The Unkillable Dream of the Great American Novel: Moby-Dick as Test Case

This essay is an interim report on a long-term study of the chimera of the great American novel—the dream either of writing it or seeing it written. The project has three main facets: a chronicle of the dispensations of authorial, critical, and readerly pronouncements (a story with a distinct beginning, several middles, and no end); a historical-formalist comparative examination of several dozen aspirants and/or nominees; and a nation-and-narration metaperspective conceptualizing “American” narrative, in broadest terms, as part of a world system inflected by what Pascale Casanova calls the “Herder effect” (78–81), the postulate of each nation speaking in its own voice, within and against which its writers must thereafter contend, even such resolute cosmopolitans as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.

This might seem a distinctly unfashionable project, out of phase with the push to think beyond/outside the confines of nationness for which Americanists, myself included, have lately been calling as a counterweight to the overemphasis on US literary and cultural difference—the “literature of our own” phase, as it were—that long marked Americanist field-defining work. But beyond this, great American novelism as such might seem so quaintly paleolithic, long since dead as a viable subject for literary history, criticism, and theory. As one recent manifesto by Alan Williams begins by asking, “Aside from pissing off the literati, does the Great American Novel, a monumentally 19th century concept, serve any higher purpose?”

Indeed, the dream of the “GAN”—initially reduced from Great American Novel to acronym status by none other than Henry James¹—has been killed off not once but at least twice. It degenerated into a media cliché soon after its first launch—on the same level, one nineteenth-century critic dryly observed, as “the great American sewing-machine, the great American public school, [and] the great American sleeping car” (Allen 1403). It was killed off again with the rise of American literary studies as an academic specialization in the middle half of the twentieth century, by a string of articles dismissing the GAN as a naively amateurish age-of-realism pipe dream, “faded into the limbo of literary lost causes” (Knox, “In Search” 64).² Scrolling more slowly through the decades, we find a bad-tempered equivalent of the “escalator effect” with which Raymond Williams metaphorizes the history of pastoral nostalgia: each generation fancying that the one before lived a life closer to nature (9–12). GAN commentary, by contrast, played itself through as a discourse of repeated dis-enchantment: each generation seeing the one before as more gullible than itself.

Yet critical pissiness also suggests the persistence of some sort of hydrant, however phantasmal. Clearly, neither critical skepticism nor authorial diffidence ever kept US writers from attempting big national fictions, then or now. “Every American novelist,” Maxine Hong Kingston once wrote, secretly “wants to write the Great American Novel” (57–58). (This during the runup to Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book [1989], one of the texts on my list.³) Or take the spate of Y2K doorstop books summing up the century, or at least the half-century, such as John Updike's In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996) and Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997). 9/11 may well generate the same. As my colleague Louis Menand remarked to me, no serious reviewer today would tout a book as the great American novel, yet it's hard to think of a major US novelist who hasn't given it a shot. The persistence in the face of skepticism and mockery of the desire for a preeminent text (or select group of texts) that might encapsulate national experience reflects some entrenched quasi-understanding among authors, critics, the publishing industry, and readers at large to read the national through N number of a perhaps infinitely extending series of putative master narratives, an alliance reinforced every time some random journalist compares Lyndon Johnson or George W. Bush to Captain Ahab stalking the whale, or when “Bush's brain,” presidential advisor Karl Rove, summed up the sense of being hounded by Democratic lawmakers as, “I'm Moby-Dick and they're after me” (Baker and Fletcher A1). Even that disaffected manifesto quoted earlier gets sucked into the vortex by going on to specify nine so-called parameters for GAN aspirants “that should go without saying,” the last of which is that “It has to reference Moby-Dick as the Great American Novel” (A. Williams n.p.).

Regarding the obsolescence of the nation-focus, I hope to treat both narrative and critical centripetalism in the light of the messily hybrid and migratory character of the texts, tropes, and plot strategies under view—including the fascination with the animating big idea itself. Broadly speaking, the conception of “a great national novel” would seem to be one (although hardly the inevitable) outcome of “the national longing for form” (Brennan 44–70) in a context of postcolonial anxiety about cultural coherence and legitimation, such as obtained in the US when the GAN first came into circulation. Why a similar discourse developed in some Latin-American countries rather than others,⁴ and why there is no equivalent in nineteenth-century German literary culture for Allesandro Mazzoni's I Promessi Sposi (1842), despite the analogous condition of a populace culturally interknit striving to realize itself as a unified country, may forever remain something of a mystery. For now, suffice it to say that US literary-cultural history is not unique in its fascination with fictional narratives that promise to sum up the national essence, nor by the same token must an inquiry into such lead to naive reaffirmation of US literary autonomy.

1. Genesis, Premises, Templates, Dispensations

Often we can't specify when a concept gets put into circulation. Here, we can: a short essay of January 1868 by New England man of letters and Civil War veteran John W. DeForest, author of a new novel that clearly tried to model his idea, Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), one of those historically notable (Fluck 88–113) but subgalactic texts that keep getting rediscovered and then falling out of print.

DeForest envisaged a work that would capture “the American soul” through portrayal of “the ordinary emotions and manners of American existence” via a “tableau” that would grasp the full geographical and cultural range of national life, with the amplitude of a Thackeray, a Trollope, a Balzac (De Forest 27). To date, he argues, American fiction has been overwhelmingly “local” or sectional; moreover, its best fiction writer, Hawthorne, captures “little but the subjective of humanity” (28). The closest approximation is Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which despite glaring defects did have “a national breadth to the picture, truthful outlining of character, natural speaking, … drawn with a few strong and passionate strokes, not filled in thoroughly, but still a portrait” (28).

