The Characteristic Theology of Herman Melville: Aesthetics, Politics, Duplicity

The Characteristic Theology of Herman Melville

Aesthetics, Politics, Duplicity

Bradley A. Johnson

Foreword by David Jasper

The Characteristic Theology of Herman Melville

Aesthetics, Politics, Duplicity

Copyright © 2012 Bradley A. Johnson. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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isbn 13: 978-1-61097-341-0

eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-620-3

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Johnson, Bradley A.

The characteristic theology of Herman Melville : aesthetics, politics, duplicity / Bradley A. Johnson ; foreword by David Jasper.

xii + 168 pp. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 13: 978-1-61097-341-0

1. Melville, Herman, 1819–1891 — Criticism and interpretation. 2. Death of God theology. 3. Christianity and the arts. 4. Theology. I. Jasper, David. II. Title.

ps2387 .j64 2012

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

To Katrien

Foreword

According to Horkheimer and Adorno the greatest artists were never those who embodied a flawless and perfect style. In our Western academies at this moment we live in dark times in which utterly philistine demands are made upon the practice of reflective thought and the relentless drive to produce that which is immediately useful and finished is everything, such that all true thinking is in danger of falling into an abysmal darkness and the consequences of this are almost too terrible to contemplate. Theology, for its part, has, by and large, condemned itself, at best, to a life on the margins of cultural relevance by its inveterate refusal to acknowledge the terms of its enterprise and to embrace the impossibility of its venture. If genuine thought in the context of the modern Subject in the process of self-becoming is to sustain any kind of validity today, even in anticipation, then it must embrace a creative imagination, a kind of confidence game, undertaken in confidence, in which, perilously, we place our trust. Not to so engage will consign us to even greater dangers, and it is to be wondered whether that terminal condition has not already been reached.

It is not the task of a Foreword to describe in brief the text that lies before us, nor to attempt to perform the function of an Introduction that, as will quickly become evident to the reader of this book, can only be superfluous and even inappropriate. It should, at best, merely try to set a tone, to apprise the unwary reader of the task ahead and to celebrate the revisionary exercise that carries thought forward, allowing possibilities for theological thinking previously unthought—shocking, provoking. Certainly the book which you about to read is an exercise in relating literature to theology at its most imaginative and intelligent. A great deal has been said, and will in future be said, about Herman Melville, arguably the greatest American novelist of the nineteenth century if not even more. But finally the only way to allow Melville’s writing to work on, or in, us is to read his texts as provocations to theological thinking, and the best way to do that is to exercise oneself as freely as possible in their impossible contexts and their incessant theatricality. Though hardly conventional in his education, Melville was nevertheless deeply immersed in the literary and philosophical culture of the first half of the nineteenth century—the time of Romanticism and German Idealism, of endless reflection on the self and subject, of excess and obsession. From this fermenting mixture, fanned by the salt winds of Melville’s sea faring life—the only Yale and Harvard that were open to him, as he tells us—emerges his fiction enveloped in its pseudonyms, plagiarisms and hoaxes. Literature is deeply serious in a manner that the frequently absurdly solemn theological and even philosophical enterprises often do not appreciate inasmuch as they tend to make the mistake of taking themselves too seriously and in the wrong way, thus losing track of the secrets that lie hidden behind masquerades and the performances of fictions—the genesis of secrecy.

In the pages that are before you will encounter the beginnings of an aesthetic theology that moves outside the boundaries of the more traditional theologies that are girded by the authority of church and ecclesia. Yet, and perhaps for that very reason, it is desperately needed as being, as Philip Goodchild writes of Deleuze, no longer modelled on the true but an attempt to generate an ethos of thought that expresses an intensification of life. And, as in the characterization of the theological Subject at the end of the book, the reader of these pages will almost inevitably recognize in him or herself a constitutive inadequacy in the task of reading and interpretation, but actually only thereby begin to discover a creative potential that was hitherto unknown and unexplored. It is difficult to think or imagine anything more important than this today if we are to hope for any escape from that pallid hopelessness which was the fate of Bartleby and from the depths of the Dead Letter Office to which the tenor of our times might otherwise so easily consign us.

