LITERARY SUBVERSIONS: THE ENLIGHTENMENT SUBJECT IN WHEATLEY AND MELVILLE

A thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for 3C, the Degree

Master of English

In

Literature

by

Joseph David Watkins

San Francisco, California

Spring 2016 Copyright by Joseph David Watkins 2016 THESIS

Joseph David Watkins San Francisco, California 2016

In order to meet the requirements of the degree Master of English in Literature, this thesis discusses how the works of Phillis Wheatley and Herman Melville subvert Enlightenment tropes used in early American economic and political rhetoric to justify, naturalize, and perpetuate instrumentalization. Through analyzing how these subversions operate in relation to the tropes they deconstruct, the thesis advances a radically democratic aesthetic practice based on the production of polysemy and the wild proliferation of modalities of sameness and difference.

I certify that the abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis.

Chair, Thesis Committee Date CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read the thesis by Joseph David Watkins, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of English in Literature: English at San Francisco State

University.

Geoffrey Green, Ph.D. Professor of Literature

Sarita Cannon, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Literature TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction...... 1

Chapter 1: Dark Brilliance and Sun Blindness...... 13

Chapter 2: Usury; Excess Value and 111 Use...... 44

Conclusion...... 73

Works Cited 77 Literary Subversions: the Enlightenment Subject in Wheatley and Melville

Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. (Morrison “Toni Morrison - Nobel Lecture”)

...truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses, coins which have their obverse effaced and are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal. (217 Nietzsche On Truth and Morality in the Ultramoral Sense qtd. in Derrida “White Mythology”)

But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason. (3 Thomas Paine Common Sense)

Given that we construct the present according to how we narrativize the past, reinterpreting the past can allow us to reinterpret the present. Because literature necessarily involves a community to invest it with meaning, reinterpreting the American literary past also creates the possibility of reimagining the American present. I hope to reinterpret some of the stories and metaphors by which we have historically crafted our identities as Americans. I am examining the tabula rasa used as a metaphor for the condition of humanity and illumination used as a metaphor for perfect knowledge, or rationality, as they appear in the poetry of Phillis Wheatley and the narrative fiction of 2

Herman Melville. Both authors subvert the use of these two tropes in the construction of the Enlightenment subject and its attendant social practices.

The metaphor of the tabula rasa structurally contradicts itself: how can a slate wiped clean of figures have a figure for itself? As a marking that erases itself as such, it relies on the transparency of language to its users. The figure cannot appear as the site of a historically specific cultural inscription, which it is, for it would then no longer be either itself or pure of circumstance. Its form requires its erasure. The trope of the sun as divine illumination naturalizes this erasure, eliding culturally informed inscription, by which the Enlightenment subject interprets sight, with sight itself (250 Derrida White

Mythologies).

Because sensory perception occurs even without a social system of inscription to explain it, materiality itself can threaten the cooperation of the two metaphors. Similarly, because alternative forms of subjectification are not naturalized by the Enlightenment subject, their saliently analogous involvement in historical and material circumstance also threatens to alienate the Enlightenment subject from its transcendental pretenses.

Consequently, both material specificity and alternative forms of valuation appear as excess in a worldview composed according to the collusion of the trope of the sun as divine illumination and the tabula rasa.

By manipulating these “excesses” inherent to the two Enlightenment tropes,

Herman Melville and Phillis Wheatley subvert the aesthetics of valuation through which 3

Americans, fictional or otherwise, have been recognized as valuable or in excess of value.

Their subversions challenge instrumentalizing language’s ironically simultaneous erasure and promulgation of both sameness and historical specificity; in other words, the subversions challenge the impulse of the wealthy to naturalize their position as a shared right and this task’s consequent obfuscation of the historically specific conditions leading to, and betraying the fragility of, their privilege.

Instrumentalizing human life and naturalizing privilege via the erasure of historical specificity go hand-in-hand in American history because justifications for economically motivated exploitation in a nation with serious pretenses to democracy must not appear arbitrary; besides, if privilege doesn’t appear coextensive with right, the pride of position would appear ludicrous. Because such subversions challenge abstract formulations that are commonly complicit in the construction of American identity, they have been historically met in the works of both authors with strong and persistent denial.

These subversions interest me as a reader because I have found that instrumentalization opposes my ability to create art, because I am radically democratic and polysemy works in favor of radical democracy, and because my experience of the beautiful belongs to an economy that similarly favors polysemic proliferation, what I would call the wild, as opposed to the domesticated, aspects of artistic production.

In order to discuss these ideas at length without repeatedly explaining the theoretical framework in which they make sense, I will now explain some of the more 4

prominent or rhetorically idiomatic terms that I use. By “domestication” I mean the species of highly formalized, institutional, classist and racist subjectification that occurs within America according to interpretations of the Enlightenment subject. By

“instrumentalization” I mean the totalization of those subjects for economic gain at the expense of other forms of value, a process that necessarily restricts freedom by limiting human potential to ideological, and, by extension, aesthetic, poverty. By “wilderness” I mean to indicate the potential for change just beyond, or in excess of, the domestic. I don’t mean formlessness, irreverence, a lack of control, or that domesticity is unnatural.

Because literary domestication appears to me in accord with my linguistic model,

I will also use the word “presence” to indicate the spectral wilderness both presented and obscured by Enlightenment modes of domestication. Presence is the word I use to stand in for unmediated being. I need to use this term because it is my counterpoint to the tabula rasa and the trope of divine illumination. Presence is that which is present and therefore absent from “re-” presentation; in other words, that which is in excess of media.

In this case, words used to instrumentalize humanity are the media which re- present presence. By “excess” I mean to indicate that which is outside these figures and their attendant uses in establishing value. Because we are examining how Enlightenment rhetoric is used to naturalize oppressive instrumentalization for financial gain, the presence of that which exceeds economic purposes is the excess by which Enlightenment rhetoric can be subverted. This discontinuity between presence and instrumentalizing 5

representation marks the arena in which I hope to show Wheatley and Melville subversively maneuvering-the trick here is that though presence can never actually appear within the arena, it constantly works at its edges, eroding the discursive arrangements which naturalize domestication at the expense of the wild.

There are, however, significant differences between Wheatley and Melville’s subversions. Because white colonials justified slavery according to the denial of African humanity, in the first chapter we will examine how Wheatley exploits tropes generally deriving from Enlightenment models of man and used in the service of metaphysical justifications for slavery. When she exploits these tropes, she does so by breaking from the rhetorical tradition of the Enlightenment in order to meaningfully subvert its sense of boundless mastery, the pretense of rationality and a common justification for slavery, by showing how the originary moment that it identifies as illumination, and naturalizes as sight, is actually an inherited linguistic mode of explication. This is the aforementioned naturalization: the metaphor of the tabula rasa and its attendant sense of absolute mastery largely dictates how an American recognizes, or makes meaningful, their perception, but

Americans tend to take these perceptions as fact without reference to their metaphorical dimensions. Such tropes allow us to construct fine-sounding myths, but they deny the positive specificity of lived experience, wild presence just at the edge of representation.

Because white colonials denied African people’s ability to produce rational knowledge, as if they had any idea as to what the broadness of rationality might include 6

and without reference to its historical specificity, Wheatley’s subversions deal largely with the nature of knowledge itself-that is, her subversions are metaphysical. The tropes that Wheatley exploits are my analog to Morrison’s well-smithed armor without a knight, a necessarily polished but disembodied metaphysics. In order to animate these metaphysics with her humanity, the humanity largely absent from the metaphysical representation of African Americans as incapable of reason and from the metaphor of the tabula rasa, she reveals Enlightenment thought’s historical specificity through her own historical specificity. However, because this revelation debases the very metaphysical certainty of Enlightenment thought, her historical specificity also entails the revelation of what cannot be known-in other words, the very elusiveness of presence that makes her subversions possible.

This disjunct between presence and representation allows polysemy, for polysemy entails the potential for various people to imagine a different referent when interpreting the same word. If representation were coextensive with presence, this simply wouldn’t be possible-we would always know exactly what everyone means. As Wheatley seeks to show how the historical specificity of knowledge reveals its imperfection, her subversions particularly benefit from exploiting how polysemy can hint at the coexistence of various modes of interpretation. She also uses polysemy to disguise the subversive import of her work, embedding the more politically volatile dimensions within phrases and metaphors that allow for both racially prejudiced and radically subversive readings.

In the second chapter, I look at how Melville subverts this Enlightenment model of man as it applies to depictions of working-class “freemen” within a capitalist nation.

Because working-class white men in Melville’s time were similarly subject to naturalization as such-the myth of the tabula rasa as the discursive element whereby one can make the assumption that innate ability dictates worth and thereby naturalize the stratification of classes-and yet were not wholly subject to denials of humanity, his subversions rely less on exploiting the metaphysical figure of man as unmarked and unbounded and focus more on how the capitalist reification of a belief in such unbounded freedom leads to the ironic valuation of men based on their interchangeability. If all men are rational, implying that rationality is the condition for humanity, and we define rationality as compliance with an instrumentalizing system of exchange value, so men develop a sense of their identity at the expense of everything that would interrupt exchange value-namely, the great diversity of human systems of valuation that precede the advent of global capital.

Though we will see how both forms of oppressive subjectification appear according to the same Enlightenment metaphor, this is a different type of instrumentalization than slavery. One difference is that the rhetoric of class masks its instrumentalizing dimensions, though also at the expense of historical and material specificity, as unbound opportunity. For enslaved African Americans, slavery was depicted as the consequence of a lack of ability. In both forms, swept clean of nuanced cultural inscription, humans become like Nietzsche’s image of effaced coins: mere interchangeable tokens, their value within Capitalism mistaken for the value of their presence itself.

Obversely, I doubt that it is coincidental that both authors were concerned with the Enlightenment figuration of free subjects in the years immediately preceding wars that were popularly justified in terms of freedom, and in this sense I do see the subversions as definitely analogous. They are also analogous in that they subvert the metaphors through their aforementioned “excesses.”

Before I proceed, I would like to take a moment to expound on how I intend to use the idea of “excess,” especially as the inverse of oppressive language, and also with some regard as to how the subversion of oppressive identification is not only destructive but creates new potential for story telling and meaning making. 1 will do so with the help of Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture. She Writes:

“Finally,” she says, “I trust you now. 1 trust you with the bird that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done - together. (Morrison)

This excerpt comes from the end of Morrison’s reinterpretation of a story she says she has heard told at different times and in different ways. Two young people go to an old, blind, black woman, living on the edge of their town and said to have the gift of prophecy, and they ask her, as though to prove her incompetence, effectively instrumentalizing her in the service of their need for self-importance, in this case a type of social power, if the bird that they are carrying is dead or alive. Meanwhile, their hands are actually empty. Casting the desires and fears that animate language as an absence inherent to it, she tells them that “It’s in your hands” (Morrison).

What is in their hands? We know that their hands are literally empty, yet this absence masks the cause for their question. In this we derive a sense of old woman as mocking the youths. If we end the story there, which Morrison doesn’t do, the old women seems only to have somewhat humorously produced an insult that succinctly subverts the power dynamic the youths had intended to create. Or, alternatively, we can read the story as a sadistic exploitation of the old woman’s helplessness. However, for Morrison, the bird is not language so much as the question of whether language will be alive or dead, signaling an originary otherness before language, what I call the perpetual excessiveness of presence to language. The bird reveals itself in the speech act, but it’s not coextensive with the semantic content of their language-in as much as we are the present, which to me is a given, presence speaks, but the meanings conveyed in the speech acts of presence are not to be confused with ourselves. Given that the bird is the metaphor for what is anterior to language, that the woman goes on to tell them a story of how they have come to be where they are substantiates the cause for why they have come to her house and 10

asked such a seemingly rude question. I choose the verb substantiates deliberately because the question of presence, that which is necessarily excluded from language, and thus that which presence is in excess of, is that which is substantial in the most literal sense of the word. The emptiness of their hands carries the bird, for the question is a pretense to mask the past that language cannot contain yet relays from day to day, year to year, and generation to generation.

