Abstract
In American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), F. O. Matthiessen sought to affirm America’s “rightful heritage in the whole expanse of culture and art” by “producing” an American literary “renaissance” commensurate with the nation’s rise to international power in the post–World War I period. Matthiessen’s influential study not only named a period and defined an American canon (Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman), it also set the critical, evaluative, national, and New England–centered terms within which future readings and interpretations of American literature would occur. While Matthiessen acknowledged that “the older liberalism was the background of my writers,” who were united by “their devotion to the possibilities of democracy,” his study banished politics to the margins in order to focus “entirely on the foreground,” by “evaluating their fusions of form and content” and “what these books were as works of art.” 1
Although the Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James offered a very different model of literary and political analysis in his pioneering study, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1951), Matthiessen’s more formalist and aesthetic focus on “the writing itself” became the predominant academic mode of American literary analysis during the Cold War years and beyond. It was not until the 1980s, under the influence of Paul Lauter and the Feminist Press’s “Reconstructing American Literature” project as well as the work of Terry Eagleton, Michel Foucault, and other poststructuralist theorists, that American literary critics began to turn with renewed interest to the political contexts and insights of classic American literature.
Perhaps under the influence of this “political” turn in American literary studies, and the increasing attentiveness to the role of language and textuality in constituting rather than merely reflecting knowledge, over the past few decades political theorists and philosophers have begun to turn to classic American writers such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman as serious philosophers and theorists of democracy. This “literary turn” among political theorists is particularly evident in the series of “political companions” to classic American writers published by the University Press of Kentucky over the past five years, including most recently A Political Companion to Walt Whitman, edited by John E. Seery, and A Political Companion to Herman Melville, edited by Jason Frank. 2 The expressed goal of these editions is simultaneously reflective, constitutive, generative, and aesthetic: to demonstrate how American political thought is represented by great American writers; to describe how the American polity’s understanding of such foundational ideals as democracy, equality, freedom, toleration, and fraternity has been shaped by classic American writers such as Whitman and Melville; to suggest the ways these writers continue to influence American political thought; and to elucidate the specifically aesthetic and affective power of great American literature in shaping and inspiring the American experiment with democracy.
Whereas in the past, Whitman’s politics would have been dismissed as irrelevant or even naïve, all of the theorists in Seery’s Political Companion approach Whitman as a poet actively engaged in the constitution of a democratic citizenry and community. Divided into three clusters—“Individuality and Connectedness,” “City Life and Bodily Place,” and “Death and Citizenship”—the volume begins appropriately with George Kateb’s foundational essay, “Walt Whitman and the Culture of Democracy,” originally published in Political Theory in 1990. Kateb introduces Whitman as a political philosopher in his opening sentences: “I think that Walt Whitman is a great philosopher of democracy. Indeed, he may be the greatest” (19). Reading Whitman’s major poem “Song of Myself” as “a work in political theory,” Kateb emphasizes “Democratic Individuality” in the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau as the central meaning of democratic culture in Whitman’s work (22). Whitman’s concept of the individual as multiple, composite, and “strange” becomes the means through which individuals are connected to others in a democratic rights-based polity. In Kateb’s view, this ideal of “connectedness” as a “receptivity and responsiveness” within the individual “is not well illustrated by Whitman’s notion of adhesive love, or love of comrades.” “The comradely side of Whitman,” he avers polemically, “is not his most attractive because it is not the genuinely democratic one” (37, 38).
Kateb’s exclusive focus on “Democratic Individuality” as Whitman’s major contribution as a political theorist is contested and revised not only in subsequent essays by Nancy L. Rosenblum, Cristina Beltrán, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Jane Bennett within the opening cluster, but by other theorists throughout the volume. In an essay originally published in the same issue of Political Theory, Rosenblum challenges Kateb’s notion that individualism and the self’s receptivity and contingency, whether Whitmanian or otherwise, can become the foundation for a political philosophy of democratic unity. More important to political theory, she argues, is the aesthetic role that Whitman’s visionary poems play in creating a sublime spectacle of diversity that attaches people to democracy. Beltrán is less sanguine about the real political effects of what Rosenblum calls the “binding power of aesthetics.” Rather than activating “strong feelings of attraction to democracy,” Whitman’s “spectacles of diversity,” like Obama’s political rallies, enact a poetics of equivalence that privileges union over justice and neutralizes real problems of racial violence and hierarchy in America. “As a practice of democratic theory,” Beltrán asks, “what are the risks of choosing absorption over agonism?”
