E Pluribus Unum: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Constitutional Paradox

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E PLU|iBUS UNuM Nineteenth-Century American Literature & the Constitutional Paradox W. C. Harris university of iowa press

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University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2005 by the University of Iowa Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Design by Richard Hendel http://www.uiowa.edu/uiowapress No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. Lines from Emily Dickinson’s “I cannot live with You” are reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, Ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources. Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harris, W. C. (William Conley) E pluribus unum: nineteenth-century American literature and the Constitutional paradox / by W. C. Harris. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–87745-934–7 (cloth) 1. American literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Pluralism (Social sciences) in literature. 3. Politics and literature—United States— History—19th century. 4. Literature and society—United States—History— 19th century. 5. United States. Constitution—In literature. 6. Group identity in literature. 7. Individualism in literature. I. Title. PS217.P54H37 2005 810.9'358'097309034—dc22 2004058851 05

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Contents Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xi Introduction 1 1 “Brotherhood among the Atoms” Edgar Allan Poe and the Poetics of Constitution 37 2 “A Religion Which Is No Religion” Walt Whitman and the Writing of a New American Bible 71 3 “But Aren’t It All a Sham?” Herman Melville and the Critique of Unity 111 4 “Necessarily Short of Sight” William James and the Dilemma of Variety 153 Afterword 195 Notes 209 Works Cited 289 Index 309

Acknowledgments I am very grateful to Allen Grossman, who first helped me envision this project and suggested a beginning.His uncompromising support, demands for precision, and generous investment of time and advice made this book possible, both in its earlier and present forms. I also wish to thank Larzer Ziff for reading these pages with characteristic astuteness and care, Sharon Harrow for expert guidance at a crucial juncture, Karen Sánchez-Eppler for nourishing my fledgling work on Whitman and sharing her energy and balance of humor and seriousness about teaching and literary studies, and John Irwin for his assistance with Poe. Johns Hopkins’s generous policy of funding two semesters of writing, free of teaching obligations, allowed the time and mental equilibrium to research and draft early versions of two chapters. Final stages of the research were made possible with the assistance of Gay Jones and Mary Mowrey, of Shippensburg University’s Lehman Library. Kirk Moll, reference librarian at Shippensburg, and Francis Campbell, librarian for the American Numismatic Society, came to the bibliographic rescue in an hour of need. For their helpful comments on draft chapters, I am indebted to Sharon Cameron, Abigail Cheever, Jack Kerkering, Alex Love, Chris Lukasik, Walter Michaels, Michael Moon, and John Plotz. For their generous conversation and advice in matters professional and otherwise, I thank Lin Askew, Flip and Kim Eikner, Dev Hathaway, Chris Nemec, Andy Saunders, Terry Shelton, and Curt Schmitt. Marsha Fausti helped me maintain sanity, focus, and a sense of humor during our graduate studies. Jennifer Limón, thespian coconspirator during my years in Baltimore, helped in preparing an early draft. The unflagging support of my parents, Jeff and Judith Harris, along with the lasting friendship of Martha Wickelhaus and Kate von Goeler, has buoyed me through the many stages of the work. My greatest debt, however,is to my partner,Karl Woelz (who also helped me with indexing). His love, presence, and interest have allowed me to realize more than simply this project.

Special thanks to the many individuals at University of Iowa Press with whom it has been my pleasure to work,especially Prasenjit Gupta, Holly Carver, Charlotte Wright, and Sara Sauers. Their encouragement and generosity made a series of daunting tasks more manageable. I must also thank the readers for University of Iowa Press — Donald Pease and Peter Bellis — for their time and criticism. The precision and enthusiasm of copyeditor Jennifer Usher, of Mesa Verde Media Services,made a possibly intimidating process not simply painless but reassuring. Some portions of this book have been previously published. A version of chapter 1 appeared as “Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka and the Poetics of Constitution” in American Literary History 12.1–2 (2000). Chapter 2 appeared, in slightly altered form, as two separate essays: “Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the Writing of a New American Bible” in The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 16.3–4 (Winter/Spring 1999) and “Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the Problem of the One and the Many”in Arizona Quarterly 56.3 (Autumn 2000).I am grateful for permission to reprint these sections and for the suggestions made by anonymous readers at these journals.

x Acknowledgments

Abbreviations BB

Melville. Billy Budd, Sailor.

CB

James. “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.”

CP

Whitman. Complete Poetry and Collected Prose.

DC

Bailyn, ed. The Debate on the Constitution. Vol. 1 (of 2 vols.).

EC

James. “Address at the Centenary of Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

ECR

James. Essays, Comments, and Reviews.

EL

Emerson. Essays and Lectures.

ER

Poe. Essays and Reviews.

LD

Lincoln. Lincoln on Democracy.

LG

Whitman. Leaves of Grass, Comprehensive Reader’s Edition.

MD

Melville. Moby-Dick.

NUPM

Whitman. Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (6 vols.).

P

James. Pragmatism.

PB

James. “The Psychology of Belief.”

PC

James. “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Beliefs.”

PQ

James. “Address on the Philippine Question.”

PT

Poe. Poetry and Tales.

PU

James. A Pluralistic Universe.

PW

Whitman. Prose Works (2 vols.).

SP

James. Some Problems in Philosophy.

SW 1

Lincoln. Speeches and Writings, 1832‒1858.

SW 2

Lincoln. Speeches and Writings, 1859‒1865.

TT

James. Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals.

VRE

James. The Varieties of Religious Experience.

WM

James. “What Makes a Life Significant.”

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Introduction ★ Finishing the Constitution by Other Means One does not have to be a classicist to recognize the Latin phrase e pluribus unum or to know what it means. Anyone who has handled American money often enough knows the inscription appears on the back of the quarter and on the crowded reverse of the one-dollar bill.I remember,as a child,staring at these strange,impressively capitalized words, enchanted by a language in which “E” was a word all by itself. At some point (elementary-school social studies, most likely), I became aware that e pluribus unum is our country’s motto,a phrase that,despite its not being in English,summed up what the United States was all about: America was a composite entity, a whole made up originally of thirteen colonies and now of fifty states. That simple phrase was the essence of the federal project, the paradox of how many things could become one and yet still be different things, how my home state of Tennessee could belong to a Union and my state congressmen to a national Congress. This paradox gradually came to have personal, social significance for me, at once mystifying and revelatory of how parts relate to the whole, how I fit into the constantly enlarging real-life and conceptual circles known as “Memphis” and “society.” Although solving the riddle of part-whole relations seemed beyond me, I was comforted by remembering one of my favorite toys, a United States map puzzle in which the pieces, representing individual states, fit precisely together within the national boundary but in only one way, making a whole in one configuration and no other. E pluribus unum represents the problem of the one and the many as a central problem of American social and literary formation. Meaning literally “from many, one,” this Latin phrase implies, as an official motto of the United States,the creation of an integrated whole

from disparate, independent elements. As a philosophical issue, at least in the West,the hard theoretical problem of the one and the many, rather than simply one of state formation, can be traced back to Plotinus in the third century C.E.1 In the Enneads, Plotinus preoccupies himself with, among other philosophical problems, that of the many and the one, or more specifically, the difficulty of reconciling the imperative to unity (“from many, we must become one”) with the heterogeneous character of experience (VI.9.3,§5,p.700).The problem, as Plotinus states it, seems immediately familiar to us from the vantage point of the federal project. At times, the Enneads read like a description of the dilemma of the founding fathers as outlined in the Federalist Papers and as read by certain nineteenth-century authors (which is to say, in terms of the antebellum debates over the relative value of persons and over the disparity between political and social equality). Like Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and William James, the Federalists were deeply aware of the conflict between, on the one hand, our tendency to produce or perceive unities (“We are in search of unity”) and,on the other,our desire to maintain certain differences at the same time we are unable to elide certain others (“Something besides a unity there must be or all would be indiscernibly buried”) (VI.9.3, §5, p. 700; IV.8.6, §1, p. 415). For Plotinus, this is a limit upon self-construction, a conflict in obtaining the value of being human. For the others, it is a limit on the construction of the state as well as the individual; it is the conflict of being American. What connects the work of Poe, Whitman, Melville, and James — and what makes the classical problem of the one and the many for each of them the fundamental problem of American social, literary,and religious formation — is a common perception of the logical contradiction on which the nation was founded, the impossibilium that both supports and subverts: the attempted simultaneous execution of the principles of unity and equality. For literature to take these problems as compositional ones was a typical move in the nineteenth century. We are dealing, after all, with planned lives,scheduled texts.Thoreau starts his Walden experiment on July 4,1846.Whitman publishes the first edition of Leaves of Grass on July 4, 1855, and the Centennial edition on July 4, 1876. These are commemorative performances conspicuously staged on the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. As literary projects, these texts are vectored toward the terms of the constitu2 Introduction

tional regime,toward social formation.Aligned with the foundational act of the American state, they advertise an intent to reground the state. Seeing the literary-compositional problem and problems of social order as directly connecting to one another is the result of a distinctly American emphasis. The problem of the one and the many is a modeling problem for literary texts as well as political documents, for poems and novels as well as constitutions and amendments. The idea most explicitly stated by Whitman but shared by Poe, Melville, and others — that literary texts stand in a supplementary relation to social formation — has its precedent in the kinds of relation between the nation’s founding political documents and between those documents and other kinds of writing. Initially, political discourse stands in supplementary relation to itself: the Articles, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights (the first ten Constitutional amendments) are each compensatory to the document that precedes them and to an original predecessor text, the Declaration of Independence; each claims to fulfill the promissory note of the Declaration by resolving the problematic of unity through the institutional mediation of equality. What I am suggesting, then, is that the supplementary relation assumed by certain nineteenth-century literary texts toward traditionally nonliterary (political or theological) modes of social organization takes its precedent from the relation between America’s operative documents of state formation, each of which (the Articles, the Constitution, its amendments, subsequent legislation, and judicial opinions) either replaces its predecessor text or omits or revises those passages that, by logical contradiction, block the full realization of some founding principle. Although writers like Poe, Whitman, Melville, and James may differ in where they situate value (in unity or variety) and may offer very different solutions to the one-and-themany problem, what each confronts is the inexorableness of the logical contradiction embodied both in e pluribus unum and in the founding documents. In the latter instance, the antithesis of the Declaration of Independence’s equality proposition (“all men are created equal”) is the Constitution’s Fugitive Slave clause (Article IV, Section 2). This logical contradiction was viscerally enacted when, in the 1840s and 1850s, debates over the territorial expansion of slavery and the admission of new states to the Union as either free or slave states underscored two of the ways in which the Constitution had compromised the equality proposition: abolitionists insisted that all Introduction 3

men, even slaves, possess equal rights; secessionists made a similar claim about slaveholding states. In Congress,calls were raised for federal regulation on the one hand and popular sovereignty on the other, delineating the as yet unreconciled tension at the heart of American social formation — the tension between federal prerogative and states’ rights, between the good of the one and the interests of the many.Since these authors are involved also in the theorization of totalized states of affairs (the construction of cosmological and epistemological as well as social wholes), they come to view the American attempt to construct unity upon the basis of a difference-requirement as a specific instance of a more general and fundamental contradiction between an epistemological imperative to unity and the representational inevitability of differentiation.2 In the case of judicial review, another kind of writing assumes a supplementary relation to political writing, specifically, Supreme Court legal opinions on the constitutionality of laws, on the consonance with the Constitution of statutes which are themselves supplements to that document. In Marbury v. Madison (1803), the Court had to determine its right to issue a writ of mandamus to a federal official, to demand, in this case from Secretary of State James Madison, the delivery of the commissions in which President John Adams appointed his “midnight judges” (so-called because the judgeships were created and assigned within two weeks of the end of Adams’s term). Although the Court found it lacked jurisdiction to issue the writ, it did so on the basis of a far more empowering doctrine: that of judicial review, or the judiciary’s obligation (under the Constitution, according to Chief Justice John Marshall) to find that any “law repugnant to the constitution [sic] is void” (Gunther 10).3 My interest in judicial review is that it serves as a precedent for or at least a parallel to the immediate subject: literary review, the literary modeling of alternative social formations on a basis consistent with the terms of the constitutional regime. Just as Marshall considers all laws to be Constitutional supplements which must logically be consistent with that “supreme law of the land” (Gunther 10), so do a number of nineteenth-century American authors consider literature as a supplement to political writing, as being capable of resolving logical contradictions in the nation’s founding documents (the coexistence of slavery and the equality proposition) and thereby altering the derivative social reality. It makes sense that literary judgments in the 4 Introduction

period often are parallel to Supreme Court decisions; what the former are doing is finishing the Constitution by other means. Whereas the operative documents of American state formation approach the problematic of unity with a mind to solving it (either by fiat of reference to a transcendental term or by future Constitutional amendments), literature after the Constitution (or at least after the serious Constitutional questions raised during the 1840s and 1850s) tends to take up the federal problem as an unsolved problem, one that cannot or even should not be solved. A series of literary authors from Poe to James posit the problematic of unity — not its resolution — as that which maintains social if not also literary formation by maintaining its potentiality or fuzzy-logic status, its ability continually to generate alternative models of relation out of an explicitly prescribed set of possibilities. Ratification produces an ostensible solution in the form of the Constitution, but American literary culture, which was founded nearly simultaneously, is predicated on the notion that institutionalization has in fact not solved the problem of unity. Literary review of social formation takes on, in this period, a judicial review function. Thus it becomes clear that examining as a compositional problem what is first articulated in this country as a series of related political problems (the unification of disparates, the reconciliation of the one and the many, the preservation of variety within unity) is the burden which American civilization as it is constituted sets upon the shoulders of the literary maker and the literary analyst. In the texts I have been working with, there seem to be two quite different reactions to the need for and the possibility of supplementing the constitutional regime by resolving its antithetical impulses (those toward hierarchy and equality). In Eureka, for example, Poe sets what becomes a precedent for later writers when he urges us to see the problematic nature of unity as not inhibitive but rather constitutive of American social order, to understand that hierarchy is a representational inevitability which endows social formation with the possibility of textualization. By sustaining rather than resolving the tension between equality and unity, texts like Eureka and Leaves of Grass permit the revision of social order on paper if not also in the actual world; they allow the realization of a noncoercive compositional unity of disparates — an achievement that, it might be hoped, could translate into practical circumstances. James, like Melville, devotes much of his time to modeling alternative social formations. Introduction 5

Whereas Melville draws on the conceit of the ship of state, using the Pequod and the Bellipotent and their crews to experiment with several models (feudal, federated, communitarian), James tries to develop a type of unity which is not at odds with variety but based in it. But for all their experimentalism, both writers are intent also on exploring the extent to which certain epistemological and representational principles (like the imperative to unity and the inevitability of hierarchy) impede and perhaps cripple the endeavor of curing social order.The tension between equality and unity is irreconcilable, but destructively so; if a new model of constitution cannot be found, it seems that the whole is to be destroyed (as the Pequod is). The imperative of material and human relations toward both equality and unity is not what sustains those relations and holds forth, by textualization, the possibility of their revision; on the contrary, it is what unravels the very ground on which they stand. Text and Authority in Nineteenth-Century American Literature The subject of this study is the objective,general philosophical and literary problem of the one and the many as it comes to be understood in late eighteenth- and in nineteenth-century America as a particular and central problem of both identity formation and state formation.4 The texts examined in the following chapters are united by their concern with the construction of the self and of society not simply in light of the one-and-the-many problem as a logical problem but also in response to the conditions of secularization that change the meaning of oneness and its status as a way of being in the world. The sequentiality and historicity of this particular set of texts is provided by contemporary shifts within religion, politics, and literature (in a word, secularization) in the nature of what counts as a transcendental term, what grounds the legitimacy of selves and institutions. While this change may be most conspicuous in American political events of the nineteenth century that foreground identity formation (such as the Emancipation Proclamation, the Dred Scott decision, the Compromise of 1850), the secularization of the transcendental term is central to the history of American religion and can be traced from Congregationalism through Unitarianism and its sectarian implications, through the liberal universalism of Whitman, to the pluralistic religious philosophy of William James. Constructing the relation of 6 Introduction

the many to the one,whether in terms of the relation between the states and the Union or between the individual citizen and something like a ruling principle of citizenship,is a preoccupation of the American text. Whether those fictions are primarily belletristic, constitutional, or sacred in character makes no difference. Their aspirations to institutional authority invest the problem of the one and the many with serious interest, and that makes all the difference, since it is the affiliation with and appropriation of one or another mode of discourse that sets limits and conditions on their authority and efficacy. The continuing interest in the problem of the one and the many to American writers is due to the perception,derived from ancient Greek sources but attaining new currency in mid nineteenth-century America, that it is a problem fundamental to state formation, that the formation of the American state is an unfinished business, and that it is incumbent upon literary discourse to accomplish that which political and religious discourses no longer seem capable of,namely,securing legitimate,authoritative ground upon which the opposing interests of the one and the many might be institutionally expressed, if not reconciled. Sacvan Bercovitch and other critics have outlined the phenomenon of the “continuing revolution,” the varieties of rhetoric by which American political leaders (in succession, the Puritans, the Revolutionaries, and the Whigs) appropriated the symbolism of the American Revolution for their own cause as an image either of rebellion, stasis, or progress (Rites 180, 170). The point is well taken: Poe, Emerson, and Whitman each tap into revolutionary symbolism to power their own optimistic visions of national destiny. This study, however, examines a trend which exists alongside that detailed by Bercovitch in the variegated mass that is American discourse in the nineteenth century and which is both more specific and more general than the topos of revolution as a means of redirecting rebellion into the service of consensus. Rather, the trend of interest here is that of calling for or attempting the founding of a documentary culture, a text (and implicitly, in time, a set of texts) that bears a supplementary relation to previous forms of discourse which have, as Bercovitch writes, “lost [their] . . . grounding” and which thus no longer bear an efficacious relation to social and identity formation (Rites 147).The obverse of this trend — meaning, the rhetoric through which writers like Poe, Melville, and James connect to and attest to their continuing interest in this project, and through which we can follow that project — is the Introduction 7

rhetoric of the problem of the one and the many, a general philosophical concept originating in Plotinus that serves as a template for a variety of concerns about the relation of parts to wholes and a staging area for the modeling of social formations through literary formations in ways that respond to those concerns about individuals and their ability to sustain and to alter the institutions in which they participate.5 The status of literary texts in relation to the social has been and continues to be heavily debated. Standard accounts describe the literary as rejecting (Poirier), paralleling (Ziff), or imaginatively negating facets of the social (Tompkins), and finally as interacting with the social in such a way as to alter the categories of public discourse and be itself altered (Warner).6 What interests me, by distinction, is the transformative power that certain writers imagined the textual modeling of alternative social formations might exert on relations between persons in the real world, not so much by influencing the contemporary laws and political policies that govern those relations (in the way the Constitution’s three-fifths rule determines political representation) as by actuating changes in symbolic representation, in the abstract structures of relation as (in this case) they were intended though not actualized by the constitutive actions undertaken in the Constitution. These imagined effects depend on an analogy between the literary and the symbolic, as well as the perception that constitutive problems can be resolved as compositional ones.7 As far as theorizing some medium within which these transactions between the literary and the sociopolitical occur, it is worth revisiting the position staked out by Raymond Williams in The Long Revolution (1961): The fatally wrong approach, to any . . . study [of the relation of culture and society] . . . is from the assumption of separate orders, as when we ordinarily assume that political institutions and conventions are of a different and separate order from artistic institutions and conventions. . . . The abstraction of art has been its promotion or relegation to an area of special experience (emotion, beauty, phantasy, the imagination), which art in practice has never confined itself to,ranging in fact from the most ordinary daily activities to exceptional crises. (39) After more than forty years of intervening criticism, the admonition to remember context is apt to seem unnecessary, a suggestion long 8 Introduction

since incorporated into literary studies. Though the New Historical moment may have passed, historicizing to some degree has become de rigueur. But critics and readers, particularly of Poe and Melville, are resistant to the notion that minds enamored of abstraction can or can ever mean to address practical issues in the real world. Williams is puzzled by a similar resistance in cultural studies in general, a refusal, in this case, to admit causal (much less, mutually influential) relationships between aesthetic and nonaesthetic forms of expression and experience: it is already a curiosity of language that society commonly indicates a political and economic system,and social life (the ordinary material of sociology) the whole range of activities and relationships which are not directly political or economic. The pattern of meanings and values through which people conduct their whole lives can be seen for a time as autonomous, and as evolving within its own terms, but it is quite unreal, ultimately, to separate this pattern from a precise political economic system, which can extend its influence into the most unexpected regions of feeling and behaviour. (119) The texts I am concerned with take seriously the extension of “influence into the most unexpected regions,” but an influence wielded as much by literary and philosophical texts that address problems of “a precise political . . . system” as the other way around. In a similar vein, while mine is in no way a Marxist analysis, my approach bears some general similarities to, and is to some degree informed by, that of Marxist critic Frederic Jameson. In The Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson stipulates the relation of text and history in the following way: “our discovery of a text’s symbolic efficacy must be oriented by a formal description which seeks to grasp it as a determinate structure of still properly formal contradictions” (77). Extrapolating from the anthropological work of Lévi-Strauss, Jameson argues that “the . . . text . . . constitutes a symbolic act, whereby social contradictions, insurmountable in their own terms, find a purely formal resolution in the aesthetic realm” (79).8 While I am not willing to follow Jameson in the assertion, across genre and period, that “[t]he literary or the aesthetic act . . .always entertains some active relationship with the Real” (81), his notion that a literary text always has “its own projects of transformation”(81) seems applicable to the texts examined Introduction 9

here in informative and valuable ways. This is not to say, however, that what Jameson calls the “subtext” (here, comparable to the one-andthe-many problem as articulated in American political thought and social structure) was not present before a text “brought it into being” (82). The problem of unity certainly had been addressed before, even just within the period in which America’s founding political documents were written. I would contend, even so, that Poe’s Eureka is the text that invokes e pluribus unum as the logical contradiction which is central to, and whose literary resolution is critical to, American social, political, and cultural life. Eureka and the texts which I claim follow its lead differ from those discussed by Jameson in one significant way: Poe, Whitman, Melville, and James at times aim for the resolution of contradiction while they also (enthusiastically or not) admit contradiction’s irresolvable character. They imply, if not insist, that the ineradicably problematic character of American social formation does not impede but rather permits its continued, self-supplementing perpetuation.9 It would be unwise to claim that unity,equality,and hierarchy mean exactly the same thing to Poe,Whitman,Melville,and James, or that they mean the same thing consistently to any one of these writers. What this book attempts to get at is what appears to be a continual struggle with the slippery terms of the one-and-the-many problem, the inconsistent valence of equality and hierarchy as terms of political and literary representation. If, for the framers of the Declaration and the Constitution,“reimagining the terms of creation” (Rodgers 47) was the right basis of any just government,then this book focuses on nineteenth-century writers who take that as their literary initiative. My discussion of America’s political founding documents tries to straddle this temporal split, to attend enough to those documents as they mattered and functioned for their authors not to lose sight of how later Americans saw them as having failed to function and hoped they could function in new ways. The problem of the one and the many serves these authors’ purposes because, for one, it represents specific incumbent cultural and social crises. It also allows them to make the more general argument — and theorizations of the American state almost always theorize general as well as specific (that is, national) states of affairs — that the very order of perception is involved. William James may be the first to state it so explicitly, but Poe, Whitman, and Melville regard the unification of disparates as inherently problematic, and the inherently hierarchi10 Introduction

cal character of representation and thus of social institutions as both a perceptual and a cognitive necessity. These authors are not necessarily doing the “work of culture” in the way that Sacvan Bercovitch suggests, that is, investing their “radical energies . . . in a vision which reinforce[s] . . . the values of their culture” but confines them within the “categories of their culture” and prevents them from imagining truly alternative strategies and options of social formation (Rites 58, 190).10 Rather, the representational lability of the one-and-the-many problem allows these men, while they themselves are intent on producing unity,to raise the question of what is so good about unity in the first place,and to do so both in terms of the American state and in terms of the state of the universe.The modeling of relations,whether between atoms or citizens, amounts to a questioning of past and present models of unity, cosmological, ecclesiastical, and political. Each of these major texts is an inquiry into the prestige of unity, not only into the nature of its prestige (why it is invested in unity, of all things) but also into its quality: whether it is singularly political (and thus associated with monarchical or other secular hegemonic institutions) or originally religious; whether the latter is merely an innovation of the Middle Ages; and to what extent the prestige unity possesses for nineteenthcentury Americans partakes of either quality. The major distinction that can be made among these writers is that between those willing to rescue unity at nearly any cost (Poe and Whitman) and those for whom the benefit of the federalist model of unity has come to outweigh its costs (Melville and James). For the latter, it becomes imperative to search outside the totalizing structure of American social formation, outside the options laid out in the founding documents and stopgap measures implemented by antebellum statesmen, for methods of constructing relation from less coercive, more pliable materials: on the basis of heterogeneity,of a plurality not always already in irredeemable service to an unum, a unifying concept which, regardless of the ways in which identity and rights are parceled out, appears to be inherently hegemonic. In terms, then, of the relation of Poe and Whitman to anything like what Bercovitch calls the “categories of their culture” (Rites 190),what is so interesting about the texts in question is the inevitability of the privileging of unity in the face of manyness and in the face of the drawbacks or negative effects of unity. Melville’s and James’s acceptance of that inevitability makes their pluralistic experiments that much more striking, more sharply indicative of a subtle yet at the same Introduction 11

time unprecedented and astonishing sea change in America’s literary thought about its social self. My reference point for the problem of the one and the many in the American context — the solution to which those offered in these nineteenth-century texts refer, as their impetus to either the supplementation or more substantive alteration of American social formation — lies in the operative documents of American state formation (the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution) as well as in the Federalist Papers, the site at which the problem of unity and multiplicity is first recognized as an American problem.These are the seminal texts of what might be called American documentary culture — that notion that mundane social realities perpetuate, invent, and revise themselves through the word, indeed, through specific kinds of words in specific kinds of discourse and documents. Poe, I am claiming, founds this documentary culture, meaning that he reads these operative state documents as its foundational texts, as the original sketch in relation to which any addition or subtraction must stand,the pentimento of accumulated concerns that confronts any writer of the mid to late nineteenth century who seriously contemplates the American problem of the one and the many. As an act of vision, it may be selective, but that is precisely the intent: the determination of the value of persons based on the disparity between present-day, actualized institutions and protocols and their initial theorization — a determination driven by confidence that the power of the word has not been too significantly diminished. America’s founding political documents certainly have their own history of influence, composition, reception, and legislative emendation. They have their own intentions and internal tensions, which Robert Ferguson has persuasively outlined in one of his chapters in the new Cambridge History of American Literature. I am interested more in a received notion of these texts, not so much (and this is the thrust of Bercovitch’s work) the way in which they were rescripted for contemporary projects of representation (in social, political, and religious efforts at institution-building or -rebuilding) as the way in which they were conceived of loosely as a foundation. And foundations themselves were conceived of as always immanent because they seemed unstable. That risk never loomed larger than in the antebellum period when, starting in the 1830s, long-incipient disruptions in American social formation became more nakedly evident and less eas12 Introduction

ily palliated by and hidden behind rhetoric. The problem of slavery made the resolution of the question of the nature of personhood and the definition of the value of persons more crucial than ever. The War Between the States raised the stakes in the problematic of the many and the one and demanded its resolution in the form of the retheorization of part-whole relations, the restructuring of the Union as a constituency of integrated yet autonomous states. What had to be addressed were the foundations of the state itself, not the amendment of Constitutional laws but its present outgrowths, the conditions of constitution. The texts that interest me are those which take the founding documents as an idea, as a type for authority. Rather than “find[ing] the revolution” (to borrow from one of Ferguson’s titles), I want to look at the documentary as a literary culture founded within the burgeoning nineteenth-century literature that would produce, or out of which one can produce, the American Renaissance and other traditions. My concern is also the extent to which that literary culture is fixed on the idea of what the literary can do for America, for nonliterary types of discourse — what America needs from a literature as well as what it is not getting from political or religious texts and institutions, from Bibles or public documents. The writers I am concerned with, though distinctive in their responses, were certainly not alone in perceiving the ground of American social constitution to be unstable. Among the number of nineteenth-century figures concerned with the American incarnation of the one-and-the-many problem, Frederick Douglass and Margaret Fuller are most notable in the context of this study for their location of the problem in the unreconciled disparities between the nation’s contemporary social structure and founding political documents. Along with Douglass and Fuller, figures as disparate as Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, and W. E. B. DuBois have also called for a revised relation between the Declaration and the Constitution.11 What distinguishes these individuals from the four writers examined in this book is the fact that, while the former brought to light the need for revision, they did not attempt to produce constitutive change in the same way, that is, through literary or philosophical texts which present themselves as not merely corrective but foundational, texts which are supplemental in a reconstitutive rather than additive sense because they seek to actuate change instead of simply calling for it. Nonetheless,the pervasiveness of the concern with problems of social Introduction 13

formation, particularly inherent conflicts between commitments to unity and equality, reflects the centrality of these issues to American literary tradition as well as its intellectual history. Demonstrative of that centrality,as well as of interpretive and structural difficulties which seem particular to American attempts to resolve conflict within e pluribus unum, the jeremiads of Douglass and Fuller deserve special comment. Frederick Douglass’s “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” (1852) skillfully ironizes the national holiday as one about which those without independence, in this case, disenfranchised and enslaved African-Americans, could find little to celebrate: “Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. . . . This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn” (2114).Recalling his audience to the “saving principles” of the Declaration, Douglass, like Poe and Whitman, locates this originary national document as the opening gambit of social formation to and with which all other moves must be supplementary and consistent: “Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You must live and die, and you must do your work” (2113; emphasis added). Although elsewhere Douglass spells out the nature of that work with more conventional rhetoric (“Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost” [2111]), it is the image of carrying on the work of earlier generations that best evinces Douglass’s affinity with the supplementary logic that drives the texts examined in the following chapters.12 To say that “much of ” the founding work was “done well” is to imply that not all of it was, that a good deal was done poorly or left unfinished — in short, that the present social order is not consonant with principles it claims to embody. Like Poe,Whitman,Melville,and James,Douglass understands that the problem is not just historical but profoundly structural: “The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham. . . . It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union” (2124). Aside from the bitter sectional discord generated by the slavery question — discord that would soon erupt with new and bloodier ferocity in Kansas — logical inconsistencies like slavery compromise the structural integrity of a social formation, its self-justification as the sole logical model of American relations. The insight of Douglass’s most resonant 14 Introduction

with my concerns, strangely, stems from what appears to be a moment of interpretive failure: “[T]ake the Constitution according to its plain reading, and I defy the presentation of a single pro-slavery clause in it. On the other hand,it will be found to contain principles and purposes, entirely hostile to the existence of slavery” (2125). While Douglass is obviously correct about the inimical relation of slavery to the liberties the Constitution codifies for free citizens,he misstates the fact that “neither slavery,slaveholding,nor slave can be found anywhere in it”(2125). Douglass’s misreading — overlooking the “three-fifths”clause (Article I, Section 2), a formula for calculating representation and taxes according to population — was perhaps an exigent rhetorical move; the lapse seems doubly odd considering that this clause, which awarded slaveholding states additional congressional representatives for their noncitizen populations, stimulated the race to admit new states (both slave and free) and necessitated stopgap measures like the Compromises of 1820 and 1850. Considering Douglass’s usually unfailing exactness in word and syntax, however, his apparent misreading is more likely an ironic highlighting of the euphemistically oblique diction in the “threefifths” clause: representation “shall be apportioned . . . according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons” (dc 968). What is most in need of correction turns out to be that which is also most deeply rooted. The heart of the tension inciting the supplemental project is that the contradiction — the antagonism of unity and equality, unum and pluris — in fact does exist in the Constitution. And supplements meant to correct the contradiction, whether legislative (amendments of emancipation and enfranchisement) or literary (such as Eureka or Billy Budd), cannot erase the shadow of their being needed in the first place. Difference, whether in the abstract or in the pernicious form of slavery, was not imposed by later generations. It was there from the start. Fuller’s “The Great Lawsuit” (1843), which was later published in expanded form as Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1844), similarly grounds its claim for “expansion” of women’s lives and rights in the assertion that “an improvement in the daughters will best aid the reformations of the sons of this age” (1628, 1624). Fuller’s understanding of the present’s relation to the Declaration of Independence, for instance, is as supplemental as Poe’s or Whitman’s: “Though Introduction 15

national independence be blurred by the servility of individuals . . . still it is not in vain, that the verbal statement has been made, ‘All men are born free and equal.’ There it stands, a golden certainty, wherewith to encourage the good, to shame the bad” (1628). Fuller would seem a likely candidate, then, for this study; her correctives to Emersonian transcendentalism would seem easily translatable as a phallogocentric critique of the unum. Yet Fuller’s polemic on women’s disenfranchisement and inequality under the law is problematized by her acceptance of certain more fundamental (and, one would think, more troubling) “dualism[s]”: “Male and female represent two sides of the great radical dualism. But they are, in fact, perpetually passing into one another.Fluid hardens to solid,solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman” (1651). To be fair, Poe in Eureka regards inequality in some form as inextricable from social organization. What troubles “The Great Lawsuit” in particular is that Fuller condones the fundamental gendered partitioning of human experience, the very effects of which she and other women’s rights activists decry. The problem here is that, for Fuller, providing equality for women does not mean questioning the systemic inequities themselves (dichotomies such as male/female, poet/subject), or at least — if one admits difference as a necessity of construction — questioning whether difference might not cut across other axes. If she makes certain concessions to soothe scandalized or antagonistic readers, or if immersion in a historical moment always entails a certain degree of blindness,Fuller claims that legal and educational equality for women will paradoxically restore order by no longer inciting women to exceed the roles allowed them: the only reason why women ever assume what is more appropriate to you, is because you prevent them from finding out what is fit for themselves. Were they free, were they wise fully to develop the strength and beauty of women, they would never wish to be men,or manlike.The well-instructed moon flies not from her orbit to seize on the glories of her partner. No; for she knows that one law rules, one heaven contains, one universe replies to them alike. (1636) This goes beyond begging amnesty for infamous women’s rights advocates such as Mary Wollstonecraft or George Sand.Were women 16 Introduction

allowed to be free, they would become epitomes of womanhood, using their freedom to realize fully the role described in a system currently lacking important freedoms. The ambiguity of Fuller’s description of the traditionally feminine “moon”as “well-instructed” is ironically telling: whether women are knowledgeable or docile (and Fuller assures her male audience that these traits are not irreconcilable),the analogy suggests that granting equality on certain issues will never significantly jeopardize male hegemony. Fuller’s tribute to past civilizations as models of equitable gender roles turns on a similar irony,but in terms that parallel the frustrations of her project with those of Melville and James: I cannot complain of the age and nation, which represents its thought by such a symbol as . . . a zodiac of the busts of gods and goddesses, arranged in pairs. The circle breathes music of a heavenly order. Male and female heads are distinct in expression, but equal in beauty, strength, and calmness. Each male head is that of a brother or king, each female of a sister and a queen. Could the thought,thus expressed,be lived out,there would be nothing more to be desired. There would be unison in variety, congeniality in difference. (1634–1635; emphasis added) “Unison in variety” (which seems akin to Jamesian unity-in-variety) is a concept of which both Melville and James will try to render viable models. The difference is that, unlike Fuller, they either begin knowing or quickly discover that unity is a concept which tends to disallow variety, that difference is endangered by almost any attempt to actuate, much less perceive, an integrated or even a federated whole. While Fuller does not commit herself fully on the matter, James sees the literary as no longer capable of resolving by itself the e pluribus unum paradox,at least not single-handedly.James’s technique is both backward-looking, reconnecting literary responses to the one-andthe-many problem (represented here by Poe,Whitman,and Melville) to the problem’s philosophical origins in Plotinus; and also forwardlooking, frankly confronting the impossibility of resolving the problem with any model vectored toward unity. In suggesting that any one work, any one genre, is insufficient to the task, James seems to circle back to Poe, who prefaces Eureka with his ambition to command the historic authority and thus efficacy of multiple genres. Introduction 17

the federal enigma If the Constitution made the unification of disparates a pressing American concern in 1787, the fierce debate over the 1846 Wilmot Proviso, which asserted the federal right to regulate the expansion of slavery into newly acquired territories, made it clear that the reconciliation of federal prerogative and popular sovereignty was the most serious kind of unfinished business.The future integrity of the nation depended on it.The Civil War would be fought over the crucial question of how parts should relate to wholes. Unity became the great sociohistorical ambition of nineteenth-century America, stimulating the legislative, judicial, and social as well as literary modeling of constituent-whole relations. But the range of organizational principles upon which models could be based was necessarily restricted by the nation’s founding commitment to solve an insoluble problem in terms that are available to the culture. Because the Constitution (specifically the “separation clause”) and the Federalist Papers had restricted the set of culturally available terms to those secular in character, thereby rejecting the administration of relations between persons through ecclesiastical or monarchical structures, the variety of solutions to the problem of the many and the one that was operative elsewhere was simply not conceivable in the American context. The models of empire, monarchy, and hierarchy (social or ontological) by which Britain had unified itself with Scotland and later Ireland had been bracketed by the Declaration of Independence as violative of the equality proposition and therefore an unacceptable answer to the federal enigma.13 The federal enigma, which the Constitutional delegates had set themselves and which lingered as an unsolved problem for Poe, Whitman, Melville, and James, is the enigma of the compositional unity of disparates that manages to retain the definition of its constituents. The federal solution represented by the Constitution, therefore, is not so much a solution as a restatement of the problem as an inevitability, an institutionalization rather than a reconciliation of the incompatibility of the logical and psychological necessity of unity with the maintenance of identity. Arriving at an integrative account of American social order remained critical during most of the nineteenth century. The Constitution and its amendments attempt to solve the federal problem with more of the same; each is a supplementary political text meant to compensate for the shortcomings or correct the logical con18 Introduction

tradictions of its predecessor texts. Beginning in the 1830s, however, writers make texts of different kinds about the unification of disparates, texts that problematize categorical notions like genre and the inherent efficacy of any type of inscription. It is at this point, after the groundwork has supposedly been laid, that the American cultural project seriously gets started. And that project is solving the hard problem which writers addressed as a set of mysterious and cosmic as well as practical and local issues. This book deals with four writers (Poe, Whitman, Melville, and William James) who continued to regard it as the American problem, one of not only the formation of the state but also its sustenance. For these writers, the great difficulty of integrative states of affairs in the American context comes to constitute its Americanness. We are dealing with a stage within the history of postrevolutionary America which is characterized by a shift from the theological to the philosophical not just in the means and the terms of thinking but in the assignment of authority. As a description of this phenomenon, the notion of the post-theological crisis suggests a correlation between declining theological formations (Eucharistic Congregationalism) and ascendant formations that were literary (Eureka, Leaves) as well as theological in character (Unitarianism, Mormonism, Seventh-Day Adventism).14 Although one cannot conclude that the desuetude of the one caused the growth of the other, or vice versa, newly ascendant formations certainly attempted to do what Congregationalism had done in the past but no longer seemed capable of (the legitimation of social order).15 And if religion loses authority in America with the separation clause, the political also becomes less viable in the early nineteenth century. The seeds of the posttheological crisis could be said to have been sown as early as 1776 when the Declaration of Independence,along with its successor texts, established social formation as a secular rather than a theological prerogative.16 But this state of affairs did not become a crisis until the 1830s, when sectional conflicts over slavery and states’ rights revealed serious flaws in the constitutional regime and when the established theological regime (Eucharistic Congregationalism) was found by Emerson among others to be equally lacking in its ability to fulfill a vision of egalitarian relation either to one’s God or one’s fellow men. The crisis was the pressing need for a structure, theological, literary, or otherwise, that could do so. Introduction 19

Beginning with the Missouri Compromise of 1820, erupting in the Civil War, and persisting beyond the confines of institutional slavery, it became increasingly clear that the nation’s political founding documents had failed to actualize the equality proposition, failed to implement the principle that “all men are created equal” as a practice unrestricted on any criteria. The following chapters examine texts that exemplify distinct stages in and responses to this representational crisis as well as the larger social currents of which these texts are symptomatic (such as the political crisis over the territorial expansion of slavery and contemporary religious disputes over sectarianism and Bible translation). Whereas congressional compromises attempted merely to appease sectional tempers, the representative texts examined here are struggling, outside of the traditional channels of institutional power,to eliminate the source of that tension by resolving the logical contradiction of slavery (or by resolving our understanding of it as a contradiction) and thereby eliminating the profound disjuncture between the theorization of social order (the Declaration’s equality principle) and its actualization. In postcolonial America, official discourse exists in supplementary relation to itself: the Articles, the Constitution, the Constitutional amendments,and subsequent legislation and Supreme Court decisions are each compensatory to the documents that come before them; each means to articulate even more precisely, if not in fact to actualize, some founding principle embodied in but not adequately realized by its predecessor texts.The relationship of Poe’s Eureka (1848) to previous regulative texts (here, the operative documents of state formation) is best defined as compensatory. By theorizing relation on what Poe considers to be the most general level (cosmology, or the structuring of relations between physical particles and bodies) and thus discovering the inherently hierarchical nature of relation per se,Poe’s text supplements what it considers to be a deficiency in the documents of the constitutional regime: not their failure to institute equality indiscriminately but rather their belief that such a thing can be done.17 Eureka attempts to usurp the authority which those other forms of discourse are felt to carry in order to effect the changes of which such authority — which literature is historically considered to lack because it lacks its own and is forever borrowing others’ institutional ground — is considered capable. The difficulty of reconciling the interests of the many and the one in a nonhierarchical form is partly the result of the inherently hierar20 Introduction

chical nature of representation, and therefore of relation itself, as the cosmology of Poe’s Eureka makes quite clear.According to Poe,physical law (as well as, he insists, “metaphysical order”) mandates that all matter itself exists most commonly as part of a “heterogeneous” “agglomeration” — a federation, one might say — that is “characterized by innumerable specific differences of form, size, essential nature, and distance,” characterized, that is, by inequality (pt 1330, 1308, 1306). It is only at periodic, cataclysmic instances that atoms or selves can exist in “Absolute Irrelation” (since any degree of relation entails hegemony); true oneness is available only in the “absolute and final Union of all” (pt 1303, 1297).18 Nevertheless, what Poe, along with Whitman and Melville, is presenting us with is a text that claims to restore the relation of particulars, or our understanding of it, to a prior whole, a whole that is representationally (and thus hopefully also socially) without hegemony and inequality. It becomes clear that the extent to which each author finds restoration to wholeness possible or impossible corresponds to his consciousness of the extent to which extant social forms must be altered. It is in response to this difficulty that each text, while constituting a supplement to or substitute for extant social and aesthetic forms, also can be a foundational text, a type of document best defined as a text on which the validity of all other texts rests (like a cosmology), a text that intends itself to serve as the foundation of other texts.19 The foundational intent may be more obvious, as when a philosophical, deeply paradigmatic text like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1860, 3rd edition) or William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) tries to supply terms for a demonstrably true state of affairs. Though the motives of Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) and Billy Budd, Sailor (1886–1891) are less transparent,they too are foundational texts insofar as they mean to command authority, an act which is in every case, as it is in America’s founding state documents, fraught with the paradox of self-authorization.Before discussing the conditions under which authorization is or is not available to these texts, it is crucial to underscore why authorization is so imperative and what it is that each text means to found. Each of these texts is institutionally inclined, in that it responds to the need to produce a regulative text that is capable of revising or legitimating social order.And yet each of these texts is strangelyinstitutional, in the sense that the intent of each text to found its own institution exists Introduction 21

in an uneasy relation to the institution(s) which it seeks to imitate,if only by a pretension to regulate social as well as aesthetic space. I hesitate to call these texts literary for this very reason: that the literary is a category which tolerates instances of texts that are like (that is, are imitative of) institutional texts yet are not institutional texts in the way that the Constitution is. The most exact descriptive term for texts like these is quasi-institutional. There is an as-if-ness about these texts, an aboutness, as if such a text were a document whose inscription mattered, whose words made things happen and brought about real changes in institutions and the structure of relations. Consequently, it is necessary to examine more closely the models and available types of authoritative text,to know what was expected of institutions and what perhaps could not be. on the horns of a post-theological dilemma The crisis to which Poe, Whitman, Melville, and James are responding, each in his own way, is a crisis of authority. At the same time that each is convinced that writing still bears some effective relation to the social world, he is no longer certain of its authority to do so. Problematically, that which drives the search for an authoritative discourse capable of funding and transforming institutions is also what makes it so difficult: the shifting status of the transcendental term and the vexed credibility of theological authority and discourse. But while it is true that religious concerns hardly disappear in Jacksonian America20 — and in fact,the confrontation of problems in social construction prompt as many transcendental solutions as material ones — the grounds of legitimation were no longer assured. The foundational power wielded by theology, or at least the responsibility of wielding that power, was transferred, by the nation’s founding documents,to political and social structures.To many,however,this transfer appeared to have failed, remained incomplete. To many writers, from Poe to James, that failure demanded the recovery of theological authority or, given the dubious status of such authority in an enlightened age of higher (Biblical) criticism and evolutionary theory, the recovery of something very like theological authority, an energy equally sweeping and foundational but located in structures of cosmology, historiography, or social relation. The idea that language, especially poetic language, can be socially efficacious is not uniquely American. A fundamental assertion of late 22 Introduction

eighteenth-century Continental philosophy and Continental and English poetry,American texts from the Declaration of Independence through James’s Varieties of Religious Experience attempted to erect the state on terms other than the purely theological. But because such a claim typically depends on the ability to offer a supporting cosmology, even the apparently irreligious or unconventionally religious writer, like Poe or Melville, does not explain the material world without reference to the transcendent, the social without reference to the spiritual. An early American text like Jonathan Edwards’s Two Dissertations (1765) sets the precedent for this kind of obligation: the bipartite structure of the Dissertations (which is divided into The End for which God created the World and The Nature of True Virtue) dictates that cosmology must precede any more local theorization (in this case, a philosophy of virtuous conduct). This is the crux of the posttheological crisis: in order to describe the world, you must have precisely the kind of authority that gets lost when theology ceases to be a basis. It is just as incumbent on a secular as on a religious account to come up with some ground upon which to argue value, some authority for narrating the world in a particular way. In mid to late nineteenth-century America, the status of the transcendent term changes demonstrably and significantly in the light of historicizing trends in contemporary Biblical criticism, the proliferation of religious sects inside and outside the confines of mainstream Protestantism, and progressively louder calls to confront sociocultural pluralism in national and international affairs. For writers who feel compelled to refer to some authority for actualizing certain protocols of relation, these trends render the status of the transcendent term increasingly vexed — that is, necessary but no longer fully credible, at least in the terms in which it is familiar or has been used in the past. Robert Ferguson has written that profound shifts in rhetorical power and validity (like the postrevolutionary shift from clerical to federalist control of the rhetoric of rebellion) have tended to occur when the “pressure on language is simply not the same” as it was before (“Religious Voices” 415). The antebellum and postbellum periods, with which I am concerned, are punctuated, if not defined, by a series of such moments at which the “pressure on language”radically alters: moments when the federal solution is perceived to falter, when the secularly instituted social formation fails, by logical contradictions like slavery and restrictions on citizenship and franchise, to meet its Introduction 23

originary claim of negotiating the problem of the one and the many. These are also moments, however, when the sacred model of what an institution looks like (the church) and what kind of authority it relies on (scriptural and theological) seems incapable of meeting the needs of a dissenting plurality. Although purely practical solutions were offered (as in the 1830 Brook Farm experiment in Fourierism), the overwhelming trend is literary experimentation with social forms and, within that, a continued reliance on religion in some form — an attempt to recover theological authority or its equivalent and to come to terms with both the necessity and the difficulty of doing so in a post-theological age. If any single event is responsible for the crisis of authoritative discourse, it is the deauthorization of the Bible, the decentering of the Bible as an authoritative text — authoritative both as a standardized text (the King James or Authorized Version) and as a text which, despite the de jure separation of church and state (or perhaps because of it), is imbricated de facto in the structure and life of the republic as civic religion. The questioning of scriptural authority brought on by the Second Great Awakening helped spur an unprecedented production of private translations and idiosyncratic revisions of the Bible (translations from the original or paraphrases of the King James Version). New versions contested the accuracy of the Authorized Version; completely new Bibles disputed its veracity. Factors contributing to the pluralization of potential social formations included reliance on scripture to the exclusion of external dogma (the tenet of sola scriptura), advocacy of one’s sect to the exclusion of the established church (Eucharistic Congregationalism), and defense of one’s own version of scripture against anyone else’s. These trends made it possible for almost any modeling of alternative protocols to claim to be a (if not the) legitimate version of America which extant religious and political institutions had failed to actualize.21 The reconstruction of the rationality of unity, which is one solution to the problem of the one and the many, thus requires one to confront, to accommodate the American predilection for multiplicity,the stipulation that the one not simply be made out of many but somehow remain many. Although the separation clause of the Constitution attempts to constitute the American state on a purely secular basis, what secularization cannot erase is the extent to which the “separated” and ostensibly liberated state remains consciously dependent on the religious 24 Introduction

institutions and institutional texts it would discredit as legitimate sources of authority: “men . . . are,” in the words of the Declaration, “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” (dc 949; emphasis added). Therefore the demise of this ultimate foundational text of American culture creates a dilemma for any subsequent foundational text by compromising the very opportunity it allows. If the Authorized Version’s claims of priority are doubtful,what kind of text could possibly be capable of commanding such authority?22 If apostolic succession is the model in the Reformation for negotiating having many churches (Rome versus Canterbury, the Pope versus the Supreme Head of the Church of England), what is the paradigm in America? The answer to both questions is individualization: the individualization of authority and of text. The writers examined here find themselves in the precarious position (or imaginatively place themselves in the position) of the authors of the Articles of Confederation: namely, of creating an institution that authorizes itself by acting as if it has existed prior to its being written into existence. It is hardly surprising that scriptural reconstruction, or the writing of a New American Bible, becomes the leading endeavor of the period — even for those writers,like Poe,whose intentions are superficially secular.23 Considering different kinds of inscriptions as bearing an effective relation to political or religious documents and institutions forces us to differentiate between institutional and noninstitutional texts. The most general theory of institution to which all four authors could be said to subscribe is that institutions like social formation are revisable and that,as concrete structures of social and political life,they are susceptible to representational supplements on the model of the Constitution’s relation to the Articles. As far as a model for what is expected and required of an authoritative text, the most prominent and relevant examples are (1) the Authorized Version, which I have already mentioned and which rests on the authority of the king and a principle of conformity and cultural homogeneity at work; and (2) the Elizabethan edition of The Book of Common Prayer (1559), a text that declares church and state to be one and the same. The Book of Common Prayer is, not surprisingly, a text Americans deauthorized during the late eighteenth-century disestablishment of the Anglican church. It is that act of deauthorization, however, that throws commonness itself up for grabs: authority gets individualized, rendered available to any who would claim it. Introduction 25

Each of the texts examined here is searching for precisely that answer, seeking to determine what qualifies or guarantees one document, and not another, as institutable. A partial explanation for the anxiety about institutability would be that the literary is historically considered to lack the authority of its own institutional ground and is seen as forever borrowing others’. But of course such an answer is only partial, for it fails to include literary texts like Leaves of Grass and Moby-Dick, which are intent on recuperating the equivalent of the theological authority which had traditionally been deemed essential to narrating the world in a sensible, ordered way. In both instances, where the text is parodically related to theological and biblical texts, there is an attempt not always to recuperate an equivalent of theological authority but to avoid having to rely on anything like theological authority or any authority that might be perceived as institutional in its origin or its sustenance. The question raised here is whether there can be an equivalent of theological authority which is not in any way funded by theology, whether any regulative text is at bottom theological, and any explanation of the world, a divine business. However, legitimating social order became a wholly secular task when the First Amendment to the Constitution based American state formation on the separation of church and state.24 Although Eucharistic Congregationalism managed to attain institutional status in its own right (as a religious rather than political formation), theology began to lose its purchase in the 1830s as a valid or sufficient basis for social or cosmic order. This is hardly to say that religion lost popular favor, but rather that, as a result of secularization, it gradually lost its legitimacy as an exclusive or privileged basis of polity (coming to exist in tandem with republicanism or scientific rationalism).25 Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sermon entitled “The Lord’s Supper” (1832) is a case in point for the decentralizing tendency in religious and social discourse that made the unification of disparates, much less the reconstruction of the rationality of that unity, increasingly difficult and therefore increasingly imperative.26 In his sermon, Emerson explains that he is giving up his pulpit at Boston’s Second Church rather than administer a sacrament whose institutionally prescribed meaning no longer matches, and indeed cannot hope to encompass, the range of distinct personal values which it may possess. Revered solely for the sake of form rather than content, the Lord’s Supper was valued for its institutional status rather than any 26 Introduction

effective relation to a “spirit” or a “deep interior life.” Finding no scriptural evidence that “Jesus . . . intend[ed] to establish [through the Last Supper] an institution for perpetual observance,” Emerson judges communion to be “not in fact divinely authorized” but rather a matter upon which there is the “widest room for difference of opinion,” insofar as institutions and their rituals are mundanely and idiosyncratically authorized, that is, are adopted or abandoned because they either are or are not “suitable to me,” “consistent with the spirit of Christianity” as interpreted by “me,” the individual believer (el 1130; Hollander 1: 1000; el 1130, 1138).27 The Emersonian demand here is that institutions “should be as flexible as the wants of men” (el 1139). Poe, Whitman, Melville, and James each confront the question of whether institutions or men can live up to that demand. Emerson is contesting neither the authority of the church (Congregationalist or,more generally,Christian) nor the prescription of meaning to an act like the eating of bread and the drinking of wine, but rather the prescription of any act at all as paradigmatic, as the model and meaning by which we must live. Emerson’s sermon typifies the decentralization of American religion and identity which made it harder to conceive of unifying disparates (to support only one sect out of many) and which necessitated the theorization either of how many can be one or of how unity might be reconceived as less than one,less integrated than the federal model but nonetheless offering some kind of cohesion. Collectively this set of texts attests to an unmistakable and striking continuity in nineteenth-century American literature, a massive and constant reconstructive effort to build back the benefit and the concept of unity against the loss of its transcendent ground (God).Joseph Smith’s atavism makes him unique among these authors: as a pseudepigraphic construction of precisely the kind of unilateral theology that had never really gained American ground in the face of Congregationalism’s individualization of religious authority, The Book of Mormon attempts to turn back the clock on the process of secularization that Poe, Whitman, and Melville are seeking to bring to completion. Poe responds to the post-theological crisis by rebuilding unity on what are fundamentally antinomian, or mystical, grounds. The unity Whitman foregrounds is of another kind,a third order (gay) which satisfies the imperative to unity by apparently overcoming the binary structure of relation (the heterosexual opposition of male and Introduction 27

female). For Melville, the problematic of the one and the many is only resolved within a structure that paradoxically destroys the integrity of the participants it is uniting. Finally, as extreme a shift as James’s Varieties may seem from the commitment to solving the hard problem of unity which predominates American texts of the nineteenth century, James’s espousal of pluralism is in fact the logical end to Emerson’s questioning of Congregational monism. James is simply taking the idea of sola scriptura, which underwrites American religious formation as a whole, to its extreme but inevitable, zero-grade outcome: a state of affairs in which everybody and nobody has institutional access, in which there are no more shared or common institutions because everyone has his own institution. If, for Emerson, each man’s religion is his own business, for James, it must be his own business, for it is the task of each individual to organize the world in which he finds himself.28 Given the centrality to American thought of the problem of unity and multiplicity, it is understandable that Poe names Eureka, his own solution, after Archimedes’s triumphant announcement upon discovering specific gravity in his bath: “Eureka!” — meaning “I’ve got it!” The hard problem of unity becomes, by James’s time (and by Melville’s later period), no longer the pressing concern, the soteriological, redemptive enterprise it is for Poe, Whitman, and the early Melville. In the second volume of Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville describes America as a nation without a philosophy yet one with proclivities for practical thought.29 If James is the great American thinker on the problem of the one and the many (at the ironic point when it is, at least in his eyes, no longer a problem), then Poe, Whitman, and Melville are the experimentalists, working at a solution without an established philosophical base, theorizing that base as they go along. Differences aside, if one phrase could be said to subtend the work of these four authors, it would be the Constitutional statement of intent: “in Order to form a more perfect Union” (dc 968). The common cause to which they come separately is the coercion of the many into the one, a task on which the theoretical, political, and social life of the many (and thus of the one) depended. By 1902, James’s endorsement of pluralism suggests that coercion is no longer necessary and is even counterproductive: unity at all costs is no longer the driving force it had been; multiplicity, no longer the threat. If each of the other texts comes to terms, more or 28 Introduction

less gracefully, with the irreducibility of hierarchy and the impossibility of absolute unification and perfect equality, then Varieties embraces just that state of affairs as inevitable, right, and, far from being adverse to individual adjustments, the only means of ensuring that they might ever come to pass. Finally, the differential of time set up by the sequence of these texts provides an evolutionary narrative of responses — in the form of attempts at aesthetic if not social actualization — to the imperative to unity that is felt consistently by American writers over the period of 1848, the year of Europe-wide revolution, to 1902, the moment at which William James, poised on the cusp of modernism, looks back and surveys the history of half a century’s striving toward an impossible goal (unity, a union of still distinct parts). James closes the book on this quest by arguing that the texts — the varieties of texts — it has made are the best approximation of that goal, for better or worse. The Varieties marks the cessation of interest in, and perhaps even the need for, such an endeavor. If a Civil War–torn United States were held together, if nothing else, by physical contiguity, then the variety of these texts is also federated into a kind of oneness by their theoretical, intentional contiguity. Formalizing the Problem of the One and the Many The site of e pluribus unum presents the problem of the one and the many in a historicized,concrete manner.And while the nineteenthcentury authors discussed here view that problem in terms of the federal project,the one and the many involves other philosophical issues, the solution to one or more of which these authors felt to be incumbent on them along with the securing of social formation. Discovering the human interest in the abstract problem of the one and the many requires setting up the formal problems it raises to the mind.An inventory of this series of hard problems would also constitute a list of the six sites around which this thesis rotates: (1) the philosophical, (2) the erotic, (3) the political, (4) the theological, (5) the cosmological, and (6) the structural. Although the following chapters explore the work Poe, Whitman, Melville, and James are doing along most, if not all, of these axes, the overarching concern of this study and these writers is with the structural aspects of — and interrelated crises in — social formation and representation. The rest of this introduction focuses, Introduction 29

therefore, on what in the American context seems to be the deepest site at which the problem of the one and the many exists, where it is at once most in need of and most resistant to solution. Considered purely as a problem of the logic of construction, the one-and-the-many problem requires us to find some way of doing what seems impossible: building or even perceiving a unity that violates a principle which entails the inevitability of hierarchy. There are specific factors that must be considered in any type of construction — the strength of the materials,their ability to enter into bonding relations, the principle of organization — and in the construction of persons and social formations, these factors limit the extent to which one can preserve the autonomy of constituents bound over into a whole. William James may have been the first consciously to theorize unity as an epistemological need, but Poe, Whitman, and Melville seem all to have understood the problematic nature of the one and the many as, in the most basic sense, a conflict between two contrary principles: the epistemological imperative to unity and the representational inevitability of difference. The trail of thought leads back to the eighteenth century and the American federal solution, or rather the federal problem, since none of these writers regard the constitutional regime as having settled the matter. Just because e pluribus unum, as the early official motto of the United States, elides the problem of hierarchy, it does not, by that means, escape it. Renouncing the hegemonic relation of parts to the whole, as the colonies did by declaring their independence from the British Empire, could not prevent hierarchy from regenerating itself, as if differentiation, perhaps disparity itself, were the incorrigible mitotic impulse of any structure that humans attempt or perceive.30 It is my contention that from Poe to James, although the means of producing unity differs for each author, the consensus is that the principle of hierarchy is a precondition for unity. To say that the hierarchical nature of representation seriously limits the number of ways persons can be ordered is not to deny that in some systems relations are more equal than in others,nor is it to suggest that egregious inequalities like slavery or disenfranchisement cannot or should not be redressed. As egalitarians, we become squeamish at the mention of hierarchy, which we associate with aristocracy, the arbitrary valuation of persons which we would prefer to think is not practiced in a modern democratic society. Our reluctance to admit the principle of hier30 Introduction

archy as a precondition of unity stems, however, from our confusion of rights with equality and our tendency to read morality onto what is, at its origin, a purely structural matter. Hierarchy makes us uncomfortable because we read inequality as a disparity of rights; but equality and rights are not the same thing. Rights have to do with equity, distribution,and justice — in short,with ethics.Equality,on the other hand, is a matter of representation. And Louis Dumont, in Homo Hierarchicus (1966), defines hierarchy as just that, as an ethically neutral fact about the structure of representation.31 There are, of course, good differences; I do not mean to create the impression that hierarchies are uniformly bad or that stratification has only negative consequences. It is just that Americans tend to worry about not being able to get rid of all inequalities, even though doing so would be impractical to the extent that, in the resulting state of affairs (if it could be made real to the mind), relation itself would be impracticable. Hierarchy, in Dumont’s words, is “none other than the conscious form of reference of the parts to the whole in the system,” the “principle by which the elements of a whole are ranked in relation to the whole”(66).It refers not to a “chain of superimposed commands,nor even a chain of beings of decreasing dignity, nor yet a taxonomic tree, but a relation that can succinctly be called ‘the encompassing of the contrary’”(239).To be in a relation to anything or anyone is to inhabit a hierarchical state of affairs. What gets us into trouble, what makes the one-and-the-many problem appear so hard, is that we think we can solve it. The fact of the matter is that there is a limited number of possible constructions of self, society, and cosmos. As a social formation, the nation was founded on the conviction that it could be resolved, that unity and equality (or unity and variety) are not irresolvable, that hierarchy is not irrefrangible, not inherent in the way societies are organized, much less in relation or representation. Now, the Articles and Constitution are two kinds of compromises, and one might say that it was realized then and there that hierarchy could not be annihilated, as had been hoped, at least in the Declaration. In Democracy in America (1835,trans.1840),the perspicacious appraisal of nineteenth-century America in relation to its founding democratic aims, Alexis de Tocqueville speaks rather prematurely of the antihierarchical intention which drives the Declaration of Independence as an actualized state of affairs: “Aristocracy made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king; democracy Introduction 31

breaks that chain and severs every link of it” (2: 99).32 Because the “egalitarian mind . . . is unable to concern itself with more than a single level,” he forgets that individuals in a democracy, even if possessing the same rights or of the same class (no class, ostensibly), must stand in relation to the whole of which they are a part (Dumont 241). And that relation, which is hierarchical, creates further differentiation. What Tocqueville diagnoses as our willingness as Americans to “endure poverty, servitude, barbarism, but . . . not . . . aristocracy” can be attributed, I would argue, to a failure to differentiate carefully enough between liberty and equality, and to distinguish further between political equality, social equality, and (what we have forgotten or elided into one of these two) representational equality (2: 97). Representational equality, as I am using the term, has nothing to do with the restriction of political voice (as in that colonial war cry, “no taxation without representation”). It has everything to do with the fact that there are certain limits to the execution of equality.33 My position, then, is fundamentally a realist one — not the realities of urban life but the reality of ideas. Mine is neither a relativist nor a constructivist position (both of which are more available than ever in a postmodern world) but instead one of philosophical realism. As exemplified in Thomas Nagel’s Equality and Partiality (1991),philosophical realism takes as real the conceptual problems which can, if you are a true relativist, be considered arbitrary or constructed.34 Ethical considerations may motivate the transformation of social and political formations, but, as Nagel succinctly puts it, “What is right must be possible” (26). The philosophical realist must ask whether the problematic of the one and the many (what Nagel calls the conflict of the “standpoint of the collectivity with the standpoint of the individual”) “threatens the rejection in advance of any social ideal embodying a strong condition of equality — leaving aside the problems of its realization” (3, 75). And the answer depends on “whether people as they are actually constituted”(which includes,I would contend, the epistemological conditions of personhood, the hierarchical nature of relation and representation) “could be expected to support it” (75). As a realist, I am dealing here with problems that engage the mind with real constraints upon construction. To acknowledge constraints, however, is not to dismiss the modeling of alternative social formations as so much wasted effort. What may be overlooked are the instabilities and transformations that are possible within hierarchy. 32 Introduction

The principle of hierarchy does not entail the petrifying of extant divisions in social reality, and yet at the same time it demands that, whatever new shapes are given to sectors of that reality — by extending representation or value to previously excluded persons — those persons must still stand in relation to a structural whole, in hierarchical relation to the whole of which they are now a part.35 My concern centers on logical problems, which are more intractable than social problems,but which underlie them.The problem in these texts is the apparently nonnegotiable conflict of will and fact, the notion that we are constitutionally burdened with the problem of something that interrupts order.For Lincoln,deliberating over emancipation, human reality seems to require difference, and so someone other than the slave must bear it. For James, coming well after the demise of Reconstruction, that someone is the imperialist subject — not just the colonized subject but the subject of the colonizing party, who, personally involved or not, is complicit in the project and subject to its effects. It should be evident at this point that the argument for the inevitability of hierarchy, as I have made it so far and as it exists for these nineteenth-century authors, begins to construct a certain rationality for slavery, a logic by which the slave is thought to do the difference-work necessary to fund equality for other (white) Americans. What makes the problem of the many and the one so thorny is the constitution of social and compositional wholes on some version of the problematic of unity which is less problematic,that is,which reassigns on a less particularized basis the inevitable quota of difference-work. Not only, then, is slavery the great interruptor, the nemesis, of unity in nineteenth-century America; one could even argue that,as a formal embodiment of difference, it is the sine qua non of American polity. In part, my analysis of certain literary and religious texts that take on the curing of social formation rests on an assumption about the interrelation of the objective events of history and the imaginary constructions imposed upon them. And that assumption is that the puzzling perpetuation of slavery — the fact that it is retained by the Constitution and not contraindicated — prepares the ground for a theorization, by literary writers if not also by legislators, of a logic of slavery as a motive toward difference. The mutual concern of these writers centers, then, on three troubling but technically distinct aspects of hierarchy: (1) the priority of Introduction 33

a system of relation over its constituents; (2) the threat of unity to the disparate nature and qualitative aspects of the parts (the danger, say, of Florida becoming identical to Texas); and (3) the difference in equality among the parts themselves (slave versus free). However, the texts I am concerned with often seem to disregard such nuances,viewing these three aspects of hierarchy as inextricable. Whitman shifts most effortlessly between addressing each of these problems, since, although they are logistically distinct obstacles to the institution of equality (the Federalist Papers themselves range back and forth among these issues), it seems that for any of them to be solved they must be solved simultaneously, together — in some sense, resolved as one. As James discovers, attenuating hierarchy in one register appears to lead to a compensatory thickening of it in another.Arguing for the disaggregation of individual political life from larger, coercive movements like imperialism, James sadly anticipates the reimposition of homogenizing forces — a loyalty or an incentive to differ in the way those around one differ — on the very groups that he exhorts to throw off the imperative to unity. On the other hand, Poe and Whitman conclude (if for different reasons) that, in any social formation, inequality always inheres in some form. Something or someone must always end up bearing the burden of difference — in Billy Budd, enduring the sacrifice of individuality — that, by an equation that seems to govern the economy of representation, permits circulation of equality, of personhood, to a majority of others. Since the problem of the many and the one is infinitely sophisticatable, there is no danger of being overly specific about the form in which it recurs in a body of nineteenth-century American literary texts. In comparison with the resolution of the problematic of unity in other contexts and periods, the prime variable is the situatedness of value. In sixteenth-century English poetry,for example,value is situated in unity: to paraphrase Donne and Shakespeare,out of two,one is made. This is the inherited Petrarchan, Dantean problem. But the problematic is soluble only by divinity (Donne’s “The Canonization”) or by some access to a generality that is not an inference (Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle”) — that is, to a transcendental element. Contemporary debates over the nature of the Eucharist, as an instance of either consubstantiation or transubstantiation, delineate the extent to which the Eucharist served to model the unification of unlike substances. In America, by contrast, we wit34 Introduction

ness a refusal of the sexual model of unity. “I cannot live with You,” Emily Dickinson asserts in Poem 640, and speaks for the majority of nineteenth-century American writers when she grounds the American problematic of unity,when she situates value,in difference. If Dickinson is never quite clear as to why “We must meet apart,” she is explicit about the disjunction which actually sustains the life of the person it seems to destroy: a unified world, a world in which “I” can know “you,” is one that consists of “You there — I — here — / With just the Door ajar / That Oceans are — and Prayer — / And that White Sustenance — Despair” (2: 493; emphasis added). Unmistakably, despair is one’s sustenance; difference allows for integration, loss, for recuperation. Dickinson is representative in this regard inasmuch as, in American thought in general, the problematic of unity is modeled on difference.That modeling takes place in light of the questioning of the transcendental term as well as the disappearance of the feudal system,which seems to have disappeared but reappears in slavery. The maniac conservation of social order typified by the antebellum legislative compromises attests to the extent to which slavery bears the burden of cultural value in mid nineteenth-century America and would seem to suggest, in spite of the claims of abolitionists and some politicians, that slavery is symbolically necessary, that it possesses the character of a logical inevitability. Difference, in other words, is the assigned or appointed task of every segregated class; the delegated work of the slave is the work of difference before it is cotton or anything else. Abolition merely requires slavery in another form (witness,the advent of Jim Crow and Lincoln’s as well as Douglass’s efforts to reinvent the Negro in relation to the state). Deinstitutionalizing hierarchy as represented by slavery may provide unity on one or more fronts, may in time free the slave or a class of slaves, but it also demands that something perform the difference-work no longer performed by slavery, that some person or group of persons fulfill the difference requirement in the context of unity and so supply the difference necessary to the unity of the national institution. It is Lincoln’s consciousness, for example, of the integral role of difference-work in the preservation of national polity that enables him to bury all reservations about slavery in favor of unity — unity,explicitly,with the South,not with the Negro.As dramatized by the Dred Scott decision,the idea of the problem of the logic of unity covers over the problem of the logic of disunity: Dred Scott cures unity Introduction 35

through the shedding of disruptive elements. The inexorableness of that shedding is what the following authors confront, whether in the explicit form of slavery or imperialism (as James does, in his reaction to the American presence in the Philippines) or in the more general form of the question, one that embraces what Poe, in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” calls “the laws of gradation so visibly pervading all things in Earth and Heaven” (pt 451). The question is whether unity is conceivable without an edge, without any stratification of social or natural formation. The short form of the answer, explored in the following chapters, is that failing to conserve difference, burning up like the Phoenix and the Turtle, is not acceptable in America. (In fact, “The Phoenix and the Turtle” seems to mark the limits of the loss of distinction: “two distincts, division none” [1318].) The problematic then is not so much that of making unity. On the contrary, the authors discussed here regard unity as inevitable. The problem, rather — confronted most directly by Melville and James — is conserving difference, maintaining order within the entropic whole. Difference is almost definitionally thought of in these instances as necessary to the life of the person; necessary to unity itself, it is that without which unity is inconceivable. In America as a posttheological nation, the Protestant disposition to derive identity from negation is continued and becomes the problematic of a unity which, consistent with a need to preserve heterogeneity, is hard to construct. The ultimate failure of texts like Moby-Dick and The Varieties of Religious Experience to construct successfully a model of social unity which is not homogeneous, which is based on variety not totality, makes all the more remarkable the success of Billy Budd’s realization of social and textual entities funded by a pluralism that is, comparatively speaking, endlessly open.

