In recent years, the work of re-periodizing nineteenth-century American literary history has been actively underway. Among other things, a series of works undertaken by Cody Marrs and others has urged critics to reconsider the position of the Civil War, which neatly divides literary history into “antebellum” and “postbellum.”Footnote 1 Traditional American literary history has supposed that the Civil War stands in the middle of the century as a watershed historical moment, before which stands Romanticism and after which begins realism. By proposing what he terms “transbellum literature,” which envisions nineteenth-century literary history as extending beyond the Civil War, Marrs encourages us to see both continuity and discontinuity between the antebellum and postbellum periods. Arguing that the Civil War had a lasting impact on authors who are generally understood as belonging to the antebellum period, including Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, and Douglass, Marrs seeks both to examine the authors’ careers across the Civil War and to register the war’s impact on those authors. These canonical authors who actively worked in the antebellum period, Marrs argues,
continue to be identified with the 1850s because of a chronological segmentation of the field that has been around for quite some time, a segmentation that does not simply slice the century into two halves but presents that earlier half as climaxing in the decade or so immediately preceding the Civil War.Footnote 2
The idea of transbellum literature, in short, disrupts the symmetry of American literary history by looking at how authorial careers extend beyond the Civil War.
Although Marrs’s work has been followed by a series of critical attempts to reperiodize American literary history, it seems that critics have not adequately applied the concept of transbellum literature to examining individual authors.Footnote 3 In this essay, I would like to showcase how we can fruitfully examine authors’ careers that straddle the Civil War by tracing the transformation that this national catastrophe imposed on their literary imagination. Herman Melville, for example, is a key author whose career awaits reexamination through this critical lens. Although Melville’s poems in the postbellum era have gained increasing attention in recent years, this surge of interest in his late career is usually disengaged from his antebellum years, establishing the postbellum Melville as distinct from the antebellum Melville, as if there were two Melvilles.Footnote 4 However, in this essay, I would like to connect these two Melvilles into one continuous Melville across the Civil War, particularly by registering his transition in terms of the representations of others. By “others,” I refer to an array of characters in Melville’s works who defy readers’ and even the author’s comprehension through their hermetic silence, including Bartleby, Babo in “Benito Cereno,” and Black Guinea in The Confidence-Man. By carefully maintaining a respectful distance from the characters of his own creation, Melville managed to adumbrate, not articulate, their hidden interiority without invading their alterity. However, through his experience of the Civil War, I argue that Melville’s approach to others underwent a transformation in ways that threatened the alterity of individual characters as his focus of interest gravitated from portraying individuals toward representing national community. As the nation faced political divisions on many levels in the aftermath of the war, Melville, in his aspiration to be “a national writer,” became preoccupied with representing communal unity rather than the singularity of individual characters.Footnote 5
In terms of alterity, many critics agree that Melville forfeited his sympathetic gaze on African Americans as racial others in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866), with the publication of which, they concur, the author turned politically conservative.Footnote 6 As a most salient, classic example, Carolyn L. Karcher argues that “the powerful egalitarian convictions that Melville had dramatized with greater acumen than any other writer of his time were not rooted deeply enough in his psyche to withstand the shock of a war that brought his deepest personal conflicts into play.”Footnote 7 More recently, Brian Yothers echoed Karcher’s claim by noting the difference between “the antebellum Melville” and “the postbellum Melville.” In Battle-Pieces, Yothers argues, “the greater affinity he feels for white Southerners leads Melville to prioritize reconciliation between North and South over justice for African Americans.”Footnote 8 In all these accounts, critics concurrently express their disappointment at Melville’s failure to live up to a vision that embraced racial minorities—the vision that he expressed in his antebellum fictions. Moby-Dick (1851), for example, features the interracial friendship and intimacy between Ishmael and Queequeg. Melville’s debut novel, Typee (1846), also includes passages that critique the United States’ colonial and imperial undertakings and find virtues in “uncivilized” natives that are rare among white Christians.Footnote 9 With the advent of multiculturalism, the image of Melville as a cosmopolitan author who portrayed transethnic and transracial relationships has long persisted with good reason. Due to the reception of Melville as such, it is certainly dismaying for critics to admit that, in Battle-Pieces, his collection of poems published one year after the end of the Civil War, Melville seems to prioritize the reunion of whites over the future of emancipated Black people, expressing “a paternalist racism that is rare, but unfortunately not nonexistent in Melville’s work.”Footnote 10
