HERMAN MELVILLE:

BETWEEN CHARLEMAGNE AND THE

ANTEMOSAIC COSMIC MAN

RACE, CLASS AND THE CRISIS OF BOURGEOIS IDEOLOGY IN AN AMERICAN RENAISSANCE WRITER

 

 

Loren Goldner

 

 

Queequeg Publications

New York, New York

 

 

“For in this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth—even though it be covertly, and by snatches.”

Herman Melville

“Hawthorne and his Mosses”

 

 

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

Introduction: From Warrior-Monk to French Luxury Goods: Sacred, Pseudo-Sacred and the Adamic Imagination in Melville

 

PART ONE: “A GEORGE WASHINGTON CANNIBALISTICALLY DEVELOPED”: THE EVOLVING TOTALITY OF COSMOBIOLOGYAND CLASS, 1845-1851

 

Preface

 

Ch. I. “Damned in Paradise”: Calvinism, Liberalism, and Transcendentalism as Three Modes of Estrangement from the Antemosaic Cosmic Man

 

Ch. II. Social Foundations of the Transcendentalist “Unhappy Consciousness”: Moby Dick as a Prophecy of the Self-Destruction of Bourgeois Civilization

 

Ch. III. Melville’s Cosmic Imagination: The Myth of the Cosmic King in Moby Dick

 

Ch. IV. Moby Dick as the American Eighteenth Brumaire: The Perspective of CLR James

 

Ch. V. 1848 in the United States: American Specificity of the Myth

 

Ch. VI. Melville and the Myth

 

Ch. VII. Melville’s Critique of Orientalism and Primitivism: Melville and Marx

 

Ch. VIII. Melville and the Second Law of Thermodynamics: Henry Adams as an “Anti-Melville”

 

Ch. X. Retrospective: Melville Before Moby Dick : The Elements of Synthesis

 

PART II: THE MERCURIAL ARC OF NEGATION WITHOUT COLLECTIVITY, 1851-1856: From Pierre to The Confidence Man

 

Preface

 

Ch. XI. From the Cosmic King to the Isolated Man of Negation

 

Ch. XII. From Charlemagne to French Luxury Consumer Goods: The Sacred and the Pseudo-Sacred In Melville

 

Ch. XIII. Melville’s Critique of Transcendentalism and the Aestheticized Self: After Moby Dick

 

Ch. XIV. Theater, Painting and Blankness in Melville After Moby Dick : Non-Communication in a Class Society

 

Ch. XV. Race in Melville’s Post- Moby Dick Writings

 

Ch. XVI. Melville and Class After Pierre

 

Ch. XVII: A Blackface Minstrel Show and the Fragments of Charlemagne: The Confidence Man

 

PART III: THE HESITANT TRANSITION BEYOND NEGATION, 1856-1891

 

Preface

 

Melville in the Desert: Clarel

 

The Ambiguous Return of the Antemosaic Cosmic Man: Billy Budd

 

Conclusion

 

Bibliography

 

 

 

 

Introduction: From Warrior-Monk to French Luxury Goods: Sacred, Pseudo-Sacred and the Adamic Imagination in Melville

 

At the end of Herman Melville’s masterpiece Moby Dick , Ishmael descends into the vortex of the Pequod ’s downward plunge and re-emerges, saved, on the coffin of his friend, the Polynesian harpooner, Queequeg. The scene is Melville’s “little yes,” an affirmation of hope through a “higher primitive,” after the “big no” of Ahab’s demonic self-destructive quest, the crackup of a whole civilization built on the isolated bourgeois ego.

The evolution of Melville’s own work has a vorticist quality to it. His vision of class and a “higher primitive” goes down, in fact, with the Pequod . The explosive years (1846-1851) of his six novels of the sea are followed by a descent, from Pierre to The Confidence Man , into satirical destruction of the novel form and above all of the classical novel’s mainstay, the character. This is all over when Melville is 38 years old, when he leaves, almost a broken man and a largely forgotten author, for Egypt, which had provided so much symbolism in his work. There ensue 35 desolate years, during which Melville, marginal and isolated, takes a job as a New York customs official, and turns largely to poetry, culminating in Clarel , the portrait of the late-nineteenth-century cultural desert, set in the actual desert of Palestine, which he had visited on the same 1857 journey.

Then, in his final (posthumously published) work Billy Budd , the “mariners, castaways and renegades” return, in a greatly transformed context, opposing another authoritarian captain, around another Adamic figure.

This study arises from the following tension: in Europe, after 1848, bourgeois consciousness in revolt sought a new universal in the working class and instead found itself in the orbit of the state civil service; in America, bourgeois consciousness in revolt found a new universal in what Melville called “antemosaic” primordial reality, Queequeg, embodied concretely in the multiracial working class, the “Anacharsis Cloots deputation,” in radical antithesis to the state.

Herman Melville (1818-1891) worked his way to this synthesis in the feverish production of six novels of the sea, culminating in Moby Dick , in the 1846-1851 period. As the whaling ship Pequod (named for the Massachusetts tribe annihilated by the Puritans in 1636) was destroyed by Moby Dick, the Indian harpooner Tashtego was nailing a red flag to the mast, catching as well the wing of a sky-hawk with its “imperial beak,” as the waves covered them over. In this succinct image Melville, connects the red man with the red flag, pulling down the imperial eagle, more in what Marx (in the Manifesto ) called the “mutual destruction of the contending classes” than the triumph of proletarian revolution. While Melville retained a lifelong ambivalence about the prospects for successful collective rebellion, he always underscored, when dealing with it, that in America such a rebellion passed necessarily through the “primordial,” red and black “mariners, renegades and castaways” caught up in the “white and turbid wake” of the Ahabs.

This Melville, soaring to the height of his powers in the first phase of his creative life, and sinking with the Pequod , is the subject of Part One of this study, and has elsewhere been treated, in different ways, by Baird, James, Franklin and Karcher. But another Melville, superimposed upon (and retroactively illuminating) the first, emerges in the works written after Moby Dick , over the forty subsequent years of Melville’s life. In Moby Dick , Melville places the “antemosaic” cosmic men—Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo—at the head of the working class, and, in Billy Budd such a figure re-emerges in the opening pages as the “Handsome Sailor,” “a common sailor so intensely black that he must needs have been a native African of the unadulterate blood of Ham,” who anticipates (and shadows) the Adam-Christ figure of Billy himself. Melville is Miltonian, and Blakean; his Adamic figures pass through battle with the world of radical evil, and do not, like the wide-eyed Transcendentalists Melville portrays so scathingly, inhabit a benevolent nature, a “prejudice of the more temperate climes,” as Melville put it. But when Melville treats race and class, his framework is not merely modern capitalist society, bourgeoisie vs. proletariat. Melville’s cosmic men come out of a Biblical eschatology and revolt against the cosmic kings of the same eschatology, above all Charlemagne, the figure in whom the Greco-Roman warrior ideal, from Homer to Caesar, and the Judeo-Christian messiah, from Moses to Jesus, converge to produce the specifically Western version of cosmic kingship, the Holy Roman Empire. From this convergence Melville highlights the warrior-monk, the Templar Knight, who recurs repeatedly in his writings, just as Charlemagne recurs repeatedly. This Melvillian medievalism, which culminates in Clarel (1876), illuminates retroactively elements of the sea novels which, taken in isolation, overshadow it with more generally studied matters.

