Israel Potter Deported Rodrigo Lazo

Leviathan, Volume 22, Number 1, March 2020, pp. 146-165 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lvn.2020.0009

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/750720

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] Israel Potter Deported

RODRIGO LAZO University of California, Irvine

This lecture aims to break down the walls separating felds of study by inter- preting Israel Potter in relation to concerns about migration and transnational labor that are common in Latino/a/x and trans-American studies. Turning away from a critical emphasis on the book’s dedication to the Bunker Hill Monu- ment as a response to national US mythology, I consider Potter’s movement away from home and his status as a refugee to engage questions of national belonging. Israel Potter is an important book for those who study migration in the Americas and the transatlantic dimensions of the age of revolutions. In the spirit of C.L.R. James’s commitment to reading Melville through “the world we live in,” I argue that Israel Potter’s condition as a migrant subject who is denied national reintegration at the end of his life shares structural similarities to recent governmental efforts to detain and deport migrants, some of whom have lived in the United States for years.

begin with profound gratitude to the conference organizing committee for inviting me to deliver this lecture. Your kindness inspires me, partic- I ularly because I can think of many Melville scholars whose work would merit this distinction, and so I am humbled. I also feel particularly indebted to friends whose work on Melville continues to inspire me and who have helped me remain engaged with Melville’s work with their interesting conver- sation and the publication of my work.1 My research is highly interdisciplin- ary and I am, like Israel Potter, a wanderer of sorts in the academic fields of trans-American studies, Latino/a/x literary history, and the Hispanic history of North America. My research agenda pulls in different directions. But I have always found Melville to be a writer in dialogue with those fields because he often thought and wrote about what in his time would have been considered Spanish America. It should be no surprise that the great mid-twentieth- century Melvillean Stanley T. Williams was also the author of The Spanish Background of American Literature (1955), a book with a far-ranging vision and one that informed the research agendas in the 1990s of many of us starting in trans-American studies. In the spirit of putting Melville in dialogue with fields

146 L e v i a t h a n A J o u r n a l o f M e l v i ll e S t u d i e s Israel Potter Deported of study that might seem out of his immediate orbit, in this lecture I bring Israel Potter together with conversations that are important in trans-American studies and Latino/a/x studies.2 Israel Potter is not the most obvious of Melville’s books to discuss Lati- noamérica because other works have a more direct geographic affinity (e.g., “Benito Cereno” and “The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles”) or address directly aspects of the people and cultures of the region (e.g., Moby-Dick and White- Jacket). But Israel Potter should not be an unexpected choice; it may be the most important Melville book for the current crisis over immigration in the United States and across the globe. It is a book that speaks to migratory experiences and thus is relevant to current discussions in the United States about restricting immigration, opening doors to refugees fleeing persecution in other countries, and the deportation of people who have been living in the United States for many years. On the day I began working on this lecture, the Washington Post published an article about a war veteran whose personal history raised issues relevant to my reading of Israel Potter. This veteran, Jilmar Ramos-Gomez, had fought in the War in Afghanistan, which has now entered its nineteenth year and surpassed Vietnam as the longest war in US history, which is to say it seems to have gone on since Ishmael proclaimed, “BLOODY BATTLE IN AFFGHAN- ISTAN” (Moby-Dick 22). Ramos-Gomez’s service as a lance corporal and tank crewman had earned him “a National Defense Service Medal, a Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, an Afghanistan Campaign medal, and a combat action ribbon” (Rosenberg). These decorations suggested that Ramos-Gomez had given a lot of his heart and mind to the cause. But after his return, the decorations did not keep him from coming under the scrutiny of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Ramos-Gomez, a US citizen born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was detained by ICE and held in a facility to await deportation. We could say, to quote Israel Potter, that “His scars proved his only medals” (192). As a war veteran who is denied a pension, Israel Potter raises for us questions about how a nation, both through its institutions and in the popular imagination, responds to soldiers who fall into hardship after service. In the case of Ramos-Gomez, the ACLU said in a statement, “He has episodes where he disappears and when he is found again, he often has no recollection of where he has been” (Rosenberg). Ramos-Gomez was released before deportation, but it appears his mental state from post-war stress, his psychological scars, put him in a precarious situation with a government agency eager to deport people. As reported in the Washington Post, ICE told one reporter that Ramos-Gomez claimed to be a foreign citizen who was unlawfully present in