The use of a negative dialectic ^synthesizing a new understanding of seemingly opposed perspectives by pointing out what they both are not, which is to say that which the bird holder’s performance exposes, the excess that “holds” the semantic content of the message, yet which is nevertheless done together-instantiates the collectiveness of meaning, indexing the powers between people, benevolent or otherwise.2 Morrison and

1 ’’The philosophy of the absolute and total subject [the young man who finds and reinforces his identity with the ruse of the bird] is a particular one. The inherent reversibility of the identity thesis [that the young man will only fully emerge after the pretense of the bird has been revealed] counteracts the principles of its spirit [his need to recognize otherness as togetherness, revealing the identity asserted in the pretense to actually be the negative of his true self].” (Theodor Adorno Negative Dialectics 142)

2 The rhetorical import of a message always involves itself in what it not spoken, and in this way the negative of any message becomes a potency ironically within and beyond it. As the waiter says in an anecdote often recited by Slavoj Zizek , “I am sorry sir, I cannot serve you coffee without cream, we do not have any cream, would you like coffee without milk?” The idea being that what a word doesn’t represent has a specific character that informs its usage, albeit in this instance appearing to humorous affect; or, as Derrida said, “Who has ever met a me?” (from the documentary, D ’ailleurs, trans. Me) where the idea is that one of the words most intimately connected to identity, me, cannot be experienced in accordance with its linguistic form--i.e. as the object that receives the action of the subject, for it is the speaking subject itself that uses it; or, as in the idea Baudrillard posited in his work Simulations, that people go to Disneyland and act like children to assure themselves that they are not similarly pretending, or simulating, when they act as adults, disguising the difference between signifier and referent by conspicuously indulging in a consciously constructed image of that difference through play; or, as St. Augustine responded when asked to describe the nature of time, “Si non rogas intelligo [If you do not ask, I understand]” (St. Augustine. Confessions 453-430 XI, xiv) prompting the student to silence and immersing them in the state wherein we do not exist in time but as it, inseparable from it, and in which any description of the moment would be an excess that interrupts a sensibility to it. 11

the fictional old woman use the power relations implicit in the youth’s language to invoke change, prompting them to reinterpret the text so that that which informs it but isn’t included in it comes to the fore-perhaps an impossible task, but thereby an unending and productive one, and one of the effects of literature that I most value. Look at their reply:

Tell us about ships turned away from shorelines at Easter, placenta in a field. Tell us about a wagonload of slaves, how they sang so softly their breath was indistinguishable from the falling snow. How they knew from the hunch of the nearest shoulder that the next stop would be their last. How, with hands prayered in their sex, they thought of heat, then sun. Lifting their faces as though it was there for the taking. (Morrison “Toni Morrison - Nobel Lecture”)

The repetitions of “tell” and “how” render each sentence affectively paratactical-the periods are arbitrary; this is a record of a lecture-linking as though in analogy each proclamation until the final fragment, which is affectively a verbal phrase that links the image of their faces lifted to the sky with two imminent interpretive possibilities: we can see their faces lifted as though the sunlight was there for them to take, or we can see their faces lifted up under the sky as though their faces were so unguarded in the gesture as to suggest that they themselves were there for the taking, benevolent or otherwise. What type of taking we imagine says a lot about who we are, about how we respond to the foundational American traumas of slavery and race relations, and about how we choose to imagine the intentions of authors. I think that Morrison works this ambiguity into the passage deliberately, for this ambiguity is a condition of how any large group exceeds the dimensions of its history.3

Part of the crux of this fictive event is the youths’ abusive language, an abuse that continues and departs from earlier abuses. Its cruelty inflects, in a broader sense, the cruelty of humanity to humanity. It has something of the fear of difference, perhaps even the creation of a scapegoat to restore a sense of control, but in its solution I also find a hidden potential for togetherness through reworking the very abusive speech act that had abused its speaker. I like to think that its solution can be a guide for the potential of literature in this country today to incite us to continually go beyond our aggressions, fears, and prejudices, to make new stories about what value and why. The old woman’s subversion challenges the forces that underlie the youth’s false pretenses, it challenges their sense of status, of who is superior and inferior, who has power and what power could mean, and it does so precisely by putting their own language back in their hands with a new sense of presence explicit in them. Melville and Wheatley seem to perform such subversions for the American literary audience.

3 Where history is the inscription of the past rather than its “unbiased” discursive equivalence. 13

Chapter One: Dark Brilliance and Sun Blindness.

How with hands prayered in their sex, they thought of heat, then sun. Lifting their faces as though it was there for the taking. (Morrison “Toni Morrison - Nobel Lecture”)

By such wicked and inhuman ways the English are said to enslave towards one hundred thousand yearly; of which thirty thousand are supposed to die by barbarous treatment in the first year; besides all that are slain in the unnatural wars excited to take them. (23 Thomas Paine African Slavery in America)

Contrary to the charges of simple imitation and guileless assimilation that we will see have been leveled at Phillis Wheatley (Erkkila 202; Gates, Jr. 8; Slauter 83; Willard

234), her poetry subverts colonial American metaphysical Enlightenment rhetoric- rhetoric used both for the justification of instrumentalizing humans on the basis of race and to naturalize this oppression-by exploiting its native excess, challenging early colonial American Enlightenment metaphysics within the range of possibilities of their own idiom while simultaneously encouraging her message’s proliferation by disguising its more radical import within the polysemic ambiguity of that range. She subverts the certainty of Enlightenment metaphysics by reworking the trope of illumination that is naturalized within it in order to make its truth production appear self-evident. Because this task entailed some risk for an enslaved African American woman, and because it debases the idea of a perfect correlation between language and the world, she often writes in a mode that allows for both prejudiced or radical interpretations, manipulating the

Enlightenment reflexivity whereby prejudiced sight is naturalized in the interpretation of the seen, but also highlighting the tautological structure of this tendency.

In 1772, near the end of the colonial era of American history, Phillis Wheatley, a woman living in Boston under conditions of enslavement, tried to publish a collection of her poetry. She had begun to acquire some fame for works she had published in newspapers both in London and Boston, garnering special attention for a particular elegy written for a well-known minister, George Whitefield (Willard 244), and she decided to publish a book; however, the owners of the local publishing houses either denied that she had written the work, or they doubted that the public would believe she had written the work. It was, according to the publishers, either too well-written to be authentic, or too authentic to be well-received (Carretta xiii; Erkkila 202; Gates 7; Slauter 82; The

Gentlemen’s Magazine 456). What, then, could she do?

Eric Slauter describes the situation as one wherein “Colonial whites worried when blacks failed to reproduce white culture, and they worried when blacks did reproduce it” (96). I object to his wording. I don’t think any “re-” is at all necessary; however, if we omit the prefix-removing the part of his language still mired in the confusion of claims to racial authenticity and singularity, a part of the linguistic legacy I am examining-we can see the problem simply enough: the society in which she wrote was largely either threatened by her abilities or unable to imagine them. The solution they invented to remedy this reluctance-they, ostensibly, being

Phillis and her legal owner, John Wheatley-was to have a number of colonial officials conduct an official interview to substantiate her claims of authorship. Though we will never know what they asked her (Gates, Jr. 7), she had her interview, and at the end of it they signed a document stating that she was indeed the author of her work. Still, even with their signatures to legitimize her work, she couldn’t find a publisher in Boston.

These marks of simultaneous condescension and approval, the official signatures, however ill- or well- meaning the officials may have been in producing them, prefigure the partial impossibility of entrance into the society they are meant to represent. They are a specular excess, a reflection of a substantial limitation in the ideology of those who either rejected or failed to see her. Again, I choose the word “substantial” deliberately. I am speaking of ideology not only as a mere system of inherited beliefs, but also as the material location and arrangement of those beliefs. The choice of the colonial magistrates to sign her work is the trace of a material condition. The magistrates were responding to a threat by placing their signature over it, creating the illusion of control precisely where control is threatened, and this is not the logical and deliberate valence of their reaction, this is not their rationality, this is not contained or transmitted in its logos; rather, this is the material dynamics of ideology, ironically in excess of language and precisely that which gives the gesture its force and import. Further, it is not an excuse to say that their behavior was materially bound-it’s a different type of indictment. 16

She did manage to publish her works after the interview, though she had to go to

London to do so, and the first edition featured a lithograph of her sitting at a table, pen in one hand and chin in the other, staring off in contemplation, with the words “Phillis

Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston” arching along the top of the portrait’s elliptical border (Erkkila 203). Why is this important? The idea of natural genius-as opposed to human genius, which was considered above the natural order-rising from the masses, was a selling point for poetry for much of the eighteenth century,4 and an effective way to dismiss the more metaphysical implications of Wheatley’s authorship by miring it in racial and class prejudice. Her work, the majority could make the cold claim, was an exception, a mere incident of nature: a mind of such a polish that their own brilliance might find some semblance of itself within its reflections.

The reception of her work bears out the thesis that colonial American culture wasn’t absolutely alienated from their ideological prejudice by Wheatley’s mimesis.

Some people accepted her work, and, despite the obvious inaccuracy of such a description, some dismissed it as imitative: “While some celebrated the example of

Wheatley as evidence of the mental equality of blacks and whites, others cited the

4 For examples of poets advertised as natural geniuses, see how the works of Elizabeth Hands, Stephen Duck or even the celebrated Robert Burns. For a discussion on how Europeans often explained the difference between the constrained genius of nature and the liberal, radically free genius of Man, see Derrida’s analysis of Immanuel Kant’s critiques of pure taste, titled “Economimesis,” especially the fourth page, wherein he ventriloquizes Kant’s sentiments: “On the side of nature is mechanical necessity; on the side of art, the play of freedom... but analogy annuls this opposition. It places under Nature’s dictate what is most wildly free in the production of art. Genius is the locus of such a dictation—the means by which art receives its rules from nature.” (4 Derrida “ Economimesis” Diacritics, Vol. 1, No.2, The Ghost of Theology: Readings of Kant and Hegel. 1981) 17

writings themselves as proof of the natural inability of black people to rise above the level of imitation” (Slauter 83). What the assertion of imitation fails to realize is that all cultural production, always at least partially, if not wholly, involves itself in mimetic activity of one sort or another.5 Homi Bhabha writes:

The ‘unthought’ across which colonial man is articulated is that process of classificatory confusion that I have described as the metonymy of the substitutive chain of ethical and cultural discourse. This results in the splitting of colonial discourse so that two attitudes towards external reality persist; one takes reality into consideration while the other disavows it and replaces it by a product of desire that repeats, rearticulates ‘reality’ as mimicry. (Bhabha 130)

Presence, what Bhabha calls external reality, is represented according to a prejudice that oscillates according to its object; or, in plain terms, when white colonial Americans wrote or spoke artfully, it was considered to be genuine cultural production, and when black colonial Americans wrote or spoke artfully, it was considered to be deceptive imitation.6

Wheatley’s success, according to Bhabha, should have isolated white colonial Americans from their own rhetoric of superiority. Slauter notes a limitation in this interpretation:

5 A debate over whether language imitates the natural world or merely imitates the linguistic acts of the speech community implicated in subjectification continues, but this is not the place for it to play out. Regardless of which position is taken, we can use the position to further the paper’s argument. Nevertheless, I find it important to acknowledge this point of contention and appeal to readers from both sides.

6 Slauter: “In the 1760s and early 1770s, runaway black slaves—from New England to Georgia, and generally men—were describes as ‘artful fellow[s]’ who would, if allowed by gullible whites, ‘impose on [them] by [their] artfulness’” (98) (Savannah Georgia Gazette, Feb. 2, 1764. from, Windly, Lathan A. Slave Advertisements: A Documentary History from the 1730s to 1790s, 4 vols. Westport: Greenwood Press. 1983.and Eds. Hodges, Russel. Brown, Alan. “ Pretends to be Free": Runaway Stave Advertisements from Colonial Revolutionary New York and New Jersey. New York: Garland. 1994.) 18

That, basically, the idea that the inconsistency between political rhetoric and material circumstances led to abolition, which greatly underestimates society’s ability to contradict itself [...] can caste whites as actors and blacks as merely reactors. (90)

The argument for mimetic activity as simply being effective against slavery because of the race of the imitator, the similarity of the work destabilizing the discriminatory modes of classification used to justify oppression, merely treats the agent of change as incidental. Of course, Phillis Wheatley didn’t simply imitate precedent. She showed deference to precedent, but that isn’t the same thing. In Bhabha’s work we find an odd erasure of this agency: “For in ‘normalizing’ the colonial state or subject, the dream of post-Enlightenment civility alienates its own language of liberty and produces another knowledge of its norms” (Bhabha 123). Actually, to the degree that Wheatley’s work merely reflected a “normalized” reiteration of precedent her work was easily dismissed.