Charlemagne is for Melville the unitary sacred; Charles V, and even more so Napoleon and Nelson, from the revolutionary era of Melville’s grandfathers, are the unitary pseudo-sacred. The warrior-monk, the Templar, is the individual knight of the unitary sacred quest, but, as Melville says in his diptych short story “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,”

 

the iron heel is changed to a boot of patent leather; the long two-handed sword to a one-handed quill…the knight combatant of the Saracen, breasting spear-points at Acre, now fights lawpoints in Westminster Hall. The helmet is a wig. Struck by Time’s enchanter’s wand, the Templar is today a Lawyer.

 

This devolution and dispersion of the unitary sacred into the banality of the modern—what I call the pseudo-sacred 1 —is a motif through all of Melville’s work. For Melville was neither of the medieval period of his aristocratic Scottish ancestors 2 nor of the era of the French and American Revolutions of his grandfathers. Nor was he nostalgic for those times. Melville’s works refer repeatedly to a genealogy of warriors from Charlemagne to Napoleon and Nelson, but Melville’s own era, highlighted for him by his personal abrupt downward social mobility, is the era in which the individual reaching back only two generations to the American Revolution (as Melville does most conspicuously in Pierre and Israel Potter ) for a sense of historical continuity is dashed instead against the blankness of capitalist wage-labor: the blankness of Bartleby’s office wall, the blankness of the Berkshire mill girls in “The Tartarus of Maids,” or even the blankness which “zones” the San Dominick in “Benito Cereno.” And beyond them, and intimately tied to them, are the slavery question and the “metaphysics of Indian hating” of Colonel John Moredock in The Confidence Man , the “backwoodsman” who “would seem to America what Alexander was to Asia.”

Melville was a grand bourgeois, with aristocratic overtones (most immediately, his mother’s upstate New York Dutch patroon background) whose life trajectory abruptly turned downward with the bankruptcy, madness, and death of his father in 1831, when Melville was thirteen years old. The impoverishment of the family obliged Melville to go to work in his late teens, first as a clerk in an uncle’s New York bank, then as a small-town schoolteacher, and finally as a seaman. He thus experienced, particularly after the crash of 1837, more immediately than any other writer of the “American Renaissance,” the shattering of the old individual personae in the new, increasingly capitalist conditions. Melville’s early work up to Moby Dick (1851), however harshly it condemned the Transcendentalist mainstream of that Renaissance, was nonetheless still within a “romantic monumentalist” mode and within the problematic of the figure with a quest, ultimately, the problematic of an Ishmael. Pierre (1852) turns that tradition upside down and inside out, carrying it to almost sarcastic self-destruction. “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) no longer has a quest. He is at the dead end of non-communication, in the Dead Letter Office of the New York literary world of Young America, upon which Melville turned his back (in Pierre ) after that world had rejected Moby Dick .

But something far more epochal is at work in this turn than the biographical or a literary settling of accounts, for in what I call (in Part II) the “mercurial arc of negation without collectivity” (i.e., without the working class) of Melville’s 1851-1856 writings (from Pierre to The Confidence Man ), Melville is taking the first steps into modernism, in parallel with developments in Europe (e.g., Flaubert). These steps are the response to the same post-1848 demise of the last of the romantic lyricism left from the 1789-1848 period between the French and American Revolutions, on one hand, and the crises of 1848 which ended an era on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe, this had been the revolutionary eruption of the Parisian proletariat, followed by workers’ rebellion elsewhere, which ended the political unity of the “Third Estate”; in America, it was the shattering of the Jacksonian Democrats by the fallout from the inter-related questions of expansion and slavery, brought to a head by the Mexican-American War of 1846. It was this shattering of the politics of the era of liberal bourgeois individualism which ruined the social foundations of romantic lyricism, and created “the first vague sense of feeling an unknown living obstacle in the dark,” as Henry Adams called it in his autobiography. 3

Melville, in such circumstances, is a writer of dispossession. But his dispossession is not merely personal nor social nor artistic: it is epochal. He articulates it succinctly in one passage of Moby Dick :

 

This is much; yet Ahab’s darker, deeper part remains unhinted. But vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound. Winding far down from within the very heart of this spiked Hotel de Cluny where we stand—however grand and wonderful, now quit it—and take your way, ye nobler sadder souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes; where far beneath the fantastic towers of man’s upper earth, his root of grandeur, his whole awful essence sits in bearded state; an antique buried beneath antiquities, and throned on torsoes! So with a broken throne, the great gods mock that captive king; so like a Caryatid, the patient sits, upholding on his frozen brow the piled entablatures of ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder souls! question that proud, sad king! A family likeness! aye, he did beget ye, ye young exiled royalties , and from your grim sire only will the old state secret come. 4

 

Melville, all his life, was one of these “young exiled royalties.” The preceding is one of many passages in which Melville revisits the death agony of his bankrupt, raving father, the source of the “broken throne,” “captive king” mocked by the gods, the “proud, sad king,” a “family likeness.” And from the exaggerated cosmic kings and their symbols (the Egyptian pyramids, Charlemagne), as well as from their pitiful devolution in the modern world (the overtones of Charles V in the frail character of Benito Cereno, the absent Charlemagne, the “man in the purple robe,” who never appears in The Confidence Man ), Melville attempts to work his way through his crippled father imago to the “state secret.” His dispossession moves from family to class to politics to the cosmic and back again.

Across the Atlantic, in 1848, the Protestant pastor father of the four-year old Friedrich Nietzsche died (from an accident) in the midst of the revolution, and by the 1880s, in the last feverish period prior to his insanity, Nietzsche was trying to dynamite the foundations of all possible “fathers”: God, Man, science, historicism, society and socialism, in short, of every universal central to Western culture, in the name of an “active nihilism” in which the aesthetic lawgiver, the Superman, imposes his own order(s) on meaningless chaos in the name of no higher “ethic” than his own self-overcoming. Nietzsche was the radical expression of the fact that, after 1848, the isolated individual in bourgeois society could seemingly no longer be “mediated,” as Hegel or Marx would have it, in any “higher” universal, as each in turn unmasked itself as “nothing,” that is as passive nihilism.

Melville, Nietzsche’s senior by a quarter-century (and the exact contemporary of Marx), never went so far. 5 If, as one recent study has claimed, by the 1880s the aging Melville was sympathetically studying Schopenhauer, 6 whom Nietzsche identified as his mentor in the final phase of his own earlier “passive nihilism,” Melville never asserted, as Nietzsche did, that the “forms” imposed on “wild nature,” were imposed on nothing . When, in Melville’s last work Billy Budd , Captain Vere, standing over the body of Claggart, whom Billy has just struck dead, runs his hand over his face and “the father in him…was replaced by the military disciplinarian” the “forms” of the military disciplinarian are imposed on “natural” feelings , not on a void. While Melville, in various writings ( Pierre , “Benito Cereno,” “Bartleby,” “The Tartarus of Maids,” The Confidence Man ) had articulated different kinds of blankness and void, he always remained within a classic “nineteenth-century” problematic of “appearance and reality” rather than a Nietzschean and post-Nietzschean questioning of the very meaning of the term “appearance,” if indeed all “reality” has fallen away. Melville is decidedly not grist for the contemporary postmodernist/nihilist mill.

