The task of elaborating a religious socialism in contemporary American society is difficult. Yet one of the most American of American novelists, Herman Melville, takes up this challenge. His novel Moby-Dick contains multitudes of metaphysical and political reflection. Melville became the centerpiece of esteemed historian C. L. R. James’ only published work on American Civilization, Mariners, Renegades & Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. As religious socialists, our reading of these two texts together unearths a wealth of resources, for themes of race, civilization, technology, class, spirit, divinity, and power are these texts’ very warp and weft.
Consider James’ reflections on Moby-Dick in 1952 during his detention on Ellis Island. “The voyage of the Pequod is the voyage of modern civilization seeking its destiny,” he wrote while being held by the Department of Immigration. In 1953, his book on Melville was published and James defiantly sent a copy to every single sitting American senator. This book was subsequently and ironically included by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) as further evidence of his subversive activities. James, the black Trinidadian political theorist, historian, novelist, and cricket enthusiast, had in 1950 already begun writing a volume titled American Civilization: The Struggle for Happiness. This manuscript was not published until 1993, four years after his death. But its themes—the torturous contradictions of modern America, its status as global hegemon, the agony and spiritual poverty of the intelligentsia, and the creative relationship between human labor, technology, and nature—were all taken up and expanded in Mariners, Renegades & Castaways.
In Mariners, James made these themes inseparable from the concrete narrative and images of Moby-Dick. He viewed Melville’s art as an insightful vision into modernity. He even considered it prophetic. James wrote: “The writer of this book confesses frankly that it is only since the end of World War II, that the emergence of the people of the Far East and of Africa into the daily headlines, the spread of Russian totalitarianism, the emergence of America as a power in every quarter of the globe, it is only this that has enabled him to see the range, the power and the boldness of Melville and the certainty with which he wrote down what he intended to do. In this no writer, anywhere, at any time, has ever surpassed him.” Images such as the solid timber of the mainmast, the hypnotic glare of the golden doubloon, and sulfur-spewing iron of the try-works emerge from Melville’s distinctive world of nineteenth-century America and its global spread. But the novel also reaches into the future. The quest of the Pequod has happened already. But the quest of the Pequod is also happening now.
What was it about Melville and his literary art that elicited such admiration from James? Melville entered his adulthood as one of those impoverished remnants of New England aristocracy. He drifted, not belonging to the staid financial and intellectual elites, and he remained unable to fully leave that social class behind. His itinerancy and famed journeys as a sailor and whaleman were a search for belonging, spiritual peace, and reintegration. His earlier novels provide a fictionalized testament to his entrance into one of the most dangerous working-class enterprises of the time. It also provided a seemingly endless fund of concrete experiences and technical details about shipping, sailing, harpoonery, accounting, oceanography, nautical hierarchy, and human civilizations unknown and often unmentioned by most New Englanders.
James must have identified with Melville. He was also an itinerant, except his journeying reversed Melville’s youthful movement. The budding writer and journalist came from Trinidad into Lancashire, England. Unlike Melville, James became explicitly political and active in various revolutionary movements. Even now his writings remain important for diverse groups of Marxist, postcolonial, literary, and historical scholars. Still, and with some exceptions, Melville has not been primarily received as a political writer. He distanced himself from any organized political movement, owing to his general pessimism. But James considered Moby-Dick a profound work of political philosophy. In it, three themes tied the Trinidadian intellectual and the sojourning New England sailor together: radical democracy, a critique of racial hierarchy and empire, and the conviction that nature and creative labor belong together.
Radical democracy is easy to find in Moby-Dick. Throughout the novel Melville dissolves the pretensions of aristocratic privilege into a bath of irresistibly wicked humor to reveal the exploitation that supports it. In one of the shortest chapters, “Postscript,” Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, reflects on the ritual of anointing. With the coronations of Pedro I and II in Brazil, the practice would have still taken place in Melville’s own lifetime, and even in his own hemisphere. Anointing is, Ishmael remarks, a “curious process of seasoning,” the function of which remains elusive. “Certain I am, however, that a king’s head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery?” He returns again in a later chapter, “Heads or Tails,” to the elaborate archaicisms of monarchy. According to English law the head and tail of any whale belongs to the king and queen respectively. It is, he wryly notes, a “division which, in the whale, is much like halving an apple; there is no intermediate remainder.” The same chapter includes an account of two “poor sun-burnt mariners” who successfully hunt a whale. They are then accosted by a warden who wields delegated royal authority to promptly confiscate their quarry.