A J o u r n a l o f M e l v i ll e S t u d i e s 147 RODRIGO LAZO the United States. But, according to some news reports, Ramos-Gomez had a copy of his US passport in his possession, and thus he was racially profiled (Silva). That implies that the color of his skin and his name led authorities to assume that he was not a US citizen. In both the Ramos-Gomez case and the end of Israel Potter, a government bureaucracy denies a claim to national participation. Ramos-Gomez was situated as a person not belonging in the United States and Israel was “repulsed in efforts, after a pension” (192). For Ramos-Gomez, the issue was something more basic than a governmental benefit, namely the right to live within the territorial boundaries of the nation-state. We could apply to Ramos-Gomez the point that Hester Blum has made about Israel Potter, “As an American citizen unable to claim the ‘protection’ of his nation, whether at sea or on foreign shores, Potter discovers that his rights are neither inalienable nor independent of the will of sovereign states” (117). The two situations share a structural exclusion in that operations of the state reject soldiers who have gone to war for the nation and become vulnerable in succeeding years. In Israel Potter’s case, he has become an “old man” (190) who has faced years of poverty and, in the other, Ramos-Gomez faces psychological challenges, possibly from trauma caused by a war. (The treatment of war veterans in the United States has been a matter of concern in recent decades as a result of the reception of those who fought in Vietnam.3) Critics have emphasized that Israel Potter raises concerns about how a nation treats soldiers after a war. Robert S. Levine brings forward the social questions raised by the denial of the pension and writes, “The novel is ultimately rejuvenating in the spirited way that it presses its readers to reflect on the value of wars that are made in the name of nations but not necessarily in the service of the ordinary people who inhabit them” (“Introduction” viii). Noting that Israel is an unknown person who dies a pauper, Levine goes on: “Melville can be seen as telling the story of a common man who does good work for his country but remains in the margins, unrecognized by his compatriots” (x). That emphasis on Israel being a common man, a term used also by other critics, opens the connection with Ramos-Gomez, whose war decorations cannot shield him from going through a process that has become common for Latinos without papers. What might Israel Potter, the character, have in common with those who are being deported, some of whom see themselves as US patriots, in this one notorious case even when they have served in the military? The Ramos-Gomez situation does raise the question as to whether in today’s United States Israel Potter could face deportation.4 I invoke deportation in the title of this lecture to bring forward some of the concerns of the field of Latino/a/x studies. Those include the following: 1) the relationship

148 L e v i a t h a n Israel Potter Deported of a migratory individual person to the nation, the nation as a monumental conception, and the nation-state as a bureaucratic apparatus; 2) the transnational dynamics created by migration; 3) the role of migrant labor; and 4) the relationship of counter-history to national mythologies and even mythical historical figures. Of course, those concerns are not solely of Latino/a/x Studies, and they overlap with other approaches, including trans-American and transnational studies as well as ethnic studies approaches that emphasize labor.

Transnational Labor, Migrant Fiction

connection with Latino studies could be made at a basic level if we think of Israel Potter as a story about a guy who leaves his hometown and A ends up migrating to another country, where he lands a job as a gar- dener on the grounds of a retreat frequented by George the Third. Not to be too flip, but isn’t that scenario reminiscent of the undocumented people working on Donald Trump’s golf club, as reported by various news organizations? One of those workers, Margarita Cruz, was quoted in the New York Times saying that Trump “would come over and say hello, ask your name and how long you had worked at the club. He would ask how you liked the rug, or a picture on the wall, things like that” (Zaveri and Correal). While George the Third’s con- versation with Israel is on more weighty matters of battles and armies—“Were you at Bunker Hill?” the king asks (33)—the hierarchical labor conditions related to the care of upscale grounds bring together the “king” of the realm and workers keeping up the place. Israel does share with Latino gardeners the weight of a transnational experience. Transnationalism, as discussed by numerous scholars, involves simultaneous economic, familial, and social connections to more than one country.5 The notion of transnational migrant labor is predicated on the taking of jobs in one place even as aspects of life, including immediate family, are in another country. Transnational processes include a geographic arrangement by which presence in one location is not predicated on a complete separation from another. An excellent example of transnational duality is at the end of chapter 1, when the trajectory of Israel’s life is summed up: “This little boy of the hills, born in sight of the sparkling Housatonic, was to linger out the best part of his life a prisoner or a pauper upon the grimy banks of the Thames” (7). The “hills” here could include Bunker Hill, the location of the battle that becomes one of the defining moments of his life, but also the hills of his home, which Israel has not relinquished at the end of the book. Viewed from a Latino studies perspective, that line from Israel Potter prompts a consideration of the many people from hills in Guatemala or Honduras who live parts of their lives under

A J o u r n a l o f M e l v i ll e S t u d i e s 149 RODRIGO LAZO oppressive labor conditions (prisoners and paupers) while touching the banks of various rivers around the United States. Transnational experiences are no less than a challenge to the presumed singular national affiliation on which so much patriotic discourse—and even the bureaucracies of nation-formation—is premised. Can’t a person have an allegiance to more than one country, meaning not only affective commitments but also communal affiliations? Are the interests and well-being of a particular nation so exclusive as to preclude someone’s connection to another nation? In discussing Melville and British culture, Paul Giles has argued that when Israel Potter is in Falmouth, England, doubly hunted as both an American and an Englishman, “this perplexing situation functions as a microcosm of the novel’s wider pattern, in which the whole idea of loyalty to a particular nation becomes hopelessly ‘snarled,’ lost in ‘bewildering intertanglement’” (241). The reference is to the passage in chapter 19, in which the battle between the Bon Homme Richard and the Serapis is described as follows: “Never was there a fight so snarled. The intricacy of those incidents which defy the narrator’s extrication, is not ill figured in that bewildering intertanglement of all the yards and anchor of the two ships, which confounded them for the time in one chaos of devasta- tion” (136). Just as the two ships of state are snarled, so are narrative intricacies that confound even the narrator, who struggles to explain how a Bunker Hill patriot becomes an Englishman. The transnational dimensions of Israel Potter point us to a healthy ten- sion in Melville studies, going back at least to F.O. Matthiessen’s 1941 American Renaissance (incidentally, now the name of a white supremacist and nationalist on-line magazine run by the Yale-educated Jared Taylor), between the critical emphasis on Melville as a national writer (representative of the United States) and his place “among the nations,” the phrase used in the title of the 1997 international Melville conference in Volos, Greece, and a companion volume of essays (Marovitz and Christodoulou). That conference followed in the geographic inclination, if not the exact spirit, of C.L.R. James’s 1953 Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, a book that positions not only Ellis Island but also the Pequod as “a miniature of all the nations of the world and all sections of society” (3). I think these paths in and out of Melville make for a healthy ten- sion, with some scholars considering Melville in and of the United States while others of us want to approach his work via the coast of Chile, England, the great Pacific Ocean, the Marquesas, Rome, and the Galápagos Islands. As noted at the outset, Israel Potter may confound readers inclined to an international perspective, given the national implications of the dedication “To his Highness the Bunker Hill Monument” and the setting up of the title character as a lad seeking independence from the “tyranny of his father” (9)

