Colin Dayan
It is no accident that precisely nails and hair, which are cut away as dead matter from the living body, continue to grow on the corpse.
—Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama
Why should I try to resurrect Melville’s Israel Potter from a certain kind of academic disregard? Why this sometimes plodding, apparently clunky historical fiction instead of the thrill of illicit love in Pierre, the mad pursuit in Moby-Dick, or any of the later tales that recast in such startling ways the expectations of fiction and the order of nature? Of course, it is tempting to approach this novel on something like a dare. After all, though it was written about—and in general favorably—at the time of its publication, contemporary scholars of Melville have tended to ignore Israel Potter—until very recently.1 Either it is considered one of his minor literary achievements, lacking the complexity, ambiguity, or philosophical depth of his other writings, or it is seen as his capitulation to the fastidious and polite reading public.2
Melville’s book is Israel Potter’s second edition: a preservation of the story “forlornly published on sleazy gray papers” and now “out of print.” The “editor” describes his rescue of the “tattered copy” from the “rag-pickers,” but claims that his near “reprint” ought to be regarded as nothing grander than “a dilapidated old tombstone retouched.”3 Melville gathers up the tattered pages of Israel’s autobiography, the rags that both clothe Israel’s body and compose the matter of the book, as well as the “useless scrolls” (156) Israel produces in the brick kilns in order to reweave them, with other fragments of history—not only Henry Trumbull’s edition of the Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter (1824), but also fragments of Robert C. Sand’s Life and Correspondence of John Paul Jones (1830), James Fenimore Cooper’s History of the Navy of the United States of America (1839), Ethan Allen’s A Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s Captivity (1779), and Jared Sparks’s Works of Benjamin Franklin; with Notes and a Life of the Author (1836–40) (184).
Melville turns away from the monumental—not, as some critics have suggested, toward a revalorization of the common man but toward the living relics that serve as American democracy’s ballast. If we consider this as Melville’s desperate attempt to be accepted, then we might take the patriotic story of a forgotten hero, his effort to give life to Henry Trumbull’s Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter (and the other books on John Paul Jones, Benjamin Franklin, and Ethan Allen), as nothing more than what one of my students called “a monumental hodgepodge.” Instead, let us take it as his most radical, even maddening work. In it Melville recovers details and fragments that have been silenced in standard histories, while using the frame of conventional history to take itself apart from the inside, in order to hollow it out from within. This is not an easy task. And he must put his prose to the test.
Of all his works, this is the most derivative.4 It grapples with the recalcitrant givens—the remains of the already done. This is a universe in which everything is appropriated. But Melville’s Israel Potter also uses this unruly epic history to engage with the unsaid: what Michel-Rolph Trouillot, writing of the Haitian Revolution, described as the “unthinkable” history, the “impossible.”5 But it is not Haiti alone that matters to Melville—and it does, especially in Pierre—but rather everything that has been concealed from the story of the American Revolution and the myths associated with the birth of the nation. The slime of civilization that washed up as mud in Pierre’s final dream, heralding the climax of pistols, ebon hair, and death, is nothing more in Israel Potter than dregs.
In order to exhume and literally put back in the things that were removed from the official story, Melville surrenders his prose to the excrescence.6 It is not just a matter of accumulating the detritus found in the path of an insignificant life, but something more risky.
In chronicling the process of decay and loss, Melville surrenders the plot to what denies it: the unruly outcroppings of the inanimate or insensate. This is a world of objects where things attain a certain stubborn or comic agency, and this resolutely material residue, whether pieces of clothing or fragments of history, what Saint Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians called “the off-scouring of all things” (4:13), matters more than anything human. Character becomes irrelevant as everything disposable or discarded throbs with animate life.