36 Introduction

Chapter One ★ “Brotherhood among the Atoms” Edgar Allan Poe & the Poetics of Constitution Does not so evident a brotherhood among the atoms point to a common parentage?—Poe, Eureka

“I have no desire to live since I have done ‘Eureka.’ I could accomplish nothing more” (Letters 2: 452). Poe wrote these words to his mother-in-law,Maria Clemm,in July of 1849 — only three months prior to his death. Nearly a year after the publication of Eureka: A Prose-Poem (1848), Poe still considered it his last word, that toward which all his previous writing had been vectored. As if having finally said what he had been trying to say all along,Poe felt his body of work, his career, and his life were complete.1 Considering the many kinds of writing within that body of work, the generic classification of Poe’s last (and to him, his greatest) opus is a difficult but important matter. In what genre did Poe choose to say his final word? Eureka would seem to be prose, but the matter is not so simple. Classifying the text is difficult, not just because Poe wrote in so many genres (poetry, drama, criticism, tales, and — his own invention — the detective story) but also because Eureka claims to be all of these things, if not more. Eureka’s generic aspirations serve as an index to the work the text is doing or purporting to do. And that work is the subject of this chapter: namely, Poe’s reorientation of American literary culture, his theorization in Eureka of the homology as well as the cause-and-effect relationship between literary and political formations, in which literary documents supplement or complement the operative documents of state formation and thereby validate the state as it was intended if not actualized by those foundational texts. As the intentionally constructed founding document of a literary culture that had not before existed, Eureka is Poe’s attempt to answer the question of what literary culture comes to in America, that is, in an unchurched or posttheological society.2

According to its subtitle,Eureka is a “prose-poem,”a hybrid of the genre that Poe wrote the most about (poetry) and the genre he wrote the most in (prose). In the preface to Eureka, Poe further complicates the text’s generic status by characterizing it as a love letter, an “ArtProduct,” a “Romance,” and “a Book of Truths” (the last evoking both prophecy and arcana). Then, as if sweeping away all previous categorizations, Poe insists that it be judged “as a Poem only” (pt 1259). Poe’s presentation of Eureka as a text that satisfies the criteria of several different genres and then, finally, “as a Poem only” can be read as a kind of generic recruitment,an attempt by one genre (poetry) to encompass many others. This recruitment is hardly final, and the text’s refusal to settle within a single genre is meaningful enough to be pursued later in this chapter. For the time being, however, let us take Poe at his word (that Eureka is a poem), for our compliance permits us to see what work the author imagines poetry as doing: dissolving generic and disciplinary boundaries (boundaries separating literature from science and the literary from the social) and consequently getting at the mechanism of American social formation by addressing the terms of its foundation. If Eureka is “a Poem only,” then it is poetic speech written against metricality, an example of literary formation not restricted to linear structure. Further, Eureka’s generic ambivalence — as a long poem (nonmetrical in character) that is also a prose poem — foregrounds the attempt to keep genre open and problematic in relation to a social structure that seeks the maintenance of the relation of persons on a nonhegemonic basis.Eureka founds a tradition of American texts that attempt to form a social order that is consistent with the equality proposition, to realize and institute the ideal upon which the nation’s first document (the Declaration of Independence) and thus the nation itself had been founded. The following discussion of Eureka is thus only the first move within a larger effort: namely, to contend that the American poetic text is fundamentally modified by the idea of America as a constitutional regime. The character of the literary in America and the nature of the American literary enterprise, as exemplified in Eureka, categorically involves a mindfulness of America as a documentary state — that is,as a state invented by an operative document (the Declaration of Independence) that invites the reinvention of that state in subsequent documents (like the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution).3 38 “Brotherhood among the Atoms”

Critics by and large have addressed Eureka on the basis of its scientific sources and sought to redeem it as a valid contribution to and advancement of cosmological theory; their devotion to source criticism has unfortunately strengthened rather than dissipated the text’s reputation as, if not inaccurate science, then a synthesis of contemporary sources or at best an attempt to usurp science’s professional, disciplinary status by incorporating science (cosmology) within literature.4 While certainly not exhaustive of the interpretive possibilities, this chapter outlines one context in which Poe’s text is critically significant: the documentary state, or the supplementation of a textually located foundational moment of social formation — in the American case, the operative documents of state formation. The topos that preoccupies Poe in his cosmology is the same that preoccupied the authors of the operative documents of state formation: the abstract philosophical problem of the one and the many realized in a concrete, particular form as the federal enigma (e pluribus unum), or the problem of unifying disparates without violating the identity (that is, the difference) of its constituents. It is the solution of this problem that the antebellum period made so increasingly imperative and that the Civil War, in spite of legislative and judicial attempts to mediate the crisis of conjunctive relations, made seem at once superfluous to a Union that was no more and yet all that more imperative if it were to be resuscitated. As a theorization of the oneand-the-many problem, Eureka is one of a series of nineteenthcentury American literary texts that attempt to come to terms with the problematic nature of unity in order to resolve certain logical contradictions within American social formation (for example, the existence of slavery in a society founded on the equality principle).5 This chapter shows how Poe in particular comes to understand the oneand-the-many problem as a conflict between two contrary principles: the epistemological imperative to unity (“a tendency of all . . . to a general centre”) and the representational inevitability of hierarchy (the “repulsion . . . [by which] Matter is enabled to exist in that state of diffusion demanded for the fulfilment [sic] of its purposes”) (pt 1288, 1354). Whatever the reason for the largely scientific turn of Eureka criticism up to the present, the urge to approach the text on its scientific basis is understandable. On the face of it, what Poe offers us is a cosmology, intended to explain the evolution of the universe. He charts edgar allan poe 39

the differentiation of matter from a single initial particle into many particles; he describes the laws governing the formation and behavior of bodies. But he does so in terms that highlight not only the longstanding analogy in the West between cosmic and social order but also the problems they share. In both cases, one is faced with a seemingly irreconcilable set of alternatives: absolute unity at the expense of difference (and thus equality) or absolute equality (which requires differentiation) at the expense of unity. Antifederalists and even some Constitutional delegates objected to the way the Constitution had done the latter, by limiting state autonomy and establishing federal prerogative with the creation of a national legislative body (Congress) and a national judiciary (the Supreme Court). What had seemed a necessary compromise in 1787,however,appeared increasingly unsatisfactory in the 1840s and 1850s, when debates over the extension and morality of slavery made clear yet another way the Constitution had compromised the Declaration’s equality principle (that all men are created equal). But Poe does not view the compromising of equality as inhibiting the American state; rather, he sees it as constitutive. For Poe, the conflict between equality and unity, difference and hierarchy actually sustains the life of the state and of literary culture: it is an unfilled promissory note, a dialectic that by refusing to resolve itself guarantees the continued production of literary texts and social formations texts that at least attempt to resolve it. Eureka insists that insolubility is the natural state of the one-and-the-many problem and urges us to accept what the Constitution is uncomfortable with, what the Articles were structured against: the necessity of anomaly, of hierarchy. Like most of his contemporaries, Poe held both political equality and social inequality to be integral to the American project. Absolute equality is a structural and representational as well as a perceptual impossibility, and any account of conjunctive relations must therefore be content with relative equality, with mediatory structures that hold forth the possibility of revision. Although not syntactically any more difficult than Poe’s tales or criticism, Eureka has a cognitive complexity, inappropriate to literature,which has relegated it to a place among the less significant works of Poe’s oeuvre and obscured its prominent, properly central status as one of the major works of the American Renaissance. Cognitive complexity is expected of cosmological treatises, which are, in effect, 40 “Brotherhood among the Atoms”

theorizations of totality.6 But a pretension to totality seems inappropriate for a literary work (inasmuch as the literary connotes selection): If . . . I seem to step somewhat too discursively from point to point of my topic, let me suggest that I do so in the hope of thus the better keeping unbroken that chain of graduated impression by which alone the intellect of Man can expect to encompass the grandeurs of which I speak, and, in their majestic totality, to comprehend them. (pt 1330) Eureka also possesses a seriousness incongruous with literature or with belles lettres, a conviction more characteristic of prophecy: That the demonstration does not prove the hypothesis, according to the common understanding of the word “proof,” I admit, of course. . . . [I]n the case now discussed, although all must admit the deficiency of what we are in the habit of terming “proof,” still there are many intellects, and those of the loftiest order, to which no proof could bring one iota of additional conviction. Without going into details which might impinge upon the Cloud-Land of Metaphysics, I may as well here observe that the force of conviction, in cases such as this, will always, with the right-thinking, be proportional with the amount of complexity intervening between the hypothesis and the result. To be less abstract:— The greatness of the complexity found existing among cosmical conditions, by rendering great in the same proportion the difficulty of accounting for all these conditions at once, strengthens, also in the same proportion, our faith in that hypothesis which does, in such manner, satisfactorily account for them:— and as no complexity can well be conceived greater than that of the astronomical conditions, so no conviction can be stronger — to my mind at least — than that with which I am impressed by an hypothesis that not only reconciles these conditions, with mathematical accuracy, and reduces them into a consistent and intelligible whole, but is, at the same time, the sole hypothesis by means of which the human intellect has been ever enabled to account for them at all. (pt 1318) In the manner of a prophet, Poe speaks to us with the greatest conviction about the greatest subject. The declaration that we should all share his conviction is made all the more urgent by the fact that he is the only one who presently holds it: edgar allan poe 41

I observed, just now, that, in fact, there had been certain vague attempts at referring Gravity to some very uncertain isms. These attempts, however, although considered bold and justly so considered,looked no farther than to the generality — the merest generality — of the Newtonian Law. Its modus operandi has never, to my knowledge, been approached in the way of an effort at explanation. It is, therefore, with no unwarranted fear of being taken for a madman at the outset, and before I can bring my propositions fairly to the eye of those who alone are competent to decide on them, that I here declare the modus operandi of the Law of Gravity to be an exceedingly simple and perfectly explicable thing — that is to say, when we make our advances toward it in just gradations and in the true direction — when we regard it from the proper point of view. (pt 1290) This is the exhortation of the prophet and the madman: that we must reorient ourselves, adopt a new perspective; that we must stand on our heads, if need be, to see the truth as it cannot otherwise be seen. For Poe this demands seeing everything, seeing all at once — an ugliness of totality. To the detriment of its own accessibility, much less popularity, Eureka espouses both the cognitive totality and the seriousness that may be characteristic of other genres like cosmology and prophecy but seem wholly inappropriate for a work of literature, for what Poe himself calls a “poem.”Poe’s tales draw the reader in because they conceal something.7 Eureka, by contrast, does not draw the reader in because nothing is hidden; nothing escapes the text’s pornographic obsession to “show it all.” As a kind of cognitive pornography,Eureka is fascinating not simply in its ambition but in its ugliness, creating (from a literary perspective) a blockage to its own reception by doing what is both admirable and repulsive: saying too much, saying what should not be said.8 The subject on which Poe has so much to say — cosmology — would have been familiar; and the need to say so much, to say everything, more than apparent. Cosmology was a topic of mass appeal for Poe’s audience: John Nichol’s Architecture of the Heavens (1837) went through seven American printings in as many years. And although many Americans might not have read Simon de Laplace’s Système du Monde (1796; trans. 1830), they would most likely have come across his particular theory of universal evolution (an expansion of Kant’s 42 “Brotherhood among the Atoms”

nebular hypothesis [Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), 62–64, 71–82]) in more widely read and debated works like John Herschel’s Treatise on Astronomy (1833), Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), and Alexander von Humboldt’s Cosmos (1845).9 The nebular hypothesis contradicted the inherited Biblical notion that creation was a finished business by claiming that matter was still condensing (as one could observe in certain nebulae) and therefore that creation was continuous and still in progress.Poe’s readers would have been well prepared to enter a discussion of the nebular hypothesis; most would have found the debate accessible, its terms familiar, and the stakes (the credibility of science versus religion) engrossing. Like other generic labels, cosmology fails to describe the text as a whole.Poe’s truth claim,which privileges coherence (or consistency) over correspondence, encourages an aesthetic interruption of referents inappropriate to scientific treatises.10 In spite of Poe’s plea that Eureka be “judged as a Poem only,”we cannot do so because it is more than that. Poe’s exaggerated concern in Eureka with truth rather than beauty blocks, as I observe below, the text’s classification as a poem of the kind he had already written. The genre of essay is also precluded, not so much by Eureka’s length (on the long side at, in the Library of America edition,roughly 100 pages) but more significantly by its departure from the hermeneutic stance of fellow essays like Emerson’s “Nature” (1836). Emerson and Poe’s common endeavor is assembling the physical world and recruiting it to a shared, institutionally unauthorized model of the world. In contrast to the hermeneutic of “Nature,” which tells us how to read the signs of a world, Poe’s text is a physicalist proposition that tells us how the pieces of that world fit together.11 The question of genre would be neither so problematic nor so pressing if Eureka did not both encourage and frustrate its own classification. Although the preface offers a number of genres (besides poetry) for which Eureka might qualify — prose poem, romance, prophecy, love letter, treatise, and “ArtProduct”(pt 1259) — the text is not classifiable as any one or as only one of these things (which would seem to be the point of having different genres, of there being a notion of genre at all). Instead, Eureka exists in excess of any one category. At once generically uncertain and generically multiple, it hovers uncannily in between: neither this nor that and yet all these things. In terms of Poe’s oeuvre, the uncanny has edgar allan poe 43

migrated from theme (in tales like “William Wilson” [1839] and “Berenice” [1835]) to structure (in Eureka). In spite of all these difficulties, Eureka’s thesis is simple and available in a pedestrian account: matter is not merely condensing (as the nebular hypothesis contends) but engaged in an unending cycle of contraction and expansion. The universe and all bodies are always moving toward either unification or differentiation, toward oneness or multiplicity: “are we not, indeed, more than justified in entertaining a belief . . . that the processes we have here ventured to contemplate will be renewed forever, and forever, and forever; a novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness,at every throb of the Heart Divine?”(pt 1356).The fact that these are the opposite poles and the contrary drives also of the American constitutional regime might be taken to suggest that Poe is writing not just about cosmology, about the physical relation of particular atoms, but about the physics of social formation, the relation of the particular to the general, the many to the one. Besides standing accused of having too much plot (for presuming to tell the history of the universe) and of having the wrong plot (for being scientifically rather than, and not entirely, literarily minded), Eureka also has the reputation of having no discernible plot, of being hard to follow.12 Critics like Barbara Cantalupo and Susan Welsh argue convincingly that Poe’s “involut[ed]”style is polemically aimed at contemporary texts (like William Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise, Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology [1836]) that attempt to describe the complexity and enormity of the “universe in all its movement”in an inappropriately “additive,linear”(that is,reductive) style (Cantalupo 85; Welsh 9).But it seems unnecessary to make elaborate excuses for the fact that Eureka is difficult to read when in fact it is not. What is hard about it is the cultural work it tries to accomplish: assembling that greatest poem, America.13 I contend that the text’s undeserved critical reputation as an anomaly within Poe’s corpus and within American literature as a whole stems from a lack of proper contextualization, from the failure to consider the socially intended character of cosmology and thus Eureka’s status as what Susan McCaslin calls a “cosmogonic poem” (3) — cosmogony implying a description of the universe’s origin with which a study of its present state (a cosmology) might not concern itself.McCaslin rightly draws attention to the fact that the “primary function of the cos44 “Brotherhood among the Atoms”

mogonic myth is to enact a return to origins; to the very beginnings of primordial or mythic, as opposed to merely historical time” (24). I wish to add that, at least within the American context, a “return to origins”almost always involves a return to national origins,to the site of the United States’s mythic as well as actual foundation. In reading Eureka as socially vectored, I am consciously arguing against received notions that have made a certain kind of contextual argument seem not worth pursuing because irrelevant to Poe. Biographical studies of Poe, as well as his own tendency to vacillate between seeming apolitical and trenchantly partisan, have contributed to the current critical impression that Poe is not in the least concerned with the social and that, far from being merely unconcerned with democracy,he is vehemently antidemocratic.Despite the credence given this portrait of Poe, it is demonstrably false and stems from a failure to be clear about what we mean by democracy as opposed to what Poe means by it (essentially, a failure to differentiate between social and political equality) and about what we construe as the criteria for the literary’s relation to the social. Typically, resistance to making such a socially minded argument about Eureka connects with a certain methodological persuasion, namely that one can generalize the position of an author quite independent of the texts the author has signed. Because those resistant to such an argument are also committed to an image of Poe heavily influenced by the major biographies (Arthur H. Quinn’s Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography [1941] and Kenneth Silverman’s Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance [1991]), the accrued effect has been a tendency to separate Poe the writer from Poe the man, an impulse encouraged by Poe’s own vacillation between seeming apolitical (preferring the abstract to the concrete) and advocating unpopular political positions (regarding slavery and aristocracy).14 Retaining such a distinction, however, impoverishes our understanding of Eureka in the context of the contemporary American political climate and our understanding of Poe himself as a figure no less complicated than that climate. Mediating the biographical positionings of Poe and those in Eureka is Eureka’s status as a cosmology, a genre that brings with it a connectedness authorized by a higher order of abstraction than the sites at which other authors have theorized the one-and-themany problem (solely as a philosophical, erotic, political, or theological difficulty). Another mediating factor is that, as Poe’s last major edgar allan poe 45

work, Eureka is a product of maturation and thus releases Poe from positions that he may hold as a Southerner but may see as surpassed by a point of view not constricted by locality. Given the entrenched nature of certain perceptions of Poe and his work, specific objections should be addressed at the outset. One is that if Poe means to address problems of social organization, cosmology is an oblique way to do so (although not uncharacteristic of an author fond of puzzles and hoaxes). But within the genre of cosmology, the analogy and the implicit efficacious relation between social and cosmic order are inherent; taken out of this context, the analogy is likely to seem hidden or forced, something not to be taken for granted. As for resistance in principle, then, to reading cosmology as socially minded, I point to the long-standing tradition of precisely such a practice in the West, a tradition sustained by the idea that cosmology is always about the construction, revision, and legitimation of social order, of those structures which, in this case, potentiate the constitutive actions undertaken in the Constitution.15 My assertion of Eureka’s social resonance is also based on the notion, from classical precedent as well as from Poe himself, that particular documents or genres (poetry, in particular) bear an effective — that is, an actuating rather than a purely prescriptive — relation to institutions like social formations.16 But even so, the claim that Eureka addresses residual problems of American social formation is bound to seem out of character for an author whose narrators make consistently denigrating remarks about democracy. Count Allamistakeo, the resurrected subject of “Some Words with a Mummy” (1845), regards the American project of e pluribus unum as the “most odious and insupportable despotism that ever was heard of upon the face of the Earth.” What he is specifically objecting to, however, is the “consolidation of the thirteen states” (pt 820; emphasis added), and “consolidation” is precisely the action George Washington calls for in his prefatory letter to the Constitution, the document that first instituted federal prerogative at the expense of local and individual interests (dc 965). The tyranny of democracy is that the “Mob” absorbs its members, as it does the title character of the “Man of the Crowd” (1840), depriving them of individual agency and identity (pt 820). To Pundit, a character in “Mellonta Tauta” (1849) speaking in the year 2848,the idea that “the ancient Amriccans [sic] governed themselves” in a “sort of every-man-for-himself con46 “Brotherhood among the Atoms”

federacy” is an “absurdity” (pt 879). What Poe means by and repudiates as democracy is something different from what the operative documents of state formation mean. It is, in fact, a revision of how those documents imagine democracy — namely, as a formation of both political and social equality. To Pundit, the idea “that all men are born free and equal” is the “queerest conceivable” because it “run[s] directly contrary to the natural analogies,” the “laws of gradation so visibly impressed upon all things in the moral and physical universe” (pt 879, 881). The implication is that hierarchy in the physical universe requires hierarchy in the social. Far from taking the preceding examples as refutations of democracy and conclusive evidence of Poe’s aristocratic beliefs (as critics like Scott Bradfield [69–72] and Geoffrey Rans [38] have done), I contend that Poe’s political stance is neither purely democratic nor wholly aristocratic and that he is not refuting democracy altogether, only insofar as it intends social as well as political equality. And as an examination of America’s founding documents as well as some of Eureka’s contemporaries demonstrates, equality unqualified is a phantom of American rhetoric. A narratable state of affairs, a practicable model of social relations, must be built on a more restricted sense of equality.

i ReadingEurekaas a poem,as Poe urges us to do,initially seems inappropriate because it has certain characteristics not congruent with poetry as Poe defined and practiced it. The business of poetry, he asserts, is the “Rhythmical Creation of Beauty,” and the majority of his poems (like “The Bells” [1848], “The Raven” [1845], and “Eulalie” [1844]), with their higher regard for sound than sense, bear out this assertion (er 688).17 Yet because Eureka is concerned with structuring the world rather than evoking it, its business is not so much the “creation of beauty” as the dissection of beauty, an inquiry into its mechanism.Eurekais poetic in the sense that it is interested in the combination of forms. Beauty here is beauty in the abstract: the beauty of abstract forms, the structures of material and social relation. Eureka is poetic in its concern with theorization, or experimentation with as yet unactualized states of affairs, and theorization, using Poe’s terms, is the job of poetry. In the Drake-Halleck review (1836), Poe specifies that a poem is not “the faculty of Ideality”but “the means of exciting it in mankind” edgar allan poe 47

(er 511).18 Poetry actuates a faculty, stirs an energy that has conventionally been regarded as possessing the power to make and remake, to legitimate and alter, social and political institutions. Poetry is not simply the manifestation of the “Poetic Sentiment” but that which excites it, which instills a sense of “design,” of the order of things. This image of the design that is distinct from its execution points to the distance between an actual and a potential (or ideal) state. By this image Poe means not so much to incite alteration of the actual better to match the potential as he does to point to the ideal’s being (and having been) there all along behind the real. His point is that our perception of that distance, our belief that there is any disparity, say, between the institution of slavery and the institution of democracy, is the result of our miscomprehension of what is ideal. Such a reading of Eureka — as in part a theorization of the right conduct of relations between persons — rests on the fact that for Poe theorization of the aesthetic is theorization of the social. He makes this point most strongly in the Drake-Halleck review: To look upwards from any existence, material or immaterial, to its design, is, perhaps, the most direct, and the most unerring method of attaining a just notion of the nature of the existence itself. . . . We find certain faculties implanted within us. . . [F]or example, we discover in all men a disposition to look with reverence on superiority, whether real or suppositious. . . .Phrenologists call it Veneration. . . . And although, preserving its nature, it becomes perverted from its principal purpose [divine worship], and although, swerving from that purpose, it serves to modify the relations of human society — the relations of father and child, of master and slave, of the ruler and the ruled — its primitive essence is nevertheless the same, and by a reference to primal causes, may at any moment be determined. (er 509–510) Poe’s acceptance is not of political inequalities but rather of social inequalities. Specific social inequalities like slavery are accepted because they belong to the general species of inequality (the hierarchy implicit in “Veneration”) which must exist in some form, given the representational and moral parameters of the American constitutional regime as initiated in the nation’s founding documents. In fact, Poe neither values nor devalues institutions like slavery, monarchy, and family, which he regards only as embodiments of the abstract 48 “Brotherhood among the Atoms”

principle of hierarchy which, though it must exist in some form (as the precondition of unity if unity is read as equality), does not entail any specific institution. Poe’s concern with what I am calling the documentary is admittedly a concern with the abstract, but an abstract that is not unconnected to the real and thus reserves the ability to “modify the relations of human society.” However, the extent, nature, and subject of that modification are neither immediately clear nor clearly fixed in character.The Drake-Halleck review hints at the belief in social hierarchy that underpins Poe’s notion not only of American social formations but also of how we are to regard those formations: as successful or unsuccessful, faithful or unfaithful reproductions of those founded in predecessor documents. The phrase “primal causes”invokes the idea of an actuating principle (in Scott Bradfield’s words, a “force which shapes the world” [100]) that does not address existing institutions but instead digs below those superstructures to the foundational, originary moment (the “primitive essence”) when any number of arrangements and concepts of relation were still possible.The power of the supplementary,as I have termed it,is precisely the ability to “determin[e],” to influence, revise, and regulate the terms of relation, and to do so at their foundation, their “primitive essence,” rather than in their more recalcitrant, present-day incarnation. Eureka’s foundation thus could be said to have a local as well as a general site: locally, the operative documents of American state formation provide access to the founding moment of the nation; cosmology provides access to the founding moment of the universe. But the locality of one of these sites does not entail the explicitness one might expect. In the manuscript-found-in-a-bottle with which Eureka opens, the “letter-writer” (writing from the distant future) critiques the “crawling system” of inductive reasoning precisely for its crippling devotion to detail: “[O]ur progenitors . . . blinded themselves . . .with the impalpable,titillating Scotch stuff of detail. . . .The vital taint . . . in Baconianism . . . lay in its tendency to throw power and consideration into the hands of merely perceptive men . . . — the diggers and peddlers of minute facts”(pt 1265).It would seem that Poe is not interested in detail at all, were it not for Eureka’s explicit reference of scientific matters: “I think it advisable to proceed as if even the more obvious facts of Astronomy were unknown to the reader. . . . I propose to avail myself of the advantages . . . of the iteration in detail” (pt 1272).If Poe is avoiding details,then,it must be the details of someedgar allan poe 49

thing else — like the real problems of social organization in which, as an antebellum American, he was inevitably immersed, but which, as a writer who preferred speaking of the ethereal over the mundane, he not surprisingly omits. Although the immediate subject is the system of inductive reasoning, the fault described is generally intellectual in character: it is the failure to consider the “applicability or inapplicability [of facts, details] in the development of those ultimate and only legitimate facts, called Law” (pt 1265). And the ultimate, foundational status here attributed to “Law”recalls the passage already quoted from the Drake-Halleck review, in which Poe makes it clear his concerns lie not in detail but “design,” the “primitive essence” of the “relations of human society” (er 509, 510). What is most important about the preceding passage, however, is Poe’s ambiguity as to what exactly is to be “determined.”19 In the immediate context,the object of that determination (“it may be determined”) is “Veneration.” But because the review goes on to enumerate other faculties which may similarly be determined, determination becomes an axiom rather than a specific instance. “It,” then, potentially refers to what we usually think of as needing correction (the present system) and to what really needs correction, according to Eureka (our perception of that system).20 The remainder of this section deals with the precise nature of this ambiguity. In short, my claim is that the ambiguity ought to be regarded as intentional — inasmuch as changing our conception of social relations (how they should be conducted, how they are conducted) is never entirely disconnected from the potential to revise and alter those structures and relations themselves. The actuating “faculty”accessed through cosmology and through the founding documents revises in the abstract but never abandons the possibility of doing so in the flesh.21 As a supplementary document, Eureka does more than reproduce the founding documents’conflict between the desire for individual sovereignty and the desire for the integrity of the whole. The text polices this tension, searching either for signs of its irreducibility or for some logic by which it may be resolved. Eureka’s apparent vacillation over the relative priority of unity and difference is a mark of how this text is an experiment, conducting independent trial runs of each possibility, in an attempt to discover whether, if equality and structured relationships are inherently antagonistic, American social order can be based on either by itself. In other words, Eureka sharpens the contradiction 50 “Brotherhood among the Atoms”

within the founding documents,exploring each option singly and concluding that they are each integral to the constitutional regime, that the poetics of constitution is driven forward, and the potential curing of social order is made possible, by this very antinomy. Pursuing the first option, Eureka reasons that if structure is itself given to hegemony, then the only way to actualize equality is to annihilate structure altogether. Whereas cosmology typically serves a maintenance function, legitimating social order by its homology with cosmic order, Eureka suggests that any social formation, any structure in which conjunctive relations can be formulated, is only an approximation of extreme, ideal states (union or equality). Absolute unity lies outside the reach of institution and actualization. The consolidating urge of the Constitution — the urge for unification above all else — is present in amplified form in Eureka as the “Uni-tendency”that produces physical and social formations that privilege the one over the many (pt 1280).Poe’s language,I would argue,is socially marked: he speaks of the “brotherhood among the atoms” (their “tendency each to each”), their derivation from a single parent, and their desire to return to their “original” (by which Poe means “normal”) state of union (pt 1286, 1299, 1281). Eureka sides with the Constitution in valuing the “rightful condition” of “One” over the “wrongful condition of Many” (the notion of individual sovereignty as privileged by the Declaration and the Articles) (pt 1320). As an intentionally constructed founding document, Eureka supplements the operative documents of American state formation by reenvisioning what in those documents was merely a political ideal (unification) as an inexorable law of physics, a material fact: [E]ach atom attracts — sympathizes with the most delicate movements of every other atom, and with each and with all at the same time, and forever. . . . Does not so evident a brotherhood among the atoms point to a common parentage? Does not a sympathy so omniprevalent, so ineradicable, and so thoroughly irrespective, suggest a common paternity as its source? . . . [I]s it not because the atoms were, at some remote epoch of time even more than together — is it not because originally, and therefore normally, they were One — that now, in all circumstances — at all points — in all directions — by all modes of approach — in all relations and through all conditions edgar allan poe 51

— they struggle back to this absolutely, this irrelatively, this unconditionally One? (pt 1286–1287) “Irrespective” has the revolutionary timbre of the Declaration of Independence’s “unalienable,” but Poe and the delegates are speaking of very different things: “sympathy”versus “rights”(dc 949).The “sympathy”of individuals for one another,their overwhelming desire for union, is “irrespective” of the very “rights” (the differentiated and sovereign status of individual states) which the Articles’decentralized structure sought to preserve. An “irrespective” union resembles the hegemonic relation of the whole to its parts, which the Declaration rejected but the Constitution resumed. But Poe takes the notion of consolidation even further than does the Constitution; he actualizes it. Rather than sacrificing a “share of liberty,” union in Eureka means being “even more than together,” sacrificing the differentiation and mediation of bodies and social processes altogether (dc 955). Oneness means not simply homology, or being as one; it means that there only is one. By taking unification to the point of eradicating not just hierarchy but difference altogether, Poe fulfills the Constitution’s promissory note for both union and equality — the first having been effected only imperfectly in the Constitutional form of a hierarchical bureaucracy, and the second compromised by that institutional embodiment if not by actualization itself. The achievement of absolute unity, however, is not the solution it seems, for one has still not escaped the problem of difference. If feudalism can be visualized as a vertical line whose various points signify different positions along the axis of power,the polemic force of democracy is its reduction of that line to a single, medial point. But if individuals are no longer to be differentiated along the axis of power, there is still the need to differentiate them as individuals. A social formation in which everyone occupies the same position would not be perceptible as society, since it would be a society of one. Absolute equality, as espoused in the Declaration (“all men are created equal”), is representationally impossible since the many,no matter how equal in a number of other ways (the rights of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”), must differ at least in number, in the physical space they occupy (dc 949). Thus democratic imaginative reduction of the feudal line to a point issues only in the expansion of that point into another dimension, into a horizontal rather than a vertical line. In this way the 52 “Brotherhood among the Atoms”

Declaration’s claim for each person’s “separate and equal” status — like the Articles’ attempt to institute it by granting authority over the states only to the states themselves — runs up against the unpleasant fact (in the Constitution) that a horizontal is still a line, that linearity, however one looks at it, still entails differentiation (dc 949). And the sense of difference that enables perception and representation is itself hierarchical. One must be able to tell things apart, to tell where something ends and something else begins. There must be some line, some edge, to set off this object, this person, as distinct from that one. Perception relies on the accretion of such appreciable distinctions,and distinction cannot shed its hierarchical valence. Because any perceptual field is mechanically dependent on the establishment of relations, a task which requires technologies of gradation and delineation, it follows that the democratic intention of nonhierarchy is representationally impossible, or that democracy is representationally impossible as anything but a line (and thus, as hierarchy). A host of distinct objects, like individuals, cannot be perceived or represented to be occupying the same place at the same time.22 The contention that they can,as Poe explicitly states in “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” (1841), constitutes a naive refusal to acknowledge a basic fact of social and representational life — that democracy can exist only in a compromised form: “Among other odd ideas, that of universal equality gained ground: and in the face of analogy and of God — in despite of the loud warning voice of the laws of gradation so visibly pervading all things in Earth and Heaven — wild attempts at an omni-prevalent Democracy were made” (pt 451). Eureka’s reduction of all matter to a single point can thus be read as an attempt to transcend relation altogether, to avoid the hierarchy that seems to inhabit even the ostensibly linear social formation of democracy.23 If difference itself entails hierarchy, then difference must be eliminated. But that means achieving one goal of the constitutional regime (union) at the cost of the other (equality).Equality may exist when difference has been eradicated,but it is only nominal: there is no one else around to enjoy it. And Eureka is as pragmatic as it is theoretical. We come now to the second trial of Poe’s experiment, in which he grapples with the volatile character of the material and struggles to calculate the minimum requirement for hierarchy, the point at which the structural mediation of relations has not yet foreclosed the possibility of ever overcoming mediation and actualizing immediacy. edgar allan poe 53

Eureka, like the Constitution, wrestles with the paradox that equality in relation cannot be practiced unless instituted between persons, unless compromised by the very social formation that actualizes it.24 Poe expresses this paradox as a natural law: unification physically necessitates the existence of some prior nonunified state; equality cannot be instituted except in contrast to (a former) inequality,except as something made out of difference. The inherently hierarchical character of representation stipulates that despite the democratic intent of universal condensation, some individuals or groups will inevitably be more equal than others: But . . . shall we be justified in imagining the atoms heterogeneous, dissimilar, unequal, and inequidistant? More explicitly — are we to consider no two atoms as, at their diffusion, of the same nature, or of the same form, or of the same size? — and, after fulfilment of their diffusion into Space, is absolute inequidistance, each from each, to be understood of all of them? In such arrangement . . . we most easily and immediately comprehend the subsequent most feasible carrying out to completion of any such design as that which I have suggested — the design of multiplicity out of unity — diversity out of sameness — heterogeneity out of homogeneity — complexity out of simplicity — in a word, the utmost possible multiplicity of relation out of the emphatically irrelative One. . . . Difference of size, for example, will at once be brought about through the tendency of one atom to a second, in preference to a third, on account of particular inequidistance . . . — a matter not at all interfering with the generally-equable distribution of the atoms. Difference of kind, too, is easily conceived to be merely a result of differences in size and form, taken more or less conjointly. . . . We perceive, therefore, on the whole, that it would be supererogatory, and consequently unphilosophical, to predicate of the atoms, in view of their purposes, any thing more than difference of form at their dispersion, with particular inequidistance after it — all other differences arising at once out of these, in the very first processes of mass-constitution. (pt 1278–1279) The nonchalance with which equality is regarded (“generallyequable”) and inequality is underplayed (“more or less conjointly”) — and the qualificatory prose in which such regard is couched — are justified by their end: the integration of individuals into a single social 54 “Brotherhood among the Atoms”

order.25 Poe has provided an explanation which naturalizes unification as a physical law that requires opposition and resistance. If matter is to condense, if any kind of body is to form, then inequalities of mass, arrangement, and distribution are necessary; otherwise, gravity has nothing upon which to exert itself. It is therefore inevitable that some particles will form groups to the exclusion of other particles. The “sympathy” of “brotherhood” manifests itself, oddly, in interest and in privileged relation. That is to say, difference exists because democracy demands it. Passages like the one just cited are concessions to the staunch claim for individuality (at the cost even of unity) which motivated the decentralization of authority in the Articles and which the Constitution curbed but hardly extinguished. The circumlocution of Poe’s explanation can be read as an effort to counteract the consequences of difference, to dispel the sense (which grows with each sentence) that difference does not in fact “aris[e] at once . . . in the very first processes of mass-constitution” but is difficult to quantify and,given an inch (a “particular inequidistance”),can create a hierarchical mile. The potential of difference, even in the ostensibly benign form of individual sovereignty, to build upon itself and thereby proliferate the criteria by which previously unqualified relation might come to operate forms the conclusion of the second half of Poe’s experiment. Individuality valued for and by itself (to the exclusion of union) results in a dystopia in which social processes actually come to exclude the equality they were meant to embody. The upshot of Poe’s trial runs of union and equality is that each,valued singly or to the exclusion of the other,has disastrous consequences not just for the constitutional regime but for the possibility of relation itself: in the one case,there is no longer anyone to relate to; in the other, there are too many people for relation to take place on an utterly nondiscriminatory (that is, unmediated) basis. Like the Constitutional delegates, Poe recognizes hierarchy’s (unfortunately) integral status in the representation of relations but regards institutional actualization as more important in the long run than the degree of equality thus compromised.Eureka thus thematizes the strain between the poles of union and equality as inescapable: it is the tension out of which social formations, founding documents, and supplementary texts like Eureka emerge. Preserving equality at the expense of union, as the Articles do, appears unfeasible.Attempting to strike a balance is more stable but not complete: the Constitution stands,but refinements,supplements,have edgar allan poe 55

yet to be made. Eureka refines by demonstrating the utter inextricability of the desires of the many and the one, the antithetical nature of the American constitutional regime. Poe suggests that it is precisely this ambivalence (this kind of repeated, experimental selection of one principle over the other) that permits the actualization of equality in the only form possible: relative equality. Materially or politically speaking, the conflict between attraction and repulsion prevents things from lapsing into either nondifferentiated oneness or chaotic difference. It allows bodies to form, social formations to be instituted: the diffusive energy being withdrawn, and the rëaction having commenced in furtherance of the ultimate design — that of the utmost possible Relation — this design is now in danger of being frustrated,in detail,by reason of that very tendency to return which is to effect its accomplishment in general.Multiplicity is the object; but there is nothing to prevent proximate atoms, from lapsing at once, through the now satisfiable tendency — before the fulfilment of any ends proposed in multiplicity — into absolute oneness among themselves:— there is nothing to impede the aggregation of various unique masses, at various points of space:—in other words, nothing to interfere with the accumulation of various masses, each absolutely One. For the effectual completion of the general design, we thus see the necessity for a repulsion of limited capacity — a separative something which, on withdrawal of the diffusive Volition, shall at the same time allow the approach, and forbid the junction, of the atoms; suffering them infinitely to approximate, while denying them positive contact; in a word, having the power — up to a certain epoch — of preventing their coalition, but no ability to interfere with their coalescence in any respect or degree. The repulsion . . . must be understood, let me repeat, as having power to prevent absolute coalition, only up to a certain epoch. Unless we are to conceive that the appetite for Unity among the atoms is doomed to be satisfied never; . . . a conception which cannot really be entertained, however much we may talk or dream of entertaining it — we are forced to conclude that the repulsive influence imagined, will, finally — under pressure of the Uni-tendency collectively

56 “Brotherhood among the Atoms”

applied, but never and in no degree until, on fulfilment of the Divine purposes, such collective application shall be naturally made — yield to a force which, at that ultimate epoch, shall be the superior force precisely to the extent required,and thus permit the universal subsidence into the inevitable, because original and therefore normal, One. (pt 1280–1281) The bold attempt to differentiate between those bonds that are conducive and those that are injurious to equality is frustrated by the fact that the chosen terms, coalition and coalescence, have the same etymological root (coalescere, meaning “to grow together”).26 “Preferen[tial]” relations contravene equality by introducing mediation,but Poe’s etymological hoax (a hoax of difference) insinuates that social formations cannot be built on any other ground. To speak of mediation as not an unfortunate fact but as a “necessity” (the “necessity for a . . . separative something”) seems both an insidious naturalization and a nervous elision of democracy’s dirty little secret.But Poe is at once conning us and inviting us in on his game. His game is in fact the one we have been playing on ourselves by accepting assurances (like those of the Constitution) that coalescences are not coalitions, that no social bonds are discriminatory. At the same time, to get wise to the game is not to become disillusioned, for the terms that perpetrate a hoax of difference also delineate the space in which the difference (or the making of a difference) is still conceivable. Poe’s point is that the game we play on ourselves is conceptual; the hoax is that we have to choose at all, or indeed that we can choose between absolute mediation and absolute equality. Extant social formations are described as both rigid (“suffering them infinitely to approximate, while denying them positive contact”) and tenuous (“only up to a certain epoch”) — and not because social formations are going anywhere,not because the present state of relations is nonnegotiable, but because the refusal to accept a renegotiation of both individual and group integrity makes it so. Insist on one or the other,and the whole thing collapses into either the many (the “utmost possible Relation” in which all relations are mediated) or the one (the state of “Absolute Irrelation” [pt 1303], the nation of one, in which there are no relations to mediate). Both the utopic and the dystopic ideals are inaccessible; the present is riddled with mediation and

edgar allan poe 57

seems stagnated by exclusionary “coalitions.”But it is all we have,and Poe means us to see that it is not so intractable as it appears. Otherwise, documents like Eureka — or any document after the Constitution that intends an effective, supplementary relation to social order — would be superfluous.As long as there remains a “separative something,” atoms can break out of one orbit or one cluster and join another; social alignments and the bases on which relations are conducted can be revised — if only incrementally, if without apparent or immediate effect. Eureka’s awareness of the antagonistic relationship between equality and institutional regulation, and its attempt to resolve that antagonism nonetheless, qualifies the text as another of America’s founding documents. At the date of Eureka’s publication, the constitutional regime had lasted 72 years. And yet in 1848 the inequalities of the present may have seemed greater than at any time since 1776: the two-party system of Democrats and Whigs was in turmoil, spawning the shortlived Liberty and Free-Soilers parties, finally establishing the hardier Republican Party; meanwhile, the admission of newly settled territories as either slave states or free states made the tension between national and local sovereignty painfully clear. Supreme Court rulings of the period asserting federal over state prerogative were the judicial countermeasure; the Compromise of 1850, the legislative one.27 It is no surprise that the debate over conjunctive relations should have proved so inflammatory in the 1840s and 1850s and have culminated in civil war: structuring relations between the whole and its parts was not simply a contemporary cause célèbre (as the Federalist and Antifederalist papers attest) but the constitutive tension of American state formation (between pluralism and dirigisme), the problem the Declaration and the Articles set out to resolve but which the Constitution accepted as an inevitable component of structured relation. But Poe’s concern with foundations extends beyond Eureka itself to his ideas about American literary culture.In an 1842 review on John G. C. Brainard he had written, “We [Americans] have . . . arrived at that epoch when our literature may and must stand on its own merits, or fall through its own defects” (er 405). Making an analogy between the injustice of Britain’s political hegemony over the colonies in the 1700s and the dominance of English reprints in America’s struggling literary market, Poe adds, “We have snapped asunder the leading-strings of our British Grandmamma, and, better still, we have 58 “Brotherhood among the Atoms”

survived the first hours of our novel freedom” (er 405).28 As a reviewer for the Southern Literary Messenger, Burton’s, the Broadway Journal, Graham’s Magazine, and the Evening Mirror, and as editor of all but the last periodical,Poe championed criticism (and its venue, the journal) as the instrument by which American literary culture’s independence from British and French influence could be established. Prospectuses for the journals Poe planned to start himself (called, in turn, the Penn Magazine and the Stylus) read like a second Declaration of Independence, founding an independent literary, in addition to political, culture.29 Poe’s promise that each magazine will “endeavour to support the general interests of the republic of letters, without reference to particular regions” suggests not merely the cultivation of a national style (a style characteristic of the whole rather than any one part) but the theorization of the state as a stylistic enterprise, an understanding of the American republic as a republic of letters (a state made up of letters and therefore constituted and capable of being reconstituted in documents) (er 1025, 1035).30 In this light, Poe’s own battle for stricter international copyright laws amounts to a kind of literary-cultural protectionism: he felt that an independent literary culture could never flourish in America as long as American publishers were allowed to flood the domestic market with legally pirated British texts, as long as the United States remained a “literary colony of Great Britain” (er 1044).31 Poe envisioned himself as the founder of a literary culture — of what could be called a shadow culture to the fading culture of Christianity, a counter to the loss of confidence in America’s inherited theological order (Eucharistic Congregationalism). Unitarianism and Poe’s Eurekaare,respectively,theological and literary responses to the American quest for institutions that were not beholden to existing regimes. Emerson’s 1832 refusal to administer the Lord’s Supper constitutes a disavowal of American theological culture, if not ecclesiastical culture in general,as a suitable basis for state formation and the relation of persons. Poe responds in 1848 by offering literary culture as the institution upon which American culture (political and aesthetic) can be founded. Whatever position Poe envisioned for himself in the history of American literary culture, he certainly seems to think of himself as one of its founders, more specifically, as a founder of that certain current within it that takes as its responsibility the resolution of the problems of American social order and takes it consciously as an instance edgar allan poe 59

of the general philosophical problem of the one and the many. With the sense that literary documents,like political documents,possess the power to supplement and revise structures of relation, Poe appears to be one of the first American authors so fully to imbue his career and his texts with a foundational timbre (where the notion of foundation embraces cosmic in addition to social formation).32 Given Poe’s equation of literary foundation with national foundation (his is a republic of letters and literary journals, not of legislatures), it is not surprising that his foundational consciousness allies him with another set of foundational texts: America’s public documents of state formation. E pluribus unum is present to Poe’s mind not merely as the theme of Eureka but also as the principle of relation upon which America had been founded: “The United States’ motto, E pluribus unum, may possibly have a sly allusion to Pythagoras’ definition of beauty — the reduction of many into one” (er 1366).33 Although e pluribus unum initially seems to concern only the reduction of all matter (in Eureka) or the forging of a collective polity (in the founding documents),the problem will turn out to be in both cases the relation of those parts, the construction of a whole from parts that once united remain legible and to some degree distinct. Poe presents various ways of structuring the unum as the concern of American political and, starting with Eureka, American literary documents. Poe’s definition of poetry, like America’s founding documents, is predicated on the notion not merely that the literary mirrors or describes the social but that finely shaped words (or literary forms) can shape social formations: Its [Poesy’s] first element is the thirst for supernal beauty — a beauty which is not afforded the soul by any existing collocation of earth’s forms — a beauty which, perhaps, no possible combination of these forms would fully produce. Its second element is the attempt to satisfy this thirst by novel combinations among those forms of beauty which already exist — or by novel combinations of those combinations which our predecessors, toiling in chase of the same phantom, have already set in order. (er 687)34 The “combinations” or forms left to Poe as an American writer are both literary and social, and as a model for the relation of the one and the many,Eureka is mindful of that legacy and of the fact that the legacy is not simply property (documents, protocols of relation) but a task 60 “Brotherhood among the Atoms”

(what to do with that legacy). Poe describes the relationship toward the “combinations” of “our predecessors” as one of revision and recombination, of experimentation among a finite set of terms — in other words, a carrying on of the revisionary and regulatory procedures initiated in documents written by the nation’s forefathers, documents that must be among the predecessor documents of any American text that considers social relations.The intimation that “no possible combination of . . . forms” might ever be able to “fully produce” the “supernal beauty” is Eureka’s contribution to the concept of the documentary: that the constitutional regime was founded on a promissory note that can never be — perhaps ought not to be — made good.35

ii The common ground of Eureka and America’s founding documents is their concern with the enigma of the American constitutional regime: the formation of relations between participants in a nonhierarchical way. As documents of a documentary state, they all exhibit the same tension between unionism and pluralism, between the achievement of homogeneity on the one hand and the preservation of difference and the sovereignty of the individual on the other. The problems Eureka is trying to solve are residual, then, from a set of antecedent texts. Supplementary founding documents like Eureka arise from the feeling that the Constitution (the final text in this set) formulated American social formation but failed to institutionalize it, to actualize it in a real state of affairs. The text is firmly in place but has not produced what was intended. Fulfilling what was perceived as a still unfulfilled promise becomes, beginning with Poe, the business (one might say the mission) of the literary community. Although by the late 1840s Unitarianism had largely supplanted Congregationalism as the Massachusetts orthodoxy, it seemed that Unitarianism itself was suffering from what might be called institutional alienation: that is, the failure of an institution any longer to embody a principle upon which it was founded, or its failure to have embodied that principle in the first place. While this kind of concern about institutional alienation is hardly specific to American ecclesiastical history, it in fact characterizes the American constitutional regime as thematized in the operative documents of American state edgar allan poe 61

formation. In their concern with the right institution of relations between the one and the many, the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Federalist and Antifederalist papers follow one upon the other, envisioning, supplementing, and revising the construction of the American unum. The fact that one document was not enough — that the Constitution superseded the Articles and that the Federalist and Antifederalist papers fought a tug-of-war over this change — attests to the unrelenting reevaluation of various ways of structuring the whole that characterizes the American constitutional regime. What drives these documents is the attempt to carry out the Declaration’s call for an institution based on equal relations. The documents that followed quickly discovered the difficulty of filling this order, of instituting equality. It becomes clear upon examining this set of texts that the ideal of arriving at the “right” structure came to seem less feasible and thus became less important than constructing a formation that effected a compromise between constitution and institution,between the ideal and the practical, between equality and hierarchy.36 The Declaration of Independence justifies the colonies’ dissociation from the British Empire on the basis of the equality proposition (the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal”) (dc 949). The hegemonic relation of the British whole toward its parts is rejected in favor of an open, unstratified structure of unprivileged relation. What motivates this rejection is not so much King George’s tyranny but the fact that, within a hierarchy like that of the British Empire, tyranny is not so much a willful crime as an unpleasant fact. The Declaration’s unwillingness to tolerate hegemonic social formations is immediately checked, however, by the difficulty of actualizing relations in a way that is consistent with the equality proposition.The proliferation of a national structure in the Articles and the stratification of that structure in the Constitution convey an increasingly strong conviction that the state cannot be run, that the relation of its parts cannot be regulated (ironically, regulated so as to guarantee their equality) without some structural differentiation, without hierarchy. Because of the delegates’initial eagerness to eschew any semblance of hierarchy (of privileged relations between the one and the many), the structure of the new unum is so loosely formulated in the Declaration as to be nonexistent. It seems that if the states are to 62 “Brotherhood among the Atoms”

remain “Free and Independent,” they cannot be bound by anything more constraining than friendship: We . . . publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor. (dc 952) The pledge of “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor” is as far as the delegates were willing to go and seems no more binding than a gentleman’s agreement, a foxhole pledge to stand together against Britain but not necessarily to stand as one. The personal nature of the pledge suggests that it was also as far as they could go: there being as yet no group of states they could claim to represent, no collective by whom they could claim to have been delegated, the men who signed this pledge did so consciously as individuals. The lives, fortunes, and honors involved were emphatically their own.In the Articles and then in the Constitution, the structure of the Union becomes increasingly complex and stratified and draws closer to the hegemonic model refuted by the Declaration.37 The motive for this return — or regression — to hierarchy is not so much the loss of desire for an open,nonhegemonic structure but the realization that any protocol of relations, that institution itself, is inherently hierarchical. And because institution in some form is necessary, the violation of the equality proposition becomes inevitable. As a supplement to the Constitution, Eureka views the sense of compromised equality that troubled many of the Constitutional delegates (and excited Antifederalist sentiments) as not inhibitive but in fact constitutive of the American state. Rather than siding with one or another of the tenets of the constitutional regime (like the decentralizing Articles which privilege difference and equality over unity), Eureka accepts the unsatisfactory compromise of the Constitution as, on the contrary, satisfactory. For only an unfulfilled promissory note, edgar allan poe 63

a dialectic that refuses to resolve itself, can stimulate the continued production of literary and social formations necessary to a republic of letters. The life of a documentary state is conducted in texts: American social formation is legitimated by repeated attempts to actualize the ideal of nonhegemonic relations upon which it was founded; American literary formation is sustained by the failure (if not by the inherent representational inability) to do so effectively. Drafted within two weeks of the signing of the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation are the first attempt to institute an open political structure. But the result is little more binding than the Declaration’s pact for “common defence”: an alliance, “a firm league of friendship” into which the “states severally enter” — that is, each of their own accord (dc 954; emphasis added). Although the document describes itself as “articles of Confederation and perpetual Union,” the emphasis is definitely on the former. Whereas “Confederation” implies an alliance of distinct states, “Union” implies the consolidation of those states, the erasure of (at least some) distinctions, and the allocation of authority to some central body rather than to the states “severally.”Delegates to whom “union”meant a return to hierarchy and a violation of the equality principle demanded the insertion of a state sovereignty clause (Article II) to ensure the maintenance of equality through the maintenance of difference: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled” (dc 954). With such provisions, the Union resembles a domestic partnership more than a marriage, “binding [the states] to assist each other” without binding them together (dc 954). National government may be necessary for the “more convenient management of the general interests of the united states,” but the embodiment of centralized authority is limited to a unicameral Congress (dc 955). Because the states appoint their own congressional delegates, Congress is not significantly differentiated from the states themselves. All powers delegated to the national government are symbolic rather than actual: the states are forbidden from exercising these powers (like coining money or making treaties) “without consent of . . .congress,” and yet, when the states are Congress, there is little to stop them (dc 956). The Articles give Congress the power to adjudicate disputes between states but deprive it of the power to enforce its own rulings. 64 “Brotherhood among the Atoms”

The states, both ideally and physically, remain sovereign. The equality proposition has been preserved, but at the cost of any structure by which equality may be effectively administered.38 After eight years, that cost became clear. A 1786 convention called to revise the Articles ended up producing an entirely new document (the Constitution), whose disposition of powers created a more efficient administration but did so at the cost of state sovereignty. “[I]n Order to form a more perfect Union,” the Constitution does away with the fundamental principle of confederation: the decentralization of power (dc 968). Centralization is most apparent as a thickening of the federal, the flowering of hierarchy not just between the state and national levels but within the national government itself. Congress becomes divided into two houses, and two additional branches are added (the executive and the judicial). The most severe contrast to the Articles is the abrogation of state sovereignty.What had been state powers (by default) were now explicitly assigned to the federal government. Declaring federal legislation to be “the supreme Law of the Land” meant, in the worst of circumstances, the invalidation of state legislation and a return to a hegemonic protocol of relations between the one and the many (dc 980). Expecting opposition to such a radical (to some, reactionary) departure from the Articles, three of its drafting members (Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay — all writing under the pseudonym “Publius”) launched a sevenmonth propaganda campaign, extolling the virtues of the new plan in a series of 85 letters “to the people.”The papers appeared in four New York newspapers as installments of The Federalist. Though the Federalists could not claim that equality had been successfully and faithfully institutionalized, they could claim to have done their best. The implication of structuring the unum at all, it seems, is the compromise of equality in all relations. Opponents of the Constitution, collectively known as the Antifederalists, matched The Federalist Papers blow for blow in their own series of editorial letters. Whatever specific feature of the new plan Antifederalists objected to, their fears are best evoked by their opponents’ (the Federalists’) call for consolidation, issued in the prefatory letter to the Constitution: It is obviously impracticable of the federal government of these States; to secure all rights of independent sovereignty to each, and edgar allan poe 65

yet provide for the interest and safety of all — Individuals entering into society, must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest. . . . It is at all times difficult to draw with precision the line between those rights which must be surrendered,and those which may be reserved. . . . In all our deliberations . . . we kept steadily in our view, that which appears to us the greatest interest of every true American, the consolidation of our Union. (dc 965; emphasis added) Hamilton (in Federalist 9) would deny the charge of consolidation, but the Antifederalist letters, as well as the two-year span of The Federalist Papers themselves, made it clear that many did not believe him.39 The leading Antifederalist concern was as to exactly at what point and by whom the line that “reserved” some rights and “surrendered” others would be drawn. It would hardly be unwarranted to view the proclaimed difficulty of drawing that line “with precision” as a promissory note for the future redrawing of that line,for the potential abrogation of state authority by federal prerogative and thereby the effective if not actual dissolution of state governments and legislatures. The Antifederalists’ fear in this regard seemed confirmed, at least initially, by the fact that the Constitution was drafted and ratified by a national body alone without being “confirmed by the legislatures of every state” as specified in the Articles (dc 962). The legacy of the founding documents is an ambivalence toward institutionalization. The strong desire to preserve boundaries within boundaries nevertheless yields to the overwhelming pressure to secure that first, outer boundary that marks off the American state. The fact that the Constitution has never been replaced, only amended, suggests that the legacy of the constitutional regime includes a consciousness that ideal and practice, equality and institution, are antithetical and that institution and hierarchy are inextricable. Grasping the implications of various ways of structuring the unum in these founding documents clarifies the context into which Eureka enters in its capacity as a document of state formation.Eureka approaches the poetics of constitution with the assumption that institution is inherently hierarchical and that, even if relation is instituted on an equal basis (on a notion of horizontal rather than vertical linearity), the hierarchical character of representation itself defeats the nonhegemonic, homogeneous intent of any social formation. 66 “Brotherhood among the Atoms”

iii In a contextual analysis of Eureka like this one it would seem natural to read the allusions, near the end of the text, to the “still more awful Future” and to the “inevitable catastrophe . . . at hand” as predictions of the Civil War (pt 1353). Such a reading is apropos, given the immediate referent: Poe’s apocalyptic vision of the end of the universe, the collapse of differentiated matter back into the “primordial Particle”and finally into nothingness (1277). One must not forget, however, that for Poe apocalypse cannot be divorced from its reversal, and the reflowering of matter from a new originary particle into many particles overshoots what, in this reading, would be the postwar reconstruction of unity. So while Poe may be stating war as the unavoidable outcome of sociopolitical tensions which were already well pronounced in America,the “still more awful Future”is more generally a prediction of the abstract disaster (of which civil unrest is one instance) that inevitably, periodically befalls ventures in social and material construction. Given the way life ends in Eureka (by beginning again), it is also a prediction of the cyclical nature of such disasters,a suggestion that they issue in epochs of harmony,structural change,stasis,and — once again — instability. So when Poe speaks of “Unity” as the “lost parent” of the many, of matter in its differentiated state, it does not seem coercive to discern a subtext of mourning for the Union that, even in 1848, is showing signs of strain (1287). It is important, however, to emphasize that, given Poe’s and cosmology’s interest in ultimate foundations, the loss of unity here refers to a condition which is general in the deepest sense — not just cosmic as well as social, but structural (as it includes cosmic, social, and other modes of organization). Poe’s willingness to accept inequality as inevitable — and therefore its eradication through the structural reform of relations as a vain attempt to accomplish only nominally what nature would in time effect absolutely — could be read as an irresponsible dissociation of human agency from its political state, a morally negligent endorsement of constitutional anomalies like those which condoned slavery.40 In this light, it would be hard to understand that Poe regards matter itself (and so any “generally-equable”and thus inequitable distribution of social privilege) as a temporary state that will be inexorably reformed and shaped to look more like equality. And yet to contend, as Poe does, that the resolution of conjunctive relations is edgar allan poe 67

not available to man’s perceptual and representational faculties (he cannot apprehend relation except as mediation) does not preclude the possibility and/or efficacy of supplementing the terms of conjunction and negotiating the terms, the relativity, of equality. And for Poe, these adjustments are the domain of the literary (as opposed to the politically representational, as exemplified by Supreme Court decisions or congressional compromises). Poe’s reorientation of the literary is fueled by the conviction that the literary can accomplish what the politically representational has failed to do — insisting as each of those decisions and compromises did that the dispute between the many and the one was (or even could be) solved. Supplementary texts like Eureka, like America’s founding documents, actively attend to the distance between constitution and institution, between virtuality and actualization, between relations de jure and relations de facto. This distance is the potential and yet intending space in which hard cultural work and the remedying of social formations — the redrafting of the Constitution and of constitution itself — must be done. What distinguishes Poe’s text from those of the delegates,and what signals Eureka’s initiation of the documentary,is that policing the tension between the contrary desires of the constitutional regime does not result, as it had in the Constitution, in the compromise of equality for the sake of union (“giv[ing] up a share of liberty to preserve the rest”) but rather in the acceptance of that antithesis as not inhibitive but in fact constitutive of American social order (dc 965). One must give up on the elimination of hierarchy in any other form than the ideal (condensation),which seems a world apart.Rather than simply relocating its telos,Poe does away with the notion of telos altogether, in the sense of a single goal toward which social order is vectored. Neither individual sovereignty nor equality can be fulfilled completely without dissolving the other, without dissipating the social order which compensatory documents like Eureka attempt to cure. The constitutional regime emerges as the tension of imperfection, of being caught in between. Without a definite telos, without the election solely of either element of the American antinomy (equality and difference), the life of social and literary formations is the continuous asymptotic approach, in each new document, toward both terms of that opposition. The tension cannot be broken but only sharpened,since that tension (analogous to that between unregulated 68 “Brotherhood among the Atoms”

rhythm and regulative meter) drives the poetics of constitution.41 Poe does not address so much the anomalies themselves, nor does he seem intent upon redressing them; what he does redress is our concept of those anomalies, our concept of them as anomalies rather than, as Poe views them, inextricable from the nature of the Constitution and from the constitution of American social formation. It does not hurt to reiterate that the distinction between political equality and social equality is fundamental for Poe and for the Constitutional delegates alike: both Eureka and the Antifederalist papers struggle with a compromise that seems antithetical to the absolute equality espoused in the Declaration’s equality proposition, but both Eureka and the Constitution come to accept this paradox as structurally and representationally inevitable and as morally desirable. As even a casual acquaintance with The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym makes clear, blacks are considered by Poe to be brutish, inferior, and appropriately subjugated. What should not be elided is that for Poe (and he was not alone), black slavery is not inconsistent with political equality, which is implicitly for whites; because blacks are not considered political subjects, servitude is not a problem, for it upholds the social hierarchy many Americans (slavery advocates, apologists, and abolitionists alike) believed was in no way dissonant with political equality, was part and parcel of the American social formation as a version of democracy.42 The distinction between social and political equality is fundamental for Poe and also to our understanding Poe’s apparently aristocratic stance in its more accurately ambiguous light. He takes the not unheard-of and characteristically American stance that endorses political equality at the same time it eschews social equality in favor of social hierarchy.43 Poe is getting us to accept about constitution what the Constitution is uncomfortable with (what the Articles were structured against): the necessity of anomaly, of hierarchy. The Federalist Papers evidently were convincing enough on this count to alleviate any lasting rebellion against ratification. But Poe holds political equality and social hierarchy as equally integral to the American project; whether or not he is condoning specific anomalies (like the slavery clause of the Constitution), he is presenting the unalterable fact that whatever the original formulation (that is, even if the slavery clause had been omitted before ratification), a polity based on equality is impossible.When Pundit,in “Mellonta Tauta,”refers to the dicedgar allan poe 69

tum “that all men are born free and equal” as the “queerest idea conceivable” (pt 879), he is objecting not so much to equal right — that never is mentioned — as to equal access. What proved the undoing of a democratic venture in ancient Egypt, Pundit insists, is not the idea that everyone had the same rights but the assumption that social equality followed from political equality: “Every man ‘voted,’ as they called it — that is to say, meddled with public affairs — until, at length, it was discovered that what is everybody’s business is nobody’s,and that the ‘Republic’(so the absurd thing was called) was without a government at all”(pt 879).Pundit is explicitly against “universal suffrage,” but not because he is against political equality, that is, against the ideal equality of all men. Rather, the vote cannot be had by all for purely practical reasons: because it implies that men are equal in all ways. And this is, as it is in Eureka, both a social and a representational problem.Equality of access means unmediated relation, which not only offends the aristocratic belief that certain spaces are off limits to the masses but also traduces the epistemological ability to tell individuals apart. “[E]verybody’s business” becomes “nobody’s” because everybody has become, with equal access to any social space, potentially the same person. The imperative to unity (which turns out to be an epistemological necessity) runs up against the representational inevitability of hierarchy (or the epistemological necessity of difference). Equality is valued, both in Eureka and in the Constitution, as an ideal, and the ideal is here equated with the political; as a practice, it is resisted. The point of Eureka is stronger than that: as a material reality, it is impossible. Poe’s plans for the journal he long hoped to found suggest that he is not, as has been suggested, an unapologetic aristocrat, but rather a man caught between the local and the national, that is, between an appreciation for the Southern system of caste and gentility and an attachment to a national vision of democracy that elides sectionalist differences. As a result, Poe’s plan to bankroll a mass-marketed periodical on the support of a Southern landowning aristocracy evinces an adulterated elitism, a relative democracy that resembles contemporary ideas not of how democracy should work but, inasmuch as it holds to contrary aims (difference and equality), how it does work. And that is perhaps the only way it can.44

70 “Brotherhood among the Atoms”

Chapter Two ★ “A Religion Which Is No Religion” Walt Whitman & the Writing of a New American Bible We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the earthly world.—Emerson, Representative Men1

Leaves of Grass represents a lifelong endeavor. Between 1855 and 1892 Whitman produced nine editions of Leaves, not simply expanding it by incorporating new poems but extensively revising and rearranging the predecessor text.2 Considering the differences between editions in format, typography, and content, and the changes in tone and subject matter introduced by new clusters as diverse as Calamus, Sea-Drift, Drum-Taps, and Autumn Rivulets, one might be led to argue that Whitman’s compositional “theory” changed just as often (pw 2: 739).3 On the other hand, it would be difficult to dispute the fact that,whatever motive one can ascribe to any particular edition, Whitman remains faithful throughout to at least one “object” (pw 2: 738).4 In his own words, that object is the “combin[ation of ] these Forty-Four United States into One Identity, fused, equal, and independent” (pw 2: 738).5 To resolve the paradox of this chain of adjectives — how disparates can be at once “fused, equal, and independent” — would be to work out the one-and-the-many problem differently than the federal model (as epitomized by e pluribus unum and the founding documents), to conceive of unity neither as the relation of an abstract (Union) to particulars (states) nor as a structural compromise between centralization (Congress) and decentralization (state legislatures), but instead as a relation of pluralization whereby integrity, identity, and differentiation are guaranteed.6 The difference pluralization makes — its advantage over decentralization — is that it never risks,as the Articles of Confederation had done for national government, subjugating the good of the one to particular wills, never allows the horizontal elaboration of structure (democratization) to overreach the capacity of management (totality). It also permits, as

centralization does not, some independence of operation, a certain capacity for interference with hegemony’s singular imperatives. Indeed,it turns out to be the case,in the third edition of Leaves (1860), that, as long as the overarching commitment to totality, to the one, is maintained, ancillary, more sublunary commitments are permissible. In terms which emphasize the continuity of Whitman’s work with that of Poe and Melville, Whitman’s object is the resolution by literary means of the problematic of the many and the one as it impinges on identity and state formation. What Whitman is seeking, poetically as well as politically, is an answer to the problematicity of unity. His project, which his language presents as a continuation of the federal project, is the unification of disparates, the forging of compositional, political, and social unities that manage to preserve the identities and autonomies of their constituents. Without the allegory of either Poe or Melville, Whitman presents his writing as an explicit modeling of American social formation, a response in kind to the contemporary debate over the relative political and social value of persons. Whereas Poe and Melville offer a critique of relations between persons as they currently stand, Whitman offers Leaves of Grass as a praxis, a manual for their transformation. This chapter explores the poetic means by which he is able to make that offer, specifically, (1) the tropes of pluralization and fragmentation that act as remedy for what Whitman sees as the essentially distributive problem of the one and the many, and (2) the acts of mediation and translation by which Whitman represents hierarchy as ineluctable on some level, as the sacrifice, the death of the organic, required for the attainment of symbolic life.7 Following the development of this remedy through the early editions of Leaves allows us to compile an inventory of the alternative models of social formation by which Whitman seeks, in turn, to actualize fantasies of unmediated relation, to extend representation to the previously unrepresented, and finally, when confronted with the inexorableness of hierarchy as a precondition of unity, to secure integration by the only available means. For Whitman, as for Lincoln, that means is violence: representational violence, for Whitman; actual violence, for Lincoln. The sacrificial model to which this poet and this president call us seems extreme unless we recall that we are dealing with a period in which American politics is dominated by the idealization of union, specifically, the Lincolnian embodiment in the Union of the idea of the one, the priv72 “A Religion Which Is No Religion”

ileging of unity at all costs, over which the Civil War was fought. What Lincoln means by union is not unanimity but rather rule by a majority that administers a collective identity for a collective good, and does so on the basis of the sacrifice of equality. Strangely enough, Lincoln and the secessionists are both acting on the conviction that unity and equality are incompatible; Lincoln opts exclusively for the former and the Confederacy for the latter.8 It is perhaps Lincoln’s exclusive focus on the Union that enables him to see with such clarity that unity entails hierarchy, and so is inherently antagonistic to equality. In the “First Inaugural Address”(1861) — which for Lincoln constituted part of his oath to protect the Union — he is explicit about the fact that one kind of differentiation, which he calls the “majority principle,” is indispensable to the maintenance of union as a physical state of affairs: “A majority . . . held in restraint by constitutional checks, and limitations . . . is the only true sovereign for a free people. . . . Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy, or despotism in some form, is all that is left” (sw2 220). It is this background of unity achieved by force of war against which Whitman is moving, attempting to turn it into some alternative social formation, to reconstruct the rationality of unity on different bases than Lincoln does (on the basis, for example, of the union of body and soul).9 Although Whitman and Lincoln concur on the necessity of a sacrificial model for the solution of the one-and-the-many problem,they differ significantly on the price of representational access: whereas Lincoln’s republic requires the sacrifice of the many, Whitman’s democracy requires only the sacrifice of the one, the representational icon of unity and integration embodied in Lincoln, the great Citizen, our “first great Martyr Chief ” (pw 2: 509).10 My account of the necessity of sacrifice in Whitman, for which a poem like “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” provides the clearest indication, admittedly controverts the line of argument that pursues, and produces, Whitman as a liberational figure.11 But, by the same token, I do not wish to obscure the complexity of the management of sacrifice by Whitman. Whitman’s rereading of Lincoln’s horrible murder as sacrifice is an interpretive act by which he assigns the sacrifice requirement to Lincoln and renders the sacrifice efficacious not just for himself but for many.12 Solving the problem of the one and the many remains the fundamental task that Whitman sets himself in each edition of Leaves walt whitman 73

because, in his eyes as in Poe’s, it is the task the nation had set itself at its own inception, the work which political texts of institutional intent (not just the Constitution but supplementary documents like the Compromise of 1820, the Fugitive Slave Law [1850], and the Kansas-Nebraska Act [1854]) had failed to bring off and which it now fell to literary texts to complete.13 While the founding fathers and many of Whitman’s contemporaries may have tried to reconcile the inevitability of hierarchy with their desire for equality,Whitman finds, also like Poe, that he must reconcile himself to the fact that unity requires difference, indeed, requires the compromising of equality. In Leaves and Eureka both, unity demands sacrifice — of equality, of variety. It is merely a question of extent. Poe envisions radical social transformations being brought about only at apocalyptic, end-time moments and only by extraplanetary physical forces.Whitman thinks of the unification of disparates as being,on the contrary,within human control, even though the effort required may be massive (requiring new institutions which subvert as far as possible the principle of hierarchy) and the sacrifice extreme (social as well as actual death). What the first section of this chapter demonstrates,however,is that Whitman’s acceptance of the inevitability of a sacrificial model does not constitute acceptance of its most extreme form — exemplified by the body and soul dialogue in section 5 of “Song of Myself ” (1855) — or preclude its refinement. Comparing this originary instance to analogous moments in subsequent editions of Leaves (the final section of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” [1856] and section 7 of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”[1865]) allows us to assess what reduction Whitman is able to exact, over time, in the cost of unity, the enormity of sacrifice, and the degree to which the principle of hierarchy must intrude upon any social or institutional reality. But just as antebellum legislators and judges offer a series of solutions — in the form of congressional compromises, Supreme Court decisions, and the several phases of Reconstruction — so does Whitman offer more than one answer to the pressing question of how the many can also exist as one.14 If the initial lesson of Leaves is that absolute equality is inconsistent with life and that wholly unmediated relations are incompatible with social states of affairs, the third edition offers itself as a model of discourse for distributing identity with the least possible mediation.The remainder of this chapter takes seriously the claim that the third edition is itself Whitman’s most ambitious response to 74 “A Religion Which Is No Religion”

the problem of the one and many, the prototype of a textually based and textually implemented social formation that permits the multiplication of personhood and the circulation of identity at the least possible human cost. In 1857,between the second and third editions of Leaves, Whitman announced in a notebook his plan for “The Great Construction of the New Bible”(nupm 1: 353).Like the calendrically referenced lectionary of the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer (1559),the structure of this prospective New Bible — “Three Hundred & Sixty Five” poems, one for each day of the year — would consist of internal textual divisions after which the life of the reader and the state could be patterned.15 Although Whitman says that the “New Bible . . . ought to be read[y] in 1859,” he makes only one other allusion in the 1850s to a neo-Biblical project: “‘Leaves of Grass’ — Bible of the New Religion.”16 From someone ready enough to write anonymous reviews for his own work (a fairly common practice at the time) and to reprint Emerson’s congratulatory 1855 letter in the second edition, it seems uncharacteristic of Whitman to have never publicly touted the third, 1860 edition as the New Bible which he had privately christened it. Not surprisingly, critics have tended to minimize Whitman’s reference to a “New Bible” as little more than a passing conceit, one of several ideas the poet considered as a symbol for the kind of cultural work he was endeavoring to do. The least dismissive accounts concede that if such a neo-Biblical intent manifests itself in any edition of Leaves it would be the 1860 edition.17 But if we weigh the force with which Whitman speaks of a New Bible as “the principal object — the main life work” and if we consider the fact that the mid nineteenth century was until then the most active period of sectarian splintering and Bible translation in American history, it seems that an important argument has been left unmade about the way in which the 1860 Leaves responds to demands that nineteenth-century Americans were making on the Bible, the work that sacred writing, in its received and newly invented forms, was being called to do (nupm 1: 353). In the most general terms, terms which align Whitman with the project begun by Poe, that work is the creation of a quasi-scriptural text capable of reconstructing the institutional authority necessary to alternative social formations, and doing so in spite of the compromised status of the transcendent term. As Emerson had written ten years earlier in Representative Men, “We too must write Bibles, walt whitman 75

to unite again the heavens and the earthly world” (el 761). Like Poe and Whitman, Emerson sees founding, truth-telling texts as being endowed with precisely the practical intent that his country needed so urgently but that its extant political and religious institutions could no longer supply.Those texts could be secular as well as sacred.When Emerson writes of “former great men [who] call to us affectionately” to write new “Bibles,” he could be referring as easily to Thomas Jefferson, John Dickinson, and Gouverneur Morris (the primary authors of the Declaration, the Articles, and the Constitution) as to Moses and the pseudonymous prophets (el 761). The example of Poe continues to serve as a precedent. Poe claims that Eureka is many kinds of writing — essay, cosmology, romance, and scripture (“a Book of Truths”) — yet he urges us to consider it finally “as a Poem only” (pt 1259). Just so, while Whitman calls the third edition of Leaves a New Bible, one cannot forget that, even setting aside the issue of the eight other editions which are not cast as New Bibles, it is also a secular text, a book of poems. Like Poe, Whitman locates the primary force for institutional change in the literary: “the problem of humanity . . . is social and religious, and is finally to be met and treated by literature” (pw 2: 365).18 Literary discourse in this case assumes what Whitman perceived to be the office of American political institutions (the involvement of all parties in a single register of rights and representation) as well as the office that American religion had historically taken upon itself (the preservation of idiosyncratic sovereignty as an equally viable foundation for a communal vision).19 A New Bible presents an alternative to what Whitman describes in “The Eighteenth Presidency!” (1856), an early political pamphlet, as the sacred but incomplete “covenant of the Republic . . . sworn to by Washington . . . with his hand upon the Bible,” accomplishing what the Revolution had left incomplete because it would not be accomplished solely within the modus of social formation (cp 1319).20 If Whitman has memorably written that “[t]he United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” it must not be forgotten that in the same preface (1855) he refers to that poem as “the great psalm of the republic,” that is, as a sacred poem (pw 2: 434, 437; emphasis added). Recasting Leaves in 1860 as a New Bible allows Whitman to attack the problematic of the one and the many as the central cultural problem for America, not so much to revise the constitutional regime 76 “A Religion Which Is No Religion”

with a religious supplement and to replace it with a new order in which the political is no longer a category, or at least in which the function of the political has been subsumed by a formation that is both literary and theological in character, a text whose generic complexity implies a discourse of wider, more efficacious authority. Much has been written on the influence of contemporary religious revivalism on the inclusiveness of Whitman’s work and on the resonance of Biblical rhetoric and imagery through nineteenth-century American culture generally. Yet little has been said critically about a phenomenon of great interest to any investigation of the documentary and/or the constitutional regime in American literature: the writing of a New Bible,the New American Bible.I refer not to one specific text,but to the mid century deluge of private and institutionally sponsored translations and revisions of the received, Authorized (King James) Version. Idiosyncrasies of translation and redaction aside, these texts are all “new Bibles”: foundational texts which constitute a protocol of relation divergent from, and meant to usurp the institutional status of, that of extant secular and/or religious documents. Within this context, the 1860 edition, which is the next edition after the 1857 notebook entry planning “the New Bible,” appears to be one such essay at an American Bible,a document intended to found a new, scripturally-based social formation. Characterizing the neo-Biblical intention of Leaves of Grass is not simply important for Whitman studies; it is integral to the larger project of evaluating the relation of American literary culture, in its selfannounced foundational period, to documents of institutional status and to sacred as well as secular forms of writing. Understanding what Whitman means by a “New Bible” and what it means to read the 1860 edition as such requires some understanding of what the Bible itself meant both to Whitman and to American culture at large in the mid nineteenth century — what status it possessed in relation to secular institutions like the American government and what possibilities it offered as a viable social and political alternative to those institutions. Politically, of course, the 1840s and 1850s were consumed by debates over how to resolve the logical contradiction of the nation’s founding documents: namely, the conflict between the Constitution’s Fugitive Slave clause, the Declaration’s equality principle, and the Articles’ defense of states’rights.But among the solutions offered,a good many were nonpolitical; at least, not all of them addressed the problems of walt whitman 77

state government in its own secular terms. Many Americans turned to the Bible and to religion in the hopes of accomplishing the work at which secular texts and institutions were failing: the reconstruction of relations on an unmediated or egalitarian basis, either textual or sectarian. Yet the character of new religious sects and communities formed between 1830 and 1850 (including Mormonism,Oneidan perfectionism,and Seventh-Day Adventism) must be differentiated from those which had gone before.21 As I have already noted, by the 1840s the de-authorization of the King James Version was almost a fait accompli: German-born Higher Criticism had discredited the Authorized Version’s claims to historical accuracy, and the number of private translations was growing exponentially.22 The decades following the Second Great Awakening saw the decline of America’s established or predominant religion (Congregationalism) and the rise in prominence and membership of previously minor sects (Methodists, Baptists, and Disciples of Christ). Thus, while theological authority had come to seem, at least to Whitman, incompatible with the hierarchical and dogmatic character of institutions, it nonetheless appeared impossible to distribute identity without some structural or creedal basis. Paradoxically, the multiplication of sects (and thus of claims of privileged relation to a transcendent term) which had drawn the status of the transcendent term into doubt also rendered its reconstruction more critical. Redeeming the unrepresented may be Whitman’s chief poetic and political objective.But that objective requires the redemption of something more dubious, problematic, and perhaps unattainable: theological authority.Whitman is fully aware of the various institutional causes in which theology has been enlisted, “the paraphernalia ? of modern worship, [the] sects, churches, pews, sermons, [and] observances . . . [that] have nothing to do with real religion” (nupm 6: 2091–2092). But just as the Disciples of Christ cast off ecclesiastical doxa in favor of sola scriptura (“the Bible alone”), so does Whitman reject institutional attempts to regulate the relation of the many to the one. This is not to say that mediation can be dispensed with: when the poet writes that “what passes as the authority of the Bible . . .[must] surely,surely go,” his objection is not to mediation per se but rather to the restriction of the right to mediate to one text,the Authorized Version (nupm 6: 2091). So while theological authority should be disestablished, Whitman asserts just as strongly that it cannot exist outside some social or liter78 “A Religion Which Is No Religion”

ary formation (a nation or a poem) that distributes it. “The people,” he writes in the 1872 Preface, must begin to learn that religion, (like poetry,) is something far, far different from what they supposed. It is, indeed, too important to the power and perpetuity of the New World to be consign’d any longer to the churches, old or new, Catholic or Protestant — Saint this, or Saint that. It must be consign’d henceforth to democracy en masse, and to literature.It must enter into the poem of the nation. It must make the nation. (pw 2: 462–463)23 As for Poe, for Whitman poetry has the power to “make the nation.” And the recuperation of something like theological authority is integral to theorizing the right relation of particulars to one another and of the whole (the state) to its foundations. Yet the redemption of theological authority without mediation seems virtually impossible. When in the 1855 Preface Whitman declares categorically that “[t]here will soon be more priests” to mediate the individual’s relation to the divine, he immediately qualifies the revolutionary force of his words by adding, “A new order shall arise” and “take . . . [the priests’] place”: “they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest. The churches built under their umbrage shall be the churches of men and women. Through the divinity of themselves shall the kosmos and the new breed of poets be interpreters of men and women and of all events and things” (lg 729).24 The centrality of this paradox to Whitman’s project — the mediation of nonrestricted identity — is captured in his perhaps best known apothegm: “The priest departs, the divine literatus comes” (pw 2:365).25 The question, though, is whether sacerdotal functions can be assumed without the more negative consequences of institutionalization, whether a priesthood of men and women, no matter how inclusive its congregation, does not still constitute a hierarchy.26 Whitman’s answer may be paraphrased as “yes, but it cannot be helped.” The advancement made by the 1860 Leaves is the realization that the mediatory structures necessary to the unification of disparates do not have to negate the value or scope of the new social identity being distributed. For Whitman, the new religion is to be an institution which is not an institution, meaning that it is not administered by an invested few,a class administering its own hierarchical distinction.27 Whitman expressed this paradox most succinctly in an walt whitman 79