David Jasper

University of Glasgow

Acknowledgments

Any work whose transition from germ of an idea to published volume required ten years is bound to have its fair share of acknowledgments, and mine is no different. I want, first, to thank my doctoral advisors at the University of Glasgow, Professors David Jasper and Yvonne Sherwood, whose combined comments and critiques were as invaluable as the confidence they showed in me as I set off down idiosyncratically interdisciplinary paths. Of my many peers along the way, all of them invaluable, I want especially to single out my friends Anthony Paul Smith and Adam Kotsko, who, during the long, often frustrating, years between dissertation defence and publication, provided crucial moral support and intellectual challenge. Various sections of and passages from chapters three and four in particular have made their way into a number of published essays, so many thanks to the editorial teams of journals such as Political Theology , Journal of Religion , and The Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds , as well as the groundbreaking edited volume After the Postsecular and Postmodern (Cambridge Scholar’s Press, 2010). Thanks, too, to my friends at Wipf & Stock, without whom this particular monkey would still be on my back. And, finally, thanks to my wife, who has suffered this same monkey every step of the way. The bananas are now all ours, dear.

Introduction

Beginning is going on. Everywhere. Amidst all the endings, so rarely ripe or ready. They show up late, these beginnings, bristling with promise, yet labored and doomed. Every last one of them is lovingly addressed: in the beginning. But if such talk—talk of the beginning and the ending—has produced the poles, the boundary markers of a closed totality, if the beginning has blocked the disruptive infinities of becoming, then theology had better get out of its own way.

In the beginning, theology starts again.¹

On Introductions

An introduction, in addition to being a formal greeting or welcome, is meant to set the tone and the tenor of a particular project, so as to hint at the chorus of voices and themes that will in due course emerge. In so doing, a project’s ending is translated, or, in the event of its qualitative malignancy, metastasizes to its beginning. Because they are typically written after the book’s body, and quite often even after the conclusion, introductions are slightly shady affairs. They are, the postmodern theologian Mark C. Taylor affirms, awkward, embarrassing affairs—coy games of hide-and-seek, revelation and concealment, appearance and disappearance. ² This is to say, a conclusion is never far from its introduction. The reader will soon notice that this introduction is no different.

Replete with its as yet unsubstantiated assertions, an introduction tends to be, for no less an authority on the subject than Hegel, a string of random statements and assurances about truth.³ The insidious implication of these random statements and assurances, he fears, is that they unfaithfully portray truth as some autonomous, constructive particularity, some Kantian Ding-an-sich, that illegitimately precedes the philosopher’s attempt to develop an argument. In any narrative, whether it is philosophical or otherwise, such truth might range from the writer’s historico-cultural preconceptions and agendas, to the intentions and purposes read into the author by his or her reader. Problems arise, however, when one conflates such preconceptions with the imagined immediacy of a self-conscious author. On this point, even Søren Kierkegaard, one of Hegel’s chief critics, agrees, finding in it a rationale for his use of pseudonyms and indirect communication:

It gives me pleasure to see that the pseudonyms, presumably aware of the relation subsisting between the method of indirect communication and the truth as inwardness, have themselves said nothing, nor misused a preface to assume an official attitude toward the production, as if an author were in a purely legal sense the best interpreter of his own words; or as if it could help a reader that an author had intended this or that, if it were not realized; or as if it were certain that it was realized because the author himself says so in the preface; . . . or as if an author were served by having a reader who precisely because of the author’s clumsiness knew all about the book.⁴