As a salient example of Melville’s reconciliationist sentiments, in “Supplement,” a work of political prose attached to Battle-Pieces, the author explicitly argues for the necessity of the North’s leniency toward the defeated South: “The maintenance of Congressional decency in the future will rest mainly with the North. Rightly will more forbearance be required from the North than the South, for the North is victor.”Footnote 11 Although Melville voices his downright repudiation of slavery by noting, “The blacks, in their infant pupilage to freedom, appeal to the sympathies of every humane mind” (185), it is undeniable that in “Supplement” the reconciliation between whites takes precedence over the hardship that awaits the emancipated Black people in the wake of the devastating war. After the above-quoted line, Melville continues, “For the future of the freed slaves we may well be concerned; but the future of the whole country, involving the future of the blacks, urges a paramount claim upon our anxiety” (185). In short, the Civil War for Melville was not a war about slavery; it was a collective experience that engaged with “the whole country,” which apparently excluded the freedmen. Indeed, in Battle-Pieces, Melville seldom depicts slaves and slavery in explicit ways, instead focussing on the experiences of the war from the standpoint of whites, both northern and southern. Thus the postbellum Melville seems to conflict with the antebellum Melville who sought to transcend racial boundaries and reach out to the racial other. However, unlike the preceding critical accounts that see a radical break between the antebellum and postbellum Melvilles, I instead argue that Melville always saw African Americans as others, describing them as essentially distanced from himself. It is certainly viable to see the break, and there is ample reason to support the claim that Melville’s interest shifted away from Black people after the Civil War. However, it is possible to perceive not only the discontinuity but also the continuity in Melville’s perceived shift from describing Black people with sympathy in his antebellum fiction to leaving them absent in Battle-Pieces and thereafter. For Melville, as I will demonstrate, Black people essentially remained inscrutable others who defy full literary representation.
When it comes to representing others in Battle-Pieces, Melville’s focus appears to be on white southerners at the expense of forcing into the background the problem of freed slaves in the South. This relegating of African Americans to a secondary concern is certainly problematic, but over-problematizing this issue might lead us to gloss over Melville’s literary endeavor to represent the South as the other, a task that is worth examining in its own right. What is problematic in Battle-Pieces is, I argue, less the absence of black people than Melville’s overt representation of and identification with the South. Taking as a main subject of inquiry “Lee in the Capitol,” one of the poems written from the perspective of the South, I would like to inquire into what the South as a geographical and political entity meant to Melville after the Civil War. In this poem, Melville gets inside Lee’s inner psyche, ventriloquizing his suppressed emotions. The trouble with Melville’s representation of the South as such is that, by ventriloquizing Lee, Melville seems to compromise the alterity of the South in ways that conflict with his representation of others in his antebellum fiction. At the heart of this perceived change lies his concern with representing community rather than individuals, a task demanded by a national catastrophe such as the Civil War. Despite his strong urge to portray community at the expense of individuals, however, Melville ultimately finds himself othered from the southern individuals, thereby demonstrating less discontinuity than continuity in terms of his ethics of alterity.
MELVILLE’S ETHICS OF ALTERITY
What brings antebellum and postbellum Melvilles together is his basic perception of Black people as others who remain at a distance from his understanding. This awareness of alterity does not discourage his sympathetic gaze toward them; rather, I argue that it is exactly what enabled him to portray the racial other without doing violence to their alterity, the attitude that might be termed Melville’s ethics of alterity. Melville’s portrayals of Black characters in his antebellum works, such as Babo in “Benito Cereno” (1854) and Black Guinea in The Confidence-Man (1857), register his sympathy toward the adverse fates of Black people.Footnote 12 However, Melville also distances himself from them, never allowing himself a facile understanding of and sympathetic identification with racial others.
Toward the very end of “Benito Cereno,” we find Babo, a ringleader of the revolt on a Spanish slave ship, stubbornly silent after the failure of his desperate attempt to murder Benito:
Seeing all was over, he uttered no sound, and could not be forced to. His aspect seemed to say, since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words. Put in irons in the hold, with the rest, he was carried to Lima … Some months after, dragged to the gibbet at the tail of a mule, the black met his voiceless end. The body was burned to ashes; but for many days, the head, that hive of subtlety, fixed on a pole in the Plaza, met, unabashed, the gaze of the whites.Footnote 13
This passage intimates that Babo’s silence is significant: his aspect “seems to say” something. The narrator in this tale forbears doing violence to the alterity of Babo’s inner thoughts, but tries to fathom the meaning of the silence by attempting to translate it. The narrator does come close to getting inside the mind of Babo when he writes, “His aspect seemed to say.” We can read three things here. First, through the linkage between Babo’s silence and the verb “say,” Babo’s silence is likened to a language translatable into English. Second, with the verb “seemed,” the narrator’s translation is shown as uncertain and open to the possibility of failure. Finally, it is intimated that Babo’s inscrutable silence is not empty but pregnant with something that he wants to say but withholds in his mind. The phrase “seemed to say” presupposes Babo’s interior recesses. The result of the narrator’s translation is “since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words,” which is ultimately a failure, as the narrator does not have access to the original to be translated. At the very least, however, the phrase “seemed to say” leaves a small cleavage in Babo’s seemingly impregnable, untranslatable silence, which encourages the reader to attempt to translate the untranslatable.
