<< A Golden Age of Literary Journalism | Front Page | Fat Ulysses >>
Wednesday, June 15, 2005
Wrestling Over Melville
This essay by Randy Boyagoda in the online journal The New Pantagruel demonstrates how truly catastrophic in its consequences has been the relentless politicization of literature over the past twenty-five years. Boyagoda wants to recoup Moby-Dick for the cause of American patriotism, arguing that Melville’s “primary ambition” was “to enable Americans to appreciate, in the fullest complexity, their muddy grandeur, and recognize, however vexingly, the imperfect splendor of their nation.”
Boyagoda traces Moby-Dick‘s rise to prominence in academic literary study, making the plausible point that Richard Chase’s Herman Melville: A Critical Study (1949), for example, was part of an effort made by prominent post-war Americanists to identify “a native-born artist whose achievements could adequately complement the stature of a fledgling superpower.” That much of now canonical American literature was used by many such critics to celebrate America, to enlist works of literature in a cultural cold war rather than delineate their purely literary virtues, is undeniable. To this extent, the “neoliberal” ideology of much of early Americanist criticism surely did make literary study an implicitly political activity, in turn almost ensuring that later, more radical critics would attempt to discredit the ideology while continuing to regard the study of American literature as an excuse to engage in cultural politics.
Boyagoda deplores the results of the left-wing appropriation of Melville, citing specifically what he considers the baneful influence of the Marxist interpretation of Moby-Dick by C.L.R. James, but he doesn’t renounce the political approach itself, advocating, in fact, that conservatives abandon whatever lingering belief they may have that “high literature ought never be dragged down into conversation with politics.” (I myself haven’t noticed many scruples on this score among present-day conservatives, but I suppose Boyagoda moves in different circles than I do.) He offers an alternative interpretation of Moby-Dick in which Queequeg becomes “the ideal American”: “The son of an island king, he leaves behind his aristocratic inheritance to seek adventure and edification in the West. He willingly humbles himself to become a lowly crewman and rises through the whaling ranks through his skills as a harpooner. Today, he seems the archetypal American immigrant in search of the Promised Land, who found it, worked hard, and made good.” Certainly Queequeg is portrayed sympathetically in Moby-Dick, and Boyagoda’s simplistic account is no more simplistic than the view of him as exemplar of the working class, or the view of Ahab as rapacious capitalist or incipient fascist (although it does seem rather too squishily multicultural for most conservatives’ comfort). Yet Boyagoda isn’t finally interested in “scraping away an accumulation of critical barnacles and returning to Melville for Melville,” as he claims to be, but is plainly concerned that a new set of barnacles be added:
These same virtues [embodied by Queequeg] must be nurtured today no matter how old-fashioned or “patriotic” (or even Christian) they may seem to those too easily disenchanted by America’s strengths and weaknesses. Such efforts will inevitably be derided in some corners as a new conservative politicization of literature. More truthfully, they develop out of and seek to develop further a thoughtful love of country. . . .
What a thoroughgoing denial of the integrity of such a singular work as Moby-Dick to suggest it is valuable because it might ultimately inculcate a “love of country”! Does Boyagoda really expect that thoughtful people will want to read Melville’s novel so they can get a good dose of such patriotic medicine? How does it return Melville to Melville to reduce his literary achievements to such pap? On the other hand, is it any better to value Melville primarily because his work can be similarly wrenched out of shape from the other direction and made into a left-wing critique of American excess? Does it return Melville to Melville to portray him as a political polemicist, of whatever persuasion?
That such a novel as Moby-Dick can be read in such wildy disparate ways as those of Boyagoda and of James and his followers suggests to me two things: 1) Moby-Dick really is the sort of capacious work, allowing a multitude of readings, that the New Criticism encouraged us to think of as the supreme accomplishment of literary art; 2) neither the conservative nor the radical interpretations of Moby-Dick can be trusted as accounts of what Melville was “really” trying to do. They’re just interpretations, and very pallid ones at that. They don’t come close to describing the aesthetic and metaphysical mazes one can travel in reading Melville’s novels and short stories. Boyagoda says that reading Melville will help Americans recognize “the imperfect splendor of their nation.” How about the perfect splendor of literature?
