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.

Yonder, by the ever-brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun…goes down; my soul mounts up! Is this, then, the crown too heavy that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy…Dry heat upon my brow? Oh! time was, when as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and malignantly! damned in the midst of paradise! 72

 

This American Protestant, above all New England Puritan consciousness, having recreated the Mosaic world of exile for itself, surrounded by shadows of Primordial Men, indeed lacked the “low enjoying power,” was indeed “damned in the midst of paradise” as it left the “white and turbid wake” wherever it went, prepared as it was to bring the entire world to ruin 73 in an attempt to avenge the fundamental, original crime of de-cosmization, exile from antemosaic paradise, and the vestiges of Primordial Man, Indians, Africans and Polynesians, which it enlisted in the venture were always there to remind it of the Adamic world from which it was excluded. 74

These forces and themes were hardly literary exercises restricted to Calvinist sermons and removed from the sphere of politics. 75 For the Puritans, the communities they created in New England were the New Covenant in the wilderness; in 1773, the participants in the Boston Tea Party disguised themselves as Indians 76 ; the Lockean liberal tradition which influenced the US constitution was a tradition conceived within the shadow of regicide (that of Charles I in 1649) 77 and two revolutions against the Stuarts; the separated powers created in the constitution were the “fragmented body of the king,” the dispersed “Tudor polity” as one writer called it. 78 If it was indeed Old Testament imagery and not the historical past of the Holy Roman Emperors and absolutist kings that dominated the American imagination of the past, there was nonetheless encoded in the founding documents of the American polity a “missing king,” a powerful executive (by contrast with the British parliamentary system) whose centrality to the cohesion of the whole would emerge above all in times of crisis, the homunculus Napoleons from George Washington through Andrew Jackson to later figures associated with military prowess such as Theodore Roosevelt. 79

What was the source of this American Protestant second exile from the “Egypt” of Europe’s kings and popes 80 ? What, indeed, was the source of the first exile, the post-Mosaic evolution from mythopoesis to disincarnate logos? From the Bible to Max Weber, the answer has always been: work, if not the cause, then as the symptom of exile. Sohn-Rethel 81 in particular has shown that the break between Heraclitus 82 and Parmenides, which Frankfort showed to be the final break with the Asia Minor cosmologies of fire and light, was closely linked to the sixth-century bc Greek commercial revolutions and the triumph of a commodity economy of unprecedented scope, if not exactly capitalism. It was Parmenides who made Being, in contrast to Heraclitean temporality, the absolute, nondeterminate, supratemporal and supraspatial realm above all “second qualities,” such as color, shape, etc. Exchange, and the contingencies it imposed on “secondary qualities” of specific material goods 83 in Greek antiquity as in seventeenth-century Europe, was the social force that spread its abstraction over sensuous reality, the social basis for “de-cosmization” and the separation of logos from mythos. And exchange was in turn the expression of commensurate quantities of labor. Moby Dick, as non-determinate abstraction, is therefore not merely a philosophical or religious metaphor, but equally the embodiment of “white” abstraction imposed on social life by exchange-value, a world subjugated to the categories of work.

In addition to the declining legacy of New England Calvinism and the shadow of regicide in the Lockean tradition of American liberalism that issued periodically in George Washingtons and Andrew Jacksons, there was a third manifestation of the frayed pseudo-sacred in America in 1840: New England Transcendentalism. As indicated a moment ago, the discontented young men of 1840 in Europe, the Theophile Gauthiers or Gerard de Nervals, looked back to historical imagery mostly derived from medievalism; in the United States, where there was no such historical imagery, young discontents looked to Europe, but above all to Indians, to nature, and to the Orient. 84 Precisely because no legend of cosmic kingship, no Charlemagne or Barbarossa 85 asleep until the coming of the Third Reich, presented itself to American consciousness, the very primordial imagery of Biblical origin 86 mentioned earlier, resurfaced in its components parts in a certain nature mysticism, a certain fascination with Indians that verged on primitivism, and above all in a wave of Orientalism derived from the new translations of Persian and even more so Indian texts made available by the newly-founded fields of linguistics and comparative mythology. Emerson was undoubtedly the pioneer of this consciousness, but Thoreau and slightly later Whitman followed in a similar vein. 87

This consciousness was the consciousness of Ishmael. In 1840, in Europe and the United States, a romantic “unhappy consciousness” (to use Hegel’s term) constituted, within the individual egos of young Germans after the fashion of Madame de Stael, young Parisian dandies and boulevardiers, and young New Englanders tired of both Calvinism and the traditions of the revolutionary era, the last recourse of the mythical world 88 shattered by the Reformation and the modern revolutions, above all the French. A figure like Stendhal’s Julien Sorel could fondle his cameo of Napoleon and dream of heroic action, 89 but neither Washington nor Jackson could fill the same role for the Harvard or Yale student with his head full of Kant and Coleridge. The United States, as we said, drew its historical imagery not from the Holy Roman Empire and its pseudo-mythical successors, but directly from the Old Testament and its Adamic visions of paradise and paradise lost.

 

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

 

[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 Haerticorum— and concluded by a Sanskrit invocation.

Herman Melville

White-Jacket

 

If the young Karl Marx arrived at his own perspective in the course of the 1840s in a polemical dialogue with the remnants of the German idealist (and above all Hegelian) thought still dominant in the German universities, Herman Melville, only one year Marx’s junior, was arriving at his perspective, albeit in literary form, in a polemical dialogue with a diluted variant of those ideas, New England Transcendentalism. Once this parallel is understood, their common arrival at the symbol of the Vendôme Column (Melville in Moby Dick (1851), Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire (1852)) as the representation of frayed pseudo-mythical power in the world after the French Revolution and revolutionary regicide, is less surprising, if still remarkable.

There is a very developed view of history, society and politics in Moby Dick , one that has heretofore attracted attention but which has never, as yet, been elaborated in its entirety.

Moby Dick is about the self-destruction of the bourgeois ego. This term is chosen reluctantly, because the English language provides no better equivalent of what in French might be called the “moi absolu” or the “absolu littéraire,” or what could be extracted from German Idealist philosophy (above all the work of Fichte and Schelling) as “das absolute Ich.” 90 As a critique of the limits of the bourgeois ego, a novel composed against the backdrop of the 1840s in America is necessarily a critique of Transcendentalism. The term “bourgeois ego” unfortunately does not capture fully the thrust of Melville’s diagnosis, insofar as it limits Melville’s vision to modern capitalist society. Melville is writing about that society, undoubtedly. But he is also writing about the West and the West’s relationship with non-Western peoples in an historical sweep that encompasses and transcends the latter, bourgeois phase of Western history. The Biblical figure of Ahab, and the constant invocation of the Old Testament, in the context of a world-historical “comparative mythology,” 91 makes this obvious. Melville clearly sees the figure of Ahab as the culmination of a tradition whose origins well antedate modern capitalist society, even though much of our discussion linking Moby Dick to the American social scene of the mid-nineteenth century will focus on two sources of Ahab’s character that are modern and bourgeois: seventeenth-century Puritanism and Calvinism, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century liberalism, as it shaped the American experience.

Not accidentally the more expressive French and particularly German terms better capture the overtones of what is meant by the “bourgeois ego,” because New England Transcendentalism derived directly from several decades of German philosophical and aesthetic influence in the United States, 92 above all through the work of Kant and Coleridge, who was deeply influenced by Kant’s aesthetics. Van Wyck Brooks captures the mood of the late 1830s in which young minds were, in Melville’s phrase from White-Jacket , “turned by the Germans”:

 

In short, the more sensitive minds of the younger generation, the imaginative, the impressionable, the perceptive, those who characterize a generation—for the practical people never change, except in the cut of their clothes— were thoroughly disaffected. The shape of the outward world had ceased to please them. The Fourth of July orations had ceased to convince them that “freedom” had any connection with religious feeling. The aristocrats of trade were essentially vulgar, the “rational” Unitarians were materialistic. The young people were radicals and mystics. 93

 

Nor can there by any doubt that it is such people that Melville has in mind in his own parallel evolution to Marx’s critique of the Young Hegelians. The three major characters of Melville’s early sea-faring novels, Redburn, White Jacket and Ishmael, can all be described to one extent or another as “transcendental divines,” to use Melville’s phrase from the passage in White-Jacket quoted earlier. Moby Dick , in particular, is filled with references to the contemporary philosophical ferment.

 

[B]ut lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth, by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature… But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all, and your identity comes back in horror. Over Cartesian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise forever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists! 94

 

Ahab is of course no pantheist. But he too is a metaphysician, and his metaphysics, while difficult to pinpoint to any particular philosophical doctrine, have some very “Kantian” overtones, with the visible world relegated to the phenomenal appearance, behind which there is an unknowing “thing-in-itself”; there is a “Fichtean” dimension of action, perhaps almost Nietzschean in its sense that there is nothing behind the phenomena; finally, there are certain brooding Calvinist dimensions, which are ultimately overshadowed by a very modern-sounding doctrine of action for action’s sake. Ahab, who (as noted previously) leaves a “white and turbid wake” of abstraction wherever he sails, has this to say about what drives him:

 

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its feature from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate ; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. 95

 

Ahab’s battle is the battle of the man of resentment who has been cut off from the “low enjoying power” of the sensuous world, for whom the white pall of abstraction has cast all “visible objects” into “pasteboard masks,” leaving him entombed in his bourgeois ego, “damned in the midst of Paradise.”

That Melville’s own position is beyond either the dreamy Transcendentalist or the more severe Calvinist viewpoints is indicated by several passages. At one point in the narrative, the Pequod has a whale’s head hanging from each side, following a hunt:

 

As before, the Pequod steeply leaned over towards the sperm whale’s head, now, by the counterpoise of both heads, she regained her even keel…So, when on one side you hoist Locke’s head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds keep for ever trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw away all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float right and light. 96

 

But Melville’s own position is not an “agnostic” one, as the above passage taken in isolation might imply. What lurks behind the “pasteboard masks,” the “white and turbid wake” to which Ahab’s grim Calvinist ego condemns him, and to which “pantheism” is only a pseudo-alternative, is sensuousness , represented above all by the three harpooners Queequeg, Tashtego and Daggoo, in whose activity, as shall be seen, is taken up as lived reality the “cosmic” quality which the Transcendentalist seeks in dreamy nature mysticism. Melville’s answer to both Ahab and Ishmael is portrayed in the famous scene of the Heidelberg Tun. Tashtego, Queequeg and Daggoo are extracting sperm from the head of a sperm whale suspended on the side of the ship when Tashtego falls into the head, which in turn falls into the water under his weight. Only when Queequeg dives into the water and cuts open the head is Tashtego saved from drowning. Here, in one poignant sequence, Melville shows the three noble non-Western harpooners as it were emerging from the head of abstraction, the real concrete supersession of all other viewpoints present in different characters in Moby Dick . Melville leaves no doubt about his meaning when he writes:

 

Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious perishing; smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end can be recalled—the delicious death of an Ohio honey-hunter, who seeking honey in the crotch of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaning too far over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed. How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honey head, and sweetly perished there? 97

 

Kantian and post-Kantian idealist thought originated in Germany as the ideology of the humanist civil service of Prussia and smaller principalities influenced by enlightened absolutism. 98 Fritz Ringer captures the remoteness from possibilities of action that characterized the milieu:

 

The non-noble bureaucrat in Prussia represented an extreme which was equalled nowhere else in Europe. The German Protestant pastor, too, was unique is some ways. But the most unusual man on the European social scene during the eighteenth century was the German scholar, the man of pure learning. He had less connection than his English or even his French counterpart with an emerging entrepreneurial class; he also lacked the French intellectual’s contact with the cosmopolitan world of aristocratic or magisterial salons. Separated at once from the class of petty burgher artisans and from a relatively uncivilized feudal caste, he developed an intense faith in the spiritually ennobling power of the word and an equally strong sense of its impotence in the practical sphere of technique and organization. 99

 

This ideology thrived in the period of top-down bureaucratic reform in Prussia in 1807-1813 described by Rosenberg and others 100 ; the spread of comparable state bureaucratic modes of social organization to countries such as Russia just as promptly spawned the spread of German philosophy. 101 But when these ideas reached the United States, they took hold in a social milieu characterized precisely by the absence of an Enlightened civil service and the state-sponsored intelligentsia it engendered. In the United States, in contrast to pre-revolutionary France, Prussia or Russia, civil society hardly required a mercantilist state to come into existence; quite to the contrary, in the United States, civil society had to battle well into the nineteenth century to create a viable state. 102 The “marginal men” spawned on the European continent after 1815, the Julien Sorels, the Hölderlins, the Herzens and Bakunins 103 indeed had their counterparts in the United States, as Van Wyck Brooks’ characterization indicates. But, as indicated earlier, remoteness from action did not, in contrast to the European experience, produce “Napoleonic” longings in the New England generation of the 1840s, but rather a combination of nature mysticism, primitivism and Orientalism as it first surfaced in the work of Emerson and slightly later of Thoreau. Just as the Puritans escaped from Popery, organic polity and the imagistic church of Mary, so this later generation reproduced the “escape from history” in their largely apolitical rejection of American society. They reproduced the “moi absolu” as it developed through the French, German and Russian “cycles,” 104 but in contrast to the long metamorphosis described by Camus, 105 the “moi absolu” had no reforming or revolutionary statist vocation in the United States.

New England, like its romantic counterpart in the German Vormärz, announced a break in culture, one which in both countries was crystallized in the year 1848, the year of the European revolutions and the year in which the foundations of the American political parties were shaken by the sectionalist crisis, following the 1846 defeat of Mexico. 106 In Europe, the break was clear: the “ugly revolution” of the Parisian proletariat, to use Marx’s term, forever buried the lyricism of pre-1848 liberal romanticism, 107 and replaced the rhetorical unity of the Third Estate, in the minds of continental liberals, with the grim specter of the “classes laborieuses et dangéreuses,” and of communism. In the United States, the crisis of 1848 did not announce the inexorable division of society into warring classes (an event which awaited 1877 and the end of post bellum Reconstruction) but it did, as Michael Rogin has argued in his book on Melville, 108 constitute an irreparable break in the ideology associated with the American Revolution. 109 The battle over the expansion of slavery into the newly conquered territories opening up in the American West destroyed the last vestiges of continuity with the political traditions and national unity derived from the revolutionary era, a continuity personified for Melville in his upstate New York family.

We stated that New England Transcendentalism announced a break in culture. It was not the break. Melville was.

The term “ugly revolution,” coined by Marx, refers to the eruption of the Parisian working class, with its own demands within the bourgeois liberal Third Estate, which had theretofore (as in the July Revolution of 1830) subordinated the workers to at least an appearance of unity. In 1848, in Europe, romantic lyricism ran up against the “ugly” reality of the new industrial class and that class’s apparent ingratitude toward liberal artists of the phrase. That confrontation announced a new “collective” quality to social confrontation and politics in the rise of socialism as a threat to liberalism. Just as social realities and relations had earlier expressed themselves in the lyricism of the English romantics, or as in the work of Lamennais, Lamartine or Louis Blanc in France, so too did the “ugly revolution” quickly recast the aesthetic landscape. 110 The “absolu littéraire,” the “moi absolu” of earlier romanticism was at an impasse. As with bourgeois society and culture generally, it was confronted with realities external to its phrases: the yet inchoate movement of the proletarian masses was the first, most striking threat. But beyond that, in the course of the 1840s, two additional features were inseparably added to that perception: one was the new industrial society that technological innovation had created, the society that engendered the proletariat. The second was the entry of the non-West into consciousness as an immediate presence in contemporary history. The Opium Wars in China, the imminence of the opening of Japan, French and American colonization of Polynesia, in addition to the 1849 gold rushes in California and Australia all combined to create the truly world market for capital that Marx described in the Communist Manifesto and the sense, in the cosmopolitan ports of the US northeast seaboard, that the straits of Molucca were closer by than “Salem or Portsmouth.” 111 Nothing in a consciousness nourished on Keats, Lamartine or Heine was prepared to deal with this reality. The 1848 revolutions in Europe and, more diffusely, the crisis of 1848 in the United States crystallized this awareness. The aesthetic response in Europe was an immediate retreat to formalism: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1851) could be seen as a manifesto of a new sensibility that would never attempt to encompass the sensuous totality of society as a Balzac had done, but would on the contrary increasingly turn inward on itself and make the problem of artistic creation, instead of society, the subject of the art work itself. 112 Rogin has seen the work of Melville after the publication of Moby Dick as a parallel to this retreat from sensuous totality and society in European culture after 1848. 113

One could do worse than characterize Moby Dick as one of the foremost depictions of the shattering of the Western bourgeois ego, and the location of the emerging alternative to the bourgeois ego inseparably bound up with the collective association of men in the extraction of wealth from nature, and led by figures from the non-Western world who represented positively what figures such as Flaubert only expressed negatively: that the supersession of the shattered aestheticized bourgeois ego would not be a new “aesthetic,” but a new kind of activity .

 

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

 

Without too much reservation, the sensibility of Moby Dick can be characterized as a “cosmic imagination.” Before attempting a definition of this term, let us permit Melville to present this sensibility at its most condensed:

 

By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mystic-marked whale remains undecipherable. This allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale represents, he not seldom displays the back, and more especially his flanks, effaced in great part of the regular linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude scratches, altogether of an irregular random aspect. I should say that those New England rocks on the seacoast, which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks of violent scraping contact with vast floating icebergs—I should say, that those rocks must not a little resemble the sperm whale in this particular… 114

 

What would become a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of the North, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are found exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters, be it observed, are your cold-blooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies are refrigerators… But more surprising to know, as has been proved by experiment, that the blood of a polar whale is warmer than that of a Borneo negro in summer…Oh, man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou, too, live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter’s, and like the great whale, retain, O man! in all seasons a temperature of thine own.

But how easy and how hopeless to teach these fine things! Of erections, how few are domed like St. Peter’s! Of creatures, how few as vast as the whale! 115

 

Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I have been a stone-mason, and also a digger of ditches…Likewise…I desire to remind the reader, that while in the earlier geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now almost completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what are called the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate intercepted links, between the antichronical creatures, and those whose remote posterity are said to have entered the Ark; all the Fossil Whales hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last preceding the superficial formations. And though, none of them precisely answer to any known species of the present time, they are yet insufficiently akin to them in general respects, to justify their taking rank as Cetacean fossils.

Detached broken fossils of pre-adamite whales, fragments of their bones and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals, been found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in Scotland, and in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Among the more curious of such remains is part of a skull, which in the year 1779 was disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris, a short street opening almost directly upon the palace of the Tuileries; and bones disinterred in excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon’s time . Cuvier pronounced these fragments to have belonged to some utterly unknown Levianthanic species. 116

 

When I stand among these mighty Levianthanic skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs and vertebrae, all characterized by partial resemblances to the existing breed of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man. Here Saturn’s grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this world’s circumference, not an inhabitable hand’s breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world was the whale’s; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab’s harpoon had shed older blood than Pharaoh’s. Methusaleh seems a schoolboy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horror-struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all human ages are over.

But not alone has this Leviathan left his pre-Adamite traces in the stereotype plates of nature, and in limestone and marl bequeathed his ancient bust; but upon Egyptian tablets, whose antiquity seems to claim for them an almost fossiliferous character, we find the unmistakable print of his fin. In an apartment of the great temple of Denderah, some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite ceiling a sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs, griffins and dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial globe of the moderns. Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore; was there swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled. 117

 

What is condensed in these passages is virtually every theme of Moby Dick: a view of cosmic evolution; “mystic hieroglyphs”; Indians; nineteenth-century geological and biological theory; the antipodes of Arctic waters; the tropics; and finally, “St. Peter’s,” the crowning place of the Holy Roman Emperor. In the second passage, there is found once again geology, paleontology, whale fossils and biology (Cuvier) brought directly into relationship with mythic power by references to the Tuileries and Napoleon. In the final passage Melville juxtaposes whale fossils with Egyptian and Biblical references.

The “cosmic imagination” in Melville, then, is this eruption of “mystic” and “mythical” imagery within the primordial world of cosmic evolution; it is Melville’s answer to the “white and turbid wake” cast by Ahab and Ahab’s civilization over the sensuous world, and it is social and political by the link between these mystic and mythical symbols and the myth of the cosmic king, which will be elaborated momentarily.

