Reading Melville’s magazine writing as pioneer readers once read it in the 1850s is no longer possible. Contemporary critics cannot recreate, for want of resources, how those readers chanced upon anonymous stories in Putnam’s and Harper’s and skimmed, dismissed, or perhaps even reread them in the drawing room, the railway carriage, or the library. The opinions of professional reviewers of The Piazza Tales are poor substitutes; like us, they could never not know they were reading Melville. The book cover and the contents page of whatever edition we present-day Melville readers hold in our hands remind us that we are trapped in what psychologists call ironic processing: try not to think about Melville’s authorship when reading “Bartleby, the Scrivener” or “Benito Cereno” and all one sees is Rodney H. Dewey’s 1861 photograph, from which Melville stares back defiantly, arms folded, hands withdrawn.
This chapter offers alternative speculations on how to cope with this dilemma rather than a solution to it. Primarily I concentrate on the one thing a contemporary reader can do: read Melville’s work as magazine writing by also reading the other material among which it was embedded when first published. The different magazine pieces that appeared in Putnam’s or Harper’s may not have been written in dialogue with one another, but for the reader they were all part of her or his experience of the magazine; they were the paratextual apparatus readers often take for granted—titles, subtitles, prefaces, epigraphs, illustrations, book covers, blurbs, dust jackets, and so on—that in Gérard Genette’s words “surround” and “extend” a text “to ensure the text’s presence in the world.”1 While magazines exhibit many of the same paratextual components one finds in books and book publishing, they also have their own paratextual systems.
A magazine is most like an edited book that contains pieces by different authors, but unlike an edited book, because it has a title—Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art, for instance—that reappears periodically with new sections written by sometimes the same but also different authors. One reason why Putnam’s was not a book in the 1850s was because it paginated continuously—six issues to a volume—and printed two columns to the page rather than one. Each article published within an issue one might consider a text, but each issue of Putnam’s is also a text formally sealed by front and rear covers. And the collection of six issues into a volume creates another text when that volume is bound and published in book format. Genette describes paratextuality as “first and foremost a treasure trove of questions without answers.”2 The first questions one might ask of magazine paratexts are: What exactly constitutes a magazine text? Where exactly does a magazine text begin and end? And how viable is it to think of Melville’s magazine pieces as self-sufficient texts one can extract from the pages of Putnam’s and Harper’s without fundamentally altering their constitution?
The textual boundaries of magazine writing are not immediately obvious. Consider the example of Melville’s “The Encantadas.” Where and what is this story? In Melville’s lifetime, something titled “The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles” appeared five times. Three of these occasions were the monthly installments Putnam’s published in March, April, and May 1854, which appeared under the pseudonym Salvator R. Tarnmoor. To ensure readers did not lose track of the whole of which each installment was a part, Putnam’s added a suffix at the end of the first two months: “(To be continued).” In parts 2 and 3, after the title and pseudonym but before the sketches restarted, the magazine reminded readers these sketches had antecedents: “(Continued from page 319)”; “(Concluded from page 355).” The division of the sketches between issues probably owed more to the physical space each took up than to natural breaks in the story. Putnam’s operated on the basis that articles were no longer than ten to twelve pages. The division of “The Encantadas” into sketches certainly made breaks less intrusive than in either “Bartleby, the Scrivener” or “Benito Cereno,” whose narrative impetus this limit suspended. With its multi-sketch format, “The Encantadas” is actually a rare form of magazine writing: a serialization within a serialization.
Alert readers no doubt also spotted that Putnam’s made a mistake by jumping from Sketch Sixth to Sketch Eighth in the April issue, a mistake repeated when “The Encantadas” appeared for the fourth time: the compilation of the six issues from January to June 1854 that was volume 3 of Putnam’s. This mistake remained because the volume bound together coverless issues of the magazine (or reprinted them from the same stereotype plates). The fifth appearance of “The Encantadas” was in The Piazza Tales, published by Dix & Edwards in May 1856. Minus the pseudonym and with the numbering of the sketches corrected, the book of collected magazine pieces introduced Melville on its title page as “AUTHOR OF ‘TYPEE,’ ‘OMOO,’ ETC., ETC., ETC.” The etceteras give some sense of the quantity of Melville’s output, but by hiding Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre they also skip conveniently across works whose qualities many readers and critics struggled to discern, to the extent that they were clearly not worth advertising. The full title of “The Encantadas” gained a semicolon and moved a comma to become “The Encantadas; or, Enchanted Isles.” And The Piazza Tales did correct one omission from the magazine version: a symbol in Sketch Fourth meant to indicate the shape of Albermarle and Narborough Island. The magazine version prepared readers for this symbol—“A familiar diagram will illustrate this strange neighhourhood”—but what followed was two blank lines.3 The missing “letter” restored to The Piazza Tales version was an upper-case E rotated ninety degrees clockwise, although this still incorrectly visualized the shape of Albermarle Isle. The E needed to rotate 180 degrees (PT 609).
Each encounter with these iterations of “The Encantadas” marks a different reading event. At each point the nature of the text is different. The treasure trove of questions about these events might include: What responses did serialization produce? Did readers rejoice when they reached the end of the first installment and saw there was more to come of “The Encantadas”? Or did they sigh with disappointment because they knew next month’s issue would contain one fewer readable article? What was the consequence of the missing “letter” and the absence of Sketch Seventh? Did readers sit bemused and give up on a story and a magazine proofed so incompetently? Or did they move on forgivingly because the sketches were so enjoyable? How did readers respond if their subscription to Putnam’s started with the April or May issue? Did they track down earlier issues or remain satisfied with reading only part of some larger work? What nods of recognition did the buyers of The Piazza Tales, or readers of reviews of that book, exhibit—and how did it make them reassess their first reading of Salvator R. Tarnmoor’s story of the same name—when they saw Melville’s name? Or had they never heard of him before now? And had they forgotten reading the serialized version of the story? Did they not know, or care, that the sketches appeared first in Putnam’s? Or did they, after reading The Piazza Tales, rush out and buy the “entirely New and Uniform Edition”—all five volumes—of the works of George William Curtis advertised along with other books and journals at the end of the volume?
Genette is right to suggest that questions of this sort have no answers. But asking them is important nonetheless. They help remind us that our reading habits and expectations of writing are often stubborn, predictable, and partial; that a text is a material object with which we interact and not merely language and narrative we interpret. When Melville reviewed a new edition of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Red Rover for The Literary World in March 1850, he took the opportunity to concentrate his entire review on the book’s “sober hued muslin” binding (PT 237). He was particularly enthused by the care taken by the book’s publisher in stamping in relief on the covers a “horse-shoe,” an object which “in all honest and God-fearing piratical vessels is invariably found nailed to the mast” (PT 237–38). How one defines a text—as content, as cover, as inside or outside—alters the interpretations and thoughts one deploys to make sense of that text.
The textual boundaries of Melville’s magazine writing are much less fixed than the subsequent reprinting of stand-alone stories suggests. In later collections they appear only to stand in relation to one another, but when first published they bled into their surroundings. And like a territory subject to state and federal laws, at some crossover point each of Melville’s magazine pieces is also part of another text whose estate is the broader contents of an issue, a volume, or a whole run of Putnam’s or Harper’s; the cosmos of magazine publishing, in which Charles Briggs saw Putnam’s as one speck of star-dust, is an even larger master text. Melville’s magazine writing and the content adjacent to it were for readers of Putnam’s and Harper’s all part of the magazine text. The individual pieces published in a magazine—each poem, tale, sketch, and essay—were therefore paratexts for each other in the same way that titles, subtitles, footnotes, and illustrations within each piece were paratexts to those pieces.
This is a more liberal interpretation than perhaps Genette intended when defining paratexts. But few of Melville’s pieces for Putnam’s and Harper’s were reprinted during his lifetime. There is little work to do, therefore, in assessing the paratexts of reprinting as Ryan Cordell has done for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad.”4 But magazines bring paratextuality much more closely into the ambit of intertextuality; magazine texts reside together more intimately than do book texts, and the magazine is a different kind of textual system that requires its own parameters.5 Magazines embedded Melville’s writing among a host of other material, and these are the paratexts this chapter engages. This sometimes means looking at pieces directly preceding or following Melville’s writing in pages of the magazine, sometimes pieces in different issues or across different magazines; and sometimes Melville’s writing is its own paratext.