Because of the debates about the value of neoclassical style, some considering it slavish imitation-‘“slavish,’ a word that had come specifically to signify a lack of mental originality in the 1750’s” (Slauter 83)-Wheatley’s neoclassicism was sometimes ironically used to argue for her supposed inferiority; however, in performing a close reading of the poetry, I find the assertion conspicuously inaccurate.7

If her works were slavishly neoclassical, the very second poem, “On Virtue,” wouldn’t be written in Miltonic blank verse. Neoclassical works followed the classical

7 Voltaire, at least, would support my opinion: he admired her “versification” (Willard 233). 19

forms of antiquity, not forms created in the previous century. Likewise, her imagery appropriately belongs right on the cusp between the romanticism and neoclassicism.

Consider the slant-rhyme tercet in “To Maecenas:” “While blooming wreaths around thy temples spread, / I’ll snatch a laurel from thine honour’d head, / While you smile indulgent upon the deed” (10 Lines 45-47). As I read the work, though she references the crown of laurels like so many other eighteenth-century poems, it is the double leap of verb on line forty-five, blooming and spreading, that catches my attention. When I read it,

I don’t see the words or even hear the rhyme-I watch flowers blooming and spreading; further, in the following lines, I see her reach up and “snatch” the laurel, the verb being especially given to the imagistic properties of represented movement, suggesting a type of reaching and grabbing that has a unique velocity and poise. This sequence of imagistic verbs leads me into the third line with such a sense of time and movement that I don’t see a mere smiling Maecenas; I see Maecenas smile, his lips reiterating the movement of the blossoms framing his temples. They are not images like I am used to finding in Pope,

Swift, or Addison8, though we see some verbal movement in their works as well.

They are images that combine their mobility toward the audience’s transport.

Much of neoclassical poetry utilizes verbs that don’t describe actions we can readily

8 Of the three of them, Pope’s “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” is the work that features verbs anywhere near as cumulatively mobile, and he merely lists them one after another: “They rave, recite, and madden round the land” (line 6). While almost all of the other verbs are stationary, abstract, or appear far separated from others of like character: “guard” and “hide” (Line 6), “renew” (Line 9), “board” (Line 10), “ is” (Line 11), “shine” (Line 12), etc. 20

imagine in the physical world. Neoclassical fictional poetic subjects tend to exhibit embodiment in parodic or comical moments, but their engagements in serious moments tend to be portrayed through more abstract verbs. Because Wheatley uses especially active verbs to show symbolic interactions, I not only intuit their importance but imagine them played out in a physical drama. This is one reason why relegating her work to slavish imitation of the neoclassical is another conspicuous sign of sublimated white colonial insecurity.

Obversely, it would be a mistake to only categorize her work with the Romantics and not Neoclassicists-she uses the rhyming couplet and metrical line with the discipline of any poet that could brag about their “numbers,”9 uses a number of neoclassical tropes,10 frequently calls the sun Phoebus, speaks of laurels adorning the heads of poets and alludes to figures of Greek and Roman antiquity almost as a rule-no, her work largely belongs to her moment, right on the cusp of the eras we associate with the two styles. More interesting to me than whether or not her mimesis alienated free colonial whites because it was penned by an enslaved person of color is that she went beyond precedent, added to it, subverted it, yet did so in such a way that didn’t provide audiences

9 Eighteenth-century poets used the term “numbers” to describe adherence to meter and rhyme, and the perfection of one’s “numbers” was generally taken as a sign of sophistication.

10 In the first line of the first poem, “To Maecenas,” she writes of Maecenas in the bowery’s shade, an image frequently used to describe women in British poetry throughout the eighteenth century. Because Maecenas was a man, yet the figure is meant to stand in for her patron-her female patron-the gender- bending allusion both shows an awareness of neoclassical tropes and a willingness to play with them in unprecedented fashions—i.e., they are not slavishly imitative. 21

with an easy excuse to dismiss the work. I am thinking of her subversion of what in

“White Mythologies” Derrida calls the heliotrope (250). By the heliotrope Derrida means the Western tropic tradition of naturalizing recognition as perception via the substitution of divine logos with solar illumination.

The use of the sun as an originary metaphor for knowledge-enlightenment, light, sight, or vision being frequent idioms of truth and revelation-is traceable back to

Aristotle’s Poetics (Derrida 250), though in all likelihood it’s a few centuries older. The

Enlightenment’s pure light of reason, or rationality, the ability to uncover the properties of reality through rationality, takes this trope as fact (Locke 351). Wheatley’s “On

Providence” is built on the trope. The opening couplets state,

Arise, my soul, on wings enraptur’d, rise To praise the monarch of the earth and skies, Whose goodness and beneficence appear As round its center moves the rolling year (26 Lines 1-4)

Here, Wheatley establishes the traditional linkage of evaluative perception to sight by linking the ideas of goodness and beneficence with the word “appear,” and then explicitly extends the sun’s facilitation of that appearance to divine majesty. At this point, the familiar trope has merely taken center stage, the heliocentric model of the solar year aligned with monarchy. 22

The first instance of her subversive reworking of the heliotrope appears in the first

stanza. The final two couplets of the first stanza introduce the conceit of the sun qua divine origin of knowledge:

Of light divine be a rich portion lent To guide my soul, and favour my intent. Celestial muse, my arduous flight sustain, And raise my mind to a seraphic strain! (26 Lines 7-10)

At first glance this seems to follow the pattern of precedent in lockstep: the sun and the

Christian God are rhetorically conflated, the sun portrayed as having the power to let the faithful fly without tiring11, as well as to guide the soul by “a rich portion lent” of “light divine.” That the poet asks to have her production on par with the productions of angels is already taking the trope beyond its usual parameters, but that she is asking this as an enslaved African woman is absolutely beyond the norms of the era. The subversion cannot be condemned, for the request is absolutely pious. Further, by asking for her mind to be lifted to a “seraphic strain,” she also admits that she doesn’t have pretensions to perfection. One doesn’t ask for what one already has, and so her request prepares the audience for that subversive double movement that I will show typifies much of her work.

Continuing the first subversion, she begins the second stanza with the lines:

“Ador’d for ever be the God unseen, / Which round the sun revolves this vast

11 an allusion to Isaiah 40:31 machine” (28 Lines 11-12). The diction here can confuse a modern audience, but the verb

“revolve” refers to an action perpetuated by God; by casting God as unseen, however, she

interrupts the traditional form of the conceit and sets up the formulation whereby she will critique the tendency of other eighteenth-century poets to take the immediacy of sight as equivalent to the immediate perception of truth later in the poem.

Thomas Jefferson was so conspicuously irate over Wheatley’s works-which he denied as her own work an entire decade after their publication (Willard 234), bringing attention to what, after the American Revolution, his election to the Presidency, and before the work had even been published in the United States, would seem a relative non- issue-that he seems to have appropriated the most explicit subversion of the heliotrope as his own idiom for justifying his prejudice. Willard writes of Jefferson’s publication Notes,

“The racial discourse which informs his chapter on ‘Laws’ strictly aligns the bestial qualities assigned to black bodies with a mental ‘immovable veil of black’(138)” (234).

When Jefferson uses the phrase “veil of black” in the same work in which he conspicuously attacks Wheatley’s ability to produce true art, it seems to directly engage the most explicit subversion of the heliotrope in “On Providence”: “The sable veil, that

Night in silence draws / Conceals effects, but shews th’ Almighty Cause: [her italics]” (27

Lines 53-54). For Wheatley, not only is the metaphorical “sable veil” movable-it is drawn nightly-but in night’s momentary elimination of light, it removes the endlessly distracting effects that are taken in Enlightenment metaphysics to be knowledge itself. 24

Having removed objects and subjects from the field of immediate recognition, the recognizer is left to contemplate his or her origin.

No longer in the interpretation of the phrase “all men are created equal” do we restrict our sense of “men” to its author’s prejudice. No longer in the interpretation of

Jefferson’s own words do we rely on a common projection of his racially prejudiced and tautological field of visuality. The veil covering the origin of knowledge, the state of the knower,12 seems to have been his so-called light of reason all along. In “On Providence”

Wheatley writes, “As reason’s pow’rs by day our God disclose, / So we may trace him in the night’s repose” (28 Lines 83-84). God discloses the power of reason through light, but the truth of God doesn’t appear until the veil is drawn. In effect, it’s the power of reason rather than the truth of God that we see during the day, while divine truth only appears imperfectly, in the absence of Enlightenment light and obscured by the form of the veil.

Further, the use of night as the converse of the metaphor employed so consistently in Enlightenment rhetoric is not merely described by Wheatley as darkness, but sable-the use of the adjective “sable” appears in her work only one other time: she uses it to describe race. In line forty of “To Maecenas” she connects herself with the legacy of the

12 For later literary elaborations on this theme see Ralph Ellison’s use of optic white in Invisible Man, the metaphor for the projected white visuality that effectively erases, or covers over, like paint, the subjects it means to apprehend: “That invisibility that occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact” (3 Ellison). In one part of the novel, as the narrator works in a factory manufacturing a paint dubbed “optic white” (196), he also works in a factory that subjects him to an inhumane instrumentalization, effectively manufacturing the disappearance of his humanity by force of the visually articulated bias that limits his legal opportunities of employment to conditions that suit the racist assumptions about him. (Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House. 1992. Originally published in 1952) 25

poet Terence, a poet of Roman antiquity, by describing each of them in turn as “[poets who are] one alone of A fric’s sable race” (10 Line 40). By aligning her race with the subversion of the heliotrope, she effectively demonstrates how material circumstances directly inform how we understand language and by extension the world around us.

This use of night as an originary metaphor doesn’t stop at subverting the

Enlightenment model of knowledge and prejudiced depictions of race, but subverts another metaphor that was instrumental in the construction of the American political subject: John Locke’s tabula rasa. Locke’s tabula rasa, the dream of an unmarked, unbound subject, capable through interacting with his world to establish uncorrupted truth, as though recognition were not an inheritance but an innate ability, as though language were transparent to its objects (308-309), is a radical iteration of the heliotrope.

What is a blank slate if not a visual metaphor, the forceful creation of a visuality that allows for the transposition of desire onto what is in fact an enigmatic, complex, and unseen world of thought, forgetting, dreams, and all other forms of cognition? For what is a person who can see and name their world in the absolute, perfect, illuminating transparency of reason, if not someone in possession of the uncorrupted state known as the tabula rasa?13 Further, because this figure is the figure that Jefferson and his cronies

13 Though the preference for the interpretation of tabula rasa as blank slate and its fidelity to an idiom of whiteness as purity, blankness being derived from the latin for white, is telling. The literal translation of the term is not blank slate but erased slate, a difference that perhaps doesn’t coincidently coincide with either the fact that we can find a number of Roman texts that respectfully depict people of various skin tones, including people explicitly identified as African without any conspicuous addendum or supplement, or that the concept of the tabula rasa was used to give oppressors carte blanche. The erasure of history and etymology appear bound in common usage. 26

built their model of the republic on,14 Wheatley’s subversions critique their naturalization of inequality: equality naturalized through the ironic erasure of sameness-ironic because sameness is the vehicle for enforcing equality, which was in many ways the goal of the revolution. The elimination of kings and lords and their replacement with inalienable rights and elected officials is tantamount to acknowledging that each free, landowning

European man, all at once, belongs on the same level by virtue of the rationality denied to and deconstructed by Wheatley.

This is not to say that the idea of the tabula rasa was used to erase experiential specificity. Rather, it was used to abstract from experiential specificity the legitimization of a single cultural response to it: what many white colonial Americans called rationality, or reason, was demonstrably a prejudiced privileging of the legacy of white male landowning subjectivity over all others. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes:

So, while the Enlightenment is characterized by its foundation of man’s ability to reason, it simultaneously used the absence of and presence of reason to delimit and circumscribe the very humanity of the cultures of the people of color which Europeans had been ‘discovering’ since the Renaissance. (8 "Race, ” Writing and Difference)

Thus, “scores of reviews of Wheatley’s book argued that the publication of her poems meant that the African was indeed a human being and should not be enslaved,” for

“Writing, argued many Europeans, stood alone among the fine arts as the most salient

14 Locke’s Two Treaties on Government (1690) articulates the formula on which the tripartite government of the United States is formed, and in it the blueprint of the logic that informed Jefferson’s model of the republic can be found. 27

repository of ‘genius,’ the visible sign of reason itself’ (8-9 “Race, ” Writing and

Difference), regardless of the culturally biased misreading this entailed. Wheatley deconstructs this myth, and she seems to have used the experience of slavery to hone the finer details of that deconstruction.

