Paroxysms of sovereign violence; colonialist rapine; the slave trade and slave insurrection; civil war; revolution; mutinies—asserted, disguised, suppressed—and desertion; settlement, migration, and exile in the New World and in the Holy Land; the micropolitics of social bonding: a squeeze of the hand, the wastage of pity, morbidities of trust and credit as exemplified by the sob story and the open palm. There is simply no corner of Melville’s work that does not focus on politics as practice or theory. And yet, as Jennifer Greiman reminds us in her searching and absorbing book, Melville’s Democracy: Radical Figuration and Political Form, there is nothing like consensus in the critical literature about what Melville’s political ruminations add up to. Often, critics have gestured toward something called “democracy,” though as my list above suggests, the values conventionally associated with that word are, in Melville’s work, more honored in the breach, as if what concerned Melville most of all was understanding everything that can go wrong with democracy.
And yet, Greiman asserts—and follows many others in asserting—that Melville’s abiding political puzzle is democracy. The touchstone for this view used to be the ending of the “Knights and Squires” chapter of Moby-Dick, where Ishmael sings of “that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy. His omnipresence, our divine equality!” (qtd. p. 120). Invoking the Christian trope of God as He who has his center everywhere and his circumference nowhere, Melville casts the ground principle of democracy—equality—as a kind of paradoxical entity that is as omnipresent as it is unlimited. Greiman invokes this passage, but her central text is the famous letter to Hawthorne of May 1851, where Melville names a “ruthless democracy”: “It seems an inconsistency,” Melville writes his friend, “to assert unconditional democracy in all things, and yet to confess a dislike to mankind—in the mass” (qtd. p. 2). It is Greiman’s ambition to make sense of such seeming inconsistency.
Some years ago, Stanley Cavell wrote an essay on Poe titled “Being Odd, Getting Even,” a formula that captures the combination of deviance and ratiocination characteristic of Poe’s imagination, its zero-sum calculus. I was reminded of Cavell’s title by Greiman’s use of a like formula: Melville’s democracy, she asserts, is about “being equal and becoming different” (pp. 5, 9). Poe’s world is about getting back—often through revenge—to some putative earlier state; it’s about evening the books. Melville’s is about never getting back, never returning, because all that was the same (equal) has become different. For Greiman, the fact that Melville’s meditation on democracy is full of contradictions, is “inconsisten[t],” is precisely the point (p. 3). Melville is, as it were, consistently inconsistent, and this has everything to do with his aesthetic practice, his “radical figuration.” Melville avails himself of more or less familiar ways of thinking about democracy—as a theme, or a theory, or a symbol. But themes, theories, and symbols are modes of containment: they are meant to make what is thematized or symbolized sit still, as it were. But democracy does not sit still; it’s all about making what is equal become different. Because of this, Greiman argues that it is the restless energy of Melville’s figurative language that most closely aligns with the fugitive, inconsistent “ruthlessness” of democracy. Devoted readers of Melville will, I think, be familiar with the experience of what Greiman means by “radical figuration”: once launched, Melville’s figures and extended metaphors unspool themselves improvisationally, committing themselves to a line of flight before knowing when or how they will wrap up, so that we ask, when they come to rest, how did we end up here?
Greiman’s stress on radical figuration helps us understand her thesis—which also serves to structure her exposition—that for Melville democracy is green, it is round, and it is groundless. These words are like magnets for Melville’s radical figuration. Consider one of Greiman’s examples, from Melville’s Pierre: “For indeed the democratic element operates a subtile [sic] acid among us, forever producing new things by corroding the old, as in the south of France, verdigris, the primitive material of one kind of green paint, is produced by grape-vinegar poured upon copper plates. Now in general, nothing can be more significant of decay than the idea of corrosion, yet on the other hand, nothing can more vividly suggest the luxuriance of life than the idea of green, as a color, for green is the peculiar signet of all-fertile Nature herself” (qtd. pp. 81–82).
Green here is not so much a color as an “idea”—the “idea of green”; it is paradox and problem, one that essentially suggests the paradoxicality of democracy itself. The figure suggests democracy is corrosive and constructive at once, both decay and fertility.
Of course, many have pointed to the logical paradoxes involved in democratic theory. Greiman recruits a strong support crew of thinkers of democracy, from Rousseau to Derrida, Lefort, Rancière, Arendt, Honig, and Connolly, and the idea of the “surround” in Moten and Harney. To further enrich her inquiry, Greiman puts Melville’s work in dialogue with the color theory of Goethe and the political rhetoric of de Tocqueville, Douglass, and Whitman. Some highlights (for this reader) of her itinerary through Melville’s corpus include: Tommo’s dubious encounters with the “state of nature” in Typee; the treatment of the “Round Robin” mutiny in Omoo; the serial political parables of Mardi; the figure of green and the polarity of “light and gloom” in Pierre; suspense in Battle-Pieces and its “Supplement”; the treatment of the “Grand Armada” chapter of Moby-Dick as a key to understanding the “mutual enclosures of life and death, calm and commotion, peace and peril” (p. 196); and the politics of settlement and migration, of rooting and uprooting in the Holy Land of Clarel. And there is much more. Greiman cuts a broad swath, one that is intended to suggest the consistent inconsistency of Melville’s focus on democracy across his entire writing career.
It is not easy to characterize Greiman’s “method,” if that is even an appropriate word in this context. She is attentive above all to the movement of Melville’s poetry and prose, its way of casting complex concepts into flexible figures—the sphere, for example—and then pushing those figures to a breaking point. In one sense, then, she adopts a formalism reminiscent of Georges Poulet’s Metamorphoses of the Circle or Peter Sloterdijk’s great Spheres trilogy focused on “bubbles,” “globes,” and “foams.” But Greiman is, finally, less interested in figures than in figuration, the aesthetic energy that builds up a figure and then breaks it down, overflows it, abandons it. It feels beside the point, then, to attempt a kind of bulleted summary of Greiman’s elegant and challenging book. One reads Greiman, as indeed one reads Melville himself, not to find the achieved results of thought but to see thinking at work, to watch all that is equal become different, to track the energy of figurative language as it carries our most closely held values in its current and then beyond our reach. Reading such work is a bracing and freeing experience.
University of California Press