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Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne & The Antemosaic Cosmic Man

Race, Class & Crisis of Bourgeois Ideology in an American Renaissance Writer
Loren Goldner
$15.00
ISBN: 0970030827
Format: Paperback
Subject: Literature
Pub Date: 09/30/2005
Publisher: Queequeg
Shipping Weight: 1lbs
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Class Struggle and the Adamic Imagination in Herman Melville

In Europe, after 1848, bourgeois consciousness in revolt sought a new universal in the working class but soon found itself in the orbit of the state civil service; in America, bourgeois consciousness in revolt found a new universal in what Melville called "antemosaic" reality, Queequeg, embodied in the multiracial working class, the "Anacharsis Cloots deputation," in radical antithesis to the state.

Herman Melville (1818–1891) came to this perspective in the feverish production of six novels of the sea, culminating in Moby Dick, in the 1846–1851 period. As the whaling ship Pequod was destroyed by Moby Dick, the Indian harpooner Tashtego nailed a red flag to the mast, also catching the wing of a sky-hawk, with its "imperial beak." Thus Melville connects the red man with the red flag, pulling down the imperial eagle, but more in what Marx called the "mutual destruction of the contending classes" than the triumph of proletarian revolution. In Moby Dick, Melville places the "antemosaic" cosmic men—Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo—at the head of the working class, and, in Billy Budd, such a figure re-emerges as the "Handsome Sailor," "a common sailor so intensely black that he must needs have been a native African of the unadulterate blood of Ham."

Melville is Miltonian, and Blakean; his Adamic figures combat the world of radical evil, and do not, like the wide-eyed Transcendentalists Melville lacerates, inhabit a benevolent nature, a "prejudice of the more temperate climes," as he put it. But when Melville treats race and class, his framework is not merely modern capitalist society. Melville's cosmic men come out of a Biblical eschatology and revolt against the cosmic kings of the same eschatology, above all Charlemagne.

Melville was a grand bourgeois, with aristocratic overtones, whose life path abruptly turned downward at 13 with the bankruptcy, madness, and death of his father in 1831. Poverty obliged Melville to go to work as a seaman, in his late teens. He thus experienced, more than any other writer of the "American Renaissance," the shattering of the old bourgeois personae in the new capitalist conditions.

Melville, then, is a writer of dispossession. But his dispossession is not merely personal or social or artistic: it is epochal. Melville, all his life, was a case of "exiled royalty." His work repeatedly revisits the death agony of his bankrupt, raving father. And from the exaggerated cosmic kings and their symbols (e.g., Charlemagne), as well as from their pitiful devolution in the tinsel of the modern world, Melville attempts to work his way through his crippled father imago to the "state secret." His dispossession moves from family to class to politics to the cosmic and back again.

The 1848–1850 conjuncture in the Atlantic world witnessed the birth of communism (Marx), modern art (Courbet, Flaubert), the end of classical political economy, and the formulation of the entropy law, or Second Law of Thermodynamics. Their simultaneity was not accidental, and Melville's work echoes each of them. 1848, in Europe, had been the year of the eruption of "the dangerous classes"; in America, it marked the end of interclassist Jeffersonian-Jacksonian populism, over the slavery issue. The link between communism, modernism, neoclassical economics and the Second Law of Thermodynamics is the beginning of the "dissolution of the object" in the "dream worlds" of a new mass consumption.

This study attempts to situate Melville's works in this convergence.

About the Author

Loren Goldner is a writer and activist living in New York City.
 
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