In like manner, Black Guinea, a disabled Black beggar in The Confidence-Man, remains silent despite the harsh treatment he receives from the passengers aboard the Fidèle:
To be the subject of alms-giving is trying, and to feel in duty bound to appear cheerfully grateful under the trial, must be still more so; but whatever his secret emotions, he swallowed them, while still retaining each copper this side the œsophagus. And nearly always he grinned, and only once or twice did he wince, which was when certain coins, tossed by more playful almoners, came inconveniently nigh to his teeth, an accident whose unwelcomeness was not unedged by the circumstance that the pennies thus thrown proved buttons.Footnote 14
Pretending to be cheerful when begging for money, Black Guinea remains silent by swallowing his “secret emotions.” As the passengers readily cast Black Guinea as an animal-like figure devoid of humanity, the mere object of a “game of charity,” the narrator’s eyes go deeper than Black Guinea’s visible body, inquiring into his “secret emotions,” which he imagines being suppressed within his mind. However, Black Guinea’s “secret emotions” are never fully revealed to the reader. He “swallowed” his emotions. These secret emotions are only fleetingly revealed through his “wince,” when the coins strike his face. There are several ways of interpreting this wince. He might, for example, be wincing at the humiliation of being pelted by the crowd, or at the recognition that some of the supposed coins are actually buttons. Yet his facial expression eludes any definite interpretation because, in this novel which destabilizes the correspondence between what appears and what is, the wince might be another theatrical performance of the confidence man. Thus the private, interior space of Black Guinea is left inscrutable and unreachable in a way that resonates with Babo’s enigmatic interiority. Rather than articulating Black Guinea’s secret emotions, The Confidence-Man only adumbrates his interiority, highlighting both its presence and its unknowability at once. This unknowability, however, does not indicate nihilism. Melville urges readers to suspend their judgment and to keep inquiring into Black Guinea’s “secret emotions.”
The expressions “seemed to say” and “secret emotions” both gesture toward the existence of certain emotions hidden behind the inscrutable silence of Black characters, Babo and Black Guinea.Footnote 15 In Melville’s works, silence does not represent a semantic void; rather, such an expression presupposes the rich interiorities of silent characters. In both of the scenes quoted above, the characters’ silence is shown to possess a certain degree of emotion. Babo is “unabashed,” and Black Guinea harbors “secret emotions,” which he is said to swallow. These descriptions point to secret interiors that resist categorization, naming, and containment, yet nonetheless invite the reader to attempt to define. As Judith Butler phrases it, silence has the effect of “circumscrib[ing] a domain of autonomy that cannot or should not be intruded upon by the questioner.”Footnote 16 In creating silent characters, Melville carves out interior spaces that are uncontainable by language. Put differently, in Melville’s literary imagination, silence does not signify a flat surface without depth, but indicates a deep interiority which readers are encouraged to actively imagine.
The question then arises as to whether the experience of the Civil War transformed Melville’s representations of Black characters, as many critics have argued. In Battle-Pieces, there are only two poems that either directly or indirectly depict Black people. First, “‘Formerly a Slave’: An Idealized Portrait, by E. Vedder, in the Spring Exhibition of the National Academy, 1865” portrays their existence only indirectly by writing about a deceased former slave painted in a picture, Portrait of Jane Jackson, by Elihu Vedder, which Melville actually saw in the spring of 1865:
In this poem quoted here in full, “the sufferance of her race,” a phrase that indexes the speaker’s sympathy toward Black people, is doubly removed from the reader because the poem, itself a verbal representation, is about another representation of an ex-slave in the painting. That Jane Jackson is no longer alive highlights the speaker’s distance from the object of his sympathy. Above all, we do not hear any direct words of this ex-slave, with her silent existence frozen in the painting. Along with this sympathetic speaker, the reader is invited to fathom the significant, silent expression – “Her dusky face is lit with sober light” – with no guarantee of success because she is forever silent. While Cody Marrs describes Jackson’s face in this poem as wearing an “indecipherable expression,” it is precisely this indecipherability that invites the reader’s imaginative interpretation.Footnote 17 Moreover, given that the poem is subtitled “An idealized Portrait,” we cannot help but question the speaker’s ability to fathom the real interiority of Jane Jackson because the subtitle tacitly admits the limitation of the speaker, who can present only an “idealized” version of an ex-slave, not a true-to-life representation.Footnote 18
In yet another poem, “The Swamp Angel,” Black people are again denied direct representation: they are ominously figured in the form of a cannon, which was nicknamed the “Swamp Angel” by the northern army. We hear no direct words from Black people, but only the cannon’s explosive noise, which is described as “a breath that is blastment” and “the voice of his screaming” (78, 79). The cannon is personified as an avenging Black man who ruthlessly and vengefully attacks the white southerners. It is significant that the cannon is associated with the figure of speaking, “lip,” yet its speech does not constitute language, only making deafening sounds. As if complementing the lack, and the dispossession, of the verbal power of Black people, this cannon, with “a thick Afric lip” (78), volubly avenges the white southerners.Footnote 19 Despite their explosive sounds, it nonetheless remains true that the Black people are deprived of their language and thereby remain silent. The poem invites the reader to hear the anger of the enslaved that is not given linguistic articulation yet is adumbrated in the explosive silence figured by the cannon.