The less than casual reader of Moby Dick cannot fail to notice Melville’s constant undercurrent of references to mystical and esoteric phenomena, as in the mention above of “mystic hieroglyphics.” When Queequeg signs onto the Pequod, his mark is the Maltese cross of the Knights Templar. 118 On occasions the whale’s brow is likened to “cabbalistic hieroglyphs.” 119 The movements of the whale’s tail are said to be “akin to Free-mason signs and symbols.” 120 The gold doubloon Ahab nailed to the mast as a reward for the first sighting of Moby Dick is filled with the astrological symbolism of the Zodiac. 121 “Human or animal,” writes Melville, “the mystical brow is as that great golden seal affixed by the German emperors to their decrees.” 122 Then, immediately thereafter, he states:

 

Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can. 123

 

Champollion was the decipherer, in 1822, of the Rosetta Stone brought back to France from Napoleon’s 1799 Egyptian expedition; Sir William Jones was the English scholar who in 1780 demonstrated that Sanskrit was an Indo-European language. But Melville’s references to these figures point as much to the limits of their decipherings as to their accomplishments. It will be seen in a moment what Melville means by deciphering the “Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face.” For now, the issue is Melville’s deliberate and pointed inclusion in his book of references to Kabbala, the Knights Templar, Freemasonry 124 and astrology. Many works have been written on the obvious Old Testament symbolism and references that infuse the book 125 ; these references will not be followed out here, nor will it be asked if there is a “hidden text” in Moby Dick . There is more than enough on the surface to get at what Melville is talking about.

A good starting point is “that great golden seal affixed by the German emperors to their decrees.” As with mystical and esoteric symbols, the references in Moby Dick to the Holy Roman Emperors are persistent and unmistakably intentional. 126 The pulpit in New Bedford where Ishmael hears a sermon is an “Ehrenbreitstein,” the eleventh-century castle across the Rhine from Coblentz later taken over by the princes of Trier and blown up by the French during the famous battle of 1801. 127 The masts of the Pequod “stood stiffly up like the three old kings of Cologne.” 128 Ahab’s table, where he and the three mates eat in solemn silence each night, is “like the Coronation banquets at Frankfurt, where the German Emperor profoundly dines with the seven Imperial Electors….” 129 In Ahab’s soliloquy, “this Iron Crown of Lombardy,” as was mentioned earlier, is the “crown too heavy” that he wears. 130 Finally, Melville takes pains, at the end of the chapter “Cetology,” to say:

 

But I now leave my cetological system standing thus unfinished, even as the great cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; great ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity…” 131

 

In this passage, one notes the parallel between Melville’s use of the Cathedral of Cologne as a symbol of the “uncompleteness” of evolution in this passage with the earlier use of the Dome of St. Peter’s in a similar evolutionary context. Why do these symbols of the convergence of sacred and secular power, as represented by the Holy Roman Empire, recur in these discussions of cetology?

Before attempting to answer that question, it is useful to look at a few more passages in which similar imagery crops up. When he first introduces the Pequod in New Bedford harbor, this is Melville’s full description:

 

[The Pequod ’s] old hull’s complexion was darkened like a French grenadier’s, who has fought in Egypt and Siberia…Her masts stood stiffly like the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrim-worshipped flagstone in Canterbury where Beckett bled…She was appareled like any barbarian Ethiopian emperor…A cannibal of a craft…The helmsman who steered by that tiller felt like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. 132

 

A little later, Ahab is introduced as follows:

 

In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty which it symbolized? For a Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was Ahab. 133

 

What Melville is weaving into his treatises on cosmic evolution, 134 with which we began, and these multiple references to the Holy Roman Emperors and to kingship generally, is a socio-political treatise on the tradition of cosmic kingship in Western history. 135 It is this convergence, in Melville’s underscoring of the “incompleteness” of evolution (the uncompleted Cathedral of Cologne) that the lengthy treatises on every aspect of whales and whaling that fill the pages of Moby Dick emerge as central to the socio-political dimension of the book. Through the use of “cabbalistic hieroglyphs,” the Knights Templar, “Freemason signs” and astrology, Melville is referring to the “esoteric” science of the Renaissance 136 that was displaced by the “white and turbid wake” of “Newton’s sleep” (as Blake called it); by his association of such symbols of “cosmic kingship” in its Egyptian, ancient Near Eastern, Greco-Roman or medieval forms, and the continuities and discontinuities of symbols of pseudo-sacred mythical power (Napoleon), Melville is linking the demise of that apprehension of nature to the demise of the cosmic state in the modern bourgeois era; in showing, as shall be seen in the following chapter, the modern working class, led by “Queequeg,” 137 as the heir to the realization of the totality of cosmic evolution and the symbolism of cosmic kingship, Melville is rejecting any restorationist nostalgia and is posing a return on a higher level (symbolized by the final scene of Ishmael’s rescue by Queequeg’s coffin) of a “cosmic” sensibility, realized not in asocial, dreamy Transcendentalist fashion but as a new form of activity superceding the domination of nature by categories of work, of which the beauty and grace of Queequeg, Tashtego and Daggoo as they ply their difficult trade, constitutes the germ. Marx saw the modern proletariat as the heir to German classical philosophy 138 ; Melville went farther, and saw the modern proletariat as the heir to the totality of configurations of mastery, in a new form inseparably individual and collective, of all of human history. In the counterposition of Ishmael and Queequeg, Melville, almost alone in the nineteenth century, saw in the pseudo-sacred of the individual aestheticized bourgeois ego, last remnant of the myth of cosmic kingship removed from a collective social praxis, both how near and how far modern bourgeois society was from the realization of the totality of past evolution and history in a new kind of activity.

What, then, is cosmic kingship? 139 When modern political theory looks back to antiquity for the continuities of Western political thought, it is above all to Greek theoreticians of the polis, and to Greco-Roman antecedents of concepts of citizenship comfortable to modern partisans of democracy. Yet if one considers the role of Bonapartist dictatorship in modern Western history, from the original Bonaparte onward, it is clear that there is another tradition of political power in the West, one less enshrined in theory, but possibly as if not more influential in practice than democracy (and it exists in close relationship to the perceived weaknesses of democracy). That is the tradition of Plato’s kosmokrator , 140 the cosmic king (or philosopher-king, as the term is usually translated) who emerges in the Republic , and the Timaeus . The real source of the cosmic king is the Egyptian pharaohs, a tradition in which, prior to notions like the “divine right of kings,” the pharaoh was considered simply as a living deity. 141 The Egyptian tradition is the ultimate source of the unity of sacred and secular power for the West. Melville, as shall be been momentarily, is perfectly aware of this, as the earlier reference to Champollion might already indicate. Whenever citizen polities and republics break down, it has been the tradition of cosmic kingship, or later, of secular myths modeled on cosmic kingship, 142 that has replaced them. The early courts of the Jews transposed the myth to that of the messianic king, but were still organized on the Oriental model. 143 Alexander the Great is probably the first “Orientalized” man of power directly in the Greco-Roman side of the Western tradition, 144 following the decomposition of Greek democracy in the fourth century bc . As noted in the first chapter, the component parts of the Western tradition of cosmic tradition are present in the oldest myths, 145 but a distinctly Western civil society as arose in Greece in the sixth century bc had to emerge from Asiatic forms before “Orientalism” could appear as a retrogressive mode; prior to that, there were simply Oriental or Asiatic forms of power. Jesus in turn appears numerous times in the Bible as Christ the King. 146 Ernst Kantorowicz is one historian who has studied the tradition of cosmic kingship from antiquity into medieval times, and his works are veritable source material for the mythical and historical allusions in Moby Dick. 147 In the late second century ad , when the republican traditions and the classical Greco-Roman culture which rested on them had definitively died in the late Roman Empire, Roman culture underwent a rapid and irreversible “Orientalization” which announced the triumph of cosmic kingship, and of its symbols and myths, in the heart of the empire. 148 Not only was classical Roman culture overwhelmed by a wave of “Orientalism” comparable to that which appeared at later “interregna” in Western history, such as the Renaissance, or the nineteenth and twentieth centuries 149 ; the trappings of Oriental power replaced the old classical pagan myths at the highest levels of the Roman state. 150 A new phase of the relationship between sacred and secular power was achieved in 312 ad with Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, founding the tradition of “Caesaro-Papism” that would last until the end of the empire. With the collapse of Rome and of classical antiquity, the sacred-secular myth of cosmic kingship was renewed once again with the coronation of Charlemagne in Rome in 800 ad. 151 And Melville, with his constant references to the Holy Roman Emperors cited above, does not fail to incorporate this phase into his story, most directly in the character of Fedallah, the Oriental shadow of Ahab’s “kingship.” From Egypt to the late Roman Empire, to the Holy Roman Empire, the Western tradition shows a continuity of “Oriental” power constituting, like Fedallah, a “shadow” to the more mainstream and commonly acknowledged forms of power. 152

With the costly victory of the Popes over the Hohenstaufen, 153 the chaos of the fourteenth century and the interregnum of the Renaissance and the Reformation, 154 the tradition of cosmic kingship in the West was severely shaken. But it was able to reconstitute itself one last time, in the absolutist states of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of which the Spanish world empire of Charles V 155 and then the aspirations to French world empire of Louis XIV 156 were the prototypes. The stage was set for the French Revolution, and revolutionary regicide, which constitutes not merely the shattering of the divine right of kings, 157 itself decadent well before 1789, but more seriously, the entire continuity of the tradition from Egypt onward. The sacred-secular link was broken. Henceforth, power could no longer be cosmic, grounded in “nature”; it could only be mythic. The era of Napoleons had begun. 158

If the reader thinks such considerations are far from the concerns of Melville and Moby Dick , study of the following passage is in order:

 

Now, as the business of standing mast-heads [keeping watch] ashore or afloat, is a very ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate more. I take it, that the earliest standers of mast-heads were the old Egyptians because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them. For through their progenitors the builders of Babel, must doubtless, by their tower, have intended to rear the loftiest mast-head in all Asia, or Africa either; yet… as that great stone mast of theirs may be said to have gone by the board, in the dread gale of God’s wrath; therefore, we cannot give these Babel builders priority over the Egyptians. And that the Egyptians were a nation of mast-head standers, is an assertion based upon the general belief among archaeologists, that the first pyramids were founded for astronomical purposes… In Saint Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him a lofty stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of his life on its summit… in him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless stander-of-mast-heads [and who] literally died at his post. Of modern standers-of-mast-heads we have but a lifeless set; mere stone, iron and bronze men; who, though well capable of facing out a stiff gale, are still entirely incompetent in the business of singing out upon discovering any strange sight. There is Napoleon, who upon the top of the column of Vendome, stands with arms folded, some one hundred and fifty feet in the air; careless, now, who rules the decks below; whether Louis Philippe, Louis Blanc or Louis Devil. Great Washington, too, stands high aloft on his towering main-mast in Baltimore… Admiral Nelson, also…stands his mast-head in Trafalgar Square…But neither Washington, nor Napoleon, nor Nelson, will answer a single hail from below, however madly invoked… 159

 

In this passage one thus comes closer to the socio-political meaning of Moby Dick , as well as to Melville’s mention, in the midst of a treatise on whale fossils, of the discovery of a whale skull under the Tuileries, in the passage quoted earlier. 160 Not only was Melville perfectly aware of the tradition of cosmic kingship, but he was also aware that the French Revolution marked a turning point in history in which the sacred dimension grounded in a cosmic order was shattered forever, and that in the postrevolutionary period, the mythic 161 or pseudo-mythic power that reconstituted itself on the ruins of the cosmic myth was a homunculus, a pharaoh with feet of clay.

It is essential to underline the “Oriental” dimension of cosmic kingship, for it is central to Melville’s critique of the Orientalism of the Transcendentalists. In the tradition outlined here, a link to the East plays a constant, recurring role in the constitution of this kind of power. Egypt was the prototype, and as indicated earlier, required no “Oriental revival.” But thereafter, it is uncanny how the theme of ex oriente lux recurs again and again in this tradition. Plato, in his relationship to Pythagoreanism 162 and to Egypt, 163 already introduced this basic idea of kingship in the Republic . Alexander marched to the banks of the Indus and married the daughter of Darius; the Macedonian court was completely Orientalized 164 before his death in 313 bc . The late Roman emperors, as indicated, were overwhelmed by Orientalism. The Holy Roman Emperors not only took up this continuity, but also in the period of the Crusades, along with other European monarchs, renew the Oriental myth. 165 Frederick II the Hohenstaufen, the stupor mundi of the thirteenth century, not only “Orientalized” his Sicilian court but was accused of secret conversion to Islam by the Pope. Louis IX, Saint-Louis, died on a crusade in Tunisia 166 ; the Oriental figure of Saladin came to symbolize the mirror image of his friend and rival Frederick II. Even Napoleon made his “journey to the East” on his Egyptian campaign, paraded his troops in front of the pyramids and later helped to lay the foundation for nineteenth-century Oriental studies in France. Clearly we are dealing with a very profound myth of the state in the Western tradition, and just as clearly was Melville aware of the centrality of those “earliest standers of mastheads,” the Egyptians. Starbuck, Ahab’s first mate, is a “revivified Egyptian.” 167 When Stubb has a premonitory dream about Ahab, the captain appears to him as a pyramid. 168 Just prior to the reference to Champollion cited earlier, Melville writes:

 

But now? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his greatest genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyramidal silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale been known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by their child-magian thoughts. They deified the crocodile of the Nile, because the crocodile is tongueless; and the Sperm Whale has no tongue, or at least is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of protrusion. If hereafter any highly-cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birth-right the merry May-Day gods of old; and lovingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; in the now unhaunted hill; then, be sure, exalted to Jove’s high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it. 169

 

Thereupon follows, as indicated earlier, Melville’s challenge to decipher the “Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face,” as Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics and as Sir William Jones 170 discovered the Indo-European character of Sanskrit.

When Melville refers in the just-quoted passage to the “now-egotistical sky” and the “now unhaunted hill,” he refers to the same frayed quality of the modern mythical-religious apprehension of reality which emerged in the “mastheads” passage. But in the Champollion/Sir William Jones passage, Melville is already pointing toward the supersession of the contemporary Napoleonic pseudo-myth: the “Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face,” the modern working class. For Melville, as shall be shown, the modern labor process in its collective and de-mythified character does not stand over and against the “merry May-day gods of old” as a “disenchanted world” of Weberian resignation, as the “white and turbid wake” of Ahab. 171 It is, on the contrary, the actual and potential source of a new, directly lived “cosmic imagination” that exceeds in its power anything known in the past. This is a “reading” of Melville which must be pulled carefully out of Moby Dick , and one which is still ahead of the argument. What is being proposed for the moment is merely that the two strands of Melville’s “cosmic imagination,” his discussion of cosmic evolution as yet uncompleted “like the Cathedral of Cologne” and his discussion of the frayed condition of cosmic kingship (the kingship associated with the cathedral) and its modern successor, the Napoleonic myth, converge in one idea: that the modern collective appropriation of nature represented by the modern labor process is potentially the location for both the realization of natural evolution— the completion of the cathedral dome, so to speak—and the lost power of the deflated gods and kings. For Melville, the sapping of the basis of the cosmic state represented by Pharaonic Egypt and its successors, are two sides of one single process: that in which the “metaphor” of work, understood as alienated labor, has taken over the “now egotistical skies” and the collective association of men in society.

It is necessary to locate the cosmic imagination expressed in the passages that opened this section in a larger mid-nineteenth-century context. The references to Agassiz and Cuvier, as with those to figures such as Linnaeus, Leuwenhoek and Lavater which recur throughout Moby Dick do not merely show Melville, from his cetological researches for Moby Dick , to be conversant with the entire range of pre-Darwinian and evolutionary thought. 172 They demonstrate Melville’s affinity for aspects of the critique of the then-dominant Anglo-French paradigm of science, based on the model of Galilean-Newtonian physics, 173 which developed in Germany through figures such as Goethe, Schelling and von Humboldt. 174 Whether or not he read these specific authors, it is clear that he was familiar with the tradition when he has Ishmael say, in a discussion of whale physiology,

 

It is a German conceit, that the vertebrae are absolutely undeveloped skulls. But the curious external resemblance, I take it the Germans were not the first to perceive. 175

 

Melville, through Ishmael, is poking fun at the teleological extremes of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie which ultimately discredited it. But no reader of Moby Dick , and no reader of Goethe’s writings on botany, paleontology and geology, or of Alexander von Humboldt’s multivolume Cosmos (1828-1858) 176 can doubt that these authors stand squarely in a tradition of a “hylozoic” conception of nature closer to Leibniz than to Newton. 177 Further, in these cases, but particularly in Melville’s, the immediacy of the mystic and mythical qualities in the very midst of the geological, paleontological and evolutionary presentations of nature leave no doubt that he saw the “mythopoeic” faculty as a central part of nature itself, part of the uncompleted “Cathedral of Cologne” ready for further development. His conception both converges upon and radically departs from Emerson’s 1835 essay “On Nature,” a classic statement of the Transcendentalist view. There, too, myth is evoked 178 in the heart of a biological-evolutionary view. But what radically distinguishes Melville from Emerson, 179 as from other Transcendentalists 180 such as Thoreau, is precisely his underscoring of collective human labor as the extension of that cosmic-evolutionary process, and the individuality achieved by real human beings through that process, an idea as foreign to the Transcendentalists as it was to the Young Hegelians attacked by Marx.

This cosmic-evolutionary aspect of Melville’s thought will be further elaborated in a later chapter; it is now necessary to proceed with a presentation of his socio-political analysis of the modern world, for which his dissection of the tradition of “cosmic kingship” in relationship to nature has prepared the terrain.

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

 

In the previous section, Melville reported the discovery of a whale skull under the Palace of the Tuileries in 1779, and other bones discovered in “excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon’s time.” These obvious rapprochements of cetology, paleontology and the symbols of frayed mythical and pseudo-mythical power must now be examined more closely.

As with the recurring references to the German emperors, the references to Napoleon and the French Revolution in Moby Dick are too frequent not to be intimately linked to the central themes of the book. Melville, as noted, described the complexion of the hull of the Pequod as “like a French grenadier’s, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia…” 181 The Pequod’s crew is “an Anacharsis Cloots deputation from all the isles of the sea.” 182 In a cetological discourse on killer whales, Melville remarks in an aside: “For we are all killers, on land and sea, Bonapartes and sharks included.” 183 The whale “once swam over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle and the Kremlin.” 184 In the chapter entitled “The Town-Ho’s Story,” the rebellious crew of the Town-Ho is referred to as “those sea-Parisians entrenched…behind a barricade.” 185 But Melville’s deepest thoughts on the significance of Napoleon and other nineteenth-century embodiments of the pseudo-mythic are expressed in the “mast-heads” passage quoted previously. Nor does he limit himself to French history for his examples. In a passage whose analysis follows momentarily, Melville invokes “thou great democratic God!…Thou didst pick up Andrew Jackson from a war-horse, who didst thunder him higher than a throne!” 186 George Washington, it will be recalled, was among the “standers of mast-heads,” “who will not answer a single hail from below…” On occasion, Melville inverts the relationship, calling Hercules “that antique Crockett and Kit Carson.” 187

How can one fail, through the entire historical gallery invoked above and in the preceding chapter, to note the uncanny parallel between Melville’s analysis of the cosmic king and its modern reconstitution in pseudo-mythic power, and the concluding passages of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire ? 188

 

When Guizot utilized this Granier at the time of his ministry in an obscure provincial paper against the dynastic opposition, he used to boast of him with the phrase “c’est le roi des drôles”—“he is the king of the buffoons.” It would be a mistake to call to mind the Regency of Louis XV in connection with the court and the clan of Louis Bonaparte. For ‘France has often experienced a government of mistresses, but never before a government of kept men.’

Driven on by the contradictory demands of his situation, Bonaparte, like a conjurer, has to keep the eyes of the public fixed on himself, as Napoleon’s substitute, by means of constant surprises, that is to say by performing a coup d’etat in miniature every day. He thereby brings the whole bourgeois economy into confusion, violates everything that seemed inviolable to the revolution of 1848, makes some tolerant of revolution and others desirous of revolution, creates anarchy itself in the name of order, and at the same time strips the halo from the state machine, profaning it and making it both disgusting and ridiculous. He repeats the cult of the Holy Tunic at Trier in the form of the Napoleonic imperial mantle in Paris. But when the emperor’s mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will come crashing down from the top of the Vendome Column. 189

 

The remarkable parallels between the import of this passage from Marx and Melville’s “mast-heads” passage are striking, and equally striking is the use by both authors of the Vendôme Column as a central symbol. But there is more. The Eighteenth Brumaire , published one year after Moby Dick, abounds in the same stream of examples of frayed pseudo-mythic power throughout, constantly emphasizing the hollow quality of modern ideology dressed in traditional garb:

 

The material and economic conditions of the ancient and modern class struggles are so utterly distinct from each other that their political products also can have no more in common than the Archbishop of Canterbury has with the High Priest Samuel. 190

 

Nowhere, however, are the “Melvillian” themes so apparent are so condensed as in the famous opening passages of The Eighteenth Brumaire :

 

Hegel remarks somewhere that all the great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussadiere in place of Danton, Louis Blanc in place of Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848-51 in place of the Montagne of 1793-5, the Nephew in place of the Uncle. And we can perceive the same caricature in the circumstances surrounding the second edition of the eighteenth Brumaire!

Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted. The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living. And, just when they appear to be engaged in the revolutionary transformation of themselves and their material surroundings, in the creation, in the creation of something which does not yet exist, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they timidly conjure up the spirits of the past to help them… Luther put on the mask of the apostle Paul; the Revolution of 1789–1814 draped itself alternately at the Roman republic and the Roman empire; and the revolution of 1848 knew no better than to parody at some points 1789 and at others the revolutionary traditions of 1793–5…

If we reflect on this process of world-historical necromancy, we see at once a salient distinction. Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just and Napoleon, the heroes of the old French Revolution, accomplished the task of their epoch, which was the emancipation and establishment of modern bourgeois society, in Roman costume and with Roman slogans. The first revolutionaries smashed the feudal basis to pieces and struck off the feudal heads which had grown on it. Then came Napoleon. Within France he created the conditions which first made possible the development of free competition…Once the new social formation had been established, the antediluvian colossi disappeared along with the resurrected institutions of Rome— imitations of Brutus, Gracchus, Publicola, the tribunes, the senators, and Caesar himself. Bourgeois society in its sober reality had created its true interpreters and spokesmen in such people as Say, Cousin, Royer-Collard, Benjamin Constant and Guizot. The real leaders of the bourgeois army sat behind office desks while the fathead Louis XVIII served as the bourgeoisie’s political head…

In these revolutions, then, the resurrection of the dead served to exalt the new struggles, rather than to parody the old, to exaggerate the given task in the imagination, rather than to flee from solving it in reality, and to recover the spirit of the revolution, rather than to set its ghost walking again.

For it was only the ghost of the old revolution which walked in the years from 1848 to 1851, from Marrast, the republicain en gants jaunes, who disguised himself as old Bailly, right down to the adventurer who is now hiding his commonplace and repugnant countenance beneath the death mask of Napoleon. 191

 

Thus for Marx, as for Melville, mid-nineteenth-century bourgeois politicians were only, and necessarily only “Louis Philippe, Louis Blanc or Louis Devil,” because new tasks and new social forces had come onto the scene. Who were these new forces?

The Holy Tunic of Trier 192 to which Marx refers in the first passage above is a useful point through which to return to Melville’s answer to that question: as shall be seen in a moment, it goes to the heart of some of the most revealing symbolism of Moby Dick . In 1910, the German scholar Robert Eisler published the ponderous two-volume study, Weltmantel und Himmelzelt , 193 which traces the lineage of the myth of the cosmic king from the ancient Near East to the Holy Roman Emperors studied by Kantorowicz. The “world mantle” and the “cosmic vault” studied by Eisler was, once again, a symbol of the cosmic quality of kingship in the tradition inherited by the West: the “king’s mantle” ultimately being derived from the “cosmic vault” itself, just as the Egyptian pharaoh was an incarnate deity. In Moby Dick , Melville wrote:

 

Men may seem as detestable as joint-stock companies and nations…but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes…this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shall see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! His omnipresence, our divine equality!

If then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave around them tragic graces…if I shall touch that workman’s arm with some ethereal light;…then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind!…Thou who, in all Thy might, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons, bear me out in it, O God! 194

 

Not only does Melville, like Marx, have a critique of “joint stock companies” (the term most often invoked to refer to capitalism), but he, like Marx, sees the modern working class as the heir of all human achievement in history, indeed, (if the earlier analysis is correct) of all evolution, taking up the nobility once invested in cosmic kingship, and still present in caricature in the “Louis Philippes, Louis Blancs and Louis Devils,” but essentially “one royal mantle of humanity.” 195

Before proceeding further with Melville’s analysis of modern capitalism and the working class, it is imperative to refer to the work of CLR James, 196 whose book Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953) and whose autobiography Beyond a Boundary (1961) have underscored many of the themes developed here. This is necessary, in order to dispel any impression that this is the first attempt to see these affinities between Melville and Marx, and at the same time to highlight those aspects of the analysis at hand which are less developed by James (and in different way, by Rogin).

James’s book on Melville appeared at the height of the McCarthy period, and in his treatment of Moby Dick the presence of the international phenomenon of Stalinism is constantly before the reader. Thus his attempt to depict Ahab as a forerunner of the “managerial revolution” described by James Burnham in the 1940 book of the same title which, while having its merits, strikes the contemporary reader as somewhat overblown (though by no means false) must be seen against the immediate context in which the book was written. But James does present an analysis of Melville which has remained unduly ignored.

James, as indicated, sees Ahab as the prototype of the modern manager. He cites as evidence the confrontation between Ahab and his first mate Starbuck, when Ahab refuses to stop the voyages for repairs and Starbuck asks what the owners in Nantucket would say. Ahab replies:

 

Let the owners stand on Nantucket Beach and outyell the typhoons. What cares Ahab? Owners, owners? Thou art prating to me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners… 197

 

James also cites the scene in which Ahab stomps on the ship’s quadrant as evidence of a will to power which brooks no limitations from mere scientific measurement:

 

“Science! I curse thee, thou vain toy! he yells, and stamps upon the instrument…Aye, thus I trample upon thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; this I split and destroy thee!”…It is on the same evening that the storm breaks, the fires burn on the masts, and Ahab defies the fires of industry. Thus, within one day, Industry and Science, the twin gods of the nineteenth century, have been deposed. 198

 

It is in James’s analysis of the personalities of Ahab and Ishmael in particular that their connection to the general problems of Transcendentalism, already touched upon, becomes clearer. Of Ahab, James writes, after describing the funereal atmosphere that reigns at his officers’ table:

 

The meals are the symbol of Ahab’s isolation from the men with whom he works, an isolation forced upon him by his position of command. Nobody stayed in that cabin one minute longer than they had to. 199

 

In a rare frank discussion with Starbuck, as James points out, Ahab describes his situation as the “Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command.” 200 He then enters into the nub of his analysis of Ahab as the prototype of a rebellion against capitalist rationality by men of his class:

 

For generations people believed that the men opposed to rights of ownership, production for the market, domination of money, etc. were socialists, communists, radical of some sort united by the fact that they all thought in terms of the reorganization of society by the workers, the great majority of the oppressed, the exploited, the disinherited. Some there were, of course, who believed that the experiment, if made, was bound to result in tyranny. Nobody, not a single soul, thought that in the managers, the superintendents, the executives, the administrators would arise such loathing and bitterness against the society of free enterprise, the market and democracy, that they would try to reorganize it to suit themselves and, if need be, destroy civilization in the process. There are a number of writers, chiefly German, who have shown that they more or less understood the type. 201

 

What is of interest in James’s analysis is not specifically whether or not he is right in seeing Ahab as the forerunner of the “managerial revolution,” still less the aptness of such a term. The power of James’s analysis of Ahab is its convergence with the portrait of the bourgeois ego or “moi absolu” as developed in Section II with regard to the tradition of German idealist philosophy, to which James himself refers. 202 For “managerial revolution” or not, James has hit upon a thread of the present analysis of the fraying of mythic power, as has been documented throughout Moby Dick , namely that in its final phase of secularization, the “bourgeois ego” or “moi absolu” ultimately derived from the tradition of cosmic kingship becomes a naked, secular will to power at the head of a bureaucratic state, in the name of values that go well beyond those of liberal capitalism, but which are hardly those of socialism. Thus we can concur with James that Ahab is a prototype for the late nineteenth or twentieth century Bonapartist, fascist or Stalinist dictator.

But James’s analysis hardly stops there. Ahab has accomplices: little Ahabs. James locates these accomplices in the mates and in the character of Ishmael.

For James, Ishmael is the prototype of the modern alienated intellectual. But, in his own mind, Ishmael is not fully a member of the crew; like the “transcendental divine” described in White Jacket , Ishmael shares with Ahab the “absolute I.” As with the mates, that is the “hook” through which Ahab enlists Ishmael in his own will to power, because Ahab understands that men like Ishmael, Starbuck, Flask and Stubb, while appalled by his own tyrannical power and impotent to oppose it, identify with him as a man of action. In short, Ishmael is the prototype of the intellectual sycophant of Stalinist and fascist regimes of the interwar period, the social milieu from which James most directly drew his analysis.

 

[Ishmael] is a member of a distinguished American family, is well educated and has been a teacher. But he cannot endure the social class in which he was born and reared, so he lives as a worker, digging ditches, or what else comes to hand. He is subject to fits of periodical depression…and whenever he feels a fit coming on, he goes to sea. Today they do not go to sea— they join the working class movement or the revolutionary movement instead.

Who does not recognize Ishmael? He wants to be a plain ordinary seaman. He feels himself one of the people. But it isn’t that he likes workers. It is that he hates authority and responsibility of any kind. He does not want to be a Commodore but he does not want to be a cook either…

What is wrong with this young man? He is as isolated and bitter as Ahab and as helpless. He cannot stand the narrow, cramped, limited experience which civilization offers him. He hates the greed, the lies, the hypocrisy. Thus shut out from the world outside, he cannot get out of himself. The only truly civilized person he can find in New Bedford and Nantucket is a cannibal savage, the harpooner Queequeg, and the story of their relations is, like all great literature, not only literature but history. 203

 

James continues:

 

Ishmaels, we say, live in every city block. And they are dangerous, especially when they actually leave their own environment and work among workers or live among them. For when Ahab, the totalitarian, bribed the men with money and grog and whipped them up to follow him on his monomaniac quest, Ishmael, the man of good family and education, hammered and shouted with the rest. His submission to totalitarian madness was complete.

Most of the men on the ship at some time or other showed antagonism to Ahab. Ishmael never did—not once. And the analysis of why this type of young man behaves as he does is one of Melville’s greatest triumphs.

As usual with Melville’s people in Moby Dick, Ishmael at first sight is merely one of those dreamy young men of education and intellect who cannot live in the world. Ishmael’s favorite place on board ship is up on the mast-head where he is supposed to be taking his turn at looking for whales. He never sees one, for he is up there dreaming his life away and imagining that his soul is once more at one with the waters that stretch around him to the horizon on every side. But soon it becomes apparent that that Ishmael is no mere dreamer. He is a completely modern young intellectual who has broken with society and wavers constantly between totalitarianism and the crew. 204

 

James, having shown the subordination of the “transcendental divine,” Ishmael, to the “Calvinist” (returning to the type introduced in Section I), then turns to Ahab’s power over the pragmatic “liberal” social type, Starbuck:

 

His is the story of the liberals and democrats who during the last quarter of a century have led the capitulation to totalitarianism in country after country. On the night of the great storm, Starbuck, forgetting himself, shouts to Ahab before all the men, to turn back. He points to Ahab’s harpoon which has caught fire from the magnetic flame on the mast. The voyage, he says, is doomed to disaster. For a moment, it seemed that Starbuck was saying what the men were thinking. They raise a half-mutinous cry and rush to the sails. One word from Starbuck and Ahab would be over the side. But Ahab seized his harpoon and swearing to transfix with it any man who moves, tells them that he will blow out the flame and blows it out with one breath. His fearlessness, his skillful pretense of being able to command the mysterious magnetic flame, terrify the men. It is characteristic of Starbuck that, having missed his chance when he has the men behind him, he seeks out Ahab that night, alone, to plead with him. Ahab dismisses him contemptuously. No need to emphasize that in reality, Starbuck hates the men and looks upon them as uncouth, barbarous sub-human beings. 205

 

Melville, as interpreted by James, is showing in this dynamic a whole perspective on modern history. What, in Moby Dick , escapes the “absolute I” and the little Ahabs, the mates and Ishmael? Clearly it is the crew, and most importantly, the three harpooners, the Tahitian Queequeg, the African Daggoo and the American Indian Tashtego. They maintain among themselves a totally different set of social relations. They are not victims of the “moi absolu” and its gravity:

 

In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint and nameless invisible domineerings of the captain’s table, was the entire care-free license and ease, the almost frantic democracy of those inferior fellows the harpooners. While their masters, the mates, seemed afraid of the sound of the hinges of their own jaws, the harpooners chewed their food with such a relish that there was a report to it. They dined like lords; they filled their bellies like Indian ships all day loading with spices. Such portentous appetites had Queequeg and Tashtego, that to fill out the vacancies made by the previous repast, often the pale Dough-Boy was fain to bring on a great baron of salt-junk, seemingly quarried out of the solid ox. And if he were not lively about it, if he did not go with a nimble hop skip-and-jump, then Tashtego had an ungentlemanly way of accelerating him by darting a fork at his back, harpoonwise. And once Daggoo, seized with a certain humor, assisted Dough-Boy’s memory by snatching him up bodily, and thrusting his head into a great wooden trencher, while Tashtego, knife in hand, began laying out the circle preliminary to scalping him. 206

 

Once again, Melville contrasts this Rabelaisian scene to Ahab’s cabin:

 

[I]n the cabin was no companionship; socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though nominally included in the census of Christendom, he was still alien to it. He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled Missouri. 207

 

James, following Melville, uses the scene at which Ishmael finds himself at the helm of the Pequod in the “Try-Works” chapter, to highlight the difference between Ishmael and the crew:

 

That night, Ishmael is at the helm and he looks down at the men working below.

‘The hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in front of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooners, already the whale-ships stokers…(opposite the mouth of the works)…lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire…Their tawny features…their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works.

That at first sight is the modern world—the world we live in, the world of the Ruhr, of Pittsburgh, of the Black Country in England. In its symbolism of men turned into devils, of an industrial civilization on fire and plunging blindly into darkness, it is the world of massed bombers, of cities in flames, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world in which in we live, the world of Ahab, which he hates and which he will organize or destroy. 208

 

Immediately thereupon follows the clinching moment of James’s analysis:

But when you look again, you see that the crew is indestructible. There they are laughing at the terrible things that have happened to them. The three harpooners are doing their work. True to himself, Ishmael can see the ship only as an expression of Ahab’s madness… 209

 

Lost in this contemplation of the “dark, satanic mill,” to use Blake’s phrase, Ishmael nearly capsizes the Pequod : “That,” writes James,

 

is the end of Ishmael. Henceforth he will seek refuge from the world in books, particularly in Ecclesiastes , where it says that “All is vanity.” “ALL” in large print. He takes refuges in his philosophical abstractions—he will soar like an eagle in the mountains and even if he has to swoop, his lowest flight will be higher than that of ordinary men.

How wrong he is is proved but one brief chapter afterwards. The boiling is over and the hatches are replaced and sealed. What follows now is the summation of a whole way of life, the climax of all that Melville has been saying about the meanest mariners, the renegades and castaways.

In the sperm fishery, this is perhaps one of the most remarkable incidents in all the business of whaling. One day the planks stream with freshets of blood and oil; on the sacred quarter-deck masses of the whale’s head are profanely piled, great rusty casks are piled about…

But a day or two after, look about you, and prick your ears in the self-same ship; and were it not for the tell-tale boats and try-works, you would all but swear you trod some silent merchant vessel, with a most scrupulously neat commander… The great catch is scrubbed…and when by the combined and simultaneous industry last concluded, then the crew themselves proceed to their own ablutions…and finally issue to the immaculate deck, fresh and all aglow, as bridegroom new-leaped from out the daintiest Holland.

Now, with elated step, they pace the planks in twos and threes, and humorously discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets and fine cambrics; propose to mat the deck; think of having hangings to the stop; object not to taking tea by moonlight on the piazza of the forecastle. To hint to such masked mariners of oil, and bone, and blubber, were little short of audacity. They know not the thing you distantly allude to. Away and bring us napkins! 210

 

But, concludes Melville,

 

many is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the neck of their clean frocks, and startled by the cry of ‘There she blows!’ and away they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again. 211

 

And from this scene James in turn summarizes his own analysis:

 

Thus, around the try-works, there comes to a head the hopeless madness, the rush to destruction of Ahab, and the revulsion from the world of Ishmael. Ahab sat in his cabin marking his charts, Ishmael, thinking of books and dreaming of how he would soar above it all like an eagle, will become in his imagination as destructive as his monomaniac leader. But the Anacharsis Cloots deputation, the meanest mariners, renegades and castaways, remain sane and human, in their ever-present sense of community, their scrupulous cleanliness, their grace and wit and humor, and their good-humored contempt of those for whom life consists of nothing else but fine cambrics and tea on the piazza. 212

 

There, in the most compact expression, we have the central social and political theme of Moby Dick , the encounter between three different manifestations of the ultimately asocial ego of bourgeois society, in Ahab, Starbuck and Ishmael, shown in their interdependency, counterposed to the real individualism of the collective social relations, in work and in play, of the crew. Melville had arrived at the same insight, in the same decade, as Marx (and had done so in confrontation with two variants of the same body of thought), namely that real individuality was finally realized through collective association in praxis. It was only the ultimately destructive shadow of individuality, the bourgeois or absolute I, that was shattered by the social relations of modern industrial capitalism. Just on the eve of the era in which the relationship between the “Ishmaels” and the “Queequegs” of the world, the intelligentsia and the working class, was about to become of central significance in the rise of the modern socialist movement, Melville had already foreseen the different social characters that would emerge in that actual historical drama, as well as some of the results.

James, in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways , presents a very cohesive interpretation of Moby Dick parallel to that developed in this essay. But his book does not develop, except in passing, the theme of the tradition of cosmic kingship and its dissolution as we have described it and documented it in Melville. James’s analysis converges with our own in seeing Melville posing the modern work force as the immediate heir of past evolution and history, in the richness of myth and art. But his full contribution does not stop there. 213 James’s analysis of working-class culture and its potential goes even farther in developing sides of Marx’s thought which were virtually unknown at the time James wrote his book on Melville and which, even today, remain at the margins of dominant interpretations of Marx. These ideas concern the supersession of the antinomy between work and leisure. They are developed primarily in James’s autobiography Beyond a Boundary (1963) and they are, as shall be seen in a moment, directly related to the assessment of Melville developed here.

The point here is not to summarize Beyond a Boundary. What is immediately relevant for our analysis of Melville is James’s assessment of the social role of sports, as revealed first through his own childhood and subsequent involvement with cricket, as observer, sportswriter and player, and its link to his estrangement from the mainstream Marxism he encountered in England and later in the United States. James, as he himself relates, developed his imagination on a steady stream of English novels, above all in the work of Thackeray 214 which he read in his middle-class home, and through the constant games of cricket played outside his window. What fascinated James in cricket 215 was above all the “social aesthetic,” to use a certain language, whereby men from the neighborhood described by his aunts as “ne’er-do-wells” were transformed into aristocrats of self-mastery and brilliance at bat in cricket matches. James found the “social aesthetic” of cricket, at once collective and highly individualized by the tensions of men at bat, 216 on a continuum with the social procession that passed through the greatest literature, and began to crystallize it into a remarkable and original view of culture generally. It is in the chapter “What Do Men Live By?” of his autobiography that he articulates these ideas most succinctly:

 

Fiction-writing drained out of me and was replaced by politics. I became a Marxist, a Trotskyist. I published large books and small articles on these and kindred subjects. I wrote and spoke. Like many others, I expected war, and during or after the war social revolution. In 1938 a lecture tour took me to the United States and I stayed there fifteen years. The war came. It did not bring soviets and proletarian power. Instead the bureaucratic-totalitarian monster grew and spread. As early as 1941 I had begun to question the premises of Trotskyism. It took nearly a decade of incessant labour and collaboration to break with it and reorganize my Marxist ideas to cope with the postwar world. That was a matter of doctrine, of history, of economics and politics. These pursuits I shared with collaborators, rivals, enemies and our public. We covered the ground thoroughly.

In my private mind, however, I was increasingly aware of large areas of human existence that my history and my politics did not seem to cover. What did men live by? What did they want? What did history show that they wanted? What exactly was art and what exactly culture? I believed that, more or less, I knew. Years afterwards I was to see my preoccupations formulated clearly if crudely in the pages of Old Solemnity itself, the Times Literary Supplement. I was to read:

…“For example, in an age of market research and public opinion polls what exactly do men—and women—want from work, money, life? Has any British political party ever conducted a sample enquiry, as a good manufacturer must do to design and sell his wares? Again, if by materialism is meant a dominant individual and social urge for material good things, it has never in history precluded deep spirituality, better arts and the fuller realization of human personality. A strong case could be made for the exact opposite.”

Better arts? What is better art? Better than what? To be investigated presumably by sample polls, organized by a political party, with spirituality taken in passing. I was travelling in a different direction.

A glance at the world showed that when common people were not a work, one thing they wanted was organized sports and games. They wanted them greedily, passionately. 217

 

What is most striking in James’s analysis of sports is the link, or least the synchronicity, he establishes between sports and popular democracy, first in ancient Greece and then, in the second half of the nineteenth century, when mass spectator sports and the emergence of the working-class movement moved to center stage simultaneously:

 

Organized games had been part and parcel of the civilization of ancient Greece. With the decline of that civilization they disappeared from Europe for some 1,500 years… More curious still to the enquiring eye, after this long absence they seemed all to have returned within about a decade of each other, in frantic haste… Golf was known to be ancient. The first annual tournament of the Open Championship was held only in 1860. The Football Association was founded only in 1863. It was in 1866 that the first athletic championship was held in England…In the United States the first all-professional baseball team was organized in 1869… 218

 

But, continues James,

 

in that very decade this same public was occupied with other organizations of a very different type, Disraeli’s Reform Bill, introducing popular democracy in England, was passed in 1865. In the same year the slave states were defeated in the American Civil War, to be followed immediately by the first modern organization of American labour. In 1864 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels founded the First Communist International. 219

 

But James’s Trotskyist comrades would have none of it.