Comments
Benito Cereno, Bartleby, The Confidence Man, Billy Budd. The man’s got his work cut out for him.
Benito Cereno seems that Pat Buchanan might be able to make use of it.
I think that there is quite a good deal to learn from Boyagoda’s essay.
First, the only thing worse than a high Theory piece of literary criticism is a piece of conservative literary criticism. Queequeg as exemplar of Christian virtues! Boyagoda has found a way to not only get Melville utterly wrong, but to get him wrong gracelessly.
Second, doubters should note that there really is a difference between liberalism and conservatism when it comes to liberary criticism; they aren’t both just neoliberalism. No liberal could be so leadenly, stubbornly propagandistic, so wholly unselfconcious in tracking a Party-approved line.
Boyagoda is of Canadian birth and “Boyagoda” seems to be a Sri Lankan name. He would seem to represent a pro-immigration, globalist form of Americanism.
I’m glad you think there’s something to be learned from that essay, Rich.
I went to the New Pantagruel home. They have a cute, contrarian thing about Intelligent Design which succeeds in opposing the scientists, without exactly supporting Intelligent Design (which would not be cute). Biologists are “them”, an interest group depending on state funding, and the NP author doesn’t like them. It’s as bad as the worst post-modernism.
He ends the essay with a statement that’s not completely off-the-wall:
They are depicted in such a fashion as part of Melville’s primary ambition: to enable Americans to appreciate, in the fullest complexity, their muddy grandeur, and recognize, however vexingly, the imperfect splendor of their nation.
That’s an arguable claim...only Boyagoda doesn’t argue it so much as assert it. “Queequeg is the novel’s finest figure,” he says, as if no reasonable human being would ever disagree with him. I think this article is the dark side of Sean’s contention about the value of the Malcolm piece. To be painfully banal: Malcolm, being a good writer, writes good articles for a general audience.
That sounded unnecessarily uncivil. I didn’t mean to imply Boyagoda a bad writer per se, only to note that he didn’t defend his conclusions in a manner similar to the way that Malcolm didn’t defend hers...but that Malcolm’s reading never tempts one to distrust the motives for her reinterpretation of Stein, whereas Boyagoda’s, by virtue of how he explicitly and repeatedly locates himself in the Culture Wars, does. (And I don’t say that because I’m on the other side of the Culture Wars. I know plenty of conservatives who write intelligently about literary historical matters, but they earn my trust not by displays of political solidarity but by the depth of their involvement with the work. Boyagoda attempts to place Moby Dick in the contemporary literary canon but neglects to mention Love and Death in the American Novel?)
Boyagoda’s concluding statement is indeed off the wall insofar as he asserts that this is Melville’s “primary ambition.” How does he know what Melville’s primary ambition was? Since Melville was writing a novel and not a political tract, I have to conclude that his primary ambition was to write a compelling work of fiction.
There’s no reason why Boyagoda should have to mention Fiedler or any other other critic. (He does mention several.) He’s only surveying the critical reception of Moby-Dick in a general-interest essay, not himself writing a scholarly essay. You say critics should show “depth of involvement with the work,” but citing a secondary source doesn’t necessarily say anything about a critic’s engagement with the work at hand.
Boyagoda’s concluding statement is indeed off the wall insofar as he asserts that this is Melville’s “primary ambition.” How does he know what Melville’s primary ambition was?
By “not off-the-wall” I simply meant defensible. Your complaint seems similar to mine. He could muster evidence--letters, journal entries (his own or Hawthorne’s), etc.--to support that claim, but chooses not to.
Since Melville was writing a novel and not a political tract, I have to conclude that his primary ambition was to write a compelling work of fiction.
Of course, but then why could I pass for a cetologist when I finished it?
There’s no reason why Boyagoda should have to mention Fiedler or any other other critic. (He does mention several.) He’s only surveying the critical reception of Moby-Dick in a general-interest essay, not himself writing a scholarly essay.
