Melville's Quixoticism and the Modern World-System

Abstract

“I promise nothing complete,” says Ishmael in Moby-Dick (1851), “because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty” (Melville 117). Notwithstanding this disavowal of comprehensiveness, Melville's novel offers a number of quite capacious portraits of the modern world. Consider, for instance, the global vision that emerges as Ishmael compares geopolitical conquest to the taking of “loose-fish,” whales apparently unclaimed by others and thus available for seizure: “What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish” (356–57). This censure of imperial acquisition is striking for its broadly scaled perspective, extending from the Americas across Europe to Asia, and locating the mid-nineteenth-century domination of the global South by North Atlantic nations like the United States and England in a history running back to the arrival of Spaniards in the New World. By giving his moment's iniquity these spatial and temporal dimensions, Melville anticipates more recent accounts of globalization by world-systems theorists. As Immanuel Wallerstein has argued, the global order in which Melville lived and that we continue to inhabit emerged in the sixteenth-century Atlantic and “expanded over time to cover the whole globe” (23). Ishmael's comments on “loose-fish” are no isolated instance in Moby-Dick—neither the only time Melville sketches a globe-covering whole nor the only point when he draws that whole with the dimensions of the modern world-system. Such forays into large-scale thinking require Melville to grapple with a problem that has lately drawn the attention of literary critics: How might the novel, a genre long considered in relation to “national culture” and “a few special characters and a few exciting actions,” represent and appraise structures and experiences that emerge on transnational and supra-personal scales (Keith 269; Levine 60)?1 I argue that Moby-Dick's engagement with this problem is notable, first, because Melville, like Ishmael, aspires to “nothing complete” in his rendition of a world-spanning whole, and second, because the novel's committedly incomplete account of global interrelations takes shape via an engagement with a text authored just in the wake of the modern world-system's sixteenth-century constitution, Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605/1615).The influence of Cervantes's novel on Moby-Dick has received meagre critical attention, even though Melville demonstrates his engagement with the Spanish author in one of his book's most famous passages. When Melville, via Ishmael, announces his intention to “ascribe high qualities, though dark” to the “meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways,” he invokes as a muse the “great democratic God” who “didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes” (103). The few scholars who have analyzed this literary-historical connection have done so primarily with reference to character, reading Ahab's monomaniacal pursuit of the whale as an analogue of Quixote's single-minded pursuit of chivalric ideals.2 Such critics take a common approach to the literary afterlives of Cervantes's novel, for while literary Quixotism can name all sorts of borrowings from Don Quixote, texts are most commonly termed Quixotic when they feature a character whose idealism, focus, or naivete resembles that of the world's most famous knight-errant.3 It is not, though, that single character type that proves essential to Melville's treatment of globe-spanning structures so much as a Cervantine mode of counterpoising the perspectives of multiple characters. In Don Quixote the title character's famously idealist outlook is regularly juxtaposed to the empirical sensibility often embodied by Sancho Panza. Amongst the effects of this oscillation between idealism and empiricism, I suggest, is a constant reconfiguration of the scale of the setting Quixote and Sancho inhabit: idealist perceptions of chivalric milieus such as Quixote's expand the dimensions of the novel's world, locating his and Sancho's immediate surroundings in a cosmopolitan geographic framework, while the empiricist perspective associated with Sancho contracts the scope of that world, such that its spatial extension is defined by what can be readily and sensorially experienced. I term this technique Quixoticism, and it is this method, as opposed to a more character-driven Quixotism, that Melville draws from Cervantes and uses to navigate the aesthetic challenges global scales pose for the novel genre. Moby-Dick thus offers a Cervantine account of globalization, in which expansive structures of connection are repeatedly made to appear and dissolve as the narration toggles between idealist and empiricist perspectives.The oscillatory tendencies of