Customer Reviews

Herman Melville and the American Calling: The Fiction After Moby-Dick, 1851-1857

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

William V. Spanos, founding editor of "boundary 2", tells us that his book was created out of a crisis "at a time I was beginning to think that intellectual work in America was futile" (xiv). It takes up the argument of his "The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Cannon, the Cold War", and "The Struggle for American Studies" (1995) that Melville's work anticipates the destruction of the American episteme in "the United States' arrogant and brutal intervention in Vietnam" (3) and delegitimates the discourse of the New World Order. This crisis has intensified with the reaction to the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the Ahab-like War on Terror that has rejuvenated the American calling to carve out a world in its own image. The toxic mixture of neo-conservatism and evangelical Christianity has mobilized the American exceptionalist ethos, "re-achieving a religio-patriotic unity" (100), that Melville corrosively deconstructed and which led to him being frozen into silence by his contemporaries.

Subsequent efforts to rehabilitate Melville's later fiction as a self-critical part of the great American tradition, or efforts to criticize him for complicity with this imperial vision, have under-valued the incisiveness of his interrogation of American exceptionalism and the rhetoric and thematics of spectrality. Now, with the advent of postructuralist theory we can at last begin to grasp the nature of Melville's post-humanist anticipation of the deconstruction of the self-enclosed subject. Spanos will illuminate "the relevance of Melville's fiction for the late postmodern, indeed, post-9/11, American occasion" (34):

"What ... the silent specter of Melville's post-Moby-Dick fiction calls for now in an age that the arrogant intellectual deputies of the official culture of America first identified as "the end of history" and the advent of the 'New World Order' presided over by the United States, and later, after the attack on American soil on 9/11/01, re-inscripted as the perpetual 'war on terror', is a spectral politics, a politics that puts into positive practice the dislocating refusal of Pierre, of Bartleby, of Israel Potter, of Babo, and of the Confidence-Man. Until that time comes to pass ... resistance, no matter how vocal, will remain impotent or complicit with America's (exceptionalist) apparatuses of capture." (55)

The attacks on 9/11 "have enabled the contemporary custodians of the American national identity to recuperate the exceptionalist national identity that was shaken to its foundations in the 1960s" (100).

According to Spanos, the American calling that Melville resists after flirting with it in his early fiction is the calling of manifest destiny. As he de-centres this American subjection and incorporation, so too does he subvert the calling (interpellation) of the transcendental (father's) voice of Europe. Melville's fiction from "Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale" to "The Confidence-Man" "--from his prophetic announcement of the self-destruction of the logical economy of the Adamic ship of state to his decisive de-realization of the ant-bellum American reality produced by the relay of optimistic philosophies that had their origin in the myth of Puritan election--constitutes a sustained haunting of the exceptionalist problematic, past, present, and future" (17). Although Melville's interrogation of the American ideology has be noted by other critics, Spanos aims to show the postmodern "revolutionary force" (17) of Melville's fiction after Moby-Dick by tracing the "fundamental affiliation between metaphysics and cultural production" (29). Melville's "essential legacy" (52) is "remarkably proleptic of the postmodern occasion" (43) in the grip of "the post-Cold War neoconservative version of the (Anglo-Protestant) American national identity and its messianic imperialist democracy" (103).