1857 notebook entry, “Founding a new American / Religion (? No Religion),” that is, a religion which is no religion, a rite which is practicable without being regulated (nupm 6: 2046).28 What Whitman attempts to forge with his New Bible is a protocol of relation that hovers between being an actualized and a purely theoretical state of affairs. Whitman may adopt an ambivalent stance toward formal institutions, rejecting all sectarian, doctrinal restrictions; still, the new housing of religion — whether nation-as-poem or poetry-asscripture — cannot escape its own creedal and therefore mediatory status. Although the model of discourse offered in Leaves’ third edition may not finally be any more exempt from the necessity of sacrifice than the models of previous editions, the sacrifice may in fact be less debilitating. After examining these previous models and after looking more closely at the wider cultural project of the New Bible, this chapter concludes by turning to “So Long!” — the last poem in the 1860 edition — as an experiment in the modeling of the commensurability of persons on the basis of less costly incommensurabilities: the sacrifice of immediacy, intranslatability, and silence for moments of mediation,translation,and a comprehensible social presence.29 “So Long!” suggests that free, open, unmediated relation is available, paradoxically, only by way of mediation, by disruption and fragmentation — only by admitting hierarchy as being on some level ineluctable.30

i As a New Bible, Leaves of Grass performs as the foundational text for new protocols of relation which are funded by an alternative (in this case, nonsecular) institutional basis for social formation. And yet as the exemplar of that protocol, “Song of Myself ” #5 supplements the forms of already existing institutions: the Church, in its imitation of the Nicene Creed (“Credo in unum Deum”31); and the literary, in its rehearsal of the medieval dialogue between body and soul.32 “Song” #5 illustrates not only the way in which nineteenthcentury American literary texts model themselves on canonical sacred writings (the Bible among them) but also the tendency of scripturally mimetic texts to be simultaneously invocatory and parodic of their model. In this case, the poem hovers between being a liturgical parody (“the peace and knowledge that pass all the argu80 “A Religion Which Is No Religion”

ment of the earth”33) and being itself a liturgical speech-act (“I believe in you my soul”). It should be noted in advance that, in emphasizing the violence of this passage instead of its superficial tonal and erotic tenderness, I am definitely reading against the grain.34 What is most striking about “Song” #5 is not its sensuality or expansiveness but its violence. This is the unmitigated violence that unity requires, the destruction of the very basis of social formation that the institution of equality demands: I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you, And you must not be abased to the other. Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best, Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice. I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning, How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me, And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart, And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet. Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth, And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own, And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own, And that all men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, And that a kelson of the creation is love, And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields, And brown ants in the little wells beneath them, And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap’d stoned, elder mullein and poke-weed. (lg 32–33) The lesson is simple: social mediation involves bodies and words whose inevitable difference constitutes the beginnings of hierarchy. walt whitman 81

Artificial inequalities like slavery can be abolished, but the inherently hierarchical nature of representation means that the equality of persons and the openness of discourse will always be qualified. Here, plunging the tongue into the heart is meant to overcome the need for those qualifications; the gesture is an enactment of immediacy, of unmediated discourse and absolute equality. If the gesture is violent, it is logically so, for two reasons: (1) it physicalizes statements about successful communication which are equally violent, such as “I took that to heart” or “Your words pierced me to the heart”; and (2) it violates the distance we usually enjoy from the notion or experience of a speech-act subject to the condition of perfect presence. One may, as most readings of this passage do, draw back from the violence with which Whitman rewrites models of discourse and perception,but not before savoring the frisson generated by the vertiginous prospect of the dissolution of persons. As an actualization of what an intended state of affairs would look like, “Song” #5 satisfies the ambition of unmediated relation, introducing an immediacy to equality that we see as violative.But Whitman is simply catering to a familiar, peculiarly American fantasy: the fantasy of immediacy, which feeds the integrative mania of Eureka and symbolically underwrites the constitutional regime in the form of e pluribus unum.35 The final stanza of section 5 presents a visionary experience,that is,an enhancement of perception that produces a successful perceptual change, a realization (a being made aware) of the humble. The bosom kiss relieves and renders transcendent (in short, perfects) the mind previously subject to hierarchy and opens it to a democracy of objects like “brown ants,” “mossy scabs of the worm fence,” and “poke-weed.” This alteration of perspective marks the poem as an unanticipated success, a passage of discourse discovery. But the poem’s success comes not merely in the initiation of relation without the mediation of bodies; it comes also in the abolition of words (which signify by difference) and the initiation of subvocal discourse (which signifies by no difference). “Only the lull . . . the hum of your valvèd voice” evokes a new vocabulary consisting strictly of heart-words. The unarticulated “hum” is the “only” word left in a nondifferentiated language,a form of discourse previous to,or at least beyond, the articulation of the languages that separate us.36 Without words,the implication runs,communication is immediate; discourse, transparent. Miscomprehension is no more, because interpretation 82 “A Religion Which Is No Religion”

(the need to comprehend and the opportunity to fail to do so) is no more. Sense is immanent. Whitman’s success is not unmitigated, though: the wordless hum may abolish hierarchy, but in critical hindsight,as well as the hindsight each successive edition of Leaves affords Whitman on the previous one, the transgressive force of the bosom kiss problematizes body and soul relations to an unacceptable extent. It kills. Ironically, what is destructive about the institution of equality is its actualization; as long as it remains in the subjunctive of the literary, it can still be thought of as having a constructive potential. As a poet, Whitman must estimate the cost of ideal states of affairs, and, in the final accounting, he finds unity realized as equality too costly for a distributive model of identity.No state,no individual,could withstand receiving a new identity which liberates by demolishing the material and perceptual constructs that house identity. Unsurprisingly, then, editions after the first one find Whitman more willing to countenance inequality, indeed, more interested in doing so because he has begun to realize not just the encroachment equality makes on what is for him the supreme good (the Union) but the ways in which inequality facilitates unity,in which differentiation, mediation, and interruption stitch together the unity of the many to the extent that they compromise the equality of the few, by denying those few access to the whole. As he writes in the 1876 Preface, one of the three “points . . . [he] seek[s] to make . . . again and again” in Leaves is that the vital political mission of the United States is,to practically solve and settle the problem of two sets of rights — the fusion, through compatibility and junction of individual State prerogatives, with the indispensable necessity of centrality and Oneness — the national identity power — the sovereign Union, relentless, permanently comprising all, and over all, and in that never yielding an inch. (pw 2: 465–466; emphasis added) And in 1876,as before,Whitman considered America’s “political mission” as its, and therefore his own, poetic mission. But it is hard to imagine a starker, less labile model of integration: for all this passage’s soothing talk of “compatibility” and the respect to be paid to “State prerogatives,” “the sovereign Union” still towers “over all,” “relentless,” “never yielding an inch.” If this postwar portrait modeling of unity strikes us as sinister, almost totalitarian (despite the underwalt whitman 83

standable urgency the war and a botched Reconstruction had given to any project of unification), in 1856 Whitman’s life and art have not yet faced the crisis that would make severer demands on individuals trying to forge a social formation, and make openness a less viable option for such formations. If the core problem of the 1855 Leaves (as exemplified in “Song” #5) is the apparently insoluble fact that absolute unity, unity realized as equality, is too costly, too consuming (it consumes the individual, uses up the very difference, the body, that is to be made equal), the core problem of the 1856 edition is how to find a stable, durable (or at least endurable) median between the extremes of unity without difference and distinction without equality. In the 1856 Leaves we find a Whitman who has not yet given over to the shriller cry for unadulterated unity which characterizes the 1876 Preface and which comes out poetically in that edition’s turn to an increasingly disembodied spiritualism.37 In 1856 Whitman still strives to attend to equality, to a multiplicity of details equally. The poetic problem for Whitman, in preparing the second edition, is that of redeeming the previously unrepresented (which he does by extending representation to the excluded middle, the middle class) and yet preserving the wholeness of the state and the composition. A poem like “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” clarifies the way in which the many, or the usual, becomes vivid and is invited into representation, the way in which the poem is unified by Whitman’s ability to produce a text that preserves the specificity of particulars but still achieves a compositional whole.From one line to the next,Whitman shifts without apparent effort between the particular and the general, grasping the detailed and the universal in a single line, extending to disparates the same lucid light of representation.Section 9,which concludes the poem, best exemplifies what I am talking about: Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebbtide! Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves! Gorgeous clouds of the sunset! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me! Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers! Stand up, tall masts of Mannahatta! stand up, beautiful hills of Brooklyn! 84 “A Religion Which Is No Religion”

Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers! Suspend here and everywhere, eternal float of solution! Gaze, loving and thirsting eyes, in the house or street or public assembly! Sound out, voices of young men! loudly and musically call me by my nighest name! Live, old life! play the part that looks back on the actor or actress! Play the old, the role that is great or small according as one makes it! Consider, you who peruse me, whether I may not in unknown ways be looking upon you; Be firm, rail over the river, to support those who lean idly, yet haste with the hasting current; Fly on, sea-birds! fly sideways, or wheel in large circles high in the air; Receive the summer sky, you water, and faithfully hold it till all downcast eyes have time to take it from you! Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any one’s head, in the sunlit water! Come on, ships from the lower bay! pass up or down, whitesail’d schooners, sloops, lighters! Flaunt away, flags of all nations! be duly lower’d at sunset! Burn high your fires, foundry chimneys! cast black shadows at nightfall! cast red and yellow light over the tops of the houses! Appearances, now or henceforth, indicate what you are, You necessary film, continue to envelop the soul, About my body for me, and your body for you, be hung our divinest aromas, Thrive, cities — bring your freight, bring your shows, ample and sufficient rivers, Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual, Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting. You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers, We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate henceforward,

walt whitman 85

Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves from us, We use you, and do not cast you aside — we plant you permanently within us, We fathom you not — we love you — there is perfection in you also, You furnish your parts toward eternity, Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul. (lg 164–165; emphases added) The poet calls on the multiplicitous and the transient, confident of being able, like the overarching sky, to “faithfully hold it all till downcast eyes [of not just ferry passengers but readers of this poem] have time to take it.” By its inclusion, the material is rendered both evanescent (“spiritual”) and enduring (“lasting”). Appearances are, on the one hand, called on to be transparent (“indicate what you are”) and give way to immanence and, on the other, accepted as a mediatory “film.” The payoff of extending representation as Whitman does is that mediation, which we think of as contributing to the problematic character of the one and the many, ends up resolving the problem. No longer the foothold of hierarchy, mediation becomes “our divinest” part, which is to say, it connects us to the divine, to the unrestricted community of selves. In realizing the unity of materially embedded souls, in achieving representationally what seems impossible when dealing with the recalcitrant materials of construction in the real world, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”solves what is not only a federal problem (unity without hegemony) but also a poetic problem: assessing the limits of representation and finding some means, if not of transcendence, then of compensation.38 Mediation is praiseworthy in this case because it is necessary for the maintenance of social reality: just as the ferry physically connects two islands (Manhattan and Long Island, which contains Brooklyn), just as the experience of riding the ferry provides a common reference for everyone that rides it or reads Whitman’s account of it, so does mediation act as go-between for persons in the present as well as over time (“in the house or street or public assembly,” “men and women generations after me”). The closing stanza asserts that use, or representation, does not preclude continuation and presence, nor does it limit capacity: “We use you [referring to 86 “A Religion Which Is No Religion”

“Appearances”], and do not cast you aside — we plant you permanently within us, / We fathom you not — we love you.” Whitman is ecstatic in his expansiveness because he has discovered, in the moment of reconstructing identity,that loving and incorporating others — whether objects or persons — does not entail “fathom[ing]” or figuring them out, emptying them of content.39 Calling upon the cities to “thrive,” to produce more bodies, makes perfect sense, because Whitman has found the representational space to hold them all (just as the water “hold[s]” the “summer sky”), to confer identity upon them and render them persons. Using the word incorporating in discussing “Brooklyn Ferry” might seem problematic for an analysis like mine, since it has implications that would thicken or run counter to my argument. Incorporating is undeniably what Whitman is doing (or attempting to do) at this point in the poem, and that rightness could be construed as undermining what I am claiming about the catalogues as mediation. Incorporation is what the poem attempts to do, and that is why the poem ultimately does not work, because something cannot mediate (act as go-between between one or more persons, between a poem and a person) if that something is by definition incorporative. If the selves with whom we are to connect, the objects to which we are to have access equally and without end, have been incorporated in this text, it is hard to imagine how those selves and objects can be mediatory,can connect us to anything,isolated as they are in a scene and a moment that has been rendered static. Similarly, if “we plant . . . permanently within us” “the summer sky” and all other “[a]ppearances,” then how are we ourselves to connect with other human beings, who are like us ravenously storing up “[a]ppearances”? Is there anything left, any interstitial element, to mediate between us? One could object that worrying about such matters is unnecessary. Of course, the poem is still able to mediate; or, depending upon one’s position on these matters, the poem is no more able to mediate than any other poem. It consists simply of words arranged on paper, and has or does not have the connective power Whitman consistently claims for Leaves (as in “So Long!”: “This is no book, / Who touches this, touches a man”).40 Nonetheless, the conflict between medium and message in this case, between incorporation and mediation, is a sticking point. It exposes the only drawback to Whitman’s expansion of the capacity for perwalt whitman 87

sonhood: even as the textual realization of a metaphysical intention (e pluribus unum), the extension of representation and thus unification remains a nontransitive, one-sided affair. The model of identity Whitman arrives at is accumulative without being distributive, and therefore viable only as a model of aesthetic or compositional integrity — not as a reconstructive account of social formation. For all the radicalness of Whitman’s interlocutive style (accosting “you” as if that pronoun can refer simultaneously to those reading the poem in 1856, “[a] hundred years hence,” and all the years in between), the poem effects no guarantee of “[t]he others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them, / The certainty of others” (lg 160). It may seem unfair to say that naturally Whitman fails to incorporate us in the poem; he wrote the poem then, we read it now. But it is not so unfair, since the poem does incorporate. What it incorporates, however, are mere representatives. They cannot get out; we cannot get in. If we consider exactly how “Brooklyn Ferry” goes about producing unity and equality,its shortcoming as a model of distributive identity becomes immediately clear. Unity is produced by the standardization of experience: although Whitman alludes to diversity and detail (the “impalpable sustenance of me from all things” and “my smallest sights and hearings”),the poem contains only two of the poet’s trademark catalogues, and even those (sections 3 and 9) train themselves on the sights and sounds associated with one particular locale (the ferry). This stands in stark contrast to the catalogues of the 1855 Leaves, especially sections 15 and 33 of “Song of Myself,” the social and geographical panoramas crossing lines of class, race, occupation, gender, and place, transcending but simultaneously federating the diacritics of experience.Although “Brooklyn Ferry”also deals with experience, with appearances and materiality, the fact is that all these become mere images, imported into what Whitman calls in line 7 a “well-joined scheme,myself disintegrated,every one disintegrated and yet part of the scheme,” what Betsy Erkkila characterizes as a “spiritual and unitary scheme [by which Whitman] seeks to deprive the physical and social world of its potentially corrosive [and,I would add,divisive] power”(146).Despite its reliance on fairly concrete “rituals of ordinariness” to weave a “pattern of connectedness and continuity throughout time,” the poem seeks really to empty out the physical world with its instability and mediation (“the old knot of con88 “A Religion Which Is No Religion”

trariety” [line 71]), to evacuate the space in which social transformation must occur but which has proven too resistant and even obstructive to reconstruction (Erkkila 144, 142).41 By far, though, the clearest sign of the poem’s essential failure to execute the kind of reconstruction of personhood for which Whitman was aiming is ironically a moment of apparent success. With characteristic braggadocio, Whitman asks in section 8, What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face? Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you? We understand then do we not? What I promis’d without mentioning it, have you not accepted? What the study could not teach — what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplish’d, is it not? (lg 164) But are these questions purely rhetorical? Is Whitman sure what he “promis’d without mentioning it” has been accomplished? If he is alluding to the distribution of a new social identity — which he has not spoken of in this poem — then it has not been accomplished.The problem is that unity as it is produced here involves the storing up of identity but does not allow for its distribution, and it is this difficulty that,by the logic of my argument,drives Whitman to reformulate relations in the subsequent editions of Leaves. Poetry is the only speech left to the poet to perform work that is not simply necessary but crucial to life. The reconstruction of state and individual identity has perhaps never been as much literally a matter of life and death as it was in America just before and after the Civil War: secession made unification the critical task; Reconstruction made it the dissemination of the concept of unity. As a poet who, in the 1855 Preface,purported to “absorb”his country,Whitman bears down even harder on these tasks in the postwar edition of Leaves (lg 731). In the wake of a war that had claimed 620,000 lives,nearly three-fifths of them in the name of the Union, the hard problem of the one and the many was a problem Whitman felt he must solve, or die. This is not to frivolously psychoanalyze Whitman but rather to portray accurately what he saw to be at stake for American social and individual identity in the walt whitman 89

crisis of unity. Death is, in fact, what the resolution of that crisis ends up requiring. It is toward the extinction — the rendering no longer inevitable — of the sacrificial model that Melville,James,and even Poe are working. Whitman cannot afford it. In the fourth edition of Leaves (1867), which incorporated the war poems of Drum-Taps (1865–1866), Whitman is aiming for a middle ground between the kinds of solutions proposed in “Song of Myself ” #5 and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Since he views the unification of disparates as primarily a problem of distribution or equivalence, he is seeking a protocol of relation that strikes some compromise between a social unity that kills those who would receive new identities and a compositional unity that hordes identity without being able to release it. It should be pointed out again that these are not characterizations the editions themselves might offer but critiques of what those editions perform from the vantage of later editions, in this case, from the standpoint of what concerns Whitman takes up, and what new strategies he finds for dealing with old concerns,in the war poetry (published in 1865 and 1866,intercalated in Leaves in 1867).The solution Whitman arrives at in “When Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865), his elegy for Lincoln, is the ironic distribution of identity to the many that derives from the sacrifice of the one, the principle of the center. In this case, the assassination of Lincoln, the exemplary citizen, solves the distributive problem of moving from the general to the particular. “Lilacs” offers integration by way of qualification of the principle of the center, the death or disintegration of which allows the circulation of identity and permits the experience of unity on a fragmentary, momentary basis — which is, for Whitman, the only kind of unity available in the world of the real. It is not the second best, accepted in lieu of a more complete unity; it is, furthermore, the kind of unity that is available to all, which is a condition extant protocols of relation were unable to fulfill. A word should be said here about the theory and provenance of sacrifice, so as to distinguish the sense in which Lincoln’s death is read by Whitman as a sacrifice from the senses in which it is not. Literal sacrifice, typically of a strictly anthropological provenance, involves a premeditated instance of a ritualized, traditionally public act of the destruction of a life (animal, vegetable, or human) whose rendering up is deemed valid and redemptive to the extent that its loss will be felt.42 As Freud points out in Totem and Taboo, the sacri90 “A Religion Which Is No Religion”

fice’s efficacy depends also on its being offered in common, as well as the sacrificial animal’s being considered “of the same blood” as “the sacrificing community, its god, and the sacrificial animal” (911). In other words, sacrifice signifies in this context only insofar as it constitutes a kind of suicide, the voluntary murder of one’s own, the giving up of a member of the family which is bound together that much more, relegitimated and recognized as a family in the cynosure of god and community. There is also the political or ideological application of sacrifice: Lincoln was not actually slain on an altar, but he could be seen as one last, though unintended and unfortunate, martyr to what by his assassination became that much more of a sacred cause.Finally, we have the mythic or poetic use of sacrifice: Whitman stages Lincoln as sacrificial victim, whose death should be mourned as saddening (it deprives us of a magnetic presence) but not unjust or unnecessary (it supplies us, the unrepresented and underrepresented, with a presence whose compensation far outweighs that single though significant loss). Making a distinction between literal and poetic sacrifice might appear to draw an analogous line between efficacious and nonefficacious sacrifice, between the kind of result anticipated from one specific act as opposed to another. But for Whitman, the effect of poetic sacrifice, or a murder read as sacrifice, is the same as that of literal sacrifice; that is, it has subsumed the kind of real efficacy that animal sacrifice once possessed but has long since lost. Sacrifice is characteristically internecine, involving the exchange (given by Whitman a quasi-soteriological timbre) of the life of one for the good of the many. The solutions proposed by Whitman are not, then, merely poetic solutions, in the sense that poetic solutions might be construed to have no chance of producing results in real-world institutions and lives. My reading takes seriously Whitman’s sometimes exasperating (and so, understandably suspicious) confidence in the poetic production of such results. The issue is not whether he did or did not bring about certain changes in the world outside the covers of Leaves of Grass but that he was sure he could.Whitman never seriously posits the idea that what happens poetically happens socially at the same time. Nowhere does he say that social and political change are useless,that they can be accomplished only in the space of poetry; poetry is, however, the most potent instrument for the reconstruction of representational life, its alteration on axes (mental, conceptual, individwalt whitman 91

ual) that extend into and may logically affect spaces in which representation might be thought to have consequences that are somehow more real (perhaps because they impact more than one person, or groups of persons with inherently conflicting interests). The differentiation between what is true in the poem and what is true in the world lies, finally, in the lapse between a moment of discourse discovery and its being taken up as a social formation. Whether a praxis becomes instituted is never guaranteed.That is up to those other than the poet; it is up to the many for whose representational life Whitman is poetically working.43 Within the context of Whitman’s notion of the extent of the relation between the poetic and the political, my key claim is that Whitman’s proposed solutions are contemplated as producing alteration in the ways in which real persons form and structure alliances and unions, the terms on which they negotiate the requirements and benefits of personhood. Instead of offering models of resolving the oneand-the-many problem that are not applicable to a real political sphere,Whitman models relations on criteria that have been excluded from or simply omitted from the official American political (that is, constitutional) paradigm: the scriptural, the disenfranchised. Because the merely political is understood by Whitman, among others, as being no longer viable for the administering of a social identity consistent with the Declaration’s equality principle44 — because the slavery question seemed to have enervated congressional power to resolve it (witness the incendiary result of failed palliatives like the Wilmot Proviso, the Fugitive Slave Law, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act) — the curing of social order must be accomplished by other means than the political, in this case, by the literary taking upon itself the obligation (and therefore hopefully the institutional power) of both the religious and the political. Whitman’s solutions are emphatically applicable, though not in the sense that Lincoln’s death, understood in some symbolic manner, automatically restructures the franchise. Whitman’s myth of Lincoln as sacrificial victim, causing, in the poem, something like a rising of the waters, is not to be dismissed as just another flop in the political realm, or if so, only to the extent that any document, any act, is a flop until it is circulated, adopted, until its words are translated into its readers’ or spectators’ minds, words, and acts. 92 “A Religion Which Is No Religion”

Section 7 of “Lilacs” makes perfectly clear Whitman’s acceptance of the inevitability of the sacrificial model for social and identity formation. And he accepts it not only because it is necessary; he embraces it because, as section 7 demonstrates, the reward is immense: (Nor for you, for one alone, Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring, For fresh as the morning, thus would I chant a song for you O sane and sacred death. All over bouquets of roses, O death, I cover you with roses and early lilies, But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first, Copious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes, With loaded arms I come, pouring for you, For you and the coffins all of you O death.) (lg 331) Death, surprisingly, produces “copious” life. Lincoln’s death may be the occasion for the poem, but the poet tells us that he is not mourning for Lincoln (“Nor for you alone”). In a sense he is not mourning at all, in this “Victorious song, [this] death’s outlet song” (lg 337). For the flowers are no emblem of life that has been lost; they are the frank equivalent,in all their multiplicity,of the life that has been gained — the profound distributive capability that the sacrifice of the one has given to the poet, as well as the pluralization and circulation of personhood which that sacrifice has granted to the many. There is, one might say,more room in the community of identity.There is more manyness to go around. One cannot overemphasize the sheer plenitude (“All over bouquets of roses”; “ I cover you with roses and lilies”; “Copious I break”; “With loaded arms” [emphases added]). We are certainly in the presence of manyness,inundated with particulars.But neither is there any contradiction in saying that these roses,these persons Lincoln has left behind (persons whose value he has produced by leaving), are also one. The many are one in this case because they sing in the unison of collective, social action: “pouring for you, / For you and the coffins all of you O death.” That integrity is physicalized in the parentheses that enclose section 7, uniting its stanzas, embracing like arms the flowers the poet bears. But parentheses can only walt whitman 93

insinuate what Whitman has done so graphically: he has produced a whole the integrity of which is inevitable. The many cannot be anything other than one when they are produced from one in the first place, when, as the poem’s numerical trajectory demonstrates, Whitman gets from “one alone” to “all of you” simply by multiplying one into many. As a strategy for generalization, pluralization marks a breakthrough in relation not only to Whitman’s earlier work but to previous attempts to resolve the problematic of unity which relied typically on either abstraction (Plotinus’s Enneads, the United States motto e pluribus unum) or brute reduction (Poe’s Eureka). Whereas abstraction produces hierarchy, pluralization preserves individuality. As an experiment in modeling alternative social formations, “Lilacs” reaps the reward of viewing the relation of the one and the many as a relation of plural individualities, rather than of the particular to the abstract (or the general).Pluralization allows for the extension of relations in directions that the abstract-particular does not — the many establishing alliances among one another, defining and connecting groups that would perhaps go unrecognized or not exist at all under the terms of the strictly vertical (and implicitly subordinate) relation that each particular has to the same center (the general, the inaccessible abstract that is always of another order). Rather than abstracting difference or eliding it altogether, the poem depicts the nation as a compositional whole whose constituents are nevertheless distinctly defined: in “the large unconscious scenery of my land,” the poet can still discern “the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with its meals and minutia of daily usages” (lg 333, 334). But this is not the hoarded plenitude of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” The flowers are broken off and offered with the intent of circulation. Though it may seem obvious, the flowers do not circulate without the coffin: just as the benefit is inextricable from the sacrifice, so is the surfeit of personhood now in circulation dependent on there being breaks, lacunae, fragmentation. Flowers grow, the land is invigorated, but only in the wake of the coffin as it travels from Washington to Springfield,Illinois: “Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the endless grass, / Passing the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprisen . . . / Night and day journeys a coffin” (lg 330). Without the coffin there would be no flowers to circulate, no pluralization of identity and multiplication of 94 “A Religion Which Is No Religion”

life. The Christological tone of this image (the wheat “uprisen” from its “shroud”) reinforces Whitman’s recasting of Leaves of Grass as a New Bible and helps us to understand what the 1860 edition has to teach us: namely, what is added to writing by calling a book of poems a Bible. What the neo-Biblical adds is that it functions to secure social formation on its structure or system. By structure, I mean the adoption of formal patterns associated with scripture: for the first time, in the third edition, Whitman separates what had been one continuous poem (in the 1855 text) or distinct poems (in 1856) into “clusters” or books, within which he marks off “chapters” (individual poems) and, within those, “verses” that outnumber and do not correspond to the section divisions of later editions.45 By system, I mean the theoretical concerns that may or may not be taken to inhere in these structural features as concerns of theological discourse, such as the production of social unity by reference to the transcendental term and the mediation of that unity through the translation of relation to the one into relations between particulars. The resurrection image of the wheat “uprisen” from its “shroud” is significant in yet another way. Christ rose alone. Here we have a mass resurrection, the bringing into representation and into social formation multiple individualities; the sprouting stalks are delineated by the adjectives “each” and “every” rather than the blanketing “all,” which would be less representative, less attentive to the many individually. This is not to say that the integration denoted by “all” is not also achieved in the same moment as the recognition of pluralities. If, as Whitman wrote in his lecture on the “Death of Abraham Lincoln” (1879), the “grand deaths of the race . . . are [the nation’s] most important inheritance-value,” then Lincoln’s supreme legacy is “Unionism,” “a new virtue . . . but the foundation and tie of all . . . [which] he seal’d with his life” (pw 2: 509; pw 1: 98; emphasis added).46 This explains why Whitman brings flowers “to coffins all,” why the flowers are “for you and the coffins all of you O death” (emphases added): by rereading Lincoln’s murder as sacrifice, Whitman has rendered that one death as ultimately efficacious.47 Because Lincoln’s death fulfills the sacrifice requirement for us all, the death of the one becomes, or serves instead of, the death of the many.Lincoln’s coffin is not the only one in the procession,then; traveling alongside are the coffins for us all,the coffins we would have had to one day occupy if Lincoln had not died for us, had not relieved us walt whitman 95

of the obligation of sacrifice. After all, death is what Whitman is covering, literally smothering, with flowers; death is what is being buried in “the coffins”: “all of you O death” (emphasis added). Analogous to the Christological topos of the death of death,48 the image here of burying not just the dead but death itself is Whitman’s way of reading an idea that goes back to Homer’s Ode to Hermes onto American “Religious Democracy”: the purchasing of symbolic life by organic death; the assurance that the second death, which is meaning-death or symbolic death, will not occur (pw 2: 410).49 By the time he wrote “Lilacs,” Whitman knew too well what that sacrifice could look like, in all its extremity. As a nurse in Civil War military hospitals,he had felt as if he were watching the wholesale sacrifice of a generation: These three years [spent nursing in the hospitals] I consider the greatest privilege and satisfaction . . . and, of course, the most profound lesson of my life. I can say that in my ministerings I comprehended all,whoever came in my way,northern or southern,and slighted none. It arous’d and brought out and decided the true ensemble and extent of the States. While I was with wounded and sick in thousands of cases from the New England States, and from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and from Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and all the Western States, I was with more or less from all the States, North and South, without exception. (pw 1: 113)50 Imagining himself as comprehending all, he sadly finds himself able only to comfort. He can hold hands, bring presents and fruit to the sick and dying young soldiers,read from the Bible,but he cannot stop the necessity of death. And although Lincoln died after the war and so did not literally end it by dying,that is exactly what Whitman reads back onto that terrible moment — though hardly with the intention of obliterating the deaths of those young men, of suggesting they sacrificed nothing. They lost much, but their sacrifice was not, representationally speaking,effective enough.They were,more exactly,not enough (in the scheme of social formation) to be effective; they were the many,and the many were dying every day,whether by chattel slavery, minié ball, or disenfranchisement. The one always counts more than the many. Whitman knew that. To free up personhood, the one, or some part of it, must die. Since that part can obviously not (for 96 “A Religion Which Is No Religion”

Whitman, at least) be the Union, it would have to be some representative, something so closely identified with the Union that its extinction would seem like the end even when it was in actuality the beginning. Lincoln’s death provided the perfect figural substitute; he could serve, the poet hoped, as the ram whose death would save Isaac (the Union). He hoped it would end the need for any further attrition of identity, both for the sake of the many and for the sake of the nation they needed to rebuild as one. In contrast to “Song of Myself ” #5, “Lilacs” is a fully anticipated passage of discourse discovery: the multiplication and circulation of the value of persons is possible only because the slain president serves (to return to the words of Whitman’s lecture-eulogy) as “conservator of [the Union] to the future. He was assassinated — but the Union is not assassinated — ça ira! . . . The soldier drops, sinks like a wave — but the ranks of the ocean eternally press on. Death does its work, obliterates a hundred,a thousand . . .but the Nation is immortal”(pw 1: 98–99). Whitman’s repetition of the word “but” in these sentences is meant to connote triumph over adverse conditions,and yet the logic of “Lilacs”suggests that he need not try so hard,that the victory comes about automatically. In this light, the word “but” becomes a condensed, irrevocable mark of causality; the passage should read: Lincoln was assassinated,and therefore the Union is not assassinated; the soldier sinks like a wave, and it is because he does so that the ranks of the ocean eternally press on. The funeral procession that fertilizes the ground, the flowers that weigh down the bier, the exuberance that seems inappropriate in a national state of mourning — all these stem from a discovery which renovates the relation of particulars, the discovery of the “[s]trange” truth that “battles, martyrs, agonies, blood, even assassination, should so condense — perhaps only really, lastingly condense — a Nationality” (pw 2: 508).51 If Lincoln’s death provides Whitman with the symbolic means of solving the problem of the one and the many, it does not do so until 1865. And since Whitman was neither prescient nor so callous as to expect such a tragedy, we should not be surprised at the tremendous energy which he brings to bear on producing in the third edition of Leaves what the first two had failed to produce: a model of identity that is both distributive and minimally mediated; a model of social formation that attempts to satisfy what he has discovered, in the 1855 and 1856 editions, to be the antithetical principles of unity conceived walt whitman 97

of practically (as hierarchy) and unity conceived of ideally (as equality).52 The 1860 edition offers what is certainly the most ambitious model out of any we have examined so far: in this case, the model is not contained in a single poem or a cluster of poems; the model is the text itself, in its entirety. The model is that of the New Bible, a quasiscriptural text that manages to strike a balance between equality and the mediatory structures (institution, hierarchy) which are necessary to distribute it.

ii Whitman was not the only American who found it necessary,either by revising the Authorized Version (the King James Version) or by writing an entirely new Bible, to produce an American Bible and so claim the United States, the New Israel, as the site upon which old covenants — Biblical as well as federal — would be fulfilled. The unprecedented formation of new religious sects between 1830 and 1850, most of which claimed an idiosyncratic understanding of scripture not mediated by dogma, contributed significantly to the decentering of the Authorized Version and, consequently, to the democratization of the transcendental term. A privileged relation to the one (God) became available to everyone,and yet it was at the same unavailable to anyone on extrainstitutional grounds. Writers of new Bibles and sect charters faced the same problem as the founding fathers: how to institute equality, how to unify persons on the basis of equal value other than through mediatory institutional devices. The pressing question for those who would recuperate some form of theological authority is whether those devices (credos, leadership structures, new Bibles) inevitably amount to hierarchy, or whether the structure of unity may actually be compromised in favor of the value of persons. For those who chose to produce new Bibles as their solution to the one-and-the-many problem,the greatest difficulty was distribution — both in the literal sense of distributing multiple copies of a uniform, foundational text, and in the symbolic sense of translating, of making one text (whether the Authorized Version or not) speak to its many readers. As the history of American Bible societies makes clear, the distribution and the translation of Bibles has served privatizing motives as often as universalizing ones. In Whitman’s hands, however, the ambiguous strategies of translation and distribution are 98 “A Religion Which Is No Religion”

the means for constructing a distributive model of social identity which is capable of evading the mediatory effect of institutions.53 American Bible translation,revision,and distribution,all of which reached an unmatched peak in the mid 1800s, provided a concrete means of re-theorizing social order by creating a new community, the identity of which was mediated through a single (and often unique) document,so that the value of persons and the physical text itself transcended existing distinctions between states,races,classes,and sects. (Of course, distribution could just as easily create or sharpen such distinctions if sacred texts were distributed selectively, among a limited class or area, or only to members of an already existing sect.) Before 1816, the year the American Bible Society (ABS) was founded in New York, the distribution of Bibles on a wide scale had been unknown. Any group distributing Bibles up to that point had done so on a local level and with limited means. Being a national organization with corporate means, the ABS began to find it possible to realize what Peter Wosh refers to as the “fundamentally new idea” of “Christianiz[ing] the nation” (64). In just four years, the ABS printed and distributed 100,000 Bibles. Over the next four decades, as the Society sought to reach (or rather, create) a nationwide market, Bible recipients came to include immigrants, Confederate soldiers, and slaves.The sole criterion for admission to this new polity was the possession of a Bible. Equality was as available as a book; the resultant union, without limit—and, for once, without differentiation.54 A great part of the impetus for Bible distribution campaigns was the dramatic increase of interest in Bible translation. One cannot overemphasize how remarkable it was that, suddenly, so many people found it necessary, if not imperative, to make new translations of a text that had been accepted in one standard, authorized form — the King James Version (1611) — for over two hundred years. Furthermore, it was not just clerics and academics but lay believers who were calling for and executing new translations. What was being produced were not just scholarly, officially endorsed refinements of a master text, or revisions meant to produce a more authentic and accurate translation.The trend was increasingly toward sectarian and idiosyncratic revisions and retranslations, emphatically private versions of a Bible believers came to see as that much more their own Bible.55 The implications of this trend for social formation are obvious: total fragmentation; individual autonomy at the expense of the walt whitman 99

unity of not only the state but, very often, the sect that a new version was intended to found or establish. But, as a particularly striking episode in Bible translation history shows, translation, like distribution, is potentially as unifying as it is divisive. In 1826 Alexander Campbell, who had founded the Disciples of Christ fifteen years earlier, published a version of the Bible intended to correct and update the language of the King James Version. One of the changes he made ignited a controversy that would last for over forty years. That change was the substitution, in the New Testament, of the word immerse for the word baptize. Campbell bases the alteration on the fact that the words baptize and baptism, which appear in the KJV, are not translations of the original Greek words, baptizo and baptizein, but rather transliterations. The source of what Campbell views as an error is the second-century Latin translation of the Septuagint, which transliterates baptizo into “baptize” instead of using the closest Latin equivalent (immergere, to immerse).56 Linguistic accuracy aside,using “immersion” appealed to Campbell’s nonsectarian instincts by avoiding any exclusive, denominational privilege “baptism” might be taken to lend to Baptists.In the next thirty years,at least eight English immersionist versions and foreign-language translations of the KJV followed suit, inciting both enthusiasm and outrage. In 1835 the ABS refused to print Bibles for Baptist missionaries in Calcutta who, faced with a language that lacked an equivalent for “baptize,”had used the Bengali word for “immerse” rather than transliterate baptizo. Those within the ABS who had been outvoted on the matter,led by Spencer Cone and William Wyckoff, split off in 1836 to form the American and Foreign Bible Society (AFBS). Although formed by pro-immersionists, the AFBS soon became divided between those who favored the practice in foreign translations only and those who wanted to do so only in English. The latter faction, led again by Cone and Wyckoff, broke off in 1850 to start a third organization, the American Bible Union, which published the long-awaited immersionist version (of the New Testament, at least) in 1862–1863. Matthew Conant’s 107-page Appendix to his translation of Matthew demonstrates the length to which immersionists would go, the fervor that had brought them this far. Both immersionists and their opponents deeply appreciated the impact of single words: the implications of translation (especially when a sect’s name is involved), the ability of textual changes to create or dissolve communities and societies.57 Anti-immersionist Baptists claimed they rejected the practice 100 “A Religion Which Is No Religion”

because it was sectarian, but it seems clear that they themselves were acting out of sectarian interests. What the immersionist controversy did for Whitman and his contemporaries was to intensify the problems facing any religious or social formation committed on the one hand to unity (to the idea of one God or one state) and on the other hand to equality (the acceptance of multiple interpretations of that God or state). One problem is that the distribution of identity on an unrestricted basis can be accomplished only through some form of mediation (a New Bible, in this case). In other words, the immediacy of relation hoped for in a more open model of relation will always be qualified simply by being implemented, by the differences that bodies and texts inevitably bring with them.58 The lesson Whitman might be said to have taken away from the tribulations of American Bible societies is the difficulty but the unparalleled importance of coming to terms with the exact nature of institutions — the conditions, requirements, and implications of institutional status. The great discovery of the 1860 Leaves is that the success of any prospective social formation in producing unity or distributing identity rests upon its ability to negotiate the inherently hierarchical character of representation itself.To overcome the stratifying effect of institutionalization, relation would somehow have to defy its own mediatory, static character. The only kind of institution capable of doing that would be one dedicated to its own fragmentation and postponement. It would have to be like Alexander Campbell’s sect, the Disciples of Christ, which was initially dedicated to the merging of all Christian sects in a single, nondenominational form — dedicated, that is, to its own eradication. If the new American religion is to be anything like the new American social formation,that is,an institution that eschews hierarchy, then a model founded on self-refuting claims is ideal; its frangibility would render it capable of generating a structure which is not only open to but also capable of its own revision. In this way, Whitman’s “new American Religion” evades stratification and restriction of access even as habits of relation are implemented and generalized; it is capable always of collapsing back onto itself,of reinitiating and refounding itself like the American Bible Society, thereby harnessing both the strength and the openness of a praxis just being forged. The New Bible is the central element of Whitman’s plan for a new religion, an entirely new theologically grounded institution,that with its own priesthood and its own sacred walt whitman 101

text (Leaves of Grass) proposes, counterintuitively, to mediate unmediated discourse. The means by which Whitman attempts to satisfy this paradoxical objective are also the terms by which he represents its constitutive tension. As in the immersionist controversy, the tension between unity and differentiation is played out in the inclusive and exclusive practices of religious communities — the former represented by immersion, or the dissolution of particulars into a nondifferentiated whole, and the latter by baptism, or the crystallization of one out of the many into a discrete body or sect. The immersionist impulse of Leaves should be familiar from the tongue to heart kiss of “Song” #5. It is true that Whitman retains this impulse: “So Long!” (1860) contains similar moments of realized immediacy, or immersion, moments in which the obstacles to absolute unity (like bodies and institutions) are dissolved. But by contrast with “Song,” “So Long!” sets these moments in opposition to others in which the experience of oneness is mediated, translated, made legible and vocal so that it can be made available,can be distributed to the members of this New Bible’s congregation. Translation and distribution, which served as much as they disrupted the objectives of Bible societies and sectarians, are deployed by Whitman as the ideal kind of mediation, a selfcanceling form of hierarchy that builds a noninstitutional,immediate unity that need not be spoken (the “subvocal hum” of “Song”) on the disparities, the distances across which oneness must be translated, made available in writing to those who, not being one, do not already know it (lg 33). By concluding the 1860 edition with “So Long!” Whitman literally leaves us with the idea that it is only by the sacrifice of unity that unity can be actualized at all. By accepting translation over and against immediacy, baptism over and against immersion, and hierarchy over and against equality, the poet of “So Long!” comes to understand that the latter term of each pair exists only in relation to the other, only within the whole that comprises them both. Before the ultimately efficacious sacrifice of Lincoln’s death (as Whitman rereads it), that sacrifice must be borne by each one of us, by our bodies, by the text, and by the tenuous community of meaning we are able to build across it. As the last poem of the 1860 edition, as well as the next four editions, “So Long!” has the authority of being the last word.59 Yet it is not, perforce, a poem of “conclusion”: “To conclude — I announce 102 “A Religion Which Is No Religion”

what comes after me, / The thought that must be promulged, that all I know at any time suffices for that time only — not subsequent time; / I announce greater offspring, orators, days, and then depart.”60 For the most part, the poem is a rewriting of organic death as symbolic life: ending as beginning, death as birth, and disruption as continuity. Unlike the instant transformation of discourse and self achieved in “Song” #5, the exchange of mediation for immanence is here neither certain nor instantaneous. The reward may not follow hard on the sacrifice, if it does at all. The sacrifice required may be ongoing. This time, shedding the difference of bodies does not render persons unequivocally accessible: Dear friend, whoever you are, here, take this kiss, I give it especially to you — Do not forget me, I feel like one who has done his work — I progress on, The unknown sphere, more real than I dreamed, more direct, darts awakening rays about me — So long! Remember my words — I may again return — I love you — I depart from materials, I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead.61 “I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead” implies that a disembodied Whitman will be present to each reader of Leaves of Grass, in the book itself. But his presence in the text is not assured; he speaks like an ascending Christ who promises no Paraclete or Comforter, or does so only equivocally: “Remember my words — I may again return — I love you — I depart from materials.” Stanza 17 describes an intelligible, mediated state of affairs which has been traded for a less than or barely intelligible one: “So I pass — a little time vocal, visible, contrary, / Afterward, a melodious echo, passionately bent for — death making me undying, / The best of me then when no longer visible — for toward that I have been incessantly preparing” (Leaves of Grass: Facsimile Edition 455).A speaker “made undying”by death hovers unsatisfyingly between the unmediated (the only register in which meaning can be made available to everyone) and the mediated (the only register in which sense can be made to anyone). The “best of me” which is still available is “a melodius echo”; the “vocal” “pass[ing],” available only for “a little time,” we are left with only its “melodius” echo, altered if not embellished, implicitly no longer as reliable as and even less immediate than its original. walt whitman 103

The most perplexing movement in this poem — and a common subject in Whitman criticism — is that by which Whitman is “disembodied,triumphant,dead”and yet reembodied in the book before us.62 Although familiar to most readers of Whitman, the gesture is perhaps misunderstood. The lines “My songs cease — I abandon them, / From behind the screen where I hid, I advance personally” summon up that moment in “Song of Myself ” #6 when the poet assures us with the image of interred bodies growing up from the graves into living grass that “there is really no death,” that death makes no difference.63 “So Long!” makes the more nuanced argument that death, in fact, makes all the difference, that, even though death takes much (it interrupts the familiar, transposing or translating it into a foreign tongue), the potential returns for persons and social formations are immense (it equalizes, it unites across difference).64 When Whitman claims in “So Long!” to come out “[f ]rom behind the screen,” that disclosure has the same self-mitigating force as the claim to “advance personally” (or, as Whitman would later intensify the line, “advance personally solely to you” [lg 505; emphasis added]). Just as the poet claims to make the person immanent but must do so through textual mediation, so does the privileging of the reader who receives Whitman’s “solely,” receives Whitman’s “advance,” undo itself by extending that privilege to anyone who reads this poem.Translation holds a no less complicated status,since what the poet makes available to each reader (“curious enveloped messages”), he does so “personally,” in “whispers” that we must “ben[d] for” and decipher in our personal, nonlinguistic vocabularies (“My songs cease”). Translation allows communication across difference, but as a kind of death (as in “old age . . . meet[s] its translation”), it entails the canceling out of the original text and the possible loss of meaning: “So Long! / I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold, / I announce an old age that shall lightly and joyfully meet its translation.”65 This brings us to what I take to be the import of “So Long!”: Translation is perhaps the only way we can be one. As a species of mediation, translation risks error (either willful or unintentional); it involves fragmentation, the breaking down of a compositional whole so that, as a collection of analogous fragments, the whole may eventually be transmitted.Yet translation only brackets the issue of incommensurability. As W. V. Quine has argued, because no word has an 104 “A Religion Which Is No Religion”

exact foreign equivalent, “uniquely correct translations” do not exist (Honderich 879). The second language version is always an approximation of the original text, and yet, unless we learn the original language, we must accept translation as being more or less commensurable to the original. In the case of the unrestricted relation of persons, or the integration of the many into the one, we do not have the option of learning a second language. In unity, there is no language; in plurality, there are too many languages. We must parse out unity in so many moments of broken speech. Whitman has not said we will all understand, or that we will understand at once. When we do, however, the reward is substantial enough to keep us reading, to continue attempting to translate. In opposition to the word “translation” in “So Long!” stands the word “immerged,” for it is between these poles that Whitman suspends his “true theory of the youth, manhood, womanhood, of The States,”his theorization of social formation and its potential for immanent change.66 Although Whitman uses the word immerge instead of immerse, for argumentative purposes any substantive difference between the two words which come from the same Latin verb (immergere; past participle, immersus) seems negligible. For Whitman, immersion connotes absorption (cf. lg 43, line 299; and lg 166, line 10) and the erasure of the particularizing, sectarian marks that baptism confers in his lexicon (cf. lg 236, line 18; and lg 299, line 108). One meaning of “immersion” is “baptism,” however, and it is on this connection, contested so fiercely among Bible societies, that Whitman plots the volatile course of social formation: O how your fingers drowse me! Your breath falls around me like dew — your pulse lulls the tympans of my ears, I feel immerged from head to foot, Delicious — enough.67 “[I]mmerged from head to foot”evokes its predecessor image in “Song of Myself ” #5 (“[you] reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet” [lg 33]). The consummative moment of the earlier poem is simultaneously embraced and stayed, as the ambiguous “Delicious — enough” implies. Immediacy is at once “enough” and insufficient, because the message is immanent but its meaning is far walt whitman 105

from clear (or, on the other hand, because the meaning is immanent and the message capable of transmitting it, garbled or lost).68 More than a fantasy about his posthumous reception and fame or a critique of the relation of the author’s corpus (both his text and his person) to the market, “So Long!” presents us with an equality-based model of relation, thereby fulfilling the promissory note of the constitutional regime, but can only do so by deferring complete fulfillment, translating some fraction of that equality into another,immediately inaccessible register.That is the difference which death reinstates,the mediation that unrestricted relation invokes, which it must invoke to stave off differentiation and the proliferation of hierarchy. But reinstated difference and deferred realization are not a pis aller, rationalizing curable anomalies; nor are they, as in Eureka, the inequalities endemic to representation and social formation which actually incite re-theorization of the state. Instead, Whitman presents us with a discourse that does not simply maintain itself over time by deferral and incommensurability but whose present operation is funded by its own refutation, whose meaning is disseminated by its own interruption,its translation into registers that are never quite coincident. The idea of translation brings us again to what must remain the central criteriological question for a New Bible: what kind of Bible is it to be, compared with its predecessor texts? As I have already said, Whitman is attempting in 1860 to do what so many of his contemporaries were doing, which is to innovate an American social formation on a basis truer to the constitutional regime than the documents intended to institute its principles and/or truer to some vision of relation that the constitutional regime had failed to imagine or embody in the first place. But how is Whitman’s intent specifically neoBiblical? As the beleaguered history of American Bible societies suggests (and as the title of Peter Wosh’s study of the ABS emphasizes), “spreading the word”was the order of the day for poets like Whitman as well as for minister-scholars like Alexander Campbell, Spencer Cone, William Wyckoff, and Thomas Conant. The phrase distributing the word (by which I mean not just the logistics of doing so but the implications of having done so) serves to name a culturally active problematic in the mid nineteenth century, the answer to which was sought by poets,ministers,and illuminists,through new books,sects, and religions. All of these individuals asked, How does one draw in a community? How does one do so with a text, with one text, with a 106 “A Religion Which Is No Religion”

text that is individual for each yet possesses some core consistent for all? The New Bible is the salient model for the third edition of Leaves not simply because Whitman,in 1857,writes that it is,but also because in 1860 he takes this problematic to the extreme. Everyone’s not having the same text, or having one that shifts between the legible and the inscrutable, between the “emblematic”69 and the real, is the fons et orgio of the self-refuting institution capable of its own continual retheorization. Whitman’s New Bible invokes an institution that is as nonhierarchical and unrestricted as relation ever can be because it is so intermittently.70 In “So Long!” Whitman himself is translated, as if he is the text. He is translated not into a language but rather into another representational space. As soon as he announces “an old age that shall lightly and joyfully meet its translation,” he says, as if surprised, “It appears to me that I am dying.”71 Far from holding off his own translation as he had in the 1855 Leaves (“I too am untranslatable”), he greets translation as the movement into another tongue,another register,in which the gain cannot be communicated precisely but is known by the loss that accompanies it (“Song of Myself,” lg 89). Since my interpretation of “So Long!” depends on the notion of “translation,” which I connect to the various translations of the Bible, I should make it clear that my reading is not meant to elide the fact that the “translation” that “old age” meets in verse 14 is death, a translation of the self or consciousness from the material to the spiritual world. But, given the ways in which Whitman marks the 1860 edition as neo-Biblical (for instance, dividing the text into enumerated sentences, not sections or stanzas), I believe that “translation” should also be read as referring to a linguistic change. I do not regard these two senses of “translation” as interchangeable, nor does Whitman; but he wants to be able to do so. My reading draws attention to the way in which Whitman means to render books and bodies, if not interchangeable, then communicable, the way in which he regards words and selves as things that are, to common sense, not commensurable, yet whose very incommensurability demands an economy of exchange, a distributive logic, whose currency is grounded on frangibility, fragmentation, interruption — those breaks which are really what permits transmission, what allows something to come across. Any slippage in meaning, then, between the two kinds of “translation” is one upon which Whitman depends.72 walt whitman 107

The fact that this book before us is “no book, / . . . [but] a man” reinforces the sense in which translation is death and continuation, revelation (“From behind the screen where I hid, I advance”) and obfuscation (“enveloped messages”; “immerged from head to foot”). “[D]ecease calls me forth” — both to us, the readers, and away from us, toward some unknown.73 Leaves of Grass is still a book of poetry. We can decipher some of it; some part remains obscure. But we are left to parse it on our own, in a dyadic congregation that links us, tenuously, to others working at the same text, if not with the same purpose. Leaves is part of the writing of the New Bible, not necessarily the final product itself. As Whitman wrote in the 1860 poem “Says” (a poem excluded from Leaves altogether after 1876), the “glory of These States [is] that they respectfully listen to propositions,reforms, fresh views and doctrines, from successions of men and women, / Each age with its own growth.”74 Only three years later,the war would offer Whitman the opportunity while nursing wounded and dying soldiers to practice such an economy, in which loss is accepted in lieu of a value-bearing gain to follow. However, the increasingly unilateral investment of the postwar editions — in the transcendent soul alone, forsaking immanent materiality — suggests that Whitman either found that practice too demanding or found no such reward awaiting him in the Union’s victory or its halfhearted Reconstruction. In 1860, at least, Whitman seems to have achieved the situation outlined in the 1855 edition by actualizing that originary moment of undifferentiated union on a basis capable not simply of its own dissemination but of warding off the inevitably restrictive effect of extending a praxis to the point that it ipso facto becomes an institution — that is, becomes regulated by or in the interest of those who practice it over and against the interests of those who do not. “Who[ever] learns my lesson complete” is as unable to communicate it as the teacher: “I lie abstracted and hear beautiful tales of things and the reasons of things, / They are so beautiful I nudge myself to listen. / I cannot say to any person what I hear — I cannot say it to myself — it is very wonderful” (lg 393–394). And yet the lesson is transmitted: “And that my soul embraces you this hour, and we affect each other without ever seeing each other, and never perhaps to see each other, is every bit as wonderful” (lg 395). As in “Song of Myself ” #5, valuebearing discourse is available on an unrestricted basis only in some nonconventional (because conventionally insensible) form. What 108 “A Religion Which Is No Religion”

Whitman hears but cannot “say to any person” recalls the inarticulate “hum of your valvèd voice,” the wordless discourse of “Song of Myself ”#5 which at once refuses to communicate in a familiar tongue and offers to communicate everything in a discourse we have not yet acquired, one which, indeed, we never may grasp for more than a moment, by more than a half-intelligible strand (lg 33). The outlook, even so, is not as bleak as it may seem. Even though the Whitmanian lesson of personhood must be mediated if we are to receive it, the “mediums” specified in the 1860 Leaves are potentially numerous enough to cease being mediatory. As Whitman prophecies in “Chants Democratic” (1860), they are not only the priest-poets of America but also those they reach with their words, who become poets in their turn: “Strong and sweet shall their tongues be . . . / Of them, and of their works, shall emerge divine conveyers, to convey gospels, / Characters, events, retrospections, shall be conveyed in gospels — Trees, animals, waters, shall be conveyed, / Death, the future, the invisible faith, shall all be conveyed.”75 The 1860 edition means,then,to spawn a literature (“divine conveyers,”“gospels”) that is also a distributive organization, the latter being as ephemeral as it is recurrent, as successful as it is delayed and indirect.

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Chapter Three ★ “But Aren’t It All a Sham?” Herman Melville & the Critique of Unity Beyond the communication of the sentence, what took place at [the] interview [between Budd and Vere] was never known. But in view of character of the twain briefly closeted in that stateroom . . . conjectures may be ventured. It should have been in consonance with the spirit of Captain Vere should he have concealed nothing from the condemned one. . . . Even more may have been. . . . The austere devotee of military duty . . . may in the end have caught Billy to his heart. . . . But there is no telling the sacrament, seldom if in any case revealed to the gadding world, wherever. . . two of great Nature’s nobler order embrace. There is privacy at the time, inviolable to the survivor; and holy oblivion, the sequel to each diviner magnanimity, providentially covers all at last.—Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor

As literary documents that address the constitutional problematic of unity, Eureka and Leaves of Grass deliver one distinct response: preserve unity at cost to plurality.1 By contrast, texts like Moby-Dick, Billy Budd, and The Varieties of Religious Experience constitute what I am characterizing as a second distinct, nearly antithetical response: preserve unity only insofar as it does not impinge on plurality. The challenge issued by Melville and James — their reversal of the hierarchy of unity over plurality — is one that seriously inquires into the possibility of what, in the context of traditional ways of thinking about the construction of social order in America, seems impossible: the basing of unity on its apparent other, plurality; integration not through the sacrifice of difference but through its preservation. Melville and James do more than simply problematize the conditions under which the assembly of social wholes has been considered; they point out what has always been problematic about the categories,what

has made a solution to the one-and-the-many problem so elusive,what has maintained its status as a hard,apparently insoluble problem.That stumbling block, according to Melville and James, is an obligation to unity, inherited from the founding political documents after which literary texts like Eureka and Leaves pattern their supplementary relation to social order. Failing to question the value placed on unity at the expense of difference prevents a right relationship of particulars. Melville questions the unity obligation. Within the context of a national discourse that, as the Civil War approached, placed an increasingly demanding and increasingly unrealistic burden on the Union, Melville regards the very idea of obligatory unity as itself burdensome.The expectation placed upon unity,the cachet given to oneness, and, by implication, the stigma attached to multiplicity — all these, Melville asserts, do not enable but actually threaten the vision of integrity that his contemporaries (politicians and Young Americans alike) seek to actualize. Melville asks us to determine exactly what, in our pursuit of unity, we are demanding of American social and literary culture,how we are demanding it,whether the means suit the end, and, indeed, whether the end is what we thought it was. In a writing career that spanned forty-five years, from Typee (1846) to Billy Budd (1886–1891, published posthumously in 1924), Melville’s attention to the problematic character of unity in American social formation is clearly demonstrable. It is possible to chart a through-line in Melville’s oeuvre that shows his continuous concern with these issues. His first novel, Typee, with its idyllic South Sea setting, signals an early attempt by the author to escape the burden of unity as the valorized category in Western culture. Typee’s narrator deserts his whaling ship for Polynesia, for the promise of tolerance and plurality it holds out,even in its very name; desertion can be read, then, as a means of physically and culturally bypassing an oppressive Western impetus toward conformity (similar to what Ishmael later confronts in himself as the strictures of monotheism).Melville’s interest in social formation can be traced through White-Jacket (1850) and Moby-Dick (1851), texts that address the problem of governance of which the ship, as social microcosm, is the theoretical site. The early chapters of Moby-Dick — in which Ishmael overcomes the prejudice that his Christian, Western background inspires in him toward Queequeg — show Melville still at the point of exploring the promise of polytheism (which is a constant presence in his work, whether 112 “But Aren’t It All a Sham?”

as polytheism or some other model of manyness). Finding the “traces of a simple honest heart” in an idol-worshipping “heathen,” Ishmael is the white person who represents a culture of unification in doubt about itself: “I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy” (md 52, 30, 53). But Moby-Dick is hardly the culmination of Melville’s efforts to solve the problematic of unity in narrative form. Rather, it represents one stage in a long series of efforts by Melville to free himself from, to disburden American social order of,the way in which unification had come to be regarded as compulsory. The Confidence-Man (1857) and Clarel (1876), as successive experiments in forging a plurality-based unum, nonetheless willingly concede the fact that plurality carries its own burdens.In The Confidence-Man it does so only because Melville seems not yet to have relinquished an obligation to unity. In the context of a picaresque meditation on the consequences of plurality for social and economic well-being, the very difference which provides the mobility aboard the steamboat Fidèle produces equality in a form that is finally as paralyzing as it is superficially liberating. Anyone, it seems,can pass for anyone else by changing clothes or wearing blackface. If counterfeit currency cannot be distinguished because “Detectors” (bank-issued guides listing the marks of legal tender) are themselves being counterfeited, then what hope is there, and what standard, for distinguishing sincerity from deceit? Secure financial and social relations become impossible. This is equality run amok: differences are erased to the extent that equality is available without restriction,but at the same time,difference remains an obstacle to perception. Navigating the public space represented by the steamboat on which the entire novel is set (this claustrophobia distinguishes The Confidence-Man from Moby-Dick, and perhaps indicates its even weaker viability as a model of social formation) becomes all but impossible, at least in any certain or reliable way. Plurality is the masquerade,the continual masking and unmasking,that produces the illusion of equality. Thus The Confidence-Man regards cynically that which Melville would, in Billy Budd, embrace as the ideal condition for producing unity: the thickness of difference, the inscrutability of identity which disables any unifying project grounded in the transparency of pluris in regard to a transcendental unum. Even in the moral and epistemological instability of The Confidence-Man, however, one finds a moment of insight into the possibilities of plurality: herman melville 113

If reason be judge, no writer has produced such inconsistent characters as nature herself has. . . . [I]t might . . . be thought, that he, who, in view of its inconsistencies, says of human nature the same that, in view of its contrasts, is said of the divine nature, that it is past finding out, thereby evinces a better appreciation of it than he who,by always representing it in a clear light,leaves it to be inferred that he clearly knows all about it. (914) This brief aside lampooning the author’s own apparently poor skills of characterization would resurface, more completely developed and constitutively integral, in the “ragged edges” of Billy Budd, a text which takes inscrutability and inconsistency as the single basis for a social and textual formation that produces equality without a crippling obligation to unity. Clarel, a long narrative poem detailing a theological student’s pilgrimage through the Holy Land, conducts a more honest (that is, less ironic) assessment of the particular difficulties associated with the element Melville has been championing throughout his work in opposition to unity: plurality. If Melville had first sought refuge from a unity obligation by traveling west in Typee to Polynesia, the site of no monotheism, Clarel constitutes an analogous, though reverse, move within the same dialectic: traveling east, to the roots of monotheism (the Holy Land).Although it is monotheism itself that Melville regards as the problem, his motive in this case is recuperative. Through his protagonist, Melville reaches for an originary site not already saddled with multiple interpretations; of course, all Clarel finds in Jerusalem is overinscription,an embarrassment of interpretive claims on the One (in this case, God), claims whose sheer multiplicity not only problematizes their individual validity but makes the transcendent term seem impossibly inaccessible.If Clarel marks a return to origins,to the site at which oneness was sacralized and thus the one place in which it might be attainable, then it also marks the deepening of Melville’s concern with the hard problem of unity, a desperation if not an uncertainty as to how to reconcile what in the West appears to be an inexorable obligation to unity with the equally undeniable (and to Melville, inviolable) differentiated character of human experience. Although one could turn to almost any text of Melville’s for signs of his fundamental concern with the one-and-the-many problem as it 114 “But Aren’t It All a Sham?”

impinges upon American social formation, this chapter focuses on the two texts which I believe best evince his development in this matter. Read together, Moby-Dick and Billy Budd emphatically demonstrate the progress Melville made in producing his own solution to the hard problem of unity. It is my contention that Moby-Dick represents one of Melville’s stronger movements toward, and Billy Budd, his most successful realization of, the narrative equivalent of pluris, his most fully articulated theorization of manyness, decenteredness, and incompleteness as viable bases for textual, individual, and social identities that are not grounded in the more limiting categories of uniformity, integration, and totality. In both these texts, Melville attends to the preventative role of particularity with respect to the integration of wholes. Through narratives that dramatize the incommensurate character of models of unity with regard to what they attempt to unify, he takes the position that variety (and in a sense, the sheer superfluity of unifying constructions one can impose on that variety) ends up preventing unity. Variety, in other words, allows Melville to entertain the possibility of reneging on what appears to be an obligation to unity of a certain type. Billy Budd makes it clear that, by 1891, Melville no longer doubts the possibility of disavowing unity as the privileged model for individual and social construction. Despite the distance of forty years between Moby-Dick and Billy Budd, it is possible to single out Reconstruction as the event that transformed the author’s understanding of the one-and-the-many problem or his own capability to solve it.Whereas the war was technically resolved through a mere military triumph, the fate of American social formation, as Melville saw it, rested wholly on the outcome of Reconstruction, which was an effort to do something lasting about the contradictions of the unity and plurality models America was committed to from its origins (e pluribus unum). Melville was not optimistic about such an effort’s prospects: Battle-Pieces (1866) diagnoses — and Clarel depicts — the defeat of the kind of monistic embodied in Reconstruction. For example,“Lee in the Capitol,”the penultimate poem of Battle-Pieces, directly attacks what Melville viewed as the vindictiveness of the congressional Reconstruction plan, which superseded the significantly milder presidential plan (see Garner 425–432). President Andrew Johnson, with whom Melville sided, felt there was no need for anyherman melville 115

thing but “restoration”; since secession was never legally valid under the Constitution, the Union had never been fragmented. There was nothing to put back together. Congress disagreed. In the name of readmitting the seceded states in such a way as to elicit authentic submission and loyalty, Congress in 1866 convened a Reconstruction committee, before whom former confederate general Robert E. Lee was called to appear. Lee’s testimony, or Melville’s version of it in Battle-Pieces, views the congressional plan in no uncertain terms: A voice comes out from these charnel-fields, A plaintive yet unheeded one: “Died all in vain? both sides undone?” Push not your triumph’ do not urge Submissiveness beyond the verge. Intestine rancor would you bide, Nursing eleven sliding daggers at your side? * * * So in the South; vain every plea ’Gainst Nature’s strong fidelity; True to the home and to the heart, Throngs cast their lot with kith and kin, Foreboding, cleaved to the natural part, Was this the unforgivable sin? These noble spirits are yet yours to win. Shall the great North go Sylla’s way? Proscribe? prolong the evil day? Confirm the curse? infix the hate? In Union’s name forever alienate? From reason who can urge the plea — Freemen conquerors of the free? When blood returns to the shrunken vein, Shall the wound of the Nation bleed again? Well may the wars wan thought supply, And kill the kindling of the hopeful eye, Unless you do what even kings have done In leniency — unless you shun To copy Europe in her worst estate — Avoid the tyranny you reprobate. (236–237) 116 “But Aren’t It All a Sham?”