It seems to me that the wish-dream of an unbound and unmarked subject capable of pure knowledge would appear as obviously false to an enslaved American, and situating Wheatley’s work within the context of her experience seems to bear this out.

Her name has two sources: the first is the name of the slave ship that carried her over the middle passage, and the second is the last name of the man who purchased her upon arrival (Carretta i). If she were in anyway unmarked or unbound, it certainly wasn’t manifest as a visibility; quite the opposite, for the degree to which she would manifest creative production, aesthetic production being traditionally tied to concepts of the freedom of the soul, the more controversy she raised. If she were unbound, it was always at the risk of punishment or social backlash. Because the will of others constrained her life, materially and ideologically, because the names of her captors and oppressors were the mark by which she was known-and let’s not forget, her first book was only published after an entire collection of white signatures was procured to sanction its introduction- because she would have known about branding and all the other ways the even less fortunate and enslaved were literally marked and bound, because she would have had as part of her formative childhood experience the trauma of being locked beneath the deck 28

of a ship and all the horrors that accompanied this, I can’t imagine her believing in anyone, anyone at all, as being a blank slate. Both being subject to these atrocities and bearing their mark as her name, how could she imagine her life as unbound and unmarked? Further, the conspicuous and persistent refusal to acknowledge her abilities also speaks to a type of prejudice that does not betray pure rationality so much as conspicuously biased, i.e., culturally bound and marked perception.

Wheatley even plays with how the myth of the unbound subject plays out in name. The two early variants of “To the Right Honl. William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth,

His Majesty’s Secretary of State for North America &.c” do not feature single penultimate “&.c” but three sequential &.c’s (130-131 Wheatley), overtly mocking the pompous supplementarity of attaching titles as though it attached importance. Given that privilege was equated with the freedom of genius, the Earl’s supposed radical freedom as a man has an ironic corollary in name as his unbounded addition of more names, none of them changing who he is, and none of them changing the biting double register of the poem itself: that she can sympathize with the rebellious colonist because of her enslavement indicts British tyranny, but it also indicts the colonists, regardless of how pompously either party names themselves as deserving of their position. It is Phillis

Wheatley, and perhaps here the name means more than in other instances, who understands what is not in a name. 29

I imagine that Wheatley must have faced the dilemma of either believing that slavery was the product of years of accumulated cultural inscription, or believing that it was the product of men who, in accord with the model of the tabula rasa, had pure and unmarked capacities for intelligence; and, astoundingly, I don’t see any evidence that

Phillis Wheatley gave up on humanity. Quite the contrary, in spite of all of the inequity she witnessed and was subject to, she wrote a didactic poem to the students of Cambridge instructing them to “improve their privileges while they stay” (12 Wheatley Line 21), apparently without malice or envy, but a strength to encourage and instruct students who couldn’t possibly appreciate what immense patience and forgiveness giving such encouragement would have demanded of her. Seeing the contexts that inform the production of subjectivities, which is perhaps a fancy way of saying wisdom, allows for a patience and subtlety that enables an artist to produce texts that benefit whomever they take the time to theorize.

Wheatley repeatedly called for the moral amelioration not only of herself but seemingly everyone in the colonies, regardless of class, race and gender. We find numerous allusions to Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Wrote in a Country Churchyard” throughout Wheatley’s own elegies, perhaps most notably the parallelism between the penultimate couplet of “On the Death of a Young Gentleman” and the penultimate couplet of Gray’s poem. Wheatley writes, “To eye the path the saint departed trod, / And trace him to the bosom of his God” (18 Lines 23-24), whereas Gray writes, “No farther seek his merits to disclose, / Or draw his frailties from their dread abode, / (There they alike in trembling hope repose) / The bosom of his Father and his God.” (Lines 124-128).

As is often the case in Wheatley’s work, as she reworks precedent she also undermines its original sentiment. In this case, she admonishes people not to simply leave the deeds of the deceased to be forgotten in the grave, the deceased’s meek works belonging to a past that we need not exhume for inspiration, as we see in Gray, but to remember and draw inspiration even from those whom we might call meek. The British rural inhabitants whom Gray memorializes for their simple devotion to simple village life and religion as

“Some mute inglorious Milton” (Line 59) or “Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood” (Line 56), Wheatley would liken to a departed saint, threatening Jefferson’s ideals with an expression of the radically democratic potential of Christianity: “And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” {King James Bible,

Matthew 25.40). Yet, if we only speak of those who didn’t accept Wheatley because they recognized her value, we paint a limited picture. There were also those who couldn’t accept Wheatley simply because they couldn’t imagine the full significance of her work, though they thought that they had.

Against the argument that Wheatley subverted an abusive legacy of racial discrimination coded in rhetoric, one could point to the welcome reception of her work amongst those who endorsed and even practiced slavery. On the contrary, I take the 31

welcome reception of her work amongst practitioners and supporters of slavery as evidence of her skill. If we return to Wheatley’s comparison of herself to Terence, “one alone of A fric’s sable race” (10 Line 40 “To Maecenas”), we find a structural ambiguity in the line that allows prejudiced readers to interpret the line as meaning that Wheatley and Terence are alone because they are exceptional Africans while simultaneously allowing unprejudiced readers to interpret the line as meaning that she and Terence were alone simply because they weren’t in the lands of their birth. Such ambiguity supports her subversive measures, and has much to do with why:

To what must have been Jefferson’s profound discomfiture, the response to Wheatley’s poetry in colonial America and England resounded with accolades o f‘genius!’ from the very people against whom the poet waged her subtle war. (Willard 235)

This instance of polysemy in “To Maecenas” doesn’t stand alone amongst her work. She often exploited the polysemy of rhetoric, its excess of potential meanings, to simultaneously disguise and implement her subversions. When she discusses freedom in the penultimate line of her poem “To the KING’S Most excellent majesty. 1768,” stating that “A monarch’s smile can set his subjects free” (13 Line 15), she presents the audience with a range of choices that say as much about the reader as the author’s intentions: the facile reading interprets the line as encouraging the King to be more lenient in his treatment of his subjects; a slightly more nuanced reading recognizes the contradiction between maintaining that a king would remain a king if his subjects were free, an 32

interpretation that can be compounded by suggesting that the king’s smile might come from recognizing this contradiction and deciding to appreciate its cleverness by simply repealing the Stamp Act; it could be interpreted as saying that the kingly action would be to let the colonies rule themselves; alternately, the line might be a subtle allusion to the fact that though a slave is not technically a royal subject, by assuming the voice of a subject she subtly announces her equality, needling those who uphold the contradictions inherent in the rising tide of colonial accusations of tyranny-namely, that the enslaved are incapable of rational subjectivity. Wheatley understood how to aesthetically exploit the excesses of rhetoric.

Because the line allows so many readings, and does so without condemnation so much as praise, it facilitated the audience in recognizing their own initiative without recognizing the critique of their hypocrisy. This may be a technique Wheatley learned because she lived surrounded by those who couldn’t see the overdetermined logic of their justifications for slavery, but it may also be because she was simply predisposed to being aware of the ambiguities native to linguistic acts; I suspect, however, that the answer has much to do with how both factors reinforced one another.

Another example of Wheatley’s tactical amelioration of the very thing she subverts is that she doesn’t completely disregard the heliotrope even though she debases its relation to specific metaphysical formulations. The third stanza of “On Providence” begins with the couplet, “Almighty, in these wond’rous works of thine, / What Pow ’r, 33

what Wisdom, and what Goodness shine?” (26 Lines 25-26). Again, the lines have a structural ambiguity that allows different readers to decide on different interpretations.

We can take the question as rhetorically intoning the inability of power, wisdom, or goodness to shine on their own, their glare blinding people from seeing the truth, or we can take it as spoken in amazement of how God’s brilliance reflects through them.

In any case, to ameliorate the shine of power among creation brings to attention that thin line between believing that something is good merely because of its ostensibly

God-given ability to overwhelm and being in awe of the power of God because of the evidence of that “pow’r” in the overwhelming forces at play within “his” creation. The difference may seem insignificant; however, when the questions of colonial emancipation and abolition are the context of power’s use, we can see that the range and character of the audience’s engagement with the text decides the rhetorical import of her subversion.

If we are to understand that the ostensibly God-given gleam of power is its own justification, the rhetoric of “might makes right” confirms that her ability to produce such a complex gesture puts her on the same level, if not above, those who have and would justify her enslavement by announcing the superiority of their own powers of reason. Of course, this reading can still be recuperated into Enlightenment racism by the assertion that she is humbly recognizing the brilliance of someone else. If we interpret the lines as meaning the latter, however, the line between the natural and human world is disturbingly 34

displaced by the continuity of God’s illuminating influence through the whole of it, suggesting that reason is coextensive with neither logos nor sight.

The disconnection of the conceit-divine logos presented as light and making for the extended metaphor of perception as divine knowledge-from its referent, here threatens the entire structure of Enlightenment while remaining within the Judaeo-

Christian structure that informs and regulates it: the dawning rhetorical possibility of the literally impossible, dark luminance. Knowledge in her poetry appears as both darkness and light, each mode only relegating the other to its opposite as fits the verse, for her metaphors for knowledge can cover in their revelations and reveal in their lack of sight.

Every thing, the word “thing” denoting positive objects of knowledge, can appear as vanity, the product not of perception but unquestioning fidelity to an inaccurate sense of capability. Why restrict any model for the power of God to the sight of man? Is it not rather the sight of man that, following Christian piety, should be limited to the power of

God? Thus the following line in “On Providence” reads: “And are thy wonders, Lord, by men explor’d, / And yet creating glory unadorn’d!” (26 Lines 27-28), a proclamation which can be glossed as both a questioning of whether men ever explore the wonder of

God, and a definite assertion that, regardless of the answer, there is always more beyond what humanity has embellished with what it calls knowledge.

But she didn’t draw out such radical conclusions for the audience-she knew better than 1 how to avoid putting herself at risk while presenting dangerous ideas. 35

The revolutionary calls for freedom in Wheatley’s work implicitly express what I have called the excess beyond colonial American Enlightenment rhetoric. We see the erasure of this excess in the erasure of specific referents in the political service of abstraction, in what Slauter calls “the obvious but buried referent” for “the metaphor of political slavery” (82) used by colonial radicals on the eve of the Revolution. In this sense we can see how Wheatley’s mere race, and her conditions of enslavement, in conjunction with her production of what was considered by many to be the realm of genius, did much to reveal how the abstraction “freedom” had become detached, unmoored, and excessive in its usage, to the point of what today allows its facile ridicule; however, we must remember that this was no mere accident of race or oppression, but a conscious, nuanced, tactical sequence of decisions made by an author in a very dangerous time and at risk of extreme censor. In other words, she was not merely an obvious but buried referent so much as the person who was willing to animate what Morrison calls a “suit of armor polished to shocking glitter [...] from which the knight departed long ago” (“Toni

Morrison - Nobel Lecture”). Additionally, that white colonial Americans were able to dismiss the work based on assertions of mimicry and mental slavery, assertions that were conspicuously inaccurate and unfair in their application, ultimately reveals in their persistence a conspicuous insecurity on the part of the ruling class.

The fact that her subtlety in employing these subversions threatened Thomas

Jefferson’s sense of propriety for at least eight years-the duration between when she published Poems and he refuted her poetry in his TVoto-suggests just how skilled and societally relevant a poet she was. The persistence of Jefferson’s concerns and denials ironically betray just how effective and well-crafted he actually feared her poems to be.

Furthermore, that he was demonstrably interested in reversing her subversion-which I hope to have shown to be so instrumental in deconstructing the model of white, land­ owning, male chauvinism that endorsed Jefferson’s rise to power-betrays her enduring effect on American history and remarkable insight into the abusive politics of its early rhetorical claims. I attribute the efficacy of this subversion, at least in part, to her nuanced sense of the far-reaching rhetorical scope and centrality of the heliotrope, and more so to her subtle encoding of polysemic potential within her work, protecting her messages from being too frank for racist colonial whites to appreciate while also carrying latent semantic potential for ideological destabilization.

We can also see the intrusion of excess in Willard’s explanation of just why she had such a welcome reception among those that she most harshly criticized. Her careful maintenance of polysemic critique qua the amelioration of the rhetoric of freedom, a polysemy only possible by the disjunction of knowledge and presence, allowed her to present ideas that were dangerous to their proper time, all the while preserving a route of retreat or plausible deniability. Given that the racist people of the time were resolute in denying the intelligence of an enslaved African American poet, the likelihood of them attributing the full rhetorical import of her poetry to subtlety and tact was unlikely, and 37

the majority of them seemed unable to even recognize much rhetorical import past their prejudice anyway. By exploiting the prejudices of white colonial Americans, she enveloped her more radical subversion within the very sun blindness it contradicted.

