The Truth of Polyphony and the Fraud of Ethnology

Somewhere between the poles of free will and necessity, somewhere within authorized discourse, Melville developed a strategy he called "the great Art of Telling the Truth,—even though it be covertly, and by snatches"; he wrote fiction using a narrative strategy whose authority was rendered suspect in its own telling. Somewhere between his sardonic suggestion to "Try to get a living by the Truth,—and go to the Soup Societies" and his conviction that American political discourse spoke with authority but not with the truth of democratic principles, Melville incorporated the truth not as subject matter, but as the very mode of telling. Truth does not surface in the story of a fated captain demonically pursuing a dumb brute in the face of prophetic warnings; instead, truth lies in the narrative used to tell the story of that captain and that whale. Ralph Ellison thus observes of Melville: "Whatever else his works were 'about' they also managed to be about democracy." The content of Melville's narrative form is a truth that can be expressed only in the hardly utterable contradictions of racial heterogeneity besieged by American democracy.^[16]

Slavery played no part in Melville's "ruthless democracy." As both idea and practice, it sullied the democratic body politic and demo-

cratic narration. Like slave ships that "run away from each other as soon as possible," slavery had no companion concept among the fraternity and freedom of his oceanic democracy (195). Frederick Douglass censured American politicians who acted "like hungry sharks in the bloody wake of a Brazilian slaveship," and four years later, Melville called upon the same image to suggest the solitary, anticommunal pathways of bondage, commenting that only sharks, voracious and self-devouring, "the invariable outriders of all slave ships crossing the Atlantic," provided a community for slavery (235). Melville's unsettling commitment to "ruthless democracy" impels his narrator to radical actions and even more radical strategies of narrative. Lacking any model or precedent, Melville constructed a novelty entitled Moby-Dick that created a polyphony, not simply in terms of the culturally diverse voices of the crew, but in terms of the diverse forms of narrative Ishmael uses to tell his and his shipmates' story.^[17]

As the novel ranges from transcendental meditations upon existence to democratic choruses, Ishmael flits in and out of the story. Soon after Ishmael selects a cannibal named Queequeg for his bosom friend, the narrative ceases to be the story of a young sailor, as is Redburn . Rather, it becomes the story of different ways to tell the story of a crew sailing after glimpses of democracy, glimpses that are dangerously susceptible to Ahab's demagoguery. Unlike Ahab, Ishmael does not invent ways to make the crew, in its heterogeneous composition, coalesce around his story of the Pequod . He relinquishes suicidal autobiography to the dramatic democracy of "Midnight, Forecastle." While the delegates of the choruslike crew speak and exchange thoughts, Ishmael remains silent, much in the same way that later he loses track of himself among the ecstatic utterances of an unctuous community of shipmates squeezing spermacetti—"Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it" (323). Ishmael dissolves into the crew, becoming one of their number, engaged in the common quest. After he boards the Pequod , he blends into the rigging of the communal narrative, relinquishing his own authorial and sovereign "I" to refocus the narrative's concerns on the many and diverse elements of whaling, as well as the heterogeneous composition of the crew.

Melville's narrative style and polyphonic discourse employ modes of telling particularly suited to situations marked by such

heterogeneity and difference. Only through what Richard Brodhead calls "a conflict of fictions" could a "ruthless democracy" be represented. Brodhead argues that Hawthorne and Melville remained in continual tension with "constitutive conventions of their genre"—the novel—and this tension caused them to eschew any single narrative mode. Moby-Dick resists generic imperatives "to subsume varied material into a unifying and homogeneous narrative mode," privileging instead diverse representational strategies. If democracy is to be "unconditional," as Melville suggested in his letter to Hawthorne, then the narrative that transmits unconditional democracy must shirk off any conditions or conventions that allegiance to one fictional style demands. Only heterogeneous composition could represent the heterogeneous bodies forming the Pequod 's crew.^[18]