De Forest risked self-contradiction in taking for granted that there must be such a thing as an “American soul” when the literary evidence to date, by his own say-so, argued the opposite. He was myopic in positing that regional and national fiction must be antagonistic. So too his assessment of Uncle Tom's Cabin, which shows scant interest in slavery and racial division except as issues now happily resolved, much less in the possibility that a black novelist might see things differently from a white one. Such limitations mark him as the product of a particular background and time: a white Anglo-American Yankee writing in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, with fictional realism coming into ascendancy, long before the critical establishment began to take serious notice of the large body of narrative writing by writers other than white Protestants.

Myopic, yet prophetic, too. Critical calls for an autonomous national literature dated back to the Revolution, but no substantive theory of what might actually constitute national fiction had congealed, due partly to the regional fissuring DeForest deplores. With the war behind and completion of territorial conquest and hinterland settlement in sight, so too (for the first time) was the GAN. It was, in short, arguably at once the leading literary edge of the “romance of reunion” between northern and southern whites⁵ and, beyond that, a leading literary edge of the broader push toward consolidation of the nation as a literary, cultural, and political unit.⁶ Also pivotal was prose fiction's rising critical prestige stateside. Nina Baym, the most thorough student of antebellum fiction criticism, convincingly argues that the emergence of the GAN idea required a greater acceptance of prose fiction as a high art form than then obtained, however much Cooper, Sedgwick, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, Stowe, and others helped make that emergence possible.⁷ Sure enough, I've unearthed only a few scattered antebellum references to “the great American novel,” the earliest an advertisement for an 1852 London penny edition reprint of, fortuitously, Uncle Tom's Cabin, a promotional hype that simply touts its runaway best-seller status.⁸ The literary nationalism that had run strong in US criticism since the Revolutionary era and had intensified during the antebellum years was an indispensable precondition,⁹ but not until the late 1860s was a self-conscious discourse of the (or even “a”) great American novel possible.

De Forest's essay was also prophetic in its concurrence with a rising tide of nation-centric theory abroad. The conception of national literature as national expression in Hippolyte Taine's just-published Histoire de la litérature anglaise (1863) would have immense influence on late-century formulations of American literary/cultural difference (Evans 12–13, 92–93). This too was the eve of Ernest Renan's seminal essay, “What Is a Nation?” (1882), which defined “a nation” as “a soul, a spiritual principle,” entailing “the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories” and “the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form” (Renan 19). That personification is the remote origin of the most influential treatise on nationalism in recent times, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983, 1991), which reinvents nationalist theology as mythic fabrication (15).

Anderson theorized the nation as the fruit of collective imagination, not primordially “there.” Whatever its shortcomings,¹⁰ this model without question intensified literary-critical attention to the historic role of literature and the arts in the work of nation-building. Through an Andersonian prism, nations seemed indeed to “depend for their existence on an apparatus of cultural fictions in which imaginative literature generally plays a decisive role”—in the first instance, the novel particularly (Brennan 49). De Forest himself would never have made such big claims about the American novel, which for him barely existed. His standpoint was far closer to Renan's that national fiction presupposed a national soul, not that fiction was a nation-building force. He shows no interest, for example, in Uncle Tom's Cabin's activist thrust, much less its possible role in touching off the Civil War. Yet he took the notion of nation-building and fiction-building as intertwined projects to a new plane of assertion that haunted later novelistic and critical practice. The very naivete of Taine's, Renan's, and De Forest's hypostasizations relative to Anderson's demystification of the nation as a produced effect abetted the mentality that a nation's artifacts might embody nationness if not create it.

The GAN soon entrenched itself as a term of reference for publishers, reviewers, and critics, despite the skepticism it provoked.¹¹ Though used more as an epithet than as a concept defined with any precision, several specific connotations quickly took hold. First, GAN discourse commingles retrospect with anticipation, typically stipulating that the great work remains unwritten, although some previous named effort points the way. When a specific claim is lodged, except for publisher advertisements of new titles, it's usually a novel at least a decade old. Second, GAN discourse therefore correlates broadly, but unevenly, with evolving canon theory, increasingly appropriated, though never monopolized, by the professoriat. On the one hand, GAN talk is a far more open and participatory discourse, as evidenced during the early years by contributors' columns in newspapers and magazines and in our own time by internet blogs. Googling “great american novel” while drafting this essay yielded 2,660,000 hits (many of them predictably redundant). On the other hand, both late Victorian common readers and turn-of-the-twenty-first-century bloggers have regularly been swayed, even against their intuitive judgments, by what they take to be critical consensus, as for instance with those today who accept Moby-Dick (1851) as a possible GAN while confessing that they don't much like or understand it.¹²

A third constituent is the paradox of the one and the many. Although the mythical GAN is regularly hypostasized as a singular, unique “the,” it's taken de facto more often than not as a plural category. One can readily think of it as, say, a top five, as with the much-publicized 2006 New York Times poll of the best American novels of the past quarter century (Toni Morrison's Beloved [1987] received the most votes overall) (Scott 16–19), or as an open, even infinitely extendable, series. This pluralization comports with the disputes over criteria dating back to De Forest. Should regional fiction be disallowed? Frank Norris, for one, claimed the opposite. Should the setting necessarily be American? Edith Wharton argued the contrary. Must it be a realist mimesis? Most authors and readers seem to have thought so, especially through the 1930s, but many objected from the start, anticipating the now-discredited but hardly defunct correlation, first suggested by D. H. Lawrence and F. R. Leavis, of romance as the mark of American fictional difference, a claim also sometimes made (on rather different grounds) for Latin-American narrative as well (Glissant 105).¹³

So, even though the GAN has typically been deployed as a labeling device, it also implies a rudimentary conceptual matrix, an incipient critical problematics, not merely for the score of novels most commonly so named by those who play the game, but also as a basis for mapping the whole, massively complex, ever-changing flow of narrative discourse in US history since its inception.