Yet I haven’t addressed to what degree or how being forced to produce one’s message as a subtext that deconstructs the very idiom it appropriates amounts to an aesthetically pleasing linguistic act. The prospect sounds almost masochistic, and so must be addressed. Wheatley did meaningfully rework the tradition, allowing a new range of speech acts to proliferate the field of possible speech acts, but that doesn’t mean that her partial subjugation to the idiom of her captors was ideal, nor that she somehow ended the ideological tyranny she subverted. Some ask, what about her seeming inability to speak her “own” language? Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) wrote of Wheatley’s tone as a

“ludicrous departure from the huge black voices that splintered southern nights” (qtd. in

Erkkila 202), but doesn’t this description re-inscribe a cultural linguistic difference onto the field of visuality, onto bodies, as though Wheatley were somehow inauthentic or less

“black” because she chose a voice that Jones merely doesn’t identify with? That is, he operates within that slippage between black as his cultural inheritance and black as a description of African descent, forms of identification which may have some overlap but which aren’t coextensive. Further. I hope to have shown that Wheatley did have “a huge black voice that splintered the southern night,” just not his black, night, or hugeness of voice. Sometimes what is aesthetically vital doesn’t produce joy, pleasure, or awe, 38

I have always felt a little resistance to the way that many of my academic counterparts have employed Audre Lorde’s metaphor of the master’s house and tools

(iSister Outsider 112) to depict the entire English language as inherently oppressive and belonging to oppressors. Because I read the semantic import of any message as contextually specific, being fundamentally interested in the losses and gains possible because of its rhetoric’s excess, I don’t believe that it’s accurate to depict an entire language as oppressively belonging to a group of people, constructed or otherwise. The way many of my counterparts, professors and peers alike, have depicted the English language, tends to recreate the same essentialist and absolutist differences that police race and gender. I have heard academics describe the oppressive use of English as inherent to all English language itself, to white English, where white means the Queen’s English, to academic English, to language informed by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant tropes, etc., but in all cases as oppressive in that it belongs to a legacy that is painted only in terms of one type of usage.

On the other hand, I do want to look at what degree words, or even diction, can belong to any person or group of people; however, I won’t arrive at an answer. The most I hope to do is to work the problematic out enough to challenge the assumptions and arrive at some sense of belonging that allows for the continual interference of presence that I propose subverts the ideological limitations of Enlightenment man. Speech acts certainly belong to individuals, or at least the uniqueness of certain speech acts belong to 39

individuals, but the terms “words” and “diction” describe necessarily inclusive categories. It is generally understood that when I speak of the word “the,” I mean the word “the” as uttered by anyone, anywhere, anytime, including all accents, dialects, skeins and grammatical arrangements. Why does this model of language matter to my argument? The word “the” certainly has a tradition of use as an index of specificity, and the nature of that specificity makes it mean something radically different in different language communities. We can focus on the variance as marking a discontinuity that can be conceptually amplified to signal difference amongst all its users, but we can also focus on the analogical uses in order to argue for similarity amongst all its users. This is true for any cognate from various speech communities. Belonging, then, could only occur as a type of exclusive specificity that actual speech acts paradoxically violate in the very moment they create it. Wheatley’s works have a power that may not have resonated with what Baraka called a hugeness of voice, yet the comparison of his sense of huge, black voices with her voice relies on establishing some semantic complicity within the possible iterations of voice and immensity. There is semantic continuity and rupture between our two uses.

Differences and similarities between a word’s various uses appear because of the disjunct between presence and representation, and in this can see that how we parse a language community depends on how we trace its history. Shall it be a rupture or a continuity? Does English come from England, or does it originate in each person who 40

assimilates it into their consciousness? We are nowhere near answering such questions when presented as ultimatums. Always, to me, both options appear as valid, though politically fraught, decisions; and, in Wheatley’s particular case, they can conceal a buried ultimatum of racial allegiance. It often feels to me as though we are still asking if the words belong to Wheatley or if they are mere imitations of white language.

My argument is for identifying Wheatley’s work as belonging uniquely to the experience of eighteenth-century Africanism, the land of her birth and early childhood, which I am regrettably forced to speak of in continental terms because we don’t know precisely where she came from; to black colonial and white colonial Americanism, the place of her short adulthood; to herself as a specific black woman and in a grand sense to the history of American literature; and, also, as effectively deconstructing the master’s house in the sense that language is and was used as a domestic insulation from difference

(Lorde 112). Further, this deconstruction also necessarily presents the possibility for shelter for almost anyone brave enough to use it.

Lorde writes: “Divide and conquer [difference used divisively] must become define and empower [difference used constructively]” (112), yet in either case the crucial distinction is not between the English language and another language but its rhetorical variations, variations which display both a continuation of a construction and a rupture from its older forms. As for the claim that the shelter can be for almost anyone, I wouldn’t make this claim if I didn’t identify a radically democratic vein in both Wheatley and Lorde.

To the degree that Wheatley uses the traditional tropes of English language poetry for her own unique purposes and with her own unique associations, which I hope to have already sufficiently argued for, they are distinctly her own. What more could make them her own than the fact that only she could have produced them in these exact arrangements? To the degree that they communicate specifically white European formulations they are not distinctly hers, but that is not the same as saying that they are not hers or that they essentially belonged to John Wheatley. Shall we abandon her linguistic agency because of her enslavement? A limiting intellectual inheritance and its liberating reformulation coexist in almost every speech act. We can say that she provides a new sense of rationality as incomplete, as both emerging from the darkness of interiority and through the marks of society on that interior, or we can say that the word

“rationality” no longer applies to her use of the heliotrope but functions as a mere place holder, the mere repetition of phonemes with radically different semantic content-I reiterate my explanation: linguistic history and its ties to language communities can be construed as a continuity, but the ties can also be construed as a series of ruptures. I have no intention of making a decisive claim as to which is true-I hope my work illustrates both. 42

In accord with my reading of Morrison’s Nobel Lecture, understanding the radical democratic potential of polysemic proliferation allows us to re-craft the story of our present in the service of meaningful togetherness because it deconstructs the ideological reduction of African Americans in the name of their exploitive totalization by white

America, a continuing and divisive legacy. Further, because this meaningful togetherness relies on polysemic proliferation, it is also aesthetically pleasing to me. I want to see meaning multiplied and refracted, distorted and divided, everywhere, frequently, deliberately, and with nuance, augmenting and revitalizing the social potential of every moment, while I fear its ossification in the name of an instrumentalizing, systematic and systemic economy of produced sameness and difference. I am speaking of Capitalism.

Roughly half of a century after Wheatley’s Poems, just before the American Civil

War as opposed to just before the American Revolution, Melville subverted the totalization of people in the name of economic gain through the use of narrative fiction, as opposed to its subversion through poetry. Though Melville’s subversions similarly reveal the imperfections of Enlightenment models of humanity, he focuses on how the myth of the unbound and unmarked subject reifies as a hierarchy for supposedly freemen within the practice of Capitalism. Also, because his subversions take place in the form of a story, there is not a discourse on the imperfect correspondence between knowledge and presence but a narrative wherein presence takes the stage, in a sense, as a character who continually exceeds economic totalization. In this character we see the similarity to the 43

conditions of slavery and Wheatley’s subversions, but we also see crucial differences between two historical legacies of the experience of oppression. 44

Chapter Two: Usury; Excess Value and 111 Use

In that in our nation’s founding moments a few privileged men arrogated freedom and reason to themselves, what I called sun blindness in the last chapter, they also created the possibility of exploiting this arrangement an American legacy. In an almost identical reiteration of my thesis on Wheatley’s work, I can also say that Melville subverts colonial

American Enlightenment ideals used both for the justification of instrumentalizing humans on the basis of class and to naturalize this oppression by exploiting the excesses native to their rhetorical excesses, challenging their assumptions within the range of possibilities of their own idiom. However, because Melville was a white male, he didn’t have to use polysemic ambiguity to disguise his message. The consequences of his polysemic excesses, instead of resulting in a gradual revelation of artistic agency, have led to persistent misreading. Further, as Melville wasn’t subject to the possibility of as extreme censure as Wheatley, he had the luxury of making his politics overt. He is practically begging for us to notice the coming homogenizing and instrumentalizing forces of Capitalism, and yet generations of critics have persistently, to the point of conspicuity, denied it. You may notice that this denial mirrors the denial of Wheatley’s significance by Jefferson and other colonial whites discussed in the previous chapter. This is not accidental. The denials take a different form, focusing on what he means rather than on his ability to produce meaning, but similarly betray the insecurity of a people that suspect, on some level, the implication of a “cover-up” within their identity.

I find in the aforementioned arrogation of reason and freedom to a select few the latent necessity of creating the myth of the self-made man and its ironically accompanying naturalization of class stratification. The metaphor of the self-made man naturalizes privilege as achievement by effacing historical and material specificity in the name of unbound opportunity. Instead of realizing the privilege of being bom with a specific biological inheritance that has power or efficacy according to specific, arbitrary contexts, the self-made man believes that his status absolutely reflects the quality of his own efforts. Because all men are supposedly equal and their capacity to see the world is uncorrupted, anyone who doesn’t “rise” can be silently relegated to their status, and thereby unproblematically instrumentalized for the benefit of their “superiors.” The narrator of Bartleby the Scrivener is a man of such a prejudice, the type who would happily conflate his sinecure with his worth, and by extension his worth with the amount of money in his account. Yet I find an absolute unoriginality in this character, which is not to say that he is Melville’s contrivance but Melville’s careful depiction of Capitalist society’s contrived production of subjectivities. He is a servant to capital, and marks the emergence of capital as the definitive social force during the nineteenth century.

Bartleby is the excess, or raw material, that such social forces inscribe their modes of being onto. Bartleby’s passive resistance is the material resistance of the form 46

that will never be that inscription-in short, Bartleby is that which in human presence always exceeds metaphor. As such, society can at most describe him as inscriptions from the past that capital erases, but it is only a projection of their own haunting loss. There is a sad irony in that generations of American critics will go on to repeat their mistake.

As capital increasingly replaces other forms of cultural value, the character of characters becomes their ability to procure and secure it-in short, the quality of their labor. Yet having such character ironically wipes them clear of the unique social inscriptions that had given early American culture its great and fecund diversity. The more money changes hands, the more what it represents becomes interchangeable, the more society must lose its specificity. It is, in effect, wiped clean, made solely a vehicle for exchange. In a terrifying way, the practices of capital and slavery have always mirrored each other in the United States. The occupation of a scrivener in the office of a financial attorney, the occupation of the men employed in the office of the narrator, makes for the arena where we can see such an erasure swiping clean the tabula of men’s hearts and minds in the work of Melville. The scrivener’s task of inscription reduces his inscriptions to the instrumentality of money-i.e., the minutiae of accounts paid or wanting, fiscal penalties and rules of exchange, the demands of the laws of capital. Each of the quirks that our narrator uses to define the men in the law office is stated in terms of money. The Master in Chancery, our narrator, is merely the colonial governor of this 47

erasure, and the simplicity of his heart’s inscription is the dull message against which the material of Bartleby will resist:

Yes. Here I can cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval. To befriend Bartleby; to humor him in his strange willfulness, will cost me little or nothing [...] But this mood was invariable with me. The passiveness of Bartleby sometimes irritated me. (25)

Even as we watch the character attempting to have a conscience, the Chancellor speaks of purchasing his goodness. Because he validates the reasonableness of the decision to keep

Bartleby on as a matter of costs, purchases and benefit, he has no language to account for why his investment doesn’t pay off. He wants more from Bartleby than to purchase self- worth via charity, but without a system of value that can investigate the reaches of friendship he cannot identify the cause of his disappointment. He is, in the final analysis, much more than

[...] one of those unambitious lawyers who never address a jury, or in any way draw down public applause; but in the cool tranquility of a snug retreat, do a snug business among rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title-deeds. (4)

Yet to be more than what one can say one is and to be able to act out the significance of that excess requires modes of articulations that one lacks. The men whom the Chancellor works for, too, are reduced to the simplicity of exchange: “[...] the fact that I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor; a name which, I admit, I love 48

to repeat, for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion” (5).