 

The conjunction hit me as it would have hit few of the students of society and culture in the international organization to which I belonged. Trotsky had said that the workers were deflected from politics by sports. With my past I could simply not accept that. 220

 

What James did in Beyond a Boundary , in the most unpretentious fashion developed out of his experience with world literature, politics and cricket, was to cut though decades of the Marxist discussion of culture, most of which revolved around a debate between figures such as Lukács who saw the works of high bourgeois culture, up to the watershed of 1848, as bourgeois society’s legacy to the working class, or currents such as the Frankfurt School, which saw that legacy more in the modernist revolt against classical bourgeois culture, but which had in common with Lukács a belief, implicit or explicit, that socialism would involve the “raising” of the working masses to some cultural level set down by the bourgeois intelligentsia or the radical avant-garde 221 What distinguished James’s approach from that of all previous Marxists, who tended to view popular culture with a thinly-veiled Puritanical contempt, was his affirmation that phenomena such as sports were no mere useless diversion from “politics,” but on the contrary contained a vision of a new, higher rationality for the organization of society that superseded the capitalist antagonism between work and leisure. James may not have known it at the time, but he had reproduced Marx’s own fundamental idea of the same supersession:

 

Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness [ Naturbedürfdigkeit ] and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore no longer appears as labor, but as the full development of activity itself… 222

 

But the question is clearly not one of a juxtaposition of texts to determine whether or not James’s view is closer to the “real” Marx than those of other writers. What is at stake is a much vaster issue. In considering James’s view of sports, and popular culture generally, as the germ of a rationality beyond work for a higher organization of social life, one is immediately reminded of the scene of the first lowering of the boats in Moby Dick. The second mate Flask is too short to see the situation clearly and tries to elevate himself:

 

Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwhale to steady his way, swiftly stood aft, and then erecting himself volunteered his lofty shoulders for a pedestal. Good a mast-head as any, sir. Will you mount?…

Whereupon planting his feet firmly against two opposite planks of the boat, the gigantic negro, stooping a little, presented his flat palm to Flask’s foot, and then putting Flask’s hand on his hearse-plumed head…with one dexterous fling landed the little man high and dry on his shoulders…the sight of little Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious; for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed a snow flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider. 223

 

The “barbarous majesty” of Daggoo in this scene, as with that of Queequeg or Tashtego in others, makes it clear that Melville sees in their “work” the kind of grace of total activity which James later saw in the transformed “ne’er do wells” on the cricket field.

Sylvia Winter, in an essay entitled “In Quest of Matthew Bondsman: Some Cultural Notes on the Jamesian Journey” 224 (Matthew Bondsman being the “ne’er-do-well” who was transformed into a figure of self-mastery at bat in cricket), has attempted to generalize James’s views on culture in a way that gets at their general import (if James’s own import is not clear enough). Winter sees the real contribution of James as the development of an “imaginaire social” previously lacking in the Marxian tradition:

 

With the governing categories of the bourgeois polis reversed socially, aesthetically, the West Indian cricketeers kept the theoreticians of this technical rationality in the rightful place—as the mere secondary means to a Jamesian defined and popular end, the realization of the genus homo of the freeplay of faculties. 225

 

One can certainly concur with Winter that the ideology of Marxism developed out of Marx’s work is blind to the question of the “imaginaire social” as developed (to use her term) by James, and that figures such as Lukács, Mehring, to say nothing of lesser figures, could find substantial support for their defense of classicist aesthetics in the writings of Marx. 226 This is a complex issue far beyond the present essay. Nor is it a question of disputing Winter’s assessment of the “real Marx” by confronting quote with quote. In this writer’s opinion, the passages previously cited from Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire should establish beyond any doubt that, in his sensitivity to the uses of historical imagery in ideology and his ability to use it to his own effect, Marx had an awareness of the “imaginaire social” to the highest degree. Let us quote one additional passage to establish the meaning of this term:

 

Wonderful, indeed, was the change the Commune had wrought in Paris! No longer any trace of the meretricious Paris of the Second Empire! No longer was Paris the rendez-vous of British landlords, Irish absentees, American ex-slaveholders and shoddy men, Russian ex-serfowners, and Wallachian boyards. No more corpses at the morgue, no nocturnal burglaries, scarcely any robberies… “We,” said a member of the Commune, ”no longer hear of assassination, theft and personal assault; it seems indeed as if the police had dragged along with it to Versailles all its Conservative friends.” The cocottes had refound the scent of their protectors—the absconding men of family, religion and, above all, of property. In their stead, the real women of Paris showed again at the surface—heroic, noble, and devoted, like the women of antiquity. Working, thinking, fighting bleeding Paris—almost forgetful, in its incubation of a new society, of the cannibals at its gates—radiant in the enthusiasm of its historical initiative!

Opposed to this new world at Paris, behold the old world at Versailles—that assembly of all the ghouls of all defunct regimes, Legitimists and Orleanists, eager to feed upon the carcass of the nation—with a tail of antediluvian republicans, sanctioning, by their presence in the Assembly, the slaveholder’s rebellion, relying for the maintenance of their parliamentary republic upon the vanity of the senile mountebank at its head, and caricaturing 1789 by holding their ghastly meetings in the Jeu de Paume. 227

 

In this passage, worthy of Balzac 228 (the political view notwithstanding), Marx shows the “imaginaire social” to be the capacity to sensuously mediate general historical truths through appropriate concrete materializations of those truths in a fashion, which, in a few deft phrases, captures their essence.

It is, however, certainly true that the “scientific” Marx, which emerged through a long historical process of appropriation which can hardly be described here, was the Marx of a (poorly understood) Capital , and in reality, since very few Marxists ever mastered that work, of a more general “economic interpretation of history.” While the “texts” show beyond any doubt that the perspective of the overcoming of work through an all-sided activity (as in the passage from the Grundrisse cited above), or the famous “Trinity” passage at the end of Vol. III of Capital ) was at the center of Marx’s problematic from beginning to end, a century of “Marxism” 229 transformed the impact of his work into a critique of “bourgeois economics” (as if, for Marx, there were any other kind) in which the “imaginaire social” that shines through in the Eighteenth Brumaire , The Civil Wars in France or the historical passages in Vol. I of Capital fell away completely, culminating perhaps in the sclerotic “scientific” Marx portrayed by an Althusser. 230 The impact of Marx was further complicated by the debate on culture carried on by several generations of intellectuals in terms foreign to, and in this writer’s opinion, beneath the level of Marx’s project of the “full development of activity itself.” There can be no question that through the classical humanist tradition as defended by Lukács, and one arguably traceable to Marx’s scattered writings on art and literature, a separate aesthetic external to the project of all-sided activity was at the center of the Marxian discussion until quite recently. Only the definitive demise of high bourgeois culture and of the modernist coda, and consequently of the desire of pro-working class artists and intellectuals—the Ishmaels—to see their creations as somehow directly revolutionary, has made possible an approach to culture like that of James and more in keeping with some of Marx’s less developed or implicit views. This shift can be defined succinctly as the transformation of the question of culture from an aesthetic to an anthropological viewpoint.

And this anthropological viewpoint leads directly back to the decomposition of the Napoleonic myth, as analyzed by Marx and Melville in strikingly similar terms. For if it is correct that the Napoleonic myth is a secular reproduction of the earlier myth of “cosmic kingship,” the “Pharaoh with the feet of clay” in a “de-cosmized” society, then by implication the aesthetic consciousness of the literary “moi absolu” of nineteenth-century romanticism, of the Ishmaels or the Parisian dandy, 231 is also such a reproduction. In what sense? Readers of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black will recall the scenes, referred to earlier, in which Julien Sorel fondles the cameo of Napoleon he always carries with him, and judges his actions in terms of this ultimate ideal (and image) of unitary action. They will also recall Stendhal’s repeated references to the great, and lost, traditions of aristocratic action which dominate the self-conception of Mathilde de la Mole. It would again lead far afield to multiply examples from nineteenth-century literature, but the point is this: what danced in the fantasy life of the Parisian romantic just before or often 1848, or in a different way (as has been argued) for the New England Transcendentalist, was a “memory” of a life intensely and collectively lived, perhaps best captured for Western traditions by the pageantry of the Renaissance urban festival. 232 What had happened to those traditions? As with the myth of the cosmic king, the unitary social “play” of Renaissance pageantry had been subjugated to the new rationality of work which took hold of Western capitalist societies in the course of the sixteenth and above all seventeenth centuries (a rationality of which the Calvinists who settled in New England constituted the nec plus ultra) . In “politics” as in “aesthetics,” what had previously been lived had retreated into a pale mythical flicker, in homunculus Napoleons in politics and in a separated and increasingly “inward” romantic unhappy consciousness, two phenomena which, if the previous analysis is correct, are hardly unrelated. Over and against these two phenomena of the retreat of “cosmic kingship” from political power, i.e., the transformation of the aura of power into the pseudo-mythic, and the simultaneous retreat of the “cosmic” (Rabelaisian) dimension from the social realm generally, there arose the “ugly revolution”: the uprising of the working class against the order that excluded it. For well over a century after 1848, the “moi absolu” of the Napoleonic variety, in the forms of fascist, Stalinist and Third World Bonapartist states, continued to intrude upon Western political reality and heavily influenced the working-class movement itself through the common identification of the latter two types of regimes as “socialism.” Simultaneously, most of the aesthetically inclined intelligentsia developed the “moi absolu” through artistic forms external to the general social activity of the proletariat. Thus the “imaginaire social” developed in bits and pieces by Marx, as well as the “all-sided development of activity” at the center of his perspective receded before the ideologization of his work by “national development” regimes closer to the Prussian prototype than to socialism, and by intellectuals glorifying such regimes, much in the “Ahab-Ishmael” vein.

Why, after the shattering of the “moi absolu” in both Europe and the United States in 1848, did the “modernist” avant-garde appear, for the subsequent four decades, only in France? The response to this question must be two-fold: first, because France was the country par excellence of the Napoleonic myth, and second, and related, a peculiarity of capitalist development in France after 1850. France was always a distant second to England in the development of modern industrial capitalism, but under Louis Napoleon’s Second Empire (1852-1870) it began to close that gap. In particular, Paris in the Second Empire was at the vanguard of one development of the emergent political economy, that of mass consumer goods and of new methods of marketing them to an expanding middle class, namely the department stores such as the Samaratine and the Bon Marché which appeared there in the 1850s. 233 In no other city of the world—certainly not in the “Manhattoes” described by Ishmael in the opening passage of Moby Dick —did the aesthetic consciousness of the “moi absolu” confront this new capitalist consumption so directly as in the Paris governed by none other than the pseudo-myth in power, Louis Napoleon. It is precisely in this environment, as many writers, led by the Frankfurt School critic Walter Benjamin, 234 have pointed out, that the “modernist” aesthetic consciousness evolved in a critique of the new consumerist “imaginaire social” coming into existence. But less noticed by most of this criticism is the bridge between the “aesthetic” and “anthropological” dimension of culture that was being thrown down in such a development. The missing link in the equation that leads to an “anthropological” appreciation of culture 235 from the works of Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, or Verlaine is that of the fetishism of commodities as materialized by the new consumerism. 236 When the aestheticized “moi absolu” of midcentury romanticism confronted the fetishism embodied in the new consumer commodities, culture implicitly or explicitly crossed the threshold from the separate aesthetic sphere of the “arts” to the general social sphere of the “totality of social life,” and therefore to the general “imaginaire social” in retreat since the end of the Renaissance.

But this consciousness was separated from everything that “1848” had introduced to modern consciousness: the proletariat, the new industrial technology, and the non-Western world. As the last mirage of “cosmic kingship,” it was no closer to the “re-cosmization” of social life than Ishmael was to Queequeg. As expressed in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, formulated in 1850, to which its detachment from nature explicitly led (cf. Section VI) it could not be farther from a “cosmic imagination.” As a view that implicitly accepted the new, consumer-based “neoclassical” economics then coming into existence in response to both the rise of the working-class movement and to the new consumerism, it certainly never left the terrain of bourgeois ideology. 237 This aestheticized “moi absolu” was at antipodes from the unitary “re-cosmization” of society, nature and “aesthetics” symbolized by “Queequeg.” Its fragmented quality made it incapable of fully grasping— indeed, it ultimately reproduced — the consequences of the subjugation of reality by the categories of work and subsequent separations derived therefrom. But above all, in France, the enmeshing of this consciousness with the Napoleonic myth, even if to reject it, never broke out of the legacy of the “Holy Roman Empire” interposed as a “memory screen” for bourgeois or “bourgeois anti-bourgeois” consciousness in Europe. It could never arrive at the “antemosaic” grasp of the cosmos expressed by Melville. 238 To the extent that it tried to reject the Napoleonic myth, it could only be in the Orientalism of Baudelaire or Flaubert, or the primitivism of Loti or later Gauguin, two options that, as shall be shown in a moment, Melville had already rejected in Moby Dick .

 

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

 

I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.

II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who cannot catch it.

…

What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose Fish.

Herman Melville

Moby Dick

 

The unity of bourgeois consciousness was shattered in Europe in 1848 when it became clear that class war was inevitable. The unity of bourgeois consciousness was shattered in the United States in 1848 when it became clear that a confrontation over the issue of slavery was inevitable. 1848 in Europe shattered the Third Estate; 1848 in the United States shattered Jeffersonian-Jacksonian democracy. When one has understood the difference between the two, one understands the difference between a polity that took its historical imagery from the myth of the Holy Roman Empire and one taking that imagery from the Old Testament.

In order to get at this American specificity, however, it is first of all necessary to locate the socio-economic and political conjuncture of the American 1848 within the international conjuncture. Only then can one understand the fate of the Napoleonic myth in the United States.

The most important context for politics as the North Atlantic political economy approached midcentury was the imminence of a great expansion of the world market, as the latter was hailed in the 1848 Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels. Industrial capitalism in the 1840s existed essentially in England, the northeastern United States, and in the continental zone demarcated by Belgium, northern France and scattered developments in western Germany (which, it must be remembered, did not yet even exist as a political entity). A Kondratieff approach to the international business cycle would describe the period from 1820 to 1848 as a “low tonic” period, 239 with “international” (i.e., Anglo-American and French) commercial crises interrupting expansion in the contractions of 1819, 1827 and, worst of, all, 1837. The immediate and imposing result of the first phase of the Jacksonian era (1828-1836) was the deep, persistent depression beginning in 1837 following the demise of the Second Bank of the United States, and which lasted into 1843. In Europe, a new downturn began in 1846-47, along with the Irish potato famine, and created an ominous backdrop to the imminent 1848 revolutions, as reflected in Tocqueville’s famous 1848 speech predicting the uprising that occurred a month later.

Some of the international signs of the expansion of the formal world market into actual economic penetration of new zones, 240 of which American expansion into the West and Southwest was a part, to be greatly accelerated after the discovery of gold in California in 1849. On the level of communications and transportation, the introduction of the telegraph and the railroad boom of the 1840s were another dimension of this acceleration.

The revolutions and counter-revolutions in Europe in 1848-50 occurred on the eve of the long “high tonic” boom which historian Eric Hobsbawm has called simply the “age of capital” which lasted, despite sharp contractions in 1857-58 and 1866, and the world cotton crisis provoked by the US Civil War, until the world depression of 1873. In the course of that boom, the foundations were laid for the “consolidation of the internal market” of ascendant powers outside the “Anglo-French zone,” 241 expressed most clearly in the unification of Italy (1860), the American Civil War (1860-65), the Russian emancipation of the serfs (1861), the Meiji Restoration in Japan (1868) and the unification of Germany (1862-66-70). Thus both the US territorial expansion of the 1840s, brought to a head by the 1846 defeat of Mexico, and the domestic crisis of the 1850s leading to civil war, can be fruitfully located in a general expansion of the capitalist world market and of internal reorganization of major powers, or future major powers, to meet the challenge of English industrial supremacy. Indeed, from 1850 to 1873, England fell from unchallenged hegemony to primus inter pares status among industrial powers.

Thus the cumulative crises which came to a head in Europe in 1848, and which first acquired their ominous contours in the United States in the same year, were crises linked to the bursting of the constraints for an imminent extensive and intensive expansion of world capital accumulation. And primary among these constraints were various pre-capitalist social relations in agriculture.

What immediately strikes the observer as the specificity of the United States in this process, in contrast to continental Europe, is the absence of a bureaucratic state as a permanent fomenting force in this expansion. It is certainly true that, in the 1860-65 Civil War and subsequent postwar reconstruction, Northern capitalism triumphed over the Southern slave economy through the agency of the state, 242 just as it is true, against any “laissez-faire” interpretation of nineteenth-century American economic history, that the state was always central for economic development through tariff policy, the two Banks of the United States, Indian removal, land acquisition for infrastructure (e.g., canals) and railroads, and through land policy in the new territories. But, outside the special case of the South, the tasks of US “modernization” did not include the top-down bursting of the fetters of pre-capitalist social relations on economic development or in the constitution of the bare rudiments of a “civil society” as occurred in Prussia or in Russia. 243 This singularity of US social development permitted the United States, alone of the ascendant powers that underwent internal reorganization in the 1860s, 244 to pass into the phase of mature capital accumulation with the “Tudor polity” still intact. This singularity is the “material basis” of the extreme fragility of the “Napoleonic myth” in American, in contrast to European history. It is, therefore, when combined with the “poetry of the past” taken from the Old Testament, the basis for the direct recourse to nature mysticism, primitivism and Orientalism, in contrast to historical nostalgia, that characterized the American “Vormärz” of the 1840-48 period, the backdrop against which Melville wrote Moby Dick .

There was of course a “statist” development in early (and subsequent) American history, originating with Alexander Hamilton’s 1790 Report on Manufacturers , 245 extending through the national banks of the 1816-1836 period and revitalized to some extent by the Whigs in the 1840s. 246 But this current had been driven from power in 1828 by the Jacksonian extension of Jeffersonian Federalism, 247 and the politics of the 1830s were dominated by a showdown over the Second Bank of the United States.

The recovery from the 1837-43 depression and the 1846 defeat of Mexico shifted the focus of US domestic politics from the economic battles of the 1830s to the sectionalist question which dominated the next three decades, and thereby broke apart the Jacksonian alliance of Northern urban laborers, Southern slavocracy and Western “yeomanry.” 248 It was this incipient realignment that enabled Republicans to take substantial parts of Northern labor away from the Democrats in the 1850s 249 and to eclipse the Whigs as the party of capitalist development after the Van Buren presidency. The success of the Republicans in realigning Northern labor with Western “free soilers” in the crisis of the 1850s ended the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition’s viability as a contending force for national power until it resurfaced in the late-nineteenth-century agrarian crisis as Populism, to again be defeated by a Republican appeal to Northern labor, in the 1890s.

From the “Melvillian” viewpoint established thus far, what is central to the argument is three-fold. First, the anomaly of American politics in the 1828-1860 period relative to Europe. A fundamental “democratization” of politics occurred in the United States in the 1820s “anti-Masonic” and other movements that culminated in Jackson’s triumph in 1828. 250 This was merely the first phase of a general level of political mobilization that continued through the Civil War and beyond, unlike anything known in Europe at the time. Not only did the United States attain universal (white) male suffrage long before any European country, but the first working-class political party was founded in the United States in the 1830s. Thus, in contrast to Europe, the enlistment of broad masses of people in political life did not assume the form of independent working-class political action, and did not have to invoke “socialism” to gain access to political institutions. The most “Bonapartist” figure in nineteenth-century American politics, Jackson, came to power at the head of an anti-centralist movement. This democratization through mass mobilization, when taken over by the Republican Party in the 1850s, still could speak to a “yeoman” consciousness in broad layers of the American population with its “free land, free labor” ideology based on the palpable reality of the easy availability of land. 251 This second mass mobilization of Northern urban labor for the final triumph of capitalism was, once again, not linked to a battle for political power in the name of socialism, but to a political party of Northern industrial capital with a plausible “yeoman farmer” critique of industrial wage-labor. 252 The United States by the 1850s had attained a level of mass participation in politics 253 that Europe achieved only in the 1890s, and in some countries only through the 1914-1945 crisis and its aftermath.

The significance of these realities, if this analysis is correct, is the implication that the US Civil War was not, as Barrington Moore has called it, 254 the “last capitalist revolution,” but merely the last capitalist revolution that openly spoke the language of capitalism. What the mass democratic mobilizations in the United States and in Europe have in common, despite their temporal discontinuity, is a social content involving the destruction of pre-capitalist social relations, above all in agriculture 255 : the US Civil War, and the more protracted European crisis of 1914-1945. 256 In the European case, the mobilization of labor, under the rubric of “socialism,” for this completion of the bourgeois revolution acquired a very statist and very Bonapartist face. In France, the repressive Second Empire regime, which had come to power on the defeat of the working class, nonetheless found an important echo of working-class support based on the Napoleonic legend. 257 In Germany, the Lassalle-Bismarck collaboration of the early 1860s was at the origins of the Social Democratic welfare state. 258 This statism achieved in Russian Stalinism possibly the nec plus ultra of the continental “geschlossener Handelstaat” cited earlier, 259 now speaking a “Marxist” language. This is the meaning of the Bonapartist myth, as it has been analyzed through Moby Dick , in relation to the respective trajectories of the “marginal men” of the 1840s.