Moby-Dick's narration, to be sure, have drawn the attention of a number of the novel's most astute readers. Those critics have focused on the deconstructive phase of the oscillations and have found such negatory turns to articulate notions of an American nationality shorn from past precedent and unmoored by any telos.4 By giving greater attention to the generative portions of this narrative pattern and especially their provision of global visions, and by drawing a Cervantine genealogy for those novelistic oscillations, I offer a transnational reappraisal of an element of Melville's writing more typically considered with reference to US national culture. As I do so, I do not mean to suggest that Moby-Dick's engagement with globalization is manifest only in Melville's Quixoticism. Rather, I focus on Moby-Dick's Cervantine vacillations because they are a site where Melville negotiates the challenge of global scale as a specific problem of novelistic representation. Indeed, Melville's Quixoticism suggests a yet-unrecognized answer to a query recently posed by Anna Kornbluh about what the novel genre can “bring to the representation of capitalist globalization” that other cultural forms cannot (151). Ishmael's aversion to completeness, in particular, challenges prevailing models of the novel's relation to globalization. Such paradigms make the totality-seeking disposition Georg Lukács's The Theory of the Novel (1920) located in the genre central to the novel's engagement with the broad temporal and spatial scales of a globalized world.5 Authors expand the novel's already capacious form, this line of argument goes, in order to come ever-closer to a comprehensive account of the breadth and variety of global society.6Moby-Dick's relation to globalization has been considered in just these terms; Robert Tally, for instance, argues that “Melville really did want to create a global map that could incorporate everything” and that his novel thus “delights in such mastery of space” (Melville xii, 8).7 My argument, by contrast, is that Moby-Dick has a fundamentally different relation to totality than critics have found in it, as well as in the novel of globalization more generally. Rather than unfolding along a teleological trajectory that draws asymptotically closer to completion, Melville's novel features a nonprogressive series of oscillations between an idealism that affords glimpses of a global whole and an empiricism that constantly checks an aspiration to totalizing mastery. The political significance of this formal pattern comes to the fore when Melville uses it to represent the modern world-system: while sociological accounts of that global order tend to cast it as so extensive and overdetermining as to be immutable, Melville's Quixoticism registers the system's structuring force while still imagining it as malleable and thus contestable.In 1855, Melville bought his own copy of Don Quixote, an 1853 edition of Charles Jarvis's 1742 translation of the novel (Sealts 163). Several books he completed shortly thereafter feature prominent references to Cervantes's knight. “Don Quixote” is, for instance, termed “the sagest sage that ever lived” in “The Piazza,” the first of The Piazza Tales (1856) (56). But there is ample evidence that well before the mid-1850s Melville had already become familiar with Don Quixote, either in English translation, or, given his language skills, in the original Spanish. In White-Jacket (1850), a novel detailing the eponymous character's experiences on a US Navy frigate navigating around South America, several characters are described as “like Don Quixote” or “Quixotic” (51, 208; cited in Levin 219). In addition to these allusions, at several points White-Jacket's characterization and plotting take a Cervantine cast. Such influence is striking in the chapter “Theatricals in a Man-of-War,” which, as Hershel Parker has noted, has as a source a section on “Aquatic Theatricals” from the 1841 book Life in a Man-of-War (653). That chapter details the role of White-Jacket's friend Jack Chase in a shipboard play; it describes Chase as a “chivalric character” (94), a notable designation, since such Quixotic diction is absent in the chapter's source material. Moreover, the most acclaimed part of Chase's “chivalric” performance, his rescue of “fifteen oppressed sailors from a watch house, in the teeth of a pair of constables” (94), echoes an iconic early moment in Cervantes's novel, when Quixote likewise undertakes a kind of sailor liberation and frees “a chain of galley slaves” who are being led into compulsory shipboard labor (Cervantes 163). As if to recall how the physical world invariably foreshortens Don Quixote's fanciful flights, Melville abruptly curtails the imagined world of Chase's drama by summoning a “black squall” that requires the players and the