men; it possesses voice and will where individual white men turn out to have none. Man is a piece of nature given voice, but is taken over, and ultimately enslaved, by this nature. Late-eighteenth-century Roman-

tic notions that the world is a living organism—and Romantic interest in folklore, folktales, folk music, and the natural savage—were generated by the intersection of European and colonized cultures; they in turn informed the ways the United States tried to reclaim its own pre-Christian animism through the cultures it colonized.

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During the American Renaissance, the ascription of primal and transformative powers to dumb nature produces a theory of animated religion: a living nature replaces a dying god. Fears regarding the seductive power of that “animated nature” were widespread in antebellum America. It is against this backdrop that Emerson’s pantheism, and Melville’s response, evolve. I

here explore how this now relatively unfamiliar discourse of animation came to be so influential during the American Renaissance. Through this pantheistic animism, writers develop a rhetoric to conceptualize how racial-

ized bodies are produced, are structured, and come to signify. I allude to some of the “marginal” pantheists I introduced earlier, but not as consistently; their works tend to parallel those of Emerson and Melville, but in less aesthetically compelling and intellectually challenging ways. I also explore how inanimate objects are turned into animate beings, and how a protoevolutionary taxonomy of spines, leaves, and representative body parts re-

flects the operation of pantheistic animism in the works of Emerson and Melville. For most of its adherents and critics, pantheism is a kind of universal reli-

gion that emerges in specific manifestations; but pantheists tend to trace those local developments through only the broadest historical periods. In All Is One, Edmond Holmes describes the fall of man from nature: The animism [that] peopled the outward world with nature spirits was the instinctive protest of man’s heart against the materialism of his conscious thought. ... [When] animism fell into disrepute ... it made possible .. . sci-

entific exploration....{But] as belief in the supernatural waned... especially in Protestant countries... materialism reject[ed] the supernatural, and [gave] a mechanistic explanation of life....[The loss of animism]... emptlied] nature of her own spiritual life. (16-17)

In this view, modern Christianity, which has become a form of mechanistic materialism, denies any spirituality in nature. American pantheists then revolt, in some sense perversely, against a variety of materialist epistemologies by

insisting that matter itself is spirit. The principle of animation—sometimes

consistently designated by this term, sometimes only by inference and implication—imparts an impersonal life to all objects but also dispossesses them of will. (The overlapping but distinct terms “animism” and “animation,” like “Pan” and “pantheism,” are used interchangeably throughout this period. I do not intend to duplicate that confusion, but almost all the authors I address fail to differentiate between their usage.) A consistent grammar of this animation appears through much of transcendental American writing, one of immanence; vitality; animated dust; enchantment; living trees, rocks, and ships; physical merger with the All; selfgeneration or “self-publishing”; the

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involuntary movement of animated limbs; and the archetypal conjunction of spines and leaves. For example, as Carolyn Merchant notes, Thoreau believed in a “vital life permeating” the rocks, rivers, and mountains as part of his understanding of Native American animism (100). The rhetoric describing such vitality typically invokes a transcendental discourse that synthesizes “aboriginal” and pre-Western animism with contemporary Western science or “scientific” cosmology. The final irony is that the polarization between spirit and matter that Holmes contends pantheism will resolve is for Melville, and at times even for Emerson, false: the animated natural world turns out to be a mechanism that controls man.

I Pan! All! That which is everything has goat’s feet and a tail! With a black face! This really is curious. D. H. Lawrence, “Pan in America” (23)

Pan is the original name of Emerson’s “Nature,” and black its original and final color. In assessing the influence of pantheism on writers of the period, it is important to understand how a non-Western, transcendental animism came to be contained within Western conceptions of history.’ This hybridization occurs because pantheism in its American context developed, at least in part, as a discourse of racial dispossession. Emerson’s inconsistent dissembling of an

often racialized “Pan” is analogous to the suppression of blackness in the American Renaissance. Pantheists imagine divine nature as black, universal, impersonal, and unindividuated, yet possessing all the fantasized transcen-

dental attributes of white men. These fragmented white men can become whole only by merging into a black, feminized nature. White male pantheists imagine that what would otherwise be considered the effects of political and economic alienation—dismemberment and the loss of bodily integrity, selfcontrol, and self-identity, all of which could be understood as “infectious” effects of slavery—could be rendered as transcendent mergers with the divinity. Through transcendental nature, the characteristics attributed to white male individuality invert and distort those attributed to the black slave. The impersonal forces larger than the individual white male Jacksonian self—all forms of otherness to the dominant paradigm of American identity—are figured as involuntary, impersonal, and finally dispossessive aspects of black nature, the Other itself. It bears emphasizing that much of transcendental white male in-

dividuality comes to be predicated on everything that is neither white nor

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male. In “The Pan-American Zone: Imperialism in Transcendental American Geographies” (http://scholarworks.umass.edu/umpress/) I analyze the cultural geography of space. Here I address the cultural geography of the pantheist body in the racial coding of animism. While pantheists such as Ishmael fantasize that they can merge into divine nature, they just as frequently wind up dismembered by it, like Ahab or Emerson’s American Scholar. The image of the “truncated” transcendentalist in nature—Emerson’s and Melville’s multiply amputated, self-divided representative man—is restored to one of its crucial contexts in the double consciousness W. E. B. Du Bois ascribes to blacks, one overdetermined by a contested association of blackness with nature. Much as Mardi’s “transcen- dental eye” sees itself from outside itself, and Emerson, as the transparent eyeball, sees his own body as part of external nature, Du Bois’s African American sees himself as an other. But instead of transcendental vision, wherein one is nothing and sees All in nature, blacks experience social invisibility, whereby one is situated as nothing and sees all in society. These equivocal instances of self-division also connote the larger dispossession of a non-Western cul-

ture and a form of what Richard Slotkin defines as regeneration through violence. White men siphon transcendental aspects of black (and Native American) culture and use this hybridized pantheism to circumvent the constraints of an isolated Jacksonian self; blacks and women have little ac-. cess to these “constraints” of propertied self-reliance and little interest at this period in merging with nature, or in transcending an individual self and body they have yet to possess in the culture. Images of isolation, fragmentation, and racial division invert pantheistic

fantasies of democratic fraternity, universality, and merger with a divine nature. The rhetoric of divisibility and partition that attends pantheism reveals the economic and political underpinning of the rhetoric of union in the United States.* In antebellum culture, as I later explore, many ideas of union—including the holding together of free and slave states—and social merger between men, emblematized by Ishmael and Queequeg, racialize nations and selves through a transcendental rhetoric of parts and wholes. Aspects of antebellum political and economic caste systems, based on the division of society by gender and race, are played out in a widespread figurative partitioning of racialized and gendered bodies. For instance, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Margaret Fuller posits that man claims, “I am the head, she the heart”; like Frederick Douglass—often demarcated in his Narrative and speeches as a “slavehand” and then “shiphand”—Fuller protests that she has been given a subservient part to play (29).°? Not pantheists who

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seek to redeem their own division in divine unity, Fuller and Douglass refer to some of the contemporary tropes of transcendental social unification to protest their social and economic fragmentation. But pantheism plays out the identity politics of white men, and few African Americans or women, even an avowed transcendentalist such as Fuller, invoke the dialectic of transcendental merger and dismemberment found in Emerson's and Melville's work. By contrast, white male transcendentalists often sacralize merger with a dispossessive black nature, which turns out not to restore them to unity but to fragment them further. These transcendentalists imagine that they experience the ontological effects of slavery. Walter Benn Michaels argues: “What slavery proved to Stowe was that even the possession of one’s own body could not be guaranteed against capitalist appropriation. “The slaves often say (she quotes an “acquaintance”) when cut in the hand or foot, Plague on the old foot.... It is master’s” (176). But this is the alienation Melville’s white male characters attribute to Pan as a form of divine dispossession; in a kind of reverse colonization, they sacralize their loss of physical self-control and selfidentity, their own duality and dismemberment. The observed body—one’s foot, and finally one’s vision—is an Other separate, and ultimately detached, from the observing self. Its willful and even dismembered limbs become animated by divine nature itself. White male pantheists “steal” the self-loss that slaves and women are forced to experience. The thematics of race, slav-

ery, animation, and what I later address as the “involuntary”—of bodies that lack self-identity, and that frequently move of their own volition—are closely connected in antebellum literature. As Cynthia Davis suggests, whiteness is a key, often overlooked element of Billy Budd (51). I would add

that whiteness is indissociable from many antebellum and even latenineteenth-century protagonists involuntary actions and their transcendental double consciousness. That Billy’s hand moves involuntarily, or that he doesn’t ejaculate when hanged—or perhaps lynched—represents a partial inversion of slavery, whereby blacks are deprived of physical self-identity and control of their bodies. In a disturbing fashion, pantheists worship the effects of their appropriated alienation and exalt the debilitating consequences of America’s slave and market economy. The transcendental dispossession of family—what I later discuss as the refusal of Emerson’s and Melville’s characters to own a

mortal parent and their resolve to spurn familial bonds—mimics slaves’ forced exile from traditional family structures. The depiction of truncated white men in Emerson’s and Melville’s texts mirrors the physical abuses of slavery and finally deifies them: pantheists sacralize the dispossession of the body as an almost sublime inability to control their extremities. From Emer-

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son's hand to Billy Budd’s arm, a divinity reproducing the effects of slavery moves our limbs; the pantheistic animation of often truncated limbs represents the polarized corollary of the way American society dispossesses workers and slaves of self-identified bodies. Much as Emerson poorly concealed Pan as nature, nature poorly concealed the racial premises of transcendentalism. As Frantz Fanon asserted:

“The real Other for the white man is... the black man.... The Other is perceived on the level of the body image absolutely as the ot-self” (161).4 This is the way Emerson—right after invoking “theories of races”—describes “NATURE at the outset of “Nature,” as “all that is separate from us,” the “NOT ME... all other men and my own body” (1:4-5). In some linguistic, so-

ciological, political, and Lacanian terms, nature is the racial Other of transcendental ontology. Emerson’s “not me” of Nature is also black and female, all that which is not the white male self, including its projected (and sometimes rejected) physical self. Such a realization should restructure our sense of how this divine, but racially “othered,” Nature functions throughout Emerson's writing and some of the white American Renaissance. When the repressed “not me” returns, whether in “Benito Cereno” or a philosophical tract, it is often coded as dark or black. In “The American Scholar,” for instance, it appears as “this shadow of the soul, or other me” (1:98). The ra-

cial shadow is transcendental nature—the NOT ME, or all other men and Emerson's body, but also all the racial and gender others whom transcendental identity politics did not include. Emerson’s “not me” locates a split be-

tween self and nature, self and other, observing and observed self—and that transcendental double consciousness itself is racialized. (Emerson is also evacuated in such self-representations; his body, dreams, and particular identity are at various points identified as “not me,” or part of nature. All that is left of Emerson is the impersonal merged with the divinity.) In much of white male American Renaissance literature, the shadow that falls divides blacks from whites and individuals from themselves, their Others, or “not me’s'—sometimes metaphorically and psychologically, sometimes in terms of figurative dismemberment. Furthermore, as Carolyn Sorisio observes, “by labeling the body ‘NoT ME, Emerson asks readers to envision themselves as separate from their corporeality. Race, gender, and any other corporeal markers are less significant than the soul. [Despite] the liberatory potential of denying corporeal significance, such a move also reveals the privilege

that Emerson experienced to some degree as a white male in American society” (116).° As Sorisio concludes, Emerson could assume a “me” that was

“not inextricably related to an embodied self,” a self that also transcended the self (117).

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Pantheism codes race in numerous ways, for nature is designated as black in much of American Renaissance literature. Hawthorne, for example, reifies a long-standing transcendental association in imagining a group of runaway slaves, in their “primeval simplicity,” as “not altogether human ... and akin to the fawns and rustic deities of olden times” (“Chiefly,” 420). As Eric

Sundquist, among others, has observed, though Hawthorne imagines the “monstrous birth” of slavery in “Chiefly about War Matters,” he also situates a group of African Americans as nature incarnate (“Slavery,” 7).° Like Emerson, Hawthorne associates Pan, the rustic deity, with blackness and the condition of slavery. The “primordial” blackness of nature also provides a subtext for Hawthorne’s novel-length voicing of pre-Western and “primitive” beliefs in general, and in particular for Donatello, who is aboriginal Pan ina kind of blackface throughout The Marble Faun (a work whose otherwise bi-

zarre and conjoined obsessions with primitivism, race, transcendentalism, Pan figures, and displaced colonization can perhaps only be fully contextualized through American pantheism). Strikingly, Hawthorne uses the same phrases to describe the progenitor of Monte Beni: as “a being not altogether human,” part of a lineage of prehistoric “sylvan creature[s].” This “race of rustic creatures,” who lived in the “primeval woods,” bear a “wild paternity” that also renders them capable of “savage fierceness” (Marble, 233, 7).’ In other words, Hawthorne is consistent and rhetorically explicit in connecting African American slaves to his archaic Pan figures; both groups represent anachronistic, liminal species that exist beyond American society, yet help define it. In this context, Hawthorne develops a fable of primitivism that could accommodate a narrative of racial “progress.” In that narrative, white men can reach nature primarily through the mediation of the vanishing racial Other,

who retains a direct, pantheistic access to the numinous. “A being not precisely man,” and in a “high and beautiful sense an animal,” Donatello, for example, claims he can communicate with the “woodland inhabitants, the furry people, and the feathered people, in a language that they seemed to understand” (78, 247). Such depictions deify and reify a racialized nature that is at the heart of Emersonian pantheism. “A creature of the happy tribes below,” the not precisely, not altogether human faun incarnates a form of development theory as mythology, but he is also “contagious” in his status and his mediation (79).° As if offering a blueprint for Hawthorne’s faun, Emerson writes in his Journals that “the negro must be very old & belongs... to the fossil formations. What right has he to be intruding into the late & civil daylight of this dynasty of the Caucasians and Saxons? ...[S]o inferior a race must perish

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shortly like the poor Indians” ( Journals, 7:393). As if Hawthorne had picked up where Emerson left off, Donatello’s bust even possesses something “very much resembling a fossil countenance” (380). Indeed, the transcendental Donatello seems to have been animated, or released from stone, only to perish as part of a primitive nature that is superseded as the first Roman Republic gives way to the second in cultural fantasy; his aboriginal racial identity is crucial to that transformation, and the new republic is (re)generated by incorporating what it suppresses. (Donatello could also be called “the last of the fauns.” Melville’s transcendental Pierre, who must similarly perish, is also described as a slave, “infant Ishmael,” and a “primitive” in a variety of contexts, and as growing sickly because he cannot live as a savage “Texan Camanche” [89, 302].”) Even for the more cautious Hawthorne, as if paraphrasing Emerson, “the faun is a natural and delightful link between human and brute life, with something of the divine character intermingled” (Notes, 3:327). Through such fantasies, blacks are equated with Native Americans, and both are “intermingled” with the vanishing race of “pre-Etruscan” (aboriginal) fauns. Representing divine nature, they are also sacrificed to it. Their successors under

this notion of “social evolution” are transcendental white men in the New England woods, writing about their predecessors in Arcadia. More than the Salem of his Puritan ancestors, Hawthorne’s old Republic of Rome suggests that the United States must eradicate some primitive ontology of nature to develop a version of animism as part of its own self-definition. This form of cultural absorption also further contextualizes white anxieties about cannibalism—the absorption by and of the Other—that are generated by and projected onto issues of colonialism, slavery, and race. In a society equally trepidatious about race and nature, a dangerously “infectious” Pan, like blackness, is frequently masked yet frequently present.

Emerson’s Pan/instinct/nature is implicitly and explicitly connoted as black, a process beginning long before Stowe provides Emerson with the following pretext from Uncle Tom's Cabin: Emerson’s Pan is “aboriginal, old as Nature, and say|s], like [Stowe’s] poor Topsy, ‘Never was born; growed.’... The mythology cleaves close to Nature; and what else was it they represented

in Pan....Such homage did the Greek pay to the unscrutable force we call Instinct, or Nature.... [Pan] could intoxicate by the strain of his shepherd’s pipe” (“Natural,” 12:35-36).’° The intoxicating, seductive god of transcenden-

tal nature turns out to be black. Like much of American transcendentalism, such animism is intimately connected to the interior, only intermittently recognizable blackness of nature. From Emerson to the contemporary novelist Charles Johnson, actual race—which is naturalized from the position of whiteness—is the particularity that must be transcended, and it becomes

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validated only in universal nature, and only as a “fossil” formation that is being sentimentalized even as it is being displaced."

Many writers in the period develop this association of transcendental nature with blackness in consonant ways. Emerson had orated in an early lecture that “the free negro... stand[s] as he does in nature below the series of thought, and in the plane of vegetable and animal existence” (Cabot, 2:429). Yet that is the same plane of existence Emerson sacralizes as the source of natural law, and in the occult relation between man and the vegetable world. Hawthorne’s subsequent invocation of “leafy patriarchs” reflects

Emerson’s, Pierre's, and pantheism’s embrace of a nature divine because primitive. Literalizing Melville in his fantasy of grassy repose with Hawthorne (where his legs seem to send out shoots into the earth), or Emerson’s striking depiction of the slave girl Topsy as parthenogenetic black nature “jes growing’ from the soil, Donatello may also, like a nature god, “have sprouted out of the earth.” (The Marble Faun might be as much a response to Melville's letters and late novels as Moby-Dick is to Hawthorne’s work.) Donatello represents another manifestation of the fantasy reified in Topsy, a black body that has no parents but emerges animistically from the soil. He is the “not me” of Emerson’s plantations of god. (Attempting to emulate such figures, Pierre “forsake|s] the censuses of men, and seek|s] the refuge of the god-like population of the trees.... Their high foliage,” he says, “shall drop heavenliness upon me; my feet in contact with their mighty roots” [106].) Birds recognize the not quite human Donatello “as something akin to themselves, or else they fancied that he was rooted and grew there” (74-76). So does Hawthorne describe “not quite human” southern blacks as so primevally natural that it was “as if their garb had grown upon them spontaneously” (“Chiefly,” 419-20). But as Ishmael Reed corrects Emerson (via James Weldon Johnson) at the beginning of Mumbo Jumbo, it was black culture, not black bodies, and “the earliest ragtime songs, [that] like Topsy, ‘jes grew’” (12). In these fantasies of a wild, self-generating blackness, the contradictions

of white transcendental self-representation are powerfully brought to bear on the body of the slave. The “Saint Vitus” of the slave’s dispossessed body—

which moves at the bidding of external forces—is transformed into the sought-after, self-transcending reverie of the pantheist. In Emerson’s system of representation, nature’s blackness is finally cathected to its demonology, and to a pre- or postconscious existence both desired and dreaded. Black nature is imagined spontaneously to create (or grow) itself, to be absolutely self-reliant, in ways the white transcendentalist can only poorly emulate. It should be no surprise that Pan is also a blackface trickster, a confidence man,

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in nineteenth-century America. As Gerald Vizenor notes, however, the tragic mode attributed to the trickster figure in Native American literature “is not in structural opposition to the comic sign. Rather, it is a racial burden, a postcolonial compensation at best” (11). In other words, demonologies and putative dichotomies are created when African American and Native American trickster figures are turned into white transcendental versions of Pan: they are the side effects of appropriation and imperfect translation. Emerson uses Stowe’s parthenogenetic black girl Topsy to deify the alien-

ating effects of slavery in the guise of a transcendental pantheism, a discourse that turns out to be partly regenerated from or ascribed to black culture. In this sense, pantheism represents an ideological inversion, a wish returned distorted. A self-propagating (and female) black nature becomes the necessary predicate, and a revealing reflection, of white male transcendental self-reliance in nature. For Emerson, the black female slave girl actually represents a corollary of natural law. In this jarring concurrence, we begin to glimpse black nature as the repository of transcendental white identity structures. In Moby-Dick, the pantheistic Ishmael emblematizes whaling, his central interaction with nature, “as that Egyptian mother who bore offspring themselves pregnant from her womb” (118). Like Topsy, this racialized Egyptian mother parthenogenetically reproduces in a male fantasy of nature.'* Melville also ascribes a transcendental demonology to the whiteness of the whale, which comes to connote its opposite, probably because he was aware of the way writers such as Jeremiah Reynolds described the original for Moby (Mocha) Dick as “a freak of nature, as exhibited in the case of the Ethiopian Albino” (17). (As I later discuss, the racialized Pierre also ef fectively identifies himself as a “freak of nature” [345].) Such phrases capture

the intersection of African blackness, racial inversion and taxonomical anomaly that Melville projected onto the whiteness of the whale. Like transcendentalism itself, the whale was an “albino African” (see, for instance, Vincent, 189). Ishmael frequently racializes the avenging whale, for example, telling us that the markings of sperm whales are like the undecipherable hieroglyphics of both Egyptian pyramids and the Indian palisades of the upper Mississippi, and that the blood ofa polar whale is “warmer than that of a Borneo negro in summer” (307). (These primitive, often naturalized, and archetypal hieroglyphics were also closely associated with Nat Turner, whose 1831 slave revolt was partly inspired by his vision of leaves in the woods inscribed with hieroglyphic characters.) In this Topsy-turvy world, Melville’s “Egyptian mother of whaling” performs the same cultural function as the black girl in Uncle Tom’s Cabin: she is part of a reified fantasy of

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slavery in which black bodies materialize from nothing in nature and are born already pregnant. It is not a coincidence that Emerson and Melville both conceive of a self-fertilizing nature as a self-reproducing black girl or mother. (I will return to this idea of “economic” parthenogenesis as central to transcendental representations of the white body.) It is no accident that one of Melville's most pantheistic protagonists asks to be called (that is, renamed) Ishmael, or that Lawrence associates him with the pagan god: “An outlaw, even in the early days of the gods. A sort of Ishmael among the bushes. Yet always his lingering title: The Great God Pan” (“Pan,” 22). In Melville, we move from White-Jacket, a rather pallid sailor who frequently depicts himself as a slave, to the black-identified Ishmael—

who asks, “Who ain’t a slave?”—neither of whom is known by his “real” name (6). Melville also casts the merging Ishmael as a foil to the dismembered Osiris/Pan, using a series of common associations that link Egypt and blackness with nature. Emerson notes that Jones Very claimed he “would as soon embrace a black Egyptian mummy as Socrates” ( Journals, 7:122). (Transcendentalists seemed equally to embrace Egyptian mummies and Egyptian mommies.) Advancing a similar set of assumptions, Nathaniel Richardson in

1849 begins “The Pantheistic Movement” by asserting that “Pantheism is a child of the mysterious East,” and situates Egypt as one of the sites of such “Oriental fervor” (548-49).)° Identifying several sources for his notion of an immanent deity that absorbs all things, Emerson notes that “Plato, in Egypt

and in Eastern pilgrimages, imbibed the idea of one Deity, in which all things are absorbed” (“Plato,” 4:53). As Nathaniel Richardson adds, listing the avatars of the “pantheistic temple,” the “Egyptian [has] his Osiris” (563). In the mid-1840s, Job Durfee began his transcendental treatise The Panidea

by invoking “Nature, that veiled Isis.... The African, who worships the beetle, or fetich, has not been entirely mute [in being a divine querist]” (351). It is not unusual in the West to conjoin blackness with nature; but we have here not a case of mere correlation but a deep structural logic that relies on a

black nature to define white identity. As John Irwin points out in a Nietzschean context in his reading of Pierre, Osiris is also a version of Dionysus (318). That Osiris—the original black Pan whom Ishmael Reed claims the West misappropriated—leads us back to the classical and Egyptian sources of Dionysus/Pan but also to the transcendental context for this fantasy of salvation in nature. Variations of that dismembered black nature god preside over the slave republic. Beginning with Melville, this trajectory takes us through Reed’s and Charles Johnson’s parodic but Afrocentric representations of a black Osiris as the original of a dismembered Western Pan or na-

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ture god, and a black Ishmael as his proper narrator. For these contemporary writers, pantheism represents the return of the racial repressed. Though an odd pairing with Ishmael Reed, D. H. Lawrence narrativizes

a similar appropriation of white, transcendental pantheisms from Native American and African sources. Both writers use Pan and pantheism to assess race and identity in the New World. In “New Mexico,” Lawrence warns

that we will no longer encounter “the pantheism we are accustomed to, which expresses itself as ‘God is everywhere, God is in everything. In the oldest religion, everything was alive....So rocks were alive” (146). Lawrence adapted these ideas himself in finding American nature to be alive, to be the All or mass body of American identity. Lawrence procures these images from the transcendentalists, who took them from both Hegelian and pre-Western sources. In his 1872 essay “Transcendentalism,” Cyrus Bartol asks whether “the soul [is] reared on primitive rock? or is no rock primitive, but the deposit of spirit, therefore in its lowest form alive, and ever rising into organism to reach the top of the eternal circle again?” (120). Just as Lawrence insists in “Pan in America” that trees are sentient, he contends that in America, rocks and inanimate objects are alive. But like Donatello, that nature is

always a supposed remnant of pre-Western cultures. The language of - animation/animism relies on transcendental and racialized code words, specific associations of the primitive with the racialized that persist to this day. But when the racialized (but still white) Ishmael or Pierre attempts to merge with nature using a pre-Columbian version of pantheism, he cannot reach a contemporary American nature. Lawrence imagines America as the last place in the world where an original pantheism might still be found, though even there it is being undermined by the imposition of postcolonial forms. Precisely in that contested space where conceptions of nature vie with one another, Lawrence locates American identity. The irony is that for Lawrence, “the newest democracy Lis] ousting the oldest religion” (“New Mexico,” 147). (Emerson himself, after

asking who has yet traced the source of nature and human intelligence to its Nile, asserts “Jam of the oldest religion” |“Natural,” 12:16) In other words, the transcendental construction of a white democracy—at least at the level of literary representation—appropriates and displaces the oldest, native, nonwhite pantheist cultures. Alleged to be unwittingly complicit with a historical process they would reject, (Reed’s and Lawrence’s versions of) Emerson, Whitman and the transcendentalists take Pan, the oldest deity, into captivity for their new republic: a moribund transcendentalism cannibalizes a preWestern nature.

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A good example of the attribution of pantheism to aboriginal sources can be found in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s 1827 historical novel Hope Leslie, in which the Puritans living in proximity to Native Americans discover that

“there is a living and breathing spirit infused into nature....|T]he trees have tongues, and the very air is vocal” (18). These Native American tongues

speak with notably transcendental voices of the great god. The Indian Magawisca orates that the Great Spirit, “and his ministers, are every where present and visible. ... [Nature’s] forms are but bodies for his spirit. I hear him in the rushing winds—in the summer breeze....I see himin... the falling leaf” (332). Emerson advanced nearly identical claims in his essays and

daily life; while Hawthorne observed that Emerson could find no better way to spend a Sabbath than “to ramble among the woods,” Emerson told him there were “whispers to be heard in the breezes” (Baker, 214). As Mary Kelley writes in her introduction to Sedgwick’s novel, Magawisca’s “supposed heathenism in actuality is a pantheistic counterpart to the Christianity ascribed to Hope. Because Sedgwick had read Roger Williams's Key into the Language of America (1643), she understood the central importance of pantheism to seventeenth-century New England Indians” (xxvi). Our definition of such pantheism represents a Western interpolation. But Melville's Berkshires neighbor, before such writers as Reverend Dewey, locates pantheism as salient to the native past and transcendental present, proposing that few “have not at some period of their lives, lost their consciousness of individuality—their sense of this shrinking, tremulous, sensitive being, in the dread magnificence—the ‘holy mystery’ of nature” (Sedgwick, 237). Like Bronson Alcott, Sedgwick makes pantheism sound like a fad we all must go through or dally with at some point. (Melville similarly defines the iterated “mystery of Isabel” in terms of her transcendence of white male individuality in nature.) Magawisca’s dismemberment, like that of Charles Johnson’s Soulcatcher or Dana in Octavia Butler’s Kindred, reflects an underlying racial rationale for the endemic amputations of white male pantheist discourse.

More recent critics of nineteenth-century American literature have of course emphasized the importance of race in the formulation of a “naturalized” U.S. identity. And they sometimes at least implicitly document the struggle between Christian and transcendental views of nature and the preWestern views of the colonized. In Iron Cages, Ronald Takaki contends that diversity was dangerous for the republic, which required a “homogeneous” culture and ethnic composition (63). As a result, white male transcendentalists needed to extirpate many traces of the heterogeneous cultures they used to help create their own identities. Richard Slotkin notes that for the critic

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Kenneth Rexroth, “our memory of the Indians connects us with the soil and the waters and the nonhuman life about us. They take for us the place of nymphs and satyrs and dryads—the spirits of the places” (17). In the 16208, the proto-transcendental Morton of Merrymount, who also vigorously opposed slavery, was among the first to pursue the Dionysian element

of the Puritan mind, seeing the New World as an Arcadian paradise; his “metaphors are pagan—classical rather than scriptural,” writes Slotkin, for whom Morton’s celebration of May Day “represented all that was left of the worship of Flora,” before the kingdom is overtaken by a desiccated Puritanism (59). Reed, and those who claim a lineage of pantheism apart from Puritanism, and even some Emersonian transcendentalists, imagine themselves as heirs to Morton’s vision of the New World. For Morton, the new English should not, to use Jefferson’s phrase, amputate themselves from the Indians, but must merge with them and their culture of nature (62). A Dionysian Pan

morphs into a Native American, or a priapic emissary of nature. Slotkin notes, “In Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, Morton appears as a demonic emissary of atheism, lechery, paganism, and democracy” (64). Even in 1863, Congressman Samuel Sullivan Cox of Ohio uses the same language of transcendental seduction to describe Morton; as part of a long disquisition enu-

merating the Puritan, and especially transcendental, ills of the North that precipitated the Civil War, Cox told a New York Democratic assembly that “the early annalists [such as William Bradford] do not forget to record that as early as 1626, Captain Wollaston’s company arrived: and that one Morton seduced them into quaffing and drinking, dancing and frisking; and that they were no better than atheists” (289).!* One strain of radical American democracy is from the start intertwined with some of the principal features of pantheism. From Emerson to Ishmael to Donatello, the transcendentalist

stands on the verge of going native—of being seduced. As we shall see, as nature itself is threatened with extinction, this natural metamorphosis produces men who are half animal, regenerated but also severely damaged. Transcendental discourse is often situated in relation to aboriginal religion. With Merrill Richardson, in The New Englander in 1843, we begin with a Western version of god-intoxication: “Not only was God the animus mundi, and ‘All but parts of one stupendous whole, / Whose body Nature is, and God the soul, but all was God, and God was all. Pantheism, a word full of denial and scepticism to superficial minds, is one of the highest products of the devout spirit of man. It has been well said that Spinoza was Godintoxicated, transcending time and space, all forms and appearances. God to him was All in All” But after offering this overview of European tran-

scendentalism, Richardson provides a typically Emersonian account of

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racialized, “heathen” nature. White universality is predicated on a “primitive” view of animated nature. Sounding like Magawisca, Richardson claims that God “is constantly operating every where and in everything; growing the grass, the tree, the flower; animating and inspiriting the soul.... It is seen by those you call heathen. The wild Indian hears the whisper of the Great Spirit in every breeze; listens to it coming from every dell and cave of

his mountains; sees God in the forest.... Not mere dead matter, but the spirit of beauty and goodness, which animated surrounding nature, has always been worshipped by them” (75-76). Such a passage reminds us of Ishmael Reed’s and Kenneth Rexroth’s claims, to paraphrase Frost, that we were never the land’s and the land has never been ours: that American transcendentalism is fashioned from a corrupted Native American pantheism, and represents the Emersonian loss of an original relation with nature. White pantheism itself later splits in two, and what Melville calls its final, “corporate” incarnation winds up an offshoot of “universalized” global capitalism rather than its antidote. In the first path of pantheism, a displaced, hunted culture haunts us; in the second, a merely impersonal, transcendental nature dispossesses us. The effect may be similar, but the cause remains radically dit

ferent. An “only” misappropriated, dispossessed, but still extrinsic nature offers hope; a purely phenomenal nature that turns out to be a confidence trick—a mere reflection of the structures of tyrannical, impersonal law it was meant to oppose—offers none. Much of the discourse of animation serves as an unrecognized commen-

tary on slavery and race relations, for it is blacks, Native Americans, and women, not white men merging with nature, who are dispossessed of voice and identity, whose bodies become “animated,” by living in a repressive soci-

ety. I briefly pursue the history of ideas related to (rather than a narrative history of ) the Columbiad to suggest how Emerson and Melville incorporate the foundational context of native dispossession in formulating their worldviews: they sometimes imagine pantheism as expressive of a United States that is “exceptional” not in its remove from politics but in its repression of

those politics.’ Far from being a discourse of white identity in isolation, pantheism cannot be understood without considering its underlying reliance on and “shadowing” of aboriginal and African American cultures, and its racialization of nature itself As Emerson asserts in “Self-Reliance,” “the white

man has lost his aboriginal strength”; the pantheist regains that strength only by renouncing individual social identity and merging with universal, and racially aboriginal, nature (2:84). In Reed’s terms, pantheism incubates

both guilt and vengeance, and represents a postcololonial discourse that comes to us haunted.

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My aim here is to demonstrate the caduceus-like intertwining of two aspects of American culture. To contextualize how and why white pantheists worship the alienating effects not just of the marketplace but of slavery in particular is also to remap our understanding of American multiculturalism and racial interaction. White transcendentalism generally denied its cultural dependence on African American belief systems; bridging the two rhetorics allows us to reopen a dialogue between two “national literatures.” Emerson and Melville sometimes directly incorporate African American religious motifs into their writing. As John Carlos Rowe demonstrates, the later Emerson comes to imagine that the African “‘has avenues to God / Hid

from men of Northern brain,’... [and] clearly appeals for New England transcendentalism to be changed significantly by its exposure” to African American religion (19-20).!° Sterling Stuckey has also documented the ways in which Melville was especially influenced by African American music, and

by his encounter with slave songs in Douglass’s Narrative (9-12). But the imagined black Other, conflated with divinely animated nature, divests the white transcendental self of its attributes. Contemporary African American writers have been in the vanguard of the critics, proposing theoretical claims about how slave narratives begin to adumbrate, respond to, and recalibrate the concerns of white transcendentalism. In this context, a number of contemporary African American writers have become the most astute analysts of the American Renaissance as a whole, and I here first address their highly relevant critiques of American Renaissance pantheism and animism. What occurs when an African American reclaims the transcendental “shadow of the soul,” or “not me,” which for Emerson is black nature: what will the Other be for him or her? In one trajectory of African American literature, from Harriet Jacobs as she hides in the attic to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Toni Morrison’s spectral narrator in Jazz, the black body becomes sociologically or narratologically, rather than transcendentally, dematerialized or invisible. Black subjectivity, not the white transparent eyeball, was invisible while seeing all. For

Ishmael Reed, writing in the late twentieth century, the real HooDoo of pantheism lies behind fake white transcendentalism. In his satirical reprise of and reprisal to the American Renaissance, Flight to Canada, Reed proposes that a violent, culturally impoverished white society plagiarizes African iconography to prop up the empty shell of American transcendentalism. In their divergent Afrocentrisms, Reed and Charles Johnson revise the history of slavery and black culture in the United States by reclaiming pantheism. They resituate the black male transcendentalist in the guise of Emerson’s individualistic rogue, but they also resuscitate his reliance on an overriding, dispossessive

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nature. Contemporary African American writers such as Reed and Johnson return to the images and period of the American Renaissance not only to recontextualize slavery but also to address the origins of transcendentalism and Romanticism as nonwhite and non-Western. As Jay Grossman observes in slightly different contexts, slavery was a surprisingly ubiquitous presence in transcendental discourse, reflected in what he tracks as the “persistent occurrences of enslaved bodies within [the] high canonical texts of transcendentalism, where the critical tradition has in various ways occluded them” (27). I argue that the reason for that presence is that transcendentalism is a _ distillation of white male racial identity politics. The white discourse of a transcendental, pantheistic nature, and the racial codings on which it relies, begins with the appropriation of “aboriginal” pantheism from Native American and African sources. African Americans

and Native Americans were once allegedly one with nature, a condition white pantheists tried but failed to achieve, as reflected in their discourse of bewitched animation and their recurring alienation from nature. A system that treats men as things, slavery makes the pantheistic exchange of animate (or human) and inanimate or (inhuman) traits inevitable in American economies of representation; the transcendentalism that seeks to erase the boundary between man and “the lower forms” of nature can wind up being at least discursively complicit with the slavery that treats blacks as members of a primitive species and (in)animated objects. While they are associated with “animated nature” under transcendentalism, African Americans are simultaneously rendered “inanimate” property under slavery. As Reed writes in Flight to Canada: “Isn't it strange? Whitman desires to fuse with nature, and here I am, involuntarily, the comrade of the inanimate, but not by choice... .. I am property. I am a thing” (75). It is Walt Whitman—whom Reed somewhat unfairly sets up as a straw or white man—who wants to transcend his identity, guilt, and limitations by merging into a racialized nature. (Reed

here follows the lead of D. H. Lawrence, who calls Whitman “the first white aboriginal,” though surely Ishmael beat him to that position [Studies, 182].) The white pantheist seeks to be a comrade of the inanimate, to make the inanimate part of nature’s Over-Soul and himself its inanimate vessel. White men, almost to the point of exclusion, use this rhetoric of pantheistic transcendence at this period, having usurped what for Reed is the natural

language of African (or Native American) HooDoo or nature worship.’ White men try to transcend the society they have created by escaping into nature, even while African Americans are trying to gain initial access to that society. Reed tries to recuperate these African and Native American gods lost to transcendentalism; he locates a specific form of regeneration

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through violence in this dispossession, writing: “Now they got white men fighting white men on land taken away from the Indians—Rappahannock, Chattanooga. It’s spooky. As long as they're in this country, this country is under their spell. It’Il be one great HooDoo sea” (Flight, 143). In Reed’s view, transcendentalism is under the spell of the spirits of stolen lands. Pantheistic animism is another ghost in the machine of this Columbiad. In Oxherding Tale and Middle Passage, Johnson implies that blacks and women lacked access to a Jacksonian self during the American Renaissance,

and were thereby dispossessed of a transcendentalism rightly theirs—what he at times naturalizes as a pre-Western, unmediated relationship with Being. Having no culturally sanctioned self-identity to transcend, blacks did not attempt to regain a pre-Western unity of being that was rightly theirs. Johnson wrestles with the difficulty of now reinvesting blacks with a “transcen-

dental” identity originating in Africa. In Johnson, a (fictitious) African unity of being lies behind Emersonian pantheism. In each of his texts, from Faith and the Good Thing to Dreamer, Johnson asserts that slavers brought over not just slaves but a shape-shifting, explicitly transcendental African/ Allmuseri god and culture to the New World, paralleling Reed’s arguments about a black Osiris/Pan and American pantheism. (It is important to note, however, that neither of these authors is proposing a “Black Athena” model of literal historical development, or a historically specific Afrocentrism, especially since the concept of a unified Africa is a Western imposition [see, for example, Mudimbe]. Rather, they are exploring the cultural logic of white transcendental interaction with African-based cosmogonies.) The exaggeratedly transcendental American ship in Middle Passage, the emblematic Republic, is also under a HooDoo spell: it carries an entire transcendental A frican culture in its hold, a transcendental god, which Johnson claims to set free. This transcendentalism is configured as unified, opposed to the dualistic transcendentalism of white Americans. Johnson casts black double consciousness back not just to the American Renaissance but to a white transcendentalism stolen from African American culture. In Johnson’s works, antebellum double consciousness becomes a form of whiteface minstrelsy. After Emerson—whom he openly emulates in numerous ways—however, Johnson also situates racial identity, in its social context, as an emblem of illusory particularity: nature is black when it is universal, but “blackness” is a traumatic effect of slavery, or “multiplicity,” when it connotes specific racial identity. For transcendentalists, any utilitarian use of nature destroys and “deanimates” it, and such use is partly associated with slavery and colonization.

Reed traces white identity through this process of violent usurpation.

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Because whites generally use the bodies of nature in utilitarian fashion— exactly as in Mardi, whites in Flight even emblematically use skulls as ashtrays and containers—nature defiles their bodies in return. Swille’s son, for example, returns with a “reticulated claw... the skin belonged to that of a crocodile.” Such transformative powers—part of what Slotkin describes as the animal identifications of the Daniel Boone myths—don‘’ allow for fusion with nature but lead to nature’s dispossession of men: “Look at me: | have to go through eternity this way. You know, it’s hard to get crocodile skin clean....I can't control the tail” (137, 140). Having used the animated bodies of nature in a sacrilegious manner, whites are taken over, or “animated,” by those rebellious, uncontrollable bodies. Reed then remarks that it “sure was lively out in the woods when they had them horn cults, blacks dressed up like Indians” (184). Blacks in harmony with Native American nature worship, members of Pan’s “horn cults,” are displaced by pale transcendentalists. Pantheism in Emerson and Melville fails because it has always been a surrogate, tainted belief system. For Reed, authentic pantheism is abrogated by white transcendental writers who—in this somewhat indis-

criminate generalization—remain structurally complicit with the murder | and enslavement of blacks and Native Americans, and who try to merge with the once animate nature their countrymen physically and metaphysically subjugate.

I NOW TURN to the ways in which this racially coded animism appears in transcendentalism itself as a discourse of “primitive” origins and creation. Paraphrasing Robert Chambers’s 184.4 work Vestiges of the Natural History

of Creation, James Buchanan delineates the principle of animation as “a transition from the inorganic to the organic” and the instillation of life itself (though Buchanan, as an anti-pantheist, denies such can occur in modern times [69—70]).'® In the male system of pantheism, Pan controls the present creation (or rather transformation) of life, and cannot symbolically account for a woman’s ability to reproduce, which, in both contexts, also helps explain the frequent presence of Adamic moments and figures in pantheistic works. (These are familiar images in the abstract, but their critical relevance might be unfamiliar to those who situate them as dated, largely “thematic” components of the virgin land/American Adam approach to American literature.) Pan animates or imparts life to the insensate elements today. Thus

Emerson, who claims to witness the creation of the world, is able to assert, “The primeval world—I can dive to it in myself” (“History,” 2:23). And Melville, invoking Emerson, writes Evert Duyckinck that he “lovels] all men who dive” (Correspondence, 120-21). In Emerson, the world knows no

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beginning or end, only perpetual becoming, and hence always remains in both primitive and millennial time: “‘In the economy of the world,’ said [Scottish geologist James] Hutton, ‘I can find no traces of a beginning, no prospect of an end’” ( Journals, 12:117). Without irony, Emerson also attests, “I am present at the sowing of the seed of the world” (“Intellect,” 2:346). In

Mardi, numerous transcendental characters more humorously assert, “‘I have lived ever since I can remember.’ And truly, who may call to mind when he was not? To ourselves, we all seem coeval with creation” (12). This emphasis on primitive self-creation again reflects the racial politics of white male transcendental identity, which ontologically and culturally relies on its

projections of black nature. Pantheism incorporates a component of a “primitive” and millennial Christianity in which the divinity immanently intervenes in each moment and gothically animates each being. In overdetermined fashion, the primitive is equated with the moment of creation and blackness, reflecting white male anxiety about independence, self-reliance, and self-generation. Animation also contains a principle of parthenogenetic male generation;

the male pantheist creates what he thinks, and animates dead matter like a Frankenstein of the mind.” The epithet “American Renaissance” might most fittingly refer to the rebirth of inanimate matter in the transcendental writing of this period. Emerson believes that “the poet animates nature with his own thoughts” and, as noted, thereby creates the world (“Nature,” 1:55). For the pantheist, “we animate what we can, and we see only what we animate” (“Experience,” 3:50).7°

Melville also comments on Emerson’s peculiar primitivism, again suggesting the awareness he had of many of Emerson’s doctrines: “I could readily see in Emerson, notwithstanding his merit, a gaping flaw. It was, the insinuation, that had he lived in those days when the world was made, he might have offered some valuable suggestions” (Log, 1:179). This is the sentiment

most of Melville’s protagonists advance, in sardonic terms, once at sea. Melville occasionally proposes such notions straightforwardly, but he sounds unconvincing when he does so. When Melville writes, in his southern persona of “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” that “the world is as young today as when it was created; and this Vermont morning dew is as wet to my feet, as Eden’s dew to Adam’s,” his prose falls flat (Piazza, 246). When Melville is Emersonian without the buffer of his own doubt, without the attendant inversion, he is usually far less persuasive than Emerson. Melville's metaphysi-

cal prose is often palatable in proportion to its degree of selfquestioning irony; this presents a limitation on the styles Melville can successfully navigate, and on the conclusions he can justifiably sustain, and suggests why his

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narrative strategies reached a series of impasses after Moby-Dick (when they often lost the first part of the equation, the sense of irreverent questioning, and increasingly relied too heavily on inversion, irony, or the deadpan). Since, for pantheists, God suffuses the world, all objects are divinely alive and universally representative. All things possesses a deeper significance than

can be gleaned from their quotidian appearances; their real meanings and identities lie in their animated, interior forms. According to Emerson, the seer gives symbols “a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes, and a tongue, into every dumb and inanimate object” (“The Poet,” 3:20). To

Emerson, the universe is composed of a “bewildering series of animated forms” (Baker, 30). It is the American dream to get this animated world, as our domesticated Other, to see, talk to, reflect, indemnify, and finally identify us. It is Melville who implements this dictum far beyond the visage of the

dumb white whale. Throughout Mardi, Melville still playfully insists that his world is the sentient matrix for representation itself: “Mardi is alive to its axis” (458).7!

This pervasive and regularized rhetoric of animation distinguishes most forms of pantheistic writing; it is characterized by the initially sublime and fnally paranoid premise that everything, both organic and inorganic, is (only) impersonally alive. Reverend Manning observes that the pantheist attributes consciousness to everything: “Goethe's theosophy was that of Spinoza, modified by his own poetical tendencies... . [T]he whole universe was conceived as divine; not as a lifeless mass, but as the living manifestation of Divine Energy ever flowing forth into activity” (193).** For John Fiske, in his 1885 address to the Concord School of Philosophy, everything is animated by this same impersonal vitality: The universe as a whole is thrilling in every fibre with Life, —not, indeed, life in the usual restricted sense, but life in a general sense. The distinction, once deemed absolute, between the living and the not-living is converted into a relative distinction; and Life as manifested in the organism is seen to be only a specialized form of the Universal Life... reappearing from moment to moment under myriad Protean forms... [through] this animating principle of the universe (149-51).

A generic pantheistic animation or vitality infuses all matter, from the disembodied limbs of living things to inanimate organisms no longer “alive.” The fleeting, protean forms of Pan create a shell game—for Melville, finally a confidence game—of identity; everything is animated, but life can never be located in a stable individual subject, but only in the systems of impersonal

nature.

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For Manning, the slippage of the stable boundaries between men begins with the removal of the boundary between god and nature: Goethe “did not distinguish between the divine and the simply natural. He animated nature with God” (380-81). As Louisa Cohen later attests in Pantheism, the equivalence of nature and god is bound up with a “belief in the identity of matter, life and mind [that] will doubtless bring upon the writer the accusation of materialism” (15). For Emerson, despite his aversion to materialism, the world of thought must correspond to the world of forms, leaving “Spirit... matter reduced to an extreme thinness,” and matter only spirit gaining weight (“Experience,” 3:53). (Animation here represents another way for Emerson to find perfect correspondence between psyche and soma throughout existence: he sees a unity of thought and morals permeating “all animated Nature” “The Sovereignty of Ethics,” 10:184]). Ironically, when coupled with theories of animation, evolution or development connects spirit and matter as indissociable. In 1857 James Buchanan complains of this deification of “democratized” natural forces; for the pantheist—who makes the mind, and the innate laws of matter, the only cause and god—“matter, in appearance the most cold and insensible, is in reality animated, and capable of engendering thought” (135). (Not surprisingly, many documentary descriptions of the conventions of pantheism sound like pastiches of Emerson’s journals.) In one of his later books, 4 Brief History of Culture, John Hittell provides a useful summary of the issues at stake in postulating an animate nature: a religion termed monism or scientific pantheism has appeared and gained many adherents among learned men. It teaches that matter and force are the only fundamental existences: that [matter and spirit] are inseparable, indestructible, uncreatable... [and] interconvertible. ... “The immanence of the deity in nature” ... regards “physical and chemical forces, or the forces of dead nature, as a function of the

omnipresent Divine Energy in a diffused, undifferentiated state. ...° Many scientists would strike out the word “dead” from that passage. Nature, pervaded by its immanent and inseparable Deity[,] is not only alive, but the only source and home of life. (281-82)

In the American Renaissance, pantheism marks a confluence of the most socially unacceptable aspects of “primitive” cultures and contemporary natural science.*? God is not separate from nature or natural law and, in the consistent terminology of pantheism, “pervades” individual identity. As Roberto Unger elaborates, this “immanence, the typical form of savage and ancient

religion|,|...has no cosmogony of the creation of the world by God and therefore tends toward the view that the world is eternal and uncreated....

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Pantheism is its characteristic guise, and the philosophy of Spinoza its fullest metaphysical statement” (158-59). That racialized metaphysics merges with scientific determinism, an animated materialism, and finally a black transcendentalism. “Savage religion” becomes consonant with Spinozism and its New World variations.

Through his theory of animation, however, Emerson remains content with one point of light: “It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.” Animation is also a principle of singular consistency, a nature that controls everything. To Emerson, “one design in nature unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench” (“American,” 1:108, 112). All antinomies are “animated” and harmonized by one nature; difference dissolves in the wake of Pan’s metaphysical blitzkrieg. Each individual is immanently “voiced” by animating nature; according to Emerson in an early sermon, we should “perceive that God does not look at us from afar, but literally animates us” (Sermon 160, Complete Sermons, 4:174). (Emerson states unequivocally that he does not mean this metaphorically.) Melville again grafts these Emersonian coordinates onto Mardi in playful terms (before demonizing them in later works such as Moby-Dick): “With Oro [Pan], the sun is coeternal; and the same life that moves that moose animates alike the sun and Oro. All are parts of One. In me, in me [emphasis in original], flit thoughts participated by the beings peopling all the stars” (615). Throughout Mardi, Melville uses this almost transcribed Emersonian language of pantheistic animation to associate a universal and accretive white male identity—which borrows from all cultures and historical periods— with the transcendental laws of nature.

Emerson’s theory of animation, whose formulations again sound like Magawisca’s, denies difference, hierarchy, and the very polarization in which

it participates. In the “Divinity School Address,” in another passage that might have inspired several pastiches in Mardi, including Babbalanjass assertion that the whole universe is of one mind, Emerson asserts it is a “sublime creed that the world is not the product of manifold power, but of one will, of

one mind; and that one mind is everywhere, in each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the pool, active” (1:123-2 4).74 Instead of oppositional power in soci-

ety, men encounter a tyrannical unity in nature.

I John Hunt traces the transcendental idea of an animate nature, a living and divine world, to Neoplatonism, particularly Plotinus and Proclus, familiar figures in Emerson’s and Melville’s writings: the world-soul is “the all of life

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in whose essence all things live. Plants and animals—yea, minerals, stones, and pebbles, are all animated by it; for it is the only true element in nature. But, whatever its manifestations, it is still one and the same,” whether manifested “as the divine Socrates” or “as a blade of grass” (92-93). Pan then instills

or “animates” matter, even inanimate matter, with a uniform Edwardsian Substance—with life, vitality, and even agency.

An animated nature personified, Pan is most often associated not with the human form but with anthropomorphized vegetation: flowers, plants, grasses, and trees. In Alcott’s view, “wood and water god both, man loves to traverse the forests, wade the streams, and confess his kindred alliance with primeval things” (“Thoreau,” 93). And as Emerson would have it, with almost endearing obscurity, “the world, the universe, is a gigantic flower, — but the flower is one function or state of the plant, and the world but a stage or state of the Pan” ( Journals, 11:187). This obsession with animated vegeta-

tion resonates throughout Melville’s writing, particularly in his images of women. Incessantly characterized as a plant, Isabel in Pierre hopes to be “drank up by the pervading spirit animating all things” (119). Pierre and Isabel frequently go among men as foliage: “Pierre, doth not thy plant belong to some other and tropical clime?” she asks (296). When Pierre renounces his pantheism, the chapter is titled “The Flower-Curtain Lifted from Before a Tropical Author” (a designation that also refers to Melville’s status as a novelist of the South Seas and a literary heliotropist). As Nathaniel Smith Richard-

son asserts in “The Pantheistic Movement,” “Pantheism has its temples breathing more than Panchaean odors, and its sunny regions laughing with a tropical luxuriance of flower and tree” (563). Such associations with plants define not just the divinity but our identities. To emphasize man’s afhnity with nature, Emerson equates the influence of nature with that of genius. In this early version of “Pan” (later “Nature”), Emerson writes, “I love the wood god. I love the mighty PAN.... [I]n

the fields I am not alone or unacknowledged. They nod to me and I to them... . It takes me by surprise & yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right. We distrust & deny inwardly our own sympathy with nature. We own and disown our relation to it” ( Journals, 5:179; see also 10:187; 12:65).”° (Even as an angel “sympathizes” with his pantheistic letter to Hawthorne, Melville avows and disavows the “all feeling” in a similar man-

ner (Correspondence, 193-94]. Not surprisingly, Hawthorne describes Melville as able neither to believe nor to be comfortable in his unbelief [Zog, 2:529].) When thinking or acting as a representative man, one becomes the inlet for a higher nature and agency, and one’s sympathy, one’s susceptibility

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to influence, as we will see Melville bear out, is evolved through a pattern of seduction and betrayal, of afirmation, disowning, and denial. Lawrence’s “Pan in America” reads as an extension of Emerson’s druidism; it is worth considering here as a direct gloss of an American Renaissance in which men communicate with trees. Tocqueville and Lawrence, European writers who try to define U.S. identity, focus on pantheism as a crucial feature of the emerging nation and form two poles of criticism for the American Renaissance. A self-conscious rejoinder to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, “Pan in America” propounds a vital animism predicated on a radical transitivity with nature: Iam conscious that it helps me, vitally ... that shivers of energy cross my living plasm, from the tree, and I become a degree more like unto the tree, more bristling and turpentiney, in Pan. And the tree gets a certain shade and alertness of my life... . Is it truer to one’s life to insulate oneself entirely from the influence of the tree’s life, and to walk about in an inanimate forest of standing lumber, marketable in St. Louis, Mo. Or is it truer to life to know, with a pantheistic sensuality, that the tree has its own life, its own assertive existence, its own living relatedness to me? (25-26).”°

Lawrence inhabits a world much like Mardi, where everything is alive, and as he adds, nothing may be taken for granted. (This passage also echoes Emerson’s assertion in “Nature” that “it is the [integrity of impression] which

distinguishes the stick of timber of the woodcutter from the tree of the poet” [1:8].)

The same exchanges of vitality occur for Melville as a result of mere association. Men become more rock-, tree-, or horse-like, more nature-infused, through an “osmotic” animation of their bodies. Redburn tells us that Liverpool truckmen, “spending so much of their lives in the high-bred company

of their horses, seems to have mended their manners and improved their taste, besides imparting to them something of the dignity of their animals” (Redburn, 198). As Emerson effectively predicts, protagonists of pantheistic narratives begin metonymically to absorb the traits of their professions, and to merge with and become “narrated” by their surroundings. The characteristics of living creatures are generally transferred from passive to active participant, or more precisely from hunted to hunter (though two farmers in Israel Potter are described as “two human steers” [18]). This transcendental counterpart to regeneration through violence might be termed ontology through proximity. For example, just before encountering a “bull, a cow, and a calf” in Omoo, a cowardly hunter is shot at, and in turn falls to the ground “bellowing like a

calf” (220). In Mardi, a “miserable old miser...who accumulated useless

, The “NOT ME’ ¢ 87 monstrosities, throwing away the precious teeth,” himself becomes a “wziserable old humpback” (392). In Moby-Dick, in response to the hunt, Ishmael comes to feel “faint, bowed, and humped,” while a whaleman “spout([s] blood like a whale” (248, 544). The permeability of animated nature destabilizes the self-reliance, and the very boundaries, of white male identity.

For the nineteenth-century pantheist, merger with a botanical nature supplants most forms of religious communion, but the substitution is troubled. Melville’s attempts to “live in the all,” here delineated in a letter to Hawthorne, follow an Emersonian pattern of owning and disowning—of resistance, seduction, and disillusionment: “Spread and expand yourself, and bring yourself to the tinglings of life that are felt in the flowers and the woods, that are felt in the planets. ... What nonsense! ... This ‘all’ feeling, though, there is some truth in it. You must often have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summet’s day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the a// [emphasis in original] feeling” (Correspondence, 193-94).”’ Here as elsewhere it is not so much that Melville contradicts himself, or says what he does not mean, but that he cannot escape the force of his own rhetorical strategies, which undercut or polarize any of his opponent's straightforward assertions, but also his own. Almost each time Melville asserts his most profound transcendental feelings, he soon laments his expression of and susceptibility to “flummery.” (Such immediate contradiction is endemic to Melville’s approach to transcendentalism and Emerson. He writes, for example, in the margins of Emerson’s “The Poet” (in a phrase that wholly corroborates Emerson’s theory of correspondence): “Mr. E is horribly narrow here. He has his Dardanelles for his every Marmora.—But he keeps nobly on, for all that!” [Log, 2:649]. Which is to say, there is some truth in it. As Melville tells Hawthorne regarding the “all feeling,” the problem is that men insist upon the transcendental truth of a temporary feeling or opinion—that is, they universalize and find the Dardanelles for every Marmora.) But if Melville is to merge with Hawthorne, and feel Hawthorne’s heart beneath his ribs, it can be done only through transcendental nature, where they will “cross [their] celestial legs in the celestial grass that is forever tropical, and strike [their] glasses and heads together, till both musically ring in concert” (191). The flower curtain still covers the tropi-

cal author, even as Hawthorne, the anti-transcendental writer of the “The Celestial Railroad,” becomes the celestial partner of Melville’s florid fantasies.

As usual, however, Melville’s desire to “spread and expand himself” into nature, to join the “fugitive” Pan and experience a botanical existence, re-

capitulates Emerson’s language, not Hawthorne’s. In phrasing incorporated piecemeal into many essays, Emerson writes: “Man feels the blood of

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thousands in his body and his heart pumps the sap of all this forest of vegeta-

tion through his arteries.... Then it occurs what a fugitive summer flower papilionaceous is he, whisking about amidst these longevities. Gladly he could spread himself abroad among them; love the tall trees as if he were their father; borrow by his love the manners of his trees” ( Journals, 10:80). (Again, it often seems as if Melville were lifting passages not just from Emerson’s essays but from his unpublished writings.) Men are physically and onto-

logically botanized throughout transcendental literature. To overcome his mortal nature, man seeks the divine diffusion of Pan's flowers and trees. What to some critics seem like unfortunate Romantic tendencies, best downplayed— particularly when they generate fauns as literary protagonists—lie at the heart of these writers’ very sense of existence. Emerson even repeatedly asserts that “man seems a higher plant” (“Natural,” 12:24). (By contrast, part of the dissonance throughout Melville’s works is that for him, “[man] may be said to be an

inferior species of plant,” uprooted, needing to forage, and dependent on other plants that are independent of him [Mardi, 508]. As usual, Melville plays with, extends and finally inverts Emerson’s precepts; it falls to him to narrativize their demonology in full.) Inveterately situating men as kinds of flora, Emerson recalls that “Plato calls the world an animal; and Timaeus affirms that the plants also are animals; or afirms man to be a heavenly tree, growing with his root, which is his head, upward... . [W]e take the cheerful hint of the immortality of our essence, and its versatile habits and escapes,” in its metamorphoses to new forms (“Poet,” 3:31). For the pantheist, an idealized evolution regulates the transformations that render all living things versions of one another; men thereby receive proof that all boundaries between organic forms are illusory, temporary, and permeable. Sounding as if he were anticipating Melville’s description of his merger with nature—or commenting on Emerson’s equivalent depiction of man as nothing but an animated tree and his repeated assertion that “the trees are [but] imperfect men” (“Nature,” 3:181)—Reverend Dewey laments that when the pantheist sees god’s visible works in the natural world, “they perhaps might recall to him some more definite thoughts of the creator. No, ‘he [the pantheist] sees men as trees walking.’ They are mere phenomenal shadows” (“Blanco,” 202). (Reminding us how often Emerson transcendentalized the Bible, these passages also evoke Mark 8:22, where a blind man Jesus healed claims he can now see people, but they look like trees walking.) Such rhapsodies regarding Elysian fields were not merely a quirk of Melville’s; pantheism was in the air. Emerson is of course similarly overcome by the “all feeling,” one he again affirms and denies, while walking in the woods.