For Hegel, to project into an introduction or preface a certain immediacy of truth, that is, to consider the truth of the work as something already in place and simply in need of fleshing out, is the signature of a profoundly naïve irrationalism. Such thinking, indeed, stands in the way of the whole philosophical enterprise as Hegel envisioned it. To conceive of a fully immediate truth, he famously jeers his former roommate Friedrich Schelling (of whom we will have much more to say in the pages to come), is akin to presenting the "Absolute as the night, in which, as people say, all cows are black."⁵ On the contrary, Hegel continues, "One can say of the Absolute that it is essentially a result, that it is only at the end what it is in truth.⁶ In this way, Hegel can begin his introduction by denouncing introductions as not only superfluous but, in view of the nature of the subject matter, even inappropriate and misleading."⁷ Of course, one can but hope that Hegel appreciated the irony that his condemnation of introductions was written as a preface to Phenomenology of Spirit, itself a six-hundred-page introduction to his vaunted and often vilified philosophical system.⁸ For my part, I will simply say that one need not have similarly systematic claims for one’s project in order to sympathize with Hegel’s contempt and appreciate the ambivalence that informs its irony.⁹

An Untimely Intrusion

Similarly, and in keeping with the original sin of the Calvinist upbringing weighing heavily on his soul from birth, Herman Melville was acutely aware of the untimely intrusion of life’s end. Like several of his most famous characters and narrators, he believed endings to be somehow out of place, before their time. In Moby-Dick, for instance, Ishmael is sensitive, from the very beginning of his famed journey, to the fact that the inevitable end of Captain Ahab’s wrathful search for the Whale was suicide.

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practicably assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.¹⁰

In a dialectical maneuver that will prove especially significant for my reading of Melville as a whole, the inevitability of Ahab’s end, the intrusion of Ahab’s cardiac arrest before its time had come, is what makes possible the monomaniacal quest for the Whale that infects the Pequod’s captain and crew. That is to say, the ending of Moby-Dick is the fundamental presumption that makes the novel itself at all possible. Neither such a maneuver, nor its implications for what we will see is an aesthetic re-evaluation of subjectivity, are as simple as it may at first appear.

Melville himself would also endure a misplaced ending. Indeed, when he died in 1891 several obituaries expressed shock that he had not died years earlier. One year earlier, in fact, Edward Bok had observed:

There are more people to-day who believe Herman Melville dead than there are those who know he is living. . . . Forty-four years ago, when Typee appeared, there was not a better known author than he, and he commanded his own prices. Publishers sought him, and editors considered themselves fortunate to secure his name as a literary star. And to-day? Busy New York has no idea he is even alive, and one of the best-informed literary men in this country laughed recently at my statement that Herman Melville was his neighbor by only two city blocks. Nonsense, said he. Why, Melville is dead these many years! Talk about literary fame? There’s a sample of it!¹¹

For the New York Times Melville just as well should have been dead, for they could not even remember his name: in its two notices of his death, his first name was reported, respectively, as Henry and Hiram.¹² And in a glaring oversight that has persisted until only recently, The Press claimed that he had done almost no literary work during the past sixteen years.¹³ Seemingly silent unto the end, Melville’s death is memorialized by a blank scroll chiseled onto his tombstone in the Bronx, where he is buried next to his son, Malcolm.¹⁴

What, though, of his beginning? By all accounts, it certainly seems innocent enough. But is it really? Might it be pertinent, for example, that Melville’s mother added a terminal e to her children’s surname after the death of their father in 1832? A one-letter change is, of course, small and inconsequential. What difference does a character make? Is it overly felicitous to suggest that for her son Herman the change would ultimately hint at the inherent fluidity of his very identity, a notion with which he would even occasionally play by signing letters with his original surname, Melvill. Consciously or not, Elizabeth Renker suggests, these acts of reversion would effectively split him in two.¹⁵ Melville himself, in fact, suggests something similar when he concludes a letter to his British publisher, John Murray, whom he had not yet met, by playfully questioning the latter’s persistence in carrying on this mysterious correspondence with an imposter shade, that is, the fanciful appellation of Herman Melvill.¹⁶

Herman Melville and Aesthetic Theology

In this way, I wish to suggest that Melville was astutely attuned to the dialectical dynamics at work in the processes of self-creation, or self-becoming, in a manner not dissimilar to that described much later by one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers about such processes, Maurice Blanchot:

The writer only finds himself, only realizes himself, through his work; before his work exists, not only does he not know who he is, but he is nothing. He only exists as a function of the work, but then how can the work exist? . . . If he does not see his work before him as a project already completely formed, how can he make it the conscious end of his conscious acts? ¹⁷

