Empire for Liberty
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Empire for Liberty

Melville and the Poetics of Individualism

Wai Chee Dimock

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Empire for Liberty

Melville and the Poetics of Individualism

Wai Chee Dimock

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About This Book

Wai Chee Dimock approaches Herman Melville not as a timeless genius, but as a historical figure caught in the politics of an imperial nation and an "imperial self." She challenges our customary view by demonstrating a link between the individualism that enabled Melville to write as a sovereign author and the nationalism that allowed America to grow into what Jefferson hoped would be an "empire for liberty."

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CHAPTER
1Nation, Self, and Personification
“YOU MUST have plenty of sea-room to tell the Truth in,” Melville said in an inspired though not usually remarked moment in “Hawthorne and His Mosses.”1 He was thinking, perhaps, less of Mosses from an Old Manse, the slim volume under review, than of the “imperial folio” he himself happened to be writing at the moment. Moby-Dick was a “mighty book” imaged after the “mighty bulk” of the whale, Melville explained. Its “outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep” was to encompass “the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth.”2
Truth had its spatial appetites, Melville seemed to suggest. For its proper accommodation one needed a vast theater—indeed, nothing short of an empire would do. Melville was by no means the only one to make “sea-room” such a cardinal virtue, and such a cardinal necessity. Jefferson, in his 1805 inaugural address, had entertained a similar premise. “The larger our association,” he said, “the less will it be shaken by local passions.”3 Jefferson was speaking in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase (1803), an event which rapidly put to rest the fear that space might be a liability for republican government. Far from being a liability, territorial expansion had come to be seen, by the 1830s, as a basic requirement for the nation’s well-being, so basic that it became practically an alimentary need. Major Davezac, a speaker at the 1844 New Jersey Democratic State Convention, proceeded from just that premise when he alluded to America’s “pasture grounds”—invoking, in his zeal, if not the “mighty bulk” of the whale, then something almost as bulky:
Make way, I say, for the young American Buffalo—he has not yet got land enough; he wants more land as his cool shelter in summer—he wants more land for his beautiful pasture grounds. I tell you, we will give him Oregon for his summer shade, and the region of Texas as his winter pasture. (Applause.) Like all of his race, he wants salt, too. Well, he shall have the use of two oceans—the mighty Pacific and turbulent Atlantic shall be his.4
Melville’s love of “sea-room” was perhaps more widely shared than we might think. He could not have known about a speech at the New Jersey convention, and the point here is not to trace any “influence” from that quarter. Yet, in a broader, less determinate fashion, Melville and Major Davezac do seem to occupy some common ground—a domain of cultural inscription shadowed forth in authorial pronouncements no less than in expansionist rhetoric. What brings them together, in their respective plea for authorial “sea-room” and bovine “pasture grounds,” is a shared convention of ideas—a convention that, even as it entertains the diversity of individual utterances, is nonetheless regulative in the constitution of that individuality. The relation between Melville and Davezac then, between the enshrined writer and the forgotten speaker, is the relation between two voices inhabiting a historical moment: they are conditioned by that moment, circumscribed by it, and differentiated within it. At once parallel and separate, they map forth a kinship in difference.
It is the difference, of course, to which we have customarily attended: we have taken that difference for granted, embraced it as an article of faith, developed elaborate arguments from this central premise. Yet something surely ought to be said about the kinship as well. To do so is not to make a Davezac out of Melville, or even to uncover a Davezac in him, but to restore a measure of historical contingency to such categories as “authorship,” “textuality,” and indeed “literature” itself. If we are to think of authorship as an articulation of the author’s selfhood, and if that selfhood is itself a contingent term within a historical process, then literature too must be understood to be contingent. There is no transcendent ground, ultimately, for its formal authority—its assembly of shape and meaning— because the “author” who authorizes that form is himself historically constituted. And if by literature we still refer to a collection of honored texts, the “text” too must be understood to be an expedient (rather than absolute) term, pressed into service only by fiat and for the sake of convenience. For the “text” and its “context” are in every case inseparable, the latter being not so much external to the former as constitutive of it, encompassing it and permeating it as the condition of its textuality.