150 L e v i a t h a n Israel Potter Deported and gaining “that fearless self-reliance and independence which conducted our forefathers to national freedom” (10). Critics in different decades pick up on this national claim along with the narrative’s ironies and skepticism—even ambivalences—about the mythology of nationhood (see Dryden 40–43 and Colatrella 4–5). John Hay, for example, considers the history of the stunted construction of the Bunker Hill monument to argue that the book “emphasizes gentle disillusionment (rather than harsh apostasy) regarding patriotic ideals” (197). Russ Castronovo also tends toward the national by noting that “Israel enacts his American story in a prose whose religious and political overtones replay the national history of revolution and liberation” (143), which is to say that Castronovo does not emphasize the intertanglement that Giles posits with transnational Englishness. But despite the associations of Israel with national (New England) terrain, the trajectory of his adventures—Israel Potter even goes to “Porto Rico”—presses a nationalist reading to account for fifty years outside the country of his birth. Israel is a migrant even if his migration begins in one nation in the wake of a revolutionary historical period that led to the establishment of independent nation-states across the Americas. In developing my dialogue between this Melvillean wanderer and Lati- no/a/x studies, I want to make a case for Israel Potter as migrant fiction. By migrant fiction, I refer not only to a narrative that recounts a story of and engages with the experience of migration but first and foremost a narrative that gets away from itself, escapes its own terms and moves in unexpected directions. A migrant fiction may lead ultimately to a gravesite or monument, even if it starts out with an auspicious tone. But before delving into how Israel Potter migrates away from itself, let us touch on the matter of people’s migration. When one considers the history of labor in the United States, the word migrant might regularly be appended to worker, and certainly a good example of migrant fiction is Tomás Rivera’s . . . Y no se lo tragó la tierra, a classic novel of Chicano/a migrant workers whose title is translated in one case as This Migrant Earth. (A popular edition uses the word-for-word translation . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him.) US history is full of episodes that unite migration and labor, both from countries around the world and internally, such as the period of the Dust Bowl in the prairies. And in the literary panorama, we might say that US literature allows for a space where Jurgis Rudkus meets Tom Joad. At least since Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts (1996), scholars have sought the connection between literary forms and the words and lived experiences of actual migrants and immigrants. A study such as Alicia Schmidt Camacho’s Migrant Imaginaries (2008) is concerned with the world-making potential of border-crossers who hold a subordinate position to that of citizens. Paying attention to how migrants use

A J o u r n a l o f M e l v i ll e S t u d i e s 151 RODRIGO LAZO language, Schmidt Camacho proposes that migrant imaginaries “narrate a condition of alterity to, or exclusion from, the nation,” even as they also “enun- ciate a collective desire for a different order of space and belonging across the boundary” (5). While Israel Potter does not move toward collective aspirations (the truncated narrative of his England years does not provide details as to whether this was even an option), I do think the questions of belonging in a transnational situation and longing for community follow the narrative and drive Israel toward the end. Migrant fictions are about movement: the movement of characters across national borders, the movement of books and print culture across borders, and the movement of imagination across various conceptual limitations. Thus migrant fiction’s plot trajectories and situations differ from the teleological assumptions of the immigrant narrative, which implies a single destination and assimilation in terms of language, dress, and culture and also participation in the economic well-being of the self and nation, as articulated in the classic formulation of Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). Kirsten Silva Gruesz has shown that the intention assumed in the immigrant trajectory (settling and integrating) may not be operative in certain nineteenth-century experiences, including those of writers who may be errant rather than settled. But my main point here is not to present a definition paper by which I elucidate this term migrant fiction and then fit Melville’sIsrael Potter into it. Because if a migrant fiction is anything, it is a narrative that escapes—and thus escapes also the very term migrant fiction. What I’m arguing is that the movements undertaken by Potter in the book, and by the narrative itself, bring questions of migration and identity into the center of this text, which ultimately presents the US subject as simultaneously within the nation and outside of it, as marked nationally but living a transnational experience, as longing to be a part of a home (whether a nation or a house or a hill) and wanting to run away from that home. As migrant fiction,Israel Potter bears the marks of Melville’s travel writing, which is to say a migratory quality that moves toward unstable islands, a coast where everything is grey and “far-scattered farmhouses” near “the rough- est roads or the highest hills” (3). It is important to note that Israel Potter was published in the same years as the periodical pieces of the mid-1850s that read like travel narratives, including “Benito Cereno” and “The Encantadas.”6 While the Bunker Hill dedication opens with a critique of biography as a genre, a point that Peter Bellis has elucidated in relation to Melville’s fictional response to history, chapter 1 throws in yet another generic possibility by addressing someone who would be interested in traveling: “The traveler who at the present day is content to travel in the good old Asiatic style, neither rushed along by