We can see similar reductions in the descriptions of the regular scriveners:

Turkey was a short, pursy Englishman of about my own age, that is, somewhere not far from sixty. In the morning one might say, his face was of a fine florid hue, but after twelve o’clock, meridian-his dinner hour-it blazed like a grate full of Christmas coals; and continued blazing—but, as it were, with a gradual wane-till 6 o’clock P.M. or thereabouts, after which I saw no more of the proprietor of the face, which, gaining its meridian with the sun, seemed to set with it, to rise, culminate, and decline the following day, with the like regularity and undiminished glory. (6-7)

Turkey is analogous to the model of the working man’s money. He rises and labors with the rhythm of business in a still largely agrarian economy before the widespread use of electric light—the rhythms of the sun regulate and stimulate his behavior. At the Meridian of the day business reaches its fever pitch, his face shines, and afterwards it begins its slow decline toward evening. He takes his dinner then, at midday, and from then on spends his hours finalizing what has been accomplished before. Turkey’s clothes are grubby and worn (12) because he acts out capital in its circulation amongst the lower classes-unlike the way money passes hands amongst the rich, the transference of title deeds, accounts and contracts, all neatly arranged and kept in vaults, the working class uses the paper dollar, a material stained by transfer, folded in wallets, grubby and worn.

But we need not say that Turkey is a metaphor for common capital. Rather, the reification of capital interests as the institutions that shape a man’s daily life restrict him to a rhythm 49

and type of action that resembles the same material restrictions placed on money. He is labor capital and needn’t metaphorically or metonymically represent it-he acts like money because he wants money.

The circuity resembles the circuity of Turkey’s daily routine-and in this we have some inkling of that once magnificent sun that could illuminate the great and multiform chain of being-and so everything that could fill personal time and space becomes chained to the orbit of exchange value. Turkey’s labor capital is for sale. As he sells his hours, his location, and for the duration his thoughts and desires, he must forego all of the other values that could otherwise fill up his day. Suppose he is a lover of religion or some other such system of value: any overt expressions of piety during work hours would be interruptions, and unwelcome by his cronies. He is instrumental, and the measure of this instrumentality is also the measure of his exchangeability. To the degree that he expresses anything specific, anything personal, he is in excess of his function as a scrivener. It is only to the degree that he does what could be done by someone else that he has value within a society where employment dictates worth, and so his substitutability ironically becomes the measure of his specific value.

His counterpart, Nippers, dresses well (12) and has quite a different relationship to the workday, always at odds with with the hight of his table (10), always scheming for more, characterized as “ambition and indigestion” (10), and appearing “piratical” (10).

He acts out the role of capital in the hands of the wealthier elements of society-outside of 50

his work in the office he is somewhat of a politician, “I was aware that he was [...] a ward-politician,” (11) and somewhat of a lawyer, “he occasionally did a little business at the Justice’s courts” (11).

Like the money of working-class men, Turkey’s agency belongs to his love of his own labor: “In the morning I but marshal and deploy my columns; but in the afternoon I put myself at their head, and gallantly charge the fore, thus!” (9). Nippers’s agency appears in the creation and manipulation of rules: politicians and lawyers are both in one way or another concerned with the policing of other men. Nippers’s agency takes the form of economic asymmetry-which is not to say that lawyers and politicians are inherently bad, but that politics and law are valences along which capital can be readily shown as vehicles of our society’s inequities. Our politicians have historically sworn allegiance to the people while simultaneously protecting their material inequality by law.

Bartleby is none of these things. As our narrator informs us in the first paragraph of the story, he is “one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources, and in this case those are very small” (4). In fact, Bartleby so lacks salient defining characteristic in the eyes of the ex-Master Chancellor, ruler copyist, that he must provide a backdrop of detail in order to contrast with what would otherwise be blankness:

Ere introducing the scrivener, as he first appeared to me, it is fit I make some mention of myself, my employees, my business, my chambers, and general surroundings; because 51

some such description is indispensable to an adequate understanding of the chief character about to be presented. (4)

What can the blank repetition of capital animated by and animating human cognition reveal of a man beyond the circularity of its recognition, but to reiterate itself as the backdrop against which difference might reveal itself? Just in case we didn’t pick up on this, Melville repeats the gesture as metaphor:

My chambers were upstairs at No.— Wall Street. At one end they looked upon the white wall of the interior of a spacious sky-light shaft, penetrating the building from top to bottom. This view might have been considered rather tame than otherwise, deficient in what landscape painters call ‘life.’ But if so, the view from the other end of my chambers offered, at least, a contrast, if nothing more. (5-6)

Besides the somewhat disturbingly easy readability of the heliotrope as the origin of the tabula rasa into this image, the building’s anthropomorphism a latent image of the tabula rasa’s reification, it also puns on the oxymoronic name Wall Street.15 We could extend the analysis to include the fact that the address of the office on Wall Street remains a blank. The office building qua subject wherein vulgar and privileged roles of capital play out their daily routine under the anachronistically feudal eye of some cheap master of imitation, of course, deserves the interchangeability of a blank address. That Bartleby, the passive carrier of past inscriptions that persist beyond the life of their intended

15 A street is a thoroughfare, a passage between places, whereas a wall is that which divides and restricts passage between places. In the coupling of the two words we see a nuanced sense of mediated being, or representation, as that which both facilitates and restricts being in the same gesture. The gesture, of course, is its passage between people. 52

recipients, should show up and disrupt these dynamics seems to extend fittingly the metaphor into allegory. But this reading goes much too far. To interpret a reified metaphor as allegory mistakes contrived presence for contrivance-neither is the relationship between office and inhabitants metonymic, nor do we need to call the office synecdochical. It is enough to say that these men merely act out the metaphorical inscriptions that were instrumental in their respective processes of subjectification.

Bartleby’s excess to the social inscriptions of capital causes the Master

Chancellor’s consistent inability to discuss Bartleby as anything more than uncanny, which in turn causes the narrator’s obsessions with returning Bartleby to comfortable modes of interpretation. He is the coin that refuses the inscription-effaced by long usage, his blankness betrays the emptiness of the metaphor that has replaced any qualities beyond the character of capital amongst the others. The excess doesn’t need to protest. It simply returns the image of the inscriber to itself without taking it upon itself to embody its implications: when Bartleby decides that he will no longer work as a scrivener, the narrator asks, ‘“And what is the reason?”’ to which he “indifferently” replies, “‘Do you not see the reason for yourself?”’ (42). The polysemic response implies the insult that the narrator cannot see, the observation that the narrator decides on his own type of sight, and the possibility of assuming that Bartleby might have complete confidence in the

Chancellor’s abilities to see and know his own world. Melville’s characteristically dark 53

humor shows here in the irony that the ex-Chancellor then looks at Bartleby and decides that he has become blind from all the copying (42).

The long arc of Bartleby’s resistance is that the narrator will be left with a haunting myth: the only fact we seem to be able to gather about Bartleby, and this a dubious but perhaps affectively true fact, is a rumor born from the unspoken fears taxied between the depths of a collective. The people rumor he was once a subordinate clerk in an office of dead letters (71). And why should society in general imagine this rumor?

What is it about the refusal to be absorbed into blank instrumentality that haunts a society such that it invests the refusal with the quality of letters that never arrive? What is it about that instrumentality? All that scriveners do is copy page after page of other people’s concerns about money because they themselves are also concerned with money.

Bartleby also appears in excess to the abusive circuits of capital in his refusal to engage in the society it creates. He first refuses to examine his own copy:

‘What is wanted,’ said he mildly. ‘The copies, the copies’ said I hurriedly. ‘We are going to examine them. There’ - and I held towards him the fourth quadruplicate. ‘I would prefer not to,’ he said, and gently disappeared behind the screen. (20-21)

I find no lack of humor in the depiction of a manic master copier describing the copy he held out as “the fourth quadruplicate,” superfluously repeating the numerical descriptor in the very moment that he orders Bartleby to examine what amounts to another repetition. The joy of humor reveals its contingency in that not everyone finds the same things funny. Why would American society find the debasement of such a character humorous in 1853? It isn’t simply gratifying because a cruel and selfish man looks foolish-a cruel and selfish fool may just as well be a tiresome character.

The humor of the character only appears within a greater context than himself.

Bartleby’s simple refusal exceeds the Chancellor’s limits of imagination, giving us an image of just how limited his mind is. Because we see the Chancellor’s pride most clearly in how the limitations of others disparage him, to see such a direct and essential limitation within himself provides a reprieve from the atmosphere of condescension he exudes. That this humor should work on a large scale-the novella was well-received (195

Montiero)-tells us something about the state of being employed in America in the first half of the nineteenth century. Organized labor hadn’t even yet won the eight-hour workday through the Haymarket Riots. The descriptive forms the condescension the

Chancellor exudes are the type of abusive language that Bartleby’s excess humorously deconstructs. It is perhaps a self-righteous humor-people often celebrate the fall of the prideful-but we also see the Chancellor’s humanity.

The Chancellor replies to the refusal: ‘“You are decided, then, not to comply with my request—a request made according to common usage and common sense?”’ (22). To me, non-compliance with common usage and passive resistance to a process of subjectification limited to terms of instrumentality are practically synonymous. Again, as in Wheatley’s work, the author has exploited the polysemic potential of an abusive speech act in order to subvert it; and again, just as in Wheatley’s work, the exploit can be read in favor of the prejudice it also subverts: the terms “common sense” and “common usage” have such an incredible transparency within our society as to appear so self-evident that any deviation from them raises suspicions of abnormality- unless, of course, a person is uncommon simply because he or she is rich. In other words, the common sense of the common usage of the terms common sense and common usage disguises the passage’s subversive potential.

It is worth noting that this strategic indeterminacy works on multiple levels within the text. Take, for example, that we can dismiss Bartleby as anything to be taken seriously simply because he has such a silly name, because we never have an explanation for his behavior, and also because the pathos that a modern audience might locate in his suicide can be dismissed as a cardinal sin or comic inversion of the American spirit. On the other hand, we can also interpret the parts of the text that allow those interpretations to have contradictory significance: the lack of an explanation for Bartleby’s behavior may simply reiterate that Bartleby’s presence exceeds common sense-indeed, I would have it that presence itself exceeds common sense; Bartleby’s refusal and ultimate demise needn’t be inscribed into religion as suicidal-we can also see his refusal as a type of martyrdom, the holy message of a man who refuses participation in an exploitive and morally degraded social economy; finally, his preference for non-conformity only 56

appears as a comical inversion of the American spirit to a person who-and perhaps this is in the American spirit-only recognizes freedom to the degree that it resembles his own deeply limited pursuit of wealth and status. My case doesn’t need to go so far as to claim that one reading is correct and the other wrong. A text that allows the option of both readings already exceeds a stable repetition of the status quo.

Melville, unless I have absolutely misunderstood his works, loved diversity. This love often appears as those sweeping vistas of amalgamated human difference that populate his stories-as he put it, “In short, a piebald parliament, an Anarchist Cloots congress of all kinds of that multiform pilgrim species, man” (Melville The Confidence

Man 10). Though it may not be the easiest thing to see, the affection also appears in the tension between felicity and terror that typifies so many of the conflicts that erupt in his narratives as a consequence of human difference. Ahab and Starbuck, at their most hostile, reveal subtle nuances of character through the enduring peculiarities of their conflict16. The Confidence Man almost wholly relies on the conflict of very different characters in order to expound on the differences amongst men; yet, even in this quick parting of fools from their money, we catch flashes of some greater, irrational benevolence. This irrational benevolence, the irrationality of the affection that binds

Ishmael to the course of the Pequod despite its date with doubloon-ordained oblivion or

16 “Thou hast outraged, not insulted me, sir; but for that I ask thee not to beware of Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of Ahab; beware of thyself, old man” (Melville 7271 Moby Dick; or, the Whale Project Gutenberg. 2013 Kindle File) In this moment, it is because of the tension between Ahab and Starbuck that Starbuck’s affection becomes salient. 57

the gold-buttoned passenger of the steamboat in The Confidence Man to continue in all good humor his conversation with the very man he knows is a charlatan out for the contents of his pocket book (40), inflects a sense of capital that is both hostile and empathic. Consider, then, the Anarchist Cloots congress on the docks of the Mississippi as compared to the Master in Chancery’s musings on Bartleby:

I remembered the bright silks and sparkling faces I had seen that day, in gala trim, swan-like sailing down the Mississippi of Broadway; and I contrasted them with the pallid copyist, and thought to myself, Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so deem misery there is none. [...] Presentiments of strange discoveries hovered round me. The scrivener’s pale form appeared to me laid out, among uncaring strangers, in its shivering winding sheet. (35)

The risk in both stories is that this metaphor-which “after much usage, seems to a nation fixed, canonic and binding” (217 Nietzsche On Truth and Morality in the

Ultramoral Sense qtd. in Derrida “White Mythology”)-would reduce the diversity of men to its simple material auspices. If there is a concurrent triumph in Moby Dick, The

Confidence Man and Bartleby the Scrivener, the only three Melville works I can claim to have closely examined, it’s the endurance of human diversity despite the practical effacement of difference. Yet in each case I also see the latent image of an emergent monoculture, the threat of global capital and its ultimate relegation of the diversity of human thought to the reductive and immaterial symmetry of pecuniary exchange. The

“happiness” that “courts the light,” a la Wheatley, conceals the cause of the illusion of 58

prosperity-the American metaphoric legacies used to obscure the injustice of race slavery and classism intersect, so as capital becomes the dominant idiom of truth therein we find the negative joining of both injustices as the unarticulated opposite of wealth. Bartleby is imagined first as hiding in the dark and then seen covered from direct sight by a thin cloth-which is to say, he is represented as directly opposite to day light and then as though thinly separated from perception by a veil. I take this as no coincidence of metaphor, and considering that Wheatley wrote on the eve of the revolution and Melville wrote on the eve of the Civil War, we can also see how the coincidence of metaphoric negation in each text is both politically timely and appropriate. Freedom was literally at stake in both wars, and so the question of how we produce an image of freedom in the public imagination would have “mattered” in the lives of Melville and Wheatley.