One role of magazines was to strike up conversations with readers. This took the form of founding statements, publication of readers’ letters and work by unknown writers, and editorial reviews of past volumes and projections of future contents. The subscription method of paying for a magazine established a reader’s investment and a publisher’s commitment to continue the conversation over the next year. The pieces in each month’s issue also spoke to one another for the reader just as one part of a novel’s narrative speaks to another. In this chapter I listen to Melville’s writing as it was part of these conversations. The thoughts and feelings of pioneer readers of Melville’s magazine writing may be lost, but one line of productive speculation is to ask, What meanings does Melville’s writing accrue when juxtaposed against fellow-traveling magazine writing? This kind of paratextual criticism can supplement a contextual criticism that treats Melville’s writing as most adjacent to the tides of historical and social events. His writing was certainly adjacent to these tides, but it was borne across their currents in the holds of Putnam’s and Harper’s. These magazines were not rudderless and drifting ghost ships; they were sturdy vessels that plotted courses through storms. Harper’s claimed to offer the American people “the unbounded treasures of the Periodical Literature of the present day.”6 Embedded among the cargo of these treasures, Melville’s writing sparkles anew when caught in their reflected glister.
The August 1854 issue of Putnam’s was the only occasion during Melville’s magazine career when he published more than one piece of writing in the same number. The second installment of “Israel Potter; or, Fifty Years of Exile” appeared as the third item in the magazine.7 Picking up the eponymous war veteran’s story after his escape from English captors, chapters IV through VII follow him on his journey toward and through London and his subsequent dispatch to Paris, where he meets Benjamin Franklin. The preceding item in the magazine was Melville’s “The Lightning-Rod Man,” a four-page sketch about the standoff during a New England thunderstorm between a pushy salesman of lightning conductors and a skeptical narrator. In this instance, and unbeknown to the magazine’s reader, the proximity of a lightning-rod man and America’s very own lightning-rod pioneer meant that Melville’s anonymously published writings acted as their own paratexts.
Melville wrote “The Lightning-Rod Man” in the spring of 1854, and Hershel Parker suggests he delivered it to Putnam’s sometime close to April 1.8 Melville sent sixty pages of his suggested new serial to George Palmer Putnam on June 7, 1854, nearly two weeks after he first sent it to Harper’s. Melville wrote the pieces, then, at roughly the same time. There can be no question of authorial intentionality in the proximity of “The Lightning-Rod Man” and Franklin’s first appearance in chapter VII of “Israel Potter”; Melville had no control over when Putnam’s published his work. No proof exists, either, that the juxtaposition of Melville’s two musings on Franklin was the result of someone in the editorial office connecting up the dots. But it is not impossible to rule out editorial intentionality, especially when the first item in the August 1854 issue of Putnam’s—directly preceding “The Lightning-Rod Man” and “Israel Potter”—was an essay titled “The Smithsonian Institution: Its Legitimate Mission.” The essay’s author we now know was the doctor turned journalist and ornithologist Thomas Mayo Brewer. In the air and on the pages of this issue of Putnam’s were science, the history of science, the advancement of knowledge, and the American men on whose ideas future development would proceed. And electricity was central to this discussion.
When his Putnam’s essay appeared Brewer was editor of the Boston Atlas. He first corresponded with George Palmer Putnam in December 1852, when he offered to advertise the new magazine and other of Putnam’s publications in his newspaper. Appealing to Putnam’s faith in quality, Brewer ventured that the Atlas “is the largest of any of the large commercial papers, of permanent subscribers among the best classes of our citizens, a much more valuable list than that of the penny, or the two-penny journals, even though the latter may boast a numerical advantage.”9 In his next contact with Putnam Brewer discussed the possibility of an essay on the Smithsonian, and Putnam clearly agreed to publish it.
Brewer’s essay is sober but evangelizing. Bolstered with the kind of discursive footnotes one finds in Putnam’s at this time but never in Harper’s, it argues that the purpose of the Smithsonian Institution is to advance and disseminate knowledge. Congress was impeding this mission by decreeing the institution spend half its income on a gallery of fine arts, various lecture series, and the building itself. In supporting Joseph Henry, the institution’s first secretary, the essay intervened in a long-running dispute over resources between Henry and the Smithsonian’s librarian, Charles Coffin Jewett: Henry wanted more money for research and original publication; Jewett wanted more for the library and museum. Jewett lost, and Henry dismissed him in July 1854, just as Putnam’s published Brewer’s essay. The tone of Brewer’s assessment of Henry was very different from an earlier depiction of him in the September 1853 issue of Putnam’s Monthly. Edward Bissell Hunt described Henry as “a hale and rather portly man, with a face alternating between abstraction and a very kindly consciousness.” Although recognizing his skills as a scientist, Hunt indulged in underhand criticism of Henry by arguing that he was much better qualified as a researcher than an administrator; the implicit judgment in Hunt’s belief that “he is busy with what others, doubtless, could do as well” is that there were men with more suitable qualities who would better do the job of running the Smithsonian.10
These turf wars between researchers and administrators, advancers and institutionalizers of knowledge, are pertinent to Melville’s depictions of science and Franklin, given Joseph Henry’s area of research expertise. In the International System of Units, the “henry”—or the symbol H—measures inductance. Henry was a pioneer of electromagnetic science. He and the British scientist Michael Faraday both discovered electromagnetic self-induction during independent experiments in 1831. Faraday is better known than Henry now by virtue of publishing first, but Henry was the early nineteenth-century inheritor of Franklin’s experiments with electricity. Faraday himself once assured one of Henry’s former Princeton students, Theodore Cuyler, that “by far the greatest man of science your country has produced since Benjamin Franklin is Professor Henry.” Samuel Morse’s telegraph put to practical use Henry’s work on the electromagnetic relay. We also know that Henry taught Melville at the Albany Academy in 1831.11
Franklin is the subject of a good deal of comment in critical treatments of both “The Lightning-Rod Man” and Israel Potter, but only Joshua Matthews brings the two pieces together. Even then the juxtaposition is fleeting; they are simply examples of “other uses of Franklin in fictional pieces composed and published at the same time.”12 Brewer’s essay attracts no attention. But the contiguity of the three pieces can add to our understanding of Melville’s magazine writing. Perhaps rather than two texts, “The Lightning-Rod Man” and the four chapters of “Israel Potter” make sense as a new hybrid text. Elements of a larger text purchased and read as the August issue of Putnam’s, this hybrid text has consequences for the reading of its own elements. Rather than trying to interpret the two pieces separately in their own contexts and traditions, their publication as pieces of magazine writing in the same number alongside Brewer’s essay affects the interpretation of them against and within each other. The paratext of “The Lightning-Rod Man” puts into new light the depiction of Franklin and Franklinesque lore in chapter VII of “Israel Potter” and vice versa. Brewer’s essay on the Smithsonian provides a new frame for understanding Melville’s pieces. Putting the paratexts to work opens a new dialogue.
Melville does not sugar-coat Franklin’s legacy in either story. “The Lightning-Rod Man,” Allan Emery concludes, depicts the way that “science turned people into images of Franklin at his worst: the paranoid technician.”13 For a magazine so supportive of science that the word appeared in its title, Putnam’s puts into odd juxtaposition Brewer’s support for Joseph Henry’s scientific mandate and Melville’s critique, none of which appears particularly well disguised. As a paratext, Brewer’s essay shows that Melville’s pieces do not align with a fixed magazine position but present an alternative point of view on issues consonant with the magazine’s broader interests. What made the pieces suitable for Putnam’s was Melville’s use of magazine conventions to express his ideas.
“The Lightning-Rod Man” and chapter VII of “Israel Potter” converse with history and the history of science as their effects are felt in more mundane domesticated conflicts. The authoritative footnotes Brewer includes in his essay extend the conversation to other voices outside the magazine; there are quotations from Senator James Pearce’s report on the distribution of Smithson’s fund and from a lecture delivered by Joseph Henry. Melville instead strikes up a dialogue with his magazine surroundings by enacting this dialogue in dialogue form. Brewer speaks to Joseph Henry’s detractors by defending the right of the scientist of electromagnetism to implement Smithson’s vision over that of the bureaucrats and financiers. Both of Melville pieces proceed by way of a battle of wits between two antagonists: the lightning-rod man and the narrator; Franklin and Israel Potter. In Melville’s world, his fictional conversations say something about the nature of conversation itself.
Both scenes take place in a single room and proceed mainly by way of direct speech after introducing and describing the lightning-rod salesmen and Franklin. Melville’s salesman is in the business—like Morse—of practical application, though the story says more about what happens when that application veers away from the optimism of invention and how such optimism itself is delusional. The lightning-rod man first intrudes on the narrator’s hospitality; then zealously espouses the practical benefits of his conductor, now an object of commercial exchange rather than enlightenment experiment: “Hark! Quick,” he says at another crash of thunder, “look at my specimen rod. Only one dollar a foot” (PT 121). And he maintains his blinkered pitch even as the narrator, refusing to be gulled by the sales patter, points out instances when rods fail. The same tension Brewer identifies between Smithson’s expectations for the institution and the practicalities that result after the interventions of Congress are evident in the disparity between the thrill of scientific discovery and the degraded performance of Melville’s commercial lightning-rod man.