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As Emerson becomes the transparent eyeball in “Nature,” he experiences “perfect exhilaration” and is suffused by “the Universal Being” (1:9). Such exhilaration—an ecstatic but unsustainable transcendence—marks not just the experience of a sublime reverie that leaves the pantheist on the brink of fear, but nature’s dispossession of the self, infinite nature stealing into finite man. In a related sense, the woodgod’s divine tree also represents the surplus of Christ and his restoration to a divinity of nature. When Pierre wants heaven “to confirm [him] in the Christ-like feelings” he experiences, he emblematically swears he will “forsake the censuses of men, and seek the refuge of the god-like population of the trees... . Their high foliage shall drop heavenliness

upon me; my feet in contact with their mighty roots, immortal vigor shall

so steal into me. Guide me, gird me, guard me, this day, ye sovereign powers! ... ye Invisibles” (107). Melville reveals how conscious he is of pantheism’s price; identity is guaranteed to the extent that men forsake the world of

society and individuality, and accept the sovereignty of an inhuman, animated nature. Like Emerson, men become transparent/transcendent, for good and ill, in their proximity to the invisible gods of the forest and their universal will. (Pierre asks his “invisible powers” of nature to “cram [him] with [their] own intent” [107], much as Lawrence in “Pan in America” beseeches, “Give me your power, then, oh tree” [26].) From Ovzoo on—where already “Oro, the great god of their mythology, was declared in the cocoa-nut log from which his image was rudely carved,” and where “there stands a living tree, revered itself as a deity”—the “great god” Pan/Oro is associated with the living tree of pre-Christian, precolonial nature, not the tree of the postcolonial cross (376). Even our continued existence is vested in nature’s resurrection. Rather than sleep in his “mouldering mast” like Lord Nelson, WhiteJacket would “rather be urned in the trunk of some green tree, and even in death have the vital sap circulating round [him], giving of [his] dead body

to the living foliage” (316). Pan’s trees have, and excite more sensations than, some of Melville’s personae, who—like the characters called WhiteJacket and Taji, or Bartleby—lack some crucial aspect of their own identity. Many of Melville’s characters follow Pierre in imagining a divine presence in trees. In fact, Melville himself had such an eccentric attachment to the arboreal that he was documented as the nation’s first tree-hugger: on a walk with Hawthorne and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Maunsell Field notes that Melville “took us to a particular spot on his place to show us some superb trees. He told me that he spent much time there patting them upon the back” (Melville, Log, 2:506). (Such scenes help explain why personae in the work of

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Melville, Emerson, Lawrence, Dillard, Pynchon, and others spend so much time talking to trees.) So does Donatello, the faux faun in The Marble Faun, “intoxicated” and “exhiliratled]” like Emerson on his commons and. Melville on his walks, “in a sudden rapture, embrace the trunk of a sturdy tree, and seem to imagine it a creature worthy of affection and capable of a tender response” (74). After their friendship has waned, Hawthorne seems to satirize the transcendental leanings of his former correspondent more harshly than Melville ever satirized Emerson. Through these botanical identifications, male pantheist identity is feminized as much as racialized, as it is ultimately predicated on everything the white male is not—all that is extrinsic to and in excess of it. Melville’s male protagonists often undergo a form of feminine trans-plant. In the pantheist’s chain of being, women and plants are supposed to offer transcendental serenity, a post-individual existence beyond the constraints of male individuality. Under pantheism, the boundaries and traits of individual identity are delineated as male, but collective identities are female. In male pantheist fantasy, plants often serve as surrogates for women’s bodies. Nineteenth-century pantheists, emblematized by Robert Hunt in Panthea—published two years before Pierre—frequently interpolate their visions of great mutations of animal and plant life with depictions of enchanted floral women: “Poor woman’s heart! it is made of the fibres of sensitive plants, which are knitted into a cell by the golden sun-ray” (186).7° In Mardi, Yillah is “unsophisticated as a wildflower,” frequently identifying herself with sweet moss and the arbors that transform her into a blossom (147). Ever the mediator of man to god, woman in this system is even mote the priestess of Pan, attributed with an unmediated relation to nature. In some ways an extension of Magawisca, Isabel would meanwhile “steal away into the beautiful grass” to worship the summer and the sun, which she repeatedly refers to as human (123). Throughout Pierre, Isabel represents Melville's fantasy of merger in the grass. Able without male equivocation to identify with nature, Isabel would serve as a conductor for the superindividuated man still external to it. Women’s consonance with nature, which

men can achieve only by transcending their individualities, destabilizes men; while his body fragments, Pierre becomes a species of Isabel’s nature, which in “a very few days and hours had not so much advanced, as magically transplanted the youthful mind of Pierre” (166). Isabel’s mystery “enchanted [Pierre], till he had sat motionless and bending over, as a tree-transformed and mystery-laden visitant” (128). Before Pierre is “transplanted” into an element of beauty, he fulfills his early potential as a tropist. This promise of

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transplant marks Isabel’s unnerving effect upon Pierre and completes the process of transformation that begins with the rebellion of his body parts and ends as his body is shrouded in Isabel’s floral hair. (Isabel’s “hair-shrouded form” is matched only by the “often shrouding trees” [126, 162].) Women’s hair during the American Renaissance is often depicted as a vine-like covering or veil of nature.*? Pierre ends as Isabel “fell upon Pierre’s heart, and her long hair ran over him, and arbored him in ebon vines” (362). The mossy and

explicitly vine-like Hawthorne whom Melville wished to merge with in a tropical nature—“the Hawthorne [who] is a sweet flower,” with whom Melville wishes to share “the nourishment of the vine”—has merged into Pierre's equally taboo half-sister (Correspondence, 230, 192).°°

Finally, for the pantheist, the seemingly variegated aspects of an animated nature all emblematize man. The pantheist allies himself with representative forms of nature, such as horses or flowers, but perceives those figures to be only men in disguise. Emerson imagines individuals as purely convertible tropes, much “as the naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a horse as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a tree as a rooted man” (“Compensation,” 2:101). Surface variety proves interior unity, and A is always only a version of B (and has no identity simply as A). As Redburn, a modified Emerson, adds, “and after all, what is a horse, but a species of four-footed dumb man, in a leathern overall, who happens to live upon oats” (197). For Emerson, “from whatever side we look at Nature we seem to be exploring the figure of a disguised man,” with that disguise connoting Pan’s own dissemblance (“Natural,” 12:23).

For Melville, the ironic disguise begins to subsume any possibility of merger with a trustworthy nature. What might begin as a digressive comic interpolation about nature soon tracks a form of insidious cancer, or wild mutation, rather than controlled transformation. For example, animal and plant characteristics at first connote positive marks of Pan. As transcendentalists’ symbol of universal representation, the goat god had developed into Christ, shepherd of All, the truly representative man. But by the time of The Confidence-Man, Pan has for Melville degenerated into the cloven-hoofed master of disguise and transformation: “As he breathed these words, he seemed

so to enter into their spirit ...as unconsciously to wreathe his form and sidelong crest his head, till he all but seemed the creature described,” a rattlesnake (190). Proximity to the snake now makes us more saurian. In codifiable degrees, from Mardi to The Confidence-Man, men start to become chameleons and snakes instead of horses and trees. Through pantheistic proximity, The Confidence Man takes over those who come close to his (lack of) nature, and

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his hollow form serves as the final emblem for the impersonality of nature's animation.

IV Why did all manly gifts in Webster fail? / He wrote on Nature's grandest brow, For Sale. Emerson, “Webster” (9:399)?!

To what extent some economists are misled by the Fetishism inherent in commodities ...is shown... by the dull and tedious quarrel over the part played by nature in the formation of exchange value. Karl Marx, Capital (94)°?

[ This system] which seems to transcend space and time, gives us Transcendentalism. But why will this system sink God and nature in man?... When a man has cut himself off from every thing which is not himself (which he must do if he attempt to transcend space and time) he must find the reason of all things in himself. ... Transcendentalism is, therefore, a sort of human Pantheism. Anonymous, “Mr. Emerson and Transcendentalism” (236)

Of course, if I like to cut myself off, and say it is all bunk, a tree is merely so much lumber not yet sawn, then in a great measure I shall be cut off. D. H. Lawrence, “Pan in America” (25-26)

Pantheists treat nature not as a commodity but as the source of identity. Pantheism has a uniformly anti-utilitarian bias; nature, people, even rocks can’t be judged on the basis of use, but only on that of being. Knowledge of

nature must be intuited and empathic, never mechanistic or economic in character. The utilitarian formulates an objective use for a body, which leads to its commodification; the pantheist wants to see a body’s essence as somehow removed from its almost irrelevant objective use. Pantheism is conceived as an antidote to a rhetoric of self-division and partitioning, and a fetishization of body parts as money in antebellum U.S. society. For the pantheist, bodies should never be broken down and recombined for expedient ends but must be treated as inviolable wholes. For Emerson, nature is imbued with an ethical character that rejects any utilitarian or partial consumption or evaluation: “Whatever private purpose is answered by any member or part, this is its public and universal function,

and is never omitted. Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use.... In God, every end is converted into a new means. Thus the use of commodity, regarded by itself, is mean and squalid” (“Nature,” 1:41). But through these

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same transcendental and impersonal conversions of nature, man is also commodified. Promising perpetual novelty through repackaging, Emerson can be read as a dynamic critic of capitalism once his valences are overturned and his exhaustion is revealed. As David Harvey writes in The Condition of

Postmodernity, modernity and capitalism usurp the function of nature in earlier societies (which leaves pantheism to straddle the two stages of development). Quoting Marx in Grundrisse, Harvey asserts that capital produces a stage of society “in comparison to which all earlier ones appear as mere local developments of humanity and as nature idolatry. For the first time nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely as a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power for itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it to human needs” (111). Emerson’s pantheism represents an attempt to restore an intrinsic power of nature and transcend its utilitarian use; it fails, however, because it doesn’t oppose capitalism from without but mimics its processes from within. The forms of animation I have been addressing also reflect a dispossessive transcendental nature that uses men as its limbs and its mouthpiece; it is nature that commodifies and uses beings in utilitarian fashion. At first Emerson sanctifies a Pan of pure Being who shuns the fragmenting inanimate marketplace: This ecstatical state seems to direct a regard to the whole and not to the parts.... Let him beware of proposing to himself any end. Is it for use? nature is debased, as if one looking at the ocean can remember only the price of fish.... There is something social and intrusive in the nature of all things; they seek to penetrate and overpower each the nature of every other creature... to fascinate and possess... for they desire to republish themselves ina more delicate world than that they occupy (“Method,” 1:211-12).

This passage also illustrates how transcendental Being relies on animation;

nature is an indivisible whole, but it animates and imprints individuals. (When creatures seek to “republish” themselves, they do so not as individuals but as dispossessed representatives of nature.) The ecstasy of excess is a form of transcendence, the erasure of self by the whole. This desire to infiltrate, possess, and republish represents the core of pantheism’s obsession— how one man comes to possess not just another man’s property but his identity. Natural law is like a virus that programs us. For Emerson, the law of nature “publishes itself in creatures, reaching from particles and spiculae through transformation on transformation to the highest symmetries” (“Nature, 3:179-80). The universe is selfpublishing, but one of its parchments is

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men: “Thought is all light and publishes itself to the universe. It will speak, though you were dumb, by its own miraculous organ” (“Literary Ethics,” 1:187).°? As Emerson says of nature’s animation, “in all animal and vegetable forms ... a mysterious principle of life must be assumed, which not only inhabits the organ but makes the organ” (“Method,” 1:200). This principle is the mysterious agent on which William Ellery Channing fears pantheists must rely; it is a kind of Heideggerian Dasezn, inherent in the object or life, yet nowhere isolable or quantifiable. It is also the principle that starts moving the limbs of Melville’s characters. The organs of man—from his body parts to his voice—are on loan from Pan; despite the pantheist’s attempt to merge the two, the principle of life is never equivalent to life itself. As the individual organs of men are displaced, Pan orates for and through us: “The Soul which animates nature is not less significantly published in the figure, movement and gesture of animated bodies, than in its last vehicle of articulate speech. ... A statue has no tongue, and needs none” (“Behavior,” 6:169). Nature animates, gives a tongue to all things, and “publishes” itself in men, who are dumb statues without her. This ventriloquizing animation threatens notions of cause and effect, free will and selfreliance (or reflects their destabilization). Despite Emerson’s assurances to the contrary, animation is also immanence, which generates a discourse of dispossessive power. Theodore Parker— whom Reverend Manning, for one, deems a modified pantheist—offers a fa-

miliar description of the transubstantiation of the world, intimating that natural law is the only stable entity within pantheism. Parker believes that an infinite god exists in every atom, and in the “immanence of god in man, as well as matter, his activity as both. ... God is immanent in the world, how-

ever much he transcends the world.... {He is] what is permanent in the passing. ... [T]he fullness of God ... passes into the crystal of the rock, the juices of the plant, the life of the emmet and the elephant. He penetrates and pervades the world” (Discourse, 172; see also “Divine Presence,” 59). That oft-cited fullness of God passes into and possesses man. Without Pan, man is a hollow shell. But such a perspective leaves man a specter of his former self. Emerson “learns that God 1s; that he is in me; and that all things are shadows of him” (“Circles,” 2:309). (Possibly with Emerson in mind, Reverend Dix writes that “Pantheism [makes] of Him not a person, but an abstraction ... not a reality, but a shadowy intangibility” [45].) Even Emerson’s language darkens when he describes how man’s identity is backed:

“The maker of all things and all persons stands behind us and casts his dread omniscience through us over things” (“Over-Soul,” 2:280). God burns brightly in us but leaves us transparent, evacuated, and overshadowed.

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The variety of men function only as the manifold screens through which God speaks..For Emerson, Pan’s pipes become channels of breath, sound, and divine torrents: “Man does not possess [the forces of Nature], he is a pipe through which their currents flow” (“Perpetual,” 10:74). Emerson identifies man as an instrument only temporarily animated and orchestrated, though serving as great Pan’s dummy suffuses him with numinous vitality: O What are Heroes, prophets, men But pipes through which the breath of Pan doth blow A momentary music.... Their dust, pervaded by the nerves of God Throbs with an overmastering energy.

| (“Pan? 9:360)

Man is “pervaded” by the overpowering energy of god, which sets his frame a-dance with a divine chorea. Emerson also obsessively imagines men as casings and foyers of the All: “All men are but porches into one mind”; “God enters by a private door into every individual”; “God [will] deign to enter and inhabit you’; “Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same”; “To this sea [of Intellect] every human house has a water front” (Early Lectures, 2:147; Manning, 299; “Intellect,” 2:327; “History,” 2:3; “Natural,” 12:15).

Explicit in his relegation of will from man to nature, Emerson admits, “I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than

the will I call mine... that Unity, that Over-Soul” (“Over-Soul,” 2:268). (When Ahab has this same realization, he becomes monomaniacally enraged.) The Over-Soul, the All, uses permeable man as the repository, the inlet, and finally the womb for its (inordinately male) will: “In this eternal resuscitation and rehabilitation of transitory persons... {we see] the eternal mind, careless in its channels, omnipotent itself, and continually ejaculating its torrent into every artery and vein and veinlet of humanity” (“Natural,” 12:28). In Emerson’s rhetoric of divine insemination, man is the “channel through which heaven flows to earth,” and artists the “vessels filled with divine overflowings.” Man serves as a feminized host for the active divinity that perpetually infuses him: “The life of the All must stream through us to make the man and the moment great” (“Natural,” 12:21). “Greatness” is a fluid external force that possesses the individual: man “is great only by being passive to the superincumbent spirit,” what Emerson repeatedly calls a “superincumbent

tendency” (McAleer, 269). Man in turn gives birth to god in his body, and when Pierre is given a vision like heaven-begotten Christ’s, “these things were

foetally forming in him. Impregnations from high enthusiasms he had received” (133).

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To Emerson, “this Supreme Presence” is a “great reality which seems to drown all things in the deluge of its light,” and “the entrance of this into his mind seems to be the birth of man” (“Method,” 1:210, 223). As Pierre discoyers, man is fertilized, created, and creates only when infiltrated by a divinity that negates his individuality. For Emerson, “the reference of all production at last to an aboriginal Power explains the traits common to all works of the highest art,” and makes the poet a transparent medium (“Art,” 2:358). (That aboriginal and collective Power remains racialized.) Through this “primitivist” animism, Emerson becomes a radical proponent of deindividuation. As W. H. Mill declares in 1861 in his Observations on the Attempted Application of Pantheistic Principles to the Theory and Historic Criticism of the Gospel, “to

' whom can that name [of pantheist] be given if not to those who teach... that when any one thinks and reasons, it is so far not he (the individual) but the Universal Spirit that is in him” (11). For Emerson, in all relation, conversation, and comparison, “tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to common nature.... [That] is not social; it is impersonal; is God” (“Over-Soul,” 2:277). (This pronouncement has an oddly Lacanian ring to it, echoed, for instance, in the assertion that every sexual relationship includes tacit reference not to one’s parents but to the big Other.) This impersonal and aboriginal god is the pantheist’s sole creator, or rather translator; only this deified system can originate thought or act as the medium of representation. Asa result of god’s immanence, for Emerson, “most men and most women are merely one couple more,” duplicates creating more duplicates, temporary resting points for the eternal (“Fate,” 6:11). This is why Emerson concludes, “Tt is a greater joy to see the author’s author, than himself” (“Nominalist,” 3:233). Emerson records that Jones Very had similarly remarked that he “valued his poems not because they were his, but because they were not” (“Inspiration,” 8:277). As always, Emerson reveals that transcendental self-reliance is actually god-reliance (or reliance on a representative, impersonal self that denotes the opposite of individuality): we must allow an immanent god to animate and speak through us. The demonology of that reliance on god is dispossession, and finally near enslavement. When he despairs, Emerson fears that “nothing is of us or our works—that all is of god. Nature will not spare us the smallest leaf of laurel. All writing comes by the grace of God.... I can see nothing at last, in success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied from the Eternal” (“Experience,” 3:69).

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And yet is the god the native of these bleak rocks. Emerson, “Experience” (81)

Melville literalizes many of these Emersonian propositions in Mardi; in such a kingdom, where poets are merely duplicates of one another, actions and ideas can only be innate or implanted: “All men are inspired... for the essence of all ideas is infused. Of ourselves, and in ourselves, we originate nothing” (331, 493). (So does Pierre later redundantly conclude that “no mortal who

has at all gone down into himself will ever pretend that his slightest thought or act solely originates in his own defined identity.” As such sequences illustrate, Melville’s novels, like Emerson’s essays, in some ways do not “progress” in conventional contexts [176].) Throughout Mardi, such assertions, from the cataloging of reincarnated individuals to the resuscitation of a doctrine of innate ideas, are made in the context of Emersonian pantheism.

For Melville, this animation of the world produces an omnipresent deity, initially benign but finally all-consuming. In Mardi, Taji repeatedly describes the ubiquity of his pantheistic divinities, who reside in nature like the gods of Spinoza and Goethe: “So numerous were living and breathing gods in Mardi that I held my own divinity but cheaply. And seeing such a host of immortals and hearing of multitudes more, purely spiritual in their nature, haunting woodlands and streams, my views of theology grew strangely confused; I began to bethink me of the Jew that rejected the Talmud, and his all-permeating principle, to which Goethe and others have subscribed” (176). Melville resurrects Spinoza’s “all-permeating principle” as one potential basis for his own metaphysics and the ontological framework for human identity. At the behest of Pani, Mohi elaborates the “plurality of gods in the land” (presaging Pierre’s sardonically imagined but still divinely animated air): “[The gods of] wood and of stone are nothing in number to the gods in the air. You breathe not a breath without inhaling, you touch not a leaf without ruffling a spirit. [Gods]

of rock and of fell...; gods merrily swing in the boughs of the trees and merrily sing in the brook. Gods are here, and there, and everywhere; you are never alone for them” (340).** We breathe god in with the dust and as the dust. These infinite forms of Pan, who “overhear all our inmost thoughts,” may be “the semi-intelligibles, the divided unities in unity,” and fallen deities, but they are infinite in number upon the face of Mardi, “at least three billion trillion of quintillions” (341). These mostly facetious but partly serious declarations again remind us of Merrill Richardson and Magawisca in

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Hope Leslie; a modified Native American, non-Western pantheism presides over such passages in Melville. Codifying the tenets of impersonal consciousness and pantheistic animation, Babbalanja’s description of Mardi offers a blueprint for pantheistic world construction: I live while consciousness is not mine, while to all appearances I am a clod.

And may not this same state of being, though but alternate with me, be continually that of many dumb, passive objects we so carelessly regard? Trust me, there are more things alive than those that crawl, or fly, or swim. Think you, my lord, there is no sensation in beinga tree? ... Think you it is nothing to be a world?... [What are our tokens of animation? That we move, make a noise, have organs, pulses, and are compounded of fluids and solids. And all these are in this Mardi as a unit. Daily the slow, majestic throbbings of its heart are perceptible on the surface in the tides of the lagoon. Its rivers are its veins; ... and as the body of a bison is covered with hair, so Mardi is covered with grasses

and vegetation. ... Think you there is no sensation in being a rock? (458).

Among many critics, James Russell Lowell complained of Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” that he would not “hear the anointed Son of God / Made like themselves an animated clod” (McAleer, 250). To Emerson, Christ is only one emblem of divinity, an “animated clod” much like Mardi’s inhabitants as well as its landscape. Mardi serves as a nexus for the debate about whether that animated clod represents the divinity or a confidence trick. But by the end of his life, Pierre, as his literary persona Vivia, inverts Babbalanja and laments:

“I own myself a brother of the clod, a child of the Primeval Gloom. Hopelessness and despair are over me” (342). Visible everywhere in transcendental literature, rocks and stones are never senseless things to the pantheist. As the distinction between organic and in-

organic life, human and nonhuman, and finally personal and impersonal blurs from Whitman to Pynchon to Dillard, plants and birds and rocks and things become co-relatives to men. (Dillard’s rocks are in some ways her most

differentiated characters.) As the Reverend Morgan Dix complains of transcendentalism: “Look at the dull, inert stones of the wilderness: it is God sleeping. Look at the Brutes endowed with instinct, but without intellect: that is God dreaming” (45). In Pierre, these same rocky masses, beginning to bear the pantheistic “enchantment” of life, “seemed to express that slumbering intelligence visible in some recumbent beasts—beasts whose intelligence seems struck dumb in them by some sorrowful and inexplicable spell. Nevertheless, round and round those still enchanted rocks... so barren in themselves, distilled a subtile moisture, which fed with greenness all things

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that grew about their igneous marge” (343). All matter bears this latent sentience. [he animate aspects of the world of Mardi have not been completely extinguished even in Pierre, which Melville dedicates, with bitter irony, to his final patron, the giant rock of Mount Greylock, his version of Emerson’s Monadnoc. At first, to see the soul in the stone is to receive god in nature. As Lawrence resumes in “Pan in America,” a “rock will give [man] some of its radiant cold stillness and enduring presence, and he makes a symbolic return, of gratitude. ... Is it better to see the rock as a mere nothing, not worth noticing because it has no value, and you can’t eat it as you can a deer?” (28). Asin The Marble Faun, Pan has been figuratively and literally walled in, in enchanted stone and statues, and writers dream of liberating the animate in the inanimate. In his transcendental treatise of 1826, Observations on the Growth of the Mind, Emerson’s friend Sampson Reed writes that nature’s living presence is imprisoned in rock by our refusal to acknowledge it: “The very stones cry out and we do well to listen to them” (13). In “Pan-Worship,”

Eleanor Farjeon, an early-twentieth-century poet, writes, “O Pan, old Pan, / Shall I not see thee stirring in the stone. / Crack thy confinement, leap forth—de again?” (11; emphasis in original).*° In the literature revising Ameri-

can Renaissance animism, this ascription of pure being culminates with Pynchon’s conclusion to Gravity's Rainbow, a mock Puritan hymn sung soon after Pan himself appears in the text, and which evokes the transcendental presence of “a face on evry mountainside / and a soul in ev'ry stone” (887). Modeled on human anatomy, Mardi becomes Melville’s first enormous living body. Like Moby Dick, it is seemingly dumb, but is actually an emphatically animated and conscious mass—Tocqueville’s pantheist incarnation of the democratic nation. Since everything is alive and connected, the once anthropomorphic chain of being must be reconfigured on egalitarian terms; as Melville resumes, “suffering is suffering, be the sufferer man, brute,

or thing” (Mardi, 577). As many pantheists iterate, “the divine spark, it is consciousness, but man does not share it alone, the meanest, lowest amoeba has in its own dim way a consciousness or feeling of existence” (Amryc, 105,

169). The late Emerson still avers that the “latent omniscience” of life—a phrase he repeatedly uses—“works remotely in grandest and meanest structures by the same design, works in a lobster or a mite worm as a wise man would if imprisoned in that poor form” (“Sovereignty,” 10:183). In this instance, Babbalanja might anticipate his role model by claiming that in Mardi or in man, “in kings, mollusca, and toadstools, life is one and the same... a certain febrile vibration of organic parts operating upon the vis inertia of

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unorganized matter.... What keeps up the perpetual telegraphic communication between my outpost toes and digits, and... my brain? It is not [, nor you, nor he, nor it. No; when I place my hand to that king muscle, my heart, I am appalled. I feel the great God himself at work in me. Oro is life” (538). All Mardi is a recitation of these Emersonian sentiments. Oro, who returns in a more demonic guise in Moby-Dick and Pierre, presides over the raising of each man’s hand. Like Melville writing to Hawthorne, Babbalanja gropes beneath his ribs and finds god.

In Melville’s works, from Mardi on, communication between people, and even between parts of the same person, can be kept up only through the transcendental deity, which acts like a metaphysical neurotransmitter. That “great God himself” is, as Pip would say in Moby-Dick, not you, nor I, nor he, but appalling. Such a conviction is not peculiar to Mardi, but repeats a

central trope of most pantheistic writers: the dispossession of individual will by a greater force, such as the mass of nature, impersonal law, or a collec-

tive humanity. Starting with Babbalanja’s amused declaration that god moves his limbs, we move toward Ahab’s far less sanguine insistence that god moves his hands for him; Ishmael’s “transcendence” of his hands while squeezing sperm; and Pierre’s loss of physical self-identity. Impersonally animated rather than created and judged by a Christian god, transcendental subjectivities are immortal only in being recycled. Like devotees of many religions, pantheists empty themselves to locate god. But in antebellum America, Pan becomes a demonic force, the thing within us that overtakes and leaves us with the horrific, or radically liberatory, prospect of no longer being equivalent to ourselves.

VI An individual body is the momentary arrest or fixation of certain atoms, which, after performing compulsory duty to this enchanted statue, are released again to flow in the currents of the world. Emerson, “Natural History of Intellect” (27)

My mind then ran on in reveries concerning the probable effects upon the human constitution of living entirely on ginger-nuts. ... For long periods [Bartleby] would stand looking out, at his pale window behind the screen, upon the dead brick wall.... his incessant industry (except when he chose to throw himself into a standing reverie behind his screen) ... made him a valuable acquisition. ... [But] Bartleby remained standing at his window in one of his profoundest dead-wall reveries. Melville, “Bartleby The Scrivener” (Piazza, 23, 28, 25-26, 37)*°

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Yet man insulates himself more and more into mechanism, and repudiates everything but. ... automatism and mechanization. ... godin the machine. ... But even the most mechanized human being has only got his windows nailed up, or bricked in. D. H. Lawrence, “Pan in America” (27, 31); “Democracy” (717)

American pantheism, and much of Melville’s work, oscillates between ecstatic reverie and dead-wall reverie, and enchantment and dispossession, seduction and disillusionment. At first the pantheist seeks to transcend his physical constraints by immersing himself in an oceanic nature. For Emerson,

man is the inlet for the torrents of divinity; all coasts of the world are enchanted by nature’s animation: “From the earth, as a shore, I ook out into that silent sea. | seem to partake of its rapid transformations; the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind” (“Nature,” 1:17). This dilation represents the pantheistic reverie—the diffusion and loss of self—that Melville guards against yet incessantly pursues. (Melville

often echoes Emerson’s evocation of this oceanic feeling: “Three days enchanted on the sea....|T|here we lay rocking, helpless as an infant in the cradle... this serene, passive foe—unresisting and irresistible” |[White-Jacket,. 325].).°’ As in “Pan,” men merge with the elements and the currents, and the force of god animates their dust, which is akin to the “pantheistic ashes” that compose the surface of the globe in Moby-Dick (159). As Emerson iterates, “How all things sparkle / The dust is alive” (“Poet,” 3:313). But such animation recurs to a more biblical configuration of ashes and dust. After Em-

erson’s Pan has gone, after “the breath of Pan” has evacuated its subjects, white men lie as “White hollow shells upon the desert shore. / But not the less the eternal wave rolls on / To animate new millions, and exhale / Races and planets, its enchanted foam” (“Pan,” 9:360). Nathaniel Richardson

describes pantheistic theories using the same keywords in “The Pantheis- , tic Movement”: the transcendental spirit “marches along the track of ages

as if it bore in its hands the wand of an enchanter ... and even dark and earth-born masses are suffused with the divine expression of the one animating spirit” (556). Juxtaposed against what Melville comes to see as the dangerously transformative powers of an animated nature and enchanted women are the even more threatening, and deadening, effects of the machine. Mechanization is the demonological obverse of animation, but for Melville they turn out to be two necessary sides of the same principle: the universal nature that merges becomes the correlate of the universal capitalism that fragments. Where the mass body is animated and enchanted in nature, the individual body becomes a fixed mechanism. Work is a positive, “animated” activity aboard the Pequod,

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but so appropriated that the vital force of labor is subsumed by mechanism.

The crew’s individualities are “ground to finest dust...in the mortar of Ahab’s iron soul. Like machines, they dumbly moved about deck” (536). The men hold on to their implements “mechanically,” while “all their enchanted eyes” follow the whale; hands become mechanized while eyes, the emblems of Emersonian transcendentalism, remain the last parts to stay enchanted (571).

Those most strenuously opposing mechanization and fragmentation often find themselves the most susceptible to a “mechanical” alienation from their society; they begin to act mechanically, or find themselves imprisoned by the mechanisms they abhor. Even Thoreau can become “walled in” by his own perceptions, trapped within the pond that becomes the world and a prison— the observer who worries, “If we knew all things thus mechanically, should we know anything really?” “Journal,” 75). In his dead-wall reverie on Wall Street, the passively disobedient Bartleby is also a version of Thoreau, who published “Resistance to Civil Government” several years before Melville’s story. In his pursuit of social independence, Emerson must perpetually remind himself that one’s “isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual.”** Emerson perceives two ways of knowing, one mechanical and one vitalistic, but Melville discovers that the distinction is deceptive. As Michael Rogin—who demonstrates how the “iron path” of mechanization was also the path of the nation and Melville’s family—suggests, after Georg Lukacs, “every cog is hu-

man; when power is attributed to emblems, and they do human work, the writer has succumbed to animism.” (115). Primitive animism comes full circle to meet the antebellum slave and market economy: once the machine is animated, little difference between nature and the economy can be maintained.

Already problematized, pantheistic fraternity is further endangered by mechanistic fragmentation. As Rogin continues: “Ahab resists fraternity by

manipulating mechanical power....Such images ...made the eighteenthcentury Newtonian machine into an organism, and they brought it tolife.... Organic, corporate images sanctified nineteenth-century industrial capitalism” (138). Ahab’s machine is a variation of the machine of nature. Mechanization exists in precarious balance with animation throughout Moby-Dick. In his own body, Ahab conjoins mechanism with animation, the organic with the inorganic, stabilized by “the mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality in him” (165).

The hard border between the natural and the artificial evaporates when machines are animated with life, and living creatures, taken over by an impersonal nature, begin to act mechanically. Nature is revealed to be a machine

complicit with, the model for, the capitalist use of human bodies, rather than an alternative to that system. Even Pierre increasingly begins to act

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“mechanically,” and moves and responds as an automaton; for example, Isabel’s “fervid exclamations” to the animated face at the painting exhibition are “mechanically responded to by Pierre,” and “both [Lucy] and Pierre now mechanically again seized Isabel’s frantic arms” (315, 318, 352, 355). If Protestantism ends in pantheism, pantheism ends in a mechanistic nature. By his last novel, Melville finds himself caught between mechanized pantheism and vitalistic mechanism: “Oh Very! lam now started to get me made some kind of

machine to do the sort of work which boys are supposed to be fitted for” (Confidence-Man, 108). (Given Melville’s radical egalitarianism and his penchant for sometimes oblique puns, it’s possible that this exhortation is also

meant to invoke Jones Very, who had written, for instance, that “the men upon whom the superior mind acts are mere mechanical instruments of its power” [21].) What begins to emerge as a soulless corporate state in Pierre becomes mechanical and genetic by The Confidence-Man.

Vil Spines, Leaves, and Books: The Taxonomies of Transcendental Bodies Live with God, with living nature as the Roses do. Wilfulness vitiates and enslaves, but the leaf partakes of the sublime of All. Emerson ( Journals, 12:130, 160)

In reading some of Goethe’s sayings... I came across this, “Live in the all.” ... bring to yourself the tinglings of life that are felt in the flowers and the woods. ... What nonsense! Melville, Letter to Hawthorne (Correspondence, 193-94)

Thus Goethe suggested the leading ideas of modern botany, that a leaf or the eye of a leaf is the unit of botany, and that every part of a plant is only a transformed leaf....In like manner, in osteology, he assumed that one vertebra of the spine might be considered as the unit of the skeleton. ... “Man and the higher animals are built up through the vertebrae.” Emerson, “Goethe” (5:275)

Apply this spinal branch of phrenology to the Sperm Whale... . Under all these circumstances, would it be unreasonable to survey and map out the whale’s spine phrenologically? For, viewed in this light, the wonderful comparative smallness of his brain proper is more than compensated by the wonderful comparative magnitude of his spinal cord. Melville, Moby-Dick (349)

“The Best lightning-rod for your protection is your own spine.” Emerson, quoting Thoreau, “Aristocracy” (10:47)

104 ¢ Chapter 2 “Scarce savoring much of the Picturesque!” / “Pardon,” here purled a cultured wight / Lucid with transcendental light... . “Ay—picturesque! But naught atones / For heroic navies, Pan’s own ribs and knees.” Melville, “At the Hostelry” (Collected Poems, 337, 325)

The cultural geography and anatomies of pantheism are predicated on theories of universal animation, and mid-century natural science confirms or stimulates pantheists’ prognostications. In their pantheon, Goethe, the liberator or corrupter of youth, is the founder of modern science, and of what becomes an Emersonian discourse of representative and archetypal taxonomy. As Reverend Manning summarizes: The history of comparative anatomy cannot be written without reference to [Goethe]....In botany, also, Goethe’s work on the Metamorphosis of Plants may be said to have suggested, if it did not originate, what is now the

distinctive doctrine and boasted glory of modern science[,]...that all plants conform to a single type in their structure; that in their development... they only repeat the universal type|,] ... they all name Goethe as the master who gave them the right clew to nature|,] ... [and] the so-called development theory.... The unity of nature was with him a transcendental truth. (198-99)

These threads of comparative anatomies and the unities of nature converge in Emerson, who resituates them in an explicitly transcendental American context and provides a taxonomically archetypal and botanical system of representation for all life. (I focus on the animated bodies of nature here but return to human anatomy at the end of this book.) Searching for Pan’s viscus, many antebellum biologists, and would-be biologists such as Emerson, affirm Goethe’s morphology. According to John Hunt in Pantheism and Christianity, more than ninety percent of the bones in the human skeleton have their homologies recognized by common consent in the skeletons of all vertebrata. The same uniformity recognized in the animal kingdom is acknowledged by botanists to prevail in the vegetable world. .. . [S]cientific botanists have adopted the unity of Goethe... . [E]very flower... isa metamorphosed branch ... subject to exactly the same laws of arrangement as regularly shaped leaves. ... [T]he principle of archetypal order .. . originally connected with

the mental philosophy of Plato, and the mystical dreams of the later Platonists, [is] now established by observations on external nature. (362—63)°?

Spines and leaves come to represent the developmental or proto-evolutionary archetype in nature. As Melville suggests in Moby-Dick, pantheism is a form of natural science based on Platonic ideals. As transcendentalism or “devel-

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opment” evolves into pantheism, all body parts resolve into an exclusive organ, or are alleged deterministically to unfold or evolve toward a more inclusive whole.

As Emerson documents, Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants first fixes on the spine as the vital unit of body-building: “every part ofa plant is... a leaf, metamorphosed,” and “the vertebra of the spine is the unit of anatomy; all other parts are merely metamorphoses, degradations, abortions, or enlargements of this” (Emerson, Early Lectures 2:24). (Whole bodies imitate this spine whether they are transformed, aborted, or enlarged. Melville relies heavily on this vocabulary of metamorphosis, abortion, and enlargement to depict how human bodies change.) In Goethe’s wake, Robert Chambers writes that all vertebrate limbs, however unlike they appear, develop “on one plan” (195). For the transcendentalist, variety remains but the proof of ulterior unity. According to Chambers, “the pitcher [emphasis in original], as this is called, is not a new organ, but a metamorphose of a leaf. These facts show how all the various organic forms of our world are bound up in one—how a fundamental unity pervades and embraces them all” (197). What makes the world animate is also what enables it to be universally coded and translated under one model, to mass-produce organic bodies on its assembly line. For Emerson, nature “has worked on one plan.... |T|his unity exists in the organization of insect, beast, bird, still ascending to man.... [T]he only difference is of less and more.... This unity of design in the creation—this unity of thought—is the key to all science. There is a kind of latent omniscience not only in every man, but in every particle—that convertibility which we see in plants, whereby the same bud becomes a leaf, bract, sepal, flower, seed, as the need is.”40 We might consider this literally a “unified field” theory.*! Principles of animation, immanence, latent omniscience, and universal convertibility together create transcendental ontology. Like Pan, the spine and leaf represent the sentient animal and vegetable kingdoms, and become the transcendental “key to all science”: they are particular forms that represent and can be translated into all other forms. As IJ later argue, these “natural laws” lay the scientific blueprint for a transcendental world order, a world without political borders, as seen from an American vantage. Emerson's self-reliant man actually depends heavily on the uniformity of transcendental nature. As Emerson writes in a passage virtually repeated in “The Sovereignty of Ethics,” mentioned earlier, “this selfhelp and se/fcreation proceed from the same power which works in the feeblest and meanest structures by the same design in a lobster or ina worm” (“Natural Religion,” Uncollected, 50-51). Whether in Mardi’s mollusk or king, the same nature animates and connects all life. Male parthenogenesis is the other effect of this unity of

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design, and Emerson’s “self-creation” proceeds from the concept of animation; Pan presides over a living world that converts and reincarnates itself, its universally translatable parts, without birth or death.4? Animation, classification, and conversion supplant reproduction. All structures of composition, from writing to human bodies, begin in the composition of the archetypal plant; Pan's papilionaceous flower is man’s alpha and omega. Quoting

Goethe, Emerson insists “it is in the stomach of plants that development begins, and ends in the circles of the universe” (“Sovereignty,” 10:186). (This stomach or eye of the plant represents the true chain or circle of being, from

the flower to the All of the universe: its demonological inverse ends in the cannibalism of a reflexive, circular chain of being.) Plants are Pan’s symbols not just because they represent nature but because Romantic taxonomy situates them as archetypes of universal anatomy. In the plant, any willfulness or individuality is subjugated to the All; by merging with nature, with Emerson’s leaf, man transcends his particularity. He becomes an architecture of leaves, not a specific leaf.

A fundamental unity also pertains to most of the naturalists of the American Renaissance. Near the conclusion of Walden, Thoreau goes a bit

further off the limb than usual and claims that “in the globe or animal body,” all forms develop from the manipulations of lobes, or leaves: “The

earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves.... [T]he atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. ... The whole tree itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves... . Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be regarded, fancifully, as a lichen. . . with its lobe or drop... . The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf” (295-97). (Almost all such “fanciful” pronouncements, however, later prove literal and demonological in pantheist discourse.) The leaf itself was patented long ago; the world only copies the “patents” of nature’s ur-organs and uniform natural laws. Once

again, the world talks to us through these floral in-carnations. Thoreau launches into a lengthy (and without the context of pantheism thoroughly bizarre) digression on the linguistic origin of these leaves, which are themselves ultimately lobes, globes, or eyes, and the basis for the structure of all matter. All of nature resembles the leaf because all leaves are really globes and orbs. In Thoreau’s projected world, the trees really do have eyes. From Goethe's morphology of leaves, we inevitably reach the all-encompassing orb, moving from atom to earth: “No wonder that the earth expresses itself in leaves.... Internally, whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe... [/obos in Greek] globus, lobe, globe. ...’The very globe con-

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tinually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit” (296). Thoreau’s “translation” is not just linguistic; it produces a reified transformation from leaf to lobe. All leaves are themselves lobes; the leaf not only can be converted to but already is a lobe, a globe, an animated orb, and Emerson's transcendental eye/I. As Emerson iterates, life begins in “every globe from

the remotest heaven... from the first principal of growth in the eye of a leaf” (“Nature,” 1:40). As I argue in “‘Infinitely Repellent Orbs, ” the male eye or orb that sees and generates these forms becomes one archetype for transcendental male self-representation and reproduction. In his pantheist epistemology of classification, Emerson repeatedly adumbrates and augments Goethe’s and Thoreau’s idea of anatomical repre-

sentativeness: “Every part of a plant is only a transformed leaf.... [A] leaf | may be converted into any other organ, and any other organ into a leaf” (Cowan, 18). These organs, which serve as the models for all literary representation, and whose transformational abilities make them universal signifiers, are animated by the same forces of Pan. (Emerson “cheats” in so far as he wants to render leaves, spines, and orbs universal signifiers whose intrin-

sic shapes are meaningless in the face of their all-plastic representativeness, while still playing up their intrinsic shapes and properties when those properties support a universal application, as he does with the circularity of the eye.)

And no one could accuse Emerson, or his infinite series, of being spineless: “Nature is always self-similar... .’The whole art of the plant is still to repeat leaf on leaf without end....In the animal, nature makes a vertebra, or a spine of vertebrae, and helps herself still by a new spine, with a limited power of modifying its form—spine on spine, to the end of the world... [with] no limit to this ascending scale, but series on series” (“Swedenborg,” 4:107—9). So do spines endlessly refer, like cause and effect, in an infinite series. (To the end of the world indeed—nature will never change, only un-

fold.) For Emerson, the will and energy of Pan manifest themselves in man, primarily in the vital compression of the spine, the bodily mandrake, the phallic selfsame: “The strongest idea incarnates itself. ... The one serious and formidable thing in nature is a will... . [T]he menagerie of forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate” (“Fate,” 6:13, 30, 8-9). (As Ishmael offers for the literate invertebrate crowd, “Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters” [289].) In a literal-

ization of familiar Romantic tropes, vertebrate spines then metamorphose into the spines of books and the leaves of trees into the leaves of books; this pantheist conceit is most obviously put into practice in Whitman’s leaves of

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grass, though in a purely transcendental taxonomy, that phrase would connote lobes or eyes of grass. Throughout the American Renaissance, the spines and leaves of natural forms are transformed into the spines and leaves of texts, for both are treated as transcendental archetypes, the building blocks of representation. The transcendental book grows out of and embodies the vertebrate and invertebrate archetypes, and becomes an animated, living text. If worlds are alive to Melville, all parts of that world can be imbued with the characteristics of life. Melville develops a consistent world-view that internalizes these transcendental morphologies, and his images, assumptions, and

politics make most sense in that context. Melville animates his landscapes, ships, and mechanisms, as Emerson animates impersonal physical laws, and imbues them with the unwavering identity his characters no longer possess. A belief in animism produces metaphors that graft the parts of the animate onto the inanimate. Not just plants and birds and rocks, but all things are alive. People begin to resemble inanimate nature, while the inanimate world takes on the characteristics of people. Even as people become dehumanized and mechanical in increasingly industrialized societies, the “primitive” inanimate resurges in increasingly animated forms. Throughout Melville’s work, for example, “the rigging lived” (Moby-Dick, 557). In Omoo, the equine Julia “dashed

the waves from her prow, and pranced, and pawed the sea.... How the fleet creature would fly....[T]he prancing Juda... bridled her head like a steed reigned in” (9, 23). Again and again, beneath her “sea-jockeys,” or sailors, “the Julia reared up on her stern, like a vicious colt” (59). Redburn then says that a

ship at sea, transporting us to oceanic feelings, is animated—permeated with a male, pantheistic vitality—while one in dock remains inert: “['T]he pitching and rolling only imparts a pleasant sort of vitality to the vessel; so that the difference in being aloft in a ship at sea, and a ship in harbor, is pretty much the same, as riding a real live horse and a wooden one” (115). In

Moby-Dick the process cuts both ways, turning ships into creatures and creatures into ships. With his prodigious jaw hanging down, the whale “for all the world [looks] like a ship’s jib-boom” (332). To Ishmael the “vast ivory ribbed chest” of a whale skeleton “resembled the hull of a great ship” (453). The sperm whale “transform|[s] himself from a bluff-bowed sluggish galliot

into a sharp-pointed New York pilot-boat” (284). The mere painting of a “wrecked ship,” of a beached whale, could hardly represent “the noble animal in all its undashed pride of hull and spars” (263). Equivalences run rampant, and Ishmael even suggests that “the entire ship seems great Leviathan himself” (428). Just as Ishmael ties Queequeg to his person, he tethers the whale to his ship: “The two—ship and whale, seemed yoked together like

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colossal bullocks” (292). Yoked together, machines become living things, and living things machines. In this process, men are regenerated through the violence of their actions aboard ship; these vessels are composed of, and become, the living things their passengers hunt. Appropriated from a living body—and now a detached body part—ivory implements merge with the ship, transitively turning it into an animated creature, the “ivory-tusked Pequod”: “The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks glistened . . . like the white ivory tusks of some huge elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows” (234, 104).

A form of pantheistic regeneration is thus achieved through the ascription of life to ships. Once the body is aligned with a higher force—or a machine or construct is perceived as somatic—the self partakes of a larger whole or an all-inclusive divinity. The human body is structured along the same lines as other animate objects, specifically plants, and finally other now “animated”

inanimate objects, such as ships. As is the case with the men who become more equine with their proximity to horses, passengers and ships intermingle. Even as our surroundings assume our qualities, men become vessels: Ahab

cries, “It was Moby Dick that dismasted me” (163). If Moby Dick gains human , agency, Ahab becomes a sailing machine in return. Indicating that he is as well versed in Goethe’s Morphology of Plants as Emerson, Redburn reveals

the connection between this animated taxonomy and the All, between living ships and archetypal plants: I think it would not be a bad plan to have a grand new naming of a ship’s ropes, as I have read, they once had of the classes of plants in Botany. ... [T]he various parts of the human body; which, indeed, is something like a ship; its bones be

the stiff standing rigging, and the sinews the small running ropes.... Every mast and timber seemed to have a pulse in it that was beating with life and joy; and I felt a wild exulting in my own heart.... Then was I first conscious of a

wonderful thing in me, that responded to all the wild commotion of the outer world; and went reeling on and on with the planets in their orbits, and was Jost in one delirious throb at the center of the All. (65-66).

(Melville might also be teasing the young Redburn for his delirium, yet he and his characters repeatedly succumb to these same “profound feelings’ — the Pan/All feeling—and become increasingly bitter that they prove illusory or are betrayed.) If ships and worlds are constructed like human bodies, man is again the measure of all things. This wildly animated anatomy—the ship’s beating pulse, spine-like masts, and leaflike ropes—launches Redburn into another Emersonian reverie with infinite nature. He merges with these “throbbing” worlds of a Mardian universe, with all orbs and orbits.

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Such pantheistic reveries are sometimes overtly prompted by the pantheist’s taxonomical epiphanies. As always with Melville, however, the metaphysical merger is interrupted by the quintessentially banal functions of the body, as Redburn discovers: “But how soon these raptures abated, when... I had a vile commission to clean out the chicken coops” (66). Melville would exchange pulse and heartbeat with ships much as he would, when “feeling pantheistically,”’ with men such as Hawthorne (whom he tells, in describing his own development, that he has come “to the inmost leaf of the bulb” [Correspondence, 193]). But for Melville, the metaphysical aspects of idealism and pantheism are subverted by their proximity to the self-consuming patterns of bodily needs; a cycle of desire and satiation, ingestion and excretion, assertion and ironic revision, and reverie and disillusionment continues to preside over a pantheist episte-

mology. Animation lasts a relatively brief moment before some surge of irony overtakes it, before the physical reification of animism intervenes and the seduction becomes a confidence game. In what Ishmael calls the Atlantic of his soul, animation begins with a kind of conversion, a transformation of animal parts to ships and vice versa; it primarily involves an exchange of skeletal apparatus, the production of a carinate animal body. Worlds have “Himmaleh keels and ribs,” while “all prowling whales, prowling keels, and prowling sharks were invaders” (Mardi, 367, 469). Consequently, the white ribs “of what had once been a whale boat [can be seen] as plainly as you see through the peeled, halfunhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse” (Moby-Dick, 540). (Again, a “whale boat” is also a boat made of whale; these inversions are not merely linguistic anomalies but point to the underlying logic of identity construction in pantheism.) Beyond being the formal subject of prosopopoeia, Melville’s vessels are literalized not as machines but as beings. His ships remain imbued with animated vitality, subject to fraternal welding, and to a pantheistic exchange of heartbeats: “To a seaman, a ship is no piece of mechanism merely, but a crea-

ture of thoughts and fancies, instinct with life. Standing at her vibrating helm, you feel her beating pulse. 1 have loved ships as I have loved men” (Mardi, 120). This is the same ship’s pulse, and the same kind of animated vessel, that sends Redburn into orbital delirium. Because they are animate, ships are depicted as living organisms, and not exclusively surrogate whales, but a variety of species: As Taji tells us, “Any craft will decay; yet, forever

may its first, fine model be preserved, though its prow be renewed every spring, like the horns of the deer, if in repairing, plank be put for plank, rib for rib, i exactest similitude” (Mardi, 399), part for part, ratio intact, reflecting Melville’s circulation of body parts as money in Mardi, which in turn

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reflects Emerson’s strict laws of compensation. All ships sail on Pan’s ribs and

spines. The stun-sails of Redburn’s Highlander “are light canvas which... overhang the wide water, like the wings of a great bird” (64). Ships attain life through the ascription of these animal characteristics: “But what monsters of

canoes! Would they devour an innocent voyager? Their great black prows curling aloft and thrown back like trunks of elephants, a dark, snaky length behind like the sea serpent’s train. The prow of the foremost terminated in a large, open shark’s mouth” (Mardi, 199). Virtually all Melville’s craft are designated as creatures, and this “primitive imparting of life” locates the intersection of pantheistic animism and regeneration through violence throughout his work. A yacht becomes the Fergus Mixolydian of ships, “its masts young Zetland firs; its prow a seal, doglike holding a swordfish blade. He called it the greyhound, so swift was its keel; the sea hawk, so bloodstained its beak” (Mardi, 482). Seemingly inanimate objects absorb the vitality of defeated foes and hunted animals. Even the sea on which these vessels navigate partakes of their animation; hunters on the living world of Mardi believe that whales “run in veins through the ocean,” just as fish swim through the “veins” of its rivers (4). Such figurative images become increasingly and demonically literal in Melville’s work.

Melville in turn transposes the convertibility and compressibility of Emerson's taxonomy to the microcosm of spines, which consequently animate and regenerate his vessels. For seaworthiness, the most significant skele-

tal part remains the human spine: “This ship and I are two brave fellows... Some one take me up, and launch me, spine-wise, on the sea—for by live-oaks! my spine’s a keel” (Moby-Dick, 556). Boats are built on the bones of creatures, and the animated Peguod, recalling ships in Mardi and Redburn, has “a claw

footed look... her venerable bows looked bearded... her masts stood stiffly | up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne” (69). The world is not merely figuratively animated but literally constructed equivalently to men— anthropomorphically on the model of animals, and on the model of man as their highest form. The spine turns out to be the transcendental father of the man, a kind of detachable, vital generative part; but emblematic of man’s division into such parts, “if you be sick of a lumbago, ’tis not you that are unwell, but your spine” (Mardi, 4.4.4; emphasis in original). (When a man is sick, or

speaks the truth, it is not he who is sick or truthful but the god at work in him, the god animating the specific organ. Even in sickness, man possesses no self-identity. Since man is not his parts, he also cannot be responsible for what happens to him; the vital agent of life resides in him, but he is not it. Limbs and identities are equally detachable. Such conceits again implicitly reify slavery: a plague on the foot that is sick, because it belongs to master,

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and is not you.) Modeling himself after Prometheus, and designing a blueprint for anew man, Ahab is ready to embody the world within himself: “By heavens! [’[l get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra. So” (472). The spine, and ultimately the tail of that spine, is the authentic physical distillation of Pan, the condensed, further irreducible microcosm of the true. As configured through overlapping theories of proto-evolution or development and animation, the transcendental spine becomes the ur-part that becomes the whole. The animated body of the world of Mardi is itself just a giant spine, much as the world is only

a giant leat/lobe/orb for Thoreau: mountains are “the vast spine that traverses Kolumbo, spurring off in ribs that nestle loamy valleys veined with silver streams” (544). The pantheist traces variety backwards until he finds the primal unity and archetypal model of a spine. In Mardi, directly anticipating Ahab, Babbalanja promises to “prune” himself to essential type: “I will train myself down to the standard of what is unchangeably true. Day by day I drop off my redundancies; erelong J shall have stripped my ribs; when I die, they will bury my spine” (390). Unravel a man in space and time and you wind up with the spine. In its transformational abilities, the spine also serves as the self-reliant, self-contained procreative organ of the pantheistic man—a moveable phallus.*? Male parthenogenesis takes the place of creation, but transcendentalists create not from their ribs but from their spines. Melville, who depicts worms that grow whole bodies from parts and sharks whose parts assume lives of their own, fixes on the spine as the representative

organ of representative men. Like the body parts so often imbued with what Melville calls “pantheistic vitality,” the spine regenerates its world, pieces of bodies, in its own image (Moby-Dick, 302). The new homunculus, the spine not only represents and distills the man but also replaces him: the man now represents the spine. Truly obsessed with spinal phrenology, Ishmael concludes that the world, and all its skulls, is constructed on vertebrae, and then hoists himself on his own petard: You will be struck with the resemblance of [a quadruped’s] vertebrae to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance to the skull proper. It is a German conceit, that the vertebrae are absolutely undeveloped skulls....[MJuch of a man’s character will be found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that flag which I fling half out to the world.

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Ishmael then recounts that a foreign friend once showed him a foe’s skeleton, whose vertebrae were inlaid in the “beaked prow of his canoe” (3449). These “German conceits” allow us to trace Melville’s pantheistic taxonomy through Emerson’s natural science to Goethe. Many of the most seemingly bizarre and digressive sections of Moby-Dick—such as the entire chapters devoted to whale phrenology—are parodic interludes concerning pantheist natural science.*4

In pursuing a version of a representative, always male anatomy, pantheists seek a universal, animated organ, the one from which all other organs evolve. Just as physical laws translate one another and reflect versions of one unified force, all men and books duplicate one another, are merely versions of the one true representative man or book stripped to type. All men can be traced back to a universal, representative man, and he back to a single, all-embracing part. As noted, Emerson believes that a mysterious principle of life, entelechy of entelechies, inhabits each organ. Living beings are “animated” by this divine force, which patterns living organs according to its all-inclusive design. We can now see how some of the abstract and seemingly disparate principles of animation I have been delineating coalesce to structure aspects of nineteenth-

century natural science in America, which is often a transcendental and Romantic enterprise.

WHAT FINALLY happens to the animated pantheist body if it is not yet commodified but merged into nature? What is the end of reverie, of squeezing, or merging in the celestial grass? The delirious throb ends in a shriek of panic. Well before Romain Rolland, Melville’s passenger takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bot-

tomless soul, pervading mankind and nature....[E]very dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some indiscernible form seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came: becomes diffused through time and space: like Wickliff’s pantheistic ashes.... And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one-half throttled shriek you drop through that ¢vansparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for

ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists! (Moby-Dick, 159)” , Everything in this passage—the transparent air, enchanted mood, pervading spirit, and comprehensive embodiment of thought—suggests a pastiche and recalibration of Emersonian transcendentalism. (For Emerson, the translucence the pantheist experiences in reverie with nature reflects the fact that the material world “hides through absolute transparency the mental nature”

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[“Natural,” 12:5].) On Pan’s “seductive seas ... [so] lulled into such an... unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth that at last he doses his identity” (Moby-Dick, 158-59). Pantheism seduces men, its willing subjects, into merger with the All until they, like Emerson, “become nothing.” The loss, or “transcendence, of white male identity is the central underlying premise of pantheism. What most alarms Melville, however, sometimes comforts Emerson. The thought-diver’s diary entry approaches Ishmael’s subject from a typically inverted perspective: “Go inward & I find the ocean; [lose my individuality in its waves. God is unity, but always works in variety. I go inward until I find Unity universal, that Is before the World was; I come outward to this body a point of variety” ( Journals, 5:177). We should also remember, however, that even Em-

erson was sometimes wary of the enchantment of pantheism, and grew “almost [afraid] to think how glad” he was—“glad to the brink of fear” that his “perfect exhilaration” and “wild delight” in being immersed in nature also veer close to mental illness (“Nature,” 1:9-10; 6:374). While still in that near-hallucinatory state, Emerson, much like Melville’s sailor, imagines “nothing can befall [him] in life—no disgrace, no calamity” (1:10; 6:374). The sequence from Moby-Dick to Pierre, where youthful seduction

ends in dismemberment, is also the narrativization and denouement of such denial. The transcendentalist ecstatically invisible in the woods becomes the invisible sailor who loses his identity altogether. “The Eternal Pan,” who for Emerson also always “hides in pure transparency,” still pervades, enchants, and diffuses (“Woodnotes II,” 9:58-59). But in Melville he draws the life from his subjects. As in Mardi, pantheistic correspondence matches the organs of men’s bodies with their counterparts in other species, thoughts with

their materializations, visible images with the soul, and the shores of the world, until no difference remains between the self and the abyss through which it is falling. Finally in correspondence with the All, the pantheist shrieks, loses his identity, and becomes nothing. Identity for Melville resides no longer in a continuous self but in the process of transformation; our bodies are no longer equivalent to our selves. Even Emerson avers that his body (nature) is self-differing, not self-similar. In other words, the life that Emerson senses within him is never equivalent to him, and will continue to manipulate his body without his direction. If, as both Emerson and Melville assert,

nature “keeps up the perpetual telegraphic communication between” the parts of our bodies, it mediates communication between selves and the parts of selves. More disturbingly, life is never locatable in persons, but only in the

processes occurring between persons. The detachable aspects of the self

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redefine the boundaries of individuality. As we will see throughout Melville’s work, animated parts assume their own lives, and are then partitioned, alienated, and fetishized. In America, an agency that resides in a transcendental god dispossesses us. The world is animated and alive, but at the expense of the pantheist.

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‘A Democracy of Devils’ The Limits of Individualism in Emerson and Melville

Conversation is not permitted without tropes. ... God himself does not speak prose, but communicates with us by... dark resemblances in objects lying all around us. Emerson, “Poetry and Imagination” (8:12)

~ [ropes on tropes!” said Media... . “My tropes are not tropes, but yours are.” Melville, Mardi (494)

Metonymy: Poetry seems to begin in the slightest change of name, or, detecting identity under variety of surface. Emerson (Journals, 13:60)

I

FAR FROM being a formal figure or object of representation, Pan for transcendentalists embodies the principles of representation. Pantheism offers a system of figural language that often achieves unity at the expense of particularity. In Emerson’s pantheism, all similarity and contiguity must remerge as equivalence and identity. Any object becomes universally representative, and itself “represents” the whole system of signification. Metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche in Emerson implicate actual exchange or transformation, pro-

viding the means to achieve a required transcendent unity. Language for Emerson is a tool of natural transformation, a form of universal conversion or translation that reveals the underlying equivalence of seemingly disparate objects and thoughts. Representative men are only placeholders for the real actors in Emerson's system: transcendental laws and tropes. After briefly assess-

ing how these transcendental tropes function in the abstract, I demonstrate their political and social consequences. For Emerson and Melville, U.S. democracy is built on tropes that both universalize and tyrannize. Representativeness—the idea that any object can stand for and be converted into any other—for Emerson primarily involves physical convertibility. 117

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For Emerson, true currency, literal fluidity, is found in metaphors of nature: “The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind” (“Nature,” 1:30, 32). Through this extreme idealism, the world has no real existence. In this context, pantheists don’t recognize any distinction between mind and nature, metaphor and metonymy. (And they often mean synecdoche when they refer to metaphor and metonymy. It can be difficult to label transcendental tropes because they erase the difference between metonymy, synecdoche, and simile: parts and wholes are destabilized; all objects represent one another; metaphors are literalized; and similarity and likeness become identity. A metonymic trope can become a synecdoche or simile depending on how far one is will ing to accept transcendental premises.) For Emerson, poetic language first reveals unity in unlike things; most pantheists perceive, “by and by, when they apprehend real rhymes, namely, the correspondence of parts in Nature” (“Poetry and Imagination,” 8:4849). Like Emerson’s collected work, nature is a universal concordance, an infinite circle of references without a necessary or linear sequence. (As Emerson warns us, “Seekest thou in nature the cause? This refers to that, and that to the next, and the next to the third, and everything refers” [“Method,” 1:200].) For Emerson, the external world is a series of correspondences for the mind; translation between the two is not just possible but inevitable. Extending Gérard Genette’s work, I argue that tropes lose their distinctive function when subordinated to transcendental principles of correspondence. What Genette observes of Dumarsais applies to pantheism; it “sketches a new conflation of synecdoche and metonymy, which are seen as connected since they are both based on a relation, or connection, which is neither the relation of resemblance not the relation of contrast of irony: it was implicitly to subordinate all tropes to the free associative principles of similarity, contiguity, and opposition” (106). Metaphor tends to equate internal qualities, metonymy external ones. But metonymy blurs into synecdoche under pantheism, for any object becomes part of and equivalent to the object of comparison; association becomes equivalence. As Emerson asserts in “Nature,” one becomes part and parcel of god; every part becomes a metonym and synecdoche for that divine whole (1:10). A “metaphorization” of metonyms could provide a means to critique the way aesthetic language supports the political structures of society. But the necessary inverse of this process, which metonymizes metaphors, leaves parts and wholes in unstable relation to each other and subjects—and the tropes that represent them—interchangeable. Given the unified representativeness of the divinity, Genette would “then see that every metonymy can be converted into a synecdoche by appeal to the

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higher totality, and every synecdoche into a metonymy by recourse to the relations between constituent parts” (109).’ In short, with the fluidity of panthe-

ism comes the convertibility of the content of tropes, and finally of tropes themselves. My goal in identifying how these tropes operate under transcendental discourse is to explain how and why the difference between being like, resembling, and actually being is abolished. Transcendental tropes become identitarian (with disturbing consequences in a republican democracy).

In transcendental antebellum discourse, similarity and contiguity are used as indices for equivalence and universality. Just as every part of America can be made to represent the whole, every part can be “transcendentalized”

to universality. Emerson insists that in the moral as well as the aesthetic realm, “it is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men and things” (“History,” 2:5). In such contexts, the supposed universality of whiteness remains closely connected to transcendentalism. Michael LeBlanc proposes, for example, that the fact that Melville’s confidence man can cross the color line through blackface helps us

take a decisive step toward a racial unconscious of confidence games.... [Richard] Dyer’s claim [regarding the only partial realization of white identity in the corporal or racial] suggests that the ultimate endpoint of the confidence man, that ideal point where the material body disappears behind an infinite mutability, is tied up in the Western ideal of whiteness. [There is a] a racial unconscious to the con game, an implied whiteness hidden within the drive to become all identities at once. (14—15)

According to Patricia Williams in The Alchemy of Race and Rights—whose

title also implicitly refers to the transcendental discourse of elemental universality—Americans have had a great need for “the hypostatization of exclusive categories and definitional polarities... transcendent, acontextual, universal legal truths .. . [a way to] universalize their relative [size]” (8, 13). (Or as Quickskill is told in Ishmael Reed’s transcendental satire Flight to Canada:

“You're too...too ethnic. You should be more universal. More universal” [107].) Williams locates a form of transcendentalism as a still dominant force of American culture—part of an ahistorical quest for comforting universality in the face of America’s struggles with diversity. Whether in Emerson’s imputed equation of Walden Pond with the Atlantic or Melville’s invocation of “magnets” that will make him equivalent with Hawthorne, pantheists “universalize” relative size, equate difference, and turn comparison into generalization, all from the perspective of the dominant paradigm.