Mentioning some created the burden of mentioning the others; by mentioning the work of future neo-cons but not Fiedler, he creates the impression that he’s cherry-picking the critical record...that’s he writing a Whig history of American Studies. The fact that Fiedler’s argument--equally important, equally well-known--isn’t included makes me distrust Boyagoda or, at the very least, question his principle of selection.
The advocacy of Melville ca. 1950 was in part merely an argument against the Europhile argument that America is shallow, has no real culture, etc., etc. Expats like James, Eliot, and Pound reinforced this idea, and something like it was pretty strong in English departments when I was young. I find this idea bobbing up in some of the European denunciations of the Second Iraq War, too, and I find it offensive. It’s not as if Europe doesn’t have its own skeletons of militarism and imperialism.
And frankly, I think that Melville will be a poison pill for those guys. I’d love to have a chat with Boyagoda about “The Confidence Man” as an yea-saying appreciation of Prosperity Theology, the reinvention of self, brandnaming, and so on. One of Melville’s characters even proposes putting missionary work on a sound free-market basis, selling mission stocks on Wall Street.
I think we can all guess why Fiedler’s work wasn’t included--rafts and honey.
I think this article is the dark side of Sean’s contention about the value of the Malcolm piece. To be painfully banal: Malcolm, being a good writer, writes good articles for a general audience.
Right. Boyagoda’s a bad writer and a bad critic--shallow, tendentious, uninterested in his material. I don’t think there’s much more to draw from his example--particularly not evidence about the relentless politicization of literature. Sorry, Daniel, I think that’s piling a lot of freight on a slim vehicle. Boyagoda’s essay tells us that political criticism of Melville is bad to the same degree that a bad essay about, um, color motif in MD would tell us about the limitations of formalist criticism. I.e., not that much. If you want to show the failings of political criticism it would be much fairer to start with the good examples (Rogin, Slotkin, CLR James?) and demonstrate their failings.
Personally, I think it would be a very weird reading of MD indeed that did not talk about democracy, Americanism, rapacious capitalism, and demagoguery. Along with metaphysics, those things are all very much subjects of the novel and seem very near to the mainsprings of Melville’s inspiration. The fact that Boyagoda does a really bad job talking about them doesn’t say much except that he’s a really bad reader.
Malcolm, on the other hand, writes really good essays for any audience.
In some ways, Boyagoda does a good job talking about these things. His prose is admirably clear and straightward, his motives undisguised. I’m uncomfortable with the comments being made here that attack his “writing.” Isn’t the burden of these comments that B’s “a bad critic” because he’s conservative? Would we be making the same kind of comments about an essay that said, say, that Melville’s “primary ambition” was to help us “appreciate America’s shortcomings,” its “historical crimes”? Our squalor rather than our splendor?
Isn’t the burden of these comments that B’s “a bad critic” because he’s
conservative?
No. The burden is that he’s a bad, because tendentious reader. That’s evident in a one-sided and reductive reading of MD and in the reductive account of the critical history--which casts the ADAish Chase as a neocon before the fact, makes (Popular Front, victim of red baiting homophobia) Matthiesen a version of Mrs. Miniver, and suggests that the only alternative views of Melville are trivial. I think that’s all bad criticism and, by the same token, bad writing. Prose can be clear and straightforward and still be bad writing.
This goes beyond him being one-sided, or reductive, or tendentious, or political. Here is Boyagoda:
“Queequeg [...] is the novel’s finest figure — brave, generous, and gallant — and, I propose, its ideal American. [...] Today, he seems the archetypal American immigrant in search of the Promised Land, who found it, worked hard, and made good. [...]”
“Queequeg embodies these national virtues, which endow all Americans with “democratic dignity.”
These same virtues must be nurtured today no matter how old-fashioned or “patriotic” (or even Christian) they may seem to those too easily disenchanted by America’s strengths and weaknesses.”
Here is Melville, presenting Queequeg’s view of America and Christian virtues:
“But, alas! the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even Christians could be both miserable and wicked; infinitely more so, than all his father’s heathens. Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor; and seeing what the sailors did there; and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they spent their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost. Thought he, it’s a wicked world in all meridians; I’ll die a pagan.”
