The End of America: Geology and Cartography in Herman Melville's Pierre and Victor-Lévy Beaulieu's Voyageries

Abstract

What would it mean were someone to proclaim, in a certain apocalyptic tone, "the Time is near, the End of America is at hand?" In "Hawthorne and His Mosses," Herman Melville announces "the coming of the literary Shiloh of America," whose advent is further to herald and to prepare for that "political supremacy among the nations, which prophetically awaits [America] at the close of the present century" (Melville [1850] 1967, 550, 546). Ac- cording to this version of the End, the ark of Truth would find its final sanc- tuary in the democratic republic with the American Shiloh. In spite of this nationalist, fin de siècle rendering, such apocalypticism is not endemic solely to nineteenth-century America. In his Monsieur Melville (1978) and Les Voyageries (1973-83; published separately), Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, a con- temporary québécois author and polemicist, appropriates the American rhetoric of the New Frontier and the New Man for his own purposes. With Melville as literary co-conspirator, Beaulieu undertakes the accomplishment of La Grande Tribu, a Homeric reconstruction of Québec's origins. Para- doxically, however, Monsieur Melville discerns the roots of Québec's future grandeur not in the earthbound past, but in the starlit firmament of the coming New World (Beaulieu 1978, vol. 3, 129).