Pantheism represents a form of ideal universalization that erases difference and particularity. For Emerson, “generalization is always a new influx

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of the divinity into the mind” (“Circles,” 2:309).* From Emerson’s vantage, “the correlation of forces and the polarization of light have carried us to sublime generalizations” (“Progress,” 8:211). “Sublime generalizations” elevate even contradictory, “fallen” particulars to universal philosophical truths. According to Emerson, “a perception is always a generalization: it lifts the object, whether in material or moral nature, into a type.... The philosopher knows only laws.... The game of Intellect is the perception that whatever befalls or can be stated is a universal proposition” (“Natural,” 12:40). Universality is literally ascendant, a higher law; particularity is by definition false, a misperception. As White-Jacket remarks, reflecting on such transcendental taxonomy, “there must [always] be some general law which induced [a] phenomenon’; each particularity must be traceable to a generalizable occurrence (48). A unique, even a relative, occurrence is impossible. In his need for representativeness and the abstract idea of equality, the pantheist typically erases the distinction among tropes. In Remarks upon Alchemy and the Alchemists, General Hitchcock writes, “Thus by way of similitude I have delineated unto thee sufficiently the universal” (quoting the alchemist Basil Valentine; 95). Under transcendentalism, similarity becomes identity, and equivalence universality. Through such tropes of reference, pantheism, in the process of defining itself, comes to define both egalitarian

and “tyrannical” aspects of mid-nineteenth-century America. As Sharon Cameron says of Ahab in The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Mel-

ville and Hawthorne, “like other American characters, he understands the fluidity of shifting relations to promise the conversion of relationship to identity” (67).° This is the very leap from metaphor to synecdoche that Emerson makes over a comma in his description of the man of eloquence and magnetism: “He has established relation, representativeness” (“Aristocracy,” 10:53). Similitude produces the universal, and relation representativeness; they become the determinants of transcendental white male identity.

Cameron also notes that Ahab—and, I would add, the transcendental mind, whose demonology Ahab personifies—“sees no difference between the world and the mind that conceptualizes it. Rather, either world and self have nothing to do with each other or else they are identical” (Corporeal, 67). Such is the essence of pantheist polarization, whose extremes are represented by Ahab and Ishmael. Pantheistic representation polarizes any equa-

tion, any median self, to its absolute terms, the microcosmic smallest and macrocosmic largest parts—the self and god, part and whole, one and All. (And we can survive in neither context: as Melville intimates, “the microscope disgusts us with our Mardi, and the telescope sets us longing for some other world” [381]. The microcosm of the individual is too solipsistic and

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isolated, the macrocosm of the world beyond our comprehension.) According to Wai Chee Dimock, the U.S. logic of “empire for liberty” necessitates a similar inversion: “In each case, freedom is only the positive pole within a double formation, a constitutive polarity of terms.” Dimock notes that “as a self-contained unit, the selfis the seat ofagency” but also of self-consumption, and this polarization creates a “circuit of identity,” the relatedness that defines consciousness for Ahab and for Melville’s short-circuited individuals (Empire, 111, 137).* The transcendental self exists only in and as a circuit of polarities, a switchboard for the relays of similarities and oppositions that are resolved into an impersonal identity. Synecdoche is usually based on contiguity, but for transcendentalists, contiguity becomes identity. In Catholicity and Pantheism, Reverend De

Concilio argues that pantheists can never acknowledge that the infinite cannot appear all at once but only in a series of separate movements (4041). The pantheist denies etiology and creation because he recognizes no differences among substances; developments preexist in the first forms. Rev-

erend Manning identifies, for instance, why pantheists cannot distinguish between aspects of creator and creation: “According to Spinoza there is no such thing as a created universe... [and no] possibility of creation. Cause and effect are but different aspects of the same energy, natura naturans and natura naturata; God, nature... or whatever one may choose to call it, continually going out of itself and returning into itself” (106). For Emerson, “natura naturans, the quick cause, before which all forms flee as the driven snow’ is “itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks and multitudes (as

the ancient represented nature by Proteus, a shepherd)”; that principle of nature appears “in undescribable variety” (“Nature,” 3:179). Emerson also writes that the “perception of identity through endless mutations, makes man know the Proteus” (“History,” 2:31), and Proteus, Pan, and Nature are interchangeable for him. (Emerson is also fond of calling Nature “the Pan.”) For Nathaniel Richardson, in “The Pantheistic Movement,” such ideas effectively bear the mark of Melville’s Confidence Man; his appraisal pinpoints the characteristics of both Emerson’s Pan and his demonological obverse: “Tt is the Word, the great Pan, that humanity adores, under a multitude of pseudonymous characters; all the names of the deities are but epithets of the litany

of that one, universal and eternal God” (564).

This philosopher's transcendental “perception of identity” through mutation and variety is mirrored in Emerson’s prose, in numerous reformulations saying nearly the same thing. Some of this repetition can be accounted for in the recycling of passages from Emerson’s “atemporal” journals, but much of it is aesthetically and epistemologically consistent with his pantheism. Because

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Emerson detects “identity under variety” throughout his work, and his writing practice reflects his ontology, his essays can be considered an encyclopedic poem, each part the synecdoche of the whole. This system of referential-

ity helps explain why it is difficult to treat Emerson’s works—with the exception of his most despondent and “Melvillean” essays, such as “Experience” and “Demonology”—in linear or purely chronological fashion. Lifeless and meaningless on its own, each part is animated only with the life of the All.

For the pantheist, the absolute relatedness of the self to the world also renders the self uncontainable. For Emerson there is “nothing but is related to us, nothing that does not interest us—kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron shoe, —the roots of all things are in man” (“History,” 2:17). Everything is of equal interest to Emerson because everything is a repetition of the divinity. In this sense, Emerson’s idealistic sense of relatedness could foster either Ahab’s monomaniacal relation of all things to himself (tyrannical incorporation) or Ishmael’s lack of boundaries (egalitarian merger); both are

equally divine. An endemic inability to differentiate the self from nature results from the instability of pantheist tropes. In his overtly Emersonian mode, Ishmael asks you to “consider them both, the sea and the land, and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?” (274). Melville’s the-

matics turn Emerson inside out, ironicizing his analogy of relatedness to something in ourselves. Melville decides that identity is a function of what the self can be exchanged for; the sea can be exchanged for the land, and both for an aspect of the self. Much as Emerson insists that nature is a metaphor for the human mind, Ishmael repeatedly proposes that “you could almost see [Ahab’s] thought” (163). (Ishmael often stops short of endorsing transcendental precepts; he voices and is lured by them, but also tries to warn himself of his impulses, and oscillates between Romantic idealization and skeptical reevaluation.) The line between inward and outward—like the line between self and

All, parts and wholes, and figurative and literal—is erdded by pantheistic representation. The act of equation or comparison becomes dangerous because it threatens male autonomy. To the pathologically self-reliant man, dependence is painful, a debt that makes men susceptible to outward influence, while independence is pleasurable and secure, an asset that demarcates inward genius; for Emerson, “a man in debt is so far a slave” (“Wealth,” 6:90). Slavery for Emerson is an ontological, not sociohistorical, condition. The Emersonian self is battered between poles and must be either isolated and incommensurate or merged and representative. Under principles of transcendental metonymy, all things are indebted to one another.

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As Derrida, in a different context, claims of Mallarmé, the use of transcendental tropes “thwart|s] all the contrasts between proper and figurative mean-

ing, metaphor and metonymy, form and content...the more and the less” (17). To the pantheist, who again takes this principle to its most extreme, all metaphor becomes metaphysical in this way; as Derrida suggests, “the movement of metaphorization ... (the passing from a proper sensible meaning to a

proper spiritual meaning through a figurative detour) is nothing but the movement of idealization” (25). The pantheist is an idealizer of tropes, but ironically makes figurative speech transcendental by materializing thought. (Perhaps it was fitting that near the end of his life, as his daughter Ellen wrote, when Emerson experienced a debilitating loss of memory, he “forg[o]t names of people and things, and the exercise of his favorite metonymy, through which he associated epithets for forgotten words, was “on these occasions so witty I wish it could be recorded” [Letters, 1:666].) Melville sometimes resists his own tendency to idealize language by turning his spiritual metaphors back to literal ones, so that, for example, the wind or god’s will is embodied. The final goal of pantheist representation is to reify metaphor, to move from figurative correlations to actual change, or as Michael Cowan says, “to create by metaphor a metamorphic rock” (17). In general but still applicable terms, Derrida claims that the “activation or actualization of

metaphor consists in animating the inanimate” (39). The pantheist makes a career of a specific form of such animation; in animating the inanimate world of industrial America, he literalizes metaphors. Though it is Derrida who makes the following claim, his assertion would not be unfamiliar to Emerson, who attests, “Analogy [is] the key to the universe” ( Journals, 9:ix), or to the Melville who discovers in Moby-Dick the “strange analogy” of nature to the self: “Nature always finds in [physis] its own analogy, its own resemblance to itself, and finds increase there only of itself” (Derrida, 45). As I later argue, Emerson’s laws of resemblance and correspondence make the world so uniformly representative that travel—whether in literal terms or in the substitutions of metaphor—becomes impossible.” As Derrida concludes, “a de-tour is a return tour guided by the function of resemblance under the law of sameness” (73).

All things are identified according to the pantheist’s rigidly structured taxonomies. For each pantheist phenomenon, thete is a correlative category: for example, for each physical horror, a spiritual one. In White-Jacket, the sea is “the stable of brute monsters, gliding hither and thither in unspeakable swarms, even so it is the home of many moral monsters, who fitly divide its empire with the snake, the shark, and the worm” (377). No less than Emerson, Melville conceives of a compartmentalized world through strict laws of compensation: with every real animal must come a metaphorical one, until

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distinctions and etiology dissolve. Absolute size becomes irrelevant, because the comparison through which identity is defined renders things equivalent. Things can be perceived only when they a priori fit grids of classification, which bring them up to the same size and speed. As Melville darkly declaims in The Confidence-Man, “when the duck-billed beaver of Australia was first brought stuffed to England, the naturalists, appealing to their classifications, maintained that there was, in reality, no such creature” (70). If a creature doesn’t correspond to the taxonomical structure, it doesn't exist. The “duckbilled beaver” had no correlative, no analogue, so it could not be represented until it could be exchanged for another creature. A particular or unique duckbilled beaver can’t be taxonomically “processed” until it becomes a universal type, and until it can be synecdochically exchanged for something else. For every duck-billed beaver there must be some corresponding beaver-tailed duck. For Melville, there must be “a wing in the air for every fin in the sea,” and the two appendages become equivalent (Mardi, 148).° Similarly, “the hated whale [must have] the round watery world to swim in, as the small gold-fish has its glassy globe” (Moby-Dick, 169).

The analogy between self and nature returns throughout Emerson’s and Melville’s work; so Taji declaims in Mardi, “Every wave in my eyes seems a soul” (49). One can trace how the structure of the following description, typical of Melville’s systematic use of such analogies, is then translated to other classifications of men: “Those crescents yet unwaning shine and count a devotee for every worshipper of yonder crosses” (Mardi, 554). In Melville, natural signs must be matched to human ones. As Taji and his expedition “sailed from sea to sea... vast empires explored... [they] for every ray in heaven beheld a king” (Mardi, 567). Much as Emerson has his Dardanelles for his every Marmora, in Moby-Dick, just as “our captain has his birthmark,” there’s “another in the sky” (177). Each exchange must subtract from one side what it takes from the other, displace where it adds, and leave all things equivalent with one another. Pantheism initiates a zero-sum game of representation. As a result, pantheist metaphors exchange, or displace, self for All, and all similarity for equality.’ The Melvillean metaphor compares the exotic with the familiar, and ultimately levels both sides of the simile with irony. The quintessential Melvillean query is constructed as a pantheist equation: “But what is an insular fortress indeed, but an embattled land slide into the sea from the world’s Gibralters and Quebecs? And what a main-land fortress but a few decks of a line-of-battle ship transplanted ashore? They are all one” (White-Jacket, 160). It is the pantheist epithet, “they are all one,” that ratifies all equations. What is man but a landlocked version of god, and what is god but an exaggerated

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man? Stretch the shore enough and it becomes the sea; stretch matter sufhciently and it becomes air. The elasticity of nature tethers any two forms together; trees and horses are only men, and land-guns sea-guns in disguise. Such transcendental metaphors—which appear to elide contradiction by equating the unequal—suffuse Emerson’s and Melville’s work. The typical form of Emerson’s commutative rhetorical query compares two disparate objects to discover not just resemblance but equivalence: it asks, what is A but a form of B? Identity is transcribed through tautology—sliding signifers that cannot be independently corroborated and have no resting place. Emerson claims, “Reptile or mollusk or man or angel exists only in a system of relation” (“Poetry and Imagination,” 8:10). They cannot exist in and of themselves, nor can they exist in the modified self-reliance Emerson proposes, save through the corroboration of an immanent deity. Revealing as much about himself as about his subject, Emerson describes Thoreau as referring “every minute fact to cosmical laws,” as submitting every smallest object to every largest: “To him there was no such thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the Atlantic, a large Walden Pond” (“Thoreau,” 10:479). Melville had begun satirizing this Emersonian precept in Redburn: “He seemed to be full of hatred and gall against every thing and every body in the world; as if all the world was one person. ...1 could not but be struck with the manner of the two sea-captains during their brief interview. ... To them I suppose, the great Atlantic Ocean was a puddle” (76). To see the Atlantic in a pond or puddle is in Melville’s imagination the necessary correlative of personifying the world in one person, or later all evil in a whale. Romanticism, as Pierre demonstrates, gives way to monomania and the indiscriminate compression of the world, “as if all the world” were one encyclopedic nature. ‘The Scottish editor James Hogg, who also published the works of Thomas De Quincey, summarily dismissed Emerson as “sift[ing] down upon usa fine pantheism which is to melt god, and man, and nature into one grand harmonious whole” (352—53). As Emerson tells us without qualm, every violation, suicide, or miracle, “however large it may show near us, melts quickly into the All, & at

a distance is not seen. The outline is as smooth as the curve of the moon” (Journals, 12:130). The universal solvent of pantheism again systematically “melts” things to a uniform horizon, a glutinous mass. No distinctions between ponds and oceans, selves and nations—microcosm, panorama, and object itself{—are recognized. America becomes a crucible that undifferentiates

the world: for Emerson, “Nature is the manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces” (“Plato,” 4:51).

Though engaged in constant displacement, and indifferent to absolute measurements, pantheists keep meticulous account of proportion. Anything

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moved must be replaced, anything added compensated for by an equal loss. Emerson denies space and time, the local accidents of history, in much the same way he denies optical scale; the pantheist concludes that “there is no profane history; that all history is sacred; that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time” (“Over-Soul,” 2:297). (In fact, Emerson often phenomenologically doubts the existence of time altogether.) Because “the entire system of things gets represented in every particle,” every particle becomes the entire system (“Compensation,” 2:97). For Emerson, “things are so strictly related, that according to the skill of the eye,” the ability to use metonymy and synecdoche, “from any one object the parts and properties of any other may be predicted.” One can infer any other part and the whole from any part: “That identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great intervals on our customary scale,” such as intervals between ponds and oceans (“Nature,” 3:182). From the disappearance of quantitative, temporal, and spatial differences comes the internal identity of all things. As Reverend Manning suggests, “pantheists are fond of repeating Schelling’s celebrated remark, that ‘all difference is quantitative.’ This assertion of the one, and of the identity of all things in it, is a complete rendering of the doctrine of Spinoza. It is pantheism crowded into a single sentence” (295, 137).

II

Through transcendental metaphor America becomes a house of representatives, channeling an infinite series of resemblances. Through such idealized but impracticable metaphors, pantheists dream of codifying one book. They embody the abstract and universalize the particular. Such a process also marks

the monomaniacal or “primitive” tendency of a Westernized pantheism to animate and literalize metaphor. In the West, only those too close to nature fail to distinguish between the figurative and the literal. For Jung, “if we take our metaphors concretely we return to the primitive point of view” (65).° For Northrop Frye as well, “in all our ordinary experience the metaphor is nonliteral: nobody but a savage or a lunatic can take metaphor literally” (136), Transcendental pantheists—Emerson and Melville, and their “primitive and lunatic” personae or characters—often take metaphor literally, embody thought, and reify what I earlier classified as these “animistic” tropes. Their transcendentalist is again a racialized primitive who reanimates metaphor to pre-Western forms.

To Emerson, nature is the process that translates our thoughts into shapes. Through this ascription of thought and life to nature and its shadow world of mechanisms, an animated rope or harpoon line becomes an “iron

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leech” (Moby-Dick, 385). In Melville’s work, figurative tropés are reified, and the images become increasingly absurd and monstrous, but all the more literal: “A righteous judgment descended upon him in a crab which caught the

blade of his midship oarsman” (354). (While “crab” is a rowing term, here

immediately connoting how an oar can be jammed underwater, I think Melville uses it because it could also double as a literalization.) These are the personifications of nature that only a “primitive” or a madman would accept at face value; but pantheists surmise they are transcriptions of the way inde-

terminate objects assume new identities and thought becomes feral. This process of figuration is particularly evident in Melville’s descriptions of animals, of “faith like a jackal [that] feeds among the tombs” to gather “vital hope” (37). Thoughts are projected, transformed, and perpetually given “natural” form. Through such syllogisms, the sea behaves “as if its vast tides were a conscience”; Ahab’s conscience in turn resides “in this ship’s keel,” while it seems as if “guilty beings [were] transformed into those fowls and these fish” (234, 474). Following Emerson, Melville turns metaphors, “as ifs” and “likes,” into assertions of identity—into “is” and “becomes.”

Transcendental tropes reify their claims—so that ajudgment appearsasa_ crab—but also equate those reified forms, so that the crab is only a squat, crusty version of a man. No hierarchy applies to the sides of the equation, only continual reference. Surface variety again proves ulterior unity. For Emerson, a fin must also exist for every wing: “Not only resemblances exist in things whose analogy is obvious, as when we detect the type of the human

hand in the flipper of the fossil saurus, but also in objects where there is great superficial unlikeness. ... The river, as it flows, resembles the air that flows over it; the air resembles the light.... Each creature is only a modification of the other; the likeness of them is more than the difference, and their radical law is one and the same” (“Nature,” 1:43-4.4). As a result, a muskrat is “only man modified to live in a mud-bank. A fish in like manner is man furnished to live in the sea” (“Natural,” 12:22). Melville facetiously invokes these same naturalist sentiments in Redburn, where “land-sharks [and] landrats,” the servants of landlords, devour men “limb by limb”; they can be understood only as versions, or subspecies, of their familiars in the animal kingdom (138). Through pantheism’s version of “development,” animals metaphorically

evolve into one another.'° In Moby-Dick, for all the mystic majesty of the whale, some truth resides in Flask’s Emersonian impression that “the wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least water rat” (119). The rat, in other words, is a microcosm of the whale. Pantheists seem incapable of defining an object as a thing in itself, and can interpret objects only in relation; as suggested in the context of animation, a horse is not a four-legged

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animal that trots, but a man with extra limbs and bad teeth. (Though Emerson believes it is not merely the eye that relates unrelated things. He laboriously chronicles that man is composed of the same matter and in the same manner as other animate, and formerly inanimate, objects.) Through the laws of radical relation, pantheists magnify, elongate, or shrink forms until they coincide."! At this point, an appropriate thematic of reified metaphor to assess in more depth involves the aforementioned representation of body parts as metaphorical and literal currency. For Emerson, nature circulates tropes in an infinite but closed economy. Currency serves as one emblem of transcendental representation and identity; fluid matter corroborates fluid mind. All objects are “currencies” because they can be translated into one another, and are as “all-plastic” as money. To allege you can't convert something—which Melville finally does—is like trying to use an unexchangeable currency, a Soviet ruble of meaning, or like saying you can't get there from here. In a journal entry appropriately titled “Flowing

Religion,” Emerson’s pundit suggests that the various names of god are “symbols like coins of different countries, adopted from local proximity or convenience... but they all represent the value of corn, wool, and labor, and are readily convertible into each other, or into the coin of any new country” ( Journals, 7:4.49-50). Just as evil is always convertible to good for Emerson, tangible goods are convertible to symbols, and that convertibility proves the commensurability of all cultures and forces. Pantheists claim that ideas are not just the purest but the only forms of currency, including in themselves all others. As Emerson succinctly indicates, “money is representative and follows the nature and fortunes of the owner” (“Wealth,” 6:101). Money is representative because it is a pure sign or idea, an external coordinate that remaps the internal. For Emerson, labor and capital are the outward symbols of the inward man (in ways rhetorically consistent with the externalization of the soul we find throughout Moby-Dick, even when that concept is mocked). But even the early Melville is suspicious of the “representativeness’ of money. In Mardi, for example, an old miser, smitten with the teeth of an attendant of Taji’s entourage, offers to buy the contents of his mouth, “one tooth of the buyer for every three of the seller’s,” which seems a mercantile absurdity. But Babbalanja points out that “this is the very principle which regulates all barterings. For where the sense of a simple exchange of quantities, alike in value?” (392). In other words, from the pantheist’s socially

alienated perspective, market exchanges must be mercantile absurdities. Bartering—a form of synecdoche—involves an equating of the unequal, rendering difference the same through comparison and exchange. In nature, such

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exchanges are sublime; in society, appalling. Literalizing the market to its extremes, Melville finds that analogy simply exchanges either quantities that are exactly alike in value, which is senseless, or objects wholly unalike in value,

which is senseless and mortifying. The self follows suit, becoming either equivalent to (merged with), or incommensurate with (fragmented from), the other objects that define it. No room is left for the mutually beneficial exchange of unlike objects, for a comparison that accommodates difference. The systematic use of versions of such “dental money” locates the self/body as the center of representation; but it also decenters it, leaving it fissionable and locat-

able anywhere, in any of its necessarily detachable parts (Mardi, 398). In Pierre, one must exchange the parts of one’s own body to earn a living, but by The Confidence-Man, any remaining faith in such an economy has been betrayed: “‘How can I repay you?’ ‘By giving me your confidence’” (74). Repayment as revenge—the offering of an equivalent trope of translation—becomes an Ahabian obsession; every missing (body) part must be paid for to maintain the whole. (Melville decides that confidence and souls should never be bar-

tered, but finds that nothing can remain outside the system of payment.) Transcendental confidence and faith are the commodities that wind up being lost, and most highly prized, in this system of exchanges. Instead of missing | teeth, men wind up missing limbs, confidence, and identities, none of which can be replaced. The Melville who rewrites the rule of a tooth for a tooth from Babbalanja to Ahab, of a transcendental eye for an eye in Mohi, becomes disillusioned with the alternative that was supposed to transcend, not duplicate, what he saw as American ideology. The equals sign and the dollar sign become indistinguishable emblems of a demonological system. We will see these tropes of exchange lead to dismemberment.

I] The systematizing of science has fallen into pantheism or syncretism. ... | [Modern science tyrannizes in secret over the intellects of men. ... Rationalists and pantheists cannot deny this. The Catholic World (New York), September 1871 (457)

Our recent culture has been in natural science. ...[A]nd the next lesson taught is the continuation of the inflexible law of matter into the subtile kingdom of will and of thought. ... [I]f the ball never loses its way in its wild path through space, a secreter gravitation, a secreter projection rule not less tyrannically in human history, [and] keeps the balance of power from age to age unbroken. Emerson, “Worship” (6:218-19)

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As Tzvetan Todorov argues in The Conquest of America, “the postulate of equality involves the assertion of identity”; in America, the need for men to be equal can feed into the need for universal, and finally tyrannical, equivalence (167).’* In pantheism, representation “tyrannizes” the particular elements of the equation. Emerson addresses exchange through the “men of the mine, telegraph, mill, map and survey, —the monomaniacs who talk up their project. ... [H]ow did our factories get built? ... This speculative |emphasis in original] genius is the madness of a few for the gain of the world. The projectors are sacrificed, but the public is the gainer. Each of these idealists, working after his thought, would make it tyrannical, ifhe could” (“Wealth,.” 6:93-94). It is as if Melville systematically dramatizes these “ifs” at the end of many of Emerson’s assertions and overturns their assumptions. Where Emerson believes that good will come of evil, Melville decides that the speculative genius undoes himself and those around him. Melville maps the demonology of Emerson’s theory of pantheist idealism in Ahab and the Confidence Man. Working after their thoughts, most of Melville’s protagonists wind up either tyrannical, like Ahab, or tyrannized by their idealism, like Ishmael. The

naive Romantic protagonist, the youthful Ishmael, and the post-Romantic paranoid, the adult Ahab, are inversions of the same principle, subsequently replayed in one person in the youthful, then embittered, Pierre. Ishmael and Ahab experience these sometimes overlapping forms of complementary para_ noias, and must decide whether it is better for everything to connect or not to connect at all: no middle ground between the polarities exists.

In this context it is Hawthorne who concisely depicts the grim identity between the polar opposites generated by pantheistic discourse. Just as Mohi

in Mardi decides that mirth and sorrow are close kin (613), the narrator of The Marble Faun situates identity through polarity, and that polarity as constitutive of transcendentalism: “Pan, and the god of wine, and he of sunshine and music... and all evolving, as their moral, a grim identity between gay things and sorrowful ones. Only give them a little time, and they turn out to be just alike!” (227). In The Blithedale Romance, Coverdale complains

of the “fixed idea” of transcendental minds—the corollary of an Ahabian anti-transcendental monomania, which, true to the Emersonian principle of transformative nature, “combin|es] constant transition with intolerable sameness” (38). Himself becoming fixated on this “prolonged fiddling upon one string, —such multiform presentation of one idea!” Coverdale begins to see things in terms of their “general sameness,” and to glimpse people “as cut out on one identical pattern, like little wooden toy people of German manufacture” (56, 149). In both novels Hawthorne suggests that transcendentalism is both cause and effect of a perverse fixation with finding grim identities.

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The notion of representative identity, or unity under variety, is the basis for most pantheist systematizing. Emerson of course requires that things be absolutely commensurate: “It is necessary to suppose that every hose in nature fits every hydrant” (“Natural,” 12:20). This a priori “principle of identity,’ if not its rudimentary intimation of a kind of heterosexual harmonic convergence, requires that all disparate elements fit under categories of similarity, contiguity, and commensurability. Thus Emerson proposes in “Nature”

that “it is not so pertinent to man to know all the individuals of the animal kingdom, as to know whence and whereto is this tyrannizing unity in his constitution, which evermore separates and classifies things, endeavoring to reduce the most diverse to one form” (1:67). The “tyrannizing unity” that reduces di-

versity to one form is a dominant feature of American pantheism. Whether applied to the antagonistic forces of nature, the antagonisms among cultures, or the seemingly unique duck-billed beaver, this tendency resolves difference to a transcendent sameness. In “The American Scholar,” Emerson argues that

there is |

never a beginning, there is never an end to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself. .. . Classification begins. To the young mind, everything is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it learns how to join two things, and sees in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground, whereby contrary and remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem.... [H]e and it proceed from one root. (1:83-85)

The pantheist’s “tyrannical unifying instinct” refutes or transcends contradiction, bending things to a common representation, to a point where Ishmael’s and Ahab’s obsessions seem to converge. Though couched in this typi-

cally floral unity, Pan’s reign is one of instinctive power and tyranny (and Emerson repeatedly identifies Pan as such a “behemoth of instinct.” Emerson iterates in “Natural History of Intellect” that “this reduction to a few laws, to one law, is not a choice of the individual, it is the tyrannical instinct of the mind” [12:20-21]). Transcendentalism is a system of identitarian tropes that eviscerate the choice of any individual and reduces or “levels” all contradic-

tion to harmony. Ahab personifies this tyrannical reduction to one law, but he monomaniacally rebels against the “nature” that imposes his monomania on him. As Emerson continues in “The American Scholar”: “The chemist finds

proportions and intelligible method throughout matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts. The

132 ¢ Chapter 3 , ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact; one after another, reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to their class and their law” (1:85). All

foreign constitutions and remote parts are naturalized, all particularity universalized. Or as Emerson adds in “Intellect,” enacting his own claims, “the intellect pierces the form, overleaps the wall, detects intrinsic likeness between remote things, and reduces all things into a few principles” (12:326). Transcendentalism turns out to be a kind of tyrannical cooking reduction. In the land of democratic egalitarianism, of millions of isolated individuals, the system of universal representation can account for only “one law” and one mind, and must incorporate, reduce, and dissolve all remote customs, constitutions, and geographies’?

For Emerson it is in this case the young mind that resists correlation but that becomes “tyrannized” by classification as it matures. Maturity coincides with the eradication of the individual, and of any subject-object distinction. But forced “maturity” is just another name for tyranny, as the rapidly aging Pierre discovers. By the time of The Confidence-Man, the “original storyteller,” transformed from the All of nature to Archimago, has become so powerful that the self can maintain no identity, and Melville cannot describe the Emersonian representativeness that “tyrannizes” him: “I wish I could [tell] you in my own words, but unhappily the original story-teller here has so tyvannized over me, that it is quite impossible to repeat his incidents without sliding into his style” (207). To the transcendentalist, dependence, influence, imitation, and magnetism can all become tyrannical unless projected onto nature. Ahab’s social tyranny, which evolves into the corporate pantheism of Pierre, winds up the tyranny of representation itselfin The Confidence-Man. But that novel’s final universal story turns out to be the same tale of seduction and betrayal told over and over with minor variations, a tyranny of narrative stasis. IV We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins. Emerson, “Nominalist and Realist” (3:2.46)

In Hivohitee’s eyes, [even] the greatest [corporeal] demigods were as gourds. Melville, Mardi (332)

Pantheism allows Emerson temporarily to harmonize mutability and identity; the unique becomes sufficiently universal and inclusive to represent all other objects and transcend its own particularity. But man winds up more closely resembling a plant, a transcendental sage, than an “individual,” because he must be stripped of particularity to attain representativeness. Pan-

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theism relies on a course of generalizations, requiring the idealization of any part to a system, any individual instance to a rule or type; it also requires that any emblem become actually equivalent to what it merely represents. That the sequence of any trope must be commutative also means that the whole or divine can be shrunk back to, and represented in, the individual, leaving Emerson continually in motion between nothing and All.

In the American Renaissance, the transcendental formulas prescribing the boundaries of divine identity, with a few contortions, determine those prescribing male identity. Emerson’s Pan, yesterday a pine, tomorrow a bundle of grass—‘clothed in a leopard skin to signify the beautiful variety of things,” but literally “representative of thee, man”—is great by virtue of his ability to represent (“Method,” 1:205). (When Ahab describes his “tawny” crew as “Pa-

gan leopards,” “unrecking” and virtually pre- or post-conscious in nature [164], he also invokes the spurious but commonly circulated etymology that derives the word “leopard” from the Greek word panther, or pan-beast—a cultural association of leopard and Pan that modernists such as Joyce and Lawrence revive.) While signifying variety, Pan represents unity. During moments of sublime transcendence, which many male American Renaissance writers seem to have shared, being most representative simultaneously means being most individual. Representativeness, however, conflicts with individuality. Pantheists such as Emerson attempt to reconcile these lauded but antagonistic American virtues by claiming they coincide in genius. But representativeness inflates a partiality to an inclusive wholeness; such universalizing and generalizing generate a form of coercion, misrepresentation, and finally tyranny. This sequence, at _ least in part, arises as an outgrowth of Emerson’s Unitarianism, in which Christ is a mortal man, a particular individual, but must also represent divinity, universality, and the All. Such a tension parallels the uneasy relation between, yet mutual dependence of, extreme egalitarianism and hierarchies of divine power in pantheism. Christ is not a specific redeemer or miracle worker but a representative of the continual infusion of divinity in each man, and embodies the idea of being universally representative. In being equally able to represent divinity, each man becomes all-inclusive: to Emerson, “In some sort, the end of life, is that the man should take up the universe into himself, or, out of that quarry leave nothing unrepresented” ( Journals, 11:4.40). But such inclusive representation is possible only when the self is amorphous and the universe a chameleon: “Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself” “Experience,” 3:79). The universe falls into us, and we devour it; but the process also works in reverse, and the pantheist falls from reverie into the abyss.

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The individual never survives the process of pantheistic representation. In the end, Emerson is interested only in the “moments in the history of heaven when the human race was not counted as individuals, but was only the Influenced, was God in distribution, God rushing into multiform benefit” (““Method,” 1:210). Contrary to popular conceptions of his notion of self-reliance, Emerson rarely considers anyone or anything in individual terms. His laws of convertibility and transference promise a compensatory unity, but Emerson concedes the price to be paid: “These forces are in an ascending series, but seem to leave no room for the individual” (“Perpetual,” 10:72). As Emerson writes, “Pan, that is All... disdain{s] particulars” (“Natural,” 12:35-36). (Such disdain for particularity is often expressed with a violent affect in Emerson’s thought; when he asserts that the law of Nature “disdains words,” Emerson also adds that it dissolves persons [“Fate,” 6:49].) Representativeness leaves no room for the individual, who is redeemable only so far as his idiosyncrasy is eradicated, and he represents some larger, particularly some national, truth.'* He is targeted as the representative specimen of the taxonomist who sees only the ideal, the national, the universal, and the ahistorical; the very term “representative man” is then an oxymoron. Men are as individuated as pumpkins; only the species matters. Emerson can claim that “under-

neath the inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection,” but that trivial particularity is male individuality. White male individuality is universal: an individual white male is irrelevant. As noted, for Emerson, the individual is always wrong (“Experience,” 3:69).

Vv

An infinitesimal part becomes a just representative of the All. Emerson ( Journals, 12:58)

In his letters to Hawthorne, Melville enthusiastically describes his initial merger with nature, as legs become shoots, hair becomes leaves, and the parts

of his body become indissociable from one another and his surroundings. But he again counters that such pantheism falsifies by its insistence on the universal application of transient experience. Like guidebooks, such feelings refer to the fleeting and particular “real” rather than the ideal, and can be used only to describe and never to predict. But such is the inflation of transcendental metaphors: they generalize what is incomparable, immeasurable, or otherwise unique. For the pantheist, experiences and objects are intelligible only as either incomparable, unique, fixed, and autonomous, or as comparable, universal, contractible, and expandable.

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In one of Emerson’s dreams, a seer suggests that what “is conveyed to one

man by the name and rites of Pan or Jehovah” is represented by animals, politics, or electromagnetism to others. To Emerson, this apparent relativity reveals only the ulterior universality of what is represented. As Goethe claims, “to recognize God in all his manifestations, that is true holiness on earth” (Manning, 192). Emerson spins out the consequences of seeing god simultaneously in all things rather than sequentially; his sage promises “that the doctrine of Pantheism or the omnipresence of God would avail to abolish the respect of circumstance, or the treating all things after the laws of time

and place, and would accustom men to a profounder insight” (Journals, $:552). Such idealism becomes especially crippling to the possibility of political reform, and its mystical indifference to reality can be expressed in frighteningly millennial terms in Emerson: this is the “screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower, and thou shalt be known only to

thine own.... And this is the reward: that the ideal shall be real to thee, and the impressions of the actual world shall fall like summer rain, copious, but not troublesome, to thy invulnerable essence” (“Poet,” 3:41-42). (In a fundamentalist appropriation of Emerson, this passage could offer a familiar invocation to the initiates who would be shielded from a worldly holocaust.)

Emerson conceives of his pantheism as an esoteric doctrine that should be accessible only to initiates, and not understood by the general public. Mel- | ville inverts this rhetoric of a “sheathed” flower in Pierre, where, in a longrunning mixed metaphor, a botanical pantheism fails to sheath the sword of male individuality. Always speaking from behind the screen of Pan—which, as the universal flower, also hides and then reveals its sexuality—Emerson extols “the universal sense”; in “Self-Reliance” he declares, “To believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius” (2:45).

That genius can also become tyrannical, for example, in the Ahab who believes that he should represent and contain all others: “They were one man, not thirty. ... [AJI the individualities of [his] crew... all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal” (557). Such a formulation

of genius also corroborates the idea that private gain and virtue will be synonymous with (but actually supplant) the public good. But the transcendental genius is not “self-reliant”; he is dispossessed by god, some external force, agency, or representative law. Transcendental “self-reliance” requires the evacuation, if not the tyrannical displacement, of individuality.

It is at this juncture that Emerson must confront the polarities of pantheism, where the self must either dissolve in or contain the All. When pressed, Emerson acknowledges that his belief in genius might be puerile and even dangerous: “What more facile than to project this exuberant selfhood into

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the region where individuality is forever bounded by generic and cosmical laws,” which is where Pan purges the self of particularity (“Demonology,” 10:22). Through much of “Demonology,” Emerson perceives that the merger of individual heart with universal mind is a horrible mismatch. Still, Emerson usually deifies such personal projection because nature promises to reconcile these conflicting visions through sublime generalization. “Art [is] nature passed through the alembic of man,” and “a single object [or person] is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace” (“Nature,” 1:24). Emerson insists that in the moral as well as aesthetic realm, only universal nature gives worth to particular manifestations (“History,” 2:5). Trying to come to terms with his early suspicions about such Emersonian individuality, Melville harangues himself in the catechisms of Mardi, worrying that unity will tyrannize men in a democracy. Here he begins with the same “Away!” he later bids his “chattering Spinozan apes” in Pierre: “Away! As unerring justice dwells in a unity, and as one judge will at last judge the world beyond all appeal, so does man come nearest the mark when he imitates that model divine. Hence one judge is better than twelve” (185). This lone judge represents tyrannical unity, a composite or reduction of the variety of society, not a democracy of dialogical voices. Throughout Mardi, Melville struggles to maintain the concept of individuality in the face of transcendental representativeness. Individuality becomes a comic illusion clung to in the face of its manifest impossibility. Our

categories of individuation turn out to be trivial and insupportable; like Emerson's pumpkins, Melville’s characters are often not individuals but only “individualized by a distinctive name bestowed upon them at birth” (333). (This is not to deny that many of Melville’s characters are well drawn, but to argue that they often do not themselves believe in traditional concepts of demarcated individuality, and that Melville produces as many types—from his eponymous and pseudonymous characters of Typee, White-Jacket, and The Confidence-Man, to characters whose true names are shrouded, such as Taji and Ishmael—as “realistic” characters.) Whether innate or earned, individuality is contrived and insignificant, paradoxically bestowed before men can even be said to exist. They never choose its identifying marks, only receive them. Some of Melville’s anxiety regarding identity should be placed in the context of this transcendental system of instabilities. The often phallic, impersonal distinguishing of men remains one of Mel-

ville’s central concerns. As Taji later iterates, inverting his previous pronouncement, “for, after all, this gaining a name is but the individualizing of a man, as well achieved by an extraordinary nose as by an extraordinary epic” (Mardi, 378). Throughout Melville’s works, the most seemingly rea-

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sonable marks of identity alternate with the most arbitrary, reducing both to the level of the ridiculous. White-Jacket sees himself as a kind of trademark, “individualize|d only by] ‘that white jacker’” (121). The ease with which superficial and impersonal designations differentiate men renders individual-

ity transitive; as easily could another tailor, wear, and become the white jacket. Identity can be passed around like a garment, for it exists external to the host. Confronting such a lack of intrinsic identity, the younger Melville hopes that being representative will guarantee a self.

Reprising the pattern of Melville’s early novels, the adolescent Pierre begins his life as the apotheosis of Emersonian individuality. Affirming the era’s suspicion that pantheism will prove “seductive” to ardent young minds, Pierre spends most of his time pursuing and retreating from its lures. But a repeated, failed attempt to attain a representative identity shapes a kind of regression from Mardi to Pierre, as Mardi’s nation of Vivenza (America) is

distilled into Pierre’s mythical, all-representative, and doomed American character Vivia. Youthful representativeness is as crucial an issue for Melville as for Emerson. This passage from Pierre amends Emerson’s description of Thoreau as a man possessing a wholly foreshortened perspective: “That all comprehending oneness, that calm representativeness, by which a steady philosophic mind reaches forth and draws to itself, in their collective entirety, the

objects of its contemplations; that pertains not to the young enthusiast. By his eagerness, all objects are deceptively foreshortened; by his intensity each object is viewed as detached; so that essentially and relatively every thing is misseen by him” (175). An “all comprehending oneness” is equivalent to pan-

theist representativeness. Instead of maturing, Pierre becomes more tyrannized by what Emerson calls an instinct for unity. Age delivers Melville's pantheist only from a pursuit of unity to his imprisonment by it; hence the passage of time in and among Melville’s works often marks a fixed spiral of degeneration. Pierre's interest in representative democracy also follows an Emersonian sequence. At first, Pierre resists the tyranny of unification. “Millions of circumstances modify all moral questions,” he says. “Yet, by one universal maxim,

to embrace all moral contingencies, this is not only impossible, but the attempt, to me, seems foolish” (102). But then Pierre, following his transcendental polarities, again reverses his own precept: “These are most small circum-

stances; but happening just now to me, become indices to all immensities” (357). Pierre’s disillusionment more darkly recapitulates Redburn’s discovery that experiences must be held in isolation without providing a map to the fu-

ture, and that life manuals—“the infallible clew to all... intricacies’—must fail (151).

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The Melvillean sailor realizes what the Melvillean writer at first does not, that “nearly all literature, in one sense, is made up of guidebooks,” reductions that are always already obsolete (Redburn, 330). One cannot use one object, person, or event completely to understand or anticipate another; yet this is the pantheist’s transcendental objective. “Swayed to universality of thought by the widely explosive mental tendencies of the profound events which had lately befallen him,” Pierre succumbs to an idea his author has already discredited: that one instance is sufficient to reflect and determine all subsequent instances; that the particular can serve as the universal, or that the part can be whole (283). As James Duban observes, even Theodore Parker had warned of the danger of taking “a transient impulse, personal and fugitive, for universal law” (Melville’s, 251); but Emerson tried to situate that “fugitive” Pan/pantheism as emblems of immutable, universal law. But as noted, Melville only gradually accepts, as he writes to Hawthorne regarding the “all feeling,” that “what plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion”

(Correspondence, 194). Pierre starts off midway between Melville’s tendency toward and suspicion of inclusivity. But in the end, Pierre fails to “federate” or “unionize.” Melville reminds us that American pantheism represents a form of extreme transcendentalism in disguise, and the ascendance of All over one: “Yet Plato must not be transcendently great to him (Pierre), so long as he (Pierre himself) would also do something transcendently great. He did not see that... no one great book must ever be separately regarded, and permitted to domneer with its own uniqueness upon the creative mind; but that all existing great works must be... regarded as a miscellaneous and Pantheistic whole” (284). Terrified of a social indebtedness that manifests itself as enslavement, the pantheist paradoxically seeks to merge into a post-individual existence in nature as a defense. No isolated instance can be tolerated unless it is domesticated by the “pantheistic whole”; the domination of the representative genius or great book is supposed to be replaced by the domination of the benign whole, Ahab’s great tyranny by Ishmael’s. Pantheism protects men from, yet also generates, that which seeks “to domineer,” to republish itself in other minds—that is, male individuality. Even Emerson worries about man’s “monomania becom|ing] insupportably tedious” when he seeks salvation in a single source, such as one all-powerful, transcendent book or

idea (“The Method of Nature,” 1:196). Tyrannical male monomaniacs, such as Taji, Ahab, and Pierre, see all things as representative of a god who is All, whether that monomania manifests itself as a quest for lost origins,

white whales, putative half-sisters, or transcendental self-creation. Their

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monomania remains predicated on the quest for a universal deity, or a fetishized idea that one absolutely identifies with, like Pierre, or absolutely ~ demonizes, like Ahab.

VI Each germ of Pantheistic sway, / Whose influence, not always drear, / Tenants our maiden hemisphere... / Hither, to renew their old control— / Pan and the pagan oracles. Melville, Clarel (1.117.159—65)

And then 4e crossed over to the United States: | mean Pan did. Suddenly he gets a new name. He becomes the Over-Soul, the Allness of everything. “Shall I not treat all men as gods,” [Emerson] cries? If you like, Waldo, but you ve got to pay for it.... A hundred million American godlets is rather much for the world to deal with. D. H. Lawrence, “Pan in America” (23); Review of Americans, by Stuart P. Sherman (318)"°

Establishing the relationship between parts and wholes, states and unions, and individual and polis, transcendentalism codes U.S. democracy as a form of representativeness (rather than of negotiated conflicts and interests). For Melville, the tyranny of transcendental representation infiltrates the new republic’s political systems. The “leveling” of metaphor and the unification of space and time in pantheism produce democracy of a kind, a uniform or static operation of universal law—what Melville, concluding where Emerson will not, sees as the egalitarianism of negation and finally death. Tropes, not social classes, are given parity in the New World. Describing Ahab’s inability to find borders for his injuries, and hence his identity, Marius Bewley could also be describing Melville’s difficulties with the egalitarianism of pantheism: “Essentially, democracy is the denial of degree, and, by implication, of limit also. But the very principle of form is boundary and limitation. Thus, the democratic aspiration that would deny the hieratic element in creation ends in a monstrous negation. It is the very essence of formlessness” (107). This denial of degree and limit that potentially subverts democracy— where the seeming opposites of one and All, and individual and nation, become equally solipsistic—also lies at the heart of pantheism. Ishmael and Ahab are both “totalitarian” in denying difference. Ishmael represents the All to Ahab’s One in a mutually defining, closed system. For while Ahab is explicitly anti-pantheistic, his manner of controlling the ship by welding men to his body; his obsession with body parts stolen from him by a silent

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but divine nature; and his sense of a ubiquitous cultural geography of time, space, and law dramatize many of pantheism’s most salient beliefs. In that sense, though we are told that “few thoughts of Pan stirred Ahab’s brain,” the captain is of Pan’s party without knowing it (456). Under the dialectic of pantheism, no merging Ishmael is possible without dismembered and dismembering Ahab, and no Melville without Emerson, or some Emersonian foil. Emerson provides the best initial example of the potentially monstrous formlessness of transcendentalism: denying history, and in this sense the “local accident” of democracy, he promulgates the notion that intellectual progress requires us to ignore “surface differences” (“History,” 2:12). Especially in a presumed democracy, these surface differences are what separate men. As

we saw, Abraham Kuyper claims in Pantheism’s Destruction of Boundaries that in pantheism the traditional “boundary falls away” between state, god, and subject. In political terms relevant to Pierre, Kuyper adds that “the(se] boundaries have been destroyed; why then longer render homage to him who is high and declare those who are low politically under age? Are not rich and poor an antithesis, which, since all boundaries have been effaced, offensively disturbs your much lauded [pantheistic] harmony?” (27-28). Similarly equating boundarylessness and monstrosity, and presaging Bewley, Reverend Dix writes that in pantheism, “all boundary lines are swept away, all differences disappear, all life, all thought, all reason are struck and heaped and massed together in one monstrous lump, one inconceivable aggregate. There is a complete identification, or, which is the same thing, there remains but one appalling chaos” (55). (Or as Emerson insists, “Without identity at base, chaos must be forever” [“Natural,” 12:20].) Melville uses a similar syntax of “massed” bodies to describe the All of pantheism. Dix’s monstrous lump of complete identification recapitulates Tocqueville’s feared degeneration of the monstrous mass or aggregate of American democracy (552).

Through its susceptibility to pantheism, American democracy is set up to succumb to a totalizing vision. Emerson inveterately asserts that “Everything bad is individual, idiosyncratic. Everything good is universal nature. Wrong is particular. Right is universal” (Journals, 2:32.4). But Emerson’s same “universal nature that obliterates all ranks, all evils, all individualities” instead of bolstering universal democracy eradicates it; in this system, “superficial or individual nature,” whether in man or the once human personality of god, is abolished, leaving only ideal agents and impersonal laws (Correspondence, 149-50; Early Lectures, 1:11). For Emerson, “ranks, evils and individualities” is

a redundant phrase. As Slavoj Zizek warns, in different but applicable contexts, “the path to universality goes through the murder of the particular”

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(Puppet, 18). Democracy is based on the coalition of disparate individual parts or agents; pantheism merges these agents into an undifferentiated universal. Tropes alone remain democratic, with no difference existing between parts and wholes, similarity and equivalence, specific instance and universal law. Transcendental idealism leaves only an abstract equality to stand in for an acknowledgment of political or cultural divisions. Along these lines, Tocqueville’s study of American democracy unearths the same transcendental contradictions implicit in Emerson’s writings: Equality inclines men to wish to form their own opinions; but, on the other hand, it imbues them with the taste and the idea of unity, simplicity, and impartiality in the power which governs society. Men living in democratic times are therefore very prone to shake off all religious authority; but if they consent to subject themselves to any authority of this kind, they choose at least that it should be single and uniform. Religious powers not radiating from acommon centre are naturally repugnant to their minds,

which for Tocqueville explains the surprising progress of both pantheism and Catholicism in America (2:29). (Melville surely had Tocqueville in mind when Ishmael facetiously invokes “that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy!” [117].) For such critics of the day, pantheism seemed to be emerging as the natural religion of democracy, part of the surprising resurgence of pagan oracles and animistic transcendentalism in the New World. While the younger Melville toys with a democratic politics that would erase difference, the later Melville charts the return of the old kings, after the apparent revolution; as he writes in Clarel: What if the Kings in Forty-Eight Fled like the Gods? Even as the gods Shall do, return they made; and sate And fortified their strong abodes; And, to confirm them in state, Contrived new slogans, apt to please— Pan and the tribal unities. Behind all this still works some power Unknowable. (2.4.99-107)

| Just as animation and “pre-Western” primitivist tropes recur under New World transcendentalism, so do the old political forms. The return of the repressed becomes eternal return.

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Vi To work in, if we may so term it, and justify God, His divine aggregate, the people (or, the veritable horned and sharp-tailed Devil, His aggregate, if there be who convulsively insist upon it)—this I say, is what democracy is for. Whitman, “Democratic Vistas” (283)

Ideals, all ideals and every ideal, are a trick of the devil... . What has Identity got to do with Democracy? D. H. Lawrence, “Democracy” (705)

Hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals. Melville, Redburn (276)

So, when you see or hear of my ruthless democracy on all sides, you may possibly feel a touch of a shrink. Melville, letter to Hawthorne, June 1(?), 1851 (Correspondence, 190)

Believe me you will pronounce Pierre a thorough going Democrat in time; perhaps a little too Radical altogether to your fancy. Melville, Pierre (13)

For critics such as Lawrence, democracy in America becomes a form of “myself monomania,” an elevation of the self to divine centrality, and the disper-

sal of that self into hundreds of millions of godlets. In Studies in Classic American Literature, Lawrence echoes Tocqueville’s and Dix’s warnings for

the new republic. For Lawrence, European Pan has been disfigured as the American Over-Soul and pantheism as New World transcendentalism. Turning his critique to Whitman, Lawrence identifies his poetry as the final extreme of the mass representation of white men. Here the monomaniac is depicted as an extension of the pantheist, since both seek a destructive universal merger (one that for Lawrence is ineluctably sexual; it most offends Lawrence that Whitman would merge not just with negro slaves but with syphilitic and “evil prostitutes”): “T reject nothing,” says Walt. If that is so, one might be a pipe open at both

ends, so everything runs through....“I embrace ALL,” says Whitman. “I weave all things into myself.” Do you really! There can’t be much left of you

when you've done. When you've cooked the awful pudding of One Identity.... DEMOCRACY. EN MASSE. ONE IDENTITY. The Universe is short,

adds up to one.... This merging... is Whitman’s contribution to American democracy. (174, 182—86)!°

(Pantheistically extending sympathy into a necessary sharing of identity, Whitman is happy to be an evacuated shell or Pan pipe—for Lawrence a

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[sexually] indiscriminate channel open at both ends. Lawrence, whose sexual inclusiveness stops at Whitman’s form of homoeroticism, is scandalized.) In all these writers, democracy in America is a transcendental enterprise that merges the individual into the mass. As borne out in Emerson and Melville, pantheists must then wonder, like Reverend Buchanan, whether “humanity [is] a collective being, or... nothing but a series of individual men?” (135). The idealized mass merging of pantheism becomes a form of debased “democracy en masse.” By taxonomical design and Lawrence’s logic, Pan and the devil are variations of the same figure. For his advocates, Pan in America frequently

becomes conflated with Proteus, and for his detractors, with the hissing and , gliding chameleon, even as the ahistorical figure of Pan, sometimes incongruously, becomes representative of pantheism. As Lawrence traces it, in the Middle Ages, Pan, with his goat’s horns and his cloven hoofs and tail, morphs into

his penultimate descendant, the Western devil, who also attains some attributes of aboriginal tricksters (“Pan,” 23).

The allure of “One Identity” and the “ALL” also partly seduces the more skeptical Melville. Melville might avoid becoming more like Whitman only by reasserting his indecisiveness, suspicion, and perpetual ironic distance from, rather than confident identification with, his own work. In this light, Ahab is not just what Donald Pease recontextualizes in Visionary Compacts as an only retroactively imagined threat to consensual democracy, but the fruition of transcendental democracy (239-45). Myself monomania, in which love is transformed into hatred of the fetishized object, leaves Ahab as much as Whitman the one who weaves—or as Ahab says, “claps up”—all things into himself. Both Ishmael, who merges with everyone—or cooks the awful pudding of one identity while squeezing sperm—and Ahab, who incorporates all

things, are perversions of Whitman’s ideal democrat who represents all things; but they also anticipate the logic of Whitman’s enterprise.

Emerson at times tries to mediate the solipsism of an unexpectedly monomaniacal or tyrannical democracy: Every thought is a prison also. I cannot see what you see, because I am caught

up by a strong wind and blown so far in one direction that I am out of the hoop of your horizon. ... Excess of individualism, when it is not corrected or subordinated to the Supreme Reason, makes that vice which we stigmatize as monotones, men of one idea, or, as the French say enfant perdu d'une conviction isolée, which give such a comic tinge to all society. (“Intellect,” 2:339, and 4.40, n. 1, citing “Natural,” 12:50) (Pantheism, however, imagines almost nothing but excess—excess individualism and antinomianism, excess union and merger, and excess representation.

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As Lawrence Buell pinpoints the issue, ““democratic individualism,’ finally, is also something of an oxymoron” that entails “mass rule” as much as “individual freedom” [272].) This comic tinge, the other side of the tragic monotone, marks the irony bridging the antagonists Ishmael and Ahab; isolation is the universal franchise of democracy. (Ahab, for example, having effectively abandoned his wife, remains alone throughout his life, and the seemingly kinless Ishmael is the lone survivor of that life.) In “The Natural History of Intellect,”

Emerson immediately counters himself and claims, “You laugh at the monotones ... but if we look nearly at heroes we may find the same poverty” (12:51), a power that decays into an underlying impoverished “exhaustion.” In its relentless polarizations, transcendental nature has the same “indigence” of resources, even in creating infinite variety from a limited unity or a few base elements. For Emerson also insists that “excess of individualism” in pantheism can be cured only by the complete merger of the self with divinity. If we read Tocqueville, Melville, Emerson, and Whitman on the subject of U.S. democracy, we come away with a picture of a damaged society of isolatoes whose bodies merge with or absorb the entire world.

Melville had written to Hawthorne that it might seem inconsistent to assert unconditional democracy but confess a dislike for mankind in the mass (Correspondence, 191).'’ In Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre, Melville more critically uses pantheism to characterize the excesses and dichotomies of such unconditional democracy. Pierre sardonically conceives of democratic America as a machine for social transformation: The democratic element operates as a subtile acid among us; forever produc-

ing new things by corroding the old.... [NJothing can be more significant of decay than the idea of corrosion; yet on the other hand, nothing can more vividly suggest luxuriance of life, than the idea of green as a color... [of] Nature herself. Herein by apt analogy we behold the marked anomalousness of America; ... how strangely she contradicts all prior notions of human things; and how wonderfully to her, Death itself becomes transmuted into life. So that political institutions, which in other lands seem above all things intensely artificial, with America seem to possess the divine virtue of a natural law; for the most mighty of nature’s laws is still this, that out of Death she brings Life. (9)!®

But that nature is not for us. Relying on natural law rather than the “artificial” or politically mediated law of European countries, anomalous or exceptional America could perpetuate itself by converting evil to good. In practice, America resurrects by killing, becomes itself over Europe’s dead body, and “creates” life by transforming existing life; the conversion of good to evil is necrophagous. Pan’s Nature is the “apt analogy” for American democracy; its dictates possess the “divine virtue of natural law” in a society

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that transcends history and politics. But the real “democratic element,” as Melville puns, is a corrosive acid.

In traditional eschatology, men attain immortality through god after death, and perhaps then partially lose their individuality. Emerson and Melville realize that this moment comes before death in American democracy. Democratic “leveling” is the result of American pantheism’s representation of

the All as the self; that process is reflected in Emerson’s and Melville’s repetition of phrases wherein “all are” equated through a debilitating homogenization. In Emerson, pantheism offers the promise of incessant transmutation, translation, and resurrection, but in Melville only the promise of equivalence in death; in Moby-Dick, it is only “death [that] alike levels all,” that, for instance, makes Queequeg an equal (477). In Melville’s next novel, Pierre, “hopeless of all other real and permanent democracies,” rejoices “that Death is

this Democrat, still hug|s] the thought, that though in life some heads are crowned with gold, and some bound round with thorns, yet chisel how they will, headstones are all alike” (278). But in life, this “radical democracy” will not allow any man to rely on another, and makes him equal by forcing him to be isolated and incomparable. Redburn intimates as much, asserting that “hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals” (276). By The Confidence-Man, Melville’s shape-shifting Pan has taken the place of Milton’s Satan, who presides over a republic of democratic demons. Melville reprises Milton in mak-

ing a fractious democratic equality—in part, the political bickering that results from refusing centralized authority, in favor of what turns out to be an even more tyrannical natural law—the emblem of Satan’s kingdom. Democracy degenerates into formlessness.

Transcendental democracy turns out to be America’s lowest common denomination, its great leveler. To Whitman, “the absolute soul,” of which each individual partakes, bears “something so transcendent, so incapable of gradations (like life) that, to that extent, it places all beings on a common Jevel... on one broad, primary, universal, common platform” (280). We have seen the effects of pantheistic leveling on Melville’s configuration of democracy. I now trace how this schema affects his representation of bodies. Where Emerson tends to gloss over the ramifications of his natural laws, Melville mercilessly pursues them. For Melville, the “equalizing” but indifferent dispensation of a transcendental ethos has crucial implications for men in a democracy, who aren’t magnified or raised but diminished and razed. W hiteJacket warns: “That saying about levelling upward, and not downward, may seem very fine to those who can not see its self involved absurdity. But the truth is, that, to gain the true level, in some things we must cut downward; for how can you make every sailor a commodore? or how raise the valleys,

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without filling them up with the superfluous tops of the hills?” (168). (This leveling also becomes the “lowering” Ishmael repeatedly experiences.) To raise

the sailor, one would have to “cut down” the officer; Melville engages Emerson's laws of compensation and finds that they level society. Melville’s subsequent staging of transcendental ambiguity in Pierre indicates leveling upward always cuts downward. Under Melville’s revision of Emerson’s pantheism, compensation is again transformed into a kind of vengeance. It is surprising how straightforwardly Emerson himself situates his laws of compensation as an acceptable form of what Melville will term leveling. In “Compensation, Emerson writes: “For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else; and for every thing you gain, you lose something... . There is always some /evelling circumstance” that not only brings down oppressors but also ensures that any equation retains the same ratio of immutable law (2:98). While Emerson predicts that his “tendency to magnify”—to elevate particulars to universals—will again prove “comic to those who do not

share the philosopher's perception of identity” or physical indeterminacy (“Thoreau,” 10:479), Melville finds less comically that the pantheist must oscillate between the sublime and the ironic. Where Emerson magnifies, Melville levels. And the irony generated by pantheistic inversion again represents a form of violence. Melville’s parodies magnify primarily to deflate but are literally cut up, as evidenced by Surgeon Cuticle’s mix-and-match body or Ishmael’s dissection of the whale.

Melville winds up debunking transcendentals and the convictions of U.S. ideology while longing for them to be upheld; hence he vacillates between lambasting these ideals and mourning their absence. Later in Pierre, Melville recalibrates his earlier query about preaching the transcendence of death: Yet the world vows that it is a very plain, downright matter-of-fact, plodding, humane sort of world. It is governed by the simplest principles, and scorns all

ambiguities, transcendentals....[T]hat doctrine which the world actually and eternally practices, of giving unto him who already hath more than enough... and taking away from him who hath nothing at all, even that which he hath, —then is the truest book in the world a lie. Wherefore we see

that the so-called transcendentalists are not the only people in the world who deal in transcendentals. (262)

Ambiguities—the subtitle of the novel—are equated not only with transcendentals but also with leveling downward. In Moby-Dick, the weak and inoffensive are slaughtered (most whales besides Moby Dick are characterized as victims); in Pierre, the poor are deprived of what they have left and seeming friends are turned to foes: these are the ends of transcendence.

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Through pantheism, each man becomes representative because he constitutes the entirety of his world. Yet all other men in the democracy remain representative as well. In “Experience,” Emerson acknowledges as much, offering what reads like a blueprint for Ahab’s psyche: “The great and crescive self, rooted in absolute nature, supplants all relative existence and ruins the kingdom of mortal friendship and love. Marriage is impossible. ... The soul

is not twin-born but the only begotten... is of a fatal and universal power, admitting no co-life” (3:78). At first, Melville hopes to transcend the isolation of the Jacksonian marketplace through the democratic fraternity of life aboard ship, where all men pursue “the same common business .. . all hopeless prisoners like myself... . [I]t was then,” says the narrator, “that I used to feel a certain

love and affection for them, grounded, doubtless, on a fellow feeling. And though ...I used to hold myself somewhat aloof from the mass of seamen... it is quite impossible to live so long with five hundred of your fellow beings, even if not of the best families... without feeling a common sympathy with them” (White-Jacket, 174). But common sympathy and merger prove far less of a panacea than Melville hopes even at this stage. It is when transcendent fellow feeling fails that men become partitioned and isolated, and when it grows that they start to merge bodies. To Melville’s characters, existence alone or “in

the mass” remains equally repellent; they are unable to exist alone or in the community, which again turn out to be deceptively equivalent states. Ishmael repeatedly seeks to remedy such atomization, but he finds men antagonistic to one another and themselves, multiply fractured and divided: “Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own” (121). (As Emerson ironically acknowledges in “New England Reformers,” “the union is only perfect when all the uniters are isolated” [3:267].) In Melville, aboriginal people working on American ships sometimes lose their social identities and wind up as sickly individuated as the Americans start: set adrift on the great white way, each silent sailor seemed resolved into his own invisible self” (dobyDick, 214). (This “resolution” of All to one now begins to mark a social rather than transcendental invisibility, the fate that pantheism, in its subsequent variations, tracks in the next century.) By Moby-Dick, going to sea has be_ come an act of both communion, of joining the common business of men, and of dissociation. Ishmael relates to other men by trying to merge with them, which is as extreme as Ahab’s attempts to incorporate them as parts of his body; both acts deny membership in a functioning polis. Moby-Dick begins as a tale of spiritual withdrawal, Emerson’s isolato fleeing society; a pantheist at heart, Ishmael discovers himself tied to Ahab as well as Que-

equeg, yet at the end he is absolutely alone, as isolated as Pierre (who is

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described as “solitary as at the pole” [338]). Ishmael has taken the pantheist’s circular voyage, winding up where he started, and for all his desire to merge with it, the whirlpool of the All will not accept him.