Several recipes or formulae—not mutually exclusive—seem to facilitate, though hardly ensure, GAN status. The most obvious and surefire is to have been subjected repeatedly to a series of memorable rewritings (in whatever genre or media), thereby giving the text a kind of master-narrative status whether or not it aspired to such. Of this The Scarlet Letter (1850), the most durably canonical classic American fiction, is my favorite premodern demonstration case, both despite and because it is arguably at least as much a diasporic or “Atlantic world” narrative as an “American” one, despite having traditionally been treated by Americanists as a designedly fictive myth of national/Puritan origins.¹⁴ Recipe two might be called the romance of the divide (or “divides,” plural), fictions of sectional and/or ethno-racial division instantiating that division in the form of a family history and/or heterosexual love affair, which thereby becomes a national synecdoche. De Forest's Miss Ravenel builds around this trope, although by far the most influential early text to do so is Uncle Tom's Cabin. Recipe three is a narrative centering on the lifeline of a socially paradigmatic figure (traditionally male, but diminishingly so), whose odyssey tilts on the one side toward picaresque and on the other toward a saga of personal transformation, or failure of such. Among premodern candidates, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) stands out in later critical accounts, if not in its own time. An expanded variant of the socially representative protagonist mode, arguably a category of its own, is the paradigmatic family saga, as in Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans (1925), William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom (1936), and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Still another recipe is the heterogeneous symbolic assemblage of individuals, often positioned in a confined space in the service of a common task or defined against the background of an epochal public event, constituting thereby an image of “democratic” promise and/or dysfunction. Here Moby-Dick, with its complex ideologization of the shipboard microcosm, the global village that is the Pequod’s crew, today stands pre-eminent among the classic US fictions. That The Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Huckleberry Finn, and Moby-Dick have in fact been cited in latter-day lists of possible GANs more often than any other premodern texts confirms the ongoing influence of critical canonization (in Stowe's case, recanonization), ratified by school syllabi and artistic recyclings at various levels of sophistication from pop to avant-garde, in shaping public memory of what counts as monumental in the distant past, if not the near distance.¹⁵

These encapsulations, formulaic though they are, should substantiate why a great American novel project must be transnational and also transgeneric. Recipe number three, for example, can't be understood without taking into account antecedent picaresque and Bildungsroman traditions, as well as such nonfictional prototypes as slave narrative, conversion narrative, and Franklinesque success stories, none of whose provenances are distinctively national. The same holds for novels like Moby-Dick that build on the heteroglot assemblage scenario: e.g. Frank Norris's The Octopus (1901) (especially if considered the first of an unfinished trilogy), John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy (1930–36), Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948) (steeped in both Melville and Dos Passos), and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) (steeped in Melville, if not also Dos Passos).

Perilous though schemes of periodization always are, for rough and ready purposes one might distinguish three phases of GAN discourse. During the late 1800s, the basic templates and defining issues were set in place. Then came a further surge of interest among writers and reviewers, followed by expressions of disavowal by the emerging literary-scholarly establishment. On the one hand, a number of major novelists increasingly weighed in during the first third of the twentieth century with position statements bespeaking personal investments in the GAN,¹⁶ and the most exhaustive attempts yet to actualize the GAN (whether or not directly so professed) hit the market: e.g. Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925), Stein's The Making of Americans, and Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy. It's tempting to see the 1920s as a breakthrough point of sorts, as the decade that saw the publication of the first of a half-dozen twentieth-century parodies entitled The Great American Novel (by William Carlos Williams in 1923), concurrently with Dreiser's and Stein's discrepant monumentalizations, as well as with the slow-selling but now perennial nominee The Great Gatsby (1925), the now-faded contender Babbitt (1922), and the best-selling satire Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), proclaimed rather astonishingly as a GAN candidate by Edith Wharton (Hegeman 525) in memory of her own shot at the GAN in The Custom of the Country (1913), also centered on an uppity parvenu (Lee 330). It's also tempting to presuppose some interconnection between this scene, the rise of the US to acknowledged world power status after the Great War, and the birth of American literature as an academic discipline. Yet however influential these latter developments were in promoting the circulation and prestige of the US worldwide during the remainder of the century, the professionalization of American literature studies also reinforced a dismissive view of the GAN idea as amateurish sloganeering on behalf of a dubiously middlebrow project not to be confused with what really counted in modern fiction, the high modernist revolution from James and Conrad on, a judgment explicitly seconded by (some) creative writers.¹⁷ New journalist Tom Wolfe, for instance, drew on Lionel Trilling's critique of Dreiserian social realism in explaining “Why They Aren't Writing the Great American Novel Anymore.” Answer: the panoramic social novel was dead. “Most serious American novelists would rather cut their wrists than be known as ‘the secretary of American society,’ ” declared Wolfe, quoting Balzac's self-description. “With fable, myth and the sacred office to think about—who wants such a menial role?” (157).

Since Wolfe's article in 1972, indeed since World War II, precious few novelists or critics of stature have deigned to treat the GAN as a credible idea or enabling myth. British writer Martin Amis's defense of Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March (1953) as the book that “retired the cup” (114) and American novelist Jane Smiley's of Uncle Tom's Cabin as the book that should have been the ur-text for American fiction rather than Huckleberry Finn are conspicuous exceptions. More indicative of the distinct unfashionableness of GAN talk is Norman Mailer's gun-shy tribute to Dos Passos: “If we have any one great American novel, and perhaps we don't, but if we do; it would be U.S.A.” Still, notwithstanding its ostensible second death, the idea lives on as mantra and as aspiration, despite the double-whammy of the modernist (and postmodernist) revolutions and the critical sophistication of US literature studies that came with the academicization of the field.

[N]otwithstanding its ostensible second death, the [Great American Novel] lives on as mantra and as aspiration, despite the double-whammy of the modernist (and postmodernist) revolutions and the critical sophistication of US literature studies that came with the academicization of the field.