Melville employed this composite narrative form as a political venture: not simply to tell a different story of America, but to tell differently a story of America. As Ishmael fades in and out of the narrative, he initiates, in the words of Carolyn Porter, a "discursive democracy." Drawing upon Bakhtin's ideas of polyphony, Porter argues that Ishmael speaks in a "double-voiced discourse" that appropriates authorized discourse at the same time that he parodies that discourse, undermining the validity of the tongue he has chosen to speak. In the same way that the parricidal urge in national narratives of Washington at once acclaims the text and thwarts its coherence, Ishmael acts as a textual insurgent, acknowledging a recognized discourse only to plunder it of its authority. Melville accords Ishmael an ironic authority capable of subverting dominant cultural authority. For example, in both "The Advocate" and "The Affidavit," Ishmael employs legalistic discourse to undermine its own credibility with faulty and exaggerated examples about the sperm whale fishery. Whether the prevailing discourse is legalistic, scientific, or philosophical, Ishmael siphons off the discourse's authority by subjecting it to a mixture of irony and parody. Each discourse corresponds to a vision/version of reality, so that, according to Brodhead, "no representation of reality can pretend to a final validity." Without "final validity," there is no consummate authority, and the crew resides in a democratic narrative, precariously prone to incorporation within Ahab's political rhetoric. For the time being, however, the unmanageable sum of these irreconcilable and discordant visions promotes an egalitarian consciousness that relin-

quishes control of the narrative so that others may speak; Ishmael embodies a narrative consciousness that speaks as one sailor among the thirty-man crew, as one more isolato forming the "Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth" (108). Ishmael's voice is "a virtual sponge, capable of soaking up an infinite number of voices and squeezing out their discourse into a pool as large as the ocean he sails," writes Porter.^[19]

Yet radical democracy causes Ishmael embarrassment. It is a political, sexual, and cultural vision that cannot be sustained without breeding dangerous conflict and acute self-awareness for its practitioners. Thus, while squeezing sperm, Ishmael finds himself apologizing to his shipmates for his reckless and transcendental passion, which leads him to mistake their hands for "gentle globules" (323). But rather than apologize to the reader or confess a sense of embarrassment for his fraternal feelings, Ishmael interrupts "A Squeeze of the Hand" in midcourse to speak of the stark preparations of the tryworks, whose mechanical violence mutilates the harmonious universalism just related. He descends into the blubber room among the barefoot cutters, whose stumps that were once toes replace affectionate fingers squeezing sperm. The impulse that leads Ishmael to squeeze "the very milk and sperm of kindness" becomes the source of bodily amputation (323). If the spademan "cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his assistants', would you be very much astonished? Toes are scarce among veteran blubber-room men" (324). The rhetorical question encourages us to answer that, no, these common amputations being so ordinary do not astonish us, though, Ishmael, we are surprised at your mad and exuberant language of squeezing sperm. The quickness with which the narrator's jubilations of fraternity dissipate as the crew prepares the ship to become the factory at sea causes Ishmael and his reader to look back upon the episode of squeezing sperm as the embarrassing ramblings of a utopian dreamer.

Melville the letter writer presents his democratic ideals with similar apprehension to the more politically conservative Hawthorne. He sees with an Ishmael-like timidity his own tendency toward the arrogance of Ahab: "It is but nature to be shy of a mortal who boldly declares" unflinching faith in radical democracy, he wrote to Hawthorne. But Melville could not bridle that Ahab within from autocratically taking up Ishmael's ideas about democracy and

transforming them into parricide of national dimensions. Melville thus "boldly declares" to Hawthorne that "a thief in jail is as honorable a personage as George Washington." And within Moby-Dick , George Washington becomes as honorable as a pagan savage who peddles shrunken heads. In the famous passage where Ishmael experiences salvation from his misanthropy as well as from the cultural prejudices of Christianity, he describes the magnificence of his bedmate Queequeg by way of the unabashed comparison we have already noted:

With much interest I sat watching him. Savage though he was, and hideously marred about the face—at least to my taste—his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable. You cannot hide the soul.... Whether it was, too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it otherwise would, this I will not venture to decide; but certain it was his head was phrenologically an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington's head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed. (58)

To counteract the potentially jarring nature of his metaphor, Ishmael here puts forth a comparison tentatively developed. Just as the stares of the New Bedford citizens accost Ishmael and his bosom friend as they make their way through town streets, Ishmael the narrator knows his description will provoke, at the very least, the astonishment of the reader. Proceeding with clauses to explicate and clarify his position, all of which delay the final rushed assertion, he confesses his conceit is "ridiculous." His authority is ironic not simply because it subverts authorized discourses, but because it participates in its own destabilization. Ishmael takes on the same embarrassed tone Melville used when he communicated to Hawthorne his sentiments about Washington, admitting that the analogy was "ludicrous." Yet Melville goes on to affirm the "Truth" of his brash egalitarian comparison, knowing all the while it lacks any authority in the patrifilial culture of antebellum America: "This is ludicrous. But Truth is the silliest thing under the sun." As narrative, as an attempt to speak political "Truth," "ruthless democracy" will not be logical, even, or regular—otherwise it could easily succumb to the regime of truth.^[20]