The narrator of “The Lightning-Rod Man,” on the other hand, is a benevolent figure happy to take in strangers to his house and comfortable with the art of conversation. Despite defying both his opening attempts—the thunderstorm is not “fine,” says the stranger, but “awful”; “Not for worlds!” will he stand on the hearth as directed—the narrator continues by jokingly comparing the tripod-holding intruder to the classical figure of Jupiter Tonans (PT 118). The salesman quickly shows his sly aptitude in the conversational arts; his manner and what conversation he proffers are all part of his sales pitch. While the narrator takes exception to being ordered around in his own home, the salesman achieves his intention of turning the conversation to his business as he forces the narrator to ask of this rude intruder: “If you come on business, open it forthwith. Who are you?” (PT 120). Once he knows the stranger’s business, the battle of wits commences.
If the salesman wins the opening gambit by forcing the narrator to engage him on matters of business, his mirage of pseudo-knowledge also contains the means by which the narrator sees through it. When the salesman explains in a patronizing tone—“Do you comprehend?”—that lightning passes from earth to the clouds in a “returning-stroke,” the narrator is inspired with confidence rather than alarmed (PT 122). What the narrator understands by the “returning-stroke” he does not say. But this moment marks the point at which he feels confident enough to regain authority in his own home. He is, he says, content to place his trust in God and sends the “false negotiator” packing as the “scroll of the storm is rolled back” to show the house undamaged (PT 124).
Melville dismantles the hubris of science as it turns facts and principles into language and discourse. The language of science in the mouth of the lightning-rod salesman is piously didactic and illusory; the salesman commands and conjures at the same time. As the response to the call of Brewer’s essay, “The Lightning-Rod Man” undercuts the suggestion that science leads benignly. Soliciting Putnam to publish the essay, having first warmed him up, shows Brewer’s strategic craft. What Putnam or anybody else working for the magazine knew of the infighting at the Smithsonian is hard to tell, but the essay was part of a struggle for power that science was fighting in order to secure its own institutionalization. In that process the magazine was one location in which protagonists used the dark arts of persuasion. What Melville does in “The Lightning-Rod Man” is to take one step back and make conversation itself the object of study. Rather than the rights and wrongs of arguments, “The Lightning-Rod Man” asks on what grounds a listener or a reader should judge arguments trustworthy.
Chapter VII of “Israel Potter” continues this dialogue in paratextual relationship to “The Lightning-Rod Man.” The stakes of the analysis are loftier, although the disparity between antagonists makes it a slightly different conversation. In place of the lightning-rod salesmen there is the horse’s mouth: Franklin, the “sage” of legend for whom readers are well prepared by the chapter’s subtitle. Israel, they are told, will find Dr. Franklin “right learnedly and multifariously employed” (IP 37). The vernacular “right” and the verbose “multifariously” create a greater distance between the subservient, uneducated Israel and Franklin the philosophe than between the narrator and the lightning-rod salesman. The sense of distance is reinforced as Melville describes the “presence” of the man in whose company Israel finds himself. Franklin is one part intellectual, two parts alchemist. He is surrounded by the trappings of science and knowledge—pamphlets, books, and printed documents spanning many different subjects—but is wearing a dressing-gown “embroidered with algebraic figures like a conjuror’s robe” when Israel first meets him; he sits “at a huge claw-footed old table, round as the zodiac,” and the walls of his room have “a necromantic look” (IP 38). This was the first chapter of the serial Melville composed from his own imagination. The earlier chapters he based largely on the original source for the story, Henry Trumbull’s The Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter. In imagining Franklin, Melville layers the trappings of wisdom from different ages; the modern man of science is the occultist of yore. As responsibility for knowledge of the world passes from one perspective to another, the depiction of Franklin suggests that current advancers of knowledge are prone to inherit the deficiencies of their predecessors.
As soon as Israel enters his company Franklin becomes the “grave man of utility” who suggests writing a pamphlet on the dangers of boots with high heels when he sees Israel’s footwear, warns of the irrationality of tight shoes, and reels off aphorisms at every opportunity. Before Israel has managed two whole sentences, Franklin has told him two ineluctable truths: “Had nature intended rational creatures [to wear tight shoes] . . . she would have made the foot of solid bone, or perhaps of solid iron, instead of bone, muscle, and flesh”; and “Always get a new word right in the first place, my friend, and you will never get it wrong afterwards” (IP 40). More quickly follow, and Israel is trapped like a fly in the web of Franklin’s linguistic dexterity; each effort he makes at conversation is pulled apart and thrown back at him with some accompanying nugget of wisdom. In “The Lightning-Rod Man” the narrator can more than stand up for himself, but Israel is not in a fair fight in this chapter. He is sent off to bed with Poor Richard’s Almanack to read after dinner, which “in view of our late conversation,” Franklin tells him, “I commend to your earnest perusal” (IP 45). There is in truth little conversation; Franklin simply dispenses language.
Chapter VIII of “Israel Potter” in the September issue reintroduced readers of Putnam’s to Franklin and offered a fuller appraisal of Franklin the sage. The narrator is more respectful of his achievements, but the Franklin who seeks the company of the Parisian literati—“a soul with many qualities, forming of itself a sort of handy index and pocket congress of all humanity”—also “needs the contact of just as many different men, or subjects, in order to the exhibition of its totality.” When conversing outside of this network such “exhibition” loses its luster. The narrator notes how Franklin’s “casual private intercourse with Israel, but served to manifest him in his far lesser lights; thrifty, domestic, dietarian, and, it may be, didactically waggish” (IP 48). The showman becomes the dogmatist.
Melville’s lightning-rod man is the redacted Franklin, one without the articulacy, the knowledge, or the wit, who tramps New England evading the “dissuasive” communal conversation the narrator undertakes with his neighbors (PT 124). Intruding into people’s homes for private conversations, he manifests those “lesser lights” in his sales pitch and his hectoring tone. Like the humble Israel, prospective customers are in danger of being mesmerized by a conjurer’s tricks with words. What they need to repel intruders is the “returning-stroke” of their own conversation. For the narrator of “The Lightning-Rod Man” this is his trust in God’s ordained fate; more generally it is the belief in one’s own voice. Eventually Israel recognizes that every time Franklin enters the room “he robs me . . . with an air all the time, too, as if he were making me presents” (IP 53). Seeking help in his dilemma from Poor Richard’s Almanack, Israel summons the confidence to see through Franklin’s talk: “‘Oh, confound all this wisdom! It’s a sort of insulting to talk wisdom to a man like me. It’s wisdom that’s cheap, and it’s fortune that’s dear. That ain’t in Poor Richard; but it ought to be,’ concluded Israel, suddenly slamming down the pamphlet” (IP 54).
The problem with both Franklin and the lightning-rod man is that they are men who want to talk but who brook no dialogue. Heard from their own position their ideas sound authoritative; heard from the position of an interlocutor the same ideas control and deceive. Though written separately and contingently juxtaposed in the August issue of Putnam’s, Melville’s two pieces introduce this interlocutory party to the conversation. Read forward and backward as each other’s paratexts, and as paratexts of Brewer’s essay on the Smithsonian, Melville’s pieces foreground dialogue as a form that pulls the rug from under monologue. “The Lightning-Rod Man” converses with Brewer’s certainties about science; through conversation the piece unpicks the debased offspring that follow from even the most important scientific ideas. Chapter VII of “Israel Potter” mirrors the dialogic structure of “The Lightning-Rod Man” but puts different personalities in dialogue. The stories speak across each other’s borders so that one is able to imagine how the narrator of “The Lightning-Rod Man” might react differently to humble Israel—both hail from the Berkshire Hills—when faced with Franklin’s aphorisms and gobbets of wisdom. His treatment of the salesman suggests he would give them short shrift. And that poor Israel might, in turn, be the kind of customer gulled by the salesmen.
Melville’s two pieces remind the Putnam’s reader that if science is to manage the way the world is known then skeptics still have a role to play in holding science’s image of itself to account. With its multi-author format, incessant production cycle, and juxtaposition of nonfiction and fictional forms, a magazine like Putnam’s allows that accounting to take place because it is dialogue in action. Melville takes the structure of a form whose contents speak to each other and internalizes it in “The Lightning-Rod Man” and chapter VII of “Israel Potter.” As a result, characters are in dialogue with other characters in the same piece and also with their magazine bedfellows. These conversations are easy to miss when one reads writing that appeared first in magazines as stand-alone stories with firm borders. A story like “The Lightning-Rod Man” looks less like a discrete allegory of rebellion or religious revivalism when one thinks about it as magazine writing; it looks instead, to use George William Curtis’s phrase, “thoroughly magazinish.”