audience to return to their regular shipboard roles (White-Jacket 94). While Chase's chivalric endeavors on-stage allow for an imaginative escape from shipboard routine, “a delirium of delight,” as White-Jacket puts it (94), the collective return to maritime labor generates “disappointment” all around (95). A redeployment of figures and narrative patterns from Don Quixote provides the engine of this encapsulated account of the affective swings that accompany life on a naval vessel.By the time Melville began composing Moby-Dick in early 1850, as White-Jacket suggests, he was already drawing on Cervantine technique. But to see how Don Quixote did the same on a much larger scale for Moby-Dick, we must consider, further, how Cervantes's novel responds to New World conquest. Cervantes was indeed so interested in Europe's forays across the Atlantic that he applied several times, unsuccessfully, for positions in Spain's colonial bureaucracy (Wilson 37–38). Arguing that “Cervantes's novels were stimulated by the geographic excitement of a new world” (3), Diana de Armas Wilson observes that he was acutely sensitive to the fact that, as J. H. Elliott puts it, “America had given Europe space, in the widest sense of the world—space to dominate, space in which to experiment, and space to transform according to its wishes” (406; qtd. in Wilson 145). Wilson and others convince me that Don Quixote registers such an expanded sense of space not only through its many references to New World people and places but also via sendups of knight-errancy that parody the conquistadors' chivalric pretensions (Wilson 28–30, 135). More important for my purposes is just how Cervantes responds to this perception of geographic extension by his management of literary space in Don Quixote. In revealing that his adored Dulcinea is in fact Aldonza Lorenzo of Toboso in La Mancha, Don Quixote declares her “worthy of being lady and mistress of the entire universe.” To this, the squire replies, “I know her very well . . . and I can say that she can throw a metal bar just as well as the brawniest lad in the village” (Cervantes 199). What we have here is, of course, is the familiar contrast between Quixote's tendency to see a world that conformed to chivalric ideals and Sancho's compulsion to call attention to empirical details of their environment, but what bears noting is these outlooks' grounding in divergent spatial frames. Where Quixote's idealism puts his beloved in the context of “the entire universe,” Sancho's attention to observable details situates her in “the village.”The alignment of an idealizing perspective with a scale that strains for universality occurs even when characters other than Quixote do the idealizing. Bowing to the pressure to sustain the Don's chivalric misprision, Sancho Panza tries to convince him that a Tobosan peasant woman riding a donkey is actually Dulcinea, on grounds that she “is faster than a falcon, and she could teach the most skilled Cordoban or Mexican to ride” (519). Sancho here at once idealizes the woman as “our mistress” and places her in a world that stretches far beyond La Mancha, across the Atlantic and into the Americas.8 As if to acknowledge this reversal of their usual positions, Quixote plays the empiricist and smells on the woman “an odor of garlic” that offers a localizing counter-perspective (520). In moments like these, we might say, the scope of the novel's world is in flux, in turns dilating across the Atlantic or even “the universe” and contracting down to the Manchegan world its characters can see and smell. At a moment when New World colonization was dramatically expanding the scale of Cervantes's Iberian world, then, he evidently seized on this technique to manipulate the scale of novelistic settings. Indeed, by having Sancho sketch a capacious world by including Mexico, Cervantes ties his scalar shifts of narrative to the historical incorporation of the Americas into the European spatial imaginary.The epistemological consequences of so moving between discrepant scales and perspectives are particularly clear in the chapter relating Quixote's assault on a herd of sheep. On spotting an approaching dust cloud, he misapprehends a flock of sheep and attendant shepherds in a manner that is at once chivalric and cosmopolitan. He says to Sancho, “This host facing us is made up of and composed of people of diverse nations: here are those who drink the sweet waters of the famous Xanthus; the mountain folk who tread the Massilian plain; those who sift fine gold nuggets in Arabia Felix; those who enjoy the famous cool shores of the crystalline Thermodon; those who drain by many diverse means the golden Pactolus; and Numidians, untrustworthy of their promises; Persians, those notable archers; Parthians and Medes, who fight as they flee; Arabians, with movable