And so, obscure as he once was and discredited as he has since become, Major Davezac is nonetheless a phenomenon worth recalling—not only to be studied independently, but also to help us contextualize what might otherwise have appeared discrete and contextless. In the presence of such a figure, whose historicity is manifest, we can begin to imagine Melville’s own historicity in all its filiations and correspondences. The emphasis on kinship, then, is hardly an attempt to demote the author. It is, rather, an attempt to disseminate within him a network of associations and, in so doing, to ask again what constitutes an “author,” what constitutes a “text,” and what constitutes the “subject” of literary studies. Such an approach necessarily shifts the emphasis away from the achievements of individual authors to the relational matrix they inhabit. If this seems a disservice to the author in one sense, the disservice, I hope, will simultaneously be a tribute.
For to the extent that the text is seen not as a reified entity—not a monument of individual achievement, but a field of permutating relations—the author too is saved from the fate of reification.5 He is saved, in Melville’s case, from the fate of being always and only a “great author.” Excused momentarily from that imposing charge, he takes on a more interesting contour: he is not so much a given as a problematic, produced and reproduced by the relations that engage him. If he sometimes exemplifies a “poetics of individualism” (as he does in my account), he is nonetheless not reducible to that poetics, because he is neither enclosed by it nor exhausted within it. Other poetics, other modes of human meaning and legitimacy, will find a voice in him as well, as other critics will testify. To focus on the context of authorship, then, is not only to resist a reified notion of that activity; it is also to reflect on the inescapably contextual character of literary criticism itself, and to resist its tendency to reify its own procedures. For that reason, this study will not aim to be a “definitive study.” Embedded in its own context—in the current debate about individualism— it is necessarily partial, partisan, provisional. If this makes for a more limited project, it also makes for a somewhat different kind of criticism—one that insists, I hope, on the contingency of author and critic both.
In any case, as the exemplar of a “poetics of individualism,” Melville will emerge, in my account, as something of a representative author, a man who speaks for and with his contemporaries, speaking for them and with them, most of all, when he imagines himself to be above them, apart from them, opposed to them. He belongs, in this sense, to the company of those whom Sacvan Bercovitch has called “prophets of probation”: “historian-seers whose representative qualities were enhanced by their hostility toward those they represented,” in whom “alienation and engagement” were, “by their very contradictions . . . made to correspond.”6 Given such a premise, my goal obviously is not to uncover a timeless meaning in Melville’s writings, but to multiply within them some measure of their density of reference: to examine them, in short, not in their didactic relation to the twentieth century, but in their dialogic relation to the nineteenth.
Two recent studies, Michael Rogin’s Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville, and James Duban’s Melville's Major Fiction: Politics, Theology, and Imagination, have done much to invoke just that sense of cultural dialogue in Melville.7 This study differs from both in locating that dialogue not in thematic representation, but in what I call “textual governance”—the formal logic by which Melville executes his authorial dictates, supervises and legitimizes, affixes meanings and assigns destinies. This textual governance, I believe, cannot be divorced from the social governance of antebellum America, for the terms of Melville’s authorial sovereignty, by which he fashions his textual universe into a textual given, are ultimately analogous to the terms of America’s national sovereignty, by which the social universe is fashioned into a social given. From this perspective, Melville’s authorial practices are neither strictly private nor even strictly literary, for what they adumbrate, in their controlling logic of form, is something like a controlling “logic of culture.”8
Melville, of course, would not be happy with such an account. Authorship, for him, is almost exclusively an exercise in freedom, an attempt to proclaim the self’s sovereignty over and against the world’s. To be worthy of its name, authorship must wrest itself free of what he calls the world’s “dull common places”; it must indulge in its own “play of freedom and invention”; it must bring forth “those deep far-away things in [itself].” Indeed, the art of authorship, as he describes it in a celebrated moment in “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” is none other than the art of escape: “in this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands.”9 Truth here assumes its characteristic Melvillean pose as the persecuted object. But it has other poses as well, as we can see (in a less celebrated passage) in a letter to Hawthorne:
By visible truth, we mean the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things as they strike the eye of the man who fears them not, though they do their worst to him,—the man who, like Russia or the British Empire, declares himself a sovereign nature (in himself) amid the powers of heaven, hell, and earth.10