Focusing on Whitman’s lines, “He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing” (132), Bennett offers a refreshing antidote to the more judgmental and moralistic approaches to Whitman offered by Beltrán and Nussbaum, who foregrounds Whitman’s “ethical” celebration of the body, sexuality, and love as a means of solving the problems of sexual and racial oppression. In Bennett’s view, Whitman’s poems suspend the identity-frame and conventional legal and moral categories. He speaks in a “middle voice” that neither passively receives nor actively embraces in order to enact in his poems and induce in his readers a new kind of solar judgment that does not judge but is judgment.
Whereas the opening cluster effectively foregrounds the question of the relation between the individual and aggregate, difference and identity, in Whitman’s democratic poetics and in democratic theory, Marshall Brown, Jason Frank, Michael J. Shapiro, and Terrell Carver turn to Whitman’s poems of the modern city as a site of democratic liberation and enchantment. Against an antidemocratic terror of the urban crowd, or what Edmund Burke called “the swinish multitude” in his attack on the French Revolution, Berman compares Walt Whitman and Charles Baudelaire as poets who seek to make people feel at home in the city by turning the modern city into a site for “the liberation of sexual fantasy” and erotic exchange between strangers. Returning to the problem of “connection” and the binding power of aesthetics addressed by Rosenblum and Beltran, Frank departs from those like Kateb who emphasize Whitman’s Emersonianism. It is in “the promiscuity of urban encounter among anonymous strangers” (157), he argues provocatively, that Whitman found the experiential and aesthetic base for political attachment and a new vision of democratic citizenship. Reading Whitman in relation to various political philosophers and theorists, including Kant, Benjamin, Deleuze, and Bakhtin, Shapiro calls attention to the monologic whiteness of Whitman’s “I” and his failure to engage more dialogically with the ethnic difference of New York city. Carver also criticizes Whitman’s male-centered vision, which, like the male-dominated history of American democracy, is full of undemocratic racial, sexual, and class exclusions.
The theorists in the final cluster “Death and Citizenship” examine the ways human mortality inflects Whitman’s vision of the theory and practice of democracy. Reading Whitman through the lens of Alexis De Tocqueville’s aristocratic critique of democracy in Democracy in America, Paul Augustine Lawler argues that Whitman’s Democratic Vistas (1871) is a “noble failure” because he never reconciles Hegel and Darwin with religion and what he calls the “free entrance” of the person “into the spiritual world.” But as Bennett and other contributors observe, Whitman was not, as is usually assumed, a poet of “personal” immortality. In fact, as Jack Turner persuasively argues, Whitman was at best agnostic about death, and, like a long line of classical philosophers, from Plato, to Epicurus, to Seneca, “this coolness in the face of death” reveals affinities with “the character dispositions and sensibilities most conducive to democracy” (272).
Kennan Ferguson also grounds his contrast between the “embodied democracies” of Whitman and Richard Rorty in the different relationship of each to death. Unlike Rorty, who envisions Whitman as the poet of “a future democratic condition,” Ferguson reads Whitman as a poet of the present, “of the United States as they are, not as they have been or will be” (300), who celebrated death as an intrinsic aspect of life. Actually, however, the drama of the “body politic” in Whitman’s poems lies somewhere between Rorty and Ferguson. Whitman envisioned the present as continually linked with both the past and the future, a metaphysics and a politics he embodied grammatically in the present participial form of the closing lines of “Song of Myself,” which move from the I of the poet to the you of the reader in a perpetual present that links both past and future, poet and reader: “I stop somewhere waiting for you.” 3
More than other theorists in this collection, Morton Schoolman illumines the structural relationship between “political liberty and equality” and “individualism” in Whitman’s democratic poetics. Focusing on the contradiction between “the individual” and “the mass” that animates Democratic Vistas, Schoolman examines Whitman’s attempt “to realize the principle of all-inclusiveness” and “democratic enlightenment” through the aesthetic education of his poetry. “Moving identity and difference beyond contradiction,” he writes, “Whitman achieves reconciliation—between North and South, the People and the people, the individual and the mass” (320). For Schoolman, it is through Whitman’s aesthetic orientation to the world as appearance and thus intrinsically unknowable, and especially through his poetry of the “unknown” and “death,” that Whitman seeks “to create and maintain the all-inclusiveness and openness to difference” that grounds America’s “democratic enlightenment,” makes American democracy unique, and promises to “propel global democratic development” (324, 323). Schoolman asserts that Whitman’s aesthetic model of democracy, in which difference can exist free of the violence associated with “the construction of Otherness,” makes it “perhaps the most radical in modern democratic theory.”