The death of Nietzsche’s Protestant pastor father (in the year of the continental revolution, no less) when Nietzsche was only four, and the excessive burden of internalized guilt from that inadvertent Oedipal victory, gave Nietzsche an extra edge in the dissection of everything that made up the super-ego, the conscience, the Kantian categorical imperative, Apollonian form, pallid Straussian theology, and morality, which were the mainstays of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. 7 The 1831 death of Melville’s father, the importer of French luxury goods and clothing for the “coxcombs” (dandies) of 1820s Manhattan, when Melville was thirteen, also gave the author of Moby Dick a certain edge in understanding the shift of the 1848-1850 conjuncture that was no less epochal. This aspect of Melville’s life and writing has not received the attention it deserves, and the implications go far beyond Melville and literature.

The 1848-1850 conjuncture and its aftermath in the North Atlantic world witnessed the birth of communism (Marx 8 ), of modern art (Courbet, Flaubert), the end of classical political economy, and the full formulation of the entropy law (Clausius), or, the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the latter being one culmination of classical physics). Their simultaneity was not accidental, and Melville’s work echoes each of them. What they all have in common is the death of “Napoleon,” of the illusion of the autonomous, conscious, liberal-romantic-heroic individual “self,” an illusion which Melville encountered most immediately in his contemporaries, the American Transcendentalists, 9 and in their English mentor Carlyle.

What does this have to do with the death of a Manhattan importer of French luxury goods in 1831?

If we consider, as we find it throughout Melville’s work, the devolution of the cosmic unitary sacred (from ancient Egypt to Charlemagne), into the unitary pseudo-sacred from Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to Napoleon, Washington and Nelson, we see here a “gallery” of warriors who could, in very different societies, well into the nineteenth century, seemingly serve as individual ego ideals for action. Stendhal’s hero in The Red and the Black , Julien Sorel, always carries a pocket cameo of Napoleon, which is, for him, such an individual ego ideal, while at the same time nourishing fears that “this fatal memory will forever prevent us from being happy.” But, as Melville points out in the “standing mast-heads” passage of Moby Dick , which is at the center of the following analysis, by 1850, the statues of “neither Washington, nor Napoleon, nor Nelson, will answer a single hail from below, however madly invoked.” This mid-nineteenth-century world is instead ruled by “Louis Philippe, Louis Blanc or Louis Devil,” that is, by transparent banality.

1848, in Europe, had been the year of the eruption of “les classes laborieuses et dangereuses”; in America, the beginning of the end of interclassist Jeffersonian-Jacksonian populist hegemony, over the slavery issue. In that same year, Melville himself had co-signed a manifesto denouncing the Astor Place riots in New York City, a plebeian outburst occasioned by the arrogance of an English theater group on tour but more than a symbolic turning point in the constitution of “highbrow, lowbrow” 10 in American culture. It was in turn only symptomatic of the larger crisis of the Jacksonian coalition which had ruled the country for 20 years, by then (in its Northern working-class dimensions) more associated with the machine politics of the Van Burens than with the war heroism that had given Jackson a national profile.

One figure, one of the “young exiled royalties” of the 1789-1848 period, was the dandy. The dandy arose, in the decades between the revolutionary tremors, in the shadow of Napoleon, Nelson and Washington. As the epic “poetry” of the era of the bourgeois revolutions turned to tepid prose, to the rule of “Louis Philippe, Louis Blanc or Louis Devil,” the dandy was one possible stance on the impossibility of heroic action, its reduction to appearance and elite consumption. The dandy was the “dust” of the exploded unitary sacred (the latter most immediately symbolized by French revolutionary regicide), a “resurrection within,” as a “unique” “aristocratic” attitude (among non-aristocrats), of the shattered myth of the deposed or eroding monarchs. As the spread of capitalist methods painted their “grey on grey” on all aspects of life, (le mal du siècle, l’ennui, as Baudelaire later called it) invading as well the world of literature and consciousness (as depicted in Melville’s scathing portrait of the New York “Young America” literary scene in Pierre ) (cf. below), one possible middle-class response was this disdainful assertion of “uniqueness,” expressed in snobbish comportment and above all in clothing; it was a further phase in the devolution from “being to having to appearing,” in Rousseau’s formulation. Neither Melville nor any of his major characters were dandies, but dandies are persistent minor characters in his work, from Lt. Selvagee and the poet Lemsford in White-Jacket to Harry Bolton in Redburn to Pierre’s cousin Glen in Pierre to several figures 11 in Clarel . Similarly, collections of French luxury goods, mute presence of the father in the world of the “young exiled royalties,” are scattered through Melville’s books. Such dandies and “coxcombs” were the customers of Allan Melvill’s 12 luxury import business, one of the tangible links between the young Herman Melville’s “life world” and his books.

The issue here, however, is neither biographical “detail” nor, particularly, psychobiography.

The 1846-1851 period in which Melville was working up to Moby Dick was not just any historical conjuncture. These years, and particularly the years of European revolution and counter-revolution (with an American counterpart in the irremediable crisis occasioned by the awareness of the inevitability of civil war over slavery), saw the four above-mentioned interrelated “paradigm changes,” which amounted to one epochal shift in the history of bourgeois civilization. These were, once again, the appearance of communism, made self-conscious in the Manifesto of Marx and Engels (1848); the end of classical political economy, which had culminated in Ricardo (1772-1823) but remained dominant through the midcentury Ricardian socialists; the appearance, in the arts, of modernism (of which the later Melville is a pioneer) and the elaboration of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the entropy law, most generally associated with the German Clausius in 1850. Small wonder that a dying sperm whale in Moby Dick “over and over slowly revolved like a waning world.” However much or little the “young exiled royalty” Melville was aware of these contemporary developments (and his books from Mardi onward shows he was well aware of communism), his work amounts to a vast documentation of this epochal shift, in which “French luxury goods” played a central role. 13

Much has been written about the eruption of the Parisian proletariat into world history in the spring of 1848. This sundering of the European “Third Estate” in the European capital of revolutions has also been linked many times to the demise of romanticism and the beginning of modernism. Similarly, the first global appearance of a movement that announced itself as the gravedigger of bourgeois society has more than once been linked to the end of classical political economy, based on a labor theory of value, and the ideological attempt, beginning in earnest after 1870, to refound a “neoclassical economics” centered on consumption rather than on production, conceptually burying the centrality of labor in the creation of wealth. All this notwithstanding, far less attention has been paid, until quite recently, to the subterranean links between this overall conjuncture and the formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Yet Melville’s work provides a virtual “laboratory” for the associative interaction of all of them.

At the center of this problematic is “whiteness.” One movement in Melville is that from “whiteness” in the early work (the whiteness of the jacket in White Jacket , the whiteness of the whale in Moby Dick ) to the blankness of the later period, the blankness of Bartleby, of “Benito Cereno,” of “The Tartarus of Maids,” the desert of Clarel and hints of blankess in Billy Budd . The blankess in the later Melville is the blankness of the isolated creative bourgeois individual in the new historical period of increasingly conscious collectivity: one symptom of a “waning world.”

The subterranean link between communism, modernism, the shift toward neoclassical economics and the Second Law of Thermodynamics is the beginning of the “dissolution of the object” in the “dream worlds” of the new mass consumption. This shift is operative across the entire spectrum of culture and science under consideration, but is perhaps most easily grasped in the end of classical political economy, Ricardo.