Ahab remains the monumental figure who will merge neither with Nature nor with the democratic mass and only absorb them; but as even Emerson warns, “to be isolated is to be sick, and in so far, dead” (“Natural,” 12:21).

With his usual uncanny precision, Emerson virtually predicts Ahab as a character who will not accept the overpowering forces of Nature (while still universalizing them). Ifa man “should measure strength with [these forces], if he should fight the sea and the whirlwind with his ship, he would snap his spars, tear his sails, and swamp his bark”; if he accepts these forces, he “uses the monsters, and they carry him where he would go” (“Perpetual,” 10:74). As we will see, that monster is less Moby Dick than (the mass of) other men, and other men’s bodies.

The Melancholy of Anatomy The Body Politics of American Pantheism

All that is separate from us, all which philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE.” Emerson, “Nature” (1:4—5)

He made voluminous notes in speculative philosophy and metaphysics, and arrived at this definition of God: “The great whole is one, and all the parts agree with all the parts.” He records “determined to regard myself impersonally—that is, as an impartial observer... I was constantly inquiring of myself about myself.” William A. Croffut, describing General Ethan Allen Hitchcock, in Hitchcock’s Fifty Years in Camp and Field (51)

The world that I regard is myself. It is the microcosm of mine own frame shat I cast mine eye on; for the other, I use it, but like my globe, and turn it round sometimes for my recreation. Theodore Parker, quoting Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, in “Divine Presence in Nature” (66)

Whitman sings... Iam All, and Allis me.... Very nice. But we don’t like the look of this Supreme Being. ... It is surely the magnified Average. ... We are all one, and therefore every bit partakes of all the rest. That is the Whole is inherent in every fragment. ... But no! With a nasty bump you have to come down and realize that, in spite of your infinite comprehension ... your consciousness is not you....So the new American pantheism collapses. D. H. Lawrence, “Democracy” and “Pan in America” (705-6, 23-24)

Part One: Mergers and Amputations I

THE DISCOURSE of transcendental pantheism reaches its final narrative in the register of merged, fragmented, and rebellious bodies found in Emerson’s 149

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and Melville’s work. The fragmented body reifies the social isolation of Jacksonian individualism, even as fantasies of union in nature are supposed - to allow men to transcend that isolation, in a nation conceived as a union of parts. From Emerson’s transcendental, transparent eyeball to the dismemberments many of Melville’s characters experience, pantheistic discourse figures male bodies as parts of other wholes, or merged with collective bodies, but never sufficient or whole as themselves. I address Emerson's selfrepresentation as a transparent eyeball in more detail later in this chapter, but here invoke it briefly to establish the alienation that seems to preside over transcendental anatomy. Emerson becomes an organ of his own body so he can be nothing and see

All. For Slavoj Zizek, the notion of “an extracted organ without a body” emerges in the “guise of the gaze itself as an autonomous organ no longer attached to a body” (Organs, 30). Emerson’s transparent eyeball, a “transcendent” organ that is a partial object, represents a detached part that Emerson imagines can become equivalent to and coextensive with the self. The emblematic moment of transcendentalism, Emerson’s transformation into the

transparent eyeball might also represent what Zizek identifies as a literalization of the phrase “to cast one’s eye over something”; for “when we see ourselves ‘from outside, from the impossible point, the traumatic feature is not that I am objectivized, reduced to an external object for that gaze, but, rather, that it is my gaze itself that is objectivized, which observes me from the outside” (154-55). Emerson denies the detachment of his eye—though such detachment returns elsewhere in his writing, especially in the death of his son—and turns this objectivization into transcendence; he identifies with the All, with the gaze, and with the racialized Other beyond himself. This process often involves both merger—union with the All—and dismemberment, or fragmentation into a part. Pantheists incessantly exchange or transform body parts and become Others in themselves. Something similar happens to many of Melville’s characters at sea, when they transcend or lose awareness of their bodies, as occurs, for example, in Ishmael’s vision of transcendental reverie on the masthead, or the immersion in the All that Melville describes to Hawthorne. What Zizek terms the “autonomized hand” that reflects me and not I—

some Other part of me—is the gothic mascot of pantheistic discourse. When Zizek depicts a subject who is not unified, “so that some parts of his body seem to lead their own particular lives,” and his “hand does not obey his will,” he recapitulates the quintessential rhetoric of transcendental anatomy. In summarizing the trajectory of the film Fight Club, Zizek observes

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that “the self-beating begins with the hero’s hand acquiring a life of its own” (Organs, 172-73). As | document throughout this chapter, such is the fate of many of Melville’s characters, Pierre most of all. Such figures become dis-

possessed and ventriloquized by their own bodies, which move with the transcendental force of nature that they, as isolated subjectivities, cannot attain. Transcendentalism turns out to be a discourse not of transcendence and unity but of ventriloquism, dismemberment, and dispossession. Pantheists imagine that there is some whole of Nature they could rejoin, and from which they are cut off. But from Zizek’s Lacanian perspective, one should “reject the topic of the personality, a soul-body unity, as the organic Whole dismembered in the process of reification-alienation: the subject emerges out of the person as the product of the violent reduction of the person's body to a partial object,” an Other—what Emerson defines as Nature: all other men avd my own body. We see versions of that violence throughout Emerson's and Melville’s work. Zizek clarifies that this partial object is not “an element or constituent of the body but that of an organ that resists its inclusion within the Whole of a body ... the part of the subject that the subject has to renounce to subjectivize itself” (Organs, 175). In Emerson's and Melville’s terms, it represents the excess or surplus of Nature, the impersonal All. Until Pierre, Melville seems to situate the self as a once whole figure dismembered by society and that might be restored in Nature. By Pierre, feeling frustrated and betrayed, Melville conceives of subjects who have become fragmented and dis-organized. One need not allege that Melville was writing within a proto-Lacanian framework to identify parallels between psychoanalytic theory and a transcendental discourse that can be understood as a fantasy of the Other. As Zizek implies, a character such as Pierre, in Emersonian terms, loses his gaze; it is externalized from him, and his transcendental eyes turn away from him, become partial objects. Zizek concludes that as “bodies are just [the] means for the reproduction of genes, individuals are just means for the propagation, for the reproduction and expansion, of memes qua elementary units of meaning” (122). Melville discovers that transcendental Nature speaks through and usurps us. According to the anthropologist Victor Turner, the “use of an aspect of human physiology as a model for social, cosmic, and religious ideas and processes is a variant of a widely distributed initiation theme: that the human body is a microcosm of the universe” (95). In Musion and Delusion; or, Modern Pantheism versus Spiritualism, Charles Bray contends that transcendental bodies are only metaphors for, transformed and incarnated aspects of, minds:

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This Pantheism is as old as the world.... [It tells us that the] human body is a perfect cosmos, an epitome of the action of the forces of the whole world.

Every action of the body—the heart, the liver, the lungs, &c., —that is now performed unconsciously or automatically was originally performed voluntarily.... “All are but parts of one stupendous whole, / Whose body nature is, and God the soul.” ... Continuing then the analogy between ourselves and the universe... the bridge... between nerve elements and consciousness has been discovered. (41)

The pantheist body becomes an incarnation of mind, and of the impersonal, transcendent laws of nature, which evolve toward the involuntary. But these laws turn the body into a battlefield for social antagonisms masquerading as natural laws. In this chapter I explore how the assumptions of pantheism govern the representation of these “microcosmic” bodies in Emerson and Melville, and how these bodies characterize a divisive U.S. society on the brink of civil wat—a body about to dismember itself. In pantheism, selves and bodies are either figuratively merged into a larger transcendent, transpersonal being— such as the Over-Soul—or broken into smaller, unintegrated fragments and rebellious limbs. I primarily address the conceptual fragmentation of bodies in Emerson and Melville; but I also trace how this figurative rendering of the self both corroborates and fosters the actual uses of gendered human and animal bodies in the U.S. economy. When, as Emerson and Melville discover, bodies are used as inanimate objects—as parts of ships or mechanical implements—inanimate objects, made of once living materials such as wood or ivory, come to be used as surrogate human bodies. If, as Catherine Holland asserts, American democracy under Jefferson “was framed as a legacy of American nature, and national citizenship became imaginable by reference to the human body,” under pantheism those associations were complicated if not reversed (43).

According to Gertrude Hughes, the transcendental persona “is not a psychological entity but a spiritual one” (275). But for Emerson at times, and for Melville consistently, that spiritual entity provides a foundation for the political, economic, and psychological self. While I would not contend that most mid-nineteenth-century politicians acted with transcendental assumptions in mind (though some explicitly did), such assumptions are more pervasive even in power structures than a cursory look at political figures might suggest, and they reveal some of the premises of antebellum society. A po-

litical as well as transcendental rhetoric of fragmentation was common between the nation’s founding and the Civil War. Usually associated with slavery and southern secession, this language of dismemberment also con-

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jured ideas of national rebellion and amputation. Madison, for instance, recorded various assertions that “the union cannot dismember a state without its consent” (1459). President John Adams asks James Lloyd in March 181s, were “we not threatened with more and greater, and even with division, disunion, dismemberment, a dissolution of the constitution, and a total anarchy?” (146). In a speech delivered to Congress in July 1848, Senator Edward Hannigan asserted: “Disunion! It is moral treason to breathe the word!... [H]ow can you dismember us, when Kentucky stretches her arms across Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. You can never dismember us! We will hold the union together with hooks of steel... . You can never dismember the union!” (Benton, 240). During the Civil War, accusations are common in the press against the British and “their openly expressed wishes that the Confederates may succeed in their attempts to dismember the Union” (Anonymous, “International,” 54). Even in 1863, politicians such as Senator Orville Browning of Illinois conceive of dismemberment as the antithesis of union in politics, law, and cultural geography: “Mr. President ...if there be any such thing at any time at her will—causelessly to dismember this union and overthrow the government—there is an end to all constitution and all laws” (Greeley, 566). In a remarkable speech titled “Puritanism and Politics,” delivered to the Young Men’s Democratic Association of New York, on January 31, 1863, Con-

gressman Samuel Sullivan Cox accused hypocritical Puritanism and “the lesser spawn of transcendentalism” of being “reptiles boring into the constitution” (282, 286). Vilifying the elite of the North for fomenting rebellion and disunity, Cox renounced an explicitly transcendental rhetoric of dismemberment. Northern cries for unity are cast against the transcendentalists’ failure to distinguish between blacks and whites, and their attempt to unify the races (299). Trenchant in ways he did not intend, and perhaps with “The Method

of Nature” in mind, Cox asserts that northern transcendentalists unify and equate the wrong parts, and by so doing fragment the whole: “Emerson holds that he is God: that God is everything: therefore he is everything. Do you wonder, therefore, that since he makes the negro part of himself, that he holds him to be his equal?” (297). Those Cox later calls “transcendental abolitionists” represent disunity and dismemberment (357). For Cox, transcendentalism itself threatens the nation: I entreat the democratic young of New York not to countenance any of these schemes of dismemberment, which we of the West will repress... . [We must deny] all sympathy with any scheme which would in any way mutilate the republic... . Jefferson Davis is aware of these things. ... New England fanaticism and speculation have made Disunion. New England stands in the way

of Re-Union!...[T]hat perfect infidelity and skepticism which Parker

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preached and Emerson sang. ... Alas, how fatal has been its direction in national affairs. (284-85, 296)

(One should not be surprised that Cox titled his memoirs Union—Disunion— Reunion.) The “source of this egotistic and arrogant philosophy of the North,”

the intellectual Satans and “universal Yankee|s]” who think they are “the ocean” and “all things,” is “that coterie known around Boston as the Transcendentalists” (296-98). In The Blithedale Romance, Zenobia calls Coverdale “a sort of transcendental Yankee,” affirming the political connotations of the movement (162). Eerily echoing Melville, and displaying a surprising familiar-

ity with transcendental rhetoric, Cox cites a newspaper that asks how is “a union possible—can there be a head without brains or a body without a heart[?]” (299). Such images of dismemberment, mutilation, and disunion are consistently used to discredit an abolitionism associated with racialized transcendentalism. While transcendentalism did not as overtly inform most of the political discourse of the day, its wide-ranging rhetoric of union and dismemberment helped create and reflect prevalent conceptions of individual and national identity. Using his array of transcendental keywords, Emerson both confirms and inverts Cox’s allegations regarding dismemberment; he lectured, for example, that Lincoln’s mobilization “was magnetizing all discordant masses under its terrific unity” (Cabot, 2:600—6o01). For Emerson, the South was not part of any union but an incarnation of duality that finally could be dealt with only through further division: “Gulf as it is, the war with its defeats and uncertainties is immensely better than what we lately called the integrity of the Republic, an amputation is better than cancer” (Letters, 5:252—53). In Emerson’s work the rhetoric of race was never separable from the rhetoric of transcendentalism, and national union never dissociable from Union with the All: “Whilst Slavery makes and keeps disunion, Emancipation removes the whole objection to union” (“American Civilization,” 11:307).

My initial reading of Mardi and Pierre in this chapter, and of a consistent rhetoric of merger and amputation in antebellum discourse, also sets up my final treatment of pantheism as a closed male system of representation. Emerson and Melville ultimately cannot imagine an economy that doesn't recapitulate the divisions they are trying to transcend; they depict their society, from its economic structures to its literary practices, as a marketplace of gendered bodies. Paradoxically, gender fragmentation is the result of an epistemology that in language, geography, heredity, and taxonomy cannot imagine anything but universal continuity. I explore here the relationship between the

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fragmentation and dispossession of language and the fragmentation and dispossession of bodies in pantheism. As Luce Irigaray writes of Freud, in terms pertinent to the enterprise of male transcendentalism as a whole, “he is a prisoner of a certain economy of the logos, defin[ing] sexual difference by giving a

priori value to Sameness, shoring up his demonstration by falling back on time-honoured devices such as analogy, comparison, symmetry, dichotomous oppositions, and so on” (121).’ This perennially quixotic economy of “the same” with one hand renders all things unified, and with the other dismembers them. The pantheist body ends up divided and at war with itself—often

consuming itself, moving involuntarily, and animated by the “excess” or Other of white male individuality, its “NOT ME.”

In their pursuit of an imagined lost universality, American pantheists develop a Gnostic sense of a fractured godhead, one expressed most often in images of fragmented human bodies whose pieces must be gathered. Pan-

theists formulate an American Osiris myth that conflates Osiris with Orpheus, both of whom are associated with an artist who receives his identity from a deified nature, and who is dismembered and reborn. Emerson stipulates in “Nature” that he is “part and parcel of God” (1:10). (Variations of that phrase have biblical and Puritan origins, but Emerson might have derived his usage from Hindu sources and the Bhagavad Gita.) Thoreau echoes Emerson in stating, “Once I was part and parcel of Nature; now I am an observant of her,” again emphasizing the transcendental rift between nature and self-consciousness, Being and seeing ( Journal, 1:378). As Reverend Dix echoes, for the pantheist “there is nothing eternal but that substance, the forms are not eternal; that only is eternal of which they are made... . So that all which you see is part and parcel of god” (26, 24). Melville’s Babbalanja similarly invokes a self that “is resolved into its pervading original, becoming a thing constituent of the all-embracing deific, whereby we mortals become part and parcel of the gods, our souls to them as thoughts” (Mardi, 561).

But even for Emerson the fluidity between man and divinity gradually ossifies: as he later pithily writes in his journal, “God the whole: we parts” ( Journals, 12:454).* Men are parts of, but also partitioned from, the divinity. For Emerson, men are only “god in distribution,” and become the amputated limbs of his unified body; or as he orates in an early sermon, every man “is only a fragment of the divine nature” (“Method,” 1:210; Sermon 26, Early Lectures, 1:223). God serves as a distribution network for these fragmented mortal bodies: “The wholeness we admire in the order of the world is the result of infinite distribution” (“Method,” 1:199). This is quintessential pantheist logic; unity, or whole-ness, is the result of distribution. Melville literalizes and mocks this Emersonian ontology of bodies but finally recapitulates many

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of its assumptions. In a letter to Hawthorne concerning his “pantheistic feelings,” Melville has a similar vision of divine fragmentation, and of a redemptive restoration from “infinite distribution.” He writes: “I feel that the

Godhead is broken up like the bread at the supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling” (Letters, 142). I come back to that godhead at the close of this book. Melville’s quest for an Emersonian wholeness was in many ways peculiar to a white male subjectivity. Failure to reach that whole leaves the transcen-

dentalist facing what Robyn Wiegman calls “a cosmic order in which the ascendancy of the white masculine is no longer universalized, but reduced to its own corporeal particularities” (48), an oscillation that in the contexts [address moves between figurative merger (universality/wholeness) and amputation (particularity/dismemberment and commodification). Samuel Ot ter shows that Melville, especially in the context of his interest in ethnology and race, “associates knowledge with appropriation, representing the ways in which anatomy enables commodity and the parts of the body become vendible” (231). I contend that Melville also expresses his anxieties about race and

commodification in his response to Emersonian transcendentalism, which defined the integrity of white male bodies against the dismemberment of nonwhite bodies. Melville persistently claims that a rhetoric of racial and gender fragmentation constructs all kinds of white male characters—that they are the ones fragmented into body parts. But because he realizes that the demonology of transcendentalism situated Nature as whole and black, and the white man a fragmented part, Melville concludes that merger with Nature is premised on its obverse: dismemberment in society.

In nineteenth-century America, the conditions for this fragmentation most often center on the nation’s racial and class divisions. In Iron Cages, Ronald Takaki notes that Jefferson hoped Native Americans would have “the wisdom of the animal which amputates and abandons to the hunter the parts for which he is pursued”; if Native Americans could “amputate” their lands and culture, they could then “blend together, to intermix, and become one people” with white America (59). In other words, if Native Americans amputated themselves, they could then join the Union. In rhetorically and ontologically consistent ways, the assimilation of American unity—merger, transcendent oneness, or unity—is predicated on (such typically nonwhite) amputation. (Melville, for example, models the disenfranchisement of his “ship-hands” on what happens to the bodies of slave-hands.) But the process, like America’s original political rebellion, comes back to haunt us: the dismemberer is himself dismembered. Men are figuratively amputated throughout the American Renaissance; their body parts attain their own wills and

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become breakaway republics. No central nervous system, no central government, reigns in the willful parts of the body politic. America, the fragment of a mother country, the rebellious part—separated from England by ocean, generation, and its quest for self-definition—figures

its identity as divided, exiled, and partitioned. In Mardi, the self-reliant, parthenogenetic ‘Tapparians “resolved to secede from the rabble, form themselves into a community of their own” (399). Each part—national region, self, or limb—threatens to renounce the dangers of consanguinity and to become its own isolated whole. As Takaki indicates, ““born equal, white male Americans were encouraged to assert proudly how they had no king, no traditions, and no past (even no parents, as Tocqueville noted).” Beyond “loosening the ties of filial obedience,” American pantheists often construct themselves as parricides, and smaller and smaller units, until they split or secede from themselves (12.6, 71).

This dismemberment has numerous implications for the division of labor and gender in the United States. The self-reliant, white transcendental American doesn't have children but rather reproduces body parts: its persona buds. Just as mechanical commodities become animated, body parts, such as teeth, become animated commodities, representative organs (like the spine), exchangeable bits, and sometimes even new beings. This process represents the necessary corollary of pantheistic animation. Where commodities once became joyously animated as living things, human bodies now become fragmented as inanimate objects. For Melville, the cannibalistic use of bodies does not entaila regression to a primitive economy; rather, our economy constructs a version of the primitive or a literal animal economy, a “natural” economy, onto which it projects its own operations. Melville early in his career begins to suspect that U.S. capitalism is predicated on a kind of cannibalism, the extraction of capital from living bodies.? But it turns out that transcendentalism itself participates in the fragmentation Marx locates as the outgrowth of capitalism. According to David Harvey, for Marx “the conversion of labour into wage labour means ‘the separation of labour from its product.’... The labourer is viewed as a ‘hand’ rather than as a whole person....“The absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa, which makes man a mere fragment of his own body, becomes realized’” (104-5). As Marx writes in Capital, producers “mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine” (106). Such rhetoric is consistent with pantheism’s configuration of a fragmented white male identity, as well as Emerson’s conception of modern labor; in their depictions of man’s mutilated body, Marx and many pantheists respond to similar social conditions with similar critiques (though radically different solutions).

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In The Emerson Museum: Practical Romanticism and the Pursuit of the Whole,

Lee Rust Brown reminds us that in Marx’s theory of alienation, social relations can become an autonomous thing, alien from people, and that under the “secular animism” that results, “the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life” (152-53). As Wai Chee Dimock remarks, it is striking “that Marx (like Emerson) ... should choose to condemn what he saw as the ‘fractional work’ of capitalism by invoking the ideal of an unfractionalized whole—a whole encapsulated by its physical body... called ‘the individual himself’—whose much-publicized dismemberment he lamented, but whose original (and eventual) integrity he never questioned” (“Class,” 60).* In other words, Marx is also in his fashion pursuing a more overtly political version of Emerson’s lost transcendental whole, a gathering of fragments back to some hypothesized All. In Signs Taken for Wonders, Franco Moretti describes a form of mass culture under capitalism that is also resonant for the operation of pantheism. As the worker or cause is occluded from the process that produces capital or effect, and as the relationship between cause and effect is therefore inverted in capitalist postmodernism, “ ‘the “whole” has become the “part,” and the part the whole.’ ... [C]ultural fetishism ... is the transformation of a human capacity into an attribute of ‘things’: compositional laws, rhetorical procedures that now appear obligatory, natural, and binding. Their meaning can no longer be understood, precisely because they can be no longer controlled.” When Moretti concludes that “the autonomization of culture, its transformation into an objective form, capable of producing meanings basically independent of the consciousness and the will of its producers, is ideology’s

true cover,” he locates much of the “narrative sequence” of pantheism. The fetishism of commodities produces a fetishism of impersonal laws and dispossessed wills, and the “transcendence” of the individual that capitalism supposedly valorizes (152).

Commodity fetishism complements the pantheist dialectic of the animation and fragmentation of bodies. Marx argues that “the mystical character of commodities does not originate in their use-value” (Capital, 82). For Melville, when use-value is employed to evaluate worth, human bodies become commodified and fetishized without this mystical overlay. Melville chronicles the unnatural and sacrilegious use of bodies in most of his novels. Throughout Mardi, for example, skulls are used as and so become smoke bowls, spit-

toons, and dice cups. This is the nature (or “idealism”) of capitalism, of not alienated but wholly integrated laborers, who become whatever they are used for; their work is reified into an inverted metonymy of the whole for the part. As Emerson predicts, under this radical correspondence “the priest becomes a

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form; the attorney a statute book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship” (“American,” 1:84). Through pantheistic proximity, the worker’s body takes on the nature of his work. No wonder Ahab becomes “an iron statue” (483). Melville’s longed-for evaluation of commodities in terms of pure being is offset by the demystification of human bodies. Being and utility then turn out to be one and the same: pantheism proposes an often hotrrifying, underlying identity. According to Marx, “primitive” societies do not confront alienated labor because the individual is not yet “developed” away from his community, “a narrowness reflected in the ancient worship of Nature.” The increasingly alienating enterprise of the American economy generates an atavistic pantheism as salve and symptom. In these terms, the antebellum American “worship” of nature is alienated because the individual has lost his sense of community; in that worship we locate the breakdown of the relation between man

and commodity, as well as what Marx would call a deanimation, a “strip[ping] of [nature’s] mystical veil” (Capital, 82, 91-92).> When Melville’s protagonists in Moby-Dick and Pierre repeatedly try to uncover what they call the “veil of mystery,” however, they strip away their own identities (Pierre, 41). When

potential pantheists such as Redburn first discover that commodities—in whose category Melville includes everything from flowers to ships—are just as animated as they are, they lose themselves in ecstatic oneness with the living world, a lost brother with whom they have been reunited. But once they realize, like Pierre, that they themselves can become as commodified and mechanized as ships, they fall from their transcendental perches. Even Emerson engages in the fragmentation of bodies he criticizes. Emersonian man is universally representative but also inordinately self-contained; he is stretched to the size of the world, while the world is incorporated into his body. Pantheism’s cultural geography of microcosmic spaces is brought to bear on the body of the pantheist himself. As noted, Emerson repeatedly insists that the transcendentalist must incorporate the world into himself (see,

for instance, “Nature” 1:20). The “inexhaustible” part of Emerson’s man turns out to be his impersonal appetite. Emerson’s well-known dream in which an angel gives him and tells him to eat the world, “diminished to the size of an apple,” is one of tremendous bodily disjunction ( Journals, 7:525). In

these recurring images of divine consumption, cannibalism, and inversion, the engorged body, or part, becomes the container for the shrunken universe, or whole. As Melville realizes, in Emerson’s rhetoric such inconsistency— particularly the inconsistency of malleable bodies—is a form of violence. As Sharon Cameron asserts of Ahab, “projection is too casual a word for an appropriation that converts the world into the self (takes it into the body) or

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the self into the world (diffuses it through the world’s body by taking that self apart)” (Corporeal, 34-35). In this respect Ahab personifies the demonology of Emersonian transcendentalism and its polarization of self and world. Emerson’s style, often accused of being fragmentary, disconnected in its attempts to connect everything, also creates a form of dismemberment. A reflexive example can be seen in Emerson’s descriptions of fragmentation itself. Already in “Nature,” Emerson writes that “words are finite organs of the infinite mind....They break, chop, and impoverish it” (1:44-45). And by “Experience,” where many of his inversions surface, Emerson admits, “I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me” (3:83). In “Swedenborg” Emerson concludes, “Our books are false by being fragmentary” (4:103). Emerson's essays, like his own body, are conceived as the entire world—one that must be swallowed whole—but also as infinitely divisible fragments.

As we have seen, as man becomes equatable with god, the part with the whole, the animate with the inanimate, man also becomes equatable with any fragment. While Emerson would have man represent the deity, he would not

have a fragment represent a man. Against the premises of his ontology, Emerson sometimes tries to claim that “it is forbidden to go out of the All into

the particular, or out of the particular into the All” ( Journals, 12:118). But such is the essence of Emerson’s project; and the frequent result of this panthe-

istic, bidirectional representation—in which the hand becomes the entire body and vice versa—is the disjunctive elongation and diminution of our bodies, whose borders become indeterminate. The corollaries of pantheist magnification and merger are reduction and leveling, and finally the “portioning” of gendered bodies.

II In the 1852 edition of the Course in the History of Modern Philosophy, Victor Cousin perceives two forces, one of divisibility, the other of attraction or uni-

fication, which pantheism takes to extremes: “The law of matter is infinite divisibility, that is, universal expansion. Infinite divisibility is the movement of unity into variety conceived without limits. ... [I]f this divisibility be not arrested—the consequence? The dissolution of all things” (1:96, 119).° The “universal solvent of pantheism”’—to recuperate Reverend Manning’s phrase, or what Emerson terms the “all dissolving unity’—contrary to Emerson’s expectation, but consistent with his terminology, does not merely move variety into unity but also unity into variety. Man becomes an assembly of parts independent of the whole; just as the pond replaces the ocean, the hand replaces

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the man. Even for Emerson, “once man was all; now he is an appendage” (“Divinity,” 1:127).

To the transcendentalist, merger with the mass of men in society causes this fragmentation. For Emerson, social connection can precipitate a form of figurative amputation and is fundamentally unnatural: “A friend therefore is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can afhrm with equal evidence to my own,” see in a friend only a reflection, another “masterpiece of nature” (“Friendship,” 2:204). (The later Emerson, however, does become intermittently more sociable, acknowledging society as the most salutary cordial life can offer [“Clubs,” 7:225].) For Emerson, social interaction is therefore solipsistic, a dance with one’s own reflection in the mirror of nature. In “The American Scholar,” Emerson recalls his favorite Platonic (and Indian) fable of a once archetypal, universal man: “[Society]

divided Man into men.... [This original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered ampu-

tation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters. ... Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things.” Emerson cannot have friends except in the state of nature. Once “god in distribution,” man is now “distributed” into monstrous fragments, a narrative to which Melville often returns. Emerson warns at length that man in this “divided or social state” becomes “the victim of society,” is duly partitioned by being too connected (1:82-83). For Melville, too, most work in his society can leave the mechanic mechanized. In Moby-Dick, for example, the oarsmen “put out their eyes, and ram a skewer through their necks; usage pronouncing that they must have no organs but ears, and no limbs but arms” (223).’ That startling description also applies to Pan himself, the god of nature who is dismembered in society. (At first unable to decide whether transcendentalism reflects the society that fragments, or a discourse that critiques that fragmentation, Melville decides it represents both.) In society, the man who works is deprived of a unified identity. As Emerson writes in his proto-Marxian mode, “a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man” (“American,” 1:84). But this is the

operation Emerson continually performs on himself; to figure oneself as a transparent eyeball is to leave the individual blind, sighted only in so far as he individually ceases to exist. As seeing eclipses being, transcendental sight, which occludes the I, is by its nature a form of divine fragmentation; the body is reduced to the eye, but the eye becomes an entire I. (At the most fundamental level, Ahab is attacking not simply Nature in the whale but the transcendental discourse that dismembers and amputates men in the American Renaissance.)

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As pantheist tract writers frequently admonish us, however, the fragment, eye, or hand also gains its own rebellious volition; transcendental bodies always seem out of balance. Emerson too writes in a sermon: “We shall be parts of God, as the hand is part of the body, if only the hand had a

will.... When we do right, we consent to [god’s] action by our hands... and submit to be his organ” (Young, 132; and see Adams, “Emerson,” 122). (You can do whatever you want, but to be right, you must let god do it for you.) This is another Emersonian hypothetical that Melville literalizes. As we shall see, that hand quickly comes to write for and instead of us; an independent will seeks its own embodiment and power. Just as men do not cohere to the body politic, their individual bodies do not cohere to themselves. In society, the partitioned individual becomes disenfranchised, as Emerson

sharply laments in his journal: “I have then no eye to see the right, —no fingers to feel it. I have only vicious members loving & doing wrong” ( Journals, 3:168). Much as Melville decides that nature /evels men, Emerson insists, “To no part is aught given without some thing being taken from some other part” ( Journals, 12:119). Society’s truncations are supposed to be balanced through nature’s laws of compensation; but by Emerson’s law of the conservation of mass, to merge one thing is to partition another. Emerson at times alleges that when “Nature goes to create a national man, she puts a symmetry between the physical and intellectual powers. She moulds a large brain, and joins to it a great trunk to supply it” (“Aristocracy,” 10:43). But as he bluntly admits in “Compensation,” the heart is lost to the head: “If the head and neck are enlarged, the trunk and extremities are cut short” (2:97). (Such was always Melville’s professed concern regarding Emerson’s overly cerebral work, a distrust likely literalized in Ahab.) As Pierre worries, “plus head, minus heart” (320). Leveling only cuts downward, and bodily mergers are met with balancing truncations. Throughout his work Emerson warns that social connection dismembers men; rarely does he put it more simply than in “Prudence”: “Society is oficered by men of parts, as they are properly called, and not by divine men” (2:231). So subdivided, man is “spilled into drops” that “cannot be gathered”; he winds up a collection of animated segments without coher-

ence. Figuratively designated an amputee by Emerson, man is partitioned throughout Melville’s fiction. The young Melvillean pantheist’s attempts to “join remote things” in nature cannot re-create a whole American, and leave transcendental men in a non-individuated, vegetative state, or as the animated corpses of dark comedy. Emerson conceives of nature’s material manifestations as a veil through which one perceives a higher truth. Like the Buddhists who carry the doctrine of idealism “to its logical extreme,” Emerson believes that “what we

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call Nature, the external world, has no real existence—is only phenomenal. Youth, age, property, conditions, events, persons—self, even—are successive maias, (deceptions) through which Vishnu mocks and instructs the soul.” Partly as a result of such an epistemology, the permeable, transparent body becomes a piece of all-plastic representation that can be used as a double, a part

or whole, for anything. The poet’s “own body is a fleeting apparition—his personality as fugitive as the trope he employs,” as “fugitive” as the fleeting and transparent forms of Pan in Emerson’s poems. As a self equally merged and amputated emerges, Emerson, using an Ishmaelean qualification, even claims that “in certain hours we can almost pass our hand through our own body” (“Poetry and Imagination,” 8:14—15, 21).8 (Since Emerson’s body is part

of Nature and is not himself, this repeated fantasy of transparency is not surprising; in it, the invisible hand of the market is transformed into the transparent hand of Nature.) Pantheists try to deny the necessary detachability of essence that comes with the detachability of (even invisible) body parts—by a variety of subterfuges. In AM Is One, Edmond Holmes asserts that “the part, as part, is so far from being divine that it is not even real. Severed, in our thought, from the tree of life to which it belongs, it is no better than a withered branch. What differentiates the higher from the lower pantheism is that the former bases its faith in God on the conviction that All is One,” and that parts are in fact wholes (21). But the control of bodies, with which men are no longer

coterminous, is relegated to forces extrinsic to the self, which come to be designated the All. Tocqueville had defined the transcendental relationship between the isolated individual and the unified mass in the new republic in terms of the most widely shared tenets of American pantheism. As for Reverend Dix, who as noted calls “this immense condition, or mass, or state” America’s only eternal being, for Tocqueville the “mass” state of nature determines the political state of democracy.’ In a society where they “are broken up” into inequalities, men will have a great desire to “merge” their individualities into the unified mass of the government or the All of nature (2:22—23). After Lauren Berlant, we might call this a national fantasy of anatomy. Americans come to perceive their individualities as the mutable parts of an immutable Being that seduces and transforms its subjects, rearranging, converting, and breaking down their bodies.

The notion of individual and mass identities that are reified as amputated and merged bodies informs a wide variety of conceits in the American Renaissance. Tocqueville’s apprehension of the encyclopedic body of democracy or the All is revisited in Whitman’s vision of consensus. In “Demo-

cratic Vistas, Whitman conjures “a copious, sane, gigantic offspring. ... ‘I |here are opposite sides to the great question of democracy .. . [but]—I feel

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the parts harmoniously blended . .. to be read only in such oneness” (261-62). Tocqueville’s “immense being” and Whitman's “gigantic offspring” of a democratic nation manifest themselves as impersonal, encyclopedic male bodies, all conjuring visions of a sublime and harmonizing, or demonological and mo-

nolithic, unity—from Emerson’s world-eating dreamer and transcendent eyeball; to the world-body of Mardi; to Moby Dick, the massive white whale/whole; to the undifferentiated, universal plant world of Pierre. As I began to address in chapter 3, when American Renaissance writers invoke the idea of the “mass,” they often signify some version of a transcendental divinity. Emerson, for example, sometimes uses “mass” as a euphemism for the whole: when he finds nature “in the mass and in the particle,” he contrasts the universal All with the individual particular (“American,” 1:85). Whitman, by contrast, remarks that “the mass, or lump character, for imperative reasons, is to be ever carefully weigh’d, borne in mind, and provided for. Only from it... comes the chance of individualism” (273). Whitman would “reconcile” these two contradictory forces, optimistically lauding the masses, but on this sub-

ject Emerson assumes a decidedly admonitory tone. When represented as Nature, the All is a sacred, indivisible whole, but a mass of men in society is

diabolical. What Donald Pease identifies as the tension between laissezfaire egalitarianism and authoritarianism, and between self-reliance and fraternal merger, is embodied in Emerson’s physiques. Emerson's repressed rhetoric of violent merger startlingly erupts in 1860, in “Considerations by

the Way,” in his desire to draw and quarter Whitman’s social masses, to break and divide this inchoate unity: “Leave this hypocritical prating about

the masses. Masses are rude, lame, unmade, pernicious....I wish not to concede anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and draw individuals out of them. ... Masses! the calamity is the masses. Ido not wish any mass at all” (6:2.49).!° Melville takes to the task of actually breaking these masses up, but draws only animated parts rather than whole individuals out of them. Any mass of bodies attracts men with irresistible gravity but also repels them like polarized orbs. Echoing Emerson’s sentiments, Melville repeat-

edly expresses his doubts about transcendental impulses in himself in his letters to Hawthorne; he proposes, for instance, “to assert unconditional democracy in all things, and yet confess a dislike to all mankind—in the mass” (Correspondence, 191). Like the barber in The Confidence-Man who worries that “the mass of mankind” are strangers who cannot be trusted, Melville either loves people while hating humanity or the reverse (229). In Moby-Dick, Ishmael overtakes his creator to conclude, “But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of un-

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necessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary” (466); valorizing an eternal ideal, pantheists have no need for the mass of men who, like the long line of men who a// seem to be named Pierre Glendinning, merely repeat one another in their endless descendedness (Pierre, 31-32). (This form

of repetition also helps contextualize redundant names such as Donald Dundonald in Pierre |[252].) Like Ishmael despairing of personal identity, Melville marks mass as the final “embodiment” of animation, the designated sign of the pantheistic excess of individual will and consciousness. “The mightiest animated mass that

has survived the flood,” that of the whale—and various other magnified bodies of nature—is also the mass body of democracy, a centralized agglomeration through which divisions are transcended (64). The whale represents an enormous mass that obeys one centralized will: “There swims behind it all a mass of tremendous life... and all obedient to one volition, as the smallest insect” (377). Ishmael stresses the “enormousness of the mass” of whales,

situating them in the terms of the Tocquevillean democratic theory that informed some of Melville’s rhetoric (291). Forming an aggregate of nature,

the leviathan is a collective being obeying the voice of nature’s one mind and an unfragmented mass political body obeying a single will. The mass body of society, however, can never be a genuine whole, only a

partial representation of divine nature, or divine self-containment. But to live as an individual male is to be painfully isolated, to suffer withdrawal from the reverie of transcendental unity, and compulsively to reenact this fragmentation of human bodies. The signal individuation of American selfrepresentation becomes a form of fragmentation, and for Emerson, “as soon as there is departure from this universal feeling, we are made to feel it painfully” (“The Heart,” Early Lectures, 2:284). As Pierre learns—as Melville learns in the fall from each reverie—individuation in America is a manifestation not of Pan but of pain.

Il Other combinations, resulting from a difference of local position and policy must have created additional difficulties. As every state must be divided into different districts, and its citizens into different classes. James Madison, The Federalist (no. 37)

The difference is that which always exists, and always must exist, between the

action of the whole on a part, and the action of a part on the whole.... No political dreamer was ever wild enough to think of breaking down the lines which separate the states, and of compounding the American people into one

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word CONFIDENCE. ... This, then, is not a case of confidence, and we must consider it as it really is. C. J. Marshall, McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. (17 US.) 316 (1819)

The crowd, as is usual, began in all parts to break up... even solitaires; involuntarily submitting to that natural law which ordains dissolution equally to the mass, as in time to the member.... Here reigned the dashing and all-fusing spirit of the West... uniting the streams of the most distant and opposite

zones... in one cosmopolitan and confident tide. Melville, The Confidence-Man (9)

For divided by water, we Mardians must ever remain more or less divided at heart. Melville, Mardi (492)

Chief Justice Marshall’s holding regarding confidence—in a case that limited the rights of states to interfere with the centralized and unenumerated powers of the federal government—serves as a harbinger of transcendentalism. Emersonian discourse reconciles inconsistency not just through confidence but through a national Union or Over-Soul that reigns in rebellious “states” —solutions that become the target of Melville’s suspicion and ire. (“In-

consistencies in the mass” are precisely what Melville alleges to Hawthorne

are not inconsistent in relation to democracy, but by the time of The Confidence-Man, Marshall’s skepticism regarding the reconciliation of transcendental inconsistencies has been redirected toward a different kind of confidence trick.) A plethora of antebellum writers locate American identity as the confluence of fragmented wholes and merged parts. Tocqueville, for example, most notably employs an identifiable rhetoric of “severance,” a physical “drawing apart” from the common “mass,” to connote American individualism, which in his view breaks traditional social and natural chains of being. For Tocqueville, individualism “disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself” (2:104~—5). Emerson’s transcendentalism severs the individual from family and friends until the circle is even smaller than the self. Emerson first imagines that an authentic life spent at a remove from society would be “melted into ...a religion” (“Experience,” 3:71); but that religion turns out not to melt or merge bodies but to fragment them. As noted, Emerson writes in his journal that “every wilfulness, however large it may show near us, melts quickly into the All.... Live with God, with living nature

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as the Roses do. Wilfulness vitiates and enslaves, but the leaf partakes of the

sublime of All” (Journals, 12:130, 160). The representative youth for an Emersonian America, Pierre embodies the process of conversion to, and disillusionment with, such transcendental merging, At first, in parlor society, “you lose your sharp individuality, and become delightfully merged in that soft social Pantheism, as it were, that rosy melting of all into one. ... [N]o one draws the sword of his own individuality” (250).'* (Once more, it almost seems as if Melville had access to Emerson’s journals and not just his essays and public pronouncements. This rosy melting of soft social pantheism opposes the amputa-

tions of male individuality: masculine bodies sever, but feminized bodies merge. Melville also consistently uses the word “soft” to connote pantheism and the feminine.) Like Ishmael, Pierre initially fantasizes that he might merge into feminine nature through other men. But even Emerson, the champion of a self permeable to nature and impermeable to men, finally recognizes the double edge of this sword, which cannot be melted into an agrarian plowshare. In “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,” Emerson writes: “The individual is the world. This perception is a sword such as was never drawn before. It divides and detaches bone and marrow, soul and body, yea, almost the man from himself. It is the age of severance, of dissociation ... of detachment” (10:326). (This passage again reminds us why Pierre needs to be read as a specific and even syntactical rejoinder to the premises of Emersonian pantheism.)!? This sword of individuality cuts even its bearer to pieces, and the idea of a phallic community of individual swords (or prickly Emersonian porcupines) becomes absurd. Emerson both rejoices and warns that “the Spirit detaches you from all associations, and makes you to your own astonishment secretly a member of the Universal Association” ( Journals, 8:253-54). Emerson once thought of the “unity, the community of men” as the result of the “strictly identical nature of which all the individuals are organs” (“The Heart,” 2:285).!* And transcendentalists routinely imagine that physical dispossession is divine animation. Like Emerson, Theodore Parker asserts: “All the wisest of men have declared

the word they spoke was not their own. They were the... organ of the Infinite” (68). But as it evolves, pantheistic rhetoric renders each man a dismembered organ of a larger, incomprehensible, and inhuman whole, as the disillusioned Pierre laments in his fragmented journal. The equality of impersonal body parts—hands or kidneys, Hawthorne’s and Melville’s divine magnets— allows for a kind of community based on universal exchange; but it does not allow for the integrity of bodies or psyches.

Transcendental attempts to merge male bodies with nature are attended by another tyrannical demonology, an uncanny shadow world. Ostensibly

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quoting Goethe in “Demonology” to qualify his beliefs about dreams and the uncanny, Emerson winds up positioning those beliefs at the center of his own thought: [One discovers] in nature, animate and inanimate, intelligent and brute, somewhat which manifested itself only in contradiction, and therefore could not be grasped by a conception, much less by a word. It was xot god-like, since it seemed unreasonable; not human, since it had no understanding. ... It re-

sembled Providence, since it pointed at connection. All which limits us seemed permeable to that. It seemed to deal at pleasure with the necessary elements of our constitution; it shortened time and extended space. Only in the impossible it seemed to delight, and the possible to repel with contempt. This, which seemed to insert itself between all other things, to sever them, to bind them, I named the Demoniacal. (10:17)

(The word “religion” might derive from the Latin ve-ligare, meaning to rebind, so Emerson’s phrasing is resonant.) These terms, especially those de-

scribing the contradictory but all-binding qualities of brute nature, had long represented critical components of Emerson’s own thought, well before Emerson designated Goethe as one of his representative men. Goethe’s ruminations here serve as proxies for the anxieties Emerson can never fully dismiss. In passages W. E. B. Du Bois would revisit, Emerson later in the same essay asserts that the demonological, this “shadow of theology,” is partly constituted

by the non-reasonable “other me” of Nature that dispossesses and rebels against the self (10:28). (In language resonant for Du Bois, Emerson also asserts that “my dreams are not me; they are not Nature, or the Not-me: they are both. They have a double consciousness, at once sub- and objective. We call the phantoms that rise, the creation of our fancy, but they act like muzineers, and fire on their commander” (“Demonology,” 10:28, 7-8). In the history of American self-construction, the representation of race is closely connected to the representation of rebellious or alienated bodies). Emerson of course began “Nature” in 1836 by declaiming that philosophy defines Nature as all that which is “not me,” so Goethe here serves as Emerson’s displaced doppelganger, in a “late essay” (1877) that was first delivered as a lecture in 1839. In fact, right before introducing the “not me” in “Nature,” Emerson remarks that many consider the phenomena of sleep, madness, and dreams to be inexplicable (1:4). Demonology is therefore the philosophical, aesthetic and ontological “other me” of Nature itself. This transcendental demonology encapsulates Emerson’s “age of detach-

ment,” its dialectic between merger and severance, reverie and disillusionment, seduction and betrayal. It is most obviously incarnated in Ahab, who

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avows, “I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened!” (171). That demoniac is the excess of white individuality, or white male will; it is reflexivity itself, duality dualized, the dismemberer dismembered. For Pierre, this reflexive demonology is revealed to be a form of transcendental auto-machia that divides the self: “Strange wild work, and awfully symmetrical and reciprocal, was that now going on within the self-apparently chaotic breast of Pierre” (105).

(Melville also intimates that the demoniacal reflects the ulterior automatism of nature, its awful impersonal control of men; in The ConfidenceMan, the herb doctor exclaims, “What a demoniac unfortunate. Regular infernal machine!” [94].) In Emersonian terms, Melville’s works narrate the dreams of transcendentalism. A combination of Ishmael and Ahab, Pierre is both unified and dismembered by Nature. Pierre’s failed writing also seems to represent Melville’s answer to “Experience,” where Emerson worries that “Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man.... Nature and literature are subjective phenomena... . [U]se what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are” (3:50, 76, 79). Pierre's narrator— whom we should probably also see as transcendentally unreliable—virtually replies, “Nature is no so much her own ever-sweet interpreter, as the mere supplier of that cunning alphabet, whereby selecting and combining as he pleases, each man reads his own peculiar lesson according to his own peculiar mind and mood” (342). As Pierre, in his increasing identification with Enceladus, also becomes a “demoniac freak of nature,” and his writing decomposes his body, Melville accepts not just Goethe but the Emersonian figure of experience as his shadow (345).

Part of Pierre's demonology arrives in the form of Isabel, who comes to express the undercurrent of his desire, wishing she were able to live, or perhaps more precisely merely to exist non-individually, as part of an undifferentiated world. Melville often imagines women as child-, plant-, and even animal-like, existing in a pre-individuated state (also reflected, for example, in the way Yillah merges into Hautia). In Mardi, Babbalanja cries: “Moose!

Would thy soul were mine; for... thy life hath not the consciousness of death ...in that soft, pathetic, woman eye!” (616). Emerson’s descriptions of a feminized, botanical world reflected a desire to merge with a universal, transcendental life: “Nature can only be conceived as existing to a universal and not to a particular end... . When we behold the landscape... we do not reckon individuals. Nature knows neither palm nor oak, but only vegetable

life, which... festoons the globe with a garland of grasses and vines” (“Method,” 1:201). Melville directly takes up such passages in delineating

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Isabel’s fantasized universal existence. If she can merge with rosy nature, Isabel will never be cut by the sword of male individuality: “I pray for peace— for motionlessness—for the feeling of myself, as of some plant, absorbing life without seeking it, and existing without individual sensation. I feel that there can be no perfect peace in individualness. Therefore, I hope one day to feel

myself drank up into the pervading spirit animating all things” (119).}° (Whereas Ishmael seeks constant motion to anchor his soul—but finds all motion is circular and reflexive—Isabel seeks motionlessness to absorb hers, but their polarized solutions address similar anxieties.) Pierre’s logic is consistent: there is no peace in individuality, but only through absorption in the animating spirit of nature. One can exist only as a sword, which cuts bodies, or a plant, which absorbs them. In Pierre, neither option proves viable. Isabel is especially dangerous because she recuperates Melville’s own epistolary prayer to Hawthorne to live in a soft social pantheism of grass and trees,

to fall entirely into botanical nature—and she iterates his fear that “your separate identity is but a wretched one” (Correspondence, 193). Isabel wants to merge her body with Pierre’s, but such fusions are salutary only between representative men. When Melville writes that he is coming to the “inmost leaf of the bulb,” and that Hawthorne must surely have shared “the a// feeling,” when

your “legs seem to send out shoots into the earth [and] your hair feels like leaves upon your head,” he asks for that feminine merger with Hawthorne ina sacralized nature, one that Rappaccini’s daughter Beatrice and Isabel achieve without effort (Log, 1:412-13; emphasis in original; “Rappaccini’s,” Selected, 343, 356). To join in nature is to exist in the mutual transcendence of male individuality. But such transcendental mergers produce a state so threatening to male individuality that Queequeg cannot survive it with Ishmael, and Pierre cannot survive it even with a female version of himself or Hawthorne. What Melville describes to Hawthorne as his “profoundest sense of being” involves a merger with feminine nature that he continually dissimulates.

In his assertion and retraction of his pantheistic impulses, written in another letter to Hawthorne, Melville had already chided Goethe for telling a man with a raging toothache to merge with the universe and “live in the all.”!” In reverie with the All, one is supposed to overcome even individual physical sensations and pain—as reflected in Melville’s dismissal of Goethe’s toothache or White-Jacket’s recoil from chicken shit, that is, the processes and effects of digestion that disrupt pantheism in a universal, collective existence. But Pierre moves from “soft social” to corporate pantheism and pillories Goethe where Melville cannot. In virtual continuation of Melville’s letter to Hawthorne, Pierre/Vivia writes on a scrap of paper,

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Away, ye chattering apes of a sophomorean Spinoza and Plato, who once did delude me that... pain was only a tickle... . [T|hou inconceivable coxcomb

of a Goethe.... Already the universe gets on without thee, and could still spare a million more of the same identical kidney. Corporations have no souls, and thy Pantheism, what was that? Thou wert but the pretentious, heartless part of a man. Lo! I hold thee in this hand, and thou art crushed in it like an egg from which the meat hath been sucked. (302)!®

(So much for Goethe reproducing any more body parts. The idea of such an

unnatural social collective returns almost verbatim in The ConfidenceMan—but without even the memory of imagined transcendence—as the “Corporation Hospital” and the “soulless corporation” [96, 203]. We are left with what Lawrence called “an empty Allness. An addled egg” [Studies, 175]. Finally, in case the connection between such pantheists and Emerson was unclear, Pierre also describes Millthorpe and Plinlimmon, Emerson’s surrogates, as both “possessing a certain constitutional, sophomorean presumption and egotism” [276, 292].) Pantheism was supposed to unify men, but is revealed to be part of the incorporated, or embodied, society it seemed to oppose; identity resides in generic or “identical kidneys,” equivalent body parts or divine frag-

ments, and the universe gets on without the transcendental geniuses who speak in its name. This impersonal nature, which Ishmael describes as the repository of “generic or pantheistic vitality,” harbors animation but no individual identity (302). The All of nature slides into the universal, transpersonal, and multinational; instead of corporate merger, we have corporate dismemberment. Pantheism produces mass bodies that have no souls (corporations/

states/ageregates); a heartless part of a man (Emerson/Goethe); and a castrated, sterile figure (Pierre, who winds up solitary as at the pole—a landlocked isolato). Between his critiques and qualifications, Melville repeatedly describes Emerson as brilliant but “heartless,” so Pierre’s jibe at heartless pantheism again suggests that Emerson would head Pierre’s list of corporate jesters. (The “insular and solitary” Emerson himself admits in his journal, “What is called a warm heart, I have not”; Margaret Fuller writes that he was “a solitary unrelated person”; and he confides to his second wife, Lidian, that he feared that “the trick of solitariness never never can leave me.”)” In the rhetoric of disunion, heart is always turned against head. This passage in Pierre also recasts Emerson's “Self-Reliance,” where “soci-

ety everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members,’ and is a joint stock company whose only refuge is merger with nature (2:49). In Moby-Dick, Queequeg—with whom Ishmael’s individuality was merged in a joint stock company—is the dark Other in Nature with

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whom the protagonist can unite (320). (Queequeg embodies the “Aboriginal self” with whom Emerson insists we merge in “SelfReliance.”) But in Pierre, it turns out transcendental nature is Emerson’s joint stock company, and merger with it rends our joints. Melville's literary pursuit of Emerson along such lines is relentless. We read in “Self-Reliance” that “the man is as it

were clapped into jail by his consciousness” (2:49). Vivia, Pierre’s literary progeny, then asks after Emerson: “Tell me why these four limbs should be clapt in a dismal jail... and himself the voluntary jailer”; “Is this the end of philosophy? ... This your boasted empyrean.... Weigh [Vivia’s] heart in thy hand, oh, thou gold-laced virtuoso Goethe! and tell me whether it does not exceed thy standard weight!” (303).*° (Tellingly, Pierre had also earlier referred to his own “gold-laced grandfather,” and his cousin Glen as having a gold-laced soul, so Goethe appears to be an adopted relative on numerous levels [17, 225].) The end of philosophy, of transcendental theories of ratio and correspondence, is the prison of the body: plus head, minus heart. As a result of what Pierre identifies as this corporate pantheism, Melville’s characters are physically partitioned, and with astonishing frequency amputated; their body parts are fetishized as objects or money and provide evidence of what Emerson terms the truncated society. The “pantheistic vitality” that suffuses men detaches what it animates. Emerson is assured that “the universal nature, too strong for the petty nature of the bard, sits on his neck, and writes through his hand” (“History,” 2:34). In Mardi, Melville's narrator writes, in the same terms but in protest of the transcendental dispossession Emerson pursues: “An iron-mailed hand clenches mine in a vice and prints down every letter in my spite. Fain would I hurl off this Dionysus that rides me” (368).*! Reverend De Concilio, in Catholicity and Pantheism, warns of the consequences of such a literalized pantheistic vitality: “[Every finite and contingent] being may cease to be a whole by itself, and may contract with a nature so foreign to itself a union so intimate and so strong as to

depend on this foreign nature in all its functions and its states.... If, for instance, a hand detached from the whole body were to trace characters, this

action would be attributed to it exclusively; it would be a subsistence, a whole by itself, and we should say, That hand writes” (178). Another term for

that “foreign nature” is the “not me” of Emerson’s Nature. American transcendentalists and Pierre/Peter reverse Saint Paul and Reverend De Concilio: their hands do not cohere, obey their owners, or act as members of one (Christian) body. Throughout his work Melville chronicles this entangling alliance of man with a “foreign” nature and the resultant rebellion of his only “children,” the

animated parts of his body. As already evident in Mardi in the leg of the

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man stung by a bee, which incontinently “cut all manner of capers” (506), through Pierre’s wildly rebellious frame, Melville's body parts become sovereign entities. Union with the All is like union with a corporation or state—so intimate and so strong that the self is given over to it. From Billy Budd’s “dislocated” arm to Pynchon’s “penis [Slothrop] thought was his own,” pantheism locates the excess or surplus value of individual (white male) will; that which is “in man more than himself”; and the generic-divine—natural—(and finally)social existing outside man, which is involuntary and beyond control.” In Empire for Liberty, Dimock makes a strong case for the way personifi-

cation is somatically reified in nineteenth-century America: “Agency thus personified is necessarily self-contained, for the trajectory of such an agent is already inscribed, staked out and provided for, and embodied always within himself” (25). But for Melville that embodiment takes the reverse form, where that personified agency comes from outside the self and fragments the individual. The “reflexive unfolding” Dimock identifies best accounts for the assumptions of Jacksonian personification, but one should add a pantheistic context for how those assumptions are dramatized in Melville’s fiction. Pierre, in this sense, inverts Redburn (where Democrats should stand on a broad base), and contends that great men never use any limbs but their own. But as a result of what Dimock would call Pierre’s “personified agency, his refusal to “brag of any arm but his own,” and his attempt to be not only “his own alpha and omega, but all the intermediate gradations,” all limbs are given over to the larger, impersonal unities of pantheism; all agency is externalized, and no hand is his own (Redburn, 281; Pierre, 13, 261). (Pierre

could be subtitled “A Farewell to Arms” instead of “The Ambiguities.”) More than any other’s, the subsistent hand of the writer becomes subject to amputation, gothic animation, and the vagaries of self-difference. The stability of the pantheist archetype necessitates the mutability of its imperfect incarnation; an ideal hand presides over a real hand. While beginning Pierre,

Melville wrote to Hawthorne that he could not even know his own hand: “The very fingers that now guide the pen are not precisely the same that just took it up and put it on this paper. Lord, when shall we be done changing?” (Correspondence, 213). Such selftransformation, so comforting to Emerson, destabilizes Melville; as he later laments, “Pan, Pan is dead! / Such fables old— / From man’s deep nature are they rolled / Pained and perplexed—awed, overawed / By sense of change?” (Carel, 4.8.7-10). Invoking the devil’s immortality, Stubb had asked in Moby-Dick if he was “the same man” that had helped kill a whale (326). Or as Zizek contends, “radical difference is the dif-

ference of the One with regard to itself, the noncoincidence of the one with itself” (Puppet, 24). It is in that light that Pierre comes to consider

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transcendentalists and pantheists members of a “guild of seJfimposters” (208). By The Confidence-Man, Melville’s most proto-Lacanian text, “the difference between this man and that man is not so great as the difference between what the same man be to-day and what he may be in days to come” (222).”? Because “the same man” is never the same from moment to moment, a shadow god is created, an oppositional confidence man whose masquerade never ends. Melville himself will only be “done changing’—done writing novels—once his characters assume the mantle of being perpetually amorphous: when, in The Confidence-Man, men differ from themselves even more than they differ from one another. Tocqueville’s circle of society has shrunk within the self, and that self alters where it alteration finds. Emerson’s old aphorism that “nature is always self-similar” for Melville is also reversed, so that nature is always self-different (““Swedenborg,” 4:107;

“Progress,” 8:224). (Even Emerson will contradict himself and meet Melville halfway, admitting, “Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same” [“History,” 2:13].) Melville decides that the transformation of death represents no resurrection but a final step of the erasure begun while we live. For Babbalanja, the dead possess only “anonymous memory,” perhaps in “an utter lapse of memory concerning sublunary things, and they themselves be not themselves, as the butterfly is not the larva.” (So does Melville underline “Take me, that I no longer be myself!” in his copy of Balzac’s Seraphita.) In any translation of individual to All, our memories and identities are lost, and we become not ourselves. The larva unequivocally is the butterfly to Emerson; to Melville, the transcendental transformation to butterfly carries with it a mortal threat. Rather than an “illustration of the miraculous change to be wrought in a man after death,” Babbalanja’s analogy in Mardi reveals that “from a chrysalis state the silkworm but becomes a moth that very quickly expires. Its longest existence is as a worm. All vanity to seek in

Nature for positive warranty to these aspirations of ours” (210). Our longest existence is with the worms. The final disclosure of transcendentalists’ perpetual invocation of the chrysalis and moth is that America and the American self are incommensurate entities. As intimated, for Melville the most crucial changes involve difference in the same person. In various guises in Billy Budd, Pierre, and The Confidence-

Man, a youth, “some bud, lily-bud,” is transformed into a fallen man (Confidence-Man, 121). Emerson had conveyed only the reverse possibility in English Traits, where “many a mean, dastardly boy is, at the age of puberty,

transformed into a serious and generous youth” (5:62). The transformation of boy to man parallels the transcendental transformation of caterpillar to butterfly, leaving us incommensurate with ourselves, not just at dramatic

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junctures but at each moment of our lives. The Confidence-Man can then be read as the logical coda to Mardi, a book of Emersonian transformations both realized and mocked: “Madam, or sir, would you visit upon the butterfly the sins of the caterpillar? In the natural advance of all creatures, do they not bury

themselves over and over again in the endless resurrection of better and better?... Was the caterpillar one creature, and is the butterfly another? ... You deny that a youth of one character can be transformed into a man of opposite

character” (124). This passage presents a strikingly direct engagement of Emerson's work; the transcendental self is an endless burial and resurrection. Melville’s subject matter here seems derived, at least in spirit, from Emerson’s list of the stable truths underlying the forms of animals: in “History,” Emer-

son purports that “genius detects through the fly, through the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant individual; through countless individuals, the fixed species ... the eternal unity” (2:13). For Melville that eternal unity has become the self-varying persistence of the Confidence Man. The transcendental hand that alienates its owner soon defies him. Emer-

son initially promises that religion will extenuate the fragmentation that afflicts men at war with themselves in society: “All that we call religion . . . is to suppress this impertinent surface-action, and animate man to central and entire action. he human race are afflicted with St. Vitus’ dance; their fingers and toes, their members, their senses, their talents, are superfluously active. ... It is as if he were ten or twenty less men than himself, acting at discord with

one another” (“The Preacher,” 10:224). Despite his assurances to the contrary, Emerson’s pantheism sometimes leads him to imagine nervous bodies as out of control, as not obeying a single will. Here, Melville again reifies and parodies Emerson's animation of bodies: “Though we galvanize corpses into Saint Vitus’ dances, we raise not the dead from their graves!” (Mardi, 580)

When Ahab crosses the lances of his crew, and “suddenly and nervously twitched them...as though by some nameless, interior volition,” Melville again attributes such involuntary acts to “St. Vitus’ imp” (165). As I soon ad-

dress, Melville’s writing is full of animated, twitching, “supervoluntary” movements. In his later work, Emerson veers closer to Melville and worries that purposeful action could turn into the “senseless repeating of yesterday's fingering and running... busy-ness which pretends to the honors of action, but resembles the twitches of St. Vitus” (“The Scholar,” 10:267).

Only by merging with god’s body can the pantheist hope to quell the re-

bellion of his own. In “Nature,” Emerson writes that within the “plantations of God...in the woods... [Iam] bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, —all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate

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through me” (1:10-11). In the All of nature, Emerson metamorphoses into the

organ of transcendental anatomy—the leaf/lobe/orb. I want to return momentarily here to the issue of transcendental transparency, and Emerson's visual metonymy, in a different context. This passage offers not just Emerson's famous image of the transcendental self as eyeball, but the necessary integration of such a self with a pantheistic god. Emerson preached in a sermon that for man to be nothing and see all is in fact to be god, to be All; he becomes able to see “not [with] man’s eye, which sees a little, but... the eye of God, which sees all” (Sermon 59, Complete Sermons, 2:105). In “Woodnotes,” Emerson

describes the “Eternal Pan” as a deity who “hides in pure transparency’; though invisible to the uninitiated, disembodied Pan sees All (9:58). As Emerson writes in “The Genuine Man,” when man is one with the divinity, “where the mind has no low ends... [man] is transparent” (Young, 185). Emerson even tautologically asserts that “the Universe is transparent; the light of higher laws than its own, shines through it” ( Journals, 6:219).