What effect does Melville’s obsession with remnants have on his prose? In the writing itself we find Melville’s real drama. Not even the perfect sentence can hold the dirt back. This consummate craftsman disavows such perfection, for he understands how the very forms of speech and heights of artifice go hand in hand with a history of extermination. In describing the ship that will become the Bon Homme Richard, for example, Melville prompts our double vision through a description that is at once bumbling and razor-sharp:
As for the ships, that commanded by Paul in person will be a good example of the fleet. She was an old Indiaman, clumsy and crank, smelling strongly of the savor of tea, cloves, and arrack, the cargoes of former voyages. . . . She was originally a single-decked ship; that is, carried her armament on one gun-deck. But cutting ports below, in her after part, Paul rammed out there six old eighteen pounders, whose rusty muzzles peered just above the watermark, like a parcel of dirty mulattoes from a cellar-way. (115)
It is in the simile, this seeming pocket of something extraneous, that meaning lies. The room in Benjamin Franklin’s “little apartment” in Paris had been described as warm, and “like some old West India hogshead on the wharf, the whole chamber buzzed with flies” (39). And here, in this more extended simile, Melville keeps alive the history of the Middle Passage. Intimating a region of indiscernibility between—generally speaking—the ship of John Paul Jones and the hold of a slaver, or more exactly, the barrels of guns and the muzzles of faces, Melville entangles myths of heroism with the wastes of empire.7 The products of trade in tea, cloves, and arrack intermingle with the aftereffects of trade in humans. That is what peers up from beneath the realities of trade, the catalog of cargo. Beneath such unseemly traffic there always lies hidden, waiting to be noticed, peering out from below, the physiognomy of misalliance, the matter of mixture.
Whatever is superfluous counts most. That these details are also consistently ignored makes their retrieval even more significant. What suffers oblivion matters tremendously, and Melville knows that better than most of his fellow writers. His secret history comes into play as if an aside, housed in the similes that are as crucial to his narrative as those in Virgil’s Aeneid. In Melville’s epic of the piecemeal, he takes things—anything nonhuman or considered unimportant or vile—and makes his text their receptacle. In projecting similitudes that are incongruous and wildly inapt, even perverse, he makes the narrative surface the holding terrain for their magical power to enchant, transform, or terrify: Israel’s tattered clothes that become his destiny; a white blanket “like an old man’s turning head”; English soldiers “like stricken deer”; a ship’s stays that whip the air “like scorpions”; a ghost like the cork of a bottle (62, 13, 88).
So though Israel Potter might appear conventional, it is, in its own way, one of Melville’s most experimental works. Imagine an entire novel built around the “painted board” that the disabled beggar on the London docks holds up in Moby-Dick, “representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg.”8 Imagine such a novel, and you have an idea of what Melville is on about in Israel Potter.
What is shocking about this book, which Melville presents as nothing out of the ordinary—nothing but a retelling, at most a parody, of a story that had already been written—is that it shows us how absolute is Melville’s inability to tell a story straight, how impossible it is for him to let the proverbial sleeping dogs lie.
Numerous critics have reflected on Melville’s “restraint” or “indifference” in writing Israel Potter, as if the writing had worn itself out. Newton Arvin calls it “creative enervation” or “fatigue”: “emblems of decay and death,” he writes, “meet our gaze at every turn.”9 I want to make a case for this novel as a radical and intensely composed work. In a singular way, it exposes the mutations in an “order of things” haunted by its own excess. Indeed, what is particularly disturbing is the intertraffic between humanity and humaneness as it becomes a potently charged vehicle for the destruction of personhood, property, and—far from the least—living beings on the basis of criteria that drift from the realm of human sociality into that of what we call “nature” and back again. What happens, I ask, when writing itself churns out the degraded and despised excess of its own operation?
Again, rather than taking Israel Potter as structurally flawed, I argue that its turgid prose, its difficulty, its failure or diminishment are intentional. It is a deliberate dramatization of what mattered most to Melville throughout his late fiction. He refused the solace of patriotic myth and artistic ideals. That is obvious. But less obvious, perhaps, is his disavowal of the meaning of what we might refer to here as human treatment. To think again about persons was his aim—not just the nature of personhood as applied to humans, but also the problem of animality, and subjectivity, produced out of the intercommunicability of humans and nonhumans: whatever is, as Melville puts it, “something more than humanly significant” (Israel Potter, 77).
The task Melville takes on is formidable. Throughout his work he teaches us that there is no such thing as an apolitical natural history. He lays out a terrain that amounts to nothing less than an alternative reality that has everything to do with how the unlikely or the extraordinary is always part and parcel of the commonplace or quotidian. Even his ghosts are not quite right: they are too palpable, too real, and at times too much like garbage to be cordoned off as “spiritual” somewhere in the beyond. We are prompted to ask, What is real? What counts as reality?