In keeping with Melville’s principle of representing racial others through silence, the Black people in Battle-Pieces thus remain equally silent. Part of the reason for their silence might be that their words are made inefficient and powerless before whites, who disregard their words. In their introduction to Battle-Pieces, Richard H. Cox and Paul M. Dowling seek to explain Melville’s representations of Black people’s silence by invoking the case of Babo:
Babo, who could have explained his human superiority and the humanity of the other blacks, refuses to speak after his recapture … Since the deeds of the blacks risking their lives for freedom could not convince whites of their humanity, what could words do? Hence Babo dies in resolute silence, his stillness resembling that of the uneducated Negro slave in America.Footnote 20
If silence is thus imposed on Black people by whites, then Melville, by focussing on and writing about their silence, imbues their silence with certain volubility whose meaning is left to the reader to imagine. While Melville’s inability to fathom and verbalize Black people’s interiority, or his “failure to represent African American characters,” might be said to indicate the limits of his imagination, it is also true that his awareness of such limits constitutes and enables his ethical distance from others, or what I call his ethics of alterity.Footnote 21 Of great importance here is that this ethics of representing racial others with distance stems from Melville’s privileged whiteness, which, for better or worse, inevitably keeps Black people at bay, as well as helps telescope the distance between the whites across the North/South divide. As Timothy Marr argues, in Battle-Pieces “Melville’s broad-minded generosity to the defeated Southerners was itself seeded with an antidemocratic racial allegiance to whiteness.”Footnote 22
If Melville felt essentially distanced from Black people, it is no wonder that he does not show his facile sympathy toward and identification with them in Battle-Pieces. In that he maintains an ethical distance from them, there is no substantial change that occurs between the antebellum and postbellum Melvilles in terms of his approach to racial others. If he addressed racial issues and slavery as the main theme in Battle-Pieces and expressed overt sympathy, that would mean a radical break from the antebellum Melville and would belie his ethics of alterity that informs his antebellum fiction. Arguing for Melville’s failure in Battle-Pieces “to put himself in imagination in the place of the ex-slaves,” Joyce Sparer Adler critically observes that Melville “sees the black as alien.”Footnote 23 Yet we should also note that the sense of alienation from Black people also enabled Melville to write about them with ethical distance. On the surface, the Civil War apparently changed Melville’s stance toward Black people and racial others; yet on a deeper level, it helped reveal and fortify his deep-seated sense that Black people were essentially others so distant from him as to recede into a secondary concern in a time of national crisis. If the Civil War set Melville more distant from racial others, it simultaneously forced him to see a different other – the white South – up close, because of the shared whiteness, which seemingly allows for telescoping the distance between self and other. Across the Civil War, Melville continued to tackle the problem of how to represent the other through literary language.
VENTRILOQUIZING THE SOUTH
In a time of national crisis, Melville became preoccupied with a more seemingly understandable other, the white South, which for Melville needed to be incorporated into the Union to maintain national unity. However, his representation of the South is deeply problematic, as I will argue below, due to his entry into the southerner’s mind. If underrepresenting Black people is problematic, overrepresenting the South is equally or more troublingly an issue. In the words of Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson, the question that confronted Melville in writing Battle-Pieces was how one could “even speak of the enemy in humane terms in a time of fundamentalist patriotism.”Footnote 24 In his antebellum fiction, Melville tackled the question about the representation of others, but later he confronted this problem in a different register: amid triumphalism shortly after the war, he sought to represent the defeated enemy from the standpoint of a northerner, a victor in the strife.