"Pierre; or, the Ambiguities" is read to reveal Melville's genealogical uncovering of the connection between the New World of American and the Old World of Europe--"patriarchal, patrician, feudal, nationalist, class structured, and racist" (27)--that structures the hegemonic weaving of the Puritan ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Pierre is more than simply proleptic of "postmodern counterhegemic discourse" (29) for it reveals that cultural representation is "ontological representation, that is the re-presentation of being in terms of ... a principle of presence" (29). Melville's criticism of the American Transcendentalists "remarkably anticipates Heidegger's deconstruction of the Western [ontotheological] philosophical tradition" (29). Melville's critique of American narrative representation constitutes "a remarkable anticipation of Jean-Paul Sartre's proto-postmodern distinction between living and telling" (36), and the "critique of narrative in Pierre also constitutes a remarkable anticipation of Jacques Derrida's postmodern deconstruction of the `Book'" (37). Recovering "Melville's remarkably proleptic intention" (46) discloses "[i]n a way that uncannily anticipates the Derridean analysis of the nonconcept differance" (40) how "Melville makes thinking the spectral nothing and its worldly manifestations possible" (49). The spectral voice of silence that Pierre discovers at the heart of the monumentalized American Cultural Memory "anticipat[es] Friedrich Nietzsche's assault on `monumental history'" (58) and "constitutes Melville's most revolutionary legacy to the postmodern American occasion" (50) for it is "proleptic of that polyvalent resistance to global capitalist power ..." (51).

Spanos usefully draws links between two speeches (1825 and 1843) of the orator-statesman Daniel Webster and Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile. Melville skillfully deconstructs the rhetoric and tropes of Webster's speeches, and subtly derails the performative representation of American national unity "to expose the national amnesia incumbent on monumentalization" (68). Melville "retrieves the singularities passed over by the American national memory in the nation-building process" (71) and gives a negative portrait of Benjamin Franklin that "epitomizes the calculative and economically rewarding prosaicness of the American national identity" (79). Indeed Melville "retrieves the specter of Israel Potter's forgotten singular being, a retrieval that appropriates Israel's symptomatic liberatory refusal to be interpellated--to be somebody, which is to say, to be answerable to the American calling--for the purpose of subverting and delegitimizing the invisible repressive nationalist hegemonic discourse of American exceptionalism" (91). Babo of "Benito Cereno" and Bartleby of "Bartleby the Scrivener" are read as kindred spirits that haunt the discourse of the American civilising mission. What the liberal humanist Captain Delano cannot see is the brutality of the slave system that will haunt America, just as the lawyer-narrator's benevolent and democratic capitalist way of seeing attempts to assimilate the unaccountable Bartleby and so neutralize his threat to repressive power.

"The Confidence-Man" pushes the idea of optimistic progress to its logical and self-destructive conclusion and affords "proleptic insights into the second Bush administration's confident justification and conduct of its `war on terror'" (172). Melville is "remarkably proleptic of that form of genealogy that Michel Foucault, following Nietzsche, calls the parodic" (177), and Melville' final novel takes aim at the confidence attendant on Manifest Destiny and American capitalist Progress. Noting that the genocidal metaphysics of Indian-hating distills the terroristic teleology of the frontier myth, Spanos argues that the reductive ontology of this murderous racial sociopolitics "is blind to the nothingness that is ontologically prior to the reified and self-identical Being (the Monos or One) it constructs as `the real'" (189). While the exterminatory Indian-hater is certainly a misanthrope--the nature of his work keeps him away from the civilized company he makes possible--he is the counterpart of the Cosmopolitan's optimistic faith in confidential fidelity. Melville's novel suggests that misanthropy is as essential to the American capitalist spirit as is optimism. Both form part of a self-confident assertion that is self-fulfilling, "banalized and embodied in the duplicitous entrepreneurs of an emergent American capitalism" (194). Congenial optimism becomes the philosophical manifestation of the bloodless congenial misanthrope, the operator in the world of human relations where all is a matter of economic profit and loss. Spanos convincingly links the story of China Aster to the metaphysics of American capitalism and the metaphysics of Indian-hating.