In the same issue of Putnam’s as “The Lightning-Rod Man” and Chapter VII of “Israel Potter,” a review essay appeared that carried on the magazine’s conversation with science and provided a paratext for the final piece of magazine writing Melville published for Curtis in May 1856. Both the unattributed essay, titled “Spiritual Materialism,” and Melville’s story, “The Apple-Tree Table; or, Original Spiritual Manifestations,” took up the conversation in the context of a cultural staple of the 1850s: the rise of the spiritualist movement following the revelations first of Shakers in the 1830s and early 1840s and then, more publicly and sensationally, of the Fox sisters in 1848, who claimed to be witnesses of spirit rappings.14 Itself a form of conversation between the living and the dead, spiritualism proved a phenomenon that set advocates and naysayers talking incessantly. One part of that conversation took place in magazines. For Genette, the permeable borders of a text create a zone of transaction that works as “an influence on the public, an influence that—whether well or poorly understood and achieved—is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it.”15 When Melville intervened in the discussion of spiritualism in the pages of Putnam’s, the voices he set chattering operated in just such a transaction zone.
Although “Spiritual Materialism” and “The Apple-Tree Table” appeared in different issues of Putnam’s, and more than eighteen months apart, Melville conceived and wrote his story well in advance of its publication. “The Apple-Tree Table” tells the story of a narrator and his wife and two daughters—the same family who appear in “Jimmy Rose” and “I and My Chimney”—as their lives are overtaken by mysterious ticking sounds coming from a small table the narrator retrieves, along with a copy of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, from a dusty and insect-infected garret. The daughters are convinced the ticking is evidence of spirits. Eventually two bugs eat their way out of the table and the ticking is explained. A version of a similar story appears at the end of Thoreau’s Walden, though Melville likely read about other instances in two sources: Timothy Dwight’s Travels in New England and New York (1821) and D. D. Field’s edited collection, A History of the County of Berkshire, Massachusetts (1829). A copy of the latter Melville read at the Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield. He also used the book when writing Israel Potter and his annotations remain intact. On the back flyleaf he wrote: “Table-Bug—Block bug.” He made the annotations between July 1850 and June 1854 (PT 722).
There is no extant correspondence between Melville and Putnam’s about “The Apple-Tree Table,” but Melville initially sent the story to Harper’s in the autumn of 1855, so he likely wrote it in the summer of 1855 or earlier. Several critics have proposed Mather’s Magnalia as an additional source for “The Lightning-Rod Man.”16 All this suggests that “The Apple-Tree Table” comes out of the same ideas and sources as the two pieces discussed above that appear with “Spiritual Materialism” in August 1854. The review essay is, then, an odd kind of hybrid paratext to “The Apple-Tree Table”: epitextual in the sense that it appears in a different issue (and volume); peritextual because it appears within that larger entity of Putnam’s Monthly—like Melville’s writing—and within the same issue to which “The Apple-Tree Table” is connected by its sources.
The substance of “Spiritual Materialism” is a skeptical account of the first volume of Spiritualism, by John Worth Edmonds and Dr. George T. Dexter, published in New York in 1853. The review opens with an epigraph from Act II, Scene 3 of Macbeth in which a hungover porter, stirred from his slumbers by the sound of MacDuff and Lennox knocking at the gates of Macbeth’s castle, makes comic asides about guests he imagines might be doing the knocking. The epigraph sets the mocking tone of the relentlessly logical consideration of the knockings heard by the Fox sisters in Rochester, New York, which are now, the reviewer claims, “echoing through all the limits of Christendom” and “turning the tables upon all unbelievers.” Tables in one form or another preoccupy the review. The object around which spiritualists sit and on which rappings are heard, the table is also the object that “takes to its legs and perambulates” according to some spiritualist accounts. But the reviewer’s position is that immaterial spirits cannot manifest themselves materially: “If a spirit finds no obstacle in high walls, and closed doors, and stopped cracks and keyholes hermetically sealed,” then “a table cannot by any possibility stand in his way, he cannot by any possibility personally push it, or maul it, or upset it.” Thus the argument is sealed. “The duty of a true man,” the reviewer says, is to “unveil the imposture—to make head against its encroachments, by fairly proving it unreasonable and dangerous,” a phenomenon that “strikes at the root of the ancient creeds of Christendom,” whose status the rest of the review defends.17
The events of “The Apple-Tree Table,” the narrator tells the reader, “happened long before the time of the ‘Fox girls,’” but the story is written in their shadow. And neither was this the first time Melville and the spiritualist sisters from western New York State shared magazine space. The March 16, 1850, edition of The Literary World carried a review of the recently published Explanation and History of the Mysterious Communion with Spirits. In this short book, Eliab Capron and Henry Barron relate the spirit-rapping experiences of John Fox and his daughters that follow them from their home village of Hydesville to nearby Rochester. The review is belittling and skeptical and ends with a joke at the Foxes’ expense: “If the spirit has any self-respect he will visit with indignation the Christy Minstrels, who have impiously lampooned his memory in the following conundrum:—‘Why is Rochester like a threepenny grocery?’ ‘Because it keeps bad spirits on the tap.’”18 The review does, however, disclose that the first spirit who contacted the sisters was a murdered peddler, though what he peddled—one hopes, of course, for lightning-rods—is not made clear. Only five pages earlier in the magazine there appeared a glowing review of Melville’s White-Jacket; immediately following the review of Capron and Barron’s book was Melville’s own review of Cooper’s The Red Rover, “A Thought on Book-Binding.”
A pattern of paratextual recursiveness begins to emerge when one notices these juxtapositions. The review of a book on the Fox sisters appears beside Melville’s entirely paratextual interpretation of Cooper; in a different magazine, the Fox sisters move from paratext to text as Melville incorporates them in “The Apple-Tree Table.” The essay on “Spiritual Materialism” in the August 1854 issue of Putnam’s is paratext to “The Lightning-Rod Man” and “Israel Potter” and its contents one part of the dialogue Melville engages in “The Apple-Tree Table” in a later issue of Putnam’s. Stamped through these texts, paratexts, and intertexts like a vein of quartz through a rock seam is the subject of Franklin’s scientific inheritance.
Franklin featured regularly as a communicant in séances because spiritualism, whatever its religious and supernatural dimensions, was also a product of the machine age. Rappings were a crude form of the code Morse invented for the telegraph. Where the telegraph enabled communication across geographical space, spiritualism claimed to enable communication across metaphysical space and time; the spiritualist body, in line with Franz Mesmer’s ideas about animal magnetism, became a telegraph machine transmitting words from one realm to another. The reviewer in “Spiritual Materialism” debunks the idea that spirits “possess something like the substance of electricity.” Because spirits are less dense than the force they are supposed to permeate, “they can no more affect such a force, or receive impressions from such a force, than they can directly affect or be influenced by objects visible and tangible to mortal senses.”19 But such arguments did not stop spiritualists from believing they could use magnetism and electricity to measure the invisible spirit world and thus legitimate their claims. One part of the spiritualist enterprise was to build and describe machines; in communications with the spirit world Franklin appeared carrying out his scientific experiments from beyond the grave.20
Science and spiritualism were not opposite poles of experience, then, nor mutually exclusive ways of perceiving and explaining the world. The language Melville uses to describe Franklin in “Israel Potter” already identifies something of the shaman in the scientist, and the proximate nature of these two roles continues in “The Apple-Tree Table.” In the garret, along with “broken-down old chairs, with strange carvings, which seemed fit to seat an enclave of conjurors,” the narrator finds markers of scientific experiment and discovery like those surrounding Franklin in his Parisian study: old documents, “a broken telescope, and a celestial globe staved in,” and “old vials and flasks” (PT 380). The “necromantic little old table” the narrator retrieves has two features “significant of conjurations and charms—the circle and the tripod” (PT 378). The table’s “three cloven feet” make it look like Franklin’s claw-footed table and an inverted version of the “tri-forked thing” the salesman carries in “The Lightning-Rod Man.” Melville then puts at the heart of his story a narrator confronted by a mystery—the ticking table—and the possible explanations that might solve the mystery for him as they find expression through his wife and daughters. Unlike other magazine pieces about spiritualism, where opinions were not always so carefully considered, Melville’s “The Apple-Tree Table” treads light-footedly between skepticism of the spiritualists and skepticism of the logicians and scientists.
Melville choreographs this dance through a narrator who is unsure of his own mind and prone to suggestion. Much of the story’s comic effect proceeds from these character traits; they also place the narrator in the same relation as 1850s magazine readers to the more strident discourses on spiritualism. The narrator is forced into conversation with these discourses as he talks with his wife and daughters and through his reading. If tables were for spiritualists the site of communion with each other and the dead, the table he brings down from the garret is for the narrator the place where he sits reading in his cedar-parlor, where the family eat breakfast and play cards, and over which they squabble.