There is a limit to how far an interpretation can be stretched. Boyagoda’s is just false. Right-wing postmodernism is even worse than left-wing postmodernism.
No one’s gonna mention Olson, well, OK--I will:
“Americans still fancy themselves such democrats. But their triumphs are of the machine. It is the only master of space the average person ever knows, oxwheel to piston, muscle to jet. It gives trajectory.
“To Melville it was not the will to be free but the will to overwhelm nature that lies at the bottom of us as individuals and a people. Ahab is no democrat. Moby-Dick, antagonist, is only king of natural force, resource....”
“Whitman we have called our greatest voice because he gave us hope. Melville is the truer man. He lived intensely his people’s wrong, their guilt. But he remembered their first dream. The White Whale is more accurate than Leaves of Grass. Because it is America, all her space, the malice, the root.”
--Call Me Ishmael, (1947)
Also, w/r/t Boyagoda… this sentence is so patently false it’s sad to think that anyone could believe it (and says something about the absolute misguidedness of his project):
“...the United States, having suffered a treacherous attack upon its soil, had entered World War II as a decisive force, in defense of core Western principles and its own democratic well-being.”
First, Japan can hardly be called “treacherous,” considering that we had nearly blockaded the country, and had been conducting provocative large-scale naval maneuvers in the Pacific since the mid-30s (when we already knew that, sooner or later, we’d go to war with Japan).
Second, America went to war with Japan very reluctantly, mostly out of a wide-spread fear--shared by Republicans and Democrats and Socialists--that such a war as we did fight would destroy, not preserve, any plausible vision for democracy. The vote to go to war in Iraq in 1991 was closer to unanimity than the one to declare war on Japan after Pearl Harbor, and, on the eve of war, opinion against the war was as high as 95% as late as 1937 (When Abyssinia, Spain, Czechoslovakia, and China had already gone down--an opposition never reached against our Vietnam War at its worst), and remained at 80% the day before Pearl Harbor.
World War Two had to be fought, no doubt… but it emphatically did destroy something in our nation’s character. And how the slaughter of 15 million soldiers (of whom just over 1% were Americans) and 40 million civilians (of whom nearly zero were) came to be a template for national celebration is just one indication of how bizarrely we’ve changed.
Would we be making the same kind of comments about an essay that said, say, that Melville’s “primary ambition” was to help us “appreciate America’s shortcomings,” its “historical crimes”? Our squalor rather than our splendor?
Daniel, not only would “we,” I already did: “That’s an arguable claim...only Boyagoda doesn’t argue it so much as assert it.” And in my follow-up I made it explicit that I attacked him not for his politics but for his unsubstantiated claims.
Speaking to Joel’s points: I really think that the turningpoints of the modern age were 1914 (when Europe began to self-destruct) and 1941 (when the US became a permanently-mobilized garrison state.) Since then the interventionist establishment, is rooted in both parties, has been able to destroy all opposition with the “isolationist” label. That’s why Saddam was Hitler, against all common sense.
Democrats who don’t seem interventionist enough are destroyed, even if, like Kerry, they really are interventionists. In 1968 and 1980, at least, Humphrey and Carter were destroyed by illegal backroom deals with Vietnam and Iran.
The Intelligent Design piece Mr. Emerson refers to sounds like something I might have written, but I can’t place it. Summary, dismissal, no citation? Whoa guy, your magisterial smugness is overwhelming!
I am pleased that this pedantic pustule Emerson is such a fan of early modern political invective, for I have a few words for him--and others.
Here is a poor clod who finds another article disagreeable to him in the same journal, and this vindicates his dispassionate intuitions. Part and parcel, it’s a bunch of knuckle-dragging loonies over there. A more creative hack would have at least looked at tNP’s “About” page for more substantial ammunition; Mr. Emerson’s own online self-representation is far and away a more deadly strike, pre-emptively launched, than I can match. It even begins to arouse pity in me for the man.