"The Confidence-Man" discloses "the ontological genealogy of this confidence syndrome" (214) and is a "proleptic exposure of the deadly confidence game the present Bush administration (and the custodians of its nationalist/imperialist policies--I am referring, above all, to `The Projects for a New American Century') has been playing with the American public" (217). The con game played by the Confidence-Man involves manipulating "his American victims' confidence" by "exaggerat[ing] the threat to their passive confidence posed by the apparent contradictions all the more to reactivate it" (219). For the Confidence-Man's American victims the Muslim/terrorist scare has now taken the place of the Red Scare. Their gullibility and ultimate assurance that the American way is right stand in the was of reacting to disclosure's of America's barbarity according to "responsible and humane imperatives" (219). Spanos concludes that, although American history has always been directed by confidence-men because the metanarrative of American exceptionalism necessarily reproduces them, now "its status as masquerade, an ideological con game intended to mobilize the American public against internal dissent and to an aggressive and violent global imperial project" (223). Melville reveals that this dominative ideology depends on its "polyvalent `Other'" (224), the specter of American `reality' that exposes the hollowness of America's Panglossian optimism. Spanos' concluding words distill his positive vision:

"Precisely by refusing to answer the American Calling, by 'preferring not to' answer its covenantal summons, Melville enables us to imagine an alternative America, one aware of the brutality of the exceptionalist Answerer, that acknowledges the ontological priority of the question--and the dignity, not simply of humanity at large but of all the phenomena on the continuum of being: the ground less ground, of any political formation that would claim the name of democracy." (228)

You will notice that, in this advocacy of a mind-shift to embrace contingency and contamination, brutality is shifted from the Call or the Caller, to the Answerer. There is something to be salvaged from the brutality of American exceptionalism. But his tentative faith is in tension with the main argument of Herman Melville and the American Calling. Spanos has given central place to Althusser's theorization of the Subject of ideology as the eye of the dominant culture that hails or calls the individual to recognize itself in the symbolic system and is in turn recognized as a subject, a subjected being; "a subjected subject who takes his or her proper place in the centered and plenary whole" (141). According to this model, the freedom of the subject before the gaze of the founding Father is an ideological effect. It is difficult to see, then, how a responsiveness that is less imperialistic and more caring can emerge within the ambit of the same spirit of global capitalism. It is difficult to see how "preferring not to" can amount to more than the passive dissent of internal immigration, the stoicism of the fellow traveler. It is significant that Spanos has previously entertained the possibility that Heidegger;s silence regarding the holocaust and his evasions regarding his complicity with Nazism amount to an "'I prefer not'". In the face of the rapacious system that Spanos has highlighted, to look "tentatively, to the releasement of an alternative comportment to being that acknowledges its contingency, its nothingness" (182) seems, however desirable, somewhat wistful. Spanos issues a timely reminder that the apocalyptic mind-set that pervades a culture industry dominated by the U.S. is a historical product that can be changed.
While the central thesis of American optimism of "Herman Melville and the American Calling" has been eclipsed by the financial crash that has shaken confidence, attention to the ideological underpinning of global capitalism is still relevant. Perhaps the climate of intolerance in the U.S., "the intimidation and/or stigmatization of dissent" (221), accounts for the unevenness of a text haunted by repetition. A sense of déjà-vu is created by Spanos' repeated use of the same quotations. For example, a quotation from Raymond Williams appears first on pages 28-28, and then reappears again in abbreviated form on page 77; a quotation from Pierre appears on page 36, and is condensed on page 172; Foucault is quoted on page 38, and forms the epigram on page 57; a quotation from William Connolly appears twice (page 98 and page 224); a quote from Samuel P. Huntington appears on pages 101 and 139; a quotation by Said appears on page 134 and in a fuller version on page 176. Most striking is the repetition of a lengthy quotation from Adorno quoted by Edward Said that appears on page 91, is repeated on page 165, and then again on page 225. The repetition of quotations serves to make the same point, underlining rather than augmenting the argument, and in part appears to me to enact a gathering of the remnants of intellectual authority. A mysterious book entitled "The Postcolonial Subject" (51) is attributed to Gayatri Spivak.

I interpret this textual stuttering as a sign of a crisis that is constricting oppositional criticism in the U.S. that, while it can see beyond the cul-de-sac of American capitalism, cannot plot a way to get there. Rather than reading (correctly in my opinion) intimations of post-structuralism in Melville, and wreathing him in the aura of solitary but visionary marginality, perhaps we should be attending to the pitfalls of oppositional criticism, then and now.

University of Fort Hare
South Africa