The Politics of Security and the Art of Judgment in the Writings of Herman Melville and Janet Frame

The Politics of Security and the Art of Judgment in the Writings of Herman Melville and Janet Frame by Philip Loosemore A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy English Department University of Toronto © Copyright by John Philip Loosemore 2011 The Politics of Security and the Art of Judgment in the Writings of Herman Melville and Janet Frame Philip Loosemore Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto 2011 Abstract This dissertation pairs a nineteenth-century American writer, Herman Melville, and a twentieth-century New Zealand writer, Janet Frame, to consider points of overlap between two novelists who were unusually sensitive to the problem of political thinking and decision in situations of state emergency. Consisting of three chapters on Melville‟s later maritime fiction (Moby-Dick, Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd, Sailor) and two interleaving chapters on Frame‟s late autobiographical and fictional writings (An Angel at My Table and The Carpathians), the dissertation explores how, in the work of these writers, figural work builds around interlinked questions of emergency and judgment. Both writers are interested in situations of peril when the fragility of bodily life is exposed and when the coherence of given political orders is tested. Both probe the response of the human legislative urge and the limits of the power of judgment in the time of crisis and exception, producing narratives of the tense moment of executive decision. Their literary forms heighten awareness of the mechanisms, frameworks, and effects of different modes of judgment--whether cognitive, moral, legal, aesthetic, or ii political--under emergency conditions. Out of this engagement with the nexus of judgment and security, both writers ask what might happen if we were to abide with precariousness and insecurity rather than default to the often destructive praxis of security. Melville and Frame also push the capacities of language and form in their attempt to represent the possibility of modes of judgment adequate to such political renewal. In their rhetoric and formal structures--including their experimental “disfiguration” of narrative lines--and in their creation of intricate, reflexive literary voices, these writers imagine what it would mean to come up against the limit of, and even to overturn, accepted categories of knowledge and thought, of calculation and judgment. iii Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and to the University of Toronto for supporting my doctoral work. For their invaluable assistance at different stages of this project, I wish to thank Elizabeth Harvey, Victor Li, Deidre Lynch, Heather Murray, and Paul Stevens, all at the University of Toronto; Allan Hepburn at McGill University; and Thomas Allen at the University of Ottawa. For their support of this project and their kind hospitality, I am grateful to Alex Calder, Jan Cronin, and Judy McFall McCaffery at the University of Auckland; Pamela Gordon and Denis Harold at the Janet Frame Literary Trust; Sarah Shieff at the University of Waikato; Jane Stafford and Mark Williams at Victoria University of Wellington; and Louise Grenside and Lydia Wevers at the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at Victoria University. I could not have completed this dissertation without the support of my family, friends, and loved ones. I particularly wish to thank Brooke Dufton; Dianne and Patrick Gallagher; Gordon Jocelyn; Barbara, Jocelyn, John, and Sarah Loosemore; Mark McCans; and Rebecca Tierney-Hynes. Finally, I would like to offer my sincere thanks to the members of my committee, Paul Downes, Chelva Kanaganayakam, and Naomi Morgenstern, for all of their advice, encouragement, and critical feedback. iv Table of Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1 – Agon: Preventive Force and the Decision on Security in Moby-Dick ............. 16 Chapter 2 – Atomic Pacific and “The Age of the World Target”: Judgment and Narrative Power in An Angel at My Table ....................................................... 57 Chapter 3 – Judgment, Security, and the Theatre of Revolution in Benito Cereno ............. 92 Chapter 4 – Security of Being and the Overturning of Judgment in The Carpathians ....... 135 Chapter 5 – Security War and Executive Decision in Billy Budd, Sailor .......................... 174 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................... 219 v 1 Introduction The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the idea of political judgment as it relates to the imperative of political security in the literary art of two major writers, Herman Melville and Janet Frame, who, though rarely if ever paired together in critical studies, shed a good deal of light on one another not only in terms of political insight, but also in terms of narrative and stylistic technique. In each of the chapters that follow, I explore, from one angle or another, how Melville and Frame question the mechanisms, frameworks, and effects of the power of judgment as it relates to issues of violence and political security. Reading Melville and Frame The dissertation consists of five chapters alternating between Melville and Frame. The three chapters on Melville unfold a chronological reading of the later maritime fiction. I analyze Moby-Dick (1851) in Chapter 1, Benito Cereno (1855) in Chapter 3, and Billy Budd, Sailor (1886-91) in Chapter 5. In the interleaving chapters, I analyze the development and extension of some of Melville‟s central political insights in two late works by Frame, namely the second volume of her autobiography, An Angel at My Table (1983), in Chapter 2, and her novel The Carpathians (1987) in Chapter 4. This interlocking pattern is ideal for a project that tries to examine points of overlap between writers and periods without insisting on the presence of direct influence (by Melville on Frame) or direct response (by Frame to Melville), or on the purely linear, chronological development of political concepts. 2 I see Melville and Frame as mutually revealing writers because of what I would characterize as their shared interest in the force of necessity in judgments that deal out death or authoritarian repression in emergency situations, and because of their shared interest in the problem of finding a way around this imperative. In their fiction, both writers incessantly interpret acts of judgment. They scrutinize and size up, for example, how individuals reach decisions in contexts where bodily life and political ways of being are at stake. They feel around the edges of the contexts of judgment, from acts of barely conscious perception to complex ideological fictions such as natural law. They grapple with the human predicament of vulnerability and the desire for security. They critique the complex speech acts that surround the unleashing of violence by state security apparatuses. Such continuities between the writers are illuminating, the more so given the considerable geographical, cultural, and temporal distances involved, distances that throw their related efforts into sharp relief. The differences between the writers, too, are important and instructive. For instance, one might, as I do in chapter one below, read Moby-Dick as a comment on the ideology of preventive, self-defensive violence playing out in a global theatre where the equatorial Pacific becomes a site of spectacular destruction in a kind of autoimmune ignition of hyper-securitizing energies. Melville‟s own philosophies of potentiality, action, and sovereign mastery can in turn, as I will further explore below, be understood in terms of Daniel Webster‟s 1841 rule on anticipatory self-defense in international law. The process of interpreting what the novel can say to us today about global, or at any rate international, wars of prevention is then implicitly enriched, as I hope to show, through a reading of Frame‟s postwar, nuclear-era 3 meditations on potentiality and destruction in An Angel at My Table and The Carpathians. Historical differences clarified by Frame‟s corpus allow us to locate more precisely how Melville‟s wide-ranging speculations resonate today, and similarly allow us to articulate more precisely how modern issues of security praxis inform a reading of Melville‟s fiction. But Frame represents more than just the afterlife of--or a foil to--Melville‟s response to emergency. For while Melville will, for example, play with the idea of a disruption to politically repressive judgment, Frame pushes further in this direction than he does, allegorizing the impossible overturning of the power of judgment, allegorizing too the profound or utter renewal of cognitive and perceptual capacities imagined to follow in the wake of such an overturning. This is not to say that Frame is somehow a more relevant or more daring writer than Melville, but it is to say that in the terms set forth by this dissertation, she offers something distinct. That is why, as I have suggested, the two chapters on Frame do not stem from questions of influence and response between the two writers. This project is about areas of overlap and meaningful difference, in terms of formal technique, philosophical preoccupation, and narrative method, between the major works of two writers who share unexpected but fruitful points of contact.

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