houses; Scythians, as cruel as they are white skinned; Ethiopians, with pierced lips; and an infinite number of other nations, whose faces I recognize and see, although I do not recall their names. In this other host come those who drink the crystalline currents of the olive-bearing Betis; those who shine and burnish their faces with the liquid of the forever rich and golden Tajo; those who enjoy the beneficial waters of the divine Genil; those who tread Tartessian fields, with their abundant pastures; those who take pleasure in the Elysian meadows of Jerez; Manchegans, rich and crowned with yellow spikes of wheat; those clad in iron, ancient relics of Gothic blood; those who bath in the Pisuerga, famous for the gentleness of its current; those who graze their cattle on the extensive pasturelands of the sinuous Guadiana, celebrated for its hidden currents; those who tremble in the cold of the wooded Pyrenees and the white peaks of the high Apennines; in short, all those contained and sheltered in the entirety of Europe.” (129)Why does the narrator, having clarified that Quixote is gazing upon sheep rather than a hostile army, fail to interrupt this lengthy monologue, if not to allow the narrative to be entirely taken over by Quixote's imaginative vision of the Manchegan road as a transcontinental knightly crossroads? To be sure, Cervantes follows up this narrative takeover with Sancho's protest: “I swear to God you're charging sheep. . . . Look and see that there are no giants or knights” (129), an appeal to observable fact that endeavors to reorient Quixote to their immediate circumstances. The shepherds offer a still more localizing rejoinder, and pelt the knight with “stones as big as fists” picked up from the roadside (130). Sancho's and the shepherds' gestures counter the Don's expansive idealism by attempting to ground him in a space much narrower than the one adumbrated in his description of the sheep, but the scene does not ultimately establish truth as lying in some empirical perspective opposed to Quixote's. Rather, since Sancho and the shepherds offer distinct localizing viewpoints, and since Quixote holds to his chivalric cosmopolitan outlook, this encounter serves to populate the novel with multiple perspectives from which a given occurrence can be appraised.As such, the sheep assault episode, along with the dual portrayals of Dulcinea, observe the principle of perspectivism identified as early as Américo Castro's El Pensamiento de Cervantes (1925). “In Cervantes,” Castro explains, “the world resolves itself into points of view,” for the novelist “made use of, time and again, that fact that the things we contemplate are interpretable in distinct fashions” (102, 96; my translation).9 If Cervantes's work generally emphasizes the countervailing viewpoints by which different persons look upon the world, a key feature of scenes like those I have discussed is that such perspectives diverge particularly in the scale of the spatial frame within which objects and occurrences are perceived. This scalar perspectivism is key to the Quixoticism that Melville put to work in Moby-Dick, though in his novel Melville employs this technique with a distinct frame of reference. Where Cervantes drew on chivalric legend to animate his moments of idealist expansiveness, Melville turns to the histories, travelogues, and science writing concerning the vast spaces of the world yet to be conquered. In the next section, I attend to the way Melville puts Cervantine technique to work across several otherwise enigmatic chapters, so that the counterpoise of idealist and empiricist perspectives on or in the same event generates a specifically novelistic account of planetary interconnection.Melville clarifies his debt to Cervantes when, in the seventy-third chapter of Moby-Dick, he reflects on a pair of philosophers who came to emblematize the two opposed perspectives whose interaction informs the concept of “Quixoticism”: John Locke and Immanuel Kant. Likening those two thinkers, respectively, to the heads of a right whale and a sperm whale hanging on opposing sides of the Pequod, Ishmael observes that “when on one side you hoist Locke's head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in a very poor plight.” He contends that the only remedy to such a “sorely strained” scenario would be to “throw all those thunderheads overboard” (294). Ishmael holds the two outlooks in balance—and by implication the Pequod upright—only to abandon that prospect in favor of a position rejecting both philosophical frameworks.10 But the next stretch of the novel, to the contrary, offers no such rejection, as Ishmael spends the ensuing chapters on a foray into “practical cetology” in which he examines and reflects, in turn, on the Lockean and Kantian whale heads that the Pequod holds in “counterpoise” (295, 