The reintegration of the Union is, in short, something to take seriously. Determining the exact terms of readmission for these former constituents is a delicate matter, for, as the last couplet slyly hints, a vindictive plan for reassembling America begins to look uncomfortably like the hegemony of the British Empire, precisely the relation the Declaration rejected and over which the Revolutionary War was fought. Excessively punitive measures might even be thought of as a thickening of difference, an undoing of the Constitution’s calculated balance between equality and hierarchy. The reckless pursuit of “‘[s]ubmissiveness’” stands in danger, Melville feels, of violating the very terms on which the Union was initially founded — the balance of representational power, if not the equality principle itself. Billy Budd, on the other hand, is set up as a mind experiment toward an outcome that is better instructed than these aborted experiments (both political and literary). Melville has found his way past the obstacles that plurality, as an alternative to integration, had posed ten years earlier in Clarel.2 But instead of trying to reduce the sheer chaos of differentiation by organizing multiplicity noncoercively (along the lines of Ishmael’s discursive eclecticism), Billy Budd suggests that, far from solving the problem, such an approach only appeases the compulsion toward unification and so defers a solution indefinitely. The required strategy, then, is to dislodge unity altogether as the valorized term of identity, the default category for social formation. It is with Billy Budd, as we will later see, that Melville succeeds where previously he had failed.

i Even though Melville experiments in Moby-Dick with varietybased kinds of unity (as in the “Isolatoes federated along one keel” [md 108]), he remains committed to unity in its most encompassing form. This is not to say he is nostalgic for it; he is committed to a totalizing unity at the same time he is driven by a desire to disable it. MobyDick is a novel driven by, on the one hand, the need for unification in the metaphysical form and, on the other, the desire to kill it, to be free of that need. To put the same point in a more dramatic form: Who killed Moby Dick? Although such a question suggests a mystery that is not there, a killing which does not actually take place in the novel, Moby-Dick can be read as one installment in a debate that persists herman melville 117

beyond the novel. And that debate could be said to center around the following questions: inasmuch as the whale represents an enervating commitment to unity metaphysics, who killed Moby Dick?3 Does Melville kill him, either in the eponymous novel or elsewhere? While it seems safe to say that Melville is not at all nostalgic for metaphysical centrality, the novel betrays significant doubt about the killing of the whale, about the necessity of the hunt as well as its chances for success. Melville is drawn to it in order to interrupt its hold on him, to escape the coercion of unity in a way the Constitutional settlement failed to do. He is trying to kill, while at the same time appearing not interested in, that type of unity. But a question the novel inevitably raises, one we have to answer as readers, is whether Melville’s system ends up merely rebuilding that coercive unity it seeks to escape.What is tremblingly at issue throughout Moby-Dick is to what extent, if any, disavowal is possible.4 I would like to begin in Moby-Dick with a passage from the end of chapter 110 (“Queequeg in his Coffin”), because it contains the images I will be focusing on as being representative of the novel’s response to the peculiar American form of the one-and-the-many problem: the federal enigma as it impinges upon the right construction of the social, political, and epistemological world. Moby-Dick, I suggest, is an experiment in the modeling of alternate social formations that is also a decomposition of the unity metaphysics on which such an experiment must to some extent depend. It stands as Melville’s comment on the desirability yet impossibility of the totality inherent in unifying projects like cosmology and phrenology (which are ventures in reading the mind of God and man), and thus the practical inaccessibility of the depth of foundation necessary to the curing of social order. The written-upon, yet inscrutable, character of the whale’s body and brow (which Ishmael attempts to read) and Queequeg’s body (which Ahab tries to read) embodies the problematic of unity — the irreconcilable fact of the differencerequirement — and its insoluble character as a social if not as a physical proposition in a post-theological culture. Not long before the Pequod’s final hunt, Queequeg has fallen ill and has prepared for his death by ordering the ship’s carpenter to build him a coffin. Going so far as to try out the coffin for size and stock it with provisions for the afterlife, the harpooner suddenly remembers “a little duty onshore, which he was leaving undone” and 118 “But Aren’t It All a Sham?”

consequently decides not to die (md 398). Fully recovered within a few days, Queequeg resumes his duties on deck. It is at this point that Ahab observes him with interest: With a wild whimsiness . . . [Queequeg] now used his coffin for a sea-chest; and emptying into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there. Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this tattooing, had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth,and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought it must have been which suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, when one morning turning away from surveying poor Queequeg — “Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!” (md 399) I want to bracket,for a moment,the conversion of coffin into sea chest, an article for use by the living rather than the dead. This coffin will soon afterwards (chapter 126) be reconverted into a life buoy, or life preserver, to replace the ship’s old disused one when it fails to do its job, to stay afloat. It is this renovated coffin that will finally save Ishmael’s life, keeping him afloat until the Rachel rescues him. This revision of death as life, along with the fact that Ishmael “only [is] escaped alone,” will serve as the final verdict on an effort that, in this passage, is still entertained as possible (if only because it is so alluring, and the possibility of success so important). That project is the production of unity, and, as in Poe’s Eureka, in Moby-Dick unity is not limited to the social or political but reaches toward that most ambitious of unities: the cosmological. The implication, for Poe at least, if not also for cosmology’s classical practitioners, is that if this most comprehensive of structures, the world picture, can be gotten right, then the right relation of individuals on the social and psychological levels will follow. So, Melville and Poe are both in line with a tradition herman melville 119

of abstraction as a solution to the inevitable bearing of hierarchy on social thought, even though, because Melville is not so certain, he divides his narrative attention between all three modes of unity. The central image in the previous passage is that of the tattoos which cover Queequeg’s body and which he tries to copy onto his sea chest.The tattoos have been described to us before,when Ishmael meets Queequeg, but it is not until now that we have any concept of their design. This is the body scribbled over, the body recruited by inscription for another purpose. The body is replaced by language; fact, replaced by significance. That other purpose — at least that for which Melville uses it, as well as the “prophet and seer” who made the tattoos — is cosmology: the writing out of a “complete theory of the heavens and the earth.” And, as seems to be the way of cosmologies (Poe calls Eureka a “Book of Truths”), a theory of universal evolution is also a “mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth.” The emotional force of this scene stems from Ahab’s frustration that he cannot get at that truth, even when presented with it in a legible, though hieroglyphic,form.Ishmael can only guess at what truth Ahab has in mind. It might be something as concrete as the exact location of Moby Dick, but, given Ahab’s consuming interest in metaphysics, what he hopes to discover is more likely the meaning of the hunt,some determination of its (and therefore, his own) place in the world. Ahab’s motive for “getting cosmic” is understandable. Stephen Toulmin, in his 1990 history of rationality, has charted the continuity of the idea that cosmological and social order are, or should be rendered, consonant: “Social and natural regularities alike are aspects of the same overall cosmos + polis — i.e., cosmopolis. [Under the Stoics, the] practical idea that human affairs are influenced by, and proceed in step with heavenly affairs, changes into a philosophical idea, that the structure of Nature reinforces a rational Social Order” (68). Restoring that “rational Social Order” when it seems out of order — as it does in America during the 1840s and 1850s as the failure of the Constitutional settlement to produce a stable, integrative social formation became increasingly clear — is the task taken up by writers like Poe, Melville, Whitman, and James. What Ahab complains of as the “devilish tantalization of the gods” is that a totalizing scheme which achieves unity on every level seems within reach, as the grapes did to Tantalus, but are in fact as ungraspable as the meaning of a text in an unknown language. The lesson 120 “But Aren’t It All a Sham?”

would appear to be, then, that the unifying design is there, that it exists, albeit in an unusable form. But reading is not the only activity taking place here: Ahab may be reading, or trying to read; Queequeg, on the other hand, is drawing. He is carving the “treatise” onto his sea chest, copying it not so much to comprehend it but to use its talismanic power to comprehend, to provide a structure for life, to impute meaning to it by grounding it in a wider, transcendent context. Nevertheless, Queequeg’s attempt to replicate a totalizing structure is nearly as fruitless as Ahab’s attempt to read it. It is cosmology itself, not whether one understands it, that fails to do what it implies: not warding off disasters at sea but providing an underlying,foundational continuity. The legitimating or stabilizing effect which cosmologies were thought in the past to have on the social world is, in Ishmael’s time, no longer available: like the ability to write “hieroglyphics,” it is the “work of a departed prophet or seer.” It is a lost art. Even Queequeg, who James McIntosh has argued “represents for the soul a possibility of . . . unalienated savage ease in nature,” is unable to translate the secrets he carries with him (36). He tries to copy it onto his sea chest, but produces only a partial, cruder version of it. One of his elders may have drawn the original, may have been able to encompass the universe “in one volume.” But like the hand that drew it, the knowledge it held is lost. Examples like this attest to the fact that Melville is ultimately ambivalent about the possibility of totality, that he wants it to be possible in a cosmological sense but is far enough along on the road to William James and Gertrude Stein that the absurdity of totality is clear in the face of the reality of indeterminacy.5 But Ahab’s inability to read Queequeg’s tattoos also raises the problem of knowing others when their skin is strange, the dream of other minds as completely legible, and the implications of that dream, and its failure, for the social and epistemological world.Ahab is what Melville hates yet cannot kill,the requirement he cannot seem to rid the world of. A characteristic line of argument about Moby-Dick, from F. O. Matthiessen (1947) to Donald Pease (1987), David Kirby (1993), and John Bryant (1998), approaches the novel as a contest of two worldviews (Ahab’s and Ishmael’s), a race-to-the-finish between two ways of relating to the world.6 Robert Zoellner (1973) follows this line when he argues that Ishmael’s “sense of oneness . . . with the external world” is what saves him while Ahab, who in his detachment herman melville 121

interprets the world idiosyncratically,goes down to destruction (46). But the fact that Ishmael survives does not diminish the fact that he survives alone. The Pequod — in which Melville extends the figure of the ship of state into a ship that is the state — still sinks, and along with it, not just the men that make up that state but the viability of any of the models of social order enacted on it in the course of the novel (hierarchy and federation in the chapter “Knights and Squires,” communitarianism in “A Squeeze of the Hand,” and dyadism in “The Monkey-Rope”).7 My intention is not to read Moby-Dick simply as a series of successful experiments in social structure which is unfortunately marred by Ahab’s egotism (Matthiessen, 438–459; Walter Bezanson, 431–434) — a reading that fails to deal sufficiently with the implications of the novel’s catastrophic ending — or as an address to specific sociopolitical issues of the 1840s and 1850s (Alan Heimert, 306–318; Wai-chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty, 109–139).8 What I want to emphasize, instead, is the failure of these experiments and argue that the novel is a critique of efforts at reconstructing relations on both abstract and concrete levels. The “oneness” Ishmael perceives in the world — whether in his masthead reveries (chapter 35) or in his exegetical attempt to decipher and catalogue every aspect of the whale within a cetological system (chapter 32) — is in this reading no less imposed and deceptively totalizing than Ahab’s monomaniacal scenario in which all natural phenomena move against him with the malignity embodied in Moby-Dick. Ahab is fascinated by but unable to read the cosmology tattooed upon Queequeg’s body. Similarly, Ishmael tries to divine the whale’s mind by reading its head according to the nineteenth-century popular science of phrenology. Like Ahab, he fails to comprehend the immensity (of the universe, of the whale) “in one volume.” The only significant difference is that Ishmael attempts (in “Cetology” but not in “The Mast-Head”) to unify in such a way as to preserve detail and variety. But this effect is due just as much to the fact that, each unifying device failing in turn to encompass the whole, Ishmael must search for, and when he finds it must take up, another.9 Given the novel’s experimentation with models of relation, the whale represents that which disrupts any solution of the problem of state order. Its presence, as an enemy of the ship and therefore an enemy of the state, implies that there must always be a disruptive ele122 “But Aren’t It All a Sham?”

ment to negate any solution and leads, one might argue, to a provision for slavery or some other compensation inconsistent with the good of the whole. I suggest, however, that the whale represents that which disrupts not just any solution of the problem of state order but the production of the cosmological and psychological unities that underwrite state order. I also suggest, contrary to most accounts, that the text attempts to produce such unities but finally casts down the crude, partial copies it is able to make (like the cetological system), regarding them as the ineffective detritus of a world whose loss of its transcendent ground (God, Union) has produced pluralism to the point of chaos. The whale is that mystery of human existence, of the world, of the mind of God, that logical contradiction which renders any solution untenable or false, the unintelligible because uninscribed element which always turns out to be unincludable (md 318, chapter 86). As Ahab might have said of Queequeg, Ishmael says of the whale, “Dissect him how I may, then, I go but skin deep; I know him not, and never will” (md 318). It is the impulse, despite all discouragement, that a solution might still be possible that constitutes what Ahab calls the “devilish tantalization of the gods.” More than simply a replacement of teleological cosmology with what John Wenke (1995) calls “an epistemological world of shifting meanings and relativistic values” (a state of affairs Robert Greenberg [1993] views as empowering rather than disabling),the novel presents as fact what William James would call the “open possibility” of “shipwreck in detail.”10 So, although Moby-Dick explores various alternatives in the modeling of social relation, the novel’s tragedy is that pursuit of the whale is fatal. The hunt for Moby Dick, like Ishmael’s hunt for the elusive significance of the “whiteness of the whale,” constitutes a search for totality, for a wholly stable world picture (and not, as Paul Brodtkorb Jr.[Ishmael’s White World] and David Scott Arnold suggest,a shifting phenomenological one), but also for that which renders its completion impossible and so rules out the solutions of the one-and-themany problem offered by various strategies for social organization and the organization of mind.11 While this may appear a pyrrhic victory for variety, we must not forget the most obvious referent of what he calls the “devilish tantalization of the gods”: what tantalizes him is the hunt for Moby Dick, the idea that he can be hunted. Similarly, I would suggest that what tantalizes Ishmael, and Melville himself, is herman melville 123

only partially the fantasy of totalizing unity; imbricated in that fantasy is the fantasy of killing the whale, of killing as much as producing an imperative to unity. Like Ahab, Ishmael senses that the construction of an integrated social reality would be much easier if other minds were immediately legible to us. “I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can” (md 293). These words conclude chapter 79, the chapter, ironically, in which the novel’s narrator, Ishmael, finds that he cannot reach any conclusion from a “physiognom[ic]”examination of the sperm whale (physiognomy being the derivation of character traits from facial features).The whale’s great forehead is described previously as a “dead, blind wall,” and here in chapter 79, entitled “The Prairie,” that forehead remains a blank, inscrutable expanse — like the prairie after which the chapter is named and to which the whale’s brow, in its “prairie-like placidity,”has already been compared; and like the ocean which Ishmael describes in chapter 114 as being like a prairie, interminable and uninscribed (md 284,405).Since physical detail is a state of affairs and allegory a hermeneutic strategy, what Moby-Dick presents us with is not realism on the one hand and allegory on the other but a reading of physical detail as allegory,12 a method for reading insides (the whale’s brain,the mind of God) by attending to the details of outsides (the whale’s brow, the book of Nature).13 Ishmael’s project is straightforwardly exegetical: he treats the whale’s brow,indeed,the whale as a whole,as if it were a text. Chapter 32 (“Cetology”) expounds the narrator’s unique “Bibliographical” version of cetological taxonomy, which classifies individual whales as if they were “volume[s],”not by genus and species but rather “Books” and “Chapters,” and designates a whale’s size in terms of the three standard sizes in contemporary printing: “Folio,” “Octavo,” and “Duodecimo” (md 120). This example, along with the attempts to “decipher”the “hieroglyphical”marks on the whale’s skin and derive the meanings encoded in the “strange folds, courses, and convolutions” of its brain, is enough to suggest that Melville, like Thoreau (who also mentions hieroglyphics), seeks to read the physical world as not just a text but a text of a particular sort (md 292, 260). In the cryptic marks on the whale’s skin,Melville seeks the very type of other language that hieroglyphics, as John Irwin has pointed out, seems to have held forth to other nineteenth-century American writers like Whitman, Thoreau, and Poe.14 Variously engaged as each was in 124 “But Aren’t It All a Sham?”

determining the legibility of origins for the cosmos,the polity,and the human mind, hieroglyphics offered the possibility of a picture language that would be more literal than writing or speech, less liable to the attrition of meaning.15 Setting aside for a moment the subject of hieroglyphics and the questions it raises for Melville about inscrutability and illegibility, we must first understand that Ishmael’s reading of the whale as text involves certain assumptions about legibility. The whale is read as a text in the way that the texts I am reading are designed to be read: Ishmael reads the world as legible because of correspondences of fact and language.16 The physiognomy Ishmael tries to practice on the whale also posits a continuity of structure and meaning and calls to mind phrenology,the immensely popular nineteenth-century science from which the phrenological enthusiast Whitman borrowed two of his central terms,“amativeness”and “adhesiveness.”Defined by contemporary practitioners O. S. and L. N. Fowler, phrenology consists of the reading of intelligence and character from the contours of the skull, the discovery of “those relations established by nature between given developments and conditions of Brain and corresponding manifestations of Mind” (Fowler and Fowler, Self-Instructor 60).17 Phrenology is able to make the inside accessible only because it is exactly inscribed on the outside; that which is usually unreadable,the essential, is made legible because it is rendered the same as the manifest. What distinguishes Ishmael’s physiognomic interest in the whale from contemporary phrenologists’ interest in the human skull, and thus aligns Melville’s novel with texts like Eureka and Leaves of Grass (1860), is a continuing interest in the reconstruction of social order as it is reflected in and theoretically facilitated by the construction of literary texts.18 For Melville, though, there seems to be a requirement of argumentation which demands the sinking of the Pequod as a sort of solution to the problem of centralization. Given the ultimate pessimism of chapter 79 (“The Prairie”) regarding the systematizing possibilities of phrenology (“like every other human science, [it] is but a passing fable” [md 292]), the promise of cetology is equally hollow. Attempts at a “regular system” of classification of phenomena (in this case, the heterogeneous attributes of diverse kinds of whale) are foolish: “it is in vain to attempt a clear classification of the Leviathan” based on distinctive physical characteristics, which occur in herman melville 125

“irregular combinations . . . as utterly to defy all general methodization formed upon such a basis. On this rock every one of the whalenaturalists has split” (md 118, 122). The character of Moby-Dick is such that, although in each of these ways the world is legible, the whale itself represents that element which renders the world illegible in each of these aspects: “It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera that I would fain put before you. Yet it is no easy task.The classification of the constituents of a chaos,nothing less here is essayed” (md 116–117). Moby Dick represents that term which can never be fully comprehended, which failure nullifies the project of a world picture, or any apprehension of the world in a psychological, social, or cosmological manner that pretends to anything like totality. The text itself can only begin to supplement the deficiencies of the present method of organization — as it attempts to do by modeling various types of intersubjective relations — and hope that it,in turn,will be supplemented by later texts (as the “architect, not the builder,” Ishmael means “simply to project the draught of a systematization of cetology” — “nay, but the draught of a draught” [md 118, 128; emphasis added]). But the supplementary bent of Melville’s project ends there: he is not so much completing the groundwork of American social formation laid in the founding documents and the Federalist Papers as he is overturning it, questioning and (in the end, in Billy Budd) refuting altogether that model’s commitment to unity, to the integration of particulars, above all else (above, that is, the internal integrity of those particulars). One deficiency that will certainly not be addressed is that which Melville regards as no deficiency at all but a release from the stricture of a commitment to totality, the fulfillment of the wish Ishmael makes even in the face of his ambitious cetological project: “God keep me from ever completing anything” (md 128). In spite of that project’s initial objective of totality, Ishmael voices the doubt that foreshadows the defeat of his own and Ahab’s “essay[s]” at “classification,” at the comprehension of all phenomena, persons, and signs within one all-encompassing yet finite system: “I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty” (md 118). The logical contradiction of the one and the many is not, then, as it is for Poe, that which holds the universe together, which perpetuates it in a cycle of annihilation and rebirth. On the contrary, it is what 126 “But Aren’t It All a Sham?”

wrecks the metaphysical project of Melville’s novel: after all, it is Moby Dick’s massive forehead that splits the Pequod and drowns its crew, and that forehead represents more than simply the epistemological enigma that Ishmael’s physiognomic failure renders it. This metaphysical enigma has its legislative form in the Wilmot Proviso (1846), which along with the Compromise of 1850 had already portended secession, already inscribed the failure to maintain unity as the inevitable although ironic outcome of the kind of unity metaphysics embodied by the national motto e pluribus unum and implemented by the founding documents.19 Although at moments Melville seems to suggest that the one-andthe-many problematic might be soluble, the series of experiments in unity metaphysics — the various alternatives for structuring relations among the many and between the many and a transcendental one — are depictions of unity metaphysics gone wrong. Further, MobyDick’s dubious ending (Queequeg’s coffin serving as Ishmael’s life buoy and, in the English edition, the omission of the Epilogue and with it the minimal optimism of a sole survivor) might be taken to suggest that the narrative’s catastrophe might in some way be sublated, neither simply raised nor removed but preserved, transformed into something in which the desuetude of one version of the social world might be an element in the construction and perhaps sustenance of another.20 The fact that Ishmael is rescued by the Rachel, a ship whose captain has forsaken his commercial obligations to search for one of his sons lost in the hunt, presages the descent of the world into a loss which the novel’s conclusion presumes to be inevitable. If one of the prevailing conditions of modernity is the loss of a providential master narrative, then Moby Dick the whale is the term in the equation of social unity that does not permit its solution. The ending implies that the sacrifice of the many is necessary — a harsher requirement than either Whitman or Lincoln was willing to assign. In this case, to make one, all but one of the many must perish, fulfilling the unity imperative only by default. Many can become one by catastrophe: this is the only positive aspect of catastrophe, that in which the great restorative possibility is frail because of the necessity of sacrifice. It seems unsurprising that among the possible combinations of persons, the only options are one, two, and many. It is two, the number designating the homosocial couple of Ishmael and Queequeg, that seems the only workable combination, and even that must be sacrificed.21 herman melville 127

Ahab’s monomaniacal quest for Moby Dick and Ishmael’s masthead reveries exemplify two means of solving the problematic of unity: the dissolution of the many into the one or the one (the individual and the divine) into the many. Notwithstanding the moments of optimism that might accompany these cautionary examples,MobyDick finally derogates the idea of a unity metaphysics that underwrites a universe successfully funded by a viable transcendental term. To be fair, both methods of unity formation (Ishmael’s and Ahab’s) are thought of as dead ends. But the one that has a future is the Ishmael sensibility, which we see represented in one of its subsequent apparitions, William James. Inasmuch as the direction of cultural history as we know it seems to be away from metaphysics and toward pragmatism (in the direction of William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey),in Moby-Dick metaphysics is depicted as being,like whaling, an industry and a technology no longer flourishing. As, in part, an outgrowth of Melville’s backing the many side in history, the novel is an account of the failure of a now obsolete world picture. It does not project any possible alliance with a future in which the idealism of unity would continue — at least, no alliance that Melville finds desirable. But, as the work of someone like William James will suggest, such an alliance may not be fully voluntary.

ii It is in his last work, which he left unfinished at his death, that Melville finally escapes — by representing escape from — the inevitability of totality.But success comes at a price: violence.Paradoxically, unity may be violent, but so is the alternative. The unity obligation which Ahab hunted in the form of the White Whale must be confronted within narrower bounds from which it cannot escape. Oneness must be eliminated not just as a compelling ideal but as a presence that implies its own superiority and insinuates the obligation to imitate it. Unity, in short, must be executed. Melville must execute the Handsome Sailor, “Baby” Budd. If in Moby-Dick Melville hunts the whale, in Billy Budd (a retroactive pseudohistorical text) he succeeds in killing the whale, that is, in extinguishing what it represents. For by killing Budd, Melville eliminates the element that could demand unity by uttering the truth to which all speculation would have to submit, the authentic version. I do not mean literally to iden128 “But Aren’t It All a Sham?”

tify Budd with the White Whale but to emphasize that the text represents a resistance to unification, a will toward heterogeneity. MobyDick’s moral problematic, in other words, consists of this imperative to resist integration, an imperative Melville finally masters in Billy Budd as a credible counterforce to the imperative to unity, a principle of group formation in its own right. What I am attempting to do in this chapter is construe the political motive of Moby-Dick and Billy Budd; that is, I am discussing an abstract philosophical problem, raised by these texts, which has a direct political application. There have, of course, been plenty of suggestions in the critical record that Billy Budd’s application is not political,at least not merely so.22 Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) is surely one of the most extensively written-about texts in American literature. From its publication in 1924, it has continued to elicit readings, and not only by literary critics; in the last couple of decades, scholars of jurisprudence have taken up Melville’s final work as having as much to say to students and practitioners of law as it does to students and professors of literature. In terms solely of literary criticism, the story has proved the ideal subject, at least insofar as it encourages a wide range of interpretations, most often antithetical, and yet avoids unequivocally endorsing any single interpretation.23 As a work that, as Peter J. Bellis puts it,“deliberately opens itself to any number of incompatible readings, without valorizing any of them,” Billy Budd is notoriously what might be called an open text: almost every imaginable element of the work — syntax, style, characterization, symbol — thematizes indeterminability (166). As critic Susan Mizruchi writes, because Melville’s narrator “makes uncertainty the basis of his aesthetic method,” “[h]is narrative is a monument to indecision” (302).24 Indecision is exactly the word to describe the state of Billy Budd criticism — or, rather, to describe the problem most critics find themselves forced to confront. By critics interested in the interpretive dilemma highlighted by Billy Budd, the text has been read as either deferring or requiring our judgment as readers,as a story whose ambiguity and evasion constitute either an indictment or an endorsement of the institutional powers represented by Vere. We are called either to sympathize with Vere as a man who subjugates personal and moral instincts to professional and legal responsibility, or to condemn him as a case-study in the abuses allowed, if not encouraged, by hierarchy (see Brook Thomas, “Legal Fictions”).25 The fact that critics feel herman melville 129

compelled to resolve the interpretive problem of the narrative, that the question of Billy’s innocence or Vere’s justification must be answered definitively,is informative,since resolution is precisely what Melville means to deny us. My hypothesis is that, for the most part, the meaning of the dialectical struggle in Billy Budd (1886–1891) has been significantly misread.In most accounts,the conflict between Billy Budd,Captain Vere, and the Bellipotent’s master-at-arms, John Claggart, is read as a staging of more or less the same conflict (that of judgment) in one or more of the same registers (the moral, the legal, the epistemological). The question these readings are responding to, the question they regard Billy Budd as posing, is whether Vere is right to execute Budd, to side with the code of military law he serves rather than with the young sailor he loves paternally (and perhaps erotically) — in effect, whether Vere is justified in upholding totality against particularity. Since the text was first published posthumously in 1924,26 the predominant answer to this question has shifted from “yes” to “no.”27 In “Melville’s Fist: The Execution of Billy Budd” (1979), Barbara Johnson helpfully refocused the discussion by arguing that, in a work that so heavily thematizes inconclusiveness and inscrutability, Melville is doing anything but asking us to decide whether Vere is right or wrong. Rather, he presents us with a question that is meant to be, and that his text renders, unanswerable, a question whose specific content (asking “Is Vere right or wrong?”) instantiates the much more general philosophical problem of indeterminability (which asks “Can any truth be finally, definitively known — not just Budd’s guilt, Claggart’s accusation, or Vere’s motives in securing Budd’s conviction? That is, is knowledge available in a discrete, totalizable, determinate form, or must any account of any state of affairs be inherently incomplete and fragmentary?”).28 The historical framing provided by Melville’s narrator — the year is 1797, in the wake of the Nore mutiny and in the midst of the French Revolution (1789–1799) — might encourage arguments that, despite its English setting, Billy Budd really addresses American Federalist anxieties about quelling revolutionary fervor and preserving the rule of government (see Richard Hocks, 65). But any such reading must contend with the fact that Billy Budd is a notoriously open and endlessly interpretable text, repeatedly foregrounding its own “insufficien[cy]” as an “adequate comprehending,” problematizing the 130 “But Aren’t It All a Sham?”

notion of anything like a true account: “The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact.” “Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial” (bb 1382, 1431). Because the story balks at context, closure, and determinability, it has been subject to the kinds of misreading I have already mentioned: attempts to assign, if not the specific political or cultural context, then the domain to which Melville refers, the register within which he asks us to weigh some issue. Recently, that domain is read as the moral, the legal, or the epistemological; the issue, as either Budd’s guilt (which seems unassessible) or Vere’s judgment (which we are being asked to understand or condemn).29 None of these readings, however, doubts the fundamental wrongness of Budd’s death; even if his execution is grudgingly accepted as unavoidable under the law, it is mourned as a personal or spiritual loss. My reading will seem counterintuitive in the face of a consensus about, if not how to read Billy Budd, about how not to read it. I argue that Budd’s death is necessary. Melville, while he may seem to ennoble the handsome,unsophisticated sailor,nevertheless regards the young man’s death as absolutely necessary. It is required by the logic of pluralization that drives Billy Budd and funds Melville’s account of a social order grounded on not unity but the disallowance of unity, the disabling of any totalizing model of relations. Budd must die because what gets killed when he gets killed is the obligation to unity Melville has been fighting to escape throughout his career. In stamping out what Vere and Claggart claim to regard as the threat of mutiny, Vere embodies the restoration of order, the very reestablishment of unity on a totalized scale that the style of Melville’s equivocating narrator, along with the story’s multiple, often conflicting endings (chapters 26–30), would seem clearly to contradict.30 But totality is what Budd’s death does not restore; on the contrary,his death erodes totality by releasing that which evades its demands: the infinity implicit in the “holy oblivion” (referred to in the epigraph to this chapter) that “covers all” (bb 1419). Melville’s motive for killing Budd is logical necessity. It is the resolution of the one-and-the-many problem, as the hard problem of American social formation, which demands that Budd must die. In terms of the plot, he is the key to solvherman melville 131

ing the mysteries that surround the events on board the Bellipotent: although he stutters when accused point-blank of mutiny, he might find the words in time to refute Claggart’s claim. Billy Budd’s death (as well as Claggart’s) deprives Melville’s narrator of the original, the source that could be consulted in order to sort out true accounts of the story from false accounts (like, one suspects, the newspaper account cited in chapter 29). But distinguishing between the accurate and the inaccurate — in order, implicitly, to suppress the latter — does not interest Melville’s narrator, who is invested in something quite different: the mystification of origin, the stimulation of multiple accounts, the deferral of a totalized state of affairs by the dissemination of indeterminacy and incommensurability.31 Without Billy Budd to speak on his own behalf, no version of Billy Budd, Sailor can truly be what the story’s subtitle imputes: (An Inside Narrative). Without Billy Budd as the original by which to judge, no account of the alleged mutiny can be proven conclusive or be conclusively dismissed.32 An obvious logical objection to this line of argument would be that, even had Billy Budd and Claggart lived to tell (freely or under duress) their role in the alleged mutiny and its being reported, nothing approaching a full story would emerge. Budd’s dying, the objection would run, provides what is perhaps the narrative’s only objectively knowable fact. My response would be that, while Budd’s death renders the truth no more or less accessible, it makes less credible a certain concept of truth — as ascertainable, as finally and totally knowable; and to a martinet like Captain Vere and the objective, institutional logic for which he literally and figuratively stands,what is less credible is less available, practically unintuitable, as a basis for action and inquiry. Budd’s death removes the onus, the impediment, of having something which to certain minds looks like the truth, which to minds like Vere’s is as good as the truth because it represents the promise of totality, of leaving no stone unturned. Though getting a firsthand account from Budd could in no way stifle the number of rumors and tales that contradict his word, his dying without providing such an account leaves the field open, making it one entirely funded by possibility and not beholden in any even nominal way to the totality implied by a version of the facts that,while merely one version among many, carries some aura of importance, of being some kind of standard, because it issues from one of the participants. One might object still that one can never be certain that what we are pre132 “But Aren’t It All a Sham?”

sented with as Budd’s words are, without addition or omission, truly his own. But the point is the same: while no one version of the events can purport,in Melville’s eyes,to be the entire truth — if only because of the inherently phenomenal nature of truth (there is always some unexplored perspective) — the force of the mere suggestion of such a totalized,complete account must be eliminated.For the force of that suggestion is so strong as to be capable,if the great machinery of naval law and imperial discourse Vere brings to bear on Budd’s case is any indication, of silencing rumor, of providing deeply needed relief by telling the truth, at last, for once straight and not slanted. From Melville’s point of view,on the other hand,and certainly from the narrator’s, Budd’s execution erases any hint of force in the suggestion that the whole story is known just because it has been legally concluded.Now,from this point of view,the real work can begin: the work of elaborating motives, of creating Budd, Vere, and Claggart as if for the first time; the work, in short, of narrating a world whose variety was held in check so long as the objective was anything so limited as the whole story. Once the hunt for an objective, outside narrative is given up (or, some might say, concluded successfully), the “Inside Narrative”that Billy Budd promises in its subtitle can open and begin to grow in directions that an inflexible, official account would shun, if not foreclose. Billy Budd represents the unity principle, that which can enforce unity by its presence — but not the kind of unity Vere means to impose by executing him (political unity) or the kind of unity Barbara Johnson reads into Budd’s hasty trial and Vere’s fervor to convict (epistemological unity). For Melville, Billy Budd’s continued existence would neither eliminate political dissonance nor resolve epistemological ambiguities; rather, it would mandate a logical unity. Having the foretopman to consult more substantially about his part in the alleged mutiny would not endanger the process of legal judgment (in fact,it might help immensely) as much as it would the process of logical judgment, that is, the construction of integrated narrative and social wholes. Billy Budd’s not dying would coerce all accounts of the events aboard the Bellipotent into a logical totality, a standard to which all such accounts would have to adhere or be rejected as invalid. Killing him may be intended to stifle mutinous impulses among his shipmates (the “strange human murmur” heard when the corpse is buried at sea suggests that those impulses can be suppressed herman melville 133

only temporarily or partially [bb 1429]), but it also stimulates their interpretive faculties: their impulses to recuperate Budd as a religious, cultural,poetic (and implicitly also,a political) figure.Budd’s life after death embodies what I am suggesting is Melville’s model of social and individual identity unhampered by the coercive demands of totality.33 This is plurality severed from any implication of unity. “Billy in the Darbies,” the poem that concludes the story, is just one of the “ragged edges” (referred to in the first epigraph to this chapter) that deprive the narrative of “symmetry of form” (bb 1431) and, in so doing, allow more than one version of Billy Budd (hero, anarchist, saint) and more than one reading of Vere’s and Claggart’s psychological attachment to him (paternal love, homosexual lust, or homophobia) to continue to circulate in and out of a narrative whose subtext(s) will never be truly finalized.34 We have before us not simply an aesthetic matter, irony for its own sake, but irony with a serious, practical motive. Budd’s death is thus a logical requirement of plurality; his execution blocks the authority of logical necessity. The unity Budd’s continued presence might enforce upon the narrative is not unlike the unity this Handsome Sailor is said to bring about among his shipmates, at least on his previous vessel, the Rights-of-Man. As her master, Captain Graveling, says, “[T]hey all love him. Some of ’em do his washing, darn his old trousers for him. . . . Anybody will do anything for Billy Budd; and it’s the happy family here. But, now . . . if that young fellow goes — I know how it will be aboard the Rights. ...[Y]ou are going to take away the jewel of ’em; you are going to take away my peacemaker!” (bb 1357). Although Graveling reads Billy Budd’s effect on his crew as beneficial, young Budd inspires an agape-based unity; unlike the totality that Vere means to impose (one that aggregates on the basis of corporeality), this is a unity in which corporeal singularity is lost.35 Unity is considered by Melville to be as stifling and dangerous as totality. Unlike Poe, he finds aggregation as demeaning to identity as integration, equally inhibitory of the lability of social formation and the ability of its participants to conduct and reconfigure their selves,relations,and alliances.Unity is imagined to be only a totality, which is to say, there is no vital conception of unity as desirable wholeness. The unity represented by Budd, one that cancels proprietary individuality, is just as unacceptable as the totality, embodied in Vere, that grants it, that dispenses particular identity on the condition of its being the property and constituent of a more general whole. 134 “But Aren’t It All a Sham?”

Though Vere, then, means to restore totality by killing Budd, he does not extinguish but instead unleashes the true antagonist of totality: the “holy oblivion”that “covers all at last,”the open-ended,raggedy infinity which is the true enemy of totalizing structures like social formations that privilege unity over plurality as the basis of authentic relation. It is only his entry into “holy oblivion”that permits Budd ever to speak again: for when he finally does speak (and in “Billy in the Darbies” he does so clearly,without his characteristic stutter),it is from beyond the grave.36 Budd is now available only as a ventriloquized version of himself, through the mediation of oral tradition and a communally authored ballad (“The tarry hand made some lines which, after circulating among the shipboard crews for a while, finally got rudely printed at Portsmouth as a ballad” [bb 1434]). Anyone can say anything they want about Budd, Claggart, and Vere. Lies will pass as well as the truth. More defamatory accounts like the naval chronicle piece cited by the narrator (1432) can be written and circulated, but so can laudatory ones.Given the fiduciary responsibilities of newspapers and journals, as well as the affective responses that reportage is designed to produce in variously affiliated groups of persons, this will be some mixture of excitement at rebellion and comfort at its suppression. Anyone can say anything they like from the moment of Budd’s death: that is the terrific freedom Billy Budd contemplates. The interpretive reversal I am suggesting in relation to the criticism is the same that I am suggesting Melville makes in relation to the common project of writers like Whitman and Poe. By reversing the meaning of the death in Billy Budd, Melville lodges his most radical and successful experiment with the critique of unity.37 The force and specific character of this reversal is best seen by looking at Billy Budd against the background of Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” where Whitman uses sacrifice of the one (Lincoln) to free up plurality for the service of the many. But in Leaves of Grass the telos of the many remains the Union. Here, the intent is to free up plurality in service of no larger whole. You have to kill the one, the original (Budd), and, as sheer difference in scale would suggest, it is much easier to kill a man than a whale. One would assume that Budd’s execution would be an attempt to restore unity (which is how Vere intends it), yet it actually frees up plurality, frees it from the burden of unity in a way that anticipates William James’s theorization of a varieties-type unity. herman melville 135

The condition for Whitman is circulation in service of the Union. The same is not true for Melville. Whereas “Lilacs” offers integration by way of qualification of the principle of the center (Lincoln’s death read as sacrifice), Billy Budd balks at integration per se. In contrast to the openness of Whitman, the joy with which he opens representation to the previously unrepresented and disenfranchised, Melville views enfranchisement — and finally even representation (or representability) — as already unacceptably compromising the identity of its social participants. Though in earlier texts like MobyDick Melville may still put some effort into working at noncoercive social formations, in Billy Budd he has given up. He has come to see the coercion, the limitation, inherent in the idea of integration, in the notion of totality that had underwritten any (at least American) model of relation. He has realized the enormous potential in plurality that is not, as it is in Whitman, beholden to some larger whole. Plurality disengaged entirely from unity is the vertiginous prospect at which he has at last arrived. It is the vantage point (some might say, the precipice) on which he has come to rest. Billy Budd must almost perforce be his last word; it is the point beyond which the totality-bound would be hard pressed to follow him. Had Melville lived, it is hard to see how he would have continued to write. He would seem to have fallen silent, having entered a register for which it is hard to find commensurable words. In a letter dated December 5, 1889, two years before his death, Melville alluded to the work-in-progress that would eventually be published as Billy Budd, Sailor: “I have just lately come into unobstructed leisure, but only just as, in the course of nature, my vigor sensibly declines. What little of it is left I husband for certain matters as yet incomplete,and which indeed may never be completed”(Letters291).38 Written three years into the composition of Billy Budd, these words are less useful as fodder for debates about the editorial and interpretive implications of the text’s unfinished state (see for example, Hershel Parker) than as an index of the degree to which the ideas of incompleteness and the deferral of totality occupied a central place in Melville’s thoughts. It is fruitless to argue about what additions and deletions Melville might have made had he lived to publish Billy Budd, but the unfinished manuscript is so rife with moments of orchestrated incompleteness as to support the kind of argument I am making about 136 “But Aren’t It All a Sham?”

the text as we have it before us. The “ragged edges” of the text are like the “rude scratches” on Moby Dick’s skin, the “riddle” of “twisted tattooing” that covers Queequeg’s body: they emblematize the inscrutability and incompleteness that impede Ishmael’s task of totality-building. It is these same elements, however, that in Billy Budd support the narrator’s project — one diametrically opposed to Ishmael’s, one that (to extrapolate Wai-chee Dimock’s description of another Melville text) “question[s] the very idea of a unified ‘whole’” (Residues 87). Although Dimock is writing specifically about “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1856), her words are applicable to a story like Billy Budd which, by refusing to be reduced to a unified account of a failed mutiny, just as thoroughly “challenge[s] . . . the idea of a fully integrated totality” (89), just as flatly refuses to be a complete universe.39 Sustaining the analogy one finds in the Federalist Papers and Eureka between psychological, cosmological, and social formation, Melville denies the possibility that a universe of persons and phenomena can be apprehended, narrated, and contained with one totalizable voice or text. As Dimock’s most recent reading of Melville (Residues of Justice [1996], chapter 2) does in relation to this earlier story, this chapter demonstrates the degree to which Melville went against the grain of contemporary American literary and political culture by opting for manyness over oneness as the basis for social formation, by “question[ing] the notion of a ‘whole’ — whether social or individual — . . . in the context of a century best known for its exposition and theorization, the nineteenth century.” (57). By creating a text that refuses totalization, characters whose motives and desires defy determination, Melville succeeds in doing what Constitutional scholar Sheldon Wolin has shown to be so difficult to do in the American context: namely, “finding a theoretical voice” for pluris (the nominative case of pluribus),making a “case for pluris . . .comparable to that of The Federalist,” the public relations apparatus which helped sell the Constitution as a fulfillment rather than a violation of the Declaration’s equality principle (135). This section looks at Billy Budd as the text in which Melville finally frees himself of the obligation to unity by realizing a text that manifests no desire to create a whole from particulars, one that, on the contrary, actively resists the limitations of what he regards as false, and ultimately damaging, pretensions to totality.40 herman melville 137

Indetermination has long been the focus of Billy Budd criticism, and for good reason. Examples of what Susan Mizruchi means when she calls Billy Budd a “monument to indecision”are not hard to come by (302). They are impossible to avoid. For instance, when Captain Vere defies naval procedure by commanding Billy’s immediate courtmartial (a matter that by statute has to be “referred to the admiral”), the narrator admits that, although Vere’s subordinate officers might question their captain’s actions and even his sanity,they cannot prove with certainty that he is insane: Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity. In pronounced cases there is no question about them. But in some supposed cases, in various degrees supposedly less pronounced, to draw the exact line of demarcation few will undertake. (bb 1407) The narrator’s sketch of Claggart’s character provides similarly equivocal results: But for the adequate comprehending of Claggart by a normal nature these hints are insufficient. To pass from a normal nature to him one must cross “the deadly space in between.”And this is best done by indirection. Long ago an honest scholar, my senior, said to me in reference to one who like himself is now no more, a man so unimpeachably respectable that against him nothing was ever openly said though among the few something was whispered, “Yes, X — is a nut not to be cracked by the tap of a lady’s fan. You are aware that I am the adherent of no organized religion, much less of any philosophy built into a system. Well, for all that, I think that to try to get into X — , enter his labyrinth and get out again, without a clue derived from some source other than what is known as ‘knowledge of the world’ — that were hardly possible, at least for me.” . . . [M]en [like Claggart] are madmen, and of the most dangerous sort, for their lunacy is not continuous, but occasional, evoked by some special object; it is protectively secretive . . . selfcontained, so that when . . . most active it is to the average mind not distinguishable from sanity, and for the reason . . . that what138 “But Aren’t It All a Sham?”

ever its aims may be — and the aim is never declared — the method and the outward proceeding are perfectly rational. (bb 1382–1383) Claggart’s inscrutability is worth discussing in its own right, but because my concern is with the death that is necessary to Billy Budd’s success,Claggart himself is not of immediate concern.Billy Budd kills the master-at-arms in the heat of the moment; unable to intercede linguistically on his own behalf,the accused strikes out.And in any case, Billy is not being tried for the intention behind the blow that kills Claggart; striking a senior officer is his crime, not murder. Claggart’s death is not really necessary to the text because (1) if Claggart had lived, he would remain “a nut not to be cracked,” providing evasive answers to further questions and perhaps fabricating new charges; and (2) there is no question raised about the rightness of Claggart’s death as there is about Billy Budd’s. Claggart’s death is accidental, arguably unintended; and, regardless of any sympathy on the narrator’s or Melville’s part for his tortured feelings about Billy, no sense of moral outrage or at least puzzlement surrounds the moment of Claggart’s death as it does Billy’s. What distinguishes the latter’s death as absolutely necessary is its logical requirement of a model of relation grounded in plurality and not obligated to the unity Melville produces by writing Billy Budd as a pseudohistorical account — one whose “ragged edges,” “bypaths” and “deadly space[s] between” resist totalization — of actions and words that themselves resist verification (1431, 1365, 1382). Claggart’s death fails to close the door on the possibility of a true account of the alleged mutiny. For a unified account to remain “closeted” like the interview between Billy Budd and Captain Vere, Billy must die. After all, it is Billy’s death, not Claggart’s, over which critics tend to agonize: Was execution compulsory? Did Vere have no alternative (either in regard to naval law or in the wake of the recent Nore mutiny)? Billy Budd is commonly regarded as a hard case — critically, morally, and legally. Actually, it is none of these. Billy Budd has to die, but for logical reasons, for the openness his death brings to social and textual formation. There is no moral issue or any real legal murkiness involved. It is in this regard that the reception of Billy Budd seems counterintuitive to me. The text is taken to typify the legal notion of a hard case (an instance in which the judge finds himherman melville 139

self called upon to support what he regards as an “unjust law”41) as well as a critical hard case (one that inspires contradictory interpretations). Common readings are that Melville condemns Vere for hastily or wrongly sentencing a sympathetic and most likely innocent character; that he wants us to sympathize with Vere as a reluctant executioner; or, finally, that he wishes us to identify with the narrator, for whom the indeterminacy and contingency that cloud historical or any other kind of knowledge irreparably undermine Vere’s (and the law’s) commitment to the determinability implicit in adjudication. Part of the problem with these readings is the way they concentrate on Vere’s culpability, as if doing so exonerates Melville from the taint of being identified with Budd’s executioner. But, considering Melville’s preference for metaphysics and abstraction, we should be accustomed to the idea that no such taint exists in Melville’s mind. Billy has to die, but it is misleading to focus on the question of whether or not Vere has to allow his death (as he claims he does).It seems more productive to consider the idea that Melville, not Vere, must kill Billy Budd.42 The legal interpretation is worth considering if only for its unique approach, condemning Vere’s behavior not on moral or ethical grounds, not even from the standpoint of positive law (where the judge must side with law over conscience), but rather on the grounds of the sheer illegality of the way he conducts Billy’s trial. This is anything but a hard case; it is a clear miscarriage of justice. By fudging on the official guidelines for naval courts-martial, Vere deprives Billy of due process. By claiming to follow the very regulations he disobeys, Vere champions a legality which betrays itself in the search for its impossible justification.So even though Melville seconds Vere’s decision to hang Billy Budd (to the extent that both find it imperative, albeit for different reasons), he does not do so legally: the blatant illegality of Vere’s conduct before, during, and after the trial forfeits law’s claim of priority. The clearly illegal basis of Vere’s actions and arguments calls attention to the narrator’s intent to ironize Vere’s pretension to totality.In the end,whether or not Billy Budd’s is legally a hard case (which it does not seem to be) is beside the point, for the fundamental concern of Billy Budd is the logical implications that are manifested when legal consistency fails to manifest truth. In sentencing Billy to death, Vere is upholding the universal in prejudice to the particular, the principle to the detriment of the instance. 140 “But Aren’t It All a Sham?”

Those who balk at Weisberg’s approach as overly literal and legalistic would fall back on the claim that its indeterminacy simply lies in another domain, that even if the text does not present a legally hard case, it presents one that is morally or ethically hard. But just as Melville’s reason for killing Billy Budd is not wholly political (a satire of institutional justice), neither is it a moral decision. Morally driven readings of Billy Budd — that is, readings of Billy Budd as morally vectored — produce the critical impasse that has come to characterize the body of literature on this text. There is ample evidence, for example, to support a reading of the text as valorizing Billy (the Christlike innocent) and attacking Vere (the servant of the state who doubts but still obeys). The trouble with this interpretive strategy, however, is that it totalizes the text, forcing characters into absolute categories of villain, martyr, and lawgiver, at the same time that it points to the psychological complexity of Claggart and Vere (and even the impenetrable innocence of Budd) as prime examples of the ways in which the text defies such simplification. Towing the ethical line forces us to take strong positions (innocence, guilt) that vitiate the pluralistic, open-ended state of affairs to which the text is ultimately committed. In morality plays, however relativistic one may wish to be, there are no subtleties, no ambiguities.43 Furthermore, Billy Budd’s metanarrative commentaries and digressions interrupt and fragment the main plot, dissipating its potentially tragic force and indicating that Melville is simply not interested in its moral implications, not interested in morality as an end in itself. He is modeling a new kind of unity in a text for the real world, not one that claims to be (or should be read as) the real world. If morality seems the wrong context or, rather, too exclusive a context for Billy Budd, then an epistemological reading of the story eschews context altogether. And this is exactly what the best known readings are arguing about: the domain in which to consider the text, the proper frame of reference for considering Billy’s death and Claggart’s and Vere’s conduct. Frustrating any unified interpretation with its “ragged edges” and its unfathomable characters, Melville’s last and uncompleted text has served as a favorite host and case study for the major theoretical critical movements of the last twenty years: deconstruction, in Barbara Johnson’s seminal essay, “Melville’s Fist: The Execution of Billy Budd” (1979); Marxism, in Brook Thomas’s “Billy Budd and the Judgment of Silence” (1982); and queer theory, herman melville 141

in Eve Sedgwick’s “Billy Budd: After the Homosexual” (1990).44 Each of these essays has in a significant way shaped the debate. Johnson’s essay may legitimately be referred to as a landmark reading, if only because, although the critical tide may have long turned against the deconstruction Johnson champions, the questions she raised continue to hang over subsequent readings. For Johnson, Billy Budd is a text about reading, about not judging, not getting mired in the binarism under which Vere operates and which the narrator himself problematizes. Thomas regards the story as, on the contrary, one that calls, if not commands, us to judge; not to object to Billy’s execution constitutes the unconscionable political act of ignoring the violence committed against individuals in the name of the state. Sedgwick, finally, reads the story as a critique of binaristic structures of thought and power that attempt to regulate gender roles and sexuality, as well as the violence they can condone and/or produce (in the latter case, through either repression or resistance). Rather than attempt to disqualify any of these readings (for Billy Budd is replete with epistemological, political, and homoerotic overtones), I suggest that the domain the text addresses most consistently is the domain of the logical. Melville is not concerned with legal, moral, or epistemological domains, at least not exclusively. What Johnson, Thomas, and Sedgwick are debating, essentially, is whether literary texts should be read as being vectored toward the real world or purely as exercises in epistemology. Their readings are problematic since Melville is interested in both,not in abstraction per se but abstraction put to (or as it can be put to) practical use. The indetermination that Melville’s narrator cultivates is neither a means of problematizing epistemological certainty nor a device meant to elicit our objection to the slipperiness that permits Vere to strong-arm the drumhead court into finding Billy Budd guilty. Johnson’s reading is thus isolated from the very domain of concern, so the problem remains. And that problem is part-whole relations. If I differ from Johnson in regarding Melville as saying that we must judge, and from Thomas in reading that judgment as being in favor of Billy’s death (not against it), then I differ from Sedgwick in reading Billy’s death as not representing the “end of the homosexual” (a fantasy about a world without homosexuals) — just as I do not regard the mystifying (what Sedgwick might call the closeting) moves of Melville’s narrator as tools of binaristic leverage. The closet door must remain shut 142 “But Aren’t It All a Sham?”

— nailed shut, if need be — but not to suppress any particular form of identity (along the axes of gender, sexuality, race, politics, and so on). On the contrary, the closet’s remaining shut frees up the space within it, opens up identity formation to a wealth of plurality it would lack were the closet opened, the true Billy revealed (as murderer or innocent,as a homosexual or the object of homosexual desire).Rather than depicting what Sedgwick calls the “shining furrow of the disappearance of the homosexual” (127), Melville is out to represent the plenitude of what seems on the face of it like repression or persecution (especially from the late twentieth-century perspective of an identity politics that valorizes openness) but which is neither. Because the interview is closeted, because that closet remains shut and we never find out what passed between Budd and Vere, because Budd dies — these are the conditions that must be met so that “conjectures may be ventured,” and not merely about the private interview between Vere and Budd,but about the characters,motives,and even actions of every participant in this history. Interpretation itself, the lability of individual and social formation, is predicated on Billy Budd’s death, on (in Sedgwick’s terms) the closet door’s remaining closed. This is not to disable the validity of the basic thrust of Sedgwick’s argument (that Billy Budd is “an account of the interplay between minoritizing and universalizing understandings of homo/heterosexual definition”) but to suggest,rather,that the minority/universal paradigm has an equally, if not more,stable foundation in the nineteenth-century debate within American literary culture about the viability of certain social formations as it does in a discussion of the “emergen[t] . . . modern homosexual identity” (127).45 Still, Sedgwick is right to point out that if “there is a homosexual in this text . . . [t]hat person is John Claggart” (92). For however homosexual Billy may seem, he remains, like the Handsome Sailor, a “cynosure,”a desideratum onto which same-sex desire is projected,but from which it may never be said, for sure, to emanate (BB 1354). He is not the authentic homosexual but the authentic individual, the most interior and unowned version of the youth whose body is impressed into service, whose loyalty is due to the King. It is this version that permits speculation to continue on the events by continuing to lurk in the closet. From Sedgwick’s point of view, Budd’s death means eliminating a rich space of creativity (presumably for identity formation), but for Melville,keeping the closet shut accomplishes precisely that: allows herman melville 143

one the freedom always to speculate.46 When the narrator hints that “Even more may have been” (1419), I would argue that his words refer not just to an unheard conversation between two men but to the plenitude of intercourse, the heterogeneity of ways of relating to one another that may pass, now uninhibited, between men on board the Bellipotent, if not (I read Melville as insinuating) between men in general wherever a variety-based social formation may be found. Plumbing the closet would mean plumbing interiority, crossing that “deadly space between,” that gap between selves that permits the deferral of totality, of integration on all counts. The central passage in this regard is the narrator’s description of the Billy Budd cult that arises among the sailors in the wake of Billy’s trial and execution — events that transpire too secretively and summarily to be easily comprehended: Ignorant though they were of the secret facts of the tragedy, and not thinking but that the penalty was somehow unavoidably inflicted from the naval point of view, for all that, they instinctively felt that Billy was the sort of man as incapable of mutiny as of wilful murder. They recalled the fresh young image of the Handsome Sailor, that face never deformed by a sneer or subtler bile freak of the heart within. This impression of him was doubtless deepened by the fact that he was gone, and in a measure mysteriously gone. (bb 1434; emphases added) The sailors regard Billy’s hanging as “unavoidably inflicted,”yet they believe him “incapable of mutiny.” The issue of Billy’s innocence or the justice of Vere’s sentence is here separated from the notion that Billy’s death was “unavoidabl[e]” — not just from the naval point of view but also,given Melville’s recurrence to the trope of ship-as-state, from the social point of view. Furthermore, the sailors’ admiration for Billy is predicated on his disappearance: the stories and meanings they are able to invent about him (their “impression of him”) are given mythic license, the power to perform cultural work, by the fact that he is not simply “gone” but “mysteriously gone.” The unspokenness that seems so dangerous in reference to Claggart is here revealed to be full of possibility.47 In fact, silence and interrupted speech (emblematized by Billy’s alternating stutter and muteness) are mandatory. Even though the narrator assures us that, like the “complicated gun-deck life” Vere knows so well, “every other form of life 144 “But Aren’t It All a Sham?”

has its secret mines and dubious side” (1399), Budd’s story cannot have a dubious side if stutters are overcome,if words are found,if false stories are sorted out from true ones — in short, if the narrative world of Billy Budd and the social world of the Bellipotent are totalized. Vere’s uncertainty about how to read his sergeant-at-arms is exemplary of what Melville holds to be the compulsory character of infinity in the construction of social and narrative wholes: “Though something exceptional in the moral quality of Captain Vere made him, in earnest encounter with a fellow man, a veritable touchstone of that man’s essential nature, yet now as to Claggart and what was really going on in him his feeling partook less of intuitional conviction than of strong suspicion clogged by strange dubieties” (1402). The “dubieties” are what Claggart’s death alone cannot sustain. Budd must die as well. It is true that Vere orders Budd’s death precisely to extinguish “dubieties.” And even Budd tries to “smother” “the ineffectual speculations into which he was led”after the afterguardsman propositions him (for mutiny or sex, it is impossible to determine) (1391). But the full text here reads, “The ineffectual speculations into which he was led were disturbingly alien to him that he did his best to smother them” (1391). This is the overwhelming instinct which even Budd feels, as a socialized member not simply of a declared heterosexual culture but of one that has declared itself against divergence in general, against difference. The constant, digressive presence of the narrator, however, overwhelms all these impulses toward coherence, homogeneity, and totality. My point is to specify exactly which domain we are talking about: the logical. And politics in the high sense, as embodied in the Federalist Papers, is deeply involved with the logical aspect of Billy Budd as a hard case (not the legal, moral, or epistemological aspects). The idea of the hard case parallels that of the hard problem, the hard logical problem of the one and the many as it impinges on models of social formation. My reading of Budd’s execution as a sacrifice — one,moreover,that is necessary — is not in line with the body of Budd criticism. What my reading does, though, is make sense of Billy Budd not as a protodeconstructionist exercise or a cautionary parable about homophobia. Instead, the text should be read as Melville’s final contribution to the common project he shared with Poe and Whitman but for which he proposed his own very different solution: the sacriherman melville 145

fice of the individual for the sake of individuality, a sacrifice that becomes mandatory upon the realization of the tremendous potential (flexibility, malleability) available to unhampered plurality. This is what I take to be the deep significance of the powerfully vague line, “Moreover, there was something crucial in the case” (1408). What is “crucial in the case” is the refutation of any presumption to totality.As far as Vere is concerned,intention or motive is not within the purview of the drumhead court. While he admits that “At the Last Assizes it shall acquit” (that is, that Budd is morally innocent even though legally guilty), Vere turns his back on depth, on the possibility of interiority, of multiple interpretations: “War looks but to the frontage,the appearance.And the Mutiny Act,War’s child,takes after the father. Budd’s intent or non-intent is nothing to the purpose” (1416). Ironically, the move to shut down speculation encourages just that: Vere’s rejection of plurality cannot dismiss it as a viable option for his crew, for readers of Billy Budd. The simple plot of the story may come to an end, but the text continues to swarm with questions that cannot be answered with satisfactory determination: Is Claggart queer? Is Budd? Was Claggart’s animosity toward Budd motivated by queer desires that he recognized but refused to countenance or by a more straightforward, at least more unconscious, homophobia? Is Vere queer? Is his affective relation to Budd more than paternal, or both paternal and homoerotic? Do Vere’s dying words, “Billy Budd, Billy Budd,”token conflicted desire (1432)? (The narrator asserts that they were “not [spoken in] the accents of remorse.”) Nonetheless, all these questions are sustained as indeterminable by the very determining impulse that would shut them down by shutting them out of the text but that fails on both counts. Vere can issue orders; the men will most likely obey them. But they are still capable of “uncertain movement[s]” like that which takes place after Budd’s execution, a movement “in which some encroachment was made” (1430). The confounding vagueness of this incident (what kind of movement? what were the men about to encroach on?) epitomizes the openendedness, the refusal of totality-based unity which Melville makes most forcibly in Billy Budd.48 The poem “Billy in the Darbies” ends the narrative, but, like each of the five preceding fragmentary chapters which try to resolve the story but only raise questions, it is hardly conclusive. Not only did this ballad apparently provide the origin of Billy Budd, the lines which 146 “But Aren’t It All a Sham?”

Melville continually revised during the six years he worked on the story are, on nearly every level, vectored toward inconclusion. It seems no accident that, in the story, the ballad is the product of the “artless poetic temperament” of “another foretopman,” a “rude” or democratized “utterance” from pluris itself: — But, look: Through the port comes the moonshine astray! It tips the guard’s cutlass and silvers this nook; But ’twill die in the dawning of Billy’s last day. A jewel-block they’ll make of me tomorrow, Pendant pearl from the yardarm-end Like the eardrop I gave to Bristol Molly — O, ’tis me, not the sentence they’ll suspend. * * * Sure, a messmate will reach me the last parting cup; But, turning heads away from the hoist and the belay, Heaven knows who will have the running of me up! No pipe to those halyards. — But aren’t it all a sham? A blur’s in my eyes; it is dreaming that I am. (bb 1434–1435) The ballad’s aggressive antirealism extends beyond the dreamlike cast of moonlight. Billy speaks of a previously unmentioned sweetheart, and then he becomes the earring he supposedly gave to her — a transformation which sets off the final series of diffusions in Melville’s siege on totality and completion.The joke that “’tis me,not the sentence they’ll suspend” puns on the text’s suspension of positivistic assumptions about truth, identity, and, by extension, unity. Finally, the awkward syntax of “it is dreaming that I am,” while necessitated by the rhyme scheme, creates an ambiguity that seems consistent with the objective the story repeatedly thematizes. Read as a strained colloqualism, the line refers to Budd’s realization that “it,” the vision of being fed his last meal and escorted to the deck for execution, is a “sham” or dream. Read noncolloquially, however, the line suggests that Budd’s existence (“that I am”) is being dreamed. The fact that the dreamer is not only unspecified (not “he,” a sailor, or “she,” Molly) but also ungendered (“it”) projects the surreal condition of a textual or social formation dreaming itself into a selfherman melville 147

sustaining state — taking pluralization as its engine, risking unintelligibility,but rendering durable the dissolution of totality-based unity Melville has sought for so long (“aren’t it all a sham?”). In the blink (or “blur[ring]”) of an eye — the dispersal and disbursement of his singularity — the imagined dream that Budd has the night before his execution is transmogrified through an intuition of the finally insufficient and thus insubstantial character of unum. And the unum Melville rejected is understood as individuality (one person’s sense experience) as well as any totalizing structure (legal codes purporting to stipulate for any eventuality, literary texts attempting to delineate motives and causes completely) which deigns the necessity of supplement. What the Bellipotent’s crew are “encroach[ing] on” in the moments after Budd’s death, what they are verging on, is the formation of an alternative to totality-based kinds of unity. Thus the “murmur” signals the nascent theorization of pluris, of manyness as the underwriting principle of integration. More than mere antiauthoritarian rumblings, this “murmur” is the source of “Billy in the Darbies”; indeed, it perhaps already contains the “lines which . . . circulat[ed] among the shipboard crews for a while” and “finally got rudely printed at Portsmouth” (1434). The long-awaited pluralitybased model of relation persists first orally,evading codification.Even when set down in fixed form, it is “rudely” printed, perhaps with errors. What better mode of dissemination than a popular genre, printed in cheap, portable form, purchased by “tarry hands” like those that composed them, read and passed on to other sailors in Portsmouth (the Royal Navy’s main home port), then carried on board countless other ships to awaken other crews to the possibility of communal persistence outside the unum paradigm. The time between Moby-Dick and Billy Budd comprised nearly half of Melville’s life and all but a fraction of his writing career and may be one of the most dramatic illustrations of how terrifically hard it is to find a philosophical basis for pluris. For theorizing manyness requires grappling with the problem of commensurability, of what happens when one unum is surrounded by other unums. It may be little consolation that, even when pluris was first bound to unum, there was little sense that pluris had a discernible theoretical pedigree. The American solution, as it stands in the Constitution, is federation 148 “But Aren’t It All a Sham?”

(Washington calls it “consolidation” in his Constitutional prefatory letter) — an attempt to locate some middle ground between integration (which would theoretically dissolve the individual states) and confederation (the loose association of states, prescribed by the Articles of Confederation, whose functioning depended largely on cooperation). Sheldon Wolin, in The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (1989), attempts to clarify the murky lineage of America’s hybrid solution.While my primary concern is with the ways in which certain nineteenth-century American authors dealt with their own urges toward and against bringing the metaphysical intention represented by the federal motto e pluribus unum into the actuality of a written order, in his chapter entitled “E Pluribus Unum: The Representation of Difference and the Reconstitution of Collectivity,” Wolin conducts a comparative analysis of attempts by the Federalists on the one hand and the Antifederalists on the other to establish a “theoretical voice” for what each saw as the structural priority of the still unformed American state.For Federalists,that priority was the nation; for Antifederalists, the individual states whose sovereignty the new Constitution would abrogate in favor of national sovereignty.The contest between these two groups was essentially over how that state should be formed (whether by integration, confederation, or — what Constitutional delegates offered as a compromise — federation); over which term within e pluribus unum should be structurally, politically dominant (the unum or the pluris, the one or the many). Wolin suggests that, compared to unum which had a strong theoretical backing in the Constitution and its public relations apparatus, the Federalist Papers, “the case for pluris never managed to find a theoretical voice comparable to that of The Federalist” (135). Although the Antifederalists were unable to articulate a convincing argument for maintaining the decentralized polities and localized governance of the Articles of Confederation, Federalists took the threat of popular resistance to the Constitution seriously enough to explicitly target the Articles and their Antifederalist supporters as feudal, backwardminded, and foolishly resistant to the Enlightenment-type progress embodied in the centralization of power in a national governing body. Wolin speculates that one reason [for the success of unum over pluris] was the ability of The Federalist to combine two powerful mythemes, one drawn herman melville 149

from Old Testament conceptions of monotheistic power,the other from eighteenth-century conceptions of a rational science of politics, especially as these latter fitted into The Federalist’s vision of the administrative power of the executive branch. The suppression of polytheism or difference made possible a unified or single national narrative, e pluribus unum. On the other hand, pluris never managed to achieve a theory, and the fact that it did not may suggest something about our basic preconceptions of theory. Stated briefly, we experience the same difficulties in grasping the antifederalists’ arguments as they experienced in making them. We and they are both confronted by a notion of theory which favors the reduction of difference to enable us to advance generalizations. We classify and categorize, we simplify, and we quantify; we regularize phenomena so that we can subsume them under general statements or hypotheses. . . . Precisely because the case for pluris is a case for diversity, those who would theorize it are put in the paradoxical position of seeking to generalize about difference, of trying to make a theory about exceptions, local idiosyncrasies, regional differences. Politically that position appears vulnerable to charges of defending the archaic against the modern, of obstructing progress. And this was precisely what The Federalist was arguing when it attacked the political system of the Articles of Confederation as feudal and democratic. In the Federalist critique, democracy is represented as a premodern political system, invented by the Greeks and foolishly perpetuated in the Italian city-states of their own day, but hopelessly unsuited to the large territory of the modern nation-state.Yet . . .American history,especially the history of the present,is a story of differences. It is a history that suggests that the true archaism is unum with its myth of a single people and a single narrative. And perhaps the supreme archaism is unum’s proudest achievement, the state. (135–136) As they saw it, the Federalists were not erecting a democracy. Difference and the conflicting demands difference brought with it were precisely that against which American social order, if it was to be innovative, had to be constructed. No model was required to produce manyness; as the authors of the Articles discovered, that hap-

150 “But Aren’t It All a Sham?”

pened by itself. The real feat was union. Oneness is easy enough to theorize. Actualizing it is the hard part. But even if the “myth of a single people” is “the true archaism,” the countersentiment of an Antifederalist-like resistance to collectivity was a long time in finding a serious voice in American literary culture. And that was not simply because, as Wolin suggests, any theorization of difference is automatically reductive, violative of the difference it means to represent. Melville and James both struggled to articulate a voice for what seemed not just ineffable but impossible, unthinkable within the confines of a social order where every aspect was imbued with a dedication to equality, yes, but to oneness above all. Billy Budd may not be the first instance of such a voice; it is, however, the strongest. If Billy Budd is,according to its subtitle,An Inside Narrative, MobyDick is an outside narrative, for in the latter, Ahab and Ishmael each long to “strike through the mask,” to obtain the meaning thought to be ensconced behind the “dead,blind wall”of the White Whale’s forehead. But with his final literary effort, Melville seems to reverse direction, producing characters and a narrative that attempts without success to get inside. And that, Melville seems to say, is as it should be.