On one side, the narrator is father to two daughters, Julia and Anna, liable to see spirits everywhere. On the other side is the narrator’s “matter-of-fact wife” to whom “the prejudices of Julia and Anna were simply ridiculous” (PT 381). The narrator is less harsh on his daughters than his wife, but once he starts reading Cotton Mather one evening he finds himself “starting at the least chance sound.” What perturbs him is that notwithstanding Mather’s “practical, earnest, upright” reputation, here is a man who can put forward convincing accounts of witchcraft and, what’s more, each case is “corroborated by respectable townsfolk, and, of not a few of the most surprising, he himself has been eye-witness” (PT 382). When the table begins ticking and he can find no explanation, Mather plays on his mind; of his daughters he confesses that “their example was catching.” He recovers equilibrium only by letting different people influence him: “Towards noon,” he says, “this sort of feeling began to wear off. The continual rubbing against so many practical people in the street, brushed such chimeras away from me” (PT 387). What the narrator thinks and feels, then, comes readily from outside himself, and like a spiritualist clairvoyant he is easily moved by external influences.
Invoking the Greek rationalist and materialist Democritus as comfort, the narrator repeats the kind of phrases one finds in “Spiritual Materialism”—“any possible investigation of any possible spiritual phenomena was absurd” (PT 388)—but quickly allows his eye to be distracted by his ear. Finding he can’t concentrate on reading, he once more hears the ticking table and finds that “the contest between panic and philosophy remained not wholly decided” (PT 388). When the first bug finally emerges from the table, Julia is convinced the insect is evidence of “witch-work” and both sisters persist in cries of “Spirits! spirits!” (PT 391). His wife’s reaction is “scornful incredulity”; she is “business-like” in sealing the hole in the table (PT 392). But the narrator finds himself with “feelings of a mixed sort” and in “a strange and unpleasing way,” he says, “I gently oscillated between Democritus and Cotton Mather,” though to wife and daughters he professes to be “a jeerer at all tea-table spirits” (PT 394).
When the second bug emerges the family tries to settle the cause of the matter by bringing in the naturalist Professor Johnson, who offers an entirely rational explanation: the bugs are the result of eggs laid in the wood many decades ago and have only now hatched and eaten themselves free. The professor, who sneers at Julia’s “spiritual hypothesis,” claims that some bug laid the eggs ninety years before the tree was felled and, given that the table is estimated to be eighty years old, this “would make one hundred and fifty years that the bug had laid in the egg. Such, at least,” the narrator says, “was Professor Johnson’s computation” (PT 397). When science is called in for proof, then, it can’t even be trusted to add up correctly. No wonder Julia still believes in spirits, though now in delight rather than terror.
Whereas the narrator never does say whether he comes down in favor of Democritus or Mather, his wife’s unfaltering skepticism and dismissal of anything but matter-of-fact explanations make her a static character who exerts little influence over the story or the reader. Like Franklin in “Israel Potter” and the peddler in “The Lightning-Rod Man,” she has a monologic view of the world and is quick to dispense her wisdom at the expense of others. Melville’s narrator lingers instead over his daughters. Julia and Anna show the capacity for change, and the final sentences of the story read like a defense of their position, for all they clutch at spiritualist explanation. Science and rationality offer only bad math and graceless sneering. The second bug may only live for a day, “but my girls have preserved it,” the narrator says. “And,” he continues proudly, just in case we disregard the girls too quickly, “whatever lady doubts this story, my daughters will be happy to show her both the bug and the table” (PT 397). It is the daughters who turn the events of the bug’s emergence into narrative and dialogue in their willingness to try to convince skeptics. What price Democritus and sneering in the face of wonder and conversation?
“The Apple-Tree Table” is another of Melville’s pieces of magazine writing that raises an epistemological dilemma. In “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” the narrator searches for the cockerel whose voice he can clearly hear. In “Bartleby, the Scrivener” there is the mystery of why Bartleby behaves the way he does. In “The Encantadas” the multiplication of perspective dislodges the security of any one of those perspectives. In “The Apple-Tree Table” the claims of science and the supernatural to explain the world are put into dialogue. The daughters rely on the evidence of “two sealing-wax drops designating the exact place of the two holes made by the two bugs” (PT 397), but this evidence is really only circumstantial. The holes and the preserved bugs do not explain. They are metonyms of a process in which, despite the same evidence, explanation works by argument and belief, expression and conviction: Professor Johnson’s account that the narrator finds “lucid” but “a little prosy”; and the daughters’ account of the “spiritual lesson” they have witnessed (PT 397).
The narrator finishes his story by likening the two holes made by the bugs to the spots “where the cannon balls struck Brattle street church” (PT 397), a reference to the siege of Boston at the beginning of the Revolutionary War. Like the bugs, the cannonballs are effects whose cause remains arguable. How the cannonballs are propelled at the church is a simple enough question to answer, as is how the bugs free themselves from the table. The whys and wherefores of how these events come to pass and what significance they carry require a different order of speculation. The church, like Brattle Street itself, was named after Thomas Brattle, a businessman more hostile than Cotton Mather to the Salem witch trials; his church subsequently attracted the ire of Mather by rejecting Calvinism for more tolerant and liberal forms of worship. These battles over belief and how religious men differently account for earthly phenomena prepare the ground for men like Franklin, whose sister was married by the minister of Brattle Street Church, and who corresponded regularly with Samuel Cooper during his time as minister at the church from 1743 to 1783. Overlapping with the liberalization of religious belief, the emergence of enlightenment science added new arguments and voices to the search for causes. Spiritualism was a subplot in the larger story of science’s gradual usurpation of religion. The odd intrusion of history at the end of “The Apple-Tree Table”—the link the narrator makes between bugs and cannonballs—brings into juxtaposition these shifting intellectual undercurrents; they are the paratexts Melville’s magazine writing engages in conversation.
Science and religion were also the evidential ground on which Americans and American magazines fought intellectual battles about race. The burgeoning fields of ethnology and ethnography gathered new archives that eventually found their way into public institutions like the Smithsonian; the interpretation of these archives provoked controversies about human origins and distinctions distorted by the sectionalism that would lead to the Civil War. Melville intruded directly into these controversies in “The ’Gees,” a short piece Harper’s published in March 1856.21
Like the narrators of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “The Fiddler” before him, the narrator of “The ’Gees” is also a writer, and he begins by observing the origins of his work: “In relating to my friends various passages of my sea-goings,” he says in a short introduction, many interlocutors express incomprehension when he uses the word ’Gee. On hearing this word, the narrator must interrupt himself—“and not without detriment to my stories”—to offer his listeners enlightenment. As a result, he goes on, “a friend hinted the advisability of writing out some account of the ’Gees, and having it published. Such as they are, the following memoranda spring from that happy suggestion” (PT 346). Melville’s own entry into print similarly resulted from relating stories about his time at sea to friends and family.22 But in “The ’Gees” the information the narrator passes on in the magazine is much more specialized: not tales and experiences but idiomatic language and local knowledge about a group of people set down in “memoranda” rather than in “A Peep” or “A Narrative” as in Typee and Omoo. Through the narrator’s claim that what follows results from conversation and dialogue with friends, “The ’Gees” enters the pages of the magazine to engage in conversation a different audience the narrator thinks might benefit from his understanding of the world. At the same time, and at a different level of knowingness, “The ’Gees” also opens up a dialogue with those who sought to apply a scientific method to the study of race and culture, the ethnologists and ethnographers whose work magazines advertised and reviewed and in whose shadow the magazines themselves published many pieces of writing about unfamiliar climes and their inhabitants.
Written in the register of instruction, then, at the same time as it instructs about Portuguese inhabitants of the Cape Verde Islands, “The ’Gees” instructs about the supply of other ethnological and ethnographic instruction magazine audiences consumed in the 1850s. As Carolyn Karcher notes, “The ’Gees” is a satire on ethnology and particularly the brand of ethnology practiced by Josiah Nott and George Gliddon in their much reprinted and popularized Types of Mankind (1854). Putnam’s considered Types of Mankind significant enough to make a long review of the book the first piece of their July 1854 issue.23 Karcher suggests that Melville wrote “The ’Gees” after reading it. She imagines that Melville “must have closed this number of Putnam’s with the foreboding that Types of Mankind . . . threatened to exert an influence as profound as it was pernicious.” “The ’Gees,” she argues, is his attempt “to beard the ethnologists in their laboratory.”24 The chronology certainly works: “The ’Gees” was one of the “brace of fowl” Melville sent Harper’s on September 18, 1854, though the piece remained unpublished for eighteen months (PT 714). And Karcher’s razor-sharp reading of “The ’Gees” shows how Melville establishes an analogy between ’Gees and African Americans and then parodies the language of ethnology, whose vocabulary creates and sustains racial hierarchies. Ultimately, she argues, “Melville undertook nothing less than to undermine the very basis of ethnology as a science classifying men according to observable criteria. In its place he advanced a unitary view of mankind.”25
That would be a heady achievement for any three-page magazine piece. Plucking “The ’Gees” out of Harper’s and only allowing it to talk to the Putnam’s review belies the nature of the ongoing conversation in both magazines about Nott and Gliddon’s book and the ideas Types of Mankind promoted. Continuing this chapter’s emphasis on paratexts and the dialogue in which magazines pieces engage, “The ’Gees” worked as a piece of magazine writing because it allowed Harper’s to continue its own skeptical attack on Types of Mankind, a position driven not by anti-racism but a religious skepticism about the pseudoscience of ethnology Nott and Gliddon practiced. During the eighteen months “The ’Gees” spent loitering in Harper’s offices, the conversation about human origins and distinctions continued; like an early guest at a party who ends up stuck at the side of the room away from the main action, “The ’Gees” relied on Harper’s to eventually shepherd it into a conversation in which the Putnam’s review was only one voice.
