E Pluribus Unum: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Constitutional Paradox

3. “But Aren’t It All a Sham?” Herman Melville and the Critique of Unity

Beyond the communication of the sentence, what took place at [the] interview [between Budd and Vere] was never known. But in view of character of the twain briefly closeted in that stateroom . . . conjectures may be ventured. It should have been in consonance with the spirit of Captain Vere should he have concealed nothing from the condemned one. . . . Even more may have been. . . . The austere devotee of military duty . . . may in the end have caught Billy to his heart. . . . But there is no telling the sacrament, seldom if in any case revealed to the gadding world, wherever. . . two of great Nature’s nobler order embrace. There is privacy at the time, inviolable to the survivor; and holy oblivion, the sequel to each diviner magnanimity, providentially covers all at last.—Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor As literary documents that address the constitutional problematic of unity, Eureka and Leaves of Grass deliver one distinct response: preserve unity at cost to plurality.1 By contrast, texts like Moby-Dick,BillyBudd,andTheVarietiesofReligiousExperienceconstitute what I am characterizing as a second distinct, nearly antithetical response: preserve unity only insofar as it does not impinge on plurality.ThechallengeissuedbyMelvilleandJames — theirreversal ofthehierarchyofunityoverplurality — isonethatseriouslyinquires into the possibility of what,in the context of traditional ways of thinking about the construction of social order in America,seems impossible : the basing of unity on its apparent other,plurality; integration not through the sacrifice of difference but through its preservation. Melville and James do more than simply problematize the conditions under which the assembly of social wholes has been considered; they pointoutwhathasalwaysbeenproblematicaboutthecategories,what Chapter Three ★ “But Aren’t It All a Sham?” Herman Melville & the Critique of Unity hasmadeasolutiontotheone-and-the-manyproblemsoelusive,what hasmaintaineditsstatusasahard,apparentlyinsolubleproblem.That stumbling block, according to Melville and James, is an obligation to unity,inheritedfromthefoundingpoliticaldocumentsafterwhichliterary texts like Eureka and Leaves pattern their supplementary relationtosocialorder .Failingtoquestionthevalueplacedonunityatthe expense of difference prevents a right relationship of particulars. Melville questions the unity obligation. Within the context of a national discourse that, as the Civil War approached, placed an increasingly demanding and increasingly unrealistic burden on the Union,Melville regards the very idea of obligatory unity as itself burdensome .Theexpectationplaceduponunity,thecachetgiventooneness , and, by implication, the stigma attached to multiplicity — all these, Melville asserts, do not enable but actually threaten the vision ofintegritythathiscontemporaries(politiciansandYoungAmericans alike) seek to actualize.Melville asks us to determine exactly what,in our pursuit of unity, we are demanding of American social and literaryculture ,howwearedemandingit,whetherthemeanssuittheend, and, indeed, whether the end is what we thought it was. In a writing career that spanned forty-five years,from Typee (1846) to Billy Budd (1886–1891, published posthumously in 1924), Melville’sattentiontotheproblematiccharacterofunityinAmerican social formation is clearly demonstrable. It is possible to chart a through-line in Melville’s oeuvre that shows his continuous concern with these issues.His first novel,Typee, with its idyllic South Sea setting , signals an early attempt by the author to escape the burden of unity as the valorized category in Western culture. Typee’s narrator deserts his whaling ship for Polynesia, for the promise of tolerance andpluralityitholdsout,eveninitsveryname;desertioncanberead, then,as a means of physically and culturally bypassing an oppressive Western impetus toward conformity (similar to what Ishmael later confrontsinhimselfasthestricturesofmonotheism).Melville’sinterestinsocialformationcanbetracedthroughWhite -Jacket(1850)and Moby-Dick (1851), texts that address the problem of governance of which the ship,as social microcosm,is the theoretical site.The early chapters of Moby-Dick — in which Ishmael overcomes the prejudice that his Christian, Western background inspires in him toward Queequeg — show Melville still at the point of exploring the promise of polytheism (which is a constant presence in his work, whether 112 “But Aren’t It All a Sham?” aspolytheismorsomeothermodelofmanyness).Findingthe“traces of a simple honest heart”in an idol-worshipping “heathen,”Ishmael is the white person who represents a culture of unification in doubt about itself: “I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy” (md 52, 30, 53). But Moby-Dick is hardly the culmination of Melville’s efforts to solve the problematic of unity in narrative form.Rather,it represents one stage in a long series of efforts by Melville to free himself from,to disburdenAmericansocialorderof,thewayinwhichunificationhad come to be regarded as compulsory.The Confidence-Man (1857) and Clarel (1876), as successive experiments in forging a plurality-based unum, nonetheless willingly concede the fact that plurality carries its ownburdens.InTheConfidence-ManitdoessoonlybecauseMelville seems not yet to...