294). Ishmael's narration proceeds in a manner that carries out this balancing act, not by the embrace or rejection of both outlooks, but rather by moving back and forth between the two. In the moments governed by idealism, the spatial scale of the novel purports to encompass the entire planet, as Ishmael and others extrapolate a model of global interconnection from their particular circumstances. Moments of scalar expansion that reach for some totalizing vision invariably prove fleeting, however, as empirically minded comments quickly narrow the spatial frame of the novel to the limits of observable detail.This dynamic is conspicuously at work in “The Mast-Head” chapter, which begins with a catalog of historical figures who have stood on mastheads literal and figurative and concludes as Ishmael imagines a “young Platonist” atop a mast forgetting that he is there for the sole purpose of whale watching (140). The youth's wayward imagination “takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature” (141). “In this enchanted world,” Ishmael reflects, “thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over” (141). The idealism of the young Platonist's reverie lies not only in the way he reimagines his oceanic surroundings as “a bottomless soul,” but also in how he “takes” what is visible from his particular vantage as representative of something “pervading mankind and nature.” As he proceeds to deduce the reality of a world that well exceeds his sensory perception from what can actually be seen, we find the space of the imagination extending even to the other side of the world. But let the young Platonist experience this sense of global interconnection, and Ishmael will leap into the role of the empiricist and redirect the young man's attention to the perils of his immediate surroundings: “while this sleep, this dream, is on ye, move your feet or your hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror,” when “with one half-throttled shriek you drop down through the transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise forever” (141). By focusing on the shriek-inducing risk of misplacing a foot or hand, Ishmael redirects the Platonist's attention to shipboard circumstances and thus deflates the globe-spanning soul space that emerges high above the living ocean.11It is not only in “The Mast-Head” that Moby-Dick features these movements between idealist vistas of global breadth and narrower visions delimited by embodied perception and sensation. We can find such shifts even in a chapter like “The Fossil Whale,” which is typically taken as reflecting Melville's interest in capacious scales of representation, not the counterpoising of the large and the small.12 This chapter opens as Ishmael announces a broadening of focus, from the sizable to the still larger: “From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate” (406). The chapter nevertheless proves as concerned with scalar contraction as expansion. Consider how Ishmael feels the strain of extrapolating the world's contours from the whale's material “bulk”: “Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts on this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs” (406). Here Ishmael's cetological observations grow into a more abstract sketch of a global and even a universal totality, one whose substantial scalar extension recalls the young Platonist's vision even as its nods to intellectual disciplines, species histories, and imperial geopolitics lend a different texture to its expanse. Noteworthy here is the fact that Ishmael's ability to describe this “sweep” hinges upon the phrase “as if,” so that his model of such “outreaching comprehensiveness” necessarily exhausts the descriptive capabilities of any human being.While this hypothetical model enlarges his imagined world, Ishmael's body, “faint” and “weary,” exerts a countervailing force that draws attention back to its ephemeral source. That is, after expanding the novel's spatial frame beyond the limits of description, Melville contracts it, by recalling Ishmael to his body. For much of the rest of the chapter, Melville maintains this comparatively narrow frame by focusing on the observable fossil record of previous “generations of whales.” Once he seems to experience a relapse of expansive idealization: while “stand[ing] among these mighty Leviathan skeletons,” Ishmael finds himself “borne back to that wondrous period” when “the whole world was the whale's” to leave “his wake along the present lines of the Andes and Himmelehs” (408). Again, however, Melville recalls him to embodied life. Still caught in a reverie, Ishmael “look[s] round to shake hands with Shem”; the turn to the tactile leaves him “horror-struck” at the recognition that the whale antedates and will outlast mankind, and that feeling in turn