How can that be? For one thing, the desire to produce and consume social realist fiction has never gone out of fashion, and furthermore it's tended to renew itself by hybridizing with modernist and then postmodernist experimentalism. Among latter-day contenders and/or nominees, witness Augie March, behind which stands Dreiser as well as Whitman and Twain; Invisible Man (1952), behind which stands Dostoyevsky as well as Emerson, Twain, Faulkner, and African-American musical and oral vernacularity; and De Lillo's Underworld, a hybrid of old-fashioned chronicle fiction and postmodern tonal flatness, ludic parody, and scrambled temporality.

Second, the dream of the GAN has arguably gained more than it's lost as the result of the related phenomena of multiple ethno-literary renaissances starting in the 1920s and the two-stage process within American literature studies of first winnowing the US literary canon down to a select number of galactic luminaries during the middle third of the century, followed by the contestation of the distinctly white, male, Protestant, politically liberal result on behalf of the (especially) women and nonwhite writers this process marginalized. The winnowing phase helped catalyze inter alia the Melville revival, Faulkner's canonization, and what Jonathan Arac shrewdly calls Huckleberry Finn's “hypercanonization”—a term that might also be applied to, say, Moby-Dick and The Great Gatsby, also beneficiaries of this mid-century winnowing process now seemingly become permanent classics, pedagogical staples, and fixtures on popular lists of top-GAN possibles. The (re)opening of the canon in the 1970s and after inter alia reestablished Uncle Tom's Cabin as a towering—if dubious—presence in US fiction history and helped prepare the way for Morrison's Beloved (central to which is the historical incident Stowe drew upon for Eliza Harris's escape and Cassy's infanticide) to top the 2006 New York Times poll. But what especially deserves stressing here is the complex symbiosis between the canonical winnowing phase and the revisionist phase that displaced it. For example, the mid-century critical apotheosis of Huck Finn that Arac skeptically demystifies, from humorous bad-boy picaresque suspiciously tolerant of white hegemonics to elevating conversion narrative of southern lad resolved to go to hell rather than return friend Jim to slavery (Arac 37–182), strengthened its eligibility as a pre-text for both Bellow's Augie and Ellison's Invisible Man—breakthrough achievements in Jewish- and African-American fiction that updated the recipe of the socially representative protagonist by fusing “mainstream” precedent with “ethnic” narrative traditions emanating from Jewish immigration narrative and slave narrative respectively. Reciprocally, the interlinked critical rehabilitation of slave narrative and the rise of contemporary neo-slave narrative¹⁸—both minoritarian variants of the socially representative protagonist-centered recipe—helped create the feedback loop that generated rereadings of Huck Finn itself as strongly inflected by slave narrative.¹⁹

Third, the GAN idea continues to thrive among the extra-academic reading public. Though it may have died out as a topic for “serious” scholars, short-take website manifestos, chatrooms, and freelance postings of lists of GAN contenders abound and multiply freely. To characterize this as a bottoms-up verdict of the “common reader” against the critical establishment overstates the case, given that internet access correlates with economic status, GAN commentators comprise but a small fraction of all readers, and their verdicts don't diverge hugely from standard college syllabi. What's out there might better be called a quasi-recycling, quasi-cutting loose of (ex-)pupils from schoolroom tutelage. From a magisterial standpoint, it's tempting to discount this barrage of cyber-miscellanea as a symptom of the naïve desire for authoritative standards of literary judgment to which books like E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987), Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987), and Harold Bloom's The Western Canon (1994) cater, but that too is simplistic. For one thing, blogosphere discourse regularly intermixes serious with jocose, generally quite aware (as GAN discourse has always been) that the term belongs in quotation marks even as one joins the game with gusto. Why then participate? Most obviously and fundamentally, to affirm a memorable reading experience. Beyond this, one finds an intriguingly question-begging desire to address what sort of image of Americanness might be encoded therein. Often this move seems less driven by any investment in the national as such than by the presumption (how responsible are we professors/critics/reviewers for implanting it?) that this is what American texts do, or at least this is the way one talks about them. Even more striking is how seldom such comments posit or contend that a GAN must be celebratory or nationalistic. Contra the thrust of academic Americanist criticism since new historicism to pin down canonical texts’ ideological valences and especially the senses in which they might abet dominant political formations, freelance GAN punditry seems at least as interested in how the novels in question disrupt mainstream pieties. Which is, after all, what one might typically expect a person to say about a life-impacting book.

This lively conversation raises the provocative question of how an old-fashioned yearning for monuments stubbornly persisting into today's putatively postcanonical era can manage to coexist with a strong penchant for images or performances of national failure and with a fuzzy, inchoate sense of the “national” itself. Ultimately I hope to explain the logic(s) of this paradox by reexamining several dozen fictive exempla in terms of the generic “masterplot” structures and intellectual genealogies that inform and reticulate them, in the context of the long history of GAN discourse telegraphically sketched here.

Insofar as no US novel has been more monumentalized since 1950, not even Huck Finn, a look at the case of Moby-Dick may help concretize some of this. To make discussion manageable, I focus initially on the genealogy and implications of a single favorite Melville motif.

2. Moby-Dick and the Specter of Anacharsis Cloots

The image in question is the spectacle of the 30-some delegation led by Prussian baron Jean-Baptiste (a.k.a “Anacharsis”) Cloots (1759–94), self-styled “orator of the human race,” before the French Assembly in 1790, which purported to represent “the ‘oppressed nations of the universe’ ” in their national costumes (Schama 474), congratulating it for having “restored primitive equality among men” and promising that “encouraged by the glorious example of the French, all the peoples of the universe . . . would soon break the yoke of the tyrants who oppress them” (Labbe 305). Here are three passages from Melville that reference Cloots:

They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod. Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were! An Anacharsis Clootz [sic] deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod, to lay the world's grievances before that bar from which not very many of them came back. (Moby-Dick 121)