David Ricardo (1772-1823) was for Marx, the most advanced bourgeois viewpoint, just as Hegel had been in philosophy. Ricardo culminated the development of classical political economy as it had developed after Adam Smith and above all a bourgeois “labor theory of value,” which identified the origin of value in the “labor time necessary for the production,” of the labor time incorporated in the individual commodity. Marx (affirmatively) called Ricardo the bourgeois theoretician of “production for production’s sake,” and counterposed to Ricardo’s labor theory of value a radically different one, based on his discovery of labor power, the cost of whose “ re production” was the sole “general commodity” which determined the “total price” of all commodities. With Marx, in a conceptual break with all “economics” (he called his own project the critique of political economy), the “secret” of bourgeois capitalist society became the distinction between “labor” (as grasped by Ricardo) and “labor power,” first formulated by Marx, a relationship that relates itself to itself, ein sich-selbst verhaltendes Verhältnis. 14 In this break, the Ricardian “object” (the individual commodity as embodied labor time) is dissolved into the self-reflexive relationship of a whole class of producers to itself. The object is dissolved into a “process,” within capitalism, of labor power in contradiction with itself, in which the (apparent) “object” becomes a mere externality or “predicate,” in Hegel’s sense. It is a social relationship of production, mediated by an object.

Melville, as shall be seen in Part One, counterposes the “whiteness of the whale,” Ahab’s “white and turbid wake,” to sensuousness and color, most immediately the sensuousness of the three harpooners of color, Queequeg, Tashtego and Daggoo. The “whiteness of the whale” is, among other things, abstraction, just as exchange value and value for Marx are abstractions from the sensuousness concrete reality (“use value”) of particular commodities. (It is interesting that “whiteness” for Melville becomes “blankness” when collective action recedes as a reality in his work.)

Marx’s transformation of the “thing,” the object, into a relationship in the critique of political economy is paradigmatic for all the above-mentioned ideological expressions of the 1848-1850 tremor in the North Atlantic world. And Melville’s shift from whiteness to blankness is part of that shift, like a shift from the Keplerian night as “plenum” to the Pascalian night as vacuum.

The appearance, in 1848, of communism as a possibility (which seemed palpable in the growing numbers and social power of “les classes laborieuses et dangereuses”) put bourgeois ideology on the defensive for the first time. Whereas, in its battle against pre-capitalism, classical political economy had “eternalized” capitalist social relations for all of history, finding homo economicus everywhere, suddenly a force had appeared that asserted those relations to be merely transitional to another, higher form of society; bourgeois ideology saw critical weapons it had crafted passing into the hands of forces battling for some kind of society beyond capitalism. Without wanting to enter into contemporary debates about the “death of the subject,” 15 it is clear that the avant-garde current of modernist culture after 1850, was engaged in exactly the project of “emptying out” the old aesthetic forms in a kind of echo of Marx’s discovery, “behind” political economy’s “object” the commodity, of the relationship of labor power to itself. The avant-garde was exploring the relationship of artistic creation to itself in a new period in which art’s claim to be a universal language had been lost. 16 The result, from 1850 to 1930, was a dissolution of the “object” of artistic representation similar to Marx’s dissolution of the Ricardian commodity.

Melville, in Pierre , captures this new climate in his portrait of the Young America literary scene in New York at midcentury, in a passage sounding (with modifications for technical change) eerily contemporary:

 

[Pierre] considered with what infinite readiness now, the most faithful portrait of any one could be taken by the Daguerreotype, whereas in former times a faithful portrait was only within the power of the moneyed, or mental aristocrats of the earth. How natural then the inference, that instead of, as in old times, immortalizing a genius, a portrait now only dayalized a dunce. Besides, when every body has his portrait published, true distinction lies in not having yours published at all. For if you are published along with Tom, Dick and Harry, and wear a coat of their cut, how then are you distinct from Tom, Dick and Harry? 17

 

Capitalist commodity exchange, by 1850, was increasingly dominating production and was moving into the “subjective” realities of literary culture, i.e., the sphere of consumption (in the broadest sense) as well. In earlier periods, when “a faithful portrait was only within the power of the moneyed, or mental aristocrats,” the “grandeur” of Charlemagne or Charles V, or still later Napoleon, Nelson or Washington, expressed what society could not do; the lordly status of the few, overlaid with a divine or semi-divine aura, was contrived to “compensate” for the seemingly inevitable and eternal poverty of the many. But the appearance of communism in 1848, in the world ruled by “Louis Philippe, Louis Blanc or Louis Devil,” was an expression, (still within the limited world of North Atlantic capitalist development) of what society could do; it anticipated a society no longer dominated by commodity exchange and thereby capable of overcoming the enforced distinctions between work and leisure. The gesture of negation of those who prepared and carried out the bourgeois revolution, the French libertines, the Encyclopedists, the Jacobins (with their attempt to found a religion of Reason) seemed to have universality because it compensated for social powers that were not yet in place; the lyrical gesture of negation, into the 1840s, of French romantic Bohemia and American Transcendentalism cracked up on the new “ugly revolution” of industry, the proletariat, the struggle to abolish slavery, expansionism, depression and the new world market, all ultimately expressing forces (and potentials) which went beyond any individual cultural revolt. After 1850, individual bourgeois negation, the “arc of negation without collectivity,” was beneath the potential of society, and devolved into blankness, just as Pierre refused a consumable appearance alongside every “Tom, Dick and Harry.” The “deflation” of the sacred into the pseudo-sacred, from Charlemagne to Charles V to Napoleon to the Parisian boulevard dandy or Broadway “coxcomb” was an expression of the growing collective power of society and announced the future in which the progress of society would no longer be at the expense of the individual, but would rather be the foundation of “an individuality as all-sided in its production as in its consumption” as Marx put it in the Grundrisse . In the decade 1840-1850, the North Atlantic world began to become aware that it could henceforth only produce “pharaohs with feet of clay,” “sawdust Caesars,” because the potential existed for re-absorbing social powers into individual powers, 18 and the cohesion of society could no longer be cemented by “great men” furnishing an image of life that could not be lived by all. On the contrary, the deflated “great men” after the mid-nineteenth century, from Louis Napoleon and Bismarck, by way of Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini to the pure media creations of today’s spin doctors, are symptoms, of an often deadly opera buffa (or “Walpurgisnacht”) reflecting the failure of society to break through to another kind of life. As Marx put it in The Eighteenth Brumaire , contrasting the bourgeois rhetoric of 1789 with that of 1848: “There, the phrase exceeded the content; here, the content exceeds the phrase.”

Modernism, neoclassical economics, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics are three interrelated responses, within bourgeois ideology, to this new historical situation in which “the content exceeds the phrase.” Through his family, and most directly through his father’s life and death, Melville inherited the movement from cosmic king to bourgeois revolutionary hero to the dandy’s deflated attempt to live a heroic appearance through elite, “unique” consumption, and went beyond all of them into blankness.

The arc of self-deflating vestigial power of elites curves downward as the arc of the unrealized power of society as a whole curves upward.

