On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World

5. Sovereignty, Race, and Melancholyin the Transatlantic Romantic Novel

f i v e Sovereignty, Race, and Melancholy in the Transatlantic Romantic Novel ‘‘Who is there to mourn for Logan?—Not one.’’ I return to these final words of Logan’s lament, words at once obdurate and magnetic, fascinating and repulsive. I return to them precisely because there is nothing to be done. Logan’s discursive isolation is melancholic, in the precise sense that it is not open to the consolations of mourning. Logan is himself melancholic, of course—Why would he mourn? For whom would his mourning have meaning , reduced as he is to the last?—but his more essential role is as the object of melancholic investment. Jefferson—or rather his text—is melancholic vis-àvis Logan: forever defeated, Logan remains unsubsumable; he is a lost object for which another could never substitute. Logan’s reduction to the last places him outside the dynamic of mourning, in the discursive location that I have characterized as the zone of lingering. In this sense, Logan’s speech is a paradigmatic instance of what Anne Anlin Cheng has called the ‘‘white racial melancholia’’ that structures U.S. culture, an ‘‘elaborate identificatory system ’’ ‘‘sustained by the exclusion-yet-retention of racialized others.’’1 147 148 Melancholy in the Transatlantic Romantic Novel However crucial to the political imagination of the United States this melancholic structure may be, it is hardly unique to that imagination. Jefferson understands Logan as a kind of Ossian, after all, and romantic-era texts are strewn with isolated and hopeless creatures, with physical ruins and human ruination. Indeed, the period’s fixation on solitude and the sublime, its elaboration of what Frances Ferguson calls the ‘‘aesthetics of individuation ,’’ seems to have reached a saturation point by the 1820s. By that time, the theme of radical solitude had been so repetitively explored that Mary Shelley’s publication of The Last Man in 1826 occasioned some amusement in the press. The topos of the last man had ‘‘come to seem not apocalyptic but ridiculous,’’ according to Morton Paley: he cites a wag from The Monthly Magazine suggesting that ‘‘a term should be invented comprehensive enough to include those superlatively late comers that usually follow the last. But, as words are at present, last things are generally the last things in the world that are last.’’2 In our own time, Barbara Johnson makes a related point: ‘‘Isn’t the end precisely that which never ceases to be repeated, which one is never done with?’’ In this sense, ‘‘the question would not be to know how to begin speaking of the end, but how to finish speaking of it, how to narrate something other than the interminable death of the penultimate, how to be finished with the end.’’3 In 1826, across the Atlantic, there were last men too, most famously, perhaps, Uncas, Cooper’s hero in The Last of the Mohicans, published that same year. And there were signs in America, too, that the theme of the last man was beginning to seem interminable. But this was because the last man in America was almost always an Indian, and as the representative of a people ‘‘destined’’ for replacement by white Americans, could only ever be ‘‘penultimate,’’ in Johnson’s sense. In early national literature, it has been often observed, Indians were perennially vanishing, and just as insistently returning, lingering, haunting.4 In John Augustus Stone’s massively popular melodrama Metamora, The Last of the Wampanoags (1829), for example, the point is made through some melodramatic plotting: having reduced Metamora , for poetic purposes, to the status of sole survivor, Stone has him emerge in Act V from within a tomb to exact just revenge, only then granting him a final scene in which to curse the whites and expire. Twenty years later, in his popular burlesque of Stone’s melodrama, Metamora; or, The Last of the Pollywogs (1847), John Brougham takes it further, having his hero jump Melancholy in the Transatlantic Romantic Novel 149 up after having been killed onstage, and shout, ‘‘I’ll not die just to save your skins!’’5 For all the raillery, however, the melancholic trope of the last had considerable staying power—the endurance of the Logan effect well into the 1820s and beyond testifies to that. Is there a way of construing this era’s fascination with melancholy as something more than disavowal or mere attitudinizing ? In his wide-ranging and...