As among Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims, or those oriental ones crossing the Red Sea towards Mecca in the festival month, there was no lack of variety. Natives of all sorts, and foreigners; men of business and men of pleasure; parlor men and backwoodsmen. … Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes, Santa Fé traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen, and Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers in full drab, and United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto, quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old-fashioned French Jews; Mormons and Papists; Dives and Lazarus; jesters and mourners, teetotalers and convivialists; deacons and blacklegs; hard-shell Baptists and clay-eaters; grinning negroes, and Sioux chiefs solemn as high-priests. In short, a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man. (Confidence-Man 9)

In jovial sallies right and left, his white teeth flashing into view, he [the handsome black sailor the narrator remembers having once seen in Liverpool] rollicked along, the center of a company of his shipmates. These were made up of such an assortment of tribes and complexions as would have well fitted them to be marched up by Anacharsis Cloots before the bar of the first French Assembly as Representatives of the Human Race. At each spontaneous tribute rendered by the wayfarers to this black pagod of a fellow—the tribute of a pause and stare, and less frequently an exclamation—the motley retinue showed that they took that sort of pride in the evoker of it which the Assyrian priests doubtless showed for their grand sculptured Bull when the faithful prostrated themselves. (Billy Budd 2469)

Melville, doubtless, got this cameo from Carlyle's The French Revolution: A History (1837), which scoffingly treats the incident as a sideshow perpetrated by a loony utopian and hypocrite to boot, a bon vivant patrician masquerading as a man of the people (269–70). So too, in the leading narrative history of our time, Simon Schama lumps Cloots with the “lunatics and thugs on the left” (Schama 808). But Melville's first and third iterations, if not also the second, find something poignantly riveting about the raggle-taggle melange of human types. He evidently grasped that Cloots was both an unstable overreacher destined to join the ringleaders of the Terror only to be purged as an extremist by Robespierre just before his fall, yet also a committed advocate of the first-ever statutory declaration of human rights—the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (Hunt 16, 220–23), which was distinctive for extending equal rights to all peoples of the world. From his brother Gansevoort's political travails as well as from Carlyle, Melville would have recognized “Anarcharsis Cloots” as a conservative byword for political demagoguery (Rogin 61), and from Thomas Paine's Age of Reason (1794–1807) he would have perceived the sense of fraternity between Clootz and that most wayward of the nation's founders (Paine 731): as a fellow anti-clerical, as the only other non-French member of the Revolutionary Convention, and as a conscious disseminator of the idea of human rights transnationally.

To view Melville's fictive social microcosms through this Clootsian lens is to foreground the elasticity of his investment in the national as such. The Confidence-Man's (1857) passenger list embeds what at first looks like its distinctively national collage within a universalized framing conception of all humanity on pilgrimage, as if frontier America were just one site of a much more far-reaching ritual process or agenda of social possibility. Its bemusement sits at the opposite end of a continuum from the open-eyed wonder of Malcolm X beholding the unimaginable multiracial concourse of the Hajj. The handsome black sailor vignette has far more to do with comradeship than nation, functioning as one of a series of heterotopic diversions from or postponements of the main plot's cooptation by the blinkered state of emergency Captain Vere imposes on the Bellipotent under claim of national security, starting with Billy's successes aboard the significantly-named Rights of Man. The Moby-Dick passage conceives the Pequod's federation of isolatoes at least as much as a funky League of Nations as of Yankee-style capitalism headed for destruction, though it's that too. It also underscores how Melville's fictive microcosms, and indeed the whole set I take up from the Templeton of James Fenimore Cooper's Pioneers (1823)²⁰ to Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange (1999), are in the first instance an age-of-revolution legacy that extends itself in multiple directions and spatial scales other than just the national, although it is also key to Moby-Dick's plot that the coffin the Pequod turns into could only have been made in the US.

Still more elastic, and commensurately more problematic, than the symbolic geography of Melville's refigurations of Cloots is their informing vision of social solidarity and order. To get at that, I turn to C. L. R. James, the first commentator to identify Moby-Dick's global-historic import as a prophetic rendition of the consequences of US transnational capitalism dramatized by its meticulous portraits of the crew, its work-world, and the supremely competent captain driven mad by the system within which he has risen. For James, Ahab uncannily anticipates “how the society of free individualism would give birth to totalitarianism and be unable to defend itself against it” (Mariners 54). One of the few Melvillians to take seriously his fascination for Cloots, James also strenuously distances the two: “Whereas Clootz [sic] thought of uniting all men in a Universal Republic, based on liberty, equality, fraternity, brotherhood, human rights, etc., Melville … had not the faintest trace of these windy abstractions. … His candidates for the Universal Republic are bound together” by their world of work (19–20). This comports with James's most daring claim that Melville “intend[ed] to make the crew the real heroes of his book, but [was] afraid of criticism,” from which it follows that the nutty fantast Cloots must be rigorously distinguished from the “meanest mariners, renegades and castaways,” who “remain sane and human” (18, 48).

Here, however, James's horizon arguably gets foreshortened by what Donald Pease calls the “future anterior” mode of his act of reading (“Extraterritoriality” 216), the context of vainly desiring a contemporary mutiny, consigned as he was with fellow detainees to Ellis Island by Cold War xenophobia on the way to deportation. James's desire to immunize Melville against Cloots bespeaks an inconsistency in his reading of Ahab both in relation to Ishmael (whom James dismisses as the wrong kind of isolato, the impotent intellectual: “the man without will” [American 84]), by contrast with whom Ahab is the robustly forceful veteran seafarer gone wrong, and to the crew, by contrast with whom he's a mad despot. James's odd mixture of respect and disdain toward Ahab resonates with Melville's several enlistments of the Cloots pageant to hint at key issues of social control: how, whether, and to what end a heterogeneous crowd is to be made coherent, in the service of whatever collective purpose. The Confidence-Man imagines a leaderless assemblage cohering only around a vague conception of pilgrimage, remaining little more than a bemusing metonymic series of antithetical etceteras. Billy Budd imagines a natural aristocracy harmonized from the top down by the handsome sailor's charisma. The Moby-Dick version, most complexly, imagines an otherwise unassimilable group of men marshaled into ad hoc order by a leader purporting to rectify the world's grievances. The pivotal verbs “federated” and “accompanying” both equivocate as to the compulsion versus voluntarism required, and the metaphor of petition also equivocates as to the nature and validity of the “grievances.” Comprehensive inclusiveness and purposeful orderliness, even hierarchical in some sense, seem proffered as terms both of worth and danger.

