Melville's Critique of Transcendental History

When, in March 1861, Herman Melville visited the nation's capital, he was received with reassuring familiarity. At the White House, he shook Abraham Lincoln's hand, noting a refreshingly common aura about the president: "He shook hands like a good fellow—working hard at it like a man sawing wood at so much per cord." The next afternoon, however, he made the pilgrimage to a monumental icon, only to report somewhat dejectedly: "I visited the Washington Monument. Huge tower some 160 feet high of white marble. Could not get inside. Nothing been done to it for long time."^[41] What Melville experienced personally—greeted by the human representative of democracy and rebuffed by the reified memorial to democratic foundings—he had expressed as ironic critique in his 1855 novel, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile . In an effort to navigate a course for America between democratic candor and democratic repression, Melville resurrects forgotten history and argues for its placement within monumental culture even as he reveals the political pitfalls of figuring history within nationalist discourse. Melville's project is beleaguered by foundational American tensions between Federalists and Antifederalists, between the unity of individuals and the erasure of individuals, between national identity and anonymity. Caught within this dialectical ambivalence, Israel Potter embraces the transcendent power of democratically inspired monumental history only to employ the parricidal force of critical parody to renounce sublime national narrative. As self-conscious biographer, the narrator of Israel Potter aligns himself with Emerson and the monument builders and then reverses his position by the end of the novel, when the title character plummets from the illusive heights of democracy.

Israel Potter thus appears as a case study of a history made sublime by its inclusion within the Revolutionary mythos. An Emersonian principle seems to inform the biographical project of Israel Potter , and its author might interrogate history as does Emerson to ask: "what food or experience or succor have they [dead, unindividualized facts]

for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter"—or for an American exile named Potter? ("History," 256). This biographer recalling the Revolution acts in concert with the transcendental thinker crossing "a bare common." Melville descends into the most common of circumstances to retrieve and elevate the life of this forgotten patriot. Browsing among the tatters of the "rag-pickers," the narrator stumbles across "a little narrative of ... adventures, forlornly published on sleazy gray paper."^[42] Out of "this blurred record" consigned to the dingy annals of obscurity, the narrator commemorates the life of a democratic hero who fought at Bunker Hill and humbly dedicates the resulting product to "His Highness the Bunker-Hill Monument" (425). Even though Israel dies impoverished and insignificant, when subjected to the elixir of democratic biography, he rises up, his story mingling with the architectural sublime of this monumental icon. The monument, a political echo of the "all" seen by Emerson's "transparent eye-ball," may "be deemed the Great Biographer" (426); it is through the influence of this lofty eminence that the almost forgotten Israel enters the currents of American national history. Melville imparts all this information in a preface dated June 17, 1854, the anniversary of American resistance to British forces on the heights above Boston. Monumental history once again works its democratic wonders of time, space, and status: barriers of time, centuries long, evaporate, and spatial divisions of low and high, common and noble, forgotten and remembered, dissipate in a sublime homogeneity of subject, biographer, and national history.

Just as orators held as indispensable the role of public desire in the erection of a monument, the design of Israel Potter emerged from Melville's anticipations of common readers. Although Melville lay his biography at the base of "His Highness," the popular mind guided the biographer. Aware that the novel was to appear serially in Putnam's Monthly Magazine , he wrote the editors: "I engage that the story shall contain nothing of any sort to shock the fastidious. There will be very little reflective writing in it; nothing weighty. It is adventure." The author who had declared his reluctance to write in accordance with the tastes of a widespread audience now, after the commercial failures of Moby-Dick and Pierre , took notice of the "bare common" and constructed a tale calculated to please a mass readership. He seems of the breed of vigorous intellectuals called

forth by Emerson in "The American Scholar" who will "embrace the common ... and explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low" (68–69); he agrees with the editorial position in Harper's that history "has presented us only with names of isolated pre-eminence. The time has come when we 'must change all that.'"^[43] The authorial sovereign who killed off characters in Mardi with regal indifference and alienated readers with a belabored allegory experimented with democratic authority.

