A Political Companion to Herman Melville

Chapter 3. Chasing the Whale

3 Chasing the Whale Moby-Dick as Political Theory George Shulman What we notice in stories is the nearness of the wound to the gift. —Jeanette Winterston My aspiration in this essay is to read Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale as a work of—not simply as a supplement to—political theory. By its dramatic form and content, Moby-Dick tells a story about politics and about theory; and through it, so will I.1 Just as ancient tragedians were interlocutors to the polis, dramatizing inescapable heteronomy, haunting pasts, and irremediable conflict to a community avowing self-rule, so Melville retells dominant romances of liberal emancipation and national redemption as tragedy-inthe -making. Whereas Sophocles created an alter-city—what James Baldwin called a disagreeable mirror—Melville is among American literary artists who conjure fictional worlds elsewhere—on a whaling ship or a raft—to illuminate enigmas closer to home. His novel exalts what he calls “democratic dignity” while dramatizing what prevailing political rhetoric of democratic self-rule finds unspeakable: American freedom is premised on multiple forms of domination and forgetting. But he composes a tragedy because his depiction of derangement in the American practice of democracy includes the paradox that democratic aspirations are inherently entangled in the risk of domination. Though theorists often assume celebratory or critical positions toward the democratic, and so cannot engage what is complex and poignant in its meaning, Melville avowedly remakes tragedy to enact what is noble, horrific, and self-defeating in the project of political self-rule. I do not think Moby-Dick is only a tragedy; it is truly a genre-busting Chasing the Whale 71 work, but I emphasize how it is an “alter-world,” like Thebes in Greek tragedy , a fictional space or place at once related to and removed from “reality,” in which to stage a tragedy—at once modern and American—of democratic dignity. Like works of canonical political theory, therefore, it should be seen not as a direct representation of the social world, but as a form of mediation by which a political community can reflect on its core axioms, constitutive practices, and fateful decisions, and so also as an artful speech act. Such acts are fraught because they engage audiences whose background conditions— cultural grammars and historical traumas—are disavowed, unspoken. This is why rationalist approaches to persuasion fail, and why experiments with fiction and genre matter to political theory. For as readers professing democratic ideals are positioned as witnesses of tragedy in an alter-world, they can identify with and yet gain distance from its characters and the fate they coauthor, and in this way readers may reflect on their own history and narrative horizon, circumstances, and choices.2 By attending not only to what is said by characters and narrator, but also to how the text orients readers, we can see Melville reshape tragedy for a democratic (and American) audience. Characters can and do argue perspectives, but the novel personifies and enacts arguments in ways that viscerally render their pathos and meaning. Moreover, while characters speak in the unequivocal terms of prophecy, the text creates experiences of fraught ambiguity; readers must credit the inescapability of the questions that characters ask, the credibility of their answers—and how they create a tragedy. In sum, my central intuition is that the text does not so much philosophically advocate a “tragic perspective” on politics or life as dramatize a “tragedy” its audience blindly coauthors.3 This distinction between the tragic and tragedy warrants further introduction here, though I must earn it by the reading that follows. We should begin with the inherited meanings of the genre of “tragedy” that Melville revises: it dramatizes the nobility and defeat of human efforts to know or master their world, the elemental powers suffusing it, or themselves as subjects . For Nietzsche tragedy is thus the “Apollonian” form by which citizens, having contacted the senseless power of “Dionysian” energies, are enabled to affirm art, boundaries, and action in new ways. In Plato’s Republic regimes thus are ruined by an excess of their animating eros—freedom in democracy—whereas for Aristotle tragic heroes are destroyed by a flaw inseparable from their virtue. In Hegel, tragedy dramatizes how conflict- 72 George Shulman ing values or rival gods divide cities and dismember protagonists, because choosing one means grievous loss of another. The genre also defeats a democratic and enlightenment “romance...