Schoolman’s essay joins Rosenblum, Beltrán, and Frank in underscoring the powerful role that aesthetics plays in Whitman’s democratic theory. In addition to his enlightening and elegantly detailed reading of Democratic Vistas, Schoolman also illuminates the implications of Whitman’s democratic aesthetics for modern democratic theory. Whereas other theorists in the volume align themselves with either the individualist Whitman or the more adhesive Whitman of connectedness and the multitude, Schoolman is the only theorist who calls attention to the conflict and the potential contradiction between the individual, or personalism, and the collectivity, or what Whitman calls “the mass, or lump character,” as the underlying dynamic not only of Democratic Vistas but of his theory of democracy as it is embodied in the poems of Leaves of Grass.
However, in emphasizing “reconciliation”—and especially Whitman’s “achievement” of reconciliation in his poems—Schoolman, like others in the volume, gives insufficient attention to the fundamental agon—the dynamic tension between self and other, pride and sympathy, I and you—that shapes the drama of democratic identity in Leaves of Grass. This tension between I and you, poet and reader, present and future, is evident in the long poem, later entitled “Song of Myself,” that opens the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass: I celebrate myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
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This same agon between individual and en masse, or what the Constitutional founders viewed as the conflict between liberty and social union, frames the opening poem of the final edition of Leaves of Grass (1881): One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person, Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.
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Unlike Schoolman, who claims that “Whitman achieves reconciliation,” Whitman seeks not so much to reconcile as to balance the tensions between self and other, body and soul, pride and sympathy, liberty and community in body and body politic. But in the poems of Leaves of Grass as in Democratic Vistas, this drama of democratic identity remains more agonistic and open-ended: a democratic vista that may—or may not—be achieved in history.
A similarly agonistic struggle between the individual and the democratic “En-Masse” marks the work of Herman Melville, which as Frank notes in his excellent introduction to his Political Companion, “is arguably nineteenth-century America’s most sustained interrogation of the American political imaginary, of the narratives and norms, principles and presuppositions, that animate the American political tradition and give shape to American political identity” (2). Organized chronologically, beginning with an essay on Melville’s first novel Typee (1846) and ending with two essays on Billy Budd (published posthumously in 1924), all of the essays proceed from the assumption that Melville has something to teach us not only about American political thought but about political theory.
Although twentieth-century critics such as Lewis Mumford, Vernon Parrington, and F. O. Matthiessen regarded Melville as an American exceptionalist whose works attacked American society for failing to live up to its highest democratic ideals, Frank underscores Melville’s more dissonant and “tragic” perspective as a “democratic realist” who affirms the democratic ideals of liberty and equality at the same time that he locates the failures of American democracy in those ideals themselves. More important for political theory than Melville’s attacks on specific forms of human oppression in his fiction, Frank avers, “is how Melville’s fiction articulates political critique at the level of philosophical principle and deep cultural presupposition” (3).
Not all the essays in this volume agree with Frank’s reading of Melville as tragic critic of dominant traditions of American political thought. In fact, Kennan Ferguson’s opening essay argues that far from being “anti-imperialist,” Melville’s early South Seas novels, Typee and Omoo, develop a distinctively American “anthropolitical imaginary” that “taught America how to be an empire” (23). Susan McWilliams’s perceptive analysis of Ahab not as the totalitarian other of Ishmael’s democrat but as representative of the “‘Isolato’ culture” of the entire crew in Moby-Dick locates Melville closer to the conservative tradition of Tocqueville who “fear[ed] that American democracy inclines toward a kind of individualism that breeds a stance of political indifference and enervates public life” (113). Roger Berkowitz’s moving essay on Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), the only essay to focus on Melville’s poetry, and curiously the only essay in either volume to focus on the national tragedy of the Civil War, argues that politics is not only about political critique. For Berkowitz, “Politics in Melville is importantly about the telling of stories and rendering of forms that,” as in his poetic account of the war in Battle-Pieces, have the power to “bind us to our highest and most glorious human and national ideals” (337).
