Melville in the Dark Ages of Democracy

This essay argues that Melville’s late writings mark a turn in his thinking about democracy, but not in the direction that critics have often claimed. Rather than a deepening cynicism about revolutionary transformation or democratic political possibilities, Melville’s work, from Battle-Pieces and Clarel through Billy Budd, is instead animated by the paradox of democracy’s groundlessness. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière, this essay tracks Melville’s engagement with the absence of a constituted people or polis through the aesthetic motifs of floods, storms, landslides, and earthquakes that appear throughout his late poetry and prose. Ultimately, it argues, one of the great achievements of Melville’s later work is the gravity with which he contends with the absence of democracy’s foundation in a presupposed territory, subject, or institution.