Such transparency, which for Emerson bears an attendant permeability and immateriality, is a form not merely of honesty or even ego transcendence but of nonexistence; as Emerson attests, “I am nothing.” Emerson’s concerns about invisibility and materiality create what Jay Grossman calls “crises of embodiment” (203). At the outset of his Works, Emerson passes not just his hand but his whole body through his body; the Emersonian self disappears as it merges with the All, the Universal Being, as a transparent eyeball or orb.”* To be nothing, not be seen, and see all, Emerson sacrifices particularity or individuality, which is absorbed by the body of the universe. Emerson has already provided Melville with what will become Pierre’s anatomy not of merger but of self-fragmentation. Most dramatically, when Ishmael disappears from

his own narrative but continues to narrate all that transpires, and warns “pantheists” about dropping “through that transparent air,” he has become Emerson’s transparent eyeball, his invisible observing machine; at least for a time, he is nowhere, but sees All (159). The socially invisible and blackidentified Ishmael becomes an invisible man in Nature. Pantheists systemically depict the American self as this transcendental orb; early on, in his sermon “Astronomy,” Emerson transports his subject, as he would soon transport himself, from the enclosure of temples to nature’s field of vision. When students, forswearing “natural laws,” came into the churches and colleges to learn the character of God they there [found] gross and unworthy views of him.... [T]he removing of this veil from the creation enabl{ed] man from the little globule in which we are embarked to send his eye so far into the surrounding infinity ... [proving that all things] fluctuate between fixed and impassable limits, that there is no ungoverned orb,

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no loose pin, no lawless particle....{P]lanet gravitates to planet and star attracts star, each fulfilling the last mile of its orbit. (Young, 175-76)*°

(At first, White Jacket even imagines he could send his eye to govern those infinite orbs, that “his volitions [could] stir the orbits of the furthest suns” [329].) But once the pantheist snaps out of his reverie, each man’s gravitational field, his magnetism, his influence becomes too strong. He must deflect others, especially his family, for when they get too close, he absorbs their bodies into his orbit (or, even worse, they absorb his orbit into theirs). For Emerson, it is the unnatural conscription of solitary men into society that generates the physical delirium of Saint Vitus. In 1838, after delivering lectures titled, respectively, “The Doctrine of the Hands,” “The Head,” and ~The Eye and the Ear,” Emerson already concludes in “The Heart” that “man is insular and cannot be touched. Every man is an infinitely repellent orb, and holds his individual being on that condition. In fact, men are con-

tinually separating and not nearing by acquaintance.... Best amputate” (Early Lectures, 2:280).”” Even the “divine magnet” that for Melville fixes his body to Hawthorne’s would not be able to overcome this repulsion of individual parts, which owe allegiance only to themselves. And these “repel-

lent orbs,” transparent eyeballs, and repulsive individuals can separate only | by acquaintance. Emblematic of their profoundest sense of being, where Melville can at least fantasize his body as equivalent and cathected to Hawthorne’s in nature, Emerson configures male bodies as inverted magnets. American transcendentalists imagine male bodies as attracting and repelling orbs and, as Thoreau attests, globes; these animated bodies are drawn into one another's orbits, strike, and split apart. Transcendental subjects are like converging and then colliding planets; Melville frequently depicts planets as men, possessing distinct personalities. These circling orbs are always invoked in conjunction with the one and the All. In Mardi, “Saturn, Mercury, and Mardi [were] brothers, one and all, and across their orbits to each other talked like souls”; Taji has imagined that “the earth pulses and beats like a warrior’s heart; till I knew not, whether it be myself... [so] that methinks all the worlds are my kin’; and as noted, like Emerson beating with the pulse of the universe, Redburn finds himself “reeling with the planets in their orbits,” lost at the “center of the All” (Mardi, 616; Redburn, 66). Here it is Emerson who disrupts the transcendent merger, acknowledging the prospect of an ungoverned orb or rebellious leaf. Men must separate and be repelled by acquaintance, and this repulsion is conceived as an amputation, a severing of relations and bodies. Emerson refers to his writing in these exact same terms; he admits to Carlyle that he considers his own compositions “the

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most fragmentary result: paragraphs incomprehensible each sentence an infinitely repellent particle” (Correspondence, 20). The infinity of the All is now marked as infinitely repellent. In this cryptic, Lawrencian passage, Emerson locates a psychic polarity in all social interaction: “The universe is the bride of the soul. A private sympathy is partial. Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in one point, and, whilst they remain in contact, all other points of each of the spheres are inert; ... and the longer a particular union lasts, the more energy of appetency the parts not in union acquire” (“Experience,” 3:77).7° (Again, any “private sympathy” would lead to flawed attempts at political reform.) But every man being the universe, Emerson also repeatedly claims that “each man, ifhe attempts to join himself to others, is on all sides cramped and diminished of his proportion; and the stricter the union the less and the more pitiful he is.” If man takes the world into himself, he becomes a divine microcosm; if the world takes him into it, he becomes pitiful. In “New England Reformers,” in Emerson’s unworkable notion of a “union [that] must be ideal in actual individualism,” merger with men, and even par-

ticipation in the Union—since each involves less than marriage with the universe—diminishes the participant and atrophies the greater self not at the point of contact (3:267). Emerson's self-reliant individuals, whom he calls “repellent orbs,” will, as Carolyn Porter demonstrates, finally see and be in opposition. The transparent eyeball, the seeing eye-orb that becomes the being I-orb, becomes cross-I’d with itself. Emerson straightforwardly admits, in the same optical terms, his periodic fear of pantheistic merger: “I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system” (“American Scholar,” 1:90). (Again acknowledging that every thought can be a prison, Emerson also assumes that the monomaniac, the man who “fastens his attention on a single aspect of truth,” risks being caught “in the hoop of [another’s] horizon” [“Intellect,” 2:339].) Great books and people exert a tyrannical influence on Emerson, who has an inordinate fear of debt, and of being possessed by another subjectivity. Other social orbits are inimical to the pantheist’s autonomy. Because “of the presence, or the general influence of any substance as of ... a living plant,” Emerson imagines an attraction whose effect resembles that of a mass body on any smaller globe: “And I can as easily dodge the gravitation of the globe as escape your influence” (“Method,” 1:216). Each orbit can have only one subject, and overlapping orbits create some form of merger (absorption) or amputation (repulsion). As Melville again echoes in The Confidence-Man: “For much the same reason that there is but one planet to one orbit, so can

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there be but one such original character to one work of invention. Two would

conflict to chaos” (239). More than one character to a book or an orbit “is good presumption there [are] none at all.” Dashing White-Jacket’s hope of

willing the suns from their paths, when Pierre despairs of finishing his book, it is because he has lost control of his rebellious and fragmented body, and his narrative, “like a vast lumbering planet, revolves in his aching head. He can not command the thing out of its orbit” (345).

Part Iwo: Superincumbent Supervoluntary Supernature IV How Equality Suggests to the Americans the Idea of the Indefinite Perfectibility of Man. Title of chapter 8 of Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book 1, vol. 2

The principle of the endless perfectibility of man... this theory of progress— whether fully comprehended in all its bearings or not... is widely prevalent... [and] essentially Pantheistic.

: Nathaniel Smith Richardson, “The Pantheistic Movement” (558-59) The Perfectibility of Man! ... The perfectibility of the Ford car! The perfectibility of which man? Iam many men. Which of them are you going to perfect? Iam not a mechanical contrivance. ... We are only the actors, we are never wholly the authors of our own deeds or works. 1T is the author, the unknown inside us or outside us. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (15, 26)”

Only nature’s automatonism keeps him on his legs. As with some old trees, the bark survives the pith. ... [S]o the body of Old Polonius has outlived his soul. Melville, The Confidence-Man (173)

In these bodies it would seem there is no individual will; they seem not integers, but fractions of a whole. If they have any individual will, it is subordinate to irresistible instinct. Now since there is no partial will, there is no power to oppose the universal will and influence of God....[I]n nature... there [emphasis in original] is no opposition to God’s will, but perfect obedience and infinite harmony... . /N/othing ever rebels. Theodore Parker, “The Divine Presence” (60-61, 65)

Knowing this superiority of theirs, our bodies are inclined to be willful. Melville, Mardi (505)

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As | intimated in chapter 2, it is an animated and racialized nature that produces rebellious and willful bodies, and parts that achieve independence from their owners. That animation locates the excess of individual life, as well as fears regarding the dispossessive effects of slavery not just on slaves but on putative masters. Pan represents what is alive but impersonal, unlocatable in a single consciousness or human consciousness at all—the Other of the self that is not merely unconscious or bacchic but not subject to will or comprehension. Despite their sometimes seemingly antagonistic perspectives, Emerson and Melville are equally certain that Pan represents the inflnite involuntary in finite man. Transcendentalists initially presume that man’s nature can be perfected and individual bodies aligned with national (and finally impersonal) bodies. But those bodies become impersonal machines alienated from their owners’ wills. Those willful bodies are an affront to the perfectibility of man, but they also reflect the demonology of pantheism; instead of the perfectible body, the transcendentalist winds up with bodies at war with themselves. Emerson attests that “by virtue of this inevitable nature, private will is overpowered. ...[T]hat which we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily, but involuntarily” (“Over-Soul,” 2:286). Like individuality, the voluntary must be purged and transcended. For Emerson, “the muse may be defined, supervoluntary ends effected by supervoluntary means” (“Natural,” 12:71-72). Ever Emerson's superincumbent muse, Pan signifies the transcendental loss of human volition: “Every man discriminates between the voluntary acts of his mind and his involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary perceptions a perfect faith is due”; for Emerson, the involuntary, which becomes supervoluntary in nature, acts under a higher dispensation, one that is infallible, post-individual, and by definition divine (“SelfReliance,” 2:65). Emerson is describing not a familiar subjugation of the individual will to an anthropomorphic deity, but the dissolution of the individual will in a transcendental, impersonal, and supervoluntary nature. “Self-reliance” is reliance on the involuntary, on a “self” outside individual identity. For Emerson, the involuntary is never rebellious. The opposite holds true for Melville. For Emerson, “that the whole of nature agrees with the whole of thought... that Nature is no other than philosophy and theology embodied in mechanics’ ensures that “there is wonderful agreement in all souls”; furthermore, like Isabel, his pantheist awaits “that rapture of absorption into the divine life” (“Natural Religion,” Uncollected, 60-61, 65). Through such assurances, Emerson initially hopes that our fallible, particular wills can be unified by the im-

personal All. As for Emerson when he walks in nature, an unaccounted-for faith and even bliss suffuse the man who acts beyond himself. If the universal

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nature cramps the writer’s hand, “the rapt saint is found the only logician. ... It is God in us which checks the language of petition by a grander thought” (“Method,” 1:194). The ecstatical state directs us to the whole of nature, but “the excess of life which in conscious beings we call ecstasy” or reverie also cre-

ates the dialectic of momentary bliss and subsequent “melancholy” (1:204). For Emerson, supervoluntary “excess” comes from nature (“Experience,” 3:69). But as Melville elaborates for Emerson, nature will ultimately not spare us. Any such momentary rapture in Melville is always followed by a rupture—

an opposing feeling of terror and dissolution, an unconscious dread that causes men to plummet from some metaphysical height. In Mardi, the tendency of dissociated body parts to repel and rebel indicates that individual will and nature’s animation are antagonistic phenomena: “[When] a huge wasp happening to sting [a man’s] foot, not him, for he felt it not, the leg incontinently sprang into the air and of itself cut all manners of capers. “Be still! Down with you!’ But the leg refused... . [A]ll commands were naught, volitions, and persuasions were as naught to induce his limbs to carry him home” (506). (The “master’s plague” remains on the foot.) Emerson’s “excess of life’—-where Pan meets Marx—is dramatized more oppressively in WhiteJacket, when Surgeon Cuticle presides over one of his many amputations, “divested of nearly all organic appurtenances.” Here the vitality of animation mingles with the horrors of amputation: “As if an organic and involuntary apprehension of death had seized upon the wounded leg, its nervous motions were so violent that one of the mess-mates was obliged to keep his hand upon it” (258). That nervous violence is pantheistic vitality. So are limbs afflicted with supervoluntary movement or divine excess in the face of death or nature. (The two parts of the mantra “organic and involuntary” become interchangeable, a pantheistic American equation.) In the absence of male creation, “pantheistic vitality” provides the transformative agency of nature, an impersonal, “latent” principle of life separate from the living host and transmittable to other forms. Pierre also discovers a shadow self that generates life: “There seemed to lurk some mystical intelligence and vitality in the picture; because, since in his own memory of his own father, Pierre could not recall any distinct lineament transmitted to Isabel” (197). Pierre discovers in the portrait, literally in the abstract, what was

absent in his actual father. Invocations of the principles of vitality and gothic animation are used to bypass procreation, especially in Pierre, whose subtext involves a consistent denial of non-incestuous sexual reproduction. Vitality, another catchword of animation, is always transcendental; an animated picture displaces, and becomes father to, the original man, and the copy replaces a nonexistent original.

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By Pierre, mechanical reproduction has also substantially altered the animating vitality of pantheism. In Pierre’s world of hereditary but impersonal duplications, portraits “demanded more reverence than the original man.” The part or reproduction has more aura than the original. While aristocratic portraits “immortaliz[ed] a genius,” the democratic daguerreotype only “dayalized a dunce,” and so transposes the soul from the chronometric (ideal) to the horological (diurnal) world; it deanimates, levels, de-transcendentalizes, and “Dial-izes’—a pun on the name of Emerson and Fuller’s transcendental journal—and reveals the original to be itself a copy (254).°° The transcendental imaginary can never be translated into the particular real: “For one swift instance, he seemed to see in that one glance the two separate beds—the real one and the reflected one—and an unbidden, most miserable presentiment thereupon stole into him” (39). The gap between the two portraits and two beds creates the vacuum into which Pierre is drawn; Pierre/Peter recuperates the role of Pierre/Pater/Pere, his father, and the bed-rock upon which his book is founded, with which his father wed, and through which the world is animated. Only through impersonal nature can men transmit generation or survive death; thus in Moby-Dick, after individuality has been purged, “a sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in |sharks’] very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life has departed” (302). Pantheist identity is precisely generic, and by Pierre corporate.?' Just as a mysterious “vitality lurked” in the portrait of Pierre’s father, it “lurks” in the severed but ever more animated parts of sharks.** These parts, which their former owners eat as “independent” beings, continue to move because the principle of life exists not in the individual but impersonally. Sharks consume their own detached, rebellious body parts because—like Emerson, Ishmael, and Melville with Hawthorne—they cannot determine the borders of their own bodies.” Their feeding frenzy is an appropriate image for the self-consumption, as well as the cultural appropriations, of pantheism. As Queequeg discovers when a detached shark head nearly bites off his hand, “it was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures. ... ‘[D]e god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin’” (302). Melville begins to fear that the bones and spines, joints and joint stocks of men are rendered vital only after the temporary, individual inhabitants have been evicted. What is willful is all that has been repressed and reified in Melville’s culture. The gothic movement of these sharks is inevitably revisited upon Pierre. When Pierre’s eyes take on a life of their own, this same pantheistic vitality has displaced his “individual” life; even the youthful Pierre wonders whether “his evasive answer had not pantheistically burst from him in a momentary interregnum of selfcommand”

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(50). In much of the American Renaissance it is pantheism—and its superincumbent, supervoluntary supernature, or, demonologically, the “plague” that moves the slave’s foot—that locates the increasing loss of self-control and self-identity in white men. Each involuntary motion, each rebellious part, also signifies the ulterior reality of slavery in U.S. ontology, which in turn underwrites its demonological opposite of white male identity. With so much dismemberment, and parts attaining their own independent lives, it becomes hard to tell the original from the portrait, the living

from the dead, the part from the whole. The pantheistic vitality that suf fuses Mardi and Moby-Dick leaves characters unable to distinguish themselves from their pantheistically animated, dismembered parts. Samoa is “superstitiously averse to burying in the sea [his] dead limb of a body yet living, since in that case Samoa held that he must very soon drown and fol_ lowit.” Presaging the posting of Aranda’s body in “Benito Cereno,” Samoa’s arm is hoisted as a literal flagstaff above his truncated body: “Now which was Samoa? The dead arm swinging high as Haman? Or the living trunk below? Was the arm severed from the body, or the body from the arm?” The arm becomes a prototype of the detachable, phallic spine. Taji asks which of

the sections of a severed worm is the worm proper; similarly, he “ever re- | garded Samoa as but a large fragment of a man, not aman complete” (Mardi, 78). And in Emerson’s truncated society it is always the writer who ultimately parts friends: “Is not this philosopher like a centipede? Cut off his head, and

still he crawls” (459).°* Always revenant, parts of bodies detach and bud, are | fruitful and multiply in place of us. Melville’s attribution of such pantheistic vitality to Emerson appears self-evident: ““Can that eye see itself, Yoomy?’ said Babbalanja winking. “Taken out of its socket, will it see at all? Its connection with the body imparts to its virtue.” To which Mohi replies, “Philosopher, have you a head?” (488). Parts is parts, and perspective and identity in-

here in them. The detachable eye of the transcendent post-individual, the organ without a body, sees what the man in himself cannot, even as Mardi sees what individual men cannot. But as apologists such as Hittell and critics such as De Concilio note, for the pantheist, “dead” body parts can be as ebullient and willful, as dispossessed by impersonal nature, as live ones. Melville’s characters pursue and flee a resurrection that dislocates the self to immortalize it (much as Ishmael’s pantheist is “diffused through time and space” [159]):

"A charm diffused throughout the sphere, / Streams in the ray through yonder dome? / Not hearsed he is. But hath ghost home / Dispersed in soil, in sea, in air? / False Pantheism, false though fair!” (Clavel, 1.5.42-44). Instead of being rendered whole by animate nature, men are severed from their bodies and alienated from the possibility of selfintegration. As Melville

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surmises: “This man’s body laughs, not the man himself. ... Our souls belong to our bodies, not our bodies to our souls” Mardi, 504-5). Possibly paraphrasing Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” and Parker’s “Discourse,” Melville even asserts that the “wisest of us breathe involuntarily,” so no man truly controls his own actions or psyche, which are fundamentally removed from him (50s). For Emerson, the involuntary represents another putative cure for individuality, but to Melville it comes to represent the impersonal cruelty of the divinity. At the end of Melville’s writing, Billy Budd’s arm is possessed by the hand of god, through which it unexpectedly lashes out, bypassing his individual will. Yet Budd, like a saint, does not ejaculate involuntarily

when hanged. Within the polarities of pantheism, every involuntary action produces an equal and opposite involuntary reaction. Billy Budd is a final bleak literalization of one aspect of Mardi, where god moves our limbs, but

now without any trace of transcendental animation. Central to transcendentalism is the premise that the involuntary represents the divine, a higher power acting through us. Emerson repeatedly intimated not just that all men are like Jesus, but that they can say, “Through me, God acts; through me, speaks” (“Divinity,” 1:129). God animates individuals, these evacuated beings who provide a screen from which to peep out at the world: “Like a bird which alights nowhere, but hops perpetually from bough to bough, is the Power which abides in no man and in no woman, but for amoment speaks from this one, and for another moment from that one” (“Experience,” 3:58). A transcendental God plays an all-encompassing shell game, and becomes, as Carolyn Porter suggests, as indeterminate as particles in quantum physics (“Reification,” 195). Such unlocatable immanence is no abstract puzzle to Melville but a matter of inestimable gravity, for god’s intervention eradicates authorship and authority in man. In most of Melville's works, a transcendental God intervenes: “And by consequence,” says Babbalanja, “not only that act, but all my acts, are Oro’s” (Mardi, 427). If beards on Mardi continue to grow without one’s volition and on the bodies of the dead, by Moby-Dick thought itself exists without individual will or agency (505): “Thoughts and fancies... by [their] own sheer inveteracy of will...

forced [themselves]... into a kind of selfassumed, independent being of [their] own” (202).*° This description rather literally affirms Brown’s and Moretti’s definitions of the secular animism of capitalism. Ahab asks who, then, controls the controlling hand; who lifts the limb that attains its own life? “What cozzening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor...mak[es me] do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? ... But if the great sun move not of himself... but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat... unless God does

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that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I[?]” (545). This passage again directly inverts Mardi, where Babbalanja rejoices that the same life that moves a moose animates the sun and Oro. It gives an interlocutory answer to Babbalanja’s question about the great god who maintains the perpetual telegraphic communication between heart and mind (615, 538). Ahab exchanges heartbeats not with a mentor or ship but with god himself; the suspicion Babbalanja develops in Mardi of the “king muscle,” of the immanent god who displaces his creation, reaches new levels in Ahab. Both subject and object, he asks: “Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm?” (545). The god that moves our limbs also displaces us. Once we recontextualize the principles of animation, Pan’s once invisible presence begins to seem as ubiquitous as Moby Dick’s. For every part of space, there is a void filled by god; as Theodore Parker claims, God “is equally present in all parts of the material world” (“Divine,” 61). The world stands com-

plete: nothing new can be introduced, and only substitutions and exchanges are possible. Melville contends that the pantheist god abhors, yet creates and is, a vacuum. In Mardi, the transcendental “Oro is not merely a universal onlooker, but occupies and fills all space, and no vacancy is left for any being or any thing but Oro. Hence Oro is in all things, and himself is all things— the time old creed” (427; emphasis in original). Oro too spares us no leaf or laurel. From Mardi to Pierre, god’s immanence has not changed, only Mel-

ville’s reaction to a divinity he once found potentially liberating, partly amusing and perplexing, and now finds a symptom and symbol of his failure. As John Hunt recapitulates, sounding as if he were quoting Mardi, the pantheist god “manifests himself in his world, eternal nature—the All of the universe. He fills all things, and is in all things” (190). (Presaging and echoing such tract writers, Melville’s novels develop a pastiche not just of the senti-

mental and sensational, as David Reynolds demonstrates, but of the radical religious rhetoric of his day [278-94].) As Taji discovers, “And were all space a

vacuum, yet would it be a fullness, for to Himself His own universe is He” (230). So does Pierre, himself a literal prie-dieu, insist that “rail as all atheists will, there is a mysterious, inscrutable divineness in the world—a God—a Being positively present everywhere; nay, he is now in the room; the air did part when I here sat down. I displaced the spirit then” (317). Melville’s final verdict on this pantheist ubiquity comes in Pierre: “Our God is a jealous God; He wills not that any man should permanently possess the least shadow of His own self-sufficient attributes” (261). After dramatizing the possibilities of becoming an enormous eye in Mardi, Melville by the time of Pierre has rejected Emerson and Goethe’s orbs. Emetson's overdetermined eye-I/orb-orbit configurations implode in the character

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of Pierre, whose self becomes a part of his own body, an orb-bit.*° As Pierre

discovers in the truncated torso of the Titan Enceladus, what Emerson viewed as the threat of disharmony and rebellion is incarnated in the extremities of our bodies. Pierre’s hopes for American democracy come apart with his body, which cannot coexist in the orbit of any others. Emerson had promised in a variety of contexts that “there is zo revolt in all the kingdoms from the commonweal; xo detachment of an individual. Hence the catholic

character which makes every leaf'an exponent of the world” (“Method,” 1:201). But when Emerson discovers this is the “age of detachment,” the catholic character of the commonweal dissolves. Emerson virtually anticipates this final dissolution, remarking that “the communication by the glance is in the greatest part not subject to the control of the will. It is the bodily symbol of identity of nature.... The revelations are sometimes tertific... /w/hen the eyes say one thing and the tongue another” “Behavior,” 6:179-80). The foremost symbol of Emerson’s body and identity turns out to be in “the greatest part” not subject to his will; for Melville, it is inevitable

that the uncontrolled parts of individual and national bodies will go their own way.

Twitching, animated corpses and disjointed, willful bodies represent the consequences of pantheism. Theodore Parker tries to persuade us that nothing ever rebels in nature, which has no partial will. Emerson asks us to “bear with these distractions, with this coetaneous growth of the parts; [for] they will one day be members, and obey one will” (“Experience,” 3:70; emphasis in original); and he assures us repeatedly that “there is [in nature] xo private will, no rebel leaf or limb, but the whole is oppressed by one superincumbent tendency” (“Method,” 1:204).°” But Melville again reveals the necessary corollary of Emerson’s claim. Each individual becomes that “rebel leaf,” which linguistically is also the “lobe” or orb cast out of the universal orbit. Created a few years before Melville’s own period of (relative) isolation, Pierre doesn’t merge with orbs but crushes them. In Zizek’s terms, the partial object has escaped the hero’s control. Instead of melting into rosy nature, Pierre's willful body rebels against and dismembers itself: “But now at last since the very blood in |Pierre’s] body had in vain rebelled against his Titanic soul; now the only visible outward symbols of that soul—his eyes— did also turn downright traitors to him, and with more success than the rebellious blood. ... The pupils of his eyes rolled away from him in their own orbits” (341). The universal or fraternal orbit has been lost; men must choose their own conflicting orbits in a democracy, until finally the parts of those men assume their own orbits as well. When pantheism falls apart, its collapse is played out in the fragmentation of the body; our eyes see what they

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will, and do not recognize their neighbors in the body. This moment delivers the dramatic resolution of Pierre’s life: his versions of transparent eyeballs, the symbols of his soul, cannot recognize their host. Pierre’s dismemberment represents Melville’s rejection of Emerson’s organs. Finally in Pierre, what “Time crushed in the egg” suggests that attempts at transcendental reproduction incur violent truncation (8). As evidenced by Emerson's transparent eyeball, eyes figuratively become the reproductive organs of a self-contained, selfreproducing male. For the male pantheist, seeing is a way of reproducing ideal forms: seeing reproduces being. To be denied sight, as Pierre discovers, is also, in the most oedipal terms, to be denied progeny. (As Theodore Parker perhaps unwittingly intimates in a passage

presented at the beginning of this chapter, in which he quotes Thomas Browne, the transcendental eye that can see itself can be used for its own “re-creation.”) Pierre simply hasn’t got the orbs to procreate with vision or with bodies; and Goethe’s orbs—the balls that would more likely Be rather than see, had Pierre, like Time, not “crushed them like an egg”—fall victim to Pierre’s abstract and finally reflexive rage (302). For Melville’s men, the transcendental act of seeing is often indistinguishable from the process of reproduction. When Emerson lost his almost “eponymous’ son Waldo, he told Carlyle that he felt as if an eye had been plucked out (Leverenz, 65; Emerson, Correspondence, 20).°* But even in symbolically ridding himself of Emerson, Melville retains the visual language of the offending eye he wishes to remove. Already in Mardi, Melville describes a character who “had lost one eye in the death of his eldest son, and now the other was gone. ‘I am childless—henceforth call me Roi Mori. That is, twice blind’” (301). By Pierre, Melville has staged the rebellion and violent dissolution of Emerson’s transparent orb, the self that would merge with and see through the All. Because he cannot see, childless Pierre cannot be. Both divided and unified through the exchange, Melville had once found Hawthorne's king muscle beating in his own chest: “But I felt pantheistic then—your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s” (Correspondence, 212). (Pan turns individual bodies into the ligature of an infinite, divine corpus; when two writers merge in nature, they begin to achieve the

divine state, the synchronized male body.) But Melville cannot sustain this divine chiasmus, and instead partitions the male body. The male rib doesn’t create a new, joint life but divides the old one. Bearing the same Janus face as Hawthorne’s faun, Melville’s anatomy turns out to precipitate a form of Emersonian vivisection: “For mirth and sorrow are kin, are published by identical nerves. Go, Yoomy; go study anatomy; there is much to be learned from the dead, more than you may learn from the living. And I

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am dead though I live, and as soon dissect myself as another; I curiously look into my secrets and grope under my ribs. I have found that the heart is not whole but divided” (Mardi, 613). In the transcendentalist’s disunified body, even the two chambers of the heart become bicameral. (Ishmael also is identified by his “splintered heart,” which is unified only by his encounter with the * Wild” pagan Queequeg, by his merger with an authentic “not me” [51].) First divided by water, Melville's American remains divided at heart.

V He is a German by birth, and is called Giant Transcendentalist; but as to his form, his features, his substance, and his nature generally, it is the chief peculiarity that neither he for himself, nor anybody for him, has ever been able to describe them. Hawthorne, “The Celestial Railroad” (Selected, 484)

And, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of contour between a young sucking whale and a full-grown Platonian Leviathan; yet ... such is then the outlandish, eel like, limbered, varying shape .. . his precise expression the devil himself could not catch. Melville, Moby-Dick (263)

Pantheism ... can assume any shape, can appear in any form, adopt any creed.... We wonder not that it begins to raise its demoniac front, and boast of numbers, and threaten to swallow up everything which stands in its way. Enoch Pond, “The Religion of Pantheism” (131)

Pan... wanting the extremities ...a shapeless giant... without hands or fingers or articulating lips or teeth or tongue. Emerson, “Natural History of Intellect” (35)

Alas, poor Pan! Is this what you've come to? Legless, hornless, faceless, even smileless, you are less than everything or anything. ... [And yet] in America... old Pan is still alive. Pan keeps on being reborn, in all kinds of strange shapes. D. H. Lawrence, “Pan in America” (23-24)°?

Law it is, which is without name, or color, or hands, or feet; ... which hears without ears, sees without eyes, moves without feet and seizes without hands. Emerson, quoting Hindu scripture, in “Worship” (6:221)

Ah! Sadly lacking was he in all the requisites of an efficient ruler. Deaf and dumb he was: and save arms, minus everything but an indispensable trunk and head. Melville, Mardi (570)

The Melancholy of Anatomy « 189 Not content with depriving [Lord Nelson] of an eye, and an arm, he stoutly maintained that he had also lost a leg in one of his battles... . “Look you; one man—hang me, ba/fa man—with one leg, one arm, one eye... flogged your whole shabby nation.” Melville, Ovz00 (57)

The prophesy was that I would be dismembered; and—Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Melville, Moby-Dick (168)

All this could Carlo do: make, unmake me; build me up; to pieces take me; and join me limb to limb.

Melville, Redburn (250) |

To separate & to knit up are two inseparable acts of life; ... & the more strictly these functions of the Spirit like breathing & expiring breath, unite, the better for science & its lovers. Emerson ( Journals, 12:118)

Before turning to the final disposition of gendered bodies in Pierre, I explore the uses of fragmented human and animal bodies in the economies of Mardi and Moby-Dick. Dismembered bodies here reify the abstract qualities of the transcendental divinity: “All the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents” (Moby-Dick, 564). Disembodied objects—from natural laws to thoughts to god—are embodied as agents external to individual men. Abstract money is reified most prominently as detachable teeth, which emblematize not just castration but the reproduction, or at least the Emersonian “distribution,” of body parts in the U.S. economy: “From the high value ascribed to dentals throughout the archipelago of Mardi, and also from their convenient size, they are circulated as money” (206). In Mardi, before the spines of Moby-Dick, teeth are the preeminent body part, not coincidentally representing both money and male virility. Money supplants nature as the sign of Emerson’s “all-plastic” power of representation. Parts of the fragmented male body are exchanged under the aegis of these “transcen-dental” tropes (Poe’s fixation on teeth, and possibly coterminous distaste for transcendentalism, leads him to similar puns): “Human

teeth, extracted, are reckoned among the most valuable ornaments in Mardi... acomplete set of jewelry... sported for necklaces... exchanged for love tokens” (205). If fetishized teeth are currency, the fear that our severed parts will grow into separate selves also reveals a fear of the impersonal animation of money.

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Melville develops an aesthetic and economy modeled on bodily processes, as Emerson foregrounds in claiming pecunia alter sanguis, that “these things

are so in nature. All things ascend.... [T]he estate of man is only a larger kind of body, and admits of regimen analogous to his bodily circulations.” The body Emerson seems to have in mind, however, is that of a vampire. All things ascend, but all commerce is a form of bloodletting. Society is not just retrospective but retropeptic, feeding on old ideas, selves, and body parts: “Thus it is a maxim that money is another kind of blood” (“Wealth,” 6:125). Blood is only the most fluid currency, a reification of capitalist circulation, but any body part will do.*° Along these lines, bodies throughout Mardi are appropriated from top to bottom, but also from the dead to the living; Mardians

have not the Hawaiian custom of “offering up teeth to the manes of the dead.... [T]he people rob not their own mouths to testify their woe. ... On the contrary, they extract the teeth from the departed.”*! In such an economy, men become fetishists, hoarders, and traders in parts: “The very beggars are born with a snug investment in their mouths, too soon, however, appropriated by their lords, leaving them toothless” (206). The latent monetary function of any physical fragment is laid bare throughout Melville’s writing; ivory tumbled in a skull, body part on body part, connotes both a game of chance and an economy of cannibalized parts: “Instead of rattling their own ivory in the heads on their shoulders, they were rattling their dice [teeth] in the skulls in their hands” (Mardi, 452).47 In Omoo, “speaking of bones recalls an ugly custom of [the inhabitants], now obsolete—that of making fish-hooks and gimblets out of those of their enemies. ‘This beats the Scandinavians turning people’s skulls into cups and saucers” (129). Again, in Melvillean rhetoric, the insistence that a custom is “now obsolete” tips us off to the practice being contemporary. Obsessed with images of appropriated bodies, Melville increasingly ascribes such practices not to “primitive” societies, where such customs have been largely abandoned, but to his own market economy, where they are being perfected in new ways. Foreshadowing MobyDick, where royalty use bones and body parts to prop themselves up, the king’s scepter in Mardi is made of “a polished thighbone” of Teei the Murdered, and since the king’s saliva must never touch the ground, “Teei’s skull had been devoted to the basest of purposes” (254). Bones make less an ossuary than a toolshed; on Mardi, a toothpick would not be a device to remove food but a pick made of teeth. Even Pan’s instruments are made from the recycled parts of his own domain. Yoomy’s pipe, “a slender golden reed, like musical Pan’s,” is fol-

lowed in counterpoint by Mohi’s, “its death-head bowl... continually reminding him of his own. Its shank was an ostrich’s leg, some feathers still waving nigh the mouthpiece” (372).

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By Moby-Dick—where the utilitarian use of objects has supplanted pure being—whaling comes to embody the essence of capitalism, the extraction of capital through the partitioning of bodies. The whale’s teeth are its most coveted commodity, but Melville details how every part of its body is converted to another purpose. The use of whale oil and blubber for “sperm candles” for illumination offers a comprehensive image for America’s economy (4.45, 114). The lights of shore ignite a pyre: the dismembered whale, “for all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all” (357). Ishmael notes that landsmen might not be able. to justify “that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light” (299). America turns death to life, death to light—in “brilliant” weddings and sermons—through the transmutations of churchsanctioned democracy, but it requires a constant supply of bodies. Not even churchmen remain outside this increasingly parasitic and violent economy. The Quaker-born Bildad stands as the perfect example: “Though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet he had in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore” (74). Aside from reproaching Quaker moral and fiscal hypocrisy in Bildad (and Ahab), Melville situates the egalitarian Christian mercantilist as a divided self. Though categorizing such violent practices as intrinsic to his society, Ishmael also reductively indicates that no substantial differences subsist in the operations of imperial economies: for a Roman general “entering the world’s capital, the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian coast, were the most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession” (111). Moby-Dick does not allow the American to imagine himself as exceptional. Over the assumed protest of the reader, Ishmael once more tells him he is no innocent: “And as those ancient dames moved about gaily, though in the jaws of the whale[,] ... with the like thoughtlessness, do we nowadays fly under the

same jaw for protection; the umbrella being a tent spread over the same bone” (335). As in Mardi, in Moby-Dick monarchs affirm their status with bones: “In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale.” Since even his brow “flashed like a bleached bone,” it is natural that, “seated on that tripod of bones, Ahab too seems a royal bone gatherer (128). Power is measured by the “Scandinavian” accumulation of such bones throughout Melville’s work, from “the resurrection of bones” among Mardi’s kings to the posting of Aranda’s body in “Benito Cereno” (336). The rapaciousness of this economy transforms everything, including space: the “back country” of New Bedford looks “so

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bony” that the land itself becomes cadaverous (32). The kinship between body and world no longer prompts Redburn’s pantheistic reverie; the signs of animation give way to those of amputation.

At first this “transcendental” economy does seem to transform death to life, as it transforms the bodies of animals: Stubb “converted the jaws of death into an easy chair” (118). Such is the transformational capacity of American democracy in its first guise, its ability to convert evil to good, consecrated by what it conquers; thus does the whale’s tail shine like “a marble steeple” (438).

But if we start off reclining in the arms of Stubb’s easy chair, we move to Pierre's democracy, which out of death brings only false life, and end in the Confidence Man’s “protean easy chair” (38). Conversion is reflexively converted, and becomes diabolical. The economy of transcendentalism does not resurrect bodies; it transforms impersonal husks. We must remember that Ishmael’s beatific vision of human kindness is induced by the dismembering of a dead whale: as he loses track of where his hands and his fellow workers’ limbs begin and end—while almost “melting” into the sperm—Ishmael exhorts, “Let us all squeeze ourselves into each other” (416). Like Melville’s merger with Hawthorne, his old squeeze—or Pierre’s with Goethe, his latest crush—this experience draws Ishmael into another temporary pantheistic reverie, another height from which he “must eventually [be] lower[ed]” (416). This lowering, which inverts fantasies of merger, now increasingly takes the form of violent demonology. (Most of these representations of conjoined male bodies have a strong homoerotic component, but that aspect of Melville’s relationship with Hawthorne has been widely addressed by critics such as James

Creech and G. M. Goshgarian, so I here focus on the relatively overlooked ontological contexts for these fantasies.)*?

Whereas ships became animated as living creatures in Melville's earlier novels, Moby-Dick depicts them as animated corpses. It is appropriated bone and ivory that turn Ahab’s dead ship into an animate creature: “tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies,” its rows of ivory “garnished lit] like one continuous jaw” (104). The conversion of body into ship conjures

Emerson’s marriage of violations of nature to nature (discussed later): for Ishmael, “many of the ivory inlayings of her bulwarks and cabins were started from their places, by the unnatural dislocation” (359). Moby-Dick is a chronicle of this “unnatural” use of bones, the dislocation of joints. Ivory is put to innumerable uses, from “an empty ivory casket” to a “whalebone marquee, yet cannot be dissociated from its essential being, leaving an everwidening gap between the “essence” of the history-transcending object and its particular use-value (64, 103). A tiller is carved from a “wigwam’” of “huge _

slabs of limber black bone taken from the middle and highest part of the

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jaws of the Right Whale” (70, 234). Connoting how whaling, the offshore microcosm of the American economy, regenerates through violence, this wigwam is again descried as Ishmael leads us inside the whale’s jaw, which he takes “to be the inside of an Indian wigwam” (334). Like the ship used to hunt it, the whale is associated with the Native Americans whose cultures

have been appropriated and misshapen to create and represent this new economy (423, 513).

Ishmael’s doomed vessel is aptly considered the ivory-tusked Pequod, a kind of floating whale skeleton. An ivory man on an ivory ship, Ahab is composed of the being he hunts. To master is to collect and incorporate the parts of others; Ahab is explicitly dismasted by Moby Dick, but in response has begun to assimilate, or falsely merge with, the parts of the whale. Always identifiable by virtue of his ivory appendage, Ahab sits on “an ivory stool” at an “ivory inlaid table” (234, 124, 150). “All rib and keel,” Ahab is most implicated in the economy of dismemberment over which he presides: polarized by pantheism’s mingling of the animate and inanimate, Ahab’s “one live leg made lively echoes... [while] his dead limb sounded like a coffin tap” (233). Ahab’s alienation generates a Manichaean duality in all the spare parts of the Pequod and its captain: “Here is only one distinct leg to the eye, yet two to the soul”

(471). As with Pierre’s fantasized double bed and his two paternal portraits, the symbolic and the real war with each other in Ahab’s frame. Throughout his writings—for example, in “I and My Chimney” and “The Apple-Tree Table”— Melville traces an elaborate fetishization of the recombinant parts of the body. It is no mere gesture for Ahab to curse the quadrant, firmament, and sun, and vow, “Thus I split and destroy thee!” To split, to render, is to annihilate (501). Ahab also becomes his own bone gatherer; he uses other men as

surrogate parts, commanding, “Ye are not other men, but my arms and my legs” (568). Pip even asks Ahab to “use poor me for your one lost leg... so I remain a part of ye” (534). (The racialized Isabel makes a similar request that Pierre use parts of her body to replace his.) The plague of slavery continues to strike the foot. As Toni Morrison intimates, Ahab has been dismembered and lost his place in society, his family, and his mind to some degree as a conse-

quence of an ideology of racial appropriation. The white whale reflects America’s institutionalization of slavery: “The trauma of racism is, for the racist and the victim, the severe fragmentation of the self, and has always seemed ... a cause (not a symptom) of psychosis” (“Unspeakable,” 15-16). On the Pequod, human implements are typically scavenged from animals. Ishmael describes a “heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with glittering teeth resembling ivory saws; others were tufted with knots of human hair” from a “monstrous cannibal and savage” (13). Yet

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Queequeg emerges as the least “savage” of the Pequod’s crew. Melville defines the “civilized” American not merely as savage but as the figure who cannibal-

izes bodies to survive, yet who continues to imagine himself as self-reliant. Ishmael himself wears the “shaggy jacket of the cloth called bearskin,” even as he remarks that bears (and whales) have been hunted nearly to extinction (34, 84). And Ishmael chows chowder until “you began to look for fish-bones

coming through [his] clothes. The area before the house was paved with clam-shells. [His landlady] Mrs. Hussey wore a polished necklace of codfish vertebrae; and Hosea Hussey had his account books bound in superior old shark skin.... Hosea’s brindled cow [fed] on fish remnants, marching along

the sand with each foot in a cod’s decapitated head” (67). In this society, capital is first acquired through decapitation; consumption becomes literal. The mythical quality of the ivory “horn” of some whales locates man’s desire to imprison its bearer in a cage composed of its own bones. A lost bird “strays

on board, and is made a captive: out of clean shaved rods of Right Whale bone, and cross-beams of Sperm Whale ivory, the carpenter makes a pagodalooking cage for it.... A sailor takes a fancy to wear shark-bone ear-rings. ...

Teeth he accounted bits of ivory” (467). This is the economy of Mardi stripped of its narrator's bemused irony. All sailors become bone carpenters, imprisoning and refitting the bodies of their prey and one another. The harpooners in turn are “all accomplished dentists,” fetishists “extracting the

ivory teeth, and furnishing a supply of that hard white whalebone with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of curious articles, including canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles to riding whips” (332). What starts out as a comic conceit of dental money in Mardi is agonizingly reified in the corporate economy of Moby-Dick. Here American commerce has its provenance in the sacrificial altar, leaving “every sailor a butcher. You would have thought we were offering up ten thousand red oxen to the sea gods” (303). Melville obsessively traces how America disposes of the parts of bodies. What happens to the bodies of whales, or the worldviews of Native Ameri-

cans or African Americans, once the republic is done with them? Surprisingly, the later Emerson and Melville are at least momentarily in accord regarding the nature of the U.S. economy. After claiming that man’s “habits are like” those of the tiger and anaconda, even Emerson admits that “Nature is no sentimentalist.... You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity ... race living at the expense of race” (“Fate,” 6:7). In Emerson’s syntax, it is possible that the race feeds on itself. Emerson asserts not that species dine on species but that race lives at the expense of race, implying that

some parts of humanity devour others; as he at least implicitly mocks the

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southern fear of black cannibalism, Emerson reminds us that the U.S. economy operates on such ideological inversions. As Melville then admonishes, ever echoing Emerson, “Unless you own the whale, you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth”; sentimentality is always a lure to the pantheist who wants to be seduced, and to imagine merger with a benign nature as transcendent (Moby-Dick, 338). When Ishmael merges with his fellow seamen, squeezing sperm until he envisions angels, he “looks into their eyes sentimentally” and ignores the slaughterhouse on which he sails (398). Melville situates the market as a forum for cannibalism, where all goods exchanged are transformed bodies. Ishmael again deflects his criticism back at the reader, but he will exonerate no one, himself included: “What befell

the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess’s veil at Sais? ...Go to the meatmarket ... and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows

of dead quadrupeds.... [Who is not a cannibal?...|Y]our knife-handle, my civilized and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is the handle made of?—what but the bones of the brother of the very ox you are eating?” (338). When Ishmael pulls back the veil of the deity, he sees a system that feeds on bodies. It is not that we eat others, but that we partition bodies and use them to eat other bodies—that the bodies are never destroyed but only transformed—that most appalls Melville. As Pierre discovers to his horror, even to breathe is to inhale another’s forsaken body; as Hamlet, one of Pierre’s predecessors, attested, the process is infinite, for all bodies must pass through the guts of beggars and be consumed again and again. (Melville asserts in numerous variations that “the drinking of that water had cured many a man of ambition... because of its passing through the ashes of ten kings” buried in the sepulcher through which a river passes. Pantheist identity is a moveable feast [Mardi, 209].) The economy of Redburn already conjures a catacomb of still circulating limbs: “Several horrid old men and women are constantly prying about the docks, searching after bodies . . . [to] get their living from the dead.... And these miserable old men and women hunted after corpses to keep themselves from going to the church-yard themselves” (179). Race lives at the expense of race throughout Melville’s work, and the living, particularly living writers, feed off the dead; for Melville, this is the sanctification of transcendental churches. A retropeptic chain of being becomes necrophagous. Throughout Melville’s work, inanimate objects are treated as living beings— are shaved and dismembered—while parts of living things are treated as inert objects of use. Redburn, for example, “‘razeed’ [his boots]. That is, [he] amputated the legs, and shaved off the heels to the bare soles” (74). (So does Ahab describe the “dead stump” attached after the whale “razeed” him [163].) As

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Samoa demonstrates in his own person, “in Polynesia every man is his own

barber and surgeon, cutting off his beard or arm as occasion demands” (Mardi, 77). Amputations are not just commonplace in Melville but the staff of life, as this passage in Redburn indicates: in Liverpool, says the narrator, “a figure head builder ... amputated [a sailor’s] left leg, and gave him another wooden one, which I am sorry to say, did not fit him very well, for ever after he looked as if he limped. Then this figure-head-surgeon gave him another nose, and touched up one eye, and repaired a rent in his tartans” (116). Amputation is another form of tailoring or carpentry. The violence of this work above deck again parallels that of the sharks below: “And, while smeared with blood like butchers, the surgeon and his mates would be amputating arms and legs on the berth-deck, an underling of the carpenter’s gang would be new-legging and arming the broken chairs and tables” (69). These polarizations again pinpoint the demonology of a pantheistic world: animated bodies are dismembered while inanimate objects gain limbs. Surgeons work on a true “birth-deck,” creating new life from the parts of old, even as carpenters add “arms and legs” to insensate things. Melville’s carpenters work primarily in ivory, and see the world’s bodies in terms of use or convertibility (Moby-Dick, 4.69). The bloody conflation of carpentry and surgery, now mutually defining practices, recurs throughout Melville’s novels. In White-Jacket, a surgeon is seated, a “skeleton swinging near his head—at the foot of the table, in readiness to grasp the limb, as when a plank is being severed by a carpenter and his apprentice” (261). Bones are pieces of wood to be carved, wood a version of bone to be fitted. Surgeons Cuticle, Bandage, and Wedge—presaging the law firm of Steel, Flint & Asbestos in Pierre—bestow teeth on one another and eagerly compete for the thrill of severing limbs; after his operation, Cuticle even eats a fake cancer in an act of staged cannibalism. Cuticle is Emersonian man, the physician who embodies his diagnosis: “carving up his [patient’s] broken flesh,” the surgeon is composed of detachable parts (White-Jacket, 259). As limbs are repeatedly cut in twain in acts of mock castration, Cuticle “seemed enacting the part of a Regenerator of life... the withered, shrunken, one-eyed, toothless, hairless Cuticle; with a trunk half dead—a memento mori to behold!” (259). Cuticle’s fragmentation also embodies the necessary obverse of pantheistic fantasies of merger; he represents a comically dismembered nature god, before Ahab resuscitates the rage associated with being self-divided. Trying to locate himself outside this system of transformations, Ishmael momentarily attempts to renounce Ahabian personification: “Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun

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through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it zs not me” (37). This passage presents a rather direct paraphrase of Emerson's “Nature.” To reject the material body as separate from the self, as the Emersonian “not me,” is in one way to resist the circulation of bodies in the U.S. economy; but it also reflects the selfalienation of that system. In Omoo, told that he is “in for it now,’ Long Ghost replies, again appropriating the response of slaves, “My hands and feet are, any way” (106). Subjected to pain, punishment, or oppressive work, the self compartmentalizes itself; it becomes an observer of its own body and refuses to identify with some of its aspects. At work in transcendental nature, the body becomes the Other or “not

me’—both the slave who repudiates the body that belongs to master and Babbalanja’s lumbago—sick apart from the self (Mardi, 537). Melville cannot long escape Emerson’s laws of correspondence. Reflecting Melville’s own oscillation over his pantheism, Ahab—who figuratively contains multitudes— later contradicts Ishmael and transcendentally claims, in Ishmael’s own language of “strange analogies”: “O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterances are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives on

matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind” (274, 312). (Such reasoning further explains why Ahab thinks the soul still “sees” two legs.) Such contradictions again suggest that Ishmael and Ahab are Emersonian man split in two. Each thought is then personified somewhere in nature; all bodies and all parts are inexorably linked to spirit, cunningly duplicated, but therefore split.

In his copy of the Essays, Melville had underscored the last line of Emerson's passage “It is dislocation and detachment from the life of God that makes things ugly,” which the poet remedies by “reattaching even artificial things and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight—disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts” (“The Poet,” 3:18). But Melville cannot make himself look the other way so as to let “faith oust fact” and ignore the results of attaching man to the inhuman. As Ahab and Cuticle discover, artificial attachments violate rather than repair nature (even if Melville began to conclude that the problem with nature is that it doesn’t exist to be

violated, and that nothing could therefore be unnatural. Melville at first tried to have faith in a benevolent, or at least universal, nature; but in MobyDick, nature cannot be humanized, and by The Confidence-Man, it cannot

be located). By Pierre, America specializes in “things intensely artificial, [which in this country] seem to possess the divine virtue of a natural law” (9). The unanticipated result of pantheism is that in transcendental America, the artificial becomes natural law. Melville concludes that the violence of the

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slaughterhouse is not part of Nature but of America’s intensely artificial economy.

As perhaps the final stage of that economy for Melville, Ishmael’s meat market becomes Pierre’s writing mill. Writing throughout Melville’s work is also associated with a violence that cuts, dissects, and transmutes. In WhiteJacket, the narrator begins his story by remarking that he opened his jacket “lengthwise—much as you would cut a leaf in the last new novel”; the leaves of pantheism remain inextricable from the cut bodies of books, cloth, and other skins (3). (Books are subjected to the same fate as bodies in Melville, where parchment is often another word for skin. Burning, digesting, and feeding on books like a cannibal, Babbalanja confesses that “ere Mardi sees aught of mine, I scrutinize it myself, remorselessly as a surgeon. I cut right and left; I probe, tear, and wrench; kill, burn, and destroy” [468].) But Melville’s rendering of writing as a transcendental enterprise reaches its climax in Pierre. Writing here operates as a corollary of amputation, of the cutting of cloth as well as bodies; and it is generated through increasingly mechani-

cal (non-animated) transformation, in what is now called the metamorphosing mill: “Two young men, recently abandoning the ignoble pursuit of tailoring for the more honorable trade of the publisher (probably with an economical view of working up in books, the linen and cotton shreds of the cutter’s counter)... . [T]heir linen shreds may have been very completely transmuted into paper, yet the cutters themselves were not yet entirely out of the metamorphosing mill” (246). This transmutation is a variation of the process that in Melville's earlier novels began transforming animal and human bodies into inanimate objects and fake limbs, but it is no longer part of an economy that is being analyzed impersonally from without; it is writing that is examining itself on the butcher’s block. Turning cloth into skin and body parts into texts, the paper mill becomes the dark site of a once redemptive alchemical transformation (263).** It is here that Pierre is “metamorphosed into a thing,”

as Emerson predicts in “The American Scholar.” Emerson later implicitly echoes Pierre, who imagines himself a slave, warning in “The Fugitive Slave Law” that slavery is “a kind of mill or factory for converting men into monkeys” (12:227).

In addition to restaging his father’s cloth business as his own tailoring, Melville repeatedly reveals how closely his authorial conception of his own writing hews to his fictional imagery. In a still partly facetious and enthusiastic letter sent to Hawthorne in November 1851, Melville invokes again the

episodic world-text of Mardi, its infinite but unimaginably condensed parchment, and the perpetual motion of Pierre’s writing mill: “I can’t stop yet. If the world was entirely made up of Magians, I’ll tell you what I should

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do. I should have a paper-mill established at one end of the house, and so have an endless riband of foolscap rolling in upon my desk; and upon that endless riband I should write a thousand—a million—billion thoughts, all under the form of a letter to you.... [T]he very fingers that now guide the pen are not precisely the same that just took it up and put it on this paper” (Correspondence, 213). The conclusion here, which we have glimpsed before

in other contexts, derives from the pantheistic premise of the first part of the letter. After finishing Mardi, and while writing Pierre, Melville conjures

the transcendental writing that increasingly cannibalizes its author and leaves him without a stable self. The body becomes a kind of player piano for divine texts, for an endless, and finally authorless, “riband.” Even Emerson

confesses: “We look at [people], they seem alive, and we presume there is impulse in them. In the moment it seems impulse; in the year, in the lifetime, it turns out to be a certain uniform tune which the revolving barrel of the music box must play” (“Experience,” 3:52). The pantheist’s greatest fear is that the animation he sees in the world and himself, and even his work, will turn out to be impersonal; that the universality of nature will turn out to be mechanical uniformity. To the disillusioned pantheist, all art is a form of automatic writing, produced by a body that achieves its own impersonal existence. (By the time of The Confidence-Man, science and magic, animation and mechanism, already destabilized in Pierre, are given over to the operations of the printer’s devil. Here, rather than being voiceless, “truth is like a thrashing-machine” [120].) As Melville pushes the notion further, the writer is ground up by his mill; writing is a skill that costs an arm and a leg to develop. Pierre’s body is transmuted into his text. To write is to self-differ, to pick up a pen to dismember one’s hand.

As a result, Pierre experiences the great Melvillean fate of being a fragmented writer, and more specifically devoured. Taji, for example, laments in Mardi: “My cheek blanches white while I write. I start at the scratch of my pen, my own mad brood of eagles devours me” (368). Rhetorically, Pierre is as “devoured” by the “all-exacting theme of his book” as by the idea of Isabel, by “all manner of devouring mysteries” and “devouring profundities”; his body is consumed in equal parts by writing and relations (308, 305, 315). That “special corporeal affliction” that descends upon Pierre is little more than “the ever encroaching appetite for God,” or a fatal writer’s cramp; Pierre is devoured by his pantheism. Pierre’s book grows only with the diminution of its author's body. And true to Isabel’s word, as he attempts to write his book, “how bitterly did unreplying Pierre feel in his heart, that to most

of the great works of humanity, their authors had given, not weeks and months, not years and years, but their wholly surrendered and dedicated

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lives” (34.0, 338). Pierre plies his ink by “thinning his blood” (304-5). Before

he can “breathe back” his defiance, or attempt to compose himself on all levels, Pierre must cry, “But give me first another body!” (360) PANTHEISM IS predicated on a male theory of the nonsexual reproduction of bodies. What happens to women’s bodies in its excessively male economies of identity and exchange? Pantheists situate women as unindividuated, naturally beyond the constraints and pains of male isolation and self-reliance.*° But in their inconsistent fantasies, women’s bodies remain dangerous and destabilizing. Even more than workers’ bodies, women’s reproductive bodies must be controlled and “portioned off” in the U.S. economy; and much as workers’ bodies are subsumed by their work, sexual fetishes replace women’s whole bodies. In Melville’s representation of women, we see both a continuation and a revision of what happens to male bodies in his novels. Modify-

ing Sharon Cameron’s arguments in The Corporeal Self, I argue that the prevalence of the fragmented body in Emerson and Melville is generated by a transcendental pantheism that cannot reconcile particular bodies with universal bodies, nor what it configures as reproductive bodies with transformative ones. That failure of imagination is also reflected in a figuratively violent discourse of female “apportionment.” New Bedford fathers, in terms made scathingly ironic, “give whales for dowers to their daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a-piece. You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say, they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly burn their lengths in spermaceti candles” (Moby-Dick, 32). This iterative portioning of women marks the denial of the sexual and economic fragmentation that allows Melville’s society to function. But the marriage bed is as contingent on violence as the charnel house. In

Emerson's demonology, marriage—viewed as merger between men and women in society rather than between men in nature—creates psychic and even physical fragmentation. Laying bare the logic of Emerson’s vision of gen-

dered American identity, Melville finds that ideas of sexual exchange and union have been disingenuously linked to the portioning and division of bodies. The dowering and nonincestuous exchange of brides, which Melville sees as the symbolic founding of society, marks the “proper” portioning of women’s bodies.*® But all such representation of the self—which is only a form of

exchange, of saying that this porpoise or arm is equivalent to this woman and can be used in exchange for each other—participates in a form of fragmenting violence. Denial of the violence of fragmentation—reflected in Emerson’s protracted struggle to mourn his son’s death without losing himself— generates a pretense that wounds do not alter the stability of the self, which is

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neither torn nor enlarged: that a limb or life can drop away or be portioned off without permanent scarring. After the national economy of Moby-Dick, a grammar of dividing women and men into parts of the body surfaces in the domestic/writing economy of Pierre. That novel’s protagonist retrospectively imagines, “Had I been heartless now, disowned, and spurningly portioned off the girl at Saddle Meadows [his Aalfsister], then had I been happy through a long life on earth” (360). (The Melvillean Ishmaelite also inherits the biblical “portion” otherwise reserved for disowned women such as Hagar and Isabel [100].) Melville does try to speak for the heart and remonstrate against the partitioning and manufac-

turing of people, even when his own rhetoric—“plus head, minus heart”— subverts itself. But for Melville, this repeated portioning of endogamous women characterizes the most fundamental social relations of his society. By his own logic, had Pierre been without a heart, and divided Isabel into parts, and given her dowered body to another unrelated man, she would not have literally come undone, offered to sell parts of her body or portion herself, and finally, in effect, used her body to produce poison. In his own appraisal, Pierre fails and fails to reproduce because he doesn’t exogamously portion Isabel’s body. Despite his protestations of being an isolated and self-reliant man, Pierre merges with Isabel. In Adamic fantasy, men create women from their own bodies. In this reversal, male society would be created by the portioning of women’s bodies.

This unsettling traffic in women in Melville is predicated on the figurative dismemberment and dispersal of their parts, which must not be allowed to “work” or reproduce the way male parts do. In The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction, Emily Martin documents the way “women represent themselves as fragmented” and physically self-detached, “lacking a

sense of autonomy in the world and feeling carried along by forces beyond their control. It seems probable that the causes behind this fragmentation must be operating at a very general level, affecting women at widely separated ends of the social hierarchy” (194, 84). Transcendental male representations

of women as portioned, and of men as fragments of god, again appropriate the alienation of a subordinated group. Women and African Americans were subjected to a variety of fragmentations in this society, but white transcendentalists claim that experience as the basis for their own identities and their fantasies of merger with Nature. Though reenacting that fragmentation himself, Melville parodies Emerson's early attempt to deny the nature of a partitioning economy. Toward the end of Moby-Dick, for instance, Melville reemphasizes the connection

of the marital ceremony to cannibal or capitalist consumption. Looking

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into the sea, even the unsentimental Starbuck murmurs: “Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his young bride's eye!—Tell me not of thy teethtiered sharks, and thy kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact; let fancy oust memory; I look down deep and do believe” (492). Seduce me, Nature, he seems to say, for the alternative is too painful to bear. But fantasies of nature cannot erase fantasies of sexual divisions. For Melville, marriage, or at least the rite of dowry that “founds” society, is itself a form of fragmentation and even

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cannibalism disguised for popular consumption. One cannot overlook the fact that almost all Melville’s surgeons are multiple amputees, that nearly all his collectors of ivory are missing limbs and teeth, that his men and women are portioned off to keep the home fires burning. Bodies that are portioned instead of united also produce unexpected births.