Other essays develop and extend Frank’s more conflicted and tragic view of Melville by examining particular works. Against Ferguson, Sophia Mihic contends that in Typee and Omoo, Melville develops an alternative framework for cross-cultural contact in which “states of artifice meet states of artifice” without the assumption of progressive history or “a world-historical hierarchy” (53, 57). George Shulman’s richly nuanced reading of Moby-Dick as political theory examines the conflicting democratic modalities of Ahab and Ishmael through which Melville seeks to create an “alter-world” in which, as in ancient tragedy, American citizens are asked to reflect on the underlying values and terrors of political self-rule. Other theorists focus on Melville’s satire of Emerson and Thoreau in “Bartleby the Scrivener” and “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo” (Shannon L. Mariotti), the perdurable politics of racial domination in Benito Cereno (Lawrie Balfour and Tracy B. Strong), the psychosocial workings of what Melville called “The Metaphysics of Indian Hating” in The Confidence Man (Thomas Drumm), and in concluding paired essays, the sensuous role of aesthetics in maintaining political authority (Jason Frank) and the “experience” of “law like love” as opposed to legal “essence” (Jennifer L. Culbert) in Billy Budd.
Unlike Seery’s Whitman volume, which includes only political theorists and political scientists, Frank’s volume contains three essays by specialists in English or American Studies. In his literary historicist analysis, Roger W. Hecht locates Pierre in the illuminating context of the Anti-Rent Wars in New York during the 1840s. Turning toward Continental philosophy and the explosion of interest in Melville’s short-story, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” among European philosophers, including Deleuze, Derrida, Agamben, Hardt and Negri, and Zikek, Kevin Attell powerfully distills their very different interpretations into questions of “language and silence” and “labor and stasis,” questions that illumine through Bartleby “the often obscure conceptual cores of their political ontologies” (195, 222). In a smart and politically visionary analysis of Melville’s notion of “permanent Riotocracy” in “The Encantadas,” Michael Jonik also draws on Continental theory, especially Deleuze, to argue that Melville imagines “an ‘archipelago of brothers, a community of explorers,’” collectively engaged in an “outlandish” struggle for “non-identitarian community” (240, 231).
Reading Melville as a political thinker who writes from what Frank calls “a perspective beyond the horizon” of American democratic ideals, many of the theorists seem reluctant to engage the more conservative dimensions of Melville’s political thought on the very issues he is purportedly championing: individual liberty, the masses, revolution, democracy, antislavery, racial equality, and the constitution of a racially just national union following the Civil War. There is a tendency to heroize Melville as “more radical” than Emerson, Thoreau, and especially Whitman, who are “inscribed” (and flattened) as American exceptionalists (Frank, 7–8). But what does “more radical” mean? Like Whitman, Melville identified himself as a “social plebeian,” and in a letter written to Hawthorne at the time he was completing Moby-Dick, he declared his belief in “political equality,” that “a thief in jail is as honorable a personage as Gen. George Washington.” But he also admitted the patrician limits of what he called “my ruthless democracy on all sides”: “It seems an inconsistency to assert unconditional democracy in all things, and yet confess a dislike to all mankind—in the mass.” 6
Whereas Melville’s prose epic of democracy in Moby-Dick registers a fear of the unleashed energies of the masses that ends in apocalypse for all except its white American orphan, Ishmael, Whitman merges with the turbulent and unruly masses in his poetic epic of democracy in “Song of Myself”: Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos Disorderly fleshy and sensual . . . eating drinking and breeding, No sentimentalist . . . no stander above men or women or apart from them . . . no more modest than immodest.
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It might be argued that Melville’s political critique of democracy came from his more conservative, and at times Burkean, reaction against the Age of Democratic Revolutions—American, French, and Haitian—and the Revolutions of 1848 out of which the work of both Melville and Whitman emerged. But whereas Whitman embraced the radical revolutionary ideals of Thomas Paine, wrote in support of the Revolutions of 1848 in “Resurgemus,” the earliest poem in Leaves of Grass (1855), justified the French Reign of Terror as the “long-accrued retribution” for centuries of human oppression, celebrated the “daring” struggle and “dreams of brotherhood” of the Paris Commune in “O Star of France. 1870-71,” and included a new cluster of “Songs of Insurrection” in his centennial edition of Leaves of Grass (1876), all of Melville’s works, in which there is not a single successful revolution—from Moby-Dick, to Benito-Cereno, to Billy Budd—express reserve about the specter of mass revolution, especially as it is embodied by the French Revolution and its terroristic legacy of human butchery and blood violence throughout the Atlantic world. Or as Melville wrote in his poetic reflection on the “Dark Ages of Democracy” in Clarel (1876): What if the kings in Forty-eight Fled like the gods? Even as the gods Shall do, return they made; and sate, And fortified their strong abodes.