Such hedging is not merely local to the Cloots motif. Throughout, it drives Moby-Dick's equivocal macro-structure as an observer-hero narrative,²¹ its dual epicenters of Ahab, the purposeful man who compromises his agenda as little as he can, versus Ishmael, the man of reflection who problematizes that agenda to the maximum: the mentally hyperactive, sometimes hilariously irreverent critic of Ahabian dominance is also enmeshed by it in voice as well as body, suffusing his meditations to a point that magnifies, indeed mythifies, the stakes of the quest even as he “resists” it through his combination of critique and parody. But unlike other observer-hero narratives—Heart of Darkness (1899), Great Gatsby, Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (1947), etc.—Moby-Dick's first personness notoriously disappears for the last part of the text save the epilogue. This swerve is often deemed a flaw, but arguably it is a stroke of genius, dramatizing a further stage of the usurpation of the novel's primary counter-voice during the last stages of the chase, although without authorizing the usurping hero, since the narrative voice now becomes the Olympian third-person that orchestrates all of Melville's subsequent long fictions. Here Moby-Dick as rhetorical construct renegotiates for the last time the question posed repeatedly from “Extracts” on, quintessentialized by the Cloots vignettes, which is the conundrum at the heart of democratic philosophy: the extent to which and the authority by which an assemblage shall be subject to order versus collectively or individually empowered.

The correspondence between this muting of the dramatized narrator and Moby-Dick citations at the level of popular culture during the past half century is striking. One of the conspicuous ironies of this novel's canon history is that since it achieved GAN status, and through whatever process of cultural-capital-incentivized trickledown it has become since the 1950s a text of frequent reference for journalists, cartoonists, and bloggers as well as for academics, there's been a pronounced disconnect between the predominant critical identification with the Ishmaelean perspective ushered in by F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941) (396–466) and later subjected to ideological critique by revisionist Americanists as symptomatic of Cold War era free-world liberal anti-Stalinism,²² and the popular reception of Moby-Dick during the same period (and beyond). In the popular discourse Ishmael scarcely exists, unless one counts novelistic echoes (e.g. Kurt Vonnegut's “Call me Jonah” to open Cat's Cradle [1963], Philip Roth's “Call me Smitty” as the opening gambit of his parodistic The Great American Novel [1973], or Thomas Pynchon's Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity's Rainbow). 1950s filmgoers remembered not the Ishmael of Richard Baseheart but the Ahab of Gregory Peck. Modern Moby-Dick cartoons are nearly all about Ahab and the whale, like my own personal favorite, a Rene Baur creation that drolly alludes to Clootsian prosecutorialism through an imagined courtroom scene where Ahab is in the dock being cross-examined by an attorney, harpoon in hand, on behalf of the white whale, who sulks in the background: “So, Captain Ahab, I put it to you that you were deliberately stalking my client.”²³

Another striking feature of media recyclings of Moby-Dick is their variegated political valence. They aren't the monopoly of the left or the right, nor do they always put a “totalitarian” or even negative spin on Ahabian presumption. As a negative image of vengeful monomania, Ahab may stand not only for the American military-industrial establishment's obsession with Vietnam or communist China, or Reagan's with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, or Kenneth Starr's prosecution of Clinton, but also for the liberal media's alleged conspiracy against Nixon, for Nixon's fraught relation to Eisenhower (“awe and fascination soured with fear and a desire to supplant” [qtd in Leonard 45]), for anti-corporate harassment of Microsoft's monopolism, for Rudolph Giuliani's prosecution of Drexel Burnham Lambert as District Attorney of New York City, for Canadian fishery officials' voting for selective lifting of the international ban on whaling, etc. In the course of such discourse, Ahabism sometimes also gets softened into a synonym for quixoticism of whatever sort, like Adlai Stevenson III trying to form a third party in Illinois to stand against Governor Jim (“The Whale”) Thompson, British Prime Minister John Major trying to control a “whale of a depresssion” (Bennett 95), or New York Yankee slugger Roger Maris, the first to break Babe Ruth's home run record in 1961, not quite managing to do it in the span of the old-time 154-game season. All this can mean a quite sympathetic view of Ahab, as with the baseball story by journalist James Reston, for whom Ahab seems one of the great legendary “gallant failures of life” (E8).²⁴

Repoliticize that diagnosis at a more intellectualized level and one gets the neo-Lawrance Thompsonian version of Ahabian “madness” that launched contemporary Americanist whiteness studies, Toni Morrison's “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” (1988), which rehabilitates Ahab as the indispensable agent of resisting hegemonic whiteness: “the only white male American heroic enough to slay the monster that was devouring the world as he knew it” (143).²⁵ Even though Morrison makes a special point of stressing the importance of the “Whiteness of the Whale” chapter, she too deletes Ishmael. In her account, the challenge to the baleful racist status quo is entirely Ahab's. Here we see a fortuitous rounding back to what seems to have been the very first African-American commentary on Moby-Dick, that of antebellum African-American physician and polymath James McCune Smith in Frederick Douglass's Paper (1856), for whom the lesson of the novel as a meditation on the possible righting of social wrongs boiled down to the necessity of firm rather than feckless anti-slavery leadership (McCune Smith 146).