In the same way that Harvey Birch's association with Washington testifies to the spy's true nobility, here, Ishmael's metaphor seemingly works to the enhancement of Queequeg and not to the discredit of Washington—and if it does, Ishmael is quick to apologize. He adopts the prose of exuberance, licensed to use hyperbole. The metaphor works to uplift Queequeg, and Ishmael hopes that his statement can accomplish its missionary purpose without tainting Washington. Ishmael thus knows that what he says "may seem ridiculous," but certain it is that his analogy contains a radical, nay, sacrilegious, political dimension. If audiences found undignified Cooper's coupling of Washington and a common peddler-spy, Ishmael's parallel hardly would appease anyone when it threatened the symbolic father of freedom by rhetorically chaining him to a dusky pagan. The urbane planter thus collides with the uncivilized islander, who, as Eleanor Simpson suggests, is described as a Negro.^[21] The fool's unauthorized description often speaks the truth: Ishmael's likening of Queequeg to Washington, "ridiculous" though it may be, conjures up the dark side of American narrative, a side marked simultaneously by truth, uneasily straddling democracy and slavery, and by a lack of authority to tell that truth. Though Ishmael first displaces Queequeg to the imaginary Kokovoko and not Africa, the conjunction of the father of his country with an idolatrous pagan nevertheless indirectly points to the incongruity upsetting both Washington as an authoritative symbol and American narrative as legitimate promise. That Ishmael reports Queequeg's native island lies to "the West and South" leads the reader from New Bedford, not to Polynesia, but to the territories received from the Mexican-American War as the bounty of Manifest Destiny, whose identity as free or slave was in contention. Geographic crises replicate and reproduce themselves on the symbolic landscape, miring Washington's identity, as well as the identities of his descendants, in the incongruous personalities of a civilized free man and the islander whom Bildad curses as the "son of darkness" (87).

Ishmael, however, can imply this truth only by way of displacement.^[22] In the abyss separating Melville's own truth lacking authority from the national authority lacking truth, displacement arises as an effective strategy. Not just in terms of a subversive content that sports with fantastic islands as political allegory, but in his very mode of telling does he come at truth "covertly, and by snatches." That is,

in order for Ishmael to reincarnate Washington in the body of a heathen, he must undermine his own authority and apologize for the truth he presents as though it were an oddity of his own brain. Indeed, for Ishmael to speak the truth, he must extricate himself as best he can from an America in crisis; he must, like Bulkington, reject the "slavish shore" that impedes the perception of truth. Ishmael is last seen, shipwrecked, but still afloat in the middle of the Pacific, yet as an author, Melville still inhabited the "slavish shore," and he lived, at the time of Moby-Dick 's composition, both in the family that upheld the Fugitive Slave Law by returning Thomas Sims to a public whipping and in an America debating the Compromise of 1850. Though like his narrator, Melville may have stood apart as he perceived a social fabric of narrative and nation where democratic practices corrupted democratic ideals, he was still dans le vrai of authorized discourse. The power of America's discourses proved particularly effective in allowing Congress, faced with same disjunctive controversy, to legislate an artificial yet authoritative closure to effect a compromise declaring freedom and enslavement compatible and mutually enhancing. Congress narrated an expanding vision of America that permitted California to enter the Union as a free state but fell back upon the idea of popular sovereignty to permit slavery in the other territories acquired from Mexico and passed the Fugitive Slave Law. The Compromise of 1850 certainly preserved America through the legislation of consensus and accord, yet as it did so, it unavoidably called into question the totality and storied perfection of the national narrative. Nation and narrative could continue expansion if the gaps in founding logic were overlooked. In other words, in 1850, promise became compromise.

The principles that once initiated perhaps the most remarkable attempt at intentional community were revised and reworded in popular consciousness: during this era of supplemented and amended narrative, the Richmond Enquirer explained this alternative reading: "In this country alone does perfect equality of civil and social privilege exist among the white population, and it exists solely because we have black slaves. Freedom is not possible without slavery." Slavery, if one compromised democratic discourse, did not appear to be incongruous with freedom, but, in fact, made for a more profound experience of civic freedom. "The situation of the slave-owner," wrote a supporter of the Confederacy, "qualifies him, in an