152 L e v i a t h a n Israel Potter Deported a locomotive, nor dragged by a stage coach” (3).7 Rhetoricians will know that Asiatic style is not about travel but about oration and is also known as “grand style.” Laurent Pernot explains, “This is a showy and recherché style, practiced by orators and writers from Rhodes and Asia Minor (whence its name)” and could be, per Cicero, sententious and studied or swift and impetuous (81). In other words, the traveler addressed in the opening of Israel Potter is not rushed but willing to circle a bit and take the interesting way toward a destination. Asiatic would contrast to the Attic style, which Pernot describes as marked by “clarity and verbal exactitude” (117)—a direct style. I connect Melville’s reference to Asiatic style to a migratory impetus in Israel Potter, whose main character is not on a locomotive going to a particular destination or even “dragged by a stage-coach” but rather caught in a dialec- tic of historical force and personal agency as he navigates and negotiates the possibilities before him. Keeping the Asiatic/Attic distinction in mind, the dif- ference between migration and immigration becomes about wandering versus staying in one place. In other words, Attic rhetorical style may be one way to describe the teleology of immigrant narrative, which implies an intention that leads directly to a destination. In the classic immigrant trajectory, a person settles in one place and assimilates the culture, politics, and language of that place. Immigration is about becoming part of a nation, fitting in by changing clothes, language, and national affiliation (if not loyalty). By contrast, the migrant moves from one destination to another or is forced to move from one detention center to another or even deported, propelled by a historical wind that might blow someone Israel-like to another country. We could say that the migrant experience involves meandering and is a bit more like the Asiatic style to which Melville alludes in the opening sentence of chapter 1. Such is the narrative promise of the book.

Bunker Hill in the Americas

s a revolutionary figure who moves into the Caribbean and England before returning home in old age, Israel Potter has more in common A with trans-American revolutionaries of his day than he does with home-bound patriots. As those who have studied the trans-American and transatlantic revolutions in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries know, the anticolonial, republican cause was not solely a domestic US process or national formation. At a time when gestures toward universal rights are out of favor, I quote Thomas Paine, “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind” (5), a line that appealed to revolutionaries in many places beyond the United States.8 The historical Israel Potter’s life spanned

A J o u r n a l o f M e l v i ll e S t u d i e s 153 RODRIGO LAZO a period when revolution had an international flair connected not only with France and Saint Domingue but by the early nineteenth century also with the wars of independence in Spanish America. In 1825, Bunker Hill still held hemispheric American connotations. Dan- iel Webster, in his speech of 1825 on the ground-breaking for the monument, considered the influence of the US revolution on the world and saw it not as exceptional but influential: “Among the great events of the last half century, we must reckon, certainly, the Revolution of South America; and we are not likely to overrate the importance of that Revolution either to the people of the country itself or to the rest of the world” (39). And he continues to observe how conceptions of the continent have expanded from the thirteen colonies to include the southern hemisphere. In this sense, Webster is, at least temporar- ily, a hemispheric American. As the historian Caitlyn Fitz has argued, between 1775 and 1825, the population of the United States saw itself in dialogue with Spanish American independence movements: “So many people [in the United States] grew emotionally and personally invested in the revolution to the south that Latin America helped to distill popular understandings of republicanism” (6). It was only fitting, then, that the poet José María Heredia, whose own exile as a result of revolutionary activities in Cuba had brought him to the United States, translated Webster’s Bunker Hill speech the same year it was delivered.9 Like Potter, Heredia spent years on the run. He moved around the United States before settling in Mexico for the final years of his short life. When Heredia translates, “We are Americans” into “Somos Americanos,” the speech is no longer univocal in a nationalist sense but hemispheric in connotation. In Heredia’s Spanish, Webster’s Asiatic style could dovetail with the movement away from Spanish colonialism: “El emisferio del Sur vá saliendo del mar. Sus montañas soberbias comienzan á levantarse y á recibir la luz del cielo” (31). The longer passage from Webster is as follows: “The Southern hemisphere emerges from the sea. Its lofty mountains begin to lift themselves into the light of heaven; its broad and fertile plains stretch out, in beauty, to the eye of civilized man, and at the mighty bidding of the voice of political liberty the waters of darkness retire” (40). With the civilization/barbarism binary operating, it appears that South America is just coming out of the sea to turn mammalian. With a superior atti- tude toward the region, Webster is celebratory. But it is important to distinguish Bunker Hill in 1825 from Bunker Hill in 1843 or even Melville’s own 1854. By 1843, Webster had changed his tone, and even his tune, and his second Bunker Hill speech on the completion of the monument was marked by the opposition we have come to associate with two Americas (north and south). His speech was sprinkled with invocations of the Black Legend and the failures of the new South American nations. By