None of this proves that Moby-Dick itself validates Ahabian force against Ishmael's dubieties or the claims of cross-cultural sociality, nor that popular culture is wiser than academic criticism. But no less self-evidently, extra-academic, middlebrow, and even lowbrow hipshooting retakes of supposed masterplots (what Pierre Bourdieu calls “naive citatology” [139]) must be factored into any serious analysis of what counts as great American novelism in order to be faithful to the legacy of this (or any culturally influential) narrative. This factor is all the more important insofar as the GAN is and has always been more a demotic than an academic enthusiasm. Books that accrue GAN charisma inevitably get appropriated in multiple disparate ways, uncontrollable beyond a point by the original authorizing “institutions which conserve the capital of symbolic goods” (Bourdieu 121), in this case critical and pedagogical establishments. Moby-Dick is notable but not unique in provoking such mutiny, readerly hijackings that are orthogonal, even antithetical, to “established” interpretations. Individually, they're often laughable; collectively they're worth noting; sometimes (e.g. McCune Smith and Morrison) they're deeply interesting. In the present case, one if not the only revelation to be gleaned from the unofficial discourse generated by Moby-Dick since it achieved GAN status is the reminder that the novel's central figure of resistance against limiting constraint (whether or not deemed legitimate) is Ahab, not James's mariners, nor the Ishmael of Cold War liberal critics who followed Matthiessen's lead, nor the recuperated Ishmael of critics of Cold War critical revisionism.²⁶ All this follows logically from Moby-Dick's version of the Clootsian microcosm: Cloots the impresario of that otherwise anonymous delegation of heteroglot multinationals. That encapsulation predicts Moby-Dick's revisionist swerve from the standard observer-hero plotline, a performance that in turn helps ensure that when boiled down ex post facto to the bare bones, according to what would seem to be a general rule of popularization of classic texts,²⁷ it gets effectively reduced to the face-off between Ahab and the whale.

Meanwhile, the metamorphic reinvention of the Cloots vignette in Melville's later work bears out the experimental cast of his own thinking, registered obliquely by the element of drollery in latter-day popular appropriations, considerably more common than what one finds in reception history of, say, The Scarlet Letter. Melville invests Cloots (and much else in Moby-Dick) with a Carlylean grotesquerie that leaves it to the reader to surmise at every point whether what's being ventured is prophecy or parody or both. The effect presages the reprise of Marx-Engels's passionate-sardonic invocation of Europe haunted by the communist “specter” reprised in Jacques Derrida's metahistorical Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (1994), where the infusion of the ludic into the passionate also reflects self-conscious ambiguation of seemingly failed enterprise(s), Cloots's and the Pequod's in the one case, the “collapse” of Marxism in the other. Moby-Dick stands somewhere in between taking the prospect of some future completion of democratic-style heroism seriously and spoofing it as doomed from the get-go owing to some combination of leaderly hubris and fecklessness on the crew's part. This problematic is more or less shared by the other novels I've mentioned that employ the heteroglot assemblage device, the GAN template of which the Cloots cameo in miniform and the whole dramatization of the shipboard microcosm it miniaturizes are avatars. Here and elsewhere, the admixture of hopeful and sardonic tonalities inherent in Moby-Dick's treatment of the Clootsian pageant of liberty's needful extension throughout the world resonates with Eric Foner's glass-half-empty, ironic but hopeful scenario of freedom in US history as a history of not-yet-realization.

All this to my mind argues for the unkillability of the GAN aspiration itself, indeed for the likelihood of its thriving all the more vigorously under threat of national emergency or decomposition, insofar as a hankering for the GAN—whether conceived as singular or plural—bespeaks a continuing desire for vicarious participation, however skeptical, in a work of social envisioning conceived as still, maybe forever, incomplete. Whether after another 150 years this process will seem to have worked more toward the end of realizing more robust images of democratic inclusion than toward reinscribing an ideology of natural aristocracy, social Darwinism, or the cynicism of ideals repeatedly betrayed, remains a question. But this very openness will help ensure that the GAN lives on as fantasy if not as achieved result.²⁸

Notes

1

James's letter of 1880 to William Dean Howells (Anesko 156–57). The context, a bemused reflection provoked by early notices of George Washington Cable's new novel The Grandissimes, is predictably ambiguous: it's impossible to say whether James is spoofing the whole idea or only the cliché-language of publishers' hype.

2

See also George Knox, “The Great American Novel: Final Chapter,” American Quarterly 21 (Winter 1969): 667–82; Herbert B. Brown, “The Great American Novel,” American Literature 7 (1935): 1–14; and Sergio Perosa, American Theories of the Novel, 1793–1903 (1983). Jay Martin is the mid-century critic to take the GAN idea most seriously in his Harvests of Change: American Literature, 1865–1915 (1967).

3

Asked about this statement in the late 1990s, Kingston opined to me that one today would wish to think of the “world” novel. But perhaps the disparate pronouncements are unsurprising given how Kingston's writing straddles “immigrant” and “diasporic.”

4

See Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (1991).

5

See Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (1993); and David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2003).

6

See Paul Giles, “The Deterritorialization of American Literature,” Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell (2007), 39–61.

7

Baym, personal correspondence.

8

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin: The Great American Novel, to be Completed in Six Weekly Numbers, Price One Penny Each Saturday, August 7, 1852 (London: Vickers, 1852). The prefatory “A Few Words to the British Reader” characterizes UTC as “the most interesting and startling work of the age. . . . The work has produced, and is producing, such a sensation as no book ever produced before in America or in Europe.” This rhetoric comports with the promotional puffery on both sides of Atlantic; see Michael Winship, “‘The Greatest Book of Its Kind’: A Publishing History of Uncle Tom's Cabin,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 109.2 (1999): 309–32.

9

See Benjamin Spencer, The Quest for Nationality: An American Literary Campaign (1957).

10

See Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (1990), 291–322.

11

For the fullest (but still quite incomplete) assemblage of documents, see Charles A. Campbell, Jr., “‘The Great American Novel': A Study in Literary Nationalism,” diss., U of Minnesota, 1951. I covered some of the ground traversed here in an article from 1994, but my thinking has changed considerably since then; see Buell, “The Rise and ‘Fall’ of the Great American Novel,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 104 (October 1994): 261–83.

