The American Jeremiad

6. Epilogue: The Symbol of America

6 Epilogue: The Symbol of America The ritual of the jeremiad bespeaks an ideological consensus - in moral, religious, economic, social, and intellectual matters - unmatched in any other modern culture. And the power ofconsensus is nowhere more evident than in the symboIic meaning that the jeremiads infused into the term America. Only in the United States has nationalism carried with it the Christian meaning of the sacred. Only America, of all national designations, has assumed the combined force of eschatology and chauvinism. Many other societies have defended the status quo by reference to religious values; many forms of nationalism have laid claim to a world-redeeming promise; many Christian sects have sought, in secret or open heresy, to find the sacred in the profane, and many European defenders of middleclass democracy have tried to link order and progress. But only the American Way, of all modern ideologies, has managed to circumvent the paradoxes inherent in these approaches. Of all symbols of identity, only America has united nationality and universality, civic and spiritual selfhood, secular and redemptive history, the country's past and paradise to be, in a single synthetic ideal. The symbol of America is the triumphant issue of early New England rhetoric and a long-ripened ritual of socialization. Let me illustrate its literary dimensions by citing the famous passage on national destiny in Melville's early novel White-Jacket: 176 EPILOGUE: THE SYMBOL OF AMERICA 177 The Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation ... the Future is the Bible of the Free.... [Thus] in many things we Americans are driven to a rejection of the maxims of the Past, seeing that, ere long, the van of the nations must, of right, belong to ourselves.... Escaped from the house of bondage, Israel of old did not follow after the Egyptians; to her were given new things under the sun. And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. . . . God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls.... Long enough have we been skeptics with regard to ourselves, and doubted whether, indeed, the political Messiah had come. But he has come in us. 1 The term American here involves a distinctive blend of the visionary, historical, and figural modes. As opposed to (say) Donne's or Blake's symbol of America,* Melville's carries in it the authority of Scripture . It offers itself neither as a conceit nor as a personal vision, but as a civic identity rooted in a prophetic view of history. And yet Melville's American clearly absorbs both civic identity and prophecy into what can only be called a symbolic outlook. "Egypt," "Israel," and "ark" gather meaning by reference to "the Bible of the Free," through an assertion of will and imagination. The "predestinated" future rests with a worldly enterprise - "our race," "the people," a "political Messiah" - but the rhetoric plainly substitutes symbolic for social analysis. The substitution is a crucial one. Historical or social analysis is secular, relativistic, and therefore open to a consideration of radically different systems of thought and action. Symbolic analysis on *Donne's famous conceit - "0 my America! my new-found-Iand, / ... How blest am I in this discovering thee!" ("To His Mistris Going to Bed," Elegie XIX)reflects the sexual imagery in many seventeenth-century descriptions of America by non-Puritan colonists. Harold Bloom describes Blake's frontispiece illustration of America as "an epitome ... of the torments of self-consciousness in relation to the contraries of nature and emergent imagination" (Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed. Bloom [New York, 1970]). Another difference between these uses of "America" and Melville's lies in Melville's association of America with Israel. For Donne, thefigura of Israel enjoined the ritual of the church. For Blake, humanizing Scripture as Romantic symbology, the figura of Israel opened into a ritual of selffulfillment . White-Jacket contains both these elements - it is at once a parable of sacred history and a Romantic conversion story - but it joins and transforms these, through thefigura of Israel, into a summons to America's mission. 178 THE AMERICAN JEREMIAD the contrary, confines us to the alternatives generated by the symbol itself. It may suggest unexpected meanings, but only within a fixed, bipolar system. Since every symbol unites opposites...