Evidently he was not accustomed to composition; for his literary contractions were so violent, that the doctor suggested that some sort of a cesarean operation might be necessary. Melville, Omz00 (250)

The Book deserves to be burnt in a fire of asafetida, & by the hand that wrote it.... Seriously again, the book is an abortion, the mere trunk of a book, minus head, arm or leg.—Take it back, I beseech, and get some one to cart it back to the author. Melville, unpublished book review, letter to Duyckinck, Nov. 14, 1848 (Letters, 75)

To borrow Mr. Melville’s style... books spring into life, now a days, by a strange Cesarean process... [in this] brand of monstrosity. Modern writers miscarry ere the embryo hath shapen limb or nerve. ... Potent elixirs and cordials elicit some reluctant spark of animation. Review of Pierre, New York Herald (Sept. 18, 1852) (Branch, 308)*

In the death of my son [Waldo]... . [I]t does not touch me; something which I fancied was part of me, which could not be torn off without tearing me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. It was caduceous. Emerson, “Experience” (48-49)

In American transcendentalism, divisions of labor remain closely connected to divisions of gender, because they reflect not only the hierarchies of the actual economy but also a split between the ideal and the real, the All and the individual. In both challenging and succumbing to that split, Melville dramatizes the transcendental assumptions that connect writing, reproduc-

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tion, and the abortion and mutilation of bodies. A gendered metaphysics is crucial to Melville’s notion of economy because work produces new bodies from the frame of the worker himself. Melville associates work not with the reproduction but with the transformation of bodies. Gender is the other “not me” for the male transcendentalist. How does a transcendentalist produce bodies, texts, and progeny from himself? Through cesarean births, abortions, incest, and self-fragmentation. Rather than accept the continuity of a transpersonal self and assume the “sword” of a male ancestor, Pierre the writer sends out his soul for her wages: He would not be forced to turn resurrectionist, and dig up his grandfather's Indian-chief grave for the ancestral sword and shield, ignominiously to pawn them for a living! He could live on himself... let his body stay lazily at home, send off his soul to labor, and his soul would come faithfully back to pay his body her wages. So, some unprofessional gentlemen of the aristocratic South, who own slaves, give [their] slaves liberty to go and seek work, and every night return with their wages. ... Keep, then, thy body effeminate for labor, and thy soul laboriously robust; or else thy soul effeminate for labor and thy body laboriously robust. Elect! (261)

This is also the electoral choice democracy gives Pierre, who must as hyperbolically choose between Lucy and Isabel: “Soon both will be close by thee, my brother; and thou mayest perhaps elect—elect!” (314). (In one of Melville’s more oblique but sustained puns, this gendered language of election is soon cathected to a rhetoric of feminized “electricity.”) Split between soma

and psyche, male and female, and even from itself, the self is located in a body that must provide for itself as an other. In a putatively egalitarian society partly predicated on slavery, gender inequality, and the rifled tombs of other cultures, such rifts reflect a series of self-polarizing divisions. In this economy, bodies must go into the world and return with more parts than they've lost. The writer’s body is not just sacrificed but “parted and parceled” as his work grows; perceived as body parts, books similarly “reproduce” by doubling. In Mardi, the great writers already sent their books, conceived as their progeny, into the world to work for them; as Babbalanja remarks, presaging Pierre, a great author is often forced, “ere his work [i]s well done, to take it off his easel and send it out to be multiplied ... [to say] this poor child of mine must go out into Mardi and get bread for its sire” (602). Melville reviews a book

he loathes as an aborted male trunk—a version of Pan’s amputated body, a Titan without limbs. One cannot help thinking this is the way he came to see

Pierre. (By Emerson’s laws of relation—which relate things and never families—the “trunk of a book” that Melville described to Evert Duyckinck

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is both an amputation and an abortion.) Books becomes misshapen, aborted, miscarried, dismembered male bodies. Work is gendered and problematized

in Melville because it involves the production of new bodies. If men are wholly self-reliant and self-made, from where do these new beings come? In his version of transcendentalism, Melville chronicles several violent economies of bodily transformation that, in fantasy, are supposed to compensate for an imagined loss of female reproduction. Fragmented bodies represent another polarization of transcendentalism,

a reification of the fantasy of merger that denies sexual reproduction in a closed male system of nature. Under his laws of compensation, whereby every loss is balanced by a gain, Emerson speculates that a man “would think twice about learning a new science or reading a new paragraph, if he believed the magnetism was only a constant amount, and that he lost a word for every word he gained. But the experience is not quite so bad. ... The damages of forgetting are more than compensated by the large values which new thoughts and knowledge give” (“Natural,” 12:100). As Melville demonstrates, such transcendental conditionals usually turn out to be predictions. And so Babbalanja anticipates that transformation, in a closed system, will bear the mark of Henry Adams’s education; no Emersonian compensation awaits us: “Excellent as it is, I can be no gainer by this book. For the more we learn, the

more we unlearn; we accumulate not, but substitute, and take away more than we add. We dwindle while we grow. ... All around me, my fellow men are new-grafting their vines and dwelling in flourishing arbors while I am forever pruning mine till it is become but a stump” (Mardi, 329). (Mardi is full of such stumps. For example, “the back tooth that Zozo the Enthusiast, in token of grief, recklessly knocked out at the decease of a friend. (Worn to a stump and quite useless)” [380—81].) In the rhetoric of bodily amputation, the learner becomes a stump, and the writer’s body fragments as he writes. True to its pantheistic principles, Mardi contains Pierre’s body in embryo.

Reminding us of Emerson’s conception of Waldo, such stumps come to represent the aborted bodies of transcendental reproduction. Body parts multiply, and one procures new bodies from old body parts, growing them as one “grows the economy: “If from a vile dragon’s molars rose mailed men, what heroes shall spring from the cannibal canines once pertaining to warriors themselves!” (206). Hands, legs, eyes, teeth, and limbs take on lives of their own; they are the only offspring of representative men, save for their texts. For Melville, writing becomes the locus for a failed or polarized form of

procreation and reflexively undoes rather than reproduces the self. Pierre the writer would live exclusively on himself, but his split personality, his split and destroyed body and soul, assume their own personae. To save Pierre

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from this fate, Isabel would return to the most traditional form of commerce, literally selling oneself, through a variety of disembowelments: “Pierre, some way I must work for thee! See, I will sell this hair; have these teeth pulled out; but some way I will earn money for thee!” (333). Work becomes an extreme form of prostitution; literally selling or portioning one’s body—not for sexual

gratification but for spare parts—represents the oldest profession and the first currency. Not surprisingly, given the novel’s transcendental and Miltonic

undercurrents, Isabel even volunteers to “go blind for thee, Pierre,” urging him, “Here, take out these eyes and use them for glasses” (349). Even as Pierre would send out his male soul to work for his feminized body, Isabel, compet-

ing with Lucy to dismember herself for Pierre, would send out her female body to pay for is work (3.49). But Pierre thinks he must control this “portioning” of Isabel’s body. His proud writer’s hand and script, however, become detached from his self; unable to live off his ancestor or his co-relatives, Pierre chooses to sell off the parts of his own body to keep himself alive. To

the end, Pierre, the self-reliant, all too representative American youth, insists that his work can be accomplished only with his “own hand.” This sometimes inchoate conjunction of self-amputation, femininity, and writing emerges early in Melville’s work. Redburn waggishly declares: “Dandies! amputate yourselves if you will... .[Harry’s] occasional dabbling in tar-pots and slush shoes had somewhat subtracted from [his hand’s] original daintiness.... Oh! hand!... what have ye come to? Is it seemly that you should be polluted with pitch. ... [Harry should be allowed to] flourish his pen, and gently exercise his dainty digits, by traversing some soft foolscap; in the same way that slim, pallid ladies are gently drawn through a park for airing” (281-82). Although Melville characterizes this process of the worker’s physical ruination in ironic terms, the joke, as usual in Melville, is later liter-

alized, and the humor becomes less whimsical and more uncanny. Pierre’s selfconsuming life as a dainty writer prevents him from living as a healthy, savage “Camanche,” and he too, as Vivia, winds up with “but a pallid cheek”

(303). As Pierre castrates Goethe, dandies must be led to amputate themselves. In Redburn, a feminized writing contravenes the sailor’s physical work—which properly taints and “tar-stains” his body “for life” (302-3). Pierre forcefully extends this conceit, using a tar/ink that is turned to blood and vice versa. Pierre will not let his writing be “tarnished” by his dependence on the feminine, but it isan empty gesture, given his attempt to create within an exaggeratedly uxorious family. In Pierre, the connection of labor and writing to incest and amputation in the American family is made explicit in the pivotal appearance of the dismembered Enceladus, “the most potent of all the giants” (345). The Greek “Titan’s

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armless trunk” also represents Pan and Emerson’s American Scholar—a giant, but amputated, transcendental male body (346). Calling his highly sexualized mother only Mary and sister, and living with his half-sister and his “cousin, Pierre dreams of this incestuous Titan, who is the result of “doublyincestuous’ relations. Pierre links Greek Enceladus to the “double-hooded” Cenci, who is charged with the twin crimes of incest and parricide (350). As

John Irwin suggests, incest entails a form of doubling and repetition; but perversely, in pantheism so does the punishment for incest: castration, at least as a form of amputation, is also a way of splitting or doubling the body. Pierre encounters the even more dismembered “American Enceladus, wrought by the vigorous hand of nature's self” (346). In the dialectic of pantheist representation, the male body is first enlarged, then amputated. This time, incest—

for the pantheist, the closest and next-best thing to parthenogenesis or absolute self-containment— produces an enormous, yet truncated, male body: “Nature, more truthful than men, performed an amputation, and left the impotent Titan without one serviceable ball and socket above the thigh” (346). The

Titan represents both the mass body of American democracy and the halfcastrated body of Emerson’s truncated society. Here, Enceladus’s trunk becomes a detached phallus, a “battering ram,” and a “mutilated” torso (350). As punishment for his incestuous desire to merge not just with Nature but with Isabel, and for his failure to “portion off” his half-sister, Pierre “began to feel that in him, the thews [muscles] of a Titan were forestallingly cut by the scissors of Fate” (399). Pierre’s identification with America’s/Nature’s Enceladus

is complete when he sees the “mutilated shoulders, and the stumps” of the Titan, and projects “his own duplicate face and features” on the dismembered trunk (345).

This truncating sexuality of mutilated torsos Melville unfortunately lives out himself, in what was possibly a violent relationship with his wife, Elizabeth, and his own perceptions of gender. For example, Melville writes

to Duyckinck, partly presaging his depiction of Isabel: “I have heard Emerson. ... [Slay what they will he’s a great man. Mrs. Butler too I have

heard...a glorious Lady Macbeth....She’s so unfemininely masculine that had she not... borne children, I should be curious to Jearn the result of a surgical examination of her person in private. The Lord help Butler... I marvel not he seeks being amputated from his maternal half” (Log, 1:28788). In male pantheism’s closed system of duplications without originals, little social position is accorded to women whose primary attribute is a denied, suppressed, or anomalous ability to reproduce. For Melville, Mrs. Butler represents another inversion, a childless Lady Macbeth who somehow bears children. Isabel also claims to “unsex” herself, producing not mother’s milk

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but poison (191, 360). Cross-gender performances, by too effeminate aristo-

crats and too masculine actresses, elicit a similar response of amputation throughout Melville's works. In pantheism, “maternal half” also becomes a redundant phrase; merger is gendered as feminine, but reproduction is often situated as a form of self-division and amputation. To create a new body is impossible, for men can (re)produce only by transforming—by merging or rending—existing bodies. Recalling the in vivo surgical examination he performs on Hawthorne’s ribcage, Melville now surgically gropes under the female plexus, but still finds the sign of Adam he seeks. In Pierre, these “imperfect, unanticipated, and disappointing sequels (as mutilated stumps), hurry to abrupt intermergings with the eternal tides”; that is, our mutilated bodies, trying to reproduce, or generate a sequel, are supposed to merge back with the All of nature (141). Parts try to become wholes, one with the eternal All. They intermix and intermerge, much as Isabel “intermarryingly blend[s]” Pierre’s father with some foreign feminineness (112).

But Pierre does not quite realize, as his narrator does, that “all the great books of the world are but the mutilated shadowings-forth of invisible and eternally unembodied images in the soul”; the translation from the archetype

to the incarnation remains a form of mutilation (284). Consistent with its set-up, in Pierre, “nor book, nor author of the book, hath any sequel, though each hath its last lettering” (360). Even the birth of his own book, like the birth of a child, truncates the author's autonomous body. And in transcendental discourse, the male-produced child or text is only a mutilated “stump.” The “imperfect body” of Moby-Dick—as Melville explicitly describes it to

Hawthorne—and its unanticipated and disappointing “imperfect sequel,” Pierre, are for Melville quickly disembodied, and merge back into the All of unread books.

Vil Unable to reproduce himself from himself, the transcendentalist is thrown back on fantasies of anomalous or asexual reproduction, budding, accretion, and multiplication. Pan represents the renunciation of family, except in the context of incest, and reproduction, except in the context of self-generation. In

the fantasies of American pantheism, men propagate asexually like some plants, through the cutting and grafting of bodies. By extension, in Pierre’s fantasy, women reproduce by being plants. In Mardi, after a lengthy compari-

son of plants to men, in which the men are routed, the Thoreauvian Azzageddi concludes: “Plants make love and multiply, but excel us in all amorous

enticements.... Plants flourish without us; we must perish without them”

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(508). This description prepares us for the way Isabel sexualizes her identifcation with flora. Women’s bodies, for Melville never properly “portioned” away from those of men, return primarily in the context of a collective botanical nature or incest, which in transcendentalism overlap; they represent discourses of nondifferentiation. After he tries and fails to reproduce from isolated male bodies in Moby-Dick, Melville introduces an incestuous female body, but even Pierre’s attempt at parturition is thwarted. Incest, like transcendental solipsism, finally proves sterile. Conceiving of an identity that is alternately merged and amputated, pantheists often situate people as collectivized plants or plant cuttings, as in this instance from Louisa Cohen's Pantheism, which reprises much of Emerson's “Method of Nature”: “[An] ‘individual’ plant may be propagated by cuttings... without beginning or end of any particular life, which is thus merged in a continuous life....|T]here is no such thing as a separate individual life either in time or space. ... [S]}uch continuous stream of life, which unites in itself successive units of life, is to the pantheist part of the life of God, which is the one complete everlasting individual life” (17).4° Ironically, the woodgod’s occult male children propagate parthenogenetically less by merging than by cutting—a variation on amputation. This passage also recapitulates Isabel’s dominant fantasy: to join a continuous stream of life that transcends the fragmentation of male isolation. These indistinguishable, successive units of life, and this form of asexual reproduction, constitute divine Nature: men wind up with continuous life at the expense of individual existence. As early as Omoo, for Melville life is generated less through sexual reproduction than through the accumulation of body parts: “The inequalities of

the coral collect all floating bodies; forming after a time, a soil.... These would appear to be bodies in the very process of creation” (62-63). In other words, bodies are created through the re-formation or accretion of extant bodies, the land itself arising through this asexual “coralation” and transformation, not actual (re)production. In keeping with the rhetoric describing the world as a growing plant/machine, Babbalanja cries, “How the isles grow and multiply around us!” (Mardi, 435) Melville gives parodic and finally literal form to Emerson’s dream of parthenogenesis as a kind of absolute self-reliance: many ignorant Mardians “sagely divined, that the Tapparians must have podded into life like peas, instead of being otherwise indebted for their existence” (400). (Tappa, which is frequently mentioned in Mardi, is tree bark used to make cloth and sheets.) Like his closest allies, plants, Pan is not born but pods into existence. An uncreated, shapeless giant, Pan, as Emerson claims, simply enlarges and transforms, “never was born; growed,” or in Melville’s translation, podded (“Natu-

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ral,” 12:35). Such a renunciation of debt and lineage leads to extreme isolation; though the Emersonian islanders of Pimminee “had dead dust for grandsires, they seldom reverted to that fact, for like all founders of families, they had no family vaults. Nor were they much encumbered by living connections” (Mardi,

399). To renounce heredity is to fake selfcreation and risk the hubris of self-propagation. As to those self-podding Tapparians, “connections, some of them appeared to have none” (399). Yet connection is the heart of pantheism, and representation itself, in Melville. The Tapparians are of course also an object of Swiftian satire—Americans so self-reliant they refute their own history. As Media objects, “He’s someone’s great great grandson, doubtless, who was great great grandson to someone else, who also had grandsires” (425). Emphasizing the transcendental context of Mardi’s pronouncements, Melville himself admits in a letter to Duyckinck: “We are all sons, grandsons, or nephews of those who go before us. No one is his own sire—I was very agreeably disappointed in Mr. Emerson” (Correspondence, 121).

The manipulation of creation, and the animation of mechanical processes that turn out to mirror nature, leave women doubly marginalized: women generally cannot reproduce in Melville’s work. Before the prison of

“The Tartarus of Maids,” in Mardi the “mournful maidens’” wheels are broken; their “distaffs snapped,” they are “pinioned” hip and arm so that the women starve. The workers are dispersed from the magician’s mill, as water turns “wheels giving life to ten thousand fangs and fingers. ... [T]he place seemed alive with its spindles... throwing off wondrous births at every revolving, ceaseless as the cycles that circle in heaven... yet no mortal was seen” (478-89). As with slavery and whaling, mothers are effectively suppressed. (Even a significant exception, Pierre’s mother, is also treated as his sister.) While full of anomalous births, Melville’s works are largely devoid of women who give birth. One rarely encounters actual pregnancy in Melville’s

writing, but its surreptitious presence underlies almost every mention of amputation, merger, animation, grafting, and transplant. We have seen that to portion women’s bodies in society, to create dowries, to give Isabel away to another man, lights gay bridal lights; but the portioning of men’s bodies only violently reproduces other male bodies in the distance, at sea, where the economy’s slaughterhouse is sometimes concealed.

Whaling, the partitioning of the bodies of surrogate males, the complete denaturing of a living body, becomes in a twisted fashion the quintessential form of male reproduction; as noted, in a world without women, the male practice of whaling represents an Egyptian mother who bore offspring a/ready pregnant (Moby-Dick, 109).?° In this parable of how white men appropriate a racialized and feminized Nature, whaling men reproduce without

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procreating, by exenterating or transforming the body parts of others. Melville here again reduces the distance between slave and capitalist economies. Like Emerson’s version of Topsy, this Egyptian mother of whaling reifies slavery; bodies in these economies just “grow” or pod, spring from teeth or limbs, and emerge either without parent or already pregnant. Melville’s Egyptian mother is a crucial counterpoint to Emerson’s configuration of the slave girl Topsy, who appears without ever having had a mother: both emblematize black female Nature and unnatural birth as definitive of male economies, and both reflect the economic reproductions of slavery. It is in American slavery that black bodies seem to be born parthenogenetically and already pregnant. Such images offer sardonic commentary on the actual forms of familial trauma through which slavery generated bodies.” Continuing his exposition regarding how bodies are produced and represented in whaling, Ishmael says that his transparent whale bookmarks are composed of the “skin of the skin, so to speak, for it were simply ridiculous to

say, that the proper skin of the tremendous whale is thinner and more tender than the skin of a new-born child. But no more of this” (306).°* Like Emerson, he cannot speak of the transcendental esoteric too openly. And as usual in Melville, “it is ridiculous” only because the skin isn’t thinner; it’s the same. Melville’s statements of apparent ridicule—that the whale might be hunted to extinction in Moby-Dick; that the world might be paved in Pierre; that pantheism might unduly influence him as he writes to Hawthorne— tend to be statements of ineluctability. The explicitly “transparent” and “magnifying” skin covering the giant sperm whale—“a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years”—is the transcendental veil of nature (567, 335). (That Moby Dick at least intermittently represents the impersonal god of transcendental nature is further confirmed when Ishmael describes his “Mo-

nadnoc hump,” associating the whale not just with Emerson’s poem of the same name but with the mountain long perceived as a symbol and site of tran-

scendental thought [569].) For Melville, the hermaphroditic whale is a perfectly indeterminate transcendental symbol: it reflects both white consciousness and the black Egyptian mother; phallicism and maternal parthenogenesis; the All of nature and the newborn child; and a racialized Nature that reproduces outside society. Throughout Moby-Dick, children are effectively born without parents or to parents already dead, and adults give birth to phantoms and ghosts—the

independent wills that take over parts of their bodies. What is perpetually called man’s “vitality” cannot coexist with its host, and flees “horror stricken

from the unbidden and unfathered birth” (202)°? The text’s catalogue of negative phrases, its consistently “unfathered” language, culminates in this

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parthenogenetic birth, what Ishmael might call a “not unvexed subject” (305). As Rita Bode argues, the “dominance of Moby-Dick’s masculine images is

deceptive, for a pattern of transformations emerges in which the masculine gives way to suggestions of the maternal” (183). Just before encountering the Nantucket ship Bachelor, Ishmael asks: “Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them. The secret of our paternity lies in their grave” (492). That dying unwed mother is akin to the Egyptian mother who bears pregnant offspring. For Ishmael, we cannot know our parentage until we too die. Moby-Dick chronicles a protracted assault on the bodies of mothers while simultaneously condemning that assault. Taji's, Ahab’s, and Pierre’s obsessive pursuits of sources and endings also represent attempts to recontextualize gendered lineage as the basis of identity. Ahab the effective widower, more like Isabel than Macduff, imagines that he is not of woman born: “Now I do glory in my genealogy. But thou art but my fiery father; my sweet mother I know not” (508). (Ahab’s widowed mother died when he was twelve months old.) The definite parent is missing for most of Melville’s characters, whose genealogy can never be complete. That Yillah,

for example, has not the “remotest conception of her real origin” ties her equally to Isabel and Ahab (Mardi, 153). Neither gender can find an origin for itself, but in pantheism only men need to guarantee a unique individuality.

All reproduction and relation of the self are problematic in male transcendentalism. In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson tautologically claims that honor is loved because it is “self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree” (2:60). A clean, fine, immaculate pedigree is equivalent to self-derivation, but leaves one self-isolated: “The soul gives itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through it” (““Over-Soul,” 2:296). A transcendental body is never born but grown like an extra limb, immaculately conceived; self-reliance becomes self-generation. (Transcendentalism and development were explicitly conjoined and ridiculed for such hubristic fantasies. For instance, the anonymous author of “The Pantheistic Movement,”

mocking Auguste Comte, asserts that development is no more ridiculous than statements that “man is a developed ourang-outang, who is a developed monkey... and so on, until we come to the ‘sel-produced child of electricity, ” perhaps the parthenogenetic child of Isabel, as inspired by Emerson [559].) The divine is without origin or antecedent, and hence without end: for Emerson, “a candle a mile long or a hundred miles long does not help the imagination; only a self-feeding fire, an inextinguishable lamp, like the sun and the star, that we have not yet found date and origin for” (“Immortality,” 8:335).

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(All these transcendental representations of se/f-creation implicate what we might term Lacanian reification; what Zizek identifies as the fantasia of the subject has no independent, “positive substantial Being,” since it is performative, “i.e., itis a kind of self-inflamed flame” | Organs, 119]. In other words,

for Zizek as much as for Emerson, the self-derived self is bootstrapped from nothing, because there is no self.) Melville, however, early concluded that even the transcendental god might not be able to create, or avoid selfdifference, because another source always precedes the one at issue: “For we are not gods or creators, and the controversialists have debated whether indeed the All-Plastic power itself can do more than mold. In all the universe is but one original, and their very suns must to the source for their fire” (Mardi, 229). Such passages remind us that transcendentalists prized not some impossible personal originality but aboriginality: the archetypal, representative, and primitive—which were often racialized. This passage is also a figurative transcription of Emerson’s “Experience” or Parker’s “Divine Presence.” Melville finally concludes that the “one original” is the Confidence Man, a mask without a face, god’s shadow without a god. For Hawthorne, this attempt at self-generation turns Adam into a false god playing with parts. As Zenobia charges Hollingsworth in The Blithedale Romance: “Ate you a man? No, but a monster! A cold, heartless, self-beginning and self-ending piece of mechanism!” (218). The self-reliant transcendentalist is selfgenerating, a monster like the Rappaccini who circumvents nature. As if deliberating with Pierre in mind, Emerson asserts that one cannot reach god through the votes of men, for “not so will the God deign to enter and inhabit you. ... It is only as a man puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to prevail” (“SelReliance,” 2:89; see also Manning, 299). But as Pierre puts off all foreign support—most overdeterminedly in Isabel—he begins to consume himself. (This process begins when Pierre realizes that “the portrait of his then youthful father [was] strangely translated” and combined “with some before unknown, foreign feminineness” [112].) Transcendental self-feeding figuratively becomes self-consumption, for example, when Pierre assumes the role of his character Vivia and “directly plagiarized from his own experience,” for that is the only form of debt and influence he can openly abide (302). We selfcreate, selffeed, and self-ignite. Pierre is the kind of proud man who “ever holds but lightly those things, however beneficent, which he for himself did not procure”; yet in any endeavor, the “seed must be borrowed from some previous planter” (261). Melville again parodies this idea of sexual “transplantation” as the essence of transcendentalism even while reifying it. His selfmade man is parthenogenetic, but by extension either sterile or a seed-borrower; in the circular logic of pantheism,

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to be self-created is to lack the ability to reproduce, and the orphans (and writers) who populate Melville’s novels wind up almost literally self-contained and endemically without issue.** When Peleg calls the crew of the Peguod “sons of bachelors,” he implies

they're not only bastards but also, confirming Tocqueville, produced without family allegiances (103). But to “federate” all nations instead of families, to be mortally parentless, is for the male to give birth with his body the only way he can, through its partitioning; in Melville’s fictional universe, to be orphaned is to be a bachelor, to be left sterile and finally extinct (Redburn, 169, and Moby-Dick, 121).

When Lucy and Isabel revise the latter’s offer to help Pierre, now “not in mere copying, but in the original writing” of his book, Pierre insists that he fights “in a duel in which all seconds are forbid” (3.49).°? But for the man who lives on and plagiarizes only himself, everything becomes precisely dual. Melville can have his protagonist live “incestuously” with two women and still bear no offspring, for parturition occurs only in the proliferation, the doubling, of parts. All “seconds,” except those that serve as duplicates of the self, are prohibited to Pierre; both despite and because of his imitation of a newly transcendental, “self-begotten Christ”—a god without a father—no children, no self-sufficient hermaphrodites, and no “bachelor demi-gods” are born from one parent (Mardi, 607).°° Admitting that the principle of transcendental nature “supplants all relative existence and ruins the kingdom of mortal friendship and love,” Emerson had been accused of sundering families (“Experience,” 3:77). But it is in Melville’s fiction that families are figuratively

torn apatt. Emerson conceived of even his son as an appendage that somehow achieved its own existence, and whose death, whose falling off, leaves no scar; in repressing what must have been extreme grief, Emerson denies his child’s inde-

pendence from his father’s body, which contains the universe. His going forth, like his coming hither, is an amputation. But Emerson always imagines

his own body as a fragment and a representation of all that is not him, including his own unconscious. Along such lines, Pierre’s attempt to be inordinately, unequivocally self-reliant takes Emerson to his logical extreme. Melville finds that a wholly self-reliant man would have a body that was never born, and only a divine heredity. Throughout his life, little Pierre tries to deny that he once didn’t exist, and that he had a mortal and all too reproductive father. As a result, Pierre’s body possesses neither integrity nor continuity. Like Emerson’s “songs, thus flying from their mortal parent” (“Poet,” 3:230), Melville’s heaven-begotten Christ “will not own a mortal parent, and

spurn[s] and rend|[s] all mortal bonds” (Pierre, 106); it is the privilege of

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divinity to acknowledge no creator. Stanley Cavell writes that “a son of man is born of woman; but rebirth, according to our Bible, is the business of the father” (16). But for Melville, rebirth becomes the domain of a father who

no longer exists, and birth the domain of a mother occluded; only the impersonal sire, the incarnation of natural law, remains to preside over a cannibalistic system that multiplies only itself. In a final and critical transcendental pun, Isabel tells Pierre, “Thou shalt not be cozened,” tricked into doing anything by her tears, but Pierre is precisely “cousined” by his putative relative. The saline “tears” in Isabel’s eyes become the “tears” (rips) on the page, and are then turned back to drops of ink/blood, revealing the power of feminine transformation as unpredictably disruptive; most of all, women change the meanings of words, which are at least doubled (64). The “cozening” family seduces, veils secrets from, and finally transforms Pierre. Isabel promises that Pierre will not “repent” anything she asks him to do, but at the end of life, he most of all regrets that he did not “portion off” her body. He has been cozened, seduced, and betrayed by incestuous nature. But as Melville moves from market to domestic economy, nature’s veil is exchanged for that of the family in Pierre, a text

that delivers Moby Dick in the house, the whale in the garden. (Pierre repeatedly recuperates Ahab’s rhetoric, asserting, for example, that Isabel’s face, like the whale’s, had uncovered one infinite, dumb mystery underlying all of time and space [52].) Like Ahab, Pierre would “strike through thy [Fate’s] helm, and will see thy face, be it Gorgon! .. . From all idols, I tear all veils” (66). Throughout Melville’s work, women represent the veils of Nature, which is why Moby-Dick, a book ostensibly without women, is as much a reading of the feminine as Pierre. Men must “pierce” Pan’s mystery, the veil of Nature, its feminine overlay, but they are dismantled in the process. The

veil of Nature that both Ahab and Pierre try to pierce, to strike through, hides the principle that now turns women, like marble Lucy, to stone but men to feminized plants. When included within the largely male scope of Melville’s writing, women are depicted as incarnating the lures and threats of pantheism. They represent nature, but a nature to which men have no access. Male pantheists had redefined tropes to be identitarian, and so produced a system of infinite “reproduction” through simulation and exchange. Conventionally perceived by Melville as having a direct relationship to nature and language, and a proclivity to merge their already non-individuated identities in nature, women can disrupt this male pantheist epistemology, for they do not need pantheism to escape indebtedness, to equate or represent the world, or to transform instead of create. In these fantasies men are pantheists, but women are always

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already pantheistic; they are like the Native Americans or racial Others on whose absence transcendentalism is predicated, but whose spectral presence always remains.

At first glance, the resurgence of pantheism could be considered a male response to what Ann Douglass characterizes as nineteenth-century “feminized” Christianity; as Lawrence summarizes in “The Overtone,’ a rejoinder to Emerson's “The Over-Soul,” “Christ was woman, and Pan was man” (Collected, 703).°’ But if Pan is male, pantheism is feminized. Here, however, American pantheism is less a male response to feminine Christianity than a

contradictory effort to extirpate the feminine within the American self. When Jane Tompkins sees women in the nineteenth century as becoming political “vehicles of god’s will,” able “to submit” themselves to higher authority and bypass men’s will, a “medium through which god’s glory” can show itself to men, and even, in Susan Warner’s words, a “transparent glazing” or medium for his light, she pinpoints the way women could threaten Emerson’s transcendental notions regarding male permeability to god. But when Tompkins suggests that Warner’s goal is “to become empty of self, an invisible transparency that nevertheless is miraculously responsible for the life in everything,” she also describes a central tenet of Emerson’s decidedly male ethos (43, 53). For Emerson, to become transparent is to lose the observing self in god, to become one with the observed; but to do so, to become god’s “transparent glazing,” is to attempt to neutralize social interaction one cannot control. For men to submit to god’s will involves a dangerous, paradoxical, feminized bid to recapture individual male authority—a move they hope to effectuate by submitting not to a god of domestic sentimental piety but to one of impersonal natural law. Tompkins inadvertently locates the danger of the feminine to the transcendentalism of the American Renaissance; for Emerson, a feminine renunciation of will and “evacuation” by god turn out to be submissive, not transcendent. Such acts represent submission not in nature but to female society. For Melville, such forms of self-renunciation also represent not the

transcendence of a problematic male individuality but the manipulative, passive-aggressive sentimentalism of nineteenth-century Christianity. As Charlene Avallone notes, the “strains of sentimental and religious discourses in [Melville’s] romances suggest an engagement with [women] writers in those modes” (51). Melville is less repudiating those modes than inhabiting them to critique a male culture of transcendentalism and its “self-contained” fantasies of the feminine. In “Loving Bondage: Emerson’s Ideal Relationships,” Christopher Newfield argues that “the harlot is Emerson’s emblem for aself-reliant woman. ... Harlot self-reliance is simply self-reliance in its common meaning of making

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one’s own identity and rules, but this is almost never the meaning Emerson intends.” The problem is that “the self-reliant woman does not submit to a higher power” (“Loving,” 191). Newfield is persuasive in arguing that Emersonian self-reliance involves “obedience to the highest law,” a kind of selfdispossession, though he slightly obfuscates how women fit into this system. Newfield claims that if we discount woman’s “potential rebellion against the universal law, which would suggest that the law is incomplete or internally contradictory ...the law can seem entirely identical to the male self. All that is left in male heterosexuality is a common union with ‘universal nature’ that does not in the least threaten male identity” (192). But Newfield’s conclusion regarding that threat is inapposite: merger with nature is coded as a male usurpation of feminine non-individuation, and few things are as threatening to a transcendental male persona. Merger with universal nature is the demonological dislocation of male identity. One must remember that Emerson’s “woodgod solicits the wandering poet” and paints like

the harlot, leaving even heterosexual merger with nature (or homosocial merger with Pan himself) potentially dangerous (Journals, 10:34.4). In this discursively consistent and consistently polarizing fantasy, men are seduced into a loss of individuality, and into want and madness as well as bliss and reverie.

Vill “Without Bell”: The Final Telegraphic Communications I and Waldo were of one mind. Emerson (Journals, 7:358)

I on the contrary do constantly aver that you & I are not inhabitants of one thought of the Divine Mind, but of two thoughts. Emerson, letter to Margaret Fuller (Letters, 2:336-37)

Could I remake me! or set free / This sexless bound in sex, then plunge / Deeper than Sappho, in a lunge / Piercing Pan’s paramount mystery! Melville, “After the Pleasure Party” (Collected, 61)

In the dialectic of pantheism, women’s bodies tend to be merged or transformed effortlessly while male bodies are partitioned or devoured in extreme conflict.°8 In proportion to her being boundaryless—“entirely fluid” and even living in “an electric fluid”—Isabel becomes catalytic, an “influence” upon Pierre that proves deadly (151, 32.4). (As Lucy and Isabel dem-

onstrate, women in Melville can also be cast as the polar oppositions of

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pantheism, becoming either still as marble or wholly fluid.) For Melville, women not only represent the primary link to nature but also incarnate it in ways men cannot. Isabel becomes a nature spirit and a literal “transformer,” a conductor of electricity; and even with the relatively inert marble girl, Lucy, Pierre “seemed as one placed in linked correspondence with the summer lightnings” (36). Once Pierre joins his half-sister, an Emersonian correspondence between causal chains and feminine lightning is reinforced: through Isabel, “strang-

est feelings, almost supernatural, now stole into Pierre. ... With the lightning’s flash, the query is spontaneously propounded—chance, or God?... [All their myriad links rattle in the mournful mystery” (111). Completing the circuit between men and nature, women in male transcendental fantasy are carriers of identity and of plagues contaminating that identity, but they bear no identity themselves. Women, particularly sexualized relations, fuse the “reciprocal,” electric energy of pantheism. The condensing haze of ambiguities seemed to be “interfusing itself with the sparkling electricity in which

[Isabel] seemed to swim.... This spell seemed one with that Pantheistic master-spell, which eternally locks in mystery and in muteness the universal subject world, and the physical electricalness of Isabel seemed reciprocal

with the heat lightnings and ground-lightnings nigh which it had first become revealed to Pierre” (151). Isabel’s all-fusing electrical spell reifies the conversions of the translatable forces of nature; via the scientific as well as popular literature of the day, it again locates a principle of gothic animation, as electricity was associated with the power to create life. (The “Pantheistic master-spell” is akin to the pantheistic vitality that animates bodies. Emerson even believed that when the microscope became powerful enough, all life would be revealed to “be electricity” | Journals, 14:174].) Isabel’s physical electricity enacts a principle of transference, conducting the “soft ground-

lightnings of the electric summer night,” through this infinite, underlying mystery—the same “paramount mystery” of Sappho’s sex that Melville invokes in “After the Pleasure Party,” the same “Mystery of Isabel!” that incessantly attaches to Pierre’s half-sister (160, 126). A fluid form, Isabel unfixes her Pygmalion even in the act of being poured into his mold; she tells Pierre his hand is the caster’s ladle, “which holds me entirely fluid. Into thy forms

and slightest moods of thought, thou pourest me; and I there solidify to that form, and take it on, and thenceforth wear it, till once more thou moldest me anew. If what thou tellest me be thy thought, then how can I help its being mine, my Pierre?” (324). But while designated a principle of (potential) fertility and fluidity, Isabel soon molds, and acts as the presumed male to, Pierre far more than she is molded: “Too nigh to me, Isabel? Sun or dew,

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thou fertilizest me!” (333). Now himself the representative plant, Pierre, like many Melvillean characters, is altered—fertilized—by the threatening proximity of others to his male self, by their coming “too nigh” to him. For Melville almost as much as Emerson, a man and a woman cannot be two thoughts of the divine mind—unless, possibly, they are offspring of the same parent. (Isabel also begins to merge her thoughts with Pierre’s as their bodies join.) For Melville, merger with an unrelated woman remains an impossible goal, deflected onto Hawthorne or an incestuous sister. When such a sister fertilizes a brother, he should become incestuously reproductive, as close to Emerson's self-fertilizing, parthenogenetic “black” nature as he can come. But that fantasy is dramatically exposed as thanatopic at the end of Pierre. In a model of human development Melville both romanticizes and sati-

rizes, babies and women are inherently “intertextual” and cannot distinguish between the self and the inanimate world; before birth and through early childhood, they exist in a state of unself-conscious feminine merger. To the pantheist, bodies and texts have no defined borders. Isabel begins life as a child undifferentiated from nature and other bodies; she lives in what Emerson describes as “the heaven without rent or seam” (“Experience,” 3:70). In Moby-Dick, to achieve harmony with heaven is to resist such seams or division, and so, in its consistently “un-bidden” language, return to the condition of “an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born babe” (468). In this revealing description, the baby is a still divine whole, one with the All. In Emerson’s and Melville’s writing, the closer one is to birth, to the All, the _ “purer” is one’s lineage, the less one has been fragmented and dis-integrated. As soon as the babe becomes male or female—a differentiated babe—it is subject to the fractioning of race, gender, and the myriad other portionings of the economies of identity. In antebellum America, difference is often figured as a form of physical division. In the language of fractured integrals that Melville returns to in “After the Pleasure Party,” souls begin as babies who

have yet to be not just amputated but gendered. In this remarkably selfcontradictory passage, Isabel explains to Pierre that another beautiful infant first brought me to my own mind... first undid in me the fancy that all people were as stones, trees, cats; first filled me with the sweet

idea of humanness.... I sawasnake....[T]hat thing is not human, but lam human. That lightning is not human, but 1am human. ... [S]omehow I felt that all good, harmless men and women were human things, placed at crosspurposes, in a world of snakes and lightnings. ... [O]ther things I was ignorant of, except the general feeling of my humanness among the inhumanities....

I thanked—not God, for I had been taught no God—I thanked the bright human summer, and the joyful human sun....I would sometimes steal

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away into the beautiful grass, and worship the kind summer and the sun. (122—23)°”

The beautiful infant merges Isabel back into a transcendental nature, not human society. Isabel was partially exiled from the natural world, but after protesting too much about her humanness, humanizes what is entirely inhuman; she realizes that the lightning is not human, and then pantheistically worships a human summer. Isabel’s very femininity is cast as izhuman. Though she claims to find humanness distinct from things, plants, and animals, Isabel continues to imagine herself as their surrogates; she does

not translate nature into art but gives it unmediated vent into the world. The world of nature is anthropomorphized, but the world of men is turned into an inhuman nature; lightning, like nature or her unsourced music, may be inhuman, but Isabel conducts them all. Her Emersonian inconsistencies are not mere contradictions; they are an enactment of her being. One can trace much of Melville’s configuration of women as botanical and non-individuated to Hawthorne and Goethe, the figures Melville most

often overtly invokes in relation to his own pantheism. Written in 1844, Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” suggests to Melville an exigent connec-

tion between the feminine and a botanical, intertextual pantheism. In Hawthorne’s more traditional story of a father’s fatal love and a daughter’s final poisoning, male parthenogenesis and a female “inhumanity” are conjoined. Repeatedly described as “another flower, the human sister of those vegetable ones,” Beatrice incarnates Emerson’s occult relation with the botanical world (Selected, 356, 333). Beatrice, whose name, character, and symbolic function are

recuperated in Pierre, remarks that her father “created” the flower with which she is associated: “He is a man fearfully acquainted with the secrets of Nature, and, at the hour when I first drew breath, this plant sprang from the soil, the offspring of his science, of his intellect, while I was but his earthly child” (343). Beatrice’s body is indissociable from, intertextual with, the body of

the plant, her twin; she is another precursor to Topsy and Donatello, an unborn child springing from the soil. Whereas Hawthorne from a remove postulates the dangers of overweening intellect and transcendental male creation, Melville anticipates the loss of the observer's nonparticipant status. Melville’s version of Beatrice discards the distance between seducer and seduced, writer and “creation.”

Isabel’s epiphany, like her human summer and sun, is also inspired by “Rappaccini’s Daughter”; there Beatrice, who as a child was as isolated from society as Isabel, “blossomed with the plant and was nourished with its breath. It was my sister, and I loved it with a human affection” (Selected, 365). Even in

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her affections and “breath,” Beatrice is as close to Isabel’s sister, or antecedent, as one can find; her “human affection” is directed at a nature outside humanity. In the transcendental fantasy Hawthorne is deriding, Beatrice cannot be-

come human because she humanizes, and becomes physically “intertextual” with, everything else. In ways men cannot, such women carry Melville’s pantheistic feelings to their logical extreme; they see nature and even inanimate objects as extensions of the body, and treat inanimate objects as human and humans as objects of nature. Finally, Beatrice’s sisterhood with nature sets up Isabel’s with Pierre. Isabel is also modeled loosely after Rousseau’s notion of a natural savage (part of a subtext that codes “the mystery” of sister Isabel as a racialized sister Jsis: dark, incestuous, Ishmaelite, a worshipper of a black nature and a bright sun, and

perhaps a member of an Osirian “mystery cult.” As Anna Brickhouse and _ Robert Levine suggest in various contexts, “ebon Isabel” is a “FrancoAfricanist” figure [Brickhouse, 24.4; Levine, “Genealogical,” 242—43]).© Brought up this orphaned “savage,” Isabel knows no god, but like Beatrice finds “the guitar was human,” and it “learned [her] to play” on it (125). As in Hawthorne's story, in Pierre the woman allied with nature and the Cenci effectively has no mother at all; in Hawthorne’s tale she is parthenogenetically generated, while in Melville’s novel she is born of a woman strikingly effaced from the narrative. (The father also effectively disappears in Melville’s tale,

and the brother replaces him.) The transcendental deification of nature produces an intertextuality of bodies but precludes the possibility of motherhood. Nature becomes all the more human, becomes a problematic and lit-

eral mother nature, when no natural mother is present, when women are relegated to an abstract association with nature and denied roles as producers of children or anything else. This narrative of portioned bodies, transcendental integrals, and fantasies of merger ends in a particularly startling telegraphic relay between Melville and Emerson. Melville cannot remake himself or set free “the sexless bound in sex, the ultimate Emersonian universal bound in the body. Just after invoking “Pan's paramount mystery’ of gender, Melville continues “After the Pleasure Party” with a familiar but still jarring depiction of sexual relativism: For, Nature, in no shallow surge, Against thee either sex may urge, Why hast thou made us but in halves— Co-relatives? This makes us slaves. If these co-relatives never meet Self-hood itself seems incomplete. (Collected, 219)

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All men and women are halves, co-relatives whose identities are incomplete, but whose unity implicates death, incest, and the transcendence of gender itself. Never fully renouncing the prospect of sexual merger in nature, Melville recasts Milton’s Eve, who is Adam’s “copartner,’ as his half and “corelative” (Paradise Lost, 9.821). Pierre is another platonic fable of the gender politics of “After the Pleasure Party”; in fact, one could summarize much of the history of American pantheism by tracing the way Emerson's correlatives become Melville’s co-relatives. (Slavery here is partly reduced to another heuristic to represent the metaphysics of white male identity, but also marks the double consciousness of gender in American society.)®! Though Emerson claims in “Experience” that the soul admits “no co-life” and that “marriage is impossible’—and insists “the genders must stay in separate spheres” —he also hoped that marriage could unite the “severed halves” of our fragmented divinity (“Love,” Early, 3:62). Though he does so for complex reasons and through complex strategies, Pierre attempts to transcend gender division through sexual merger. But when Pierre the young Platonist meets his “co-relative,” he also becomes a “slave” —cozened/cousined by Isabel—and his “self-hood” becomes as “double-hooded” as Isabel’s and the Cenci’s veils (351).° Melville consummates Pierre’s pantheism in this late poem, finalizing a discourse of gendered parts and wholes that structures much of his writing: And such the dicing of blind fate Few matching halves here meet and mate. What Cosmic jest or Anarch blunder The human integral clove asunder And shied the fractions through life’s gate? (Collected, 219)

(Since Melville names Pan explicitly in the poem, his reference to cloven bodies

is also overdetermined.) This poem distills the Pan/Osiris myth to its gender

components, its underlying foundation. Pantheism’s rhetoric of human integers, fractions, and halves recurs to the rhetoric of American gender. This formulation of cloven, amputated men and women, of two equally castrated sexes, stands behind American pantheism, its rendings and mergers. Pan’s fragments are gendered, for no person can be both sexes even by merging with the All. Few matching halves do mate in Melville’s work; only the baby still an “unfractioned integral,” the child (or child-woman) still pantheistically merged with and undifferentiated from the world, escapes the dicing of blind fate. In chapter 2 I explored the effects of pantheistic animation on Melville’s

characters, the ways in which their bodies become agents of divine will, which here reaches one of its final expositions in a confluence of breath,

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body, and divinity. Melville’s later works take Emerson's premises to their culturally necessary conclusions, restoring the “not me” to a sexualized body.

For the ethereal Emerson, whether we will it or not, a metaphysical nature sustains us every moment, and a divine wind enters and alters us. Emerson writes in “The Poet” that “the gods talk in the breath of the woods,” and in “The Over-Soul,” a work with which Melville might have been especially familiar, that “a wise old proverb says, ‘God comes to see us without bell’” (3:311, 2:271).°9 The pantheist god of nature whispers in ethereal breaths, inspires us,

without warning, without our awareness. By now, Melville has swallowed Emerson whole and spit out his bones as prose. Reprising the language and epistemology of Emerson’s essays, Melville has his protagonist in Pierre locate

the divinity in nature through this same god’s breath, but breathed into the figure of Isabel: for Pierre, the wind through the pine tree, “that is god's breath....[A]s I look up into thy high secrecies, oh tree, the face, the face, peeps down on me!...[O]h thou mysterious girl” (41). Even more closely paraphrasing Emerson, Isabel tells Pierre that “God's own breath breathed on me.... The impulse in me called thee, not poor Bell. God called thee, Pierre, not poor Bell” (158-59).°* (Isabel keeps using this Emersonian shorthand for her

name whenever god is involved.) Isabel repeatedly makes such rhetorical claims, for instance, concerning how she is “revealed” to Pierre, insisting “the great God did it, Pierre—xot poor Bell”; that immanent “great God,” of course, remains a euphemism for “the great god Pan” (158, 155). But Melville wants the reader to remain suspicious of Isabel’s rationaliza-

tions, such Emersonian projections onto the deity. What only seemingly abstract divinity is speaking, breathing, and calling through Nature/Isabel/ Bell? After invoking “the universal impulse to believe,” Emerson affirms that the subject who transcends marriage and stays “rooted in absolute nature |emphasis in original]” is “the receiver of godhead” (“Experience,” 3:77). Melville seems to have had the syntax of this entire section of “Experience” in mind

while finishing Pierre, his version of a transcendental crash. Soon after her declaration about the great god, Isabel’s “intense and indescribable [sexual] longings” are described as the “unsuppressible and unmistakable cry of the goa-head through her soul” (174). This image returns us to the fractured “god-

head” of which Melville and Hawthorne are the matching pieces; but Melville’s final narrative merger with god leaves him tethered not to Hawthorne but to Isabel. (That godhead has become a familiar version of Osiris’s phallus. We know that transcendental usage of the word “godhead” conveyed a sexual connotation. As Carlos Baker observes, for instance, Bronson Alcott writes that “mettle’—by which he seems to have meant human sperm—“is the godhead proceeding into the matrix [or mother] of Nature to organize

The Melancholy of Anatomy « 223

Man” [Alcott quoted in Baker, 51-52].)® The final transcendental dispossession of our bodies is sexual. We have moved from Ishmael’s squeezing of sperm and pantheistic “Mast Head” to Pierre’s pantheistic and sexualized godhead. If god comes to us without Bell in Pierre, god does so through her emphatically sexual body. Through Isabel’s body, the lost godhead returns to Melville's work. Isabel might be a conduit for god’s breath, but she is simultaneously one of the most embodied of Melville’s characters. The god crying though Isabel is once more the bacchic god, not the divinity of universal nature; the context for our restoration to the All turns out to be sexual. What other god but Pan would acknowledge Isabel’s song? Melville has orchestrated a final three-tiered relay, or telegraphic communication, with Emerson, ranging from “The Over-Soul” to Pierre to The Confidence-Man. By this last novel Melville has concluded that if the U.S. economy is predicated on the usurpation of bodies, all pantheism can do is echo its operation in the usurpation of voice. The transcendentalist is only an inspired or dispossessed vessel. In “The Over-Soul,” god comes to us without Bell. In Pierre, god’s ventriloquist—the voice god speaks through—Is A Bell. By The Confidence-Man, Melville has permanently thrown that ventriloquized voice back onto Emerson (Winsome), using a syntax that echoes Isabel’s speech—one of the most important clues in tracing Melville’s ideation: “Oh, this all along, is not you, Charlie, but some ventriloquist who usurps your larynx. It is Mark Winsome that speaks, not Charlie” (206).°° In his last, selfsilencing novel, it is again god, not Isabel; Winsome, not Charlie; Emerson, not Melville; Pan, not man, who speaks, and who are meant to bear the ideological consequences of pantheism.

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Notes

Introduction All emphasis throughout is mine unless otherwise noted.

1. Melville’s adulation and imitation of Hawthorne was emblematic of many “transcendental” relationships. The American Renaissance saw a period of concentrated male camaraderie and rivalry; many of its male writers were party to a complicated series of adulations and “weldings.” James Russell Lowell notes, for example: “It

is exquisitely amusing to see how [Thoreau] imitates Emerson’s tone & manner. With my eyes shut I shouldn’t know them apart,” and Ednah Littlehale (Cheney) remarks that Thoreau is “all overlaid by an imitation of Emerson” (McAleer, 336-37).

2. I have explored issues related to this topic in several articles not included here because of limitations of space: see ““Thou Shalt Not be Cozened’: Incest and Self-Reliance in the Works of Herman Melville”; “‘Or, the Whale’: Unpopular Melville in the Popular Imagination, or a Theory of Unusability”; ““In Old Rome’s Pantheon’: Hawthorne, Melville and the Two Republics”; ““Pan and the Pagan Oracles’: Greek Nature and American Identity in the Writings of Herman Melville’; “Bodies in Pieces, Texts Entwined: Correspondence and Intertextuality in Hawthorne and Melville”; and “‘Infinitely Repellent Orbs’: Visions of the Self in the American Renaissance.” 3. See Anonymous, “Spirit and Tendencies,” which appropriately appears immediately before a piece by Hawthorne in the United States Democratic Review. 4. Emerson, “The Progress of Culture,” in Complete Works, 8:223. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Emerson are from the 1904 edition of Complete Works. 5. See, for instance, Emerson, “Woodnotes,” (9:58—59) and the journal entry for September 1845 (Journals, 9:278). Emerson was also sometimes regarded as a derivative pantheist. For the Reverend J. M. Manning, Emerson’s works “seem always to be instinct with the spirit of Spinozism....[A]nyone, assuming this to be the clew to his writings, would find but little difference in tracing their harmony, —nay, even their monotony” (272). The monotony of pantheism even for its proponents informs Emerson’s sense of the monomania and identity of genius (as well as Melville’s redaction of that obsessiveness in Ahab). 225

226 * Notes to Pages 7-11

6. Merton Sealts Jr. is among the most astute critics in this area, but my argument runs counter to his contentions that Melville’s Platonism does not reflect a protracted interest in Emersonian transcendentalism, that the Emersonian passages in Mardi likely derive from Plato, and that Emerson influenced Melville only after Mardi (Pursuing, 255-57). As other critics such as Nina Baym would note, Melville’s awareness of Emerson’s works (and, I would add, his pantheism) pervades his writing. As Sophia Hawthorne describes him, Melville was “careful not to interrupt Mr. Hawthorne’s mornings—when he was here. He generally walked off somewhere—& one morning he shut himself into the boudoir & read Mr. Emerson’s Essays in presence of our beautiful picture,” an engraving of Raphael’s Transfiguration, itself a gift from Emerson. “[Melville] told me he was naturally

so silent a man... [but] found himself talking to Mr. Hawthorne to a great extent... that it was astonishing how sociable [Hawthorne’s] silence was. (This Mr. Emerson used to feel)” (Log, 2:925). This description—which only hints at Melville’s interest in Emerson’s writing—neatly summarizes the triangulated relationship between Melville, Emerson, and Hawthorne. While Melville publicly asserts Hawthorne’s influence on him, and admits to seeking Hawthorne’s approval, in private he is transfigured by Emerson. Where Hawthorne observes in “In the Old Manse” that “it was [also] here [in this same room] that Emerson wrote ‘Nature’ ” (5), Melville, in quoting Hawthorne’s lines before and after this passage, in “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” omits o/y Hawthorne’s comment about Emerson, in a kind of replication of Emerson’s elision of “Pan” from “Nature.” Sealts suggests that Melville attributes Emerson’s language to Hawthorne because he had not yet read Nature (265). But I interpret this omission as another indication of Melville’s desire to situate Hawthorne as his acceptable influence, and to try to distance the more troubling figure of Emerson. As I try to demonstrate throughout this book, Melville had become intimately acquainted with Emerson’s work by the time of Mardi. 7. For reasons of space, some of my discussion regarding exceptionalism and the sometimes troubling cultural geography of pantheism is not included in this book. The chapter containing that analysis, “The Pan-American Zone: Imperialism in Transcendental American Geographies,” can be found online at http:// scholarworks.umass.edu/umpress/. 8. While I disagree with some of his conclusions regarding the sources of Melville’s pantheism, Chai’s section titled “Pantheism” remains one of the best introductions to the topic (273-327). 9. See also “The Scholar,” in Selected Lectures, 295, and “Man of Letters,” an address from the 1860s (10:2 42). Emerson had presented (and recycled) similar academic addresses since the 1840s. 10. William Braswell indicates that Melville “heard one of the five lectures (unpublished) on “Mind and Manners in the Nineteenth Century’ which Emerson delivered in Boston during Jan. and Feb. 1849” (“Melville,” 1n 4; see also Baker, 337; Nickels, “Roaring,” 116-18; and Sealts, Pursuing, 257-60, indicating that Melville

Notes to Pages 11-20 ¢ 227

likely heard the fourth of Emerson’s lectures, “Natural Aristocracy”). In White Fire, John Williams considers how Melville might have been generally influenced by Emerson’s lectures (45~51).

11. As Emerson writes to an unidentified friend, recapitulating his lonely peregrinations in the woods, “we walk alone in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables” (“Friendship,” 1:213). Curiously, Emerson uses the same term to describe a life less lonely in the later “Society and Solitude,” asserting that a man not clothed with society will feel “a certain bareness and poverty” (7:11).

1.“ The Seductive God” 1. While many groups, especially Catholics, critiqued its tenets, aspects of pan-

theism were incorporated into the mainstream of American religion. As the art historian Barbara Novak observes, “most religious orthodoxies in the U.S. obligingly expanded to accommodate a kind of Christianized pantheism. Ideas of God’s nature and of God in nature became hopelessly entangled. ... If nature was God’s holy book, it was God” (96-97). 2. I cite Buchanan, an Edinburgh divinity professor, because his speculations overlap with those of contemporary American religious writers, and his treatise, published in Boston, was specially “imported” from Europe to stave off the spread of pantheism in New England. 3. See especially Manning’s chapters titled “The Nature and Grounds of Pantheism” and “The Pantheistic Christology.” 4. Like Emerson, Hitchcock frequently claims that “Nature and God are one” (e.g., Fifty Years, 392). Hitchcock’s extensive library contained copies of John Toland’s Pantheisticon and numerous works on Spinoza, Swedenborg, and the history of alchemy. In Pantheisticon, published in England in 1751, Toland proposed that “Pantheists can deservedly be stiled the priests and hierophants of Nature ... [who] kept up the Authority of their brotherly Union” (94-95). In The Doctrines of Spinoza ana Swedenborg Identified, Hitchcock also cites Swedenborg’s Angelic Wisdom Concerning Divine Providence, which concludes “that there is ax Only Substance, which is also the first, from which all things are” (Doctrines, 6). Invoking Spinoza’s Ethics, Hitchcock confirms, “No Substance can be conceived except God” (6). In keeping with the pantheist precedents of Spinoza, Chambers, and Emerson, Hitchcock published this pamphlet anonymously.

s. Bray became a favorite of George Eliot, who developed an interest in his theories of psychic correspondence. I thank Pam Thurschwell for noting the connection. 6. Abraham Kuyper is a Dutch anti-pantheist writer published in America. 7. Critics often single out for ridicule pantheists’ predilection for a “melted” or undifferentiated aesthetic and ethics. As an anonymous reviewer of Emerson's Poems writes in 1847, “In the pure realm to which celestial love mounts in Mr. Emerson’s theory of love, ‘Good and ill, And joy and moan, Melt into one.’ Perhaps this

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opinion is a necessary result of the principles of pantheism, but it makes as bad poetry as false philosophy” (“Review of New Books,” 202). 8. This passage is also a useful lead-in to Sharon Cameron’s comments regarding Melvillean impersonality, which can be observed in Pierre in Isabel’s desire to live as an undifferentiated and inanimate object. Though speaking more immediately of Billy Budd, Cameron proposes that “in constructing a set of effaced distinctions which are like those that dominate persons but outside of a characterological realm, Melville treats persons as if they were not governed by a set of constraints that differentiate them from other phenomena, asif...a person were not different from a stone or a manifestation of light” Z7mpersonality, 182). Impersonality in transcendentalism resembles, but is also distinct from, what Slavoj Zizek summarizes as the Marxian “dialectic of fetishization,” writing, “The ‘reification’ of relationships between people (the fact they assume the form of phantasmagorical ‘relations between things’) is always redoubled by the apparently opposite process, by the false ‘personalization’ (‘psychologization’) of what are effectively objective social processes” (First, 143). Though manifesting elements of demonology and double consciousness, that dialectic never proceeds through simple inversion, as it includes some uncanny surplus that cannot be contained. 9. Morgan Dix contends that pantheism “asserts the unity and identity of sub-

stance and denies to the infinite any real existence apart from the infinite.... |T]here is only one substance throughout the universe.... The sea and the dry land... the flowers and the trees, the bodies and souls of men... all are of one and the selfsame substance” (21). 10. Piper’s work is updated in Thomas McFarland’s Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition.

11. See also Norton, 4 Discourse, and James Duban, ““This “All” Feeling,” for an overview of Norton’s anti-Germanic critique of Emersonian pantheism. Some contemporary critics, such as Michael McLoughlin, too readily accept transcendentalists’ (inconsistent) assertions that they represent a primarily “native movement” (13). (While transcendentalism is supposed to reflect an “original” American culture—that is, it is projected by a small but influential group of New Englanders to represent a universal American belief system—it is a highly syncretic and hybridized discourse.) Gary Collison notes that while the Harvard Divinity School was still “suffering from the effects of the uproar” over the address” Emerson delivered there in 1838, Charles Follen was invited to give a “series of evenhanded but sympathetic lectures on pantheism” (214); see also George Spindler, Karl Follen. 12. Norton's passage also provides a parallel source for Melville’s invocation of

an unidentified excerpt from Goethe in his letters to Hawthorne, which inspired him to “live in the AIL.”

13. Oras Lawrence writes in “Democracy,” “to be everything... an Over-Soul, an Infinite... the history of mankind is only a history of this insane craving in man” (707-8). Though he treats the wrong kinds of merger as forms of mental illness, Lawrence also accepts transcendental multiplicity. In “Him with His Tail in

Notes to Pages 29-36 * 229

His Mouth” he writes, “The Greeks, being sane, were pantheists and pluralists, and so am I” (431).

14. Sharon Cameron also attests that Emerson “disdained ‘the personality of the deity’ (the ‘soul knows no persons’), rather discovering manifestations of deity everywhere, which throughout his essays he variously called ‘the Over-soul,’ ‘the moral sentiment, ‘virtue, ‘law, and ‘nature.’ His pantheism depended on the liquidity of foundational terms like “God, ‘Nature,’ and ‘self? terms which—offering no resistance to each other—were permeable” Umpersonality, xv). 15. With language applicable to Emerson’s belief that all surface variety proves underlying unity—and that “all changes pass without violence, by reason of the two cardinal conditions of boundless space and boundless time” —Zizek warns against those who search for a “non-violent, pre-synthetic pre-imaginative unity-in-diversity,

of a ‘secret connection between things, a utopian Secret Harmony beyond phenomenal causal links, a mysterious Life of the Universe as the temporal-spatial non-violent unity of pure diversity... precisely the temptation to be resisted” (Ticklish, 61; and see “Nature,” 3:179). In his refutations of transcendental ideologies,

Zizek also elucidates a post-Kantian, Emersonian demonology. For Kant—the source of the word “transcendentalism”—“an object which is thoroughly sublime turns into something monstrous,” but we might claim that Emerson begins to approach “the ultimate identity between the two, the fact that the sublime law is the same as the Monstrous” (Plague, 218-19). 16. Similarly, Charles Emerson writes that “Shakespeare was a proper Pagan” (“Notes,” 14).

17, Although the Athenaeum mistakes him for the object of his own satire, Melville is also trying to overcome his own attraction to an Emersonian ethos of writing. When, for example, Pierre tells us, through his haze of “ambiguities [and] transcendentals,” that “the God that made [the transcendentalist] Millthorpe was both a better and a greater than the god that made Napoleon,” he mocks Emerson's list of representative men (320). 18. In his “Wonder-Book,” Hawthorne names Dewey and Melville as his literary neighbors in the Berkshires; Henry Dwight Sedgwick—brother to Catharine Sedgwick, author of Hope Leslie—includes portraits of Melville and Dewey in his “Reminiscences of Literary Berkshire” (Sealts, Early, 105-6, 2.48). 19. An early leaning toward positivism, often associated with pantheism, leads John Fiske to “cosmic theism.” In “Is Pantheism the Legitimate Outcome of Modern Science,” a symposium appropriately held at Concord in 1885, Fiske talks of “the Universal life,” the “All-being,” Goethe, Herbert Spencer, and a pantheistic consciousness arising in the context of evolution. In The Idea of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge, Fiske presents a series of familiar observations on the implications of pantheism for individuals. After outlining the idea of God “most likely to be conceived by minds trained in... evolution,” he says, “I left it for further discussion to decide whether the term ‘pantheism’ can properly be applied to such a conception. ... [Recently pantheism] has been commonly used as a vituperative epithet, presented in

230 ¢ Notes to Page 36

the form of oracular apophthegm or poetic rhapsody. .. . [But] the world of phenomena is utterly unintelligible unless referred to an underlying and all-comprehensive unity. All things are manifestations of an [impersonal] Omnipresent Energy. ... [F] rom this eternal source of phenomena all individuals proceed, and into it they must all ultimately return and be absorbed. ... [A] view as this may properly be called Pantheism” (vi-xi). Fiske traces pantheistic ideas from the ancients: from the beliefs of Clement, who posits “God is the ever present life of the world,” to their reformulations in Spinoza and Goethe, who also “conceive of God as immanent in the uni-

verse.” Using what will become a familiar vocabulary of pantheistic animation, Fiske next emblematically asserts that “modern science” will prove “that the entire universe is an immense unit, animated throughout all its parts by a single principle of life” (83, 103, 14.445). Modern science, then, becomes the apostle of pantheism: “In the nature-worship of primitive men... [was] an essential germ of truth which modern philosophy is constrained to recognize and reiterate” (154-55). But Fiske’s work, along with Melville’s novels, indicates that while pantheism is the outcome of modern science and philosophy, it also corroborates and resuscitates a “primitive” animism, which I address in chapter 2. In 1843 Job Durfee—the chief justice of Rhode Island, and consequently slightly more familiar to historians than some tract writers—published The Influence of Scientific Discovery and Invention on Social and Political Progress, and then The Panidea; or, an Omnipresent Reason Considered as the Creative and Sustaining Logos, in which the All assimilates “the world into himself.” For Durfee, man progresses as his types are incorporated into “the Homo Universalis or Theanthropoid,” another divinity pantheistically gathered from the fragments of humanity. Like Emerson in his early sermons, Durfee denies an explicit pantheism in his ideas, likely not wanting to risk the censure pantheists incurred. His “law of as-

similation...the unity of the Reason or Logos... avoided pantheism, unless it were on the incomprehensible scale of the infinite, by recognizing a limited or quasi freedom in the human will.” But The Panidea’s ontological claims and chapter titles—for example, “The All Resolved into Its Subjective Unity in the Logos”

and “The Subjective Unity in the Logos or Absolute Reason, Resolved into Its Objective All”—invoke an unreservedly pantheistic divinity. As Durfee writes in his memoir, “‘Nature, says Plato, ‘is God’s epistle to mankind.” Durfee’s Logos represents the impersonal but divine laws of Nature, and his theories of assimilation mirror Emersonian correspondences: “All Nature is but a language subsisting from ideas in the Logos.” Almost paraphrasing Emerson, Durfee sees all effects present in causes, all mature forms present in embryos or microcosms, and all biological complexity in aboriginal configurations: “The future oak subsists in synthetic unity in the qualities of the acorn”; and “The Christian faith undoubtedly contained, originally enveloped within it, all the truths that it has ever evolved.” Durfee conceives of Nature in the terms of Emersonian pantheism, wherein all matter is ceaselessly transformed by a singularly abiding force: “The laws of Nature

Notes to Pages 36-40 ¢ 231

are eternal and immutable; yet they are the source of all mutability. ... [T]he forms of matter are constantly changing.” Durfee, however, does object to the extreme idealism of Emersonian pantheism—the self-absorption of Pan’s “fleeting forms” — claiming, “[This is] the error which I am combating—[when one] make|s] [one]self the centre of the very fleeting forms which were presenting themselves to [one’s] ever mutable senses” (Panidea, 354-55, 384, 387, 410, 421, 457; Durfee, “Memoir,” xxvi; Schneider, 325, 331). Though acknowledging that Durfee’s work found few readers, the American Review called the Panidea “the most remarkable metaphysical treatise written in this country since Jonathan Edwards’s Inquiry into the Nature of the Will” (Anonymous, “Life,” 482). 20. Similarly, W. H. Mill, in his 1861 Observations on the Attempted Application of Pantheistic Principles to the Theory and Historic Criticism of the Gospel, writes that “the Sacred and mysterious doctrine of the Trinity in Unity has ever been the surest safeguard against Pantheism in the Christian Church” (343). 21. In 1828 Brazillai Frost already insists, “We see God in nature” (Wright, 48). When Unitarians, often accused of being transcendentalists in disguise, write of god as part of the natural world, they sound firmly pantheistic in their ascription of immanence to the divinity. 22. Critiquing Whitman's theory of democracy “en masse,” Lawrence writes: “What meaning does ‘person’ really carry? ...It is not at all the same to have per- : sonality, as to have individuality. ... An individual is that which is not divided or dividable” (““Democracy,” 710).