The breakthrough of the 1840s was a breakthrough of praxis , articulated in Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” and, a few years earlier, by the far-less known Pole Cieszkowski. 19 Henceforth, outside of social practice, all questions become “scholastic”; praxis became the new reality against which all previous standards had to be judged, and largely superseded. Marx captured the impact of this shift on previous cultural forms in the Grundrisse (1857):

 

What chance has Vulcan against Roberts & Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Crédit Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them. 20

 

Julien Sorel, caressing his cameo of Napoleon, the dandy or coxcomb, and the New England Transcendentalist (Emerson, Thoreau) had in common the hopeless attempt to make different individual viewpoints, ultimately rooted in the earlier bourgeois revolutionary era, viable in an era converging toward 1848, when those viewpoints would shatter against collective practice and social realities far superior to them, and ultimately against the self-conscious articulation of the “relationship that relates itself to itself” labor power, and its adequate social expression, communism. They had in common different “contemplative” relationships 21 to reality in an historical period, as indicated earlier, when such contemplative links to society as a whole could still seem (however illusorily) to complete powers that society did not yet have. They were stances of “negation” of existing conditions by the isolated bourgeois individual in a period when such negation still seemed connected to an (ultimately illusory) social totality, whether Europe’s Third Estate or America’s Jeffersonian-Jacksonian “yeoman democracy.” They existed prior to “the movement which is the answer to the riddle of history, and which knows itself to be that answer,” as Marx put it.

After 1850, the modernist artist, the neoclassical economist and the physicist expounding the Second Law of Thermodynamics each in turn embodied stances of contemplative negation, confronting the dissolution of the object, after the appearance of self-conscious labor power in relation to itself, and ideologically combating the challenge posed by that emergence; after the eruption of a challenge saying in effect what society could do. Articulating viewpoints beneath the potential of collective practice, they constituted “the arc of negation without collectivity,” not even an illusory one. They became articulations, like Melville’s dying sperm whale, of a “world on the wane,” but insisting that the demise of their world was the demise of the world. Their ideological thrust was to bury awareness of a higher organization of society that undermined their premises. These contemplative viewpoints, most explicit in neoclassical economics, were the appropriate ideology for the phase of capitalism in which large-scale luxury and pseudo-luxury consumption, pioneered in France, obscured the earlier Ricardian “production for production’s sake” phase of capitalism.

Again, the uncanny epochal significance of Melville’s father, the importer of French luxury goods.

By the early twenty-first century, we are more than sated with assertions that reality is a “construction.” Marx’s critique of religion as the alienated inversion of man’s hopes for a better life into an other-worldly framework, Freud’s idea of withdrawing the power of the ego’s “projections” from cathected objects, or Nietzsche’s idea of everything as a manifestation of the constituting aesthetic “will-to-power” have all but passed into popular culture. While both Marx and Freud remain firmly within a classical problematic of “appearance” and “reality,” they, like Nietzsche (who claimed to overthrow such a problematic) are heirs to German idealist philosophy which, from Kant onward, developed around evolving formulations on the role of subjectivity in the “constitution” of the objective world. (Melville, as the following will show, was certainly familiar with at least Kantian philosophy through the American Transcendentalists, and often refers explicitly to German philosophy in his work. 22 ) But contemporary familiarity with popularized (and bowdlerized) ideas about “constitution” and “construction,” not to mention the highly problematic character of their use after more than two decades of “postmodernism,” should not obscure how radical they once were when the naive “objective” character of reality was accepted almost universally as all but self-evident. When Marx wrote, in the 1845 “Theses on Feuerbach” that

 

the chief defect of all previous materialism (including Feuerbach’s) is that the object, actuality, sensuousness is conceived only in the form of the object or perception, but not as sensuous human activity, praxis, not subjectively, 23

 

he consigned the theses (which imply, among other things, a critique of the entire Enlightenment) to “the gnawing critique of the mice” where they remained, in effect, for over a century, so much were they at odds with received ideas about “science.”

Yet it was exactly the case that all previous materialism, by which Marx meant both the materialists of antiquity and of the Enlightenment, conceived of sensuousness “only in the form of the object,” that is from a contemplative viewpoint. As a result, Marx continued, “in opposition to materialism the active side was developed by idealism,” whose incorporation distinguished Marx from “all previous materialism.”

It was this dissolution of the object into the relationship , as shown previously with regard to Ricardo, which characterizes the overall break, within North Atlantic culture, of the 1840s, and which defines the context for Melville’s work.

More than 150 years after 1848, it is obvious that communism was only a tendency in the mid-nineteenth-century North Atlantic world. Among both advocates and opponents, its presence and medium-term prospects were exaggerated. 24 Melville’s works are filled with references to red flags in Paris, but, like almost all other contemporaries he obviously knew nothing of Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” or his specific dissolution of Ricardian political economy, which was only worked out over the fifteen years subsequent to 1848, not to mention the intricate use of Hegel (of whom there is next to no mention anywhere in Melville’s work 25 ) in that dissolution. It is not clear what, if anything, he knew of the work of Fourier, Kelvin, Rumford or Clausius (none of whom are ever mentioned in his extensive scientific references in either White-Jacket and Moby Dick ) in nineteenth-century thermodynamics, although (as shall be shown in Part One) Moby Dick (as in the above quote about “a world on the wane”) Moby Dick is full of entropic metaphors. 26

What Melville did know in his bones, from his years in working-class life, was the social superannuation of the middle-class Transcendentalist culture, leavened by Kantian philosophy, with which he was surrounded in the literary Young America movement, animated by his friend Duyckinck:

 

[T]here were on Sundays on board this particular frigate of ours, and a clergyman also. He was a slender, middle-aged man, of an amiable deportment and irreproachable conversation; but I must say, that his sermons were but ill-calculated to benefit the crew. He had drank at the mystic fountain of Plato; his head had been turned by the Germans; and this I will say, that White-Jacket himself saw him with Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria in his hand.

Fancy, now, this transcendental divine standing behind a guncarriage on the main-deck, and addressing five hundred salt-sea sinners on the psychological phenomenon of the soul, and the ontological necessity of every sailor’s saving it at all hazards. He enlarged upon the follies of the ancient philosophers; learnedly alluded to the Phaedon of Plato; exposed the follies of Simplicius’ Commentary on Aristotle’s “De Coelo,” by arraying against that clever pagan author the admired track of Tertullian— De Praescriptionibus Haereticorum —and concluded by a Sanskrit invocation… 27

 

Right up to his satire of Emerson and Thoreau in The Confidence Man , (the book marking his virtual abandonment of fiction for poetry over the last 35 years of his life) Melville repeatedly lacerated the “beautiful souls” ( schöne Seelen in Hegel’s language) of middle-class sentimentality for their aloofness from, and irrelevance to harsh social reality and the “bloody maw” of nature. His critique, as will be shown in Part One, strongly echoed Marx’s critique of the German Young Hegelians worked out between 1840 and 1848, the years of Melville’s sea adventures and his apprenticeship as a writer.

The following study divides Melville’s work into three basic phases. The first, treated in Part One, shows Melville’s evolution to his first and most resounding synthesis, Moby Dick . In the evolution of the 1845-1851 period (the five pre- Moby Dick works being treated in a concluding chapter) the early Melville, drawing on his years as a seaman in the South Pacific, enunciates the closest vision he will ever have of a society beyond capitalism, based on a vorticist “return on a higher level” of elements of the primitive. This phase culminates in Ishmael’s emergence from the maelstrom, following Moby Dick’s sinking of the Pequod, on Queequeg’s coffin. The vision of Moby Dick might be more accurately characterized as “the mutual destruction of the contending classes” 28 than any real affirmation of another, higher society.