Melville is no fool. He understands that new forms of mercantile exploitation rushed in to fill the vacuum left behind by the shattering of aristocratic privilege. Moby-Dick thus testifies to the social and political difficulties that emerged in the new social order with its more leveled and open society. Still, he is not equivocal about his aspiration to envision a democratic movement that is metaphysically deep and socially wide. The novel is premised on the possibility that common laborers can form epic literary material as good as, even superior to, the myth of kings. The spirit of democracy and equality is in accord with the highest divine realities. For dignity of the poor, the laborer with his tools “radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!” Melville sees in the divine nature the undeniable and ultimate ground for consent, equality, and democratic deliberation. And in a passage that lends C. L. R. James’ volume its title, Melville hymns the great democratic God:
If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch that workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!
The mention of Cervantes here is no accident. The form of the novel at its very birth, with Don Quixote and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, is methodologically democratic. The novel form raises up what seems mundane and brings low the powerful. Melville sees in Sancho Panza and portrays in his own art the facility and dignity of those who are required to make the world go round. The quality of officers, mates, dukes, kings, emperors are arbitrary. But workers contain multitudes.
Even in questions of genre, Moby-Dick employs and mingles diverse categories: epic, encyclopedia, dramatic tragedy, lyric, chronicle, philosophical treatise, anthropological study, travel literature, and natural history. This is literary genre en masse. This equality of genres allows the democratic vision of Melville to accomplish something even further: the postcolonial decentering of “Western Civilization.” In this he shares much with James’ political sensibilities. Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, the white New Englanders, command Queequeg, from the South Seas, Tashtego, an indigenous Nantucketer, and Daggoo, a Black African. It’s a racial division of ruler and ruled that does not go unmentioned by Melville. “Herein it is the same with the American whale fishery as with the American army and military and merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and Railroads,” he writes. In its industrial and imperial capacities, the projects of modern civilization are seen by Melville as constituted at every level by racial division and exploitation between “management” and “labor.”
In the chapter, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” Ishamael casually lists, among other qualities of “whiteness,” the reality that “the great Austrian Empire, Cæsarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial colour the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe.” One could read both those passages as an uncritical description by Ishmael or Melville, but a radical reading is more plausible given a comprehensive study of Moby-Dick and Melville’s corpus. The praise of whiteness and its racial imperialism, for instance, turns to the horror of whiteness, a violence and malignity which this color betokens. Even Ishmael glimpses his own concerns about the “whiteness” of Christianity:
But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.
Melville here fears that the uncompromising transcendence of monotheism blanches the whole world of meaning, leaving it an illusory wasteland.
Ishmael’s deep and intimate friendship with Queequeg is the most prominent example of Melville’s postcolonial inversion of “barbaric” and “civilized.” Early on in their relationship, Ishamel is abruptly faced with his friend’s religious ritual of imposed asceticism and silence. This lasts an entire day. After the ordeal, Ishmael attempts to give an anthropological account of how so-called primitive religions and religions with primitive elements (Islam and Catholicism) are bad for one’s health. But instead of capitulating to Ishamel’s disquisition on the superiority of a rationalized Anglo-Protestantism, Queequeg looks on him “with condescending concern and compassion.” In every instance, Queequeg acts with dignity, compassion, skill, and courage. He even acts with a more profound sense of Christian charity. While on a schooner, several passengers jeer at the sight of Ishmael and Queequeg together marvelling “that two fellow beings should be so companionable….” When one of the racist passengers falls into the water, Queequeg immediately dives in and saves him from drowning. Ishmael then imagines Queequeg’s later ruminations: “It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians.”