The most critically ignored passage in Israel Potter, one that I treat briefly in The Law Is a White Dog, is near the end.10 Melville portrays Israel, the disabled and dispossessed beggar, as nothing more than a stray wandering through the streets of London. No longer depending on the biography that had given shape and structure to most of the novel, Melville envisions another kind of history—one that taxes our habits of awareness, reflection, and discrimination. As readers we are asked not only to engage with the nonhuman realm, but also to experience the everyday messiness and unpredictability of interspecies encounters, what Eduardo Kohn, writing of “Runa Realism,” calls “a certain kind of interpersonal social intimacy.”11
London is the city. And Melville sets upon his description as if making an attack on hierarchical thinking. His fantasy and the description itself I take to be the origins of his peculiarly supernatural terrain. Categorical boundaries are trundled, for they are the sources of the suffering he writes about. Ostensibly describing the “mud and mire” of brickmaking, he turns to London, where the Thames “curdled on between rotten wharves, one murky sheet of sewerage” (154). After recalling a drowned slave at the bottom of the Dismal Swamp in tidewater Virginia, Melville portrays a crowd streaming “like an endless shoal of herring, over London Bridge,” laborers trudging over the flagging of London streets as if on “the vitreous rocks in the cursed Gallipagos, over which the convict tortoises crawl” (159).12 All is dark in this “City of Dis,” even a memory of snow turns into spots of soot: “All faces were more or less snowed, or spotted with soot” (160).
In the final chapter, titled simply “Forty-Five Years,” Melville condenses Israel’s long wandering in the “London deserts” into just a few pages, as if the sufferings, his “wrangling with rats for prizes in the sewers,” all that he had endured was so great that only a few images and scenes could be recounted: the smoke-darkened pits, the earthly dungeons of the brick kilns, the ragpicking and poverty (162). Then Israel is granted a reprieve, if only for a moment. He roams into a patch of green, an enclosure in St. James’s Park: “a little oval, fenced in with iron palings, between whose bars the imprisoned verdure peered forth, as some wild captive creature of the woods from its cage.” This is the scene that Melville, with impressive understatement, calls “a sort of hallucination” (164).
As with so much of Melville’s writing, there is no escape from the torment of confinement, the disgrace of barbarous treatment, whether inflicted on animals or humans. And he invites the connections between animals, slaves, Indians, prisoners, or laborers set off against the self-righteousness and hypocrisy of polite society. How does Melville describe “alien Israel there,” looking around him as if in a dream? He seems “like some amazed runaway steer, or trespassing Pequod Indian, impounded on the shores of Narragansett Bay, long ago.” The dream is a lesson in history, not just an interlude of nostalgia, in the modern sense, but nostalgia in the older, medical sense—an episode of extreme, possibly fatal homesickness—with Israel’s thoughts of Old Huckleberry the horse, now dead and “long surfeited with clover.” The hard stones of his heart, like the flagging on the streets of London, “would feel the stir of tender but quenchless memories, like the grass of deserted flagging, upsprouting through its closest seams” (163). In a veritable pandemonium of similitude, heart stones become the street’s flagging and undying memories are like grass growing through its cracks. Then Melville picks up on the simile of the fugitive steer, and Israel has another vision. As he wanders in the fog toward Barbican, houses turn into shadows on “midnight hills.” Suddenly, he hears “a confused pastoral sort of sounds: tramplings, lowings, halloos,” and he is called upon to “head off certain cattle, bound to Smithfield, bewildered and unruly in the fog.” After the sight of cattle headed for slaughter, he sees a lovely image through the haze, a strange apotheosis: “the white face—white as an orange blossom—of a black-bodied steer in advance of the drove, gleaming ghost-like through the vapors” (164). Through this onomastics of color, Melville summons the vile stratagem of white supremacy: the attempt to racially distinguish the products of colonial mixing—those who are neither black nor white—by naming nuances of skin color. In presenting a white face that is “white as an orange blossom,” he recalls the spectral mulattoes peering from the hold of John Paul Jones’s flagship, evoking the blood taint that lurks in not-quite-right white skin.
This phantom scene would have brought other very meaty and not exactly pleasant reminiscences to the minds of Melville’s readers. Violations of the natural world were rampant in nineteenth-century London, whether horses starved and worked to exhaustion or cows driven from their rural pastures to Smithfield to be bound and slaughtered. The blood and stink, the cries of cows being killed, and the sound of horses being beaten could not be ignored. They came to Smithfield from all over England. Beasts and butchery intermingled with women shoppers and gangs of boys. Smithfield was known for “live” meat. Melville writes, “These experiences, both from their intensity and his solitude, were necessarily squalid. Best not to enlarge upon them. For just as extreme suffering without hope is intolerable to the victim, so, to others, is its depiction, without some delusive mitigation.” (161)
In London Potter seems prone to hallucinations. But instead of explaining what happens in this confrontation with assorted cows and the horse he thinks is Old Huckleberry as a sign of madness, let us examine what has happened to his memory.13 For this case of mistaken identity holds the key to the story: the entanglement of the human with other selves, what Eduardo Kohn in “How Dogs Dream” calls “an anthropology of life.”14 Such a novel anthropology is as much a part of Melville’s fiction as is law or philosophy. On the one hand, he gives readers a different sense of what it means to live—or, more precisely, to be alive and not dead. On the other hand, he creates an ontology that echoes the racist discourses of the time and the natural histories spawned by them.