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1854, Bunker Hill for Melville said less about the potential of the revolutionary spirit and more about how the monumentalizing of myth had become its own kind of “Highness” obfuscating the US Revolution’s limitations. Similar changes took place in Spanish America, as a revolutionary connection to the United States gave way to suspicion about imperial designs, particularly after the war with Mexico. But in its early version, Bunker Hill’s hemispheric reach reminds us of Israel Potter-like figures who made their way through this trans-American and transatlantic age of revolution. In addition to Heredia, another figure whose movement bears some resemblance to Potter is the Mexican priest Fray Ser- vando Teresa de Mier, who challenged Catholic Church authorities in Mexico and was pursued for most of his life. Incarcerated for his irreverence on Church doctrine, Mier was like Melville’s character practically buried alive, only to don a disguise and escape on more than one occasion.10 If we consider Israel Potter as an impoverished version of the revolutionaries who made their way from one country to another during the age of revolutions, we see the importance of migration as part of his experience. In Melville’s book, even Benjamin Franklin is situated in France rather than Philadelphia. And more importantly, Melville gives us a working-class version of these wandering revolutionaries. The terms used to describe Israel are about movement, separation, and loss of the self. Melville’s title, which emphasizes “his fifty years of exile,” presents that term exile not as a noun referring to a person (an exile) but as a description of a situation or state in which Israel lived for a half-century. With exile as a descriptor of his separation from home, Israel is variously described as undertaking “adventure” (8), “travel” (13), “sailing” (16), and “escape” (17); he is referred to as a “peddler in the wilderness” (10), “Wandering Jew” (188), “runaway rebel” (7), “alien Israel” (186), and repeatedly as a “wanderer” (192). The word alien appears again when he accidentally ends up on an English ves- sel and tries to fit into the crew. One man notices that Israel “had somehow an alien sort of general look” (155, italics mine) and the crew begins to interrogate “the strange man before them” (155). The master-at-arms then issues a judg- ment: “He don’t seem to belong anywhere” (159). Israel is also at another point imprisoned in a place “appropriate to runaways” (24), which is to say he is constantly deterritorialized as a result of his own decisions or the historical effects brought on by warships and the great men of the revolution such as Franklin. But migration’s temporary intention (escape) often comes over him. Early in the book, when Israel first gets captured as a prisoner of war and taken to England, he is held aboard a ship “like Jonah in the belly of the whale” (16)—his name does rhyme with Ishmael—and then he escapes. This sequence captures the spirit of evasive action catapulting him from place to

A J o u r n a l o f M e l v i ll e S t u d i e s 155 RODRIGO LAZO place: “No sooner does Israel see his companions housed, than putting speed into his feet, and letting grow all his wings, he starts like a deer. He runs four miles (so he afterwards affirmed) without halting. He sped towards London; wisely deeming that once in that crowd detection would be impossible” (16). Like someone trying to escape immigration authorities in today’s United States, Israel is constantly trying to avoid detection, changing outfits and directions to keep himself out of detention. In many parts of the book, as other critics have pointed out, his outfits cloak whatever identity he may be trying to hide. “Isra- el’s career consists largely of his changing clothes (every ten pages, it seems), losing himself in one crowd or another, sailing under different flags and figura- tively dying and being reborn,” Bill Christopherson writes (27). But if the narrative upon his first arrival in London frames Israel as someone who is mutable, on the move, and able to avoid the restrictions and even confinement of national organization, it also situates him as a lower-class worker, perhaps a migrant laborer, who must contend with poverty. When he trades the dress of an English sailor for the tatters of “an old ditcher tottering beneath the weight of a pick-axe” (21), Israel becomes “the very picture of poverty, toil and distress” (21). These clothes are “suitable to that long career of destitution before him” (21). And in a sentence that combines his migrant movement with hard labor, we are told that the wretched rags he wore were “but suitable to that long career of destitution before him; one brief career of adventurous wanderings; and then, forty torpid years of pauperism” (21–22). One must wonder how many migrants experience the actual migration as a brief episode, an adventure that gives way to years of sedentary labor.

The Refugee and Exile’s Nostalgia

his language of work and poverty speaks to the concerns of Latino/a/x studies: in Israel Potter, the experience of being on the run and escaping Tnational confinement is intertwined with hard labor and the difficulties of earning a living wage. The book goes as far as to describe Israel as a refugee, as presented in the first part of the title of chapter 4, “Further wanderings of the refugee” (24). This term, which has such a demanding presence in the twentieth century as a result of mass displacement of populations due to war— and Israel could be considered a war refugee—goes back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century usage in reference to Protestants who left France for other countries, including England, to escape persecution. In certain situations, per the Oxford English Dictionary, these French refugees were associated with poverty, an experience that is not uncommon among those who leave one country and go to another.

156 L e v i a t h a n Israel Potter Deported

Fig. 1. Title page from The Refugee (1865), a pirated version of Israel Potter. Univer- sity of California Libraries. Photo courtesy of the author.

Taking a cue from Melville’s use of refugee, the publishing house of The- ophilus Beasley Peterson (aka T. B. Peterson and Brothers) pirated Israel Potter and published Melville’s main narrative word for word in 1865 under the title The Refugee (Fig. 1). In that edition, the Bunker Hill dedication was left out and the new title appears to have been chosen as an attempt to draw readers.

