“Suburban Landscape no. 4” (oil on canvas)
by Kay Darling
In 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.
“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.
The drama and expanse of Moby-Dick suggested to Matthiessen a nation whose aspirations, abilities, and, by extension, tragic potential, could match and even surpass their equivalents in the Elizabethan England of Shakespeare’s plays.
Such a proposition had a robust impact on American readers in the early 1940s. While a battered Britain nobly did her best for king and country, the United States, having suffered a treacherous attack upon its soil, had entered World War II as a decisive force, in defense of core Western principles and its own democratic well-being. With the progress of the war confirming America’s new global stature, there arose an effort in English departments to begin teaching the nation’s own literature systematically, which in turn led to the onset of college-level American Studies programs. Melville benefited most from this patriotic codification of a national literary tradition. From the 1940s onward, Moby-Dick dominated reading lists and research pursuits: dissertations, symposiums, and biographies piled up quickly. So much so that by 1950, American author and scholar Robert Spiller could observe that Melville had become “the most thoroughly studied of all American authors.”
Today, we often deride the professors’ practice of strutting their politics as a premise for their scholarship (“As a Neo-syndicalist Lesbian vegan, my interest in Chaucer…”). But this is not a new phenomenon, nor does it necessarily skew Left:
My first purpose in writing this book is to set the works of Herman Melville before the reader in something like their full imperfect glory. My second purpose is to contribute a book on Melville to a movement which may be described (once again) as the new liberalism…. The new liberalism … must present a vision of life capable, by a continuous act of imaginative criticism, of avoiding … the facile ideas of progress and “social realism” … [and] the idea that literature should participate directly in the economic liberation of the masses, [and] the equivocal relationship to community totalitarianism and power politics…. [T]hese problems were also Melville’s … [and] if our liberalism is serious about its new vision of life, if it has the necessary will to survive, it must come to terms with Herman Melville.
So begins Richard Chase’s Herman Melville: A Critical Study (1949), a book at the forefront of the newly-minted American Studies movement that also helped open the Cold War’s culture front with a deadeye aim on the Soviet Union and its sympathizers in the United States. Chase, one of the New York intellectuals whose anti-Communism pointed the way to neoconservatism, was alert to the high stakes involved in defining America’s cultural inheritance and perceived Melville’s central presence within it.
Chase’s primary contention is that Moby-Dick offers us a clear choice between two ways of life. Either we can be like Ishmael, Melville’s archetypal American — self-immersed in the storehouse of Western Civilization and thoughtfully jealous of his individual liberty — or we can emulate Ahab, the extreme embodiment of the worst tendencies of progressive politics and gluttonous free enterprise. According to Chase, one of the fundamental tenets of American life that Melville’s writing actualizes — unlike Marxist Utopian thought — is a firm conviction that man and his systems of government and of commerce are always imperfect. Indeed, Chase readily acknowledged that Melville was critical of American life, but, unlike later scholars, he emphasized that Melville’s criticism, like his own by tacit connection, was born out of an amor patriae. It was, in fact, a demonstration of the self-correction and free expression that the American Experiment depended upon for its vitality and success.
The terms that Chase used in his analysis, however, said more about 1930s and ’40s politics and intellectual movements than they did about Melville’s time. Chase contended that Ahab becomes a tragic and dangerous figure principally because he was a “good progressive American.” This was a term of especial opprobrium for Chase, since, as recent history suggested, progressivism encouraged totalitarian tendencies. Like other idealistically motivated, brutal men, Ahab was “the master of the most beautifully contrived machine of his time; the builder of new worlds whose ultimate superficiality drives him to assume an uneasy kingship … leaving nothing behind but disaster for the races of the world.” Recent world history had radically transformed America’s view of Ahab; in 1929, Lewis Mumford could sympathetically regard the character as heroically embodying “the spirit of man, small and feeble, but purposive” against the terrible whale. But after Hitler and Mussolini, it was impossible to read Ahab’s fanatical speeches to frenzied, fearing crowds of sailors, or his willingness to sacrifice many lives for a private pursuit of total domination, as anything less than a prophecy against omnipotent madmen.
Fresh foreign developments thus provided post-war American readers with grim reminders of the need to purge similar tendencies from their country. Ahab was, after all, an American, and the novel’s events represented a potential turn for American life. It is here that Chase extracted from Moby-Dick a dangerous combination of totalitarian political tendencies and voracious free marketeering. For Chase, the Pequod’s journey was “an industrial enterprise bossed by Ahab,” whose quest to destroy the white whale represented capitalism’s equivalent to the extremist tendencies of fascism and communism: a desire to consume the world-in-its-totality. The captain readily sublimates himself into capitalism’s “full disastrous implications, [because] Ahab is the epic transmutation of the American free enterpriser.” In delineating Ahab’s mad ambition, Chase explained, Melville warns that “the American who exploits nature soon learns to pursue a mysterious and dangerous ideal, and this pursuit transforms him into the likeness of what he pursues.” Ahab metaphorically becomes the whale, and from Chase’s vantage point, both ultimately prefigure the modern political dictator manipulating the economic systems at his disposal: indifferent to anything but world-spanning domination, greedy consumption, and the remorseless destruction of anything in his path.