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Chapter Four ★ “Necessarily Short of Sight” William James & the Dilemma of Variety May I hope, as I now conclude, and release your attention from the strain to which you have so kindly put it on my behalf, that on this wonderful Pacific Coast, of which our race is taking possession, the principle of practicalism . . . will come to its rights, and in your hands help the rest of us in our struggle towards the light. —William James, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results”

The James texts I will be looking at in this chapter are less often discussed, being generally considered peripheral to the Jamesian canon: the pair of early lectures on epistemology, entitled “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” and “What Makes a Life Significant” (1892; pub. 1899), and two of the several newspaper editorials James wrote concerning America’s plans to annex territory acquired in the Spanish-American War (“Address on the Philippine Question” [1903] and “The Philippines Again” [1899]). Both Melville and James deal with the preventative and preservative roles of particularity with respect to the integration of wholes. The essential opposition represented by James and Melville is that between preservation of difference within unity and the prevention of unity by difference. In what is perhaps James’s best known text, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), he takes a position that is fairly conventional within American thought (namely, the possibility of preserving difference within unity) and puts it in its strongest form (the idea that variety can vitiate unity’s force or obligation). Although James is in one sense seconding the Melvillean position (established in MobyDick and Billy Budd) that variety actually prevents unity, an accurate portrait of James requires further sophistication. James marks the beginning of a shift away from at least half a century’s thinking of the

unification of disparates as a problem. Arguing that unity is on the contrary no problem at all, James believes that imperatives to unity as potentially disparate as imperialism and “the clamor of our own personal interests” conspire to eradicate difference in ways that impoverish our ability to make even the most benign, socially narratable wholes (cb 851). This is what I refer to in the title of this chapter as “the dilemma of variety”: the way in which Melville depicts what James calls “shipwreck in detail” (the incommensurate character of models of unity with regard to what they attempt to unify).James himself depicts not “shipwreck in detail”but “shipwreck ...on the whole” (which is a different dilemma,the endangerment of variety by our own overwhelming reductive impulses) (sp 1054).1 By using the phrase “dilemma of variety,” I mean not to obscure but to highlight what is being presented as the inherent illusionality of variety — for that is what Melville posits and James struggles against: the illusion that variety can somehow renege on what appears to be an obligation to unity of a certain type. As we have seen in the preceding chapters, the abstract philosophical problem of the one and the many arises and re-arises in nineteenth-century American thought in the form of a problem of social formation, specifically, as the federal problem, eliciting widely different responses as to how it can or should be solved. Whatever distinctions can be made between the solutions offered by Poe, Whitman,and Melville,these authors share a common project in their fictional modeling of social formations: the reconstruction of unity in the context of plurality, that is, in the face of the inevitable problematic of unity. Having begun this study, in the state documents and the Federalist Papers, with the construction of the new American social reality as the mystery of the one and the many, we will now end with the reconstruction of this mystery by William James as a philosophical problem. For James, who articulates it as the “alternative . . . between pluralism and monism,” the one-and-the-many problem is the “most pregnant of all the dilemmas of philosophy” (sp 1040) — migrating through Western culture, as we have seen and as James reminds us, from Plotinus’s Enneads; inscribed in the history of American social formation as the federal problem; and finally, confronted by each of the authors I have discussed as the problematic in a post-theological nation of constructing unity by reconstructing something that works like a transcendent term.2 154 “Necessarily Short of Sight”

This chapter reads James’s interest in varieties as his response to the postratification problem of mind which Poe, Whitman, and Melville appropriate as a literary problem, but which James considers a problem for all kinds of writing and therefore the province of a discourse of the most general interest: philosophy. Philosophy — not incidentally, at the end of the nineteenth century and on the edge of modernism — becomes the repository for a problem which can no longer be dealt with literarily, that is, as a problem that can be solved in compositional terms. My intent, critically, is to recuperate Jamesian philosophy as part of the central current of American literary thought, and James, as the summational figure whose cognitive ambition recalls that of Edgar Allan Poe in the cosmological prose poem Eureka. Up to the present, critics have focused on James as primarily a psychologist, a pragmatic philosopher, or a religious philosopher.3 This splintering results partly from the diversity of James’s interests, the wide-ranging passions of his intellect, making it difficult to name the single project (if there is one) that most interested him, that could be said to drive the majority of his inquiries. I am not trying to do anything like that here. The adjudication of the monism-pluralism question is certainly not the only subject occupying James’s mind, but his development of the pragmatist position as a reliable response to problems of epistemological and religious doubt is, one could argue, of a piece with the fundamental nature of the one-and-the-many problem. My immediate interest, however, is more modest but, in view of the history of James criticism and reception, equally important. And that is the repositioning of James’s corpus in relation to the contemporaneous American literary project represented by Poe, Whitman, and Melville and characterized by the literary modeling of social order in ways that are curative to logical contradictions either incidental or inherent to its present form. For someone like Whitman, the task lies in the renegotiation of the difference requirement of unity — the assignment of difference-work to Lincoln in the form of the sacrificial death of the one on behalf of the many. But to James, unity is no longer in any such crisis as it was during the Civil War, at least, not national unity. If anything, James sees the pressing task as the preservation of difference, the prevention of its elision as a requirement in a postemancipatory,imperialist world in which the symbolic difference-work of the slave has been read out of the nation and onto the imperialist william james 155

subject (in this case, the Filipinos under American occupation). James’s interest is not just political, nor is it merely religious or philosophical.Rather,I hope to demonstrate the way in which James,whatever the generic or superficial focus of the work at hand, is always devoted to the problem of the many and the one, and in at least two particular forms: the maintenance of difference in a manner faithful to experience,and the attainment of a level of unity (epistemological,minimally) that does not violate the texture of that experience. The best approach to someone like James who intercepts the problematic of unity at so many sites (the political, the theological, and the epistemological) is to examine the three texts that exemplify, respectively,his grasp of each site: the “Address on the Philippine Question” (1903), The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” (1899). It is through this retrospective sequence of texts that we witness James’s confrontation of the terms on which unity is and is not available and the implications of its being available in some forms but not others. Reading James backwards allows us to follow James as he strikes an ideal balance in Varieties between unity and plurality, only to face a defeat for manyness against the homogenizing force of American imperialism and, in that defeat, to rediscover what he had already known — namely, that the fundamental unknowability of the other recommends pluralism to such a degree as to disable unity altogether. Our epistemological blindness to difference poses perhaps the most severe threat to the revision of social formation because it relieves us, sadly, of the possibility of wholeness. While in some ways James continues the project of Poe, Whitman, and Melville, he also transforms it. Unlike any of his predecessors, James attempts to construct unity without a transcendent term or anything that works like one.As manyness comes more and more to seem the nature of the world, James finds it no longer possible or necessary to secure a transcendent term as the assurance of an ontologically unquestionable reality. Unification, if at all obtainable, must be obtained in this world; it must be based upon totality, on the arrangement of constituent elements, rather than on a superordinate generality of the sort posited by the United States motto e pluribus unum. In the fourth chapter of Pragmatism (1907), entitled “The One and the Many,” James presents his position as a departure from unitydriven metaphysics: 156 “Necessarily Short of Sight”

Philosophy has often been defined as the quest or vision of the world’s unity. We never hear this definition challenged, and it is true as far as it goes, for philosophy has indeed manifested above all things its interest in unity. But how about the variety in things? Is that such an irrelevant matter? If instead of using the term philosophy, we talk in general of our intellect and its needs, we see quickly that unity is only one of these. Acquaintance with the details of fact is always reckoned, along with their reduction to system, as an indispensable mark of mental greatness. . . . What our intellect really aims at is neither variety nor unity taken singly, but totality. (p 542) In the notion of totality, we are dealing not so much with a physical/nonphysical opposition as with the presence or lack of a term that stands over and constitutes a generality of a different order than the physical parts that analogically form its whole.As a concept,totality has a history that precedes James. Inquiry into the relation of the many and the one dates back to ancient Greece; competing claims have been made both for the priority of wholes to parts (Plato and Aristotle) and for the priority of parts to wholes (Descartes). James seems to be somewhere between Descartes, for whom “totality . . . is nothing more than the resulting configuration of the patterns of interaction of its independently constituted parts,” and Marxist theorist Althusser,whose concept of a “decentered ...totality”avoids any reference to a unifying essence, whether materialist (in the case of Marxist historical materialism) or spiritual (in the case of Hegelianism) (Cullenberg 127,134).Althusser’s stipulation that social totality must be “based on the mutual interaction of irreducible and complexly constituted conditions of existence” sounds as if it might easily have come from James (Cullenberg 135). I should emphasize that, in the tradition of historical materialism, totality has negative connotations which it does not carry for James, connotations of coercion and reduction which, as we saw in the last chapter, it carries for Melville.4 Jamesian totality is quite simply distinct from Roycean transcendent unity (and thus other to the Absolute; see Royce 418–427, 570–588) and is best described on two counts: (1) it is neither transcendent nor superordinate; and (2) rather than the sum of all facts, which smacks of absolutism, it is more like all the instances of a thing, that is, it refers to a unity without an ontology separate from its william james 157

instances. Not lost upon anyone thinking, like James, about the problematic of unity in a post-theological nation is the fact that totality thus conceived would carry a status in materialist thought, as an accommodation to a universe without transcendence in it. Varieties demonstrates the philosophical force of totality in contradistinction to unity by controverting the property of infinity which is typically adduced to the transcedent term (God) and to the ideal: [God] is assumed . . . to be “one and only” and to be “infinite”; and the notion of many finite gods is one which hardly any one thinks it worth while to consider, and still less to uphold. Nevertheless . . . I feel bound to say that religious experience . . . cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist belief. The only thing it testifies to is that we can experience union with something larger than ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace. All the facts require is that the power be both other and larger than our conscious selves.Anything larger will do,if only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivably be only a larger and more godlike self, of which the present self would be but the mutilated expression,and the universe might conceivably be a collection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no absolute unity realized in it at all. (vre 468; emphasis added) If anything epitomizes totality, and thereby captures the intensity of James’s revisionary project with respect to the problematic of unity and the compositional modeling of social formation, it is this image of “a collection of . . . selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness,” with unity realized in various degrees and modalities but “with no absolute unity realized in it at all.” This is the lesson that James presents as irrefutable, that previous authors have discovered but fought to minimize, to give as little ground as possible: namely, that incomplete unification permits continuance of the difference that, paradoxically, is essential to the integrity of the whole.5 What distinguishes William James from his predecessors is that the incompatibility of the necessity of unity with the maintenance of identity no longer constitutes contradiction in the pejorative sense: something to be erased by the privileging of either the one or the many (the latter, in Whitman’s case), or something which is either so con158 “Necessarily Short of Sight”

stitutive or so destructive of relation as to define or nullify the project of social formation (Poe and Melville, respectively). The Jamesian innovation is the acceptance of the varieties, of the multiple and pluralistic nature of human experience, as being itself a valid institution rather than an obstruction to be overcome in any specific institutional endeavor. Although the Jamesian project of reconstructing unity on the basis of variety seems to resemble that of Melville in Billy Budd, there is one important difference: despite his decided prejudice in favor of pluralism, James holds to an idea of underlying unity that Melville attempts to salvage in Moby-Dick but finally abandons altogether in Billy Budd. Further, if James can be said to pursue anything like the Billy Budd solution, he finds, contra Melville, that it fails to hold when put to use in the real world. Coherence derives, for James, not from the consistency of a structural principle but from the pursuit, by a multiplicity of persons and institutions and in a variety of ways, of at least one similar end — that end being defined for James as “union with something larger than ourselves,” whether with God or with “a larger and more godlike self ” (vre 468). Moving beyond the federal proposition for the unification of variety, and beyond his predecessors’ concerns about the preservation of variety in unity, James asserts rather that variety is unity, perhaps the only durable form of unity that can take in the actual world. He struggles, on the one hand, with the fact that unity is a logical and functional necessity in the human world (a mind or a state cannot work without it). On the other hand, he is reluctant to abandon personal integration. The problem becomes that of creating a form of compositional unity that does not diminish the differentiated character of experience — or, as Charlene Seigfried puts it, the “ordering of the diversity of experience without slighting variety” (70).6 The attempt to do just that is what James describes as “our struggle towards the light,” toward comprehending not simply unity as it may exist in variety but variety itself, the fundamental and inscrutable character of differentiation which renders its own violation necessary to any integrative project (pc 1097). Perceiving the latter is both the central force and the perpetual stumbling block of James’s work: difference seems either fundamental enough to inhibit unification altogether or so inscrutable as to prohibit integration through any means other than violence against variety (whether conscious or unconscious). william james 159

The Varieties of Religious Experience is the text in which James most clearly attempts to strike a balance between contrary impulses whose role in the structuring of reality seems to demand reconciliation (equality and hierarchy, unity and difference). Read narrowly as a contribution to the study of comparative religion,7 Varieties assures us that the heterogeneity of creeds is no longer an embarrassment of decentralized riches that fails (as it does in Moby-Dick) to explain the relation of the parts to the whole, to validate (as it might for mid nineteenth-century Bible translators) any one text as having theological or temporal priority. But the work of Varieties is also the modeling of social formation, a continuation of the work of the previous three authors; it is more than a continuation in that, for the first time since Eureka, that work is perceived as an interdisciplinary endeavor, a problem of structural implications that affect and demand the discursive attention of a wide range of writing and ways of thinking about the one-and-the-many problem. Like Poe, James considers the problem to be common to philosophy, theology, cosmology; to be a problem of literary composition as much as political formation; to be the problem of the desire for unity on erotic, cognitive, and social levels. If we read Varieties as a contribution to an ongoing assault by American writers on the problematic of unity, what James has to say comes as a relief. His message is that, in face of what seems like common sense and contrary to certain imperatives to unity, difference is not a recipe for chaos, at least not a chaos that obliterates all organization, all form, all unity. Answering his own question as to whether “the existence of so many religious . . . sects and creeds [is] regrettable,” James answers, “‘No,’ emphatically”: I do not see how it is possible that creatures in such different positions and with such different powers as human individuals are, should have exactly the same functions and the same duties. No two of us have identical difficulties, nor should we be expected to work out identical solutions. . . . The divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities, by being champions of which in alternation, different men may all find worthy missions. Each attitude being a syllable in human nature’s total message, it takes the whole of us to spell the meaning out completely. . . . We must frankly recognize the fact that we live in partial systems, and that parts are not interchangeable in the spiritual life....[F]or each 160 “Necessarily Short of Sight”

man to stay in his own experience, whate’er it be, and for others to tolerate him there, is surely best. (vre 436–438; emphases added)8 A commitment to pluralism is represented here by the strong claim that the worthiness of those missions in fact depends on their difference,their divergent aims and foundations,but an equal commitment to unity is demonstrated in the claim that the worthiness of any one mission depends on the totality of all missions as being a spatially (that is, structurally, ideologically) rather than merely temporally differentiated ensemble. Working from the observation that the multiplicity of human experience contains within it many instances of unity but fails to constitute anything like a unitary system, James offers to free us from the assumption the latter could ever be, or should ever have to be, the case. In place of the monist’s falsely exclusive sense of what unity entails and what it requires, James suggests that plurality is itself a kind of unity, if only we are willing to redefine what we mean by, and to consider what we really want out of, unity. As an encyclopedic study of individual religious experience which is akin in some ways to The Golden Bough (1890) — J.G.Frazer’s protoanthropological study in comparative religion — Varieties makes what would nowadays be an address to multiculturalism: an argument for the epistemic multicenteredness of human experience (instead of the inevitable isolation of cultures).9 We should not underemphasize the extent to which James’s writings constitute in this regard a reconstruction of American thought.Whereas,like Poe,James contends that religious as well as secular grounds are required for social formation,10 unlike Poe, Whitman, and even Melville, he does not propose one model of relations as the surest means to a particular social end (equality, difference and/or unity), asserting instead that no single “worldformula,”whatever its foundation,can serve as an exclusively sufficient description of the world. The totality of all models, extant and possible, is itself the model. Yet like his predecessors, James, when confronted with the plurality of experience, attempts to reconstruct categories on different grounds. In the Varieties that category is still unity (in this case, religious unity) which he rebuilds on the basis of its variety: “[I]n our Father’s house are many mansions, and each of us must discover for himself the kind of religion . . . that best comports with what he believes to be his powers and feels to be his truest mission and vocation”(vre 340).However,instead of being contradictory, william james 161

mutually exclusive elements, pluralism and unity coexist for James in the idea of what I am calling unity-in-variety: “Who knows whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks?” (vre 463). Varieties constitutes James’s theorization of the heterogeneity of belief to which America has been committed since the decline of Eucharistic Congregationalism (the multiplicity of ways of organizing the world which seems to refuse reconciliation within one system) as being in itself a system. The totality of sects and creeds is the only institution one can rightfully speak of as exclusively sufficient.11 With its investment in plurality, Varieties is the terminus ad quem of a period in which funding an integrative account of American social order remains a pressing concern, that is, one still considered possible of actualization. At the same time, however, James’s privileging of manyness over oneness (in his own terms, the “each-form” over the “all-form”12) marks an undeniable break with the nineteenth century and the efforts of Poe, Whitman, and the early Melville, all of whom take unification to be the telos of social and cultural formation, whether attainable or not. Although James hardly jettisons the idea of unity, he no longer holds it to be an ideal, an absolute, transcendent state into which physical disparates must be coerced or which can exist only as a description of another order than the physical. Rather, James posits unity as a principle which, if it can be called transcendent, is transcendent in a modified or finite sense. Unity-in-variety, which is my term for Varieties’s articulation of the one and the many, emphasizes the way in which unity for James is not distinct from multiplicity and disparity, in the sense of overcoming difference, but is always grounded in and inextricable from that difference. For James, unity can never pretend to be anything but less than absolute, anything more than partial.13 What surrounds the visionary modeling of relation in Varieties, however, are moments in other texts that suggest quite the contrary. What cuts against James’s notion that the varieties category might provide a less coercive form of unity is his confrontation in earlier political and later philosophical writings of loci in which the transcendent term seems inaccessible even as when conceived of as finite, as derived from totality. In these other texts — “Address on the Philippine Question” and “On a Certain Blindness in Human 162 “Necessarily Short of Sight”

Beings” — we learn that variety is vulnerable to both aggressive and inadvertent kinds of unity, to imperatives to unity some of which are superfluous and others necessary to our functioning as percipient human beings. Unity in its overwhelming force is brought home in the form of bad unities which pluralism is unable or constitutionally unwilling to oppose. In the one case, pluralism is too tolerant of difference to protect itself from precisely the coercive models of unity, like imperialism, against which it ranges itself. In the other case, variety is preserved, but to an extreme that stultifies unity in its most benign form. James contends that even those among us who are not willfully intolerant are constitutionally so, saddled with an epistemological blindness to difference that renders other minds unknowable and compromises our ability to make not just the political, social, and religious unities which we impose out of self-interest but also the epistemological, perceptual, and cognitive unities which we impose out of necessity, which we must impose if we are to make sense of the world, much less contest the way in which others make sense of it. Both the Philippine address and the “Blindness”lecture are meant to open our eyes to a social or rather epistemological reality in which difference is in fact prevalent, but so prevalent that integrative accounts of the whole must ignore it, deny it through either actual or cognitive violence. What also connects these two texts is their deconstruction of what James presents in Varieties, somewhat glibly, as the possibility of an easy or untroubled relation to pluralism. If we were to confine ourselves to Varieties, it would seem that the model of integration James offers — I am calling it the model of unity-in-variety, or totality — ostensibly sidesteps the monist-pluralist deadlock by doing equal justice to oneness and manyness as they exist in the world. Nevertheless, both before and after James’s arrival at this apparent solution, his relation to pluralism is much more ambivalent. The conviction and fluidity of James’s prose lend his texts, most of which were initially lectures, the quality of originality. However, while James may be one of the last great orators, he is not the first to advocate pluralism as a curative for the problematic of the one and the many as a problem of American social formation. Ever since the Constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation in 1787 as the operative state document, making oneness rather than manyness the culturally privileged term, there were those, following in the steps of the Antifederalists, who continued to favor the decentralization of william james 163

power embodied in the superseded Articles.14 In 1832, for example, Emerson renewed the call for the dissemination of authority (this time, on theological rather than political grounds) when he rejected the monistic Congregationalist assertion that church tradition was “fully agreed” upon and “perpetual” instead of being “as flexible as the wants of men” (el 1129, 1139).15 In 1849, the Mormons petitioned the U.S. government to have their own independent state, Deseret. Pluralism manifested itself most strongly in the antebellum sectionalist conflicts over slavery expansion, which culminated in a war that transformed pluralism from a theory (espoused as the doctrine of states’ rights by South Carolina senator John Calhoun) into a physical reality.16 James’s relation to pluralism is,then,not one of innovation.But neither is it the case of a paradigm shift: as hard as he sells pluralism against the rival (and institutionally dominant) philosophical positions of absolutism, monism, and idealism, his emphasis on pluralism should not be taken in any way as a devaluation of unity.17 At the same time that James advocates pluralism and its ethical equivalent of tolerance, he maintains the paradoxical, quasi-idealist notion that unification is still possible on a limited scale, through social or personal systems of relation to human or “superhuman unities of consciousness” (pu 766).18 For James,unity is still a necessary and inevitable state of affairs, an organizational, cognitive technique which is vital to the operation of the individual mind and the state alike. What distinguishes James from the previous authors, and signals the transition from romantic to modernist interests, is the assertion that unity is no longer an imperative in the sense that it requires exertion.19 On the contrary, unity is an imperative because it comes of its own accord: while not spontaneously self-generative,it is something we are predisposed to produce.As percipient beings in a world overflowing with stimuli and information, we, like an institution, must coherently organize a select amount of material if we are to have a world to relate to and within which to relate to others. In arguing against the absolutist positions of Josiah Royce and F. H. Bradley, James demolishes monist arguments so thoroughly that he might seem to be, and has often been read as being, against unity in any form.20 Such a perception and a reading are wrong, however.Unlike Melville,he hopes to sort out the good forms of unity from the bad. James assures us that it is differentiation and not unification that requires vigilance, lest the human habit of systematization reduce 164 “Necessarily Short of Sight”

all selves and experience to a single blanched form: “The world . . . is growing more and more unified by those systems of connexion [sic] at least which human energy keeps framing as time goes on” (p 554).21 As confidently as James assures us that the “common-sense world” is a world “imperfectly unified still” (one which, because unity and plurality are “absolutely co-ordinate,” is “partly joined and partly disjoined” [p 556–557]), his foremost concern is for the preservation of variety in the face of the human habit of imposing unity by the formation of patterns and institutions that are necessarily selective, reductive, and therefore violent.22 Because the preservation of difference within an integrated whole is also the federal problem, James’s focus on the rebuilding of compositional unity on empirical grounds such as the diversity and unevenness of experience situates him clearly within the continuity drawn by the preceding chapters: namely, an awareness of unity as both inevitable and problematic. One objective of this chapter, then, is to demonstrate the continuity of James’s commitment to a nonreductive compositional unity with the sustained cultural project in which authors like Poe,Whitman,and Melville attempt to resolve logical contradictions (and the consequent social inequalities) of America’s founding allegiance to both union and individual sovereignty.23 The larger objective of this chapter, however, is to show how James distances himself from that project, not in the sense of forsaking but rather of sophisticating it, not just theorizing the problem of the one and the many as an insoluble problem but explaining why it is a problem,why its nature is to be insoluble,and why it in fact should remain so. James’s work is the most thorough and self-conscious theorization of the problem of the one and the many, the philosophical realization that this central cultural problem is not just insoluble but definitionally so: that is, its nature is to be a problem. The conflict between unity and equality, between integration and differentiation, is what defines America within the terms to which it has limited itself. To consider the solution, much less the objective, solely to be unification is a mistake insofar as that union violates the differentiated character of subjects (as in the Lincolnian Union which depends on the continued scarcity of personhood).24 For James, the problem of the one and the many will always be insoluble because unity and differentiation are equally requirements of conscious life. Whereas other authors model social formation william james 165

exclusively either on unity or plurality as the right or only possible state of affairs, William James contends that such extremist resolutions are not viable outside the mind (that is, they are not faithful to experience) and are therefore dishonest as theorizations of the social world. Contemplating the abstract philosophical problem of the one and the many as a concrete American social problem, James sophisticates the federal enigma, or rather abandons the federal form of the project, by embracing the dilemma and refusing its perfect realization. To conceive of unity as anything but problematic, as not always at odds with equality or difference, would be not only to read selectively the nation’s founding political texts but to ignore a significant part of its literary tradition. James is urging us to disregard the notion we seem to have internalized — that the problematic of unity should be soluble — and to go along with the deeper, discouraging instinct that it is not.

i The anti-imperialism of the “Address on the Philippine Question” can be explained as a political instance of James’s philosophical regard for the diversity of human experience which he believes to be in danger of being reduced to cognitive systems of social and psychological making (and most often, of hierarchical structure) such as theism,monism,absolutism,secularism,and imperialism.Because of James’s fidelity to a pluralistic state of affairs in light of the abstract problem of the one and the many, when he then faces a concrete instance of that problem in the American annexation of the Philippines, he must accommodate imperialism in his own relative terms, that is, as a monistic endeavor that should be resisted for the practical difference it makes in the lives of colonizer and colonized alike.Yet even as an advocate of noninterference and pluralism,James cannot help but acknowledge the efficiency, however ruthless, with which imperialism produces unity. What the Philippine Address describes are the limits of pluralism as a philosophical position: specifically, to what extent the imperative to unity (imperialistic or not) is irresistible, and how tolerance may paradoxically destroy the multiplicity it would protect. Tragically and ironically, tolerance — a laissez-faire policy meant to protect pluralism and avoid “hideous ancestral intolerances and cruelties” committed in the name of an 166 “Necessarily Short of Sight”

exclusive description of the world — cannot guarantee its own survival (wm 862). By not prejudicing itself against particularity, pluralism becomes vulnerable to any intolerant force like imperialism, the sole purpose of which is to interfere,to regulate the many so as to produce a homogeneous one. Most simply put, James’s point in the Address is that while aggressive intolerance may be reprehensible, some degree of intolerance (singlemindedness, if nothing more) is inherent and necessary to social and religious formation, to the pursuit by individuals and groups of any specific common end. To James imperialism represents more than a set of morally reprehensible actions. As a mandate to absolute unity, imperialism represents a bad unity, the kind that “brooks no degrees” (p 556). An absolute unity is defined, for James, by the assertion that its constituents compose an undivided whole, united by either physical integrity or a transcendent principle that actually or symbolically overcomes the recalcitrant divisiveness of disparates. Overcoming difference by force, by either the coercion or the destruction of difference, is what makes for bad unity. As the policy of empire, it provokes James to recur to the problem of the one and the many, the problem confronted by Poe, Whitman, and Melville, but to solve it in a different way because he (James) is faced with a different practical necessity (the Philippines). As the natural conclusion to this study, James provides an instance of what happens to the problematic nature of the one and the many and suggests how, in a postbellum world, one must reread the problem in an imperial rather than a federal context. This section follows James’s struggle with the notion that the kind of bad unity provided by the imperialist project (and thus the inevitability of unity itself) is imbricated in our functioning as percipient human beings, that colonialist violence is merely a systematic extension of the violence which perceptual unity requires as a natural fatality. But the answer James arrives at is of more than local interest. Because the imperialist subject replaces the slave in a postemancipatory culture like turn-of-the-century America, any discovery James makes about the logic of imperialism informs the project that had so long dominated the American mind: resolving the slavery question. Both, after all, are instances of the more general problem of social formation, the problem of the one and the many which comes down,as I have already stated, not just to the problematic of unity (the difficulty of constructing a whole from diverse and autonomous elements) but to the william james 167

fact that the problematic nature of unity consists largely in the realization of the inevitability of what Poe calls “gradation,” the necessity to unity of some differential in the valuation of persons. Imperialism is the altered face of slavery as it confronts William James. Having publicly expressed concern in 1895 and 1896 at President Cleveland’s warmongering against England over the VenezuelanBritish Guianese border dispute, James grew still more vocal in his opposition to American policy in the Philippines.25 In the summer of 1899 he attended the first meeting of the New England AntiImperialist League. Over the next six years he maintained his vehemence, becoming an active member in the League (where he would deliver his “Address on the Philippine Question” in 1903) and producing a spate of letters to the editor.26 Spain had ceded the Philippines to the United States in the December 1898 treaty ending the Spanish-American War, and the U.S., rather than consent to Filipino proposals for self-government, launched a ruthless military campaign against rebels and insurgents alike. Despite pronounced resistance in the Philippines and at home, America would continue to occupy the Islands until after World War II. While the dissent of some Americans was no doubt racially inspired, a substantial number dissented on the grounds of the “unconstitutionality and . . . antirepublican character of imperial acquisition” — in other words, the hegemonic relation of the whole to its parts (Michaels 655n). This is, of course, the same problem that Poe, Whitman, and Melville tried to resolve within the narrower field of the American state: the fundamental question of what constitutes the inevitability of hierarchy.27 In 1899 James added his voice to those objecting to the proposed annexation of the Philippines on republican grounds when he accused American imperialists of treating Filipinos “as if they were a painted picture, an amount of mere matter in our way. They are too remote from us ever to be realized as they exist in their inwardness” (ecr 160).28 Similarly, in a letter to Sarah Whitman, James rejects imperialism as an attempt to homogenize the natural plurality of both cultures and individuals: “Christ died for us all, so let us all be as we are,save where we want to reform ourselves.(The only unpardonable crime is that of wanting to reform one another, after the fashion of the U.S. in the Philippines)” (Letters 2: 168). By James’s logic, attempting to reform “one another” inevitably becomes, in one form or another,a “conquest of extermination”(Letters 2: 101).29 His espousal 168 “Necessarily Short of Sight”

of pluralism in the Philippine Address thus could plausibly be read as an explicit project to develop tolerance and noninterference on a global scale, to make pluralism the policy of politics. There is no disputing that James reconceives of the problem of the one and the many as an external rather than simply internal problem: the “one” no longer refers strictly to America but to any nation or individual for whom the negotiation of relations between itself and the “many” (which stands now for the established and emerging nations of the world) is a difficult and urgent task.30 Yet it would be a mistake to reduce Jamesian pluralism to an effect of the general expansion of American political consciousness,much less of the events which were forcing a formerly isolationist republic to turn its attention outward to distant shores. James is not a politician, and the Philippine Address is not essentially a political speech but an opinion dictated by his philosophical commitment to pluralism. Party agendas do not interest him. He is moved not so much by the concrete abuses inflicted on the Filipinos as by the situation’s philosophical implications.31 Upon closer inspection, we find James not conducting an ex parte polemic against imperialism’s construction of the relation of disparates but, instead, problematizing relation in toto, theorizing the social world as the intersection of four contrary factors: (1) an ambivalence toward the unity that obliterates the difference of its constituents; (2) a conviction that nonidentity cannot entirely be eradicated by any unifying scheme,none of which can purport to be all-encompassing; (3) a cognizance that some order of unity is useful, if not necessary; and finally, (4) an admission that the maintenance of the desired degree of variety may be nonvoluntaristic, outside any agent’s control.32 In confronting the difficulty of guaranteeing pluralism, the Address arrives at,and offers us,some fundamental principles about how relations do and do not work, regardless of the reductive or pluralistic aegis under which they are conducted. James criticizes imperialism as an assimilationist tactic that disrespects difference and, almost surely, intends the reduction of heterogeneity to homogeneity. Yet his real focus is on the threat to difference that imperialism poses not just to the Filipinos but to his fellow antiimperialists. By threatening variety per se, the human tendency to impose unity threatens the inherently differentiated character of human experience, the hierarchical structures by which perception william james 169

operates. The central image of the Address represents imperialism as an act of ingestion. America is depicted as a beast swallowing its prey (the Philippines). James graphically traces the path of the “morsel” through the predator’s digestive tract: In the physiologies which I studied when I was young, the function of incorporating foreign bodies into one’s organism was divided into four stages — prehension, deglutition, digestion and assimilation. We prehended our prey, or took it into our mouth, when President McKinley posted his annexation edict, and insalivated with pious phrases the alternative he offered to our late allies of instant obedience or death. The morsel thus lubricated, deglutition went on slowly during those three years and more [1899–1902] when our army was slaughtering and burning, and famine, fire, disease and depopulation were the new allies we invoked. But if the swallowing took three years, how long ought the process of digestion, that teaching of the Filipinos to be “fit” for rule, that solution of recalcitrant lumps into a smooth “chyle,” with which our civil commission is charged — how long ought that to take? It will take a decade, at least. As for assimilation, that is altogether an affair of the day after tomorrow. The most sanguine expect no real assimilation of our prey to us or of us to our prey for fifty years to come, and no one who knows history expects that it can genuinely come at all. (pq 1130) While the matter-of-fact tone and clinical terminology lend James’s words a distinctive wryness, he goes against the logic and force of his own analogy by, in the end, denying that assimilation “can genuinely come at all.” Were James interested in making a straightforward polemic, extending the analogy would have been most in his interest (say, by portraying assimilation as the addition of insult to the injury of ingestion). Instead, by causing the analogy suddenly to falter — by saying that prehension, deglutition, and digestion take place according to custom and biophysical law but that assimilation will not — James foregrounds the attractive claim that unification, even in the coercive form of imperialism, is incapable of totally eradicating the distinctive features of constituent elements.33 The strength of this claim, however, is undermined by the final paragraph of the Address, in which it becomes clear the Filipinos are not the only party with a stake in the denial of absolute assimilation. 170 “Necessarily Short of Sight”

Here James speaks to his audience in terms of their status as an insurgent group within an imperialistic nation, observing that the antiimperialists and even the United States are being drawn, unwillingly or not,into larger wholes,finding themselves part of entities (America and the world community, respectively) over whose actions they have limited control but in whose will they are complicit: As a group of citizens calling to our country to return to the principles which it was suckled in, I believe that we Anti-Imperialists are already a back number. We had better not print that name upon our publications any longer. The country has once for all regurgitated the Declaration of Independence and the Farewell Address, and it won’t swallow again immediately what it is so happy to have vomited up. It has come to a hiatus. It has deliberately pushed itself into the circle of international hatreds,and joined the common pack of wolves.It relishes the attitude.We have thrown off our swaddling clothes, it thinks, and attained our majority. We are objects of fear to other lands. This makes of the old liberalism and the new liberalism of our country two different things. The older liberalism was in office, the new is in the opposition. Inwardly it is the same spirit, but outwardly the tactics, the questions, the reasons, and the phrases have to change. American memories no longer serve as catchwords.The great international and cosmopolitan liberal party, the party of conscience and intelligence the world over,has,in short, absorbed us; and we are only its American section, carrying on the war against the powers of darkness here, playing our part in the long, long campaign for truth and fair dealing which must go on in all countries of the world till the end of time. Let us cheerfully settle into our interminable task.Everywhere it is the same struggle under various names, — light against darkness,right against might, love against hate. The Lord of life is with us, and we cannot permanently fail. (pq 1135) What James calls “old liberalism,” or the policy of laissez-faire, has succumbed to “new liberalism,” or the paradoxical enforcement of that policy through world policing. The shifting reference of the pronoun we insinuates that even Jamesian pluralism may be vulnerable to the overwhelming hunger which represents the imperative to unity. At first, we refers to James himself and his anti-imperialist audience. But when James impersonates his conquest-minded countrymen,the william james 171

intended satire is defused by a confusion of pronouns: “The country has . . . joined the common pack of wolves. It relishes the attitude. We have thrown off our swaddling clothes, it thinks, and attained our majority.” Although we is meant to describe the wolfish elements within America, the substitution of the impersonal it for country leaves the first person plural open, leaves room enough in we for the anti-imperialists and for James himself, thereby highlighting the degree to which membership (perhaps even extrinsic relations) entails hegemony and complicity. The us referred to in “the international . . . liberal party . . . has absorbed us” seems to denote both war hawks and pacifists. But as the paragraph continues, the referent of we shifts again, becoming even more ambiguous, so that when James concludes,“Let us settle cheerfully into our interminable task....The Lord of life is with us, and we cannot permanently fail,” it is not at all clear to whom he is referring.Is he signing on to the imperialist agenda and suggesting his audience do the same? If that is not the case, then how can he state unequivocally that “Everywhere it is the same struggle”? While this passage raises questions of exactly whose fight for truth James has joined and to whose account of truth he has subscribed (questions he has purposefully rendered unanswerable), it also suggests that Jamesian pluralism itself is in danger of succumbing to an overwhelming imperative to unity. The Address is therefore a disconcerting critique of relation under any regime, an investigation of the way in which not only monism but also pluralism is unable to intend a certain state of affairs (multiplicity) and a specific ethos (tolerance). Pluralism must be coercive insofar as it entails a group identity. We cannot know what tone James used when he read the end of the Address to his audience, but it seems unlikely that he rushed over its ambiguities in an attempt to deceive those who supported him into supporting imperialism. By the same token, James is not out to fan the flames of anti-imperialist rhetoric, which were high enough without his help. On the contrary, he makes it his business throughout the Address not only to problematize the binaristic paradigms by which imperialism produces an explanation of the world but also to open the eyes of those who are already on his side (whether identified as anti-imperialists, pluralists, or advocates of tolerance) to the fact that explanations which claim to preserve the variety of experience in fact depend on paradigms that end up being equally reductive. For exam172 “Necessarily Short of Sight”

ple, pluralism would recommend leaving the Filipinos alone, as well as any other group attempting to “follow its own internal destinies according to its own ideal.”34 But, James insists, such a plan is neither practical nor possible. Practically speaking, for “our government [to] immediately withdraw”would leave the Islands vulnerable to the acquisitive world power next in line (pq 1133). Rather than making an excuse for installing colonial rule (which was arguably Secretary Taft’s motivation), James is speaking to the real, entangled character of relations in general. It is true that, when James states we can “abandon . . . the islands as soon as, in our delicious phraseology, we have made them ‘fit,’” he is satirizing the hypocrisy of American statesmen who preach philanthropy and the “white man’s burden” while they suppress native rule and augment their naval strategic advantage (pq 1133).35 But James’s sarcasm has a point: that it is impossible to escape the situation entirely, and not just in the practical sense. As much as James wants pluralism to mean noninterference, he is uncertain as to what it would mean — indeed, whether it is even possible — for relations suddenly not to exist, as if they had never been established. So, while James is criticizing America’s commission of “perfidy under the name of the avoidance of entanglement,” he is making a philosophical point,the implications of which far outstrip the political one: namely, that entanglement cannot be avoided (ecr 168).36 Relations, whether monistically or pluralistically administered, are entangled because,by virtue of being models of relation and representation,they participate to some degree in an imperative to unity.37 If the Philippine Address is an exhortation to “know the truth about ourselves,”that truth is more than the fact that “the country has once for all regurgitated the Declaration of Independence” (pq 1135). To James, giving up an exclusive commitment to pluralism is a step in the right direction.38 But steps remain to be taken: first, giving up the “Fourth of July fancy” which, before the incidents in the Philippines, led us to believe that we were of a different clay from other nations, that there was something deep in the American heart that answered to our happy birth, free from that hereditary burden which the nations of Europe bear, and which obliges them to grow by preying on their neighbors. Idle dream! pure Fourth of July fancy, scattered in five minutes by the first temptation. In every national soul there lie william james 173

potentialities of the most barefaced piracy, and our own American soul is no exception to the rule. Angelic impulses and predatory lusts divide our heart exactly as they divide the hearts of other countries. It is good to rid ourselves of cant and humbug, and to know the truth about ourselves. Political virtue does not follow geographical divisions. It follows the eternal division inside of each country between the more animal and the more intellectual kind of men, between the tory and the liberal tendencies, the jingoism and animal instinct that would run things by main force and brute possession,and the critical conscience that believes in educational methods and in rational rules of right. (pq 1134–1135; emphases added) The “Fourth of July fancy” James speaks of brings us back to the Declaration of Independence and the regurgitation imagery of the Address’s final paragraph. It is only by expelling the Declaration of Independence,whose equality proposition James takes to be the core of the American commitment to pluralism, that the nation can have room to ingest the hegemonic model. What is most significant about the Philippine Address from this standpoint is the complexity of James’s relation to what I have been describing as a tradition of American thought about social formation (and here in explicit relation to a founding document, the Declaration of Independence). Although one may detect a note of regret in this description of America’s failure to assimilate the Declaration of Independence, it is indisputable that for James the Declaration represents a claim for unadulterated pluralism, which, as a funding principle, provides an insufficient and unrealistic description of the world: “To the ordinary citizen the word anti-imperialist suggests a thin-haired being just waked up from the day before yesterday, brandishing the Declaration of Independence excitedly, and shrieking after a railroad train thundering toward its destination to turn upon its tracks and come back” (1132). The insufficiency of the pluralist description is constituted by its failure to provide a principle of coherence derived from a term that lies outside history. As the next section will demonstrate, James’s attraction to religious and psychical phenomena has to do with his intuitive sense that the problem of the unity of disparates can only be healed by some form of truth which is outside history and that the varieties category (of extreme liberalism) does not supply it.39 174 “Necessarily Short of Sight”

For Lincoln, saving the Union means identifying Americans with the consolidating urge of the Constitution and distancing them from the decentralizing impulse of the Declaration. For James, our relation to the past and to our own nature is more complex. The “truth about ourselves”which we must realize is not that we have jettisoned a commitment to pluralism (for we can never do so completely, just as we can never completely eradicate difference) but that we exist somewhere in between the Declaration and the Constitution,the many and the one — between, on the one hand, the desire to produce a single coherent frame for thought and action and, on the other, the pleasure of reveling in and being granted an epistemic leave by the multicenteredness and variety of experience. The “truth about ourselves” is not so much the savagery we perpetrate in the name of nationalism as the violence which is necessary to our functioning as percipient, unity-producing human beings.40 If the notion of “entanglement” and the regurgitation of the Declaration suggest that relations, no matter how pluralistically intended, inevitably constitute or work toward unity, James’s editorial letters on the Philippines confront the yet more disturbing possibility that the social world is unavoidably characterized by plurality, and to the extent of defeating relation altogether. If that is so, separateness and ignorance might no longer be moral failings, which can with awareness and effort be overcome; they might be natural and impermeable facts. This is “truth about ourselves” which the Philippine Address grazes but does not fully unearth. In his editorials, particularly “The Philippines Again,” James explores the implications of occupying the same space with others whom one does or does not presume to understand (and whom it makes little difference if one does). The worst implication, from our point of view in this study,is that both the manyness James wishes to preserve and the oneness he seeks to make in moderation are threatened, and not by a particular institution like the behemoth imperialism, but by something woven into the very material of consciousness, something the individual perhaps cannot overcome: Among the charming “Fables”which the New York World printed many years ago was one about a hippopotamus, which, walking one day in the forest (excuse the natural history), scared a henpartridge from her nest of new-hatched fledglings. Touched with william james 175

compassion, the kind-hearted animal exclaimed: “You poor, forsaken babes! Let me be a mother to you.” So she sat down upon the nest of little partridges. — “Moral: It is not every one who can run an orphan asylum.” This fable seems to have been written by a prophet, for nothing could better hit off the “blended humor and pathos” of the present situation. Having scared Spain from the nest, we are trying to run the orphan asylum by the methods of the hippopotamus. Unquestionably the great heart of our people means well by the islanders, genuinely wills them good. So doubtless does our administration. But what worse enemy to a situation of need can there be than dim, foggy, abstract good will, backed by energetic officiousness, and unillumined by any accurate perception of the concrete wants and possibilities of the case? Cynical indifference, or even frank hostility,would,in ninety-nine instances out of a hundred, work less irreparable harm. Seriously and before the bar either of morals or of practical common sense,is it an endurable notion that such vague and half-awake good will, “moving about in worlds not realized,” as that hippopotamus the American people possesses, should actually have the vital destinies of the Filipinos intrusted [sic] to its hands? The foregone necessity of a tragic issue to the efforts of such an unintelligent colossus forms one of those grotesque and sinister contradictions in human affairs at which angels are supposed to weep. (ecr 160–161)41 We may “genuinely will [others] . . . good,” but we are unable to make good on our intentions; it is as if we are constitutionally blind.James’s statement, cited earlier, that equitable treatment of the Filipinos is hopeless because “they are too remote from us ever to be realized as they exist in their inwardness” implies that it is not greed or viciousness that drives us to imperialistic action. It is instead an epistemological blindness, a constitutional self-absorption which makes every interaction with the world and with other selves recklessly destructive. Like the hippopotamus, we are condemned to “‘mov[e] about in worlds not realized,’” our most careful and caring actions producing the same result as our most reckless behavior (ecr 160, 161). This darkness in regard to all that lies outside the self is surely what James is referring to when,concluding a lecture at UC Berkeley,he “hope[s] 176 “Necessarily Short of Sight”

. . . that . . . on this wonderful Pacific Coast . . . the principle of practicalism [James’s early term for pragmatism], in which I have tried so hard to interest you . . . will come to its rights, and in your hands help the rest of us in our struggle towards the light”(pc 1097).42 The “light” toward which we struggle is not divine revelation but, given the circumstances, something equally profound: the awareness of the other, the cognizance of difference. The rest of this chapter is devoted to showing how James comes to see that the theory on which he stakes all our hopes of reaching “the light” does not fare so well in practice.43 The difficulty is not one of distance, for even at close range we are epistemically distant from the nearest, supposedly most familiar other: Surely any reflecting man must see that,far away as we are,doomed to invincible ignorance of the secrets of the Philippine soul (why, we cannot even understand one another’s souls here at home), desirous moreover of results of a sort with which we are domestically familiar,and expressing our aspirations through an Executive [McKinley] which is only too true to our own type, our good will can only work disaster. (ecr 161; emphasis added) The truly tragic result is not only that imperialistic, morally questionable projects get thwarted but also that ostensibly nobler causes like pluralism or tolerance are doomed because,as programs for interaction, they also are necessarily conducted in the dark, where blunders occur despite the best intentions. The problem is that the inability to see difference removes the chance, the possibility, of respecting it. Our ability to theorize an enlightened vantage point from which unity integrates without abridging variety does little to turn darkness into dawn, to relieve what seems to be our irreparably benighted condition.

ii The solving logic of this project so far has been the extent to which the philosophical problem of the one and the many arises as a concrete problem of social formation and personality formation. At the end of the century,as we have just seen,William James reads the problem in an imperial rather than a federal context. James’s encounter with imperialism is the defining moment in respect both to the william james 177

continuing American interest in the problem of the unification of disparates and, more particularly, to an overt shift at the turn of the century in the terms of that problem and in the kind of unity that James, in contrast to Poe, finds imaginable and efficacious. The Philippines incident embodies the violence done to difference in the name of unity. And he struggles with that violence throughout his career as he returns in text after text to the “question of the One or the Many,” which he describes as the “most pregnant of all the dilemmas of philosophy” (sp 1050, 1040). It is this same actual and representational violence that motivates Poe, Melville, and Whitman in their distinctive attempts to reconcile the interests of the one and the many in terms of the nation, the state, and the individual. What James has in common with the previous authors is a conviction that unity is a social and a cognitive imperative. Like Poe and Whitman, he even goes so far as to regard it as the most fundamental — that is,as a perceptual — necessity.James’s point of departure from both literary models like Eureka and political models like the founding state documents is the concept of unity-in-variety.44 Formulated in Varieties and expanded in Pragmatism (1907), A Pluralistic Universe (1909), and Some Problems in Philosophy (1911), unity-invariety is an attempt to strike a compromise between the violence that unity necessarily exerts on difference and the conservation of multiplicity that James’s extreme liberalism demands.45 Such a compromise seems simple in theory, since it regards neither unity nor variety as prior to or exclusive of the other. But, James reminds us with bracing clarity, practice turns out to be quite different. The concrete cases of America’s imperial relation to the Philippines and of Americans’ relations to one another spur James to search for an idiom of the acceptable production of value-bearing persons who are members of a collective but also individuals in their own right. Success, James agrees with his predecessors, has to be judged by the extent to which an intrinsic value of the self depends on or exists only as the condition of a value conferred upon the self by the collective (in this case, the state). Described in terms that foreground its cultural centrality, the common work of these four writers is the determination of the acceptable amount of representational or actual violence in the production of persons; the determination of the acceptable relation between intrinsic and conferred value; the determination, ultimately, of an acceptable working definition of the person and of a whole. 178 “Necessarily Short of Sight”

But the consonance of James with those who have gone before extends only so far.The differences are instructive of the way in which James,who carries this continuing interest into the twentieth century, takes the dramatic step of questioning whether the one-and-the-many problem can ever be anything but insoluble, given not simply the paradoxical commitments fundamental to American social formation but — and this is the Jamesian difference — the altered possibility of those commitments in an imperial rather than federal context. As a form of bad unity, imperialism not only problematizes the viability of less coercive integrative models (federalism, Jamesian unity-in-variety) but also foregrounds the epistemic solipsism that renders difference illegible and thus perceiving it, let alone respecting it, nearly impossible. Founding social unity on the basis of the surplus or endless circulation of value,then,would seem to be an ill-fated endeavor.Indeed, it would appear destined to fail before it can even begin — were it not for the fact that the blindness which allows an imperialist power to appropriate what it considers rightfully its own also allows heterogeneity to go to some extent untouched by imperialist and other homogenizing forces. This is not to deny that real atrocities are committed in the name of mother countries; this is not to say that borders are not altered, languages and cultures suppressed or imposed. Though it may seem passive or naively hopeful, James’s position is that no unity is ever absolute, no empire ever global, no institution or discourse universal — at least not yet. And until that happens, which James doubts it will, the least amount of disconnection, the sparest lacuna, allows for the sustenance of variety, the description of the world in more than one manner, the overlapping of at least two ways of being in the same practical world. Make no mistake about the continuity of concern that runs from Poe to James. Eureka reads tension between unity and plurality in the structure of the universe. Moby-Dick stoically accepts, and Billy Budd originates a social possibility from, the heterogeneous, fragmented debris which that tension (along with the competition of equally inadequate solutions) produces. But James does not share Poe’s belief in the periodical relief of that tension or Melville’s belief that one should even attempt to do so. It also has to be said that Jamesian unity-invariety is not merely a reiteration of the federal enigma, or of the idea of compositional unity, but a significant qualification of it: reconciling the interests of the one and the many is not, James tells us, a william james 179

problem in the sense that it requires resolution, much less promises it. Neither is James making exactly the same case in Varieties that Poe makes in Eureka, namely, that inequality is the engine of its own gradual but always incomplete correction. (In fact, Poe’s model of a cyclically convulsing universe makes a grim prediction for the extremes of total pluralism and absolute unity by which that adjustment dubiously takes place.) What James means to say, by contrast, is that the problem of the one and the many is rightfully a problem, and should remain so, for its intractable nature, its insolubility, is what guarantees the articulation of the entire body of human experience in its inconstant and variegated character: cohering or being made to cohere in certain patterns and then, subsequently or simultaneously disconnecting itself, differentiating itself across those lines of affiliation.Poe’s interest is in satisfying the interests of the one and the many in alteration,whereas James’s is in satisfying them simultaneously,and doing so without significantly violating the integrity of the whole or the definition of its constituents. James ensures this by specifying a kind of unity that provides coherence without attempting to incorporate variety within an all-encompassing, permanent system (an institution, that is). It seems clear that Poe could not have imagined or been satisfied with the Jamesian answer for at least one important reason: to Poe’s almost eighteenth-century mind, the unity-plurality problem is a cosmological issue that calls for a much wider purview than James’s sociological localism allows. Consequently, Poe suffers a kind of institution envy from which James is entirely free. With its multiple self-classification (as poem, prose poem, scientific treatise, romance, and so on), Eureka claims a number of institutional alliances, as if by appropriating many kinds of discourse,one could arrive at a more stable description of the world; as if by absorbing the many institutions to which theological, cosmological, and especially literary discourse are beholden, one might construct a preeminently stable meta-institution. James’s anti-institutional stance sets him in stark contrast to the institutional objectives of both Eureka and Leaves of Grass; institutional religion is bracketed as what he will not be studying in Varieties. James’s pluralism produces what is essentially a democratization of transcendence and commits him, logically, to an anti-institutional, nonuniformist stance: “I propose to ignore the institutional branch entirely, to say nothing of the ecclesiastical organization, to 180 “Necessarily Short of Sight”

consider as little as possible the systematic theology and the ideas about the gods themselves, and to confine myself as far as I can to personal religion pure and simple” — that stage prior to religious “groups’ get[ting] strong enough to ‘organize’ themselves [and] become ecclesiastical institutions with corporate ambitions of their own” (vre 34, 305). What motivates James’s anti-institutionalism is an aversion to the reductive, homogenizing nature of any unified system or description of the world. Eureka’s cognitive complexity, the result of Poe’s desire to write a cosmology that is also a “Book of Truths” (prophecy or arcana), betrays an institutional ambition that could not be altogether inhospitable to hierarchy. It is precisely such a pretension to all-inclusiveness and a sufferance of the violence representational unity exacts that distance the first American author to confront social formation as a literary responsibility from the first to confront the extent to which not only literature but philosophy might be unable to execute that responsibility. James is closer to Whitman in that, for the latter, unification is always a problem of civil order, of the relations between persons. Despite the impression of heterogeneity fostered by the voluminous catalogs and the irregular line of Whitman’s poetry, multiplicity is always fodder for his first priority: unity. Multiple subjects populate the “vision[s]” of “Song of Myself,” for instance, but the slave, the bride, the laborer, and the prostitute are all experienced through and even claimed to be contained within the poetic “I” who assures us that “I am the man, I suffered, I was there” (lg 66).46 Whitman’s allegiance to oneness is best illustrated by the visionary experience (section 5), in which the experience of manyness — the opening of the mind previously subject to hierarchy to a democracy of objects (“brown ants,” “mossy scabs of the worm fence,” and “poke-weed”) — is a felicitous by-product of the section’s primary objective, the modeling of unmediated relation, and remains subordinate to the lingering shock of the bodily invasive heart kiss that brutally actualizes that union. Apart from this singularly visceral moment, union is ultimately accomplished in Whitman’s poetry by transcending the disparities of material and political life that resist it.Whitman’s tolerance of difference is exactly what James is asking for in the Philippine Address,but the poet’s accompanying appreciation that the many are finally only metaphysically one is unsatisfactory to the philosopher, for it does nothing to satisfy the perceptual and cognitive imperatives william james 181

to unity (“An order must be made”[pu 645]).Tolerance,or the refusal to value exclusively, is crippling in that it preserves difference at the expense of the self ’s psychological and volitional unity: [S]o blind and dead does the clamor of our own practical interests make us to all other things, that it seems almost as if it were necessary to become worthless as a practical being, if one is to hope to attain any breadth of insight into the impersonal world of worths . . . , to have any perception of life’s meaning on a large objective scale. Only your mystic, your dreamer, or your insolvent tramp or loafer,can afford so sympathetic an occupation,an occupation which will change the usual standards of human values in the twinkling of an eye, giving to foolishness a place ahead of power, and laying low in a minute the distinctions which it takes a hard-working conventional man a lifetime to build up. You may be a prophet at this rate; but you cannot be a worldly success. (cb 851; emphases added) If one is tolerant enough to value all lives and experiences equally, to actually take in the idea of unity-in-variety as an epistemic reality,then he is unable to value any one of them over another, which means he is unable to take any interest in his own life over anyone else’s.Respect for others leads to paralysis, an inability to take interest in any plans for one’s future,lest they interfere or pretend to be of more value,even to their originator, than any other plans for any other life. The “loaf[ing] at my ease” that allows Whitman insights into the unity of the immense variety of experience is, practically speaking, the behavior of a “worthless unproductive being”(cb 851).The “prophet”who “abolishes the usual human distinctions” is also a “hoary loafer” for whom spending the day riding public transportation and just observing the crowd is “the most worthy way of profiting by life’s heavensent opportunities,” an “ideal tramp” whose leisure comes at the cost of alienation from the very world to which he relates indiscriminately (cb 851, 853). So, although indiscriminate relation may produce the unmediated union that Whitman takes to be the fully actualized state of American social formation (“All is eligible to all”), for James abolishing all distinctions is anything but liberating.47 Without the broadest differentiations, like that between good and evil, there is nowhere to go in a static, uniform world, no work (either cognitive or social) to be done.48 182 “Necessarily Short of Sight”

Comparison with Whitman suggests that James’s disposition toward pluralism should not be exaggerated.“On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” witnesses the shift to a minimalist, literalized version of the one (the individual rather than the nation); Varieties is ultimately concerned with the individual’s union with a higher, spiritual version of himself. But just as the one represents for Whitman both nation and self,neither should James’s rejection of unadulterated pluralism be taken to imply an essentially monist position. For as hard as James attempts to sell the notion of actual unity between disparates, he has little to worry about. It works as a model for noncoercive unification of the individual with a higher power (which is imagined as residing in or accessed through a subliminal part of the self) — its original design in Varieties. But it breaks down when James attempts to expand it into a model for the integration of physically and psychically discrete individuals into a social unity.Despite the optimistic, open-ended query that concludes Varieties as to the extent to which heterogeneity might actually constitute unity (“Who knows whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor overbeliefs may not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks?” [463]), in the later writings there exists a persistent hope but little possibility for the notion of unity-in-variety as a working rather than a purely theoretical model, as an answer to the hard problem of e pluribus unum. Returning to the problem in Some Problems of Philosophy, the best he can claim is that “the world is ‘one’ in some respects, and ‘many’ in others” (1049).49 Having won the day against the plausibility of absolute monism, he has nevertheless failed to construct a description of the way in which “things are ‘with’ one another in many ways” but not in others that is much more viable or exact than the federal model (“the pluralistic world is thus more like a federal republic than an empire or a kingdom” [pu 776]). The closest he comes to something between federalism (interpreted as a loose affiliation) and political absolute (empire) is the notion of a “world imperfectly unified still,” a “common-sense world, in which we find things partly joined and partly disjoined” (p 556–557). James is comparable with Whitman on one other important point. As an anthology that makes no effort to produce a uniform account or privileged type of religious experience but embraces revivalism and mind-curing along with orthodoxy, Varieties is a characteristically American Bible. As an international anthology comprising the william james 183

experience of not just Christians but also “Hindus, Buddhists, [and] Mohammedans,” it attests to a decline of interest in nationalism (on James’s part, if not on the part of those who supported American annexation of the Philippines) and a concomitant investment in the science of a real world that, while conceived as a civic matter of the relation between parts and wholes, is no longer political in the sense of funding a partisan project of unification (vre 361). It does an injustice to James to underplay the force his espousal of pluralism would have had in its original context.Pluralism had always been an American tradition, from the Declaration of Independence’s equality proposition to Emerson’s individualization of religious authority. But thus far it had always stood to be reconciled with and against the overarching commitment to union on which American social formation, once founded on the decentralizing, nonhierarchical equality proposition, was built and, once jeopardized by civil war, upon which it was sustained. The radicalism of Jamesian pluralism is the suggestion that multiplicity is not,as Emerson and Lincoln contend, necessarily at cross purposes with unity and with the idea of institution.50 Instead, multiplicity can be thought of as the source of a unity that is not based, as imperialism is, on homogeneity, as being not so much the basis for any particular institution as a metainstitution that avoids the inevitably homogenizing tendency of one “world-formula” that is posited or defended in explicit opposition to another. It is precisely this sheer multiplicity of ways of representing relations that, in Moby-Dick, prevents any one of them from being satisfactory or efficacious. Although Moby-Dick always contemplates structuring of social relations, its end depicts the consequence of excessive localism, of thinking that “the world . . . may be saved, on condition that its parts shall do their best” (sp 1054). The result is the “shipwreck in detail”which Melville literalizes in the fate of the Pequod (sp 1054; emphasis added). Again, Billy Budd is the product of Melville’s reconsidering the possibilities of variety. Nevertheless, Melville eschews altogether the stability and coherence of institutions for which James is sometimes nostalgic. It is at this point that we gain the deepest insight into what it is that attracts James so strongly not just to religious phenomena but to the more inclusive category of psychical phenomena. Finding unity to be inevitably destructive of difference, James seeks to heal the one-andthe-many problem by finding a form of truth outside history.Religion 184 “Necessarily Short of Sight”

is unable to supply it, as he discovers in Varieties.51 Undeterred, James goes on to reconceptualize transcendence as finite in its reach, as distinct from the idea of the transcendent principle which for absolutists and traditional theologians is not only all-encompassing but purports to obliterate distinction and disparity on a higher level of representation. That disparity is precisely what James wishes to hold onto, and not only the disparity between physical, conscious selves but between each self and its own, distinct higher realm with which religious experience connects it. In the process of secularization which got underway with Poe, this would seem to be the final, crucial step of securing the theological ground that is imperative for the funding of social formation, but doing so by reference to a theology which confronts and incorporates the concrete problematic of the one and the many that is so central to American culture. This is the realization of what has been portrayed as the ineffable mystery of the Trinity as the practical business which it has always been: that of distributing personhood within the social collective.In a lecture from A Pluralistic Universe, again titled “The One and the Many,” James specifies this sometimes abstract problem as the historically inscribed, hard American cultural problem of the federal enigma: [P]luralism or the doctrine that [the universe] is many means only that the sundry parts of reality may be externally related [sic]. . . . Things are “with”one another in many ways,but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. . . . Something always escapes. “Ever not quite” has to be said of the best attempts made anywhere in the universe at attaining all-inclusiveness. The pluralistic world is thus more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom. However much may be collected, however much may report itself as present at any effective centre of consciousness or action, something else is self-governed and absent and unreduced to unity. (pu 776; emphasis added) The contention that “we still have a coherent world” because “[o]ur ‘multiverse’ still makes a ‘universe’” demonstrates that the hard problem of the one and the many persists in the American context as the salient, culturally central idea of e pluribus unum (pu 778).52 Yet in reaching outside history for a form of truth capable of resolving the problem of the one and the many, a truth which pluralism in and of itself cannot supply, James is not suggesting that the problem william james 185

is resolved in any final sense.It is neither wholly soluble nor insoluble, but somewhere in between: Some day . . . even total union, with one knower, one origin, and a universe consolidated in every conceivable way, may turn out to be the most acceptable of all hypotheses. Meanwhile the opposite hypothesis, of a world imperfectly unified still, and perhaps always to remain so, must be sincerely entertained. This latter hypothesis is pluralism’s doctrine. Since absolute monism forbids its even being considered seriously, branding it as irrational from the start, it is clear that pragmatism must turn its back on absolute monism, and follow pluralism’s more empirical path. This leaves us with the common-sense world, in which we find things partly joined and partly disjoined. (p 556–557; emphases added) It is James’s reaction to the condition of being immersed in this “imperfectly unified” world, of encountering difference at eye level, that the concluding section of this chapter explores.If unity-in-variety is a means of contending that, in keeping with the federal enigma, unity should remain problematic on an absolutist or imperialist scale, two of James’s earlier lectures present the grimmer prospect of unity’s remaining problematic on any scale, even the most productive or innocuous.James’s conviction,in “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” of our epistemological blindness to value is relieved only by a fragile hope, in “What Makes a Life Significant,” in our being able to identify with the abstract ideals behind idiosyncratic values. The concept of unity-in-variety and the tolerance it inspires would seem a prima facie solution to James’s predicament in the Philippine Address, were it not for the fact that the unbiased, bird’s-eye view from which unity-in-variety is visible is a point of view commonly unattainable in any practical, difference-making — in any other than the purely theoretical — sense. The fable of the egg-sitting hippopotamus with which we ended the last section recalls us to the disconcerting extent to which our immersion in a multiplicitous present, as admirably as that ensures plurality, denies us not only the compassion but the cognitive, even perceptual capacity to administer and to enact the tolerance that plurality deserves and, perhaps in the abstract, inspires. In A Pluralistic Universe, James provides another analogy for our plight, which, he suggests, is as difficult to overcome 186 “Necessarily Short of Sight”

as it would be for characters in a novel to sympathize with and share every other character’s point of view: What boots it to tell me that the absolute way is the true way, and to exhort me, as Emerson says, to lift mine eye up to its style, and manners of the sky,if the feat is impossible by definition? I am finite once for all, and all the categories of my sympathy are knit up with the finite world as such, and with things that have a history. . . . I have neither eyes nor ears nor heart nor mind for anything of an opposite description, and the stagnant felicity of the absolute’s own perfection moves me as little as I move it. If we were readers only of the cosmic novel,things would be different: we should then share the author’s point of view and recognize villains to be as essential as heroes in the plot. But we are not the readers but the very personages of the world-drama. In your own eyes each of you here is its hero, and the villains are your respective friends or enemies. The tale which the absolute reader finds so perfect, we spoil for one another through our several vital identifications with the destinies of the particular personages involved. (pu 651) Earlier in his career, James had confronted this impasse — our immersion in the subjective life of the cosmic novel’s characters (our lives) that prevents us from “shar[ing] the author’s point of view” — and its implications for the solutions (one of which we have reviewed) that he proposes. From his description of epistemological darkness, it is but a short step to the postmodernist contention that varieties have become contingencies, that the science of a real world ceases to have the possibility for them that it had for James,in spite of the doubts (“On a Certain Blindness” [1899] and “Address on the Philippine Question” [1903]) that raged around moments of hope (Varieties [1902]).

iii It has become clear by now that for James the project and the duty of philosophy are social rather than purely intellectual: “The complete philosopher is he who seeks not only to assign to every given object of his thought its right place in one or other of [the] sub-worlds [we occupy and adhere to], but he also seeks to determine the relation of each sub-world to others in the total world which is”(pb 1029). william james 187

If the Philippine Address calls us to noninterference with other “sub-worlds,” and if Varieties provides one model of a “total world” in which disparate “sub-worlds” might coexist in a noncompetitive manner, two earlier essays by James — “On a Certain Blindness” and “What Makes a Life Significant” — confront the possibility that that model, or, indeed, any other, may never have a chance to prove itself. In these two lectures, James goes even further than asserting that variety is a form of unity by suggesting that a cognitive synonymy between systems (their connection to equivalent ideals) is enough to provide coherence without smothering difference.53 The only drawback is that epistemological unity may be impossible, and pluralism not so much a voluntarily adopted moral or philosophical position as a stifling fact that anchors each of us to our own idiosyncratic, solipsistic, and inherently intolerant point of view. Multiplicity is in danger not so much of annihilation as of never being noticed, and the unity that facilitates social and psychological life, in danger of never materializing. James’s insistence that we wake up to the autonomy of the other which compromises the imperative to unity seems unnecessary, but the fact is that we are even less aware of difference than we might have thought, than our appreciation of the Varieties may have led us to believe. By contrast with the political and ethical concerns of the Philippines speech and the psychological vectoring of Varieties, “On a Certain Blindness” approaches the problem of the one and the many from a level of epistemological construction, arguing that every human is blind to the value of other points of view than his own — blind, indeed, to his own blindness. The presumption of any person, system, or institution to “regulate the vast field” of truth is, James contends, a hardwired human tendency; it seems that we are predisposed to be monists, or at least try to be, to regard truth as singular and static instead of plural and continually in flux (cb 860). But if being aware of our blindness fosters tolerance and “non-interference with [others’] peculiar ways of being happy,” it also condemns us to a state of ignorance about the “dark places,” about the other selves whose difference we are respecting, with whom we dare not interact because we are “external and insensible” to them, because we can never really know anyone outside ourselves (cb 862, 861).54 The achievement of unity within variety is of little significance if we are unable to see variety in the first place and is of even less pos188 “Necessarily Short of Sight”

sibility if, as James contends, our disability is not so much a matter of psychological or social prejudice (either of which might be influenced to the contrary) as of a constitutional, epistemological selfcenteredness: the blindness in human beings of which this discourse will treat is the blindness with which we are all afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and peoples different from ourselves. We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth. But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with which we vainly look to others — the others are too much absorbed in their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons’ conditions or ideals. (cb 841) While human injustice can in part be ascribed to hatred and irrationality, we cannot totally pin the blame on others with whom we do not share those traits and behaviors; nor can we blame the traits and behaviors themselves, treating them as products of ignorance which we can combat. James suggests, however, that some ignorance is not curable but is a universal, congenital characteristic that results not from a simple lack of interest in others’ lives but from an epistemological solipsism, a blindness to difference that is not an unwillingness but an inability to view difference indifferently. Our situation appears to be even worse than that of the hippopotamus in the fable, for she at least can see the fledglings she is about to crush. We should not “presum[e] to regulate the vast field,” but what else can we do (cb 860)? James asks whether we “cannot use our sense of our blindness to make us more cautious in going over the dark places,” but, being “necessarily short of sight,” each of us shrouded in the “impenetrab[ility]” of the self, how can we possibly do so (wm 862)? Tolerance and noninterference are difficult to ensure when it is difficult, if not impossible, for us merely to view other “sub-worlds” objectively, that is, as being anything other than a poor substitute or analogue for our own. The theoretical ideal of unity-in-variety is of little use if we cannot attain an indifferent perspective in practice.Our william james 189

predicament is that, although we obey some imperative to unity, we cannot respect, much less see, the others to whom we are relating (hegemonically or not),by consequence of which our coercive behavior toward others, whether intentional or unintentional, is a strange form of unity-production, of making and breaking wholes. But such inadvertent unity is a small benefit weighed against intolerance and interference, the attendant costs of moral and physical violence. If Varieties was James’s harpoon aimed at Moby Dick as the interrupter of all human arrangement, then the “Blindness” lecture is his meditation, before the fact, on why the harpoon is almost sure to miss. It misses because the logical contradiction between unity conceived of ideally (as equality) and unity conceived of practically (as hierarchy) proves to be more constraining than James had anticipated or hoped, too fundamental to the structure of American discourse, too fundamental perhaps to perception itself. Tolerance and noninterference, not surprisingly, are the tactics James offers in these two essays for overcoming the impasse of nonsympathy that makes unity-in-variety ineffective. In “On a Certain Blindness,”James tries to secure tolerance by declaring truth and reality to be nondiscrete, nonunitary, requiring “many cognizers to take [it] in” (tt 708). Although the multiplicity of experience is meant to inspire tolerance, historically it has failed to do so; therefore, James reverses his tactic, recommending tolerance as a means of protecting difference. The second essay, “What Makes a Life Significant,” focuses on interference, which is a product of intolerance. If we cannot relate to others, cannot value their lives and experiences as they value them, then we might still be capable of connecting intellectually to the ideals that motivate them — the concept being that ideals may resemble one another where concrete experiences do not. The hope is that, as similarities beneath the differences, ideals can be something we respect instead of something we “inflict.” The discouraging upshot of the two essays is that we are blind not only to the value of difference but also to the ideals behind those values. We now have in view the full range of the Jamesian reconstruction of the one-and-the-many problematic: the inevitability of unity, the assurance of variety, and the conflict of both states of affairs’ being true, both trying to work for the other’s good. In “Address on the Philippine Question,” James is moved by a desire for what we should have (tolerance); in Varieties, by a desire for what we already have (a 190 “Necessarily Short of Sight”

pluralism that coheres in a noncoercive unity); and now, in “On a Certain Blindness” and “What Makes a Life Significant,” by a desire for what we cannot have. However loose and open to change the pluralistic universe may be, our blindness to difference prevents us not only from refraining from engineering schemes of unification on a massive scale (imperialism, nationalism) but also, more destructively, from escaping from our perceptual and cognitive tunnel vision so that, institutional and international hegemonies aside, the quotidian business of relation on the most personal as well as intellectual and theoretical levels might resemble as little as possible a game of blindman’s bluff in which, to our chagrin, every player has been blindfolded from the start. “[H]ow soaked and shot-through life is with values and meanings which we fail to realize because of our external and insensible point of view. The meanings are there for others, but they are not there for us. . . . [T]his . . . has utmost practical importance. I wish that I could convince you of it as I feel it myself” (wm 861; emphasis added). Unfortunately, as James’s ironic plea for the impossible admits, “Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to the enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are stonecold. . . . [I]t is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel like Jack” (wm 861). James’s campaign against intolerance has increased resonance for us in the late twentieth century, when the same rhetoric reappears in the form of multiculturalism and elicits a wide range of responses to difference, from an appreciation of variety to what might nowadays be called a bleeding heart liberal “shame” about any preference as an instance of intolerance. The postmodern dilemma of multiculturalism has drawn extreme responses: from separatist interpretations (beginning with Horace Kallen in the twenties) which stem from a distrust of unity as an artificial, repressive imposition (a “forced integration”) to attempts by those like Habermas to arrive at the “possibility of mutual understanding” and an awareness of unity as “the source of the diversity of its voices” (117, 140). The work of Barbara Smith and S. S. Schweber expounds, in the fields of philosophy and quantum physics, the idea that the claims of solidarity to manyness and to oneness are equally contingent, and that it is that contingency which allows any unity (as it does in Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”), to either a whole or its parts. James’s work, particularly “On a Certain Blindness,” gives us a through-line william james 191

to modernity and its sense of contingency, and Schweber acknowledges as much by beginning his essay with an epigraph from James that asserts inactuality to be part of the truth. The work of William James and of Charles Sanders Peirce, Schweber writes, is equally consonant with Darwinism and with indeterminacy theory. Physics, for Schweber, provides an indeterminant cosmology James did not have but of which he had predicted the need: a cosmology appropriate to the empirically apparent variety of experience and the consequent indeterminate nature of truth. This is a world that would have satisfied Poe and perhaps, as he and other eighteenth-century writers thought of them and reconstructed their intentions, the founding fathers themselves. But it does not satisfy us. The best and certainly the most honest answer to the American problematic of the one and the many is that given by James in the introduction to the volume that contains “On a Certain Blindness” and “What Makes a Life Significant”: the truth is too great for any one actual mind . . . to know the whole of it. The facts and worths of life need many cognizers to take them in. There is no point of view absolutely public and universal. The practical consequence of [pluralism] is the well-known democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality, — is,at any rate, the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself tolerant. These phrases are so familiar that they sound now rather dead in our ears. Once they had a passionate inner meaning.Such a passionate inner meaning they may easily acquire once again if the pretension of our nation to inflict its own inner ideals and institutions vi et armis upon Orientals should meet with a resistance as obdurate as so far it has been gallant and spirited. Religiously and philosophically, our ancient national doctrine of live and let live may prove to have a far deeper meaning than our people now seem to imagine it to possess. (tt 708) It is true that, as one might expect, James offers an optimistic solution which is both simplistic and circular: imperialism will cease to enthrall us once we stop imposing our own institutions and ideals on the Filipinos; pluralism will once again have meaning when we become tolerant. But he ends the introduction with the more subtle, ambiguous statement we have also come to expect. True, pluralism’s “far deeper meaning” may be read as the possibility of fulfillment equal to, 192 “Necessarily Short of Sight”

if not greater than, one’s own particular take on the “pursuit of happiness.” And yet another meaning which we may not, or rather would not, “imagine [pluralism] to possess” is the bleak separatist extreme to which the “doctrine of live and let live” can be taken. What is inescapable is that the “sacredness of individuality” and the imperative to a higher, collective unity both form part of “our ancient national doctrine.” This “deeper,” more unpleasant meaning (of entwined and contradictory priorities) is what James, like the authors before him, urges us to work to resolve, but it is also what he, apart from Melville, expresses the greatest dismay over, the greatest doubts about being able to solve. The problematic of the one and the many is no longer the impetus to its own resolution as it was for Poe; it is now the impasse, and the solution, as imperative as it is, seems impossible.

