Melville and Americanness: A Problem

What is “American” about Melville’s writings? Drawn from my keynote at the 2012 “Melville and Americanness” conference at the University of East Anglia, this essay explores various ways of responding to that question, while suggesting that there are no easy answers, in part because of Melville’s ironic knowingness as a writer. Among the topics considered in the essay are Melville’s perspectives on American literary nationalism, slavery and race, empire and imperialism, and democracy. I present Melville’s “Americanness” as a “problem” that animates his writings and contributes to their continued vitality today.

In an April 1851 letter to Hawthorne, Melville proclaimed that The House of the Seven Gables could be re-titled “Hawthorne: A Problem” (NN Corres 185), thus making clear that he had no easy purchase on the book or on Hawthorne himself. I feel the same way about Melville and Americanness, a topic that, like Hawthorne’s House, seems deceptively simple. But do we know who or what “Melville” is? Do we know what “Americanness” is? Aren’t there infinite complications and permutations created by the conjunction—”and”—that links “Melville” with “Americanness”? Of course when I say that Melville and Americanness is a problem, I am talking about the best sort of problem: the kind that raises questions and issues promising to develop new perspectives in Melville studies. All of which is to say that I think “Melville and Americanness” is a great idea for a conference, especially one taking place outside of the United States. My hope here is to get things underway more by surveying some terrain than by doing the impossible (solving the problem).

Let me begin with the conference’s call for papers and poster. Both ask us to consider how Melville’s “Americanness” intersects with current thought, which makes this sound just a bit like a conference on “Melville Our Contemporary.” In many respects, Melville is our contemporary. Notably, the Occupy Wall Street movement has made “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Melville’s very American 1853 tale of Wall Street, its sacred literary text, sponsoring group readings of the story and using Bartleby’s tantalizingly enigmatic quasi-declaration, “I would prefer not to,” as the eye-catching slogan on a number of its posters.¹ In “Occupy Wall Street’s Debt to Melville,” posted in April 2012 on the Atlantic Monthly’s website, Jonathan Greenberg celebrates Bartleby for offering “a heroic example of how to possess political space.” Greenberg concedes that the story is difficult to interpret, in large part, I would say, because we never get inside Bartleby’s mind and because, as sixty years of criticism demonstrates, we invariably read into that mind our own ever-shifting desires. Nevertheless, Greenberg provides a good sense of how powerfully Melville can appear to be speaking to Wall Street of 2012, declaring at the conclusion of his essay: “By refusing to articulate specific demands, Bartleby defies the very terms on which Wall Street does business. Melville thus provides a prescient illustration of the force of the Occupy movement.” In this formulation, Greenberg collapses or reorders time, making Melville sound like an author who wrote a story specifically for the Occupy Movement after it had already established itself. Several recent Americanist literary critics have emphasized matters of temporality, with Melville celebrated in works like Pierre and Israel Potter for destabilizing and fragmenting chronological time.² From this critical perspective, it would seem appropriate to think of Melville as a writer who could both inspire and comment on a movement that developed over 100 years after his death.³

To take another recent example of Melville’s contemporaneity with respect to Americanness (and in relation to some of the economic issues embraced by the Occupy Movement): as if in anticipation of our conference at East Anglia, and in the same month that Greenberg posted his essay, the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood published an op-ed piece in the New York Times titled “Hello Martians. Let Moby-Dick Explain.” In this playful but angry piece, Atwood describes the landing of a small group of Martians in her back yard, in Canada, and guess what...