Unlike many of his contemporary academic boosters of U.S. power, Chase refused to believe that the United States had come of age, but he thought it had the potential to do so, provided its citizens acted out of authentic concern for each other. They could do so by emulating the thoughtful, large-hearted Ishmael and rejecting the impetuous, self-destructive Ahab. In sum, Chase realized the necessity, in an age of competing superpowers with radically opposed worldviews, of America having a proper conception of itself — and of its imperfections — and that it sensed the civilizational urgency of self-improvement.
With the end of the Cold War, the political context of Chase’s interpretation became obsolete, but Moby-Dick remained firmly entrenched as a politically-instructive masterwork of American culture. The novel’s post-Cold War trajectory confirms its persistent political importance while revealing the regnant suspicions of an increasingly liberal academy about the values and aims of American civilization. The New American Studies movement, predominantly centered in English departments, is today the foremost promoter of an aggressive, antagonistic mood towards the nation’s literature, culture and international presence. Its account of Moby-Dick, pitched expressly against Chase, draws its inspiration from C.L.R. James’s Mariners, Renegades & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953), the recently discovered “madwoman in the attic” in Melville studies and one of the most promising weapons of the academic Left in the contemporary culture war.
For decades, James was a Trinidadian intellectual best known for his Marxist history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins (1936). In 1952, he was detained for four months on Ellis Island; having been in America for fifteen years agitating on behalf of the Socialist Workers’ Party, he was suspect under the newly-inaugurated McCarran-Walter Act. While on Ellis Island, he devised a reinterpretation of Moby-Dick that not only ran counter to the Matthiessen-Chase model but also involved a creative autobiographical component. Like Chase, James firmly believed that literary criticism had a role to play in diagnosing and shaping contemporary politics and found the means to make his point in Melville’s novel. Moreover, he also contended that Melville’s cautionary imagining of the world had to be heeded a century on because recent events had rendered his message newly relevant. Totalitarian dictators were to be feared, as Melville depicts them, but these were not strictly Russian or German types but outgrowths of Western civilization in every national form. After calling Ahab “the most dangerous and destructive social type that has ever appeared in Western Civilization,” James offered an unsettling, personally felt, observation.
People today still talk about Nazi imperialism, dictatorship, lust for power, living space, etc…. [T]hey could not face Hitler yesterday with a clear mind and good conscience (as they cannot face Stalin today) because the madness of both was born and nourished in the very deepest soil of Western Civilization. The political organization of Modern Europe has been based upon the creation and consolidation of national states. And the national state, every single national state, had and still has a racial doctrine. This doctrine is that the national race … is superior to all other[s]…. This doctrine was sometimes stated, often hidden, but it was and is there, and over the last twenty years has grown stronger in every country in the world. Who doubts this has only to read the McCarran Immigration Bill of 1952, which is permeated with the doctrine of racial superiority.
James authentically believed he was doing a service to the United States by comparing its government policies to recent totalitarian horrors. But to any American in the 1950s who read James’s book with Moby-Dick’s recent rise to national prominence in mind, his analysis would have seemed heretical and subversive. While agreeing with Chase’s view that Ahab was a totalitarian type, James rejected the heroic impression of Ishmael as the democratic individualist, and instead derided him as “an intellectual Ahab. [For as] Ahab is enclosed in the mason walled-town of the exclusiveness of authority, so Ishmael is enclosed in the solitude of his social and intellectual speculation.” The real struggle aboard the Pequod, according to James, was between these conjoined Ahabs and the men beneath them. Ishmael and Ahab were thus the white ruling class tyrannizing a mass of sailors whom James envisioned as heroic black workers. His evidence involved a mixture of passionate (if creative) commentary and personal biography, culminating in a bitter rant against his treatment by the Justice Department and the INS. In James’s fashioning, Ellis Island was the real-world actualization of the Pequod, and he was a latter-day captive black sailor, his fate in the hands of monomaniacal powers bent on total world domination. Not surprisingly, his effort won him little favor with U.S. authorities. His book sold a few copies and quickly fell into anonymity for almost fifty years.