My aim in this book, in short, is to assess what I regard as the profoundly theological implications of conceiving modern subjectivity in the register of aesthetics (i.e., self-creativity). It may strike both the student of literature and the student of theology as peculiar, but I will seek to substantiate my conception of theology as a fundamental, ontological discourse that operates best when emerging in the spaces between any number of discourses and discipline. The centrality of subjectivity in modern, post-Kantian philosophy, with its endeavor to re-think the role and limits of subjective imagination and spontaneity, and the importance of this philosophical endeavor in the aesthetic maneuvers manifested in the literature of Herman Melville, both affirms my commitment to interdisciplinarity and aligns it with those of a radical theological tradition now largely neglected. As a long-time representative of this tradition, Thomas J. J. Altizer’s declaration in a recently published essay is significant: We must be prepared to accept the paradox that modern philosophy has been more deeply theological than modern theology, which is perhaps not so paradoxical if our greatest modern imaginative vision has been more fully theological than has our theological thinking.¹⁸ For Altizer, this is true because it is the modern philosophical vision that allows theological thinking to rethink its own deepest grounds, those of subjectivity, a re-thinking which is initially an unthinking of every established theological ground—only then is a truly theological thinking possible. Such is, he concludes, the first goal of radical theology, which I will translate further into a conception of theology as a kind of intentional aesthetic practice committed to the potential of a united thinking and creativity.¹⁹

In Melville I will find theology characterized in ways hitherto thought unthinkable. By allying Melville’s theological characterizations with Altizer’s provocation, this book aims to embody the subject of theology as a revolutionary theological Subject—that is, as a creative, active emergence from the interstices of religion, literature, and philosophy.²⁰ I do not regard, however, this merely as an interdisciplinary exercise. The peculiar, and perhaps even sometimes seemingly strained, connections I will trace are best understood not simply (or at all) as the happy convergences and coincidences of different discourses brought into in a harmonious dialogue. My aim is not to highlight connections made obvious by the hindsight of well-read acumen. On the contrary, my emphasis throughout is on precisely the forced peculiarity of these connections; which is to say, the interdisciplinary model I hope to exemplify is invested in that which is unthought in thought—i.e., its radically disruptive, repressed aesthetic-theological excess. Only in this way does one’s thinking about theology (qua subject) become a theological thinking (qua Subject).

David Jenkins expresses something similar when he specifies literature as theology’s forgotten dialogue partner: "Theologians need . . . to stand under the judgment of the insights of literature before they can speak with true theological force of, and to, the world this literature reflects and illuminates."²¹ Such a forceful perspective, nevertheless, remains a marginal one. This is but one of the reasons David Jasper candidly sighs: I am tired of the academic game of proving that I have read this and this—one reads about a lot of things, and what is interesting is why some strike one as desperately important and others as instantly forgettable. (Most ‘theology,’ as such, bores me to tears.)²² An ultimately relevant theology, as understood by the likes of Jenkins and Jasper, and carried forward here, is one that is vital beyond its strictly confessional and/or disciplinary confines. Only by first blurring its existing contours may it more sufficiently blind the hegemonic systems of closure it wishes to resist.

Importantly, this is not to say I am interested in identifying Herman Melville as a theologian. Rather, my aim is to highlight the ways in which the complex theatricality of Melville’s life and fiction model the aesthetic-theological dimensions of subjectivity and in the process characterize (in the dual sense of rendering it a subjective character and/or agency and rendering a description of its objectified character and/or agency) theology as a revolutionary Subject. Contrary to the most common postmodern reading of Melville, with which my own will surely be associated, my point in emphasizing theatricality and character is not that Melville introduces and participates in a kind of counterfeit economy, as it were, wherein classical notions of truth and identity are forever frustrated by one’s epistemic inability to see beyond the mask of phenomenal limitation. His is, to express it for now perhaps obliquely, one in which the gamble of faith that anything at all exists behind the phenomenal mask is itself betrayed as constitutive of the