Wars for Oil: Moby-Dick, Orientalism, and Cold War Criticism

Wars for Oil: Moby-Dick, Orientalism, and Cold War Criticism JEAN-FRANÇOIS LEROUX Ottawa University I n an article which appeared in the London Observer five days after the September 11th attacks, Edward Said lamented: Osama bin Laden’s name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any history he and his shadowy followers might have had before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination. Inevitably, then, collective passions are being funnelled into a drive for war that uncannily resembles Captain Ahab in pursuit of Moby Dick, rather than what is going on, an imperial power injured at home for the first time, pursuing its interests systematically in what has become a suddenly reconfigured geography of conflict, without clear borders, or visible actors. Manichaean symbols and apocalyptic scenarios are bandied about with future consequences and rhetorical restraint thrown to the winds.1 Some two years later, he recurred to the analogy, this time with reference to the “demonization” of Saddam Hussein after September 11. “He [Saddam],” remarked Said, “was identical with the whole of Iraq, a desert place ‘out there’ . . . destined for the exercise of US power unleashed illegally as a way of cowing the entire world in its Captain Ahab like quest for re-shaping reality and imparting democracy to everyone.”2 Said’s reading of Moby-Dick in the Observer as an adumbration of what he called in his Introduction to the 1991 Library of America (LOA) edition of Moby-Dick America’s “self-image as an all-conquering force for good in the world” drew criticism, in turn, from Eric Gibson in the OpEd section of the Wall Street Journal.3 Accusing Said and other “harpooning,” “polemical” C  2009 The Authors Journal compilation C  2009 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 Edward Said, “‘Islam’ and ‘the West’ are Inadequate Banners,” The Observer (16 September 2001). 2 Edward Said, “The Appalling Consequences are Now Clear: What is Happening in the United States?” Counterpunch (22 April 2003), http://www.counterpunch.org/said04222003.html. 3 Edward Said, “Introduction,” Moby-Dick (New York: Vintage / Library of America, 1991); rpt. in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 364; hereafter cited as Introduction. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 19 J E A N - F R A N Ç O I S L E R O U X scholars of an unpatriotism uncharacteristic of Melville, Gibson fired back with the now familiar identification of Moby-Dick as “America’s Rorschach test,”4 quoting Melville scholar Timothy Marr in a Los Angeles Times interview to the effect that “You can see within that myth of the whale [the] vision that you have of the nation.” Far from arguing the irrelevance of Melville’s work to the cultural imagination of the present, however, Marr’s statement reminds us that past and present readings of Moby-Dick, like the fateful decipherings of the enigmatic doubloon aboard the Pequod, reveal much about its community of readers, or at least their vision of themselves. And this reflexivity presumably is part of Said’s point. Thus, in his introduction to Moby-Dick, Said insists that “Melville’s contribution is that he delivers the salutary effect as well as the destructiveness of the American world presence” flowing from “its self-mesmerizing assumptions about its providential significance.” Said points out that these assumptions are themselves rooted deep in the “discourse of American specialness” woven in and through the rhetoric of the Puritan Errand, Manifest Destiny, and the Cold War (Introduction 364). Concurrently, in The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism, Marr seeks to provide a “critical history of cultural imagination” by focusing on Melville’s and other nineteenth-century American writers’ use of “Orientalism” as an at times ironic, at times solipsistic mirror. Indeed, Marr concurs “with the discovery of Edward Said that orientalist notions responded more to the culture that produced them than to its putative object.”5 Not surprisingly, given...