23. Or as Samuel Johnson proposes in 1877 in an essay also titled “Transcendentalism”: “Is [man] not more than all his past processes... .If personality be not real, science is at war with human consciousness” (146). 24. A professor at the Royal College in Paris (whose name is spelled variously),

Saisset summarizes the tenets of Emersonian pantheism and provides a history of their Romantic European counterparts; also see Ahlstrom, 162. This notion of incessant transformation is central to an American line of pantheistic writing. Thomas Pynchon, for example, introduces Gravity’s Rainbow (a rather Emersonian title) with an epigraph from Wernher von Braun. Sardonically continuing the tradition of ascribing German sources for U.S. pantheism, the passage posits that nature knows no extinction, only perpetual transformation, a demonological principle of transcendentalism the text exhaustively dramatizes. 25. Melville’s pronouncement would become a transcendental shibboleth for

twentieth-century writers. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard iterates Mardi’s despair regarding the individual’s primal irrelevance to transcendental nature: “We value the individual supremely, and nature values him not a whit” (176). Dillard also fulfills the predictions of Tocqueville, Parker, De Concilio, and others by “converting” from pantheism to Catholicism, a move she herself predicts in an interview with Karla Hammond in 1981 (“Drawing”). In The Gold Bug Variations—a novel influenced by American Renaissance writers, including Poe, who inspires its

232 ¢ Notes to Pages 40-64

titlk—Richard Powers similarly characterizes the individual’s irrelevance to the species: Dr. Ressler claims, “Nature cares nothing about the calculus of individuals” (465).

26. Appropriately, following Arrington’s article is a piece by Duyckinck titled “De Tocqueville” that responds to Blackwood’s review of Typee and Omoo, elaborates the role of the American writer and his misperception abroad, and includes a discussion of Democracy in America that implies its relevance to Melville. Even Tocqueville himself was accused of being a pantheist, and the U.S. edition of the London Quarterly Review, for one, adds that “those who follow De Tocqueville are pantheists in politics, and they will come to pantheism in religion” (Anonymous, “Carlyle’s,” 257).

27. In well-known cartoons, Emerson’s peer Christopher Cranch gently caricatured “transcendental pantheism” as his friend’s belief in an “occult relation between man and vegetable” (Miller, Cranch, 37). 28. Emerson aside, most transcendentalists never imagine nature as potentially alienating. For example, John Dwight insists in The Dia/ that “in nature we forget our loneliness” (18).

29. As part of his theory of natural conversion, Emerson calls for the perpetual transubstantiation of matter and particularity to transcendent universality: “American life storms about us daily, and is slow to find a tongue. This contemporary insight is transubstantiation, the conversion of daily bread into the holiest symbols, and every man would be a poet if his digestion were perfect” (“Poetry and Imagination,” 8:35). Beneath a passage in his copy of Emerson’s “Spiritual Laws” indicating that “hideous dreams are exaggerations of the sins of the day,” Melville writes, “Meaning, of course, the sins of indigestion.” For Melville, the particular body, and especially processes of incorporation and evacuation (versions of merger and amputation), continue to disrupt the All feeling (see Braswell, “Melville,” 12). 2. The “NOT ME’

1. According to Marshall Sahlins, “the conception of divine kings we find in Hawaii or Fiji also happens to preside over the subterranean history of our own democracies....In its global and most powerful representation, structure is processual.” Under Sahlin’s formulations, one could argue that pantheism, though claiming to be universalist, is “a program of the cultural life process” that bears “an internal (structural) diachrony, of its nature temporal and changing.” Pantheism is a dynamic, diachronic system obsessed with the universal and synchronic. Consis-

tent elements also exist within pantheism across time and among disparate authors, which should not surprise us or lead to the “the confusion of history with change, as if the persistence of structure through time were also not historical.” As Sahlins argues, from “conceit|s] of personal identity [comes] an order of political economy here the ontology of pantheism supports the persistence of both American egalitarianism and exceptionalism (77,144,140).

Notes to Pages 65-67 ° 233

2. Merger with nature is itself associated with blackness, and the federal government or mass union is racialized along similar lines, a connection that persists through the civil rights movement. Individuation, and its demonology of dismemberment, is associated with whiteness, the South, and states’ rights. For a full discussion, see my “Bad Faith.”

3. Only white male writers imagine that physical self-alienation could be rendered transcendent. In addition to including numerous passages in his Narrative about injuries to his hands or gashes in his feet, Douglass, by contrast, orates that the Irishman is unlike the slave because the former “is still the master of his own body, and can say with the poet, ‘the hand of Douglass is his own.’” Or again, Douglass remarks that even in England some believe that “these hands do not belong to

me—they belong to captain Hall [Auld]” (2:258, 1:259). , 4. In responding to histories such as Fanon’s, some artists of the 1960s black

renaissance associate animism with a rediscovery of values lost to colonialism: it was “indicative of the time when ‘black’ had to become ‘beautiful’—because it was!— and had to find its own identity and cautiously dig into its African past for that purpose. ... Going back to the animistic true past was too much of a jump, so they settled for Islam, being another facet of monotheism” (Young, “LUSH LIFE,” 43)

5. According to Sorisio, “In any given era, according to the theory Emerson proposes throughout English Traits, race could have a sense of permanence and carry with it a significance that bordered on fatal,” an attribution that also applies to Emerson’s views of nature and natural instinct (133). I don’t address texts such as

English Traits at length because they are not framed by the transcendental concerns of the other works I consider. I do not claim they would fit into the framework of my analysis, but I am not ignoring such texts because they contradict my argument. English Traits, which is far less concerned with natural law than Emerson’s transcendental works, relies on a social ethnology that differs from his typically symbolic representations of race. That said, Emerson’s attitudes in English Traits cannot be divorced from his views regarding racial “development.” Sorisio convincingly advises that “when we read English Traits and his public antislavery lectures, we should keep in mind that Emerson may have been demonstrating rhetorically the ‘fair play’ he attributed to his racial identity, and this, in turn, might lead us to question what [Len] Gougeon calls Emerson’s consistent public denial of

African American inferiority. It is fair to suggest that the less overtly rhetorical ambivalence that marks the ‘Address on Emancipation’ gives way in English Traits to a rhetoric of ambivalence that masks Emerson’s conclusion regarding race as a signifier of fate.... Although English Traits does not explicitly comment on the question of the Negro race and slavery, it is hardly coincidental or irrelevant that Emerson was working on this book, and delivering lectures in relation to it, during the very years of his most intense anti-slavery writing” (136-37). One could also contrast how Emerson treats the English with how Frederick Douglass, in both his lectures and writing, treats the English, Scottish, and Irish, particularly in the context of emancipation, colonialism, and immigration to the United States. See, for

234 ¢ Notes to Pages 67-70 example, my “Slavery of Romanism.” I address pantheism and race, especially in the

context of the twentieth century, more fully in my forthcoming book Coming between Africa and America: Transcendentalism and the “Transcendence” of Race, from Emerson to Morrison.

6. Hawthorne’s fauns are cast as fallen versions of Pan in the racialized context of The Marble Faun. See Bentley, “Slaves”; Carton, Marble Faun, 114-15; and my “In Old Rome’s Pantheon” for contextual analyses of this image of the racialized faun. 7. Paul Gilroy notes that Du Bois especially recognized the ways blacks were identified not only as liminal, but “in the intermediate category between animal

| and human,” which Du Bois designated another manifestation of the “tertium quid,” or third, unidentifiable term (55). One might also say that Du Boisian dou-

ble consciousness—a consciousness of being inside and outside society— reappropriates the not altogether human figure of Donatello. 8. Noting how close Donatello stands to nature, for example, Miriam concludes, “he shall make me as natural as himself for this one hour” (83). Part of the “contagion of his simplicity,” the “contagion” of spirit that possesses Donatello (and therefore Miriam) also seems to affect Melville in terms of his proximity to Hawthorne (79, 87). Tellingly, Melville had described such contagiousness in consonant

terms in a letter to Hawthorne, admitting his susceptibility to pantheistic sensibilities “in proportion to [his] own contact with” Goethe and that writer’s idealization of the “all feeling” (Correspondence, 193-94). 9. In Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance, Paul

Outka documents the general antebellum “conflation of nature with blackness,” and assesses the how the binaries of pastoral/wilderness and civilized/savage were racialized, and how the white “pastoral” subject could become identified with the savage hunter (40, 32-33). 10. Hawthorne similarly describes Donatello, his version of Pan or natural instinct, as “drinking in the influences” of nature, “intoxicated as by an exhilarating wine” (Marble, 74). 11. When Emerson claims that ideas, not actions, change society, he reflects transcendentalism’s American tendency to bury history and politics beneath the facade of the eternal. It is still disturbing to read Emerson’s claim that “he is immoral who is acting to any private end. He is moral whose aim or motive may become a universal rule” (Uncollected, 4.4). For Emerson, even slavery can be such a “private” evil. One effect of Emerson's rhetoric is to condemn political action as unidealistic. Emerson asserts, “I have other slaves to free than those negroes, to wit, imprisoned spirits, imprisoned thoughts, far back in the brain of man.” Furthermore, just as “prayer that craves a particular commodity, anything less than all good, is vicious,” so too “he who aims at progress should aim at an infinite, not a special benefit” (August 1, 1852, Journals, 13:80; “Self-Reliance,” 2:77; “Method,” 1:214). As Maurice Lee observes, Emerson was highly inconsistent, and his idealism led him effectively to pro-

Notes to Page 70 ¢ 235 claim, “[So long as] I am just, then there is no slavery, let the laws say what they will” (171). While Emerson became an unqualified abolitionist, it is the role of blackness in

his conception of nature—rather than just his temperament and his inconsistent views of racial equality—that makes his interest in reform too abstract to be effective. As Lee proposes, Emerson was often unable to reconcile his philosophy with his politics, as Mary Moody periodically reminded him (166). Though Emerson emerged as a vehement abolitionist, he could still propose: “He who does his own work frees a slave. He who does not his own work is a slave-holder” ( Journals, 14:04, 11:127). The early Emerson asserts that the way to free slaves is by example, by following one’s own path, and the later Emerson rarely loses that mindset entirely. Following John Carlos Rowe, I would argue that Emerson “transcendentalizes the ‘natural law’ arguments of abolitionists” (31). In this light, Emerson “transcends” his limitations whenever he does strike out against particular aspects of slavery.

Despite critics’ claims about his development on the issue of slavery, Emerson | retains many transcendental views of reform. He orates in a lecture in 1837—-which

has survived only in excerpt—that his fellow Concordians should feel they have done as much as they could and “not reproach the planter, but own that his misfortune is at least as great as his sin.” In a transcendental, reflexive chain, the victimizer is equated with the victim, who is accountable for his position; Emerson contends that the slaver “is to blame, of course, but in the same sense the slave is to blame for allowing himself to be held as a slave.” The condition of blacks is “inevitable to the men they are, and nobody can redeem them but themselves.” (This is a prospect of self-reliant abolitionism that Frederick Douglass, in striving to define his masculinity against a system that treats him as an object, considers, but for entirely different reasons.) The upside of such a stance is that “really at bottom [all men are] fraternal, alike, identical,” the downside that blacks are held responsible for their own enslavement (Cabot, 2:425-29). Perhaps more strikingly, much of what Emerson later reproves in slavery, Daniel Webster applies to pantheism. Passages from Emerson’s 1854 essay “The Fugitive Slave Law,” while critiquing Webster, also set him up as an icon of transcendental virtues: “His power, like that of all

great masters, was not in excellent parts, but was total” (11:222). Emerson does protest the conversions in society he otherwise validates in nature: “It was the question whether man shall be treated as leather? Whether the Negroes shall be... a piece of money? Whether this system ... shall be upheld and enlarged?” (11:227). But it is Emerson’s own system that generates such effects in the realm of metaphysics. His rhetoric dismantles itself: “[To] detach a man and make him feel that he is to owe all to himself, is the way to make him strong and rich; and here the optimist must find, if anywhere, the benefit of slavery....[D]ivine sentiments which are always soliciting us are breathed into us from on high, and are an offset to a Universe of suffering and crime; that self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on god” (11:235—-36). Emerson has other slaves to free in his mind, and with a typical transcendental inversion, passes off slavery as a crime against the

236 « Notes to Pages 70-72

perpetrator, insisting that “a man who steals another man’s labor steals away his own faculties” (11:237).

This late Emerson is in some ways indistinguishable from the early skeptic, who had made the almost Blakean claim that “the secret, the esoteric of abolition—a secret too from the abolitionist—is that the negro and the negro-holders are really of one party” (Cabot, 2:429). Emerson’s conception of black nature informs his conception of black social identity. Ironically, even though they are predicated on each other other, blackness in nature and in society must be polar opposites. Without imposing an accidental linguistic correlation, I would assert a heuristic connection between Emerson’s conception of the fugitive Pan—here a black, animal-like force of instinct that just grows—and his treatment of the fugitive slave law. (Echoing Emerson, Lawrence also situates Pan as a “fugitive, hidden among leaves” [“Pan,” 22].) First reflected in a theory of natural transformation, the figure of the fugitive Pan, the black faun, recurs to the fugitive slave law, in an Emersonian conversion from the transcendental to the social sphere. (One is supposed only to move from society to nature and not the reverse.) Just as union in nature cannot redeem union in a social context, the fugitive, uziversal black god becomes a fugitive, particular black slave who cannot be saved. Emerson cannot reconcile his particular concerns about slavery with his conception of race. Though nature itself is black, blacks could never be universal; in much of Emerson’s writing, race is a form of division from the All, a disruptive particularity. Whiteness is reified in his texts, and the black “not me” of nature treated primarily in metaphysical terms. Emerson finally agrees with the “scientific” conclusion that “nature respects race, and not hybrids.” Race represents a division akin to the fragmentation of gender in transcendental thought, a disruption of white male individuality. As Sorisio notes, however, Emerson affirms hybridity as a strength

of the composite English character and genealogy, so his fear and suspicion of hybridity were contextual and seemed to focus on race in the New World (133). Even in these contexts, however, I want to acknowledge the complexity of Emerson's attitudes about race. As Len Gougeon argues, the labels conservative and radical are inadequate to describe Emerson’s politics. On the single issue of changing “destiny,” Gougeon posits, for example, that in the mid- to late 1840s, Emerson was influenced by his readings in Asian literature regarding the constraints of fate, which

were countered by his readings about the abilities of great men to effectuate their own fates, and further complicated by his ongoing evaluation of the role of poets in pursuing social reform (21, 23). 12. Tracing the antebellum use of Egyptian mythology in a different context, John Birk notes that Osiris impregnated Isis while she was still in the womb of Nut (292). These cross-racial identifications, whereby, for example, the Egyptian mother represents the white economy, were perhaps common in antebellum America. Jean Fagin Yellin documents the popularity of Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave, a statue of a white woman enslaved by Turks who also emblematized black female slavery (112-19).

13. After noting that pantheism is “now more widely spread than any other form of error” and has advocates in England and America who “if not numerous

Notes to Pages 72-81 ¢ 237

are learned, gifted, assuming, arrogant and confident of success,” Enoch Pond adds: “This was pantheism. So it was in Egypt, that old cradle of superstition and speculation, from which the treasures of ‘science falsely so called’ were imported into the neighboring countries” (“Religion,” 122). Notably, Toni Morrison documents the way post-Enlightenment Europe sought “to eliminate Egypt as the cradle of civilization and its model and replace it with Greece” (“Unspeakable,” 6). 14. While of course generally opposed to any deification of nature, many Puritans, as I later briefly discuss, also saw the world in symbolic and transcendental contexts recuperated in pantheism.

15. Though beyond the scope of this project, Columbus’s enterprise is itself relevant to transcendental pantheism. As Dr. C. G. Carus writes in The Dial in 1843, “when a Columbus stakes everything on a like undoubting presentiment of the existence of transatlantic countries .. . we feel more deeply the meaning of that beautiful saying of Schiller, “Nature is ever in alliance with Genius.’... And yet with Columbus it was originally rather instinct” (315). Or as Emerson himself writes in “The Young American,” “Columbus alleged as a reason for seeking a continent in the west, that the harmony of nature required a giant tract of land in the western hemisphere to balance [the East]” (488). The discovery of the New World is repeatedly naturalized as a confirmation of the transcendental, universal, or “post-political” laws of -

nature. :

16. Rowe suggests that Emerson’s reference to plantations in “Nature” also connotes the slaveholding estates of the South, which would further associate Pan with blackness. The shadow cast over Emerson’s civil daylight is Hawthorne’s civil war. According to Catherine Albanese, Davy Crockett’s invocation of “Uncle Sam’s plantation,” which also equates Native Americans and African Americans, uses nature to justify a manifest destiny over darker races (76-77). Tellingly, Congressman Cox cites this same passage from Emerson, indicating that blacks have access to god in ways whites do not, in order to lambaste the transcendental “embrace [of] our black brother” (364). 17. That HooDoo reflects another version of the uncanny, the eerieness of animated “objects.” Animation also locates a demonology of that uncanny in nature.

As Bill Brown indicates, “Freud can be read using the term uncanny as a rather casual synonym for fearful. ... In particular he was concerned to move beyond one claim made by Ernst Jentsch, [who] .. . had ascribed the essential factor in the pro-

duction of the feeling of uncanniness to intellectual uncertainty, an especially good instance of which is those “doubts whether an apparently animate being is in fact alive; or, conversely, whether a lifeless object might not in fact be animate’ ” (“Reification,” 197). 18. As Michael Rogin suggests, Melville imagines wood and stone as alive, and

as being supplanted by manmade iron, representing the triumph of modern, impersonal political structures (275). 19. Beyond my immediate purview here, formulations or reactions to animism

are prominent in Whitman and The Marble Faun but also inform Hawthorne’s

238 « Notes to Page 81

alchemical short stories and Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” and its proposal of “the sentience of all vegetable things” (Unabridged, 541). Poe seems to ascribe the animation of the world to the terrorized, the “primitive,” and what he projects as the unconscious mind. The blacks in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym “be_ lieved the Jane [a ship] to be a living creature, and seemed to be afraid of hurting it with the points of their spears” (433). According to Michael Hollister, Bulkington’s emergence from the Grampus indicates that in Moby-Dick Melville is specifically revising Pym. For Hollister, Bulkington’s “pantheistic spirit” also stands in direct contrast to Father Mapple’s Calvinism and Ahab’s Puritanism. Hollister contends that “for Melville the whale is divinity itself: for the Christian, salvation is escape from the whale, or Nature; whereas for the pantheist salvation is spiritual union with the whale—becoming a ‘whaleman’” (282). John Irwin claims that “as readers, as survivors of that textual journey to the vor-textual abyss[,] ... we see [Poe’s] quest for fixed certainty, that univocal sense which is the linguistic equivalent of Eureka’s primal Oneness, for what it is—a death wish” (235). (Lawrence says much the same of Whitman: “Merging! And Death! Which is the final merge” [Studies, 178].) Pantheists are often obsessed with returning to a primal oneness. Melville depicts a silent abyss as the center of the globe. As White-Jacket falls over a hundred feet “toward the infallible center of this terraqueous globe,” he thinks: “All I had seen, and read, and heard, and all I had thought and felt in my life, seemed intensified in one fixed idea in my soul. But dense as this idea was, it was made up of atoms... a collected satisfaction in feeling, that I should not be dashed on the deck, but would sink into the speechless profound of the sea” (392). The search for primal oneness is often allied with a search for fixity and death. As Lawrence emphasizes, “the Pan

silence is so full of unutterable things” that speech embodies the death of Pan (“Pan,” 27). Pan animates and give voice to man, but he is impenetrably silent. Moby Dick’s divine silence reflects Mardi’s insistence that “truth is voiceless” (283)

and Emerson’s advice to “be silent, for so are the gods” (“Intellect,” 2:343). Approaching writing as an unwinnable competition with a silent divinity, Pierre complains that Plato, Spinoza, and Goethe write “as though they should say they had got water out of stone; for how can a man get a Voice out of Silence?” (208). Pierre finally decides that “silence is at once the most harmless and the most awful thing in all nature. ... Silence is the only Voice of our God” (204). Annie Dillard recapitulates that “nature’s silence is its one remark. ... We as a people have moved from pantheism to pan-atheism. Silence is not our heritage but our destiny. ... What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn’t us?” (Teaching, 70-72).

20. As Hawthorne writes in The Marble Faun, impugning the pantheist (and Catholic) mindset, Americans easily succumb to “the mystery, the miracle, of imbuing an inanimate substance with thought, feeling, and all the tangible attributes of the soul” (271). One could separately regard pantheism as a recalibration and dynamic extension of the conceit of pathetic fallacy in Romanticism, and Hawthorne’s critique in that context.

Notes to Pages 81-83 ¢ 239

21. Tellingly, by the time we get to Pierre, the world is dead “to its axis,” invert-

ing Mardi: “To its axis, the world being nothing but superinduced superficies” (323).

22. Pantheists typically cite a male lineage for their theories of animation. For an important corrective, see Merchant, The Death of Nature, which discusses, for example, the vitalistic philosophy of Anne Conway, a contemporary of Leibniz and Spinoza. Though virtually never mentioned by American transcendentalists as an influence, her work proposes a plastic nature whose microcosmic development both corroborates and challenges the work of male philosophers such as Leibniz. The notion of a natural vitality that displaces the mechanistic, which Melville dramatizes throughout much of Moby-Dick, can be traced to Conway as much as to Melville’s acknowledged sources (254-64).

23. The use of the word “animation” to connote not just movement but divinely infused life develops in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century natural science. Chambers’s widely known Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation includes chapters with such titles as “General Consideration Respecting the Origin of the Animated Tribes” and “Purpose and General Condition of the Animated Creation.” Nineteenth-century biology is also frequently used to corroborate the systems of pantheism. The early-twentieth-century fascination with “primitivism”— familiar, for example, in sociology and psychoanalysis—also reconfigures theories (and the association) of animism and animation. In Ishmael, his dated but thorough study of primitivism in Melville, James Baird provides a useful definition of animism in the American Renaissance: “Animism [the critic W. H.] Hudson defines as ‘not a doctrine of souls that survive the bodies and objects they inherit, but the mind’s projection of itself into nature, its attribution of its own sentient life and

intelligence to all things....[W]hen we revert to primitive conditions of mind, the earth and all nature is alive and intelligent. ...’ Hudson and Melville agree in this genetic area of animism.... Melville means exactly what Hudson says... [in writing,] “Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God’s great, unflattering laureate, Nature’” (265). Antebellum biology bears many of the marks of a pantheist epistemology. A passage from Stephen Jay Gould delineates the effects of Emerson’s natural and political philosophy, deifying the species and rendering the individual obsolete. Gould writes that those practicing early-nineteenth-century “romantic biology. ... were obsessed with the idea that some overarching, transcendental law must underlie and regulate all the apparent diversity of life. These laws, in the Platonic tradition, must exist before any organism arises to obey their regulations. Organisms are accidental incarnations of the moment; the simple, regulating laws lof form] reflect timeless principles of universal order” (71). For a discussion of mechanism and vitalism, animal and vegetative states, and the influence of Romantic biology on the American Renaissance, see Chai (120-23, 155-66). Recalling Emerson’s animated depictions of men as inlets and porches, Chai quotes Georges

Cuvier to the effect that “bodies should be considered as species of foyers, in which inanimate substances are brought successively to be combined” (121). Some

240 ¢ Notes to Pages 83-86

American Renaissance writers incorporated contemporary “transcendental” scientific speculation as key elements of their bildungsromans. We know, for example, that Melville had a copy of Darwin’s Journal of the Beagle in 1847 (Parker, Herman Melville, 499). Years later, still grappling with the fallout of transcendentalism, Henry Adams routinely uses natural science to confirm his states of mind, expostulating on “continuous movement, universal cause, and interchangeable force.”

He concedes, “This was pantheism, but the Schools were pantheist; at least as pantheistic as the Exergetik of the Germans; and their duty was the ultimate energy, whose thought and act were one[,] ... the point of history when man held the highest idea of himself as a unit in a unified universe” (429, 435). 24. Pan also embodies a principle of vital energy for Melville: “With Pantheist

energy of will... [laborious in a shallow wave ... [a] prouder agent proved Pan’s might / When Venice rose in reefs of palaces.” Melville again reminds us that Pan and pantheism were conflated throughout the American Renaissance (“Fruit of Travel Long Ago/Venice,” Collected Poems, 238-39).

25. Alcott writes that Thoreau’s work was “Nature choosing to speak through his mouth-piece.” Ironically Thoreau—whom Emerson repeatedly refers to as Pan, the woodgod, and whom Alcott describes as “one with things, of nature’s essence and core ... worshipper of whatsoever is sound and wholesome in Nature’— writes little of Pan directly (“Thoreau,” 93, 95). Profiting by abstraction, pantheism

would be less appealing to Thoreau, who, even if referring all things to higher meridians, grounds himself in particulars. Thoreau’s pantheism is taxonomic and linguistic without necessarily being epistemological (as Emerson’s and Melville’s pantheisms are).

26. Throughout her transcendental writings, Annie Dillard also displays an explicitly Emersonian-Lawrencian wariness of self-consciousness and seeks to see All and be nothing: “T never knew I was there either.... I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate... . [S]elfawareness had disappeared. ... Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, “When you walk across the fields with your mind pure and holy, then from all stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their soul come out and cling to you” (Pilgrim, 198). The animation of the natural world, as writers through Pynchon and Dillard attest, involves teaching stones to talk. For Lawrence in “New Mexico,” “Allis God.... But it is not the pantheism we are accustomed to.... [T]he whole life-effort of man was to get his life into direct contact with the elemental life. ... This effort into sheer naked contact, without an intermediary or mediator, is the root of religion” (146). These questions return periodically, like moments of Enlightenment thought that coexist with, but also irrupt from, periods of Puritanical reserve. For Dillard, updating Ishmael’s lament, nature “we do not use” haunts us: “Did the wind use to cry, and the hill shout forth praise? Now speech has perished from among the lifeless things of earth, and living things say very little to very few. ... You feel the world’s word as...a single chorused note everywhere the same. ... Until Larry [a Thoreau-like character who is trying to elicit speech from a stone] teaches his stone to talk, or

Notes to Pages 86-92 ¢ 2.41

until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it” (Teaching a Stone to

Talk, 69-72). The descendants of the Puritans and the pantheists cannot rest until, as Pynchon concludes Gravity’s Rainbow, they reanimate the soul in every stone: “Doctor Livingstone (living stone? oh, yes)” (684). 27. Ishmael Reed most notably recontextualizes the recuperation of a transcendental black ontology and aesthetic throughout Mumbo Jumbo. Depicting the same form of pantheistic reverie Ishmael experiences, Reed’s narrator claims that ““Freud would read this as a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the eternal world as a whole,” which poor Freud, “‘never experienced, being an Atonist [i.e., anti-pantheist], the part of Jealous Art which shut out of itself a// traces of animism” (50).

28. Aspects of such ideas can be traced to Goethe and to Hegel, who thought, for example, that men correspond to animals (which are individual and less permeable), while women correspond to plants (which are non-individuated and passively absorb “feelings” from their environment). Throughout Pierre, Melville parodies the vogue of such sentimental rhetoric. This excerpt from Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie sounds like a direct source for Melville’s (more Hawthornesque) depictions of the orphaned woman as a sensitive plant fiber, and even more emphatically for Isabel and Pierre’s arboreal twinings: “Two young plants that have sprung up in close neighbourhood, may be separated while young; but if disjoined after their fibers are all intertwined, one, or perchance both, may perish” (33).

29. The pantheistic and racialized Isabel’s dark veil, and the veil of Isis, are of course recuperated in the social world in Du Bois, who situates the veil as a primary emblem of African American subjectivity: “The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with a second-sight in this American world... [a] double-consciousness” (45, 227). 30. The extent to which Melville identifies his “sweet man of mosses” with Isa-

bel herself is further corroborated by the fact that he names the Hawthorne figure of Clarel “Vine,” which Melville associates with Isabel’s arboreal hair. Such a reading comports with Wendy Stallard Flory’s argument that Isabel is a “symbolic personification of Melville’s imagination” but also exists “beyond the limitations of time or gender” (123, 125).

31. Emerson himself reminds us that he equates blackness with nature: Webster sells nature because he markets slaves, and vice versa. (By this logic, Emerson’s “own body,” as part of the “not me” of “Nature,” is also coded as black.) Emerson’s

condemnation of Webster’s compromise makes explicit that nature and slaves were, at least ontologically, being sold interchangeably. Webster was also associated with a pragmatism opposed to transcendental thought. The Reverend William Savage, for example, even describes Webster in 1854, the same year that Emerson pub-

lished his poem “Webster,” as unlikely to “loose [sic] himself in intellectual rapture and become absorbed in a spiritual pantheism” (1).

242 ¢ Notes to Pages 92-101

32. Marx argues that “nature has no more to do with” exchange value than with fixing the course of exchange, but even he titles several chapters of Capital with some version of the phrase “The Metamorphosis of Commodities” (54). Even when men control them, metamorphoses conjure images of nature. Whereas Emerson fails to contextualize the way society produces nature writ large, Marx fails to perceive the extent to which transcendental religious structures continued to inform modern systems of identity and self-representation. 33. Throughout the nineteenth century, some Americans consider themselves the representatives, or animated parts, of the divinity. Theodore Parker, here much like Emerson, “cannot see that [Christianity] depends on the personal authority of Jesus. He was the organ through which the Infinite spoke” (“Transient,” 172). Noting that Jones Very’s poetry is premised on the isolation of the individual, David Seed argues that he “took the general Transcendentalist belief in inspiration to a

literal extreme where he believed that the Holy Ghost was speaking through him.... Since he has given up his individuality, he can only be spoken through, and hence the adoption of different voices from poem to poem and the shift of voice within a poem shows Very to be taking on a little of the privilege of God” (167, 176).

34. These definitions of animism are typically developed in the United States by natural scientists such as Richard Brown, who treats the earth as a living organism whose physiognomy can be interpreted. Presaging Emerson, Brown catalogues

animals and plants and their representative features and recognizably human traits, and offers an overview of all aspects of an animated kingdom: “Some of the first human geniuses have left on record testimonies of their belief in the physiognomy of the skies.... What are the fabled Gods of [Greek mythology] but so many acts of homage paid to the truth of human physiognomy? ...¥From this brief and hasty tour of the vegetable kingdom we pass to the physiognomy of animated nature” (4, 24, 18). Melville’s depiction of animated nature in Typee might be developed from Brown's work. Emerson’s noted invocation of instinct—“what else was it they represented in Pan.... Such homage did the Greek pay to... Instinct or Nature” (“Natural,” 12:35-36)—also reads like an iteration of Brown. The discourses of racial physiognomy that Samuel Otter examines in Melville’s Anatomies are parallel with, but distinct from, these transcendental physiognomies. 35. To be in the presence of gods can dehumanize rather than animate. Much as Emerson implicitly suggests in his poetry about the gods, Channing acutely writes of Emerson: “I know too well that we who love him have no share in his heart.... Under the unsparing hand of this terrible master, I have become like a statue, a machine, in which no part of myself is left. ... To love the gods is too great for the price it costs” (McAleer, 349).

36. Such “dead wall reveries” appear throughout the story (Piazza, 23, 25-26, 28-29, 31, 37).

37. As intimated, such feelings of transcendental merger in Melville, whether in reverie with nature or in imagined fusion with Hawthorne, are connected to

Notes to Pages 101-105 * 2.43

what Romain Rolland and Freud treat as the oceanic feeling: the sense—most often experienced on the open sea, as Ishmael and Pip discover—of merging with the natural world. Like Melville, Freud could be dismissive of this “primitive” oceanic feeling, yet he remained intrigued by its power. 38. See, for example, Manning, 306. Some transcendentalists try to sidestep the problems caused by conceiving of a sentient nature by rendering the inanimate and inhuman world purely mechanical. Theodore Parker writes that “all the action of the unconscious world is mechanical, or at the highest instinctive and in perfect harmony with God's will” “Divine,” 60-61). Some transcendentalists conceive of mechanism as a form of regulated instinct: machines too are never willful. Others insist that nature, though operating through transcendental law, can never be predictable or mechanical; General Hitchcock writes, “I find nowhere in the books of the genuine alchemists any tendency to mere mechanical theories” (Remarks, 295). 39. Describing in a strikingly Mardian fashion the way burial recesses are reflexively built of bones and skulls, even Hawthorne writes in The Marble Faun that the “strange architecture [of the vaults is] represented by the joints of the spine” (193). As Hawthorne adds, these altars “of horrible consecration are heaps of human bones” (193), a description traceable to the skull and bone altar depicted in Moby-Dick (159). 40. See “Sovereignty” (10:183—84); “News Report of a Lecture on Natural Religion, April 4, 1861,” in Cooke, 300; and similar passages in “Swedenborg” (4:107) and “Poetry and Imagination” (8:8). 41. My analysis does not implicate all searches for higher order but is limited to pantheism because, among several reasons, it presupposes an a priori commensurability and universality to cultural systems it configures as part of nature. Unlike many other comparable philosophical, aesthetic, and scientific discourses, pantheism has already found its higher order in an unusual degree of abstraction, but as posited from an unusually specific subject position. As Melville dramatizes in his later novels, it is also a distinctive version of pantheism that promises a form of

transcendence—from the constraints of male isolation, corporeality, and even temporality—that its adherents find it cannot deliver. While antebellum pantheism has suggestive and surprising affinities with, for example, modernism and Romanti‘cism, my analysis applies primarily to those writing in specific transcendental contexts and does not necessarily pertain to other quests for connection or meaning. As an example, though Melville’s perspective of course developed in distinct theoretical, historical, and personal contexts, his premise that we differ from ourselves over time more significantly than we differ from others anticipates Lacan’s postulate that we are always self-different and can never attain wholly integrated subjectivities. Melville, however, ultimately complicates and resists the impulse to transcend historical subjectivity; and unlike in the case of Emerson, who never wholly relinquishes his reliance on universality, Melville’s interest in pantheism plays itself out by The Confidence-Man. Emerson’s pursuit of an early version of a kind of unified field theory can be wholly distinguished from, say, Einstein’s. Emerson believed that all the “forces” of the world—such as electricity and magnetism, but even “the force”

24.4 ¢ Notes to Pages 105-119

of beauty—represent variations of uniform ulterior laws and can also be translated into one another. But that supposition was predicated on a transcendental belief in the underlying cudtural commensurability of all the ages of history, languages, customs, religions, and so on. As I argue in “Coming between Africa and America,” an important response to the universalizing tendency of transcendentalism, which has a strong racial component, comes from later African American writers who argue that they were dispossessed of transcendental ideation. But such criticism does not also necessitate a rejection of all pursuits of higher-order meaning. 42. Mechanized animation culminates in Ford’s Model-T, which can be seen as a Platonic archetype of metal spines. 43. Even before Pierre, Melville conceives of male identity as only impersonally phallic, as reflected in numerous descriptions of “hereditary” shafts and monuments. This geometry structures the world as a whole, in “cities of columns standing thick as mankind....See! spire behind spire’—perhaps a parody of Emerson’s “spine upon spine”’—and as Melville writes, sire behind sire, in endless series (Mardi, 411).

44. As Samuel Otter documents, Melville was concerned with phrenology as a “racial science,” but that interest also intersected with Emersonian pantheism (273). Works such as John William Jackson’s Ethnology and Phrenology, for example, asserted that the Teuton’s “free speculations tend to Pantheism, and he shows his racial relationship to the Aryan rather than the Semitic branch of the human family” (254).

45. One should note in this context that the virtually anonymous Ishmael— who narrates Ahab’s “soliloquies,” which only Ishmael overhears from some impossible vantage—seems periodically to disappear from his own text, merge with the world (and not just his fellow seamen), and momentarily transcend his material body or subjectivity. In language that would apply to Ishmael in this passage, to Emerson in his darker moments, and to a host of other writers and characters I have addressed, and that echoes the phrasing of Abraham Kuyper and D. H. Lawrence, Richard D. Erlich contends that “Pan is All, everything. ... [P]art of panic is the loss of the boundary between human passion and reason. ... [W]e fear [the] loss of self, the ultimate dissolution of boundaries, when we stand in a forest or approach the ocean or any other vastness that reminds us that the price of our individuality is triviality.” “Coda: Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences,” in Coyote’s Song: The Teaching Stories of Ursula Le Guin, available at www.sfra.org/Coyote/buffalo.htm (emphasis in original).

3. A Democracy of Devils” 1. Fora critique of the ways one historically specific use of metonymy promotes problematic generalizations using the parts and wholes of bodies—especially in Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” see Dimock, “Class.” At the root of Emerson’s project, to redirect Dimock’s phrase, lies an attempt to use dehistoricized metonymy “as the index to a historical whole” (90).

, Notes to Pages 120-126 © 2.45 2. In this context, Alcott both reinforces and erodes the distinction between the particular and the universal, claiming: “The actual and ideal are twins of one mother.... Always are the divine Gemini intertwined; Pan and Psyche” (“Orphic,” 97).

3. Cameron also posits that “in American fiction analogues get confused with and converted to identities” (Corporeal, 55). It is useful to consider Cameron’s claim about the way relationship is converted to identity in Melville’s work alongside Elizabeth Dill’s contention that William Hill Brown’s novel The Power of Sympathy and Pierre “are incest romances that explore the overlap between sensational and sentimental literature in order to expose the kind of heartfelt democracy the new nation at once seeks and fears. The pursuit of equality mutates into a call for sameness and finds an apt metaphor in incest, with orphans and aristocrats marrying only to discover that what brought them together was what Brown’s subtitle calls ‘the triumph of nature, the draw of like to like. We thus witness in these two books the closing

distance between equality and sameness” (713). | 4. Consistent with Emersonian demonology, Dimock proposes that the polar-

ity of terms within the cultural logic of U.S. expansion necessitates that any assertion—of democracy, of freedom—carries with it a leveling contradiction: our

A is predicated on their not-A (197-98, 212). , s. As Borges summarizes: “Emerson said that language is fossil poetry... . [AJIIabstract words are, in effect, metaphors, including the word metaphor, which in Greek means ‘transfer’” (Borges and Kodama, 70). As I later discuss, pantheist “travel” is itself effectuated through metaphorical exchange. 6. Recounting the work of Tommaso Campanella (and mistakenly claiming that such thought belongs only to a premodern era), Foucault contends in The Order of Things that in this “syntax of the world” there must be “the same number of beings in the water and on the surface of the earth as there are in the sky,” with a pure correspondence between them (18). Such ideas represent the fundamental premises of Emerson’s epistemology. 7. Such acontext also helps us see that Mardi is already obsessed with these im-

manent gods as part of its structure of representation, and anticipates Melville’s philosophical perceptions in later, seemingly disparate works. When interpreted in the light of its pantheistic premises, Mardi no longer appears as an incoherent digression, but emerges as a pivot on which many of Melville’s later social and political extrapolations hinge. Though Mardi is insolubly facetious, so is Pierre, and an increasingly bitter refusal to assert without retraction cannot hide Melville’s obsessive preoccupation with the disruptive ubiquity of God. His uneasy irony seems in the long run to indicate how uncertain, rather than dismissive, he remained. Melville’s frenetic tone in Pierre comes more from his heart, from his exile from and loss of faith in pantheism, than from his head, and his playful and de-

tached intellectual critique of pantheism in Mardi. !

8. In Totem and Taboo, which includes a chapter on animism, Freud claims that “association by contiguity is contact in the literal sense; association by similarity is

246 * Notes to Pages 126-142

contact in the metaphorical sense” (85). The pantheist’s animistic thoughts are magical if, as Emerson avers, thinking is a form of creating. The animism of pantheism destabilizes the tropes of metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche because it negates boundaries between living and nonliving things, spirit and matter, and similarity and identity. 9. See also Kenneth Burke’s assessment of how Whitman literalizes metaphor (“Policy”).

10. In his introduction to Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Gavin de Beer contends that for evolutionists, “the Metamorphoses of Ovid would be the best text-book of science ever written.” Beer notes that Diderot, pursuing the taxonomical codifications of natural selection, also asked, “May we not readily believe that there was never more than one primeval animal, the prototype of all, while nature only lengthened, shortened, transformed, multiplied, or obliterated some of its organs?” (12-13). 11. As Dimock intimates, the personification of nature reflects the configuration of the autonomous American, and a process that renders physical or reifies the conceit of the self-contained man (Empire, 25-26). In “Melville and His Mosses,” Edward Rosenberry suggests that Melville partially derives this technique from Hawthorne’s depiction of external nature as a reflection of man’s soul; in “the AppleTree Table,” for example, an orchard seems “the visible type of the fine mind that has described it” (49). 12. When men wind up with a self that, like Jonathan Culler’s ideal reader, is not a “Cartesian subject, but an interpersonal ‘I,’” they sacrifice singularity. As Frank Lentricchia writes, “the concept, within rationalist traditions, tyrannizes the particular” (111, 116).

13. In this sense, for American pantheists, the universality of Nature, and the democratic egalitarianism it purportedly guarantees, are paradoxically predicated on the social exclusion of those races and subject positions identified with Nature. 14. I am seeking neither to identify “representative” American literature as being concerned with America, nor to “identify nationality as the basis of literary creation,” but to contextualize and sometimes critique the beliefs of transcendentalists themselves. For them, a transnational, communal identity—but one fashioned in American terms—sometimes precludes any other regional, local, or alternative meanings. (Quotation is from Baym, 57-58; see her useful discussion of canon formation there.) 15. What is startling is that the passage Lawrence likely refers to—“IfI treat all

men as gods, how to me can there be any such thing as a slave?”—is part of Emerson's typically abstract but distinct renunciation of slavery, to which Lawrence makes no reference (“Lecture on the Times,” 1:280). 16. This “awful pudding” is also what Foucault refers to, via Giambattista della Porta, as the unchecked premodern power of sympathy, which, unless countered by some demonological antipathy, “would reduce the world to a point, to a homogenous mass, to the featureless form of the same” (24). Although George Santayana

Notes to Pages 142-157 * 247

grossly oversimplifies the poet, he does partly contextualize in structural terms why I have not addressed his work more extensively here: “Whitman became a pantheist; but his pantheism, unlike that of the Stoics and of Spinoza [or Emerson and Melville], was unintellectual, lazy, and self-indulgent; for he simply felt jovially that everything real was good enough, and that he was good enough himself” (251). In this context, Whitman represents Emerson’s notion of genius abstracted from the demonology that, to me, makes pantheism compelling and relatable. 17. Melville here deploys the same transcendental rhetoric of “it seems inconsistent” that he uses in describing Mardi, where “the sum of my inconsistencies makes up my consistency” (459). 18. This description also corrects the premise of Moby-Dick, that the whiteness of Lima and Ahab himself do not admit the “greenness” of decay. It also prefigures and dismisses Whitman’s Emersonian assurance that “nature's stomach is fully strong enough not only zo digest the morbific matter always presented . . . but even to change such contributions into nutriment for highest use and life—so American democracy” (283).

4. The Melancholy of Anatomy 1. [rigaray’s comments on symmetry and universality also bear on “transcendental” heterosexual desire: “The Greek takes hold of himself as one who is separated from infinite nature by his bodily being. ... [But man] does not even remember the fact that his body is the threshold, the portal for the construction of the universe, or universes. He exists in his nostalgia for a return to the ONE WHOLE; his desire to get back toward and into the originary womb” (“Love,” 85). Irigaray echoes, but also implicitly corrects, Lawrence, who claims that he wants “in the Greek sense, an equilibrium between me and the rest of the universe,” but also complains that “the Greeks began the cutting apart business” (“Him,” 433-44).

2. Following Plato, pantheists imagine men as mythically divided, but also as parts of a broken godhead. Bronson Alcott’s assistant, Elizabeth Peabody, indicates that one of Alcott’s students proposed “God is a rock, and we are pieces broken off” (103). This rhetoric even filters into the non-pantheistic works of William James, who notes, for example, that “the eternal’s ways are utterly unlike our ways. “Let us intimate the All’ said the original prospectus of that admirable Chicago quarterly called The Monist. As if we could, either in thought or conduct! We are invincibly parts” (23). As Pynchon recapitulates, we are “fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home” (Gravity's Rainbow, 173).

3. Like George Fitzhugh in Cannibals All!, Congressman Cox inveighs against northern hypocrisy to defend slavery: as part of its transcendental culture, “New England denounced... the Indians as devils, whose lands were forfeit, as now she denounces slavery, while her humanitarians covet the vacant soil” (296). Such a critique of the material bases of transcendental ideals would not be out of place in Pierre.

248 « Notes to Pages 158-163

4. See Dimock, “Class,” for a historical overview of the relationship between these discourses (60). She continues: “We might say that Marxist communism was, almost by necessity, an inferential derivation from Marxist individualism, the ‘collective’ here being derived always from a prior notion of the bodily subject... . It was not entirely fortuitous, after all, that Marx should be found, on at least one occasion, in the company of Emerson and Thoreau” (69). In the terms I have been developing, the pantheist All is an inferential derived from the fragmented one, the Jacksonian self. In Dimock’s analysis, “the bodily subject is central to Marxist thought, in other words, not as a matter of thematics, but as a matter of epistemology” (69-70).

5. For a discussion of the role of animated body parts in early-twentiethcentury America, see Bill Brown’s “Prosthetics.” Brown notes that for Freud, via Jentsch, “uncanniness is prompted by automata and our more general doubts about ‘whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate.’ ... [D]ismembered limbs ‘have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when... they prove capable of independent activity’” (135). Mark Seltzer also locates the body within the machine of the marketplace, postulating that the logic that personifies the market is barely separable from the logic of the market itself. The animism of pantheism then survives, as Seltzer paraphrases Veblen, in a belief in the unseen hand (85-86). For Zizek, in The Plague of Fantasies, these uncanny movements would have a generic Lacanian significance in terms of the impersonal “life-substance” that transcends individual identity, to the point where “some parts of [one’s] body seem to lead their own separate lives” (186, 180). Discussing Schelling, Zizek remarks that “man reaches his acme when he turns his very subjectivity into the Predicate of an ever higher Power ... yields to the Other, “depersonalizes’ his most intense activity and performs it as if some other... substantial, impersonal Power expresses itself [through him]” (126n32). Throughout transcendental discourse, involuntary movements bear some resemblance to, but must be considered distinct from, what Brian Massumi calls the autonomy of affect. 6. In English Traits Emerson remarks, “We had all been reading” Cousin in Boston (5:21). 7. Karl Marx similarly suggests that workers annex nature to the organs of their bodies (199).

8. Elizabeth Renker notes that in Melville’s time, the word “transparency” described a person’s sincere interiority and thoughts, which would conform to outward appearance. Melville’s thoughts on interiority, however, turn dark by The Confidence-Man, where he sardonically claims that authors should always “represent human nature not in obscurity, but transparency” (“Unreadability,” 118). 9. Religious magazines often use a rhetoric of units and mass to criticize transcendental precepts and, tellingly, associate Emerson with mania and obsession: “The one cardinal error of Emerson is to take the unit for the mass, the individual for the universal” (Anonymous, “The Emerson Mania,” 547).

Notes to Pages 164-170 © 249

10. Melville later underscores this passage in a book mentioning Emerson (Log, 2:720).

11. Emerson repeatedly situates the sublime as a counter to vitiation. Willfulness, by contrast, is an affiliate of the unconscious. In “Demonology,” for example, Emerson laments the “strange wilfulness” of the speed with which dreams disperse or baffle us as we wake (10:5).

12. Whereas Emerson goes inward, finds the ocean, and submerges his individuality, Hawthorne sees the ocean as an analogue not of nature but of humanity. In The House of the Seven Gables, his narrator describes the way a human procession “melts all the petty personalities of which it is made up, into one broad mass of existence—one great life—one collected body of mankind, with a vast, homogeneous spirit animating it” (165). Such descriptions are commensurate with Tocqueville or Emerson, save that that the anti-pantheistic Hawthorne imagines merger only in society: his narrator claims that “a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity,” not the ocean itself but the “great current of human life” (185, 256).

13. Although in this case the final printed version of “Historic Notes” appears after Pierre, Melville’s novels from White-Jacket on develop a sustained syntactical reply to Emerson’ essays. 14. Emerson observes that “in certain moments I have known I existed directly from God, and am, as it were, his organ. And in my ultimate consciousness Am He. Then secondly, the contradictory fact is familiar, that I am a surprised spectacor & learner of all my life” ( Journals, 5:337). Such self-configuration as an organ of god seems to be both cause and symptom of a transcendental alienation from one's own life.

15. Emerson repeatedly confirms his identification with Goethe, writing to Carlyle in 1838 that his address to the Divinity College “has been the occasion of an outcry in all our leading local newspapers ... against [me], Transcendentalism, Goethe, and Carlyle” (Correspondence, 196; emphasis in original). 16. As intimated, this passage further illustrates what Sharon Cameron identifies as Melville’s tendency to treat characters as if they were impersonal or even natural phenomena (Jmpersonality, 182). Poe fears that to attempt to restore individual consciousness to the All—for instance, to imagine “that the sense of individual identity [could] be gradually merged in the general consciousness,” or that “the diffused matter and spirit of the Universe” could be “blended” back to some “original Unity” (as Poe wrote in “Eureka”)—is to imagine a state of nondifferentiation that would annihilate us (see, e.g., Irwin, American Hieroglyphics, 225-26).

Further suggesting that pantheism lays the groundwork for the primitivism of modernism, in a passage that sounds as if it could have been inspired by Isabel, Jean Brun asserts, in Le Retour de Dionysus, that “Dionysus promises the expansion of the ego as far as the boundaries of the world and the transcendence of the narrow corporeal prison in which every man is jailed. ... [That] will put an end to the curse

250 * Notes to Pages 170-171

of individuation. For while waiting for the reconstitution of Dionysus’ fragmented

body he searches all the fields of nature for something that will be an organic ocean, to bring together his scattered members” (cited in Chasseguet-Smirgel and Grunberger, 222). That prison of consciousness is commensurate with the one in which Emerson and Pierre are “clapt.” 17. In his discussion of melancholy, Freud argues that pain plays a critical role in self-identification, “and the way in which we gain new knowledge of our organs during painful illnesses is perhaps a model of the way by which in general we arrive at the idea of our body.” Freud treats the body as both intrinsic and external to the self, the “body-ego.” Pantheistic reverie would return us to a state before the body in pain, before differentiation. For Freud, the disruptive toothache, particularly as it disturbs the dream state, indicates a castration anxiety reductive of but consistent with pantheistic fears of amputation (Ego, 24-27). 18. Pierre’s claim that corporations have no souls is perhaps derived from James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Bravo, which vilifies the “soulless corporation[s]” of secret deliberative bodies (1:174). For an analysis of the idea of the soulless corporation in the context of aristocracy, conspiracy, republican liberty, and revolution, see Levine, Conspiracy, 100. According to Millicent Bell, Melville was taken by Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary, which vilifies Spinoza’s pantheism as “an absurd and monstrous hypothesis that there is one Being and One nature, [a] Being [that] produces in itself and by an immanent action, whatever goes by the name of creatures” (Bell, 628). Yet Melville is unable to dismiss such idealism; his critique of Spinoza is complicated and rarely dismissive, as evidenced by Pierre’s only half-ironicized conclusion that god presides over the motion of his own body (see, e.g., Marovitz, 14). With regard to Pierre’s notion of corporate pantheism, it is also useful to note, but differentiate my analysis from, Christopher Newfield’s distinct assessment of “corporate individualism” in Emerson, by which Newfield means a discourse that validates individual merit and rejects both public and private control. My argument, however, does correlate with Newfield’s sense that Emerson’s “corporate individualism is corporate rather than democratic,” and involves complex forms of submission to intractable law (Emerson, 5, 7). 19. See Poirier, 32; Emerson, Journals, 2:2.41; Emerson, Letters, 4:32; Cabot, 1:368. A self-proclaimed “isolato,” Ishmael begins his voyage in a similar condition—fleeing society, unattached, unrelated, not even truly identified. Like Emerson, he attempts to combat his social isolation by merging with racialized nature (and beyond Emer-

son, with actual men of other races). Melville routinely castigates great figures for being heartless. In disturbing ways, Melville associates Emerson with god, remarking to Hawthorne that men fear god because “they rather distrust his heart, and fancy him all brain like a watch.” Here, Melville also asserts that “in those men who have fine brains and work them well, the heart extends down to the hams” (Correspondence, 192). This description accords with Melville’s objection that

Emerson’s (as well as Goethe’s) brains and heart are in the wrong places, and that Emerson fancies his mind able to correct the primordial flaws of the universe.

Notes to Pages 171-176 ¢ 251

Melville several years earlier had similarly noted to Duyckinck that “[Emerson’s] belly, sir, is in his chest, & his brains descend down into his neck” (Correspondence, 122).

20. Pierre is almost structured around a litany of contradictory “tell me’s, virtually hystericizing Starbuck’s language in Moby-Dick, which asks to “tell me not” of nature’s barbarity (492). Isabel, for example, implores, “Tell me once more the story of that face, Pierre,—that mysterious, haunting face, which thou once told’st

me, thou didst thrice vainly try to shun.... Tell me, tell me, Pierre” (37). Little Pierre himself declaims, “Tell me, aunt... tell me, aunt, how this chair-portrait, as you call it, was painted; ... Do, now, dear aunt, tell me all about this picture” (74). But that plea is immediately demonologically inverted, as Pierre states, “Well, go on, aunt; but don’t tell me again that once upon a time I was not little Pierre at all, and yet my father was alive. Go on, aunt,—do, do!” (74). These “tells” conclude with Pierre’s speech to Emerson’s master of demonology. Pierre asks Goethe to tell him whether his heart is adequate and whether he should be confined in jail, but also states, “Tell me not, thou inconceivable coxcomb of a Goethe, that the universe can not spare thee and thy immortality, so long as—like a hired waiter—thou makest thyself ‘generally useful’” (302-3). 21. As Elizabeth Melville writes to Herman’s cousin Catherine Lansing, “If ever this dreadful incubus of a book [Clare/] gets off Herman’s shoulders I do hope he may be in better mental health.” Elizabeth Renker treats this passage, and Melville’s relationship with writing in general, as proof of Melville’s abusive relationship with Elizabeth, but unconvincingly proposes that Pierre, his “only ‘domestic’

fiction[,]...is also the only one of [Melville’s] texts that explicitly presents the production of writing in excruciating and destructive terms” (Strike, 139). As I try to demonstrate, almost all Melville’s texts from Mardi on represent writing as a dispossessive force.

22. In a broader context, any culture will have to reconcile sick, “willful,” or inconsistent bodies with their owners. As Michael Taussig notes, citing Paul Radin, all bodies are symbols or simulacra for the psychological or spiritual subjects behind them (86). For many male transcendentalists, in a trajectory leading to Pynchon’s Slothrop, the penis becomes an organ with a mind of its own. As Victor Tausk remarks, “the fact that the erection is shortly conceived as an exceptional and mysteri-

ous feat, supports the assumption that erection is felt to be a thing independent of the ego, a part of the outer world” (213-14).

23. Richard Powers again paraphrases such transcendental conceits in The Gold Bug Variations, whose narrator notes that “we differ more from ourselves than we do from one another” (130). 24. Contrary to David van Leer’s claim that the eyeball represents a Kantian “necessity for sight, but is not itself an operating organ” (52), Emerson requires the eyeball to be an instrument of sight on a variety of rhetorical and ontological levels,

partly because he is exchanging his entire body for the organ. Though speakingin a different context—of the gigantic eye that performs a “paranoiac agency which

252 ¢ Notes to Pages 176-177

sees and hears all”—Zizek writes, “Such a gigantic eye living its own life—i.e., a particular organ which mysteriously coincides with the entire body (organism)—is perhaps the ultimate psychotic object and at the same time the purest embodiment of the objet petit a” (Enjoy, 142n12). In other words, the organ elevated to the status of the entire body is a gothically animated reflection of an evacuated or displaced self. As Zizek comments in general terms, for Lacan, “this is the fundamental subjective fantasy, to be reduced to a{n impossible, disembodied] gaze observing the world in the condition of the subject’s non-existence. ... [It is] as if we are not part of the reality we observe, but rather a spectral presence unseen by living beings... . [E]xternal observers of the paradise barred to us” (Living, 80-81). As Zizek offers in The Indivisible Remainder, in a passage that would be apropos of Emerson, in primordial fantasies of self-creation, “the subject is miraculously present as a pure gaze observing his own nonexistence. ...as a pure gaze prior to [his] own conception” (19, 22). 25. In this context Ishmael becomes the transparent eyeball removed from personal identity or history: “Cogito designates the very point at which the ‘T’ loses its support in the symbolic network of tradition ... [and finds it]self reduced to a nonexistent gaze... [a fantasy that] iseplies the choice of thought at the expense of being. ... The paradox here is that the gaze is concealed by an eye, i.e., by its very organ” (Zizek, Ti arrying, 64; emphasis in original). 26. Each body part, particularly the globular eye, is modeled after the solar or universal orb. In a sermon Emerson claims that “every drop of blood in our arteries

and every bodily function is as strictly related to that distant orb as is the act of respiration to the air” (4:154). For an assessment of the transcendental anatomy of eyes and visuality, see my “Infinitely Repellent Orbs.” 27. One can locate related discourses of amputation throughout the American Renaissance in non-pantheistic writers as an effect of the same forces producing pantheism. As Eric Sundquist indicates, Lincoln describes the nation’s past as a

“forest of giant oaks [leaving]... here and there a lonely trunk [with] mutilated limbs.” Like Cox, Webster warned his countrymen that civil “disunion and dismemberment” would ruin not only their lives but those of their descendants as well (Sundquist, “Slavery,” 4, 10). For reasons of space, I do not address Melville’s moving depiction of the wounded in Battle-Pieces but note that the brittle pun of its title, at least in part, offers a post-transcendental elegy for a dream of abstract union in Nature, replaced by a reality of physical dismemberment. Emerson’s rhetoric of amputation coincides with his sense that life cannot be confined to individual existence: “It is the largest part of a man that is not inventoried. He has many enumerable parts. ... - Nobody has ever yet dispossessed this adhesive self to arrive at any glimpse or guess of the awful Life that lurks under it” ( Journals, 9:342). This idea of an adhesive self is

recuperated in Whitman and Lawrence. Donald Pease’s reading of Emerson in “Moby-Dick and the Cold War” is noteworthy in this context. Pease writes that through a “compensatory unconscious, the inability to perform any particular action recovers the sovereign capability to perform al/ actions.” Although Emerson detests particular actions, he elevates universal action into what Pease calls the sovereign

Notes to Pages 177-179 ® 253

realm. Emerson’s notion of self-reliance, which Pease claims alienates the individual from action, also “eliminated first and third persons altogether and turned everyone

| into representations of what we could call a national second person”; such people interact not as individuals, but as part of a collective being (135).

28. After Emerson, Lawrence similarly asserts that all particular relationships must involve separation, and all ideal relationships—which he ultimately rejects— merger: “No two persons can meet at more than a few points consciously” (Studies, 152).

29. Both Melville and Hawthorne are periodically playful regarding the transcendental transformation, perfection and unification of the world. In Mardi, for example, Media proclaims, “Every ocean a wine vat! ... may the next Mardi that’s made be one entire grape” (540). In The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne effectively extends Melville’s joke. Immediately after he “read interminably” from Emerson’s Essays, The Dial, and Carlyle, Coverdale proposes, “When as a consequence of human improvement the globe shall arrive at its final perfection, the great ocean is to be converted into a particular kind of lemonade. . . . It is positively a fact!”(52~53).