dissolves the image of the whale's continent-spanning precinct (408;emphasis added).Insofar as they are not staged dialogically, these episodes of Ishmael's Quixoticism in “The Fossil Whale” differ from those in “The Mast-Head.” In both cases, however, the human imagination moves toward the edges of the sensible as it gazes upon some enormous object (an ocean, a whale) and conjures a still more expansive image of globality, an ideal image whose universalism seems palpable only as the imagination turns away from the material particularities of its location in place and time. One might be tempted to class these oscillations as instances of what Bruce Robbins has termed “the sweatshop sublime” or what Caroline Levine considers “the enormity effect.” The sweatshop sublime, as Robbins explains, is a trope in which individuals gain “sudden, heady access to the global scale,” only to realize they lack the ability to act on such a scale and be brought back to their “everyday smallness” (85). The “enormity effect” refers to the way nineteenth-century novelists invoke the sweatshop sublime “to provoke a shock or crisis at a vastness that they explicitly claim goes beyond their capacity to represent” and, by so doing, to call attention to their readers' “ethical relation” to far-off others (Levine 61, 63). Certainly, there are moments when Moby-Dick aims to produce such a shocking recognition of interconnection at a distance, as when Ishmael warns his readers, “For God's sake be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it” (184). However, I would argue, the recurrent spatial dilations provided by Moby-Dick's idealist moments remain distinct from passages that produce the enormity effect, because they are more concerned with tracing the characteristics of a global whole than with eliciting shock at a vastness that defies novelistic representation.It is indeed because Melville's Quixoticism generates so many images that strain for global totality that at some point one has to see them as the kind of idealization that Kwame Anthony Appiah describes and defends in As If (2017). For Appiah, an idealization is a “useful untruth”: a fiction that simplifies, stabilizes, or elides some feature of the world in order to help with “thinking about reality” and “finding our way about in the world” (xii, 4, 5). These useful untruths, Appiah explains, are necessary in considerations of topics that, like the global interconnection of interest to Melville, are so “exceedingly complicated” that apprehending the “whole subject” “requires us to leave out some of the details” (23–24). Appiah goes on to argue that such topics are best understood via multiple idealizations—not because an increasing number of ideal models would draw us ever-closer to a total and unified intellectual picture of a phenomenon, but rather because “we humans work best with multiple models of the world,” models that may be “incompatible with each other” but that are nonetheless “good enough” for understanding different facets of a given milieu (104–5, 110). Moby-Dick's fleeting panoramas prove both useful and untrue, in Appiah's sense. They provide readers with models that are illustrative but so discrepant that a single global whole cannot be abstracted from them. Because Melville's most expansive images draw on his maritime experience and research, they may endow the setting for the novel with a greater degree of factuality than the novel's plot does its characters. But he nevertheless ensured those images of the world remained simplified and partial when he made each of those appearing in “The Mast-Head” and “The Fossil Whale” suppress what the other reveals.Yet while Appiah's argument is that the varied idealizations allowing for complex wholes to be understood are to be produced by different texts, Melville incorporates multiple idealizations of global totality into a single work. By doing so, Melville represents a globalized world in a distinctly novelistic fashion. More specifically, the imperfect alignment of Moby-Dick's panoramas constitutes an additional layer of Cervantine perspectivism—for the novel counterpoises not just small and large scales but varied iterations of the latter—and that perspectivism is itself a manifestation of one of the novel genre's hallmark qualities, its embrace of heterogeneous voices and outlooks. Yet because Moby-Dick's global visions remain discrepant and ephemeral, Melville's book proves much less invested in the totalizing mastery that critics have often found in novels of globalization. Instead, Moby-Dick takes a pluralist approach and periodically adopts different universalizing outlooks that allow for distinct synoptic visions of the world. This novelistic pluralism remains marked by irresolution, for the consistently prompt dissolution of those ideal visions ensures that