Radical Future Pasts: Untimely Political Theory

15. Pathologies of Freedom in Melville’s America

435 15 Pathologies of Freedom in Melville’s America Jason Frank YouAmericansmakeagreatClamouruponevery littleimaginary Infringement of what you take to be your Liberties; and yet there are no People upon Earth such Enemies to Liberty, such absolute Tyrants, where you have the Opportunity, as you yourselves are. —Benjamin Franklin, A Conversation about Slavery (1770) Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books. —Captain Ahab in Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851) American Tragedy Herman Melville has not received as much attention from political theorists as some other major writers of the American Renaissance—Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau. His work is left out of anthologies of American political thought, overlooked on syllabi, and very rarely engaged in professional research. Various explanations for this neglect come immediately to mind. Unlike the others, for example, Melville was never a political activist; he was not overtly engaged in the momentous political struggles of his time over slavery and white supremacy, industrialization and class conflict, western settlement and native displacement, national unity and sectional discord, self-governance and imperial expansion. He was also al- 436 Jason Frank most exclusively a writer of fiction—short stories, novels, and poems—not of political essays, treatises, and reviews. Melville’s work is moreover not easily situated on the ideological spectrum of left to right, liberal to conservative, and not easily placed within the discursive paradigms of “liberalism” and “republicanism” that often frame scholarship in the history of American political thought. His writing strikes a note of tragic dissonance in the established harmonies of the American political tradition. Political theory’s neglect of Melville has impoverished not only our understanding of American political thought in the nineteenth century, but of the American political tradition itself. Melville’s collected work—from Typee (1846) to Billy Budd (posthumously published in 1924)—offers what is arguably nineteenth-century America’s most sustained and critical interrogation of the American political imaginary, of the narratives and norms, principles and presuppositions, that animate the American political tradition and give shape to American political identity. Although Melville was not actively engaged in the political struggles just mentioned, his fiction addressed the conflicting values and commitments underwriting these struggles with a philosophical depth and subtlety unsurpassed by his contemporaries. Melville’s “provocative, prophetic books,” one recent biographer writes, “compose a kind of underground history of America.”1 Michael Rogin—the political theorist whose work on Melville is the most important exception to the field’s general neglect of him—has dubbed Melville America’s Marx because of Melville’s systematic critique of the structures of domination in nineteenth-century America.2 Following Melville’s own invitation in the opening line of Moby-Dick (1851), we might instead call him America’s Ishmael, the quintessential biblical outcast and prophetic voice of America’s dispossessed and disinherited—its “renegades and castaways.” Although Melville was not directly engaged in the partisan politics or the myriad reform movements of his time, he demonstrated a preoccupation with political critique across the entire span of his writing career; it is misleading to claim that “politics never engaged him deeply.”3 Melville sometimes evinced his literary preoccupation with politics by overtly espousing positions. His first novel, Typee, for example, includes lengthy condemnations of missionary violence and moral hypocrisy in the South Seas, reflections on the “civilized barbarity” of colonialism, and even a concluding vindication of Lord George Paulet’s brief governance of the Hawaiian Islands. Mardi (1849), Melville’s first work of experimental fiction, dwells on the violence of the slave trade and the moral inconsistencies of a slave-owning Pathologies of Freedom in Melville’s America 437 republic. White Jacket (1850), his report of life aboard a military frigate, admires British naval policy while railing against the practice of flogging in the United States Navy. “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855) is, among other things, a scathing indictment of the economic exploitation and spiritual alienation that characterized the industrial workplace , where workers in a demonic paper mill (in this case young women) “did not so much seem accessory wheels to the general machinery as mere cogs to the wheels,” “blank-looking girls with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper.”4 These were controversial positions in his time, and Melville was roundly...