At the heart of the intemperate conversations about race in the 1850s were conflicting ideas about whether different races developed from a single point of origin or from multiple points. Types of Mankind does not stand in for a single ethnological view on this matter. There were ethnologists who disagreed with the arguments of the book, and many others who objected to conclusions the authors drew from scientific evidence. Even though the Putnam’s reviewer of Nott and Gliddon’s book was not one of them, many ethnologists, natural scientists, and educated commentators used the pages of magazines to make the unitary case for human origins that Karcher sees in “The ’Gees.”
The belief that races developed from multiple origins—polygenesis—flourished in the work of some influential American natural scientists and ethnologists, most notably Samuel Morton’s Crania Americana (1839). Morton argued that differences in skull sizes between races were too significant to be the result of common ancestry; the result of design instead, he argued, they indicated the long-standing separation of the races. Sharing the same classificatory impulse with many nineteenth-century attempts to better understand the human body, Morton’s work was similarly influential beyond the scientific domain and had social and ideological consequences. The history of these consequences—through social Darwinism, eugenics, and biological racism—is still with us; in 1854 it resulted in Types of Mankind, whose frontispiece carried an engraving of Morton in dedication.
The long Putnam’s review of this seven-hundred-page work followed up an earlier report on the impending publication of Nott and Gliddon’s book in March 1853. Just before a brief, disparaging comment about E. D. E. N. Southworth’s “ponderous” The Curse of Clifton, the magazine gave notice of “a work on the Types of Mankind” and expressed confidence “that it will be a book of great utility.”26 The full review first lays out the idea of monogenesis—racial development from a single point of origin—as supported by the Bible and existing science, and then goes on to defend polygenesis and the validity of the science Nott and Gliddon use to make their case. Literal readings of the Bible, the reviewer argues, are mistaken and scripture makes for poor evidence. Humans of all races certainly share more in common than they do with any other species: “A man is . . . entitled to every consideration that properly pertains to man, as separated from ape, baboon, bat, or any other creature.” But the reviewer is also clear that “so far as scientific and archaeological inquiries go, the preponderance of evidence is on the side of fixed and primordial distinctions among the races.”27 While Gliddon was primarily an Egyptologist, Nott was a trained physician, a slave owner, and an apologist for southern slavery. The review appeared as Godwin and Curtis stepped away from the magazine, but the appointment of Frederick Beecher Perkins hardly damaged the magazine’s antislavery sympathies. If the nature of the review is surprising for a progressive magazine, then it is a reminder that Putnam’s took no fixed progressively political line through the course of its brief history and that the magazine’s faith in science could lead it into dangerous territory when ethnologists like Nott and Gliddon used science to justify their political prejudices.
Frederick Douglass certainly understood the motives of those making the polygenist case. In “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered,” first a speech delivered at Western Reserve College in Ohio in July 1854, Douglass described Nott and Gliddon’s book as the “most compendious and barefaced” of attempts “to disprove the unity of the human family, and to brand the negro with natural inferiority.” Furthermore, he argued, “slaveholders have availed themselves of this doctrine in support of slaveholding. There is no doubt that Messrs. Nott, Gliddon, Morton, Smith and Agassiz were duly consulted by our slavery propagating statesmen.”28 And Putnam’s soon changed its mind about Types of Mankind with another essay, in January 1855, whose title, framed as a question—“Are all Men Descended from Adam?”—appears self-consciously to engage and rewrite the earlier title, “Is Man One or Many?” While the argument of this later piece is tortuous, especially without the sense of geological time or Darwinian evolution familiar to any present-day understanding of biological development, the conclusion is clear enough: “The various converging arguments from science, history, and tradition, as well as the deeper moral consciousness of the race, are, we conceive, conclusive of the unity of mankind.”29 The emphasis on religion in both the title and the argument of this essay addresses the larger battle between science and Christianity for intellectual priority. In the conversations about human origins, science and religion twisted around one another in odd shapes. Polygenists like Nott and Gliddon disparaged religion, but Christians could be polygenists, like the Unitarian Louis Aggasiz; monogenists defended their beliefs on scriptural grounds, or they could take on the polygenists on scientific grounds, like the Reverend John Bachman.30
So exercised was Harper’s by the arguments and implications of Types of Mankind that two consecutive editorials in September and October 1854 attempted to dispute the book and its findings. In tenor, as one might expect, these pieces lack the sharpness of Melville’s satire in “The ’Gees”; they operate not through punning and parody but direct hostility and aim to undermine polygenist arguments on first principles. Nonetheless, they show that Harper’s thought as little of ethnologists as did Melville. The first editorial mocks the presumption of scientists to know more than God, and of ethnologists it notes dismissively that “no show of second-hand learning in Egyptian antiquities, . . . no amount of facts even, or phenomena, in natural history, however soberly collected and carefully classified, can avail to decide the great question of origin while this higher law remains undiscovered and unrevealed.” There are, Harper’s argues, moral, logical, and metaphysical laws that are beyond the naturalist and that cannot “be reached by sense or observation.”31 There is something of the “The Apple-Tree Table” narrator’s residual trust in explanations beyond science here: a faith that material facts contain more than one can explain through science. For Harper’s this is true especially of Josiah Nott, who, it argues, is much less qualified to pass judgment on the physical world than the early British empiricist Francis Bacon. The second Harper’s editorial restates the monogenist argument, but faced with scientific and Christian defenses of slavery prefers the latter because the former is potentially much more destabilizing. The Christian position “will be found in the end to be the true conservatism.”32 The implicit thrust of this view in Harper’s is that science, and certainly the pseudoscience of ethnology, cannot sustain the claims it professes.
Given such hostility, it seems more likely that the magazine understood full well the satire of “The ’Gees.” The surprise is that they held back the piece for so long when it made excellent company for these “Editor’s Table” columns. When finally published, though, Melville’s piece also sat comfortably in the March 1856 issue, which continued a fascination with overseas spaces and races that the magazine treated with a casual orientalism common to both Putnam’s and Harper’s. The issue’s gateway to foreign exploration was an opening essay in which the landscape artist T. Addison Richards guided the reader on a richly illustrated tour of the Juniata River area of Pennsylvania. Noting the importance of Pennsylvania as a thoroughfare for immigrants, the piece ends by registering the arrival of the railways and the telegraph and the changes effected by modernization: “Steam and electricity must stir up the Juniata folk, as they are rattling the dry bones of all other communities.”33 Steam was the motor that took Commodore Matthew Perry on his expeditions to Japan in 1853 and 1854. The first of these trips forms the subject of the second article in the March 1856 issue. The essay describes the customs and appearance of Perry’s Japanese hosts, distinguishing between “the people generally,” who “are not remarkable for their good looks,” and the “higher classes,” who are “somewhat better looking.”34 After a piece on whaling on the high seas, which marks in passing the story of “Mocha Dick” and the whaleship Essex, the reader of Harper’s then embarks on “Passages of Eastern Travel,” where the narrator frames his account in the nostalgic and orientalizing discourse of a civilization in decline. “This worship, this creed,” he writes of Islam, “is approaching its end,” and the two hundred thousand people lying around him at night “are not worth the counting among the races of men” because “the end is coming.”35
All of these pieces deal with modernity’s futures in one form or another. Whether it is the extension of steam and electricity to rural Pennsylvania, Perry’s aggrandizing steam-powered trips to Japan, a whaling industry whose products would soon become obsolete, or the American perception of an ancient civilization supposedly in decline, Harper’s registers for its readers the friction of emergent and residual cultures and creeds and the peoples and races caught up in the structural shifts of power. Harper’s signaled its faith in industrial progress by printing and reprinting many articles about new industrial techniques and projects, in the United States and elsewhere.36 The magazine’s forward-looking approach to manufacturing and industry based on new scientific methods was entirely consistent with its orientalizing depiction of other races and its dismissal of the science ethnologists used to support their views on race and human distinctions. Dominion of man over man was the result of political forces; the question of human origin is a matter for a higher authority than science: “In the domain of mere facts, or observation,” the first “Editor’s Table” article on ethnology declares, “we will give all credit to the naturalist. But this inquiry stretches far away beyond his narrow sphere. It involves logical questions, moral questions, metaphysical questions. . . . Now science, commonly so called, can not settle these questions.”37 In the practical world of mechanical application, science has its place; beyond this practical arena science overreaches. “The ’Gees” makes a similar distinction while supporting the magazine’s antipathy toward ethnology.