As argued earlier, the aestheticized bourgeois ego, the “moi absolu” of French and above all German romanticism, never acquired a statist vocation in the United States, and it can now be further asserted, for the reasons stated above, that it had no role to play in the emancipation of civil society from pre-capitalist constraints. In Europe, on the other hand, through the dandy Lassalle or the Jacobin strain in Russian Populism, 260 the “moi absolu” had a heady statist future.

As the final piece in the “Melvillian” prophecy of American working-class history, it is necessary to note the subterranean relationship between the situation of white and black labor, with a mutation in conditions of one being simultaneous with a mutation in the conditions of the other. In 1846-48, the battle of the free vs. slave character of the newly opened Western territories began the process that pulled parts of the Northern working class from the Democratic to the Republican Party. In the Civil War, the Northern working class was mobilized by the Republican party in no small part by the “free soil” ideology, wherein white and black labor could at some level envision some form of land ownership after emancipation. In the postwar period, the first major “class against class” confrontation in US history occurred in 1877, the year of the end of Reconstruction in the South. Finally, for good measure, it might be noted that the second major “class against class” crisis in the United States, in 1893-94, occurred just as black labor’s migration to the industrial north was beginning, in part precisely for use against the combative white, Northern European, American-born workers whom Northern capitalists wanted to recycle out of industry with cheap black and immigrant labor.

Thus, to take up again the themes developed earlier, it might be concluded that the failure to date of “socialism” in the United States, at some abstract but still significant level, reduces itself to the failure of the Napoleonic myth to implant itself in the working class, 261 and hence the failure of “Ahabs” and “Ishmaels” to make the inroads there that they have made in European socialism. But if this analysis is correct, that “socialism” was not socialism, but rather a recapitulation of a basic democratic mobilization that had triumphed in the United States decades before in the same task: eliminating pre-capitalist obstacles to capitalist development. The lack of the Holy Roman Empire as a “memory screen” for American literature expressed the lack of a feudal past to combat, and hence the absence of the basis for the constitution of a statist Napoleonic myth or reality in politics. 262 Conversely, the same social situation that drove literature toward nature mysticism, primitivism and Orientalism propelled white labor to adopt a “yeoman” ideology of individualistic mobility and for most of its history to renounce the realization of the radical implications of its subterranean link to the “Queequegs,” the black proletariat. Such a perspective, today as in 1851, remains the “uncompleted Cologne cathedral” of American history.

 

Ch. VI. Melville and the Myth

 

There was no Ossian, so one had to be invented. This invented Ossian was cut to measure out of the poetic presuppositions of an unpoetic age and affected everyone who desired to experience poetry. In Western European literary, political and social history this desire was epoch-making, since from it developed not only a Romantic literature but also an ideal of the classless national state, an organic conception of culture, and hence a foundation for the radical movements of the nineteenth century.

R.T. Clark

Herder: His Life and Thought 263

 

That Melville, at the time he wrote Moby Dick , was intimately familiar with a vast range of world mythology is no mystery; the most casual reading of the book suffices to demonstrate it. Clearly Melville’s stay in the Marquesas in 1844-45 was decisive in the awakening of this lifelong interest; an ethnologist specialized in Polynesian mythology who met Melville by chance late in the author’s life was astounded by his knowledge of the subject. H. Bruce Franklin has also established Melville’s immersion in virtually all material available on the subject of comparative mythology by midcentury after his return from the Marquesas. 264

It is necessary, however, to situate the appearance of a figure like Melville in a broader historical movement of sensibilities and ideas. To do so, it is necessary to sketch the history of what in the title of this section will be called not “myth” but the myth. 265

Since the 1930s, figures such as Georges Dumezil have uncovered a remarkable coherence of myth within the Indo-European cultural sphere, and in world mythology generally. Dumezil’s work on Indo-Iranian, Greek, Roman and Scandinavian mythology 266 have amply confirmed the quip that “the first half of the nineteenth century discovered that all of modern English and French literature derived from German and Scandinavian folk-tales. The second half of the nineteenth century discovered that all German and Scandinavian folk tales were derived from Indian mythology.” 267 Another major figure of nineteenth-century comparative mythology, when asked what the greatest achievement of his field had been, wrote simply: “Shiva=Jahwe=Jupiter=Jove.” 268 The French writer Edouard Schuré, writing in 1918, described this nineteenth-century evolution as follows:

 

A hundred years ago, the West had already begun to see two colossi rising up behind the Acropolis and Mount Sinai, and they have only loomed larger since. The first was the Hindu pagoda, which seemed to emerge slowly from an inextricable virgin forest of poetry…Then came the Egyptian pyramids, and right next to them, the immemorial Sphinx…Anyone who today reflects on the origins of science, religion or art no longer stops with Athens or Jerusalem, but takes the road to India or Egypt… 269

 

That Melville was moving along similar lines of inquiry is quite evident from his references to Sir William Jones and Champollion in the passage previously cited about “the decipherment of the face of everyman.” The discovery of the Indo-European character of Sanskrit in 1780 and further work on Sanskrit by the Schlegels and later Herder from 1780 onward was not only a tremendous breakthrough for Western thought and the founding chapter of modern linguistics 270 ; it was a central aspect of European and particularly German romanticism, later rebounding onto the Orientalism of the American Transcendentalists. 271 But this study has referred to these developments as constitutive of “the” myth. What is meant by such an “essentialist” formulation is that the rise of comparative mythology and related fields such as linguistics 272 were not merely intellectual exercises but stages in the decomposition of the unitary myth of Christianity and aspects of a general cultural effort to “reconstitute the myth,” 273 just as Napoleon represented a last Ersatz recomposition of mythic unity before being shattered into the fragments of late-nineteenth-century Bonapartist buffoons such as his nephew. Both before and after the French Revolution, the ability of Western societies to “see” other societies and cultures was determined more by their own internal dynamics than by the raw material thrown up by the expanding circles of contact after the mid-fifteenth century. It was successive transformations of the socio-epistemological “lenses” of the West that mark the successive phases of Western appropriation of the non-Western world. But a brief perusal of the history of this process makes it plain that, particularly after the mid-eighteenth century, Westerners were seeking through knowledge of non-Western societies to fill the void left by the desiccation of the Christian myth. As shall be seen in a moment, the “myth of the cosmic king” is the myth, and different cultural responses to its demise reveal its ongoing power in the aspects of non-Western cultures that were most sought out. Melville’s own work constitutes a qualitative development in this process, even if its actual influence was quite modest.

For the Western society poised on the threshold of its rapid rise to world hegemony in the mid-fifteenth century, at the time of the first voyages of discovery, the world essentially consisted of the three “Abrahamic” faiths Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The vast majority of Europeans who arrived in Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas and later in Oceania between 1460 and 1650, like the vast majority of those who reflected upon this development, saw the peoples encountered in these new worlds in terms of the same dichotomy that had animated the Crusades in the high Middle Ages: Christian and heathen. 274 Naturally the steady stream of travel accounts, early ethnographies, missionary reports of other religions and myths, as well as the new vistas of flora and fauna 275 opened up by this period constantly reverberated on schisms and debates already underway within the “Christian” paradigm. But it was the rare remarkable figure such as Las Casas who, in the sixteenth century, already asserted the fundamental humanity of the newly encountered peoples, particularly those found in the so-called “state of nature.”

Since the thirteenth century, Europe had received fantastic reports from the silk route trade of the civilization of Asia, and it had earlier acquired a knowledge of Islam through the Crusades, as well as through the steadily-increasing flow of manuscripts coming from Islamic Spain after the eleventh century. Reports such as Marco Polo’s description of the splendor of China were received with a mixture of awe and disbelief, but blended into a kind of fantastic realm of exoticism in which the fundamental notion of “civilization” was never called into question; Christian missionaries entered into a dialogue with the dignitaries of Chinese culture from the thirteenth century onward. But little or nothing in Western experience in the declining Middle Ages or early Renaissance prepared it for the encounter with the so-called primitive, “antemosaic” peoples of Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas or Oceania. It was simultaneously an encounter with the Adamic myth in vivo, and a repellant spectacle of the most craven backwardness, obvious confirmation of what the absence of Christianity signified in moral depravity. 276

As early as the mid-sixteenth century, 277 the elements were present for two later Western responses to the encounter with the non-Western world, that of Orientalism and that of primitivism . Both, taken by themselves, appear as manifestations of what James Baird (writing of primitivism) has called “cultural failure.” 278 Both grew out of “archetypal” aspects of Western culture itself, namely the myth of the cosmic king or Primordial Man, the anthropocosmos, a myth containing within itself both the “Oriental” discussion discussed above and the Adamic myth. Both Orientalism and primitivism clearly had a major impact on Melville. But obviously they are not timeless categories; they advance and recede within broader movements of society and culture. In the section on the cosmic king, it was mentioned that, around 180 ad , Roman society was overwhelmed by a wave of “Egypto-Orientalism” that reached the highest levels of the society and essentially marked the end of the Greco-Roman classical ideal. Again in the era of the Renaissance, when the medieval Christian myth had seriously decomposed, a second “Egyptian” wave captured the imagination of the West, in figures such as Pico della Mirandola and Marcilio Ficino of the Florentine Academy, to say nothing of the “Egyptian” Giordano Bruno. 279 But with the consolidation of the absolutist state in the mid-seventeenth century, this wave of neo-Platonic, Hermetic and Kabbalistic “Orientalism” began to be marginalized by the ideology of the new science, (as expressed in the shift from Newton to Newtonianism as propagandized by Voltaire) or at the very least transformed into the ideologies of the secret societies. 280 This new consolidation of a unitary view which caused the “Oriental” shadow of Western culture to recede, 281 the successor to Greco-Roman classicism and medieval Christianity, was the semi-secular humanism of the late Baroque and Enlightenment period, inseparable from the late sixteenth and seventeenth century revolution in astronomy and physics. 282

Because the focus here is on the relationship of cosmos and mythos, mention must be made of the impact of the Copernican and Newtonian revolutions on the “de-cosmization” of the West. 283 It is more readily conceded today than it was 75 years ago that the scientific revolution associated with Kepler and Newton grew directly out of the neo-Platonic and Hermetic currents of the Renaissance. 284 Newton to the end of his life practiced alchemy with the greatest passion (indeed, he wrote much more about alchemy than about physics) and saw his work in physics as a small part in a much larger project to confirm the truth of the Old Testament. 285 Yet already in the polemic between Newton and Leibniz 286 it is evident that the fundamental mechanism of Newton’s physics, whatever the intentions of Newton himself, pointed to a result totally foreign to the neo-Platonic “cosmobiological” view of Ficino, Kepler, Bruno or Paracelsus. With Newton and Descartes, the universe was distanced into a mechanical representation totally separated from imagination; life, in a way unthinkable to a Kepler, became contingent in the universe. 287 With the popularization of the atomistic-mechanistic substratum of Newton, as with the general worldview of Bacon, Locke, and Hobbes, 288 the Western view of nature had been radically “de-cosmized.” In a universe of uniform space and time, in a heliocentric solar system and an astronomy that revealed the enormous distances of the planets and stars and thus the insignificance of the earth, life had been marginalized far more radically than at any time during the repression of the “Egypto-Oriental” underside of Western culture during the periods of Greco-Roman classical and medieval Christian dominance, and the new secular humanist scientific ideology was underwritten by remarkable successes in explanation which the earlier “paradigms” never achieved. Further, as this ideology was appropriated by the Enlightened-absolutist state, 289 the new rationalization (or what today would be called “modernization”) of nature was extended to all domains of social life. Without by any means accepting the overall framework which a writer like Foucault has brought to bear on these processes for the so-called “age classique,” 290 one can agree with him that the ideology of Man, the underlying “episteme” of secular Baroque-Enlightenment humanism, was a creation of the absolutist state, an Ersatz mythical substitute for Christianity. As it developed in the court culture of Versailles in the era of the “Sun King” Louis XIV, it was the last possible coherence of the Western myth of the cosmic king, a defensive last-ditch reconstitution of the myth, but one already rent with irreversible fissures. 291 It was within this post-1650, semi-secularized and recomposed ideology that an “unhappy consciousness” could first appear, and begin to seek, outside the Western paradigm, in Oriental and primitive motifs, a substitute for “something missing” within the dominant culture of the West.

The appearance of such an “unhappy consciousness” within a culture is of course nothing peculiar to the modern West. Boas showed in his major studies of antiquity and the Middle Ages how a “primitivism” has appeared in many different cultures in periods of desiccation and decline, 292 a kind of “nostalgie de la boue.” And it has already been argued that the actual sources of Western culture in Egypt and the ancient Near East created a substratum of “Orientalism” that recurs in periods of Western cultural breakdown. But if anything sets off the modern Western “unhappy consciousness” from that of earlier periods, it must be the radical discontinuity with the earlier unitary myth represented by the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, and the establishment, simultaneously, of a Western world hegemony that for more than three centuries created the virtually unshakeable impression that Western and world history were one and the same.

With the “de-cosmization” of the West in the mid-seventeenth century, 293 the appearance of the “unhappy consciousness” was not long in coming. If its first articulate expression was Pascal, 294 a series of figures of the European Frühromantik and Rousseau 295 open this space far wider. 296 With Rousseau’s critique of the artifices of civilization, and the chinoiserie of the late eighteenth century, both primitivism and Orientalism had moved into the vacuum opened up by the seventeenth century. But neither Rousseau nor the French admirers of the emperors of Persia or China 297 made any fundamental departure from the more broadly held and suprahistorical view of “Man.” The decisive threshold was crossed only when the Enlightenment view of Man was dissolved by the great revalorization of myth, folk culture and history associated with Vico and above all the German Sturm und Drang after 1760. 298

With the appearance of Sturm und Drang, this study arrives at the threshold of the very German Idealist philosophy, culminating in the work of Schelling, Fichte and Hegel, which was at the source of Transcendentalism, through German philosophical and literary influences in the United States after 1815. But if the preceding analysis is correct, this German development from 1760 to 1830-32 (the years of the symbolic deaths, in quick succession, of Goethe, Beethoven and Hegel), and indeed on to Marx has a “universal” quality about it. For Germany was the first “underdeveloped” country, relative to the more advanced civil societies of England and France, and the first country that essentially “caught up” with, and then surpassed, England and France through a state-sponsored “revolution from above.” 299 Further, in carrying out that revolution, Prussia and the German states forged the first “national” ideology as a response to, and a critique of, the allegedly abstract cosmopolitanism of the French Enlightenment, 300 exemplified above all in a figure like Herder. In throwing over the thin cosmopolitan rationality of the French Enlightenment and asserting the primacy of a national identity created through history , in which myth, folklore and the primitive were central moments, German culture produced a legacy that again and again was taken over by developing nations seeking a state-sponsored national self-assertion. 301

What was significant above all in German cultural development from 1760 to 1830 (to say nothing of the appearance in 1840-1848 of Marxism) was this interaction with France and French culture. Modern German thought arose as a critique of the French Enlightenment; after 1789-1793, it was an ongoing autopsy of the French Revolution. 302

As Marx put it:

 

Even the negation of our political present is already a dusty fact in the historical lumber room of modern nations. If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs. If I negate German conditions of 1843, I am hardly, according to French chronology, in the year 1789…We have in point of fact shared in the restorations of the modern nations without sharing in their revolutions…Led by our shepherds, we found ourselves in the company of freedom only once, on the day of its burial . 303

 

From the recoil of Schelling, Hegel and Hölderlin at the Jacobin Terror, to the mystique of Napoleon, to the period of glaciation that set in with the Restoration in 1815, Germany, to once again quote Marx, “carried out in thought what other peoples carried out in practice.” In the terms developed earlier in this study, German thought was founded on a dialogue with the shattered myth of the cosmic king (regicide) and the reconstitution of the pseudo-sacred myth (Napoleon). As elaborated above, the aestheticized bourgeois ego or “moi absolu,” the “Werther” unhappy consciousness that made Napoleon cry and provoked suicides all over Europe and that was generalized internationally by romanticism in the 1815-1840 period, was the last flicker of the myth, 304 the myth of the cosmic king, and not accidentally was linked almost everywhere to a cult of Napoleon.

Thus when the historical conjuncture of the 1840s drove Melville to his critique of the “transcendental divines,” as it drove Marx to a critique of Hegel and the Young Hegelians, it is not altogether surprising that their respective solutions to the end of the “moi absolu,” the Napoleonic myth of romanticism, spilled into the realm of collective praxis 305 and culminated, for Melville, in “Queequeg,” for Marx “primitive communism,” “returned on a higher level.” Although each used different language to express it, both of them located the supersession of the “cosmic king” and his secular residues in an all-sided critique, both of them located the supersession of the “cosmic king” and his secular residues in an all-sided activity in which antinomies of work and leisure, aesthetics and utility would be superseded in a new, higher unity that echoed the unity of primitive cultures. And the rediscovery of the “primitive” by Herder and Vico, at the origins of the tradition Melville and Marx both annexed and went beyond, 306 was an indispensable moment in the critique and practical supersession of “the” myth.

 

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

 

Savage though he was…his countenance had something in it which was by no means disagreeable…You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tatooings, I thought I saw the traces of a simple, honest heart; and in his large, deep eyes, fiery blank and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand devils…He looked like a man who had never cringed and who had never had a creditor…certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of George Washington’s head…Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.

Moby Dick

 

[S]eated like Ontario Indians on the gunwhales of the boats, we swiftly but silently paddled along…

Moby Dick

 

In the Old Testament, in the ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian origins of the West, and in the myth of the cosmic or primordial man found in the great world religions, Adamic man or Adam Kadmon 307 (the First Man of Jewish mysticism) there are already contained, in germ, the two major manifestations of “cultural failure,” Orientalism and primitivism, that periodically erupt in crises in the West, as they erupted in late antiquity, in the Renaissance, or as they have recurred periodically in cycles of cultural crisis since the late eighteenth century. This study has argued that the “Old Testament” imagery that characterized the American imagination, in contrast with the “Holy Roman Empire” imagery that dominated European memory, pushed New England in the direction of nature mysticism and Orientalism, and to a lesser extent primitivism, 308 whereas European romanticism drew its imagination from symbols associated with feudalism. (Goethe, in his poem “Amerika, Du hast es besser,” considered this absence of an historical landscape of decomposed castles to be a positive virtue of America.) Both the European and American romanticism of the 1840s appear as a last phase of an “unhappy consciousness” in its lyrical state, and its exclusion from the collective world of work as the key to its search, in a mystified view of nature and in temporal or geographical exoticism, for an escape from the barrenness of the isolated ego. The following section will attempt to show that Melville’s Moby Dick is a polemic with this sensibility.

Anyone familiar with Moby Dick will immediately recognize the foremost dramatization of the theme of “Orientalism” in the figure of Fedallah, the “Parsee” and “fire worshipper” who heads the shadowy special crew that Ahab slipped aboard the Pequod to man his own whaleboat, and who is portrayed as Ahab’s shadow.

 

But one cannot sustain an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent—those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of the earth’s primal generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct recollection, and all men his descendents… 309

 

But no description of Fedallah captures Melville’s conception of him as the nocturnal shadow of Ahab’s mad quest like the following:

 

On such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For of these moonlight nights, it was his wont to mount the main mast-head, and stand a lookout there, with the same precision as if it had been by day. And yet, though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman in a hundred would venture a lowering for them. You may think with what emotion, then, the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft at such unusual hours; his turban and the moon, companions in one sky. But when, after spending his uniform interval there for several successive nights without uttering a single sound; when, after all this silence, his unearthly voice was heard announcing that silvery, moon-lit jet, every reclining mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had lighted in the rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. “There she blows!” 310

 

And finally:

 

Meanwhile, Fedallah was calmly eyeing the right whale’s head, and ever and anon glancing from the deep wrinkles there to the lines in his own hand. And Ahab chanced so to stand, that the Parsees occupied his shadow; while, if the Parsee’s shadow was there at all it seemed only to blend with, and lengthen Ahab’s. 311

 

The above passages show once again the themes developed earlier: if the “modern standers of mast-heads” are nothing but “Louis Philippe, Louis Blanc or Louis Devil,” Fedallah is counterposed as the Oriental night shadow of such barrenness of the pseudo-mythical; after developing the theme of the “deciphering of everyman’s face,” Melville shows Fedallah applying palmistry to the face of the whale. At every turn, he is the re-mythification of a demythified world, the “mauvais côté” or bad underside of the more “mainstream” and Western madness of Ahab. He is the Oriental shadow of the cosmic king described earlier. It is Fedallah who tells Ahab of the improbable circumstances in which Ahab will perish, circumstances that materialize in the final destruction of the Pequod; it is Fedallah who appears, roped to the side of Moby Dick, in the final fight with the whale. He is the personification of the “dark Hindoo side” of nature as Ahab sees it, 312 the same Ahab who is elsewhere described as sequestered in his cabin in “Grand Lama”-like exclusiveness. Melville did not answer the Orientalism of Emerson and Thoreau with philosophical arguments, but with passages like this:

 

But did you deeply scan him in his more secret confidential hours; when he thought no glance but one was on him, then you would have seen that even as Ahab’s eyes awed the crew’s, the inscrutable Parsee’s glance awed his; or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times affected it. 313

 

One is reminded of Nietzsche’s prediction in The Will to Power that a “new Buddhism” would be the final stage of nihilism in the West. Conscious or not of the myth of the cosmic king (and there seems every reason to believe he was conscious of it) Melville created in the character of Fedallah a polemic with Transcendentalist Orientalism without peer. Just as in the late Roman Empire with the appearance of “sol invictus” symbolism, the final degenerate stage of Ahab’s Calvinism would call forth its Oriental shadow as a pseudo-alternative, but one stilled totally trapped in the “moi absolu.”