As for the graduate student Kaufman, caught in the grips of responsibility-deferral syndrome, he might focus his interests and discover a suitable dissertation topic if he could only wean himself from the easy ego-inflation of blogs and comments. He will one day be a fine member of the middling professoriate if he applies himself, for already he realizes that a good writer is an unsuspicious writer, or at least a one who does not arouse Kaufman’s suspicions, disturb his prejudices, operate from different assumptions. The ideal of course in he who eschews “politics,” who affects an apolitical stance--one who masters that pose of crypto-apathy: above it all, know it all, sigh sigh sigh!
I invite one and all to submit letters to the editor at tNP regarding Boyagoda’s mendacity, or anything else.
As for the graduate student Kaufman, caught in the grips of responsibility-deferral syndrome, he might focus his interests and discover a suitable dissertation topic if he could only wean himself from the easy ego-inflation of blogs and comments.
Why defend a compatriot’s unsubstantiated claims when ad hominem attacks are so much more successful at...diverting people’s attention from the fact that your compatriot’s essay consisted of a series of unsubstantiated claims?
Also, I’m curious as to why you’re so concerned with the dispassionate nature of the criticisms of Boyagoda--John’s “dispassionate intuitions,” my “crypto-apathy"--would you prefer an impassioned but uncivil assault on Boyagoda’s work? I consider careful, dispassionate evalution a virtue, but if you’d like to debate my contentions with insult and invective instead, well, feel free to continue alone. The stakes are not so high as you think, my friend…
Scott, trolls aren’t interesting, don’t bother. The only remotely unusual part of this one is, as you’ve pointed out, the attack on dispassion. Conservatives don’t really think, they just have gestures, and they want everything to be at the level of impassioned gestures. See, for instance:
http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/11/dead_right.html
"Xs don’t think, they just have gestures...”
Is that an analytical statement or a gesture? Is this a forum of thick-skinned spoudaioi or an ingrown toe-nail?
Mr. Kaufman complains about the ad hominem. Fair enough; unlike Emerson he has not expressed an affection for old school enjoyments. Yet he has nothing to say of his own guilt-by-association and other fallacious contributions.
For the record, yes, I do prefer rhetorical assaults to be impassioned, direct, honest, and unpretentious when it is impossible or imprudent for a critic to be dispassionate. I hold that no one is ever dispassionate, and on the most important debates, this is absolutely true of all participants and onlookers. What we tend to like about “dispassionate evaluation” is that it confirms what we already believe--thus it is a facade. Fairness and openness to contrary and alien positions is not about being dispassionate at all; it is about noting the arousal of one’s passions and being willing to question them, perhaps rejecting or confirming them to some extent.
I see this sort of impassioned, interested criticism as eminently civil and protective of true civility rather the installation of more ideological mannequins of enlightenment rationality, the eyes of reason cleared of primitive sentiments, such as the religious, political or libidinous.
Re. Boyagoda, email him. Send him and the tNP editors a letter for publication. I do not intend to defend the content of his essay here. I actually agree with some of the legitimate critiques behind the humorless invective and terminally earnest assessments of his survey, if not the prejudicial assumptions that direct them.
Egads, you’ve been flamed by the ghost of Ambrose Bierce! His politics seem a few centuries out of date, but his compatriots somehow tricked the NYTimes into giving them front page attention:
“The debate [over the future of conservatism] ... is unfolding on Web sites like Mr. Stegall’s ... where they tackle subjects as heterodox as the perils of Wal-Mart and urban sprawl, the dangers of unfettered capitalism to family life, and the feared takeover of [conservatism] by hawkish neoconservatives.”
The inaugural issue has a rather leftist-seeming blast by a guy who writes for In These Times, and their editorial roundtable on the presidential election reveals a bunch of guilty ‘00 spoiler Greens espusing contempt for Bush and extolling the virtues of not voting.
Hm. The Jesuits are after me—I dread the Comfy Chair. I wasn’t expecting this.
But is M. Jape really a Jesuit? Might he not be, instead.... a http://www.modernhistoryproject.org/mhp/ArticleDisplay.php?Article=Kulturkampf&Entity=HuxleyAL<a href="">Synarchist?</a>
Never heard of ‘em! And I rather like the Frankfurt Schule.
No Synarchist ever admits to it, of course.