What is a paragraph, I ask you? Or the new literature of America.
Illness as metaphor, an augury of social death. There is no sensible connection between the pandemic years of cholera and the social demise of the old colonial aristocracy, but who can know what cholera might have meant for the old families of New York, of Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Richmond? What are the physical consequences of social death, what psychic consequences follow the social death of a class, no matter how odious or ancient, and what is their physical impact? The recursions of hysteria are endless, after all. Herman Melville’s father died just months before the first cases of cholera reached Boston and New York, late in January 1832. Forced to travel seventy miles overland, in subzero temperatures, after two days, Allan Melvill reached his home in Albany only to fall into a delirium. Already unstable because of his failure at business and the collapse of his finances, the inexorable decline of the Melvill and Gansevoort families, he died having lost his mind, social ruin and bodily exposure leaving him emotionally undone and physically wrecked. His son Herman was twelve years old. How did young Herman absorb this loss? In what manner did this sudden absence manifest itself? What bearing would it have on his fiction, on his family, his siblings, his mother; on the family he begat, the wife he tortured, the children he raised? When Herman Melville’s eldest son Malcolm killed himself in 1867, what story was he telling about his family, his father, Herman, and grandfather, Allan? Why the ‘e’ in Melvill? Why the ‘w’ in Hathorne? Why did Edgar Poe continue to abuse the name of John Allan long after their unhappy association had reached its end? Which father were they disobeying? Who did they hope to kill? And what words did their murder ultimately make possible?
John Allan. Allan Melville. All An. Al Lan. Lan: in Arabic: negation, future tense. As in: He will not. I prefer not to. An all. Anal. The beginning of control. The end of the line.
Having dishonored himself and bankrupted his family, Allan Melville went insane, became ill, and died. His death was no matter of individual pathology, but indicative of a more general malaise, and it would situate Herman in life as a laborer, his body, and his work forever oriented in relation to the operation of the market and its inscrutable whims. An earlier generation of writers wrote as patricians and propagandists, hobbyists and politicians with nothing but time to kill. For Herman it was neither a profession nor an occupation but a job, one that came after a series of employments and schemes that did not quite pan out, but that left Herman, a failure, with no end of material that he might exploit. Had Allan Melville survived, had he lived long enough and well enough to support his son, Herman may well have become a writer, but a writer of a very different kind, and his fiction would have taken a much different form. Tethered to the legacy of an ancient American family, yet deprived of the income that flowed from that name, Melville became a student of the means of production and circulation, of the tragic romance of a world wrecked by capitalism, the hysteria it induced, the paranoias of those left in its wake. Melville writes as the son of a class that has died but cannot be bothered to take note of its death, less a ghost than a zombie, a corpse that goes about walking, working, with no particular purpose or aim. While Frankenstein’s monster is a new kind of man, Melville peoples his books with protagonists who stand for the dead, for those who have refused to die, those who go on living despite having lost all reason or need.
This is where we find Ishmael at the start of our voyage. It is where we will leave him should reach its end. A tale told by a narrator with no particular desire or aim, with “nothing particular to interest [him] on shore,” Moby-Dick is a story about mania as told by a melancholic, a meditation on madness that is both unavoidably tedious and unquestionably great. Ishmael is no idiot–he is blithely intellectual–-but the story he tells tests our capacity for endurance, rising and rising with little hope for release. Giddy and pretentious, exceedingly petulant, language escapes him, quite literally; like bile from an upset stomach, he wretches up words.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago–never mind how long precisely–having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my sold; wherever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off–then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. (1)
The words have aged, and become now familiar; yet they still bear the gravity of their earliest enunciation, the weightiness of a moment for a person in a world shadowed by death. The novel begins declaratively, with brevity and command, its narrator asserting itself as both a character and a person, someone who may not be reliable, or who is prone to deception, or both. Without preface or apology, Ishmael strides onto the page, announcing himself, demanding to be recognized on terms that are his, bearing a name that is most certainly one he has chosen; a name without a patronymic, without any trace of a father, a name meant for one set loose on the world. Claiming the name of a son who would make himself into a patriarch, a firstborn son who was cast out on account of his mother, the mother who was not the wife of the man who was his father, the mother with whom he would be forced to wander the earth, Ishmael is not chosen but he has chosen himself. He will make himself a people, he will make himself their chosen, the object of their fantasies, of all their desires. A solicitation, a demand, “call me Ishmael” is an introduction to a character, who may be a person, that is addressed to an unknown interlocutor, who is presumably the reader, but we cannot be sure. Ishmael does not seem to care with whom he speaks, or what he goes on to reveal about himself or the people he chances to stumble upon. An emblem of what is perhaps a strain of congenital hauteur, Ishmael needs not to solicit an exchange with those who are beneath him. He knows them already, based on his observations; he does not seek recognition in their words. Conversation is useless, so just let him talk. He knows what they are looking for, whoever they may be. He knows what they need, what they want, the taste and the meaning of the things of which they dream. They may not know it, at least not yet, but what they want is Ishmael, and as much of him as he can possibly spare. Others are tripping over themselves to hear mere stories about the dissolute boudoir of his personality.Sublime and loquacious, throughout the novel, his presence, his story, will shoot forth in spasms of words, as if jerked from the opening of a singular orifice. Dropped on the ground like so much lost seed, they will take root, and burn trees of flame.
Of course, we know–because he tells us–that things are not quite so rosy as at first they might appear; or, at least, things are not as good as the portentously declarative introduction might initially convey. As with Ishmael, son of Hagar, this Ishmael has problems, many problems, and he is dying to tell us about all of the problems that he has, even if the enthusiasm with which he tells us leaves us suspicious of his meaning, and what he makes of their manifestation. The name he gives us, we will come to realize, was the announcement of an albatross, a blessing, a curse. Even his trials are of talmudic, momentous, and he can be understood only through punctilious rabbinical scrutiny. Ishamel, he tells us, is sometimes dark, and may be brooding, given to trespassing upon funerals and harassing their mourners, or shopping at windows, looking for coffins. This is the novel we are reading, and it is blank. This is who we are dating, and he is not right for us at all. We hope he is interesting, but he is not. He strings words together in a portentous melee. He does not belong to the gothic: Unlike Young Werther, Ishmael has no girlfriend, he has no boyfriend or companion, no family or friends; he betrays no connections to any another, no coworkers or acquaintance, no lovers or whores; he seems perfectly content to prevail upon the patience of whomever he may be addressing in any particular moment, any fleeing instance, but then only for that instance, and then, no more. His problems, Melville tells us, are most wholly internal, a product of “spleen” and also the “hypos,” the inscrutible chemistry of the blood and of the phlegm. He symptoms, it would seem, have no situation: no context, no rhyme, no reason, no meaning or purpose. His desolation bears no trace of romance, no semblance of a relationship to the world beyond that of himself. He is less sad than an unfinished idol, perhaps perhaps, what can be known of this man.