Melville’s postcolonial vision does not only look outward–to missionary contacts, colonization of far-off lands. It takes stock of American history and the grim racial realities of 1851. The crew of the Pequod is a multi-racial body conspicuously composed of representatives from every nation and tribe on earth. The most abused on board are black Americans, the cook and Pip, the cabin-boy from Alabama. The officer Stubb embodies the racially inflected libido dominandi of this hierarchy. Stubb inflicts cruelties and humiliations on the ninety-year-old cook. Before abandoning him in the open ocean, Stubb reminds Pip that the ship can afford to lose him but not a whale, pointing out that “a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama.”
So what does James make of Melville’s colonial reflections? James, who wrote Black Jacobins, a monumental study of the Haitian Revolution, was certainly not unaware of them. Nor would it have been lost on him that the Pequod is explicitly named for a Massachusetts tribe that vanished due to genocide. For James, it is exceptionally important that not only the harpooners, but the entire crew of the Pequod, are a multi-racial and multi-ethnic working class community whose concerns lie primarily in their skillful and creative labor. Melville’s description of the crew as “an Anacharsis Clootz deputation” strikes James as “decisive,” constituting a key passage that can be used to help read the entire novel. The historical Clootz was a Prussian nobleman active in the French Revolution and called for a Universal Republic against tyranny of all forms and for an explicit brotherhood of all races. Moby-Dick is not the only time Melville brings up Anacharsis Clootz. James notes it in Meville’s The Confidence-Man, where Melville describes a group of all races and religions as “a piebald parliament, an Anacharsis Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man.” This multi-racial community is likened to the Mississippi river, a rushing churning mixture which is cosmopolitan and confident. Melville thus thought that American civilization was already and should continue to be a transnational and heterogeneous identity.
Nature and technology unite James and Melville too. Melville everywhere dwells with the non-human and lingers in the empty silences of deep time, antediluvian visions, subterranean secrets hidden away in the chasms of the earth. Consider Melville’s near-Lovecraftian invocations of outer space– “Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way?”
Melville also feels the joy and mystery of the infinite, particularly in the ocean and whales. “It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude; on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea.” Melville definitely refuses to say what this encounter with the Infinite may mean. This gives his prose power. Melville argues that, like the jet of the whale, a misty state between flat skepticism of divine realities and fundamentalist faith provides the only substrate for the possibility of a revelatory rainbow in the emerging industrial modern world. All great thinkers have been misty, mystic, thinks Melville.
But this mysticism tortures Ahab. He furiously berates and interrogates a dead whale head, convinced that it contains wisdom which it is unwilling to share. The opaque and “hieroglyphic” character of nature’s communication is mirrored by the religious knowledge of colonized peoples. To Ahab, Queequeg’s body is the most important glyphic sign. When Ahab sees Queequeg’s coffin covered in marks identical to Queequeg’s tattoos, tattoos given to him by a religious elder of his tribe and described as containing the mysteries of heaven and earth, Ahab exclaims “Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!” and turns away in frustration. Tashtego’s older compatriot knows how to read signs otherwise and interprets Ahab’s scar. Likewise, the old Manxman, a representative of the Isle of Man which proudly maintained (and maintains) its internal government against absorption into Great Britain, was taught by a witch and knows how to read runes and interpret omens. For Melville, empire and imperial forms of monotheism are ignorant and hostile to magic, the variety of religious experience, the voices of suppressed peoples, and Nature itself.
Ahab verges on madness. And James saw this madness in the modern triumph of machine over humanity. The specific form of the machine was, in his analysis, the totalitarian bureaucratic state-capitalisms of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, as well as the more ambiguously and surreptitiously totalitarian aspects of the United States. For James, the whole world stood in a global crisis of industrial modernity and totalitarianism. He believed Melville intuited this. Moby-Dick represents the terror of industrial modernity in the image of the furnace of the try-works. The ship is a floating factory. James sees in that furnace “the world of the Ruhr, of Pittsburgh, of the Black Country in England…the world of massed bombers, of cities in flames, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki…” This industrial process is focused and intensified in the spiritual totalitarianism of Ahab whose singular will incorporates the whole of the crew. Ahab “will be soul and brains and spirit, and the rest of mankind will be arms and legs. It is the elite theory of totalitarianism, whatever its origins, shapes or forms,” writes James. Ahab is a Promethean type, noble in his refusal of base profit and property-relations as the sum of the human spirit, hideous and demonic in his desire to instrumentalize all humanity and nature.