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Is Melville here standing on the other side of democratic history as its radical critic? Or is he a refractory conservative reflecting on the historical futility and blood terror of revolution, past, present, and future?
This problem of interpreting Melville’s political thought is inextricably bound up with the complex narrative form of works such as Moby-Dick, where the narration is split between the “egalitarian” voice and vision of Ishmael and the more politically critical and ironic perspective of the omniscient narrator that floats in and out of the narrative. Thus, Ishmael’s invocation to “Equality” and dedication to exalting the “high qualities, though dark” of “meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways” in Moby-Dick can either be embraced as the primary voice and vision of Melville’s democratic epic—as it is by C. L. R. James’s and other contemporary left political philosophers such as Deleuze and Casarino—or read ironically from the point of view of Melville’s darker, more critical and tragic, but not necessarily more “radical” omniscient narrator. Most of the political theorists in this volume tend to focus on either the more radically democratic or the more politically critical Melville rather than noting the ways the complexities of Melville’s narration—its multivalent symbolism and contradictory points of view—create a both/and meditation on the paradoxes of democracy that asks readers to reflect on the pressing political dilemmas of their times without offering any clear solutions. Interestingly, too, none of the essays address how Melville’s “sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose visitations,” he wrote, “no deeply thinking mind is always free,” inflects his political theory. 9
While Frank’s introduction underscores the “irresolvable tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes” in Melville’s political thought (8) and Shulman focuses on the conflicting political modalities represented by Ahab and Ishmael “as a form of mediation by which a political community can reflect on its core axioms, constitutive practices, and fateful decisions” (71), like the series editor Patrick J. Deneen, the political community that Frank, Shurman, and other contributors imagine is a primarily American democratic citizenry. In Shulman’s reading of Moby-Dick, its racial others—Queequeg, Pip, Tashtego, Dagoo—and its multinational crew drop out of Melville’s democratic story and Moby-Dick as political theory. This nationalist focus misses the national and internationalscene of on-going democratic revolution, crisis, and struggle out of which Melville and Whitman emerged and to which their writings responded. Despite this nationalist focus, however, Seery’s volume includes essays that link Whitman with Baudelaire, continental philosophy, and global democratic struggle, and Frank’s volume contains superb essays by Attell and Jonik on the prescient relevance that Melville’s work continues to have not only for what Alain Badiou calls the present “time of riots” (229) but for such notions as transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and the commons among contemporary continental philosophers.
The irony of both political companions is that with the exception of Frank’s evocative discussion of promiscuity between strangers as the base of democratic attachment in Whitman’s vision, neither volume fully considers the place where Whitman and Melville were arguably most politically (and sexually) radical and visionary. In Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Democratic Vistas as in Melville’s novels from White Jacket, to Moby-Dick, to Billy Budd,both imagined alternative forms of democratic community grounded in homoerotic comradeship and sexual love between men as a means of countering the imperial logic of unleashed individualism and the binding force of law, capital, arms, and the state. “I say democracy infers such loving comradeship,” Whitman affirmed in Democratic Vistas, “without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and incapable of perpetuating itself.” 10
As the first volumes devoted to the political thought of Whitman and Melville, both collections provide a rich and expansive view of their political insight and teachings. The essays highlight not only the contributions Whitman and Melville made to American political history and American political traditions but the concerns they continue to share with contemporary political theory: the relation between individualism and social union, identity and difference, liberty and law, nationalism and transnationalism, democracy and capital, race, class, empire, revolution, sexuality, love and war. In the attention that Rosenbloom, Frank, and others give to the sensuous and captivating power of aesthetics, the essays also press contemporary democratic theorists to reconsider the traditional antithesis between aesthetics and politics by recognizing the affective and creative power of language. Or, as Whitman wrote of the role of poetry in bringing a fully realized democracy into being in “Poets to Come”: I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future, I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness. . . . Leaving it to you to prove and define it, Expecting the main things from you.
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