the New Pantagruel

Moby Dick and the Culture Wars

by Randy Boyagoda

n a 2004 issue of the Modern Language Association members’ newsletter, then-MLA President Robert Scholes cited Thoreau’s cautionary dictum “to beware of enterprises that require new clothes” as a justification for encouraging his colleagues to “be doubly cautious of those who drape themselves in the flag.” He went on to describe a Signorelli fresco of the apocalypse in which Christ and the Antichrist are painted to look remarkably similar. During these (last) days, Scholes cautioned by zany extrapolation, we must be especially wary of “master[s] of spin,” particularly those who attempt to restrict academic freedoms “in the name of ‘patriotism’ (as in the Patriot Act).” Erudite extremism from such corners is not surprising. But a more recent outgrowth of the American academy’s radicalization, particularly after the attacks of September 11, 2001, is the blunt pride and self-valorized defiance with which many prominent humanities scholars such as Scholes now position themselves, their scholarship, and American literature itself against “patriotism,” the national community, and traditional cultural consensus. In conservative circles, the politicization of literature is frequently lamented and ascribed, with ample reason today, to puffed-up leftist academics. And yet, as will be argued, great American literature entered the modern culture wars with the politically charged, unambiguously conservative rise to national preeminence of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, a novel that became an important component of post-World War II patriotism, Cold War intellectual politics, and even the early neoconservative movement.

I.

“Suburban Landscape no. 4” (oil on canvas)
by Kay Darling

For those who cannot imagine American literature without Moby-Dick, it is surprising to realize how recently Melville’s book became the national epic. Dismal reviews and poor sales relegated the novel and its author to near-anonymity in the latter half of the 19th century. Arguably the first major consideration of American literature in the modern era, Van Wyck Brooks’s America’s Coming-of-Age (1915), neglected even to mention Melville. Popular American interest in Melville began at the centenary of his birth in 1919, while only British writers in the 1920s, notably D.H. Lawrence, vigorously promoted his greatness. It was not until the 1930s and ’40s, however, that American scholars turned to his work in earnest. The timing suggests that their motives were not strictly literary. The United States was in need of a native-born artist whose achievements could adequately complement the stature of a fledgling superpower.

The earliest influential domestic scholar to champion Melville was F. O. Matthiessen, whose American Renaissance (1941) conferred an apt historical moniker on the burst of intellectual creativity that arose in New England a century before. To understand Melville’s importance, according to Matthiessen, one had to appreciate the double inspiration of his work. First, Matthiessen identified in Melville an intense devotion to Shakespeare, though not the slavish sort of foreign imitation hamstringing nineteenth-century American culture that Emerson lamented in Self-Reliance. Matthiessen suggested that while Moby-Dick’s frame was certainly Shakespearean, the bricks and mortar were entirely American. To prove this second point, he characterized the author’s jaunty, exclamatory prose as evidence “that the dialect of mid-nineteenth-century America could rise to dramatic heights. That does not mean that any Americans ever spoke like this — any more than Elizabethans talked like Lear — but it does mean that the progressions of Melville’s prose are now based on a sense of speech rhythm, and not on anybody else’s verse.” Melville’s artistic self-possession, American-voiced as it was, should be read, Matthiessen tacitly proposed, as a sign of the nation’s potential greatness, which is embodied spectacularly in Ishmael’s proud, funny, rambling, exuberant pronouncements, such as this magnificent paean to a tiny New England whaling town:

Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See, what a real corner of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it — a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background…. Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don’t grow naturally … that they have to sale beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in the summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day’s walk a prairie … that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea turtles. But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.

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