A Hid Event, Twice Lived: The Post-War Narrative Sub-Versions of Douglass and Melville

A Hid Event, Twice Lived: The Post-War Narrative Sub-Versions of Douglass and Melville ZOE TRODD Harvard University Nay, but revere the hid event . . . . . . And live, twice live in life and story Herman Melville, “The Conflict of Convictions” and “In the Turret” O n-beat, then syncopated, Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville wrote in rhythm with one another as they explored the gaps in America ’s rhythms of representation. Douglass in The Heroic Slave (1853) and Melville in Israel Potter (1855) confronted these gaps and offered counternarratives , or sub-versions. Challenging the dominant narrative of irreversible progress, they invoked the Founding Fathers: Melville to emphasize the chasm between commemorated icons and forgotten patriots, Douglass as a protest of the American Revolution’s unfulfilled promises and of the narrative that celebrated 1776 as the birth of freedom.1 But after the Civil War “introduced into the national consciousness a certain sense . . . of the world being a more complicated place . . . the future more treacherous,” as Henry James claimed in 1879, the two writers’ approaches to narrativizing diverged. Melville continued to challenge America’s New World narrative in Battle-Pieces (1866), which depicts a storied land of half-hidden traces and anticipated James’s next claim: “The good American, in days to come, will be a more critical person than his complacent and confident grandfather,” added James. “He has eaten of the tree of knowledge.”2 Douglass, however, produced The Life and Times (1881), which erases traces of subversion and embraces official version instead. Closing down the possibility C
2008 The Authors Journal compilation C
2008 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 For one discussion of Douglass’s engagement with national memory, see David W. Blight, “‘For Something beyond the Battlefield’: Frederick Douglass and the Struggle for the Memory of the Civil War,” Journal of American History 75.4: 1156-78. 2 Henry James, Hawthorne (New York: Harpers, 1879), 114. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 51 Z O E T R O D D for counter-narrative, Douglass in The Life and Times seemed the complacent grandfather of both his earlier self and Melville. Paradise Denied B eyond the revisionism of Israel Potter, Melville offered other glimpses of a counter-narrative, in particular through a growing skepticism of the timeless, traceless utopia at the heart of New World mythology.3 “The penalty of the Fall” might seem to press “lightly upon the valley” in Typee (1846), but in fact the “natural amphitheatre” is already “in decay,” with “fissures caused by the ravages of time,” and the “Timeworn Savages” come to “resemble dusty specimens of verde-antique.”4 The narrator tries to “bury all . . . remembrances of [a] previous existence” (144), but eventually abandons his search for a timeless paradise regained.5 In “Hawthorne and His Mosses” (1850), Melville imagines a world “as young today as when it was created . . . [with] morning dew . . . as wet to my feet, as Eden’s dew to Adam’s,” but in Moby-Dick (1851), with its search for an “unsourced existence . . . before time,” Ishmael learns that one should “[n]ever dream with thy hand on the helm”—never try to achieve utopia.6 By 1852, in Pierre, the “trance-like . . . green and golden world” of the book’s opening, an “everlasting . . . Present,” immediately reveals the snake always already there; “Time . . . spoiled” and engaged in a “quenchless feud . . . with the sons of Men.”7 Like Melville, Douglass challenged the narrative of Edenic innocence in his pre-Civil War works. If Eden exists in America, it is barred to slaves. One slaveholder’s garden in the Narrative (1845) has such tempting apples that the slaveholder must try “all kinds of stratagems to keep his slaves out of the garden,” and a great house in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) offers “a scene of almost Eden-like beauty” that the slaves “never visited.”8 3 For Edenic history, see R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955). 4 Herman Melville, Typee, ed. John Bryant...