Fedallah and his special crew first appear in Ishmael’s glimpse of shadowy figures boarding the Pequod in the fog on the morning of its departure, whom he initially mistakes for a mirage. They appear on deck for the first time only for the first lowering of the whaleboats. But they are far from the sole “Oriental” presence in Moby Dick . Melville’s use of world mythology invariably includes extensive commentary on Egyptian, ancient Near Eastern and Indian mythologies of the whale. References to cosmic kingship as previously defined are present in abundance. In the chapter on the sperm whale’s tale, the following passage appears:

 

Out of the bottomless profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching at the highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth his tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell. But in gazing at such scenes, it is all in what mood you are in; if in the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the archangels. Standing at the mast-head of my ship during a sunrise that crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw a large herd of whales in the east…such a grand embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the home of the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African elephant, I then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout of all beings. For according to King Juba, the military elephants of antiquity hailed the morning with their trunks uplifted in the profoundest silence. 314

 

Whales are likened to “King Porus’ elephants in the Indian battle with Alexander,” 315 or, on another occasion:

 

What then shall I liken the Sperm Whale to for fragrance, considering his magnitude? Must it not be to that famous elephant, with jewelled tusks, and redolent with myrrh, which was led out of an Indian town to do honor to Alexander the Great? 316

 

From the earliest introduction of Ahab as a “Khan of the plank,” to these uses of Oriental majesty and images of power, Melville is constantly keeping the theme of cosmic kingship, and its Oriental sources, before the reader.

Quite in contrast to the uses of Oriental imagery in Moby Dick stand Melville’s uses of the primitive. 317 One searches in vain for a “positive” invocation of an Oriental image, whether Egyptian, Ottoman, Persian, Hindoo (sic), or Malaysian; such cultures are invoked only to refer to power. The difference between Melville’s attitudes toward Orientalism and his attitude toward primitivism are as different as the characters of Fedallah on one hand and Tashtego, Queequeg and Daggoo on the other.

It was already mentioned earlier 318 that Melville’s use of the harpooners is hardly that of the “noble savage” ideal; Queequeg, Tashtego and Daggoo are repeatedly portrayed at work in the most advanced technical operations of whaling. CLR James captures this in one passage:

 

So far it might seem that Melville is merely repeating the old pattern of noble savage vs. corrupt civilization. But he is not doing that. Queequeg is no ideal figure. Queequeg’s ignorance often makes his behaviour entirely ridiculous. His religious practices, if sincere, are absurd. In his own country he has eaten human flesh. But the thing that matters is that as soon as they get off the land and onto the boat from New Bedford to Nantucket, Queequeg shows himself what he will later turn out to be, not only brave and ready to risk his life, but a master of his seaman’s craft. To his splendid physique, unconquered spirit and spontaneous generosity, this child of nature has added mastery to one of the most important and authoritative positions in a great modern industry. 319

 

Every stage of human history is vividly present in Moby Dick. The Pequod and its project, on one level, are a microcosm of what Melville refers to throughout as “joint stock company” capitalism 320 ; in the personality of Ahab, one has a latter-day version of the Calvinist consciousness of the seventeenth-century revolutions which created the modern polities of England, Scotland, Geneva, Holland and New England which one associates with the cutting edge of capitalism in that period.

Feudalism is present in the use of imagery from medieval kingship, above all from the German kings and princes of the Holy Roman Empire. “Versailles,” the “Anacharsis Cloots deputation” and Napoleon constantly refer the reader to the absolutist state, the French Revolution, and Thermidor. Antiquity is present in the abundant use of Greco-Roman mythology and history; “Asiatic despotism,” 321 as has been seen, is equally present. Finally, and perhaps most obviously, what Marx called “primitive communism” is present in the harpooners Queequeg, Tashtego and Daggoo, and in some use of American Indian and Polynesian mythology and symbols. Nowhere are all these historical phases so present as in the chapter “The Whiteness of the Whale.” 322

It is now necessary to confront Melville’s theory of history with that of Marx. His theory, despite appearances, is no more linear than Marx’s. As shall be seen in the following section on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the recurrent reference to “vortices” and “spirals” in Moby Dick shows Melville, like Marx, to have a “vorticist-helical” conception of historical time, 323 in which elements from the beginning “return” at the end, just as we saw the “primitives” plying the most advanced technical trade. Melville’s rejection of Orientalism and primitivism is not from the viewpoint of some Weberian “iron cage,” facing the disenchantment of the world with a sober stoicism that considers the power of myth lost to a “disenchanted” modern man. That is indeed the “modern” outlook, of the Calvinist Ahab “damned in paradise,” of the sober and pragmatist Starbuck, of the dreamer Ishmael. In Melville’s view it is the Ishmaels who seek in Orientalism and in primitivism a hopeless escape from the barrenness of life in modern capitalism, as described in the opening passages of Moby Dick in Ishmael’s description of the “city of the Manhattoes”:

 

Circumnambulate the city on a dreamy Sabbath afternoon…What do you see? Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of men fixed in ocean reveries…But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lathe and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks… 324

 

To the Ahab, Starbuck and Ishmael variants on the bourgeois ego, as we have seen, Melville counterposes the crew, and above all the harpooners, as the “return” of the nobility of aspects of primitive society portrayed in Typee and Omoo within modern social and technological relationships. The nobility of the harpooners at work, a nobility that makes their “work” a unitary activity, is what Melville counterposes to the bourgeois ego, and to the degenerate “Orientalist” shadow of the bourgeois ego. Melville, as was discussed earlier (Ch. V) clearly sees the “crew,” the working class, not merely as the heir apparent to the totality of the organization of work brought into existence by modern capitalism, but as destined to transform work into another kind of activity by the realization, in associated labor, of the totality of both human history and of cosmic evolution. Melville’s view of history, like Marx’s, is helical. Their parallels might be sketched as follows:

 

CHART HERE

 

Marx’s view of history in particular has often been treated as a “stage” theory of history with a linear conception of progress. Such an understanding of Marx simply confuses his view of history with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberal views. It not only ignores Marx and Engels’ abiding interest in the “helical” view of figures such as Morgan or their uses of Bachofen, but also Marx’s 1878-1881 correspondence with the Russian Populists in which he seriously contemplated a possible “leap” of Russia to communism without the necessity of a capitalist “stage,” 325 or statements like the following:

 

It is the same with “ Progress .” In spite of pretensions of “ Progress ,” there are continual retrogressions and circular motions. Not suspecting that the category of “Progress” is completely empty and abstract, Absolute Criticism is rather so profound as to recognize “Progress” as absolute… 326

 

Melville similarly saw his idea of the “savage” present at multiple levels of history:

 

Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e., what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him…

As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the same marvelous patience, and with the same single shark’s tooth, of his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not quite as workmanlike, but as close-packed in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles’ shield; and full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert Dürer. 327

 

As in his earlier praise for the “so emblazoned a fraternity” of the “mariners, renegades and castaways,” Melville is presenting the “savages” returned on a higher level in modern social and technological relations as heirs to all of history and, indeed (as argued in Chapters III and IV) to cosmic evolution. Melville rejects a false counterposition between the “enchanted” world of the cosmic myth, prior to the nineteenth-century consolidation of Calvinism, Lockeanism and capitalism, and the “unhappy consciousness” in its different forms. He is trying to show that “just on the other side” of the unhappy consciousness, in the ribaldry and nobility of the “meanest mariners, renegades and castaways,” is a “realized” cosmic quality. To see this more clearly, it is necessary to look at Melville’s critique of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

 

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

 

Another important event in Western cultural development occurred in this remarkable 1840-1850 conjuncture under discussion: the formulation of the entropy law, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This section will attempt to show that Melville had a critique of entropy; that entropy was the antithesis of the cosmic imagination; and that he saw it as the projection into nature of the “unhappy consciousness” of the bourgeois ego. Melville’s work shows no explicit awareness of the formulation of the Second Law; he is, rather, combating the “entropic metaphors” secreted by a certain culture in decline.

Almost immediately after its formulation in 1850, the entropy law was seized upon by broader currents of ideology, and particularly continental Kulturpessimismus , as the scientific confirmation of its view of a “world on the wane,” 328 as indeed the pre-1850 world of bourgeois romantic lyricism was on the wane. The perfect counterpoint to Melville is one American unhappy consciousness, Henry Adams, who joined his Kulturpessimismus to a theory of history based on the entropy law, and who also saw “1851” as the year in which he vaguely recognized something amiss in his Boston Brahmin world.

Literary critic Robert Zoellner has seen in various images of self-consumption and misanthropy, centered of course in the figure of Ahab, the fundamental entropic metaphors of Moby Dick . 329 Without disagreeing, I would prefer to focus on the overall metaphor of the Pequod’s journey to self-destruction as Melville’s portrayal of the self-destruction of the bourgeois ego and the civilization producing that ego. But it is first necessary to see how the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that states that all closed systems necessarily dissipate to an equilibrium state of equally distributed and dispersed energy, or, at the cosmic level, to “heat death,” is related to the bourgeois ego.

The bourgeois ego, as we have been using the term, is first of all itself a “closed system” in its vain illusion of atomistic autonomy. The Second Law of Thermodynamics can be seen as the final phase of a two hundred year evolution in physics. Leibniz already saw it as implicit in Newton’s vis inertiae; he realized that the concept of inertia was the logical outcome of a universe set in motion by a creative act of God, but in which God did not constantly intervene. To Newton’s vis inertiae , Leibniz counterposed the vis vitae , a fundamentally “hylozoic” conception that saw the universe as above all alive, and with life as the creative intervening force that overcame inertia. Newton’s physics carried the day in the late seventeenth century, as part of the “white turbid wake” discussed earlier, and Leibniz’s critique faded into obscurity.

The actual science of thermodynamics emerged from physics only in the early nineteenth century, not insignificantly from studies of closed energy systems such as steam engines. It was indeed Carnot’s study La puissance motrice du feu (1824), which laid the foundations for the First Law of Thermodynamics, that held that the total energy of a given system was always constant. But Carnot’s law constituted an important break with the physics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which had, after Newton, conceived of the universe on the model of a clock, initially “wound up” by the creator and thereafter functioning on its own. Thus LaPlace had been able to tell Napoleon that his “system of the world” could dispense with the hypothesis of God; it was external to the system. But the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century conception of the clock mechanism had an important corollary for the physical notion of time: if the clock could be “rewound” periodically, time and hence physical phenomena were reversible. Carnot’s steam engine maintained energy at a constant level, but it was obviously passed from one form to another in expenditure; hence time, with Clausius, became irreversible. 330

The full implications of the mechanism of Newton’s universe, already seen by Leibniz, were reached only in the course of the 1840s, more or less simultaneously in the work of Kelvin, Thompson and Clausius. But it was the Prussian Clausius, in the counter-revolutionary mood of Germany just after the crushing of the revolution of 1848-1849, who in 1850 formulated the Second Law in full. Clausius summarized the thermodynamic research on steam engines and gases in the law that held that not only was the energy of closed systems constant over time, but tended to the lowest level of energy organization. 331 After Clausius, time for physics was not merely linear, as it had been for Newton, irreversible, as it had been for Carnot, but dissipative .

The real significance of the social context of the appearance of the Second Law of Thermodynamics cannot of course be dealt with here. But two aspects of it should be highlighted: the “contemplative” assumption of non-intervention in the cosmos, already criticized by Leibniz; the analogy between the “closed system” of thermodynamics and the “closed” bourgeois ego; and finally, most importantly, the metaphor of work which thermodynamics brought directly into physics. Not only was thermodynamics as a science developed out of experimentation with the new industrial technology of the early nineteenth century; it made the fundamental units of energy output comprehensible in terms of the work performed by machines. Hence, for modern society, the concept of energy would be linked not merely to linear, irreversible and dissipative time, but to a “strong metaphor” of work.

Here, again, the totality of Melville’s vision of the fate of bourgeois society becomes visible. 332 The threshold between the “antemosaic” world of Queequeg, Tashtego and Daggoo, and the sober, not to say dour vision of the Calvinists “damned in the midst of paradise,” “lacking the low enjoying power,” was precisely the subjugation of the universe to the metaphor and categories of work. And for Melville, as it was argued earlier, this critique of work was not made from the vantage point of “leisure” (its bourgeois antipode) but from a kind of unitary activity that takes up within itself the totality of past evolution and history.

That Melville had a critique of a linear conception of time was mentioned in the previous section. In the final scene, when Ishmael is pulled into the (vortex) maelstrom and then cast out again, the reader is offered a final hint by Melville that the destruction of the Pequod is not to be understood as the end of the world, but the end of a world. This “helical” conception of history is underscored, as indicated earlier, by the fact that Ishmael is saved by Queequeg’s coffin, as if to say that the death of the bourgeois ego projected itself into nature and created the atomistic-mechanistic world of Newton, which ultimately led to the “heat death” pessimism of Clausius, so this new society founded on a unitary activity fusing the “primitive” with modern social organization and technology will recapture the cosmic imagination suppressed by the rise of capitalism, and the “old Dutch savage” Dürer will reappear in “new savages” with the same cosmic grasp of nature.

A decisive stage, as indicated earlier, 333 in the “de-cosmization” of the West was the final detachment of logos from mythos effected by Greek philosophy in the sixth century bc , a development further linked to a fairly mature commodity economy in that period. While any detailed discussion of the relationship between Greek philosophy and modern physics is obviously beyond this study, it should be noted in passing that the final stage of this autonomization of the logos can be situated in the transition from Heraclitus to Parmenides, which consisted in the suppression of time , in early Western thought, as a fundamental constituent of Being. 334 The conception of the infinite that emerged from Parmenides’ (and his student Zeno’s) elevation of Being above all spatiality and temporality was that of the infinite divisibility of space and time of Zeno’s paradoxes. It was this infinity which Hegel called “bad infinity,” and which was the basis of the emergence of linear time in modern physics, incorporated into Newton’s infinitesimal and, through Carnot’s definition of energy as a form of motion, into thermodynamics. It is not unfair to say that a Western “sense of reality” developed in the sixth century bc , long before the appearance of experimental science in its modern sense, and intimately linked to the appearance of a commodity economy, later became a “material force” in the further development of science and technology. Thus in linking up with the “antemosaic,” prior to the detachment of mythos from logos, Melville, consciously or not, was delving into the deepest origins of the subordination of reality to the “white turbid wake” of abstraction, commoditization, and the categories of work.

From the mid-nineteenth century onward, once again, a certain Kulturpessimismus seized upon the Second Law of Thermodynamics as the scientific basis of its sense of decline, most prominently in the work of Nietzsche, Henry Adams, Brooks Adams, and Oswald Spengler. But if the overall analysis presented here is correct, this elitist Kulturkritik was the expression of the “moi absolu” in recoil from the demise of bourgeois-patrician dominance before the rise of industry, factory towns, rebellious workers and, later in the century, a new mass politics. It was the “Ishmael” consciousness of the “try-works” chapter discussed above 335 in a mature industrial capitalism, mistaking the decline of its world for the decline of the world.

Nothing confirms this analysis for the American context more than the trajectory of a late-nineteenth-century figure such as Henry Adams. Indeed, in a fashion which should no longer be surprising, Adams cites “1851” as a decisive turning point in his evolution. His autobiography The Education of Henry Adams is a veritable anti-Melville.

Adams was born into the Boston Adams family that produced the Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams. His autobiography tells the story of the impossibility of living in the world of the second half of the nineteenth century with that socio-cultural inheritance. For Adams, again, “the first vague sense of feeling an unknown living obstacle in the dark came in 1851.” 336 The Jacksonian era had already separated Adams and the United States from the kind of patrician politics with which his family was associated, a separation best embodied in the rise of the Northern urban political machines. But Adams’ definitive sense of the uselessness of his own heritage came as a journalist in Washington during the Grant administration. That experience determined Adams to abandon any involvement with contemporary politics or social reform, or journalism aimed at social reform.

Grant’s administration outraged every rule of ordinary decency, but scores of promising men, whom the country could not well spare, were ruined in saying so. The world cared little for decency… The system of 1789 had broken down, and with it the eighteenth-century fabric of a priori , or moral, principles. 337

But Adams, in 1893, arrived at an even more decisive insight into the overall forces that had destroyed his world. In that year, he first visited the Chicago World’s Fair, where he first saw the new electromagnetic dynamo; he then went to Washington, where he attended the Congressional special session on the repeal of the Silver Act. Here is the patrician bourgeois’s summation of the results of that year, the pit of the worst depression of the 1873-1896 “long deflation,” as well as of the Carnegie Steel strike, the biggest labor insurgency since 1877. “The banks alone, and the dealers in exchange,” Adams wrote, “had insisted on repeal. In his view the country had crossed a point of no return.

 

He [Adams] had stood up for his eighteenth century, his Constitution of 1789, his George Washington, his Harvard College, his Quincy, and his Plymouth Pilgrims, as long as anyone would stand up with him. He had said it was hopeless twenty years before, but he had kept on, in the same old attitude, by habit and taste, until he found himself altogether alone. He had hugged his antiquated dislike of bankers and capitalistic society until he became little better than a crank… The matter was settled at last by the people. For a hundred years, between 1793 and 1893, the American people had hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and back, between two forces, one simply industrial, the other capitalistic, centralizing, and mechanical. In 1893, the issue came on the single gold standard, and the majority at last declared itself, once and for all, in favor of the capitalistic system with all its necessary machinery. All one’s friends, all one’s best citizens, reformers, churches, colleagues, educated classes, had joined the banks to force submission to capitalism… Such great revolutions commonly leave some bitterness behind, but nothing in politics ever surprised Henry Adams more than the ease with which he and his silver friends slipped across the chasm, and alighted on the single gold standard and the capitalistic system with its methods. 338

 

But Adams is no mere Brahmin lamenting the bygone days when New England gentlemen ruled the United States. Like Melville, he had a veritable cosmic and historical theory showing that demise to be quite in the order of things. What had closed forever the world of “his eighteenth century, his Constitution of 1789” and so forth was the unleashing not merely of capitalism, but of the vast mechanical and then electromagnetic energies of modern technology.