The popular dynamics informing Melville's narrative give birth to a democratic hero. Israel enacts his American story in a prose whose religious and political overtones replay the national history of revolution and liberation. Fleeing the oppressive conditions under his patriarchal roof, shunning "the tyranny of this father," Israel departs for new lands, the frontier, though this quest will eventually and ironically land him back to the fleshpots and prisons of the Old World (435). He enters a textual landscape marked by tenets of hard work and opportunity similar to the world described in Letters from an American Farmer ; like Crèvecoeur's outcast immigrant from the Scottish Hebrides who achieves the American Dream, Israel collects his wages, purchases a tract of land, clears it, and establishes a homestead. But once seized by that unquiet American spirit, he lights out for the territories, becoming an Ishmael wandering in the wilderness as a surveyor, hunter, trapper, quick-witted peddler, and Nantucket harpooner. Israel stumbles across an American identity in his restlessness, falling into generic company with the archetypal Yankee folk hero, the jack-of-all-trades. The itinerant and changing nature of his commercial endeavors requires wit and native intelligence, characteristics to become embedded in the national folk fabric as American know-how and ingenuity. When the always pursued Israel outwits his captors by masquerading as a scarecrow or by intoxicating English sailors though remaining sober himself, he reveals his kinship with the "agile, jig-dancing, shrewd, talkative, humorous, flaxen-haired hero," Brother Jonathan of the early 1800s, who would evolve into Uncle Sam.^[44]

The cultural distinctness of Israel's Americanisms leads to a notorious, though common, articulation of a politicized self that inevitably conflicts with the Old World mores of British culture. An original American son, Israel stands as independent from Europe as Jefferson's mammoths or as innocent as Cole's sketch of the United

States' historically virgin landscape. The young patriot naturally takes up arms at Bunker Hill, where his previous days in the woods shooting deer give him the marksman's skills to take exact aim "between the golden epaulettes" of the officers as though he were shooting "between the branching antlers" (440). Rustic talent with the rifle translates into monumental resistance to the legions of the British pharaoh. Israel, however, is taken prisoner at a later engagement and transported to England, beginning his fifty years of Babylonian captivity. Escaping from an English prison ship soon after, Israel nevertheless remains imprisoned within the confines of exile. Although he evades detection by disguising himself as a cripple, a ghost, a gardener in the king's garden, and a London brickmaker under the taskmasters of "the English Egypt," only with difficulty can Israel conceal his particularly American spirit (602). Unable to quell the distaste for patriarchal authority that first led him to "emancipat[e] himself from his sire," Israel cannot subdue his innate passion for independence: he fails, no matter how much he might try, to address his employer as "Sir John" and not "Mr. Millet"; he touches, but cannot bring himself to remove his hat when he bumps into King George along the walks of the garden; and he informs the monarch "firmly, but with deep respect, 'I have no king' " (434, 460). Politically as well as aesthetically, Israel springs up from humble origins to mature as a transcendent type in whom a community of nineteenth-century Americans would share a common cultural legacy. The calculated popularity of Israel's fictional figure transforms a forgotten soldier of Bunker Hill into a nationally recognized icon.

To say, however, that Melville inscribed himself as a writer of democracy simply because he considered what the popular mind would consume would be fallacious. Though he made his home in the democracy of nineteenth-century America, Melville thought himself as much an exile as Israel Potter. As Richard Brodhead observes, Melville's novels and correspondence often contained "brutal assaults on his readers and on American literary culture."^[45] Melville found companionship only in his own forlorn fictional creation, Bartleby; both would "prefer not to" copy and write within the accepted forms of notation or narration. Bartleby's fate is well known; finding no place in society, he dies huddled at the base of a prison wall. Ishmael represented a more encouraging example for

Melville by overcoming alienation to outline a "ruthless democracy" in his friendship with a tattooed savage speaking broken English. Yet Melville could not enter into such a contractual agreement with the urbane and literate transcendental thinker of Nature . After hearing this popularizer of monumentalism give a lecture, Melville wrote: "I do not oscillate in Emerson's rainbow, but prefer rather to hang myself in mine own halter than swing any other man's swing."^[46] And in "The Mast-Head" chapter of Moby-Dick , Ishmael effectively parodies Emerson's transcendental sublime, cautioning those who would swing from the top of an isolated eminence. Ishmael muses in an Emersonian strain, only to arrive at a grim reminder of the consequences of forgetting the self within transcendental currents:

but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity, takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him ... seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space.... There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand and inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists! (136)

Transcending to an elevated state where soul and cosmos become mutually transparent is not without its dangers. Unity, capable of expanding the individual to the scale of an empire, is also capable of effacing the individual in that expansion. Melville's quarrel with Emerson encompassed more than the ether of ontology, however; his comic imitation points to the blindness of the "transparent eyeball" and its destructive consequences for the citizen living within a political culture dedicated to monumentalism. Following the tastes of the American public and gratifying a culture pursuing the

monumental may produce a paste-board mask of democracy, but not the "ruthless" substance of democracy necessary for the uniqueness of individual contribution and participation.

