Talking Big

“Who aint a slave? Tell me that,” Ishmael says in the opening chapter of Moby-Dick. It’s a question to pursue in reading Melville’s novel. In 1851, what could he be asking his readers? For, as Pynchon wrote in his own novel Mason & Dixon, throughout the long history of America, “coiled behind all gazes the great Worm of Slavery.” I know what Melville means in context. Charles Olson makes good points about this in his book re: capitalism and industry.

Olson’s book Call Me Ishmael is fantastic by the way. Here is a link to Chris Power writing about it in Granta. Power calls it one of the best books of literary criticism he’s ever read. I agree. It’s so passionate, and Olson was a great writer himself.

The Norton third critical edition of Moby-Dick has this footnote: “Melville said he always regarded slavery as an ‘atheistical iniquity,’ but (unlike, say, Henry David Thoreau) he did not feel a personal obligation to devote his life to ending it.” Four years after Moby-Dick Melville published Benito Cereno, a novel that directly depicts and addresses slavery. There’s a pretty good interview with historian Greg Grandin here that is worth reading on this topic.

Here’s his answer to one question.

What was Melville’s position on slavery?
That’s the big debate right? There are left Melvillians who want to claim that Melville is this critic of empire, slavery, and individualism. And then there are right Melvillians who want to say he was really more of a metaphysician—he cared more about cosmic concerns, like finding meaning in a meaningless society. As a historian, I don’t know what Melville thought—he left no letters or diaries about why he wrote Benito Cereno. But what I’m trying to do is transcend the debate. When Melville was talking about metaphysics—how to assign meaning in a world that seemed to be meaningless; how to reconcile individual democracy with some kind of moral structure; how to confront the obliteration of the self in a godless universe—those concerns were connected to slavery. Slavery is about deception. Slavery is about the obliteration of the self in a larger system. That is slavery. So even when Melville wasn’t talking about slavery per se, his metaphysical concerns still had a concrete manifestation in the real world.