Critics of Battle-Pieces have long stressed the emotional detachment that informs the collection as a whole.Footnote 25 William Dean Howells, in his 1867 review of the collection, dourly observes,
Mr. Melville’s skill is so great that we fear he has not often felt the things of which he writes, since with all his skill he fails to move us. He treats events as realistically as one can to whom they seem to have presented themselves as dreams; but at last they remain vagaries.Footnote 26
Indeed, in “The Portent,” Melville callously depicts John Brown’s silent body in ways that reverberate with his representations of Black figures in his antebellum fictions. Despite the apparent “unreadability of Brown’s body,” his silence invites the reader’s inquisitiveness into his hidden interiority:Footnote 27 “Hidden in the cap / Is the anguish none can draw” (7). Here, Melville makes a double movement of revealing and hiding Brown’s inner thoughts, echoing his representations of Babo’s and Black Guinea’s secret emotions. While he admits his inability to fathom Brown’s interiority, he does not let Brown remain a silent, absolutely inscrutable figure by indexing the existence of “anguish,” which the reader is enjoined to imagine.Footnote 28 This distancing might be indicative of Melville’s skepticism toward political radicalism represented by Brown and other abolitionists.Footnote 29
While Melville distances himself from Black people and white radical insurrectionists such as Brown, what is prominent about Battle-Pieces as a whole is his portrayal of white southerners, whom he depicts as if he has an intimate knowledge of their interiority. While he mostly takes the standpoint of a northerner, some of Melville’s personae in this collection take the standpoint of a southerner. For a prominent example, in “Lee in the Capitol” Melville gets inside Robert E. Lee’s inner psyche, ventriloquizing the former Confederate general’s secret emotions. In the note appended to this poem, Melville offers an observation about Lee’s testimony before Congress in 1866, in which the former Confederate general was questioned by northern congressmen about what the South might be feeling about the North:
After various questions had been put and briefly answered, these words were addressed to him [Lee]: “If there be any other matter about which you wish to speak on this occasion, do so freely.” Waiving this invitation, he responded by a short personal explanation of some point in a previous answer, and, after a few more brief questions and replies, the interview closed. In the verse a poetical liberty has been ventured. Lee is not only represented as responding to the invitation, but also as at last renouncing his cold reserve, doubtless the cloak to feelings more or less poignant. (180)
Melville thus justifies his license for imaginatively getting into and verbalizing Lee’s interiority. In “Supplement,” Melville specifically locates one of his aims in this collection as follows: “In imagination let us place ourselves in the unprecedented position of the Southerners – their position as regards the millions of ignorant manumitted slaves in their midst, for whom some of us now claim the suffrage” (186). Speaking as a northerner, Melville here acknowledges the distance to be bridged between him and southerners. “Lee in the Capitol,” then, is his imaginative endeavor to transcend such distance and to place himself in the position of the southerner.
What is noticeable about the note to “Lee in the Capitol” quoted above is that Melville presupposes the existence of “feelings more or less poignant” in Lee’s mind, and in the poem he removes the “cold reserve” and the “cloak” that hide those poignant feelings to verbalize them in Lee’s stead. In the opening part of the poem, the speaker emphasizes the silence that informs Lee’s life after the war: “No word he breathes of vain lament, / Mute to reproach, nor hears applause – / His doom accepts, perforce content, / And acquiesces in asserted laws” (163). Furthermore, just before Lee’s monologue, the speaker emphasizes the inscrutable interiority of this general. After one of the questioners asks, “Aught else remain, speak out, we pray” (165), Lee remains silent for a while:
Thus the beginning of the poem seems to promise Melville’s ethics of alterity because of the emphasis on Lee’s silence. Despite the questioners’ inability to “mark within his breast,” however, the speaker then goes on to take “a poetical liberty” to ventriloquize Lee. Also noteworthy about these lines is the speaker’s rather overt sympathy toward Lee, which one-sidedly imagines the emotional pain that he imagines Lee is undergoing. Comparing Melville’s poem with Lee’s actual testimony, recorded in “Robert E. Lee’s Testimony before Congress (February 17, 1866),” what stands out is Lee’s volubility in the former and his reticence in the latter.Footnote 30 In Melville’s poem, we see Lee energetically imploring northerners to give clemency to the South. Quite unlike the actual testimony, in the poem Lee returns questions to the questioners:
Given that this poem is soon followed by Melville’s “Supplement,” in which the author pleads for clemency toward the South, it is possible to argue that Melville uses Lee as his southern avatar to voice his own political ideas. Elsewhere in the poem, Melville’s Lee says that he can understand the pain southern soldiers must have felt: “All those who stemmed Secession’s pride, / But at last were swept by the urgent tide / Into the chasm. I know their pain” (167). It would be safe to assume that this “I” indicates not only Lee’s subjectivity but also Melville’s as an author who seeks to imagine the secret emotions of the South: Melville, he seems to argue, knows the South’s pain. However, when Lee says, “I know their pain,” Melville is doubly removed from “their pain” because he is not a southerner, and he is not Lee. Nonetheless, he tries to transcend such distances.