That the effacement of Bartleby prefigures the gradual effacement of cultural specificity, ironically producing the image of a future without freedom through the material twin of the very figure that it is used to imagine it, haunts the narrator, though he may not understand it. The society believes him to be the carrier of the past, the ghost of the agency of all their dead letters, but he is the harbinger of their future. Thus, when the narrator relates the ghostliness of Bartleby-“Like a very ghost [...] he appeared at the entrance of his hermitage”(28)-the error of attributing this ghostliness to the death of the past hinges on a spectrality, or incomplete presence, that originates as much in the

Chancellor’s semi-awareness of a sublimated other within himself as an image of a 59

similar and impending sublimation in what was our then national future. It is the spectral

arrival of this future that has kept so many critics from understanding Bartleby’s

resistance. He is, like Wheatley in the public imagination must have been, a force that

threatens to deconstruct the complicity between an American identity and

instrumentalization.

Kingsley Widmer’s 1969 article “Melville’s Radical Resistance: the Method and

Meaning of ‘Bartleby’” comes very close to my own reading, but his ideological

affiliation with Capitalism seems to have him posit a number of odd non sequiturs. He

draws one false relation with the assertion that the work can only be a critique of capital

if we are interpreting the work through biographical correlates: “As an economic critique,

the novella would only provide an ornately obtuse and irrelevant allegory. But that may

well be the fault of those who insist on a reading of paranoid autobiography” (447). I

hope I have demonstrated that Barlteby does concern itself with the practices of capital

without resorting to any reference to Melville’s life or my own. His other irrational claim appears in the same paragraph: “Money, the narrator repeatedly notes, is not an issue for

Bartleby” (446-447). The irony that this proclamation precedes almost immediately what

Widmer takes as his ultimately superior insight-“The essential fact of the story is that we have just one full character, the narrating attorney [...] We see what he sees, with particular emphasis upon his limitations in explaining and justifying himself’ (448)- completely passes him by. If the limitations of the narrator are the essential fact of the 60

novella, that he overtly makes the claim that Bartleby has no issues with money is exactly why we should believe the opposite. Nevertheless, there are some observations in his reading that I do agree with.

Widmer does note that the narrator “sees Bartleby [...] as the specter of rebellious and irrational human will, whose very existence he denies” (448), and goes as far to elaborate that this irrationality is “a sympathetic but ironic critical analysis of the practical optimist, the blandly benevolent rationalist” (448) that as a “well-meaning, prudent, rationalizing enforcer of established values” (448) fails “miserably in a deeper awareness of humanity” (448); however, he remains hell-bent on erasing historical specificity in the name of establishing a transcendental interpretation. Caught in that

Lockean aspiration to establish absolute values, Widmer still tries to reabsorb Bartleby into the system of rationality that he exceeds-albeit, as its converse-but Bartleby is not absurdity or irrationality incarnate. Bartleby is in excess of a historically specific rationality; and, by extension, he is also in excess of the oppositions and subcategories that the adherents of this rationality created.

There is a historical specificity to semantic content that changes though the words that carry it endure. Nineteenth-century capitalist absurdity is not coextensive with, for example, eighteenth-century monarchal absurdity. Widmer defines Bartleby as the irrationality that ironically represents the supposed rationality of the narrator in its true 61

state. I take Bartleby as speaking from beyond both rationality and its converse-he needn’t represent anything, and as such figures presence rather than its dislocation.

That Widmer cannot connect this failure of “established values” to the dominant system of value both in the society at the time and that serves as the dominant trope in the text betrays just how attached to rationality the idea of commerce will become. Whatever the failure is, Widmer protests over and over again, we shouldn’t take it as a critique of capital! ‘“Wall Street’” he commands us, “should not primarily be taken in its political sense because in the description Melville plays upon the pun rather than the economics.

Walls, dead walls of restriction and incomprehension, block everything” (449). Yet it’s a false dichotomy to suppose that playing upon a pun that is precisely derived from economics, and which he recognizes as having a significance that betrays a relation to the circulation of meaning, or qualitative value, is not economic because it is a pun.

Economics must be serious! What a sad inability to experience the humor that exceeds simple obedience to the ethos of Capitalism. Puns, the very consolidation of multiple meanings into a single gesture, cannot be economic. The arts, he seems to believe, belong to that abstract freedom of genius, not the societal constrictions that demonstrably limited

Melville’s creative endeavors.17

Yet Widmer also goes so far as to say:

17 In the age of patronage, Melville’s relatives were eager to, and did, find him a sinecure in a customs house-a fact that 1 can’t imagine wouldn’t have had an influence on his own artistic development, but this is tangential (Widmer 447). 62

Not only will private selfishness be inadequate to produce a public good, the whole psychology is insufficient [...] Absolutist Bartleby, who asserts the freedom of the will but denies it any specific reasons or moral values, lacks all selfishness. (454)

At times, the strength of his denial of a link between Capitalism as an economic mode and historical social practices and conditions seems like it might be meant satirically. If only that were the case! How is private selfishness not one of the defining characters of

Capitalism? This willful blindness leaves Widmer no choice but to imagine Bartleby as denying that his “freedom of will” features any reason or value, but it is the inability of society to provide Bartleby with any specific form of reason or moral values besides selfishness-an insufficient psychology, to use his own words-that leads to the absolute blankness of Bartleby’s will. Widmer’s reversal places agency where Bartleby lacks it, and denies it where Bartleby exhibits it. Bartleby is perfectly selfish, is the self that is always in excess of representation, and so asserts nothing positively except for three short declarations18: “‘I know you’ he said without looking round—‘and I want nothing to say to you’” and, “I know where I am” (66-67).

In the nineteenth century, “want” had at least two common denotations: to desire, or to lack.19 We can read the second declaration as conveying that Bartleby has no desire to speak with the Chancellor, but we can also read it as conveying that he has a lack of

18 Unless we include the moment when the narrator asks Bartleby what he is doing, and he replies that he is sitting on the banister (61).

19 Today we would say that such and such was ‘found wanting’ of such and such item or characteristic. that nothingness which characterizes speech with the Chancellor. We can also read it as meaning that he lacks nothing to say, meaning that he has an excess of words that he would prefer not to use, which again returns us to that comical excess to the customary seriousness of the story’s metaphysical import, a seriousness that I refuse to separate from the burgeoning competitive social economy of an emerging capitalist society. Widmer presents the declarations as Bartleby’s indictment of the man who would accept the

“walled-in life” (456), and in this much we can agree.

The metaphorical representation of knowledge as containment, or capture, is the type of valuation that I suggest presence exceeds and resists. That Bartleby qua presence should only have these three positive statements to make to such a system of valuation agrees with this reading. Bartleby’s conflicts always take place along the valence where knowledge is made physical practice, and so the final stand must rise against the Master in Chancery’s attempts at capture precisely when they coincide with their reification as final enclosure. If there are three things presence knows, it knows you, it knows it has nothing to say to you, and it knows where it is-in other words, Bartleby recognizes the

Chancellor by his efforts to enclose him, refuses to be defined by someone else’s enclosure, and he has have no desire to repeat enclosure by engaging the Chancellor in the same type of language that the Chancellor could understand. This wider-ranging 64

metaphysics allows for Widmer’s readings, and a number of others, yet I maintain that this is not simply transcendental but historically specific.20

Another relevant attempt to explain Bartleby as related to a system of enclosure comes from a 1988 article written by Peter A. Smith, who writes in his introductory paragraph: “The Domination of the themes of isolation, noncommunication and enclosure suggest that there is another possible approach to the tale: Bartleby as a victim of the law of entropy” (155). Oddly enough, Smith’s exclusion of Capitalism also leads to a strange inversion. Smith would have it that Bartleby is “a victim of both physical and information entropy who turns himself into a perfect ‘isolated system’ and dies by refusing to take in any external ‘energy’ in the form of either food or information” (155-156). He means that

Bartleby is a victim of entropy because he isolates himself from the external input that would otherwise allow Bartleby’s physical and psychological economy to maintain its internal complexity.

Closed systems-the metaphor Smith uses for Bartleby-are doomed to lose their internal complexity simply because matter resists itself, tending over time toward rest.

Here we have another odd intersection: the continual input of the sun allows for the majority of the earth’s complexity; or, as Wheatley wrote of “solar rays” (26 Line 32):

“Without them, destitute of heat and light, / This world would be the reign of endless

20 Enclosure, after all, is a culturally specific practice arising from culturally specific models of justice, agency and jurisprudence. Is it any mistake that one of the precursors to the modern prison was the debtor’s prison? People who committed other crimes suffered corporeal punishment—branding, whipping, beheading, torture—but debtors were contained. 65

night” (27 Lines 33-34).21 In other words, Smith unwittingly returns the referent as the interpretive key to the sedimented Enlightenment metaphor. The re-inscription of the deconstructed metaphor to the epistemic field created by the Enlightenment exemplifies that subterranean taxying of buried referents that society ascribes to Bartleby; i.e., the carrier of dead letters. Again, this ironic projection of society’s own lost past prevents it from seeing that Bartleby belongs to the present as much as it does, and to its future even more.

In the sentence immediately following Smith’s thesis, he claims that “Bartleby’s demise comes as the result of his making a conscious choice about his fate” (156). The sentence does nothing to advance the paper. Whether the choice was Bartleby’s or anyone else’s doesn’t bear on whether or not his isolation depicts entropy. Smith then makes the claim that Bartleby intended his choice to communicate through “graphic example [...] the pointlessness of the activities with which we delude ourselves into believing that our lives have purpose or meaning” (156). Whether we ascribe any intentionally or not, we can interpret Smith as picking up on the correlation between Bartleby and a world devoid of the reason predicated on the heliotrope-after all, he doesn’t call Bartleby qua entropy a demonstration but a graphic depiction, focusing on the visual as the operative mode of depiction. Further, that Smith should take a character’s intentionally produced visualities

21 Note the similarity to that famous line from Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence,” which I take as a probable indication that he was at least partially affected by Wheatley’s poetic politics of metaphor and a certain sign that her work does belong to its era, just on the cusp of Romanticism and Classicism: “Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night.” in a work of literature as more crucial to the plot than language betrays the endurance of our societal preference for sight as the definitive idiom of truth-if seeing is believing and there’s nothing new under the sun, recognition by sight is total and self-evident; in other words, the preference for graphic depiction betrays the totalizing naturalization of culturally specific forms of knowledge.