Twenty-first century American scholars, however, are intensely enamored of James’s Melville. A leading figure in the New American Studies, Donald Pease, has positioned himself as the valiant defender of both Melville and James from pro-American intellectual forces of the 1940s and ’50s. Pease contends that the older, nationalist forms of American Studies actually served the interests of the government’s anti-immigrant policies. Moreover, such scholarship helped turn America into a neocolonialist, imperial power by providing a “cultural typology with which to interpret and thereafter to subsume other literatures and geopolitical spaces into a universal Americanism.” A representative contemporary American academic, Pease seems equally troubled by the fact that his predecessors in the academy supported America in the Cold War as by the possibility that anyone could be coerced into believing in a positive, “universal” national image. Contrary to such intellectual imperialism, Pease explains, James rightly “questioned the dominant discourses and assumptions within the field” of American Studies and his “interpretation of Moby-Dick from the mariners’ perspective … minoritized [sic] a classic” by offering a heterodox alternative to the national consensus about Melville, and about 1950s American life more generally. In other words, C. L. R.James, circa 1952, is the prophetic self-portrait of the American academic liberal, circa 2005. This embattled soul is now faced with a government waging a war on free speech at home and against Third World minorities abroad, a government illegally imprisoning people at a secretive island military base, a government justifying crime after crime in the dubious name of “patriotism.” What, one wonders, is a professor to do?
The nation’s intellectual life is today unevenly divided, in part between a minority whose interest in American classics remains motivated by a critical love for the country, and a majority driven by a resentful animosity towards traditional American life, which they seek to de-value through the very books that helped to form a national culture. In response to this problem, intelligent conservatives must reject both the naïve presumption lingering in their circles that high literature ought never be dragged down into conversation with politics, and also the easy temptation to dig in and grind along well-rutted ideological divisions. The better solution, I suggest in concluding, begins with first scraping away an accumulation of critical barnacles and returning to Melville for Melville.
In reading Moby-Dick, for example, we should cultivate a new interest in Melville’s depiction of Queequeg, a character who was rather ignorantly dismissed as a savage by Chase, and lamely celebrated as an exuberant member of the working class by James. Queequeg, “George Washington cannibalistically developed” according to Ishmael’s early, pregnant description, is the novel’s finest figure — brave, generous, and gallant — and, I propose, its ideal American. The son of an island king, he leaves behind his aristocratic inheritance to seek adventure and edification in the West. He willingly humbles himself to become a lowly crewman and rises through the whaling ranks through his skills as a harpooner. Today, he seems the archetypal American immigrant in search of the Promised Land, who found it, worked hard, and made good. He represents, in short, the actualization of Melville’s American ideal:
[T]his august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt 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!
The greatness of America, Melville recognized, was that it knew that the true source of human dignity was not to be found in royal blood or fine robes or race. It was based on an ideal proposition of Divinely imaged humankind, which in turn encouraged hard work and, diligence, and, moreover, recognized a potential in all men to order their essential liberty to the greater good of their community and their nation, even to the point of great personal sacrifice. Queequeg embodies these national virtues, which endow all Americans with “democratic dignity.”
These same virtues must be nurtured today no matter how old-fashioned or “patriotic” (or even Christian) they may seem to those too easily disenchanted by America’s strengths and weaknesses. Such efforts will inevitably be derided in some corners as a new conservative politicization of literature. More truthfully, they develop out of and seek to develop further a thoughtful love of country. Scholars from across the political spectrum purport to marshal their work under the aegis of defending American principles and traditions. Today, those with the best prospects of putting these labors towards the rehabilitation of America’s cultural health, as opposed to using them to indulge in self-inflated ressentiment, will propose ideas in support of the American Experiment with a genuine love of the country’s enabling freedoms leavening an honest criticism of their troubling malformations.
Such scholars should heed and emulate the sober and demanding critiques of America put forth by its greatest writers. In Moby-Dick, as in so many of his other works, Melville offers a vigorous vision of American life in no small part by turning a hard eye to the absurdities, hypocrisies, and darker sins of his nation, as embodied in Ahab’s vicious tyranny and, if less infamously, Ishmael’s calloused amnesia. At novel’s end, Ishmael altogether forgets his cherished Queequeg amidst the chaos of the Pequod’s sinking. George Washington cannibalistically developed goes to an anonymous watery grave, with neither care nor commemoration from the erstwhile admiring narrator, who in turn thoughtlessly floats to his rescue upon his friend’s empty coffin. Melville’s Americans are true to life — often generous of mind and heart if inevitably flawed in both respects. They are depicted in such a fashion as part of Melville’s primary ambition: to enable Americans to appreciate, in the fullest complexity, their muddy grandeur, and recognize, however vexingly, the imperfect splendor of their nation.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 2.2.