In Lee’s actual testimony, for the northern questioners, the South represents the inscrutable other that they seek to understand, and they ask Lee several questions to fathom the secret emotions of the South. For example, one questioner asks, “Are you acquainted with the state of feeling among what we call secessionists in Virginia, at present, toward the government of the United States?” Lee does not offer a satisfactory answer, simply replying, “I do not know that I am.” Exchanges similar to this one recur during the testimony, thereby emphasizing all the more the inscrutable alterity of the South for northerners. Through his testimony, Lee repeats the reply “I do not know” more than ten times, frustrating the North’s desire to know the South, whose alterity remains beyond understanding. In the testimony, Lee does not voice his opinion, merely answering the questioners’ queries in an impassive way, and his reticence reinforces a sense that he is not enthusiastic about voicing his political views.Footnote 31
Lee in Melville’s imagination, on the contrary, expresses his interiority, which the author imagines was repressed in the testimony. In the poem, asked “Aught else remain, speak out we pray” (165), Lee, though much hesitant at first, responds to offer an eloquent defense of the South and an ardent appeal for the North’s leniency. As William H. Shurr argues, Melville has indeed taken “considerable liberty in preparing a lengthy speech where Lee offered only a few short and dignified answers to the questions he was asked.”Footnote 32 This eloquence makes a marked, reverberating contrast to Babo, who remains silent after the recapture: “Seeing all was over, he uttered no sound, and could not be forced to. His aspect seemed to say, since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words.”Footnote 33 This passage reverberates with what Lee says at the beginning of his testimony: “All’s over now, and now I follow Fate” (166). Yet the significant difference is that, after this line, Lee begins to speak his thoughts and Babo remains silent until his death. Whereas Black people are forced to remain silent, Lee or the South is given a “voice or proxy” (165) in the figure of the voluble Lee in Melville’s poem. Or, to put it in a different perspective, one can argue that Lee’s alterity in the poem is compromised, while Lee in the actual hearing represents sheer alterity for the northern questioners. This difference, of course, is partly due to Melville’s white identity, which helps annihilate the distance between him (the white northerner) and Lee (the white southerner), while simultaneously distancing him from freed Blacks. By ventriloquizing Lee, Melville comes close to infringing on his silence, or what Butler calls “a domain of autonomy that cannot or should not be intruded upon by the questioner.”Footnote 34 With the elimination of the differences between the North and the South, Melville’s South is ultimately incorporated into an inclusive “we” in the last line of this poem. The narrator closes the poem by gesturing toward a hopeful future in which the North and the South will be unified under the banner of the same nation: “Faith in America never dies; / Heaven shall the end ordained fulfill, / We march with Providence cheery still” (169).
INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNITY
A major problem with Melville’s portrayals of the South, as we have seen so far, is that he represents it as an abstract, collective existence. In “Lee in the Capitol,” Lee seems to embody the South as an abstract entity rather than speaking as an individual. What emerges here is a tension between the individual and the community, one of Melville’s preoccupations in many of his antebellum works, and one can argue that his emphasis has been on the former. In Typee, for instance, Tommo experiences a compelling attraction to the Typee community, despite its threatening potential to assimilate his individuality. Ultimately, however, he preserves his individual self by extricating himself from the community in the end. In “Bartleby,” the idiosyncratic individual, Bartleby, is pitted against the capitalistic system in which the narrator works. As yet another example, in Israel Potter (1855), Melville depicts the eponymous character against the background of the national community. Despite his self-sacrifice for the cause of the Revolutionary War, Israel ultimately finds himself abandoned by the very country for which he fought. Upon his return to America in his old age, on the Fourth of July Israel “narrowly escaped being run over by a patriotic triumphal car in the procession” that glorifies the “HEROES THAT FOUGHT” at Bunker Hill.Footnote 35 Although the political community ostensibly celebrates its members as heroes, it neglects the individuality of each soldier, subsuming them into an abstract collective to further the national cause. In all of these examples, both community and individual are portrayed as an inseparable pair, but Melville’s attention is directed toward highlighting individual characters against the backdrop of the community. In Battle-Pieces, on the other hand, Melville’s interest seems to be less in closely following individuals than in depicting community at large. Clark Davis notes “the tension between the individual and society” at work in Battle-Pieces, and indeed such tension is a hallmark of many of Melville’s works, but the emphasis is different in Battle-Pieces.Footnote 36