In pursuit of details that give a new meaning to this novel and exact a reading that transfigures our notions of character, metaphor, and motive, I take this final vision as a way to read back through to the first chapter. Everything is foreordained: the anonymity of death and its inevitability. In the dense fog of the Berkshires, a young Israel rides his horse through a “menacing scene,” when he “sees some ghost-like object looming through the mist at the roadside.” As he comes closer he sees, in epic prolepsis, “a rude white stone, uncouthly inscribed,” the tomb of “some farmer . . . upset in his wood-sled” who “perished beneath the load” (6). This sequence of phenomena commits us to a strange form of subjectivity. Melville forces us to attend to the provisional in every attempt at communication, where what should be most certain becomes highly tenuous. We learn what writing might look like if it were to become a perspectival phenomenon, a means of seeing otherwise or crosswise. A new kind of anthropology is possible when a writer like Melville gives what is distinctive to humans—language, culture, sociality—to other bodies, sometimes more or less disembodied.15
This ending was already presaged in the first chapter. Melville dreams Israel forward from the fogs of the Berkshires to the fogs of London. One landscape cast at the end of the book as unreal—Israel’s delusion—is portrayed in the beginning as real, his direct observation. At the beginning and end, the spectral is cast into doubt, bucking up against an all-too-material prospect.
No matter the landscape or its location, Israel remains imprisoned; even the green grass in St. James’s Park is imprisoned like a caged creature. Let us recall that as early as the first chapter, even in his native terrain, Israel remains trapped by the past that is never really past. He rides his horse through a “menacing scene,” when he “sees some ghost-like object looming through the mist at the roadside.” As he comes closer he sees not a phantom thing but a rough stone, “uncouthly inscribed,” the tomb of a farmer ousted from or crushed by “his wood-sled.” (6).
Through an unusual kind of double inquiry beyond the edge of the so-called natural, Melville keeps flesh and phantasm disparate but interchangeable. This is a world of matter alive with spirit, a terrain rich with things and thoughts, as we saw in the appearance of the ghostly steer: both body and spirit. White-faced but black-bodied, the steer appears before Israel. Startled into action, Israel starts driving the “riotous cattle” to the right, away from Smithfield Market and into the barnyard of his memories. He dreams himself back home to the Berkshires, “into the mists of the Housatonic mountains; ruddy boy on the upland pastures again.” Alone against the horizon, as singular and noteworthy as the not quite white, orange-blossom face of the black-bodied steer, the cattle boy appears “clear-cut as a balloon against the sky” (165).
Can we know nature in a way that is resolutely antitaxonomical? Giving his readers a different sense of what it means to live—or, more precisely, to be alive—Melville contrives a metaphysics that remains distinct from the racist discourses of his time. Even as he uses the taxonomies of natural histories, moving between brute matter and rational man, he overturns them. Refusing to purge any experience or phenomenon of ambiguous attributes, he projects new categories of persons and nonpersons or animate and inanimate.
What if I say that Melville wants to make us see like a dog? The intensity, the fixed gaze. We find in his similes an extraordinary compression. Although they do not define action, they sharpen our appetite for seeing and knowing, while suggesting something unseen and unheard behind what is seen and heard. Mood replaces certainty. Again, there is no action for the simile to reflect. But there is an all-but-unintelligible feeling to suggest. Or is it another kind of intelligibility—and feeling so intense that it exacts another kind of cognizance?
We are, to put it mildly, in the regime of metamorphosis, where entities, whether animate or inanimate, occupy a terrain of indistinction. But more than these ventures into another kind of depth and reach, Melville gives us details that matter more than any large monument or precious abstraction. On the scent of the insignificant, then, we his readers, moving through an unexpected terrain, learn to be attentive. We have the chance to learn what it means to know with the body, to see adamantly, to know so fully with the flesh that it is nothing other than mind: in other words, to be animal, not human—to become animal. So let us examine the sequence of phenomena as committing us to a strange form of subjectivity.