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Afterword i The deep classicism of early American political culture is evident in the pseudonym, “Publius,” under which the Federalist Papers appeared in New York newpapers from the fall of 1787 through the spring of 1788.Even if the drafters of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution (Thomas Jefferson, John Dickinson, and Gouverneur Morris, respectively) and the coauthors of the Federalist Papers (James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay) were not consciously borrowing from Plotinus, they were well in touch with the currents of contemporary classicist-Enlightenment thought throughout which Plotinus’s original had diffused. Plotinus’s idea of “identity in variety” or “unity in plurality”is like the federal ambition to construct a state identity which does not overwhelm but nevertheless forms the basis of the autonomy of its members: “We are not asserting the unity of the soul in the sense of a complete negation of multiplicity [but rather] thinking of soul as simultaneously one and many, participant in the nature ‘which becomes divided among bodies,’ but at the same time a unity by virtue of belonging to that order which ‘suffers no division’” (IV.9.5, §3 and §8, p. 421; IV.9.2, §6, p. 419). Although unity and equality are available in certain forms, it seems that some qualities (Plotinus is speaking of sensation, but we can extrapolate the value of persons) cannot be distributed evenly: “even in the case of the individual soul [which is] described . . . as permeating its body, sensation is not equally present in all the parts . . . and yet all these powers join in the one soul when the body is laid aside” (IV.9.3, §7, p. 420). Plotinus is of the opinion that injustice and inequality are unfortunate but that relative equality is the best we can hope for. Aside from the symbolic equality imputed by a notion such as the “body politic,”absolute equality cannot be realized in this body, in this social formation—not until bodies and relations are transcended altogether. What this book explored, in part, is the extent to which America’s founding political documents share

Plotinus’s notion of the impossibility of justice and, at greater length, the ways in which certain nineteenth-century authors,in their assumption of e pluribus unum as a literary as well as social endeavor, either protested or accepted the inevitability of hierarchy. Because the Enneads were written in Greek,however,the Plotinian correspondence is most likely one of ideas rather than of the words themselves.1 For the origin of the exact words e pluribus unum, we must look elsewhere—particularly, to the Latin poets of antiquity. Horace is confidently cited as the source by many (see Robert Ferguson [“Finding the Revolution”] 367), but the attribution seems shaky, if not totally unfounded: the closest Horatian passage (quid te exempta juvat spinis de pluribus una [Epistle II,2.212]) differs in gender (una rather than unum) and, more significantly, in sense (extracting one thorn from among many). C. W. Foster, in a paper delivered at a 1930 numismatic convention, points to line 104 of Virgil’s Moretum for a nominally better match: color est e pluribus unus. Again, there is a difference in case (unus instead of unum). And while the sense of these lines (“the many colors blend into one”) corresponds more closely to that of our national motto,the immediate context in Virgil (making a salad from diverse ingredients [461]) seems as incongruous as that in Horace. Pursuing a labyrinthine history of false attributions and mistaken derivations, each one a cul-de-sac, I became as intent on ferreting out the truth as I was on explaining the difficulty otherwise adept scholars have had in tracking this elusive beast to its lair. If there is no consensus on the classical source of the phrase, there is certainly no shortage of precedents in seeking one. Virgil’s case has been argued repeatedly,or at least repeated so often that it has become a commonplace for which even the most thorough researcher either feels uncompelled or is frankly unable to offer an origin. By contrast, the claim for Horatian provenance has a legible basis: the motto for the Spectator on August 20, 1711, was Exempta juvat spinis e pluribus una, a slight modification of the line from Horace (. . . de pluribus una). The most convincing theory by far, though, is the one that provides an exact match: The Gentleman’s Magazine, an English periodical with wide circulation in pre-Revolutionary America. From its inception in 1731 and well into the nineteenth century, The Gentleman’s Magazine featured the motto “E pluribus unum” on its title page, along with an illustration of a handheld bouquet of flowers 196 Afterword

and a second motto (“Prodesse et Delectare,” a paraphrase of Horace’s De Arte Poetica, line 333: Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae). It is possible to take one additional step backwards: the editors of The Gentleman’s Magazine were borrowing both the motto and the bouquet from the title page of The Gentleman’s Journal, which had been published in London from 1691 to 1694 by Huguenot refugee Pierre Antoine Motteux. Yet Motteux makes no attribution; had he done so, the editors of the Magazine would most likely have reproduced it. Here the trail ends. Although scholars who point to the appearance of the slogan in The Gentleman’s Magazine also argue for either a Virgilian or Horatian source,neither the Magazine nor the Journal accredits any author. What seems, then, to be an unfounded attribution, added to the discrepancy between e pluribus unum and the Virgilian text (e pluribus unus), has only fueled speculation and encouraged scholars to search farther afield—from Aristotle to St. Augustine to obscure Philadelphian poet John Carey. The reason no one has been able to locate the motto’s authentic classical source is astoundingly if not embarrassingly simple. There is no such source. According to the exhaustive research of Monroe E. Deutsch, the author of an apparently little-known but nonetheless definitive essay on the subject, e pluribus unum is not a quotation, at least not of any ancient source. It is an invention on the part of Motteux, a creative tailoring of Horace’s de pluribus una to his own sense: that,just as the diversity of a bouquet is capable of pleasing varied tastes,so also the Journal offers a miscellany in which every reader should be able to find at least “one of the many Pieces . . . acceptable” (Motteux, cited in Deutsch 406). Horace is the more likely source than Virgil because Motteux’s use of e pluribus unum (to mean “one selected from among the many”) closely conforms to the second Epistle’s metaphor of extracting one thorn from a mind riddled with many thorns (Deutsch 392). It is only fair to note that the Moretum’s account of salad-making speaks much more directly to federal concerns about preserving variety within unity: “little by little the elements lose their peculiar strength; the many colors blend into one, yet neither is this [new color] wholly green, for milk-white fragments still resist, nor is it a shining milky-white, for it is varied by so many herbs” (459, 461; emphases added). Nonetheless, the only way to claim, as so many have done, a Virgilian provenance for the motto on the Great Seal is to let one’s consciousness of the federal project Afterword 197

negate the simple fact that Motteux, like Horace, is describing an act of extraction or selection, not combination.2 Besides which, the Moretum is one of Virgil’s minor and more obscure poems, less widely known, certainly, than Horace’s Epistles. None of this would be of more than antiquarian interest if the words e pluribus unum were not featured so prominently in two of our national icons: the reverse of the one-dollar bill and the Great Seal of the United States. Though today the less familiar of the two, it was the Great Seal for which the motto was originally designed.The Great Seal is the site at which the one-and-the-many problem entered America’s official and cultural consciousness as a central foundational problem, emblematizing every practical question of policy and procedure that confronted the Continental Congressmen and Constitutional delegates as they struggled to erect de novo a working political institution consistent with often impractical ideals. The history of e pluribus unum, as a slogan rather than merely an instance of a philosophical abstraction, matters also because writing played an indispensable part in the founding of the American state. In what Christopher Looby describes as a “nation that imagined its inception as an effect of linguistic action” (2) and in what Washington Irving calls a “logocracy or government of words,” writing is thought of as executing the more dramatic acts of state like disavowing colonial status, waging what Irving satirically calls “wordy battle, and paper war” (Salmagundi 143).3 Equally as important, though, are the multiple forms of documentary and belletrist writing (pamphlets, gazettes, letters,patriotic sketches,and occasional poems) that facilitated the cultivation of early American political discourse and the dissemination of a new (that is, a supposedly nonhierarchical) social identity. What made American political discourse possible in the first place were other kinds of writing,the declarations,articles,and constitutions that first announced the structuring of equality in light of the requirements for unity as a primary problem of the American state, as what it would remain regardless of the discourse or institution: a problem of writing, of finding words that are right and effective. As a slogan of the American state, e pluribus unum was born out of a search for the right words. On July 4, 1776, the same day that the First Continental Congress adopted Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, Congress also commissioned Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams to design a Great Seal representative of 198 Afterword

1. Design for a seal or coat of arms for the United States. Pencil sketch by Pierre E. Du Simitière, August 1776. Courtesy Library of Congress.

thirteen colonies for whom unity was as yet simply a defensive maneuver. The three delegates met with French painter Du Simitière, who provided the sketch the committee presented in its report on August 20 (see fig. 1; Benjamin Franklin 562–563, Jefferson 494–497). Although “e pluribus unum” is included in that sketch, it seems to have been added sometime between August 14, when Adams saw the preliminary sketch without the motto, and August 20, when the drawing appeared before Congress. Because in creating Virginia’s state seal, Du Simitière had used a motto suggested to him by someone else (Jefferson, in that case), it is likely that in selecting the motto for the Great Seal the artist again drew upon the ideas of others, in this case, the committee members who were effectively his patrons. As to which of the three men on that committee was responsible for the interpolation of “e pluribus unum,” no hard evidence survives. Nonetheless, Franklin’s involvement with The Gentleman’s Magazine (as avid reader, contributor, and commercial distributor) makes him the best candidate for introducing Du Simitière to the phrase.4 Besides, with his regard for utility over decorum, Franklin is the least likely to have been troubled by the disparity between the original and the intended sense (extracting spines versus uniting states) or by the incongruity of context (applying the Afterword 199

trademark of a popular commercial English publication to the serious institution of a government rejecting English rule). To complete the lineage: the Du Simitière–Franklin design was initially rejected, and Congress passed on six other designs before turning the project over to the Secretary of Congress, Charles Thomson, in May 1782. With the aid of heraldry expert William Barton, Thomson arrived at a design which,aside from incorporating two elements of the very first design (the motto e pluribus unum and the allseeing eye), bore no resemblance to Du Simitière’s proposal. Thomson’s final draft, accepted by Congress on June 20, 1782, and first used on September 16,1782, is the Great Seal,the reverse of which we know from its appearance on the one-dollar bill (see fig. 2) and, in modified form,on the quarter: a spread eagle bearing a shield,clutching thirteen arrows in its left talon, an olive branch in its right, and holding in its beak a scroll bearing the legend e pluribus unum. Like the operative founding documents, like the American state itself, that legend is committee-born. The result of six years’ drafting and redrafting, it epitomizes the compensatory logic by which the political and social institutions of the United States were instituted and continually revised through texts, each of which bore an intentional, efficacious, supplementary relation to its predecessor texts. E pluribus unum is therefore emphatically a nonquotational statement generated by a problem (rather than vice versa, as could be argued in the case of the “elastic” clause of the Constitution [Article I, Section 8], the Tenth Amendment, and Article II of the Articles of Confederation—all of which attempt to extend or reserve nebulous “powers”). True, Motteux may have coined the phrase, but as it is put to use in the inception of United States political iconography, it is recreated. In its new, federal context, it becomes the practical problem of executing an alternative social formation modeled in the founding documents. Regardless of the exact provenance, e pluribus unum signals problems that command a unique, immense amount of attention: not merely an awareness of the difficulty of unification but the importance of the terms on which unification takes place. My focus here is on literary and philosophical instances of the American textual tradition marked by a concern with e pluribus unum: attempts either (1) to bring the metaphysical intention represented by e pluribus unum into the actuality of a written order or (2) to get out from under the obligation to the kind of totalizing metaphysical inten200 Afterword

2. The Great Seal of the United States (reverse). Detail from the one-dollar bill.

tion embodied in the constitutional imposition of hierarchy on the decentralized polity set up by the nation’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation. Federation is the solution to the problem of the unification of disparates proposed by the Constitutional delegates in 1787, and from Poe to James, the debate has continued as to whether such a model is practicable or sufficient.5 The ratification of the Constitution marks a privileging of unity over the plurality embodied by the Articles. However, while most delegates agreed that the colonies required some form of group identity, the terms on which that identity was established, the cost of union to the sovereignty of its constituents, would continue to be debated. But neither disagreement over nor Afterword 201

revision of the terms of union should be taken as diminishing the fundamental commitment to unity upon which the American state was established.6 Regardless of exactly how one goes about making one out of many, the imperative to do so is a foremost concern and a persistent hard problem of American culture. The pervasiveness of this concern can be anecdotally demonstrated within the history of postRevolutionary American currency,which has historically featured the motto e pluribus unum and thus made the unification of disparates literally the problem on the money.7 Until the Coinage Act of 1792 and the establishment of the U.S. Mint, the printing of paper money and the minting of coins was, in keeping with the Articles of Confederation, a decentralized affair in which each state produced coins and paper money stamped with its own insignia. The first coin imprinted with the legend e pluribus unum, and the only state-issued currency ever to do so, was the 1786 New Jersey cent (Massey 67). As a prenational slogan (first suggested in 1776), the words represent a pride in the individual state as part of a whole that is nevertheless a whole in its own right. But the slogan also reads as precisely the kind of federalist sentiment—critical of the inefficiency and vulnerability of decentralized government—that would issue less than a year later in the drafting of an altogether new Constitution.8 While e pluribus unum was finally adopted as a national motto in 1782, the slogan did not appear again on any specie or paper money until 1795—that is, until after the Coinage Act of 1792 had created one system of currency out of the many previous independent state systems.Beginning in 1798,when the words reappeared on the $5 half-eagle gold piece, e pluribus unum gradually became a standard insignia on U.S. specie (Massey 97, 101). In this way we can locate e pluribus unum quite close to the site of American state formation, as an embodiment not only of the federalist privileging of unity but of the very different terms in which those like the Antifederalists interpreted that unity.9 Although successive writers (of both secular and sacred texts) as well as legislators would offer distinctive and often conflicting accounts of integrative social formation (and of how integrative such formations should be), the problem that remains constant throughout is how to hold in one a country which is so dedicated to each being his own nation.10

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ii What initially drew me into this project and what continues to fascinate me is the energy with which American writers have sought to resolve pressing questions concerning the distinctive forms into which the originality of America’s political thought forces personal identity. It is the novelty of American social arrangement that raises hard problems of an arresting kind to which the nation’s literary discourses present various solutions.Each of the texts I’ve looked at here understands literary and philosophical writing to have some potentially efficacious relation to the reconstruction of social order—even though each author offers a slightly different answer to what is required for a text to be able to do that, as well as into what new, particular shape relations between persons are to be molded. The common project shared by these writers—one I see them as sharing with the authors of America’s founding political documents— is re-theorization, the getting right on paper and in abstract terms, of the way in which persons count and are counted in social wholes.The interest is in structure, construction, in textual as well as social composition, in political as well as epistemological representation. These predominantly concern some answer to the question of how parts combine to become wholes, how the dimensions of that whole are shaped and reshaped by competing claims for solidarity and autonomy, for unity and equality. Part of what has drawn me to these issues is the ambition of American authors to achieve a textual resolution of fundamentally social problems which they feel political discourse has proven incapable of handling. What strikes me as characteristically American about such an endeavor is not its object but rather, in the American context, its continual return to a finite series of historically problematic solutions. Whatever the solution, the attempt, repeatedly, is to do something that not only seems impossible but is logically excluded: to produce unity without the sacrifice of some degree of particularity, some rights—and that seems to be not just theoretically impossible but impracticable in an extended sense,that is,in any real venue. It is as if the production of social wholes were not favored by formal thought. Because the properties referred to do not have any crossover or identity access, the question of poetics—that is, a general theory of assemblage—is how to deal with relational properties when they are Afterword 203

inherently contradictory (when, in the American case, unity is inherently antithetical to and consumptive of equality, destructive of difference). One aim of my project, then, is to view poetics as the site of doing, or even thinking, what is otherwise unthinkable, as a way of solving theoretical problems inherent in the construction of ideal states of affairs (like unity) from the recalcitrant, real-world material that comes to hand, the difference which is all that is available. For the poetic text in history,representation or depiction is the culture’s effort to access what it’s been separated from but desperately needs. Different kinds of writing are resorted to in each case—cosmology, poetry, sacred text, or some hybrid of these. In spite of their common interest,Poe,Whitman,Melville,and James are responding to noticeably different moments in the life of literary and political culture. Poe writes at a time when cosmology is a particularly current topic, and he turns to two genres with traditionally posited foundational and reconstructive power: cosmology and poetry. If you want to get national foundations right,what better place to go than the most basic origin: universal foundation. Whitman, by comparison, seeks some neo-Biblical amalgam of secular and sacred poetry to infuse America with a new energy—most specifically, an increased horizon of representation. Whitman and Poe both aim for unity at the least possible cost to difference; but since they value unity as the highest priority, the level of sacrifice they find tolerable may seem, from a more objective point of view, unpalatable. Another common idea I have found between these texts and writers is a mindfulness of America as a textually based and sustained entity—a place in which writing is from the start a business that’s at once essential to sorting out identity and difference, but also a task that’s never finished, that is constantly in need of reformulation. The Articles of Confederation had this supplementary relation to the Declaration of Independence, as the Constitution did to the Articles—each sought to improve on, to actualize, e pluribus unum in ever more perfect faith to what are essentially contradictory principles: equality and unity, manyness and oneness. In this “documentary culture,” then, each of the nineteenth-century texts I’ve looked at adopts a similar compensatory stance toward the political texts (including legislative and judicial supplements) that have failed to realize the promissory note of the Declaration’s equality proposition. Nevertheless, there are important disagreements as to how unity and 204 Afterword

plurality should be balanced: for Poe and Whitman, allegiance to unity must come before everything else; the sacrifice of difference may be minimized, if possible, but inequities like hierarchy and mediation are structurally—representationally, perceptually—indispensable. Melville and James, by contrast, question this kind of obligation or imperative to unity. They model relations in ways not grounded in unity but in variety, and produce textual and phenomenal worlds that begin to look increasingly less viable and less inhabitable. Billy Budd and James’s Varieties of Religious Experience are both powered by an idealism that, as James’s editorials about the Philippines suggest, almost always fails in the real world. This is not to specify failure as the only possible outcome: Joseph Smith’s The Book of Mormon (1830) and Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health (1875) achieved remarkable success,producing two other examples of the New American Bible (more traditionally sacred, despite their innovations, than Whitman’s 1860 Leaves) that focused on curing the disjunctures of social order with nonpolitical (and for Eddy, maniacally nonphysical) solutions. However, the extent to which Mormonism and Christian Science became and have endured as viable and, in the former case, locally dominant institutions should be taken as more likely the exception than the rule. The wholesale reorientation of social formation is, to judge from the record, seldom so successful: first of all,re-theorization must take place virtually from the ground up; second, it is tremendously difficult to persuade enough constituents to alter the whole to which they belong or their affiliation to it. And the persuasiveness of any rethinking of the relation of persons is a crucial factor in that new thought’s attaining institutional status. Diction or register does not seem to be an important factor: The Book of Mormon is clearly not written in the argot of the Articles of Confederation or the Compromise of 1850,and yet Smith’s followers were successful enough at building a cohesive, independent social entity to pose a symbolic if not also economic and political threat to the non-Mormon populations that eventually drove them out of Illinois and Missouri. If languages and/or genres that are not the official language of political instrumentation are capable of carrying serious sociopolitical weight—if the power to found or revise institutions is not confined to the language of those institutions—then there is no determinable reason why texts like Eureka, Leaves of Grass, or Billy Budd should fail where The Book of Mormon succeeds. Afterword 205

Similarly, Mary Baker Eddy’s unconditional repudiation of materiality would seem only antithetical to the Jamesian embrace of the physical and all its differential baggage. Nevertheless, the extreme character of Eddy’s theorization of individual and social existence (as void of substance in toto, as being hardly recognizable as existence) is insufficient to justify the way in which Science and Health was taken up as a viable, practicable template for spiritual and civic life while Varieties succumbed to that tide of texts and ideas whose intellectual curiosity is destined far, if not forever, to outweigh their motive force. Recently, however, that force has grown more palpable. While no one writing about the war in Iraq has,to my knowledge,referred readers back to William James or the conflict over Filipino sovereignty, the parallel could not be more appropriate. The relevance of James’s work may seem in doubt to some, especially when, amidst the fervid rhetoric of perpetual war (what President Bush calls the “war on terror”), it is unpopular to scrutinize philosophical underpinnings. Yet this reluctance to scrutinize theoretical groundings does not obscure—in fact, it may highlight—the persistence of the federal enigma as a deep cultural force behind the current historical moment. De Tocqueville opens the second volume of Democracy in America with a rudely prescient diagnosis: “I think that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States” (II: 3). In context, de Tocqueville’s point is that Americans “have a philosophical method common to the whole people,” “us[ing] their minds in the same manner ...and according to the same rules . . . without ever having taken the trouble to define the rules” (II: 3). As in the writings of Poe, Whitman, Melville, and James, theory is organic to Americanness. Current White House foreign policy and (until the prisoner abuse scandals) the American public’s largely unquestioning support for the war suggest that the French observer was also correct in his corollary stipulation: what is equally integral to the American character is ignorance of theory, or ignorance of the centrality to American political and social history of philosophical concerns like the one and the many. As Russ Castronovo and Dana Nelson put it, in their introduction to Materializing Democracy (2002), “This inability to think critically about what is theoretically all around us—what we might consider the opacity of democracy— seems inherent to the first stirrings of popular government in the 206 Afterword

United States” —and, they suggest, to much of current political and cultural discourse (1). Nearly fifty years before James, de Tocqueville reaches the conclusion the former would make when confronting American imperialism in the Philippines: As to the influence which the intellect of one man may have on that of another, it must necessarily be very limited in a country where the citizens, placed on equal footing, are all closely seen by one another; and where, as no signs of incontestable greatness are seen in any one of them, they are constantly brought back to their own reason as the most obvious and proximate source of truth. It is not only confidence in this or that man which is destroyed, but the disposition to trust the authority of any man whatsoever. Everyone shuts himself up tightly within himself and insists upon judging the world from there. (I: 4) James’s revision of de Tocqueville is that being shut up tightly within oneself is not an act of volition, but an ontological given. The only “incontestable greatness” for James is the originary fact of solipsism. It is this constitutive blindness which makes equity impossible because one cannot see objectively to administrate or distribute in an equitable manner. What could be more unfortunately illustrative of the near-impossibility of objectivity and impartiality, of seeing beyond one’s own model of the world, than the arguments by which the U.S. and Britain justified invading Iraq in 2003 and the debacle of instability which issued from that invasion? The debacle would seem to have been produced, in part at least, by what appears less and less like unwillingness and more like the inability of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al to comprehend the following: that a significant portion of Iraqis did not desire democracy, that freedom is not universally synonymous with democratic governance, that Western democracy (even if it could be regarded monolithically) is the only possible incarnation of democratic principles,or,finally,that democracy is not the inevitable by-product of dictatorship fission. The debate about “the one” —whether the proper transcendental term is America, democracy, the Coalition, or those who love freedom—still has tremendous consequences in regard to who demands war, who makes it, against whom, and in the name of what principle or entity. Afterword 207

De Tocqueville has faith that American solipsism, which appears to spring fully formed from the founding documents, leads in every instance to the Cartesian principles which, he implies, are the basis of sound government. James and Melville insinuate that the outcome is not so certain or uniform. If one leaves aside motives more Machiavellian in nature,perhaps the violence and miscomprehension that American foreign policy,from the Philippines to Vietnam to Iraq, has both embodied and produced stems from our conflicted commitment to union and equality, to the one as well as the many. For Poe and Whitman, that conflict is richly generative, navigating a chaotic plurality toward eventual unity; for Melville and James, this constitutive antinomy generates, to their pleasure, its own fragmentation, loosening the strictures of oneness, combating though not defeating its inherent violence. More than anything else, the longevity of the one-and-the-many problem suggests that the troublesome link between these antagonistic ideas may not be so much willed as it is compulsory: nothing less than the epistemological heart of America.

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Notes introduction 1. Although the one-and-the-many concern runs throughout the Enneads, conspicuous sites include III.8, IV.8–9, V.1–4, and VI.9. Earlier discussions exist in the works of Pythagoras and the preParmenidean school of Pythagoreans (late sixth and early fifth century B.C.E.), but the texts in question are fragmentary and their concern is more strictly cosmological (that is, a concern with the differentiation of original unity,which,as we will see,greatly interests Poe). (For the preSocratic texts noted here, see Kirk and Raven 224, 240–241, 250, and 253.) 2.I should add that when I speak of a “difference-requirement,”I am referring to the idea that even an institution formed in opposition to gradation, practically or representationally,has to be able to distinguish between the persons it is declaring equal and so requires some form of differentiation, some category of person (like the slave) to perform the inevitable quota of differencework. (Whitman, for example, reassigns the difference-work to Lincoln in the form of an ultimately efficacious sacrificial death of the one on behalf of the many.) It should be clarified that the notion of difference-work’s inevitability is a belief espoused by Lincoln and others of the period. In these texts, there’s no question, at least none that I can detect in any strong form, that difference can be done away with altogether. 3. 1 Cranch (5 U.S.) 137, 2 L.Ed. 60. Other landmark cases for judicial review are Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee (1816) and Cohens v. Virginia (1821), details of which are available in Young, Gunther, and most Constitutional casebooks. 4. The satisfactory formation of one from many is a preoccupation which is, of course, not original to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American context in which I examine it. Unification is an objective problem only insofar as it is a historically inscribed problem, a state of affairs which is privileged in Western philosophy (first by the pre-Socratics) at the same time that it is deprivileged in Western representation (Homer, for example, equates unification with death because the unification of the world is what the gods fear). What is original to the founding political documents of the United States and to a particular body of American literary texts of the nineteenth century is the attempt to resolve this problematic through the inscriptional and/or fictional modeling of social formations.

5. For the most part, this study is not driven and structured by the direct contesting of critical readings, especially since I am most interested in dealing with neglected texts of major American Renaissance authors or with texts by the same authors which have not been read in light of the one-and-themany problem. Current criticism of these authors seems intent on straddling an ideology-transcendence dichotomy, a balancing act meant to avoid readings that dwell exclusively on either the aesthetic (as Matthiessen does in the landmark American Renaissance [1947]) or the ideological (as Marxist critics of the 1970s did under the assumption that art conceals strategies and agendas which the critic must ferret out). I locate my work within this continuum generally but prefer to focus on an ideology other than the Puritan legacy — to focus on the one and the many, on the relation of selves within a supposedly nonhegemonic society.Like the model of consensus,this model is revised and used to the present moment by each writer. The new types of history of American literature have been very vocal in this matter. In the last ten years, the critical ground has included expanding the notion of literature beyond belles lettres and high art,taking increased interest in historical context as well as in texts not formerly considered literature or within its scope (such as sermons, pamphlets, sensational novels). From Ideology and Classic American Literature (ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen) and Lawrence Buell’s New England Literary Culture, both published in 1986, to Bercovitch’s The Rites of Assent (1993), Elisa New’s The Regenerate Lyric (1993), and the first volume of the new Cambridge History of American Literature (1994; ed. Bercovitch), American literary critics have been intent, as suggested by the title of a 1986 collection of essays, on Reconstructing American Literary History (ed. Bercovitch), which typically means reevaluating the place of ideology in American literature studies. Critics like Bercovitch have foregrounded consensus as the telos and dissent as not counterproductive of but rather in service of that consensus (about how a republic is constructed and how republican relations are conducted): “the summons to dissent, because it was grounded in prescribed ritual forms, circumscribed the threat of basic social alternatives ...[and thereby] facilitated process in such a way as to enlist radicalism itself in the cause of institutional stability” (Rites 50). I see the situation as neither so sinister nor involuntary (as if the authors cannot resist, cannot get outside the terms of American cultural-political debate to fresh options even if they wanted to). This is the revision of American history that has taken place over the last decade or so,a revision of the history and the consequences of American federal(ist) commitment to certain kinds of logic (regarding the self-conceptualization and the relation of political structure to social formation). Frederic Jameson’s statement that “the aesthetic act is itself ideological”(79) holds true in the important sense that these texts cannot productively be regarded simply as aesthetic objects with no extratextual intent 210 Note to Page 8

or as aesthetic objects whose investment in particular ideologies, whose intellectual involvement with social and political events, compromises their efficacy because it mitigates the extent to which (meaning, the sincerity with which) they are able to advocate change in real-world states of affairs. Christopher Looby’s work in Voicing America (1997) on the importance of utterance balances out the recent emphasis on print culture (most notably, Larzer Ziff ’s Writing in the New Nation [1997]). Both Looby and Ziff, however, uphold the concept, which I would not contest, of America as a “logocracy.” Also, shifts in representative periodicals like American Literature and American Literary History mirror these trends in sources and methodologies. Recent work by Russ Castronovo and Dana Nelson on questions of nationality and citizenship signifies another new direction for American literary and cultural studies — one of great promise.In their introduction to Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics (2002), Castronovo and Nelson outline an ambitious project (to which their volume is a contribution) for realizing the possibilities and limits of a “materialized democracy,” particularly for an American public that simultaneously cherishes democracy as an indescribable abstraction and admits a blithe, sometimes even proud disconnection from the practical realities of governance (6). Though conceived before I became aware of this essay, my own book is similarly concerned with the conditions under which democracy, in its idealized and often less satisfying practicable forms, is “more and less possible, more and less livable, more and less emancipatory” (8). Other work by Nelson and Castronovo is also of interest in elucidating the intersections and divergences between their work and mine. Nelson’s “Representative/Democracy: Presidents, Democratic Management, and the Unfinished Business of Male Sentimentalism” (2002) examines yet another American incarnation of the one-and-the-many relation, in this case the fetishizing of the executive in the civic imaginary (328–333, 348n). In National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (1998), Nelson examines the “antidemocratic structure of national manhood,” the way in which the abstraction of a gendered and racialized subject “trained and continues to train citizens — and not just white male ones — to conceptualize U.S. democracy through antidemocratic modes” (xii). Castronovo’s Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (2001), taking a cue in part from Whitman, proposes that “death structures U.S. national identity,” inspiring fantasies of participation from states of exclusion (physical death or political marginalization) intended to silence the “democratic unpredictability and spontaneity” symbolized by gender, race, and sexual variance (6; see 4–10, 16–19). 6. Richard Poirier, 4–7, 16–17; Larzer Ziff, x; Jane Tompkins, 106; Michael Warner, xii. There is also the contrary kind of claim, formulated by Richard Notes to Page 8 211

Poirier in A World Elsewhere and articulated more fully by Sharon Cameron in The Corporeal Self, that American literary formations are vectored not toward but away from the social: in American fiction analogues get confused with and converted to identities. They stop being emblems for social change, and instead initiate revisionary notions about the boundaries between persons. Thus, the idea (now a commonplace) about the American desire to repudiate conventions of British fiction or to flee from society constitutes an explanation that itself socializes characters’ desires to diverge from and overcome the reality that predicates persons as discrete who, because they are discrete, must come into social relationship. (55) But it seems unnecessary to cordon off the social in this way. Abstraction does not automatically entail a disconnection from reality; likewise, a concern with social order does not rule out the imagining ways of relating so radically different as to go beyond implementation, even in a revised version of the present social formation. 7. For example, an assertion of Eureka’s and Leaves of Grass’s social resonance must be based partly on the notion (discussed more fully in the chapter on Poe) that particular documents or genres, especially poetry, bear an effective — that is, an actuating rather than a purely prescriptive — relation to institutions like social formations. 8. Jameson makes a further distinction between the practical and the conceptual here, distinguishing the “social contradiction” “‘resolved’ by the formal prestidigitation of narrative” (which in this case might refer to antebellum sectional conflict over the expansion slavery) from the ideology, “the antinomy” or “logical . . . double bind,” that best describes that contradiction as an abstract problem (in this case, e pluribus unum) (82). Also resonant for our purposes is the fact that, for Jameson, although contradiction may be soluble by way of some new “praxis,” the antinomy is not. Further, something that resonates with these nineteenth-century writers’efforts at representational reconstruction is Jameson’s contention that “[s]uch reconstruction is of a piece with the reaffirmation of the existence of marginalized . . . cultures . . . and the reaudition of . . . oppositional voices” (86). One of the idiosyncrasies of Jameson’s terminology, however, which has not been imported is the way in which social contradiction,“however reconstructed,remain[s] an absent cause,which cannot be directly or immediately conceptualized by the text” (82). 9. This project is not intended to detail the literary parallel of something like the rise of liberalism in American political culture. As historians and critics like Daniel Rodgers have pointed out,the illusion of a republican-to-liberal paradigm shift is deeply questionable. Certain liberal elements (concerns for individual rights and property) are present from the beginning. The temporal division into which the texts looked at here fall (Poe and Whitman, then 212 Notes to Pages 8‒10

Melville and James) suggests a definite shift in the balance or proportions of concerns — from,in the terms of political theory,republicanism to liberalism. Nevertheless, whether the greatest sympathy lies with unity or plurality, each of these writers wrestles with the uneasy admixture of concern for the one and for the many that constitutes a certain idea of American social formation which no one discussed here questions. My use of terms like hierarchy and unity is not meant to “clamp . . . paradigms” over what Rodgers reminds us are the “clashes of value” that characterize the history and development of American political culture (10, 9). While there is no attempt in these pages to suppress the “processes out of which political language is made”(11),this study is doing something different from what Rodgers criticizes as “stringing our best writers together in traditions,” the kind of “intellectual traditions [which] are the convenient inventions of intellectual historians” (11, 47). I don’t mean to deny at any point that “there is nothing static about the language of Natural Rights” (47) and by extension relations between the one and the many. 10. Though Bercovitch holds to this line throughout most of The Rites of Assent, he vacillates at least once when he contrasts “America’s classic writers” (meaning the traditional literary roll of the American Renaissance) with the contemporary historian George Bancroft: “All of [the former group] . . . however captivated by the national symbol,also used the symbol,as Bancroft could not, to reach beyond the categories of culture” (190; emphasis added). Whatever it means to “reach beyond the categories of culture,”it implies an agential quality with which Bercovitch seems uncomfortable. I do not wish to appropriate the phrase, however, since I do not think the four authors examined here wish to get beyond those categories. To the contrary, they take as read certain sociocultural imperatives (unity, republicanism, individualism); indeed, they depend on those being the bounds of debate, on being able to take a certain (albeit, from the outside, a limited) representational palette as given. 11. Thoreau, Anthony, and DuBois also reflected on or sought to revise the relation between the Declaration and the Constitution, but the contributions by Fuller and Douglass are particularly incisive and representative of interpretive issues and structural difficulties faced by Poe, Whitman, Melville, and James. In “Slavery in Massachusetts” (1854), Thoreau exhorts his audience to opt out of the facile debate about slavery’s constitutionality by “recogniz[ing] a higher law than the Constitution”: The judges and lawyers . . . try this case by a very low and incompetent standard. They consider, not whether the Fugitive Slave Law is right, but whether it is what they call constitutional. Is virtue constitutional, or vice? Is equity constitutional, or iniquity? . . . The question is not whether you or your grandfather, seventy years go, did not enter into an agreement to serve the devil, and that service is not accordingly now due; but whether you will not now . . . serve God, — in spite of your own past recreancy, or Notes to Pages 11‒13 213

that of your ancestor, — by obeying that eternal and only just constitution which He, and not any Jefferson or Adams, has written in your being. (1990, 1989) Thoreau’s call in regard to the founding documents, then, is not that of the writers considered here: in urging citizens to heed an internal, moral set of principles that the U.S. Constitution has failed to embody (altogether, it seems), Thoreau proposes not revision or supplementation but transcendence of unjust laws, if not personal secession from the current social formation (with no clear alternative proposed). Unlike Thoreau, Anthony engages with a particular practice (the denial of suffrage to women) largely on the basis of its unconstitutionality — in this case, the conflict of female disenfranchisement with the preamble of the Constitution and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments (154–160). In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), DuBois — opposing Booker T. Washington’s advocacy of “concentrat[ing] . . . on industrial education, the accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South” instead of political power, civil rights, and education — recalls “the black men of America” to the Declaration’s “self-evident” truths, a promise as yet unfulfilled for African-Americans (398–399). The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade (1896) clarifies DuBois’s positioning in regard to the Declaration as an instance of unmitigated moral failure (“It was the plain duty of a Revolution based upon ‘Liberty’to take steps toward the abolition of slavery: it preferred promises to straightforward action” [196]), requiring not so much a specific textual supplement as the admission of a missed historical opportunity and the commitment, on the part of African Americans, to embodying those founding principles (as he puts it in The Souls of Black Folk, “developing the traits and talents of the Negro . . . in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic” [370]). The failure is not in the text, nor even so much the man-made structures erected on them, but in the people themselves. Thus while Thoreau, Anthony, and DuBois called for reconciliation between the first national founding document and its successor texts, they — unlike Poe, Whitman, Melville, and James — do not position the powers of constitution and reconstitution in the realm of the literary or the philosophical, in a concretely textual process of supplementation. 12. No doubt, Douglass would have been as impatient with the literary means by which Poe, Whitman, Melville, and James attempted to provide a supplement to problems of social construction as he was with a Reconstruction administration tardy to establish and safeguard black civil rights. 13. Given the nonseparation of the English church and state, the solutions that unified England and Scotland (1603 and 1706), and subsequently England and Ireland (1800), were, though legislative acts, inherently theological, meaning that they were realizations of divinely ordained principles, 214 Notes to Pages 14‒18

and necessarily hereditary, meaning that the stability of social formation depended on a continuity of rule and consistent investment of authority. Because these precedent solutions relied on inherited rather than created powers, they were not applicable in America. The 1706 Act of Union between England and Scotland is reprinted in Statutes VI: 565–586 (Anno 5° & 6° Anne, cap. VIII); the Act of Union between England and Ireland, in Statutes XX: 395–424 (Anno 39° and 40° George III, cap. LXVII). Other relevant legislation can be found in Statutes IV: 585–586, 680–687 (under King James I), VI: 484–485, 629, 637–639 and VII: 49–50 (under Queen Anne). See also Act of Uniformity in The Book of Common Prayer, which rendered church and state synonymous and which is a different sort of unification. 14. Nathan Hatch and Mark Noll characterize this period as that of a sea change for “an America that had largely been Presbyterian, Congregational, and Anglican” (75). According to the 1850 U.S. census, the percentage of Congregationalists had declined from 20.4% in 1776 to 4.0%; by contrast, in the same time period Methodists had skyrocketed from a meager 2.5% to 34.2%, becoming the most numerous sect in America. Congregationalists, who had held that distinction in 1776, now ranked fifth, far behind Baptists (the second largest sect, at 20.5%) and Catholics (who had risen from a sixth place of barely 2% to a sizeable 13.9%) (Finke and Starke 31). 15. The groundswell of sectarianism and illuminism in mid nineteenthcentury America suggests that at some point the social order underwritten by Congregationalism no longer seemed consistent with the principle of unrestricted relation which the founding documents had called for but which neither they themselves nor the institutionally predominant theological formation (Congregationalism) had supplied. 16.In “The Bible in Revolutionary America”Mark Noll remarks on the lack of “self-conscious connections between biblical themes and Revolutionary political theory,” an absence particularly notable in the Federalist Papers (48). Noll explains that “the Bible was everywhere (in the national consciousness) and nowhere (in explicit political theory) during the early years of American politic” and that “the politics of Revolutionary America were distinctly biblical (because articulated by leaders who found inspiration in scripture and because taken for granted as the basis for national values) while at the same time quite untouched by the messages of scripture (because worked out as politics with almost no reference to the sacred page)”(53).Similarly,until sectional animosities became too strong and disruptive to be ignored and, during the 1830s and 1840s, many religious leaders began to see the need for a more cohesive political theory than that of the founding fathers, “most Bible-believers of the early national period appear to have believed that the founders had settled major political questions once and for all. Their own efforts to make American Notes to Page 19 215

culture biblical took for granted the validity of that earlier political framework. They did not feel a need for a biblical political theory” (52). 17. If the Articles and the Constitution act upon this belief in good faith, the Declaration is responsible for introducing the ideal of perfect equality as the primary concern of American state formation. Jefferson also writes the notion of perfect freedom into the Declaration as well: our rights are the potentially reckless triad of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (dc 949). But of course perfect freedom does not make for perfect equality; it usually produces inequality. This is the central paradox of the national project: wanting to believe that what we know will almost certainly never be the case is in fact the case. The question is whether any equality one could achieve would always be theoretical, and whether that is enough, whether that was all that was desired or was simply deemed to be enough, to be better than nothing. 18. The “tendency to union” (pt 1305) is nearly impossible to truly satisfy, Poe insists elsewhere, on account of “the laws of gradation [that] so visibly pervad[e] all things in Earth and Heaven” (“Mellonta Tauta” [1849], pt 451; see also “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” [1841], pt 451). 19. In Emerson’s essay “The Poet” (1844) and in Poe’s criticism, there is the accompanying desire to locate early in a literary system an originary text or figure (a literary forefather, so to speak). 20. Sacvan Bercovitch and Robert Ferguson have demonstrated the influence of Puritan and dissenting Protestant ideology on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American political structure and social identity, and Lawrence Buell admits that the “religiocentric” character of “American thought before 1865” as well as the “pervasive[ness]” of Christian ideology in its life and letters is a “scholarly commonplace” (166–167). 21. Another factor in the de-authorization of the AV was the changes that were occurring in biblical scholarship in the early to mid nineteenth century. Under the influence of Wilhelm de Wette’s A Critical and Historical Introduction to the Canonical Scriptures of the Old Testament (1806–1807), scholars David Friedrich Strauss (The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, 1835), Wilhelm Vatke (Biblical Theology: The Religion of the Old Testament, 1835), and Ferdinand Baur (The Epochs of Church Historiography, 1852, a culmination of Baur’s groundbreaking monographs from 1835–1841) introduced historical criticism into biblical studies and began an assault on conventional notions of biblical inerrancy, inspiration, and historical veracity which is thus an assault on the Authorized Version’s right to be authorized. Based on discrepancies between the Gospels, Strauss contested their historicity and made a distinction (radical, at that time) between the historical Jesus and that portrayed in the Gospels by late first-century (c.e.) authors who were most likely not the apostles.De Wette’s and Vatke’s work on the Old Testament suggested a similar discrepancy between the events of the Bible and the biblical record 216 Notes to Pages 20‒24

of those events. The dating of Deuteronomy and, indeed, the entire Pentateuch as being much later than had previously been thought disturbed institutional assumptions about the formation of Judaism (that is,as a religion that had been monotheistic and codified from the start instead of being so only after exile). The suggestion was that tradition is not received complete, that canonical criteria are arbitrary, and that religious institutions do not spring full-grown from a closed canon. On the contrary, canons are the products of institutions, and institutions shape retrospective, necessarily revisionist histories of themselves through canon formation. The notion of pseudonymity was introduced by Baur’s work on the Pauline tradition and viewed as an attack on the credibility of biblical authority and the integrity of early church fathers who had canonized certain texts and perhaps even written some of them. The implications are not necessarily so drastic, but it is important to understand the crisis of authority which this scholarship was felt,at that time, to precipitate.Following Baur’s lead,David Meade and James Barr have both more recently drawn attention to an alternate notion of authority which influenced the production and reception of pseudonymous texts: pseudonymity as a means not of false literary ascription but of access to an authoritative tradition which later authors (second century c.e.) felt themselves to be a vital part of, which they viewed themselves as legitimately perpetuating. For useful general discussions of canon formation, see David Dunbar and Lee Martin McDonald. These nineteenth-century developments in biblical criticism were hardly spontaneous,however; they were the logical outgrowth of rationalist inquiries in the previous century. As Robert Morgan and John Barton note of Strauss’s New Testament work in particular (and it seems only natural to extrapolate it to de Wette’s and Vatke’s Old Testament work which followed similar critical assumptions), Strauss’s “Gospel criticism was not entirely new, but his argumentative power and the over-ripeness of the time made 1835 the year in which the rationalist criticisms of the Bible, pioneered in the seventeenth and developed in the eighteenth centuries, finally entered the bloodstream of Christian theology . . .” (52). 22. Within itself, of course, the claims (to authority, to priority, to canonicity) are stipulated since the Authorized Version is stipulated to be the accepted version. That is the circularity of claims to authority. 23. Poe’s orientation toward religion is ambivalent: of the many kinds of writing which Eureka claims to be, religious writing is not one of them; and yet this materialist description of the universe explicitly includes God as part of that universe, as its origin and telos. 24.The First Amendment to the Constitution reads,“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ” (dc 982). While popularly read as a guarantee of freedom of reliNotes to Pages 25‒26 217

gion, the Amendment is more accurately known as the “separation clause” because it separates church and state, distances the political from the theological, and declares the formation of the state, and thus the regulation of relation between its members (the problem of unity and multiplicity), to be a wholly secular affair. For example, although the Declaration of Independence speaks of securing certain God-given “unalienable Rights,”that God is a deistic, if not a wholly secular, abstraction: “Nature’s God” seems to be no more than the highest of “the Laws of Nature” (dc 949). A necessary distinction should be made at this point between religious and governmental institutional texts. The latter seem to depend on the existence of the former (the institution, its texts), even if the governmental institutional text refutes that religious institution. This is the irony of the Constitutional separation clause: you cannot really separate if the governmental institution is dependent on or beholden to the religious one it would reject. (Similarly, e pluribus unum is an ironic homage to the imperial entity, Britain, that had both contained the colonies and yet related hegemonically to them, been one with them and yet above and separate.) Jefferson’s well-known declaration of every person’s “unalienable rights” is significant not just because it writes the notion of absolute equality (“all men are created equal”) into the national consciousness but because Jefferson gives God credit for those rights. This man who would later push for the separation clause to be included in the Bill of Rights, here declares that for these rights man is indebted to God: “men . . . are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”(dc 949).Given the theological endowment of the American state, secularization of the same can never be considered absolute. 25. Bercovitch objects to the term secularization on the grounds that it wrongly suggests a paradigm shift and insists that it would be “more accurate to speak of a process of adaptation, revision, and extension within a certain secular-sacred outlook” (Rites 147–148). Of course, Bercovitch is describing an earlier period, in which “eighteenth-century clergy . . . substituted a regional for a biblical past, consecrated the American present as a movement from promise to fulfillment,and translated fulfillment from its meaning within the closed system of sacred history, into a metaphor for limitless secular improvement” (147). Mutatis mutandis, the second third of the nineteenth century was also the site of a “shift [in] the focus of figural authority from Bible history to the American experience” (147), or, more exactly, from texts which had traditionally held some kind of authority (political founding documents as well as the Bible) to new, literary versions of those texts (Poe’s cosmology, Whitman’s New Bible). Secularization thus seems a sufficiently appropriate term for this shift in the center of authorized discourse from the political and the religious to the literary—even though that shift entails the internalization of certain aims of political and theological discourse. 218 Notes to Page 26

26. “The Lord’s Supper,” delivered September 9, 1832. Although not Emerson’s last sermon, it was his farewell to Boston’s Second Church, from which he resigned his post after the church board insisted that he administer communion. Emerson took up another post three years later (at East Lexington Church) but finally gave up his pulpit in 1839. 27. Emerson’s sermon marks the point at which the religious path in America splits: either you go for a new kind of institution, pursuing the reactionary ambition of someone like Joseph Smith to build his own ecclesiastical edifice, or you go for no institution at all, heading off like Emerson into the innovative middle distance. 28. It should be noted that pluralism is not the same as relativism. The relativist considers each explanation of the world to be equally valid; he operates on the principle of substitutability: one such explanation is as good as any other, but each is considered to be sufficient in itself, to fulfill completely the needs of those participating in it. What the pluralist considers sufficient, however, is something quite different: validity is not a property each system possesses equally and intrinsically; rather, the validity of any one system is contingent upon the belief that all systems are equally and simultaneously valid, that an explanation of the world is sufficient to any man’s needs only when he considers that the meeting of his needs depends upon the meeting of everyone’s, upon the coexistence of all those explanations, whether he directly draws on them or not. For James, the unification of disparate persons or ideas has gone from something that does not but could, with effort, exist to something which cannot exist and which should not be allowed to exist, much less be sought after. 29. On the one hand Tocqueville thinks “that in no country in the civilized world is less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States” and that, as a result, “the Americans have no philosophical school of their own, and they care but little for all the schools into which Europe is divided” (II: 3). It makes sense that the American project should be one of philosophical as well as political independence, rejecting inherited monarchical and ecclesiastical models as legitimate bases for social formation and theorizing its own social order free of English and European influences, of models derived from Old World philosophical traditions. On the other hand, Tocqueville observes an investment in the practical that he anticipated would eventually be formulated as a philosophy in its own right (as it eventually was by Peirce, James, and Dewey): “permanent inequality of conditions leads men to confine themselves to the arrogant and sterile research for abstract truths, while the social conditions and institutions of democracy prepare [men] to seek the immediate and useful practical results of the sciences. . . . These Americans who have not discovered one of the general laws of mechanics have introduced into navigation an instrument that changes the aspect of the world” (II: 46, 45). Notes to Pages 26‒28 219

30. The notion that inequality is structurally inescapable will be as repugnant to some as it is alarmist to others. Yet modern anthropologists like Louis Dumont and theorists of perception like James J. Gibson have persuasively argued that hierarchy is one of the operating conditions for perceiving and ordering the world around us. To tell objects apart, we must be able to distinguish edges; any perceptual field will contain one object that is behind and partly hidden by another. Therefore, models of social formation, which represent relations between persons in a perceptual field wherein spatial distance stands for social distance, cannot be altogether void of the differentiating characteristics upon which politically imposed inequalities are based. Similarly, part of the history of philosophy has been an ongoing response to the fact that justice is hard if not impossible to work out practically. One prominent example is John Rawls’s formulation of the concept of an “original position,” “a purely hypothetical situation so as to lead to a certain conception of justice,” and for Rawls that conception is “justice as fairness” (17, 12). Because circumstances tend to impair one’s ability to reason about generalities (because, as Rawls eloquently puts it, the “principles of justice are hidden behind a veil of ignorance”), the original position provides a vantage point of “reflective equilibrium” from which individuals can “best interpret moral relationships” (12, 20, 22), that is, objectively assess and, the implication is, alter their principles and judgments about social equality and justice. Another eminent response to the logical impossibility of justice is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idea of the general will, to which Rawls’s “original position” is indebted if not analogous. 31.It is Louis Dumont’s point,and one I agree with,that equality is not what we really mean. What we mean is equity, substantive rather than formal equality, the apportionment of privileges and materials, not the conceptual basis — which is social formation — on which we relate to one another. Arguing about equality in the former terms is,of course,much more common,perhaps because it allows one to generate the moral force that best serves both sides of the partisan debates over welfare and opportunity to which recent discussions of equality seem to be limited.For examples of the moralist or substantive approach,see Bernard Williams, Amy Gutmann, Kai Nielsen, and Miller and Walzer. 32. Dumont adds that today we still “tend to put everything on the same plane” (244). He wonders, sardonically, “how we [egalitarians] have managed to free ourselves . . . from hierarchy, and from the opposition between ensemble and element that is something like its formal principle” (244). The answer is that we have not: “[w]e moderns have not stopped making value judgments; we give unequal values to people, places, and situations” (244). Although Dumont has been criticized of late (see Steven M. Parrish, 77–87, 95–100, 217–224),his insistence on the embeddedness of hierarchy (or differentiation) in social and epistemological structures, which has its counterpart in scientific theory in James J. Gibson’s work, has not been significantly displaced. 220 Notes to Pages 30‒32

Of the critical charges lodged against Homo Hierarchicus (complaints of Dumont’s tendency to totalize or to evacuate agency),most are minor intradisciplinary adjustments and do not detract, as far as my own work is concerned, from the basic correctness of Dumont’s core claim. 33. As Allen Grossman has succinctly put it, the realization of “union as value,” or the institutionalization of equality, is permanently at odds with the “constraints upon variation consistent with union as structure,” which is to say, hierarchy (“Poetics of Union” 66, 65). 34. Although Nagel speaks much to the same point, he attributes the failures to “reconcil[e] the standpoint of the collectivity with the standpoint of the individual”to the shortcomings of “human nature”(which reads like stubbornness) (3, 90). Though Dumont’s emphasis may be too far in the other direction, he is accurate in also attributing the difficulty of resolving the oneand-the-many problematic in social and political formation to the recalcitrance of the physical world itself: To adopt a value is to introduce hierarchy, and a certain consensus of values, a certain hierarchy of ideas, things and people, is indispensable to social life. This is quite independent of natural inequalities or the distribution of power. No doubt, in the majority of cases, hierarchy will be identified in some way with power, but there is no necessity for this. . . . Moreover it is understandable and natural that hierarchy should encompass social agents and social categories. In relation to these more or less necessary requirements of social life, the ideal of equality, even if it is thought superior,is artificial.It expresses a human claim,which also entails the choice of certain ends. It represents a deliberate denial of a universal phenomenon in a restricted domain. We have no intention, any more than did Tocqueville, of throwing out this ideal. But it is well to understand to what extent it runs contrary to the general tendencies of societies, and hence how far our society is exceptional, and how difficult it is to realize this ideal. (20) 35. This should be defined in contrast to American transcendentalism, which is not a form of philosophical realism because it has a transcendental background (its basis in Kant being the idea of the sufficient condition). What Poe, Whitman, Melville, and James attempt, by contrast, is the reconstruction of the transcendent term, which is an assertion of an ontologically unquestionable reality.Transcendental,for Kant,means not concerned with the transcendent but rather concerned “with the possibility of knowledge” (Honderich 879). 1. “brotherhood among the atoms” 1. This is not to say that Poe did not write or publish anything after Eureka but rather that it was his last significant work, followed only by five minor Notes to Pages 32‒37 221

sketches and about the same number of poems (“The Bells” and “Annabel Lee” the most notable among them). Eureka’s thematic, aesthetic, and theoretical consistency with the rest of Poe’s work has been adequately argued and documented by Margaret Alterton, Joan Dayan, Robert Jacobs, Geoffrey Rans, Charles Schaefer, and Kenneth Silverman. 2. The assertion of intentionality is based on Poe’s appreciation of Eureka, in the letter to his mother-in-law, as being not simply his magnum opus, but the nation’s.By describing nineteenth-century America as a “post-theological culture,” I refer to the conditions of intellectual and social life under the historically inscribed process of secularization which contributed to shifts in the meaning of oneness, the nature of the transcendental term (whether the One is read as “God” or “the Union”), and thus the conditions for legitimating social and/or theological formations. For more on the context of the posttheological crisis, see the fourth section of my Introduction. 3. My notion of the documentary state neatly complements Poe’s conception of the American republic of letters. 4. The lineage of the text’s scientific sources is well documented, the most helpful accounts remaining those by Frederick William Conner (67–91), Carol Hopkins Maddison,and Arthur H.Quinn (543–557),all of whom agree that Eureka advances beyond rather than merely synthesizes the contemporary sources upon which it draws. Contemporary reviews either reject or applaud Poe’s scientific aptitude (see, respectively, Sargent and Browne). John Limon provides a more recent, more balanced account of Poe’s ambivalence toward science (comfort derived from its classificatory regimes combined with an anxiety about its enviable professionalization). Locating Eureka within contexts other than scientific debate has received rare but rewarding attention (see Susan McCaslin’s analysis of Eureka as a cosmogonic, socially vectored poem comparable to Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days and Horace’s De Arte Poetica). A commonly cited source for Poe’s theory of material condensation and radiation is the fifth-century b.c.e.Empedocles: “at one time [the cosmos] grew to be one only from many, at another it divided again to be many from one” (Kirk and Raven 326, §423). Whereas most critics admit to similarities between the cosmologies of Poe and Empedocles, both Peter Page and David Ketterer argue that Poe borrows some ideas directly (the cycle of matter, aether). Regardless, what remains true is that Poe incorporates into the American literary project of resolving the one-and-the-many problem the self-legitimating notion (originating with Empedocles) that the imperative to unity and the difficulty of erasing difference (both of which are apparent in social formation) are rooted in inexorable physical laws which produce the cycle of material condensation and diffusion. The further resonance of the Great Seal’s motto “e pluribus unum” with Empedocles underscores the penetration of a classic 222 Notes to Pages 37‒39

philosophical trope into American thought as a hard problem of material as well as abstract political construction. 5. Along with the other texts examined in this book — Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Melville’s Moby-Dick and Billy Budd, and William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience — Eureka is a nineteenth-century American text notable for adopting a supplementary attitude toward predecessor documents of social and/or literary formation for the sake of rendering some account of what literary culture can add to legitimation of state formation by repeating that formation in another authoritative modus. Further investigation would require one to examine other nineteenth-century American texts which,like Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon (1830) and Melville’s Clarel (1876), are relevant for the ways they suggest Poe’s participation in another genre of American foundational writing: the writing of an American Bible (for a discussion of Whitman’s investment in this project, see chapter 2). Clarel narrates a young theological student’s pilgrimage through the Holy Land in an attempt to regenerate his faith in the theological foundation of the American state, which had been shaken by the injury of civil war, the insult of the Gilded Age, and the advent of evolutionary theory. For Joseph Smith, state formation exists in complementary relation to theological formation: as an American Bible, The Book of Mormon complements the Protestant Bible in the sense of being based on Christian tenets, but, as a new revelation, is actually meant to supplant it. Similarly, the American (Mormon) state displaces Protestantism by styling itself a thirteenth (till now forgotten) tribe of Israel. In spite of The Book of Mormon’s rather innovative claim for presence at origins (specifically, Christ’s post-ascension appearance in North America), Smith is working quite traditional ground in generating a social state from an extant theological order. Eureka, then, in its allegiance between the literary and the political, marks the secularization of state formation, the relation of persons on a secular (in this case, literary) rather than the theological basis to which Smith, in 1830, still clings—the basis Emerson would disavow two years later when he refused to administer the Sacrament and exchanged his pulpit for a lectern. 6. Exemplary texts would be Johannes Kepler’s Mysterium Cosmographicum (596),Gottfried Leibniz’s Monadology (1720),Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1725), George Berkeley’s Siris (1744), and Immanuel Kant’s Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755) — although Leibniz and Vico dwell more on the social and literary implications of cosmology. Of these, Berkeley’s Siris is most like Eureka in the former’s almost maniacal drive to incorporate every aspect of physical and nonphysical reality (from animal magnetism to the salutary properties of nostrums like tarwater). Eureka is the first text to do so in the American context, however; moreover, it is the first among these works that purports to be literature, to be any other thing than a scientific or philosophical treatise. Notes to Pages 39‒41 223

7. By contrast, the plot mechanism of Poe’s tales (as well as their epistemological force) is that the concealment of something necessitates its uncovering, disinterment, or discovery and is perhaps the only way of procuring knowledge, of eliciting revelation. Typical embodiments of this principle are burial (as in “Berenice”), premature burial (in “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Premature Burial”), imprisonment (in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”), and entombment (in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym). 8. This is not meant to be a judgment or an essentialist account of pornography, but rather an account of the way in which a certain notion of the literary regards excessive cognitive ambition pejoratively, as a mark of the pornographic, of the nonliterary. 9. Although Laplace was responsible for popularizing this hypothesis and starting it on its controversial career, Kant deserves credit for its introduction nearly half a century earlier. 10. The truth of a proposition, certainly in the sciences, depends on its demonstrability, its correspondence with reality. The coherence truth claim, by contrast, demands only an internal consistency, the coherence of claims with one another rather than any reality outside them.Both J.Lasley Dameron and Nicholas Rescher cite F.H.Bradley as the “chief formulator”of the coherence theory (Rescher 7). Eureka, however, reveals Poe espousing the coherence theory avant le lettre when he writes that a “perfect consistency . . . can be nothing but an absolute truth” (pt 1349). 11. Understandably, then, Poe’s conception of the material is dramatically different than Emerson’s. For Poe, the material is a means to an end: it is no more than an approximation of an ideal, the realization of which involves, in fact, the annihilation of matter, of any structure through which actualization might be perceived. In “Nature,” by contrast, the real must remain distinct, because it is the text through which one reads and experiences the ideal: “‘Material objects,’ said a French philosopher, ‘are necessarily kinds of scoriae of the substantial thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve an exact relation to their first origin.’ . . . By degrees we may come to know the primitive sense of the permanent objects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an open book, and every form significant of its hidden life and final cause” (el 25; emphases added). Nature, for Emerson (at least in 1836), is something to be interpreted.For Poe,nature is something that becomes something else; it is a text that does not “purge the eyes to understand” it but that purges, or undoes, itself, rewrites itself beyond our perceptual (inherently hierarchical) limits (el 25). 12. Accusation may seem too strong a word, since the indictments against Eureka are not explicit, nor are they general enough to omit it from critical attention altogether. And yet most of the attention that the text has received — the labor that has been invested in taking the edge off Eureka by demon224 Notes to Pages 42‒44

strating its continuity with other discussions of the nebular hypothesis or with Poe’s aesthetic theory — carries just such an accusation. Seeking to justify or soften Eureka’s anomaly rather than to question the validity of the characterization has resulted in its misclassification as a text that is sure to be misread rather than appreciated as one deeply invested in the constitutional regime and therefore, as I have already observed, in the literary. 13.The trope of America as a poem has a well-known history in the period, originating (apparently) in Emerson’s “The Poet” (“America is a poem in our eyes”) and then reiterated by Whitman in the 1855 Preface (“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem”) (el 465; lg 711). What seems to have gone unnoticed is Poe’s medial position in this lineage, a presence that draws attention to the common project this supposedly anomalous text shares with the work of Emerson and Whitman. 14. Without impugning the achievement of Quinn’s and Silverman’s biographies, it is worth noting that both use broad strokes to present their subject’s political views. Silverman depends on Poe’s “repellent” and “denigrating” portrayal of blacks in “The Gold-Bug” (1843) and “The Man That Was Used Up” (1843) as evidence that, “although in no way consumed with racial hatred, [Poe] considered blacks to be less than human — as did many other Americans in the 1840s” (206–207). Turning to a review in which Poe condemns contemporary poet James Russell Lowell as a “rabid . . . Abolitionist fanatic,”Silverman admits that Poe was retaliating against Lowell for a personal slur and against the hypocrisy of Northerners who paid lip service to abolitionism (er 819). On weaker ground, Quinn infers Poe’s psychic landscape from the social status and assumed political views of those who visited the Allans’ Richmond home while Poe lived there: because, Quinn declares, “there can be little doubt that Poe had an opportunity to meet . . . men and women of breeding, whose professional and personal character was high,”“[t]here can be little question concerning the effect this upbringing had on him. He was never a democrat in any sense” (94). Even though most critics would second Geoffrey Rans’s observation that “Poe took such care not to expose” his ideas (39), the influence of these portraits on Poe criticism has been strong, as illustrated by Scott Bradfield’s citation of Josiah C. Nott as a “fellow proslavery ideologue” of Poe’s and his quoting of Nott’s “Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races” (1844) as if it might as easily have been written by Poe (80). 15. While Eureka may be one of the first American texts to thematize the homologous and the causal relations between literary and state formation,Poe draws on a tradition stretching from Emerson’s prefatory poem to “The Poet” (1844),which likens the poetic structural characteristic of rhyme to the “musical order” of the cosmos (el 445), back to Books II and III of Plato’s Laws, which describe how the “poets became rulers and held sway over unmusical Notes to Pages 44‒46 225

lawlessness” because “lawlessness . . . originated in our music” (3: 700d; 701a–b). Likewise, Horace’s De Arte Poetica locates the founding of civilization within the context of the orphic myth (that is, the founding of poetry): “In days of yore, this was wisdom, to draw a line between public and private right, between things sacred and things common, to check vagrant union, to give rules for wedded life, to build towns, and grave laws on tables of wood” (lines 396–399; pp. 482–483). A source temporally closer to the American Renaissance is Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry” (written in 1821, published in 1840; rpt. in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose), which presents poets as not simply those who, because they see the cosmic order “according to which present things ought to be ordered,” are the “institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society” (483, 482), but those whose responsibility it is to supplement institutions as they inevitably decay and drift from their foundations: “all language, institution and form, require not only to be produced but to be sustained,” and it is the poetic faculty “when as from a magnet the invisible effluence is sent forth, which at once connects, animates, and sustains the life of all. It is the faculty which contains within itself the seeds at once of its own and of social renovation” (492–493; emphases added). 16.As to whether Poe imagined Eurekaas having any institutional intentions, as founding something politically real, it must be emphasized that the criteria for institutionalization are neither genre- nor discourse-specific. As the available literature on how documents are instituted suggests, authority for institutionalization comes from the outside and is arbitrary (Berger and Luckmann 53–67; Searle 90–99). There is no set of internal marks that can render certain documents institutable and others not so, only the uses to which some person other than the author puts them. Essentially, Eureka has neither more nor less intentionality toward the political than a text like John C. Calhoun’s Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States (1851). Calhoun may be speaking with an intent toward institutionalization when he suggests specific revisions to the federal government structure (1: 390–396), and yet, even if his suggestions had been adopted,the intentionality of the Discourse itself,like that of Eureka, would have remained on the level of abstraction. 17. “Review of Ballads and Other Poems. By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” Graham’s Magazine (April 1842). Poe’s definition of poetry as the “Rhythmical Creation of Beauty” is not unique; Emerson and Shelley, among others, maintain that poetry is not confined to metrical speech (er 686). The rhythmicity of prose is particularly important for Eureka, whose dashes, parallel clauses, and general elongation of line mirror the text’s generic ambivalence as a prose poem — a work hovering between poetry and prose, between the one and the many. 18. Southern Literary Messenger (April 1836). My discussion of Eureka as poetry (as the predominant genre that could be said to recruit the text’s many 226 Notes to Pages 46‒48

other genres) is supported by Eureka’s demonstrable continuity with Poe’s theorizations of poetics both before and after it (the Drake-Halleck review [1836],“The Philosophy of Composition”[1846],and “The Poetic Principle” [1850]). What Poe is doing in Eureka cannot safely be called criticism, which for him meant reviewing: judging a work of art by purely formal criteria (as an aesthetic execution evaluated according to critical “laws that cannot vary”) rather than by any putative value that one might assign to its content (the opinions it expresses) or to a relevant context, for such an assignment will be idiosyncratic to each critic and produce “opinion” instead of criticism (“Exordium to Critical Notices,”Graham’s Magazine [January 1842]; er 1031, 1032). Criticism should, Poe demands, be an evaluation of the “mode or vehicle of opinion [rather than a] discussion of the opinion conveyed” (er 1032). Eureka is not criticism because, in its aspiration to be a work of many genres, it attempts what, according to Poe, criticism definitionally cannot do: to be “anything and everything at once”; far from being a “conglomerate science” (which sounds like Eureka), criticism is “not, we think, an essay, nor a sermon, nor an oration, nor a chapter in history, nor a philosophical speculation, nor a prose-poem, nor an art novel, nor a dialogue. In fact, it can be nothing in the world but — a criticism” (er 1031; emphasis added). If Eureka were to be considered in any way critical, one would have to conclude, given Poe’s comments in the “Exordium,” that in Eureka he is either contradicting himself or, more interestingly, counteracting the dilettante’s pretension to “include” (that is, to be, to imitate) “every form of literature” with the subsumption of all genres — not merely the mimicry of generic content or aesthetic texture but the incorporation of each genre’s intentional relation to social order (er 1031). It seems hardly coincidental that this kind of generically democratic scope occurs in Eureka, Poe’s theorization of American social formation, his attempt to reconcile how a state (as well as a text’s genre) can be at once the many and the one (er 1030–1031). 19. This ambiguity is paralleled by Eureka’s indeterminable generic character. As a prose poem (a genre which itself challenges conventional categories) and as a text that claims to meet the criteria of many genres, Eureka cannot be made to settle within any one of the many categories it aspires to embody. It seems hardly coincidental that this kind of generically democratic scope occurs in Eureka, Poe’s theorization of American social formation, his attempt to reconcile how a state (as well as text’s genre) can be at once many and one. 20.Poe here resonates with Emerson’s notion (in “The Poet”) that the poet alters not so much the institutions themselves as our perceptive relations to them and thus to one another (el 455–457). Rather than ignoring specific inequalities, Poe sees — and urges us to see — the deep order, the absolute or political equality, that underlies and in fact entails certain social inequalities. Notes to Page 50 227

21. Eureka should be contrasted to panegyrics like Freneau’s The Rising Glory of America (1772) and Cornelius Mathews’s Poems on Man in his Various Aspects Under the American Republic (1843),texts whose nature is to take foundation as written, as properly executed, and whose work is legitimation, not supplementation.Poe is concerned with foundation in the sense of getting the foundational moment and its terms right, supplying what the founding documents omitted: centrally,a clear understanding of the representational necessity of inequality. While producing a socially vectored text like Eureka might seem unlikely for an author not given to preachy or dogmatic poetry (for example, “Alone” [1829], “Sonnet — Silence” [1839], “Ulalume — A Ballad” [1847], and “The Bells” [1848]), I contend that counterpropositional poetry in actuality is even more related than didactic poetry to changing states of affairs because it gets at the mechanism of change, the core, instead of proffering a prescriptive model that the present does not, but should, match. However much Poe’s theorization of poetry invests in the aesthetic and recoils from the didactic,such a commitment in no way forecloses the possibility that poetry may have an efficacy which cannot be categorized as either didactic or prescriptive. Poe explicitly opposes his aestheticism to didacticism in “The Poetic Principle” (1850) when he denounces the “heresy of The Didactic”: the “assum[ption] . . . that the ultimate object of Poetry is Truth” and that “[e]very poem . . . should inculcate a moral” (Sartain’s Union Magazine [October 1850]; er 75). What Poe says should never be inculcated also includes any particular system or particular conception of relations. Thus, rather than constituting a change in Poe’s stance (from socially indifferent to socially conscious), Eureka attests to a continuity in his notion of the work of poetry. 22.James Gibson’s The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems is an exemplary modern theorization of the hierarchical character of representation that we see in Eureka. Hierarchy is embedded deep within our perceptual processes because perception relies on “edge” phenomena: “kinetic occlusion . . . specifies the existence of an edge in the world, and the depth at the edge, but it does even more. It also specifies the existence of one surface behind another, that is, the continued existence of a hidden surface” (204). Because the perception of one object in space depends on the “kinetic optical occlusion” of one object by another, there will always be a hidden surface (the “fact of one surface behind another”) and thus at least two levels in any representation, which would include models of social formation and relation (203). 23. The notion that representation is inherently hierarchical is one the “fables of mind” of which Poe, according to Joan Dayan, is trying to deprive us, so as to elicit an “as yet unknown angle of vision” (28, 30). Syntactically producing a “loss of comprehension . . . [or] direction” and a “‘convertibility’ of terms” (feats Dayan attributes to Poe’s use of the dash), Eureka draws 228 Notes to Pages 50‒53

out our attention only to produce “excessively obvious” points, confounding our notions of linearity in order to elicit the understanding that hovers within us, just beyond the reach of a hierarchical model of representation (27, 76). 24.If what Gibson calls the “continued existence of a hidden surface”is representationally insurmountable, then poetry itself, like social formation, involves the selection — both the inclusion and the suppression — of particulars (204). Alexis de Tocqueville, a contemporary of Poe, asserts as much in the second volume of Democracy in America (1840), in which he argues that democracy, equality, and non-difference inhibit poetic production and that poetry can flourish only in a feudal (or otherwise hierarchical) system: “The Poet is he who, by suppressing a part of what exists, by adding some imaginary touches to the picture . . . completes and extends the work of nature.” Consequently, “[i]n democratic communities, where men are all insignificant and very much alike, each man instantly sees all his fellows when he surveys himself. The poets of democratic ages, therefore, can never take any man in particular as the subject of a piece; for an object of slender importance, which is distinctly seen on all sides, will never lend itself to an ideal conception” (2: 71, 73; emphases added). 25. Poe’s hedging, in qualifiers like “generally” and “more or less,” betrays a consciousness that inequality must take some form: “difference of form” sounds vague, but when representation intends (as it does in social formations), such differences have serious implications. Although difference seems unavoidable (or at least acceptable as a means to union), it sparks worries that Poe immediately tries to defuse: inequalities that are structurally necessary or inevitable are said not to “interfer[e] with the general” condition of equality. But the assurance provided by “generally-equable” is shaky at best. Just as Poe makes an analogy between material and social formations, his qualificatory language attempts to elide the very real difference between “equable” (which implies an even physical distribution) and “equitable” (which implies the even political distribution of equality). And yet it is because of his efforts to render the two synonymous (efforts shared by the Constitution) that the distance, if not the antagonism, between structure and equality is revealed in Eureka (as it was in contemporary judicial decisions and congressional compromises that wrestled with this discontinuity). 26. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist 10, makes a similarly dubious distinction between “consolidation” and “confederation” (Wills 41). Although originally confederation implied a nation governed by its member states, that very federal government soon came to look upon state governments as distinct from and subject to itself as a national authority. 27. New York v. Miln (1837), Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), and Luther v. Borden (1849) are contemporary Supreme Court cases (all under Justice Roger Brooke Taney) notable for establishing federal prerogative over state Notes to Pages 54‒58 229

contracts and laws (including fugitive slave laws that circumvented the federal 1793 Fugitive Slave Act and the original such clause in the Constitution [Article IV, Section 3]) as well as the sovereignty of state populations (see James Young). Although eventually defeated, the Wilmot Proviso (1846) — which would have subjected slavery to federal prerogative by banning it in territories acquired in the Mexican War (1846–1848) — raised specters of noninterference and state sovereignty that would later culminate in secession (Haas 22–24). Meanwhile, the Compromise of 1850, which revised the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 to allow deportation without due process,was meant to mollify slave states and to decentralize prerogative in regard to the conduct of the slave trade (Haas 36–39). As an attempt to regulate relations between parts of the whole on a nonhegemonic basis, the Compromise of 1850 was a failure. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 made it clear that centralization of the issue (specifically, the establishment of a national policy on slavery) was necessary,however repugnant it might be to those with vested interests (material or ideal) in state sovereignty on the slavery question. 28. “John G. C. Brainard: A Few Words about Brainard,” Graham’s Magazine (February 1842). 29. Appropriately enough, the Penn Magazine was to be published in Philadelphia, the site at which Jefferson’s Declaration had been read and ratified. In Poe’s mind, a journal should ideally be in the control of one person (the artist-cum-editor) who ministers to, and in the interests of, the many (his readership). The title of the Stylus not only suggests the power of the journal in a republic of letters but also emphasizes the medium in which literary and social formations will be created and revised: “stylus” (or “style”) refers to engraving tools, pens, and ancient writing instruments (used on wax tablets) capable of both incising and erasing. 30. “Prospectus of The Penn Magazine,” Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post (6 June 1840); “Prospectus of The Stylus,” Philadelphia Saturday Museum (4 March 1843). As the phrase suggests, in Poe’s “republic of letters” self-making is never solely an aesthetic affair. Men of letters become men of republican letters, not belles lettres, and the production of persons attains the same engagement with self-making that characterizes American literary and political production. I should add that by “republic of letters” I am referring not to the ideological consequences of print culture (discussed by Michael Warner in The Letters of the Republic) but instead to the notion of letters as evoked by my phrase “the documentary,” to the possible effective relations of texts to each other (supplementary) as well as to the present system and our conception of that system. 31.“About Critics and Criticism,”Graham’s Magazine (January 1850).For a discussion of Poe’s copyright crusade, see Andrew Levy (18–19) and Arthur H. Quinn (436). In a review in the Weekly Mirror (8 February 1845), Poe 230 Notes to Page 59

reacted to the flood of English texts, much as the colonies had to the king’s taxes, as the imposition of a social formation (hierarchy) that was most, or most immediately, evident in economic terms: Poe complained of the “irreparable ill [that] is wrought by the almost exclusive dissemination among us of foreign, that is to say of monarchical or aristocratical sentiment, in foreign books” (cited in Quinn, 436). 32. Poe’s most notable predecessors in this regard would be the Connecticut Wits. Usually divided into the Major Wits (John Trumbull, Joel Barlow, David Humphreys, and Lemuel Hopkins) and the Minor Wits (Richard Alsop, Elihu Hubbard Smith, and Theodore Dwight), this Revolutionary-era group of contemporary men of letters was the first consciously to interrogate the relationship of America’s national and literary foundations. Thus, although Poe’s politics are not entirely consonant with those of the Wits (who were not themselves politically homogeneous), Poe, in crying out for a literary culture both distinctively national and concerned with social as well as aesthetic matters, is carrying forward concerns articulated by the Wits fifty years earlier (see Parrington). At the same time, Poe transforms those concerns by exploring the idea that the efficacy of literary texts intent upon legitimating, supplementing, or revising social organization lies in their attention not to explicit political practices but rather to the relation of particulars in the abstract. Poe is talking about not so much founding literary culture itself as founding a certain notion of literary culture, as well as what founding one entails. A founding literary culture is not one that sets a standard but one that makes a country great — indeed, that makes a country. And it does so not simply by being a superior brand of aesthetic product but by serving some independent “Ideality,” by having some relation to or concern with the right foundation of the nation of their provenance, the nation those documents will come to represent, if not themselves come to be. The literary and the social are for Poe equally textual; each has its life in documents. 33.“Marginal Notes: A Sequel to Marginalia,”Godey’s Lady’s Book (August 1845). 34. Review of “Ballads and Other Poems. By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” Graham’s Magazine (April 1842). 35. One might legitimately contend that the “combinations” Poe is talking about in the preceding passage are literary rather than political. But I hope to make clear that Poe regards America’s literary and political foundations similarly,in that he believes neither was done properly; thus for Eureka the nation’s political founding documents operate first and foremost as documents in which aesthetic choices have implications beyond the texts themselves. 36.The colonies’secession from the British Empire is motivated by a desire no longer to be part of anything, but the delegates specify that government must have some institutional embodiment: “the Legislative powers,incapable Notes to Pages 60‒62 231

of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions from within” (dc 950). 37.By contrast to the Declaration,the Constitution involves a highly impersonal promise,for it is made by delegates of a collective,by true representatives who have other lives, fortunes, and honors besides their own to pledge (more forcefully, they have the authority to do so). Recent, helpful accounts of the vicissitudes of the period between the Articles and the ratification of the new Constitution can be found in David C. Hendrickson’s Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (115–157, 211–256) and John Ferling’s A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic (281–313). 38. The inability of the national government (under the Articles) to make “resolutions” instead of “mere recommendations” was a leading Federalist argument in favor of the Constitution’s reassignment of sovereignty from its decentralized residence in individual states to a centralized national body with “discretionary superintendence” and legislative prerogative. See Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 15 (Wills 70–71). 39. In Federalist 9 Hamilton also asserts that the Constitution describes “a Confederate Republic,” an “association” rather than a consolidation of states (Wills 41). But the abolition of state individuality is exactly what Antifederalists feared in the new plan, especially in the “supreme law” clause (Article I, Section 8; also known as the “sweeping” or “elastic” clause), which gave Congress carte blanche to “make all Laws which shall be necessary . . . for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof ” (dc 973). Besides the extensive powers it was already granted (like direct taxation of individuals by the national rather than state government), Congress could add to them and extend their jurisdiction. To the Constitution’s detractors, such possibly unlimited centralization would render state institutions little more than vestigial. The unum’s relation to its constituents would be admittedly stratified,necessarily hierarchical,and thus, to some, inexcusably hegemonic. Exemplary Antifederalist statements in this regard are “A Republican Federalist” (Kenyon 119), “George Mason Fears for the Rights of the People” (Bailyn 2: 605), “‘Centinel’ I” (dc 58), and “‘Agrippa’ IV” (dc 449). John Calhoun would renew the Antifederalist cry against consolidation, when, for a cause no less sectional or state-interested than theirs (slavery in this case), he theorized American government, much as the Articles had, as federal (that is, coordinated by the several states) rather than national in character: “Ours is a system of governments, compounded of the separate governments of the several States composing the Union, and of one common government of all its members, called the Government of the United States. 232 Notes to Pages 63‒66

The former preceded the latter, which was created by its agency. . . . Neither is perfect without the other. The two combined, form one entire and perfect government.”Such a government is “federal and not national,because it is the government of a community of States, and not . . . of a single State or nation” (1: 111–113; emphasis added). Calhoun defends Southern claims to state sovereignty and their demand for an equal voice in Congress by locating the concept of separate-but-united states in all three founding documents. It was, of course, in his interest to deemphasize the Constitution’s arrogation of state powers to federal (that is, national) bodies; he hedges on the extent to which the “different organization” embodied in the Constitution was substantial (Calhoun 1: 117; dc 965). 40. While it is true that Poe opposed democracy, he opposed it because he saw in it the seeds of unrestrained individualism and the chaotic disruption of a natural hierarchy: “The fundamental law of nature does not decree that all people should live together, but apart. Human nature is implicit with fragmentation, discord, mutiny, and genetic conflict” (Bradfield 80). Although Bradfield correctly points out that Poe endorses slavery as necessary insofar as it restrains “the natural forces of [society’s] own destruction,”for Poe those forces are not wholly identified with the Negro, and his enslavement does little to neutralize those forces, which persist in the world (81). The fundamental problem (of which slave rebellion and abolition are only instances) lies deeper,manifesting itself more generally in the subversive,democratizing passion of the “‘many who want,’” the overzealous “‘spirit of liberty’ . . . which destroys the ‘governmental machinery’ of nations by asserting that ‘all things be in common’”(Bradfield 83–84,quoting Poe’s Complete Works 8: 267–268). 41.My reading should be contrasted to one like John Limon’s.Limon views Eureka rather one-sidedly (as reveling in the ecstasy of annihilation), but this reading is somewhat forced by Limon’s larger concern: charting a progression in Poe’s career from a fear of to a comfort with the dissolution of individual identity which the notion of a “swarming [or living] universe” (78) would demand — a trajectory Limon traces from the claustrophobic tales that resist the self ’s being called upon to merge (tales in which a Baconian, classificatory distance protects the individual) to Eureka itself. I would not characterize Eureka so monistically but, instead, emphasize the tension between its concern with the right structuring of present material and social formations and the assurance (issuing from the last few pages of Eureka, which Limon’s reading privileges) that such concern is pointless, since any extant inequalities will be righted (actually,dissolved) in the end-time condensation and annihilation of all matter. To read Eureka as wholly invested in annihilation is to ignore the fact that the life of the universe, according to Poe, does not end in condensation and annihilation but begins the process (of radiation, condensation, and annihilation) all over again: Notes to Pages 67‒69 233