Part Two, “The Mercurial Arc of Negation Without Collectivity,” treats the 1851-1856 period of Melville’s writing, in which both the “higher primitive” and the working class recede from his work. It is here that the contrast between the memories of cosmic kingship (ancient Egypt, Charlemagne) or its devolution into the unitary pseudo-sacred (Charles V, Napoleon, Nelson) is examined from the era ruled by the “Louis Phillipe, Louis Blanc or Louis Devil” and the concrete social mediation of the latter, luxury consumption. Thus Pierre travels from youthful bourgeois upstate New York idyll, to his “Memnon Stone” experience of the impossibility of poetry, to the Enceladus vision in the “utter night-desolation of the obscurest warehousing lanes” of Manhattan, to suicide in the Tombs. Thus the Spenserian idyll of Melville’s narrator in “The Piazza” on “Charlemagne,” Mt. Greylock in the Berkshires, is shattered by the encounter with the desolate, impoverished mountain girl, Marianna. Thus the majestic Charles V, sixteenth-century world emperor, becomes the crumpled pathetic figure of Benito Cereno. Thus the frivolity of the latter-day London Templars is dashed against the blankness of the Berkshire mill girls. Thus, finally, Charlemagne, the world emperor, the “man in the purple robe,” is announced by Black Guinea, the black minstrel figure at the beginning of The Confidence Man , and appears only in crumpled form as the cosmopolitan, Mississippi riverboat confidence man.

This devolution of the grandeur of “Charlemagne” into the tinsel of the modern, into the “dust of the sacred” of French luxury consumer goods, by mid-nineteenth-century capitalist realities, from the “City of Dis” (London, transposed from Dante), slavery, factory work and the “metaphysics of Indian hating” is the fundamental Melvillian moment. The “young exiled royalty” revisits again and again the image of his dying, bankrupt insane father, the failed importer of French luxury goods. He creates, in his initial period, first a series of authoritarian sea captains, leading up to the “pharaoh,” the “khan of the plank,” Ahab, always presented against the world historical backdrop of the unitary sacred (Egypt, Charlemagne) and the unitary pseudo-sacred (Charles V, Napoleon), to counterbalance that crumpled figure. Revolt and the primitive fail Melville, and recede, but the devolution of the cosmic king continues to its last sarcastic convulsions in The Confidence Man .

Part Three, “The Hesitant Transition Beyond Negation,” is the shortest of three parts and treats the long 1856-1891 period of Melville’s obscurity and overall commitment to poetry. The warrior-monk moves in a sense to center stage with the epic (18,000 line) poem Clarel (1876) shot through with a kind of medievalism that only seems extreme if one overlooks the presence of the Templars and “Charlemagne” in the earlier work. Clarel, the Protestant divinity student looking for faith in Palestine, is still a figure of the quest, and is no less one of disillusionment than earlier protagonists, but this “ship of fools” is no longer a sea voyage or a Mississippi riverboat but rather a group of pilgrims in the desert of the Holy Land. Revolution, in a book written in the aftermath of the Paris Commune (1871) is only mentioned to be scathingly denounced by fearful or disillusioned figures. Clarel is ultimately a tour d’horizon of the spiritual desert of the West in the “age of positivism,” and still shows (like the earlier works) a lively awareness of contemporary developments in philosophy, theology, and science. One gets the sense that Melville was able to write Clarel because the epic poem format had freed him from the novelistic problem of character.

In Billy Budd , the novel left unfinished at the time of Melville’s death in 1891, there is no more negation. There is, as indicated at the outset, the vorticist “return” in Melville’s oeuvre of the “mariners, castaways and renegades,” and the Adamic figure of Billy echoing the cosmic man, Queequeg. But in Billy Budd there is no Ishmael: the man with the quest has disappeared. Billy Budd echoes Moby Dick in many ways, and differs from it in many ways. Melville again portrays, in the “ragged edges” at the end of the book, something (though less dramatic) of the “mutual destruction of the contending classes.” Billy dies; Vere dies; the “spot where Nelson fell” is echoed by the spar from which Billy hung, which for decades thereafter entered into seamen’s lore. “Charlemagne” is still present in the “King’s yarn” and the “King’s rope.” The negation of the middle-class intellectual, by disappearing altogether, gives way not to the triumph of unilateral Adamic affirmation, but in the final form of Melville’s Miltonian universe, the angel pitted against radical evil.

 

PART I: “A GEORGE WASHINGTON CANNIBALISTICALLY DEVELOPED”:

THE EVOLVING TOTALITY OF COSMOBIOLOGY AND CLASS, 1845-1851

 

Toward the Synthesis of Moby Dick

 

Preface

In 1841, a 21-year-old scion of a ruined upstate New York family of revolutionary pedigree goes to sea, the sole employment available to him at the depths of the economic depression remembered in American history as “the hungry Forties.” In 1844, after years on various merchant ships and whalers, and seriously ill, he jumps ship in the Marquesas, where he spends several weeks in the care, possibly the captivity, of a tribe of Marquesan cannibals. His health restored, he abandons a somewhat idyllic existence (one possibly endangered by the cannibals in question) and boards a US navy warship returning to America. Out of these experiences, he fashions two books, Typee and Omoo , which make his reputation as a writer of adventure stories and as the “literary discoverer” of the South Seas. In 1851, following two further minor novels based on life at sea, and the transitional book Mardi , he publishes a much more ponderous and metaphysical work, Moby Dick . Herman Melville’s reputation is ruined with a public interested only in more adventure stories and ill equipped to fathom the vast mytho-historical backdrop to this “whaling story.” The failure of his next novel, Pierre , in 1852, seals his literary fate for his own lifetime. Melville sinks into obscurity, and remains obscure for the remaining four decades of his life. He continues to write novels, short stories and poetry, but never again attains the cosmic sweep of Moby Dick and never again attracts serious public attention. Compelled as he is to live out his working life as a customs official in New York, Melville’s death in 1891 similarly attracts little attention. The man who put American literature onto the level of world literature is remembered in the manuals for decades thereafter as a “minor New York writer.” Only in the 1920s does literary criticism unearth Moby Dick and place Melville in a perspective that does justice to his stature. 29

Such, in capsule form, is the life story and subsequent fate of one of the great figures of nineteenth-century American and world fiction.

At first glance, it might seem arbitrary to draw any specific parallels between Melville and his virtual contemporary in Europe, Karl Marx. Melville was not a “political” writer in the strict sense of the term. It is true that many of Melville’s writings, from the early novels of the sea White Jacket , Redburn and Moby Dick to his last, unfinished novel Billy Budd are preoccupied with problems of authority and revolt, but the revolt is as often as not centered on protagonists having more in common with twentieth-century themes of “existential” revolt than with proletarian insurrection, even though the latter is almost always present. A closer look at Moby Dick , in particular, nonetheless reveals an uncanny subterranean parallel between that novel and a book published by Marx in the following year, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte . Indeed, a less casual reading of Melville’s book shows the American author to be not only quite familiar with the entire Napoleonic legend which is the subject of some of Marx’s more memorable passages; it shows Melville to have filled his “whaling story” with extensive references to French revolutionary history generally. In fact, as this study will attempt to show, Melville weaves the question of charismatic authority so totally into his story of the destruction of the Pequod that it would not be an exaggeration to characterize Moby Dick as, among other things, a treatise on the origins and decline of the Napoleonic myth, one with specific references to both the immediately contemporary period of American politics— that of the aftermath of the Mexican-American War and the sectionalist crisis it spawned— and to American and world history generally.