Melville describes the Yankee defenders at Bunker Hill gripping their muskets by the barrel and beating back the British assault by “wielding the stock right and left, as seal hunters on the beach, knock down with their clubs the Shetland seal” (13). Israel “starts like a deer,” and then, pursued by the English, he fully occupies and becomes without any fanfare the animal: “After a mile’s chase, the poor panting deer is caught.” Later, still pursued, he finds a place to rest in an old carriage house, climbs into a “dismantled old phaeton . . . and curling himself up like a carriage-dog, endeavored to sleep” (25). Again, it is in the simile that Melville gives birth to what matters most to him: the earthly and darkened horizons of a civilization refined in cruelty and a nation consumed by greed. But even things so innocuous and sweet as objects of nature, flowers and birds, are twisted into an apt sweetness that nevertheless ends in the discordant. Here is Melville finding words to capture the rapture of a June day in the Berkshires: “The yellow bird flits like a winged jonquil here and there; like knots of violets the blue birds sport in clusters upon the grass; while hurrying from the pasture to the grove, the red robin seems an incendiary putting torch to the trees” (5).
Ghosts begin and end Israel Potter, as the mists, fog, and phantoms of the ending also appeared in the beginning. In the early chapter describing Israel’s rollicking escape from Squire Woodcock’s house, Melville apotheosizes the magical in his capitalized, graphically set off, “AN ENCOUNTER WITH GHOSTS” (77). The insubstantiality of the downtrodden—the unreality of what is everywhere too real—Melville takes on. Shortly after his escape from a living entombment, feeling “almost as unreal and shadowy” as Woodcock’s ghost that he has pretended to be, Israel catches sight of a man in the distance. Or he thinks it’s a man. He sees in the stranger’s fixed gesture “something more than humanly significant.” He approaches, only to see “the dark coat-sleeve flapped on the bony skeleton of the unknown arm. The face was lost in a sort of ghastly blank. It was no living man” (77). Not exactly a dead man either, but rather another disguise, this time a scarecrow. Loath to leave behind this human in effigy, Melville restages the scene a few pages later, but this time with positions reversed. As the farmer approaches, Israel, in the scarecrow’s tattered raiment, twice attempts to assume the scarecrow’s “fixed gesture,” but to no avail. The farmer persists in his curiosity, until Israel, fearful of discovery, acts the ghoul, “showing his teeth like a skull, and demoniacally rolling his eyes” (79).
On the English frigate The Shuttle, in one of the oddest escapades in an increasingly malicious but near-magical world of contingency and dispossession, Israel shuttles from maintop to forecastle to the hold, all the while hauntingly unrecognizable. He has thrown overboard his jacket, which would have identified him as an American sailor, the quartermaster of the Bon Homme Richard, just defeated by the Serapis, and he wears now only a “dark blue woolen shirt, and blue cloth waistcoat” (133). An “isolated nondescript,” Israel can neither be remembered nor recognized; he is unidentifiable as anything other than “an old top-mate.” But he knows such anonymity is risky, so he tries to join varied groups on board, moving, with each rebuff—as always in his story—downward: “As a last resort, he dived down among the holders” in “the dark bowels of the ship” (134). Once again, forced to move on, he goes down among the “waisters; the vilest cast of an armed ship’s company; mere dregs and settlings—sea Pariahs,” and comes to rest among an “unhappy, tattered, moping row of them” who sit mournfully “like a parcel of crest-fallen buzzards, exiled from civilized society” (135). Even these humans reject him, this time violently, only for him to be encircled by all the sailors sharing stories of this “vagabond claiming fraternity.”
In the midst of the tumult, an officer appears and begins to question his identity: “Who the deuce are you? . . . Where did you come from? What’s your business? . . . What’s your name? Who are you, any way?” The officer of the deck declares him to be “out of all reason . . . out of all men’s knowledge and memories,” and Israel himself opines that “none of them [is] willing to remember me” (137). Again, we see Israel’s inexplicability—a fluid impermanence that yet stubbornly first materializes as “Peter Perkins” and then is transformed into “a poor persecuted fellow,” then into a madman, and finally into a ghost, albeit one that is radically palpable, unabashedly material. In exasperation, the master-at-arms takes hold of him bodily: “‘Come along then, my ghost,’ said the master-at-arms,” and “collaring the phantom, he led it hither and thither, not knowing exactly what to do with it” (139).