Despite its status as a memorial pillar to democracy, the Bunker Hill Monument obscured the patriot of democracy. When democracy became reified as a monumental structure, it loomed over the individual; when the representation of democracy achieved a grand scale, the individual forfeited political, local, biographical specificity in an exchange for a national identity that overrode and silenced the particular heroism as well as the personal tragedies of a common, exiled citizen such as Israel. Like much of nineteenth-century American culture, the April 1852 issue of Harper's could acknowledge the desirability of monumental modes of historical representation even as it affirmed without qualms that "national memory [or] ... public spirit is often most blindly destructive of private interest ."^[47] Stranded in England for a half century, Israel returns to the promised land of democracy on a day specifically designated for remembrance—the Fourth of July. He steps ashore in Boston and meets a mass celebration commemorating the heroes of Bunker Hill. In this sense, the monumental performs the key function of preserving the hero's fragile actions with a symbolic recollection. The monumental administers a civic memory, integral in instructing post-Revolutionary sons to remember the indispensable foundations laid by the American fathers. At the same time, however, Israel reaches "the Fortunate Isles of the Free" only to discover his exile remains intact (611). The patriotism enacted by Israel, now reified as public ritual, has no need for Israel: "the old man narrowly escaped being run over by a patriotic triumphal car in the procession, flying a broidered banner, inscribed with gilt letters:—'BUNKER-HILL . 1775. GLORY TO THE HEROES THAT FOUGHT !' " (613). The American fervor for monumental remembrance inadvertently tramples the citizen who, ironically, may have performed the very deeds that are being remembered. Although the public enthusiastically reaffirms the bravery of men like Israel, it has little space to commemorate Israel himself. America, able to articulate democracy only in monumental proportions, cannot construct a panegyric to a democratic individual and has no place for Israel; the former minuteman finds sanctuary only on Copp's Hill, a position occupied by British troops during the battle, to view the ceremonies at the "incipient monument" (613).

Undertones of monumentalism's pitfalls exist even within the ebullient dedication of Israel Potter . The narrator lavishes praise upon the patriotic column and concludes with a simile that yokes together Israel and the monument, but it is an uncomfortable union: "[I wish] summer's suns may shine as brightly on your brow as each winter snow shall lightly rest on the grave of Israel Potter" (426). The incongruities uneasily paralleling summer and winter, high and low, radiance and solemnity, all prevent the reassuring supposition of a sublime harmony that might raise up Israel out of his neglected grave. Even in death, Israel remains alienated, untouched by the impassive mode of the history reified by the Bunker Hill Monument. Unconcerned with Israel, unconcerned with the lost children of democracy, this "Great Biographer," whose intractable granite composition Melville emphasizes, stands above the subjects it honors. Under the aegis of monumental history, the political citizen is forgotten. This is not to say, however, that a sublime configuration of history could make no place for the individual. Just as the descending torrent in a painting of Niagara Falls diminishes the human figure, locating the individual as a minuscule element of the natural order, so, too, the historical sublime understood the individual as part of a greater historical process. Israel's life has meaning only insofar as it conforms to a national history too myopic to notice and avoid running him down with "a patriotic triumphal car." Under the gaze of "the Great Biographer," Israel becomes nameless and joins ranks with "the anonymous privates of June 17, 1775, who may never have received other requital than the solid reward of your [the Bunker Hill Monument's] granite" (426). Once enveloped by the iconic representation of the independence he defended, Israel forfeits the spirit of resistance he had faithfully preserved throughout his long years of exile and becomes dependent upon monumental history. Remembered as an anonymous patriot of Bunker Hill, Israel loses his identity as a sufferer exiled from America and achieves a new identity as an alienated subject marked by the nonmarkings of historical obscurity and political neurasthenia.^[48]

Gathered up in the folds of a processional banner, Israel Potter as a human actor ceases to have significance. He forms an incidental part of the historical picture, just as the shrunken figures emphasize the natural order in a landscape portrait. Whether in the depiction of nature or the monumental representation of American history, a

mystified process subsumes the individual. Yet an important difference exists: whereas the "natural" need not embrace human action, American history and the politics it remembers is a discursive space of human creation where individuals should be able to act and appear to one another as citizens. What Hannah Arendt calls the "space of appearance," where citizens speak and act to "reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world," dwindles and decays before a mammoth construction of history designed to be stable and immortal in contradistinction to the fragility of human affairs. In short, the national architecture of monumental representation in the nineteenth century invalidated politics. The discourse of American monumentalism held that monolithic iconic remembrance would supplant the doddering and transitory memory of human deeds with a more permanent icon of history. Although most dedications honored the veterans of Bunker Hill who attended the 1825 groundbreaking ceremonies, noting the "venerable men, the relics of a past generation, with emaciated frames, tottering limbs, and trembling voices," orators and writers mentioned these individual patriots only to gain support for a less frail historical construction. By the time of the monument's completion in 1843, Webster would stand before the column and deny his own human agency as a participant in historical discourse: the monument "is itself the orator of this occasion. It is not from my lips, it could not be from any human lips, that that strain of eloquence is this day to flow most competent to move and excite the vast multitudes around me."^[49]