eminent degree, for discharging the duties of a free citizen. His leisure enables him to cultivate his intellectual powers, and his condition of independence places him beyond the reach of demagogues and corruption." If America could compromise in this way, Melville and Ishmael could compromise Washington with comparisons to thieves and cannibals. Their ability to make these comparisons reflects a culture whose authority to enforce a narrative—especially one that told an inconsistent story as though it were consistent—was as titular as its symbols. Ironic subversion thus presented itself to Melville and his narrator not only out of the gap between truth and national authority, but out of the seams of that authority itself. Melville and Ishmael spoke discourses that repeated American national authority, but, to recall Bhabha's account of colonial discourse, the discourses they reproduced were "uttered inter dicta ." It is in one such eruption or moment of "sane madness" that Ishmael compromises the patriarchal founder of America, likening Washington to his cultural opposite. His patriotism is one among many ritual repetitions of Washington, but it is also one of the most "ridiculous"—that is, if parricide is a laughing matter. In the contradictory echoes of homage as criticism, promise as compromise, and Washington as Queequeg, patriotic repetition takes on a subversive, if not murderous, intent toward the patriarchal myths, legacies, and institutions that undergirded the nation.^[23]

Whereas the Richmond Enquirer adjusted the principles of the narrative to fit the times, other discourses, scientifically developed, functioned as critical commentaries that amended social actualities to fit the new narrative. In his Treatise on Sociology (1854), Henry Hughes concluded: "In the United States South, there are no slaves. Those States are warrantee-commonwealths." Bridging divisions between the industrial ethics of the North and the agrarian ideology of the South, Hughes stressed economic affinities, calling the slave-holder a "prudent capitalist." Ethnologists like J. C. Nott and George R. Gliddon shored up the makeshift narrative with a spurious mixture of biology, history, and anthropology. South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun found ammunition in their ethnological substantiation of racial stereotypes, using their arguments to encourage expansion of the peculiar institution. Nott's and Gliddon's exhaustive study Types of Mankind "proved" the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race over others whose physical and mental inferiorities

supposedly threatened the continued advancement of civilization. America was not to understand literally Paul's words that God "hath made of one blood all nations of men," for indeed the white and dark races, as ethnology's interpretation of biblical history and anatomy attested, were physically distinct and should remain so. "The Negro and other unintellectual types have been shown ... to possess heads much smaller, by actual measurement in cubic inches, than the white races," reported Nott and Gliddon. Democracy, said the antebellum ethnologist, can be implemented successfully only among whites, for only they are historically and biologically conditioned for self-determination; in contrast., "dark -skinned races, history attests are only fit for military governments." This discourse implied that founding principles needed to be reexamined in the light (and darkness) of these new findings in the human sciences. Apparent contradictions between freedom and enslavement were only the "facts" of nature and biology, not the result of human failing or hypocrisy.^[24]

Ishmael's perception of Queequeg's high and noble brow refutes the ethnologist's narrative that acted as a varnish on the disintegrating national narrative. Both the "son of darkness" and the founding father exhibit the cranial capacity to conceive of democratic principles. Even Ishmael, prone to "deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off," can experience the regeneration of democracy (23). Despite having a cranium choked with grim Puritanic loomings, Ishmael, too, can conceive of ideals like brotherhood and universal fraternity. Queequeg provides the impetus for his redemption, demonstrating the equality of their crania—and thus their equal capacity for freedom, democracy, and good—when he clasps Ishmael about the waist and "pressed his forehead against mine" (59). And Queequeg concretely reaffirms his commitment to the fundamental ethics of the joint-stock company of humanity by repeatedly saving castaways, among them an African named Daggoo trapped in the sinking head of a whale, a white landlubber who has just called him "the devil," and a refugee from the merchant marine stricken with a bout of misanthropy (65). Once Queequeg's actions indicate the fallacious nature of racist biological classification, Ishmael employs his double-voiced discourse to appropriate and subvert ethnology's authority. That is, through Queequeg, a darkskinned heathen whose visible being renders him suspect in the Puritan vision, Ishmael finds the impetus to examine the cultural

authority of his era. Queequeg, who lacks any authority while on the mainland of the United States—even when he tries to use a cultural artifact like a wheelbarrow, he shows his distance from a basic cultural literacy—ironically provides Ishmael with the authority to parody and undermine the discourses of that dominant culture.