12

This, for example, from a blogger who favors Last of the Mohicans (1826) (based perhaps on the film rather than the novel itself): “Found Moby Dick quite hard to get into, but after reading some of the above comments have decided to give it another go” (http://thorntree.lonelyplanet.com/messagepost.cfm?postaction=reply&catid=46&threadid=1). As examples of late Victorian and turn-of-the-twenty-first century participatory discussion, compare the month-long controversy in the pages of the San Francisco Examiner by F. Bailey Millard's article “The Great American Novel” (27 December 1896) with the 2006 PBS special/online symposium on “The Great American Novel” (www.radioopensource.org/the-great-american-novel/) in the way of the New York Times poll. See A. O. Scott, “In Search of the Best,” New York Times Book Review 21 May 2006: 16–19.

13

The hypothesis that American fictional difference from British lay most distinctively in the former's preoccupation with “romance” as against “novelistic” modes most influentially derives from the mid-twentieth-century critics Lionel Trilling and Richard Chase. For the most influential critique of its limitations, see Nina Baym, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” American Quarterly 33 (1981): 123–39; for the most extended later attempted rehabilitation of the hypothesis, see G. Richard Thompson and Eric Carl Link, Neutral Ground: New Traditionalism and the American Romance Controversy (1999). For the most sophisticated adjudication, see Mark McGurl, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James (2001).

14

See Lawrence Buell, “Hawthorne and the Problem of ‘American Fiction’: The Example of The Scarlet Letter,” Hawthorne and the Real: Bicentennial Essays, ed. Millicent Bell (2005).

15

A symptomatic instance is the Wikipedia entry for “Great American Novel” (1 June 2007): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Novel. To let one other example stand for all, see also Christopher Schmitz's list of 20 “Contenders for Great American Novel,” posted since at least 2005 by amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/Contenders-for-Great-American-Novel/1 m/33H3DJF07GCDY). Huck Finn, Moby-Dick, and The Scarlet Letter are ranked first, second, and third, with Uncle Tom's Cabin in seventh place. (The top-ranked post-1950 novel is Kerouac's On the Road [1957], in eleventh place.)

16

See Frank Norris, “The Great American Novelist,” The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, ed. Donald Pizer (1964), 122–24; Edith Wharton, “The Great American Novel,” Yale Review 16 (1927): 646–56; Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (1961), 302; and Theodore Dreiser, “The Great American Novel,” American Spectator Yearbook (1934), 16–25.

17

See especially McGurl's calibrated account of the institutionalization of fictional modernism's aesthetic of difficulty in US narrative practice as a discountenancing of Howellsian “militant probabalism” (46), not—at least during modernism's heyday—so much a pursuit of anti-mimesis per se as a valorization of smart versus stupid.

18

See Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (1999).

19

See William L. Andrews, “Mark Twain and James W. C. Pennington: Huckleberry Finn's Smallpox Lie,” Studies in American Fiction 9 (Spring 1981): 103–12; Lucinda H. Mackethan, “Huck Finn and the Slave Narratives: Lighting Out as Design,” Southern Review 20 (Spring 1984): 247–64; and Elaine Mensh and Harry Mensh, Black, White, and Huckleberry Finn: Re-Imagining the American Dream (2000), 34–45.

20

See David Simpson, The Politics of American English (1986), 155–83.

21

See Buell, “Observer-Hero Narrative,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 21 (1979): 93–111.

22

The most influential statement has probably been Donald Pease's Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (1987), 235–75, as attested by, for example, William Spanos's The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies (1995).

23

See http://www.cartoonstock.com (Moby Dick cartoon 3). A noteworthy exception is a 1982 Gary Larson rear-view shot of a frustrated Ishmaelish scribbler straining for the right first sentence after five discards: “Call me Bill,” etc. (1: 190). Larson's several other cartoons that allude to Moby-Dick follow the norm (1: 26, 200, 383).

24

“Ahab and the China Whale,” quoting prominent Sinophile journalist Edgar Snow, The Nation 17 May 1965: 519; Anthony Lewis, “By Hate Possessed: Reagan's Nicaragua Obsession,” New York Times 24 March 1986: A19; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “So Much for the Imperial Presidency,” New York Times 3 August 1998: A23; Morrie Ryskind, “What Really Defeated Nixon,” Los Angeles Times 14 November 1962: A5; John Leonard, “Mr. Nixon as the Last Liberal” (reviewing Gary Wills's Nixon Agonistes), New York Times 15 October 1970: 45; Lee Gomes, “The Microsoft Ruling: Rivals Rejoice but Await a Remedy Just as Tough,” Wall Street Journal 8 November 1999: A30; “Captain Ahab Prosecutors,” Wall Street Journal “Review and Outlook” 29 December 1988: 1; John Gray, “Grits Unable to Satisfy Critics Despite Exit from Whale Group,” (Toronto) Globe and Mail 30 June 1981: P11; Gillian Bennett; Ray Hanania, Mary Gillespie, Alf Siewers, “Name His Party!” Chicago Sun-Times 30 May 1986: 10; James Reston.

25

Morrison's own principal source in Melville studies was Michael Rogin's interpretative biography. See also Lawrance Thompson, Melville's Quarrel with God (1952).

26

See Spanos.

27

See Michael J. Preston, “Rethinking Folklore, Rethinking Literature: Looking at Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels as Folktales, A Chapbook-Inspired Inquiry,” The Other Print Tradition: Essays on Chapbooks, Broadsides, and Related Ephemera, ed. Cathy Lynn Preston and Michael J. Preston (1995), 32–33.

28

For research assistance, my sincere thanks to William Pannapacker, Christopher Le Coney, and Katherine Gray. Portions of this essay were first tried out in lecture form at Oberlin College in 2005, at the 2007 Dartmouth Institute, and at the 2007 IAUPE triennial convention in Lund. I am grateful for generous, valuable feedback received on all three occasions.