Science first makes an appearance in “The ’Gees” when the narrator passes comment on the hardiness of the ’Gee. “Upon a scientific view,” he claims, “there would seem a natural adaptability in the ’Gee to hard times generally.” But the basis for such a scientific view remains undeveloped; to support his judgment the narrator reaches instead for religious analogy: “the kindly care of Nature in fitting him” for harsh experiences, “as for his hard rubs with a hardened world Fox the Quaker fitted himself, namely, in a tough leather suit from top to toe” (PT 347). To compare the skin of the ’Gee to the apocryphal suit George Fox stitched for himself means the narrator mixes up the natural and the man-made. If the suit for the shoesmith Fox was a practical garment he could make using his skills with a needle, to later admirers it symbolized his strength of character to withstand his spiritual battles with established religion. But science prided itself on empirical discovery, not on analogy and symbolism. The narrator’s choice of evidence lacks any scientific credibility. The scientific “view” is subjective and, as the narrator continues to dispense his judgments, “The ’Gees” knowingly unpicks the narrator’s own narrative of how one comes to know the ’Gee.
When he compares the ’Gee to livestock, the narrator dismisses the possibility that one can know either creature through intuition. To understand the ’Gee one must examine him like one examines a horse. After measuring and assessing physical attributes there is one other check to perform: “draw close to, and put the centre of the pupil of your eye—put it, as it were, right into the ’Gee’s eye; even as an eye-stone, gently, but firmly slip it in there, and then note what speck or beam of viciousness, if any, will be floated out” (PT 349). Physicians used eyestones—small stones with one flat and one convex side—to remove dirt and other particles from under the eyelid. Using one’s own eye as an eyestone, the narrator suggests here, finds no physical attributes and only imputes moral ones. Science, or the literal “scientific view,” is partial; as the narrator demonstrates, it is put to use diagnosing moral, not physical or biological, qualities.
Even after all manner of examination, the narrator readily admits “the best judge may be deceived.” So ship captains looking for deckhands should never negotiate with a ’Gee as a middleman, “because such an one must be a knowing ’Gee, who will be sure to advise the green ’Gee what things to hide and what to display, to hit the skipper’s fancy” (PT 349). Searching for knowledge, sailors are so easily deceived they must invent ever more cunning ways of preventing deception. One captain, Hosea Kean, goes ashore and surprises ’Gees in their homes to see them as they truly are: “By this means, more than once,” the narrator claims, “unexpected revelations have been made. . . . In the stall, not the street, he says, resides the real nag” (PT 350). Ethnologists keen to see a ’Gee for themselves should show caution when looking at those ashore in Nantucket or New Bedford; these are “sophisticated” not “green ’Gees” and “liable to be taken for naturalized citizens badly sunburnt.” The narrator cautions that “a stranger need have a sharp eye to know a ’Gee, even if he see him” (PT 351). To the ethnologist, one might object, sophistication and greenness should be irrelevant; the scientific study of race is concerned with the physical and biological qualities of the ’Gees as a group, not with their cultural performance. But the narrator of these “memoranda” demonstrates that ethnology always returns to ethnography. Relying on analogy and symbolism, cultural reference and moral distinction, the “scientific view” seeks evidence and truth only to find the sharpness of its own eye’s failings. In “The ’Gees,” the distinction the narrator makes between seeing and knowing means this satire on ethnology is also a satire on the epistemology of science and its failure to know even as it tries to establish the means of seeing by which it generates knowledge.
Melville trains his literary attention most vividly on race and disparities between seeing and knowing in “Benito Cereno,” written during the winter of 1854–55 and beside which “The ’Gees” looks like an apprentice piece. The later story takes the risk of forgoing topical references and allusions to science of the kind one finds in “The Lightning-Rod Man,” “Israel Potter,” “The Apple-Tree Table,” and “The ’Gees.” Much more important than race to one contemporary reviewer of The Piazza Tales was the story’s “thrilling, weird-like narrative.”38 The weirdness comes from the transfer of content to form; Melville wrote about race in his story at the level of narration, perspective, and literary language. Readers engaged in dialogue with their magazines, and other writers providing material for magazines, did not always want such boldness. Writing a story in such a manner produced something less beholden to magazine paratexts than some of Melville’s other work, even while the story relies on Amasa Delano’s account of his voyages published in 1817. George William Curtis’s declining opinion of “Benito Cereno” registers from an editorial perspective what Melville’s story tells from a literary perspective: that the mechanisms of racial dominion are embedded at a level more abstract than the public opinions of magazine book reviews, essays, and scientific pronouncements. The setting of the “blank ocean” against which Captain Delano finds the San Dominick appearing with “something of the effect of enchantment” loosens the story’s attachment to the world of New York so precious to Putnam’s and to the domestic scenes Melville populated in his other pieces (PT 50). Adrift in the South Pacific, “Benito Cereno” works its magic at a tangent to magazine paratexts.
One such paratext was “About Niggers,” a piece in the December 1855 issue of Putnam’s in which the final installment of “Benito Cereno” appeared. The essay covers ethnological ground once more and works ironically through a conversation between an unnamed editorial “I” representing Putnam’s and the figurative prig and naysayer Mrs. Grundy. Stereotypical black characters are introduced in order to undermine the bogus claims on which stereotypes rely. The piece deals with chattel and wage slavery, slave revolt, especially the Haitian Revolution and the role of Toussaint L’Ouverture, and concludes that black men are men who happen to be black and whose capacity for all manner of acts—passive and violent—confirms their human status. Though Delano’s encounter with the San Dominick took place in 1805, Melville set “Benito Cereno” in 1799, right in the middle of the Haitian Revolution, and the juxtaposition of the revelation of the slave revolt in the final episode of “Benito Cereno” alongside “About Niggers” is therefore notable both contextually and paratextually; the essay is of a piece with the increasing antislavery message Putnam’s published after 1854. Yet “Benito Cereno” surpasses at every turn the simplistic ironic form offered in “About Niggers,” which plays to the crowd like a politician on the stump in front of a captive audience. Like the satire of “The ’Gees” once we recognize it, the irony reinforces the opinions of those who already know better rather than changing the minds of those who do not. Melville tries a different form in “Benito Cereno.”
In the next chapter I look more closely at the power of story rewriting in “Benito Cereno” and Israel Potter, but in brief, what these cases both allow is for the distance of a minor historical drama to supplant the immediacy of more contemporary dramas whose intricacies exercise the pens of magazine writers, editors, and publishers in the mid-1850s. The cover of a real-life story frees rather than inhibits Melville, and “Benito Cereno” determinedly refuses to take the reader by the nose. The third-person narrator’s careful staging of Delano’s experience intervenes between author and reader; it withholds from, and discloses to, the reader crucial information in a way that the narrators of Melville’s other pieces do not. As Melville stares back defiantly from Rodney Dewey’s photograph, so his best narrators stoically resist the easy pleasures of the storyteller’s quick win: the hastily revealed piece of information with which to settle matters or the key that unlocks a mystery. The topical in the magazine world is soon last month’s topic. A story resists consignment to a back catalog in the degree to which it enables the means of its own rereading and later contemplation and transcends the paratext of publication.
The longevity of “Benito Cereno” results because the science in scientific racism is expunged as an object of debate by the narrative and the reader is left facing a conceptual problem much more unsettling than a quickly drawn satire of ethnology. Melville suffocates the ethnologists by removing from them the oxygen of ridicule. The seeing and knowing integral to questions of racial distinction become formal qualities of the text rather than subjects on which the narrative exercises opinions. This is immediately apparent as the story begins and works in the early pages in two ways: the construction of impossible spatial perspectives, and early examples of Delano’s inability to see staring him in the face the slave revolt under whose influence the whole story unfolds. Delano’s efforts to know what afflicts the “strange sail” in the harbor of St. Maria require him to swap “the glass” of his telescope, through which he first examines the San Dominick, for something more forensic (PT 46). The narrative elements are like the mechanical parts of a microscope; they are the lenses, the light source, and the calibrating wheels that help bring the specimen plate into focus.