But a crucial step has been lost: he doesn’t recognize that relating the significance of Bartleby through the Master in Chancery serves more than one purpose. It is as though

Smith trusts the Master’s sight over his own faculties of perception, unable to fortify his own interpretive preferences: “we delude ourselves into believing that our lives have purpose or meaning-an awareness which the Master in Chancery comes to only well after

Bartleby’s death, when he is reconstructing the story of his dealings with the scrivener” (156). Yet to say that life has no meaning and to be privy to a graphic depiction of entropy doesn’t mean the same thing. Why should an image of inevitable oblivion disrupt the workings of rationality? This could only come about if rationality were animated by some force in excess to it, some force that desires to continue beyond the rational of observation. Of course, that was the case, and the eternal life ascribed to man by Locke and his Christian counterparts marks the boundary of rationality’s preference for sight and the beginning of its unspoken complicity with a different poetics: faith, belief that can only be justified by unseen experience, the experiences of the mind, veiled in the darkness of interiority, appears most clearly in the absence of phenomenal 67

light. But by the time Smith reads Bartleby, the anthropomorphic link between irrationality and entropy has disappeared from common usage, and the common sense of late capital returns its roots as a metaphysically vacant literalism.

What is worse, by reading Bartleby without an eye for how he exceeds rationality, making for the possibility of endless polysemy through the continual reinterpretation of what cannot be contained in knowledge, Smith uses Bartleby to depict a fetishistic telos of oblivion. Because his Bartleby must be epistemically contained-a closed system is the image of complete self-containment, perfect capture-and because he naturalizes his immediate mode of recognition, unable to see value beyond the values of the Master in

Chancery, Bartleby can only stand in for Thanatos. What’s worse, Smith’s Thanatos then becomes a linguistic model for all semantic transmission: “Information can be lost during transmission, but it can never be gained” (157). This, Smith tells us, is the conclusion that we should draw from Bartleby’s graphic depiction. How, then, can we justify having produced knowledge at all? Here is the depiction of a man who barely speaks, and yet from it we are meant to understand the consequent oblivion of all meaning and purpose due to entropy? There is no small irony in the position.

What good is an unmarked coin to a consummate capitalist reading? Instead,

Smith can counter-intuitively resurrect Bartleby by making his negative message, the shared human inevitability of oblivion, the ultimate import of the novella: 68

The narrator’s final proclamation, “Ah, Bartleby! Ah, Humanity!” (65), with its implications that we are all isolated and as doomed as Bartleby, proves that Bartleby’s message, in the end, was not a “dead letter.” (162)

Smith’s conclusion works against his argument. If all humanity is doomed and isolated in individually experienced meaninglessness, any “living letter “ only communicates nihilistic solipsism through its sender’s literal negations.

Bartleby the Scrivener is not a nihilist manifesto. Many readers seem bent on a nihilist reading because its tragic dimensions push toward the absurd, effectively defusing what would be a harsh criticism of their involvement in an economically tiered society; however, the affective dimension of tragedy still necessitates a sense of human dignity and fallibility in both audience and author, and we can only arrive at that sense of the work if we presume the possibility of meaningful empathy. Yet, as long as readers are bent on containing Bartleby’s hubris as a positive knowledge transmitted by representation, they won’t ever find it. There is no obvious hubris in Bartleby unless we understand his resistance as presence, and if representation cannot communicate presence that means that his pride only appears by way of omission. Bartleby never says why he prefers not to do whatever he happens to be resisting, so there is no depiction of his pride for us to criticize.

The question of whether Smith realized the internal contradictions of his conclusion and was consequently drawn into further contemplation is beside the point; 69

his open contradictions subvert his own argument, and in so doing seems to accidentally repeat Melville’s subversions. Bartleby cannot merely depict entropy, but he shows how a man who refuses to participate in the symbolic economy of his society according to its own terms suffers relegation to some form of non-being. Nevertheless, he is still a man, and perhaps the pathos of Bartleby relies on the formulation whereby his not being a character makes him become a man to the audience.

All of the characters whom Melville elaborates on in the novella appear not only as contrivance, but indict their society, our society, as similarly populated by beings defined by grossly simplified cultural inscriptions. The degree of characterization they exhibit betrays their fictionality; they are what we might call stock characters, a metaphor that again betrays the systemic proliferation of capital as the worn-out metaphor for representation-in this instance, stock. We know stock characters by their inability to surprise us. The Master in Chancery fulfills our expectations of a man who gamers his esteem by emulating the prominent members of his society: he oscillates between obsequious admiration of his employers and benevolent condescension toward his employees, and the goofmess of his stuffy diction serves as the primary counter-balance to the dour arc of the plot. He is a pretentious bumbler whom we learn to have some empathy for, a character as old and routine as at least Falstaff. In this capacity Melville’s work can be unsettling, for the unstated humanity we infer in spite of the character’s failings repeats the benevolent condescension we identify in him. The same goes for 70

many of Melville’s works: Ishmael’s candid attempts to build an image of himself that is clearly not identical with its author still betray his character, but always by what is not said. Bartleby, on the other hand, simply has nothing to say. He refuses to speak, and in so doing becomes ironically indicative of incredible specificity by the same token that he appears emblematic of all man. The turn makes heartless readings possible.

If we merely take Bartleby as emblematic of all men, we can reduce the story to a type of moral allegory about the danger of humanity’s “dark side.” In an essay that treats the theme of currency as existential rather than expository, Sanford Pinsker writes:

“Melville’s vision is split into two voices-one incorporated in the exclamatory phrase

‘Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!’ and the other which whispers about a darker humanity we cannot know in words” (26). Pinsker makes Bartleby representative of a “darker” humanity, repeating the distinction of seen and unknown according to the heliotrope, but

Bartleby illuminates as much as anyone else in the story. Without him there wouldn’t even be a story. So why should he be dark? Pinsker characterizes Bartleby’s resistance to interpretation as revealing the novella’s nihilistic import: “Befriending a Bartleby [...] is to risk daily exposure to a nihilism so complete that normal life-with its normal illusions and vanities-is no longer possible” (23). But there is no “a Bartleby” in the sense that

Bartleby belongs to a category or species of men, symbols, or characters. There is only

Bartleby; his resistance to interpretation is not a symptom of latent nihilism so much as the hilariously endearing imagination of an author who asked what would happen if there was a man who simply refused to participate in all alienation, invented the heartbreaking answer that he would be alienated in the most abject sense, and still wrote the story in a way that allowed us to sympathize with everyone involved.

In Bartleby we have an explicit critique of the Enlightenment rhetoric of the tabula rasa as an element in the practice in Capitalism. Melville shows how, in combination with Capitalism, the idea leads toward the effacement of alternative forms of valuation, gradually homogenizing society in the name of a freedom that actually takes the form of economically motivated instrumentalization. Because Melville and Wheatley both notice that this rhetoric relies on the metaphor of illumination, they both subvert it by expanding the sense of knowledge to include the concealment of presence. At this tropic juncture, where we see in the work of both authors the idea of the subject as antecedent to and beyond representation, or knowledge, the legacy of slavery and the exploited white population merge in trope through their shared negation. If we accept my displacements, behind the veil that covers Bartleby’s body we find the inscription on the statue of Isis: “I am all that has been and is and shall be; and no mortal has ever lifted my mantle” (131 Plutarchus Plutarchs de Iside et Osiride). We never find Bartleby’s body at rest, no longer vulnerable to instrumentalizing forces, no longer vulnerable to alienation; we only ever find more inscription, the inscription of the impossibility of finding his body in inscription, the impossibility of finding “[...] a thing which is its own cause [...]” because its “nature [...] cannot be conceived except as existing” (2 Spinoza ), we find the 72

negative of presence, presence being that which exceeds and animates language.22 We find the continual lack of such a body, a lack that allows for the endless play of aesthetic forms-but this is the terror of Melville: the bird, Bartleby, does die. Shall we hold it as coincidental that the continual instrumentalization of the world in the name of Capitalism informed by Enlightenment rhetoric is leading us precisely toward global catastrophe, or that every day in the Capitalist tiered world system millions of people are instrumentalized in the name of an American need for substance? This is the dour sense in which time has made more converts than reason.

22 The inclusion of this reference to Spinoza and the inscription on the statue of Isis is directly inspired by a very similar inclusion made by Derrida in “Economimesis” on pages nine and twelve, respectively. 73

Conclusion:

Melville and Wheatley subvert the metaphor of the tabula rasa as used to justify and naturalize both instrumentalization and privilege. Bartleby shows us something like the blank slate, the substance on which rationality and reason would be inscribed, yet his material resistance to such inscription reveals both the effacement of nuance by ill use and that which, ironically, in its very blankness exceeds the figure of the blank slate.

Wheatley shows us how the naturalization of knowledge as perception informs us of knowledge’s inseparability from historically specific subjectivity by accenting the erasure such figuration necessarily entails-for Wheatley, only in the absence of the force by which identity naturalizes itself in its surroundings, the immediacy of sensory perception, does the culturally specific naturalizing force of the subject become apparent. In both works, the naturalized world and presence seem to me as though caught in an unending struggle, but the nature of this struggle allows for the linguistic ties that connect and separate humanity to come into sharper focus.

If presence cannot wholly appear in text, and what remains beyond our comprehension belongs to imagination, the creation of polysemic excess within the rhetorical dimensions of existing tropes belongs to the imagination of the impossible: many eighteenth-century white colonial Americans lacked the ability to imagine knowledge as a covering. I quote Plutarch quoting an Egyptian inscription in the penultimate paragraph of the last chapter not only because the quote seems to reiterate my own notions about presence, not only because it shows a discursive historical coincidence of an African culture and “the West,” nor even both of these things combined in addition to the fact that lifting the veil of Isis was an Enlightenment trope, nor also because of the European trope of representing land and people that Europeans were atrociously taking in the name of divine logos as the body of a woman, and not at all because locating all of these in the body of Bartleby would provide us an ultimate universalizing absolution, as tempting as that may be, but because Phillis Wheatley was known to refer to white colonial Americans as “modern Egyptians” (Willard 236), inflecting the secret that America has long concealed: that our faith in capital enterprise, when informed by Enlightenment models of being, takes on mythological proportions, and evidence of this can be found in our willingness to instrumentalize humanity in its name. Our money, to this day, features the title “In God We Trust” without any sense of irony. We are Mammonists, and any alternative beyond what is already figured as failure remains an impossibility in the imaginations of most Americans today. The singular oblivion of the all holy dollar has become the transferable cathexis of our traumatic instrumentalization, and with it we try to repurchase our being-I am that which works, that which produces value, and, finally, that which buys my proven equivalence in products and services rendered. But I never substantiate myself in these symbols. I am only displaced. Usually these signifying purchases are consumer goods, the chain of substitutions for status, esteem, desire, power, etc., that have replaced togetherness by 75

producing an infinitely comparable scale of financially determined worth, and sometimes they are art.

I like the different economies of valuation that I experience in Wheatley and

Melville. Everyone must produce and inherit their little worlds of meaning, and where this production becomes uniquely one’s own so it augments and subverts the inherited order of meaning. These deviations trace the influence of everyone’s material excess to representation and make for a wild proliferation that, at least for me, is aesthetically pleasing. This is not to suggest that we abandon artistic formalism in the fear that it coincides with the practice of capital, but that we don’t polish the armor to a fine perfection while forgetting that knowledge is embodied, is inscribed on and formative in the development of knowing subjects, and if it does this without this remembrance it threatens to write itself over presence, including the presence of other people. Let us not be like white colonial magistrates! Let us be surprised by art, yet not need to “sign” that difference with our resemblance in order to endorse it! I have tried to write of how

Melville and Wheatley’s literary productions work within textual networks without making too many ontological assumptions about Melville and Wheatley. I have tried not to speak for them but to attend to the effects of their words. In other words, I recognize that there are as many ways of interpreting their works as there are people to do so, and that no one will ever reveal the works in their absolute totality. 76

As I hope we have seen in both my readings, the meaningful reception of these rhetorical, aesthetic subversions shouldn’t be limited to the pleasure of consuming what we easily recognize. Sometimes, artwork needs to break our attachments to the metaphors with which we so readily order and make sense of the world. In these moment, I begin to sense presence along the periphery of representation, some uncertain agency on the other side of the text, the past’s effective force in the present, and know that I had been too attached to an interpretation, too attached to understanding the world according to a dying metaphor to perceive my own inteipretive limitations. When my reading becomes too much a token to be traded for a sense of esteem, position, worth, moral rectitude, it becomes “powerless to affect the senses,” mere meddling, and in all of its trading and substitutions it “rings like unto bullion” (5 Melville), working for me but working me over, instrumentalizing me in the name of its formations while ironically alienating me in the name of my own identity. I leave you now to ponder what polysemic proliferation can wildly emerge from this statement: after brief periods of recognition for their works, both

Melville and Wheatley died in obscurity (Carretta i; Monteiro 195). 77

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