1. Melville, Moby-Dick , 246. All subsequent citations in this chapter are to the Houghton Mifflin edition cited in the introduction and will appear parenthetically in the text.

2. John Seelye has also compared the kinetic, linear quality of Ahab's story to the static, discursive circularity of Ishmael's musings. Melville: The Ironic Diagram (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 6, 63-66.

3. Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," in the Library of America edition, 1154. Nina Baym underscores Melville's discomfort with narrative in "Melville's Quarrel with Fiction," PMLA 94 (October 1979): 909-24. She suggests that "Melville abandoned narrative principles and did not use normative fictional genres.... [He experienced] a rapid disenchantment with fiction both as a mode of truth telling and as a mode of truth seeking" (913).

4. Various critics have noted Moby-Dick's allusive treatment of Manifest Destiny and the political crisis it produced. See, for instance, John McWilliams, Jr., Hawthorne, Melville, and the American Character: A Looking-Glass Business (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Rogin, Subversive Genealogy ; and Heimert, " Moby-Dick and the American Political Symbolism," 510.

5. Ezra B. Chase, Teachings of Patriots and Statesmen; or the "Fathers of the Republic" on Slavery (Philadelphia: J. W. Bridley, 1860), 6, 12. On Clay's reverential faith in Washington's Farewell Address, see Bryan, "George Washington," 54. Few figures questioned the prevailing political retrospection as Melville did. For a rare exception, see Albert Brisbane, who in 1840 criticized the leading statesmen of the day for putting their faith in "the policy of a Washington or a Jefferson, and not in new principles or organic changes.... It is clear that our politicians are all looking backwards." Social Destiny of Man: or, Association and Reorganization of Industry (New York: Burt Franklin, 1968) viii.

6. My use of "truth" as a category of knowledge is not meant to imply a transcendent or universal intelligence. Rather I follow both Melville and Foucault in subjecting "truth" to the critical perspective of genealogy. As I will argue below, for Melville, "truth" did not denote universals, but instead a historically specific and racially contextual belief in democracy.

7. Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," 1160, 1162; Michel Foucault, "The Discourse on Language," in The Archaeology of Knowledge , trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1972),224; Power/Knowledge , 131.

8. Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," 1160.

9. In trying to evade slipping dans le vrai , Ishmael thus resists the "author-function" also described by Foucault in "What Is an Author?" in The Foucault Reader , ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 101-20.

10. Three recent studies of Moby-Dick raise similar questions. Wai-chee Dimock's Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), Rogin's Subversive Genealogy , and Carolyn L. Karcher's Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville's America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980) all understand Herman Melville as a profound critic of a national mission that sanctioned the domination of Native Americans, the enslavement of African Americans, and the imperialist aggression of the Mexican-American War.

11. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York: Signet, 1980) 16, 42,21,44; Derrida, Dissemination , 41; Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket , (New York: Penguin, 1986) 44; Jacobs, Incidents , 3.

12. The Letters of Herman Melville , ed. Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 96.

13. Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land , 11, and see her discussion of further accounts of Melville's variance from potential colleagues, 9-26.

14. Melville, Letters , 127, 78.

15. Donald Pease, Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987),46; Charles H. Foster, "Something in Emblems: A Reinterpretation of Moby-Dick ," in New England Quarterly 34 (March 1961): 11; Melville, Letters , 127, 128.

16. Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," 1160; Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 40-41. Edgar Dryden has also paid attention to the thematic content of Melville's form, noting especially its metaphysical dimensions. Dryden argues that in Melville's hands, the novel acts as a metaphysical attempt to formulate an "experience which is both particular and unified" (7). My focus on the political content of narrative form, however, suggests that Moby-Dick often struggles against the implicit coherence and unity and of narrative. See Melville's Thematics of Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968).

17. Frederick Douglass, "To The Lynn Anti-Slavery Sewing Circle, August 18, 1846," in Life and Writings , 1:187. The range of Moby-Dick's narratives, according to Baym, confused readers, and early reviews were "unable to determine its genre." "Melville's Quarrel with Fiction," (917-18).

18. Richard Brodhead, Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 20, 4.

19. Carolyn Porter, "Call Me Ishmael," 102, 101, 100; Brodhead, Hawthorne, Melville, and the Novel , 151. John Samson underscores Porter's discussion of how Ishmael subverts authorized discourses of antebellum America. Working from insights supplied by Bakhtin and Foucault, Samson stresses how Melville developed an anti-authoritarian stance toward a national culture that was becoming increasingly monolithic. White Lies: Melville's Narratives of Facts (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 11-16. Anacharsis Clootz was a radical democrat and German-born leader of the French Revolution who headed a delegation he proclaimed as an "embassy of the human race." He was sent to the guillotine in March 1794.

20. Melville, Letters , 127.

21. Eleanor E. Simpson, "Melville and the Negro: From Typee to Benito Cereno," American Literature 41 (March 1969): 28.

22. This displacement of Queequeg from the "dark continent" to the imaginary Kokovoko serves as an misdirection that corresponds to Melville's theory of truth telling. As Ishmael says of Kokovoko, "It is not down in any map; true places never are" (62).

23. The Richmond Enquirer is quoted in Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie , 53; Hudson, The Second War of Independence in America , 150.

24. Henry Hughes, Treatise on Sociology, Theoretical and Practical (1854, reprint; New York: Negro Universities Press, 1968), 227, 214; J. C. Nott and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind (Philadelphia: Lippencott, Grambo, 1855), 403, 404. Karcher's Shadow over the Promised Land provides excellent readings and background of antebellum ethnology and its representation in Melville's texts. For instance, in her chapter "A Jonah's Warning to America in Moby-Dick ," she discusses at length how Queequeg rescues Ishmael from color prejudices instilled by contemporary scientific discourses (62-69). Also helpful is George Fredrickson's The Black Image in the White Mind .