Truth here belongs to individuals of a very special kind, individuals who have every right to call themselves “imperial selves.” Unlike the ones Quentin Anderson describes, however, these selves are “imperial” not only in consciousness but also in conduct: indeed, their very mode of existence seems to have something in common with the Russian and British empires.11 At once autonomous and impregnable, “a sovereign nature (in himself),” the imperial self is quite literally empirelike, his province of selfhood akin to a national polity. The mutuality between self and nation here is no accident, for it was just such a mutuality (as I will try to show) that constituted both the self and the nation in antebellum America. In Melville’s context, the mutuality between self and nation produces an individual who, being empirelike, can finally have at his disposal the “sea-room” that Truth demands. In short, the spatial appetites of Truth make the author an “imperial” self almost by necessity—imperial, not only because he writes freely, in sovereign autonomy, but also because he writes appropriatively, like an empire. His authorship enlists the sovereignty of both self and nation—both the freedom of the former and the dominion of the latter—to bring forth a new sovereign, an authorial variety, a figure whose literary individualism is always imperially articulated. This logic suggests to Melville, in Mardi, that, “like many a monarch, I am less to be envied, than the veriest hind in the land.” The same logic inspires him to produce an “imperial folio” in Moby-Dick, and to complain, in Pierre, that “the Empire of Human Knowledge can never be lasting in any one dynasty, since Truth still gives new Emperors to the earth.”12
Lasting or not, Melville clearly thinks of himself as one of Truth’s “Emperors.” To Hawthorne, for instance, he depicts himself as the “lord of a little vale in the solitary Crimea” (adding, in a burst of elation, that Hawthorne’s approval of Moby-Dick has “now given me the crown of India”).13 Imperial sovereignty in such remote regions would presumably give him the privilege he had wishfully attributed to the whale in Moby-Dick, that of “liv[ing] in this world without being of it.”14 Such are the terms of authorial freedom for Melville. And yet, even as he lays claim to that freedom, the very idiom of his claim already suggests a bond between him and the world from which he wishes to be free. For Melville, as it turns out, is hardly the only one to speak of personal freedom in imperial terms. Blackstone had resorted to the same idiom when he characterized the basis of individual freedom—“the right of property”—as “that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world.”15 Even more famously, and closer to home, Jefferson had immortalized the same idiom, the same conjunction of freedom and dominion, in his striking (and not altogether oxymoronic) praise of America: as an “empire for liberty.”16
If Melville’s language of freedom resonated with Jefferson’s, it resonated, just as surely, with the language of freedom in antebellum expansionist discourse. The idea that America was an “asylum for those who love liberty” had been a commonplace, of course, since the eighteenth century.17 In the 1840s, however, the phrase “extending the area of freedom” came to have many useful new meanings. Andrew Jackson had coined that phrase to justify the annexation of Texas, and, in one form or another, the word “freedom” came to be a code word for America’s continental expansionism.18 John L. O’Sullivan (in an editorial that launched the phrase “Manifest Destiny”) suggested, for instance, that America’s claims to Oregon were justified by the “great experiment of liberty” to which Providence had appointed it.19 Less providentially minded, Representative Duncan put the cause of liberty even more bluntly. “Personal liberty is incompatible with a crowded population,” he said, and the “possession and occupation of Oregon” thus have “the love of liberty for its means, liberty itself for its reward, and the spread of free principles and republican institutions for its end.”20 The United States Magazine and Democratic Review summed it up best of all. Whereas European powers “conquer only to enslave,” it reasoned, America, being “a free nation,” “conquers only to bestow freedom.”21
Far from being antagonistic, “empire” and “liberty” are instrumentally conjoined. If the former stands to safeguard the latter, the latter, in turn, serves to justify the former. Indeed, the conjunction of the two, of freedom and dominion, gives America its sovereign place in history—its Manifest Destiny, as its advocates so aptly called it. Within this context, Melville’s terms of authorial sovereignty—his particular conjunction of freedom and dominion—would seem exactly to replicate the terms of national sovereignty. That he should evoke the nation’s territorial acquisitions to image forth a writer’s literary achievements is no accident. Hawthorne is to be admired, Melville thinks, because his authorial geography mirrors the nation’s: “The smell of your beeches and hemlocks is upon him; your own broad prairies are in his soul; and if you travel away inland into his deep and noble nature, you will hear the far roar of his Niagara.”22
Majestic in sweep, replete with “sea-room,” the authorial geography here perhaps says less...

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