Furthermore, Melville can be construed as stripping Lee of his alterity by rendering his existence closer to the northern causes of the war, one of which was to save the Union. First, the speaker notes the historical fact that Lee was offered the position of Union general by Lincoln: “Intrepid soldier! had his blade been drawn / For yon starred flag, never as now / Bid to the Senate-house had he gone” (164). Regarding this historical fact, Martin Griffin notes, “Lee stands also, in Melville’s vision, before Congress as he stood at home in April 1861 after receiving Lincoln’s offer to take command of Union forces, debating with himself whether his loyalty to Virginia or to the United States should take precedence.”Footnote 37 Furthermore, the speaker passingly notes Lee’s kinship with George Washington, a fellow Virginian and one of the Founding Fathers: “Allied by family to one, / Founder of the Arch the Invader warred upon: / Who looks at Lee must think of Washington / In pain must think, and hide the thought, / So deep with grievous meaning it is fraught” (165). Indeed, a distant family relationship existed between Lee and Washington: Lee had married the daughter of Washington’s adopted son. By hinting at this family connection, the speaker encourages the reader to deliberate upon the irony of Lee’s having fought against the nation that his distant relative and the nation’s symbolic father did much to found. The speaker thus emphasizes that Lee, the southerner, has much in common with the North, thereby northernizing, as it were, his southernness. In “Supplement,” Melville drives home this point by describing southerners as those “who, having a like origin with ourselves, share essentially in whatever worthy qualities we may possess” (184). It should also be noted that, in the years leading up to the Civil War, “Washington had long stood as a national figure transcending party and region,” a fact that contributed to Melville’s goal of healing the chasm between the North and the South.Footnote 38
Melville’s representation of southerners in Battle-Pieces can also be approached by looking back at his engagements with the South in his antebellum works. As discussed earlier, Melville’s enigmatic characters remain silent: Babo and Black Guinea closet themselves in impregnable silence, thereby presenting an enigma to the reader. To this list of enigmatically silent characters, we can add Bulkington in Moby-Dick, whose presence is felt only through his absence and silence. Bulkington, a southerner, only fleetingly yet all the more prominently appears in Ishmael’s narrative: “His voice at once announced that he was a Southerner, and from his fine stature, I thought he must be one of those tall mountaineers from the Alleghanian Ridge in Virginia.”Footnote 39 Notable about Bulkington, whom Ishmael assumes to be Virginian, is that we hear no direct word from this southerner: Ishmael only notes that he heard his “voice,” never letting Bulkington speak despite his fascination with this alleged southerner. The next and last time we see Bulkington, in chapter 23, he appears as a dead man to whom Ishmael dedicates “the stoneless grave” in the form of a short chapter devoted to him.Footnote 40 Melville certainly seems fascinated by this southerner as the other, but he does not go so far as to ventriloquize his thoughts. Ishmael notes, “I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man,” suggesting both his sympathetic attraction and the unbridgeable distance from him.Footnote 41 Bulkington’s silence is precisely the kind of silence that Melville utilizes to represent the other with the ethics of alterity, and that he seems to dismiss in imagining Lee’s interiority. Comparing the representations of Bulkington and Lee, both Virginians, we can see Melville’s alleged shift in his imaginative stance toward southerners.Footnote 42 While depicting Bulkington’s silence with awe, Melville ventriloquizes Lee’s actual silence in the Congress hearing. What is apparent in Moby-Dick is that Melville was fascinated with the South as a romantic other whose alterity he represents with respectful distance.Footnote 43 But the Civil War forced Melville to change his attitude: faced with the national crisis, the author found it necessary to understand and represent the South up close – yet, as I will argue below, ultimately ended up failing to do so. The discontinuity that seems to exist between the antebellum and the postbellum Melvilles in his endeavor to depict community actually constitutes a continuity.
The apparent elimination of differences between the North and the South, individual and community, is very unlike Melville, the author who wrote about others while preserving their differences in his antebellum fictions. However, a closer look at Battle-Pieces in its entirety also reveals that Melville finds himself distanced from southerners. What is noticeable about the poems spoken from a southern standpoint is that they invariably lack a first-person perspective. As Timothy Sweet argues, “In the few poems that do take a first-person voice, ‘the people’ speak in ballad stanza or song from differing positions.”Footnote 44 However, this tendency to speak in the first-person plural is more conspicuous in the poems written from the southern perspective. The speakers in “Frenzy in the Wake” and “Stonewall Jackson (Ascribed to a Virginian),” the only two poems written from the southern perspective, employ the collective “we” instead of “I.” In “Stonewall Jackson,” the poem is ascribed to “a Virginian,” yet the speaker uses the plural “we” throughout to mourn the death of Stonewall Jackson: “One man we claim of wrought renown / Which not the North shall care to slur” (60). In “The Frenzy in the Wake,” too, the speaker expresses bitter hatred toward the North by creating a binary opposition between “they (the North)” and “we (the South)”: “Curse on their foreheads, cheeks, and eyes – / The Northern faces – true / To the flag we hate, the flag whose stars / Like planets strike us through” (97). As Thomas Dikant argues, in this poem “Melville creates a dramatic monologue from the perspective of a Confederate,”Footnote 45 but we should note that this monologue is written with the collective “we,” which suggests Melville’s inability to portray an individual southerner.