As in Russia (the other ascendant world power identified in the 1840s by Alexis de Tocqueville along with America as one of the two future arbiters of the fate of Europe) the enduring expression of nineteenth-century social-political tensions in the United States occurred not in explicitly “political” works but in a midcentury literature which, like Russia’s, was just coming to maturity as a world literature. It is true that the far more explosive position of the “marginal men” who wrote and commented on Russia’s novels and poetry, the revolutionary intelligentsia, makes this far more obvious for Russia than for America. One of the secondary offshoots of this study will be an attempt to explain the historical significance of the far less prominent position in American society of the “marginal men” such as Melville or the New England Transcendentalists, relative to larger social movements, and above all the importance of the failure of these “Ishmaels” to achieve anything like the relationship to the American working class that their counterparts achieved in Russia. But here, we get ahead of ourselves.

The purpose of this study is to distill from Melville’s writings, but chiefly from Moby Dick , a social-political “theory” as it related to American (and world) history in the 1840s. It will attempt to show that Moby Dick contains not merely a commentary on the immediate events of the 1840s, but also a more sweeping, near-prophetic view of America in world history generally. Having presented Melville’s outlook and related it to the immediate context from which it sprang, it will look at how certain themes he identified played themselves out after the appearance of Moby Dick . The picture that emerges, it will be mooted, justifies a characterization of the pre-1852, “early” Melville as little less than an “American Marx” in “literary” form, with indeed more insight into America specifically than even Marx, to say nothing of several generations of Marx’s epigones. For Melville achieved what few subsequent Marxists achieved, namely the ability to see American history without the distorting lenses of European history. He was thus able to show, in his analysis of the relationship between the intelligentsia, the working class, charismatic authority, and the state, the great opportunity of the American social experience. But this requires understanding that opportunity, as few American radicals of the twentieth century have, as something other than a pale shadow of the European experience. In Europe, intellectuals and working classes so often appeared to move in directions outlined by Marx, but the long-term result of their efforts, for reasons foreseen by Melville, seem to have led to the same stasis and impotence in the face of the decline of bourgeois civilization that besets America.

The argument proceeds as follows. It has often been said that one fundamental difference between European and American social experience flows from the absence of any pre-capitalist historical point of reference in the United States, and that as a consequence a relatively pure “Lockean” polity began with a “clean slate,” so to speak. The result, according to analysts such as Louis Hartz, has been the marginality of either conservative or radical/socialist critics of American society. 30 Both have lacked a pre-capitalist frame of reference from which to step outside the “dominant paradigm,” either in the name of some lost unitary feudal idyll or of some post-capitalist future (or both) revealing the present social relations, in Marx’s characterization, as transitional , not inscribed in the “nature of things.” There is undoubtedly much truth in this analysis. But it misses something fundamental about America’s “mytho-historical” self-understanding, namely a pre-capitalist frame of reference, not feudal certainly, but in the imagery of Old Testament prophecy, in the fundamental myth of the New Covenant in the wilderness, in the relationship between “Israel” and “Egypt” and “Babylon,” in the perception of the peoples encountered in the New World as Adamic man in Paradise. The founders of America in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did indeed “take their poetry from the past,” in Marx’s phrase, except that it was not the historically recognizable past of the decomposed Holy Roman Empire or of Greco-Roman antiquity, but rather a primordial myth drawn from the imagery of the Old Testament. This myth did not of course grow out of an attempt to recapitulate the real social relations of the ancient Near East (any more than European use of ancient or feudal historical imagery really involved a programmatic attempt to restore those relations), but rather from a deep identification between early American experience and that of the Jews “going out of Egypt.” Central to this mytho-historical understanding, furthermore, was a “post-Mosaic” sensibility of man “after the fall,” making it possible to endow the peoples of color, initially Indian, then African, and finally Polynesian with which Protestant Americans came into contact in the “wilderness” with (largely subconscious) qualities of the Adamic myth. Bent under their severe Calvinist heritage, conceiving of the world and the self as fallen, early white Americans indeed were “damned in Paradise,” and they attributed, largely to condemn them, “Adamic” qualities to these peoples, with consequences we shall see.

Europe, by contrast, was cut off by its historical experience from direct contact with “primitive” peoples within its own borders, although it certainly created, in every major country, its own Adamic projections into the New World and its peoples. But Europe labored under its own myths, first the myth of the “cosmic king” of the feudal and later absolutist state, culminating in the “Sun King” Louis XIV, and then the pseudo-mythical restoration of the shattered cosmic king, victim of regicide: the Napoleonic myth. In Europe, the centralist state haunted the “poetry of the past” of the conservative right, but also, through the phenomenon of Bonapartism with its ambiguous legacy, an important part of the left, far more indeed than Marxists at the time or later cared to concede, particularly when, in the twentieth century, Bonapartism fused with the myth of the “Third Rome” and appeared, to many American and Western European “Ishmaels” to preside over the first “socialist” state in history. It was the great prophetic insight of Melville to have seen that the “Ishmaels” of the world, for all their seeming aloofness from it, had one fatal flaw deriving directly from their outlook, namely a subterranean identification with powerful “men of action,” and hence a susceptibility to be enlisted in the warped projects of such men. But it was an even greater insight of Melville to have understood that the “Queequegs” of the world would see things differently, because their social relations freed them from entombment within the isolated bourgeois ego in its Calvinist (Ahab), liberal (Starbuck), and Transcendentalist (Ishmael) varieties.

After analyzing the Calvinist, liberal and Transcendentalist versions of American individualism, both historically and in Melville’s portrayal of them, I will then trace in more detail the parallels and differences between Melville and Marx, with reference to the crises of 1848 in the United States and Europe; with respect to their views of nature and social relations mediated by nature; through their strikingly similar analyses of the frayed Napoleonic myth of the mid-nineteenth century, and finally through their theories of history. Melville’s view of history encompasses primitive society, Oriental despotism, Greco-Roman antiquity, feudalism and capitalism just as surely as that of Marx does, and like Marx, Melville does not understand these societies in a linear-progressive fashion (as did bourgeois-liberal views of progress) but rather in a “helical-vorticist” fashion, wherein elements of earlier mytho-historical modes “return” in higher modes. Melville’s portrayal of Ishmael in the final scene of Moby Dick , swept into the vortex of the maelstrom and then carried back to the surface with Queequeg’s coffin, is a condensed symbolic expression of the “supersession” of the wreckage of the world of the bourgeois ego by a fusion on a higher level with elements of the primordial past, much as Engels in the final passage of The Origins of the Family described communism. But Melville is no “primitive”; he has a critique of both primitivism and Orientalism, and indeed understood, through his critique of the Transcendentalists, both primitivism and Orientalism as aspects of the “Ishmael” consciousness. As a counter-point to the early Melville, indeed as a veritable “anti-Melville,” I will analyze one real nineteenth-century Ishmael, Henry Adams, with respect to Melville’s critique of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (which Adams made the basis of his theory of history), as to Adams’ strikingly parallel (if differently assessed) portrait of nineteenth-century American history, and even his 1891 book on Tahiti, showing that he analyzed, from the viewpoint of the “unhappy consciousness” which Melville overcame, virtually every major theme touched upon by Melville. Finally, using themes developed by the Caribbean Marxist CLR James, author of an unusual and little-known study of Melville, I will attempt to outline a “program” for American Marxism understood not from the vantage point of the “Ishmaels” but of the “Queequegs.”