The narrative moves forward through Delano’s attempts to modify his angle of vision. He readjusts first by looking at the strange vessel through his glass. He continues to observe the ship’s movements, though his vision is obscured by “the vapors partly mantling the hull,” but “it seemed hard to decide whether she meant to come in or no—what she wanted, or what she was about” (PT 47). The next turn of the calibrating wheel comes when Delano lowers one of his whaleboats in order to gain “a less remote view” (PT 48). And “a still nigher approach” leads to a view “modified” that makes clear the “true character of the vessel.” As he closes in still further, Delano sees the disrepair into which the ship has fallen and assesses the component parts of the vessel in detail: the spars, the ropes, the bulwarks, the forecastle, the quarter galleries, and the coat of arms on the stern-piece. The structure of the vessel comes into view like the fibers in a piece of cloth closely examined. Still, though, there is obfuscation: the canvas wrapped around the prow, the “copper-spike rust” and “dark festoons of sea-grass” shrouding the ship’s name (PT 49). Once aboard the San Dominick, Delano is then faced with yet more difficulties in turning what he sees into knowledge.
At this point, the narrative management of perspective begins to overwhelm the capacity of Delano’s observation. Boarding the ship reveals another level to the structure of the specimen. Going past the cloth’s fibers, what now comes into view is the molecular structure of the fibers themselves. Now Delano, the subject of “all eager tongues,” with “one eager glance took in all the faces, with every other object about him” (PT 49). This panoptic or omniscient perspective, what the narrator describes later as “that first comprehensive glance,” is impossible. Glances are never comprehensive. Somehow, the glance takes in both ten particular figures—the “four elderly grizzled negroes” picking oakum and the half dozen “hatchet-polishers”—as well as the “scores less conspicuous” who populate the ship (PT 50). Somehow the glance is simultaneously varifocal, looking at the same time in several places and through several focal lengths, while also anticipating the one absentee from this “hubbub of voices” of most significance to Delano: the ship’s commander, Don Benito, who returns “an unhappy glance” to his visitor (PT 51). Delano now embarks on that process of trying to read the Spaniard and his relationship with the ship’s other occupants. This reaches a false summit at the end of the first part of “Benito Cereno” as Putnam’s published it in the October 1855 issue.
The impossible perspectives the story uses in these early sections contribute to that larger problem of perception that affects Delano as he nears and boards the San Dominick. Delano is “a person of a singularly undistrustful good nature,” and this makes him easier to deceive (PT 47). But so does his failure to know what lies behind what he sees in front of him. When Don Benito tells Delano that his friend, Alexandro Aranda, has died of the fever, Delano suggests to the quivering Spaniard that he knows “what it is that gives the keener edge to your grief” and thinks it must be something similar to the grief he himself experienced when consigning to the sharks one of his friends who died at sea (PT 61). Delano thus responds with an empathy in which knowledge comes from looking at oneself rather than at what is before one’s eyes.39 Having already “witnessed the steady good conduct of Babo” (PT 52), when Don Benito faints and falls into Babo’s arms Delano sees only an obedient servant making “a silent appeal . . . to his master” (PT 61). Delano cannot see through the performance of Atufal’s submission that quickly follows, and he does not know that while he is right when noting that “padlock and key” are “significant symbols, truly,” their significance is not in what he sees—Don Benito with the key, Atufal in chains and padlock—but the inverse: Babo and Atufal are in charge of the key (PT 63).
Delano also fails to know the real state of the San Dominick because of a willingness to make assumptions or inferences that he bases on his own codes of behavior. Don Benito’s reserve, for instance, displeases him; he explains it away as “conscious imbecility—not deep policy, but shallow device” that in any case Delano does not take personally (PT 54). The lack of discipline aboard ship, “the noisy confusion” that “repeatedly challenged his eye,” Delano puts down to the absence of senior officers. On decks where “not so much as a fourth officer was to be seen,” Delano’s eye is distracted by what he does not see because he has no other explanation for the disorderliness. When Don Benito moves from Delano’s side to whisper with Babo, Delano is embarrassed at Benito’s discourtesy while the “menial familiarity of the servant lost its original charm of simple-hearted attachment” (PT 64). He catches a Spanish sailor who “kept his eye fixed on Captain Delano” and then moved to look at “the two whisperers.” Delano thinks himself the subject of the whispering. From these actions—his looking at someone else looking—Delano assumes Don Benito an impostor: “some low-born adventurer, masquerading as an oceanic grandee; yet so ignorant of the first requisites of mere gentlemanhood as to be betrayed into the present remarkable indecorum” (PT 64). So important to Delano are these markers of distinction that he is incapable of recognizing the possibility of other kinds of impostors: the slaves who are now commanders but who are “masquerading” as dutiful and submissive servants.
In the final pages of the first part of “Benito Cereno” a crescendo of interpretation comes over Delano. Fearing for his ship rather than himself, he reads the “gloomy hesitancy and subterfuge” of Don Benito’s account of events as “just the manner of one making up his tale for evil purposes” (PT 68). But Delano draws back from this explanation because he cannot believe it possible to “counterfeit” what he observes: “the very expression and play of every human feature.” It is “incredible” that every person aboard the San Dominick is “a carefully drilled recruit in the plot.” And the questions Don Benito asks Delano about his ship that give rise to Delano’s suspicions are the same questions that prove to him the questions are innocent: “The same conduct, which, in this instance, had raised the alarm, served to dispel it” (PT 69). Finding these thoughts “tranquilizing,” Delano looks in the eye subterfuge of a different kind and cannot even see it (PT 70).
We can be too hard on Delano. What, after all, does rebellion look like? If we assume we know, then neither would we be able to identify it should it appear in different guise. Readers with the benefit of hindsight can see what Delano misses. But this was a benefit the pioneer readers who sat down with the first part of “Benito Cereno” as it appeared in Putnam’s did not possess. As a serial, “Benito Cereno” mirrors Delano’s own inability to know the true state of affairs aboard the San Dominick and what fate awaits him. The reader, like Delano, knows the truth of the matter only retrospectively; the narrator sees on the reader’s behalf what Delano cannot see, but the reader becomes aware of this and knows Delano’s faults only after reaching the December issue of Putnam’s. What Delano cannot see is that Don Benito is scared for his life; that African slaves are capable of the kind of intelligent subversion whose preparation, execution, and perpetuation requires sophisticated acts of disguise and manipulation. Important as it is that the reader eventually recognizes Delano’s blind spots and the racist assumptions from which they stem, the achievement of “Benito Cereno”—enhanced by serial magazine publication—is to show that seeing and knowing are unreliable companions because they are embedded in the narrative forms by which readers assimilate them.
Like “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “The Encantadas” before it, “Benito Cereno” asks fascinating epistemological questions about observation and knowledge that expanded the horizons of magazine writing in the 1850s. With the exception of brief references to sophisticated and raw Africans that reprise the language of “The ’Gees,” “Benito Cereno” gains philosophical and historical traction from the deletion of topical specificities; Melville moved the historical specificities into what Curtis called the “dreary documents” at the end. There is little doubt that “Benito Cereno,” like “The ’Gees,” is embedded in the magazine paratexts of Harper’s and Putnam’s and that these paratexts, like the ironic sketch “About Niggers,” are important contexts and counterpoints for understanding the representation of race in “Benito Cereno.” They are also important paratexts and contexts for understanding how some writing goes beyond them. As I noted in the introduction, part of the reason for examining the embeddedness of Melville’s authorship in magazine writing more generally is to understand what qualities separate the memorable from the forgettable. The irony of “About Niggers” and the satire of “The ’Gees” are blunt instruments that certainly leave their mark; by comparison, “Benito Cereno” is a scalpel that dissects the body of American racism.
When Melville wrote about the Galapagos Islands in “The Encantadas” he created a world at odds with Darwin’s version of the same islands. On the subject of human origins, it was Darwin who eventually settled the scientific argument in favor of monogenesis with The Origin of Species (1859), a victory even Nott accepted, though he did not change his views about slavery. Like magazines quickly replaced by the next month’s issue, some ideas have a shelf-life even if they do not have a sell-by date. Ethnologists of the “American School” are now themselves specimens. The historical occasion in whose context they were caught up was a scientific revolution in the study of human biology. From Darwin to DNA and the human genome project, this revolution was more thoroughgoing than probably anyone in the nineteenth century could foretell. But the failure of American ethnologists like Nott and Gliddon was to mistake evidence for fact, opinion for truth, and their historical moment for universal experience. “Benito Cereno” transcends the paratexts and contexts of magazine writing because its narrative form anticipates the problems of such category errors. Against pseudoscientific hubris “Benito Cereno” shows that seeing is not knowing. When the narrator of “The ’Gees” notes that stopping to enlighten his listeners with facts about Cape Verdean sailors is “not without detriment to my stories,” he articulates what Melville’s best magazine stories communicate implicitly: that in stories, not facts, should a writer trade.