In “Lee in the Capitol,” Lee speaks in the first person, but the speaker of the entire poem is an unnamed narrator, who is probably a northerner trying to fathom the silence of Lee. Given that, in many of the poems written from the northern perspective, the speaker uses the first-person “I,” it is remarkable that none of those poems about the South are written directly from the southern perspective. This difference indexes Melville’s intentional distancing from the act of impersonating the southerner. Ultimately, Melville can only indirectly write about the South because he finds himself othered from it. Or, because of the perceived distance, he was compelled to approach the other with such force and urgency. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that Battle-Pieces contains only a few poems written from the perspective of the South, compared to the predominant number of poems written from the northern standpoint. Seen as a whole, the presence of the South in this collection remains marginal and limited.Footnote 46
Melville’s distance from the South becomes most evident in “Magnanimity Baffled,” in which a northern soldier offers friendship to a southern soldier, only to meet the latter’s silence: “Still silent, friend?” (117). It turns out that the southern soldier is dead:
As Timothy Marr argues, “Melville insinuates that it is only the silence of the dead that can voice the human scale of tragic loss,” and the silent corpse also signals the distance yet to be bridged between Melville the northerner and the South.Footnote 47 One should also note that the word “magnanimity” in the title is also used in “Lee in the Capitol,” albeit in a different sense. Melville’s Lee implores the North’s leniency toward the South by noting, “Where various hazards meet the eyes, / To elect in magnanimity is wise” (167). These two poems contradict each other: while Lee expands on the necessity of the North’s magnanimity to the South, the dead southern soldier intimates the South’s refusal of it. This contradiction indexes Melville’s complicated imagination for the other, which fluctuates between the double desires to ventriloquize the South and to maintain its silent alterity. In Battle-Pieces as a whole, then, Melville makes efforts to forestall doing violence to the alterity of the South, despite his strong inclination to verbalize its silence. As a result, Melville imaginatively depicts both the eloquence and the silence of southerners, never settling on one or the other. This conflict, or his failure to fully ventriloquize the white South, ultimately ensures the continuity between the antebellum and postbellum Melvilles in terms of his commitment to the ethics of alterity, attesting to his agonized struggle to write about a national community, a difficult task demanded by the Civil War.
Drawing on the idea of transbellum literature, this essay has delineated Melville’s troubled continuity across the Civil War in terms of his ethics of alterity. Thus, tracing the author’s career across the Civil War positions the war not as a watershed moment that divides the century into the antebellum and postbellum periods but as a crucial pivot around which an authorial career plays out. This view, which the concept of transbellum literature allows, highlights not only the centrality of the Civil War in nineteenth-century literary history but also the author’s thrownness into a history that demanded a recalibration of his literary imagination.
CODA
Melville’s experience of being othered from the object of his depiction in Battle-Pieces is actually not limited to the southern whites and the formerly enslaved. In “Supplement,” Melville explicitly identifies himself as a northern writer:
what Northern writer, however patriotic, but must revolt from acting on paper a part any way akin to that of the live dog to the dead lion; and yet it is right to rejoice for our triumph, so far as it may justly imply an advance for our whole country and for humanity. (184)
Yet, in that he tries to sympathetically imagine the defeated South, he is actually distanced from the North, which, at the time of Melville’s publication of Battle-Pieces, felt triumphant about the victory in the Civil War. As Randall Fuller puts it, Melville’s work “dampen[s] the North’s smug triumphalism,” and some of the contemporary reviews of Battle-Pieces indicate how far removed Melville’s sober tone was from the general triumphalism in the North.Footnote 48 For example, a reviewer in the New York Times castigated Melville’s appeal for leniency toward the South in “Supplement” by noting, “The use of such treasonable language as this shows a singular hardihood on the part of one who has studied and written about the ferocious inhabitants of the South Seas.”Footnote 49 Yet another review, which appeared in the New York Independent, called Melville a “happy optimist,” critiquing his appeal for leniency toward the South: “[Melville] now feels that we should forgive and receive at our hearthstone the brothers who stabbed us.”Footnote 50 Failing to sound as patriotic as was expected, Melville did not gain popularity with northern readers, who, tired of war, “were certainly not interested in ambiguity or self-questioning.”Footnote 51 Divided between the North and the South in his attempt to unify them, Melville ironically found himself alienated from both. If, as Nina Silver argues, “in the early postwar period, stories depicting the close, emotional bonding of northerners and southerners were extremely rare,” it is no wonder that, as early as 1866, Melville’s plea for leniency toward the South failed to receive eager support.Footnote 52 Despite his attempts to reconstruct the national community, what we ultimately see is less the community than the solitary individual who is distanced from the community he hopes to reconstruct.