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Peterson was not only a publisher but a bookseller, and judging by his list of books for sale (pirated and otherwise), he sought to capitalize on the popular book market in Philadelphia. An advertisement from 1868 listed dozens of sensationalistic titles, including numerous “Lives of Highway Men” and “Sea Tales.” It left off The Refugee from the list of its eleven “Revolutionary Tales,” even as it featured twenty-one titles by T. S. Arthur and another dozen by George Lippard (“American Booksellers” 46–47). In its effort to attract readers to The Refugee, the publishing house described Melville on the title page as “Author of ‘Typee,’ ‘Omoo,’ ‘The Two Captains,’ ‘The Man of the World,’ Etc., Etc.” Melville had not written the latter two, and the following year Peterson published a book titled “The Man of the World” by William North, an English novelist who had published science fiction. Melville was not happy about the pirating of his work. As Zachary Turpin has shown, on 28 January 1876, Melville published a letter to the editor in the New-York World, in which he says, “SIR: Permit me through your columns to make a disavowal. T. B. Peterson & Brothers, of Philadelphia, include in a late list of their publications ‘The Refugee; by Herman Melville.’ I have never written any work by that title. In connection with that title Peterson Broth- ers employ my name without authority, and notwithstanding a remonstrance conveyed to them long ago” (8). Admittedly, The Refugee does not sound very Melvillean as far as titles go, but Peterson did offer an interpretation with a sensationalistic gloss to which we will turn below. At the risk of challenging authorial intention, I must admit that I like The Refugee as a title, and not the least because it captures the estrangement in the life of Israel Potter as well as the textual rovings of Israel Potter. Let us consider the editorial decision to delete the introduction to the Bunker Hill monument. It excises Melville’s national spin of revolutionary myth and instead emphasizes a forced (transnational) movement of this character. Potter is deported or pushed into running so many times and lives in exile so long that he does have something in common with people seeking refuge from political turmoil and/ or hardships in their personal lives, in his case familial restrictions and a love gone wrong. Refugees, exiles, and migrants share an uprooting of the self and even a confusion that comes from moving across borders and nations. Chris- tophersen characterizes Israel’s plight as an “identity vacuum” (27), although it is not so much a vacuum as an overflow of possibilities, as new places allow for a multiplicity of affiliations. For migrants, the answer to “Who are you?” can change with place and time. But while Melville uses refugee and other appellations already noted, his preferred term is exile, as emphasized in his own title. Exile implies an

158 L e v i a t h a n Israel Potter Deported uncomfortable and insurmountable separation from home. In a recent article about Israel Potter, Emilio Irigoyen argues that “one significant way in which the story represents the experience of exile is by textually embodying the sense of suspension (in time) and of detour (in space) often associated with it” (15). Irigoyen, who relates this to form, has an apt term to describe Israel Potter’s condition: “moving stasis.” In his reading, the form of the text enacts a mate- rial example of the endless deferrals of the condition of exile, a home that is an absence. Keeping in mind the temporality of exile itself, I want to consider how the novel also concerns itself with another temporality, that of nostalgia, which is brought on by exile. As Edward Said has written, exile “is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home.” Said goes on to note that exile’s “essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement” (173). Melville does not give up that sadness and we see it emerge at the end of the book. Said also asks, “But if true exile is a condition of terminal loss, why has it been transformed so easily into a potent, even enriching, motif of modern culture?” (173). My answer, not his, is that exile motivates nostalgia, a sweet aching for what was, a longing for home—or rather what characters perceive as a home untouched by time. The temporality of nostalgia, which attempts to arrest a historical past, is not uncommon in the novel and certainly not in recent Latino fiction, most prominently in a book such as The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, by Oscar Hijuelos, in which Cuban nostalgic time is not only about recapturing the Havana of the years before the 1959 Revolution but about the experience of musicians who come to work in the United States and do not relinquish a connection to their homeland. At the same time, the contemporary United States is full of people whose nostalgia colors their conception of a true home, and somewhere between the might-have-been and actual condition is the imagination of a comfortable return to what was. I am thinking here of not only a variety of Latin American immigrants, but also people from Iran looking back before 1979 or people from Vietnam (once widely considered refugees) looking at that country before 1975. Israel Potter speaks to many of us who have been in such situations. While Said’s notion of exile is influenced to a great degree by the sep- arations created by the wars and genocides of the twentieth century and my view of nostalgia is informed by contemporary Latino literature and the work

A J o u r n a l o f M e l v i ll e S t u d i e s 159 RODRIGO LAZO of scholars of immigration (not to mention my personal experiences), Israel Potter also raises the importance of a particular history informing Melville’s vision: how would the mid-nineteenth century view nostalgia? In an article that recalls the use of nostalgia as a medical diagnosis related to slavery, Jona- than Schroeder writes, In marked contrast to its current status today, in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Europe and the Americas, the medical concept of nostalgia was the only pathology that related exclusively to forced mobility. It was solely used to diagnose sailors, soldiers, convicts, slaves, and other groups whose labor forcibly separated them from home. Above all, it was diagnosed in the white ethnics and black Africans who made up the bulk of this labor force and whose extreme reactions to compulsory mobility were said to reveal a latent vulnerability to this deadly variety of melancholic insanity. (655) Melville’s book does not dwell on the psychological effects of Israel’s exile. Despite historical pressures, Israel’s agency is never completely eliminated; he often chooses to move in a particular way, albeit within the limitations of war and work. The few pages devoted to his decades in hard labor hint at the hardships faced by the working class. More than anything, Israel Potter ends with a yearning for reconnection with a different time and place in life. After decades in England, Israel gives himself up to migrant nostalgia and what Melville describes as “the stir of tender but quenchless memories” (186). In the year 1800, the narrator of Israel Potter tells us, “back to New England our exile was called in his soul” (186). Israel’s thoughts return to his early days, even imagining he hears Old Huckleberry, his “mother’s favorite old pillion horse” (186). The occasion for the “returns of his boyhood’s sweeter days” (186) were the many episodes of financial hardship, extreme poverty, and even injury that he suffered, the latter causing “a prolongation of his exile” (184). That is to say, migrant nostalgia is brought on by his being “In want and bitterness, pent in, perforce, between dingy walls” (186). Nostalgia is my word. Melville is not as kind. He uses hallucination: “Sometimes, when incited by some little incident, however trivial in itself, thoughts of home would—either by gradually working and working upon him, or else by an impetuous rush of recollection—overpower him for a time to a sort of hallucination” (186). Schroeder notes that nostalgia was known to induce hallucinations that could lead to suicide, and thus Melville’s diction is not far off from the way nostalgia was described in his day. And it is the appeal of that hallucinatory thinking that draws Israel back to the United States, however at a point in life when he is a brother to the “white-haired old ocean” (189).