Adams does not exactly reproduce the Transcendentalist consciousness of the 1840s; his nostalgia is not that of the dispossessed liberal arts student, as his scathing remarks on the intellectual worth of his Harvard education makes clear. When Adams was at Harvard in the years 1856-1860, Transcendentalist influence was still strong, and with it the “German influence.” Adams’ description of this atmosphere is pertinent here:

 

The literary world then agreed that truth survived in Germany alone, and Carlyle, Mathew Arnold, Renan, Emerson, with scores of popular followers, taught the German faith. The literary world had revolted against the yoke of the coming capitalism—its money lenders, its bank directors, and its railway magnates…The middle class had the power, and held its coal and iron well in hand, but the satirists and idealists seized the press, and as they were agreed that the Second Empire was a disgrace and a danger to England, they turned to Germany because at that moment Germany was neither economical nor military, and a hundred years behind Western Europe in the simplicity of scholarship. Goethe was raised to the rank of Shakespeare—Kant ranked as a law-giver above Plato. All serious scholars were obliged to become German, because German thought was revolutionizing criticism. 339

 

But Adams never quite embraced what he called the “Concord Church” which was the center of this sensibility in 1856:

 

He never reached Concord, and to Concord Church he, like the rest of mankind who accepted a material universe, remained always an insect, or something much lower—a man. It was surely no fault of his that the universe seemed to him real; perhaps,—as Mr. Emerson justly said—it was so; in spite of the long-continued effort of a lifetime, he perpetually fell back into the heresy that if anything universal was unreal, it was himself and not the appearances; it was the poet and not the banker; it was his own thought, not the thing that moved it. He did not lack the wish to be transcendental. Concord seemed to him, at one time, more real than Quincy; yet in truth Russell Lowell was as little transcendental as Beacon Street. 340

 

Thus Adams, far from retreating to his study, set out to embrace his times, as a diplomat in London during the Civil War, as a journalist in Washington during the Grant administration. His experience with the corruption of machine politics under Grant was such (as indicated above) that he abandoned any hope of influencing the contemporary world and set out to understand it, whatever the conclusions. He studied the new evolutionary theory even though he believed that “evolution from Washington to Grant upset Darwin.” 341 He studied Lyell’s geological theories. He felt, had he been up to it, that “he would have been a Marxist.” 342 But unlike Melville, Adams never “went to sea,” so to speak, never immersed himself in the real collective experience of working-class life, and consequently his autobiography, while clearly professing his desire to understand his time, is nothing if not a sober account of the dispossession of the bourgeois ego by modern capitalism, industry and science. This attitude comes through clearly in his description of his return to the United States in 1868, after seven years’ diplomatic service in London:

 

Had they been Tyrian traders of the year bc 1000, landing from a galley fresh from Gibraltar, they could hardly have been stranger on the shore of a world, so changed form what it had been ten years’ before…One could divine pretty much where the force lay, since the last ten years had given to the great mechanical energies—coal, iron, steam—a distinct superiority in power over the old industrial elements—agriculture, handiwork, and learning…he had become an estray; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage; a belated reveller, or a gypsy scholar like Mathew Arnold’s. His world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow—not a furtive Jacob or Isaac still reeking of the ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs—but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he—American of Americans, with heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him. 343

 

This fourth-generation member of the Adams family knew quite well the new balance of social forces in this world, as he began his journalistic career:

 

[L]ittle as he might be fitted for the work that was before him, he had only to look at his father and Motley to see figures less fitted for it than he. All were equally survivors from the forties—bric a brac from the time of Louis Philippe; stylists; doctrinaires; ornaments that had been more or less suited to the colonial architecture, but which never had much value in Desbrosses Street or Fifth Avenue. They could hardly have earned five dollars a day in any modern industry. The men who commanded high pay were not as a rule ornamental. Even Commodore Vanderbilt and Jay Gould lacked social charm. 344

 

Adams’s sense of dispossession, once again, does not limit itself to a cultural and social theory; he finds a confirmation of these trends in nineteenth-century science:

 

Politics, diplomacy, law, art and history had opened no outlet to future energy or effort, but a man must do something…At that moment Darwin was convulsing society. He was a Darwinist before the letter…The atomic theory; the correlation and conservation of energy; the mechanical theory of the universe; the kinetic theory of gases, and Darwin’s Law of Natural Selection, were examples of what a young man had to take on trust. 345

 

In conversation with the geologist Sir Charles Lyell, who was writing evolutionary works on geology “to support Darwin by wrecking the garden of Eden,” 346 Adams reports the following:

 

Adams gave up the attempt to begin at the beginning, and tried starting at the end— himself…he asked Sir Charles to introduce him to the first vertebrate. Infinitely in his bewilderment, Sir Charles informed him that the first vertebrate was a very respectable fish among the earliest of all fossils, which had lived, and whose bones were reposing, under Adams’ own favorite abbey on Wenlock Edge. 347

 

This fish was the “cousin of the Sturgeon, Pteraspis.”

There is in these passages from Adams a striking parallel to Melville’s mention of the whale bones discovered just under the Tuileries. 348 Yet even more striking is the passage that follows. Melville is talking about the “antemosaic” reality of cosmic evolution, the “unfinished Cathedral of Cologne,” as a totality of which the modern working class, and above all the Queequegs, are the heirs, the returned “cosmic man” which will appropriate that nature and history by superceding the world of world into a new kind of activity. Adams, on the contrary, finds in the metaphor of Pteraspis a refutation of both evolution and of any idea of progress:

 

[H]e yearned for nothing so keenly as to feel at home in a thirteenth-century Abbey, unless it were to haunt a fifteenth-century Prior’s house, and both these were his joys at Wenlock… The peculiar flavor of the scenery has something to do with the absence of evolution; it was better marked in Egypt; it was felt whenever time sequences became interchangeable. One’s instinct abhors time. As one lay on the slope of the Edge, nothing suggested sequence… The Roman Road was twin to the railroad; Uriconium was well worth Shrewsbury…One might mix up the terms of time as one liked… but the greatest triumph of all was to look south along the Edge to the abode of one’s earliest ancestor and nearest relative, the genoid fish, whose name, according to Professor Huxley, was Pterapsis… Life began and ended there. Behind that horizon lay only the Cambrian, without verterbrates or any other organism except a few shell-fish… 349

 

This evolutionary-historical sequence, for Adams, is no story of realization, but, on the contrary, one of meaningless change:

 

To an American in search of a father, it matter nothing whether the father breathed through lungs, or walked on fins, or on feet. Evolution of mind was altogether another matter, but whether one traced descent from the shark or the wolf was immaterial even in morals… Adams had doubts of his own on the facts of moral evolution…(Pteraspis) began in the Ludlow shale, as complete as Adams himself— in some respects moreso— at the top of the column of organic evolution; and geology offered no sort of proof that he had ever been anything else. Ponder over it as he might, Adams could see nothing in the theory of Sir Charles but pure inference…He could detect no more evolution in life since the Pteraspis than he could detect it in architecture since the Abbey. Coal-power alone asserted evolution—of power—and only by violence could be forced to assert selection of type…behind the lesson of the day, he was conscious that, in geology as in theology, he could prove only that evolution did not evolve…(he felt that)…the idea of Form, Law, Order or Sequence had no more value for him than the idea of none; that what he valued most was Motion, and that what attracted his mind was Change. 350

 

Adams did not step back before the full implications of his train of thought:

 

[He] had no need to learn from Hamlet the fatal effect of the pale cast of thought on enterprises great or small…To him, the current of his time was to be his current, lead where it might. He put psychology under lock and key…One had no time to paint and putty the surface of Law, even though it were cracked and rotten…He, at least, took his education as a Darwinian in good faith. The Church was gone, and Duty was dim, but Will should take its place, founded deeply in interest and law… 351

 

Adams is one of the consummate nineteenth-century figures of the bourgeois ego in decline. His is the consciousness of the American world prior to 1840 transposed to the world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was, as James said of Ahab, capable of criticizing everything about his world, but was incapable of calling into question one thing: his relations with his fellow men, that is to transcend the merely individual viewpoint from which the vast complexities of modern society did indeed appear as dissipative. Adams remained ignorant of the realities of the working class, but as he said:

 

[B]y rights, he should have been a Marxist, but some narrow trait of the New England nature seemed to blight socialism, and he tried in vain to make himself a convert. 352

 

He remained even more foreign to the realities of “Queequeg.” In his veritable recapitulation, in the negative mode, of the Melvillian trajectory, he even published a book Tahiti (Paris 1901). As Stephen Brush puts it:

 

In 1890 Adams went to the South Seas and observed the contrast between the healthy nudity of Samoa and the Westernized degeneracy of Tahiti. Together with his brother Charles, Adams studied signs of decay in his own father. He read Nordau’s Degeneration, and Clarence King suggested that they “go and pose for Nordau together—he seems to have had no degenerates or hysterics of our type—fellows who know all about it but manage to get a world of fun and some pleasure from it.” 353

 

He never called into question the ideology of work at the foundations of the modern conception of energy, and remained foreign to the reality of “Queequeg,” the “return on a higher level” of the “savage” unitary activity that supersedes the work/leisure antinomy. He thus articulated the most complete synthesis of Kulturpessimismus and thermodynamics of the late nineteenth century. 354 Like Ishmael in the “Try-works” scene, he never got close enough to see that the crew was laughing.

 

Ch. IX. Queequeg and the Return of the Antemosaic Cosmic Man: the Shattering of Puritan/Liberal/Romantic Consciousness”

 

Not that the Red Indian will ever possess the broad lands of America. At least I presume not. But his ghost will.”

D.H. Lawrence

Studies in Classic American Literature

 

Part One of this study has presented the following analysis of Moby Dick . When the situation of the American Transcendentalists is compared to that of European romanticism, above all the romanticism issuing from the works of Kant and Coleridge, the distinction that emerges is the absence of a feudal-historical past as a source of material for Americans. Lacking such a past, indeed studiously oblivious to history, figures such as Emerson, Thoreau and later Whitman turned to a complex of nature mysticism, primitivism and Orientalism instead. Investigating further the source of this distinction between Europe and the United States, we found that the primitivism and Orientalism which cropped up in the first generation of American literature was quite in continuity with founding Puritanism’s re-creation of the “Mosaic” sense of reality upon its arrival in the New World: the New Covenant in the wilderness, with the Indians and blacks (and ultimately Polynesians) encountered in that new world as the shadows of Adamic man. European romanticism, working off the “myth of the cosmic king” mediated by the feudal experience of the Holy Roman Empire, had no such direct apprehension of the “primitive”; indeed, from Chateaubriand and Goethe onward, it looked to America for precisely that.

A further decisive difference between Europe and the United States emerged in the relationship of the intelligentsia to the state: because the Enlightened absolutist states that consolidated themselves in the wake of the Reformation wars, in contrast to the Calvinist republics, had to foment civil society and capitalism, the intelligentsia that emerged in those societies was much more of a “civil service” intelligentsia than was necessary or possible in the United States. Thus the “aesthetics” of this social stratum, particularly after the reforming civil service had completed its role, was the aesthetics of “marginal men” (something they had in common with their American Transcendentalist counterparts) but it was an aesthetics, like Julien Sorel’s cameo of Napoleon, which was never very far from the state.

The crises of 1848 in both Europe and the United States shattered this consciousness or forced it into pessimistic retreat from the world: the “ugly revolution” in Paris, and the sectionalist crises in the United States both forced the “unhappy consciousness” to mutate from its apparent lyrical to its actual pessimist mode.

But the results of 1848 were very different for Europe and the United States, because of the question of the state. What emerged out of the 1848 crisis in Europe was Marxian socialism and the artistic avant-garde, while neither socialism nor the avant-garde had any real impact in American life until the 1890-1920 period. But concealed in the rise of “socialism” in the European working classes was in fact a “dual revolution,” a completion of the bourgeois revolution that was simply not necessary in the United States. Thus the actual “socialism” which emerged on the continent was in reality a concealed extension of the mercantilist development regimes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, far from Marx’s actual project, and it entered into crisis once the actual transition to capitalism was complete.

The radical intelligentsia in the United States, it has been argued, has almost always compared American to European experience unfavorably, because of the twin absence of a socialist working-class tradition and consequently of a place for a cultural avant-garde in the working-class movement (to the extent that the European movements, in the 1920s in particular, afforded the avant-garde such a place). But such a view of American politics badly underestimates both the reality of the European experience, and even moreso the American experience. For lurking just behind such a view is a blindness to both the realities of statism in the European “socialist” experience, and to what extent the revolutionary political and artistic intelligentsias were state-spawned social strata whose ultimate destiny was the state. One hardly wishes to minimize the legacy of backwardness and lack of the most minimal traditions of class consciousness which the absence of a socialist tradition has bequeathed to American workers. But with the hindsight that almost 150 years of statist “dual revolution” (completion of the tasks of the bourgeois revolution by working-class parties) in Europe, whether of the Social Democratic or Stalinist variety, one can begin to appreciate both CLR James’s point that the history of the twentieth century has confirmed how prophetic Melville was, and one can also understand that little is to be regretted by the “failure” of the working class to respond to the “Ahab” or “Ishmael” variants of the unhappy consciousness. The working class, by its position in the technological extraction of wealth from nature, and by its association, has a “different agenda,” a different problematic that laughs at the unhappy consciousness, even when, as with fascism or Stalinism, the unhappy consciousness momentarily, with its “Fedallahs” and “special bodies of armed men,” deals the working class a serious setback.

Melville has, if this analysis is correct, provided a remarkable typology of the variants of the bourgeois ego, and of the consequences of the ultimate logic of the bourgeois ego. But unlike many “Ishmaels,” particularly those “Ishmaels” like Henry Adams who came after the watershed of 1848-1850, and who confronted the full force of the mobilization of reality by the categories of work, the working class, led by the Queequegs, Tashtegos and Daggoos, sees things differently. Against a Weberian view of an “iron cage” that sees the somber mobilization of the Pequod for the insane pursuit of the total abstraction of a world dominated by work, the working class, in a more “Jamesian” optic, poses its unbreakable spirit of light-hearted contempt for such projects. Against the “entropic” destruction implicit in such a project, it is, for Melville, the heir to the vast cosmic evolution of nature and of the totality of the poetry of myth, not in “consciousness” but in its unitary activity, the nobility of harpooners in the midst of the most modern social relations and technology. The isolated bourgeois ego trapped in the world defined by work is trapped in the Mosaic world of white abstraction symbolized by Moby Dick; the working class, and particularly the Queequegs, by their inactivity superceding the categories of work/leisure, inherit a “cosmic imagination” as realized in the total exercise of their faculties, one which must ultimately redeem both nature and “work” as activity.

Thus the American socialist intelligentsia which has, understandably, compared its own situation with its European political and cultural counterparts and found that situation wanting, has to date misunderstood the possibilities inherent in the specificities of American historical experience. The “Mosaic” consciousness of the bourgeois ego in the United States, in contrast to Europe, had no intermediary “feudal” imagery interposed between it and the “antemosaic” realities of the “Queequegs” and the cosmic apprehension of nature available to the Queequegs. And because of the weakness of the statist traditions in the United States, the “Queequegs” have not been enlisted in “socialist” projects alien to their own tasks. That this has left them susceptible, on occasion, to enlistment in even more retrograde ideologies may in fact be the case, but when a socialist movement finally worthy of the potentials of the “antemosaic” realities of American history finally comes into existence, it may finally show that the Adamic myth present in the founding of America was not so much an escape from history (the latter understood in the European sense) as an anticipation of a completion of the history contained in the prophecies of cosmic man in the ancient Near East, the archetypes of modern primitivism and Orientalism, in the beginning.

 

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

 

In Moby Dick , Melville had achieved the synthesis toward which he was working in Typee , Omoo , Mardi , Redburn and White-Jacket . He had merged the encounter with the primitive of the two early books which had made his reputation, the cosmic-symbolic-allegorical dimension attempted for the first time in Mardi , and the realist confrontation with class, hierarchy and authority which emerged in the latter two works. He never achieved this synthesis again, although (as shall be seen) he approaches the same elements, in greatly transposed terms, in Billy Budd . Melville continued to write for forty years after Moby Dick , mainly wrestling with the same themes, except that the realist treatment of collective rebellion had receded from the forefront, as it did from Western literature generally in the 1850-1890 period. As the Pequod sank, the Indian Tashtego was nailing a red flag to the mast, pulling a skyhawk and its “imperial beak” down with the ship. Red flags would continue to appear on the horizons of Melville’s work (particularly in Clarel and in Billy Budd ) but after Moby Dick the middle-class “Transcendental divines,” the men of the quest who succeeded Redburn or Ishmael, were no longer confronted directly with the “ugly revolution” of proletarian life. The problem of middle-class malcontents, from Pierre to Clarel, henceforth operated according to a logic of its own, separated from any hint of a “social solution.” The artistic elaboration of this “new logic,” comparable to developments across the Atlantic, makes Melville, with elements of Pierre , “Bartleby the Scrivener,” The Confidence Man and Billy Budd , a co-founder of modernism.

The preceding analysis of Moby Dick attempted to show that America differed from Europe as an “Adamic,” antemosaic universal of the anthropocosmos differed from the Napoleonic universal of statism. The events of 1848 in America showed that the continuity with the American Revolution had been broken by a crisis over slavery and expansionism; in France, and throughout Europe, the continuity with the French Revolution and its “universal” impact on Europe was broken by the red, “ugly revolution” of 1848, the (seeming) specter of communism. The latter counterposition does not mean that America was not a class society as Europe so obviously was; it merely means that the specificity of the American working class was inseparable from a race question with no counterpart in Europe and from an imperial expansion whose terms had been set down in the Puritan extermination of the Indians of New England in the seventeenth century, and which in the 1846 defeat of Mexico had opened the way to the consolidation of the continent to the Pacific. This Puritan legacy was the “Old Testament” historical memory screen that substituted for feudalism as America’s pre-capitalist past. Moby Dick became the archetypal novel of nineteenth-century American literature by articulating the American universal against Calvinism as the “antemosaic cosmic man,” right in the midst of the crisis of continuity, symbolized by the Compromise of 1850, with the world of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the “founders,” but after that articulation, the waters closed around Melville too.

Melville the man and the author of Moby Dick , was a prophet of the “antemosaic” who, in his lifetime, was honored neither in his own country, nor in any other. The early popularity achieved by the two South Seas books was called into question by the reception of the first “metaphysical” novel, Mardi , and somewhat redeemed by Melville’s return to more realist novels of sea adventure, however laced with bitter social commentary. Moby Dick delivered the coup de grace to this recovery of an audience. Meanwhile, Melville had married and started a family. The combination of his personal circumstances, his failure as a popular author capable of supporting a family from his writing, and the broader social crisis closed off for a lifetime the creative sources from which Moby Dick had emerged. To understand these sources, a closer thematic look at the pre- Moby Dick books is required.

 

a. Typee and Omoo : The Primitive; The Critique of Western Civilization and of Christianity

 

The most important elements of Typee and Omoo , in setting the groundwork for Moby Dick , are Melville’s first forays into the primitive and into the critique of the impact of the West and of Christianity in the South Seas.

In one scene in Typee , which certainly attracted the attention of American readers in 1846, naked Tahitian women swim out, board the ship in Nukuheva harbor, and dance for the crew, as

 

the wild grace and spirit of their style excel everything I have ever seen [with] an abandoned voluptuousness in their character which I dare not attempt to describe.

Our ship was now wholly given up to every species of riot and debauchery. 355

 

But Melville is not narrating this scene merely to indulge in erotic exoticism. He is using this encounter to show the devastating impact of Western intrusion on the islanders:

 

Alas for the poor savages when exposed to the influence of these polluting examples! Unsophisticated and confiding, they are easily led into every vice, and humanity weeps over the ruin thus remorsely inflicted on them by their European civilizers. Thrice happy are they who, inhabiting some yet undiscovered island in the midst of the ocean, have never been brought into contaminating contact with the white man. 356

 

With this setting, Melville, in a time-honored trope of Western writing on non-Western cultures since the sixteenth century, uses Tahitian women as foils, in this case for a general critique of the forms in which Western culture imprisons women:

 

People may say what they will about the taste evinced by our fashionable ladies in dress. Their jewels, their feathers, their silks, and their furbelows would have sunk into utter significance beside the exquisite simplicity of attire adopted by the nymphs of the vale on this festive occasion. I should like to have seen a gallery of coronation beauties, at Westminster Abbey, confronted for a moment by this band of Island girls; their stiffness, formality and affectation contrasted with the artless vivacity and unconcealed natural graces of these savage maidens. It would be the Venus de’ Medici placed beside a milliner’s doll. 357

 

Melville also comments on the system of polygamy, with “a plurality of husbands, instead of wives” which is found in Polynesia:

 

Imagine a revolution brought about in a Turkish seraglio, and the harem rendered the abode of bearded men; or conceive some beautiful woman in our own country running distracted at the sight of her numerous lovers murdering one another before her eyes…Heaven defend us from such a state of things! We are scarcely amiable and forebearing enough to submit to it. 358

 

If Melville’s frank discussion of South Sea sexuality could both anger and titillate an Anglo-American audience, his comments on the impact of Christian missionaries had no such ambiguities. He cites the “diseased, starving and dying” natives of Hawaii:

 

The missionaries may seek to disguise the matter as they will, but the facts are incontrovertible; and the devoutest Christian who visits that group with an unbiased mind, must go away mournfully asking—“Are these, alas! the fruits of twenty-five years of enlightening? 359

 

Melville is in fact inclined to think that four or five Marquesan missionaries to the United States might be more useful than Americans in the Marquesas. 360 For “the penalty of the Fall presses very lightly upon the valley of Typee”:

 

Ill fated people! I shudder when I think of the change a few years will produce in their paradisiacal abode; and probably when the most destructive vices, and the worst attendances of civilization, shall have driven all peace and happiness from the valley, the magnanimous French will proclaim to the world that the Marquesas Islands have been converted to Christianity! 361

 

The impact of the missionaries and their works again come in for another hostile portrayal in Omoo :

 

Doubtless, in thus denationalizing the Tahitians…the missionaries were prompted by a sincere desire for good; but the effect has been lamentable. Supplied with no amusements, in place of those forbidden, the Tahitians, who require more recreation than other people, have sunk into a listlessness, or indulge in sensualities, a hundred times more pernicious, than all the games ever celebrated in the Temple of Tanee. 362

 

Melville is unsparing in his portrayal of “contaminating contact with the white man.” It is, as was seen earlier in Moby Dick , not merely the critique of religion or imperialism, but the critique of civilization itself that animated him, a critique that also raises the issue of class:

 

What striking evidence…of the wide difference between the extreme of savage and civilized life. A gentleman of Typee can bring up a numerous family of children and give them all a highly respectable cannibal education, with infinitely less toil and anxiety than he expends in the simple process of striking a light; whilst a poor European artisan, who through the instrumentality of a lucifer performs the same operation in one second, is put to his wits end to provide for his starving offspring that food which the children of a Polynesian father, without troubling their parent, pluck from the branches of every tree around them. 363

 

Melville admits that Polynesian cannibalism is a “rather bad trait,” 364 but says it occurs primarily as “revenge upon their enemies”; and

 

I ask whether the mere eating of human flesh so very far exceeds in barbarity that only a few years since was practiced in enlightened England:—a convicted traitor…had his head lopped off with a huge axe, his bowels dragged out and thrown into a fire; while his body, carved into four quarters, was with his head exposed upon pikes, and permitted to rot and fester among the public haunts of men!