On the Universal agglomeration and dissolution, we can readily conceive that a new and perhaps totally different series of conditions may ensue — another creation and radiation, returning into itself. . . . Guiding our imaginations by that omniprevalent law of laws, the law of periodicity, are we not, indeed, more than justified in entertaining a belief . . . that the processes we have here ventured to contemplate will be renewed forever, and forever,and forever; a novel Universe swelling into existence,and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine? (pt 1356) 42. Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom remains the best work on the “American paradox [of ] the marriage of slavery and freedom” (6): The seeming inconsistency, of slaveholders devoting themselves to freedom was not peculiar to . . . Jefferson or Washington. Nor was it peculiar to Virginia. The men who came together to found the independent United States, dedicated to freedom and equality, either held slaves or were willing to join hands with those who did. None of them felt entirely comfortable about the fact,but neither did they feel responsible for it.Most of them had inherited both their slaves and their attachment to freedom from an earlier generation, and they knew that the two were not unconnected. The rise of liberty and equality in America had been accompanied by the rise of slavery. . . . The paradox is American, and it behooves Americans to understand it if they would understand themselves. (4–5) 43.Making this distinction is useful for addressing the historical Poe,since my point is that Poe’s political stance is neither purely democratic nor wholly aristocratic. It is possible to believe at once in political equality and in social hierarchy, and I would like to argue that this is Poe’s position; this is what he is urging on the founding documents,both on the Articles which idealize individual autonomy and on the Constitution which reluctantly accepts a compromise of that autonomy. One could go further and say that contemporary political events like the Compromise of 1850 were federal acts that,to all intents and purposes, reinstated state prerogative; the issue of slavery was negotiated as a national dispute (over the many and the one), but that dispute, while de jure federal in character, was de facto state and/or sectional. This Compromise, along with other congressional acts like the 1846 Wilmot Proviso, can be read as the kind of extreme democracy that Poe is against both because it is socially repugnant to him and because he holds it to be representationally impossible. 44. Poe wrote frankly to Robert T. Conrad that “What I need for my work [founding The Penn Magazine] in its commencement . . . is caste. I need the countenance of those who stand well, not less in the social than in the literary world” (22 January 1841, Letters 1: 154). For Andrew Levy, the “chief irony of Poe’s magazine project is that he makes his own success, and the success of 234 Notes to Pages 69‒70

his aristocratic ideal,dependent upon the resources that can be provided only by a rising mercantile culture: a large literature class and, of course, magazine technology itself ” (19). 2. “a religion which is no religion” 1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men, Chapter VII (“Goethe; or, the Writer”),el 761.Writing new Bibles was not the fixation solely of Whitman or of sectarians and religious visionaries (see Lawrence Buell 167–168). In chapter V of Representative Men (“Shakespeare; or, the Poet”), Emerson writes that the “world still wants its poet-priest, a reconciler” (el 726); chapter VII (“Goethe; or,the Writer”),from which my epigraph derives,ends with the following prescription: “The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life, in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use” (el 761). As an attempt to realize the unmediated discourse of “Song of Myself ” on a larger textual and social scale, the 1860 Leaves seeks to “honor” the truth of the American project “by use,” by rendering that truth in its avatars (social and political equality, religious immediacy) usable and practicable. Also to the point is Herwig Friedl’s remark that Leaves — and I would extend the description to Poe’s Eureka — “contains history in the attempts at symbolic interpretation of the universal process both as sacred or metaphysical and as profane history” (299). 2.The nine editions are dated 1855,1856,1860,1867,1872,1876,1881,1889, and 1891–1892. 3. “Walt Whitman’s Last,” Lippincott’s Magazine (August 1891). 4. “The Old Man Himself,” from Horace Traubel, “Walt Whitman: Poet and Philosopher and Man,” Lippincott’s Magazine (March 1891). 5. Ibid. My claim is that, while all editions of Leaves share the same nationalist focus, they may not envision the nation in quite the same way. If all versions of the text can be said to aim for the production of “One [American] Identity,” it should be added that each does so on terms and in registers (historical, erotic, metaphysical) that are quite distinct. Nonetheless, I do not go so far as John Kinnaird, who distinguishes Whitman the poet from the “prose Whitman,” differentiating between his poetry, the work of “the ‘soul’ that ‘accepts’ and ‘is satisfied,’” and his prose, the work of the “ego” that “compulsively wills his meanings into ideology” (29). Although there is some truth in Kinnaird’s claim that, in the case of the 1855 Leaves, the Preface gives the poems a nationalist focus they might lack by themselves (28), such a claim would have to overcome Betsy Erkkila’s more substantiated argument that “the drama of identity in ...‘Song of Myself ’...is rooted in the political drama of a nation in crisis” (95). Moreover, compartmentalizing Whitman as Notes to Page 71 235

Kinnaird does seems problematic in any sustained analysis. To oppose Whitman’s “personal vision of poetry” with “the democratic idiom” of his prose, even “dialectically,” risks not only ignoring any motive internal to poems but suggesting that poems themselves have no animus and, further, that individual poems are somehow innocent of their author’s concept of the work of poetry (Kinnaird 36). All that being said, I should make clear that when I speak of the motive or object of a certain edition of Leaves, and how that edition succeeded or failed in fulfilling or achieving it, I am referring to what I read, in Whitman’s prose, as his own retrospective assessment of the success or failure of past editions — an assessment that changed over time along with his vision of the text and project of Leaves. Still, it seems counterintuitive to attempt to sever the poetic intent of Whitman,whose prose is itself so often poetic, from his poetic products. After all, for Whitman Leaves comprised “dual forms,” its “prose and poetic” components alike (“Preface, 1876, to the two-volume Centennial Edition of L. of G. and ‘Two Rivulets,’” pw 2: 465).Insofar as the nationalist focus of Leaves existed in the 1855 edition (albeit in the Preface), that focus, though often recast as erotic, political, or religious (or some amalgam of one or more of these), persists throughout the remaining editions, in later Prefaces and/or poems. 6.Covering some of the same ground,Kerry C.Larson makes a more extensive list of Leaves’ constitutional concerns and objectives (xx–xxi). 7.On the necessity of mediation to Whitman’s enterprise,see Kerry Larson (72) and Allen Grossman (“Poetics of Union,” 190, 192). As to the inevitability of hierarchy as a principle of any model of organization (social or literary), Grossman notes that “[t]he limits of . . . [Whitman’s and Lincoln’s] systems” for the extension of discourse to the previously unrepresented “becomes plain in the two related issues of hierarchy, the constraints upon variation consistent with union as structure, and equality, the management of access of persons one to the other consistent with union as value” (190). But while Grossman delves more into the crisis precipitated for Whitman by his elimination of traditional verse form (the problem of reinstituting union without hierarchy, so to speak), I wish to explore that which made Whitman’s project of union all the more difficult: his attempt to extend representation without discrimination through institutional forms like the New Bible and hybridized models of union by sacrifice — models which did not so entirely depart from received forms (as Grossman might be read as suggesting). A métier like the New Bible, however its name may suggest revision so total as to be innovation,still carries resonances of the institution from which it is borrowed.While it is true that “the centered, hierarchical, Lincolnian ethical rationality is precisely the enemy element from which Whitman is bent on exempting his human world,” it is also true that, as if prescient of the inevitable failure of his project without some concession to hierarchy, Whitman finally strikes a com236 Notes to Pages 71‒72

promise with hierarchy — albeit in an altered form — in a way Grossman does not concede (202–203). This chapter suggests that “[t]he fate of Whitmanian policy,” at least in the first four editions, is not so grim. Consequently, I would amend Grossman’s characterization of the trope of pluralization in Leaves: “Whitman’s policy was to establish a new principle of access that would effect multiplication,or pluralization (the getting many into one),”not (as Grossman adds) “without the loss entailed by exchange,” but, on the contrary, with “the loss entailed by exchange,”the inequalities demanded,indeed,constituted by the relation of persons on an undistinguished basis (192; emphasis added). I agree with Larson that it is, rather, the “tensions” through which “the full authenticity of . . . [Whitman’s] vision emerge[s],” but hold back at the notion that they “are the product of a basic conflict in his Leaves between the longing to abolish all mediations in the social discourse by offering a poetry ‘before preaching and law’ and the consternation that ensues over the withdrawal of such mediations” (xxii, 28). It is, I contend, precisely the “withdrawal of such mediations”that Whitman embraces.To be fair,he embraces their withdrawal as far as anyone can — the acceptance of mediation as a necessary means on condition of its own, intermittent disruption. But this is far from consternation. Whitman finds a peace with the antagonism of institutions toward the individual and equality by contemplating them in a new space, operating on ground that deforms their more pernicious intentions. As to the intent and efficacy of sacrifice, John T.Irwin,writing on Faulkner, distinguishes between sacrifice that “restore[s] . . . physical [or organic] life” by “physical destruction” (the ram’s death saves Isaac’s earthly life) and sacrifice that “restor[es] . . . spiritual [or nonorganic] life” by the “destruction of physical life”(Jesus’s death gives Christians an afterlife) (Doubling 131–132). On the poet himself as sacrificial offering, see Larson (87). 8. What may appear as the special sense in which the Confederacy is here equated with a commitment to equality can be traced to Southern secessionist pamphlets and speeches of the period. For examples, see Jon L. Wakelyn’s useful anthology, especially Howell Cobb’s “Letter . . . to the People of Georgia” (88–100), Jefferson Davis’s “Remarks on the Special Message on Affairs in South Carolina. Jan. 10, 1861” (115–142), Rev. James Henley Thornwell’s “The State of the Country” (157–178), and Albert Pike’s “State or Province? Bond or Free?” (326–348). While the typical secessionist argument indicted Lincoln and fellow “Black Republicans” for wishing to “pervert” the Declaration of Independence’s equality proposition “from its plain and truthful meaning” by abolishing slavery, secessionists usually made another, quite different claim about equality. The equality which they were refusing to grant slaves,and which antislavery advocates wished to grant them, was,they protested,precisely the equality the nation (in the form of Congress) refused to grant them. Equality, as the secessionist demanded it, meant a Notes to Page 73 237

restoration of the rights of state sovereignty, self-determination, and property that centralization had abrogated (or at least was capable of doing). 9. My argument here is indebted to Allen Grossman’s work on Whitman and Lincoln (“Poetics of Union”). 10. “Death of Abraham Lincoln. Lecture deliver’d in New York, April 14, 1879 — in Philadelphia, ’80 — in Boston, ’81,” collected by Whitman in Specimen Days and Collect, rpt. in pw 2:457–509 and cp 1036–1047. 11. Arguably, not all critics who accept the liberational argument do so disingenuously, but the value which Whitman’s more utopian moments have for some agendas is understandable. Liberationist readings of Whitman have been and continue to be common, in spite of the increased theoretical sophistication (or self-consciousness) of feminist, race, and gender/sexuality studies. Pertinent examples from the recent literature include readings by Harold Aspiz, Joseph Cady, Michael Moon, Christopher Newfield, M. Wynn Thomas, and Alan Trachtenberg. The value of individual scholarship aside, such readings function to satisfy the need of certain liminal or marginalized groups to validate an identitarian affect by locating that affect within a canon or mainstream tradition. The more outstanding among these studies (see Vivian Pollack, Rosemary Graham, and Terry Mulcaire) balance Whitman’s liberatory or individualistic impulse with an awareness of the profoundly conservative component of his work (see Newton Arvin, 30–31). 12.While Whitman’s elegiac preoccupation with the slain president makes Lincoln the icon of unity in 1867, in earlier editions the vehicle of unity is — and in later editions, tends to shift back toward — Whitman’s own body (Larson 58, 157–160) or the textual body of Leaves. 13. See Herbert J. Levine (“Union and Disunion” 575). The sense of Leaves as unfinished is bound up, for Whitman, in the process of continual revision and the continued discovery that the desired result has not been achieved. The point is that, assuming the work of the political text, the literary document does not do it either. The revisions of Leaves should be read in light of the realization that neither in history nor in literature is this problem ever solved, its solution ever complete.This interpretation of the function of revision in Whitman speaks to the way in which revision works in the founding documents. 14. If, beginning in the 1830s, the expansion of slavery into prospective states like Texas made that task more pressing, it also came to appear more difficult to accomplish, if not impossible. The legislative compromises and Supreme Court decisions of the antebellum period constitute attempts to either remedy or palliate the problematic character of the unification of disparates on a federal level; the secession and confederation of the Southern states, an attempt to do so on a local or regional level. The troubled course of a finally ineffectual Reconstruction testifies to continued disagreement about the terms on which unification should occur. 238 Notes to Pages 73‒74

15.Michael Moon adds that Whitman’s choice of 365as the number of poems in his New Bible is central to his dedication to “annularity, [that is, to] the making of a great ring or cycle of poems that would have the status of scriptural texts” (124). Thus the calendrical dimension of Whitman’s “New Bible” — the stipulation of one poem for each day of the year — renders it both atavistic and nontraditional, suggesting that Whitman’s New Bible comes not only with an improved format but with a prior claim to legitimacy. Another Biblical or liturgical characteristic of the 1860 edition is the numbering not of lines or sections but of individual sentences.For instance,in the 1860 edition the originally undivided “Song of Myself ” (which finally ended up in fifty-two sections) was divided into 372 sections (or more exactly, 372 sentences) which contain anywhere from one to twenty lines.Furthermore,the marginal enumeration of stanzas in the third edition reads less as a literary effect than a reference aid of the kind found in modern Bibles, here designating the verses of Whitman’s New Bible. Moon reminds us that the 1860 text’s claim of priority ought also to be understood in relation to Whitman’s own work,establishing “a kind of primacy for the third edition which he now wants to deny to the two previous editions, by belatedly deciding that the earlier editions were more tentative (‘published . . . on trial’) and ‘inchoate’ projects than they had actually been” (125). 16. Whitman, Notes and Fragments Left by Walt Whitman, 55. 17. In Walt Whitman’s America David Reynolds categorizes the “New Bible” as one of several ideas Whitman considered but never pursued while “floundering” for a “metaphor” to unite his book and characterize the kind of serious cultural work it was endeavoring to do (368). Reynolds rightly argues that the final words of the 1857 notebook entry (“it ought to be read[y] in 1859”) suggest that Whitman “expected the project would be done in two years. Presumably he expected to have completed by then 365 poems, largely of a religious or philosophical nature, to replace or complement the Bible. Although composing new ‘Bibles’ was not unusual in the era of The Book of Mormon and The Great Harmonia, it is surprising that Whitman would mention such a grandiose project and then drop it — unless the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, containing many new religious poems, can be seen as a kind of Bible” (367–368). Reynolds, however, fails to pursue the neo-Biblical argument, perhaps because even to him the evidence he cites for it — Whitman’s enthusiastic review of Harper’s Illustrated Bible (1846) and the decorative illustrations and ornate fonts of the 1860 Leaves — seems at best circumstantial.As I have already pointed out,Leaves bears a number of superficial Biblical characteristics, but it is possible to launch a much stronger argument for Whitman’s neo-Biblical intention if we move beyond superficial similarities to affinities of motive and institutional intent. Only a handful of critics have taken the neo-Biblical claim further than Reynolds. Michael Moon agrees that while Whitman seems by 1860 to have Notes to Page 75 239

left off constructing a New Bible, “the scriptural ambitions he had first articulated for his project in 1857 account for some of the most significant differences between the 1860 Leaves and its two predecessor-editions” (124). Although, Moon admits, Whitman was “far from unique in cherishing scriptural ambitions for his writing,” Whitman, unlike Harriet Beecher Stowe and Julia Ward Howe, did not seek to “tak[e] over such fundamental aspects of Judeo-Christian scriptural tradition as its pervasive soteriological or apocalyptic claims” (124n). My reading of the 1860 edition does not so much contest Moon’s reading as it means to sharpen the terms and context of what Moon regards as Whitman’s “attempt ...to launch a gospel of immanence grounded in the text’s extensive interrogations of the natural and the real” (124n). Along with Reynolds and Moon, Maria Stefanelli is one of the few critics to deal substantively with the neo-scriptural motive of Whitman’s work. Her deManian reading of chiasmus in the “Children of Adam” poems and Psalms 4 and 23 makes the same general point as work by Karen Sánchez-Eppler and Mark Maslan (although their concerns are more strictly political and formal): namely,that “division [as well as union] is a vital principle of Whitman’s poetics,” one that is “enabling rather than debilitating” (Maslan 136). (See also Herwig Friedl as to how Whitman’s attempt to “make a meaningful [social, cosmic] whole” and yet “find symbols for a totality of change” ends up “creat[ing] the contradictions it sets out to overcome” [306].) Although Stefanelli takes as her starting point F. O. Matthiessen’s claim that Whitman “seemed to think that he could gain universality by making his chants psalms for a new Bible” (557), she fails to develop an explanation of what a new Bible might have meant to Whitman and to an audience for whom the founding of new sects and religions came to seem both the answer to the problem of unrestricted relation and no answer at all. 18.Democratic Vistas. Although Democratic Vistas was not published until 1870 (falsely dated 1871), the essays from which Whitman composed this longer piece (“Democracy” and “Personalism”) had already appeared in Galaxy, in 1867 and 1868 respectively. As in Poe’s case, “literature” means to Whitman a “national literature”which is the “sole reliance ...of [an] American democracy” whose operative documents and legislative speech-acts have lost the power of “great literature”which “penetrates all ...shapes aggregates and individuals . . . constructs, sustains, demolishes,” and legitimates social formations beyond the capacity of either secular or theological institutions (pw 2: 366). Whitman expands on this shift in Democratic Vistas: Our fundamental want to-day in the United States . . . is of a class, and the clear idea of a class, of native authors, literatures . . . sacerdotal, modern . . . permeating the whole mass of American mentality . . . affecting politics far more than the popular superficial suffrage, with results inside and underneath the elections of Presidents or Congresses — radiating, begetting 240 Notes to Page 76

appropriate teachers, schools, manners, and, as its grandest result, accomplishing, (what neither the schools nor the churches and their clergy have hitherto accomplish’d, and without which this nation will no more stand, permanently,soundly,than a house will stand without a substratum,) a religious and moral character beneath the political and productive and intellectual bases of the States. (pw 2: 365) 19. In spite of the “separation clause,” religious discourse remained, for Whitman, the proper register for resolving the logical contradictions of political founding documents which he read as antitypes to God’s covenant with Israel. In this light, attempting to resolve the contradictions of political and social life in a quasi-scriptural text would seem to follow quite naturally. It should be no surprise, then, that the theology of the book of Exodus is the theology of Leaves: both exhibit their concern with the one and the many by producing a unity from distinct elements (scattered tribes and disenfranchised citizens). After all, the problem of the one and the many is a Biblical as well as a political problem.In the histories of early America and ancient Israel, unity is formulated first as a loose association of particulars (in the Articles, a “firm league of friendship”; in Genesis, an unstable phratry of the Twelve Tribes) which later gives way to a centralized identity based on a higher abstraction (the Constitution’s “more perfect Union”; the God of Exodus whose name is “I am who I am”). This correspondence shows the Biblical models of unity to have been at home in American’s late eighteenth-century minds. Even earlier, the federation impulse is evident among clerics in the Puritan and mid eighteenth-century periods (see Perry Miller, The New England Mind, chapter 2). Jonathan Edwards’s typological reading of America as the New Israel can be taken as characteristic; it is a reading that would make a case for the transmission of the phratry model to the colonies. 20. “The Eighteenth Presidency!” (1856). Though composed early in Whitman’s career, the pamphlet was first published posthumously in 1928 as part of Walt Whitman’s Workshop. Whitman’s relation to the founding documents is at once supplementary and foundational. He regards the Constitution as “a perfect and entire thing, an edifice put together,” complete in itself, but also as something which “time only is great enough to give . . . area,” which can be “better understood from results, growths,” supplements and revisions (cp 1318).As a New Bible,Leaves implicitly eclipses the received scriptures by accommodating present circumstances, by satisfying the need for a text that has an efficacious relation to the state, in a way the Authorized Version cannot (its authority having been bracketed by America’s secular founding instruments).By addressing the originary site of state formation with this new Bible, Leaves professes a presence at the origins both of the state and of a transcendental, natural state (the site of relation not yet codified by either secular or theological institutions). Notes to Page 76 241

21. American sects had certainly been formed before 1830, the most prominent being Ann Lee’s Shakers (1774) and Alexander Campbell’s Disciples of Christ (1811). But nothing could match the fervor with which new sects and new religions arose between 1830 and 1850: Mormonism (1830), Oneidan perfectionism (1838), Jehovah’s Witnesses (1844), Seventh-Day Adventism (1844), and Harmonialism (1847) — not to mention a number of Protestant splinter groups (among them, “Two-Seed” Baptism and Universalism). I am stressing here what I perceive to be the missing subtext of the conventional history of the Bible and social reform in America during the first half of the nineteenth century (a history recounted by both Mark Noll [“The Bible in Revolutionary America”] and Timothy Smith). Although the Bible may have adequately funded the state for many Americans,the mid century welter of new religions and sects suggests that for an equally significant number the same was not true. As already noted, in “The Lord’s Supper,” Emerson’s farewell sermon, Emerson voiced his dissatisfaction in 1832 with established American religion (Congregationalism in his case) and its prescriptive, spiritually empty rituals (el 1129–1140). Joseph Smith broke away from his Universalist roots to found Mormonism in 1830. At the same time, evangelists and theologians like Charles Finney and William Ellery Channing were cutting denominational ties (with Presbyterianism and Congregationalism) in favor of revivals and new sects (for Channing, Unitarianism) that promised a relation to God unmediated by dogma or ecclesiasticism. Thus, although the term post-theological crisis may not refer necessarily to a uniform phenomenon, it seems to me the best term to describe the period of American religious life during which the “individualization of conscience” fostered by the Second Great Awakening (1795–1810) manifested itself not merely in idiosyncratic Biblical interpretations but in more ambitious projects for the regrounding of American social formation on neo-Biblical or on literary bases (Hatch and Noll 66). 22. Philip Gura deals at greater length with the impact of Higher Criticism on literature of the American Renaissance (The Wisdom of Words, 15–31; The Crossroads of American History and Literature, 157–173). 23. Although written after what one might call Whitman’s neo-Biblical period (1857–1865), the 1872 Preface is on this matter consistent with notebook entries of the late 1850s and the 1860s (see nupm 6: 2061). 24. This passage is notable for the vacillation between “every man[’s] . . . be[ing] his own priest” and a select number of individuals (poets) fulfilling that function for them. Similarly, one of Whitman’s notebook entries (dated 1857 or after) admits that as soon as the old churches are razed, a new one is immediately erected. It seems that even a religion “comprehensive enough to include all the Doctrines & Sects” cannot be formed except as a sect, distinguished, if by nothing else, by its willingness to countenance what other sects will not: heterogeneity (nupm 6: 2046). 242 Notes to Pages 78‒79

25. The divinity of the poet who assumes priestly duties stems not only (in the traditions of Horace and Plato) from his being a poet but from poetry’s transcendence of the priesthood, its accomplishment of the religious act of administering relations between individuals (including God) in nonecclesiastical, noninstitutional terms that avoid the mediation and reification of difference that institutional structures involve. 26.A notebook entry from the 1860s instantiates this ambivalence between founding a more inclusive religious institution and the impossibility of doing so other than in a congregation, between persons, and therefore within a network of mediating differences: religion . . . [must] adjust itself to the ranges of real life and all men and women[.] That would be a religion of some account . . . [namely, one with] reference . . . to . . . the people[.] The people! none excluded — not the ignorant, not roughs or laboring persons — even prostitutes. . . . This is what America is for — to justify this is what she means — If not she means nothing. . . . I will not be fooled with the facade of the few — . . . I say that a religion which from those vast ranges of life in the great cities, raises its house aloof, an exile — which, to them, enters not, and they enter not into it ...is no religion for These athletic and living States.(nupm 6:2092–2093) Whitman may not be fooled by the “facade of the few,” the structural gradations that admit only a select number into the visibility of a social formation, but, considering the analogy, neither is he fooled by the facade of the many — for the latter is still a facade. Any group, whether of the few or the many, must “raise its house”; and, since even a one-story house must have a floor, walls, and a roof, any blueprint must differentiate to this minimal degree. 27. At first glance, this claim strongly resembles Kerry Larson’s suggestion that Whitman’s “avowed ‘anti-institutionalism’ chronically lends itself to invocations of norms and controls commonly associated with these same institutions” (xx). My reading, by contrast, rests on the idea that these are not “the same institutions,” that Whitman — by a representational legerdemain analogous to the conflation of “legitimacy . . . and legitimation” which dominates Larson’s concern (90) — attempts to alter, by innovation as well as reconstruction, institutions and social formations that are so in name only, that is to say, systems of relation that, precisely by not being political or ecclesiastical bureaucracies, by not existing wholly in the real world, or being only half way in, hovering between the textual and the real, are able to retract into the former at any time and reconfigure if there is a risk of hardening into restriction and irrefragable hierarchy. 28. Though the entry is undated, Edward Grier concludes that “the date, from the paper, is 1857 or after” (nupm 6: 2046n). The instability of the new priesthood that flickers in and out of actualization, far from being a hindrance to Whitman’s project and far from evasion on his part, equips Whitman with Notes to Pages 79‒80 243

the advantage of liminality (the quarter from which alternatives are most persuasively urged) without the disadvantage of institutionality (the codification that fixes representations of relation and the value of persons). Although writing more particularly about the Calamus sequence and about a “circuit” of “erotic exchange” (422, 443), Tenney Nathanson’s comments on Whitman’s attempt to transform relations between persons, to find new rites or rituals, are of interest here (see also 433–434). Although I agree with Nathanson that, because in 1860 Whitman “gives up . . . his distance from social structure,” that text lacks the “anti-institutional polemics” of the previous two editions, I read in Whitman’s nascent institutionalism a transformative energy that Nathanson does not: If the sequence displays a practical political concern with how group practices can facilitate and protect individual intimacies, it also suggests that cultural structures subtend particulars in a moral radical way, not simply fostering behavior but generating the very possibility of its occurrence by forming the subjects who will engage it. . . . In Calamus Whitman celebrates structures of exchange that pre-exist and shape us; admitting their power to breach our self-sufficiency, he suggests that they thereby constitute what we properly are. (423, 419–420) Whitman’s conservatism, his willingness to entrust the distribution of immediacy to the mediatory institutions,does not cancel out the decentering,interruptive energy with which he implements those institutions. 29. My interpretation of the poem is by and large in line with Nathanson’s account: “If the impediment represented by writing gives way to an actual presence [in ‘So Long!’] . . . this figure’s advent paradoxically takes the form of a dissolution....The poet ...becomes the embodied presence who defines what presence and body should be only by trading one absence for another, passing through writing only by passing into death”(314).Still,I would refrain from applying the permanence Nathanson claims for the poet’s “presence” to the much less stable system of relation inaugurated by the poem: “Having just emerged from signs and on the verge of passing once more under their sway . . . [the poet] becomes, by virtue of this double proximity and this double danger, what presence should be” (315). 30. In terms of the arc of Whitman’s neo-Biblical motive, my contention is that the antagonism between union and disunion, between equality and incommensurability — which critics have just recently begun to agree are equally, and only together, central to Whitman’s poetics and his politics — is present in the early editions of Leaves, most particularly the third, the 1860 text. That tension is what disappears from the 1867 and successor editions and is characteristic of the contemporary movement away from sectarianism in the Protestant community and away from the body in nontraditional movements like Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science. 244 Notes to Page 80

As far as critical attention to the integral character of this tension to Whitman’s work, this long-needed advance has been made variously by Grossman (“The Poetics of Union”), Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Mark Maslan, Michael Moon, and Maria Stefanelli. Stefanelli supports the notion that the actualization of Whitmanian relation is predicated, particularly in the 1860 Leaves, on a consciousness of the incommensurability of the person: “It is in the effort to fragment the self that Whitman actualizes deconstruction, by decentering the concept of brotherhood into differentiation, desire for the other, awareness of differences in the other; into dialogue as negotiation of social meanings of power and distance”(184).She reads “In Paths Untrodden” (1860) as “the poet’s writing lives of this double process of contractiondilation,of mystical intimacy and social openness”(186) — although it applies equally well to “Song” #5 and the 1860 Leaves. (See also Grossman, “Whitman’s ‘Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand,’” 120–121.) 31.The full text of the Nicene Creed is available in Bard Thompson,62–65. Grossman (“Poetics of Union” 194) and Levine (“Whitman’s American Bible” 150–151) discuss Whitman’s creedal innovation. 32.Bossy cites the body and soul debate’s textual provenance as a Goliardic verse work entitled Dialogus inter corpus et animam (also called known as the Visio Philiberti),“unconvincingly attributed to Robert Grosseteste”(145).The body and soul debate offers a site of correspondence between Whitman and Poe. For Poe, as for Whitman, body and soul exist in an antagonistic though productive relation: “the two Principles Proper, Attraction and Repulsion — the Material and the Spiritual — accompany each other, in the strictest fellowship, forever. Thus The Body and the Soul Walk hand in hand” (pt 1306). Although an older Whitman would accuse Poe of “abnegati[ng] . . . the perennial and democratic concretes [like] the body,” these lines from Eureka could not be closer to Whitman’s position in the body and soul dialogue of “Song” #5 (“Edgar Poe’s Significance,”The Critic [3 June 1882],rpt.in Specimen Days and Collect [Philadelphia: Rees Welsh & Co., 1882–83], pw 1: 232). Moreover, the 1860 Leaves of Grass concludes its opening poem, “Proto-Leaf,” with the same image — indeed, the same language — of correspondence without the elision of difference: “O my comrade! / O you and me at last — and us two only / . . . O to be relieved of distinctions! to make as much of vices as virtues! / . . . O hand in hand — O wholesome pleasure — O one more desirer and lover, / O haste, firm holding — haste, haste on, with me” (Whitman, Leaves of Grass: Facsimile Edition of the 1860 Text, 22; emphasis added; cf. lg 28). Like the visceral conflict in the third stanza of “Song” #5, the commitment to both equality and difference exemplified in “Proto-Leaf ” and Eureka is not to be left behind but held onto as, if not the means by which absolute unity or absolute difference can be brought about (the one could not be apprehended; the other could not be considered in a single field or formation), then as the medium in Notes to Page 80 245

which relations must be experienced, the engine by which supplementary literary and social formations are generated. 33. Specifically, Whitman is parodying the Biblical “peace that passeth understanding.” The gesture in stanza two of reaching “till you felt my beard, and . . . till you held my feet” — that is, of hands outstretched in either direction at once — mimics the gestures of both crucifixion and Mass.The gesture’s parodic charge may come also from its modeling of an encompassing (oral) sexuality,a physically impossible compassing of a person by relation to another. 34. Exemplary readings which emphasize the passage’s eroticism — or more specifically, view its ferocious sexual moment as producing a calm, untroubled sense of union — include those by Mitchell Breitweiser (124–125), Malcolm Cowley (xii–xiii), Betsy Erkkila (97–98), M. Jimmie Killingsworth (42–43), Larson (115–116), Moon (47–49), and Carmine Sarracino (5–7). My reading, by contrast, builds on the anomalous attention to violence in “Song” #5 that we find in Grossman (“Poetics of Union” 195–196). 35.Contra Levine (“Union and Disunion”),“Song of Myself,”whether read in the context of the 1855 edition or from the perspective of subsequent editions, endorses a unification fantasy that is unexecutable and, in the end, inapplicable to the real world. Although the catalogs may contemplate a “federated model of personal identity: self and world, soul and body, Whitman and his compatriots, shown as equal parts within a unified whole” (Levine 579), such a description cannot cover the poem as a whole, certainly not section 5. 36. Nathanson is eloquent on the way in which the “lull” and “hum,” “themselves instances of echolalia . . . serves as synecdoches for an archaic oral activity governed by pleasure in vocal effusion rather than by representational exigencies of the symbolic function”(130).Although Nathanson characterizes the “valvèd voice”in terms much like mine (as the “origin of language in pure, unmediated expression” [226]), his reading emphasizes the somewhat regressive character of section 5 as a fantasy about conflating infantile, prelinguistic sexuality and adult sexuality. Even so, there is more to be said about the “hum of your valvèd voice” as it relates to fictions of the ideal voice, available in accounts of the sound both of the voice of God (see Grossman, “Poetics of Union,” 195) and of the human heart (as discovered by the nineteenth-century introduction of the stethoscope into medical practice). 37.After the failure of Reconstruction,Whitman turns increasingly toward the soul, away from what he had previously viewed as the productive tension of body and soul in conflict. Religiously, the trend of Whitman’s oeuvre is a movement away from founding a new scripture and an order that supplants the present ones to merely subscribing to the present system in a selective manner (a vision that sees only unification). As the passage from the 1876 Preface suggests, Whitman called more forcefully for the claims of the one to the exclusion of those of the many. At the same time, the importance of mak246 Notes to Pages 81‒84

ing a new foundation, a new scripture, fades as Whitman gears himself toward generalization and purely spiritual (and less, if at all, bodied) theorizations of American social formation. Originally an innovative, sectarian force that actualizes egalitarian relation within the potential, liturgical space of poetry only by continually reinstating the inequalities that inhibit relation, religion became for Whitman in the late 1860s and the 1870s a much more conventional, nebulous optimism (characteristic of contemporary mind-cure and healthymindedness movements), eschewing formalization in any sense — certainly any theorization of relation driven by the obstruction of relation — and therefore by necessity eschewing the body itself. But, paradoxically, what would seem to solve the problem of unmediated relation (by eliminating differentiating criteria like the body) annuls the extrainstitutional status that had incited and permitted the imaginative curing of institutional anomalies by inscriptional means. For a poet in whose name actual churches had been founded (one in England and one in Australia) whose liturgy was Leaves of Grass, one might say that the criteria of institution had changed irrevocably. The potential had been rendered actual. And the exclusive, mediating character of the actual, the inherent hierarchy of relation, did not seem to matter any more. 38. As exemplified by both Eureka and Leaves, the literary can be identified as a compensatory culture characterized by a commitment to resolving the residual problems of American state formation via textual supplements to the state’s founding documents. The repeated effort to fulfill the promissory note of the Constitution seems to be driven by the feeling that such a note is never (perhaps never can be) adequately funded. When one’s subject is conjunctive relations, it seems that neither poetry nor politics can ever find another model than the constitutional regime whose conflicting desires for unity, for equality, and for individuality can only be approximated if they are all to be actualized, if they are to be actualized at all. Even in their partial reliance on the scriptural (or perhaps because their reliance is equivocal, is only partial), Eureka and “Song of Myself ” together comment on the limits of representation. What scripture cannot produce is something that contradicts representation. 39.This is what Larson refers to as the poem’s “fantasy of abundance without surfeit, of a capaciousness which will not incapacitate itself ” (129). At the same time,what “Brooklyn Ferry”contemplates is not at all the “implicit economy of exchange” which, in Larson’s view, characterizes the long catalog sections of “Song of Myself ” (128). 40. Whitman, Leaves of Grass: Facsimile Edition of the 1860 Text, 455. 41. I must concede that the preceding lines (from stanza 8) can and have been read as proof that “Brooklyn Ferry” is a successful passage of discourse and/or identity discovery.But the only proof we have is the silence with which Notes to Pages 86‒89 247

we might feel compelled to meet the imperious tone of Whitman’s rhetorical questions. Nevertheless, Quentin Anderson is not wholly without justification when he reads in “Brooklyn Ferry” “the assertion of a power that dissolves the world of objects,” “an agency more inclusive and unmediated than print” (121, 120). The poem itself encourages such a reading, especially in section 3 (“It avails not, time nor place”) and in section 8, which I have already quoted. My own reading, however, agrees with the other predominant account of the poem (see Erkkila), which makes much of the irony that “consciousness becomes unitary”only through the “canceling ...out”of the “immediacies of a physical world [and] . . . absorbing them into the imperial self,” that is, only by eliding the possibility of unity in a social reality rather than a transcendental state (Anderson 122,121).That is,whereas for Anderson “what the poem dissolves into the plenum of consciousness is not only the apprehended world,but ...the world ...as determined”phenomenologically (121), my reading is closer to that of Nathanson, for whom the catalogs of “Brooklyn Ferry” “enact a ritual of incorporation in which a contracting object world is subsumed within the poet’s agglomerating interior” (38–39). My contention that the poem fails as a reconstruction of personhood does not seem incompatible with Nathanson’s claim for “Brooklyn Ferry” as a purely poetic success “generat[ing] the archaic space in which the objects . . . [the speaker] names now subsist” (39). Also Larson (127–128). 42. Freud emphasizes the necessarily communal character of the act: In spite of the dread which protects the life of the animal as being of kin [and therefore being a totem animal whom no one individual was allowed to slaughter],it became necessary to kill it from time to time in solemn conclave, and to divide its flesh and blood among the members of the clan. The motive which commands this act reveals the deepest meaning of the essence of sacrifice. We have heard that in later times every eating in common, the participation in the same substance which entered into the bodies,established a holy bond between the communicants; in oldest time this meaning seemed to be attached only to participation in the substance of a holy sacrifice. The holy mystery of the sacrificial death was justified in that only in this way could the holy bond be established which united the participants with each other and with their god. (912) 43. As a form of mediation, institution is something to be wary of. As for Poe, for Whitman the urge to initiate a new protocol of relation is matched by an ambivalence toward the mediating, hierarchical effects of actualization. Of course,a text cannot ensure its own institutionalization by any internal marks. Texts like Leaves cannot be distinguished from the Articles or the Constitution simply by opposing the political character to the literary character of the former. The political is a status unattainable by any text of its own volition; it can only be assigned by external powers, the agents and institutions that accept 248 Notes to Pages 90‒92

and approach it as praxis. Additionally, it is not clear that literary texts which address anomalies of social formation desire to achieve political or institutional status; it is certainly not clear how they would do so,if they could ensure such ratification.If no set of internal marks can render certain documents institutable and others not so, then the institution of any one text is, as John Searle (118–119) has implied in regard to the Declaration of Independence, partly a matter of luck and partly a matter of bluffing, of acting as if the theorized institution already exists and has authorized texts before that text has called the institution itself into existence. Few can claim to bluff as confidently as Whitman (as in section 8 of “Brooklyn Ferry”) that their intentions have been realized. Institutionalization, as far as it is within the control of the author of a text, is largely a matter of getting oneself heard. Pierre Bourdieu states the extreme form of this argument when he declares in Language and Symbolic Power that “every language that makes itself heard by an entire group is an authorized language ...authoriz[ing] what it designates at the same time it expresses it, drawing its legitimacy from the group over which it exercises its authority and which it helps to produce as such by offering it a unitary expression of its experiences” (129). To discuss, therefore,whether a text like Leaves desires institutional status is not so relevant as to understand how it prepares itself for, defends itself against, the effect of being efficacious insofar as it is heard or read by a group. That copies of a book have to be distributed before they can be read is patent. But Leaves models the distribution of personhood within its poems, the translation of the poet himself into a language each reader can understand — the language of new personhood. Even if a text (either the Declaration or Leaves) is never assumed as an institutional document, it founds and polymorphously determines the nascent, if somewhat dispersed, community of those writing and reading it. Consensus does not mean simple reception or approval by an audience, but consensus about the relocation of authority to the institution which the document or speaker theorizes,an imaginative body or institution with which the actual body, the members of the extant institution, can identify, meaning that they can identify themselves among its members. All texts are constitutional or constitutive but their reception can make them institutional facts and create a number of institutional effects. Regardless of whether a document is actually taken up by an empowered institution (like the American government), it has the power not merely to theorize a new mode of relation; it has the power of being heard by any audience, like a coterie or a sect, and producing an effect on the protocols of the document or of the group that adopts it. Comparing the “we” of the Constitution’s “We, the people” to the “I” of “Song of Myself,” the question arises as to the difference the plural makes in the institutability of the former document. I would contend that pluralization makes no difference, because the pronoun is still in the first person and Note to Page 92 249

because the Constitution features a limited group speaking to others as if they are speaking for them. The resulting conditionality renders the Constitution no surer of acceptance than Whitman’s poem. 44. See Larson, xvii–xviii. 45. The editorial decision to parse what had been stanzas into verses accents the way in which Whitman’s line structure is governed by Biblical parallelism. 46. “Death of Abraham Lincoln”; “Death of President Lincoln,” Memoranda During the War (1875), rpt. in Specimen Days. 47. The illocutionary character of Whitman’s words is debatable (see, for instance, Mark Bauerlein 9–13). Poetry cannot make Lincoln’s death anything other than the murder it was, and yet the rereading of that murder as sacrifice attests to the fantasy of wholly efficacious language that Whitman shares with Poe, a fantasy given particular centrality in American political (and, indeed, literary) culture by the nation’s founding documents. 48. The Biblical source for the notion of the death of death is 1 Corinthians 15:55 (“Where, O death, is your victory? / Where, O death, is your sting?”), which is a New Testament echo of Hosea 13:14 (“O Death, where are your plagues? / O Sheol, where is your destruction?”). An equally relevant site is John Donne’s rewording of the same notion in the Holy Sonnets: “death, thou shalt die” (IX.14). 49.Specimen Days. The relevant lines from Homer are the young Hermes’s words to the turtle which he must kill in order to make the lyre, the assurance that “if you die, then you shall make sweetest music” (Homeric Hymns IV.38, p. 367). 50. Memoranda During the War (1875), rpt. in Specimen Days. 51. “Death of Abraham Lincoln.” 52. This formulation of the one-and-the-many problem as a conflict between two antithetical ways of envisioning unity is derived in part from Grossman (“Poetics of Union” 190). 53. Whitman capitalizes the word new in his plans for a New Bible (and I have continued the practice) so as to distinguish it from the new Bibles of his contemporaries, who, for all their innovations, did not intend to produce anything other than religious or sacred texts. They did not aim, as Whitman did in 1860, to produce a foundational document that was literary as well as theological in character. 54. It is true that in some aspects, the directors of the ABS, like the Federalists,demanded centralization: local Bible societies were expected,like states, to adopt constitutions modeled on that of the ABS. Nevertheless, the Society faced the same challenge as the Constitutional delegates: procuring unity without stifling the independence of the agents and auxiliaries through whom they were able to express unity. In terms of the structure of the ABS, 250 Notes to Pages 92‒99

hierarchy could extend only so far: realizing that their plan for national distribution could best be accomplished through paid agents and auxiliaries, the Society’s directors depended on decentralized, semiautonomous means for the instrumentation of a unified, centralized identity: the Christian nation. Peter Wosh’s Spreading the Word, although primarily a history of the ABS, is probably the best account of Bible distribution in the period. 55. Rather than anomalies, the commercial success of Harper’s Illustrated Bible (1846) and the impact of Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon (1830) suggest the tremendous appeal that was becoming associated with having one’s own distinct version of the Bible. Philip Barlow records it as a matter of fact that “the growing prestige of the Holy Book, as interpreted by oneself, reached its apex in the middle years of the nineteenth century” (8). We can better gauge the height of that apex by noting that before the 1840s, new translations or revisions of the KJV were all but nonexistent in America. Before the Revolution,only a handful of partial translations were made,typically Psalters; the only two full translations in the same period were into foreign languages (the Eliot Indian Bible [1663] and the German Saur Bible [1743]). The tide began to turn slowly with six new English versions and translations made between 1800 and 1830.The deluge began at that point and continued through the Civil War, averaging one new version or translation every two years. Through the 1820s, the focus had been on distributing copies of the Authorized Version rather than on making a new version on one’s own authority.However,suddenly in the 1840s and 1850s,one finds almost as many translations of the Bible (either one or both Testaments) as there were individuals who were able, or thought themselves able, to make their own translation. A translator might not even have deemed knowledge of Hebrew or Greek necessary, relying merely on inspiration; many thought revision of the English KJV in itself was sufficient. In terms that reflect the centrality of the problematic of the one and the many to American consciousness, the attraction of private versions of the Bible derives from what one critic has called “an already strong reverence [in America] for unmediated scripture” (Barlow 7). Fuller accounts of the translation history are given by Harry Orlinsky and Robert Bratcher as well as by Paris Simms. 56. In the fourth century c.e., Jerome would follow the same practice in his Vulgate translation of the Septuagint. Given Campbell’s passion for going back to the original text and recovering what he considered to be the original meaning, it is unsurprising that he, along with Barton Stone and his own father, Thomas, were founders of the Restoration Movement, an antidenominational,antidogmatic group which included the Disciples of Christ and was dedicated to the purity of Christian text and tradition alike. 57. The disputes between Baptists and other sects in these Bible societies, and among the Baptists themselves, present at least two notions of religious Notes to Pages 99‒100 251

community (that is,of religiously informed social formation): a differentiated, sovereign sect (comparable to Whitman’s “poetics of . . . embodiment”) or a nonsectarian whole (comparable to Whitman’s “poetics of merger”[SánchezEppler 924]). Details of the ABS’s role in the immersionist controversy are available in Wosh (118–150), Roland Worth (152–160), and Orlinsky and Bratcher (48–86 passim). 58. Whitman’s New Bible meant to unify disparates (disenfranchised citizens) in a way that no institutionally sanctioned document like the Bible or the Constitution had, in a way that churches and governments could not, dependent as they are on the delegation of power and the reservation of identity — that is, on the hierarchical management of the representation of persons. But since the transformation of social structure was to occur through a text (Leaves of Grass), mediation could not be done away with entirely. 59. One noteworthy feature of “So Long!” is Whitman’s penchant for internal dashes, separating two grammatically equivalent clauses, which later would be separated only by a comma. The dash materializes the desire for relation on an equal basis, but marks also the inherent distance, difference, and inequality present in such an arrangement. 60. Whitman, Leaves of Grass: Facsimile Edition of the 1860 Text, 452, 451. Following the practice of the 1860 edition, I have sometimes referred to lines from “So Long!” by the verse markings Whitman gave the poem in that particular text, the marginal numbers that set off each sentence of the poem, instead of the sections that characterize other editions. The 1860 variants for “So Long!”are also available in Whitman,Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, 3: 452–458. 61. Ibid, 456. Whitman later underscored the idea of translation evoked in verse 14 (“I announce an old age that shall lightly and joyfully meet its translation” [454]) by adding the following: “I receive now again of my many translations, from my avataras ascending, while others doubtless await me” (lg 506). 62.Though often commented upon,the disembodiment/immediacy claim of Whitman’s poetry is seldom gotten right, I think. Terry Mulcaire gives a Marxist reading of the Whitmanian construction of the relation between book, body,poet,and public — a reading which,theoretical differences aside,insists as I do that Leaves does not simply offer moments of transcendence and immediacy but rather challenges us to comprehend what I have called the constitutive tension between union and disunion, between generality and particularity or the one and the many. In Mulcaire’s terms (which owe much to Foucault), “[t]he cultural distinctions Leaves asks us to make, then, are not between repression and alienation on the one hand and freedom and immediacy on the other but between different linkages of repression and alienation on the one hand and freedom and immediacy on the other” (495; emphasis added). 252 Notes to Pages 101‒104

63. Whitman, Leaves of Grass: Facsimile Edition of the 1860 Text, 455; lg 34. 64. The other relevant moment also occurs in the 1860 edition. “Scented Herbage of My Breast” is often read as a rejection of the “show of appearance,” or the “[e]mblematic” meaning of the leaves of grass, which are “capricious” because rather than telling what they mean they “mask” the “real reality” they are meant to convey. Rather than a refutation of the signs that cannot be relied upon to “tell in [their] own way of the heart that is under” them, “Scented Herbage” marks a discovery which Whitman develops more fully in the later poem: namely, that “real reality” cannot be made immediate, that “death and love” “hide in these shifting forms of life, for reasons” (lg 113–115).One of those reasons,I would argue,is the necessarily mediated character of representation, the sacrifices in personhood that are required, paradoxically, to expand the category of person, to extend it in any one direction. 65.Whitman,Leaves of Grass: Facsimile Edition of the 1860 Text, 454.“Old age” was subsequently altered to “end,” a word that better stresses the paradox of an end that is also a beginning in another register, a translation, and thus not an end, or a death, in its original register. 66.Whitman,Leaves of Grass: Facsimile Edition of the 1860 Text, 454,455, 453. 67. Ibid, 455. 68. The relation of particulars on an unrestricted basis is theorized as the continual exchange and interpolation between these extreme, apparently irreconcilable states in which one is encompassed first by one’s own soul and then by its proximity to another’s (the reader’s, in this case). As “Leaves of Grass” #10 (“Myself and Mine”) attests, Whitman holds institutional status at bay, even in his New Bible: “I charge that there be no theory or school founded out of me, / I charge you to leave all free, as I have left all free” (Leaves of Grass: Facsimile Edition of the 1860 Text 226). 69. Whitman, “Scented Herbage of My Breast,” lg 114. 70. Focusing on the Children of Adam and Calamus clusters, Stefanelli argues that Whitman’s New Bible is meant to counteract the Bible’s vilification of sexuality and transgression: Whitman reshapes the biblical pattern in order to people his poems with contemporary children of Adam who have interiorized their parents’experiences and live through them with a different attitude, thus transforming sin into a new consciousness of sexuality and nature. A centrifugal movement away from the Biblical text takes place in Whitman’s poems, which is the counterpart of the centripetal forces supporting unity in Genesis. (173–174) I would argue, however, that rather than moving in strictly one direction (centrifugal,foundational),the 1860 Leaves moves in two contrary directions (cenNotes to Pages 104‒107 253

tripetal and centrifugal, supplementary and foundational), as intent on establishing itself as liturgy as it is in refuting the authoritative and institutional status of liturgical texts. 71. Whitman, Leaves of Grass: Facsimile Edition of the 1860 Text, 454. 72. For examples of the slippage between the bodily and the linguistic in Whitman’s use of “translate” and “translation,” see “Song of Myself ” #6: “I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women” (lg 34); “Song of Myself ” #21: “I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul . . . / The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue” (lg 48); and “Song of the Answerer”: “He resolves all tongues into his own and bestows it upon men, and any man translates, and any man translates himself also” (lg 168). 73. Whitman, Leaves of Grass: Facsimile Edition of the 1860 Text, 455, 454. 74. Ibid, 419. 75. Ibid, 189–190. In the 1867 edition, Whitman retitled this poem “Mediums,” the title it retains in lg, 480–481. 3. “but aren’t it all a sham?” 1. Given the text’s brevity (at eighty pages in the Library of America edition), it seems more accurate to call Billy Budd a short story, not (as almost everyone else does) a novel. Although underlining the title might seem to perpetuate this miscategorization, I continue to underline only because using quotation marks might cause confusion (being mistaken for scare quotes meant to suggest the idea of Billy Budd). Bibliographic minutiae aside, it of course makes a tremendous difference whether one regards it as a novel or a short story: whereas a novel implicitly constitutes a totality,a short story repels the notion of totality (which I claim Melville has set out to do). 2. The only intervening texts in this period are John Marr and Other Sailors (1888) and Timoleon (1891), both collections of poetry. 3. From James’s point of view, as we will see, the more accurate version of the question is not “Who killed Moby Dick?” but “Can Moby Dick be killed at all?” James’s answer, almost contemporaneous with Billy Budd, is that no one kills Moby Dick, and that, despite some very enthusiastic assurances to the contrary, it seems impossible to do so. 4. In the next chapter I ask the logical follow-up questions: If Melville fails to kill Moby Dick, does James manage to do it? James certainly thinks that he does. If neither of these authors can be credited with the act, then we must ask, Can Moby Dick ever die? Does the ghostly form of Moby Dick still loom before us? The decision each of these writers makes, to their own satisfaction, is whether to try to kill Moby Dick or not to go on the hunt at all. I am making an argument, then, that gets centered in Melville, concerning Moby Dick as a figured response to what blocks our ease in the world as obtained through 254 Notes to Pages 107‒118

constructing state formations.In contrast to Melville,who attempts to destroy the problem, James will attempt to dissolve it. Despite the difference between their responses (and others like theirs), the contest can be characterized as one of warriors versus pragmatists, seafarers versus academics. 5. Etsuko Taketani describes the way “Melville pluralized History by juxtaposing rival cosmological concepts” (133). Concerned specifically with the conflict between Christian and Gnostic cosmologies, Taketani regards MobyDick as an “attempt at relativizing the presumed authority of the Bible as the ultimate narrative and true history” (125). And while Joseph Andriano means to connect the “social/political aspects of race” in the novel to Ishmael’s cetological project, his focus is similarly on Melville’s problematization of “traditional hierarchies” which grant one race or species supremacy over others by purporting to have surveyed the totality of living things and ordered them according to their natural place (141).Central to both our projects is Melville’s laying bare the irony of constructedness, of having to design what should already be clear by design. 6. Matthiessen, 451–456; Pease, 270–274; Kirby, 80–93; Bryant, 80–85. This species of argument surely owes some of its continued vitality to what is generally known as the theory of two Moby-Dicks: promulgated by,among others, Leon Howard (150–179), George Stewart, James Barbour (203–220), and Harrison Hayford (648–659), this theory proposes to explain the IshmaelAhab dialectic — the way the narrative’s sympathy and voice seem to waver between these two differently charismatic figures — as largely a result of Melville’s having changed his mind, midcourse, about what kind of novel he was writing. 7. The dominant narrative model of Moby-Dick is certainly hierarchy, as figured in the feudalized relation between the mates and the harpooners, or the “Knights and Squires” of the whaling boats (md 105). And yet within this overarching constraint, Melville offers us at least three other possibilities. The first is essentially federal: Ishmael describes the Pequod’s crew as “Islanders” or “Isolatoes” who, while not used to “acknowledging the common continent of men,” are now “federated along one keel” (md 108). The word “federated” evokes the difficulty of such an alliance, which poses the same dilemma as the constitutional regime: how to coerce islanders into a continent; how to convince individuals protective of their independence to delegate control to some other, central body; how to engage in alliance and affiliation without impinging on individual sovereignty. Other models of relation Melville experiments with can be classified as communitarian (in the “Squeezing of the Case” episode, where equality means nonidentity) and dyadic (the “Monkey-Rope” that ties Ishmael to Queequeg and literally joins their fates). This last model, which submerges the individual in a “joint stock company of two,”has the most promise, because it forges the unity of the whole on the basis of the differences Notes to Pages 121‒122 255

that render individuals dependent on one another (md 271). Because those differences in this case are primarily economic and occupational, however, this kind of “Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals” (md 271) is tenuous at best, for it depends on factors outside individual control. And it helps to recall that, as an economic venture, the Pequod is an unquestionable failure. 8. Matthiessen’s focus on Ahab’s egoism (for examples, see 444, 447, 454, 459) hardly constitutes ignoring the novel’s catastrophic ending.It does,however, divert attention from what really kills Ahab and his men: not so much Ahab’s personal hunt for a whale, but rather the pretension to totality embodied equally by Ahab’s way of seeing the world and by the ship itself, by the hopeful experimentalism it (and therefore the novel) represents. What kills the crew of the Pequod is undeniably the whale, but Ahab hunts the whale so relentlessly because it has to lend coherence and meaning to an entire world, to the whole range of ventures in social and economic formation embodied by and enacted on board the Pequod. And because Moby Dick is that which refutes various claims to totality made throughout the novel (by Ahab, by Ishmael, by the novel itself), it destroys the ship. Ahab does not take over to the degree Matthiessen suggests — at least, Ahab, in his mania, merely carries out the ship’s purpose to the full. It is totality, not pride or evil, that sinks this ship.A pretension to totality may involve pride,but Melville’s deeper concern seems to be the stifling effect of a totality-based scheme of unity on the inherent (and to his mind, more valid and just) heterogeneous character of representation. Focusing on Ahab’s egoism, in short, threatens to distract us from what is being destroyed: the ship as state, the project of social integration which, based as it ultimately is on totalization, goes mad and shows itself in Ahab’s madness. 9. Richard Dean Smith’s chapter on Moby-Dick’s “gospel cetology” explores in detail the many ways the novel echoes and investigates the challenges traditional theology and cosmology faced in the form of contemporary scientific developments that questioned man’s place in the universe as well as the authorities by which he claimed that place. 10. John Wenke, 159; William James, “The One and the Many,” sp 1054. Fuller versions of these readings can be found in Wenke (146–163) and Greenberg (82–101). 11. Brodtkorb Jr. (Ishmael’s White World), particularly 3–10, 19–41, and 123–139; David Scott Arnold, 40–63. 12. This same idea underlies Sharon Cameron’s discussion of Moby-Dick in The Corporeal Self (11, 18–19, 66–75). See Bainard Cowan (119–125) for the argument that, to the contrary, allegory “postulates a leap . . . [that] cannot overcome its impossibility, because the absolute disjunction of the conceptual realm from the ideal logically preclude[s] any crossing; hence the leap is a fictional device for an experience that cannot be formulated” (122). 256 Notes to Pages 122‒124

13. The premise of reading insides by looking at outsides is that the material gives access to the metaphysical, to the psychological, and, by providing a sense of the cosmic cementicity of the thing, generates allegory. But Melville is definitely a realist, and in the Dantean sense in which the outside is important because legibility is important; allegory is only a secondary kind of legibility, for in Moby-Dick, what you see is what you get (both in the sense of the world’s legibility and,as I will discuss later,the sense that what you see is nothing, a blank, multiply interpretable yet therefore inscrutable void). 14. John Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: 15–16 (Thoreau); 20–25, 29–31, 98–99 (Whitman); 51–73 (Poe); 285–286 (Melville). 15. The trope of reading “the Book of Nature,” or reading the world typologically as legible because of correspondences of fact and language, is not uniquely American, of course. But as an exemplary meditation on this trope from Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici (1643) suggests, reading the book of Nature secures identity in both the secular and sacred realms in a way that someone like Melville might have found especially potent in attempting not only to redress inconsistencies in social order through writing but also to reconnect that order to a transcendental, foundational term capable of supporting it: I could never content my contemplation with . . . general pieces of wonder [like] the Flux and Reflux of the Sea . . . and have studies to match and parallel those in the more obvious and neglected pieces of Nature,which without further travel I can do in the Cosmography of myself. We carry with us the wonders we seek without us: ...we are that bold and adventurous piece of Nature, which he that studies wisely learns in a compendium what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume. Thus there are two Books [sic] from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that one written of God, another of His servant Nature, that universal and public Manuscript, that lies expans’d unto the Eyes of all: those that never saw him in the one, have discover’d Him in the other. . . . Surely the Heathens knew better how to joyn and read these mystical Letters than we Christians, who cast a more careless Eye on these common Hieroglyphicks, and disdain to suck Divinity from the flowers of Nature. (part 1, chapter 15; cited in Ernst Curtius, 323; emphases added) Part of what links Melville to the other authors in this study, especially Poe, is the former’s attention, which parallels Browne’s, to hieroglyphics and more generally to arcana — to arts that “the Heathens [which for Browne would include Queequeg] “knew better . . . than we Christians,” like “joyn[ing]” “mystical Letters” to produce divine revelation. 16. See A. Robert Lee, 83. On the whole, Lee’s article is useful for its careful attention to the many ways in which Moby-Dick constitutes an attempt to read the world as text. Though I disagree with Lee when he reads the “perNotes to Pages 124‒125 257

sistence of [Melville’s] anatomizing” as “heroic” (the totality implicit in anatomy is, I argue, what Melville is writing against), Lee does admit “Melville’s . . . frustrations as an inscribed Truth-seeker” (88). 17.According to O.S.and L.N.Fowler,two self-proclaimed phrenologists of the ante- and postbellum era,phrenology’s “simple yet comprehensive definition is this: every faculty of the mind is manifested by means of a particular portion of the Brain, called its organ, the size of which, other things being equal, is proportionate to its power of function” (Fowler and Fowler, SelfInstructor 60). An even stronger statement of phrenology’s central tenet comes in section II.10 of the same text, entitled “Form as Corresponding with Character”: Nature classifies all her works into orders, genera, and species. Form constitutes her great base of this classification.She always does up similar characteristics in like configurations . . . [and] things alike in character are alike in form. . . . All tigers are like all others and all canines resemble each other in shape and character. All human beings resemble all others in looks and mentality. . . . Therefore, since outline shape indicates outline character, of course all the minute details of shape indicate like peculiarities of character, so that every wrinkle and shade of configuration indicates a like diversity in their mentality. And since the brain is confessedly the organ of the mind, its special form must of course correspond with the special traits of character. Or thus: since universal shape corresponds with universal character, of course the form of the head is as the special characteristics of the mind. And this involves the doctrines of Phrenology. In short, the correspondence between form and character is absolute and universal. (42) Arguably,phrenology is riddled with fallacies,for to read the character of one’s brain means reading the bumps on one’s skull, and that would require that the shape of the skull be determined by the shape of the brain, or that the latter is replicated by the former in every contour. For all its faults, however, phrenology’s basic assumption of a correspondence between form and meaning is one it shares with a long tradition of philosophers, social theorists, and literary authors, including the authors examined here. For similar contemporaneous works on phrenology, see Fowler and Fowler’s Phrenology Proved, Illustrated, and Accepted (1842) and O. S. Fowler’s Fowler’s Practical Phrenology (1843). 18. Thus I would qualify Leo Bersani’s claim that “the Pequod’s crew reenact the origin of American society as a break with the very idea of the social” (83) by adding that, while Melville eventually disables every kind of social formation tried out in Moby-Dick, he is not dismissing the possibility that somewhere satisfactory alternatives might exist — beyond the boundaries of totality-based models of integration, territory that had till then rarely been explored, much less thought capable of supporting anything resembling life. 258 Notes to Page 125

19.The connections made in this book between literature,history,and religion suggest a relation to a philosophy no older than Descartes,one that developed with the recession of theology and the loss of its hypostatic solution of the one-and-the-many problem through the union of many substances in the one substance of the Host. The obligation to resolve the problematic is then taken over or inherited by metaphysics, or the tradition of postAristotelian Enlightenment philosophy. 20.Grace Farrell Lee’s reading, though an early instance, is representative of the optimism that derives from taking Ishmael’s survival at face value: Ishmael is redeemed from “that vital centre” of the vortex of Hell by the novel’s central emblem of death and life, the coffin-life-buoy which had transformed the Pequod into a hearse and which was translated, by Queequeg’s carving, into the very image of his living, loving self. It is a fit vessel for one who made the gnostic dive to death,for upon its lid are carved copies of [Queequeg’s] tattooing. . . . Such truths may remain forever mysteries, but the very act of diving towards them through “the great floodgates of the wonder-world” makes our live hearts beat against them . . . though we did never solve their riddle. (84) Lee gestures toward the idea of lost knowledge and unattainable significance but fails to take the novel seriously as an indictment of the pretension to totality that tends to underwrite the epistemological,cosmological,social,and psychological models of relation under which our lives proceed. A more recent version of the optimistic argument can be found in Bert Bender (32–33). Similarly, William Rosenfeld produces a hastily optimistic reading of what is, at the very best, an ambiguous scene: Queequeg’s copies of his body tattoos onto the coffin, “thus identifying the art of attaining truth with the coffin” (321). But even though the coffin becomes a life buoy, it is still a coffin. The art of attaining truth is still dead. 21. It is important to note that, among the texts discussed in this book, Moby-Dick is the only novel. As a novelist, Melville is immersed in the world of concrete constraints (phenomenological?) and subject to real world kinds of realization (national, social), so he structures real problems into the world picture. The point is that narrative operates on the same logic as material relations. 22. For a reading of the story as a parable about Melville’s failed literary career, see Nancy Ruttenberg. Richard A. Hocks reads the text as Melville’s attempt to reconcile the rise of utilitarianism and pragmatism with the tragic vision he prefers, the abstract with the rise of the particular. Cary Goodwyn, although arguing in terms of a struggle between republicanism and individualism, similarly reads in the text the author’s frustrated attempt to reconcile a conflict that seemed well on its way to being resolved — and not in favor of what Goodwyn and Hocks regard as Melville’s side.Even Cyndy Hendershot, Notes to Pages 127‒129 259

who reads Budd’s contradictory “tropings of the feminine” as a sign of Melville’s “pessimistic view of the triumph of patriarchal authority,” makes the larger claim for the story as a “deconstructive gesture toward the naturalization of metaphors” and “binary oppositions” (109). To write against the naturalization of binary oppositions is to oppose the normalizing effect of models of thought and relation that seek to impose unity by fostering an illusion of clear difference. 23. In 1984 R. Evan Davis points to the “almost even division of critics proposing two opposite and incompatible readings of the same text” (173). H. Bruce Franklin informs us that, over ten years later, this division shows no signs of healing but has become only more deeply entrenched: “Has any work of American literature generated more antithetical and mutually hostile interpretation than Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor?” (337). 24. Davis correctly diagnoses the interpretive dilemma posed: “there is no critical consensus of opinion on how to interpret either Billy’s fate or Captain Vere’s decision,which is responsible for it”(173).Davis regards the lack of consensus as “[u]nfortunate” (173). I would suggest that, fortunate or not as one may feel witnessing the seemingly interminable critical debate on Billy Budd, an endless spawning of multiplicity is precisely the logical, if not the critical, legal, and moral, state of affairs that Melville hoped to bring about. Although Dennis Berthold is writing about political rather than logical “ambiguities,” I would agree with him that the ambiguities of a text like Budd “are incapable of resolution because they incorporate contradictions Melville found in the politics of his own century even as we continue to find them in ours” (454). 25. For representative examples of the sympathetic reading, see Charles A. Reich (60) and Christopher Sten (314); for the nonsympathetic, see Eric Henderson and Brook Thomas (“Legal Fictions”). 26. At his death Melville left what Harrison Hayford refers to in his notes to the Library of America edition as an “unfinished and semi-final draft” (1447), from which Raymond Weaver produced the first “reading text,” published in volume 13 of the Constable “Standard Edition” of Melville’s Complete Works (1924). Eschewing the editorial choices Weaver made, F. Barron Freeman produced a more scholarly edition in 1948 that included all manuscript variants and revisions. As Hershel Parker notes in “Billy Budd, Foretopman and the Dynamics of Canonization,” it was the Constable edition that led to Billy Budd’s immediate canonization in England (22). Although American critics were somewhat slower to embrace the story,its canonical status seemed indisputable by 1941 when F. O. Matthiessen included it in his American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, the book that set the parameters of American Studies for the next thirty years. It is worth noting that, until the English critical revival of Moby260 Notes to Pages 129‒130