Melville forces us to attend to the provisional in every attempt at communication, where what should be most certain—the division between human and nonhuman or even life and death—becomes highly tenuous. At the end of his story, after returning to the Berkshires, Israel remains indiscernible, lost textually in cross-specific ambiguity: not exactly a man, not exactly a ghost, not exactly an animal. In the sewers and gutters of London, he has “sunk below the mud, to actual beggary.” Without his disguises—the clothing that made his identity legible, if false—Israel remains ungraspable: not exactly a man, not exactly a ghost, neither living nor dead. No longer encased by a “dead man’s broadcloth,” a beggar’s rags, or a seaman’s garb, he has no being that can be identified, even in retrospect, except what is contained in the sequence of similes scattered throughout, as if unwholesome outgrowths of what might have been merely human. Israel subsists at the last in gorgeous similitude as an oak tree, undeterred by the winds, enduring mutilation, hemmed in and confined, but still there:
As those tough old oaks of the cliffs, which though hacked at by hail-stones of tempest, and even wantonly maimed by the passing woodman, still, however cramped by rival trees and fettered by rocks, succeed, against all odds, in keeping the vital nerve of the tap-root alive. (165)
Melville does not let us forget the import, reach, majesty, and magic of this simile. The vividness and prominence of an old oak tree come back to us in the final sentence of this novel: “He died the same day that the oldest oak on his native hills was blown down” (169).
Melville’s purported biography of Israel Potter is not so much the story of a man’s life as it is a textual burial ground. Before the appearance of the stalwart old oak, standing in the midst of loss, Melville offers his readers a grim revelation. With Virgilian pathos, he writes, “Few things remain.” After all the perspectival shifts between entities, living and dead or insensate and sentient, substance or shadow, Israel’s character is ultimately emptied of meaning. No matter that he is described as a “bewildered old man” (169). By now, readers know that the term “man” no longer refers to anything merely human in a world where the whole mix of human and nonhuman animals, spirits, and things becomes indistinguishable, but utterly materialized in and through the similes that are the gist, or if it be not too vulgar a term, the meat of this fiction.
1. See, for example, the special section on the novel in Leviathan 20, no. 3 (October 2018).
2. Only one early reviewer in England recognized the deliberateness in Melville’s craft of the unreadable, or, more precisely, his surrender to the ordinary: “The book leaves the impression of having been carefully and purposely rendered common-place. You feel that the author is capable of something much better, but for a freak is resolved to curb his fancy and adhere to the dustiest routine.” Weekly Chronicle, June 2, 1857. For more recent responses of interest, see David Chacko and Alexander Kulasar, “Israel Potter: Genius of a Legend,” William and Mary Quarterly 41 (1984): 365–89; Daniel Reagan, “Melville’s Israel Potter and the Nature of Biography,” ATQ 3 (1989): 257–76; Bill Christophersen, “Israel Potter: Melville’s ‘Citizen of the Universe,’” Studies in American Fiction 21, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 21–35.
3. Herman Melville, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1982), vii. All other references are to this edition.
4. See Walter Bezanson’s “Historical Note” in Israel Potter, ed. Hayford, Parker, and Tanselle, 173–236.
5. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Books, 1995), 73, 82.
6. For an analogous reading, see Priscilla Wald on Pierre in Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).
7. See Christopher Taylor’s Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
8. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, G. Thomas Tanselle, with a new forward by Hershel Parker (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1957), 269. Further citations in the text.
9. Newton Arvin, Herman Melville: A Critical Biography, second edition (New York: Viking Press, 1957), 232, 234.
10. Colin Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 114–15.
11. Eduardo Kohn, “Runa Realism: Upper Amazonian Attitudes to Nature Knowing,” Ethnos 70 (2), June 2005: 171–96.
12. On Melville’s tortoises, see Matthew A. Taylor’s essay in this volume.
13. For the other approach, see Kris Lackey, “The Two Handles of Israel Potter,” College Literature 21 (1994): 32–45.
14. Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology of the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 14. This book elaborates on Kohn’s groundbreaking article on a radically generative “ecology of selves”: “How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Natures and the Politics of Transspecies Engagement,” American Ethnologist 34, no. 1 (2007): 3–24.
15. Kohn promises in How Forests Think not a “multiculturalist” or a “dualistic” framework but rather an Amazonian multinaturalist framework, where culture—and, by extension, the human—“ceases to be the most salient marker of difference” (40–41).