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Name out of Memory?

onsidering how often Melvillean fictions are not clear on whether the reader should laugh or cry or both at the same time (I am thinking Chere of “Bartleby”), it is no surprise that Israel Potter begins with an upbeat tone, only to end in a downcast, pensionless death. In the opening we get “ample food for poetic reflection in the singular scenery” (3) and “crests or slopes of pastoral mountains, while far below, mapped out in its beauty, the valley of the Housatonic lies endless along at your feet” (3). And then, we hear that “In fine clear June days, the bloom of these mountains is beyond expres- sion delightful” (5). The hopeful tone of the book’s opening makes one wonder whether upon first leaving New England and making his way to the Caribbean, Israel was able to enjoy the warm waters at the beach. While the episodes with Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones, and Squire Woodcock are funny, the book gets progressively darker and at one point we are left to wonder if civilization is a “thing distinct or is it an advanced stage of barbarism” (148). By the final chapter, Israel is left to suffer the indignity of the nation-state, and his son has to tear him away from a “dismal, damp wood” (192). Israel is stunned, faced with the uncanny realization that neither nostalgic vision nor hallucination (Irigoyen’s “moving stasis”) can stand up to the changes of time. Places do not remain the same. With Potter’s “name out of memory,” the title of Melville’s book is a response to the effacements of time. But what is the name-memory that Melville wants to retain? Crit- ics have emphasized that the name suggests a Puritan (national) failure, an “Israel” leading not to a promised land or a New Jerusalem but to a potter’s grave (Zaller 608). But perhaps more importantly, the name “Israel” invokes a geography far from the New England home that functions as ground zero for the nation. An anti-hero called “Israel” pushes outside of local conceptions of the nation-state, just as the name Jilmar Ramos-Gomez does not sound like that of a person who fits into an Anglophone vision of the nation. With Israel as a wanderer, that name can pass outside of the nation. At the end, the book fades out of print. And Israel’s very being is gone. Not even an old oak tree can withstand the changes brought on by time. The ends meet, as the book comes to a close along with Israel’s migratory impulse and its desire for return. We are at the Melvillean clinker. By this point Israel Potter is a fiction that has migrated away from itself. The story of a young man on the move jumping into transatlantic revolutionary encounters, changing and shifting as he goes along, gives way to the heavi- ness and tired limbs of old age. We are told, “Few things remain” (192). I might

A J o u r n a l o f M e l v i ll e S t u d i e s 161 RODRIGO LAZO be so metaphorical as to say that at the end Israel Potter is deported, and so is Israel Potter, sent off to a place that not even nostalgia can reclaim. Deportation under the current regime has led to untold stories of hardship for people who are forced to return to countries they do not recognize. Indeed, many have not lived for decades in the countries to which they are deported and may not even speak the local language. While deportations to Central America and Mexico have dominated news reports, people have also been deported to different parts of the world, including Asia and the Middle East, sometimes to tragic conse- quences. At the end of his book, Melville sends his character Israel Potter to an unrecognizable other world, and thus his book cannot remain a travel account, biography, or revolutionary war story, not even a sea tale. But we cannot leave it there. The publisher T. B. Peterson gave us this gloss on the title page of The Refugee: Written with a life-like power. We advise no one to take up ‘The Refugee’ until he has the leisure to fnish it; for when he has once dipped into its fascinating and adventurous pages, he will not be disposed to leave them until he has reached the very last. This is really a delightful book, in which one may fnd food for laughter and sterling information into the bargain. It is written in a pleasant off-hand style, such as will be enjoyed by everybody. There are portions of the work, infnitely superior to any thing of the kind we ever before read. This claim to adventure echoed Melville’s own description. Writing to George Putnam in 1854 with 60 pages of the manuscript of “Israel Potter,” Melville explained, “I engage that the story shall contain nothing of any sort to shock the fastidious. There will be very little reflective writing in it; nothing weighty. It is adventure. As for its interest, I shall try to sustain that as well as I can” (NN Correspondence 265). Melville’s attempt to write a story with “nothing weighty” is a reminder of how migrant fictions escape their own trajectories. To leave one’s home is a weighty matter. Why do we continue leaving native lands to come to the United States? Maybe to get away from the “tyranny of the father” or the “faithlessness of love” or even an attempt to see the City of Brotherly Love. Perhaps we flee political oppression or social hardship, most recently the violence plaguing Central America. And why do people stay? Certainly opportunity, and for some that may be as simple as a low-wage job and a place to live. Israel Potter reminds us that for some contemporary migrants, work can overtake their lives. Despite hardships, including the type of hard labor that Israel Potter did, migration is also an adventure and one that demands a gamut of tones: hopeful, adventurous, sad. If inspired to go back to an imagined place of origin, one likely will find “the roads had years before been changed” and “new orchards, planted from other suckers, and in time