Appropriately, Tocqueville’s chapter on perfectibility immediately follows his discussion of pantheism. For Nathaniel Richardson in “The Pantheistic Movement, only god can be perfect, and “this disagreeable fact” that history does not chart a “progressive perfection” remains the greatest rebuttal to American pantheism (559). Continuing his discussion of man’s imperfection, Lawrence notes that escaped slaves “people the republics of Liberia or Haiti.... Are we to look at America the same way? A vast republic of escaped slaves.... We are only the actors, we are never wholly the authors of our own deeds or works. IT is the author... . You have got to pull the democratic and idealistic clothes off American utterance, and see what you can of the dusky body of 1r underneath” (Studies, 14, 11, 26). That impersonal IT is again the transcendental “excess” of individual life, and the reification of white male identity. In Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed clarifies how Lawrence’s white transcendental notions of possession are derived from pantheistic non-Western cultures: “/¢ was sipping from a glass of wine and listening to the radio. ... J¢ is lying in the President’s bed, just as in ‘Flight to Canada’ it bragged

about lying in [the slave owner] Swille’s bed. The poem had gotten Jt here.... What else did the poem have in mind for it. Js creation, but in a sense, Swille’s bloodhound. ... “Flight to Canada’ was responsible for getting him to Canada. ... It fascinated him, it possessed him; his typewriter was his drum he danced to” (96, 100). For American Renaissance writers, we are dispossessed by god when we create. Reed argues that this dispossession is actually the dispossession of slaves. He writes that Stowe essentially plagiarizes the narrative of Uncle Tom’s Cabin from the slave Josiah Henson, and that stealing a story is like possessing someone’s soul: “Human hosts walk the streets of the cities, their eyes hollow, the spirit gone out of them. ... Somebody has taken their story.... Harriet saying that God wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Which God? Some gods will mount any horse” (Flight, 16, 19; emphasis

254 ° Notes to Pages 179-187

in original). When whites claim that a transcendental god has infused them, to extend Reed’s argument, they are receiving stolen property. 30. Around the time of Pierre, Melville also declines “being oblivionated by a Daguerreotype,” which reproduces a part for the presumed whole but fails to retain essence or vitality. Taking his cue from his own novel, Melville seems wary of becoming a portrait without an original (Log, 1:4.05; emphasis in original).

31. Melville’s references to generic or pantheistic vitality generally comport with what Zizek, after Marx, situates as the “selfenhancing circulation of capital,” which is a “self-engendering monster. ... whose solipsistic path of parthenogenesis” aims only at “expanded reproduction” of itself (Violence, 12, 23). Transcendental fantasies of absolute self-reliance and self-creation comport with these “Hegelian fantas[ies] of capital’s self-generating reproduction,” as Zizek designates them in Living in the End Times (225). Impersonal pantheistic bodies—which produce and reproduce themselves ex nihilo; consume themselves; are dismembered but still animated; and bud, fission, and sprout from the earth—are also uncanny, gothic incarnations of the excess or surplus of capital. 32. Appropriately, the American Journal of Insanity featured an article in April 1852 that characterized assertions that matter exists not of itself but only by “virtue

of, and in reference to, its inner vitality” as carrying “us to the very brink of German pantheism.” Review, “Monro’s Remarks on Insanity” (303). 33. For a discussion of how such images are resuscitated in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, see my “A Woman Need Not Be Sincere.”

34. His hell an idea born of an undigested apple dumpling, Melville derives some of these images from Cervantes, who claims in Don Quixote that legs do not carry the belly, but the belly legs (695); Melville then asserts that the belly and legs would form two distinct beings.

35. Hawthorne satirizes this transcendental obsession with lightning: in The House of the Seven Gables, Clifford, heralding Ishmael and Pierre, situates electric-

ity as “the all-pervading intelligence! ...[B]y means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles.... [T]he globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence! Ov, should we say, it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we deemed it!” (264). 36. For the original of this configuration, see Kenneth Burke, “I, Eye.”

37. Apropos of Emerson, Zizek notes that “Pure Will” is “a Will that acts in accordance with universal moral Law, not in accordance with particular (‘pathological’) motivations” (Tarrying, 24). 38. Even “non-transcendental” writers emphasize the importance of orbs in the framework of transcendentalism. In “Ligeia,” for example, Poe uses this transcendental language of eyes, I’s, orbs, and orbits to locate the identity of the narrator’s wife: “Those eyes! those large, those shining, those divine orbs! ... the twin stars of Leda.... [I]n my intense scrutiny of Ligeia’s eyes, have I felt approaching full the knowledge of the secret of their expression ... and so at length utterly depart. And (strange, oh strangest mystery of all!) I found in the commonest objects of the

Notes to Pages 187-190 ® 255

universe, a circle of analogies to that expression ... a sentiment such as I felt always aroused within me by her large and luminous orbs.” Poe’s language offers a pastiche of Emerson’s circular analogies of the universe. The protagonist who sees transcendent meaning in orbs is often an obsessive monomaniac who uses eyes and circles to wrench determinate meanings from dumb nature. Transcendental images of orbs continue to connote a troubled conflation of identity, as Ligeia dies and is supplanted by, or merged with, the narrator's second wife, Rowena. Ligeia’s fate presages that of Pierre, who similarly loses his eyesight as he tries to complete his transcendental text: her readings “rendered vividly luminous the many mysteries of the transcendentalism in which we were immersed. Letters, lambent and golden, grew dull... wanting the radiant lustre of her eyes. And now those eyes shone less and less frequently upon the pages over which I pored. Ligeia grew ill. The wild eyes blazed with a too-too glorious effulgence.” Finally, when Rowena is transformed into the dead Ligeia, the narrator locates her resurrected identity in her eyes and ends his tale: “And now the eyes opened of the figure which stood before me. “Here then at least, I shrieked aloud, ‘can I never—can I never be mistaken—these are the full, and the black and the wild eyes... of the lady Ligeia’” (Unabridged, 479-92). Not merely the windows of the soul, eyes during the American Renaissance locate the interplay between the personal and impersonal aspects of consciousness. 39. These passages comport with the claim of Ralph Waldo Ellison—who recalibrates the representation of materiality and invisibility advanced by his namesake— that the “whole of American life [i]s a drama acted out upon the body of a Negro giant.... [For] the Negro’s body was exploited as amorally as the soil and climate” (4.6).

40. Though Emerson imagines them as universal tropes, one should of course situate his metaphors of natural science as historically determined. As Robert Durling demonstrates, for example, although money “[was] termed currency in [the fourteenth century], the notion of the circulation of money is foreign to the conception, which is rather that of the currency or river of blood that carries food to the members where it is, precisely, accumulated. The notion of wealth as inherently parallel to the circulation of blood would have to wait until after Servetus’s and Harvey’s great discoveries” (71).

41. Virtually all the commodities of Mardi are composed of the bodies of dead animals; a huge skin of wine, for instance, is but “the portly peltry of a goat, its horns embattling its effigy head, its mouth the nozzle” (291). In The Confidence-Man, we are introduced to an eccentric-looking person “somewhat ursine in aspect; sporting a shaggy spencer of the cloth called bear’s skin; a high-peaked cap of raccoon’s skin, the long bushy tail switching over behind; raw-hide leggings” (106). (That shaggy bearskin seems to have been inherited from Ishmael.) 42. My project “Coming between Africa and America” includes a discussion of how Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada reprises Mardi’s economic anatomies. Given

Melville’s temperament and Reed’s interest in Masonism in Mumbo Jumbo, it is possible that both writers are also referring to what Richard Hofstader describes as

256 « Notes to Pages 190-209

the common nineteenth-century belief that Masonic ritual “required drinking wine from human skulls” (18). 43. See also my “Bodies in Pieces.”

44. For an important contextual reading of how changes in the marketplace, and specifically in the family business of tailoring, affect Melville’s writing, see Rogin, 24-27. 45. lam not sanctioning the images and gender associations I am tracing. Such notions, especially the ascription of individuality to masculinity and merger to femininity, are embedded stereotypes of pantheist discourse; while I seek to explicate how and why these definitions operate, I hope to suggest why they fail those who develop them and those to whom they are applied. 46. Fora full analysis of the relationship of incest to exogamy in transcendental discourse, see my “Thou Shalt Not Be Cozened.” 47. In the context of this section, Irigaray’s comments on cause and effect are equally salient: “As for the feminine, this absence of inscription of its causes and effects in the chain of causalities leads, e.g., to Aristotle’s notion that a woman is engendered as if by accident. A genetic aberration. An illness. A monstrosity” (“The Envelope,” 77).

48. The repetitions of pantheistic identity recur throughout Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which Dillard self-consciously devises as a kind of dialogue with transcendental American writers: “The infinite variety of detail and the multiplicity of forms is a pleasing one... . [But] it is wot one pine I see, but a thousand. | myself am not one, but legion. ... In this repetition of individuals is a mindless stutter... . It was like the old fable about the corpse’s growing a beard. ... I can barely keep myself from ascribing a will to these plants” (161). Life resides not in us but in the interstices, and even the animated dead bodies, of an indiscriminate nature. 49. In “The Virgin Shapeshifter: Melville’s Quarrel with Maids,” Faye Lenarcic argues that Melville’s women often represent enchanted shapeshifters who disguise themselves as innocent maidens. As Lenarcic and other critics have noted, the waterwheel in “The Tartarus of Maids” also associates women with a “machinery of birth” that transforms the natural into the mechanical (147). so. Here Melville again anticipates Marx. After invoking “the fantasy-notion of mother qua self-reproducing monster, which generates its offspring without the

mediation of the phallus,” Zizek notes that Marx “determined Capital as a self reproducing Mother-Thing” (Zarrying, 246). A critical difference is that Melville racializes that self-reproduction in the context of both slavery and the demonology of the Other in nature. Transcendental images of parthenogenesis, parasitism, self-

consumption, and regeneration are common throughout antebellum discourse. Sampson Reed, for example, writes in 1838: “There is among insects a class called parasites. Their instinct leads them to deposit their eggs in the bodies of other insects, where, when the young is hatched, it has only to open its mouth and eat up its brother. ... Transcendentalism is the parasite of sensualism. .. . [I]t will be found to be itself a worm, and the offspring of a worm.” Though considered a harbinger of

Notes to Pages 209-213 * 257

Emerson’s “Romantic naturalism,” Reed later warns that transcendentalism “will rather be caressed,” and that it will seduce even those who have renounced “sensualism” (vi-viii). For critics, transcendentalism remains a seductive and parasitic ideation. With rhetorical accuracy, Reed, long before Dillard, also associates the cannibalism of insects and the parthenogenesis of worms with transcendentalism. s1. As Philip Armstrong suggests, “Moby-Dick insistently parallels the com-

modification of the animal and that of nonwhite labor” (1059-61). , s2. Throughout Melville’s novels, one eats on boneware and writes in blood. As we read about and on the “jacket of the whale”—its book jacket—whaling itself becomes a form of cannibalistic and cabalistic inscription. Whale skin is used as the transparent bookmark for scribe Ishmael’s “whale books”; this “infinitely thin substance, which ... invests the entire body of the whale” is used for every aspect of the text: its parchment, its binding and even the optical magnifier that sees itself. Again, one body magnifies another, and finally itself: as Ishmael sardonically offers, “it is pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles, as you may say.” As he oscillates between mocking and dramatizing the precepts of pantheism, Ishmael

also periodically “inverts” corporeal pantheistic imagery. Instead of becoming a transparent eyeball that can see the All of the universe, as he does elsewhere in the

narrative, Ishmael here “fancies’—that is, willfully imagines—that he can use transparent whale skin, which he equates with a baby’s skin, to magnify texts (306). Writing for Melville also typically requires the bodies of animals; already in Omoo, a fellow of “literary turn” employs “an immense quill, plucked from a distended albatross’ wing” (74). Because writing is a barbarous practice to chronicle a barbarous economy, Ishmael remarks, it is only within the last few months “that society passed a resolution to patronize nothing but steel pens” (300).

53. Such images of “negative” birth—from Topsy to the Egyptian mother of whaling—are racially charged, connoting the disrupted generations of slavery. As Hawthorne writes in “Chiefly about War Matters,” the womb of the Mayflower “spawned slaves upon Southern soil—a monstrous birth, but with which we have an instinctive sense of kindred” (420). 54. Literalized under transcendentalism, the term “self-made man” was coined by Henry Clay before the Senate in 1832 and quickly became “the dominant American conception of manhood” (Kimmel, 140-42). Distinguished from the “genteel patriarch,” the selfmade man in Emerson morphed into the self-reliant and finally self-generated man. In another example of what Richard Poirier describes as his tendency to “lose his grip” on his own phrases and “precipitat[e] a crisis over his own terminology,” Emerson conflated then altered the meaning of “self-reliance,” “godreliance,” and variations of self-generation (148). It as, as David Leverenz suggests, through what Emerson calls these “initiative, spermatic, prophesying man-making

words” themselves that male self-generation occurs (4.4). | 55. Pierre otherwise might escape the fate of the protagonist in “Pausilippo”: “Unmanned, made meek through strenuous wrong, / Preluding, faltering; then

began,/But only thrilled the wire—no more,/The constant maid supplying

258 « Notes to Pages 213-221

voice, / Hinting by no ineloquent sign / That she was but his mouth-piece mere, / Himself too spiritless and spent” (Melville, Collected, 24.4).

56. It seems appropriate that Alfred Aiken titles his pantheist tract on the “SINGLE ONE OMNIPRESENT AWARENESS Bachelor God (19).

57. Lawrence’s mergers are more emphatically masculinist than Emerson’s. As Mrs. Renshaw adds, “The men are all women since the fauns died in a frost one

night” (Collected, 703). Since hearsed was Pan, alas for male things of wilding feature.

| 58. Emerson imagined male connections as manifestations of transcendental union but gender as a form of division within the divine. Carolyn Sorisio contends that “unlike Fuller’s description of ‘radical dualism,’ which proposes a similar theory of complementary behaviors of the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ realms, Emerson uses the words ‘male’ and ‘female’ rather than ‘masculine,’ suggesting that for him the bipolar qualities of the universe are embodied respectively in men and women,” and in essentialized, hierarchical ways (120). While Fuller considered herself a transcendentalist, Emerson chided her that they must not be conjoined in nature. Men could never merge in society or with women; as Emerson wrote, more broadly confirming what he told Fuller, even “love was only phenomenal.... The soul knows nothing of marriage, in the sense of a permanent union between two personal existences.” As Sophia Hawthorne remarked precisely of Emerson, he “knows not much of love. ... He is an isolation. He has never yet known what union meant with any soul,” again suggesting that his unions were focused on the universal (Baker, 193, 231).

s9. Isabel is here a kind of anti-Heidegger. For example, for Heidegger, “while the nature of nature is not and must not be fully historical, the worldhood of the world is human in a way that nature can never be” (Lentricchia, 86). 60. Emerson located race partly through the eyes, not just in the context of transcendental vision but in the ocular construction of identity. Addressing immigration, he claimed that “it is the light complexion, the blue eyes, of Europe that come: the black eyes, the black drop, the Europe of Europe is left” ( Journals, 7:226). Here the “black drop” that makes one black is equated with black eyes. Repeatedly remarking on her “two unfathomable dark eyes,” Pierre tells Isabel that the sight of her leaves him “only sensible to the Nubian power in [her] eyes.” Isabel ends the novel by covering dead Pierre in her “ebon vines” (also called “ebon tresses”) (312, 314, 362, 145). Such passages reconfirm that Melville associated Isabel as much with Egypt and Africa as with France and Europe. 61. While he encodes slavery as Pierre’s abstract notion of transcendental sub-

jugation, Melville doesn’t entirely keep to the philosophical fragmentations of male bodies; for slavery “parches all fertility. ...|Llet every master who wrenches bond-babe from mother, [so] that the nipple [will] tear; ... 07 cuts the holy unity in twain till apart from man from wife like one bleeding body cleft—let that master ... live again to die forever damned” (Mardi, 534-35). But with the notable exception of

Notes to Pages 221-223 * 259

“Benito Cereno,” even when Melville wants to engage slavery directly, he tends to do so through a metaphysics, rather than a politics, of fragmented bodies.

62. Such doublings can be read in the context of what The Evening Mirror in 1845 calls Melville’s “double-revolutionary descent,” which distinguishes him as much as his talent (Log, 1:197). 63. Emerson also cites this claim in his journals as a Spanish proverb (2:480).

64. Lucy establishes this pattern of using selfdispossession as a form of self affirmation before Isabel arrives, paradoxically claiming, “I tell thee, Pierre—and ‘tis Love’s own self that now speaks through me” (37). 65. Some Puritans voiced a comparable formulation of the godhead. Edward Taylor writes in “Meditation One,” “What! hath Thy godhead, as not satisfied / Married our manhood, making it its bride?” (s). 66. Itisalso in such contexts that Melville appears, through his representation of pantheism as a transitional discourse, most modern to us, for he effectively concludes, well before Wittgenstein or Lacan, among others, that language speaks us.

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Blank Page

Index

aboriginality, 8, 13, 16, 23, 32, 40, 64, 68-69, 245-46n8, 248ns, 254n31, 256n48. See 74-76, 78, 96, 143, 147, 172, 212, 230. also consciousness in nature; imma-

See also African Americans; Native nence; impersonal, the; incarnation; Americans; primitive, the; race; pantheistic vitality; plants, rocks; Saint

whiteness Vitus; automatism (and mechanism) absorption (into nature), 31-32, 4.4, §1, 72, (antithesis)

86, II, 125, 14.4, 148, 170, 176-78, 180, antinomianism, I5~16, 26, 30, 35-36, 42, 143 230n19, 242n31. See also cannibalism; archetypes, pantheist, 31, 38, §5, 64, 104-9,

melting; merger II2, 161, 173, 180, 207, 212, 24.4n42. See Adams, Henry, 25, 204, 240n23 also leaves; representativeness; spines;

Adams, John, 153 universaliism

Adams, Richard, 162 Armstrong, Philip, 257ns1 African Americans, 3, 23, 58, 62, 64-65, Arrington, A., 50-52, 232n26

67-68, 77-80, 194, 201, 237N16, atomism, 41 241N29, 244N41, 255n41. See also race auto-machia, 10, 168—69. See also Civil War;

Ahlstrom, Sydney, 231n24 demonology; double consciousness;

Aiken, Alfred, 258n56 self-difference

Albanese, Catherine, 237n16 automatism (and mechanism), 27, 101-3, 141, Alcott, Bronson, 19, 29, 74, 85, 222—23, 152, 158, 169, 176, 179, 181, 199, 209,

2402s, 247N2 239n23,244n41, 248n5. See also

All, the, 95, 160, 163-64, 166—67, 170-71, corporate pantheism; pantheistic 173-74, 176-77, 180, 207, 218, 230n19, vitality 236N11, 238nn19—20, 247NI, 257N52, Avallone, Charlene, 215 passim. See also Over-Soul; unity

“all feeling,” the, 1-3, 28, 56-57, 85, 87-88, Baird, James, 239n23 97-98, 109, 138, 156, 170-71, 180, Baker, Carlos, 28, 34, 74, 222-23, 226n10 228n12, 232n29, 234n8, 240n25. Seealso _— Bartol, Cyrus, 29, 38, 73

merger; oceanic feeling; pain (antith- Bayle, Pierre, 250n18

esis); reverie Baym, Nina, 226n6,246n14

Amryc, Charles, 47, 50, 99 Beer, Gavin de, 246n10 animism (and animation), 62-63, 73-74, 76, Bell, Millicent, 250n18 78, 80, 83-84, 93, 98, 101-2, 108, 113, 115, Bentley, Nancy, 234n6 123, 126, 141, 1§2, 1§7, 159—-GO, 162, 172, Berlant, Lauren, 163

175, 181, 183-85, 189, 195, 217, 221, Bewley, Marius, 139-40 230NI9, 233N4, 239N23,240N25,242n33, Bhagavad Gita, 155 279

280 ¢ Index

Bible, 214, 221 Christ, 19, 33, 36, 54, 88-89, 91, 95, 98, 133,

Birk, John, 236n12 184, 213, 24233

Bode, Rita, 211 Civil War, 4, 75, 152-54, 237N16, 252n27. Borges, Jorge Louis, 245ns See also auto-machia; union Bradford, Governor William, 75 classification. See taxonomy

Braswell, William, 226n8 Clay, Henry, 257n54 Braun, Wernher von, 231n24 Cohen, Louisa Emily, 83, 208 Bray, Charles, 19-20, 43, 46, 151-52, 227N4 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 10, 27, 42, 239n23

Bremer, Frederika, 34 Collison, Gary, 228n11

Brickhouse, Anna Campbell, 220 colonialism, 62, 69, 71, 73, 76, 79, 226N7 Brown, Bill, 184, 237n16, 248ns5 Columbus, Christopher, 237n15

Brown, Lee Rust, 158 | Comte, Auguste, 30, 35, 211

Brown, Richard, 242n34 Concilio, Reverend Januarius De, 26-27, Brown, William Hill, 245n3 31-32, 36-37, 46, 121, 172, 183 Browne, Thomas, 149, 187 consciousness in nature, 43-44, 46-47, Brownson, Orestes, 26, 29 49, $4, 82, 105. See also animism;

Brun, Jean, 249n16 hylozoism; immanence; plants; Buchanan, James, 17—19, 21, 23, 30, 37-38, rocks; Saint Vitus 41-42, 44, 48—§0, 80, 83, 143, 227n2 Conway, Anne, 239n22

Buell, Lawrence, 144 Cook, Joseph, 29

Burke, Kenneth, 246n9, 254n36 Cooper, James Fenimore, 250n18

Butler, Octavia, 74 corporate pantheism, 27, 76, 103, 132, 171, 182, 2s0n18. See aéso automatism

Cabot, James Elliot, 11, 58, 70, 154, 235-36n11, | corporeality. See digestion; incarnation;

250n19 materialism; personification

Cameron, Sharon, 120, 159-60, 200, 228n8, correspondence, pantheistic theory of, 83,

229N14, 245N3, 245n16 87, 91, 110, 118, 123-29, 134, 14.6, Campanella, Tommaso, 245n6 162, 197, 203-4, 217, 226n7, 245n6, cannibalism, 69, 73, 106, 157-59, 193-96, passim 198-99, 2OI-2, 204, 214, 257N§0, Cousin, Victor, 25, 160

257n52. See also absorption Cowan, Michael, 107, 123 Carlyle, Thomas, 27, 177, 187,249n15,253n29 Cox, Samuel Sullivan, 75, 153-54, 237n16,

Carton, Evan, 234n6 247N3, 2§2N27

Carus, Dr. C. G., 237n15 Cranch, Christopher, 232n27

Catholicism, 16, 26-27, 29-30, 32, 37) 41; Creech, James, 192

227N1, 231NS, 238n20 Crockett, Davy, 237n16 cause and effect, 49, 51, 94, 107, 121, 158, 176. Croffut, W. A., 25, 145

See also self creation; unfolding Cromphout, Gustaaf Van, 29

Cavell, Stanley, 214 cultural geography, 226n7

Cayton, Mary, 26, 38 Cuvier, Georges, 239—40n23 Cenci, Beatrice, 206, 220-21

Cervantes, Miguel de, 254n34 Darwin, Charles, 50, 240n23. See also Chai, Leon, 10, 29, 40, 226n8, 239—-40n23 development Chambers, Robert, 333, 80, 105, 2274, Davis, Cynthia, 66

239N23,246NI0 Davis, Jefferson, 153

Channing, William Ellery, 31-32, 56, 94, debt (and influence), 81, 122, 132, 138, 178,

24.235 200, 208—9, 212, 214, 217, 234n8,

Index 281 234n10. See also incest; imitation; dissolution. See melting individualism; isolation; magnetism; Dix, Reverend Morgan, 1, 20-21, 29,

self-reliance; self-creation 47-48, §2; 94, 98, 140, 142, 155, 163,

Della Porta, Giambattista, 246n16 228n9 democracy, 6, 8, 20-22, 46, 132, 137, 139-45, double consciousness, 65—67, 79, 168, 221, | 157, 163—65, 173, 180, 231Nn2, 2.45n3, 228n8, 234n7, 241n29. See also auto-

247n18. See also egalitarianism; machia; self-difference

polarization Douglas, Ann, 215

demonology, 6, 46, 57-58, 70-71, 96, 100, Douglass, Frederick, 65-66, 77, 233n3, 233n5,

106, 121, 129, 167-69, 229NI5, 245N4, 235n2o 246n16, 251n20. See also polarization; Duban, James, 138, 228n11

self-difference Du Bois, W. E. B., 65, 169, 23.4n7,

Derrida, Jacques, 123 241N29

development (evolution), 33, 49-50, 104-13, Durfee, Governor Job, 72, 230-31n19

127, 229NI19, 240N23 Durling, Robert, 255n40

50, 88 251n99

Dewey, Reverend Orville, 28, 33, 35, 41-42, Duyckinck, Evert, 11, 80, 203, 206, 209,

Diderot, Denis, 246n10 Dwight, John, 232n28 digestion, 56-57, 170, 232n19, 247n18,

254n34. See also “all feeling,” the Eddy, Mary Baker, 52 (antithesis); cannibalism; pain Edwards, Jonathan, 24, 32, 41, 45, 85,

Dill, Elizabeth, 245n3 231NI9

Dillard, Annie, 90, 98, 231-32n24, 239n19, egalitarianism, 9, 13, 21-22, 49, 99, 103, 120,

240-—41n26, 256n 48, 257Nn50 122, 132—33, 139, 164, 191, 203, 232NI,

Dillingham, William, 11 246n6. See also democracy

Dimock, Wai Chee, 121, 158, 173, 24.4N1, Egypt, 36, 71-73, 209-11, 226N7, 231N12,

2454, 246n1I, 248n4 236N12, 237NNI3—14, 2$7N53,

Dionysus, 72, 75, 249—-50n16 258n6o

disguise (masks), 4, 6, 12, 20, 26-27, 31, 45, electricity, 11, 44, 203, 211, 217, 243, 25.435 47, 49, §3—55, §8, 69, 91, 113-14, 125, 138, Ellison, Ralph Waldo, 77, 255n39

176, 184, 212, 231N2I1, 236nI1 Emerson, Charles, 229n16 disillusionment, with pantheism (betrayal, Emerson, Ellen Tucker (daughter of Ralph

exhaustion), 10, 38, 40, 43, §7—58, Waldo Emerson), 123 87, 93, IOI, I10, 129, 132, 137,144, I$ 4, Emerson, Ellen Tucker (wife of Ralph Waldo

159, 165, 167-68, 181, 199. See also Emerson), 39 demonology; pain; seduction Emerson, Lidian, 117 dismemberment (amputation, fragmenta- Emerson, Mary Moody, 34 tion), 3, 65, 74, 129, 152-58, 160-64,167, | Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1, 7, 9-10, 12, 34,

173, 177, 183, 188—96, 200, 202-7, 56, 74, 80, 113-14, 139, 1§3, passim; 220-21, 248n5, 252n27. See also merger development of thought on pantheism,

(antithesis) 9-1, 35, 38, 43, 97) 121-22, 235-36N11

dispossession, 95, 100, 150-51, 156, 161-62, (see also demonology; disillusionment; 165, 167, 175-76, 184, 197, 199, 233N3, polarization); attitude toward slavery, 240N25, 242N33, 253n29, 257—-58n55, 71, 122, 154, 180, 198, 233N5S, 234—-36N11,

259nn65—66. See also animism; 241n31, 248n4 (see also slavery)

immanence; involuntary, the; —Works: Saint Vitus; self-difference “American Civilization,” 154

282 ¢ Index

—Works (cont.) “The Natural History of Intellect,” 49, 55, “The American Scholar,” 67, 84, 131-32, 69, 73, 81, 88, 91, 95, 100, 113-14, 120,

158-59, 161, 178, 198, 206 127, 134, 140, 143-44, 148, 180, 188,

“Aristocracy, 36, 103, 120, 162 204, 208-9, 242n33

“Art, 96 “The Naturalist,” 61

“Behavior,” 94, 186 “Nature” (I), 12, 14, 32-33, 40, 47) 51;

“Character,” 15 53-54, 67-68, 86, 89, 92, IOI, 107, “Circles,” 94, 120 114, 118, 128, 136, 149, 159-60, 168,

“Clubs,” 161 176, 196-97, 226n6

“Compensation,” 35, $3, 91, 126, 146, 162 “Nature” (III), 88, 93, 121, 126, 229n15

“Considerations by the Way,” 164 “Nature” (VI), 114 “Demonology,” 35, 46, 58, 122, 135-36, “New England Reformers,” 147, 178 168, 249n11 (see also Not Me, the) “Nominalist and Realist,” 21-22, 40,

“Divinity School Address,” 51, 84, 98, 96, 132 160—61, 184, 228n1i1, 249NI5 “The Over-Soul,” 94-96, 126, 180, 211,

English Traits, 174, 233ns, 248n6 221, 228n13, 229N14 “Experience, 40, 58, 81, 83, 96-97, 122, “Pan, 95, 101, 236nII 133-34, 147, 160, 167, 169, 181, 184, “The Patient Pan,” 55 186, 199, 202, 212—13, 217, 221 “Perpetual Forces,” 39, 95, 134, 148

“Fate, 19, 22, 96, 107, 134,194 “Plato,” 125 “Friendship,” 161, 227n11 “The Poet,” 82, 88, 101, 135, 197, 213, 222 “The Fugitive Slaw Law,” 198, 235n20 “Poetry and Imagination,” 44, 46, 55,

“Goethe,” 103 117-18, 125, 162—63, 232N29, 243N40 “The Heart” (lecture), 165, 167, 177 “The Progress of Culture,” 10, 18, 22, 44,

“Historic Notes of Life and Letters in 120, 174, 225n4 New England,” 167, 249n13 “Prudence,” 162 “History,” 80, 95, 119, 121-22, 136, 174-75 “The Scholar,” 175, 226n8

“Immortality,” 40, 211 “Self-Reliance,” 13, 36, 40, 44, 174, 180,

“Inspiration, 96 184, 212, 234NII

“Intellect,” 35, 43, $7, 81, 95, 132, 178, 238n19 Sermons, 84, 1§§, 176, 230N10

Journals, 14,17, 23-24, 37, 42-43, 48, $4, “Society and Solitude,” 227n11 56, 68, 72, 81, 85, 87-88, 103, 114, I17, “The Sovereignty of Ethics,” 61, 83, 99,

123, 125, 133-35, 14.0, 1§§, 159-60, 162, 105-6, 243nN40 167-68, 176, 189, 216-17, 234—-3§N20, “Swedenborg,” 107, 160, 174, 243N40

249NI4, 250NI19, 252N27, 258nGo, “Thoreau,” 146

259n62 Uncollected Lectures (“Natural Religion”),

“Lecture on the Times,” 246n15 105, 180, 234nII

Lectures, 39; 95; 105, 14.0, 154-55, 165, 221, “Wealth,” 122, 128, 130, 190

226n8, 226NI10 “Webster,” 92, 241n31

Letters, 216, 250n19 “Woodnotes,’ 55, 176, 225ns

“Literary Ethics,” 94 “Woodnotes II,” 114 “Love” (lecture), 38 “Worship,” 129, 188

“Martin Luther,” 18 “The Young American, 237nI5 “The Method of Nature,” 34, 46, 48, 55, Young Emerson Speaks, 185 93-94, 96, 118, 133-34, 138, 153, 155, Emerson, Waldo, 39, 187, 202, 204, 216,

169, 178, 181, 186, 208, 234n1 226n6, 227N7, 230NnI19

“Monadnoc,” 39, 54 Empedocles, 48

Index « 283

Erlich, Richard D., 24.4n45 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 7, 18-19,

evolution. See development 28-30, 34, 47, 56-58, 82, 97, 104-7, 109, exceptionalism, 8-9, 76, 144, I91, 226n7, 113, 135, 168—72, 185, 187, 192, 205, 219,

232N1 228N12, 229—-30N19, 234n8, 238n19,

exhilaration, 90, 114. See also intoxication; 241N27, 249NI15, 250NI8, 251n20

pain (antithesis); reverie Gougeon, Len, 233ns, 236n11 expansionism (includes manifest destiny), Gould, Stephen Jay, 239n23

9, 13, 226N7, 237N16, 245n4 Greeks and Greece, 28-29, 41, §4; 69, 133, eyes (sight, vision), 48, 65, 150-51, 161, 175-77, 205-6, 225n2, 226N7, 229N13, 236NnI2,

183, 185-87, 205, 251-§2nn2 4-26, 237113, 238n19, 242N34, 247NI 254—55n38, 258n6o. See also leaves; Grossman, Jay, 78, 176

stars guidebooks, 134, 137-38, 226n7 Fanon, Frantz, 67, 233n4 hands, 2-3, 65--67, 100, 150, 156-57, 160,

Farjeon, Eleanor, 99 162—63, 167, 172-73, 175-76, 181, 184, Feidelson, Charles, 37 192, 205, 233n3. See also dismemberfetishism, 41, 92, 115, 143, 153, 158, 172, 189-90, ment; dispossession

200, 226n7, 228n8 Hannigan, Senator Edward, 153 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 29-30, 41 Hardack, Richard, 107, 225n2, 233n2,

Field, Maunsell, 89 234nn5—6, 252N26, 255N 42, 256n 43

Fiske, John, 82, 229-30n19 Harvey, David, 93, 157 Fitzhugh, George, 247n3 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1-2, 4~5, 56, 59, 67, Flory, Wendy Stallard, 241n29 69, 74, 85, 87, 89, 100, 134, 150, 156,

Follen, Charles, 228n11 166—67, 177, 182, 187, 192, 198, 207, 219, Foucault, Michel, 245n6, 246n16 22§nI, 225n3, 234n8; relationship with fragmentation. See dismemberment Melville, 1-2, 90, 110, 119, 241N30,

Frost, Brazilai, 231n21 242N37, passim Freud, Sigmund, 155, 237n17, 241n27, —Works:

242-4337, 24§-46n8, 248ns, 250n17 The Blithedale Romance, 212, 253n29

Frye, Northrop, 126 Coverdale, 130, 154, 253n29 Fuller, Margaret, 65-66, 182, 258n58 Zenobia, 154, 212

“The Celestial Railroad,” 87, 188

Garnett, Richard, 34 “Chiefly About War Matters,” 68, 70, gender identity and gender construction, 6s, 226n6, 257N53 67-69, 71, 90; 95; 154-55, 200-223, House of the Seven Gables, 249n12,

256n47, 258n58. See also debt; incest; 254035

self-creation The Marble Faun, 4, 32, 68-70, 90, 99, Genette, Gerard, 118-19 120, 238Nn20, 243n39 genius (and greatness), pantheist conception Donatello, 32, 53, 69-70, 73; 75, 90, 219, of, 14, 29, 46, 56-57, 85, 95, 122, 130, 133, 234n8, 234n10 (see also Pan; race)

135-36, 138, 149, I7I, 175, 182, 225n5, Miriam, 234n8

237NI5, 247n16. See also “The Old Manse,” 226n6

representativeness “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” 170, 212, Germany and Germanic influence on 219-20 pantheism, 9, 25, 27-29, 31, 34 42, Beatrice, 170, 219-20 51, 130, 228nII, 240N23, 254n32 “Wonder-Book,” 229n18

Gilroy, Paul, 234n7 Hawthorne, Sophia, 19, 226n6, 258n58

284 ¢ Index heart (and heartlessness), 2, 65, 87, 90, 100, 25329, 2§4N31, 255n28. See also 109—I0, 154, 162, 166, 171-72, 184-85, dispossession; immanence; involuntary, 187—88, 201, 212, 226N7, 242N35, 245N7, the; pantheistic vitality; Saint Vitus 250n19, 251n20. See also intellect; incarnation (and correspondence of inward

Melville: opinion of Emerson and outward, materialization), 45, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 25, 28, 41, 47, 49, 120, 122, 173, 176, 248n8. See

47, 73, 241N27, 2§4n31 also animism, pantheistic vitality;

Heidegger, Martin, 94, 258n59 personification

Henson, Josiah, 253 incest, 13, 181, 200, 203, 105-8, 213-14, 218,

Heraclitus, 46 220-21, 245n3, 256n46. See also debt; Hitchcock, General Ethan Allen, 227n4, gender identity; self-creation 243n38 individualism (pantheist redefinition of), 4, Hittell, John, 17, 44-46, 83, 183 21, 29, 40, §6—$7, 82, 132-37, 140-4], Hofstader, Richard, 255n42 143-44, 155, 165, 167, 178, 249—-50nI6,

Hogg, James, 125 250n18, 256n 48. See also isolation;

Holland, Catherine, 152 self-reliance

Hollister, Michael, 238n19 individualism, Jacksonian, 64-65, 150, 173,

Holmes, Edmund, 38, $7, 63, 89, 163 248n4 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 14 influence. See debt homosocialty, 2, 65, 143, 17-71, 188, 192. instinct, 121 See also Hawthorne: relationship intellect, 36, 250n19. See also heart; Melville:

with Melville; merger opinion of Emerson

Hood, Edwin, 32-33 intoxication, god-, 19, 69, 75, 90, 234NI0.

Hughes, Gertrude, 152 See also exhilaration; reverie

Hunt, John, 18, 27, 45, 84-85, 104 inversion. See polarization

Hunt, Robert, 42, 90 invisibility (and transparency), 14, 48, 55, 65;

Hutton, James, 81 67, 89, 94, 96, 113-14, 147, 150, 161, 163, hylozoism, 41, 61. See a/so animism; plants; 175-78, 185, 187, 207, 210, 215, 248n8,

rocks 252N25, 25§N3, 2§7N52

involuntary, the (and the supervoluntary), idealism, 8—10, 16, 19, 23-35, 32, 41, 48, 110, 64, 66-67, 78, 152, 155, 166, 173, 175, 118, 30, 135, 141, 1§8, 162—63, 231NI9, 180—90, 221-23, 248n5, 251n21. See also

234n11, 250n18. See also maia; dispossession; immanence; impersonal,

materialism the; Saint Vitus; tyranny

imitation, 28, 39—40, 132, 225n1. See also debt Irigaray, Luce, 155 immanence, 7, 11, 13, 18, 22, 24, 28, 21, 40, Irwin, John, 238n19, 249NI6 48-49, §8, 63, 72, 81, 83-84, 94, 96, 125, Isis, 72, 236n12 183—85, 222, 230N19, 232N21, 245N7, isolation, 13-14, 25, §2, 120, 147-48, 171, 211, 250n18. See also animism; dispossession; 213, 250N19, 253n58, 258n58. See also

impersonal, the; pantheistic vitality; debt; individualism Saint Vitus

impersonal, the, 13-14, 16, 23, 30, 33-34, Jackson, John William, 244n44 37-41, 45-47, 49-50, 62~—64, 67, 76, 82, Jacobs, Harriet, 77 92-94, 96, 98, 100, 102, 108, 121, 136-37, James, William, 247n2 149, 1§1-§2, 158-59, 164, 167,171,180-84, Jefferson, Thomas, 75, 152, 156 189, 192, 199, 210, 214-15, 228n8, 229nI14, Jentsch, Ernst, 237n17 230N19, 237N18, 244N43,248n5,249n16, Johnson, Charles, 69, 72, 74, 77-79

Index « 285

Johnson, James Weldon, 70 Madison, James, 153, 165 Johnson, Samuel, 231n23 magnetism and magnets, 2, 4.4, 119-20, 132,

Joyce, James, 133 1$4, 167, 177, 204, 243. See also debt Jung, Carl, 126 magnification, 127-28, 145-46, 149, 160, 165, 210, 226N7, 257N§2

Kant, Immanuel, 23, 229n15 maia (illusion), 113-14, 118, 162-63. See also

Kelley, Mary, 74 idealism |

Kimmel, Michael, 257n5 4 Manning, Reverend J. M., 18, 22, 27, 30-31, Kuyper, Abraham, 20, 140, 227n6 33, 35-37) 39-40, 46-47, 53, 82-83, 95, 104, 121, 126, 135, 160, 212, 225§n5, 227N3,

labor, 1, 67, 101-2, 128, 157-59, 161-62, 24.3N38 197-200, 202-3, 205, 209, 236nII, Marovitz, Sanford, 250n18

24.8n7, 257Nn5§1 marriage, 147, 178, 200-202, 221-22, 238n19, Lacan, Jacques, 67, 96, 51, 174, 212, 243N4], 258ns58, 259n66. See also union

248ns5, 252n24, 259n66 Marshall, Chief Justice John, 165-66 Lansing, Catherine (Melville’s cousin), Martin, Emily, 201

251N2I Marx, Karl, 92-93, 157-59, 161, 181, 24232,

Lawrence, D. H., 6, 24, 33, 58, 61, 64, 72-73, 248n4, 248n7, 25431, 256ns0 78, 86, 88—90, 92, IO], 133, 139, 142-43, masks. See disguise

145, 171, 179, 188, 215, 228-29n13, mass, the (and giant bodies), 20, 25, 41,

231N22, 238nI19, 240n26, 244n45, 44, 48, 55-56, 99, 140, 142, 163-65,

258n57 2.55139

246nI5, 247NI, 2§2Nn27, 253nNn28-29, 171, 178, 188, 244n12, 248n9, leaves (lobes), 58, 63-64, 70, 74, 87, 103-13, Massumi, Brian, 248ns5 134, 167, 170, 176—77, 186, 198, 236n1I1. materialism, 6, 27, 29, 33, 38, 41, 63, 83-84,

See also archetypes; eyes; orbits; plants; 162-63. See also idealism

spines Mathiessen, F. O., 11

LeBlanc, Michael, 119 McAleer, John, 34, 95, 98 Lee, Maurice S., 234-35 McFarland, Thomas, 228n10 Leer, David van, 252n24 McLoughlin, Michael, 26, 228n11 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhlem, 18, 239n22 melting (and dissolution), 20, 22, 43-44, 112,

Lenarcic, Faye, 256n49 125, 132, 134-35, 160, 166—67, 227Nn7,

Lentricchia, Frank, 246n12 245n45. See also merger

leopard (Pan/panther), 55, 133 Melville, Elizabeth, 206, 251n21 Leverenz, David, 187, 257n5 4 Melville, Herman, 77, 81, 87, 89, passim;

Levine, Robert S., 220, 250n18 development of thought on pantheism, Lincoln, Abraham, 154, 252n27 9-12, 34; $7) 595 97> 110, 136, 243N41, literalization, 12, 16, 31, 45, 48, 70, 84, 97, 245n7 (see also demonology; disillusion106-7, IIO—II, 118, 122—23, 126-29, 150, ment; polarization); opinion of 15§5—$6, 162, 172, 184-85, 194, 201, 205, Emerson, 4, 10-11, 80—81, 87, 171, 162, 208, 217, 245-46nn8—9, 257n5 4. See also I7I, 187, 206, 226n6, 229n27, 249N16,

incarnation; metaphor and metonymy 250nI9

Littlehale (Cheney), Ednah, 225n1 —Works:

Locke, John, 24, 226n7 “After the Pleasure Party,” 216-18, 220-21

Lodge, David, 11 “The Apple Tree Table,” 246n11 Lowell, James Russell, 98, 225n1 “At the Hostelry,” 104

Lukacs, Georg, 102 “Bartley the Scrivener,” 89, 100, 102

286 « Index

—Works: (cont.) Ahab, 36, 45, 95, 100, 102, 109, II2,

Battle-Pieces, 252n27 120-22, 127, 129-30, 132-33, 135, “Benito Cereno,” 67, 183, 191, 259n6I 138-40, 143-44, 147-48, 159-62, Billy Budd, 66-67, 173-74, 184, 228n8 168-69, 175, 184—85, 190, 193, Clarel, 139, 14.1, 173, 183, 241n29, 251n21 19§—-97, 211, 214, 2255, 238N19,

The Confidence-Man, 91, 103, 12.4, 129, 244N.43, 247NI8 132, 145, 164, 166, 169, 171, 174-75, Bildad, 119

178-79, 197, 199, 223, 243N41, Bulkington, 238n19

248n8, 255n40 Flask, 127

The Confidence Man (character), 21, Ishmael, 2, 7, 22, 26, 34, 43, 45, 48, 50-51, 40, 45, 70, 91, 121, 130, 136, 175, 192, 57, 65, 71-73, 75, 100, 107-8, 112,

212,223 114, 120, 122, 130, 136, 138-41,

Winsome, Mark, 223 143-44, 146-47, 150, 163-65, 167, Correspondence, I-2, §, II, 36, §7, §9, 80, 85, 169-71, 176, 182, 188, 190-98, 200, 87, 91, 103, 110, 114, 138,140, 142, 144, 2IO—II, 223, 240N25, 243N47,

250-§1n18 25752

170, 173, 187, 198-99, 209, 234n8, 244n 45, 250n18, 25225, 255N 40,

“Fruit of Travel,” 240n24 Mapple, Father, 238n19 “Hawthorne and his Moses,” 81 Moby Dick, 20, 41, 71, 99, 148, 193, 214, Israel Potter, 86 238ni9 Letters, 156, 202 Peleg, 213 Mardi, 10, 33, 40, 43, 48, 58, 65, 80, 82, 84, Pip, 100, 193, 243N27 86-87, 90, 97-100, I0§, IIO—II, 114, Queequeg, 65, 108, 145, 147, 170-72, 117, 120, 124, 128-29, 132, 136, 154-55, 182, 188, 193 157-58, 164, 166, 169, 172—73, 175, Starbuck, 202, 251n20

177, 179, 183-85, 187-91, 193-99, Stubb, 173, 192 20304, 207-9, 2I1I-12, 226n6, 238nI19, Omoo, 43, 86, 108, 189-90, 197, 202, 208,

239N21, 244N 43, 245n3, 245N7, 23226, 257Ns2 247N17, 255N40, 258n61, “The Paradise of Bachelors, the Tartarus Babbalanja, 33, 84, 98-100, 112, 128-29, of Maids,” 256n49 155, 169, 174, 183-85, 197-98, 203, “Pausilippo,” 58, 257—58n55

208, Pierre, 28, 31, 34, 36, 42, 72, 85, 91, 98-100, Hautia, 169 1O2—3, 132, 138, 14.2, 146, I§1, 154,

Media, 209, 253n29 164-65, 168—72, 182, 185—87, 196-99, Mohi, 48, 97, 129-30, 183, 190 202-3, 205, 207, 210, 212-13, 218, 223,

Oro, 43-44, 84, 89, 100, 184-85 228n8, 251nn20—21

Pani, 97 Enceladus, 186, 205-6

Samoa, 183, 195-96 Isabel, 51, 58, 74, 85, 90-91, 103, 169-70, Taji, 89, 97, 110, 124, 128, 136, 138, 177, 178, 193, 199, 2OI, 203, 205—6, 208,

183, 185, 211 211, 213-14, 216-22, 228n8,

Yillah, 90, 169, 211 241nn28—29, 2453, 245N7, 247N3,

Yoomy, 183, 187, 190 248n13, 258nns9—60

Moby-Dick, 1-3, 10, 33-34, 45, 84, 101-4, Lucy, 103, 203, 205, 213-14, 216-17,

IO8—-Il, 113, 123-24, 126—28, 145-46, 259n64 173, 183-84, 188-89, 192—96, 201, Millthorpe, Charlie, 171, 229n17 207, 209—II, 213, 218, 239n22, Pierre, 49, $7, 59, 73, 89, 95, 97-98, 125,

247n18 137,144, 147, 162, 167, 169, 173, 185,

Index « 287 187, 192-93, 195, 198-201, 203, Native Americans, 3, 18, 62, 64, 69, 71,

205-7, 212-14, 217, 222, 238n19, 74-76, 78-80, 98, 156, 193-94, 203, 239n21, 241InNN28—29, 250n16, 226N7, 237N16, 247n3. See also

257n55, 258nn6o—61 aboriginality; African Americans; Plinlimmon, Plotinus, 171 primitive, the; race; whiteness Vivia, 98, 137, 170-72, 205, 212, natural science (pantheist theories of, and Redburn, 86, 111, 125, 127, 138, 142, 173, 177; monism) 8, 44, 50, 83, 229-30nI9,

, 189, 192, 195-96, 205, 213 239N22,243-44N41, passim Redburn, 50, 91, 108-10, 137, 159,173,205 | Newfield, Christopher, 215-16, 250n18

Typee, 61, 232N26, 242n33 Newton, Isaac, 18, 24, 102 White-Jacket, 89, 101, 120, 123-24, 136-37, Nickels, Cameron, 226nr10 145-47, 170, 177-78, 196, 198, 248n13, Norton, Andrews, 28, 51-52, 54,

258n19 228nnII-12

Surgeon Cuticle, 146, 181, 196-97 Not Me, the (The Other), 3, 17, 61-62, 67, 70, Mephistopheles (devil), 2-3, 21, 27, 34, 77, 14.9, 155, 168—69, 172, 180, 188, 197, 91, 142-43, 145, 154. See also Pan 2.03, 222, 236NII, 241N31, 256n50. See also

Merchant, Carolyn, 64, 239n21 demonology; race merger, with nature and others (and loss or Novak, Barbara, 227n1

transcendence of self, intertextuality of

bodies), 2-3, 5, 56-57, 78, 142, 154-55, oceanic feeling, 14, 101, 108, 150, 242—43N37.

161—62, 166-67, 170—72, 175-76, 187, See also “all feeling,” the; exhilaration;

192, 202, 220, 226N7, 233N2, 242N37, merger

24.4N45, 258n57. occult, 46, 51, 70, 208, 219. See also

See also absorption; melting demonology metaphor and metonymy under pantheism orbits (orbs), 52, 106-7, 109—12, 164, 176-79, (includes analogy), 117-18, 120, 122, 185—87, 226n7, 252n26, 254—-55n38.

126-28, 139, 14.4, 1§2, 1§5, 197, 214, See also stars 244NI, 245n5, 245—-46n8, 255n40. organic, the, 8, 36, 41, 62, 80—82, 88, 98, 102,

See also literalization; synecdoche 105, 151, 181, 250n16. See also animism;

Michaels, Walter Benn, 66 automatism (antithesis); consciousness

Mill, W. H., 96, 231n20 in nature Miller, Frederick, 232n27 Orpheus, 155

Miller, Perry, 24 Orr, John

Milton, John, 18, 145, 205, 221 Osiris, 36, 72, 79, 1§5, 221, 236n12, Mirabaud (Baron D’Holbach), 53 Other, the. See Not Me, the modernism, 93, 133, 243N41, 249N16 Otter, Samuel, 156, 242n33, 24.443

Monadnoc, 99. See also rocks Outka, Paul, 234n8 money, 92, 110, 118, 128-29, 172, 189-91, 194, Over-Soul, 13, 24, 39, 40, 46, 48, 53, 78, 95, 205, 23§NI11, 255N40, 256n50. See also 139, 14.2, 1§2, 166, 226n7, 228n13,

animism; teeth 229n14. See also All, the; union

Moretti, Franco, 158, 184 Ovid, 246n10 Morrison, Toni, 77, 193, 237n13

Morton of Merrymount, 16, 75 Pacific, the, 1, 226n7, 232n1

Mudimbe, V. Y., 79 paganism, 24, 59, 141, 188

Murdock, James, 25 pain (physical pain, and loss), 20, 39-40, 52, muteness (silence), 46, 139-40, 217, 226n6, 56, 165, 202, 23229, 250n17. See also “all

238n19, 240n26 feeling,” the (antithesis); disillusionment;

288 ¢ Index

pain (physical pain, and loss) (conz.) 109—IO, 113, 120, 130, 139, 145—46, I5 4, dispossession; polarization; reverie 160, 162, 168—69, 203, 247NI17, 2§7N§2.

(antithesis) See also demonology; self-difference

Pan, 3, 6, 11, 16, 27, 31, 39, 42, 44, 46, §2—55, Pond, Enoch, Reverend, 17, 27, 188,

57-58, 66, 68, 70, 72-73, 79-80, 82, 236—-37N13 84-85, 87-88, 90-91, 93-95, 97, 995 Porter, Carolyn, 178, 184 105-6, I12, 114, I21, 130-31, 133, 138—43, postmodernism, 8, 158

163, 165, 173, 176, 180, 185, 188, 190, Powers, Hiram, 236n12 2.03, 206, 208, 214-17, 220-23, 226n6, Powers, Richard, 231-32n25, 251n23 231NI9, 236NI11, 238n19, 240Nn24, primitive, the, 62, 68, 80-81, 89, 126, 190,

242N33, 24.4N45, 258n57. See also 2.05, 220, 234n8, 238n19, 243n37,

Mephistopheles 249n16, 250n19. See also aboriginality; pantheistic ashes, $7, 101, 113, 226n7 African Americans; Native Americans; pantheistic vitality, 61-62, 86, 94, 96, 108, race; whiteness IIO, 112, 181-82, 210, 239N23,240Nn24, Proclus, 84

248ns5, 254N30, 254n32. See also progress (pantheistic lack of; static), 9, 23, animism; automatism; dispossession; 29, 30, 97, IZI—22, 137, 139 immanence; impersonal, the; involun- Prometheus, 112

tary, the; Saint Vitus Protestantism, 26, 31, 34-35 Parker, Theodore, 16, 29, 39, 50, 94, 138, 145, Proteus, 121. See also transformation 1§3—§ 4, 167, 179, 184-87, 212, 242n33, Puritans, 18, 24, 32, 36, 45, 69, 74-75, 993

243n38 153, 1§5, 237N1I4, 237—-38nI9, 240n26,

Paul, Saint, 33, 172 241N26, 259n65

Peabody, Elizabeth, 247n2 Pynchon, Thomas, 33, 90, 98-99, 173; Pease, Donald, 143, 164, 202-3n27 231N24, 240—41N25, 247N2, 251n22 perfectibility, pantheist idea of, 179,

253n29 race, 58, 67, 71, 74-75, 119, 134, 1§6, 168, 194,

personification, 41, 173, 196, 248n5. See also 209—10, 218, 220, 233N2, 233N5, 234n8,

incarnation 236N11, 238NI9, 242Nn34, 250N19, 257NS§I1, pervading (pantheistic god; also includes 258n6o. See also aboriginality; African penetrate, publish), 83, 85, 93-95, 105. Americans; demonology; Native

See also immanence; substance Americans; primitive, the; whiteness Piper, H. W., 27, 228n10 rainbow (Pan’s colors), 33, 55, 226n7. See also plants, 51, 56, 85, 87-89, 104-13, 132, 135, 164, Pynchon, Thomas 167—68, 170, 178, 186, 207-8, 214, rationalism, 16, 28, 31, 34-35, §1, 129, 246nI2.

218-20, 241n28. See also animism; See also materialism leaves Read, Charles, 30 Plato (Platonism, Neoplatonism), 7, 16, 19, rebellion (and willful bodies), 27, 30, 35,

27-28, 50, 72, 84, 88, 104, 138, 161, 42, 80, 152-54, 162, 168-69, 179-81, 210, 226n6, 230n19, 238n19, 239n23, 186, 216

247N2 Reed, Ishmael, 70, 72-73, 76-80, 119, Plotinus, 84 241N27, 253—-§4N29, 25547 Poe, Edgar Allen, 19, 189, 231-32n25, Reed, Sampson, 99, 256—57n50 237—-38n19, 249NI16, 254—55n38 Renker, Elizabeth, 248n8, 251n21

Poirier, Richard, 14, 257n54 representativeness, 7, 9, 13-14, 22, 36, 38, 55, polarization (includes pantheistic reversal, 57, 65, 82, 85, 91, 104, 107, 112-13, 117-18, ambivalence, leveling), 45, 53, 57, 71 85; 120, 128, 131-39, 147, 157, 1§9, 170, 189,

Index « 289 204-§, 212, 229n17, 242n33. See also seduction (pantheistic), 1, 36, 42-43, 56, 75;

archetypes; genius; metaphor 114, 132, 214. See also demonology;

reproduction. See self-creation disillusionment reverie, I-2, 20, 34, 50-51, §7, 88—89, 100, Seed, David, 242n33

109—I0, 113, 133, 159, 165, 180-81, 192, self-creation (includes parthenogenesis), 13,

212-13, 230NI9, 242N31, 242n36, 69-72, 80-81, 105-6, 157, 181, 187, 204, 250nt7, passim. See also “all feeling,” 206-13, 231, 254N31, 256—57N50, 257N5 4.

the; animism; merger See also debt; incest

Rexroth, Kenneth, 74-76 self-difference, 2, 28, 55, 107, III, 114, 173-75,

Reynolds, David, 185 183, 192, 197, 199, 243N41, 2§1N23, Reynolds, Jeremiah, 71 passim. See also auto-machia; dispossesRichardson, Merrill, 75-76, 97 sion; double consciousness; polarizaRichardson, Nathaniel Smith, 25, 72, 85, 101, tion; Saint Vitus; transformation

121, 179 self-reliance (god-reliance), 13, 40, 96, 135, rocks, 54-55, 64, 73, 86, 92, 97-99, 108, 123, 164, 172—74, 180, 201, 205, 211, 215-16,

182, 24026, 247n2, passim. See also 235§n20, 257n5 4. See also individualism animism; consciousness in nature; self-worship, 47-49

Monadnoc Seltzer, Mark, 2.48ns5

Rome, 58, 69. See also Catholicism; Haw- Shakespeare, William, 229n16; Hamlet, 195;

thorne: The Marble Faun Macbeth, 2.06, 211

Rogin, Michael, 102, 237n16, 256n44 Sherman, General William Tecumseh, 19

Rolland, Romain, 113, 242—43n37 silence. See mutenesss Romanticism, 6, 10, 26, 29, 41, §4, 62, 78, slavery, 67-68, 72, 78-79, III, 122, 1§4, 156, .

IO7, 125, 238n20 183, 193, 198, 210, 221, 233N3, 234—-36nI1, Rosenberry, Edward, 246n11 24.6NI5, 24.7NS3, 253N29, 2§6Ns0, 258n61 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 18, 220 Slotkin, Richard, 65, 74-75

Rowe, John Carlos, 77, 235n20 Socrates, 72, 85 Sorisio, Carolyn, 67, 233ns5, 236n11, 258n58

Sahlins, Marshall, 232n1 Spencer, Herbert, 50, 229n19. See also Saint Vitus, 27, 70, 175, 177. See also animism; development consciousness in nature; hylozoism; spines (includes phrenology), 63-64, 103-13, immanence; impersonal, the; involun- 157, 182—83, 189, 243N39, 24.4NN42—45.

tary, the; pantheistic vitality See also archetypes; leaves Saisset, Emile Edmond, 39, 49, 231n24 Spinoza, Baruch, 10, 18-19, 28-30, 35, 37, 41

Santayana, George, 246—47n16 54, 82, 84, 97, 121, 126, 171 Savage, Reverend William, 241n312 stars (includes planets and suns), 45, 56-57, Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 25, 41, 61, 84, 87, 109, 176-79, 211, 22.6n7,

126, 248n5 254n38. See also orbits

237NI5 the; union

Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von, state, the, 15, 22, 35-37, 164. See also mass,

Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 28 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 8, 66, 69, 71, 253n29;

Schneider, Herbert, 24 Topsy (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), 69-71, 210, Sealts, Merton, 59, 226n6, 226nI0 219, 2§7N53

Sedgwick, Catharine, 5, 8, 74, 98, 229n18, Stuckey, Sterling, 77 241n28; Magawisca (Hope Leslie), substance (universal pantheistic), 24-25,

32,74, 76, 90, 97 41, $5, 227n4. See also immanence;

Sedgwick, Henry Dwight, 229n18 universalism

290 ¢ Index

Sundquist, Eric, 68, 252n27 See also All, the; dismemberment Swedenborg, Emanual, 19, 32, 34, 227n4 (antithesis), Over-Soul synecdoche, 118, 12-21, 12.4. See also universalism (pantheist validation of

metaphor universalization and generalization), 27, 29, 31, 44, §1, 119—20, 131, 133, 226N7,

Takaki, Ronald, 74, 156-57 243n31. See also archetypes

Tausk, Victor, 251n22 Urquhart, W. S., 53

Taussig, Michael, 251n22 utilitarianism, 42, 79, 86, 92—93, 161 taxonomy (classification), §4, 104-13, 106-7, 12.4, 131-32, 240N25, 242n33. See also Van den Abbeele, Goerges

archetypes; tyranny Van Leer, David, 251n24 Taylor, Edward, 259n65 Very, Jones, 72, 96, 103, 242n33 teeth, 56, 86-87, 129, 189-90, 193, 204. Vincent, Howard, 71

See also animism; money Vishnu, 163 Thoreau, Henry David, 42-43, 64, 102, vitality. See pantheistic vitality 106—7, II2, 125, 207, 22§NI, 240Nn24, Vizenor, Gerald, 71 248n4

Timaeus, 88 Warner, Susan, 215 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 16, 20-21, 30, 36, 38, Webster, Daniel, 235n20, 2.41n31,

42, 44, 46, 86, 99, 140, 157, 163-65, 167, 252n27 174, 179, 213, 232N26, 249N12, 253N29. Wiegman, Robyn, 156

See also democracy Wellek, Rene, 29

Todorov, Tzvetan, 130 whaling, 71, 191, 193, 20910, 257N52 Toland, John, 227n4 whiteness, 3-5, 8, 13, 33, 62-74, 76, 81, 87, 90,

Tompkins, Jane, 215 IOI, 114, 119-20, 134, 142, 155-57, 168, transformation (and metamorphosis), 28, 173, 183, 2O1, 209-10, 221, 233nn2-3, 39-40, 43, 46, §0, $3, 75, 88, 91, 104-5, 234N9, 236NII, 237N16, 247n18, 107, 112, 123, 161, 173—75, 191-92, 198, 253-54n29. See also aboriginality;

231N24, 242n32, 246nI0. See also African Americans; Native Americans;

self-difference; transitivity primitive, the; race transitivity, 86-88, 91. See also Whitman, Walt, 30, 73, 78, 98, 107, 142-43,

transformation 145, 163-64, 23122, 238nI19, 246n9,

transparency. See invisibility 247N16, 252N27

Turner, Nat, 71 Williams, David R., 24, 34

Turner, Victor, 151 Williams, John, 227n10 tyranny (tyrannizing, monomania), 129, Williams, Patricia, 119 132, 138-39, 142—43. See also involun- Williams, Roger, 74

tary, the woods, I, §, 17; 345 51, $4, 56, 68-69, 74, 76, 80, 87-89, 103, 114, 175, 222, 227NI1I,

unfolding, 9-10, 40, 46, 49, $1, 173, 23019. 24.4N45, 252n27 See also cause and effect

Unger, Roberto, 83-84 Yankees, 28, 153-54 union, 152-54, 156, 166, 173, 178, 258ns58. Yellin, Jean Fagin, 236n12

See also merger Young, Rob, 253n4

Unitarianism, 24, 27, 31, 37, 133 youth (under pantheism), 41-42, 54, 104, unity (pantheist ideas of), 41, 91, 105, 114, 130-32, 137, 162, 174. See also 121, 131, 133, 137, 171, 240N23, 249N16. disillusionment

Index « 291

—Works: 248n5

Zizek, Slavoj, 186 The Plague of Fantasies, 23, 229n15, Enjoy Your Symptom, 252n24 The Puppet and the Dwarf, 140-41, 173 First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 228n8 Tarrying with the Negative, 25225,

Organs without Bodies, 61, 150-51, 212 254N37, 2§6nso The Indivisible Remainder, 252n24 The Ticklish Subject, 22915 Living in the End Times, 252n24, 254031, Violence, 25 431

RICHARD HARDACK was a Javits fellow at the University of California Berkeley, where he received a doctorate in English and J.D. He was a visiting assistant professor for four years at Bryn Mawr College and Haverford College (from which he also graduated). He has published widely in American studies and African American studies.

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