Transcendent and unifying, the Bunker Hill Monument was the sublime national icon. Webster's optimism that its lessons and history would extend to "vast multitudes" depended upon monumentalism in several ways. Its expansive, highly visible character allowed for the enactment of democracy on a grand scale, but also imperative to the perpetuation of Webster's democracy was an understanding of monere as an action of reminding and instructing Americans in examples of civic virtue garnered from the past. Without monere , citizens would lapse into forgetfulness of the founding principles. The monument, however, was to guard against prodigal sons, becoming, as Webster hoped, a ritual space of memory where "troops of ingenuous youth shall be gathered ... [and] there shall rise from every youthful breast the ejaculation, "Thank God, I—I also—AM AN AMERICAN !" Yet ironically, in its triumph over time, Webster's version of the monumental

sacrifices the vital element of human responsibility and participation that characterizes a notion of republican remembrance best expressed by Lincoln in his 1838 address before the Young Men's Lyceum. Lincoln called for a "political religion of the nation" that, however improvident it may have seemed, could be located, lived, and experienced, only in subjects who would appear tenuous, ephemeral, and impermanent in comparison with the durability of the monumental. Rather than preserving history within a monolithic icon of remembrance, a diffused structure of republican memory had to be supported by "other pillars," whose rag-tag heterogeneity—"the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions"—defied the aesthetic and political principles of unified, enduring construction.^[50] Like Webster, Lincoln acknowledged the imperative of preserving the founding legacy, but unlike Webster, he saw that democratic principles could be transmitted only by human beings. Icons, uninhabited by citizens, played no role in Lincoln's thinking. Whereas Webster preferred to trust the "Great Biographer," Lincoln understood that history, if it was to preserve an inheritance of participatory democracy, had to arise from human articulation.

Emerson also pronounced the death of politics, but little grief accompanied his announcement. In "Heroism" he writes: "Who that sees the meanness of our politics, but inly congratulates Washington that he is long already wrapped in his shroud, and for ever safe" (381). Death emerges as the supreme moment of historical transcendence, the summit where one forever escapes the obstacles that could sully the self with the physical dealings of the "bare common." Emerson's outlook emphatically opposed federal orderings, leading him to declare that "every actual State is corrupt" ("Politics," 563). What appeared in the void, perhaps unforeseen by Emerson, was not the ideal state founded on individual conscience, but the nation-state. The apex of politics was to be not involved in politics at all. Emerson represented the culmination of history as a sacrosanct realm that citizens enter only upon forfeiture of their lives, specific, full, and local. Advancing beyond Webster's understanding of the Bunker Hill Monument as a triumph over time, the Emerson of monumental culture posited the national historical icon as a triumph over life. Ishmael's parody of the transcendental dreamer atop the masthead—"There is no life in thee"—reads as the epitaph of Lincoln's republican citizen. In its sublime, transcendent configuration, monumental

history stifled civic being; it resulted in the nihilistic slogan "Let the dead bury the living."^[51]

The edifices towering over the Israels and Melvilles evoked what transpired within the culture of monumentalism as acting politically gave way to a fabricated remembrance that precluded the necessarily impermanent and unpredictable quality of action. The individual became a speck in the political landscape. Immediately after the speaker in Nature announces "I become a transparent eye-ball," material being fades, and he declares "I am nothing; I see all" (10). Despite the focus on "all," which may indicate ideals of brotherhood and community, Carolyn Porter states that within this passage the "rhetorical emphasis falls on the predicates, distracting us from the miraculous return in the second clause of the 'I' who has just been voided by the first. Swallowed up by its role as seer, the material self disappears."^[52] This unsubstantial self can hardly participate in the materiality of daily life and the politics that emerge from life thus lived. Transcendence, although it may originate in the "bare common," severs the citizen from all the things—history, place, community, desire—that make him or her a citizen. Concern for a vital political community vanishes in an ethereal atmosphere: "The name of the nearest friend then sounds foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance" (Nature , 10). Politics are sublimated, as though the affairs of "street and village," the happenings that can occur only within public spaces, corrupt individuals. Emerson expands this view to affirm the value of a transcendent existence unconcerned with acting or speaking in the world, the sole ways to realize civic self-definition. He does not sing the praises of the political citizen; instead, he prefers the apolitical being whom he celebrates in "The Poet": "Thou shalt leave the world, and know the muse only. Thou shalt not know any longer the times, customs, graces, politics, or opinions of men, but shalt take all from the muse" (467). Monumental culture encouraged the purification of the individual, and it carried forth that process until any political sensibility was refined out of being.