Just as ethnology distinguished three types of mankind by identifying the black race, the sons of Ham; the brownish yellow race, the sons of Shem; and the white race, the sons of Japeth, Ishmael proposes the classificatory system of cetology. His system allows him to discriminate along with Linnaeus: "I hereby separate the whales from the fish" (117). With meticulous and scientific care, Ishmael divides his study into books, folios, chapters, and subheadings. Textual classification becomes biological classification and allows this amateur naturalist to discriminate authoritatively between sperm whales, baleen whales, and porpoises. Yet Ishmael soon undercuts his newly pilfered authority by extending it too far, using it to make untenable hypotheses. He parodies the authority that permits one to make discriminating judgments between types of whales or types of mankind.^[25] Of humpback whales, Ishmael the taxonomist writes: "He is the most gamesome and light-hearted of all the whales, making more gay foam and white water generally than any other of them" (121). The improbable nature of sketching an entire whale group's personality repeats ethnology's fraudulent categorization of a "light-hearted" race, or William Smith's conclusion in Lectures on the Philosophy and Practice of Slavery (1856), which ascertains from an assumption of black "intellectual inferiority" that slaves "are the most cheerful and, indeed, merry class of people we have amongst us."^[26]

The socially enmeshed "truth" that props up observation—whether it is a description that "foam" is "gay" or slaves inferior—leads to untenable conclusions that force Ishmael to view suspiciously the foundations of his governing classification. Thus, Ishmael, like any good researcher, tells us his sources, in this case, Linnaeus's "System of Nature, A.D. 1776" (117). What seems a scrupulous piece of scholarship is in actuality an error. Linnaeus's Systema Naturae first appeared in 1735, and the important tenth addition was issued in 1753. Under the guise of scholarly authority, Ishmael substitutes the date of the Declaration of Independence for the date when the Swedish botanist separated whales from fish. Rather than

producing skepticism about Linnaeus, Ishmael intends to question the meaning of 1776, to classify it as a year that, despite its pretensions to equality, never instituted practices to actualize the dictates of freedom. Disagreeing with Linnaeus by asserting that "the whale is a fish," Ishmael abjures separation, proposing in its place a system of inclusion where types of fish are not segregated: "By the above definition of what a whale is, I do by no means exclude from the leviathanic brotherhood any sea creature." (118) Ishmael consents momentarily to speaking dans le vrai of biological discourse so that he can then misuse its authority to deflate an uncritical political discourse. By the ironic authorization of a cetology, we learn blacks are not separated from whites, but integrated, as whales and fish are, as Queequeg and Ishmael are, in a universal fraternity.

"Unconditional democracy in all things," Melville realized, was a radical project requiring that Ishmael encode his ideas about democracy in the discourse of taxonomy. Indeed, he was doing no more than the humanist researchers writing dans le vrai of ethnological discourse who "discovered" historical and biological predeterminations for black slavery. An all-important difference, however, lies in the fact that Ishmael remains an isolato, floating above the depths plumbed by his parodic discourse, while ethnologists existed as part of a federation where various discourses (biological, legal, historical) intersected and supported one another. Not only did ethnologists like Nott and Gliddon find compatriots in the ranks of a social critic like Hughes, or in the pages of a political commentator like James Fenimore Cooper, or in the impassioned rhetoric and magnetizing presence of an orator like Calhoun. They were also part of a historical brotherhood that stretched back to the founding fathers. In Notes on the State of Virginia , Jefferson established a textual foundation upon observations of geography, plants, and animals to comment, however tentatively, upon his black slaves' animal-like sensuality and intellectual slowness. In contrast, Ishmael stands alone and embarrassed in the desert of his own rhetoric, able to associate with other discourses only in a "ludicrous," if not subversive, manner.

Radical truth telling demands consideration of a cautionary postscript, however. Ishmael's beliefs about democracy could cause more than embarrassment and alienation; such a democracy is fraught with the danger of its own "ruthless" and frantic nature. Ruthlessly democratic form leads to discursive experiments like "Midnight,

Forecastle." Here, Ishmael, the narrative authority, disappears, and the text presents unmediated the crew as chorus, a central element of drama in Athenian democracy, now the polis of the Pequod . They alternate between joining together under the textual designation of "ALL" and reasserting their individual characters with their opinions about whaling, the sea, and women. The chorus thus unites an assortment of thirty men into a crew that nevertheless preserves the diversity of sailors from Malta, Nantucket, China, and Tahiti. But this democracy, including whites and blacks, splinters over racial conflict. The chapter ends in a scuffle echoed by an atmospheric squall: nothing more can be told; the communally spun and diverse narrative stalls; the reminiscing about Tahitian girls, the speculations about Ahab, the singing of mariners' songs, indeed, the development of the dramatic chorus, dissipates as the Spanish sailor comes at the African Daggoo with a knife. "Unconditional democracy" may be too radical; it may join together racially different citizens who can interact only in a volatile and violent manner.