Melvillean Frequencies
Herman Melville, as I implicitly argue in Haunted Modernity, developed a style of cultural criticism that was not dependant upon the category of an autonomous, masterly, and possessive subject. In April of 1851, for example, Melville wrote to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne in the midst of frantically revising Moby-Dick for publication that October. “It is this Being of the matter; there lies the knot with which we choke ourselves. As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you jump off from your stool and hang from the beam.” Melvillean Frequencies will demonstrate how Melville’s interrogation of agency as it was manifested in the mid-century discourses of Evangelicalism, Common Sense philosophy, and liberalism has since produced a “network” of readings that dramatize the limitations and, more importantly, the possibilities of the critical imagination within the confines of twentieth-century modernity. Given the “translations” by Bess Meredyth, Lewis Mumford, Rockwell Kent, F.O. Matthiessen, Richard Wright, Orson Welles, Ralph Ellison, Charles Olson, C.L.R. James, Bob Dylan, William S. Burroughs, Thomas Altizer, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, and Laurie Anderson, Moby-Dick has become a kind of “sacred” text in which and through which religious history has been generated. Such a possibility was entertained by Melville, himself, in May of 1851. “Though I wrote the Gospels in this century,” he confided to Hawthorne, “I should die in the gutter.”
By exploring the frequencies of Moby-Dick in American history, I hope to historicize an evolving mode of Pragmatic religious reflection that runs counter to a dominant religious orientation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—that of American evangelicalism. The history of Evangelicalism, a religious tradition practically and etymologically centered around the “good news” of the New Testament, has often idealized an unencumbered act of faith made possible through conditions of epistemological clarity. From Jonathan Edward’s directing his parishioners to seize an “extraordinary opportunity” for salvation to Joel Osteen’s bestselling Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential (2004), evangelical piety has continued to rehearse the harmonious relationship between the spiritual rationalism of Jacob Arminius (c.1560-1609) and the ocularcentrism and empiricism of Francis Bacon (1561-1626).
In Moby-Dick Melville explored, via Captain Ahab, how the relentless pursuit of spiritual autonomy, epistemological clarity, and ocular dominion could eventually result in submission, confusion, and blindness. By arguing that Moby-Dick has become a medium in which and through which others have carried out the critical task originally assumed by Melville (although the idioms employed and the questions posed differed for each), I will look to those artists and intellectuals who share Melville’s interest in reimagining a kind of agency that did not necessarily conform to the instructions manuals for evangelical conversion, social contracting, capitalistic exchange, or scientific inquiry. Such works are religiously significant not as attempts to secure salvation or the name of God, but as an inquiries into the possibilities of living life within a world that traffics in appearances and whose meanings are deemed specious or totalitarian or both.
Each of my projected chapters will focus on a different historical period corresponding roughly to the major phases of Moby-Dick’s reception: its public invisibility from 1851 to 1914, the “Melville Revival” of the 1920s and 1930s, the leftist appropriations of Moby-Dick in the 1940s and 1950s, and finally, post-structuralist readings from the 1960s to the present. Drawing upon the historiographical insights of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Wai-Chee Dimock, and Steven Mailloux this study will explore how the meaning of Moby-Dick did not endure in its original form but in its unraveling.