25. Therefore Ishmael allows Melville to criticize the discriminating actions of judges like his father-in-law Lemuel Shaw, whose decision to uphold racially segregated schooling in the case of Sarah C. Roberts v. City of Boston (1849) later acted as the foundation of the doctrine of "separate but equal." See Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land , 10.

26. William A. Smith, Lectures on the Philosophy and Practice of Slavery, As Exhibited in the Institution of Domestic Slavery in the United States: With the Duties of Masters to Slaves (1856, reprint.; Miami Fla.: Mnemosyne, 1969), 223, 223-24. Ishmael here undercuts the declaration he later extrapolates from his observations of Pip: "For blacks, the year's calendar should show naught but three hundred and sixty-five Fourth of Julys and New Year's Days" (319). In fact, Ishmael's own association with Queequeg, as well as his descriptions of Daggoo, should logically contradict his "findings" here. Also noteworthy is the severe irony of Ishmael's statement when considered alongside of Frederick Douglass's comments on the meaning of the Fourth of July to the Negro, or Harriet Jacobs's description of New Year's Day as a time of uncertainty and separation for the slave mother who sits "watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning." Incidents , 16.

27. Richard Chase, Herman Melville: A Critical Study (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 42. Chase's classic study traces the Prometheus motif throughout Melville's work. See, especially, 45-48.

28. Michael Walzer suggests that "symbolic action" is key to political manipulations. "The union of men," writes Walzer "can only be symbolized; it has no palpable shape or substance." "On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought," Political Science Quarterly 82 (June 1967): 194. For accounts of the struggle for narrative authority between Ishmael/Melville and Ahab, see See F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Whitman and Emerson, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 445-47; Nicholas Canaday, Melville and Authority , (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1968), 52; Robert L. Caserio, Plot, Story, and the Novel: From Dickens to Poe in the Modern Period (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979), 137; and, Seelye, Melville , 63-71.

29. Charles Olson, Call Me Ishmael , (New York: Grove Press, 1947), 53.

30. Rogin similarly notes that Ahab makes ceremonial use of the pagan harpooners to invest his rule with a mystical, religious power. Subversive Genealogy , 129-31.

31. Melville, Letters , 133, 142.

32. Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," 1159, 1158. On the Puritan understanding of the relation of symbolism to allegory, see Charles Feidle-son, Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). In Typee (1846), the ship's captain attempts a similar manipulation of dark bodies as part of an effort to curb his crew's desires for "liberty" or shore leave: "if you'll take my advice, every mother's son of you will stay aboard, and keep out of the way of the bloody cannibals altogether.... for if those tattooed scoundrels get you a little ways back into their valleys, they'll nab you—that you may certain of. Plenty of white men have gone ashore here and never been seen any more." Herman Melville, Typee (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 34.

33. Melville, "Hawthorne and His Mosses," 1159.

34. Pease, Visionary Compacts , 245. On Ahab's ability to distort the covenant into a form of possession, notice his appraisal of Starbuck after the ritual of "The Quarter-Deck": "Starbuck is now mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion" (140).

35. James Baldwin, "Everybody's Protest Novel," in Notes of a Native Son , (Boston: Beacon, 1955), 16. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 25. Foucault continues to say that the political involvement of the body establishes "the 'body politic' as a set of material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, relays, communications routes and supports for the power and knowledge relations that invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge" (28). On female abolitionists'/suffragists' use of the black body, see Karen Sánchez-Eppler's fine article, "Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Abolition and Feminism," Representations 24 (Fall 1988): 28-59.

36. For further commentary on the theatrical dynamics between Ahab and Pip, see Canaday, Melville and Authority , 45, and Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land , 84-88.

37. John Schaar, "The Uses of Literature for the Study of Politics: The Case of Melville's 'Benito Cereno,'" in Legitimacy in the Modern State (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1981), 77. These redemptive moments, of course, have strong components of male eroticism and homosexuality, which Melville understood as fulfilling desires that are at once political and sexual. On this point, see Robert K. Martin, Hero, Captain, Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986).

38. Homi Bhabha equates this reduction of narratives with nationalism: "For the political unity of the nation consists in a continual displacement of its irredeemably plural modern space, bounded by different, even hostile nations, into a signifying space that is archaic and mythical, paradoxically representing the nation's modern territoriality, in the patriotic, atavistic temporality of Traditionalism. Quite simply, the difference of space returns as the Sameness of time, turning Territory into Tradition, turning the People into One." "DissemiNation," 300.

39. The Congressional Globe: New Series, Containing Sketches of the Debates and Proceedings of the First Session of the Thirty-First Congress (City of Washington: John C. Rives, 1850), 246.

40. There are, however, studies that read Moby-Dick's characters as having real-world referents in the antebellum political scene. Foster thus reads Ahab as Daniel Webster in "Something in Emblems," while Alan Heimert positions John C. Calhoun as Ahab in " Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism." I resist this strict type of allegorical reading. I agree more readily with Rogin's strategy for reading Melville in Subversive Genealogy : "The intention here is neither to make Melville's romances real by reducing them to some preexistent reality, nor to recover American history in Melville in order to unmask the truth behind his fiction, but rather to understand Melville's constructions in the light of the material from which they were made" (23). Rogin thus writes: "Melville was a realist in his attention to a political rhetoric which, in the literary definition of that term, was not realist. Unlike that public language, however, Melville's version of American history was no celebratory romance" (41). Likewise, David S. Reynolds argues that "historical source study can be delimiting'' and focuses his critical energies on the rhetoric, not the message, of reform movements of Melville's era. See Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988), 156.