162 L e v i a t h a n Israel Potter Deported grafted, throve on sunny slopes near by, where blackberries had once been picked by the bushel” (191). These lines are a reminder that someone deported may not be able to return to something that resembles a home. National reintegration may be an impossibility. As a wandering novel with a wandering character, Israel Potter pushes us to consider how easily national belonging can be undone. What the book shares with Latino/a/x studies is a concern about the ways national subjects can become unrecognizable, even when they win medals in a US imperialist conflict. This matter of the unfinished business of the American revolution is not only about the United States but about the rest of the Americas and the world. Israel Potter calls attention to the ways refugees and migrant workers are expelled from the nation when they are rejected as being foreign or as not belonging within the national space—and even a decorated veteran can face deportation because bureaucrats and immigration enforcement police do not see him as belonging to the nation. Like Israel, today people are being ejected from the nation-state by “certain caprices of law.”

Notes 1 My thanks to the organizers of the Twelfth International Melville Conference, Melville’s Origins, particularly Jennifer J. Baker. My appreciation to John Bryant, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Timothy Marr, Kevin Hayes, and Samuel Otter for including my work on Melville in their collec- tions and to Sam for keeping me in the loop with Leviathan. I enjoy ongoing conversations about Melville with Jesse Alemán, Wyn Kelley, Elisa Tamarkin, Chris Castiglia, Hester Blum, and my collaborator Kirsten Silva Gruesz. I also thank those who asked questions and gave me comments after the lecture, as I have integrated additional references. Most of all, I thank my dissertation director and longtime mentor, Robert S. Levine, who gave me a copy of his edition of Israel Potter and signed (or assigned) it as “summer beach reading.” That is the beloved copy that I used to develop and write this lecture. 2 My use of Latino/a/x reflects debates about the naming of the field and ethnic labels used in self-identification. The usage of Latino/a over the last twenty years was intended to raise awareness about gender differences, but more recently, some scholars have called for the use of Latinx as a way to push past the binary opposition of male and female. In turn, Latinx is increasingly used as a reference to an entire population, which then raises questions about X as an imposition on people who might identify by gender (e.g. Latina). For an insightful discussion of the issues raised by Latinx, see Rodriguez, “X Marks the Spot.” A book that considers the indeterminacy of X and its relationship to contemporary global politics is Milian, LatinX. 3 For an account of the treatment of veterans of the Vietnam War, see Wright, Enduring Vietnam, 319–36. 4 My facetious point does raise the question of whether his last name and blond hair would protect Potter from the treatment given to Ramos-Gomez. 5 The literature on transnationalism and labor is considerable. For a pioneering study, see Basch et al. For a more recent consideration of transnational labor from Mexico, see Deborah Cohen. 6 Originally serialized in Putnam’s in 1854–55, Israel Potter was also published as a book in 1855. 7 My point here is that neither biography nor travel account can close off generic possibilities. I agree with Hennig Cohen when he writes, “The array of literary forms comprising Israel Potter, some of them well developed and others inchoate, suggests Melville’s impatience with the limitations of literary form” (299).

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8 For a discussion of Paine’s influence on Spanish American revolutionaries in the early nineteenth century, see my forthcoming book Letters from Filadelfia. 9 The translation was published by a New York bookseller looking to tap into the Span- ish-language reading market. 10 Mier differed from Potter in that the priest had powerful benefactors throughout his life, which meant he did not suffer abject poverty or struggle in low-wage work. For a biography of Mier, see Domínguez Michael.

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———. Moby-Dick. 2nd Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Hershel Parker and Harrison Hayford. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. ———. The Refugee. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson and Brothers, 1865. Milian, Claudia. LatinX. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2019. Paine, Thomas. Collected Writings. New York: Library of America, 1995. Pernot, Laurent. Rhetoric in Antiquity. Trans. W. E. Higgins. Washington, D.C.: Catholic U of Amer- ica P, 2005. Rivera, Tomás. . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra / . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him. Houston: Arte Público, 1995. Rodriguez, Richard T. “X Marks the Spot.” Cultural Dynamics 29.3 (2017): 202–13. Rosenberg, Eli. “A Latino Marine Veteran Was Detained for Deportation. Then ICE Realized He was a Citizen.” washingtonpost.com. 16 Jan. 2019. Web. Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile, and Other Essays.Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000. Schmidt Camacho, Alicia. Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the US-Mexico Border- lands. New York: New York UP, 2008. Silva, Daniella. “ACLU Says Records Show Racial Profiling, Mocking of Marine Detained by ICE.” nbcnews.com. 17 Jan. 2019. Web. “T. B. Peterson and Brothers’ Publications.” The American Booksellers Guide. Dec. 1868. Turpin, Zachary. “Melville’s Letter to the World.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 19.1 (March 2017): 8–11. Webster, Daniel. Webster’s First Bunker Hill Oration. Ed. Louise Manning Hodgkins. Boston: Leach, Sewell, and Sanborn, 1889. Williams, Stanley Thomas. The Spanish Background of American Literature. New Haven: Yale UP, 1955. Wright, James. Enduring Vietnam: An American Generation and Its War. New York: St. Martin, 2017. Zaller, Robert. “Melville and the Myth of Revolution.” Studies in Romanticism 15.4 (Fall 1976): 607–22. Zaveri, Mihir, and Annie Correal. “Trump National Golf Club in NY Fires Undocumented Workers, Lawyer Says.” The New York Times. 26 Jan. 2019. Web.

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