But James also approaches the relationship between technology and nature with a different emphasis. For James, nature and technology unite around the technical skill of the Pequod’s crew and the ignorance of its officers. The Pequod does not run on windy abstractions or political slogans (James was ruthlessly critical of any perceived vanguardism) but on the genuine “international solidarity of labor.”
James also saw in Moby-Dick descriptions of creative labor that could lead beyond the crisis. He drew attention to the laboring crew of the Pequod and to Melville’s description of the crew as “all a unity.” James writes, “You cannot distinguish between man and Nature and technology, between sweat and beauty, between an imperative discipline more severe than war, and yet sensations that are as new and powerful as any human experience.” Some might call this description Romanticism, others Transcendental Pantheism (or at least Panentheism). In either case, Melville distinctively recasts it. James ascribes to Melville a “totally new sense of Nature, as incessantly influencing men and shaping every aspect of their lives and characters. Nature is not a background to men’s activity or something to be conquered and used. It is a part of man, at every turn physically, intellectually, and emotionally, and man is a part of it. And if man does not integrate his daily life with his natural surroundings and his technical achievements, they will turn on him and destroy him.”
So what are we to make of this as religious socialists? Melville’s darkly transcendental Romanticism and James’ literary postcolonial Marxism offer several advantages. Instead of attempting to lead with theory, they lead with story, narrative, and image. As both are novelists, this is not some propagandistic concession. They both believe that literature uniquely communicates realities that cannot be said any other way. In James, that respect for literature leads to an even richer engagement with theoretical and historical discourse, especially as it relates to capitalism and empire. They are both concerned with America and the America they are concerned with is always presented as already having been constitutively international. Melville and James describe and critique the negative global impact of the American empire and programmatically underline and imagine the positive goal of a multi-racial America in global solidarity. They understand in their bones that America has never been an autonomous zone or nation-state of self-sufficient citizenry. In this way, Melville and James can help contemporary American socialists avoid the false dichotomy between “nationalism” or “globalism” in favor of a more flexible and place-conscious network of solidarity.
Even though they differ significantly on the religious significance of nature, Melville and James are united in exploring the post-capitalist vision of labor and creativity. This “Romantic” character of socialism has not been emphasized in the contemporary American context enough. The Christian (and non-Christian) socialists of Victorian England spoke often of craft and how the beautiful and useful could be united. Care for workers also meant enabling workers to become skillful co-creators of their own streets, homes, churches, and cities. James sees the task as even more urgent: we must, from the ground up, emancipate communities of laborers from wages and profit. Only then can our skills adapt and unite Nature with genuine human needs, needs both physical and creatively spiritual.
Melville, on the other hand, encourages a prophetic, romantic, American socialism. As in the rise of industrial capitalism, the voices of Nature and the transcendent are muted by capital and silenced by the profit-organized industrial civilization of today. Our ecological and economic need for socialism is therefore a religious one: the hieroglyphs of ocean, sky, and life in all its forms, including the abyssal pre-human earth, mean something. And while the human capacity to attend to Nature and the divine will always exists, only a socialist world could allow us to collectively pursue those transcendental, even magical, tasks of attentive contemplation. Imperialism, racial hierarchy, and capitalism are social-historical evils that kill this religious sense. But as James and Melville remind us, liberation and metaphysics belong together and all of the resources of Romanticism and Transcendentalism in America rightfully belong to America’s religious socialists. We should not hesitate to seize them.
Andrew Kuiper writes about literature, philosophy, theology, mysticism, and politics for a variety of publications and on Substack under the name Naucratic Expeditions.
Image Credit: Grace Darling Rowing out to Sea in a Furious Storm. Colour Wood Engraving by E. Evans after C.J. Staniland. Welcome Collection. Source: Welcome Collection.