The fiend-like skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth. 365

 

Melville contrasts the situation in the West with “the perpetual hilarity reigning through the whole extent of the vale,” where there seemed to be “no cares, griefs, troubles or vexations” 366 :

 

There were none of those thousand sources of irritation that the ingenuity of civilized man has created to mar his own felicity. There were no foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes…no unreasonable tailors and shoemakers…no duns of any description; no assault and battery attornies, to foment discord…no poor relations, everlastingly occupying the spare bed-chamber…no destitute widows with their children starving on the cold charities of the world; no beggars, no debtors prisons; no proud and hard-hearted nabobs in Typee; or to sum up all in one word—no Money! That ‘root of all evil’ was not to be found in the valley.” 367

 

Melville spares little in his polemics on the theme of “civilization and savagery”:

 

When I remembered that these islanders derived no advantages from dress, but appeared in all the naked simplicity of nature, I could not avoid comparing them with the fine gentleman and dandies who promenade such unexceptionable figures in our frequented thoroughfares. Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden—what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear! Stuffed calves, padded breasts, and scientifically cut pantaloons would avail them nothing, and the effect would be truly deplorable. 368

 

Nevertheless, as indicated, Melville uses this framework in Omoo to continue his expose of the themes first introduced in Typee . After detailing the destruction of the former South Sea cultures, the vast depopulation between Cook’s voyages in the 1770s and the 1840s, Melville sums up:

 

[W]ho can remain blind to the fact, that, so far as mere temporal felicity is concerned, the Tahitians are far worse off now, than formerly; and although their circumstances, upon the whole, are bettered by the presence of the missionaries, the benefits conferred by the latter become utterly insignificant, when confronted by the vast preponderance of evil brought about by other means.

Their prospects are hopeless…Years ago brought to a stand, where all that is corrupt in barbarism and civilization unite, to the exclusion of the virtues of either state; like other uncivilized beings, brought into contact with the Europeans, they must here remain stationary until utterly extinct. 369

 

Such direct commentary and “anthropology” had disappeared from Moby Dick . It was replaced by Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo, on one hand, and by a far broader concept of the “antemosaic.” The vehicle for the realization of the virtues of Polynesia as Melville had experienced them and written about them became the “Anarcharsis Cloots deputation,” centered on the Pequod ’s harpooners. The Anacharsis Cloots deputation first appears in Melville’s work in Mardi , along with other new themes that find their summum in Moby Dick .

 

b. Mardi : Emergence of the Cosmic–Allegorical–Symbolic

 

After the publication of Omoo in 1847, Melville married Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, 370 and moved with her to Manhattan. The celebrity from his first two books opened up the New York literary world to him, and he was able to avail himself of the 16,000-book library of his friend Evert Duyckinck, editor of the prestigious magazine the Literary World , for a kind of intellectual stimulation he had never previously known. At the same time, a persistent undercurrent of skepticism about the authenticity of the adventures recounted in Typee and Omoo , particularly in English reviews, stung Melville; these elitist critics could not believe that such books were written by “an American sailor.”

Thus, while wanting to continue to exploit the South Sea material, Melville decided to move from more or less straightforward adventure to a much higher symbolic and allegorical level, “to see whether,” as he said in the preface, “the fiction might not, possibly, be received for a verity: in some degree the reverse of my previous experience.” 371 The result was Mardi (1849), Melville’s sprawling, aesthetically-flawed, half-baked rehearsal for Moby Dick , 372 introducing for the first time the organizing theme of the quest present in so many subsequent works. Mardi introduces many of the motifs that matured two years later in Moby Dick : cosmic kingship, Orientalism, esotericism, and myth. 373 It also introduces direct commentary on American and European politics in the conjuncture of 1848. However, even the author of one of the most interesting studies of Mardi admits that “though a trump, [it] is undeniably a bore to the casual reader.” 374

Mardi is, like Moby Dick , Pierre , or later Clarel , the story of a quest. The overall Spenserian inspiration of the book makes the characters more or less allegorical. They include a South Seas sailor, who later names himself “Taji”; Jarl, a Scandinavian seaman; Media, king of the mythic South Seas land of Mardi; Mohi, the chronicler; Babbalanja, the philosopher, and Yoomy, the poet. The bulk of Mardi is their search for the beautiful maiden Yillah, with whom Taji enjoyed an idyll in a “tropical bower” and who then disappears. The search, which makes up the bulk of the book, allows Melville to move into the “fictional” dimension he promised to his English editor and to attempt thinly veiled commentary on contemporary society and politics.

The Norse seaman, Jarl, is the first of Melville’s “Anacharsis Cloots delegation,” one of the universal class, the “castaways, mariners and renegades” which later people the Pequod ’s crew and other books of Melville:

 

Now, in old Jarl’s lingo there is never an idiom. Your aboriginal tar is too much of a cosmopolitan for that. Long companionship with seamen of all tribes: Manilla-men, Anglo-Saxons, Cholos, Lascars, and Danes, wear away in good time all mother-tongue stammerings. You sink your clan; down goes your nation; you speak a world’s language, jovially jabbering in the Lingua-Franca of the forecastle. 375

 

And where, in this revolutionary year, the Anacharis Cloots delegation is present, kingship cannot be far away:

 

A king on his throne! Ah, believe me, ye Gracchi, ye Acephali, ye Levellers, it is something worth seeing, be sure; whether beheld at Babylon the Tremendous, when Nebuchadnezzar was crowned; at old Scone in the days of Macbeth; at Rheims, among Oriflammes, at the coronation of Louis le Grand… 376

 

And where, in Melville in 1848, kingship is invoked, the pseudo-sacred, tied to democracy, is sure to follow:

 

Man lording it over man, man kneeling to man, is a spectacle that Gabriel might well travel hitherward to behold, for never did he behold it in heaven. But Darius giving laws to the Medes and the Persians, or the conqueror of Bactria with king-cattle yoked to his car, was not one whit more sublime, than Beau Brummel magnificently ringing for his valet. 377

 

All of these strands, of the erosion of feudal authority in the democratic era come together in one of a number of the narrator Taji’s meditations on history:

 

Ah! but these warriors, like anvils, will stand a deal of hard hammering. Especially in the old knight-errant times. For at the battle of Brevieux in Flanders, my glorious old gossiping ancestor, Froissart, informs me, that ten good knights, being suddenly unhorsed, fell stiff and powerless to the plain, fatally encumbered by their armor. Whereupon, the rascally burglarious peasants, their foes, fell to picking their visors; as burglars, locks; or oystermen, oysters; to get at their lives. But all to no purpose. And at last they were fain to ask aid of a blacksmith; and not till then, were the inmates of the armor dispatched. Now it was deemed very hard, that the mysterious state-prisoner of France should be riveted in an iron mask; but these knight-errants did voluntarily prison themselves in their own iron Bastiles; and thus helpless were murdered therein. Days of chivalry those, when gallant chevaliers died chivalric deaths!

And this was the epic age, over whose departure my late eloquent and prophetic friend and correspondent, Edmund Burke, so movingly mourned. Yes, they were glorious times. But no sensible man, given to quiet domestic delights, would exchange his warm fireside and muffins, for a heroic bivouac, in a wild beechen wood, of a raw gusty morning in Normandy; every knight blowing his steel-gloved fingers, and vainly striving to cook his cold coffee in his helmet. 378

 

In Mardi , for the first time in Melville’s work, a mythical nature also appears, anticipating the “cosmic evolutionary” dimension of Moby Dick . The astrological and astronomical references are pervasive and, according to one interpretation, structure the entire work on the Zodiac. 379 Also present is biology, which Melville does not hesitate to mix with meditation on chivalric myth such as the one just cited. In an early chapter devoted to the Indian Sword fish, (capable of penetrating ship hulls) after a brief natural history account, Melville immediately introduces mythic human history:

 

[A]mong the erudite naturalists he goeth by the outlandish appellation of “Xiphius Platypterus.”

But I waive for my hero all these cognomens, and substitute a much better one of my own: namely, the Chevalier 380 …A true gentleman of Black Prince Edward’s bright day, when all gentlemen were known by their swords; whereas, in times present, the Sword fish excepted, they are mostly known by their high polished boots and rattans. 381

 

Similarly, as indicated earlier, astronomy and astrology are everywhere, linked to a formulation of cosmic kingship. Taji and his companions are in Juam, ruled by King Donjalolo. Different parts of Donjalolo’s residence are associated with different houses of the Zodiac, House of the Morning and House of the Afternoon. Donjalolo is moved about his grounds every day, “thereby anticipating the revolution of the sun” 382 :

 

[R]eclining by night, like Pharaoh on the top of his patrimonial pile, the inmate looks heavenward, and heavenward only; gazing at the torch-light processions in the skies, when, in state, the suns march to be crowned.

And here, in this impenetrable retreat, centrally slumbered the universe-rounded, zodiac-belted, horizon-zoned, sea-girt, reef-sashed, mountain-locked, arbor-nested, royalty-girded, arm-clasped, self-hugged, indivisible Donjalolo, absolute monarch of Juam:—the husk-inhusked meat in the nut; the innermost spark in a ruby; the juice-nested seed in a golden-rinded orange; the red royal stone in an effeminate peach; the insphered sphere of spheres. 383

 

With such formulations, even in a Polynesian context, the Orient also emerges. A shark is “the great Tamerlane”; 384 sitting down to a feast of biscuits on the Parki the companions “laid close siege thereto, like the Grand Turk and his Vizier Mustapha sitting down before Vienna”; 385 the sun “seemed toiling among bleak Scythian steeps in the hazy background Above the storm-cloud flitted ominous patches of scud, rapidly advancing and receding: Attila’s skirmishers, thrown forward in the van of his Huns.” 386

The old priest escorting Yillah to be sacrificed was “like a scroll of old parchment, covered all over with hieroglyphical devices, harder to interpret, I’ll warrant, than any old Sanskrit manuscript.” 387

A sunrise is “a bright mustering…among the myriad white Tartar tents in the Orient”; sunbeams “thwart the sky, like lines of spears defiling upon some upland plain…And see! amid the blaze of banners, and the pawings of ten thousand golden hoofs, day’s mounted Sultan, Xerxe-like, moves on: the Dawn his standard, East and West his cymbals.” 388

But Mardi does more, in Melville’s evolution, than introduce many of the motifs of Moby Dick at cosmic, mythic or allegorical level; it also introduces, as indicated earlier, the immediately contemporary political scene of the world conjuncture of 1848, a level of commentary absent from the previous South Sea adventures. After much wandering in the Mardian archipelago in truly mythical islands and kingdoms, Taji and his companions approach a barely-veiled Europe—“Porpheero, a neighboring island, very large and famous, whose numerous broad valleys were divided among many rival kings” 389 —in which European countries appear under transparent names (France=Franko, etc.).

Melville engages in an extended discussion of contemporary world politics. There are references to Chartism, 390 the sectionalist crisis over slavery in the United States, the 1848 uprisings on the European continent, the annexation of Texas, Latin American revolutions, the California Gold Rush, and Western imperialism in Asia. As Taji and his companions encounter these different developments, they discuss whether or not democracy is compatible with slavery, 391 and whether or not the young American republic will escape the cycles of revolt and tyranny that have characterized the Old World.

The extended debate about contemporary politics in Mardi is unique in Melville’s work. While “red revolution” is a constant reference point even in such late books as Clarel and Billy Budd , it is usually present as a specter in the background of some latent revolt. The special weight it is given in Mardi is an indication of the impact of that year in Melville’s evolution.

Such is the view of history in the conjuncture of 1848 in Melville’s Mardi . But Melville’s first engagement with history and politics went beyond a commentary on current events, however important. A cosmic dimension enters. It seems at times to resemble a Transcendentalist supermind. It is in the narrative voice of Taji (and, it must be quickly pointed out, by no means necessarily Melville’s):

 

Do you believe you lived three thousand years ago? That you were at the taking of Tyre, were overwhelmed in Gomorrah? No. But for me, I was at the subsiding of the Deluge, and helped swab the ground, and build the first house. With the Israelites, I fainted in the wilderness; was in court, when Solomon outdid all the judges before him. I, it was, who suppressed the lost work of Manetho, on the Egyptian theology, as containing mysteries not to be revealed to posterity, and things at war with the canonical scriptures; I, who originated the conspiracy against that purple murderer, Domitian; I, who in the senate moved, that great and good Aurelian be emperor. I instigated the abdication of Diocletian, and Charles the Fifth; I touched Isabella’s heart, that she hearkened to Columbus. I am he, that from the king’s minions hid the Charter in the old oak at Hartford; I harbored Goffe and Whalley; I am the leader of the Mohawk masks, who in the Old Commonwealth’s harbor, overboard threw the East India Company’s Souchong; I am the Veiled Persian Prophet; I, the man in the iron mask; I, Junius. 392

 

This passage, with its suprahistorical sweep, foreshadows a similar sweep in some passages of Moby Dick . 393 But whereas, in the latter work, Ishmael uses a millennial view of history and evolution to explain the primordial quality which leaves him “horror struck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale,” Taji is focused “merely” on world history and a very specific, “masked” or hidden presence in it. 394

A second statement of suprahistorical or cosmic consciousness occurs in the chapter “Dreams,” 395 just after Taji has learned of Jarl’s death at the hands of pursuing avengers. 396

 

Dreams! dreams! passing and repassing, like Oriental empires in history; and scepters wave thick, as Bruce’s pikes at Brannockburn; 397 and crowns are plenty as marigolds in June. And far in the background, hazy and blue, their steeps let down from the sky, loom Andes on Andes, rooted on Alps; and all around me, long rushing oceans, roll Amazons and Oronocos; waves, mounted Parthians…And like a frigate, I am full with a thousand souls…Shoals, like nebulous vapors, shoreing the white reef of the Milky Way, against which the wrecked worlds are dashed; strowing all the strand, with their Himmaleh keels and ribs…Like a grand, ground swell, Homer’s old organ rolls its vast volumes under the light frothy wave-crests of Anacreon and Hafiz…In me, many worthies recline, and converse. I list to Paul who argues the doubts of Montaigne; Julian the Apostate cross questions Augustine…I walk a world that is mine; and enter many nations, as Mungo Park rested in African cots; 398 I am served like Bajazet: 399 Bacchus my brother, Virgil my minstrel, Philip Sidney 400 my page…Fire flames on my tongue, and though of old the Bactrian prophets were stoned, yet the stoners in oblivion sleep. But whoso stones me, shall be as Erostratus, 401 who put torch to the temple; though Gengis Khan with Cambyses combine to obliterate him, his name shall be extant in the mouth of the last man that lives. And if so be, down unto death, whence I came, will I go, like Xenophon retreating on Greece, all Persia brandishing her spears in his rear. 402

 

Mardi is a failure because its allegorical character proves an unsuccessful, schematic vehicle for the themes that Melville tries to treat. Nevertheless, it is important as a transitional book in which for the first time Melville rises above the immediate autobiography and “travel account” of Typee and Omoo , both in the commentary on 1848 in Europe and in the United States and in the “higher” world-historical consciousness in several of Taji’s meditations. Before these different political, world-historical and cosmic levels bore fruit, Melville turned to the one element still missing from his writing: social class.

 

c. Redburn and Melville’s Discovery of Class

 

Redburn (1849) was Melville’s “least favorite novel,” ostensibly written merely to make money. In it, Melville returns to the more straightforward, semi-autobiographical sailor’s narrative of Typee and Omoo , but this time turning away from the South Seas and using material from his first sea voyage to Liverpool in 1839. Nevertheless, despite the fact that it decidedly belongs to Melville’s lesser fiction, Redburn provides remarkable material, deepens themes already present in his earlier work, and introduces themes that had earlier been absent or only latently present. For the purposes of outlining the elements of Melville’s evolution up to Moby Dick , however, the following will single out only the encounter with mid-nineteenth-century proletarian reality by a downwardly mobile individual.

Redburn tells the tale of Wellingborough Redburn, son of a deceased “importer in Broad-street,” “a gentleman of one of the first families of America,” who, like Melville, had to ship out as a seaman because his family had come on hard times. It is, for now, only Redburn’s encounter with the Liverpool slums that concerns us.

The first sight of Liverpool is a shock:

 

I beheld lofty ranges of dingy warehouses, which seemed very deficient in the elements of the marvelous; and bore a most unexpected resemblance to the ware-houses along South-street in New York…plain, matter-of-fact warehouses…

To be sure, I did not expect that every house in Liverpool must be a Leaning Tower of Pisa, or a Strasbourg Cathedral; but yet, these edifices I must confess, were a sad and bitter disappointment to me. 403

 

Melville is getting closer to the daily reality of working-class life. In no book prior to Redburn had he written, in so many words:

 

There are classes of men in the world, who bear the same relation to society at large, that the wheels do to a coach… Now, sailors form one of these wheels; they go and come around the globe; they are the true importers, and exporters of spices and silks; of fruits and wines and marbles; they carry missionaries, ambassadors, opera singers, armies, merchants, tourists and scholars to their destination; they are a bridge of boats across the Atlantic; they are the primum mobile of all commerce; and, in short, were they to emigrate in a body to man the navies of the moon, almost everything would stop here on earth except its revolution on its axis, and the orators in the American Congress. 404

 

In such a passage, Melville is already beyond any Transcendentalist hues that may have made their way into works like Mardi . But Redburn’s experience of dispossession, faced with the proletarian realities of his shipmates and of Liverpool harbor, is nothing compared to what awaits him when he attempts to explore the city. He finds a church, used in 1588 for a reception of the Earl of Derby, and during the English civil wars as a military prison and stable “for the steed of some noble cavalry officer”; its basement is now used as a morgue for unidentified bodies found drowned under the Liverpool docks. In a side street called “Launcelott’s-Hey,” in a cellar beneath a crumbling warehouse, he finds a shriveled woman and her two starving children; he goes for help, but no one, including a policeman, shows the slightest interest; desperate, Redburn feels “an almost irresistible impulse to do them the last mercy,” but holds back

 

For I well knew that the law, which would let them perish of themselves without giving them one cup of water, would spend a thousand pounds, if necessary, in convicting him who should so much as offer to relieve them from their miserable existence. 405

 

Melville’s passages on the Liverpool waterfront slums are worthy of his contemporaries Dickens or Engels. Redburn is besieged and followed by beggars, crying “for Heaven’s sake, and for God’s sake, and for Christ’s sake, beseeching of you but one ha’penny.”

 

The pestilent lanes and allies which…go by the name of Rotten-row, Gibraltar-place, and Booble-alley, are putrid with vice and crime; to which, perhaps, the round globe does not furnish a parallel. The sooty and begrimed bricks of the very houses have a reeking, Sodomlike, and murderous look. 406

 

Redburn describes the ease with which the English army and navy recruit in these areas, with idyllic advertising of travel and pay, whereupon the recruit in reality “encounters the keen saber of the Sikh” or “stands a shivering sentry on the bleak ramparts of Quebec.” He notes with surprise the absence of blacks who, in the United States, “almost always form a considerable portion of the destitute,” but also notes the seeming absence of color prejudice in England. 407

The final element of the early Melville’s evolution was to turn his attention from class ashore to the detailed investigation of hierarchy on a ship. Although there had been rumblings of mutiny, and an actual mutiny, in Typee and Omoo , and authoritarian captains in Mardi and in Redburn , Melville in White Jacket turns to the detailed anatomy of shipboard hierarchy, and its pseudo-sacred aura, as his main theme.

 

d. White-Jacket: The Pseudo-Sacred as the “Bunting” of Hierarchy

 

When Melville left Polynesia in 1844, he signed onto a US navy frigate for the homebound voyage. White-Jacket (1850), Melville’s last book prior to Moby Dick , recounted that experience. White-Jacket constituted Melville’s first work in which concrete exploration of authority, discipline and revolt in the specific work situation of ordinary seamen was the focus and not (as in some of the earlier works) a side feature of a different theme. It appeared in the midst of a national controversy over the harsh discipline in the US armed forces, particularly the navy, and its graphic portrayal of the realities of flogging in the navy prompted one Rear Admiral to say it belonged “on the desk of every member of Congress.” Some historians credit the book with inspiring Congressional action to outlaw flogging; others are more circumspect. 408

White-Jacket also took Melville beyond semi-autobiography into the politics of his own family. 409 I