 

Ch. I. “Damned in Paradise”: Calvinism, Liberalism and Transcendentalism as Three Modes of Estrangement from the Antemosaic Cosmic Man

 

In the beginning was the Creative Word, a word which, in the ancient traditions, was also sung, as with the vak 31 of the Vedic hymns or the Sumerian cosmology. The Creative Word told the story of the Primordial or Cosmic Man, the Adam Kadmon of the Jewish Kabbala, 32 the Iranian Gayomart, 33 the Purusha of the Rg Veda, 34 the cosmic king of Egypt. 35 The cosmic king or Primordial Man, moreover, often seemed to have a black face, and thus Egypt became known to the Arabs as “al-Khem,” black earth, the possible source of the word “alchemy,” 36 black being the “nigrido” of the alchemical process. 37 The Creative Word had simultaneously created the cosmos and the state 38 ; the pharaoh, for example, was a living deity on earth, who upon death returned to the sun-deity of which he was the instantiation, and re-emerged into morning every day to assure the order of the cosmos. 39

The cosmology of the Creative Word was imparted to the West most directly through Hebrew Genesis, but modern research uncovered a millennial evolution of antecedent cosmologies of the word in Egypt and the ancient Near East. 40 In Genesis, Moses asks Yahwe “What is your name?” and Yahwe replies: “I am that I am.” 41 But long before even Moses, in the Sumerian King List of 3000 bc , the exegesis of the unspeakable name of the deity 42 in the cosmology of the Creative Word fused royalty, divinity and cosmos into the single act that created both the world and the state. 43 Even the conservative thinker Eric Voegelin, late in his life, was compelled to admit a continuity between the shamanic uses of the Sumerian King List and the modern Gnosis of a Hegel. 44 The “Verbe au Ciel” is the primordial unity cosmology whose history can be traced to the origins of the state in the Fertile Crescent in the period 6000-3000 bc . Thus, much later, when Herman Melville wrote his “counter-Bible” Moby Dick , the twin temptations of primitivism and Orientalism, the constant shadows of “cultural failure” in the West, which he posed and rejected, were already present in the origins of the ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian states from which the Western tradition emerged. 45

In Genesis, Yahwe asks the Primordial Man to name the animals 46 : later, in the flood, it is the procession of animals which board the ark with Noah. In theses stories is contained the idea: the word descended in flesh, man as the ascent of the totality of species. 47 When man names the procession of animals, he partakes of the cosmic act of creation and participates in the exegesis of the unspeakable name of God Yahwe 48 which the cosmos is . He thereby knows the “vak,” the Word or vibration that brought man into existence to “know itself.” 49 This cosmology, as the Dogon elder Ogotemmeli told French ethnographer Marcel Griaule, is a cosmology of song and dance, a festive procession, “the world order in color and movement.” 50

Thus the modern reader of Moby Dick , wondering about the purpose of Melville’s lengthy discussions of cetology, paleontology, 51 mythologies of the whale, and references to Cuvier, Linnaeus, Agassiz, and Leuwenhoek, might locate them in this “antemosaic” 52 tradition of “cosmic procession” at the head of which stands man, the latter being, as Melville implies, incomplete, like the Cologne Cathedral of the Holy Roman princes.

Egypt, Africa, Yahwe, Moses: we are in the world of the Old Testament, the world, for example, of the “Song of Songs,” of the relationship between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, the presence of Africa in the background of Pharaonic Egypt, 53 a presence later transposed, in the fourteenth century, to the legend of the Ethiopian king Prester John on the Catalan Map of 1375, on the eve of the era of the Western voyages of discovery. 54 But the world of Adam Kadmon, 55 of the Primordial Man, of Queequeg, 56 as Melville calls him, is “antemosaic”: there is already, at the origins of the three Abrahamic faiths Judaism, Christianity, Islam, a fall, a “de-cosmization,” 57 present if not in Genesis then in the sclerotic legal formalism of Talmud and Torah that came to be the mainstream of Judaism, and which marked the mainstream of the two later breakaway monotheisms. The departure from Egypt is the metaphor for exile: it is the exile from the decadence of the pharaohs, but it is also a metaphor for the exile from the unitary cosmology taught to Moses in the sanctuaries of Memphis. 58 The “antemosaic” world is the world before the interdiction on image-making; it is a “mythopoeic” world prior to the emergence of logos from mythos . 59 And insofar as it is a separation from a “mythopoeic” world, it is also separation from the myth of the Cosmic King. If Henri Frankfort is right that the Mosaic Yahwe was a transitional god who retained a mythopoeic character by his personal, vengeful relationship to the chosen people, 60 the process of “de-cosmization” is completed with the autonomization of the logos in early Greek philosophy in the sixth century bc . 61 This transition is later codified in the Hellenized New Testament of the apostle Paul. The Western logos, derived through Yahwe from the ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian cosmologies of the Creative Word, appears for the first time as the absolute, as non-determination, the separation from any mythopoeic image 62 : later, Ahab, the mutilated man of resentment, will pursue the white symbol of this decosmized and demythified abstraction to the ends of the earth and to the destruction of himself, his crew, and above all the “men of color,” the Primordial Men Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo, who come from that “antemosaic” world from which Ahab is exiled.

Three millennia after Moses, the Protestants who arrived on the shores of New England brought with them the whole Old Testament imagery of the exile from Pharaonic Egypt and the New Covenant in the wilderness. 63 They found themselves in the presence of both a wilderness and of primitives who to them were nothing if not a living memory of man in the Adamic state. 64 They had just separated themselves, in the previous century, from the “image-making” of the Catholic Church, sacred dimension of that Holy Roman Empire to which Melville makes such constant allusion in Moby Dick . They were a second exile; they founded America with an often conscious and explicit reference to the Jewish exile; they and their immediate ancestors had just carried out a revolution centered on the desire to return to the directness and fundamentals of primitive Christianity, prior to Paul, the Patristic period, and the Popes. If the Catholic Church had been the “body of Christ,” then the “body politic” founded by Calvinists in Geneva, Holland, Scotland and England, and later by dissident Protestants in North America, 65 was a New Covenant broken out of the imagistic Marial Church. 66 In the course of the seventeenth century, in the slave trade, the “Anglo-American” North American oikoumene would populate the New World with African slaves, and the Prester John of the fourteenth century would be transformed into the more familiar images of modern racism, 67 thus joining the “Daggoos” to the “Tashtegos” already present in the New World. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these Anglo-American Protestants would begin to arrive in Polynesia, whereby the world of “Queequeg” was similarly overrun by, first, missionaries and, shortly thereafter, gunboats, so that Melville, during his stay in the Marquesas in 1844, was arguably one of the last Westerners to have contact with a relatively intact Polynesian culture on the eve of its definitive demise. 68

In Europe, in 1840, when men dreamed of unity before the fall, they remembered first of all history, 69 as embodied in the unity of the Holy Roman Empire and its “cosmic kings” Charlemagne 70 and Frederick Barbarossa, 71 a unity shattered forever by the French Revolution and reconstituted in frayed form in the “pharaoh with the feet of clay,” Napoleon and his successors. In America, the world from Nantucket to Charleston confronted the Protestant imagination with a memory, not of kings and popes, but of the world of the Old Testament, rematerialized before the newly (and twice) “de-cosmized” Ahabs of Nantucket, the Ahab who says:

 

I leave a white and turbid wake, pale waters, paler cheeks, where’er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them, but first I pass.