Dick in 1919, Melville had fallen out of the canon and serious critical notice (if he had until then ever merited either). 27. Early critics, following E. L. Grant Watson’s 1933 essay, “Melville’s Testament of Acceptance,” championed what became known as the acceptance argument about Billy Budd: namely,that the text marks its author’s “acquiescence to tragic necessity”(Milder 4) — although critics have historically been divided in their emphasis on whether Budd’s hanging is more of a tragedy (the humanistic reading) or more of a necessity (the Christian reading). Although the popularity of the acceptance theory lasted well into the 1950s (see Warner Berthoff), the 1960s saw the rise of the obvious counterargument, the resistance theory. First suggested by Joseph Schiffman in 1950,but made prominent by Phil Withim ten years later, resistance readings typically claim that Melville distances himself from a power mad Vere and/or a blindly naive narrator. The acceptance-resistance opposition has continued to structure Budd criticism, despite the shift in critical focus from theology to politics, from viewing Budd as a statement about Melville’s personal faith or doubt to viewing it as an inquiry into what Milton R. Stern calls the “nature and possibility of and desirability of liberation . . . the nature and function of the state, the very concept of government” (xx). For example, Cary Goodwyn gives a republican spin on the resistance theory, whereas Nancy Ruttenberg “rejects precisely the type of either/or reading to which [the text] has historically given rise” (87). 28. To clarify Melville’s project, one might consider Hegel’s search for a distinction between totality and infinity. Like Hegel, Melville regards totality as the enemy of mind (Adorno), the death of life (Levinas 53–60, 293–294). What Melville reaches for, via Billy’s death, is open-ended, raggedy infinity (the “holy oblivion” that “covers all at last”). 29. These categorical distinctions may seem more unstable than useful, since many readings tend toward the eclectic (looking at the story morally as well as legally, for instance) or claim one of these domains to be Melville’s primary concern. Among the critics who interest themselves in the moral dimension of the story are Cary Goodwyn, Eric Henderson, Richard A. Hocks, and Brook Thomas (“Judgment of Silence”). Analyses of Budd’s legal aspects — and in some cases its suitability as the exemplary text for the interdisciplinary hybrid known as law and literature — have been made by Charles A. Reich, John P. McWilliams, Richard H. Weisberg (Failure of the Word), Brook Thomas (“Legal Fictions”), John M. Budd, Lawrence Douglas, and Bernard Schwartz.For epistemologically grounded readings of the text,one might turn to, among others, Cyndy Hendershot, Barbara Johnson, W. D. Redfern, or Eve Sedgwick. 30. Though technically only five chapters, the textual coda (that which follows the climax of Billy’s hanging) comprises what are functionally six Notes to Pages 130‒131 261

episodes: (1) a discussion by the ship’s surgeon and purser of the absence of any movement in Billy’s body while being hanged; (2) an analepsis to the crew’s equivocal, muted response to the execution; (3) news of Vere’s death and the rechristening of his ship; (4) a journalistic account of the alleged mutiny that paints Billy as the villain and Claggart as his victim; and the final chapter which really has two parts — (5) the apotheosis of Billy into naval hagiography and (6) the doggerel ballad immortalizing a Billy who speaks from beyond the grave and beneath the ocean. Together, these largely metanarrative fragments aim at — and yet, by their number and contradiction of the foregoing chapters, blatantly fail to produce — the “symmetry of form” which, while “attainable in pure fiction,” is not “readily achieved” in a “fact[ual]” “narration” (bb 1431). 31. I agree with Barbara Johnson on the centrality of indetermination to Billy Budd (and with Paul Brodtkorb Jr. [“The Definitive Billy Budd”], to the extent that Johnson is reworking Brodtkorb’s argument in the light of deconstructionism).Nevertheless,my interpretation of its function differs distinctly from hers. I concur that this is a story about judgment, but for Johnson judgment involves the “absolute transformation of all differences into binary differences,” the “maintenance of political authority . . . [by the establishment of ] a set of rules” (that is, the law) which is dedicated to the “repression of ambiguity” (106). It is here that my reading diverges from Johnson’s. For Johnson, we must not judge because we cannot judge, because the ultimate indeterminability of motive, of difference itself, prevents us from ever being sure of judging rightly. My position is that, in fact, we must judge. We must find Budd guilty as Vere does — but not because we can be sure he is guilty or because convicting him shores up our own epistemological or moral ground. Johnson writes in regard to Claggart, “the absence of knowledge . . . leads to the propagation of tales” (95). The same could be said of Billy, but in neither case, I would argue, is “lack of information” the source of “evil” that Johnson claims it is (95). Instead, lack of information is the only thing that can defeat the claims of totality, of the regulation and restriction of information, identities, and protocols of social relation. 32. In speaking specifically of mutiny, my wording may appear misleading, if not inaccurate. It is true that the narrator dismisses the idea that Billy was part of a mutiny, and it is likely that the reader will follow suit. But in a text so laden with indetermination, in a narrative whose irregular, stop-and-start course is determined by the inaccessibility of anything like omniscience or the “real story,” the narrator’s dismissal of the mutiny charge out of hand can only be halfhearted and must admit a stronger emotional than logical basis, a sympathy and/or attraction to Billy that presents crucial scenes like Billy’s meeting with the afterguardsman under cover of night and dresses them in the murkiest innuendo. Billy may seem innocent, but the innocent are capa262 Notes to Page 132

ble of criminal acts, consciously or not. Most importantly, however, the narrator cannot dismiss certain descriptions of Billy just because they are unflattering, incongruous with an idealized version of Billy. Another objection would suggest that the issue is insubordination, not even murder, let alone mutiny. It is true that insubordination (here, striking an officer) is the formal charge against Billy Budd, the count on which the drumhead court tries him. A charge of murder is never entertained, but perhaps only because the seemingly lesser crime of insubordination already requires execution (at least according to Vere’s demonstrably inaccurate version of naval law). The point remains that what Billy Budd did or did not do is, despite the narrator’s wishes, finally up for grabs. As is the case in the closeted interview with Vere, the facts of the case, the words spoken behind closed doors, lie always at one remove, if not more. Entertaining a sympathetic account of Billy’s actions is predicated on (and so, cannot exclude) the entertainment by others of polymorphously divergent accounts. 33. My reading of Melville’s success in Billy Budd is best contrasted with Brook Thomas’s (“Legal Fictions”): “The ambiguities arising from [the] silences [of ‘Melville’s ambiguous texts’] testify to how effectively the dominant ideology could deflect any radical criticism directed at it. Their lack of closure indicates that Melville could not concretely imagine the very alternatives to established forms of society which his texts seem to suggest” (49). Even though I share Thomas’s wariness of valuing “open-ended texts [as] valuable in themselves” (in Billy Budd’s case, reading a text that “has the potential to subvert legal form [as] ...liberating”[49]),I would have to exempt Billy Budd, where, for once, deferred closure truly means success. Mine is not a protodeconstructionist reading, in which postponement and free play are (or have the tendency to become) autotelic. Melville’s very concrete objective is the modeling of alternative social formations, an exercise whose abstraction is grounded by its serious and (in both a pre–Civil-War and postReconstruction America) urgently real motive. 34. While the “ragged edges” passage (which concludes chapter 28) is often cited to suggest that Budd presents a morally or epistemologically indeterminable case, what has to be considered is the passage immediately before it, the end of chapter 27: “And the circumambient air in the clearness of its serenity was like smooth white marble in the polished block not yet removed from the marble-dealer’s yard” (bb 1431). Though one could read this as an ironization of the order Vere feels he has restored on board the Bellipotent by executing Billy, the uninscribed block of marble (which suggestively resembles the “dead, blind wall” of Moby Dick’s forehead [md 284]) connotes not so much unity as it does a blank object on which no structure or order has been imposed. Like the door that deprives us of Vere and Budd’s private conversation, and more importantly, like Billy’s dying without giving his side of Notes to Page 134 263

the story, the indetermination represented by the uncarved block of marble (excavated from the quarry and polished, but as yet a tabula rasa) is what permits the multiple readings supplied by the last three chapters, each attempting to supply the closure the chapters before it failed to provide. 35. The latter is the American nightmare (the nightmare of communism), but at the same time it is the American dream, the fantasy of unity on the order of e pluribus unum. The idea of agape — the principle of unifying love which Budd seems to wield on the Rights-of-Man — can be traced back to its formulation in 1 Corinthians 13:4–10, 12. As Melville read them in his own copy of New Testament and Psalms, Authorized Version, these verses were annotated by Melville as follows: “Charity [often translated “love”] suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, / Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; / Rejoiceth not in iniquity,but rejoiceth in the truth; / Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. / Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. / For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. / But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. / . . . For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then I shall know even as also I am known”(Melville’s Marginalia 1: 372–373).What happens in Billy Budd constitutes a reversal of the events Paul speaks of: for Melville, when “that which is perfect” is “done away” (when totality is deferred, an obligation to unity on a reductive model finally escaped), then “that which is in part”shall come,be realized as a social (and no longer merely a psychological) state of affairs. Knowledge-in-part, along with the disavowal of knowledge as a discrete telos,is what allows the various accounts and images of Billy Budd to be circulated; it is what allows tales themselves to be told. 36. Although this particular passage concerns the private interview between Budd and Vere, “holy oblivion” describes Budd’s death just as aptly. For Budd’s hanging is simply the fulfillment of a promise, the permanent deferral of totality which the closeted interview postpones only momentarily. 37.In arguing for the necessity of Billy’s death,I am not reading that necessity as mournful,as do John B.Noone and Charles A.Reich.As Robert Milder notes, John Noone “conceives the story as tragic because social,” and does so out of a “reluctance to leave Melville’s narrative as bleakly resigned to the rule of authority as its action might suggest” (Milder 9). I argue, by contrast, that endorsing Billy’s death does not constitute for Melville an endorsement of authoritarian rule. Even though Melville points us toward the illegality of the drumhead court’s proceedings (a reading that is hotly contested among critics), his deeper concern seems to be not with the moral or political wrongness 264 Notes to Pages 134‒135

of an innocent young man but with the logical necessity of doing away with the unity principle. 38. Letter to Professor Archibald Machmechan, New York. 39. As a text that continues to inspire ongoing critical debate and often antithetical readings,Billy Budd might be fairly compared to the Melville story with which Dimock is concerned. Like “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” Budd does not seem to possess a meaning integral enough or binding enough to give it anything like a concluded identity.For ...in its very polemical energy, [the text] also carries with it something like a polemical overload,with consequences unintended, unexpected, and quite possibly unwelcome. . . . [Consequently] any attempt to devise a hermeneutic totality for the text is bound to fail — woefully,but perhaps also happily.For that failure is surely a tribute to the story’s continuing vitality, its continuing ability to sustain new meanings, even troubling meanings, over time. The semantic horizon of the text is thus commensurate neither with the sum of its parts nor with the sum of any number of readings. Taking these incommensurabilities as reminders of a nonintegral universe, we should perhaps also take to heart their intimations of possibility, in order to rethink the very idea of adequation . . . as it informs a reading of a text. (84) Although Dimock lays more emphasis on the disjuncture between text and history (which is not part of my argument) and on the surplus of meanings generated by a text (like Billy Budd, “Paradise of Bachelors” has been read for its homophobic resonance), it is very much to the point of my argument that Billy Budd proves continually able to “sustain new meanings” and “any number of new readings,” many of which are incompatible. I would add that this interpretive fecundity is dependent on Billy’s death. It is only because Billy dies before he can tell the full story, only because he and Claggart both die before a so-called true account can be pieced together, that the text is able to serve as a model of social and textual formations grounded in pluris (not unum). 40. In an economical essay on puns in Budd, W. D. Redfern describes “Melville’s . . . refus[al of ] hierarchy in subject-matter” in terms that highlight the same connection I have been addressing in Melville’s work between the making of compositional, cosmological, and social wholes, as well as the violence totality-based models of unity exert upon the difference they are supposed to preserve: The obsessive motif of demarcation lines crops up again with the suggestion that nobody is expert enough to distinguish between sanity and insanity, for example in the case of Vere. . . . Melville succumbs to the lure of digression, yet another way of evading, or of complicating, demarcation lines. . . . Form, the supposed god of the artist, is linked none too flatteringly by Vere with the notion of shipboard discipline and camouflaging Notes to Pages 136‒137 265

facades. . . . As he wrote in Moby-Dick: “God keep me from ever completing anything.” . . . Only the unnatural Navy has a perfect code of order, and can achieve final solutions. . . . While art can impose some shape on chaos, Melville seemed to believe that there were limits to what it should even try to accomplish in shape-making; a certain faith must be kept with messiness . . . or at least with a plurality of possibilities. (361–363) I would add only that while a later text like Billy Budd is characterized by an almost pure antipathy toward totality and order, a work like Moby-Dick presents a more ambivalent Melville, not yet quite able to give up on practices of “shape-making” (like cosmology). 41.On the “unjust law”and its status in the debate between legal positivism and legal naturalism, see Bernard Schwartz, 232; Kent Greenawalt, 8–11; Frederick Schauer, 35–37; and Brook Thomas (“Legal Fictions”), 42–43. Natural law holds that moral concerns are necessarily and/or rightly involved in legal decisions, whereas legal positivism holds that legal judgments should not be influenced by moral concerns but grounded solely in the letter of the law. In this context, numerous critics have read Vere as upholding an “unjust law”when he refuses to acquit Billy on the basis of youth,apparent innocence, or his own personal attachment to the boy. For an indication of Billy Budd’s status in jurisprudence studies as the prototypical hard case, see Schwartz 230–236, 369–371. As law professor Richard H. Weisberg writes, this text “has come to ‘mean’ Law and Literature” (“Editor’s Preface”).The notion of the hard case derives from legal positivism and refers to the situation where one must enforce a law one feels to be unjust, either in the particular case or in general. As legal scholars like Richard Weisberg (Failure of the Word) have suggested, however, Billy Budd’s courtmartial presents not so much a hard case as an instance of how much the rules have to be bent to accommodate a certain obligation to unity. Like Weisberg, H. Bruce Franklin feels that the story is unequivocally the portrait of a miscarriage of justice. But Weisberg claims further that this is not a hard case because Vere blatantly and repeatedly violates the procedure he claims to be upholding so rigidly. Instead, Weisberg reads Billy Budd as a lesson in the abuse of power: by doing what few critics seem to have previously done (except for gestures by Merlin Bowen and C. B. Ives), that is, by looking at the legal procedures Vere claims to be following, Weisberg elegantly refutes readings that valorize Vere as a conscience-stricken law enforcer. By Weisberg’s count, Vere commits eight violations of naval procedure as dictated by the English Articles of War of 1749: for example,a naval court-martial requires five judges,not three; a ship’s captain is not allowed to preside over a court-martial; the proceedings must take place on the open deck, not in concealment; and neither a court-martial nor a sentence of execution made by one is to be carried out without the presence or requested permission of the admiral. 266 Notes to Page 140

Although I find the legal readings as represented by Weisberg and Schwartz ultimately lacking (contra Weisberg, Melville seems to be out for more than just vilifying Vere’s procedural violations, and, contra Schwartz, those violations do not of themselves render Billy’s trial a hard case), I nevertheless would defend the method behind the legal reading against critics like Robert Milder (8–9) and Christopher Gowans (23 n16) who dismiss it as outside the story’s concern (Gowans) or outside Melville’s realm of knowledge (Milder; Hayford and Sealts [1962],176).The first claim is demonstrably false: the narrator writes that the three officers selected by Vere to try Billy Budd “seemed to think that such a matter [Billy’s striking of Claggart] should be referred to the admiral” (bb 1407). The second claim is hardly credible: not only did Melville serve for two years on American ships where the domestic version of the Articles of War were read aloud to the crew monthly (Weisberg, Failure of the Word, 209–210 n34), but he could hardly have been unfamiliar with regulations that had played such a prominent part in the 1842 Somers trial (cited in bb 1417), in which his own cousin, Guert Gansevoort, and two other officers were court-martialed for the summary execution-at-sea of three alleged mutineers. If the public disgrace heaped on his cousin were not enough to interest Melville in the trial (though acquitted, Gansevoort was ruined), James Fenimore Cooper’s exhaustive 1844 commentated edition of the Somers transcripts helped to make the trial a cause célèbre for decades to follow. As Brook Thomas (“Legal Fictions,” 26–27) and Bernard Schwartz (230–235) each note, Melville’s interest in and knowledge of legal matters had an additional source: his father-in-law was Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of Massachusetts’s Supreme Court from 1830 to 1860. The frequent suggestion that Melville based Captain Vere on his father-in-law,though not critically useful, gains credibility from the fact that Shaw upheld the Fugitive Slaw Law of 1850 even though he found it morally repugnant. 42.Insisting that Melville (not Vere) must kill Billy Budd is meant to underscore my concern with the logic of the represented drama rather than its morality or politics. Such an insistence has implications which should be mentioned. If the author enforces logic over other dimensions, he could be said to eliminate the motive which brings most readers to fiction, a basic emotional (as opposed to intellectual) engagement of the kind explored by Aristotle in the Poetics. My reading of Billy Budd may then, to some, render it a less attractive work than it is for those who engage it ethically. Secondly, saying that Melville rather than any character in the story must kill Billy might evoke a version of the author much like the Trollopian narrator (lambasted by Henry James) who may do what he pleases regardless of what the characters demand because it is his story,not theirs,because it is make-believe,not human history. But in texts like Budd, as much so as in Eureka and Leaves of Grass, the sense of an external, empowered narrator or author is never very far away. Notes to Page 140 267

We are not allowed to forget it. Furthermore, the importance of these texts as part of American literary culture (as these writers conceived of that culture) was the way in which aesthetic formations (emotionally engaging or not, apparently free of or dominated by a narratorial presence) stood the chance of ministering to social formation, reconstructing perceptions and perhaps the material circumstances of personhood. To that extent, Billy Budd is both make-believe and human history; that is, it is a work of fiction that concerns itself not with actual historical events but with the social structure within which such events unfold. 43. There is only peripeteia, only the reversal of antitheses: “In the jugglery of circumstances preceding and attending [Billy’s striking of Claggart] . . . and in the light of the martial code whereby it was formally to be judged, innocence and guilt personified in Claggart and Budd in effect changed places” (bb 1408). 44. Though on a theoretically less ambitious scale than Sedgwick, Kathy Phillips and Jonathan Yoder make similar arguments about Budd’s problematization of binaristic structures of thought and power that restrict the expression of homosexuality. See Robert K. Martin for a discussion of the story’s homoeroticism against the background of Melville’s earlier writings. Like Sedgwick, Martin (Hero 107–124) regards as repressive the stories that grow around Billy after his death. Martin is right to observe that the closing ballad “transforms [Billy] into the heterosexual admirer of ‘Bristol Molly’” (Hero 124). But he also sees this transformation as a “betray[al]” of Billy’s “memory,” a dishonest revision by which “Billy’s homosexual figure of integration is lost.” The problematic of reading Billy as authentically gay aside, the ballad can hardly be said to bring closure to Billy Budd or anything like certainty to guesses about the Handsome Sailor’s desires (sexual or seditious). Although the allusion to a sweetheart seems more a standard generic feature than a specific insight into Billy’s private life,none of the text’s attempts at closure is any surer of succeeding than the others. Indeed, it is their failure on which depends the richness of Billy’s (and Vere’s and Claggart’s) story, the endless interpretations which that story is able to support; and the sheer number of those interpretations, like the inconsistencies between the several accounts of Billy’s actions, is what ensures that failure. As Melville’s narrator writes of Claggart,“His portrait I essay,but shall never hit it”(1372).The same should and must be said of Billy. Like the hypothetical X — , to whom the narrator compares the master-at-arms, Billy “is not a nut to be cracked by the tap of a lady’s fan” (1382). Yet he is also not capable of being seen through, his mind and character fixed by any single portrait. 45. Something should be said about Billy Budd’s erotic implications. This chapter makes no attempt to stamp out the homoerotically-vectored readings of Budd. The fact that homosexual desire is present in the text, at least in 268 Notes to Pages 141‒143

Claggart,seems at times undeniable,as when we are told that the way Claggart looks at Billy is often hateful but also contains “sometimes . . . a touch of soft yearning,as if Claggart could even have loved Billy but for fate and ban”(1394). But even though homosexuality is there in the text (whether one finds it in Billy or Claggart or both), eros has never been Melville’s foremost concern. The ejaculatory spilling of the soup, the tap on the backside with Claggart’s rattan, the afterguardsman’s clandestine proposition to mutiny (to join the “gang” of “impressed ones”) — all of these incidents can be read for gay subtext (bb 1380,1389).Yet regardless of the erotic possibilities here (and Melville has always favored male-male situations anyway), the movement of the story away from eros and toward logos shows that its author regards eros as not being the objective of the piece but, like the mystery of the characters’ motivation, something to be uncovered, something not singled out. Furthermore, Sedgwick’s reading of Claggart as the frustrated, internally homophobic homosexual fails to give a full or satisfactory reading of passages like the following: “As to Claggart, the monomania in the man — if that indeed it were — as involuntarily disclosed by starts in the manifestations detailed, yet in general covered over by his self-contained and rational demeanor; this, like a subterranean fire, was eating its way deeper and deeper in him. Something decisive must come of it” (1396). Instead of reading this “subterranean fire” simply as homosexual desire or homosexual desire repressed until it turns into homophobia, I wish to press on the uncertainty as to “what was the matter with the master-at-arms” (1381). 46.It seems frankly insufficient,by contrast,to say (with Mary Fussell) that Melville’s failure to intrude on the closeted interview signals an “inability to conceive and execute this crucial scene” and constitutes an “organic flaw in the basic structure of the work” (55). My position — that Billy Budd is a history that permits conflicting versions of that history — thus has more in common with Cesare Casarino’s Foucaultian reading of heterotopia in Melville. On the subject of the individual, John Samson asks, “If it is clear what stories Melville is un-writing” (Western, Christian narratives of progress as well as scientific hypotheses that had begun to displace those narratives), then “what . . . is the story that Melville is writing?” (229). Whereas Samson is content to place Melville in the company of “anarchistic figures” like Bakunin, Veblen, and Nietzsche, I would argue that “dismantl[ing] the forms and contents of the ‘Powers’of his day”(230) meant,for Melville,the textual formation of models of relation by which groups and individuals could attain a unity that in no way (as the Constitution admittedly does) compromises their particularity. 47. Barbara Johnson gets right the indetermination that pervades Budd, but I would stress the necessity of Billy’s death to something larger than himself (the pluralization of identity within the text) as well as something outside the text (the social formation that might be patterned on that textual model). Notes to Page 144 269

Otherwise, we are left simply with (in terms that recur from Moby-Dick) the necessity of the blank wall to interpretation and the schemes it supports.What gets written out is the relevancy of the freedom (interpretive as well as political) that Melville believes may be secured by one death. 48. By contrast, Nancy Ruttenberg argues that in “his desire to eliminate ambiguity, Vere condemns narrative itself to irrelevance” (89–90). 4. “necessarily short of sight” 1. “The One and the Many.” 2. James’s last book, Some Problems in Philosophy (1911), which was published nine months after his death, attests retrospectively to a lifelong commitment to reviewing the one-and-the-many problem, the solution to which he regarded as the diagnostic for the viability of any philosophical position. Pluralism encourages the “empiricist notion, that the parts are distinct and the whole is a resultant”; by contrast, monism asserts that the whole is fundamental, that the parts derive from it, . . .that the separations we uncritically accept are illusory, and that the entire universe, instead of being a sum, is the only genuine unit in existence. . . . The alternative here is known as that between pluralism and monism. It is the most pregnant of all the dilemmas of philosophy,although it is only in our time that it has been articulated distinctly. Does reality exist distributively? or collectively?— in the shape of eaches, everys, anys, eithers? or only in the shape an all or whole? (sp 1040) As much as James weighs in on the side of pluralism, I would argue that taking a wider account of his work (in terms of politics and religion as well as philosophy) places him somewhere between monism and pluralism.What James does for the solution of problems of social formation by means other than the political (by literary modeling,in the case of this study) is to provide the insight that what is problematic is not so much the character of relations (for they will always be shot through with difference even as they aim for unity) as it is the terms, the structures, by which we apprehend and model relation (monism vs. pluralism, unity vs. difference). Our terms are too extreme, and renaming makes some way toward revising.At least,that is the optimistic position James takes in the Varieties. For James’s full discussion of Plotinus, see chapter VII of Some Problems in Philosophy (esp. 1041–1042). Although his note refers us to a contemporary anthology of ancient philosophy, he performs his own translation of Plotinus, most likely from M. N. Bouillet’s French translation from the Greek (3 vols., Paris: Hachette, 1857–1861), which he also cites in his notes (sp 1041n). James makes the federal analogy explicit in A Pluralistic Universe when he describes the “pluralistic world [as being] more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom.However much may be collected,however much may report itself 270 Notes to Pages 146‒154

as present at any effective centre of consciousness or action, something else is self-governed and absent and unreduced to unity” (776; emphasis added). 3. This chapter does not deal in depth with Jamesian psychology, specifically the Principles (1890), which is very much still alive as a critical subject (see Joseph Alkana 103–121). Likewise, over the past two decades, James’s contributions to the philosophy of religion have hardly gone unanalyzed (see, for instance, Henry Levinson, Robert Vanden Burgt, William Gavin, Bennet Ramsey, and Ellen Suckiel). Yet critical energy has largely been devoted to making internal connections within the Jamesian oeuvre, producing a coherent system of thought out of a massive body of work with a variety of interests. Even the Cambridge Companion to William James (1997), which contains a number of noteworthy essays (including those by David Lambeth, “Interpreting the Universe after a Social Analogy”; Richard Niebuhr, “William James on Religious Experience”; and Ross Possnock, “The Influence of William James”), regards James (by necessity in an anthology, perhaps) as a man of compartmentalized or compartmentalizable interests. I want to make the connections that it seems have not been made, one of those being the place of Varieties, and James’s work as a whole, in the larger current of American thought — a current that extends beyond philosophy and theology, that connects back to the problematic of unity and the notion of the requirement of difference as issues that are fundamental to the maintenance of not just certain forms of discourse but the integrity of social formation, of a reservoir for the value of the person which makes discourse possible in the first place. 4. Emmanuel Levinas is perhaps the most cogent modern theorist of totality as negative (53–60, 293–294). It is only fair to note the development of James’s position on totality and the possibility of rehabilitating unity through a concept like pluralism: although Varieties posits pluralism as a nonrigid form of unity, its tendency toward amassing and conglomeration, compounded with the conclusion that man’s blindness to difference is at base epistemological, ultimately renders it a poor and only marginally less violative model of social and identity formation. 5.In the Jamesian universe the closest thing to the transcendent is the ideal, which, against the tradition of English and German idealism, he conceives of as in fact not transcendent but as interpenetrative with the material world and capable of affecting it or of potentiating change in it. God need not be entirely finite but of an order not entirely distinct from the mundane or profane world. Here James is distancing himself as a philosopher from those he calls “refined” supernaturalists,those for whom “the world of the ideal has no efficient causality, and never bursts into the world of phenomena at particular points” (vre 465). James believes, to the contrary, that “in communion with the Ideal new force comes into the world, and new departures are made here below” (465). Notes to Pages 155‒158 271

For James (at least in Varieties), totality carries the implication of what he calls “crasser” or “piecemeal” supernaturalism: the notion that the ideal is not isolated from the material but is capable of affecting or contributing to the alteration of the physical world. Instead of numbering himself among the Kantian or “refined” idealists who “bar out ideal entities from interfering causally in the course of phenomenal events,” James opts for a “crasser” supernaturalism that “admits miracles and providential leadings, and finds no intellectual difficulty in mixing the ideal and the real worlds together by interpolating influences from the ideal region among the forces that causally determine the world’s details” (464). Thus in putting forward the notion of totality, James is rejecting a conception of the ideal as transcendent, as “inhabit[ing] a different dimension of being altogether from that in which existential propositions obtain,” and thus unable to “get down upon the flat level of experience and interpolate itself piecemeal between distinct persons of nature” (465). 6.Instead of shifting toward pluralism altogether,Varieties reverses the priority of the many and the one — the priority which writers from Jefferson to Poe to Melville had been laboring under: that the local importance of difference and individuality aside, unification is the ultimate and generally more worthwhile goal. James makes the radical suggestion — completely the antithesis of Lincolnian unionism — that the one is not the privileged element in the equation of e pluribus unum in the sense that it is privileged to the prejudice of variety.In this way Varieties inscribes the forward edge of modernism and the declension of integrative concerns like Whitman’s and Poe’s into a kind of terminal liberalism. Experimentalism along the axes of the one and the many is the American contribution to modernism. 7. For a discussion of Varieties as a contribution specifically to religious philosophy, see Ellen Suckiel, Heaven’s Champion, chapters 1 and 7. 8. Varieties is rife with further examples of James’s commitment to multiplicity: for example, “the very fact that [definitions of religion] are so many and so different from one another is enough to prove the word ‘religion’ cannot stand for any single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name” (32). Because “the fact of diverse judgments about religious phenomena is . . . entirely unescapable [sic],” unification is to be resisted inasmuch as it implies a standard: “when we touch our upper limit and live in our own highest centre of energy, we may call ourselves saved, no matter how much higher some one else’s centre may be” (304, 220). 9. While Frazer’s work may pave the way for studies like James’s, their interests diverge in significant ways. The Golden Bough posits unity but at the deep level of the ontology of myth rather than, as Varieties does, at the level of individual psychology. James has effectively rewritten the ontic or ontological unity offered by Frazer as a multiculturalism. James being deeply Low Church Protestant, it is not surprising that in Varieties he produces a kind of 272 Notes to Pages 159‒161

philosophical form of Congregationalism, borrowing the logic whereby congregations form wholes without abandoning their autonomy. One of James’s students, Horace Kallen, was the first to read the pluralistic component of James’s philosophy to the exclusion of all others. With its depiction of a world “ruled by separatism and immutability,”Kallen’s Culture and Democracy in the United States (1924) formulated the idea of cultural pluralism which has resurfaced in the last decade in the educational doctrine of multiculturalism and various racial and religious separatist movements (Possnock 337). 10. By the turn of the century, the process of secularization has come full circle: whereas in 1848 Poe was arguing for the basis of social formation on secular as well as religious grounds (the latter being traditional at that point), in 1902 James is arguing quite the reverse (religious grounds having been decentered in favor of largely secular ones). Since Varieties is, after all, an attempt to relocate religious experience in an efficacious relation to secular life, it deserves to be noted how James’s pluralism sets him in relative contrast to the emphatically monist stance of the Act of Uniformity which prefaces the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, a legislative act which allies the authority of ecclesiastical and governmental bodies, and ensures a consonant and univocal expression of the state by making any nonverbatim recitation of liturgical texts a crime punishable by anything from a fine to life imprisonment. The preceding Act of Settlement (1558), which settled the state in order that the church could then be settled on it (in the Act of Uniformity), reversed Queen Mary’s repeal of anti-Catholic legislation and reaffirmed the Protestantism of England and its sovereign. For the full text of the Act of Settlement, see Statutes IV: 109–117; for the Act of Uniformity, see either Book of Common Prayer, 5–13, or Statutes IV: 117–122. 11. Despite appearances, James is not a relativist but what one might call a totalist. While he posits a variety of worlds among which “our present consciousness”is “only one out of many,”and while the inhabitants of each world produce unity through a variety of distinct “world-formula[s]”,nowhere does he make the relativist assertion that one description of the world is as good as another (vre 463). For relativism presumes that only one “world-formula” at a time can be true.James asks,by contrast,why “we assume that only one such system of ideas can be true” and whether the “world be so complex as to consist of many interpenetrating spheres of reality, which we can . . . approach in alteration by using different conceptions and assuming different attitudes” (116).Rather than a diatribe against any particular world-description,Varieties is a demonstration of the way in which opposition, disagreement, and difference are not at all inhibitive but in fact constitutive of a certain kind — an unmitigated, unadulterated kind — of unity. The “real world” as we see it is not just “of a different temperament” from the real world as others see it; if we Notes to Pages 161‒162 273

learn anything from Varieties, it should be that the reality of the world inheres in being of innumerable and typically divergent temperaments (463). 12. Given the familiarity with Emerson’s oeuvre that we can infer from the frequency with which James quotes his work (six times in Varieties alone), and given the homage of the “Address at the Emerson Centenary” (“there is something in each and all of us . . . that ought not to consent to . . . living at second hand” [1121; emphasis added]), James’s terminology of the “eachform” and the “all-form” is almost certainly an allusion to Emerson’s poem entitled “Each and All.” Published in the 1846 volume called simply Poems, “Each and All” asserts the interdependence of the one and the many: “All are needed by each one; / Nothing is fair or good alone. / . . . Over me soared the eternal sky, / Full of light and of deity; / Again I saw, again I heard, / The rolling of the morning bird; / Beauty through my senses stole; / I yielded myself to the perfect whole” (Hollander 1: 258–259). James cements the connection to Emerson when he quotes the last line of “Each and All” in lecture II of A Pluralistic Universe (652); it is this text in which James coins “the each-form and the all-form of reality” as a vivid, structural means of distinguishing pluralism from monism (777). Other prominent instances of their use occur in pu 645, 649. Although James is probably not alluding to a poem of Whitman’s which hinges on the distinction between “each” and “all,” the convergence of American literary and philosophical thought on these terms is nonetheless instructive, no less demonstrative of an inscribed historical continuity. The Whitman poem, entitled “Starry Union,” while unpublished until well after Varieties, depicts the relation of the one and the many as one of ambivalent tension rather than easy complementarity: “Union all! O its Union all! / O its all for each/one, & each/one for all!” (lg 673). 13. As James writes in Pragmatism, we “must equally abjure absolute monism and absolute pluralism. The world is One just so far as its parts hang together by any definite connexion. It is many just so far as any definite connexion fails to obtain” (554). Elsewhere James explains that what he objects to is not unity per se but the “dogmatic rigoristic” claim of idealists and absolutists that unity must be monistic in character: “Provided you grant some separation among things . . . [pluralism] is satisfied, and will allow you any amount, however great, of real union” (pu 556). Admittedly, James’s position has been read as incoherent or logically inconsistent. James scholar Marcus Ford argues, as I do, that Jamesian pluralism is less than absolute, that for James “unity does not exclude variety,” and so disparates may, indeed, be “separate and together at the same time” (51, 52). While this description concurs with my term unity-in-variety, I do not agree with Ford’s assertion that James’s efforts to “establish a middle way between the complete disunion of all things and their complete union”constitute a failure (56).Ford finds noble 274 Notes to Page 162

but futile James’s attempt to resolve the monist and pluralist assertions that relations are either wholly internal or wholly external. Such a resolution rests on the “assumption . . . that what is true of successive events must also be true of contemporary events,” an assumption for which Ford finds no ground: Even if one weakens the claim to “What is true of successive states may also be true of contemporary states,”one is at a loss to find examples where this seems to be the case. One may point to the “experience-of-the-pastin-the-present” and to the “anticipation-of-the-future-in-the-present” but are there examples of “two-separate-experiences-experiencing-together” that one can also point to? I think not. Indeed, if two things could be both separate from each other and, at the same time, not separate, in what sense are they actually separate things at all? (53–54) But in contending that Jamesian pluralism, despite its best efforts, “is finally a form of metaphysical monism,” Ford seems to have misread or overlooked the “examples” to the contrary “that one can . . . point to” in James (54). First, with the language of successive/contemporary events, Ford is alluding to James’s argument for unity-in-variety by the “interdigitation” of reality, the claim that our experience is not divisible into clear units but is, instead, like a log “which takes two men to carry it”; although “carried first by William and Henry, then William, Henry, and John, then by Henry and John, then by John and Peter,” the log “never drops, and keeps its sameness throughout the journey” (pu 748, 762). The log has relations to each of its carriers or each group of carriers; one might say it enters into a series of unions with them. But still, the log is never united materially with them; thus Ford’s insinuation that two things can never be “both separate . . . and, at the same time, not separate” is unwarranted. The second example James provides of how “two things may be both separate and together,” again, seems clear enough, although Ford fails to mention it. For the purposes of this study, it is the example: federalism. In A Pluralistic Universe, James writes that “[t]hings are ‘with’ one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. . . . Something always escapes . . . the best attempts . . . at attaining all-inclusiveness. The pluralistic world is thus more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom” (776; emphasis added). The hybridism of Jamesian pluralism, which Ford regards as a shortcoming and ultimately a detriment, is a conscious, direct means of addressing the problem of the one and the many in the concrete terms of social formation (e pluribus unum). The federal model would no doubt fail to satisfy those like Ford whose foremost concern is theoretical consistency. For James, federalism is the most valid and useful kind of theory, because,like unity-in-variety,it deals with the practical — hoping,ideally,that “unity need not exclude plurality” but also working to secure that materially Note to Page 162 275

by modeling institutions that permit both external and internal relations,both distinction and integrity (Ford 51). 14. As an embodiment of a “firm league of friendship . . . for common defence [and] security,” the Articles do not engage with the problematic of unity but, in so doing, create the practical problem of instability and ineffectiveness (dc 954). The Constitution, which creates a centralized national government (“Union” is capitalized as it had not been in the Articles), provides the structural and administrative stability lacked by the confederacy of states. 15. “The Lord’s Supper.” 16.Such indifferent regard for authorization,and thus for the exclusive claim of an institution or social order, would not have been acceptable to James’s predecessors, those for whom pluralism was a palpable threat not simply to intellectual life but to the continued life of the State. See Paul Connerton on the theorization of social or collective memory (and its corollary, forgetting). 17. It is interesting to note that, while scholarship that puts James to sociological uses (see Horace Kallen’s Culture and Democracy in the United States [1924]) has traditionally, though wrongly, given pluralism pride of place in James’s work, critics grounded more strictly in philosophy err too far in the opposite direction by reading James’s commitment to unity with extreme prejudice — indeed, to the exclusion of — his concomitant dedication to variety. Commenting on the history of James criticism, Seigfried writes, “For too long the understanding of philosophy as a quest for unity has gone unchallenged.James argued that unity is only one of the primordial drives of the intellect, the other one being a drive to become acquainted . . . with detailed particularity. He revalued the privileging of the systematizing passion of close observation and description by approaching the issue pragmatically. What was then demonstrated was that neither interest is more valuable or more definitive of a concretely situated rationality” (71). 18. According to James, when individuals “experience union with something larger” than themselves, either singly or in a group, they feel themselves to be “co-conscious” with a “wider world of being,” “coterminous with a more” or a “higher power” which can be either a divine being or a social collective (vre 468; pu 762; vre 467, 454). 19.The modernism of James’s interests is exemplified by the fact that what he is attempting to do in this world and in discourse (to preserve heterogeneity within a whole) had traditionally been only conceived and depicted as occurring in the eschaton (see Dante’s vision of the Rose of Heaven: “So over the light and round and round did I / See mirrored on a thousand tiers all those / Of us permitted to return on high. / And if the least degree so greatly glows, / What measure shall suffice for the amplitude / Of the extremest petals of this Rose?” [Paradiso, Canto XXX.112–117]). 276 Notes to Page 164

20.At the time James was writing,idealism and absolutism had established a firm foothold in both American and Continental philosophy and had maintained it, thanks largely to the efforts of F. H. Bradley and Josiah Royce (at Oxford University and at the University of California at Berkeley, respectively).In a fight against an incumbent — one,moreover,whose success James attributed to the Hegelian bias of contemporary American and British philosophy (vre 403)— it is only logical that James should queer his rhetorical pitch, matching his opponents’ “rigorous” monism with an equally exaggerated pluralism (pu 556). In the heat of the argumentative moment, consequently, it is easy to forget that James is arguing not against unity of any kind but merely against the claim to absolute unity (see P 554, pu 556). 21. James’s Pragmatism (1907) describes a “world imperfectly unified still,” one “in which we find things partly joined and partly disjoined” and in which neither unity nor plurality is “primordial,” “essential,” or superior (556–557, 546). Nonetheless, James is far from denying the extent to which we do unify, or at least impose patterns of coherence, on our experience. 22. Producing unities is a necessity for the bare apprehension of reality, and thus easily becomes a habit, a means of making more complex phenomena conform to a pleasurable and comprehensible pattern. Cf. Varieties: [O]rder and disorder, as we now recognize them, are purely human inventions. We are interested in certain types of arrangement, useful, aesthetic, or moral,— so interested that whenever we find them realized, the fact emphatically rivets our attention. The result is that we work over the contents of the world selectively. It is overflowing with disorderly arrangements from our point of view, but order is the only thing we care for and look at, and by choosing, one can always find some sort of orderly arrangement in the midst of any chaos. If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them,leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand,and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature are just like this. She is a vast plenum in which our attention draws capricious lines in innumerable directions. (vre 393n) 23.For Melville and Poe,hierarchy is an inevitable constitutional problem. By reading economy onto polity in Moby-Dick, Melville realizes hierarchy as a problematic of American economic as well as constitutional settlement. Whitman, like James, acknowledges hierarchy as a perceptual requirement and a precondition of unity. But whereas Whitman hopes to minimize that requirement by the managed sacrifice of difference, James is opposed to the elision of difference practiced by imperialism and, worse, by what appears to be the epistemological blindness of all men. Notes to Pages 164‒165 277

24. The extreme form of unionism represented by Abraham Lincoln was formed by him pretty much out of whole cloth; that is, the idea of unity at all costs, such that individual interest is entirely subjugated to the integrity of the state, did not exist prior to that in a fully articulated form (or at least not in this unilateral form). Lincoln declares the Union to be perpetual not only because union is a “universal” as well as a constitutional law but also because the authors of the Articles and the Constitution say it is perpetual. Since “the intention of the law-giver is the law,” the original intention of union by the whole (the people, by proxy) nullifies any subsequent “resolves and ordinances” by parts of that whole (First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1861, sw2 217; Message to Special Session of Congress, 4 July 1861, sw2 217, 216, 218). In the “House Divided”speech (July 1858),Lincoln puts unionism in its most extreme form: speaking of a Union that is currently “half slave and half free,” torn between the interests of the one and the many, or what he later calls the “principle[s] of generality, and locality,” he says “it [the Union] will become all one thing, or all the other” (sw1 426; Message to Congress in Special Session, sw2 257; sw1 426). The historical process of secularization which we have been following flows, then, through Lincoln’s own conception of civil religion. Coined by Rousseau (The Social Contract [1762], book 4, chapter 8) but given modern currency in American studies by sociologist Robert Bellah, “civil religion” entails the “worship of a higher reality that upholds the standards the republic attempts to embody” (“Legitimation” 13). For Lincoln, there is but one standard, or transcendent principle to which social formation must conform: Union, the integrity of the One. Though Lincoln seldom speaks about religion, he represents the Civil War, a struggle of polity, in religious terms, especially in the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address. It is this understanding of religious symbolism serving as a means for reconciling secular authority with ultimate truths that enables us to make the proper sense of Lincoln’s quasi-theocratic conviction that intention is its own enforcement as well as of his multiple references to divine law and divine will (Speech at Steubenville, Ohio, 14 February 1861, ld 194–195; Address to the State Senate at Trenton, New Jersey, 21 February 1861, sw2 209; First Inaugural Speech, sw2 223; Proclamation of a National Feast Day,sw2 264; Meditation on Divine Will, sw2 359; and Second Inaugural Speech, sw2 686–687). Civil religion allows Lincoln to equivocate on the matter of whose side, North or South, God is on. It also provides him, in the Second Inaugural, with a framework for laying responsibility for the war (that of causing it and now of repairing the damage) at the feet of both sides. Most fundamentally, however, civil religion entails the reinvestment in social order of the privilege formerly invested in the divine; and Lincoln forms another link in this historical process of secularization. As exemplified by his 278 Note to Page 165

words to a Southern woman whose prisoner-of-war husband he had just released, Lincoln subjugated religious order to civil, or secular, order: “You may say your husband is a religious man . . . but . . . in my opinion, the religion that sets men to rebel and fight against their government,because,as they think, that government does not sufficiently help some men to eat their bread on the sweat of other men’s faces, is not the sort of religion upon which people get to heaven!” (sw2 663). More to the point, it is not the kind of religion upon which people can forge a Union.Lincoln’s civil religion comprises,then, the re-theologization (or quasi-theologization) of America. As unswervingly monistic as Lincoln’s Unionism is, it is a logical successor to Emerson’s distancing of religious authority in “The Lord’s Supper.” The extremes of privileging the one versus privileging the many are born out of the same process. 25. “From William James, Professor of Psychology, Harvard University,” Congressional Record — House, 28, Part I (28 December 1895), 399; and unheaded letter, Harvard Crimson (9 January 1896), 4. Both are reproduced in ecr, 151–153, retitled as “Letter to the Hon. Samuel W. McCall on the Venezuelan Crisis” and “Answer to Roosevelt on the Venezuelan Crisis.” 26. The letters total eight in number: “The Philippine Tangle,” Boston Evening Transcript (1 March 1899), 16; unheaded letter (retitled “The Philippine Question” in ecr), Boston Evening Transcript (4 March 1899); “The Philippines Again,” New York Evening Post (10 March 1899), 4; “Governor Roosevelt’s Oration,” Boston Evening Transcript (15 April 1899); “Diary of a French Naval Officer: Observations at Manila,” Springfield Daily Republican (4 June 1900), 5; “Views of Prof. Blumentritt,” Springfield Daily Republican (2 July 1900), 5; “Secretary Taft a Biased Judge,” Boston Evening Transcript (2 May 1904), 10; and “Professor James on Philippine Independence,” New York Evening Post (21 May 1904), 4. All of the above are reprinted in ecr, 154–169, 176–181. 27. Freud’s concept of a narcissism of least difference speaks to the same concern, encompassing all our ugliest hatreds. This type of narcissism desires what it cannot have (no difference) and most often at the point of most difference. 28. “The Philippine Question,” Boston Evening Transcript (4 March 1899).It seems significant that James begins his popularization of pragmatism (first in a UC Berkeley lecture entitled “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results” [1898]) at the same time he is becoming alarmed enough about U.S. annexationist policy to join the Anti-Imperialist League (in 1899). 29. Letter to William M. Salter, September 11, 1899. The letter to Sarah Whitman is dated June 18, 1902. 30. This shift, which is a shift not away from the problem of the unification of disparates but rather in the terms of the problem, would come to be characteristic of modernism, the movement of which James is on the forward edge. Notes to Pages 168‒169 279

31. Discounting biographical factors does not mean, however, that we might not be able to locate a sociohistorical motive for James, some visible experience of fanaticism (before the Spanish-American War) that frightened him into such a conspicuously driven point of view as he made pluralism. 32. Much of the Address is what we might expect of anti-imperialist propaganda. In typical rhetoric, James cites the disastrous effects, for both sides, of the American presence in the Philippines: “torture whitewashed,massacre condoned,” “the inoculation [sic] of Manila with a floating Yankee scum,” (pq 1131). James also gives his advice for inducing an as yet undecided American government to grant the Philippines independence as they had just granted it to Cuba in the 1902 Platt Amendment: a grassroots effort to “circulate . . . phrases” in favor of Filipino independence “so that the public ear become inured” and, directly or indirectly, congressional minds persuaded (pq 1134). As confident as James is in the power of public opinion and discussion (“Constant dropping wears the marble. Phrases repeated have a way of turning into facts” [pq 1134]), the balance of James’s hopes for the preservation of pluralism rest in what he conceives to be the inability of any unifying structure (institutional or intellectual) to consistently, perpetually, and thoroughly combat heterogeneity. 33. Inasmuch as not every “morsel” one swallows is digestible, much less assimilable,the analogy is not technically false; given James’s interest in claiming that some differences are unassimilable,it is odd that James does not bring up this obvious point. 34. “The Philippine Tangle,” Boston Evening Transcript (1 March 1899), 16. 35. Of the many reasons America held on to the Philippines for so long, foremost was the naval base it provided in the Pacific theater. The evidence that James is being sarcastic in regard to “teaching . . . the Filipinos to be ‘fit’ for rule” (pq 1130), aside from the evidence of the scare quotes, is abundant in his newspaper editorials: “We can easily protect them against foreign interference; and if they fail to be good exactly according to our notions, is not the world full even now of other people of whom the same can be said, and for whose bad conduct toward one another we agree that it would be folly to make ourselves responsible” (ecr 180; “Secretary Taft a Biased Judge,” Boston Evening Transcript [2 May 1904], 10). 36. “Diary of a French Naval Officer: Observations at Manila,” Springfield Daily Republican (4 June 1900), 5. The title of this editorial refers to the partial translation James had made of an eyewitness account of events in the Philippines. 37. Although any imperative to unity, whether of a monist or variety type, has a character that is unethical from James’s particular form of extreme liberalism, James’s conviction that unity is inevitable and necessary in some min280 Notes to Pages 169‒173

imal, perceptual and/or cognitive form leads him, in Varieties, to attempt a compromise between extreme liberalism and extreme monism in the concept of unity-in-variety. 38. James cautions us against inferring from pluralism the lack of any unifying factors: “Please note that pluralism need not be supposed to stand for any particular kind or amount of disconnection between the many things which it assumes. It only has the negative significance of contradicting monism’s thesis that there is absolutely no disconnection” (sp 1041). 39. These are also the terms in which Plotinus founds his solution to the problem of the one and the many. Like James, Plotinus argues both for an imperative to unity (“from many, we must become one”) and also for the plausibility, truth, and pleasing character of unity-in-variety (“unity in plurality” or “identity in variety”) as a model of relation that provides integrity without a “complete negation of multiplicity” (VI.9.3, §5, p. 700; IV.9.5, §8, p. 421; IV.9.2, §6, p. 419). 40. The inevitability of hierarchy is expressive of some kind of coercive unity, which Christianity thins out by stating the idea of the Trinity but fails to purge of its monistic element. 41. “The Philippines Again,” New York Evening Post (10 March 1899), 4. The fable of the hippopotamus resurfaces with a more hopeful outcome in the children’s books of Dr.Seuss,particularly Horton Hatches the Egg (1940) and Horton Hears a Who! (1954). Horton is an elephant, not a hippopotamus,but his decision in the first book to hatch an abandoned bird’s egg seems just as preposterous to his fellow animals as the hippo’s does to James. The fact that, when Horton’s adopted egg hatches, the chick is more elephant than bird (having the wings of a bird but the trunk, feet, ears, and tail of an elephant) implies that relation (or, in the most pessimistic light, colonialism) is merely a matter of surrogacy. By contrast, Horton Hears a Who! follows the elephant’s quest to protect a civilization of “small persons” populating a speck of dust from the great harm that is apt to befall something so tiny in a jungle. Unable to see these “small persons,” Horton’s fellow animals believe him to be insane and want to cage him and destroy the speck of dust in order to restore him to sanity. Horton’s eventual success in convincing his fellow animals (or rather, the tiny people’s success — for it is they who must make all the noise they can in order to be heard and to prove their existence) provides the equation that cognizance of the fact that, as Horton says, “A person’s a person. No matter how small,” produces tolerance. Although this second story might be read more distrustfully, as a whitewash of the relationship between a protectorate and its protector, the idea that multiplicity ensures its own protection is not something one finds in James (at least not in the Philippine writings). Notes to Pages 173‒176 281

42. “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” delivered at the University’s Philosophical Union, 26 April 1898; printed in the University Chronicle (Fall 1898) and later that year as a pamphlet by the University Press. A shortened version was printed as “The Pragmatic Method,” Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods (December 1904). 43. Rather than the idea of pragmatism tout court, James means a pragmatic approach to the problem of the one and the many. 44. James never gives a definite name to the philosophical position he is crafting in Varieties and A Pluralistic Universe. The term “pluralistic pantheism,” although extrapolated from James’s prose (he argues for “pluralistic panpsychism”and against “monistic ...pantheism”[pu 772,640]) and rightly used by critics like Henry Levinson (250) and Marcus Ford (40), has a religious timbre that seems restrictive compared to the more general, theoretical term I am offering, unity-in-variety. After all, Pluralistic Universe and Some Problems in Philosophy are emanations of a concept initially applied to the spiritual kind of unity particular to religious experience which developed into a theorization of unity in a variety of forms (social, political, and intellectual) and degrees (ranging from the physical to the conceptual). The other Jamesian catchphrase which I am not using deserves mention. “Radical empiricism” is the term James offers to describe his philosophical commitment to be “fair to both the unity and the disconnection”and yet admit that “there appear to be actual forces at work which tend, as time goes on, to make the unity greater”(“A World of Pure Experience,”Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, 29 September and 13 October 1904; rpt. in Writings, 1902–1910, 1162). I prefer to speak of unity-in-variety so as to avoid disputes, which lie outside the scope and interest of this study, over James’s relation to the empiricist school and, more importantly, to demonstrate the continuity of James’s concept with foregoing American thought about the problem of the one and the many as a culturally central,hard problem that is philosophical rather than merely social. Unity-in-variety describes the pursuit by individuals of their own, equally valuable and valid ways of relating to a transcendent spiritual prinicple. It is only when James tries to make this a model for social cohesion that it fails to take. 45. To understand unity-in-variety, it helps to identify it negatively. It is not, for example, comparable to the quasi-mystical Hegelian notion that the “world is both one and many, many in one” and that the disparities inherent in manyness are but “mediating aspects of that higher concept,” the One, the “absolute whole of wholes” (pc 1092, pu 674). The Hegelian Absolute Mind may seem to provide the welcome transcendent term that a secularized American culture lacks, but the unity James means does not involve synthesis, which, to his mind, amounts to the evasion rather than the resolution of 282 Notes to Pages 177‒178

the contradictions represented (if in an oversimplified fashion) by Hegel’s dialectic.Neither does the Jamesian concept of unity involve the monistic concatenation of subjects and objects in a physical, materialist manner. In either case, unity would not be problematic: one is either pretending to reduce the many into one and producing only symbolic unity, or actually doing it and producing a real unity in which disparates no longer exist.What makes it problematic is the accompanying desire to preserve variety,the desire to unify without completely violating constituent identity; inasmuch as this desire also underwrites the federal project, we see how unity-in-variety sophisticates the federal project, or rather, our understanding of it. The conflict of interests, as the Constitutional delegates might put it, between the one and the many is not, James is telling us, the problem. The problem is that the terms within which American federalism, and within which James also, chooses to solve it (achieving unity without eliding variety) are themselves problematic and render the problem of the one and the many insoluble. And that is not at all, for James, a misfortune — at least not in Varieties, where he is able to construct a model in which coherence and differentiation do not cancel one another out. If the Philippine Address weighs the benefits of unification against a particular means of accomplishing it (imperialism), Varieties theorizes how one might go about producing unity in a form less coercive of the definition of its constituents, a unity that is not so much imposed upon disparates as a constitutive or substantial alteration as it is observed as a state of affairs that already exists, in a mitigated and always less than absolute form, between them. 46. Unification by the telescoping of the many into the one (literalized as the self) occurs most drastically in Whitman’s “Poem of Many in One” (1856) when the poet asks, “The Many In One — what is it finally except myself ? / These States — what are they finally except myself ?” (“Chants Democratic,” Leaves of Grass: Facsimile Edition of the 1860 Text, 125). 47. “Poem of Many in One” (1856), rpt. as “Chants Democratic,” Leaves of Grass: Facsimile Edition of the 1860 Text, 109. 48. James singles out the line “What is called good is perfect, and what is called bad is just as perfect” (from “To Think of Time,” 8.114, lg 439) as exemplifying Whitman’s “indiscriminate hurrahing for the Universe,” his “insist[ence]” — which James reads as either disingenuous, dishonest, or simply naive — “that what immediately appears as evil must be ‘good in the making’” (ec 1124, vre 85). This and the many other memorable moments at which Whitman embraces evil are also those at which he effectively evacuates it — and his gesture — of any substance: “I make the poem of evil also . . . / I am myself just as much evil as good . . . — I say there is in fact no evil” (“Starting from Paumanok,” lg 19). In “Song of Myself,” in an equally sweeping fashion, he declares the “earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good” (lg 35). Notes to Pages 181‒182 283

The problem of the existence of evil is the main factor that motivates James, in his refusal to be so disingenuous as Whitman, who “deliberately excludes evil from [his] field of vision,” to formulate pantheistic pluralism (unity-invariety), and not to value “once-born” religions like Christian Science as highly (as being as authentic) as “twice-born” religions like the majority of Protestant sects, especially American revivalist sects (vre 86). 49. Similarly, in A Pluralistic Universe James argues that “the collective and the distributive ways of being coexist,” that the “absolute sum-total of things may never be actually experienced or realized [as an ‘absolute totality’],and that a disseminated,distributed,or incompletely unified appearance is the only form that reality may yet have achieved” (761, 649). 50. Lincoln’s civil religion of Unionism at all costs and James’s unity-invariety embody the most developed form of two solutions to the problem of the one and the many. In his seminal 1967 essay entitled “Civil Religion in America,” Robert Bellah uses the term “civil religion” to refer to particular “institutionalized ways of dealing with” the “potentially conflicting claims” between religious and secular claims to legitimacy, that is, between temporal or “political authority” and religious claims to a transcendent truth or “ultimate meaning” (Introduction viii, x). These concerns are hardly unique to America; they had also occupied many before Lincoln, but few before him had rendered their contradictions so clearly and shown them to be so fundamental to American sociocultural formation: namely, the implications of ascribing the privilege of religious truth to what was reconceived as not only a divine but also a secular virtue (unity) and invested in a specific version of the state (the Union). American civil religion amounts, for Rousseau, to an “ideology at once transcendent but focused on the nation-state,” “the handmaiden of neither the church nor the state” (Hammond, “Conditions” 77). Lincoln’s Union exemplifies the contradictory American commitment both to what Bellah calls “republican virtue” (the sacrifice of private interest for the good of the state) and also to liberalism (the pursuit and guarding of private interest at the cost of public participation in the state).Seeking to repress the revolutionary aspect of the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln urges Americans to pledge their allegiance to the Constitution. But both documents are themselves doubly committed to republicanism and to liberalism: the signers of the Declaration pledged their solidarity to the republic, but they also committed themselves to the proposition that “all men are created equal,” a phrase that is easily taken to its liberalist extreme of, paradoxically, rejecting the claims of the state in favor of the individual’s self-interest. By contrast, the Constitutional delegates were motivated by republicanism as they sought to solidify the integrity of the Union and by liberalism as, simultaneously, they sought to ensure that the whole did not violate the rights of 284 Notes to Pages 183‒184

its constituents (thus, the Bill of Rights). Lincoln’s civil religion means to resolve this contradiction by urging Americans to fight a war that is at once a war for the Union and a war for the fulfillment of the equality proposition, the “new birth of freedom” he speaks of at Gettysburg (sw2 536; for a further example of this double commitment, compare the 1861 Message to Congress [sw2 258–259, 261] with the 1856 Republican Banquet Speech [sw1 386]). Civil religion in the American case, then, differs from other instances of civil religion Bellah and Hammond examine; American civil religion is the means not of reconciling rival claims by church and state but of reconciling the state with itself. There is, however, no doubt as to how Lincoln wishes the reconciliation to occur — liberalism and self-interest sacrificed to republicanism and the state; the interests of the many, to the interests of the one. But James’s model of unity-in-variety does not, as one might expect embody the antithetical commitment to liberalism, pluralism, and the many. On the contrary, James’s model strikes the middle ground and is so, more than Lincoln’s Unionism, an instance of true reconciliation and therefore, in the terms Bellah sets out, the more successful civil religion. This is not to say that Lincoln was not a “great civil theologian” but that he was not “our only” one (“Legitimation” 12, 15). James has the liberty of indulging pluralism that Lincoln does not, and therefore Lincoln’s solution is not so much a reconciliation of contradictory allegiances to the one and the many as a resolution of that conflict in favor of the one. Lincoln makes this prejudice clear in the 1838 Lyceum Address when he urges that allegiance to the “Constitution and [its] Laws . . . be preached from the pulpit” as “the political religion of the nation,” upon whose “altars” all Americans are to “sacrifice unceasingly” (sw1 32). While Bellah might disagree with me in calling James our second great civil theologian, by Bellah’s terms it is arguable that Varieties, along with James’s subsequent texts, theorizes the dual commitment of American social formation more accurately than Lincoln could afford to do. And while hardly proof of my claim, it is ironic but fitting that the title of Bellah and Hammond’s book, Varieties of Civil Religion, so nicely mirrors James’s. Indeed, Lincoln’s and James’s solutions to the one-and-the-many problematic are both projects of civil religion; Lincoln and James are our two great civil theologians. 51. Not surprisingly, James considers what he calls “double-storied” religious experiences to be more valid, that is, more capable of accomplishing the necessary healing, than single-storied experiences (typified by Christian Science). Single-storied religion posits evil to be the resultant of a state of mind and therefore easily overcome by positive, cheerful thoughts. Doublestoried religion, which includes the majority of Protestant sects, defines the religious experience as the acceptance of evil as an inexorable fact the overNotes to Page 185 285

coming, or at least the combating, of which provides the experience with a narrative form and makes religion a means of transformation rather than an accident of birth and disposition. “In the religion of the twice-born,” James writes, “the world is a double-storied mystery”; “their redemption is into a universe two stories deep. Each of them has realized a good which broke the effective edge of his sadness; yet the sadness was preserved as a minor ingredient in the heart of the faith by which it was overcome”(vre 155,174; emphases added). A “man must die to an unreal life before he can be born into the real life” (vre 154), yet that unreal life must be retained, at least remembered, as the proof of deliverance and the evidence of change. 52. James follows the notion of interfusion to the farthest extreme possible without positing unity as a static, absolutist regime that denies change and elides difference: “Without being one throughout, such a universe is continuous. Its members interdigitate with their next neighbors in manifold directions, and there are no clean cuts between them anywhere” (pu 748). 53. While 1899 is the date of the two lectures’ publication in Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” had been delivered in various forms at Bryn Mawr and Stanford in April and September 1898, respectively; “What Makes a Life Significant,” at an “Episcopal theological school” sometime in October of the same year (James, Letter to wife Alice [October 22, 1898], cited in Writings, 1878–1899 1171). 54. Fortunately, though many of us are aware of our blindness, few of us can act accordingly, since that would mean not acting, not being active, at all. Ironically, it is those who can do so (the prophets and mystics among whom James counts Whitman and Emerson) whose complete impartiality renders them unfit for the social world: deprived by interest in any one point of view by their equal valuing of all points of view, they are practically paralyzed, volitionally inert. afterword 1. Even though Plotinus was available in the eighteenth century in both Latin and English translations, the Latin equivalent of “from many, we must become one” (“unum ex multis evadere”) rules out Plotinus as the literal source of the motto on the Great Seal (Plotini Enneades 531). 2. C. W. Foster’s interpretation of the Magazine’s motto more closely fits the American sense: both a magazine and a committee-born entity like the American state can be thought of as a “product [that is] the work of many hands” (799). Still, one wonders to what extent a consciousness of the federal project colors Foster’s judgment.

286 Notes to Pages 185‒198

3. Salmagundi was the collaborative effort of Irving, his brother William, and James Kirke Paulding, and, since modern editors do not attribute the letter quoted here (no.7) to Washington Irving,it is the work of either his brother or Paulding. 4.The Franklin connection is further strengthened by his daughter’s being a seller and distributor of the Magazine in London and his nephew Benjamin Mecom’s having appropriated both of its mottoes (e pluribus unum and Prodesse et Delectare) for the short-lived New England Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure (1758). To the familiar mottoes-and-bouquet design, Mecom added the original couplet, “Alluring Profit with Delight we blend; / One, out of many, to the Public send” (qtd. in Deutsch 402). 5.Formally speaking,compositional unity is the reciprocal of federal unity: prima facie, it would seem that compositional unity appeals to us because it answers our requirements for reality; beyond that, its appeal stems perhaps from its functionality (as it does for Lincoln and James). 6. A commitment to unity is, in its incipience, a theological issue, an old mystery appropriated by the Christian church in the Middle Ages. Reproduced as the idea of the Trinity — the seemingly unanswerable question “How can three be one?”— it becomes the very type of the Divine (cf. Aquinas), a good, privileged thing to be. 7. More remains to be said about the theorization of money, about what intentions and desires are involved in writing on money, and what difference it makes whether that money is national or local.Cf.Georg Simmel,Philosophy of Money (1907). 8. Actually, New Jersey initially favored amending the Articles over writing a new constitution. Although many states were dissatisfied with the Articles’ decentralized plan, New Jersey delegates offered a plan that would extend the powers of the existing Congress, which was a thirteen-man committee of states as opposed to the more distinct, autonomous body that delegates with more extreme federalist inclinations wished to create. Opponents of the New Jersey plan argued that it would not alter the present situation because individual states could still not be held accountable to any authority outside themselves. While certainly not as extreme as the Constitution in terms of centralization, the New Jersey plan still offered an account of unity that was more centralized than that of the Articles.In speaking of New Jersey’s federalist sympathies, then, it must be understood that we are dealing with more than one account of federalism, more than a single structure for unity. While New Jersey’s prenational use of e pluribus unum signals a predisposition to unity on the state level (New Jersey was the second of the thirteen colonies to adopt a provincial constitution), on the national level it demon-

Notes to Pages 198‒202 287

strates a marked willingness to commit to a version of unity, to enter a federal state (although not the more hierarchical state framed in the Constitution). 9. We are dealing here with something that arises in political theory at a certain stage of the development of a complex population: the unification within some affinity of otherwise (and already) autonomous units. A useful language for discussing the unity of units as opposed to the unity within each of those units is that developed by biblical criticism in discussing the phratry, or the group identity produced in the unification of the Twelve Tribes of ancient Israel. 10. Likewise, the broadest exemplification of these authors’ approach to the one-and-the-many problem is a dialectical opposition in which the poles represent one or more of the following extremes: regional-national, statefederal, republican-colonial, agrarian-capitalist, and individual-classist or individual-sectarian.

288 Notes to Page 202

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Index Adams, John, 4, 198 Althusser, Louis, 157–158 American and Foreign Bible Society, 100 American Bible Society, 99–101 American Bible Union, 100 Anderson, Quentin, 248n41 Andriano, Joseph, 255n5 Anthony, Susan B., 13 Antifederalists, 40, 58, 62, 65, 69, 149–151, 163, 202 Aristotle, 157, 197 Arnold, David Scott, 123 Articles of Confederation, 3, 12, 20, 25, 31, 38, 51, 53, 55, 61–66, 69, 71, 76–77, 149–150, 164, 195, 200–201, 204–205 Barlow, Philip, 251n55 Barton, John, 217n21 Baur, Ferdinand, 216n21 Bellah, Robert, 278n24, 284n50 Bellis, Peter J., 129 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 7, 11–12, 218n25 Bezanson, Walter, 122 Bible: 19th-century translations of, 99–100; higher criticism and, 22–24; King James Version (Authorized Version), 24, 78, 98–100. See also New American Bible; New Bible body-soul dialogue, 80 Book of Common Prayer, The, 25, 75

Book of Mormon, The, 27, 205 Bourdieu, Pierre, 248n43 Bradfield, Scott, 47, 49 Bradley, F. H., 164 Brainard, John G. C., 58 Bridgewater, William Whewell, 44 Broadway Journal, The, 59 Brodtkorb, Paul, Jr., 123 Browne, Thomas, 257n15 Bryant, John, 121 Burton’s (magazine), 59 Bush, George W., 206–207 Calhoun, John, 164, 232n39 Cameron, Sharon, 212n6 Campbell, Alexander, 100–102 Cantalupo, Barbara, 44 Carey, John, 197 Castronovo, Russ, 206 Chambers, Robert, 43 Christian Science. See Science and Health Civil War, 13, 18, 20, 39, 67, 73, 89, 96, 112, 155 Coinage Act of 1792, 202 Compromise of 1820, 15, 20, 74 Compromise of 1850, 6, 15, 58, 74, 77, 92, 127, 205 Conant, Matthew, 100, 106 Cone, Spencer, 100, 102 Confederacy (CSA), 73 Continental Congress, 198–200 cosmology: 19th-century theories of, 42–43; contemporary physics

cosmology (continued ) and, 192. See also Edgar Allan Poe: cosmological theory Cowan, Bainard, 256n12 Dante, 276n19 Davis, R. Evan, 260n23, 260n24 de Laplace, Simon, 42 Declaration of Independence, 2–3, 12–13, 15, 18–20, 23, 25, 31, 38, 52–53, 58, 62–64, 69, 76–77, 92, 117, 171, 173–175, 184, 195, 198, 204 Descartes, 157 Deseret, 164 Deutsch, Monroe E., 197 Dewey, John, 128 Dickinson, Emily, 35 Dickinson, John, 76, 195 Dimock, Wai-Chee, 122, 137, 265n39 Donne, John, 34 Douglass, Frederick, 13–15, 35 Dred Scott decision, 6, 35–36 DuBois, W. E. B., 13 Dumont, Louis, 31–32 Du Simitière, Pierre, 199–200 e pluribus unum: Melville and, 115, 127, 149; Poe and, 60; possible origins of phrase, 196–202; as U.S. motto, 1, 3, 10, 14, 17, 30, 46, 60, 94, 150, 156, 194, 197–202; Whitman and, 71, 82, 88, 94; William James and, 183, 185 Edwards, Jonathan, 23 Emancipation Proclamation, 6 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 19; and individualization of religious authority, 184; “The Lord’s Supper,” 26–27, 56; Nature, 45; and religion, 59; Representative Men, 75–76; and Whitman, 76 310 Index

Erkkila, Betsy, 88–89 Evening Mirror, 59 federal engima, 18, 39, 166, 179 Federalist Papers, 2, 12, 18, 34, 58, 62, 66, 69, 126, 137, 145, 149–150, 154, 195 Ferguson, Robert, 12, 23, 196 Ford, Marcus, 274n13 Foster, C. W., 196 Founding documents, 3–4, 61; and judicial review, 4–5; supplementary relation of American literature to, 12, 50, 61. See also Articles of Confederation; Declaration of Independence; U.S. Constitution Franklin, Benjamin, 198–200 Franklin, H. Bruce, 260n23 Frazer, J. G., 161 Freud, Sigmund, 90–91 Fugitive Slave Clause, 3, 77 Fugitive Slave Law (1850). See Compromise of 1850 Fuller, Margaret, 13, 15, 17 genre, 37–38, 40–44 The Gentleman’s Jounal, 197 The Gentleman’s Magazine, 196–197, 199 George III, King of England, 62 Gibson, James J., 228n22 The Golden Bough, 161 Goodwyn, Cary, 259n22 Great Seal of the United States: designing of, 198–200; on U.S. currency, 202 Greenberg, Robert, 123 Grossman, Allen, 236n7 Habermas, Jürgen, 191 Hamilton, Alexander, 65–66, 195

Hammond, Phillip E., 284n50 Heimert, Alan, 122 Hendershot, Cyndy, 259–260n22 Herschel, John, 43 hierarchy: James on, 168; Poe on, 39–40, 47, 48–49, 53, 55, 61–62, 68–69; and U.S. Constitution, 64; Whitman on, 79 higher criticism, 78 Hocks, Richard, 130 Homer, 96 Horace, 197–198 imperialism. See William James: on imperialism Iraq, 207 Irving, Washington, 198 Irwin, John, 124, 227n7 James, William: “Address at Emerson Centenary,” 274n12; “Address on the Philippine Question,” 153, 156, 162, 166, 168–174, 186–188, 190–191; epistemological views of, 155–156, 188; on imperialism, 153–156, 163, 166–179, 192; “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” 153, 156, 162–163, 183, 186–187, 188–192; “The One and the Many,” 185; “The Philippines Again,” 153, 175–176; A Pluralistic Universe, 178, 186, 270n2, 274n12, 284n49; plurality in, 111, 153–156, 159–163, 166, 172–173, 180, 183–184; pragmatism, 155; Pragmatism, 156, 178, 274n13; Some Problems in Philosophy, 178, 183, 270n2; totality in, 156–158, 161; unity in, 153–154, 158–162, 164–168; on unity-in-variety, 162, 178–179,

186, 190; The Varieties of Religious Experience, 111, 153, 156, 158, 160–163, 178, 180–185, 187–188, 190, 205; “What Makes a Life Significant,” 153, 192 Jameson, Frederic, 9–10 Jay, John, 65, 195 Jefferson, Thomas, 76, 195, 198 Johnson, Barbara, 133, 141–142, 262n31 Kallen, Horace, 191 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 74, 92 Kant, Immanuel, 42–43 Kinnaird, John, 235–236n5 Kirby, David, 121 Larson, Kerry, 236n7, 243n27, 247n39 Lee, A. Robert, 257n16 Lee, Grace Farrell, 259n20 Lee, Robert E., 116 Levinas, Emmanuel, 271n4 Lèvi-Strauss, Claude, 9 Lincoln, Abraham, 33, 35, 73, 90–93, 95–97, 127, 136, 155, 165, 175, 184, 278n24, 284–285n50 Looby, Christopher, 198 Madison, James, 4, 65, 195 Matthiessen, F. O., 121 McCaslin, Susan, 44–45 Melville, Herman: Battle-Pieces, 115; Billy Budd, 15, 21, 34, 36, 111–115, 117, 126, 128–148, 151–153, 159, 179, 184, 205; Clarel, 113–114; The ConfidenceMan, 113; cosmology in, 115–118, 119–123; epistemological issues in, 141–145; homosexuality in, 142–145; inscrutability in, 125–126; judgment in, 142; legal Index 311

Melville, Herman (continued ) issues in, 139–141; letters of, 136; literary career of, 112, 115; Marginalia, 264n35; Moby-Dick, 21, 26, 36, 111–115, 117–129, 136, 148, 151–153, 159–160, 179, 184; moral interpretations, 139–142; necessity of sacrifice to unity, 127; “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,”137; phrenology in, 125; plurality in, 111, 135–136, 146–148; religion in, 112–113; sacrifice in, 145–146; social construction in, 126; Typee, 112; White-Jacket, 112 Milder, Robert, 264n37 Mizruchi, Susan, 129, 138 Moon, Michael, 239n15 Morgan, Edmund, 234n42 Morgan, Robert, 217n21 Mormons, 164. See also The Book of Mormon Morris, Gourverneur, 76, 195 Motteux, Pierre Antoine, 197–198 Nagel, Thomas, 32 Nathanson, Tenney, 244n28, 246n36 Nelson, Dana, 206 New American Bible, 25, 99, 183 New Bible, 98, 106. See also Walt Whitman: neo-Biblical project of New England Anti-Imperialist League, 168 Nicene Creed, 80 Nichol, John, 42 Noll, Mark, 215n16 Parker, Hershel, 136 party system, 58 Pease, Donald, 121 312 Index

Peirce, Charles, 128, 192 Penn Magazine, 59 Philippines, 166–177, 184, 206–207 phrenology: in Melville, 125; practitioners of: Fowler, O. S. and L. N., 125 Plato, 157 Plotinus (Enneads), 1–2, 8, 17, 94, 154, 195–196, 281n39 Poe, Edgar Allan: aristocratic attitudes of, 45; “The Bells,” 47; “Berenice,” 44; biographies of, 45–46; career as editor and reviewer, 59; “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” 36, 53; and copyright laws, 59; cosmological theory of, 39, 45, 50–51, 54–55; democracy in, 69–70; DrakeHalleck review, 48; editorial work for magazines, 59; “Eulalie,” 47; Eureka, 5, 10, 15–21, 28, 37–56, 58–61, 63, 66–70, 76, 94, 106, 111–112, 119–120, 125, 137, 155, 160, 178–181, 205; founder of documentary culture, 12, 58; and future of American literary culture, 59–60; hierarchy (“gradation”) in, 168; John G. C. Brainard review, 58; Letters, 37; “Man of the Crowd,” 46; “Mellonta Tauta,” 46, 70; Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 69; plans for own journal, 59, 70; question of genre in Eureka, 37–38, 42–44; race in, 233n40; “The Raven,” 47; relation of American literature to British tradition, 58–59; religion in, 59; and science, 39–40; slavery in, 67; “Some Words with a Mummy,” 46; theory of poetry,

38, 47–48, 60; “William Wilson,” 44 poetry and social construction, 46, 204 Poirier, Richard, 8 Possnock, Ross, 271n3 post-theological crisis, 19, 23–28, 37 “Publius,” 66, 195 Quine, W. V., 104–105 Quinn, Arthur H., 45 Rans, Geoffrey, 47 Reconstruction, 74, 82, 89, 115 Redfern, W. D., 265n40 religious sects,: Baptist, 78; Congregational, 6, 19, 24, 26, 59, 61, 78, 162, 164; Disciples of Christ, 78, 100–101; Methodist, 78; Mormon, 19, 27, 78, 205; Oneidan Perfectionist, 78; Seventh-Day Advenstist, 19, 78; Unitarian, 6, 19, 59, 61 Rodgers, Daniel, 10, 212n9 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 278n24 Royce, Josiah, 157, 164 Ruttenberg, Nancy, 270n48 Saint Augustine, 197 Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, 252n57 Schweber, S. S., 191–192 Science and Health, 206 Second Great Awakening, 24, 78 Sedgwick, Eve, 136–138 Seigfried, Charlotte, 276n17 Seuss, Dr. (Theodore Geisel), 281n41 Shakespeare, William, 34 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 226n15 Silverman, Kenneth, 45

Simmel, Georg, 287n7 slavery: as logical contradiction to equality, 23, 33–36; and political conflict over states’ rights, 13 Smith, Barbara, 191 Smith, Joseph. See The Book of Mormon Southern Literary Messenger, The, 59 Spanish-American War, 168 Spectator, The, 196 state formation, 6–7, 21–22, 24, 26, 29–36, 39–40 Stefanelli, Maria, 245n30, 253n70 Stern, Milton, 261n27 Strauss, David Frederich, 216–217n21 The Stylus, 59 Tatekani, Etsuko, 255n5 Thomas, Brook, 129, 141–142, 263n33 Thomson, Charles, 200 Thoreau, Henry David, 2, 13, 124 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 28, 31–32, 206–208, 229n24 Tompkins, Jane, 8 Toulmin, Stephen, 120 U.S. Congress, 64–65, 71, 116 U.S. Constitution, 3–5, 8, 12–15, 18, 20, 22, 24, 26, 33, 36, 38, 40, 46, 52–55, 58, 61–63, 65–66, 69–70, 76, 116–117, 137, 148–149, 163, 175, 195, 200–201, 204 U.S. Mint, 202 U.S. Supreme Court, 4–5, 58, 68 Vatke, Wilhelm, 216n21 Vietnam, 208 Virgil, 196–197 Von Humboldt, Alexander, 43 Index 313

Warner, Michael, 8 Washington, George, 46, 76 Weisberg, Richard, 140–141, 266n41 Welsh, Susan, 44 Wenke, John, 123 Wette, Wilhelm de, 216n21 Whewell, William, 44 Whitman, Walt: Autumn Rivulets, 71; Calamus, 71; catalogs in Leaves of Grass, 87–88; “Chants Democratic,” 109; and the Civil War, 89, 96–97; Christological imagery, 95–96; concept of U.S. as poem, 76; “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” 74, 84–90, 94; Democratic Vistas, 240n18; differentiation in, 71; Drum-Taps, 71, 90; “The Eighteenth Presidency!” 76; immersion in, 105; incorporation in, 87; Leaves of Grass, 5, 19, 26, 71–75, 111, 135, 180, 205; Leaves (1855 edition), 2, 84, 88, 95, 97, 107–108; Leaves (1856 edition), 84–89, 97; Leaves (1860 edition), 21, 72, 75–76, 79, 95, 98, 102, 108–109, 125, 205; Leaves (1867 edition), 89–90; on Lincoln, 72–73, 90–91, 96–97; mediation in the work of, 72, 78–80, 82, 86–88, 102–103; “Myself and Mine,” 253n68; on necessity of sacrifice for unity,

314 Index

90–91, 95–97, 127; neo-Biblical project of, 75–80, 95, 98; pluralization in, 71–72, 93; “Poem of Many in One,” 283n46, 283n47; on poet as priest, 79, 101; on poetry and social reconstruction, 91–92; Preface to 1855 edition, 78, 89; Preface to 1872 edition, 79; Preface to 1876 edition, 88–84; Prose Works, 71; “Proto-Leaf,” 245n32; on religion, 77–80; “Says,” 108; “Scented Herbage of My Breast,” 253n64; Sea-Drift, 71; “So Long!” 80, 87, 102–107; “Song of Myself,” 74, 80–84, 88–90, 97, 104, 108–109, 181; “Starry Union,” 274n72; strategies of social construction, 72, 104; “Starting from Paumanok,” 283n48; “To Think of Time,” 282n45; translation of, 104–108; “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” 73–74, 90, 93–97, 136, 191 Williams, Raymond, 8 Wilmot Proviso, 18, 92, 127 Wolin, Sheldon, 137, 149–150 Wosh, Peter, 106 Wyckoff, William, 100, 106 Ziff, Larzer, 8 Zoellner, Robert, 121